The Dollhouse Society Volume I: Evelyn (Includes Indecent Proposal, Dreams in Black & White, Playing House, Freeze Frame, plus a bonus story!) (11 page)

“Your boyfriend isn’t here, cunt. No one is. What don’t you squeal for him like a good pig?”

I wouldn’t squeal. I wasn’t the type of girl to make a scene. I wouldn’t give
him
the satisfaction.

Brian moved closer, and I could feel that terrible hate of his all mixed up with jealousy and lust. It was the type of emotional cocktail that made men cut up women and keep their parts in freezers, I realized. He stopped and looked down at my panic with a satisfied expression on his face like the good little sociopath that he was. “What does that motherfucker have that makes you girls let him do the things he does to you? Is it the money, the diamonds? I have money. I have diamonds. I have more money than Ian-fucking-Sterling does. Does he fuck you girls in the ass? Is that what you like?”

I wondered where Mr. Sterling was. I mentally tried to hurry him along.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you, you fucking piece of shit.”

His voice was little more than a sibilant hiss, but I felt the shock of it all through my body as if he had hit me. I looked up. Finally, I was afraid, really afraid. The kind of afraid where your mind starts racing and you start looking at everything in your environment with an eye toward an escape route or a weapon. But I was bound to a chair, and there was nothing practical I could use to defend myself. I wondered about talking him down.

“Go away, Brian, you’re drunk,” I said. My voice was soft, hoarse and maybe a little dangerous-sounding. “Go home and sleep it off. No one wants to play with you tonight.”

Brian smiled and his eyes crawled over me in an unfriendly way. He bent forward just a little and the ice in his drink clinked around. He pinched my nipple, hard, so I whimpered, but not in pleasure. “You know you’re nothing special, cunt. A piece of fucking meat. I wonder if you even realize that. I wonder if you even care. He’s been tapping the ass of that secretary of his for months. Her and a hundred other cunts he drags off the street. But you probably don’t care about that, either, do you?”

I wouldn’t give Brian the satisfaction of looking surprised, or hurt, or
anything
. He was just trying to get to me. To hurt me. I gave him very steady eyes and said, “I’d love to meet the woman who fucked you up, Brian.”

I thought it was a very clever thing to say. Apparently, so did Brian. The smug look on his face broke, and I could see the little cracks of rage there, like flaws in a porcelain vase before the whole thing shatters apart. The level of his hatred for me frightened and surprised me. I was a huge nobody. I wasn’t important enough for anyone to hate. “You have a big fucking mouth, cunt,” he said low, dangerously. He tossed his drink at me. I cried out as the scotch and ice hit me high up in the chest and the coldness immediately slid down my body, toward all my exposed parts. “Why don’t you suck my cock with that big fucking mouth of yours?” he said, fumbling to undo his trousers with drunken precision.

I’m ashamed to admit I started crying then. I used to laugh at girls in horror movies who always became hysterical the moment the monster was revealed, but now, as Brian undid his pants and shoved his cock in my face, I was no different. I’d seen the monster and I wanted to scream and cry and, most of all, run away. I took a deep breath to scream for help, but Brian recognized what I was doing and lunged forward and jammed his hand over my mouth.

I’m not sure if he really meant to do that, or if he was just panicking now because I was—a kind of contagious hysteria. But I didn’t want him touching me, not
him
of all people, and the moment I felt the meat of his hand between my teeth, I bit down. Hard.

Brian roared and jerked his hand back. The edge of his Rolex caught in my grandmother’s pearls and suddenly there were pearls all over the floor, jouncing across the carpet.
“You fuck! You fucking piece of shit!”
he screamed, and I had a moment where I almost wanted to laugh in his face. He sounded like a hysterical old woman. I wanted to ask him if he had any balls at all between his legs, but I didn’t say that. I’d live in New York all my life. I’d been born in Brooklyn. I was smart enough to know you don’t poke a crazy.

Still raging, I saw Brian draw his bleeding fist back, ready to pop punch me square in the jaw. No one had ever hit me before. For all our games, Mr. Sterling had
never
hit me. I wasn’t sure if he was even capable of it. I closed my eyes, hoping his fist would hurt a little less if I didn’t see it coming.

