Ken Goldman

Skin Flick

They met on midtown Manhattan barstools inside a crowded 5th Avenue pub. She exchanged ninety minutes’ worth of the requisite loungespeak with him over the several white wine spritzers customary for the Friday night ritual. When the time felt right he hailed a taxi to take them uptown, escorting her into his Park Avenue walkup where the young attorney went belly-on with the girl for over an hour. 

Although one night stands were quickly becoming anachronisms, tonight fortune had smiled on Gittleman & Silvestri’s star player. A small part of that fortune probably had hinged on the photo which had recently appeared in the Business section of the Sunday Times above a caption listing the man’s name and credentials, a fact not lost among the bistro’s more aspiring female patrons. 

Another evening spent doing the bedspring hula was not a bad way to pass a wintry midnight. Still, Vincent felt the evening called for a little more creativity on his part than he had thus far demonstrated during their short time together.

***

At first Vincent did not believe Moira would  go for his idea, especially not this quickly.  But neither had he pictured himself sharing the covers of his brass bed alongside the new paralegal from Shengold and Roth three hours after they had exchanged introductions at Marabella’s Alibi Tavern. Early impressions made from a bar stool’s perspective were not always accurate given the sexual paranoia of the 90’s, but black spandex tells no lies. 

Moira had proved herself as enigmatic as a cheerleader with a bullwhip, even enthusiastically assisting him when he slipped the condom on. The raven-haired stranger gave him a surprising E-ticket ride without the traditional waiting period. Considering the evening’s circumstances the suggestion Vincent contemplated sharing with her did not seem so out of line as it would have an hour earlier.

Typically, serendipitous sex amounted to little more than masturbating with a partner. But there seemed a rhythm to his encounter with Moira that went beyond sexual parameters. From the get-go the woman seemed completely in sync almost as if she had known him, and he enjoyed a good verbal sparring partner as much as he did an ebullient companion beneath his sheets. Still, holding her in his arms during those disquieting moments after such cavalier fucking felt vaguely ridiculous. He did not even know the woman’s last name.  Maybe she had told him back at Marabella’s, but if she had he didn’t remember it. His mind had  been on other things, specifically on how much he would enjoy wearing Moira’s long legs around his neck.  The two lay beneath the cool sheets in a gray silence lasting the entire length of Vincent’s Marlboro. 

“You know, the first person who speaks after making love usually says something stupid.” She slid closer to him. “Do you feel like saying something stupid, Vincent?”

He touched her cheek, turning her face toward his so he could look into her eyes.  The gesture seemed almost tender, a strange counterpoint to what he was thinking.

“Can I be honest?”  

“Oh fuck. Is your next sentence going to end with the words ‘genital warts’ or ‘blood test’?”   

He stopped her question with a finger to her lips, offering his most reassuring smile. “I’ve had my shots, okay? It’s just that I don’t often make a suggestion like this.  So if you plan on turning indignant and smacking the shit out of me, tell me now and I can spare myself a lot of embarrassment, all right?”

Moira returned his smile, indicating that she might consider sharing this diversion. “Smacking the shit out of you?  Is that what you’re into?”

An audacious little piece of ass as well as an excellent lay. Vincent liked her. He pulled himself from the bed.

“We can negotiate that part later.” Slipping into his jockey briefs he stepped inside the walk-in closet and returned holding a small video camera. “What I was thinking we might try is a little home movie.  Watta ya say, kid? Ya wanna be a star?”   

Staring at the camcorder she giggled, but her twisted grin revealed nothing of the cogs turning inside the young woman’s head. 

 Moira climbed from the bed and walked to Vincent without covering her nakedness as so many women did on first nights. She squeezed her breasts into his ribs, brushing her lips against his ear while flicking her tongue at it with soft butterfly kisses. When she spoke he felt her warm breath heat his skin.

“That Sony’s got video stabilization, I hope. You know, in the event of bumps or  knocks on this casting couch of yours, that sort of thing?  Wouldn’t want that picture out of focus when you whack off to your video memorabilia, would you, Cecil B.?”  

Vincent smiled, knowing that beneath their repartee Moira had discerned the uneasy demons lurking behind his pig-in-shit expression. Most nights the space alongside him in this bed remained empty, and even a videotaped  remembrance of a warm body seemed better than that empty space. In place of the touch of a woman’s flesh an inventive home video would see Vincent through those nights spent alone. The adage about Nature abhorring a vacuum proved especially true for single men.  Whenever a woman’s hand was unavailable, there was always his own.

