Punishment with Kisses (13 page)

I pushed her onto her back and climbed aboard like a harlot who wanted her (wo)man-meat and nothing else. I drew the long scarf from my neck and instead of using it on myself, as Ash had done in the video, I used it on Shane.

But I had no experience with bondage or erotic asphyxiation, and I hadn’t been a Boy Scout. Nor had I paid much attention to the knots on the riggings the few times I’d been out on friends’ sailboats. Not knowing the difference between a noose and any other binding, and not ready to risk my lover’s life for one night of pleasure, I decided to start slow. I tied Shane’s wrists to the bedposts. She was compliant and tested the bindings to demonstrate their effectiveness in restricting her movement.

I rode her hard, watching her wince and moan and strain against the scarf that prevented her from grabbing me by the hips and positioning me where she wanted. Instead, I shifted my weight around, judging from the look on her face and my own pleasure to determine the best angles.

I was riding her and slamming my pelvis up and down around the shaft of her cock, and all at once I pictured whipping her with a riding crop and imagined her riding me this way with spurs. The notion brought me right to that point where I was about to blow, and I could see from Shane’s face that she was just as ready as I, and right before I let go, I turned and smiled at the camera.

June 1

I’m worried about kiddo. I think Megan wants to be like me, to emulate me and my life. But it’s a life of such dreadful emptiness and need I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, especially my beautiful sister. I feel like I have a huge hole in the middle of my soul that I’ve been trying to fill with an endless parade of lovers: women, men, going back to, hell, how long has it been? I don’t know, since I was a teenager, for sure, since the big one, the first one, the only one that really mattered. Sometimes I’m numb. No, usually I’m numb. Sometimes I want to feel pain, just so I can feel something. Choke me, fuck me, hit me, burn me; but do it with a hint of tenderness. I want to feel something besides empty pain. A punishment with kisses.

I’ve slept with over a hundred women at this point, especially if you count all the Dinah Shore festivals and Michigan madness and the play parties and that one weekend. Oh, that weekend. But all those notches on my lipstick case aside, I still feel empty. With all the sexual exploration I’ve engaged in during my twenty-six years, my life still feels so devoid of intimacy it’s a fucking joke. It’s so crazy that I still believe in love, still want to be with The One. But will I ever? I envy Megan for her innocence, her naiveté. I hope she never becomes who I have become. I hope she never has to go through what I’ve been through. I hope she never sees the world for what it is, the stinking cesspool of filth and betrayal.

There was a new girl at the office, a reporter named Paula, with hair so curly it seemed like it had been transplanted from another part of her body.
Hello, Hair Club for Men.
She called it a jewfro, though she was Irish, so I was not really sure if it was okay to repeat her colorful language. Was it racist?

I nicknamed her Curly Q because she was bubbly and quirky with perfect little features—the upturned nose, the sparkling violet eyes, the puckered lips, and perpetually rosy cheeks. Paula seemed like she liked me. She’d been hanging around my cubicle every day at work, bringing me Twizzlers and mocha and asking me out to lunch or drinks. I assumed she was hitting on me, and I was enjoying it, playing various kinky scenarios in my mind like a series of short porno trailers for a best of compilation, until we went out to dinner and I discovered her true motive.

“I know about Shane and Ashley,” Paula revealed almost innocently. I was immediately appalled to hear anyone mention their names together. I was particularly perturbed that a colleague from work would bring them up.

“I’m sorry, what?” I honestly didn’t know where this was going.

“Look, I’ll be honest with you, Megan. I have an ulterior motive in befriending you,” Paula confessed. “I want to write a book about your sister’s murder and I’d like your cooperation.”

Apparently Paula had true crime aspirations from her time on the police beat at the
Oregonian,
and when she discovered she could be working alongside me at the
Willamette Week,
she was determined to use that connection to write and sell her own based on real life
In Cold Blood
–style thriller. Paula said she’d already had interest from a publisher, particularly regarding the love triangle angle.

