Emma Pacchiana
Starfuckers
After it was over, Max watched Darcie leaning over the tiny vanity mirror on the hotel room desk, rubbing off her smudged eyeliner with a spit-wet finger, wearing the threadbare black underwear and white tank top she hadn’t taken off the whole time she was fucking Max. Max was still in the bed, wearing the same thing she’d had on the whole time, which was a pair of black athletic socks and nothing else. The follicles of her scalp felt tender. So did other parts of her. She listened to Darcie talk about the date she wanted Max to join her on that night and sucked, desolately, on a lock of limp hair.
“He’s just like this, I don’t know, startup guy,” Darcie was telling her, leaning close into the mirror, one leg up as she sat on the ergonomic desk chair, knee pressed against her chest. “Invests in startups. Or maybe it’s crypto or something now. He’s just a professional rich guy. I mean he’s disgusting, obviously. I’m sure he’s secretly doing fucking weapons sales. You’ll see. But he’s rich as shit.”
“Okay,” said Max. “You know him from Gemini?”
“No, he was a regular at the last place I worked. The steakhouse.” Darcie turned around and shook a braceleted hand through her thick and glossy blonde hair. It was a gesture Max had seen her make dozens—hundreds of times: in her hotel room, on the casino floor, at the resort restaurant, at the bar, in the back alley by the hotel dumpsters where the waitresses took smoke breaks. Darcie’s hair was like a living thing, moving, reacting, doubling her nightly tips. It smelled permanently like expensive orange-blossom shampoo mixed with the money-plastic-sweat of the Gemini Casino, a scent that suffused Max’s nose and mouth while Darcie leaned over her in her hotel bed, two fingers deep inside her, pulling her hair and pinning the side of her face into the pillow and her thigh into the mattress. Sometimes, alone in her room, Max would catch a lingering corner of that smell and have to stuff her palms into her eyes just from how bad she wanted it that minute. She was well aware that something was wrong with her—that normal people weren’t supposed to enjoy being treated this way—and that whatever it was was only getting worse.
“You don’t have to be nice to him,” Darcie said. “He just likes for people to see him with two girls at once. He’ll pay for whatever. But I guess that doesn’t matter for you.”
Max made a noncommittal noise in response. I pay for whatever, too, she wanted to say, but didn’t. She pushed the bedsheets off her legs and bent down to retrieve her Levis and t-shirt, then noticed Darcie, involved in typing something on her phone, glance up at her.
“You can’t wear that to dinner,” she said. “Andrew’ll never go for it.”
“I know,” said Max.
“I mean,” said Darcie, “I like it. But he’s a guy. You know, half a soul and most of it’s in his cock.”
“I get it,” said Max. “I’ll be a girl.”
“Okay.” Darcie went back to her phone. “So how’d you do today?”
“Not that great,” said Max. The lackluster drink she’d made herself an hour earlier—vodka and Dr. Pepper from the minibar—was now flat and warm. She sipped at it grudgingly anyway. “Ronnie’s still covering six. He acts like I have leprosy. I ended up cashing out after two hours.” She fidgeted where she sat on the bed, feeling the unpleasant cold and wet fabric of her underwear against her skin. “I can’t wait for Jace’s vacation to be over,” she said.
“Why don’t you just switch tables until he gets back?” Darcie asked. “Santangelo already thinks you’re up to something, sitting there losing all day.”
“I’m not losing,” said Max. “I’m breaking even.”
“Right.” Darcie looked at her a moment, then returned to her typing. “Well, Tony thinks you’re scamming him with your weird system.”
“I wish I was,” said Max, rubbing her face. “I could run him out of business and maybe stop finding glitter all over my shit.” Darcie laughed. Tony Santangelo was her boss at the casino, the one whose idea it had been to have the floor girls dust shimmer over their cheekbones every night. Max’s “weird system” involved memorizing basic strategy in order to consistently break even on blackjack day by day, thus incrementally transforming the inheritance given to her by her dead piece-of-shit grandfather into a comparably sized pile of money with no attendant ethical curses. As this system was mostly based on Max’s various unsayable superstitions and inextricable fears, none of which she really expected anyone else to get, she didn’t bother trying to explain it again.
