Punishment with Kisses (19 page)

I had to read and reread and then go to the Internet and scour online groups to unlock each reference. Was Double Down a bar? A person? An action? Who were the Sluts and Squares? When I did discover the answers—that Sluts and Squares was a dance night with queer burlesque performers, for instance, or that the Double Down was a lesbian party or that Bruce was a local drag king or that Persephone was a sexy fire dancer at Rose City Vaudeville—it didn’t lead me to any
real
keys to unlocking the mysteries of my dead sister. Everything seemed rather ordinary by the time I unlocked it. So why then all the subterfuge? Maybe she was just too high to make sense? Or maybe drugs made her paranoid?

Even more frustrating were the clues that were entirely indecipherable. Was MILF truly the
American Pie
definition—that is, a “Mom I’d Like to Fuck”—or some other obscure Portland underground reference? Masochistic Intersex Lesbian Femme? Married Illiterate Lesbian Friend? Often times I had to skip an entry altogether as I had no clue what it was really about. Who fucking knows? And until a moment ago I was wondering, who fucking knows if
any
of it even had anything to do with why she died.

And then it struck me. One passage that left me shaking my head not with frustration but with sudden awareness.

The real sex diary of Ashley Caulfield, October 31

The One isn’t a MILF. Or is a MILF? DDO’s MILF, but not my MILF. Hard to gauge what anyone feels inside, though. I know that from how much I want to turn myself inside out, cut a scar from throat to cunt and just turn it all inside out so the whole world can know what I’m feeling, the pain of hiding, of wanting, of holding back, of keeping it all in for so long feels today like way too much. But what would He say? What would they all say? The Junior League. Chaste little kiddo with her nose in a book so long she’s lost touch with how I hurt, how I bleed, just like her. Or does she remember? Does she already know? She looks like she knows something. Oh, Mother May I tell? Tell her, tell him, tell them all you’re the one offering me a punishment with kisses now?

Suddenly it dawned on me. It was all perfectly clear in my head, every reference illuminating and concise. Tabitha was The One. As perverted and horrible and wrong as it sounded, I was certain that Ash was fucking our stepmother. I had always read DDO as Daddy-O, a vapid salutation Ash used on our father when she was disobeying.
Isn’t that right, Daddy-O?
She said it at the gala before she died, and on the night she was banished to the pool house.

Oh God, as violently ill as I felt that night of the break-in, the night of Ash’s murder, the night Shane left, that was nothing compared to how I felt right now knowing with almost sureness that my sister and the woman we both called stepmonster for years were having an affair. In Ash’s journals it was clearly going on for at least two years, maybe more. When—no,
how
could this have started? How could Tabitha have betrayed Father? And in the end, was she another of Ash’s perverted pick-ups or something more real?

Was she another jilted lover who thought Ash got what she deserved, or was she as torn up as I was about her death? Ash wrote so often about The One, as a sort of ominous force, yes, but also as the sole arbiter of her happiness. Clearly she had a power over my sister—did this also mean she was her murderer?

It took me months to begin to understand what transpired between my sister and Tabitha. I could see the path I was on so much more clearly now. I’d dipped my foot in the pool of Ash’s sexual depravity and instead of recoiling I’d discovered that I might really like to take a swim. Somehow, just learning of my sister’s sexual power buoyed me. Maybe by fucking my way through life, I’d learn the secrets that everyone wanted kept from me. Maybe by recreating Ash’s sexual adventures, I’d gain some of that power too.

Daddy-O probably thought learning of Ash’s depravity would shatter me, but really, it freed me up to become something entirely new. Three years since Ash’s death and I had become a new woman. I was…uncontrolled, liberated like Ash was from all the artificial constraints of polite society and all the bullshit artifice that the average American lived with. My nights had become more exciting than I could have imagined when I was with dull ol’ Shane. How ironic that I once wanted her so badly I would have given her anything, even my livelihood. I now thought of her as sort of a dullard, a weight I escaped, awakened not just by Ash’s murder but by the passing of the guard in my family. Ash’s journals weren’t windows to her soul; they were portals to my own.

