We had a long drive to make the next gig on the calendar. It wasn’t the only thing I’d clean up for the next tour, I thought. A lesser gig half way to a good gig was superior to two straight travel days between gigs. But in lieu of that, I knew about a magical golden field off a road that went off our main road.

  I was shown the way to it during one of my dad’s beer promotion circuit trips he took me on. It was the home of one of his old team’s stars from back in the glory days of multiple Cups and huge contracts. The guy did say, when we visited him, that I “must” call him anytime if there was anything he could ever do for me. He maintained in every post-career interview that dad was his bodyguard out on the ice, and it was dad’s ready fists that were the main reason for all of his league-leading goals — and his name on the Cup so many times.

  So I did that — I called him up out of the blue and I told him our situation: I managed an indie band, we were out touring, we had a motorhome to live in, but I needed the band to soak up that golden field scene on the back of his land — the setting sun, the waves of breeze visible over the tall grass, the cliffs and the streams and the hawks in the sky. “I just need them to take a night off and decompress,” I said.

  He was glad to let us drive up his long driveway, keep going past his hilltop mansion with it’s pools and golf course and landing strip, and keep going all the way out to the back forty and out of sight. “They don’t want to meet the great superstar?” he said, only half laughing.

  “Not exactly sports fans, these three,” I said. He understood.

  I pulled the motorhome sideways against the sunset and as Tania, Bianca, and Natalee stepped out and down the steps, they stared bewildered and awed at the western landscape master painting I put them in the middle of. I dragged out a table and some chairs and even a couch and a lamp and side tables — I made an inside-out living room out of the wide-open space — and I went back in to make a gourmet dinner I’d been planning on in my head the whole way up.

  “It’s exhilarating,” Bianca said, after they ate dinner and drank wine and settled into the couch to watch the sunset show.

  “It looks like what you think of when you hear the word ‘freedom,’ Natalee said.

  Tania, on the other hand, remained agitated. “I never even knew this kind of shit was real,” she said. “Why is it way out here? And how is it owned by someone?”

  We all glanced at each other but left her query alone. Her tone, however, seemed to infect the others’ minds.

  “We don’t deserve it,” Bianca said suddenly.

  “We’re just visiting,” I said.

  “I don’t mean just this,” she said. “The motorhome, the meals, the treatment,” she said. “It’s not our image.”

  “It makes it a fuck of a lot harder to write songs about pain and suffering, I can tell you that for free . . . “ Tania said, twisting her pained and suffering expression around and over her shoulder at me. “ . . . when we’re experiencing about the exact opposite of that.”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek, unsure what to say. My own struggle was to avoid taking comments as blame.

  Natalee jumped in for me, probably thinking she was speaking for me. “You could, you know, Tania, show a little fucking gratitude once in a while — this scene, the food, the rest: it’s someone’s hard work, you know?” she said, and she gestured with her tilting head over to me, sitting there silently.

  It’s not what I was thinking or would have said. What I would have said, if I was able to form the words and build up the will to speak them, would have been something about the taciturn and ambiguous effects of success.

  But we were interrupted: Joshua, the retired hockey superstar, and Carrie, his stunning wife, had come out strolling through the grass toward us, their arms around each other’s waists.

  “Just wanted to properly welcome you all,” Joshua said. “We won’t stay, but just wanted you to know, you’re welcome to stay as long as you want to, and if there’s anything you need.”

  “Mi casa,” Carrie said, and she laughed.

  “It’s incredibly beautiful here,” I said. “Thanks for letting us pull in.”

  He handed me a wine bottle. “From our winery,” he said. “Enjoy!” He and his wife smiled and turned around.

  It was Natalie who stopped them. “Weren’t you Joshua . . . ?“ she started, and she stopped, squinting and half grinning over her shoulder. “I had brothers,” she said, “with your poster all over their walls.”

  He snorted sheepishly. “I still am Joshua . . . “ he said, drawing attention to the way she trailed off with a self-deprecating shrug.

  Natalee hung her head and chuckled.

  “We’re having trouble with success,” Bianca suddenly said to him. “And we’re not used to all this,” she said, gesturing with her arm across his acreage, but also to the food and wine and motorhome and the rest of it. “How did you handle it?”

  His wife rolled her eyes and puffed her cheeks out and patted him up and down over his back. They met glances too, and he grimaced at her.

  “Not well, in a nutshell,” his wife said for him, and she nodded and chuckled.

  He sat down in the grass and leaned back on his hands behind him and gazed at the flaring and enlarging sun. “His dad, this one here,” he said, nodding toward me. “I tell everyone it was his fists that allowed me room out there to score,” he said.

  The three girls spun around at me. “You never said!” Bianca said.

  I shrugged. “Not something I go into a lot,” I said.

  “But it wasn’t his dad’s fists, it was what he said to me,” Joshua said.

  Now I perked up. I’d never heard any other version of things than the fists, and it was as a simple story: If anyone checked Joshua too hard, my dad would take him out. Fini. Players learned to give the superstar a wide berth, or face the consequences.

