Objectify Me: A Fireworks Novella (The Fireworks Novellas) (5 page)

Chapter Six – Charlotte

As tempted as I am to push Levi up against the wall and start undressing him, I rein it back a little. I’ve never met a guy who was scared off by that approach, but there is always a first time. I let go of his shirt and look around the suite.

“Nice.” The furniture is all real wood with carved brass handles and gilded mirrors. When I follow him into the big bedroom, I see there’s a four-poster bed with a vintage quilt and a ton of fluffy pillows. More antiques line the walls: a dresser, a bookshelf with paintings hanging over it. An ornate crystal chandelier twinkles above us. Basically this is my dream room. An improvement on the mattress on the floor with the milk-crate nightstand arrangement I have at my house. If I wasn’t a high-class lap dancer, I would feel very out of place. “Can we go out onto the balcony?”

He holds the balcony door open.

Something about New Orleans at night makes me happy. Maybe it’s the air being cool and fresh, unlike the warm and humid days. Maybe it’s that there always seems to be music playing somewhere. Maybe it’s just that the people here are happy, and it’s hard to resist. And when you’re above the street like this it feels like floating.

“Hey, throw me something, beautiful!” some shirtless guy yells at me from the street. Levi pulls one of the strings of beads from his neck and throws it down. Shirtless catches it expertly. “You’re beautiful too, brother!”

Levi waves as the dude and his friends stagger off. I finger the beads remaining around Levi’s neck. “What did you do to get these?”

“I don’t know. Looked pretty, I guess. Why don’t you have any?”

“I turned them down. Got about a hundred strings of beads at home.”

He leans forward, lifting one of his sets of beads over my head, so we’re both wearing it. “Now you can’t escape. Unless you want to.”

I just shake my head at him. I don’t know what they’re feeding these west coast boys, but it does not have enough hot sauce in it. A Louisiana boy would be smoking a cigarette by now, and looking like he wants to call me a cab.

I mean, if memory serves.

I start to back up, pulling him with me back into the suite until we’re standing by the bed. It’s fun to watch his chest rise and fall as he looks down on me. I lift the beads from both our necks and toss them away.

He unbuttons my cardigan and lets it slip off.

I remove another rope of beads.

He actually bites his lip and Lord, it makes me want to lick him all over. I lift my arms as he pulls off my tank top.

“Pretty sure I’m going to lose this game of strip poker,” I say, taking another set of beads from him.

He looks down on me like he can’t decide whether to take my bra off or work up to it with my shoes and jeans and stockings. I sit on the edge of the bed when he kneels and starts from the floor up.

“These are the cutest shoes I have ever seen,” he says, unbuckling my little Betty Boop pumps. No one with a penis has ever complimented my shoes before. Not even a gay man. There’s something nice about someone who notices the little things like shoes. Levi kisses the top of each foot as he removes them.

I slip one finger under another string of beads, counting in my head – bra, jeans, two stockings, garter skirt, and panties. Six items. And he has six strings of beads around his neck. At this rate, I’m going to be completely naked before he even takes his shoes off. Sounds fun.

“Are you good at math?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.” He reaches up and unbuttons my jeans. I lift my butt so he can slide them down my legs.

The next bead string I just pull until it breaks – beads go rolling all over the room.

Levi stands up and looks down on me again. “I’m so glad you still have this on,” he says, fingering the fluffy tutu garter skirt. We’re living the fantasy that Jack wants me to sell at the club – the girl who has the stripper lingerie under her everyday clothes. Levi seems to be enjoying it, too.

“You’ll be even gladder once you take it all off.”

And with that, the game is over. I yank him up onto the bed by the remaining beads and push him down so I can straddle him. He kicks his shoes off as he pulls me down for a kiss so roughly that I nearly head-butt him. Then I’m lap dancing the way no one is allowed to, sliding the satin of my panties against the hardness of his erection as his hands hold my waist.

“God, you taste good,” he says on my lips. “Like a margarita.”

“I guess you got yourself a cocktail after all.” I stand up on the bed, a foot on either side of him. His expression as he looks up at me is just precious – a mixture of fear and worship. “You got a condom?”

He nods dumbly, not taking his eyes off mine. His hands search his pockets frantically. Wallet, phone, keys go flying across the bed. While he’s searching, I bounce above him, moving my hips from side to side.

“Jesus Christ…where the fuck…?” Finally, he rolls to the side and checks his back pocket, coming up with the goods at last – three condoms.

