“Cinderella goes to the ball,” Liz said. “She didn’t look dressed for a stretch limo-type event.”
“She can look after herself.” Patrick knew Liz was thinking of pimps and drugs, the sort of problems the women in her shelter encountered, and for the most part, why they ended up there. And he knew that a middle-class background and education, even well-meaning supportive friends, meant nothing if a woman were involved with the wrong sort of man.
He didn’t like to think of Jo in trouble. And while it might not be any of his business, he saw in himself the urge to rush in on a white charger and save her. But he wasn’t going to do that anymore. He put the white charger firmly back in the stable, shut the door and immersed himself in the genteel problems of the Bennet sisters.
13
“HEY, JO.”
I couldn’t tell who it was in the dimness of the limo but I recognized his voice.
“Ivan?”
“That’s me.” He placed a hand on my knee which made me feel uncomfortable. Weren’t we supposed to not acknowledge each other outside of the Great Room? We’d seen each other that afternoon and passed each other as though we were strangers. “Looking forward to tonight?”
“I guess so.” I moved away from him and tried to see out of the dark tinted windows. We made one more stop to pick up a woman called Judy, who cuddled up with Ivan and talked to him in whispers for the rest of the journey. We were going west into the mountains, I knew, because my ears popped a little as we gained in altitude. I wondered if anyone had smuggled in a GPS to discover the destination; it could be done easily enough if you owned one. I’d tried with my cell but lost the signal. And what exactly went on on the second floor of the house?
The limo continued to climb and then made the turn onto a driveway and made another turn to take us to the side entrance. We went into the chilly locker room where a few others were changing. We were mostly quiet. It was as though we assumed our snarky, bitchy personae inside the Great Room; here we merely prepared. Ivan snapped the elastic of his boxers and preened in front of a full-length mirror. Judy leaned to apply mascara at a mirror.
I stripped off my jeans and socks and sneakers. I wore a pair of my fancier underwear, red silk with black lace, and no bra beneath my black T-shirt. Part of me wanted to be home, snug on the sofa with Patrick and Liz and her husband, watching videos and laughing. I hoped Patrick was okay, that little Yolanda had recovered, for the time being at any rate, poor kid.
“Move it, Jo.” The door was flung open by Pete. “If you’re late, there’ll be consequences.”
“Bite me,” I responded, already feeling the stirrings of naughty insubordination, and strolled through the door he held open, taking my time.
It was mostly the same crowd but in different combinations of twos and threes. The fire crackled invitingly and the snack table was stocked with a gorgeous cheese-and-fruit assortment. As we entered, a female staff member, dressed in black, was putting the finishing touches to it. She took no notice of us.
I helped myself to some wine and joined in the Scrabble game with Pete and Ivan and Lindy, who had been punished so humiliatingly the other night, and who wore only a thong and a skinny camisole tonight. Pete seemed to be in a heterosexual mood tonight, stroking Lindy’s thighs and breasts, while she mostly ignored him and Ivan, shoving their hands away when she wanted to put pieces on the board. I wondered if it was a tactic to view their pieces, or, more likely, a conspiracy to trick someone—myself, for instance—into doing something stupid.
“You don’t think Jo’s feeling left out, do you?” Pete asked at random.
I smiled and used my Q on a triple word score. Sometimes a high Scrabble score was the best revenge.
“I think you’d better take care of her,” Lindy said.
Ivan moved over to my side of the board and laughed when I turned my pieces facedown. “What are you worried about, babe? You’re winning. And it’s not your pieces I’m interested in.”
He nuzzled my neck. “The best defense is to masturbate yourself senseless before you come. Come here, that is.”
“You don’t know much about female sexuality, do you?” I looked at the board. “That’s not a word, Lindy.”
“It is, too!”
Pete wriggled his fingers under her thong. “Mmm. Someone’s getting wet.”
“You going to challenge her, Jo?” Ivan slid his hand under my T-shirt.
“Do you think I should?” I stroked his cock through his thin cotton pants. “Perhaps I’ll make you come instead.”
