Merry Random Christmas Read online

  Speaking of whom: where in the fuck was Joe?

  My chest started humming. I reached into my shirt and—

  “No! Darla, please! I don’t need to see anything red and glowing.”

  I slid my phone out from between my beastly breasts. I waggled it in front of her. “Phone. Don’t worry. And besides, I haven’t been wearing the nipple clamps that long. I’m sure my nips are still just pink.”

  “I meant the red-nosed—oh, God,” she muttered as I checked my texts and ignored her.

  No text. Hmm. Notifications said I had a new Instagram picture from Joe. I opened it.

  “What the fuckity fucking fuck fuck is that?” I screamed.

  It was a picture of Joe, wearing a candy-cane patterned g-string. His fine skin glistened in dim light, and he was surrounded by women about Joanne’s age, all touching my man. Mine.

  Mine.

  “Why are you growling?” Joanne asked, grabbing my phone out of my hand before I could stop her. Her eyes darted to the picture and if I coulda recorded her face in that moment, I woulda, because her eyes bugged out like someone squeezed her so hard they shot out on rubber bands.

  “Is that Edie Chadron touching my son?” she screeched. “And why is Joey wearing a g-string and covered in money?”

  “Money?” I snatched the phone back. Joe’s wrists had finally healed and he was playing bass again, but our next gig wasn’t scheduled until after the turn of the year, in Las Vegas. Tyler, aka Frown, had been filling in for Joe as our substitute bass player, but he and his girlfriend, Maggie, had their own side gigs going. At this precise moment, I didn’t give a shit about them, but the bottom line was that money was a little tight until the next gig, and if this is what made Joe resort to turning his cock into a joystick for old, rich women to ride on Christmas Eve, then I was about to start crying.

  “I cannot believe that Edie Chadron, the chairwoman of the second-wave feminist organization she co-founded with my mother, is sticking her fingers all over my son’s buttocks!” Joanne fumed. “What in the hell is Edie thinking?”

  “I don’t know what half of that meant,” I said, scrutinizing the picture. By my eyeballing, Joe was wearing at least five hundred bucks in glossy money stuck all over his hips, g-string, ass and back.

  Then I read the caption on the Instagram photo:

  Here Comes Santa Claus

  “Ho ho fucking ho,” I hissed, texting Joe. The effort was silly. He hadn’t answered anyone else’s texts.

  Texting Trevor was a worthless practice, too.

  I tried Liam, using tact and grace with a text that read: WHY IS JOE WEARING A G-STRING AND COVERED IN MONEY?

  I texted the same thing to Sam, because the germ of an idea began to grow in my mind.

  And once you plant a seed in the fertile soil of my imagination, step back.

  “Sam and Liam were strippers,” I muttered to myself, starting to pace on the sidewalk. “Now Joe’s in a g-string with a bunch of old women in that picture he sent from his account.”

  “Hey!” Joanne barked. “They’re not old!” The skin under her eyes shot up in outrage, but her forehead stayed in place.

  “Any of those women got a Snapchat account?”

  “What’s Snapchat?”

  I shook my head. “They’re old.”

  “Is Snapchat like that Twitter thing?” she asked, frowning. Or, at least, I think she frowned. “Are you implying that because we’re not all up to date on the latest social media craze, we’re old?”

  “You use your phone to talk to people, Joanne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yer old.”

  She opened her mouth to protest. I covered it with my palm. She shrank back.

  “Anyhow, quit interrupting me. I’m thinking.”

  “You’re quite the multi-tasker, aren’t you?” she said with a derisive snort.

  I gave her the stink eye. “You ask a woman in a threesome relationship that question, Joanne, you might need to brace yourself for the answer.”

  She paled.

  “Look, you can stand here and gawk at your own son’s mighty fine hindquarters covered in money and—” I squinted at my screen. Then I shoved it in her face. “Is that a lipstick imprint on his ass?”

  Joanne pushed the phone out of her face and made a sound like a frustrated moose.

  “But,” I continued, looking up into the night sky, the rest of my thought buried by an increasingly disturbing sense that something was very wrong.

