Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (17 page)

And then I saw the Silverado pull into the drive and out jumped my son from the back, pausing briefly to chat with the three inside, and then they honked at him and he flipped them the bird, but he was smiling as he walked toward me, until he saw me. He’d become—perhaps through the sheer need to survive—one of them.

“Oh, they’re not so bad,” he said and I knew right then that I’d lost something precious and vulnerable, that part of my son that a mother cherishes and hopes never gets cold. Had I not been paying attention? Had work, and the rest of it, distracted me? Was it Sam’s influence or Sam’s advice that had caused our son to not only make peace with his bullies but befriend them?

It was hard getting an answer through the closed door to my son’s room. Frankly, I didn’t try too hard. It was Friday—spring break had begun—and my son was headed out to his father’s for the week. I hadn’t yet spoken to Sam since he’d left my apartment, but I was also a good ex: I didn’t try to dig out details via my son, not that I would have been successful had I tried, I suppose. All I knew was that the two of them were going camping over the break, which allowed me to delay any worries about my son and these three
hoodlums
—to use my mother’s old phrase—until school started up again in a week. This left me alone for a week without my son, without my ex, without Olivia. What’s a woman to do?

I called up Terrance. He was just back in town, bearded and looking every bit the part of a future grad student. Despite four acceptances, he hadn’t decided yet where to study. He was also genuinely happy to see me. Happier, maybe, than I’d ever seen him. An innocence floated around him as though he had not yet even contemplated the thought that in a few months he’d be leaving this town, and me, for the remainder of his life. Or maybe that’s why he seemed so invigorated. I know
I’d
feel that way.

He took me out to dinner. I felt self-conscious through the meal—we’d never really hung out together outside of the apartment or the cafe—and I was sure I caught a few glances from the other tables. Or, not to put too fine a distinction on my feelings, I felt self-conscious for
him,
this young man who couldn’t see that he should really be with someone else, someone of his own age and interests and who still felt like life was out there, ahead, and not this thing pressing down from above, full of trap doors below and long slides down, no child’s play.

In the restaurant he had a way of holding my hands, or brushing a crumb from my lips, that made me exquisitely nervous. It was almost the kind of behavior you’d expect from someone who was about to propose, now that I think back on it. Thankfully, that wasn’t the thought in his head, or I might have said yes just to take the ladder up to some unknown spot on the playing board, my son in tow.

After dinner, Terrance took me to a movie, some foreign film, and he fingered me there during the previews, his wrist now and then hitting the underside of my tub of popcorn and sending a few strays to the floor. I suppose I could have stopped him from ever starting, but the theater was mostly empty and I wanted him.

“Let’s just go to my place,” I whispered.

“I want to see this film,” he said, fingers moving in out in out, the consummate multitasker, eyes on the screen.

And so we stayed. I’d never contemplated, desired, or succeeded in reaching orgasm in public before, except once, at the gym, when completely by surprise I came while on a stationary bike with an incorrectly adjusted seat. In the theater, I held my breath through the little contractions around his fingers. He kept his bundle of digits there and was, I think, going to have another go until I pulled him out. Halfway through the movie, when I wanted those fingers back in, he was busy eating popcorn and smiling at the French on the screen he understood but I didn’t, except for a few scattered words. The subtitles must have failed to capture the humor, because the film seemed humorless to me. I didn’t have the heart to pull his hand out of the buttery popcorn and return it to humorless me.

Back in my apartment I opened a bottle of wine and he started kissing my neck. I ran my fingers across his beard. It was a little harsh on the skin, and I had more than a little trepidation about what it’d feel like when he moved down on me. All evening, despite the delicious dinner, the film and fingering, and even the long walk back, a cloud of something like guilt had been hovering over me and I knew that before anything further happened this evening, I needed to tell him about Drake. So I did. I sat him down on the couch and told him about Olivia and her husband, about me and Drake, the maids, the police, all the high-level stuff, even Mr. Drake’s mysterious gift that I had yet to receive.

He was smiling through all of it. Imagine that. No distance, no distrust, no reconsiderations. He just ran his fingers through his beard and smiled, occasionally sipping at his wine with a look of utter contentment.

