Wild Licks (6 page)

She made me laugh in spite of myself and the burning need below my belly. “Likewise. It is far more pleasant to talk to you than to some model they would hire for me out of a catalog or something.”

“Good,” she said, and folded her hands above her knee, looking through the dark-tinted window away from me.

I could make out that we were on Santa Monica Boulevard and we would be at my condo soon. We lapsed into silence. Did she feel how fragile the balance was between us? Did she understand how tenuous my position could be? The need for a public image that hid the truth of my desires yet projected a dangerous sensuality to my fans was a tricky strait to navigate. As Christina would say, my image was an asset to be maintained. My publicity value was an asset to be guarded. I reminded myself being seen in public with Gwen was a tactic for doing so, and I found myself grateful that she seemed to understand this.

And gratitude was a feeling I should express when felt, or so I had learned. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

“You're welcome, Mal,” she replied, just as quietly.

She was an intriguing woman, wasn't she? Try as I might to encase her in my mind as nothing more than a stratagem, my curiosity was piqued.

Curiosity could be even more dangerous than flat-out lust, though. I forced myself to think about Excrucia instead. In her, had I found a woman whose interest in pain complemented my own?

I'd dabbled in the organized bondage and fetish communities in both the UK and the States, but as fame had grown, I'd pulled back from anything that could be scandalous—much as I would have relished my family's horror had I landed in the tabloids for it. The classes and seminars on safety and technique made sense to me but also left me feeling cold and unmoved inside. No one seemed to value pain for what it was: actual pain.

I'd discovered pain as a secret friend at a childhood Christmas party, candles everywhere, tapers and tea lights. I've always liked candles, the flickering light making everything seem like a dream. At the dinner table I started playing with the flame of a tea light with the tip of my finger, flicking it back and forth. Did you know you can feel a flame without getting burned? It feels like air pressure, like gossamer, like the touch of a ghost.

I began to test myself. How long could I keep my finger in the flame without it hurting? And then the test became how long could I keep my finger in the flame
despite
it hurting?

That was when I started to feel alive.

I didn't discover that inflicting pain on others was just as good—better, even—until I was a teenager. I was sent to a boarding school with many longstanding traditions, most of them unacknowledged by the faculty and administration. I don't know about the girls at the school down the road, but among the boys, hazing rituals and tests of endurance—especially those involving nudity and jeopardy to one's genitalia—were commonplace. Points of honor were won through such activities.

Bullying was never my style. I was not interested in picking on the weak. Sadism without honor is madness. What intrigued me was the submission of willing victims. Everyone who wants pain has their reasons. Some feel pain as pleasure. Some experience emotional catharsis through it. Some test themselves and their mettle.

Some simply feel alive.

My imagination flooded with erotic images. If the redhead from last night were sitting beside me, what would I do? My fantasy reeled off as easily as a porn film. I would say to her,
“If you are truly giving yourself to me, you'll climb onto my cock right now.”

“
Right now?”
she would ask.

“
Yes, this second. Or I'll have the chauffeur take you to your destination and never see you again.”

Her lip would tremble slightly and then she would ask,
“And if I do it? If I pass your test?”

“
Then we will proceed directly to my home, where you will spend the next two weeks as my fucktoy, naked and prepared for me to take you anytime the mood strikes me.”

I would unzip my trousers and my erection would strain upward and I would command her to engulf me. The test:
“You have ten seconds to get me all the way inside you.”

In her haste she would climb astride me and simply yank her panties aside, struggling to get the head of me positioned between her lips. Yes, the struggle would be the sweetest part of all, as she would fight to accommodate my size without any preparation. Once inside, I would find her snug and slick with desire but the initial penetration would make her bite her lip and me gasp…

I nearly gasped aloud there in the limousine as I realized I had imagined Gwen and not Excrucia at all. Thank goodness we were pulling up to the privacy hedge that surrounded my condo. I opened the door, desperate to escape the allure of this woman. From the curb I turned to close it and saw she had crawled to my side of the seat and was looking up at me with huge, lust-filled eyes.

That's your imagination,
I told myself. You're confusing her with every other woman who has sucked you into a vortex. “Ms. Hamilton,” I forced myself to say in the most polite tone I could muster. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

She held out her hand and I took it gingerly, my fingers disconcertingly damp, and kissed the back of her hand. Her skin was smooth, perfect, and I knew all I had to do was tighten my grip, pull her out of the car, and tell her to come with me and I could have her.

