Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  Mal,

  I know who I am and kink isn’t just a fun game or a compulsion—it’s a part of me. I’ve never felt so rejected or invalidated as you made me feel tonight. Maybe someday you’ll see that.

  Gwen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fly

  GWEN

  I was in the airport on the way home when I saw the e-mail from my agent about the video job. I should have seen this coming, I thought. Of course the music video Simon had been talking about was for The Rough. I’d even introduced him to Christina. In fact, reading his e-mail again, it made it sound like he thought I already knew it was going to be a Rough video.

  Very rough. I wondered if Mal knew or if he would find out when he got back to town. Was he going to accuse me of stalking him for taking the job?

  Should I even take the job?

  As soon as Axel had called to let me know he’d seen Mal at the studio, that Mal was being as stubborn as ever and that he was on the way back to the hotel, I decided not to be there when he returned. There was no way I could listen to all that about quitting kink again. I caught a cab directly to the airport.

  It had not been difficult to get a flight once the ticket agent realized I wasn’t concerned with the price. I had just enough time to grab some coffee and breakfast before it was time to board.

  The world felt strange around me—not just because it was Canada, where everything was almost the same but not quite—but because I hadn’t been in the real world in two weeks. I fumbled taking my change from the cashier at the coffee stand while behind me a dozen people waited impatiently for me to get my act together. I juggled my open wallet, the coffee, and the croissant in a paper wrapper as I tried to get to a table before I dropped everything. Thank goodness a businesswoman got up and left the one near the counter. I made it there without spilling anything but then burned my tongue on my first sip.

  I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with me, if maybe everything was somehow my fault.

  I wanted to go back to being the best version of myself, not a klutzy, neurotic wreck. Was that what Mal had been trying to say, that the real me wasn’t good enough? No, he’d never said that. If anything, all he’d said was that the real version of himself wasn’t good enough, but maybe that was the message I was supposed to hear that he was too polite to say.

  That was when I checked my e-mail and saw the one from Simon with the details. Where to be, what time. The concreteness of the news grounded me and immediately stopped my neurotic slide.

  I was still contemplating whether I should back out, though, when I read a little farther into Simon’s e-mail, which described the director’s concept for the video and how it was like a mini-movie. They might even try to turn it into a short to enter into film festivals.

  The director was Miles Redlace.

  There was no way I was backing out of this job. I typed back an answer hoping I sounded enthusiastic, helpful, cheerful, and professional, or at least not like a sad weirdo who’d just been roundly rejected by the man she willingly served as a sex slave for two weeks.

  I felt a flare of deep chagrin, my cheeks as hot as the coffee. I bit angrily into the croissant. Out here in the real world that was what it looked like, didn’t it? I’d just let a man fuck me six ways from Sunday—two Sundays, in fact—and then he threw me away. All his talk about how he did it because he loved me seemed like just that, nothing but a story, a fairy tale.

  God, I hate you, Mal Kenneally, I thought as tears prickled my eyes. Then I shook my head. What the hell kind of a thought was that? I looked down at the tiny hole in the lid of the coffee cup, at the wisp of steam coming out of it, trying to get a grip on reality. This is the world, I thought. This is how the outside world would see us, if they knew. The tabloid version of our story. But I also knew all too well that the tabloid version of reality wasn’t reality at all.

  It would be easy to fall into, though. A comforting, consensual delusion where nymphomaniac women are preyed upon by manslut rock stars. If I could believe in that reality I could hate Mal and move on.

  The thought was almost tempting.

  But my sister and Axel’s relationship ran smack dab into that delusion. And so did the burning in my heart that had nothing to do with coffee, the solid fist grasping the core of the truth. I loved Mal, he loved me, and that love was built on something deep inside us that didn’t fit the outside world’s ideas. That something could only come out in music and acting and the reality we made for ourselves when we were together.

  Maybe there was no way to prove it to him. Maybe Mal was actually incapable of seeing it. Maybe he truly didn’t feel the bond between us, and it was my imagination after all. If so, maybe the relationship was doomed, and there was nothing to do but cry and try to move on…

  No. Don’t give up. You’re not going to give up on your acting career or Mal’s stubborn attitude. Hate the culture and the people who made him that way if you have to hate something. I cursed the family and the exes who must have taught Mal he didn’t deserve love.

  I looked up and realized I’d just heard “Los Angeles” coming from somewhere. A gate announcement? My coffee had gone cold, the croissant was still in my hand with a bite taken out of it, and they were calling my flight. I gulped down a few more swallows of the coffee, then threw it and the croissant into the trash and ran as fast as I could, panicking the entire way to the gate.

  I made it onto the plane, and in first class they fed me, and then I actually slept almost the entire way to LAX. I decided to take it as a sign that things were going to start going right.

  * * *

  MAL

  The phone rang. I picked it up, saying nothing.

  Axel’s voice: “Wake-up call.”

  “What makes you think I slept?”

  “That bad, eh? Did you guys fight all night?”

  “No. She’s gone.”

