Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (6 page)

Having come against the tongue of a bound near-stranger in my kitchen, I wasn’t about to let him go. He could fuck me in a moment. For now, I felt I’d stored up enough frustrated nights to indulge myself a bit more. I crossed my legs behind his back. Luckily, Terrance seemed more than willing to stay there, moving his head back to kiss the inside of my prickly thighs again and again until he returned to my clitoris, despite my
no’s.
Amazingly, he knew my timing better than me; I thought I wasn’t ready to be licked again, but I was. Oh I
so
was. Sometimes I can’t believe men get just the one shot. What kind of life can that be?

Terrance alternated between licking my clit and pushing his tongue as far inside me as he could, his ears pressed tight against my inner thighs, his chest giving off a moan of pleasure, as though he’d reached some sweetness within me that I had never known I possessed. And, yes,
yes,
rereading that last sentence I realize how cock-eyed, awful, and just plain over the top that sounds, but unless you’ve had a Terrance on you like I did, unless you, too, have had The Tongue, you can’t know what’s hyperbole or not. He was enjoying it too, and I mean really, truly enjoying it, just as much as me. He did this humming, lapping thing that set off my second and completely 10/10 orgasm. I was done. Wiped. Sure, I could come again in a bit, but I was full. I just wanted to nap. I pushed him away, got down from the counter, and washed Terrance’s face with a damp paper towel. His shirt was drenched with me and his own saliva. He had a hard-on, but I tried to ignore it. I know, reciprocity, reciprocity, especially after mentioning my husband’s lack of the quality, but I was spent. I hurried to the bathroom and when I returned he was still there, in the kitchen, still kneeling.

“I should get to work,” he said. His hard-on was gone, which was unfortunate, because I’d had a change of heart in the bathroom. There was even a condom in the pocket of my robe, only slightly expired.

“Wait. You don’t want to, you know, do me?”

“I believe I just did. Twice.”

“I mean fuck me.”

“
Now
who’s being forward?” he said, then smiled. “But I’m not permitted. Hope you’re not disappointed. And anyway, I got to get to work.” He held out his bound wrists, a puppy-doggish look on his face.

I began to undo them and waited for what I suspected would be coming. First making me feel safe after having pleasured me orally, then once he was free, grabbing my hands, having me on his terms. But no, there was nothing like that from Terrance. I felt a little ashamed at my projections. Terrance reached into his pocket, took out a pen, and wrote his number on the inside of my hand.

“Whenever you want me to go down on you, anytime, you call me.”

“You
are
a gigolo,” I said, my heart just about crestfallen in a superficial way. I was still warm and light-as-air and frankly didn’t care.

Terrance laughed. “Yeah, a gigolo who lives off tips.”

“Oh,” I said. “I should tip…what do you…how much…”

“At the cafe,” Terrance said and laughed. “At the cafe.”

I blushed. “You go around pleasuring women for the hell of it?” I reached out and saw a redness on his cheeks. But not from embarrassment; it was redness I’d put there from the prickliness of my unshaven thighs.

“Something like that,” he said.

I followed him down the stairs, trying to figure him out. “Well, that’s a new one,” I said.

“Get used to it,” he said, and began walking his bicycle away.

I think I could,
I thought to myself. I wanted to run out there and kiss him, but he was already nearly at the road.

“I think I could,” I shouted.

“Could what?” he shouted back.

“Never mind,” I said, and waved him away. I watched him get on the bike and heard the ticking of the bike’s flywheel, and then he was gone. I went back upstairs into the bathroom, ran the hot water, and shaved myself like I hadn’t shaved since the morning of my wedding. I went through two blades. And still I didn’t feel smooth enough. I licked my own leg. No, not smooth enough.

“Here,” Olivia said, writing down a phone number she copied from her phone’s screen. “Ask for Maria.”

And that’s where I was a week after my first encounter with Terrance, in a strip mall’s waxing salon, Maria hunched over on her stool, applying wax and making me professional-grade smooth. Like a new eraser. A pink-hot, painful eraser. I’d planned on surprising Terrance that night, but I knew I’d need a day or two to recover first.

“You want the backside, too?”

