Dark Secret Love (2 page)

When I arrived at college, I felt like a virgin all over again. Brock was gone, and I doubted anyone could replace him. On a lark, I made out with the dorm stud the first weekend of school, but he wound up choosing a thin-lipped blonde sorority chicklet to date instead. I crushed on a black-denim-wearing artist type who managed to tie himself into my lunar cycles. He was a quiet pervert who fucked me only when I was on the rag.

To my dismay, college guys turned out to be high school guys with better access to fake IDs and beer. I had no interest in the nightly alcohol raids, the shaving cream fights, the drama. I floated around in a cloud of unspoken desires until I found my match off campus at the grocery store. Robert was thirty-four to my nineteen, and he was as kinky as Brock—but different. Brock had been tall and lean, strong but built for speed. Robert was big, studly, hugely muscled. At six-foot four, he towered over me. Undeniably handsome, he had women swarming him
at the store. Every bored housewife asked him to choose her produce.

I tried to catch his eye for months, wearing special outfits to spark his interest. But it wasn’t until the school year ended and I moved off campus that he took notice. I was painting my apartment—a skyline in graffiti—and I came into the store late wearing paint-splattered cutoffs, smudges of blue paint on my cheekbones and my arms, and he couldn’t get enough. Here was the first man I’d ever met who liked a “sweet disorder in the dress” (if you know that Herrick poem), rather than neat and pristine. As soon as I walked into the store, he came forward. He had been in the middle of arranging fresh fruits, and while I watched, he pulled a knife from his pocket and cut open a peach. He didn’t offer me the piece; he fed it to me.

Within minutes, we were fucking in the service elevator at the grocery store, and later that night he arrived at my apartment to continue our games. Like Brock, he understood me from the start. There were no romantic whisperings. No cajoling or gentle touching. He lifted me up and held me against the wall, fucking me with a brutal intensity. I’m slightly built—five-foot four in flats—and he could move me however he chose. Bending me over the sofa, carrying me to the windows, spreading me out on the dining room table. We didn’t sleep until dawn. And for that whole summer, he came to my place when his shift was over, between midnight and three AM, and told me all of the things he wanted to do to me.

“I want to fuck you on top, on your side, up the ass …” His hands were huge and roamed over my body as if he’d owned me from the start. I was weak in his presence,
needing him, craving his warmth. Finding safety in his size alone.

But then I went and did something unbelievably stupid—depriving me of any sexual pleasure for three lonely years.

My mistake’s name was Byron. I met him at a party for the newspaper where I interned during my freshman year at college. I had hit the ground running after landing in Southern California, hosting a late-night radio show on the college station (I won the spot with an essay, beating out four hundred other contestants), writing for the college paper, and interning at an alternative weekly. Although I wound up despising school, I loved Los Angeles from the moment I entered Hollywood, and I lived for my job. I’d worked on the paper in high school, had been writing since I could grip a pencil, but this was my first real name-on-the-masthead gig.

My poor editor didn’t know what to make of me. I was shy and quiet, but extremely proficient. I could jam out well past a hundred words a minute. At the time, there was no Internet, and staff writers either dropped off their stories on disk—big, flimsy floppy disks—or faxed them in. My main job was to key in the pieces that arrived by
fax. But I also brewed coffee, made photocopies, ran errands.

That’s how I met Byron. He was a former frat-boy friend of the owners who would drop by from time to time to get lunch or shoot the shit. Eventually, he stopped striding past my desk on the way to my bosses’ offices and began hanging out to chat.

He was twenty-six when we met, but seemed older. He dressed in an artsy, European style and drove a crimson convertible. I asked him out once on a lark, to go to a screening with me, and he turned me down flat. He was no teacher. He didn’t date teens.

I didn’t pursue him heavily. I took no for an answer and continued to see Robert. Not to date him—we never went out—but to fuck him. And then came Halloween—in what would have been my sophomore year, had I been actually attending classes. The newspaper held an annual staff party in a revolving steakhouse restaurant on top of a local office building. Byron was there on a date, but he ended up flirting with me. I attended the party because I was staff, but I couldn’t buy drinks. Byron kept sliding over to me with vodkas in hand, and finally steered me back to the booth. He sat me at his side, stroking my thigh under the table while his girlfriend stared daggers at me. I didn’t care. I wish I could say I did, but I didn’t.

It was an alcohol-drenched night, and the following day, Byron showed up at the office, pulling me aside to say, “You know, if you play with the big kids, you could get burned.”

“Is that what you are?” I asked. “Big kids?”

He didn’t intimidate me. I was used to Doms. He liked that I didn’t back down. We started dating, though not exclusively. Byron was always quick to tell me about the
other women he was dating, although I kept quiet about my own activities, seeing no need to share. I met up with Robert after dates with Byron. I knew that the chemistry was better with my midnight-to-three man, but I was confused. I thought I was supposed to end up with someone like Byron, a man with prospects, with a solid education. With a goal greater than stacking perfectly proportioned fruit pyramids.

What did I know? I was only nineteen.

Byron made it clear to me that I was not his one and only. We were still free agents, able to see (and by “see” he meant “fuck”) other people without any of that nasty emotion called guilt. But I was his first choice for a date on Valentine’s Day, a time for lovers—he said this in a way that let me know I’d won some sort of prize in his book. Unfortunately, Byron was fighting off a cold. He took me out for an expensive dinner downtown and gave me an intricate violet lace corset from a fancy store. And then he drove me back to his place and passed out.

