Love and Whiskers

by Olivia Myers

  A nightingale sounded its plaintive song from the willow outside Jane’s window. Jane closed her eyes, letting herself bask. No, it had been years since she’d experienced anything like this.

  Stephen was fast asleep next to her, gently snoring. It was a beautiful sight, Jane thought. Everything was beautiful, and she didn’t want to disturb any of it. She felt as though she were living in the world of John Keats, the deathless world of poetry, where all of life is just one extended heartbeat, and there is no measurement; there is only feeling.

  These thoughts in mind, she lifted herself out of bed and tidied her hair. She put on the skirt and the tights she’d worn the night before—why not look her best?—and clipped on her black bra. It’d be nice to take a walk, she thought. Or get some coffee from the diner. It was less than a block away, and she didn’t want to drink the watery coffee that she usually made in the mornings.

  Stephen’s wallet sat on the bedside table. It was a thick, leather bag of a wallet—big enough for storing incriminating evidence. Well, she thought, if she was hosting the award-winning literary doctor, the least he could do was buy them both coffee.

  Jane unbuckled the sizeable wallet and flipped through the currency. Mostly Euros and Swiss Francs, but she managed to extract a few dollars. She absentmindedly flipped through the sheaths of business cards and contact numbers. The people a man like this would know! She couldn’t even begin to imagine—the most famous doctors, the most famous writers, who wouldn’t he know?

  Suddenly, her mouth went dry. She nearly dropped the wallet. She held a picture pinched between her fingers, of a beautiful girl with hair not unlike Jane’s, with a wide, warm smile and a keen, intelligent face. A lot like Jane. Or, as a matter of fact, nearly identical to Jane, except for the first name, signed in cursive on the bottom of the photograph: “With love, Christine.”

  Jane zipped the wallet closed, and set it gently back on the table. She turned and looked at the man sleeping gently in the large bed. Could this man, her former lover—her current lover—really be her daughter’s fiancée?

  “Stephen,” said Jane firmly. The man stirred. “Stephen,” she said again as he awoke, “Stephen, I need to ask you something important.”

  The older man sat up in bed and blinked at her with his large, beautiful eyes.

  “Miss Jane Eyre,” he said sleepily, “you are a miracle for tired eyes.”

  “Stephen,” she approached him. “Stephen, my dear. Would you like me to get us some coffee?”

  THE END

  Bound to be Desired

  The afternoon sunlight blazed through the huge windows looking out on the Parisian skyline. As she moved about someone else’s apartment, Christine O’Darragh thought the view was like something in a snow globe. No one could deny how beautiful it was. And the loft houses around it had to be centuries old, older than the revolution. The plaster was so chipped that it bore the red brick of the building underneath like an indecent burn mark on an otherwise perfectly sculpted body.

  Most people found the area around Rue de la Sainte-Ursule pretty. Christine thought about her mother, a poetry professor back in America. Without a doubt her mother would see the ugly loft houses as romantic. She would probably look at them and imagine the starving writers who lived inside and tapped away on their old typewriters, hoping against hope for the fabulous luck that would lift them out of their poverty. It was romantic, thought Christine. Romantic for everyone else but her.

  To Christine it was indeed a snow globe world. It was fake, warped, and cheap, and useless when it came right down to it. She thought about the loft houses, their romantic image. Christine knew the truth. No starving artists lived there, no writers. This was one of the most fashionable districts in all of Paris, and one of the most expensive. The chipped paint was decoration. The only people who lived there were the fabulously, monstrously wealthy. They were the people who had twenty houses around the world, but couldn’t call any one of them a home.

  Christine knew all about these kinds of people. They were her clients. And, besides that, Stephen Thomas, her fiancé or, rather, ex-fiancé, had been one of them.

