Three, Two, One (321) Page 9

  But she’s looking up at him like he’s her king.

  He smiles down at her and she resumes, placated. And then JD looks me dead in the eye. “You told me to be nice in there?” He motions to the bedroom.

  I don’t answer him. He knows I did.

  “Now it’s your turn. She might be yours, but she wants me.”

  “Then why am I here?” It’s a serious question. He could break our rule and just take her. He knows I won’t fight him over it. Not over a girl. It won’t happen.

  “Because I know you want her. And just once, Ark, I’d like to see you get what you want.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  He squats down again to kiss Blue on the lips. “Let’s turn a little, baby. So Ark can watch.” She scoots around until her body is sideways to mine as he grabs the soap.

  And then I do get what I want. I take what JD gives me. Because her eyes lift and meet mine. She holds my gaze with none of the maliciousness I came in here with. She holds my gaze with trust.

  I look back. Her attention is on me, not JD. But JD doesn’t seem to mind that she’s stopped, because his fingers are playing with her clit, making her eyes droop to half-mast. And when he says, “Jerk off, man. She’s waiting for you to start,” I get that feeling once again.

  This will not turn out well.

  But I’m caught in the spell of a trusting girl, my best friend, and a rock-hard cock. I can’t help myself. I begin to move my hand up and down my shaft. My thumb slides up over my wet tip and then my palm slips back down my length in long, slow strokes.

  A few pumps with Blue’s eyes on my movements and I’m dying. JD’s fingers are fully inside her now, and she’s buckling her back as he soaps up her breasts. He withdraws his fingers, reaches under her, and lifts her up with two hands cupping her ass. Her legs wrap around his hips and he enters her with one quick thrust.

  She gasps, her fingernails digging into his shoulders. And then he slows down and fucks her like that for a few moments. “You like it hard or slow, Blue?” he asks.

  “Both,” she whispers.

  “You like it rough or soft?”

  “Both.”

  “You like me or him?”

  Blue opens her eyes and looks first at me, then back to him. “Both.”

  “Why?”

  His question stops her and me at the same time. “Why?” she asks.

  He nods. “Why both? Why not just one?”

  She looks at me, but I can’t help her. Because I’m interested too. She takes her gaze back to JD, who is fucking her so slowly now, it’s just a barely detectable grinding. “Because I need to be surrounded. I need be held on both sides. I can’t feel safe unless I’m surrounded.”

  I don’t know what that means, but JD must, because he kisses her on the lips. It’s a long, tender kiss. Not a kiss I usually see him give. If he kisses the girls we film, it’s always hard and demanding.

  But everything about Blue is soft.

  And JD, who is normally not soft, decides in this moment that he will be soft for her. He gives in. I can see it.

  I stop masturbating and just watch them.

  Blue responds with a long, passionate kiss of her own. Her body, still being held up only by JD’s hands under her ass, slowly moves in tandem with his hips.

  I watch them make love.

  And when JD comes inside her, she doesn’t throw her head back and scream out her release. She rests her head on his shoulder and cries.

  I get up and walk out of the shower, grabbing a towel on my way. I’m just about to walk out and go back to my own room when they start talking. Their words echo off the bathroom walls.

  “Is it because we want to share?” JD asks. She must say no, because JD says, “Then what is it?”

  There’s some sniffling and a long pause. I walk back over to the open bathroom door and listen as her small voice tries to make sense of things. “I don’t want him to hate me.”

  JD laughs. “Sweetheart, he’s got it bad for you. There’s no way in hell he’s gonna hate you.”

  There’s a few more minutes of talking. Reassurances from JD. Promises, even. And then the silence that says she accepts what he’s telling her is true just as the water shuts off.

  I take a deep breath and drop my towel on the floor. I’m practically dry now anyway. So I just crawl in to JD’s bed and flop over, face first on the mattress, forcing myself to push aside all the warning bells going off in my head. Because JD is right.

