Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (31 page)

When Terrance came back, Petunia uttered a shocked cry. “How can you have an erection staring at cereal boxes! You did pick a unique one Eloise,” she said. “For god’s sake, take a cold shower.”

“Where?” Terrance asked.

Eloise pointed. Once he’d gone, I followed Eloise on a slow walk around the floor. The fog had cleared, or rather, it had settled as night fell so that it now felt like we were floating on the clouds. The clouds were almost imperceptible, lit by a fraction of moonlight. Our reflections hung there in the glass, almost completely transparent, our eyes the brightest most solid-seeming things. That and the white boxes in my hands. Petunia turned off the lights and we went and stood by one windowed wall and looked at the stars.

“My daughter has a crush on your guy there,” she said.

I feigned surprise. “Oh? What did she say?”

“Your son told me.”

“He’d never say something like that.”

“I asked if he had a crush on my daughter. And that was his answer,” Petunia said.

We didn’t say anything for awhile. “All the same,” Petunia said, “I’m glad he’s going under lock and key.”

“Terrance would never…” I began, but out from the darkness sprung the image of those college girls. “Don’t worry about that,” I said.

“Should we check on the prisoner?” Petunia said.

At the showers, Petunia pushed open the door and went inside and I followed, both of us discovering Terrance jacking himself off.

“My,” Petunia said, eyes widening.

I looked down. For a moment.

Terrance laughed. “Hey, just complying with orders,” he said.

He didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed, though I had enough embarrassment for both of us. I tried to lead Petunia out of the room by her shoulders, but she brushed me off and had a seat on the narrow bench at the end of the lockers. She was here for a show. She looked up at me and patted the empty space on the bench beside her. And there we sat watching Terrance soap up at the nearest shower, his hands going down to his cock to continue the strange dance of self-love. The water bounced off his back as he turned fully toward us, hands and cock frothing. Petunia gave off little affirmative moans and nodded her head, as though she were judging a competition and I felt a little bruised when his expression went soft and he ejaculated while staring right at her, his jism springing out onto the tiles.

“Hey!” Petunia said, reaching down to her sandals. “You hit me.”

Terrance’s blank face broke back into a smile and he laughed.

Petunia swooped up the bit of cum with her finger, then pointed her finger at my mouth, the tip holding a small bead.

“Nuh-uh,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, and brought her finger to her open mouth.

I seized her wrist, looked at Terrance, and licked it up. I tasted Terrance, then garlic.

Petunia laughed. “I was only teasing!” she said.

I couldn’t wait to get that cock cage on him. I just wished I could put a muzzle on Petunia.

Terrance rinsed himself, shut off the water, and caught the towel I threw at him. His full penis was quickly going flaccid, that ugly word used for little else than the posture of a post-ejaculate cock.

Petunia snapped her fingers and I handed her the little white box. She proceeded to place one piece behind Terrane’s scrotum, then nodded to me. I took the plastic sheathe and slid it over Terrance’s penis. Terrance looked down at me and smiled during the procedure, giving me a
can you believe this
expression before he winced.

“Sorry,” Petunia said. “Didn’t mean to pinch you.” She bent down closer and I heard a kiss, but onto plastic. Now I was
really
glad Terrance was under lock and key.

“How’s it feel?” I asked, watching Terrance walk around the showers, like a customer trying on a new pair of shoes, contemplating a purchase.

“A little heavy.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Petunia said, quickly. “It’s like wearing glasses. Pretty soon you’ll forget all about it.” She turned to me. “Give it,” she said, gesturing for the matching keys. “I’ll hold onto that for a day or so, so you at least give it twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll hold onto it,” I said.

“No you won’t,” Petunia said. “You’ll unlock him first chance you get.”

She was right. Reluctantly I handed her the keys. “Twenty-four hours,” I said.

“Twenty-four,” she affirmed, then got up. “Well, I’ll be off. Think I’ll put a key in another lock tonight,” she said, her fingers twirling the chain around her neck. She winked at me. “Nice meeting you Terrance,” she said, holding out your hand.

Wouldn’t you know it, an up-turned hand, waiting for a kiss. Terrance shook it instead.

