by Daryl Banner
“Are you a model?” asked the woman after she undid my binds and I climbed off the display. “My name is Lori Turlington, owner of this gallery. I can hook you up. I have big contacts in the business.” But to her kind words, I only pulled off the ball-gag, said, “Thanks, ma’am, but no thanks,” then offered her a wink and went on my way.
After slipping my clothes back on—which had been neatly folded and kept in a back room somewhere—I pulled out my phone and called my roommate. Yeah, sure, I’m a wuss, whatever, but I’m sure as fuck not going to walk through this neighborhood alone at night.
Ten minutes later, Dmitri is giving me a tight smile as I slip into the passenger’s side. “You had a showcase and didn’t tell me?”
I glance back at the gallery with half a grin on my face and a soreness in my jaw that I’m still massaging out. “Not exactly.”
“Did you meet up with that new girl you were telling me about?”
“Yep.”
Dmitri chuckles dryly as he kicks the car into gear, pulling out onto the road. “Didn’t work out, huh? Did she turn out to be a friend of one of the six hundred exes you pissed off?”
“Nah. She just gave me … a little lesson in art,” I answer, grinning.
Dmitri nods dubiously, his gaze lingering on my face until the red light we’re at turns green. Then he pushes a foot to the gas and groans, “I really don’t feel like going back to our place.”
“Why? Oh.” I can already tell from the sight of his smirk. “Eric’s got some dude over?”
“Same dude. And they’re binge-watching Ab Fab. Hand-in-hand.”
“Why don’t you just admit there’s something between you guys?” I ask him, partly annoyed. “You act like a jealous bitch, dude.”
“No, I don’t. My eye is more occupied with someone else, actually. Eric having or not having guys at our place is irrelevant to my love life. It’s merely irksome.”
“Hah … ‘Merely irksome’ … You and your words. So who’s this new dude you’ve got your eye on?”
Pulling up to a stop sign, Dmitri puts the car into park and faces me. “You do understand that I’m bi, right?”
I shrug. “Yeah, sure. So who’s the new dude that you’re—”
“It’s a girl. She’s in my Wednesday night workshop. She’s blonde, she’s got cherry lips, and her name is Riley.”
I stare at my roommate and buddy. When is he gonna quit dancing around the bushes and just fess up? “Riley? Is that so? Why don’t you invite her over then and bury your face in her bongos?”
“Not everyone’s built like you, Brant. Some of us find other qualities in a person attractive. I ask her what sets her soul on fire, and then I dive in and bathe in it. Minds make me horny,” he says, “and if a girl—or a guy—can stimulate this puzzle-box of a brain of mine, now that’s what gets me going. Not … bongos.”
“All I’m saying is, your life would be so much easier if you’d just admit that you’re gay. Sure, okay, minds make you horny. But I think a male mind makes you hornier.”
“I am actually bisexual. Ladies and lads do it for me. You’re the one in denial, Brant, not me. Bi-erasure. Look it up. You’re being a fuckin’ simpleton. Shit.” He snorts and looks away. “You made me cuss.”
I can’t help but laugh at that. “Dude, you always cuss.”
“I’m trying not to. It weakens my fucking writing. Shit, did it again. Fuck.” He groans and leans into the wheel, sighing with frustration. “I don’t want to go home.”
“Hey, hey.” I slap his back and give it a rub. “Screw them all. Riley. Eric. Nell. Screw ‘em. Let’s go throw some balls tonight and get drunk. It’s Saturday. Our bowling bags are still in your trunk from last time.”
“I’m driving,” he whines. “Who’s Nell?”
“Leave your car in the lot, then. We’ll walk home or call for a cab. C’mon, you need this. We both do.” I scratch behind his ears like a cat. “Purr for me, Dmitri. Purr for your Master Brant.”
He slaps my hand away with a laugh, then grips the wheel with new conviction. “Alright, you got me.” He flips the car back into drive, then hits a hard left toward the bowling alley. I smile at the side of his face, suddenly feeling good about everything in the world. I throw an arm behind his seat and kick back as he takes us to my favorite spot.