Darcie thumbed one last thing into her phone, then tossed it onto the mussed bedspread. “Don’t turn on the TV,” she said, and crossed the floor to the bathroom. Max heard the sound of the hair dryer a moment later—the hotel’s eighties-era circuits had a habit of shorting whenever both appliances were running at the same time. The screen of Darcie’s phone was still unlocked, new texts popping up in gray at the bottom every few seconds. Max picked it up. The thread was under an unsaved number she didn’t recognize.
in them all day so i can still
smell it when you send them okay
sure
your a goddess can i just get a pic
now first im fucking hard just thinki
“Do you have something to wear?”
“Sure,” said Max, and clicked the screen off as Darcie emerged from the bathroom, hair suitably volumized, wearing the tight, black, and sex-discrimination-lawsuit-short dress that constituted the uniform for all servers at the Cosmos Card Room. Max assumed the same uniform requirements were the reason she never saw anyone serving drinks on the floor who wasn’t female, under 120 pounds, and in a full face of makeup. Like Darcie, she usually spent at least five hours a day on that floor, sitting at blackjack table six, slowly but surely working through the five hundred thousand dollars in cash she had sitting in the closet of her hotel room. The untainted money she’d won since the beginning of this project was in a pink duffel bag under her bed, about two-thirds as full as she’d hoped for it to be by this stage, partially due to Max paying, as Darcie had termed it, for whatever.
She was five weeks into her stay. She’d met Darcie at the end of the first week, started having sex with her by the middle of the second, and ever since had been letting Darcie fuck her plans up significantly, probably irrevocably. Max had once, checking into the Gemini Casino Resort with a suitcase full of her inheritance, had a goal for herself. She’d had ideals and principles and was going to do whatever she could to carry them out, even if she was the only person to whom those plans made any sense at all. That was all basically gone now. She no longer had any idea what the fuck she was doing, so she’d do whatever Darcie wanted, and they both knew it.
“By the way,” said Darcie, leaning over the tiny mirror again. “You should drop a hint about being Howie Archer’s heir or whatever at dinner. Andrew’s a total starfucker, he’ll love it.”
“I don’t tell people about that,” said Max.
“You told me,” said Darcie.
Which was the other way she’d fucked things up.
“Drinks,” declared Andrew the moment they’d all finished shimmying into the silver half-moon booth. Blinking plastic stars hung at varying lengths from the ceiling of the resort’s indoor bar, and the tables were laminated in plastic over collages of replica-sixties newspaper articles about the space race. They’d been seated, by chance, at Max’s favorite, the one dedicated to clippings on Yuri Gagarin. She had a feeling this still wasn’t enough to augur anything positive about their night.
“We need drinks,” he repeated, and put an arm around Darcie’s waist as he leaned over to signal a waitress. Darcie didn’t seem to react, only swept her hair over one shoulder with a hand and recrossed her legs under the table, bare except for the tiny strip of dress attempting valiantly to cover her underwear. Both Max and Andrew stared shamelessly at her thighs.
Darcie smiled. “Whiskey rocks,” she said to the young girl who came over to their table.
“No, no.” Andrew shook his head, waving a dismissive hand. “We’re having champagne. Three glasses.” He named a brand without looking at the menu. “Wait,” he added, looking over at Max. “She’s drinking age, right? Or are you cradle-robbing again, Darce?”
“I’m twenty-two,” said Max, glaring a hole into the shiny tabletop. Space pioneer reports, “I feel well”; sent messages while circling earth.
“Don’t be an asshole, Andrew,” said Darcie. “Three glasses and a whiskey, okay, Imogen?” The girl nodded gratefully at her, face a little pink, and gave her a little wave as she left their table.
The pins in Max’s hair were pulling at her still-sensitive scalp, giving her a headache. She reached a hand up to tug them looser. In the moment, it had felt kind of intimate and sexy to let Darcie make her up, their ankles and knees touching as Max stood against the wall and Darcie’s thin fingers brushed and twisted her shaggy hair into something resembling femininity. Now she just felt like a Barbie scribbled on with marker. Across the table, Andrew was Zuckerbergishly underdressed in a gray zip-up fleece and jeans, dark hair still damp and ridged from a comb, his face boyish and wrinkle-free in a way that was more suggestive of years spent in windowless rooms than actual youth. Darcie, of course, looked incredible. Max’s thoughts, normally racing with the usual sourceless dread, were for the moment mostly taken up by the desire to press her face into Darcie’s armpit.
When the girl returned with their champagne, Andrew made them all cheers, and as they sipped—Max draining most of her flute in one nostril-tickling gulp—he watched for the reaction on their faces.
