She comes, but keeps going for me, and it only takes another thirty seconds or so for me to finish, at which point she collapses on me, and we just lie there, still united.
“You’re shaking,” she says when she finally picks her head up.
I don’t know what to say.
I’m embarrassed.
“It was such good sex,” I offer.
She picks up the ring around her neck, kisses it, and says, “Trust me, Chuck Bass. Good things ahead. I just need to do it my way this time. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
She kisses me on the lips. “Now I will shower and make myself look super hot for you . . . and Vince Neil.”
She winks, and then she’s off me and in the bathroom.
When she comes out again, her hair’s teased out a little and she’s wearing heavy black eyeliner and raspberry red lipstick. She has on these tight jeans, four-inch heels, and a black tank top. “Not bad for a last-minute pack job and having no idea where the hell we were going, right?”
“I’m not letting Vince Neil anywhere near you,” I say.
Because the casino comped us drinks at a restaurant called Tuscany, Portia insists we eat there, which makes me feel like a poor asshole. I tell her we can eat wherever she wants. “It’s your night,” I say. But she insists.
They seat us at a table for two in front of a fake bald mountain, water flowing over beige rocks—all indoors, of course.
We are in the mall portion of the casino—I can see a Tiffany’s and a Coach store, and I hope to God Portia isn’t interested in purchasing expensive items tonight, because I don’t have the funds for that. I’ve budgeted enough for concert T-shirts, this dinner, and maybe coffee in the morning. But the name-brand shit her first husband bought her is looking worn and old lately, and I know how much she loves high-end fashion. I also know I will never be able to buy her that stuff on a regular basis.
I wonder if my financial situation kept her from putting on my ring.
Portia orders a pink grapefruit Cosmo, and I order a diet tonic water.
We clink glasses, and Portia says, “To our future.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
We drink.
Portia says, “Remember the video for ‘Looks That Kill,’ where it’s some postapocalyptic world and there are all of these women running around in loincloths and the boys of Mötley Crüe are herding them into a pen with torches? And then the woman leader comes to free all of the herded women in the pen, which she does, and she seduces the members of Mötley Crüe and even jumps over walls like a superhero?”
“How could I forget?”
“And then in the end the Mötley Crüe boys surround her with their fists in the air, and they all disappear into a flaming pentagram?”
“That’s the best part!”
“I used to imagine I was that leader of women in the video, the one Mötley Crüe could not herd into a pen. A freer of women. Do you think that made me a feminist even before I knew what the word meant?”
“Couldn’t tell you for certain,” I say, and then laugh. “But I’ll go with it if it makes you happy tonight.”
“You think that’s stupid, right?”
“It was just a music video. It didn’t mean anything,” I say, and then instantly wish I hadn’t, because Portia loves to talk about stuff like this—get all deep and philosophical—and I want her to be happy tonight.
I’m relieved when she smiles and takes another gulp of her pink drink.
“As someone who lists Gloria Steinem as a hero, I probably shouldn’t like Mötley Crüe—a band who will most likely have strippers onstage tonight,” she says. “A band that’s notorious for objectifying women. I tell myself I’m grandfathering Mötley Crüe in, because I listened to them before I knew any better.”
“Like letting the racism of a beloved uncle slide?”
“Exactly! This music—Mötley Crüe—it’s our childhood. It’s what we have. It raised us, for good, bad, or indifferent.”
I glance at the ring hanging around her neck and say, “It’s that for me—but it’s a bit more too. It kept raising me even after I became an adult.”
I really wish I hadn’t said that, because I don’t want to talk about my past tonight.
“How so?” Portia asks, and then I know there’s no turning back.
“I mean, as a former junkie.”
She cocks her head to the side, sips her pink Cosmo, and says, “Mötley Crüe did do a lot of drugs.”
“They say Nikki Sixx used to do five thousand dollars’ worth of drugs a day. And that was in the eighties. Can you imagine?”
“You sound impressed,” she says.
“Many years of my adult life, I didn’t make five thousand dollars a year.”
Why did I just say that?
“But what really impresses me is Nikki Sixx’s sobriety,” I say, and wonder if it sounds too soapbox, too former-drug-addict-turned-reformer. But for some reason I keep on going anyway, maybe because I really believe it. “When I was in rehab, one of the counselors—his name was Grover, which is an unusual name, and he was an unusual guy—he saw me draw a pentagram and the words Mötley Crüe in my notebook, with the little dots over the o and u and he asked me if I had ever seen the Nikki Sixx episode of I Survived. When I said I hadn’t, he pulled out this VHS tape and we watched it together. It was all about how much drugs Nikki Sixx did, how he didn’t even enjoy playing music anymore, didn’t even care that he was a rock star, crashed cars, ended up alone on the holidays, paranoid in a closet, died twice and was brought back to life by an EMT Mötley Crüe fan who gave him adrenaline shots even though he was already pronounced dead. How he didn’t even go to his grandmother’s funeral, because he was so strung out. He was very close with his grandmother apparently. The episode ends with Nikki hitting rock bottom, but then getting clean and discovering that playing music sober could be a rush too. And then he started a charitable organization that helps teen drug addicts. They can learn how to make and produce music. I remember Nikki saying that music can give them a goal, something to focus on. When Grover showed me that episode, something clicked, and I decided if Nikki Sixx could beat addiction and make Dr. Feelgood sober, well, then maybe I could get sober and become an elementary school teacher.”