by Julia Kent
While I chugged my coffee and let the caffeine kick in, I came to realize Charlotte was talking to me, her words washing over like a river with a quick current. I tuned back in.
“– it makes sense, Darla. Given your notoriety in the chicken fetish community. And then there are your books –”
“What do my books got to do with animal fetishes?”
“Well, you’re writing about animal shapeshifters...”
“WHOA! Hold on there. You cannot equate the two. Ever.”
She peered at me. “Why not? I would think that women who read about men who become animals are into that.”
My long, frustrated sigh was the first truly real, in-touch reaction I’d had in hours. “I am not going to even try to explain this right now. You’d have to talk to Amy about this to get a really thorough explanation.” I took more gulps, then said, “Speaking of Amy, where is she?”
“Sam went to the airport to get her.” Charlotte looked up as a group of people came into the lounge area through the double black doors. “I might need to use your pass for her tomorrow. She is going to die a thousand deaths if she comes in here and sees all the AnFet booths.”
“She’s pretty uptight, isn’t she?”
“Yes and no. She tries so hard to look respectable on the outside, but underneath she’s as dirty and kinky as the rest of us.” Charlotte poked my shoulder. “You finished?” She looked in my coffee cup. I slugged down the last inch, grateful.
“I’m good.”
“You said Joe’s out there, trying to help?”
I closed my eyes and imagined him out in the universe, a place like heaven, surrounded by white clouds and nothingness. Finding eight thousand dollars somewhere wasn’t going to be a simple prospect. Joe’s offer was beyond generous, but I couldn’t imagine how he would pull this off.
And then it hit me.
“Shit!” I hissed. “He’d better not borrow money from his parents! I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I doubt it. Joe has really changed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve changed him, actually. First of all, there was a time he never would have offered to help you. Now he’s helping, but he’s also more independent. He always chafed against his parents’ control – especially his mom – but now I think he’s carved out a life where he isn’t just making decisions to try to please her or to piss her off. Instead, he’s making his own decisions to meet his needs.”
“And how does that connect to not borrowing money from his mom?”
“He wouldn’t want to give her that leverage. He’ll find any other way but that, unless your life were in danger.” She frowned. “It’s not, is it? You didn’t borrow from a loan shark.”
Not unless the band is changing its name from Random Acts of Crazy to Loan Shark, I thought.
“No.”
“Then whatever help Joe’s giving won’t involve his parents.”
“I wonder what he’s up to.”
Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. “I have to go. The booth ran out of silicone urethral soundings. Who knew the big ones would be so popular in this crowd?”
I flinched, then curled inward, like a guy protecting his balls. “You got some job there, Charlotte. What in the hell is a ‘urethral sounding’?”
“For urethral play. You stick the long spike into the urethra and –”
“STOP! I’m good. Geez. Your company sells that?”
In the middle of standing, Charlotte froze, only her eyes moving to zone in on mine. “You’re judging, Ms. Chicken Tender?”
“Fair enough.” I stood with her, my stomach growling, bladder filling. All the parts of my body that had gone numb were slowly coming back online. I needed to get back to being in the real world and to start to face the consequences of what I’d done.
“Besides, the new trend is electrosex.”
“Electro-huh?”
“You shoot electrical pulses through a special sounding.”
“I thought Sybians were hard core, but now you’re telling me people use electricity inside their bodies?”
“You might be edgy with your permanent threesome, Darla, but underneath you’re pretty vanilla.” Her manicured hand patted me with a condescension that made me really start to wonder about Liam.
“I don’t know whether to be pleased or offended.”
She hugged me, her chest vibrating with laughter as she changed the subject. “Whatever’s wrong, Joe and Trevor will always help.”
“But they didn’t fuck up. I did.”
“They love you. You’re a team. In a team, the weakest member gets help from the strongest. That’s how teams work.”
A team.
“Right,” I said as she turned away, refilling my coffee cup, handing the white paper cup to me. We exited the small room and found ourselves inundated by light, the rush of stale air followed by an arctic wind, and trickles of different melodies creating a strange orchestra of cacophony.
“See you later. Go find Trevor. You need connection right now, Darla. Nothing you’ve done can’t be undone.”
“But –”
She waved, doing that quick, small-stepped high heel walk women perform when they have no choice. The crowd ate her up and then I was alone.
Lonely.
Just me.
And that’s when I knew this was all a dream, a nightmare gone wrong, some subconscious trek through the deepest, strangest layers of the system of cells and emotions called Darla, where monsters and dragons played in the ocean of tucked-away terrors and all my naked-on-final-exam-day dreams took a back seat to the main show.
Because standing right across the way from me was Calvin.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DARLA
I could not believe my eyes. I reached up and rubbed them, then waited for the fuzz to clear.
Nope. Still there.
I closed my eyes and took three deep breaths. Looked.
Still there.
By this point, I’d seen damn near everything you could possibly goggle at. Animal fetish conventions will do that to a person.
But the last everloving fucking person I thought I’d see standing in front of a real fur butt plug booth was my stepdaddy.
