The Dollhouse Society Volume I: Evelyn (Includes Indecent Proposal, Dreams in Black & White, Playing House, Freeze Frame, plus a bonus story!) (8 page)

He pulled me upright on the bed, onto my knees, so my back was pressed to his chest, his hands pinching my bare tits until I stopped struggling to escape him. He knew, as well as I did, that if I truly wanted escape, I only needed to use the safe word. Then all play would stop in the Dollhouse. The angle and depth of his thrusts changed, going deeper and harder into me. I groaned at the sheer, bruising impacts, at the way he moved inside me, pounding me into submission. He held me in his teeth and shuddered violently as he neared his climax. Then he came hard, grunting and slamming himself all the way up inside me, and his orgasm brought me as well. I screamed and thrashed in his embrace as my inner muscles tightened down around him, milking him over and over, taking as much of him as I could.

We finally collapsed to the bed with him still firmly embedded in me. Even soft he was huge and filled me. We stayed that way for a moment as we recovered. “My courtesan,” he groaned into my hair as his soft, hoarse voice took on human inflection again. His lips brushed the bruise on the back of my neck. My lover, my gentleman, was licking me tenderly in the aftermath of his violence. “You’re so warm and perfect and beautiful and everything I want.”

Perhaps his words embarrassed him, because he stopped speaking then. Slowly he pushed himself up, letting up the terrific pressure of his body, and worked on freeing himself from me, slowly, an inch at a time. I knew he didn’t want to hurt me anymore than he had.

We lay side my side on the big white bed while the others at the foot of the dais began drifting away to other rooms in the Dollhouse. All the good chemicals were wearing off and I realized I ached all the way up to my bruised womb, but it was a good ache. It was an ache I cherished. He pressed himself against me, touching my face, kissing me desperately and sucking my tongue into his mouth as if he meant to memorize my taste. It felt good to snuggle against him like that, my naked chill pressed to his warmth. I imagined lying in his bed like this, the two of us together. I didn’t even mind the aches and bruises.

“Stay with me, Evelyn,” Mr. Sterling said, burying his face in my hair. His voice sounded desperate. It was a tone I’d never heard from him before. “Don’t leave me.” His hand moved protectively over my hair.

“Yes, sir.” I didn’t know what he meant, exactly, but I had no intention of getting up just yet. I didn’t think I could.

Most of our audience had drifted away to other rooms, leaving only Brian and a few others down on the floor. He glared at me over Mr. Sterling’s shoulder, a combination of contempt, jealousy and lust etched across his face.

I heard the distant growl of thunder overhead. I knew a storm was coming.

***

PLAYING HOUSE

“Oh wow, these are really nice!” I said, looking at the array of vacation photographs covering my workstation. Clarissa stood over me, looking very pleased with herself and perhaps a little smug. I looked at pictures of her and her boyfriend at the airport, wearing hats and sunglasses, waving, pictures of them goofing on the Eiffel Tower together, and Clarissa, alone, posing like a model in front of the Arc de Triomphe. I felt a little pang of jealousy. She looked so beautiful, and Paris looked amazing, like New York City, only cleaner and better lit and full of history and architecture.

I thought how nice it would be to see Europe. Paris first, and then a quick ferry over the English Channel to London. I thought about seeing the Louvre and the London Museum of Natural History. I’d never been outside of New York, and I wondered if Mr. Sterling would take me someday. Probably not. I knew he owned flats in all the major European cities, but he never went anywhere. He never left New York anymore.

His wife and son had died while on vacation on the French Riviera, their plane having crashed into the Mediterranean. I didn’t think Mr. Sterling would be taking me anywhere.

Of course, I could always go on my own, I thought, particularly now that I was in Mr. Sterling’s permanent employ. When my electronic paycheck had gone into my bank account on Friday, I’d come as close to having a major heart attack as I’d ever been. I had never owned that many zeroes in my life! Every two weeks, on payday, I gave my mom thirty percent of my paycheck to help cover her rent in the city, but this week I was stumped as to how to give her that much money without her thinking I had knocked over a small bank. So, yeah, I could go to Paris if I wanted to. But who wanted to go to Paris alone?

