“It’s no use going back to yesterday,
because I was a different person then.”
―Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Dare
“ . . . Being rude, pushing people out of your way, is probably who you are—either that or who you’ve become.”
I couldn’t remember the last time someone called me on my shit. Well, that’s not entirely true. Ingrid certainly laid me out, almost daily, but she was also a woman who had not one shred of interest in my cock or my wallet.
The ones who did never put me in my place.
The kicker was, instead of being pissed, I was intrigued. Her words were running through my damn mind on a continuous loop.
Fuck, why didn’t I get her name?
I was finally in the cab, on my way to somewhere I didn’t want to go. I stretched my legs out, until my foot hit something soft and bulky. I leaned over to discover an oversized leather purse, partially wedged under the passenger seat.
Two scenarios crashed through my brain at the exact same time: (1) It’s a bomb and this was how I was going to bite it, or (2) the purse belongs to either Ms. Dixie or her sister.
My pulse quickened, just from the hope the bag belonged to the girl whose bee-stung, pink mouth was now playing the starring role in my latest fantasies. If she was like most women, she would have a ridiculous amount of crap in this bag—and I was sure as shit hoping she did so I could find out more about her.
Her name would be the perfect start.
I pulled on the end of my beard, thinking how much I valued my privacy. I would understand if she was the same, which meant I should just look for her ID and hand it off to Ingrid. Let her handle the rest.
But that would mean I would never know much about her. I’d be no better off than I am now—another asshole with a hard on who did nothing about it.
Nope, not gonna happen.
No way.
If this was her bag and she had been careless enough to leave it behind—in a New York City cab of all places—then I had every right to go spelunking through her possessions.
“Fuck it,” I mumbled to myself, and I hoisted the bag onto my lap.
I released the zipper and peered inside.
Oh, there was a bomb in there all right, but it wasn’t the kind I was expecting. Almost hidden, I spotted a hot pink, crushed velvet, drawstring bag, with a logo I’d recognize anywhere: one of New York’s most popular sex novelty stores.
Which meant anything—and I mean anything—could be inside her little pink bag of tricks, assuming it belonged to my Southern girl.
Until I knew exactly who owned this purse, I wasn’t going to loosen that drawstring. Rummaging through this woman’s bag was a task that would require proper attention—one I planned on giving one hundred percent of my focus. I took out my phone and made a call.
“Hey, it’s me. Yeah, postpone my meeting and reschedule for this evening. In fact, clear the rest of my day.”
“Are you sure?” Ingrid asked.
“They want me. I don’t need them,” I reminded her. “Just say I secured a reservation for that restaurant everyone keeps talking about . . . Christ, I can’t remember the name.”
“You don’t mean Protzig, do you?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I know for a fact they’ve been trying to get in there for months now, with no luck. Then call over there and make the res.”
“Dude, that’s the most in-demand restaurant in the city right now.”
“Well then, I guess you’ve been rewarded with your first challenge of the day,” I said.
“That’s quite the inspirational speech, chief. Remind me to include it in the montage for your memorial service someday.”
Being rude, pushing people out of your way, is probably who you are—either that or who you’ve become.
I couldn’t get that brunette spitfire out of my head. She was right. I had turned into a self-centered prick. In fairness, I was never the ‘nice’ guy. I had almost zero tolerance for bullshit and I wanted everything to happen yesterday, but that came with my New York birth certificate.
I expelled a harsh breath. “If anyone can do it, you can, Ingrid. I honestly don’t know what I would do without you. You’re the shit.”
There was a long pause. “Hey, you still there?” I asked.
“That’s the first time, in almost a year, you’ve given me a compliment.”
Shit, had it been a year already? I really was an asshole.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got this,” she added.
I thanked her and hung up, then gave the cabbie the address for the studio.
There were a million possessions to explore, but first I needed to ensure it all belonged to the right woman. I grabbed the phone inside the bag and hit the home button, but unfortunately, it was password protected.
“Smart girl,” I murmured. Fortunately though, her screensaver had a photo of her and three other women with their arms around each other, clearly in the middle of sharing something hilarious because all of them were laughing. I felt an unexpected stab of jealousy. I couldn’t remember the last time I had that good a time, really letting it all hang out.
Unfortunately, her sister was also in the picture, so there was no way to know which one owned the phone. I tossed it back and started searching. There was some make up, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, a lot of Uniball pens and a couple boxes of those nuclear-strength ginger-flavored mints.
I finally found her wallet, and there it was: a school ID with her photo.
Alice Elizabeth Leighton
Doctoral Candidate, Clinical Psychology/Human Sexuality Studies
Hudson University
Student # 837462
Jackpot, it’s her.
