Flowers and Stones, Page 2

much dead time, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to entertain her.

  “It took you long enough.”

  She tapped the pencil against the paper.

  “Before I came here the first time, I went to the Yellow Roof like you had suggested and engaged one of their escorts. This escort, I had just found out from one of the attendants, was fairly good at chess. So, when we were finished with-you know-business there was time to spare, so I requested a game. He brought out his board, and we played. And I won. Hands down. And here’s the thing,” she paused and looked up at me, shoulders ever so slightly forward, “I’m terrible at chess. Just, awful.”

  “Beginner's luck,” I mused, pouring her another cup of tea. He had probably let her win, though.

  “No. He let me win,” she replied. Smart one. She chewed on the end of her pencil. I hadn’t noticed until now that her braces were off. When had that happened? “And I know why he did it. Conceptually, I get it, but it led me to wonder why you didn’t do the same thing.”

  I tsked at her.

  “You came to me with the assumption that I would be good at this little game of yours. I’m not about to disappoint a customer. I’m actually a bit proud that you’ve gotten so much better.”

  She gestured with her glass.

  “That’s a slightly more genuine sentiment than I expected.”

  “Oh, that’s me: hooker with a heart of gold.”

  She smirked and looked away.

  “And I am just that, you know, darling.”

  She looked back at me confused.

  “A pleasurecrafter. A hooker. A prostitute. A gigolo. A rent-boy. And you’ve spent one to two hours a week here for the last half a year. The allowance mommy and daddy give you wasn’t meant for this sort of thing.” She cringed on “mommy and daddy.” I tapped her lightly on the nose. “Why come here so religiously?”

  She pondered for half a second. “I wanted to win. I wanted to beat you. And now that I have, I don’t totally know what to do with myself.” She rubbed the back of her neck. The wandering cloudiness of a person without purpose settled in around here. I had seen it time and time again in clients whose post-coital guilt made them restless. This was not a good place for her. This needed to stop. I sighed.

  “I could have let you win the first time out; I considered it. But then I thought, ‘Why not get some extra cash from the little rich girl.’ I knew as long as you kept losing, you’d keep coming back, purse in hand. Good to see that my natural wiles are still sharp as ever after all these years.”

  “Are you about to tell me that you finally let me win?”

  “Maybe,” I lied. She had won fair and square, but a little misgiving went a long way. “Perhaps it’s best, I began to think, that you weren’t a customer any longer.”

  “Pol-len, what are you trying to get at?”

  I stopped myself just short of flinching at the sound of my name. She had never actually addressed me by it before. I wasn’t even sure if she knew it. Why was she choosing now, of all times, to say it aloud? Desperation? Uncertainty?

  “You need to stop coming here, darling. You’re a smart, pretty girl with a whole big wide world to conquer. It’s exam season. Don’t waste your time at a place like this.”

  “Turning away a well-paying customer. Is that sincerity or your ‘natural wiles?’”

  “My job done well is a perfect blend of both. Sometimes even I’m not so sure of it myself.” There was a ding. That was the end of the hour. Silently, she stood, picked up her board, and started toward the door. She paused.

  “Did I ever actually tell you my name?”

  “No.” But I knew it was Gwendolyn. The madame had told me. Gwendolyn tapped her fingers on the door frame. Then she walked out.

  A year passed. A year’s worth of rouge and nail lacquer, of money pressed into sweaty palms, of men coming in and out of my den. I woke up one crisp, spring morning to a piece of paper sitting on the ottomon in my parlor. A recruitment offer for a private concubinage, the sort of place that was in the business of buying people like me permanently.

  “What is this?” I dropped the paper down on the desk in the madame’s office. I wasn’t angry. Just confused. Was he trying to get rid of me?

  He looked up from the small piles of paperwork spread out over the old wooden desk, and pushed his reading glasses up of his nose and onto the top of his forehead. He had been at this game for a long time and it showed in his graying temples and fine crows feet. He had been supremely handsome once, but this wasn’t a kind industry.  

