When we’re talking about my career in adult entertainment, I tell time by what my hair looked like. Kayden can do the same with the list of companies she’s been contracted to. So let’s go back to when I had finally grown out my natural (brunette) color to nearly shoulder length and she was with Adam & Eve. We were both in New Jersey for the first Exxxotica convention in the Northeast megalopolis. On my way back in from the 7-11 (around the corner, down the street, technically against the rules because we aren’t supposed to walk around by ourselves at these things) I saw Adella (Digital Playground’s publicist) sitting at a table with two women that I didn’t know. Adella waved me over. 

Air kisses were exchanged. I climbed into the empty seat across from Katie (Adam & Eve’s publicist) and next to Kayden (one of Adam & Eve’s contract stars). The furniture was dark wood and sized for mildly overweight business men, not petite women who make their living being nude on camera. The setting made her look more delicate, blonder, more blue in the eyes. Her chest, while significant, wasn’t entirely out of the realm of natural possibility. Her purse was on the floor, leaning against a chair leg. Sticking out of it was a book.

A real book. Not an issue of Glamour or a celebrity-gossip rag. An actual book, made of paper, picture-less aside from the cover. 

“Oh my god, you’re reading a book.” came spilling out of my mouth. Adella, always prepared to cover or explain a social gaffe on my part, interjected with “Stoya reads too” and went back to her conversation. Twenty minutes passed, favorite genres were discussed, opinions were expressed, debated. She’s a Dave Eggers kind of girl and my heart will always belong to speculative fiction, but still, to find another woman in porn who wants to intelligently discuss the written word!

We were obviously in love and needed to do a movie together immediately. Two contract stars working together was a rarity at this point, reserved for a production company’s big-budget, hopefully award-winning yearly feature. The fact that we were contracted to different companies meant that we were star-crossed. She an Eveulet and I a Playgroundague. Tragedy.

Kayden, with her knowledge of business and contracts started presenting convincing arguments for this project. I’m presenting them as bullet points because I think that’s how her brain works:

- Adam & Eve and Digital Playground had partnered on a film a couple of years ago, the original Pirates, setting a precedent for collaboration.

- It could be called Kayden loves Stoya, or Stoya loves Kayden, which was similar to a line of titles selling quite well for Club Jenna at the time.

I jumped in with the fact that our fan bases were similar enough that cross-branding would be beneficial for both of us and profitable for our respective companies. 

Kayden said something about how even with contract star rates, it could be shot very inexpensively and therefore be low risk.

Our respective publicists rolled their eyes at us simultaneously. It was so well timed I swear they must have rehearsed.

Fast forward: Kayden left Adam & Eve to join Digital. Two contract girls in the same scene is still expensive, too expensive to be considered financially viable for anything other than the five or six girl orgies in films like Top Guns and Babysitters 2. An orgy, while initially fun for the novelty and apparently visually stimulating for the viewer, is not the same thing as sex with one or two partners. We begged. We stamped our feet. We pleaded. Eventually Manwin acquired Digital Playground and was persuaded to shoot us together for what we thought was Twisty’s, but turned out to be Babes.com. 

In retrospect, if I’d just asked her outright, there’s a chance we could have been having sex on our own time in any number of hotel rooms from Edison through Johannesburg.