WHEN I’M FINALLY DISCHARGED from the hospital at noon the next day, Earl Grey picks me up in typical Earl Grey fashion: although he’s ditched the helicopter (which was totaled in the Space Needle crash), he pulls up at the hospital entrance in a NASCAR stock car. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” Earl says, greeting me in front of the hospital. He’s wearing a racing jumpsuit covered in logos of companies he owns. “I thought I lost you.”
I shake my head. “You won’t lose me that easily.”
He kisses me. It’s a deep, long, passionate kiss that seems to last forever, like a low-scoring, tied baseball game that’s gone on for forty-seven innings. An ambulance rolls up behind Earl’s stock car and the ambulance driver lays on the horn. Apparently, Earl is parked in the emergency room lane. I start to break away from his kiss, but Earl sucks harder at my mouth. Our passion cannot be interrupted by rude ambulance drivers and their honky horns and dying patients!
When we finally part lips, the sun is setting and there is a line of sixteen ambulances backed up behind Earl’s stock car. He gives a little wave to the pissed off ambulance drivers, and we hop into his car and speed off into the Seattle traffic.
“So what’s the story behind this car?” I ask once we’re on the road.
“I could tell you it’s a replica of the car Tom Cruise drove in Days of Thunder, but that would be a lie,” he says. “It’s the actual car.”
I shake my head. Earl Grey sure has a hard-on for this Tom Cruise guy. “Wow,” I say.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to act impressed,” he says. “I’d rather you be impressed by the size of my cock than by the car I drive.”
“No problem there, Mr. Grey.” I smile. He tilts his head toward me and smiles back. “But keep your eyes on the road, Sir.”
“Point taken,” he says, turning his attention back to the road.
“Where are we headed?” I ask.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he says, speeding into the hills.
Twenty minutes later, we pull up into the driveway of a secluded mansion overlooking Seattle. The setting sun is beautiful and romantic. “Who lives here?” I ask.
“Eddie Vedder,” he says, killing the ignition. “But it’s on the market. I thought I’d bring you here and see what you think of it.”
We step out of the car. “You want to buy this place?”
Earl pulls a key out of his pocket and opens the door to the mansion. “Eddie’s on tour with Pearl Jam right now, but he lent me a key so we could give it a test drive,” he says, smirking wickedly.
We enter the house. Like everything Earl shows me, it’s amazing. The bright color scheme, the space-age furniture, the floor-to-ceiling fish tank with naked women swimming in it—just walking through the door, I already know this is where I want to spend the rest of my life. This is where I want to spend the rest of our life.
“Did you decorate this place too?” I ask.
Earl nods. “You know it, baby.”
“You’re so talented,” I say. It doesn’t seem fair that one man could be so beautiful, and so talented, and so rich, but damn: Earl Grey is the total package. My inner guidette shakes her head. That’s like the fiftieth time you’ve said that, using nearly the exact same words, she says. I’m about ready to tell her to go back to styling her poof, when I feel a kick in my abdomen. The baby! It reminds me of Earl’s sadism. Is all the money in the world worth putting up with the pain he’ll subject me to in order to satisfy his own twisted desires?
Earl takes me on a tour of the mansion. It has sixteen living rooms, a recording studio, a bowling alley with thirty-two lanes, and two and a half bathrooms. “Plus,” Earl says, “there’s even a guest bedroom for when your parents come to visit.”
“Or my friends,” I say.
Earl doesn’t look happy when I say this, but he nods. “If your friends want to stay, sure,” he says. “But Jin will have to sleep in the horse barn out back.”
My mouth drops open. “Why do you have to be such an asshole sometimes?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry. I care about you. Ponyboy just wants to get into your pants. I have to protect what’s mine.”
“So I’m yours,” I say curtly.
“If you want to be, yes,” he says. “I’ve already told you how I feel about you.”
And I was going to tell you, until you crashed us into the flipping Space Needle. “What happened to make you this way?” I ask, avoiding the L-word for the moment.
