by Eden Myles
Beck’s face sharpened. “Oh yes. I want things.”
“Such as?”
He narrowed his eyes with interest. His hand moved up his thigh so it rested near the top of his leg, very close to his rather substantial erection. When next he spoke, it was with a different voice, softer, hoarser. “Sleep with me tonight, and I’ll make a call, and tomorrow morning you’ll have the number one African supermodel on your doorstep.”
I shifted around, the sweating insides of my thighs squicking uncomfortably. “I don’t think so,” I said, but my voice was soft. I was almost afraid he couldn’t hear me. “I’m not sleeping with you, Mr. Beck.”
“We won’t be sleeping, pet.”
“Don’t call me that. And I’m not giving you a quick roll in the sheets for a name on a list, so forget about it.”
“I had something else in mind, actually.” He looked me over, carefully and thoroughly. “You have a beautiful mouth, Rachaela. I should like to fuck your mouth. Then tie you down on my bed and cane you since it’s obvious you’ve had very little discipline from the men in your life. Then I’d like to fuck your pussy. I might even like to fuck your ass. I haven’t decided. After that, I’ll decide if I should keep you or not.” He slid off the counter so he was resting against it, very tall, very slim, and more than a little foxy in his dark suit. I tried to decide if he was handsome, homely, beautiful or just scary. I looked at the walking stick in his hand and decided on scary. If he had said all those things in some kind of joking manner, I would have laughed him off. But he sounded dead serious.
“Oh,” I said, sounding disappointed even to myself. “You’re one of those.”
“One of what?”
“A kink. You hurt women.”
He blinked slowly, like he didn’t understand.
“You’re a dom. A dominant.”
“I know what a dom is,” he said, his voice so low it faintly growled. “I’m not a dom. I’m a gentleman.”
“Gentlemen don’t talk like that. Gentlemen don’t cane women.”
“You misunderstand. I’m a gentleman.” He said it like it was his title.
“Malcolm said you were here for the sex tourism.”
“In a way, yes,” he agreed. “But I’m not looking for a submissive. I’m looking for a courtesan.”
I could feel the sweat trickling down my legs under my dress. “What’s the difference?”
He looked faintly annoyed with me, as if I should know better than to make him explain. “I’m not looking to terrorize a woman with ropes and paddles, Ms. Lee. I’m looking for a courtesan willing to submit to both punishment and reward at my hands. A permanent engagement. I can see you don’t understand.”
“No,” I agreed. “I don’t.”
“The gentleman/courtesan relationship is old, Ms. Lee. It is ancient. And there is more to it than some silly game played between two naïve children. A dom and his sub have an understanding, an arrangement. They play a game. A courtesan belongs to her gentleman. There is no arrangement. There are no games. No lies. No ‘role-playing’. She lives for him. She services him. That is her purpose.” And that’s all he said on the matter.
I didn’t even know where to begin with that. So Wolfgang Beck was a deviant sexual maniac and a completely twisted control freak. I thought about asking him further questions out of plain old morbid curiosity, but he blinked and the look went out of his eye, that look that said he was thinking about me tied down on his bed while he did those things to me. His face smoothed out and returned to its usual easy, almost empty, mirth. I had been dismissed, released. He had tested me, and I had failed. I was free.
I waited to feel relief. I felt angry instead.
“How would you feel about a corporate partnership?” he asked suddenly. His voice was even and remote. Not a trace of his earlier aggression remained. He gave me a cordial look I easily recognized. It was the same look I got from all the good businessmen I knew, that look that says, Let’s do business, shall we? Let’s make a lot of money. “I’m here in the States looking for investment opportunities, and I think it would be great fun to help you run the magazine, Ms. Lee. I think I should enjoy that very much.”
***
I was still thinking about Wolf’s invitation to meet his courtesan when I got back to the apartment that night. The first thing Asia said was, “You’re late. And Daddy called. You missed him.” She was on her way past me, carrying a pint of Ben & Jerry’s into the living room.
