“Oh my god.” Now, Twyla’s skin, usually this warm, rosy beige, has gone grey and unhealthy-looking.
“You can’t stay,” I do my best to cover the screaming. “It’s a goddamn siege. And the security team’s nowhere near us.” I watch her try to twist the top off the fancy glass bottle. Like everything else, the water itself is a statement: we’re rich and special and we accept only the very best. Fucking slow-melted high-altitude mountain-top mineral water, mined by rainbow unicorns and flown in on only the finest Dalai-Lama-blessed aircraft, to be poured straight from elf-blown crystal bottles into our rarified movie star throats. Of course it’s not a screw top.
Irritated by the whole thing, but also feeling real shitty about what I’ve done, I swipe the bottle and knock the cap off on the edge of the counter.
I’d use my teeth like Dad taught me back in third grade, but this set cost me a fortune.
When I hand her the bottle, Twyla rolls those big, expressive eyes. “I’ll wait.”
“For what? The clown army to breach the wall?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll need to eat at some point, Twy. I’ve noticed you get hungry around this time of day.”
“You’ve noticed that?”
“I pay attention.”
After a pause, she puts a hand on her belly. “I can’t eat. My stomach’s a mess from the stress. Besides, casting directors are always telling me I’m too hea—”
“They’re pricks.” Sudden anger turns my voice low and mean. And sure, this marriage is a twelve-day-old sham set up by our PR teams, meant to keep me out of trouble and to help her rise to fame. We’re basically colleagues hanging out in the same house, but there is not a goddamn thing wrong with Twyla Hernandez. Not her sharp brain or voluptuous body or the face that stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw her. She’s beautiful on-screen and off it.
Although hell if I know what it is about her that works. Her face is a thrilling combination of round and soft, sharp and smart. Definitely not the look cameras usually like. Not anymore at least. There’s something old-fashioned about her that I like. She’s got these big eyes that swallow you up and lips that make you want to lean in and touch, they look so goddamn soft.
And the rest of her? Generous hips, round belly, tiny wrists just begging to be wrapped in leather. If she was really mine, I’d…
“Well, I’m fat.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
She scans my face as if looking for some underlying meaning to what I’m saying. “I know,” she says.
“Good. Cause you’re fuckin’perfect, Twyla.”
Her eyes go wide, her pupils blow open.
My body reacts like she’s thrown a switch. I lean in to tell her all the things I think about doing to that dreamy body, when my phone buzzes in my hand. It takes my eyes a second to focus on the screen, a couple more for my brain to kick in and read the text from the security team. “Traffic’s at a stand-still on 495. Company’s calling in a second team.”
“Shit,” she mutters, turning away. Good. Distance is good. Last thing we need is another complication.
In the meantime, the volume’s dialed up out front, like the crowd’s gotten bigger or closer, or more rabid. Feels like everything’s closing in, like one of them could breach our front wall and make a break for it any second or find a way through the neighboring properties into the back, which would leave us completely open.
“Come on.” I reach for her arm. “We’re goin’.”
She steps back. “Going where? How? Are you calling a cab? Sending out a bat signal? Everyone’s scrambling to handle this catastrophe and you’re talking as if you’ll just fling on your cape and forge a path through the circus out there. Meanwhile, you’re acting like your…sexcapadesaren’t that big of a deal and I’m—”
“Sexcapades?” Referring to the video that was just leaked as a sexcapade is like calling a genocidal dictator avewy, vewybad boy. “I’m a Dom, Twyla, a power-hungry pansexual, open for pretty much…anything.”
Her eyes go a little wide and vague. I can almost imagine that it’s curiosity I’m seeing. I push back the wishful rush of… Shit, I don’t know what this is. From the second we met, I’ve never been quite straight in my head when it comes to this woman.
Hardening myself, I go on. “You know what all that means?”
The frustration rising up inside me isn’t her fault, it’s mine. Or maybe a little bit the fault of the reporter willing to go to such impressive lengths to entrap me. That was true dedication to their trade. And, honestly, it wasn’t even worth it. The sex was mediocre, the entire experience empty. Just a little run-of-the-mill power exchange that I barely got it up for.
And now this. The end of a career, the end of a perfectly good fake marriage.
“Pansexual means I’ll fuck anybody I feel like, Twyla.” Why am I doing this? Why am I rubbing it in? Trying to hurt her. Maybe push her away. As if I need any more help doing that. The thing is, I’ve got no idea why I’m saying this shit. She’s leaving, we’re splitting up, our made for the media marriage is over before it started, so… There’s no reason to push her buttons. And yet, I can’t seem to stop myself. “Sex is sex. And kink is kink. And as long as they’re human and I’m into it, I don’t care about bullshit things like gender, shape, size. I like cunts and dicks and hot, bruised skin. I like watchin’ willing people getting hurt and fucked. I care about—”
