Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (35 page)

This was my second session with Mr. Tailor. Our previous meeting had seen Mr. Tailor asking me to wear some Victorian-era boots with tiny clasps. I’d put them on and then he knocked at the door, came in, and slowly undid the clasps, one by one. Then, when my feet were removed from the boots, he looked up at me.
You didn’t orgasm,
he said. The entry in
A Collection Of Sins
, my well-worn handbook of sorts for my work on the second floor, simply read:
Mr. Tailor. Come after removing clothing. Harmless.
I’d assumed that meant, well,
him
coming. I imagined I’d step aside and let him go to town on the boots. But no, he wasn’t a fetishist in that way.
I
was supposed to come, or pretend to come.

This time I was prepared.

“Thirty,” he breathed.

“Mmm,” I said, then took a deep breath and sighed it out again. I was acutely aware of the sounds I made and was erring on the cautious side. Mr. Tailor didn’t seem the kind of client who’d appreciate an obviously faked orgasm. Mr. Tailor’s fingers parted the dress as far as my knees. I sighed again, and squirmed just a little.

I’d found that clients—okay, mostly men—who patronized the second floor weren’t into what I expected they’d be into. They weren’t here for bondage stuff or in need of a dominatrix, which was both a relief and a surprise. A relief because, honestly, I’m not into the whole BDSM thing. (Yes, I realize you remember the whole Terrance episode, but that wasn’t dark dark, like BDSM.) It’s like people playing Nazis and fetishists for show. It seems to me—and I honestly don’t mean to offend anyone who
does
enjoy it—to be an ignorantly narrow view of the variety of sexual enticements available. It’s like readers who devour everything by one author at the expense of any other writer. Or who only find enjoyment from one genre of music when there’s such wealth—of music, of books, of desires—to choose from. What I found on the second floor, instead, was a broad range of fantasies with a startling high percentage of them being about
shades
of pleasure. Whereas something like bondage takes sexuality and ties it down, restrains it, limits it, here on the second floor sexuality was a broad avenue with dozens of alleyways. Though, thank god, we did have a domme on staff for those who thought perversity was what they found in magazines and the internet and in a certain fiction series that shall not be named. It took the pressure off of me and the others.

“Forty-one,” Mr. Tailor said.

The dress was being unbuttoned from the bottom and I could feel more of the fabric part in half now, one side falling toward the velvet couch back at which I stared; the other falling down over my increasingly bared thigh. The dress parted a tad more with another released button; I could feel the remaining discs of mother-of-pearl shift against my upper thigh and could feel Mr. Tailor’s hot breath as he worked his way closer. And now that I’m remembering the session (it’s 2:30 a.m. as I write this and I’m on my second medicinal nightcap of merlot) I have to admit to noticing Mr. Tailor’s scent after all. Mint. Clean, pure, mint.

“Forty-five.”

I sighed again. Another fifty-four buttons and he’d be at the last one, there at my armpit. I was glad I’d shaved this morning.
Had I remembered to apply deodorant?
I took a deep breath and sighed it out.
Yes. Thank goodness.
I realized, somewhere around button fifty, that Mr. Tailor might just be my favorite client so far. I had to do so little. Just lie here and sigh.

I could see goosebumps on my arms and felt a chill go through me. The warm summer had long since migrated south, leaving San Francisco with the heavy mute wetness of what I was told was a typical taciturn autumn. I gave Mr. Tailor another sigh, another little squirm. Maybe it was the cold or the fabric of the dress, but my nipples had perked up, especially Noble, where it brushed the dress. (Left is Barnes, right is Noble. Also, in full disclosure, I’ve also called them—when I was nursing my son years ago and my husband would occasionally suckle at my breasts in the midst of our infrequent love-making—Chocolate & Vanilla; and even earlier, when they had seemed to erupt from that easy flat chest of mine with a showman’s roared pronouncement: Barnum & Bailey.)

