The Hinky Bearskin Rug (18 page)

Her head was
still full of those voices talking over her, monitoring her arousal, everyone
watching, holding her down, helping her let go. Her body throbbed.
Randy.
She was probably smiling. A big
sigh heaved up and out of her.

Randy turned
up his palm. “First of all, there are many supernumeraries on the set, and
several of them are women. The actress has a choice in what sex acts she will
perform. The number of actors available is quite small, because of the necessity
for absolute control of one’s priapus, so the chances are she already knows
them. She chooses her sexual partners among them.”

Shaking her
head to clear it, Jewel said, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because it’s
part of my responsibility to you,” he said, “as your incubus. Furthermore, no
one directs the sex act once it has begun. There is direction beforehand, but
no one interrupts the course of mutual arousal and satisfaction.”

He was totally
killing her mood. “So?” she said with annoyance. “I don’t really care, you
know.”

“But I do.” He
raised his big dark eyes to hers. “There can be no tenderness in the fantasy
you asked for.”

She blinked.
He’d been digging into her sewer of a libido for three months, and tonight he
was
critiquing
it? She snapped, “I
suppose you and Velvita have tenderness in your porno reality?”

“Perhaps not
that. But there is courtesy and respect.” After a pause, he admitted, “Very
well, I confess, I wanted to tell you. You were dismayed by the smut and the
processes for its creation. Once inside your mind, I could see why. You have so
many misconceptions. I used those misconceptions to give you the fantasy you
believed in.” He looked earnestly into her face. “But I can’t allow you to
believe those things are really true.”

“Why the heck
not? It’s my fantasy.” She stood up and started putting on her clothes. “And I
still don’t want to do it again.”

“Very well, we
won’t.” He lay on the rug, watching her dress. He looked very comfortable
naked, and yet somehow full of inner tension. It made her crazy to think of him
sharing his glorious body with Velvita Fromage.

“I read your
diary,” she said. “I’m sorry if you didn’t mean for me to find it.”

His black
brows snapped down. “My — oh. On the computer.”

“Yes.”

I was being broken to my work, like
that cart horse,
he
had written.

She knelt and
put her hand on his. “It must have been horrible. In that whorehouse. I never
imagined. I’m starting to realize that I — I can’t imagine what you’ve been
through.”

The tension
seemed to melt out of him. He smiled, and she realized how very much she had
missed him. “That’s a relief. I had feared you would be distressed by my
decision to stay.”

Her skin
prickled with sudden dread. “You’ve stayed for three months,” she said,
puzzled. “Why’s now any different?”

“Stay here. At
Artistic.” His eyes grew wary again as her frown deepened. “Velvita says they
will pay me to be an actor with their company.”

“You —
what?”
Her mouth fell open.

“Now that I am
no longer invisible, I can perform in the guise of an ordinary actor. Or, if
the story calls for it, I can draw upon my incubus powers. We shall see what
the camera can capture. As you know, when we enter what you call demonspace, we
vanish from this world until you achieve climax.”

She found
herself on her feet, staring down at him in shock. “But — but you’re out.
You’re human again. I just got you out.”

Slowly he got
to his feet and took her hands. “Jewel, I beg you to understand. This is a
tremendous opportunity for me.”

“Screwing
skanks for a living?” she yelled suddenly, and drew her breath in sharply,
surprised at the suddenness of her rage.

With dignity
he said, “They are no less deserving than any other woman I have satisfied. No,
that’s not what I mean.” He took her hands, squeezing them painfully. “I was a
long time in that brothel. A dozen girls came and went. But not one, not one
could I please. It—” his jaw tightened. “It hurt me to fail.”

Jewel pulled
her hands free and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “That bitch, your
mistress. She meant you to fail.”

“She meant me
to learn that I was already a failure,” he said soberly. “Those girls taught me
so much. I couldn’t put their teaching into practice before the place burned
down and the brass bed passed to a new owner.”

“I didn’t know
it burned down.”
There’s a lot I didn’t
know,
Jewel realized. That didn’t feel nice in her tummy.

His voice was
full of self-loathing. “I thought them unworthy of my consideration. I learned
otherwise. I thought myself a more-than-adequate lover. This, also, was untrue.
In time, I pleased more than a hundred other women. Yet I could not give what
they could give themselves with their bare hands. I owe them this.” His voice
shook. “And I can never repay them.”

Her mouth
opened but no sound came out.

“Don’t you
see, Artistic and Velvita have given me a chance to settle my debts. I held the
whores in contempt, and I can never take back that insult. But I can respect
these
women.
Now
I can give enough.” He pleaded, “I beg for your understanding,
Jewel. Let me earn my keep with the one skill I have. Even now, in my soul, the
earl does battle with the incubus. I — I don’t know which one I want to win.”

Jewel blinked.
Holy split personality.
“I guess I
don’t know which one I would want to win, either.” Tears sprang into her eyes. “I
really don’t feel good about this.”

“I know you
don’t. I understand.” He squeezed her hands again, hurting her, and she pulled
away. “Let me beg your tolerance yet awhile?”

She felt sick.
“I suppose I have to.” Her throat was raw and painfully tight. “If you get
stuck, Velvita can always sneak me in here.”

“If you grant
me your permission to stay,” he said, “I doubt I shall get stuck.”

My permission!
She felt even sicker as she admitted
that, yes, she had loved owning him.
I’m
always saying he has no right to complain about my multiple sex partners. How
can I ask him for more than I want to give?
Yet the thought of him coming
home from “work” every night, back to her bed, nauseated her.

“You’ll be
careful about disease?” she said over her shoulder.

“These women
are tested monthly. They have only dozen or two sex partners, all of them
professionals.” He said gently, “They take more precautions than you did before
you met me.”

