by Ava Cummings
We make our way to an expansive kitchen with more harsh edges and dark colors. I shudder at the coldness of it all. Damien grabs an open bottle of Perrier Jouët, its flowery design unmistakable, and motions to me, asking if I want a glass.
“Cheers, Anna. To us.”
I hold my glass up and he gently touches his to mine, creating a beautiful ringing sound. “Us.” I’ve never been an us.
Damien and I circulate. He’s here to work, after all. Not in the conventional sense—not doing a deal with a client or working the room for his next promotion. But looking for inspiration, that glimmer that will lead to a spark, the seed of an idea that will then blossom into his next piece.
We sidle up next to our host, who’s sitting on a couch, some young thing dry-humping his leg. It seems pretty par for the course here, and we chat as if we’re at a normal cocktail party, not a porn king’s debauch.
Bob tells us that he operates in a universe of his own creation, where fantasy and sexual adventure reign. It’s a sort of secret club, where there’s an unspoken rule, a code of silence: What happens here stays here.
When I look more closely at the crowd, it appears to be made up of two types: lost young girls and rich older men lusting after them. But Bob says he gets all types, from celebrities to wayward souls, all bonding over the same needs and desires.
In a way, it’s liberating, even for me, dropping into this hedonistic world for the night. But the desperation that has brought these people here simmers just below the surface.
“Hey, come back to me.”
Damien’s voice snaps me out of my analytical haze, processing tonight, this place, and how peoples’ lives take such divergent paths.
“Where were you? Lost you for a minute.”
I look around. Bob and his friend have gotten up and are walking away, the porn impresario pretty much holding up the girl as she teeters on her heels.
“This place is weird. Bob is weird. You really can find anything in New York, anything you want, and there are other people in this city that want the same thing.”
“And the wealthier you are, the more you feel entitled to do whatever you want.” Damien adds, like the wise sage that he can be.
We scan the main room and see people engaged in every sort of partying. Some snort lines of coke out in the open. Another group passes around a joint. Still others are indulging in who knows what, in plain sight or just beyond it.
“Check that out.” Damien motions with his head to a couch on the right.
I see a small group engaged in a sort of mini-orgy. It looks like three girls and two guys, but it’s hard to tell.
“Kind of hot, though, huh?” Damien floats.
I give him my I-don’t-think-so look.
“I thought you liked a little public display of…well, maybe ‘affection’ is too tame a term.” He grins at me and continues, “Anna, your story about you and that money dude—it totally turned me on.”
“Hearing about what I’ve done with other guys doesn’t freak you out?”
“You’re not with him anymore. So it poses no threat. And he was a scumbag. So there’s no danger of you going back to him. And besides, I have talents, you know. In that realm.” He smiles and leans in, nudging my shoulder.
I blush.
“Yes…you do.” I remember the night at his studio, and my stomach flutters.
“What else have you done that’s crazy like that?”
“I don’t know. Nothing really.” I look down. I realize that I’ve separated myself emotionally from sex…until Damien. I thought I was protecting myself from getting hurt. Now I’m starting to see that it only perpetuated a cycle of emptiness. Now those experiences feel…sad. It hurts to talk about them. They were born out of pain.
With Damien, it’s different. I love feeling close to him. Even this conversation—it’s not just sexy, it’s intimate. Sharing this with him, talking about my escapades, brings me closer to him and has started to erase some of the past hurt. Telling him somehow makes it okay that those things happened. I can own them now.
And the more I tell him, the more he wants to know. I venture something.
“Well, I let a guy…shave me once.” I cringe.
I put it out there. I can’t believe it.
Damien’s eyes light up.
“Tell me more,” he says, almost panting.
“In the shower.” His eyes bore into me, and he gives me a devilish smile.
“It was all part of a night of dares…not regular dares but, like, sexual dares.” Then I lose my moment of confidence. My mind spins back through everything Jesse and I did that night, and I clam up.
“Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”
“I don’t think so, Anna. You can’t just put that out there. Sit your cute little butt over here and tell me exactly what happened.”
He pulls me over toward him, looks me in the eye with his intense gaze, and then leans in and takes a definitive, deeply sensual kiss from me. His tongue dives into me, swirling with mine. With every movement, he’s telling me he wants to be closer and know me more. He needs to know, with urgency. I moan quietly and meld my mouth with his.
“Anna, you turn me on. It’s not just your stories. It’s you.”
So I tell him about that night with Jesse. When I’m done, Damien looks into my eyes and commands, “Come. With me. Now.”
He grabs me and pulls me down a hallway.
Damien finds a bathroom, looks to make sure the coast is clear, and pulls me in. It’s a huge room, done up in Carrera marble—floor, walls, countertops. There’s a massive Jacuzzi tub against one wall. It probably fits at least four. And then there’s the shower, which is the size of my bedroom, with at least a dozen showerheads pointing in different directions. I’m sure Bob has had some crazy times in there.
Damien closes the door behind us and comes toward me.
Gently walking me backward until I come up against the wall, he lifts me up. I wrap my legs around his strong, hard body as he cradles my butt, moving me close to him.
“You are so sexy, so beautiful,” he says between gasps. “I need to be close to you.”
