The Dollhouse Society Ultimate Boxset: 21 Books & 5 Shorts in the Dollhouse Society Series

by Eden Myles

  I thought about Simon’s request, and how lonely this weekend was going to be with just Sheri to gab at me, so I said, “Sure. Why not? What time should I come over?”

  ***

  We’d agreed on nine in the morning, because Simon had football practice at eleven.

  His dorm was a mess. Not that I was a clean freak or anything, but it was seriously littered with clothes that needed washing, fast food cartons, and haphazardly stacked textbooks. His high school football jersey and pennants decorated the walls. While he went to dig some sodas out of his tiny dorm Frigidaire, I went to look over his trophy collection.

  There were albums stacked neatly under the TV. I expected to find gaggles of football pics and girlfriend photos, but when I opened up the first one, I realized the album was actually a butterfly collection, which I found kind of weird. The same was true of the other albums. All butterflies, meticulously labeled and displayed on the pages, along with carefully penciled in factoids, habitat information and rough sketches.

  Simon stepped back into the room with two Mountain Dews and looked at me a little pensively but didn’t say anything about me looking at his bug collection. “You wanna start?” he asked only, and I put the album back and we both sat down at his cluttered desk to go over the ancient economics of Greece and Rome for the next hour and a half.

  I guess my seeing his collection really bugged him, no pun intended, because eventually he said, “I like Lepidoptera. I think they’re cooler than stamps or collecting toy soldiers or whatever.”

  “It’s all cool, man,” I said.

  Simon sat back in his chair and folded his arms against the back of his head. “Can I ask you something really personal, Daniel?” he said.

  “I guess.” I turned a page of his textbook.

  “Does anyone give you a hard time? Being gay, I mean?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Not that I’ve noticed. But then, I don’t really know what folks say about me behind my back.”

  “The guys I know think you’re pretty cool, actually,” he said, and his words uplifted me somewhat. “Most don’t even know you’re gay. You don’t act gay.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” I turned and looked at him. “You’re not out with them, are you?”

  Simon looked horrified, as if I’d asked him to stick his hand into a box full of rabid weasels. “Ut-uh. I wouldn’t know where to start, but I am thinking about telling them.”

  I wondered how that would go over—the star quarterback of the Columbia team being a butterfly-collecting closet case. Probably like a lead balloon. It was almost like a bad Lifetime movie plot or something.

  Simon shrugged and all his muscles moved in his upper chest and arms under his t-shirt. “I mean, I’d like to. The guys are always dragging me to strip clubs, you know? And they’re constantly introducing me to these chicks and stuff, and I have to keep giving them lame-ass excuses or pretending I like the girls they send my way, but it’s a huge drag. I’d really love to tell them and just get it over with, but then it might get back to my parents.” He bit his lip, then started telling me about his folks who lived in western Pennsylvania, and although things seemed slightly more modern and civilized out there in the Keystone State, I got the feeling he was in the same boat as I was. No matter where you went, parents were parents. They all wanted their sons to grow up, find a girl, settle down, and act normal and acceptable.

  I didn’t say a whole lot, but I found I really liked talking to Simon. Before I left his dorm, he asked me if he could kiss me. I was feeling comfortable enough with him to let him do it, and it was a warm kiss, not too wet. He didn’t ravage my face the way Mr. Karenina did. I liked that, but I was also a little disappointed. Simon ran his hand up the back of my hair, then slapped my cheek in a friendly way and told me he was looking forward to our next tutoring session.

  I got all the way back to my dorm before the guilt started setting in.

  ***

  The following Saturday, Kate let me into Mr. Karenina’s kitchen and said, “How are you doing, Daniel?”

  “I’m good,” I told her. She looked beautiful, even with the sling on her arm, and I thought again how much she resembled her father. I thought how she was going to be on TV a long, long time, seeing how neither she nor Mr. Karenina seemed to age very much. I’d finally gotten up the courage to ask for her autograph, and as she smiled and scribbled her name lefthandedly across the photograph of her I’d printed off the internet, I said, “How does your arm feel?”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Everyone’s treating me like I have a terminal disease, including Da. He’s been insufferable these last few days!” She led me into the breakfast nook, where she poured me a coffee. “Has the work been okay?”

