Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (18 page)

“Shh,” Terrance said, stroking my back. “Just relax. Breathe.”

I breathed.

“Hold you cheeks apart.”

I reached back and grabbed my own ass and spread them. I felt another few drops of lubricant. “Careful,” I said.

“See?” he said, as though he felt what I felt, which definitely wasn’t what he thought I felt.
You
know.

“Is it all in?” I asked.

“That’s my finger,” he said.

“Oh Jesus,” I said and bit the pillow as he pulled out his finger and I felt his penis barge inside me. I moved one hand to him and ringed my fingers around his cock.
That’s all that was in?
I thought.

“No more than that,” I said.

“That’s it,” he said, still stroking my back, my breasts. And then a free hand of his went back to my clit and I, well, frankly, I didn’t care what he did. Which was a good thing, considering that there was hardly a drop of lubricant left by the time, many, many minutes later, Terrance at long last came in a place no man had ever cum before. Well, in me, anyway.

We woke again sometime in the middle of the night, both of us still half-damp from our post-coital evening showers, and I felt Terrance reach for another condom, my mind incredulous. And yet he entered me as we spooned (vaginally, thank god), and I remember mostly the hot blasts of his breath against my back, and the thought that I hoped I had another set of clean sheets in the linen closet. I was dry for as long as it took to think that thought, then ready again. And finally, in the morning, yet another condom, used as we again showered, my hands on the cold and hot faucets for balance, trying to stop the water from changing temperature, seeing my reflection in the finish of the faucets, the sounds we were making echoing off the tiles. It was too much, too much for me and I got down on my knees and finished him off, this time the full hundred-percent swallow coming from my own ability. And for that he fucking carried me out of the bathroom, dripping, dropped me on the bed, and went down on me like old times, even though it took me a full hour to come, he never wavered. He wouldn’t let me push him off. And when I came it was
my
turn to grab his head and not let go until the very last pulse of my orgasm. I was spent. Had I a white flag, I’d have waved it.

After he left in the late morning, I wrapped an icepack in a towel and put it between my legs and slept until late afternoon. I couldn’t walk properly again until the next day.

I loved it.

Every problem I had been brooding over seemed inconsequential and ridiculous and I wanted to send Olivia chocolates and Drake whatever it was he wanted, and to extend this moment until it was endless. It didn’t matter where Terrance studied—I’d find a way to follow him, I told myself.

Olivia spoiled that fantasy.

“And up the ass, right?” she said, over the phone.

“He told you
that?
” I said.

“No.
I
told
him,
” she said. “Once down the throat, once in the puss, and one in the tushy.”

I felt sick. My suspicions had been right. Drake, Terrance, now myself—all playthings to Olivia. How could it all have felt so warm, so passionate, when everything Terrance had done had been on Olivia’s orders. In retrospect, it now almost felt like it’d been Olivia there behind me, her giant strap-on dildo butt-fucking me. All night and morning I’d been flooded with pleasure (and some pain) while Terrance’s head had housed bullet points to be crossed out one by one.
One in the tushy
, my god.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “It was more than just those times.

“
Oh?
”

I switched the phone to the other ear. In front of me on the computer were half a dozen open e-mails, all addressed to my contacts to whom I was trying not to sound desperate as I fished for work. I’d been relishing the affair, but I’d also been pragmatic about the need to start getting back on my own two feet, an instinct I now felt, sadly, confirmed.

There was a long pause on the other end of the connection. “Terrance is going to need some reprimanding,” Olivia said.

“Leave him alone,” I said.

“Ah, Eloise. That’s so sweet. But he came to me first. Turned on by his aunt, poor fuck.”

“Oh god,” I said. “You’re his
aunt
?”

The phone laughed. “No, Eli. I
played
his aunt. But I’m too old for that role now, at least the aunt he remembers.”

Me? His surrogate fantasy aunt?
Could I believe her? Was this another manipulation?

“Leave him alone,” I repeated.

“No, no. It’s done. He needs to be punished. I’m texting him right now. He doesn’t touch you, doesn’t see you for a week. You can’t let them get away with such indiscretions or they’ll be deep-throating you seven days a week, ass-fucking you eight.”

