THE DIRTY ONES

by JA Huss

  “Buddy system,” I murmur back.

  The best thing about this cottage is the view from my bed at night. There’s a large window and a long wall running perpendicular to it, perfect for bed placement. I didn’t realize this when I put the bed along this wall, but the first night I slept in here after the remodel was finished, it hit me in the face like a very sweet surprise.

  The angle of the bed and the placement of the window frames a gap in the thick trees surrounding the cottage, and in that gap there are stars.

  Not tonight. Tonight it’s just the constant fast-falling snow lit up by a hidden full moon. But the heavy flakes make a white curtain that dulls the blackness of space and makes me feel like I’m underneath a fluffy down comforter.

  I stare at it, lids heavy and tired, even though five minutes ago the idea of sleep felt as foreign as the man out in my living room, so I allow myself to drift away…

  When he comes up the stone stairs to the second floor of the tower his expression is one of expectant surprise. And by that I mean he knew this was coming. Some part of him knew that I’d get a night alone with him eventually.

  It’s only fair, right?

  “What’s going on? Where’s Sofia?”

  “She has the night off,” I say, then add, “I guess,” to make it seem like I didn’t play a part in these unusual circumstances.

  “Huh,” he says, taking a seat on the long, crushed-velvet couch.

  The couch was Camille’s request. It’s been here since the second week we played this little game. Camille got the point of the game before the rest of us because she and Bennett went first, so she took that little pad of paper sitting on top of the wooden box marked “suggestions” seriously.

  This room is her imagination incarnate because that first night we came up here the whole floor was empty. Nothing but cold stone to fill up the darkness.

  We each had a candle. There’s no power in this building. It’s some leftover relic of master masonry from back in the days of soldiers and forts. So that’s all there was. Just seven people holding seven candles, standing in the dark.

  But tonight the walls are covered in elaborate tapestries. The cold floors are warmed with threadbare Persian rugs. There’s more than just one couch too. Louise asked for another one about a month into things. That’s the one I’m sitting on. Thick pillows and soft cushions slipcovered in cream mold to my body like perfect summer-day clouds.

  This couch is out of tune with Camille’s vision of the room, but no one cared. Not even Camille, because that first crushed-velvet couch is about as comfortable as a church pew.

  There are four more chairs, each situated on a diagonal so that all the seating is arranged in an elaborate circle built for conversation.

  And oh, the conversations we’ve had up here.

  That alone could fill a book.

  Not a sexy one. Not an erotic one, like what was actually being written. But a fantastic mystery for sure.

  How many nights did we sit up here in our circle of seven, trying to figure out what was happening? Who was doing this? What it all meant and how we’d have to pay the price for the hedonism that took place within these four walls?

  Too many.

  Hayes wanted a bar. Fully stocked with a long list of expensive liquor and champagne. The sound of ice dropping into cut-crystal glasses will always remind me of Hayes. Hayes and I were always drunk when we had our time together. Louise didn’t partake, but she tried to opt out of everything.

  Bennett wanted a Victrola you could make play by turning a crank. Old, crackly music will always remind me of Bennett. He would offer Camille his hand and she’d accept. He’d pull her into the center of the room and they’d dance in slow circles for hours sometimes. Putting off the inevitable.

  Sofia wanted clothes. Gowns. Racks and racks of them. We played dress-up when I spent the evening with Sofia and Connor. It was so weird.

  Louise wanted games. Monopoly, checkers, chess, backgammon, Life, Trouble, Hungry Hungry Hippos. Shit like that. Every fucking week it was another goddamned game.

  She’d gone well past weird by that time, but it wasn’t this place that did that to her. Louise was just naturally weird. Always asking us weird questions about shit.

  What were those questions?

  I can’t remember. I just remember the games.

  I asked for books. So by this time, at the end of the school year, we had stacks and stacks of them. No shelf—no one bothered to waste a suggestion on a shelf, not even Camille, even though she sometimes read them too. Always looking for a way to escape her fate. They just lined the perimeter of the room in tall towers like soldiers keeping the walls at bay.

  Connor wanted nothing. He never once dropped a suggestion into the box.

  I admired that about him. How he resisted the perks but never the acts.

  He was into the acts.

  We all were, even me, who was only there to write them all down in perfect detail.

  I’d gotten good at my job by this time. My words flowed effortlessly as I chronicled what happened in the second floor of the tower. Maybe they weren’t prose, but they were on their way.

  “So…” Connor says. “What do we do?”

  I smile at him from my couch. “What you always do, Con.”

  “Who’s writing it down?”

  “No one,” I say. “Not this time. This time it’s just…” But I can’t fill in the blank. I’m young, and embarrassed, and even though the things I’ve witnessed and done in this room over the past nine months should’ve cured me of any lingering childhood shyness, I feel shy.

  “Just what?” he asks. “Your turn?”

  I shrug, eyes tracking him as he gets up off his couch and walks across the well-worn Persian rug to sit next to me. “You wanted a night alone with me?” he asks.

  I look him in the eye when I say, “Wouldn’t you?”

