by Eden Myles
“Jerrel,” I said, very civil-like. “Asia will be down in a minute. Wardrobe malfunction. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”
“Water, if it’s not too much trouble.”
I went back into the kitchen to retrieve another bottle of Avian. Jerrel followed me in and whistled. “You redid the kitchen.”
“Not really. Just moved a few things around.” I turned away from the refrigerator and noted that Jerrel had been admiring my ass while I’d been bent over, and not my kitchen. I handed the frosty bottle to him.
He took it in his big hand but didn’t immediately open it up. He took pains to look innocent. “How’s your dad?”
“Good. Arthritis has been bad, though.”
Jerrel’s eyes traveled over me like two bits of metal being dragged up my body by force of an invisible magnet. I was still wearing my office clothes, a white blouse cut just low enough to be a little disarming, and a black pinstripe business skirt just short enough to make men look, but not so short as to make a tramp of me. I could have worn my usual pants suits this week, since Wolf was in Africa, attending to his men, and I didn’t have to worry about conditioning—hell, I’d worn pants for years at the office while building up the magazine, hoping I’d garner more respect from the men in the industry—but now I’d gotten into the habit of wearing flexible, prettier, and slightly more revealing clothes for Wolf, and I was having trouble breaking the habit. I still liked my pants, but I thought how it was nice to look like a woman, sometimes. “You look good, Rache.”
“Thank you.”
“Really good.”
“Jerrel.”
“I’m just stating the obvious.”
I started moving past him, toward the foyer, but Jerrel put his hand on my arm, halting me. “Look,” he said in that deep, velvety-soft voice of his, the kind of voice you normally hear in a fantasy-movie voiceover giving you the back story—or a porn movie during a money shot—“I know we’re fighting about everything…the divorce papers, Asia…but is there any way we can stay friends? I worry about you, Rache. I don’t like that you’re all alone all the time…”
“I’m not alone.”
The stunned look on Jerrel’s face took me aback. I couldn’t believe Jerrel’s ego, that he was so shocked by the possibility of me seeing another man. I felt a surge of anger I quickly dampened down. I knew he thought I would never do better than him. He probably thought I was going to wait around in the wings while he ran out his mid-life crisis, banging everything in a skirt. Well, he was very wrong about me. He didn’t know me at all.
“You’re seeing someone?” he asked, sounding almost accusatory, like I was cheating on him.
“As a matter of fact.”
“Anyone I know?”
“No,” I said, and left it at that.
“I just ask because I worry about Asia, Rache. About what she might be exposed to.”
This from the man I later learned had banged my maid of honor at our wedding. “I’m not dating a pedophile, Jerrel. I assure you that you have nothing to worry about.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
Jerrel shook his head slowly back and forth. “Still playing the Big Boss Lady.”
“Yes,” I said, crossing my arms. “I am the Big Boss Lady, here and in the office. It’s my job. I’m sorry that hurts your manhood so much, Jerrel. But the fact of the matter is, I can take care of myself.”
“God, you’re still such a fucking bitch…”
I pressed my lips together. I was about to say, And you’re a playa, Jerrel. You always will be. So don’t lecture me on how to raise my daughter. But before I could, Asia bounded into the kitchen.
“Daddy!” she cried, and threw herself into Jerrel’s arms. Jerrel clenched her tight and then told her all about their coming week, how he meant to take her looking for a horse all her own. Asia, of course, was just child enough still to be ecstatic. She couldn’t have a horse in the city, but out in the Hamptons, Jerrel said, the sky was the limit.
I stalked quietly by them both and out into the hallway to help Asia carry her things downstairs.
***
“Ein Unglück kommt selten allein.”
I looked over at Wolf in the driver’s seat of the roadster and said, “Did you just clear your throat?”
Wolf smirked. “I said, ‘when it rains, it pours’.”
I turned in my seat a little and looked at him. “You don’t use the German much.”
