Private Research: An Erotic Novella

by Sabrina Darby

  I found what I was looking for. She was young, maybe a bit younger than me and her lips and jaw, the only reveal beneath her more concealing half mask, made me think of a model. Her brown hair flowed loose and tousled over the back of her chair, and her cloak was artfully askew, revealing. In front of her was an empty glass and another one half-full of something that from this distance looked fruity.

  Whether she was awaiting someone or simply alone, I knew she was perfect. I left Sebastian at the bar and walked over to where she sat on the velvet sofa. Perched next to her, letting my own cloak fall where it might. I was past any physical insecurity. This was how seduction was done here at Harridan House. It began with the physical reveal, and then the request. I’d seen it happen more than enough times to know. But still, finding the practiced words was hard.

  “I’m Mina. Would you like to join us?” I said simply, gesturing to Sebastian, who was walking toward me with our drinks and that concerned crease on his forehead.

  “Flor. What’s your kink?” she asked, and from the accent, I knew she wasn’t British. Spanish, maybe?

  “I want to watch him with someone else.”

  I ignored Sebastian as he sat down in the chair across the table even though I knew he must have heard what I said.

  The woman turned to study him. Then smiled.

  “I have a friend who is late. Male. He’ll join us.”

  It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but if this woman wanted two men instead of one, it wouldn’t really make a difference to me.

  I nodded. Looked to Sebastian, who had a small, deceptive smile on his face. He was pretending. Fine by me. He’d be turned on soon enough.

  I took a sip of my drink, welcoming the familiar taste, the warmth of the alcohol that would make everything easier.

  “Come.” The woman said, taking charge. “I know exactly which room.”

  “This is what you want?” Sebastian demanded as we followed her from the lounge, his voice low.

  “Yes,” I insisted. “And she’s gorgeous. I’d fuck her.” I kept my tone light, flirtatious, trying to remind him of how hot he’d found the sight of me with another woman the last time.

  “Mina.” He spun me around, and I was up against the wall with him kissing me, deeply, devouring me. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he murmured. “Let’s go.”

  I closed my eyes against his kisses, against the words. Tried to find the strength to convince him that this was what I wanted.

  “Hmm.” Sebastian broke away and we both looked at Flor. “Perhaps you don’t just want to watch?”

  I swallowed hard, trying to clear my head. “No, that is what I want.” I shot a challenging look at Sebastian. His lips tightened before he nodded once.

  She raised an eyebrow and reached for Sebastian. He looked at me a moment longer, his eyes full of doubt, then he stepped into her embrace, head lowering, mouth finding hers.

  The kiss was tentative at first, each of them learning each other, then it deepened, the natural result of continued sensation. Sebastian’s hands ran down the outside of her cloak, molding it to her body, exploring her curves.

  Flor broke away. “You know how to kiss.” She gestured to the right with her chin, to an open door. With a teasing glance, she slipped the cloak from her body and passed over the threshold. Sebastian looked at me again. I forced an encouraging smile.

  His lips set, and he turned from me, entered the room. I took a deep breath. Looked around the dimly lighted hall with its maroon walls and gilt sconces. Then I followed them inside.

  I hung back by the door, observing. The room was sparse, as far as Harridan House went: a bed, a velvet chaise, a table with towels, and the ubiquitous crystal bowl of condoms and lube. The rooms never seemed dirty, and I imagined a secret army of cleaning elves that crept into each room after every encounter, disinfecting and wiping away signs of previous use.

  Finally, I turned my eyes reluctantly to Sebastian, who was kissing Flor again, and she was unfastening his cloak, running her hands down over his arms. I could see his erection sandwiched between them and, knowing how that hardness would feel against my skin, sucked back a moan. I didn’t want to watch. I wanted to be her. In his arms.

  But I’d wanted this pain. This jealousy. This final breaking of any pretense at monogamy, or at there being anything to our relationship but the exploration of pleasure and sex.

