Stories

19yo Fucks Her Heart Out – Full 1080p – Quinn Martin

Even after landing in LA, getting her baggage, hailing a cab, and being dropped off at Lizzie’s door, Holly can’t shake the feeling that she’s just the means to making someone’s half-made point. As she sidles awkwardly up the front walk of the little ranch house with a small front yard teeming greenly, managing both her duffel bag and not small suitcase, she knows it’ll have a lot of fucking, and hopefully not much violence.

This isn’t to say Holly doesn’t often slam her body again and again against the racquetball-court-wall of life, just to see what angle it throws her off at, and how fast. It’s that violence that scares her the most; it’s what she lives for. The violence of freedom.

Lizzie opens the door in a pair of plaid boxers and camouflage t-shirt. She looks very relaxed, like a cat sleeping snug inside the cardboard box of life.

“Hey, how’s it going,” Lizzie says, her voice gravelly with sleep. She leans in for a hug. Her body is a dense little radiator. “Come on in,” she says.

Lizzie picks up Holly’s suitcase before she can protest, lugs it into the foyer. Holly switches on the light and two women stand there, blinking at each other while their pupils pin.

Holly wants to say something that clicks into the moment and makes it turn as smooth as Lizzie has.

“Yeah…” she starts to say.

“Your first time in LA?” Lizzie asks, cutting her off.

“Yeah,” Holly says, “I’ve never been on the West Coast before, so like,” she makes a laugh-adjacent sound, “I’m a novice in every sense of the word.”

The two of them make the noise together, the noise that women know doesn’t mean itself, but is ancillary to so much of living. Sound. It smooths.

“It takes a little time to get used to everything, but you’ll be fine—” Lizzie breaks off mid sentence, “you must be exhausted, though. We can talk about stuff in the morning, or whenever.” She starts walking up the stairs, pulling Holly’s suitcase along with her. Holly trails slowly after her belongings. The carpet is very thick and soft, it eases the bubbles rising in her gut. Lizzie pants in front of a closed door at the top of the stairs.

“This is it! Bathroom is across the hall, and feel free to stick stuff in the hall closet if you need more room. This is your place, too, so.” Lizzie lays her hand on Holly’s shoulder and smiles. Holly considers this could be a story about seeing and trying to be seen.

“Thanks, Lizzie,” Holly says. She gets caught up in trying to say it like she means it, even though she does.

Predawn’s darkness coats her mouth. The muscles there quake with involuntary meaning.
Holly kind of sleeps. It’s sickwarm like standing water. Holly kind of awakens. It’s still not morning enough for the morning doves quite yet, the time of day when only idiots don’t feel like little children.

She sits in front of her pore-magnifying mirror trying to see what she can make herself do. Holly makes her eyes roll back, tries to make it look like she’s experiencing pleasure. She puts a finger on her undereye bag and tugs the skin down, reveling in the red wetness that hides behind her eye. It’s a piece of beef or an alien lung.

She curls up on her bed and tries to go back to sleep. She watches the light white slide through the slates of the blinds like a cut-paper puppet show. The bars creep from the white chocolate colored carpet onto the bed like a leak. One jumps onto the bed and warms Holly’s toes.

There is a closeness to this room, with the “A Child’s Wish” scented Yankee Candle on the side table and the cottage cheese ceiling. It’s a room that knows what it is for: It says “I will contain you,” and nothing more.

She floats in a thought about the girl she watched a movie with on the plane from Oklahoma last night. The cabin of the plane was so cold; it clearly hated Holly. The kid sitting next to her had taken Holly’s blanket, a square of felt wrapped in cellophane, when she had gone to the bathroom. She thought about telling the kid that the blanket was hers, but she couldn’t take a blanket from a kid. This kid looked insanely young to Holly, but she was probably like fourteen. Well enough on her way to becoming. The way her ponytail spiraled hopelessly reminded Holly of mini pots of acrylic paint in primary colors, of cat pads, ponies, and the smell of popcorn, which always used to make her stomach churn.