  Cambridge lights crowded out the stars. I didn’t care. If the North Star was good enough to guide The Three Wise Men on Christmas Eve to find Jesus, and Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus had animals to huddle around them and keep them warm, then it was good enough to guide me to find my stripping, naked-ass boyfriends who were currently being kept warm by the overly enthusiastic huddling of an entirely different kind of mammal.

  Genus: cougarious fornicatious.

  “But,” I said again, staring at Joe’s ass on my phone and realizing I wasn’t stuttering, I was just naming what I saw. “I, for one, am going to find my goddamned boyfriends and make them explain what in the hell they’re up to.”

  Chapter Two

  Joe

  “Oh, baby, you got one hell of a nice candy cane for me to lick,” the woman said, rubbing up against my oiled thighs, her hand searching for my sweet stick. She slipped a twenty in with the other bills that hung from that tiny piece of ropy fabric like palm leaf fronds. My g-string was an X-rated wallet. I was wearing more cash than I made from a single band performance most nights, and I’d only been stripping for fifteen minutes.

  That’s right.

  Stripping.

  Trevor caught my eye and gave me a look like a character in a Saw movie right before he was about to be eviscerated by set of electric hedge trimmers. Three women rubbed their hands over him like they were buffing a car hood.

  Fives and tens hung off his g-string, one twenty dollar bill plastered flat against his right buttock, curving to the concavity of his glutes as he moved and bent, legs muscles following the gyration of his hips as he danced.

  Or, at least, tried to dance.

  He really sucked.

  None of the women cared. At the end of the night, we’d count up our tips and if he made more money than me, I’d be ripshit pissed. I’m way hotter.

  What the fuck? Why was I even thinking about that? I was a Penn law student on sabbatical between my second and third year of law school as my band made its big national tour breakthrough, and here I was worrying about whether I made more money as a stripper than my best friend?

  Yeah. That pretty much summed up my Christmas Eve.

  “I’m going to kill Sam and Liam,” he called out to me. I gave him a thumbs’ up. A woman’s well-lipsticked mouth covered my thumb instantly, her teeth grazing the pad, her tongue sucking like she was twirling a candy cane.

  The sensation went straight to the root of my shaft, making it twitch.

  No.

  Cardinal rule of stripping, groaned at me and Trevor by a very sick Sam and Liam right before we agreed to this stupid, obscene, fucked-up job: never get a hard on. The women think it’s an engraved invitation.

  I had to think to shrink.

  Think. Imagine...my mom walking Mavis on a leash.

  Ah. Sweet flaccidity. Limp as an overcooked Ramen noodle.

  “Why would you blame Sam and Liam for this?” I asked Trevor as I danced closer to him. The throng of ten or so women clinging to me moved like we were a pillar holding up the world. “It’s your fault they got food poisoning this afternoon,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “How the fuck was I supposed to know the eel at that sushi place was bad? I don’t eat eel,” Trevor growled back. His growl turned upward two octaves as someone decided to reach down and give his jingle bells a little squeeze.

  “You convinced us to try that place,” I said with a wince at the memory. “We warned you a restaurant called ‘Sushi Salvage’ was no
thing but trouble.”

  “It’s cheap. Sam and Liam are on a budget and we haven’t gotten our advance yet for—” His tone was defensive. We were both talking through fake smiles plastered on our faces. Most of the women were so drunk we could have recited the Gettysburg Address and they’d have cheered for us.

  “The Yelp reviews were horrible.”

  “Yelp is biased and you never can trust those reviews—” He yelped as someone added a stroke of his candy cane to the light bounce of his jingle bells.

  We were dancing to some ‘80s song by Billy Idol. It wound down, followed by Nine Inch Nails’ Closer.

  Oh, shit.

  Trevor and I shared a look of twinned horror as a hundred women at this party all screamed out the main line from the song. You know. Of course you know it. You’ve seen “Magic Mike XXL,” right?

  Every fucking woman at this party looked at us like we were Joe Manganiello and they were an extra in the film.