And I could ruin her. And that would not be good. I let go reluctantly.

“Until next time. Good night, Mal,” she said, before reaching out and closing the door herself.

I didn't even wait until I reached my bedroom. The moment I was on the other side of my front door, I tore open my trousers and relieved the pressure that had been building there as if I were a hormonal teen again, on my hands and knees like an animal, painting a series of grayish stripes on the foyer tile, my control utterly gone.

As we drove away, I clung to the sense-memory of Mal's lips against the back of my hand. I don't think it was my imagination that his lips lingered a little too long. Mal Kenneally was obviously interested in me. For a guy who supposedly hid all his emotions, Mal was as readable as a billboard on the 101. I was sure I hadn't heard the whole story behind his sex and dating rules, though. Maybe it was as simple as him justifying his fear of commitment? Why else make a rule that he could only have sex with a given woman once?

I mean, I get the whole rock star thing. He had a steady stream of women throwing themselves at him. He didn't have to make a commitment to have plenty of sex, so why should he?

I, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky, and pretty much all I could think about while he'd been sitting there in the car with me was how his cock had felt inside me yesterday.

You're deluded,
I tried to tell myself.
If he wanted you, he would have invited you in. He wouldn't have said no.

Besides, you're making him seem more interesting than he probably is. Yes, the sex was hot, but come on, he's obviously got issues. He's clearly a big old cup of avoid-for-your-own-good, right? Buy a bigger dildo instead.

But while my insides clenched with need every time I thought about him, I knew it wasn't his cock I really craved. It was something else. His attitude. His…mastery?

This wasn't how it was supposed to go. If I was going to get into dom/sub role-playing, I was supposed to find a guy and exchange checklists and negotiate and talk about limits and aftercare before we even set foot into a dungeon. I was not supposed to hop onto a beer bottle on command.

But just thinking about it was making my insides melt all over again. Maybe with time I might have forgotten about Mal or reduced the memory to the status of a favorite fantasy, but now having spent the evening next to him—touching him and getting to know him—I was more attracted to him than ever. It was like getting hooked on a drug where a big second dose ensured the need took hold.

To think tonight we hadn't even had sex. Maybe we didn't have to. The film had stimulated all the right parts of my fantasies, even the deep hidden and forbidden parts. And Mal had as much as admitted that it had done the same for him, too.

I slipped back into thinking about that room backstage, draped with cloths and tapestries like a vestige of an ancient seraglio. He'd ordered me to put the condom on him and I'd done it, and obeying him was the best aphrodisiac ever. No, the second best. Him reducing me to a fuckable hole was the best.

What the fuck was that about, anyway? I lowered the window to let the wind into the limo, to feel the air moving on my face. I'd always been interested in various kinks. Growing up, I'd known they existed. Bondage had looked like fun, spanking had sounded great, but I'd never fantasized about being a human sex toy. Had I?

Was that why Mal only did a groupie once? Because what got him off was treating her like a disposable fuckdoll?

Worry about Mal later,
I thought.
Why did
you
get off on being treated like that?

Was it a leftover vestige from Chuck? My first real lover, my first time doing kink, and Chuck had degraded me and ordered me around and spanked me and I had loved it at the time…until I'd realized he was actually a really degrading person. But I'd imprinted on that style of dominance, I guess. How else could I explain why I found bossy male entitlement hot?

But you don't find it hot in spoiled brat dudebros,
I thought. They had entitlement up the wazoo, too.

But they were boring. They didn't even care enough to boss me around or
make
it hot. They'd just expected me to lie there and think of New England.

And they weren't Mal.

I tripped and fell right into a fantasy about Mal, like something out of a historical romance only much dirtier, Mal as viscount or duke ordering me to get on his cock…to milk him dry so that when the upper-crust seductress intent on tricking him arrived at his English country estate he wouldn't be able to impregnate her. He'd keep me hidden, naked and chained by my collar under his palatial four-poster bed, and after a lavish dinner in the formal dining room, he'd take the woman to bed. The bed would creak and groan while he tried to satisfy her. Maybe he'd even fuck her—yes, Mal would get it up, of course he would—and she'd be none the wiser that he had barely a dribble of seed to plant between her legs. Then when she was gone, he'd pull me out from under the bed and put me into the covers and snuggle with me all night long…

Oh, self. That was not a good fantasy. That was a degrading and useless and
fucking hot
fantasy.

