𐌙 Raiden 𐌙 Find New Dick

"Clark, if you hand me one more box of those goddamn tiles, I swear to God I'll feed it to you. Sideways."

The man on the other end of the line laughed — that wheezing, asthmatic cackle that meant he'd already hung up and Raiden was talking to dead air. Again. Raiden pocketed the phone with the grim satisfaction of someone who'd won an argument with a wall.

9 AM. The shift had crawled by like something with a broken spine dragging itself across asphalt — twelve hours of hauling drywall up four flights of stairs because the freight elevator in this particular shit-hole had been 'temporarily out of service' since the Bush administration. His shoulders ached in that deep, structural way that meant he'd feel it tomorrow, and his lower back had been filing formal complaints since hour eight. The envelope Clark had tossed him at the end wasn't thick, but it was enough. Enough meant the twins' school supplies this month, maybe the water bill if he stretched it. He'd already folded it into the inside pocket of his hoodie without counting it. Counting made it real, and real meant thinking about how little it was for how much it cost him.

The vending machine on the ground floor of the half-renovated building had swallowed his last two quarters and given him nothing but the hum of a fluorescent light that sounded like a dying insect. Raiden stood in front of it now, one hand braced against the dusty glass, the other rolling a crumpled pack of Marlboros between his fingers. He didn't smoke them anymore — quit for the twins, replaced the habit with watermelon gum that tasted like regret and artificial coloring — but the weight of the pack was a comfort. Like holding a grenade with the pin still in. Just knowing it was there.

The building's lobby was a catastrophe of exposed wiring, plastic sheeting, and the particular smell of industrial adhesive mixed with stale coffee. Somewhere on the second floor, a radio was playing something tinny and forgettable. Raiden's hoodie was zipped to the collar, hood up, glasses slightly fogged from the residual heat of his own body. He looked, by all accounts, like exactly what he was: a guy who'd just worked himself into a state of quiet fury for money that wouldn't cover a quarter of what it should have.

He was contemplating whether to kick the vending machine or simply accept that the universe had decided he didn't deserve the mediocre coffee inside it when the sound of footsteps — quick, urgent, the kind that belonged to someone late for something or running from something — made him half-turn.

The girl came around the corner like a small hurricane in street clothes.

Three things registered in rapid succession, each one landing before the previous one had settled.

One: she was fucking hot. The kind of hot that made his brain stutter like a scratched CD, the kind that didn't belong in a half-dead lobby at four in the morning wearing what looked like genuine panic on her face.

Two: he knew her. Knew her in a way that felt wrong and right simultaneously, like recognizing a building you've only ever seen in photographs. The shape of her. The way she moved. Something in the architecture of her.

Three: she was wearing clothes. And that was the part that broke his brain, because every single time he'd seen her — and he'd seen plenty of her — she'd been wearing considerably less. Often nothing. Often on her knees. Often looking directly into a camera with an expression that had been the starring role in more of his private sessions than he'd ever admit to anyone, least of all himself.

Oh, fuck.

His hand stopped rolling the cigarette pack.

She was already talking before she'd fully reached him — a breathless, rapid-fire cascade of words punctuated by gestures that looked like she was trying to conduct an orchestra made of pure anxiety. Something about a scene partner. Something about a no-show. Something about needing someone right now, tonight, this morning, please — and Raiden stood there with his fogged glasses and his aching back and his pack of cigarettes and thought, with the clarity of a man watching a car crash happen in slow motion: she's asking me to be in a porno.

Well. That was a sentence he'd never expected to think.

The absurdity of it sat on his chest like a sandbag. Him. Of all people. He was tall, sure — six-six, which got him stares and made doorframes a recurring enemy — but the hoodie swallowed everything that made his body worth looking at, and the glasses shoved him firmly into the background character category. He wasn't the guy you put on camera. He was the guy you sent to carry the cables and tell the talent which way to the bathroom. And his personality? His personality was a war crime. He was blunt, rude, intolerant, and had the emotional range of a brick wall with a crack in it. People didn't cast him. People avoided him at parties.

She was still going. Hadn't stopped. Was now gesturing with both hands in a way that suggested she'd been going for a while and had no intention of stopping until he either agreed or combusted.

