Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (14 page)

“Remember how I thought you looked like a natural in that outfit?” she asked.

I nodded and checked the gas gauge. Over half a tank.

“I thought that when you came around looking at the apartment. Already then.”

“You said that,” I answered, if a little too impatiently.

My leg was getting stiff. I wondered how to use the cruise control. I wanted to turn the radio up high and not listen to Olivia talk about me in a
sexual
way. Call it modesty or embarrassment or plain uncomfortable.

“I invited you up to the bedroom, you remember, where Drake…”

“That’s not something you forget.”

“Good,” Olivia said, running her right hand across the top of the upholstered door. “Because I need you to do that for me while I’m away.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need you to relieve Drake of his stress.”

“I am
not
going to…”

“No, no,” she said. “That was one end of the spectrum. You need to find your natural ability, your wavelength.”

“You’re asking me to fuck you husband?”

“God no,” Olivia said, and laughed. “Just tie him up, give him some Eloise-treatment. That whip is for using, by the way.”

“Well, I’m glad we cleared
that
up. Sure, no problem,” I said, cavalierly, as though this were a trifle to ask of me.

“I’ve never enjoyed sarcasm,” Olivia said, serious as lead.

We didn’t say anything for about five minutes, at which point I heard a siren, then saw a patrol car behind us with its muted flashes of red and blue in daylight. My speedometer fell from seventy-five until we were stopped, there on the shoulder of the highway. Who knows what it had been when the siren first sounded and the lights first lit.

The patrolman did. “Eighty-one,” he said.

“Go on,” Olivia said to me. She’d told me to be assertive during the patrolman’s walk up. A pep talk of sorts.

“That is entirely my fault,” I said, owning up to the infraction.
Admit freely. Excuse strongly. Be firm,
Olivia had said.

“My neighbor here has a flight she might miss,” I said.

“Hello,” Olivia said.

“Her daughter’s on bed rest. First grandkid. I just didn’t want her to miss her flight.”

“Mmm,” the officer said, scribbling in his little notebook.

I looked up at him. Didn’t blink.

“This is a dangerous section of highway,” he said. “It’s easy to get distracted.”

“Yes,” I said. “I, uh, I succumbed.”

He looked away from me and far off down the road. A double-wide trailer passed us, yellow outstretched flags waving like a frozen semaphore at the sides of the truck’s bed, followed by a petite pickup truck with more flags, both easily going eighty.

“I’m going to give you a warning,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Don’t let me catch you going over the limit.”

“I’m coming right back after I drop her off,” I said. “Watch me. I’ll be going sixty-five. Not a mile over.”

“It’s sixty.”

“Sixty,” I said. “Not a mile over.”

A minute later I pulled off the shoulder and back into traffic, and in another minute we were passing the double-wide.

“Well now,” Olivia said. “See? I knew you were the one.”

“The one.”

“To not fuck my husband.”

We had a laugh, though I wasn’t sure exactly what about.

“So. Wednesdays,” she said.

“You’re serious.”

“Absolutely. He’ll go to pieces without his relief.”

I let up on the gas pedal a tad. I knew Olivia was a sentence away from insinuating that I owed her. Owed her for all of it: the apartment, my freedom, my pleasure, a percentage of my life that hadn’t even been
me
just a couple seasons before. And it was true: I
did
owe her. What was the harm?

“Okay,” I said.

“Good.” She reached between her feet, snapped open her bag, and pulled out a manilla envelope. She placed it on the dash.

“What are those? Instructions?”

“Exactly,” she said, showing me the front where she’d handwritten,
Instructions for Eloise.

I remember feeling lightheaded. Olivia briefly grabbed the wheel. She smiled at me, sweetly, nearly grand-motherly, but behind that was something that filled me with trepidation.
She
was the one with all the confidence.

“Got it?” she said, releasing the wheel.

I nodded, keeping my eyes off the envelope to prevent myself from driving us off the highway. “What’s it say?”

“Don’t read it while you drive, promise me. Wait till you get back.”

“I promise,” I said.

I partly complied. Halfway back, at a rest stop populated by a half-dozen truckers, half as many RVs, and a few battered cars, I sat in the Cadillac and sucked my finger on the paper cut from opening the envelope. It was one page, unfolded, and in one corner of the envelope rested Olivia's necklace. At its end: a key.

