The Further Adventures of Louis and Elle
CHAPTER EIGHT
SEX, POWER, AND AGGRESSION
Louis Wentworth sat up in his chair and stretched his arms to the ceiling. He’d been writing for two hours and felt slightly cramped. It had been a good day generally. As the trailing spouse at the conference on “Sex, Power, and Aggression,” he had free run of the luxury hotel suite while Elle attended the sessions. Today she had given her keynote address. He’d wanted to attend, but the rules were the rules. Sessions were closed to non-attendees—and attendees were all female.
So instead he’d spent the day working on his new detective novel, THUNDERBIRD. He’d created a new character, Charles Winter, an ordinary guy who turned private investigator after being laid off from his tech job. Charles lived in a town much like the one where Louis and Elle lived—a very ordinary American city, not spooky like New Orleans or glamorous like San Francisco. And yet very soon Charles had discovered that there was a world beneath the world he was used to—a community of witches and wizards who lived in new townhouses and ordinary gated communities and apartment complexes, and who carried on the most outlandish tricks and feuds. And strangely enough, they seemed to trust him to mediate and work with the warring groups to solve threats from outside. Working as a magical detective had some dangers to be sure—Charles sometimes had to face down salamanders and shape shifters and even, perhaps, the occasional succubus. It also had its perks—magical purses of gold, singing birds that tell the future, and most important the ravishing blonde Milagro Hada, who might or might not herself be a witch but who often guided him around the strange new world he must make his way in.
Because, once in the magical world, there is no escape. Charles had to go forward or face worse dangers than salamanders.
The idea for the series had come to him a few weeks before, when he’d reread THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler’s classic noir mystery. The LA setting was iconic of course; but Louis hoped the ordinary surroundings of his ordinary-seeming witches would give his series a fresh quality. At any rate, his agent was excited and he was enjoying the opening scenes of THUNDERBIRD.
He’d worked for a few hours in the morning, then taken a long swim in the resort hotel’s Olympic pool—a swim that had cleared his head and let new ideas flow in. Then he’d worked two hours this afternoon before realizing he had no more intellectual energy for the work. Now he was sitting at his ease, contemplating what to do next.
The room phone rang. Louis picked it up and said, “This is Louis.” A voice spoke for a few seconds. Louis’s eyes unfocused briefly and then focused again. Without a word he hung up, then shook himself slightly as if waking from a nap.
He remembered how cool the swimming pool had been. Right now the room seemed hot. He fiddled with his collar, then walked over to check the thermostat. It said 68, but the room felt much hotter. Hastily he stripped off his clothes, went into the bathroom, and ran a cool shower. He soaped himself thoroughly. When he emerged, he studied himself in the mirror. He was thinner than he used to be; since he’d married Elle he’d become something of a fanatic about the gym. After begging her to allow it, he also cooked most of her meals—and his meals too of course—and worked hard to keep their diet healthy. He was muscular but slim. A few days earlier Elle had teased him by praising his “girlish figure”; he’d blushed but had found it oddly sexy. Now the phrase came back into his mind.
He noticed Elle’s perfume bottle by the sink. He opened it and took a sniff. It was the smell of Elle; he wanted suddenly to dive into the bottle and drown in her aroma. Instead, on impulse, he took the dropper and put a few dabs on one wrist, then rubbed his two wrists together. It was like carrying Elle with him; it was, he thought, like being Elle in some strange way. He replaced the stopper. Then his eye fell on her lipstick—a new dark color, named DOMINATRIX. Again on impulse, he rubbed the tube over his lips, then dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a tissue.
“Girlish figure” indeed. He’d remove the lipstick later. He wrapped himself in one of the hotel’s fleecy robes and emerged into the room. He stood for a moment facing his desk, idly wondering whether to write some more or read one of the old magical books he was using to research his new series.
“Well,” said a voice. “You look good enough to eat.”