  My jingle bells started tingling as the groping increased, the song pounding loud and hard, the technobeat impossible to not respond to.

  Chickens in diapers. I had to think about chickens wearing diapers to—

  Limp.

  Whew.

  As I gyrated and pretended I was a stripper in a movie, I watched Trevor leap in the air like the floor was electrified, dodging fingers and hands. We were the only entertainment at this Christmas Eve party. A long time ago, Sam and Liam had said yes to this singular gig. The money was spectacular, and their girlfriends had agreed it was fine.

  Then Trevor convinced us to go to Sushi Puke-o-rama and Sam and Liam happen to love eel.

  Bad eel, it turns out.

  They’d been barfing their guts out a few hours ago, and the woman who ran the stripping entertainment company couldn’t find substitutes.

  Trevor, in his infinite guilt, had offered us up as tribute.

  You think tribute is hyperbole? This is The Hunger Games, all right. These women are starving for our flesh. Look at that cougar over there, her palms clenching Trevor’s ass like she’s auditioning his cheeks for a porn movie.

  The surprised look on his face makes me think she slipped him a little something while doing her eval.

  And I don’t mean a twenty in his g-string.

  Flash!

  A blinding white light made my brain hurt for a microsecond, then someone pinched my right nipple. Hard. So hard I gasped, then felt ten thousands hands crawl up and down my body, palms lubed up with the oil Sam and Liam had insisted we use.

  Peppermint scented, in honor of the holiday.

  Ho ho ho. A hundred of them, all looking at us like they wanted to touch Santa’s sac.

  I left off the K for a reason.

  I looked down, the song’s lyrics infused in me, and saw the crown of a blonde head, unruly curls falling over her shoulders.

  Darla?

  I reached down, driven by pure instinct, and tipped the woman’s chin up to meet my eyes.

  No. Not Darla. A woman somewhere between my age and my mother’s, wearing heavy eye makeup and glitter across her eyelids, eyes brown and swimming with the unfocused look of someone who’d had more than a few drinks. She took my gesture as an invitation and slid her hands up the backs of my calves, trapping me in place.

  A cold line of dread started at the base of my cock and traveled up my spine, settling into my teeth, making me ache for freedom.

  This was a bad, bad idea.

  Fuck Trevor and his discount sushi.

  The blonde’s hands circled around and up between my knees, her actions gaining the attention of the other women.

  Flash!

  Another picture taken. None of these cougars knew anything about social media, right? I didn’t have to worry about these pics on YouTube or Instagram or Snapchat. They might post it on Facebook, but who cared? No one under forty was on Facebook anymore.

  I was safe.

  “You owe me big time for this,” I snapped as Trevor floated by, a woman in his arms, ten more doing a conga line behind him. A conga line to the song “Closer.”

  I stilled, freezing in place, and not because the blonde at my knees had her nose in my crotch like she was doing her best golden retriever imitation.

  I just stared at Trevor and blinked.

  After that week on the island of Eden, I thought I’d really seen it all. Nope. This was new.

  Because the woman Trevor was carrying had slipped a dog collar on his neck, and the woman behind him had attached a leash.

  Candy cane patterned, of course.

  “Closer” ended, and then...

  “Here Comes Santa Claus” came on, making the women clap and cheer as Trevor took little bouncy steps. He played up to the crowd and reached into his g-string. How he managed to keep anything in there was a mystery to me, but hey—

  Mine was stuffed full. Enough said. No room at the inn for anything more.

  He pulled out a tiny set of actual little jingle bells with red ribbons attached to them, and slid them over his balls, on the outside of the g-string.

  Then he jumped.

  Money floated in the air over his head as the chicks lost it. Just lost it. Mayhem reigned for the next five minutes and I felt like I was in a collagen and estrogen-filled mosh pit.

  Which perfectly described this party.

  We weren’t allowed to drink. Strippers had to be sober. No drugs. Pure, unadulterated sensuality and plenty of skin was what we were being paid to provide. No escapism. We were making a solid four figures each, plus tips, to wiggle asses, touch the women (without crossing any major lines), and give them their escapism.