I continue my dance to the music drifting up from the street. Soulful New Orleans jazz – probably from the pub next door. It’s unlike the auto-tuned crap we danced to at the club. In fact, everything about this dance is unlike the club. Maybe if I made the guys lie on the floor so I can dance over them like She-Ra, I might enjoy it more. They might enjoy it more, too.

“Sit up for a second,” I say. Levi sits up obediently. “Give me your hands.”

He sets the condom on the bed and puts his hands in mine. I slide them over my hips under the garter skirt, tucking his fingers into the top of my panties. Then with painstaking care, I undo the front garters, inviting him to pull the panties down. Then I do the garters back up while Levi stares at my neatly trimmed strip of pubic hair. It’s a bit harder undoing the back garters, but eventually I manage, and Levi pulls the panties down to my knees while I clip the garters back.

I step out of the black satin and kick it away. “I take it you want me to leave the rest on?”

“What?”

So cute. I bet if I asked him his name, he couldn’t answer. “Put that condom on, baby.”

He feels around with one hand while undoing his belt and fly with the other. “Leave your pants on,” I say as I lower myself to my knees.

His cock is just lovely. Sufficiently sized without being ostentatious. Circumcised too, which is a nice treat. And so hard I could probably snap it off. He whimpers as he rolls the condom on.

That second before the act is magical sometimes. We look into each other’s eyes and a silent agreement passes between us. Maybe this is a one-time thing, but when you get to this point, it shouldn’t matter. We agree to give each other this and not think of anything else for as long as it lasts.

“Are you ready?” he asks, his voice as breathy as fog.

“Let’s find out,” I say, guiding him into place.

I slide down slowly, relishing the friction and fullness, and the feel of his hands gripping me by the curve of my hips. I relax and let him move me up and down, his own hips thrusting in time with me. As we fuck, I sway from side to side, letting the pleasure build slowly. His glistening eyes follow me as I move, fixed on me like a predator on prey.

“You look like you want to devour me,” I say.

He just sighs and shakes his head.

“You want to go faster?” I do. And I don’t. I’m surfing that plateau just before the desperate need to come takes over.

“No,” he says. “This is perfect. Come down here.”

I let myself fall forward. Our lips meet in slow, sweet kisses, then hot hungry ones, with tongues penetrating and teeth biting lips. Levi grips the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my hair. The change in angle presses his cock against nerves inside me that haven’t been touched in months. I move up and down with more urgency.

“God, you feel good,” I say. I push back, slipping one hand between us to stroke my neglected clit.

“I can do that,” Levi says. “Let me do that.”

I laugh at his eagerness – it’s like sexual chivalry. “You handle the nipples,” I say, shaking my head. I can sense an orgasm building on the horizon, like a train whistle approaching in the night.

Levi slides his hands up my sides and stomach, reaching into the cups of my lacy bra and pulling them down until my nipples are exposed. He rubs the sensitive buds with his thumbs first, cupping the softness around them, then he pinches lightly, rolling his fingers and thumbs until a thrilling tingle begins to spread across my breasts. His hips snap upwards and one hand grips my shoulder, holding me down as his cock digs into me.

“Fuck…fuck…that’s good…” He pulls me down to kiss him again, mashing our bodies together, pressing my fingers hard against my clit. “I want to make you come,” he says against my lips. “Can I do that? Tell me what to do.”

“Keep doing what you’re doing.” I gasp. “Until I tell you to stop.”

If there’s a sweeter feeling than a beautiful boy laughing against your mouth while he’s fucking you, I don’t know what that is. I slide my free hand around his head to stroke the softness of his hair, feel the warmth of the skin on his neck. We breathe together; the rhythm of movement between us intensifies.

As I reach that place where orgasm becomes not a possibility but a certainty, I open my eyes to see Levi biting down on his bottom lip, a desperate, helpless look in his eyes. “I’m close,” I assure him. “Really close.”

Seconds later, close becomes all the way there in a wash of heat and pleasure that makes my skin tingle and burn.

“Ah…yes…” I sit up and push down on him, engulfing him, feeling the tip of his cock pressing inside me. I slap my hand over my mouth because we’re in a hotel and the balcony door is open to one of the busiest streets in America. And I don’t feel like sharing how good this is.

Levi keeps pumping upwards, his cock pistoning in and out as the spasms rock my core. He sits up suddenly, burying his face in my cleavage to muffle his incoherent noises. His arms clench around me and we rock together, pulsing in time as the waves retreat.

Down in the street, someone plays a slow and mournful zydeco fiddle as Levi holds me there, his breath hot between my breasts.

“You’re crushing me,” I squeak after a moment.

