Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (13 page)

“Did you, did you just come?” I asked.

He nodded quickly.

“Jesus, Sam. I wasn’t even touching you,” I said, seeing the condom’s tip now full with his ejaculate. “You
do
like going down on me after all,” I said, actually moved. I untied his legs, then his arms, and he climbed off and limped to the bathroom as I lay there reconsidering everything I’d thought about my ex-husband. Perhaps he, like Drake, just needed to have his stress hormones pushed a little farther than I’d ever pushed them before. Much farther.

When he emerged from the bathroom, face washed, condom gone, he was still hard. “Jesus, Sam,” I said.

He came over to where I lay on the dry foot of the bed and lay beside me, close, like we were lovers again.

“That was, that was intense,” he said. I ran my fingers over his bare hard penis just to feel it. “No one’s ever done it for me like you,” he said. He kissed me.

“Whoa there,” I said, feeling the kiss on my intervening palm.

“I think I made a huge mistake leaving you,” he said.

“Think?”

“I did.”

“You did.”

He ran a hand down my thigh. I derailed it.

“Would you consider taking me back?”

I snorted. The thought had never, not for a million years, crossed my mind.

He chewed his lip. “I’d let you, you know. Say once a week.”

“Once a week what?”

“You know. This. Whatever this is. Tie me up, ride me.”

I thought immediately of Terrance. The last thing I needed were two Terrances.

I slapped him on his ass. “C’mon Sam. Time to send you home.”

“No really,” he said, adamantly. I was alarmed. He was practically begging.

And I saw then that this wasn’t about me. This wasn’t about me at all or the moment we’d just had there, my pleasure, his pleasure. It was still about him: jobless, probably broke, needing a place to go and lick his wounds long enough to strike out on his own again.

“Go move in with your parents,” I said. “At least they probably still love you. Have to.”

“Please Olivia.”

“Get dressed Sam,” I said. “I got work to do.”

“Olivia.”

“No Sam. Now leave.” I felt nothing for him.

Remember this: when your ex wants to come over to talk, it’s best to do it over the phone. Because a week after Sam visited I received papers from an attorney. I was being threatened by Sam for kidnapping, forced imprisonment, rape, endangerment, and a slew of other crimes that made my hands shake just holding that letter: shake from anger, first, then from fear. Deep, deep fear. I could lose more than my independence. More than the paltry alimony and child support that were late. I could lose my son. And maybe, maybe I already had.
She deserves to,
you may be thinking, but keep in mind I’m showing you here the brief sexual proclivities of a suburban mother. You’re not seeing the many,
many
hours that a good mother puts in. The time helping with homework, the swim meets, the field-trip volunteering, the rest of the facets that made up my life. Consider those before passing judgment.

I was good. Too good. Sam moved into my apartment the next week and slept on the couch. The alimony and child support payments didn’t resume, but I wasn’t expecting them to. Sam needed $1800 for a website for his new coaching services. He needed new clothes. All of this I paid for. My savings sank like there was a whole at the bottom of the account. Our son was more confused than ever. I was a wreck. Sam grew cocky and ominously relaxed and I wanted nothing more than to get him out of my life. To fashion from this blackmail something
I
could use: a shiv that would stop him from messing with me.

This, all of this, every word of it, I told Olivia in her sunroom, beginning with that encounter when Sam had come over.

At first she laughed. “It was estrogen. Expired, too,” she said, talking about the pill I’d given Sam.

“But his, you know, he lasted so long.”

Olivia tapped her forehead. “What goes on down there starts up here,” she said.

Then I told her the rest, why Sam was staying with me. His blackmail.

Olivia held her little porcelain tea cup the entire time I told my story. She didn’t say anything for awhile. The Drake’s had recently installed heated floors and a humidifier in the sunroom and the room felt tropical and the polar opposite of the chill outside. It felt too hot. Unnatural.

“This isn’t good,” Olivia said, finally.

This time it was me on the couch–a proper divan. “I know.”

“What does your hus–your ex-husband do?”

“He’s always been a manager of sorts. So, people stuff. Accounts, business.”

“Hmm.” That was the extent of her help.
Hmm.

