Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  “Just doing my job, ma’am,” he said.

  Maybe they hired photographers to document the project? I thought.

  “If you could just sit here in the light, we could get a few nice shots. You look so pretty when you smile.”

  “Um, I don’t think my character is supposed to look happy and smiley,” I said, even as I sat down on the couch where he was pointing. “If you want to do smiley portrait shots, I could go put on the intact version of this shirt.”

  He already had a camera to his eye, this one digital, emitting a soft beep each time he pressed the button. “Oh no, this is fine, just fine. In fact…” He went to one knee in front of me, reached out and opened the shirt, exposing the bustier-shaped breast form that covered me. Before I could react—the thought that I was going to move away from him, complain, get him kicked off the set, had barely formed—he let out a whiny, “Oh for crying out loud, they’re not even real.”

  I shifted away on the couch and pulled the tattered shirt closed. “Of course they’re not. Excuse me, but you’re being very—”

  “Gwen, Gwen, I’m sorry,” he said, putting the camera down and taking one of my hands before I could snatch it away. He was still on his knees and he held my hand in both of his. His fingers were sweaty and puffy. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just trying to capture the moment.”

  “Okay, well, I have work to do here—”

  “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. A very long time. But the time was never right. I think the right moment is finally here, though. Gwen Hamilton, I love you. No one in the world loves you more than I do.”

  Oh my God, help, I thought, but I couldn’t bring myself to scream it. I was too paralyzed to scream.

  “It’s so hard to get close to you. I’m so glad we’re finally alone.”

  I forced my mouth to move. “Mr. Lavern, I appreciate your admiration, but—”

  “Don’t go cold on me, Gwen. Not now. Not after everything I’ve done for you.”

  What the hell is he talking about?

  “That spread in EW? All me. They wouldn’t have even bothered with a picture of you if I hadn’t pushed them to run it. Come on, you owe me at least a kiss for that. Show your appreciation.” He leaned forward like he was going to push his mouth against mine.

  “No!” I leaned back, trying to get my foot between my body and his, but all that happened was I got it caught on a camera strap.

  “Don’t be like this, Gwen, don’t be difficult—”

  “Difficult!” I tried to push him away with my free hand and that only made things worse. He launched himself onto me, his legs straddling my hips and trapping me against the couch while he tried to grab my free hand.

  I tried to punch him in the eye with the engagement ring but I gashed him in the forehead instead.

  “Bitch!” He trapped my hand in the crook of his elbow and I took a deep breath to scream.

  That was when Mal hit him in the head with the guitar.

  He was knocked off me onto the floor, and I scrambled over the back of the couch.

  Amazingly, the guy wasn’t unconscious. He staggered up, blood trickling from his forehead, and then rushed me like a tackle in football, his arms outstretched. I fled straight through the hole where the window was missing, and he chased me.

  I didn’t think he’d be able to run faster than me, but he brought me down only a few steps onto the manicured grass. I struggled to get away, twisting in his grasp, but I only succeeded in ending up on my back with him on top. I froze and stopped struggling when I realized he was holding a knife to my cheek.

  “I didn’t want to have to do this the hard way,” he said.

  “Neither did I,” said Mal, who held a straight razor to Lavern’s throat. He loomed behind him like a dark angel, the hand with the razor steady.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Lavern said. “Just back away and I won’t hurt her. I just want her to listen to me.”

  I could see Mal’s face just beyond my assailant’s. His eyes were narrow and his teeth set. “No. You will drop the knife or I will slit your throat.”

  “Are you kidding? I could scar her face. She’ll never work again.”

  “The beauty of hers that moves me is deeper than her skin,” Mal said.

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “I’m going to count to three.” Mal’s eyes met mine and I knew he was saying that for me. Whatever was about to happen was going to happen on three. “One.”

  “I just want to talk to her.”

  “Two.”

  “Come on, man!”

  “Three!”

  I twisted desperately away from the knife and heard Lavern scream. I scooted away on the grass and looked back to see Mal holding him by the hair. A couple more members of the crew moved in to help, Nancy and Roddy hurrying to help me up, Nancy asking me, “What happened? What happened?” Miles was ranting about security and how we really shouldn’t have needed any on a location like this. One of the tech crew had zip-tied Lavern’s hands behind his back and he was bellowing for his lawyer. Nancy rushed away to take a phone call.

  Then I was standing alone and saw Mal was off to the side of the knot of people around the hollering madman.

  Mal was looking at the shiny, clean straight razor in his hand, turning it back and forth as if he regretted it was actually unbloodied.

  Then he saw me looking and closed it, slipped it away, and came to squeeze my hand. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, but my senses were still spinning and my heart wouldn’t slow down. “You…you didn’t cut him.”

  “Oldest mindfuck in the book,” he said, patting the pocket where he’d tucked the razor. “Pretend to cut them with the dull side.”

  “You knew he’d let go of me to try to protect himself.”

  Mal nodded but did not smile.

  “I really thought you were going to slit his throat,” I said. “You really sold it.”

