by Gabi Moore
He turned back to me.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. He was the rich, asshole one-percenter, and I was the honest, truth-loving journalist who was going to expose him to the world. It was like he didn’t even know how this story was supposed to go.
He was looking down at the chessboard.
You wouldn’t think someone with such triumphantly toned pec muscles could look disappointed, but he did. And I felt bad.
“You misunderstand me,” he said. “I know what the press makes me out to be, obviously. But the way you wrote about me was …different. You get it. What did she say…?” he looked over to Kai, who immediately parroted off a line from my article.
“She said, ‘Hood is not the first to troll the media with fake ‘leaks’, but why should he stop there? When you’re as wealthy as he is, you can afford an extra identity or two.’”
He chuckled.
“Man, I love that line,” he said, clapping his hands together. He stared meditatively at the chessboard again, Kai looking pleased at having performed well.
Was it some weird sort of S&M thing? Was there a dungeon somewhere in this stupidly huge house? That would make for a good story.
“I love it because it’s so true. I want you to write more like that. You’re good at creating characters, so make another one for me. I don’t like the image they have of me right now”
“The image?” I asked, thinking that he must be deluded if he thought the media had got him all wrong and that the model sipping champagne in his lap right now was somehow not what it looked like.
“Yeah. The image. Go on – what do think of me? Tell me. Three words.”
“Three words? What do you--”
“Yeah, quickly. Tom Hood. First three words that pop into your head. Go.”
“Ok bu--”
“No, just do it.”
I squirmed in my chair. I was mesmerized by how tight and vibrant his skin seemed. Warrior-like, I thought, making a note to say so in my revised piece. But I was also aware of another image trying to push into my mind. My gaze fell on the toned V shape disappearing into his pants, and I thought with horror about how well I knew how that shape continued down over the rest of him.
“Ok. Stupid,” I said. This seemed to upset Kai more than it did him.
“And …privileged,” I said after a pause. “Or maybe, entitled.” This elicited a tiny twitch around his mouth but he only sat silently, waiting for the third word.
My eyes flicked over his bare stomach again.
“And. Well. Sexy.” I said this like it had been tortured out of me.
When I looked up I fell immediately into the beam of his gaze again.
“But I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Can we just start with the interview?” I said, a little embarrassed.
What had made him make that sound on the phone yesterday? What made this man happy? What did he do, secretly, for pleasure? What did he do with this beautiful woman in all these rooms? What special words and gestures and actions would get him to make that sound again?
“Start? We started ten minutes ago. This is the interview. You’re going to write a story, a different story, and you’re going to make sure I don’t seem stupid or entitled or privileged. You’re going to--”
“Mr. Hood,” I snapped, “I’m not your hired PR person. You don’t get to tell me what to write,” I said, lashing out at even the slightest suggestion that I would slot into his vast harem somehow.
A slow, strange smile spread over his lips.
Reading some invisible change in the tides, Kai jumped up, stood behind him and began to gracefully massage his shoulders with long, womanly fingers. He spoke again, this time the velvety quality giving way to something rougher and more abrasive.
“Penelope Welsh has a net worth of around $1.2 million. I could buy your magazine before breakfast tomorrow and easily tell you what to do.”
He was stroking the curved neck of the wooden Queen piece, turning her over again and again in his fingers.
“But I won’t, because I have better things to do with my time, and besides, you want to write what I tell you. That’s why you’re here.”
I nearly laughed out loud. I didn’t know what surprised me more, his audacity, or the fact that I had trouble summoning up a rebuttal to it.
“Go on, leave if you’re not interested,” he said, gesturing to the door, while I fumbled for a response.
I was shocked at the sudden nasty turn things seemed to have taken. I began to wonder if I had been too rude, and played out a future where Penelope would tear me a new one for not only failing to apologize, but losing what could be a very lucrative story for Cache.
“I’m …I’m sorry. That was rude of me,” I said simply. Kai’s eyes met mine for a brief moment, over the strong curve of his shoulder. For a moment, there was nothing in the room but her nimble fingers working on the tanned tendons around his neck.
He looked at me pointedly.
“Why are you limiting yourself with that job, anyway? Writing trash for Penelope Welsh, for peanuts? You’re too good to be that kind of journalist, you know. You’re an artist. Like me,” he said, and this time I did laugh out loud.
An artist? This guy had a massive chip on his shoulder.
This time, the twitch on the corner of his mouth was more pronounced. Kai stopped massaging him and looked a little alarmed.
Shit. I had gone too far again.
He placed a hand on hers and spoke again.
“I’m going to ignore your insult. You know, I’ve read every piece of yours. You’re talented. You’ve worked hard to get were you are. I admire that. But your voice is wasted where you are now, and you know that, so I won’t tell you again. You think I’m an idiot and you don’t even bother hiding your contempt for me. But I complimented you and you responded with venom. I suppose you’re getting the proper journalistic training there after all.”
