Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (4 page)

I must have fallen asleep, because when I next looked out the window, Gabriel and the woman were gone, as were their vehicles. It took two hours to clean up the mess, do laundry, spot clean, etc. At the time I felt a desire to chop off the top of the bed’s northwestern-most post and have it as my own, but I soon felt the extent of my over-enthusiasm on the walk back to my place. By the time I was taking my son to the dentist after school I ached like I hadn’t since recovering from giving birth those years ago, the pain paradoxically met by a terrible sensitivity so that just crossing my legs made me feel at risk for coming. I survived the night on expired Vicodin and ended up having to see a gynecologist. Luckily, neither the ache nor the persistent arousal lasted more than a few more hours after the gynecological visit, though I wished I could have known that beforehand so I could have skipped the embarrassment.

I did purchase a dildo after the experience, but it proved an unfathomable disappointment.

And so there you have the highlight of my sexual life between the dissolution of my marriage and the love affair with a bedpost, there before Olivia’s influence took over.

I hope you’re better at getting your rocks off than I used to be.

Olivia and John returned from their business/vacation while my son and I were away for a weekend visiting family. Within a month, things were back to normal. Mr. Drake was busy at work and Olivia was inviting me to the club every week or so. The first time back, I faked a ankle injury, so we switched from tennis to lounging in the pool and jacuzzis—which is my kind of sport. Olivia had also started the habit of stopping by the apartment with a plate of something freshly baked: cookies, home-made biscotti, zucchini bread. And though I despise zucchini for reasons that you should in no way misconstrue as having anything to do with phalli, I felt compelled to invite her into the apartment each time. Her baked goods became an entrance ticket. I also let her in because I was, in truth, quite lonely during the day: one of the perils of being self-employed, and doubly so being a ghostwriter. There’s not even fan mail.

Olivia’s favorite position was reclining on the sofa by my work desk. She took to it naturally, like a psychiatrist’s patient, I thought, and I had to bite my tongue more than once as I sat in my ratty office chair from saying
Well, how does that make you
feel?, even in jest.

“You make me so sad,” she said on one visit, the same day I was later to meet The Tongue.

I laughed and gnawed on a biscotti she’d brought over. Coffee was brewing in my kitchen with a sputter.

“Tsch,” Olivia said. “All day, slaving at your computer, and at night you’re never out, never having any fun.”

“I have fun,” I said purely defensively. Truth would have been something like:
Mind your own business. So I don’t have fun.
But Olivia was a fixer.

“You need someone getting you hot and bothered. Tell me the type.”

“Type?”

“The kind of man who gets you hot and bothered.”

“You know. The usual.”

“Ha!” Olivia laughed. “There
is
no usual.”

“Well, for me it’s the usual.”

“What was your husband like?” Olivia asked, her stockinged feet pushing out of her pumps. The shoes fell to the floor in a quick one-two.

“Sam?” I said.

“Ugh. Sam,” Olivia said, palm on her forehead. “With that name I get the picture already.”

“No, he was funny,” I said, defensively, if only to forgive my own attraction to him those years ago. “In the beginning, anyway,” I said. “The first few years.”

“It’s always a riot the first few years.”

“Well, I liked the way he carried himself,” I said. “I liked his voice. What about Mr. Drake?”

“We’re talking about you, hun. I’ve taken care of John, believe me.”

I was glad she put an end to that tangent anyway, as I realized I was opening up the opportunity for another invitation to that upstairs bedroom. And I really didn’t want to go there again. It was mortifying enough to wonder if they’d noticed the stains on the duvet I’d scrubbed and sent through the dryer. I went into the kitchen, poured the coffee, and set it back down on the long oval coffee table.

“Everyone at the club is too old for you,” Olivia said, still on topic. “Unless you’d just like money.”

“Money’s always nice,” I joked, then sat down on my office chair.

“But a woman needs more than money. And you’re young enough to still be needing
more
for quite some time. Am I right?” She strained her head back to look at me from her supine position and the effect was startling, her face upside down, the wrinkled brow like a sneering face.

“Whatever you say, Olivia.”

“Do you like the slow romantic type or the aggressive rough ride?”

