The lights drop off as suddenly as they had come on and a side door opens. I blink, trying to get my vision back, and that man with the ponytail is back.
“This way,” he says softly, taking my arm.
“What happened?” I ask, suddenly panicking. “Did I make a mistake?”
“No,” he says, and I can see that he’s smiling. “Not at all. You did great.”
“Really?”
“Really. I think you’ll be pleased, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
He leads me down another hallway, past large paintings and statues, and places me into another room. It’s a lounge room, like the one before, but much smaller and without a bar. There’s one table and some couches.
“Go ahead and have a seat,” he says. “Your client will be in soon.”
“My client?” I ask. “Someone bought me?”
“Someone bought you.”
“How much did he pay?”
The man smiles. “Be patient. He’ll be here soon.”
He leaves and I’m left alone. I sit down at the table, heart hammering in my chest.
Someone really bought me. I have to admit, I never thought someone really would. Not after seeing all those other beautiful girls in the other room. They’re the kind of women that I thought men would want, not a plain girl like me. I’m five foot three and nothing special. My dark hair is thick and long, which I think is my best feature, although boyfriends have told me that it’s my ass. I don’t really know about that. I haven’t had a boyfriend in a few years now. I’m twenty-four, didn’t go to college, and wasted the prime years of my life.
I tap my nails on the tabletop, nervous as hell, not sure what to expect. Frankly, I’m afraid. The man that comes through the door will be the man that owns me for the next month. What if I hate him? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how I can do this for a whole month. I’m going to be someone’s toy, someone’s property. I’m going to submit to him because I need this money, and this is the best way I could find to get it.
I’m freaking out and I know it, but I can’t help myself. It’s overwhelming and so new. I want to get up and run away, get the hell out, but I know what’s waiting for me out in the real world is much worse.
I need this. It’s that simple. I can’t run away.
As I look up, the door slowly opens. My heart starts to beat erratically out of nerves and I feel like I might faint.
And then he steps into the room.
Tall and broad. Bright green eyes. Handsome as hell. He looks muscular under that perfectly tailored suit. He’s young, maybe in his early thirties, and I can’t help but stare at him.
This is the man who owns me. I know it deep down inside of me. He smiles at me and shuts the door behind him.
This can’t be real. He’s too handsome. He’s way too handsome, and young, and gorgeous, and oh crap, he’s looking at me with this sexy cocky grin that’s driving me insane.
“Hello, Aria,” he says, his voice rich and deep. “My name is Ethan. And I just spent a lot of money to make you mine.”
I can only nod, heart hammering in my chest, and I feel like I might pass out at any second.
3
Ethan
The first time I saw Aria, she was standing in the middle of a stage with lights glowing down all around her.
She looked perfect. That’s the only way I can describe it. The way she folded her hands in front of her and looked nervously at the ground made me instantly fascinated by her. I didn’t expect to actually bid, and really thought I wasn’t going to, not until I actually hit the button and wrote down a number.
The girls before Aria were all beautiful but none of them interested me. I’d seen women like them before, slept with women like them before, and I wasn’t interested in trying them again. They were too confident and too conventionally pretty. Aria was beautiful as well, but in a different way. Her long, thick hair framed her thin, pale face and made her blue eyes that much brighter. I couldn’t help but stare at her body as they had her spin around.
It was totally surreal. I was alone in my own little vestibule with a small computer screen in front of me. I could see the starting bid and I watched as men began to put money down on her. As soon as I saw that other men wanted her, I knew that I had to have her. I couldn’t let some other bastard take her home, not when I couldn’t be sure how they’d treat her.
It was a moment of insanity, but I wrote an absurdly high number and submitted it. There was a pause and then my bid was accepted. No other bids came through, and a minute later I won the auction.
After Aria left the stage, I was escorted out of my room by the same young woman that brought me in there. She took me down a series of hallways and left me outside of a room, saying that Aria is in there and that I can go in any time. She handed me a sheaf of papers with the winning bid amount on it and what appeared to be a contract.
Then she left, and that’s how I find myself standing outside of this room, my heart pounding.
I can’t believe how nervous I am to meet her. I’ve met thousands of beautiful women in my life and slept with a fair number of them, too. But I’ve never felt this nervous before. It’s absurd.
I own her. I bought this beautiful girl to keep for a month. I have responsibilities that were all described to me beforehand, like making sure she’s fed and clothed and made comfortable. She has to be able to contact her people once a day, or else they’ll come looking for her. And they physically check on her a few times as well, to make sure she’s not being abused. If I break terms, there will be consequences, though they didn’t say what kind of consequences.
I don’t plan on hurting her. I don’t know what I really plan on doing with her, to be totally honest. I don’t want to fuck some girl that I bought and who has to do what I want. That’s not fun, not at all.
As I stand there, it suddenly occurs to me what I have to do.
If I’m going to sleep with her, she has to want it. I can’t just take her because I paid for her. There’s no fun in that, and it makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable just thinking about it.
I know what I need to do. I have to seduce her. I have to make her want to do it.
That’s going to be hard. She’s an escort and it’s not likely that she genuinely wants to fuck her clients. She’s doing all of this for money, and I have to convince her to do it for sheer pleasure.
I have a month to pull it off. Maybe I’ll even get some companionship out of this deal if she is never seduced. It’ll be hard to know when she truly wants it, since it’s her job to make me feel like she does, but I’m a good judge of character.
It’s how I got so far in business. I can read people and understand what they really want from life. I know how to give it to them and how to take it away. I have to assume that I’ll be able to see through her bullshit and truly understand when she wants me and when she’s just putting on a performance for the man that bought her.
I can feel my nervousness slowly recede as I begin to plan how I’m going to do this. I feel good having an idea and there’s an excitement coursing through me, beneath all the uncertainty.