“The Sex Club,” I said. “Do you three—you, Allison and Tara—do you do things all on your own?”
“Sometimes,” she said. Then, giggling, “We’re not lesbians or anything like that. But we do enjoy one another. Truth be told, it’s not all that often we can arrange it. But three women alone can get pretty boring believe it or not.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked. “Like I said, I’m trying to wrap my head around it all.”
“Sometimes other people join us,” she said. “Men.”
“What . . . men?” I questioned, feeling my mouth go dry, my sternum tighten.
She looked me in the eye.
“Mackey,” she said.
It was all I could think about as I watched Mackey turn away from the podium, face the front of the bookstore. I knew he was staring down Stella because I could see her locking eyes on him.
“Just give me an excuse,” he said to her. “Just give me the excuse I need, and you’re done. Vic is done. More than done. You understand me, Stella?”
The stunned bookstore crowd didn’t make a sound.
“Go home, Mackey,” Jimmy said. “Sober up, and we’ll talk.”
Jake looked Mackey up and down, then turned his back on him. The members of the press continued to record the scene with their smartphones. The fans who had come to buy my book, many of whom had likely bought Mackey’s books, had a confused look on their faces. Hadn’t Mackey achieved the very rare status of rich and famous writer? Why then, did he look so pathetic? Why did he smell like booze? Why does he look like he hasn’t showered in days, or had a good meal? Why did he look broken, strung out, and down on his luck?
“He’s right, Mackey,” Stella said. “Go home. Sleep it off.”
He nodded, as though her word was still golden with him. If she told him to go outside and jump in front of a speeding cab, I’m sure he would have done it. He exhaled a breath so deep and so toxic it seemed to invade the interior of the bookstore like an explosion of mustard gas. He began making his way to the door, the crowd stepping back to create a narrow path for him to leave just as they had when he arrived. When he got to the door, he placed a limp hand on the opener, then turned to face the crowd once more.
“I’ll be waiting for your call, Jimmy,” he said in a defeated tone. “I’m even happy to call you. Just like I’ve called you a dozen times over the past month. But you’re lying to me. You won’t return my calls. Same goes for you, Jake. You won’t return my calls either. The Hollywood producers don’t know my name anymore. The options on my books have all disappeared.” He paused for a beat until he worked up just a hint of a smirk. “But I know what you did, Vic. I know what you did to those men so you could write about them. You murdered them for your career. Plain and simple.”
The ground beneath me felt like it was dropping away. If I hadn’t held onto the podium, I would have dropped into a black, never-ending hole.
“Hell’s Mackey talking about,” Jake said under his breath. He ran his hand through his short, cropped hair and reached out for Jimmy. He pulled Jimmy to him. “What the fuck is Mackey talking about, Jim?”
Jimmy’s eyes went wide. He straightened up like a soldier at attention. He painted a false, anxiety-filled smile on his face.
“Obviously, these are the ramblings of a crazy man, Jake,” he assured him. But I could see the worry in his big, unblinking eyes. It was almost like he suspected I knew just a little too much about murder all along but made the decision not to bring it up. He was an agent, after all. He wanted the money. Money spoke to him more than the Holy Spirit. Money was what Jimmy had in place of religion. If he could sell his own mother in a million-dollar gross point film deal, he would do it. That’s the way guys like Jimmy rolled. It was also the reason he no longer took Mackey’s calls once it became obvious he could no longer string two sentences together. At least, not without Stella sharing his bed night in and night out. It was the reason why Jake and Hollywood would no longer return his calls. He’d become a liability to them, and a liability in show business was death. Pure and fucking simple.
“Go home, Mackey,” I repeated. “You’re scaring me. Scaring the good people who came out for a signing and reading.”
“Savage Sins,” he said through his smile. “Who is the real savage? Who is the real sinner?”
He turned, walked out of the bookshop, slamming the door behind him like an angry, begotten son.