Wolf seemed to think about that. He’d come back from Africa smelling like Africa, but with a lot more German cluttering up his speech. He said it was because the hospitals in Botswana were still very much under the control of the South African German population. His men had all pulled through, and he hadn’t needed to fly them back to the States for treatment, but it had been touch and go with some of them. “Around the early part of the 1990’s, the South African government declared English the official language of Namibia,” he explained. “I was eighteen at the time, and up until then, German was all my parents spoke, though they did know English. It took me a while to learn. But I still think in German.”
“That must have been hard on you,” I said, and then rethought that. “No, never mind. You have an eidetic memory. How long did it take you to learn English? A weekend?”
“Fluidly? A week.”
“Damn, you were slow back then.”
Wolf smirked a little. I studied his desert-burned profile, the sharp angles and almost hawkish features that were striking rather than handsome, the heavy, white-blond hair knotted at the nape of his neck. I tried to imagine Wolf at eighteen, softer and more underdeveloped. It was very hard to imagine.
Outside, the garish neon lights of New York after dark flashed by the windows of the car, but I didn’t want to look out the windows and watch the city. I wanted to watch Wolf. “It’s not raining, sir,” I said in answer to his earlier statement.
“It’s raining in your head, my pet.”
I told him about Jerrel trying to turn my daughter against me. I’d never been very big on telling others about my issues, but something about Wolf made me feel comfortable, like he wouldn’t judge me, no matter how messed up my life was. He also wouldn’t suggest anything, which was even better. I really just wanted him to listen. There was nothing he could do for me anyway.
When I had finished my tale of woe, he said, “Do you want to bow out of tonight?”
“Are you giving me a choice, sir?”
Wolf looked slightly annoyed. “You always have a choice, Rachaela. You can exercise your own free will anytime. Why do you think I insisted we develop safe words?”
I had been rubbing the tops of my thighs, pushing the skirt of my strappy cocktail dress up a little ways as I did so, and I knew he’d noticed. I thought how I probably looked like some big cat sitting in Wolf’s bucket seat, rubbing myself against his upholstery. “I don’t feel like I have a will of my own, Wolf, especially when I’m with you…when I’m beneath you,” I told him honestly. The words brought the heat to the edges of my ears.
“You confuse lack of will with a lack of inhibition.”
“Come again?”
Wolf snorted, and it took me a moment to realize he was interpreting my words as a double entendre. I hadn’t even realized I’d made a funny. “You don’t give yourself to me because you have no choice, Rachaela. You give yourself to me precisely because you do have a choice, and you choose to exercise that choice. You trust me, and you trust yourself. You’re a very powerful woman, and I respect and admire that.”
Now I snorted. “Funny, I don’t feel very powerful around you.”
“You are,” he said, sounding serious for the moment. “If you didn’t feel powerful and secure in that power, you wouldn’t feel comfortable submitting to your gentleman.”
“Jerrel thinks I’m a bitch.”
“Not many men know how to handle a strong woman.”
“But you d
o.”
“Yes,” he answered with a perfectly straight face. “I like strong women. My father made his fortune mining gold ore from the desert, but my mother worked as an Ambassador in the Embassy of the Republic of Namibia. She was a very powerful woman, highly respected.”
“I hope you’re not seeing me as your mother.”
He glanced over, giving me what I knew now to be his bedroom eyes, faintly dangerous. “No. I don’t see you as my mother, Rachaela.”
“What do you see me as?”
“My partner. My courtesan. My woman.”
The warmth and insistence in his voice made me wet. “That’s a rather wifey term. What will Jasmine think?”
“We can ask her,” he said as he pulled into the lot behind Jasmine’s studio apartment to pick her up.
She emerged wearing a short red evening dress similar to mine—little more than a negligee, really. Wolf had dressed us both similarly—but then, we were his roses tonight, with one of us destined to be his orchid, his courtesan. He had given me sixteen red roses when he’d come to pick me up. I’d thought it was an odd number, and when I’d asked him about it, he’d told me it was because he’d been inside me sixteen times, which immediately made me blush, something that hadn’t happened in years. Jesus, he’d been counting. But with Jasmine, he gave her a dozen white roses before handing her down into the front seat of the car, leaving me in the middle this time. I thought that was odd…and disturbing. It looked much too much like a wedding bouquet to me.