Deep down, I experience a pang of frustration at the fact that I’m spending all this time with Dmitri and hanging out with him doing things that Clayton and I used to do. Clayton’s the one I would have texted to pick me up after my “experience” at the art gallery. Clayton’s the one I’d actually confess to what happened, what Nell did to me, and—maybe more pressingly—what Nell is doing to me. For some reason, I don’t feel the need to confide as deeply in Dmitri. With Clayton so wrapped up in his own life now, I’ve been doing a lot more of standing on my own feet. And yeah, they’re shaky feet, at best.
Even my bowling game’s off. It’s the first thing Dmitri notes after we arrive at Tricky-10 Lanes on Kingston, park in the back, grab our bags out of the trunk, enter like we’re kings, slip on our snazzy shoes, order drinks, claim lane 7, don our gloves, pull out our balls, and bowl five horrible frames. I shrug and blame it on the beer, even though I’ve only had a sip or two. Okay, maybe I’m on my third bottle.
“Is Nell the girl from the art school? Or the dancer?”
“Art school,” I answer, grabbing my blue-and-orange ball from the ball return. “How’d you know her name?”
“You mentioned her in the car.”
“I did?”
“Sure did.” Dmitri lines up for his shot. He takes a breath, pulls back, lets the ball loose. It hits everything but two pins on the side.
“That sucks. Gonna have to ride the lightning on your next one.” I shake my head and kick back the rest of my beer. The empty bottle bangs hollowly against the table. I pick up the little plastic menu. “I need fuel, dude. Want the cardboard fries or the plastic pizza?”
“I want the scoop,” he shoots back. “Tell me about this Nell girl.”
For some reason, I don’t want to talk about her just yet. I feel like she’s some precious secret I need to protect. “She’s … opinionated.”
He laughs at that so hard, his thick glasses bounce. “Opinionated?”
“Don’t swing too close, dude, you’ll go right into the gutter.” I twist around and flag down a waitress across the room.
“What do you mean opinionated?” He lifts his ball, preparing to go.
The waitress, a girl with soft, bushy brown hair to her shoulders, drifts up to my side. Her eyes become especially flirty when she smiles. “What can I get you, big boy?”
I grin, kicking back in my seat. “Which one will I regret less: fries or pizza?”
“Nachos,” she murmurs softly, biting her lip.
I give her a wink. “I’ll take the nachos, then. Two of them. And another beer, please. Samesies,” I say, tapping my empty bottle. Dmitri bowls and the ball slips into the gutter almost right away. “What’d I tell you, dude?? What’d I tell you?”
The waitress leans unnecessarily far over the table to get my empty bottle, her breasts grazing my shoulder. I look up at her quizzically. When her gaze meets mine, she wears a questioning expression of her own. “You got anything going on tonight, Brant?”
I blink. She knows my name? “Just shooting some lanes with my bud and getting smashed,” I answer carefully, a list of twenty-thousand girls’ names racing through my head at the speed of light as I speak.
“I get off in another hour,” she says, biting her lip again.
Laura? Mandy? Grace? Gina? Jen? Emily? Cassandra?
“Oh, that’s cool,” I reply vaguely. Sarah? Susan? Darcy? Tracy?
“I thought, maybe …” She brings her lips to my ear and lowers her voice to a sigh. “After I get off … maybe we both could get off …”
Kelly? Olivia? Lena? Ramona? Ashley? Amber?
“I think I … I might need to, ah …”
“I’ve been thinking about you for weeks,” she moans, her tits in my face, her soft hand on my shoulder, and her breath tickling my ear.
The next moment, Dmitri’s in front of us to save the day. “You’re up, buddy.”
She pulls away from me, giving Dmitri the stink eye before flipping her hair at me and saying, “I’ll be back with those nachos.” Then, with a frosty, pointed wink, she hightails it to the bar.
I come up to the lane, my lucky blue-and-orange ball held up by my hand wearing the lucky blue-and-orange fingerless glove. My wrists still ache from the unrelenting cuffs earlier that bound them for hours.
There are worse aches to suffer.