  It wasn’t slow between them. They’d found their rhythm, their chemical attraction, and Sebastian was all over her, hands, mouth, almost rough in his intensity. She was moaning rather loudly, and I wondered if that was for me or if she was usually that vocal.

  I watched the moments of sex progress, her manicured hands closing over his cock, his fingers disappearing inside her pussy. The two of them descending onto the bed.

  I was turned on despite myself, moistening my lips with a sudden need to be licking, kissing, participating. I slipped my hand between my legs and touched myself, my fingers slipping slightly. Yes, I was undeniably wet.

  Then Sebastian broke away to grab a condom, and he looked at me. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him because he sent me a beautiful smile, and I found myself smiling back.

  She took the condom from him and ripped it open, slid the latex down his length, grinning up at him as she did. She pulled him down, over her, and I moved forward slightly to get a better view as he pressed against her pink folds, pushed forward, and slid inside.

  My sex clenched, and I moved my fingers more vigorously on my clit.

  I felt the pressure of the room change and glanced to my right to see a man, casually nude, enter the room. I had only the briefest impression of salt-and-pepper hair, tanned skin, a muscled, fit body, before I turned back to watching Sebastian. To watching his pale buttocks move rhythmically. I’d never had this view of him before, and I admired the power of his body.

  “I see she couldn’t wait. She’s stunning, isn’t she?” the man said. His words confirmed for me that he was the one Flor had meant to meet. There was no jealousy in his voice, only lust and admiration. Even as my insides were all bunched up in confusion, I had to agree. Her head thrown back, her body taut with growing pleasure, and with Sebastian’s beautiful body pumping into her, she was gorgeous. They were gorgeous. I was disturbed and aroused all at once. And my fingers still moved between my legs but more slowly now. I hoped the voluminous folds concealed my actions.

  I hardly noticed at first when the man’s hand rested on my arm over the cloak, but then he pulled it to the side and pressed himself against me as his hand rounded over my breast. I stood frozen in shock, my own hand stilled over my sex. His mouth closed over my shoulder. His fingers pulled on my nipple. It felt good and wrong all at once. I had no idea who this man was, had hardly glanced at him when he’d entered the room. Knew only that he was at least passably attractive and likely a good decade or more older than me

  “Don’t stop touching yourself,” he said. He moved to stand fully behind me, pressing himself against my back, and through the fabric of the cloak I could feel him hard against my backside, nestling against the crack of my buttocks. After a moment’s hesitation, my fingers moved again. I focused on watching Sebastian and Flor, on letting this stranger’s hands and body simply be an accessory to my pleasure.

  I’d learned well over the last two years, and this last week more profoundly, that pleasure needed no deeper emotions. His other hand closed over my other breast and as he massaged me, kneading my flesh, his tongue licking the sensitive skin of my neck, I watched Sebastian slide in and out of Flor. Their movements were increasingly frantic, and the room was filled with moans—mine, Sebastian’s, Flor’s. The stranger’s hips rocked against me, and his hand moved down, closed over mine, then took over the manipulation of my clitoris. The warmth and pressure had me gasping. It was almost too much, too confusing, the visual stimulation and the physical, feeling pleasure but seeing Sebastian several feet away engaged in his own.

  He looked over his shoul
der and our gazes caught. With the silk mask obscuring his expression, I only felt the intensity of it, could only wonder at what he was thinking, before he turned back to Flor.

  Everything seemed to speed up after that. His thrusts, her screaming pants, the stranger’s fingers. Sensation was rising in my body, my legs were shaking, and then I was crying out and bucking, my head arched back.

  I leaned back heavily on the man for support and forced my eyes open. Sebastian and Flor had found their climax, too, and Flor was looking at me—or looking at the man behind me—while Sebastian had rolled off her to his side and stared up at the ceiling.

  I was swept up in strong arms and laid gently on the lounge. My mind a confused blank mess, I watched the anonymous man whose hands had pleasured me step toward the bed. Watched lips move, new greetings or words of some sort be exchanged, then Flor’s lips close over the man’s penis. Which was just as thick and erect as it had felt against me.

