Machine by Normandie Alleman
2
Bridger
I threwdown my rag and cleared my workstation. I felt bad Sal had gotten sick, but I didn’t appreciate being left in charge of the entire shop when I had four cars to work on. My boss expected too much, and it wasn’t like I needed the job. The more responsibility Sal put on me, the closer I came to quitting.
Now I was late and Barvo was going to be sure I heard about it. Not to mention that I’d seen some things lately that made me suspicious that somebody I worked with was trying to copy what I did on my off-time. Last week I’d gone into the back room looking for a specific tool, and, hidden under a drop-cloth, I found something that looked like the hydraulic setup I used. It was certainly not like anything we used fixing cars.
The rest of the guys appeared to have no knowledge of it, and Sal was out that day. When I got to work the next day, the thing was gone. I convinced myself I was being paranoid and tried to forget it. Working two jobs was getting to me.
But what else was I going to do? I didn’t sleep great, and you could only go to the gym so many hours every day. Since I came back from Iraq four years ago, the only person I’d really spent time with was my mother, and I sure as hell didn’t want to sit around with her all day. I loved my mother, but she could be a bit much.
So I did what I knew how to do best—I worked.
I usually changed out of my grimy clothes before heading to the studio, but tonight I was too tired. I hadn’t expected it to be a big deal, but my partner saw it differently.
The minute I walked in the door, Barvo started in on me. “Really? Is that what you’re going to wear? Look at your hands.”
I washed my hands before leaving the garage, but they did still look a little dirty.
Barvo stood there wearing glasses, a t-shirt, jeans, and his ever-present flannel shirt, fuming. “I need you to play the doctor for this shoot.”
I sighed. “Why don’t you do it, then?”
Barvo rolled his eyes. “Really? You want me to do it? First, give me a body transplant. I’ll need that curly head of hair, about six inches of your height, and about fifty pounds of muscle.”
I chuckled. “Only fifty?”
“Motherfucker. Get cleaned up. We’ll throw some gloves on you. That’s kinkier anyway.”
“Why a doctor?”
Barvo couldn’t leave well enough alone. We were bringing in millions with our online porn videos. But that wasn’t enough for him. Oh no, my partner wasn’t one to sit on his laurels. He was always trying to mix things up. Now he’d taken to filming the back of me coming into the shot with the model and adjusting the machine or saying something filthy to her.
As long as I didn’t have to interact with the girls physically, and my face wasn’t on screen that was fine by me. But Barvo was so obsessed with the creative and talent side of the biz that he’d taken to sleeping on a cot in his office. I wasn’t even sure he still had an apartment.
“Medical play. It’s all the rage these days. See how we’ve got her legs up in the stirrups?”
Now that he mentioned it, I looked at the bank of monitors and noticed that the girl on camera had her legs up in stirrups. The set looked just like a doctor’s office. The model (we called them models rather than actresses because our videos didn’t require any acting) had dark hair and dark eyes with curvy breasts and hips, and a slender waist. For a second her face was replaced in my mind with the even prettier face of Dynassy Barnes, and I couldn’t drag my eyes away.
If Barvo noticed, he didn’t say anything. He probably thought I’d stopped to admire the scene he’d set up. It was, in fact, amazing. Everything looked exactly like a doctor’s office.
I shook my head and the girl went back to looking like herself. The momentary vision of a naked Dynassy was gone, but I’d filed it away in my head for later.
As strange as I found it sometimes to actually be in the pornography business, I had to admit, my friend Barvo had a serious knack for the artistic side of the business. The lovely raven-haired model lay back on what looked to be a medical exam table, her legs spread wide in a set of obstetric/gynecological stirrups, while one of my fucking machines shoved a condom-covered dildo in and out of her dripping pussy. The girl’s head swung from side to side, moans escaping her lips.
“Can I finger my clit?” she asked no one in particular.