“Did you miss me while I was gone?” Clarissa asked, grinning and leaning across the partition that separated our cubicles. She was enjoying the fact that she’d just spent two whole weeks in the city of lights while the rest of us wage slaves worked the pool at Sterling Cosmetics.

“It wasn’t the same without you,” I said. And then I saw her staring at me very closely.

She squinted. “You look different, Evie. Did you change your hair or something?”

I almost blushed. Clarissa can be very astute at times.

For the past two weeks, while she’d been in Paris, I’d been with Mr. Sterling. After work every day, he sent his driver round to pick me up at my apartment. Usually we had dinner at a nice, elegant, tucked-away place, but once he took me to the symphony, and another time, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’d been there before, of course, but it was nice seeing the exhibits while he held my hand. After dinner, we usually returned to his penthouse suite on Central Park West and he made love to me on his enormous, king-sized, four-poster bed full of white satin sheets. Sometimes he was gentle. At other times, I came away delightfully sore. Sometimes, afterward, I read to him from whatever was on my personal reading list, and sometimes I just sat among his rumpled sheets and listened to him explain some issue he was having with the corporation. I didn’t know how to help him with the issues, I didn’t even know how a corporation really ran, but I still listened, and I learned that that was really all he wanted. He wanted me to listen. He wanted me to be there.

His apartment was as huge and luxurious and wintry white and naked of furnishing as you can imagine. What few accents he had were hard and natural. He liked stones and crystals and seashells, and he clustered them together in all different places. He had a housekeeper, but no family or friends. Not even a pet. It was a very cold apartment.

On Friday, when I’d gotten the unexpected bonus in my pay, he’d also presented me with a gold card in his name. He said it had no credit limits. He told me I could buy anything I wanted. I didn’t, though. I felt funny about spending someone else’s money. I really wasn’t a “rags to riches” kind of girl. I
had
gotten my nails done just yesterday (on my own dime) after Mr. Sterling told me how much it hurt him to see me biting my nails off all the time.

I waggled my fingers, showing off my French manicure to Clarissa. “You like?”

“Wow.” She took my hands and looked them over like she didn’t recognize them. “Since when do you get your nails done at the salon, Evie? I thought you said that was a waste of money?”

“Yes, I know.” Ever since I’d become the professional courtesan to one of the most powerful men in the city, I’d changed. I had to be pretty now—or as pretty as I could be, anyway. It was my job. It was what Mr. Sterling expected. But, of course, I couldn’t tell Clarissa that. She’d immediately tell me that I was being taken advantage of, that Mr. Sterling was using me, had bought me like some common prostitute. Maybe he
was
buying me, using me, and maybe it was wrong for me to let him do so, but the attention he showed me was nice. It made me feel
not invisible
. It made me feel pretty when I’d never felt pretty in my whole life.

I was a big girl. I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew he’d get tired of me. I knew it wasn’t love. But I wanted to enjoy it for as long as I could.

I looked again at the pictures of Clarissa and her boyfriend kissing for the camera. Was I wrong to want that?

***

On the way home from work, I stopped at a little vintage dress shop in Soho. I knew they had a fantastic array of dresses, and Mr. Sterling and I were visiting the Dollhouse tonight for a Society meet. I decided I couldn’t wear the little black dress again. Someone might remember it, and then someone might laugh at the poor girl. Or, at least, that was the little nibbling fear at the back of my mind. The other courtesans were nice enough, but beautiful. Really beautiful. Movie-star material, as fantastic as human peacocks. If they saw me in a twice-worn dress, they might think less of me.

I chose a silver flapper-style dress, partly because I liked it, but mostly because it was one of the few dresses in the shop that would fit a girl who stood six feet tall. It still came very short on me, but then, Mr. Sterling liked me in short dresses. I decided it would look good with my grandmother’s double string of pearls.

