“But why are you in the Society?” she asked. “It seems like just a cheap swingers club. I realize Professor Deveaux made my initial tests exciting and appealing so I’d stick around. But why are you still doing it, if you know it’s a scam?” Her blue eyes searched his dark gaze.
His lips twisted in a helpless smile. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked, tilting up her chin. “From the moment I saw you at the January party, I knew I had to meet you. Meet you and save you and love you—if you’d let me.”
His words sent a throb of longing through her heart. “Tell me everything,” she requested.
He brought her bare feet, still red and throbbing from the stilettos, into his lap and began to rub them. “There’s not much to tell, Chelsea, except that I’m just like you…sort of. Odette was my professor too but I’m a graduate student. We had an affair.”
Her stomach jolted with this unhappy news. “You slept with her?”
He didn’t look proud. “It only lasted a few months. When she began taking me to Society parties, I realized I was just another in a long line of pet boys she liked to keep around. At that point, she was beginning to tire of me, and hinted that I should share my favors with the other, older female members. I refused. So she told me if I wanted to keep my membership, I had to act as a Muse toward a new recruit. You.”
She slowly processed his words. Now she understood Professor Deveaux’s oddly hostile manner toward her as the tests went on. On some level, she must have been jealous of Chelsea’s bond with the young man she still considered her property. “So you didn’t go through the tests like I did?”
He shook his head. “They only test people they think might react badly to the actual parties. They want to see how far you’ll go. Since I was already Professor Deveaux’s lover, she vouched for me.”
“So it’s just a sex club.” Her cheeks flamed with embarrassment at her own naivete, but she had to confirm this. “All her talk about publishing and networking was just a load of crap.”
“Oh, that part is real enough, for the older, successful members. For the students they bring in like us, yeah, it’s bullshit. We’re just the entertainment, the inspiration as they call it. In the months I’ve been hanging around, I haven’t seen any young writer benefit from their connections. They don’t even like us to talk to the more famous members.”
“Then why do any of them stick around?”
He shrugged. “Desperation to get published, I guess. And the chance to befriend some of the most legendary writers of our time. And, of course, to have the sex life of their wildest fantasies. Erotics Anonymous may not be your cup of tea, Chelsea, but plenty of people do enjoy that kind of scene.”
She was disgusted with herself, with Professor Deveaux, with the entire system. Even with Jeff for willingly buying into it. “Professor Deveaux made it sound so elegant and harmless,” she said softly. “I’m a fool. A stupid, naïve fool who thinks everything is going to turn out perfectly, like in the books I read.”
“No, Chelsea, no. You were simply deceived.” He stroked her cheekbone and stared imploringly into her blue eyes. “But you showed a lot of courage tonight and you should be proud of that.”
She rubbed her face against his fingers like a cat. “Why didn’t you just tell me during our tests?” she whispered. “We were alone together then. I was so hungry to look in your eyes, speak to you, know who you really were.”
His body stiffened. “I wanted to. You looked so innocent that first night…but Odette insisted that you wrote these kinky stories. And you did willingly go along with the tests. I thought you might report me as a traitor and choose the advantages of the Society over me.”
She leaned over and kissed his beautifully shaped mouth. “Never.”
They were close to campus. With a warm feeling of relief, Chelsea spotted the chapel steeple in the distance. The blue lights of a fancy French restaurant glittered on the snowy streets as they drove down Main Street. She sighed, thinking enviously of all those girls in her dorm who had enjoyed traditional Valentine’s Day celebrations with boring college boys. Never again would she look down her nose at their romantic dreams.
Muse knocked on the glass. “Can you let us off up here at Les Bijoux?” he asked the driver.
She looked at him, bewildered. “What? I’m in a bathrobe!”
“This is our first Valentine’s Day together. We’re going to start out right.”
The maitre’d looked astonished to see an elegant young man in a tuxedo come in with a girl clad in a long black bathrobe and stiletto heels. Chelsea stood proud, giving him a confident smile. After standing naked in a room full of strangers tonight, she doubted much could embarrass her ever again.
She kept that smile on her face as they walked through the white-clothed tables, drawing stares from the remaining Valentine’s Day couples. At this late hour, many of the tables were empty, but some couples still lingered over their wine and chocolate mousse. Chelsea slid into a luxurious booth of soft leather and opened her menu as if she were dressed perfectly respectably for the most romantic night of the year.
After a few moments, she glanced around. She recognized many of the couples from campus. Yes, this was exactly the kind of Valentine’s celebration she had scorned as being clichéd and boring. Now there was no place she would rather be. She glanced back to find her Muse gazing at her over the candle flames.
“By the way,” he said with a shy smile, “my name is Milo.”
It was just after eleven p.m. when Les Bijoux closed and Chelsea and Milo headed into the street. The snow was still falling, transforming the parked cars lining Main Street into white-bound humps. The icy sidewalks glowed red and blue under the neon sign of the bar where they had first met. As the bitter chill penetrated her bathrobe, the warmth of the wine she’d imbibed vanished. She huddled into Milo as he hailed a taxi, acutely aware of her nakedness.
As they slid into the backseat, he seemed nervous. “Uh, Chelsea, you have to remember that I’m just a graduate student. My place isn’t as grand as the Society parties. There won’t be any fancy hotel rooms or masks or naughty outfits…”
She took his jaw in her hand and looked deeply into his eyes. “Milo, I fell for you. Not a kinky fantasy.”
A few minutes later the taxi pulled up in front of a large ramshackle house that looked as if it had been divided into apartments. Milo paid the driver and helped her out, escorting her up the icy driveway.
He unlocked the door. As her eyes adjusted to the dark room before her, she found herself in a typical student apartment. The leather couches and sophisticated stereo equipment hinted that Milo might be more well-heeled than a lot of struggling students, but it was very much a bachelor pad nevertheless. She brushed the snowflakes from her hair and kicked off the painful stilettos for the last time and turned to him.