Holly has always hated movies. Anything can happen on that screen. You can see anything—a swinging eyeball, butt cheeks sewn together. That was just the usual stuff. And even though she almost always predicted the scare before it jumped, she jumped anyway. She used to dread being dragged through it—the crying, the blood, the leaky drama. Howlingly mad people invited fear into the frigid black box with them just to yowl their collective head off. As if there isn’t unfabricated fear enough in life already.

Holly watched a movie on the plane because there wasn’t anything else to do. In the movie, a man who loved a woman who didn’t love him back anymore took her to a cheap motel. They got drunk and zipped their bodies all around on dark blue poly sheets. The shiny sheets made the heart-shaped bed seem broken.

Holly felt the kid’s eyes on her screen. The kid leaned in until Holly could feel the warm weight of her arm on the armrest. It’s nice, isn’t it, Holly thought. Being fourteen. You were mostly just a pair of eyes then, undiluted by whatever dumb beliefs you may eventually hold. The world is given to you objectively without the marring lens of the expectation that you’re playing some cohesive character.

When the man uses his face to part the woman’s legs, the kid became very still. Unblinking, their eyes reflected back at them were four disjointed stars, a post-operation constellation. Had the kid seen anything like this before? Did she know this was a thing that people did? Would she remember riding on this plane, watching the actor’s head enter the tunnel of the actresses’ skirt? Holly wouldn’t ever have to know. When the waitress marched down the aisle armed with stale croissants in crackling wrappers, the girl asked if she could have one for her mom, who was still sleeping, and then ate both.

Holly wakes with a start. She forgets where she is for a second. In an overwarm house in a city for her exists only aerially. The clock reads 8:24. She sits on the bed for a couple of minutes, snaking her long brown hair up into a bun and then letting it fall back to her shoulders. She thinks about her college apartment back in Oklahoma City—the drafty upstairs room in the old purple Victorian, the roommates coming and going with predictable velocity. This is what college taught her: everyone wanted to collect the same stories, the kind of drinking and drugging and fucking shenanigans that signaled to other people that they were real.

It followed that everyone at The Party glittered, sweating, swaying or singing or not singing along to the music and talking or hanging around the fringes of conversation with that mono deadbright look in their eyes like wow, how terrifying is free will? Dancing the same three or four moves, dressed up like the idea of themselves having a good time. Holly liked to lean into people as hard as she could at parties, press into corners and sling back Cantaloupe Smirnoff and listen until she had a whole little life spun melting sticky in her hand. It always washed right off.

Holly lets her head hang heavy toward her left shoulder and pads toward the bathroom. She pees and stares at the little glowing shell-shaped night light and leans toward this being some sappy story about childhood. About grieving for the fact that there is a world that we have to lean our way into and a world that we have to let go of. At some point in Holly’s adolescence there must have been a time when everyone was flushed with adoration of the future to come, and they fled toward it while she stayed back, sitting there shocked like: wasn’t there magic in an Alaska license plate just yesterday?

Holly flushes the toilet and returns to her room. The unzipped contents of her red duffel bag spill onto the floor. She remembers leaving her college town. Taking snapshots of her body, parsed down to breasts and flanks, plucked chicken slabs. Holly knew that telling anyone who might consider her a “friend” would dilute the idea. Lock the whole thing down into some arc, bend her back to it Christ style. Her story would be told for her, jogging parallel to her life. It would build before dying in their mouths. Holly was just someone sad to remember: she’s doing porn, she’s going to LA to do porn, Holly’s going, Holly’s going, Holly’s gone.

