Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  I cupped her unblemished cheek. Dear, precious beauty. “You know I won’t lie to you. I figured it out in the trailer after the beach party.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh.” She blinked them away. “Oh.”

  Oh indeed. I wasn’t even sure where to start untangling this mess. Maybe it was for the best that the truth came out now, before anything truly disastrous happened to body, mind, heart, or soul. “You’ve been deceiving me. Lying to me.”

  “I know.” She shrank down. “I…I know. I’m sorry.”

  I should have asked her why, but all I could feel was sorrow and loss. I hated what I had to do next. But the euphoria of the scene faded and was replaced with the dread knowledge of how close to major disaster we had come, how close I’d come to ruining the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. And for what? To bring an adolescent sex fantasy to life? Only one course of action made sense.

  “We can’t do this again,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted.

  “For how much longer? No, Gwen, this whole thing is clearly dangerous beyond all reason.” I realized suddenly that her deception was the lever I could use to pry us apart. “And I don’t just mean physically. You’ve been lying to me.”

  “And you’ve been letting me!”

  “Which only proves how fucked up we are!” I forced myself to look at my palm, regretting it immediately as blood was beginning to well out of the horror-movie wound. I showed it to her for a split second before I clenched it again. “That could have been your face, your head. Your career—”

  “Career isn’t everything!” she cried, hopping to her feet and grabbing another chunk of ice out of the bucket.

  “—your life,” I finished. I took one more breath, putting a heavy lock on my emotions and clicking into post-emergency response mode. I looked around. I needed to take myself to the hospital but first I felt it prudent to remove any trace of what had happened. In the bedroom I dug a pair of track pants out of my bag and stubbornly pulled them on one-handed.

  Fishing the burned wig out of the hot tub wasn’t difficult, but there was no sign of the swab baton I’d used. It must have been sucked into the filter. Fine. Your average person certainly wouldn’t suspect it was a sex toy.

  I carried the dildo and the chastity device into the bathroom. Gwen had moved to sitting on the lid of the toilet, looking shell-shocked.

  In fact, she was probably in shock, and I meant that in the medical sense. Especially when I went to wash the dildo and realized I was washing off blood. So much for keeping my emotions in check. “Gwen!” I barked in alarm.

  “What?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I slammed the dildo down onto the counter, my own hands shaking.

  “Why?”

  “This…this . . .” I gestured at the thing. What was I thinking, using it like I did? Why did they even manufacture such monstrosities? “It’s got your blood on it!”

  She squinted at the green and black object and made an unimpressed face. “Oh, come on, Mal, don’t tell me you’re freaked out by a little blood. Women bleed, you know.”

  Why did the worst explanation—that I’d torn her somehow—seem more believable to me at that moment than the more likely one? I stared at her, trying to reassert my rational mind.

  “Stop being such a freak case, okay?” she entreated. “I’m all right. I’m perfectly fine. You, though, you probably need to get your hand taken care of.”

  My rational mind. If I had been listening to it instead of the siren song of the Need all along, I never would have been meeting her in secret in the first place. I knew perfectly well pursuing my extreme sexual fantasies was a mistake.

  Time to own that mistake.

  She had taken the clips out of her hair and I allowed myself one last caress, brushing her bangs off her forehead. “I think you may be in shock,” I said, trying to sound as calm and authoritative as possible. “At the very least, you’re probably experiencing some intense after-scene effects. Drop in blood pressure, chill…”

  Gwen rubbed the burn on her cheek with her fingers as if to prove it didn’t hurt. “I’m going to be fine.”

  “Come get in bed,” I said, trying not to sound gruff but failing. I drew back the covers for her.

  “All right.” She climbed into the bed but quickly realized I wasn’t getting in with her. “Where are you going?”

  “To the ER.” I held up my fist.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. Neither of us needs that kind of publicity.”

