Oil of Roses Ch. 16

Many thanks to Literotica author 'englander1961' for her help, editorial services, encouragement and a title much better than my original, which has elevated her to the status of House Goddess of Sexy Story Titles. Thanks to Sammi Scott, aka Titsy McYarn, the Cute at the Heart of the Abyss for her help and valuable critique. Thanks to Literotica author 'KY ridgerunner' for the stories that planted the idea in my head months ago. A belated and much overdue thanks to John Hasty for his peerless editing. Bounteous thanks to Kevin for his incredibly thorough critiquing and voluminous notes.

After you've read this, if you have any inclination at all to comment, please do so, either by email or on the comment board... The best way for me to grow and improve as an author is to hear from the people who read my work.

I welcome constructive critiques and non-abusive comments. I will answer, in at least a semi-prompt manner, any email that comes with an email address.

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If you have not read the earlier installment(s) of this tale, it would probably help you to make sense of this one if you did so.

* * * * *

After a somber end to the brunch, Karen and Patricia made their farewells, checked out of their room and headed home. Tamara cleared her and Eddy out of their room and transferred up to the suite. She and Margo settled in on a couch in the bedroom to talk. Harry got back from a trip to the toilet to find Margo on the room phone. When she hung up she said, "Harry, I'm taking Tamara to do a little clothes shopping and it looks like Kelly is coming with us. Do you need anything while we're out?"

"Yes my love, if you can, pick up some liqueurs you think would go well with coffee... I feel many more pots of leaded coming on... a bottle of Bailey's for sure. Now that the cat's out of the bag about us buying Tamara for Eddy, we don't really have to stay here, but we do have the suite for a week, might as well enjoy it."

The ladies ventured forth leaving him apparently alone in the suite. He wandered into the sitting room and found Carol, sitting in the dimness, tailor-fashion on the floor, her hands folded together in her lap. He sat down across from her and noticed that her eyes were closed. She smiled as she heard him sit.

"Hello, sir."

"Hello most precious one. May one inquire...?"

"It's Sunday, I'm talking with God."

"You're talking with God."

She opened her eyes to look at him. "Sir, I don't know what religion is correct, or if any of them are. But I believe Something, somewhere, was responsible for creation. I happen to believe that It takes an interest in the lives of It's creations but I have no proof. So on Sundays, out of tradition I suppose, I try to find some time to quietly commune with that Entity."

"You mind if I join you?"

"No Harry, I don't mind at all."

After awhile, Carol got up and left Harry sitting there. She wandered into the kitchenette and got herself an orange juice. She thought about reading the paper but realized that she really didn't care. There was nothing in the news she felt particularly compelled to keep track of. Her world was a large one, but its places of import rarely made it into the paper. She decided that a bath was always a good idea, especially if one had a Jacuzzi tub at one's disposal so she began to run herself one.

In the other room Harry had finished but found he wasn't ready to get up just yet. There was something he needed to do, something he wanted to do, something it was way past time to do but he found himself reticent to do it. Finally he realized he was stalling, got up and went to grab his cell phone.

* * * * *

"Hey gorgeous, there enough room in that tub for me?"

"Sure Harry, hop in."

He climbed in to the tub. "You remember me telling you about my sister Nicki?"

"Yes, Harry."

"I called her this morning. We talked for a bit, I apologized to her, told her about Angie, apologized to her, told her I'd really like to see her, apologized to her, told her next week would be fine, and apologized to her one more time."

"So she's coming to visit, in the middle of renovating the bathroom and putting in the pool and hot tub?"

"Yeah, I told her about the state of the house but she wanted to come down anyway. Sounded like she needed to get away for a bit... I figure we'll put her up in her old room upstairs, if Kelly doesn't mind taking my old room as hers. That leaves them the upstairs bathroom and the three of us the guest bathroom downstairs. Jesus, that's gonna be tight for awhile."

"Yeah Harry," she said, cuddling up next to him, "but think how glorious the master bath will be when it's finished."

Harry caressed her breast. "True, room for all of us to bathe, room for all of us to love, room for all of us to shower... God, it'll be positively sybaritic."