That night, after a sumptuous dinner at the 21 that was only half-clouded over by Mackey’s surprise appearance, Stella and I retired to our room at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Since the book signing, she’d changed into a black skirt and black thigh high stockings supported by a black garter belt. Without a word, I sat her down on the edge of the bed where she could see herself in the large gold framed mirror mounted to the opposing wall.
“Dessert, Vic,” she said. “I want you to have your just dessert.”
She parted her thighs for me while I knelt down, fully clothed, and pulled her soaking silk black panties aside. As I began to work my lips and tongue over her pink wetness, she unbuttoned her blouse revealing a black lace pushup bra. She pulled it down so that her breasts were exposed, the nipples hard and erect from the elastic pressure. She pinched her nipples with her long red fingernails so that they swelled even larger. Her thick black hair was parted over her left eyes, and it bobbed and moved with the thrusting of her hips.
She did something then that caught me by surprise. She took hold of her smartphone and tapped a number that was stored on her speed dial. I heard a groggy “Hello” from a voice I recognized. A wave of cold ran up and down my spine when the voice was suddenly matched with a face. It was Mackey.
I stopped, gazed up at Stella. But she shushed me, then placed her free hand around the back of my head, pulled me back into her pussy.
“Don’t stop, Vic,” she said. “Don’t stop ‘till my juices cover your face.”
“What do you want, Stella?” Mackey said, his voice coming over the speaker. “Do you want me to watch you?”
I moved my tongue slowly over her throbbing clitoris, and it dawned on me that Mackey wasn’t only on speaker. He was on a live video call.
“Yes,” Stella said, her voice lower than normal, stressed, excited, impassioned. “I want you to rub your cock. Your eight-inch cock.”
Once more, I was able to gaze up at her while I was working, and I could see the picture on the video phone. Mackey was filming his sex for her. It was long, hard, and thick, and I knew that if she could, Stella would have wrapped her lips around it. She would have taken it into her mouth and swallowed it whole, swallowed everything that was about to explode from it.
Part of me—a big part of me—wanted to run away from this scene. Wanted to slap the phone out of her hand and smash the screen with my boot heel. Only a few hours before, Mackey had made a scene at my signing. A terrible scene. He accused me of murder. I knew he’d slept with Stella behind my back. Slept with the Sex Club. That was bad enough. It was, in essence, payback for my having slept behind Stella’s back with Allison and Tara. But this was going too far.
Or was it?
I’d never seen Stella so excited. Never felt her thighs tremble like they were, her entire body on fire.
“I’m going to explode,” she said.
She set the phone down while I stood up, freed my sex, and slipped it inside her. She raised her legs up over my shoulders, and I fucked her as hard as I could. She shouted with each thrust until I came inside her with everything I had, my teeth biting into her shoulder.
When I was emptied, I slowly pulled myself off her and breathed. I glanced at the phone, and the image of Mackey was gone. He’d hung up. I couldn’t have been happier that he was gone. I also couldn’t have been more weirded out.
Moments later, I poured two glasses of ice cold champagne. We stood by the open floor-to-ceiling French doors and felt the cool city air circulate around us. Stella was wearing the white bedsheet like a robe, and I w
as buck naked, exposing myself to all of Manhattan.
“Cheers,” I said, holding up my glass for a small toast.
She clinked my glass, sipped.
“You want to tell me what the hell that was all about?” I said, addressing the white elephant in the room. The same white elephant that had been plaguing us almost all day. She drank some more and flicked the hair out of her eyes. I didn’t have to spell it out for her to know I was talking about Mackey.
“You’re not asking the right questions, Vic,” she informed me.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, maybe you should be asking me why Mackey knows you killed those two men so that you could write your novels?”
A sharp start in my heart.
“And you know the answer, Stel? Or did you provide him with the answer?”
She shook her head, pursed her lips.
She said, “He told me, with his own lips, that he deduced it.”