Barvo pressed a button, “Sure, hon. Whatever you want.” Then he glared at me. “That would have been much better if the doctor had answered her. Then I could edit it into the scene, make a better vid.”
I blew out a deep breath. “Sorry, okay. I had to stay late. My boss went home early, leaving me to handle all the customer service shit on top of the cars I was supposed to be working on.” I stood up, took a step and pressed the same button Barvo had. “Yes. Play with yourself however you like. It all helps with the research.”
The model giggled and started to roll her clit between her fingers, tilting her hips up slightly.
“See? That’s it!” Barvo shook his head. “Even your fucking voice is more of a turn on than mine.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t in the mood for Barvo’s never-ending pity party about how unfair it was that women favored me over him. It hadn’t been Barvo who’d come home from Iraq with a war injury to find his fiancée was fucking one of his “friends.” It’s not like things had been easy for me with women, but Barvo conveniently ignored this bit of history.
Hell, Barvo got laid all the time. The guy just had a jealous nature. Insecure. No matter how many women he banged, he still felt the need to compete with me. Probably some old baggage left over from high school when the jocks had given him wedgies and swirled his head in toilet bowls. That’s what my mother would have said, anyway. The poor guy would probably never get over it.
Rather than sit and listen to Barvo’s insecurities, I went to the bathroom to scrub myself as clean as possible. The model’s moans served as a familiar background melody.
“That’s it,” I heard Barvo say through the mic. “Let me know if you want it faster or slower.”
“Mmm. Faster, I think,” she purred back.
I stuck my head out of the door, soap all over my hands. “Make it slower.”
Barvo looked at me like I was nuts. “She just said faster, dude.”
“So what? I’m telling you, if you do it slower, it will drive her insane. Make it even hotter.”
“Listen, you can’t do the opposite of what the model asks for. It’s like non-consent or something. We’ll have models telling their friends that we fucked them, and not in the good way. You can’t do that, man.”
“Trust me,” I said, then went back to washing my hands. Things were getting tenser between me and Barvo all the time. These days it seemed like we disagreed on just about everything. What the fuck was that about?
The sounds from the monitor floated into the bathroom, and I could hear the model. “Oh my God! That’s amazing. Oh my God! Oh, oh, oh…oh…I’m going to come!”
Hands all clean, I came back into the studio. “You made it slower?”
“Fuck you,” Barvo answered, which meant he had. My unspoken “I told you so” hung in the air. To have said it out loud would have just been redundant.
This wasn’t a good time to tell Barvo I’d met Dynassy Barnes. He would have hounded me to introduce him, and there was no way in hell I was gonna do that, because experience told me he’d either ask her out, or worse, try to talk her into doing a shoot for us.
I also didn’t want to risk being outed as a pornographer. Pornographers were old, hairy-chested guys who unbuttoned their shirts down to their navels and wore gold necklaces. That wasn’t me. I’m a veteran, a SEAL, for God’s sake. My two lives didn’t mesh, and it fucked with my head.
Plus, Dynassy Barnes was not the kind of girl who masturbated on camera for other people to watch. There had been a sex tape out there with her in it once, hadn’t there? I couldn’t remember. Pop culture was my partner’s venue, not mine. I might have to google it later.
Barvo and I had come a long way from the day he had asked me if he could borrow my new invention.
My fiancée had just left me, and I was depressed. What did I care if Barvo borrowed my sex machine for a kinky date with some girl? All I’d asked was that he put a condom on the thing before he stuck it inside anyone. After that, I forgot all about it.
I’d built the thing for my fiancée after my nether regions had gotten blown to bits in an IED explosion overseas. Scared I’d never be able to satisfy her again, I created a machine that could. Unfortunately, once I got home, I found out my (now former) best friend had taken over that job, and she wouldn’t be needing me or my machine.
