Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  Chino knew LA; there was no doubting that. “All right. After the set, we’ll go.”

  He grinned and smacked me on the upper arm. “Now you’re talking.”

  The set was mercifully brief, four songs, including Ford’s mandolin jam, which brought the house down. I was glad about that. Gave me something to talk to Chino about besides myself.

  “I sometimes wonder if being our bass player is going to be enough for him,” I said as Chino pulled his SUV out of the parking lot. He had what I assumed was a rosary hanging from his rearview mirror but on closer inspection I realized it was a figurine of Elvis on Mardi Gras beads.

  “I know what you mean. Ford’s a cool caterpillar now, but one day he might butterfly on outta here.” He turned on the car stereo and the orchestral sound of a movie soundtrack filled the car. “Ah, you young’uns.”

  I snorted. Chino was the eldest of the group by about five years, and he often lorded it over us as if he were a different generation just because he was closer to thirty than we were. “So, you promised me good food.”

  “What are you in the mood for? Seafood? Best tacos on the West Coast? Thai food so spicy it’ll leave a stump where your tongue was?”

  “How does one judge the best tacos on the West Coast?”

  “By how little English they have on their menu,” he said seriously. “Really, though, there’s a crab shack up the coast. They’ll have fresh Dungeness—”

  “No, no, you’ve intrigued and challenged me with this best tacos idea.”

  “All right, but you gotta promise me none of your gringo bullshit.”

  “Which would be what exactly?”

  He laughed. “Just play it cool. If anyone gives you a dirty look or whatever, you know? It’ll be okay. You’re with me.”

  “You know I have Spanish ancestry, do you not?”

  He laughed again. “Boyyy, that won’t get you far in this crowd. Trust me. Let me do the talking. You know how no matter what kind of restaurant you go into around here, you’ll find Mexican busboys and cooks? This is the place all of them go to eat.”

  The place was the very definition of a hole in the wall, a former Chinese restaurant in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere. They’d boarded over the old restaurant sign but left the neon dragon in the window.

  The menu was written in magic marker on pieces of paper taped to the wall. I could read many of the words thanks to a few years spent trying to teach myself Spanish as a teenager, but that didn’t mean I knew what they meant. “Old clothes?” I asked. “Is three Marias a religious reference I’m missing?”

  Chino’s startled look was deeply satisfying to me. “You can read it?”

  “Only a little,” I admitted. “And my pronunciation is atrocious.”

  “Well ropa vieja is called ‘old clothes’ because it’s a stew with shredded beef in it, so it’s like when your clothes shred in the laundry. No really!” He waved his hand emphatically. “I’m not making this shit up just to get back at you for the explanation of what ‘spotted dick’ is.”

  I held in a chuckle. On the tour one of the shows had been in Victoria, British Columbia—the one place on Earth I’ve been that tries to be more British than Great Britain—and while eating in the hotel pub I’d had to explain much of the menu. “Spotted dick is a pudding,” I reiterated, as if he still doubted it. “You can Google it.”

  He shook his head. “I guarantee you Jell-O has no ‘spotted dick’ flavor pudding.”

  A waitress came over and had a rapid-fire conversation with Chino that I could not really follow except for the English words peppered throughout. I gathered he was ordering an assortment of food. And beer.

  She brought us two glass bottles of beer and plastic cups. Chino merely wiped the mouth of the bottle with a paper napkin and drank directly from it. I did the same.

  “Okay, so you said female trouble,” Chino said, settling back in his chair with his beer in one hand. The general hubbub around us was in Spanish, and no one was listening to what we were saying. “I thought you had a foolproof system for avoiding exactly that?”

  I leaned against the wall. “I did. And if I had stuck to it, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “Mal, I love you like a brother, but you know we all think your tactic of only ever fucking a woman once is whack.”

  I took a pull from my beer before mounting my defense. “The entire problem is with inappropriate emotional attachments. My tactic prevents that.”

