Good Girl Seeks Bad Boy
c. 2000, Miriam M. WynnHe’s got his hand under her blouse and she’s thinking this is one big confused night of too much wine and incense – she should never have listened to Kitty, her new age confidante – when he beings to whisper things in her ear in a language she is positive is made up.
“What language are you speaking?”
“Shh, just let the rhythm flow–“
”No, what language–“ She insists by pulling her lips away and he is forced to face fresh air.
“Gintu. It’s a Southeast Asian dialect.” He says it but his eyes are lingering on her lips, swollen with what he believes is his talent at persuasion but which are really just reacting to the strawberries they ate earlier.
She sighs heavily and puts her hand on his chest, her usual goodbye gesture.
“Dear friend, at least pick one that exists.”
She sends him packing, as she always sends them packing, pants tented at the crotch and faces at a loss. She’s at a loss too. This happens ten times out of ten.
“I’m not trying anything else, put that back.”
Kitty mews and Nina rolls her eyes in response, tired of trying to negotiate with people. Her percentages always leave her on the losing end.
“Come on baby, you just didn’t pick the right scent last night. Peach was too cloying. Try some cedarwood, something more masculine, incite their libido–“
”I have no problem inciting their libido. It’s their brains I can’t arouse.”
Kitty gives her a falsely sympathetic look and Nina gives up. She is being used as an example, which even Kitty doesn’t realize. It gets old.
“See you round, babe. I’ll take a raincheck on the rainforest balm.”
Online she stares at the personals. It happens, over and over again, and her wrists ache even before she begins surfing. Click on love, find a match, somebody who will be this or that to you, who wants to meet you, who wants to play with your mind and guarantees he can titillate your intellect as well as your body and then you meet in a public place and he seems so on and then you’re alone together and then his hand is up your skirt and it is over. He’s an exact replica. You are beginning to feel like one yourself.
She begins typing in keywords. In a very bad mood, she types in: cruel, bitter, ugly. She gets pages and pages of hits. She narrows it down. Vicious, mean, liar. Getting there. Finally, Selfish, manipulative, perverted. She gets no hits. She takes out manipulative. Bingo. Twelve men. She scans them, narrows it down. They all have their little descriptions and then the keywords they wanted to be found by, some of which match her search. She wonders if they’re really all they promise to be, and knows they aren’t. She saves them to her profile and begins her experiment.
Dark Horse Seeks Willing Victim - 28 yr old male, blonde, likes s&m and group sex. They exchange the usual bullshit e-mails about positive vibes and an interest in exchanging with someone they can click with, then get down to business by phone.
“Public place, no exceptions.”
“Café on 4th and Gilroy. Don’t wear any underwear.”
But she shows up with underwear. She is not about to obey a man who cannot turn her on by the sound of his voice on the phone. He is indeed 28 and blonde and she is immediately disappointed. He is plain but there is no cruelty or viciousness in him to make him worth getting to know. She doesn’t even let him get to the kissing with the hand up the skirt.
Restrained Professor Seeks Blank Canvas - 42 yr old male, brown hair, balding, likes bondage and blindfolds. His e-mails are highly literate and she clutches a pillow between her legs, excited at possibilities. When they get to the phone his slow alto, a slight drunken drawl that she attributes to thoughtfulness, makes her a little short of breath. Enough to be hopeful.
They meet at another café and this time she is turned on. He wears glasses, looks young for his age, and dresses conservatively, but well. His hands are neat and his nails are clean. He is enigmatic and quiet, slightly feminine in his air of mystery.
They meet again two nights later; and one last time for the final plunge. She shows up at his apartment wearing no underwear and red lipstick, as he asked. He ties her up. She moans and squirms. He pulls out his cock and it is thick and livid, and she is about ready to scream her exultation when he turns to her, glasses still on, and says – “Would you like a glass of chardonnay?” He actually means it.
She has nearly given up. She has gone through two more and she doesn’t have the energy to go through the whole list of twelve. Is five a charm?, she wonders. If this doesn’t work, she will swear off men forever, which is extreme coming from her. That will likely mean several years. She may resort to lesbianism.
Male Seeks Female - 99 yr old male, brown hair, black eyes, likes sex. She laughs at this one. She wonders if it’s really a 99 yr old and almost dismisses it but something about the brown hair/black eyes and the absolute simplicity of Male Seeks Female keeps her attention. She sends an e-mail and gets no reply. She sends another with her phone number, completely out of her mind with late night personals searching, so when she gets a phone call two weeks later she has no idea how he got her number or who he is.
“Male seeks female,” he says to her first thing, and she vaguely remembers and is then quite irritated that it took two weeks to get any sort of answer. She is about to drop the receiver on the hook when he says, “You want to be treated badly, don’t you?”
His voice is low and rough as gravel. He seems genuinely curious, and speaks with complete openness, as if she has some ugly secret he knows she wants to get out.
He waits for her answer but gets none, as she’s choking on the situation. He says, “I wanted to see if any girl would admit it. That’s what you really want, all of you.”
“I’m not a girl.” She spoke with a frog in her throat and had to clear it.
“Yes you are, you all are.”
“Have something against us, do you?”
“You wanted bitter.” His voice is noncommittal. She can’t tell if he’s joking or not. He waits. He seems the very patient type. As if he’d wait forever on the other end of the phone until she admitted she really did want to be considered a girl and not a woman and that deep down she just wanted to be abused.
“Yes, I did.”
