The Dollhouse Society Volume I: Evelyn (Includes Indecent Proposal, Dreams in Black & White, Playing House, Freeze Frame, plus a bonus story!) (10 page)

After some time, he guided me into a new room that resembled a Chinese palace, where a gentleman had successfully suspended his courtesan from a giant ceiling mobile with dozens of colored silk ribbons tied to various parts of her body. He kept fixing and re-fixing the ribbons, adjusting his courtesan so different parts of her gleaming anatomy were on displace. Onlookers came and went, observing them or commenting on their skill.

“Do you have to play?” I asked Mr. Sterling. “Or can you only watch?”

“A gentleman can either watch or play, if he has a courtesan. I’ve spent three years watching.”

He sounded bitter about that.

I looked again at the pretty, talented couple. “Do you want to play with me?”

He turned and palmed my cheek. His ran his rough thumb over my lips. His expression didn’t change, but I could see the excitement in his electric blue eyes.

We went back out into the hall and started exploring the rooms together.

We agreed on the boudoir. It was very French and very unoccupied. It sported a vast canopy bed with sweet-smelling pink linen sheets, a huge wardrobe full of hundreds of dresses and costumes, and a vanity full of toiletries. The walls were flocked with white, pink and gold roses. Mr. Sterling explored the room very thoroughly before pulling out the vanity chair for me. “Come,” he said, holding out a hand for me, and I went to him and let him guide me down into the chair before the lighted vanity mirror. 

His earlier makeover displeased him now. He used a gentle astringent to wipe all my cosmetics away and started over. There were dozens of antique pots of cosmetics available to him. He examined them all before setting to work repainting my face. He chose softer shades this time, blushing shades of rose and violet and tawny sunset. He painted my face all over, the colors so expertly melded together that after a while my face looked like it had the natural blush of ancient porcelain.

The vanity annoyed him, restricting his work, so he transferred the chair, and me, to the center of the suite and simply spread the cosmetics out on the floor around the chair. He spent the next hour on his knees, working carefully over every inch of my face, perfecting his work while I wriggled uncomfortably in my seat. The fullness of the pearls
was
annoying me again.

Onlookers came and went, many staying to watch Mr. Sterling work with his little brushes and wands. He had to tell me to stop moving around so much. “Please,” I told him, straining to leave my seat. I wanted him to fuck me on the bed, or fuck me in the chair, or on the floor, anything to stop this terrible, endless ache inside me.

“Soon, my dove,” he said. He sounded like he was in a reverie. “You’re so beautiful. I want everyone to see how beautiful you are. I want everyone to see how beautiful women are.”

I didn’t care anymore about beauty. I almost slid to my knees on the floor. The onlookers murmured quietly among themselves, but I didn’t know what they were saying, if they approved. I no longer cared about much of anything.

Next he took an antique silver brush to my hair. He said my hair reminded him of shorn Oriental silk. Then he slid the little red slip of a dress off me so I sat in only my black silk stockings, garters and platforms in the chair. I pressed my knees together to keep from giving the audience too intimate a show. I tried to fold myself up, gather my warmth around me.

Mr. Sterling had found a number of white satin scarves in the wardrobe. I dreaded the scarves, because I knew what he had planned. He started with my arms. The vanity chair was one of those eighteenth century skirted affairs with a tall back but no arms. He tied my arms loosely behind the chair, binding my wrists together just tight enough so I couldn’t move them but not so tightly that it hurt. He asked me if it hurt. I thought about telling him a lie so he’d free my arms and I could cover myself up, but when I glanced up to search his face, I saw how much he was enjoying this. Mr. Sterling had waited three years to play in the Dollhouse. And when he had finally chosen a courtesan to play with, he had chosen me, a bit, fat, Greek nobody. I told him the truth. I told him it didn’t hurt.

After he had finished with my arms, he went to work on my ankles, carefully hooking the toes of my shoes behind the legs of the chair and then securing them with more scarves. The chair was wide by today’s standards, and the motion opened me up fully to the audience, my legs spread just as wide as they could go. I closed my eyes so as not to see. I felt the strain in my inner thigh muscles as my body worked to accept this new challenge. My mind worked at accepting my new vulnerability.

