Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3)

The
Being Eloise
series, including:

Tongue Tied,
book 1

Lock & Key,
book 2

A Collection Of Sins,
book 3

Also, as a ghostwriter, too many books to name, and none that can be, for reasons to be made clear.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Eloise Spanks

Published by Satirev Books

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First edition, updated November 6, 2012

Thank you.

Books 1-3

Book 1 of
Being Eloise

This is a true story.

If you’re the kind of careful reader who really savors a book—you know, removes the dust jacket, checks out the gilded title, chooses a bookmark, reads about the typeface used—then perhaps you’ve read the disclaimer a page or two back:
This book is a work of fiction...
Baloney. Ba-loney. That paragraph is here at the insistence of my publisher who, litigation-aware people that they are, want the protection of a smattering of legalese. Who am I to say no to them?

That said, there are some untruths within these pages, but they’re all necessary—and some are even kind. First, there’s this: my name isn’t Eloise Spanks. It’s actually…well, let’s just say it’s no one you know, personally, though there’s a chance you’ve read some of my work before. I’m a ghostwriter. Or rather, was. Also, because few of the people in this book would like to have their names publicly associated with the sexual content within—and because they don’t know I’ve written about them—I’ve changed their names considerably. And to come completely clean about the untruths in this true story: I’ve also taken life’s chronology—often languid and boring, or else insanely busy and hectic—and evened it out a bit in the interest of a better read. I’ve also omitted the tangential intrusions of life, like needing to deal with a protracted illness in the family, the half-dozen doctors visits for a badly torn meniscus, and the many additional hours spent in unrelated daytime pursuits (grocery shopping, bill paying, etc.) that no one wants cluttering up their valuable evening reading time (or morning, or afternoon). In addition, I’ve omitted mention of the many hours of insomnia during the night, though it is in these latter hours that these pages were written.

As a ghostwriter, page count is my measure. I can produce a long descriptive passage that’ll evoke every one of your senses. I’m not going to do much of that in this book, though, because that’s a trope of fiction. Instead, I’ll tell it as it is, though I’m hardly immune to the pull of a nicely worded phrase. If you find me writing about someone’s “auburn locks,” or “sun-drenched afternoons”, or “a throbbing heart,” well, then I’ve fallen into writing fiction for a moment. Forgive, then forget.

Now, let’s get started.

As a ghostwriter, I’ve written and rewritten manuscripts for minor celebrities, CEOs, and athletes who want to be writers but have more ambition than time, and more money than both. I’ve penned romances, sci-fi, and enough teen-lit to make you want to gouge your eyes out. I nearly have—a retinal tear, according to my ophthalmologist. As one of my former editors liked to say: I “know my shit.” It’s why I got hired. It’s why I was one of the few writers who could claim this gig as my sole endeavor. Note the past tense—little did I know that within a year all this would change. I’d trade the pen for an implement you’d hide from your own mother. The words that would come out of my mouth, the places I’d put other men’s mouths—I can’t tell you. Yet. Before I get there, I need to tell you where I come from. Self-pity paragraph starts now:

Writing fiction is really just telling lies well enough that the mind is fooled but bears no grudges. It’s unbelievably safe, especially when your name’s not on the cover of the finished book. This, though, this isn’t safe at all. This is truth and ugliness and sex and lust all balled together. It might not be my real name on the cover, but then few have used my real name for awhile now. Until writing these pages here, the only true words I’d written were the recipes I gussied up for a celebrity-themed cookbook. Those words produced something real. Truth
can
be delicious.

The editor who was my favorite—and not only because he gave me the most work—would counter my whining about the meaninglessness of what I was ghostwriting by saying: “You’re entertaining the masses. You’re battling the scourge of TV and the web. You’re real.” Ghosts aren’t real. Heck, words aren’t even real. They’re marks on the page, vibrations in the throat and air and ear.

The truth was I’d grown tired of writing for others. It sounds like an easy gig, but try sitting down and writing for five, six, seven solid hours. Every day. No benefits. No vacations—it doesn’t pay
that
well. Your brain turns to mush and your tush as well. I wanted something made of truer stuff to inhabit my waking hours. When the economy began to contract, as they say—as though it were on a diet—I found myself with time to pursue wild ideas. In my desk drawer sat notes for an abandoned nonfiction book about a train robbery that occurred in the Great Plains carried out by a blind ringleader; also a defunct project about a circus in Guatemala made up of former criminals–an idea sparked by an episode of
Nightline
; and finally scribbles and outlines for a half-dozen other projects that did done nothing but make a desk drawer depressively heavy. Stalled optimism weighs a pound a dream.

If the economy
contracted
, my marriage broke in half. One day it was there, the next not, gone quietly, without arguments, and in a way that could only mean that he no longer loved me and I no longer loved him. We’d simply grown apart, I thought. We’d been married ten years, what sounds everlasting at the start and no time at all from the finish.

My husband was away on business all the time and our abbreviated conversations grew unceremoniously shorter, leaving our divorce free of the drama I’d seen hit other friends who had separated. But our amicable breakup was another lie. I found out after the divorce that he’d been having an affair for three years. Three. Years. At least he was faithful to being unfaithful.

