by Gabi Moore
“Yeah, don’t bother. You know what keeps rags like Cache afloat? Stories about people like me. That’s it. That’s all. You have the nerve to look down on me and yet every time I do something, you reporters swoop in like vultures, ready to make money off it. ‘Fair’? If you say so. Judge my life all you want, but it pays your salary.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself. All the pieces the magazine had done on him over the years where crowding my mind, and I desperately searched for something to argue back with.
He had inherited a huge chunk of money from his father, had invested it in dodgy fracking technology in Canada, had called the president a “tit” to his face. For god’s sake, this was the man who had just last month been in the papers for hosting pirate themed yacht orgies in the Mediterranean – and he was lecturing me about my integrity? It was too much.
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but I was floundering.
“Hey, shh, don’t worry about it, I’m not angry. But you know what I’ve noticed about journalists?” His voice was calmer now, and Kai began stroking his shoulders again.
“They’re cowardly. They don’t do much of anything themselves, they just sit on the sidelines, watching everyone else. Now that I think of it, it’s all pretty voyeuristic.”
His hand had reached up to Kai’s again and was absentmindedly stroking hers in return.
“I’ll write your story. I didn’t mean to offend you. I want to show the public who you really are.”
He didn’t seem all that interested in my new confession, although I had startled myself with how easily I had given it. He was staring vacantly at a spot in front of him, thinking. Kai began to trace her hand down the front of his chest and he accepted it, not breaking his gaze or train of thought. She leant forward, letting the full lusciousness of her breasts and hair fall over him. She nuzzled herself into his neck and he gripped her forearms, trapping her there. He snapped his eyes up and straight to meet mine again, catching me staring. The effect was electrifying.
“Do you? Do you really want to show them …or do you just want to watch?”
He began to gently kiss the length of Kai’s thin arms, his eyes never breaking their gaze with mine.
My entire body flushed with the intensity of the moment.
“You’re curious about me, aren’t you? I think you’re like everyone else, you have a morbid fascination with me …you wish you could …wish you had the guts to do what I do...” he mumbled this in between kisses he was planting on her soft, white skin.
He had a way of saying things that you simply couldn’t argue with. He was an arrogant asshole. But he was also right. I didn’t dwell on whether I was enjoying this new flagrant display, or whether he was spot on and that I did want to see him kiss this beautiful woman’s arms, and maybe even do other things to her, and know exactly what he did on the phone yesterday, and what turned him on, and what he really thought of me, and what his life was really like, every bizarre, sordid, sexy inch of it…
But I didn’t focus on that. I thought, instead, about how he must be a sex-crazed exhibitionist, him and this woman both, and that they were both playing with me, and that I would write an awfully clever piece later on about these eccentricities …but was he right about the magazine? Where we all just feeding off him?
I said nothing. I couldn’t. Keeping my breathing steady was apparently taking every last drop of effort I had.
“What do you think, Kai, do you think she’ll get rid of that ugly blue dress and come play with us?”
My heart beat furiously in my ears. Kai gave me a long, slow look, dripping with more sexiness than you’d think possible for anything other than a black panther.
“I think she wants to keep her ugly dress on,” Kai said, “But later, when she goes home tonight, she’ll wish she had taken it off.”
Who the hell was this woman anyway?
With a deep breath that seemed to expand his already broad chest, he twisted his head to the side and received a deep, wet kiss from Kai, slipping his hand through her hair and pulling her down further into him. With a strange little thrill, I noticed that his nipples were hardening under her girlish hands.
She drifted away and he returned his gaze to mine, something warmed and loose in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
“Go ahead then, prove to me you’re not like every other coward journalist and do something instead of just writing about it.” He turned his torso again, giving me a full view of his crotch and angling Kai so that she came round to the front of him and seated herself on the floor at his feet.
“You’re very angry, Miss Mack. Just look at Kai …isn’t she so beautiful? She’s not afraid to be vulnerable. She’s very submissive you know. Not my thing, personally, but look how happy it makes her,” he said teasingly to the top of her head; she replied by giggling and playfully slapping the top of his thigh.
“Is it true, the rumor about those tar sands in Canada?” I asked, afraid of where this was going.
“Not even remotely,” he said, fixing his gaze on Kai, who was nestling her face into his crotch.
“Did you really inherit everything from your father?”
“I never inherited a single cent from anyone.”
“Is it true that you called the president a tit?”
“Nope. I called him an asshole,” he replied, watching closely as she began to gingerly trace the outline of his cock through his pants.
“Is it really even you in those pictures?”
He looked at me and grinned.
“Of course.”
I felt a dull ache growing between my thighs. I really did want to get out of this dress. I really was too angry. And I really did want to know about him, everything about him…
My head was spinning.
He reached down and tenderly tucked Kai’s hair behind her ears, revealing that she was staring at him hungrily. With swift fingers, she began to pull down the zip, and he smiled peacefully down at her.
“I have to go,” I said abruptly, jumping up from my seat. They both turned confused faces to me.
“Don’t go,” he said to me with the same tenderness.
