Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (32 page)

I grabbed a light sweater and looked around one last time, then headed to the showers where a fully-dressed Terrance was combing his hair. Vain, vain, vain. I noticed the much larger imprint of his penis within his jeans, though, and I thought to myself: twenty-three hours to go.

With their suitcases and bags deposited, and with Petunia having promised an all-hands meeting in the morning, I was now in charge. I introduced myself and Terrance and welcomed them to San Francisco. They looked eager, and who could blame them? They’d taken the train up from Los Angeles and had seen California at its finest. What were they thinking? That when the fog and clouds cleared, tomorrow would show them the San Francisco they’d envisioned: that bright fulfiller of promises, giver of riches. It wasn’t that for me, but I had the disadvantage of age and experience to keep me pessimistic. Still,
their
youth rubbed off on me as we all piled into one elevator, pressed tightly together, their Lithuanian vaguely Russian like, but with all the edges and harshness buffed out. Maybe it was because Terrance and I were there with them, but by the time the elevator opened on the ground floor, English had taken over.

The night was cool outside, faintly drizzly, and the wind had shifted so that it felt like the bay was just a block away, the air brined and besotted with the sea. I could tell that the women in the group had already picked out their partners, if only for platonic relationships, though some walked hand in hand. Had I been taking them out to eat by myself, I would have been jealous of their youth. But I
possessed
Terrance now and felt more than their equals. I felt like I alone (except for Terrance) knew the bright side of life, the gray everyday that would form the crust of most of their lives, as well as the dark side which they’d probably only glimpsed. On the internet. I was, if anything, well-rounded. Terrance dropped my hand to work at his phone, and soon a dozen flagged restaurants appeared on his phone’s screen.

I turned around and walked backwards. “What do you like to eat?” I asked the group. “There’s just about everything here.”

We settled on Mexican quickly, as though they’d had this discussion already, perhaps on the train, perhaps for months before coming here. We headed toward an authentic five-star Mexican restaurant that Terrance had read about. It was likely much more expensive than my usual fare, but it was Petunia’s card I held in my hand, not mine, so
why not?
But we didn’t make it that far. Instead, down a quiet street between two closed-up shops somewhere in Castro, the Lithuanians slowed in front of a narrow dive bar, waved us over, and soon we were two steps down and inside. It was early yet, hardly anyone inside, and those that were looked like regulars and gave us the once-over. Even the bartender looked skeptical as a dozen tow-headed youngsters piled in.

“Gonna needa see I.D.s,” he said, even when I explained the situation. Out came a dozen different forms of identification: driver’s licenses, stiff Lithuanian passports, laminated student I.D.s, all inscrutable in the dim light of the bar. The bartender, an older man with slicked gray hair, didn’t look up to the task of deciphering each one individually, especially as he was dubious about one Lithuanian’s explanation that the whole month/day order was reversed in Europe compared to the U.S.

I handed him Petunia’s credit card. “Put it all on there,” I said, and he looked up at me—and doubtless my age—and took the card, no doubt relieved that he didn’t need to squint at more than one I.D.

The Lithuanians began with margaritas all around, except for two guys who wanted whiskey, straight, and who sat by themselves at the end of the bar. They were the only ones who spoke Lithuanian that evening—the only true drinkers of the bunch, I guessed, and would later be proven correct; they led the bunch back to the building later, much later.

But drinks in hand, we took over a cluster of tables just outside the edge of light from a pool table’s lamp, and there we talked about San Francisco. The places to see, where to dance, how expensive were apartments. I could see that they’d outgrown Petunia’s plans for them, even before a single day at work. Petunia was a stepping stone in their eyes: San Francisco would be theirs in twelve months. By the second margarita, most of the group were clearly tipsy, as was I. It might have been the top-shelf tequila the bartender was using. Whatever it was, it was good. Terrance, on the other hand, nursed his first beer. Pleasantly buzzed, I felt my concerns—about my son, about moving, about Terrance, and mostly about my new employment—pushed back, as though all my day-to-day worries wouldn’t reappear in the morning but were at the other end of something that felt as long as vacation, weeks away. I vowed to drink more often. I believe I repeatedly said so aloud.