I stare at the ten pins that await me at the end of the lane and I think about the waitress. I may know some of the staff by name, but hers completely eludes me. And I wouldn’t find that so bothersome if it weren’t for the fact that I think she and I have shared a bed. Or was it a closet? Or was it the kitchen scullery? Or was it in a car out back? Or was it back at school in a classroom? In a shrubbery? On a rooftop? In a dormitory? In the bed of a pickup?
Behind a privacy screen in the art room?
“Brant? You waiting on the pins to drop themselves?”
I stand here on the approach and I stare at those ten pins that await me, and it’s like those pins are ten random chicks I’ve screwed and then utterly forgotten. And whenever I knock the pins down, the machine just sweeps them off and replaces them with ten more. Ten girls gone, ten more on the way. Tens and tens and tens.
Girls and girls and girls.
“Brant?”
I pull back, breathe, then send that ball screaming down the lane. It takes the pins down with a furious clatter.
All the pins but one.
That one final pin stares at me defiantly. It’s so opinionated, that stubborn pin. It acts like it knows everything about me without even having dinner with me yet. It claims to get what I’m all about. It accuses me of being a woman-objectifying man-whore. It cuffs me to a block and shows me off to the world as the pussy-lickin’ slut I am.
I snatch my ball from the ball return, angry, and march up to the approach. Then I launch it down the lane with crazed conviction.
The ball barely grazes the remaining pin.
The pin wiggles. The pin dances. Then the pin settles, staying in its place, unfallen.
Dmitri comes up to my side and throws an arm over my shoulder. “You win some, you lose some.” He messes up my hair as I stare down the lane at that pin, frozen in place, disbelieving. “I say we pretend the nachos made us sick, then dodge big-tits waitress and head home for a round of Call of Duty. How’s that sound?”
“Perfect,” I grunt through gritted teeth, fuming over that stubborn, shiny, beautiful pin.
That pin named Nell.
Chapter 7
Nell
Everyone else in class has left already and the studio is gorgeously silent. My apartment suffers from the noise of nearby traffic, police sirens, and a rhinoceros or two that live directly above me. Not to mention the six rock star hopefuls that live in the box across the hall from me and who rehearse no less than four times a day. I know all their songs by heart and against my will. I’m Bleeding Picklock’s number one fan and can’t stand them.
So it’s a welcome relief to have a peaceful, quiet studio all to myself. My hands are riddled with charcoal scratches from an angered cat that made me bleed every shade between black and grey. That angered cat rests in two dimensions on the wide paper before me. She’s a hungry cat, as her own tail is curled around her body, resting in a food bowl in front of her. And it’s to that tail that she’s stuck a fork, slicing off a piece of it with a knife to eat for dinner.
I think I’ll call this one: Eating Pussy.
“So did I do well?”
I don’t turn around. His voice comes behind me from the door, and I know exactly whose voice it is without daring to lay my eyes on his sexy face. I keep the charcoal pencil pressed to the paper, adding details to the fur on my hungry cat’s ears.
“I’d say the crowd that gathered,” he goes on, “was quite receptive.”
I bring a blackened, dirty finger to the paper, blending a shadow.
“Might even need an encore,” he says, the smile evident in his voice. “You can’t just be a one-hit wonder. They have those in the art world, don’t they?”
I lick my lips, smile at my artwork, then say, “I have never been, and will never be, a one-hit anything.”
His soft, slow footsteps echo through the room. “You already got another hit in that brilliant mind of yours? Something maybe about castrating men?” he suggests innocently. “Maybe I can stand on a stage for you, naked, with a big ol’ censorship bar sticking out from between my legs. We can call it Penis Envy.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Or we can skip the stage, skip the censorship bar, and just … you can have me naked. I mean, before you chained me to that display and ditched me, you did talk me out of my clothes.”
Despite my rising blood pressure, I speak evenly as I carefully add a whisker. “They weren’t chains. They were handcuffs.” I clear my throat. “Fake handcuffs, at that.”
“I still couldn’t free myself,” he points out. “The little trick latches were out of reach. Hey, if you wanna use chains next time …”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m all for exploring. I’m not a master of kink, per se, but …”
“Despite how you might see the world,” I murmur thoughtfully, applying a light stroke to the cat’s left paw, “every female in the world is not interested in slipping between the sheets with you.”
