by Fanny Merkin
“Then how would you recommend we shake our friend off?” he says.
“I don’t know. Do you have a gun?”
“You think I carry a gun with me in the glove compartment of my stock car, Anna? What kind of thug do you think I am?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“But you have a point. I think I have a bazooka in the backseat,” he says. “Let’s trade places—you take the wheel.”
We’re going almost three hundred miles an hour down the highway, but we switch places without slowing down. It’s only when I’m in the driver’s seat that I remember something important. “I don’t have a driver’s license,” I tell Earl.
“Don’t worry,” he says, leaning into the backseat and opening an oversized violin case. He pulls a bazooka out.
“I’ve never driven a car before, either,” I protest. My foot is on the gas and I’m trying to steer. It’s just enough like Super Mario Kart that I sort of have the hang of it.
“You’re doing fine,” Earl says, loading the bazooka.
“Thank God it’s not a stick shift,” I say. I’ve heard stories about stick shifts. While they might make for fun double entendres, I hear driving them can be a bitch.
Earl looks at me, confusion plastered all over his face. “It is a stick shift, Anna,” he says.
Uh-oh.
“Don’t worry, though,” he says. “I’ll just fire a warning shot at this guy; he’ll back off, and hopefully you won’t have to change speed. Okay?”
I nod, as the hills zip by us on the right . . . and a thousand-foot cliff looms to the left. Gulp.
Earl tries rolling down his window, but it’s locked. “Can you turn the child lock off?” he asks me.
As I search the driver’s-side door for the child lock, the PT Cruiser chasing us taps our bumper. I grab the steering wheel with both hands and start hyperventilating. “I can’t do this,” I say.
Earl grips my arm and gazes gazingly into my eyes with his steely gray eyes. Even in almost total darkness, they look as beautiful and luminescent as ever. What did I do to deserve this gorgeous man? “You can do this,” he says. “Now unlock the windows and keep your eyes on the road and your foot on the gas pedal.”
“Yes, Sir,” I say, grinning. I find the child lock and flip it so that Earl can roll his window down.
He grins at me. “Let’s show this SOB what happens when you ride Earl Grey’s ass.” He leans out the window and aims the bazooka at the PT Cruiser.
“Fire in the hole,” he says, shooting the bazooka. All this talk about riding asses and firing in holes is turning me on. I can’t wait until we get back to his penthouse . . .
The PT Cruiser explodes behind us in a fiery inferno that lights up the mountainside. Woah. Earl grabs the wheel and we trade places again. He slows the car and turns it around.
“I thought you were just firing a warning shot,” I say.
“That was what I was trying to do,” he says. “It was also my first time using a bazooka. My bad.”
“Could anyone have survived that?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”
Earl drives the car up to the edge of the wreckage, which is still blazing. He leaves the car idling with the headlights illuminating the crash site and steps out. I follow him.
There’s a crumpled body on the ground crawling out of the twisted metal. Earl bends over and rolls the person onto their back. It’s a bruised and bloodied elderly woman I instantly recognize as one of the door greeters from my Walmart store.
“Mother!” Earl says.
“Oh, my baby boy,” she says weakly. She looks like hell, but that’s to be expected since she just survived a car chase that ended in a bazooka blast.
“I thought you were dead,” he says, cradling the woman in his arms.
“I faked my own death so you could never find me,” she says. “I didn’t want you to see your poor mother as a casino junkie. Even after I shot my blackjack dealer in the face and got clean, I knew that I could only complicate your life. After rehab, I applied for the only job an ex-addict who looks thirty years older than her driver’s license can get in this country—”
“A Walmart greeter,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says, nodding. “I had written you off completely, Earl. Until last week, when you walked through the automatic doors and back into my life.”
“At the Portland Walmart,” he says.
“Yes. You didn’t see me—no one looks at us greeters—but I immediately knew it was you. Your tousled hair, penetrating gray eyes, and long fingers haven’t changed a bit since you were a baby.”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “Why follow us, though? Why not try to contact me?”
