by Ella James
After that, everything got crazy. Mom and dad, aunts and uncles, everyone oohing and aahing over Lana in her gorgeous dress. I kept tearing up, but couldn’t tell if it was gladness for my sis or lasdjlkdfjl for him.
Maybe alksjdfd for him.
What do I even call it?
There’s no name.
I held myself together until the wedding started, and Laura and I stood beside Leah at the front of the room. That’s when the snapshot memories started flying through my head.
His arm, tucked over mine.
His hand, stroking my cheek.
Our fingers, clasped so tightly together, all ten of our knuckles had turned white.
Hansel on top of me, his eyes squeezed shut, my hands pressed on his chest as he pounds into me.
I want to hold the memory close, but I’m worried if I do, I’ll cry in front of Lana’s crowd.
She and Roberto say their vows, and Leah’s friend Xander stands up to read a quote.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like Xander. He’s a snobby antique Star Wars memorabilia dealer who uses words like “pontificate” in his every day vocabulary, so typically when he opens his mouth, I turn off my brain.
But I have Hansel right there at the back of my throat, in the pit of my stomach, in my trembling fingers, and so anything anybody says about love is bound to impact me.
Xander says something ridiculously simple—a quote from a book. Something so obviously cheesy-showy, in this context, that shouldn’t affect me at all. Only it does. So much so, as the ceremony ends and we file down the little makeshift aisle and toward the parlor’s exit, I bolt under a partition gate, collide with a waiter, dart around him, and run all the way out of the hotel, toward the road, where I have to talk myself out of asking for directions to The Enchanted Forest.
Xander’s book quote was by Pablo Neruda. It said, “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply.” And some other stuff you might be able to envision someone like Xander reading at a wedding.
I don’t even remember exactly what it said, but it mentioned hands. And falling asleep. And loving someone without forethought or intention.
It made me hot. Like…sweaty-sickly hot. As if deep down in my belly was a flame.
Standing by the road, I remember what the show girl told me about Saturday. How applications are due at five o’clock. I check my phone and find it’s almost nine o’clock at night. I missed turning in an application to be Hansel’s sub.
Hansel has a sub.
I sob all the way back up to my room.
As I collapse on the bed, exhausted and already half asleep, I see a snapshot of a lilac, leather roller skate.
*
I was at the skating rink. Sophomore year, second Saturday of September. Just me, and the girls my mother called my “just-Leah friends.” Maura, Kaye, Shayna, Tiffany. Maura was dating Trey Reiss, a junior with a compass tattooed on his back. Kaye had just told me about her crush on Shayna. And Shayna, of course, was wrapped in Eric.
Tiffany and I had been the odd girls out. Although I guess we weren’t really odd or out, because we had each other. We shared a king-sized packet of Skittles and a “Monster” sized Sprite, and Tiffany joked that we were lovers. I saw Kaye blanch out of the corner of my eye.
I remember I felt pretty that night. I think it was the brand new, lime green Chucks. I wore them with a short, black taffeta skirt that kind of flounced around me when I skated. I remember the shirt I had on. A floral pattern with little shoe lace bows perched on each sleeve. The way it made my boobs look bigger than they were. I was pretty sure the left one was a little bigger than the right, but that night, they were looking even. I had on some watermelon lip gloss, and when I smiled at myself that last time in the tiny little bathroom, I thought, I’m the prettiest. Not Lana. I might even be completely beautiful.
And then I tilted my head and washed my hands and told myself I didn’t care. Mom and Dad were always telling us looks didn’t matter. That by the time we finished college, we wouldn’t care what brand of shirt we wore, or if our blonde hair was dirty blonde, golden blonde, or pale blonde.
But still, I was glad about my new Chucks and my flower shirt from Anthropologie.
The rink was dark when I skated back out. The disco ball was glowing pink. The rink had mirrored walls, so little pink dots were flying all over everything.
