Wild Licks by Cecilia Tan Read Free Book Online Page A

obvious. Something like Steely Dan,” Mal said. “It’s a literary reference. To a William S. Burroughs book.”
    “Who was Steely Dan?” I asked. Burroughs had not been in my reading curriculum.
    “Not who, what. It’s the name of a dildo in the book Naked Lunch .”
    Now I was blushing so hard I wanted to fan my face. The last thing I needed to be thinking about—while sitting next to the man who had given me a knee-trembling orgasm last night with a beer bottle—was a steel dildo. But I could imagine what Mal would do with one so vividly, right down to the wicked glint in his eye.
    He sounded thoughtful, satisfied. “I’m glad we settled on ‘The Rough.’”
    “Yes,” Ricki said, “I like The Rough.”
    Axel put an arm around her. “I know you like it rough, darling.”
    “You are terrible,” Ricki said with a mock slap on his hand.
    “He corrupted me,” Axel said, pointing at Mal.
    “You’re each a bad influence on the other,” Ricki concluded. “Now shhh, they’re about to introduce the film.”
    The lights went down and I settled into my seat, trying to tamp down the feelings raging through me. There was a tall, dark, and handsome gentleman sitting beside me, the same man who had seen my hidden tattoo. The same man I had begged to hurt me.
    It suddenly occurred to me that almost no one saw both sides of Mal.
    Except me. My stomach dropped like I was on a roller coaster as the realization took hold in my mind. We were alike in that way. Except Mal had separated his “bad boy” side from his gentleman side and somehow still managed them both. I’d been fighting that battle for a long time, good girl versus bad, and good girl had pretty much been in charge ever since the disaster of secretly dating a much older tattoo artist when I’d turned eighteen.
    His name had been Chuck; he had been pushing thirty at the time, and thinking back on him now I knew he was nothing more than a sleaze. But at the time I had been giddy with having moved to the East Coast, with the freedom of college life, with the temptation to explore who I could be where no one knew me.
    The night we’d met, I had gone to a club. One of the guys in my dorm had a band and they were playing at a bar downtown and I’d promised him I’d go to see him play. They were great, and he was cute, but after their set, I didn’t find him.
    What I did find was Chuck, sitting on a motorcycle outside. He had a tattoo of a bullwhip on one arm; I had a lifetime of fantasies built on pirate movies and Westerns and books like Ariadne Wood’s, full of dragons and heroines who sacrifice themselves to save the day. Somehow those two things added together to him taking me back to his place and spanking me until I came.
    Three weeks later, I had the “Excrucia” tattoo and was convinced I had found the perfect man for me, the only guy who had ever successfully made me come.
    Three weeks after that, on the day I’d gone to his house to confront him about the STD I’d come down with, I found him in bed with two girls I didn’t even recognize. The bubble burst that fast. Bad girl went back into the fantasy closet and good girl took over with a big, fat “I told you so.”
    I retreated into college life, studying, joining a sorority, a theater improv troupe, a campus pro-environmental group. I’d tried to put my fantasies aside and figured if I was going to get into kink, it would have to wait until later. I dated a bit within my social circle but that’s all it was, really, “social” dating, not good sex and certainly not love.
    And here was Mal Kenneally, a perfect “society” date in public and a perfectly wicked match for every “bad girl” fantasy I’d ever had in private. I’d convinced myself that I would never meet someone right for me.
    But here I’d already met him. And I already wanted him. The man who had seen my tattoo. Who had left bruises on my skin. Who knew I needed him to hurt me. Except he didn’t know it was me