Random Acts of Fantasy (17 page)

We sauntered down to the main lobby, on our own for a few hours while the band practiced and got their act down. We’d known from the start that we’d be on the edges of everything. Amy’s nose was a bit out of joint because I was getting paid but she wasn’t, but then she was leaving early, too—she couldn’t even stay for the performance because her mom had some family thing she needed to get home for. I had handled more administrative paperwork than I’d ever imagined, from tax forms to shipping instructions to equipment orders.

I still hadn’t done five thousand smackeroos worth of work, but that was okay. My time to bust my ass was on performance night. Trevor and Joe would need some ego holding, Liam would get cocky, and Sam would get all morose (especially without Amy here), and that’s when I always went into the zone.

Fangirls know exactly what to do when they’re given the opportunity to shift from squeeing fan to part of the crew. We just do. It’s in our DNA or something. You listen to every recorded bootleg version of a band’s song and get to know the nuances so well you can tell when Trevor had a cold for the Attleboro performance, or that Joe sprained his thumb a week before the Franklin bar recording, and…you get the picture.

I was like the fifth Beatle’s girlfriend.

But not now. Now I was Darla, Amy’s buddy, and we were checking out this resort that used an awful lot of nudity as art on the walls, as we were just noticing.

I mean beaver shots. No Michelangelo paintings. Not Rubens.

Hair tacos. Pussies galore in picture after picture, from Georgia O’Keeffe watercolors to spun colored glass under frames to artistic black-and-whites that showed whether a woman had ever nicked herself shaving her pussy bald.

“Are we in the Labia Wing? Is there a Penis Wing we’re missing out on?” I whispered to Amy as our necks ricocheted back and forth, taking in the overwhelming view of labia minora, clitoral hoods, and hair.

“I don’t know about you, but I’d rather look at vulvas than cocks and balls,” she said.

“You got something you want to tell me?”

She laughed. “No, no. I’m straight. I like penises. They feel good to touch and have in me,” she clarified. “I just think they look like flesh-covered gearshifts with two big meatballs attached, and I giggle when I see them presented as art.”

“Great. I’ll never view a gearshift the same way again. Thanks for that.”

“What are friends for? Just don’t touch the gearshifts with lotion on top.”

“Amy!”

She ground to a halt and stared ahead toward the lobby. Sunlight poured down in those colored waves that made the room both old-worldly and psychedelic at once, like Sherlock Holmes and the Grateful Dead joined forces to run a chain of resorts.

“Take a good look at the fountain, Darla,” she said in an even tone that I knew she was struggling to maintain. Her head cocked to the right and she studied it, so I took her lead and—

Oh, my.

To quote George Takei:
Oh, myy.
 

The fountain was two figures made of blown glass, their bodies like a Greco-Roman ideal of what male and female look like, with these vulvas and penises—scores of them—attached at intervals.

All spurting up.

“At least they give equal attention to female ejaculation,” Amy murmured. “Feminist points for that one.”

“Female
what
?”

She patted my arm. “We’ll talk later.”

“Talk about what?” The fountain was mesmerizing, and my eyes were attached to the water and glass now that I knew what I was looking at. In real life when a man comes you get about ten seconds of the lotion geyser and then—that’s it. Even a dude with a healthy refractory period can’t get it together for another half hour or more, and by then your fingers are stained orange from eating Cheetos and watching more episodes of
Scandal
, so why bother?

But this was like being able to watch a penis orgasm again and again and again and—

It was on a timer! How cool. One, two—come! One, two—come.

“It comes on a timer.”

“Don’t most guys?” Amy whispered. We got caught up in a fit of giggles and had to turn away, my eyes anywhere but on that damn fountain. I turned and saw the elevators as I tried to gather myself, and then noticed some sort of character, a person in a giant rabbit costume, bright pink like the Easter Bunny, with those big, blue -and-white plastic eyes and floppy two-tone ears. A sea of pink and white fur and those eyes.

Like a happy
Donnie Darko
moment.

He waved and I waved back, but my eyes didn’t quite catch up to my hand. Amy turned toward what I was staring at and her hand didn’t wave.

It clasped over her mouth in a kind of shocked horror. If she’d been wearing pearls she would have clutched them. Hard.

Because the bunny was fucking a chipmunk.

Not a real chipmunk, mind you, but another human being dressed in a chipmunk costume.

“Are they doing what I think they’re doing?” I said like a ventriloquist, trying to speak without moving my lips. My eyes, though. I couldn’t turn away, so my staring was giving it all up. Might as well just talk in a normal voice, because if there’s any point in life where you don’t have to hide your shock, it really ought to be when you watch the Easter Bunny fucking Alvin from
Alvin and the Chipmunks
in broad daylight in a hotel lobby.

I mean, really.

Apparently, we arrived just as they finished off. The fountains behind us spurted in with perfect timing. And then the chipmunk ran off, making happy noises.

We sort of shuffled toward the door where the chipmunk had run off to, the spray of the fountain now a bit ominous, like we were surrounded by nothing but sex suddenly. As we walked through the enormous carved doors, the sunlight blinded us.

“If you see a were-hedgehog, then I’m going to start thinking we’re at a really perverted romance writer’s convention,” Amy hissed at me. 

“A were-
what
? Did you mean to say were
wolf
?” What in the hell was a were-hedgehog? 

“Ask your mom. Hot book in romance.”

I was about to ask what in the hell hedgehogs and romance have to do with each other when a light ocean breeze filled with the scent of salt and heat made me relax instantly. I pulled sunglasses off the top of my head and put them on, my eyes adjusting. Hedgehogs and nympho chipmunks be damned. 

Amy did the same, sucking down the rest of her coffee and pitching the empty cup in a gold trash can at the building’s entrance.