“Evelyn.”

I realized that I was bound naked, wrists and ankles, in an antique vanity chair, the coolness of the room hardening my nipples, and my cunt wide open to the inspection of anyone who cared to look. I could feel the pearls sliding around in my wetness. I wondered what the audience thought. If someone, anyone, had ever told me this would happen to me someday, I wouldn’t have believed them.

“Evelyn. Look at me.”

I opened my eyes, finally.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. Mr. Sterling’s voice had that purring uplift to it that I sometimes heard, as if this now were his life’s work, the greatest thing he had ever accomplished. He sounded very pleased with himself. And then he frowned. “Almost perfect.”

He touched up my makeup—he seemed never completely satisfied with that—then arranged my hair so it fell in loops across my shoulders but didn’t deliberately obscure the view of my nipples from anyone. He was less happy with my nipples. They’d been hard and dark in the beginning, like stiff little pebbles, but my body was growing accustomed to the coolness of the room. “In centuries past, French courtesans would rouge their nipples with blush in order to appease their masters,” he told me. “It made them look darker and more fully aroused.”

I had been researching the history of courtesans for two weeks. I had read all about the things they’d done to make themselves more beautiful.

“You knew that already,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Intelligent and beautiful,” he said, his voice soft, rumbling and intimate as he ran a hand down the front of my body. He dropped to his knees before me, thankfully obscuring the view of the audience for the moment. He was able to fit his entire body between my spread legs. He picked up the rouge pot, dipped his finger in it, and considered my nipples. Then he seemed to have a much better idea. He leaned between my legs, cupped the side of my body to keep me steady, and attached himself to me. Like before, the suction of his mouth was unbelievably ruthless on my tender, oversensitive tips. In mere seconds, my back was arching and I was bucking wildly
against my bo
nds and groaning deliriously as shocks of pleasure and near-pain flashed through my body. A little orgasm fluttered through my belly, and the warmth and power of it loosened a bit more of the pearls.

Mr. Sterling touched me at my core while his mouth sucked and sucked at my other nipple. “That’s become a problem, yes?” he asked me when he’d finally released me. His lips trailed a wet, snail’s trail of saliva across my chest and down over my belly as he bent to the most suffering and intimate part of me. His mouth found me and he used his teeth and tongue to tease the pearls loose. I cried out at the sensation as he used his teeth to withdrew them slowly. They came and came. I was so wet, there was no pain at all.

The chair was wet, his mouth, the pearls.

He dangled the pearls over my face and had me suck the wetness off each little saltwater sphere. He slid the tiny hard balls across my lips. I tasted myself, but I also tasted him. He was still inside me, that bit of him. I sucked some of the pearls into my mouth and he kissed me fiercely, the pearls between us, tangled over our tongues. A murmur of approval passed like a ripple over our audience. They were pleased with Mr. Sterling’s creativity.

He draped the now wet little pearls around my neck and then returned to my sore little cunny, pressing his thumbs into my folds to separate them just a little more. He licked me there, then ate me out. I rocked against his mouth, but in this position, my actions were limited to just thrusting and groaning. He teased my engorged clit with his tongue and teeth. He shoved his tongue in and out of me, the roughness of his cheek and five o’clock shadow rasping against the sensitive insides of my thighs and making my inner muscles clench. His tongue went deeper than ever before, making me shudder and nearly sob in response. He stopped briefly to remove his glasses. I had never seen him without his wire frames. He looked so different! But before I could decide if I liked him this way or not, he pressed his face tight against me again, spreading me apart even further, until my legs screamed from the pressure of his invasion,  and sucked against me, sucked against my opening fiercely, until I felt myself go. I screamed as I came in his mouth.

