Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody (16 page)

“Point taken,” he says, turning his attention back to the road.

“Where are we headed?” I ask.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he says, speeding into the hills.

Twenty minutes later, we pull up into the driveway of a secluded mansion overlooking Seattle. The setting sun is beautiful and romantic. “Who lives here?” I ask.

“Eddie Vedder,” he says, killing the ignition. “But it’s on the market. I thought I’d bring you here and see what you think of it.”

We step out of the car. “You want to buy this place?”

“If you like it,” he says.

Earl pulls a key out of his pocket and opens the door to the mansion. “Eddie’s on tour with Pearl Jam right now, but he lent me a key so we could give it a test drive,” he says, smirking wickedly.

We enter the house. Like everything Earl shows me, it’s amazing. The bright color scheme, the space-age furniture, the floor-to-ceiling fish tank with naked women swimming in it—just walking through the door, I already know this is where I want to spend the rest of my life. This is where I want to spend the rest of
our
life.

“Did you decorate this place too?” I ask.

Earl nods. “You know it, baby.”

“You’re so talented,” I say. It doesn’t seem fair that one man could be so beautiful, and so talented, and so rich, but damn: Earl Grey is the total package. My inner guidette shakes her head.
That’s like the fiftieth time you’ve said that, using nearly the exact same words,
she says. I’m about ready to tell her to go back to styling her poof, when I feel a kick in my abdomen. The baby! It reminds me of Earl’s sadism. Is all the money in the world worth putting up with the pain he’ll subject me to in order to satisfy his own twisted desires?

Earl takes me on a tour of the mansion. It has sixteen living rooms, a recording studio, a bowling alley with thirty-two lanes, and two and a half bathrooms. “Plus,” Earl says, “there’s even a guest bedroom for when your parents come to visit.”

“Or my friends,” I say.

Earl doesn’t look happy when I say this, but he nods. “If your friends want to stay, sure,” he says. “But Jin will have to sleep in the horse barn out back.”

My mouth drops open. “Why do you have to be such an asshole sometimes?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry. I care about you. Ponyboy just wants to get into your pants. I have to protect what’s mine.”

“So I’m yours,” I say curtly.

“If you want to be, yes,” he says. “I’ve already told you how I feel about you.”

And I was going to tell you, until you crashed us into the flipping Space Needle.
“What happened to make you this way?” I ask, avoiding the L-word for the moment.

He ignores me. We walk into the Starbucks inside Eddie Vedder’s house. Earl orders a Pike Place Roast from the barista, and then looks at me expectantly. “What will you have? Your usual?”

I nod. “Earl Grey. Hot.”

After he pays, we take our drinks with us and sit on the patio overlooking Seattle. The sun is still setting. “Is it this beautiful every day in Seattle? I always thought it was supposed to be cloudy and rainy,” I say.

Earl laughs wickedly. “That’s all part of the city’s anti-tourism campaign,” he says. “The truth is, it
never
rains in Seattle.”

I sip my Earl Grey tea. It’s hot, but not as hot as Earl Grey. “You never answered my question,” I say. “What happened to you as a child?”

“You want to know why I’m so sadistic. Why I take pleasure in causing pain.”

“Yes.”

“My father was killed in a drunk diving accident when I was an infant. My mother raised me by herself,” he says. “Unfortunately, she was a gambling addict. She practically lived in casinos. In fact, I barely have any memories of her except for a few snippets of her with feathered hair. I remember feeling very lonely.

“When I was four, my mother lost me in a high-stakes poker game to Bill Gates. Mr. Gates brought me to Seattle, but had no interest in being a father to me, this helpless gambler’s son. He gave me sixteen billion dollars and set me up with a foster family.”

“I had no idea how rough you had it,” I say. “Where is your mother now?”

He shakes his head and gazes into the setting sun. “I tried to look her up once, but found out that she died of a gambling overdose.”

“That’s so heartbreaking,” I say.

“Dr. Drew says that when I tie up women and spank them, I’m acting out the anger I feel towards my mother.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I was lost for years. I was a marshmallow addict and chocoholic; my grades suffered at school. When I was twelve, a classmate introduced me to AD&D.”

“AD&D?”

“Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” he says. “A role-playing game. By pretending to be someone else, I was able to escape my chaotic life. Once I became a Dungeon Master and started orchestrating our scenes, I found that I liked being the one in control. I wasn’t at the whim of foster parents or Bill Gates.

“Alas, the good times didn’t last forever. As my friends started meeting girls and having sex, they stopped role-playing. My own hormones soon started raging as well. That’s when I discovered BDSM—Bards, Dragons, Sorcery, and Magick. Erotic live-action role playing.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me all of this upfront,” I say.

“I told you I have fifty shames,” he says. “Role playing is one of them. Things like Nickelback and Olive Garden are others.”

“Why do you need to feel ashamed at all?”

“A rich guy like me isn’t supposed to enjoy these things,” he says. “I’m supposed to drink three-hundred dollar bottles of Pinot Noir and listen to classical music. My pleasures, however, are of the guilty variety. I can’t share them with the other rich people at the country club. Feeling shameful is the only way I can reconcile my desires with the pressure to fit into the box society puts its aristocratic class in.”

“Can’t you just, I don’t know, like the things other rich people like? Would that be so hard?”

Earl shakes his head. “We can’t choose the things we like any more than we can choose who we love.”

“Have you ever had a normal relationship?”

“You’re my first,” he says. “And, hopefully, my last.”

“The way you say that sounds like you’re planning to kill me,” I mutter.

He laughs. “I would never kill you,” he says. “I might pay someone else to, but I would never do it myself.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“It’s true. I can’t hurt you,” he says.

“What if I want you to?”

“Hurt you? Why would you want me to do that?”

