Hidden Bodies (16 page)

I smile. “That’s fine,” I say. “As long as your father acknowledges that
Fast Five
is the most brilliant one, an affirmation of family values that simultaneously
points the finger at our corrupt judicial system even as it endorses traditional American values like Sunday dinner and loyalty.”

I am fucking on tonight and Ray claps his hands. “Right again, Professor.”

Love groans, she prefers
little movies
, and Forty is drunk now and quoting
The Big Chill
, as if his knowledge of acclaimed movies will convince Barry Stein that he has
something of his own to say. Ray doesn’t like his son like this, drunk and trying. He doesn’t like it when Barry Stein motions for Milo to move closer and save him from Forty and I bet
sometimes Ray wishes he and Dottie never fucked it up and had kids.

It’s an ugly thing, the inside of a family, the disappointments, the disgust, and I am relieved when Dottie tugs on my arm. “
Professor
,” she says. “I still
can’t get over that you read all those Jonathan Franzen books. I loved
The Corrections
, but I couldn’t get through it. Everyone in my movie club was so excited for
The
Corrections
to become a film.”

“Movie club?” I ask.

“We were a book club,” she concedes. “But we couldn’t get through this one book that had us all stumped, something about Haiti, I don’t know, it was so long and so
sad
.
And Haiti? It’s a reach for us, honestly. I wish I were worldlier but I’m small at heart. Anyhow, now we watch movies. But maybe if we had a
guide
for which books
to pick . . .”

“You should ease back in with something more relatable,” I say. “Maybe
Portnoy’s Complaint
?”

And I choke on my drink because I didn’t even realize Amy was still on my mind and she is, clearly, or I wouldn’t have suggested that fucking book.

“Hey, Professor.” Forty leans in, only to be interrupted by a waitress who lays a hand on my shoulder. She is sorry to trouble me, but she has an urgent message. I look around for
Love and Love is gone and the waitress slips me a napkin.

Order: Joe Goldberg

Deliver to: Suite 79

When: Now

LIFE
is kind of like one of those Barry Stein movies where everything works out. I take my orders and I find Love’s wing and I knock on the
door. She is slow to answer and I take in the luxury of it all, the detail, the panels on the walls. Even the abandoned room service trays look like high art—flutes, cheese knives, truffle
fries. The door opens and Love furrows her brow, looking at me blankly.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t order any room service.”

“Love,” I say. “I know you didn’t order any
food
. I got your note, you know, at the table—”

She cuts me off. “I said I didn’t order room service,” she objects. Then she winks and it’s like
that
. She tries to close the door and I stop that from happening
with my foot. Love is kind, love is patient but also, mainly, above all—
yes
—Love is perverted.

“Miss,” I say, as if I’ve done this a million times. “It’s a courtesy from the hotel, a token of our gratitude.”

“This is sort of inconvenient,” she simpers, running a finger along her collarbone. “My butler just drew a bath.”

I tell her I wasn’t planning on getting wet and that I have
strict orders
to service her. She opens the door and it’s like stepping into the vault of a fucking bank, it just
feels
like money, the parquet floor, staunch hardwood—
hard, wood
—Love’s little silk shorts and her matching teddy and her buttery skin, slightly darker than the
creamy walls. The bed is through French doors and she could have shut those doors but she didn’t and I look at those sheets, white, crisp, and I look at her, white, crisp and she shakes her
head.

“I told you,” she says. “My butler drew a bath.”

She motions for me to follow her into the bathroom and it’s an obnoxiously spartan design, a sink you could find in a walk-up in Reseda, unremarkable chipped tiles on the walls, exposed
pipes and a dull shower curtain out of a porno movie, pulled aside to reveal the full tub. But it’s not full of water. It’s
yellow
and she giggles.

“Don’t tell my dad,” she says, breaking character. “I don’t do this all the time.”

“Is that
champagne
?” I ask.

“Veuve Clicquot.”

