Sex Objects Read online

  When I had everyone’s attention, I told the musicians we would resume with the scherzo—the third movement—and I waited a moment until they turned their scores to the correct page before I raised my baton.

  Two hours later, still dissatisfied with the orchestra’s grasp of the score, I had to end rehearsal or explain to the executive director why we had gone into overtime. Orchestras across the U.S. have faced diminishing audiences and revenue shortfalls for several years, leading to bankruptcies and closures, and that made our continued existence an anomaly. If I sometimes had to sacrifice artistic integrity to ensure that we kept our expenses in line and the tight-fisted executive director off my back, then I would bite my tongue and do so. Otherwise, I might find myself cobbling together a career as a traveling conductor, leading part-time orchestras in several small cities, or worse, competing against the musicians I currently led as we all scrambled to find jobs as music educators in school districts with their own financial difficulties.

  After I closed my music and dismissed the musicians, I made my way to my dressing room, where I had left my coat and my purse. I put my baton—a musical instrument far more important than a cello or a flute—into a baton tote. Then, with the door closed, I stared hard into the full-length mirror. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt with the orchestra’s logo on it because it had not been a dress rehearsal, and I examined myself closely.

  A male conductor can grow fat and bald and no one thinks twice about it, but not so a female conductor. On a good night more than two thousand pairs of eyes are focused on my backside as I lead the orchestra, and the slightest weight gain or hint of gray in my hair meant reviews the next day would devote at least a paragraph to the change in my appearance. Thank god for Lady Clairol and Spanx, which did for me what nature and regular exercise did not.

  The musicians were always quick to leave the concert hall when rehearsal ended, and I had no desire to commingle with them as they departed—or any other time—because they might get the mistaken impression we were equals. As maestro—especially as a female maestro—I maintained professional distance offstage in order to retain authority over the orchestra’s musicians onstage. So I waited on the couch, nursing a bottle of water until I felt certain most of the musicians had vacated the hall.

  Then I pulled on my coat, grabbed my purse and the baton tote, and stepped out of my dressing room. As I locked the door behind me I was surprised to find the handsome new cellist walking toward me with his instrument in its case, headed, as I was, to the exit.

  “Alejandro,” I said with a nod.

  “Maestro,” he replied.

  “Plans for the evening?”

  “Practice,” he said. “Always practice.”

  We reached the exit, and he pushed the door open, holding it so that I could step from the warmth of the concert hall into the cold outside. I suppose if I had turned I could have passed without so much as grazing Alejandro, but I didn’t. I pressed my hip into the cellist’s crotch, feeling the bulk of his package through our clothing as I touched against him.

  I turned to him once I was outside, rested my hand on his forearm and asked, “Do you know the score, Alejandro?”

  He leaned forward so that his breath warmed my ear as he spoke. “Yes, Maestro,” he said, “I know the score.”

  I left him then, walked quickly to my car, and was inside my high-rise apartment less than half an hour later. Once home I stripped off my clothes, showered, and stepped into my studio, a spare bedroom that I’d had soundproofed before installing floor-to-ceiling mirrors and an expensive sound system. I grabbed my practice baton, started a recording of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing the piece we had been practicing all afternoon, and watched my naked reflections conduct the entire symphony as if I were fully clothed and had live musicians before me.

  As the final movement began its crescendo, I dropped my practice baton to the floor and slid the palm of my right hand down my abdomen to the juncture of my thighs while my left hand cupped my breasts and pinched my swollen nipples. The triangle of dark, curly hair tickled my palm as my index finger slipped into my female opening and found the tight bud of my desire. I flicked it back and forth, matching the music’s quickening tempo.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Alejandro there with me, his fingers in place of mine, his breath warm against my ear as it had been in the doorway of the concert hall, his package free from the confines of his jeans, throbbing with desire and jutting firmly toward the ceiling.

  And just as the music climaxed, so did I.