  Sebastian’s hand twitched, and his head turned to look at Flor and the other guy. My gaze flickered down to where his now-flaccid penis was still wrapped in the wet condom. I looked away.

  What the hell was I doing here? What had I done? I buried my head in my arms and tried to make sense of it all, to remind myself it didn’t matter. That now I could go home and leave this all behind.

  It wasn’t Sebastian’s fault. Maybe tonight had been the catalyst, but there was no doubt I was someone who liked sex, who could enjoy the touch of anyone regardless of emotional connection. At the same time, I still had some ideals. Deep down I wanted monogamy. Wanted all these sexual desires to stay in the bedroom with just one man.

  And I’d proven to myself fully that that man couldn’t be Sebastian.

  “Let’s go.” Sebastian’s hand on my arm, pulling me up was rough and his voice tight, as if he were angry.

  I stumbled to my feet and struggled to keep up with him, wondering at his sudden change in demeanor. He’d thrown the condom away, but he hadn’t even bothered with his cloak, and we were walking fast down the corridors, past other members.

  HE LED ME into the spa, ripped the cloak from my body, and pulled me into one of the showers. He turned the water on and it came down us strong and hot from both jets. Poured shower gel on his hands and wiped it first down my body, then his. I yanked my sodden mask off and stared at him.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me?” he demanded, taking his own mask off. I shrunk back at the fury on his face. “What the hell was that little scene about? ‘I’m just going to watch’ and then his hands all over you.”

  I looked at him incredulously, the fact that he was jealous dawning on me.

  “How was that different than that woman the other night? Because it was a man? I was in the middle of watching you fuck some other woman, and you have a problem with a man getting me off with his fingers?”

  “We didn’t agree to it!” Sebastian’s voice was raised, and I’d never heard him like this before. I looked out through the smoky glass, wondering if anyone else could hear us. He grabbed my chin and forced me to look back at him. “It has to be mutual, Mina. I didn’t do anything you didn’t agree to. You did.”

  “So what’s the big deal?” I pushed his hand away, trying to disguise the fact that I was terrified inside, that I felt guilty, like I’d done something horrible. Of course, I’d planned to do something that would end things definitively between us, but . . . this was different. Sebastian was angry with me. “It was just sex. It’s just about pleasure. No different than what we’ve been doing all summer.”

  His face went red, and then I was really scared. I reached for one of the disposable loofas and poured more shower gel on it, trying for some normalcy.

  “Just sex?” He shook his head. “You think that’s all that’s been going on between us?” He ran a hand through his hair as if he’d pull it out, as if he were in agony. As if I’d maybe misjudged everything.

  Except I hadn’t.

  “Yes. What does it matter?”

  “Not matter?” He grabbed me again, by the shoulders this time, and I flinched at his touch. “What the hell—” He let go of me and grabbed a loofa too. We washed ourselves off in angry silence, punctuated every so often by Sebastian ejecting half a phrase: I can’t believe—How could I have been—

  “Don’t,” I said finally, desperately. “Don’t pretend we were having a relationship. Like this ever would have lasted past next week, when I go back to New Jersey and these last months fade into the past. You chose Harridan House. You’re the one who wanted to come here and had sex just now and—”

  “I fucked that woman because you wanted me to. You told me it was your fantasy, Mina.” His eyes flitted back and forth, searching my face, and the anger suddenly seemed to leach out of him. He shook his head. “But I made the mistake I thought I was too smart to make. I didn’t take into account the power of fear. I believed you because I never imagined you were just too much of a coward to face up to the fact that maybe something real is happening between us.”

  “Something real? You think this is real? You pay me—”

  “I paid you to do research!”

  “What do you want from me?” I glared defiantly at him, daring him to say something different, something braver than he claimed I was.

  He stared at me. His light blue eyes open. Thinking.

  In our silence, the sound of the water hitting our bodies, pounding against the tile, grew thunderous. I turned the silver knob and reached for the towels in the shower’s little antechamber.