I bite my lip. Why must something always go wrong? I never should have come up here and I don’t want to get into a tub of champagne. She could have said it was fucking André and I
would have been irritated because I do not
need
a bathtub of money. First she wants to pretend that I’m her servant and now she wants to rub her money on my cock,
literally
,
she wants me to soak in her wealth. We are young and new to each other and this is the
good
time, the new time, and we don’t need a tub of money and she knows that I can’t
afford to fill a tub with
Veuve Clicquot
and I don’t need to do that because my dick alone is good enough.

She slips out of her shorts and a proper lady would have taken off her shirt first. She is bare as I expected she would be; no jungle there. She moves one strap over her shoulder, exposing one
of those Love tits I’ve wanted to see and she lifts that round Love tit and licks her tongue against that firm Love nipple and the shirt collapses onto the floor. She steps into the tub and
sinks into the money water and I don’t move and my head explodes with bad Love word play:

Is this Love is all you need is Love for real?

“Come on in,” she says. “It’s so good in here.”

But I won’t
come on in
. Of all the fantasies she could have gone with, she had to make me into a
servant.
She could have opened that door and pretended that I was a CIA
operative or the hotel doctor or an escaped convict. But in her fantasy, I’m servile, a have-not, and she’s a princess. This is not my fantasy and she is not the boss and I tell her to
get out.

“Joe,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“Get out of the tub.”

“This is for us.”

“Drain the tub, Love.”

“This is twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of champagne,” she argues
.
“Why don’t we just get in?”

I step closer. “Drain the tub.”

She doesn’t want to drain the tub and she grinds her teeth. “Why?”

I look at her. “Because I don’t need twenty-five thousand dollars. Of anything.”

“I thought it would be fun,” she pouts. She stands, parts of her body obscured by bubbles, and she hits the drain. The money begins to disappear into the sewer system and I tell her
to dry off. I slam the door. Fuck her if she thinks she can buy me.

I kick off my shoes and peel away my clothes. I hear her snag one of the many plush towels. She’s drying up—fuck you, symbolism—and she’s pissy, slamming cabinets and
draining the tub, ashamed and lecturing me about waste. Yes, the girl who fills a tub with
champagne
is gonna teach me about conservation. This is good, she
should
feel ashamed,
that money could have fed a lot of poor kids. And this is my room now and I am in charge and she yanks the door open and she’s wrapped in a towel.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asks. “Really, I want to know.”

“Take off that towel.”

She looks around, as if I’m the kind of asshole who would record something this intimate. I tell her the rules. “No talking.” She nods. I’m going to re-create what we had
in the room at Soho House. “We’re gonna play Joe Says.” She opens her mouth. “Joe says no talking.” She smiles, complicit. She drops her towel.

“Joe says hand on pussy.” She slaps her right hand over her vagina.

“Joe says
left
hand on pussy.” She switches hands.

“Rub your clit.” She looks at me. Our eyes are locked and I step even closer.

“Kiss me the way you did in the room.” Her lips quiver. “Feel how wet you are down there. Now feel how hard I am for you.” She looks down at me. “Push me onto the
bed and climb on top of me and ride me until you can’t take it anymore. Tell me what you want, exactly what you want, and make me give it to you how you like it.”

I reach for one of her taut, ripe nipples. “Let me start by licking your tits as I feel you up.” She spreads her legs and now we are so close that our eyelashes could touch.
“Cum as hard as you can because you don’t need any fucking champagne when you’re fucking me. Show me that you know that. Take me.” She huffs. “Own me.” She
puffs. “Joe says, ‘fuck me.’”

We are on the bed. I don’t even know how we got there, I just know about skin meeting skin—
Love is all you need is Love
—and this sex is a circle, it never ends. We are
animals and she is loud.
Joe says don’t stop, fuck me
and when I’m not possessed by the pure
rapture
between her legs, between the sheets, I laugh.
Joe has
Love.
I have never known this kind of wetness, the stuff of pornography,
sopping
. I want to eat her but I hold back—I am not a
servant
—and I nip at her belly and
she pulls me on top of her for more, and she is silent, demanding, and she pulls me inside of her and it’s like Chateau: The Body Version. I belong in here, in Love.

