The Companion Contract

by Solace Ames

The first time he’d said my name, and he’d said it flawlessly. Not that my name was hard to pronounce, I was just so used to hearing Serena that the two simple syllables sounded shockingly intimate.

  Ay-mee.

  “You want to hire me as a sober companion?”

  “More or less. Mostly more.” The hint of a smile again.

  “I guess you saw I have informal experience. But I think you need training for that, a psychology background, classes and seminars and so on...” I wrestled down the rising intonation at the end. I wanted to sound respectfully skeptical, not hopelessly lost.

  “Miles gets dangerous when he’s bored. Dangerous to himself, mainly. He plays well with others, when he’s in the right mood. I think you could keep him in that mood. Keep him sober, and entertain him. He’s very fond of beautiful women.”

  “Oh. So it’s that kind of job.” I wasn’t sure why I was surprised. I already knew sex had to be involved—if he’d denied that, I would have walked, because I don’t like to be lied to. Maybe it was the coolly paid compliment that pleased me more than I expected.

  “Yes. Have you done anything resembling this before? Long-term paid companionship?”

  “Not really. I’ve done some escorting, but not for longer than a weekend. You’re right, I’m interested. I have a lot of questions, though, starting with compensation.”

  “The figure I have in mind is less than half your daily escorting rate. But there’d be other compensations. We’ll be at a house here in Malibu, and all your expenses will be paid. There’s also a percentage of profits from a tour. I’ll have some more questions for you, as well. I’m enjoying this mutual interview, by the way. It’s very civilized, very professional.”

  “Thank you.” I liked being called a beautiful, civilized professional. A normal woman my age would probably find the compliment deeply unsettling. At least I think so. I don’t know many normal women my age.

  The waiter came. I ordered the crab cake appetizer and a salad. Emanuel ordered steak. I couldn’t help wondering what the waiter thought of us together, if he cared at all. Relatives in a rainbow family? Romantic partners?

  “Civilized and sort of surreal,” I said. “There are women—well, guys too—who’d crawl over broken glass to give Miles Morrison a blowjob. But you’re talking about paying me.”

  “He’s still presentable, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Emanuel took out his phone and pulled up a photo. “From this week.”

  Miles Morrison was the regular kind of white-skinned guy, but besides that, he was exceptional in every way. Tall and slim and dark-haired, with a pretty mouth that seemed meant to snarl into a microphone, the rest of him all sharp and hard. He wore a ragged T-shirt, and there was a dagger tattooed over the hollow of his throat and a haunted look in his eyes. Older eyes than I remembered...

  “He’s still got it,” I said. “And no coke bloat. He’s lucky.”

  “Oh, yes.” Emanuel swiped the screen to a photo of a document. I recognized the type immediately: results of a full-panel blood test. I’ve gotten screenings from the same lab, and traded the results before shoots. “He doesn’t even have hepatitis C. His wife was a nurse who made sure he had clean needles.”

  “His wife?”

  “He went to rehab after she went to prison. She’ll be there for some time. They’re in the middle of a divorce. Aside from his test results, there’s nothing neat and clean about what you’re getting into.”

  “I haven’t accepted yet.”

  I caught the eyebrow raise clearly this time. I could read him enough to know that he knew that I was hooked.

  “What are your reservations?” he asked.

  “It’s completely insane, for one. For two...” I bit the inside of my lip and looked away to the ocean, where the blue was almost bright enough to burn my eyes. I wished I could see Emanuel’s eyes, that calmer blue. Maybe he’d take off his glasses inside. “Well, I can’t think of anything specific that’d scare me away. If he beats me up, I fight back, take pictures of the bruises and go to a lawyer. I don’t have a reputation to lose.”

  “I don’t think it would come to that, but I’d hurt him myself.” He said that in the same even tone as he’d laid out the rest of the proposal.

