It’s a busy, hot night in the Quarter. The block of Royal Street in front of the hotel is clogged with cars caught behind a clattering horse-drawn carriage full of tourists. From a short distance away, George can still hear the second-lining wedding party they sat behind in traffic for almost twenty minutes before he decided to hop out of his chauffeured Bentley and walk the rest of the way to the hotel with Melvin at his side.
The Monteleone’s vast, marble-floored lobby is no quieter. Rowdy conventioneers process in and out of the Carousel Bar. Four drunken frat boys try holding each other up as they make their way to the elevators like exhausted contortionists performing their last act of the evening.
“I hate the French Quarter,” Melvin growls under his breath.
“Nonsense. The Quarter’s lovely. It’s the tourists you hate.”
“You aren’t riding up with those fools, are you?” Melvin thumbs one giant paw in the direction of the frat boys who have just piled inside one of the elevators. As the doors start to close, one of them starts sliding down the wall. The hand he brings to his mouth at the last second does little to contain the spray.
“She’s in the Faulkner Suite,” Dugas answers. “Other side of the hotel. Thank God.”
“And I don’t like you going to see this woman alone.”
“She’s harmless.”
“Harmless people aren’t this damn secretive.”
“It’s called discretion, Melvin. In another era, it was considered the equivalent of class.”
“In another era, you could have owned me for a couple hundred dollars.”
“You’re not my type.”
“I’m going up with you. Only way to make sure you don’t get barfed on.”
“You’re doing nothing of the kind. You’re staying down here in the lobby where I will meet you when I’m done.”
“You don’t even know her name, do you?”
“I most certainly do. Melvin, for a second, you might want to consider that I’m the one trying to keep this woman a secret from you.”
George gives Melvin a three-fingered wave good-bye, then the elevator doors close inches from his nose, leaving him alone in a quiet cell with his thoughts.
Why does he feel the need to explain himself to Melvin? The man is his bodyguard, not his father. George’s father has been dead for thirty years and the world is all the better for it. The clownish antics all throughout the Monteleone’s shiny, elegant lobby were nothing compared to the changes his daddy would undergo after a few bottles of Dixie beer. Having his only son go from poor white trash to multimillionaire real estate developer by the age of thirty didn’t give the old man any gratitude in his later years. George’s father died like he lived, a mean drunk who thought the world owed him, no matter how many homes and cushy rehabs his son paid for on his behalf.
As for Lilliane, is she truly as harmless as he just let on?
George can’t be sure. During his visit to The Desire Exchange, he witnessed many things that defied easy explanation, but he never felt threatened or in danger. Still, would the woman he’s here to meet lose her cool if she found out George had a bodyguard standing sentry just outside the door to her hotel room? Probably not.
Based on his past interactions with her, she doesn’t seem the type to lose her temper easily. Like him, she operates with the quiet confidence of someone with resources so vast they render raised voices or open threats too trivial to be relevant. Unlike him, she has the power to make elaborate, detailed fantasies reality. Sure, he’s got enough cash on hand to realize plenty of dreams, but not as quickly or as effectively as Lilliane and her colleagues.
Still, parking Melvin outside the door to her suite isn’t worth the risk. Screw Jonathan Claiborne and his confused little girlfriend, Miss Emily Blaine. George doesn’t want to endanger his own chances of visiting The Desire Exchange again. Although, given the depth and power of what he experienced during his first visit, he’s not sure that’s possible. Or necessary.
Someday, I’m gonna find out what was in that punch they made us drink and I’m going to bottle it and make a fortune.
No sooner has this thought entered his head, then a voice that sounds surprisingly like his mother’s says right back. You’ll do nothing of the kind, George Dugas. For once in your life, you’ll do what your father never could. Be grateful!
These sudden desires to do something other than enslave something—or someone!—he enjoys, is so unlike him, he wonders if Lilliane has cast an hypnotic, submissive spell down through the old walls of the historic hotel. But he’s not quite sure he’d call the woman magical. A magician, for sure, but truly, deeply, inherently magic? To apply that label, you had to believe in magic in the first place.
If someone pressed him on the subject—and they never would given he’d never shared his experiences with anyone—George would insist that what happened to him at The Exchange was some sort of drug-fueled hallucination, possibly brought on by chemicals that would make the FDA mess their shorts. An amazingly coherent, sustained and overpowering hallucination, a hallucination that released him from old, bad ideas about who he truly was. But a hallucination, nonetheless.
The results were magical, that was for sure.
Maybe that’s why he’s more than a little nervous about seeing Lilliane again.
Because she’d done something most people who knew him would’ve thought impossible. She’d turned him into a halfway decent guy.
Let’s not go that far, kid. Better, maybe. But decent?
He raises his hand to knock. Just then the door to the Faulkner Suite sweeps open over plush carpeting. Lilliane’s hair is brushed out in a rich, mahogany halo. Her slinky black dress is a few shades darker than her skin. The hotel suite is a bright symphony of turquoise upholstery and powder blue carpet. She moves through it like a knife cutting wedding cake.
