Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (39 page)

I felt less enthusiastic an hour or so later as my knuckles throbbed in a bowl of ice water and my head swam from too much wine. Later, waking in the night, I forgot where I was for a moment and the first memory to come back to me was of the feeling of Peter’s grope. I ran my hand down there, as though expecting to find his fingers. It was a sure sign that things had begun to go off-track for me, sexually, when the thought of my faux-attacker’s hand preceded a sleep-aid masturbation session. Even more off-track as the fantasy I replayed in my head as my fingers worked below was of me beating Peter to a bloody pulp. I came to the image of a TKO.

If Mr. Tailor, Hank the Wank, and Peter represented new men in my life—though only in a professional capacity—there were just as many other men whose orbits intersected mine. Call them pre-existing conditions. Terrance, you’ll remember, was still living with that crazy French Canadian roommate who he’d been fucking during our time off, but he was still wearing the chastity device he’d consented to wear as a kind of penance for those misdeeds. It was the same type of device that my client Eve had also locked over her husband’s…well, you know the cock and bull story—though in this case it’s true.

So it was with both surprise, and no small amount of delight, that I received an unexpected visit from Mr. Irldale. He was in San Francisco on business, I was sure, though he was awfully convincing pretending to be there just to see me. It was movie night at Petunia’s. Her husband would be there, my son and Eli, and Terrance. And I don’t know if it was a desire to make Terrance jealous, or me wanting to bring in fresh blood, but I invited Mr. Irldale to join me.

He offered to drive us there, but I wanted more time alone with him to suss things out. Was his divorce final? Had he sold his house? Did he have plans to restart his autobiography? That he had found where I worked wasn’t unsettling—he didn’t have an ounce of the threatening about him—but it did speak to something richer on his end. Where, between curiosity and obsession, did his interest in me lie? Perhaps that was stretching my womanly ways—and I mean that metaphorically. I’m not talking about flab here.

“Let’s walk,” I said.

“When in Rome.”

“You come up here to sell your memorabilia?” I asked.

“I’ve moved here,” Mr. Irldale said.

“No!” I was surprised.
Womanly ways?

“I’ve kept an apartment here for fifteen years, actually. Sold the place in L.A.”

So much for that idea.

“I get the picture,” I said. “We’re turning here,” I added, grabbing his arm as he was about to step off the curb. I held it a few seconds as we rounded the corner. “So you had a little love nest here in the city and your wife, your ex-wife, found out.”

He grunted. “You’ve got that switched around, remember? I bought the place for my mother, but she’s passed on.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no, ages ago. I’d been renting it out for years, but now I’m my own tenant.”

“Where?” I asked, my mind’s motivations leapfrogging my tongue. Did I want to go there, now? Have a fuck with a regular man, free of restraints and fetishes? Free of gropes and punches? Just comfort and sweetness? No. Maybe. Yes.

“San Mateo,” he said, and I felt a little crushed. My heart had been wishing for him to say
not five minutes from here
or
see that building there?
Still, San Mateo wasn’t L.A. It was quite close.

“I’m not going to ask how you found me,” I said.

“That’s best,” he said. “Let’s stop in here.”

I followed him into a small market and leaned against the cold glass bank of refrigerator doors from which he pulled out a bottle of water. “Okay, how did you find me?” I asked, curiosity besting my intentions to seem cool and composed.

“Let’s just say it was expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“Three thousand,” he said.

I whistled, then thought that number over while he paid. In my head, all I could think of was,
should have paid me the three thousand and I’d have sent you my address,
although there was something untoward about that arrangement, true. It wasn’t until we were outside that I dug deeper. “So you’re like my stalker now?”

“I spent three thousand to
not
be your stalker.”

“You could have just called,” I said.

“I did,” Mr. Irldale said. “Or started to, many times. But the way you left, I was sure you’d say no. And when I tried calling I got someone else’s number.”

“You got the right number,” I said. “It’s just not mine anymore.” I didn’t feel like explaining the whole Olivia debacle thing right then and there, or ever. I’d moved on.

He cracked apart the lid of his bottle of water, took a large sip, and handed it to me for a drink. The water was ice cold and so clean-tasting, somehow purified in a way that made the idea of transporting a bottle’s worth of water molecules halfway around the world seem justifiable and not the insanity that it is. There was also something in that act, our lips touching—okay, okay, through the intermediary of a water bottle’s plastic screw, I know—that made me feel close to him. Again.

