The Hinky Bearskin Rug

by Jennifer Stevenson

  There it was. She swallowed hard.

  “To whom will you open your heart, then?” His eyes were big and bright and quiet. The storm clouds were gone. “I can try to lower the social superiority that is my shield. What then is your shield? Can we ever be close?”

  Her heart was hammering. She could barely hear her own voice. “We can try.”

  Was it fear making her pulse pound? Or something else? She remembered what Randy said so often to her: Are you afraid because you’re aroused, or aroused because you’re afraid?

  God, he knows me so well.

  No point in struggling. What she wanted wasn’t sex, but something she couldn’t name, couldn’t see, couldn’t touch. Even now she wanted to run away, when he was under her skin in a way that made her shiver.

  How can he love a wild animal like me?

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing,” she said helplessly. “I’ve never been in love like this.”

  He smiled. “We shall have to be inventive.”

  A laugh fell out out her. “We’re good at that.”

  “I cannot promise I will never again be trapped in a bed.”

  “I was wrong to ask if you wouldn’t.”

  His shoulders sank and the tension seemed to leave him. “You will come for me? You’ll rescue me?”

  Floating on air, she said, “Always.”

  o0o

  Excerpt from The Hinky Genie Lamp

  “Lena Sacker!” Jewel Heiss felt that warm glow a woman gets when she’s treating a woman she doesn’t like with respect. She shouldered her cell phone against her ear, put her ancient Tercel in first gear, and coaxed her bumper closer to the car ahead. “Hey, girl, it’s been a while!” Not since you made porn with my boyfriend, she added mentally. “’Sup?”

  “Hi, Jewel. I need kind of a professional courtesy.”

  “Like what? I give somebody a ticket, you give somebody a blow job?”

  Lena ignored that. “Would it interest you to know that the pink stuff is appearing somewhere new, where it’ll be easy to study?”

  “Hell yes.” Jewel crawled the Tercel south along Lake Shore Drive with her sex demon partner silent in the passenger seat. A pink veil shimmered against the blue and steel of late-summer thunderheads above, the sign of a dangerous commute. Disappearances in the pink stuff were up this summer. Da mayor had expressed concern. Like she could do anything about it. “Not in public, I hope. We can’t afford more news coverage.”

  This was an understatement. The slower traffic got, the lower the pink smog sank onto the expressway. To the left, the lake sent sparkles winking through a pink haze. Half a mile ahead, where Lake Shore bent to the left at Michigan Avenue, the road — and the bumper-to-bumper traffic — disappeared completely. Only the flag on top of The Drake Hotel stuck up out of that uncanny fog. Jewel felt her chest tighten.

  “Not public. Laboratory conditions,” Lena said.

  “At your company?” Like I’m ever setting foot in that place again.

  Lena Sacker was half owner of the porn company that had hired Randy to, uh, perform when Jewel had temporarily kicked him out of bed and out of her apartment, some weeks ago. The porn factory had been lousy with hinky stuff. All due to the high concentration of sex, Randy had claimed.

  Sacker said, “No, at our practice space in Cicero.”

  “Cicero. That’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  “Perfect. Then there will be no stain on your record if the pink stuff gets really thick and eats a dozen people in the audience,” Lena said breezily.

  Jewel sucked in a breath. “You win. What’s happening in Cicero?”

  “Roller derby.”

  “Roller derby!” Jewel let loose a laugh. “As in mudless mud wrestling? Knee pads and fishnet stockings? Do people still do that?”

  “We do,” Lena said.

  Jewel geared down and let the Tercel idle, helpless and immobilized in the pink stuff. “I guess we can stop by. Unofficially.”

  Cars ahead of them were fading as the pink stuff sank lower and lower, nearer and nearer.

  She didn’t want to admit how deeply grateful she felt to be on the phone with somebody who sounded calm. The pink stuff made Jewel anxious. In spite of the heat, she rolled up her window and signaled to Randy to do the same.

  “I’m not happy about it either. My girls are being affected. Tonight’s a practice. It’s happened two nights in a row, so I’m betting it’ll come again tonight. Six o’clock. I’ll leave your name at the door so you can get in. If anybody asks, you’re a reporter doing a newspaper article. Park next door.” Lena gave her the address of the practice space.

