Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (29 page)

Terrance saw me first and jaywalked across the intersection, a bouquet in his hand. Thoughtful, impractical. We were three miles from our destination.

“I’d have settled for a kiss,” I said.

He kissed me, crushing cellophane between us. It was a simple, old-fashioned kiss. He handed me the flowers.

“Keep holding it,” I said, reaching into my back pocket. I felt the map and felt the other pocket and pulled. In my hands I held a bandana. I folded it until it made a decent blindfold, then stepped behind him.

“In public?” Terrance asked. “Have I created another sexpot?”

“You’d like that,” I said. “Hold still. Can you see?”

“Nothing. It’s perfumed,” he said.

“Little touches,” I said, though I’d scented the bandana for another reason. The distinctive scent of a few well-spaced restaurants could let him recreate our route. Think I was being overly cautious? Remember, Terrance could digest telescope data and tell me the chemical makeup, rotation speed, and distance of a star. I imagined finding me would be easy. But for now, his nose smelled only
Garden of Lilac
or something like that. The perfume was one of those thoughtful, hideous gifts from my son a Christmas ago.

“You know there’s laws against public indecency,” he said, teasing, as he felt my hands at the buttons of his shirt. He was thinking
down
; I was buttoning up.

“You’re showing a bit too much skin,” I said. “I’ll take that now,” I added, encircling the bouquet’s rubber-banded base. The flowers were unbelievably colorful, more perfect than true flowers should be. Also, odorless.

“We’re going to take a little walk,” I said.

“Mob talk,” he said, joking.

I thought instantly of my little interrogation of his Tuesday girls and smiled. “Not quite.”

My hand in his, I led him down the street. It was like leading the blind. I had to remember to think for two, to notice the curb’s drop, the smear of dog shit, the locked bicycle’s front wheel extending too far into the sidewalk’s path. (Little did I know that the universe would take note of this action of mine. But I’ll save that for another book.) We turned left, left, right, left, right, right, left, left, right, left, with some jaywalking thrown in for good measure. I know because I still have that map. At the time, I’d wedged it between the stems of the flowers to help guide me. Now, reader, without going back and looking, give me that sequence of lefts and rights. Can’t do it? Then neither could Terrance.

We went through neighborhoods I’d never seen before, having made most of my long-distance journeys by mass transit down main avenues. We passed mothers with strollers who pointed us out and smiled, thinking there was something grand at the end of our journey: a surprise party, a roast, fun of the kind they hadn’t had for awhile. We swept around a procession of the elderly pushed in their wheelchairs by their young and darker help. We passed a few homeless migrating from one broad thoroughfare to another.

As Terrance talked about his studies and his teaching, I found myself searching for someone. Not the mothers, not the old people. Maybe it was my overabundance of—not happiness, no, but contentment: I had an apartment lined up, a new job, my son in school, Terrance by the hand. Everything was feeling so right that I felt it all had to go horribly wrong. Maybe I could assuage that suspicion by doing some good. Or maybe I just felt that I was headed toward sin and I had one last act of kindness to still commit. Either way, I’m sure there was some biological imperative behind my need to commit a kind act.

But no one seemed right, not until just before the neighborhood ended and gave way to a more industrial section of the city. I saw her. A woman my age on a porch swing. The length of the chains supporting the swing were unequal; the swing sank subtly toward the end closest to the home’s open door. There sat the woman with her legs drawn to her and hugged tight by one arm. She looked worse than me: worn, tired. There were a few green oxygen tanks sitting outside by the door. She looked healthy enough, though. There was someone inside, I inferred. A mother or father. She’d come out for a cigarette.

“Wait here,” I told Terrance and left him at the break in the weed-choked, rose-less rose bushes. I went up the walk, up the steps, the woman’s head tilting back to take me in as I grew close. I didn’t say anything. I plucked my map out from amid the flowers’ stems, then handed her the bouquet. She took them without a smile on her face, just blank. She pinched off a bit of tobacco from her tongue.

“There’s no card,” she said.

“They’re for you,” I said, and took the steps back down.

“Wait,” she said and I did. “I don’t know you,” she said.

“I don’t know you either,” I said, heading back to Terrance.

