Best of 2017

by Alexa Riley

  And exactly what Alexander Henley likes.

  Those videos showed me three constants:

  The first being that these women get fucked until they are utterly exhausted. Until they’re nothing but a broken, sweaty, whimpering, cum-splattered mess at the end.

  The second being that these women are always like puppets, doing exactly as they’re told without hesitation. There’s this obedience to them that I can’t really put into words, I just felt it. I felt it everywhere.

  And lastly, on every single video without fail, these women get… strangled. Hands-around-the-throat until they choke. Like properly choke. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they have these glassy eyes without any fight in them at all, and sometimes they cry. Sometimes they even smile. Sometimes they cry as they smile.

  It made me hurt inside. A weird, tender kind of hurt.

  The kind of hurt I’ve tried to close away since the night my life was taken away from me. But this time it was different, this time it was… beautiful…

  Peaceful.

  I can’t even begin to explain how fucked up I must be to feel like this. You can’t understand until you’re in these shoes. Not unless you’ve lost everything. Not unless every day is a fight you’re not sure you want to be fighting.

  Not unless there is one single dream in life you’re grasping onto with every tiny part of your broken soul, not unless laying yourself before him and offering up your everything is the only destination at the end of a really painful road.

  Cindy told me she’s pretty sure Mr Henley is into it in real life, asphyxiation. She told me this shit is dangerous and fucked up, and if there was any truth in the things his wife told her that I’d be crazy to risk finding out.

  I’m crazy, alright.

  I didn’t tell Cindy that Mr Henley’s browsing history made me burn up. Made me flush hot and cold and shiver all over. I didn’t tell her that I had to clench my thighs all the way through, unsure whether I wanted to faint or play with myself right then and there.

  I didn’t tell her he is my final destination.

  The thing that keeps my soul alive enough to care for Joseph and keep on breathing.

  My breaths are borrowed. Loving him gives them to me. Loving him keeps me hoping.

  He can take them away.

  Literally if he wants.

  I guess I passed her craziness test anyway, because Cindy put the TV back to standby and carried on with the rest of her tour. A tour which ended in Mr Henley’s actual bedroom, and Mr Henley’s cases full of sex toys.

  She wasn’t lying about those either. Some of those toys could never be used, at least I don’t think so, you’d have to be… loose… to take some of them. Like real loose.

  Maybe I’m not the best judge since I’ve never done any of it before, but I know enough to know what might fit and what might not.

  I told Cindy that and she laughed and said I should scroll further back through his browser history and I might change my mind on that.

  We’d cleaned the whole house before she finally beckoned me over to Mr Henley’s bedside table. I held my breath as she eased open the top drawer, peeking inside as she so carefully flipped through some paperwork and pulled out a business card.

  “This is your gateway to Harley’s Tavern,” she told me.

  The card looked innocent enough. I turned it over in shaky fingers, looking for more, but if there was any meaning it was lost on me.

  Claude Finch, senior auctioneer. Finch Hamilton.

  The address listed one of those posh auction houses in Chelsea.

  “That’s who hooks him up,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He has a private email address, some random account under the name Ted Brown. It was open on his screen one day, there were loads of emails there from CF. Emails showing women with all the usual tick-boxes underneath.”

  “So you don’t know it’s definitely this Claude guy?”

  She rolled her eyes. “CF. In the bedside drawer with all the dodgy paperwork. He’s an auctioneer.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “No buts,” she said. “It’s him.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  She shrugs. “Pretend you dialled the wrong number.”

  The idea of actually calling this guy launched my heart into my throat. I wrote his number in my little notepad and slipped that business card straight back into the drawer, exactly as it had been.

  “I’m glad I’m not going to be around to see what a whirlwind of shit you get yourself into,” she said.

  And so am I.

  For all the insight and tips I got from Cindy during our handover, I’ve never been as excited as the moment she hands me her work mobile, loaded up with Mr Henley’s real-time schedule, and finally says her goodbyes.

  I feel the craziest rush of freedom, this weird naughtiness at the thought that it’s just me in his space now, me on my own, free to rummage and root through his life as much as I like.

  It takes me two days without her to pluck up the courage to strip naked in his bedroom and slip between his bedsheets. My heart is thumping, right between my legs, my thighs all clammy and jittery as the cotton brushes my skin. I press my nose into his pillow and breathe him in, and I can smell him there, that same deep scent, gorgeous enough that I never want to breathe normal air ever again.

  I play with myself in his bed on my third day alone. And again on my fourth.

  I drink out of his whisky tumbler and put my lips around the cigarette butt in the inkwell.

  I run my fingers around his toilet seat, knowing his bare ass has been right there.

  I put on his worn shirt from the laundry hamper, wrap his tie around my neck and imagine him choking me with it as he takes my virginity.

  I smell his boxers. I smell his bedsheets where his cock must’ve been.

  I put his toothbrush in my mouth, and my reflection in his bathroom cabinet makes me feel so sick, so out of control that it takes my breath.

  So I stop. Stop doing this crazy shit and focus on something more practical – on finding out everything I need to know to be close to him for real.

