by Kailin Gow
“Jaymie,” I say. I clutch my purse with Jaymie's ID in it. “Jaymie Wakeley. And yes, I can strip.
“I'd like to see.”
“I'm sure you would. What's your name?”
“Dick.” He grins.
“Really?”
“Richard Parker. At your service. Or are you at mine.”
He unbuttons the top button of my blouse. He inhales my scent. His fingers are expert.
“Go on, then,” he whispers. “Get on the pole.”
I do what he asks. I give them all a show. I get up on that pole and I give myself over to the desire that flows through my veins with my blood. Piece by piece, I remove my clothing, revealing my lingerie underneath. I know they're watching me; I know they're all watching me, but I don't care. I know how to do this. My body is expert; my muscle memory takes over.
Have I done this before? I wonder?
I shake out my hair. I lean in. I make eye contact with Dick, who is staring at me with a tantalizing mixture of desire and amusement. I focus all my efforts on getting him aroused. I remove my bra, revealing my large and shapely breasts. I can hear him gasp as I shake my hips, lean in, come closer then pull away.
He takes me by the waist. He looks me over, takes me in.
“Sit down,” he whispers.
I can feel his hard-on through his trousers – enormous, impossibly hard. It turns me on so much I can't think; automatically, I start to laugh.
“All right,” he says. “You've got the job.”
He looks up at me.
“You want to go fill out that paperwork, now?”
I know exactly what he means. I want it as badly, as desperately, as wildly as he does. I nod my head. “Yes,” I whisper.
He takes my hand and lets out a belly laugh.
“I'll be right back,” he tells the men sitting alongside him. Then he pulls me with him, back, behind the ballroom, to the second floor, where one of the mansion bedroom still remains: all 19th century furniture, gold leaf, wood panels, faded glory.
A desk is in one corner of the room, to be sure, but our eyes are both on the enormous four-poster canopy bed.
It happens so quickly, so wildly. Months of pent-up sexual energy have made me desperate for relief. At once he's all over me, removing his belt, his jeans, while I still wait before him, naked except for my black satin panties, my nipples hardening and reddening with desire while I wait, in agony, for him to touch me again.
Then he kisses me – my lips, at first, then my tender breasts, throbbing with need, then he goes lower, lower, to between my legs.
I scream so loud I think they must hear me downstairs. That first touch of his tongue on my clit sends waves through me. I'd forgotten how wildly, intoxicatingly good this feels.
I keep on screaming as he feels me, slowly, first with his tongue, then with his fingers.
Then he turns me over, slapping my ass with a grin on his face.
“You like that?”
“Yeah...” I can barely breathe. “Yes! Yes.”
He rams into me, his enormous cock filling me up, pushing me deeper and deeper into the bed.
“Damn, you're so gorgeous – so luscious. It's not every day a woman like you walks into Belle Reve wanting a job. I must have done something right in my life to deserve this.”
I squeal in delight, in ecstasy. I feel something powerful, passionate within me, something I've been missing for far too long.
The old me loved sex. That much I'm sure of.
It's the one thing I know about my past life that I didn't know before. This feeling, this orgasmic intensity – has the capacity to make me feel like myself.
And then, in the moment of orgasm, I have a vision.
Another man touching me. Another man inside me. A man with starlight eyes – my man. My husband. Inside of me, kissing me, touching, holding me with such a heady combination of gentleness and wild desire.
I don't know what it is. A memory. A feeling. A dream.
Whatever it is, it brings me to tears.
He loved me.
The feeling of my orgasm brings back that certainty.
My husband and I did this. My husband made me come. My husband loved me.
He couldn't have hurt me. He couldn't have been the one to push me into that water. Because the husband I remember – for I remember, now, his touch, if not his face – was the love of my life.
I gasp at the memory as Dick keeps on pounding.
I cry out.
Dick rolls onto the bed next to me, spent.
He grins.
