Page 40 of Masks and Mishaps

When I collapse on the bed, my body feels like all its structures have faded. I’m air—I’m nothing but weightless, vaporous air.

And I’m so messy.

“Well, look at that,” he says running his palm over his mouth. “Youcansquirt.”

I end the recording and toss the phone to the side as Dalton peels the mask off his face and lets it fall to the floor with an audibleplop.

“I did some data analytics of my own,” he announces, smugness rich in his words. “Squirting is lucrative. This video is going to make you a ton of money.”

He reaches out, slides his fingertips through my oversensitive pussy, and brings them to his lips. Helicksthem.

Then he looks at me, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and says with a grin, “For the next four weeks, you’re going to be so fucking in love with me.”

Seventeen

DALTON

WhenIwasfifteen,my father sat Lander, Everett, and me down in his home office and offered us our first bourbons. There between the paneled walls and shelves of old books Cavendish men had inherited and not read since the American Revolution, my father, Dalton Franklin Richmond Cavendish the Third (known as Frank by most, but known as Fucknugget by me) told us how to be successful men.

The path involved Princeton University, Harvard Law School, a job at Cavendish, Dawson & Waits (or the White House, in Everett’s case), and a stunning wife who didn’t need attention so long as she had diamonds. It was the path our three fathers had all taken, and like us, they’d started out as infants terrorizing the same au pair.

It was a weird year. Lander’s parents had passed, and my parents had become his legal guardians. Everett’s father was in Richmond, apparently being the Governor of Virginia but mostly being a cuntsack, so Everett stayed with us in McLean too.

For three fifteen-year-old boys who had been best friends their entire lives, the prospect of living together should have been unreal, but we were all having our first bouts of ennui. For Lan and Ev, their lives had been upended. I, on the other hand, was realizing I never wanted to be a goddamn lawyer.

I was outrageously stoned during my father’s life path pyramid scheme presentation, but even if I hadn’t hotboxed my bedroom that morning, all I would have remembered was the bourbon.

My father toasted and we drank:May we get what we want, may we get what we need, but may we never get what we deserve.

The rolling heat on my tongue spread through my body, and the feeling was otherworldly.I like drinking, I said later while staring tipsily at my bedroom ceiling, pretending I was speaking to Lander and Everett, but I was saying it to myself.I like drinking.

The liquor hit the rightsomethingI was looking for. Up to that point, nothing had eased me quite so smoothly. To this day, nothing has come close…

…Except for Essie’s pussy.

I run my tongue over my teeth, missing her taste while I watch her through my office’s clear walls. It’s Friday, and I can still feel her luscious thighs clenching my ears.

As usual, Essie’s clacking away on her keyboard in that seamless way computer science majors do. When she glances over, I wave with a tick of two fingers.

She glares.

Before I can react, my desk phone rings.

“Cavendish,” I say in lieu of a greeting.

“She’s here. Get to my office now,” Warner Hannington replies on the other end of the line.

I take one last look at Essie. She’s focused on her model, already bored of me. Fine—for now.

In Warner’s office, the older man is stoic and his salt and pepper hair is slightly less gelled than usual. “She’s not going to be like him,” he finally says once I’m sitting on one of the cream couches on the other side of the room.

He’s talking about Claudia Villatoro, Bernardo Villatoro’s daughter and only heir—the woman who controls the fate of Hannington-Hale.

“Nobody is their father,” I remind Hannington, but neither of us is saying the quiet part out loud: Claudia has more bikini and cocaine pictures on the internet than any billionaire in the world.

Warner looks rattled for the first time in my memory. “The fuck was Bernardo thinking…. And how are you so calm?”

“Aren’t we just having a conversation? We’re not going to save the bank today.” I recline on the expensive couch. “I’ll take care of it.”

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