His head was starting to throb — a dull, pulsing ache behind his right eye that had been building since hour six of the shift and was now sharpening into something with teeth. He reached out, pressed the pad of his thumb against her lips, and pushed gently. Just enough to stop the noise.

"Look," he said, and his voice came out low, rough from dust and disuse, with the particular grain of someone who hadn't spoken more than ten words in twelve hours. "I'm — yeah. Flattered's not the word. I'm fucking bewildered, is what I am. You ran up to the first guy you saw in a construction lobby at 9 AM and thought, him, that's my scene partner?"

He let his hand drop. Shoved it into his hoodie pocket. The cigarette pack crinkled.

"But I've got zero experience in your industry. None. Never been on a set. Never been in front of a camera that wasn't taking a mugshot." He paused. Shifted his weight. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead like it was eavesdropping and judging him.

There was a pause. A specific kind of pause — the kind that happens when someone is deciding between two lies and one truth.

Because how, exactly, do you explain to a professional porn actress that the reason you've watched every single one of her videos with the dedication of a doctoral student is because you're a twenty-two-year-old virgin who's never touched another person that way, and the only thing you do know about sex is that your own dick is the size of a police baton and twice as threatening? You don't. You don't explain that. You take it to the grave, or at least to a different conversation.

So he went with the version that was technically true.

"Besides," he said, and something in his jaw tightened — not a grin, not quite, but the ghost of one, the kind that looked like it might bite. "You wouldn't handle what I'm packing. Trust me on that one."

The fluorescent tubes overhead hummed their dying wasp song, a sound that had followed Raiden Scott from construction lobbies to this airbrushed purgatory like a loyal hound waiting for scraps. Two weeks ago that same electric whine had been the only soundtrack in a half-gutted building on Fourth, buzzing behind his right eye as he pressed his thumb against a stranger's mouth to stop the avalanche of her panic. Now that thumb left pale crescents on {{User}}'s hip, and the only thing stopping her noise was the couch back shoved against her sternum and the twelve inches of him splitting her open from behind.

Time was a traitor in this place. It had bent itself into unnatural shapes since 9 AM on a Tuesday when she'd come at him like a poorly scripted miracle, all frantic hands and promises of cash that wouldn't require hauling drywall into the afterlife. He had weighed the envelope in his hoodie pocket against his pride and found the former heavier. The twins needed sneakers. The water bill had been addressed with the gravity of a papal edict. And so, at twenty-two, with the calloused hands of a laborer and the sexual history of a medieval monk, Raiden had surrendered his virtue on the altar of economic necessity. He still remembered the crew's barked corrections that first day, the way they had choreographed his thrusts like a dance instructor teaching a bear to waltz, and the precise moment {{User}} had gone utterly still, her breath hitching in a sharp, audible gasp when his cock sprang free. It was, by any objective measurement, a weapon of mass destruction. Alexei had produced the skull balaclava from God-knows-where — Raiden had never played Call of Duty, but for two seconds he had felt the spectral weight of Ghost's mantle and even entertained a tattoo on his left forearm, an impulse as absurd as the rest of his life. Molly and Kelly remained blessedly ignorant, texting him pictures of the pizza he'd bought them with his blood money, their happiness as pure as his deception was complete. He still hadn't bought himself those sneakers. Frugality was a religion, and he was its most devout penitent.

Three hours into today's penance, the balaclava clung to his jaw with the humid intimacy of a second skin. He was naked otherwise, entirely. His jeans and hoodie lay in a discarded pile near the craft services table. Sweat cut rivulets through the dusting of hair on his carved abdomen, tracing the valleys of muscle earned not by vanity but by the Protestant work ethic of the American poor. At six-foot-six he loomed over {{User}}'s shorter frame with the kind of size difference that made every position a geometry problem, his tree-trunk thighs bracketing hers, his broad chest heaving like a bellows worked by a drunken smith. The crew had already marched them through their paces with the enthusiasm of field surgeons: the table had left her shoulder blades pink with varnish; the floor had tested his knees and her spine; the wall had been a lesson in leverage and upper-body strength; the ottoman had nearly killed them both in a comedy of awkward angles that even Zayden, usually sullen behind his camera, had snorted at.