Lindy ignored us. Pete’s fingers were inside her thong, their mouths joined in a deep kiss.
A few people strolled over to watch, and Jennifer, who’d invited me into the bathroom last time, knelt to caress Lindy’s breasts. Pete disengaged his mouth from Lindy’s, and he and Jennifer pulled her camisole off over her head, revealing full breasts with a tattoo of a dragon curling around them.
“Pretty,” Ivan said.
Lindy fell back against the Scrabble board, legs spread wide, scattering pieces as Pete and Jennifer nibbled at her breasts. Pete’s fingers pushed in and out of her tiny thong, which was darkened with her juices.
Ivan’s cock hardened beneath my fingers, and when he slipped his hand into my panties and rubbed my clit I didn’t stop him. “Damn,” he said, his breath tickling against my ear. “Damn if they’re not going to make her come. You want me to do you? Be quiet and you’ll get away with it.”
“I don’t trust you.” My hips bucked to his rhythm. “Hey, I take it back. You’re not that bad at female sexuality. You’ll tell. I won’t come.”
“You will.” He licked my neck and nibbled beneath my ear. “You will, honey. Let it go, you won’t get another chance like this. Look at Lindy. She’s a big sexy mess.”
She was. Above her, Jennifer kissed Pete while each of them manipulated one of Lindy’s hard nipples. Lindy’s own finger moved on her clit now, her legs raised and parted, her drenched thong pushed aside to reveal the dark pink folds of her pussy.
“Oh, God,” I said. I wanted Ivan to stop, I wanted him to continue. I wanted to close my eyes and succumb to the orgasm that awaited but at the same time Lindy and Jennifer and Pete demanded my attention.
Ivan’s mouth teased at mine and his tongue slipped inside, a gentle suckling. His other hand pinched my nipple while that sweet manipulation of my clit went on. And on. “Come,” he whispered. “Come, I dare you.”
I broke the kiss to see what the others were doing. Most of the inhabitants of the Great Room had gathered to watch. Jennifer knelt between Lindy’s thighs now, thrusting her fingers into her pussy. Pete knelt over Lindy, stroking her breasts with one hand, the other pressed against his cock.
“He’s going to come on her tits,” Ivan murmured. “And she’s going to come. She’s a noisy girl. They won’t notice if you do. God, you’re so wet. You’re dripping. You like that?” He pushed his finger inside me. “Like some more?”
His fingers moved in and out of me, his thumb grazing my clit. “Do it,” he murmured. “No one will see.”
My thighs tensed. I knew I shouldn’t trust Ivan, any of them. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I allowed myself to come, but with every stroke of his hand, every clever pinch to my nipples, I drew closer and cared less for the consequences.
And then I came to my senses and rolled away. “You bastard!” I screeched and grabbed for the nearest missile, which was the velvet pouch that held the Scrabble tiles.
He ducked the shower of tiles, laughing, as applause broke out. ‘Nearly got you, there, Jo.”
Jennifer, Pete and Lindy had meanwhile disentangled themselves, all of them red in the face and out of breath, but grinning stupidly.
“And I was winning! Look what you did to the board!” I continued.
“Look what you did to the tiles, honey,” Pete said. “If we’ve lost any, you’re in for a spanking.”
I got onto my hands and knees to gather tiles and wagged
my butt at him. “Exactly how long am I going to be the new kid on the block? I’m tired of this already.”
“Now, don’t be mad,” Jennifer said. “You—”
A bell rang and Pete jumped to his feet. “Okay everyone, look pretty.”
People arranged themselves in sexy postures on the furniture. I sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by the debris of the Scrabble game and finished my glass of wine. I knew I didn’t look pretty—I looked bad-tempered and flushed and my hair probably stood on end.
Angela, or Mrs. Danvers in black leather, opened a door I’d barely noticed before, quite near where I sat. It wasn’t the door we used that led to the locker room. This one had a keypad, and, I now realized, must have led to the main part of the house.
Pete came over to talk to her and then he beckoned to Lindy, who stood, tugging her camisole back down to cover herself. She looked excited and proud, and the room erupted into a chorus of whistles and applause.
