Throb (Club Grit) (11 page)

Keanne took a nap on the plane and so did I. We both needed our rest if we were going to play hardball with the magazine publishers. Behind the scenes pictures of Keanne’s music video could command a high price from a good magazine, better than some low-res cell phone selfies taken by a staffer. No, something taken by Keanne’s entourage’s photographer would go for at least a few million dollars. To be dealing in millions of dollars seemed crazy, but Keanne’s appeal transcended things like race, class, and gender. The right magazine could use Keanne’s star power to increase their readership by leaps and bounds. By the end of this trip, Keanne’s pictorial would be sold, and the issue wasn’t “if” but for “how much”.

A limo was waiting on the tarmac when we landed in New York around two in the morning. It took us straight to the hotel: the Waldorf Astoria. Bellhops were ready, when we arrived, to take our bags to our rooms. Keanne’s Louis Vuitton luggage set, in its understated checkered pattern, half the squares the color of his skin, the other half the color of mine, was more resplendent than my plain American Apparel overnighter in all black. We were ushered into a private elevator, which made no additional stops, just passing floor after floor until there were no more floors to pass.

We were literally at the top: Keanne had booked a penthouse room. Or, to be more accurate? Keanne had someone book it for him. I don’t know what sort of accommodations I’d expected from Keanne: maybe we’d stay with a friend of his, maybe we’d get a cheap motel that he’d trash in an impromptu party. I didn’t expect the “Royal Suite” to be so, well...royal.

Keanne held the door open for me and when I entered, I gasped. It was like something out of rococo France. The entire room was done in shades of mint blue, gold, and black. Heavy beige and turquoise drapes were moved back to reveal sheer white panels. There were was a large black grand piano in the corner, as well as two sets of sofas and coffee tables. The floor was beige with a gold pattern, except in the center, where a pink bouquet of roses was painted over a sky blue oval.

This was it: this was our Versailles, and although Keanne was King, what was I? Was I a courtier or was a Marie Antoinette? “There’s two rooms,” said Keanne, as he entered, closing the door. “Pick the one you like best.”

“Really?”

“Of course, really.” I didn’t need to be told twice. The first room I checked was the “Duke’s Room”, with gold and pastel yellow walls, a large tapestry above the bed, and plain all-white sheets on the bed, softer than anything I’d touched shopping for dorm bedding or experienced when sleeping from hotel to hotel with Keanne last summer. It was nice but I had to see the other room before making a decision.

Once I saw the “Duchess Bedroom”, I knew that I had to sleep there. There was a small beaded chandelier above the bed, with a matching light on the walls, painted a beautiful robin’s egg blue. The sheets were like the ones in the duke’s room, on a large bed, with three plain prints above it. It was the most relaxing looking of the two rooms, in shades of dusty blue and eggshell white.

“I’m taking the girly room,” I said, coming back out for my duffle. “Are you going to get more sleep?”

“I was thinking of ordering room service, if you’re up for it,” he said, taking his own bags from the entrance to the bedroom.

“Sure, just give me a minute,” I said, opening my duffle bag and looking for something my Victoria’s Secret pajamas, before getting changed and waiting in the living room with my iPhone, turning it on to see if I had any new messages.

Jason had sent me a text while we were still up in the air and when I read it, my heart fell.

Hey Becca, sorry I didn’t see you off, I think I got home a few minutes after you left. Have a great time in New York! If you need me to pick you up from the airport, let me know. xoxo J

What do you even say when a guy texts you something like that? I couldn’t exactly just say
We got into NYC okay, ttyl
without it sounding like I was blowing him off, and
Hey, Jason, I’m having a hard time, because I think I might be in love with two men at once, which means I’m not in love with either, and my heart is flip flopping and so is my brain. I don’t like feeling confused and not knowing what to do, and maybe it would have been better if I told you all this before I left, because even though I’ve known you for months, I still have so many secrets that I haven’t told you, about my worries, secrets, and regrets
seems just a little bit needy and clingy and weird.

