Until Lucas, it had been Grant who had been in control most of the time, if anyone really had. He was the one with the reliable car. He was the one with a job, the one who could pay for things and say “Just pay me back when you get the chance.” He’d been the one to say “We should do this or that.” If it hadn’t been for that, Shawn wasn’t sure Lena or Edward would have left their houses. Maybe Shawn wouldn’t have, either. Maybe he would have just stayed locked in his room while the chaos surrounding him raged on.
And now Grant was trying to win back some of that control.
Unless . . .
Unless he was right about Debbie . . . or at least about something happening that night.
That’s what Shawn was afraid of. Maybe he’d experienced something too. Maybe it hadn’t just been Edward and him lying out under the stars all night. Maybe he was afraid it would all come back to him.
Had he been lying to himself about that, too?
He grunted and strained against the ropes but the drinking and the adrenaline and whatever Grant had slipped them were still having their effects and he felt weak and flaccid.
Still, he felt like he needed to fight against whatever was happening before . . . before what?
Before the craziness—the irrationalia or whatever—enveloped him too.
Growing up in his family, he knew craziness wasn’t something you chose, it was something that sucked you in and swallowed you, forcing you to live out the rest of your life in the corrosive liquid of its stomach.
Then why did he doubt Grant so much?
Did he really think Grant would choose to be this violent and manipulative?
In short, no. For the same reasons he couldn’t really blame his sisters for how they’d acted growing up. He didn’t have to speak to them anymore, but he couldn’t blame them.
Which was exactly why he couldn’t let Grant follow through with what he wanted to do.
Grant had taken his hand off his cock and now stood over Lena, his shaky hands fumbling with the knots of the rope.
Shawn tried to catch Lena’s eyes but she was fixated on Lucas, formerly the man in the woods and now the man on the floor. If she had been his one remaining ally, she had crossed to the other side. Not for the first time in his life, Shawn marveled at how close to the bone the past was to a lot of people.
“Grant! Lena!”
Neither one of them acknowledged him.
“You can’t do this.” He tried to sound forceful but it was dampened. They could do this. They could do whatever they wanted to.
“You shouldn’t do this!”
He was able to get behind that with a little more verve. It was a statement that, even on the surface, was true. No one should really take advantage of a kidnap victim who’s had his limbs broken. But there was another reason. A deeper reason.
Why? he asked himself. Why shouldn’t they do it?
He answered softly, not really knowing if he were only answering himself or the rest of the room.
“Something terrible is going to happen.”
TWENTY-ONE
Lena had her doubts but her hopes quashed them for the moment. Grant worked the knots of the ropes but it was impossible for him to move fast enough. What part of her thought this would work? She gave fuck all about Debbie or the demon or even, for that matter, Grant’s mental state. She wanted what she had come for. Not just Lucas. Not just Lucas’s cock. That great elusive orgasm. She tried to calm herself down, tell herself to relax. The odds were stacked against her anyway. She didn’t need a mountain of anxiety on top of it. Twenty-five years of highly transgressive sex and nearly pathological masturbation had probably ruined her organs. Not to mention what nearly as many years of borderline to all-out alcoholism and clinical depression had done to her brain.
But, no, she didn’t want to think about any of that.
She was about to get what she wanted.
And that was the terrifying thing.
What if she got what she wanted but the results were not what she expected?
That’s why she had to go into it expecting nothing.
The ropes dropped away and she felt a sliver of freedom. She considered launching herself at Grant like some kind of feral beast, gouging at his eyes and pistoning her knee into his crotch. But why would she do that? To save Lucas and Shawn and Edward? How was that freedom?
She stood up on wobbly legs.
If this were going to work, she felt like she needed to erase the past twenty-five years.
Then she thought about how wrong that would be. It was a tired cliché, she knew, but she thought of herself like a dam that needed to break. It was everything she had done over the years that would give this more meaning. The countless failed experiments. All the nights of loathing and self-doubt and utter humiliation and debasement. All would have been worth it if they’d ended with that one explosion, that one rupture.
“Roll him over,” she told Grant.
Grant bent, rolled Lucas onto his back, and shuffled to a corner of the room, his hand returning to his cock. She realized she had spent years around these guys and had never seen one of their cocks. Not even by accident. Despite whatever Shawn and Grant thought had been going on between Edward and her.
Grant’s eyes flicked greedily between Lucas and her.
Shawn seemed determined not to look. He strained against the ropes, his face red with exertion. She didn’t know what he expected to do. He’d look, eventually. She knew he would. Out of curiosity, if nothing else.
She grabbed the hem of her t-shirt and pulled it up over her torso and head before sliding it down her arms and letting it drop to the floor. She hadn’t bothered putting her bra back on. She was suddenly more thankful for the years of yoga than she’d ever been. It hadn’t centered her or helped make her more mindful or whatever the fuck it was supposed to do, but it had given her a great body. She wondered if Shawn would compare her to his wife when he finally decided to look at her.
