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

by Eden Myles

  My jaw almost dropped to the floor. Devon pointed his gavel at the man. “One hundred fifty from Mr. Jeremy Eccleston. Can I get one-fifty-five or do we have a closer?”

  The Great Room was unnaturally silent in the wake of such a ridiculous sum, which is why I clearly heard the Brit whisper, “Three hundred.”

  Devon turned a startled eye on the man and I felt my stomach drop down to someplace closer to my polished wingtips. “Three hundred from Anton Griffiths. Do we have a closer, then?”

  I looked at Mr. Eccleston for deliverance. Please…please…please don’t let me down!

  But he didn’t raise his bidder’s board.

  “Sold to Mr. Anton Griffiths for three hundred thousand dollars,” Devon said. He inclined his head. “And may I say thank you for the generous contribution, Mr. Griffiths.”

  Oh, Mother Mary, blessed are thou among women. Just take me now!

  ***

  I was standing in the banquet hall of the Dollhouse, talking to Izzy, when Devon stepped up to me and said, “You know, mate, Mr. Griffiths is one of the biggest real estate moguls in the city of New York. Might be nice if you actually went and talked to the man who bought you.”

  I glared at Devon. “He didn’t buy me. This whole thing is a farce, you know that?”

  I didn’t wait for his reaction. I stomped out of the hall and took the first exit I could find. Yeah, it was childish, but at the moment I just didn’t give a shit.

  The gardens behind the Dollhouse were lit with subtle, hidden uplights, making the grounds glow ethereally with all the perfectly manicured flowers lining the stone paths that wound their careless way along. Fireflies and other night insects flitted through the lights, and the bold twitter of crickets and cicadas reminded me that summer was in full bloom, the heat almost oppressively close in typical Long Island style. Huge weeping willows dotted the ground, their long, trailing branches rustling in the midnight breeze. I followed one lighted path until it reached the fountain at the center of the garden.

  From the stories I’d heard, many gentlemen in days gone by had walked their courtesans along these meandering stone paths. I imagined them doing so in their grand, turn-of-the-century finery, sitting on the stone benches, or making love on the edge of the lighted fountain where a giant stone Pan stood majestically above it all, playing his Greek pipes while water nymphs clung to the pedestal where he stood

  I slumped down on the edge of the fountain and trailed my fingers in the cool water, closing my eyes to the sound of the koi plashing against the marble sides of the fountain. I knew Izzy Pop was disappointed in me. Hell, so was I. When I’d first learned that my best friend had been raped on her first ever real date, I’d managed to be the strong one, the supportive shoulder, the one she could turn to. But right now I didn’t feel like that man. I felt frustrated and angry. Why was I so angry over such a stupid, goddamn small thing like the auction?

  I tried to dream up a way of leaving the festivities early, but I wasn’t much of a liar. Anytime I stretched the truth, I usually just came off sounding stupid.

  “Ah, there you are,” came a smooth British baritone that startled me.

  I looked up and swore under my breath. Anton-fucking-Griffiths stood at the edge of the path, dressed in his fancy tuxedo, walking with a silver-headed cane. Was he stalking me? Jesus. I looked him over and what came out of my mouth was, “Oh. It’s you.”

  “That’s not a very appropriate thing to say to your gentleman,” he pointed out.

  “You’re not my gentleman, old man. I just did this for charity.”

  He narrowed his dark grey eyes. They were almost the same steely color as his hair. A muscle in his cheek ticked and I realized I’d probably offended him. Then again, I’d always been of the opinion that you should say exactly what you’re thinking, and damned the consequences. Griffiths put both hands upon his cane. He said in a low, controlled voice, “I understand you’re disappointed you weren’t snatched up by Mr. Eccleston, but I assure you things did indeed work out for the best.”

  “For you or for me?”

  He didn’t elaborate. He did say, “I would like to remind you that I paid three hundred thousand dollars for the pleasure of your company.”