Maybe I should talk to Ricki. I wasn't sure I really wanted to get into the intimate details of my fantasies with her, though. We were close, but still, we had boundaries, too. I wondered if Granddad thought about that when he left the running of the Governor's Club to us. Did he think about how two sisters like us would manage to run a secret sex dungeon for Hollywood's elite without it getting too incestuous?

For the most part, we just stayed out of each other's way. If one of us was playing in a scene room, the other one was “on duty” as hostess, so we never actually saw each other play. When Axel put Ricki in bondage, he never did it in the main central room. I got spanked by everyone in the club for my birthday, but that wasn't like a scene-scene; I didn't even take off my clothes. Come to think of it, Madison was probably a much better choice of someone to talk to. We'd really hit it off, and she had tons more experience with kink than I did. I knew she wouldn't judge. She was also great as a dungeon hostess.

Running the dungeon was fun. I really liked being part of people having good sex and having a safe place to get kinky. But I really needed to figure out what was going on in my own head.

And buy a bigger dildo. I took out my phone to mail-order one before I even got home.

My sister and I have this in common: We're very systematic about things. We make lists. She loves spreadsheets. I like flow charts.

And I liked sex with Mal. No,
liked
was not the right word. Craved, needed, “would die without”—those were more accurate. By morning I had decided to set aside all my doubts about my underlying motivations and focus on concrete goals. I had tasted the forbidden fruit and all I could think about was how to have more of it.

I sat down with my tablet in my room and drew a circle on one end and wrote
GWEN
in it. On the other end I drew a triangle with
MAL
in it. Okay. Now to visualize the paths from one to the other.

One potential path was going to be through the publicity dates, so I wrote the word
DATES
in the middle. The obstacle there was Mal's rules. He would have to get over the whole rule thing—let's face it, he'd have to get over himself, too, and what were the chances of that? I suspected if he really grew to like me that he'd start to bend the rules or decide that they no longer applied, but he had also demonstrated a fairly iron will, so it wasn't going to be easy. I made a dashed line through the word
DATES
to indicate the shaky nature of that plan.

Of course another potential path was through the Governor's Club. C-L-U-B. Axel was already a member. Just a few weeks ago Ricki and I had floated the idea about whether the rest of the band, being so intimately linked to Axel, should be invited, too. It was obvious to me now that Mal was a kinkster at heart. Would he be able to resist me if the right situation in the dungeon came up? Maybe he'd consider anything that happened in the dungeon to be under a different set of rules from either groupies or dating. Certainly worth finding out. I drew another dashed line, this one through the word
CLUB
. There was still the question of whether he would accept an invitation, and even if he did, whether I could get through his resolve.

Then there was a third way. I wrote
SUPERFANS
on the tablet and swooped my finger through a thick black line. Obviously given what I had seen, Mal would have rock star sex regularly with girls he didn't know. I still had the contact information of the superfans I'd met at the show. I'd have to cook up a convincing disguise, but hey, if it worked once, it could work again.

I liked the third way best because it was another test of my acting skills and it was the plan that relied the most on me and the least on anyone else. Mal could just be Mal; he wouldn't have to change anything, and we'd both be happy.

Time to set up a fake e-mail address.

I had just finished setting up an alias and mail-ordering a black wig when a text came from Ricki:

Next week, Bob Monteleone fund-raising bash, you, me, Axel, Mal?

I pulled up my to-do list and drew a circle around the word
DATES
. If it was going to work, I just had to be ready when he changed his mind. I called her instead of texting back. “Fund-raiser, you say?”

“Yes, a banquet. CTC has a whole table.”

“Well, if he'll put up with it, I wouldn't mind having Mal Kenneally as my date.”

“Was he that bad? I thought you were getting along great at the premiere.”

“Oh, he's a sweetheart, but I think he'd rather be sitting in his crypt pulling the wings off bats than talking to me.”

Ricki laughed and then tried to stifle it. “Oh, Gwen. That doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement.”