I threw my purse down on the sidebar in the hallway. “Did he say anything about the papers?”
“Not to me.” She disappeared into the room.
I looked after her. She was thirteen now, tall and coltish. Like me, she’d gotten my mother’s smooth, straight hair. Like me, she wore it long so it hung like a curtain nearly to her waist. She used to wear pajamas all the time at home with My Little Pony on them. Now she wore painted-on Guess jeans and middy shirts and a chain around her neck with a school ring that her boyfriend Jayden had given her. They were going steady, although Asia called it exclusive. Sometimes I wondered where my little girl had gone.
I stepped into the darkened living room and watched her bunker down with her ice cream and an episode of Vampire Diaries on Netflix. “Sorry about being late. We’re having a contract crisis at the office. You want I take you out? We could get some Indian.”
“I already ate,” she said, ignoring me.
“I can order in.”
“I said I ate already.”
Asia and I had been best friends once, up until Jerrel and I got serious about the divorce. Then everything changed. I’d thought she would adjust. She was a smart girl, a real survivor like me. But maybe I was wrong. A few months ago, she’d surprised me for my birthday with a Carnival Cruise Line vacation. She’d saved up for it for two years, she’d told me, and there were two tickets, one for me, and one for her daddy. I offered to go with her instead, and she blew up in my face. She’d been blowing up ever since.
I’d been blaming hormones, but I knew better now. I stepped around the furniture and reached for the ice cream carton. I snatched it away and banged it down on the table beside her. “Listen to me, Asia. Don’t you ever speak to me like that again. Do you understand me?”
Asia glared at me defiantly. “No!” she shouted, jumping to her feet and snatching up the ice cream. “I don’t understand you at all!” She threw the ice cream across the room and raced up to her room in tears.
***
I was feeling like shit the next day when I got to work. I hadn’t slept, the birth control pills I took to control my PMDD were making me feel sick again, and I’d had to play phone tag with Jerrel for three hours before he finally got off the golfing green long enough to tell me the divorce papers were on their way. I had to make certain he sent them to my office instead of the apartment. I was sure if Asia found them we’d have another fight. On top of it, one of my top editors came down with the killer flu bug that was going around and wound up in the emergency room the night before. And we still hadn’t found that contract.
I was sitting at my desk, trying to unfuck a thoroughly fucked up photo shoot schedule with one of our models when Wolf let himself into my office and sat down on the edge of my desk. I looked up and noted the fitted, pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit, complete with waistcoat and watch fob, the glowing white shirt, the silk tie, everything wrinkling up because of the way he was perched on my desk, not that he cared. He once told me he liked having sex in his power suits because of the way they rubbed against him when he came inside a woman. No, really.
He dropped the contract in front of me. “Found it.”
“Thank God,” I said, picking it up. “Where was it?”
“Filed wrongly.”
I was far too relieved to be angry with my secretary. “At least something is going right for once.”
“Ro
ugh day, my pet?”
“Rough week.”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me all about it over dinner tonight?”
I looked up at him, wondering if he was being serious or just flirty, as usual. “Are you asking me out?”
“As a friend only,” he said. His voice was dry, clipped, almost without accent. “I want you to meet Jasmine tonight. I want to get your opinion of her.”
“Jasmine your potential it girl.”
“That’s correct.”
I held his steady, almost steely gaze. “Isn’t choosing a sex partner sort of your decision, not mine?”
“Courtesan,” he corrected me.
“Courtesan,” I agreed. I was feeling too tired to argue with him.
Wolf smirked. “You have good instincts for people, Rachaela. You know whom to trust. I want you to meet her. I want you to tell me if she would make a good courtesan or not.”
“I don’t even know what to look for.”
“You will tell me if she is submissive. If she will please me. You know what I like.” He put his big hand over mine.