  Christine was a studio designer, and if her credentials and her clients were to be believed, she was one of the youngest and most successful in Paris. La Nouvelle Monde—the company Christine worked for—worshipped her as a protégé of French interior fashion. She was paid a fortune, given a fabulous apartment within walking distance of where she worked, and had been guaranteed a partnership within the next three years.

  Christine passed across the hardwood floors of the spacious living room and into a quiet corner of the apartment, bathed in sunlight. There was a visible skyline but it was not the postcard, snow-globe stuff that she detested. This view was more like it—the alleys of Paris, the forgotten segments. Ugly and congested, but authentic.

  Alexander trailed behind Christine, his hands crossed politely behind his back. He had been Christine’s client for a little over a month now, and during that time he’d watched over her like a hawk as she renovated his spacious apartment. Christine hadn’t the slightest idea what he did for a living, nor did she particularly care. With his stellar body and his inhumanly good looks, he could have been anything in the world.

  I might be renovating the apartment of a famous French actor, Christine thought to herself, and I wouldn’t have any idea.

  Not too long ago, Christine would have tried to find out more about the man she was working with. She used to love mysteries, loved solving the unknown and learning something new.

  Ever since she had learned about her fiancé’s infidelity, Christine had changed. She now detested the word mystery. Solving mysteries had been monopolized by the image of a condom in a back pocket; of stuttered, half-assed excuses; of hands thrown into the air with the words Do as you like. Yes, Christine was done with mysteries, as she was done with romance, as she was done with the postcard perfect world in which she had been living. All that was left for her now was reality, gritty and bitter reality, and because it left nothing hidden in the darkness, she had learned maybe not to love it, but to trust in it.

  “The reading room is fine,” Alexander said to her in French.

  This room had been one of the points in designing the apartment renovations that had given Christine the most trouble. She wanted the light to come in gently through the spacious windows, but she didn’t want the room to be overwhelmed. She wanted to keep a bit of shadow. She’d solved this problem by putting up drapes and covering the upper half of the windows. This way, the morning sun was blocked and only the evening light could shine through.

  But the drapes had also posed a problem. She didn’t want anything frou-frou: that certainly wasn’t Alexander’s style. And only after weeks of searching did she manage to find a drape that she liked. A thick, rough, maroon-colored fabric: dark and textured like spilled blood. It matched Alexander perfectly.

  Alexander made Christine edgy, although everything about him was gentlemanly. Each time they met she always noted how dapper he looked, as if he’d been dressed for a photo shoot: plain white dress-shirt with a thin tie slicing his body in two halves, which his impeccable, Italian coat then drew back together. His hair was slightly longer than most men’s, and he wore it parted and generously covered with gel, so that its exterior shone like steel.

  What made Christine nervous was his face. It was a perfectly handsome face, clean-shaven, even rather pleasant to look at, but there was something distinctively cruel about it. His lips were too thin and when they grinned they sliced Christine like a paper cut. In those lips she could read his arrogance, an awareness of his own power. It both thrilled and scared Christine to be too close to the man.

  “Show me the bedroom,” said Alexander.

  With her clipboard pressed tightly to her breasts, Christine led Alexander to an adjoining room. She made a “voila” gesture with her hand as she revealed an enormous, four poster bed. A curtain was bunched up at the top of the bed, waiting t
o be let down. It was the most ridiculous bed Christine had ever seen. A regal monstrosity, like something from the time of King Louis.

  But Alexander had insisted on everything: the size, the four posts and especially the curtain. He did not like being exposed to the dark, he’d said to her. He was afraid of it. Christine had no idea how to take that statement.

  This was the first time Alexander had seen his new bed. He screwed up his thin mouth, twisting it this way and that. Christine found it impossible to read the expression. Alexander kept his real emotions camouflaged so that Christine was constantly thrown into a state of confusion, not knowing if he liked something or detested it.

  “It looks fine,” he said at last. Christine felt a great weight fall off her. “It looks fine,” Alexander repeated, his voice low, mocking, and icy, “but I am not going to be looking at my bed, am I?”

