The Dollhouse Society Volume I: Evelyn (Includes Indecent Proposal, Dreams in Black & White, Playing House, Freeze Frame, plus a bonus story!)

by Eden Myles

  He draped the now wet little pearls around my neck and then returned to my sore little cunny, pressing his thumbs into my folds to separate them just a little more. He licked me there, then ate me out. I rocked against his mouth, but in this position, my actions were limited to just thrusting and groaning. He teased my engorged clit with his tongue and teeth. He shoved his tongue in and out of me, the roughness of his cheek and five o’clock shadow rasping against the sensitive insides of my thighs and making my inner muscles clench. His tongue went deeper than ever before, making me shudder and nearly sob in response. He stopped briefly to remove his glasses. I had never seen him without his wire frames. He looked so different! But before I could decide if I liked him this way or not, he pressed his face tight against me again, spreading me apart even further, until my legs screamed from the pressure of his invasion, and sucked against me, sucked against my opening fiercely, until I felt myself go. I screamed as I came in his mouth.

  I sagged back against the vanity chair, so sore from all the attention he had shown me that I didn’t know if I would ever move again. He smeared my wetness across his mouth. He watched me in his predatory way, waiting for me to use the safe word, to stop the play. I took deep, ragged breaths and fought to slow my thudding heartbeat. I thought about it, briefly. I was afraid of how sore I would be tomorrow when all the good chemicals had worn off. But I decided I didn’t want him to stop. I didn’t want this to ever stop.

  He pinched my breasts with his thumb and forefinger, and then my clit. I jumped and danced for him. Finally, he approved of my new “coloring”.

  “My pretty little dove,” he said, and there was real affection in his voice this time, real warmth. It wasn’t just an affectation, I realized. This was a different voice, softer, more intimate than I was used to. It was the voice you used with your lover at three o’clock in the morning, and I thought, ridiculously, This is the sound of love. “You’ve been so patient. You’ve been such a good dove, suffering so much. I have something for you.”

  I waited, my heart starting its inevitable gallop once more. I wondered if I could take what he wanted to give me. I wasn’t sure I could take him inside me right at the moment.

  He withdrew a flat, red velvet jewelry case from an inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He opened it like a clamshell to reveal a choker made of pink teardrop diamonds. I have never seen pink diamonds before. I had never seen so many diamonds in one place in my life. I felt my pulse jump as a little flash of terror passed through me. I didn’t want diamonds. I didn’t want silk dresses. I didn’t even want vacations in Paris, I realized. I didn’t want expensive gifts from Mr. Sterling. I wasn’t here for that reason, and the sight of the necklace saddened rather than uplifted me, reminding me of how I had been bought and paid for. I had been paid for with money and bits of silk and rare carbon pulled from the earth, and I understood that, intellectually. I knew that. That was our arrangement. I had accepted that. So why did it hurt so much?

  But I smiled, because I knew it made Mr. Sterling happy and proud to lavish gifts on someone, even if that someone was me. I schooled my face to reveal nothing. I was very good at doing that.

  “You have no proper jewelry, my dove. You should have jewelry. Diamonds as well as pearls.” Mr. Sterling took great care in fastening the choker around my neck so I wore the pearls and the diamonds together. He took a step back, looking at me like someone might look upon a statue by Michelangelo or a painting by Rembrandt for the first time, a kind of religious fervor in his face and eyes. I thought he must be admiring the diamonds. No one in their right mind would look at me that way. “I want to remember this,” he said. “I want you for my private photo collection, Evelyn.” I wondered if he meant the collection on his wall in his office, or some other collection. Again he waited to see if I would protest, if I would say no, deny him, but when I didn’t, he said, “I’ll only be gone briefly, to fetch Malcolm and his camera.”

  After he left the boudoir, I could feel the mood shifting. This was less about entertaining the others now and more about Mr. Sterling’s obsessive pursuit of beauty. The audience began breaking up and moving on to other rooms, which relieved me greatly. After a few moments, only one person remained.

  Brian.

  I hadn’t noticed him earlier among the other gentlemen. But then, I hadn’t been looking for him, either.