Well, that was
a nice slap in the face. She stiffened.

To her back,
he said, “Do you — would you prefer I did not sleep at your apartment?”

She kept her
back turned. Rage and pain made her say, “Yes, thank you, I would prefer it. If
you have somewhere to stay.”

“Very well.”

Oh hell, oh
ugh, was it that Velvita girl? Or would he turn invisible and hide out in
demonspace?

At the moment
she didn’t give a red rat’s ass.

She looked
back. He looked stricken, his black eyes huge with worry, as vulnerable as she
had ever seen him.

And yet he’s holding out on me.

Backbone.
Damn. The one thing he needed to make him irresistable, and he was using it to
sleep with “a dozen or two” gorgeous, skinny, sexually Olympic porn stars.

She licked her
lips and swallowed a jagged lump. “Call me if you need anything.” God, was she
pathetic or what?

But he only
nodded again. “I will. And you.”

“Oh, yeah.”

She picked up
her purse and shoes and walked out.

Clay was in
his suite at The Drake Hotel when Jewel called. “I’m coming over.” She sounded
upset.

“I’ll come to
you,” he said, looking out at the wet streets.

“I’m on my way
over in a cab now from the Artistic Building.” She hung up.

This was
promising. She must have seen His Lordlybuns. It must have gone badly.

Clay’s hopes
were realized when she arrived.

“I’m crushed,”
she moaned. “This is awful.” Then she told him all about it.

Clay was
careful not to comment while she obsessed over Randy’s defection. If he agreed
that Randy was a poop, she would defend him. If he defended Randy, he’d be in
deep poop himself.

“Let’s walk
back to your place,” he suggested.

That got her
out in the night air, surrounded by milling tourists, but even a smoggy moon
couldn’t deflect her.

“I’ve been
treating this guy like a — like a
dildo.”

She explained
Randy’s trauma over being forced to become a boinkmeister. Then she explained
it again, with girl footnotes. Then she started blaming herself.

Clay clenched
his teeth to keep his mouth shut.

“He knows so
much about me from crawling around in my head like he does, and he’s been so
patient. Always there for me. And how he talked about those women at the
brothel! I felt like a brat. I wasn’t even nice about it. I just sent him off
to work with that — that
girl,
that
Velvita. If he’s not staying at her place I’ll eat my new shoes.” She added
sadly, “I shouldn’t hate her. She’s actually been really nice to me.”

“Tell me,”
Clay said, hoping to stem the flood of Randychatter. “What is it about her that
bothers you?”

They stopped
to wait for a walk signal at the Nordstrom’s pedestrian overpass. Hordes of
tourists stopped with them.

“Besides that
she’s screwing my sex demon?” Jewel plunged her hands into her hair and pulled.
“Listen to me! I
don’t
own him. I
don’t. Plus she’s skinnier and younger than me, and she can probably do fifty
things in bed that I’ve never heard of.”

“Now that
would surprise me,” Clay said, and felt wounded when she shot him a dirty look.

“What’s that
supposed to mean?”

“Hey.” He took
her hand as they crossed the street. “When I met you, you bragged about being
the slut-de-la-sluts. Your words, not mine. Those women you work with — well—”
He’d better tread carefully. “You and your gang have this whole wham-bam-grrl
ethos. I don’t pretend to understand it.” He shrugged. “I would think you would
be glad to meet a real porn star.”

She looked
glum. “If you had read his diary, you would understand. Do you want to see it?
It’s on my computer at home.”

“I don’t think
that would be fair to Randy,” Clay said hastily. Besides, he’d been hearing
about it for twenty minutes.

They walked
under the pedestrian bridge over Rush Street and slipped between the chain link
fence and the
keep out road closed
barrier
blocking off the Trump Tower construction site.

“Anyway I said
something like that to Velvita — about how people treat porn stars. And she
said men are mean to male porn stars out of jealousy. God knows,” Jewel said
bitterly, “I’ve had to confront my jealousy. What a
bitch
I am!”

“I think
you’re a decent, honest person,” he said.

She blinked at
him and stopped in mid-rant. “Thanks.”

“I think your
decency is not about who you go to bed with, but who you are inside.”

Her chest
heaved on a shuddery sigh and Clay relaxed a little. He smiled. “It’s possible
that this Velvita person is also decent and honest in her own way. She’s still
not you.”

“That matters
to you,” she said gloomily. “God knows how Randy will feel after a week or so
of — of—”

“Did you want
to keep him?” Clay blurted and winced at his error.

She looked him
straight in the eye. “I thought I wouldn’t ever have to face up to it, because
he
was the one who stuck to
me
like glue.” She scooped up a rock and
threw it overhand at the scoop of a bucketloader, making a hideous clang in the
night. “But, yeah. I thought he was mine for life.”

Ouch.
“Is it the sex?” Clay said. Another
error. He handed her another rock.

She seemed to
think about that one, and then raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s a lot. And now I
know about all this horrible shit that happened to him in 1811. And probably
worse, if I only knew. He’s such a good guy inside. He totally melted my heart.
By
leaving
me.” Her face crumpled.
She dropped the rock on Clay’s foot.

Oh, for cri-yi,
he thought.

But he bumped
hips with her and got his arm around her. “Hey, hey. Come on. He’ll be back.”

“Oomp,” she
said. “Why? Oomp.”

“Because he
knows he’s left you alone here with me.”

Her head came
up at that.

“Antler-clashing,
remember?” Clay said. He pulled up his shirt-tail and blotted her face. “We
know what we’ve got.”

She squinted
at him. “You don’t have me. Neither one of you has me.”

“Oh, please.
You’ve been faithful to us for three whole months.”