It never came.

When I finally opened my eyes, I sensed rather than saw the enormous shadow looming behind Brian, holding his arm back. The face of the man holding it was twisted into such a brutal mask of rage that I had trouble for a moment recognizing it as Mr. Sterling. I recognized him more by his shape than by his face.
“You dare,”
he said, and those two little words frightened me more than all of Brian’s blustering threats combined. The voice was colder than ice, cold like steel left to freeze in ice, and I had no doubt in my mind that Mr. Sterling could kill a man and feel nothing.

Brian must have sensed it too. His face suddenly turned as white as a sheet. “She’s a whore!” he screamed. “She’s a whore and you treat her like a wife…!”

Mr. Sterling wrenched Brian’s arm down and a little backwards at a hard, bad angle. I could tell he’d had some serious martial arts training. The motion was so smooth and calculated that the sharp crack of Brian’s arm doing things that human arms are never meant to do anatomically filled the room, sounding like the crack of a gunshot. Still not satisfied, Mr. Sterling wrenched the now well-broken arm backward in a restraining hold. The arm looked like rubber, like something in three or four pieces. Brian shrieked like a little girl. The pain had finally caught up with him. I screamed too, the chaos contagious. Mr. Sterling shoved Brian down onto the floor on his face, pinning his broken arm to his back. Mr. Sterling was at least six and a half feet tall. He had to weight close to three hundred pounds, not an inch of which was fat. It had to be like being hit by a locomotive.

Brian’s cries turned to hysterical sobs.

Others began piling into the playroom, drawn to the chaos. I saw Malcolm, with Devon in tow. Malcolm immediately dropped his camera and pushed through the crush of gentlemen and courtesans. He kept saying, “Get him off of him! Get him off of him
now
before he kills Brian!”

Another gentleman I didn’t know leaped forward, but even he and Malcolm were not enough to restrain Mr. Sterling. Two more joined the fray and between the four of them, they were able to prize Mr. Sterling off Brian. It was like watching an elephant being attacked by fleas. I wondered how they would ever do it, but somehow they managed to drag Mr. Sterling into a corner of the boudoir and hold him, though I noticed that Malcolm had to strain to keep his arm firmly wrapped around Mr. Sterling’s upper chest.

“I’ll kill him!”
Mr. Sterling spat, his teeth bared like a lion that mean to kill.
“I’ll fucking gut the bastard…!”
He struggled against all four men, and I think the only thing keeping him from tossing them off and lunging at Brian and making good on his promise was his desire to
not
hurt the other gentlemen attached to him, particularly his friend
,
Malcolm.

“Get him out of here,” Malcolm ordered over Mr. Sterling’s threats. His voice was surprisingly calm, deep and powerful, and I had the feeling that Malcolm, despite being small and nothing very interesting to look at, was very good at controlling his company and his courtier. “Get Brian out of here
now
.”

Two more gentlemen moved forward to pick Brian up off the floor like a writhing sack of flour. They dragged him from the boudoir, but they were less than careful about his broken arm and he screamed and cried the whole way. The expressions on their faces suggested they might be enjoying this a little too much.

Malcolm finally loosened his hold on Mr. Sterling, who was shrugging free anyway. He took one fierce look at me, turned, and punched a sizeable hole in the French wallpaper. His punch went all the way to the studs. I flinched and looked away from the site of Mr. Sterling leaning against the wall, breathing roughly and trying not to kill a man, feeling strangely guilty for having caused all this.

I was tired, so tired.
I sagged in my bon
ds and tried to recall the safe word. I couldn’t. Thankfully, Devon was there beside me, blocking me from the view of the other gentleman and their courtesans, and he stayed with me even after they’d led Mr. Sterling away. Maybe they were afraid of what he might do, that he might go after Brian. “I want to go home,” I told Devon as he went to work on my binds. When my arms were free, I wrapped them around his neck and breathed in his aftershave. “I want to go home, Devon. Take me home.”

“You bet, doll.” He got my legs unbound so I could close myself up properly. Then he lifted me into his arms and carried me from the room.

