She shrugs. “Play cards for a bit?” She’s gotten quite addicted to
piquet
. And quite cutthroat.
“Sure.”
I’d happily adjourn us to the bedroom and shed my worries alongside my clothes, turn my mind over to the delightful task of exploring her body. But I can survive a few hands. We stow the leftovers, refill our glasses and wander to the living room.
I put a record on—viola, but nothing too sad. As Caroly shuffles, I think again how nice it might be if this place were ours, hers and mine. Her things in the medicine cabinet and around the bedroom, not secreted in cupboards and drawers lest my other visitors see. In that alternate universe where I’d managed the day’s mission, maybe I’d have asked her to come live with me. She wants to move this autumn, out of her current flat. If we split the rent, I could afford to stop selling my body, find another job.
All these years I thought this must be my calling, but lately…
Arranging my cards, I wonder, what else could I do? Go back to being an artists’ model, perhaps. Tutor people at French or English or Portuguese. Anything but continue being a kept man—kept and shared by a dozen or more women, but kept all the same. I’ve long fancied myself lucky to have succeeded in my vocation, but what used to strike me as decadent has begun to feel cloying. I’m anyone’s pretty pet for the right price. I could be Caroly’s alone, not a pet but a partner.
But that universe is so very far away. I realize that now.
“Making any progress with the locks?” she asks. Earlier this month she gifted me a bag of antique padlocks, along with a set of tiny tools and a book on how to pick them.
“Yes, I’ve fiddled two open so far. It’s harder than I expected.”
She grins, clearly pleased to hear her puzzle is proving difficult. “Good.”
“It’s rather satisfying, that sound when you’ve succeeded and the shackle snaps free. Though it comes after quite a bit of blind frustration.” My clocks are kinder. Like a jigsaw puzzle, you can see your progress. The padlocks do nothing but taunt, and until I get better, picking them is more a battle of wits than an art.
“When your birthday comes around, I’ll be sure to put your present in a box with at least four locks.”
I shake my head, smiling. “Cruel creature.” I imagine it though—Caroly still a part of my life when January and my birthday arrive. Snow falling outside. Picturesque, the two of us here in this room, sharing a hot meal, perhaps playing this very game. So bleak and lonely should she move on before then. Me still here. Always here.
“Did you have any interesting clients this week?” she asks, discarding a queen. I warm to the change of topic. As always, there’s no jealousy in her tone. She likes to hear the sorts of requests my visitors make of me.
“I’ve had two since the last time you were here.”
“Anything unusual?”
“You know I can’t tell you anything so specific. So recent.” A woman’s desires are as intimate and vulnerable as her sex, entrusted to the man she exposes herself to.
“Of course not.”
“But I can tell you that neither visit was peculiar in any way.” My Wednesday evening guest was a typical one in that she prefers to simply treat our appointments as dates, dressing up to be catered to first with food and wine, then with my mouth and hands and cock. Thursday was much the same, if a bit more…vigorous. The only difference was which man I was expected to be.
“I got to play very different lovers,” I tell her.
Her cards immediately lose their interest. She sips her wine, eyes wide. “What sorts of lovers?”
Ones very unlike the coward I truly am.
“First the perfect seducer. Warm and clever and shameless.” I can feel his skin slipping over my shoulders like a cloak.
“Forceful?” she asks, meaning a different sort entirely.
“No, nothing like that. A familiar type. A beloved scoundrel, not a selfish one. A persuasive gentleman. A slow-burning candle between the sheets.”
“Who else?”
“A rougher man, with a foul mouth and punishing hips,” I say with a smile. “The sort who’d never bed a woman beneath a stitch of covers.”
She purses her lips then brings the glass to kiss them.
“I could be either of these men for you,” I tell her, eager to do so. Eager to be anyone but myself until the sun rises again.
“Do most women want you to be nice or mean?”
I hadn’t thought about it before, but the answer needs no pondering. “Nice.”
She nods.
“It’s not just any woman who pays a man to make love to her,” I say.
“Are most of them weird, like me?”
I smile, leaning forward to curl a dark-blonde lock behind her ear and trace her jaw. “None are so special as you.” I speak a Lothario’s words, but they’re my words as well. True down to each letter.
“But a lot of your clients must be…I don’t know. ‘Damaged’ sounds mean.”
“Many come to me needing a sense of safety or distance. A prostitute is a man one can’t get too attached to—”
“Oops,” she says, teasing herself. Just a little joke, but her meaning floods my chest with heat and pride.
“I’m not your prostitute any longer.”
“That’s true.”
“You’re welcome to get as attached to me as you wish. Though it baffles me why you might.”
Her gaze falters. “Some of them must get attached though. Despite how impossible the circumstances are.”
“Of course.”
“What do you do?”
“I end those relationships.”
“Just like that?”
I nod. “It’s the kindest way.”
She swallows. “How close did you come to doing that with us? Ending it?”
The question startles me. But she told me perhaps four visits into our arrangement that she had to stay away for a while. I was proving too expensive and she… How had she worded it? She’d been in danger of falling in love with me.
“You were the one who wanted distance,” I remind her. “You had the self-awareness to understand how worrisome your feelings ought to be. I didn’t need to scare you away. You did that job yourself.”
“I suppose.”
I clear my throat. “In truth, it would have been hard to draw that line. I’d grown attached to you as well.”
That draws a pink stain to her cheeks, a sunrise to banish my gloom.
“You must know that by now, having seen what it takes to coax me out of these walls.” That had been my first time in years, leaving this flat—going out to seek Caroly after she’d told me she needed to stay away, to protect her heart and her bank balance. It took me days to manage it, but the gesture had to be made.