  He leaned against the wall of the boudoir, drinking from a much-too-large tumbler of scotch filled all the way to the top. He watched me intently, but his eyes flickered in that way of someone doing a fine job of tying one on. Or maybe that was just some facial tick of his. I could tell he wanted me to look up, to acknowledge him. To be embarrassed. But I wouldn’t. Not him. Not Brian…

  “It’s like casting pearls before swine,” he finally said, and chuckled at his own poor wit.

  My head jerked up. Brian had beautiful eyes and perfect hair and a beautiful Italian tuxedo and a winning smile and a face that might take him to the Presidency one day. But he was ugly. So full of hate. I had to force myself not to strain too hard against my bonds.

  “You are such a fucking pig,” Brian said in a lilting, drunken voice. He swaggered toward me, sucking down more scotch in a way that reminded me of how some joggers in Central Park suck down bottles of Avian water after a good morning jog. “You know when you wash garbage, it’s still garbage, right? And when you put diamonds on shit, it’s still shit.”

  My heart ticked along a little faster in my throat. I swallowed against it. I worked at ignoring him. I looked toward the door but I didn’t immediately see anyone.

  “Your boyfriend isn’t here, cunt. No one is. What don’t you squeal for him like a good pig?”

  I wouldn’t squeal. I wasn’t the type of girl to make a scene. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  Brian moved closer, and I could feel that terrible hate of his all mixed up with jealousy and lust. It was the type of emotional cocktail that made men cut up women and keep their parts in freezers, I realized. He stopped and looked down at my panic with a satisfied expression on his face like the good little sociopath that he was. “What does that motherfucker have that makes you girls let him do the things he does to you? Is it the money, the diamonds? I have money. I have diamonds. I have more money than Ian-fucking-Sterling does. Does he fuck you girls in the ass? Is that what you like?”

  I wondered where Mr. Sterling was. I mentally tried to hurry him along.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you, you fucking piece of shit.”

  His voice was little more than a sibilant hiss, but I felt the shock of it all through my body as if he had hit me. I looked up. Finally, I was afraid, really afraid. The kind of afraid where your mind starts racing and you start looking at everything in your environment with an eye toward an escape route or a weapon. But I was bound to a chair, and there was nothing practical I could use to defend myself. I wondered about talking him down.

  “Go away, Brian, you’re drunk,” I said. My voice was soft, hoarse and maybe a little dangerous-sounding. “Go home and sleep it off. No one wants to play with you tonight.”

  Brian smiled and his eyes crawled over me in an unfriendly way. He bent forward just a little and the ice in his drink clinked around. He pinched my nipple, hard, so I whimpered, but not in pleasure. “You know you’re nothing special, cunt. A piece of fucking meat. I wonder if you even realize that. I wonder if you even care. He’s been tapping the ass of that secretary of his for months. Her and a hundred other cunts he drags off the street. But you probably don’t care about that, either, do you?”

  I wouldn’t give Brian the satisfaction of looking surprised, or hurt, or anything. He was just trying to get to me. To hurt me. I gave him very steady eyes and said, “I’d love to meet the woman who fucked you up, Brian.”

  I thought it was a very clever thing to say. Apparently, so did Brian. The smug look on his face broke, and I could see the li
ttle cracks of rage there, like flaws in a porcelain vase before the whole thing shatters apart. The level of his hatred for me frightened and surprised me. I was a huge nobody. I wasn’t important enough for anyone to hate. “You have a big fucking mouth, cunt,” he said low, dangerously. He tossed his drink at me. I cried out as the scotch and ice hit me high up in the chest and the coldness immediately slid down my body, toward all my exposed parts. “Why don’t you suck my cock with that big fucking mouth of yours?” he said, fumbling to undo his trousers with drunken precision.

  I’m ashamed to admit I started crying then. I used to laugh at girls in horror movies who always became hysterical the moment the monster was revealed, but now, as Brian undid his pants and shoved his cock in my face, I was no different. I’d seen the monster and I wanted to scream and cry and, most of all, run away. I took a deep breath to scream for help, but Brian recognized what I was doing and lunged forward and jammed his hand over my mouth.

  I’m not sure if he really meant to do that, or if he was just panicking now because I was—a kind of contagious hysteria. But I didn’t want him touching me, not him of all people, and the moment I felt the meat of his hand between my teeth, I bit down. Hard.

