Exposed (Madame X, #2)(2)

And I know where you go.

You don’t go to broker a deal. You don’t go to negotiate terms with other businessmen. You don’t go to sign a contract, or to scout a new location, or investigate potential real estate investments. These are all things a businessman would do—I know, I’ve researched it. You’re president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Indigo Services, LLC, as well as a dozen other businesses both private and publicly traded. You should be sitting in a corner office, with a landline phone pressed to your ear, a computer monitor in front of you, discussing P-and-L statements—profit and loss, that means—and quarterly returns, and who isn’t performing up to par.

Par is a golf term, meaning minimum number of strokes to complete a hole, but it often is used colloquially to mean a minimum standard; I’m always learning new things, now that I have access to the Internet.

You should be doing these things. I’ve learned what a CEO does, what a businessman does. From TV, from books, from the Internet.

And I don’t think you do any of those things. Or, at least, not when I would expect you to do them.

You answer e-mails at four in the morning. You wake me at six for sex, exercise from six thirty or so until eight thirty, shower, eat a quick breakfast, and then you go to sleep at nine and wake at noon. Wake, answer e-mails, return phone calls, do things involving spreadsheets and graphs, and then you leave.

Or, sometimes, after sex with me in the morning, you skip the shower, and just leave.

And when you return, you avoid me. You work out. Shower. Avoid me. Work. Avoid me.

Finally, you might sit with me, eat with me, take me to dinner or to the theater.

And Caleb?

I know what you do when you leave, why you avoid me.

You’re “training” your “apprentices.”

Translated, that means f*cking.

Teaching ex-prostitutes and ex-drug addicts and ex-homeless girls how to pleasure a man. How to give a proper blow job. How to take anal. How to take a come-shot to the face and look sexy and grateful and seductive while doing it. How to beg for sex without actually saying a word.

You teach them this by showing them.

By f*cking them.

They put their mouths on your cock, and you instruct them on proper fellatio technique.

You bend them forward over the bed and put your cock in their bottom, and you tell them how to make sure they don’t get hurt in the process, how to make sure it feels good for them.

You pull your cock out of their mouths and you come all over their faces, and claim it’s for their sake, because some clients like that, although you don’t. Oh no.

How do I know all this?

I am friends with Rachel. Down on the third floor, in apartment three. Rachel, formerly known as Apprentice Number Six-nine-seven-one-three, or just Three for short. An apprentice in your street-to-Bride program. After you’ve left for the day, after your three hours of sleep, after I watch your sleek white Maybach slide elegantly toward Fifth Avenue, I take the elevator to the third floor and knock on door number three, a bottle of white wine in one hand.

Rachel pours the entire bottle into two glasses—not wineglasses, because she doesn’t own any of those, but rather into large cylindrical juice glasses—and we drink it sitting on her bed, and we talk. She tells me things. About her former life, which she isn’t allowed to talk about but does with me for some reason. About her current life as a Bride-in-training. She tells me everything. Sometimes too much.

“Sorry, TMI?” she often asks.

TMI: too much information.

Yes, I tell her. That you were just there—in the very bed upon which I sit—f*cking her in the ass, that is too much information. That you pulled out and came on her back is also too much information.

Yet still she tells me. As if I am her priest, her confessor. It’s girl talk, I think she thinks.

Education for me, is how I see it. It’s how I learn terms like come-shot, which I probably would have been better off not knowing.

I find it strange, however, that you do none of these things with me. That you never have.

You don’t f*ck me in the ass. You don’t come on my back, or my face.

I try to imagine how I would feel if you did. Would I like it? Would I hate it? Would I feel degraded . . . or turned on? Some days I think one way, some days the other. I don’t have the courage to ask you about this. I don’t think I want to find out how I feel about it.

Rachel likes pain with her sex. She likes to be spanked. Hard. She likes it when you tie her hands behind her back with a necktie and f*ck her from behind and spank her with your belt while you’re balls-deep inside her. That’s verbatim what she tells me.

I don’t want to know that.

I also can’t stop going down to talk to her, knowing that she’ll tell me all these things.

I want to know, and I hate that I want to know.

She also tells me about her fellow apprentices’ predilections. Four has a thing for having a vibrator in her anus while you have sex with her. Five is a blow job aficionado and does actually like taking come-shots to the face. Seven, Eight, and Nine don’t like any one thing in particular that Rachel knows about, and Two likes autoerotic asphyxiation, meaning she likes it when you choke her while f*cking her.

I know more about the sexual goings-on of Floor Three than I think is healthy.

It also tells me that you have an unnatural and possibly superhuman sex drive. At least once a day with me. Rachel claims you visit her once a week, usually. Plus girls Two and Four through Nine. Including me, that’s ten women. A different woman every day, with an extra three you can rotate to have more than one a day. Which, honestly, is just one possible permutation based on the available information, variables, and my skill with mathematics.