“You don’t have to stay,” were his last words before his head hit the pillow.

I called this chapter “Heart of Glass,” but I should have called it “Slut.” Say the word slowly with me. Wrap your tongue around it. Stretch it out sensuously. Sss-llll-uttt.

I’d have been loyal if I’d stayed. But Byron had told me the rules of the game so many times they were tattooed
on my heart: if I played with the big kids, I might get burned. And that remark left me free in my mind to bring my new present to the grocery store and wait until the end of Robert’s shift. I parked right up front, and when I walked into the store, his handsome face lit up immediately.

“One minute,” he said, “I have a few things to buy.”

If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show any sign. He simply clocked out and walked into the parking lot, brown paper bag under one arm, bouquet in hand. Grocery store flowers—cheap and dyed and perfect.

We went to his place at the beach, nearly empty, totally nondescript. He poured champagne into jelly glasses and we toasted each other.

Slut.

Is the word echoing in your head yet? It should be. Because after downing the first glass, I excused myself from our party on the living room floor in order to use Robert’s bathroom. And inside that tiny space, I slipped on my newest piece of lingerie, working those intricate pearl buttons into the holes that ran the length of the form-fitting piece. It was tiny, a 32A, an ideal fit. There was a matching lace thong that covered just about nothing. But I knew I wouldn’t have either piece on for long.

Robert whistled when I came back into the room. And then he stood and lifted me into his arms and held me up against the wall. His favorite way to fuck. He was brutal by nature. Massively different from Byron. There were no books in his apartment. No pictures on the walls. He didn’t really exist in the place. It was simply where he went to sleep. Like a cave. A dwelling, not a home.

But it was exactly what I wanted. The way he held
me against him, his massive chest, his rock-like body. I had one of those sweet, drunken discussions with a girlfriend the other day, and we giggled about “cocks we’ve known.” Robert’s is one of the few that I can remember in great detail. In my memories, he is always erect.

And on this night, he fucked me for hours. With me riding him, my back on the wall, legs around his waist, the lace of my thong pushed to the side. Then with me bent over the edge of his thrift-store sofa, gritting my teeth as he slammed against me. Never slowing down. Never needing to pause.

Slut.

He spanked me with those great big mitts of his. Spanked me because he liked the sound and the feel and the way I got wetter with each stroke. He knew enough to pull me over his lap, to put me in the proper pose, to hiss the statements that would take me where I needed to go.

“Bad girl, showing up after midnight to get fucked.”

“Yes, Robert.”

“You know what I ought to do to you, don’t you?”

He was sex incarnate. And although I could tell that he loved the dainty finery of the lingerie, he couldn’t be gentle with the pieces. He was always rough, needing to pull at the lace rather than waste precious time working the buttons to get the corset off. Tearing the panties with his paws, leaving the whole new outfit in tatters.

I flashed on Byron, passed out on his bed, half a world away in Hollywood, not dreaming I could be this deviant. No inkling at all that I could be this bad.

“Such a slut … Tell me what you need … Come on, girl. Say it.”

I stayed all night with Robert. Or all that was left of the night. I didn’t mind that it was already February 15th
by the time he’d clocked out of work. Didn’t mind that Cupid had left the building. I got precisely what I wanted on Valentine’s Day. The perfect gift for the perfect slut.

One rainy night soon after, I found myself unexpectedly engaged in a threesome with a sultry female vocalist and her dark-haired, dark-eyed roommate, an up-and-coming soap-opera star who boasted the mournful look of a young Dean Martin. These were friends from the paper, and throughout the evening, various acquaintances wandered through our lair. Someone wanted clothing advice for a gig he was playing. Another needed to borrow cash. Despite what you might have heard, I was a willing participant. I was tipsy but not drunk. I wasn’t entirely nude (at least not while others were present)—I had on Ava’s gold satin robe. This wasn’t my first ménage (although the previous one had been with two guys, and Playboy’s advisor calls that a “gang bang” rather than a ménage à trois). The upshot is that although I never told Byron everything that happened (about how Charlie cradled my face in his hands while he fucked me, about how he crooned “Oh my girls, my sweet girls” as Ava and I took turns licking his cock clean), Byron thought he had me all figured out. Or had himself all figured out. I think he truly believed I joined in the sexfest to get him to notice me. Not true at all. You would have joined in, too.

Ava was this stunning green-eyed blonde, and I looked up to her. Eight years my senior, she seemed so worldly. Sure, she worked two other jobs while trying to further her music career, but she made everything look so easy. Effortless. She dated handsome, older men who gave her gifts, and she fucked young actors who fueled her libido. Charlie was one of them. He looked like the movie star he
later became. Beside the way they looked, they wanted me. Charlie thought my naïveté was charming. He couldn’t wait to demolish my inhibitions. What he and Ava—what most people, in fact—didn’t understand was that I didn’t have many inhibitions.

There’s a difference between being shy and being pure.

Mystery is everything. The Monday after the infamous ménage, Byron arrived at the office at 8:30 and asked me what had happened. When I shrugged and said simply that I’d spent the weekend with Ava, he insisted that I move in with him. For no sane reason, I did, effectively saying goodbye to good sex and hello to nearly three years of the worst sort of submission.