Darkest Love (6 page)

The sex had proceeded, with Mandy's body lit by the shimmering bulbs. The lights sparked in and out of view as he fucked her. It gave her the look of an angel.
Angel of sex
. There was a moment when the lights caught her face–softly but absolutely clearly, evoking the light painted by a Renaissance master–and he gasped at the beauty of it. When she slid onto his penis the light changed again, haloing her breasts so they looked twice as big, while a shadow nipped her waist to a tiny speck. He sighed at the sexy poetry of it.

Rain had let her work up and down on his cock, pleased she was a giver. And now he remembered the side benefit of sex with Mandy—her wonderful breakfasts.

“You know I do.” He wrapped her in a bear hug that she cut short, complaining about panda eyes. She pulled away, leaving a smudge of black liner on his chest.

“Fix yourself up then.” Rain watched her ass retreat into the bathroom. A clatter of pots and bubble of coffee soon after let him know she had moved to the kitchen.

“Keep my coffee black, Mands.” He rolled on his side and dozed off again as the smell of eggs and bacon started to waft into his nostrils.

“Oh.” Rain awoke from the nap some fifteen minutes later to breasts in his face and an elegant breakfast on a tray. The crackling of the meat in the pan had filled his dreams with snapping things: fireworks and rubber bands.

“Gee, Rain. You sure are a jumpy lover.” Mandy's face was pretty and startled above his coffee cup. That Perpetually Startled Bimbo look was actually sort of hot.

“What can I say?” Rain cracked, seizing a toast from his plate and digging into his eggs. “I like quick pounding motions. You learned that last night.” He winked, stuffing his face as Mandy ran a manicured hand up and down his leg. She looked a lot better with the panda-eyes washed off, and any dullness in her skin was compensated by her cooking skills. Feta cheese and pesto in scrambled eggs was a surprisingly good idea…

Rain nibbled on. It was not a bad life.

* * * *

“Ow!” Annie wailed as Lily's palm hit her shoulder. The sting, as painful as a belly flop, spread through her arm and she hissed. Lily watched her silently as she pressed her tongue between her teeth and doubled over, waiting for the pain to subside. How was her friend able to use those slender fingers like a whip?

When her shoulder had recovered, Annie stood, letting the chair scrape back with another awful sound—

shkreeeeeeeeet
. She raised a palm.

Lily's eyes widened. “Oh, no you don't. Snap out of it.”

Too late.
Annie sent a furious palm into Lily's décolletage, catching the edge of her collarbone.
Ha.
The thud was disappointingly dull, but that area was prone to breakage. Annie had shattered her own décolletage on a field trek once.

“Annie. Calm down! I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!” It was Lily's turn to double over.

“Lily. I love him. Don't ever say things like that to me again!” Annie's voice echoed from the walls of her small apartment and astonished her with its shrillness. It was as if the wraiths of her own lust and humiliation were rising from the walls, hitting her ears. The sound did not seem to be coming from her.

“Please calm down, you crazy beast! Annie, I'm scared for you. You let him… choke you in the water?”

A fresh set of tears welled in Annie's eyes and fell down her already streaked cheeks like storm water. Her throat was hoarse from crying. Lily had slept on the couch after they'd arrived home from Guastavino's. They'd gone to sleep peacefully enough, sipping peppermint tea and joshing that Rain wasn't that hot in his suit anyway. When Annie woke up it was a different story. Her head felt like it had been bashed with a hammer. She'd stumbled to the bathroom and peered at her own sad, hung-over face in the mirror glass.

She had started crying. All the emotions she had held in since Sivu came out at once and she just bawled, shrieking when Lily tried to comfort her and bucking against her friend's impatient cries that Annie
always
did this: she let Rain Mistern get the better of her.

“I'm sick of cleaning up his messes!”

It was a terrible moment to reveal that Rain choked her to unconsciousness. That was when Lily had gone silent. With a quivering lip, Annie had swept out of the room, and when Lily found her staring at the Offline icon next to Rain's name on Skype, it was the last straw.

SMACK.
Her friend had dealt her that belly-flop slap.

