In Summertime Saga

She reached for her phone before she reached for me.

I was still on my back, still catching my breath, the ceiling fan pushing warm air across skin that was cooling and damp, and Jenny rolled onto her side and grabbed her phone from behind my book on the nightstand and unlocked it and the screen lit up her face blue-white in the dark room. She'd pulled the sheet up to her waist but her back was bare, the dip of her spine and the curve of her hip and the red mark on her shoulder where I'd pressed my mouth too hard.

"You were recording."

"My phone's been propped against your book since I walked in." She was already swiping, the screen reflecting in her grey eyes. "You didn't notice?"

I hadn't. She'd walked through my door in a t-shirt and bare feet and I'd been looking at her body and the set of her jaw and I hadn't clocked the phone she'd slipped onto the nightstand behind the paperback. Jenny planned things and didn't tell you and then reviewed the results like a producer screening dailies.

"The lighting is wrong on your left side," she said.

I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at her. She was naked, lying on her stomach with the phone in both hands, her feet kicked up behind her, scrolling through footage of us having sex. Her hair was wrecked and there was a red mark on her collarbone where my mouth had been and she was critiquing the cinematography.

"We just had sex and you're giving me production notes."

"The sex was a nine. The lighting was a six." She didn't look up from the screen. "I can fix the lighting."

"The sex was a nine?"

"What, you want a ten? Earn it."

I lay back and looked at the ceiling and listened to her scrub through the footage. The bed was warm and the sheet was tangled around my ankles and the smell of her and me and the room was everywhere and the fan was pushing all of it around in slow circles. I felt loose and good and the woman next to me was frame-by-frame editing our first time together and I couldn't decide if that was romantic or the opposite.

The video played through the phone speaker, tinny and small, the bed creaking and heavy breathing and the sounds she'd made when my mouth was between her legs. Hearing it back was strange. My own breathing, louder than I thought it had been. Her voice, the real one, breaking on syllables.

Jenny scrubbed past the oral. "Good angle here. Can see everything." She tapped the screen to pause on a frame. "Your back looks good."

"Thanks."

"I'm serious. You've been working out."

"I've been working out." Kevin's gym. Push-ups in the side courtyard. Strength 2 and it was starting to show and Jenny had noticed it from behind while reviewing sex tape footage on my bed.

She played a few more seconds. Paused again. "OK this part is actually good. The angle when you went down on me, you can see my stomach. The muscles. That's a good shot."

"I wasn't thinking about the shot when I was down there."

"I know. That's why it's good. It's candid." She swiped forward. "This part is too dark. Can barely see anything. And here, your arm is blocking-" She scrubbed faster, hunting.

Then she slowed down. The audio changed. The small high sounds were getting closer together and louder and Jenny's thumb stopped moving and the video played in real time.

On the screen: her face. Shoulders up, head on the pillow, my arm across the bottom of the frame. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was open. The moan she'd tried to muffle with her fist came through the speaker, desperate and raw and half-caught by her knuckles.

She watched it. Her thumb stayed still. The light from the screen moved on her face and her lips were parted and she was watching herself come apart and she looked like someone seeing a photo of themselves they didn't know had been taken.

She swiped back. Watched it again. This time her jaw relaxed and she tilted her head. She'd never heard her own voice like that from the outside. The real voice.

The room was quiet except for the video audio. The moan through the phone speaker, then the gasp. The silence after. Jenny watched the silence too, the part where her body went slack on the screen and her hand fell from her mouth and she lay there with her eyes closed and her chest moving.

"We're keeping that," she said.

She put the phone face-down on her stomach and looked at the ceiling. The fan was turning. The streetlamp outside threw a rectangle of light on the far wall that had been there the whole time and I'd only noticed now. The sweat on my chest was drying and my skin was starting to get cold and Jenny was radiating heat beside me and neither of us was reaching for the blanket.

She was quiet for a while. Jenny wasn't quiet often. When she was it meant she was working on a sentence.

"You know what you're doing," she said. "You know that, right? That was- you know what you're doing."

"I've been told."

"By who."

My mouth opened and what almost came out was the truth. Lauren, or Laura, on Egyptian cotton sheets with photos of a husband who came home early. A bartender in a hotel lounge whose name I never learned. Women in a life that ended with two gunshots and a ceiling fan I never liked. I could have told Jenny that the eighteen-year-old body she was lying next to was running on a decade of experience it shouldn't have and couldn't explain.