  Christine didn’t know if he had really asked the question, or if he was simply talking to fill the cavernous room. She was rooted in place, afraid to speak, yet afraid of the idea that he might be waiting on her to break the silence.

  Thankfully, she didn’t have to decide. Alexander’s voice cut through the silence again, as penetrating as an ice pick. “Close the door, please.”

  His please made Christine shiver but she did as she’d been bidden. In her experience with Alexander, he had always been conspicuously polite. Polite, but direct. Alexander never requested: his default was demand.

  “I do not like open spaces,” he said to her, still in French. “You understand?”

  “I understand,” Christine answered in French, and felt the words pass from her like a ghost.

  “Please,” Alexander said again. “Lie on this bed. Tell me if it is comfortable. Do this now.”

  Christine obeyed. She didn’t have a choice. When Alexander spoke to her the way he was speaking now, there was something hypnotic about it. There was a power that made Christine’s body obey the words of this man, and not the words of her own will. Not the warning that flashed in the back of her mind, the warning that she had learned to ignore in the past few weeks.

  She set the clipboard down gingerly on the bedside table and lay down on the bed. Her ample breasts rose and fell softly with the quick, heavy breaths she was taking. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself.

  “Well?”

  “I am comfortable,” Christine whispered. The sounds of drawers opening and closing infiltrated the naked silence. Christine tightened her eyes and winced with each new jarring sound. She knew what was coming. Ever since Stephen had moved out, she lived for this.

  “You are not telling me the truth,” came Alexander’s voice. “You are not comfortable, Christine.”

  Her name in Alexander’s voice filled Christine with a terrible, painful thrill. It was like a bad word, coming from him.

  “You need my help to be comfortable,” he said. “You have too many worries, Christine.”

  “I have too many worries,” Christine responded with a whimper. She knew what was expected of her. Alexander had been thorough in her teaching, the first time he had used her. That was what he said: used. For Alexander, there was no such thing as making love. There was only using.

  “You need me,” said Alexander. The voice was frighteningly close. The sound stung Christine’s ear like a wasp. “Say it.”

  “I need you, Alexander.”

  No sooner had the words passed her lips than Christine felt a rough pressure turn her body over and force her legs apart. A man’s hand, a hand as big as Christine’s face, grabbed her ankle and expertly slipped a leather thong around it, then moved on to the second ankle. She knew better than to open her eyes for this part. Alexander never let her watch him work. She’d made the mistake once before. Never would she make it again.

  Alexander moved on to her hands and fastened these to the posts above Christine’s head. The knots were tight and Christine whimpered as she felt the harsh rope dig into her flesh.

  “You are too delicate.” Alexander’s voice was as close to her now as the vein in her neck. She felt the weight of the giant man on top of her, his chest pressed against the thin cloth of her white top. His enormous penis pressed against Christine’s thigh. He was completely naked, and she still fully clothed. But she was not allowed to open her eyes. This was forbidden. This was what Alexander demanded.

  “How delicate are you, Christine?”

  “I am nothing, Master,” Christine whispered, her voice seized with trembling.

  “I am going to take off your blouse, Christine. And then I am going to take off your skirt. If you move one muscle—if I see even the twitch of your eyelid—I will stop immediately and you will never see me again.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Christine froze the instant Alexander laid his hands on her. He bunched Christine’s thin white top in both hands and lifted it up her body until it was stretched above her head. She was not wearing a bra—Alexander had demanded that she never wear an undergarment in his apartment after their first meeting—and the cool air made her skin prickle. But she dared not move.

  Alexander’s hands slid down her body until they were resting on her thighs. They unclipped the thin, leather belt of her skirt with expert speed and tossed the object aside. Then he seized her skirt and tugged it down past her thighs. Functioning on instinct, Christine wiggled the lower half of her body to make removing the garment easier.

