Who: Cass and Wren What: A visit turns into a proposition. Where: Aubade, 501 When: After this arrives. Warnings: None.
Histoire d'O. Why was he not surprised?
She had been reading De Sade when they met, after all - and he was sure he knew who this book was from, it could be from no one else.
He had perused the Story of O when he was still in Musings, and found it mostly despicable. He understood that the acts in the book were consensual, and people should be allowed to have sex any way they liked, but the way the main character was treated smacked of misogyny, and he found it difficult to stick with a book that spent so much of its time in torturing and debasing a woman. Consensual or not, the severity of it left him with a bad taste in his mouth. He read it once and never picked it up again.
He’d done much the same with Justine, read it once and then never again. On an intellectual level he understood the concept, but it didn’t make for a pleasant read, at least not for him. He flipped through the pages and then retreated into the bedroom. He didn’t know what the book was meant to say to him. Was it just an offer of another book she liked, or was it meant to be a missive about what he ought to do to her? If she was looking for something like that, she’d come to the wrong place. He had nothing to offer her, nothing, at least, that she seemed to be looking for.
Wren waited an entire day after having the book delivered to knock on his door. Getting into Aubade was easy enough (the doorman remembered her from last time, and she looked like such a sweet girl). She had her hair up in a wispy loose chignon and she wore a designer dress and cardigan - the most expensive item in her wardrobe. Her face was devoid of all makeup except powder, and she had gloss on her lips. There was no hint of the prostitute in her appearance or her demeanor, and that was the entire point. She’d never had an owner as rich as the one who lived in this apartment building, though, admittedly, she would have pursued him even if his address hadn’t turned out to be quite so prestigious. He’d had kind eyes, tormented, yes, but kind. And she couldn’t live off the air; she needed a sponsor.
She knocked on the door to 501, and she folded her hands behind her, and she waited patiently.
He had slept only fitfully that night, and when he opened the door he looked tired. He couldn’t hide the fact that he was glad to see her. He had thought about contacting her on the boards to ask her about the book, since he wasn’t sure what he was meant to do with it - read it, study it, what - and he was a little surprised to find her standing there on his doorstep. “Hey,” he said. He was dressed, thankfully, he’d been awake long enough for that, in loose dark pants and a long sleeved shirt. He’d shaved - he always shaved, actually, even when he didn’t go out for days. It was just about the only act he would acquiesce to using a mirror for, and sometimes he avoided it even then. He pulled the door open a little wider to allow her in, eyes roving over her briefly. She looked lovely and pulled together, which didn’t surprise him at all. From the second she walked in he was that strange mix of unsure and closed off, trying to figure out why she’d come back and what he ought to say to her.
She walked past him like the apartment was hers, and she managed it without seeming pushy or demanding. Her strappy black sandals came off her feet first, and she left them neatly by the door, her black-stocking covered toes curling into the thick, lush carpet as she looked at him. He looked tired and ill-slept, and she closed the space between them and touched his cheek gently. Then, wordlessly, she slipped off the cardigan and handed it to him. She didn’t wait for his reaction, and she didn’t hesitate before turning to the stairs. She knew the way, you see, and she walked it like a woman who didn’t require permission to do as she pleased. As she neared the top of the stairs, she dragged down the zipper at her spine to the small of her back, baring smooth skin (her tattoo covered up by professional, waterproof makeup) to his view, unmarred by undergarments.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching her walk up for a long, long stretch. He was holding her cardigan in his hand, just looking, taking in the view. Christ, he was still human.
He followed after her eventually, after she’d already rounded the corner of the stairs, prepared to find more dropped articles of clothing, since stripping on her way to the bedroom seemed to be her favorite way to get it done.
She varied it a little this time, because it wouldn’t do to bore him this early on. Her dress was folded neatly at the foot of his bed, and she was curled up in one of his armchairs in his bathrobe, her black stockings visible under the silky fabric. It was parted, but the way she was curled in the chair revealed a sliver of skin of skin from neck to navel and nothing more. She smiled at him, a slow and sweet smile. “Read to me,” she said in Italian.
The book was sitting on a table close by, and he walked over to her, laying the cardigan over the back of a chair close to the door. The room was mostly bare aside from the bed - two chairs, one small table beside the chair she was sitting in, and heavy curtains over the windowed walls - that was all. He stood in front of her for a moment, choosing in the end to sit on the floor with the book, just at her feet. Close enough to look at her long lashes and glossed lips, but not quite close enough to touch. He rarely if ever wore a bath robe, and the one she was wearing had been sitting unused in the closet since it had arrived along with a myriad other articles of clothing he’d ordered when he moved into the apartment. It smelled like dust, and a little like him, in the way that everything in the apartment smelled like his home.