Startled, Louis jumped and, embarrassingly enough, gave a small squeak of surprise. But then he saw his wife Elle, back from the session, lounging in an easy chair in the suite. She was quite a picture. For her speech she had chosen an elegantly tailored suit that fit her perfectly. It was dark navy, with faint pinstripes, like a banker’s suit. The lines were almost mannish; even with the curves of her body, Elle appeared almost androgynous. She wore a man’s-style white cotton shirt and a loosely tied blue-and-orange-checked necktie. The effect was heightened by her new shoes, a pair of Italian flats that looked like men’s spectator pumps but were slimmer and oddly sexy, again in an androgynous way. All told, Elle gave a strange and wild impression—as if a prosperous businessman had been magically spirited away by fairies and replaced by a sensual female beauty.
Louis was surprised. Then he was strangely stirred.
Then, as if somewhere in his brain a switch had been flipped, he was wildly aroused. “My god, Elle, you look . . . SO HOT!”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “But you know, you look oddly fetching yourself.”
He realized he was wearing her lipstick and nothing else except the bathrobe. He began to blush.
Then she said, “Aren’t you hot wearing that bathrobe? Hot? Sweaty? Getting hotter and hotter, aren’t you?”
All of a sudden the bathrobe was unbearable. He tore it off and threw it down. Now he was standing in front of his wife wearing only her lipstick. His blushes deepened.
“Sit,” Elle said. “Let me tell you about my lecture.”
Obediently he sat. She looked at him, smug as a cat, and then stretched luxuriously. “Listen carefully, Louis. I gave a lecture today about androgyny. Or more properly about the different sexes all of us have inside us—the male and female selves that every person has, no matter what they look like on the outside. I have a female self—you know it well, don’t you? And I have a male self—look at me here in my suit and tie and shoes like Mr. Businessman—and that male self is shot through with my female self and my female self is shot through with my male self and you have both too, don’t you, Louis? Inside you there’s Louis and inside you there’s Louise and across both of them there’s a self that’s neither sex or both at once and a self that is dominant and a self that’s submissive, isn’t there, darling? And both at the same time, but basically your male self is submissive and your submissive self is female too, isn’t it? And my female self dominates your male self and you let me dominate you and you let me call up your male self or your female self as I wish because what I wish is what you wish, isn’t it, yes, that’s right, nod your head, you can close your eyes too to see your selves inside and let them listen to me because one can dominate the other or both but I dominate both and both want to listen only to me and relax, let your thoughts drift as you listen to my voice and sleep . . . sleep . . . sleeeeeeep . . . .”
After an indefinite time, Louis woke slowly. He had probably only been out for only a few seconds—at least, the scene in front of him was the same. Or was it? Something was subtly different. Elle was still fully dressed, though her necktie was untied and her posture was different—more relaxed, more wanton somehow. And . . .
His eyes traveled down below her waist to the strap-on dildo, and he heard his wife’s voice—its tone as smoky as a burning cedar forest—say, “Louis, you know you want to blow me. Do it NOW!”
The floor seemed to give way beneath him. He fell to his hands and knees, and from the back of his throat he gave a kind of avid gurgle, a sound of pure appetite, as he found himself crawling abjectly toward her. “Come on, bitch!” she said. “Suck it.” He covered the distance between them on hands and knees as quickly as he could and then without even thinking he took the dildo into his mouth, it was all he could think about, it wanted to take the full length in, he wanted to swallow it whole, and he felt Elle’s hard firmly on the back of his head as she said, “Suck it, bitch, take it all.” He’d never felt so right as he did at this moment, kneeling with his head between his wife’s legs, sucking her dildo, eager, desperate to please her, to make her come——
“Oh, GOD, Louis!” she cried. She arched her back and bucked, then gave a heavy sigh. “Good boy,” she said. “Good boy, Louis. Now—SLEEP!”