I’d taken over
A Collection Of Sins
from Carla, who was away from the second floor on maternity leave. It would be better to not describe
A Collection Of Sins
to you, reader, and let you conjure it in your mind. Perhaps you imagine a leather-bound book of crisp creme pages, gilded edges, the endpaper printed with a repeating pattern of some ominous-looking flower, a nightshade relative, while the copious notes inside are inscribed in perfect calligraphy. This is how it’d be in the movie version of this book, during the opening credits. But here’s the truth: it was actually a ninety-nine cent composition book from Targét with the words
A Collection Of Sins
inscribed on the yellow cover by an eraser, the same method I remember using for defacing our school books years ago, a typeface made up completely of harsh angles and splayed forms, making any words look like the names for our favorite heavy metal band. If Carla had been unkind to the cover, she’d gutted the inside. Many of the pages had been ripped out or simply filled with loops and patterns—the symbolic transcriptions of dozens of phone calls Carla must have been stuck on. The missing pages represented, I imagined, clients who’d come and gone or were committed to Carla’s memory. Still, despite all the omissions, there were a handful of entries left, perhaps the ones she’d thought I’d be able to take over in her absence.

A Collection Of Sins
was just another piece of equipment I was given on my first day. I read it cover to cover in the break room and then began cold calling. Well, not exactly cold calling; the clients had previous relationships with the second floor. But it felt cold and scary to me. A chill went through me with every wait for an answer. Believe me, I didn’t miss the irony that I was setting up sessions for just the sort of thing I’d left another state to get away from.

And to ward off any preemptive questions from you, dear reader: if my working on the second floor sounds implausible to you, then surely you’re a young reader, one who thinks absolutes rule now and forever. You love X. You hate Y. You’d never Z. But then come your late thirties, your early forties, and suddenly you find you despise X. You’re okay with Y. And what’s wrong with Z,
really?
It’s not that our alliances shift as we age, but that the absolutes that had made the world seem a more understandable place begin to dissolve. We’re charged particles, seeking out the nearest electron to fill our needs. Covalent bonds help us make it through the night. The immutable breaks apart; we become something we wouldn’t have recognized. We are vapor. (And yes, I was skimming through my son’s science textbook this evening. More often, though, I find that the language of science gets to the heart of what I mean better than the dull instruments of ordinary words.)

On that first ill-fated day with Mr. Tailor, when I’d failed to orgasm at the delight of having my feet freed from Victorian footwear (whoop-de-do, right?), Mr. Tailor mentioned having tried a different place, one where he wasn’t quite satisfied. That he returned after I’d messed up the boot-unlacing session meant something I supposed. Most likely that he’d been bluffing about using another agency.

“Sixty,” he breathed.

And yes,
obviously
, all that I’ve written above from his last count was
not
thoughts I was having during the unbuttoning. I was instead (ahem) getting a tad hot and bothered. Strike that, I remember now how cold I was. Make it cold and bothered.

At this time I was still living with my friend Petunia, still rebuffing near-daily emails from Terrance, and still job hunting. Working here on the second floor was just something I’d felt obligated to do as my other skills—writing—weren’t getting much traction in the marketplace, as they say. I’d stopped calling and emailing potential employers and instead had begun walking to every publisher, ad agency, design studio, nonprofit, for profit, you-name-it, asking if they were looking for an experienced writer. Nada. They wanted experienced copywriters, not
fiction
writers, though what’s advertising writing but fiction? Turns out that’s not a good selling point. Also against my odds for a job? Hordes of eager, work-for-hardly-anything college graduates who clog up any empty spots that come up.

Since my son and I needed to move out of Petunia’s office space on the imminent arrival of her Lithuanian programming team (see book two), and since I had managed to find an apartment that would be vacant soon, I had taken the referral I’d received (via Petunia, no less) and visited the second floor. And there I began working, M/W/F, making the bread, needing (ha! sorry, it’s a three-glass night) the dough—though it was a fraction of what I had been making before the whole economic implosion. It was rent money. Justifiable. Flour and water.