And holy shit, she studied sex. I didn’t want to sound like some nineteen-year-old frat boy, but fuck, that was hot. I couldn’t help but feel a rush of blood leave my brain and rush straight to my dick, with the fantasy of her as the naughty professor in a short-as-hell plaid skirt and a white, button-down top, keeping me after school to have her way with me.
Only problem with my fantasy is that the girl in real life wanted nothing to do with me. She wouldn’t even give me her name. But there had been heat between us, until she figured out I was a selfish asshole and blew me off.
Alice had my number in less than five minutes.
She had balls for telling me off, and self-respect for walking away. And for the first time in a really long time, I wanted to prove I was worth someone’s time, versus what I usually did—try to make a woman prove she was worth mine.
Guess I’m going to have to work a little to get in there.
This will be good for me, I thought. When was the last time I actually had to exert any real effort to get a woman into bed? Although, after what happened, I hadn’t had anyone in my bed for over a year. I hadn’t seen the point and, besides, it had always come easy.
Too easy.
There she was in her ID photo, the perfect picture of that Cheshire grin in the palm of my hand. She had her glossy dark, bourbon-colored hair twisted into one of those messy buns on top of her head, with glasses perched on the tip of her nose. The only thing missing was a pencil behind her ear. She was every bit the graduate student, intellectual and adorable all at once.
Now that I was sure this monstrosity of a purse was hers, I was going to enjoy exploring the shit out of it and I had no intention of playing fair.
Fuck that.
I wanted this woman.
She had a couple of concrete blocks posing as textbooks in there. The first one was Obeying the Master: Evolution of Human Sexuality in the Kink Community. Man, that’s a hot title. But after thumbing through a few pages, I laughed to myself, because leave it to a bunch of tight-assed academics to make a topic like kinky sex read like stereo instructions.
The other one wasn’t any more interesting. Pity. I was always up for learning something new.
She had a lined, spiral notebook in there too, with a shit-ton of sex info, citing trends and statistics in the U.S. and worldwide, along with some interesting commentary of her own. Alice may be a good lil’ grad student, but she was no bloodless academic. Just looking through the margins, I could tell she had a fire in her belly that was anything but textbook.
“Hey buddy, ride’s over,” the cabbie said over his shoulder.
“Oh right,” I glanced at the meter and gave the guy a fifty. “Keep the change.”
The cabbie kept thanking me, which always made me uncomfortable, so I pushed out fast. I shoved the notebook back in and cradled the bag under my arm. I knew I was demonstrating a level of weirdness, even for me, but I didn’t want anyone even looking at her bag. I wanted to be the only one who got the chance to explore what was inside Alice’s head.
Being raised by a single mom, I knew a woman’s purse wasn’t just someplace to keep her shit together. It was a small, portable caravan of her life with everything she held important, like a tangible, tactile diary.
Of course, I made a living, a really good one, out of finding meaning in ordinary objects, of taking the discarded and transforming them into something new. So there was a strong possibility I was building up this impromptu scavenger hunt, and this woman, into way more than I should. She sure as hell was beautiful, and having a backbone made her even more captivating, especially when I thought about . . . well, the shit I tried not thinking about anymore.
Because thinking about what happened has never made the present any better and I haven’t found anything close to an answer. Maybe not getting an answer to the countless pleas to any higher power that would listen was the universe’s way of telling me I didn’t deserve a reprieve—getting no answer was my punishment for playing God.
I shook my head, physically trying to rid myself of that train wreck. For now, I wanted to shut myself off from the world and get to know this woman.
As soon as I walked into the studio, I spotted Ingrid standing over one of her canvases, placed on the floor in front of her. Rail thin, she was wearing her usual uniform of jean shorts over ripped black tights, swimming in an oversized sweatshirt, with her Doc Martens and a beanie covering her electric blue hair.
“Everything taken care of?” I saddled up next to her, studying her progress.
“Yeah, total cake,” she answered without losing focus on her painting. “Maybe someday it’ll sink in that your name is like a Wonka golden ticket.”
“Still?
She met my gaze, cocking one brow straight up like a super villain. “Hells yeah. In fact,” she turned, reaching over to her desk, grabbing a message slip, “here’s another one for your collage. It’s a beauty.”
Confirmed dinner for three, 8:30pm. Make sure to ask for Tiffany. She’s the VIP liaison. Her personal cell is 917.555.0439 if you need her before or after your reservation.
She also asked if you were ‘involved’ and what you liked in a woman.
PS: I should get a raise for having to deal with this shit.
PPS: The feminist revolution wept today. It was a long, ugly cry.
I let out a sound between a laugh and a bark.