My bosses at the newspaper could see the change in me right away, too. They took me off that mandatory leave and, best yet, off that stupid slush pile of crappy freelancer pitches. If I had to read one more misguided pitch on the benefits of Botox, I would have lost it. What part of alternative newsweekly did these writers not understand? Now I was actually out in the field, following leads, writing articles, and making deadlines. In the months following the break-in I had become something of a social butterfly. It didn’t hurt that I was the only reporter at that paper who had her finger on the pulse of Portland’s dirty underbelly. Well, hell, it was not the pulse my fingers were tapping, but each night I did find a great outlet for my creative juices and in the morning I got to type it up and submit it. I spent part of my time writing traditional news articles and the rest undercover as a culture columnist. I was now PDX’s Lipstick Lesbian, the anonymous sex columnist who took on—don’t forget up and under—Portland’s sexual playground and told the tales. I had topped nearly every girl at the paper and even two of the gay boys played bend over boyfriend for me. Hell, the guys in the mailroom looked like they were going to blow when I walked by now, but I had my sights set on bigger things. It was my boss Cassandra who I wanted to really make cream, but she insisted on maintaining her “boundaries.” I figured after a few more of my masturbatory columns she would be putty in my hands, but who could wait?

“Hello, Megan,” Cassandra said as I walked through the door to her rather tiny office. I was wearing a pencil skirt and a white oxford shirt that was missing a very pivotal button. I knew she was interested when her gaze fell immediately to my breasts. But she was still coy, still worried about propriety and about the power dynamics of being my boss. Still, she practically licked her lips when she asked me, “What’s up?”

God, didn’t she know I just wanted to fuck her so badly, right there and then on her white Formica desktop with the other reporters scurrying around outside?

“I just ran across a Goth strip club with a lesbian domination night. Want to join me there?” I twirled pieces of hair around my fingers, flicking the end on my tongue like a Long Island Lolita.

Cassandra was clearly aroused, her face flushed with excitement though, as always, she played it cool. “I’m not sure that’s the best use of my time. We’re on deadline for the hospital administration story.”

I moved into the office, closing the door behind me and flicking the lock sideways. Alone, that was how I wanted us. The boss lady looked like a doe trapped in my headlights, but she didn’t want to lose her administrative decorum. I couldn’t stop dreaming about pulling off those wire-rimmed glasses and pushing my head down between her ample thighs. I had wanted to see her “O” face for weeks now and I was finally bold enough to just take it this time.

“I’m pretty busy, Megan, if we could…” I pulled her chair from her desk, rolling her lap out toward me so I could hitch up my skirt and straddle it. I put my fingers, still damp from touching myself in the restroom, on her lips and blew, “sh-sh-sh” at her. She resisted, briefly, but by then I had pulled open my shirt and thrust my chest at her. She complied, her protestations a distant memory in the face of my breasts. It was hard to find a lesbian who didn’t like me with my shirt off.

I arched my back so my whole upper body leaned against her desk, a pile of pens and paperclips and corporate ephemera stabbing at my flesh, and my legs entwined around her waist like a squid pulling its prey underwater. Though I wanted to force myself on her, playing the top dog in this little erotic battle, I figured the way to win her forfeiture was to let her think she was the one in charge. She wouldn’t have to admit defeat that way. And if I had learned anything from Ash it was that if you open yourself up for the taking, someone would always want you.

And Cassandra did. She wanted me badly right now, so with the simple arch of my back I let her know she could have me. And she did. My panties were gone in seconds and her hands were groping me up and down my body. Boss lady apparently wanted me quite badly and I was thrilled to oblige. She tried to talk, but I shushed her again, and the whole move must have emboldened her because within minutes her fingers were inside me, balled up into a delicate little fist that was engulfed by my cunt. I bit down hard on the palm of her free hand to keep from screaming and even still I came with an eruption of grunts and groans that I was fairly certain the entire office had heard.