He doesn’t rub in his victory. “You wanted a lot of nasty things. I’m going to assume you just couldn’t get the pain you wanted.”
“This neck of the woods everyone’s a pretender.”
“Or are you?” He says it in such a very gentle way she doesn’t even consider it a cliché. She sighs, not willing to fall for it again. A compromise.
“I won’t be if you aren’t.”
“That’s a good girl.”
She fidgets in the pub he picked out, with loud televisions blaring sports news and women giggling and men knocking back beer after beer. She knew instinctively he was going to be one of these kinds of men – no tailored suits, no manicures, no punk hair, no cellular phone. He was going to be honest, brutally honest. He wasn’t going to pretend.
She sits on a bar stool and sips water with moody looks around the room until she finally figures out that the guy standing across the room, leaning against the wall next to the phones, is the one. He’s got on dark blue jeans that are well wrinkled but not dirty; sturdy black shoes that are unscuffed; ruffled black hair and brown eyes and he is nowhere near 99 years old. She calculates. Late thirties. With her success rate this one is not likely to last.
He stands watching her for a while, face completely still and utterly unreadable. She is, amazingly, not responding physically. The only change she can feel is a rapid speed in heartbeat, not natural for her. The only link she can think of is fear. It’s a rare feeling for her. She realizes that she did a very stupid thing asking for cruel, bitter, vicious, mean and perverted. She looks around, tries to think fast, but she is slowed down by the surprise of her fear and he gets to her before she can slip away and ask a nice, normal fellow to escort her to a cab.
He puts one hand on the bar and leaves the other in his pocket. He is a foot or so away from her face and he has no smell, no particular details with which she can gauge what type of man he is. If he’s a serial killer or a rapist.
He says, “Calm down.”
She blinks. “Is it that obvious?”
“To me,” he says. “Not to them.” His voice is measured. She is absolutely terrified now because he has openly stated he is used to measuring fear in women.
“You wanted this, didn’t you?” He asks. It’s more of a statement. She is afraid to answer. He lifts his hand from his pocket and it is suddenly gripping her chin, very gently. She swallows.
“Good girls like bad boys. Now let’s go.”
He has a large, new, costly truck. It’s black as night and she feels swallowed by her mistake and swallowed by danger. She sits frozen and as close to the door as she can possibly get though half of her brain is wailing on her for her absolute uselessness because she never really attempted to get away. He does not speak the entire ride. They make turns into suburbia and away from it and through shopping districts before finally arriving at a duplex. One half is his.
He gets out and comes around to open her door. He takes her by the hand and gently lifts her out. He guides her up the stairs and beyond the screen door, then beyond the heavy oak door. It slams shut behind them. He locks it. They stand in complete silence in the dark, the only sound their breathing.
She is wide-eyed and watching, seeing the glittering of his own eyes, wiping her damp palms on the sides of her skirt. She was supposed to have started this in control, this whole thing in control, but ever since his phone call she has lost it. They were supposed to have stayed in public and now she’s alone, in his house. She shudders. It’s just then that his hand shoots out and grabs on to her neck. It makes her scream a little but it’s choked off by the absolute warmth of his hand. It’s a smooth, soft hand. He is not hurting her, just holding her in a vulnerable place.
She sags against the door. She has no more strength to indulge her fear. She can only be a victim. She lets her head fall back. Just then, he squeezes. She gets her strength back. She struggles upright and reaches out and suddenly his hands are roughing her up, pulling off her clothes, squeezing and slapping her thighs, her butt, but never her face, and violent as he is he is oddly tender and protective of all the places where he could hurt her most.
Somehow words escape her – “What do you want, what do you want, who are you–“
He refuses to answer, will only methodically beat her lightly until she is down to her underwear and bra, and he is fully dressed, and she is crying, silently, begging him with all the dignity she can muster for answers.
It’s when she finally goes silent that he gives her a reward. His mouth covers hers and begins to suck the last of her restraint away. His hands go between her thighs and she is rising, falling, pinned against the door by a dangerous man and his touch is the cruelest, meanest, most vicious thing she could ever hope for yet it is also the most loving, the most knowing, the most terrible because it will not answer her, won’t break her in two and kill her and won’t kiss away her pain. She is sobbing in rhythm with the thrusting of his hand – he has not pulled his dick, his penis, his organ free, he has not told her to get down on her knees and suck him, he has not really hurt her in any way yet he is being utterly selfish, and quite perverted.
He brings her to orgasm, pleasuring her so ruthlessly she has become one finished mess. She moans, low and deep, a sudden, giving moan of relief from so far down inside her that it completely fills the room, his mouth, the air between them. It’s at this moment, his fingers still inside her, that she bursts out crying. The tears fall fast and heavy, and her hands squeeze his shoulders, and then let go, so she is limp and done with.
It’s as she’s crying, half happy and half sorry, fifty percent right and wrong, that he lifts her like the rag doll she is against him. She burbles into his shoulder mumbling something about letting her go, and is rewarded with his scent–a completely benign and delicious scent that will do her harm because, against every possible calculation, this night seems to have succeeded. He has given her exactly what she wanted. She thinks. She does not know what to make of it, or of him, or of herself. She is not sure what else he intends to do to her.
He speaks into the darkness before turning to take her deeper into the abyss of his house. It is the most reassuring, frightening thing she has ever heard. “Good girls ought to know better.”
She hopes to God he’s just making fun of her fear and not planning to keep reviving it by turns. Half of her is afraid she can’t survive it. The other half of her isn't certain that she doesn't want to be afraid....