  That seemed to convince her, and she sank back into bed with a sigh. “Okay, but we need to talk.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed her on the forehead. “You want to talk about how close to the edge of the precipice we can get? We shouldn’t be on the cliff in the first place.” Wasn’t it obvious I couldn’t be trusted? And if she trusted me anyway, it was just proof how fucked the whole idea was.

  “Oh, Mal. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” I bent to kiss her one last time and she tipped her head so that I caught her mouth instead of her forehead, stealing one last kiss from me before I forced myself to leave.

  Chapter Nine

  Gunpowder Plot

  GWEN

  I could not believe he left like that, but then again, it made some sense. His hand was badly injured and I was in no shape to go anywhere. Seriously. I was wobbly and weak in the aftermath of the scene. Just getting from the bathroom to the bed had been a dicey proposition. That didn’t stop me from fantasizing about getting in my car and tailing him to the hospital. But I’d taken a first aid class in college and knew better than to try driving while in shock.

  Not that he should have been driving himself, I thought, after I’d had a while to think about it. I should have insisted on an ambulance, or at least a taxi…?

  I didn’t even know which hospital he might have gone to.

  He’s probably fine, I thought to myself. He might get bloodstains on the inside of his car but that would be the worst of it.

  And now that no active crisis was going on, I could barely keep my eyes open. It felt like sleep was ambushing me despite my worries. I was that exhausted and drained by the scene and the aftermath.

  I woke again in the wee hours of the morning and he wasn’t there. I searched around the main room of the suite to make sure he wasn’t sleeping on the couch or out by the pool, but he still wasn’t back. I dragged myself to the bathroom and checked myself out more thoroughly than before. I was fine. I was going to be sore for a while, but it was the good kind of sore. The blood definitely wasn’t from an injury and the burn on my face didn’t seem that bad. It was red and visible and I wondered if the skin might blister, but it really wasn’t worse than a bad sunburn. I’d burned my hand worse while making coffee.

  He’s completely overreacting, isn’t he? He totally is. Surely once he had a calmer look at things it wouldn’t seem that dire to him, either. I’ll tell him when he comes back.

  I went back to bed, but when I woke up in the morning, I discovered he’d managed to slip in, take his things, and leave again without waking me. The massage table, the dildo, even the chastity belt—which was mine!—everything was gone except for my own bag of clothes.

  The only thing he left was a note.

  Gwen,

  I’m truly sorry but it’s for the best. Your health is too precious to be risked gratifying my twisted fantasies. Your deception and my compliance with it is all the proof I need that we should have known better—that deep down we did know better but we did it anyway. Every woman I’ve cared for, I’ve pushed too far. I care for you too much to break you. I have to stop before things get even worse.

  Please respect this boundary of mine and accept my good-bye with grace.

  Mal

  I read the letter over several times, trying to make it say something other than what it did.

  But he wants me and I want him, I t
hought. Shouldn’t there be a way to work it out when that’s true? I was angry that he wanted me to “accept his good-bye with grace” but didn’t have the balls to say it to my face, and I was sad that he felt his fantasies were somehow to blame. He was right about one thing, which was that I should have told him sooner who I was, but that made our lack of communication my fault, not his. Did that mean I deserved to lose him? I didn’t think so.

  I called Maddie on the drive home.

  “Hey, Gwen, what’s up? Planning for the party?”

  Our regular dungeon party was in two weeks. “No, I’m calling about something else.”

  “You sound upset.”

  “I do?”

  “Well, you don’t sound like your usual perky self. Are you driving? Do you want to meet for coffee or something?”

  “Um, I think I’d rather not be in public when I tell you what I’ve got to tell you.”

  Her voice was soothingly firm. “I’ve got coffee in my pantry, you know.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Maddie. I don’t want to impose.”

  “Stop it. I’m texting you my address.”

  Forty-five minutes later, I was pulling up to a Spanish-style condo on a side street in West Hollywood. The front courtyard was surrounded by ten-foot-high walls and crowded with palms and banana trees. To the side of the main door was a stairwell up to the second-floor unit and at the top of the stairs Madison was waving. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a scrunchie and she was in sweats.

