by Myles, Eden
“So I’ve been told.”
I glanced up and my heart immediately started knocking in my throat. Just once I wanted to be able to look up at Wolfgang Beck and not have my entire body react like some coquettish schoolgirl who’d never been kissed. I couldn’t even understand it. It wasn’t like he was conventionally handsome or anything, certainly not All-American model material. Everything about him was stark and sharp-edged and almost cruelly drawn. He had a harsh European look, like someone who belonged to the last century, a man you’d see in an old tintype in a drawing room somewhere. I knew none of this was about his money. I had money, maybe not as much as he, but more than enough to support myself and Asia. I couldn’t understand my reactions. I didn’t believe in love anymore, not romantic love, anyway. “And you’re okay with that.”
He offered me a little smile, almost but not quite flashing those ferocious teeth of his. “I enjoy sex. I enjoy the company of women. I find no greater joy than losing myself in the wet velvet heaven of a woman’s body as she comes beneath me. Why do you find that so offensive and unnatural, my pet?”
I looked him over and realized that Wolf was one of the most honest men I had ever met, and that was saying a lot in publishing. I set my pen down. “I don’t find it offensive.” I took a deep breath and let it out slow. “You’re exactly what it says on the label, aren’t you? You don’t pretend to be something you’re not.”
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked with genuine curiosity.
I shook my head with exasperation. “Because everyone pretends to be something they’re not. Nobody’s that open, particularly about sex.”
“Maybe they should be. Maybe there would be fewer misunderstandings, then.”
I swallowed hard. He had a point. “You’re not monogamous, are you?” I said. “What’s the proper term? Polygamous?”
“I prefer the term ethically promiscuous. Polygamy implies a form of marriage, and I don’t believe in marriage.” He watched me carefully, waiting not for my judgment—which he didn’t care about anyway—but my reaction. He’d been very upfront about his sexuality and his general disdain of marriage that night in the restaurant. He slept around, he said. A lot. But from talking to Malcolm and Devon, I’d learned that Wolf was almost pathologically obsessed with safe sexual practices. They said they thought it was because over fifteen percent of the population of Namibia was living with HIV. I kept waiting to feel offended by Wolf’s casual attitude towards sex, but somehow it just didn’t happen. It’s hard to be angry with someone who’s that upfront and honest.
Then he surprised me by saying, “Are you concerned about my other partners? Do you require medical records? If so, I can have them delivered to you by tomorrow.”
“It’s not that, Wolf,” I told him. “I know you’re responsible.”
“What then?”
I tapped my fingers against the proof sheets, then I just spat it out. “How many other…courtesans…are there? I’d like to know.”
“There are only two.”
“Jasmine…and me.”
“Correct.”
“That’s all?”
“If there were others, Rachaela, I would tell you.” He sounded slightly miffed, as if I had accused him of lying.
“And how long do you think this…ménage a trois…of ours will last?”
“As long as it must last, until I’ve decided on a courtesan.”
“And then?”
Wolf’s face blanked of all emotion. “What exactly are you asking me, Rachaela?”
I blanked mine as well. Two could play at this game. “That night at the restaurant when you explained what’s involved in being your courtesan, you made it sound very permanent, very much a…fixed position.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “A gentleman and his courtesan normally pair up for life. I’ve known a few gentleman who have even married their courtesans.”
“So by choosing a courtesan…well, it sounds like the end of the road for your ‘ethical promiscuity.’”
“I’m a gentleman, Rachaela. I take my duties as such very seriously.”
“I guess I just find it ironic that a man who is so opposed to any kind of permanent arrangement would be interested in a…permanent arrangement.”
Wolf looked slightly annoyed. I’d scored a point on him, go me. “It’s five to six. Do you want to finish those proofs?”
I clipped my notes together with the proofs, working quickly and efficiently as the clock ticked quite literally over my shoulder. At six o’clock on the nose, Wolf came around the edge of my desk and said, “Up.” His voice was neither soft nor gentle.
