The Last Best Tip

by Cassandra Duffy

  The sun was already setting, in late afternoon, by the time Brooke had a roaring fire going in the fireplace and her things tucked away in one of the guestrooms, which was decorated entirely in black marble plates and moose antlers dipped in bronze. Back in the main hall, she warmed herself in front of the fire, or as close as she could get to the fire without melting her hair. She tried very hard not to think of how many dead black bears she’d had to walk over to get to where she was standing.

  The front door, which apparently opened seamlessly out of one of the walls, burst inward, and Vendela stormed in, her stiletto heel boots clacking loudly across the marble floors. Her hair was as straight as an arrow, all of uniform length, and long enough to reach a mere hand’s width from her belt. She occasionally wore it in a loose bun or an overly-precise ponytail, but left it free flowing when she wished to think, either brushing it with an antique, silver-handled brush, or combing it with a downright ancient-looking bone pick. Her hair was left down at the moment, her eyes, and much of her face, covered by enormous black sunglasses, and her lithe body poured into thigh-high black boots, black ski pants, and a black turtleneck with a white mink coat wrapped lovingly around her svelte frame. The form-fitting clothing was a vast departure from how Vendela usually dressed; her typical clothing billowed around her with clunky, over-sized jewelry, giving her the appearance of a little girl trying on her mother’s clothing. Brooke much preferred how Vendela looked in the tighter outfit.

  “Brooke,” Vendela said, in her truncated, peculiar way of speaking that wasn’t so much of an accent as it was an unnatural cadence. “I need you to…” She often left long, pregnant pauses in her sentences, which were spoken in such a flat, uninflected tone, as to make the endings entirely unforeseeable until she spoke the final few words, which often left Brooke more than a little surprised at the sharp delineations from her expectations to what Vendela actually wanted. “…get my studio lit. And, you should find…a thimble that fits you.”

  Through the rest of the evening, and well into the night, Brooke followed Vendela around her studio, hopping from mannequin to mannequin as they brought together the beginnings of Vendela’s fashion line for the following year. Vendela removed only the mink coat, storming through the well-lit studio on her ridiculously unpractical boots, inspecting things through the pitch-black lenses of her oversized sunglasses, and always trailing a wake of expensive, lavender-scented perfume. Brooke, when she wasn’t furiously scribbling down everything Vendela was saying, caught herself falling a little in love with the perfume, and, toward the end of the day, caught herself eyeing Vendela’s compact legs and firm behind in the tight, black, stretchy material of the ski pants.

  When they were finally finished, on the pre-dawn side of 3 AM, Brooke stumbled up the spiral staircase to her room and flopped onto her bed. She crawled weakly over the edge of the bed to search through one of her bags for the thick, woolen socks she’d brought to sleep in. Her hand brushed something solid with a smooth, leather-like strap running off it. She fished out the item, gobsmacked when her hand emerged from the bag with her strap-on. The black, ultra-harness with thong back, open crotch, and an 8” pink, pearl silicon dildo was hers alright, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember packing it, or, since she clearly did, why she would. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the pink phallus, which looked far more like a Popsicle than a penis, as if it might explain how it got there. When it refused to answer, she tucked it back in her bag and snuggled down beneath the covers, still fully dressed, to dream fitful, cold dreams of Vendela stalking reindeer in her clacking boots and designer sunglasses.

  ~€~

  Brooke awoke late the next day. Vendela wasn’t up yet when she ventured out into the house in search of breakfast. She ate, made a pot of coffee, drank most of it herself, and cleaned the almost entirely stainless steel kitchen before wandering back up to her room when Vendela still wasn’t awake.

  Her room, with proper vent flow adjustments on the shafts up the walls from the main fireplace, became toasty, and Brooke decided to take another look at the peculiar stowaway in her bag. She hadn’t been dreaming—her strap-on was right where she tucked it the night before. In an act of ridiculous impetuousness, for which Brooke had no earthly explanation, she stripped naked and pulled on the strap-on, cinching it tight over the curve of her hips. Admiring herself in the full-length mirror, she turned this way and that, cocking her hips to one side or the other, grasping the phallus in one hand and then both, admiring how the black material broke up the tan lines of her skin and how perky the fairly impressive pink dildo looked jutting out from her mound.

  Her skin, which was one of her most prized body parts, was already beginning to dry under the frigid, aridity of the arctic weather, and Brooke decided she needed to halt the scaling/flaking process before it started. For a moment, only a brief one, she considered taking the strap-on off to apply the lotion, but the moment passed, and she left it on. For the better part of an hour, she stood in front of the mirror, applying moisturizer to her arms, across her chest, cupping her own lotion-slicked breasts for a moment before moving on to her stomach. She drizzled a stream of the off-white lotion across her firm butt cheeks and along her legs, bending in entirely unwarrantedly sexy ways to rub the lotion in. By the time she’d finished her moisturizing regiment, she was drowsy again, and Vendela still hadn’t awoken.

