Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody (8 page)

The music that Earl has picked out starts off with lyrics comparing a woman to cherry pie. Earl hums along, flipping various controls and doohickeys. I don’t want to make him feel any more uncomfortable about our six-year age difference, so I keep my mouth shut and don’t ask who the band is. They sound embarrassingly bad, like Adam Lambert if he were straight. I don’t always pick up on double meanings, but even I can tell the song is about sex. “Mixing up the batter while she licks the beater”? I mean, c’mon, guys. That’s just crude.

“And one more thing,” Earl says, turning around. “Take your finger out of your nose.”

“Sorry,” I say, pulling it out. I’ve got to stop being such a disgusting idiot around him!

I feel the jet inch forward. The engine roars, drowning out the awful music. We speed up and before I know it we’re airborne! I look out the window and see the Holiday Inn below us getting smaller and smaller by the second. Soon, the entire quaint city of Portland shrinks from view. What was life like before I met Earl Grey and started going on these crazy adventures? I can hardly remember. It’s like I was born yesterday. That’s something Dad’s always telling me: “What were you, born yesterday?” I never understood his question, because of course he knows my birthday. Now I think I get what he was saying. It’s an amazing feeling.

“Watch this,” Earl says over the noise of the jet’s engine. He angles the plane directly toward a snow-capped mountain.

“Are you trying to kill us?” I scream.

“Hush, baby,” he says. “That’s Mount Rainier, one of the most dangerous active volcanoes in the world. But don’t worry—it hasn’t erupted in over a hundred and fifty years.”

“I’m not worried about it erupting,” I mutter, bracing myself for our imminent collision with the mountain.

When we’re less than a hundred yards away from impact, Earl presses a button and three missiles shoot out from each wing and explode into the side of Mount Rainier, making a hole large enough for us to fly through to the other side!

When we’re in the clear, I tell Earl just how amazing that was.

“I do this kind of stuff all the time,” he says. “I can guarantee you’ll never be bored around Earl Grey.”

No way, not in a million years,
I think. Well, maybe in a million years, because who knows what the ramifications of extending one’s lifespan to such a length are? I can see, yeah, in a million years maybe two people would get bored of each other. But in fifty or sixty years or whatever? No way.

I look back and see that the hole Earl shot in Mount Rainier is in the shape of a heart.
Swoon!
As the long-dormant volcano erupts plumes of thick, black smoke behind us into the air, all I can think about is this: I’m in love.

Chapter Eleven

W
E’RE AT EARL GREY’S penthouse apartment at the top of one of the tallest, most elegant-looking steel erections in downtown Seattle. It’s directly across the street from his office; he commutes back and forth using a zip-line stretched between the two buildings. The inside of Earl Grey’s bachelor pad is amazing. It’s almost all black and white, with a few splashes of puce and cadmium red. It’s just perfect.

“This is beautiful, Mr. Grey,” I say. “I wish I had an interior decorator to do my place up like this.”

“I did it myself,” he says.

“Oh.”

“No homo,” he says forcefully.

I shake my head. “I wasn’t thinking that. Was that what you were thinking I was thinking? Because that’s definitely not what I was thinking.”

(It’s totally what I was thinking.)

“What do I have to do to prove to you how not-gay I am?” he asks.

You could just shut up and press “start” on the sex machine.
I don’t say that, though, because I think he likes the cat-and-mouse game. Every time I’m too direct with him he gets all emo and shuts down. Instead, I say, “What did you bring me all the way here for?”

“To show you this,” he says, leading me into a reading room. His library is huge and filled with thousands of books. I wonder what else of his is huge. Probably his kitchen.

Earl runs his long fingers over the books at eye level on one of his many bookcases. His fingers stop on one book.
Twilight
.

“You brought me all the way to your bachelor pad to show me
Twilight
? I’ve got news for you, I’ve read it like a hundred times,” I say, rolling my eyes.

