Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes
Forty nods and Ray raises his glass. “To family, to food, to fun, to the fast and furious.”
Ray and Dottie are proof that money can buy happiness and Forty groans—Dad, enough with those movies—and Love laughs. “Joe,” she says. “Something you have to know about my dad, he is obsessed with Fast and Furious movies.”
I smile. “That’s fine,” I say. “As long as your father acknowledges that Fast Five is the most brilliant one, an affirmation of family values that simultaneously points the finger at our corrupt judicial system even as it endorses traditional American values like Sunday dinner and loyalty.”
I am fucking on tonight and Ray claps his hands. “Right again, Professor.”
Love groans, she prefers little movies, and Forty is drunk now and quoting The Big Chill, as if his knowledge of acclaimed movies will convince Barry Stein that he has something of his own to say. Ray doesn’t like his son like this, drunk and trying. He doesn’t like it when Barry Stein motions for Milo to move closer and save him from Forty and I bet sometimes Ray wishes he and Dottie never fucked it up and had kids.
It’s an ugly thing, the inside of a family, the disappointments, the disgust, and I am relieved when Dottie tugs on my arm. “Professor,” she says. “I still can’t get over that you read all those Jonathan Franzen books. I loved The Corrections, but I couldn’t get through it. Everyone in my movie club was so excited for The Corrections to become a film.”
“Movie club?” I ask.
“We were a book club,” she concedes. “But we couldn’t get through this one book that had us all stumped, something about Haiti, I don’t know, it was so long and so sad. And Haiti? It’s a reach for us, honestly. I wish I were worldlier but I’m small at heart. Anyhow, now we watch movies. But maybe if we had a guide for which books to pick . . .”
“You should ease back in with something more relatable,” I say. “Maybe Portnoy’s Complaint?”
And I choke on my drink because I didn’t even realize Amy was still on my mind and she is, clearly, or I wouldn’t have suggested that fucking book.
“Hey, Professor.” Forty leans in, only to be interrupted by a waitress who lays a hand on my shoulder. She is sorry to trouble me, but she has an urgent message. I look around for Love and Love is gone and the waitress slips me a napkin.
Order: Joe Goldberg
Deliver to: Suite 79
When: Now
19
LIFE is kind of like one of those Barry Stein movies where everything works out. I take my orders and I find Love’s wing and I knock on the door. She is slow to answer and I take in the luxury of it all, the detail, the panels on the walls. Even the abandoned room service trays look like high art—flutes, cheese knives, truffle fries. The door opens and Love furrows her brow, looking at me blankly.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t order any room service.”
“Love,” I say. “I know you didn’t order any food. I got your note, you know, at the table—”
She cuts me off. “I said I didn’t order room service,” she objects. Then she winks and it’s like that. She tries to close the door and I stop that from happening with my foot. Love is kind, love is patient but also, mainly, above all—yes—Love is perverted.
“Miss,” I say, as if I’ve done this a million times. “It’s a courtesy from the hotel, a token of our gratitude.”
“This is sort of inconvenient,” she simpers, running a finger along her collarbone. “My butler just drew a bath.”
I tell her I wasn’t planning on getting wet and that I have strict orders to service her. She opens the door and it’s like stepping into the vault of a fucking bank, it just feels like money, the parquet floor, staunch hardwood—hard, wood—Love’s little silk shorts and her matching teddy and her buttery skin, slightly darker than the creamy walls. The bed is through French doors and she could have shut those doors but she didn’t and I look at those sheets, white, crisp, and I look at her, white, crisp and she shakes her head.
“I told you,” she says. “My butler drew a bath.”
She motions for me to follow her into the bathroom and it’s an obnoxiously spartan design, a sink you could find in a walk-up in Reseda, unremarkable chipped tiles on the walls, exposed pipes and a dull shower curtain out of a porno movie, pulled aside to reveal the full tub. But it’s not full of water. It’s yellow and she giggles.