  There were ugly rumors about Emanuel’s past. I’d run into a few in my research this morning. Fans loved to debate the timeline of Avert’s breakup by arguing which had come first: Miles Morrison’s increasingly erratic behavior or Emanuel’s return to his native Colombia. Emanuel came back after a year, but the U.S. almost didn’t let him back in, and apparently there was a failed extradition order filed in international court. Something about terrorism. I’ve heard terrorism was relative in Colombia. Or at least more relative than it was elsewhere. Or maybe just more common.

  Since then, he’d kept a low profile.

  “I won’t put up with violence or disrespect,” I said. “I understand he might be hostile in the beginning. But if he really doesn’t want me there, I can’t stay.”

  “I don’t intend on chaining him to a radiator.” One corner of his mouth twitched, as if he was imagining the sight of Miles Morrison howling at the end of a chain.

  “Nobody has radiators in California. I’ve never seen one in real life.”

  “Maybe you’ll go on tour with us. We’ll play New York City and stay in a Victorian Harlem guesthouse with a big steaming, hissing radiator and mimosas for breakfast, and then we’ll walk in the snow.”

  His words took me there. I wasn’t thinking of money and rules anymore—I’d stepped one foot in a dream.

  I tried to step back. “The radiator sounds a little frightening.”

  “You’ll get used to it, Amy.”

  He sounded so certain. I couldn’t tell if he meant that as a warning or as a comfort. “I like traveling. I’ve got a passport, but I haven’t used it yet. It’s blank.”

  “Blank? The best kind. Pages ready to be filled. I can’t guarantee you that—it would depend on some uncontrollable factors—but coming on tour with us would be a goal. You’d be hired as an assistant tour manager.”

  “That sounds like a lot of responsibility.”

  “Oh, yes. And compensated as such.”

  We talked money until our food arrived. I ate nervously. My stomach was tight as hell. Emanuel ate slowly and methodically, slicing the steak into neat rectangles. I thought of his fingers passing over the grid lines of a guitar neck, tracing and plucking.

  I thought of his fingers smoothing over passport pages.

  “Do you speak any Japanese?” he asked.

  “Yes. No.” I really needed to get hold of my racing thoughts and slow my heartbeat. “Some. Mostly food. My family are Japanese-Filipino. They grew up speaking Tagalog and English and raised me speaking nothing but English. I know a little of a lot of languages, but I’m basically monolingual. I can say ‘de la Isla’ right, at least.”

  He smiled. Giving him that easy pleasure relaxed me. People love hearing their names said right. “I learned English in Berlin, from a Jamaican. As a result, my accent is unusual. I don’t believe in perfecting accents, though—it’s good to keep a flavor of home.”

  “And your home—?”

  “Colombia, below the Darién Gap.” I could hear the Spanish in his accent now, the foundation and the bedrock. “The department of Chocó. I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never be able to return.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged, interrupting the orderly angles with a second of fluid grace. “I’ve been luckier than many.”

  I wanted to tell him I knew how terrible it felt to be lucky. They stripped my family away when I was thirteen. If I’d been born a year earlier, I could have gone with them. I tightened my grip on the fork and only asked, “Did your family come with you?”

  “Some
.”

  “I’m here alone now, but I send money back to the Philippines. I’m proud of that.”

  “It seems we have similar values. The house is half a mile up the beach. Would you walk there with me?”

  It was a beautiful day. I nodded and smiled.

  Chapter Three

  We walked over the wet sand that the tide had left behind. Emanuel wore shoes woven out of leather strips, fisherman sandals. He left solid footprints. My sandals dragged until I took them off and slung them from my left hand as I walked. The wet coolness of the sand rasped against the soles of my feet.

  Just as I expected, the brim of his hat stayed effortlessly tilted despite the breeze. There was something comforting in that.

  “I watched a few of your scenes,” he told me. I kept to his right and slightly behind, not making any eye contact. I was incredibly nervous. I didn’t know how to act, how to project myself.

  “Did you like them?” I asked, like they were test reels of school plays and soap commercials.