“Fun, huh?”
I nod. I admit it – I loved every part of it. And in the days and weeks and months to come at Belle Reve, I will enjoy his cock inside me many more times.
But deep down, the question is prickling inside me.
Who is the husband that loved me?
Who is the man I once loved?
Will I ever find him again?
Chapter 4
Xander Blue
I stare at the woman before me in shock. Can it be? I hadn't noticed it before – I mean, there had been a resemblance, I supposed, but there had been so many differences, too. Different hair, different features – a different nose, different lips. The way she moved. The way she walked. The way she talked – nothing like Marina.
I'm not crazy, right? My dead ex-wife hasn't been in front of my nose the entire time? I haven't slept with my dead-ex-wife, have I?
Just saying the words in my head makes me feel like I've completely lost it. Marina is dead. I know that. I've mourned her loss. I've said goodbye to her so many times. It's taken me months, years, but I've finally come to terms with the chance that she's gone, never to return.
And suddenly my imagination is playing tricks on me. It's like I'm trapped in Vertigo. That woman standing, talking to Ben, with that dark brown hair – she looks so much like Marina it takes my breath away. And little things about her – her smile, her expression. Things I never noticed before.
No, Xander, I tell myself. You've lost it. You miss Marina so much you're trying to convince yourself she's there when she's not. How many times have you tried to convince yourself Marina might be alive, despite everything that happened – only to be disappointed and have your heart broken time and time again? What makes you think that this time will be any different from any of the other times? You need to stop pretending. You need to stop hoping. Face the facts.
And the facts were that I'd made love to Jaymie Wakeley and she hadn't felt like Marina at all. Marina had a different body – younger, slimmed, less toned, while Jaymie had the hard, sensual, controlled body of a professional. Marina held me differently, was held by me differently, kissed differently, laughed differently, caressed me differently, touched my cock differently...
Why am I thinking about this now?
And yet –
She looks so much like her, talking to Ben, that I can't move. It's like seeing a ghost. Could it be a trick with the lighting? It is dark at night after all, and they are only illuminated by a single lamp post. I want to go to her, to run to her, to shake her, pull her away from Ben, ask her the questions I need to ask to get the answers I need to put my mind at rest. But I know I can't do that.
Just like in the Blue Room, you can't trust anybody. Everybody lies. Everyone hides behind a different identity. Like our patrons who hide under different names Mr. A, Mr. F, Mr. X… And I know now that whatever is going on with Jaymie – she's lying to me, too. What's she doing with Ben? Isn't he supposed to be dead? And if she knew he were alive this whole time, why wouldn't she tell me in the first place?
I sigh.
Marina or not, Jaymie isn't exactly the person in the world I trust most right now. Ben tried to kill Staci. He was Roni Taylor’s spy at the Blue Room. What the hell is Jaymie doing with that two-faced murderer?
“Bye,” I hear Jaymie say to Ben, as she shakes out her long hair and heads back into her car. Ever conscious of the possibility of being
seen, I hurry back to mine. Silently I follow her as stealthily as possible back to the Blue Room. I take a shortcut when she goes into a gas station to fill up, allowing me to make it back to the hotel in time to park and wait in the lobby bar.
She comes in a few minutes later: blonde again. Damn, she looks as fine as ever: against my better instincts I can feel my cock getting hard.
She catches sight of me and winks.
“You having a good evening, Xander Blue?” She smiles at me.
She's eating gas-station Twinkies straight from the package. A little bit of cream has made its way to her upper lip and my mind goes blank. All I can think is how badly I want to lick it off her.
She takes a bite out of the Twinkie, sucks the cream out, wrapping her luscious lips around them. It's enough to drive a guy crazy. It's enough to drive me crazy at any rate.
“An interesting evening,” I say. “Thanks to you.”
