Playing with Fire

by Alison Tyler

  “Ms. Sullivan isn’t feeling well,” Jake said. He didn’t stop walking, so Angela practically had to walk backward.

  “Please give my best to your husband,” Catriona managed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Angela said as she was left in their wake. Catriona didn’t even have the strength to wave.

  She let Jake drive again. She didn’t even ask where he was going, as long as it was away from the penthouse.

  “I have to ask this.” She cleared her throat. “Why did you go turncoat tonight? That doesn’t seem like you.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But Timothy hired you…”

  Jake glanced at her, a small smile on his lips. “I said he asked me to work tonight. I turned him down. I knew he was cheating on you, and I wanted no part of it. But then I decided to come with you tonight, and tell you the truth afterward.”

  Her pussy clenched, a delicious tremor rocking her sex. “So…you would have helped me anyway. You didn’t have to blackmail me by…”

  “Say it, Catriona.” His voice brooked no argument.

  She almost couldn’t form the words. “By making me lie across your lap. Oh, god.” Her voice cracked as a fresh wave of humiliation washed through her.

  “No, I didn’t have to,” he admitted, not a shred of remorse in his voice. “But the opportunity was too delicious to pass up. You can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it, Catriona.” His voice dipped low. “You know you did.”

  Moisture, heat, pressure welled up between her legs again, sudden and strong. Her tender ass throbbed harder. She betrayed herself by squirming in the leather seat.

  “And when we get to a motel, we’ll explore just what else you enjoy.”

  Oh, god…

  ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  I. K. Velasco

  There was that harsh disinfectant smell—an illusion of clean. There were still pockets of dirt around the cracks and crevices of the tile. There was the steep staircase with the rickety rail, the heavy unlocked door, the rasp of rusty hinges, the harsh sunlight, and the wall of wet heat. Past the threshold, there was the blacktop, the rooftop garden, and the plastic kiddie pool, blue with yellow ducks on the edges. One of the sides was tilted down, the side where her head weighted the pillow polyester. And she was there, of course, wearing only an inch of water and a wayward grin.

  I stood with my hands in my pockets. My palms felt sweaty, like the beads of moisture on her naked skin.

  “On the roof,” I said. Her eyebrows arched.

  “I’m hot.” Obvious. “A/C’s busted. It’s like an oven inside my loft. Baking my bones.”

  “Feel good out here?”

  “Of course. Are you going to join me?” There was that dangerous tone and the matching look. I turned away from her. I couldn’t give in. Not quite yet.

  I looked at the view, the three-tiered urban tectonic layers—hazy blue, after an acid rain sky on the top; on the bottom, crisscrossed alleys and boulevards; and in the middle, the blocks of brownstone, steel, and skyscraper, each with a matching rooftop, just like the one I was standing on. There were thousands of them, stacked on top of us. How many people inhabited those rooftops right at this moment, escaping (embracing) the sun? How many people could see me? Could see her? I swallowed my heart into my stomach.

  There was always that. That feeling. That possibility. That danger. Something that I never thought I would need. Rather, she needed it. And I needed her.

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “It is high. Twenty stories.”

  “You know it’s not the height.”

  There was the time when she’d handcuffed herself to the bookshelves at the library, the 58th Street branch. I found her on the fifth floor, medieval history section. I rocked her against the shelves, shaking the whole row as the leather-bound books clapped the linoleum. Both hands were bound. I always wondered how she’d accomplished that by herself.

  There was the time at the Met. While the members of the board and the honored sponsors had cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the main hall, I fucked her in the Asian Art wing. We did it under the watchful eye of the Standing Buddha, fifth century Gupta period. The mottled red limestone matched the flush of her skin.

  There was the time when she’d followed me home, and I’d found her on the Queens West. The subway car stayed empty until Canal Street, but her eyes stayed focused on the windows and the whispering doors, looking for those strangers, for the danger. Her hands clutched the bar above, her craving apparent by the stretched, distended muscles of her arms.

  There were those times and many others. But this wasn’t the same. There had always been that inky gloom, some blanket of protection in the shadow of night. In the heat of this summer day, there was the luminous glare, the harsh radiation. These are the sources of danger—the light that eats the shadows, exposing reality within. I felt safer in the dark.