"Sybaritic... good word for it... inside of two months it'll all be finished," she said.

Harry's cell phone went off in the other room. He climbed out of the tub, wrapped himself in a towel and went off to answer it.

"Yeah, Eddy... OH SHIT! Oh God man, I am so sorry. It completely slipped both our minds! Oh, please apologize to the two of them for me and I'll apologize to them too and there'll be a bonus for them and oh shit I'm really sorry. Okay, we'll see you when you get here... bye."

He padded back into the bathroom, his face flushed with embarrassment. "We forgot to mention that at some point in the next week, some gentlemen would be delivering your bequest."

"Oh no," she giggled, "so some Italian gentlemen show up and drop something off and Perry and Bevy go on full alert?"

"No, not exactly... a rather large truck showed up and dropped off 178 small but very heavy crates of vinyl record albums as well as 8 larger crates of electronics equipment and speakers. The boys made sure the smaller crates were ok but they didn't have the equipment to check out the electronics for bombs or other nasty surprises, so they called Eddy who brought the equipment. It all checked out. As I'm assuming Tony was the gentleman with the vinyl collection you spoke of, it appears you've inherited it."

"Oh my God, Harry. Over five thousand albums, all of them in perfect, or near perfect, condition... a system that can play them with absolute fidelity... a turntable you could fuck next to without disturbing thanks to the vibration dampening set-up... he left me the most precious possessions he had. He left me the only thing he really could, I imagine. Anything else his family would've gone batshit and fought in court but they never considered his vinyl to be anything but an old man's folly of a hobby."

"Well, Baby Girl, it's your folly now." Harry climbed back into the tub. "I've never asked about your past much but now seems like a good time to, while we have a soak. Feel like talking about it?"

"I suppose so. You know I left college my freshman year. I was nineteen. I knew how I wanted my life to be and so I went in search of someone to collar me. I ended up owned by a guy named Dick Laney who I'd met while exploring the scene before I left school. He still is pretty much a mover and shaker in certain circles and if you are kind and we make the Fetish Ball this year, I'll point him out to you. His was the multi-slave harem I was in, so I learned very early that I wasn't cut out for that kind of service. He was also very generous with his friends and that meant that even though he's kind of a shithead, he's got lots of 'friends'. I think I got loaned out to most of them. I was with him about five months and it felt like five years. It wasn't that he's a bad man or a bad owner or a bad Master, I just don't think he's a very good one either, and he's certainly not the one for me. One night we were in The Elysian Fields, a club down on Guadalupe and I'd displeased him somehow, so I was tongue-bathing his boots when this elderly gentleman came up. It was Tony, although we didn't know it at the time. He seemed very frail and infirm, but confident. He pulled out five grand, put it on the table and bet that against me that he could make Dick shit himself by only saying two words. Dick laughed and said sure, no problem, he'd take the man's money. They shook on it and Tony said "kill him".

"All of a sudden Tony's boys, who nobody had noticed closing in around us all drew down on Dick and he's staring at all this hardware, none of them more than a foot from his face and he shit himself. Tony picked up his five grand, offered me his hand and told Dick to give one of his boys his address. He said that someone would be by the next day around noon to pick up my stuff and it all better be ready by then. That started my three year relationship with Tony Juliana."

"Jesus Christ, he took you away from Dick with style."

"Yeah, Tony had a lot of that type of style. He always said he was old, he'd survived Prohibition and gangland wars, he'd survived his wife and kids, he didn't have to put up with shit anymore. He said the worst anyone could do to him was kill him and at his age, that wasn't much of a threat. He knew he didn't have many years left to him and he'd decided he wanted to see and do a lot of things he wouldn't have otherwise. He'd always known the whole BDSM scene existed and it interested him but he'd never really explored it. So he'd gone to The Elysian Fields that night and being a gentleman had come to this little pet's rescue, not understanding really that I didn't exactly need rescue, although I sure as hell wanted it.

