Coercion Read online

  Coercion

  Cara McKenna

  This is the first title in the Curio Vignettes series, follow-up stories to the novel Curio.

  June has come to Paris. But while his neighbors are shedding layers and going out in search of spring sunshine, Didier Pedra prefers the quiet sanctuary of his garret, content to watch the city’s bustle from the safety of his windows. He’s shaped his life around venturing inside of things—inside clocks and other brass curiosities to pass a lonely afternoon, and, once the sun sinks, inside the bodies and minds of the women who pay for the privilege of sampling his other skills.

  But one visitor is unlike the rest. Once a hesitant patron, Caroly is now his eager lover and a challenging but cherished companion. For weeks Didier’s indulged her questions about what other women want from him, but in words only. Now he’s ready for them to take the storytelling to the next level, and act out his clients’ most wicked desires.

  Coercion

  Cara McKenna

  Dedication

  For my readers. Didier’s not the only one who appreciates when the odd check lands in the mailbox, elevating a beloved craft to a true livelihood.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Ruthie and Bobbi, good friends only too eager to return to Paris with me for this series, and to my editor, Kelli, polisher of my rusty cogs.

  Chapter One

  Inside, my world is small. Safe.

  Within the horizon of a curved boundary, everything is brass, steel, nickel. Air and shadows. The busyness of Paris fades, growing as distant as space, reality replaced by the movement of gears, the snap of springs. The rhythm and flow of the Métro, of walk signs and traffic lights—all are gone, and I’m lost in the tick and pivot of cogs.

  The only wrongs to confront are those of rust, dust, wear or warp. I solve them with tweezers, oil, a jeweler’s monocle, a can of compressed air. I wander the dark geometry of my watches and music boxes for entire afternoons, entire appearances of the sun, until—

  I jump when the alarm goes off, as I always do. And as always, I catch the monocle when it falls from my eye and press the knob of the clock to still the hammer assaulting its bells. The brass polish has left grit under my nails and a headache between my eyes from the fumes I hadn’t noticed until now.

  Outside my windows, the sunset is ripening. The pigeons have tucked their heads beneath their wings, seeming ripened themselves, soft and round with sleep.

  It’s nearly eight, time to abandon the world of my precious hobbies for the slightly larger realm of my flat. I haven’t left this place for two days, not since Caroly was last here. When she stays the night, she makes me come with her in the morning, just to the café down the street for breakfast. Then she goes to work, and I flee back to my safe little nest.

  Before I met her, I hadn’t ventured outside these walls in three years. Now I manage the feat as many as four times a week, for twenty minutes or maybe two hours, for a drink or a meal, or to sit in the park and listen to Caroly molest my language with her thick American accent. Such infrequent, brief excursions may sound pathetic, but to me it’s no less profound than taking one’s first steps following a car crash, having been told you’ll never walk again.

  Caroly is coming tonight, and tomorrow she’ll make me leave. In the morning my heart will curl like a fist between my ribs, clenching as she opens the door and leads me to the stairs and down four flights to the street. It will stop entirely as we step outside, but halfway to the café I’ll feel the warmth of the sun or the coolness of the breeze, smell flowers or bread, and forget the crushing hugeness of the sky and buildings for a breath or two.

  But for tonight, I’ll stay safe. Tonight we stay in my world, with its familiar walls and scents and sounds. Her body is familiar too, after these three months of acquaintance, and she’ll let me get lost inside her, fascinating as any clock or watch.

  I shower, scrubbing myself with a rough cloth in the hot water. Rub shea butter into my skin. Caroly likes my stubble so I forgo shaving, but smooth a measure of the good-smelling balm she bought me over my jaw and neck. I dress in my bedroom, stroll across the flat to select the evening’s music. Something with cello tonight, I think. Dark and sensual. With her eyes and nose and ears catered to, I head to the kitchen to turn my attention to her mouth.

