TWENTY-SIX

I LISTEN TO THE MESSAGE on my phone, unable to place the voice at first, but eventually I realize that it’s Lola, asking for an update and wondering if I’ve seen the news. I go online, wondering what she’s referencing, when I realize that Maxxy the missing pop star has been found. She’d sneaked off to rehab to kick an undisclosed substance abuse problem, but hadn’t wanted anyone to know about her addiction because it’s so taboo these days to admit that you can’t handle a life most people think they’d kill for.

People on Twitter are already tearing her apart, talking about #FirstWorldProblems and #PoorLittleRichGirl and #CheckYour-Privilege. I’m so over the language of the social justice warriors. Who cares if she’s famous—she’s trying to get better, and all they’re doing is trying to tear her down.

Ironic, since they’re all about calling out microaggressions and building women up.

I turn the TV on to listen to the soundbite they’ve been playing on all the stations, from the looks of it.

Maxxy smiles beatifically from behind a podium at the press conference. “Being honest is more important than my ego—and potentially helping my fans with similar addictions was more important. I care about each and every one of you. We all need to get better and do better.” She reaches up to tuck a lock of glossy hair behind her ear, and I see it: the tattoo on her wrist. It’s the same one I saw the other night on the woman being flogged.

Maxxy was at the hotel when I was.

Maxxy isn’t the squeaky-clean pop princess everyone thinks she is. I wonder if she even has an addiction, or if that’s just a story she’s decided to roll with to tarnish her image a little to help her transition from bubblegum to something a little stronger in time for her next album. Street cred can be bought after all.

Is she another woman getting sucked into something that’s biding its time waiting to chew her apart, suck the marrow from her bones and spit her out like she’s not even worth swallowing? Is she another victim in the making, like the girls who brought Bundy’s businesses crashing down?

Or is she a new breed of player, someone with steel inside her? Someone The Juliette Society doesn’t see coming, but grab onto and try to keep hold of any chance they get? Is she someone strong enough to come and go whenever she pleases, never once realizing that that is the greatest privilege of all when it comes to that club?

Is she like Anna?

Is she like Inana?

Is she like me?

Where do I fit into it? Am I the tale, or the person telling it? The paper, the pen, or the writing?

Maybe I’m none of those things.

I wake up with a gasp, cramped from sleeping on the couch with the blanket bunched up around my throat. Annoyed, I toss it to the ground and check my phone.

My fiancé left me for a damsel in distress, so I do what every woman my age would do:

Get drunk and make poor choices to celebrate my freedom.

I’m in a room deep inside the bowels of the Janus Chamber, on all fours in the same cage Anna was in—or one that’s exactly like it.

The slightest movement, and my skin touches the cage. When that happens, I get a jolt of electricity through my body—and inside it. When I got here, a man asked for volunteers, and because he had eyes like the sea after a thunderstorm, I said yes.

Now my labia are clipped apart, and there’s a silver butt plug inside me—and it’s hooked up, too, only they vibrate instead of shock, and they don’t stop.

Not after the fourth orgasm. Not after the fifth.

I’m sweating, and my even my fingernails are painfully sensitive as wave after wave of sensation courses through my system, confusing my senses. For a while I think I black out, and I come to leaning heavily against the bars of the cage, rivers of electricity arcing through me, but at this point I can’t tell if it’s pain or pleasure because they’ve become the same thing.

I’m hot and cold all over, inside as well, shivering with release and need all at once. Experiencing the same things Anna did.

I realize there are people around the cage, watching, drinking, never taking their eyes off me, as though I’m the best program they’ve ever seen.

I feel better than I’ve ever felt, and when they finally release me from the cage, I’ve lost all concept of time and am sure I will shock anyone who touches me, I’m buzzing that much.

But I don’t, and the crowd moves on as another girl is placed inside the cage.

I go back to the club and drink until the world spins, but it spins me in the right direction, because somehow I wind up in a room with a young man whose lips are a little too red, as though someone tried to suck them from his face and gave up partway through.

He’s beautiful in a vulnerable way.

I’ve been the ultimate submissive tonight. It’s time to flip the coin.

He’s vulnerable because I’ve tied his ankles and wrists to the bedposts and am marking him with a rod. Arms, thighs, belly. I’d do his back, but his erection wasn’t comfortable and I didn’t want to make him keep lying on it.

What I’m doing is meant to hurt him, but I’m not cruel. Not like some people.

Line after line, I enjoy seeing the redness spring up against the white. He’s like a tiger or a zebra I’m creating one slap at a time.

He smiles, and tears of joy and relief leak from his eyes, but I know he won’t say a word, because I ordered him not to. It feels strange to be the one giving orders, and yet I’ve taken to it. Something about it is strangely comforting.

I want to discover what his limits are.

The lines I make on his skin are warm on my tongue.

I go further, lose myself in the surrealism of the scene, in the sadistic person this man wants me to be, taking joy in causing him pain. I turn into claws and hurt and teeth and sharpness, and I’m a razor’s edge away from flaying the meat of us both from our bones just to see if we’re the same inside when Max steps into the room and pulls me off the man.

I can tell from the look in his eyes that he’d underestimated me, but that I’ve not only redeemed myself—I’ve impressed the shit out of him.

Look what we made me into, Jackie boy.

And yet I still feel a little…untethered from reality as I walk outside and get in my car, turning down Gold’s offer to let me stay in one of the suites instead of driving back to Inana’s.

What happens now? Am I to end up unhappy and alone, like Claudia? I thought I was leading-lady material, but Jack’s given up on me as though we haven’t spent years together. If he wasn’t it, who was my Tommaso? Anna? Inana? How long have Jack and I been going through the motions, trapped together by what we thought was love, was right, was a fit? I used to believe in it with no room for doubt. But cracks formed in the brittleness of who I thought I could be, should be, and now there’s air and light and freedom leaking into me and I want more and more. The good and the bad of it on my terms—it won’t all be good, but how will I know if I cut that part of myself off completely, suppressing it forever and living a life where I’ll always look back and wonder what I might have been if I’d known more about myself?

I was doing this to get it out of my system. Is it wrong that I discovered that this is who I am and don’t want to give it up? Shouldn’t your partner accept who you are deep down? Isn’t that what love is?