I swallowed it. The truth would have made me sound insane. Or like the worst kind of liar.

"Intuition," I said.

Jenny turned her head on the pillow and looked at me. Grey eyes, sharp, searching. She didn't buy it. But she was naked in my bed and the footage was good and the sex had been a nine and the present situation was working.

"Intuition," she repeated. Her mouth twitched. "You're eighteen."

"Talented eighteen."

"You ate pussy like you had a degree in it."

"Self-taught."

"Guys don't just know how to do that. Guys your age definitely don't know how to do that. Erik probably thinks the clit is a band."

I laughed. It came out before I could stop it and Jenny's eyes narrowed.

She was lying on her side facing me with her hair across the pillow and a strand stuck to her neck with sweat and the sheet loose around her waist and the lamp light catching the freckle below her left breast I hadn't noticed before.

"Intuition," she said again. Flat. Then she snorted and looked at the ceiling again and her fingers drummed on the phone against her stomach. Deciding whether to push or let it ride.

She let it ride. For now.

"The angle was wrong for the second half," she said, sitting up on her elbows. "Phone was too far left. You can see the headboard but you can barely see my face."

"Because I moved the nightstand."

"Because you moved the nightstand." She picked the phone up again and scrubbed to a different section. Turned the screen toward me. "Look. See? That's the wall. That's your elbow. That's ceiling. That's useless."

I looked. The frame had shifted when I'd braced against the headboard and the video was mostly my arm and the wall and a sliver of ceiling fan.

"Tragic," I said.

"Don't be a smartass. The first half is gold. The second half is garbage. If I'd had proper lighting and a stable angle the whole way through, this would be the best content I've ever shot. Including the professional stuff."

"Professional stuff?"

"I did a collab once. With a girl from Pink Channel. Her camera guy charged two hundred dollars and he couldn't hold a steady frame either so at least you're cheap."

"I'm free."

"You're ten percent." She sat all the way up and the sheet pooled around her hips. She was looking at me with the boardroom face, evaluating. "So we reshoot."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Right now."

"Unless you've got somewhere to be."

Her mouth was trying to stay flat but the corners were pulling. She swung off the bed and stood up and she was naked and businesslike and she grabbed the desk lamp and moved it to the other nightstand and tilted it until the light was warmer. Picked up a hoodie from my chair and rolled it up and propped her phone against it, tested the frame, adjusted, tested again. She leaned down to check the angle and I watched her move and she was building a set, my bedroom was a studio, and she was walking around my room naked with her thighs still damp from round one and my cock was paying attention before my brain was.

She tapped record. The red dot pulsed on the screen. She leaned in to verify the framing with her hair falling past her shoulders.

Then she climbed back onto the bed and swung her leg over me and settled onto my hips. My cock was hard against her ass and she could feel it because she shifted back and the slide of her, still wet, still warm from before, made my jaw clench.

"Better lighting this time," she said.

She reached behind her and wrapped her hand around me and lined herself up and the head pressed against her and she was slick, wetter than the first time, my cum still inside her mixed with hers. She sank down. Slow. Inch by inch. Her eyes fluttered shut and she exhaled through her teeth and her hands found my chest and her nails pressed into my skin. The angle was different from missionary, deeper in a different way, and she was swollen from round one and tight and hot and she kept sinking until her hips were flat against mine and her weight was on me and she stayed there. Adjusting. Her pussy clenching around me in small pulses and her thighs trembling on either side of my hips.

"Nn- oh fuck-"

Her eyes opened. She looked down at me. Her lips were parted and the flush was already starting on her chest and the lamp was warm on her skin and I put my hands on her hips and she started to move.

Slow roll of her hips. Forward and back. Finding the angle. Her breasts swaying with the motion and her stomach flexing and she braced her hands on my chest and her hair fell forward around her face. I pushed up when she rocked forward and she inhaled sharp and her nails dug in.

She glanced over her shoulder at the phone. Her hips didn't stop moving. She confirmed the angle and turned back to me and her hair was curtaining us and I grabbed her hips and pushed up harder and she bit her lip.

"Don't move the headboard this time," she said.

I moved the headboard.