  I sat up straighter, feeling bad for the first time. I had agreed to this, after all, with no guarantees attached. No other courtesan or courtier had cost the other gentlemen so much money. “Yeah, you did,” I acceded. I looked him over. He wasn’t in bad shape for an old man. If I closed my eyes, I was pretty sure I could blow him without gagging too much. I sighed heavily. “So what do you want me to do, then? What’s your poison?”

  “It depends on what your boundaries are,” he answered. “What you’re comfortable with doing with me.”

  “Well, what do you like doing?”

  He smirked then, a little. “Many things.”

  I’d been with a couple doms, though I’d never been able to figure out what the big deal was. I mean, it was kind of fun for a while, but this one guy was into golden showers, and another asked if he could cut on me with a scalpel. Suffice to say, my relationships with those dudes hadn’t lasted. If I wanted someone pissing on me or taking me apart, I’d sleep with my boss down at the bowling alley where I did part time at the concession counter, thank you very much. He hated queers with a vengeance.

  I decided boundaries were in order. “I don’t like weird shit, if that’s what you’re implying. No blood play or whatever.”

  Griffiths looked appalled. “Exactly what kind of men have you played with, Stefan?”

  “I haven’t ‘played’ with anyone, I’ve ‘scened,’ but I’m not a fan. I don’t like BDSM, that’s all.”

  “I’m not sure you’ve actually experienced real BDSM. Blood play is not BDSM. Proper BDSM is safe, sane and consensual.”

  “Then I guess I don’t know much about proper BDSM.”

  “Obviously.” Griffiths stared down at the ground a long moment before raising his eyes to me once more. “We should probably get this out of the way early on, then. I’m a gentleman, Stefan. I don’t do ‘weird shit’. I don’t harm my companions, either physically or emotionally. I’m appalled that anyone would, and I certainly have no intentions toward you in any such way.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Didn’t make me feel any better, though.

  “I believe in a moderate amount of discipline, but I will never hurt you or make you afraid. I will never make you do anything you don’t consent to.”

  Which was pretty much anything he had going on in that head of his. But I nodded just to be polite.

  “Do you have a preferred safe word to stop play?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “The guys I was with didn’t use them.”

  Griffiths swore under his breath. “Well, think a few up, or we’ll go with the old standbys—green for go, yellow for slow, and red for stop. Is that acceptable?”

  I grimaced. “We have to do this?”

  “No,” he said, surprising me. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Plays, and sex in general, need not be part of our relationship. But if things go in that direction, we need to have rules in place in order to protect us. I don’t play without safewords and full consent.”

  At least he had no intentions of tying me up and trying to carve me like a Thanksgiving turkey. I guess that was something.

  “I’ll forward my guidelines and list of requirements to your email. Personal grooming, behavior and such. I expect them to be followed, even if we exclude sex from our relationship.”

  I nodded. That seemed fair.

  “You submitted your medical records to the Society before the auction, did you not?”

  “Yeah.”

  He grimaced. “In future, please use appropriate address when speaking to me. I prefer ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘Yes, Mr. Griffiths’. Mine are on the database as well. Devon will give you the access codes if you ask for them.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “They’re important to have shou
ld we decide to include sex and move to a state of exclusivity.”

  Sure, like that was going to happen anymore than me ‘yes, sir’-ing him. Seriously? Exclusivity with an old queen like Anton Griffiths? If there was a purgatory, like I’d been taught in Sunday School, that had to be it.

  He gave me a hooded look that betrayed no reaction on his part. “I guess we’re done here.”

  “I guess we are.”

  He stepped up to me and handed me a business card. This close, I smelled his cologne, light and loamy, but still manly. The smell stirred something deep in my loins I didn’t want to contemplate. I noticed he moved lithely for an old man, with a sleek, pantherlike grace. A kind of ferocious energy surrounded him, and I had a feeling he was a formidable businessman in the boardroom. “When you’re ready to spend time with me, here’s my address.”

  I took the card without looking at it.

  He snatched my hand, surprising me. I half expected him to threaten me, to tell me off, but his touch was warm and surprisingly strong. He wore rings on his big, sinewy hands. He brought my knuckles to his lips to swipe a kiss across them. A kind of electricity shivered through my hand and up my arm, but I took pains to ignore that. He looked at me with sharp, hungry grey eyes.

