The Dollhouse Society: Felix (2 page)

But something about the fact that this man preferred silence to bluster made me move to the center of the room, leaving plenty of space between us. I tried to look tough but made the mistake of crossing my arms over my ample bosom. I wanted him to know he didn’t impress me, but I knew by doing that, by crossing my arms over myself protectively, I was telling him the truth—that he scared me half to death.

He was tall, well over six feet, and very slender. His tuxedo fit his wide shoulders and sleek hips like he’d been sewed into it. He had a lean, determined face that made it difficult to judge his age, high cheekbones, and a faintly Roman nose that was at odds with his almost black almond eyes. His silken black hair was long and hung in a thick, shining, blue-black braid to his waist. It wasn’t until he spoke again that I recognized the clipped Asian inflection lurking beneath his British accent. Ah, that would explain his look—it was obvious he was of mixed descent.  “What’s your name, little girl?”

I worked hard not to say something wry and stupid. I swallowed. “Felix. And I’m not a little girl. I’m twenty-two years old.”

He smirked, briefly, like I had amused him. “Felix.”

“
That’s not a made-up name,” I told him defensively. “And it’s not short for Felicity, either, so forget about that.” I’d spent so much of my life explaining about my name that it made me want to carry a sign around so I could just hold it up when folks gave me the anticipated surprised and/or suspicious look. When he did, I sighed and explained, “My dad had this obsessive love for the Felix the Cat cartoons as a boy. You know? ‘Felix the Cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat?’ He wanted to call his son Felix, but he and my mom only ever had me. So guess who got stuck with the wonderful, wonderful name?”

I expected him to laugh at my sarcasm. He didn’t. “I’m Alex Ishikawa,” the gentleman said. He said it in a bored, offhand way, like I should instantly know who that was. “And you
must
be a little girl if you thought you could fool anyone tonight with that silly disguise.” His eyes scraped over the length of me, making me want to hug myself tighter.

I dropped my arms instead. “It’s not a disguise. I really am a courtesan. I’m just new.” I might be short and plump and a little on the young side, but I thought I’d fit in quite nicely with the other courtesans. To my surprise, not all of them were tall and sleek. There were as many different types of courtesans here tonight as there were gentleman who owned them. I’d seen black women, white women, Asian women, women of mixed descent. I’d seen tall, willowy women and short, plump women like myself.

Mr. Ishikawa arched an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed.

I sighed. I saw no point in perpetuating a bad lie. He would just ask me who my gentleman was, and trying to come up with a generic name would make me look stupid. I hated looking stupid. “Fine. How did you know?”

“
Courtesans don’t speak to other gentleman. It’s a house rule.” Mr. Ishikawa nodded toward the settee. “Sit down, take that mask off, and we’ll discuss what to do with you.”

“
No,” I told him. I wanted to remain standing. I wanted to be able to run…in case I needed to.

He lost the smirk. “Sit down, little girl, or I’ll call the others and let them decide what to do with you.”

His voice, not raised but more of a sibilant hiss, made some of the crystal in the room vibrate, so I went and sat down on the settee. I fiddled with the tie on my mask until it came off. My face underneath was as damp with sweat as my fumbling hands. A big part of me kept thinking this couldn’t be happening even as I dropped the black feather mask to my lap. My heart felt like it was trying to beat its way up into my throat. My blood sounded in my ears. “My friends know where I am. If something happens to me, they’ll come looking for me,” I proclaimed bravely. I always heard something like that, or a variation on it, in the slasher movies I watched. It usually worked.

Mr. Ishikawa watched me a long, silent moment, his black-eyed gaze centered on me. He didn’t look particularly impressed by my threats. I started to squirm under his intense concentration once more. Finally, he tore his eyes away and went to the wet bar to fix himself a drink. I watched him prepare a saki, neat, vaguely hypnotized by the snugness of his trousers over his incredibly tight ass and the way his long braid brushed between his shoulder blades as he worked.

“
Whatever you have planned, you won’t get away with it,” I added, but felt even more ridiculous. Was there a point when I would just stop delivering bad lines from B-movies?