This little speech was delivered so eloquently, so quickly and with such precision that I felt cut. The beginnings of tears were stinging my eyes. It was true. I had made a career of my shitty attitude, calling it “insightful comment” and “wit”, but he was right. I wanted more than anything to be taken seriously, as an artist, and this bonehead had figured me out in ten minutes. My face prickled but my ego stung more.
‘I’m …I’m sorry you feel that way, Cache magazine is--” I started but he interrupted me again.
“Yeah, don’t bother. You know what keeps rags like Cache afloat? Stories about people like me. That’s it. That’s all. You have the nerve to look down on me and yet every time I do something, you reporters swoop in like vultures, ready to make money off it. ‘Fair’? If you say so. Judge my life all you want, but it pays your salary.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself. All the pieces the magazine had done on him over the years where crowding my mind, and I desperately searched for something to argue back with.
He had inherited a huge chunk of money from his father, had invested it in dodgy fracking technology in Canada, had called the president a “tit” to his face. For god’s sake, this was the man who had just last month been in the papers for hosting pirate themed yacht orgies in the Mediterranean – and he was lecturing me about my integrity? It was too much.
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but I was floundering.
“Hey, shh, don’t worry about it, I’m not angry. But you know what I’ve noticed about journalists?” His voice was calmer now, and Kai began stroking his shoulders again.
“They’re cowardly. They don’t do much of anything themselves, they just sit on the sidelines, watching everyone else. Now that I think of it, it’s all pretty voyeuristic.”
His hand had reached up to Kai’s again and was absentmindedly stroking hers in return.
“I’ll write your story. I didn’t mean to offend you. I want to show the public who you really are.”
He didn’t seem all that interested in my new conf
ession, although I had startled myself with how easily I had given it. He was staring vacantly at a spot in front of him, thinking. Kai began to trace her hand down the front of his chest and he accepted it, not breaking his gaze or train of thought. She leant forward, letting the full lusciousness of her breasts and hair fall over him. She nuzzled herself into his neck and he gripped her forearms, trapping her there. He snapped his eyes up and straight to meet mine again, catching me staring. The effect was electrifying.
“Do you? Do you really want to show them …or do you just want to watch?”
He began to gently kiss the length of Kai’s thin arms, his eyes never breaking their gaze with mine.
My entire body flushed with the intensity of the moment.
“You’re curious about me, aren’t you? I think you’re like everyone else, you have a morbid fascination with me …you wish you could …wish you had the guts to do what I do...” he mumbled this in between kisses he was planting on her soft, white skin.
He had a way of saying things that you simply couldn’t argue with. He was an arrogant asshole. But he was also right. I didn’t dwell on whether I was enjoying this new flagrant display, or whether he was spot on and that I did want to see him kiss this beautiful woman’s arms, and maybe even do other things to her, and know exactly what he did on the phone yesterday, and what turned him on, and what he really thought of me, and what his life was really like, every bizarre, sordid, sexy inch of it…
But I didn’t focus on that. I thought, instead, about how he must be a sex-crazed exhibitionist, him and this woman both, and that they were both playing with me, and that I would write an awfully clever piece later on about these eccentricities …but was he right about the magazine? Where we all just feeding off him?
I said nothing. I couldn’t. Keeping my breathing steady was apparently taking every last drop of effort I had.
“What do you think, Kai, do you think she’ll get rid of that ugly blue dress and come play with us?”
My heart beat furiously in my ears. Kai gave me a long, slow look, dripping with more sexiness than you’d think possible for anything other than a black panther.
“I think she wants to keep her ugly dress on,” Kai said, “But later, when she goes home tonight, she’ll wish she had taken it off.”
Who the hell was this woman anyway?
With a deep breath that seemed to expand his already broad chest, he twisted his head to the side and received a deep, wet kiss from Kai, slipping his hand through her hair and pulling her down further into him. With a strange little thrill, I noticed that his nipples were hardening under her girlish hands.
She drifted away and he returned his gaze to mine, something warmed and loose in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
“Go ahead then, prove to me you’re not like every other coward journalist and do something instead of just writing about it.” He turned his torso again, giving me a full view of his crotch and angling Kai so that she came round to the front of him and seated herself on the floor at his feet.
“You’re very angry, Miss Mack. Just look at Kai …isn’t she so beautiful? She’s not afraid to be vulnerable. She’s very submissive you know. Not my thing, personally, but look how happy it makes her,” he said teasingly to the top of her head; she replied by giggling and playfully slapping the top of his thigh.
“Is it true, the rumor about those tar sands in Canada?” I asked, afraid of where this was going.
“Not even remotely,” he said, fixing his gaze on Kai, who was nestling her face into his crotch.
“Did you really inherit everything from your father?”
“I never inherited a single cent from anyone.”
“Is it true that you called the president a tit?”
“Nope. I called him an asshole,” he replied, watching closely as she began to gingerly trace the outline of his cock through his pants.
“Is it really even you in those pictures?”
He looked at me and grinned.
“Of course.”
