Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  “I think that was the proof that you know perfectly well the line between BDSM and being an abusive ass, and you didn’t cross it,” I said, hugging myself. “If you ever did, you know what? We’d deal with it the same way we’d deal with any other mistakes or hurts in a relationship.”

  He shook his head but it was more of a violent shudder than a reply. His eyes were squeezed shut and his jaw clenched.

  “Please, Mal,” I said.

  “Is that what it would come to? You begging me to hurt you? Tempting me constantly? Trying to entice me into hurting you?”

  “You trained me to come from pain!” I cried.

  “And it was a mistake!” he roared. “I never should have laid a hand on you. If you really love me, Gwen, then help me to stop.”

  I swallowed and my voice came out a rough whisper. “If you really love me, then treat me like I’m not just an addiction you need to kick.”

  He pressed his hand to his eyes and took a few deep breaths, then looked at me suddenly. “My coat.” He held out his hand.

  I shrugged off the duster and handed it to him.

  “What if I told you to suck my cock right now,” he demanded in a low voice as he put the coat on. “All I’d have to do is tell you I agree with you, you’re mine, and a minute later I could choke you on this blasted erection.”

  “That’s…that’s probably true,” I said, almost wishing he’d do it. Almost.

  “That doesn’t seem really fucked up and wrong to you, Gwen?” He adjusted his package like his balls were aching. “That I can snap my fingers and fill your throat with come just because I’m the dom?”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that, and you know it,” I said, my own anger reddening my face. I put my hands on my bare hips.

  “Psychobabble and window dressing,” he said.

  “You know what gives you clarity, Mal? Do you remember? Will you fuck me and then we can talk again?”

  He shook his head. “Will you quit kink to stay with me, Gwen?”

  “That’s an impossible question.”

  “When a woman doesn’t say enthusiastically yes, that means no,” Mal said with a nod. He gave my naked body one last look and before I realized what he was doing, left.

  Gone. Out the door. “Mal!”

  I pulled the door open and looked into the hallway but he was already out of sight. By the elevator? He was counting on the fact that I wouldn’t run after him while stark naked.

  Unfortunately, he was right. I ducked back into the room. Where had he hidden my suitcase? In the closet. I dragged it out and hurriedly pulled on a pair of underwear and pants, a shirt, a sweater.

  It felt so strange to be wearing clothes after two weeks naked. But even stranger to be wondering what the hell could be going through Mal’s mind. A few hours ago I had been certain everything was solid, everything was perfect between us. And right now I didn’t know what to think, what to feel. Give up kink? The thing that made us us?

  I hurried out to the elevator: no sign of Mal. He wasn’t in the lobby either. Should I go looking on the street? Had he gone back to that deli to confront those two waiters?

  Running through the streets of Montreal at night was not probably the best strategy. I needed help. I went back upstairs and dialed Axel’s room.

  * * *

  MAL

  I walked. Stalked. Strode heedless through the empty streets, half hoping for trouble to present itself, as a violent confrontation would have been welcome just then.

  But no attack came. The only trouble was brewing in my own head. How could she not see it? How could she let me do what she did? No: I could not rely on her to protect herself from me. To expect she would, merely placed the blame on her when it belonged squarely with me. The only solution was to stop altogether.

  I was the one who could not leave well enough alone. I was the one who could not resist temptation.

  Devil child. That was what my father had called me a very, very long time ago for defying him. Even at the time—eight or nine years old—my thought had been, You don’t know the half of it.

  Even Axel didn’t know everything. In the years that we were apart, when he had gone back to the States and I was in boarding school? Those had been dark times.

  Dark times. When I had hurt others as well as myself. The tattoo on my back largely obscured the scars I had inflicted on myself, in the days when I believed in penance, but they could still be felt.

  I looked up and realized my feet had taken me all the way to the recording studio. It was located in an old industrial building that now had offices and art studios in it, and I could see the lights burning several floors up. Our studio’s floor.

  Curiosity, a desire to get out of the cold, inevitability, all pushed me to go upstairs. I punched the key code on the entry pad and rode the elevator up.

  The music that met my ears when the doors opened was familiar, something Axel and I had listened to on repeat for days on end when we were teenagers. Nine Inch Nails.

  I looked into the listening room to see who was there and was not wholly surprised to see Axel. The listening room was a conference room with surround-sound speakers, a boardroom table in the middle, and low black leather armchairs along two walls. Axel was at the head of the table, twirling a pen in his fingers. In front of him I recognized one of his old notebooks of lyrics and song ideas.

  “Oh, hey, Mal,” he said casually. “What are you doing up at this time of night?”

  “I had a fight with Gwen,” I said baldly, and threw myself tiredly into an armchair. “What are you doing here?”

  He picked up the remote next to him and cut the music off. “Just trying to figure out if I can really live with some of these songs.”

  “What do you mean? I thought we settled on which songs we’re using.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, sighing. “I’m having serious second thoughts about whether I can really get up there in front of thousands of people and say some of the things that are in them.”

  That didn’t strike me as much like Axel at all. “You’re the one who has pushed the band’s image the most in the kink and fetish direction. You can’t be getting prudish all of a sudden.”