  “Thanks.” Jewel smelled a set-up. “How do I find you?”

  “I’ll be on the track, jamming as sacker tart.”

  “You’ll be how much, where, with pastry?” Jewel said, picturing naked Jello-wrestling, but Lena had hung up. “That was Lena Sacker, your co-star from Hot Pink Studios,” she said to the sex demon in the passenger seat. “She’s found hinky stuff at, get this, her roller derby practice.”

  “I’ll call Clay,” Randy said, pulling out his own phone.

  Randy loved his cell phone. For two hundred years he hadn’t owned so much as a TV or a pair of pants, and he used his phone as often as he could. Now that he had a paycheck, too, Jewel didn’t object.

  She said, “Provided we survive this pink shit, we can exit at Michigan, swing east, and pick him up on the office front steps.”

  Jewel was senior investigator of the Hinky Division of Chicago’s Department of Consumer Services, protecting citizens as best she could from magical mishaps without ever, ever mentioning the word “magic.” Clay and Randy both worked under her. Which was a total joke. Clay worked when he felt like it, and Randy was under her — and all over her — and inside her, day and night.

  She guessed she had to call him her boyfriend now.

  Randy murmured into his phone.

  The pink smog seemed to press against her windshield and the window beside her. She switched her engine off.

  For something to do besides panic, Jewel watched Randy. His black hair was longer now, pulled back in a ponytail that softened the aristocratic planes of his face. He always wore a crisp, white, tailored shirt with his favorite black Armani suit or, as now, with blue jeans. He looked hot and poised and relaxed and powerful. She loved listening to his fancy English accent, even when he was annoying her with his English lord ego.

  Earlier that summer, while undercover busting a fake sex therapist, she had released him from the “treatment bed” and acquired a hinky roommate... a roommate who would stop at nothing to give her an orgasm... a roommate who was ruthless about getting his own way.

  He made her crazy. She was quite aware that she was hopelessly addicted to his mojo.

  His black eyes, sometimes soft, sometimes sharp as jet, narrowed as he spoke to his former rival.

  Be nice to Clay, she prayed. She hadn’t slept with Clay in a while, not since Randy had made it clear in his maddening way that he cared. Clay was their teammate in the department. They all had to work together. Randy was still jealous of him.

  Randy frowned, listening to the phone, and his lips tightened. Then he glanced over at her. Her heart lurched. As if he knew how she felt, he reached out and touched her hand, and she suffered a ripple of ecstasy that shouldn’t happen unless a person was actually getting laid by someone with godlike pleasuring powers.

  As he glanced over at her, their eyes locked, and suddenly she was falling, falling into him, thinking, I want you, I want to be with you, I want to vanish into you. The world swam around her. Scary, but good. Good and scary. Like he always said to her, Are you aroused because you’re afraid, or afraid because you’re aroused?

  Behind them, a car honked. The pink stuff was fading.

  Jewel blinked, and put the car in gear.

  Randy smiled a little, then went back to tightening his lips at the phone, where Clay was no doubt being annoying. />
  There had been something so patronizing in that smile. I know how you feel. And it’s okay.

  It was not okay. It shook her. Her heart thumped and her tummy felt unsettled.

  At last Randy tucked his phone away. “Clay prefers to stay at the office. Things to do.”

  “What things?” Those two always irritated each other. She should have called Clay herself.

  “He declined to inform me.”

  Jewel resolved to discuss this with Clay at length, when Randy wasn’t around. Clay used to be a con artist — most recently, a fake sex therapist — but that was over. At least, she hoped it was over. The thought of what he might get up to away from her supervision didn’t help her anxiety level.

  “Turn on the radio,” she said. “It’s almost time for ‘Ask Your Shrink.’”

  “—Understand you’re uncomfortable in traffic. Are you remembering to breathe?” came the voice of Your Shrink, calm and faintly Teutonic, like a cross between Sigmund Freud and your mom.

  “I’m afraid to breathe! What if that stuff gets into my lungs?”

  “Breathe, breathe. You are strong and you are safe. There is no danger.”