  Rehearsal the following day was much the same as before, but I heard far fewer honking geese and screeching cats. The substitute bass player had either memorized his part or had overnight learned to sight-read. And again, I avoided letting Alejandro’s smoldering sexuality distract me by never looking directly at the cello section. At the end of rehearsal, I returned to my dressing room, put my baton into its tote and waited for the musicians to vacate the building.

  I waited far longer than usual and had just about given up hope when a light tapping roused me. I opened my dressing room door to find Alejandro standing in the hall, his cello case in one hand. He wore a black button-up shirt, crisp button-fly blue jeans and his perpetual smirk.

  “Everyone else has left the building, Maestro.”

  I realized in that moment, I’d been waiting for this. I pulled him inside and pushed the door closed. Alejandro barely had time to rest his cello case against the wall before I pushed him back against the door and leaned into him. My breasts flattened against his chest; I covered his mouth with mine and thrust my tongue between his teeth. The cellist might not have ever played my tune, but he knew the score and he followed my lead.

  As we kissed, I pulled his shirttail from his jeans, unbuttoned his fly and shoved my hand under the waistband of his briefs. His cock was already rising to attention as I wrapped my fist around it, and I knew then what a glorious instrument it was. As I began to stroke his cock, Alejandro reached under my sweatshirt and deftly unfastened my bra. I released my grip on his cock long enough for him to push my bra and my sweatshirt up and off, and the rest of our clothes quickly followed.

  I pulled Alejandro to the couch, where I sat and spread my legs. He knelt on the floor before me and kissed his way up the inside of one leg until his face was buried in the dark curly hair of my mons. With just the tip of his tongue he licked the length of my slit, tasting my desire as I moistened. He parted my lips with his fingers and then drove his tongue into me. When he found my clitoris and flicked his tongue across it, I grabbed the back of his head.

  I had dallied with a flautist when I was younger, a woman of considerable talent both onstage and in bed, but Alejandro played my lips and my clit with far greater skill. He flicked his tongue forward and back, and then side to side and finally with a circular motion unlike any I had ever before felt.

  As he tongued my clit, he slipped two fingers inside me and began to piston them in and out.

  “Adagio!” I commanded, telling him I wanted a slow tempo, and he obeyed because even with his face buried between my thighs I was the maestro, conducting our sexual concerto.

  As my desire grew, I became wetter, and Alejandro slipped in a third finger, filling my vagina as the tempo of his fingers and his tongue increased. I was hot and wet, the effluent of my sexual desire soaking his chin and hand and running down the crack of my ass to drip to the carpet below. He pressed the tip of his pinky against my slickened asshole, and it opened to him.

  “Allegro,” I whispered hoarsely—quick and lively.

  Alejandro’s fingers were strong from many years of fingering the strings of his cello, and he knew how to use them inside me just as he knew how to use his tongue upon my clit.

  I wrapped my fingers in his hair and held his face tight against my pussy. “Presto!” I commanded. “Prestissimo!” Faster! Fastest!

  And then I came, my entire body writhing as orgasm swept through it, a much more powerful feeling
than the one I’d had the night before when I’d only imagined Alejandro pleasing me.

  Despite struggling to catch my breath, I pushed the cellist away, making his tongue stop and his fingers slip free, and made him lie back on the couch. I straddled him and lowered myself onto and around his glorious instrument. Then I taught him a thing or two about my skills as I began a slow rocking that steadily increased in tempo. As I rode the cellist he reached up and took my breasts in his hands, squeezing them tightly while thumbing my erect nipples.

  I rode him hard, the end of the couch beating a quickening rhythm against the wall as he repeatedly thrust his hips upward to meet mine. Our bodies were a pair of finely tuned sexual instruments moving as if playing a rondo—a musical piece in which the leading theme is repeated—and the repetition was our bodies slamming together in perfect harmony.

  And then Alejandro came, filling me with liquid heat. While he spasmed within me, I came, and my vagina clenched and unclenched, as if it were drawing the last fading notes from his glorious instrument.

