by Sasha Grey
Copyright © 2016 by Sasha Grey, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink
Cover photograph: iStock Photos
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-180-0
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-181-7
PROLOGUE
ASK YOURSELF THIS.
If you had a key that promised to unlock the secrets of the world, wouldn’t you want to use it?
If you could catch the rich and powerful stripped naked, in flagrante delicto, exposing all their closeted kinks and perversions, wouldn’t you be tempted?
If that’s what you want, come with me.
But I have to warn you: Once you cross that threshold, nothing will ever be the same.
You will never be the same.
I’m not.
Nearly four years ago, a statue of Pan looked on while the core of my life was cracked open on a platform as one of the most powerful men in the world marked me as his equal. No, not his equal—as one of his own, like attracting like though we’re not quite the same. I could protest all I wanted, but my moral compass had somehow led me to the same dark room as DeVille, and I can’t deny that a part of me belonged there. A part of me liked squeezing his throat.
A part of me remains there, floating in a sky the color of his oxygen-deprived lips.
A part of me that knows I’m not like other people, not like Jack.
Too much like DeVille and others in The Juliette Society.
But the larger part of me locked that experience deep down inside. It’s easier to pretend it never happened—especially since I never saw Anna again.
I haven’t thought of my friend in ages.
At first, Anna’s empty chair behind me in Marcus’s class had gravity to it, filled with the weight of my expectations and hopes and my frustration that she never returned. At least not before I started to resent the hell out of her.
I chose frustration over her absence rather than believe someone as vibrant as Anna could be extinguished by someone who appreciated neither her inner flame nor the curves containing it. She was more than a reaction to pleasure or pain. Locked in a cage and used for someone else’s pleasure, she was an atomic detonation.
But seeing the way she simmered with the rest of us was like watching the already lit fuse. You couldn’t look away, and if you did, it was to see the looks on the faces of everyone around her. Gauge their reactions to decide what yours should be. What was safe to share.
People like her don’t exist in your life for long.
There’s a reason she stopped answering my calls. There had to have been.
Because why would she disappear after connecting me to a lifestyle that she embraced on a more fundamental level than I ever did?
Was that it? Could she sense, underneath it all, that I would turn from it, put all memories of it away to have a normal life with my Jack?
Was it disappointment that turned her from me? Her absence was a rejection that stung worse than any breakup I’d experienced.
I had to will myself to move on from the easy friendship we’d enjoyed together. I thought I’d meant more to her than I had. I imagine she kept in touch with others in her life; it was me who wasn’t important enough for her to bother with calling, so I chose to forget about her, too. Even a few months later, the brash, wild things we’d done together felt more like dreams than memories.
Maybe because the things we’d shared had been so fantastical, it was easier to pretend they’d been imagined and to put them firmly behind me. I graduated, found a job as a beat reporter at a newspaper. Settled deeper into my life with Jack, but both of us too busy, too consumed with work, to lock down a date to actually say our forever vows. At this point it’s pure ceremony; I’m already committed to him. Normalcy and comfort cover my memories of Anna and The Juliette Society like a warm blanket until it felt like they had happened to someone else.
Life goes on. We move on from the people we knew and the people we were, especially at that age.
Especially from the things that moan in the night.
Does this happen to everyone who embarks on a journey of the senses? Do they all eventually disappear, having felt too much?
I don’t think of Anna often. The disappointment is embarrassing.
And yet…
It’s an uncomfortable truth when you get a good look in the mirror and what you see makes you want to cringe—but you can’t, because you wouldn’t take it back. It felt too good. Still, the knowledge crawls across your skin like a dried film of soap you didn’t quite rinse away in the shower, always there embracing you, reminding you every time you have to restrict your movements so you can ignore the fact that your skin feels too tight. Like you’re stuffed full of more and sooner or later it’s going to split you in two and break free.
Four years is a long time to change, and shift, and grow. Four years is a long time to bury memories deep down until they’re etched upon your bones and you can almost forget that you were the person who once ached to have those experiences.
Almost.
Is character subservient to desire?
Are we driven by our desires, or do they drive us completely?
ONE
AS A GENERAL RULE, PEOPLE who work in hotels know better than to ever stay in one. This is not unique in the service industry. People who work in airports have their own version. They will tell you they always take a packed lunch to work and never eat at the concession stands. That’s because they know something you don’t: All that uneaten airline food that gets dumped out of every arriving flight is a magnet for vermin and cockroaches.
Same deal with hotel employees. If they really have to, they will only stay in large hotels. The bigger the better—preferably the supersized resorts with a thousand rooms or more. Why?
They know it’s the only way to beat the odds.
Let me explain.
At some point in its history, every hotel in the world has hosted at least one guest who checked in but never checked out. Or rather, they checked out, but never settled the bill.