Elle Murphy stood for a moment over the motionless form of her husband Louis. He had dropped to the floor on command and now lay at her feet as limp and heedless as a crumpled handkerchief. Sighing happily, Elle unstrapped the dildo and carefully repacked it and its straps in its case, putting that safely out of sight in her suitcase. Then she yawned luxuriantly and began to undress. The black and white patent spectator flats came off first. They were beautiful and very comfortable, but also so powerful that she used them sparingly. The mannish business suit fit her well and gave her a very satisfying feeling. But she had to admit that in the past few minutes it had begun to seem a bit tight and even sweaty. and so she was glad to peel off first the pinstriped jacket and then the tailored trousers. Then she shed the man-style white silk shirt, and slipped out of her bra and panties.
It was time for a bath.
As the hot water steamed up the hotel bathroom, Elle began to reconstruct the events of the day. The conference was a remarkable thing: a more or less secret gathering of key feminist scholars and activists from academe, the professions, and even some tech companies, in which the participants (each carefully selected for brilliance, diligence, discretion, and devotion to female supremacy) shared notes on how to survive and to subvert the killing patriarchy that infests most contemporary institutions. Elle had come because some of the organizers had read her online posts on female dominance, male submissiveness, and genuine love and respect between the parties to these unconventional relationships. Clearly many of the regulars had found themselves wondering how they could construct satisfying relationships with the men in their lives, in which they could nurture their partners while at the same time expressing their needs and achieving their secret desires.
The hypnotic induction she’d used on Louis just now was a smoother version of the keynote address she’d given, in which she explained her theory of the differently gendered part of each personality—and especially her own pet theory of a third, ungendered self beneath the two gendered “selves” inside each of us, a third “self” that contained a powerful erotic impulse triggered purely by power exchange, dominance, and submission.
Her talk had been well received. After the session, she’d been swarmed by powerful and intriguing women—old and young, fat and thin, of all colors and sizes, some grey and motherly and others looking like teen-aged models—asked her discreetly for help with individual situations, usually involving men to whom they were despite their better judgment attached. Elle patiently gave each woman a few pointers in how to change the power dynamic in a love relationship, moving the female partner into a position of equality and then, step by step, one of superiority. If all went well, inside a few months the lucky man in each woman’s life would be begging her to take charge of their lives, first in bed and then elsewhere.
But not all of the women who waited for her after her talk wanted advice about men.
After all the others had left, she heard a musical voice say, “I mostly just want to introduce myself.” She found herself looking up—up—almost craning her neck to meet the eyes of a woman clearly at least six feet tall. Elle couldn’t tell how tall because she wasn’t looking at the shoes; she wanted to look down to check them but the eyes held her—large, dark, and liquid, framed in an olive face and above a very generous, even lush mouth.
Elle, for the first time in a long time, was almost at a loss for words. “Hel—“ she said, then cleared her throat. “Hello, you are . . . ?”
The tall woman reached into a pocket for a card. Elle used the opportunity to shake herself loose from the eyes and look her new acquaintance up and down. It was a remarkable sight. Dressed in a suit much like hers, the tall woman gave a very different impression. Where Elle was buxom and curvy, this woman was angular—feminine to be sure, but with the body of a supermodel, seemingly created for the very purpose of displaying her grey pinstriped suit.
During her look up and down, Elle found her eyes traveling a long, pleasant distance on a pair of elegant legs sheathed in black tights. Finally she got to her red Zara high-heel ankle boots—adding three inches to this magnificent creature’s height.
The mystery woman presented the card. SHAHRZAD GREEN, Associate Professor of Gender Studies, it read, above the seal of a prestigious university about an hour away from the tri-county area where Louis and Elle lived.
“I was fascinated by your talk,” the woman said. “I wanted to ask whether you have ever incorporated narrative theory into your hypnotherapy work.”
“Narrative,” Elle said. “Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘narrative.’ I certainly use Ericksonian tales, for example.”
“Those are great!” the tall woman said. “But narrative is much much bigger than that! Narrative is who we are! You were talking about the triple self and that is actually three narratives, three stories that live inside the larger story we call ourselves, and that we retell as we change. Gender itself is a narrative. If a female self retells her own narrative she may become a lesbian self, or a bisexual self, or a male self and the male self can tell the reverse story. I’d love to share some of what I have learned by studying women’s inner narratives! Do you have time to get coffee right now?”