This being a Friday, the subs were running slow as usual, and I only just managed to get home in time to feed my cats, shower and change into my dress and heels before it was time to go. I was playing with the pearls in the mirror, remembering my grandmother, when a text came up on my phone. I rushed downstairs and Mr. Sterling collected me in the Mercedes-Benz.

He looked slim and fitted in his Italian tuxedo. He’d opted for gold wire frame glasses tonight. His cufflinks and the small diamond-studded pin in his cravat looked like gold as well, real gold. We sat together in the dark of the car, riding silently toward Staten Island, and I read to him from an English version of
Gigi
by the French writer Colette. The novel was about a young Parisian courtesan and her relationship with a wealthy, cultured man. I had found it battered and used during one of my weekend excursions into the open street bazaars on Fulton Street. I was detailing the Parisian visuals for him when he said in his quiet but rumbling voice, “You haven’t used the card I gave you, Evelyn.”

I stopped and looked at him over the book, at the flicker of his icy blue eyes pinning me. I felt a dull fission come off him in the dark and I realized he was cross with me. “I didn’t know that was an order.”

“Anytime I tell you to do something, I expect to be obeyed.”

Instead of going directly to the Dollhouse, Mr. Sterling instructed his driver to stop along a line of shops just off Broadway. He escorted me to one that was dark and closed for the evening, a little modern clothing boutique no bigger than my apartment. Mr. Sterling knocked on the glass door and a woman appeared. She was closing for the night, but when she recognized him as Ian Sterling of Sterling of New York, she let him in, and even gave him the keys to her shop so we could leave anytime we pleased. Mr. Sterling explained that her shop, like so many in this city, carried his cosmetics.

We had the floor of the shop to ourselves. It was a very exclusive shop, complete with sofas and benches for relaxation, wet bars and vast entertainment systems. I sat on a bright red pleather sofa while Mr. Sterling went about the process of picking out different dresses for me. When he returned, he asked me to model for him. I’d never modeled anything before, but I slipped out of the flapper dress, shivering when the coolness of the shop touched my skin. Under the dress, I’d only been wearing my stockings, garters and platform Mary Janes. 

Mr. Sterling sat on the sofa, arms resting on the back, dominating it, and watched me undress. He studied me with his usual critical eye, the same eye that had made him a genius at mixing the right colors and textures together to produce some of the finest cosmetics in the world. I always felt so shy when he looked at me that way and
I
hurried to try on the first dress for him.

We went through six or seven before he made a decision. The dress he chose was very red, very silk and very short. He said I was extraordinary in that very few women could wear red effectively. He asked me to keep the pearls on. I thought he might like the pearls. Even though the red dress barely covered my ass and looked more like a camisole than a real dress, it cost more than three of my paychecks combined.

“You’re like a little doll, Evelyn. I need to dress you up for the evening.” He sat on the sofa with me straddling his lap while he reapplied my makeup with a much heavier hand than I would ever use. He was very good at painting a woman’s face.

I didn’t mind him dressing me up, painting me, making me prettier than I ever could myself. He worked unhurriedly, giving me those smoky eyes that you see on celebrities but never seem able to duplicate yourself. I watched him work in the mirror on the back wall behind the sofa, trying to follow what he was doing.

I was feeling prettier and bolder than usual. I spread my knees to either side of him and pushed myself up a little. That gave him access to my cunny, if he wanted it. I wasn’t wearing any bikini underwear. I hadn’t worn them all week. I found them a nuisance now, rubbing against my clit and ass so all I wanted to do was touch myself under my workstation all day.

He palmed my face as he studied his work. I could see the growing hunger in his face, that look a man gets when he knows a woman won’t say
no
. It made him look older, crueler, all slanted lines, and yet even more beautiful. He was a beautiful man. I rubbed my wetness against him, against all that male beauty. 

“Too forward, Evelyn,” he warned me. He did not like me presenting myself to him outside of a direct order. He expected me to act like a lady until directed otherwise.