“
And what do you expect will happen to you, Felix?” Mr. Ishikawa mused. “I work in miniaturization. Acorn Technologies. Have you heard of it? We produce pacemakers and defibrillators and shrink smartphones. We’re not exactly Yakuza, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“
Oh.”

He moved to the settee, carrying the saki for himself, a white wine for me. He set the tall stem-glass down for me on the teak-inlaid, cherrywood tea table, along with a cocktail napkin, the way they do in expensive bars. I expected him to sit down beside me, but he stayed standing instead, looming over me, but set one foot on the edge of the antique tea table. “Normally, courtesans are not permitted to imbibe alcohol during a meeting of the Society—we gentleman require their sobriety throughout the evening—but you’re not really a courtesan, are you? So we’ll make an exception tonight.”

I gulped the wine to give myself strength. “You gentleman
require
,” I said as sarcastically as possible. Fear always translated to sarcasm with me. “What gives you the right to require anything of these women?”

Mr. Ishikawa offered me a closed smile. “What you witnessed out there offends you.
We
offend you.”

I nodded and gulped more wine. If something unfortunate was going to happen to me tonight, I wanted to meet it head-on and maybe a little less sober than I felt right now. I fumbled around mentally and sought my argument. “Women were the absolute last group of persons to be truly emancipated in this country. Black men could vote before women could.” I indicated this room, this house, this life, with the glass, sloshing a little wine over my wrist as I did so. “You have no right to take women’s freedom away like this. To reduce them to…paid companions that have to do whatever you say. It’s unethical. It’s immoral.”

“
Let me guess. You plan to expose us.”

I nodded. I had a bad habit of getting drunk fast and sloppy. When I went out with my roommate Cookie, all it took was a couple of beers or a glass of wine and I started waxing on about all the woes of the world. I hated that about myself. Alcohol just opened me up.  “I’m a student journalist at CUNY,” I explained. “I’m writing an article about the sex trade in New York. Well, I
was
, but then I found these journals by a man named Tiberius Sloan…”

“
And now you plan to write about the Society.”

“
The oldest gentleman’s club in New York? A secret society of men who brutalize women? I
need
to write about the Society, and about men like you!”

“
What about men like me?” Mr. Ishikawa said. His sharp, narrowed-eyed attention was now wholly focused on me.

I felt my pulse ticking in my throat. My heart was beating much too fast, probably from the alcohol. “You don’t respect women. You treat them like…possessions to be used.”

“
Is that what you’ve observed tonight, Felix? Women being brutalized? Women being used?”

I sat drinking my wine, thinking. Admittedly, I had expected something a little different than what I’d encountered here tonight. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, but it wasn’t this. For one thing, I’d thought it would be all women, but there were gentleman who kept courtiers—male companions—and a few female gentleman as well. I hadn’t anticipated that and it had thrown me a little.

Truthfully, none of the courtesans or courtiers looked like they were being held against their will. In some ways, it reminded me of some of the wilder parties my friends had dragged me to, the ones hosted by Doms who kept dungeons in their homes, with subs on leashes crawling around on all fours. In the beginning, I’d been faintly horrified by it all. Then I’d talked to some of the subs and discovered they’d actually given consent to this, that they were okay with it, even got off on it.

But just because the women here tonight had agreed to be treated this way didn’t make it right.

Mr. Ishikawa took my drink from me. “First of all, let me be perfectly clear about something, Felix. There is not one person at this gathering tonight who is here against his or her will, not one person being forced to do something he or she does not approve of. There are stringent rules in effect, and safewords used and enforced at all times within the Dollhouse. Those rules and safewords are there to protect both courtesans and gentleman.” He gave me a poignant look. “Do you understand the concept of SSC?”

“
Safe, sane and consensual? Yeah,” I told him. “I researched the BDSM lifestyle before I did this.”

“
Do you feel those rules were broken tonight? Do you feel anyone was at risk in some way?”

“
No,” I told him honestly. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t be. Look, I want to know everything about the Society. I’m not judging—well, I’m trying not to judge—but I do want to understand it. And I do plan on writing an article about it.”