  “Ah.” He cleared his throat nervously. “Um, does that mean we should call off the studio session for today?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Of course not?”

  I was in no mood to explain. “See you there in an hour.” I hung up the phone and then attempted to stand. I had been sitting at the side of the bed without moving for enough hours that my back and legs were stiff. Since coming in and discovering Gwen was gone—her toothbrush, her suitcase, completely gone—all I had done was sit there and think.

  In fact, for a while I didn’t even think. I merely sat there in shock. Her absence hit me hard, like a chunk of my head had been torn away.

  You idiot, I thought. You wanted her to leave.

  But it felt nothing like a victory to have her gone. Not that I had been expecting it to; I had been expecting it to hurt. When I told her I cared for her, loved her, it was true. That still wasn’t enough to bridge the yawning chasm between what she needed and what the Need would let me be.

  I stood in the shower for far too long, my mind caught in a loop, the water too hot but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to lessen my suffering. Perhaps I was reminding myself I was alive.

  The studio, the band, the album beckoned. How could things that were so important to me seem so insignificant all of a sudden? I felt as if I were deep down in a dark well, and everything in my life was contained within the bright circle that looked so small and distant above me it may as well not be real.

  I forced myself to put on socks. To put on trousers. A band T-shirt would do. In the bathroom with the comb in my hand I discovered the folly of standing under the water for so long after such a wild and restless night: the bottom twelve inches or so of my hair were an impenetrable mass of tangles. I took the knife from the pile of sex toys that I had amassed in the past two weeks and sawed it off just below my shoulders.

  Some fan would probably pay thousands for the mass of hair in my hand, I thought bitterly. I chucked it into the trash. So much for love.

  I encountered Axel at the elevator. He looked openly shocked at my appearance. �
��She dumped you?” he asked, sounding confused.

  I merely shook my head and said nothing.

  “Look, we really don’t have to go into the studio today—”

  “If you are worried that the destruction of my relationship with Gwen will negatively impact my attitude with Larkin Johns, you are mistaken,” I said evenly as we got into the elevator. “I promise you I shall be docile as a lamb.”

  “A lamb bit me at a petting zoo when I was five.” Axel showed me one of his fingers. “You can still see the scar.”

  “You’re not funny, Ax.”

  “You’re not exactly a laugh riot yourself,” he said. “Seriously, Mal, what happened?”

  I shook my head. “She finally took all my exhortations to leave to heart, and she left. At least the record’s mostly done.”

  “Small consolation,” Axel said. “I feel like it’s my fault. I mean, fuck, I—”

  “It’s not your fault.” The elevator doors opened and I strode out into the lobby.

  Axel caught up to me and we got in a cab together but he stayed silent this time, perhaps unable to come up with a suitable tactic to broach the subject again. Or perhaps, like me, he had decided to focus on the day’s work instead. I expected a grueling day since much of what remained to be done was tedious redubbing work and filling in gaps.

  Then again, perhaps that was a saving grace. Redubbing I could do with my brain and fingers on autopilot and my heart turned off.

  The first few hours passed without incident. Then we began work on a song entitled “My True Soul.” Axel and I had cowritten the lyrics, and the song had a bridge with a vocal line and a guitar line repeating like a call and answer. As we listened to it, though, quite suddenly Chino put his hands over his eyes trying not to laugh. He waved a hand though, as if to say, Ignore me.

  A few moments later, Samson’s eyes widened and he burst out laughing, too.

  Johns looked around. “Something wrong?”

  Samson gestured for him to go back. “Play the bridge again.”

  Johns started the song again from an earlier point and Axel’s voice, soaring with heavy reverb, sang, “A soul, a soul, a soul!” This time it caused the two of them to laugh uncontrollably.

  “Oh my God,” Ford said, and put his head down on the conference room table, also laughing.

  Axel and I looked at each other and then he put a hand to his forehead. “Oh my God is right. It sounds like I’m singing ‘asshole, asshole.’”

  “It doesn’t really,” Chino said, eyes still crinkled from laughter, “but once you hear it, you can’t unhear it, and the more you repeat it the more hilarious it gets.”

  I could see why they were laughing even though I couldn’t feel any mirth myself at that moment. I couldn’t feel much of anything. It was as if I were in a tank, underwater, while they were all on the surface, and I could only see and hear them from far away. Later we took a conference call from Marcus about the video they planned us to shoot when we got back to LA. I barely absorbed the details. We’d all be going back to California, but I was at the bottom of a well where I couldn’t feel anything.

  Chapter Seventeen

  No Strings

  GWEN

  My call was for three in the afternoon at a private address north of the city. I would have almost thought it was sketchy to be showing up at a residential house except for the production trailers in the circular driveway. The house had a modernist architectural look to it. I went up to the front door but a short woman with her dark straight hair cut in a pageboy waved to me from the nearest trailer.

  “Gwen?” She was waving a tablet and she had a walkie-talkie on her hip.

  “Sorry,” I said, hurrying up to her. “All I had was the address.”