  “It’s like Rod said. When you act, you don’t ‘pretend.’ You feel your real emotions. I wanted that man dead for touching you, and I wanted to be the one to do it.” He let go of my hand and pulled back.

  “But you didn’t.” I desperately wanted him to hold me, to give me something solid to lean against, to put his arms around me. “Because you know where the actual line is. You know how to dance all the way to the edge without crossing it.”

  “I’m no hero,” he said.

  “You’re my hero, and that’s what matters.” I felt my knees going weak.

  “We’ll see if the police agree,” he said as the sound of a siren heralded their approach.

  * * *

  MAL

  The police were brusque and thorough, separating us to take initial statements, then insisting we proceed to the police station for more of the same. By the time they were done with me, Gwen had long since been taken home. It seemed that ultimately they were not going to be charging me with assault, even though I gathered Beau Lavern dearly wanted them to. It appeared that he lived in a fantasy world where Gwen was his prize, his due, his one true love, even though they’d barely spoken in the past.

  I heard that night from Axel—who’d heard via Ricki—that someone had been sending Gwen threatening e-mails, and it appeared to be the same man. A genuine stalker.

  Then came a message from Nancy Cho asking if it was possible to meet them to do the last scene they needed to complete the video. Of course I agreed immediately.

  After all, Gwen would be there.

  “Mal, you still there?” Axel’s voice came through the phone.

  “Yes. Sorry, just answering a text.” I was sitting on my back patio, looking at the charred ashes in the bottom of the grill. “Ax, tell me something.”

  “Sure, what?”

  “You’ve known me longer than anyone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you say I have trouble telling fantasy from reality?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because sometim
es I imagine that she loves me.”

  “If we’re talking about Gwen, she does love you. If you’ve got a delusion, man, it’s that you don’t deserve it.”

  For some reason his words felt like they seeped directly into my chest, like what had happened today had cracked my armor so much that what he said was finally getting through. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Yes, you are, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve love.”

  “I’m an irascible perfectionist who alienates the people I should be cultivating.”

  “Let me and Christina do the cultivating, Mal. You just do you.”

  “I seriously contemplated quitting everything a few days ago. Not just kink. Booze, the band—”

  “Wait a second, I may have to take back what I said about you having a grip on reality.”

  “It was just the black dog nipping at my heels,” I assured him. “Though perhaps I still prefer not being able to tell if negative thoughts are valid and, oh, thinking all positive thoughts are automatically valid.”

  “In other words, you may be depressed but at least you’re not a wacko stalker who thinks you’re the true reason behind people’s fame?”

  “Yes.” Maybe it took seeing someone who was truly crazy to appreciate the measure of my own sanity. I gathered some sticks from under the evergreen bushes and put them into the grill. I lit them with a long match and they caught quickly. “Do you remember the night we got our tattoos?”

  “Do I? How could I forget it? You could say it’s permanently marked.”

  “Ha.” I stared into the flames. He and I and Chino had gone to a tattoo parlor in Boston after one of the shows we’d played there, to an artist Axel knew from his days on the street. We’d been planning them for a while. Blackwork Celtic-style dragons. The artist took us into her shop at midnight and we didn’t leave until morning, because it took all night to finish all three of us. Chino’s went up the side of his leg, its tail around his ankle. Axel’s wound around his right arm, onto his chest, and held his nipple delicately between his teeth. Mine was on my back, the wings across my shoulders.

  The artist did mine last, and by the time she had started I had been slightly delirious from sleep deprivation.

  “I had a vision that night,” I said. The flames crackled and danced.

  “What kind of a vision?”

  “That I was stretching my wings, trying to fly, but I was too weighted down by the gold and jewels encrusting me. I had to shake them off before I could take off.”

  “Oh, there’s no symbolism there at all. None.”

  “Hush. When I could finally fly, I went to the top of a mountain and shook the foundations of a temple until a beautiful woman came out and offered herself to me.”

  “And?”

  “And I couldn’t very well actually consummate penetration with her, being not her size. So I commanded the saddle maker there to make a saddle for her with an ivory phallus affixed to it.”

  “Huh.”

  “Thus did she give herself to me, and me to her at the same time, achieving a balance of power that should not have been possible between a dragon and a human.”

  “You were high on endorphins.”

  “Yes, I was.” I threw a few more sticks into the flames and listened to them crackle. “But I think I finally know what the vision means.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means I’ve been an utter fool. But at least I see that now.”

  * * *

  GWEN

  I dragged myself into the kitchen feeling like I had been run over by a truck. I guess being slammed to the ground by a bona fide stalker had some aftereffects even though medically I checked out fine. I wondered how Mal was doing. Had I imagined the connection between us when our eyes had met over the shoulder of my attacker? I didn’t think I had.

  “Wow, I didn’t think you’d be up until at least noon,” Ricki said from the breakfast table where she was sipping from a huge coffee mug while checking the morning papers on her tablet. “You had a rough day yesterday.”