“I knew something was up,” he said.

“You did?”

He nodded. “Olivia called me, told me we could finally do it.”

“Do? Do what?”

Terrance stood up and pulled a square wrapper from his pocket.

“Is that?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes it is.”

A condom. It was like I’d never seen one before. Our relationship had been so defined by
my
pleasure that I’d pretty much thrown out any hopes for a normal sexual relationship.

He was still smiling. I, however, was not. “What do you mean,
Olivia said we could?
”

“Oh, and she said to say
you’re welcome
and
congratulations.
”

“For what?” I was lost. “What does Olivia have to do with, with
that?”
I said, pointing to the condom wrapper. “Or with us?”

“Olivia and Drake had that bet going.”

“Bet?”

“How long a woman could hold out with just, you know, getting licked.”

I felt licked, in the old-timey sense of the word. But just for a moment. Terrance moved over to the couch and tried to put an arm on me.

“Don’t. Just. Wait.” I thought hard.
I was the subject of a wager? An experiment? Let’s see how long poor lonely Eloise can go without going cock-mad? Jesus.

“C’mon, don’t be sore. If anything was sore it was my tongue.”

“And you and Olivia?” I asked “You see her on some kind of regular basis?”

He nodded. “Well, not until you came into the cafe.”

“I thought it was just her husband,” I muttered, mostly to myself.

“C’mon,” Terrance said. “Let’s do it.”

I could hear Olivia berating Terrance, ordering his every move since I’d known him, since he’d handed me his phone number, probably since he’d been mowing their lawns ages ago.

“You poor guy,” I said.

Terrance looked puzzled. He squeezed my shoulders. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“Give me one good reason you’re here?”

“I like you.”

“A real reason. Nothing to do with Olivia.”

“I said I like you.”

“Really?”

What a softy I was. I let him sit beside me. He put my hand on the crotch of his pants, a move I’d done many times, testing him, only to be brushed away. Not this time.

“You liked all this?” I asked. “Never coming?”

“Oh I came. Just not until I got home. Sometimes I’d have to stop in the woods…”

“Ugh, enough,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m surrounded by weirdos.”

“Hey now, calling the kettle black,” he said.

And he was right. I was one of them. I’d tied Terrance up and made him pleasure me. It might have been his own predilection at first, amplified by Olivia’s orders, but it had been my lips on his and I’m not talking the kind where lipstick glides.

I let him kiss my neck as I held my glass of wine, watching it slosh up, clear against the glass, dark crimson above the flute. I could send him away right now. I could step out from this gang of deviants at any time, the ol’ Eloise two-step: do or don’t, stay or go now. I let him unbutton my blouse. I drained my glass and stood up.

“Let’s go,” I said, and pulled him up, hand-in-hand now, and started toward the bedroom.

He pulled a few more condom wrappers out of his pocket and I had to laugh at his audacity.

“Olivia might be giving you free reign,” I said. “But I’m just one woman.”

But I was game. I dug through my underwear drawer for the old bottle of lubricant I’d hardly used and put it beside the accordion of condoms. And then I smiled back at him.

He was a different man. And not just because of the beard. He was using a different soap, too, his travels had darkened his tan, his hair had been cut by someone other than his usual barber. And best yet: there were no ties on his arms and legs. His hands, instead, were on me. I unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down, then his briefs, and watched his cock come to life. And I say cock, not penis, because this was the best of all worlds: Drake’s thickness, my husband’s length, but on the body of a man I enjoyed and was about to enjoy.

What followed was something I’d never really enjoyed with my ex, but which, now, I wanted to do badly after all that Terrance had done for me. I licked the tip, the ever-so-faint taste of pee that was gone in a moment. I pushed him back onto the bed, made myself comfortable, my knees on his cast-off jeans, Eloise Spanks, the cock sucker.

