Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (41 page)

“I’m sorry Eloise,” Terrance said.

I lowered my hand and could see Terrance’s hands on the cups of Petunia’s bra. Was he trying to push himself free? He looked sorry in more ways than one as his head sunk deeper into the crack between the two pillows. Petunia undid her bra and her sizable tits now dangled at him, menacingly. More than anything, I wished Petunia would just stop rocking. She wasn’t going to let anything interrupt her, it seemed. More than his infidelity though, more than Petunia’s false friendship, I was puzzled by the cage, there on the nightstand.

“How’d you get out?” I asked, standing now. I’d take an answer, then leave. I felt Mr. Irldale stand beside me, a little shaky compared to my stiffly composed stance. I felt I had him on my side now; this man accustomed to infidelities and betrayal.

“She had the spare key,” Terrance pleaded.

“What spare key?” I asked, and then I saw it, dredging there against Terrance’s chest, two keys at the end of a necklace.

“How many times?” I asked. “And would you just stop it!” I shouted at Petunia.

“Whoa!” Petunia said. She arched her back and sat upright over Terrance, sending Lorne off again, like a bucked rodeo rider. “
You
were neglecting him,” she said, still now, turned at her waist, a couple rolls of fat winding around her like she could be turned and turned and unscrewed into two pieces. I was beginning to wish she was back at her fucking again. “You can’t do that to a man that’s crazy about you,” Petunia continued. “Because then they get crazy about other women.” She smiled and tried to eat the smile but it stayed there on her face.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“Go. Stay. Whatever you like,” Petunia said. “We’re just having fun. Stop being such a pretentious little bitch.” And with that she leaned back over Terrance again and resumed her bucking. “C’mon Lorne,” she said. “Get it in.”

Mr. Irldale pulled me away and I was glad in that moment to have someone to free me from this sight, but no, he instead took me to the foot of the bed. “Now would you have a look at that!” he said. “I didn’t even know about this until tonight!” he said, shaking his head in something like admiration.

And there I saw the object of his fascination. Lorne wasn’t an ass-fucker after all. It was the two of them, Lorne and Terrance, in the same place. Petunia’s vagina.

My hand went up again to block the sight after witnessing the second thrust. Here I was, Adam and Eve’s wish fulfiller, the woman unbuttoned, the once dominatrix, and I just couldn’t look. I thought I was unshakable, but apparently not. Maybe because my heart was involved, this cruel, unforgiving heart of mine. Maybe because in the course of one visit I’d turned Mr. Irldale into a denizen of this world here.

“Are you going to join them?” I said. “It looks like she might have space for one more,” I added, cruelly.

“D.H. has a standing offer,” Lorne said through his teeth, a cigar, no less, now planted in his mouth.

“Which I’ve refused,” Mr. Irldale answered, mostly for my benefit I assumed.

I thought of those dark apartment windows that could have been mine, the sleep and pointless dreams that could have been my pillow. To be safe. To be ignorant.
Was that better?
I felt a strange, almost unconscionable envy just then. Not to be double fucked-no. At least not physically. But metaphorically. I had wanted Terrance and Mr. Irldale to want me. For me to have both in my own style, emotionally, physically, whoever it turned out to be. But now I could never see Terrance again. And Mr. Irldale, standing there smiling at this sight like a boy’s reaction to his first glimpse of the impossible nakedness of pornography, well, what could I do for him if this was what he found so enthralling? After all, he’d come after me on the notion, somewhat well-founded, that I’d been a dominatrix of sorts.

“I’m going to come,” Terrance said.

“Oh God. Can we
go
please,” I said, pulling Mr. Irldale even as I implored, but he, now, was immovable.

“Come in me cowboy,” Petunia said, and I could see then that her ass cheeks were tattooed with the twin masks of drama: tragedy on the left cheek, comedy on the right, even as I felt that those should be tattoos on my skin, not hers—though somewhere more conservative, like the calve of one leg. Petunia was just a big fat double-stuffed joke. God I envied her.

“C’mon D.H.,” I said, just as Terrance came. A lump went down my throat when I realized this was the last time I’d ever hear him come—and that this last time would be because another woman was over him. His cock slid out in the space between two of Lorne’s thrusts.