“Rachaela,” Jasmine said, and touched the side of my face with her painted fingertips, this pretty little Dresden doll of a woman. It was an absent touch of greeting, and yet, somehow, more intimate than I’d expected from my rival. We drove out to Long Island in relative silence, with Jasmine making some small noises of appreciation over her roses. Wolf’s roadster wasn’t very big, so Jasmine’s body kept me pressed tight against Wolf’s side. Eventually I developed enough courage to slide my hand along Wolf’s leg.
He’d told us a little of what to expect when we arrived at the Dollhouse, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it. It was a big, rambling stone colonial set far back on a huge, private estate. The estate itself was surrounded by tall, wrought iron fences and dense copses of pine and fir trees, very private, and in a place like Long Island, that meant the house was not just old but very, very expensive. Hampton House looked old and expensive, like a museum or university. I half expected to see a coach house out front and footmen in powdered wigs as we pulled up. There was a coach house, converted into a guard station, but also modern valet parking. The guy guarding the front entrance looked like serious hired muscle, despite the tuxedo.
Wolf walked the two of us inside, and I was immediately taken by how well preserved everything was, the smell of age and wood and oil. The timber framing and wainscoting went forever. The receiving room was huge and furnished like an Eighteenth Century hunt club study, with gigantic oil paintings, stuffed and mounted game animals, and two-hundred-year-old Shaker furniture. It was occupied by perhaps fifty members of the Dollhouse Society, all with scotch or martinis in hand. Some of the men I recognized from the society papers, but some I knew personally, like Malcolm. He was standing near the hearth, talking to a very tall gentleman dressed in a dark evening suit and glasses. The tall man looked like someone I should know, but didn’t.
Wolf stood between us girls, his hands brushing the sides of our hips. “Ah, there’s Malcolm.”
“Who’s the man with him?” I asked.
“That’s Ian Sterling.”
“Of Sterling of New York? The cosmetics company?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Can we say hello?”
“I can. You cannot.”
I blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Gentleman are not permitted to converse with other gentlemen’s courtesans inside the Dollhouse. It’s a house rule,” Wolf explained. “You may converse with other courtesans, of course.”
I was about to protest that rule rather vocally when Jasmine linked her arm through mine. “Would you like to explore with me, Rachaela?”
I concentrated on controlling my anger and let her drag me along into an adjoining room, which was done up quite a bit differently than the receiving hall. This one was larger, longer, and stark white, though the walls were flocked with framed photographs of different types. Some were as large as lithographs, others mere tiny tintypes. All of them depicted some form of erotica, everything from the fashionably elegant photo shoots I employed for Blaze magazine to the more hardcore stuff. Much of it looked quite old, the strangely artsy, almost demure style of the early Twentieth Century, under parlor maids being flogged with feather dusters, topless Mata Hari-type dancing girls kissing apples and snakes, that type of thing. It reminded me of the French postcards that gentlemen used to share between themselves during that period. I’d seen pictures of cards like those online years ago and they had been a big influence in my launching the magazine in the first place. Most of the photography was much too stylized to really be called pornography.
A large group of women stood clustered together near the giant-sized stone hearth, sharing drinks from the sidebar. Jasmine stopped and looked them over nervously. “They’re very pretty,” she said, actually biting a nail, though that was something of an understatement. They weren’t merely pretty. They were gorgeous, model-perfect in their sleek long bodies and ten-thousand-dollar gowns, though none of their garments were quite as short as our own. It was like the United Nations of courtesans; I saw women of every ethnic variety and combination. Devon, the only man in the room, was the only one who really stood out, but the moment he saw us, he gaily waved us forward, a girl attached to each arm.