“Don’t tell my dad,” she says, breaking character. “I don’t do this all the time.”
“Is that champagne?” I ask.
“Veuve Clicquot.”
I bite my lip. Why must something always go wrong? I never should have come up here and I don’t want to get into a tub of champagne. She could have said it was fucking André and I would have been irritated because I do not need a bathtub of money. First she wants to pretend that I’m her servant and now she wants to rub her money on my cock, literally, she wants me to soak in her wealth. We are young and new to each other and this is the good time, the new time, and we don’t need a tub of money and she knows that I can’t afford to fill a tub with Veuve Clicquot and I don’t need to do that because my dick alone is good enough.
She slips out of her shorts and a proper lady would have taken off her shirt first. She is bare as I expected she would be; no jungle there. She moves one strap over her shoulder, exposing one of those Love tits I’ve wanted to see and she lifts that round Love tit and licks her tongue against that firm Love nipple and the shirt collapses onto the floor. She steps into the tub and sinks into the money water and I don’t move and my head explodes with bad Love word play:
Is this Love is all you need is Love for real?
“Come on in,” she says. “It’s so good in here.”
But I won’t come on in. Of all the fantasies she could have gone with, she had to make me into a servant. She could have opened that door and pretended that I was a CIA operative or the hotel doctor or an escaped convict. But in her fantasy, I’m servile, a have-not, and she’s a princess. This is not my fantasy and she is not the boss and I tell her to get out.
“Joe,” she says. “What’s wrong?”
“Get out of the tub.”
“This is for us.”
“Drain the tub, Love.”
“This is twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of champagne,” she argues. “Why don’t we just get in?”
I step closer. “Drain the tub.”
She doesn’t want to drain the tub and she grinds her teeth. “Why?”
I look at her. “Because I don’t need twenty-five thousand dollars. Of anything.”
“I thought it would be fun,” she pouts. She stands, parts of her body obscured by bubbles, and she hits the drain. The money begins to disappear into the sewer system and I tell her to dry off. I slam the door. Fuck her if she thinks she can buy me.
I kick off my shoes and peel away my clothes. I hear her snag one of the many plush towels. She’s drying up—fuck you, symbolism—and she’s pissy, slamming cabinets and draining the tub, ashamed and lecturing me about waste. Yes, the girl who fills a tub with champagne is gonna teach me about conservation. This is good, she should feel ashamed, that money could have fed a lot of poor kids. And this is my room now and I am in charge and she yanks the door open and she’s wrapped in a towel.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asks. “Really, I want to know.”
“Take off that towel.”
She looks around, as if I’m the kind of asshole who would record something this intimate. I tell her the rules. “No talking.” She nods. I’m going to re-create what we had in the room at Soho House. “We’re gonna play Joe Says.” She opens her mouth. “Joe says no talking.” She smiles, complicit. She drops her towel.
“Joe says hand on pussy.” She slaps her right hand over her vagina.
“Joe says left hand on pussy.” She switches hands.
“Rub your clit.” She looks at me. Our eyes are locked and I step even closer.
“Kiss me the
I reach for one of her taut, ripe nipples. “Let me start by licking your tits as I feel you up.” She spreads her legs and now we are so close that our eyelashes could touch. “Cum as hard as you can because you don’t need any fucking champagne when you’re fucking me. Show me that you know that. Take me.” She huffs. “Own me.” She puffs. “Joe says, ‘fuck me.’”
We are on the bed. I don’t even know how we got there, I just know about skin meeting skin—Love is all you need is Love—and this sex is a circle, it never ends. We are animals and she is loud. Joe says don’t stop, fuck me and when I’m not possessed by the pure rapture between her legs, between the sheets, I laugh. Joe has Love. I have never known this kind of wetness, the stuff of pornography, sopping. I want to eat her but I hold back—I am not a servant—and I nip at her belly and she pulls me on top of her for more, and she is silent, demanding, and she pulls me inside of her and it’s like Chateau: The Body Version. I belong in here, in Love.