Earl smirks. He gently tilts the book out by its spine and the bookcase next to us begins to swing into the wall!

The walls of the room on the other side of the open bookcase are painted entirely black. “Is this your dungeon?” I ask him.

“You’re impressively perceptive, Anna,” Earl says, nodding. “I call it my ‛Room of Doom.’”

“And you want me to go in there. With you.”

He nods, waving a hand toward the secret passage. “Ladies first.”

The first thing I notice is the smell: Nag Champa incense and dirty laundry. The room is illuminated only by black light, but I can see enough to tell this is the kind of closet R. Kelly wouldn’t mind being trapped in. The room is tiny compared to the rest of Earl Grey’s apartment. There’s barely enough room for the waterbed. Whips, chains, ropes, riding crops, paddles, and iron shackles are hung up on the walls next to black-light posters—really trippy black-light posters. “Room of Doom”? More like the “Dorm Room of Doom.”

I feel Earl’s hand on my left shoulder. He’s breathing into my ear. “Welcome to my world, baby.”

“Do you bring all your dates here?”

“I don’t know if I’d call them ‛dates,’” he says. “They are, more accurately, LARPers. ‛LARP’ stands for ‛live-action role playing.’”

“I saw that term used in the quiz.”

“The quiz you so stubbornly refuse to fill out,” he says, trying to act all exasperated. I think he’s putting on more of a show now.

“These LARPers . . . If they’re not dates, then what are they? Volunteers? Where do you meet them?”

Earl picks up a leather toy that looks sort of like a whip, only with multiple leather strips hanging off the end. “There are women who LARP professionally,” he says. “They’re all over Craigslist.”

I laugh at the thought of him trolling for women on Craigslist. Surely someone as good looking and rich as Earl Grey doesn’t need to resort to picking up girls on the Internet! “You’re kidding,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I know, it just seems so dirty to meet women on Craigslist.”

“Dirty and gross,” I say.

“It’s just one of my fifty shames, Anna,” he says, lowering his head.

“And you use these . . .
things
on them? You torture them?” I ask, motioning to his sex toys.

“If the game calls for it. Take this flogger, for instance,” he says, perking up and swinging the leather tool through the air. “I’ll use this on a woman’s back, and ass, and legs.”

“And these LARPers like it when you beat them?”

“Oh yes,” he says. “Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. At another level, though, my LARPers want to please me. I am the Dungeon Master, after all.”

Control freak.
But damn! What a sexy control freak.

“So you want me to role-play with you?”

“Eventually,” he says, grinning.

“So how does this erotic role playing work?”

“I make the rules, and you obey them. It’s very simple. Follow the rules, and you will be rewarded. Break the rules, and you will be punished,” he says. “It’s about exploring each other’s limits within a codified system of punishments and rewards. It’s about trust.”

“What do I get out of the whole deal? I don’t know if pretending I’m an elf being whipped is really my thing.”

“I see you as more of a faery than as an elf, but we can get into specifics later. What I get out of our arrangement is you, submitting to my every whim,” he says. “And what you get is Earl Grey.”

Wow. Somebody thinks highly of themselves.

“We don’t have to start out role-playing today; we can ease our way into our characters with time. I need you right now, though—any way I can get you.”

Oh my.
Earl reaches a hand out to me. I take it in mine, and he leads me to the waterbed. I am no longer hung over, but I’m so nervous that I’m shaking.

“Let’s get comfortable, shall we?” he says, removing his calculator watch and setting it on top of the nightstand by the bed.

I take a cue from him and remove my yellow LiveStrong bracelet, setting it next to his watch.

“Let’s get even more comfortable, hmmmm?” he says, removing his pink Crocs.

I remove my tennis shoes and nearly choke on the smell of my own dirty socks. They’ve been through a lot in the past two days. If Earl can smell them, he doesn’t give any indication. I just hope he’s not a foot fetishist.

