Page 16 of Once Upon a Dream
Daneice, Devorah, Nanami, Nina.
Ellie and Yasmine. Isabella and Mary Grace.
Tamsin.
Twelve girls. Twelve pairs of pointe shoes knotted and slung carelessly over shoulders as the dancers crawled one by one out of the second story window and onto a nearby tree branch. Cal had to respect their ability to sneak out undetected—even with his car windows rolled all the way down, the only noise that came from the dark house was the rustle of the tree branches as the girls crept along and dropped like silent fruit onto the grass below. They walked out past the school property and piled into two different cars, hybrids that made no engine noise until they turned off their street.
Cal put his car into drive and followed.
He had a plan, like he always did. He’d follow, get pictures, go home and sleep off this latest run of work. And then tomorrow he’d hand Purkiss the evidence, get his six hundred dollars, and move on to the next job. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was about what a divorced ex-soldier could expect. He was lucky to have stable work, however lonely it was.
And it was lonely. In the Army, you were never alone, not really. There was always someone to keep watch with you, always someone else who couldn’t sleep, always someone else squinting at the road alongside you looking for disturbed earth and foxholes. But there was some loneliness still. You missed your family, your friends, cold beer. You missed your own horizon, trees, snow, the Science Channel, 24-hour drugstores crammed with bright bags of junk food.
He’d stupidly thought coming home to his wife after his last tour would mean being cured of all kinds of lonely. How wrong he’d been; he’d never guessed that peculiar isolation of laying in bed next to a woman while remembering the pops and booms of desert guns, the scatter of bullets and the smell of gunpowder singed in the sun. The blood, the fear, the blood, the blood, the blood.
They’d told people they’d grown apart. But the truth had been that it was hard to keep a wife when Fallujah was your mistress. So his last tour hadn’t been his last tour after all, and he signed up to go to Afghanistan instead.
Some kinds of loneliness were better than others.
The girls drove far out of Richmond, out into Goochland County where the horses and the rich people lived. Country roads were shit for tailing, so Cal had to stay farther behind than he’d like, following the unblinking red eyes of taillights through the bends and warps of the road, wondering where the fuck these ballerinas were headed. And then suddenly there were no taillights, just the trees in the dark, and Cal had to reverse to see what he’d missed: a narrow road turning sharply off the small highway, disappearing into the dark like a path into fairyland.
He killed his headlights, rolled down the windows again, and crept up the road. His eyes adjusted to the dark fast enough, to where he could see the individual trees and the black glint of the James River between their branches. The twist and rise of the road—
Awareness prickled on the back of his neck, and with a cold feeling in his gut, he realized he knew this place. It was different in the dark, different with the war ghosts in his mind, but the minute he cleared the rise and saw the sprawling, elegant profile of it, he knew.
Persepolis.
Shit.
He parked the car at the edge of the lot, killing the engine after confirming the two hybrids were indeed there. And sure enough, he could see the slender shadows of the girls down by the entrance of the building, gliding like swans into the door, the moonlight catching the shine of slipper-silk as they moved. And the idea of all those lithe bodies wearing their pointe shoes into Persepolis stirred up an uncomfortable amount of heat in his blood. The idea of Tamsin, long legs wrapped in ribbons, up on her toes and bent over a bench with her pussy exposed—shit. Shit.
She’s nineteen, he thought angrily to himself. A child. Stop it.
But it was hard to stop. Especially with Persepolis in full view.
He rubbed at his forehead, trying to remember the plan, trying to ignore the blood flowing to his groin without his permission. The problem was that the plan had gotten a lot more complicated just now, because Persepolis wasn’t the bar or house party he’d been expecting. Persepolis was the kind of place where people with lots of money and specific interests went to play. Whips and chains, that kind of shit. Cal had done a fair amount of work for them over the last four years, mostly background checks for new members, and so he knew very well what went on inside.
Which meant that he was going to have to tell Purkiss that his daughter was sneaking off at night to get beaten and fucked by strangers. Or maybe she was doing the beating. Either way, he didn’t think Purkiss would take it well.
Still, he had a job to do and he could still follow the plan. Take a few pictures of the cars outside, go home and stroke himself in the shower thinking of how those pointe shoes would feel on his back as he buried his face in some young pussy.
Fuck.
Take those pictures and go home, Cal.
And yet he was getting out of the car. Walking down the winding path to the door without his camera. Nodding at the doorman who recognized him immediately. Stepping inside the wide windowed bar area where those not at play drank and laughed and talked.
Persepolis was too cautious to serve minors, which meant that the girls wouldn’t be here. No, they’d be downstairs in the public playroom. Although, since they were far too young to be members, they must be guests, and there was a chance that whoever they were a guest of, he or she would have them in a private playroom.
Cal tried to ignore the knot of disappointment the thought tied in him. It had nothing to do with wanting to see those ballerinas fucking en pointe, those sleek, young bodies at work. Nothing to do with wanting to see Tamsin’s pert tits or high, round ass.
Nothing to do with the thought o
f all twelve girls in one room, licking and twisting and rubbing.
Sure. Because he could lie to himself, but he couldn’t lie to his cock. And his cock remembered exactly how long it’d been since it’d been inside a woman. Too fucking long.
He walked down the floating staircase into the airy concrete and glass playroom, taking care to stay in the shadows as he did. It wasn’t hard—a woman was whipping a man on stage and the spotlights were on her, and darkness spilled in from outside like water. It was as he moved undetected around the back of the room that he saw them. Waiting by the stage in their shoes, literal dancers in the wings.
