Stained Sheets

Chapter Two-1

CHAPTER TWO

Marni

They are all here: the banker, the doctor, the CEO; three polished performers, three beautiful wives. Carlton would call them power friends. I’m still not used to any of them, but I am trying to fit in because my husband—I still tingle at the sound of that—is so sure that I, we, need these people in our little world. He was a little terse with me tonight, which worries me; so I’m here, wearing a green dress that feels a bit too skimpy for this crowd. I’m getting lots of stares.

All the important members of Carlton’s exclusive men’s club have arrived, as promised.

John and Maggie Driver—he’s the banker, a zillionaire I’m told, with a crusty formal expression and an authoritative attitude that gives me chills—and I mean this in an oddly s****l way, even if it also feels a little creepy. Maggie is beautifully blonde, well-kept, not even the tiniest flaw on her pretty face; at least not that I can see. She’s also the most welcoming of the women, effusive when she needs to be, drawing me in with her one hand grabbing for mine as if we are old pals. When she plants a kiss on my cheek, I feel grateful for her acceptance. CEO Bronson Kent’s wife, Jane, bores me with her highbrow talk. She wears her dark hair in a pageboy with bangs, and dresses in nothing but black. Jane does book reviews for the Journal and takes on obscure wildlife causes that only she can care about. The others laugh at her behind her back, although I think she knows this and doesn’t care—nothing phases Jane. Still, she’s part of their crowd. Of the three, she’s the most dismissive of me. The third, Trina Reeves, is a voluptuous redhead, a bauble to decorate her husband’s arm.

I flirt with them, batting my lashes and smiling coyly. It’s a female body language that usually works in my favor—they find me charming if nothing else. Although I don’t think anything would work in my favor with Jane; she’s just a hard ass b***h. I’m sure she tolerates me only because the others do, and because her handsome husband, who thinks of me as ‘eye-candy’—his words—told her to be nice.

“Hey there!” Maggie waves, cheerily as I approach. “And look at you! What a dress! So daring, but so…so you.”

Why me? Why’s this tight thing me?

“You know before I had the baby, I could fit into something like that,” Trina says.

“This was Carlton’s idea,” I dash off glibly. “I told him I thought it was a bit much… but, well.”

“Ah, he’s still the new groom, you’re the bride, of course he’d want you looking like a s*x pot,” Maggie says.

Like a sexpot?

“I have a little presentation to make,” Jane tells us, having completely dismissed the discussion about my dress. “You’d better listen up, because I’ll be quizzing you all afterwards.” This should sound like a joke, but she does it with a straight face, sounding completely sincere, and then moves off.

We wait, wonderingly, then as she begins to speak, I see Daniel Cody, my editor standing alone on the perimeter of the room. I wander his way to give myself a needed break.

“Hi there, gorgeous,” Daniel greets me as he usually does. I’m just a lowly copyeditor at work, while here I’m part of the royalty.

“Hi.” A cursory hug follows, and we’re ordered to listen up, as Jane taps on a wineglass with a knife. We stare through the crowd. “What do you think she’s going to say?” I ask him.

“The usual nothing,” he replies.

Daniel has an animal magnetism that has always attracted me to him. In fact, we had a brief affair before Carlton arrived on the scene—and one brief tryst afterwards. He f***s like he’s ravenous, even slapped me around a bit, mostly on the ass, but sometimes on my t**s. I get so hot I come on his hand, while he keeps slapping my bare skin. It’s all head back, eyes rolling upwards, losing myself in the amazing sensations, that are, on the one hand, too much to enjoy and never enough. I’m getting off, begging for more. I’ll bet I could beg him now for a brief quickie in the broom closet and he’d take off with me in a heartbeat.

But no! No! I have to stop thinking that way, even if these miserable gatherings seem to put me in the mood for something outrageously daring.

Besides, Cody is a confirmed bachelor and we’ve already determined that we would never be right for each other. He does look perfect here in this setting. The tweed sports jacket—very expensive—the graying hair and mustache; he is so like a noble country sportsman with the huge estate and the rack of guns and the deer head over the mantle. He even smokes a pipe, adding his distinct odor to the cigar scent that already permeates the room.

“She’s kind of pretty tonight,” I say, seeing Jane brush her pageboy back in an elegant gesture. Her hand is delicately thin—almost too thin for the heavy gold engagement ring and wedding band. She looks up to make her point, focusing keenly on the center of the small gathering where the most well-heeled of the club are listening intently. If she wins them over to her cause, she’ll have all the money she needs to fund this latest project. That is how this society works.

“Pretty?” Cody counters me. “Like a snake is pretty.”

“Oh, that’s bad.”

“She’ll suck you dry.”

“And you know this for a fact?”

“I know Jane,” he lowers his voice, “in an intimate way.”

“Ooo, I’d never taken her for an adulteress.”

He laughs at the word adulteress. “She’s had hers, still does, but not me.”

“Oh?” I sidle up to him, but just a bit. Can’t forget where I am and who I’m with or that Carlton’s eyes have just landed on me with a look so obtuse I have no idea what he’s thinking. I wave, smiling, and he nods—which I take to mean I’d better get along, so I give Daniel a smile and move to my husband’s side.