“Love triangle?” I could feel my cheeks burn. Ash. Cynthia. Shane. I couldn’t help but picture their naked bodies entwined. I tried to push the image away, replacing it with Shane holding me, explaining what happened that day. I told myself eyewitnesses were unreliable, even when they were me.

“I know you and your sister were fighting over your girlfriend, Shane—”

“So you think I killed her? My own sister? Jesus.” I shook my head until my teeth rattled. How could anyone think I was capable of murder?

“I didn’t say that,” Paula protested. “I just think it’s an intriguing element to the story. You don’t think your love triangle played a part in her death.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered as though it was. “Look, Paula, I don’t know what the fuck you think you know, but you’ve got it all wrong.” In the eighteen months since Ash’s death I’d become familiar with many of the local reporters, their style and techniques, and I had developed a way of dealing with them all. But Paula’s insinuations—her straightforward accusations—threw me. “Get this straight, I did not kill my sister!”

“Hey, Megan, I’m on your side, I’m not saying—”

“Bullshit you’re on my side. I can’t believe the preposterousness of you taking me to dinner to do research for your book. And then you accuse me of being the cause of Ash’s death.”

“You mean murder.”

“Her murder,” I repeated. “Neither I nor Shane had anything to do with her
murder.
And if you knew anything you’d realize that Ash would never fight with me, or anyone else, over one of her many conquests.”

“You’re right,” she said in what I thought was an apology. “I understand your sister
was
quite the slut.”

“You bitch!” I shoved the table away and flung the remains of my blended mocktail on Paula’s smug little perfect face.

She smiled. “Of course,” she said, dabbing the drink from her brow with a napkin, “I can’t imagine it was your sister who was the jealous one.” Paula smirked.

Wow, this bitch is unflappable.
Meanwhile, I was shaking and my voice started cracking when I shot back, “I’m getting a restraining order in the morning.” Like that was going to happen, and then I burst out crying and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I ran from the restaurant and tumbled into a cab where I sobbed all the way back to the apartment. I was still bawling when I got there, hoping that Shane would do her part to soothe me. Instead, there was a note on the fridge: “We’re in production, had to go back to the office. See you tomorrow. Love, Shane.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck it all to hell. I had a dead sister, a cold girlfriend, a calculating reporter, and a father so rigid he wouldn’t know empathy if it bit him on the ass. I couldn’t believe all of this was happening to me. I mean, I recognized that I was the sister who lived, but I still couldn’t bear feeling like no matter what I did, I couldn’t fucking win. Sometimes I wished I were the one who was dead. The dead had it easy.

*

The next morning I had to be at the paper before our family attorney’s office was open, so I hoped I could just avoid Paula until I talked with him about the possibility of getting a restraining order based on nothing but a few rude comments and her blaming me for my sister’s murder. Maybe this could be one of those times where Father’s money and standing in the community would grease the wheels of justice and shake loose the paperwork I wanted.

In the meantime, surely I could at least tell my boss, right? But Paula was an experienced reporter and I was just an editorial assistant, so who would a publisher keep? Probably her. I just read submissions, answered complaint letters, and wrote calendar copy. You didn’t need talent or a degree to do that. But Paula had bylines. Plus, she wasn’t the one refusing to work within five hundred feet of another employee. Still. I was here first.

Before I could march into the publisher’s office, my cell phone rang with a call from a girl I was fairly collegial with at
Just Out,
the local gay newspaper.

“Have you seen the blogs?”

“No,” I honestly replied. “What’s up?”

She inhaled sharply, as though deciding how much to tell me. I was nervous as hell. “Just tell me! What’s going on?” The pregnant pause was freaking me out.

“All right. Someone posted something on SheWired.com alleging that you’ve been in a long-term relationship with the number one suspect in your sister’s murder!”

That bitch, Paula.

“A bunch of local bloggers picked it up and are reprinting it. And so did Perez Hilton.”