  My bell rings just as I turn the heat down under a pot of pasta, and I jog to the intercom panel to unlock the foyer door and twist the deadbolt open. Sometimes, if rarely, I’ll go down to meet her at the building’s front door, to show her it’s been a good day. But tonight I won’t. She’ll hand me my post, perhaps noticing the stack is thicker than usual, and she’ll know that I didn’t make it downstairs yesterday either. She’ll give me a look—frustration, likely, but never pity—then the topic will be dropped.

  As I check on dinner I feel her footsteps. My heart speeds to match them, the happy race of anticipation. Then she’s at my threshold, haloed in the light from the hallway, and I couldn’t hide my smile if I tried.

  “Good evening.” I say it in English. It’s become our custom. English inside my flat, where she is still a tourist of sorts, French outside.

  “Hey.” She pushes off her shoes by the door. A green paper bag hangs from her hand, from the wine shop near the museum where she works.

  I cross through the living room to kiss her cheeks. “What have you brought?”

  “Something with a pretty label.” She shows me the bottle. Caroly likes pretty labels, beautiful objects, haunting, elegant music and rich food. She grew up poor, she told me, but her heart is an aristocrat’s, beating for the finer things. It seems she counts my company among them. I watch her eyes sometimes, when she doesn’t know I’m looking. When she reads or studies a painting in a gallery, they’re cool blue, distant. But when her gaze turns to me, heat burns there. Always.

  I give the bottle a second’s attention, far more captivated by her. She does things to me, as if she were magnetized, my hands made of iron. They reach for her face and I glance her smooth, fair skin with my thumbs, slide my fingers into her hair, dark-blonde curls so soft they could belong to a toddler. Her lips purse in their bashful way, and I kiss them. My body would happily take things much further, but there is cream sauce to attend. Besides, I have more planned for tonight.

  “You smell awfully good,” she tells me. “Is that the stuff I bought you?”

  “It is.” I smile when she presses her nose to my throat for another sample.

  “It smelled different in the store.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, it’s even nicer on you.” She kisses the spot, handing me a stack of post as she steps back.

  “Thank you.” Among the bills and rubbish is a plain, unstamped envelope with my first name written in cursive, inside it a check from yesterday’s client. Caroly used to leave such payments for the pleasure of an evening. I can scarcely remember that dynamic, so much has happened since she ceased being my patron to become something more. I remember taking her virginity, every second of those first visits, but of us being strangers, client and whore—anything other than we are now—it’s as hazy and theoretical as a dream.

  She’s not coy about what I do, nor jealous. Lately she’s asked more and more about my clients, wanting to know what they wish to do with me, to me. I tell her, compositing the details so they belong to no one actual woman. She used to ask over wine, before we took one another to bed. Now sometimes she asks in bed, and I know it excites her, eavesdropping on other women’s fantasies.

  She rubs my arms through my sleeves, and just that affectionate, innocent friction makes me wish the cotton would disintegrate. That everything would dissolve until it’s just us in our bare skin.

  “Something smells amazing.”

  “Only pasta.�
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  “Works for me. I’m starving.” She follows as I walk to the kitchen. “I like the music.”

  “I knew you would. How is your new exhibit?”

  “Almost ready for public consumption.”

  I uncork the bottle and she sets glasses on the butcher block. I like that she knows where to find things, that she has a favorite mug. I like her secret basket of womanly accoutrements, hidden beneath my bathroom sink lest my clients see it and feel uncomfortable.

  We toast to Caroly’s achievements at the museum and sample the wine, as lovely as its seductive label.

  She leans back against the counter, wrapping a slender arm around her long waist. I know every inch of the body behind her blouse and skirt, better than any man on earth. The thought stirs my blood as it always does, a hypocritical possessiveness. Though so much of sexual pleasure is rooted in the darker emotions, I long ago quit regarding guilt and envy and shame as sensations to avoid.

  “What did you get up to today?” she asks.