  He grins, his hands already on my body. Already squeezing my breasts. That sweet spot between my legs is already throbbing with desire when a finger slides against it, pressing down and moving in small circles.

  I close my eyes, confident that this is right when I reach for his hard cock and squeeze it through the fabric of his pants.

  His mouth finds mine in that same moment. Open, hungry, tongue inside me. It’s a kiss of lovers who know each other well. And we do. We’ve done this lots of times, just never alone.

  I’m breathing hard. My fingers fumble with the button, then stumble over his zipper, but he’s not having any problems finding his way underneath my panties. And the wetness I’ve been saving for this moment spills out onto his fingertips as he pushes them inside me, thrusting with an urgency I’ve only dreamed about.

  “I was hoping for this,” he says, talking into our kiss.

  “Me too,” I whisper back.

  “Did you ask for a night with Bennett and Hayes too?”

  I don’t even freeze up at the question. And my answer is truthful. “No.”

  This excites him more. And when I pull his cock free of his pants, he’s so thick and stiff, I want to do things to that cock. Dirty things. Kiss the tip. Put my mouth around it and suck. Take him deep into my throat.

  But he’s not ready to move on to that. Not yet. Because he pushes me backwards. Hard, making me bounce into the soft cloud-like cushions of the comfy couch, and then he roughly tugs my panties down, throws my legs over his shoulder, and opens them up. A gleam of mischief in his eyes. A wry, slanted smile cutting across his face. Grinning as he lowers himself between my thighs and licks me with one long sweep of his tongue.

  I buck my back, not ready for the sensations that flood my body.

  He eats me out like a hungry animal. Like he’s been waiting for this opportunity as long as I have.

  This is right, I internalize. This isn’t the dirty game. That’s what we play when we’re together with Sofia and the others. This is something different. Something real. Something outside of all those other nights. Apart, and sp
ecial, and good.

  I think that the whole time he licks my pussy. The whole time I suck his cock. The whole time he fucks me. Even after we’re done, when he’s getting dressed. I think it as he zips his pants and adjusts his shirt. When he grins at me one last all-knowing time and disappears down the stairs.

  But I stay in the tower. Hours longer. Writing down every detail. Reliving every single moment in my head and transferring it to the book where it won’t be lost. Hoping one day, through some miracle, he reads it.

  Then praying he doesn’t.

  I wake up in the real world with his real hands on my real body.

  I reach for him, tugging him down next to me, fully aware that everything I’ve done is about to come back and kick my ass. But not caring one bit.

  No regrets. No apologies.

  Because it will all have been worth it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN - CONNOR

  After Kiera goes to bed I just run all this through my head over and over on an endless loop.

  I wish I could say I never saw this coming, but we knew.

  We all knew what we were doing. How we were active participants in our own inevitable decline.

  I just hoped it would come later than this. Not when I was still a rising star. I figured it would all explode once I was established. Once my power was consolidated and I was thoroughly addicted to it and would do anything to keep it all from unraveling.

  So maybe this is better? Maybe this is a choice? Maybe even a way out of that future someone else dreamed up for me.

  Maybe if I never become that self-absorbed, power-hungry political hack the world will be a better place?

  Maybe whoever did this to us understands me better than I understand myself?

  Maybe they’re actually trying to save me?

  That’s some altruistic fuckery on their part, for sure. But in the end, will I be a better person if I never enter the world of global puppeteers?

  Honestly, lying here in Kiera’s living room, staring up at the ceiling as I listen to her breathe through her dreams down the hall, I could go for that life. One where I leave the family name and the expectations that come with it behind. Forget the power I’ll have. And the money that will flow. Because that’s what it does when you already have it.

  It just flows.

  I could leave behind the family estate, like Kiera did. Even though she says she was cut out. I still find that hard to believe. Something weird is happening there.

  Maybe I’ll make things up to her and figure that shit out. Give her back the family estate.

  It’s not a big estate. The land is there. And the lake view with a boathouse and a dock. But the house is modest by my family’s standards. Five or six bedrooms. Four or five thousand square feet. This cottage. And all of it’s old, but not the same way that our estate is old either.

  It’s the Vermont side of Lake Champlain, for one thing. And it’s not made of stone, or brick, or gold, for that matter.

  Our mansion is so well maintained, our lawns and gardens so well kept, our stables and outbuildings so well updated, you’d never know the entire place was built over a hundred years ago when our old money was still nouveau riche.

  The Arlington name is synonymous with wealth, and power, and privilege.

  Bonnaire, on the other hand. Who are the Bonnaires, anyway?

  I know Kiera was on some kind of free-ride scholarship. And it makes sense. Her family must’ve all gone to Essex over the years. This house is one ferry ride across the lake away, after all. But she never did explain her status.

  By the time the game ended we’d pretty much figured things out. It was about controlling us. I know that for certain. Forcing us to understand that we have a part to play in the world and this book we were writing was… what do they call it in those secret societies? Oh, yeah. Mutually assured destruction.

  We knew why we were playing, what it all meant, and who was who.

  Except for Kiera.

  We accepted her as the outsider. The necessary impartial observer who kept us in check. She wrote our fates in the book.