  I’ve got it bad.

  I want her and I’ll take her any way I can get her.

  A few moments later the bathroom light turns off and the room goes dark. They are silent as they climb into bed next to me and the girl’s warm skin touches mine as JD pulls her close to him.

  He’s hogging her now because he can, and I feel the anger building up again.

  But then her tiny hand finds mine in the dark and she grabs hold of it. Gives it a squeeze.

  I squeeze back.

  JD’s breath is like a whisper across the back of my neck. It lingers the way a whisper does, and then he’s kissing my scar.

  I open my eyes. Ark is sleeping in the bed next to me. His chest is rising and falling in the same rhythm as the tiny puffs of air JD is caressing my skin with. Ark’s dark hair falls over one eye, his cheek pressed against the mattress. He doesn’t use a pillow, and that suits him for some reason—that Ark should prefer to sleep without a comfort everyone takes for granted. This makes the line from his neck to the dip at the small of his back more straight than it might be. One arm is flung out towards me, only a few inches from my own, which is tucked up under my chin. His palm is facing down on the white sheets and I want nothing more than to grab hold of him and never let go.

  JD’s kisses recapture my attention. “Hey,” he says, right next to my ear so the sound gets caught in the curve of the shell. Captured. Maybe to keep Ark sleeping while JD gives me some attention.

  “Hey,” I say back with the same discretion.

  “I’m sorry I made you cry last night.”

  “You didn’t,” I insist.

  He says nothing to that. I’m not ready to talk yet, and he’s not gonna push me. That’s what he said last night after I cried. He’s not gonna push me to talk. And that feels like a miracle. How did I find two people with more secrets than me, at just the moment when I needed it most?

  I know the answer, but I refuse to believe it. I won’t believe it. Not after everything that’s happened.

  JD’s words stop, but his hands are just beginning to wander. I’m sore all over from the night before my escape. It’s always worse the second day. It’s like the gods of punishment are fucking with you the first day. Because you start to think it wasn’t so bad. You start to think you won’t be limping for a week or struggling to breathe through the bruises on your throat. Or that the open sores on your back won’t be weeping with pus for days before they finally scab over.

  But the gods of punishment are cruel. Because they make that first day bearable for the sole purpose of building you up just to take you back down again on day two.

  My whole body hurts, but JD’s touch is soft and soothing. He doesn’t try to fuck me again. He doesn’t even try to get me off. It’s like he knows. And he must have an idea if he recognized the branding scar on the back of my neck.

  “You know what it means?” he asks, his voice still very low. “That brand?”

  I nod. Of course. Everything was explained the first day. “Eternity.”

  I feel a long hot breath on my upper back as JD deals with that. “Did you see any—”

  “No.”

  He stops talking for a few seconds. Maybe I stunned him. Or maybe he accepts it as truth. Or maybe he knows that was too much.

  We’re silent for so long after that, I figure he wants to go back to sleep. But then his soft touches start up again.

  A fingertip tracing up and down my prominent ribs.

  His palm cupping the hip
bone that sticks out way too far.

  His lips caressing the welts on my back.

  Every bit of it hurts. Not all in the same way. But every bit of it hurts. The bones remind me of how malnourished I am. What could these two beautiful men see in me? How could they possibly see past my emaciated shell of a body? And the kisses across my back are just painful. Putting on a shirt will be a reminder of what they did, no matter how loose it is.

  And then his hands rub lightly over the curve of my ass. The hands that grabbed it with such passion last night and made me forget.

  He knows I’m crying before I do. He turns me towards him, hugging me close.

  But it hurts. It all hurts and I cry harder. “Please stop,” I beg. “Please don’t touch me anymore.” I just want to lie still and forget. I don’t want to be reminded of anything. Not the good. Not the bad. Not anything.

  JD is still next to me for several minutes, but then he just gets up, gets dressed, and walks out of the bedroom. A few moments later the front door slams.

