Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (9 page)

I realized, even then of course, that this was all terribly silly. A woman in her thirties telling her ex to watch their son on the pretense of being out of town so she can enjoy a lover. Then, instead of spending the afternoon with her said lover, instead hiding in a closet for no other reason than because she was enticed to. And not even enticed. I had no idea what was going to happen. Could this still be just a ruse?

“Who?” Drake said incredulously from the foot of the stairs. “Give me another name. If I don’t go then the deal falls through. Remember what happened when Werner went. Like a stone. No, worse. We lost the whole contract.”

“But Singapore?”

“Three days.”

“You were just in Singapore!”

“Four days. Tops.”

They were getting closer, climbing the stairs. My right hand twitched from all the pages I’d written just before coming here.

“I just need someone who doesn’t have their head up their ass.”

“What about the young guy you hired?” Olivia asked.

“We hire a dozen young guys every month.”

“The one I was flirting with when I came in a few weeks ago.”

There, I thought, that was something.

“I haven’t seen him around,” Drake muttered. “Wait, no. Fired.”

“Why? He felt compelled to flirt with me.”

“Flirt? No. He was fired because he didn’t know the first thing about risk management. And Chinese, my ass. I didn’t even tell you this, did I? We had the Chinese over and I thought I’d impress him with the language abilities of one of our bottom rungers. Kid lied. Fucking Vietnamese, not even Chinese.”

“Still,” Olivia said. “He was sweet.”

“
I
didn’t fire him. I don’t fire anyone anymore.
I’m
the nice one. God I should retire.”

“What I’ve been saying,” Olivia said.

They were in the room now, their entrance coinciding with my realization that I needed to pee.

“How bad’s the stress today?” Olivia asked.

“Eleven,” Drake said.

“
That bad?
”

“That bad.”

“That doesn’t give me much room to work with, Drakey.”

“I know,” Drake said. I could see him through the slats now. He sat on the bed and took off his shoes. Olivia took off her bracelets, then her earrings and put all of them on the dresser. She looked at the closet and opened the door and I held my breath. She saw the luggage rack, folded it and put it back, and looked for a moment, thoughtful. And then she smiled. She never looked me in the eye. She shut the door.

“Pull it out,” she said.

God she’s direct
, I thought, but I misjudged. Drake reached under the bed and pulled out the suitcase I’d seen earlier while on snoop patrol. Olivia removed a necklace from around her neck with a key at the end and unlocked the suitcase. There were two duffel bags inside. She handed Drake one and took the other for herself, then pushed the empty suitcase back under the bed.

I had made a mistake, I realized. I just knew that within each of their respective duffel bags would emerge a weapon. A pistol with a silencer. A knife. This would be the end of Eloise Spanks who disappeared one Wednesday, having not even been on the flight she’d reportedly told her husband she was returning on, confusing her ex and investigators, brewing speculation by reporters, bringing endless sorrow to her son, fading into oblivion as another embodiment of unanswerable questions. Years from now someone would find a hand or a bit of skull and the local police would scratch their heads, then go have lunch.

I could not have been more wrong.

From Drake’s duffel bag emerged a pair of unattractive pleated beige pants, a folded khaki knit top, and scuffed brown shoes. He proceeded to undress down to his underwear and socks, and I found his front side not half-bad for a man his age, musing that my own ex had not been in such good shape even though he was many years Drake’s junior. And, of course, I’d seen a glimpse of the rest when he’d climbed out of the jacuzzi the evening before. I couldn’t see Olivia anymore, though. Perhaps she’d left the room.

Drake dressed quickly, laced up his shoes, and then rummaged in the bag for something small, something I couldn’t see from my slatted view. He folded the duffel bag and placed it under the bed.

“John!” came a shout. It was both Olivia and not Olivia: louder, harsher, and in a moment I saw her as she barged into the room dressed as a business woman, her hair pinned up in the back with what looked like chopsticks, a black attaché case in her hands.

“Ms. Drake,” Drake said.

“Hello John,” Olivia said.
So that was it. Some kind of play acting, and the little used
John
.
“You taking off?” Olivia said.

“I thought I would.”