“Wait, what?
Who?
”

“They’re all anonymous posts, but the blogosphere seems pretty captivated by it. Even our bloggers are posting the gossip and, well, I heard the police were paying attention too. I just thought you should know.”

Oh, my God, how was this even possible? Obviously, this was Paula’s doing. But how could she just have made something up and then posted it anonymously and instantly get it accepted as fact? God, it was so fucking unfair.

“Wait, why would Perez Hilton reprint it? It’s not like we’re celebrities.”

“Oh, well, uh,” my tipster stammered, clearly uncomfortable blurting out the problem. “Well, you should read his, um, it’s, I think you should read it. Look, Megan, I gotta go. I just wanted to warn you, okay? Hang in there.”

With that, she was gone. I snapped my cell phone closed and ducked into the nearest Starbucks—in Portland never more than a few feet away—where I was lucky enough to find an empty terminal and log on to Perezhilton.com. As soon as it loaded I wanted to put my hands over the screen to hide the page from the other patrons. It wasn’t a PG image. At first I thought I’d stumbled onto a pop-up ad for a porn site. Then I looked closer. I recognized the star on the XXX video still. We happened to have DNA in common.

The story was there too, right on the front page, above the digital fold.

Well, well, we have news from the naughty today as insiders tell me that Ashley Caulfield, aka porn star Pookie Michaels, was involved in a lesbian love triangle with her own sister! The younger sister, Megan Caulfield, is a reporter at the
Willamette Week
in Portland, Oregon. Meanwhile, the third leg in this sordid triangle, Shane Ryan, a female editor at the
Women’s Poetry Journal,
is Caulfield’s on-and-off-again lover (currently on). Michaels, who came to fame (pun intended) in the amateur film
Muff Diving Miss Daisy,
was stabbed to death last July. No one has officially been named in connection with her murder, though Ryan is apparently considered a suspect. No word yet on the Sapphic sister’s involvement in the homicide, but talk about sibling rivalry! Crazy lesbionics!

I couldn’t help but read it over and over again. Then I Googled my name and discovered links to at least a dozen other blogs. Gossip spreads like wildfire on the Web. I wasn’t sure what was worse: being implicitly named a suspect, being romantically linked to an overt suspect, or discovering my sister was an amateur porn star. God, I hope she was an amateur. This would totally kill Father if he found out. I’d never thought about whether Father was a porn aficionado or not. I mean, I assumed he watched porn, even if I couldn’t imagine where or when. He must’ve, though, right? Didn’t all men? Still, it was disturbing to think about Father stumbling onto scenes starring Ash. But that’s exactly what I had done. And having stumbled onto my sister’s homemade sex videos, I didn’t destroy them, didn’t take a hammer to the DVDs and reduce them to shards. No, I deliberately watched them. And then I acted them out. I felt like vomiting again.

Clearly, Paula had been one busy beaver last night, planting gossip on blogs to stir the pot and lend credence to her own theory of the crime—that Shane or I killed Ash. In doing so Paula might have given my lawyer more to work with, but how could I counter her allegations? They were preposterous, but everyday folks wouldn’t understand that. At best, they’d think I was the slut banging my dead sister’s girlfriend, when it had been the other way around, and at worst, they’d think I was the killer myself.

It was all too much to handle, and though I couldn’t wait to ream Paula, I couldn’t bear to walk into the
Willamette Week
offices this morning. I called my editor from the coffee shop and feigned sick. I was pretty certain he knew what was going on, but he sounded sympathetic and told me to “take care of myself now” almost as though I’d never be coming back.

Was he right? Was this it for my career? Just because I didn’t need the job—financially—didn’t mean I wanted to lose it. Plus, I needed it for my résumé, right? Who’s going to hire me with a blank sheet of paper? Or worse, once they learn I was fired from the only position listed because everyone thought I was a homicidal slut? A friend of Father’s? I shuddered at the thought.