“My apartment’s just across the way.”
They hiked across Sunset and up the aptly named Horn Street as it rose steeply away from the boulevard. The front door of her apartment wasn’t more than a two-minute walk from there; you could still hear the traffic and noise below, though it was far enough away to possess a dream-like quality, and it was matched by the pastoral screech of crickets in the brush. The girl’s duplex hadn’t been painted since The Doors were the house band at London Fog, and for a moment, Clay wondered if the place was abandoned. But nothing in this neck of L.A. was ever abandoned. People would share a cardboard box with flesh-eating rats for this kind of real estate.
The girl produced a key and they climbed the stairs to the upper unit, which was barely large enough to call a studio. Fridge, dresser, desk, queen bed, hardly any personal possessions. It could have been an AirBNB. Or a modest place to turn tricks. And Clay wondered if he’d unknowingly become a john, if at any moment the girl would drop the sultry pretense and start naming prices.
She didn’t. She locked the door behind them and didn’t bother taking off her mask or turning the lights on. Her body found his, and she kissed him hard enough to part his lips and slip her tongue through. Clay heard her tennis skirt unzipping, and any hesitation evaporated. He grabbed her hips, but she knocked his hands away, even as she pulled the blouse over her head.
In her immaculate white underthings, her body fell sideways onto the bed and she beaconed Clay to follow. Her aggression shouldn’t have surprised him. After the reach-around in the men’s room, did he really think they’d exchange biographies and astrological signs? It’s not me she wants anyway, he realized. It was a rock star. She didn’t know, or want to know, that he was just another human being with shortcomings. No. What she wanted was a God incarnate.
And what Clay wanted was…
Her thighs were soft and slender under his calloused guitar fingers. She moaned as he seized her buttocks through her panties. “Yes.”
Clay slipped the panties down to her ankles.
“Do me now,” she moaned.
He dragged her across the bed. “Rougher!” she cried.
Her flesh was cold, his own skin on fire in comparison. Cold front, warm front, they might have created a thunderstorm between their bodies. Clay slipped his hands between her knees and spread them. His groin ached for release, but he hadn’t lost his mind completely. “Do you have a condom?”
“What for? You think I’m a slut who does this with everyone?”
“Of course not. But how do you know I’m not?”
Her teeth were as white as her thighs in the dark. “You’re not rock royalty yet,” she assured him. “You’re as lovesick as a puppy over your guitar player.”
Clay’s silence incriminated him.
“Right now she’s fucking that hot guy she was talking to. Probably in his car behind the Whisky. Trust me, I smell my own. And do you think she’s making him wear anything? Forget her, look at me—I’m drunk and I’m sad and I want to be screwed right through this mattress. So put it in me, or go back to the Viper and cry in your beer.” Abruptly her tone upshifted from cynical mocking to a girlish, seductive coo: “Come on, let me swallow you all up down there.”
Clay hung over her, the head of his cock poking through his boxer briefs.
The mask. Something about her mask worried him. Like she was going to tear it off and reveal Kiss Kiss’s burned face. Or worse. But for now, the urge to mate was stronger. He lowered his jeans and briefs, watched as she licked her palm and seized him—much harder than in the bathroom—and delivered him to the fork of her legs.
No! his mind screamed. Don’t!
The girl lifted her hips quickly and lowered them slowly, lifted and lowered; her labia slide up and down his shaft, parting for his stiffness. Clay’s moan was helpless, his climax already building. A few thrusts was all it would take for deliverance. “Yeeeees,” the girl cooed, and though they were face to face, Clay felt no huff of breathe from her lips. “Explode in me.”
That was when he became aware of a growing commotion outside. Feet pounding up the stairs, arriving at the door. A fist slamming the wood.
“Clay? Clay! Open up!”
The girl’s eyes went wide in the dark. “Who the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know,” Clay said. But that was a lie. Because even if the voice was tinged with panic, he recognized it and was as disoriented to hear it as he had been in the Viper Room.
Essie again.
“Clay, get away from her right now!”
The voice was so adamant that Clay reacted, disengaging from the groupie on the bed. “No!” the girl gasped. “Not when you’re so close.”
“Open the door!”
The girl reared up. “No. No!” she screamed. “I’m giving you everything without even knowing you. You owe me!”
Clay stumbled away from the bed, hiking up his jeans over his confused, twitching cock. And the girl was climbing off the mattress, coming after him. And Essie was shouting and slamming her fist into the door.
“Who the hell is that anyway, your mother?” the girl mocked. “Mommy, mommy, come to my rescue? You fucking pussy!”
“Clay, don’t listen to her. She’s not a girl anymore!”
Clay fled to the door and
