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

Of the rooms upstairs, there were three bedrooms to narrow down to the one. First, a master bedroom, then a bedroom/library, and finally a plain guest bedroom. It was this last room that Olivia’s note had referred to:
the one facing the woods.
I could find nothing remarkable about the room. There was a queen-size bed under the cloud of a feather duvet, a dresser holding nothing more than a satchel of lavender, and a small writing table with a book on South African art lying splayed, spine up on the chair. Drawing the folding louvered closet doors aside, I was met with an empty curtain rod and a wicker hamper in one corner of the closet. I stepped into the closet and onto the carpet that was softer and darker from little traffic. I drew closed the doors and sat on the lid of the wicker basket for at least five minutes just to try and fathom what I’d missed. I had a fair view of the room from here. I could see down through the horizontal openings in the louvered slats, down at the edge of the bed, at the light beige carpet. I notice then a pair of men’s shoes set neatly together, each filled with the honey-colored wood of a shoehorn. I startled me for a moment, as I hadn’t recalled seeing them a moment ago. But of course, they’d been there all along. I just hadn’t looked at this side of the bed until now. It was 12:35 pm, a Wednesday, and my heart was somewhere around 120 bpm. My irrational, curious heart.

I tried to imagine what Olivia had meant by her note. Did Olivia expect me to watch the two of them during afternoon love-making? I didn’t know. Was it still all a put-on?

I left the closet and got to work: Eloise Spanks, first-rate snooper. It’s something I’m natural at. Qualms of invading privacy—regardless of what I’ve told my son—don’t really affect me. It comes from being a writer, I suppose; the need to scope the scene, uncover the motivations, glean as much information from appearances and bring the light to the darkness. Not that I was an expert. After all, I hadn’t caught my husband’s affair. There are things the heart holds back from the gray matter. Traitor.

I was disappointed to uncover so little in the Drake residence. The prescriptions in the master bath told me only what the Drakes suffered from intermittently. If they suffered from anything more, then those prescriptions travelled with them. If there was a stash of lingerie, sex toys, or porn, well, it was well hidden. And since I didn’t find any, my guess was on
well hidden.
They either read copiously, or had earlier in their lives, or perhaps they just amassed lots of books they planned to read one day. An entire shelf in the library was devoted to French erotica of a kind I hadn’t seen before: a series of neatly bound dark blue books with sewn-in red silk bookmarks. My distant high school French couldn’t really decipher it with any degree of accuracy other than to know that it was smut. Highfalutin French smut, but still smut. Honestly, though, it was the drawings that tickled me: simple line drawings of men and women coupling. But that was the extent of any titillation, both in the books and in the house. It was an otherwise normal house as far as I could see, of a class of people far above mine, monetarily and athletically speaking.

I was persistent, though, in my snooping, hoping to catch a new detail every time I came over to water and take in the mail. I think I even began to over-water—I began finding tiny clouds of flying insects bumbling through the air above the moist soil of the plants, the kind that live a day, if that. Upstairs, the dresser drawers were still empty, the shoes still horned, the wastepaper basket holding nothing of intrigue: just an empty water bottle. Under the bed—my snooping was now down to the ground-level—I discovered a large suitcase, but it was locked, ending my investigation of the bedroom of interest. With only a week left until Olivia and Drake returned, I had no more places for my imagination to roam within the house and uncover clues as to what went on here. Mostly I was disappointed that I couldn’t uncover what Olivia’s note alluded to without accepting her invitation. I was disappointed, in other words, that I couldn’t cheat, that I couldn’t remain timid. Because the extreme invasion of privacy I was engaged in was really just an expression of my timidity. Whatever Wednesdays were all about, they rested in Olivia’s and Drake’s minds and actions only. It drove me crazy.

What I’m about to confess is, I’ll admit, a little sad. But I do so just so you have a baseline of where I was coming from before Olivia began to affect my life.

On the Friday before they returned, as I was working at my laptop, the pool guy pulled into the drive. He was earlier than usual. He was not a young, ripped, shirtless all-American catalog sex object, but a short tidy man who looked like he should have amounted to more in his life by this age of his life (late 30s). He seemed, in other words, like a boss who’d had to let go of all his employees and do the work himself. He was pale for outdoor work, and pale for someone south of the border. All this, combined with the wide-brimmed straw hat which he usually wore while working, would have excluded him from the pantheon of most women’s fantasy objects. And yet this specimen of a mortal man is what my imagination had to work with this particular afternoon just a few days shy of my cycle, when I typically get the craving.