“How? There was never a police inquiry. Nor will there ever be a police inquiry.”
I was getting angry. No, that’s not right. I was getting hot. She was baiting me, testing me. That whole thing with Mackey showing up on a video feed . . . It was beyond strange. In fact, it wasn’t strange at all. It was all carefully planned. Stella was demonstrating the absolute power she had over me now. It was a web I had allowed myself to become tangled in one step at a time.
I had to watch out.
I was dealing with something very dangerous here. How the hell did I get here? Stella was controlling everybody, including me. She’d been controlling us all along. Me, Mackey, Tara, and Allison. Maybe there were more out there like us. Maybe she was operating in different neighborhoods, slipping inside the lives of unhappy women, forming Sex Clubs with them, then plotting to kill their husbands. Maybe she’d had Mackey kill for her in the past, and then when she took away the opportunity from him, he could no longer write. Maybe that’s exactly what she was doing with me.
“Mackey is smart,” she said after a time. “He read the newspaper accounts of Tara’s husband’s accident along with the account of Andrew Craig’s suicide. Then he read Savage Sins, and he figured it out. He couldn’t be entirely sure, but he was right on.”
I could almost feel the blood boil inside me. How much time had she been spending with Mackey? How often had she been fucking him again? Couldn’t have been all that long if he was still stricken with writer’s block. Writers need their muses, but not on a part-time basis.
“How the hell did he get a copy of Sins?” I questioned. “It only just came out today. Besides a handful of newspapers and trade magazines, I’m the only one who had a pre-publication proof.”
She drank her champagne and smiled.
“I gave him a copy of the typed manuscript, Vic,” she said. “I had it photocopied. I was only too happy to let him read it before anyone else did.”
I’m not sure how many seconds went by. How long the situation went from relative peace with Stella and I simply talking things out, to my having grabbed hold of her, and shoving her against the wall. Maybe no time had transpired at all. She’d dropped the bedsheet, but she was still dressed in her underwear and stockings, her breasts now pushed back inside the bra cups.
She smiled devilishly.
“What are you going to do to me, Vic?” she said. “Are you going to hurt me? Are you going to strangle me? Are you going to murder me like you did the others?”
I made a fist with my right hand. I cocked back my arm, my free hand wrapped around her neck, holding the back of her head against the wall. I felt the sweat dripping off my brow, into my eyes. The noise of the traffic outside was filling the room, but I could hear only the pulse of my elevated heartbeat inside my brain. This was more than baiting. She was setting me up.
Don’t swallow the bait, Vic. Don’t fucking do it . . .
Slowly, I lowered my hand, relaxed my fist. I felt something happening behind my back. I wasn’t sure what. But my gut was speaking to me. So was Stella’s face. I felt this urge to turn around, and Stella knew it. I could see her eyes shifting from my face to over my shoulder and back again.
“That’s right, Vic,” she said. “Turn around.”
I did. I turned around. That’s when I saw her iPhone set up straight against a pillow. I saw the red RECORD indicator flashing on and off inside the device’s digital screen. Stella was filming our every move, our every word.
I went to grab the phone, but then stopped myself. What the hell was the use?
“That’s right, Vic,” she said. “It won’t do you any good to turn the phone off, or to even toss it out the window onto the concrete sidewalk below. And you understand why that is, don’t you?”
“You’re sending the video to a mainframe somewhere. Or maybe one of your friends or lovers is looking at us now, in real time.”
“The latter is more correct. It’s not just a video I’m making. It’s a Facebook video, and Tara and Allison can see your cute pale naked ass right now. Would you like to wave to them?”
My world was burning around me. I didn’t know where to turn. How to stop this from happening. I was powerless.
“What about your boyfriend, Mackey?” I said, swallowing something that felt and tasted like a brick. “Is he watching too?”
She laughed aloud. “Oh god, no,” she said. “I put Mackey back in his cage after our little . . . well, you know what we did just moments ago.”