I wanted to stay. I wanted Kai to unzip him and put all of him in her mouth, and I wanted to watch her coax that manly, delicious sound from him again. I wanted to see his arrogance shudder a little, and slip off. I wondered how he was when he came; whether he would lose control and grunt and clench his teeth, or whether he went soft and only whimpered, throwing back his head and giving in to pleasure. I wanted to catalogue everything this strong, healthy man’s body did, and I wanted to document its every twitch and sigh, everything that gave it pleasure.
But another, stronger force compelled me to stand up awkwardly and before I knew it, I was racing down the same glittery halls I had walked only a few moments earlier. I tore down the swooping staircase and out of the house, heart pounding, completely disbelieving of the things I had seen in there. My head was spinning with the improbability of this whole thing, and with some amusement, I realized I was soaking wet.
Kai was wrong about me.
I didn’t regret not taking my dress off when they had asked me. I regretted it that very instant, when I turned back and took one last glimpse of the house, with a growing, desperate pang that I hadn’t had the guts to be in there right at that moment.
Chapter Six
Let me tell you, nothing in this world seems so boring after such an encounter than a full 8-hour day of sitting in front of a laptop.
Had my job always been this lackluster? I had something of a stimulus hangover form the night before. It was all too much. The champagne, Kai, the never-ending acres of manicured gardens I had to run through to leave… I have left plenty of heated moments in my life, let me tell you, but something about having to make your way through twelve rooms, a billiard area and a giant reception hall before you can slam the door behind you can make any girl disoriented.
It was all well and good for filth
y-rich people like Kai and Tom to lounge around and be degenerates all day. But some of us had to make a living. A real living. I’m sure I could be an eccentric sexual connoisseur too if I didn’t have to get up early in the morning and remember to give my cat his medicine every day.
I was irritated, but some of what Tom had said had taken root in my mind and was growing there, quietly.
The way he put it, it did seem like the media had swarmed around his larger-than-life life, themselves creating this overblown image and then feeding off of it in turn. But surely Tom was no innocent party – in fact, he seemed to love the attention. Thrive on it. He had specifically requested me, some unknown junior writer at a shitty magazine (it had only taken me the morning to decide that he was right about this) to craft an even more enthralling tale for the plebian masses.
It was awesome. And I was right at the center of it, tasked with putting just the right words to bring out how truly epic the whole arrangement was, how we were all complicit in this modern day myth making, with Tom and his mammoth manhood standing at the epicenter of it all. It would be a brilliant article, my best work.
The trouble was, I couldn’t write. I sat for twenty minutes staring at an empty Word document. Everything that left my fingers felt phony. I backspaced it all, irritated. I wanted him to read it. To approve. He had lavished such soft, liquid gentleness all over Kai as she worked her fingers over his zip. And I wanted that for myself, I thought, not without a little embarrassment.
The tone of the piece was coming out all wrong. No sooner had I started to write, did I realize I hadn’t captured the real strangeness of this man’s presence, of how his well-spokenness wasn’t at odds with his underwear model body, but somehow a natural part of it. He was a complete man whore, true, but there was something else about him, something noble and admirable, something that I wasn’t managing to capture. Each paragraph just looked like something cheap and nasty from one of our rival magazines.
I backspaced everything and started again.
I had to show the reader how dazzling it had felt to be there with him, with the gravity of his presence seeming to warp and dominate everything around it.
I wanted to write about Kai, too, and about how completely she seemed to have surrendered to this invisible force. I didn’t write how jealous it had all made me, and how badly I had felt the pull to let myself slip away with the current of his charisma.
“Tom Hood nude pictures,” I asked Google for the bajillionth time that week.
Who was I kidding? It wasn’t even remotely “research” anymore.
I scrolled through and landed on the picture I had first obsessed over on my cold kitchen floor a lifetime ago. It was the same grainy candid celeb shot it always was, but this time it looked different to me.
This time, the expressions on the girls’ faces seemed so much more …joyful. Tom’s grim seemed broader, more wholesome, and the surface of each of his limbs seemed less flat, imbued with new depths somehow. People were wrong about him. He wasn’t a vapid playboy. He was an Adonis, and these women were not groupies, they were devotees, sexual pilgrims, and the only difference between them and me was that they had given way to his…
I threw my phone into my bag and stared at the blank page again. I was a professional. What I thought about him didn’t matter. Just write, dammit.
Chapter Seven
I turned the package over in my hands again and again. It was almost a perfect cube, tastefully wrapped and giving no clues at all about what could be inside.
“Oh my god, is what’s-his-name still sending you shit again?” said Clara.
I’m pretty sure I’ve had hours-long conversations with Clara only to discover at the end of it that we both had been talking about completely different what’s-his-names. Present circumstances meant I was relieved from having to lie to her, which was convenient, so I managed to be less curt with her than I usually am.
“Yup, from what’s-his-name. Idiot.”
“Open it.”
“Nah, later.”
“How did the meeting with what’s-his-name go?”
“Fucking hell, Clara, which what’s-his-name? I can’t believe anyone ever lets you near a keyboard.”