  “You mean you do it so you don’t get attached to them?”

  “You have it backwards. It’s that I don’t want them getting attached to me.”

  “Hmm. I guess I can understand that with groupies, but with a woman like Gwen? This is Gwen we’re talking about, right?”

  There was little point in denying it. “Yes, Gwen, who I wasn’t supposed to get involved with emotionally, you might recall. The rule isn’t only for groupies.” I tried to decide how much to tell him. Chino knew me fairly well, but only Axel really knew much of my past. “I’ve had a few serious attempts at relationships. All have been disastrous, more so for the women I was involved with than for me.”

  “Disastrous, how?” He had a concerned look on his face, so unlike his usual wry smirk.

  Perhaps that’s what convinced me to tell him. “I have this tendency to be attracted to submissive women,” I began.

  “That’s not news,” Chino said, “and you’re hardly alone there.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s things like—” I broke off with a shake of my head. “It never works out well.”

  “It’s okay, Mal. You can tell me whatever it is.”

  “Well, there were a few clingy ones to begin with when I first started exploring dominance and submission, and then I’d have to explain I wasn’t recruiting a slave, I was just sowing my wild oats. I began to make that part of the negotiation up front—the no repeats thing—and that cut down the clinging on a lot. But then I—” The specter of my failure with Risa hovered in the back of my mind. So many things had gone wrong there. So many. But my worst mistake had been in thinking love justified all. “I met a woman—not through the scene. Someone my father arranged for me. I thought, well, I’ll scare her off with my whips and chains.”

  “Let me guess,” Chino said, his beer completely forgotten now. “She wasn’t scared off.”

  “Indeed, she was quite excited and more than willing. In fact, she begged me for more and more extreme treatment as time went on. She was…the first submissive that I let love me.”

  Chino nodded as if he heard what I implied but couldn’t bring myself to say aloud, that she was also the first one I’d loved, truly loved.

  I tried to explain it as simply as I could. “She wanted to ‘serve me,’ to ‘be mine,’ so very much that any small fault I found with her crushed her self-esteem, and she would beg me to punish her to ‘make it right.’ No, that’s not even the right way to put it. She wanted me to hurt her, to do terrible things to her, to damage her.”

  “Physically? Mentally?”

  “Yes and yes, and emotionally.” I couldn’t even separate the tangle when it came to Risa. “This was the woman who very nearly talked me into branding her labia.”

  Chino’s mouth hung slightly open. He tried to play devil’s advocate. “Some people like the extremes.”

  “It wasn’t a matter of ‘like.’ At first I thought she was a perfect match for my sadism, but I eventually came to see she was using me as an elaborate form of self-harm. I put my foot down about the branding.” The burn on my palm seemed to throb in time with my heart as I remembered her fighting with me. “She accused me of not loving her enough to give her what she needed. When I wouldn’t give in, she showed the scars to her father and told him I’d not only ruined her, but I’d also been torturing her.”

  “What! Did they go to the police?”

  I made a dismissive noise. “O
f course not. A man like that fears scandal more than he fears having his daughter violated. Her father and mine then agreed to keep us apart.”

  “Man. Real Romeo and Juliet stuff.”

  “Quite.” I set my bottle on the table and rotated it slowly, seeking out the cool condensation with my fingertips. I had to tell him the final piece. The story wouldn’t be complete without it: “She tried to kill herself shortly after.”

  “Mal, holy shit. Seriously?”

  I nodded. After she was committed, I’d left for the United States and hadn’t spoken to my own father since. Axel had been at university and I’d slept on his floor for a couple of weeks until I sorted a place to stay. “She used to drop hints to me all the time about breath play. I have to wonder if she had a death wish the entire time.”

  “That’s just…not healthy.”

  “No,” I agreed. I had been looking at the beer bottle but I forced myself to raise my eyes so he’d see how serious I was. “I avoid going that far or that deep again by avoiding repeat engagements. Or I had successfully avoided it until recently.”