  Brian roared and jerked his hand back. The edge of his Rolex caught in my grandmother’s pearls and suddenly there were pearls all over the floor, jouncing across the carpet. “You fuck! You fucking piece of shit!” he screamed, and I had a moment where I almost wanted to laugh in his face. He sounded like a hysterical old woman. I wanted to ask him if he had any balls at all between his legs, but I didn’t say that. I’d live in New York all my life. I’d been born in Brooklyn. I was smart enough to know you don’t poke a crazy.

  Still raging, I saw Brian draw his bleeding fist back, ready to pop punch me square in the jaw. No one had ever hit me before. For all our games, Mr. Sterling had never hit me. I wasn’t sure if he was even capable of it. I closed my eyes, hoping his fist would hurt a little less if I didn’t see it coming.

  It never came.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I sensed rather than saw the enormous shadow looming behind Brian, holding his arm back. The face of the man holding it was twisted into such a brutal mask of rage that I had trouble for a moment recognizing it as Mr. Sterling. I recognized him more by his shape than by his face. “You dare,” he said, and those two little words frightened me more than all of Brian’s blustering threats combined. The voice was colder than ice, cold like steel left to freeze in ice, and I had no doubt in my mind that Mr. Sterling could kill a man and feel nothing.

  Brian must have sensed it too. His face suddenly turned as white as a sheet. “She’s a whore!” he screamed. “She’s a whore and you treat her like a wife…!”

  Mr. Sterling wrenched Brian’s arm down and a little backwards at a hard, bad angle. I could tell he’d had some serious martial arts training. The motion was so smooth and calculated that the sharp crack of Brian’s arm doing things that human arms are never meant to do anatomically filled the room, sounding like the crack of a gunshot. Still not satisfied, Mr. Sterling wrenched the now well-broken arm backward in a restraining hold. The arm looked like rubber, like something in three or four pieces. Brian shrieked like a little girl. The pain had finally caught up with him. I screamed too, the chaos contagious. Mr. Sterling shoved Brian down onto the floor on his face, pinning his broken arm to his back. Mr. Sterling was at least six and a half feet tall. He had to weight close to three hundred pounds, not an inch of which was fat. It had to be like being hit by a locomotive.

  Brian’s cries turned to hysterical sobs.

  Others began piling into the playroom, drawn to the chaos. I saw Malcolm, with Devon in tow. Malcolm immediately dropped his camera and pushed through the crush of gentlemen and courtesans. He kept saying, “Get him off of him! Get him off of him now before he kills Brian!”

  Another gentleman I didn’t know leaped forward, but even he and Malcolm were not enough to restrain Mr. Sterling. Two more joined the fray and between the four of them, they were able to prize Mr. Sterling off Brian. It was like watching an elephant being attacked by fleas. I wondered how they would ever do it, but somehow they managed to drag Mr. Sterling into a corner of the boudoir and hold him, though I noticed that Malcolm had to strain to keep his arm firmly wrapped around Mr. Sterling’s upper chest.

  “I’ll kill him!” Mr. Sterling spat, his teeth bared like a lion that mean to kill. “I’ll fucking gut the bastard…!” He struggled against all four men, and I think the only thing keeping him from tossing them off and lunging at Brian and making good on his promise was his desire to not hurt the other gentlemen attached to him, particularly his friend, Malcolm.

  “Get him out of here,” Malcolm ordered over Mr. Sterling’s threats. His voice was surprisingly calm, deep and powerful, and I had the feeling that Malcolm, despite being small and nothing very interesting to look at, was very good at controlling his company and his courtier. “Get Brian out of here now.”

  Two more gentlemen moved forward to pick Brian up off the floor like a writhing sack of flour. They dragged him from the boudoir, but they were less than careful about his broken arm and he screamed and cried the whole way. The expressions on their faces suggested they might be enjoying this a little too much.

  Malcolm finally loosened his hold on Mr. Sterling, who was shrugging free anyway. He took one fierce look at me, turned, and punched a sizeable hole in the French wallpaper. His punch went all the way to the studs. I flinched and looked away from the site of Mr. Sterling leaning against the wall, breathing roughly and trying not to kill a man, feeling strangely guilty for having caused all this.