She unbuttoned and unzipped her pants before peeling them down her legs.
She looked down at Lucas.
His eyes were plastered to her.
Of course they were.
You couldn’t take the dog out of the man. That was what one of her good friends had told her and she knew it to be true. It was one of the reasons she’d agreed to marry Trent. She could smell it on him. She knew he would take every opportunity presented to him and, in a way, it made her feel like she didn’t have to try as hard. Although she viewed her indiscretions as a nearly spiritual quest and felt like he was mostly just banging sluts to feel better about himself, to prove he still had it.
She glanced in Shawn’s direction. His eyes were open, running down her body quickly, discretely.
She let her hand drop to the fabric of her underwear, her fingertips running along the cleft in her vulva.
She met Lucas’s eyes. The look in them was indeterminate. Or maybe just a nearly unreadable mélange of emotions: fear, desire, possibly even contempt.
The room suddenly seemed very quiet.
“What do you want me to do?” she said softly.
“I just want you to let me go,” Lucas groaned. “You’re all fucking nuts.”
“Do you want me to be seventeen again? Do you want this to be my first time?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “I told you I was sorry, okay? I was a monster back then. I know that now.”
“You shouldn’t be sorry about that,” she said. “That was exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed. I’m just sorry we couldn’t keep doing it. I’m sorry I couldn’t have found you sooner.”
Lucas lifted his head and smashed it back into the concrete of the floor.
“Don’t do that,” Lena said. “I’m going to make you feel good. If you want to not be sorry anymore, give me this moment, okay? That’s how you can absolve yourself of the guilt. And remember . . . Now, I know, maybe it’s not the hottest thing to say, but I kept you from being ass raped by this guy.” She hooke
d a thumb at Grant. “So show some fucking gratitude. I know the circumstances are a little unconventional but pussy’s pussy, right?”
Now Lucas was openly crying. Something about it, maybe the vulnerability of it, turned Lena on even more. Maybe it was possible for this to happen.
She slid her underwear down her thin but muscular legs, dropped to her knees, and slid the dress up past Lucas’s waist.
His cock was completely flaccid.
She looked at it and then tried to meet his eyes but he was staring up at the ceiling.
She pinched the tip of his cock between her thumb and fingertips and said, “I think you’re trying really hard not to get turned on right now. Think about it: this is something you’ve never experienced before. It’s completely new. Isn’t that exciting?”
“I’m in . . . a lot of pain,” he said.
“I can make the pain go away. You have to at least try.” She swirled the tip of her index finger around the opening of his penis. “Promise me you’ll try.”
He didn’t say anything.
She moved her hand down to cup his scrotum. She squeezed it, gathering the balls together in her hand.
“If you don’t try, I’m going to squeeze your nuts until you puke. Got it?”
“I’ll try,” he rasped.
“But there’s . . . no pressure or anything, okay?”
She straddled his stomach, put her hands on his chest, and locked eyes with him.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” she said. “I know you don’t remember that night, but I do. Very clearly. I’ve probably thought about it every day since. There hasn’t been a person I’ve fucked who I haven’t imagined was you, at least for a couple of minutes. Every cock that’s been inside me, I’ve wanted it to be you. So I get it if this means nothing to you, but it means everything to me. All you have to do is lie there. Lie there and think about whatever you want to think about, but this is happening. Now tell me what you want.”
“Put . . . put it in your mouth,” he said, just like he had that night so long ago.
TWENTY-TWO
Edward’s thoughts were liquid. His body felt liquid. No. Something more buoyant than liquid. He felt like both his body and his consciousness were bobbing along the surface of some night ocean, breaking the surface for a moment or two of clarity before being dragged back down to a briny fogginess.
He willed his eyes to open and take in his surroundings.
He was in some kind of utility room with a furnace and a water heater and assorted things like mops and brooms. He felt paralyzed but it didn’t really occur to him that he was tied down. He kept his eyes open as long as he could before they forced themselves closed and his leaden head drooped until his chin rested on his chest.
For a few moments, he was able to do what he did best—listen to the sounds around him. Some people remember places they’d been by visual cues—architecture, road signs, the diversity of the people around them. He remembered places by the way they sounded. Whenever he traveled to a new place, if he got the chance, he would sit somewhere with his eyes closed for as long as possible, listening to the sounds around him and then traveling to sounds farther and farther away until he was almost sure he could hear the vacuum of space. In that respect, every place was really the same.