As I lay there, spent and sweaty, I noticed Cassandra—her clothes amok, her hair askew, her office trashed—looked positively aghast. Apparently she didn’t often let passion overcome her—at least not in the workplace—and no doubt by now she was deciding just how she’d spin this to the rest of the staff. It’s not easy for the big cheese to live down that she had fucked the newspaper’s adventure slut.

Personally, I felt great. There was something about boss lady that intrigued me more than the other tricks I’d had lately, and while it wouldn’t stop me from checking out the lesbian action at Club 69 tonight, it might at least entertain me a little bit longer.

“How about we finish what we started here?” I didn’t wait for Cassandra to reply. “Let’s say around seven at my place.” I straightened my skirt and walked back into the newsroom, smiling broadly at anyone who looked my way.
Yeah, that’s right, I just banged the boss. How do you like me now?

*

“I feel like I have a huge hole in the middle of my soul that I’ve been trying to fill with an endless parade of women.” I was trying to shock Dr. Finnigan. She wasn’t really my shrink. She was my psychiatrist neighbor. She had lived in my building for years, but it didn’t dawn on me until now how useful she could be in helping me understand my sister a little bit more. I took her a cup of tea the same day I took Cassandra and though I didn’t plan to fuck Finnigan, I did hope she was as easy to crack.

“I guess, Megan, the question is why you feel like you have a huge hole in your soul.”

Finnegan had to be at least sixty, with long gray and white hair, a slight overbite, and half a dozen cats. She listened intently whenever I talked and never seemed to pass judgment on what I was saying. I did so like trying to shock her though. So far I’d recounted every single sex act I’d experienced and titillated her with a list of aberrant behavior I’d tried out with past lovers, from last week’s threesome to a costumed gang bang. Some of the stories were mine; many more were actually entries from Ash’s journal. I wanted to know my sister, and if I couldn’t decipher her life—or death—maybe Dr. Finnigan could.

So far the lady was unflappable. Even still, these thrice-weekly encounters were becoming mandatory pit stops for me. Work, Dr. Finnegan, a night of fucking, and back again. It was more healing than confession, and Finnegan made a better priest than any I’d seen. But tonight, I didn’t feel like going to confession. The hole in the soul was Ash’s. I had bigger fish to fry.

“I’ve got to go, Dr. Finnigan. Big date, you know?” As the graying doc looked curiously askance, I swooped up my stuff and bid adieu. “You’re not the only one who likes pussy.”

I air-kissed my way out the door and back to my apartment. I’d hardly changed a thing since Ash left it to me. The more I came to know my sister through her journals, the more I found myself becoming the woman she was. One night before going out, I rifled through the bottom drawer of the vanity and pulled out that aging bottle of Nana de Bary perfume, emboldened with a woman on the front—naked, except for thigh high boots. Each time I spritzed Ash’s old perfume on me, on my neck, wrists, belly button, it was like a pilgrimage to another time and place. I was venturing outside my life and inside Ash’s. By the time I made it to the club, I had to admit, I even looked a little like Ash now. As I strode down the long mirrored hallway leading from the box office to the main showroom, I couldn’t help but look fondly in the mirror and watch myself walk by. How many times had Ash gone out like this? How many times had she spritzed Nana de Bary and been inspired by that woman wearing the thigh high boots? Plenty, I was sure because Ash’s trench—the only other thing I was wearing over the boots—was saturated with the stuff. I wondered what Dr. Finnegan would say about that?

The real sex diary of Ashley Caulfield, November 12

I’ve wanted her from the moment my eyes first shone on her. Not in the way I was supposed to, but in the deep, aching need only a woman scorned could have. How could The One be here for him and not for me? I remember making my first move. She laughed and fended me off like the schoolgirl that I was. But I knew then as sure as I do today that she wanted me just as badly as I needed her to. I saw it, hell, still see it in every look she gives me. She tried to hold back, to temper herself, to tell me it’s not right. But I knew that desire could only be held at bay for so long. Finally, on one of the many occasions when we were left all alone in that big house, I made my move. Nobody can resist supple young flesh, least of all a woman in a bad marriage to a much older man. I was her passport to pleasure. She was my punishment with kisses.