He relaxes his arms a bit and turns his flushed face up to mine, a look of reverential wonder in his eyes. And while he holds my gaze there, and I bask in his worship, his hands slide up my back to undo my bra. As he slips it off and tosses it away, he leans down and plants a wet kiss on each nipple, raising goose bumps all over my body.

I move back, rising off his softening cock and falling down beside him.

He turns to face me. “I didn’t even take my shirt off,” he says.

“I know. Raunchy, huh? You could have scales under there and I would never know. Or like horrible racist tattoos or something.”

He chuckles. “I’m Jewish.”

I squeeze his cock. “I figured that.”

He reaches down and pulls the condom off, dropping it on the floor by the bed. “Not that Jews can’t be racist. But we’re not usually known for sporting tattoos advertising it.”

“Are you? Racist, I mean?”

“I try not to be.”

I can’t help laughing. “You’re so West Coast.”

“What does that mean?”

I unbutton his shirt as I answer. “Around here, white people are so uptight about it. If you even suggest they might be racist they go ‘I ain’t no racist! My daughter’s boyfriend is black! I voted for Obama! My maid is black!’ But, you just know they’re not happy about their daughter’s boyfriend.” I gasp when I push his shirt open. His nearly hairless stomach and chest are hard and chiseled with defined muscles. Abs, pecs – the whole package. “Holy crap. Are you a boxer or something?”

He laughs. “A boxer? No. I just worked out a lot this last year because I gave up drinking and partying.” He undoes his cuffs and pulls the shirt off, throwing it across the room.

“You’ve fallen off the wagon a bit tonight, honey, haven’t you?”

“Have I ever,” he says, pulling the covers off. As he wriggles out of his pants, I’m treated to the full view of the rest of his spectacular body – lean, toned arms and legs, strong, muscular shoulders. Nothing too bulky or obvious – he looks like he could be a champion of some sophisticated sport – like rowing or lacrosse. He climbs out of bed and stands there in the warm glow of the chandelier, grinning down at me as he slowly tugs the rest of the blanket off. “Come have a bath with me. It’s one of those old-style tubs.” He pulls me up by my hands. I wrap my arms around his neck and he just picks me up and carries me into the bathroom while I hang off him along with five strings of plastic beads.

“Maybe this is optimism speaking,” I whisper into his ear as we walk into the huge bathroom. “But I think you’ve got your manhood back.”

Chapter Seven – Levi

It turns out having full sex in an antique claw-foot tub is nearly impossible. But climbing out of said tub all warm and slippery and bending a girl over the bathroom counter has a much lower degree of difficulty. And the icing on the cake is when she invites you to use the handle of your electric toothbrush for something it almost certainly wasn’t designed for. If I manufactured electric toothbrushes, I’d put little clit-sized pads on the end of them, just for the ladies. That’s a million-dollar idea right there.

And then when you get back into the bath because you’re all sticky, you have to add more hot water because the bath has gone cold. And the warm water makes you sleepy so you climb back into the bed all clean and curl up with this gorgeous naked girl. And for a second, before she falls asleep in your arms, you have one of those beautiful fleeting moments where everything just fits together, skin to skin, your chest to her back, her round ass nestled against your exhausted cock, and it seems like the two of you have known each other for years.

Then reality sets in.

I roll over slowly, careful not to wake her, and stare at the ceiling, trying to ignore the music and laughter still drifting up from the street. So this is what it feels like to be a man again. Tired but restless. Sort of seedy. When I was seventeen and made a habit of hooking up with girls I just met, even really trashy girls, I had no trouble sleeping after. Half the time, I barely managed to stay awake long enough to give her a post-game cuddle. And now I add that to the pile of stuff rolling around like lost marbles in my head.

Trashy. Who am I to judge a girl as trashy, anyway?

Falling asleep right after sex? Lame. Did any of those girls actually believe I didn’t do that just so I wouldn’t have to talk to them? Have that pathetic “what are you thinking?” conversation wherein actual stuff that you’re thinking isn’t really permissible? Like you can never say, “I think my parents don’t really expect me to live up to the standard my sister set,” or, “Sometimes when I have sex, I just feel like someone is watching me masturbate”. I never even had those conversations with Naya. I don’t know why I’m surprised that I don’t want the same things I thought I wanted when I was seventeen. That’s just logical. I grew up. I used to think the point of emotionally connecting with girls was to get sex. Now I realize I might have had that backwards.

Outside I hear glass break and someone shouting. I sigh up at the chandelier.

“You want me to go on home?” I turn. Charlotte is lying on her side, watching me.

“You’re awake.”

She nods. “It’s okay. I don’t live far from here. I can walk.”

