Chapter Twenty-Three
Maybe this was a mistake.
Poppy stands outside the spectacular gates of Justin’s apartment building, shivering in her slip dress and vintage Betsey Johnson jacket and wondering if she made the right decision. Agnes may be right: She should be more disciplined.
Then an Academy Award–winning actor breezes past, and Poppy follows him inside.
In the entrance foyer, she adds her Payless heels to rows of footwear left by the other guests. One glance at the designer names tells her she’s looking at about twenty grand worth of shoes.
“Welcome,” says a woman dressed in a black suit and wearing a headset. “Name?”
“Poppy LaRue.”
“Fabulous.” The woman hands her a red claim ticket, like for a coat check. “Your phone, please.”
“What?”
“This evening has a strict no-phones policy. It’s to ensure privacy for all guests. It will be returned when you leave.” She holds out her hand, and Poppy hesitates. But maybe this is how the elite really roll. Who needs a phone when you’ve already arrived?
Inside the apartment, buzzy and warm and filled with classical music, she sees that the young woman in the fishbowl has morphed from hot co-ed to sophisticated seductress in a black silk gown.
A few feet away, Justin Baxter looks even better than she remembered—and Martha, even worse. Poppy shudders.
Seating cards are arranged on an entrance table. The only time she’s ever seen that before was at her cousin’s wedding. All around her, a remarkable number of bold-faced names circulate, sipping champagne served by handsome young men in tailcoats.
She accepts a glass, anticipating the crisp and delicious bite of her first sip. As she brings the flute to her lips, Justin notices her and smiles.
“Hey, d’ya happen to know if they’re serving anything nonalcoholic?” a short, pretty brunette asks her. She has a pixie haircut and a smattering of freckles across her nose, and Poppy immediately recognizes her from a Netflix show.
“Um, no—but I haven’t really been looking.”
Just as the actress spots someone else to talk to, leaving Poppy awkwardly alone, the crowd starts moving to their dinner seats. Poppy downs the crisp champagne and follows the herd.
Her designated table is nearly full by the time she slips into a seat.
“Hey, I know you,” the guy next to her says. He’s good-looking in a dandyish sort of way. He wears his brown hair slicked back, and he’s dressed in mint-green suspenders with a matching cashmere sweater tied around his shoulders. “Poppy LaRue, right?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Billy Barton—nice to meet you. I caught your show a few weeks ago. Brava.”
“Thanks.” Why does his name sound so familiar?
“I’ve never seen you here before, right? I can’t believe I would fail to notice a face like yours.”
She smiles. “I was here once before. But it wasn’t a dinner like this.”
“Well, you’re in for quite a show.”
The way he says it makes her tingle in anticipation.
“Oh yeah? Like what kind of show?”
“One never knows. But it’s always interesting. And the chef is sublime. Somehow Justin lured her away from a hot, recently opened and impossible-to-get-into restaurant for the night. God only knows what they pay these people.”
“I can’t imagine,” Poppy says, nodding to the waiter filling their champagne glasses.
He’s model-gorgeous, and a quick glance around tells her that all of the servers are ridiculously beautiful.
One appears to spoon something unrecognizable onto Poppy’s plate, while another pours her a glass of red wine and also a white.
“I’m used to having red or white,” she admits to Billy.
“Oh, you must have both. Breaks up the flavors so the palate stays excited.”
The light classical music changes to an ominous, carnival-esque dirge.
Heads turn as a wiry blonde with defined muscles steps into the center of the room.
She wears only a black sports bra and black boy shorts.
In contrast to her sporty body and outfit, her nails are gothic talons painted deep aubergine, and the dramatic strokes of her winged eyeliner are visible from across the room.
The woman begins twisting her body into positions that make her look like rubber.
“I just love contortionists, don’t you?” Billy says.
Poppy doesn’t want to admit she’s never seen one before. Is this a thing in New York? She still has so much to learn.
“So, were you interviewed for my magazine’s piece on burlesque?”
So that’s why she recognized his name. Bette had been trying to get his attention that first night she pulled Mallory onstage.
“No, and I should be. Justin says I’m a rising star.”
Billy smiles. “Quite an endorsement. So you’re a proverbial ‘one to watch.’”
She shrugs. The way he talks makes her feel like English is her second language.
“You are adorable. I need you in the piece. Expect a call from the writer. His name’s Alec Martin.”
Alec Martin. Mallory’s journalist boyfriend. Maybe this can give her some sort of leverage with the Mallory problem. How, she doesn’t know yet. But she can’t wait to figure it out.