  I couldn’t understand my reaction at all. I was just horny. I was always so horny. He so wasn’t my type. “Until then,” he said, bowing properly over my hand.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Yes, sir,” he corrected me. Then he left me alone in the garden.

  I rolled my eyes. Like I was ever going near his house. I mean, what was he going to do to me if I didn’t show up? Send the sex police after me?

  I sat there for a while, waiting for the heat and electric pressure of Griffiths’ touch to leave me, but it lingered a long, long time. Finally, I got up, and, forgoing any excuses, walked to my car in the parking lot. I drove back to the city in silence, but didn’t immediately go home to my dorm. I was too wired for sleep.

  I stopped at a gay pickup bar only a couple miles from campus. I figured I might as well make the best of an otherwise bad night.

  ***

  I was selling popcorn to a pimply, overweight, spoiled-looking kid at the bowling alley when I spotted Izzy Pop strolling in. She was dressed in a short, designer trapeze dress and three-inch clods, her dark hair gathered up in a pretty chignon and held with a diamond pin and her eyes shining with excitement and mischief.

  I still couldn’t get over how much she’d changed from the mousy little introvert I’d known for most of my life. She’d bloomed beautifully since becoming the courtesan of the Michaels brothers. She immediately crossed to me, cut in front of the kid, and leaned on the counter. “And where did you run off to last night, my hot, sexy and very expensive friend?”

  “Hey, no cutting in front of the line!” the kid whined.

  I finished squirting gross, blue-dyed butter substitute all over the popcorn for the kid—for some reason, the “rainbow popcorn” was a huge hit here—and tossed the kid his box. The kid peered in and simpered, “I wanted the orange popcorn!”

  I grabbed the box away from him and set it down in front of Iz. “I had work today, remember? Couldn’t be out all night partying.”

  She rolled her pretty brown eyes at me. “You work evenings in this dump, Stef. I’m pretty sure you slept in to noon as always.” She tapped her manicured nails against the countertop. “But I guess the million dollar question is, who did you sleep with, hmm?”

  “No one you know,” I said with a secretive smile. What goes on in an underground leather bar stays in an underground leather bar.

  Her mouth dropped open. “So it wasn’t Anton Griffiths?” she said, sounding more offended by my sexual life than she ought to be. “What kind of a slut are you, anyway?”

  “Hey, now…”

  She wagged a finger in my face. “You know it’s true.”

  “Says the chick who sleeps with two guys.”

  “For your information, I’m monogamous. I’m just monogamous with two men. You, on the other hand…”

  The fat, pimply kid gave me a sour look as he interrupted. “I want my popcorn!”

  “And I want to win the lottery, kid, but it ain’t happening anytime soon,” I retorted.

  The kid started screaming like a three-year-old, making the bowlers on the opposite side of the alley stop mid-game and look over their shoulders at the concession area. Jesus. Remind me never to have kids.

  Izzy grabbed the blue popcorn and pushed it into the kid’s arms to shut him up.

  “But I wanted the orange!”

  She gave him a dangerous glare and he immediately scampered off. Then she turned that stare on me. “I told you this was a bad idea but you wouldn’t listen!”

  “It’s not a bad idea!” I retorted. “It’s just…the old guy and I aren’t compatible.”

  “How do you know? You’ve spent maybe ten minutes with the ‘old guy’.”

  I crossed my arms across the bright red Kingpin Bowling Alley T-shirt I had to wear and glared at her. “I just know! Christ on a cracker, Iz, he’s like a hundred-fucking-years old. Why do I get the Medicare dude? Do your friends just hate me or what?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “What?”

  Iz sighed. “Anton Griffiths is forty-four years old. Granted, not some super young stud, but, Jesus, Stef, he’s not your grandpa. And from what I’ve gathered talking to the other courtesans and courtiers, he’s got a pretty wild side to him.”

