Tousle Me (9 page)

Hunter gives my hand a squeeze. “You like?”

“I love it.” I wonder if it would be wrong to roll on the bottom stair for a bit. Scent mark it, or something. “It’s amazeballs.”

“Totes amazeballs,” he corrects. “Now—to my room.”

I turn to stare into his demonically green eyes. “Oh, Hunter.”

“Come.”

He leads me up the staircase and along a dark hallway lined with framed Savage Garden posters. Cobwebs streak the corners of the high ceilings. An old, yellowing sock is squashed into a corner; when we pass an overstuffed sofa, it doesn’t have a single cushion. You can totally tell a guy lives here.

“Here we are.” Hunter throws open a pair of ornate double doors to reveal a surprisingly minimal bedroom. I gasp.

In contrast to the rich colors of his lobby, the room is stark white with shiny black furniture. There isn’t an ounce of decoration besides the odd pile of money. Wow…Hunter’s issues run so deep, he doesn’t even want to get attached to his own home. Poor guy. Once again, I’m overtaken with the urge to heal whatever his deep dark secret is—even if it has nothing to do with me. Even if he doesn’t want me to. I mean, for Chrissakes, he bought me a unicorn!

“What do you think?” he asks.

“It’s very you.”

“Isn’t it?” He smiles, taking my hand and leading me to a white sofa and white coffee table with several covered silver platters. “I had Labron set up some British delicacies. I thought you might like to try them.”

I go to sit down. “Oh, yummy.”

“Gosling?”

I glance up. “Hmm?”

“Not you.” He strides over to a long glass tank that lines one wall. “Ryan Gosling. My one-eyed snake.”

As Hunter taps the glass and coos lovingly, I squint to get a look inside. The green and brown snake does indeed appear to have only one eye; not in a Cyclops kind of way, but more like the product of an accident. I wonder if he had to get the snake after he made that throwaway satirical comment about it, like I did with Rule…?

“This snake and I bonded on one of my trips to Hoi Sinful,” Hunter explains, sighing as the snake licks his palm with a forked tongue. “There he was, just a prop for a sub-par bondage act. But when he lost an eye in an unfortunate encounter with a penis, I realized he was just as damaged as I was. He lashed out at me, at first.” Hunter turns to me and rolls up his shirt sleeve to reveal a long, faint scar across the top of his arm. A scar that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there during the cage fight. Huh. “He didn’t want me to get too close, so he ripped open my bulging and defined bicep. But what he didn’t count on was my dedication.” He eyes me intensely. “Or my ruthless perseverance. I said to myself, I always get what I want…and God damn you, Ryan Gosling, I’m going to have you whether you like it or not.”

I sniffle, wiping away a tear. “That’s beautiful.”

“I know.”

“You totally owned that snake.”

“Yup.” He clicks his tongue. “Still do.” Then he pulls the lid back on to the glass tank and strides over to sit beside me, lifting the lids from the silver platters. “Hob Nob?”

I stare at the chocolate cookie things. “What are they?”

“A fucking institution.” He takes a bite, chews, and sighs.

“Oh. I love institutions.”

“And try these,” he says, pointing to a tray of pink jelly sweets. “Percy Pigs. They’re like gold dust over here.”

“Hunter,” I say, my voice weak with emotion, “thank you for sharing these with me.”

“My pleasure.” He wipes Hob Nob crumbs off his jaw and leans in to kiss me. “I’ve been waiting to get you alone for so long…”

My lips are just an inch from his when I jerk up. “Hunter?”

He blinks. “What?”

“What’s behind that scary old antique door over there?” I point over his shoulder.

His green eyes mist over with fog. “You must never go through that door.” He grips my chin. “Promise me, gosling.”

“I—I promise.” But but but it’s like a red rag to a bull. I stare at the elaborate door, squinting. In fact I’m pretty sure a little smoke is leaching out from under it.

Hunter waves a hand in front of my face. “Er, hello?”

“Sorry!” I fling myself at him, our mouths crash-landing together in an awkward dance of tongues and teeth. Hunter groans in discomfort, then in delight, shoving me back on the sofa to deepen our kiss. Oh God. He’s eating me like a Percy Pig. Squeal, piggy! Squeal!

But then he pulls away. What did I do? Is this still about the octopus?

Crap—is that a cupboard in the corner? IS IT?