  I finally looked at her. She looked at me. She was anxious. I could tell from the tightness in the corners of her mouth. Her eyes stayed clear, glassy black lakes. I had delayed enough. She wouldn’t ask again. She didn’t have to.

  I undressed and as the cloth released my skin, there was that perilous exposure—that heat touching the fleshy surface and everything inside. I shivered.

  I stood in the inch of water, my feet between her legs. She twisted up toward me, her palms on my hips. Her mouth was there, too fast. She was always this way—quick to act, eager to consume. I pulled away, clutched her shoulders, and moved underneath. She hovered, the wave of her hair brushing my chest. There was the harsh sunlight, mercurial incandescence surrounding the glow of her silhouette. I closed my eyes, crushed her mouth. She tasted like dynamite. There was the burn there, the fever of her softness surrounding my length, swallowing me into her.

  “Mmm…it’s hot out here,” she said.

  I opened my eyes. The haze swam into focus on her wayward smile. Not directed at me. I followed her gaze and watched the stranger wave from the next rooftop.

  HOT OFF THE PRESS

  Thomas S. Roche

  Deirdre already had the first line written before she even had her clothes off. It popped into her head when she looked around the fantastically opulent bedroom of the hotel suite: Crass Faster’s room at the Tall Tree Inn wasn’t as nice as I expected. She was thinking ironically, but she didn’t have time to write the punch line in her head, which would have gone something like It was only the nicest fucking hotel room I’ve ever seen, because she simply had to get her clothes off.

  For tonight she’d strayed far from her usual jeans and a tight T-shirt; she was all decked out like the kind of slut, she figured, who went backstage at a Crass Faster concert to fuck the performer. She wriggled out of her impossibly short plaid schoolgirl miniskirt, kicked off her high-heeled shoes, took off her garter belt and fishnet stockings, and the almost ludicrously infinitesimal black mesh thong that had been crawling up her ass all fucking evening. She piled it all on a nearby Danish Modern chair in a rumpled lump that reeked of cigarettes, weed, liquor, and sex, her purse atop it. One thing she did not remove was her Crass Faster T-shirt, because she thought it would be kind of hot for the guy to come in here and fuck her while she was wearing it, and in any event she didn’t want him to miss the point she was making by spreading herself on his bed—that she was a fan. I mean, she thought it would already be pretty obvious, but why take chances? Her career was at stake.

  Deirdre wondered if maybe she ought to slip into the shower for a quick rinse. She decided that was out of the question; Crass Faster was probably on his way up. He could enter the hotel room at any moment, and she wanted to be ready. Besides, she didn’t want to take off her dog collar. Deirdre checked herself in the giant mirror that covered one whole wall of the bedroom suite. Yup, she looked like a slut, all right. Naked from the waist down, big tits spilling out of her T-shirt, shaved, collared, painted—she checked the traits off on
her mental checklist; yes, yes, she looked like a whore. Mission accomplished. She’d already touched up her makeup in the bathroom at the after party, but she figured an encounter with Crass Faster was worth a little more cherry-musk lip gloss, so she fetched some from her purse and slicked up her lips till they glowed and smacked of sickly sweet sex. Oh, she couldn’t wait to smear that sickly sweet sex up and down Crass Faster’s hard prong and email Courtney the snapshots on motherfucking Eye-Fi. She was getting wet just thinking about it: that’d show the bitch.

  Deirdre put her camera and tape recorder on the nightstand and crawled onto the bed, thrilling at the feel of the silky comforter. She stretched out on the bed naked except for her dog collar and about six pounds of makeup. Tasting cherry musk, she pouted at the door and practiced spreading her legs.

  Deirdre was not naturally a slut. She eschewed romantic relationships in favor of furthering her writing career. She was known across Redwood College as the girl who’d been in every issue of every campus publication since she’d arrived at Redwood three and a half years ago. She’d taken on the school newspaper first—natch. In the first issue of Deirdre’s first semester they published her letter to the editor about how there were no sanitary napkins in the dorm bathrooms the first day of school, and Deirdre had never looked back since.