He immediately went into moans and I took him deeper, gagging once. I was out of practice—not that this was something I could do that was resume-worthy. But then I managed to take in a good three quarters of him, pulling completely off often just so I could breathe. An arc of saliva tied me to the tip and I went back again with a full breath, bobbing back and forth, a little more each time, halfway in, again three-quarters. With my ex-husband, it’d take a good fifteen minutes, and so it was this I had in mind when Terrance’s hands suddenly grabbed my head and pulled me forward so hard that my three-quarters achievement went straight to one-hundred percent and stayed there. I lost my balance and grabbed his waist. My throat tightened and I couldn’t help but gag. There I was, completely, utterly his, my nose smushed in his pubic hair, the throb of him releasing his ejaculate traveling all the way to my lips, and there, at the back of my throat, far past where I’d ever felt it before, the hot splashes of a man’s cum. And before I could feel anything other than shocked—like not being overly thrilled—I had to consider that I was his this
one time
, whereas he’d been mine completely, again and again and again, past the point of breathing. Okay, honestly, I didn’t think that
at the time
. I was just trying, as hard as I could, to keep it together.

It took me a few minutes just to get my breath back after the half minute he held me there. I could still feel him in my throat, like a ghost. I went to the bathroom to spit—I’m not the swallow type—but there was nothing to spit. Deep is deep. Instead, I drank from the tap, smoothed my eyebrows, then returned to the bedroom. I stripped and crawled into bed beside him and we lay like that for so long that he fell asleep, though I was as awake as could be. I watched his chest rise and fall through his T-shirt, watched his lips break open and purse and a faint puffing begin; watched as his cock, slumped now, began to contract, leaving behind a dribble of semen. My Terrance. Terrance for the moment. He’d make other women incredibly happy when it was his turn to pleasure them. Undergraduates, likely. Oh the world of pleasure they’d be in for—why hadn’t there been a Terrance for me when I’d been younger?

I let him sleep for a half hour, then crawled to the middle of the bed and licked up the spilled cum on his thigh, then to the tip of his cock, and resurrected it, letting it grow within me for a minute.

“Hey,” he said, softly, stroking my arm.

I pulled off and lay beside him. “You dozed off on me,” I said.

“I did.” He smiled.

I reached over to the condoms and took the top one from the counter and rolled it down over him. I lubed up the latex and crawled over him and oh, finally, you can imagine my enjoyment to at last have Terrance
and
his cock. I was so used to seeing just the top of his face beneath me that he felt now so incredibly tall: there was an entire chest there for me, a cleft chin, a smile. And even though my ex and I had been fucking in this very bed not so very long ago, that memory was temporarily erased. Terrance was exceptional. I came on top, and yet he didn’t withdraw, he didn’t come. He turned me onto my knees and was there again from behind, in me, and one of his hands there at my clit, rubbing gently like he’d been born a woman while his free hand traced indecipherable letters on my back, and just often enough slid down and under me to run across my nipples. With every thrust I felt myself pressed lower into the mattress, and in just a few minutes I came again lying splayed beneath him, gushing onto his nearly immobile hand, myself a panting wreck. He brought my hips back up in the air and ran his hands over my wet inner thighs, his fingers tracing my labia. But I pushed his fingers away. I was beyond touching. I heard the snap of the lube bottle opening.

“I’m too sensitive,” I said. “I think I’m done.”

“You’re not done,” he said.

“Give me a minute, then,” I said, laughing.

And then I felt his hand again, but just skirting my clit, rising along the outside of my labia, then up the entire length of my ass. Almost no part of me wasn’t his to touch. I felt him kiss my ass cheeks, first the left, then the right, and I couldn’t help but smile. And then I felt the chill of more lube sliding down my ass. I was done, but for his sake I reached back to help guide him back in me.
One last time,
I thought to myself. This time it was
his
hands that shooed me away and I felt him, bluntly, as he pressed his cock against my
definitely
private area.

“Hold on,” I began. My ex had talked me into anal sex once, just once, and I had a razor-sharp memory of that night’s misadventure.

“That’s not going to wor…” I began, but instead I bit the pillow.
If Drake could take it from Olivia, couldn’t I take it for Terrance? After all, compared to all that I’d done to Terrance…
As Terrance moved in slowly I clenched around him, unable to relax. Mostly because I suddenly wondered if even this,
I want you to fuck Eloise’s ass
was part of Olivia’s instructions to Terrance. Was this whole evening the surprise I was to be given for servicing Drake?