by Fanny Merkin
“Watch this,” Earl says over the noise of the jet’s engine. He angles the plane directly toward a snow-capped mountain.
“Are you trying to kill us?” I scream.
“Hush, baby,” he says. “That’s Mount Rainier, one of the most dangerous active volcanoes in the world. But don’t worry—it hasn’t erupted in over a hundred and fifty years.”
“I’m not worried about it erupting,” I mutter, bracing myself for our imminent collision with the mountain.
When we’re less than a hundred yards away from impact, Earl presses a button and three missiles shoot out from each wing and explode into the side of Mount Rainier, making a hole large enough for us to fly through to the other side!
When we’re in the clear, I tell Earl just how amazing that was.
“I do this kind of stuff all the time,” he says. “I can guarantee you’ll never be bored around Earl Grey.”
No way, not in a million years, I think. Well, maybe in a million years, because who knows what the ramifications of extending one’s lifespan to such a length are? I can see, yeah, in a million years maybe two people would get bored of each other. But in fifty or sixty years or whatever? No way.
I look back and see that the hole Earl shot in Mount Rainier is in the shape of a heart. Swoon! As the long-dormant volcano erupts plumes of thick, black smoke behind us into the air, all I can think about is this: I’m in love.
Chapter Eleven
WE’RE AT EARL GREY’S penthouse apartment at the top of one of the tallest, most elegant-looking steel erections in downtown Seattle. It’s directly across the street from his office; he commutes back and forth using a zip-line stretched between the two buildings. The inside of Earl Grey’s bachelor pad is amazing. It’s almost all black and white, with a few splashes of puce and cadmium red. It’s just perfect.
“This is beautiful, Mr. Grey,” I say. “I wish I had an interior decorator to do my place up like this.”
“I did it myself,” he says.
“Oh.”
“No homo,” he says forcefully.
I shake my head. “I wasn’t thinking that. Was that what you were thinking I was thinking? Because that’s definitely not what I was thinking.”
(It’s totally what I was thinking.)
“What do I have to do to prove to you how not-gay I am?” he asks.
You could just shut up and press “start” on the sex machine. I don’t say that, though, because I think he likes the cat-and-mouse game. Every time I’m too direct with him he gets all emo and shuts down. Instead, I say, “What did you bring me all the way here for?”
“To show you this,” he says, leading me into a reading room. His library is huge and filled with thousands of books. I wonder what else of his is huge. Probably his kitchen.
Earl runs his long fingers over the books at eye level on one of his many bookcases. His fingers stop on one book. Twilight.
“You brought me all the way to your bachelor pad to show me Twilight? I’ve got news for you, I’ve read it like a hundred times,” I say, rolling my eyes.
Earl smirks. He gently tilts the book out by its spine and the bookcase next to us begins to swing into the wall!
The walls of the room on the other side of the open bookcase are painted entirely black. “Is this your dungeon?” I ask him.
“You’re impressively perceptive, Anna,” Earl says, nodding. “I call it my 'Room of Doom.’”
“And you want me to go in there. With you.”
He nods, waving a hand toward the secret passage. “Ladies first.”
The first thing I notice is the smell: Nag Champa incense and dirty laundry. The room is illuminated only by black light, but I can see enough to tell this is the kind of closet R. Kelly wouldn’t mind being trapped in. The room is tiny compared to the rest of Earl Grey’s apartment. There’s barely enough room for the waterbed. Whips, chains, ropes, riding crops, paddles, and iron shackles are hung up on the walls next to black-light posters—really trippy black-light posters. “Room of Doom”? More like the “Dorm Room of Doom.”
I feel Earl’s hand on my left shoulder. He’s breathing into my ear. “Welcome to my world, baby.”
“Do you bring all your dates here?”
“I don’t know if I’d call them 'dates,’” he says. “They are, more accurately, LARPers. 'LARP’ stands for 'live-action role playing.’”
“I saw that term used in the quiz.”