I stood up, and he assumed my chair. As he sank down into the cushioned seat, he rested his hands on my shoulders so his weight forced me down onto my knees in front of him. He held me down while he ran a hand in loving strokes over my hair and face and looked me over carefully as he decided on my conditioning for today.
I tried to decide why I was letting him do this. Why I was letting all this happen. It had to be hormones. Or maybe it was just the divorce papers.
It had taken Jerrel and me months to hammer out the details, but when the papers had finally arrived, Jerrel had added a joint custody clause to them without my approval. He wanted Asia to spend two weeks out of a month with him in the Hamptons. Asia, of course, was ecstatic about the arrangement. I’d immediately contested the clause, and Jerrel had responded by threatening me with more court dates. But I didn’t want Asia’s life that messed up. It was bad enough she was getting in trouble in school. The last thing I needed were her classes—her whole life—being carved up like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey just to feed Jerrel’s ego. Besides, Jerrel wasn’t home half the time, always traipsing off to a tournament somewhere, which meant Asia would be spending most of her time alone. She thought Jerrel would be taking her along with him on his tours, but I knew better. If he did, it would seriously cramp his style with all the groupies he was always picking up. But how could I explain that to Asia? She worshipped her father. I didn’t want to speak against him, and I’d striven to take the higher ground in every instance, but somehow, I’d wound up the villain. I’d spent most of yesterday morning hiding in the office bathroom, crying myself into a migraine headache until Wolf softly knocked on the door, wondering if I was all right.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Just plain…damned.
“My lovely, my beautiful Rachaela,” Wolf said. He spread his legs and drew me up against the hard wall of his body and the harder parts still in his trousers as his hands combed through the heavy reams of my hair. He fisted his hands in it until it hurt, then bent to kiss me. His kiss was gentler than I’d expected, like he was tasting me rather than trying to eat me alive. He kept kissing me until the saliva had welled up between us, and I thought, Yes, this is the reason I’m doing it. To forget for a little while. To feel like something other than Big Boss Mama at the office and the Wicked Bitch of the West at home. I wanted to forget. I needed to forget. It was either that, or I was going to need my Zoloft increased.
For just a few minutes after work, from six p.m. to about a quarter after, I could feel like a woman. I could feel like something desired rather than merely respected or even reviled—depending on whose opinion you asked. Wolf was very efficient in his lovemaking, and so far, our schedule had worked. He never detained me very long. He did bite an awful lot, but I was learning to adapt to that. In a way, I even cherished those bites. Sometimes I’d lay sleepless in bed late at night and just touch them, remembering.
“I love your mouth, mein liebeling. Suck my cock and balls with that sweet mouth of yours.”
I undid his trousers. Wolf, so far as I was aware, was no fan of underwear, so I never had to struggle with him. His cock was thick, bright pink and fully engorged when I took it in my hands. I struggled to wrap my fingers entirely around him. I licked him, tasting his salty sweetness, then slowly took the pulsing heat of him into my mouth. Wolf buried his fingers in my hair and buc
ked his hips a little so I was forced to take a little more today than I had yesterday. A little pre-cum spurted into my throat. He had been encouraging me to take a little more of him every day. He called that conditioning. He muttered under his breath, something in Afrikaans, but I couldn’t tell if it was a command, an endearment, or simply an exclamation of relief.
I had almost reached the root of him when he pulled out. “Balls, too, Rachaela,” he said rather sternly.
I obediently lowered my head and scraped my tongue across his testes until I heard his breath catch in his throat. I had once thought it was merely a cologne of his that made him smell this good, like spice and citrus, but I think it was his soap, or shampoo, or aftershave, or a combination of all those things. Or maybe it was just the fact that he had lived so many years in Africa. His skin and the warm, blond fur at his groin smelled like sand and sea and clove and cardamom. I licked him and then took each of his testes in my mouth, carefully sucking on them until I’d made him grunt out words in other languages. I loved listening to him murmuring breathlessly in that singsongy accent—it was the only time he sounded gentle and maybe a little vulnerable. He pulled my hair, making me release him, then held me in place while he thrust his cock back into my mouth. He fucked my mouth while he watched me with a pale, narrowed-eyed concentration that bordered on the devote. He worked himself in and out, a slow, steady rhythm that became increasingly staccato until he finally came in my throat. He made me swallow all of him down, every drop, before dragging me up onto his lap.