After Jane finishes with her little speech, there is the usual cocktail talk that leaves me bored. Although I’m never really bored in these surroundings. Even after all these months, I still get a little tingle of excitement at even being inside this exclusive rich man’s playground. Deacon House, as it’s properly known, is furnished like a gentleman’s study in rich wood paneling, the colors hunter green and harvest gold. Elegant paintings of rural scenes are strategically placed between the bookcases, against walls covered in jacquard fabric. The dark green carpet is much too thick for high-heels like the spikes I wear, so I have to be careful when I walk alone. It’s so much easier to move on the arm of a man—which really is the only way women are allowed in this masculine setting, according to their strict rules. We arrive and leave in the company of a member, which lends a bit of mystery to the events here. Fact is, most of the time the men come here without their wives… if only I could be a fly on the wall…I have a feeling that things get pretty raunchy behind closed doors!

I understand that there’s a private club behind the façade of this one, but I have no idea what that’s about.

Carlton brought me into his world and though I’ve been given a decent enough welcome, I still feel as if I’m an inconsequential piece of fluff; here to inflate my husband’s ego. This is a world of trophy wives and I think he pegged me as his next right at the start. He was married to Sandra Sterenburg before me—she does commercials for some brand of coffee, and sends him cryptic notes about the settlement that just doesn’t seem to ever get settled. I don’t concern myself with that.

Trinket though I was, when I first arrived on the scene, the regulars, Maggie, Jane and Trina, kept me from feeling like a total outsider. It is their duty, I believe, something they do on orders from their husbands. This is, after all, a patriarchal society where husbands rule and wives relent. You’d think that Maggie and Jane, especially, would recoil at the anti-feminist sentiment here, but when your husband brings in plenty of money to fund your pet projects and days at the spa, I suppose it’s easy to be submissive in certain situations.

I really dreaded the club that first time. At Carlton’s suggestion, I told the girls about my years in Paris and Madrid; about my briefer stays in Istanbul, Cairo and Malaysia. He thought that would give me credibility and drama. And why not tout my experience abroad; my father was a statesman with the Foreign Service for many years. I lived in exotic places, ate exotic food and learned languages that have, oddly enough, stayed with me. Sometimes I force myself to recall those strange sounding languages…I take trips back in time, exploring my memories—at least until they stumble into the incident that ended my international travels.

I try not to think of that misfortune, but often my mind returns to the time without my realizing. Suddenly I’m back in that North African mosque again, respectfully waiting for the pilgrims to finish their prayers so that my father can speak with his friend, Aman. I’m very careful of protocol; it was drummed into me since I was very little…

I was eighteen, my father and I had traveled to Morocco, which I thought was a vacation, but I’m not so sure. I don’t know why we were in the mosque; in fact, there are many blurry moments in my recollection of those terrible events. One minute I was respectfully on my knees waiting for father, the next, I felt something cold against my throat and a sickly smell filling my nostrils. I recall being lifted from my reverent pose and dragged away by a pair of strong arms that emerged from beyond the heavy folds of a man’s robe. But that is all I recall of my capture, until I awakened flat on my back, bound and gagged, the light so scant in the humid room were I lay, that I thought I’d just met eternity. Nothing but inky darkness, the most profound black emptiness. I froze, petrified and though I tried to scream in panic, no sound came from my throat. I wasn’t gagged, but I couldn’t scream. More evidence, I believed, of my earthly demise.

Then, in time, I heard noises, voices; I saw a band of light under what I suppose was a door; I smelled incense, the smooth fragrant scent of flowers.

A slight breeze grazed my arms, the hairs stood on end. And when I began to move my hands enough to feel my immobilized body, I realized that I was bound, securely bound.

The voices beyond me became more heated, an argument in a foreign tongue I knew only as some Arabic dialect. Then my world fell silent again and I waited, awake—or maybe half-asleep. Either way, this was an uneasy waiting, filled with unanswered questions, fear, quaking limbs, a parched mouth, and a rain of tears that stung as they streamed from eyes and ran down my cheeks.

I must have slept because I awakened again to the sensation of being jostled by powerful hands. Something cold was pressed against my temple.

“You not fight, American girl!”

I froze in panic. The gun then disappeared, although it left me terrorized.

The ropes were untied and my limp body was lifted from the bed. I walked, hobbled and drunk-like from the desolation of my dark room to the terror of another room filled with loathsome men in long robes.

“Let me see her…” The voice inside the robe was thick with a Middle Eastern accent. The face was hidden, so I could only see the man’s lips move, not his eyes for they were buried in the shadows of his garment. At his command, the man who’d taken me from my room, pushed me forward in the direction of the voice and there I stood, naked but for my panties and bra.

“Turn, slave!” came the sharp command.

I turned, my hands clasped together in front of my body in a failing effort to cover my private parts. My dark, mussed hair fell over my face, half hiding my eyes and smelling of sweat. Had I been able to see their eyes, their stares, the exhibition would have been more difficult; even so, I trembled with every breath, every miserable half turn, every bit of tit and ass and crotch exposed. After making my 360 degrees, I saw the voice-man nod toward someone behind me, then seconds later, my arms were grabbed and pulled back; the added exposure diminishing me further.