  I close my eyes with relief and slow the crying down to small hiccups of air that cannot be rushed. They stop in their own good time and there is nothing I can do but allow myself to forget.

  “I saw this golden monkey once,” Ark says a few minutes later, startling me out of my blissful solitude. “It escaped from its enclosure at the zoo a few summers ago. JD and I were just getting into the groove of things with the business. And we were shooting a scene at the zoo.” He stops to chuckle. “It’s fucked up, I get it. But don’t judge me yet, Blue. Because I’m a man of many layers. And I do things for a reason.”

  I turn my body, wincing and groaning as I let the pain take over for a second. “What’s that got to do with a monkey?”

  He smiles at me and his dark eyes soften for a moment. He’s older than JD, that’s clear. He’s got some worry lines around his eyes. And he’s got a look that makes me feel like he’s in control of things. Maybe everything. “They thought it was still in the zoo, so they were telling all the patrons to keep an eye out that day. Like a public service announcement. They’d stand at all the intersecting paths leading to various animals, and talk about the missing golden monkey. They were desperate to catch it. If it got out of that park, it’d probably get hit by a car on Colorado Boulevard, or snatched up to be sold as a pet.”

  I eye him, wondering if they found and sold the monkey.

  He smiles again, like he knows what I’m thinking. “But it didn’t get out of the park. And JD, me, and the girl we were filming were the ones to actually find the golden monkey.”

  “Where was it?”

  His smile stops and his expression becomes sad. “Just sitting in a tree. It was closing time and even though we are scum for filming a girl sucking off JD at a family park, at least we did it late at night. So when I looked up and saw it, it was illuminated in one of those yellowish sodium lamps they use all over the city to try to cut down on light pollution. So it was…” He stops. Like he’s thinking. Like he’s picturing that golden monkey right now. Seeing it again. “It was like a halo around its head.”

  “Was it beautiful?”

  “No, Blue. The monkey was sick, I guess. It escaped while being transported to the medical facility and that’s how it got away and we found it in that tree.”

  “Oh.”

  “They said she had cancer and they were taking her to be euthanized, because they felt she was in a lot of pain.”

  My attention on his story is rapt. I cannot look away even if I wanted to. “What did you say?”

  “What do you think I said?” His eyes search mine for a moment. And then he breathes out a long breath. “They said she was not worth saving. The treatment would be long and the odds were not good. It was expensive.” He shrugs. “So JD and I adopted the golden monkey. We donated a hundred thousand dollars to save her and buy some new machine they needed for… something. I don’t know what.”

  “Did she live?”

  “Well, first they had to catch her. She was up in a tree. She was in pain. She was not at all interested in coming down. No amount of food could coax her. They had a net and they had her keeper calling to her. But she just clung to that branch high up in the tree for dear life.”

  He looks at me and his expression softens again. I have a bad feeling about this story. “She died, didn’t she?”

  “She came down, but not until the sun came up. She climbed down. So very slowly. She was in a lot of pain. But she came down and she wrapped her little monkey hands around that handler’s arm and… gave in.”

  “She died,” I say without emotion.

  “No, Blue. She gave in to us.”

  I can’t breathe.

  “She gave in to what we were offering. She let us help her. And yeah, it involved a lot of things that made her sick, and uncomfortable, and probably wishing she was dead. But she trusted us to save her.”

  “Did you? Save her?”

  “She’s still alive today. No one thought she’d make it. And fuck, after the first night, JD and I were kicking ourselves for offering up that money. We had it, but money was new for us back then. We were pulling it in, and the payoffs were big. But it still felt like a dream. Like it wasn’t real. So the money meant more back then than it does now.”

  “That just means it was a bigger sacrifice to give it over.”

  He nods. “Yeah. I know. But even though it’s not such a risk for us to help like that now, it’s still a genuine offer.”

  “We’re not talking about a monkey, are we?”