I sat on his knee and he kissed me and told me how proud of me he was, how much I had learned these past few weeks, what a good little courtesan I was, how much he enjoyed fucking me. He moved his open mouth over my lips and chin and down over my throat. He stopped where my pulse ticked at the base of my throat and nibbled me there.
“You, sir, are a vampire,” I said, making my statement sound very Jane Austen-esque.
“I’m not a vampire,” he told me, smirking.
“Werewolf, then.”
“I’m not a werewolf.”
“You’re a big, bad, nasty, evil wolf,” I said. I kept expecting to feel stupid saying things like that to him, but somehow being with him made it all right.
Towards the end of our marriage, Jerrel and I had tried experimenting with different techniques to help liven up our waning sex life. Hardcore porn. Dirty sex talk. He’d even bought a pair of silly, bright pink, fur-lined handcuffs, though we’d never got around to using them on me. The porn left me rolling my eyes with its lame sauce dialog. The sex talk left us giggling together. But Wolf didn’t giggle. Wolf was pretty much the antithesis of all things giggly. He liked sex talk, liked using it on me, but with him it wasn’t fantasy; it was all about exploration and possibilities. He could get almost scatalogically perverse at times. I palmed his cheek as he kissed me, enjoying the scratch of his beard against the palm of my hand. “Malcolm says you’re always on the prowl, sir. He says everyone is afraid of the big, bad wolf.”
Wolf faintly growled against my throat. He liked it when I called him that, liked it when I teased him, provoked him. He stood up with me pressed against him, his hands all over me, hot and very insistent, then turned me so my belly was pushed up against the edge of my desk. He kicked the chair away and bent me over the desk. He pushed my business skirt up and out of his way and fingered the wetness between my legs, very rough, but not too deep. I wriggled against him. I wanted him deeper. Today, I wanted him as deep as I could get him.
He leaned against my back to hold me still while he faithfully worked a condom on. I struggled, and he warned me to stop it, to be still. I just struggled harder. He slapped my ass, hard. I cried out and told him No while he rubbed at the heat he had created. We had developed a series of safe words of ascending emergency so I could stop him when I’d reached my limits, when I’d had enough of him. That was good, because it left me with the option to struggle, to scream, if I wanted to. Wolf liked it when I struggled and screamed. I had only stopped play once, and that was when he’d tried to penetrate my other opening. Maybe he’d been too big, or maybe he’d just gone too fast for me, but I hadn’t liked the feel of him there, the tremendous pressure. He said I would get used to it, given time. He promised to go slow, to teach me.
He rubbed his partially engorged cock against my wetness. He thrust into me a few times while I groaned and scratched at the top of the desk at the feel of him, the depth he always managed to achieve. But before we could develop a rhythm together, he pulled out and probed me in the other place, testing my readiness. He was wet and slippery. He pushed a little ways inside me. I whimpered and tried to draw back, but there was nowhere to go, no way I could escape his penetration. He groaned, licked the nape of my neck, then bit me. I cried out as he shoved himself further inside. He was huge and hard again, and his bite fucking hurt. I would have screamed had he not reached around and shoved his fingers deep into my mouth. He growled out some words as he moved around inside me, forcing me to adjust to the pressure there. He removed his fingers and waited to see if I would use one of the safe words. I thought about it, then decided to see if I could take him. I knew that Jasmine was taking him there. He’d said as much.
Wolf groaned with satisfaction. “My good little courtesan. Let me claim that tight little ass of yours,” he said and thrust into me a few times before pulling out very carefully. He removed the condom and came against my lower back and ass, less like he’d meant to make love to me and more like he was scent marking his personal property. I felt the warmth of him dripping down between my buttocks and around my sore little hole.