I left feeling overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed. The next day I could barely work. Blackmail, if you’ve never had it done to you, makes you wish you’d never been born. It’s inescapable and incalculably stressful. The worst. And then came the next day.

“Got an interview,” Sam said.

“Yeah?” I said cautiously.

“Your landlady. Turns out her husband runs a big firm, has a job opening.”

“What kind?”

“Financial shit. Investment-kinda company. I don’t know.”

“I mean what kind of position?” I said.

“H.R. I mean, it’s more than an interview. They said they’re extremely interested. Only thing is, it’s not here. Position is in Florida.”

“Florida?”

“I know. So if I get it, I, you know, I wouldn’t be around much for the kid. I mean, I’d visit, or he could come down, or whatever.”

“Why don’t you see if you get the job first,” I said, killing any hope that I’d otherwise naturally cling to, just so I wouldn’t be disappointed.

That, it turned out was unnecessary. Olivia gave him a ride to the interview, but she came back alone. And when Sam came back he was walking. Funny.

“And?” I asked. “How’d it go?”

He walked silently through the living room and gathered his things into his bags, then headed down the stairs.

“Sam?”

He put the bags in his car, then came back up, not even looking me in the eye.

“Sam?” I wasn’t enjoying this silent treatment.

He picked up a few more things from around my apartment until there was nothing there that was his. He put those in the car, too.

“Sam!”

I noticed he was limping. He sat in his car and started the engine and I stood there perplexed and woozy, like there’d been a chain on me, pulling and pulling and now suddenly, it’d snapped away and I didn’t yet have my balance, didn’t know why I was free. The car spun at the gravel, and then headed out into the dusk and when I looked away from the brake lights I saw the silhouette of Olivia standing in the sunroom, looking at the car as well. She turned toward me, held up a hand and waved, then drew a curtain and her shadow grew fainter and fainter and I knew that I owed her. Again.

Until I’d seen Olivia dressed in her catsuit that one Wednesday afternoon, I’d never seen anyone actually wear such a getup. That is, until about a week after Sam left for good. There I was, standing in front of my hallway mirror in an outfit Olivia had brought in a large box done up with a purple ribbon. Olivia still held the ribbon in her fingers, drawing the loops taut with her thumbs.

“Almost perfect,” she said, eyeing me. “Maybe a little tight around the waist?”

I stood sideways and pulled at the pleather. And then I realized: it was leather. She’d gone all out for me. Still, I felt odd accepting the gift. Would I say no? No. But the generosity (and choice of article) was unusual.

“It’ll stretch,” Olivia said.

She came toward me and pinched the catsuit and pulled up at the straps over my shoulders. I felt her fingers draw back my hair and hold it tightly behind my head in a bun.

“This is what you were measuring me for,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, eyes sparkling. “What do you think?”

“It’s really not me,” I said, though inwardly I was giddy. I looked…well…powerful and in charge. A little pudgy in a few places, but definitely not someone to mess with. And you know what? I was fine with strength rather than extraordinary attractiveness, not that I ever had anything but aspirations for the latter. “I mean, maybe it’s me,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Of course it’s you. First time I saw you I thought: this is what she needs. Some assertion. And then I heard all those stories.” She pulled a little hard on my hair, then let go.

“Really? Wait, what stories?”

Olivia walked over to the box on the dining room table and pulled out a short whip from beneath the tissue paper. “Catch.”

Again, a little shiver went through me as I felt the handle in my hand. I mean it, too—that shiver. It’s not a throwaway false description. It was nearly electric. I was like a bad, bad mid-life-crisis princess. A smile cracked my face, maybe. I don’t recall. I just remember this vague warmth and okay-ness with the outfit. Scratch that. It was far more than okay with it.

“What stories?” I said, snapping out of my own head space.

“Oh, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. I slung the whip against the wall.

Olivia smiled. “Exactly.”

“Men are going to flip,” I said, adding, “hypothetical men.”

“That’s what I mean to talk to you about,” Olivia said, holding out her hand for the whip. She placed it back in the box. “You can change now.”

I put my hands over the catsuit and crossed my thigh-high boots.

“Don’t worry. It’s yours to keep,” Olivia said.

“I’ll just, I’ll just wear it a bit longer,” I said, the mirror still a mesmerizer.