Elle was quite caught up in her enthusiasm. She was exotic, sexy, smart, focused, and managed to make Elle feel that she was the most interesting human being Shahrzad had ever met. With her height and her dazzling eyes, she also managed to make Elle feel ever-so-slightly small and even a bit submissive—feelings she hadn’t had in a long time and found not entirely unpleasant. Once Elle realized what she was being offered, she found herself oddly reluctant to give a definite “no.” Without her quite realizing it, Shahrzad’s questions—the images and open ended suggestions, the powerful gleam of her dark eyes and the music of her voice, like distant chimes carried by the wind—had entangled Elle in a vaguely hypnotic web, and the powerful hypnodomme was suddenly beset with images of her and Shahrzad somewhere else, lost in each other . . . .
That, she realized, was the narrative at the moment—Shahrzad whispering, Elle naked, with her head between the taller woman’s legs. But Elle knew her own stories might, if she chose, take them in a different direction—to Elle sitting calmly with this tall stunner helpless at her feet.
She shook her head. How did she wander into such thoughts? She had a partner and a self and a narrative and wasn’t looking for new ones. Was she?
She had thanked the young woman for her interest. Shahrzad then asked whether Elle would consider giving a public lecture as part of a series sponsored by the Women’s Studies program. Then she’d shyly leaned down and kissed the hypnodomme on the cheek, her lips lingering just a fraction of a second longer than usual, and turned at once to go without a backward glance.
Elle, who studied seduction, had to admire the opening gambit. She’d been more stirred than she cared to admit to herself.
So she’d gone to the house phone, called Louis, triggered him and whispered a few suggestions for pleasures they still had not tried.
She stepped out of the bath and dried herself off carefully as she explored her memories of Shahrzad. If she had still been single, she admitted to herself, the tall woman would have had her out of her clothes well before now.
But she wasn’t. She had Louis, the perfect hypno-husband, and now she knew that Louis could also be the perfect wife, in bed at least.
She had more to learn about this man. And she was eager for the next lesson.
She closed the bathroom door, went to her drawer and took out a pair of red silk pajamas and a pair of red panties. Then she turned to face Louis, who had not stirred.
“Louis!” she said, snapping her fingers. “Wake up, Louis!”
The crumpled figure on the floor began to rustle and twitch, then Louis stared at her blankly, clearly trying to remember who he was and how he had gotten there. She had no particular interest in letting him get his bearings, however. “Louis, come here at once and dress me!” she said, and snapped her fingers.
He crawled toward her on hands and knees, then knelt in front of her. She handed him each garment—the pajama trousers first, then the blouse. He put each on her body with great silent concentration, and his eyes were utterly blank, as though Louis Wentworth, the husband she knew as witty, energetic, charming, flirtatious, and brilliant, had taken a vacation at the beach and left a submissive robot behind.
Elle knew the expression. It was one of the sexiest things in the world.
When he finished buttoning the blouse, she told him, “Get me my red 4-inch pumps from the closet! Now, Louis!” In a moment, she was sitting comfortably on the bed, one foot extended and then the other as Louis, as attentive as Prince Charming searching for Cinderella, slid the sexy heels onto her feet. “You may kiss my feet,” she said, and he got to work kissing and licking each foot in turn while he wife and owner closed her eyes. It had been a long day. She deserved some pleasure.
But so did Louis, after all. He’d spent hours writing, then she’d made him submit to her, sucking her off in lipstick and perfume.
Time for some Louis time.
“Louis!” she said, snapping her fingers. “Look up at me! Look at me, Louis!”
At once he reared back on his haunches, for all the world like a dog showing its owner how it could sit up and beg. “Look at my eyes, Louis,” she said. “Look deeper . . . deeper . . . Louis, you can’t look away. Try! Try hard! The harder you try to look away, the more locked and fixed and stuck in place your eyes become, the more helpless you become, and as you try harder your mouth is coming open now, hanging open now, you can’t even close your mouth as you look deeper into my eyes . . . deeper . . . .”