I squirmed against him, rubbing his release against myself and him, so we both smelled like him, like sex. “I’d like to see those medical records,” I told him, blushing furiously at the very words. “And Jasmine’s. If we’re all okay, all three of us, could we be monogamous among ourselves? Could we…do more?” I didn’t know the right word for what we had. I didn’t even know if I could ask this of him.
Wolf’s teeth scraped along the back of my neck as he released me. He licked the little mark he had left, gently, almost lovingly, as his hands stroked and caressed my breasts. “You want me to come inside you, Rachaela? Really come?”
“Yes, sir.” And then I added, “I take birth control pills. I’m responsible too. But I need to be able to trust you.”
“You want the arrangement to end with the three of us,” he guessed. “No other potential courtesans.”
“Yes. If you can give me that, then we can do whatever you want.”
He made a grunting sound of approval. “I’ll arrange it.” He went to one knee and licked me tenderly, the sensation making me wriggle and groan. I pushed my ass against him and his tongue went partly into me, soothing the pain he had caused me. Then he stood back up and lowered my skirt so it was faintly damp and stuck to my ass in places, but still conservative.
Finally, we were done.
“You can go home now, Little Red Riding Hood,” he said. And he slapped my ass and walked away.
* * *
My hand accidently brushed the top of the stove as I maneuvered the cornbread out of the oven with a bunched up tea towel. I yelped and nearly dropped the whole Pyrex dish onto the floor. I swore violent and smacked the dish down atop the stove, kicking the door closed.
Asia padded into the kitchen to retrieve the pitcher of ice tea on the counter. “You all right, Mom?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine. Burned myself.”
“Put some ice on that before it blisters,” she said and took the pitcher out into the dining room. I could hear my dad muttering something, and Asia muttering back, probably about me being a total klutz in the kitchen.
Honestly, I’d never really been Susie Homemaker, even before Asia, but dinner in my parents’ house had always been something special on Sundays, particularly when my mom was alive. I’d tried to keep up the tradition. When I lived with Jerrel, my dad would come over mostly every Sunday to read the
Times in the living room, watch a baseball game on TV with Jerrel, or play checkers with Asia. I never minded making dinner because it gave Asia time to spend with her grandfather. Jerrel might be out of my life these days, but I still liked making dinner for my dad, a retired beat cop who lived off his pension down in Brooklyn. Dad was getting up there in age now, and I really wanted him to sell the house and move in with me and Asia—the neighborhood was far safer—but he wouldn’t hear of it. He and mom had lived in that house down on Lafayette Street for over forty years. I knew he would die in it someday, surrounded by all of Mom’s things.
I looked over at my bounty—the buttermilk-battered fried chicken and collard greens, the corn bread and calico baked bean casserole. During the week, Asia and I ate a lot of pizza, Chinese takeout and Lean Cuisine, but on the weekends I liked to make the food my dad had grown up on. Asia liked to call it our Southern Sunday.
I was digging some ice out of the freezer for my hand when I heard the door buzzer go off, and Asia speaking to the lobby concierge about a visitor. About five minutes later, Asia wandered back in. She looked impressed, which Asia never did anymore. “Your partner’s here, Mom.”
“What?”
“The one with the funny name.”
“Wolf?”
She mouthed, He’s hot, rolled her eyes, and then pantomimed toward the dining room.
Oh God, no, please tell me Wolf did not invade the sanctity of my own home! Clutching the ice to my hand, I hurried out to the living room and found to my extreme horror that Wolfgang Beck was sitting at my dining room table, dressed in one of his “weekend suits,” which were just a little less formal than the clothes he normally wore to work. Instead of a tie, he wore a cravat, of all things. He was talking to my dad. My entire world teetered over a fiery abyss of destruction for a moment.
I stopped and just watched my family talking to my partner and gentleman—my lover, the man who had, in the course of the past two weeks of my conditioning, made himself intimate with every part of me, who had come in every orifice of my body. Wolf was explaining the concept of his seed villages to my dad. Dad and Asia listened with rapt attention—Asia, more than I was comfortable with. When Dad spotted me, he looked up with a wide, wrinkly grin. “Baby girl, you should have told me your partner was so interesting. Do you know he’s developing the Namib desert?”