Anyway. Back to cold and bothered. It had been awhile since I’d been with a man—with Terrance that is. And though reading his e-mails wasn’t getting me rethinking my stoic approach to pleasure since our west coast moves, the nights were. There, drifting off to sleep, I recalled the pleasure he’d brought me. The feel of his lips on my neck, below my ear, lower, taking in each nipple with his lips as though they were delicacies, giving me a preview of what his tongue would be doing a minute later down below. I mean, here I was, wanted, and I was holding myself back from Terrance. It wasn’t my lack of a suitor that frustrated me but my own willpower’s ability to disengage with Terrance. Those nights, alone on that futon in the little office Petunia had let me use, I believed I could clear my mind of Terrance and his eagerness to pleasure me if I…well, just rubbed one out quickly, before the thoughts kept me up half the night. So a quick rub on the futon, my teeth clenched on a pillow to muffle my coming; or there, a hot orgasm in the shower, Pfisters third-to-the-last setting on the dial trained on my clitoris; ah release, release, release. But alas, for all of that effort, I was a lass not left stoic again. My libido had played its old trick and taken back its promise to leave me alone if I just masturbated. I vowed to stop the self-pleasuring just so I could keep my head clear. I got out of bed and sat at my laptop and wrote out a good portion of what would become book two. During the day, I redoubled my visits to businesses looking for work, including embellishing my C.V. and working on my handshake and smile. I began suggesting lunch to talk over what I could bring to the metaphoric table, even when I could barely afford to put anything on it. I was miserable.

And so it was, at button count sixty or so, the dress parted cleanly at my waist, that I found myself battling the cumulation of about two weeks of
no-touchie, no-feelie
(which is what my head had coined the impossible endeavor.) It also turns out that sighing and pretending to be turned on by Mr. Tailor’s unbuttoning had the perverse effect of getting my system going. Fake it until you make it, right? And I liked Mr. Tailor. He was respectable-looking, he had a kind face, and I had to do so little. I know it may sound creepy, a stranger slowly unbuttoning my dress, and paying me for the honor, but that’s not how it felt at the time.

“Sixty-five,” Mr. Tailor said, not like a count-down (or
up,
rather) but more like a status update or the mention of a cruising altitude. It was what it was.

And Mr. Tailor was, if I haven’t mentioned it yet, on his knees. You may have noticed that I’m not averse to men being on their knees. For someone like Mr. Tailor to be on his, at his age, seemed an even greater sacrifice. Another button parted, another breath of mint. I could even see the shadow of his head now on the back of the velvet couch. From somewhere on the second floor I could hear a woman yell “Jump! Jump! Jump!” and my head cobbled together a nude male going through hoops. Really, I had no idea what was going on in the other room.

Though I soon learned that it’s usually a futile pursuit to try and understand the source of a client’s fetish, I nevertheless attempted to piece together an understanding of why Mr. Tailor was turned on by buttons and clasps. I could imagine his parents being wealthy, maybe he’d been raised by a private tutor, and one afternoon when only the two of them had been home, he’d found her (his tutor) napping on a couch not unlike this one. And young Tailor, the boy, the young man, had begun to unbutton his tutor’s dress. And though she woke, she made no move to stop him. And this transgression of their previous boundaries continued, button by button. She allowed his hands to explore her as they traveled along the sudden expanse of skin, young Tailor getting a hands-on education if ever there was one. The surprise of a faint mole or two against the smoothness of her back. The length of her leg. Her hand guiding his to places he’d only imagined.

Sccrreeeech.
(That’s a needle-on-the-stopped-record sound effect, in case you didn’t get that. And if you’re too young to know that sound except as a sound effect on TV or a sample in a song, then, well, god I envy you your youth and pity you your upcoming life mistakes. More importantly, you’re missing the sensation of what it’s like for the needle to scratch the record, for it’s this: horror. And the horror here is the little fantasies we indulge in which, if real, would be dark crimes.) The thing, of course, that lessens the horror is that there was plenty wrong with my imagining of the source of Mr. Tailor’s button fetish. a) I’d watched way too much British costume drama. And b) Mr. Tailor would have been a young man in the late 1950s/60s. Uh, miniskirts? Yeah.

Nevertheless, this little imagining of the tutor and the student was something
I
was thinking about as Mr. Tailor continued unbuttoning me. I was the tutor. I had my thoughts and head locked just right, my—let’s call it what it is—horniness acting as bouncer to any interrupting thoughts. I moved my hand down to my underwear. (I realize I’ve forgotten to mention this: I also wore lacy underwear and a bra, but thank goodness no corset.) With one touch of my finger, (maybe two) my moans took on some serious veracity.