Now the women stood face–to–face. Annie felt her heart pounding faster and a new feeling rising inside her: fear.
I am going crazy.

Lily was just trying to help. “Lily, why am I such a dirty slut?”

With that Annie collapsed in a heap, hugging her legs and burying her face in her quivering, tear-drenched knees.
I am too filthy to live.
A deluge streamed from her eyes, and one word chorused in her head:
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
She rocked in time to the thought, banging her forehead against her knee bones.

After a moment Lily sat next to her and spoke. “Annie, don't see him again.”

Annie raised her head and peered. Her friend's mouth quivered and her eyes were full of stunned concern Annie had never seen on anyone but her grandmother. With a gasp of recognition she collapsed into her friend's chest, sobbing like the child she had been the last time she saw kind eyes like those.

* * * *

“I probably will sleep with him again.”

Lily's face dropped. A heavy feeling, one that acknowledged the truth of Annie's statement, filled the space between the women. “You are a masochist.”

Annie nodded. “I think I am.”

The computer beeped as the chat box quivered from an incoming signal:
Rain Mistern is online
. Lily placed her hand on her friend's arm. “No horseplay in the tropics, please.”

“I am crazily obsessed with him.”

“…Please?”

Annie glanced at Lily's face, and down at the trashy arm tattoo she wished she had never gotten, and over to Rain's name on the screen. Lily knew her story: the way Annie had slept around with men at university after reading one too many radical feminist texts. “There is nothing feminist about opening your legs and letting a bunch of horseshit guys give it to you. Especially if they talk about you in the campus pub and ruin your academic career,” the more sensible woman had said.

“Feminism is about sexual freedom.” Annie had said. She scoffed when she remembered it. How naïve she had been!

Lily pulled her back into a hug, placing a hand over Annie's eyes to cover Rain's incoming message and averting Annie's body with a twist of her upper arm.

“Your grandmother is protecting you,” Lily smiled, bringing a finger to the sapphire pendant Rain had recovered. She knew that would hit the spot.

Annie nodded. Her grandmother had been the only one who cared about her. Annie's mom, herself a disillusioned feminist, had let her daughter sleep around since age fourteen and warned her about absolutely nothing, even sneaking rough boys in and out of the house. She would describe the boys to Annie's father later when she got angry and wanted to hurt her daughter. Annie had received more than one belting for that.

Annie's eyes teared up again as she remembered. Her mom's other bad habit was revealing her confidences to friends. Every one of her aunts and uncles and her communion sponsors and all her mother's tennis partners knew about the guys who dumped Annie and the guys who rejected her and the guys who pumped and dumped her.

“Sex is bad for me,” Annie whispered, comically blunt. Lily laughed.

“Reckless sex is bad for you.”

“I know what I need to do. I need to get out of here.” Annie hopped to her feet and swept to the bedroom, not even glancing at Skype. Lily heard the click of a phone dislodged from its charger and the opening and shutting of a cupboard.

“Where are you going?”

Annie's teary head popped out from around the door. Her smile revealed the extent of the redness that had gathered in her eyes as she cried. “I'm going to Sivu. By the time Rain gets there I'll be yards ahead of him. He's
not
going to torture me in New York.”

She whipped her head back out of view and unzipped her suitcase with an assured
zap
. In the living room Lily shook her head, not sure what to think.

* * * *

“Annie?”

Annie tried to ignore Lily's voice. She knew the other woman was trying to pull her back into a heartfelt discussion, but Annie wasn't even sure if she could trust her dearest friend.

Terrible memories were flooding back. Her father had been a humiliation specialist–his favorite move during a rage was to kick you in the rear. Annie stiffened right to her bones when she remembered his hands on her shoulders and his booted foot kicking her in the part of her body she hated most.

She started to cry even now, thinking about it. That behavior had only started after her ass came in, around age fourteen. It was as if her father wanted to express his scorn for her developing body. To shame it, just as the bullies at school did.

I have no support,
she thought, stuffing sock balls and folded lingerie into her suitcase and tuning out Lily's entreaties and questions.
I am the perfect punching bag for men. The perfect slut. The perfect submissive for sadistic Rain Mistern.