He looked up at her, curled in the chair under a bath robe far too big from her in just those black socks. She looked strangely child-like. He wondered if that was usually the appeal for her clients. “You like books where women are tortured,” he observed in Italian, then flipped it open. He picked a section on a whim, reading about O and her love for Sir Stephen, and Jaqueline’s rejection of her.
Wren listened to his voice as he read, and she watched his face. The words were unimportant at the end of the day. She’d read the book; she’d had a master once who had liked the French sadists very much, and so she knew the passages nearly by heart. His accent was as she remembered it, even around the French and Italian syllables, and his eyes remained as blue as they were kind. She leaned forward a little in the chair, baring a little more tantalizing skin, a touch of pink where the robe opened at her chest. “It is torture if the woman likes it?” she asked in her schoolgirl’s Italian, open gaze curiously awaiting his response.
He stopped reading, looking at the book, struggling to find an answer to the question that both made sense to him and was right. “Yes,” he said finally. He went on, tone growing harder and more serious as he went on. There was a touch of anger, too, that hinted at the bottomless depths of it underneath. “Because it’s still torture to the person who is hurting her, and it’s still torture to the people who read the book. Some of them will care that she said yes, but not all of them. Some of them would want to see her hurt regardless. I’m sure that sounds short-sighted,” he said, looking up at her. “But I read a book like this and all I can think of are the men who would read it and only love that a woman is being whipped and made into a slave. I don’t dispute that there are many other people who are only able to enjoy it because she consents, but I am not one of those people.” He paused. “It is better than Justine,” he admitted. “She doesn’t even have the opportunity to say yes in that book. I suppose this book’s saving grace is that she does.”
The anger surprised her, but then the nature of people generally did surprise Wren. She was too trusting by far, and she tended to believe what she was presented with on the surface. He hadn’t presented her with anger in their previous encounter, and so she hadn’t expected to encounter it now.
She listened to his voice, to the conviction behind his words, and that surprised her as well. The book, though not one she enjoyed personally, was generally well accepted by men. Men liked ownership, despite what this man in front of her was saying. She wondered if his anger stemmed from something, if something had brought it on, and she wondered if it was the wrong path to tread. But, in the end, he’d laid out his feelings on something that mattered to him and Wren was too fundamentally interested in people to not pick up that gauntlet.
She slipped from the chair to the soft carpet, and she sat in front of him. Her legs were crossed like a child’s in a circle of round-robin, and she didn’t adjust the robe when it opened more. “What about her pleasure?” she asked in English.
His eyes lingered on the open line of her robe for a moment, then carried on up to her face. “It’s obviously important,” he said, voice gone tired again. “She should be able to have what she wants if that is what she wants. I just can’t help but think about the motives of the people around her.” He went quiet for a moment, feeling more than a little foolish. If she loved the book, he’d hurt her feelings. Per usual, he’d let his anger run roughshod over someone else. “In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter at all.”
She’d followed his gaze to the robe, and he’d noticed how quickly he’d looked away, but it didn’t make her feel insecure; Wren was too at home in her body for that. She reached forward, and she took the book from between his fingers and set it down on the carpet beside him. The quietness circled around them, and she just tipped her head to the side, assuming he’d explain his feelings if she waited. She had feelings of her own about the book’s subject matter, but she’d come here with a purpose and voicing her feelings went against that purpose entirely. She was starting to worry she’d mistaken matters, but you couldn’t see it in her face or demeanor. She was as quiet as the air in the unused rooms of the palatial home. It was hard to mold yourself to what someone else wanted, she thought, when they seemed to want nothing at all.
Cass did want things, but he’d done an excellent job convincing himself that he didn’t want anything at all. He told himself that, if anything, he wanted quiet, and to be left alone, and even that wasn’t entirely true. Wren was here, wasn’t she?
She was silent long enough to get him to look up again, for some kind of reaction, but all she seemed to be doing was waiting for something. That made him curious. “What do you think about it?” he asked. Cass wasn’t the sort to look for people to lie to him, to hope they’d give him an easy answer so that he wouldn’t need to deal with their true feelings, with honesty. He didn’t want her to tell him what she thought he’d like to hear, he wanted to know what she thought, because it might give him some inkling of what made her tick. So far, he had no idea at all.
