The Hinky Bearskin Rug

by Jennifer Stevenson

  At some point in the middle of a silly yet tender scene where the professor tried to put his ankle behind his own head, Clay slid his hands up under Jewel’s red knit top. She let him.

  I shouldn’t sleep with my partner. More than a mantra, it’s a good idea.

  Jewel was sick of being responsible. She hadn’t had sex in forty-eight hours, her incubus was doing somebody else, possibly this very porn star, damn her scrawny ass and perky tits, and Clay, as usual, was just Clay. A normal guy. He almost fell off the couch trying to kick his shoes off, and she laughed until she got the hiccups.

  And yet she couldn’t forget that moment of vulnerability in his face. He was so darned sneaky. If she were to take his sexual messages seriously — the heavy focus on intimacy, the extreme vanilla quality, his slowness — she might almost believe he had been making love to her all this time, while she’d been having sex with him.

  That unsettled her. This is not about l.o.v.e. Setting aside his style in bed, Clay’s message came across loud and clear: I’ll go easy on you if you go easy on me.

  She would never have to work at a relationship with him.

  On the other hand, she might never know who he was.

  This whole train of thought gave her the willies.

  They spent an hour on the sofa in front of the TV. By the end of Onika’s girlie-porn movie, Jewel felt sad and unaccountably lonely. Clay did his best but, every time she looked over at the screen, she saw the girl from the bearskin rug, and her mind wandered off, picturing the dreams that Velvita Fromage might be having while she cavorted with Sancho and Randy.

  In the end, to Jewel’s deep shame and confusion, she faked falling asleep.

  Clay took it like a gentleman. She lay still while he got up and put his shoes and shirt back on. As he bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead, she felt an urge to drag him down on the sofa with her again. She kept her eyes closed.

  When the door had shut behind him, she got up, got naked, crashed into bed, and pulled out her battered vibrator, wondering why on earth she had turned down a perfectly good man when she was horny.

  Maybe tonight the vibrator made her feel more in control. She badly needed to feel in control. Odd, because boffing random guys used to be her number one way of feeling in control.

  Of course Clay wasn’t random. Anything but. Her partner. She rationalized her decision by invoking the don’t-fuck-your-partner rule, which hadn’t worked very well so far.

  Maybe that was why, as her little electric friend buzzed, she thought about Randy instead.

  o0o

  Next morning, as she checked her email, she had a sudden attack of nosiness and inspected the register that kept track of Randy’s activity on her computer.

  The browser history was a mile long. Hm. Have to ask Clay about this click-bot thing. Excel tutorial. Microsoft Word tutorial. Good boy, Randy was building solid work skills there. Solitaire — he’d used the most advanced form and had beaten the computer more than eleven hundred times.

  And a text file, eleven kilobytes, called “My First Month, by Randy Darner.” She clicked on it.

  As she read the first line, Jewel flushed. This is private.

  Her mouth went dry.

  She couldn’t have stopped reading for a million dollars.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “My First Month”

  by Randy Darner

  I was twenty-six when my life ended and I became immortal. I didn’t know at the time that this had happened. One moment, I was sneering at my mistress, my pride stinging from her complaint, and the next, I was bodiless, blind, hearing her voice pronounce a sentence that has yet to run its course. As judges will, secure in their wigs of office, she ranted a good deal, but what I remember vividly is this: Until you satisfy one hundred women, you are a prisoner in this bed, an incubus.

  A hundred women! From my lady’s complaint I was to understand that I had yet to satisfy a single one. That stung worse than ever her vengeful magicks could.

  Come, Randall, this is tedious. This is to be porn,not puling lamentation.

  Of my first days as an incubus I remember little. I dreamed of whores, and the things whores do. In time, with growing dismay, I realized that the brass bed in which I lay imprisoned was situated in a brothel.

  Well, at least my task should be easy enough.

  So I thought.

  My lady had granted me magical powers, powers to enter a woman’s secret heart, be she never so respectable, and sniff out, as a hound sniffs out a coney in its burrow, her hidden desires. Whoso lay in my bed, I would know her wants, and would have the power, supposedly, to render her wanton.

  Yet in that unclean academy it seemed that the whores did not desire desire, not even abed. I found them distasteful. They were little better than drabs. They were dirty, coarse, and lowborn, as were their customers, and the girls were further cheapened by their work. The sauciest opera dancer was as an angel floating above the sewer where they plied their trade. They did not even serve gentlemen.

  I spied on them whenever they occupied my bed. There they performed prodigies of contortion — and yet felt nothing. As my mistress promised, their desires were in my view.

  But not one of them desired congress.

  In a moment of hurt, I had declared to my mistress that all women were like this, though I hadn’t believed it.

  But what if it were true? In despair I wondered, are none of these women ever carried forward, flesh upon flesh, in the sweaty tangle of the moment? Is there no whore who jousts for jousting’s sake?

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Yet the more time I spent wading through these women’s lives with my coat-skirts fastidiously raised, as it were, the more certain it seemed that I would never be free.