I wondered if that was such a smart thing to say. Mr. Ishikawa might not be Yakuza, and the Society probably didn’t have much in common with the mob, but the men out there in the other room were some of the most powerful in New York. I knew if they wanted to ruin me, to shut me up, they probably could.

“
Do you?” the man standing over me said.

“
Tell me,” I retorted. “If I’m missing something in all this madness, some purpose to these gatherings—this lifestyle—tell me what it is.”

Mr. Ishikawa stared down into his drink. “It’s obvious you’re quite resourceful, quite intelligent, Felix. What if I showed you, instead?”

My heart beat a little faster as I wondered what he meant. From out in the hallway I could hear footsteps as gentleman walked their courtesans up and down the halls. I thought about calling out to them, letting my presence be known, but I decided I wanted to hear what this man had to say first. Curiosity and alcohol had bolstered my courage. “What exactly do you mean?”

Mr. Ishikawa smirked. “Do you know who Gloria Steinam is?”

I sat up straighter. “Of course. She’s a famous journalist, feminist, and a political activist. She started
Ms.
Magazine…”

“
Many years ago, she also went undercover at one of Hugh Hefner’s nightclubs as a Playboy Bunny in an attempt to better understand the lifestyle before she wrote about it.”

I was smart enough to catch onto what he was suggesting. “You think I should
be
a courtesan before I write about the Society?”

He came and sat beside me. He rested his arm on the back of the settee, dominating the space around him. Again, I was acutely aware of his heat and scent. His presence seemed to wrap itself around me. “What would you say if I took you on as my courtesan? Just for a couple of months. I’ll pay you well. At the end of two month, you’ll get your story, and I’ll make no attempts to keep you from writing it…”

“
But,” I said, because I sensed a
but
in there somewhere.

“
No
but
. You’ll see the lifestyle from the inside out, rather than as a stranger looking in, trying to make sense of everything.” This close, I realized Mr. Ishikawa’s eyes weren’t black at all, not in the Asian sense. They were a dark, stormy blue, so dark they looked black in certain light. He watched me with a stillness I found unnerving, like he could sit there for days, unmoving, a statue. He had pale, poreless skin and luxurious black hair, like a man of all smooth contrast, not the rugged type I was used to seeing, to dating. He smirked thinly, but it was as much of a mask as the one I gripped with stony fingers in my lap. It revealed nothing more than what he was willing to show me.

“
You’re afraid,” he finally said.

I sort of scrunched back in my seat but tried not to be too obvious about it. “No.”

“
What are you afraid of? That I’ll hurt you?”

“
Will you?”

“
Perhaps a little. I find a moderate amount of pain to be very edifying.” He tilted his head and looked me over very carefully. “If you were my courtesan, I’d stripe your ass with my cane. I think you would look very pretty…stripes for an obvious tigress. If you were very bad, I’d put you on the ropes and fuck you for hours.”

I opened my mouth, closed it. I felt dizzy—the wine, his cologne, his words. But it wasn’t fear, exactly. My father was an oil driller off the coast of Texas. I’d grown up around roughnecks, guys so course and blunt you could have cut sheet metal on their attitudes. I’d never been afraid of any of them. I’d never been afraid of men, period. But now, when I looked at Mr. Ishikawa, his refined, princely appearance, his filthy, lecherous mouth, I felt my insides quiver and threaten to spill out. Just his eyes made the seam between my legs dampen.

“
I might hurt you, but I would never harm you,” he explained like there was a difference. His voice was so soft and gravelly I had to strain to hear it. I thought how this must be how he conducted his life in the business world—softly, coherently, without anger, but with unmistakable force, a man used to being obeyed who never needed to raise his voice in the office or boardroom to prove it. “I’m a gentleman; I would never do anything to hurt or scar a courtesan. Of course, I would need to train you properly, and I’m a strict taskmaster about such things.” He narrowed his eyes in obvious challenge. “You would need to obey me, to come when I summoned you, to make yourself sexually available to me when I commanded it. Your body would no longer be your exclusive domain. You would belong to me. You would be my plaything, my doll, my courtesan. But…” His face softened but only a moment, “…I would never harm you or scar you, Felix. We would use safewords and safe sex practices. I would never force you to do anything you didn’t approve of.”