“Most of them are.”
I slap my charcoal pencil down so hard on my desk, I worry for a second that I’ve broken it. When I finally turn to grace Brant with my furious eyes, I catch him startled, his hands thrust in the pockets of his low-hanging jeans, and his shoulders, visible due to the black tank top he wears, are hunched upward. His forehead is wrinkled in surprise.
I was prepared to burn him with a mouthful of scathing words about women and respect and boys like him who only have sex on their minds … when quite suddenly sex is the only thing on my mind.
How’d he become ten times hotter since the last time I saw him? And this time, he’s got clothes on.
“Actually, what I came here to say …” he starts.
“I think you’ve said it already.” I steal my confidence right back by ripping my eyes away from him and returning to my work.
“Listen. I … I joke a lot, alright? It’s like my defense mechanism. I sorta deflect all my anxiety and shortcomings by … flirting. By staring at your gorgeous boobs. By imagining you in different positions.”
“Please, go on,” I moan mockingly. “You’re making me so wet.”
“But maybe you do the same thing.”
I can’t even decide where to place my pencil. Also, for some reason, my thighs are squeezing together so tight, you’d think I was trying to fuse them together. I turn to Brant again, humoring him. “Is that so?”
“Yep. And maybe your art is … kind of a defense mechanism too.” He takes a few tentative steps toward me. “Maybe you hide behind all that angsty art so that you … don’t have to risk being hurt by people.”
I rise from my stool, pencil gripped like a weapon. “Don’t come in here and presume to know me after one night.”
“Am I right, then?”
“My art isn’t a defense mechanism. It’s the means by which I express myself. It’s what I do. It’s my passion. Maybe you’d understand any of that if you had a passion outside of the one in your pants.”
Brant wrinkles up his face. “I can’t tell if you just insulted me or complimented me.”
“I mean, really, tell me. I’m curious. Tell me what made you choose photography. Or is that all a lie? Are you just some creep with a camera around your neck? Hell … Are you even enrolled at Klangburg?”
<
br /> “I left my camera at home. So I was right, then?”
I blink. “What?”
“About the art thing.” His expression turns quizzical as his bright eyes dart over to my drawing. “Is that cat eating its own tail?”
“I just said …”
He moves around me, as if he just lost all interest in debating art and cameras and defense mechanisms. He stands in front of my raked desk, observing my work. When he crosses his arms, his back spreads, flexing the muscles of his triangular form that peek out from under the black tank top.
There’s something incredibly sexy and intimate about how Brant studies my work. This time, he knows it’s mine. Something about that fact sends a shiver of anxiety through my system, not unlike the way his fingers might feel if he brushed them over my skin.
“Is it like … symbolic?” he asks, keeping his gaze on the drawing.
I don’t answer, watching him with my pencil gripped so tightly, my hand cramps.
“We eat ourselves. We’re so hungry we … eat ourselves.” He starts moving his knee, as if gently bouncing to some song in his head. “Yeah. I think that’s what it means. Except I don’t got no tail,” he throws at me, turning his head and flashing a sexy, teasing smile.
Just his face melts all of my insides. His dimples convert my guts into a steamy broth that both feels like home and like somewhere frighteningly unfamiliar and exotic. His eyes—like the sky at noon without a single cloud in it—dive so deeply into me that I fear for a moment he can see my every truth, even the ones I’m too scared to see myself.
Of course, on my exterior, all Brant really sees is what anyone sees: a woman who’s turned to ice—emotionless, bitter, and with an invisible shell as hard as diamond enclosing me like a second skin.
“So, is this a game show?” I throw back at him, though my voice is softer. “You guess what my work means and I give you a prize?”
The joke encourages him, his smile growing. “What kind of prize do I get? You gonna take your top off?”
I swallow a chuckle, pressing my lips together tight so as not to laugh. Damn it, Nell. Remember who he is. “Nope.”
“Good idea. Make me wait.” He winks. “Then a kiss, maybe?”