“You know, buddy, what’s-his-name …Tom Hood. Your interview with him.”
“Yeah it was OK. He’s a bit of an asshole, no surprise there.”
“Oh,” she said, taking her turn to look over the box.
“Complete ego maniac. Wants me to write a big piece singing his praises.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Are you going to?”
“Nah. What kind of asshole does that? I’m just going to write it like I see it,” I said, putting on a phony accent and shrugging. Why was I saying this? Why couldn’t I tell Clara what I really felt?
Her face went serious.
“It’s such a big story, though. And it is kind of weird. No offense, but …well, why not get Penelope to write it? Why did he ask you? No offense.”
I took the package from her hands.
“None taken. He just saw that I had mentioned him in another piece and he thought I owed him an apology.”
“That’s it? So, Tom Hood, the Tom Hood, wants you to do a feature piece on him, just like that?”
I shot her a sour look and she balked immediately, sensing she had overstepped.
“Whatever, celebrities, I don’t understand them,” she said breezily.
“He’s not just a celebrity you know, he is an actual entrepreneur … and a lot of what we’ve written about him is actually kind of shitty and--” I stopped. Clara was staring at the package with renewed interest.
“Oh my god. That’s from what’s-his-name isn’t it?” she said slowly, eyes widening.
I spun around and went to shove the package in my desk drawer.
“Yes, it’s from what’s-his-name, so what?”
She backed away with a sheesh and left, leaving me to think about what had just happened. Was she jealous of me? It hadn’t occurred to me, but many women would have killed for the chance I had. More seriously, my mind wandered again to a darker thought: why had I thrown him under the bus like that? What counted as staying true to my story angle and what counted as a stupid crush on a hot celebrity?
Look, I’m a decent writer. But Tom Hood’s life seemed harder and harder to explain. I was getting drawn in, when all I wanted was to occupy that calm, neutral territory of a true pro, be objective, show people that I didn’t care how glitzy and glossy a thing was, my job was to get to the bottom of things …and I intended to do that job well.
I opened the drawer again and tore off the wrapping. Inside was a padded jewelry box, with a delicate gold bangle nestled inside. Along the bangle’s edge was a beautiful etched eye motif, like something you’d find marked on the entrance of an undiscovered Egyptian temple. It was so exactly my style that I held it in my hands for a moment, taken aback by its weight and cool surface, how pretty it was.
A tiny note inside was scribbled with a time and a date, as before. It was from him. I was being summoned, again. I snapped the box closed and flung it aside. Here I was trying to brainstorm a flattering and subtle profile for this man, and he was just a garden-variety player after all. Trying to buy me with stupid trinkets… One hot tear was growing on my lower lashes.
I had never both badly wanted and not wanted a thing at the same time before.
Chapter Eight
I returned to 67 Baltic Terrace the next day with quite a bit more apprehension than the first time, which is saying something.
Oppressed on all sides by sparkling fountains and trimmed topiaries, I felt more keenly than ever how much I didn’t belong here. Not only was this attention from Tom Hood, the Tom Hood, entirely unexpected, I felt compromised by it instantly.
Was he making fun of me?
I was nothing like Kai, nothing like the leggy goddesses that seemed to follow him everywhere. I was dumpier by miles. Completely lacking in glamor. Matte, even. So, what
was the game, then? I couldn’t decide if I felt more humiliated that he had given a gift at all, to me, or that I was completely, utterly, one hundred percent wooed by it. Not only did this playboy jock have the audacity to mistake me for one of his floozies, but astonishingly, he seemed to be doing a good job of it. And here I was, dressed up, again, excited nearly half to death to see him once more.
What an idiot, I thought, as I found myself again in that cool marble entrance hall, except I wasn’t quite sure if I meant him or me.
Half expecting Kai to glide down the staircase and collect me again, I was surprised instead to see him, standing at the top of the staircase, looking down at me. This time, there was no broad, easy grin. Just his face. He was covered up this time, too, and the contrast to before seemed more intimate somehow.
“Hello,” I said, my voice echoing slightly against the walls.
He simply stared at me a little longer, then gestured for me to come up with a small, noncommittal lift of his chin. I obeyed. It must have taken me roughly 40 years to ascend that staircase, or perhaps it only felt like it with his eyes following my every step. But I reached the top landing and looked him square in the eye – or as square as I could given he was more than a foot taller than I was.
His gaze moved down the length of my body but stopped, and he frowned and suddenly looked crestfallen.
“You didn’t wear the bracelet,” he said, already seeming to accept the unhappy fact.
I had come here full of indignation for him but with these simple words his disappointment crushed me and I realized that I had offended him, again, and that it was the last thing I had wanted to do. Why hadn’t I worn it? I had no clue.
“I’m …I’m sorry but I …” I could do nothing but trail off as I stared at his eyes again, and what I found there stunned me a little, so that even I, Katie Mack, who always has something to say, was speechless. It was a naked gaze, a look so full and open that I blushed instantly and started stammering again, desperately trying to normalize the situation.