If you’ve ever stayed in a hotel, you’ll know that scenario is highly unlikely unless you’ve been comped, and in this case, I’ll tell you right up front, that didn’t happen. What we’re left with is a paradox, one that can only be resolved if the person occupying the room fulfilled one condition, and one condition only:
They expired.
Scientists have done statistical studies on this—the number of people who have died in hotels, the number of hotels that have had dead people in them. That means it’s a fact. Not just a freak occurrence, and actually far more common than you’d think. It happens almost every day.
Say a group of retirees on a package tour arrives at their hotel. The eventuality that at least one of them is going to get off the bus, and not back on, is pretty damn high. He or she might not even get the opportunity to play a full round of mini-golf.
According to the world wide web, at last count, globally, there were estimated to be something like 17.3 million hotel rooms in 187,000 hotels. That means wherever you travel in the world, which
ever class of hotel you stay in, during high season or low, there’s a one in ninety-three chance you’ll be sleeping with the dead.
You might think that’s an acceptable risk, something you could easily live with.
Wait.
You don’t even know how the person died.
There are several options. I’ll warn you now, they get progressively worse.
First, there are the natural deaths. This could include any number of sudden fatal illnesses, viruses or superbugs, heart attacks, aneurysms, embolisms, a massive hemorrhage, or—are you ready for this?—spontaneous combustion.
Don’t laugh—it’s been known to happen. And there’s nothing funny about it if you’re the one who has to clean up the mess afterwards. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Then there’s death by misadventure. One clumsy fumble with an electrical gadget in the bathroom could lead to a nasty shock that might prove terminal. An unexpected trip or fall after a long night at the hotel bar may result in severe head trauma, or a laceration or amputation and, from there, catastrophic blood loss. That one last drink to wash down a cocktail of prescription meds before bed might mean that tomorrow morning’s wake-up call goes unanswered.
With suicides, there are a few things that are, if you’ll excuse the unfortunate turn of phrase, a dead cert. One, you know the deaths definitely occur inside the room, because you sure as hell can’t open the window to jump out. Two, with not a lot at hand in the way of props, the chosen method of exit has to be both creative and effective. And, three, the body won’t be found for a while. Because if you have decided to kill yourself in a hotel room, the very first thing you’re going to do is hang the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob.
Finally, there’s murder. The number of homicides in hotel rooms is second only to those that happen at home. But let’s just skip the gory details and leave the rest up to your imagination. One thing that’s a given, though: murder most foul is never pretty.
At this point, let’s take a second to spare a thought for the person who has to clean up after all this—the hotel maid. As jobs go, being a hotel maid is an utterly thankless task. It really, really sucks.
People who clean up crime scenes are considered specialists in their field. They will launder the carpet, rugs, linen, and soft furnishings to remove any unsightly stains and completely sterilize and deodorize the environment. By the time they’re finished, you’d never believe anything happened there at all. That’s why the really good ones often make six-figure salaries. Even the poor schlub who has the task of cleaning up after a porn shoot—he’s called the “jizz mopper,” but never, ever to his face—can expect to make a decent salary.
A maid has to do the same job in less time, fifteen to thirty times a day, every day, and all for minimum wage and whatever’s been left for her under the pillow—with no guarantee that it will be money.
But if she’s done her job properly, when you enter your room for the first time, there are two things that will never cross your mind. The first is: Who died here? And the second is: Who last fucked in this bed?
Which reminds me, there’s one last category I forgot to mention. One that’s definitely worthy of discussion on its own merits: the final fuck.
If you have an interest in this stuff—and you can probably tell I do—there’s a story that almost every hotel employee is dying to tell you, and will, with just a little prodding. Really, it’s been told so many times that it’s become something of an urban myth. So forgive me if I embellish a little here and there.
This story, it begins with a man and a woman checking into a hotel. They’re booked into the best room in the place: the penthouse suite. What he does exactly, that’s not important. He could be a venture capitalist, a corporate litigator, a tech entrepreneur, maybe even a black marketeer. All you need to know is that he’s Loaded— with a capital L—and so the world is his oyster. Which is good for him, because he was never going to get by on looks or presence alone.
If you wanted to visualize the word unattractive, this guy would be it: tall but grotesquely overweight, with ruddy skin, small piggy eyes, a thin hollow smile. And he has, shall we say, a hydration issue: He sweats. A lot. Consequently, he’s enveloped in a permanent fetid funk. He smells like a men’s bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned in a while.
The girl he’s with, she’s his girlfriend—but only for the night, if you get my drift—and almost his exact opposite. She’s tiny, around a third of his size, and sex personified. Blonde hair that falls to her shoulders in cute Shirley Temple curls, framing a heart-shaped face and full, plump lips like soft pillows. A body that’s a work of art—the perfect S-curve, just like the Venus de Milo: small, perky tits, slim waist, and a big curvy ass, the kind you want to bury your entire face in.
