The Redemption (18 page)

“What the fuck is this skanky-ass place?” I say. “Why don’t we just go back to the suite? I demand a rematch in our breath-holding contest. How about two out of three?”

“A deal’s a deal,” she says, putting up her hand. “As long as there are no neckties, you’re required to do whatever I want tonight.”

“How did you even find this place?”

“Google.”

“No, I mean—yeah, Google.” I roll my eyes. “I’m saying how did you even
think
to find this particular place out of all the strip clubs in Vegas? Why did you take us
here
?”

“Oh, you’ll see.”

“Why the fuck would I want to watch a dime-a-dozen stripper when I could glory in the exquisite pulchritude that is Sarah Cruz, the goddess and the muse?”

She laughs. “We’re here to fulfill an item on my
addendum
. So hush.”

Ah yes. Sarah’s addendum. When she first hit me with that word, it sounded so sexy and exciting and mysterious. But ever since she tied me up like King Kong, I’ve become slightly less enthusiastic every time she pulls out that word. I have a sudden thought that makes me hopeful. “You’re gonna strip for me?” Just the idea is making me tingle.

“Let’s just go in and have a drink, shall we? Get a little loose. And then I’ll tell you exactly what I have in mind.”

Uh oh. She’s got that crazy gleam in her eye. Shit. I can’t resist her when she looks at me that way.

Four Scotches and I’m feeling fan-fucking-tastic right now. I’m not normally a Scotch drinker, but what the fuck—when in Vegas, you gotta act like a member of the Rat Pack, right? Fuck yeah. This place is so fucking old school tacky, four doses of Scotch was the only way I could stomach it. For the past hour, Sarah and I have been making out in the corner of the club like teenagers while naked women gyrate around poles a few yards away from us, and I’m bursting out of my skin wanting to lick her and get inside her. I’ve yet to see a single stripper who turns me on a fraction as much as Sarah does, though glimpsing an assortment of titties and asses while kissing and groping Sarah’s titties and ass has been a certain kind of lowbrow entertainment. I guess it’s the same thing as going to the county fair once a year and chowing down on disgusting crap like chicken-fried bacon. Wretched, yes—but kinda fun once every blue moon.

“I’ll be right back, baby,” she purrs, her cheeks flushed. “I’m gonna get everything set up for us. Don’t go anywhere.”

She disappears.

I’m hard as a rock. What the fuck is she up to? Is she gonna give me a little striptease? That’d be so fucking hot. Damn, this woman is something else. Never boring, that’s for sure. I close my eyes. I can’t feel my toes. Scotch will do that to you. I laugh. Where the fuck is she? I’m so worked up right now I might have to insist on a little bathroom action after her striptease. Or, hey, as long as we’ve been acting like teenagers all night, maybe we’ll do it in the backseat of the car.

She’s back. She grabs my hands. “Come on,” she says. “My sweet Jonas. Come on.” She pulls me to her and licks my face. “I’m losing my mind, baby.” She drags me toward a dark hallway on the other side of the club.

“Where are we going?”

“The Red Light District.” She points to a sign above our heads at the entrance to the hallway flashing “Red Light District.”

We stop just inside the hallway, and a security guard trades our cell phones for claim checks. An imposing sign on the wall reads, “Video Taping Strictly Prohibited.” After giving up our phones, we stumble into the darkened hallway, holding hands. We stop at a large, blackened pane of glass. “Pour Some Sugar on Me” blares at us from behind the glass.

“What the fuck is this?” I ask.

“A peep show. Like in Amsterdam,” she says.

I laugh. “This is absolutely nothing like Amsterdam.”

She frowns at me. “How would I possibly know that? Just play along, you snob.” She begins feeding tokens into a slot until the black curtain on the other side of the glass rises. A naked woman in a tiny black room bathed in garish red light dances and touches herself for a grand total of about ten seconds. The curtain closes.

I shrug. “Whoop-de-doo. A naked girl. Now let’s go back to the suite and fuck like animals.”

She laughs and pulls me along to the next window, where we’re treated to another naked, gyrating woman bathed in red light in a black box. This time, the song behind the glass is “Talk Dirty to Me.”

“It’s a porn juke box,” I say. “Yippee.”

She kisses me. “I can’t stop thinking about my dream, Jonas. I want you to make my dream come true.”