  “Very little, outside the brass.” That is her term for my hobbies. Going inside the brass, as if I don special equipment and spelunk between the wheels and pinions. Which I suppose I do.

  “Enjoy yourself?”

  “I did.” As much as one enjoys a deep dream. Once the trance of my hobby has been broken, it seems as though I’ve lost more hours than I recall experiencing. Often I feel as if I’ve only actively lived perhaps ten years of my life, many more lost. Not squandered, but dozed through. I wonder if morphine addicts feel this way. Sometimes I suspect I ought to fret more about it, but the worries only draw me back to my cabinet and its clockwork curiosities, to hypnosis or meditation, to that world where my brain goes as quiet as the Buddha’s.

  “Can I help with anything?”

  “No. You are only allowed to relax and be spoiled,” I tell her.

  “Sounds easy enough.”

  I tend to the sauce and pasta and we eat in the kitchen, tall chairs set close together at a corner of the island, facing the tiny window above the sink where a single ball of feathers sleeps. Caroly calls him the Sommelier, believing as I do that it’s the same pigeon, night after night. Sometimes she’ll hold up whatever bottle we’re drinking from, as if seeking his approval. My flat is on the top floor of the building and other birds roost outside my bedroom window. She calls them the Perverts.

  “Are you taking me out this weekend?” How that word sours my mouth. Out.

  “I am. Not far, just down to the river again, if you like.”

  “I would.” It will scare me white as bread dough, but I’ll be proud of my effort once she’s led me back home. And she will lead me. I have a terrible sense of direction, even in the city where I’ve lived my entire thirty-four years. As confounding as dyslexia.

  “I’ll pack us a lunch,” I say.

  “Saturday or Sunday?”

  “I have a client Sunday evening, so Saturday is best.”

  She nods stoically. I hope she’s noticed by now, I never take clients on Fridays and Saturdays anymore. Those are hers, the precious evenings without curfew, mornings when she needn’t rise early for work and I get to study her face in the dawn light, placid with sleep.

  Caroly toys with her supper. “Can I ask what she’s like?” Again, no jealousy in her tone, only curiosity. Her question makes me smile, the perfect catalyst for my plans.

  “You may.” I assemble a female collage in my head, of this client and several I’ve known with similar appetites, constructing a fictional woman whose confidence can’t be violated. “She’s in her early forties,” I say, picturing her. “Very successful, in a challenging field dominated by men.”

  Caroly’s fork hovers, frozen above her plate, her expression rapt.

  “She can never for one minute appear an emotional, vulnerable woman,” I continue. “But inside she misses those things. She misses being able to let a man lead without fearing it undermines her professional façade.”

  “What does she like to do with you?”

  “She likes for me to seduce her.”

  My clients like all sorts of things, and I enjoy being whatever excites them. I’ve always loved pleasing women. When I was a teenager and my classmates were concerned merely with having sex, I was determined to find occasion to become good at sex. To study and practice and master it, like the trade it would one day become to me.

  Nothing turns me on more than seeing that wicked gleam in someone’s gaze and knowing I’ve put it there. I see it in Caroly’s eyes as she sips her wine, and I feel my cock grow warm and heavy and eager.

  “How do you seduce her?”

  “With wine,” I say, tapping Caroly’s glass with my fork. “And softly spoken words, and with pressure.”

  “Pressure?”

  I nod. “She likes to feel the guilt, to feel as though I am talking her into my bed. She craves the regret as acutely as she might an orgasm.”

  Caroly’s blue eyes are round. “She likes you to make her regret stuff?”

  “She savors the shame.” I sip my wine slowly and make a face of decadent appreciation upon swallowing.

  “That’s… Huh. I wonder what that feels like.”

  Finish your supper and I will show you. More than bedtime stories tonight. An entire play for us to act out, if she wishes to don another woman’s identity, slip inside her skin and experience my body through new hands, new eyes, a new mouth.

  “What else does she like?”