“No. No, of course not.” I touch her shoulder, smooth and cool now from the night air rolling through the open window. Her naked breasts are just covered by the sheet. “Do you want to go? Let me walk you home if you do.”

She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. “Do you want me to stay?”

I find I don’t have to lie. When Charlotte is awake and looking at me with her smudgy eyes she feels less like a stranger and more like someone I can trust. Someone I
should
trust. “Yeah, I do. I have a flight at three tomorrow, but we can have breakfast together. I’d like to buy you breakfast.”

“Aw, you’re sweet. I accept.” She slides forward and kisses me. “Wanna have sex again?”

“I don’t have any more condoms.” I mean I could search through Buck’s duffle bag, but that just seems a little desperate. “Do you have any?”

“You know, I make a point not to carry them around. It’s a disincentive to do things that ladies really shouldn’t do.” I can’t help but laugh at that. She laughs with me. “Obviously that strategy fails on occasion.”

“Lucky for me.” I
do
feel lucky in that moment. She’s lovely and sexy and funny and warm. I
am
lucky she chose me for a little lapse in ladyness. God, it’s disorienting the way my mind bounces back and forth.

She runs her hand down my arm, making my cock twitch against her thighs. Then she takes my wrist and turns it so she can see my watch. “It’s only 2AM. Let’s get something to eat.”

“Now?”

“Hell yes, now. I’m starving.”

We leap out of bed, fall around in the dark accidentally trying to put on each other’s clothes before I finally turn the light on. Then we both laugh at the mayhem in the room. Her bra hangs off a lamp. There are beads everywhere. We only ever find one of her stockings so I lend her a clean pair of socks. And it turns out she has a pair of Chucks in her tote bag so she doesn’t have to walk in those killer heels. I throw a hoodie over a t-shirt because my shirt somehow ended up on the wet bathroom floor.

“Mister Borovski?” The doorman sighs at me as we come down the stairs. “Let me guess, you’re hungry?”

“I’m that predictable?”

“Ivy Grill. Two blocks down.” He does that ‘away with you’ gesture again as Charlotte and I giggle out the door and onto the street.

The Ivy Grill is hopping. The soundtrack to
Dream Girls
blares out of an old jukebox, the giant bearded cook lip-syncing along with it. He’s wearing a sparkly tiara and pink lipstick. Drunk people of every possible gender expression sip multi-colored milkshakes along the spotless Formica counter.

Charlotte and I slide into a booth just as a skinny freckled waiter in a tutu greets us. “How y’all doing tonight? Wanna hear the specials?”

I zone out and watch Charlotte listen to the waiter say things about pulled pork and soft-shelled crab. In the florescent lights of the café, not only is she just as pretty as in the dim light of the club or the street or my hotel room, she’s beautiful. Her hair is messy and her eyes are smudgy and the skin on her neck and cleavage is red from where I rubbed my face. It’s almost like the further away she gets from that perfect plastic doll thing she had going on at the club, the more I…like her?
Do
I like her? All I know is that thinking about her breasts and soft tummy makes me grow hard under the table. I shift my weight uncomfortably.

“And for you, boss?” the waiter says.

I have no idea what the specials are, so I go with something safe. “Uh…burger and fries. Do you serve beer?”

“Sure. ID?”

Charlotte pulls her ID out, too, as the waiter checks them both and leaves us. I catch a glimpse of the year on the card. She’s two years older than me.

“I’m trying not to sober up,” I say to Charlotte when the waiter drops two bottles on our table a minute later.

“You don’t seem very drunk.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just nursing a low-grade buzz that’s been going on for three days. You’re not drunk, are you?”

She shakes her head, sipping the light beer she ordered. “I don’t like to drink much. I had some champagne at the club, but that drink I had on Bourbon Street was virgin.”

“That makes one of us.”

She snorts and dabs her nose with a napkin.

“It’s good that we’re not drunk,” I say. “I’m wary of drunk sex. I don’t think it’s healthy.”

She puts her beer down and stares at me while I hope she doesn’t notice I’m blushing. “You might be the first college boy in America to ever say that.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. There are whole student clubs dedicated to sober sex out west.”

“How…liberal.”

I make her laugh by listing some of the odder clubs at UW. Like the one dedicated to Anime. Or the one about nothing but Beyonce. There’s a cat club and a dog club of course, and who could forget the My Little Pony club, or the one about Rubik’s Cubes? By the time our food arrives, she has tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Did you go to college?” I ask as we dive into our meals like starving orphans.

She finishes chewing a giant bite of club sandwich before answering. “UNO. I did three years of engineering.”

