Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (33 page)

“Well, fuck,” I said, disappointed, as I pulled back onto the bed.

Terrance laughed. “Should have got the key.”

“Well, fuck,” I repeated. Here I was, hot and bothered, with Terrance all to my lonesome, and we were shut out. So much for being his master.

Terrance unbuttoned my shirt, then kneeled in front of me and kissed me. “I taste about four different drinks,” he said, lips withdrawing.

I put my hands on his head and pushed him southward. He tried to stop at my breasts, tongue going for my nipples, but I pressed down harder to the destination I preferred. If I didn’t have the key, there was always this.

He went down willingly, the plastic of his cage running down one of my legs until he was there and, parting my legs with his hands, he began to lick me, no foreplay, no gentle runs of tongue. He went straight there and quickly, as though the first five minutes of his usually wonderful tongue play was skipped over. Or perhaps I’d passed out during that part. But I don’t think so. With Terrance down below, I forgot about the cage and the key, knowing only that I wanted to halt the morning, keep this feeling in me on loop, be stuck here forever in this gravity-less, orangeish, wonderfilling, state.

Terrance’s hands ran up the insides of my legs then across my stomach. He parted my top and ran his fingernails across my nipples. His hands reached for mine and he took them and placed them over my breasts and I complied with his request and traced my fingers over my nipples. It seems comical that I would find touching my breasts a private act, especially with a caged man there between my legs, but it was for me and I did it slowly at first, checking to see if he was watching. He was. I continued.

I’ll skip the mechanics of what came next for I find it gratuitous and, mostly, because writing this is making me want Terrance. And wanting Terrance, as I write this, is not a thought I should be having.

Oh, all right. This once. What’s a little self-indulgent remembering?

I soon found, no felt, why Terrance’s fingers were absent from their usual position on my breasts (when he wasn’t tied down, that is). With his tongue on my clit, he then put—as my ex-landlord Olivia once said—two fingers in the bush and his pinky in the tush. My tush. I felt down there with my hands to find out what combination he was using to elicit the sensation I felt. He was, I knew, taking advantage of me. A testing of my Rule #2, and I was very, very happy that I didn’t have the key now. Had it been in my possession, there’d be more than a finger up there thanks to his sweet talk, and I’d be walking funny the next morning.

When I came, it was neither sudden nor surprising, but exactly how I knew it would be: at first taking forever, then seemingly not going to happen, then suddenly a feeling it might, a certainty it would, then that excruciatingly long high that I always doubted would lead to the orgasm itself, though, in my experience, when had it not? Strange the distrust we have with our own bodies. Terrance kept going and kept going, tongue a-flicker, fingers pumping, even through the pounding on the door by his roommate. And then I burst and came spastically, gushing, his fingers suddenly seeming so large, especially the pinky, as I tightened around him. He laughed but I pressed his lips back against me for another count of five four three two one.

“Lovely,” he said when I pushed his tongue away. I let him leave his fingers there. What the hell. The lamp’s orange seemed more mature, like the light was composting, turning back into something elemental. I heard French. Hadn’t the Lithuanians said something about absinthe? On the ceiling, the rim of bright light was like a giant sun against the ceiling. What had Terrance said about what stars were made of? Oh, what the hell did it matter. What did it matter if there was one star out there (our sun) and no others? I closed my eyes and saw a million stars sparkling, flares of blue throbbing through the ether, and when I opened them again I was climaxing once more and Terrance’s fingers weren’t in me but rather on me, rubbing my clit intensely while his caged cock was plunging in and out. My feet battered him away. “No more,” I said, lovingly spent. “Oh, please no more.”

He groaned—loudly, frustratingly. Then he gave a resigned laugh. And when I woke the third time, it was dark, and the bed was empty, and I could hear a shower running. My legs touched dampness and I could feel the mess I’d made of Terrance’s bed and the deep forgotten shame of young childhood returned for a moment, loosened:
I’ve wet the bed
. A window had been opened and I felt exposed and cold. All the warmth, from both cocktail and tongue, fell away the second I moved. I was sick. Somewhere in the apartment, an alarm went off. I stumbled into my clothes, then sat on the edge of the bed, breathing deeply of the night air. I could hear other alarm clocks. Beeps and insistent ringing and an occasional snatch of song quickly interrupted. It was morning for the first risers.