There was this area that had funky, old, orange carpet—the short, rough kind of carpet, like they have on the floors at school—and it was elevated just a little bit over the rink itself. The rink, a big oval, was separated from this bench-filled, square area by a half-wall. I leaned on the wall and looked out at the clumps of people skating. I inhaled the smell of stale popcorn and slightly sweaty shoes, and found myself smiling.
Tiffany skated by and held her hand out. I slapped it.
Shayna and Eric glided by, holding hands the way they always did. Shayna waved, telling me I should come on out, but I kind of liked just standing there.
Secretly, I was looking for Freddy Burke. Freddy was this senior lifeguard who had saved me when I hit my head on the diving board at the community pool back in July. He was loud and sometimes a little…much, and his fingers weren’t that gentle with my head, but my body reacted to his like Coke and PopRocks, and every Friday when he played football, my eyes would follow him around the field, watching his legs flex and his butt and shoulders as he moved. Feeling kind of…heavy, way down low in my stomach.
After another songs, I spotted him. He looked good in a blue plaid shirt and cargo khakis. He had really dark hair. I liked dark hair.
Tiffany waved again, and I started toward the rink. I got one foot onto the slick surface when something buzzed inside my pocket. I thought for a second about skating and answering the phone at the same time, but I wasn’t very coordinated. The last thing I needed was to land on my butt right in front of Freddy.
I waited for a break in the traffic, then I turned around and went back to the carpet area.
Missed call: Lana
“Hmmm.”
Lana was dating this guy named Holt McCalister, and she didn’t usually call me when she was over at his house.
It was something that made me sad, but I’d accepted it.
Maybe they’d had a fight. If Lana broke up with Freddy, I would get to see her all the time again.
I decided to go outside to call her back.
The rink had a side door, marked with one of those plastic, glowing EXIT signs, situated just to the right of the men’s bathroom. I didn’t bother taking my skates off. I waved at the guy behind the food counter—kind of geeky and not very nice, but he was playing on his iPod, so he waved back when I nodded at the side door. No one would mind me going out it.
I used the stopper on the back of my skates to keep my balance, and pushed the heavy door open. I held my arms out for balance and stepped onto the asphalt in my rented skates.
The first thing I noticed was how bright the streetlights were. The parking lot was crowded, filled with familiar cars, so I didn’t feel uneasy as I hobbled out a few steps in my skates and pushed “SEND” to call Lana.
In the semi-darkness, my screen glowed brilliant green. Just like my shoes, I remember thinking pointlessly.
The phone rang three times before Holt picked up.
I heard Lana sobbing in the background.
And that was all, because the next second, the door of a SUV parked very close to me opened. A figure rushed at me, and something stung my arm.
The something was a Taser, I learned later. It didn’t just sting, it shocked me into brief unconsciousness.
As soon as I crumpled, Mother reeled me in the back door of her SUV and wrapped me up in tape and rope, like a spider dressing a captured fly.
I woke up in the back of her Ford Expedition with an awful headache and the need to puke.
I did, and she laughed lightly, the sound of it carried over the leather seats, in the stale air from her h
eater. “Look who’s up now. Sleeping Beauty. That’s not your name, though, is it darling?”
I was confused, of course—this was heightened by the blaring country music—but it didn’t take her long to turn down the Garth Brooks and explain.
Lana had probably called because Laura had been hit by a car. This car, in fact. Mother had tried to take my sister first, but Laura ran into some woods near the high school, where she’d been one of the last people leaving band practice, and managed to hide.
When she couldn’t take Laura, she went after me.
“I know all three of you dearies. Pretty little blonde girls. That’s what I needed. A pretty little blonde to be my Gretel.”
It didn’t make sense at first, but she explained as she drove—as the lights of Boulder dimmed and I saw the Flatirons go by, and eventually, my ears started popping as we drove west on 285, toward the high Rockies, and the little towns of Conifer, Bailey, Jefferson, and finally Fairplay.
