All I can see in my head is him last night, gripping the bedpost, his straining cock in his fist as he stared down at the pictures and groaned aloud as he came, his hips pumping—
Fuck. I can feel the blush threatening to creep up my neck and into my cheeks, and I bite my tongue, trying to force it back with the sharp pain. Now that I’ve seen Alexandre naked, how handsome he is, now that I’ve seen something so blatantly sexual that I know I wasn’t supposed to, I can’t look at him the same. I know what’s underneath his crisply starched clothes, his carefully groomed exterior, his cool demeanor. Remembering that barely leashed passion while he touched himself makes me wonder what he would be like with a partner. It’s impossible not to imagine his muscles flexing above me, his teeth clenching as his hips thrust forward, driving his cock—
“Anastasia, are you alright?” Alexandre looks at me, his eyes narrowed with what looks like concern. “You’re flushed. And you’re breathing heavily. Are you ill?”
“I—ah—no,” I stutter, shaking my head. “I just didn’t sleep well.”
His brow furrows. “Even with the tea?”
It’s the closest he’s come to actually admitting that the tea contains a sedative.Fuck. Of course, he can’t know that I didn’t actually drink the tea. “Um—just some bad dreams.” I bite my lip, hoping that he’ll buy it. If he starts to get suspicious, I won’t be able to get away with not drinking the tea again. And even though I know I should stay in bed tonight and every other night, rather than risk his anger, I’m already aching to see him naked again. To watch him while he touches himself and imagine that it’s me that he’s looking at with such desire instead of whatever porn he had scattered across his bed.
“Perhaps tonight will be better.” Alexandre’s hand drops from my arm as he shakes out the dress, and I instantly miss the feeling of his touch on my skin. It’s hard to know if it’shistouch that I want, or simply to be touched at all, but it hardly seems to matter anymore. Who else will ever have the chance to touch me again? And who would I want to, other than him? My options are slim to none these days.
Better the devil you know—and I’m not always sure that Alexandre even qualifies as a devil. Some days I’m less certain than others, like yesterday. And then days like today—I just can’t be sure.
He undresses and dresses me efficiently, leaving the tray for me to pick up as he strides out into the hall. At first, I think Yvette has gone, but my heart sinks when I see her sitting on the living room couch, examining one of her long, manicured nails. She looks up when she hears our footsteps, her expression softening when she sees Alexandre and hardening again at the sight of me.
“I have to go out, as usual,” Alexandre explains, glancing at me. I have a feeling that I know what he’s going to say next before he says it, and his next words only confirm that. “Yvette will be staying here to keep an eye on you today while you work. I hope that she’ll have only good things to report when I come home. And,” he pauses, his eyes narrowing. “I shouldn’t need to say this to you, Ana, but keep your hands occupied, and not between your legs.”
Yvette smirks, her lipsticked mouth turning up in a cruel laugh, and I feel my face flame, more humiliated than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Even at Juilliard, where the ballet masters and mistresses would sometimes call out our flaws and mistakes in front of the whole class, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so embarrassed. I wish the floor would open up so that I could disappear, and yet—I think I see a flicker of heat in Alexandre’s eyes when he says it. I could be imagining it—I’msurethat I’m imagining it. Still, just the thought that he might be in some way aroused by the thought of me pleasuring myself or by instructing me not to sends a throb of sensation between my thighs that makes me grit my teeth and clench them together.
It’s quickly mitigated by the realization that not only has he embarrassed me in front of Yvette, he’s also leaving her here in charge of me. Which means I’ll have to be here with her, alone, all day.
Cleaning Alexandre’s apartment has been, up until now, a pleasant enough way to pass a day with no television or anything else to do. Now it feels like nothing but misery.
“Mind your manners,” he says sternly to me, returning Yvette’s delicate wave goodbye before heading to the door, and I don’t think I’ve ever hated a phrase more.
If I ever leave this place, I never want to hear the wordmannersagain.
“Well, well,” Yvette smirks as the front door closes. “Just the two of us, little pet.Petit animaux.” She taps her nails on the knee of her tailored cigarette pants, looking me up and down with her dark, keen eyes. “It’s a shame you’re not mine. We’d have such fun. For one thing, you’d be cleaningmyapartment naked. And the first thing you’d attend to, I’d require the use of your tongue.” Her own pink pointed tongue trails over her lower lip, and I repress a shudder. It’s not that Yvette isn’t beautiful or that I couldn’t ever be convinced to experiment with a woman—but she’s so patently cruel and rotten to her core that I can’t stand the thought of touching her, even if she were a man. She hates me, and not for any reason other than the man she wants has taken a liking to me, that he’s amused by me and treats me better than she thinks he ought to.