It was a throwaway gesture on my part. They weren’t my flowers, really. Flowers just wilt more quickly in my care. And though I could sense that flowers had come to that house before, I doubt any had come for her, the caregiver. I could see a faint smile on her lips as I put my arm into Terrance’s and pulled him. “Onward,” I said.

“Thank you,” the woman said, and I heard her get off her swing and then the wheeze and slap of her screen door.

“Miss,” a voice said from the next house we passed. The voice came from an older woman kneeling on the porch beside a beast of a dog. She held a brush attached to a cat-size ball of fur. “You can leave that one with me, if you like,” she said, pointing the brush at Terrance.

Now it was my turn to smile. “Sorry,” I said. “Not today.”

She shrugged and went back to brushing. “Just you and me Fidel,” she said.

“Where
are
we?” Terrance said.

I laughed, enjoying his confusion. “Nearly there.” Another left, right, left. Through the lobby, pausing at the elevator.

“Hotel?”

“Shh,” I said, then pushed him through the break in the elevator doors. Just my luck: Petunia was on her way out. Her mouth opened wide at the sight of Terrance. I’d told her about him in broad strokes and, with a finer brush, a few points about my plan for keeping this relationship from consuming me like last time. I put my fingers to my lips as Terrance and I exchanged places with Petunia. Before the door closed, she leaned forward and whispered.

“Your packages came,” she said, just as the doors began closing, leaving me with a quick image of her grabbing her crotch. “Oh, and my team will be coming…” she said full voice, but the elevator shut her out as though it knew I didn’t want to hear from Petunia right now.

“Who was that?” Terrance asked.

“No idea,” I said as we went up. Terrance kissed me, but it didn’t take long to reach the penultimate floor. The elevator dinged and I led him out.

A wide lane wound past the elevator, the sides drawn with cereal boxes. In the middle sat a large toy car, upside down, a remote control lying on a chair swiped from a nearby cubicle. After my son and I moved into the apartment I’d secured, I was going to need to come down on him on homework. I was also going to need to weed him off three dozen preservatives and food additives. A cereal detox program might not be a bad idea.

“Give me your phone,” I said again. This time I shut it down. All of my precautions could be undone with the help of GPS. And I want to emphasize here that these precautions of mine were not because of Terrance, not because of any physical threat—though I was taking the same precautions one would take in a situation of, say, domestic abuse. No, the threat was
me.
If Terrance knew where I lived, he’d visit every day and I’d let him, I’d dissolve, willpower’s melting point being precisely the temperature of his wet tongue. And then where would I be? Well, I knew. As do you if you’ve been following along since the beginning. I didn’t plan to degenerate quite that far this time.

I hadn’t planned to take off the blindfold, but we were fogged in; there was no chance Terrance would be able to tell where we were now. I turned on a bank of lights and then returned and began untying the bandana.

“Where
are
we?” Terrance asked, for about the tenth time that late afternoon. He squinted as the blindfold came off, his hand held out against the lights. His arm came down slowly and then he looked to me and raised an eyebrow, utterly perplexed.

“This is where I’ve been hiding,” I said. I kicked a box of cereal to him. “Hungry?”

Just then I heard a whine and around the corner of the elevator column came a tiny helicopter, halting suddenly to hover drone-like in front of us. Some little servo whined as the helicopter swayed back and forth, kept aloft on four encircled rotors. I suspected we were being watched.

“Hi Mom,” the helicopter said.

“[redacted]?” I said. As ridiculous as it is in hindsight, at the time it actually felt like my son had been transformed into this little machine. A witch angered, a curse spoken. But then I saw Eli riding an office chair that she propelled backwards towards us with kicking feet. My son came next, walking and holding Eli’s phone. The helicopter landed at my feet. Terrance picked it up.

“Why aren’t you in school?” I asked the two of them.

“Early release day,” Eli said.

“Since when?” I asked.

Eli shrugged. I saw their backpacks now by the elevator, but still I didn’t trust them.

“Hooky,” Terrance said. “I can smell it on them.”