***

FREEZE FRAME

It was sometime after midnight when my cell phone went off.

I extradited myself out from under my covers and two cats and fumbled around in the dark for my phone on the bedside table. I looked at the lighted alarm clock and saw it was 3:15 in the morning. My pulse jumped. You only ever get bad news at 3:15 in the morning.

“Yeah,” I said, still feeling fuzzyheaded from the dream I’d been having. It wasn’t anything sexual. I’d been dreaming about my grandma, who had passed on close to ten years ago. I’d been dreaming of going up the apartment stairs to her flat, accompanied by someone I couldn’t see, and feeling excited because I was going to introduce her to this very special person for the first time.

There was some deep, raspy breathing for a moment. I sat up, suddenly alarmed, my head clearing quickly. I started thinking maybe it was Brian. Would he really hate me so much as to stalk me? Then I looked at the number on the phone and recognized it.

“Mr. Sterling?”

The man on the line took a deep, rattling breath to speak. “Evelyn…my dove…”

“Mr. Sterling?” I said again, more frantically this time. Suddenly there was a knot in my throat. I sat amidst the rumpled sheets, my cats padding around me with annoyance, and worked on controlling my fluttering heartbeat. The night before he had been so angry, so very angry with Brian, who had tried to attack me at the Dollhouse. I thought Mr. Sterling was going to kill him. “Is everything all right, sir?”

“Evelyn,” he said again. And then: “You have a beautiful voice, Evelyn. Do you know that? I love your voice, Evelyn. I love you, Evelyn…”

He sounded very drunk. I had never heard him like this before, and it reminded of the time that Clarissa had drunk called me at two o’clock in the morning to tell me she was going to kill herself when her boyfriend broke up with her the last time. I slid out from under the covers and start scrambling around in the dark for my clothes. I kept talking to him even as I made my way out of the apartment, down the backstairs, and out to the curb. I signaled to a cab and told him where to take me. I was shaking a little as I sat on the worn vinyl seat and listened to Mr. Sterling mumbling drunkenly into the phone.

He’d grown silent by the time I’d reached his white-glove apartment building on Central Park West. The doorman and night concierge knew me well enough to let me up. I took the glass elevator to the penthouse suite and let myself into his apartment with the little keycard he’d given me.

I found him in the living room, dressed in his shirtsleeves, and sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, his cell phone blinking on the floor beside him. He’d finished off two bottles of expensive scotch and was working through a third. He was surrounded by broken glass, porcelain, shattered seashells, and various crystals. There were holes in his walls. I stopped in the doorway and looked at the minefield of debris scattered across the carpet. He’d trashed the room, broken damned near everything in it, including some of the antique erotica that decorated the walls.

When he finally looked up at me, it wasn’t with the eyes of the man I knew. It wasn’t the eyes of Ian Sterling, CEO of Sterling of New York, possibly the most powerful man in New York City. It wasn’t the eyes of my gentleman, able to mete out pleasure and pain in equal measure. There was so much pain and rage locked behind his pale blue eyes and wireframe glasses that I was afraid to approach him for a moment. I was afraid he would lash out blindly at me.

Then I saw the blood on his hands where he’d broken his knuckles, and it galvanized me. I picked my way across the broken debris until I was standing beside him. He shuffled around a little, knocking over the bottle of scotch on the floor beside him. “She liked shells,” he said in a voice that sounded like there was cotton stuffed in his mouth. “She liked shells but you like pearls…”

“You should go to bed, Mr. Sterling,” I said.

I helped him up, no small feat. He was huge, but I was tall and not weak. Digging my way under his arm to keep him upright like a human crutch, I walked him down the hallway to his bedroom. We made a detour into the bathroom so he could throw up all over the toilet, then I walked him the rest of the way to his room.

After I got him into bed, I paired him down to just his trousers. Then I went back into the bathroom to retrieve the First Aid kit and went to work cleaning the ugly gouges in his knuckles with astringent. I was wrestling with the covers when he grabbed me. He was so strong he dragged me right down into the bed with him as if I really were a doll. He spooned his body against mine, his hands moving over my belly and breasts, and buried his face in my hair. He trembled against me and said something about the pearls again.