I looked at it. I thought about tonight. Jerrel was picking Asia up so they could see the game at Yankee Stadium. Undoubtedly, Asia would spend most of her evening telling Jerrel how awful a mother I’d been. I didn’t want to sit alone in my darkened living room, watching/not-watching TV and eating Chinese out of a takeout box while I thought about that. “Sure. Why not,” I said.
It’s not like I have any kind of life, I silently added. Why not pick out a sex slave for my business partner?
***
There was a French restaurant in Midtown that seated only twenty-six people at a time. It was considered the most expensive French restaurant in the city. But I didn’t know that until Wolf arrived to pick me up and told me where we were going. He said he wanted to make a good impression on Jasmine.
I stepped down off the curb and looked over his roadster. It was silver, vintage, and looked like the one James Dean had owned and died in. I didn’t ask him if it was the same car.
Wolf looked particularly dashing in his Brioni tuxedo. It was dark, geometrically fitted to him, and made me think of James Bond. He carried purple orchids and he smelled like a rich African bazaar full of flowers, sun and spices. His cologne had a slight citrus smell about it. I figured it was foreign and very expensive, just like him.
He looked me over, but there was an aloofness to his face that I wasn’t used to seeing. I was his friend, not his date. I wore my black take on Marilyn Monroe’s pleated halter dress and red gladiator sandals with three-inch heels. The dress wasn’t very expensive but looked it. The shoes were expensive and had been my gift to myself on my thirty-fifth birthday. He offered me the orchids, which surprised me. Then he took my hand and brought my fingers to his lips. His eyes stayed focused on my face, not going below my chin, even though the neckline of the dress plunged lower than I was generally comfortable with. He was being a gentleman tonight. “You look like heaven,” he said.
“You don’t have to be so formal,” I replied.
“It’s not formal to treat a woman well. It reflects good manners and good breeding.”
“Both of which you have.”
“I like to think so.” He nodded toward the roadster. “I have roses for Jasmine, but I felt if I gave you roses, that would be like sending you the wrong signal. Then I saw the very regal orchids and thought of you. You are my friend as well as a woman, Rachaela. That means I should take very special care with you.”
“No caning?” I said, and wondered where that had come from.
His expression changed, and I could tell I’d ruined an otherwise perfect mood. “You confuse cruelty with discipline. But then, most uneducated people make that mistake.” He turned, suddenly very cold, and opened the door of the roadster for me. I didn’t like the way he’d said that, so dismissive, but I slid silently into the car anyway and worked at keeping my big, fat, “uneducated” opinion to myself.
On the way over to picking Jasmine up, I asked, “You don’t have plans to hurt this girl? I don’t want to be party to that, just so you know.”
“I have no plans to harm Jasmine in any way she does not consent to.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Just so.” He drove with one hand on the wheel and one on the gearshift. He was a smooth driver, but defensive.
“Explain to me what you mean.”
He blinked and the wind tossed his yellow ponytail over one shoulder. “I promise that nothing will be done to Jasmine that she does not fully agree to. I’m not a sexual predator, you know.”
“I didn’t say you were, Wolf. I just don’t want you…convincing her to do something she’ll regret.”
“You don’t have much trust in me, do you?” he said. I could feel a kind of tension building between us, an invisible wall. I was getting so tired of fighting. I was fighting with Jerrel, Asia, everyone I knew. I didn’t want to fight with Wolf tonight. His mouth, a very severe and almost lipless slit, grew grim. “Is it because I’m white, or it is because I’m a man?”
I decided not to dignify that with an answer.
We picked up Jasmine in Soho, from the back door of a studio apartment. I had been expecting a tall, leggy African woman. Instead, I got a small, demure and rather sweet-looking Asian girl of about twenty-five with a bob of black hair, an exceedingly short, dark blue satin cheongsam, and a body that made me envious from the get-go. I thought how uniquely unfair it was that very petite women should have such big boobs, a kind of cosmic joke played on the rest of us giraffes.