  “I . . . I want you to stay.”

  My hands fell to my side, and my face felt slack. I turned back to stare at him, wide-eyed. I’d dared him, but I’d never imagined he might actually say it. Actually want it.

  He reached for me again, but this time not angrily, one hand curving behind my head, where my hair was wet and plastered against my body. I blinked away the sudden hot tears.

  “I don’t want it to be all about sex. I want more.” He pulled me in, and I went, stunned and distraught, flat against his chest. But he wasn’t done yet. He just kept torturing me with words. “I want you to do what you need to do, finish your degree, and then find a position here.”

  “We barely know each other, Seb, sex aside.” What I said as I shivered in his embrace was true. Maybe two years before we’d had half a dozen deep conversations, and these last months we’d had countless more, pushed each other, been as physically close as two humans could be, but that wasn’t the basis for me to make some permanent transatlantic move. Or for Seb to do so either. At least not for a while.

  “What I know is that we were friends, Mina, and I fucked that up,” he said. “But I was lucky enough to get a second chance. There’s more here. There’s been more the whole time.” He shifted and cupped my face in his hands, lifting my chin up, everything about this touch painful in its gentleness. I stared into his eyes. Water dripped from his hair onto my forehead, my cheeks, hot like tears. “I want to give us the chance. I want you to stay.”

  Stay. Stay. Stay. The word echoed in my head, emptying me of all other thought, of speech. I was aware instead of sensation, of his fingers stroking the line of my jaw, like he could make me say something.

  My brain snapped back to life with a flood of impossibilities. I grabbed two towels, nearly throwing one at him, and then wrapped myself in the other one, taking another for my hair as I left the shower.

  So he’d been thinking of me as his girlfriend. And why shouldn’t he have? I’d been the ideal one for him this summer. Willing to cede independence and decisions for the chance to finish my work. Willing to sleep with him, to explore the kinkier side of sex, or at least what was kinky to me. I’d now witnessed sexual acts and fetishes that I had no desire to experience for myself.

  And what would a relationship between the two of us in the future be? A continued membership at Harridan House as long as all acts were agreed upon in advance? Would Sebastian really be s
atisfied without that?

  Would I?

  I didn’t talk to him as we dressed and returned to his apartment, but everything inside me ached. We got ready for bed in that same silence, and when I finally climbed under the covers, I lay on the edge, turned away from him.

  Until he invaded my space and held me close, his body so familiar. My stupid attempt to prove I couldn’t be with him meant nothing. The activities in which we’d engaged at Harridan House—that was just sex. But here, in the privacy of his flat, his bed–this was more, no matter who else he’d fucked.

  We didn’t agree to it. It has to be mutual, Mina. Sebastian’s twisted morality was not so twisted. Was fundamentally honest. He’d tried to stop us from going to Harridan House. I was the one who had pushed. He’d humored me.

  Of course, he hated anything that smacked of cheating, that broke trust. I knew his family history. A dark fog of disgust enveloped my thoughts, my chest. I’d been trying to protect myself and I’d given no thought to his emotions. I’d been selfish and cruel.

  I lay there in the endless dark, thinking, feeling, reexamining everything with the frantic pace of desperation. He was awake, too, his thoughts as silent and raging as my own.

  Finally, at some point in the night, he let go of me and fell onto his back with a sigh.

  I flipped over to face him. His arm was over his head, forearm resting against forehead, but at my movement, he turned his head to look at me. Questioning. Waiting.

  “I thought if you slept with someone else, I’d break everything between us.”

  His lips pressed together tightly, but he didn’t speak.

  “When he touched me, I was going to move away. And then I thought that that act, too, would make everything more final.”

  “Sex without emotional attachment is just sex,” Sebastian said. “You and me? We like physical pleasure. If you’d even wanted to fuck him, I would have dealt with my own jealousy. But it’s infidelity that breaks relationships.”

  “I know,” I said quickly. “Now, I know. But . . . I didn’t know we had a relationship.”