“Well,
I
don’t think so. You’re going to be here late tonight.”

“What’s wrong?” Drake asked.

“For starters, where’s your name tag. Everyone down here wears name tags. No exceptions.”

“Right here,” Drake said, holding up a name tag that he hastily pinned to his shirt.

Their banter went on at this level for a couple of minutes and I’ll admit I was not only feeling a sleepy droop of boredom at their play—which, I’ll be honest, had all the dialogue finesse of an adult film—but also at the realization that this book idea would probably not pan out—at least not with this kind of banter. Who’d ever be interested in it? Just then, Olivia pulled a short whip from her attaché case and struck Drake across his shoulder—hard.
Interesting,
I thought.

“You miserable prick,” Olivia said.
More interesting.

Drake held his arm.

Olivia pulled out a thick stack of papers and flung them into the space between her and Drake, the pages seesawing and swirling through the air and landing all over the floor and bed. “You have five minutes to alphabetize these case files by the last names of the field officers.”

“But ma’am…” Drake said. If he wasn’t visibly shaken he was sure good acting it.

“Five,” Olivia said and left the room.

I realized then that except for the time I’d lightly slapped my ex when he was ogling a woman at a party years ago, I’d never seen a woman hit a man like this. I mean, my slap was more to get my then-husband’s attention—this here involved a whip and was nearly biblical in its authority. With the slowest of movements, I climbed down from the closet’s shelving, both to try and see more of what was going on at the more oblique angles of the room, but also so I could make a run for it if things got too intense. By the time I had both feet back on the carpeted floor of the closet, Drake had assembled all the pages on the bed, hastily placing them in a number of piles. I admit I had the thought that I could use Drake as my own personal assistant with the Irldale notes.

“Time!” I heard Olivia shout. For the record, no way was that five minutes.

Drake froze. It was a most peculiar thing to see. My landlord, the executive, the guy in the hot tub fighting the stresses of corporate life and now clad in the beige garb of a lowly assistant. This was some kinky shit. It got kinkier.

In came Olivia. Gone was the business outfit, the pantsuit replaced by a full-on (I-kid-you-not) catsuit that covered her body in glossy black except for three places: both breasts and her, as my grandmother used to say,
naughty bits.
She strode confidently into the room and went straight to the closet, her outfit squeaking with each step. I backed away instinctively, even if she couldn’t see me. The pure black sheen, the sound, the shape of everything about her—that which she revealed and that which was
barely
hidden—belonged to a beyond-sexy, purely pornographic force. It, for a moment, turned off the autonomous system within me. I had to tell myself to breathe. She got up close, too close, until she was pressed against the slatted closet door.

“I hope you enjoy this,” she whispered.

I heard a brief tapping as she moved away, and saw, in a flash, the twin piercings of her nipples. This was a woman who had not had any work done, and to whom gravity had been kind. With my breasts as reference, all I could think was that Olivia had spent more time on her back than I had, doubtlessly lounging, sleeping in late, her days blue and cloudless though this scene here in front of me was getting darker.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you,” Drake said, turning, papers in hand, but many more left unsorted.

“I said I hope you enjoy this,” Olivia said. “Pay attention!” She whipped him again, this time so hard he cried out.

“I’m sorry,” he pleaded.

“I gave you a simple task. And you failed,” Olivia said, or whatever persona she’d adopted, said. She yanked the paper from his hands and looked at him in disgust. “You’re a fucking embarrassment, you know that? You can’t even put A before Z. No wonder this company is about to tank.”

“I’m a failure,” Drake said, adjusting his name tag. He was also wearing a pair of horrible ‘80s glasses: as tall as they were wide: smoky plastic rims, the epitome of geekery and bottom-feeding.

Olivia dropped the papers except for the topmost sheet, then proceeded to rip the page in half, then half again, then again, until it was just ragged squares.

“Eat these,” she ordered, spilling them into Drake’s open hands.

Given Olivia’s getup, I’d expected something…well…sexual, but here was my landlord chewing on cellulose and ink while his wife stood over him, her stilettos sinking into the mattress. She flogged his back while he chewed.

