Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (27 page)

“Ohhhhhh,” Eli said, with a sucks-for-you tone of disappointment in her voice. The boxes were still falling off the counter and bouncing with little instrumental rustles onto the carpet, a hundred egg shakers shaping the sound of disappointment. “So close!” Eli said. “Just so you know: I’ve made one two levels higher.”

“Mom!” my son complained.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Now I have to start over,” he said.

“I’m outta here,” Eli said, plucking the box of Lucky Charms down from my son’s hand. She tore into the box and headed for the elevator. I thought of her parents, Petunia’s little key even now likely being inserted into that tiny padlock. What must it feel like to be free? How often did Petunia let him out? Once a week? And how did he keep things clean down there? So many questions, so many
inappropriate
questions to be passing across my mind as I stared at their daughter.

“Wait,” I said, and ran to where she stood by the elevator. I had to keep her here so she wouldn’t burst in on her parents. Maybe she knew all of it, maybe she knew nothing. Still, it wasn’t right. “Your hair is so pretty,” I managed. “What should I do with mine?”

She shrugged, negative interest in her face, but she didn’t reach for the elevator button.

“Okay,” she said, as though with reluctance, but I could feel a tirade coming. “It it were
me
, here’s what I would do…” The young think everything is easily fixed. God love them.

So I stood there and let my hair be lifted by those freckle-free hands and arms, let myself be turned and examined and judged and re-imagined in the eyes of a high school girl, the whole floor hushed gray as though to listen to her every word, even as the view of white homes and buildings disappeared, replaced by the lapping of fog as it tried to find its way to me.
We know you’re in there Eloise Spanks. Come out and play.

For a book that’s likely to be categorized under
romance,
erotica,
or that bastard
literotica
, there hasn’t been a whole lot of sex. So let’s fix that. As I mentioned up front, I have taken the liberty of compressing time where it suits a better order of events, and now—just to be up front with you—we’re going to skip over how I went from unemployed to being Adam and Eve’s fantasy consultant (just
consultant
on tax forms). I’ll save those intervening months for the next volume of my confession. There’s lots to tell, but the strands don’t fit in with what I’ve chosen to reveal in this book.

First, though, know that from my arrival in San Francisco and through those early months, I received daily emails from Terrance, aka
The Tongue
, who was now a Ph.D. student living a BART ride away and studying across the bridge, in Berkeley. Terrance ended each email with a plea for my new phone number, but I wasn’t ready for his voice or his messages. I had a job to find and my life to rebuild. At least, I wasn’t ready for him in the beginning. Admittedly, when it comes to the warm and fuzzies, I’m like a big tea kettle of water—it takes forever for me to boil, but once I do, I whistle. In the beginning of my time in San Francisco, though, I was still cold. I wasn’t sure who Eloise Spanks could be and reuniting with Terrance seemed a way of giving the old Eloise too much say in the formation of the new. People don’t change, you’re thinking, and that’s true to some extent. But new locations
do
change people. I could feel it. Even my skin felt different, if only because the humid dampness of my old town was replaced with the chilly wind of this new (to me) city.

To give you a sense of what I was waking up to most every morning, I’ve sifted through Terrance’s emails and present a few below.

Elusive Eloise,

Knowing that you’re in the same city, somewhere, unreachable—why not tell me?—is excruciating. Today, in my SDAGS class (Stellar Dynamics and Galactic Structure) I thought only of you. Not galaxies, not dark matter. Stars? Pfft. Nothing on you. Call me. 415-###-#### [Redacted, obviously]

Terrance

And later that week,

Enigmatic Eloise,

Call me call me call me call me call me. At least write. Is that too much to ask? I want to solve equations with my tongue, there on the blank page between your legs. I want to feel the weight of you on me and look up and see you staring down at me and let both of us forget there is infinity beyond the bed. I have been bad. Please don’t tell me you’ve been good. Have I really lost you?

Terrance

I eventually replied, but kept my response clean, as though he’d sent a collection of polite nothings.

Terrance,

So nice to hear you’re doing well. I always thought grad school would suit you. I’m living with the ghosts of Lithuanians and eating the great bounty of the American heartland in all its pinks, greens and chocolate hues every morning. Study hard.

Eloise

Which only brought back:

Errant Eloise,

I’m so happy you wrote. But you think you can cool me so easily? I know, under that tone, you want me. Fuck your ghosts and rainbows and call me. Don’t make me beg.

Terrance

And later…

Evil Eloise,

I’m begging. On my knees.

Terrance

And then, blissfully, I didn’t hear from him again until two weeks later. But he was even more distraught then.

Ebbing Eloise,

FYI, I have, over the course of the past five days, licked to pleasure no fewer than three of my undergraduate students in the Astronomy 101 course I’m teaching. I mean, not in class, obviously. All three are roommates. They still have vestigial acne and giggled and tasted like painfully sweet candy, and one kept sticking an obscene little vibrating dildo in her that kept bumping my chin. I felt like I was shaving. I could barely manage. Please. My tongue needs a more mature canvas. I need you. Here is my address. [redacted] Come anytime. I’ll leave a key under the potted (plastic) gerber daisy. I have an older roommate but she’s a librarian on campus and works long hours and smells, constantly, of garlic. She may be French or, perhaps, just French-Canadian. If you do not save me, I may fall for her.