Holly hates stories, how made up they are, how they keep existing far after the breathless exhilaration of their conception. Time reveals most of them to be oversimple, cute. Big dumb beads on a string. The story is what’s left when all the blood has pumped out of the thing already. Stories are like horoscopes, the Zodiac, tarot cards. They’re just taking the things that you happen to notice while gawking about and stringing them together with some tacky “grand design.” Making a tangled piece of costume jewelry.

When her old friends couldn’t remember what her last name was, then she’d be fully feral, whittled down to truth from living off of what was known only in her own mind.

Holly picks through soft mounds of fishnet and nylon, the fabric a forgettable twist without a human body forcing it to remember its shape. She likes the sudden solid presence of her naked body. Smoothly permanent. Holly is thin, pale, unremarkable as a catalpa pod. Narrow-hipped, but not in the pseudo-starving way that’s so fashionable. At least not any more. Skinny arms and a chest ghosted with stretch marks, parallel bars that indicated a strain she never felt. Her legs are long, which is a plus. She’s completely shaved between them because she likes to see the intricacies of her vulva. It reminds her of a baby’s head.

She decides on a pink mesh bra and underwear set, and a dark blue tracksuit with white racing stripes down the side. She pulls and zippers and looks at herself again in the mirror, filling out this second suit so well that it becomes more meaningful than her body. Dumbfuck meaning, squeezing her into this or that kind of character. That’s the problem with movies: they make people think they know how things shake out, they make people think that seeing anything is the same as seeing everything. They’ll never come close to seeing everything: not in the black box (cold, so Holly knows it hates her). Especially not on some page.

Holly steels herself for the trip downstairs by considering that this could be a story about the anthropological kindness of the omniscient camera eye. So fascinated in the little edges of people, all the places that you can’t see yourself. Extreme close-ups of places so sealed off it would seem even air couldn’t possibly gain access. But of course, the camera isn’t interested in the girth and width of air.

Good sex is like being so seen that the scrapped together you of you, the pip of a voice that chirps on constantly, actually exists outside of yourself. That’s the trick—exiting the mind in favor of the body. It’s difficult, isn’t it? Is playing still playing when it’s unlearning how to work?

To fuck well is to be honest, to follow the free rovings of mind instead of doing what she thinks she ought to do. Either way, she imagines the eager faces of her lovers and her audience to be as endlessly beveled as she is. That’s what she hopes.

Holly pads down the stairs and chastises her heart for pounding. She can be this person, she tells herself. Self-assured and boundless. Comfortable with a complete lack of spiel, little she would or would not do or say. Lizzie seems to already be living in that world, though Holly does not know her well enough to really judge this. Holly thinks Lizzie would not be one to judge if Holly tried to join her in her airborne hang of being. Lizzie is sitting in the kitchen slowly floating smoke to the ceiling.

“Hey,” says Lizzie. “Sorry if I woke you up.” Lizzie does not have good teeth. It makes Holly want to shift her hand over her mouth, suddenly significant with its bourgeoisie benefit of three years of braces.

But then Holly does what she’s want to do sometimes: she throws herself against the wall and sees if she can cut the moment hard and squirrel away some small sterling kernel of truth. These tidbits she collects to figure out how she can keep staying in the world.

Can she birth herself, the person she thinks she could be, into existence? If what she thinks the world is, is, indeed, the world.

“Oh, no worries,” Holly says, and she smiles widely, flushing with shame and excitement, revealing her face in full: naked, earnest as a daisy denuded of petals.

Lizzie smiles back at her! Ah, sincerity. It makes Holly’s heart start again.

“Is there any coffee?” Holly asks.

“In the pot,” Lizzie says. She blooms a smoke plume. “You meeting John today?”

“At eleven. Hopefully traffic isn’t shit.” The swear feels strange to Holly, but Lizzie doesn’t notice.

