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The moment moved on with the sweet music lulling their wine-soaked senses, but they were immediately reawakened from a reflective daze when Elise finally made her grand announcement.
“I’ve been having an affair,” she said. Although she tried hard to sound fearless, her voice quavered slightly and she waited for her friends to say something, but neither Laney nor Sandra knew how to respond. By now, after so much delay, the announcement was hardly earth-shattering. Elise averted her eyes from their wondering expressions, while fingering her skirt nervously, making her look a lot more childish than womanly.
The awkward quiet begged to be broken, and Laney finally had to prompt her. “You obviously want to tell us, Elise, for crissakes get on with it!”
“This isn’t easy,” she whined a bit.
“Well, it shouldn’t be,” Laney came back, irritated.
“Don’t you go judging me, Laney Priestly.”
“I only meant that having an affair wouldn’t be easy for you, confessing it even more difficult. I wouldn’t think it was in your nature.”
“Well, maybe my nature has changed—matured.”
“I really wouldn’t know, but you’re dying to tell us, so…”
“It’s astounding even to me, I mean to admit I’ve been unfaithful, and yet being unfaithful to Matthew is furthest thing from my mind. It’s not about unfaithfulness at all.”
“So who’s your hot new lover,” Sandra wanted details.
“Cabral Icaboni.”
“Who?”
“He’s the new conductor of the symphony. A phenom, a virtuoso. As you’d expect, he’s volatile—just like Matthew, but much younger.” Her eyes closed as if she were bringing him to mind that moment. “He has this patrician face that’s sculpted like a Greek God’s, and a rag mop of blonde hair that plays to the crowd of old ladies who will spend their season ticket money lusting after what’s in his pants. Like they’ll ever know.” The more she spoke, the more Elise drew in on herself, half mindful of her friends, half in the dreamland of her memories, grasping for every detail. “Matthew and I haven’t been doing well, not since the island, and that’s the plain facts of it. Matthew expected to go at a dead run into this sadomasochistic lifestyle. Whips and chains and leather, dungeon houses and bondage brothels. I told him no. Of course, I was frightened, but it was more than that. It’s so much easier to put on propriety’s clothes when you live in a normal world, with normal people behaving normally all around you. It’s just not me to be parading around in leather in some seedy underground dungeon, with unwashed hairy types, beer drinking Harley riders with their trashy females hanging on like pestering flies. I know, you don’t hear this kind of judgmental talk from me, but it’s what I think inside about that crowd. I tried it once, for Matthew’s sake. We went to this pubic dungeon in someone’s rank basement. It wasn’t exactly public; they required a password to get in. Anyway, after about a half hour, I couldn’t stand the smoke or the music or the people, and I practically puked in the bathroom. I called a taxi and went home, didn’t even tell Matthew I was leaving. I called him on my cell soon as I got home. He came home furious. It’s not been the same between us since, and now I think he has plans to move to San Francisco. I don’t know that for sure, he hasn’t said as much, but can feel him drawing further and further away…”
Sandra and Laney only needed to keep their eyes on her, Elise wouldn’t need prompting.
“But this isn’t about Matt, it’s Cabral’s story,” she sighed. “About three months ago, a few weeks after he took over the orchestra, I was in the rehearsal hall after everyone had left. I was cleaning out my sheet music, bending over the piano, and suddenly Cabral is behind me. He puts his hand right on my thigh, right on top of the brand. It started to throb, like he’d turned on a switch. He started to rub it and I got all juicy between my thighs. At the same time, I was frozen, completely unable to move, I was so shocked. I’m thirty-two and married, he’s twenty-one and quite single. There’s not a runway model on the East Coast who hasn’t dated Cabral. And there are the Hollywood starlets, and a number of ingénues in the New York theatre crowd. He could have the entire flute section of the orchestra, and a couple of first violinists. But he doesn’t date the orchestra members. He said that to me as if it would be lowering his standards to fraternize with his underlings.
“I’m older though, and good for other purposes he says…but that’s getting ahead of myself. Cabral has his hand on my thigh, pressing the brand as if he knows it’s there. ‘You have a special vibe, Elise,’ he tells me. ‘I do?’ I said. I was petrified. ‘And you have a special assignment.’
“He stood up and put a key in my hand, a motel key for a place just outside of town on the state highway. ‘Come in your trench coat and a pair of high heels, red high heels, spiked high heels. Maybe a bra and panties, but that’s all. Tomorrow in the morning, ten o’clock.’
“Then he walked away. I stood up, not moving for a long time, gulping back pangs of guilty anguish, ‘what would Matthew say? … should I tell him…Elise! Are you crazy?’ I almost started to laugh out loud at how juvenile this was. I mean, isn’t that the most cliché of sex fantasies—the trench coat? I did it once for Matt in Spain, and it was hot. But to be ordered by a man eleven years younger than me, this punk phenom with the crazy hair and the swagger of a cocky adolescent…I was crazy to even consider it.