Moira paused, contorting her face in mock concentration while she pretended to consider his suggestion.  She was toying with him, but he expected that much. Women enjoyed doing that, as if false modesty were a coy remnant from some earlier age as tight-assed as the new millenium was in danger of becoming.  Finally she answered, “Sure. Why not?  But I’ve got a suggestion too. You want to set up that fancy shutter box while I share it with you?”

She did not have to ask him twice. He pulled a tripod from the closet and placed it beside the bed before the woman might have second thoughts. When he rejoined her Moira was holding her nylons balled in her hands.

“You ever play blind man’s bluff?” she asked, tugging at the sheer material  like a child twisting a long strand of taffy, hiding half her face demurely behind the extended nylon. 

“Not since I was a kid.”

“Well, Vincent, tonight you get to be a kid again.  Shut your eyes.”

Like an obedient child, he did just that. He knew this game, and playing it was going to make for one hell of a mind fucking video.

She tied the stocking securely around his face, covering his eyes and wrenching the fabric so tightly his temples throbbed.  He forced himself not to wince with the sharp pain.

Blinded, he heard the young woman sifting through her hand bag for whatever paraphernalia she had brought along.  Some object jingled and snapped, something metallic sounding like locks twice being opened and clicked shut again. In workmanlike fashion the woman secured his wrists to the supports of the beds brass head rest. She had handcuffed him, and the cuffs were strong suckers from what he could tell. Unable to pull free he yanked himself into a clumsy sitting position, preparing himself for a whole lot more action than, up to this moment,  he would have had any right to expect.

“I’m guessing you’ve done this before,” he said.

“Oh yes. That I have. Wipe that smile off your face, please, or I might become very cross with you.”

“The stocking’s a little tight. Could you loosen it a little?”

“I could. But no. I won’t. You don’t want to spoil the surprise I have planned for you, do you?” She kissed his mouth hard,  her tongue playing hide-and-seek with his. Pulling away she shoved him into the mattress so abruptly he lost his breath. While he gulped for air she tore his jockey briefs from under him. He lay twisting naked before her.

Vincent felt the sudden rash of a blush heat his face.  The reaction to his complete vulnerability first startled, then fascinated him.

“Got you where I want you, huh, Vincent?  Excuse me for just a moment, will you, sweet cakes? I’ve some business to attend to.”  

A moment later Moira’s voice came from what sounded like the kitchen. “Just getting a few things I may be needing. Don’t miss me too much.”  Drawers opened and slammed shut as if the woman were searching for something, but Vincent could not imagine what.

 …or maybe he could . 

“Moira?”

Nothing. Not a word.

“What the fuck–?”  

In the momentary silence a disquieting thought occurred to him. Had he been scammed? Was this woman playing him for a sucker,  seducing him just to rip him off and leave his sorry ass tied here while she ransacked his apartment?  Bar sluts stung wealthy schmucks all the time as a way of life. Christ, some made a living of it. He probably didn’t even know this woman’s real name. Maybe she had lied to him about working for Shengold and Roth too. How could he have been such a stupid shit not to see this coming? 

He pulled at the cuffs that bound his hands to the posts, feeling the flesh of his wrists chafe against the tight metal shackles that scraped harshly against the brass supports. Moira had done a damned good job making certain he could not pull himself free. She was probably robbing him blind right now.

No, not blind.  

Blindfolded.

“Hey!  Come on, Moira! Let me in on it, will you?”

Stupid… Stupid… 

The attorney inside his brain told him that something didn’t add up. There were easier ways to pull this off besides fucking him, and what would the woman hope to find in his kitchen anyway?  Maybe this scenario was part of her game, meant to keep him anxious inside his darkness, intended to make him feel weak and vulnerable. It was a power thing, probably rooted in dated buzz words like penis envy. Moira needed this master/slave bullshit to get herself off.  That had to be it. 

 Had to… 

As silently as a panther she had returned to him. Probably she had been standing aside for a minute or two watching him squirm, savoring the moment.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” she said in a throaty whisper that was not an altogether poor imitation of Gloria Swanson. “I turned the camera on, okay?”

Before Vincent could respond she pressed her mouth against his with such breathy force the woman could have been administering CPR.  She smeared his face with wet kisses as if tasting him, sucking and biting at his flesh as she progressed slowly down his neck, kneading his chest with her sharp nails as her tongue slid south in long serpentine streaks. Stopping at his inner thigh she teased him with her fingertips, thumping on his skin, then scratching at it.  He could not tell if she had drawn blood, but he would not be surprised if she had.

“What were you looking for in my kitchen?” he finally managed, aware his voice had lost its wise ass edge.