“I’m Mother, Gretel. I’m your Mother Goose.” She laughed. “It’s a little unconventional, I know that, but I think you’ll like The House. It’s not a cottage, like the story, and there’s not a lot of candy. It’s a mansion. Much nicer than that little match box you live in. Some of my windows have a view of Mount Bierstadt. Snowy now up there.”
She told me how she was born to be a mother. It was her calling, but her husband, Ben, had died in some sort of accident.
“I never got to bear the fruit of my own womb, but this is better. You’ll see. Pretty soon you will tell me how it’s better.”
She told me I would have my own bedroom. She had already decorated it. And next door, Hansel.
“Your rooms look almost just alike. You’re brother and sister.”
On the other side of me was Sleeping Beauty, she said. Across the hall, Rapunzel. Red Riding Hood had “picture perfect” auburn hair, and Little Boy Blue wasn’t as little as she’d wanted. He was twelve, so young enough, she guessed.
“I had Snow White,” she said, but… “I don’t figure we need to talk about her. She’s gone now. I’ll be replacing her when you get settled.”
I croaked out questions, which she answered readily, telling me, in her high-pitched, almost chirpy voice, how she had rescued “her” children.
“They were all unwanted. All but you. I had some trouble finding a suitable Gretel—you know, blonde, with blue eyes and a delicate, Germanic sort of face. I saw your family one day, oh I’d say a month or two ago, down at that Home Depot south of Boulder. I was buying…well, it doesn’t matter. Did you know that I get nervous when I leave The House? If I were never to return, well…I don’t know what. My children would perish, I believe. Stuck in their rooms, the poor dearies.”
She sounded resigned to the possibility. I almost puked again.
“I did a good thing, really, when you think about it. With the other children, most of them were re-homed. That means they had been adopted, but they weren’t wanted. I helped them, welcomed them into my nice, big home. But I couldn’t find a Gretel. No Gretel near here, in Nevada, Utah, or anywhere that I could drive. When I saw you—the three of you—I knew. Your parents have three. I took only one.”
Weeks later, it’s her voice that haunts me most as I lie on the cot in my room.
How, even when I kicked and cried and screamed and cussed, as she hauled me out of the car and threw me on a rug that she rolled over me, she never got too worked up. She sounded happy and content.
When I kicked my way out of the rug, she put a gun to my head and asked me would I please stand up and walk very slowly.
“Oh.” She laughed—a giggle, from a pretty, fair-skinned face. “You can’t use your hands, can you, sweeting? All tied up. That’s what you are.”
The gun is how she got me to walk to my room. Through the foyer and the hallway with its creepy, flaming torches. She held the gun to my head as she showed me several huge windows along a hall with a green rug. She showed me a statue of a naked man—David, I think it’s called—and explained how, due to Ben’s death, she had a lot of money to buy things like that, and to support “her” children.
After the first time she led me to my room, she stabbed me with a needle. When I woke up, the door was shut. The nightmare had begun.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucas
The process of finding another sub is always tedious. Looking over the notecards Raymond makes for me is damn near pointless. I don’t want to know their backgrounds or their interests. Just height, weight, build, and hair and eye color.
Raymond does most of the vetting on his own, one of the many tasks that he and he alone can be entrusted with. He’s been working with me since the year after I returned to Vegas, and by now, he knows exactly how I like things done.
How many subs has he found for me, I wonder as I lean back in my massive leather office chair. I tap my fingertips against my laptop, but it’s difficult to count them when they don’t have names.
If there were robots advanced enough to serve my needs, I’d happily invest in one of them. I’m not looking for an emotional connection. I don’t “need” the physical connection either, not for anything beyond the demands of my dick. It’s a business arrangement, and I’m glad that’s all it is. I don’t warm up to people easily, and that’s never going to change.
The phone on my desk rings—my secretary, Leda, putting a call through from the head of the casino’s board of directors. I agree to the date and time of our next meeting and transfer him back to Leda so she can put it in on the schedule.
