Exposed (8 page)

Mark reached down and got our clothes, then led me to the large common bed. A crowd from the main room followed. When we got there, several men asked Mark if we would like additional company but Mark declined. They stood right at the edge of the mattress, not two feet away from where I lay. Mark got naked and brought me back to the edge of orgasm with his mouth, then moved up my body and slipped deep inside.

I could feel his cock move against the very back of me, and I knew his cum would shoot so deeply inside and fill me. As he got closer, so did I, and we finally came together, our bodies arching as one, Mark thrusting as deeply as he could, me to receive him.

We lay there for at least several minutes. Finally Mark asked if I wanted a drink.

“I’d love a bottle of water,” I told him. He got up and found his clothes and walked downstairs to the bar while I started getting dressed. I was sitting on a bar stool putting on my shoes when a man sat down beside me.

“You are really beautiful. Why do you do this?” he asked. I suppose he thought he was trying to pay me a compliment.

Because my brain circuits were under the influence of a massive bath of endorphins, I didn’t really react. I wasn’t interested in a debate with this guy. I remember seeing his face while Mark and I were playing our games, and I remember seeing the hunger there.

“That’s an odd question. Why are you here? Why did you watch?” I asked.

“It’s not the same thing,” he said. “I’m not trying to offend. I’m just trying to understand why a woman so beautiful would want this, or need this,” he said, gesturing around the dimly lit room, which was starting to become a bit dingy in my eyes.

I realized then that there was more than a little bit of judgment in his question —
and
a whole lot of hypocrisy.

“Because I like it?” I said, then realized the question mark I’d added to the end of the sentence was cowardly. “Because I
like
it,” I repeated, this time with emphasis on the word.

“Well, if you like being a slut, I suppose you just do,” he said, standing up and walking away as he saw Mark get to the head of the stairs.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I asked in a louder voice, but he moved quickly into the crowd and disappeared. I guess I was shocked, though I don’t know why. I know I was hurt, and I don’t really know why that was, either. Of course what we were doing would cause judgment. But to sit there and watch, get aroused, maybe satisfy himself, and then come up and slam me like that?

Someone stopped Mark on the way to where I was sitting, nodded in my direction. Mark smiled and nodded, but I could tell he was edging away, trying to get back to me.

“Several people thanked me for our sharing,” he said as he sat down, untwisting the top off the water bottle he’d pulled from the bin of ice downstairs.

“Not everyone was that generous,” I said and took a swig of water.

“What’s that?” he asked, his voice still a little languorous from his orgasm.

“A guy came up after you left and called me a slut.”

“Really?” Mark said. “Who?” He scanned the crowd around us.

“He’s gone now. But he was getting off on us along with everyone else. I saw him.”

“Really,” Mark said again, but now in that voice he uses when he’s starting to think deeply about things.

I love the way Mark thinks, most of the time. When intrigued by an idea, his voice gets that tone, and he looks off, his eyes not seeing anything in this time or place. Instead, he’s looking at ideas that line walls in the castles of his mind, as if they’re paintings. Often when he comes back, I’m delighted with whatever it is he’s found.

Not this time.

“I suppose, from within his framework, he might be right.”

“Mark!” I gasped, nearly choking on my water.

The tone of my response brought him back from his interior world and into mine, with a crash.

“Not in absolute terms, of course,” he said.

“In whose terms?” I asked. “Yours?” I asked to put him on the defensive. I was pissed and took the opportunity to sting Mark as I’d been stung by the judgment of the stranger.

“Of course not. I was just considering the word ‘slut,’ how he meant it, where he’s coming from. It was just an idea,” he said.

“I’d like to go home now,” I said, standing up from the bar stool.

“Jess,” Mark said, with a patient-but-impatient tone in his voice; an apology that wasn’t, really, implied but not spoken. He knew better than to say it out loud.

“I’d like to go home. Now,” was all I could say.

Every time before then, after we’d been to the club, we’d make love again at home. It was intense, erotic, and special. That night when we got home, I went immediately to the bathroom, took a hot shower, and put on my favorite flannel nightgown before crawling into bed. When Mark reached over for me, I told him I was really, really tired.

But it took me a long, long while to fall asleep.

• • • •

Not many of our cases went to court, but sometimes I wasn’t able to negotiate a plea acceptable to both my client and the DA’s office, especially if it was a drug case we had to argue under federal jurisdiction.

Sarah, Lily, and I had spent a few weeks tearing into a case I could not make go away. Sheri was twenty-five and originally from Bellingham, but had been living in Seattle since she dropped out of college her junior year. She fancied herself a singer and artist who had no reason to waste any more time in school.

She did pretty well, at first — gigs with some well-known local bands, paintings up in a few Seattle galleries. I didn’t like them much but that doesn’t mean they weren’t art.

But a “friend” suggested that if she really wanted her career to take off, she would have to cut a demo record, then take her band to Los Angeles and put it in front of some studio executives. It would be expensive, but they could “help her out.”

All she had to do was bring a backpack from Canada to the US. She didn’t even have to know what was in it, they told her, so she could claim innocence. That’s what she told me, but she wasn’t
that
innocent.

Ferries come and go between Anacortes and Friday Harbor in Washington. Some of them come from Victoria, British Columbia. But passengers on those ferries that come from Canada have to go through Customs.

Not everybody is searched, but honestly, if there were a profile for a stupid drug mule, she’d pretty much fit the bill. They went through her backpack, found the heroin, found the hashish, found the “ice” from Asia.