  “You think Gwen Hamilton is like that other girl?”

  “Yes.” I felt a sudden urgency to be sure he knew I didn’t wish to speak ill of Gwen, or even Risa. “Listen. It’s not my way to air my private affairs, especially in sexual matters.”

  “I guess you didn’t leave all your British traditions behind, then,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

  He was irritatingly correct, but I held fast.

  “That’s not what I’m trying to say, but yes, your silence would be appreciated. What I’m trying to say is just…what I’ve told you…I would normally never speak of.”

  “And it’s important to you that I know that?”

  “Yes.” Hearing him put it that way did make it seem a bit silly that I felt he might judge my actions less harshly because I was a polite boy at heart. Stupid. “Anyway.”

  Of course our food arrived just then and we had to pause to devour a large platter of things whose names I didn’t even ask about, although Chino did explain that trés marias referred to the three different sauces. While we ate, my mind turned the Gwen question over and over: I had a gorgeous woman at my beck and call, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with her. Lock her in a room and use her, toy with her, demand her obedience, and if she couldn’t obey to compel compliance through force…except by all indications Gwen was completely willing to obey me. Was the problem that I wanted to see her both on my arm before the glitterati and over my knee? The problem was that love was no antidote for the damage that could result when her need for pain met my need to hurt—in fact, it was throwing more gasoline on the fire. By the end of the meal, I hadn’t come to any new conclusions, but at least now my belly was full and that made me somewhat calmer than before.

  “I told you there was good food to be had in this town,” Chino said when we were staring at the empty remains of our plates. He then ordered a second beer for me and a cup of coffee for himself.

  “Thank you for that,” I said, and saluted him with the beer in my unbandaged hand.

  “Now, you were saying.”

  “Yes. I was saying.” Food and drink had mellowed me, which made it marginally easier to say. “Gwen and I have been playing a dangerous sexual game, and I broke things off with her before it went too far, but she’s none too happy about it.”

  “Well, Gwen seems more down to Earth than your Juliet, but you obviously know her better than I do. When you say dangerous, how dangerous?”

  I was blunt. “I…set to fire her the other day.”

  He seemed unfazed. “You mean like we did in the video for ‘Short Fuse’?”

  “Yes and no. I used the same fire-play technique, but we also had a…mishap.” I held up my bandaged hand. “And it was nearly much worse.”

  “I knew your story about burning yourself cooking didn’t sound right.” Chino sipped his coffee, frowning slightly. “And you’re worried it’ll happen again, or worse?”

  “Yes.” I hunched over my beer, staring into the dark hole of the brown bottle. “That’s why I’ve decided we shouldn’t go any further, but she’s resisting my decision.”

  “Whoa whoa whoa. You didn’t think she’d have a problem with you unilaterally declaring that something you did together was over, without her input? Are you telling me you set it up so that you were the one ‘in charge’ all the time, not just in the dom/sub role-playing? You dictated everything in the relationship?”

  “First of all, it wasn’t a relationship—it was a sexual affair at best—and secondly, yes, because I’m the dom.” I held up my hand before he could jump down my throat. “And, yes, I’m not a complete idiot, I realize now—saying it aloud to you—how patently ridiculous that sounds.”

  “Do you? I mean, help me out here, Mal. I’m not exactly a shining example of responsible commitment myself, so, you know, pot-kettle-black, but I really was under the impression that when people are into role-playing that there’s a pretty firm delineation between when they’re in a scene and when they’re not. And when they’re not, they’re equals in the relationship. Right?”

  “Right. But like I said, this wasn’t a relationship.” Even as I said the words, I felt the lacerations in my heart, the yearning for a love I didn’t dare admit. Instead I spoke the harsh necessity: “It was nothing more than a game.”

  “And what is it now?”

  “Over,” I said, and stood abruptly. “Game over.”