“The quiz you so stubbornly refuse to fill out,” he says, trying to act all exasperated. I think he’s putting on more of a show now.
“These LARPers . . . If they’re not dates, then what are they? Volunteers? Where do you meet them?”
Earl picks up a leather toy that looks sort of like a whip, only with multiple leather strips hanging off the end. “There are women who LARP professionally,” he says. “They’re all over Craigslist.”
I laugh at the thought of him trolling for women on Craigslist. Surely someone as good looking and rich as Earl Grey doesn’t need to resort to picking up girls on the Internet! “You’re kidding,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I know, it just seems so dirty to meet women on Craigslist.”
“Dirty and gross,” I say.
“It’s just one of my fifty shames, Anna,” he says, lowering his head.
“And you use these . . . things on them? You torture them?” I ask, motioning to his sex toys.
“If the game calls for it. Take this flogger, for instance,” he says, perking up and swinging the leather tool through the air. “I’ll use this on a woman’s back, and ass, and legs.”
“And these LARPers like it when you beat them?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. At another level, though, my LARPers want to please me. I am the Dungeon Master, after all.”
Control freak. But damn! What a sexy control freak.
“So you want me to role-play with you?”
“Eventually,” he says, grinning.
“So how does this erotic role playing work?”
“I make the rules, and you obey them. It’s very simple. Follow the rules, and you will be rewarded. Break the rules, and you will be punished,” he says. “It’s about exploring each other’s limits within a codified system of punishments and rewards. It’s about trust.”
“What do I get out of the whole deal? I don’t know if pretending I’m an elf being whipped is really my thing.”
“I see you as more of a faery than as an elf, but we can get into specifics later. What I get out of our arrangement is you, submitting to my every whim,” he says. “And what you get is Earl Grey.”
Wow. Somebody thinks highly of themselves.
“We don’t have to start out role-playing today; we can ease our way into our characters with time. I need you right now, though—any way I can get you.”
Oh my. Earl reaches a hand out to me. I take it in mine, and he leads me to the waterbed. I am no longer hung over, but I’m so nervous that I’m shaking.
“Let’s get comfortable, shall we?” he says, removing his calculator watch and setting it on top of the nightstand by the bed.
I take a cue from him and remove my yellow LiveStrong bracelet, setting it next to his watch.
“Let’s get even more comfortable, hmmmm?” he says, removing his pink Crocs.
I remove my tennis shoes and nearly choke on the smell of my own dirty socks. They’ve been through a lot in the past two days. If Earl can smell them, he doesn’t give any indication. I just hope he’s not a foot fetishist.
“That’s not quite comfortable enough, though,” he says, grinning. I still cannot believe that this attractive, kinky man is interested in me.
“Oh, it’s not, is it?” I say playfully, putting my arms up the back of my shirt, unhooking my bra, and twisting out of it like it’s a straitjacket. I dangle my red push-up bra off the end of a finger and toss it at Earl.
He catches it. “Oh my, Anna,” he
says. He drops my bra to the floor, and reaches his own hands up underneath his black T-shirt. Thirty seconds of fumbling around later, Earl pulls a lacy black bra out from under his shirt. “Two can play at this game,” he says with a wicked flash of wickedness.
“Were you wearing that since we left the hotel?” I ask.
“I told you I’m kinky, baby,” he says. There’s an awkward pause. “Let’s just get naked. Ready, set . . . go!”
We strip the rest of our clothes off at record speed. Soon, we’re both as naked as the day we were born. Except, y’know, we’re not covered in blood and attached to our mothers by umbilical cords.
I run my eyes up and down Earl Grey’s breathtaking body, and my eyes stop to rest on his magnificent length. I want to grab it, swing it around, and bite into it—but, somehow, I’m able to contain myself. It’s probably for the best, because I don’t think Earl wants bite marks on his little milkman.
I’m not the only one checking someone out—Earl is taking in every inch of my body with his gray eyes. I feel naked before him, mostly because I don’t have any clothes on.
“You’re beautiful, Anna,” he says.