That’s right. Calvin was chatting away with some woman, holding up a purple glitter butt plug and making some pretty obscene gestures. I heard him say ‘unicorn’ and the woman laughed, tossing her hair like she was flirting.
He just smiled back, then patted her shoulder.
Maybe I still had alcohol in my blood. Maybe my nerves were so frayed, I was inventing shit.
Or maybe my stepdaddy was fucking a woman he met in a crowd of people all sexually aroused by imagining themselves a level or two lower on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary scale.
Ducking behind a big plant with leaves taller than me, like someone shoved palm tree leaves into the soil stem first, I watched Calvin.
Definitely him. Bill at the roulette wheel had reminded me of my daddy. Calvin and my daddy looked nothing alike. Calvin was long and lean, tall and tendon-y, and was a quiet dude you’d never suspect of lying to his wife.
What in the hell was my stepdaddy doing at an animal fetish convention when Mama told me he was on a fishing trip with his buddies?
Don’t answer that.
I know.
“Oh, God,” I moaned to myself, hands flying up to my temples, fingers threading in my hair as I tugged, hard, hoping this was a nightmare.
Naw.
Calvin had lied to my poor, sweet Mama back home in Ohio. He was fishin’ all right.
Fishin’ for pussy.
Or horse. Maybe dog. Possibly hedgehog. The man must have had some kind of kinky fetish if he was here.
He set the butt plug down on the edge of the booth. I tracked him as he and the woman – who I will now refer to as the AnFet Whore of Babylon – walked slowly away from the booth, right past the guy selling bridle
s for ‘Bad Horsies.’
Images of my mama sitting at home, watching Wheel of Fortune, thinking her wonderful new husband was out with his buddies shitting in the woods, not showering for a few days, fishing from a canoe, catching and releasing all day.
Calvin looked like he was catching, all right.
Catching himself a whore.
I know, I know, you’re thinking I was being unfair maligning that poor woman, but my circuits weren’t exactly wired properly when it came to someone threatening my mama. And make no mistake – having her husband cheat on her was a threat.
Any woman I thought was the Other Woman was target practice. Does that make it right? No.
Hell no.
Because when someone cheats on their spouse, it’s the cheater who is breaking the vow. Not the other person they’re fucking.
Logic, though, has a tendency to disappear when I’m watching my stepdaddy in Vegas at an animal fetish convention while he smiles and hugs some floozy.
Like my day wasn’t bad enough?
His name formed in my mouth, the C catching at the base of my tongue like it was lining up to march right on out at full speed and name him. I see you, my mouth wanted to call out, to disgrace him, to make him face me as a surrogate for my poor, cheated-on mama back home.
Some part of me stopped my mouth, though. And that is no small feat.
Mama always said I invented stupid explanations for perfectly ordinary events. My imagination, she said, always got the better of me. Maybe she was right. Before I stomped on over to him and screamed, perhaps I should take a few minutes to see if there was a perfectly rational explanation for this.
I slipped my phone out of my back pocket and surreptitiously aimed it at Calvin and the whore.
Er, woman.
Click.
I knew photography was strictly prohibited at the event, but I had to give it a try. Mama might be in denial if I had to make this known, and a picture is worth a thousand words.
And one divorce.
My phone rang suddenly, making me eep! and draw attention to myself. Fortunately, the sound was close enough to some animal that people ignored me.
Mama, the phone display said. Why on earth would Mama, of all people, be calling me now?
I answered.
“Mama?”
“Darla?” She sounded so nervous. “Where are you?”
I looked around the convention hall and lied so hard, my ass started to warm up from imagining what hell is like. “In Vegas with the band, like I told you.”
“You left a message on my personal voicemail! You know I don’t listen to that!”
“Personal voicemail?”
“I, um, you know. Calvin and me have the business voicemail and I have my personal voicemail.”
“For someone who wouldn’t touch a cellphone until 2014, you sure do have a lot of tech, Mama.”
“Where, exactly, are you in Vegas?”
“Why all these questions, Mama? Is there a problem? Do you need me to come home? I know you said Calvin was on a fishing trip. Did something happen?”
“Uh...” Mama sounded fidgety, and if anyone knows what that sounds like, it’s me.
“Mama, why do I get the impression you’re lying to me about something?”
She sucked in so much air between her teeth, I’d swear she was beta testing for jet engines. “I know my hearing ain’t what it used to be, but there is no way you just said what you said, Darla.”
“Then what is going on? Did Calvin do something to you?”
Genuine shock hit my ear. “What? No! The man is an angel! He’d never hurt me. Besides, you seen the difference between him and me? I could squash him in a fight.”
“He still on that fishing trip?”
“Yep.”
Oh, shit.
“Okay, Mama,” I said slowly. “Why’d you call?”
“Just… I didn’t realize the band’s in Vegas now.”
“That’s why you’re calling? We were rescheduled. You just now figured it out?”
“Something like that.”
I pulled my phone away from my ear and stared at it, open-mouthed.
My mama sounded like me when I was trying to find a way out of a mess without admitting I’d gotten myself into it in the first place.
“Where did you say he was fishing?”