I stare at her. She can’t possibly mean the dream with the Jonas poltergeists making love to her every which way, and the red wine pouring all over her, and the people in the restaurant watching us? Holy shit.
The people in the restaurant watching us.
Oh my God. She’s insane. I knew she had some crazy in her—and in fact, I like my baby’s crazy—but this is pure insanity.

“You said we’d do whatever I want tonight.” She smiles. “This is a gonna get me off like crazy.”

She tugs at me, smiling wickedly, and leads me to the end of the dark hallway to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” She opens the door to reveal a stripper who, seemingly, is expecting us.

“Baby, thank you, but I don’t want a threesome,” I say. “I only want you.” I know most men have to beg their girlfriends or wives for this particular treat, but I’ve already done the threesome thing and I’ve discovered quite emphatically that the format diverts me from what I like best—and, regardless, I don’t want to share Sarah with anyone, even another woman.

“No, you big dummy,” she says. “This girl’s here to help me get everything set up.”

“Sarah, listen.”

She licks my face. “I want to be a dirty girl tonight.” She’s panting. “With you. Let’s do it, Jonas. Let’s be crazy. I want to act out my dream.”

“Baby, I’m all for fun and games, but this is really kinky.”

Her eyes light up. “Kinky, yes. Good word. Let’s be kinky.”

I pull back, ready to tell her no—and yet I’m rock hard. Am I appalled or turned on by this whole thing? I can’t tell which.

“I’ve arranged everything for us, baby. No one will know it’s us. We’ll be wearing masks. I’ve got bandages to wrap around your tattoos and my scars. You can wear your briefs if you want, I don’t care. I’ll wear my panties if you want me to—and you can just pull things down or push them aside, whatever we need to do—whatever you’re comfortable with.” She’s talking so fast, I can barely follow what she’s saying—or maybe she’s talking normally and I’m just fucking drunk. “No one will even know it’s us, Jonas,” she continues. “We can do whatever we want in the window—anything at all—and no one will know it’s us. Maybe people will see us, maybe they won’t—it just depends if anyone happens to put tokens in the slot. But that’s the turn-on—thinking someone
might
be watching the whole time.”

“Why do you get so turned on by the idea of people watching us fuck?”

“Remember the library?” she purrs. “Wasn’t that hot?” Her body is jerking and jolting with her arousal. She grabs at my cock through my jeans. “We’ll be wearing masks—no one will know it’s us. Come on, Jonas. You can lick me and no one will know it’s us.”

I shudder with anticipation. This is totally depraved.

“Sarah,” I begin. This woman turns me on like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, but I have zero interest in becoming a porn star.

“Just this once,” she says. “It’s like a bucket list thing.”

“Sarah—”

“Pretty please.” She licks my face again.

I shiver. Fuck. I don’t want to disappoint her. And she’s awfully convincing. “I’ll make out with you in the black box, but I’m not gonna lick your pussy—certain things are sacred.” Truth be told, I might even fuck her in the window if things get too hot for me to resist, but I’m most certainly
not
going to church on her in a disgusting shithole like this.

She’s instantly deflated. “Okay,” she says. I’ve plainly taken the wind out of her sails.

I truly do not understand this crazy-ass woman. Aren’t women supposed to want rainbows and unicorns and long walks on the beach? What the fuck is this? I can’t believe out of the two of us
I’m
the voice of sexual reason in this relationship.

“Will you do me a big favor and pay this nice woman for me?” Sarah asks. “I promised her two hundred bucks to let us take her place in the window for twenty minutes.”

I pull out the cash and hand it to the stripper.

“You’ve set up a table in there, right?” Sarah asks her.

“Yeah,” the woman assures her.

“Oh, and there’s a particular song I want playing.”

“Sure. What is it?”

Sarah whispers to her.

“Never heard of it,” the woman says. “You sure you don’t want ‘Baby Got Back’ or ‘Talk Dirty to Me’ or something like that?”

“No—it’s got to be that song.”

My interest is piqued.

“Tell it to me again,” the woman says, and Sarah leans in and whispers again.

“Okay, I got it. I’ll do my best.” She motions to a small cardboard box on the floor. “There’s the stuff you asked for. I’ll be right back.”

Sarah laps at my mouth. “I’m so excited.”

“Tell me again why you want people to watch us fuck? I don’t get it.”