“Did you sell all your trophies and gear?” I asked, handing back the bottle.

“Turns out I’m not as salable as I thought. Most of it’s in storage.”

“Maybe you have to be dead first,” I said.

“Maybe.”

This was the wrong direction for this conversation, and maybe for our feet, too. We were nearly at Petunia’s building, now just past the bar where I got hammered in the company of that group of young Lithuanian programmers. “So why me?”

“It was something you said.”

I rode the pause, didn’t say a word. Waited.

“About being a dominatrix,” he added.

“Ah,” I said. “
That.
Why did I tell you that?”

“It got the old gray matter thinking. Were you kidding around?”

“No,” I said. “I sort of did that. For a brief time.”

I felt suddenly hesitant to get any closer to Petunia’s building, to Petunia and her husband, to Terrance, and to the whole atmosphere of, well, sexual
strangeness
that seemed both ensconced and emanating from the building ahead of us. It even seemed like Mr. Irldale bringing up the dominatrix thing was a direct result of our proximity to the building. Were we to turn and flee in the other direction we’d become more innocent. He’d hold my hand. Another mile, we’d kiss. Another mile we’d be naming out babies. Another we’d been skipping, like children. All nonsense, of course; there’s no fucking way I’m ever having another kid. I love my son to pieces, but I’m not built to take on two.

“Maybe we should do something else,” I said.

“Instead of?”

“The movie night thing.”

“No John Wayne?”

“It’s up to you,” I said. A simple question that was unfair at its heart; I was asking him to choose between the known (me) and the unknown.

“What else do you have in mind?” he asked, and I could read his eyes, even through the sunglasses that were, here under S.F.’s cloudy skies, superfluous. The thought on
his
mind, that word whipping through his head was
dominatrix.
But if that’s what he wanted, he could well enough afford any number of them back in L.A., or here now in San Francisco. It’s not exactly like they’re a rare breed. I presumed he wanted something that a dominatrix wouldn’t provide. Discipline
and
sex, maybe. It debased him somehow, lessened my appreciation of Mr. Irldale to know that he would have such a plebeian taste in fantasy. It put him somewhere above Hank the Wank but below Mr. Tailor on the totem of imaginative sexual proclivities.

“I don’t do that anymore,” I said, half-truth, half-lie. “It’s more complex now,” I said.

“Everything is,” he replied.

And there we were, standing before Petunia’s building. It seemed ridiculous not to go on up. Plus I’d then have to make excuses, call my son, etc.

Mr. Irldale’s mention of the dominatrix thing put a small damper on my lust for him just then. But only momentarily. In the elevator ride up, he kissed me. I wanted to jump the poor guy’s bones. Instead, as the elevator reached Petunia’s floor, his hand and mine were overlapped against the metal railing. Casual, like long-married couples.

The elevator opened to the sight of Petunia hitting a pasta spoon against Terrance’s crotch as he passed by her on his way out of the kitchen. The sound confirmed what I knew to be true: Terrance was still wearing the cock cage.

“Cut it out!” Terrance said, when Petunia did it again. He looked up at us as we exited the elevator. “Oh, hey.”

“Just testing,” Petunia said, winking at me. “Looks like someone’s brought company to the corral,” she said.

I took a deep breath as we entered the apartment. “This is Mr. Irldale,” I said.

“D.H.” Mr. Irldale said, holding out a hand.

“Ah,” Terrance said, shaking hands.

Flustered at the collision of social worlds, I couldn’t quite remember how much I’d told Terrance about Mr. Irldale.

“This is Terrance,” I said, when he failed to introduce himself.

“Ah,” Mr. Irldale said, making me then wonder how much information about Terrance I’d shared with him.

I didn’t need to worry about an awkward evening, at least not at its beginning. One western down (
Rio Bravo
), the remains of a bottle of Laphroaig nearly finished by the men—and turned down by the women (we preferred white wine rather than having our mouths taste like ashtrays, thank you very much)—we were all getting along smashingly. Petunia’s daughter Eli and my son went down one floor halfway through the movie for some kind of pinball championship going on among the Lithuanians. After the film’s end, Lorne, Petunia’s husband, brought out cigars and he and Mr. Irldale went out onto a narrow balcony to smoke. Petunia went to work arranging something in the kitchen.

