Pauline La Nottee
Action backstage
CHAPTER ONE
"Candy, beautiful, that about wraps it up for this film."
"Thanks, Frankie," the voluptuous brunette said, exhausted now that the shooting had been wrapped up. She waved weakly to the director behind the camera and fumbled for her robe. "I could use a glass of iced tea."
And I can also use a cold shower, Candy Mullender thought, sniffing the air. She could smell the rich, ripe woman-scent of her own perspiration and feel the moisture coating her smooth, tapering ivory-hued thighs and trickling down the valley between her high-set tits. The camera crew were wiping their brows and hands too, looking just as wrung-out as she felt. Eighteen hours of straight shooting for a new film was bound to take a lot out of anybody. And as a performer, one of the rising female movie stars, Candy found she could put more of herself into a character if she completely immersed herself into the role. Although she was now twenty-five, she had never become entirely adjusted to the way her teenage fans ogled her sensual body. It made her uncomfortable, just as did the four-letter words everybody else seemed to use so casually.
"Sometimes I wonder if they're listening, or just looking," she once mused to the agency man assigned to her.
"Honey, it's like the old sign at railroad crossings -'Stop, Look, and Listen,' Jason Wells told her. "They look, and they listen-they break box office records at the theaters in order to see your beautiful face."
"I suppose so," she had conceded, but wishing it didn't have to be that way. She fet like a piece of meat on a rack.
Now, dripping wet from her last scene in the movie, with her thin robe belted around her tiny waist, the sleek brunette entered the studio where the camera crew were wrapping up today's shooting. They caressed her exhausted body and exchanged the meaningless showbiz kisses and she forced herself to endure it all. She knew they meant nothing, but the close contact with male flesh, and the scent of manhood filling her flaring nostrils, excited her and she had to break away.
"Guys, I've had it," she said, feeling the flush of sexual arousal begin to sweep upward through her quaking belly. "Must have some tea-my throat is on fire."
Rick Benton was immediately at her elbow with a thermos of iced tea. He poured a glass and she gratefully drank it, thanking the youth with her deep violet eyes and seeing the shy worship in his own dark eyes. Rick was barely fifteen, a pleasant self-effacing young boy, tall for his age and unmistakably handsome. He had appeared one day from the farms of the midwest and attached himself to the camera crew. He did the unpleasant but necessary tasks, such as carrying the heavy electronic equipment, keeping track of the scripts, bringing coffee, and he never complained if they forgot to pay him. He was happy just to be on the glamorous fringes of show business. He had a guitar which he was learning to play, and his greatest hope was to be a singer himself one day.
"Thank you, Rick," the exhausted brunette movie star said gratefully, favoring him with a smile which showed fine white teeth set in an unbelievably soft oval of sensuous lips. The tea was soothing to her strained throat. Candy Mullender rarely drank anything but tea or coffee or milk or lemonade, and smoked a cigarette only when under stress. She knew that virtually all the actors and actresses she worked with at least smoked marijuana, and many dropped acid or took pills or even heroin or the other hard narcotics, but Candy had never felt the need. They called her square and she shrugged it off, setting her own standards and sticking to them. In ten years struggling up the thorny ladder of show business, she had seen too many people with talent fuck up their heads with dope and alcohol.