I held up my head to read Maria’s face. She had one of those expressionless faces, just features and folds. I suppose this kind of job could do that to you. What had she
not
seen?

“Backside?” I asked. I’d never noticed hair on my back.

“Around the anus,” Maria said, pronouncing
anus
with the stress on the second syllable, so that it took me just a second to understand her.

“Oh,” I said. “The a-nus.” No one, not even my doctors, had ever referred to my anus before. I don’t think I’d ever said the word before. Briefly, I considered the procedure she was suggesting. And also: did I have a hairy anus? That did not sound appropriate. Surely any hair would have to go. Terrance had run his tongue toward my ass once, but I didn’t like it. It was too—icky. I was not a woman with that kind of a fetish, even if Terrance was. And still my pause to Maria’s question continued, because I knew my answer pretty much meant I was deciding the kind of woman I’d be from this point forward.

“No,” I said, finally. “Just the front.”

“Then you’re done,” Maria said.

“You know, what? What the hell?”

“Sorry?”

“Go ahead and do the back,” I said, but telling myself that it was not because I wanted Terrance anywhere near there. Instead, I was just overwhelmingly self-conscious now of the fact that I apparently had a hairy asshole, so much so that if I
didn’t
have it made bare, then it’d probably look just horrible against all that other smooth, hairless, skin. Part of me, though, couldn’t help shake the feeling this was some kind of scam, like when the mechanic tells you there’s carbon build-up that needs removing, or some part of the engine needs to be flushed. I had no idea what I looked like back there.

“We do it doggy style,” Maria said then, her inscrutable face suddenly lighting up, followed by laughter.

I laughed, but being on all fours while a woman waxes and plucks out your ass hairs is, to say the least, humbling.

When Maria was finished, I dressed. Slowly. Even the elastic of my underwear was painful against my skin, and I was pretty sure she hadn’t even waxed up that high. I had entered that morning as a waxing newbie, and left as another casualty.

“You okay?” my son asked me that evening, as I shuffled through the house, my robbed follicles still reporting the theft to the pain centers of my brain.
What we women do for others
, I thought.
And without being asked!

“Just cramps,” I said, as I sat down gingerly beside him to help him with his math homework.

I’d like to interject—so that you have a better picture of me—that I am a mother first, a writer second. And, strange as it might sound, a woman third. But you’re not here wanting to read about raising a son, or about the fleeting joys of restructuring sentences and killing adverbs. Just know that I prided myself then on being a good mother, and that there is more to me than what might be coming across—a sex-starved, newly-liberated, near-middle-age lollipop. Okay, back to our story…

It was a Friday night, and after my son was picked up by his father for the weekend and the brake lights clicked off and matched the darkness of the night, I went for a walk in the cool air. The fields were long harvested and I could see the billowing treetops of the hill far in the distance, and in the sky there were the still-lit contrails of planes from which pilots could still see the sun. I walked across the field to a filling station at the other end, bought a soda (a Friday tradition) and drank it on the walk back. I loved big sky at dusk. All around me I could hear the excited squeaking of mice. The dry machine-sheared stalks under my shoes buckled satisfyingly. It was one of those moments I wish came with a pause button. I’d freeze all of it if I could: the sky, the field, the soda, these elements which felt almost like touchstones of another time, maybe the 1950s. And even though I wasn’t anywhere near born during that era, or could say with any certainty that this moment had some kind of authentic connection to that time, I liked to believe it did. That some things never changed, like the happiness of a woman swilling sugar water under the first wink of Venus and Mars and Jupiter.

I was blowing a one-note ditty across the mouth of my soda bottle when I saw Terrance’s bicycle, leaned there against the stairs leading to my apartment. There was no one at my door, though.

“Terrance?”

I looked at the main house as I climbed upstairs and saw Terrance in the Drake’s sunroom sitting beside Mr. Drake, the two of them watching something on TV, sports. Drake had his fists clenched. I moved up the stairs to my apartment slowly, hoping neither would notice me. I was wearing a skirt cinched only at the waist and, for purely medical, pain-avoidance reasons, no underwear. Without my usual topiary of hair down there I felt every swash of fabric, every swish of breeze. The breeze across the field had been heavenly.

I screamed when I stepped into my living room.