  I was tired, so tired. I sagged in my bonds and tried to recall the safe word. I couldn’t. Thankfully, Devon was there beside me, blocking me from the view of the other gentleman and their courtesans, and he stayed with me even after they’d led Mr. Sterling away. Maybe they were afraid of what he might do, that he might go after Brian. “I want to go home,” I told Devon as he went to work on my binds. When my arms were free, I wrapped them around his neck and breathed in his aftershave. “I want to go home, Devon. Take me home.”

  “You bet, doll.” He got my legs unbound so I could close myself up properly. Then he lifted me into his arms and carried me from the room.

  ***

  FREEZE FRAME

  It was sometime after midnight when my cell phone went off.

  I extradited myself out from under my covers and two cats and fumbled around in the dark for my phone on the bedside table. I looked at the lighted alarm clock and saw it was 3:15 in the morning. My pulse jumped. You only ever get bad news at 3:15 in the morning.

  “Yeah,” I said, still feeling fuzzyheaded from the dream I’d been having. It wasn’t anything sexual. I’d been dreaming about my grandma, who had passed on close to ten years ago. I’d been dreaming of going up the apartment stairs to her flat, accompanied by someone I couldn’t see, and feeling excited because I was going to introduce her to this very special person for the first time.

  There was some deep, raspy breathing for a moment. I sat up, suddenly alarmed, my head clearing quickly. I started thinking maybe it was Brian. Would he really hate me so much as to stalk me? Then I looked at the number on the phone and recognized it.

  “Mr. Sterling?”

  The man on the line took a deep, rattling breath to speak. “Evelyn…my dove…”

  “Mr. Sterling?” I said again, more frantically this time. Suddenly there was a knot in my throat. I sat amidst the rumpled sheets, my cats padding around me with annoyance, and worked on controlling my fluttering heartbeat. The night before he had been so angry, so very angry with Brian, who had tried to attack me at the Dollhouse. I thought Mr. Sterling was going to kill him. “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “Evelyn,” he said again. And then: “You have a beautiful voice, Evelyn. Do you know that? I love your voice, Evelyn. I l
ove you, Evelyn…”

  He sounded very drunk. I had never heard him like this before, and it reminded of the time that Clarissa had drunk called me at two o’clock in the morning to tell me she was going to kill herself when her boyfriend broke up with her the last time. I slid out from under the covers and start scrambling around in the dark for my clothes. I kept talking to him even as I made my way out of the apartment, down the backstairs, and out to the curb. I signaled to a cab and told him where to take me. I was shaking a little as I sat on the worn vinyl seat and listened to Mr. Sterling mumbling drunkenly into the phone.

  He’d grown silent by the time I’d reached his white-glove apartment building on Central Park West. The doorman and night concierge knew me well enough to let me up. I took the glass elevator to the penthouse suite and let myself into his apartment with the little keycard he’d given me.

  I found him in the living room, dressed in his shirtsleeves, and sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, his cell phone blinking on the floor beside him. He’d finished off two bottles of expensive scotch and was working through a third. He was surrounded by broken glass, porcelain, shattered seashells, and various crystals. There were holes in his walls. I stopped in the doorway and looked at the minefield of debris scattered across the carpet. He’d trashed the room, broken damned near everything in it, including some of the antique erotica that decorated the walls.

  When he finally looked up at me, it wasn’t with the eyes of the man I knew. It wasn’t the eyes of Ian Sterling, CEO of Sterling of New York, possibly the most powerful man in New York City. It wasn’t the eyes of my gentleman, able to mete out pleasure and pain in equal measure. There was so much pain and rage locked behind his pale blue eyes and wireframe glasses that I was afraid to approach him for a moment. I was afraid he would lash out blindly at me.

  Then I saw the blood on his hands where he’d broken his knuckles, and it galvanized me. I picked my way across the broken debris until I was standing beside him. He shuffled around a little, knocking over the bottle of scotch on the floor beside him. “She liked shells,” he said in a voice that sounded like there was cotton stuffed in his mouth. “She liked shells but you like pearls…”