  “Every time she has a slot open, she makes a recruitment swing through the area. She happened to drop by, and I gave her your name. She seemed incredibly interested, and she’s willing to come back this evening to give you more details if you’re curious. She said she’d even buy out your current contract.”

  “Are you really okay with something like this?” I had been at this brothel since I was a teenager. It had been my home and place of work for almost ten years.

  “Okay with losing one of my top sellers? No. Not particularly. But you’re getting old, Honey Pot.”

  “Oh, thanks, papa.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re closer to thirty than twenty, and you know what’s it’s like in our branch of the profession in particular. You’re marketability is taking a plummet.”

  I knew this harsh information, of course, and I was sure my consternation with it was showing in my face.

  His voice went low. “This estate has a great reputation among its personal staff. They’re in Illuria, and sex work there is considered a high class service sector job. They treat their courtesans well. You’d be part of a private collection: nice quarters, nice clothes, and a limited clientele hand-picked by the master. They do fair contracts and pay a good wage. You can sign on for a year, then never look back, if you want. it’s a chance you might not get again, and you need to consider it. As a friend, not an employee.”

  That evening a smartly dressed woman who had managed to wrap her fluffy long black hair into a bun sat at my table and scanned my room with flickering eyes while I poured over the details of the contract she had brought with her. What I was being promised was, indeed, pretty spectacular. Almost too good to be true. Which it why it was extra suspicious that the name of the estate--what Earldom or Duchy I would be employed by--had been left off.

  “I know,” the woman, Aveline, sighed. “It’s a security issue. At this stage, we discuss a provisional contract, what we’re willing to offer. Then, if based on that information you’re still interested, we do a background check. Investigate of all your previous clients, any criminal record, employment history, family, that sort of thing. Then we’ll come out with the full contract that we consider your official hire documentation. It might seem a bit excessive, but-”

  “No, I understand.” This was a powerful estate. The bigger they were, the more hoops they constructed. I wasn’t terribly sure I was of high enough quality merchandise for such a place, to be honest.

  “Look,” Aveline moved from a stiff business-like posture to leaning over the ottoman we were using as a table. Frank, casual. “I’m not a negotiator, but I insisted I be the one to come down and make this happen. I grew up in a brothel. I know what it’s like, I know you want out, and, guess what, I can give it to you.” She paused, then sighed. “This isn’t a normal recruitment run. I was sent to get you, specifically. They’ve already run the background check, and you’ve been cleared. I’ve got a blank check and full reign to do what I need to do to bring you on board. Because, you’re coming with me at some point. Maybe not tonight, maybe you need to think on it a bit, but you can’t stop this.”

  I set the contract down and leaned back just a little against the pillows. “Why all...this...for my sake?”

  “Will you accept, ‘it’s complicated’ for an answer? She has an image she’s trying to form and-”

  “Damn, it’s Gwendolyn, isn’t it?” That was the only “she” I reall
y knew, and the only person in recent memory that would take something this far. Aveline’s face revealed that I was right. “I tell that girl that she shouldn’t be wasting her life here, and I thought she had taken my advice to heart. Did she inherit the estate, so now she wants to bring the brothel to her?”

  “Is this where she kept disappearing to last year? I could kill her.” Aveline ran her hands down her face just a moment. “She told me she wanted to recruit you because she read about a pleasurecrafter winning the Stones and Quarters championship again this year, and that’s the sort of person she wanted on her staff. But, obviously, that’s only a partial truth. So, what did you do to her to make her so impressed with your skills because it’s not like she’s talking to me about it. It’s a pain in the ass to build out a harem for someone who’s apathetic, at best, about sex.”

  This was more candid than I expected, and I eyed her cautiously.

  “All we ever did was play her weird Stones and Quarters variant.”

  Aveline stared at me. “The older she gets the less I understand her,” she said, more to herself than to me, I think. “Well, it’s not my job to question her motivations, just to get her what she wants. So, are you in or out?”

  “I feel like I want to speak with her.” I was hesitant to make such a request, but there were suddenly a lot of variables at play. I actually knew this girl and not in the way I knew my other clients. Had the