We got no farther than about twenty feet onto grass that felt like walking on a thick carpet of memory foam when Amy suddenly went down, tackled by someone, her body flying with his through the air and landing about eight feet ahead of me.

And then the sound of Sam shouting “Get your fucking hands off her!” filled my ears, the thump of heavy, fast footsteps, and I saw Trevor and Joe coming up right behind him.

Sam ripped the guy off the ground and I bent to check on Amy. Her face was smashed into the grass and she looked stunned. I would be, too, if I’d been tackled by a unicorn.

Yep.

A naked unicorn.

Not a real one, of course. A naked male human wearing a white unicorn mask.

Carrying a giant water gun.

A sudden shock at my back made my sacrum tighten and I turned around to shout and was greeted with a mouthful of water in a long stream that soaked my waist, my breast, and my face.

“Oh! Sorry!” A thick Irish accent came from behind the head of a chicken.

And it wasn’t Mavis.

The chicken head and the unicorn held their guns up toward each other in a gesture of “time out,” while Sam’s nostrils flared and he let go of the unicorn to help Amy up.

“I didn’t mean to hit you, Miss,” said the unicorn. His accent was British. A thick cockney that made me take a second look at his pecker and—yep.

Intact.

I’m going to digress for a moment here, because why not take a small detour in the middle of a story about a naked water-gun fight between a unicorn and a chicken to talk about penises? Intact men are so interesting to me. It’s like there’s this polite turtleneck there, keeping everything nice and slick and ready for you. So very proper.

Like a sex butler, at your service.

That’s all I wanted to say about that.

Now Sam blew a gasket and started screaming at the unicorn until he looked down and saw the flaccid dick just sitting there, like a witness.

“You’re naked?” he asked, his voice going up so high I thought he was being castrated on the spot.

“Indeed,” the unicorn said, but because I’d just been thinking about sex butlers I had an unreal moment where I thought maybe his foreskin had actually responded. Because, hey—if men think with their dicks, evolution means they should eventually speak with them, right? Wouldn’t that make everything so much easier if peckers could talk?

“Would you like to join us?” the unicorn added, pointing to a small shed with little windows that reminded me of a much nicer version of my purple passion place. “The masks and water guns are there. Naked water-gun fights are a hallmark of our annual stay at Eden.”

Amy spoke up. “Are they co-ed?” Her eyes were very obviously on Irish’s penis, which began to respond as if it somehow knew she was looking at it.

“AMY!” Sam thundered.

“Just curious!” she shouted back, eyes merry and nose twitching with impishness. Joe and Trevor started laughing. The naked dudes trotted off, penises bouncing like Hacky Sacks attached to bungie cords. It was hypnotic. I could watch the
boing boing boing
forever.

Amy stretched her arms out, checking her body and brushing grass off. She’d chosen a lightweight sundress that made me think of pictures of my grandmama from the 1950s, like a pinup girl, with a Marilyn Monroe sensibility. Amy had that casual look, all round and curvy with a naughty-librarian feel.

Sam seemed to love it, his arm slipping around her waist as he pulled her in and whispered something in her ear that made her step in closer to him and press her hips against him.

“Naked water-gun fights,” I said to Trevor and Joe. “What the hell kind of place is this? And did you notice the penis and vulva fountain?”

“The what?” Trevor asked as Joe seemed distracted, looking all over the grounds. To the left was a topiary of greenery carved in animal shapes. Straight ahead, the ocean, with beaches that—at a glance—were very “clothing optional.”  So optional that no one wore any.

“Never mind.” I pulled the guys close. “I think this is a sex resort,” I hissed, expecting them to be shocked.

They just nodded. “We know,” Joe said, his mouth crooking into a half-smile. “One of the music assistants explained it to us just now.”

“‘Explained’ is an overstatement,” Trevor added. “We had to put two and two together on our own.”

“Yeah? Well, Amy and me had to watch the Easter Bunny ramming Alvin and the Chipmunks for us to get it.”

They both just stared at me.

Couldn’t blame them, because damn if that made any sense to me, either, but I’d seen it with my own eyes, so I knew it had happened.

“Furries,” Joe mumbled.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Furries,” he said louder, looking out at the ocean, spotting some—yep—naked parasailers. Wouldn’t you get contact rash from your sac dragging on the surface of the salt water?

I must have said that part out loud, because now they stared at me again, and Trevor kind of tucked his hand down near his basket.

“What’s a furry?” I demanded, tired of being looked at like that all the time.

“What you saw. People dress in furry costumes and have sex in animal character.”

“Interspecies costume sex?”

“I, uh…hey, your kink is not my kink,” Trevor sputtered.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Just because someone else gets off on it and I don’t, doesn’t make it wrong,” Joe said.

“Oh. That. Duh,” I said, stretching out the last word. If someone wanted to fuck through a costume and have fun pretending, so be it. Same with naked unicorn water-gun fights. Have at it.

I’m sure plenty of people thought our threesome wasn’t quite normal either, and I didn’t give a shit what they thought as long as they left us alone to enjoy ourselves as we were.

It clicked.

I relaxed.

“So it’s a sex resort,” I said, kinda loud. “If people want to have fun, as long as they leave me alone, I don’t care. Live and let live.”

“There’s an entire costume section here,” Joe said. “Want to pick some mascots and fuck each other?”

I smiled. “Would you wear a Michigan costume and let me peg you in an Ohio State mascot outfit?”

“No.”

I pouted.

“No!” But he was distracted. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sam and Amy hurry back to their room, clearly turned on by something. Amy and I would be walking funny by the time this was over, because frankly, even if I wasn’t into the kinks that I was rapidly becoming aware of, right in front of my face, I was turned on by the turbocharged air of sexuality in general.