"Luckiest night of my life... for the next two years we went places and met people and saw things... oh, Harry. Anytime you wonder how I know something or where I met someone or how in the world did I ever hear about thus and so, it was probably because of those two years. There was no place his money and reputation couldn't get us into... and there are some stories I could tell and some stories it'd be better if I didn't even remember. If we wanted to meet someone or get invited to a certain party, Tony turned on the charm, made with the money, dropped names if he had to and we were in. A lot of times, the charm was all that he needed. He was incredibly well-read and very well-spoken... he wasn't your typical mobster. He liked to call himself a 'student of the human condition with a lot of lab experience'. He was a witty, funny man. Which made some of what we saw together even harder to keep a straight face through.

"Harry, you remember that woman, used to be mayor, big in real estate? I've seen her kneeling naked, getting a cum shower from twelve men then getting it washed off by a golden shower from the same dicks. And she was the fucking mayor at the time! I've seen that Robert Milton guy, the ex-televangelist, gobbling cock like he was at a hot-dog-eating contest and let me tell you, his mouth works just at fast sucking dick as it does preaching and praying.

"There are still places in this town where you can get anything and anyone you want, for a price. There are places where you can watch any sex act you can imagine being performed, or for even more money, join in. I'm pretty sure we saw most of them.

"We went out to a little concrete bunker in the hills one night, watched some people making what was supposed to be a hardcore porn film with some S & M elements. This big bitch, six foot four, built like a goddess of war, is fucking this pretty young boy, couldn't have been more than sixteen, seventeen, she's on top and he tells her he's about to come and she... she... she shoved..."

Carol's composure had dissolved into tears. "Carol, Baby Girl, shhhh, whatever it is that's upsetting you about this, you don't have to say anymore."

"No, no I do. She shoved an ice pick in the soft spot on his temple and rotated it, wrenched it around in there... and she was coming while she did it... we were watching them make a snuff flick... I screamed and Tony and his boys got me out of there. Tony apologized to me for hours later... he thought it was just a normal S&M porn shoot.

"Two weeks later, I was helping him get ready for bed and he told me that I didn't have to worry about those people ever making another movie like that. Like an idiot I asked him if he'd had them arrested. He said no, he'd had the boys find out who their distributors were and delivered the filmmakers to them in pieces. I asked him about the woman who actually did it. He just looked at me and said there were things I really didn't want to know. About a year later I could have sworn I saw her turning tricks on 8^th Street. The woman's arms had so many track marks on them they looked like railroad yards, a lot of her teeth were broken off and she was definitely working the low rent end of the street. She didn't look like a goddess of war, she looked like a crack whore in the last days of her life and if it was her, it would've been much kinder of them to kill her. I doubt you'll find anybody in this area to this day who'll consider making snuff films.

"After that, I told him I'd heard rumors about a House on the south side that dealt in children, under the age of fourteen, but I never wanted to see it and if he went there I never wanted to hear about it or what happened afterwards. He and the boys would go out without me on occasion, maybe one of those nights they visited there. All I know is I never heard of the place again.

"I don't want you to think that places like those were the only places we went. We went to the symphony, the opera and to the theater. We'd go to clubs that played big band, swing and jazz. We'd go dancing. Of course he didn't have too much use for modern music but I even got him into Absinthe & Opium, a goth club downtown. He never quite got 'goth' or the music and I had no luck explaining it to him.

"After every concert or symphony, after every live performance of music, he'd hunt and peck out at least a paragraph, sometimes much more, on an old typewriter he had. I asked him what he was doing the first time I saw him do it. He explained he was putting down his impressions of the music, the performers, the whole experience, so he could always remember it the way it was that very night. I asked him how long he'd been doing that. He said he'd been doing it all his life. I imagine his family's thrown them away, but Harry, just from stories he'd tell, what was in some of those notes... there probably wasn't a big band he didn't see live. He saw Enrico Caruso perform several times. He caught most of the Rat Pack's Vegas shows while they were there to film the original "Ocean's 11", even hung out with them. He was acquainted with Beverly Sills and Luciano Pavarotti, hell, he knew a lot of opera's biggest stars over his lifetime. He used to take them out to dinner or throw parties for them when he and they were in the same town. He and Duke Ellington were on a first name basis with each other.