  “You’re good at what you do. Do you enjoy it? I’m asking on a professional level.”

  A smart answer to my stupid question, followed up by an even better question. He knew this was hard for me, and I was grateful for that. I took a deep breath of the clean salt-fresh air and decided to be honest. “I hate being asked whether I enjoy the sex, but as for the job? Right now, I can answer that with a negative. I’m getting burned out. I need a break. It’s not killing me or anything, and my health is fine, it’s just I’m sick of dealing with industry people. I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise, but a lot of them are scumbags.”

  “Plenty of those in my industry, as well. The man last night with the camera, for example.”

  “How did he get in?”

  “He’s a rock journalist, and not a good one. If good ones even exist. Frank Zappa once said that rock journalism means people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read. I have to agree.”

  Once I untangled that, I had to agree as well. “You’re pretty good at talking so far. How many languages do you speak?”

  “I’m an exception. Five. Here’s the house.”

  He led the way up the winding wooden stairs. The house was somewhere on the steep slope above us. I scraped the sand from my feet against the sun-warmed boards and slipped my sandals back on.

  The ocean always made me feel alive and strong. I could handle this. I could make the right decision.

  The stairs ended at an unlocked gate and leveled out into a small garden overgrown with weeds and purple wildflowers. A Mission-style house, white stucco walls and red-tiled roof, rose in front of us. The back of the house was luxuriously open—no walls, just pillars—and shaded and coolly inviting. If it wasn’t for the overgrown garden and the small, empty concrete pool, I could visualize the house splayed out in a glossy magazine, the kind I’d leaf through in a waiting room. It was gorgeous.

  Emanuel stood by the side of the garden path, hands resting in his coat pockets, waiting while I gaped.

  “It’s not exactly my house,” he said. “It belongs to a friend. I have the run of the house for the summer and maybe beyond.”

  I couldn’t say anything more intelligent than “Wow.”

  He beckoned, and I followed him around the empty pool and into the shade-covered open living room. The floor was covered in broad terra-cotta tiles interwoven with smaller, brighter flashes of turquoise and sea-green. My eyes kept getting caught by the little iridescent tiles until I forced myself to look up at Emanuel instead. I was suddenly nervous again. The house was so old, and quiet, and peaceful, and rich. I felt out of place.

  “I’ll give you the tour. Five bedrooms. Two garages in the front courtyard, one of them converted into a studio. This is a private place. See the walls?”

  The garden walls were white stucco like the house, but stained darker with age and covered with trailing vines. They seemed much taller than they needed to be, and defined a narrow lot. There was hardly five feet of space between each side of the house and the walls.

  “Yes. It’s a really amazing house. Who owns it?”

  “A woman with a tragic story.”

  “You’re going to tell me?”

  “Of course. She was the mistress of a rich man in Colombia. She inherited his money when he died, but rivals threw acid in her face. She’s in Switzerland now for another round of plastic surgery. I did a favor for one of her children a long time ago, and we’ve been friends ever since.”

  “I hope it works out for her there.” A tragic story for sure. Emanuel obviously had one himself, but I wasn’t going to ask about it. I needed to impress him, and part of that goal was showing I was all right with secrets, that I could walk past closed doors without jiggling at the locks. “So where would I be staying?”

  The walled portion of the first floor had a low ceiling, and many of the lights were out. Our footsteps echoed through bare tiled corridors. I didn’t ask about taking my shoes off. This house was a sprawling, beautiful dead thing, but the veins hadn’t run dry. I could imagine it coming alive again, and not even in a horror-movie lurch. It would be a quiet waking. A reflowering.

  My thoughts were turning strange, and maybe I should be way more scared than I was. My heart was beating fast, true, but from something more complicated than fear.

  There were two bedrooms on the smaller second floor. The one Emanuel showed me had a balcony overlooking the ocean. The only furniture was an ancient, ugly carved wooden bed and chest of drawers. The bathroom was a lot more impressive—bigger than most of the hotel rooms I stayed in, and a full wall of mirrors to make it look even bigger. A massive claw-foot bathtub dominated the central space.