I sagged back against the vanity chair, so sore from all the attention he had shown me that I didn’t know if I would ever move again. He smeared my wetness across his mouth. He watched me in his predatory way, waiting for me to use the safe word, to stop the play. I took deep, ragged breaths and fought to slow my thudding heartbeat. I thought about it, briefly. I was afraid of how sore I would be tomorrow when all the good chemicals had worn off. But I decided I didn’t want him to stop. I didn’t want this to ever stop.

He pinched my breasts with his thumb and forefinger, and then my clit. I jumped and danced for him. Finally, he approved of my new “coloring”.

“My pretty little dove,” he said, and there was real affection in his voice this time, real warmth. It wasn’t just an affectation, I realized. This was a different voice, softer, more intimate than I was used to. It was the voice you used with your lover at three o’clock in the morning, and I thought, ridiculously,
This is the sound of love.
“You’ve been so patient. You’ve been such a good dove, suffering so much. I have something for you.”

I waited, my heart starting its inevitable gallop once more. I wondered if I could take what he wanted to give me. I wasn’t sure I could take him inside me right at the moment. 

He withdrew a flat, red velvet jewelry case from an inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He opened it like a clamshell to reveal a choker made of pink teardrop diamonds. I have never seen pink diamonds before. I had never seen so many diamonds in one place in my life. I felt my pulse jump as a little flash of terror passed through me. I didn’t want diamonds. I didn’t want silk dresses. I didn’t even want vacations in Paris, I realized. I didn’t want expensive gifts from Mr. Sterling. I wasn’t here for that reason, and the sight of the necklace saddened rather than uplifted me, reminding me of how I had been bought and paid for. I had been paid for with money and bits of silk and rare carbon pulled from the earth, and I understood that, intellectually. I knew that. That was our arrangement. I had accepted that. So why did it hurt so much?

But I smiled, because I knew it made Mr. Sterling happy and proud to lavish gifts on someone, even if that someone was me. I schooled my face to reveal nothing. I was very good at doing that.

“You have no proper jewelry, my dove. You should have jewelry. Diamonds as well as pearls.” Mr. Sterling took great care in fastening the choker around my neck so I wore the pearls and the diamonds together. He took a step back, looking at me like someone might look upon a statue by Michelangelo or a painting by Rembrandt for the first time, a kind of religious fervor in his face and eyes. I thought he must be admiring the diamonds. No one in their right mind would look at me that way. “I want to remember this,” he said. “I want you for my private photo collection, Evelyn.” I wondered if he meant the collection on his wall in his office, or some other collection. Again he waited to see if I would protest, if I would say no, deny him, but when I didn’t, he said, “I’ll only be gone briefly, to fetch Malcolm and his camera.”

After he left the boudoir, I could feel the mood shifting. This was less about entertaining the others now and more about Mr. Sterling’s obsessive pursuit of beauty. The audience began breaking up and moving on to other rooms, which relieved me greatly. After a few moments, only one person remained.

Brian.

I hadn’t noticed him earlier among the other gentlemen. But then, I hadn’t been looking for him, either.

He leaned against the wall of the boudoir, drinking from a much-too-large tumbler of scotch filled all the way to the top. He watched me intently, but his eyes flickered in that way of someone doing a fine job of tying one on. Or maybe that was just some facial tick of his. I could tell he wanted me to look up, to acknowledge him. To be embarrassed. But I wouldn’t. Not him. Not
Brian
…

“It’s like casting pearls before swine,” he finally said, and chuckled at his own poor wit.

My head jerked up. Brian had beautiful eyes and perfect hair and a beautiful Italian tuxedo and a winning smile and a face that might take him to the Presidency one day. But he was ugly. So full of hate. I had to force myself not to strain too hard
against my bo
nds.

“You are such a fucking pig,” Brian said in a lilting, drunken voice. He swaggered toward me, sucking down more scotch in a way that reminded me of how some joggers in Central Park suck down bottles of Avian water after a good morning jog. “You know when you wash garbage, it’s still garbage, right? And when you put diamonds on shit, it’s still shit.”

My heart ticked along a little faster in my throat. I swallowed against it. I worked at ignoring him. I looked toward the door but I didn’t immediately see anyone.