He was short and bald, and was wearing a filthy Tshirt with a cannabis leaf drawn on the front. He raised his voice. To her surprise Teresa discovered he had a British accent.
'All right, everybody, we'll do another take. Quiet please! Everyone in their places. Are you ready, Shandy and Luke?' Teresa said she was, and the man with the big false whiskers put his newspaper out of sight somewhere behind the counter. 'OK, we'll start now.'
Shandy and Luke. Teresa glanced at Luke, who gave her a wink.
SENSH
Teresa had been expecting the director to shout 'Action!', but apparently this was not necessary. Both cameras came into use, indicated by tiny red LEDs that glinted at the front.
Luke at once moved towards her roughly and began grappling with her, his arms round her back, trying to kiss her. At first, Teresa instinctively resisted, but after a few seconds she forced herself to relax and not to try to control the events of this scenario. She felt the areas of her mind and body that were Shandy's also resisting Luke's advances, but with less conviction. After a few seconds of halfhearted wrestling, Luke took the front of her shirt in both hands and tore it open. Teresa heard the familiar screech of velcro, and realized that the buttons were fake. Her exaggerated breasts were revealed.
Shandy turned away and picked up a bottle from the counter. Holding it by the neck, she brought it down on the crown of Luke's head. lt shattered instantly with an unconvincing noise that sounded more like plastic apparatus dismantling than glass breaking. Luke reared up, shook his head, then came back for more.
* * * SENSH
This time he snatched at her bra, hooking his fingers under the scrap of cloth that connected the halfcups. He pulled at it roughly. The bra tore apart as easily as the shirt had done, and fell away from her body instantly. Tossing it aside, Luke sank his face between her breasts, cupping them in his hands and pressing them against his cheeks. Teresa felt the stiff bristles of his moustache scratching against her. She groaned in ecstasy. The man with the handheld camera moved in closer.
She allowed Luke to nuzzle her breasts for several more seconds, but then there was an interruption. The man in the cowboy suit who had been standing behind the lights stepped forward.
He grabbed Luke by the collar, pulled his head back and away from her body, then took a mighty swing with his fist. To Teresa he appeared to miss by several inches, but Luke's head jerked backwards, and he staggered away from her, his arms windimilling. He collapsed into a table and two chairs, which smashed at once. Both cameras briefly recorded this, then returned to their main focus of interest.
Her rescuer was now sizing her up with overacted relish, standing before her and stroking one of her naked breasts with his fingers. Shandy licked her lips, and her nipples became erect. She stroked her hand across the front of his jeans; Teresa was startled to realize that there was already an immense bulge inside them. His hips were gyrating slowly. This went on for some time.
* * * SENSH
Behind them, the director's voice cut in.
'Come on, Shan!' he shouted. 'Get on with it!'
Shandy deliberately delayed a little longer, letting her tongue play temptingly across her lips, but after another annoyed shout from the director she reached across to the zipper of the man's jeans and slowly slid it down.
Teresa was undeniably impressed by what she saw come prodding out of there, and was intensely interested in what Shandy and the man did for the next uncounted minutes.
She stayed to the end of the action, thinking how little she had previously known about certain kinds of sexual performance, how well and enthusiastically Shandy could perform them, how much quick pleasure they brought, but how few of them were ultimately worth knowing.
Finally it was all over. With not much more likely to happen Teresa recalled the LIVER
mnemonic. Shandy was walking towards a shower cubicle, clutching the tiny costume against the front of her body.
You have been flying SENSH Y'ALL
Fantasys from the Old West
Copyroody everywhere doan even THINK about it!!
A piece of inane music, synthesized somehow with a drumming beat and an endlessly repeated sequence of three chords, jangled deafeningly around Teresa as she returned, not entirely willingly, to reality.
Later that evening, alone in her room and stirring restlessly with her memories of the day, Teresa took her notepad from her bag and found an unused page. She regarded it for a long time.
Finally, 'm careful handwriting, she put down the words:
That wasn't what she had meant to say, wasn't even what she thought. lt hadn't been so interesting. Size wasn't everything. Neither was stamina.
She didn't sign the page, but instead stared at the inadequate words, trying to summon memories of her times
with Andy, the long and happy years becoming so increasingly difficult to recall. The caprice of writing down the flippant words had instantly died, to be replaced by a familiar longing.
He was slipping ineluctably away from her, ceasing to be the person she remembered, becoming instead simply the bearer of a name, the man who had had a past role in her life, someone she recalled as a lover but not as someone making love, except in fragments of memory, incidents that had with time lost their passion. A man, a figure, a lover, a friend, a husband, he had been all of these, but he was becoming more remote from her. He would never know this reality of the years beyond his death in which she had to live