She was still holding the silk panties, a small red wisp that, even folded, suggested the intricate curves, folds, and integuments of her body. She reached out to him with them in her hand. “Take these, Louis!” she crooned in a soft, caressing contralto. “They are my panties. I wear them on my body, Louis. Take them. Don’t look away, but take them!” His hand reached out somewhat blindly. She put the panties into it.
“Look at me, Louis, deeper and deeper and feel how completely helpless you are, naked and totally under my hypnotic power, how you can’t look away, you can’t even close your mouth, you must obey every command I give you, it’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever felt. Take the panties, Louis, and touch yourself with them, do it now, feel how silky and sensual, touch yourself, you’re going to find you can’t hold back, you’re going to come when I tell you because you are powerless, you can’t hold back, Louis, come . . . NOW!”
Her eyes were locked on his, and she felt a tingle as she saw his pupils roll back slightly in his head. “Oh, God, ELLE!” he said as he spurted into the panties.
He could barely shape the sounds, because he couldn’t close his mouth. He couldn’t look away and her voice had swept him into an explosive orgasm at her feet.
It was very, very sexy. She doubted Shahrzad knew any tricks to match this one.
“Louis,” she said. “When I snap your fingers you will wake up, not remembering anything except that you’ve had a marvelous sexy time with me and that you are very very tired. You will go to the bathroom and clean yourself off. You will put my panties on the floor of the closet. Tomorrow when you wake up, your first thought will be that you need to wash out my panties so they are clean for me if I want to wear them. But right now you will leave the bathroom, climb into bed, and at once pass into a deep sleep of wonderful sexy dreams about your new novel. Here we go, Louis—one, two, THREE!”
She snapped her fingers. He shook himself slightly and looked around in some puzzlement. “Elle,” he said, “how – how did I get –“
“Forget about that, Louis,” she said. “Go clean yourself off. It’s your bedtime.”
In less than three minutes, her hypno-husband was sprawled on his side of the king bed, breathing the soft slow breath of deep sleep. His eyeballs behind his eyelids chased themselves back and forth like dogs at play.
Elle sat down on the bed for a moment, watching her captivated husband wandering through a land of dreams she controlled. She’d enjoyed taking Louis as her teenaged girl-slave. She had a sudden image of “Louise” with long curly hair and little rosebud breasts and the dark black lipstick that looked so ridiculous on her, like a little girl dressed up in mommy’s clothes.
The image melted into another girl-image, this one of Shahrzad. The card she’d given Elle had her cellphone number. If Elle called her now, she’d bet she could have Shahrzad on her knees before her inside an hour, begging to please her new mistress.
It was an appealing thought, in a way. She actually was going to do it, she thought, as soon as she got out of bed again. She took a deep breath and smelled a faint but intoxicating scene—her own perfume blended with the scent of her husband Louis into a new scent that seemed like a newly discovered part of her own, just as Louis sometimes seemed like a part of her self and sometimes like a distant, alluring and ever mysterious other. She took another breath. Shahrzad probably didn’t smell like this, she thought. And besides, Louis was her narrative. He was not just the story she told; he told her story. He had made her into Hypnoteen and now into Milagro Hada, the buxom witch in his new detective series. He called her his Muse; but perhaps his telling was what made Elle Elle. She never wanted to leave the story they were weaving together, even for a subplot told by an enchantress like Shahrzad.
Then, out of the blue, she had a thought–“I wonder if Shahrzad would like to meet Justine.”*
She felt lighter all of a sudden, as if she had solved two problems that had been buzzing around in her head. She sighed, and caught another deep whiff of sleepy Louis. As she breathed in the scent, her eyes suddenly grew heavy and slid irresistibly shut. Louis, she thought. He tried so hard to please her- -
His body shifted, and her head now nestled in the hollow of his neck, bathed in that intoxicating scent, and her eyes closed for good and Elle Murphy slept, wrapped in the arms of her one true love.