  “The house needs some renovation,” Emanuel said. “That’s another project. You can help if you’d like. Only if you’d like, as something to help pass the time.”

  “I like the idea of the job. I’m just wondering if you have any other applicants?” I couldn’t keep the rising intonation out of my voice, as hard as I tried. I wanted to be a part of this, and I hadn’t even met the man I was supposed to sleep with in that big bed.

  “You’re my first choice, Amy. I have a few other women in mind, if we don’t come to an agreement.”

  “You think he’ll like me?”

  “He’ll love you.” His smile was crooked and sensual but somehow entirely sincere.

  Now that I was looking at his face, I couldn’t look away. I rested my shoulder against the doorframe of the bathroom, tried to look away, and totally fucking failed. I wondered if my neck had twisted in that second. “How do you know that?”

  Please don’t tell me Miles Morrison has yellow fever. I’d take the job even if he did, but that always put me off a man and made it harder to get in the mood.

  “I know him fairly well,” Emanuel said, the smile still curling on his lips. He took off his dark glasses and slid them into his coat pocket. His slate-blue eyes were opaque, unreadable, and burned into me with a cold fire. “And we have similar tastes.”

  “That’s a great line.” I was proud of myself for managing that little bit of banter. Some of the power I’d lost came flowing back to me, and I could feel tingling in the soles of my feet, as if the house was talking to me. Talking into me.

  “Some of what he likes is complicated, and has to do with pain, but it’s nothing you haven’t done on camera before. And then there are simple pleasures. He’ll always enjoy a good blowjob, and you’re very good with your mouth.” Still formal. Still brutally sincere.

  “Thank you.” The tingling raced up my legs, into my thighs. The situation had gone fucked up in a very familiar way. The fear came closer, the confusion went further away—I wasn’t as lost.

  Maybe I could clear things up even more.

  I followed the
tug of gravity and slid to my knees.

  I felt good there. Good and right, the heat between my thighs climbing higher. I looked up at his towering form and licked my lips in offering.

  “I’ll take the invitation,” he said, and stepped closer to me. The house was so quiet I could hear the soft rustling of his suit. It was like music. “This isn’t a condition of the job, though.”

  “Okay.” My voice came out soft and small. I couldn’t say anything more complicated. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted this, but God, I fucking wanted it. To seal our agreement with a ritual? To thank him for what kept me alive through the hardest years? Or at the base of it all, because I was a whore who loved to suck a hard man’s cock?

  I do love it, and I’m not ashamed.

  He didn’t rush to take himself out. No hesitation either. All at a measured pace. He knew what he wanted.

  He cradled my jaw in the palm of his hand and gently pushed my lips open with the back of his thumb. I tasted his skin against my tongue. He was greedy with my mouth, tracing my teeth, pushing deeper, pulling a little wanting sound from somewhere down low in my throat. No more embarrassing thoughts about his humanity crossed my mind. I didn’t need proof he was warm and alive and real, I just needed his cock inside me. Now.

  “You’re very good,” he told me. I felt his voice falling down on me before I even understood the words themselves. Everything about him was heavy. “Here.”

  He wrapped his fist around his cock and pressed into me. Men usually wanted my eyes open, but this time I kept them lightly closed and angled my face back and opened nice and wide for him, because that was what felt the sweetest and I was living in the moment. His cockhead filled my mouth, crushed down my tongue, tasted good and salty. I closed my lips around his shaft and sucked him like candy.

  I was so turned on, my hands were already kneading anxiously at my thighs. But I wasn’t shameless enough to touch my pussy—no, I was going to show him what a good cocksucker I was, how devoted to his pleasure. I brought my hands up and worked his cock, massaging his root and balls. He had hair there, short and tightly curled, where I was used to men being shaved—a new texture for me.