“You bit my lip, gosling,” he manages. Blood spills down along his jaw and spatters on his white shirt. Hunter draws a finger through the red and tastes it experimentally. “Hmm. Not bad.”

I try very hard to smile, and not let my face contort with disgust.

“Don’t look so repulsed. This is just like smelling my own farts, but more…primal.”

“I like the way you say
primal,
” I whisper.

He flashes a teasing grin. “Almost as much as how I say
besmirched
?”

My girlcore shimmies. “Almost.” I want to kiss Hunter, but he’s still covered in his own blood. Admittedly, this is an improvement on weasel entrails, but Harlequin forgot to warn me about the frequency of heroes being splattered with some kind of bodily emission. I want my frickin’ money back, you bastards.

“Which reminds me.” He reaches for a Percy Pig. “I wanted to talk to you about your little performance in the lecture theatre this afternoon.”

“Oh. That.” I lower my eyes. “I didn’t mean to, I thought—”

“It’s all right. There’s a first time for everything. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I’m slightly concerned that you’re nineteen and you’ve never had an orgasm. If you were ugly or something, I’d get it, but you’re at that convenient level of attractiveness between unthreatening and aspirational.”

I blush. “You’re so sweet, Hunter.”

“I have to ask…haven’t you ever played with yourself?”

“Whuh?”

“You know, strummed your own banjo. Taken one for the taco team.” He gives me a conspiratorial nudge. “Cleaned out the bat cave.”

“If I had a banjo and it was mine, why
wouldn’t
I strum it…?”

Hunter’s eyes roll skyward. “I’m talking about masturbating. Making yourself come.”

“Oh!” I blush even harder. “Oh.”

“Oh, oh, oh! Precisely.”

“Why would I do that?” Surely masturbation is just for whores, like Enid.

“Why wouldn’t you?” he says incredulously. “Seriously. I’m surprised your cervix hasn’t exploded. It must be like letting a bath run and run and run, but never yanking the plug out.”

“So the whole place is just engulfed in a massive, never-ending flood?”

He cocks an eyebrow. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“The person who finally wanted to take out that plug would have to wade through a whole lot of water.” I grimace. “And bits of old soap. And hair.”

Hunter takes my hand again. “Are we having a metaphorical conversation about your tortured past? Because I don’t fancy wading through too much hair, if you catch my drift.”

He doesn’t know about what happened in the cupboard. It…changed me. I just don’t feel pleasure like normal girls—or at least, I didn’t until this afternoon, when I felt his fingers Russian dancing on my jelly bean.

“There was no hair in the….” I want to say
cupboard
but it won’t come out. My throat’s gone dry. All those hands, prodding, pushing—

“You can save the dark secret, gosling. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you catch my drift about the hair. Let’s not beat around the bush.”

“I caught it.” I did not catch it. I have no idea what he’s on about.

“So anyway.” He’s grinning The Grin again, like I’m the groupie backstage at an Eine Richtung gig and he’s just come off stage, sweaty and hungry and horny as a scoutmaster. “I was thinking, since you want us to wait—and I’m likable and contemp enough to be okay with that for at least two more chapters—we’d work on the whole masturbation thing.”

“You mean like, uh, teach me?”

“Yeah,” he breathes.

“Oh, Hunter.” I run my fingers down the buttons of his bloodstained shirt. He’s a wolf in expensive but soiled clothing, like the hero from one of my favorite books this semester,
Moderately Attractive Bastard
. If Hunter wants to teach me how to make myself come, I am so up for that. Like, everywhere. “So…so how…?”

“How does anyone learn anything?” He pulls an iPad from nowhere. “YouTube tutorials!”

Pretty sure that learning to climax should not start with an anti-climax. But still. I must hide my disappointment because Hunter just wants to help me before my cervix explodes.

Note to self: Google “cervix.”

Hunter taps on the tablet and then places it on my lap, slipping an arm around my shoulders as he does so. “Here we go. The PsycheFoof channel has loads of videos on it.”

I peer down at the screen. The most recent upload appears to be some sort of charity musical number called
Do the Frig.

“Erm…where to start?” I mumble.

“Knock yourself out, gosling.” He kisses my forehead and strokes my hair. “I’m going to wash this blood off and have a word with Labron. I’ll be back soon.” With that, he strides to the door, pausing by the stereo. He messes with it for a second and then the low bass line of an Eine Richtung song pours from the speakers. “Ah, much better.”

Then, he leaves.