  He shrugs.

  “You made that all up, didn’t you?”

  “Her name is Ophelia. I’ll take you to see her one day.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “Why do you need help?”

  I shake my head at him.

  “Well, when you can admit that to me, I’ll tell you why we’re helping you.”

  And then he throws the covers off and swings his legs out of bed. He’s naked, as am I, but after that conversation it feels… different. I watch him walk around the bed, turning my body to see him as he comes over to the other side and picks up his pants. His dick is erect and he looks at me as he handles it, tucking it inside his jeans, but only drawing up the zipper halfway and leaving the button undone. “You’re not the monkey in that story, Blue. JD is.”

  And then he walks out of the bedroom, leaving me alone. And even though five minutes ago, all I wanted was for these two strange men to let me work out my conflicted thoughts on my own, I feel lonely.

  And a little while later, as I work up my courage to get up and go talk to the man who told me a story, the man who wants me to tell him one, the front door slams again.

  I guess wishes do come true.

  I stop by a boutique on the mall and chat up the salesgirl about some clothes for Blue and then head over to the bus station.

  It always comes back to the bus station. I’m not sure why I look here first when I need to find JD, but this is where I end up. I sit on the concrete wall where he was sitting that night I got off the bus. High on something. Starving. Talking to a girl who wasn’t there.

  JD the junkie.

  Lots of people have asked me over the years why. Why him?

  But why not him? Why only help people who are good candidates? Why bother saving the dying monkey when there are so many more deserving animals?

  What does deserving even mean?

  The bus station is busy because it’s Monday morning. Most people are going to work, but this is my weekend. JD and I work Thursday through Sunday. If all goes well—and most weeks it does—we film Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and then I edit and deliver on Sunday.

  This week we have girls lined up for all three filming days. But that doesn’t mean they will show. I’m not sure why we’ve had such a rash of no-shows lately, but it’s getting old. I can’t wait to shed this business and move on.

  I spy a hooker I know coming out of the bus station and whistle. “Shadow
!” I wave her over.

  She takes a long drag on her smoke, probably wondering what I want. Maybe wondering if I’ll pay her to suck off JD. But we don’t do whores. They can’t pass the health tests.

  Shadow knows this, so that’s why she hesitates. I don’t want her for work, so I must want her for something else.

  She drops the cigarette and stubs it out with the toe of her four-inch heels, then waves back as she looks both ways and crosses the street. Her short skirt is gold and barely covers her ass, and her top is sleeveless and beaded with black and gold sequins. “I ain’t seen him,” she says as she steps up on the curb. “I know you only come here to look for JD and I ain’t seen him.”

  I nod. “OK. Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “Now wait, sugar. I said I ain’t seen him. But I heard something that you might find interesting.”

  I don’t bother being suspicious. Shadow wants a little bit of cash and truthfully, I’d have given it to her just for crossing the street. So I’ll take whatever she’s got. I grab a wad of bills from my pocket and count out three twenties. “Buy some breakfast, Shadow. You’re too skinny.”

  She smiles and I notice she’s missing a tooth. Not one right in front, but off to the side a little bit. “You always were a sweet talker, Ark.”

  I put my hands up like I’m guilty.

  “Anyways, I was just coming from Charlie’s and I overheard some men talking about you.”

  “Me?” Charlie is her pimp. Not some corner dude, either. A guy who knows his business.

  She pulls out another smoke and lights it up, taking her time with a long drag. “Uh-huh. Someone called in while I was talking to him. They tells him there’s a girl missing and do Charlie know anything about it. Then Charlie says talk to JD and Ark, because you keeps track of the street girls.”

  “Do you know who called him?” I ask, feigning disinterest.

  “Nah,” she says. “Charlie just hung up without saying names. But he was talking all polite and shit. So my intuition figures it was someone more important than him.”

  “OK. Well, thanks for that, Shadow. I guess he’ll get in contact with me if it’s important.”