EVER-EXPANSIVE ERECTION
"Do you have any idea how much a Heinrich Lutz gimp suit costs?"
"I want to burn it for the symbolism," I said. "A baptism by fire."
"It's calfskin leather from a single calf," Sydney said. "He tans and dyes it himself. The eye mesh is the same as a Sennheiser microphone. The zippers are YKK UltraSelect, chromed in Heinrich's workshop in the Black Forest—"
"You'll never get the salt stains out."
"—and the snaps are titanium—"
"Does Heinrich chrome those, too?"
Sydney scowled at me. "You're mocking a twenty-nine-thousand-dollar gimp suit."
"Is Heinrich a submissive?"
She glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the glass the Chao Phraya river flowed through Bangkok, providing the background for the luxury apartment's main room. I'd argued—shocking, given my demonstrated financial ignorance—for a less fabulous, lower profile, and therefore safer place while I fled from the law, but Sydney refused to rent something amongst the riff-raff because she might visit me. She'd signed the lease and paid for a year in advance. I now resided on the thirty-fifth floor of Phraya One, Bangkok's most exclusive riverside address. Sydney had spent the past week furnishing the place, transferring my money from Stu's Belize bank, and shopping online for my Einstein-inspired wardrobe. A clever bounty hunter would have scanned the world for inexplicable spikes in jeans, dark t-shirts, flat front shorts, and Air Force One purchases.
"Is Heinrich your submissive?" I asked.
"He is," she said, annoyed. "I didn't pay for the suit. That doesn't make it less valuable."
Heinrich Lutz's fancy fucking gimp suit stared at me with steel mesh eyes. I'd worn it for more than a day, enduring twenty-seven hours in a state so removed from my self-image I wanted to kill it because it existed, as if the gimp suit itself—apart from the wearer—was a soul-stealing entity, an unsettling idea I hadn't yet dismissed. I wanted it gone.
"Sydney, the leather is ruined."
"I can get it out with vinegar and water."
The gimp suit hung over a shrink-wrapped block of cash. We'd landed in Bangkok with two blocks, paid the pilots with one, and Sydney's gimp for a day had carried the other—bitching the entire way, drawing his mistress' ire—to the black Mercedes limousine, from the limousine into Phraya One, onto the elevator and into the apartment.
"It'll lose its shine," I said. "Why don't I order a new one to replace this one?"
"Oh," Sydney said, sarcastic as hell, "you have twenty-nine thousand dollars just laying around, Mr. Fugitive?"
I pointed at the block of cash. "By my count, I have about ten times that."
Sydney sat on the money. With its leather gimp suit cover, the cash block served as a perverse ottoman. "Bråt, you need this. We don't know how long it will take for Stu and your sister to clear your name. It could be years. And there's no guarantee you'll sell another screenplay. You can't work here, you can't take meetings in L.A., you can't fly commercial. You can't do anything requiring identification until I'm able to get you a fake passport."
She was right. I was completely dependent on her. "How long will that take?"
"I don't know," she said. "I have to talk to someone."
"Can you trust him?"
Her smile was slight. "Can you trust me?"
"I trust you," I said, "despite your ridiculous stunt in Mexico, and—"
"You forced me to do that," she snapped, as if she'd waited to say it since I'd gazed at her adoringly on that Mexican beach. "You hurt me. And it wasn't the porn or Troika or any of that. I like it that you make porn. It turns me on that you're fucking all those other girls and I can't stop her. I love it that you're close friends with Troika and you've had sex with her."
"Then—"
"Stop it. Don't play stupid, Brät. You hurt me by intentionally going all vanilla on me with your 'and you, you're beautiful' and 'I love making love with you' bullshit. As if you were going to tell me you loved me right there. Give me a break. You hurt me because you wanted away from me so much you were willing to diminish yourself. Fuck that." She released a long, cleansing breath, and gazed out the window. "And fuck you for it."
I deserved that, but knew better than to apologize to Sydney.
"I was losing myself," I said. "I was desperate."
"Then what's this?" she asked. "I like this thing we're developing here, but only to a point. I want to be your friend, but I need you to handle me."
I crossed the room to the window. The outside air vibrated with the heat. Across the river the Oriental's pool—where Zola first made her intention clear—flashed turquoise beneath the heavy sun. Dead construction cranes dotted the skyline, motionless next to husks of unfinished skyscrapers.
I needed Sydney but was reluctant to begin again with her.
Second chances never work, unless one or both people change enough in the interim to alter the relationship's dynamics. I doubted Sydney had changed at all. Why would she? She was fully formed, clear with who she was and her place in the world. Me? Not so much. I was evolving. She was polished. I was rough. To continue the gem metaphor, I suspected she meant to cut my facets. Was that a bad thing?
"Brät?"