  Jewel listened as Your Shrink talked the motorist, who was probably stopped in traffic somewhere within a hundred yards of them right now, off his window ledge. Your Shrink talked a good Hinky Policy line. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, cope.” Her voice was soothing, even if she was full of bullshit.

  There couldn’t be a soul left in Chicago who didn’t know the city was under siege by weird magical phenomena, like a lot of cities around the world. But da mayor’s Hinky Policy actually seemed to be working. Chicagoans coped. Creatively, resentfully, or simply trying to turn a dollar on the hinky stuff, they coped.

  Jewel herself called in to “Ask Your Shrink” fairly often, although she never used her real name. It was the closest to therapy she could ever get. She knew too much that could never be told.

  o0o

  The derby practice track occupied a big-box retail building that had once anchored a mall on Cicero’s northern edge. Inside the cavernous room, women in tights jogged slowly around on an oval track taped on the concrete. A set of cheap metal bleachers sat on one side. Jewel and Randy climbed to seats on the top row.

  More women trickled out onto the floor and started warming up. Jewel saw that they wore uniform jerseys with their names printed on their backs: Irrita Belle, Stun Bunny, Rapture Snatch, Bichon Frizzy. They jogged. They pranced. They kicked their own butts with their heels. They leapfrogged.

  Which one would be Lena? Only a few girls had fashion-perfect bodies. They seemed to be all sizes, from tall down to shrimpy, from scrawny to fridge-shaped to spherical.

  She stole a glance at Randy. Was he interested?

  Of course he was. His black eyes were bright. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching. His very name was a dirty joke, and one he had fully embraced in his two-hundred-years’ servitude as an incubus haunting a brass bed.

  Of course the derby girls turned him on.

  Jewel stifled a sigh.

  After they jogged, the derby girls stretched. Then they did push-ups for an appalling length of time. Jewel got tired just watching. After the push-ups — man-style, she noted — came sit-ups and leg lifts. On and on and on. Good grief. Jewel considered herself to be in adequate shape for someone with half a desk job. That looked like it hurt.

  “What are we waiting for?” Randy said.

  “Pink stuff,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “But we can’t identify ourselves as Department of Consumer Services.”

  He nodded intelligently. “Undercover.” Randy loved going undercover.

  Finally the team put on skates and about fifty-seven pads, helmets, and scary-looking tooth-guard things that made them look like boxers.

  Then they skated.

  Jewel’s breath caught.

  At first they just rolled around in a mob, about thirty of them. Some seemed to be pushing for speed. Some skated on one foot, then the other. Some skated backwards. The one labeled Donna Draper did goofy stunts like putting one ankle behind her head and skating on the other foot. Somebody went down with a whoop, who? Fist Kist, a big girl with a high, hard stomach. That had to hurt. But the others calmly skated around the fallen girl, and she got right up and skated on.

  They were fast and strong, sexy in their tank tops and kneepads, totally focused, whizzing past one another with inches to spare, fearless. Jewel felt a stab of envy.

  In that moment, she thought, I want that.

  An hour into the practice they took a long break. Randy got up and stalked off to the men’s room. Jewel sat, stunned and charmed and fascinated, her butt going flat on the hard bench. She tingled all over. I’m not strong enough to do that, she thought. But I could be.

  “Let me guess,” somebody said in her ear. “Sometime in the past hour you said to yourself, ‘I want that.’”

  Jewel turned her head. Lena Sacker, AKA Velvita Fromage the porn star of Hot Pink Studios, not exactly recognizable in a sport bra, bike shorts, knee pads, elbow pads, wrist pads, and big, clunky skates with wheels on all four corners, sat down beside her on the bench. The tooth guard, shiny with spit, was stuck into a hole in her helmet. Jewel thought Lena looked infinitely sexier this way than when she was on camera, naked except for fuck-me heels, energetically boinking some porn star with a nine-inch schweinstücke.

  Thank goodness Randy was in the restroom.

  “How did you know?”

  “Because it happened to me.” Lena looked Jewel over the way she always did, like a madam inspecting a wannabe ho. “You ever do any team sports?”

  “Basketball in high school.”