I’m not good at taking compliments, but I try my best. “You’re more beautiful,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “You ready to do this?”
“Absolutely.”
Earl Grey takes my hand and guides me onto the waterbed . . .
Chapter Twelve
WOW, that was amazing,” I say, sprawled out on my back in Earl Grey’s bed.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’ve never had three orgasms in a row before just holding someone’s hand and sitting down on a bed. I can’t imagine what the actual sex is going to be like.”
“You don’t have to imagine,” I say.
“You’re right,” he says. He’s hovering over me again, but this time we’re both naked. I can feel his stick shift delectably pressing into my stomach. Kathleen would call him a “Trent Reznor,” since he has a nine-inch nail. (Don’t worry—I don’t get her references either.)
My nipples are hard, either from my heightened state of arousal or because it’s a little chilly in the Dorm Room of Doom.
“I want you so bad,” Earl says, “but I’m going to make you wait.”
“Haven’t we waited long enough?” I say.
“I’m going to kiss every part of your body,” he says. “Starting with your feet and working my way up . . .”
Quintuple crap.
“How about if you start a little higher, like at my knees maybe?” I say.
“Anna, there’s no need to be shy,” he says, backing himself down the bed toward the lower part of my body. He kneels at the foot of the bed and bends over my feet. “I love your scent, Anna,” he says, placing his nose an inch away from my toes and inhaling deeply. His eyes grow wide with surprise. “But, perhaps, I shall start with your knees. Good idea.”
He kisses my kneecaps, which is a little weird, because there aren’t many nerve endings there. Or the skin is too callused. I don’t know—like I ever look at my knees? When he moves his lips to the back of my knees, raising my legs slightly to accommodate his mouth, I let out a yelp. It tickles. Maybe kissing every single part of my body isn’t the way to get me ready for his meatsicle.
He moves on to kissing my quads, and before long I feel his lips on the insides of my thighs . . . Now we’re getting somewhere. When his mouth is a half-inch away from my lady parts, though, Earl Grey skips up to my belly. “Are you teasing me?” I say.
“Whatever do you mean, Miss Steal?” he says, flashing me that toothy grin and winking.
He continues his exploration of my body, finally reaching my bust. He flicks his tongue at one of my aching nipples to wet it, and then blows on it. Just when I think he’s done toying with it, he clamps his mouth down and begins sucking greedily. My nipples are now so hard they could cut diamonds. Earl looks up at me and smiles.
“Your lip!” I say. “It’s bleeding.”
He pats his lip and looks at his hand. Oh no . . . He cut his lip on my hardened point!
“I guess I won’t be going down on you today,” he says, sighing.
“Do you have AIDS or something?” I say.
“Not anymore,” he says.
“I give blood every three months,” I say. “I’ve never had sex. I’m pretty sure I’m clean.”
“I want to taste you, Anna, and I will. Another day, preferably after my lip is healed.”
“Okay,” I whisper.
Earl places one of his long fingers on my lips and I instinctively begin sucking it. He withdraws his finger and I watch him slowly approach my sex, hidden deep within my untamed thatch of pubic hair. His hand disappears into my pubes, and he searches for my love button.
Ah! Oh. He’s found it. This feels . . . good.
“Do you like that, Anna?” he says, running his finger over my most sensitive spot like it’s a MacBook trackpad.
“Yes, Mr. Grey,” I say.
“Is this how you pleasure yourself?”
I don’t. The blank look on my face says it all.
“You have climaxed before, haven’t you, Anna?”
I shake my head. “Never.”
“You’ve never even touched yourself?”
Again, I shake my head.
Earl sighs. “You’ve been missing out. If I had your gorgeous body, I would spend every day lying in bed, discovering myself. I would never leave the house.”
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” I say. I focus my attention on what Earl’s doing with his hand . . .
“You’re so wet,” he says, dipping a finger inside me.
Duh. I’ve been going through three pairs of panties a day since I met you, Earl Grey.
“Moan,” I moan. “Moan, moan, moooooooan.”