  “Anybody who’s on show, who’s on a stage, and hockey — all pro sports — they’re on a stage, they’re just entertainment,” he said. “There’s a tension between your stage self and your true self. And as the stage self becomes more widely known, and more successful — more rewarded . . . ” he said directly to Bianca, “ . . . like this, that tension increases,” he said. “Your true self receives all the adulation from the fans and all the contracts from the managers, but it’s the stage self that is earning it. It was the same thing between me and his dad,” he said. “Everybody thought I was some smooth skater going down the ice, not fully realizing that other players got out of my way, knowing his dad was coming into the zone right behind me,” he said, and he laughed.

  “It’s just like it really was between my dad and all the other guys he fought the most with,” I said. “His best friends to this day are the guys he fought with the most,” I said, and I laughed.

  “Well that’s right,” Joshua said, and he nodded. “Being true to yourself doesn’t mean you need to deny your ability to play with your alternate selves,” he said. “That’s what your dad taught me. It’s okay to go out there on the stage as an avatar of yourself,” he said. “Fans loved believing he and those other guys hated each other, but they were always having beers after and laughing together.”

  His wife snickered. “And then you hang up that mask at the rink and you come home again,” his wife said, playing with her fingers in his hair, “and you resume your true self.”

  “That sounds so fake,” Tania said. “Where’s the authenticity?”

  Both Bianca and Natalee piped up, and I did too, but Joshua hushed us all with his outstretched hand. “You’re a creator,” he said to Tania. “An artist. And a very good one, I looked at some YouTubes. But you are not the creation.” He paused a moment. “You are not the art.”

  “And you’re full of sellout bullshit,” she said back to him, and she kicked her chair backward and went up the steps and into the motorhome, slamming the door behind her.

  “We’re going through things,” I said to him with a shrug after a couple of beats.

  “Come on,” his wife said to him, “we’ll leave you guys to it. Stay as long as you need,” she said.

  Bianca, Natalee and I remained on the couch quietly drinking his exceptionally good wine — like we knew what good wine from bad was — and the sun went down so that dark purple light filled the sky.

  Right before the very back of the RV was a bathroom — but we turned that into a sound control room when I found how to remove a panel into the bedroom behind it, and I replaced it with soundproof glass. The bedroom itself we turned into our recording studio where we could cut demos, work up new songs, rehearse, and record interviews for our social media. There were pushouts both sides of the RV that turned into single beds, and we turned a closet in the former bedroom into another single bed. The couch up front turned into yet another bed that I used.

  Suddenly, the side door swung open and Tania hung her head out. “Well are you going to fuck me or what?” she screamed across the field at me, and she went back inside, leaving the door swinging open.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Joshua and his wife were long gone, thankfully. Bianca and Natalee continued staring into the nearly gone horizon, but they both slightly grinned, too.

  “Well go on then,” Bianca finally said. “Help her settle down.”

  Natalee, though, was the one that surprised me more. She turned to me, pulled my chin to make me face her, and she kissed my lips lightly with her pursed mouth. “Do it for all of us,” she said. “Or nobody is getting any sleep tonight.”

  I nodded and snorted. She was right about that. “Wish me luck,” I said.

  “You can do it!” Bianca said and she gave me a pulled smile expression and a thumbs up.

  “If anybody can!” Natalee added, and she squinted her eyes and also pulled a fake smile, and gave me thumbs up.

  I crept toward the open RV door and leaned my head inside before climbing up the steps. I closed the door behind me — the others could wait, I decided.

  The dimmer point lights buried in the trim around the ceiling of the RV cast a soft golden glow throughout the space. I didn’t see her at first, but when I found her standing stark naked right in the middle of our hang-around room, I startled. She had pulled her long, straight black hair down over the front of her face, but I could see her dark eyes peering at me through strands. Her hands were both cupped over her groin. But I noticed movement and glanced down. The middle finger of one hand was bent and pushing down and pulling up. I drew my gaze back up her body to her eyes. She dropped her mouth open and gasped lightly. I realized she was masturbating.

  “You okay?” I said to her.

  She snorted and half turned away and looked down. A grin spread over her face before she twisted back up to me. “It’s all a show, isn’t that what your dad’s friend said?”

  “Not quite sure that was what he meant,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes and swung her head around and stepped up to me high on her toes. “You don’t understand anything,” she said, and she pushed my t-shirt up over my head and undid the waist of my pants. She slid her warm and lithe naked body down the front of my body and came down to her knees, pushing my pants, and my shorts down with her.

  With little warning, she grunted, she pressed her palm into my abdomen, spread her fingers over my stomach, and pushed her open mouth all the way down the length of my shaft.

  “Tania,” I said, but she pulled off me, gripped me hard in her fist, and pumped me against her face.

  “It’s what you want, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Not going to say no,” I said.

  She came up my body like smoke wrapping around me, and with one foot snaking around my leg and her arms curling around my waist and neck, she licked her way from my chest, up over my shoulders and neck, and all over my face. She took my mouth with her mouth and grunted inside our kiss. She moved against me like she moved on stage.