  “I’ve got a call,” I said, pulling the almond milk out of the fridge and pouring it into a bowl. “By which I mean an actor thing, not a phone call.”

  “I know what a call is,” Ricki said with a gentle smile.

  I got a spoon and sat down at the table. “We need to film one more scene that didn’t get finished yesterday.”

  “There’s more coffee in the carafe,” she pointed out.

  I nodded and got myself a mug and sat back down. It wasn’t that early in the morning; I was just muzzy and out of it. “Anything leak to the news yet?”

  “I saw a small thing about the ‘incident’ but nothing much. When they get wind of the e-mail thing, it might blow up a bit, but right now I’m not predicting anything bad for your career from the press.”

  “Good.” I took a sip of the coffee.

  “Gwen, are you sure you should go to a film shoot today?”

  “Why, do I seem nervous?”

  “You’re distracted enough that you forgot to add cereal to your bowl.”

  I looked down into the bowl of almond milk. “Oh, I’m going low carb,” I said casually, and picked up the bowl and drank it.

  Then busted out laughing, which startled Ricki into laughing, too. She put her hand over her eyes. “You really had me going there for a second!”

  Ha. So maybe I could act after all.

  “Still,” she said when we had settled down again, “I’d feel better if Riggs or Reeve drove you.”

  “Ricki, what are the chances I have another stalker? Zero. They have the guy in custody and he won’t be making bail.” I sipped a little more coffee. “Though maybe having Riggs take me wouldn’t be a bad idea. Just because I’m tired. I didn’t sleep well.”

  “I would imagine,” Ricki said.

  “Oh, nothing like that. It wasn’t like I had nightmares reliving the attack or something. I just lay awake thinking about Mal. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

  Ricki made a sympathetic face. “Is anything going on with Mal? The last thing you told me was it was over.”

  “I don’t know. He goes to extremes. When I left Montreal, it was like the world had ended. But the past couple of days it’s like I can see the wheels are turning in his head. We’ve had a couple of…moments. I mean, maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part? I feel like he’s regretting what he said in Montreal. Then he did rescue me…”

  My sister looked at me over the top of her immense coffee mug. “Do you want him back?”

  “I do,” I said with a sigh. “If he’ll come to his senses.”

  “Does he still want to quit kink?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I know he’s got some issues to work through. But seriously, Mal quitting kink would be like a lion going vegan.”

  “I guess the real question is would you be better off waiting for him to deal with his issues on his own or being with him when he does?”

  I looked into my own coffee. “I’d much rather be with him while he figures it out, because then maybe I’ll be part of the solution instead of the problem. I don’t know if he’s ready to hear that, though.”

  “Well, I hope he comes to his senses.” Ricki got up from the table and stretched. “If he doesn’t, you want to go for consolation sushi tonight?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know.”

  “You can have sashimi. That’s low carb,” she said with a wink as she headed toward the home office.

  I smiled. My sister would be there to support me whether or not Mal flipped his lid and came up with another excuse why we shouldn’t be together.

  * * *

  They had decided to do the shoot at a coffee shop the crew was able to commandeer after the morning rush had died down. There was one trailer parked outside. Riggs walked me all the way to the door of it. I told him I’d text when we were done, but it could be hours. That was just how these things went. Three and a half days of filming to make a three-minute vid
eo.

  I didn’t see Mal anywhere but maybe he wasn’t there yet. I went to the wardrobe assistant first and she turned me around and around.

  “I think we should stick with what you’re wearing, Gwen. I mean, no offense, but you picked something really sweet and almost demure to wear today.”

  I was wearing a white cardigan sweater with the top button closed, beige capris, and espadrilles. “Cute but boring was what I was going for,” I confessed.

  “You’re channeling your character is what it is,” she said with a warm smile. “Go to makeup.”

  Makeup was all of two feet away, in the same section of trailer, which made me chuckle. The makeup artist was someone different from the previous day but she looked at reference shots and fixed my makeup and hair.

  Still no sign of Mal, which was just as well since I hadn’t figured out what I was going to say to him yet. Hey, thanks for rescuing me, um, wanna hang out? Yeah, no. Swoon and cry, My hero! and fall into his arms? Not likely.

  Nancy came into the trailer, her radio at her hip and an earpiece in her ear. “We’re going to start with some shots of you on the sidewalk, looking in the window, trying to see if he’s here, pacing up and down, waiting for your rendezvous.”

  They had a few different cameras running, to get different angles, plus Miles swept in with a handheld a couple of times while I paced up and down with a hopeful yet slightly apprehensive look on my face.

  Not pretending. Wondering if he was going to show up. Knowing that giving my heart to someone was such a huge deal. The entire future seemed wide open and yet I felt I’d never get through it if he refused to be there with me. Mal, why? It’ll work between us; I know it will. You just have to give it a chance: give yourself the chance to be your best self, too.

  “Okay,” I heard Miles call to me from behind the cameras, “now you’re going to look to the left and see him coming and your face should light up with delight. Okay? Action.”