Just as I’m reaching the peak of my arousal, he withdraws his finger. “I’m going to assume you are not taking birth control pills,” Earl says.
I never expected to have sex, ever, so that’s a big “no.” I shake my head.
“It’s okay,” he says. He leans over to the nightstand and pulls a string of condom packets out. The packets are connected to form one long foil snake, which disappears over the edge of the bed. There have to be at least thirty condoms on it. How many condoms is he going to wear?
Earl tears one of the packets open and slides the condom onto his turgid python. “I’m surprised that fit,” I mutter. Did I say that out loud? What is this man doing to me?
He just laughs. “These condoms are tailored,” he says.
“So you went into a store somewhere and they measured you? And what—made them just for you?”
“The perks of being part of the .00001%, Anna,” he says.
Wow. Um, wow.
Earl Grey rises above me, towering over my naked, quivering woman-flesh. I can’t believe this is happening—it’s too much like a wet dream about Robert Pattinson to be real.
“Are you ready for my love gun?” he says.
Uh-oh. “What’s a love gun? Is that a sex toy?”
“No,” he says. “I’m talking about my penis.”
“Oh,” I say. “Then yes. Fire away.”
He positions himself between my legs. I pull my legs up, bent at the knees to expose my sex to him. He has a mischievous look on his face as he kneels and scoots toward me. He places the sheathed tip of his erection at the entrance to my garden of delights like a dart player lining up a shot. I close my eyes and prepare for the sexy time to begin . . .
. . . and Earl is gone. I hear him slip back off the bed and run off. What the hell?
I open my eyes and spot him. He’s in the library, about thirty yards away. He’s in a low crouch. Without warning, Earl begins jogging straight at me, picking up speed the closer he gets to the waterbed. By the time he reaches the entrance to the Dorm Room of Doom, he’s running at full speed. I close my eyes again and spread my legs wide to receive him. He slams his pink torpedo into me, followed by the
rest of his body on top of me. My skull crashes into the headboard.
“Ow!” I yell.
He’s breathing heavy, and stops to catch his breath. “Was that an 'ow’ for your head, or for your panini?”
“Both, I think,” I say, wincing.
“I told you I play hard,” he says.
I open my mouth to say something, anything, but I have no witty comeback for him. I think I have a concussion. He kisses me on the forehead. “You’re tight,” he says.
“I’m a virgin,” I say, before correcting myself: “I was a virgin.”
“Actually, you’re still a virgin,” Earl says, looking down at his point of entry. “I’m in the wrong hole.”
He pulls himself out and changes into a fresh condom. “Let’s try this again,” he says. I must have a look on my face like some poor girl on a blind date with Chris Brown, because he adds, “No acrobatics this time. We’ll take it easy.”
He kneels between my legs again and slides easily into me. This time, I’m sure he has the right hole because it doesn’t feel like I have to take a dump. “Now I’m going to move around,” he says, swiveling his hips slowly. Is he going to announce every action in bed?
It hurts, but yet it feels . . . good. The physical connection between our bodies strengthens the emotional connection we already have. “You want more?” he says.
“Yes,” I whimper, and he thrusts forward. He swings his hips to the side, then up, then down, like he’s trying to sign his name on the back wall of my carnal cave. Time slows down as Earl speeds up; I’m somewhere in a blissful land where nothing in my life matters anymore, where Earl Grey’s money and power are distant concerns. Right now, in this moment, we are just two people doing the eternal dance between man and woman. I quiver, and shake, and try to contain the pleasure coursing through my body. It’s no use—he’s driving me over the edge, into a world of ecstasy I didn’t know could exist. The only other time I’ve felt this good was when I shot smack with Kathleen.
“I want you to climax,” Earl says. No, he doesn’t just “say”—he commands me to climax. For him, I will. For him, I’ll do anything. The walls of my pink palace, responding to his voice, spasm around him. As waves of pleasure roll over my body, he screams my name and I feel his Mount Rainier erupt inside me.
