The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Fantasies, Plausible or Not

Previously: "The Cherry, Hung with Snow" 

David Kirkham feels like he's warming up to take you a fifth time, but you tear yourself away. "Do we owe anyone anything before we check out?" you ask. He's still shirtless, but you're dressed and ready to take off.

"Come on, babe," he pouts. "Where you goin'? We can still—"

"I'm going home. I told you. You even put your pants back on."

"Yeah, well, maybe I got back into 'em too soon." He leers.

Then he sighs. "Fine, you can take off. I'll collect what they owe us."

"What they owe us?"

"I— Kelsey— I paid for a night, but we're staying the night. Unless—"

"No."

"Okay, then I get a rebate on the unused part." He puts his hands on his hips. "That's the kind of place this is."

"Well, I'd say you got your money's worth." You turn to the door.

"Jesus, Will, you're not pissed at me, are you?"

"No, I'm not pissed at you. I'm being in character. I'm kind of worn-out, Sydney. Amanda—" You touch the front of your skirt.

"Yeah," Kirkham chortles. "She's tight down there. Like chipping open an ice floe."

You glare. "Anyway, I have to go."

"Be sure to use the wand tonight," he calls as you turn to the door again. "Think of me while you're—"

Jesus, you exclaim to yourself as you wrench the door open. You totter out to your car and fumble the keys into the ignition. You glance in the rearview mirror as you pull into the street, in time to see Kirkham, in shades but still shirtless, swagger out of the room and turn toward the office.

* * * * *

You spend a long time on your back, cradling the polished wooden wand between your breasts, after you've gone to bed. The ceiling is dim and gray, and you seem to stare through it, into a dim and gray expanse above and beyond. The blankness seems empty but oppressive, as though emptiness itself, if gathered and massed in one place, might acquire weight.

You had Kirkham's penis between your breasts this afternoon, and he came there, splooging all over your neck and chin. The memory of his cock, and what Sydney did with it, warms and excites you down below, despite feeling fucked to raw and bloody rags.

But as you hold the dildo-shaped wand between your breasts you do no more than lightly run a fingertip up and down the shaft. You're too distracted and bemused with other thoughts to concentrate on the wand. Sydney texted you this evening. Some dick pics as an appetizer, because she couldn't help herself, but then with some advice. Think about what you want, Will, she said, while working with the wand. Give yourself a goal to focus on. The power needs something to concentrate on or it won't flow. Make the thing you want specific, she continued. Something you can picture, or imagine yourself holding or touching.

Then she sent you another dick pic, this one of her acquired penis, rigid and straining, measured against the length of her wand of Baphomet.

A goal to focus on, you think now as you stroke the wand. Something specific. But your mind is as blank as the ceiling above. What do I want?

But it's hard to concentrate on what you want when there are two of "you" to answer: Will Prescott and Amanda Ferguson. And even if one of you has a sharper and more concentrated ambition—to get into a great college, preferably one that rejected all of your friends' applications, and to graduate Westside with a higher GPA than them—that's not something that you can "picture" or "hold."

(Although, suddenly, you get a vivid picture of Kelsey, her face flushed and twisted with anger, clutching in her claw-like hand a crumpled letter of rejection from Harvard. A shiver of schadenfreude ripples through you.)

Money, influence, independence ... These are all things that Amanda prizes, and you nestle deeper in the bed as your mind gropes toward pictures of what these might look like.

Then you stiffen as you see it in your mind's eye.

You are standing on a wooden floor under a high ceiling, facing a wide, floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window. There's a table at hand—a flat, severe, modernistic design of tubular steel painted black, with a snow-white lacquered top. Two narrow, high backed chairs, also molded of white and black, stand at attention at either end. Off to the side is a kitchen, also also painted in shades of ebony and ice. Through the window you are looking down on water from a great height. It could be a river or it could be a bay, but the banks are steep and green, and beyond these soar glass towers of silver and gold and azure against a blazing blue sky dappled with cottony clouds. It could be Seattle or it could be San Francisco. It might also be Austin. But it is expensive and it is chic.