Holly can really do and say as she likes. Her stomach lurches in freefall as she floats a little with Lizzie, two people in the air outside of decency. No one here has to know that she loves hedgehogs and once stayed in bed for almost ten consecutive days. Holly made her High school dance team as a sophomore, and the jolt of confidence encouraged a brief period of chubby, flushed, prettiness-adjacent preteen awkwardness that made her visible to idiot men, who suddenly held the door open for her and pigged out on her body as it shifted underneath her T-shirt. To counteract that attention she plunged in and out of unconvinced anorexia in her teens and early twenties. As a college junior it rendered her clownish, balding, exaggerated. Her receding hairline made her look Cro-Magnon. Like one of the first women. The middle of her backbone was her most secret spot: a dry opal of a bruise formed from the knobby cruelty of her own vertebrae. Holly spent a lot of time in college lying down.

“Mugs are all the way to the left,” Lizzie says.

Holly gets down a white mug that says Little Miss Sunshine. She stands awkwardly across from Lizzie, the kitchen island a set piece between them.

Holly has seen girls who look like Lizzie in porn before. Her freshman year of college, Brian Dorman talked about how funny it would be if the group of freshmen assembled in his dorm room went on PornHub, talked about it so incessantly that no one could hear the episode of South Park playing on his laptop. How had they ended up there? Holly stood there awkwardly. She ended up growing wet and relieving herself over and over again later, in the privacy of her dorm room. She’d go for hours sometimes, alternating between porn, roulette style chat rooms, and her imagination. Her fingers wrinkled and sore by the end, and she filled with a sense of herself so solid that it sent her plunging straight to sleep.

So she was sympathetic toward Brian, who had probably thought that it would be good to act like some previously pictured someone, the laugh track skateboard heartthrob he imagined as a kid. A person totally devoid of any kind of confused self-loathing. Why not push that version of himself outward into reality, see if he could fly?

Yes, Holly imagines, filling her mug to the brim and opening to the fridge to stare about for what feels like half an half, Brian was enacting some dumb story about himself when he selected “Sneaky 0fficer punishing fat titty teen shoplifter.” They passed around two warm 40’s while the girl who looked like Lizzie moaned.

The girl’s body was a Mesopotamian fertility idol’s. Tattooed birds circled her innie, growing simpler until they turned to stars. Her breasts were enormous, partially, Holly remembers thinking, to make the rest of her body seem smaller. Her stomach was taut and imprinted with muscle, her thighs and calves were thick and tan and shaped as if from clay. It was standard-issue fucking, in her mouth and then she was on top, and then vigorously from behind, the mouth of her vagina dripping and gasping, a creature still partially marine.

Holly couldn’t stop watching. Everyone was talking to each other, kind of drunk. But Holly saw their eyes flick over to the scene. The conversation was just patina. But what happened on the screen was power. The violence of freedom played out in the spreadblossom woman’s open wound.

“I’m being, like, so rude right now,” Lizzie says, “let’s go sit on the couch.” Lizzie leads the way to the sofa. There’s a box set of Friends and a bashed-in copy of Oldboy on the glass coffee table. When she sits down, Lizzie hands Holly a joint and without really entirely thinking at all, Holly inhales deeply, and suddenly she’s high with Lizzie, and they are fish with fancy tails swimming in a room filled with air.

This very well may be a story about a long and winding death drive, about dying. That inevitable second birth we all lapse into. A story about making it to death with your head on your shoulders, having sewn together something comprehensible, maybe vulgar, but with honest feeling to it.

Would her someday grandchildren ever be able to believe that, in turning herself inside out for the camera, she was actually turning her right side in? Was Holly not her bravest, most honest self when she was solely concentrated on making the blushing slit of hers sap silver? Moreso certainly than that person the unnamed collective of public opinion would have her play. They’d like to bend Holly’s limbs like a doll to the fax machine and have her gesticulate stiffly to the little children, make some pointless neutered cog out of her as her brain ambered in her skull. Hardly any chance she’d sew half of a soul for herself in her lifetime.