A week after borrowing the thing, Barvo showed up with the news that he’d taken a video of his adventurous date boinking the machine then uploaded it to the internet. Within a matter of days, the video had over a million views on an amateur porn site. When Barvo suggested we host our own site and make some money, I hadn’t objected. Back then, I’d been so depressed, I probably would have agreed to anything if it would make him leave me alone. I was in and out of the hospital. Over the past four years, I’d had nineteen surgeries, and I was optimistic I wouldn’t need a twentieth. But back then, I’d been a fucking mess.
Along the way, Barvo kept having great ideas and I kept okaying them. He was a creative genius, and I worked on the mechanical side between my hospital stays. The money just kept rolling in, until one day I turned around and realized I needed a financial adviser.
There were times when I wondered how Barvo and I had gotten where we are—top-tier pornographers, pulling down tens of millions of dollars a year. Barvo worked on the business full-time. I tried that for a while, but it drove me crazy. I needed to keep busy, doing something with my hands. I needed to be more active than sitting in a studio all day watching girls fuck themselves. Don’t get me wrong, it was great the first one or two hundred times. But once the novelty wore off, it became an exercise in frustration.
Because, I couldn’t jack off to it.
Getting aroused only reminded me that I was half a man.
So I worked, doing what I was best at—being a mechanic. But while I’d originally wanted something part-time to keep my busy, that had grown into Sal leaning on me more and more. The old man had taken advantage of my need to be needed and before I knew it, he’d heaped a ton of responsibility on me. After today, I was wondering how much more I could take.
As if reading my mind, Barvo said, “Man, I don’t know why you don’t quit that fucking job. You don’t have to put up with that guy’s bullshit, so I don’t know why you do. You could buy him out three times over.”
“Yeah, I’m thinkin’ about quitting.” I inspected my hands. They weren’t as clean as a surgeon’s, but they were about as clean as a mechanic’s were going to get. My cuticles harbored black stains that were likely permanent and the majority of my skin was rough and calloused, broken in places. “Where are those gloves? These hands aren’t going to fool anybody.”
Barvo inspected them and made a face. “Eww, you’re right. Yeah, let me get you those gloves.” He got up and went into the prop room.
While he was gone, the model asked, “Hey, Doctor, can I come again—please?” She trilled the “please” out longer as she pinched one of her nipples between her fingers. I watched her toy with it, first gently, then tugging on it more roughly, waiting to feel a stirring in my groin. None came.
Pressing the button, I answered, “Yes, you may come. And what a good patient you were to ask so nicely.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” She bit her bottom lip and tweaked her other nipple. Then she rubbed the apex of her sex, stimulating the hood of her clitoris just the way she liked it. Her body began to tense, and I froze, watching her. Watching someone bring themselves to orgasm never failed to fascinate.
Each human’s body is different, and female bodies are more mysterious and unique. It was as if, no matter how many times I saw it, how many women, each orgasm was a singular event all its own. The way they teach you in school that each fingerprint is like none other in the world, or each snowflake is unique. That’s how I saw orgasms—each one was magical and special.
Sex could be like that too, but watching the models, that was as close as I could get to any sort of release.
Barvo handed me a pair of latex gloves, and I put them on. We both watched the lovely woman as spasms overtook her body and her moans morphed into squeals.
“You know, if you ever want to get more involved, I can have her suck your cock,” Barvo said. “I mean, if things start working right down there.” He motioned to my crotch.
I shook my head, reminding myself that my friend meant well. We didn’t talk much about my struggles in the erection department. Several of the girls had asked him if I would be interested in filming a scene with them, and I think Barvo hoped I’d be up for it one day, if only so he could live vicariously through me. But tonight I was tired, and I wasn’t about to get into it now. “Just give me the script.”
Barvo sighed and handed me a sheet of paper with minimal stage directions on it, and as I opened the door and crossed into the room where the model flinched with pleasure, we both watched as she curled her toes and her lashes fluttered open.
“Oh Doctor, am I glad to see you!”