“Nuh huh.”  

Her mouth curled into a smile as her lips touched his warming inner thigh, and he could not help smiling too. Moira’s open mouth continued its voyage upward. Her lips airbrushed his cock, then took it slowly inside her mouth while her tongue did a mad dance around it.

“Christ, that feels so good–”  

The woman stopped his words by touching his lips with cold fingertips.

“Don’t speak.”   

He felt a  sudden freezing wetness between his legs and recognized at once what the woman had taken from his kitchen.  Moira had slipped ice cubes into her mouth, and Vincent throbbed and swelled with each flick of her chilled tongue. Something bestial reawakened from deep inside him, some ravenous and unwieldy ogre taking its commands from the blood-gorged member pulsating between his legs. Forcing himself to remain silent he concentrated instead on the soft skimming of the woman’s cold lips touching his balls with quick angel kisses. In his mind’s eye he pictured Moira’s lips blue with the icy chill of the cubes warming to the hot flesh of his prick, and he thrust himself at her so she could take him full into her mouth.  

She did. Moira filled her throat with him, licking and biting at his cock like an insatiable animal finally come to feed. Her mouth became a living thing, moving in a rhythmic stop-action motion strobing inside his brain. He wanted to break free of the blindfold and cuffs, to tear his fingers inside his tormentor’s snapping pussy and to fist fuck her raw, then to dine on Moira’s dripping cunt until she begged that he shove himself inside her. In the same moment he almost spilled the volcanic ash bubbling within his groin, she stopped herself cold.

“Do you want to fuck me, Vincent?”

“Yes.”

“Let me hear you say it.  Tell me how much you want to fuck me…”

“I want to fuck you.”

“How  much,  damn you! Tell me how  much  you want to fuck me!” 

She scattered a handful of ice cubes between his legs. The freezing sensation first numbed then excited him while she lapped at the icy puddles in his crotch like a thirsty cat. Vincent’s body twitched and heaved almost against his will.

“I want to fuck you more than anything Ive ever wanted! I want to fuck you in your mouth, in your cunt, in your ass. I want to fuck you six ways from Sunday!  I want to fuck you until your goddamned eyeballs explode!”  

 “Do it!”  she screamed at him, sitting on his chest and pushing her damp vagina into his mouth.

“My hands?” he asked, his voice pleading like a horny teenager’s. “Will you free my hands so I can touch your tits?”

She slapped him open-palmed across his face, slamming him so hard  his front teeth came down painfully on his tongue.  He tasted his own blood.

“No pleasure without pain, you bastard! Do as I tell you!”  

And now her cunt came alive too. It rose and fell on his mouth, and Moira pressed herself so hard against his face he almost could not breathe. Despite the blood inside his mouth he crammed his tongue into her, eating her while grotesque animal noises escaped from deep inside his throat, eating every inch from inside the woman’s vagina until his jaw throbbed with flashes of sharp pain.

She took his cock into her hands sucking it more vigorously than before, almost chewing on it. Vincent pictured his own blood dripping from her teeth into the reddened flesh surrounding his balls, blood she had swilled from his torn skin. Still he engorged inside the woman’s mouth.  She lifted herself on him, and as he slid himself inside his cock grow even harder.  

Straddling him, she leaned and arched her back as if reaching for something above her, then heaved and swelled like an ocean wave breaking on him. The release of hot semen seared through his prick as if he had ejaculated battery acid.

He screamed.  He had to scream. And just as quickly he stopped.

Because something hit his head hard…  

Vincent had only enough time to feel the thick pain explode in his temple.  He passed out that moment into a darkness blacker than what lay behind the woman’s nylon stocking that he still wore tied to his face.

***

Damn. 

Vincent’s head hurt. It hurt bad. He rubbed his temples to soothe the throbbing of the turbojet engines revving inside his brain. It took a moment for the realization to hit him.

 My hands are free!  

When he pulled the nylon stocking from his face the burst of sunlight almost blinded him. Squinting through the mixture of pain and daylight, he looked at his digital clock on the night stand. It was 10:32 a.m.  

 …and the girl was gone. 

Maybe he had been right about that harpy all along, and he was not sorry Moira had left. There certainly was no kick in waking up with the Marquis de Sade. Pulling himself from bed he stepped on the cracked remains of what had been his Sony camcorder. She must have used the video camera to bludgeon him.

“Crazy bitch,” he muttered.

He checked his belongings on the bureau.  The Rolex remained where he had left it and seventy-three dollars lay untouched inside his alligator wallet. At least the woman hadn’t taken anything expensive that he could tell. The videotape cartridge of last night’s performance lay in the middle of the bureau as if Moira had cleared a space for it. Vincent knew he must look like shit. He stared into the wall mirror to verify it.