Eloise,

Sincere thanks for taking care of my Drake while I’m away. Remember: Wednesdays. No more. No less. I’ll call you on Thursdays to hear how it goes. Be firm with him. The greater the stress, the greater his relief. He knows to obey you. Wear the outfit. But if you’re daring (and I think you are) try the second outfit I had made for you. You’ll find it hanging in the upstairs closet.

Tomorrow is Wednesday. Remember.

Yours,
O. Drake

When I looked up, a patrol car was beside me in the parking lot a few empty spaces away. I raised my hand and waved. I got a wave back. I took the necklace, undid the clasp and fastened it behind my neck. I tucked the cold key under my sweater and felt guilty, dark, arrest-able, and alive—and then the patrolman climbed into the Cadillac and we made out for a half hour before he cuffed me.

Okay, okay, that part didn’t happen, but I remember at the time wishing it would. As much as that key around my neck thrilled me, the other part of me wanted the patrolman to stop me from becoming the person I was becoming, this new Eloise. Not because I didn’t want to spend my Wednesdays being cruel to my landlord, but because, worst of all, I began to think I did.

Later, when I pulled the Cadillac up to the house, Gabriel’s truck was there. I could hear music playing from a boom box by the pool. I wanted to head straight up to the Drake’s upstairs bedroom, open the closet door, and find out what
exactly
Olivia had ordered for me from the costume department. But the doors were locked and I’d long since given back the keys from my house-sitting month. I should have had copies made.

I climbed the stairs to my apartment feeling incredibly important. Like being entrusted with someone’s Ferrari, or their boat. And with that trust came a sense of incredible responsibility to not fail. Still, at the time, I thought Olivia was damn presumptuous to unequivocally believe that I’d go through with this twisted sexual release therapy she and her husband did—me, a surrogate Olivia, a cactus and balm to Drake’s frustrations. On the other hand, wow, did it ever show confidence in their marriage—to let another woman in like this to something so private and, I thought then, unusual. She claimed to have seen that I could do the job, could play the role, and in a way, I
wanted
to believe her: that I held that degree of confidence, that surety of control, those guts.

But I feared I didn’t. And even with twenty-four hours to go until Wednesday afternoon, I was torn between feeling obliged to Olivia and Drake—but Olivia especially—and of wanting to keep my nose the heck away from other people’s sexual proclivities. I mean, could such a thing ever end well? Did Drake even
know
that his wife had asked me?

I had the option of doing nothing, of course. Just not say or do a thing. When Olivia called me up on Thursday I could explain that on further introspection I’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t comfortable with the idea; that I was flattered by her trust and thankful, in a certain way, for the opportunity, but that I would be such a poor substitute for her talents. Or just lie and pretend I had a cold. Strep, say. But if I didn’t go through with it—putting Drake’s pleasure (?) out of the equation for a moment—what would
I
be missing? My head said no, but my heart said
now!

With all this going through me, it was no wonder I was little help to my son that evening. We sat at the dining room table trying to figure out some double-variable algebra. So many problems to figure out, so much work that needed to be shown, so many possible answers, not the mere x=5 or x=3, but x=5 and -5 and y=what again? Even with the answers to the odd-numbered problems printed in the back of the book, I know I sent my son to bed just as confused as when he started his homework. I remembered all too well the feeling he had, of math being seemingly endless and impenetrable, always carrying another trick up its sleeve, a blunt instrument with which to strike you and make you feel completely ill-equipped to fathom its mysteries. Perhaps the frustrations of math were the best exposure to the frustrations of life you could dream up. From my vantage, I appreciated the truth of mathematics: not that life can be figured out, but that it can’t. You can try, you can try until midnight night after night, you can bring your crib sheet along, memorize its equations, but you’ll fail in the end. It’s just too big, too powerful, too endless. Still, you can try.

