AND IT HASN’T.
Her best friend, Heather, has Gypsy blood, and one of the things she’s told Miri over the years is to be careful what you wish for. Miri laughs. She’s lived a perfect life, she tells Heather, and has nothing to wish for.
How ironic that the one thing she wishes for, she gets.
How ironic that Miri’s one wish—for her night with Jack never to end—turned out to be right out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, a dark wish that changes her life forever. She doesn’t become a princess; she doesn’t find a goose laying golden eggs; she doesn’t even find out that her family is the royalty of the land and that she is wealthy and famous beyond her imagining.
What she ends up with is the opposite of what she wants. What she gets is a life she couldn’t have bargained for.
Miri thinks now that she’d give up sex completely if it were possible, if she could figure out a way to live without the dreams, if the psychiatrists might give her drugs that would rid her, once and for all, of that night. Of Jack.
Her occasionally dangerous sex life has become even more so and yet no matter how many risks she takes, she stays safe. Irony again.
The sex club in the suburbs. Definitely not her best idea, but when she sees the ad in the back of the alternative paper she can’t help herself. One word sells her on it—bondage.
She emails the address listed in the ad and waits by her computer for an answer. She goes through the screening process, provides him—a man is doing the screening, obvious from his questions—with everything he asks for.
Age. Height. Weight. Measurements. Hair color and length. Preferences.
He asks about tattoos and piercings, and though he doesn’t say so, she knows she will have better luck if she has them. Luckily, she has a single tattoo and a pierced navel. He grudgingly accepts this.
Her job, her marital status, her sexual experience—and here she thinks he gets much more than he bargained for because he goes offline for almost twenty-four hours. When he comes back, he asks for pictures. Lots of them.
Pictures of her dressed. Pictures showing her tattoo and piercings. Pictures of her scantily clad—his words, not hers—and naked.
Naked and sprawled, completely exposed, on her bed, though she is at least careful enough to hide anything that might signal her location. She does wonder, at one point, whether every sex club goes through this lengthy screening, but she ignores the warning voice and continues on.
She is desperate by this point, almost two years without an orgasm, almost two years after the night.
Finally, he asks for a phone number. She gives him a cell number for a phone she has purchased for this purpose, just as she has given him an email address created especially for this exchange. Foolish Miri, thinking this will keep her safe, when she has no sense of safety.
He invites her to what he coyly calls their next get-together. “Just a few of us, my dear,” he says in his smarmy, slimy, trying-to-be-sexy voice. “Just so we can meet each other before we go any further.”
Miri once again shakes off her misgivings and follows his directions. She drives out of the city, into the dark unlit streets, her hands tight on the wheel of Heather’s borrowed car. She drives for what seems like forever before she arrives at a house deep in the country, surrounded by nothingness. There are no streetlights, no neighbors, no apartment buildings or convenience stores.
There is only darkness.
She pulls into the driveway, stops her car in front of a sprawling bungalow and gets out. She ignores the four or five trucks parked haphazardly in front of the house. She ignores the curdling in the pit of her stomach. She ignores the warnings echoing in her mind. She ignores the stench of cows. She ignores everything except her body’s craving.
A tall, thin man steps onto the porch. Her contact had not reciprocated with pictures of himself, but Miri knows who he is. She recognizes his laugh.
“Miri.” He laughs. “Come on in and meet the gang.”
She expects couples. She finds four men and one woman. One very big woman. She is bigger than any of them, scarier than any of them. Because she is in charge, and Miri can tell right away that this woman has been waiting for years for another woman to show up at this club.
And yet Miri still doesn’t walk, doesn’t get back into her car and drive away while she still can.
If she had this story to make up, she would make it worse than it is. She would make it more violent, more evil, more dangerous. She would make the men less tawdry, the woman more demanding, the sex… Well, she’d make the sex more interesting. And she’d certainly make herself have an orgasm.
Because that would definitely be ironic. The worst sexual experience of her life would be the one that gave her what she needed, what she wanted more than anything. Instead, mostly, Miri is bored by it all.
She realizes it isn’t safe; after all, there are five of them and only one of her, and she is the new meat. And in this crowd she is grade A meat, prime rib when they are used to hamburger. But she is still bored. Bored practically to tears.
The woman, Faye, pours her a drink, and Miri knows without even tasting it that it is drugged. GHB, she guesses, and she wonders where these suburbanites got it, wonders what connections they have. She refuses it, saying she doesn’t drink, that she likes to be alert, winking at Faye and then at the men.
Faye hesitates, wanting to force her to drink, but the men overrule her. They know she won’t run and they’d rather she be aware. And Miri still thinks this might work, that the danger might give her the edge she needs to get over the edge.
She’s wrong.
For a short time she does think it’s a possibility, when Faye takes charge and orders the men around her. Miri waits while Faye wraps ties around her wrists, her knees, her ankles. She tests the cheap fabric and knows freedom is only one sharp tug away.
Faye directs tongues everywhere, hands everywhere, rough and hot on Miri’s body. She hears them panting, feels them touching her, hears Faye’s voice directing them. One to her right breast, one to her left. One to her belly. One to her anus. One to her clit.
Faye chooses her mouth. It’s almost enough. It would be enough, she thinks, if they weren’t all so excited by her appearance, by having some woman other than Faye in the room with them.
For a moment, a very short moment, Miri feels a sense of possibility. It lasts only as long as they do.
And that’s not long enough. Their excitement at seeing her naked body sets them off. They grab their cocks, she feels the shudders of a few short strokes and then it’s over.
The danger of this encounter lies in her boredom, not in their numbers.
She says thank you politely, ignoring the pleading in their eyes, and drives home. She throws the newly purchased cell phone into the river as she passes over it, and deletes the email address she has given the man.
And Miri falls back into her memories of him.