by Sasha Grey
See, the people who this place is meant for already wallow in class and pomp. When they look to cut loose, it helps if they feel like they’re slumming it.
So this place? The VIP section that has its own entrance, unattached to the main club? Gritty doesn’t begin to describe it.
It’s metal and concrete and black glass. Hard angles to lean against when you want a fix of pain—or want to inflict it upon someone else. That’s your prerogative. It brings to mind city slums, red-light districts, seedy drug deals in back alleys.
It’s meant to feel a little unhinged and dangerous. And it does.
The floors are black and the walls are dark with hints of color, like an oil slick. The music is bass to get your body and mind sedated; it’s sludgier, more rhythmic than the trance that plays in the other club.
There are fewer people here, but it’s a bit smaller, and though spacious, it doesn’t feel empty. There are more alcoves for ducking into if you want a little privacy by yourself, or with a friend…or three.
There are various apparatuses in the vaguely octagonal room as well, and there are numbered doors that lead away from this main area. I open the door to Room 3962, the one nearest to us. Familiarity strikes like lightning when I see the man inside. Square jaw, short salt-and-pepper hair. Something about those perfectly plucked eyebrows…I know his face, but recognition doesn’t come until his face relaxes in between strokes of the flogger.
No way.
Jack’s favorite anchorman.
The man who, with a well-timed exposé, brought Bundy’s skanky empire crashing to the ground like a wobbly Jenga tower. A man with no charm and even less authenticity: Forrester Sachs.
Him being anywhere near a scene like this would be shocking enough—but the fact that he’s strapped, naked and spread-eagled, to a St. Andrew’s cross makes my brain stutter for a moment.
They say context is everything, that you can run into someone you know well, but if you’re in another town or country and not expecting that person, your mind will take a moment to recognize him.
Ding, ding, ding.
“More,” he moans over his shoulder, and the tall woman sets the flogger aside with a smirk, liberally coats a dildo the size of my forearm with enough lube to fill an inflatable plastic pool, and shoves it home into his ass.
Vlad the Impaler’s got nothing on modern BDSM.
I can’t look away.
The best part is that the dildo she’s buggering him with isn’t a regular dildo. No, this is a model of Jesus nailed to a cross, the pati-bulum giving her a fantastic grip with which to shove Jesus’s feet and legs on the stipes all the way inside Sachs’s asshole.
At least he’s crying out the correct name.
Jesus Christ, indeed.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me want to whip out my phone and take a video—a little souvenir to play for myself while watching the normally uber-composed Sachs as he’s taking someone down in a supposedly impartial interview on television. But something tells me I wouldn’t make it to the door with any video footage or photographs, so I don’t bother trying to capture the moment.
What would Jack think about this?
Would he flip out to know I was here, or would he be as unaffected as he’s been for the last couple of months when I mention my work? I push thoughts of Jack from my mind and move away from the cross, not liking the taste of guilt and frustration that’s been introduced to my tongue.
It would make sense for Inana to have stumbled into the same secret society I did, wallowed in it for a while, then met resistance when she tried to get out. The things she did, the things she was interested in would have been compatible, welcomed, encouraged, but she was outspoken as well and had a medium of her own.
She wouldn’t have been used to playing by anyone else’s rules.
But TJS doesn’t take no for an answer—and they don’t like people they can’t control.
It would be such a neat little package if this place was one of theirs, and she’d found it.
Designed to keep the rich businessmen happy when they’re near Vegas on conference. They come here, feel like they’re part of something elite and forbidden, and are happy to pay big bucks for the privilege of getting fucked.
Like Sachs.
Neat little bows don’t exist in the real world. It’s a messy damn place, and when we start looking for patterns, that’s when things get dangerous.
We see things that aren’t there.
We find the things we want to see, picking something out of nothingness. Order from chaos.
Fact from fiction.
But this is still a damn good place to kill an hour or two.
Why would I have been led here?
That’s a question that has a clear answer—I just don’t know it yet. I turn to ask Max, but he’s no longer at my side. When did he leave? I scan the room, but he’s nowhere to be found. Maybe he found a scene he wanted to participate in—or watch. Maybe he’s hidden in a shadow or behind a mask, watching me.
What is this, really?
A reward? A test? Do they see in me the capacity for this, the interest, and want to see my reaction?
Maybe they’ll be more surprised at my reaction than I am at the fact that this place has been pulsing beneath my feet the whole time.
A woman in a blue latex suit with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail sidles by, leading a lanky man crawling on the floor by a leash made of hair.
Maybe hair extensions—who knows what’s fake and what’s real in here? Other than the tits.
Fake.
I’m not supposed to like this. Women aren’t supposed to like anything like this except for when there’s a man on top leading the way to her sexual “awakening.”
But I do. I still do. I may have left my leather and denim life behind, but that didn’t stop me from indulging in fantasy online, calling it “research.” I’ve found that the only female desires or fetishes we speak about are horrible, abusive pseudo-rape fantasies, and those are all that seem to be accepted by mainstream media, furthering the rape culture we so desperately need to cleanse. This is what has seeped into the mainstream media, rather than the true desires of women, because they’ve taken our power away.