I want her to taste me—Get your dick sucked—and I tell her and she turns into a different person. “Oh. I kind of don’t do that.”
If there were music it would stop. “Oh,” I say. Kind of is the most useless phrase in the English language. “Well, I could do it to you.”
She squirms. “I just like it better like this,” she says. She kisses me and her pussy envelops me, quicksand, and it’s impossible to argue about blowjobs as she rides me like a Donzi on the water, bump, bump, bump, and it would be perfect, my best performance yet were it not for that little voice in the back of my head, a warning, a caution.
Get your dick sucked.
It’s almost as if she heard Mr. Mooney and she knows I need more. She looks at me. “There’s a Coke in the fridge,” she smiles. “Will you get it?”
I bring the glass bottle of Coke to Love and she shakes it and sprays it all over my chest and yes, it’s on my dick and yes, kind of was just foreplay and she is licking the Coca-Cola off my midsection, she is nothing but a tongue, a set of eyes, hands. She is below my belly button and she is stroking my inner thighs and now she has me in her hands but somehow there is new cold Coke on my legs. She rises and her eyes meet mine. “Fuck me,” she says.
“Joe says, ‘Suck me,’” I say.
“Love says, ‘Fuck me.’” She takes over and I give it to her and I know she’s never had it like this before because she tells me she’s never had it like this before. We finish together, bliss. Natural symphonic mastery of sex. I am thirsty, spent. I swallow the last drops of Coke and we laugh about our sticky bed.
“Now I’m thirsty,” she says.
“I think there’s some Coke left,” I say—on my dick—and I grin.
“Nah,” she says, and my joke goes right over her head. “I’m good.”
She pinches my nipple. Soon, she is asleep and I am awake. The sex, the sex. I ate Amy’s superfruits but it was never worth getting her jungle stuck in my teeth. It’s just right with Love’s pure, classic Coca-Cola pussy, and I will block out the critical part of my brain hissing that the Coke was tainted by the champagne. Fuck you, brain.
I dig around the room for Love’s panties. I am a hunter. I want to smell Love, taste her. I find them eventually and they’re in the trash, mixed in with a banana peel, numerous price tags from Neiman Marcus, and a half-full jar of face cream. I move the trash bin across the room so she’ll see it when she wakes up and I fall asleep too.
I wake up the next morning to her laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“I see you figured out my little indulgence,” she says. “I never wear the same panties twice. I know.”
“You throw them away every day?”
She kisses me. “But now that I have you, you can keep them all and you can sew them together and make them into a quilt.”
“I’m not sewing your fucking panties, Love.”
“Oh, yes you are.”
“Oh, no I’m not.”
We kiss. She licks my earlobe. “Ya wanna take a shower or ya wanna fuck?”
I WANT A BLOWJOB GOD DAMN IT. #mydayinla #chateauproblems #cantgetmydicksucked
“Joe says let me taste you.”
She pulls away. “Joe,” she says. “Is this gonna be a problem?”
“There is nothing even remotely resembling a problem in this room,” I say. “I was just playing around.”
I can feel a story coming and I’m right. Love has never been comfortable with anything oral. Her mother claims she never gave Love’s father a blowjob and she told Love that if a man loves you, truly, he doesn’t need that.
“Wow,” I say. “I can’t believe you talk about this stuff with your mom.”
“We don’t really have boundaries.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Joe.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but they met in middle school. Do you really think your dad has gone his whole life without getting his dick sucked?”
She shakes her head. “That’s the part of the story I’m getting to,” she says, and then she tells me about the year she and Forty had their sweet sixteen, a giant Beverly Hills bonanza with hundreds of people. She got a horse as her present and Forty got a massage. “And Forty gets home,” Love says, “And he is messed. Up. And I am like what’s wrong? And he is like, I can’t tell you. And I am like, you have to.”