“How are you dolls tonight?” he asked, and Jasmine peered up at him as if she had never seen anything more splendid.
“Devon,” I said with a smile. “We’re fine, but the gentleman are in the other room. Do you like hanging around with us dolls?”
He gave me a droll look. “Doll, I am a doll.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He offered me a lascivious smile and introduced the two of us to several of the other courtesans.
They seemed nice enough, chatty, not nearly as stuck up as I’d expected they would be. One young brunette caught my attention immediately. She was very tall and rather shy, and she had a rather noticeable bulge beneath her cocktail dress. I thought about what Wolf had said about the gentlemen marrying their courtesans. Apparently, pregnancy wasn’t off the menu, either.
“Are you…playing tonight?” I asked the young woman who introduced herself as Evelyn.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed, setting her hand on her rather substantial belly. “Ian won’t let me play until after the baby is born. I’m just here to meet you new girls.”
“Ian Sterling. You’re his courtesan?”
“Yes,” she answered brightly. “Ian’s being very stern with me. No play, either in the Dollhouse or at home. And only very gentle sex.”
“You two play at home?”
“Oh yes, we have our own playroom,” she said without even an iota of shame. “But we won’t play again until after the baby.” She rubbed at her belly and blushed.
I noticed that Devon was busy entertaining Jasmine, so I attached myself to Evelyn. She seemed very sweet, much too sweet to be a courtesan. She went to the wet bar and poured us both sparkling waters. Belatedly, I recalled the no-alcohol rule that Wolf had mentioned.
“How do you…?” I began, and then stopped. I didn’t really know how to ask something so personal as How do you play? What exactly do courtesans and gentleman do?
“Do you know anything about the Dollhouse? Do you know what to expect?” Evelyn surprised me by asking.
I took the glass of lime bubbly water from her and said, “Wolf’s told me some. You…well, basically, you have sex for the enjoyment of the gentlemen.”
“And for our own enjoyment as well,” Evelyn told me.
“You must be certain all your needs are being met as well. Devon told me that.”
“So it’s not all for them,” I grinned.
“Who said it was all for them?” Evelyn grinned back, and I felt that she and I were going to be very good friends in the future.
I’d never really had a close girlfriend before. I’d been an only child, and somehow I’d breezed through high school and then college without developing any real attachments. Certainly it was difficult to find any women to talk to me now. Most women who saw the magazine thought I was a lesbian, a pervert, that I exploited women, black people, or all of the above.
“Do you enjoy this?” I asked. “Being a courtesan, I mean?”
Evelyn smiled serenely down at me. “I love Ian. I love being his courtesan as much as I love being his secretary and his wife. It’s very empowering.”
“I don’t see how,” I said. “You do what he tells you to do, don’t you? You do everything he tells you to do.”
Evelyn smiled. It was a secretive smile, the smiles of women throughout history—Elizabeth I, Joséphine de Beauharnais, all the women of real power. “Don’t you know, Rachaela? He only tells me to do what I want him to tell me to do.”
I was still thinking about Evelyn’s words when Wolf came to fetch me. He took my hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm, very gentleman-like, as we went to collect Jasmine from the gaggle of courtesans. “Usually, a courtesan has a debutante ball her first night in the Dollhouse, but since I’m still undecided about the two of you, the board has granted me a pass on the ball. We’ll still be able to use one of the playrooms, however.”
I swallowed, perhaps a little nervously. “Which playroom?” I had a horrid fantasy of Wolf taking us down into some frighteningly depressing dungeon space full of racks and chains. I didn’t think I would enjoy that.
“I’ve decided on the Wedding Suite,” Wolf said as Jasmine attached herself to his other arm. “I thought it fitting, since this will mark the beginning of my monogamy.” He looked at us both. “You may approve or disapprove, of course.” He walked us into a long hallway covered in yet more of that antique erotica that was so beautifully fascinating. I wanted to return to the Dollhouse one day soon just so I could get a closer look at the pictures on the walls. “Here we are,” he said, leading us into one of the playrooms.