George blinks. He needs a moment to contain himself. He wasn’t prepared for the shock of seeing her again. In his lifetime, he’s only met a few black women as self-possessed as Lilliane, and they all hightailed it out of the South as soon as they found the right husband or academic scholarship.
But it’s not Lilliane he’s seeing. He’s seeing what she turned into the last time they were together, when she slid both of her hands up his naked thighs, brought her lips gently to his, and whispered the mantra everyone at The Desire Exchange was so fond of, “Trust your fantasy.”
Within seconds, they were no longer on the dais she had asked him to step up onto, naked as the day he was born. Suddenly they were inside the elevator George rode to his office every day. Only now it was just George and that beautiful young lawyer he often shared a ride with. The one he’d never spoken more than a few words to, the one he always looked away from quickly because the sight of his sparkling blue eyes and delicate jawline and full lips always made him…frightened queasy sweaty nervous. George was no stranger to bedding beautiful men and women. But only if he was paying them. Only if he was in control. This young man was different. And when Lilliane brought her lips away from his, she was him. She was the handsome, bright-eyed young lawyer. And she was unfastening her tie and bringing one veiny, muscled hand—a man’s hand—to the side of George’s cheek.
The elevator’s walls seemed vaporous and thin, but George knew, on the same level you just know something in the middle of a dream, that he and the young man were trapped together in the elevator, finally. It was the very fantasy Lilliane had made him write out as part of his test and somehow now, her kiss, her touch, had made it a reality. But what he’d written during his test was just the beginning. What came next was wholly unexpected, wholly unpredictable, wholly…magic magic magic, he wants to whisper.
Don’t be an idiot, he’d told himself then. He says it to himself again now as he stands just inside the threshold to her suite, watching her pour him a scotch and soda without asking what he’d like to drink. It was the punch. The punch they made you drink. It was drugged.
But how could the drugs
have been so powerful as to recreate the divinely musky smell of the young lawyer’s cock? Or the devilish, oh-so-real glint in the young man’s blue eyes after George tore his suit off and he rocked onto his back on the elevator floor, his sandy blond hair tousled, drawing his powerful, naked legs back so he could offer himself up to George in full—cock, balls, everything? And the words! The words he’d spoken next, they’d pulled down a dam inside of George’s soul.
“Well, Mister Dugas, would you like to taste or would you like to watch?”
And without a moment’s hesitation, George gave a response that changed the course of his life and made every dollar he’d given to The Desire Exchange seem worthwhile. “Both. But mostly…I want to watch.”
Him? A voyeur? How could that be? On some level he’d always known, but he’d also doubted with a force that had made his knowledge useless. George Dugas was a master of the universe, a man who’d built entire neighborhoods, a man who had made and derailed careers, a man who had sampled almost every pleasure on offer among the world of consenting adults. And this was his greatest desire? To taste briefly, then set in motion and observe? It wasn’t possible. But the proof was in his feeling of total rapture as he watched the prone young man stroke his cock, still slick from the brief ministrations of George’s lips and tongue, until an expression of almost religious ecstasy transformed his fine, beautiful features and slender threads of cum shot from the tip. The proof was in the shuddering, hands-free orgasm that tore through George at the sight of the young lawyer’s body bucking and tensing against the elevator’s floor, his high, barking cries turning to rough growls.
The man rose to his knees, powerful chest heaving, cheeks flushed, his lips meeting George’s gasping mouth. The next thing George felt was the gentle scrape of Lilliane’s blood-red fingernails traveling down his bare thighs, circling the threads of his cum without disrupting them. The hallucination’s components faded gently, the elevator’s walls and floors, the heat radiating from the drained young lawyer, all of it replaced by Lilliane’s confident, steady touch and the feelings of The Desire Exchange’s other visitors watching him again from the nearby shadows.
“And now, Mister Dugas,” she had whispered to him. “From this day forward, your true fantasies shall be your guide.”
As George chokes back memories of this experience, Lilliane places a rock glass full of his favorite drink in his hand and gestures toward the nearby love seat.
There’s a spread of pictures on the table next to her. They’re Photoshop jobs created by Arthur Benoit’s men. The originals were society photos taken of George and various other muckety-mucks at two different charity events earlier that year. Gone are the muckety-mucks. In one set, the one in which George sports a blood-red Hermès necktie, Jonathan Claiborne has been inserted next to him in each image, dressed in a black designer suit he doesn’t own and probably couldn’t afford even after a solid month of visits to George’s pool house. The second set were taken at a swanky outdoor fundraiser for the Audubon Zoo. In each one, Emily Blaine holds a fleshy arm around his waist. Her white chenille sweater flatters her ample curves, but it’s the red polka dot skirt that doesn’t quite seem her style. It’s amazing what can be done on computers these days.
But the smiling people who have been grafted onto old photographs of George are not Emily and Jonathan anymore, he reminds himself. Not here, at least. Not right now. They are Lily Conran and Leonard Miller, and in less than a few days they’ve been given complete fictional lives on paper.