And right at this moment, the point at which we enter this story, that’s exactly what he’s doing. She’s naked on all fours on a double-wide bed and he’s positioned behind her, stuffing his face (which, as you might imagine, is second nature to him), nosing the crack of her ass like a pig hunting for truffles to snuffle up all her scent. The smell of that ass mingled with her sex is like honeysuckle, sweet and tart at the same time, and it’s driving him wild.
This guy, he’s in heaven. He’s really getting in there, has his fingers in lots of pies, so to speak. And he just can’t believe his luck, making it with this super-hot chick who under normal circumstances wouldn’t even give him a first look, let alone a second. Even better, she’s digging it, responding to his every thrust and stroke. At least, that’s how it seems to him.
Pretty soon, she’s riding him. She’s moaning and groaning and grinding, putting on a real performance, giving it her all, trying to get him off. Because, despite appearances to the contrary, he’s actually really grossing her out and all she wants to do is jump in the shower and wash him off. But this guy, he just doesn’t want to come.
She has this one trick up her sleeve that she only uses in very special circumstances, as a last resort, when everything else fails. This time, she really wants this to be over, like now, so she’s decided to skip ahead and pull out her secret weapon. And this thing, it only ever works with the element of surprise.
She’s maneuvered herself into exactly the right position now, reverse cowgirl, so that all he can see of her is that ass pumping up and down in perfect, fluid motion like an oil derrick in full swing. She leans all the way forward to give him a better view and waits for her cue, that pained little moan that guys sometimes let out when they’re starting to lose control. When she hears that, she jams her middle finger right up his ass. And twists.
If it’s not timed right, this kind of thing can be a real passion-killer. Because guys get pretty weird very quickly if you go anywhere near their ass. But catch them by surprise, and they’ll come before they’ve realized what’s going on. Afterward, they won’t mention it, they’ll pretend like it never even happened. That’s because, like hotel employees and people who work at airports, she knows something they don’t:
These guys liked it and they just can’t bring themselves to admit it.
This time, she shoves her middle finger in right up to the knuckle, just to make sure, and it works better than she expected, better than it ever has before. Because all of a sudden, he ejaculates, and BANG—his heart explodes. Right at the same time.
Brings a whole new understanding to the phrase simultaneous orgasm, doesn’t it.
There’s another version of this story. The same basic scenario, apart from one minor detail: The position has changed. He’s on top of her, pounding away, when she reaches around to stick it to him. His fuse blows—PIFF, just like that—and he falls like a giant monolith, right on top of her, and…well, you can probably guess the rest.
Who these people were, it doesn’t really matter. Their names will be scrubbed from the register, like they never even existed. Some vaguely plausible story will be concocted to preserve their dignity and absolve them of shame. It will all be covered up
. Nobody will be any the wiser.
You want to know why?
Because hotels are like embassies. Hotbeds of covert activity that takes place beyond the reach of the law. Repositories for secrets and transgressions. A place where all the bodies are buried.
Right about now, you’re probably asking yourself, Where all this is leading? Good question. I was just getting to that.
You see, Inana was one of these people who had access to all things exclusive. Like the blonde, she was an expert in her field, a pro—and unlike the blonde, not that kind of pro. She did it purely because she enjoyed it, because she wanted to understand the limits of female desire—to better know herself. She acquired a reputation, became wanted and desired by some of the most powerful people in the world. Through that reputation, she learned things, the same secrets and transgressions that hotels try so hard to hide.
Maybe Inana kept her work life and private life separate, and like Einstein at the patent office, this was a way for her to get outside her own head and be immersed in something completely different as a means of inspiration.
Or maybe there’s something secret in this hotel, based on the way it doesn’t show up in any fucking browser or map I’ve searched online.
I just know she’s not around to speak for herself. And I need to find out more, because I feel like her experience resonates with mine and she might have all the answers I’ve been seeking about myself.
This hotel, the last place she was known to have worked, is so exclusive that it doesn’t appear in any guidebook or on any map. You couldn’t book a room here even if you wanted to. That’s not as unusual as it may sound.
That’s another thing the hotel industry doesn’t want you to know. There are hotels built in secret locations all around the world that are anything but what they seem. If you were to look out the window of your room in one of these hotels, you’d swear you were in Paris, Rome, New York, Tokyo—any of the world’s most glamorous cities. In actual fact, it is a room without a view at all, like an old movie set with pictures or paintings on the windows, located in some desolate backwater of China or the UAE, away from prying eyes. The room is an exact mock-up, a prototype, for a hotel that has not yet been built, so that its architects can test out new designs, tailored precisely to the demands of their clientele.
