Show Me by Carole Hart Read Free Book Online

extraordinarily good-looking and willing to have sex on air.
    At first, Emily was painfully shy about the whole endeavor. Her researchers had had to do most of the talking when vetting interviewees. Her participation had been confined to saying diffidently afterward, “Um, I don’t think I want to . . . with that guy. If that’s okay?” Or else, “Yes, he seems—I mean, don’t you think? I’d like to, if it’s okay.” The charm of that first season (released as a set, it was now selling like hotcakes) was partly her shyness. It made every moment of film feel compellingly real.
    The format of the show took shape around the drama of two attractive strangers meeting, getting to know each other, and then having sex in front of the cameras. Every week there was a restaurant date (in a restaurant where the other diners were all paid extras), then a “cute” date based on the gentleman’s real-life job (Emily perched in the cockpit of a plane; Emily getting a riding lesson from the real-life cowboy), and finally a long, leisurely, wine-soaked chat in bed, followed by . . .
    Well, the first few times, what followed was difficult. The difficulty sometimes turned into multiple takes and humiliating long afternoons. Emily’s “magic touch” had completely failed her. It was impossible for her to concentrate on someone else’s body with a forest of microphones and camera lenses staring her down. The cowboy had taken two hours to get an erection, and then had threatened to beat up one of the cameramen who laughed at the wrong moment. Another man, an oceanographer who had a fascinating story to tell but a childish sense of humor, had been incapable of stopping himself from saying the wrong thing while they were fucking. In the middle of the sex scene, he would say something like “Wait. What’s that birthmark? Why—you’re my sister!” He’d apologized later, confessing, “Well, it felt so good when you laughed.”
    By the second season, she’d begun to relax more. The magic touch returned, and she began to enjoy the way men reacted to her. Making them shift from self-conscious posing to uncontrolled sexuality gave her a feeling of power, not to mention the actual fucking, which was often a fantasy come true. At the same time, she became comfortable being sexual in front of an audience; she could either blank out the cameras or perversely enjoy the illicit thrill of being watched.
    But of course, by the second season, she hadn’t had sex off camera for a year. She’d been too preoccupied and too busy getting used to her new life to think about dating. So it became perfectly natural to fall into a sex trance in a TV studio, knowing that any minute the director could interrupt with a request. “Turn a little toward camera one.” “Can we have more vocalizing?” All of this became part of sex, until when she was attracted to a man off camera, she immediately imagined him in that double-king-sized bed, surrounded by film equipment.
    “I’m worried that I’m becoming strange,” she told Babylona. “What if I can never have a normal relationship after this?”
    “Oh, you’ll have normal relationships,” Babylona said, with a sad tinge to her voice. “You’ll fall in love and desert me; I can tell these things. It’s tragic.”
    But Emily was not so sure. The show had become a crazy dream world of sensuality. She would wander through the city, noticing all the good-looking men and wondering if they had a story, if she could get them on the show. One day she actually struck up a conversation with an absurdly sexy man in a bar, who turned out to be a successful artist and a fan of In Depth. He was the first near-celebrity she’d had on the show—the first person, anyhow, who had considered it a possible boost to his career. The day after it aired, her producers were besieged by phone calls from slightly less well-known artists. Soon Emily was sleeping with a series of C-list celebrities trying to become