  “Don’t!” The fury of Alexander’s voice struck Christine like a bullet. A moment later and she felt Alexander’s hand as it collided with the cheek of her buttocks. The blow was as hot as lightning. Christine felt her eyes fill with tears as the fire roared through her, and she bit her lip until she tasted blood.

  “You were to remain still,” Alexander said. “You have disobeyed me.”

  “Master,” Christine choked. “Please, Master.”

  “You will not be punished today.”

  “Master,” Christine had to fight to suppress a sob. “Please, Master. Please, I will take anything from you.”

  “You will have no punishment today.”

  “Please, Master,” Christine’s voice whimpered. Tears flowed from her eyes. “I need something, Master.”

  Alexander did not make a sound but Christine could feel him behind her, feel his presence. She could feel his strong, warm cock barely touching her thigh.

  At last the voice behind her answered. “You are not going to be punished today. But your tears please me. So I am going to put my cock in your asshole. You are to say nothing. Do you understand?”

  “Master—” Christine began, only for the punch of Alexander’s penis to cut her short as it entered her. The word she had formed transformed into a half-scream, and then into a gasp of pleasure as Alexander drove his throbbing cock deep inside her. His thighs rocked back and forth as he put himself further and further in, and the bed rocked as Christine rocked, completely at one with the man who was at once both so terrifying and exhilarating.

  Although he wasn’t trying, every rocking motion caused her clit to rub against the bedsheets. She was going to come, and she clenched her teeth so she could be silent. Her pleasure was something Alexander could never know.

  Alexander put all of himself inside her, until it felt for Christine that she was no longer herself, but him as well. It was as if she were sharing this strength, pumping with him. And then she felt a sudden, hot explosion in a place inside her body no one had ever been before, until now. She felt Alexander’s power as he ejaculated, as if she herself was the one in his position. With his final stroke, she felt herself tense, felt her own explosion of pleasure. She exhaled raggedly, determined to come without his knowledge.

  Christine was nearly out of breath from gasping. She felt her throat strangling to find sounds, but she knew that she was not to speak until Alexander was through.

  He took his time after he came inside her, letting his penis linger until it had softened, and only then did he pull out. She remained tied to the bed while h
e dressed. Only when he had untied her was she allowed to open her eyes.

  His cruel, smirking face greeted her. Christine recoiled instinctively from it as if from a monster’s face in a nightmare. She was still naked, and she struggled into her blouse and her skirt as he stood over her.

  “The bedroom is fine,” he said, watching her reaction. “I will see you in two days to talk about the kitchen.” Without another word, he took his coat from where it was resting on an armchair and disappeared out the door.

  Christine remained another hour, smoothing her clothes, making the bed. She felt Alexander’s seed inside her. It was the warmest part of the man, without a doubt, and although she’d never tell him, its presence was a comfort. Putting her face into her shirt in case he was somehow still watching her, she hid her smile.

  ***

  In a café not far from the Rue de la Sainte-Ursule, Christine sat holding a thin, French cigarette. She took small, periodic puffs, but otherwise ignored the cigarette. Her attention was focused elsewhere. She was waiting for someone.

  A little past noon, a tall woman with dark hair and impeccable high heels waved at Christine. She hurried to Christine’s table with little, mincing steps.

  “My lovely!” she said, exchanging kisses on Christine’s cheeks. Adèle Demoraine was Christine’s coworker at La Nouvelle Monde, and the first person Christine had met when she first moved to Paris with Stephen. Adèle had been attending the university in Nanterre at the time, just outside Paris, where Stephen was a guest lecturer delivering a series on French poetry. Adèle liked Stephen’s lecture and had requested an interview with the man for a segment in the campus Arts magazine. It was during this interview that Christine first met Adèle.

  What a difference those two years had made! Searching through her memories, Christine could recall Adèle as a shy university student, always in a hurry, a student who wore jeans and a loose coat, who didn’t know how to put on makeup because she’d been reading about Renaissance architecture while the rest of the girls her age were learning about mascara.