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“I almost miss The Boy.” I put my lips to my latte, and the kiss of bitter espresso drowning in the soy milk is faint, like a memory of taste.

“Well, that’s understandable,” says Charlie. “You guys dated a long time, right?”

“Yeah, on and off,” I say. “He really became a part of my life. Of my blog.” I sigh. “I wrote about him a lot. People really liked the stories.”

“It’s tough when a relationship ends,” says Charlie.

The waiter comes and balances the bill on the edge of the table. “Mind if we split the tab?” I ask him. “I don’t want Charlie to feel any pressure to put out.”
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“Take that down immediately,” types The Boy.

“What?” I instant message back. I check the webcam built into my MacBook, a tiny black square full of potential for private publicity. No light blinks green to tell me I’m being filmed, but still, “Do you mean my sheer panties?”

“No, that story you wrote about me. Get rid of it now, please.” His typed messages appear in flashes of black and white on my computer screen, but his words are vibrating with reds. “You have no discretion. People who know me might see this. Do you understand?”

“All right,” I type back. “I apologize for invading your semi-privacy with a public semi-fabrication.” And I really am filled with regret—it was such a great story. I click a button in the back-end of my dot-com, and with an e-checkmark next to DELETE the tale is erased from everything but memories.

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Sitting in the jacuzzi, I watch the steam bubble off the water black with night, the spa breathing puffs of gray floating towards golden city lights.

My seat in the hot tub is like a throne: the Los Angeles night is laid out for me, though the kingdom looks like a miniature of itself, like a smart cut of cardboard glittering with yesterday’s Christmas lights.

I watch a tiny car silently buzz along the coast, but even the automobile doesn’t scale the city for me: it all looks fake. “Can you believe that each of those lights is a home, is whole world into itself, full of people the center of their own universes?” I ask.

“You can’t see house lights from here,” says The Boy. “Those are all street lights.”

“Even way up in the Hollywood hills?” I look at a dark silhouette melting in the sky, a hump of land sunny days have shown to be a pricey mound of dirt littered with houses. The hills are freeways away, but I think if I stretch my hand far enough out of the steaming water I can grab them, and crumble their earth in my fist.

“Yeah,” says The Boy. “Look how equally spaced the lights are.”

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My iPhone vibrates against my thigh, flashing that The Boy is calling. I stretch on the nude leather of his bedroom’s chaise lounge, in an unchaste yawn, before I press ACCEPT. “Yes, sexy one?”

“Can you come up the elevator and open the garage door for me?”

“Done.” I hop up, and in and out the small lift, into the garage. I feel against the dark wall, and press the first blur of a button I touch. One of the mahogany doors yawns open, like a heavy curtain rising. I see The Boy waiting for me, though I’m out of his line of vision, like an actress paused in the wings of a stage. “Want to play dress up?” I ask.

“I want to play ‘get rid of the garbage,’” says The Boy. “I can’t see you. Where are you?”

“I’m standing on some rug,” I answer, tiptoeing to the carpet’s curling edge. “I don’t mind a dirty mind, but dirty feet don’t get me off.”

“So open the other garage door so I can see you.”

I finger another button, and a second door slides up. The inside of the garage is spotlighted by the sun, setting the scene: a young femme fatale looks on while the older man, The Boy, sweats, maintaining his Los Angeles land. I step out further into the light. “You want to watch me so you can touch yourself?”

“Precisely,” says The Boy, not looking up from the empty boxes he’s juggling.

I rub my breasts through my blush-pink nightie, snaking my hands down my stomach, lids lowered; I’m playing Clara Bow. “How’s this?” My breath is a moan, spiraling down in time with my hips. His name slides off my lips.

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“Want to get a pizza?”

“Sure,” I say, without looking up at The Boy. I put down my MacBook, and check my reflection: my bobbed hair’s carefully disheveled, my lingerie romper a crisp black and white. I grab my iPhone and wallet, and– “I just have to get my shoes downstairs.”

“Don’t bother.” The Boy walks into one of his closets, and pushes the button to call the elevator. On the way out he tosses pink, Made-in-China flip-flops at me. The sandals rest on his Persian rug; I stare at them.

“No way am I wearing one of your ex-hoe’s shoes.” I wrinkle my face. “Especially when they’re flip-flops.”

“Just put them on,” he says. “You won’t even get out of the car.”

I tie tight my belted camel coat, rubbing my cheek against the fox fur collar. I finally slip on the rubber sandals. Over the elevator’s rumbling as it rises to our floor, I hear The Boy chuckling in the closet. “Oh, don’t come in here yet. I haven’t worn this in forever.” I hear some shuffling. “Okay, you can look.”

The Boy walks into his bedroom’s low light, and his Greek bust of a body is covered completely by a brown robe dusting the floor. The dirt-dyed fabric is shapeless, except for a peaked hood that swallows his white face into a shadow.

“From Saks?” I ask.

“Turkey,” he says, grinning. “It’s actually incredibly warm. I wore it on the plane home, and the other passengers looked worried, like I’d been praying to Allah.”