  I smile. Sometimes I feel like a fine cut of meat, Caroly’s questions asking what another woman’s recipe might make of me. But her affinity for beauty makes her anxious, makes her worry she’s shallow, and I’ve learned not to tease her about the topic. I understand anxiety as well as anyone might, so I hold my tongue, even as I find her objectification charming beyond reason.

  “Finish your pasta and I will tell you what else she likes.”

  We eat in easy silence and leave the dishes to soak. I carry the glasses and she the wine, and we retire to the couch in my living room. Along the window ledges, pigeons we have yet to name are finding their spots in the day’s dying light. Some bits of Paris are going to sleep as well, while others are only now waking.

  Part of me wishes that one day this might be our living room, hers and mine. But much would have to change to make that possible. There would be no more clients, no more of the income I’ve grown so accustomed to.

  I’m capable of change; I know that now. But only slowly. Someday Caroly might get me onto the Métro or out of the city, get me to sleep somewhere unfamiliar, to travel with her to Spain or England or beyond. All those things must happen before I could ever change something so great as my livelihood or invite her to share my quarters permanently.

  This evening, however, I want to travel no farther than my bed. Our bed, hers and mine, until Thursday dawns.

  “So.” She tucks her legs beneath her bottom, cupping her drink in both hands. “Tell me about her.”

  “I would prefer to show you, if you’ll let me.” Hope flutters in my belly.

  Long fingers drum her glass, ever-nervous creatures. “Show me how?”

  “I wondered if tonight, you would like to be her. Do with me all the things she likes.”

  Her eyebrows rise.

  “You’re so interested in what my other lovers ask of me, perhaps we could begin exploring those things instead of merely talking. This woman’s desires and any number of others.”

  “Like role-playing?”

  “Like this storytelling you love so much, but more.”

  She purses her lips, nodding very faintly, very slowly. “We can try that.”

  She fascinates me, Caroly. Her body, long and pale as winter, her rich, smooth voice softening the edges of that homely accent. She arrived on my doorstep a blank canvas, at once terrified and eager to be transformed. At first so cautious, yet never once has she dismissed any lovers’ game I’ve proposed. Each position and activity is a new delicacy to her, every one at least
sampled and many deemed worthy of ordering again and again, and my pleasure to serve. At times she closes herself up, cold and tight as a mussel, but once you coax her open, she will let you swallow her whole.

  “I am glad you’re intrigued,” I say, “but we’ve not played any games like this before. Do you trust me?”

  “I do.”

  No hesitation, and I smile. “Then we have only one formality to discuss. Can you snap your fingers?”

  She shows me she can, with either hand.

  “The woman you are tonight may say things she doesn’t mean. She may tell me to stop or slow down. And the man I will be may choose to ignore those words. But snap your fingers to tell me you truly want me to stop, and I will. In an instant.”

  “I know you would.” Her face betrays her eagerness and I suspect she won’t find occasion to use our little signal. She’s excited to try on this woman’s kink, to explore the places most women have ventured with their lovers by her age. To be “part of the club”, as she’s called it before.

  “Always wine, with this client.” I refresh our glasses nearly to the rims. “She likes to get drunk. To calm her nerves and so she may blame her desires on the intoxication.” I give Caroly’s blouse and skirt a mischievous looking-over. “She dresses not unlike you. Straight from the office, from all that pressure and power, all those men she fights so fiercely to make her equals, when she secretly wishes she could be off guard with a man. To surrender, if only for an evening.”

  Caroly adjusts her legs, crossing them primly and sitting up straighter. I smile to myself, because yes, some women like the fictionalized one I speak of do sit so exactly like that, ever alert. I lean closer, as I do with them, letting my nearness and the wine begin to loosen their shoulders, deepen their breathing, stir their pulses.

  “When we are together,” I tell her, “we are never client and prostitute. She is herself, but I am a handsome stranger who’s taken her home against her better judgment.” I am still Didier, but not the man I truly am. In those games I’m fearless and selfish, no sentimental whore with peculiar hobbies.