You don’t fuck me in the ass. You don’t come on my back, or my face.
I try to imagine how I would feel if you did. Would I like it? Would I hate it? Would I feel degraded . . . or turned on? Some days I think one way, some days the other. I don’t have the courage to ask you about this. I don’t think I want to find out how I feel about it.
Rachel likes pain with her sex. She likes to be spanked. Hard. She likes it when you tie her hands behind her back with a necktie and fuck her from behind and spank her with your belt while you’re balls-deep inside her. That’s verbatim what she tells me.
I don’t want to know that.
I also can’t stop going down to talk to her, knowing that she’ll tell me all these things.
I want to know, and I hate that I want to know.
She also tells me about her fellow apprentices’ predilections. Four has a thing for having a vibrator in her anus while you have sex with her. Five is a blow job aficionado and does actually like taking come-shots to the face. Seven, Eight, and Nine don’t like any one thing in particular that Rachel knows about, and Two likes autoerotic asphyxiation, meaning she likes it when you choke her while fucking her.
I know more about the sexual goings-on of Floor Three than I think is healthy.
It also tells me that you have an unnatural and possibly superhuman sex drive. At least once a day with me. Rachel claims you visit her once a week, usually. Plus girls Two and Four through Nine. Including me, that’s ten women. A different woman every day, with an extra three you can rotate to have more than one a day. Which, honestly, is just one possible permutation based on the available information, variables, and my skill with mathematics.
Your life is sex, I think.
And work.
You sleep with me, though. Like, actually sleep. Three hours in the morning, from nine to noon, and usually, unless “work” intervenes, another three hours from ten at night to one in the morning. Strange hours. You’re always on the move, always going. You wake suddenly, completely, and immediately. Your eyes flick open, you blink twice, and then you get up and dress. No stretching, no rubbing of your eyes, no yawning. No hesitating on the edge of the bed, rubbing your stubbled jaw with a palm. Just . . . awake, totally. It’s eerie.
Living with you is bizarre, that’s what I’m learning.
I’m never bored anymore.
I still work. But now I go down to what was once my apartment, which has been converted into an office, and meet my clients there. My bedroom now has a computer, and there’s a large flat screen TV in the living room. It is my space. If I have a “home,” it is there, not really the penthouse with you.
There is no evidence, visually, that I live with you. I do not know if this is unusual or not. I have not changed any of the decor. I have a section of your closet for my clothes; by “closet” I mean two thousand square feet dedicated to clothing storage. Your home—which is the entire upper floor of the building—is open plan, certain areas sectioned off with movable screens. The closet, then, is a very cleverly designed area, screened off so as to be invisible from anywhere else in the apartment, built-in racks to hang suits, slacks, and button-downs, shelves for T-shirts and underwear and socks. And my clothes. But apart from the shelves and hangers of my clothing, a casual visitor—of which there are none, not ever—wouldn’t know I’m a resident. There are no pictures of you, of me, of your family, of anyone. Just abstract art by unknown artists. Macro photographs of a leaf or an insect head, the surface of a lake so still it could be a mirror, splotches and swaths of color, textured paintings using glops of paint an inch thick, an elaborate line drawing of tree. Weird, impersonal, beautiful.
Like you, in many ways.
My space is my old apartment. I still stand at my window and make up stories for passersby on the sidewalk below.
My life is the same, really. Except now I live in the penthouse, and I watch TV and surf the Internet and you have access to my body whenever you are home. Ostensibly, I suppose I could leave the building if I wanted.
But I still have no money of my own. I never see a check or a single dollar bill. I have no identification.
I still have no control over my clientele.
I have no name but Madame X.
No further knowledge of my past, other than that I’m Spanish . . . or so you say.
? ? ?
They sniff a tumbler of scotch, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. Assessing.
“What kind of whisky is this?” comes the question.
“It’s scotch, actually,” I answer. “Macallan 1939.”
Their hands clutch the crystal tumbler, thin lips touch the rim, golden liquid slides. Tongues taste, a pink smear visible through the distortion of the crystal. “Damn. That’s fuckin’ amazing.”