I hurried from my desk in the living room to my bedroom. From here I had a good view out over the back of the house and, more specifically, the pool. The van said
Gabriel’s Pool and Water Gardens
on the side and wore on its back doors the slightly larger-than-life size photo of a smiling blonde man, likely Gabriel’s boss, and probably even more likely Gabriel’s boss as he must have looked at the beginning of the expansion of his sad little empire sometime in the early 1970s—judging from the haircut and the clothes of the painted cutout. In fact, Gabriel was probably dead, if he ever existed at all. Still, it was the name
Gabriel
I gave to the pool guy as he donned his straw hat and lugged his equipment from the rear of the van. Gabriel the cut-out waved to me, still as can be, a pool net clutched in his hands. Then the door closed and
my
Gabriel carried his equipment to the pool.

It would be a few minutes before Gabriel began skimming the leaves off the surface of the pool. And I know, I know, how original: a pool boy fantasy. It sounds like another cliche of fiction. So let’s get it out of the way: I don’t have sex with him.

On two previous occasions, however, I’d gotten myself to a state thanks to Gabriel, and this time started no differently. I pulled my jeans down to my ankles and hiked up my T-shirt and lay on my bed, propping myself up with pillows so I could see out over the top of Gabriel’s van and to the pool and back of the house. Now, I’ve read a few depictions of masturbation, and I’ve glanced at it in a very few adult films, and I’ve had a few discussions about it with friends over the years, but I don’t really know how the average reader, you, for example, goes about it. And so part of me wants to just skip this scene in case it makes you cringe with embarrassment for me. Or, rather, I feel like skipping this scene simply because it makes
me
cringe just contemplating setting it down. Because, let’s face it, masturbation is just plain weird. We go about life ignoring our little pains and heartaches, we are too often unkind to our waistlines, our lungs, our livers. We’re killing ourselves, shaving years off the seemingly distant end of our lives. But then there’s this sudden accretion of minutes where we literally can’t get enough of ourselves. We just can’t get enough. We love ourselves like crazy. So. Exhibit A:

By the time Gabriel had reached the pool, I was running my fingertips up along the inside of my thighs, around my admittedly unshaven bush and up to my nipples. I wet my index fingers with my tongue, crossed my hands at the wrists and played with my nipples until I felt whatever strange electricity they generate conduct its message both up to my head and down to my legs. I kicked of my jeans and underwear. By the time Gabriel was emptying his first net of leaves from the large sycamore, I was wet and my fingers had worked past the hedgerow of hair (and my mental note to shave, and my second mental note that what, exactly, was the point when my fingers would be the only ones to see this hair) and I carried the wetness up with my fingers to my clitoris and then I dug my heels into the bed and rubbed and rubbed and watched sweet, sweet Gabriel. And then the phone rang and I immediately saw it in my head: that red block on my calendar, the phone conference I’d forgotten to join.

I picked up my phone, apologized, and moved back to my desk as I simultaneously put on a robe. And while the temptation to continue stroking myself was there, it was killed by the lethargic voice on the other end, an editor and an author who, after a long thirty minutes, had given me a few notes that they could just as well have sent in an e-mail—or a text message, if they even knew what that was. No industry except paleontology has more dinosaurs than publishing, let me tell you.

By the time I returned to my bedroom Gabriel had finished cleaning the pool and was now hidden behind a hedge that separated the pool from the jacuzzi. I checked: I was dry again, but my brain was still sopped wet with want. I cinched my robe more tightly around my waist and quietly left the apartment, sprinting across the drive to the front doors, keys in hand. I let myself inside the house. There was no sound but the familiar ticking of clocks and then the muffled notes of Gabriel singing something: a ditty in Spanish. I was there for purely logistical reasons: the bedroom above offered an excellent view down to the jacuzzi.