I picture the twinkling cases of that old jewelry store, of gestures needed and unmade. I failed once. Perhaps that doesn’t mean I’ll fail the next time. Though the thought of a next time twists my guts into a fresh nest of knots.
Setting my cards on the table, I give her a dark, familiar look. I want to escape into a costume—any identity but the one I was born with. I want to be whatever man she has a taste for tonight.
She lets me slip the cards from her hand and scoots closer when I tug softly at her waist.
I graze my lips across hers and smile. As I toy with her hair I murmur, “I’ve missed you, since Sunday.”
“I’ve missed
you
.”
Five days we’ve been apart…five days and two other women stacked between this visit and the last. It’s selfish, but I wish my infidelity hurt Caroly more. I wish she’d make demands of me, need more of me, refuse to share me.
I love this woman. Yet a man in love would cross a desert for the object of his affection, swim an ocean, scale a mountain. I can’t even walk to Gobelins for mine. What exactly makes me feel I’m someone worth suffering jealousy over?
Anxiety is tugging at my sleeves with its tiny, insistent hands. Such a waste. I waste too much—entire days worth of sunshine. I won’t waste this too-short time I get with Caroly.
Her cheek is velvet against my palm, lips tart with wine. My fingers seek her hair, my tongue her tongue. I feel her stiffen with excitement then soften in a breath. Her mouth welcomes mine and cool, slender fingers slip inside my sleeve to cup my shoulder. Blood pulses through me, its quickness nothing to do with fear, finally. My cock wakes, eager. Hungry.
I whisper against her lips. “Let me take you to bed.”
Let me get lost in you, in a place I could navigate blindfolded.
She doesn’t reply in words but stands and takes my hand. I let her lead me to the dark bedroom, but I won’t be led for long. Not tonight, when I need so badly to feel capable. As we cross the threshold I push her toward the bed, a firm hand against the small of her back. She shoots a mischievous glance over her shoulder then pauses to tie one of the curtains to the canopy post. I peel my shirt away as she sits and we push our shoes off. She reaches for an earring.
“Don’t,” I say. Anything that’s to come off that fascinating body, I’ll be the one to remove it. I tell her as much with my eyes, and she laces her fingers obediently in her lap with a little smirk.
Heat fills me from my toes, rising upward with licking flames. I’ve left Didier outside the door with his precious disorder. Here in this room I’m a different man, a better one. One deserving of that smirk, those hands, that mouth, the secret place between her legs where only I’ve ever been allowed. That final thought swells my cock so hard and hot it hurts. Just the brush of my hand as I open my buckle sucks the breath from my lungs.
Socks and pants are kicked aside and I join her in my underwear, my readiness surely plain even in the faint light that leaks in from the hall. She’s eager as well, palms roaming my sides and hips as I roll her onto her back, drive up her skirt with my knees. I slide my arms beneath her, bury my face against her neck, breathe in that vanilla-amber scent and her skin underneath it, her hair, her sweat. The July heat’s made her warm and soft and ripe. I’ll tease her with my mouth, taste that juice no other man has ever sampled. I’ll drink her down for as long as she’ll let me, feeling her fingers clutching my hair and imagining she owns me.
I brace myself on my elbows and bring my hips low, grazing my erection between her thighs through two thin taunting layers. Nails scrape softly over my shoulders and down my arms, and she leans up just a moment to nip at my lower lip. I reward her eagerness with an explicit stroke, drawing my length along the soft cleft of her sex. Approving hands seek my backside, kneading. Begging.
Already I can feel her growing wet, the way the fabric catches between us.
“Tell me what you want tonight,” I say.
“I want to make you feel good.”
“Then let me do whatever I like.” Before the words are even out I’m moving down her body, already anticipating her taste, the pulse of her swollen flesh between my lips. I sit back on my heels and trail my fingertips over her top, her skirt. Her inner thighs are soft as the cotton, as smooth as the satin. My thumbs find the border of her panties, a tease of lace. A hand cups my heart, squeezing, coaxing the blood through my veins in heady bursts. I crave the same treatment for my cock from her actual fist, but it’ll have to wait. I’ll get lost in Caroly’s pleasure for hours, block out the bad memories of the day.
I hook a finger under the strip of fabric between her thighs, draw it up and down so my knuckle strokes her lips, making promises. Her own hand moves to join mine. I expect her to push her panties down, but instead her fingers close around my wrist.
“No,” she says.
A word I’ve rarely heard her utter in this room, curious pupil that she is.
I move my hand to her hip and meet her gaze. “No?”
Sitting up, she shakes her head, smoothes her skirt over her legs, strokes my hair. “I know what you want.” Her voice is thick with arousal. “To please me.”
“Always.”
“But I know what it does for you. I don’t want to be one of your clocks, Didier.”
I frown.
“I don’t want to be some space you escape inside to get out of your head. I don’t…” She sighs and looks around. After a long moment, she rises to tie the other three drapes to the bedposts. Then she’s at the window. She flings the curtains aside, revealing all those buildings under the darkening sky, the sunset winking pink and gold from their west-facing windows. My pulse races as I remember how it felt to be lost in that maze mere hours ago. My role dissolves and I feel like myself again—an ugly sensation.
She takes a seat on the edge of the bed. “When you shut the curtains or go inside a hunk of brass or between some woman’s legs…you’re not fixing anything that’s upsetting you.” The words are forceful, but her tone kind.
“It soothes me.”
“But it doesn’t heal you any. You have to feel that stuff. Distracting yourself and hiding just puts the pain on pause. It doesn’t actually go away.”
My cock goes limp. In my rational brain I know she’s right, but the frightened child in me resents her for it. This room is the single place I can rely on to make me feel capable and in control. The safest corner of my tiny world, and she wants to take that away?
No no no no no.
Why does the woman I care for the deepest insist on causing me the most distress?