“It’s the shit, right?” He lifted his own to his nose like a sommelier. “One-eighty a bottle. My buddy partied in Houston last year with James Harden—apparently they went through three cases of the stuff at the strip club.” He laughed loudly. Darcie shielded the side of her face with a hand and mouthed to Max, starfucker. Max rubbed the toe of her Nike into Darcie’s ankle, then stood up to grab the champagne bottle from Andrew’s side.
“So what do you do, Max,” asked Andrew as she sat back down, pronouncing the short syllable of her name somehow ironically.
“Nothing.” Max tried not to sound like she was sulking, which she was. “I just finished college.”
“Max is a card shark,” said Darcie. “You two should talk about that. Andrew’s the worst poker player I’ve ever met.”
“Watch yourself,” said Andrew, smiling at her. “I might get my feelings hurt.” The sky is very, very dark, read Max from the newspaper, and the earth is a light blue. Her hand itched. She was pretty sure Andrew had one of his on Darcie’s leg under the table.
“What’s your game?” he asked. It took Max a moment before she realized he was addressing her.
“Blackjack,” she said, “but she’s kidding. I’m not really a card shark. I just play with strategy.”
“Like Rain Man,” said Andrew.
“That’s card counting. You have to really know statistics for that. Basic strategy is just memorization. Like you always hit on eight, double on eleven, whatever.”
“Sounds pretty Rain Man to me.”
“Okay, well, it’s not.” Max tipped up her glass to hide her expression.
“Just knowing the rules is like Rain Man to Andrew,” said Darcie. She was toying with her hard-won whiskey rocks, swirling the tiny black straw around in the low glass, then bringing it up to her mouth to suck the liquid off the bottom. “One time he lost eight thousand dollars to some mobster on a single hand of cards.”
“See how mean she is to me?” Andrew looked at Max, eyes bright with amusement. “And I’m not even misbehaving yet.”
“Did you really?” Max asked him. “Lose that much?” Despite her half-million in the suitcase, despite her soul-deep hatred of money and everything it stood for, the idea still put an instinctual nervous drop in her gut.
“Long story.” Andrew shrugged. “This private game at Travis Kalanick’s house, ten-K buy-in. Back when I lived in LA. He always hung around with the shadiest people. But we can’t all be little savants, I guess.” He took the glass from Darcie’s hand and sipped at it. “So where’d you go to school?”
Why do you care?, Max wanted to ask. She couldn’t stand the idea of Darcie listening to her talk like this, swapping college stories, being a bro. But Darcie was the one who’d brought them here, the one who wanted something from Andrew, and fucking this up for her would be even worse.
She gave him the name, and he whistled. “Same as half the guys I work with,” he said. “And they never shut up about it, either. Darce’s always bugging me to get her a job, maybe I should be looking at you instead.”
“That’s not even funny,” said Darcie.
“I’d never work in finance,” said Max. “Like I’d actually rather die.”
“Okay,” said Andrew, “wow. Didn’t know it was such a sore subject for the two of you.” He emptied the last of the champagne into his own glass, then looked up at them in fake surprise. “Hey,” he said, gesturing. “Look at that. We’re out.”
“Andrew,” said Darcie.
“But the funny thing is,” said Andrew, plowing ahead, “I actually happen to have some more of this stuff back at my place. Isn’t that lucky?” He leaned back again in his seat, stretched a casual arm across the top of the booth behind Darcie. “What do you say, girls?” he asked, glancing between the two of them. Darcie looked at him in indulgent mock-exasperation as Max tried to conceal her paroxysms of pure hatred. “Maybe we have a little party just the three of us? You can teach me some blackjack. Or whatever it is you two like to do together.”
“I don’t know,” said Darcie. “I think Max might already have plans.”
“What?” Max turned to her.
“What?” Darcie repeated. “Do you actually want to?”
Want to do what?, Max wanted to ask, but of course she already knew. She’d just never let herself believe it. Despite the obvious, despite everything, she still never believed Darcie would really go so far as to fuck someone like him. Of course she was capable of it—though Darcie really hated men, hated them a lot more than any of the actual man-hating dykes Max had ever known (and she’d known a few). But she still flirted and fawned over them nine hours a day at the Cosmos, brought them their drinks and leaned over for them to stick their tens and twenties under the straps of her dress, giggled when they put hands up her skirt to buy herself time as she palmed their loose chips. And, with something almost like regularity, she went out to dinner and drinks and strip clubs and industry parties with guys like Andrew, men rich and horny and receptive enough to play along with her dream of one day leveraging herself into some kind of career that didn’t involve carrying trays of Jack and Cokes. She hated men, but over the five weeks they’d known each other Max had watched Darcie give more of herself to them than most people would have had to spare, even as she insisted that, as a species, they had less internal substance than sea monkeys. For some reason, Max just hadn’t thought she was also fucking them.