“I think she exists for his pleasure,” she said after a few minutes of silence, “on the surface.” She picked up the book and opened it, pressing her nose to the binding and smelling the old paper and glue. “It’s about giving up control, about the release of the body, about giving yourself up to things. Most people never experience that sort of freedom,” she said openly, hoping he remembered their conversation about freedom from the day before. It was her honest answer, and yet it didn’t actually give her opinion on the work.
“However astonishing it might seem, that she might be ennobled, that she might gain dignity from being prostituted, continued to amaze her. It illuminated her as if from within, and one could see a new calmness in her bearing, on her countenance the serenity and imperceptible inner smile one rather guesses at than perceives in the eyes of a recluse,” she read in imperfect French, and then she closed the book again, and she held it out to him.
He did remember their conversation from the day before. Freedom inside the skin, she’d said. “Free the way you said you are,” he said, since she seemed to be implying that. “What about her own pleasure? Doesn’t it matter?”
An inner smile in the eyes of the recluse - he almost laughed. Instead he took the book back from her, setting it aside. “Do you gain dignity from your occupation?” he said. He wasn’t mocking her, or trying to needle her, dig low with an easy hit. It was another question about honesty. The way she talked about O made it sound like she identified with her, like that was the way she saw herself - free because she had given up control of her life and her pleasure to the men who could pay for it, and perfectly happy that way. He wanted to know if that was true. He knew he didn’t want to pay for her company, but he also knew that, worry she might take it as a business proposition aside, the idea of pulling her into his bed was one of the few positive thoughts he’d had in a long while. Still, the thought of trying to forget everything with someone else was quickly supplanted by the guilt of wanting to forget. He tried not to think about it.
She smiled warmly. “The book isn’t about me,” she said truthfully. “I was just telling you what it was about, Cassidy.”
He grew very quiet and went, nearly imperceptibly, slightly red. He’d assumed that because she seemed to be referencing what she already said about herself, she was relating it back. He’d been completely wrong, and he’d jumped to conclusions, and now he didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” he offered, set totally adrift from the conversation. He’d been doing surprisingly well, and now he was floundering again. When he didn’t know what to say, he chose to say nothing instead of rambling like most, and he looked down at the cover of the book.
She opened the book to the title page, and she read the very obviously woman’s handwriting there aloud. “Even though He is not with me, I have no desire for it to not be known that I am His, that I am owned, that I am proud of Him, my collar and enslavement.” She held it back out to him, the book, and she curled her legs beside her on the carpet. “Have you ever wanted to belong to someone?” she asked him, entirely curious without being prying.
He watched her read aloud, watched her lips move. He wondered how she’d taught herself Italian and Spanish, and then she looked up and asked if he’d ever wanted to belong to someone.
“I did belong to someone,” he said, before he could reconsider. He paused, debating whether or not to take that back. No, it was the truth. “Not like that, though. I don’t think you should need a collar to feel like you belong to someone, and they belong to you.”
She closed her hands on her lap, and she looked at him with curious interest. “Who did you belong to?” she asked, and then she smiled and looked very much a teenager for a moment. “It’s like when you’re in school and you want the boy you like to give you his jacket, and you wear it all day, and then you decide it’s unbelievably cold at home and so you wear it there until bed, and when you wake up in the middle of the night for water you slip it back on before you climb under the blankets again.”
That question had been sort of inevitable. “It was a long time ago,” he said. He didn’t know how to talk about Clara. She felt private, sacred, like something that would disappear if held under the light for too long. He worried about that, about what would happen if he thought too long about letting her go, if he talked about her, took her out from anywhere but a very deep, dark, wounded place in him. He would think about her hair slipping through his fingers, and everything she was would come rushing back. In some way, it reassured him. He couldn’t forget her. He couldn’t afford to. That memory was all he had.
He smiled a little. “Did you do that?” he said, deciding to ask before immediately associating what she said with a hidden truth about her. That image was worth a smile, her getting up in the middle of the night and convincing herself that it was perfectly acceptable to wear the jacket of the boy she liked to bed. It fit the image she conveyed of innocence and youth, and contradicted the one that involved men passing through her presence and paying for her company. He liked it for both reasons.
“More than once,” she admitted without any embarrassment or shame. She liked the way his face changed when he smiled, and she suspected he didn’t do it very often. The fact that whoever he had belonged to was ‘a long time ago,’ made her heartsore, because she suspected belong was something entirely different for this man than for her, something wonderful and better than that jacket worn to bed at night, better than dreams - memories and remembering wrapped up in warmth gone cold. “You don’t get out much at all, do you?” she asked, blunt candor in the words, but no pity.
The smile widened a little. He liked knowing that about her, connecting it with her in his head, like he’d found a piece of a puzzle and put it in its right place. The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come when she asked whether or not he got out.