  I clean and snoop in tandem, working so hard I get blisters on my fingers. I buy some big white orchids for the empty vases in his living room just because it looks so cold and bare, and just hope my streak of initiative doesn’t get me fired. I gain the confidence of Brutus as best I can, and by the end of the week I’m sure I see him wag his tail when I open the door, just one sweep, but it’s enough to give me hope that we really can be friends.

  Friday evening comes around so ridiculously quickly. I turn down his bed, just so, and take a lingering look at the room before I leave.

  I say goodbye to Brutus on my way out and check the orchids have enough water to survive until Monday.

  And then I wait.

  I linger just down the street, pressed in the shadow of an ornamental hedgerow with a decent view of his front door, the work handset in my hand as his schedule switches from court to clear and the sky turns dark overhead.

  I wait for almost an hour until he shows, and it’s worth every second to see his car pull onto the driveway. I’d have waited an hour all over again just to watch him climb his front steps and unlock the door I cleaned so thoroughly this afternoon.

  I watch the lights come on, imagine him walking from room to room. Imagine the pad of paws as Brutus follows his master around the place.

  Imagine the scent of orchids in the air.

  Imagine the scent of Alexander Henley with my nose nuzzled into his neck.

  I’m about to leave for home, really I am. I’m tired and sated and ready for real life. Ready to cuddle with Joseph on the sofa and get him bathed for bed. Ready to drink coffee with Dean and tell him all about my latest adventures at Henley’s palace.

  I’ve turned on my heel and taken a step in the direction of the underground when I hear the familiar thud of that heavy front door closing.


  I hold my breath as he locks up behind him, and my eyes are wide, because I can’t believe it. It can’t be.

  But it is.

  Alexander Henley, whose dressing room consists almost entirely of tailored black suits and ties, is wearing a baseball cap, jeans and a scuffed old coat that’s seen better days. I dip behind a parked car, crouching in the darkness as he passes.

  My skin prickles.

  All of me prickles.

  And I follow him.

  Because wherever he’s going, I’m now on a mission to get there too.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALEXANDER

  I HATE TAKING THE UNDERGROUND. It reminds me exactly why I have a driver.

  It’s a strange phenomenon that when I’m dressed to be incognito I feel more noticeable than ever. The discomfort is palpable this evening. I feel observed. As though every pair of eyes on this carriage are boring into me. Staring.

  They aren’t, of course.

  A simple three-sixty makes it obvious I’m just a guy amongst a regular crowd going about their business. Just good old Ted Brown heading across town to do his bit for the community.

  Maybe I can add paranoia to my list of sexual-abstinence side effects.

  I didn’t pick some random homeless charity to absolve me of my self-loathing. The decision to volunteer at New Start, at the Brickwood branch, was an accidental choice, made for me one Friday evening after too much whisky.

  The tube station is the same grimy shithole it was a few months back. I head up to the street amongst the stream of people disembarking, being careful not to dirty my hands on the filthy handrail.

  Vivian Rachel Farr, the girl who haunts my dreams, died on the streets here. A heroin overdose. They found her body in an alleyway I’ll have to walk past this evening, a note for her parents written on a greasy old fish and chip paper in her pocket.

  That’s before I managed to get her rapist an acquittal six months later, and before her parents screamed in my face on the court steps, their haunted faces burned into my memory for all time.

  Annabel Pilcher found my drunken ass in the very same alleyway Vivian took her last breath. She smiled down on me as though I was one of life’s unfortunates – just as Vivian had been – and offered me a mug of hot soup. Enough to sober up my sorry ass.

  Sober me up it did.

  Permanently.

  If Annabel Pilcher had been on hand with a mug of hot soup when Vivian was facing her final dark night, then maybe she’d have made it through. Taken a sip of watery tomato goodness and lived to see another day. Just as I did.

  Unfortunately New Start was just a fledgling community effort back then, struggling for both the funding and manpower to make a difference.

  In me they found both an anonymous donor – generous enough to finance the opening of three branches across the East End – and good old Ted Brown, on hand every Friday evening to help cook up meals in their community kitchen and offer them out on the cold London streets.

  I was worried they’d have put two and two together by now. Ideas for expansion tossed around over cook-up time invariably led to yet another anonymous donation. As if by magic. By miracle.

  Our angel has answered our prayers again, Ted! We’ve got to secure another kitchen, Ted! Our donor came through again!

  It doesn’t mean I can sleep at night. There isn’t any donation great enough to secure that pleasure. But it enables me to face my reflection in the bathroom mirror every morning, and as far as I’m concerned that privilege is priceless.

  People always pull a sympathetic face then they talk about the homeless. Poor souls. So awful. They’ll throw a pitiful glance along with their loose change at a beggar on the street, then head on into a boutique coffee shop for a huge latte with their conscience squeaky clean.

  I’ve pondered this a lot, the disconnect between surface level social-driven empathy and the kind of genuine desire to help the world that people like Annabel Pilcher are consumed by.

  I’m not a good man and I know it. I’m fully aware of my distinct lack of moral fibre. I don’t pretend to myself that I’m anything other than a self-serving, ethically-corrupt sonofabitch.