Terrance

I’ll admit: at first I laughed. But then I could feel his sadness. Poor Terrance, afflicted with the need for older (at least older-than-him) women to rock his world. And yes, he’d brought me a great amount of pleasure and attention before, and yes, he was his own man now, free of Olivia’s domineering (see
Tongue Tied
). So why didn’t I call? Because, honestly, I wasn’t hot and bothered enough at first. I was bushed from job hunting and maneuvering around the city by foot and bus and BART and enjoyment was the last thing on my mind. And as the days went by, I think I could have satisfactorily continued my life with the occasional rub to free me of wanting. (Let me just say that those detachable Pfister shower heads work wonders.)

Yes, I would have been fine, but those e-mails from Terrance didn’t stop. I figured out how to create a filter in my mail app that would send his messages straight to SPAM. Then, when I kept checking SPAM, another filter that sent them straight to trash. A week went by before I discovered that
trash
is a folder rather than an action, and not only did I find a dozen unread messages sitting there, I made the mistake of reading them all in one go. And
then?
Well, then I really wanted him. Maybe part of me was hoping he’d normalize. That he’d take to the vanilla. That he wouldn’t need a domineering woman and could be happy with what the rest of us have, even if for many that means
nothing.
And I was well aware that I was projecting, too. I didn’t think I should go back to doing what I’d done to Terrance back east. The ropes, the endless pleasuring. The teasing.

Eloise,

After my Tuesday office hours (I don’t really have an office) and before my evening Fluid Dynamics class, I continue to visit the three roommates. I’m spoiling them, stunting them. Somewhere on campus there are three lonely guys who don’t know that I am the source of their loneliness, my having taken these three from the pool. You want to know something? I wish I were three-headed and could bring them all off simultaneously. I’m sure they’d sing out a chord of some kind. I’ve considered using my hands on the other ones, but see—you’re willful absence is making me have these sick
normal
fantasies. And they
are
fantasies because it’s not how it sounds. These girls are discreet and wait outside, coming in one by one as I finish, over the course of the afternoon. I’m tongue-tied by the last one. They’re also greedy: the calendar on their fridge has giant pink stars drawn on the remaining Tuesdays for the year. They’re terribly unsexy. Two are bare in an obscenely pre-pubescent-like way, and the third shaves far too rarely; she looks like my old man’s chin. I’ve asked them all not to wax or shave or I won’t come back, but they think I’m joking. It sounds like a perverse fairy tale, I know. And worse yet, I have to admit, I have begun to enjoy it. They’ve even begun visiting
my
apartment. Don’t let me enjoy it, Eloise. Save me.

As if that’s not enough, I’m also seeing another woman. She’s in her early fifties, older than you by far, and she finds tying me down to be both impossible to understand, and impossible to resist. I may have mentioned her. The French-Canadian with the Caesarian Scar, as I call her (in my mind). Perfect, right? Well no—she won’t let me go down on her! Doesn’t like it, she says, without even letting me show her she must be wrong. Instead I lie there, bound to the couch as she wallops me with her full weight until she gets off. If I close my eyes I can imagine it is you for a second, just as she rises up. It’s when she comes down again that the weight kills the illusion.

 >

You see what I’m having to do here, Eloise? Cobble women together to recreate you. You’re inimitable. I need you. Won’t you come see me? Let me know you’re happy, at least.

Terrance

I’d scribbled his address on the back of one of my business cards, too afraid to add it to my phone’s list of addresses, too afraid I’d call him. But by his words alone he’d made me want him. Sure, all that stuff about three girls and older woman was probably a lie. But what was the harm of falling for a fib? That I was asking myself these questions scared me; my defenses were going down fast and I
knew
it. But no amount of the Pfister or the finger felt like enough anymore when all I had to do to have more was call or visit Terrance. A woman’s quandary.

So I wanted Terrace—but this time on my terms. I had a plan: rather than give him my number, I would just show up at his place on occasion and let him do his thing. And then I’d leave. Now and then, maybe, we could go out and see a movie or have dinner, but always meeting somewhere other than where I lived. No phone calls, no text messages. Maybe I could even get the e-mails to stop. What could go wrong?

I decided to test my plan. On a Tuesday around noon (I knew he didn’t have his Fluid Dynamics course until the afternoon) I left for his place without even my I.D. or phone. There was no chance for him to discover where I lived or what my number was. All I carried was cash and my business card with his address on the back. And when I found the apartment, the second floor of a decidedly un-San Francisco-looking apartment building, I took the card with my address, ripped it, and threw it into an alleyway dumpster. It saddened me, a little, that he lived in such an unattractive building. The outside was sided in sooty brick, the bleached trails of past graffiti still visible. The concrete steps up to the entrance were cracked. Two young women sat on the stoop cracking gum and reading, one with a highlighter. Down the street someone had set up a basketball net in an empty parking space and was practicing lay-ups.

At the entrance, I lifted a plastic gerber daisy below a lineup of wall-hugging potted plants and there were the keys, just as Terrance had described. And a slip of paper, too.
Thank god, Eloise
it said. I had to laugh. My instinct was to insert the key and enter, but that was a bad habit of mine—being the intruder, the snoop. Instead, I buzzed the apartment number and waited. The crack of bubble gum behind me made me feel self-conscious. I buzzed again and a woman answered. “Yep.”

“Um, I’m here to see Terrance.”

“Busy,” she said. “Come back in a couple hours.”

That stopped me. A woman? Hours? Yet in my hand was a key. I didn’t have to obey.

“Dju here to see Terry?” one of the girls asked.

I turned and realized, uncomfortably, that I was face to face with two-thirds of Terrance’s triple threat.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you know him?”