Road Games Read online

  By the time I met Marlene, I’d stopped trying to find a steady girlfriend. I’d forgone any attempt at a serious acting career, studying to be a masseuse instead. Yet the twenty-minute rule was the most difficult to let go. I didn’t want it to be just one more of Los Angeles’s many broken promises, another glittery rhinestone-adorned carrot on the end of a fool’s gold stick.

  Marlene was a new client who lived out in Venice Beach. I made it to her house from my studio in Hollywood in a good fifty-five minutes flat. There was traffic, of course, and an injury accident, as reported over the radio. And the result was that I arrived half an hour late. The cottage sat on one of Venice’s quaint canals, but I couldn’t see the beauty of the location. Feeling sloppy and sweaty, I hefted my massage table through the tiny garden leading to the front door.

  “Oh, good, you’re pretty,” she said when she opened the door. The lie just rolled off my back. She was the one who deserved the compliment, a green-eyed minx with hair the color of an Irish setter and a cinnamon-freckled complexion. She was built small and lean but looked plenty strong, proving her strength when she tried to wrest the massage table out of my hands.

  “I can manage,” I told her, feeling breathless from being late, as if I’d run to her place rather than fought my way through traffic.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded.

  She led me through the house, which thankfully wasn’t decorated as so many homes are in LA, in virginal all-white that makes me feel nervous to even breathe hard for fear of depositing a bit of the famous LA smog on the pristine interior. These anal clients who live in their all-white homes either insist I remove my shoes at the door or else hand over those little blue paper booties doctors wear during operations. But Marlene’s place was wild, with splatters of paint on the walls, colorful metal license plates hammered directly into the giant wooden dining-room table, and clothes strewn everywhere. She had made no attempt to clean up, hadn’t even seemed to consider where I’d put the massage table.

  “How about here?” she asked, pointing to the wreck of her living room. The room contained two sliding glass doors, with a perfect view of the sun setting over the canal outside. Yet there was not even space for the two of us to stand side by side. “We’ll just shove all this…” She started pushing the coffee table, made of some antique-looking chest, against the battered black leather sofa. Then she dragged several big canvases toward the kitchen, a tiny room I could see through an open hatch in the wall. It looked as if she’d never washed a coffee cup in her life.

  “I have a show coming up,” she explained, not bragging or sounding the slightest bit self-conscious, just matter-of-fact. “Things get out of hand before any one of my exhibits. The whole place becomes my studio.”

  I nodded and helped her shove, then set up the table and turned my back, giving her the chance to undress without me staring. But Marlene didn’t seem to understand what I was doing. She moved around in front of me as if I’d been rude to turn my back on her, pulling off her white men’s shirt—once white, I should say, now decorated with various interesting splotches of color—and kicking off her ripped jeans, more holes by now than denim. “It’s next week,” she continued, stripping off her candy-striped panties. She had no bra on. No real need. She possessed mere handfuls of flesh for breasts. “That’s why I called you. Amanda Miller, the curator at the gallery, suggested I try to relax. And I’m lame at relaxing. I never got into that yoga craze, can’t stand Pilates.”

  I was liking her more by the second, and when she hopped up on the table, I found myself hoping for the first time ever that she would be one of those clients who talked, rather than one who slept. The girl was interesting and she didn’t seem phony in the slightest. Just the fact that she had proudly revealed her A-cup breasts in this world of silicone humps made me want to kiss her.

  No, that’s a lie.

  I’d wanted to kiss her since I’d first stepped over her threshold. There was something about the look in her lake green eyes, the humor in her slightly wicked smile that made me want to press my mouth to hers, to lick in a line down the hollow of her throat. To devour her whole, so that I could own what she was.