  I could barely control myself. I wanted to collapse upon Alejandro, to lie upon his broad chest and listen to his heartbeat, but I knew better. I was the maestro, not some orchestra groupie settling for a third-chair cellist because the first chair was unavailable, and I had to remain in charge. I stared down at him and saw that his cocky smirk had been replaced by a half-lidded smile of satisfaction.

  When the cellist’s cock finally softened enough to slip free, I rose from him and retrieved my clothing, tossing pieces of his toward the couch as I untangled them from mine.

  I dressed, and he watched me until I kissed his forehead and said, “Put your clothes on, Alejandro. You got the gig. We’ll be replaying this concerto for the rest of the season.”

  He smiled, and I knew he was mine for as long as I wanted to play his glorious instrument.

  Slap Happy

  Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Standing in line to pay for my bottled water, I was careful not to let the smile bursting to break out show as I casually slid my eyes over the headline on the tabloid cover. Normally, errands like this were Marcus’s job, but he had the day off. I felt him there with me, though, especially when I saw the headline: Superstar Heiress Laila Nash Caught Slapping Bodyguard—Inside: Her History of Violence.

  Yes, that was me, quite clearly taking a perfectly manicured (Essie’s Big Spender, my favorite!) hand to Marcus’s beautiful brown right cheek, a scowl on my face and a look of surprise on his. Technically, everything in that headline was true—if you were talking about the facts. Whatever was inside was surely another story, but I wasn’t about to stoop to buying the thing, especially since that would just give some pap with a hidden camera another way to profit off my everyday actions. It just tickled me to know how visible we were, how supposedly out there, and yet no one had caught on to the fact that all of it was a game, a tease, a mockery—foreplay, in other words.

  You see, Marcus, I quickly discovered on his very first day, is a submissive through and through. Sure, he has the body of a linebacker, the mind of a genius and the instincts of a Secret Service agent when it comes to being my assistant and bodyguard, but alone, with me, he’s more than willing to take whatever I can concoct for him. Not just willing—I’d go so far as to say demanding. Once we connected in that elemental, primal way, all the trappings of who we are to the outside world fell away. I wasn’t a famous-mostly-for-being-famous heiress, and he wasn’t my employee, but my lover. He wasn’t a man who could break me in half, but a man who wanted me to make him beg, make him cry, make him ache with need. It’s a perfect pairing; he works for me, serves me, dotes on me and protects me, and in turn, gets to live out his dream of being in full thrall to a powerful woman, 24/7.

  I’d never found such sheer kinky bliss with anyone else; I’d thought I had, but there’d always been a catch, something they wanted from me that I couldn’t give them, or vice versa. I’m not saying I don’t have plenty of advantages in this world, but it’s not easy being born into a family whose name is plastered across buildings and stores all over the country. I’ve been having my photo taken since I was in the womb. Of course that affects a girl.

  I may play the role of spoiled, rich, blonde brat in public, but never with Marcus. With him, I’m instantly imbued with so much more power than my five-foot-five, size-two body seems to convey. I’m not someone who needs protecting—if anything, I’m someone he needs protecting from (though of course I’d never truly hurt him). Clearly, Marcus could haul me over his shoulder in half a second if he wanted to. But I’ve seen him annoyed with me, and even then, flipping me over his knee for a spanking is never his instinct. He yells at me, gets out whatever he has to say, we make up and then it’s him on his knees.

  Last week, in fact, when the now-infamous photo that launched hundreds of gossip website news items was taken, we were grabbing lunch at In-N-Out—a mutual guilty pleasure—and he was feeding me fries. If we’d been alone, he’d have been feeding me a lot more, but we were in the car and had to be at least a little discreet. When your life has been an open book since you were born, it’s nice to have some modicum of privacy when it comes to dating. No one even suspected we were dating—though according to the tabloids, I was seeing several Oscar winners and one pro hockey player, and may have had a threesome with a certain actor/director couple.