“I didn’t say…
that
. Deep…”

“I know,” Olivia said. “Believe me. He’s a big one, isn’t he?”

“Olivia,” I said, and I couldn’t believe I was saying this. “Please. Just ignore him. Just…
give him to me.
” I said it before I meant it, and then I realized I meant it.

“Oh? Listen to you. Listen to Auntie Eloise. What have you got to trade?”

I had nothing. Except. “I won’t do Drake on Wednesday,” I said.

There was a laugh at the other end. “I like you Eloise. I really do. I see myself in you. Less…well, I see myself.”

“Un-see it then.”

“You think you can handle Terrance full-time? Well, if you can’t handle a Wednesday afternoon with Drake…”

I wasn’t falling for her psychology. “Come Wednesday I won’t be here,” I said.

“Terrance won’t be by for two weeks then,” she said, and hung up.

It wasn’t a minute before she called back.

“Eloise,” Olivia said. “I accidentally had an order of baby outfits shipped to our house instead of my daughters. Check with Drake. He’ll never get around to having them shipped to me here unless you remind him.”

“Olivia.”

“Thanks,” she said, and was gone again, and it was like the first conversation hadn’t happened—there was no trace of it in her voice.

I turned off my phone completely. It was the first Sunday of Spring Break and I felt broken. I did two things: I got online and bought a plane ticket. Then I called a taxi to the bus terminal.

And not long after I was just another single woman on a shuttle, airport bound. Just another woman staring out the window at the endless fields of spring’s palette: pale green, new green, naïve green. No one around me suspected I’d just lost a lover who had a thing for older women who reminded him of his aunt. I was blank to them, and I felt blank to myself, too. Who was I? I needed to examine myself if no one else would give me an answer. I needed to get away long enough to think, to reorder my life, to step out from the situation as I’d tempted myself to do again and again. I was a woman who could say, under her breath,
this isn’t me, this isn’t me
, and yet be unsure of who I was.

“Mr. Irldale,” I said when he opened the gate.

My backpack was at my feet. I wore sandals, jeans, and a baby-blue T-shirt. I was relieved to see him. The For Sale sign in the strip of grass outside the property had made me feel like my whole trip out to Los Angeles had been a mistake. If he’d moved already, I’d be lost. The whole city would be an unending, unnavigable morass without him here.

He was dressed the same, jeans, also a baby-blue T-shirt.

“We match,” I said.

He blinked and then his guard fell. “Ms. Spanks?” he said. “So sorry, I didn’t… Did we have a… are you…”

“I just thought I’d swing by,” I said, trying for as much casualness as I could impart with a large backpack at my feet. I wished I’d removed the airline luggage tag. “Truth is, I needed to talk to someone,” I said. “I heard about you and your wife and thought, well, maybe he wants to talk too.”

He looked at me a moment longer, then stooped forward and picked up my backpack. “C’mon inside,” he said, and I followed him through the gate, across the yard, and into the house, then without stopping, out onto the deck where I was once again greeted by that view that said, SUCCESS, in capital letters made of rarified Hollywood Hills air.

He gestured to a chair. “Something to drink?”

“Please,” I said and watched him leave for a moment before the vista snapped back into my view again. I thought I could see the ocean in the distance, a flat slate-gray endlessness with the tease of an island in the middle of it.

“Is that the ocean?” I asked.

“No,” Mr. Irldale said. “It’s out there, but you can’t see it today.”

What kind of woman would give up all this—the view, the house, the weather, the money, the man—for another; for potential instead of the actual, for dreams instead of what was here? I remembered Mr. Irldale’s wife touching his arm and laughing. If that wasn’t something real and everlasting, what was?

Mr. Irldale served up iced tea with a sprig of mint. Sweet.

“I use honey instead of sugar,” he said.

“Honey,” I said, like a new word on new lips.

Mr. Irldale put on some Paul McCartney records I’d never heard before. Something old. 1970s-era from the sound of it.