“Go, Lindy,” someone shouted, while Ivan crossed over to the piano and started to bang out an approximation of the Elgar piece used at graduation ceremonies.
Pete kissed Lindy’s cheek and slapped her bottom in an affectionate sort of way. Angela fluffed Lindy’s hair and straightened her camisole, frowning. “She’ll do. Come along, honey.”
I watched Angela as she punched in a code in the keypad and was amused to see it was the same one we used for the station library, following various disasters with people getting locked out or leaving important personal items inside, or, worse, jamming pieces of cardboard in the door. It didn’t rely on a sequence of numbers but a manual pattern—diagonally top right to bottom left, and then the remaining two numbers across. That could come in useful.
Lindy waved goodbye and stuck her tongue out at Pete, and then she and Angela left.
Ivan stood to open the piano bench and pull out some music. When he sat at the keyboard again he played a Chopin nocturne, a soothing accompaniment to my task of finding, sorting and counting the Scrabble tiles. None were missing. I tipped them carefully back into the velvet pouch and saw the room had settled back into its usual routine. I strolled over to the piano and watched his hands on the keyboard, and, although I was no musician, I knew enough to follow the printed notes as he played.
I reached over his shoulder to turn the page.
He gave me a quick, surprised smile.
There was something about Ivan I liked, despite his most recent dirty trick—maybe because he was the only person I’d seen in real life, outside the Great Room, that is, and I liked his smile (and his touch, too). Before all this, the Association and Mr. D., Ivan might have been the sort of guy I’d consider dating. Besides, he played the piano well, and I’m a sucker for musicians.
He came to the end of the piece. “You play?” he asked.
“No. You’re pretty good.”
“Thanks.”
I wondered if I could trust him, and decided to take the risk. While he had his hands on the piano and not me, that is. “So, Ivan, tell me how this works. How you get to graduate.”
He played a few idle chords. “Okay, you’ve got to get a balance. They—” nodding up to the balcony “—will notice you if you stand out. If you’re proactive, if you engage with the rest of us. They like to see us punished, but not too much. Some people really get off on getting punished and if that’s what you’re into, that’s fine.”
“How long does it take to graduate?”
He shrugged. “Some people get to go upstairs within days. A week, maybe two.”
“What happens upstairs?”
“Whatever they want, at first. Then you get to be one of the decision makers.”
“So if you graduate, you stay upstairs?”
“Some of us like it here. Pete likes playing boss. He’ll stay down here for as long as he can, before he gets too old. They don’t like anyone in the Great Room over the age of thirty and he’s pushing twenty-nine.” A few more chords, a riff of Ellington.
“Have you ever gone upstairs?”
“Yeah.” His hands stilled on the keys. “I…I didn’t have a good experience. So now I stay down here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Babe, don’t waste too much time feeling sorry for me. I’ll be tricking you again soon enough. And you’ll be doing something mean to me.”
I gazed at him, wondering what sort of hurt he concealed, and whether we might ever be friends. I sat next to him on the piano bench. “I like you, Ivan.”
“Hey, I like you, too, or I think I do. Thing is, are we worth breaking the rules for?”
“You know the rules are legalistic garbage,” I said, borrowing Patrick’s phrase.
“If you’re here long enough, you’ll take them very seriously,” he said. “And after a while, what goes on in here seems more real than anything else outside.”
I looked back over his shoulder at the room and its inhabitants. “Yeah, but it’s boring down here, apart from the fooling around.”
“It’s set up to be boring.” He gave me a sweet smile. “If we had internet access or our cells here, or even cable, we’d all ignore each other.”
He flipped the pages of the book of music and started on another Chopin nocturne, while I wondered if tonight I had some sort of sign plastered on me that announced I was safe for confessions. First Patrick, now Ivan.
I wandered over to the bookshelf and chose a tattered paperback mystery, and settled myself into one of the oversize armchairs with a plate of cheese and crackers and another glass of wine. Jennifer perched on the arm.