“I wasn’t sure you would want to talk to me,” she says, hacking up a lung. Earl tosses it aside. “I wanted to know you were okay, though,” his mother continues. “Stalking you seemed like the only reasonable option.”
Like mother, like son . . .
“Now that I know you’re alive, I’m not going let you leave me again,” Earl says. “You won’t die on me, dammit.” He throws her over his shoulder and carries her to the stock car, then pops the trunk and dumps her body inside. Earl slams the trunk shut. “Let’s ride.”
We speed back down the highway toward Seattle in silence. What I wouldn’t give to know what’s going on inside his mind right now! He grits his teeth, but keeps his eyes on the road.
We pull up to the same hospital I was discharged from earlier, and Earl removes his mother from the trunk. He hoists her in the air and plops her down into a wheelchair once we’re in the hospital waiting room. Earl’s mother is pale and unconscious. And possibly not breathing.
“Is she going to be okay?” I ask Earl, who is texting on his BlackBerry.
“Dr. Drew will be here shortly,” he says. “He’ll know what to do.”
“But I don’t think she’s breathing. Shouldn’t we do the Heimlich maneuver or something?”
Earl looks at her lifeless body. “She doesn’t look good, I’ll give you that.”
She pops her eyes open. “I never look good,” she mutters.
“OMG,” Earl says. “I thought I’d lost you again.”
“I’ll be fine,” his mother says. “All I want is for you to be happy. You kids go and do whatever it is you were going to do.”
“Are you sure?” Earl says. “We had some kinky sex stuff planned, but we can totally put that on hold.”
His mother shakes her head. “Go do your thing. If twenty years of pumping quarters into slot machines didn’t stop my heart, some little car crash isn’t going to.”
Earl kisses her forehead. “I’ll be back to check up on you.”
He takes me by the hand. As we’re leaving the hospital, he stops in the doorway. “Thank you for everything,” he says, placing a hand under my chin and raising my eyes to meet his. “I couldn’t face my mother returning from the dead without you by my side.”
Earl kisses me passionately. He’s so sweet that I temporarily forget he’s taking me back to his penthouse to show me just how sadistic he can be. For the moment, though, I enjoy his lips on mine.
Chapter Twenty-six
BEND OVER THE BED,” Earl commands. He has changed from his NASCAR jumpsuit into a black leather vest and flannel kilt. Rubber prosthetics are attached to his ears so that they appear pointed. I am only to address him as the Elfin Warlord Sliverin, he says. I am completely naked except for a pair of faery wings tied around my back. My faery princess name is Labiamajora.
“Stay,” he says. Earl leaves me bent over the edge of the waterbed. I watch the green lava hypnotically separate and clump back together in the lava lamp beside the bed. When I hear him return, there’s a faint jingling. What is he planning? My inner guidette hides in her tanning bed.
“The Elf Council has found you guilty of stealing mead from our supply shed,” Earl says. “How do you plead?”
“Gu
ilty,” I say, exactly as he instructed me prior to our “scene.” I try to turn my head to see what he’s going to hit me with, but he orders me to keep my face down and eyes shut.
“I’m going to roll a standard D-twenty to determine how many times to paddle you as punishment for your crimes against Elfkind,” he says. I hear him roll the twenty-sided die on the nightstand.
“Nineteen,” he says.
Gulp.
“After each blow, you are to count out loud. Do you understand?”
I nod. I feel him rub my butt cheeks with his palms, massaging them. It feels good. Why can’t we just give each other massages? I close my eyes and bite my lip, ready for the beating to commence.
WHAP! I feel the full force of a flat object paddle my left buttock. The telltale jangling gives it away: he’s using his tambourine. I was expecting to scream in pain, but I have skinny jeans that hurt my ass worse.
“Count!” he yells.
“Wait, Slytherin,” I say. “Time-out.”
“Time-out?”
“Am I supposed to count once for each butt cheek, or does it count as one time for the pair?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admits. “How about we count each cheek separately. And it’s Sliverin, not Slytherin.”