You know the spread, of course. Amanda saw it in an architectural magazine, and studied it enviously until it burned itself into her memory. But this is no memory of a glossy photograph. You are standing inside this apartment. That is your slim laptop open on the table, piling up with business emails and appointment reminders. And you are wearing high heels and a starchy business suit with a short skirt, with your hair falling flatly to your shoulders.

Nor was it part of the photograph when you imagine a door opening behind you. In this fantasy—to which you are a spectator, not a creator—you turn around to face a living room just as flat, angular, and cold as the rest of the apartment. A door has opened and a man has come out. He is in pajama bottoms, and his meaty, hairless chest is bare. He is golden all over, including the mane of blonde hair that tumbles messily to his elbows, and the rugged, black-speckled growth of beard on his cheeks and jaw. He is barefoot.

Hey, morning, he says in a baritone rumble. You're up early.

I have an early meeting, you reply.

He glances at a side table. Got time to drop me somewhere?

Call an Uber and charge it to me. You going to the gym?

He nods, then pads into the kitchen to pour himself some coffee. The tendons in his massive forearms ripple under the skin.

The dream vanishes with a start, as though you've shocked yourself awake, and you stiffen all over.

Is there something in the bed with you?

Yes there is. It is between your breasts.

Carefully, you lift the wooden wand drop it to the floor. For one horrible moment it felt warm and alive against your skin. But even after you've cast it away, you shudder and huddle under the covers. For it is all too easy to imagine it wriggling blindly across the carpet toward your bed, like a fat, gasping worm.

* * * * *

Kelsey—the fake version Sydney left behind—is frosty and short-tempered with you all morning, and rather than abase yourself by pleading with this robot, you turn a cold shoulder to her as well. The other girls in your group—Brooke Galloway in particular—pick up on the bad air between you two, but they don't say anything. The boys don't say anything either, whether they've noticed or not.

You spend the morning steeling yourself against a text from Kirkham, but it's at your locker that he appears. "Hey babe," he says, and leans in to press against you. He is so close you can smell the cinnamon on his breath, and see the fine hairs of the mustache he can't manage to grow. "We gettin' together again after school?"

"Text me."

"What you got to be snippy about?"

"Oh, am I snippy? I guess it's because I'm not exactly comfortable talking to—" You curve a lip at him, but don't speak his name. "Here at school. More particularly at my locker."

"We got a school project we're working on. I'm tutoring you in Statistics."

"It's calculus class we're together in."

"And I'm also taking stats." His own lip curls. "You wanna bone up on it. Bone up on some other things, too."

"It seems unlikely." You start shoving books into your locker so you can get away.

"Well, shit." He brushes a hand through his hair. "Then I guess we're gonna have to find someplace else for you to be, so we can hang out without it being—" He spits out the word. "Unlikely."

When you don't reply, he says, "I'll shoot you some names later."

Then he turns and pushes his way back into the crowd.

* * * * *

Sydney is being very passive-aggressive or something, because it's not until late afternoon that you get a text. You're at a coffee shop with Ricky and Anthony Kirk when it comes. You only glance at it long enough to take it in, then lay your phone aside.

So it's late that evening, at home, when you settle in to see who he's suggested you change places with.

The first name comes with an explanation: Ximena Calderon, x gf. Most of the rest are girls too, so you know where Sydney-plus-Kirkham's mind is. Only one of those other names, Mindy McAdams, is familiar enough for you to have a vivid impression of: a busty, trailer-trash red-head.

There is one male on the list, though: "Kirkham's little bro." You text Sydney back to explain her thinking.

Single-mom house, she replies. We get Kirkham's little bro, we get control of the house basiclly. Can hang out anytime together.

Interesting. You also query the other two girls she listed. Diana Dunnigan, she explains, is in a string quartet that Kirkham plays in. Alana Ocampo, he tells, you is just a "sexy slut."

Next: "A Girl to Drive Boys Mad" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"