Mr. Irldale was rooted at the spot. “Let’s wait until intermission,” he said in answer to my pull.

“There’s no intermission,” I said, and watched as the whole pigpile disintegrated, Petunia heaving off of Terrance and waving him aside.

“On your back Lorne,” Petunia ordered, and then crab-walked over him, settling herself down with her back on his chest, turning her head to accept the kiss her husband fed to her lips from his own; below, he feed his cock back within her. I couldn’t imagine it made any kind of progress in that cavity of hers.

“Stay hard, you fucker,” Petunia said. “Stay hard. Stay hard.”

“C’mon,” I said to Mr. Irldale. The sight of Terrance there, climbing slowly off the bed both frightened and repulsed me. But he wasn’t coming toward me.

“Lick it cowboy,” Petunia said, and a moment later Terrance was down there between that tangle of Petunia’s thighs and legs.

“I’ve had enough,” I said, and this time Mr. Irldale came with me, the sight on the bed perhaps too homoerotic for his tastes, (though I hate to admit that the image stayed with me for many a night. Not Terrance and Lorne, but the very idea of having two men that way, one within me, the other’s tongue down on me. Egad.)

Mr. Irldale and I left that den of depravity. We tottered down the hallway, through the innocuous kitchen with its ticking clock and blue-lit appliances.

“So you two
were
an item,” Mr. Irldale said.

“Were is right.” I bumped for a moment into the kitchen island. Marooned, it felt like.

“It’s a very strange thing to put a man in a cage,” Mr. Irldale said after a long pause in which I managed to get him walking toward the elevator once more.

“I know, I know,” I said. “It was Petunia’s idea, sort of.”

“I learned two things tonight,” he said.

“Great. I introduce you to cock cages and double fucking,” I said, even though I figured there was probably a more official term for the act (
double vag
, it turns out, so I wasn’t too far off.) “Congratulations.”

“Double…? Yes, that,” he said. “But I was going to say I’ve hidden myself from this whole…sexperiential world. I don’t know why.”

“Sexperiential is a big word for a drunk.”

“I just made it up.”

“It’s probably already out there.”

“I’ll trademark it,” he said.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m hardly drunk,” he said. “I’ve been pitching that swill over the balcony all evening.”

The elevator door opened and I entered. He did not.

“You going to stay and watch?” I asked. I needed the answer to be no. It had to be no or I was lost again. Alone.

“I think we should probably change the channel,” he said. “And I don’t want to be rude,” he added and stepped inside the elevator.

Good enough for me.

“What was the other thing you learned tonight?” I asked.

He squinted his face. “I don’t remember.”

I tapped the button to close the door, but just then Mr. Irldale put his hand out and stopped the doors from closing. My heart sank. And then I heard what had grabbed his attention. That fair-weather friend Petunia, the one who could get a football team to strip in high school, the success story, the wealthy one, the lucky one, the only woman here with two men, was climaxing. It came out as a long, long yell, so long that Mr. Irldale stuck out his foot to stop the insistent elevator doors. It went on and on and then kind of broke down in a series of guttural
ohs
followed, like the weakest of punctuation, by the sound of Lorne’s release. A nasty grunt.

“There,” Mr. Irldale said, letting the doors seal us together. “Now we know how
that
ended.”

In the weeks following that awful night I felt more than a little un-sexual. Not the kind of thing you, dear reader, are hoping to find in a book likely shelved with Romance or Erotica, right? Mr. Tailor (who I’d nicknamed Buttons) didn’t entice me, though I moaned and sighed as best I could for him. Peter, well, Peter never turned me on in that way (nor was he meant to), though I did feel some pleasure kicking him in the groin at an opera’s intermission and, another week, slapping his face in a restaurant.

Gradually, though, months intervened. I became so entrenched with work on the second floor that Carla’s little book of sins was more or less written in my head, even as I began looking through my own journal for what would become
my
book of the same name and what you’re reading now. My evenings during this time were filled with coaxing my son into letting me help him with his homework and reports, and my nights were spent alone in my bedroom with the TV on. I sorely missed Terrance. Not the person, not the man, but the
idea
of the man; the younger man who’d taken me out and made me feel younger.