  It’s the people in the middle that add most to the social apathy in our world. The people who share the horror stories with a simple click of a social media button, thank their lucky stars they’re one of the ok ones, and move along.

  They wouldn’t be homeless, because they don’t make bad life choices. They wouldn’t be a drug addict because they have the will power to just say No.

  Poor unfortunates. So sad. But it couldn’t be them. Oh no.

  Except it could. It could be any of us.

  Born under different circumstances, tried by life pressures greater than we could comprehend. A few badly dealt cards from life, and that could be any one of us, huddling in an alleyway at night, injecting poor quality drugs just for a break from the mental torment.

  I get that.

  I feel that.

  Most of the time these days I’m just relieved I feel something.

  Annabel has a big genuine smile for Ted Brown this evening.

  She wraps me in warm arms and her hair smells of cheap soap. The press of her body to mine always feels alien and leaves me feeling strangely emotional. I experience the simultaneous urge to push her away but hold her for longer.

  “Ted!” Her voice is muffled by my coat. She squeezes me and then lets go. “So nice to see you!”

  “Nice to be back,” I tell her, and I’m not even lying.

  Frank and Mary are already chopping vegetables. They smile and wave as I hang my coat up, and I say hello as I pass them on my way to the sink. I scrub my hands with their basic essentials anti-bacterial soap and take up position at the hob.

  Annabel unpacks the Styrofoam cups and we get to work.

  I’m not much of a chef. I choose my own meals based on simple acquired tastes and nutritional value, not from any desire for culinary expression.

  Nobody on the street cares whether I have a five star rating on food genius though.

  “How have you been, Ted?” Frank calls. His eyes are kind and well-meaning, but I hate small talk at the best of times, not least when I’m lying through my teeth – which is a lot of the time.

  “Same old, Frank.”

  He shakes his head. “You wanna tell that boss of yours to get stuffed. Works you too hard.”

  “Bosses, eh? All the bloody same.”

  He nods. “Profit, profit, profit.”

  Frank starts up his trademark rant on how it should be people not profit, and my cover is safe for another week. He’s a union type, campaigning for justice and fair treatment for all. He doesn’t just do Friday night soup kitchen, he does all three branches and he works like a trooper.

  Works and talks.

  He talks a lot.

  That’s the thing about people. Most prefer talking to listening. Set someone off on their own little monologue and nod in the right places, and you’ll have a friend for life.

  These people think they know me. They’d call me a friend, and yet they don’t know anything much about Ted Brown. They don’t know where he lives, or which company he works for. They know he’s in his forties, has a couple of kids but no significant other.

  They know he makes an average soup at best, but they don’t seem to care about that.

  The thought makes me smile, and Annabel smiles back.

  “It’s gonna be a cold one tonight,” she says.

  I nod. Agree.

  Freezing.

  The irony is that the street is the only place I ever truly feel warm.

  MELISSA

  CINDY DIDN’T KNOW everything of note about Alexander Henley.

  She didn’t tell me about his Friday night moonlighting at a soup kitchen for the homeless.

  She didn’t tell me that Alexander Henley wanders around the streets with a cap down low to cover his eyes, handing out hot drinks to people with nothing when he could be drin
king champagne in some posh cocktail bar somewhere.

  This blatant oversight is what renews my vigour to find out everything about Alexander Henley.

  Everything.

  Every. Little. Thing.

  Dean doesn’t think an evening volunteering for charity makes any difference. He maintains I’m in too deep, that the man whose house has become my own fantasy playground is just as dangerous as the internet rumours make him sound.

  He doesn’t know about the escorts. I didn’t tell him that bit. Not yet.

  He hasn’t admitted to me that he’s got photos on his phone, so I feel ok about withholding the truth, just for a while. Just until I’m certain of my next move.

  Brutus barely even growls this morning. He pads through to the entrance hallway as I disable the alarm, stares at me with mean eyes, but doesn’t make any move to see me off his property.

  Progress.

  It usually takes at least twenty minutes for him to stop growling at me, fish treats or no, even if I do get a little happy swish from his tail.

  I’ve got fresh orchids as well as fish treats, and some outdoor-reared bacon that I charged to the expenses credit card.

  My last impromptu food change seemed to be a win. Mr Henley now has two eggs every morning rather than just the one he had before.

  Maybe Mr Henley likes smoked outdoor-reared bacon too. We’ll see.

  I can’t stop beaming as I realise he’s topped up the water in the vases. He likes the orchids.

  I change them for fresh, even though they’re barely wilting, and I wrap up the old ones. I’ll take them home until they’re long dead, a piece of this place in mine.

  Yes, I like that.

  I clean fast but thoroughly, taking just a moment to smell the scent on his clothes before I do his laundry. His Friday night clothes are right in the middle of the hamper, clearly stashed amongst the pile of shirts, as though that will camouflage them. I have a sniff of those, too. The worn denim shirt smells of vegetables, but I can still smell him, that spicy smell. It’s enough to make my tummy flutter.

  And thinking of spice, I clean out his kitchen cupboard today, making a note of the opened spice jars amongst the sealed ones. He likes paprika. Paprika and… chilli. Turmeric too.