  “No worries. I’m Nancy Cho, the assistant director. Miles is still with the band at the soundstage, so we’re a little behind schedule, but we can get you started with wardrobe and I’ll fill you in while you’re in the makeup chair, okay?”

  “Sounds great!” And it did. Here I’d been bracing myself for Miles Redlace to start insulting me the minute I walked in, and he wasn’t even here. There was this nice woman with an air of competence about her instead.

  She introduced me to the wardrobe person and they discussed the scenes, deciding we should film some scenes with me in a bathrobe first. Not only that, but these would be scenes of me putting on makeup, so that meant the makeup artist would have to make me look like I wasn’t wearing makeup.

  While I was in the chair and the makeup person was layering up translucent powder on my face, Nancy told me more about the video. “So the concept is you’re a trophy wife to an older, rich man, and this young rock star sweeps you off your feet and rescues you from a life without passion.”

  “Okay.”

  “So there will be some story scenes, intercut with some band performance footage and also some artistic lip synch shots where the singer is saying the words while trailing a knife up and down your back. Since the title of the song is ‘Razor Sharp.’”

  “Do the young wife and the rock star run away at the end?”

  “I’m not sure if there will be an actual shot of the escape or if it will merely be implied,” Nancy said. “Why?”

  “The video is supposed to get people to like the band and the song, right? People might be kind of down on the idea that they’re, you know, cheating. Committing adultery.”

  “Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. Here, have a look at the plot notes while I take this phone call.” She handed me her tablet and I read through the synopsis and scene-by-scene plan while the makeup artist worked on my eyebrows.

  When Nancy came back, I handed her the tablet. “I’m sure it’s going to be great, but it’s so obvious a man wrote this.”

  She chuckled. “Is it?”

  “Maybe it’s just that my sister is on this whole campaign about how media for women should actually be aimed at women, so we talk about this stuff all the freakin’ time, but this video is really aimed at the guys in the audience, and I think most of the fans of The Rough are women who might be turned off by this whole thing.”

  “You think? But it’s a romance where she gets her happy ending; she runs off with the hot guy.”

  “Yes, but really it’s about the two men fighting and the woman is just the prize. And that’s emphasized by the fact that the lip synch segments call for a naked woman’s back and hips to be visible. It’s like soft-core porno for guys.”

  “Hmm. Well, I suppose we could have the singer shirtless, too? For the sake of equality. If their other videos are any indication, Axel has no problem being nearly naked.”

  Oh, right, of course it would be Axel playing the part of the young guy. I had somehow been picturing Mal. Of course I had. I wondered if Mal was even going to be present for this part of the filming.

  “This isn’t about you being unwilling to do those segments, is it?” Nancy asked tentatively. “I can assure you no actual nudity is required. But if it’s really a problem we can get a body double.”

  “No, no, not a problem. I’m just, you know, overthinking everything as usual.” What was I doing, criticizing the script? “I know I’m just the talent. I have a tendency to think out loud. The thing is, I know the band a little—you might already know that—and I think they might be uncomfortable portraying one of them as a cheater. I mean, I know they have a ‘bad boy’ image and all, but this is a little beyond that.”

  “No worries,” Nancy assured me with a smile. “I’ll make sure their manager is good with this image-wise or we’ll make some changes. Now let’s get you into the master bedroom and film some B-roll of you putting your lipstick and jewelry on like you’re getting ready to go out for a fancy evening.”

  We spent the next hour with me primping in front of a mirror while they filmed extreme close-ups of my face, lips, lashes, ears, all while I was supposed to express depths of hidden sadness.

  It was a lot easier to do than you’d think. Guess why.

/>   * * *

  MAL

  I could not have told you what I ate in the time between returning to Los Angeles and the video shoot. I could make some guesses, but I could not have told you what it tasted like. It was like all my senses had shut down. Like without Gwen in my world, there was no reason to open my eyes, or to smell, taste, or touch. The condo seemed very empty. My life seemed very empty. I wasn’t even feeling the pain of having lost her so much at that point as…dead. I’d gone from a vampire or werewolf who needs too much to a monster that didn’t need anything at all, a zombie who didn’t even hunger for brains.

  In a way, perhaps this was what I was trying to achieve all along. I no longer hungered. I no longer felt the Need. Greed did not own me. I wondered if this was how people who sold all their possessions and became monks felt.

  I wondered if I should quit the band. If I was really going to make a completely clean break with any kind of kink, it seemed it might be inevitable. I did not have the energy to contemplate it much, though. Right then, trying to think more than a day or two ahead was beyond me.

  The first day of video shooting began as it often did, with the prettifying of our faces and hair—a necessary evil given the lights used for filming—and then us mock-playing through the song on a soundstage that had been made up with risers and lights and fog machines. Typical stuff. I had heard this director was supposed to be some kind of conceptual genius, but I lacked the will to question the motions we went through.

  It meant hearing “Razor Sharp” a few hundred times that day, sometimes only a few lines over and over as they strove to get the shot they wanted, with Axel’s hair flipping just so in the wind machine or my fingers sliding up the neck of the guitar.

  My entire life has been a race

  To not become the thing I hate