The thumbnail is a still of Ella, like the rest, but in this one she wears a bright, innocent smile. When I click through it has the most comments of any of the videos I’ve searched for in the last half hour.
I can barely focus on them. The first line I read several times, and still the words don’t register. I’m not a fool; I know what I’m going to see when I click the play button. Still, I know I shouldn’t. And yet, I know I will.
Ella’s simper reaches right through the screen to me. Her teeth are sunk into her bottom lips, painted a cherry red as she sits on a man’s lap. The man’s hand wrapped around her waist splays across her hip. It’s a loose hold on her, not at all possessive. The black man smiles, his focus elsewhere as she stares at the camera, a beer held in his right hand. It’s not hard to tell that they’re at a bar. In public. The mischievousness that glinted in her eyes yesterday morning is there in this photo. Begging me to play.
I have to click play. That’s part of the research. Witnessing this is my job. A barely audible voice whispers that it’s not my job. That watching these videos—labeled as pornographic in no uncertain terms—could be avoided. No, should be avoided.
I don’t want to avoid it, though. I’m damn sure of that.
The comments under this particular video are about how it’s the beginning. The commenters say it over and over. This is the beginning. This is how it started. How the incident began and to keep watching.
From one of the familiar names, I read the comment, It’s her foreplay.
I hover my cursor over the video, and it plays a few seconds in a loop. She’s not alone in this three-second clip. Far from alone. I know the place—it’s a Hard Rock in Vegas. The background is crowded with patrons coming and going. There’s no possibility that anything salacious could happen within this public venue. But whatever did happen, it’s clear the other woman in the video was involved.
Because she has her fingertips on Ella’s jaw. I’m caught for a long minute watching the three-second clip of her tracing her pale pink painted nails down Ella’s jaw, down her neck, and even lower, to where her black-sequined dress barely covers her. The hemline skimming her thighs makes my mouth dry up. Clearing my throat, I check the empty room again. Comforted by silence, I return to the two women.
A hard swallow, watching them, in what I would guess is their midtwenties. The second woman’s caramel skin is a few shades darker than Ella’s. Her black hair is loosely curled and as Ella leans into her touch, she plays with her friend, or lover’s, curls.
The video begins with the other woman, dressed in black leather leggings and a burgundy crop top that shows a sliver of her olive-brown skin, tracing her fingertips over Ella’s skin. Over her neck, where I want to touch her. And lower, to where my entire body wishes to be. The two women are standing close to a high-top table, their backs to the crowd. And the way they’re looking at each other, the way they’re touching—
I scroll back down to the comments. Someone identifies the woman as Maggie, her friend. The name suits her, with her girl-next-door smile and expressive eyes. The comments are also right that the scene is hot, but it’s not just hot.
There’s something … suspenseful about it. The man she was with in the thumbnail watches in the background, his gaze mostly focused on Maggie, but it shifts to Ella as the two women clink cocktail glasses filled with a pink liquid. Over the pounding music, you can barely make out their laughter.
Though they’re standing in the bar, it doesn’t seem sleazy or even staged, the way most porn on the internet appears. Two women, flirting innocently with each other. Every so often, their eyes go to people outside the frame. I keep the volume down low, really low, but when they speak and I miss what was said, I have to turn it up a notch and then another.
There’s not an ounce of shame. And from what I gather on the site, this isn’t professional and nothing Ella would be paid for. This isn’t her job, it’s her life, her wants and desires.
I wonder if she knew it was being filmed. There’s no doubt when she stares at the camera, not more than a handful of seconds later, blushing and leaning closer to Maggie to whisper in her ear, all the while keeping her eyes on the camera, that she knows.
A genuine enjoyment shines in her eyes. It sparks in Maggie’s too.
“More drinks!” she shouts out of nowhere, downing the beverage in her hand through the thin black straw. The video continues with the two of them dancing, drinking, and Ella finding herself between two men. The front of one whose face is never shown, and the tall, cleanly shaven black man who towers over her. I wonder if he was her fiancé. Although I don’t have to wonder for long. Maggie joins them and doesn’t hesitate to kiss the man. She calls him Noah. There’s a possessiveness but then she holds Ella’s gaze, bumping her shoulder into her and the two of them share a sinful look.