Upstairs, I stood in front of the window in the narrow space between the bed and the dresser. Ever so slowly I turned the horizontal blinds until I could see down. A strip of sweat soaked Gabriel’s shirt. Backs were nice. All the fat hangs hidden. But Gabriel would be done in minutes. I opened my robe and ran my hand quickly across my breasts, pulled at my nipples to kickstart my body, and there it was: wet again. I heard a car then and the index and middle fingers of my right hand froze within me, as did the pointer finger of my left hand there on my clit. (No, I’m not left-handed, I just like to mix it up.) And I, too, was frozen. I could, of course, move, but there was this panicky hope that the sound I’d heard wasn’t real, that I wouldn’t have to do anything different, that I could, finally, just get off and take a nap before completing another hour of work and getting on with the drudgery of routine. Trick was, I told myself, I just had to not move.

But no, a car door slammed and my hands were retying my robe and I was waiting for the sound of the downstairs front door to open. Instead, I heard Gabriel speaking and looked down to see him head back to the pool, and then I saw a woman run toward him and kiss him and then disappear under the back porch. She was black, which I mention only because when she reemerged in a white bikini, the contrast was just stunning. She had the kind of figure you only see in places far from me: California, or the Mediterranean. The water in the pool was still and hardly moved after she dove. I watched her large cloud of hair shrink and wrap against her head underwater. My eyes followed her form as she swam the length of the pool. I stepped back slightly from the window when she turned and swam back, surfacing for a breath. But she didn’t see me. Her eyes were on Gabriel.

“Come in,” she said, but Gabriel said only “no, no, no,” casually.

I felt such disappointment in Gabriel then. Who was she? How did a lowly pool cleaner know someone like this woman, now swimming back, her body billowing and contracting under the now-alive water? The contrast between her skin and bathing suit was stunning—and I mean this in a purely aesthetic sense: she was not turning me on. Only making me jealous. I don’t swing that way, though I wish I did. Life would be so much simpler, it often seems. Maybe. Probably not.

What got me going again was the thought of my little unaware fantasy play-thing, Gabriel, stripping down to his underwear and enjoying the pool while the owners were away. I willed him to do it, but couldn’t hear what he was saying to the woman. She splashed him with water. And then, after a pause, out came her top and bottom, flung at him like two besotted white doves. She floated on her back, her breasts a slightly lighter shade of dark caramel, for want of a better word. And then it happened: Gabriel dove, buck-naked, into the pool. He swam after her until he caught her in a corner and they kissed and by now my hands were working my body’s mechanics again and I didn’t care when the phone in the house rang, or that I’d been standing there on the carpet for a good ten minutes already. My arms, though, were tired.

The woman slipped away from Gabriel and swam half the length of the pool before lifting herself out, and now, okay,
now
, that body
did
turn me on at some level, my body rooting for both teams, it didn’t care. It just wanted to get off. They were now right below me, at the jacuzzi. My pool man Gabriel, he of the long blue debris net and the van with the squeaky breaks, the man I’d pitied (even while he was the focus of my imagination), began fucking the gorgeous woman below him, below me, and I heard a little yelp and that yelp was from my throat. I’d never seen anyone have sex before, in person: no one but me and my ex-husband, once, in a mirror. It was pure torture seeing myself there in what seemed a clumsy mess of receptive thrusts and awkward bucking. I recall not having an orgasm that night. What I saw below me, though, was entirely different.

For the record, let me state that I had never owned a vibrator or a dildo—I wasn’t the kind of woman who thought of herself as that kind of woman—but damn it I wish I had. Maybe then I wouldn’t have done what I did next: I got up on the bed and kneeled at the corner nearest the window, and rubbed myself against a rounded bedpost. And then I got up, one leg stretched out to the windowsill for stability, the other shaking as I lowered myself over the post and felt the dark hard wood (yes, I know, a pun but it really was a dark-stained mahogany turned bedpost) enter me: first the round end, then the three rings of the profile, and then ending where the post went from round to square. It was too much to handle and for only the second time in my life I squirted as I came, which, should any men ever read this, yes, it’s a real thing, and no, don’t go suggesting giant insertions to the woman in your life in the hopes of “achieving” this. Why? Picture me, climaxing, feet slipping from the windowsill, hands pressing against the headboard to stop an impalement, then me lying back against the bed, still quirting over my landlord’s duvet.