She grins and tosses her head. She takes another bite of the Twinkie, sucking it down. I have to force my mouth shut before it drops open, comic-book-lech style. This woman radiates sensuality in everything she does. The woman doesn't just exude sex, I think. She is sex.
So unlike Marina...who I had the pleasure of teaching how to fuck and how I’d liked her to be fucked. She was an innocent virginal bride when I married her, but underneath that purity was a vixen wildcat who couldn’t get enough of sex. Yet on the outside, she was the prim and proper socialite whom no one would suspect loved sex. Maybe Marina really was…
There are so many questions I wish I could ask her. What she thought she was doing out there in the middle of some sketchy deserted park with that jerk bartender I thought Roni Taylor had shot once he stopped being a useful ally? Why did she changed her hair color? Why she looks so much like my wife – my dead wife in certain lighting? Why is she really here at the Blue Room, anyway? But I say nothing. I smile politely. I know whatever I say will tip her off that I'm on to her, that she'll just lie her way out of it. That it might spook her and then she'd run and then I'd never know the truth behind her lies.
“I had a good night too,” she says. Like it's simple, easy as shrugging. “Let's do it again sometime.”
“I'd like that,” I say, but inside I'm saying we'll see.
I head to my office. There, I Google Jaymie, check her records, look up what I can find.
And what I can find is precisely nothing.
There's a photograph of her at Rita's funeral from a local newspaper: captioned with her name. And that's it.
Damn, this woman is good.
An invisible PI with no records, no background, no info? How did she work her way into Staci's trust? I trusted her because of Staci – but maybe she's got her fooled, too?
Sighing, I drive back home to Malibu. I've had enough of the Blue Room for one day, and now I think I need to be alone for a little while, to marinate in my thoughts. It's a hard place to be, and I've avoided it as much as possible. Being here makes me think of the happy, fantastical weekends I spent with Staci – weekends that were themselves a respite from so much pain, so much longing, so much loneliness. Being here with Staci was the only time in the past few years that came close to erasing my feelings of loss and pain at losing Marina.
It had been so fucking ironic. Marina died at sea. It had been a blaze of fire, and then it was all over. Marina had wanted so badly to take the seaplane jet to Florida to visit her family’s shipbuilding business there and perform some swanky charity function there. It was a way for her to feel more involved in her family’s multimillion dollars business instead of being a socialite arm candy daughter.
Although I had an important business meeting that day, I finally agreed, and arranged the flight on a private plane a family friend had recommended. I was planning on canceling the meeting to go with Marina, but at the last minute, an emergency business meeting came up…a transfer of some much needed funds for my business, which I had to attend.. It was just one meeting, and it was only for a couple of hours. I told her I'd go to Florida to see her right after and also help with her family down there: an old shipbuilding family known for their yachts – the best in the world. They were celebrating their 100th anniversary that summer, and she wanted to celebrate by giving back to the community.
“But honey,” she sighed. “You always work. Can't you come with me – just this once?”
“I'll see you soon, baby.”
Those were the last words I ever spoke to her.
If I'd been on the plane, I would have died with her. But sometimes, no, all the time, I think that it would have been preferable to this loneliness, this palpable sense of loss. Living without her is a different, a worse, kind of death.
They found the plane: crashed. They found the body of the pilot, burned to a crisp. They never found Marina's body. At first that gave me hope: until the police told me what that meant.
“Sharks,” they said, shaking their heads, their faces so grim.
Her body had been eaten by sharks. There wasn't even a bone to bury.
I went mad after that. Went out to a little cabin I owned in Wyoming. Cut myself off from the world for almost a year – no Internet, no TV, the only cell phone a shitty cheap one I used to call my dealer and have him deliver me a few hundred dollars worth of coke every couple of days – anything to dull the pain. Later, he'd bring hookers, too. For a year, I was dead to the world.
Then came the playboy lifestyle, the girls, the booze and drunks and money. All trying to fill a hole in my heart that could not be filled. Until her.