I turned from the window. "You want me to become, as you so eloquently put it before you drugged me and left me deaf and blind in Mexico, but you have to accept where I am now. I'm not ready for you."
"You do okay for someone who's not ready," she said.
"Thank you, but I'm not going to be who you want me to be," I said, realizing I was dictating terms, not Vajra, who had handled Sydney the first time around but now remained oddly silent. "I'm doing it my way, and when I come out the other side we'll reevaluate."
"I can teach you. I'll show you exactly what I want."
"You want a man of comparable intellect who dominates you mentally, not physically, though dominate isn't the perfect term. You're not a switch. You need your man to balance you, because you respect him. Because you're a woman who doesn't submit. You—"
"Fill the void."
"Yes. But you fill voids professionally. Your life is packed with relationships with unequals."
Sydney's face cleared—untroubled, optimistic for fuck's sake. "You've listened."
"Shocking, isn't it? Now maybe it's my ignorance of not knowing what I don't know—"
"Probably it's that," she said, but grinned.
"But if you teach me, we're constrained to who you are."
"I'm fabulous," Sydney said, "and I don't like your tone. Sir."
To express the penile inflationary effects of Sydney referring to me as "Sir," it's tempting to begin with the Friedmann equations, which concern the universe's expansion, or Newton's first law of motion, because one's penis possesses inertial properties, or cosmic inflation theory—specifically the inflationary epoch, which focuses on the instant after the Big Bang. However, though we men fantasize our erections as ever-expansive and without limits, they are not, and I doubt inertia applies to Vajra, who seems restless when at rest. To give Sydney her due I needed an equation describing a post-event (Sydney calling me "sir") rapid expansion of my resting penis (Pr) into a finite space with a defined three-dimensional shape (∩), resulting in a raging boner (Br) over a period of time, expressed in volume over time (cm³ / s), and allowing for additional volume should she employ an additional salacious expression (e) or arousing vocal tone (T)—expressed as integers from zero to three—before subtracting the benchmark erection volume and rate:
Br = [2Pr * ((e + T) / 50 + 1) → |∩| / s] − [2Pr → |∩| / s]
For example, were we—for argument's sake—to benchmark a ready-for-action Vajra at seven inches long and six inches in circum-ference after a minute, yet he attained, within twelve seconds from Sydney calling me "sir" with a "fuck me now" expression and seduc-tive tone (to which we assigned both a score of three), my raging boner's volume would measure twelve percent greater (367 cm³ versus 327 cm³), in one-fifth of the time (twelve seconds versus one minute), with an inflationary rate nearly six times the benchmark. Did that make Sydney six times sexier than the average woman? I had no time to calculate for that. I already had a Br.
"You are fabulous, but I don't want to be you with a dick."
"Me with a dick is so hot, though."
"I'm sure Avi will vouch for you on that, but if this—whatever this is—"
"How are you still struggling with what this is?"
Sydney had a point. She'd aided and abetted a fugitive by smuggling me out of the country in a borrowed private jet.
"Can I talk, Sydney?" I said, to avoid veering into a relationship talk. "Can you just shut up for a moment?"
"Make me shut up."
"When you buy silverware this afternoon," I said, "can you pick up a ball gag?"
She smiled. "Aww. I've missed the funny. But I'm a demanding sub—"
"The term relentless springs to mind," I said. "And, point of fact, you're not a sub."
The hint of a smile played across her exquisite lips. "Thank you, Brät. That was sweet."
"I have it in me. On rare occasion."
Sydney snorted a laugh. Snorted. "You do need to figure out who you are," she said. "You're a cream-filled donut. Squeeze a little and woosh, out comes the gooey."
"If either one of us is gooey, it's you."
She half-smiled, half-scowled. "I'm as far from gooey as a girl gets."
"Your goo is in your actions," I said. "Mine is in my words. And actions sp—"
"Please stop," she said, and with one hand indicated the entire apartment. "This is a no cliché zone, and your verbosity bores me. You like me. I like you. Can we skip the candy hearts and get to the sex?"
When I didn't immediately whip out my cock she joined me at the window. Longboats sped upriver, clouds refused to form because of the heat, the gimp suit bided its time.
"You want me to leave," she said.
"Yes. Go back to your life."
"Brät, I could buy everything I need and run my business from here."
Translating what Sydney said to what Sydney meant was challenging. She word mined every sentence to expose the weaknesses of others, a habit so consistent she seemed no longer conscious of it. Her measuring of other humans had become second nature.
"Avi would be sad," I said, "and I'm not ready yet. Fly back to L.A. and resume the domination, humiliation, and blackmailing of your fellow man."
"I don't see them as men."
"Yes, but I don't share your view of humanity, and I don't want to."
Sydney flashed hurt. "You need some more things before I go. Do you want to come shopping with me?"
"It's too fucking hot," I said, picturing my suffocation in the Bangkok oven. "After you fly back, I'm going full vampire."