  She ushered me into a high-ceilinged great room with a sectional sofa and glass-topped coffee table. One corner of the room had been made into a mini-office, with a desk, computer, and printer, while the back of the room was delimited by a kitchen island. A hallway to one side presumably led to the bedroom and bath.

  “Nice place,” I said as she urged me to sit and poured us both large mugs of coffee. I didn’t argue as she added cream and sugar to mine.

  “Yeah, I lucked out with it. My grandmother left me a pile of money just big enough to buy the place, and the way rents have gone, I cover the mortgage with what the downstairs tenants pay.” She sat back against the couch, cradling her mug in her hands. “Should I ask what happened to your face?”

  “Oh, God.” I set my mug down and took a deep breath. “Does it look bad? I’ve been flipping back and forth between thinking it’s the worst thing ever and that it’s nothing. Well, okay, most of the time I’ve been telling myself it’s nothing, but that’s because Mal overreacted so much it’s like I had to underreact to balance him out.”

  She took a sip. “I think you better start at the beginning.”

  “Okay. You know that rock star I’ve been publicity dating?”

  “Yeaaah.”

  “It’s more than publicity dating. A lot more. But it’s complicated.”

  “Oh, honey, it always is. Go on.”

  So I told her. I told her about how I showed up backstage still dressed for a part and ended up having wild sex with him that first time. I told her about the beer bottle, everything. This was the main reason I went to Madison and not my sister or another friend. I’d never be able to tell them stuff like that, but I knew Madison wouldn’t be fazed. Sure she was a gorgeous, voluptuous redhead, but I think the real reason my grandfather hired her to be a dungeon hostess was because she simply wasn’t ever shocked or put off by anything sexually weird. She was sensible and levelheaded and didn’t judge. And I needed that right now.

  “So let me get this straight. He has, or had, a bunch of rules? Doesn’t date rich girls, except that he did, and never does the same woman twice, except that he did?”

  “Pretty much. The dating thing was just supposed to be for show, you know? But we went on a publicity date and saw this really sexy film and…” I stopped myself and started again. “I mean, when the film was over, I was like, oh, let my chauffeur give you a ride home because I basically just wanted to get him alone so I could ask him to have sex with me. Like, I would have done him right there in the limo if he’d wanted. God, when did I turn into such a pushy bitch?”

  “Asking for sex doesn’t make you pushy or a bitch,” she pointed out. “And if he thinks you’re either of those things, he’s not worth talking about.”

  “No, no, no, you’re right. He’s not the one saying that. I am. Forget I said that. Except then I kind of tricked him into having sex with me anyway.”

  “Kind of?” She cocked her head, waiting for the explanation.

  “So I had kept in touch with a couple of other fans, and I got dressed up in a different disguise and went backstage at another event and got chosen to be Mal’s girl again.”

  “Aaah, so the roadie doing the screening didn’t realize it was you or that he’d seen you before.”

  “Exactly. But—” I suddenly remembered what had happened, what the women were talking about. “But here’s the thing. Talking with some of the other groupies, it turned out Mal was trying to find me. I mean, find the girl he’d had sex with at the Forum. So I kind of wonder if he was getting ready to break his one-time-only rule anyway.”

  “Interesting. Go on.”

  So I told her about putting the knife on my back and about not saying anything so he wouldn’t hear my voice until after he’d convinced himself I was someone else. “I hadn’t realized keeping quiet was going to make the scene so hot! It was like, I don’t know, we switched to communicating through touch, through our skin. What am I saying? It was my imagination; it doesn’t matter.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, when we’re talking about a scene, your imagination certainly does matter,” Maddie said.

  “Especially given what happened later. But I’m getting ahead of myself a little. Well, later he told me this was the scene where he figured out it was me.”

  “Ah, I wondered.”

  “Yeah. But he kept up the act like he didn’t, I guess because it was obvious I was pretending not to be myself? Then he agreed to meet me—I mean her—again for sex. For a role-playing scene.”

