Punishment with Kisses (17 page)

Pat says he can still conjure up a scenario that will scare me into an orgasm—they don’t call it the petite death for no reason, you know—so I’m letting him come up with something that’ll really knock my PVC socks off.

*

I was in the middle of telling Shane about Ash’s sex journal, the one that’s more shocking than any of the others I’d already read, when a funny look washed over her face. I hoped to God it wasn’t turning her on, because I could only take things so far and reenacting my sister’s S&M play wasn’t exactly the direction I was hoping to go.

“What?” I demanded. “Did you already know this?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just…” Shane trailed off as she looked away. “I did play with Ash once.”

“What do you mean you played with Ash once? You did S&M with her?”

“No, I, um, she asked me to be a part of a sex game with her and someone else and it was kind of humiliating and I don’t want to talk about it. I just wanted you to know in case she wrote about it or something.”

“What did you do?” I was not shocked. There was little at this point that truly shocked me.

“I just said I don’t want to talk about it.” Shane was adamant. “Look, I’m just not going to talk with you about my sex life with your sister.”

Wow, so they had a “sex life,” did they? I was not sure then if I was relieved to not hear the juicy details of their tête-à-têtes, or if Shane’s reluctance to share meant she was harboring a secret far worse. What that might be, I was not sure, but the mere fact that she participated and enjoyed one of Ash’s humiliating sex games revealed a great deal about Shane, almost none of it good.

But I was not the sweet girl who fell in love with Shane what seemed like a lifetime ago. I was a chick on a mission, a sexual being in my own right, and I had Ash’s journal to keep ciphering. Fuck Shane. I was going to find Pat, this bisexual photographer who played S&M Cupid for my sister, and uncover what he knew about her death.

*

Tracking down Pat was as easy as finding Cynthia. His studio was set squarely atop the gay district in Portland, amid what local queers call Vaseline Alley. But getting him to sit long enough to talk with me was a different story.

Pat insisted on working while we spoke, so I was following him around all day as we went from one photo shoot to another. It started in his studio with a beautiful woman in a diamond necklace wrapping a striped yellow-and-black snake around her body. It was breathtaking watching her, though the whole scenario begged for a Freudian interpretation. I got the answer when I realized the vixen posing nude in front of us couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Society and the youth culture, what a fucked up duo.

After the snake girl, we did a location shoot for a gay couple’s wedding photo. It was quick and clean and this time everyone was clearly way over twenty-one. The last shoot of the day was at a nightclub called Holocene where a troupe of chubby drag queens and Rubenesque burlesque performers hosted a benefit party for something called The Fat Experience. Not sure if it was something like Esalen or Scientology, I kept my distance, marveling nonetheless at the surety of the large-bodied folks who were prancing around the stage. To be comfortable in one’s skin must be so nice. Refreshing.

Finally, at midnight, Pat turned to me and asked, “Well, chica, waddya want to know about your sis?”

I was flummoxed at this point, so the questions gushed out of me like an overactive waterfall. None of them actually stuck because I was saying them so fast even Pat couldn’t understand me.

“I have an idea,” Pat said, holding up the shush finger in front of his lips. “Why don’t I take you to the club where your sister liked to play?”

I had never been to a play party or a dungeon or a power station—descriptors Pat used on the ride over, but none of which were listed on the sign outside, which read, “Love Inc. A Private Retreat for Couples.” It was a basement party palace that was only open to private membership. I quickly learned that in the world of sex, “couples only” meant no solo men. Women were always welcome to come alone, especially if they were the pulchritudinous kind.

I followed Pat down an ordinary wood-paneled hall, past a sign in station where we showed our driver’s licenses and he a red members card, and we were on our way to the back where people were mostly just milling about in various states of leather and undress.

“Well, Pat, who’s the babe?” one middle-aged woman asked, leaning in to hear the answer. “Oh, I should have seen the resemblance. I’m Natalie.” Middle-aged pushed her hand toward me in greeting.

“Nice to meet you.” Was this how it was in a sex club, I wondered. Shaking hands with folks who were thirty years older than me, not a speck of sex anywhere in sight? But Pat pulled me away and started showing me around the club, back to the solo and group play rooms, where finally there were couples and groups of average-looking people in different scenarios, sporting leather, uniforms, or nothing but boots, each offering up scenes of submission, domination, and bondage. It would be salacious to Father, but nothing that was remotely shocking to me, especially not after reading Ash’s journals and watching her DVDs.

After Pat disappeared into another room, I wandered around more, mostly just watching the action unfold in front of me. A few of the women looked vaguely familiar. One was that tall blonde who had the threesome with my sister. Another could have been the woman from the group encounter with the bird beak masks. But in this setting everyone looked somewhat recognizable yet wholly strange. One woman even looked a bit like my stepmother, though I was certain she wasn’t. Tabitha would never be at a place like this. The very idea of it made me titter with giggles.

“Enjoying yourself, I see?” The brunette from another video sidled up to me.

“Oh, I was imagining someone here that wouldn’t dare step foot in a joint like this.”

She nodded and smiled and I could see she was quite attractive up close, when not visualized through pixilated video, though I was having trouble imagining her without a ginormous dildo strapped to her thigh. I guess this was the downside to seeing so many folks naked; real life could be a bit of a letdown. No wonder Ash had to keep ratcheting up the tension more and more just to get off.

“You’d be surprised at the people who do come in here,’’ the brunette drawled, her short hair flipping up at her collar, a little shaggy bang showing off her eyes. “Is this your first time?”

“Indeed it is. I’m Megan.”

“I know. I recognize the resemblance.” Like everyone else, she clearly knew my sister. She didn’t offer up her own name, nor did her demeanor betray curiosity. “What brought you here? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’m trying to find out who my sister Ash really was. She came here a lot.”