  Ravenous for publication, she’d written journalism, fiction, political commentary, poetry, even song lyrics so she could be in last semester’s music department broadsheet. She’d even taken a crash course in French when she’d found out that department was putting out a Francophile literary magazine; she’d lost a semester’s worth of sleep just to get her short poem “Lirez-vous mon écriture, Pierre?” into the Frenchy rag.

  Though by all accounts she was far from unattractive and, as her mom was embarrassingly fond of saying, she certainly had quite a rack on her, Deirdre’s interest in sex was primarily a literary interest. She would never have conceded that she lost her virginity solely for the purpose of writing about it for the controversial campus erotica publication Evening Dew, but that actually was the sad fact. And here she was, tarted up like some rock and roll bimbo, practicing spreading her legs on Crass Faster’s hotel bed strictly because of Courtney Capricious.

  That wasn’t even Courtney’s real name, of course, which was a total death sentence for any respect Deirdre might have felt for the girl—Deirdre considered pseudonyms cowardly and, much worse, cheesy. In the very last semester of Deirdre’s Redwood College career, Courtney, a fine arts major, had somehow—somehow!—secured partial funding from the lit department for her publication Hot Off the Press, which would collect real-life student encounters with rock stars.

  This thing was guaranteed controversy; Christ, when this fucker hit the stands the Religious Right in this state were going to shit themselves. Deirdre half planned to make the call to the local wing-nut radio station herself! Deirdre saw outraged newspaper editorials in Courtney’s future, coverage in the national media, radio spots, maybe even television—we’re talking debate in the state legislature, damn it, a new bill regulating the content of university-funded publications; it made Deirdre’s head swim! How Courtney’d convinced the school administration to fund such a project in the first place was utterly beyond everyone; Deirdre thought, unkindly, that Ms. Capricious’ famous pierced and painted lips were clearly working their magic on certain private aspects of school administrators’ anatomy, which is exactly what she planned to write in a confessional piece after the fact, possibly denouncing the publication as a decadent bourgeois attempt at creating sexual adventure to quantify the alienation of their generation from the sociopolitical process—if Marxism was still trendy by then.

  The problem was that Hot Off the Press’s partial lit department funding meant it was technically an official campus publication. If Deirdre’s writing didn’t make it in, it would break her perfect record. The official status could be argued, but Deirdre didn’t want to spend the rest of her life making that case to herself, so she intended to be in that ToC if it was the last fucking thing she ever did.

  But Courtney Capricious was less than fond of Deirdre, and had told her in no uncertain terms that she considered Deirdre to be a stuck-up kiss-ass. And this after Deirdre, right after hearing about Hot Off the Press’s green-lighting, had shown up in Courtney’s office carrying flowers, chocolates, and the latest Perky Balderdash bootleg from Vomit Records downtown! What did she have to do to win this bitch over?

  Clearly not just write a good piece; she’d already written four of them, and Courtney had bounced them all. There’d been Deirdre’s fantasy about making it with Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain in a brothel in heaven, her six-page prose poem about Jonny Buckland’s fingers, and a lengthy dissertation on what Pink’s haircut meant to female empowerment. No, no, and no—Courtney insisted that all stories be real first-person sexual encounters with rock stars. Deirdre had finally caved and blown Jake McKendrick, the singer from Saddest, the ever-popular campus emo band. She’d done it for the sole purpose of writing about it, with clinical detachment and pausing to jot a few details on her reporter’s notebook halfway through, which Jake didn’t even notice because he was too busy talking about his ex-girlfriend Bethany (about whom most of his songs were written) and how he really believed they were meant to be together. It was like he was writing fucking emo lyrics while she was going down on him—this was memoir gold, damn it!—and she put every detail into the article. But when she turned the piece in, Courtney gleefully informed Deirdre that she already had not one but two stories about fucking Jake McKendrick, and both of them had him blathering on about Bethany while in flagrante delicto. Deirdre’s story, she was told, didn’t rate—she hadn’t even boned the sad fucker. The funny thing was that nobody had ever met Bethany; Jake, suspiciously, claimed to have burned all his pictures of her, which was kind of strange for a guy with 4,700 pictures in his Flickr stream of himself with his shirt off looking sad. Clearly, there was more than one Redwood College coed who would appreciate knowing if the intimacy she’d shared with Jake was just a squirt or six in the ocean of tears coaxed from him by some slutty siren of emo despair—or if the guy was, in fact, deranged.