Actually it’s worse than that. They haven’t taken our power away. We let them keep us down in the mainstream media when it comes to sex. They’ll ask us, pressure women who aren’t into anal sex into it but you express interest in pegging them and watch the lights come on and the audience run the hell out of the theater. Hypocrisy at its finest because men can’t let themselves be in a vulnerable position.
But we could take all the power back if we realized we’ve got the reins in our hands every time we go online and connect with each other.
Why can’t we share more stories of women and their sexual obsessions that don’t scream tacky to serve as clickbait? I know there’s a lot of clickbait. I know there are men who have desires to explore weird, dark, transgressive exploits—these fetishes can’t exclusively belong to them; we have desires too. The hunger and desire to feel more, try more. Is it that men are more open to sharing their deeply rooted psychological desires, a fraternity that boasts about their sexual conquests? Women like to keep their kinks in a closet, the secrecy bringing more pleasure to their pleasures so we don’t threaten the fragile male ego.
Really, it’s more common to see female dominants—domina-trixes—than it is for a man to have a woman over his knee.
And virgins? That’s more a fetish than a lifestyle choice. You know who likes fucking virgins, other than a sliver of the kink community?
Other virgins.
Virgins are terrible at sex because they haven’t done it. It hurts for them, too, at least the women. The women who love sex right from their first time aren’t common.
So I guess sadists could find crossover appeal, but the interest is limited, is all I’m saying. I think as long as you and your partner are into it—anything goes. Consenti
ng adults are the two words that unlock doors inside yourself to places you never knew you could go.
What places in this hotel will I find?
Who will find me?
I want to explore every single room in this place, but being stationary has made me a little bit of a target, so I stride with purpose over to the bar in the corner of the room, illuminated from beneath with a purple-blue glow like a natural gas flame.
I get the feeling I’m going to need a drink to deal with what I might find. I lean in and wait for the bartender to get to me, keeping my eyes on the room behind me so as not to be sneaked up on.
This isn’t the kind of room that I’d like to be surprised in.
“What can I get you?” the maître d’ asks the woman next to me.
The tiny smudge of pink beneath his eye stops me in my tracks.
The last time I saw him he was darker—skin and hair. Now he’s got the look of a character from iZombie—hair a light blonde, skin paler, as though he spends all his time underground now literally as well as figuratively.
Maybe he does stay below the surface nowadays, if these are his new digs.
His hair may be different, and he’s lost some weight, but I don’t think two people in the world would get a fucking Krispy Kreme doughnut tattooed under their eye like a gangster devoted to type 2 diabetes.
Bundy.
Memories of four years ago crawl over me, thick and damp, making it feel like I’m breathing through a humid swamp.
The sound seems to get sucked from the room, and I do a slow spin, searching it with my eyes, hoping, dreading.
Hoping.
Anna. Is she here, too?
I’m bombarded by images, memories of my wild, free, reckless friend.
The bruises on her pale skin.
The way she’d lean in and make everything feel like a secret.
The unfiltered way she’d blurt out things about guys, sexual things that should have been too personal and dirty, but the way she said them sounded like she was reading facts from a spreadsheet.
Those green eyes I’ve missed, smiling at me with a glint, like we’re soul sisters and two halves of the same whole, or two sides of a coin.
At least, we were until she went away.
She may have changed her appearance, too, but I still find myself searching for her blond hair and mischievous smile. What would I even say to her?
Where the fuck did you go?
Where the fuck have you been?
What the fuck are you doing here?
I missed you.
But the slow rotation reveals nothing but a room full of strangers, and by the time I finish the revolution and face Bundy again, I know Anna’s not here.
It’s stupid, maybe superstitious, but it seems like I’d have felt her presence if she were here.
I lean back over the bar, staring straight at Bundy Royale Tremayne.
“No need to ask what a guy like you is doing in a place like this, is there, Bundy?” I say over the throbbing of the music.
He freezes and turns to me, eyes lighting up like we’re old friends reuniting on a daytime talk show.
Once in a while, the boomerang person we throw out of our lives circles back and finds us again when we least expect it.
When we’re in an underground club.
Bundy “Boomerang” Tremayne.
He launches himself over the bar and grabs me in an uncomfortably tight hug. “Cate? I can’t believe you’re here.”
“Catherine,” I correct, pulling back after giving his back a couple pats. “And Sachs is here? Wasn’t he the one who basically brought your career down?”
Bundy waves a hand. “Water under the bridge. Things were getting stale anyways.”
A little bit of revisionist history, but seeing Sachs’s asshole get plundered must give Bundy a certain sense of satisfaction and make it easy to be magnanimous. The last time I saw Bundy was in his apartment, which was crammed full of weeks-old garbage that still didn’t smell as bad as his feet did. He’d admitted some personal things to me regarding pubic preferences.