The margaritas were just the first (and second) round. A small group of the Lithuanians had huddled around the bartender and were instructing him, taste testing, gesticulating adjustments that were needed, and coming back to the table where Terrance and I sat to foist on us the rough approximations of their favorite drinks from back home. Sweet, vodka-ish cocktails that I downed out of politeness and a hope that the next one would remove the taste of the former. The bar’s regulars had left, no new customers had come in, and the bartender had loosened up considerably. I realized he wasn’t as old as I’d first guessed. One of the group managed to hook up their phone to the bar’s stereo and soon there was a blast of Lithuanian pop music, slick, overproduced, much like the drinks, until I realized that the reason the song’s English was so fluent was because these weren’t Lithuanian songs at all, but homegrown, American fare. You fall out of the cultural vanguard for a few years, as I had, and music may as well be foreign.

I went back to margaritas to cleanse my palette and by now I was drunk, removed from everything around me by a gloppy, shushing buffer that felt about ten inches thick. I grasped Terrance and said, “Not another. Don’t let me have another.” And then my hand went down under the table to that hard impenetrable penetrator lying ever-stiff under the taut denim and I believe I made a few knock-knock jokes then, though I can’t remember them. I do remember that Terrance moved my hand away, though, and I drunk-hated him for that, and for being sober-ish.

He smiled, that smug prick, still on beer. Then I loved him and told him so and kissed him. The Lithuanians asked if we were married and I said no and they nodded and smiled and toasted us again and again and somehow—I don’t remember how exactly—they learned about the cage.

The news went around and soon even the two serious Lithuanian drinkers came to the table, standing there with their whiskies held at the ends of their fingers. The one said something like: “Of course. We’re in San Francisco,” he said. “S & M.”

“No,” I said, “not like
that.
”
Was that a lie?
“Nothing like that at all.”

“Ahhhhh,” a woman said, wagging her finger at us a bit too long. “You are pulling our legs,” she said, her idioms down.

Terrance held up his empty beer so the bartender could see it. “It’s true,” he said then. “She ties me up, too.”

“Terrance!” I said, my hand trying to find his mouth, trying to cover his blabbing lips, though all I managed to cover were his eyes.

“Blindfolds, too,” he said. “She could be a dominatrix.”

Through the ambivalent warmth of my drinks, a little clarity shone through and I remember thinking:
does he know? Does he know I have a job not far off from that description?

“S & M,” the whisky-totting young man said, his words repeated by the others until it formed a kind of daring chant that grew and grew and sounded more like
messin’ him
after a while and even drowned out the music. Somewhere, a glass shattered.

I am mortified recalling that moment, and though I was mortified then too, it was within my protective ten-inch drunken cocoon. Secretly, I may have been enjoying the attention. I was a drunken dominatrix, showing off my love slave but under the disguise of normalcy. After all, I didn’t even have a tattoo.

The you’re-pulling-our-leg girl leaned forward, held out her hands to silence her fellow countrymen and then said to Terrance. “Show me. I call your bluff.”

Terrance looked at me, but now I was no longer mortified. I didn’t care. I
wanted
Ms. Idiom to see that the cock cage was real, that Terrance was mine and mine alone and that I didn’t care who knew. (Even if, soberly, that wasn’t true.) Terrance, luckily, declined and most of the young people left our table. Well, the boys anyway. The four women remained. We chatted a bit more, about the business schools they’d gone to, the languages they programmed in, esoteric stuff that fights against the alcohol and the music’s beat like a desperate attempt to stay sober, and then Ms. Idiom reached into her purse, pulled out her wallet, and put down a piece of paper. Terrance held it up. It was currency. Lithuanian
litas
showing a man in a turn-of-the-former-century’s clothing: stiff tall collar, shirt and bow tie, and wearing a gaze that stared out from the note like an ambassador of these kids’ ancestors. A man who had never dreamed one of his own would one day be using
his
face in a wager to reveal a contraption impossible to have even imagined in his day.

Terrance pulled out his wallet and placed an American twenty, plain yet powerful, on top. “That worth the same?”

Ms. Idiom gestured for more cash and Terrance complied, putting down another few bills of lesser denominations. Terrance then moved our jackets out of the way and made space beside him in the booth. One of the other girls covered her mouth (delicate, that one), while Ms. Idiom looked down at Terrance’s clothed crotch. She ran her fingers across the rim of her glass, waiting patiently. Terrance unbuttoned his jeans, pulled down the fly and after a few moments, hooked Ms. Idiom’s eyes with what he revealed. She looked, mouth parting, eyes widening. I watched the the other girls and their faces mimicked Ms. Idiom’s as they jostled forward for a view. Retelling this now, I realize that Terrance must have had more than one beer. He was comfortable in his own skin, but not
this
comfortable, at least not one-hundred percent sober.