“No,” he said, after a moment’s pause. “I don’t play all that well with others.” A little of the sarcasm she’d mostly been spared edged into his tone. “I used to get out less, though,” he offered, the humor dry and not really meant to be understood. Going to the bookstore and buying his own groceries were leaps and bounds, as far as he was concerned. Even with the shift in tone as the topic changed, he was visibly more relaxed now than he had been at the conversation’s start.
“Would it help if you had a companion?” she asked, adding, “an escort?” The money wouldn’t be as good as the kind a mistress would bring in, and she would do better to walk away and find someone who would relish the thought of getting to control a woman sexually - better monetarily, at least. But there was so much sadness in this man who could afford anything in the world and yet wanted nothing of it. She smiled softly. “We could help each other,” she ventured, because she might as well put the cards on the table if she was going to play the hand. “I know you don’t want a mistress,” and he didn’t. She’d been mostly naked, locked inside his home twice and he hadn’t so much as touched her. “But a rich man like you, you have to go to events and the like. Or even to the store.” It would be enough to pay for her studio in Hamartia, and it would do for now. She bit her lip, her expression hopeful.
There was in his expression, briefly, a deep sort of disappointment. It was gone as fast as it had been there, shut down before he could really feel it.
She looked so innocent, so hopeful. Was that what it was about?
He got up from the floor, walking around the back of the bed. “If you want money, you can have money,” he said, tone gone flat and cold. “But I am not going to pay you to spend time with me. I’ve managed not to sink quite to that level, and I don’t intend to do so now.” He’d gone stiff with anger, and pulled a panel aside in the headboard of the bed. There was money inside, enough to pay for her rent, her food, and anything else she might want for a long while to come. He pulled it out and tossed it down on the bed. He didn’t have much pride left, but he planned on clinging to what vestiges he still had to hold on to, and he used them to pretend this girl he barely knew hadn’t wounded him. What the hell had he been thinking?
She realized her mistake as soon as his expression changed, and she was on her feet by the time he walked around to the back of the bed. She watched him reach for the money, and she didn’t interrupt the process until he was done. “I won’t take your charity,” she said, a touch of pride in the lift of her chin. “I just thought-” she cut herself off, because she wasn’t sure he would understand, but in the end it just wasn’t in her to lie or try to alter the truth. “I like you, you have kind eyes and you don’t seem interested in doing some of the things my previous masters have done, and I thought we could help each other.” She shrugged softly. “It’s how I earn a living,” she explained, because it very simply was.
She could tell he’d been hurt by her suggestion, but she didn’t really understand why, not really. She would do whatever he wanted; that’s the way the arrangement worked - no different than starting up a car or buying a timeshare. If she liked it, it would be a nice change. “I would have slept with you without the money,” she added quite honestly, because she would have. “But I won’t take the money for nothing.” She didn’t think he could understand the correlation between money and pride, but she realized it was probably the same thing as her not understanding why he was upset.
She took her dress from the end of the bed, and she slipped off the robe, uncaring about her nudity as she slipped the dress back on and zipped the back.
Masters? He resisted the urge to groan, tried to stop himself from following that to its logical conclusion. Did that mean that if he turned her down she’d go looking for someone else, maybe someone more like the men in her books? He ran a hand through his hair, gripping it at the neck, endlessly frustrated. “So you won’t take the money for nothing, but you will take the money if I’m paying you for your time? Why? Why - I don’t -” He was resisting the urge to walk over and shake her, at this point. She made no sense, and she clearly didn’t understand a word he was saying. “I like you,” he said, almost biting that off because it felt like he might be giving her too much. “I don’t want to spend time with you if you’re only here because I’m paying you to be. I might be a miserable fucking shut in, but I’m not quite so pathetic yet that I’m willing to pretend a woman wants to be with me when I’m paying her to be. Why can’t you just take the money?” It was difficult to manage how the words came out, balancing between anger and desperation. “Take the money, so you don’t need it anymore, and then I could see you and it wouldn’t be about that. I don’t want it to be about money,” he clarified. “And I don’t want you walking out of here to get grabbed by some fucking prick who’s going to mistreat you, Jesus Christ-”
She ran her fingers over the thick, plush blanket on the bed, and she tried to figure out how to explain wealth to a wealthy man. It was normal for men of his standing to have women hidden somewhere; the practice went back thousands and thousands of years. “Athenais de Montespan was the mistress of Louis XIV of France. He loved her so much that she was called the true Queen by his court,” she told him. “They had seven children, and she born noble.” She smiled as if the story was one she liked very much. “There’s nothing wrong with taking care of someone you care for, Cassidy.” She stepped away from the bed, and she looked at the money once, then back at him. “Taking money for my time would be honest work, even if it was just to do the dishes or go to the store with you. Taking money for sleeping with you would be providing a service, pleasure. Taking your money for nothing is the same as standing on a street corner with a cup and a sign. I’m better than that. I can earn my way,” she told him, all blunt candor and pride. “And you aren’t responsible for whatever happens to me when I leave here. I’m responsible for me.”