“Okay,” I say. “One!” I almost add, “ha ha ha,” like the Count from Sesame Street, but I’m somehow able to contain myself.
“Good girl, Labiamajora,” Earl says. “The Elf Council will be pleased that you have accepted your punishment so eagerly.”
He swats me with the tambourine again. “Two!” I shout. It takes all my power not to giggle, as I just can’t get the Sesame Street Count out of my head.
Earl hits me a third time and I yell, “Three!” I finally let out a small giggle. Maybe if he was actually hurting me I would be able to contain myself. My butt barely even stings.
He ignores the laugh and hits me again. “Four!” I shout, immediately breaking down into uncontrolled laughter.
He hits me again, and again, and again. Every time he strikes my ass with the tambourine, I count out loud. And laugh. My voice gets weaker, and by the time we reach “seventeen,” I’m ready to tap out. I can’t take anymore. The pain from laughing is giving my abs a real workout.
“Count, Labiamajora,” he says sternly.
It takes all my willpower to gather myself. “Seventeen,” I say. I think I’ve finally contained my laughter, until a loud snort escapes through my nose.
“You think this is funny?” he says, paddling me again.
I’m laughing so hard that tears are running down my face now.
“Count!” he yells.
“I can’t,” I say weakly.
“Surely you know what number comes after seventeen? Or did they not teach you that at faery boarding school?”
“Yes,” I say, whimpering.
“'Yes’ isn’t a number,” he says, smacking me again.
“Eighteen!” I scream. “Nineteen!” My legs buckle and I fall onto the floor in a fit of laughter.
When my breathing finally returns to normal, I pull myself up. Earl is lying on the waterbed, his head buried in his forearms. I sit down next to him and put an arm on his back.
“Get away from me!” he says petulantly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I started thinking about the Count from Sesame Street, and then the tambourine was making that silly jangling noise, and you’re wearing those pointy ears, and . . . I couldn’t help myself.”
He lifts his head and stares at me with his gray eyes. “You think all of this is funny,” he says, waving a hand around the Dorm Room of Doom.
“You want me to be honest, I’ll be honest,” I say. “You act like there’s something wrong with you, like everything you enjoy is embarrassing or scary. News flash, Mr. Grey: This isn’t 1950 or whatever. Your sexual tastes aren’t as shocking or as deviant as you think. Neither is anything else you like. Maybe if you didn’t take your fifty shames so seriously, I wouldn’t be so compelled to laugh at them.”
“I’ve already told you: I can’t think of myself as 'normal.’ This is all part of the identity I’ve built for myself. It’s how I survived my tumultuous upbringing. It’s how I survive day to day,” he says.
I sigh. If I move in with him, and admit my feelings, and have his baby (oops, keep forgetting about that!), I will have no choice but to submit to him and put up with this perpetual pity party of his. You can’t separate Earl Grey from his fifty shames. Why can’t I fall in love with someone relatively normal, like my ethnic friend, the brony Jin?
“I can’t handle this anymore,” I say, fleeing from the Dorm Room of Doom.
“Anna!” Earl yells. He doesn’t chase me down. I think this is what he wanted anyway: to scare me away. Well, congrats.
I call my mother from the Starbucks across the street. She’s still in town, and agrees to pick me up at once. After I hang up the phone, I realize I’m still naked except for the faery wings. Oh well—my mother the nudist won’t mind. The other customers in Starbucks aren’t quite as enlightened.
“What, like none of you have seen a naked faery before?” I shout.
A dozen people, men and women, shake their heads. “Not in Starbucks,” a teenage boy working as a barista says. “It’s the juxtaposition of the naked female body with the mundane, sanitized setting of a chain coffee shop that makes it exciting. Plus the wings are just weird.”
“Get over it,” I say.
Then I remember something Kathleen told me once that should distract the gawkers. “The Starbucks logo used to feature a topless mermaid,” I say. “Go stare at her double lattes.”