It was possible. My son had certainly skipped classes last year. He’d done so then first to avoid bullying, then to fit in with his tormentors. A kid with Stockholm syndrome. But now? I decided there was no point in pursuing it given the current present company. After all, I’d told my son I’d be at interviews all day, the little lie I told to explain my unusual hours. I would have died if my son discovered what I was doing instead, there on the second floor of a building only a mile away.

“You remember Terrance,” I said to my son.

“Yeah,” my son said, with all the enthusiasm of a stone.

“Hi, I’m Miss Eli Alabaster,” Eli said, holding her hand out to shake Terrance’s. Or so I thought. I noticed it was held flat-side up, awaiting a kiss.
Jesus.

Terrance gave me a grin and he complied. Weirdo to weirdo.

I hadn’t expected my son to see Terrance again, and his standoffish reaction was as expected. But there was something more to it than his usual attitude. Something darker to his stare, and I suspected it had to do with the way Eli seemed more than a little bit interested in the handsome young man brought into her domain. And for a moment I wanted Terrance and Eli to be gone and for the floor to be just my son’s and mine again. The good mother. The good son. But if you’re always the good mother, what’s the fun in that? He’d have to learn to let me have my fun, even if the only outward evidence of it was an occasional sight of Terrance.

Terrance was an angel for the next hour. He, Eli, and my son rebuilt the cereal box pyramid, but with an interesting lattice structure that only Terrance could have conjured up. Eli wanted to know everything about him, but he kept it simple: he was a Ph.D. student in astrophysics. He liked Berkeley. No, he didn’t surf. Yes, he was also afraid of sharks. This much was also true: Terrance was closer in age to Eli and my son than he was to me, a fact I felt as I went alone to our rooms and began some preliminary packing for tomorrow’s apartment move, folding clothes, latching suitcases, all while the
kids
continued to play.

Eli got a call from her mother and went upstairs and Terrance joined my son in a few games of pinball. There was a strange awkwardness in a twenty-something interacting with a young teenager. These represented two groups exceptionally close in age when measured against the whole of a human lifespan, and yet they each belonged to generations that are so rarely in any kind of contact. The awkwardness was okay, though, for I didn’t anticipate them interacting much after now. At least Terrance was helping to give my son a positive impression of himself and, I hoped, giving my son a reason to explain why I would choose to hang out with him.

Just as I was began to consider taking Terrance back home, or perhaps blindfolding him for a trip to some anonymous restaurant, Eli returned with the ding of the elevator and invited us all out to a movie. I was more than relieved when Terrance declined, for then my little game would be up and he’d know where he was in Eloise’s world. I knew the reason for the polite turndown the moment the elevator doors closed on Eli and my son.

“Half hour there,” Terrance said. “Two hours with previews if we’re conservative. Half hour back. I have three hours to rock your world.”

“I hate that phrase,” I said. “Besides…”

Terrance came up to me and kissed me, this time his tongue flighty within my mouth. This moved into pursed kisses below my ears, then the tip of his tongue running down my neck. That was all it took; I was wet, melting. But not brain dead.

“Look,” I said, breaking us apart. “Slow, remember.”

“Like this?” He then moved to kiss me again, but in an exaggerated slow motion, his leg rising to step forward, his head turning sideways slowly, tongue extending so slowly it reminded me of those nature shows where they show a frog or snake in slow-mo as their endlessly long tongues reach out to nab their prey. I felt a little like that: prey. That was not part of my plan.

“You’re
so
strange,” I said.

“Hey, now,” he said. “Just keeping the mood light. You’re not your usual self, I can tell.”

“This isn’t exactly the place for romance,” I said, gesturing at the cubicles, the copy machine still partially surrounded by cardboard, the water cooler without a tank of water, the faces of cereal box characters smiling crazily at us in a line that reached to one wall of windows. Terrance’s eyes followed my gaze.

“Then why did you bring me here?” he said.

“Maybe that was why,” I said. “Maybe I just wanted to show you the view.”

“Well, I think we can be creative,” he said. “Come on.”

He took my hand and moved into a cluster of cubicles. He rushed off and I heard him going from one empty workspace to another, his head popping up over the partitions, disappearing. He returned a few minutes later clutching an octopus of spiral telephone cords that dangled to his shoes.