  Not ours.

  I loosened up and laughed at Trevor’s antics. Then I remembered something I’d tucked into the Santa hat I wore. Sam and Liam had suggested we hide personal items in there, because we wouldn’t have access to our clothes or coats for most of the ninety minute gig, so I had wisely attached the Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer nipple clamps to the inside of my hat.

  I was a Boy Scot. You know the motto.

  “Santa Claus is coming!” someone screamed, and then a friendly hand—way, way too friendly—stroked my shaft over my candy-cane g-string. I rose like Santa up the chimney, driven by basic biology and blood flow rather than Christmas magic.

  Ho fucking ho, no.

  I grabbed the offending hand and lifted her up in my arms, the crowd separating as if I were Moses parting the red sea.

  Without thinking, I held up the nipple clamp and turned it on.

  “Oooooh,” the crowd said in unison. Even Trevor’s conga line stopped.

  I set the woman down, a lithe, tiny lady who reminded me of my mother just enough to make my half-hard self soften beautifully.

  Pretending to touch her boob, I reached instead for my own nipple and attached the clamp.

  And instantly felt a wave of appreciation for Darla, who was wearing a full set of these right now at my insistence. I felt like a rat was gnawing my nip off from the inside out.

  Catcalls, hoots, and a spray of money greeted my little stunt.

  And flashes. So many flashes.

  The song changed to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and that’s the last time I saw Trevor for thirty minutes. I’m pretty sure that was the last full breath I took, too. So many flavors of lipstick. So many colors.

  Colors I tasted.

  Until the world faded into nothing but lipstick, wine, and my favorite scent:

  Money.

  * * *

  Time lost its meaning for a while there.

  You would think that my dick had magically transformed itself into the North Star, because nearly every woman at this Christmas Eve party was using it as a beacon for navigating the room, touching it at least once as if it were a landmark along the journey to the bar.

  At Harvard, on campus, there’s this statue of one of the founders of the college. During exam weeks, students rub his shoe for good luck. The shoe is shiny, while the rest of the statue has a
darkened patina.

  My cock was getting rubbed so much was shining like that foot.

  You could even say it glowed.

  A tap on my shoulder made me jump. In the hour we’d been stripping, no one had touched me there. Such a benign spot. I should have felt self-conscious wearing only a g-string in this crowded room with all these women, but oddly enough, I didn’t.

  I saw the appeal of stripping, and understood a little better why Liam got into it, and why Sam joined him. It was all fun and games, right?

  I shifted slightly and pulled at the butt floss. That one chick, though, who decided to give me a little extra tip...that wasn’t the kind of tip I was looking for, if you know what I mean.

  Trevor’s deep voice was music to my ears in a room full of horny, drunk sopranos. “Dude, the hostess says we can take a break. She spread some towels on her bed and has drinks and snacks for us in there.”

  “Why? To fatten us up before the slaughter?” We were being eyed and sized. Money was changing hands between various women and it was clear there was some sort of wager being negotiated.

  He chuckled. “No. But we get a ten minute breather and then we have twenty more minutes of this hellhole.”

  “A hellhole you dug for us with your turned eel.”

  “Drop it, okay? It’s not like I went into that Japanese restaurant and personally planted tainted fish. We’re doing our best to make up for it.”

  “That’s the problem,” I ground out as we walked down the hallway to the bedroom the hostess set up for us. My ears were ringing, Trevor’s argument buried under the shrill sounds that faded into a high-pitched whine that wouldn’t leave my head for two days.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “We. This we shit. You dragged me into this. I didn’t do anything wrong!” My thighs slid against each other like pistons.

  “Would it kill you to help out friends in need?” Trevor rummaged in his coat and pulled out his smartphone, then snatched up a bottled water from a silver tray. The room was decorated in lavish purples and deep adobes, mosaic tiles covering the ceiling, but with a giant, human-sized mirror embedded right over the bed.

  The hair on the back of my neck—the parts that weren’t covered in oil—began to stand up.