Moira had smeared four words in blood red lipstick on the glass:

PLAY THE TAPE, VINCENT

He felt genuinely curious now.  Something seemed very squirrely about all of this.  He snapped the video cassette into his VCR and sat on the edge of his bed to watch the Toshiba’s monitor.

Moira came on screen standing in his kitchen. She wore the black spandex mini and was still combing her hair when the picture came on.

What the hell is she do–? 

He leaned forward while she spoke to him with words uttered the night before.

“Hello, Vincent. You couldn’t videotape this particular scene with me because at the moment you’re chained to your bed post waiting for me. And I’ll bet while watching this you’re still wondering, ‘Now just what the fuck was that lunatic bimbette doing in my kitchen making such a racket?’” She pulled a  drawer open and quickly slammed it shut, opening it again to rattle the contents. “See, I didn’t want you to hear what I was really doing in here when I let a very special guest into your apartment. Damned clever of me, wouldn’t you agree, Vincent?”

He scratched his head. The woman was making no sense. Clearly she had come more unzipped than he had imagined.

He heard his own voice on the videotape call to her from the bedroom.

“Moira?” 

On screen, Moira smiled.

“You were getting pretty antsy all chained up in there, weren’t you, sweet cakes? I don’t have very much time, so I guess I should explain what–”

He heard himself on the tape interrupt her again.

“Hey!  Come on, Moira! Let me in on it, will you?”  

“That I will, Vincent.  That I most certainly will,” the woman said directly into the camera. “Tell me, Vincent. Have you asked yourself who’s been holding this expensive Sony while I’ve been making my little speech?”

Almost answering her aloud he felt like an idiot because the thought had not even occurred to him.

The video camera jiggled for a moment, and Moira’s face lost its clarity. The camcorder exchanged hands and now Moira was holding it. The automatic focus kicked in. Once it did, Vincent’s mouth came open as if his jaw had dropped a screw.  

Some other woman was staring at him from the television’s screen. She seemed a sickly imitation of Moira, and her emaciated image roused something sinister inside the shadowy caverns of Vincent’s psyche as a distant memory struggled to be reborn. 

“Vincent, meet my sister. You see, she followed that taxi we took here tonight. Look hard at her. I imagine the family resemblance might be difficult to spot now. But you already know her name.  Think back a few years. You know my big sister, don’t you?” Moira leaned closer to the camera lens. “You  do  know her, don’t you, Vincent?”  

He formed the name on his tongue without uttering a sound. 

“See… Seena…”   

 But the ashen faced woman staring back from the television screen was nothing like the Seena he remembered. 

“I know I’m not very pretty to look at, Vincent,” the woman said in a loathsome mimicry of her sister’s voice. “But you once thought I was. During our one night together you told me I was the most beautiful woman you had ever seen. Is that what you tell all your women? Is that how you get them into that big brass bed of yours?”

Moira zoomed in for a close-up of Seena, enabling Vincent to take a more intimate look at the woman whose ulcerous skin hung in fleshy tatters from her face like a ruined patchquilt. He had to force himself to look at the screen. 

“It’s syphilis, Vincent. The final stages of venereal disease and extremely contagious, caught during one intoxicating evening back in those decadent 80’s when safe sex wasn’t even a part of a man’s vocabulary. Certainly it wasn’t a part of yours. But you always had Lady Luck in your corner, didn’t you? Yours was a dormant form of the spirochete, making you only a delivery boy for the bug, so to speak. Lucky you. That’s what my doctors told me can happen, since you don’t appear to have been infected. Me, I wasn’t so lucky, as you can see for yourself.”  

The picture jiggled as Seena reached to her sister for the camera. Moira came on the screen again while putting on her coat.

“But that doesn’t mean Seena can’t return the favor with some of those micro-organisms you were so willing to share with the women in your life, Vincent. Still feeling lucky enough to roll those dice again? No pleasure without pain. Remember?” 

Moira’s smile evaporated. She finished buttoning her coat and walked out, closing the door very gently behind her. Vincent understood why.

He sprang from the mattress to watch close-up while the videotape’s prologue played out. But already he knew where the rest of the previous night’s documentary was heading.  Elbowing the beads of sweat from his forehead he watched the remainder of the recorded drama unfold on the screen.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,”  the bony creature on the television’s monitor joked to the blindfolded man handcuffed to the brass posts. 

And Vincent gagged as he watched Seena crawl naked into his bed…