  They were pathetic wretches. They went hungry. Some racked their bellies with back-alley physicks, trying to rid themselves of child. Some were beaten by their abbess or by their patrons. All were broken to their labor, broken as a dung-hauler’s horse is broken, without regard for their pleasure.

  Reluctantly I acknowledged that one’s desire might lie in abeyance while the necessities of life went unfilled.

  I fear my porn is a poor effort. Yet I feel this has merit if perhaps only to myself.

  That first fortnight bored me and disgusted me. I was sure that my mistress meant me to stay imprisoned forever. Nothing could be less to the taste of a man of my pride than to pander to whores’ desires. Faugh, what petty desires! They desired to drink themselves insensible, or to dress well, or to scratch out the eyes of some other member of their tawdry sisterhood.

  And then I met Maggie. A senior whore, she had been stolen by the abbess from a rival, so she claimed, and was paid better than the others, which boast got her hair pulled. She was thirty if a day, pock marked, with a screeching voice, drooping dugs, and a paint-raddled face. She constantly bickered with her fellows and stole from their hidden stores of money. She lied. She drove secret bargains with her patrons to cheat the abbess of her share whenever she performed special favours. She was none too clean in her habits.

  Yet she was lusty. How my Maggie loved to bounce! She brought first to my brass bed a man in orders, perhaps some country vicar up from his respectable village, and fucked him soundly.

  To my astonishment, I found myself attracted. O wonderful moment! My body, it seemed, came back to me: my heart beat again, I panted, my pulse hammered in my ears, I felt the slide of skin upon skin and a fiery bodily urge.

  At first I thought it was my own body.

  Then I realized it could not be, for I’d no power over my limbs.

  Was it the stout old vicar’s lust I felt?

  But as Maggie threw her leg over his belly and took him, first fore, then aft, riding as if the very devil had his horn in her, I came to understand that it was her body I felt: her heartbeat, her pulse, her unclean skin burning with irresistable pleasure.

  And I stopped thinking of her inferiority.

  By day I l
ay like her secret shadow under the coverlet, exulting in sensations — her sensations — as she pleasured herself. At night I learned her trade from the inside out. I, who had condescended to patronize so many of her kind, knowing nothing of what it cost or paid such a creature, I became one with her, and willingly. For to share in her panting, the rise of her greedy hunger, the sharp peaks which visited her over and over, more often and more powerfully than those crises which had satisfied me in my proper person as Lord Pontarsais — ass that I had been — this sharing was glorious.

  I was being broken to my work, like that cart horse.

  I began to understand, I thought, what my mistress had meant to teach me with her terrible curse.

  A woman’s lusts are different. Her need is particular to her sex, and quite unlike the need of man. How pleased I was with this insight! To learn this, my mistress had sent me to a harsh school.

  Had she presented herself to me, how I could not yet picture, perhaps by laying herself in this bed once more, yes, that was a pleasant thought, then I might willingly have shared her flesh, traced the secret pulse in her veins, rejoiced with her, perhaps even while another man pleasured her.

  But she never came for me.

  Not ever.

  I had been abandoned to my fate.

  In time, Maggie moved on. I never knew if she left the academy for a private patron, or retired wealthy, or, more likely, harmed herself irreparably through overwork or drink or quarrelsomeness and sank back into the stews again. She was replaced by other whores, less lusty.

  But I was never again aloof from their flesh. From Maggie onward, I lay alert to the slightest stirring of desire in whatever woman had my bed. Only when that woman felt desire could I feel alive.

  I was no longer a man, and not yet an incubus.

  In the months to come I was to discover that I had many other powers. There is a space inside every human mind, vaster than all the cosmos, like a library, or a forest, or the stacked and ordered spheres of the heavens, and this space is constructed of all that has been put into that mind, whether by bible or by painting or by plays or mummery or by the day-in, day-out practices of life itself. It is unimaginably crowded.

  My hundredth woman calls it demonspace. But it is no more than the inside of her mind and mine, the sum of all we have ever thought or dreamt.

  Moreover, this space has no order, except as the mind imagines it. To a creature like myself, an invader creeping in at the portal of desire, all is a jumble, except for the bright, clear call of lust, like a hunting horn, showing how I may share a woman’s body for just so long as she feels pleasure. While I occupy that space, I see the map to her satisfaction clearly traced. I know what other man’s face she may see while she is servicing her husband. I can assume that face. I can become him, and perform prodigies he never could.

  This is the power of the incubus: to ferret out what pleases any woman and to provide it, however impossible. For in that space, we are as gods, she and I. Whatever she can imagine, I can perform. If she has desires even she will not confess, I can find them and make them flesh, surprising her and delighting her.

  But I run ahead of my story.

  These powers did not come under my control all in a flash.

  The bitterest year of all my decades of sexual servitude was that year in the Cheapside academy. For as much as I came to know and sympathize with the women trapped in that loathesome life, as much as they were able to teach me, I failed them.

  I pleased not one of them.