“I guess I just...  You’re so frickin’ gorgeous, Jonas. It turns me on to think of you making love to me in front of the entire world.”

I study her face for a moment. “You know I’m not going anywhere, right?”

She crinkles her nose. “Even when I pull crazy stuff like this?”

“Even then.”

“Even when I scare the bajeezus out of you and don’t stick to the plan and piss you off?”

“Barely then—but, yes, even then.” I grin. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Her voice drops. “Even though there’s clearly something wrong with me?” She motions to the cardboard box. “Even though I’m not normal?”

“Even then, baby.” I kiss her. “There’s no such thing as normal.”

What the fuck have I agreed to do? We’re standing in the black window box, naked except for our underpants and Lone Ranger masks, with all our respective identifying characteristics wrapped up in white gauze bandages.

“We look like horny mummies getting ready to rob a bank,” I say.

At my comment, Sarah bursts out laughing, so hard she has to sit down on the edge of the table. I sit down next to her and she immediately leans into my shoulder, still laughing and holding her belly. Just as her laughter begins to die down and she leans in to kiss me, red lights suddenly shine in our eyes and “Baby Got Back” begins blaring through the speakers.

“What the hell?” Sarah mutters, clearly annoyed at the song selection.

“I think that’s our cue,” I say. I hold out my bandage-wrapped arms toward her. “It’s Frankenstein versus the Mummy—who will prevail?”

Sarah throws her head back and laughs again, but this time she’s laughing so hard tears stream down her cheeks from behind her Lone Ranger mask.

Without warning, the black curtain rises, and we suddenly see our reflections in the peep-show glass—which, we can now discern, is one-way glass—a mirror for us, a window for our high-class peeping Tom, whoever he may be. Sarah waves awkwardly at our masked reflections—sardonically greeting our unseen gawker on the other side of the glass—and then bursts out laughing yet again. As usual, Sarah’s laughter gets me going, too, and I lose it along with her.

As we laugh together, as I watch this beautiful, sexy, insane but brilliant woman giggling from behind her ridiculous Lone Ranger mask, crazy-ass bandages tied around her neck and torso, Sir Mix-A-Lot serenading us about big butts, I suddenly realize with absolute clarity that I don’t want to share my baby with anyone, anywhere, ever—and least of all with a bunch of losers peeping through a window in a rundown titty bar outside of Vegas. This beautiful woman is
my
treasure—not theirs. She wants the world to watch me make love to her? Too bad. I’m the only man who’s ever witnessed her reach the highest heights of human pleasure, the culmination of human experience, the most truthful form of expression two people can share—and it’s going to stay that way ‘til the end of fucking time.

My heart’s racing. I grab her hand. “Baby, you’ve got it all wrong.”

She wipes her eyes. “What?”

“Your dream—you’ve got it all wrong.”

She looks at me blankly.

“You think you need to act it out—but the dream’s not literal, baby. It’s a metaphor.”

She still doesn’t understand.

“Think about how the dream makes you
feel
—what it makes you
yearn
for. The dream’s not literal, Sarah. It’s means something different than all this. We could fuck each other’s brains out in this window and a hundred people could watch us do it, and it still wouldn’t satisfy your yearning.”

She crosses her arms over her bare breasts, suddenly modest. Her laughter is gone.

Sir Mix-A-Lot asks the guys in the crowd if their girlfriends have bountiful butts of the variety he’s been rapping about.

“Hell yeah,” I answer, right on cue with the song, and Sarah’s mouth twists adorably. “You do realize this song’s making me want to take a big ol’ juicy bite out of your delectable ass, right?”

She half-smiles at me, but I can tell she’s deep in thought.

I touch her hair. “You ready to go?” I ask.

She nods.

“We’ll go back to the suite and you can play whatever song you had in mind for tonight and I’ll chomp your ass and lick your sweet pussy and fuck your brains out ‘til you swear I’m your supreme lord-god-master—how does that sound?”

She smiles wistfully. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.” I push her hair behind her shoulder.

“About today. That I scared you.”

“You did.” I frown at her. “But you also kicked ass.”

She shrugs.

Sir Mix-A-Lot once again proclaims his enthusiasm for large bottoms, in case we weren’t clear on that by now.

 “I’m sorry about all this.” She motions to the black curtain.

“Don’t be. It was fun. I mean, look at us right now. Jesus. What a great memory.”