In the darkness of my bedroom, listening to the recording of ocean waves meant to soothe me, I, too, didn’t know what possible answers lay ahead for me. Not even the odd ones. Was I the
x
or the
y
? Was it possible for the right answer and the wrong-feeling answer to both be valid? I slept fitfully all night and ended up getting up at one a.m. when sleep hadn’t yet overtaken me. I shut off the beach surf recording and brought my laptop to bed and worked on my one remaining paying project at this point: Mr. Irldale’s book, which the publisher now had a title for, an atrocious one:
Irldale: Calling The Shots
. The title made Mr. Irldale sound arrogant and loud, whereas I’d found him to be gentle and compassionate. Part of me, the part that wanted to never see that upstairs bedroom again, nor the Drakes, wanted to flee to California and just sit on Mr. Irldale’s deck and breathe in the muggy hot air of Southern California and fall asleep again in Mr. Irldale’s presence, simple, honest, chaste, at peace.

Sam’s legal filing against me—threatening me on grounds of kidnapping, sexual torture, etc.—hung over my head as I dressed for my Wednesday appointment with Mr. Drake. (Yes, curiosity got me.) Sam had rescinded the letter when he’d moved back in, but had been silent since leaving. And I don’t trust disappearing acts.

For my own safety, I popped fresh batteries into my voice recorder and placed the unit in the only spot that could hold it, the left cup of the leather catsuit, the smaller boob. And if you must know, her name is Sally.

It was only noon—Drake wouldn’t be coming back from the club for another two hours—but I’d been wearing (and undressing from) the catsuit since my son’s feet left the end of the driveway’s gravel on his way to school. I didn’t know how my son would react if he knew what I was wearing, let alone what I was more than contemplating. A mixture of surprise, stupefaction, and probably horror and disgust. I suppose that if all our acts were those we wouldn’t be ashamed to do in the presence of our parents or our children, we’d all be upright and good. But there’s pleasure in misbehavior, and incomparable thrills in concealment.

I modeled for myself in the mirror. I looked kick-ass awesome. I also enjoyed how the younger me, the college me, the doing-extra-reading-in-women’s-studies-class me, could never have contemplated the possibility of
this
Eloise emerging. And yet, replicated cell after replicated cell, my kinked-up DNA was getting kinkier.
That
Eloise would recoil in horror. Probably stay up and read until the library closed. Go back to an apartment alone. Eat a candy bar. Rub herself silly on that comb with the slick handle. I
hated
that Eloise.

With some difficulty, I lifted one foot up onto the edge of the counter to lace the boot, then did the other. More than anything, I enjoyed the boots. The heels weren’t extraordinarily high, but they came to something close to a point, a flat disc of metal shaped like a heart and about half the size of a dime. Details. The laces continued up and up, the close-fitting leather encircling my shins and knees to end at my upper thighs. The catsuit was a one piece, and now that I’d let most of the silver buckles out a notch, felt much more comfortable. I looked perhaps less threatening, but I’m the kind of person who’d rather have a functioning respiratory system than look drop-dead dead.

I pinned back my hair—it was wavy, past shoulder length and normally dark brown, the kind of style that means nothing other than that it’d been too long since my last visit to my hairdresser. I leaned forward as I applied some lipstick and wished, a bit, that the catsuit didn’t hug me so tightly and travel so high up the chest. There wasn’t anything to see but the faintest shadow of a bust down in there, even with the straps out a notch. A zipper there would have been nice. Still, standing back, I was a sight to behold. I felt less like I was observing my reflection as that I was observing a mime, someone who wasn’t me but could act like me, could amplify my innermost wants and bring them to life.

“Damn,” I said aloud. The mime voiced the words, but the sound was only from my mouth. The mime remained silent. I stood there, holding my hand mirror, turning slowly, trying to get a sense of the whole picture, front and back.

It was still too early, so I went back to editing Mr. Irldale’s book, this time in costume, until I heard Drake pull up the drive sometime later. By then I was already in two gin and lime sodas to fortify my resolve (by weakening my reasoning). I held the whip and stared at myself in the mirror. “Hey cocksucker,” I said to the mirror. “Get ready to be owned.” Then I threw my robe over the entire getup, the mauve terrycloth robe I’d always hated, the one Sam had bought me for Christmas one year. I should have replaced it, but robes always feel like something you don’t replace until they are worn—at least not in my economic strata. Like dish-ware, spoons, husbands. You keep them until they break or you lose them.