I began to revisit my little Japanese wonder in the mornings after my son left for school, and even expanded my collection a little. And while my new suction-base dildo
did
get me off, he was a stoic lover. And a size or two too large. Petunia could keep her overstuffed desires.

“Mr. Irldale,” I said. I waited to hear his answer on the other end of the call I’d placed. He’d left me more than a few messages, but this was the first I’d returned.

“Eloise!” he said.

“You haven’t done anything rash, have you?” I asked. “You’re not married or anything?”

He laughed. “No, I’m not married.”

“Chasing the ladies?”

“They’re chasing
me
,” he said.

“Well, if you’re not too busy being chased, I have an opportunity for you,” I said.

“Let’s hear the pitch.”

“It’s of a voyeuristic nature,” I said.

He laughed. “I was a little drunk that night, wasn’t I? But, okay: I’m listening.”

“What are you doing tomorrow at ten-thirty?”

“A.M or P.M.?”

“A.M.”

There was a pause. “Eating breakfast.”

I gave him the address to the second floor. “Bring a blank canvas and something to draw or paint with,” I said.

“Are you enrolling me in an art class.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“I’m not geriatric yet,” he said.

“Ten-thirty,” I repeated. “When you get there, tell Stanley that Eloise sent you.” And then I disconnected from the call. I didn’t answer when he called back. Not then and not later that evening.

My night was restless, my dreams wanting and empty. After my son had left for school in the morning, I stood stooped in the shower, feeling the hot water pelt my back and ass while Mr. Sticky consented to take me from behind in his typical lackadaisical way, his suction-cup base affixed to one of the shower’s tiles while the rest of him slid within me rather uncomfortably. Despite my earlier hesitation, I’d become rather fond of Mr. Sticky; his size no longer bothered me. And we’d grown closer: this was the first time we’d showered together. Still, something about doing it in the tub wasn’t working for me. I detached the shower sprayer, put it on a mild pulse, and moved it down between my legs and it wasn’t more than a count of twenty before I came, slipping to the bottom of the tub before my orgasm was even over. A disappointing one, too. I had, I felt, a problem. I believe I may have even said this out loud, which compounded my problem.

A quick backtrack: a week earlier I’d been told there was going to be a life drawing session in the big room and they needed me and a few others to fill in the “class.” The clients were an art teacher and a male model presumed to be the instructor’s lover. The instructor had seen the model pose nude before a dozen different art classes, my colleague had told me, but here on the second floor, they wanted to take it a little further.

When I entered the room on the day of their session, I couldn’t help but think of what I’d made Adam and Eve do to each other in this very space, going at each other like animals. Now, though, it was a different room. The furniture had been removed and I was met, instead, by risers in the corner and a rather fetching male model in his twenties sitting on a couch—that same one where I’d been unbuttoned those months ago. As a member of the art “class," I was a prop as well. There were three other colleagues of mine sitting loosely around the couch on folding chairs, sketchpads in hand, doodling. One was on the phone. I took a seat in the back but with a clear view of the model in his white robe.

There was a knock at the door and we all turned. In came the art teacher, Ms. Scheffield. It didn’t occur to me until just that moment that the teacher might have been a man. A gay fantasy would probably not be up Mr. Irldale’s alley, although I can’t say I would have minded the entertainment. The very much female teacher was in her early forties, short, and when she spoke I detected a slight Spanish accent—Spanish as in Spain Spanish, her words adorned here and there with the flourishes of a faint lisp. She must have married a Mr. Scheffield at some point. Ms. Scheffield wore a long skirt of wool, matronly, and a flowery top with an equally colorful scarf over her curled hair. She looked like a hippie potter.

“Yeth, yeth, phonth away,” she said, putting a large art tote bag on the floor at the head of the class. (And because I’m rather sensitive to the whole non-Spanish lisping situation, having, as a child, been a bit of lisper, I’m going to go with straight clean dialogue for the teacher from here on out. Let your imagination add it if you need it.) “Today we’re going to be working on muscles,” she said. “See the muscles underneath, follow the lines. Ask yourself, is it clenched or unclenched? How do they overlap? Yes?”