“Isn’t your son coming home soon?”

“Shit!” I said, stepping first to the kitchen to peek at the time on the microwave before I bolted for the bathroom.

Olivia followed and stood behind the closed door.

“So I’m going to be away for awhile,” Olivia said. “My daughter’s on bed rest now.”

“Everything okay?” I said, unlacing the boots and pausing for her reply.

“Oh, I think so. It happened with me when I was carrying her. It’s just boring as hell being in bed all day.”

One boot off. I worked on the other. The room filled with the odor of leather: strong, new, black.

“I’m going to help out, get things ready, play mother nurse until she’s ready to deliver–a caesarian, probably–and then see how things play out, see if they want me there in the beginning. I know I can be intrusive.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. Her intrusiveness was undeniable of course, but without Olivia I wouldn’t have the apartment rent-free while I wrote. I wouldn’t have Terrance and his pleasuring. I
would
have an ex at my heels. I would certainly not be squeezing out of the sexiest, rawest outfit I’d ever worn.

The catsuit and boots sat on the floor and there I stood, more naked than it seemed I’d ever been before. I wanted to get dressed again in the leather outfit. Immediately. Mistress Eloise–I admit I liked the sound of that.

The front door slammed shut.

“Mom?”

“In a minute,” I shouted.

“I’ll tell you about the favor later,” Olivia said.

“Wait!” I hastily threw on the T-shirt and jeans still there on the floor of the bathroom. I stuffed the catsuit and boots under the sink, behind my pads, the one place in the apartment I was sure a son wouldn’t look.

I opened the door and found Olivia and my son looking at something cupped in my son’s hands.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Bird. Stunned,” my son said. “Found him on the driveway.”

“Is she dead?” I asked.

My son shook his head. What was it about boys that made them fearless to get their hands right into nature, stunned or living? Insects, lizards, bugs, dirt, muck of the muckiest order. They were fearless with the things that really exist in a way that I was not.

“It’s dead,” I said, looking. It was some kind of sparrow-looking bird with a few spots of yellow. Its feet were curled up. It looked like a taxidermic bird, like one in the collection I’d seen in the capital, with my son, years ago.

Olivia touched its head with a finger and stroked it. “She’s beautiful,” she said to my son’s nodding affirmation.

“I’m going to give it some water,” my son said. A child of positivity and possibility, despite the bullying, despite the huge maw of adulthood and its accompanying shit that would descend on him far sooner than I wanted. He took the bird into the kitchen.

“About the favor,” I said.

“Not here. Not now,” Olivia said, nodding to the kitchen.

“What?” I said.

“Young ears.”

Now she had me intrigued. Again. “When?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow. Take me to the airport? We can talk on the way.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

I heard my son yell, and then Olivia joined in as this fluttering, back-from-the-dead bird of yellow and dark gray blurred through the room and into the bedroom, then back out again, crashing into the vertical blinds, around and around our heads, the sound of its feathers in flight a sound as delicate a thing as I’d ever heard.

“The door!” my son shouted. “Hold it open!”

A smart boy, my son had the kitchen broom in his hands and took aim at the bird, first this way, then the other, until the bird finally headed out through the door. We all hurried onto the landing and watched it fly fast and far toward the house again. I held my breath for a heartbeat or two, just knowing it’d smash into the glass again, but it veered up and joined a group of its own, as though nothing had happened, as though they’d been waiting all this time for her to emerge. Which, maybe, they had been.

I’d completely forgotten about the bird by the next day, as I drove Olivia’s Cadillac on the interstate toward the airport. That is, until the car hit a bird. It bounced off the windshield too quickly to be identified, just a black blur and the brief ghost of the dust of its feathers. I felt as though the universe hadn’t appreciated our resuscitation yesterday and had made me claim another in recompense.

We had a nearly two-hour drive ahead of us and for the first hour Olivia talked only about her daughter and son-in-law and the names they were considering for the child. They didn’t want to know the sex of the child, which Olivia respected in public, but told me was foolish. “What color to paint and paper the walls? I mean, use science for something.” It wasn’t until we were out of the morning haze and the city was beginning to show itself in the distance that she came back to the topic of the favor.