“But the mark still burned like the day it was burned into my flesh on the island,” she sighed deeply. “The feeling kept spreading upward and going deeper inside. I could almost recall the throbbing of his groin against my ass. Was that real? Or did I just imagine his cock pressed to my bottom? I could have dismissed it out of hand, but there were the repercussions of this… what if… I could lose my job if the truth of our trysts ended up in the tabloids. Cabral is tabloid fodder, and there’s some morals clause in my contract—not to mention that I am a married woman. Cabral could cost me my position without tarnishing his. He could say that my tempo was sluggish, my technique is sloppy, that he wants me out of the orchestra, and has another better pianist he wants to audition. He’s already done this to Marion Brandt, so I know he has it in him to work whatever angles suit him. I’ve wondered if Marion had been caught in his trap. Had he demanded sex from her? Was that possible? Dear Marion,” her voice fell sadly. “Some people think I’m a stodgy stick in the mud, but Marion is twice as demure, and very mousy. Maybe that’s what he likes, unlikely women. I dismissed the idea, the craziness seemed to be spreading. But my head was swimming, fear and heat coming down on me at once. By then I hardly thought of Matt. My own survival. My own pressing need. Like Sandra,” she turned toward her friend on the couch, “I was hornier than I’d been since we were together on the island…
“I assume you men him?”
“Of course, I went,” Elise went on as she took gulps of wine to refresh her palate, although by then the wine was starting to taste bitter and sour her stomach. “In my red high heels, my trench coat and my sexiest Vicky’s Secret underwear. I get to the motel, to the room, and he’s already there, pacing, a drink in his hand—mind you, it’s ten in the morning. He’s wearing jeans and a white sweater, his hair as natty as usual, but he has this allure that shouts out, ‘I’m special, worship me, bitch!’ He’s moody and cross, just as he is with the orchestra, and he’s going to play me with the same precision as he does his one hundred piece instrument in the symphony hall. I know this the moment I step in the room.
“He stares at me, while I stand shivering in my shoes. I’m a lit
tle dizzy…I mean very dizzy. I’m swaying in the high heels, nothing to hang on to but my fear. I still want to laugh, this seems so silly, he’s so serious, but I don’t laugh. I know what’s at stake and I know how my pussy lips will glisten for him once I open my coat, so I can hardly be blameless. It’s just astounding to me that he could know I’d be an easy mark.
“While he’s casually drinking his scotch at ten in the morning, he tells me to open the coat. I do and stand there before him, practically naked. ‘Turn around,’ he tells me. I turn three hundred and sixty degrees and then face him again, feeling my body teeter a little off balance like a reprimanded schoolgirl. I right myself and wait.
“‘I need a whipping girl,’ he announces without batting an eye, ‘And you’re it, Elise. I like that you’re older than me. It’s kind of like fuckin’ with the babysitter, don’t you think?’ His lip sort of turned up in a twisted, smug way. ‘You’re going to satisfy my cravings to punish women. You will bend to me, bend before me. You’ll do any damn thing I ask when I have you here.’
“I can’t believe what he wants. I’m howling inside, trying to figure a way out of this, meanwhile, I’m sweating with arousal and my pussy is leaking juices down my thigh. He notices, of course, and that only gives him more ammunition. ‘You’ve got the kind of nature that submits to men, so you might as well submit to me. I know you want me, that you despise me at the same time, but that doesn’t really matter, Elise, because you’re going to do this, so we can both stay sane.’
“I closed my coat, about to run off, and he walks closer, stands right in front of me. I smell the liquor on his breath. I feel the heat of his body, and then his hand clutching the back of my neck. ‘Someone branded you,’ he says, ‘which means you belong to some man; I think that man should be me. You think I’m insane, but look at you. You came with so little persuasion on my part. I’m sure you’re afraid of me, you want your job. It’s a good job that your talent is barely suited for, and you know that too. So, we have a deal now, don’t we, Elise?’ I didn’t flinch, and I didn’t speak, so he shakes my head. ‘Yes, we have a deal,’ I said, bowing my head. It shames me that I can be bought so cheaply.
“He shoved me to the floor, on my knees, my back to him, and took out a cat o’nine tails and whipped my back. My cunt was scorching hot and ready to come by the time he finished, and dropped to his knees behind me. He’s got a long, arched cock that goes places Matthew’s just won’t go. He had my hair in his hand, his other hand grabbing at my hip and the hot brand. He was all pent-up that first day. After he came the first time, he put me on the bed on my hands and knees and used the cat on my ass and the back of my legs, going over the flesh again and again. I thought he’d never stop. I was about to scream when he finally dropped the thing and shoved himself inside me again.”
Elise stopped for a moment, while the three collectively caught their breath.