"I've always wanted to do that."
"Maybe I'll blog. You can hunt the evildoer vicariously."
"We could hunt together," she said, wrapping her arms around my neck, poking at my resolve. "You're really kicking me out?"
"If you haven't noticed, my life is kind of fucked right now."
Sydney made a slow, obvious visual survey of the apartment—the new furniture, the commanding river and city views, the leather and cash ottoman. "Oh Brät, would that we were all so fucked."
CLAWLESS SQUIRREL
This is the thing. Other than not speaking the Thai language, not understanding the culture, knowing nothing about Bangkok other than the Oriental hotel and the city's red light underground, and the persistent risks of being identified by facial recognition, arrested on the street by Thai police, and extradited to the United States, or tracked by bounty hunters, beaten into submission, and flown back to L.A. in chains in coach class with a gun in my ribs, or recognized by a Zola Lobahtum fanatic, knifed at an international chain coffee shop, and bleeding out on the blonde laminate floor before I could finish my black tea with lavender buds and vanilla, I was better off than at any time in my life.
Sydney had lovingly cleaned the gimp suit with vinegar and water, agonizing over each sweat stain's salty residue. Once the suit dried, she rolled it into a deceptively unassuming black leather cylinder and packed it into her new carry-on shoulder bag for the commercial flight to Los Angeles, along with a legion of Thai silk scarves she would undoubtedly repurpose.
Prior to jetting back to America, Sydney purchased and arranged delivery on a two thousand pound, six feet tall, ultra-lux jewelry safe for the cash. I oversaw its installation in the second bedroom's closet while she spent hours at an internet café, researching best practices for fugitives—much of which I knew because I'd read up on it for my Dash Canon near-future action-espionage-political-comedy-erotic-romance spec script, working-titled Canonade. While I moved the cash from the kitchen cabinets to the giant safe, she set up a beautiful new laptop with identical information to what she'd provided the bank and Phraya One, firewalled the fuck out of it, and disabled wireless access with a password only she knew so I couldn't access the internet even if doing so would save the world from steel mesh-eyed aliens.
"An air gap computer," I said.
"It's so you can write," she said. "That's it. You can go online at internet cafés. They're all over Bangkok. Don't stay longer than fifteen minutes, and never use the same place twice."
"This spy shit gets me hard."
"Oh, we'll definitely be fucking in a few minutes," she said, and gave me a thumb drive and a slip of paper with an email address. "Before you go to the internet café, pre-write your emails and copy your scripts to this. To minimize your time spent there. You can write me at the address on the paper."
"Notagimp at—oh, this is cute," I said.
"Isn't it?" Sydney felt my cock through my shorts. She checked her giant-yet-somehow-still-feminine watch. "We only have a few hours before I go to the airport. Is that enough time for you to make me walk funny?"
"Barely. But we'll make do."
I wrote Stu to thank him again and inform him we'd arrived, procured an apartment, transferred the funds, I'd reached the mid-point reversal of Canonade, and Sydney had flown back to L.A. Total time in the internet café: eight minutes, fourteen seconds.
The next day he'd written back:
You're welcome. Thanks for update. Write C w/ sequels in mind. Not your babysitter.
I sat on the gimp-suit-free block of cash, alone like Thoreau on his pumpkin, taking in my thirty-fifth-floor apartment's panoramic view, visualizing catching a ferry across the Chao Phraya to write in the Oriental hotel's sunny tea room, in the shadows of Somerset Maugham and John Le Carré.
So let us assess the risk. Arguably, the Oriental hotel was the one place in Bangkok I might be recognized, associated with Life with the Lobahtums, remembered for Francesca's little screaming fit on the verandah, and brought to law enforcement's attention via surreptitious photos and social media posts. Who would recognize me? Maybe a Lobahtum fan, but more likely someone on the Oriental staff. I'd conversed with multiple tea hostesses. Anyone working during the Mr. Molester incident would remember me. How couldn't they? And anyone who watched the show might recognize me. No doubt Life with the Lobahtums and Queen Frankie were tag-teaming the eyeballs of those unfortunate enough to tune in to or log on to or visit or channel surf past or like or follow either show with ominous, salacious, and libelous accounts of my great betrayal of Zola's love and Francesca's trust. I was notorious, as Sydney had put it, and on the run.
Just a man sitting on his pumpkin, recognizing his daring escape and technological safeguards and the risks of his loyal friends could be undone by any troglodyte—a diplomatic characterization of the Lobahtums' viewership—capable of snapping a photo and posting it to social media, which meant approximately forty million weak points existed in the Save Brät grand plan, because the sole discernible skill Lily's fans possessed was taking fucking photos with their fucking phones and posting them to social fucking media.
Fuck.
I'm taller than most, and couldn't change my height. In this country I was a giant. Vanity wouldn't allow me to stop working out.