  “Interesting.” Her eyes narrowed as she listened.

  “Yeah. So much for the one-time rule, eh? He sent instructions on what to wear and stuff, based on a fantasy book we both read as teenagers. You know, one of those books where there’s no sex but you know it must be going on between the chapters? We acted out a scene that could’ve happened.”

  “This is getting more interesting all the time.” Maddie tapped her finger against her mug like she was trying to solve the puzzle of Mal, which I hoped she would. “What kind of a scene? You mean like a rape scene?”

  “Not exactly. Our heroine is studying magic at an ancient castle where it’s all women and they wear these chastity belts. She’s given to an evil mage as a kind of tribute. I guess the sex is implied in the fact that she’s not wearing the chastity belt anymore in the next scene? Anyway, I wore a chastity belt, we had an amazing scene, and then he told me to wear it for the next three weeks until our next meeting.”

  She nodded, impressed. “That’s commitment.”

  “I thought so. So I wore it. I’m wearing it in the WOMedia video and I wore it to the press event yesterday.” I sighed. “I’m not wearing it now because he took it when he snuck out this morning after we had a scene go wrong.”

  I described the scene in as much detail as I could recall, the Velcro straps on the massage table, the flaming “marshmallow” on a stick, the “dragon” dildo. I found it comforting that Madison had seen those before; they even sold them at the sex-toy store where she used to work. And of course I told her how it all went wrong.

  “You know,” Madison said when I was done, “not that I’m blaming you, of course, but if he’d told you it was going to be a fire play scene, you might have at least had a chance to check if your wig was flammable or not.”

  “I should have guessed, though! I knew it was going to be a dragon sacrifice scene.”

  “Nope nope nope, no blaming yourself for this one, Gwen. That falls squarely on him. Secret tryst or surpris
e scene or what, he could have still given you some warning. Besides, who would’ve thought he was going to play the dragon himself and not a temple guard or priest?”

  “Maybe I really didn’t know him well enough.”

  “Of course you didn’t know him well enough! You were pretending to be someone else. He was letting you pretend to be someone else!”

  Oh. That made sense, I supposed. “Well, anyway, now he’s saying we can never see each other again. That it’s for my own good and also his mental health and so please respect his boundaries. And that makes me feel like I really stalked him, you know? I was the one who snuck backstage in disguise, twice, to have sex with him, and I gave him a ride home so I could proposition him—”

  “I dunno, Gwen.” She set down her coffee mug, now empty, and rested her chin on her fist. “On the one hand, part of me says yeah, respecting limits and rules is sacrosanct, but on the other hand what the actual fuck. Especially if he knew it was you but played along anyway. Just goes to show it wasn’t an actual hard limit for him.”

  “So do you agree he’s overreacting?”

  “Totally.” She turned my chin with her thumb, examining the burn mark. “I don’t think this is even going to blister. He thinks he’s being responsible and doing the right thing by breaking it off with you? No, he’s being chickenshit. The responsible thing is to accept that accidents can happen and that you deal with them responsibly when they do.”

  “Look at his note. Look at what he wrote. He says he always pushes things too far.”

  “What, can this guy not get off unless someone’s on fire or there’s live blood or something? I think he’s being chickenshit again. Unless he’s actually a psycho, which I don’t think he is. This is just another form of the same old song: men afraid of feelings.”

  I pressed my hands together. “The thing is, I’ve always got that fear in the back of my mind, that things will go too far, because of how my mother died.”

  Madison scooted a little closer to me on the couch. The whole world knew my mother had died in an accident on a movie set. Some knew the accident involved ropes and rigging. Because of the tabloids, some “knew” that it might have been suicide. Only Madison and a few others in our family’s inner circle knew the whole story of how much our mother enjoyed rope bondage and suspension and that she was likely playing with someone when the accident happened. “Oh, honey, I know,” Madison said. “But so many things went wrong there.”