I felt a dull ache growing between my thighs. I really did want to get out of this dress. I really was too angry. And I really did want to know about him, everything about him…
My head was spinning.
He reached down and tenderly tucked Kai’s hair behind her ears, revealing that she was staring at him hungrily. With swift fingers, she began to pull down the zip, and he smiled peacefully down at her.
“I have to go,” I said abruptly, jumping up from my seat. They both turned confused faces to me.
“Don’t go,” he said to me with the same tenderness.
I wanted to stay. I wanted Kai to unzip him and put all of him in her mouth, and I wanted to watch her coax that manly, delicious sound from him again. I wanted to see his arrogance shudder a little, and slip off. I wondered how he was when he came; whether he would lose control and grunt and clench his teeth, or whether he went soft and only whimpered, throwing back his head and giving in to pleasure. I wanted to catalogue everything this strong, healthy man’s body did, and I wanted to document its every twitch and sigh, everything that gave it pleasure.
But another, stronger force compelled me to stand up awkwardly and before I knew it, I was racing down the same glittery halls I had walked only a few moments earlier. I tore down the swooping staircase and out of the house, heart pounding, completely disbelieving of the things I had seen in there. My head was spinning with the improbability of this whole thing, and with some amusement, I realized I was soaking wet.
Kai was wrong about me.
I didn’t regret not taking my dress off when they had asked me. I regretted it that very instant, when I turned back and took one last glimpse of the house, with a growing, desperate pang that I hadn’t had the guts to be in there right at that moment.
Chapter Six
Let me tell you, nothing in this world seems so boring after such an encounter than a full 8-hour day of sitting in front of a laptop.
Had my job always been this lackluster? I had something of a stimulus hangover form the night before. It was all too much. The champagne, Kai, the never-ending acres of manicured gardens I had to run through to leave… I have left plenty of heated moments in my life, let me tell you, but something about having to make your way through twelve rooms, a billiard area and a giant reception hall before you can slam the door behind you can make any girl disoriented.
It was all well and good for filthy-rich people like Kai and Tom to lounge around and be degenerates all day. But some of us had to make a living. A real living. I’m sure I could be an eccentric sexual connoisseur too if I didn’t have to get up early in the morning and remember to give my cat his medicine every day.
I was irritated, but some of what Tom had said had taken root in my mind and was growing there, quietly.
The way he put it, it did seem like the media had swarmed around his larger-than-life life, themselves creating this overblown image and then feeding off of it in turn. But surely Tom was no innocent party – in fact, he seemed to love the attention. Thrive on it. He had specifically requested me, some unknown junior writer at a shitty magazine (it had only taken me the morning to decide that he was right about this) to craft an even more enthralling tale for the plebian masses.
It was awesome. And I was right at the center of it, tasked with putting just the right words to bring out how truly epic the whole arrangement was, how we were all complicit in this modern day myth making, with Tom and his mammoth manhood standing at the epicenter of it all. It would be a brilliant article, my best work.
The trouble was, I couldn’t write. I sat for twenty minutes staring at an empty Word document. Everything that left my fingers felt phony. I backspaced it all, irritated. I wanted him to read it. To approve. He had lavished such soft, liquid gentleness all over Kai as she worked her fingers over his zip. And I wanted that for myself, I thought, not without a little embarrassment.
The tone of the piece was coming out all wrong. No sooner had I s
tarted to write, did I realize I hadn’t captured the real strangeness of this man’s presence, of how his well-spokenness wasn’t at odds with his underwear model body, but somehow a natural part of it. He was a complete man whore, true, but there was something else about him, something noble and admirable, something that I wasn’t managing to capture. Each paragraph just looked like something cheap and nasty from one of our rival magazines.
I backspaced everything and started again.
I had to show the reader how dazzling it had felt to be there with him, with the gravity of his presence seeming to warp and dominate everything around it.
I wanted to write about Kai, too, and about how completely she seemed to have surrendered to this invisible force. I didn’t write how jealous it had all made me, and how badly I had felt the pull to let myself slip away with the current of his charisma.
“Tom Hood nude pictures,” I asked Google for the bajillionth time that week.
Who was I kidding? It wasn’t even remotely “research” anymore.
I scrolled through and landed on the picture I had first obsessed over on my cold kitchen floor a lifetime ago. It was the same grainy candid celeb shot it always was, but this time it looked different to me.
This time, the expressions on the girls’ faces seemed so much more …joyful. Tom’s grim seemed broader, more wholesome, and the surface of each of his limbs seemed less flat, imbued with new depths somehow. People were wrong about him. He wasn’t a vapid playboy. He was an Adonis, and these women were not groupies, they were devotees, sexual pilgrims, and the only difference between them and me was that they had given way to his…
I threw my phone into my bag and stared at the blank page again. I was a professional. What I thought about him didn’t matter. Just write, dammit.
Chapter Seven
I turned the package over in my hands again and again. It was almost a perfect cube, tastefully wrapped and giving no clues at all about what could be inside.
“Oh my god, is what’s-his-name still sending you shit again?” said Clara.