He’d said he hadn’t killed the girls in Sachs’s piece that brought his life crashing to the ground—hell, crashing through the ground. He’d said he would never hurt Anna, that he’d done all those things trying to get closer to her, and I’d believed him.
But now? It can’t be a coincidence that Bundy’s here and working where Inana was. She’s another woman who killed herself—like some of the girls did because of his amateur porn sites. The sites Sachs exposed in a news segment. More than one woman chose to end her life because of the videos Bundy took and posted online for the world to see.
Allegedly. But I still can’t see him as a killer. He’s a harmless horndog, not a diabolical genius, and most of what he shot was anonymous—and it was all with permission, whether or not they knew the footage would go up online and make him serious bank. Until it all came tumbling down.
“So you’re here now? This is your place?” I ask.
He nods. “You know how it is. Haters gonna hate, and men like me will always land on our feet. What can I get you to drink?”
“Just a Coke. I’m still working.”
Once I clocked that it was Bundy, there was no way was I letting him serve me alcohol.
He grins. “You work here?”
“Not here specifically, but in the hotel, yeah.” I don’t want him thinking he’s my boss somehow.
“Well, welcome to the show.” He grins and tosses a red straw into my glass.
I don’t know what to do with my hands or my thoughts. It’s like the past and future are colliding—here I am in front of Bundy, searching for a different woman, again. “How long have you been here?” I ask.
He squints. “Two years, give or take.”
If he’s been working here for two years, he was employed here when Inana was. “Do you remember a woman, Inana Luna?”
His eyes twinkle like a degenerate Santa Claus. “I know a lot of women, Catherine. I can’t remember them all.”
That’s true enough, though I’m sure their recollections of him would be a little less mirthful. I remember the interview Sachs did with Bundy’s mother.
“He drove those girls to suicide, Charmaine,”says Sachs, and he’s looking down at his notes nonchalantly as he says it, because he knows he’s so fucking good at this that he could do it in his sleep.
“She worked here,” I say. “Gorgeous, tall, dark complexion, dark eyes. Long black hair. She was into this kind of kink.” I try to pin him with my gaze, but he’s focused on his phone.
“Not ringing a bell, but I don’t get out of here much. If she was down here, maybe if I saw her something would twig.”
I sip my drink to avoid blurting anything out and betraying my unstable emotions, in case Max is still watching. “You’d remember her if you knew her.” I need to stop talking about Inana, but the only other thing I can think about is what’s behind the other doors in this room, and whether Jack could be somewhere just as nefarious as this.
Or if Inana ever made it here.
“What do you know about this place, Bundy?”
He leans closer and shows me a picture on his phone, of a grimy, green Chevy van in the parking lot with a dog sitting in the front seat. Since his national disgrace, he tells me, he’s been driving the highways and byways of the country with a dog with no teeth in a Chevy van that he calls “the Fuckmobile,” and somehow he ended up in the desert. He was in a local dive bar one day, and one of the old desert-rat regulars got to talking to him. Bundy says when he first walked into the bar—which is in Wonder Valley, nothing but abandoned meth shacks—everyone in the bar stopped talking and turned to look at him. They said to him, Why’d you come here?Nobody comes here unless they’re running from the law or fixing to die. I guess that’s what happens to Bundy; soon enough one of them had led him here. He walks into the bar and starts talking to people—and ends up in the same place as someone like me.
> The VIP section.
I don’t know if I should feel insulted by fate, or spooked by the coincidence.
Bundy shrugs when I say as much. “You made it here for a reason. Give it time and things will speak for themselves.”
Things I don’t want to remember, have suppressed hard in order to forget, force their way to the insides of my eyelids, waiting for me to relax and close my eyes and see them again.
I stare hard at Bundy.
But I’ve got to blink sometime.
FOURTEEN
AND YET, NOW THAT I’VE seen this, all I want is to see more.
I stay close to the bar for a while, wanting to keep an eye on Bundy and get as much information out of him as I can.
“So, you’re a bartender?” I ask, a little surprised.
“The man who pours the liquor is the man who holds the world.”
“Stop butchering song lyrics.” I lean on my elbow, slouching so I can watch people more subtly. “I don’t get it. It’s all so open here.”
“Open? We’re underground.”
“I mean that no one seems shy or worried about the rooms not being locked down.” Sachs is a well-known figure. If even a single photo was taken of what he was getting up to….”No one seems to care about privacy here.”
“You don’t need privacy when there’s no one to hide from. It’s open because we’ve already exposed ourselves to the bone. If we hadn’t stripped our defenses, we wouldn’t have gained access to a place like this. It’s free, but the cost of admission is your protective skin that the rest of the world sees. Here we’ve shimmied out of it, and it’s time to rub against each other with no lies or barriers.”
I wrinkle my nose at his metaphor.
He laughs. “You’re here too, kid. Think about that. Everything and everyone is contained within the secrets we’ve all bared to one another. None of us worry about how we’re perceived, because underneath the lies we sell the world, we’re all the same. If you think differently, well, look in the mirrors. It’s safe. We’ve all done things to get here and answer the invitation.”