“Don't take it the wrong way! He's interesting to talk to and I could listen to his accent all day. But I'm not the one you might need to convince. Mal told me it was his manager's idea that we should be seen together for publicity purposes. I think I might be more willing than he is.”

She clucked her tongue. “Does this mean you're getting used to the idea that raising your public profile could be good for your career?”

I held in a sigh. I still didn't really like that idea, but now that I had ulterior motives for being with Mal, I rationalized it. “Maybe I'm finally figuring out that being seen is part of the job description.”

Besides, I was already planning the ultimate test of my acting skills.

Why do rock stars wear sunglasses so much?

Perhaps some enjoy the mystique. I have also been told that those avoiding the paparazzi prefer them because photos that do not show your face are less desirable to photographers.

In my case the dark glasses were purely practical. Los Angeles is very nearly a desert and the sun shines as wretchedly bright as in the Sahara. Especially when one has spent most of the previous night on a glorious, whiskey-fueled songwriting binge. The five of us had played until nearly four a.m. before grabbing a few hours of sleep before a morning photo shoot. I didn't regret the night's activities one bit, but I did ever so slightly regret how bloodshot my eyes were.

I, at least, didn't scream like a schoolgirl when the stylist put the drops in my eyes, unlike Axel. Chino, not to be outdone, put on a full horror-movie act, complete with dropping to his knees and clawing at his face in agony. I held in a smile as the poor assistant stylist, who couldn't have been more than eighteen, stood beside him with her hands fluttering, a look of pure terror on her face.

Chino laughed, hopped up, and took a bow, the rest of us applauding and the stylist breathing a sigh of relief. I think he'd convinced her she'd accidentally put acid in his eyes. Which was what it felt like, but no.

Photo shoots are a test of both physical and mental endurance. The band would rather play a three-hour show in West Texas with no air-conditioning than do a photo shoot.

But they are a necessary brick in the path of success.

This one thankfully did not take all day. The photographer had just two hours with us before she had to move on to her next gig, which suited us fine. We changed clothes only once and needed hair touched up once. Doable. At least this shoot took place inside a studio and not somewhere ridiculous like the “LA River” (the giant concrete drainage ditch you always see in movies). Our previous one had taken place there, the Santa Ana winds had been blowing, and we ended up blanketed with wildfire smoke and ash.

A much more pleasurable task was that afterward we signed autographs for a few fans who had found out where we'd be—and there were nearly always a few, no matter where we went. A group of about a half dozen were patiently clustered on the sidewalk outside the building and we spent several minutes autographing things and taking selfies with them.

One of the women there was the zaftig blonde, Aurora, whose day I made by asking, “Aurora, have you e-mailed that photo yet?”

“I did! I did!” Her eyes, her face, her entire body lit up with euphoria. “Did you not get it?”

“Just checking. I had you send it to our management office but I haven't checked with them yet. I will inquire.”

“Let me know if you need me to send it again! In fact, here, just to be sure, I'll e-mail it again now.” She bent her head to her phone and I took the moment to study the faces of the other girls, looking for the mystery girl, “Excrucia.” None of them were redheads and my memory of her face was as dim as the light in the room had been. In fact, my brain seemed to be conflating her and Gwen Hamilton, since the face I now pictured was Gwen with heavy black eyeliner.

We arrived at the rehearsal studio by midafternoon. Basic Records was pushing us to deliver the next album, but I was insisting we not go into the recording studio with a producer again until we had a better handle on the material to choose from. They had wanted to put an album into the pipeline before we went on the road, but given how disastrously the recording sessions had gone, we'd only managed to fully finish two songs. Now that the tour was over, we needed to buckle down and get back to work.

Between what we had in inventory and what I'd written while we were on the road, I think we had close to forty potential songs to work with, which sounds like a surplus but trust me, once a producer like Max Martin or Larkin Johns starts ripping your music to shreds, sometimes you have very little left by the end. Well, we hadn't worked with Max Martin, but our experience with Johns had left me with a very bad taste in my mouth—so bad that I was wary of producers as a whole now.

I sat down with my electric tuner and my current favorite guitar, a Paul Reed Smith with a dragon inlaid in pearl. Yes, a dragon. It was an indulgence in image and an insanely expensive guitar, but also an insanely good one, imminently playable with incredible tone. Not to mention beautiful to look at. But if it had merely been beautiful to the eye and not also to the ear, I wouldn't have bought it.