  Barely conscious of what she was doing, Brooke climbed back into bed, lying on her back on top of the covers, to take a quick nap.

  ~€~

  “Brooke,” Vendela’s voice startled her only partially from sleep. “Come down here. I want you to show me…what you’re wearing.”

  That couldn’t be right, Brooke thought. She tried to shake off the lingering dream-like qualities of her nap, but she just couldn’t fully shrug off the drowsiness. The question wasn’t the wrong part; in fact, Vendela often asked her that when they were attending functions together that would require Brooke to look fashionable. There was something off about the question or maybe it was the answer that her sleep muddled brain couldn’t quite piece together. Regardless, she slid off the bed, and padded down the stairs in bare feet.

  Vendela was standing in front of the colossal, roaring fireplace, facing away from the flames, dressed in a white, silk kimono. For a moment, with how stock still she was standing, it was hard for Brooke to tell if it was actually Vendela or a merely a statue. It wasn’t until her feet hit the fuzzy edge of the vast bearskin rug that she looked down, more interested in the sensation of the fur between her toes, but having the unfortunate side-effect of realizing what she was still wearing.

  If she was dreaming, and she really hoped she was considering she was staring straight down at a perky pink phallus and not a lot else, it was the sort of dream she would have welcomed a chainsaw wielding maniac to interrupt. When she looked back up from the embarrassing answer to Vendela’s question, she found Vendela, standing almost toe to toe with her. She didn’t look mad, or confused, or anything really. Her tight features, with a delicate, heart-shaped mouth, razor-thin nose, and naturally slanted ice-blue eyes, were completely unreadable.

  Vendela grasped Brooke’s strap-on in one, slender hand, and led her by it into the center of the bearskin rug where the roaring fire cast flickering crimson light and peculiar shadows from the massive iron grate guarding the hearth. The combination of the heat pouring out of the inferno in the fireplace, which was quite possibly large enough to consume a small house, and the intoxicating aroma of Vendela’s perfume started to make Brooke’s head spin. She closed her eyes against the oddly drunken feeling washing over her. When she opened them again, she found Vendela in front of her, on her knees, taking the pearly pink strap-on between her lips. It was really hard to tell how good of a job she was doing with the mock-blowjob until two fingers found their way up between the gap in the crotch of her harness to slip inside her shorn pussy—after that, Brooke decided Vendela was probably doing a masterful job with her
mouth.

  How things progressed from there became a little fuzzy. Brooke was fairly certain she climaxed from Vendela’s deft fingers and the lewd show of her strap-on blowjob, which was why she assumed she next found herself lying flat on her back, panting and moaning, with Vendela straddling her, riding almost in slow motion, the front of her kimono falling open on occasion to show her perfect white breasts, which might have been carved of marble for the smooth sheen they boasted. When Brooke reached up to touch them as Vendela rode smoothly up and down on her strap-on, she found the breasts ice-cold, but absolutely perfect in every other way.

  Her eyes drifted closed, for who knows how long, and when she managed to pry them open again, she was behind Vendela, who had bent over on all fours, legs tightly clenched together with her feet between Brooke’s legs, and her head resting on her outstretched hands, reaching straight forward to grasp the bearskin fur in two, tightly-held fistfuls. Brooke’s hands gripped the delicate curve of Vendela’s hips, again, finding the skin frigid to the touch, pulling her diminutive partner back, while she thrust forward into her with the pink strap-on.

  When she faded in and out again, she found herself on top of Vendela, one alabaster leg slung tightly around her lower back and arms spread wide to either side for a stable grip against what was turning out to be a fairly violent ravaging. Her hair, her beautifully straight, perfect hair, splayed across the inky blackness of the fur like a halo of winter sunlight, and, for the first time, Brooke actually noticed how much Vendela seemed to be enjoying herself. She was smiling, sort of anyway, her white lips parted, tongue barely visible and tiny moans escaping with every thrust Brooke made. The smile, which was probably the first she’d ever seen from Vendela, was lovely, even without the sexual undertones of how it came to be there, and Brooke paid extra special attention to it as never to forget what Vendela’s joy looked like.

  Brooke’s eyes drifted closed to the sounds of Vendela’s screams of pleasure echoing through the house in a melodic, yet frighteningly high-pitched key.