Everyone pulls out their iPhones and Androids and whatever the hell smartphones they have these days and begins googling images of the topless mermaid. When my mother pulls up out front, I slip out of the coffee shop unnoticed; everyone is too busy wanking to the old Starbucks logo. Thank God they changed the logo—there are enough bathroom masturbators at Starbucks as it is.
Chapter Twenty-seven
IT’S BEEN A WEEK since I left Earl Grey, and he hasn’t tried to contact me. I’m staying at my dad’s house in Portland. I didn’t consider going back to the duplex I share with Kathleen, not even for a second—she’s probably still mad at me. Plus, the entire place is undoubtedly still under surveillance by Earl Grey, billionaire stalker extraordinaire.
My father is on my case about getting a job. I got so wrapped up in my new life with Earl Grey that I forgot I even worked at Walmart. Of course they would take me back in a heartbeat—Earl Grey would make them, or else he’d fire my boss or liquidate the company or something. I can’t see myself returning to Walmart, though. I never liked it that much, and I’m eager to start a new chapter in my life. I applied for a job at Amazon, a local Seattle publishing company. They advertised a few openings in their warehouse, which sounds like a great entry-level position in the book industry. If I get the job, I might be able to work my way up to editor in a few years.
I’m sleeping in my old bedroom for the first time since I moved in with my mother after my parents’ divorce. The room is exactly how I left it, right down to the stuffed animals and N*SYNC poster. It’s a peaceful environment, a return to the womb of sorts, but my mind won’t stop racing. My father is at work, and I’m lying on my bed fully clothed and trying to catnap. I close my eyes. My thoughts invariably turn to Earl Grey. Would our life together really be so bad? No matter how hard I try to be angry with him, my body responds with increasing desire . . .
I unbutton the top two buttons of my blouse. This gives me just enough room to slip a hand inside my shirt. I slide my fingers between my bra and left breast. I trace the edges of my areola before giving my hard nub a firm pinch. I imagine Earl Grey, my handsome knight in shining armor, knocking on the bedroom door and asking for a small favor. If you don’t mind. (I don’t.) He shuts the door behind him. I drop to my knees and grab hungrily at his belt, ripping it open like I’m tearing the bow off the
greatest Christmas present ever. I unzip his slacks . . .
I unbutton my own jeans just enough to slip my hand down the front. I let out a slight moan. I can’t believe I’ve never done this before!
When I wake up, it’s half past nine according to the clock on the nightstand. I’m still on the bed, half in and half out of my clothes. Damn—I must have been exhausted. All I’ve been doing for the past week is sleeping and eating and watching TV with my dad. I don’t remember completing my solo session; thank God I was alone! What if I had fallen asleep with Earl Grey going down on me in his Dorm Room of Doom? How would he have “punished” me? I button my jeans and sit up on the bed.
I switch the lamp on. The iPad Earl gave me is sitting on the nightstand. I haven’t touched it in a week, but since Earl hasn’t tried calling me, I doubt he has e-mailed me. Still, I turn it on out of curiosity and find an e-mail. From him.
From: Earl Grey
Subject: Have a Nice Life
Date: June 6 8:39 AM
To: Anna Steal
Dear Miss Steal—
It’s been a week since you left me, and I still cannot get over the heartache. You saw me at my most sadistic and most embarrassing, and, as I predicted, I’m one shame too screwed up for you. If we can’t be together, what do I have to live for? A lifetime of buying anything and everything I want with my vast fortune? None of it matters. The only thing I want is you.
Oh, and the latest Apple products. So I guess I want two things in life: you, and the latest Apple products.
And a Guns N’ Roses reunion album. So, that’s three things: you, the latest Apple products, and a Guns N’ Roses reunion album.
No, take off the one about Guns N’ Roses. Their last few records together were just okay, and Axl and Slash’s solo projects have been Crap City, where the hooks are gone and the licks are shitty. I think that was just nostalgia talking. So, the only things I want in life are you and the latest Apple products.