  At this date, I have carried a little more than a hundred women to that jeweled isle where there is no fear or pain or shame. They have lent me their breath, their pulse, their pleasure, their release. I have made stars fall for them. I have made mares of them and mounted them as their stallion. I have brought the dead back into their arms for one more tender tumble, and, borrowing secrets from their memories, I have made them believe that I was the departed, and that he loved them still. All this and more can I do.

  But I cannot turn back the clock to repay Maggie or any of her poor sisters for the things they gave to me.

  That failure will live with me the rest of eternity, I think. For surely, if the body of Randy Darner, third Earl Pontarsais should perish, in that moment I will slip into the nearest bed, wherever it may be, and serve out more shameful centuries until some angel comes to set me free.

  And will she pass over my failure? Or will she grant me absolution at last?

  o0o

  Jewel’s belly had gone hot and runny. Her head was on fire with pictures of Randy: Randy in an old-timey English cat house, Randy locked out in the darkness, slamming mothlike against the window while the girls did their job, Randy waiting for forgiveness from a bitch who would never come back to see how much he had learned. Her breastbone burned. She remembered making love to him on the snowy Field Museum porch, in view of the frozen lake, pouring her heat into him. In demonspace Randy had been cold and she burning, but the snow had come out of the depths of her own mind. Randy had only showed it to her. Randy could always find her, no matter what frozen hell she was in.

  A kind of high, soundless singing started up in the back of her head, like a choir of cicadas. It made her feel fuzzy and open and pleasantly full and a little sap-headed.

  I owe him, she thought.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thursday was a Velvita day. When she put on the big fluffy robe and walked into makeup, Lena already felt like a porn star. It was a slow process. The body makeup. An hour on her hair and hands. Sewing the costume on her. When she looked in the mirror and licked her lips, Velvita Fromage looked back: wicked, contented, in control.

  Her scene today had been developed between her and Onika the week before. It was written for Velvita and Sancho, kind of a spooky but emotional scenario about a historical re-enacter and the ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier. Velvita had doubts about some of the plotty stuff — you didn’t want so much plot that it delayed the sex scenes — but once she and Sancho were in it, it flowed naturally, The situation created the characters. The dialogue cued the sex. Perfect.

  This time it was a little more than perfect. Maybe Sancho was getting into the role of Zebediah. Maybe her imagination got fired up with the Puritan-girl costume. Maybe it was the tickly fake white bearskin rug.

  Whatever. Velvita found herself getting into it.

  And at the critical moment, just when she knew she was going to come her brains out and give Onika footage that would sell a hundred thousand copies, she felt herself slip sideways on the bearskin rug and slide deep into a crevasse between the hairs.

  What the—?

  Down, sideways, round and round like a Cheerio in a toilet bowl. Loop-de-loop like the The Demon roller coaster at Six Flags. She giggled and shrieked and squealed.

  And she sailed out off the end of the invisible roller coaster and into the arms of a gorgeous, unfamiliar, naked man.

  His arm circled her waist. The merry-go-round struck up a waltz. I’m dreaming, Velvita thought, that’s why this isn’t scary. She looked up into the stranger’s face.

  His big black eyes burned down into hers with compelling intensity. They danced, and the swooping music and the lift of his hand in the small of her back seemed to hit her right in the sweet spot. She remembered that the cameras would be watching, and the exhibitionist in her let out a whoop, and a cyclone orgasm whirled her in circles around her mysterious black-eyed partner.

  While she reeled with sexual aftershock, he spoke.

  My name is Randy. I need your help to get out of here.

  o0o

  Jewel reported to work at Baysdorter Boncil Thursday feeling more in control. For one thing, she’d got off last night, which always settled her nerves. Plus she was back in her navy polyester, which gave her its own brand of control and power.

  So when Steven called her into his office first thing, she thought she was ready.

  He said without any buildup whatever, “There are naked pictures of
you all over the Internet.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Excuse me?” Delayed shock hit her like a slow, wet fish in the face.

  He checked her out with a slapworthy leer. “You have nice nipples for a cop. They look great with clothespins.” He rattled off the www-dot-blah-blah-blah in a gloating voice.

  A hot flush crept up her back. How did he find out about that? And, So he really does know why I’m here.

  She snapped back, “And you do so many cops.”

  “Well....” He leered wider.

  She felt like punching him. What happened to Mr. I’m-too-sexy-for-my-suit? “What do you want? Besides a chance to exercise your Turette’s?”

  “Be nice, or I’ll see to it your superiors have that URL.”

  “Too late. It’s old news in my shop. You got a better threat?”

  Steven glowered. “How about I can get you fired.”

  “I doubt it.” Her brain started working, and she calmed down. “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not nice, remember. You’ll have to spell it out for me.”

  He leaned forward. “Kill this case. Make it go away.”

  She was about to tell him to go fuck himself when she remembered that the woman who ran the Artistic Building, source of Hoby’s pastries and hinky porn, was named Tannyhill, too.

  Was it possible that Steven knew how Wilma and the Artistic Building were connected to O’Connor’s pocket zones?

  Hell, he was in real estate, wasn’t he? And they were looking for a scammer with ties to real estate and hinky porn.