“Olivia!” I said, trying to scold.

“Well?”

“I don’t like feeling like a piece of meat,” I said. “I like a man who pays attention to the details.”

“Mmm,” she said, slowly sitting up. She reached for the coffee and took a sip, the steam swirling around her face.

“Blah.”

I bit my lip.

“You really do need to get out more. You’ve forgotten what coffee tastes like.” She pushed her feet into her pumps. “C’mon, let me take you someplace.”

I looked over at my e-mail inbox. Nothing since yesterday. No deadlines until the end of the week. “Okay. Where?” I asked, thinking:
lunch? shopping? men?

“Coffee, of course. Even the sink deserves better than this.”

Olivia’s comments were abrasive but she said them without malice, as though she saw me as an underling, a new arrival to her land of plenty, and it was her duty to bring me up to snuff. Well, all right then, I thought. Show me this fucking unbelievable coffee.

“If it’s just coffee,” I said, “Then I guess I don’t need to change.”

“Guess again,” Olivia said.

Olivia held the door open for me and I entered the cafe wearing a clean blouse and my least-frayed jeans. The cafe was a delight for all the senses. The owner had bought the whole thing, from the bar top to the glass front doors to the tin ceiling, from a cafe in a Paris arrondissement, Olivia narrated, as we sat waiting for our lattes. A little tingle went through me taking it all in—it was the perfect place to write. Not work-related writing, but the book
I
wanted to write, once I figured out what, exactly, that book would be. It was the kind of place where the wait staff knew you by name, even addressing Olivia as Mistress Drake, a weird old-world-ish colloquialism that made the place even more endearing to my untested aspirations to become a fixture here. The air smelled of chocolate. The metal sparkled. What could be better?

“Terrance,” Olivia said, as our young waiter set down our coffees, cubes of roughly hewn brown sugar nestled at the edges of the saucers. “I’d like you to meet my, my neighbor. Eloise Spanks.”

“Hello Eloise,” he said, though I felt a little let down, hoping for my own Ms. or Mistress Spanks. In time.

“I’ll have a slice of the truffle cake, too,” Olivia said.

“And for you?” the waiter asked me.

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

Olivia raised an eyebrow.

“I’m fine,
really,
” I said. The tightness of my jeans were what was really making me turn down a little something on the side. I’d gained, or they’d shrunk.

As our waiter walked away to chat with another patron, Olivia put a hand on my forearm. “I know he’s young and only a waiter, but this man knows details,” she said. “He’s going to be starting grad school in the fall, I believe. Astrophysics or something egg-head like that.”

“And you’re suggesting what, exactly?” I asked.

“I call him
The Tongue
,” Olivia said. “Just so you know.”

“O-kay,” I said, confused but not wanting to push for an explanation. Mostly because the explanation was fairly well-formed in my head.

Terrance returned with two plates of truffle cake and set one before Olivia, the other in front of me.

“I took the liberty,” he said.

“See?,” Olivia said. “Details.”

“Mind reader,” I said.

“Anything else for you ladies?” Terrance asked. He certainly didn’t look like an astrophysicist to me. Big-jawed, fit, tanned.

“Eloise is going to give you her phone number,” Olivia said to him.

“My…?” I began.

“Lend us a pen,” Olivia said to Terrance.

Terrance removed a pen from the front pocket of his apron and held it out to me in a way that made it seem he was holding a two-hundred dollar writing instrument. It was a yellow throwaway for heaven’s sake.

“Uh,” I said, hesitating first before taking it, then holding it above the blank side of the day’s specials that Olivia slid in place beneath the pen. I looked up at Terrance, trying to look apologetic. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Handsome in a way, handsomer than I am pretty, certainly. I avoided his eyes, embarrassed for him, myself, the pen. I thought of putting down a false number, but for some reason, I didn’t. I wrote it out, area code and all. He took the paper and folded it, tucking it into his apron, then smiled and walked away and I could then finally relax and try to once more enjoy the cafe. But it was tainted. I couldn’t conjure back the sensations of warmth and security, of relaxation and possibilities. Instead, I needed to soak it up now because, clearly, I could never set foot in here again. Out the door went my hastily assembled idea of myself sitting and scribbling out a volume here.