“Hey, Becca, what do you want to get?” said Keanne, and I turned to see him. He was wearing a loose pair of plaid pajamas that only helped to remind me of Jason. Above the tie together waistband of the pants was another waistband, made of black elastic, fitted perfectly to his muscles, not too tight but not sagging. Keanne wasn’t wearing a shirt, instead, his bare chest glistening with beads of water. His arms were up, around his head, where he was using a fluffy white terry towel to dry his hair, which he left natural and let grow out about half an inch, before he moved his towel down and behind him, rubbing his back, and then his front, wiping away the glistening spots from his abdomen and leaving it with a subtle glow instead.

This is what made Keanne so irresistible, not just to me, but to women around the country. He had this way of oozing sheer sex appeal effortless. He didn’t make any attempt to hide his masculinity, to put on a veneer of mystery, or to shield people from his raw power. Jason had never been shirtless around me outside of the bedroom. He’d never let me see him in a state of less than perfection. He’d always been so polite. He was a “nice guy”, but when a guy like Keanne is so good at playing the villain, it’s hard to resist the bad boy.

Keanne wasn’t actually a villain though, just such a bad boy that you could imagine him doing those sorts of things. He could be the sexy rake that seduces you away from your boyfriend. He can be the Mephistopheles at the club who comes up behind you to dance, and whose dick you enjoy as it hardens, able to be felt through his pants, which he then unzips. He whips out his cock, rubs it on your panties underneath your skirt, and as you move your hands down to let him in, let him inside you, he disappears. He’s the incubus that haunts the willing minds, and right now, I had him all to myself.

So why wasn’t I all over him? Why didn’t I just kiss him, and tell him how I’d felt this last year, when the only “contact” I had with him was hearing his songs on the radio, reading gossip about him on the Internet, and seeing his face staring back at me from the CVS magazine rack?

“What do you want?” I said as I opened up the menu, but he sat down next to me on the pink and blue toile loveseat and took the menu out of my hands gently. I could feel his upper arm next to me. It was so large and firm, and it made my relatively average arms seem tiny in comparison. He was radiating a heat that was warmer than Jason’s and I was tempted to just turn, flip my legs up and onto his lap, and nuzzle his neck.

“Whatever you want, babe,” said Keanne. “You can order whatever you want, even if it’s not on the menu. They’ll bring you whatever you want.”

I laughed as a stupid thought came into my head. “Even...theater popcorn?”

“Even popcorn,” said Keanne, rolling his eyes.

“I was just kidding!” I started but it was too late. He picked up a phone from an end table and just said, “Yeah, we’d like some popcorn and candy and just, regular movie stuff, sent up, thanks.”

“Keanne!”

“Becca, I told you: whatever you want. The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach, right?” he joked, and that’s when I remember what was blocking me and stopping me from just settling into Keanne’s body. Even though he was objectively sexier than Jason, oozing pure sex appeal even when he wasn’t groomed to perfection, he didn’t have what Jason had: a connection with me that had been forged through months of close intimacy. Although Keanne and I were having “alone time” together for the first time, it was too late. I wasn’t willing to give up what I had with Jason for Keanne. Keanne had a lifestyle that I’d wanted for the longest time, even though my parents had warned me it was unattainable, but Jason and I had a life together that I wouldn’t trade for all the diamonds in Keanne’s watch collection.

The game I was playing was dangerous, and I knew that, even as Keanne and I flipped through the comp’ed pay-per-view channels, looking for a movie and laughing at the titles of the porn channels. We finally settled on “Carrie”, which was still in theaters.

“You know, I don’t go out as much now,” said Keanne.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, like, if I wanted to see a movie, in a theater, by myself or with someone special? I can’t do that. I’d be swarmed my paparazzi. I got a place in the Hills, actually, and I’m having a home theater installed. You should visit sometime,” he said.

“That sucks. If you could do whatever you wanted, without any paparazzi or people with cellphones out trying to take a pic, what would you do?”

“I’d probably turn back time, get back to that time, permanently. Maybe doing the album last summer was a bad idea...”

“How so? You have everything most people want. You’ve got money, you’ve got fame, you’ve got girls.”