He ignores me. We walk into the Starbucks inside Eddie Vedder’s house. Earl orders a Pike Place Roast from the barista, and then looks at me expectantly. “What will you have? Your usual?”
I nod. “Earl Grey. Hot.”
After he pays, we take our drinks with us and sit on the patio overlooking Seattle. The sun is still setting. “Is it this beautiful every day in Seattle? I always thought it was supposed to be cloudy and rainy,” I say.
Earl laughs wickedly. “That’s all part of the city’s anti-tourism campaign,” he says. “The truth is, it never rains in Seattle.”
I sip my Earl Grey tea. It’s hot, but not as hot as Earl Grey. “You never answered my question,” I say. “What happened to you as a child?”
“You want to know why I’m so sadistic. Why I take pleasure in causing pain.”
“Yes.”
“My father was killed in a drunk diving accident when I was an infant. My mother raised me by herself,” he says. “Unfortunately, she was a gambling addict. She practically lived in casinos. In fact, I barely have any memories of her except for a few snippets of her with feathered hair. I remember feeling very lonely.
“When I was four, my mother lost me in a high-stakes poker game to Bill Gates. Mr. Gates brought me to Seattle, but had no interest in being a father to me, this helpless gambler’s son. He gave me sixteen billion dollars and set me up with a foster family.”
“I had no idea how rough you had it,” I say. “Where is your mother now?”
He shakes his head and gazes into the setting sun. “I tried to look her up once, but found out that she died of a gambling overdose.”
“That’s so heartbreaking,” I say.
“Dr. Drew says that when I tie up women and spank them, I’m acting out the anger I feel towards my mother.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I was lost for years. I was a marshmallow addict and chocoholic; my grades suffered at school. When I was twelve, a classmate introduced me to AD&D.”
“AD&D?”
“Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” he says. “A roleplaying game. By pretending to be someone else, I was able to escape my chaotic life. Once I became a Dungeon Master and started orchestrating our scenes, I found that I liked being the one in control. I wasn’t at the whim of foster parents or Bill Gates.
“Alas, the good times didn’t last forever. As my friends started meeting girls and having sex, they stopped roleplaying. My own hormones soon started raging as well. That’s when I discovered BDSM—Bards, Dragons, Sorcery, and Magick. Erotic live-action role playing.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me all of this upfront,” I say.
“I told you I have fifty shames,” he says. “Role playing is one of them. Things like Nickelback and Olive Garden are others.”
“Why do you need to feel ashamed at all?”
“A rich guy like me isn’t supposed to enjoy these things,” he says. “I’m supposed to drink three-hundred dollar bottles of Pinot Noir and listen to classical music. My pleasures, however, are of the guilty variety. I can’t share them with the other rich people at the country club. Feeling shameful is the only way I can reconcile my desires with the pressure to fit into the box society puts its aristocratic class in.”
“Can’t you just, I don’t know, like the things other rich people like? Would that be so hard?”
Earl shakes his head. “We can’t choose the things we like any more than we can choose who we love.”
“Have you ever had a normal relationship?”
“You’re my first,” he says. “And, hopefully, my last.”
“The way you say that sounds like you’re planning to kill me,” I mutter.
He laughs. “I would never kill you,” he says. “I might pay someone else to, but I would never do it myself.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“It’s true. I can’t hurt you,” he says.
“What if I want you to?”
“Hurt you? Why would you want me to do that?”
“I want you to do your worst. I want to feel the full fury of the sadistic bastard Earl Grey. If you’re asking me to move in with you, if you’re asking me to love you, I need to know how dark things can get.”
He narrows his gray eyes. “You’re sure you want to do this,” he says.
I nod. I realize my index finger is buried in my nostril up to the second knuckle, and remove it before Earl can admonish me.
He shakes his head. “I would say, ‘What am I going to do with you, Anna?’ but I know exactly what I’m going to do.” He grabs me by the wrist and marches me back to his stock car, then drives like a Cullen toward downtown Seattle. I know what the next stop is: the Dorm Room of Doom. We’re finally going to role play.