  “It’s what I want,” she said in a shivering whisper against my ear. She pulled on my cock and lead me with it to her bed in the side of the motorhome. “I need a good Doug-fucking,” she said, and she laughed and laid down in front of me. “Take my mind off things, baby?” she said.

  I knelt on her bed between her upraised knees. She reached down past her hips and tugged on my cock and curled in her torso to reach further with her straining neck, and she closed her mouth over the head of my cock and pumped herself down on me again. I could see out the window the glow on the faces of Bianca and Natalee with the fire ring in front of them.

  “Come on, baby,” Tania said, drawing my attention back to her. “I need it so bad!” She lifted her feet and pulled her heels into the backs of my thighs, urging me forward and down, and into her. She pulled on my cock and aimed it toward her groin and she squirmed and gasped under me. Her body writhed like a water snake.

  I braced myself with one hand against the wall beside me and my other hand against the wall above her pillows. “You’re in a different mood,” I said down to her.

  “Different?” she said, and she pulled harder on my cock and squirmed under me. “How would you know what is real and what is different about me, when I don’t even know?” she said. “All these personas you all think we just choose between.”

  “Success can be hard, sometimes,” I said. “We all know the stories.”

  She flipped her head back and guffawed at the wall behind her before she raised her body right up off the bed and suspended it on her heels and the top of her head, searching and pushing with her hips, trying to aim her pussy at the head of my cock. She dropped down frustrated.

  “Fame and fortune,” she started singing long and deep and crooning-like, “how empty they can be.”

  I was alway struck by the depth and range of her singing voice. It made me shiver. Scratchy and smooth at the same time, too — she was unique. “Who’s that?” I said.

  “The King of Rock and Roll, of course,” she said, and she laughed half-way to maniacal up at me.

  “Michael Jackson?” I said.

  She gasped and play-slapped me across the face. “Elvis!” she shouted, and she widened her eyes at me and shook her head. “Just for that, you have to fuck me now,” she said.

  I sank down on my knees and she let go of my cock. The head, big and hard by then, pushed between her lips, already wet and full. She stretched out hard under me and arched high in her back. I came down further and filled her an inch or so inside. She inhaled deeply, rolled her head hard to the side, and pressed her palms into the wall above and behind her pillows, bracing her body for mine. I pushed with my hips and in one long, smooth movement, I filled her completely with my cock. She writhed under me and thrashed her head side to side, whipping her hair over her face.

  “Fuck ya!” she groaned with a deep breath.

  I pummeled her snapping body into the small bed hard enough, the springs of the motorhome groaned and the whole thing rocked. She laughed and bit and scratched and pulled me, before she rolled us over and sank the heels of her hands into my shoulders and pumped her hips down into my hips, slapping my body with hers and pushing her pussy down past the base of my cock, grinding herself into me.

  I came out of her and threw her down under me. I already knew her enough by then to know that she loved being manhandled. She wanted agency taken away from her, she didn’t want to be responsible: she needed to feel powerless. I rolled her body over and she yelped. I pulled her up by her hips and she play-screamed. I used my knee to spread her knees and she pretended to be offended and she huffed. I slapped her ass cheeks and she spun around to glare at me with her face on its side looking up at me, her hair all over her eyes, her eyes steaming and glassy.

  “You think you can just fuck me like that?” she snarled.

  I smirked and pulled back on her hips and plunged my cock into her pussy.

  She inhaled sharply and her fists twisted up in her sheets. I pulled back and slammed myself into her harder, and she spun her face around to face the wall in front of her, and with her chin on her bed, she grimaced into the pillows and pushed back at me with her hips.

  I slammed her body and the RV rocked. The slapping sounds our bodies made surely could be heard by Bianca and Natalee around the fire ring outside. I slapped Tania’s ass harder and she screamed loud enough I worried the star hockey player and his wife could hear. By the sounds of things, it would have been nothing new to him.

  “Fuck, Doug!” Tania cried into the sheets. “That’s so good!”

  I felt her pussy contract around my cock and I gripped her waist harder and threw myself into her pussy deeper. She cried out louder and pushed back at me faster. I hung myself over her and wrapped an arm around her ribs and cupped my hand around her swaying breasts.

  She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and she arched deeply in her back and pushed her face up and around. We kissed over her shoulder sloppily. She pushed her palms into the wall in front of her so that we were both kneeling up high, and I squeezed both her breasts as she stretched her body back into me. She reached behind her with both hands and dug her fingers into my ass cheeks behind me, and she urged me into her even harder, deeper, and faster.

  I dragged my fingertips down the front of her straining body and touched her pussy lips and felt my cock, hot, wet, and raw, sliding into and coming out of her. I touched her hard, little clitoris and she jerked spasmodically against me. I circled it and she stopped breathing and strained in her neck. I touched it and her body leapt and jolted against me.

  It made me lose myself and I erupted inside her and filled her. My cum burbled out of her pussy and ran down the insides of her legs. She fell forward onto her hands and groaned and whined before she collapsed entirely onto her side under me and she pulled her knees up to her chest and sighed.

 

1 2 3