A waiter removes her plate and replaces it with a new dish. Again, Poppy isn’t sure what she’s being served.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Braised short ribs,” says the waiter.
When he’s moved farther down the table, Billy says, “I’d like to braise his short rib.”
Poppy laughs.
“You’re not drinking your wine,” he says.
“I only like champagne.”
Billy immediately summons a waiter and asks for a bottle.
“You can do that?” she says.
“It’s a Baxter party! We can do anything.”
Across the table, a bald Black guy in a sharp black suit and white tie gets Billy’s attention. They begin an animated conversation about some politician Poppy has never heard of, so she turns her attention back to the show.
There’s something uniquely erotic about the contortionist. Her body works in ways that seem to defy anatomy. The display is a perfect mastery of form and function. It’s the body as an object of art, of entertainment, of fantasy. She transcends the realm of the merely functional.
It looks a hell of a lot harder than burlesque.
So when the performance ends, she stands up and claps, then sits down bashfully when she realizes she’s the only one applauding. Mercifully, a waiter appears with a bottle of Krug and pours her a glass. This brings Billy’s attention back to her, and he introduces her to his friend across the table.
“Poppy, this is Dominick Monde, head of Toute Le Monde Films. Dominick, Poppy LaRue, burlesque dancer extraordinaire. Oooh—this show just got good.”
One of the waiters has now taken the contortionist’s place in the center of the room.
Wait—is that one of the waiters? All these guys—with their phenomenal bone structure and taut, muscled bodies—are starting to look alike.
This one is on the slim side, with a blond buzz cut and the ice-blue eyes of a Siberian husky.
The music changes to techno/trance, and the waiter/performer strips off his shirt and tosses it aside, then eases down his trousers to reveal both his lack of underwear and a massive erection.
“I love the Baxters! You can always count on them for sausage with dinner,” Billy says, and their tablemates laugh.
A second man joins him on the platform, fully nude, holding what looks like a flyswatter.
He’s Mediterranean-looking and broad-shouldered, with longish dark hair, high cheekbones, and a full, lush mouth.
His right bicep is covered in a tattoo sleeve.
Poppy immediately decides he’s one of the hottest guys she’s ever seen.
The dark guy stands in front of the blond buzz cut, who drops to his knees and takes his erection into his mouth.
“Jesus,” Poppy says.
“Jesus Lutz?” Billy says, naming an up-and-coming actor fresh off a big film debut at Cannes. “He looks like him but trust me, honey—even the Baxters don’t have that much money. That’s Derek Dart. I’ve seen him in porn. But from what I hear, his live stage performance is much better.”
The buzz cut guy works Derek Dart in and out of his mouth, gripping his muscled buttocks with one hand, the other working his thick shaft.
Poppy wonders if she’s mentally prepared to see a guy come in another guy’s mouth.
She judges by the rapid movement of Derek’s pelvis that he’s getting close, but then he withdraws.
Buzz Cut turns his back to him and bends over so Derek can spank him with the flyswatter.
She can’t help but stare at Derek’s cock, nearly purple in its acute state of arousal. It glistens with saliva.
The blond moans more from the ass-swatting than Derek did getting his dick sucked.
Poppy can’t believe what she’s witnessing—and in a roomful of people having dinner!
She’s afraid to look around because she doesn’t want to make eye contact with any of the other guests, but she could swear people were still eating and chatting like nothing remarkable was happening in front of them.
Well, this is just how rich people roll, I guess. She tries to look bored or, at the very least, not freaked out. But then Derek spits on his own cock, spreads his saliva around, and presses it into the other guy’s asshole.
Okay, maybe she’s unsophisticated. But this seems like a lot for a dinner party.
She wants to look away, but she’s riveted.
She’d only had anal sex once and found it painful—and her boyfriend hadn’t been as big as Derek.
There’s no way this can feel good, yet the blond guy’s face is rapt with ecstasy.
Or maybe he’s just acting, in which case he deserves an Academy Award.
Derek pumps his dick into the guy with fast, hard thrusts, and the exertion makes the muscles on his chest and arms bulge. Poppy is surprised to feel a faint pulse between her legs, the quickening of her own arousal.
Derek withdraws his cock and immediately pumps it with his own hand until spurts of jizz rain down on the other guy’s buttocks.
Everyone at the tables politely claps, as if a piano concerto had just concluded.
“If they’re serving that with the main course, I can’t wait to see what’s for dessert,” Billy says with a wink.
Poppy can’t imagine. But she’s damn well going to stay long enough to find out.