“Salt Fork.” That was the name of a nearby state park in Ohio. My eyes tracked him as he and his lady friend sampled edible candy bridles. Amazing what you could do with licorice and a 3D printer.
“You’re not anywhere near the Borgia, are you, Darla?”
Considering I was standing in said hotel, here came another huge lie.
“No. Why?”
“Nothing. I just heard they had a bad bedbug outbreak and wanted to make sure my baby girl wasn’t caught in any of that nastiness.”
Oh, I was caught up in some nastiness, all right.
“Good to know, Mama. I’m not staying in that hotel,” I lied. If you’re already going to hell, might as well light a big old bonfire.
Her audible sigh of relief made me goggle at my phone. “Good. Wouldn’t want you getting bit by them things.” I felt her shudder.
Since when did my mama give a shit about bedbugs in the hotels the band stayed in while we toured? I was more likely to get typhoid from one of the filthy bathrooms in the rooms we stayed in on the highways than bedbugs in Vegas. I knew a lame excuse when I heard one – because I’d spun more than my fair share of them over the years.
Something was wrong.
But more important: Mama thought Calvin was on a sports trip with his buddies while I was watching him, right here in front of me, laughing with some strange woman and sampling dog treats at the puppy play booth.
Wait.
She was handing him something.
Oh, dear motherfuckingtwatwaffle, hell to the no!
She was giving him a hotel room card.
Calvin was a dead man.
“I’m gonna kill him,” I muttered, forgetting I was on the phone.
“What those boys been up to now?”
“Who?”
“Joe and Trevor, Darla. Who you think your boys are? Sam and Dean from Supernatural?”
“I could use a good demon to invade my life and distract me right about now, actually.”
“You’re making no sense, Darla.”
“I’m tired, Mama.” Tired of watching my stepdaddy flirt and get that woman ready for wick stickin’.
“You taking care of yourself? I know you spend so much time taking care of everyone else.”
I was about to take care of Calvin, too.
“I’m good, Mama.” I made a fake yawn. “Just need to get back to the hotel room and catch a nap. You know, my non-bedbug hotel room.”
“Right.” A really loud sound came through the phone on her end, just seconds after someone announced on the loudspeaker in the convention hall that a contest for a bat bar was beginning.
What the hell is a bat bar? I wondered. Like, a theme bar for Batman fanboys and fangirls?
“Hang your lovies from this carefully designed doorway bar with spring tension and ankle cuffs,” the announcer said.
Ah. There was my answer. Literally, a bar for bat people to hang from for sexual kink. So not what I was imagining.
Raucous noise on the phone combined with the loudspeaker in the convention hall made my ears go haywire for a moment, until I finally realized Mama was saying something so loud, it was like I heard it twice.
“– got to go now. Love you. Stay out of trouble.”
Click.
My chest went tight, all the air in the world trapped in there along with a ball of fury on my mother’s behalf. Calvin was cheating on her, right in front of my face, and Mama was convinced he was just out fishing.
My eyes lit on Calvin.
And my body acted.
I can’t claim responsibility for what happened next.
“Calvin McMasterson, l
ook who the cat dragged in,” I called out, turning a few heads. Um, that’s an expression. Not a sexual innuendo.
“Darla!” I’ve never seen blood run out of a face like that. Calvin looked like he belonged in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum.
“How’s the fishin’?” I asked, giving a big old fake wink. My words were jocular but my face said he was a dead man.
“Fishing?” He had the gall to look genuinely puzzled.
“Yeah, you know... hook, line, and sinker?” I looked at the woman he was with and smirked. “Or, should I say, hooker?”
“I don’t understand, Darla. Cathy said you wouldn’t be here for a few months.”
His words hit me, hard.
“You mean you planned this trip around my travel schedule? You planned to come to Vegas and fuck some pieces on the side and you actually asked my mama when I would be in town so you could avoid me?”
I let my confrontation sink in while Calvin did his best imitation of a caught fish.
“And you!” I turned my attention to the whore. “Do you realize he has a wife?”
“Of course I do!”
Wasn’t expecting that answer.
“You know he’s married and you’re still fucking him? You’ve got some nerve, lady. Where I come from, people don’t sleep around with other people’s husbands.” Except for my Aunt Marlene, I realized, but now was not the time for logical consistency.
Now was the time for hair ripping.
“I –”
“And a good, loving, devoted wife who has been to hell and back in her life. She’s disabled and worked damn hard to rise above tragedy, only to find love in her later years and have it ruined by a woman like you who can’t handle having empty holes!”
“Empty what?”
“You’re a holestuffer!” I pointed to the butt plug. “Doubly so! You’re fucking my stepdaddy and my poor mama is back home, thinking he’s being faithful and all.”
Calvin cleared his throat and whispered “I’m sorry” to the woman.
“You’re saying ‘I’m sorry’ to her? HER? My mama is the one you need to apologize to! My daddy would never, ever have cheated on her like this, you asshatdickfacefelchingcumbasket of a man!” I screamed.
You know that phrase, ‘seeing red’? I saw the rainbow, every last glittering wave and particle blinding me with all the colors in the world as I descended on Calvin, ready to kill him.
