Free Dead Sexy by Linda Jaivin

wouldn’t tell anyone she was seeing him. She’d only broken her promise once, that day when she told Nicola what a ‘tiger’ he was. He told her if she couldn’t be discreet,he couldn’t be with her. ‘What’s the big deal?’ she’d asked.
    ‘No big deal, doll,’ he’d replied. ‘It’s just that I’m too well known in this town. I cherish my privacy. You wouldn’t like it if our photos were splattered all over magazines like your own, would you?’
    Liz would have liked that quite a lot, but she held her tongue. Johnny’s concerns for his privacy, she figured, were fair enough. Still, she reflected, as she smoothed away the clumps of foundation from the corners of her nostrils, half the fun of a relationship was talking to your girlfriends about it. What great conversations she could have been having with Nicola!
    Liz realised she’d been daydreaming when she noticed that she was rouging her cheeks with lip gloss. Looking up at the clock on the wall, she cried, ‘Shit!’ threw on the rest of her clothes and stuffed her towel and exercise gear into her gym bag. She was going to be late for her date with Johnny if she didn’t hurry.
    Barging into her flat, she chucked her gym bag in one corner and hoed straightaway intoher takeaway burger and chips (‘Bad Fat! But Do You Really Care?’) without even sitting down. The light on her answering machine was blinking. It was probably her mother. She couldn’t handle another conversation about when she was going to find a nice man and settle down. Wiping the tomato sauce off her chin with the back of her hand, Liz burped, patted her tummy and flung open her wardrobe. After three changes of frock, a quick brush of teeth and re-application of lippy, she was out the door and on her way to Bent Towers.
    Da Mann leaned back in the brown swivel chair. He found Nicola most entertaining with her Apache dance of protest and surrender. He pondered Johnny’s strange behaviour earlier in the evening. What the fuck was all that procrastinage about? Johnny had never lost his nerve in all the time Da Mann had known him, ever since they’d met at the semi-covert X parties held every month or so at that warehouse. They’d struck up a perfect partnership based on thecompatibility of the exhibitionist and the voyeur.
    But what was going on now? He peered curiously at the grainy image on Monitor 13. Kinkage!
    If she was perfectly happy to ‘Be a Porn Star in Bed!’, Nicola was nonetheless shocked by Johnny’s next request. This potentially lethal sexual practice had enjoyed some notoriety a few years earlier in connection with the death of a famous rock star. Conservative politicians were also notoriously fond of it. None of Anabelle’s readers ever asked her about it, perhaps because it was primarily a male fetish, and Nicola, who was having enough trouble keeping on top of latex fashion and menstruation etiquette, had only the vaguest notion of what it involved. What it involved, in this case, was her scarf.
    ‘Please?’
    ‘It’s perverse.’
    ‘You making value judgments, Nic? Would it make you happier to know it’s considered perfectly normal among certain Oriental andSouth American native cultures, as well as the Celts? It’s got literary cred too. It appears in the Marquis de Sade’s
Justine
and Melville’s
Billy Budd
among other classics.’
    Nicola pondered this information. ‘Don’t people die from it all the time?’
    ‘No one’s going to die tonight. Please?’
    Nicola, following Johnny’s instructions, and despite a growing sense of foreboding, pulled her own scarf and a pair of polished steel handcuffs from his briefcase. They were solid. She felt how heavy they were in her hands as she knelt down by Johnny’s side.
    Johnny reached up and cupped her breasts in his hands, squeezing her nipples and then running one hand down over her tummy to the curly tuft of hair on her mons. He rotated his hand till it was palm up, and insinuated one finger