“And?”
“And my dad’s masseuse sucked his dick. And she told him she did that for my dad once a week.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s fucked up.”
Love shrugs and says that we can play Joe Says all day long but she’ll never do anything oral with me. Or anyone. “I know you want to know if I did this for Michael or Trey,” she says. “And the answer is no.”
I strategize. “I’m just thinking, you know, it’s different for everyone,” I say. “What your mom doesn’t like, you know, maybe you would like.”
Love says that she is thirty-five years old and she knows exactly who she is. She kisses me and grabs a room service menu. We order eggs benny and coffee and pancakes and we both look at mimosa on the menu but champagne is a sore spot. I tell her I like her. She says she likes me too.
We sink into the bed together and this is what it is, sex, then a knock at the door, then food, then rest, then movies, then sex, then we think about leaving the room and we don’t leave the room, then sex, then sometimes we get in the tub, then movies, then food, then sometimes a song, then sex, then Joe Says/Love Says. Love has a butler named Henry and she texts him and he shows up with Animal Style In-N-Out burgers. We half watch movies on TBS (Love’s favorite station) and when Bride Wars begins, she says she never cheated on either of her husbands. I tell her I never cheated on anyone either.
“But you were never married?” she asks.
“No.” I don’t want to tell her about Beck or Amy. That’s what feels so unique about this room, this thing with Love. I’ve been trying to find Amy for so long and now to break away from all that hunting, to rest. In this room, in this bed, I rarely think about the mug of piss in Rhode Island. It’s as though there are invisible guards outside, like nobody can get us, our DNA, our pasts. It’s only been five meals, maybe two days. I genuinely don’t know. Love is a drug. The more she opens up about her life, the less I want to share my own stories with her. My life feels too small, too gritty.
“Okay,” she says. “You’ll let me know when you’re ready.”
Love is patient. She doesn’t push. It’s actually fun to watch Cocktail with her because, unlike Amy, she takes it for what it is. Love likes Hannah and Her Sisters but she doesn’t love it the way she loves Crimes and Misdemeanor
I blindfold her to see if she can watch it without hearing it or seeing it and I kiss her all over her body, underneath her knees, her elbows, her inner thighs. I do not eat her out. I make her come without touching her vagina. She says that’s a first.
“Does this place have a pool?” I ask.
It does and Mr. Mooney was wrong; the pool is not cold and dirty. The pool is a giant blue oval, as welcoming as Love’s vagina. My phone falls inside of it and Love swan dives to the bottom and emerges with it in hand. Her butler puts it in rice. I’m tempted to ask him to throw it away. Love says my broken phone is a sign that I’m supposed to relax. And maybe I am because it’s hard to care about my life before Love.
This is why people go west, smashing rocks and hoping to spot something shimmering in the creek. Dip a pan into the rocky water and lift it and strain it and then feel solid gold in the palm of your hand. Everything I did was worth it because it led me straight into Love’s arms.
20
I can’t decide what I like more, this bed or these sheets or this view or the balcony or the jam and toast that were waiting here when I woke up. Chateau is Adult Disney World, the kind of place where they’re one step ahead of you. I didn’t have to ask for my phone. It was here when I woke up, in a little basket by the bread, by the silver coffee pot, so much more elegant than Keurig. Love’s still sleeping and I put on a robe and pour my coffee and spread jam on my soft, blond bread and walk out to the balcony.
I am awkward at first, not used to having toast and a balcony and a robe. I’ll have to look in the mirror after I finish my breakfast because I’m curious to see if I look different, if all this luxury closed my pores. Maybe I don’t even need to buy Henderson’s skin care products. I’m happy and they could evict us right now and I wouldn’t care as long as they let me take that dirty little minx in the bed. Even the no blowjob bit; I’m a man. It’s good to have a goal.