  To my great delight, she chattered throughout the entire massage. It was as if she’d never had a massage before, or as if she were simply getting a rubdown from a good friend. She didn’t seem to want to relax in the slightest, more concerned with helping me to do my job well. When I lifted her hand in mine, she raised her whole arm for me, and I had to tell her, “No, let me do the work. Let me position you,” and gently shake the limb until she let loose. And when I rubbed the palm of her hand, caressing and soothing, she tried to return the favor, her thumb pressing back into my own palm, sending a wash of heat cresting over me.

  Maybe she was stressed, but my fingers didn’t feel it. There were no knots to discover in her back, no tight spots to slide away. Regardless, I gave her my best work, and she cooed and sighed between discussion of her art and her travels, but as far as I could tell, she was as easygoing as a house cat whose sole job is to find the best sunbeam to sleep in.

  During the hour, she told me that she’d lived in the Real Venice—she said the words as if they were capped—and that she couldn’t imagine ever living too far from water. She explained that she’d moved to LA because her work was marketable, and that she herself was marketable, admitting that her looks played an equal part in the value of her artwork. She was honest and open and I drank in every word, only responding when she asked me a direct question.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Two years.”

  “You’re good.”

  I thanked her and tried hard to believe she wasn’t feeding me a lie.

  Although I listened carefully, I also found myself fantasizing through the massage, imagining that this was my cottage, that I could sit on the tiny deck every morning and drink my coffee, watching the sunlight shiver on the little canal. Or that this was our cottage, where I would give Marlene massages every morning and she would paint me when she was in the mood.

  “Your turn,” Marlene said evenly when I was finished.

  “My turn for what?” I’d been dreaming of what it would feel like to wake up at her side.

  “A massage. Hop up on the table.”

  I looked at her, incredulous. “I’m the masseuse,” I said, as if speaking to a child. Had she not understood what I was there for? She slipped off the table and pulled on her shirt and panties, leaving the jeans in their blue denim puddle on the floor. Then she scratched her chin and gazed at me with what I felt was an artist’s eye, and suddenly I felt as naked as she’d been only moments before.

  “But you look as if you could use a massage. In fact, you look as if you could use one even more than I did.”

  I hesitated. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Sure, I get those questions a lot from my friends, especially during a night out drinking: Don’t you ever fuck your clients? Haven’t you ever been offered an extra twenty for a hand job? The answers? No and yes. I’ve been offered but I haven’t accepted. The twenty for an extra? Seems low for a fistful of pleasure.

  “Come on,” she said. “Do you have somewhere to be?”

  “I’ve got another appointment at nine.” It was my turn to lie.

  “Give me twenty minutes.” And when I looked at her, eyebrows raised at the statement, she whispered, “You know the rule of twenty, don’t you? You can get anywhere you want to in twenty minutes.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  I shrugged. “Never worked for me.” That summed up LA in a heartbeat, didn’t it? None of the lies worked for me. I’d tried to buy into them, I’d done my best, and I’d ended up in a dark studio apartment with a view of a wall, a one-time walk-on part on an infomercial, and a reputation for always being late.

  “Try again,” she urged. “Believe it one more time.”

  I looked at her. G
od, she was pretty. Not LA pretty, but really pretty. She wasn’t like the ultra-young, ultra-chic, hipless starlets I saw every morning when I went down my street for coffee. She seemed—I fought for the word—real. And she seemed to really mean it about giving me a massage, straightening out the rumpled white sheets on my table, then crossing her arms over her chest and waiting for me to take off my clothes and hop on.

  I hesitated another moment, and she shot me this wiseass smile and turned around as I had done at the start of the job, offering me a bit of faux privacy. I say faux because now that the sun had set, the whole room was reflected in the glass windows. She would be able to see me undress whether she faced me or not.

  “What do you have to lose?” she asked, still keeping her back to me. I thought about that. Nothing, really. Or everything. If I let myself believe once more, put my heart out one more time, what would happen if this turned out to be just one more lie? That was easy to answer. I’d return to my depressing little hole in Hollywood and drink myself numb from my emergency bottle of JD.