What was that line people said?
A woman always looks for her father.
Sometimes Annie wondered if her adult relationships were fraught because she had been a lapdog since birth: a dumpster for other people's rage and bad feelings.

She stared at her folded shirts slotted like colored Legos in the suitcase.

Was Lily even her friend? Annie had an awful thought:

She's hungry for information because she wants to gossip. She'll gossip with Mandy and Marty and probably with Rain himself.

“Lily, I'd like you to leave. I'm not changing my mind.” After a pause, Lily sighed and turned. Annie heard her footsteps then the click of the door as she exited.

Annie punched the air. The legs of the silky stockings she was holding flailed about like an angry octopus.

Rain sat on the couch, feeling like he was going to pop after Mandy's breakfast, and opened his Firefox browser. With a few keyboard–strokes and a scroll down his bookmarks he found it:
Field Notes,
his favorite anthropology blog, by a colleague from Yale named Clint Pearson.

He grinned as the page loaded, barely aware of Mandy body shuffling in from the kitchen and curling up next to him on the couch.

“Check me out,” he said, slapping the female thigh that was barely covered by his boxer shorts. The photographer had gotten a great shot of Rain's face beaming over that Vassar woman's shoulder, while another beam of light shone from the stage behind him, casting a halo around his happy-looking head. Photographers were shuffling all around, the zaps of their cameras producing some nice light effects in the foreground too.

But the funniest thing was Rain's expression. He peered down to where his trophy was almost spearing the woman's behind as he hugged her. Rain guffawed loudly. Why had they chosen something so gratuitous? So
phallic
?

“Look at the headline,” Mandy said, gesturing. That left no doubt about the angle they were taking:
Bad Boy of Anthropology Makes Another Conquest.

Rain skimmed the article, lips pursing in amusement as he emerged for the first time from the sensual stupor Mandy had pulled him into. The world of anthropology flooded back. The blog author–Clint Pearson–had barely managed to last one paragraph without making a crack about Rain's sex life. There were way too many references to Rain's
penetrating
insights, his
scandalous
disregard for etic factions, and female researchers who
salivated
over his tenure-grabbing prowess. Pearson even wrote that Rain was
sinking his eager teeth
into a new project on Sivu.

Annie Childs?
The man made nothing explicit, but one too many double entendres had set a very sensual tone.

“I wish they hadn't used that picture of Lynne Morgan. I'm jealous,” Mandy said, reading over Rain's shoulder.

“I wish Clint Pearson would moderate his tone,” Rain said. “This article contains so many wisecracks it is about to collapse. It requires the support of a buttress.”

“I think it
has
a buttress!” Mandy retorted, gesturing again at the picture of Lynne Morgan from Vassar and her very nice bum. Rain had to admit that was funny. He roared with laughter, patting Mandy's hip, and seized his phone from the coffee table.

He would not have suspected such quick wit from the impassive Mandy.
Perhaps the critics are right. I see women as vessels. I treat them like objects, neglecting to notice their inner qualities.

Still cackling, Rain found Pearson's number in his contacts. Mandy watched at his side, boxer shorts rustling and lips nuzzling his bicep.

“Clint!” Rain barked o-ver the phone. “You have gone too far. Headline and picture both.”

“The job of a blogger,” Clint said sleepily on the other line, “is to capture the tone of the event.” His voice was cheeky, though he sounded like he had just woken up.

“You captured bollocks, buddy,” Rain countered, stroking the female head that had collapsed in his lap. “This will hurt me and you know it.”

“Wow. Getting touchier.”

Rain knew what Clint meant. Early in his career he had ignored the sexism bleating, rushing through interview questions about his personal life and sticking to the science. The beauty of that was that it made the interviewer look unprofessional, and Rain came out looking good. “You are like a tabloid,” he had hissed after a Huffington Post interviewer grilled him about his dating habits and only asked a smattering of questions about his research. All the questions she
did
ask focused on battle–of–the–sexes style nonsense. “Are you introducing a Page 3 girl at some point?” he had scoffed. The Huff Post never alluded to his sex life again.