  I took the coffee from her, wondering how much she knew about my relationship with her father. “Oh sure. It’s really easy. And your father is great to work with.”

  “Good. He’s really happy with you too, Daniel,” she said, leaning against the sidebar and cradling her coffee cup in her good hand. “I’m really surprised by the changes in him these last few weeks.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. When my mom died, it changed Da. He became very…introverted. He wouldn’t see his friends or even step outside the house for the longest time. He used to sleep with one of my mother’s ball gowns tucked under the covers with him. In fact, do you know that up until recently, he kept all her old dresses upstairs in her wardrobe?”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “But I bet you miss your mom.”

  Kate smiled and touched a small, heart-shaped pendant she wore around her neck and said, “I keep her with me.” And then, realizing how solemn the room was growing, she perked up and said, “I hear Da’s been getting out with you on the weekends. He’s being a real pioneer, isn’t he?”

  “He likes to go into the city on Saturdays,” I said and left it at that.

  “How’s Malcolm?”

  I almost choked on my coffee.

  Kate smirked.

  “You know about that? About the Dollhouse?”

  “That my mom was a courtesan? Yes, Daniel, I know that.” She stepped forward and laid a hand on my shoulder. “I like you a lot, and I know Da does too. You’ve been good for him.”

  “But…” I said, because there was always a but.

  “All I ask is that you be gentle with him, okay? Don’t ever lie to him. Don’t lead him on. That’s all I ask.”

  “I have no intention of hurting your dad, Kate,” I said.

  Her phone went off then, and she snatched it up and looked at the number. “That’s my agent. Da will be down shortly, if he ever gets done preening. Why don’t you have some more coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said. But after Kate stepped out onto the pavilion to take her call, I made a point of walking the rooms the way Mr. Karenina liked. I marked down a couple of hazards I noticed, then wended my way upstairs.

  I found Mr. Karenina in his bedroom, dressing. He was wearing trousers, but his white dress shirt hung open as he stood in a shaft of late morning sunlight by the window, struggling with his cufflinks. He looked gorgeous in the daylight, all black and white, like a man from another era—black hair, white skin, black pants, white shirt. I set my notebook down and went to him. “Would you like me to help you, sir?” I asked, feeling very Jeevesque all of a sudden. At least I knew now why it took him so long to dress in the morning before we went into the city. It was because he never asked for any help, even from Kate.

  He looked at me—or rather, at about the level of my chin—and considered my offer. I wondered if I’d said something to offend him. Had I hurt his pride by offering to help him? Had I made him feel like some cripple? But after a tense moment his face softened and he said, “Yes, all right, Daniel. Thank you.”

  I went to work on his cufflinks, which were difficult even with eyes. Then I asked him if I could help him with the rest of his wardrobe. I knew he could manage just fine on his own, but it had been two weeks since
I’d seen him, and I wanted to touch him, I wanted to be with him, help him, and he seemed to sense that. He let me button his shirt, which I found was almost as much fun as taking it off him. When I reached his collar, he slid a hand against the back of my neck and jerked me closer so he could nudge my mouth open with his tongue. He kissed my mouth and inside my mouth. I moaned and he said, “I love it when you make those noises, Daniel, like you can hardly control yourself.”

  I made those noises while he kissed me. His free hand drifted over the front of my body and he fondled me gently between the legs, through my jeans. Then he pushed me back toward his bed and made me sit down. He continued to kiss me, pressing me into the mattress, and we made out for a while until we were both breathless. It was the best good morning kiss I’d ever had. “Your suits have arrived,” he told me as his fingers splayed over the front of my shirt, gripping the material. “Will you let me dress you, Daniel? Play with you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He went to the wardrobe on the opposite side of the room and showed me the suits, which were just as beautiful as the ones he wore. I assumed this was the closet he’d kept his wife’s clothes in, and I thought about what Kate had said about him sleeping with Elizabeth’s gowns.

  I let him play with me. It took all morning and most of the afternoon. I thought it was a somewhat odd fetish for a grown man to have, dressing and undressing his lover in the seemingly endless shirts and suits he had purchased, but not the oddest thing I’d ever heard of. And, after all, it was almost comforting, the way he handled me, gently but persistently, like some giant doll, like I belonged to him, like I was his plaything. Lost in a kind of personal reverie, he touched my skin and hair, stroked his hands across the fine fabric of the suits that clung to me. Along the way, he informed me that he and Elizabeth would play like this all day sometimes.

  By the time evening rolled around, I realized we’d never left the house, hadn’t visited the NorthStar offices at all, and I wondered what his evening plans were. He finally asked me to dinner, and then requested I accompany him to the Dollhouse this evening so he could show off my new wardrobe.

  When we arrived, many of the other gentlemen, including Malcolm, greeted him as they had that first night, but he seemed less interested in mingling with them than with being with me. He walked me into the Great Hall so I could look at the pictures on the walls a little more closely. He showed me a cluster of photographs near the piano that he told me were of Elizabeth back when she was a young woman. She was very beautiful, very glamorous, like some silver screen actress, but at the same time, she seemed like someone I would have liked to have gotten to know.

  “There are rooms set aside to play in,” Mr. Karenina explained as he walked me along in my brand new tuxedo, my hand tucked into the crook of his arm. His voice was soft and playful tonight. “Playrooms where we can do almost anything, so long as it’s tasteful. Have I worn you out yet, Daniel?”

  “No,” I told him, trying not to blush like some amateur. “I like it when you play with me.”

  We found one that looked like a Japanese rock garden, and another that resembled a French boudoir. Most of the rooms were occupied by gentleman and their trained courtesans. I watched them make art and love in all different kinds of ways, all of them very pretty, very creative, but since it was mostly a visual art and Mr. Karenina was getting almost nothing from the experience, I asked him if we could move on. I knew he wasn’t here just to chaperone me; he wanted to play.

  Mr. Karenina ran his hand along the wall of an empty playroom and said, “The schoolroom.”

  It was, as I expected, decorated like a classroom, albeit of the Eighteenth Century variety, with a blackboard, head desk, and a collection of student desks clustered around in a U-shape. It was presently unoccupied. Mr. Karenina led me to the head desk and immediately started kissing and coddling me, darting his tongue in and out of my mouth while his hands moved up my back to cradle my head. I started making those noises he liked so much. He nibbled over my chin and throat, while one of his hands seized my thigh and squeezed, then moved upward to press hard against the fly of my new, tailor-made trousers so I made more noises and bucked against his hand. The trousers were just tight enough to look good but feel a little uncomfortable. I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Karenina had designed them that way on purpose.

  “You’re hard for me, Daniel,” he said against my mouth. He clutched my cock and balls through the silken material. “Have you been a good boy during the last two weeks?”

  I thought about the kiss I’d shared with Simon. “No.”

  His clutched my genitals hard enough to hurt. Meanwhile, his other hand stole up the side of my neck to seize my chin as he misinterpreted my confession as play. “I shall have to punish you quite severely, then,” he said.

  He waited, waited to see if I would use one of our personal safe words to stop our play, but all I said was, “Yes.” The guilt had been eating through me for close to three days now.

  He released his iron hold on me. “Turn around and bend over the desk,” he commanded me, his voice clipped and as hard as steel, almost like he knew what I had done.

  I scrambled to turn, giving him my back. I leaned over the desk so my chest was resting against the hard, knotted walnut surface. But he grabbed the painful short hairs on the back of my head and pushed my head further down, until my cheek was pressed against the wood. That arched my back and stuck my rump further up. I gripped the edge of the desk for purchase, but that, too, displeased him, so he produced one of the black silk scarves he carried in his pocket and took my hands and carefully bound my wrists together tightly in the small of my back. I closed my eyes and gasped at the feel of his fingers gliding down my spine and up the incline of my ass. He undid my belt and trousers and pulled them and my underwear down to my knees.

  I wriggled in my compromised position and at the sensation of my cock and balls being crushed against the top of the desk as he pressed his body against my back, holding me down. “Stop it, Daniel,” he whispered harshly in my ear, his voice a sibilant, steel-edged hiss, but when I continued to struggle, he struck my bare ass with the palm of his hand, not a love tap. The impact made me cry out, and I was rewarded with another smack. This time I had the brains to bite my tongue and keep my mouth closed.

  “Good boy,” he said. “I don’t want to hear a word out of you.” He kicked my legs further apart and rubbed my ass where he’d struck me, then slid his fingers down my crack in order to tap at my ass. I writhed but only let the faintest grunt escape my mouth this time. “You’re a good student, Daniel,” he cooed. “You learn so fast.”

  There were a number of items on the teacher’s desk, among them books, a small McIntosh apple, a riding crop, and an old-fashioned spanking board, which looked a bit like a short, flat cricket bat with multiple holes bored into it. Mr. Karenina fingered the riding crop first, then abandoned it in favor of the spanking board. My heart started hammering at the sight, and I worked to keep breathing evenly instead of having some kind of a panic attack.

  The hard surface of the spanking board caressed my bare ass, and the feel of it, the wood smooth and hard against my skin, sent a fearful thrill through my body. I was already sore from the spanking Mr. Karenina had subjected me to. I didn’t know how much more I could endure without crying out. I closed my eyes and just concentrated on my breathing, but just as I thought I’d gotten myself under control, I heard the spanking board cutting through the air with a whistling noise, and then it cracked it against my ass so hard I couldn’t help but scream aloud at the sudden, humiliating pain.

  “Daniel,” Mr. Karenina growled with disappointment. He came around the desk and grabbed my hair and yanked my head up so I could see the grim, stony expression on his face, his narrowed eyes, his teeth set in a determined grimace. “I said not a word.” With his free hand he undid his trousers and I could see his already stiffened and engorged cock lying tight and nestled against the dark fur of his groin. Hold
ing me by the scalp, he used his other hand to guide it into my mouth. He bucked his hips, making me deep-throat him all at once.

  I choked and he withdrew, used his dick to slap me across the face, then stuck it down my throat again, even farther than before so I gagged. “Suck,” he said, sliding it back a little ways, and I sucked as hard as I could until I felt him spurt his pre-cum down my throat. Then he withdrew it and shoved the apple in my teeth and told me to bite down. I bit, the taste of him, and the sweet tartness of the apple, mingling in my mouth. Then he returned to the task at hand, removing his dinner jacket and rolling up his sleeves as he got serious with his business.

  He took up the spanking board once more, testing its weight, then slammed it against my already sore ass. I snorted the pain through my nose and my teeth clenched into the apple like I had lockjaw. My body reacted despite my best efforts, writhing against the pain and humiliation, but I didn’t say a word, even when another crack came almost immediately following the first. As he continued to spank my sore and tingling ass, I prayed for numbness, but that didn’t happen. The board had been designed in just such a way as to delay the pain and then drive it deep into my body and make every part of me react to it. It didn’t get better. It just made me harder.

  He finally stopped to reach beneath me and fondle my cock and balls. My balls had drawn up tight against the front of my body, and my cock was wet with pre-cum I couldn’t control. “Daniel, you mustn’t come without my permission,” he hissed in my ear, sounding angry now. I shivered at the power pouring off his body, a kind of electrified passion. He rubbed the spanking board against my sore ass. I moaned at his touch, the enormous pressure building inside me, and he tightened his grip on my cock, his thumb pressing into my slit, while he brought the spanking board down one last time on my ass, hard. I was able to contain myself, but only barely. He licked my ear and said, “Are you mine, boy?”