  I tossed the hundred-dollar bill onto the table and stalked out.

  Of course, a dramatic exit loses its impact somewhat when you have to wait for the other party to unlock the door of their SUV. Chino came out a few minutes later and we got in.

  “So this might not be the right time to bring it up, but listen. If you’re dead set on breaking it off with Gwen, I’m the last person who’ll try to talk you out of it. But to get back to something we were talking about earlier, let me tell you, Mal, when you’re in a mood, it’s hard on all of us.”

  I buckled my seat belt.

  “Plus,” he went on, “how does this tie in with the fact that we’re supposed to go to some kind of secret kinkster shindig at Ricki and Gwen’s house?”

  When the invitation to the orientation for the Governor’s Club party had come, I’d accepted because at the time I had taken it to be an olive branch from Gwen, perhaps even an indication that she was moving on—that both of us should move on. A party would be the ideal situation for us both to find new play partners, would it not? But my optimism had been dimmed by her attempts to argue with me tonight. “I’ll leave if Gwen can’t control herself around me.”

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “I’m basically saying, given what we’ve got on our plate right now with the album and laying down the new tracks, we need everybody working together. We can’t all be tiptoeing around wondering when you’re going to bite somebody’s head off next.”

  “I—” I couldn’t really defend myself from that accusation. “I’m very passionate about what we do.”

  “I know. We all know, which is why we stick with you. It’s why we put up with your weird groupie shit, because when you’re getting regular pussy, you’re a hell of a lot easier to deal with.”

  “What. Are. You talking about?” I kept my eyes on the road ahead of us instead of looking at him.

  “Come on, Mal, seriously? The entire band and crew have a vested interest in making sure you get your rocks off. Whether that’s with Gwen or some other way, you clearly need to be getting your freak on somehow. Mal, your sex life is unfortunately all of our business.”

  It takes a lot to make me blush. But my cheeks felt hot and I wanted to crawl into a cave and hide. “Am I truly that difficult to get along with?”

  He laughed. “Yes, Mal. You’re the dragon we send the virgin sacrifices to so the rest of us don’t get eaten.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Everyone Loves a Party

  GWEN

 
I gave Ricki the orientation checklist when we had lunch the day of the party. We were sitting at the kitchen table where we could grab a quick bite without the help of any staff. On party days they were all sent home early except for Jamison, who manned the door, and our security staff.

  I pointed to the section on the paper about rope suspension. “I wasn’t exactly sure what to put here.”

  Ricki took a pen out of the caddy on the table and wrote something.

  “What are you putting down?”

  “That no one should try to use the suspension rig in the Inquisition Room without first having a one-on-one training session with an approved senior member, and there must be one monitor on duty during any scene.” She met my eyes over the top of the paper. “Though no one but me and Axel have dared to use it so far.”

  “Well, this group is mostly older. You have to be kind of in good shape for rope suspension,” I said, knowing that probably wasn’t the reason they avoided rope.

  Ricki wrinkled her nose but didn’t argue. We’d always known our mother had died in some kind of accident, but we hadn’t learned that it was a bondage accident until several months ago. Ricki had been really shaken by it. I had a feeling a lot of the reason she and Axel had gotten into rope was that it was helping her work out her issues about it.

  I hadn’t felt the impact as hard because I didn’t have any memories of our mother at all, really. When we’d found out, I’d already long since explored my kinky side. If anything, finding out my mother had been into bondage had given me something to feel kinship with her about, and it had validated my feelings a lot. You know, the acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak.

  But rope suspension wasn’t particularly an interest of mine. Obviously there were safety concerns, too—not because rope suspension was so much more dangerous than other things, but because it would have seemed extra tragic if an accident were to occur, given the family history. I didn’t like tempting fate.

  Speaking of which: “So, we didn’t have any rule at all concerning fire play, but I thought we should put one in prohibiting it.”