“That’s not quite comfortable enough, though,” he says, grinning. I still cannot believe that this attractive, kinky man is interested in me.

“Oh, it’s not, is it?” I say playfully, putting my arms up the back of my shirt, unhooking my bra, and twisting out of it like it’s a straitjacket. I dangle my red push-up bra off the end of a finger and toss it at Earl.

He catches it. “Oh my, Anna,” he says. He drops my bra to the floor, and reaches his own hands up underneath his black T-shirt. Thirty seconds of fumbling around later, Earl pulls a lacy black bra out from under his shirt. “Two can play at this game,” he says with a wicked flash of wickedness.

“Were you wearing that since we left the hotel?” I ask.

“I told you I’m kinky, baby,” he says. There’s an awkward pause. “Let’s just get naked. Ready, set . . . go!”

We strip the rest of our clothes off at record speed. Soon, we’re both as naked as the day we were born. Except, y’know, we’re not covered in blood and attached to our mothers by umbilical cords.

I run my eyes up and down Earl Grey’s breathtaking body, and my eyes stop to rest on his magnificent length. I want to grab it, swing it around, and bite into it—but, somehow, I’m able to contain myself. It’s probably for the best, because I don’t think Earl wants bite marks on his little milkman.

I’m not the only one checking someone out—Earl is taking in every inch of my body with his gray eyes. I feel naked before him, mostly because I don’t have any clothes on.

“You’re beautiful, Anna,” he says.

I’m not good at taking compliments, but I try my best. “You’re more beautiful,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “You ready to do this?”

“Absolutely.”

Earl Grey takes my hand and guides me onto the waterbed . . .

Chapter Twelve

W
OW, that was amazing,” I say, sprawled out on my back in Earl Grey’s bed.

“Thank you,” he says. “I’ve never had three orgasms in a row before just holding someone’s hand and sitting down on a bed. I can’t imagine what the actual sex is going to be like.”

“You don’t have to imagine,” I say.

“You’re right,” he says. He’s hovering over me again, but this time we’re both naked. I can feel his stick shift delectably pressing into my stomach. Kathleen would call him a “Trent Reznor,” since he has a nine-inch nail. (Don’t worry—I don’t get her references either.)

My nipples are hard, either from my heightened state of arousal or because it’s a little chilly in the Dorm Room of Doom.

“I want you so bad,” Earl says, “but I’m going to make you wait.”

“Haven’t we waited long enough?” I say.

“I’m going to kiss every part of your body,” he says. “Starting with your feet and working my way up . . .”

Quintuple crap.

“How about if you start a little higher, like at my knees maybe?” I say.

“Anna, there’s no need to be shy,” he says, backing himself down the bed toward the lower part of my body. He kneels at the foot of the bed and bends over my feet. “I love your scent, Anna,” he says, placing his nose an inch away from my toes and inhaling deeply. His eyes grow wide with surprise. “But, perhaps, I shall start with your knees. Good idea.”

He kisses my kneecaps, which is a little weird, because there aren’t many nerve endings there. Or the skin is too callused. I don’t know—like I ever look at my knees? When he moves his lips to the back of my knees, raising my legs slightly to accommodate his mouth, I let out a yelp. It tickles. Maybe kissing every single part of my body isn’t the way to get me ready for his meatsicle.

He moves on to kissing my quads, and before long I feel his lips on the insides of my thighs . . . Now we’re getting somewhere. When his mouth is a half-inch away from my lady parts, though, Earl Grey skips up to my belly. “Are you teasing me?” I say.

“Whatever do you mean, Miss Steal?” he says, flashing me that toothy grin and winking.

He continues his exploration of my body, finally reaching my bust. He flicks his tongue at one of my aching nipples to wet it, and then blows on it. Just when I think he’s done toying with it, he clamps his mouth down and begins sucking greedily. My nipples are now so hard they could cut diamonds. Earl looks up at me and smiles.

“Your lip!” I say. “It’s bleeding.”