“Don’t,” she said, turning to Darcie in desperation before she could stop herself. “I’ll buy more of the champagne or whatever, I don’t care. Let’s just stay here. Okay? Please?”
“It’s really not a big deal,” said Darcie quietly. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I’ll take good care of her,” said Andrew. “Promise.”
Max thought she might cry. Please, she heard herself saying, and suddenly she was hearing it the way she’d said it to Darcie the first time, the day after they met, standing outside the swinging door to the kitchen at the back of the casino, a round of empty beers in Darcie’s hands. Please, just have dinner with me, just tonight. Please. Nine years is nothing, I don’t care anyway, age doesn’t mean anything. I really like you, I really want to do something for you. Please. Please? She’d just stood there, a tiny bemused smile on her shiny lips, letting Max puke it all out of herself, all the unexpected desperation and desire and need that had overtaken her the moment she first saw Darcie, yawning discreetly into her shoulder as she served the ex-Navy Seal sitting next to Max at table six. She’d never felt that way before, never had that kind of visceral, instantaneous attraction to anyone or thing, as if the jump she’d made off the cliff of her life after receiving her poisoned inheritance had ripped open an entirely new part of her body and mind in the process. A new, undiscovered, super horny part. And there was Darcie, beautiful, unreachable Darcie, with her long legs and her mean streak, who instead of dinner had taken Max into the unisex employee bathroom and pulled her hair and pulled her basketball shorts down and said into her ear, what do you want, ask me again, say please. Darcie always made her beg, sometimes for a humiliatingly, even unsexily long time, but in the end she always let her have what she wanted. Just not this time.
“I’m getting out of here,” said Max, standing. She felt absurdly exposed in the white eyelet dress she’d bought for her college graduation, the one piece of halfway girly clothing that had made it into her luggage. Her knees and her tits both had goosebumps. “Sorry,” she said, digging her nails into a palm. “I just really feel like I might have to throw up.”
“Max,” said Darcie.
“Nice meeting you,” said Andrew.
“Goddamnit,” said Max, and ran for the exit.
She was throwing clothes from the hotel room drawers into her suitcase when someone knocked on her door. It wasn’t even like she really wanted to leave the Gemini; she just had nothing else to do, no other way to express the hot frustration and fear in her stomach. If she were a normal person she could have talked to somebody about it, called her mom or her best friend and cried about her stupid twentysomething relationship drama. But her parents thought she was doing Americorps in the Everglades, and her only real friend was her ex-girlfriend Marya, who was vehemently anti- any kind of sex that wasn’t wholly egalitarian and communicative and free of any financial motive and who would probably try to have Max put on a list if she learned about anything that had been going on between her and Darcie the past month. Besides, Max was supposed to be distancing herself from all those people—that was part of the whole point of living at the casino. She was supposed to be quietly freeing herself of all associations, giving up everything that tied her to the stupid and evil world she wanted more than anything to escape. Not throwing herself at the feet of the first hot older girl she saw who didn’t give a shit about her and who—oh, God—was probably only interested in her for her money and her famous relative anyway.
Another knock. Half of Max’s clothes still smelled like Darcie’s hair. Of course escaping was exactly what she had been doing, just in the most useless way possible. When she was with Darcie it was impossible to think about anything outside of the cat/mouse world they’d created, where all stakes were life or death. But in fact death was real, constant pointless death and extinction and suffering, all to preserve the frivolous personal dramas of people like Max. She knew that; it was exactly why she was here. Even as she begged nightly for Darcie to reach inside her and erase everything she could, even then Max never thought she could forget that knowledge.
But when she opened the door to see Darcie outside her hotel room, heels and phone in one hand and the other fluffing her hair in the reflection of the peephole, she nearly forgot it all over again. All Darcie had to do was look at her with those remote green eyes for Max to want to get on her knees and beg to take everything back. She glared for a moment, then pushed past Max into her room and said, “Thanks a lot.”
“What happened?” was all Max could think of to say.
“What happened?” Darcie sat on the edge of Max’s bed, tossed her shoes to the floor, and began rubbing at a red indent on her heel with a thumb. “That’s what I’m trying to ask you. I just wanted to do some really good coke and you totally freaked out over it. You didn’t think I was trying to have sex with him, did you?”