“Let’s not do any more matchmaking,” I said. “It’s a little embarrassing.”

“Nonsense. Why?”

“The age difference, for one,” I said.

“I ignore age,” Olivia said. “Besides, like I said, a detail man is very hard to find.”

“Except for you.”

“Except for me,” she said, her lips rising into a smile as she sipped her espresso. She licked the foam on her upper lip with a tongue that seemed not part of her but part of some creature within her.

It was around this time that my son’s bullying at school rose from pestering and teasing into something that truly worried me. When the badgering didn’t stop, I ended up needing to spend the next week in meetings with the school psychologist, the vice-principal, and finally the principal. I had begun to feel like an awful mother for having to push my son out the door in time to make it to school; for sending him out for more teasing and shoving and whatever else he had been keeping from me since the school year began. I couldn’t fathom it. My son was sweet, kind, completely average looking in a good under-the-radar way.

At one meeting, I found myself rather liking the vice-principal’s voice and began picturing him with me in a carnal way, even over his assurances, so sweetly intoned, that they would get to the bottom of this matter and that they had a zero-tolerance policy for the behavior my son had been subjected to. See? Bad mother. It was Olivia’s match-making that had made me think this way again.

Through all this I was also busy with work, wrapping up rewrites for a young adult novel I’d been hired on short notice to rescue. Even Olivia had been scarce lately—her youngest daughter was well-pregnant. I’d avoided Olivia just to get a break from listening to her drone on about her upcoming grandchild. Also, even with the low rent, my budget was getting squeezed. I was more than a little stressed.

On one particular afternoon I was in the bedroom in my all together so to speak, trying to find a setting on a shipped-in-the-mail vibrator I’d diligently researched online before purchasing. It had a glut of five-star ratings, then nothing until a few one-star reviews, both ends of the spectrum sounding reasonable and yet together they made my purchase feel like an act of faith.

It was nicely packaged, but once put to use, I realized that the choice of settings seemed to be either 1) a low-level vibration that was desultory and seemingly bored, 2) a bee-like anger at the middle setting, or 3) an upper-limit buzzing that, I believe, was for turning the vibrator into some sort of torture device. There was also a final setting, a cycle of vibrational patterns, that was even worse—pure ADHD. To qualify my statement, there
was
a pattern that lasted about ten seconds in there that was lovely, and then it was gone, replaced with a rata-tat-tat and then a zizza-zizza-zizza that was painful for both my hand and my clitoris, even through the hood. So picture me there, between the rata-tat-tat and zizza-zizza-zizza when my phone rang and the first thought to go through my mind was not who was calling, but the realization that my phone, too, had a vibration setting, one that could surely prove no worse than the monstrosity I’d purchased. My second thought, even before I reached over to see who was calling, was to wonder just what the return policy was on once-used, but not enjoyed, vibrators. There had to be some satisfaction guarantee on these things. In my state, I didn’t recognize the name on the phone, and then I did: Terrance. And while normally, I’d never do this while also doing
that
, I answered.

“Hello,” I said, a little too breathlessly, and forgetting that this should be a question.

“Hi. Can I speak to Eloise, please?”

“Speaking,” I said, my voice going up a register. I coughed.

“Oh, hey,” Terrance said. “I’m the guy from the Dirks.”

“Dirks?”

“The cafe. You came in with Olivia?”

“Right,” I said, slowly. “I just didn’t know the name of the place.”

“So, I have your number.”

“Right,” I said.

“Is this a bad time?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Sounds like you’re baking.”

“Baking? No. No,” I said, then realized he probably meant that I sounded baked. Which I suppose I did. And
then
I realized that he could hear the vibrator. “Shit,” I said under my breath, grasping to turn it off. Zizza-zizza-zizza.

“I can call back when it’s more convenient,” he said.

“No no. Now is, is perfect,” I said, leaving my toy on. “I’m actually, um, just whipping some cream. It’ll just be a minute,” I said. “Just waiting for the peaks to form.” I lay back in bed, phone nestled against my ear, the vibrator on me now. I waited for him to say something. That voice.