I look back and see that the hole Earl shot in Mount Rainier is in the shape of a heart. Swoon! As the long-dormant volcano erupts plumes of thick, black smoke behind us into the air, all I can think about is this: I’m in love.
Chapter Eleven
WE’RE AT EARL GREY’S penthouse apartment at the top of one of the tallest, most elegant-looking steel erections in downtown Seattle. It’s directly across the street from his office; he commutes back and forth using a zip-line stretched between the two buildings. The inside of Earl Grey’s bachelor pad is amazing. It’s almost all black and white, with a few splashes of puce and cadmium red. It’s just perfect.
“This is beautiful, Mr. Grey,” I say. “I wish I had an interior decorator to do my place up like this.”
“I did it myself,” he says.
“Oh.”
“No homo,” he says forcefully.
I shake my head. “I wasn’t thinking that. Was that what you were thinking I was thinking? Because that’s definitely not what I was thinking.”
(It’s totally what I was thinking.)
“What do I have to do to prove to you how not-gay I am?” he asks.
You could just shut up and press “start” on the sex machine. I don’t say that, though, because I think he likes the cat-and-mouse game. Every time I’m too direct with him he gets all emo and shuts down. Instead, I say, “What did you bring me all the way here for?”
“To show you this,” he says, leading me into a reading room. His library is huge and filled with thousands of books. I wonder what else of his is huge. Probably his kitchen.
Earl runs his long fingers over the books at eye level on one of his many bookcases. His fingers stop on one book. Twilight.
“You brought me all the way to your bachelor pad to show me Twilight? I’ve got news for you, I’ve read it like a hundred times,” I say, rolling my eyes.
Earl smirks. He gently tilts the book out by its spine and the bookcase next to us begins to swing into the wall!
The walls of the room on the other side of the open bookcase are painted entirely black. “Is this your dungeon?” I ask him.
“You’re impressively perceptive, Anna,” Earl says, nodding. “I call it my ‛Room of Doom.’”
“And you want me to go in there. With you.”
He nods, waving a hand toward the secret passage. “Ladies first.”
The first thing I notice is the smell: Nag Champa incense and dirty laundry. The room is illuminated only by black light, but I can see enough to tell this is the kind of closet R. Kelly wouldn’t mind being trapped in. The room is tiny compared to the rest of Earl Grey’s apartment. There’s barely enough room for the waterbed. Whips, chains, ropes, riding crops, paddles, and iron shackles are hung up on the walls next to black-light posters—really trippy black-light posters. “Room of Doom”? More like the “Dorm Room of Doom.”
I feel Earl’s hand on my left shoulder. He’s breathing into my ear. “Welcome to my world, baby.”
“Do you bring all your dates here?”
“I don’t know if I’d call them ‛dates,’” he says. “They are, more accurately, LARPers. ‛LARP’ stands for ‛live-action role playing.’”
“I saw that term used in the quiz.”
“The quiz you so stubbornly refuse to fill out,” he says, trying to act all exasperated. I think he’s putting on more of a show now.
“These LARPers . . . If they’re not dates, then what are they? Volunteers? Where do you meet them?”
Earl picks up a leather toy that looks sort of like a whip, only with multiple leather strips hanging off the end. “There are women who LARP professionally,” he says. “They’re all over Craigslist.”
I laugh at the thought of him trolling for women on Craigslist. Surely someone as good looking and rich as Earl Grey doesn’t need to resort to picking up girls on the Internet! “You’re kidding,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I know, it just seems so dirty to meet women on Craigslist.”
“Dirty and gross,” I say.
“It’s just one of my fifty shames, Anna,” he says, lowering his head.
“And you use these . . . things on them? You torture them?” I ask, motioning to his sex toys.
“If the game calls for it. Take this flogger, for instance,” he says, perking up and swinging the leather tool through the air. “I’ll use this on a woman’s back, and ass, and legs.”
“And these LARPers like it when you beat them?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. At another level, though, my LARPers want to please me. I am the Dungeon Master, after all.”
Control freak. But damn! What a sexy control freak.
“So you want me to role-play with you?”
“Eventually,” he says, grinning.
“So how does this erotic role playing work?”
“I make the rules, and you obey them. It’s very simple. Follow the rules, and you will be rewarded. Break the rules, and you will be punished,” he says. “It’s about exploring each other’s limits within a codified system of punishments and rewards. It’s about trust.”
“What do I get out of the whole deal? I don’t know if pretending I’m an elf being whipped is really my thing.”
“I see you as more of a faery than as an elf, but we can get into specifics later. What I get out of our arrangement is you, submitting to my every whim,” he says. “And what you get is Earl Grey.”
Wow. Somebody thinks highly of themselves.
“We don’t have to start out role-playing today; we can ease our way into our characters with time. I need you right now, though—any way I can get you.”
Oh my. Earl reaches a hand out to me. I take it in mine, and he leads me to the waterbed. I am no longer hung over, but I’m so nervous
