She sent me pictures of the bruises on her thighs and arms and It made me think instantly of the light in the hotel courtyard, spilling across the carefully tended grass. It was just the beginning of spring, but it was already hot and I’d broken a sweat in the process of giving them to her.
Barbie Davenporte and I both work in adult entertainment and had it not been for that commonality, we night not have ever met. She’d come from Los Angeles and I’d come from Las Vegas, so we’d most often run into each other away from our respective lives and the people in them. We had mutual friends in the business and it’s because of them that we came to know one another.
The first time that I met Barbie was at a conference. She’d entered the line for a nightclub that some friends and I were waiting to enter and had managed to introduce herself and casually insult me in a matter of moments. That was the beginning of the baiting which would rapidly build into something between flirtation and provocation. It felt like an ongoing dare that neither of us had the intention of letting go unanswered. Our tête à tête’s weren’t separate encounters; they were one long build up that finally found us rolling around on the ground in front of a group of onlookers who weren’t sure if it was funny, appealing or disastrous.
It started playfully, but by the time we’d decided that it needed to end, I was on top of her, looking into her contemptuous eyes, both of us breathing heavily and neither of us sure what we should do about it, but both of us very clear about what we wanted to happen.
She had a boyfriend back in Los Angeles though and I had a wife in Las Vegas. We might have both known that those relationships weren’t working, but they hadn’t ended yet so we were making an effort to do the right thing in the midst of palpable desire not to. We’d laughed things off and given each other a hard time, but on the way back to my hotel, she sent me a text message admitting that the physicality had turned her on. It had turned me on too.
This is the original concept that Selena had of a photograph of me. I think it turned out quite well. I love that she is so enthusiastic about creating new things that she came up with this concept.