  “Do anything now?”

  Stung, Jewel said, “Not much. I swim in Lake Michigan five months of the year.”

  “My goodness. You’re tough enough, I guess.”

  “Thanks so much,” Jewel snapped. “Now, why are we here?”

  “Besides so I can derby hit on you? Wait ’til after the break. Then you’ll see scrimmage.”

  Lena turned her head to look out at the floor, where girls were lying on their backs, twisting themselves into pretzels, or touching their skate toes. Her voice lowered.

  “It happens during scrimmage. You’ve got a good view up here — just keep your eye out while we’re rolling. That’s when things happen. I can’t talk about it here — okay, gotta go.” She stood.

  “When can we talk?” Jewel said.

  Lena picked up her helmet and slapped it on her head. “After practice. Come down onto the track then. I’ll introduce you to coach. Get you started.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to do this.” Jewel’s heart hammered in her chest. But you know I do. Hell, you knew I would.

  Lena smiled. “And then we can go have a drink. And talk about pink on the rink.”

  As Lena clumped carefully down the bleachers to the track level, Jewel glanced in the other direction and noticed that Randy had returned from the toilet. She’d actually forgotten that he was here with her. It had to be the first time in months that she hadn’t felt him hovering like a phantom orgasm, never more than a few feet away from her.

  Randy was staring at Jewel, not at Lena.

  She flushed guiltily, which was totally backwards. She looked away, down at the track.

  The back of Lena’s black tank top read, Sacker Tart.

  In a confusion of adrenaline, envy, and longing, Jewel’s one coherent thought was, I gotta get me a derby name.

  Chapter Two

  Scrimmage scared the crap out of her.

  The group divided in half. Half sat down. The other half sorted itself into teams. Girls donned tank tops and tees until some were wearing black tops, some white.

  Lena’s black-topped group scrimmaged against white. Apparently this meant that a whistle blew, and ten girls started to rumble in a big, tight mosh. Their skates bumped into each other and slammed on the floor. Jewel couldn’t follo
w the action. Everyone seemed to be milling around, shoving, slipping ahead, getting slammed into the wall, sliding sideways, yet somehow always moving forward. She settled for keeping her eyes glued to Lena, AKA Sacker Tart.

  “What the hell are the rules, anyway?” she muttered.

  Randy pointed. “The jammers — Sacker Tart and Bichon Frizzy — work their way through the pack. The first to achieve this becomes lead jammer. Thereafter, each time they pass a member of the opposing team, they score a point. The lead jammer has the privilege of bringing the jam to a premature conclusion, should she so choose, to prevent her opponent from scoring points.”

  She sent him a funny look. “How do you know all this?”

  “Television. Roller derby was popular in the sixties.”

  Right. Trapped in bed for two hundred years, he’d watched a lot of TV. “You know the weirdest things.”

  Sacker Tart, Jewel realized, was working her way through the crowd toward the front. So was the other girl with a star on her helmet, Bichon Frizzy. They broke free of the pack together and raced neck-and-neck, each struggling to pass the other.

  Sacker Tart leaped forward in front of Bichon Frizzy and went down, curling into a ball even as Bichon Frizzy fell over on top of her, kicking her in the helmet as she rolled. The pack roared along, thirty feet behind them and closing.

  Fuck! Jewel thought, terrified for Sacker Tart.

  But before the whole pack could catch up and roll over them, Sacker Tart was up again, racing ahead.

  And, one half-second later, Bichon Frizzy was on her skates again.

  Jewel blinked. I was watching the whole time. Bichon Frizzy hadn’t scrambled up. She just flickered, like a bit of film skipping over a break. And then she was skating again.

  A faint trail of pink glitter seemed to follow her, like a boat wake.

  Jewel elbowed Randy and pointed to the pink stuff. They exchanged glances, and then she looked back at the skaters.

  Unbelievably soon, Sacker Tart had skated all the way around the track. She was coming up behind Bichon Frizzy. Jewel watched with incredulity as Sacker crouched lower on her skates, angled her body, and clipped the other woman’s thigh with her butt, knocking her into another skater. Bichon Frizzy went down again. Sacker Tart skated on.