“How did you answer this time?”
Being my assistant for so long, she was asked on a consistent basis if we were together or whom else I may be fucking. In the beginning she’d just roll her eyes, but once my career took off, she had a list of retorts at the ready.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I went for truth this time. I told her I was a gold star, Chapstick lesbian who’d rock her world more than you ever could. That seemed to shut her up.”
I put out my fist, which she bumped back without even having to look up from her work.
“Nice,” I said, handing the slip back. “Just mark out the contact info and put it with the others.”
“Will do,” she said as she shoved it into her pocket. “Got enough yet?”
“Probably, but it’s always good to have extras.”
I was currently working on an art piece partially made out of all the slips of paper given to me since I’d become famous. Business cards, torn matchbook covers with phone numbers scrawled inside . . . all had various come-ons and requests. I had quite a collection, enough to make a three dimensional, mixed media sculpture depicting a battle between the gods Narcissus and Nemesis, my own postmodern reinterpretation of the Greek myth.
“Should I ask why you’re cradling a woman’s purse like it’s your ‘precious?’”
I couldn’t help but smile to myself, knowing she couldn’t go a day without at least one Lord of the Rings or CS Lewis reference—some of the few decent residuals emanating from her strict, religious upbringing. I met her inquisitive gaze. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
“’Mmhmm.” She wasn’t buying it, but I wasn’t surprised; Ingrid had a built-in bullshit detector. Guess her time living on the streets honed that skill. I tried not to think about the way I found her because it made me want to punch things, mainly her parents.
“I’m going up,” I told her. “So, no calls, no interruptions. Got it?”
She gave a smart-assed salute. “Aye aye, captain. Enjoy getting in touch with your feminine side.”
I offered her the bird as my response, although she knew me well enough by now to know it didn’t have any real ire behind it.
Moving through the studio never got old, especially having this amount of square footage in the city. While everyone else was running from lower Manhattan after 9–11, I knew I could take that chunk of change I’d gotten from my father-slash-sperm donor and actually afford a decent-sized, live/work space. My building used to be, of all things, an international bank with offices above. Now, the first three floors were studio space and everything above that was apartments I rented out.
The top floor was all mine though. My sanctuary. And that’s where I was headed now.
I had gutted the top floor myself; keeping the industrial feel and making sure it was designed with as little clutter as possible. Every time I came home, I’d see my city through the floor-to-ceiling windows, taking in the surrounding skyline that stretched to the stars—and I felt as close to settled and peaceful as I ever have.
I sank into the corner of my L-shaped suede sectional, cracked all my knuckles at once and settled in. Just as I’d expected, there was a whole world in her bag.
I went back to her lined notebook because, even though most of what was inside appeared to be dull-as-shit lecture notes, she did have some cool doodles, random thoughts and quotes peppered along the margins.
Just thumbing through each page, I could imagine her sitting in class with those sexy librarian glasses on and her hair in a knot on the top of her head, chewing on the end of her pen, half listening to some fossil droning on.
Man, did she know all these quotes off the top of her head or did she write them down as she heard them? Some were deep, but others were funny as hell:
You cannot make everybody happy.
You are not a taco.
Group projects help me understand
Why Batman works alone
I will never
Apologize for being me.
You should apologize for asking me to be
Anything else.
In my defense,
The moon was full and I was left
Unsupervised.
I felt like I was getting a cheat sheet on everything Alice. I may not have known the particulars, but I certainly could surmise their effects. I was getting to know her in a way I had not earned.
Crawl inside
This body,
Find me
Where I am most ruined
Love me there.
~ Rune Lazuli
That last one slayed me, sucker punching me right in the gut. No way. I’ll never let anyone get under my skin like that again.
Not again.
Never again.
The only thing left that I hadn’t violated, was that hot pink, drawstring bag. I knew I should have left it alone, that once I looked inside, I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about how she used it on herself.
“Fuck it,” I mumbled, untying the perfect bow she had made and loosened the strings’ hold. Sure enough, inside was a bottle of lube and a vibrator. I sucked in a harsh breath as my cock swelled, straining against my zipper.
I couldn’t help but imagine her using that toy while I watched, spreading those porcelain white legs wide apart for me so I could admire her delectable, hot pink center. Alice may have been little, doll-like even, with those big blue eyes, but she was no girl. She was a woman—one who owned her sexual needs and desires. Her carrying around her vibrator was the hottest fucking thing I’d ever discovered, like she kept it close in case she had an ‘emergency’ and needed to get off ASAP.
I wanted to know more about this woman, especially how she tasted and sounded when she let it all go. That meant, for the first time in a long while, I was going to do the chasing.