I want her to taste me—
Get your dick sucked
—and I tell her and she turns into a different person. “Oh. I kind of don’t do that.”

If there were music it would stop. “Oh,” I say.
Kind of
is the most useless phrase in the English language. “Well, I could do it to you.”

She squirms. “I just like it better like this,” she says. She kisses me and her pussy envelops me, quicksand, and it’s impossible to argue about blowjobs as she rides me like a
Donzi on the water, bump, bump, bump, and it would be perfect, my best performance yet were it not for that little voice in the back of my head, a warning, a caution.

Get your dick sucked.

It’s almost as if she heard Mr. Mooney and she knows I need more. She looks at me. “There’s a Coke in the fridge,” she smiles. “Will you get it?”

I bring the glass bottle of Coke to Love and she shakes it and sprays it all over my chest and yes, it’s on my dick and yes,
kind of
was just foreplay and she is licking the
Coca-Cola off my midsection, she is nothing but a tongue, a set of eyes,
hands.
She is below my belly button and she is stroking my inner thighs and now she has me in her hands but somehow
there is new cold Coke on my legs. She rises and her eyes meet mine. “Fuck me,” she says.

“Joe says, ‘Suck me,’” I say.

“Love says, ‘Fuck me.’” She takes over and I give it to her and I know she’s never had it like this before because she tells me she’s never had it like this
before. We finish together, bliss. Natural symphonic
mastery
of sex. I am thirsty, spent. I swallow the last drops of Coke and we laugh about our sticky bed.

“Now I’m thirsty,” she says.

“I think there’s some Coke left,” I say—on my dick—and I grin.

“Nah,” she says, and my joke goes right over her head. “I’m good.”

She pinches my nipple. Soon, she is asleep and I am awake. The sex, the
sex.
I ate Amy’s
superfruits
but it was never worth getting her jungle stuck in my teeth.
It’s just right with Love’s pure, classic Coca-Cola pussy, and I will block out the critical part of my brain hissing that the Coke was tainted by the champagne.
Fuck you,
brain.

I dig around the room for Love’s panties. I am a hunter. I want to smell Love, taste her. I find them eventually and they’re in the
trash
, mixed in with a banana peel,
numerous price tags from Neiman Marcus, and a half-full jar of face cream
.
I move the trash bin across the room so she’ll see it when she wakes up and I fall asleep too.

I
wake up the next morning to her laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“I see you figured out my little indulgence,” she says. “I never wear the same panties twice. I know.”

“You throw them away every day?”

She kisses me. “But now that I have you, you can keep them all and you can sew them together and make them into a quilt.”

“I’m not sewing your fucking panties, Love.”

“Oh, yes you are.”

“Oh, no I’m not.”

We kiss. She licks my earlobe. “Ya wanna take a shower or ya wanna fuck?”

I WANT A BLOWJOB GOD DAMN IT.
#mydayinla #chateauproblems #cantgetmydicksucked

“Joe says let me taste you.”

She pulls away. “Joe,” she says. “Is this gonna be a problem?”

“There is nothing even remotely resembling a problem in this room,” I say. “I was just playing around.”

I can feel a story coming and I’m right. Love has never been
comfortable
with anything oral. Her mother claims
she
never gave Love’s father a blowjob and she told
Love that if a man loves you, truly, he doesn’t need that.

“Wow,” I say. “I can’t believe you talk about this stuff with your mom.”

“We don’t really have boundaries.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Joe.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but they met in middle school. Do you
really
think your dad has gone his whole life without getting his dick sucked?”

She shakes her head. “That’s the part of the story I’m getting to,” she says, and then she tells me about the year she and Forty had their sweet sixteen, a giant Beverly
Hills bonanza with hundreds of people. She got a horse as her present and Forty got a massage. “And Forty gets home,” Love says, “And he is
messed. Up.
And I am like
what’s wrong? And he is like, I can’t tell you. And I am like, you have to.”

“And?”

“And my dad’s masseuse
sucked his dick.
And she told him she did that for my dad once a week.”