“Kiss me the way you did in the room.” Her lips quiver. “Feel how wet you are down there. Now feel how hard I am for you.” She looks down at me. “Push me onto the bed and climb on top of me and ride me until you can’t take it anymore. Tell me what you want, exactly what you want, and make me give it to you how you like it.”

I reach for one of her taut, ripe nipples. “Let me start by licking your tits as I feel you up.” She spreads her legs and now we are so close that our eyelashes could touch. “Cum as hard as you can because you don’t need any fucking champagne when you’re fucking me. Show me that you know that. Take me.” She huffs. “Own me.” She puffs. “Joe says, ‘fuck me.’”

We are on the bed. I don’t even know how we got there, I just know about skin meeting skin—Love is all you need is Love—and this sex is a circle, it never ends. We are animals and she is loud. Joe says don’t stop, fuck me and when I’m not possessed by the pure rapture between her legs, between the sheets, I laugh. Joe has Love. I have never known this kind of wetness, the stuff of pornography, sopping. I want to eat her but I hold back—I am not a servant—and I nip at her belly and she pulls me on top of her for more, and she is silent, demanding, and she pulls me inside of her and it’s like Chateau: The Body Version. I belong in here, in Love.

I want her to taste me—Get your dick sucked—and I tell her and she turns into a different person. “Oh. I kind of don’t do that.”

If there were music it would stop. “Oh,” I say. Kind of is the most useless phrase in the English language. “Well, I could do it to you.”

She squirms. “I just like it better like this,” she says. She kisses me and her pussy envelops me, quicksand, and it’s impossible to argue about blowjobs as she rides me like a Donzi on the water, bump, bump, bump, and it would be perfect, my best performance yet were it not for that little voice in the back of my head, a warning, a caution.

Get your dick sucked.

It’s almost as if she heard Mr. Mooney and she knows I need more. She looks at me. “There’s a Coke in the fridge,” she smiles. “Will you get it?”

I bring the glass bottle of Coke to Love and she shakes it and sprays it all over my chest and yes, it’s on my dick and yes, kind of was just foreplay and she is licking the Coca-Cola off my midsection, she is nothing but a tongue, a set of eyes, hands. She is below my belly button and she is stroking my inner thighs and now she has me in her hands but somehow there is new cold Coke on my legs. She rises and her eyes meet mine. “Fuck me,” she says.

“Joe says, ‘Suck me,’” I say.

“Love says, ‘Fuck me.’” She takes over and I give it to her and I know she’s never had it like this before because she tells me she’s never had it like this before. We finish together, bliss. Natural symphonic mastery of sex. I am thirsty, spent. I swallow the last drops of Coke and we laugh about our sticky bed.

“Now I’m thirsty,” she says.

“I think there’s some Coke left,” I say—on my dick—and I grin.

“Nah,” she says, and my joke goes right over her head. “I’m good.”

She pinches my nipple. Soon, she is asleep and I am awake. The sex, the sex. I ate Amy’s superfruits but it was never worth getting her jungle stuck in my teeth. It’s just right with Love’s pure, classic Coca-Cola pussy, and I will block out the critical part of my brain hissing that the Coke was tainted by the champagne. Fuck you, brain.

I dig around the room for Love’s panties. I am a hunter. I want to smell Love, taste her. I find them eventually and they’re in the trash, mixed in with a banana peel, numerous price tags from Neiman Marcus, and a half-full jar of face cream. I move the trash bin across the room so she’ll see it when she wakes up and I fall asleep too.

I wake up the next morning to her laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“I see you figured out my little indulgence,” she says. “I never wear the same panties twice. I know.”

“You throw them away every day?”

She kisses me. “But now that I have you, you can keep them all and you can sew them together and make them into a quilt.”

“I’m not sewing your fucking panties, Love.”

“Oh, yes you are.”

“Oh, no I’m not.”

We kiss. She licks my earlobe. “Ya wanna take a shower or ya wanna fuck?”

I WANT A BLOWJOB GOD DAMN IT. #mydayinla #chateauproblems #cantgetmydicksucked

“Joe says let me taste you.”

She pulls away. “Joe,” she says. “Is this gonna be a problem?”

“There is nothing even remotely resembling a problem in this room,” I say. “I was just playing around.”

I can feel a story coming and I’m right. Love has never been comfortable with anything oral. Her mother claims she never gave Love’s father a blowjob and she told Love that if a man loves you, truly, he doesn’t need that.

“Wow,” I say. “I can’t believe you talk about this stuff with your mom.”

“We don’t really have boundaries.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Joe.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but they met in middle school. Do you really think your dad has gone his whole life without getting his dick sucked?”

She shakes her head. “That’s the part of the story I’m getting to,” she says, and then she tells me about the year she and Forty had their sweet sixteen, a giant Beverly Hills bonanza with hundreds of people. She got a horse as her present and Forty got a massage. “And Forty gets home,” Love says, “And he is messed. Up. And I am like what’s wrong? And he is like, I can’t tell you. And I am like, you have to.”

“And?”

“And my dad’s masseuse sucked his dick. And she told him she did that for my dad once a week.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s fucked up.”

Love shrugs and says that we can play Joe Says all day long but she’ll never do anything oral with me. Or anyone. “I know you want to know if I did this for Michael or Trey,” she says. “And the answer is no.”

I strategize. “I’m just thinking, you know, it’s different for everyone,” I say. “What your mom doesn’t like, you know, maybe you would like.”

Love says that she is thirty-five years old and she knows exactly who she is. She kisses me and grabs a room service menu. We order eggs benny and coffee and pancakes and we both look at mimosa on the menu but champagne is a sore spot. I tell her I like her. She says she likes me too.

We sink into the bed together and this is what it is, sex, then a knock at the door, then food, then rest, then movies, then sex, then we think about leaving the room and we don’t leave the room, then sex, then sometimes we get in the tub, then movies, then food, then sometimes a song, then sex, then Joe Says/Love Says. Love has a butler named Henry and she texts him and he shows up with Animal Style In-N-Out burgers. We half watch movies on TBS (Love’s favorite station) and when Bride Wars begins, she says she never cheated on either of her husbands. I tell her I never cheated on anyone either.

“But you were never married?” she asks.

“No.” I don’t want to tell her about Beck or Amy. That’s what feels so unique about this room, this thing with Love. I’ve been trying to find Amy for so long and now to break away from all that hunting, to rest. In this room, in this bed, I rarely think about the mug of piss in Rhode Island. It’s as though there are invisible guards outside, like nobody can get us, our DNA, our pasts. It’s only been five meals, maybe two days. I genuinely don’t know. Love is a drug. The more she opens up about her life, the less I want to share my own stories with her. My life feels too small, too gritty.

“Okay,” she says. “You’ll let me know when you’re ready.”

Love is patient. She doesn’t push. It’s actually fun to watch Cocktail with her because, unlike Amy, she takes it for what it is. Love likes Hannah and Her Sisters but she doesn’t love it the way she loves Crimes and Misdemeanors. Just when I think she might be perfect, she claps for the opening credits of Dirty Dancing. She hits the mute button. “Let’s not have any sound,” she says. “I’ve seen this so many times I don’t need to hear it to watch it.”