“So is he a client?” Terrance asked me.

I smiled at Terrance. He was wearing a hoodie with the diagram of an atom across the front. Unzipped as it was, he was Mr. Fission. Fuming? No. Curious? Yes.

“Remember I was telling you about that autobiography I was working on?” I said.

“You’re going to tell your life story?”

“Not
mine
,” I said, though without admitting to him that in many ways I already had begun to. “The sports guy,” I said, trying to jog his memory.

“Right, right,” Terrance said. “Nope. Don’t remember a thing.”

“It’s
his
autobiography. Anyway, doesn’t matter. It’s on permanent hold.”

“Speaking of permanent holds,” Terrance said, and pulled my hand toward his crotch. I wiggled free. He wore jogging pants, but even so, I could see the bulge from the cock cage underneath. “When?” he asked.

“How long has it been?”

“Two and a half weeks. What happened to all’s forgiven?”

I looked back at the kitchen to put my eye on Petunia before whispering: “Where’s that tongue of yours been, though? Any Canadians? Any of those students?”

He didn’t answer right away, and I didn’t give him time to draw out the silence. “I have Mr. Irldale tonight,” I said, before catching myself. “Not like that,” I added, then adding a “Though…” just to gauge Terrance’s jealousy. I was a little disappointed to see no trace of it on his face.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, doubtfully.

“Tomorrow,” he said strongly, as though this made it so.

Petunia reentered the TV area with a platter of chocolates arranged around a small bottle of liquor. She grasped tiny stemmed glasses in her hand and relinquished them to us.

“It all depends,” I added, setting down the crystal.

“I better knock on wood,” Terrance said, and gave his cock cage a good rapping.

“Funny,” I said, unamused by the joke or his openness flaunting the cage in front of our host.

Petunia looked at the two of us. “Promises promises,” she said. “Would you help me in the kitchen Eloise?”

Terrance poured himself a drink. “I’ll pretend to be the little ignoramus over here,” he said, then set the dram to his lips.

Petunia opened the dishwasher and let its cloud of hot humidity rise between us.

“You look devilish,” I said, through the steam.

“I could say the same of you,” Petunia said. “How often do you let him out?” she asked.

“I haven’t yet,” I said.

“Okay. Listen. They get irritable,” she said. “If I don’t let Lorne out enough I get Horny Lorney,” she said, thumbing toward the balcony. “Then Forlorn Lorne. I don’t let it go any longer or I have to put up with plain old cranky Lorne.”

I was a tad confused. “I thought
we’re
supposed to be, you know…in control. Isn’t that the whole point?”

“Once you’ve had kids, groveling husbands are the last thing you want. Remember: it doesn’t take much ingenuity to get the thing off, you know.” When she saw that I didn’t follow, she added, “The C-A-G-E.” Petunia began emptying the dishwasher. “It’s not rocket science.”

My thoughts went immediately to Terrance. Was the cage something he’d been able to take off, at will; something to wear just when he was around me, like a gift watch to be seen in the eyes of the bestower?

Petunia continued, “Don’t let him start thinking about getting out himself, either. I once waited a month with Lorne and caught him masturbating by squirting a Waterpik through the air holes.”

“Uh,” I said. “I did
not
need that image.”

“So give the dog a run,” Petunia said. “Before that happens.”

“Yeah,” I said, and couldn’t stifle a laugh. I had an image in my head of Terrance, naked, freed from the cock cage, running madly through a park with a group of other similarly freed men, us women standing around the chained-fence perimeter of this man park watching our pets cavorting. I was a little tipsy, I realized. I’d only had two glasses of white wine, though. If you can count the number of glasses, goes my theory, you’re still in the fairly okay zone.

Petunia joined in laughing, though I gathered her mind had its own pratfalls. I reached for a couple of glasses in the dishwasher to help her unload the clean dishes. The tumblers were too hot to touch. Petunia, though, had no trouble removing bowls and glasses; she picked them right up and put them away, accustomed to the heat in a way I wasn’t. “Shoo,” Petunia said. “Go join your men.”