Or hedidanyway.
“What do you usually do first?” she asks, lighting a cigarette and taking two long puffs from it.
“Um, the dishes,” I say in a small voice, and Yvette waves her hand.
“Well, go on then.”
Alexandre must have given Yvette instructions about how she can and can’t treat me because she’s notashorrible as I’d feared. But neither is she kind. She waits until I’ve cleaned the rug in the living room before “accidentally” flicking ash on it, makes a point of nearly tripping me or getting in my way more than once, making it difficult for me to keep my balance, and then remarks on how ungainly and graceless I am for a supposed former “star ballerina.” When I finally escape to the library alone to clean, she leaves me alone for a little while, only to pop in and tease me cruelly about how she needed to be sure I wasn’t disobeying Alexandre’s orders to keep my hands out from between my legs.
“I knew you were a little whore,” she says casually from the doorway, smoking yet another cigarette. “And I know you’re thinking of Alexandre’s cock when you’re fingering yourself in the dark. But he’s not going to put it in one of his little pets,Cherie. You could never do anything to earn that, and he knows you’re beneath him, even if he sometimes tries to pretend otherwise.”
One of his little pets.I try not to think about it, but it’s impossible not to hear the words, not to wonder what other pets he’s had, what happened to them, if he paid a hundred million each for them too—which is impossible. No one has that kind of money. No onecould.
I’m caught up in my thoughts when Yvette flicks ash on the floor again and giggles. “Clean it up,” she says. “And get your mind out of the gutter.”
She eats her lunch at the table, forcing me onto the floor to eat the bread and cheese she gives me—French baguette and brie, but it might as well have been cardboard for all that I can barely choke it down. Eating at Alexandre’s feet is awful, but eating at Yvette’s is so miserable that I can’t stop a few tears from leaking out of the corners of my eyes, hoping all the while that she doesn’t see them. But of course, she doesn’t care enough to notice.
When Alexandre comes home, he tells me that I’ve done a good job cleaning, then has me go back to my own room while he and Yvette prepare dinner. I eat on the floor again while they eat at the table and chat in French, and I can feel the beginnings of a new routine starting—albeit one that I don’t want to get used to. After dinner, Alexandre draws me a bath once Yvette leaves, and he goes so far as to gently massage my feet in the tub, asking me if they’re sore from cleaning.
“A little,” I tell him, and he gently rubs around the scar tissue, avoiding the spots that are the most sensitive. He doesn’t ask what happened again, thankfully, and I have to blink back tears at the gentleness of his fingers on my skin. I want to ask him if he forgives me yet, if I have to keep eating off the floor like a dog, if Yvette will be here tomorrow, but I don’t. Having him touch me like this feels too good, and I don’t want to make him angry. So instead, I just close my eyes, sinking down into the steaming water, until he finally sets my other foot down and starts to help me bathe.
I use the same trick to get out of the sedative tea, holding it in my mouth until he leaves and then spitting it into a different plant this time—I’m afraid of killing only one and him figuring out my game that way—and wait until the lower floor of the apartment is quiet before slipping out into the hall and carefully sneaking up the stairs again.
I don’t know if I’ll see anything tonight. After all, he’d had one of the most intense orgasms I’d ever witnessed just last night—for all I know, he’s going straight to bed. But I catch him partway through undressing this time. I watch in fascination as he takes off each item of clothing and folds it perfectly before setting it in the laundry hamper, rather than—oh, I don’t know,tossing it inlike a normal person. He strips all the way to his bare skin that way. I feel my heartbeat speed up in my chest as he turns. I catch sight of his half-hard cock between his razor-sharp hipbones, swelling steadily as if with anticipation of what comes next as he strides towards the bed and his side table.
I’ve never seen a man get erect without touching himself or being touched unless he was already hard when I got his pants off. But as Alexandre takes out the photos and spreads them across the bed, his cock steadily thickens, getting harder and harder as if the process is as arousing to him as a touch.He must do this the same way every night, like a ritual,I realize, and the desire to keep coming back, to keep watching only intensifies as I watch him grow rock hard without ever touching his cock, his thick length nearly touching his flat belly as he looks down at the photos, his face tensing with growing need as he finally reaches for a bottle on his bedside table, letting the liquid drip from it onto his cock and slide glistening down the length of it before hefinallytakes his shaft in his hand, and begins to stroke.