I found the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water and drank, then drank another, and another. I scolded myself for not taking an aspirin, which was, in light of all that I could be scolding myself for, both a trifle
and the most important thing in the world.

I headed toward the bathroom only to see Terrance’s roommate emerging from her room, the French Canadian with the Caesarian Scar. Which, incidentally, I could see plainly as she was completely naked.

We stood there staring at one another for a long pause. I was the one with something on, but I felt the more naked of us two.

“Oh no,” she said, her voice pure warning. What was her name? I couldn’t remember.

“Terrance and I, we have an arrangement,” she said, heading toward the bathroom. “He told me all about you. Careless, heartbreaker, young.”

I was startled by nothing as much as that word.
Young.

“So, guess what?” she said. Marie. That was it. I held the wall for balance as Marie spoke.

“I had to listen to you all night. Now listen to Terrance,” she said and swung open the bathroom door dramatically, the bathroom’s steamy interior a beat later turning all into swirls.

The door slammed. Locked from the inside.

“We’ll try to be quiet,” she said, loudly, through the door.

I was confused.
Was this about the other day? Did the two of them still have something going on?
But I didn’t care what she thought, because I knew what I knew. Three. Two. On…

She yelled from the bathroom. A loud, indecipherable snap from what must have been a rich branch of French expletives. The door opened and she tramped out, dripping wet, Terrance in tow, head soapy, eyes blinking painfully. And I should mention, Terrance was in tow because she was pulling him by his penis, or more correctly, the cock cage.

“What!” she yelled at me. “What!” And finally she got it out. “What is this?!”

“A cock cage,” I said.

“A cock cage,” she repeated, loudly.

There was yelling from some neighboring apartment and banging on the wall and she pounded back.

“Marie,” Terrance said, kindly.

“No no,” Marie said. “No. This is her, yes? The one who hurt you. Where is the key?”

“I don’t have it,” I said. “And I don’t think I’ve ever hurt him.”

“You. Say nothing,” she said.

“You came to me,” she said to Terrance. “What we had, the other night, last week, the week before. Remember how you said…” she said, then pulled at the cage which made Terrance nearly collide with her still-dripping mass.

And then she did something that frightened me. She cried. I saw myself in her, another ten years from now, say. A decade of neglect, little chance of love, few opportunities for pleasure, and what opportunities there had been (like Terrance falling into her life) now withheld thanks to a key you could vanish under your thumb. She dropped Terrance’s cock roughly and came at me.

“Ah, I suggest running,” Terrance said.

I did. Or tried to. We ended up circling the living room couch, I dodging remotes, magazines, anything she could hurl my way. Around and around, until finally I had to stop. She came at me like a wrestler, head down, her tits swaying, and with the impact of her head against me, out it came: countless margaritas, Lithuanian concoctions, heat and burn. Out over her back, clear to the couch behind her. Everyone froze but me. I ran, throat burning.

She came down to the stairwell, screaming, her life’s pleasure’s last chance to be true maimed by me. And she let me know it. Not in words, but those screams. She chewed my name and spat it out. Then swallowed and spat it out again.

Outside, it was cruel morning; no day has ever been so rudely resurrected. On the street I heard Terrance call my name and I looked up and there he was at his bedroom window, throwing me my sweater and bag.

I didn’t know what to say. The Lithuanians probably had a word for it. We’d been taught a bunch of cuss words the night before, but I couldn’t remember any of them.
Laizhyk-something-something.
And then I saw Terrance’s shadow on the ceiling, and another shadow, Marie, her shadow weeping. And the two shadows joined and I knew a cock cage meant nothing.

I believe I screamed the word
shit
into the streets. Weren’t situations and complications exactly like this what I’d promised myself to never fall into again? Why was my willpower so weak?