  But we never looked too close, did we?

  We saw what they wanted us to see.

  A girl from a respectable family who could wordsmith. And standing next to just about anyone Kiera Bonnaire looks like a shiny new thing, doesn’t she?

  But standing next to us… she is dull, and small, and average.

  I like that about her.

  Not that she is those things, but that she’s not. Not in the real world. It is only our surreal fantasy life that makes her look like second best.

  I get up off the couch and walk over to the book shelf, randomly pluck one out, and take it back to the couch, switching on the little lamp on the side table as I sit.

  Disappearing, it’s called. I read the back cover to get a sense of the story. It’s not a kidnapping book, like I first thought, but a story of a girl who slowly goes crazy when an unseen tormentor takes over her life, but she later falls in love with him.

  It’s just another metaphor for what happened that year, isn’t it?

  So typical of her books. Why does she write this shit? And I’m not talking about the sex, even though flipping to a random page gives me enough pornographic entertainment I feel myself getting hard after reading a few paragraphs.

  I’m talking about the theme. I might not have read her books but I saw them on the internet. I understood what they were. Her body of work is all darkness and secrets. It’s all rough sex and no fairytale endings. There are no princes, no castles, no fireside declarations of eternal love.

  It’s nothing but villains, and dungeons, and cold stone walls that mutter, This is what you deserve.

  But the answer is obvious. She, like all the rest of us, pretends none of it mattered when in reality what we did that year as the Dirty Ones has shaped us into the people we are today. And she is these characters. They are her, inside and out.

  Who would I be if that year never happened? Would I be better? Or worse?

  I decide… I’d be my father. I’d be my brother Jack. I’d be my brother Stenton. And while I love them all in a son and brother kind of way, I don’t really like them in the way that counts.

  Worse, I decide. I’d be a worse person if I was never a Dirty One.

  Who will I be when this next mystery sorts itself out? Better? Or worse?

  Remains to be seen, I guess.

  I could give up the opulence of Long Island’s North Shore. The lavish parties and extravagant charity functions coordinated by useless housewives to help them feel whole again. I could walk away from the expectations and political aspirations. After all, being a US Senator wasn’t my fucking dream, was it?

  What was my dream?

  Did I ever have one?

  I know I go along. I get it. I’ve always known that it was easier to say yes to my father than it was to say no. And I had role models, didn’t I? My brothers showed me the way. I didn’t make a decision, I realize. I just emulated them the way I was supposed to.

  Am I so used to my station in life that I need to ponder the meaning of my existence by having an existential crisis? I mean, that is practically the definition of privilege, right? People who are so well situated, so comfortable they need to make up crises to justify their worth to the world.

  I toss the book aside and get up. Walk to the edge of the hallway and listen.

  She’s mumbling things in her sleep. Having a bad dream, or maybe a good one.

  I walk towards her open door and stop, peering in as my eyes adjust to the almost inexplicable brightness that finds its way into the room.

  I never understood that about winter nights, but it makes sense, I guess. The snow reflects the moonlight, even though the moon is hidden by the cloud cover. It’s some physical law of the natural world explained by the words ‘refraction,’ or ‘reflection,’ or some shit like that. Concepts I don’t get and don’t want to.

  Except when I find myself in the spotlight-like beam
of that elusive brilliance and start to question my own sanity.

  Which is where I am now.

  Why am I here and what am I doing?

  Kiera sighs in her sleep, turns, her body wrapped up in the thick, white comforter. Her face is flushed and her mouth is open, moaning slightly, like she’s in the middle of an erotic experience.

  I walk towards her bed, pull the covers back, and get in, my legs sliding against hers, my hand on her shoulder as I gently shake her awake. “Kiera,” I say. “You’re dreaming.”

  She reaches for me. Pulls me into her. Hands already on my developing hardness, squeezing me the way she does. Did. Does, apparently, because she’s doing it now.

  “Come here,” she says. “Be real for me, please.”

  I decide we’re both having the same crisis tonight.

  Two fucked-up people. And five more waiting, somewhere else, to make our dirty-secret past something in the present again.

  I kiss her. Open-mouthed. The way we used to.

  And she kisses me back, just as hungry for a repeat performance as I am.

  Fuck that snow-covered spotlight outside. Fuck the coming morning. Fuck the inevitable consequences.

  I want her.

  And she wants me. Even if it’s only in a half-awake state, I’ll take it.

  I pull her on top of me. Her hips grind against my cock as we kiss, our tongues twisting together like old friends who haven’t seen each other in ages. Lifetimes, maybe.

  She gropes at the waistband of my briefs, so I help her pull them down my legs, then get to work on her shorts. They come off easy, the soft shearling brushing against my own skin as I drag them over her knees and let her take care of the rest. Her shirt comes off as she sits up, straddling me now, her pussy already wet from her dream, and I wonder for a second if she was dreaming about me, or was it someone else? Someone I don’t know. Some nameless, faceless man who has captured her attention in the years I’ve ignored her.

  But then her tits are resting on my chest as she leans back down, still hungry, and we get lost in another kiss.