  He huffed, half laugh, half dismissal. “No, no, no. It’s not the sex or kink that’s a problem. It’s all the…confessional self-loathing.”

  “Johns has no problem with the lyrical content,” I pointed out, feeling my hackles starting to rise defensively. Most of the songs that we’d chosen, as it happened, were lyrically mine this time around.

  Now Axel did laugh. “As you are fond of saying, Larkin Johns does not get the last word on what is or isn’t a Rough song. I don’t know, Mal. Maybe it’ll be okay. I was just listening back to this old album trying to figure out where the line is. I mean, Trent Reznor really makes the dark self-loathing thing work, but…just…I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” I moved to the table to look at what he had been writing but he closed the book.

  “Never mind. I’ll…come up with a way to make it work. I guess.”

  “Ax, you wouldn’t be sitting in the studio at four in the morning if this was a small issue,” I said.

  “Well, all right, like this one, ‘Inside.’ It’s kind of your version of ‘Closer,’ isn’t it? In the second person, you can kind of read it as just an innuendo, but it doesn’t have the uplift of ‘Closer.’ It reads as almost serial-killer level self-loathing.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Axel was finally reading the song as I’d felt it was intended initially, but which I hadn’t expected anyone to get. After all, songs like The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” which was actually about a stalker, or R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” which is about an arsonist, were interpreted by most listeners as tender love ballads.

  He leaned forward. “So…is this a bad time to ask about your fight with Gwen?”

  I met his eyes. My oldest and best friend. “No. Now is the perfect time. I’
ve decided I’m quitting kink.”

  Axel rubbed his eyes and looked at me. “You’re what?”

  “I asked Gwen to join me in quitting and she refused. I will not be adding her to the list of women I’ve ruined.”

  His jaw moved a couple of times before words finally came out: “Ruined is a pretty strong word, Mal.”

  “It’s the word Camilla used for herself.” I practically winced saying my cousin’s name. I didn’t even like hearing it out loud.

  “You mean the cousin who pretty much cornered you and jumped onto your dick? Tell me again how you ‘ruined’ her? I was there, remember.”

  “I know. If you hadn’t let slip that I wasn’t a virgin anymore maybe she would have saved herself.”

  “For marriage, you mean?”

  “Yes. I don’t place any value on that rubbish but she—and her parents—certainly did.”

  “She’s happily married and not even to some dickwad duke or something,” Axel said with a shrug. “So maybe you did her a favor by ‘ruining’ her suitability to marry a prudish aristocrat.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t be thick, Mal. Social media. I checked her Facebook just the other day.”

  Axel was the type to friend everyone he ever met. “Just coincidentally?”

  “Yes, it’s a total coincidence I happened to look her up just when you need your head pried out of your ass. Listen. She’s running a successful art gallery in London. Just finished photographing a whole series of nude self-portraits in famous British historical sites. Seriously, Mal. You might have been the spindle Cinderella pricked her finger on but it didn’t put her to sleep. It woke her up. Camilla knew perfectly well what she was doing seducing you.”

  “Fine. Maybe things worked out for her. That doesn’t mean I’m blameless. And there are others.”

  “I don’t exactly see them lining up outside with torches and pitchforks.”

  “But you should.”

  Axel flipped to the back of his notebook where there was a pocket for loose sheets and pulled out several in my handwriting. Some of them were quite old. He flipped through them. “I don’t know why I didn’t see this theme before, but now it’s really coming clear. You see yourself as a monster.”

  I stared at him. “You know I do.”

  He shook his head. “When I said Dracula was a phase you were going through, I was only kidding.”

  “It’s not only Dracula, Ax. Think about it. The kinky one is always the villain. In every story.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but I could see his eyes drifting as he tried to come up with counterexamples and could find none. From Catwoman to Baron Harkonnen to Zod. “Jeez. In the movies the kinky villain is always British, too. What is up with that?”

  “Perhaps it reflects an inner truth,” I said.

  He laughed. “Or perhaps you’ve taken it entirely too much to heart. I mean, I know we all need role models, but Mal—”

  I stood up, too discomfited by his flippant conclusions about my inner angst to subject myself to them any longer.

  He stood, too, and caught me by the arm. “Listen. I know I don’t sound serious, but I am. Just because the only representations of kink and desire you’ve ever seen are negative, are evil, doesn’t make you evil. I know you.”

  “This isn’t some facile air I fancy,” I said, shrugging free.

  “I know. Look, I remember us being ten years old and even then you were talking about the Need.”

  My blood ran cold. I didn’t recall actually confessing that to him. “I told you about that?”

  “You did. I let you hang me upside down from an apple tree and pelt me with apples until I begged you to stop.”

  I sat back down, my legs suddenly nerveless. “I don’t even remember that.”

  “After you let me down, you were the one who cried, which made no sense to me at all. I wasn’t actually hurt. I was quite proud of myself, actually.” He made a fist like he was showing off his biceps. “But you told me you thought you were possessed, like in some book you’d read.”

  I had no memory of this. Had I meant what I said or had that been a story, too? “Did you read the book? Did I lend it to you?”