I got on the morning’s first bus where freshly shaved commuters stood around me, industrious, successful, irreplaceable. I laughed suddenly, quickly, but no one noticed. And then I cried. I could see Terrance’s calming, forgiving tongue riding up that crazy French Canadian’s cunt. Someone handed me a tissue. These commuters had even things as light as tissues down cold, whereas I did not, none of it: life’s routine, the way forward, how to be, whatever you want to call it. They also, likely, didn’t have what I’d be getting a prescription for a few days later. A bladder infection that took two different courses of antibiotics to clear up. The body’s way of saying,
hey, enough is enough!

But who listens to their bodies anyway.

There you have some of the salient moments between my stepping into Petunia’s Volvo those many weeks ago to my being there on the second floor, months later, in the presence of my clients Adam and Eve—the bored couple desiring titillation, danger, excitement. I loved them for their openness, but, maybe, I also despised them a little for their want for more from life. They had more than I did. Far more. If they were kinky, they were also true to one another. They could sit next to each other in the evening, watching TV, calm, relaxed. Or so I imagined. Fearless about tomorrow’s emotional forecast.

We left our original sinners, as you remember, with Adam still blindfolded and Eve holding a small white box. They’d each come to me detailing their fantasies for our session and now it was time for Eve’s to be fulfilled.

Eve suspected her husband of cheating. Not anything serious, no actual broach of their bond, more mental cheating. He had an appetite that was hard for her to fulfill. She’d considered an open marriage, but dismissed it out of jealousy and fear. She’d tried to keep up, but over the years she found herself wanting her husband on a more, how did she put it?
Mental plane.
And swinging had been a disaster.

“So, no sex?” I asked her. We were talking over the phone, a day after our lunch date.

“Oh no,” she said, “Well, okay, less.”

“What’s less?” I asked, prying.

“Once every week or two?”

I smiled, but of course she couldn’t see the smile. “That seems perfectly reasonable to me,” I said.

“And I thought he could see you perhaps once a week, alone,” Eve said. “Can I trust you?” This part was unexpected—not the questioning of my trust, but of her wanting to send Adam to me.

I detected the hesitation in her voice. “Do you want him to see me alone?”

“Not really.”

“I think I have a solution,” I said.

Which brings us to Adam lying naked on the bed, his erection felled by my reading of a magazine article on the vicissitudes of gold’s worth. I reached for my stock handcuffs — they weren’t even real, just flick a switch on one end and they came undone, but no one up here knew that, and none were ever in any hurry to be freed of them.

With Adam’s hands bound and then tied off, I then restrained his legs to the bed. I nodded to Eve and she carried the cock cage hesitantly to her husband, as though it were made of heavy polished crystal instead of plastic. I held the diminutive lock, inserted the key and kept it open. Petunia had been right in denying me the key those first twenty-four hours with Terrance, and I knew I’d do the same for Eve. I slipped the keys into a pocket.

Adam began to stir as his wife slipped the cage’s sheath over his penis. I helped her with the second piece, and together we snapped the two pieces into one. I handed her the lock.

“This isn’t anything…electrical, is it?” Adam asked.

“Oh, not really,” I said. “Is it Eve?”

She pressed the shackle into the padlock. Adam’s life was about to be changed by the littlest click. And there it was.
Click.
“It maybe a
little
shocking,” I added.

I nodded to Eve and went to the door to leave them alone for a few minutes. I’d coached her on what to say, about how she felt he needed to come down a bit, give her some rest, learn how to please himself and her in other non-sexual ways, realize that he was hers, and she his, but only if he could relearn how to communicate and connect in ways that weren’t overblown with testosterone, or at least, not quite as often. Eve wasn’t above a biweekly night of passion.

I ate an apple in the break room and watched the local news. By now I’d been living in San Francisco long enough that I was beginning to feel familiar with the politics and city scene. But my time here had also been short enough that the newscasters still seemed like actors, like phonies. How long would this feeling last?

I returned fifteen minutes later, no longer the intruder, not even Ms. Eloise. Just plain me.

I flipped the lock switch on the cuffs and released Adam. His blindfold was already off. Eve had a smile on her face. Adam sat upright and felt at his crotch and at the smaller version of the cage Terrance wore, a deterrent to any kind of sex or self-pleasuring. On women such devices are about chastity. On men, chastity needs to be a cage, restraining the beast. Yet I suspected there were more than a few women who crossed over into the men’s camp—I’d known a few.