“Oh, sorry. So sorry,” Olivia said. “I startled you.” She was getting up off my sofa with a washcloth in her hands. She squinted at the newly turned on light. “I popped over for some quiet and to borrow something—what a headache—then I must have dozed off.”

“I have some acetaph…, acetamen…, I have some aspirin,” I said.

“Found it, thanks.”

“Is it working?” I asked.

Olivia froze, taking measure. “Nearly,” she judged. She felt her hair and smoothed her blouse.

I turned on more lights. “Is this okay?”

“Please. It’s
your
apartment,” she said. “Is your son gone for the weekend?”

“Yes.”

“What’ll you do with all that freedom?”

“Work,” I said. “I’m so far behind.”

“
Oh?
Terrance cutting into your work schedule?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

I couldn’t help but grin. “It’s crazy, I know. A man, a boy that age with a woman my…”

“Nonsense. You sell yourself short. Moth to a flame. Burn him up, I say. He’s treating you well?”

“Too well.”

“No such thing.”

“Well…”

“Spill it,” Olivia demanded.

I’d never been the kind of woman to divulge this kind of information, as improbable as that may sound to you, reading this. But remember, Eloise is not my real name. I can be intimate without losing any privacy.

Sitting down across from Olivia in my desk chair, swiveling it back and forth slightly, I realized my reticence in sharing this kind of information in the past was due to the fact that I never had much to tell—not because of self-imposed modesty or discretion or respect for a lover.

“He won’t let me return his favors,” I said.

“Specifics. Facts,” Olivia said. “You mean meals, movies, flowers? What?”

“He loves…” I began. “I mean he
really
loves to go down on me. That’s all we do.”

“What luck!”

“True,” I said.

“But you want more.”

“Yes. I mean, no. Yes. I don’t know. I’d like to reciprocate but he won’t let me. Not even, you know, with regular intercourse. And he’s just so,
so
good at what he does. I’m feeling guilty.”

Olivia’s eyes were between my legs, an eye raised. I quickly crossed my legs and flattened my skirt.

“It’s all so, so fetishistic or something,” I said. “He has me tie him up first.”

“Kinky,” Olivia said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

“No,” I said, lying. It felt like we should switch places, she in the chair, me on the amateur shrink’s couch. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Sounds like a yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “Yes. And I saw Maria today, too.”

“Tsch,” she said, shaking her head. “Terrance will be disappointed.”

“Will he?” I asked, something like alarm rising in me.

“A man like that likes a thick bush,” Olivia said, slipping into her shoes.
Terrance said almost the same thing, didn’t he?
, I thought. And I realized, then, that I’d had the waxing not for him, but for me. Still, I wondered if I’d pulled something Samson-like here. Would I lose my appeal with not a hair down there? I
knew
I should have kept something: a landing strip, a soul patch, a
T
for Terrance.

Olivia stood up. I followed her to the door.

“He’s at your place, now,” I said. “Watching a game with Mr. Drake. You know Terrance well?”

“Neighborhood boy,” Olivia said, opening the door and stepping out onto the landing. “Or was, before becoming a man. Used to clean our pool and mow our lawn.

“Oh,” I said. A light breeze stirred the water of the pool, the underwater lights wobbling mirage-like. “Don’t tell him I’m home,” I said as Olivia descended the stairs. “Okay? I need to recuperate from this waxing.”

Olivia turned and waved briefly and was gone.

Back inside, I turned off most of the lights. It was early yet, but I was still in discomfort and figured I’d go for an aspirin and some cold washcloths myself. I lifted up the edge of my skirt and felt down there. So strange. So bare and sensitive, the skin curving in ways I hadn’t felt before, or at least not in a very, very long time. There was a knock at the door. I straightened and dropped the hem of my skirt.

“Eloise?”

I hesitated. More knocking.
Damn that Olivia. What had she told him?

I opened the door slowly. “Hey.”

“Hey you,” Terrance said. Moths flitted about the porch light behind his head.

A thought crossed my mind. “Come in. But just for a minute,” I said. I pulled him inside and turned on a lamp. Then I raised my skirt but my eyes were fixed on his expression. A split second told me everything. Eyes like saucers.