  “Twenty minutes,” she cajoled, and I said to myself fuck it—and stripped. Off came my black drawstring pants, the tight black T-shirt. Down came my dark hair. I climbed onto the massage table and slipped under the sheet, reveling in the warmth left from her body moments before.

  And as soon as her fingers touched me, I was gone.

  I’ve never been a fan of receiving massages. I know that sounds strange coming from a professional masseuse, but I’ve always been the one to offer the back rubs, to stroke the sore muscles, to ease away the aches and pains. But Marlene was good. She knew instinctively how hard to press, not tickling, not messing around. Her fingers were warm and soft, and she slid them under my back and rotated in gentle circles, making the stress of not just my day, but my world fade away.

  When she told me to roll over, I did so automatically, feeling intense pleasure as her hands smoothed over my back and down my legs. Feeling even more pleasure when she started to work her way back up from my feet, lingering at the insides of my thighs. Oh, so this was going to be one of those massages—at least, I hoped like hell it would be. When her fingertips ever so lightly brushed my pussy, I almost came. I trembled on the table, and she pulled back, but I rolled over and looked at her, the sheet falling away.

  “Did I go too far?”

  I shook my head. “Not far enough.”

  “We’ve still got five minutes,” she said, glancing at the large round clock over the mantel.

  I looked over as well. The clock had been in the same position since I’d arrived. Clearly, it was broken.

  “Back down,” she instructed, and I obeyed, feeling her climb onto the table with me, feeling her mouth against my pussy, her fingertips spreading apart my nether lips as her tongue sought out my clit.

  I groaned and raised my hips as her tongue made circuitous routes around that pulsing source of pleasure. She was an ace driver. She knew just the road to take to get me off. I could feel her long, soft hair tickling my skin, could feel her smooth body against my legs, and I realized that she’d pulled her shirt back off and lost the panties, understood that we were both naked on my padded blue table, and even though I knew the thing could handle nearly four hundred pounds—I do occasionally massage the former football player—there suddenly wasn’t enough room.

  Hating to break the contact, I pushed her back and said, “Bed?”

  She gave me an embarrassed look. “I sleep on the couch.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  She slid off the table and I followed her naked down the hall to the bedroom, which had been transformed into a studio, covered with canvases and drop cloths and paint. So back we went, this time all the way through the house to the sliding glass doors. She opened them, and out we stood, neither of us caring what anyone else might think. She brought one of my sheets with us and spread it out on the wooden dock that led right to the canal. And then we were on it, and we were fucking. Fucking for real. Fingers and tongues and fists. I couldn’t contain myself. The way I’d touched her before was as a professional. Now I touched her as a lover.

  I didn’t use the moves I’d learned in school. I used the moves I had wanted to use from the moment she’d opened the door. Making her stand up in front of me as I pressed my mouth to her cunt. Making her hold on to my shoulders for support as I nipped and bit my way to the center of her body. She drew her nails dangerously along my naked skin, then held on tight, coming like the relaxed cat I’d imagined during the massage, purring as I lapped at her clit, lapped and licked until the sweet cream spilled forth, until she could take no more, falling to her knees and curling into my arms to let me hold her.

  And then it was my turn and she seemed to grow larger, to take up more space as she held me down on the tiny dock, wanting me on my stomach, one hand underneath my body, rhythmically pinching my clit, the other smacking my ass over and over, with just the force, just the heat, I craved. I don’t know how she knew I’d like that, or that I needed that sort of touch. She just knew.

  When I came, she moved her body so that she could press her mouth to mine, and it was as if she were drinking in my pleasure. Absorbing my moans and gasps into her own sultry body. Taking them for herself.

  “Was that for being late?” I asked softly as I rubbed my sore ass. She wrapped us up in the sheet together and we stared out at the glittering water of the canal.

  “No,” she said, laughing. “That was for not believing.”

  “Not believing?”

  “In anything. You let LA get under your skin. You can’t do that. You have to hold tight to what you know. And you have to believe.”

