Punishment with Kisses by Diane Anderson-Minshall Page B

but I was too flushed taking it all in to even go dig through the baskets. Standing there felt like walking into the Hustler Store and discovering that my sister lived in the place. There wasn’t a bed, but where you’d expect one sat this gloriously delicious lipstick red suede playpen sectional sofa, which took up nearly half of the diminutive room. It was squared off on all sides so you sat on the sofa and slowly slid down into a bed-like flat area that was penned in on all sides. Lying on the sofa felt like a cross between being in a child’s playpen and an orgy den, and the sheer surprise of that dichotomy was so alarming that I wanted to rush out and forget all about Ash’s fuck den. But I didn’t because, as much as I was appalled, I was equally drawn to this room and to what it represented, and to Ash’s role as some sort of sexual provocateur. When I came back to my senses, I remembered my initial reason for breaking through that veiled partition: to find Ash’s videos. I started sifting through the containers on the cabinet, trying to focus less on the instruments of pleasure—or torture—that made up the contents and look only for the sexy surveillance videos Ash had mentioned in her diary. Not surprisingly, the large black rectangular box jutting out from the bottom shelf and labeled “Punani” contained dozens of DVDs, meticulously labeled with a code I wasn’t sure I wanted to crack.

Chapter Eight

    “Megan, there’s a Shane on line two.”
    Who gave her my work number? Probably one of my damn nosy friends. Great. Who knew how I’d be able to dodge her now.
    “Hello, Shane. What can I do for you?”
    “Well, that’s formal. Okay then, can I see you again?”
    “No, sorry, not going to happen.”
    I didn’t want to see her again. I got everything I needed the other night. That was a display of weakness on my part. I had vowed not to let anyone in, much less Shane, and there I was, taking her calls again.
    I didn’t care that Father suspected Shane was involved in Ash’s murder and insisted I stay away from her because she supposedly had a criminal record, which probably meant she was busted drinking underage. I didn’t care that she was home alone all night when Ash was killed—an alibi that was beyond flimsy—or that the cops had hauled her in for questioning.
    I knew Shane and she might have been a terrible girlfriend, but she was no killer. Plus, she was as enthralled with my sister as any of them. Why on earth would she kill her? Still, our last encounter was a mistake, a one-time need on my part that shouldn’t erase the way she treated me, fucking my sister and then flaunting it by the pool for weeks after. I didn’t want to be with her, not the way I did that summer so long ago when I was a love-struck little baby dyke. Maybe I wasn’t as jaded as Ash was but I was starting to understand a bit of what drove her, and I could see that there was a little part of that inside of me. Apparently last night, that little part reigned supreme, but that didn’t mean I’d give in to my base urges again.
    Shane called again. And again. And again. In fact, Shane called twice a day, every day for the next week. Finally, I listened to her explain, “It wasn’t by accident I ran into you at the Mint. I tracked you down.”
    I hung up. Undaunted, Shane showed up at my office the next day. And the day after that. Finally, on the third day, more out of embarrassment than anything else, I relented and agreed to cocktails at Saucebox, a trendy nightclub eatery where the noise was such a roar it kept all conversations quick.
    What I hadn’t planned was how much I would need to lean toward her in order to hear even half the words Shane was saying. By the time the two cocktails in front of us had a few empties in their wake, I was practically sitting in her lap. Shane had her lips pressed to my ear, telling me about her job as the editor of a women’s poetry journal. I didn’t realize she worked