“Beautiful, Binnie,” I say. I hold the door open, following him into the elevator, almost like a meek wife. “Let’s roll.”
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“I am so dirty.” says The Boy, sweat patterning his plain T-shirt, a smudge of mud coloring his cheek.

“Not as dirty as me.” I brush a speck silvery eye shadow from my black wool, drop-waist coat, my eyes touch the tips of my virgin white peep-toe stilettos, I check my brushed-on, school-girl blush in a gilt mirror while The Boy’s looking away.

“I was in the garden,” he says, voice muffled as he drags off his shirt. “I dug up a lily for my neighbor this morning.”

“I bought a five-dollar soy latte for myself this morning,” I counter.

“That’s productive and generous of you.”

“I do what I can for the US economy,” I say. “Consumer spending is down, especially in markets that rip off upper middle-class people.” I trail The Boy into one of his bathrooms, a marble rectangle of space as large as my Los Angeles flat. As soon as he closes the glass shower door, I press my face to it. “Dance for me, baby. Once you get the water going, I want you to do this.” I rub my bra-less bust, I lick my polished lips, I wink, lids lowered with layers of mascara.

He turns the water on, and the shining wet slicks down his chest, beading in his hairs, highlighting bones and lean muscle.

“Now work your Christmas package like a UPS man,” I say, my fists bouncing against the glass. “Only with some feeling. It’s the holidays, god-dammit.”

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“Thanks for dinner, sexy.” I kiss The Boy, my boy, my lips stamping Chinese tea on his stubbled cheek.

“Twenty bucks,” reads The Boy, signing the check. “You’re the most low maintenance chick ever.”

I pat my carefully curled bobbed hair, I dab my polished nude lips with crisp linen. “I try.” While The Boy fishes for the waiter’s attention, I eye my eyeliner in the mirror of my porcelain powder compact.

“Do you know how many chicks would bum about coming to this Schezwan hole in the wall,” continues The Boy, “wishing I’d take them to Nobu instead?”

“Ridick,” I say. “Tell the hoes to book the reservation and pay for dinner, then.” I stab at kung pao chicken, letting the little piece sit a second in my mouth. “And then, tell the chick if she’s charming enough, at the end of dinner you’ll consider giving her brain.”

“I only realized 10 years ago,” he says, “how screwed up it was that girls thought they were doing me a favor, letting me buy them dinner, giving them a good time so they could decide whether or not they wanted to blow me.”

“It’s insane,” I say. “Women can make just as much money as any dude now. There’s no glass ceiling. Why should a man pay for everything?” I smash my fortune cookie, its crumbs contained neatly in its plastic wrapper. I pull out the sliver of paper: You will do well in your own business.

“Seriously,” says The Boy. “If you had a twin sister who was an exact clone of you, but already way loaded and she paid for everything, I’d dump you for her.”

“Do you really mean that?” I ask. I grind The Boy’s fortune cookie into the glass table: You value your morals over money. “I completely understand. That’s why we’re together: because I’d dump you for her, too.”

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“What do you want to do today?” asks The Boy.

I look up from my laptop, my eyes trailing from the toe to the head of his figure stretched out on our hotel bed. “How about Starbucks?” My only real interest in Orlando, in most of Florida, was The Boy in wrinkled sheets on a work-day morning, between his business meetings. “What do you think?”

“I think we’re 30 minutes away from Disney World, so we’ve got to go. Have you ever been?”

“Disney Land, yes,” I say. “But not Disney World.” I see a flash of sticky heat, sticky hands, sticky public seats, but I blink, and decide, “Let’s do it.”

He buys the tickets online, and we shuttle over to a car rental company. The Boy feels his pants’ pockets at the counter. “I forgot, I don’t have my license,” says The Boy. “You’ll have to rent the car.”

I hand over my driver’s license. “So long as I get laid for this.”

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“Mind if I sit near the window?” The Boy, my boy, nods his assent, so I squeeze his ass and slip into the leather seat.

The jet slides inside the sky, and gravity pushes me against my chair: soft as a bed, I feel it from heel to head. We’re angling into the air, entering the blue blurring with the Pacific. I watch the earth fall off, like a silk nightie slipping to the floor, and the outside shrinks: the ocean waves smooth into regular rolls, then tiny splashes, and finally just a pretty pattern played up by the sun. Just a product for my pleasure.

We keep climbing.

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Lazy waves hum, cars chuckle over cobbled streets, and layered thick above this I hear tinny music piping through the hot air. I take The Boy’s hand and we walk deeper into Puerto Vallarta, the music growing fatter. Soon we intersect a parade swaying towards the chapel tower we’d heard ringing in the morning. I step in line with Mexican kids that barely hit the hem of my skirt, and a priest splashes holy water on the children, on me.

“Watch out that it doesn’t burn!” The Boy calls across the river of people.

I smile and nod, teetering into the church on vintage hooker heels. I stare up towards heaven, and see centuries-old paintings of Christ suffering, watching over a naive scene of natives singing his praise. I feel a presence focus on me, and I turn my eyes earthward: there’s a teenaged boy eying my legs.

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