The rest of the band went through their own preparations. Ford tuned his bass across the room from me, doing the bottom string with a tuner and then using his ears for the other three, his eyes unfocusing as he listened, his dirty-blond hair hanging in front of them. Axel had gone into the bathroom to warm up his voice; everyone sounds better in the shower because of the echoes off the tile, and professional singers are no exception. Chino tightened his cymbals on their stands.

“Where's Samson?” I asked Ford.

He shrugged. “I'm not his keeper. Why are you asking me?”

Hmm. The reason I was asking him was because the two of them so frequently traveled together, but his defensive answer made me think perhaps now was not the time to point that out. “Just thought you might have heard him say something.”

I heard the outer door open, though, and in came Samson. He had his hair up in a topknot and was carrying a stack of pizza boxes. “
Ta-da
. Aren't you guys hungry?”

Ford's eyes were shadowed and he said what I was thinking: “We should really get to work.”

“Hey, we've got to eat sometime.” Samson set the boxes down on the table against the wall. “Look, I even got it from the place you like.”

Americans are strangely sectarian about certain things and pizza is one of them. Honestly I could not see why if one wanted melted cheese and tomato on flat bread it mattered so much whether the crust was thick or thin, crunchy or chewy, or a thousand other variations, but the others assured me it did. And we often let Ford pick what we ate because, we jokingly said, he was the runt of the litter and needed to fatten up. Ford wasn't actually significantly shorter than anyone else in the band but me. In fact, he and Chino were the same height, though Chino outweighed him by about forty pounds of muscle—but facts have never stopped a good round of ball-busting, and never underestimate the amount of ball-busting necessary to keep any band sane.

Ford set his bass into the stand and went to inspect what I strongly suspected was a peace offering from Samson. In a band, there are always undercurrents of who is getting along with whom at any given time.

Ford took a slice and tore into it with gusto, apparently approving of this pizza. I resigned myself to a lunch break and set down my instrument as well.

Axel joined us with a chuckle but did not comment beyond that.

“What do you think, Mal?” Samson said as we began demolishing the second pizza. “Can we work on that song from last night some more?”

“We could,” I allowed, catching Ford's eye before he looked away. It was a song the two of them had written together. Axel and I wrote most of the band's songs but we were open to some compositions by the others if they were good. It was going to be up to the record company to choose what went on the album ultimately, no matter how much I liked it. I tried to be sure they knew I approved of it so if it got cut later they wouldn't think it was because of me. “I like that riff.”

They shared fleeting smiles with each other and it appeared whatever rift had been brewing between them was healed.

When we were done working on that song, though, I wanted to work on one about sex. I'm sure that comes as a complete surprise.

We worked for several hours, running through our inventory of half-finished songs and favorite riffs, and Axel listed them on the whiteboard propped against the wall. Those without titles were represented by descriptive phrases that would hopefully spur us to remember which we meant: “So Many Drums” and “Chugga Chugga Wah” and others like that.

We took a break after sunset and I stepped out to see if some fresh air could be had—the term
fresh air
being relative to the smog level in LA. I drove to the nearest convenience store as much for the break as to actually look for some decent beverages.

Our rehearsal space was in a small strip mall, in what had once been a semi-private fitness training gym. As I pulled back into the parking lot, I was displeased to see a couple of women standing in front of the shuttered tanning salon next door. They approached the car as I got out.

“Hi, Mal,” the blond one in the front said.

Aurora again. This time I didn't use her name. “You can't be here.”

“Um, we were just wondering if—”

“No. We're working. All of you. How did you find out where we were?”

“Well, Krista thought she saw your car the other day at the Circle K down the street and—”

I shook my head. I knew getting the cherry-red 4C had been a mistake; the Alfa Romeo was too easy to spot. They'd probably seen us drive away from the site of the photo shoot today and knew the makes of our cars and our license plates. “This is utterly inappropriate and you should all be ashamed of yourselves,” I said. “Do you not see enough of us at public events? Is it necessary to invade our privacy and interrupt our work?
Go.
” I pointed to the road. “And do not come back or we will close this location and go elsewhere.”

“Okay, okay! We're going. I'm sorry, please don't ban us—”