The whole affair ending in giggling and laughter, the last girl even reaching down to touch it after asking our permission.

“S & M,” she said, but this time it was said quietly, respectfully.

“San Francisco,” Ms. Idiom said, and pushed the bills to Terrance.

Terrance, true to his word, kept me nursing the last margarita rather than accept another Lithuanian-aspiring cocktail. But the feed of alcohol kept up for hours, and by the time we all stumbled out of the bar, it was just shy of closing, near 2 a.m. We were more drunk than the drinks should have made us, thanks to their reception on empty stomachs. Entrusted with Petunia’s credit card and a long, long receipt, the two whiskey drinkers escorted their group back to Petunia’s building while Terrance led me the other direction, but not before all of us hugged and laughed and staggered in a fit of cross-cultural love brought about by a simple molecule, Ethanol, shaped–as Terrance once showed me—like a little animal, an eager dog. Warring armies should get hammered together, I say.

Ms. Idiom wanted my number and I wrote it on her hand and only then, Terrance at my side, did I remember that not only had I not wanted Terrance to know my number, I hadn’t wanted him to have even an inkling of where he was, or where Petunia’s building lay. But it was too late for that now, and besides, I was in no state to be leading a blindfolded man through the early morning streets of a less-than-kind section of town.

Terrance and I stumbled (that is, it was mostly me doing the stumbling) to Terrance’s place hand in hand, happy, drunk, without weight. The streets were sketchy in parts—areas I’d never walk alone—but with Terrance beside me I felt invulnerable. I tripped once, at a curb, and he even caught me, swooped me—it felt—to a point that felt almost airborne.

Amid his shushes, we mounted the steps up to his building, then amid more shushing, up to his apartment and his room. He locked the door to his room and threw his jacket and my purse (which he’d been carrying—I’d forgotten about it) onto his bed and I stood there, leaning against the wall, taking it in. The room
wasn’t
as I’d imagined. There weren’t astronomy posters and framed portraits of Einstein. There was no whiteboard with complex equations scribbled out hastily. There was a bed, a cupboard, a wooden desk, lots and lots of books piled high everywhere, and a sense of having arrived—even if on only modest terms—at Pottery Barn / Crate & Barrel-style adulthood.

“Come here,” I said, taking hold of his waist and sending us both down on the bed. “And stop shushing,” I said.

“Roommate, remember,” Terrance said, and at that moment, I did not.

I undid his pants and brought out the cage and admired it, the ingenuity of it, the sheer impossibility of something like this even being imagined. I fingered the diminutive lock and wished more than anything that I had the key on me.

“We could pick it!” I exclaimed.

Terrance laughed. “I’m sure you’re a great locksmith.”

“Do you have a saw?”

“Uh. No,” Terrance said, buttoning up his pants, but I slapped his hand away.

“Hmm,” I said, a solution feeling like it was hovering just out of reach if I could only think clearly. When would we have another night like this? I’d never let myself get so hammered again, would I? And I was a single mother with a teenage son. Privacy was not in the cards. But now, this night…

I thought of the feel of the cage within me, back in the showers, and it came to me.

“Condoms,” I said.

Terrance reached over to the nightstand, moved some books aside and pulled out an accordion’s worth.

“Purrfect,” I said, and grabbed them, biting into the wrapper of one and unrolling it over his plastic pecker. I was disappointed to find it didn’t unravel far before hitting the lock. I felt the shaft, and unwrapped a second condom and unrolled it over the first. Meanwhile, I could sense an erection starting within the cage, and I paused, another unraveled condom spongy between my fingers as he fully undressed. After a third, then fourth condom, I took off my pants, got up on all fours and turned myself to him and waited, one hand holding my underwear aside. I felt, once again, the size of the encapsulated erection attempting entrance, then entering—I honestly am getting wet just remembering that feeling—but it wasn’t long before I felt the cold touch of the lock against my ass. While the cage felt smooth now, with no holes to nick at me, the angle was awkward. I rolled onto my back and we tried again, the bed spinning gently, like at sea. The only light came from a small bedside lamp with an accordion shade: orangeness, warmy. Such was the state of my vocabulary. Again, it took some time but the caged cock went in, but the angle was even worse this direction and the cage was only the length of an un-erect penis. My desire was for the whole thing, the shaft that even now strained at the device. This quick in-out thing wasn’t fun, even a little painful, despite the condoms.