Raising her hand, placing it gently on my face. She leaned in and kissed me on the lips. I hated her in that moment, but the feel of her mouth against my own was enough to make me want to melt into the carpet. She had this insane power over me, and she reveled in it. It must have been the same power she had over Mackey, but I’d been too blind to see it.
“I can taste my pussy on your lips, Vic,” she said. “It tastes wonderful.”
“Please turn that camera off,” I said.
“I will when I’m ready.”
“What do you want from me, Stel?”
She leaned into me again, her lips gently brushing up against my ear lobe.
“I want you to write another book,” she said.
Without my having to ask her, I knew precisely what she meant. I could hear her words, but I felt them in my gut, as though she were stabbing me with a fork.
“About what?” I asked.
“About a man very close to your heart. For better or for worse.”
“The Handyman.”
“We need to put him back to work,” she said, her lips tickling my ear, her breath warm.
“What is it you’d like him to do for you, Stella?”
“I want him to kill Mackey,” she said.
The next morning, we packed our bags and left the city by train out of Penn Station. We never spoke another word about Mackey or the Sex Club or Savage Sins after she’d told me her plans for The Handyman. I wasn’t sure I could handle anything more as I stared out the window onto the winding Hudson River. For a previous day and evening that had been filled with more drama than one man could swallow, the night had ended not with a bang, but with a kiss. Stella had simply approached the iPhone, picked it up off the bed, stared into the screen, and blew a kiss.
“Goodnight my lovelies,” she said before stopping the live video feed.
She then went into the bathroom, undressed, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, and slipped into a black silk nightgown. Before she went to sleep, she smiled and blew me a kiss.
“You know, I really am proud of you, Vic,” she said. “I want you to know that.”
I stood by the window, drinking the last of the champagne.
“Thank you,” I said. “That means a lot.”
But what would really have meant a lot to me then, was tossing her out the window. But I could never do it. I didn’t have the balls or the strength. I didn’t have the courage. As much as I hated her, I loved her, needed her like I needed the blood that flowed through my veins. It was the worst thing that could ever h
appen to a man. To become a slave to his desires.
Stella turned out the light. I drank my drink and stared out the window onto the city under cover of darkness. After a while, I slipped into bed and listened to her gentle breaths as she slept soundly . . . and without guilt. I lay there on my back, staring up at the ceiling until daybreak.
We arrived back to our home on Orchard Grove a little past two in the afternoon. As the taxi pulled up to the house, I couldn’t help but notice the For Sale sign that occupied the front lawn.
“Am I missing something?” I said to Stella as the cab came to a stop at the top of the drive. “We never discussed selling the house.”
She opened the door. “It’s my house, remember, Vic?” she said. “I can do what I want with it.”
She got out, but instead of going around to the trunk to retrieve her overnight case, she poked her head back inside.
“You’re made of money now, honey,” she added. “You’re going to buy us a big ginormous house. It’s the least you can do for your muse.”
She smiled and closed the door.
Minutes later I was standing in the kitchen, sifting through the mail which didn’t amount to a hell of a lot. For a change, I was caught up on my bills. Rather, for the first time in my adult life, I was caught up on my bills. Stella went immediately into the bedroom, and three minutes later came back out wearing a short skirt, black tights, tall brown leather boots, and a black turtleneck sweater. Her hair had been combed, and she’d applied some lipstick.
“Got a date?” I asked.
“At least you didn’t ask me if I was going to see Mackey,” she said, not without a giggle.
But there was nothing funny in her words. The pit that lodged itself in my stomach was proof of that.
“Well,” I said, setting down the mail. “Are you going to see Mackey?”
“He’s in Albany. Came in on an earlier train. And yes, I need to see him. Or, should I say, he needs to see me. He needs his muse back, Vic. I feel an obligation to help him out.”
Savage Sins Page 3