So, with work slowed way down and a husband gone, I found myself with a lot less income, despite child support for my son, despite a little alimony. But I also found something completely unexpected for this period in my life: possibilities.

First up for the mother and son Spanks family was a move. During the summer switch between my son’s matriculation (a far too official-sounding word, but when do you get a chance to use it?) from middle school to high school, we moved to a neighborhood at the opposite end of town. More specific than that I can’t get. I won’t even mention the state. And I know, I know, not much of a move. But any new perspective is healthy even if it’s single-digit miles. It was there, in a newly rented apartment above a garage, that Eloise Spanks emerged. I still remember the sign for the apartment.

FOR RENT
2bd/1bath—$850/month
Utilities incl. +Pool. Abs. no pets.
Occasional house-sitting duties

The neighborhood was gorgeous, the front yard of all the homes running along a quiet road with a field on the opposite side. The only reason we’d found the neighborhood and the for-rent sign was because my son and I had gotten lost one Saturday trying to avoid traffic on Main, what with it being resurfaced. Here, far from the bustle, the homes were well-separated and of the kind you see in commercials: vaguely Colonial, with manicured lawns, colorful perennials, and nothing but space between homes. In fact, small slivers of forest sprung up in the un-mowed space between lots, slivers that met the greenbelt that ran along the rear of the homes. The house was also close to a bus stop for my son’s school and it was also inexpensive for this city: $850 and with pool access and utilities included? A steal. But more than any other attribute, it was the house-sitting duties that intrigued me. I’d always thought that my life had a house like this one in its future, at least when I was young and naïve about how much money it takes to keep a life going and equally uninformed about how much gets taken from you before your dollars come to you clean and yours alone. Still, the possibility of house-sitting such a place was something, even if it was a lesser, far lower, aim.

Since we were there, I knocked at the door using the large brass knocker that seem more ostentatious than practical. And indeed, it didn’t bring a response.

“No one’s home,” my son said, standing behind me.

I could hear splashing and the echoes of laughter from a pool. “Let’s try the back,” I said.

“That’s trespassing, mom,” my son said, ever the over-concerned citizen.

“If there’s no fence, it’s not trespassing,” I said, making up the rules.

My son was still at the pre-disillusioned age of the recycler, the naturalist, the lover of comics. You could write a book about all the horrors he didn’t even have an inkling of. You don’t realize what a shit we (mostly men) have made of things until it’s time to break our collective crimes and atrocities to your child.

“Hello?” I called out, pulling my son with me around the side of the house.

“Drake,” a woman’s voice said. “A visitor.”

I saw the woman first, a young sixty, shapely, with her hair done up in a white scarf. She wore black sunglasses the size of alien eyes and held up her hand to the sun so as to see us better. The man, presumably Drake, was in the pool on an inflatable yellow raft. He sat up, the pool lounger folding in the middle and making him look seated in a yellow throne. His nose was white with zinc.

“You’re the homeowners?” I asked.

“No soliciting,” the man said. “Already get the paper, don’t want to try your restaurant, don’t need faster Internet, love my gravel driveway, I’m an atheist, have a good day.”

“Mom?” my son said.

I laughed. Well, I fake-laughed. “No, I’m sorry. We’re interested in the apartment. Is it available?”

“Oh…” the woman said, and for so long that it seemed like they’d put the sign out years ago and had forgotten all about it. Perhaps they had. “I
believe
it’s available,” she said, in an odd questioning tone. “Is it Drake? What do you think?”

“It’s possible,” the man said.

“Any other kids?” the woman asked.

“Just the one,” I said, squeezing my son’s hand. “He lives with his father on the weekends.”

“I’ll show it,” the woman said.

“Is that the pool we can use?” my son asked, breaking free from my clasp and his muteness.

“Can you swim?” the woman asked, raising her sunglasses.

My son nodded.

“Then yes.”

This was how I first met Olivia, who changed the course of my life in ways I can’t yet lay bare. One week later my son and I were moved in.

My neighbor-landlords were John and Olivia Drake. Briefly:

John Drake, who goes by Drake, was in his sixties. Close-cropped gray hair, tan, very rarely seen with a smile on his face. You can add any other descriptions you like—none of it really matters. Character descriptions are, for the most part, page filler, believe me. If you have a colleague, neighbor or friend who’s about the same age, is serious, and not terribly bad to look at, that’ll do. Slide their descriptions in for Drake. This bit does matter, though: Drake’s the COO (Chief Operating Officer—I had to look up that acronym, too) of a financial services firm that employs over one hundred people in our city, and three hundred internationally. He spent four years working for a conservative think tank one floor above his company’s offices in a downtown building. Which, as an aside, feels strange. Not the employment progression, but that a think tank can be on the tenth floor of an office building, any office building. I always imagined them built out of meter-thick concrete and half-buried in a hillside somewhere, filled with the kind of people who don’t eat pizza or have active sex lives.

Drake had two children from a previous marriage, both grown, both living overseas. He had high blood pressure, was a micro-manager, and slept only five hours a night. He telecommuted into his company’s London office at three in the morning and worked until eight, then would be picked up in a town car at ten and not return until dinner. On Wednesdays he’d come home early. (Remember that, dear reader.) Some of this I’ve gleaned from his bio page on his company’s website; the rest from conversations and some snooping and, well…we’ll get to that.