  But Courtney sneered at Deirdre’s enthusiastic offer of an investigative journalism piece called “Who is Bethany? A Jake McKendrick Fan Looks for Some Answers in the Tangle of Sad Songs and Groupie Sex.” “First person, Deirdre,” said Courtney. “It has to be first person. And it better be good, no more small-town losers like Jake. We’re getting close to deadline, DeeDee. You’d better bag Keith Richards in the next twelve days, or you’re going to break your perfect record.” Courtney always called her DeeDee, or more accurately “dD,” when she was trying to piss Deirdre off; it was both a diminutive reference to her name and a skanky jab at Deirdre’s cup size.

  That particular day, Courtney had been wearing a Crass Faster T-shirt, two sizes too small with the sleeves and neckline ripped out.

  “Isn’t he coming to town soon?” snapped Deirdre.

  Courtney laughed hysterically. “dD, if you can fuck Crass Faster you’ve got a guaranteed slot in Hot Off the Press,” she said nastily. “I’ll even put you first.” She started laughing. “Hell, I know you’re not that much of a slut, dD, so I’ll even make it easy for you—all you have to do is blow him.” She cackled. “But I want pictures.”

  “Oh, I’ll get you pictures,” said Deirdre, her voice ice cold.

  The rest, as they say, was history.

  That’s why Deirdre ended up spread out on a king-sized bed at the Tall Tree Inn, the only hotel in San Isidore that even had a Presidential Suite. How she ended up there was a bit hazier, not because she was liquored up (she didn’t drink much—her only drunken binge had been for a first-person cautionary piece on student drinking) but because there had been so many hand jobs and blow jobs involved just getting into Crass’s room. Deirdre didn’t mind any of them. In fact, she’d rather enjoyed the experience, having had very little opportunity for no-s
trings-attached sex in a college as small as Redwood, since she had a strict rule against sleeping with anyone who could not advance her career. Besides, that third roadie had been fairly cute, and the second security guard had even thoughtfully offered to get her off with a vibrator he had stashed in his jacket pocket, which she had certainly appreciated. She’d declined cheerfully, wanting to save her sexual energy for Crass, whom she planned to fuck cross-eyed and bowlegged. She’d enjoyed all the fooling around enough to get pretty worked up; by the time she got her hands on Crass she was really going to go to town.

  After her numerous encounters of the evening, she’d made several mental notes, however. First, next time she’d touch up her makeup only after the last blow job of the evening, or at least the last blow job before she actually met the rock star. The amount of makeup was perfect, though; heavy enough to look like a complete whore, and then just pile on some more. The shave job was most appreciated by the one roadie who’d so very much wanted to go down on her; in fact, it had felt so good she’d had to wrestle off her own orgasm, and had faked it in consideration for the guy’s feelings, since he really was very good with that tongue. Next time she’d definitely trim her nails a bit shorter; that poor backup percussionist with the spandex pants was going to have a nasty scratch on his ball sac, and if her nails had been properly trimmed she would have fingered the drummer’s girlfriend a little while they were making out, which probably would have gotten her in the door even faster. And next time, she decided, she’d go for the ratted-out, freshly-fucked slut hair to begin the evening with, since the neat, calculated businesslike goth-chick bob she’d chosen had ended up a rat’s-nest mess—she was Robert Smith, here, spread and horny on Crass Faster’s hotel room bed.

  Deirdre heard the door opening. Her heart pounded. She’d been practicing spreading her legs for the better part of an hour by then, and as a figure stumbled into the room she realized she couldn’t decide whether to spread or cross. She decided to spread—best to leave nothing to the imagination. She propped herself up and stuck out her tits and heard the torn neckline of her Crass Faster T-shirt go rrrrrrrrrrrip!, which would have been kind of a turn-on if she hadn’t been distracted by the large number of people spilling into the room, none of them Crass Faster. There were two, no three: two women, one man, all stumbling into the bedroom making out, feeling each other up, and ripping each others’ clothes off. And more were coming, spilling into the room like somebody’d opened the doors of a late-night groupie asylum.