"If I had to define Tony by just one attribute it would be his love of music. From the notes he took to his album collection to the joy he took in hearing me sing. The radio was on the classical or golden oldies station almost all day long. When he played a record, it was almost like going to church. He'd pull out the album, carefully remove the disc from its sleeve, lovingly clean it, clean the stylus, put it on and settle in to listen. We didn't talk, we didn't read, we didn't do anything but listen when an album was playing ... no humming along, no singing along, no other extraneous sounds. We listened. He always said that you don't read a book and look at a painting at the same time, you don't watch television and examine a piece of sculpture simultaneously, music is art and should be treated as such. I never touched one of his albums, he didn't offer and I didn't ask. Those were his holy icons and I wasn't a member of the priesthood. I guess I am now. Hell Harry, it sounds like I've inherited the temple.

"We lived together, along with his bodyguards, in a suite of apartments in the old Arco Tower building. He was still married, of course, no divorce for a good Catholic, but both he and his wife were happy with him living away from the house, so we had our privacy. Tony and I never did much with each other. He was too old and in too much pain a lot of the time, although only his bodyguards and I knew it, but by God he got to see what he wanted to see. And when he was feeling up to it, we had some very good times together. But mostly I was his companion, someone young and pretty for him to look at.

"Then, the last year of his life, I was his nursemaid as well. I loved him, Harry. Not the way I love you, or Margo or even Kelly, but I loved him. He was good to me, he was kind and he was a gentleman. So when he got sick and wanted me to leave I told him in no uncertain terms that he'd have to make me go because I knew in his heart he didn't want me to. He hired a nurse and outfitted the apartment so he wouldn't have to go to the hospital till the very end. On his good days he and I could ignore all the damn machines and the nurse and pretend he wasn't dying. Those were some bittersweet days, Harry, when I could forget what he'd been most of his life and hold him and tell him honestly that I wished I'd known him when he was younger.

"Eventually the day came he had to go to the hospital and we all knew it was the last trip, so I packed up what I absolutely needed into two small suitcases and went to live at the hospital. Vic made sure the family knew that when they came to see him I'd be nowhere around but none of them ever made the trip. They were so angry at that sick old man for shit that had happened over the years that they risked pissing off Vic just to snub him. I suppose they had their reasons. I'll never believe they were valid enough to leave an old man dying alone but then again what I believe doesn't matter. They didn't come. Late one night he called me over to his bed side, and he looked at me and said "Gimme a kiss, sugar, I got to go"... and I did... and he left..."

Harry took the weeping woman in his arms and stroked her hair. Her sobs shook the two of them for a long time. "God, I wish you'd have been able to meet him, Harry... he would've liked you... you would've liked him..."

"Anyway, after he passed, Vic put me up in a hotel until the funeral but after the graveside I did a vanishing act because Phil had been eyeing me for years. I was so alone. For three years I'd had this man as my owner, my companion, someone who'd been unfailingly polite and kind even when he was in so much pain that morphine was doing nothing for him, even then he was always a gentleman to me.

"And he was gone and I had some money and two small suitcases and no owner and nowhere to go. I was staying with a girl I knew and her Master, a repulsive little toad of a man named Morgan, who was starting to eye me, so I was out actively looking when I found Paul, Paul Sands, a high school English teacher. A nice enough guy, rather new to the scene, had a real taste for it. The only problem with him was he liked watching me get fucked by other guys and like I told you, I'm monogamous when it comes to men. We'd been together for over a year when one of his resumes landed him a job offer in Michigan to teach at a private school. He couldn't afford to take me with him."

"But honey, if Paul was going to work at a private school, surely they were paying him more money, even with cost of living differences."

"Harry, you ought to know, there's 'affording' in the fiscal sense and 'affording' in the social sense. As a new teacher at a private school he was going to be under the microscope and a live-in slave didn't fit the school image. I didn't want to leave here anyway. All my friends and contacts are here; in Michigan, I knew nobody. When he left I went to work in a Denny's, earned just enough to keep a roof over my head and while I had food if I was working, I wasn't working all the time. So, Rick came along and I knew better but I was tired and I was hungry and I wanted out of the life I was in. I'd been with Rick about 7 months when I wandered into the Pearl and saw you trying to drown yourself in alcohol."