George spent most of that afternoon getting familiar with their new identities. Not because he’s all that interested in Arthur Benoit tracking down some estranged son he blew it with long before he got sick. There is, to George’s mind, a distinct advantage to being the man behind the curtain of Emily Blaine’s visit to The Desire Exchange. No doubt, she’ll want to keep the secret after her financial situation dramatically improves. Who knows what respectable high-powered friends she might start running with after she inherits Benoit’s money? And that might be exactly when Dugas might require a favor. Or three.
But there’s another motive he doesn’t feel quite as comfortable with, another surge of surprising altruism. Should this surprise him? After all, he’s the one who gave Emily Blaine—Lily Lily Lily—that grand lecture about how nobody ever acts on just one motive.
When you have an experience like he had at The Exchange, you can’t help but want to share it with others.
“How are you, George?” Lilliane asks, snapping him back to the present.
“Eager.”
“Too eager to have a seat apparently…”
She says it with a smile, but it has the force of a command. The next thing he knows, he’s on the love seat, trying not to fidget.
“Eager?” Lilliane asks.
“For us to come to an arrangement.”
“For your friends, you mean? Lily and…Leonard”
“I think they’re prime candidates.”
“Candidates?”
“For The Exchange,” George adds.
“Yes. George, I’m aware we’re discussing The Exchange. I’m just a bit taken aback by your language.”
“I’m sorry… My language? What do you—”
“Well, you just sound so clinical. That’s all. So businesslike. Did your visit with us not end with us specifically requesting that you refer your friends to us?”
“Provided they were single,” he answers too quickly. Is his face red? He feels hot. “And rich enough to afford it.”
She gives him another disarming smile. Then she studies him. The force of her gaze chills the pit of his stomach. Makes sense, he thinks. After all, the last time they were together, she pretty much stared right into his soul, didn’t she?
No, kid. It was the punch. You saw a lot of crazy things because of the punch and she just whispered all the right words to trigger your lustful thoughts. Get a hold of yourself.
“And so are you not doing exactly what it is we asked you to do?” Lilliane asks him now.
Sorta. But with a twist.
“I am… It’s just…”
“Just what, George?”
“The last time we were together was… It was powerful. And I wasn’t prepared for how I’d feel when I saw you again and I just—”
Avoiding one truth has forced him to confess another, one far more personal and revealing. She makes a small, indulgent sound in her throat.
“Have you been intimate with either of them?” she asks.
“No.”
“Good. That’s good. It’s complicated to send a lover to The Exchange.”
“Why’s that?” He knows full well why it is, but he wants to keep her talking so he has fewer chances of lying…badly.
“Chances are, they’ll come back changed. That can be very damaging to a preexisting relationship. Were you not changed by your time with us, George?”
“I was…”
“I hope so.”
“Do it again,” he whispers. “Change me again, Lilliane.”
All life seems to drain from her expression.
His cheeks flame.
The direct approach usually suits him in life, but these words slipped from him with a child’s careless enthusiasm. And without meaning to, he’s set her up. Could she alter the very air around them just by running her fingernails along his skin, just by bringing her lips to his? Could she unleash his fantasy without the aid of some silly punch that tasted like sugar water with a hint of Chloraseptic?
“Do you need to be changed again?” she asks quietly. But he can tell his question has thrown her. She straightens, running one hand briefly along the back of her neck as if to wipe away a stray drop of water. Or sweat.
Does she sweat? Was she sweating that night on the ship? Is she…
Are you human?
He’s so relieved he didn’t voice this question, he’s able to get his composure back.
“Of course, if you wish to return,” Lilliane says, ??
?we could arrange it. And there would be a process, just like the last time. But I thought tonight we were here to discuss—”
“Lily,” he cuts her off. “And Leonard. Yes, I’m sorry…”
“You called them prime candidates. Why?”
“They’re both lost,” he says. “They both believe they’re in control of their lives. But what they want…what they really want, it runs counter to who they think they are. Isn’t that what you do? You show people who they truly are?”
“We show them what they really want. There’s a difference.”
“Yes, of course. But you can’t be who you are until you know what you want.”
“Or who you want,” she says. A shadow passes over her face. She stares down at the carpet by his feet, chews her lower lip absently before appearing to remember George is still seated across from her. “It’s like we told all of you—”
“Trust your fantasy,” George whispers.
“What you trust it to do is up to you. Some people live out their fantasy with us just once, and they’re set free. Because that’s all they needed. Their system is purged. Their heart begins anew when they leave us. But for others, the fantasy they behold, the fantasy they live out, it sets the course of their future. It doesn’t release their heart, it guides their heart. Which one are you, George?”
“Let’s just say I threw out all that bondage equipment that was taking up so much space in my attic. These days, all I need is a comfy chair and a good view.”
Lilliane’s rich laughter sounds satisfied. She rises to her feet and leafs through the photographs of Jonathan and Emily’s alter egos.
“Your friends are very beautiful,” she says. “And very young. Younger than most of the people we see.”