“What are you reading?”
I showed her the cover.
“Is it good?” As I ignored her, she bent forward and touched my breast. “Let’s take off our tops and make out.”
“No, I want to read.”
“Frigid bitch!” She flounced away while I tried not to giggle.
The way I saw it was that a blatant transgression of the rules—and I’d have to pick my moment, when a large group of onlookers was gathered on the balcony—followed by a punishment, was the best way to get upstairs. And apparently I wanted to get upstairs, to progress—some latent competitiveness, which I thought was safely dormant since my time as a dance student, had emerged. Even if I didn’t know what I was getting into, I still wanted to meet the challenge. Sure, it was a game, but it was one I was beginning to take seriously.
Mr. D. would understand when I told him, but to be honest, my experiences in the Great Room seemed more real, more vivid, than what I experienced with him. So did my friendship with Liz and my…whatever it was I had with Patrick. I missed Kimberly at that moment, which was ludicrous. She was no prude, but what would she say? I’d mend the breach, I decided. One of us had to.
I stole a look at the forbidden door again, feeling like an idiot heroine in a fairy tale. First Scheherazade, now Bluebeard. I could get through. I could take a look around upstairs and see what was going on and then decide whether I really wanted to stay in the Association. What was with the masks anyway? I should have asked Ivan, while he was in a talking—rather than a foreplay—mood.
The piano music had stopped. He and Pete sat close together on the piano stool, and as I watched, Pete untied the leather band that held Ivan’s hair back, so it cascaded over his shoulders.
The two men stood and, as Pete flung his arm over Ivan’s shoulders, walked to a sofa at the far end of the room. I was expecting—hoping for, to be honest—some heavy making out to occur, but instead they held hands and talked quietly to each other as though no one else in the room mattered. As though they weren’t surrounded by gorgeous bodies—the unsinkable Jennifer displayed herself in front of them, stretching and preening.
Her efforts paid off as another couple of guys approached her. One of them, buffed and shaved with a pierced eyebrow, yanked her unceremoniously by her thong onto another sofa, where she rode his thigh while thrusting her breasts into the other’s face.
They attracted some attentio
n, the focus of the room turning to their antics. I took a quick look at the balcony. A few dark figures stood there, and, as far as I could tell, with their attention on that end of the room.
I stood and stretched elaborately, running my hands over my breasts. On the balcony, no one moved. I was as close to being invisible as I could be.
I strolled over to the doorway, punched in the code and opened it just enough to slip through—Bluebeard’s wife entering the forbidden chamber—then closed the door quietly behind me.
I found myself at the far end of what had to be the front entrance to the house. Across an expanse of beautifully polished wooden floorboards, scattered with silk rugs, was an imposing door flanked with stained-glass panels. To my right was a staircase, polished and carved woodwork gleaming, and I could hear faint sounds from upstairs. Meanwhile I stood here barefoot and in my underwear, feeling extraordinarily conspicuous, and to be honest, dumb. Did I really expect an orgy on every floor so I’d blend in?
I saw the shadows of a couple of people at the front door and the knob turned. I looked around, discovered a doorway under the stairs and darted inside. As my eyes became accustomed to the dimness I saw a coatrack, and then dived behind it as the door opened and I heard familiar voices.
“…and I told him if you don’t get a surge protector you’ll fry your hard drive, and what about data backups? Not a clue. Not even a thumb drive. I mean, these people are dumb.” I recognized the voice as Jake’s, and then heard the slithering sound of his jacket being pulled off.
“Oh, forget about work, honey. Let’s try and relax.” Cathy, cooing to her husband. I saw her hands, tipped with gleaming red nails, straighten his down jacket onto a hanger. I pressed myself against the wall as she hung a leather bomber jacket next to his.
“You smell so good, baby.” Jake’s voice lowered to a growl.
Oh, no.
Oh, yes.
“Honey.” She giggled. “Don’t you want to wait until we’re upstairs?”
He made growling, slurping sounds that indicated that he certainly wasn’t going to wait. Clothing rustled. A zipper slid down.
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