Max, her throat hot and painful, couldn’t hide the obvious answer on her face. She shut her eyes, turned her head, heard Darcie’s angry exhale. “It just,” she said tightly. “He just seemed like...”
“What he seemed like?” Darcie gathered the hair from her neck, twisting it around her hand in agitation. “What the fuck do you think I seem like? Like, just because I didn’t go to fucking college you think I’m going around sucking dick for money?”
“I didn’t mean—I don’t even think there’s something wrong with it, if—”
“God, you really are a masochist.” Darcie laughed and pressed her gold-ringed wrist between her eyes. “You’d actually love it if I was a hooker, wouldn’t you? It totally gets you off, like you’re pining after some dumb slut who doesn’t give a shit. Can you just leave me out of it? I thought we were having fun, but I’m really not trying to get named on anybody’s suicide note.”
“Don’t.” The word—suicide—sent a jolt of humiliation through Max’s chest, like somebody had ripped open the shower curtain to stare at her naked. She crossed her arms tight against her ribs, trying to hide it, trying not to let Darcie know how right she was. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I fucked up, I know, I ruined it. I’m checking out, okay? I don’t even know what I’m doing here anymore.”
“Can you stop?” Darcie shook her head. “Jesus, he’s just some guy. You don’t have to make a bigger deal out of it than it is.”
“It’s not just that,” said Max, bending down to keep packing up the suitcase. “I don’t know why I’m doing any of this. Everybody else was right, I should have just written a check to Greenpeace and gone to...” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence.
“I thought you said Greenpeace was corporate and impotent,” said Darcie. “And everything’s terrible and doomed, right?”
Max turned around and looked up at her. Darcie, leaning back on her hands on the bed, raised her eyebrows as if waiting for confirmation. Max didn’t know how to respond. It was true; she had said that once, talking to Jace and Darcie one weekday morning at the tables when the card room was all but empty, trying to explain to Jace about the environmental law internship she’d been doing the year before graduation. But the idea that Darcie would have even bothered to argue against her leaving the resort, let alone remembered such a dumb offhand comment as that one, touched Max in a way she’d never expected.
“Why’d you follow me up here?” she asked Darcie.
“You were being weird,” said Darcie. “I don’t know. Andrew left.”
“But you could have gone with him,” Max said. “Right?” Darcie didn’t say anything, just looked at her. The pale freckles on her nose were starting to show under her fading foundation. “Do you not want me to leave?” Max asked her.
Darcie didn’t meet her eyes. She scraped a fleck of glitter off her knee with a blunt fingernail, then shrugged.
“Look,” said Max. “If you don’t want me to leave, could you just, like...say it? Please?” She cringed internally at the sound of the word in her tiny, pathetic voice, for the millionth time. Darcie was quiet.
“Just stay for now,” she said after a long moment. “It’d be dumb to quit over something like this.”
Max, her head aching and skin itching under her stiff dress, drew her legs up to her chest and pressed her forehead to her knees. The wave of relief and adoration she’d experienced at Darcie’s words made her feel suddenly and inexplicably hopeless, disgusted with herself, her unbelievably selfish and undisciplined self. She couldn’t go anywhere now, no matter how badly she told herself to want to. The things she told herself she wanted had been, once again, hideously and embarrassingly eclipsed by only the barest hint of the thing she actually wanted. But she wanted it too much to do anything to change.
“Hey,” she heard Darcie say. Max raised her head an inch to look at her. Her normally vibrant eyes looked resigned and soft. “You should take that off,” she said, gesturing toward Max on the floor. “It’s too weird seeing you in a dress. I don’t like it.”
Slowly, her limbs unreasonably exhausted, Max did as she was told, unzipped herself in the back and pulled the lacy fabric over her head. Darcie tilted her head, gesturing her over. Too ashamed even to push herself off the floor, Max crawled on hands and knees, in her worn sports bra and underwear, across the room’s beige-carpeted floor, until she bumped Darcie’s legs dangling off the side of the bed. As she stared at the ankles in front of her, she felt an unusually gentle tug at her head—Darcie’s hands, undoing her own work, sliding the bobby pins one by one out of Max’s hair. Max pressed her face to Darcie’s knee. When she was done, Darcie kept touching Max’s hair, gently combing out strands between her fingers, and, even though it felt really good, Max didn’t stop her.
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Emma Pacchiana is a writer and editor living in Virginia. Her fiction was recently featured in Foglifter, and she's currently querying a mystery novel about sexual abuse.
Image by Cottonbro from Pexels
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