Read Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) for Free Online

age,” Olivia said. “Besides, like I said, a detail man is very hard to find.”
    “Except for you.”
    “Except for me,” she said, her lips rising into a smile as she sipped her espresso. She licked the foam on her upper lip with a tongue that seemed not part of her but part of some creature within her.
     
    It was around this time that my son’s bullying at school rose from pestering and teasing into something that truly worried me. When the badgering didn’t stop, I ended up needing to spend the next week in meetings with the school psychologist, the vice-principal, and finally the principal. I had begun to feel like an awful mother for having to push my son out the door in time to make it to school; for sending him out for more teasing and shoving and whatever else he had been keeping from me since the school year began. I couldn’t fathom it. My son was sweet, kind, completely average looking in a good under-the-radar way.
    At one meeting, I found myself rather liking the vice-principal’s voice and began picturing him with me in a carnal way, even over his assurances, so sweetly intoned, that they would get to the bottom of this matter and that they had a zero-tolerance policy for the behavior my son had been subjected to. See? Bad mother. It was Olivia’s match-making that had made me think this way again.
    Through all this I was also busy with work, wrapping up rewrites for a young adult novel I’d been hired on short notice to rescue. Even Olivia had been scarce lately—her youngest daughter was well-pregnant. I’d avoided Olivia just to get a break from listening to her drone on about her upcoming grandchild. Also, even with the low rent, my budget was getting squeezed. I was more than a little stressed.
    On one particular afternoon I was in the bedroom in my all together so to speak, trying to find a setting on a shipped-in-the-mail vibrator I’d diligently researched online before purchasing. It had a glut of five-star ratings, then nothing until a few one-star reviews, both ends of the spectrum sounding reasonable and yet together they made my purchase feel like an act of faith.
    It was nicely packaged, but once put to use, I realized that the choice of settings seemed to be either 1) a low-level vibration that was desultory and seemingly bored, 2) a bee-like anger at the middle setting, or 3) an upper-limit buzzing that, I believe, was for turning the vibrator into some sort of torture device. There was also a final setting, a cycle of vibrational patterns, that was even worse—pure ADHD. To qualify my statement, there
was
a pattern that lasted about ten seconds in there that was lovely, and then it was gone, replaced with a rata-tat-tat and then a zizza-zizza-zizza that was painful for both my hand and my clitoris, even through the hood. So picture me there, between the rata-tat-tat and zizza-zizza-zizza when my phone rang and the first thought to go through my mind was not who was calling, but the realization that my phone, too, had a vibration setting, one that could surely prove no worse than the monstrosity I’d purchased. My second thought, even before I reached over to see who was calling, was to wonder just what the return policy was on once-used, but not enjoyed, vibrators. There had to be some satisfaction guarantee on these things. In my state, I didn’t recognize the name on the phone, and then I did: Terrance. And while normally, I’d never do this while also doing
that
, I answered.
    “Hello,” I said, a little too breathlessly, and forgetting that this should be a question.
    “Hi. Can I speak to Eloise, please?”
    “Speaking,” I said, my voice going up a register. I coughed.
    “Oh, hey,” Terrance said. “I’m the guy from the Dirks.”
    “Dirks?”
    “The cafe. You came in with Olivia?”
    “Right,” I said, slowly. “I just didn’t know the name of the place.”
    “So, I have your number.”
    “Right,” I said.
    “Is this a bad time?”
    “No,” I said.