Wolf went shamelessly up to her, seized her face, and kissed her. He ran a big hand possessively over her hair. Wolf was a very physical person, very much into touching, but Jasmine didn’t complain. She parted her lips a little as they kissed and I imagined Wolf poking his tongue a little ways into her mouth. Then I imagined him poking her a lot as they went ahead and played tonsil hockey for the next two and a half minutes while I waited impatiently in the car.
Jasmine sat between us on the way over to the restaurant, the roses in her lap and her hand on Wolf’s knee as he drove. She smiled sweetly and chatted with me, much friendlier than I’d expected her to be—much friendlier than I would have been, had my boyfriend pulled up in a sports car with a strange women in the front seat. Jasmine explained that she was a professional graphic designer. She liked ice-skating in Rockefeller Center during the winter months, and she taught an origami class on the weekends. A lovely, well rounded individual. She was probably kind to old people and animals, too.
“How did you meet?” I asked.
“The opera. We both like Wagner.”
I hadn’t known that Wolf liked opera. Then again, I never asked Wolf what he did on the weekends.
Jasmine leaned into Wolf’s arm and I suddenly felt very third-wheel-ish. “Are you all right with this? With me tagging along?” I asked Jasmine. I thought about begging off, but now it was too late, wasn’t it?
“Wolf likes you,” Jasmine told me. “That means I’ll like you too.”
“I feel like a chaperone on a girl’s first date,” I laughed.
Jasmine frowned at me. “I’m twenty-five. I’m not a girl.”
“I just mean…you know. I feel like you two should be alone or something.” I shut up. I kept expecting to go into Mom mode. After all, a part of me wanted to try and protect Jasmine from the big bad Wolf. But when I looked at the girl, really looked at her, I realized that she wasn’t Asia. She wasn’t my daughter. Nor was she a child. She was here of her own free will. Surely she understood what Wolf expected of her? Wolf must have told her something?
At the restaurant, the owner seated us herself behind a glass partition painted with sparkling flocks of hummingbirds. We got a round table with a plush, U-shape booth and plenty of cushions all over the place. Wolf sat in the m
iddle with the two of us girls to either side of him. It made for a jiggy scene, as Asia would probably say. I was starting to feel like one of those molls in Prohibition movies, hanging onto my gangster boyfriend. While we waited to be served, Jasmine regaled me with stories about her company’s more exclusive clients as if eager to impress me. Finally, she said, “I’ve seen your magazine, Rachaela. I like the girls you photograph.”
“Thank you,” I said, looking over the all-French menu like I knew what I was reading.
“I like erotica. I don’t like porn,” Jasmine explained, and I wondered if Wolf had encouraged her to say that.
I lowered the menu. “Has Wolf explained anything about…” I stopped. Wolf was reading the menu. He didn’t appear to be overly perturbed by my talking about him like he wasn’t there. “What I mean to say is…do you know what Wolf expects of you?”
Jasmine looked up. I thought how she resembled a fine china doll, so dear she was almost breakable, but the more I looked at her, the more I realized her eyes weren’t young at all. “You mean about being Wolf’s courtesan. We talked about that last night in bed.”
“You slept with Wolf last night?”
Jasmine smiled, not a child’s smile. “We didn’t sleep.”
I felt the dreadful heat creeping up my face, but when I chanced a quick look at Wolf, he was engrossed in the wine list. I didn’t get a chance to ask further questions as the waiter came up and Wolf ordered for us. We moved through a course of lobster bisque and foie gras, followed by duck confit and some cheeses, everything accompanied by champagne and a series of table wines that seemed to go on forever.
Wolf was a perfect gentleman all through the meal. He said nothing inappropriate. In fact, he said very little at all. He almost seemed more interested in listening to me chat up Jasmine. I kept trying to figure out if there was a way to hint to Jasmine about Wolf’s particular predilections, but she was so cute and lively, like some excited little kitten, that I couldn’t bring myself to mention anything sordid. Anyway, I was afraid I would come off as sounding like a jealous rival for Wolf’s affections.