I have to set my burger down to process that. “Engineering? Really?”

She nibbles her sandwich daintily. “Don’t I seem the type?”

She doesn’t, but what do I know? Life is full of surprises. “You didn’t finish?”

“Nah, my dad got sick and I couldn’t take care of him so he needed a nursing home. I already had huge debts and…yeah. Whatever. Sob, sob, sob.” She sighs.

I know I’ve led a sheltered life. I freely admit it. But in this moment, it seems wrong that I’ve never met an American who had to quit school to take care of a sick parent. I mean the world is full of people like Charlotte. Where are they all hiding?

“So I take perverts’ money now,” Charlotte says, biting into an onion ring. “That pays for dad’s care home and my rent and debts etc. Maybe I’ll finish school later.”

“You should.”

“Yeah? What about you? You’re in pre-law?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

Maybe that’s the most insight anyone has had into me in three years. Including myself. I have a sudden urge to dive over the table and kiss her on the lips. “I suppose I’m not. I thought I might do environmental law. You know, suing oil companies or whatever but I have a feeling law school is a bit like a pinball machine. You just bounce into whatever field at the end of it without much control. I mean I could end up a tax lawyer or something.”

“Ew.”

“Right?”

“Tax lawyers are lousy tippers.”

“Maybe because they can’t deduct it.”

She laughs so suddenly, she almost spits out a mouthful of beer. I pass her a clean napkin and wonder what would happen if I just ditched Omar and Buck, my flight tomorrow, and the rest of the semester, and stayed here in New Orleans eating junk food and having sex with a lap dancer until the heat of summer drove me back to the coast.

Charlotte looks at me, her head turned to the side. “What are you thinking about?”

“I think my parents don’t really expect me to live up to the standard my sister set.”

Shit. I didn’t mean to say that. It doesn’t seem to faze her though.

“Well, I’m an only child, and the standard set by my
parents
couldn’t be lower. So there’s that.”

Not sure if she thinks she’s luckier or unluckier than me. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

I snatch the bill as soon as the waiter drops it, and wave away Charlotte’s attempts to pay. She doesn’t put up much of a fight. I appreciate that. Sometimes when women get super insistent on paying, it starts to feel kind of insulting. As though they think that I think buying them an eight-dollar burger entitles me to sex, like I’m some kind of caveman. Sometimes I just like to pay. I have money. I have a good job and well-off parents. Also, there’s nothing worse than trying to split a bill with tip and everything. Then if she pays, I start to wonder if maybe she thinks
she’s
entitled to sex.

I’m over-thinking it. I realize that.

Charlotte takes my hand as we step out into the cool night. The action on Bourbon Street has mellowed a bit, but there’s still a steady stream of people, dripping with beads and alcohol, wandering in and out of the few businesses still open. I look at my watch. It’s nearly four in the morning. We could roam around the French Quarter for a couple of hours then watch the sun come up over the Mississippi. Or we could duck into the bodega for a box of condoms and go back to the room to fuck until we can’t walk. Or I could stand here, looking at my watch, feeling her soft little hand in mine.

“This is one of those moments that’s hard to call,” she says. “Whether we should power through to dawn or go back and get some sleep.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I consider ignoring it, but four in the morning is pretty late even on the coast, so it’s probably not my mother just checking up on me. I dig the phone out and click the screen on. It’s a text from Omar.

Check this out
.

Then there’s a selfie of him and Buck, their arms around two very young looking girls in spangly bras. Charlotte looks over my phone.

“Hookers,” she says casually. “I hope they’re not planning to bring them back to your room.”

And there’s the difference between us. I’m fuming with judgment and Charlotte is as calm as a nurse. I have a brief flickering fantasy of us growing old like this, bouncing off each other like charged particles.

The next text is an address and another message.
Come join us, dude. It’s epic
.

I would literally rather be boiled alive. And as for girls in sexy underwear, I’ve somehow managed to hook up with the most beautiful one in Louisiana. The girls in the selfie look sick and scared. I’m just about to turn my phone off and forget about it, to drag Charlotte down to the bodega for condoms and maybe some cheap champagne and nacho chips, to throw her over my shoulder and carry her back up to my room where I can tie her to the bed and do dirty things to her until we pass out from exhaustion, when another text pops up.

One of them gave me her phone number, I think.

And then there’s a photograph. Some scribbled letters on the back of a business card. I stare at it, thinking maybe I’m drunker than I thought because I can’t seem to make the letters mean anything. Then I lock my screen and turn the phone upside down. The letters seem to blur and reform like the blocks I played with at my great-grandmother’s house. Russian letters.