Why, why, why, Holly used to ask herself. She picked the thing one just did not pick. The bruised spot on her spine, that’s what they’d minimize her to. The Talkers. Everybody who was there at The Party. They would sew her story from that insignificant, stupid bruise. It didn’t matter Holly was in AP Calc and refused to dissect a fetal pig because she was a vegetarian and she always sat outside during lunch, even when it rained. Those things did not explain Holly like that awful bruised spot staring at them like it was a rotting fucking chakra.

Holly forgot about the bruise before it faded fully.

Maybe, if Holly is lucky and strong, her story can go like this: she has a body and she is nothingness that can be permeated by the world and not die in anguish but take only what she must to exist and not hurt anymore. Holly has always waited for a story like that. But they never taught her anything like that in Lit class, and it never felt like that at The Party, when people were telling her their life stories. The university loved stories. It was packed to the gills with them.

“John’s an alright manager. Lowkey he just pretends to be a perv, but actually he’s harmless. And, also, this is important, ” Lizzie says.

Holly pictures all the way she’ll be opened up, and the pressure she’ll feel inside her. How it will probably not feel like closeness, and might feel like pleasure, if she could get her mind there. If the only threat of violence came from her alone.

“Okay,” says Holly. She laughs a little, in a way she thinks is casual.

“And he’ll definitely try to get you to do guy-girl scenes, like, straightaway. Too many girls wanna just do solo shit. But that isn’t where the money is. Things are changing, man. Now it’s just about how many dicks you can squeeze into an ass.” Holly snorts and blows more smoke toward the ceiling. She furrows her brow, shakes her head. Holly hates the way she balks at Lizzie’s crudeness. She expected Lizzie to be more unexpected.

“Well, do you still like doing it?” Holly asks, not sure if this is what she should be saying. She wishes she hadn’t said “well.”

“I like having a job. And I like sex, but everyone who says that they do porn just because ‘they love sex’ is shitting themselves. It’s a job. Gotta be on set for, like, ten hours straight sometimes. And it sucks sometimes. Obviously. Guys can be assholes. Can think that they can do whatever they want to you just because you’ve signed a contract. This guy last week,” Holly snorts and shakes her head, “I’ve never worked with him before but he seems alright enough. New guy, young guy. And he’s fucking me in the ass from behind, and then he pulls out and goes straight for the vag. And so I jump like two feet in the air and I’m like, ‘yo, dude, you wanna pay for my hospital bills when I get E. coli?”

Lizzie looks at Holly and laughs until tears are squeezed out of her opaque eyes. Holly laughs with her like she knows what Lizzie is talking about. Wonder what Lizzie talks about with her friends, her mother and father.

But Lizzie’s eyes are all grayed out. She slaps the corduroy wale of the couch and stands up. “It’s not all bad though. Obviously. Beats waitressing. It’ll be what it’ll be, kiddo.” Lizzie says. “I don’t mean to Mom you, but just take it slow and know your limits. I gotta go take a shower, but I’ll be around this afternoon to chat more.” Lizzie leans forward and gives Holly’s hands a quick squeeze.

Holly leans back into the couch, and considers the segmented lights of the microwave, little neon bug legs that spell the time. She calls a Lyft and closes her eyes.

By making it all overtly about fucking, Holly considers that she’s making room for much more valuable subtext. If basically all of life is actually about sex, a life that’s totally devoted to carnality is suddenly a life that’s allowed to be about the pursuit of other things. It’s a life that destroys that creeping feeling that one is not really cut out to be an object of desire, because you accrue evidence, hours and hours of footage and maybe even scars, that prove it.

Holly’s phone twinkles. Her car is here. She picks up her purse from the kitchen table and glides outside, into the day. It’s already hot out. Pink roses tumble over the stone wall. They are so sylvan, squished, slightly past their prime like fruit festering in the crisper drawer. They are not doomed to some impending irony, tragedy, even loveliness. They are everything. They are themselves. A ripedying cosmos of roses.