  So I guess I was wrong.

  I guess you can get anywhere you want in twenty minutes.

  As long as you know where it is that you truly want to go.

  Off the Menu

  Kim Baldwin

  First off, let me say I didn’t deliberately leave my umbrella behind. Honest. Amsterdam is just so damn capricious, rain one minute and sun the next, that it’s easy to forget what the weather was like when you enter a place because it is almost always different by the time you leave. And I freely admit I’m sometimes forgetful, but it’s one of my charms.

  I go to Amsterdam a lot. It’s one of my favorite cities, with its picturesque canals and refreshingly tolerant attitude about everything. And then there’s the food. There are a thousand restaurants in and around the city, so there is always a new gem to discover whenever and wherever you get hungry. Indian, Greek, Spanish, Indonesian, Tibetan even—you name it, it’s there.

  On this particular night, my stomach began to growl as I biked past a little Thai place. It was Wednesday, always a slow night out anyway, and November, not the high season for tourism with its breezy cool temperatures and bone-chilling rains. So I wasn’t too surprised to find only one couple occupying the ten or so booths, and they were on their coffee and dessert.

  It had great ambience, the dark wood pub-style booths all plushly padded with leather the color of mahogany and subdued lighting provided by candles and tasteful wall sconces in an art deco style. Though the music had a definite Asian flavor, it was more new age symphonic than native folk tune—smooth and sensual. Oh, yes. For atmosphere, I gave it an A+.

  One thing you risk in the tiny neighborhood eateries, though—once in a while, you run into the odd exception to the rule in Holland. No one speaks English. In cases like that, there are usually a lot of charades and pointing to other people’s plates. And of course I hope I can recognize a few words off the menu from previous forays into ethnic places. But yeah, I’ve made a few mistakes guessing and ended up with something that is disconcertingly unfamiliar. I still wonder what the meat was under that odd-tasting gravy I had in Nicosia.

  I knew at once I was in for a challenge in this place. A frantically energetic young man of about twenty-two welcomed me in fractured Dutch and gestured for me to sit anywhere, then brought water and a menu.
The latter was entirely in Thai characters and Dutch. By the time I had glanced through it thoroughly, seeking something vaguely familiar and finding nothing of the sort, the other diners had departed and only the waiter and I were left.

  I pointed to an entree on the menu. He gestured indecipherably, muttered something in Thai, then Dutch. I pointed to another entree, with the same result. Smiling, he put up a hand to stop further questions and disappeared into the back. Soon after, she appeared.

  She was of average height and rather slight of build, but her arms and shoulders said she worked for a living, really worked—physical labor, and lots of it. Or she had a passion for working out, or a hobby that demanded or developed impressive upper-body conditioning. Her long-sleeved navy T-shirt and blue jeans hugged her body like they were sculpted onto her.

  She had skin the color of honey, short black hair, and warm, nut-brown eyes that shone with mischief no matter what else her expression revealed. At the moment, she looked…well, appreciative, as she crossed the room, her open appraisal of me from head to foot wonderfully disquieting.

  She stopped beside my table and grinned down at me. “Welcome. I understand you have need of my services.”

  She spoke English with a British accent and her voice was honey-toned, too. Smooth, slow, and in a lower register than I would have imagined. I wanted it to be the flirtation it sounded like. Seemed so, from her very direct eye contact. Regardless of whether she was serious or playing, I wanted to play along. “I sure won’t disagree with that.”

  “If you will put yourself in my hands, I promise you won’t be disappointed.” She laughed softly.

  “You’ve certainly whetted my appetite,” I replied, taking a long, appreciative look at her, just as she had with me. Up close her body was even more impressive. Martial arts, maybe, I thought. She also had a kind of graceful power in the way she moved and stood, and in the quiet, confident way she spoke.

  “How hot can you take it?” Her smile crooked to one side as she tried not to laugh.