So I sit listening to Hunter sing something about a pumpkin in German, flicking through videos about…flicking. I don’t even know if I want to learn how to masturbate. I mean, isn’t that what Hunter is for? Still, if I’m going to give it a go, may as well do it here—back in my dorm room, Sparkles will be watching. Ew.

I watch one of the videos and only cringe twice. I also learn what a cervix is, which is handy. Then I put the iPad aside, get comfy on the sofa and go in for a fiddle. Listening to Hunter sing really sets the mood, even if this is the song about fat horses, or whatever.

Hmm. Mmmph. So this is…what it is. Kind of like sex flu, actually. Kind of like giving a very small bowl of Turkish Delight a massage. Ooh. Ooh—
oh.

Wait, wait. The door. THE DOOR.

No no no. Hunter made me promise that I’d never go through the door.

But there’s smoke misting out from under it! And who knows what he’s hiding in there? I’m lying on his couch, wanking to YouTube—this is serious. This is commitment. Before I go any further, I should know what I’m dealing with, and if Hunter has dead bodies or disgusting experiments or
Diagnosis Murder
DVDs in that room, I should know.

Maybe he’s hiding something magical. I mean, he’s an awful lot like the genie from Aladdin, when I think about it: POOF! WHADDAYA NEED? POOF WHADDAYA NEED?! (Literally—Labron is the poof).

Before I know it, I’m wiping my fingers on a pristine white napkin, doing up my lederhosen and creeping toward the ornate mahogany door between his wardrobes. I pause to listen for footsteps in the corridor, but I can’t hear zilch. I press an ear against the door, listening for the telltale groans of monsters or sex captives. There’s nothing but the whistle of the wind.

Here goes nothing.

The door opens with a heavy creak. Inside, the room is sparsely decorated, with only broken mirrors on the walls and a fancy table in front of tall windows. I inch closer to the table in the shadows, crunching bits of mirror—and Kanye West CD—beneath my shoes. There’s an oval glass container on the table, and something that looks like a flower withers beneath it. As I reach out to touch it, a shiver of silver moonlight streaks through to bounce off the glass, and foreboding string music strikes up in the background. Huh.

Floating in the glass oval is a red rose, its petals bruised and flaccid. Like Archer that one time when I walked in on him getting changed after jousting. I’m just about to touch it when a single petal falls into a heap of similarly shed red streaks.

The creepy string music gets louder. Hunter’s voice echoes in my head:
you must never go through that door. Promise me, gosling.

So
this
is his dirty secret? A flipping flower? Really? I’d hoped for something, you know, a bit less metrosexual and a bit more fucked in the head. Sure, the rose is floating in mid-air and there’s evidently some dark curse at work or whatever. So dark that not even Kanye West could break it. But if he thinks this is in any way comparable to my cupboard trauma, he’s super mistaken.

The foreboding music’s still going, and for a second, I wonder if it’s because Hunter is about to catch me betraying his trust. But nah—he’s still elsewhere. And it turns out the music is actually just the Eine Richtung CD. Maybe I’ll go find Hunter and tell him how much I enjoyed masturbating, and maybe then we’ll be able to have sex now we’re free of dead octopi.

I close the secret door carefully behind me, straighten my lederhosen, and pad down the hall to find Hunter. I hear Labron chuckling somewhere beyond the lobby, and I take my time descending the staircase of infinite awesomeness; I pause to pose on each landing, trying out such looks as Damsel in Distress, Oops I Just Dropped My Books, and my favorite: Selfie From Above (makes your double chin look teensy and your boobs look huge). When I reach the source of Labron’s voice, I hear Hunter as well.

“Oh yeah. Look at that,” he gloats, ever so slightly breathless.

I pause beside the open doorway. Labron sounds kind of, um, turned on. Hunter sounds smug with a side of sex flu. I’m not sure I want to see what’s in this room, but my womanly instincts tell me that I must. Like I’m Nancy Drew, but with a better grasp of social media.

Only when I turn the corner, I wish I hadn’t.

Hunter stands bare-chested in the middle of a huge country style kitchen, his abs rippling like trout jumping in a river. Labron is in front of him, on his knees. Leaning in. Hunter groans some British obscenity and slaps Labron’s bald head.

“Hot diggety dawg,” Labron murmurs.

Oh to the em to the gee. The help is BLOWING MY BOYFRIEND.

I mean, er, the minority character, not the help. Wait. That doesn’t sound any better. Aw hell, he’s still blowing my boyfriend!