But once that period ended, Arsen looked at me one day as we lay in bed after having a marvelous afternoon lovemaking session. I was still breathing heavily with my face nestled on his chest when I felt him play with my hair and move my head slightly so he could look me in the eyes.
“What do you think I should do with the last piece of Dad’s legacy?” he asked.
I looked hard at him. “Well, have your reasons for selling it changed?”
Arsen shrugged at me. “I used to feel that there was something wrong with openly hawking this stuff and that’s why Mom wasn’t around, even if she was dead,” he said. “But I get it now that this brings happiness to people’s lives. With my MBA, I could easily make Dad’s operation viable again,” he said.
I propped myself up on an elbow and looked at him. This is the man that I had fallen in love with. “And with my Art History degree, I could handle most of the creative branding,” I told him.
“You wouldn’t want to work the lines?” he asked me with a smirk.
I used my free hand to tickle him. He squirmed, and I moved lower. Without realizing it, my free hand grabbed onto his cock, and I began to squeeze it.
Within minutes, the idea of a reborn Hawke Media Group was being consummated quite noisily on that bed.
“Mr. Hawke, your company has really blazed a trail forward in bringing adult oriented entertainment even more mainstream than it has ever been. Many people call you a visionary. Others call you a smut peddler like your father with fancier technology. What are your comments to them?” the reporter asks Arsen as the news camera points to him. I’m standing to the side, content to let Arsen take the interview.
But he doesn’t listen to my directions.
“I couldn’t have done it without the help of my wife, Ashley,” he says, gesturing towards me. I gasp as the news camera swivels and takes a picture of me. “She’s the one that had the idea for a FaceTime app for our services, a Skype app, and a Facebook Live daily feed. She’s really harnessed social media.”
“Mrs. Hawke, any comments?” Tricia the reporter asks, looking at me. She’s looking triumphant. I don’t understand why she wants to make us uncomfortable.
I’m frozen. I wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot.
It’s true though on some level. Every time we had brainstorming sessions for what to do next, Arsen could execute like nothing else, but he came to rely on me for ideas. But I need to be honest, if it weren’t for his questioning, I would have never have gotten the juices flowing to come up with the idea. And before you start snickering, that’s mental juices, okay? Oh my God, talk about mind in the gutter.
“It’s more of a back and forth between Arsen and I that results in some of the ideas that we have coming to me,” I tell the camera sweetly, belying my thumping heart at being on television for millions. “If he weren’t asking the right questions, I wouldn’t be coming up with the ideas.”
“How did you come up with the idea to partner with Oculus Rift to provide on-demand virtual reality re-enactments of popular romance e-books?” Tricia asks.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Arsen says and the camera swivels back to him. “We were in the shower together, and having some fun, when I said everyone should be so lucky to have someone so good at…” Arsen trails off as he realizes just what he’s done. Tricia has a wide smile on her face, with a gotcha grin. Arsen’s just embarrassed himself on live television. This is what reporters live for.
But not if I can help it.
Taking a deep breath and summoning every last bit of courage I have, I take several steps over to my husband. The man I married six months ago in a wedding that the New York Journal called ‘the Social Event of the Year’.
I wrap my arm around Arsen’s and take my hand and move his face over to mine. He looks at me, and I smile at him. He see’s into my soul through my eyes – and I think he realizes that together, nothing can stop us.
That’s when I look to the camera.
“Arsen and I were having sex in the shower,” I say without any trace of embarrassment and I see Tricia the reporter gasp. “He was fucking me so good doggiestyle, when he said to me that if everyone had someone like me in their lives who could fuck so good then a lot of the problems in the world would be solved.”
“Uh-uhm, right…” Tricia says, starting to visibly sweat.
“That’s when I pulled out and got on my knees and began to suck him off,” I say to Tricia, making sure to look her directly in the eyes. “And I started saying what if we had a movie that went along with a dirty book. And then what if we could somehow take the step of creating that world one step further for people. And that’s how Naughty Realities was born. From shower sex.”
Tricia is visibly sweating. She didn’t expect me to get this raw. It’s only 8 am on the East Coast. People are still getting up.
“Although,” I say sweetly, giving the reporter a break. “If there’s anyone else in this world we rely on more than anything else, it’s Arsen’s lawyer and his beautiful wife and my good friend, Yasmine.”
Gerard and Yasmine smile from where they’re seated at the couch. They’ve just been married a month ago. It shows in how close they sit and the fact that they can’t stop touching one another.
The interview continues for a little bit longer, mainly with Gerard and Arsen answering questions on the business end. How the proliferation of high-tech phone sex has created a new industry in America. How readily accessible virtual erotic encounters have literally taken the fight out of ISIS when used successfully. And how the future looks for Hawkelane Media.
“Things are looking up,” Arsen says, looking at me as he smiles.
I look down. There’s a tent beginning to form in his trousers. I smile. Looking up indeed.