What they didn’t find was any credibility in her story that she had picked up the wrong pack when getting off the ferry. It didn’t help that she had grown up in Bellingham, her father’s company built aluminum boats, and she had been back and forth across that border like some people go to the beach for a weekend.

As the trial approached, Lily kept combing the facts for a plausible explanation of how or why this young woman could be innocent, or at least a story that would generate sympathy, which Lily did better than any of us.

Sarah investigated the behavior of the border agents to see if there was any sort of wiggle room, if one of them might have acted in any way that would allow us to get some or all of the charges tossed. I dug through the laws of both countries, looking for an opening.

I repeatedly told Sheri and her father that the odds were stacked against them. They insisted they wanted to fight it, she was innocent, it was a mix-up. The federal attorney was willing to bargain down to two years, with time served, less than half of what she faced if found guilty on all counts.

Remember Deborah Riddle? She had moved up to working for the feds. I saw her name on the list of witnesses. I thought for only a moment about objecting because of our personal background, but I doubted she would remember me and didn’t particularly want to open that can of worms.

Sheri and I stood together in the courtroom when the verdict came back. She fell toward me when found guilty of almost all of it. She fainted again when Judge Burns gave her five years in prison. She had to be helped from the courtroom to where she would be prepped for jail.

Afterwards, Judge Burns called me to the bench. He was known for being a balanced and compassionate judge, and I respected him.

“What happened here?” he asked. “This doesn’t occur very often when you’re involved.”

I explained that my client didn’t want to plead out. He just shook his head with a sad smile.

“Then I think you did the best you could with that,” he said.

“I didn’t do well enough,” I told him, and I meant it, even though I had no idea what I might have done differently.

On the way out of the courtroom, Deborah Riddle was waiting for me in the hallway.

“She got exactly what she deserved,” she said with a smile.

• • • •

Mark and I planned the trip to Colorado as a celebration of sorts. He’d won a complicated case that involved maritime and environmental law when a ship owned by an oil transfer service came too close to some sharp rocks just off the coast. He’d done well, earned kudos and a bonus.

I had the time, so we went to Colorado to do some skiing in the Rockies. The Cascades at our back door were having a bad snow year.

And as had become our habit, we planned a layover in Denver to sample what the local “scene” had to offer an adventuristic and attractive young couple. The Palace was unmarked except by a number on the building. We paid for our seven-day membership — even though we were flying out the next morning — as well as the $100 couple’s entry fee. Single women got in for $20, but single men paid $200.

The difference in prices was not only a way for the club to maximize profits, but it also helped govern the class and mix of the clientele.

We were there just as the The Palace was warming up. Most of the couches in back were full. Denver has a very different feel than Seattle, and this extended to The Palace. It was hard to define, but it was a bit more upscale than SASSA, and the people were, too. A man on one couch looked like a well-known baseball player and wore a fine, tailored suit.

The two women sitting with him, a blonde and a brunette, leaning around him, kissing and fondling each other, could have stepped right out of a
Victoria
’s Secret catalog.

I mentioned that to Mark and he said, “They’re no more beautiful than you,” which was a lovely lie I chose to believe. We each had a drink, and then he asked if I wanted a massage and motioned to the massage table in the corner of the room. It wasn’t an alcove and there were no curtains, of course.

I thought that would be quite nice, and it had nothing to do with being sore from skiing.

I took off my dress while Mark spread a thick fresh white towel on the table; then I lay face down. Mark started to work my shoulders. I was a bit startled when the hand in which he had been holding his drink touched my skin. I jumped, and he immediately knew why.

“Sorry,” he said, and rubbed his hands together to fight the chill.

A very tall,
thin
man walked over.

“There’s some product in the basket,” he said and pointed at a small shelf under the table, next to the towel basket. Mark found an oil, poured some in his hands, and started to massage my legs, then my back. When he unhooked my bra, I let him move the straps over my elbows and off my hands. I knew I was going to be naked soon and I liked that, but I was in no hurry.

When he got to my butt, my thong came off. He took a minute to organize my clothes on the shelf under the table, then again found the oils. When his hands got to the crease of my butt, he kept getting closer and closer to my vagina.

God I wanted to be touched, and once in a while, my hips raised involuntarily, as if to capture his hand inside me. Eventually, they were successful.

He went so slowly. The very tall, thin man came back over, and I heard him ask Mark, “Would you like some help?”

“No, thank you,” Mark said. “At least not yet.” Even though I knew Mark was just being polite, just the possibility sent an electrical impulse from my wet vagina right up my spine.

“You might want to try this,” said the man, standing so close the fabric of his slacks brushed my hips. He reached down and looked into my eyes as he pulled something from the basket and handed it to Mark, then he went back to a chair he shared with a brunette nearly as tall as he was, also thin and with beautiful proportions.

When Mark’s hands came back to me, whatever he had been handed was like liquid warmth and incredibly slick. Wherever he touched me, warmth spread, inside and out.

“Why don’t you turn over?” he asked at last.

There I was, on my back, naked and being oiled, in a city I didn’t know, surrounded by men and women watching Mark put his hands on me, and in me. I moaned a little whenever he brushed a nipple, but soon his fingers were inside me again, and my hips were moving against his hand, trying to consume his touch.

He knew my body so well. Just before I was about to explode, he stopped, reached down and brought up a towel. He didn’t unfold it, just placed it gently over my eyes.

“Mark…” I said, but he put his lips on mine, then pulled back a little and said, “Shhh, it’s fine.” He stood at my side and touched me, bringing me back in rhythm. Suddenly I felt hands under my neck, massaging the base of my skull, in addition to Mark’s hands at my hips.