“Do you know why she came here?”

I shook my head. I was mildly curious, oddly fascinated by these naked, blithe people and their willingness to act out roles of power and submission. The scene fascinated me the way many parts of Ash’s world had come to fascinate me, but I still couldn’t say I knew why Ash came here, to this particular place, to this particular club, or why she stopped coming here.

“She was working through something in her past. I can’t say any more, but I think she’d be glad to know that you knew that about her.” The nameless brunette began to turn, to walk away from me, but I stopped her before she did, pushing myself in front of her as nicely and calmly as possible.

“Wait, what do you mean? Please tell me what you mean. I have to find out what was going on with her before she died or I’ll never know who killed her.”

“Listen, kiddo, some questions are better left unanswered. Your sister’s death may just be one of those questions.” That was it. I had had enough.

“Oh, for the love of God,” I said, my voice raising just a pinch. “Why does everyone around me speak in fucking riddles these days? I feel like I’m Alice falling down the rabbit hole, and every time I try to get a logical answer out of someone, something cryptic comes out of their fucking mouth. It’s like living with Mister Miyagi, for fuck’s sake. Don’t tell me to go east or west or feel the wind or learn which questions weren’t meant to be answered. These cryptic answers might be fine for the Mad Hatter, but they’re driving me batty. I have to know what you’re talking about. Please just tell me.”

She looked stunned, which I hoped was a good thing. She didn’t let me know, but steered me rather forcefully down a darkened stairwell that led down another flight below the ground-level club. I began to worry. Where was she taking me? What did I know about this woman, or Pat, for that matter, or any of these people?
Nothing.
Nobody knew I was even here. For all I knew this woman was a serial killer, leading me to the fruit cellar to carve my body up like a Halloween pumpkin.

Before our feet hit the ground floor, she stopped and turned toward me, whispering in my ear, “Do you really want to know?”

“Of course,” I said with more certainty than I felt.

“Okay,” she said and calmly laid it all out. “Ash was abused as a kid. She was trying to work through it with SM.”

No, she wasn’t. She couldn’t have been. How could she have been abused and not told me?

“You’re lying. She lied. I don’t believe you.” A dozen denials rushed forth all at once.

“I figured as much. She shielded you from it.” The woman was calm, collected. Why was she lying to me? Maybe Ash wanted attention so badly she told the women here she was an abuse victim.

“Who supposedly abused her? I would have known!” We shared a room until Mother died, had all the same uncles and priests and deacons as each other. It wasn’t possible.

“I don’t know. All I know is that she was sexually assaulted as a child and took it upon herself to protect you from the abuse. We don’t normally let abuse victims play at our parties because it can be hard for them to distinguish pleasure pain from what was thrust upon them, but Ash had already gone through therapy, had moved beyond her abuse to this different place. This was her safe space to work out her self-injurious behavior without harming herself. We watched over her to make sure she never went too far.”

But she did go too far at some point, didn’t she? Something must have gone seriously wrong because Ash was dead and I was in the basement of a sex club talking about abuse allegations with a woman with pierced nipples, buttless chaps, and a belly harness.

“I have to go,” I gasped before sprinting up the stairs and out into the night air, choking back tears and swallowing oxygen like I’d been underwater or buried alive. I couldn’t breathe.

Was Ash
really
sexually abused? Who could have done such a thing to her? All our uncles were old men now, our church elders all the same old men that we had as kids. Nobody sprang to mind. That was the disturbing thing about pedophiles, how easily they blended into society. But why had it never come out over all these years? And who would have dared harm the favorite daughter of Bradford Thomas Caulfield? Surely whoever did such a thing must not have known Father, because if they had they would have known they were risking their very lives by touching Ash. I had absolutely no doubt that if my father had found someone even looking at Ash that way when she was just a child, he would have literally choked the life out of them.

I didn’t recall any of our family friends going missing, or any male relatives dying in suspicious circumstances. Wasn’t that proof that it didn’t happen?

That night I fell into bed without a word to Shane, exhausted from a day of revelations and debauchery. Was this how Ash felt? Sexually stimulated one moment, embarrassed and mortified the next? It left me with both a terrible sense of shame and a burning desire to return as soon as possible.

It was the fifth round of a knock-down, drag-out match between Shane and me.

In the weeks since the sex club fiasco I’d been back at least half a dozen times, usually for research but sometimes for more personal reasons. I didn’t tell Shane, but she sensed something was up. The girlfriend usually knows. I almost told Tabitha once, too. I ached to tell someone about my sexual odyssey, but the fear Father would find out was too great to make that leap.

Pat had taken me under his wing, introducing me to the other clubs in the city, sending me off alone or with his other friends to the girls-only affairs by the college, instructing me on going incognito to the city’s rarified mixed-gender bathhouse, even accompanying me to the couples swing parties where a girl like Ash—or me—could bounce from room to room only accepting pleasure if she were so inclined.

Pat liked to swing, with girls, with boys, and even though Ash mostly liked women, I could see why she put out for Pat, too. He was all about pleasure, pure hedonism. It was thrilling, living only for that moment, not just that orgasm, or the flush on skin when someone touched me, not even for the sheer joy of having a roomful of people lust after you, if only for a night. It was the moment, being surrounded in that moment by nothing but sexuality. It might be vacuous, living among these denizens of the night, planning nothing beyond my next trick. But I found my new world wholly intoxicating. I was no longer Megan Caulfield, bookworm and little sister. Here I was Queen Christina, Helen of Troy, Xaviera Hollander, Erica Jong. I was the happy hooker, the coffee, tea, or me girl, every erotic icon I had ever read about in literature, and I couldn’t get enough of it.