  ~€~

  For the next several weeks, Brooke awoke naked, in her bed, beneath the covers, with the strap-on folded neatly on the pillow next to her. She spent her mornings alone. When the sun set, earlier and earlier in the afternoon, working its way toward the point in mid-December when it wouldn’t rise at all for a solid month, Vendela awoke, said only a few words to her, and they went back to work. After they’d finished a few more stitches on the fashion line, Vendela would turn out the lights in the studio, go to the fireplace in the main hall, and Brooke would return to her room in a haze. As though operating entirely on muscle memory, she would strip naked, put on the strap-on, and return to Vendela for a dreamlike night of sex, fading in and out as their positions changed, seldom able to utter anything but a moan, and always ending with her eyes closing to the sounds of Vendela’s climactic screams echoing through the mansion.

  In the mornings, Brooke could remember pieces, with great difficulty, of specific moments from the blurry night before. The days were getting shorter, lasting only a few hours before sunset, leaving more and more night occupied with work and increasingly long love-making sessions with Vendela. Something remarkable, the only thing she could remember with crystalline certainty, was that Vendela always took care of Brooke’s orgasm first. Sometimes, Brooke was lying on her back, legs spread, Vendela on her hands and knees between her legs, lifting the strap-on with one hand while she held open the harness with the other to lap like a pure-white tigress at a bowl of milk. Other times, it would be the mock-blowjob and fingers. On a scant couple of occasions, Brooke could only be certain of two, Vendela had placed her in a position Brooke had never even heard of. Brooke would be laying on her stomach, hips slightly raised, knees bent with her feet in the air, and Vendela would lie facedown on top of her in the opposite direction, holding Brook’s ankles one in each hand, her legs spread around the back of Brooke’s head, and Vendela’s face craned down to lap at Brooke’s pussy from behind. There was something incredibly thrilling and subservient about the position, how the much smaller woman controlled her body with her weight, held her ankles as she pleased, and pinned Brooke’s arms beneath her shins. Of all the positions Vendela sexually gratified her in, the orgasms from that position were always the strongest.

  After a solid month of sex, work, and sleep intermingling, the days shortening until nothing but blackness remained, Brooke finally came to two very important realizations: one, there were only around three, very small windows in the entire mansion, which must have been well over 20,000 square feet, and, two, Vendela didn’t seem to eat or drink anything. There was a third revelation she desperately hoped would happen, which was a definitive answer to whether the sex-filled nights were only dreams or if it was actually happening. She’d thought the answer would become clear, given enough time, but never seemed to turn either direction. She even considered asking Vendela about it; however, whenever she tried to work up the nerve, her mouth would dry out, and she would suddenly become very certain, if only for a few hours, that it definitely was just lusty dreaming conjured up by a mind with little else to stimulate it.

  When delicate fingernail marks began appearing on Brooke’s shoulders, back, arms, and thighs, she decided the matter was settled, and didn’t consider asking Vendela anymore. She did, however, begin treating her boss far more like a caring lover than an employer—to which Vendela showed absolutely no response.

  ~€~

  January saw the fashion line coming into beautiful relief, and, to Brooke’s surprise, she saw a little of her own influences in several of the garments. She wasn’t just helping the artist to paint in needle and thread, she was adding a few strokes herself. The clothes were gorgeous, perhaps the best she’d ever seen from Vendela’s very long career…and then that was odd too. Having spent two months fucking Vendela in every which way either of them could imagine, she had never found so much as a crease or a wrinkle, nary a plastic surgery scar anywhere on her body, and yet, nothing drooped, nothing sagged, nothing felt loose to the touch. But she was—Brooke had to do some very rough math considering she didn’t really even know what month contained Vendela’s birthday—at least fifty or sixty, and that would assume her first full fashion line debuted on or around her twentieth birthday. It wasn’t impossible for such a thing to happen, nor was it impossible that a fifty-year-old woman could look as good as Vendela did, it was just so insanely unlikely that Brooke had to add it to the list of crazy realizations she had started back in December.

  ~€~

  “Brooke,” Vendela’s voice jolted Brooke awake in the interminably black bedroom. “Wake up. I want to show you the…hot tub.”

  Brooke turned on the lamp next to her bed in time to see Vendela’s pale white feet walking out her door, hair, the color of winter sunlight, floating behind her. For the first time, she felt refreshed, awake, and completely cognizant when Vendela roused her. Something told her to leave the strap-on where it was, to grab just a robe, and follow.

  Through winding corridors, her thin, pink bathroom clutched tightly to her chest, Brooke followed the faint, white outline of Vendela, dressed in her silk kimono, twenty or so paces ahead, as they made their way deeper into the mansion’s core, but also with a decidedly upward direction. The hallway, or path, or tunnel, or whatever winding dark space Brooke had walked through for the past ten minutes, finally opened onto an octagonal room with a huge, stone hot tub in the middle. Vendela was standing beside it. She let her kimono drop, her iridescently pale form slipping one toe into the steaming water, followed by a shapely leg, and then the rest of her petite form.