I take out a photo of Marina. How beautiful she looks in it! So lovely, so luscious, so full of life! But nothing like Jaymie. Marina was refined, well-bred, poised, every inch a lady. She was a virgin when we first made love, and although we discovered to our mutual delight that sex was one of the few areas in life where Marina could let loose – shriek, scream with pleasure – she wasn't experienced in the way Jaymie was. No, for Marina, sex – sex with me – was the truest form of expression, the only one a well-brought-up socialite like Marina, with her porcelain-doll looks and her porcelain-doll manners, could really be free.
And yet – now that there is a doubt in my mind, I start to wonder.
Could this wild, uninhibited woman be the Hyde to Marina's Jekyll? Could Jaymie be Marina after all? If so – why? And how could I be so stupid, so blind, as not to recognize her?
It's impossible. But deep down, some fear takes hold of me. The feeling that the two might be two sides of the same coin, the same identity, the same woman I loved, after all.
Chapter 5
Xander Blue
So, what now? I sit out on my balcony, looking out over the sea. It's painful looking at the water, now – it reminds me so much of the blue Atlantic waves that swallowed up my beloved, my darling, my Marina. It reminds me of Staci, who used to lie here with me on that balcony and stretch out her taut, golden body in the summer sun, exposing her breasts and navel to my gaze and to my caress. It reminds me of a time when I used to be happy: a time before I was plunged into this unending numbness.
I am not an unhappy man. That much is true. I do not wallow in my pain the way some men might. I have put aside my grief for the good of the company, for the Blue name, for the success of the Blue Room and all our family enterprises. I still work. I still make money – more money, I think ruefully, than I will ever know or even care what to do with. And yet, for this, for everything, there is an emptiness inside me.
I do not weep. I never once cried – not since I learned of Marina's death. Even when I learned that Staci wished to leave me for Terrence I did not cry. Outwardly, I accepted it. I sighed, was gracious, even smiled and wished her well, the way gentlemen are supposed to do. I didn't cry. Not even when I was alone, wishing for all the world that I could punch a pillow, punch a hole in the wall, did I let myself tear up. I was a man, after all. I was strong, the way men are supposed to be, the way we're always told to be.
But now I feel the nu
mbness, the darkness, overtaking me. My unhappiness is a gaping abyss threatening to swallow me up. I feel like the ground beneath my feet is constantly swaying, shifting. If I can't trust Marina's death, what can I trust?
I want to confront Jaymie. I want to ask her face to face who she is and why she is doing what she's doing. But I know I can't. There's no way she'll confess outright. If she is practicing a deception there must be a reason. So I do the only think I can think of doing. I talk to the only person who knows Jaymie better than I do, who trusts her – who must trust her for a reason. I take out my phone and I dial that number I've tried so hard to forget, but whose digits are etched on my brain.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Staci?”
I hear the recognition in her voice.
“Xander?”
“Staci – we need to meet right away.”
“Xander, I can't...”
“It's not about...” I sigh. “It's not about us. It's about the Blue Room. I need to talk to you. It's important. Where are you now?”
“I'm at home.”
“Home?” Then it hits me. The home she shares with Terrence now. Their happy domestic bliss. I clench my fists. “Text me the address, Staci. It's urgent. You know I wouldn't talk to you if I didn't think it was important.”
She sighs.
“Okay,” she says. She hangs up the phone.
A few seconds later I get a text with her address.
I rush over there as fast as I can. I dread seeing her, desiring her, feeling the pain wash over me again, but I know I have no other choice. Staci must have trusted Jaymie for a reason. I need to know what she knows.
Seeing her hurts. I feel like someone's punched me in the gut just looking at her. Knowing she's not married yet, that Terrence hasn't fully claimed her as his own, makes the fact that I cannot grab her and fuck her senseless right there and then on her beautiful living-room floor feel all the more acute. She's still as luscious as I remember, still as beautiful.