  Anyway, he was feeding them to me, and then serving himself. We were down to the last few. He held them in the air, making me open my mouth as he dangled them nearby. I caught the end of one, but that was it. Then he got out of the car. I chased him. It was a silly thing to do, but who says I can’t be silly once in a while? I think we all need a little more silliness in our lives. He’s been on me to start working out, so maybe it was his way of getting me to run after him. I did, and when I finally reached him, even in my five-inch heels, instead of rewarding me, he ate the fries—every last one. Popped them in his mouth and then gave me that grin that makes him look half his age. So I reached out my hand and slapped him. Not that hard, but hard enough. It wasn’t fake, but my anger was. I didn’t really care about the fries. It was instinctive—because I happen to know, from countless times Marcus has offered me his cheeks (both kinds), that he likes to be slapped. Spanked. Hurt. It triggers something in him, which in turn triggers something in me.

  I don’t usually mix business with pleasure, but there was something about Marcus from the moment he applied for the job, a curious mix of toughness and shyness. You don’t expect a man as hulking as he is (that’s really the only word for it) to be shy, but I caught it right away, and I must admit, it thrilled me. He was polite and deferential, all manners and graciousness. Once he started working for me, he knew he didn’t have to do much to make sure people kept their distance. I’ve employed other men his size, and even larger, in the past, who took out their aggression on the autograph seekers and paparazzi. Yes, I felt safe with them, but I also worried someone would take out a restraining order.

  The only restraining going on with Marcus was when I tied his wrists and ankles to the bed and teased him mercilessly. I felt the potential spark between us from that first day he applied to work for me. There was something about the way he held my hand and looked at me—not like an object, sexual or otherwise, or a potential meal ticket, but like a woman. His deep-brown eyes stared so intensely, I got the impression he’d give his life for me. Thankfully, I’ve never been in that kind of danger, though I do have him screen my mail and keep an eye out for potential stalkers.

  So while that photo tells a story, of course, like any photo, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It certainly doesn’t tell what happened after we got back in the car and went home. The rest of my staff know that when we head upstairs, we want to be alone. One of us will text or come downstairs if we need anything. The funny thing is that before Marcus, I never wanted to be alone, and I admit I probably abused my role as employer by making requests of my assistants and chefs night and day. But ever since
Marcus arrived, he’s been able to tame me in ways even the most proficient personal assistant never has. He loves to make me laugh, especially when I’m hell-bent on the opposite. When we close the door, we go into what feels like another dimension.

  I’m not me anymore—or at least, I’m not the girl everyone else thinks I am, the persona that’s sometimes hard to turn off. I’m not the girl whose photo has been snapped by everyone from Mario Testino to Annie Liebovitz, the one who’s appeared in ads for everything from cars to furniture to lipstick. Marcus sees beyond all that; he just wants me, unadorned, raw, naked. Maybe not literally, since I’m still a bit of a fashion diva even behind closed doors, with a special penchant for lingerie, but emotionally naked? For sure. Before him, all the men in my life were alpha males in public and private; they wanted to prove just how tough and strong and macho they were. Marcus, though, knows exactly what a stud he is—and because of that, he doesn’t mind stripping his clothes off instantly, revealing pure, thick muscle, bulging arms and thick hips, and a body I sometimes want to sink down and worship.

  This is what happens when it’s just the two of us, and it’s better than any French fry: He kneels before me, letting me tower over him in my favorite Christian Louboutin heels, the ones I reserve specifically for our private use. In my red lace teddy, I lift my breasts—which, contrary to what you may have read, are completely natural—out of the cups and press them together. He shudders before taking one nipple between his lips and sucking hard. It feels incredible, but I cram the other one in before either of us can get too comfortable, then grab the back of his head. He feasts on me, stuffing as much of my flesh in his mouth as he can. I don’t need to look to know how aroused he is; just thinking about it makes me grip him even harder. I dig my nails into the back of his neck and he maneuvers so each nipple is clamped between his lips while he firmly brushes his tongue against them. Inside, I’m tightening and pulsing and aching for him. The longer this goes on, the more feral I become.