I run my hands through the soft waves in his hair.
He pulls himself to me so that our bodies fuse as one, as close as it’s possible to be while fully clothed. The intense intimacy startles me. It feels raw, voracious—passion and emotion entangled together. My heart literally feels likes it’s swelling. He pulls his lips to mine and kisses me deeply, with an animalistic intensity.
He moves to put me down gently and begins covering me with kisses as he unbuttons my clothes.
I make a feeble effort to question whether getting it on here in the porn king’s bathroom, in the middle of a crazy late-night party, is the right thing to do. We look at each other and silently agree, without speaking, that nothing is going to stop us.
He undresses me slowly, taking care to notice every curve and little imperfection. He asks about the birthmark on my hip and my two small scars. I tell him how I got them: falling out of a tree house when I was seven, tripping on an escalator when I was thirteen. He kisses each. Tears pool in my eyes—not from a need to cry, exactly, but from an overwhelming emotion that yearns to be released. I feel so close to him.
He holds me as he deftly removes his boxer briefs, revealing himself, full and hard. He grabs a condom from his wallet and rolls it on. Gently laying me on the soft shag rug on the floor, he takes what must be a $400 plush white towel to roll under my head as a pillow.
“You okay?” he asks, making sure I’m comfortable.
“Never better.”
Gently easing himself into me, I yearn with every cell and nerve ending to be close to him. He holds me, one hand behind my head, the other wrapped about my body, as he slowly rocks inside me. We’re moving together as one and staring into each other’s eyes. I feel energy passing between us. It’s so intense that my insides begin slow, faint contractions.
“Not yet, Ann
a,” he says.
“I never knew sex could be like this,” I whisper.
“Just wait.”
He keeps moving slowly, rhythmically. Pumping me in and out, and then grinding in deep, artful circles. I match his moves. I feel him growing harder, pulsing inside me. And then he stops.
“I just want to live here a sec,” he says, gazing into my eyes with the most loving, soulful expression. He touches my face, stroking it with his hand. I put my hand over his. And we’re locked like this. There’s no movement, but the intensity, the intimacy growing between us, is overwhelming.
Ever so slowly, he starts moving again inside me, with his slow rhythm, a cadence, like dancing. As he stares into my eyes, and with our breath moving in unison, we tumble over the precipice of pleasure together, coming as one. The waves hurtle through me and the force makes me cry out. Damien moves in me with slow, deep, penetrating thrusts, and I feel him throbbing, sending another ripple of waves through me.
Tears start flowing. It feels like a release—like that wall built around my heart is tumbling down. I’ve let Damien in.
“Hey, people need to get in there,” someone yells from the other side of the door, knocking furiously.
Damien and I look at each other, and I turn beet red.
“Hey, it’s a Bob Stracciato party. Anything goes,” says Damien, as we scramble to get dressed.
We separate as we each reenter the main room, trying not to attract more attention than we already might have—not that anyone here cares. Damien gets us another round of drinks.
I’m still thrumming with pleasure. God, he’s so amazing, I think to myself as I replay the experience. I’ve never been made love to before, never even used that expression, but that’s what it was. We made love.
The scene at the party gets wilder—the music louder, the dancers more flamboyant. One girl is up on the stripper pole, while a group of men whoop and stuff bills into her barely-there dress. I find a spot on a couch in a corner, removed from the action.
Damien arrives with champagne for me, and vodka on the rocks for him.
As he takes a seat, he downs the entire drink in one swift gulp. He slams the glass on the coffee table and turns to me.
“I have something to tell you.”
I look over at him and take a sip of the bubbly as my hand starts to shake. No one ever says anything good after those words. I can’t take another blow. I’m too far in. He’s tapped a well of emotions, and now I can’t turn it off. All I can do is hope he takes care with my heart.
I shift the conversation to something lighter, in a feeble attempt to make him forget.
“Wait, I know,” I say, smiling.
“No, Anna, you don’t.”
“You like it, too,” I interrupt. “The thrill of getting caught.” I give him my best coy expression.
“Not about that. Anna, I have to tell you something. About me. You deserve to know it. And I’m…I’m ready to say it.”
Here it comes. The reason we can’t be together. A lump forms in my throat, my fingers clutch into tiny fists, digging into my palms.
“It’s not about sex.” He looks up with sad eyes—the same ones I saw at the Met before he ran off. “It’s about me…about my dad.”
“You can tell me anything, Damien. I’ll be there,” I say, my supportive instincts kicking in.
“It’s Luke Laraby,” he says, staring at me, as if he’s looking at me for strength to go on, to physically get the words out. “He’s my father.”
Synapses start firing, making connections in my brain, as the words pour out of him. As though saying those words has opened a valve he has kept locked shut.
“I never knew him. He was married to Victoria Laraby, but he kept mistresses who were his muses over the years. They fueled his artistic inspiration. Sadie Wolfe captured his heart completely. Sadie is my mom. She was an assistant at Swisher Wolfe, the gallery he showed at in the city. Her father was the owner. She and Luke were madly in love. She inspired his greatest, most famous works. She supported him, soothing his crushing insecurity and the cycling emotions he’d go through preparing for every show.