“It’s what you don’t have that matters, though, isn’t it? I don’t have respect: the media makes me into a joke. I don’t have privacy: I can’t choose when I’m presented to the world and when I get to just have “me” time, because I’ve become public property. I can’t have deep, meaningful relationships anymore, without worrying who likes me for me, and who likes me for the persona I’ve built up,” he said, moving the coffee table back so we had space on the floor to sit...

To sit the way I did with Jason, when we played video games, watched TV, or just wanted to chat. I remember how it had started, too: Jason and I would usually sit on his couch, but one time, I was super wasted and kept falling off the couch. Jason moved his coffee table so I wouldn’t hit my head and sat with me on the ground, because it wasn’t like I could fall any further.

As much as Keanne’s revelation tugged at my heart strings, another string tugged at my heart, from thousands of miles away, all the way from Los Angeles. Even though I was half-listening to Keanne as he wandered in and out of the room, carrying two pillows from his bed out for us to rest our heads on as the movie started, the one person I couldn’t get out of my mind was Jason.

There was a knock at the door and Keanne opened it. The bellhop had brought up not only two large buckets of popcorn, one with butter, the other with a chocolate and caramel sauce, but an ice bucket filled with bottles of soda, a display rack filled with packages of candies, and a pile of nachos. Keanne slipped the bellhop a wad of bills and rolled the cart over to our makeshift pillow raft.

We watched the movie and as it got tenser, Keanne teased, “Can I hold your hand if I get scared?” It wasn’t really a question: he grabbed my hand and put it between his anyway. I gave him a small smile but inside, my heart was throbbing. Where was this affection and intimacy before? And what did it mean, now?

Keanne did squeeze my hand as we watched the movie, before he wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me tight. That’s the furthest we went, though, because when the movie ended, I just gave a quick goodnight before going to my suite. I knew that if I lingered, things could escalate. I could be in Keanne’s bed, and I knew that I didn’t want to be like the other girls he just had sex with and never saw again. As tempting as Keanne’s body was, as his charm and sex allure were, I didn’t want to give into that temptation just yet. I went to sleep, hoping that by morning, those feelings would go away.

But, of course, they didn’t. In the first business meeting that morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about Keanne and Jason, Jason and Keanne. I did, however, manage to help Keanne play hardball, and left the first magazine, a large magazine focused on black entrepreneurs, waiting with bated breath for our answer to their proposal. They were offering two million dollars for the photo rights, but that wasn’t going to be the best offer of the day.

Neither was the next offer we received: an editorial newspaper’s weekly music issue was going to offer just five hundred thousand dollars for the pictures. Although that sounded like a small fortune, it wasn’t, given that it would increase the sales of their magazine by a substantial amount.

The third time was indeed the charm: a large tabloid was going to offer Keanne five million dollars. We were going to take it, too, but we played it cool, and they upped the offer to an equally cool six mill. It was accepted, and the magazine’s rep shook Keanne’s hand and said, “A pleasure doing business with you again, and send my regards to Lana.”

“Lana?” I asked, aloud, and stopped myself before I showed all my cards.

“That glorious pictorial of Keanne and Lana last month, did you pick up an issue?” asked the rep, pointing behind me. I turned: the cover of the magazine showed Keanne with Lana Minashian, the most famous female rapper in the world, having coffee together incognito in a café.

“Oh, of course, I thought you meant there was another pictorial for the upcoming issue,” I said, with a laugh, but inside, my heart was not just throbbing, but breaking.

I’d though what Keanne and I had was special, but there was a difference between watching a movie with a girl in private, and taking her out for coffee. Jason had done both with me, and Keanne, only the former, never the latter. Clubbing with the crew didn’t count, that was no date, that was just business and networking. No, Keanne and I had never socialized intimately in public, but he had with Lana.

On the plane home, I couldn’t get that magazine cover out of my head. Lana Minashian and Keanne Slims? I had heard the rumors they were dating but somehow, seeing the cover, with Keanne by my side, and having him avoid the topic at all, neither bringing it up or addressing the fact that what I’d seen had obviously disturbed me, was enough to make me question why I’d liked Keanne at all.

I pulled out my phone and opened the Kindle app, doing advanced reading for my classes. I’d finished all the required reading and homework for the week but I needed something to distract me from the man sitting in front of me that seemed like a total stranger. At least, until he opened his mouth again.