“Oh,” Petunia said, as I walked her out of the showers. “I got a call from the Lithuanians. They’re on their way. And Eli invited your son for a sleep over. I said yes. Is that okay?”

“Well,” I began. “Do you have room?”

“Of course. He can have one of the guest rooms. I’d invite you, too, but I figure you have…other plans.”

My gut said to say
no
to her invitation on behalf of my son, especially since Eli’s parents would likely be behind closed bedroom doors all evening, but my heart felt a little skip at the idea that Terrance and I could have a whole night together, here, above the fog and below the stars.

“Sure,” I said.

Left alone in the showers with Terrance, I sat on the narrow center bench beside a dozen or so lockers, all brand new, their faces still wearing a thin green protective film. Terrance walked over to me and I reached for him and brought him to me.

“So…” I began, then laughed. The cage looked ridiculous, more like a cast for a broken penis, if such a thing could break. But it wasn’t really all that ridiculous, not if it might also prevent my heart from breaking—if I stayed heartless. It wouldn’t be like last time, with my then-husband. My ex, Sam, didn’t exactly break my heart. In the year before our marriage ended, he’d been silently chiseling away at it bit by bit until it became obvious to both of us that we were ill-suited, that our love had run its course. And by then I didn’t really have a heart left to be broken. That came later, of course, after I’d refashioned one and found out about the long-term affair Sam had carried on during the latter part of our marriage. What I’d taken for our complacency was really his redirected attention. And then my heart broke, that quick regenerative organ. And I wished then that it would stay dead.

But this time it’d be different, I told myself. I had someone who wouldn’t leave, ha!,
couldn’t
leave. How long could this go on? A season? A year? A lifetime? A lifetime sounded both too short and too long. For now, I was thinking a few months.

“Does it hurt?” I asked Terrance.

“Not at all,” he replied, running his fingers up from under his balls, then down along the plastic shaft that curved down.

“What about when you get an erection?”

“Guess I’ll find out.”

“Here,” I said, and brought him forward over me as I lay back, supine, his legs straddling the bench and my body.

When he was close enough, I opened my mouth and took in the plastic cage. It was surprisingly warm, but thick and I couldn’t manage much at all. I scooted myself beneath him and licked his balls, squeezed lightly between that ring of plastic. This worked. I pulled myself out from under him, not unlike a mechanic on a creeper, emerging from under the object of her servicing. I watched his erection grow, the cage rising in small pulsed increments.
Was it too heavy?
I could see the space between his skin and the inside of the cage lessen. Was there enough space? Terrance’s erection seemed to end at mid-cock so I stroked his inner thighs and balls and provided him the visual of another mock blow job, or mock for him anyway, it was real enough for me. And when I withdrew, there he was, his cock pressed tightly against the inside of the plastic cage, his now-longer penis pulling the ring behind his balls forward. He looked uncomfortable.

“How’s it feel?”

“Not great,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not exactly.”

“Would you keep wearing it for me?”

He bent down to me and gave me a kiss, long and passionate, the hard encapsulated penis hitting me right where it counted. He broke away from my lips and stared at me, so close I could see his gaze go from one of my eyes to the other, examining my thoughts, I felt, knowing them down to their very elements.

“I didn’t know you wanted me so badly.”

I smiled and pulled him back down for more kissing. And though his covered penis should have ended thoughts of a prurient nature, I found myself unbuttoning my pants and kicking them off, then my underwear. It wasn’t just that Terrance was now mine, confined by my schedule; he was now also bigger. I had the sudden revelation that I could even have him without him having me. What would the cage feel like within me? The plastic rubbed against me for a moment and then, with no small amount of maneuvering, together, we got it inside me. Heaven, I’ll tell you. Pure heaven. Too big, yes, but so is heaven. That is, until Terrance began pulling it out and sliding it back in.

“Ow,” I said.

“What?”

“Aaaah,” I called and forced him to pull out.

“Too big?”