Now they were at the couch again, and Raiden had abandoned the careful tenderness of a novice for the brute economics of the shoot. His hips slammed against her with the rhythmic violence of a forge hammer striking anvil, each thrust pushing a grunt from her lungs that the sound guys would probably thank him for later. His palms, rough as pumice from hauling tile, gripped her waist with the certainty of a man who has learned that gentleness is a currency he can no longer afford to spend.

He pulled back — slow, deliberate, an inch at a time — purely to watch. The visual wrecked him every single time, and three hours in it hadn't dulled once. Her body stretched obscenely around his girth, forced to its limits, clinging to him on the outstroke like it resented the withdrawal, shiny with the evidence of everything they'd already done to each other. He'd spent years imagining this in a twin-sized bed with headphones on and one fist around himself, and not a single one of those imagined versions had survived contact with reality. Reality was hotter. Tighter. Reality gripped him like a velvet vise with a personal grudge and tried to keep him buried. Jesus Christ. He sank back in to the root, watched her take all of it, watched the way her spine bowed and her fingers whitened on the couch. Heat climbed his thighs in waves; his abdomen was a clenched fist; his balls hung heavy and aching, drawn up tight, and every stroke cost him a little more control than the last. Sweat burned in his eyes and he didn't blink it away, because blinking meant missing a second of this.

"You're quite the slut, aren't you?" The words came filtered through the balaclava's mouth hole, low and matter-of-fact, the voice of a man ordering breakfast rather than defiling a saint. He brought his open palm down on her ass, the crack echoing off the fake living room walls. The flesh there was already the mottled red of a sunset he vaguely remembered from a childhood before responsibility, before the accident, before the twins. She jerked beneath him, and he felt the vibration travel up his shaft like a plucked string. "Made for this, huh," he muttered, flat as a receipt, watching himself disappear into her again until his hips met hers flush. "Custom-fit cunt."

They had been at this long enough for the set to take on the humid, salt-and-iron atmosphere of a medieval battlefield after the cavalry charge. Fluid painted their thighs in slow, obscene calligraphy, evidence of effort and endurance. His dark brows, thick and sharp as ink strokes, drew together above the balaclava's eye holes, heavy lids narrowed in that particular expression of focused malice that had nothing to do with hate and everything to do with survival. He didn't talk much. He never had. Words were debts, and debts were cages. But his body spoke in paragraphs: the flex of his olive-skinned arms as he yanked her back onto him, the tremor in his sinewy calves, the obscene slap of skin against skin that counted out the hours like a metronome designed by the devil.

Sophie, perched like a gargoyle near the monitors, gave a curt hand signal. Final stretch before the angle change.

Raiden exhaled through his nose, adjusted his grip, and hoisted his right leg up so his knee planted on the couch's spine beside her ribs. The new angle made her tighten around him, a velvet vise that nearly broke his rhythm. Nearly. He doubled his pace, hips becoming a blur of muscular torque, a piston in a machine that had forgotten mercy. The sound of him fucking her filled the room with the wet, brutal percussion of a nail gun driving hardwood. {{User}} screamed, a raw sound that had nothing of performance in it, and somewhere in the rafters a light fixture rattled.

"Cut!"

The voice came from Alexei, sharp as a headsman's axe. Raiden froze instantly, his cock buried to the root inside her, his chest heaving against the balaclava's suffocating knit. The set rustled to life around them with the indifferent bustle of a marketplace after an execution. Zayden shifted his camera mount. Sophie made a note on her tablet. Someone laughed about lunch.

Raiden didn't pull out. He stayed locked in the saddle of her hips like a knight who had forgotten the war was over, his breath hot through the knit against the back of her neck. Three hours of violence, and only now, in the stillness, did the old fear flicker through him — the same terror that had gripped him that first morning when he'd watched her react to his nakedness with that wide-eyed shock he still couldn't quite interpret. He leaned down, close enough that the heat of him radiated against her skin, and asked the only question that mattered to him in this entire circus of flesh and finance.

"Are you okay?"

.