“All of it. Every piece,” she said.

At this point I wasn’t sure who had the fetish: Olivia or her husband.

So as not to be overly voyeuristic, I’m going to put all this in some context, which was provided the following morning at nine when Olivia called and invited me over for breakfast, as though the things I’d seen that evening, up to and far exceeding the paper-eating, were trivial.

I chewed slowly on a bite of muffin (which Olivia insisted was
not
a muffin but a crumpet), washed it down with a slurp of tart grapefruit juice, then cleared my throat. We both sat in the sunroom, a potted palm holding its fronds over the white-robed Olivia, like a servant tasked with providing shade.

“So…” I began, though not sure what to ask first.

“Now you have something to write about, I presume,” Olivia said. “Just change, you know, the names and details. The jobs and locations. Put us out of state.”

“I hadn’t thought that far out,” I said. “I mean, I’m not sure what to write, or if I can or should write about it.”

“Oh,” Olivia said, mock-shocked. “You
have
to include us. You get anyone kinkier, you come straight to me and we’ll exceed it.”

“I don’t think I want to see anything topping last night,” I said. “And I’m not writing the book anytime soon,” I lied. I’d finished another chapter or two by this time.

Olivia smiled in a way that made me feel like she was a mind-reader.

“But I am curious,” I said.

Her teeth broke through her smile. “Go on.”

“You whipped him into a state of panic, excuse the pun.”

“It’s the only thing that relaxes him.”

“Pain?”

“No. Stress. So much stress that he just can’t handle it. He gives in to anything. He gives up control. It’s healthy.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about that.”

The image in my mind was hard to cast aside. After the paper-eating, after tying Drake to the bed, after sitting on his face—and at that part I felt something like shame, for how was I different here than Olivia?, though as an aside there was a difference: Terrance seemed to live to please me in that department/compartment. Drake, on the other hand, had squirmed and struggled, and not in play, it had seemed. Anyway, after lots of demeaning tasks, name-calling, berating, a good half hour or more of piled-on stress that made Drake literally sweat, Olivia stripped him naked and proceeded to do the deed with her husband in a way that, well, it boggles the mind with its backwardness. She strapped on a dildo larger than any natural penis
I’d
ever seen, lubed it up, and stuck it in his ass. And not just that, there was…

“But the phone call?” I asked. “Doesn’t that take it beyond
play?
” The word
play
felt false in my mouth. What I’d seen was more like consensual abuse.

“It can’t all be fun and games, honey,” Olivia said, pouring herself another cup of coffee from a carafe. She adjusted a pillow behind her back, took the cup, and settled into her seat.

I thought back to the night before: Olivia had taken Drake’s phone and made a call with the speakerphone on.

“Yeah Drake,” came the answer after a number of rings in which Olivia was thrusting her strap-on member into her husband, about three or four thrusts to every lash of her whip. The poor guy’s legs were shaking. It was a man’s voice coming from the phone.

“Drake?” came the voice again. “Drake?”

Three…four…whip. I could see Drake shaking his head, his tied hands gripping the sheets so hard they were white.

“Okay, Drake. You’re pocket-dialing me again,” said the voice, then a long pause. “Drake?”

Finally the phone disconnected. At the time, the whole ordeal had left me sweating and wincing from my hiding spot in the closet. There was nothing worse for me than the prospect of someone being caught at something.

“Who were those people you called?” I asked, reaching for a bit more marmalade for my naked muff—crumpet. The object of my question were plural (people) as there had been two other calls made after the first.

“Let’s see,” Olivia said. She touched her thumb to her index finger. “First was the CFO.”

“At his company?”

“Oh, yes.” Thumb on her middle finger. “Then their consul, this woman who I think has her eye on him. I can’t stand her.” Thumb to her fourth finger. “Then there was their compliance officer. Workplace stuff. Sexual harassment, that sort of thing.”

“Jesus.”

“And you, of course.”

“What do you mean?” I said, my mouth still full of my last bite of crumpet.

“You were the last call. Haven’t you listened to your messages?”

I shook my head. Olivia reached over and took my empty plate. “Finished? Go have a listen.”