“I’m listening to a lot of music lately,” Mr. Irldale said. “I always thought: I should really listen to a lot more music. Finally doing it. Like everything put out by the Beatles after they went their separate ways. I finished Lennon and Harrison, now it’s McCartney. Not sure if I’m going to tackle Ringo.”

“Your kids?” I asked.

“With their mother and… Africa. Kenya. For a month.”

“I’ve never been to Africa,” I said.

“Who has? All that land and none of us have seen it.”

Mr. Irldale adjusted his chair and reclined almost flat. Beside him, a fist-sized rock sat upon on a tall stack of newspapers that were yellowing at the bottom and edges, like a slow burn he could put his hand into at any time. The sun cooked us and I let it, rather than ask for sunscreen.

We talked about Africa and tea. We talked about artificial sweeteners and watering restrictions. We talked about nothing and nothing.

“Join me for dinner?” he asked after a half hour of just words.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d like that.”

“I’ve got some chicken marinating in the fridge.”

“You don’t have plans?”

“Just me and McCartney.”

I moved to the edge of the deck, there in the slim shade cast by the treehouse tree, my feet dangling over the edge. D. H. Irldale stood behind me grilling the chicken. There was an ice-cream truck somewhere playing a belated or overly early Christmas tune, unmoored from time, forever in the world of ice and cheer.

“Onions?” Irldale asked, as he threw some vegetables on the grill to sizzle beside the chicken.

“Yes, please.”

D. H. Irldale was my anti-Terrance. Older, his own man, if newly single. I didn’t find him attractive, not sexually attractive. He was good-looking enough. I felt, instead
relaxed
around him and
that
was a sensation I realized had been lacking in my life. Over dinner we talked about music and TV, and through the B-side of another McCartney album we took in the sunset. We talked about our kids, but that just seemed to put some kind of distance between us, so I went for something we truly shared: the book.

“Such a stupid idea,” he said. “And that title.”

“It was good, though. The book, not the title.”

“Nonsense. I mean—no knock on your talents—but the presumption that people should
pay
to read about your life. I don’t know what I was thinking. I should have taken a step back and looked at the whole thing more objectively.”

“It was paying my bills,” I said.

“Go ahead and finish it however you want. With me wallowing in self-pity and chicken grease,” he said, his greasy fingers splayed out for me to view.

“Well,” I said. “No one’s paying me to finish it.”

“There you have it. Can’t pay them to write it, can’t pay them to read it.”

“This isn’t the Irldale I know,” I said. His defeated tone unnerved me. I’d worked so long with the material of his book that I couldn’t bear to hear him like this. “You hit them out of the park. You made it big. You got the…” I wanted to say the attractive wife, but instead said, “…house in the hills.”

“Gee coach, thanks for the pep talk,” he said, in an uncharacteristically dark—and I know this’ll be difficult to imagine—falsetto.

I held up my fork. “Listen,” I said. “Women come clear across the country to eat your chicken.”

He raised an eyebrow and we both had a chuckle, though I wasn’t sure what about. I didn’t want to ruin the evening with double entendres.

“What are you in town for, anyway?” he asked.

I pointed to my chewing mouth. He was still waiting, though.

“To talk to you,” I said, finally.

“Really?” He stuck out his lower lip thoughtfully, as though this meant something. Something I hoped wasn’t:
She’s desperate, a little crazy, time to show her the door.

The music ended and we sat there with the burnt husks of the vegetables and let the dark reach up out of the ground, seeping around the city’s lit grid like tar. Above us hung Venus and Mars and Jupiter. When I was a child, these were it—these and the other planets of our solar system. Now I was reading that there were hundreds of planets in the cosmos. Thousands. Millions or more. I U-turned my thoughts back to the small: there were West Coast insects here, rasping and ticking in dialects I had never heard. Somewhere deep within their bodies, past the atomic level, wiggling in the infinity of the small, lay the proposed Higgs boson, a particle that gave mass to everything. It was in everything, even the most inconsequential of matter and matters.

And here I was, in this quivering space between the endlessly large and the endlessly small. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the type of person who could be consoled by feeling insignificant or, conversely, by basking in the glories of creation. I was still in my funk of being in the intermediary space that science doesn’t touch much. Put the scientists to work on that one.