  “You did, but I didn’t really get into it the way you did. I’d forgotten all about it until we saw that film premiere.” He sat down beside me again. “Listen, you think you want to quit kink? That’s like gay people thinking they can be cured of homosexuality.”

  “This isn’t the same.”

  “Pretty sure it is. I think the Need is just sadism, Mal. That’s all. It’s not good or evil; it just is. We’ve swallowed so many messages about sex itself being evil, desire being the devil, even before you get to talking about kink. You have to get past that, man.”

  “You’ve always had a more robust enjoyment of your sexuality than I have,” I told him.

  That made him cackle. “Robust enjoyment. I was a horny kid and I grew into a horny man, that’s all. Jeez, there it is again, you know? Even the word horny is supposed to be the devil horns, right? How about randy instead. I was a randy kid and I’m randy now.”

  “But you don’t get off on causing Ricki pain.”

  “Well, not exactly. I like to spank her and flog her and stuff, but it’s all part of controlling her, of taking this incredibly powerful woman and knowing she bows to no one except me. It’s why we’re so into bondage and restraints, control and making her mine.” He picked up the pen and twirled it again. “Sadism and masochism are just one small thread in what we do. For us, it’s more about the total package of ultimate trust.”

  I looked at my hands. The fingertips of the left were dull from guitar calluses, the palm of my right seemed redder than the other, as if all the times I had reddened it while spanking Gwen had left it permanently ruddy. Perhaps it was my imagination. “For me, it starts and ends with pain. Pain is how I know I’m alive. But I learned long ago that it is even better to give than receive.”

  “So that’s what you’ve been doing for two weeks in your hotel room? Smacking her around?”

  “Yes,” I said, for the sake of the argument, but I felt that burn in the pit of my stomach that I felt whenever I lied to someone close to me. “Well, no.” My mind was full of the sensation of her sleeping in my arms, of the fierce protective urge that seized me whenever I pushed her physical limits. “A little of that, a lot of sex, and even more talk and sleep.” I shook my head, as if it would make all the ideas circling in my head settle down. “I still fear that under it all, I’m merely a very well-behaved psychopath.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “How else do you explain these delusions that spring up? Like after I’m done hurting her, how I rush to patch her up and make sure she’s all right. I gaslight her into thinking it wasn’t that bad at all so that I can do it all again, so she’ll keep letting me do it.”

  His face was skeptical. Incredulous. “You really think you convince her it wasn’t so bad and that that’s why she lets you do it again? Does she set limits and do you respect them? Do you negotiate?”

  “Yes, but it’s camouflage.”

  “I dunno, Mal, I think after two weeks if she didn’t like it, she’d have said something. I really don’t think she would have come to Montreal when I asked her to if it was because she was under some delusion you planted.”

  “She’s never refused me.”

  “Never?”

  Except tonight, I realized, when I’d tried to prove…what, exactly? “Once,” I said. “Tonight.”

  “So she put her foot down to protect herself after all and you walked out in a huff?”

  “No! Wait…” I felt like the cartoon character who gets tricked into arguing his opponent’s point. Gwen had asserted herself. “I was…trying to make a point to her about fantasy and reality, that she needed to stop living in a fantasy world.”

  “And it sounds like she asserted reality pretty strongly, Mal.”

  He had a point, but
so did I.

  “I’m a terrible person for using her to further the band’s ends.”

  Axel made a frustrated noise. “The only thing that will make Gwen feel used is if you break it off with her now. Honestly, Mal, just because you want to run from your demons doesn’t mean you have to run from her. You’re afraid of hurting her? That’s what you’re doing by pushing her away. Trust me on this.”

  “I want to believe you,” I said. “I want to believe that I actually love her and not that my twisted brain makes me act like I do so I can feed my sadism.”

  Axel reached over and squeezed my hand before letting it go. “Listen. We all love and accept you the way you are. But you bottle up a lot of rage, Mal. You know why I think you rush to patch her up?”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason you did it for me when we were kids.”

  “Because I was overcome with remorse for having hurt you?”

  “No. I don’t think that was it at all. I think it was that once you let the rage out, the positive emotions could finally come to the fore. I think that’s your real ‘Need.’”

  “I think you have been watching too many pop psychology TV shows,” I growled, and pushed back from the table. Was he right? I almost wanted to reach over and shake some sense into him, but maybe that only proved that he had hit close to home.

  I walked back to the hotel with my thoughts as tumultuous as they had been on the previous walk.

  What if you’re wrong, Axel? Whenever one of these shooters is caught or killed, his friends and neighbors always say they never suspected he was violent.

  Axel wouldn’t say that about me. He knew I was a sadist. He knew me very well.

  Maybe he also had to say whatever he could to keep everyone in the band on an even keel. Maybe he would say whatever he thought I needed to hear, whether it was true or not. Who was gaslighting now?

  I sat for a while in the hotel lobby, but as morning neared I did not want to linger there. What was I going to say to Gwen when I got upstairs? I was fatigued and did not relish having the same fight all over again.

  But when I reached the room I found her absent. A note that looked hastily written was on the bed. It read: