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

by Eden Myles

  After our yellow lab Rachmaninoff finished jumping all over Sheri in the foyer, I showed her the kitchen, sitting room, dining room, and drawing rooms, pointing out some of the original architecture we had restored. She marveled at the Shaker-style furnishings, and I mentioned that I’d let Alexei choose them entirely by touch. In fact, the house so much resembled the architectural layout and furnishings of the Dollhouse, it could be its twin. And that, alone, was proving to be inspirational.

  Manny padded after us as we moved from room to room, and as we went along, I made a point of checking everything over. When we’d moved in two years ago, we’d brought Maria with us, and although she insisted she didn’t move anything when she cleaned, I found things misplaced all the time. Alexei lived in an almost perpetual state of exasperation. He’d fallen over something three times since we’d moved in. And believe me, an Alexei with a smarting knee was nothing you wanted to face first thing in the morning. I loved him, but Kate was right; he was insufferable at times.

  “You’ve done an awesome job, Daniel,” Sheri said, looking around in wonder at the old-fashioned sunroom where Alexei and I grew our orchids and patio tree roses. “You must be really happy.”

  “I think we are,” I told her as I went to straighten up the cushions by the windows where Alexei often spent time listening to audio books or reading his Braille books with the sun on his back.

  I then led her upstairs and showed her the guest bedroom where she’d be staying for the next few days. She looked it over, nodding with great approval, but while I was fetching her some extra blankets from the linen closet, she slipped away. I never could pin Sheri down for more than a few minutes at a time, even in college.

  I found Sheri down the hall, looking over the master bedroom suite. She ran her hands over Alexei’s massive, gorgeous, wrought-iron bed, then bent to pick up a pair of handcuffs that had fallen to the floor. “Kinky,” she said, and I blushed while she dropped them in my hands and crossed the hall to the one room we had a tendency to keep shut at all times. I stuck the handcuffs in my suit jacket and hurried after her. She opened the door a crack and peeked inside, then slipped inside our darkened, dusty nursery. She looked around the room and said, “What a lonely room, Daniel. What happened with the adoption agency?”

  “Oh that,” I said, working to sound casual about it. “Well, we changed our minds. I mean, with our work and everything…”

  “Daniel,” she said, giving me that look that told me she didn’t buy my bullshit for even one moment. Like the house, I’d gone on a bit too much about this subject as well, calling her excitedly every time our caseworker set up an appointment, and then avoiding her phone calls for days on end when things inevitably fell through. “I know when you’re lying. The house…the dog…but where’s the baby?” Then she gaped at me. “Was the same sex thing an issue?”

  I snorted as I ran my hand over the dresser and looked at the dust on my fingers. The nursery was the one place that Maria didn’t clean regularly. It was almost like she was as upset with how things were going as we were and could barely stand to be in the small room. “Surprisingly, the same sex thing wasn’t an issue,” I told her. “It was Alexei’s age. They said they don’t like to adopt out to a couple where one of the partners is over fifty.”

  Sheri stared at me in horror. “Can they do that?”

  “They can do anything they want.” I looked around the room and stuck my hands in my pockets. “It’s all cool,” I said with a forced smile and a noncommittal shrug. “We’ve made some new plans.”

  “Really?” she said, fingering one of the sad-looking stuffed toys on the changing station.

  “Yep. We’ve decided to travel, a world tour. All of Europe and part of Asia…”

  Sheri sat down on the cushioned seat beside the changing station and put the toy in her lap. Manny padded over and laid his head in her lap. She looked up at me in a way that was distinctively not very Sheri-like. It had been two years, but she’d changed a lot since graduation. She looked thinner, and there were dark rings under her eyes. She seemed somehow less full of bouncy energy.

  I pulled a chair up beside her. “What’s going on?” I asked. “I have this feeling you didn’t just come out here to see the house, or me.”

  “No,” she admitted. “I didn’t. I mean, of course I wanted to see the house, and you—you’re my best girlfriend, Daniel—but that’s not my only reason.”

  I would have smiled at her words, but there was a lump in my throat. I knew something was wrong. “Sheri…tell me.”

  She looked up at me, flushed, and blurted out, “Steve and I are breaking up, and I really need someplace to put my head together for a few days, if that’s okay with you and Alexei.”

  I blinked at her in shock. Steve Harding was the guy she had moved in with after graduation. He was the former Columbia quarterback, a good friend of Simon’s, actually. Most importantly, he’d been the first guy that Sheri had ever been totally serious about. She’d been so serious, she’d even defied her own family just to be with him, citing me as an example of how a person had to follow his or her heart, even if their parents didn’t approve of their choice of lover. I had remembered, a few days before I moved out of my dorm, her saying that Steve was the kind of guy she could imagine growing old with, even dying in his arms, which was awful romantic, coming from Sheri.

  “What happened?” I asked softly. But when she hesitated, I squeezed her shoulder. “Sheri, we’re just a couple of girls here. You can tell me.”

  She laughed at that, but it was a bitter sound. “Believe it or not, it was Simon’s fault.”

  “What did Simon do?”

  She rubbed at her damp eyes with her sleeve. “It turns out the two of them had a rebound thing after you dumped Simon. Some one-night stand, he said.”

  “Steve’s bi?” I said with some surprise. He’d never even pinged my radar.

  “Well, yeah, I knew that beforehand, but I didn’t know he was still emotionally involved with Simon. Turns out, they’d been staying in touch by email, calling each other late at night. They thought it was just friendship…but you know how these things go. And then, about a week ago, Steve finally broke down and told me the truth about him and Simon.”

  “What did you say?”

  She shrugged. “Would could I say, Daniel? I told him I wanted him to be happy. And if that means being with Simon, well…that just puts me the odd woman out, doesn’t it?” She clutched the toy and stared down at her feet.

  I sat there, looking at her a long, long moment. “I wish I could say something,” I said at last, pulling her close against me in a huggle. “I mean, something to fix this. I almost feel responsible, somehow.”

  “Oh, it’s not your fault, Daniel. You never even did it with Simon, so that’s no excuse for him going after Steve like a dog in heat, except that Steve is just about as closeted as Simon. Two peas in a pod. Or rather…two queers in a closet.”

  I held her tight. I kissed her hair. “I still wish there was something I could do.”

  “In a way, you can,” she told me, looking up at my face. In the shadowy darkness, her look was intense.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t tell Steve about the baby.”

  ***

  Alexei had thrown a more formal, catered affair for dinner, seeing how we were entertaining company for the next few days. We had a full house, with Maria and Sheri, plus Kate, who’d finished filming the third and final season of the new X-files TV show and was down from Canada and had dropped in to visit her father. But while Sheri chatted about our past college adventures, our families, and other embarrassing tidbits that left me blushing at the dinner table, she deftly avoided any conversation regarding the baby. I kept trying to figure out a way of bringing it up to Alexei, but each time I found an opening, I got cold feet.

  And my feet got even colder when Alexei began detailing our travel plans, the little out of the way places he meant to show me in Europe and Asia—
Brussels, Prague, Singapore, his plans to show me the Drepung Monastery, located in the west of Lhasa. He and Elizabeth had traveled there after they’d heard about a certain herbal supplement that was supposed to inhibit the spread of cancer cells. I watched Alexei talk about his beloved late wife and felt a knot tighten and then loosen in my throat. Finally, after years of burying his emotions, he had stopped talking about Elizabeth with that halting, wounded voice of his. In fact, in the last couple of years—ever since we’d moved here—he’d stopped remembering Elizabeth as a creature at the end of her life. Instead, he’d started concentrating on the years when they’d been young and happy, and Elizabeth strong, and his memories were often funny and insightful.

  I just couldn’t bear to interrupt him. Besides, he’d been talking about our travel plans for months, and with our trip looming in just a few months’ time—ironically enough, at almost the same time Sheri’s baby was due—I couldn’t figure out a way of asking him to put everything on hold for this. For me. I wasn’t even sure if he wanted what I wanted anymore.

  Maybe, I thought, it was better if I left things alone? I mean, could either of us even handle a baby at this point in our lives? Alexei was still busy overseeing his corporation back in New York, and he’d begun funding a number of charities to benefit the blind and seeing-impaired. I’d just gotten my own business off the ground the year before, and although I was doing relatively well, the firm I’d established online, David Collins & Associates, was taking up almost all my free time. There were days when Alexei and I barely saw one another except in passing.

  After dinner, we retired to the music conservatory and Alexei played the piano for us, a few classical compositions, and then a show tune or two that Sheri had requested. We enjoyed after-dinner drinks, and Kate told us about a possible lead actress role in a major motion picture that her agent was working on—her breakout role, she hoped. Eventually, though, Sheri yawned and told us she was going up to bed. She hadn’t drunk any alcohol, but I knew she was exhausted from the travel and all the emotional crap she’d been dealing with. Kate hugged her father goodnight at the piano, pecked me on the cheek, and told us she was off as well. I gave Sheri a nod and a smile to assure her I’d be taking care of business tonight, and after everyone had left, I sat on the edge of the piano and listened to Alexei play some rambling Stravinsky.

  He played, as always, like a concert pianist, less like he was milking the instrument of music and more like he was summoning it forth in some sorcerous way. It was a huge grand piano in white, almost exactly like the one in the Dollhouse back in New York. I’d bought it for Alexei the first year we’d moved here, and it had set me back quite a ways, but I knew it was one of Alexei’s treasures. “You do know you’re very distracting when you do that,” Alexei complained when he had reached the end of his current measure.

  “How am I distracting?”

  “I can smell you.”

  I sniffed under an armpit just to be certain, but all I detected was the soap I’d used in the shower earlier that evening.

  “That’s not what I mean.” He set his hands on the keys and looked up. He was still almost breathtakingly handsome in his black tuxedo, tall and lean, with his determined, vulpine face and glossy black hair and those thick-lashed dark eyes, so beautiful you almost had the feeling that God had stolen them from an Egyptian woman when he’d put Alexei together. Most folks thought I was cute and adorable, handsome in that All-American kind of way, but I paled by comparison to Alexei’s virile, old European charm, even now. “Tell he what’s bothering you,” he said.

  “What makes you think anything’s bothering me?”

  “You barely spoke during dinner, and, Daniel, you almost never shut up.”

  I blushed even as I recognized my opening. “Sheri’s had a rough time this past year. Her boyfriend Steve left her recently for another man. Simon.”

  “Ah, Simon again,” Alexei stated, his mouth quirking up bitterly at the name of the man who had almost come between us. “Bit of a home wrecker, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t going to discount Steve’s part in the affair. I took a deep breath and forged on. “There’s more.”

  “You’re not planning on running off with Simon, are you?” Alexei asked, only half joking.

  “No,” I laughed. “But Sheri…she’s pregnant with a baby she can’t keep.”

  Alexei stared down sightlessly at the keys of the piano. “I was of the understanding that Sheri’s parents were moneyed?”

  “They are. But that’s not the issue. They might have money, but they’re also very, very prejudice. And Steve, Sheri’s ex-boyfriend, is black.”

  “I see.” He seemed to think about that for a long moment. Perhaps he was contemplating the strange nature of blind hate in general. “And what does Sheri plan to do about her…situation?”

  The moment of truth. “She wants to give up the baby.”

  “I see,” he said again. “Does she think that’s wise?”

  “If you mean, do you think she’ll come to regret it? She might, but Sheri knows as well as I do that she can’t handle the responsibility. Maybe in five years, maybe in ten. Maybe if she found the right guy to support her. But not now.” I took a deep breath. “She never talks about it, but a lot of folks at college were really hard on her, calling her a slut all the time, but they didn’t know the whole story. They didn’t know what she’d been through. When she was still in high school, a bunch of punks gang raped her one night, really messed her up, and they were never caught. It was years before she could even let a guy stand near her, let along touch her. And…well, she’ll never have a completely normal relationship with anyone.”

  “Not true,” Alexei argued. “She has a wonderful relationship with you, Daniel.”

  “But I don’t judge her,” I said. “And, besides, she doesn’t really think of me as a guy, per se. I’m her girlfriend, you see. Her guy girlfriend.”

  I waited for him to laugh at that, to make some joke, but he didn’t. He went back to playing his music and I sat there atop the piano with my eyes closed, realizing I had probably made a terrible mistake. I really was the stupidest smart guy who’d ever walked the planet, just like Sheri had said years ago. What made me think I could convince Alexei to go along with my stupid plan to adopt Sheri’s baby?

  I listened to the music, which was both sad and strangely uplifting at the same time. Finally, Alexei stopped and glanced up at me—or, at least, in my general direction. “I trust you inquired?”

  I looked down at my lover and life partner and said, “What?”

  Alexei raised his eyebrows. “Daniel, you did ask about the prospect of adopting, yes?”

  His words made me feel dizzy and light-headed. “You’re interested?” I asked with some wonder.

  Alexei pressed his lips together, the way he did when he was vaguely insulted by something I had said. “I assumed that was still on our list of goals. You do still want a family with me someday, don’t you?”

  I turned so my legs were dangling over the edge of the piano directly in front of him, blocking him from playing. “Yes, of course…but…what about our travel plans?”

  “When is Sheri’s baby due?”

  “Six months,” I told him. “So it’s going to really mess up our plans.”

  “Daniel,” he said patiently. “What would you prefer to do? Travel the world with me or raise a child?”

  I didn’t even have to think about that. “Well, actually, both. Just not at the same time, probably,” I laughed. “You have Kate all grown, but I’m still pretty new to this parenting stuff.”

  Alexei stood up and rested his hands atop my thighs. “So I change our plans. We travel in a year or three, take the child with us. What do you think of that?”

  I reveled in his words and the heat coming off his body. “Would you do that?” I asked.

  Alexei smirked. “Normally, no, but since it’s you, my angel, I might be persuaded.” Gripping my thighs, he pul
led me a little ways across the slick surface of the piano so it was just my ass on the edge, then forced my legs open so he could fit himself between. He placed his hand on my back and lowered his head and breathed in the scent of my hair and then the skin along the side of my neck. He breathed intimately against my lips.

  With our workloads so heavy, I realized it had been several weeks since we’d had any kind of real intimacy, and I wasn’t counting the quickies at bedtime before the two of us, too exhausted for anything more adventurous, dropped off to sleep. “Hi, there, stranger,” I said when we came face to face. “Long time no see.”

  And Alexei laughed at that. It was good laugh. And it was good to hear him laugh. It wasn’t often a sound you heard from him.

  He had only brushed the briefest kiss across my lips when one of our cell phones went off—which one, I wasn’t entirely sure, since we were all tangled up together, and I’d somehow never gotten around to changing the ringtones on our phones to prevent confusion. By then, I’d slid my hands around Alexei’s ass and pulled him tight against the front of my body, wondering at how hard and muscular he still was, despite being in his mid-fifties, and he was busily working at seeing how far down my throat he could stick his tongue. I gripped the front of his shirt as he explored every inch of my mouth with his tongue. There was something to be said for experience, as Alexei had so thoughtfully pointed out years earlier. Once, an athlete like Simon would have thrilled me, but now I didn’t want a younger man. I didn’t want any other man. I only wanted my gentleman.

  After the seventh ring, I broke away breathlessly to say, “We should get that.”

  “Voicemail can pick it up.”

  “It could be important.” He kissed me. “The end of the world.” Again he kissed me. “The end of everything…”

  “Yes,” he agreed, the rough burn of his cheek grazing me so I whimpered against his mouth. “But it’s also important that a child have a loving environment to grow up in,” he told me. “Don’t you agree?”