Then I grab the stack of flash cards off the corner of my desk and thumb through them. Raymond knows by now what height I like, so all these girls seem to be between five-foot-one and five-foot-five. Wide hips and an ass I can sink my hands into. Blonde hair—pale, honey, and dark. I usually stick to pale blonde, but occasionally I deviate. If the only short girl in the pack with an ass, hips, and a Midwestern accent comes with dark blonde hair, I’ll take her.
I quickly thumb through the fifteen cards, pick four, and buzz Raymond in.
I reach across the desk and hand them to him. “Contact these.”
He looks down at them, then nods thoughtfully. “It’ll have to be today.”
“Today?”
He nods again. “You’re flying to Boston tomorrow. Homes for Heroes, board of directors?”
“Right.” I shrug. “That’s good. See who can be here in the next hour. You can call a few more if you want. Stick to light blondes this round. They’re all the right body type. I’ll meet you in the executive guests’ suite in two hours sharp. Have them separated, dressed and, obviously, masked. Tell me about the nine-thirty show, with Jones and Freeman?”
I listen to Raymond explain that Laura Freeman, one of our performers, is nine weeks pregnant and doesn’t feel comfortable with the whipping portion of the show. Something about getting an infection.
“Give her leave.”
He blinks. “Leave?”
I drum my fingers on my knee and sigh. “Maternity leave, Raymond?”
“But, sir…she hasn’t had the child.”
“So what? I don’t expect pregnant women fucking in my House.” Anger heats my neck. “How often does this happen, Raymond?”
“Maybe…every other year.”
“What do you normally do with them?” I ask.
I glare at him without meaning to at first, because my cock is hard, my suite is empty, and my back hurts.
“Well…sir, we let them go. Pregnancy and this career are incompatible. Remember? You wrote it into the standard contract years ago.”
I wave my hand. “Change it.”
“You said pregnant women—”
“Change it,” I growl.
“Yes sir.”
I exhale slowly, stand up, and wave toward the door. “Get it handled for me. I’ve got a call in five with the vodka guy. After that, there’s something else. I’ll see you in the executive suite. Have them ready for me.”
Raymond nods and leaves my office. I spend the next half-hour on the phone with our largest vodka supplier.
After that, I open a new web browser, turn on TOR, and break one of my own personal rules.
I google Leah McKenzie, Peachtree City, Interior Design.
By noon, my cock is so hard, it’s throbbing, and my patience is thin. I couldn’t find anything recent on Leah. It’s as if she’s disappeared these past six months. She hasn’t even updated her company’s web site since August 2013. I’m entertaining the possibility that she’s died or been abducted.
I’m sitting on the king sized bed, flipping through my contacts for my favorite PI, when the first girl knocks. I summon her inside.
She’s wearing the uniform—blue teddy with blue garters, and a silver mask—the way she should, but immediately, I spot a problem. Her neck and upper shoulders are pocked with acne.
I look her over, have her turn a slow circle, and thank her for her time before dismissing her. She never speaks a word—just goes.
Next is T-Rex. The hands on her are…rough and weathered-looking. Leah’s hands are soft.
Cut.
My mood has worsened by the time the third one walks into the room. It takes another nose dive when I start to…smell her? What the fuck? But yes. That’s body odor. I sit up a little, checking to be sure it isn’t me. It’s her. Disgusting. Totally unacceptable when your body is your work.
I dismiss her, then wrap a robe around myself and stick my head out the door. “Ray?”
He’s right outside, holding a clip board. “Two more,” he says softly. He hands the clip board to me. I scowl down at the papers on it.
“What is this shit?”
“It’s the application, sir. We had another girl apply. Just now.”
“So what? The deadline’s passed. How am I going to deal with someone who can’t do the first thing I ask?”
“Yes—I know. But she’s insisting. She’s called the main line for times in the last hour. Her voice is as you like, and the images she sent look perfectly in line with what you need.”