“I want you to do your worst. I want to feel the full fury of the sadistic bastard Earl Grey. If you’re asking me to move in with you, if you’re asking me to love you, I need to know how dark things can get.”

He narrows his gray eyes. “You’re sure you want to do this,” he says.

I nod. I realize my index finger is buried in my nostril up to the second knuckle, and remove it before Earl can admonish me.

He shakes his head. “I would say, ‛What am I going to do with you, Anna?’ but I know exactly what I’m going to do.” He grabs me by the wrist and marches me back to his stock car, then drives like a Cullen toward downtown Seattle. I know what the next stop is: the Dorm Room of Doom. We’re finally going to role play.

Chapter Twenty-five

W
E’RE BEING FOLLOWED,” Earl says, glancing in the rearview mirror. I look into the passenger-side mirror. There’s a solitary pair of headlights closing in on us.

“How do you know they’re following us?” I ask. We’re on a two-lane highway en route to Seattle, and there’s little room to pass, thanks to the frequent curves. “Could just be some asshole tailgating . . .”

Earl shakes his head. “It’s the same silver PT Cruiser I saw earlier when we were heading up to Eddie Vedder’s place. They kept driving when we pulled into the driveway, so I didn’t think twice about it.”

“You should have told me,” I say.

“And frighten you for no good reason?” he says, stepping on the gas. Now we’re taking the curves at over two hundred miles per hour.

“Slow down!” I shout. “
Now
I’m frightened.”

“I’m sorry, Anna, but we have to outrun him,” Earl says. “This car is made for speed.”

“Didn’t you also say it was a movie prop from thirty years ago or something?”

“Well, yes,” he concedes.

“And anyway, I’ve seen NASCAR races. I’ve seen these cars wipe out and go up in flames.”

“Then how would you recommend we shake our friend off?” he says.

“I don’t know. Do you have a gun?”

“You think I carry a gun with me in the glove compartment of my stock car, Anna? What kind of thug do you think I am?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“But you have a point. I think I have a bazooka in the backseat,” he says. “Let’s trade places—you take the wheel.”

We’re going almost three hundred miles an hour down the highway, but we switch places without slowing down. It’s only when I’m in the driver’s seat that I remember something important. “I don’t have a driver’s license,” I tell Earl.

“Don’t worry,” he says, leaning into the backseat and opening an oversized violin case. He pulls a bazooka out.

“I’ve never driven a car before, either,” I protest. My foot is on the gas and I’m trying to steer. It’s just enough like Super Mario Kart that I sort of have the hang of it.

“You’re doing fine,” Earl says, loading the bazooka.

“Thank God it’s not a stick shift,” I say. I’ve heard stories about stick shifts. While they might make for fun double entendres, I hear driving them can be a bitch.

Earl looks at me, confusion plastered all over his face. “It
is
a stick shift, Anna,” he says.

Uh-oh
.

“Don’t worry, though,” he says. “I’ll just fire a warning shot at this guy; he’ll back off, and hopefully you won’t have to change speed. Okay?”

I nod, as the hills zip by us on the right . . . and a thousand-foot cliff looms to the left.
Gulp
.

Earl tries rolling down his window, but it’s locked. “Can you turn the child lock off?” he asks me.

As I search the driver’s-side door for the child lock, the PT Cruiser chasing us taps our bumper. I grab the steering wheel with both hands and start hyperventilating. “I can’t do this,” I say.

Earl grips my arm and gazes gazingly into my eyes with his steely gray eyes. Even in almost total darkness, they look as beautiful and luminescent as ever. What did I do to deserve this gorgeous man? “You can do this,” he says. “Now unlock the windows and keep your eyes on the road and your foot on the gas pedal.”

“Yes, Sir,” I say, grinning. I find the child lock and flip it so that Earl can roll his window down.

He grins at me. “Let’s show this SOB what happens when you ride Earl Grey’s ass.” He leans out the window and aims the bazooka at the PT Cruiser.

“Fire in the hole,” he says, shooting the bazooka. All this talk about riding asses and firing in holes is turning me on. I can’t wait until we get back to his penthouse . . .

The PT Cruiser explodes behind us in a fiery inferno that lights up the mountainside.
Woah
. Earl grabs the wheel and we trade places again. He slows the car and turns it around.

“I thought you were just firing a warning shot,” I say.

“That was what I was trying to do,” he says. “It was also my first time using a bazooka. My bad.”

“Could anyone have survived that?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

Earl drives the car up to the edge of the wreckage, which is still blazing. He leaves the car idling with the headlights illuminating the crash site and steps out. I follow him.

There’s a crumpled body on the ground crawling out of the twisted metal. Earl bends over and rolls the person onto their back. It’s a bruised and bloodied elderly woman I instantly recognize as one of the door greeters from my Walmart store.

“Mother!” Earl says.

“Oh, my baby boy,” she says weakly. She looks like hell, but that’s to be expected since she just survived a car chase that ended in a bazooka blast.

“I thought you were dead,” he says, cradling the woman in his arms.

“I faked my own death so you could never find me,” she says. “I didn’t want you to see your poor mother as a casino junkie. Even after I shot my blackjack dealer in the face and got clean, I knew that I could only complicate your life. After rehab, I applied for the only job an ex-addict who looks thirty years older than her driver’s license can get in this country—”

“A Walmart greeter,” I say.

“Exactly,” she says, nodding. “I had written you off completely, Earl. Until last week, when you walked through the automatic doors and back into my life.”

“At the Portland Walmart,” he says.

“Yes. You didn’t see me—no one looks at us greeters—but I immediately knew it was you. Your tousled hair, penetrating gray eyes, and long fingers haven’t changed a bit since you were a baby.”

He shakes his head in disbelief. “Why follow us, though? Why not try to contact me?”