Water tinkled in the water heater. Air hissed through the vents, the blower in the furnace bringing it from some air conditioning unit presumably outside. The floor above him creaked but it was like an environmental creak, not a person-walking-on-it creak. A sound he couldn’t place came from behind him. At first he thought it sounded like someone sweeping the floor and he had to again wonder where he was. Since it was unquestionably a utility room, he assumed he must be in Lucas’s house, probably the basement. Why would anyone be sweeping the basement floor while he was trapped in the utility closet? He remembered being tired and then Grant freaking out and then trying to make his way up to the house before blacking out. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d found himself in an unfamiliar place after blacking out. It also wouldn’t be the first time he couldn’t move very well after coming to. He thought it was called sleep paralysis but he also thought most people attached some feeling of horror or terror to it and he’d never really experienced that. It was more like, “Okay. I’m awake now but everything’s not working so great at the moment so I’ll just lie here until I can move.” At least he had a pretty good guess about where he was. Sometimes he didn’t even know what house he was in.
He again tried to focus on the sweeping sounds. That’s what his listening exercises were really all about. Focus. Otherwise he would just have music running through his head constantly. By listening to the world around him, it took him out of himself, and that was what allowed him to make music that didn’t sound like everybody else’s. Originally, anyway. Now he was pretty sure he was just a hack.
The sweeping sound was punctuated with a definite moan. He was pretty sure it was one of pleasure.
Were people fucking out there?
Maybe he wasn’t where he thought he was. Maybe that hadn’t happened at all. It certainly felt dreamlike. Getting a vaguely coherent email from someone you haven’t seen in over two decades and immediately booking a flight, leaving everything he’d worked for in the dust.
Or escaping from everything his work had given him.
Maybe that made a little more sense.
He remembered one of the first fan letters he’d ever gotten. It was from a French girl who’d seen him play a free show one night at a park in Nice. She said she’d immediately dumped her controlling and abusive boyfriend and began composing her first song the next day. She said she’d downloaded everything she could find from him on Napster. She said he’d changed her life.
The last fan letter he’d received had been from a dude living in L.A. who said he and his bros had caught his show at the Luxor while on a weekend in Vegas and how it must be great to make so much money for pressing some buttons and playing for horny bitches every night. The dude informed him he was going to download Ableton and give Edonymous a run for his money. Edward doubted this guy’s love for the music went much past the commercial stage but this was far more indicative of the messages he received these days, if any of those meatheads could even be bothered to write a message.
Clearly, the problem wasn’t them. It was him.
He guessed that’s what put him here in a utility room with people fucking on the other side of the door.
It was probably Shawn and Lena. Edward knew Shawn always liked her and felt like Lena was probably attracted to him physically (at least when he was a strapping young man) if kind of put off by him emotionally.
Personally, he’d always felt somewhat connected to Shawn. Well, since that night, anyway. He’d never really thought too hard about why, always writing it off to the fact they were the only ones besides Lucas who’d taken the trip. Over the years, Shawn had been the only one to pop up occasionally in Edward’s thoughts in a “Wonder what that guy’s doing these days” way. It was one of the reasons he was so surprised to get an email from Grant, who was the last of them he would have expected to hear from.
Bobbing up to the surface and trying to focus on the sound, trying to give shape and substance to it, unable to hear anything beyond, anything farther out before being sucked back down beneath the surface of the water and the darkening of that night twenty-five years ago.
He heard muffled voices. Muffled and meaningless and knew that if he could listen long enough, he could understand what they were trying to say. Words were powerful, even when they were nonsense. All words could seem like instructions. He’d never written a single word for any of his songs other than the title. Sometimes he felt like even that was too much. He used samples because they were already out there in the world and he was fascinated by how you could contextualize something that already existed and make it seem like something completely new, something different.
But everything was like that. The same things
happening in different contexts.
Those muffled words being uttered on the other side of the door—whatever they were—were words that had been uttered millions of times before by other people.
The same as those words that had been uttered so long ago.
Not by him.
And not by Shawn.
By that thing they found in the woods.
Edward lifted his head, breaking the surface of the water and entering a different level of dark clarity, and screamed the fog out of his head.
When he stopped screaming, the screams didn’t stop. He didn’t know if he’d been joined by the other scream or if it had started at the same time. This other scream was angrier, more primal, and he sat and listened to it, aware of the ropes binding him to the chair for the first time, being afraid for the first time. The feeling was like two loose ends finally coming together, like a circuit being completed, throwing a bright spark out into the world.
TWENTY-THREE
From the time Lena slid Lucas into herself she’d had a crazy half-baked notion this might actually work. She wanted it to go slow. Had to let it build. She wondered if that was why her life often felt so meaningless, so lacking in direction. Was that how most people lived their lives? In pursuit of the next orgasm? One thing she was sure of was that it was some kind of definitive ending. Most people could count on a few of those endings a week, even if they were alone. Not her. It could only end when she gave up or she or the other person walked away. It was more of a dissipation than a true ending.
She lifted her hips and brought them down until Lucas’s cock was slick with her juices. She put her hands on his chest and tried to look him in the eye.
His eyes were closed.
“I want you to look at me, Lucas. Open your eyes and look at me.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
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