She walked up to him, and she tentatively touched a hand to his cheek. Her fingers were warm, and they were soft, and her eyes were wide-blue sadness and regret. She stretched up and she kissed his cheek softly, and then she pressed her cheek to his for just a moment.
He held still for a moment, with her pressed against him, and then pulled back so he could look at her. “Have you ever been in love with someone? And I mean love, not just...belonging.”
She shook her head honestly, without even needing to think about it. “No.”
He shook his head. “Then never mind,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to make you understand why I said no.” He regarded her, still sad, still disappointed, but most of the anger drained out of him. “Would you let me pay you to come here and read books in my library, and not talk to me, and not go get yourself hired by someone that’s going to hurt you? Would that be a service?”
She would have said yes five minutes earlier, but she shook her head. “I’ll come though, if you want, but not for money.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “What do I have to let you do for pay to keep you from going somewhere else?” He felt sick, physically sick by this point, and he was trying not to shake her again.
She cocked her head, and she replayed his words in her mind. “You wouldn’t have said that any hour ago,” she told him in schoolgirl Italian. She didn’t want him feeling responsible for her, that wasn’t what this had been about. He liked old books, and she’d liked him, but this was different. He couldn’t keep her from getting hurt, and she didn’t want him feeling the guilt of the world on his shoulders if she did. Any arrangement someone like her made, it was temporary, that was the way the world worked. He would tire of giving her money for services not rendered, and then he’d feel too guilty to pension her off. If he wanted her, really wanted her, it would be different. If he grabbed her and tossed on her on the bed the way the man in Hamartia had, that would be different. But no, this would be all for her, but without any of the feeling or desire that made sex without money special. She shook her head, and she kissed the corner of his mouth. “Send me a book you like instead,” she told him softly, her version of goodbye.
He took her by the wrist without thinking, before she could move away. “Wait,” he said. “I’ll - I’ll pay you to come here and just be around, and go to the grocery store. I don’t go to parties, I don’t often leave this flat. It would be boring.” Safe, he thought immediately, and tried to trace back when he’d become so worried about her, coming up with nothing. When he’d decided he liked her, probably.
She looked down at the hand on her wrist, unexpected as it was, and then she looked up at his face. “That’s what I offered originally, and you said no,” she told him, because it was precisely what she had offered him when she’d realized he wasn’t interested in her body.
“Well, I’m saying yes now,” he said. He didn’t have to make conversation with her. He didn’t have to be anything other than the bitter, sarcastic, spoiled rich recluse everyone else saw all the time. She’d be able to handle it. She would be paid to handle it, and she would be safe, so it would be fine.
“Why?” One word.
‘“Because you’re beautiful, and if people see me with a beautiful girl they’ll leave me the fuck alone. The more I think about it, the better that sounds.” There was the bitterness that up until now had been missing.
“Again.”
“Because I’ve hated almost everyone else I’ve talked to since I moved here, and I like you.” There was certainly an element of truth to that, even if it did blow it out of proportion. The only other person he’d met and even remotely gotten along with had been Bonnie, and the thought of her sparked an uneasy sense of guilt.
She considered his words. It wasn’t what she’d wanted, not really, but he seemed legitimately upset, and that had never been her intention. She’d had a dreamy eyed view of coming to this gorgeous apartment every day, and being cherished and cherishing, and being able to pay her way and only seduce men until she pulled her knives out. She’d had that dream, and it was gone now. But she wasn’t going to leave him worried and guilty, because beneath it all he was a good man; she could tell he was a good man.
“I’ll come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” she said. “Whatever three hours you like. You can pay me 10 dollars an hour to go wherever you need me to go with you, and to do whatever you need done.” She smiled softly. “I don’t clean.”
She figured he’d tire of it within a week or two.
“Three to six,” he said immediately, managing not to look immensely relieved, even if it was something of a challenge. He paused. “I’ll send you a book.”
She nodded, glad he hadn’t realized and hadn’t argued, and she stepped back, and she turned, and she made her way down the stairs and to the front door. There, she slipped on her shoes and she opened the door, barely making a sound as she closed it behind her.