Buy Me, Sir(16)

The new cleaner must have noticed the empty vases in the living room  –   the ones Claire used to fill  –  and has taken it upon herself to fill  them with fresh white orchids to match the decor. It's surprising both  how much I appreciate them, and how much difference they make to the  room.

The new cleaner is getting my eggs from a different supplier, and I've had two double-yolkers for breakfast this week.

It turns out that the new cleaner is also the reason I jerk myself off  in bed on night four without using pornography. She's the reason I shoot  my load without any thought for some seedy guy's asshole, and the  reason I don't feel the need to scrub my hands clean afterwards.

The new cleaner is the reason I abstain from looking at Claude's string  of messages, although that makes no rational sense whatsoever.

I've never even properly seen her face, but she's there. A hazy figure  at the edge of my consciousness, almost ethereal as I picture the meek  little picture she cut as she shrunk away from me, the tenderness of her  apology just a whisper in my memory.

I'm certain my sex-starved mind is distorting things  –  shrinking her  stature and making her voice all the more reverent. The desperate  fantasies of a man battling his demons, turning some poor little slip of  a girl into a glowing figure of hope in my unconsciousness.

I smile at my own ridiculousness, my fingers still sticky with cum.





Chapter Eleven





Melissa



I had three days shadowing Cindy to drag every little scrap of  information out of her. She'd tut and shake her head, giving me a look  that made me feel even crazier than I felt already, but then she'd spill  the beans anyway.

I guess she owed it to me after I sat and happily watched her scroll  through the last four weeks of Alexander Henley's porn browsing history.

She wasn't lying, the stuff was …  brutal. Not handcuffs and riding whips  type brutal like I was expecting. The stuff Alexander Henley watches is  not nearly so …  I dunno …  theatrical.         

     



 

His porn tastes are dark and animalistic  –  grunts and pounding flesh and  sweat, sometimes one on one, sometimes several men on one woman as  she's pushed and pulled and thrown around, fucked raw by big dicks in  every hole. Many dicks in every hole. So many positions, so many  settings  –  some gross and grimy, and some crazily plush, some with tiny  little women and some with much bigger women. Sometimes they spit on  her, and sometimes they slap her about, and sometimes they even …  pee on  her …  but not all the time …

I wanted the ground to swallow me up as Cindy stared at me staring at a  woman getting peed on on Alexander Henley's giant TV screen, but it  didn't. I had to sit through it, all twenty minutes of that particular  video.

When she asked me what I thought, I told her I still wanted to know how to get to Harley's Tavern.

She told me I was definitely batshit if I could be even slightly interested in that crap.

I'm interested in all of it, because I'm interested in all of him. I  watched it as though it was one of those prize-winning memory games they  show on TV, where you have to memorise every single item for recall,  because to really stand a chance with Alexander Henley I need to stand a  chance of knowing exactly who Alexander Henley is.

And exactly what Alexander Henley likes.

Those videos showed me three constants:

The first being that these women get fucked until they are utterly  exhausted. Until they're nothing but a broken, sweaty, whimpering,  cum-splattered mess at the end.

The second being that these women are always like puppets, doing exactly  as they're told without hesitation. There's this obedience to them that  I can't really put into words, I just felt it. I felt it everywhere.

And lastly, on every single video without fail, these women get …   strangled. Hands-around-the-throat until they choke. Like properly  choke. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have  these glassy eyes without any fight in them at all, and sometimes they  cry. Sometimes they even smile. Sometimes they cry as they smile.

It made me hurt inside. A weird, tender kind of hurt.

The kind of hurt I've tried to close away since the night my life was  taken away from me. But this time it was different, this time it was …   beautiful …

Peaceful.

I can't even begin to explain how fucked up I must be to feel like this.  You can't understand until you're in these shoes. Not unless you've  lost everything. Not unless every day is a fight you're not sure you  want to be fighting.

Not unless there is one single dream in life you're grasping onto with  every tiny part of your broken soul, not unless laying yourself before  him and offering up your everything is the only destination at the end  of a really painful road.

Cindy told me she's pretty sure Mr Henley is into it in real life,  asphyxiation. She told me this shit is dangerous and fucked up, and if  there was any truth in the things his wife told her that I'd be crazy to  risk finding out.

I'm crazy, alright.

I didn't tell Cindy that Mr Henley's browsing history made me burn up.  Made me flush hot and cold and shiver all over. I didn't tell her that I  had to clench my thighs all the way through, unsure whether I wanted to  faint or play with myself right then and there.

I didn't tell her he is my final destination.

The thing that keeps my soul alive enough to care for Joseph and keep on breathing.

My breaths are borrowed. Loving him gives them to me. Loving him keeps me hoping.

He can take them away.

Literally if he wants.

I guess I passed her craziness test anyway, because Cindy put the TV  back to standby and carried on with the rest of her tour. A tour which  ended in Mr Henley's actual bedroom, and Mr Henley's cases full of sex  toys.

She wasn't lying about those either. Some of those toys could never be  used, at least I don't think so, you'd have to be …  loose …  to take some  of them. Like real loose.

Maybe I'm not the best judge since I've never done any of it before, but  I know enough to know what might fit and what might not.

I told Cindy that and she laughed and said I should scroll further back  through his browser history and I might change my mind on that.

We'd cleaned the whole house before she finally beckoned me over to Mr  Henley's bedside table. I held my breath as she eased open the top  drawer, peeking inside as she so carefully flipped through some  paperwork and pulled out a business card.

"This is your gateway to Harley's Tavern," she told me.

The card looked innocent enough. I turned it over in shaky fingers,  looking for more, but if there was any meaning it was lost on me.         

     



 

Claude Finch, senior auctioneer. Finch Hamilton.

The address listed one of those posh auction houses in Chelsea.

"That's who hooks him up," she said.

"How do you know that?"

"He has a private email address, some random account under the name Ted  Brown. It was open on his screen one day, there were loads of emails  there from CF. Emails showing women with all the usual tick-boxes  underneath."

"So you don't know it's definitely this Claude guy?"

She rolled her eyes. "CF. In the bedside drawer with all the dodgy paperwork. He's an auctioneer."

"Yeah, but … "

"No buts," she said. "It's him."

"And if it's not?"

She shrugs. "Pretend you dialled the wrong number."

The idea of actually calling this guy launched my heart into my throat. I  wrote his number in my little notepad and slipped that business card  straight back into the drawer, exactly as it had been.

"I'm glad I'm not going to be around to see what a whirlwind of shit you get yourself into," she said.

And so am I.

For all the insight and tips I got from Cindy during our handover, I've  never been as excited as the moment she hands me her work mobile, loaded  up with Mr Henley's real-time schedule, and finally says her goodbyes.

I feel the craziest rush of freedom, this weird naughtiness at the  thought that it's just me in his space now, me on my own, free to  rummage and root through his life as much as I like.

It takes me two days without her to pluck up the courage to strip naked  in his bedroom and slip between his bedsheets. My heart is thumping,  right between my legs, my thighs all clammy and jittery as the cotton  brushes my skin. I press my nose into his pillow and breathe him in, and  I can smell him there, that same deep scent, gorgeous enough that I  never want to breathe normal air ever again.

I play with myself in his bed on my third day alone. And again on my fourth.

I drink out of his whisky tumbler and put my lips around the cigarette butt in the inkwell.

I run my fingers around his toilet seat, knowing his bare ass has been right there.

I put on his worn shirt from the laundry hamper, wrap his tie around my  neck and imagine him choking me with it as he takes my virginity.

I smell his boxers. I smell his bedsheets where his cock must've been.