The Bomb Shelter (the remainder of chapter 1)

Lowell is on his hands and knees, naked except for a cartoon pig mask. A strand of greying hair slips through the mask’s right eyehole, giving the illusion of a wild, unruly eyebrow. From this angle, his sagging gut is especially pronounced. As always, I find him utterly repulsive.

“Oink for me,” I command. From my vantage on the bed, I can see he’s already hard. “Oink for me, or I’ll film you. I’ll film you like this and put it on the web for everyone to see.”

“Please don’t do that,” he says, sing-songey. 

“Well, then do what I say.”

“Oink, oink.” Lowell reaches toward his crotch, fondling his erection.

“I didn’t say you could touch yourself, did I?” I whip my phone out and snap a photo. I ensure the shutter is audible to him. “You want this shit online, Lowell?”

“No, mama.” His voice is small. I can see he’s dripping pre-cum on the floor.  I yawn. 

#

Lowell is dressed in expensive silk pajamas, now, atop his bed with me alongside him. As if we are a couple of some description. We’re supposed to ‘talk’. This is part of it for him, and it’s by far the worst part. His bedroom opens onto a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the lake. On nights like this, I count the lights of pleasure yachts floating past to distract myself. Three. Four.

“How old was your father when he died?” Lowell asks, breaking the silence. 

“Your age, thereabouts. Sixty-four.”

“Hm.”

He pauses. I don’t look at Lowell —I can’t—but I can sense his off-putting face, contorted in thought.

“So, I’m only a little younger than him, really?”

“I guess.”

“Is that why you’re attracted to me?”

“I’m not at all attracted to you, Lowell.”

“Don’t do that. We’re not playing anymore,” he pouts. “It’s not as if I force you into this, Aimee.”

I’d met Lowell at a Cultivating Radical Listening in the Workplace seminar — my first job, I was twenty-three, and he was still passably youthful for a middle-aged man. I never wanted to fuck him, which was fine; that’s not what he’s into. Back then he had a family: a trophy wife named Brendella, dumb as rocks, and two fat adult children. Then he got semi-famous as one of The Dictator’s big campaign donors, punished Brendella in the divorce, and bought this estate with a cool hundred-million. His wife and kids had recently been in a Vulture article about families with relatives 'radicalized' online by The Dictator. The night the magazine came out, Lowell asked me to watch him burn it in an oil drum on his golf course.

“The estate is pretty close to my new place, so it works out,” I offer. “Convenient, I mean. That’s all.”

“Your new place, being your dad’s old place?” 

Laying on my side, I turn away. “Technically, yes. But I reject your point outright.”

I stare at the bedside clock. Eleven p.m. “I should… I’ve got work in the morning.” I start to get up.

“Don’t. Stay over. Please.”

I consider it. I like Lowell’s expensive mattress, soft folded towels, and Italian espresso machine. If I wake up twenty minutes early, I can swing home, change, and still be at work on time. But whenever I sleep over, I wake to Lowell’s hound-dog snoring, his meaty arm draped over me, his grey chest hair poking through some satin pajama top.

“No. Can’t.”

“Why do you even have to work?”

“My father only left me his house,” I say, “Not everyone has their crypto and dividends and board meetings, believe it or not.” 

He sits up in bed and turns to me. “You know you don’t have to work. I’d give you an allowance — whatever you make now, plus some walking-around money.”

I turn to look at him. Somehow, he’s hard again, the crotch of his boxers taut. Giving me money has always been a part of the whole thing, but never consistently, and never enough to matter. It doesn’t feel realistic. I worry the offer will be forgotten come morning. I ask a question I’ve been curious about many times: “Why me?”

“Well, I’ve known you for…what, a decade?” he says. “I care about you.” 

I correct him: “I get you off.”

“Right.”

“I can’t be the only option you have for a…I dunno, sugarbaby.” I gesture at myself. “I’m not young. Anymore. I don’t look like…” I stop myself before saying his ex-wife’s name. Brendella, though a decade older than me, has an influencer’s good looks, a plastic surgeon whom she calls by his first name, a Filipino dietician, and a personal trainer who was in a class-action lawsuit for getting molested at one of Bryan Singer’s parties. I, meanwhile, have perpetually oily skin, a B.M.I of twenty-eight, and haven’t been to a dentist in eight years. 

“Imagine if it got out, Aimee.” Lowell flashes a greedy smile. “You and me. People knowing about us.”

“Exactly. Makes no sense.”

“No, imagine. The board would be up my ass; people wouldn’t know what to make of it, of you and me.” Lowell rubs his erection through his boxer shorts, in a daze. Gleeful. “The posts. The articles. The…disgrace of it all.”

“That’s how you see me?” I moderate my tone, trying to sound even and unaffected. For a moment, I imagine the Deuxmoi posts and the headlines; ‘Top Donor’s Portly Girlfriend Works In HR; Bravely Wears A Sleeveless Dress At Nobu’.  

“What do you mean?” he asks. 

A booze-cruise I recognise from nights past sails by outside the window. Five. I can hear thumping Ukrainian techno from the ship’s deck, even here, up the hill from the lake, across the gardens, hedge maze, and golf course. 

“That’s why I interest you?”

Lowell’s grin fades. Sympathising with me discomfits him. 

“No – no.” But he doesn’t continue that thought, instead:  “You’ll think about it, though? And spend the night?” 

I nod, resigned, strip to my underwear, and climb under the comforter with him. Lowell’s musk settles over me: an old-man smell masked by Belgian cologne and the plasticky tang of the pig mask.