“After about a year with Luke, sneaking behind Victoria’s back, Sadie got pregnant with me. He was going to leave Victoria for her. It was all planned. They were deeply in love. But Victoria wouldn’t let him. She said that he had to leave my mom, or she would expose him as a cheat and a liar.
“He couldn’t handle it. He began to spiral downward into a depression so deep even my mom couldn’t pull him out.
“Finally, in a grand gesture, in his most famous piece—which he called Exit—he committed suicide on the opening night of his show at the Guggenheim by jumping from the top floor of the museum, down into the center rotunda.
“That day at the Met, Anna, you practically fell onto one of his most famous pieces. I didn’t know it was there. They had moved it. I always make a point of avoiding the modern-art wing. Seeing you there, in front of his piece…it was like you were Sadie and I was him…
“I feel like my life is going exactly as his did. I’m afraid I can’t conquer my demons, and that I’m destined for the same ending.”
I stare at him, stunned into silence, absorbing the information, feeling it ricochet around my mind, hitting corners of my heart, searing spots of pain from my own wounds. Words aren’t coming. His story, his history, overwhelms. I don’t know what to tell him. Families torn apart, fathers not strong enough—I relate too well, and I’ve been no good at handling it on my own. I can’t be an example. “You are not your father, Damien,” I manage to say. “You don’t have to have the same ending. It is not your destiny.”
“I’ve never told anyone about my dad. But I’ve also never felt this way about anyone before…Anna, I love you,” he says, looking at me with questioning eyes. “And I’m scared.”
“I’m scared, too,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself. All my issues come flooding back, and I feel myself closing up. I want to say those special words back to him, but I can’t. My body starts to rebel against me. That openness I was feeling, that willingness to let go, closes up. The truth is that we are both broken and have deep issues concerning our fathers.
My dad’s not dead, but he might as well be. How could two such broken people make this work? It’s too much to process now, to figure out here, at Stracciato’s crazy party. Suddenly, I feel claustrophobic, like I can’t breathe.
“Take me home.”
27
No Consequences
Just as I settle into my desk for the day, my email pings with the subject line “Mandy.” Palms instantly slicked in sweat, I rub them together and move to click it open. It’s from Tessa Lee, the stylist from the Bubble Lounge and the Melodie cover shoot.
Anna,
I’m working on the set of Mandy’s new movie and overheard something crazy. Remember that whole weirdness on the Grant set visit? I think they could be related. Call me.
Tessa
Frantic, I skitter down the hall and find an empty freelancer’s office to slip into and call her.
She answers, sounding distraught.
“I was deep in a closet, digging for a prop for a scene, and overheard Mandy’s publicist.”
Great. Her publicist, the all-powerful Sandy Stein, who ruins people for fun and has already warned me about this story.
“She was talking with a couple of assistants. They were claiming that Celeb is running bogus stories by somehow getting information from Sandy Stein’s office. So they started a rumor about Malone getting a boob job by the Hollywood plastic surgeon Dr. Evans to see if the magazine would pick up on it and to expose you guys if you ran with it.”
I thank Tessa and quickly hang up. Running back to my computer, I call up the Malone story and furiously start to scan it. As I scroll through, I see that Bernie has rewritten it, turning it from a comeback piece on Hollywood’s most legendary actress to a hack boob-job story. My underarms prickle with sweat. Putting the pieces tog
ether in my head, I get a plunging feeling in my gut, all the way to the bottom of my soul.
As I run toward Bernie’s office to explain to her that the boob job news is not real and that we can’t go with it, thoughts swirl in my head, and the anger builds. She just hauls off and rewrites my story when something that will sell better comes along, no matter that I gave my word to Malone.
“Hold on a sec, Anna,” Bernie says, pointing a finger at me to halt, as Chelsea stands at the door. “Chelsea, let me know ASAP what happens with the Dr. Evans thing.”
Chelsea nods and Bernie turns to me. My knees buckle, as I stifle a gasp.
“What is so urgent, Anna?”
I stand in the doorway, frozen, getting my head together to respond as the synapses in my brain fire like crazy, making connections.
“Anna? What was so damned urgent?” Bernie shouts at me.
I finally snap out of it.
“Um, nothing. It can wait,” I manage to stutter.
“Stop wasting my time, for God’s sake,” she barks and turns to her computer.
I scamper back to my desk, dizzy, a thin sheen of sweat beginning to coat my entire body. I need to call Jesse. Yes, he will help me, I convince myself. As I move to dial his phone, my fingers shake so violently I can barely make contact with the right numbers.
When I finally get through, I say in an urgent near-whisper, “I need to go out to Goodall’s right this second. Will you take me? Jesse, this is serious. My career is on the line, and so is Damien’s. I can explain later—just tell me you can take me.”
“I’m in Philly on a story about the governor. I’m on the next train out of here. But I won’t be back for about three hours.”
The breaths come short and stilted. More dizziness. I close my eyes as I press the receiver to my ear even harder, hoping it will somehow push an idea, a solution, out of my head. Time is of the essence. Our next issue closes tomorrow, and every hour, every minute, counts.