“No, I don’t know,” I said, sitting upright now and running my hands over the cage. It was the holes. There were holes drilled around the entirety of the plastic shaft for air and, I imagined now—the thought having not crossed my mind until that moment—for letting in soap and water for cleaning. And it was these holes, as I ran my hand along the stiff shaft, nipped at my vagina. Disappointment fell on me faster than the dipping conclusion of Terrance’s erection.

Terrance, as always, had the solution. “Well, go get the key.”

“I can’t do
that
,” I said, for what could be more embarrassing than having to ask Petunia for the key to Terrance’s lock not an hour after it had been closed. But he was right. Petunia knew everything anyway. I could start Terrance’s lock up later.

I was dressed and halfway to the elevator when it opened. Out rolled a laugh and shouts in a stiff, British-like English, followed by the unmistakeable sound of suitcases rolling over the elevator’s transom. The Lithuanians! I turned quickly and headed for the showers and hissed at Terrance: “She meant tonight. They’re coming tonight.”

“Who?”

“The Lithuanians,” I said.

Terrance looked confused, as well he should have been. “I’ll explain later,” I said. “Get dressed.”

I left the showers again and by now there were six young men and women clumped by the elevators, standing there in the dark, duffel bags sliding off shoulders, suitcases set upright, handles clicking as they folded. I turned on the lights and waved.

“Hi,” I said. “Welcome.”

“Hello,” a few said. They were incredibly thin and lean and beautiful in a way that makes you wonder if Europeans aren’t doing something right. Tan, too.

“You made it,” I said.

“Yes,” a young woman said, one of only two. Two women, that is. They
all
were chatting among themselves. She swept back a lock of blonde hair and turned to the elevator, as did a couple of others. I didn’t understand until the elevator doors parted and there came
another
contingent of Lithuanians. The first scooted forward making room for the new group. Again, they were mostly young men, hair long and unstyled, but below the head they were dressed in that slightly more flamboyant, European style. One could even say a more effeminate mode. I mean, really: capris?
And
tight T-shirts? Out from this second group emerged Petunia, talking loudly.

She spotted me. “Do me a favor, would you? It’s my bad, but I have to pick up the kids from the theater, get dinner started, blah blah blah.” She took out her phone and turned it over, whipping out a credit card from a slit in the back of the case. She handed it to me. “Take them out to eat, would you? And for yourself, too, of course.”

“Sure,” I said, hesitantly at first. I didn’t especially like all those faces watching me, but mostly I was thinking,
what do they like to eat?

“I’ll come back tonight and settle them all in,” Petunia said, stepping back into the elevator she’d kept open with a foot. The elevator doors gnawed gently at her heel.

“No problem,” I said, then stepped forward and put my lips to Petunia’s ear. “What about the key?”

“Keep it,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be by to visit.”

“No,” I said, “I mean the
other
key. The small one.”

She looked at me, shocked. “You mean you need it already?! It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours! Not even twenty-four minutes!”

“All right, all right,” I said, acquiescing, fearful that she might, right then and there, use the words
cock cage
in front of all these newcomers. “Never mind. Let me just get my stuff.”

While Petunia spoke to the group of ten or so Lithuanians from her spot within the elevator, her finger on the controls, I heard my name keep coming up as their tour guide for their first night in San Francisco. I slipped away and double-checked the rooms my son and I had been occupying. Our suitcases and bags already sat outside the doors—I’d packed them earlier and I’d get them later. Past them stood another six or seven rooms. They’d been locked and curtained the whole time I’d been living here, but soon they’d be filled. Soon the floor would be alive. Code flying, meetings held, championship pinball rounds held to break the stress of whatever it was Petunia was having them build. And how strange this new world was: a team brought in to build something grand and complicated that, at its essence, was nothing more than lots of little colored dots on a screen, a Lite-Brite (remember those, or do I age myself?) of unbelievable complexity, consumer of man-years, dreamer of acquisitions. I was almost sad to see them arrive, not only because this had been my floor for a time, but because their young outdoor lives were ending, about to be replaced with pixelated views. Of course, I was romanticizing them: they’d all put in more hours before screens than I could ever imagine, or they wouldn’t be here. It was me, Eloise, whose views would now be less expansive and more terrestrial.