  I found that just a little hard to believe. Griffiths looked like a stuffed shirt. I thought back to our encounter in the garden and tried to pinpoint Griffiths’ age. I couldn’t. Then again, all I’d really noticed was the grey hair, the cane, the courtly manner…the hum of electricity in his touch.

  “You didn’t even look at him,” Iz said. “You were too busy dreaming about some young, oiled airhead from one of those stupid clubs. You are so shallow!”

  I didn’t know what to say to that so I turned my back and rested my ass against the edge of the counter. I really hated it when Iz psychoanalyzed me.

  “Fine. Don’t talk to me. Don’t listen to my advice. Just crawl back to those skeezy clubs and irresponsible assholes you always pick up. But, Stefan, don’t call me the next time some freak leaves you chained to your headboard. I love you like a brother, but you really, really need to grow up.” She stomped away.

  ***

  People criticized me all the time. My boss had all kinds of un-PC names for me. My folks thought I acted like a child most of the time. My college professors were pretty sure the accident that messed up my face had also rattled some of my brains loose. The other students at CUNY thought I was a slut. You name it, I’d heard it, but I never let it bother me…unless it was Izzy saying it. Then I dwelled on it endlessly. I guess maybe that’s the measure of real love. I valued her opinion above all others.

  Was she right? Did I like being abused by bad guys? Was I really that immature and self-destructive?

  I sat in my World History class, chewing a thumbnail and staring at my smartphone hidden in my lap while Professor Cummings droned on about the Roman Expansion. Griffiths had sent his list of demands just as he’d said he would. They were ridiculous in the extreme. I looked over the long, itemized list, his instructions on how I should groom, dress, what I was to say and not say and when I was to say it. I was expected to follow his instructions to the letter. Who the hell did he think he was? I’d agreed to be his courtier, not his personal slave.

  Jesus, Joseph and Mary. The guy was a control freak.

  At lunch, I met up with Izzy in the student cafeteria. We had our usual—she an iced coffee and a lettuce and tomato sandwich with mayo, me a yogurt and a can of Monster. I doodled in my World History notebook while Izzy made slurping noises with her straw. “You know, that stuff will make you crazy,” she said, eyeing the Monster.

  “I have to stay on top of my game,” I said with a winning grin.

  “Yo
u mean you have to dodge old pickups all the time,” she said, referring to the guys who sometimes hunted me down on campus. I was a little surprised by how clingy some guys could get after a quick, meaningless roll in the sheets. To circumvent issues, I’d even started using cover names when I went clubbing.

  “That and finals,” I reminded her. “For your information, I’m pretty much flunking World History—though, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why I even need this stupid class if I’m gonna go into computers.”

  She took my hand. “Do you want me to tutor you?”

  I shook my head. “With your finals coming up? Plus your job at the Michaels’ clinic keeping your two toy boys’ finances straight? You barely have time to sleep, Iz.”

  She gave me sympathetic eyes. “I don’t need to sleep much. And I won’t let my best friend fail, not after all you’ve done for me.”

  “No,” I told her with finality, pulling my hand away. “Absolutely not.”

  Later, after classes, I went down to the gym to work out with some weights in an effort to get rid of some of the tension mounting up over finals. The male pilate instructor was in, and I thought about approaching him finally. I’d had my eye on him for some time, and, frankly, there was nothing in the world like a good fuck to clear my mind of worries.

  I watched him work with his all-female class. He had a perfect six pack and a nice ass.

  It was my night off at the bowling alley, and I thought how it would be nice to see a movie, catch something to eat, take someone home. There was the club, of course, but I just wasn’t feeling it tonight; maybe it was what Izzy kept saying to me, or the fact that I was twenty-four years old and almost an old man by clubbing standards. These days I noticed that a lot of folks my age were starting to slow down and find committed relationships.

  The instructor and I struck up a great conversation about action films. I was about to ask him out when my smartphone went off. I looked at the text. Fuck. It was from Griffiths, asking if I could visit him at home tonight. One of the things on his list was that I had to come when he called me. Talk about eyeroll central.

  “It’s just awful what happened to Paul Walker. He was hot,” Peter the Pilate Instructor was saying.