The Body House Read online

  THE BODY HOUSE

  Iris Astres

  www.loose-id.com

  The Body House

  Copyright © January 2013 by Iris Astres

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  eISBN 9781623002114

  Editor: Rory Olsen

  Cover Artist: Dar Albert

  Published in the United States of America

  Loose Id LLC

  PO Box 809

  San Francisco CA 94104-0809

  www.loose-id.com

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning

  This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id LLC’s e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  * * * *

  DISCLAIMER: Please do not try any new sexual practice, especially those that might be found in our BDSM/fetish titles without the guidance of an experienced practitioner. Neither Loose Id LLC nor its authors will be responsible for any loss, harm, injury or death resulting from use of the information contained in any of its titles.

  Dedication

  To Ivan, who is part of everything I write.

  Acknowledgment

  Many thanks to Treva Harte for smiling when she heard the words “Male Prostitutes from Outer Space.”

  Chapter One

  No lies. The Backusian motto had been scrawled, graffiti-style, on the long brick wall of the reception room. Lying clouds the eyes and blocks your path to bliss.

  Malcolm glanced at the familiar saying, comfortable that both his vision and his bliss were safe. He never lied to any woman at the Body House. Not when he greeted them. Not when he took them upstairs. Not when he made love to them. Earth women never gave him reason to dissemble. When he said he wanted them, he meant it. Every time.

  Tonight, however, he was downstairs host, which meant he’d have to channel his sincerity into subtler seductions. With that in mind, Malcolm greeted the two walk-ins warmly, ushering the women to a leather couch beside the bar. He took the chair in front of them and smiled. A quick, assessing glance placed them both somewhere just past college-age. A little nervous and therefore endearing.

  “We want two men.” The tall one glanced with triumph at her friend, fueling her bravery with the other’s hesitation.

  An instigator, Malcolm thought. He smiled his encouragement.

  “We want them big and sexy with nice eyes. One for each of us.”

  Her companion folded her arms across her chest. “Make that one alien prostitute,” she corrected. “I’m waiting here.”

  Malcolm leaned back in his chair and nodded.

  They often came in pairs this way—one pretending to be certain while the other’s gaze kept shifting toward the door. These two looked so entrenched in their positions they were like an advertisement acting out the pros and cons of paid sexual servicing.

  Since coming to Earth, Malcolm must have heard a hundred such debates broadcast on all the infoscreens. By now he knew each argument by heart.

  Those in favor of the new alien brothels spoke of history and parity. Since men have access to paid sex, why shouldn’t women? That, he thought, was very true. He even felt a certain pride in helping with the overdue equalization. There were, after all, many benefits to sexual well-being—as the spokeswomen in favor of his honorable profession pointed out: A skilled lover’s attention increased blood flow, heightened mood, and subsequent mental acuity. It provided immunity to common ailments, stabilized addictive tendencies, reduced the less healthy appetites. All of this had been amply proven in a half-dozen ways.

  The counterarguments were meager by comparison, or so it seemed to Malcolm. Perhaps that was a cultural bias. On Backus the idea that sex was either shameful or immoral was nonsensical. It still baffled him that something so instinctive could cause guilt. Earth was a strange planet in many respects. Strange but lovely.

  “Can we choose?”

  Again the brunette demonstrated her enthusiasm. Malcolm let his smile curve a little more suggestively, meeting her gaze. “It’s a pleasant fantasy, isn’t it? A dozen or so men lined up for your inspection.” He gestured toward just such a phantom group beside the bar. “I would oblige you if I could, but my colleagues refuse. Rejection is unpleasant even for Backusians, and it’s so hard to walk back up those stairs alone.”

  It wasn’t quite a lie, but it was far from the full truth. The bigger problem with the lineup was that Earth women were talentless at picking lovers from a row of handsome men. They agonized or worked themselves into a frenzy, dragging three and four men off with them for ill-advised nights of excess.

  The current system, whereby men like Malcolm did the choosing, worked much better.

  “Is it true Backusians find all women attractive?”

  There was more than curiosity in the question. He looked at the brunette’s generous curves and honestly said, “All women are exquisite.”

  The shy girl huffed her disagreement on that point.

  “When they want to be,” Malcolm conceded. “Perhaps it’s true that our Backusian vision is a little different, but I wouldn’t say it’s more generous. Only purer. More acute.”

  “And is it true you’re always hard?”

  Correction, Malcolm thought—the reluctant friend was not so shy. He gave her his attention, in keeping with her unspoken request. She was a tiny thing. Her leggings bunched a bit at both the ankles and the knees. An uncombed pixie haircut made her eyes look positively huge. He smiled at the clever sexual ploy—to make oneself desirable without seeming to care.

  “Always hard?” he repeated. “I would say we’re always prehard, by which I mean we’re always ready to be ready.”

  The tall one’s posture softened. He felt the first real flush of interest drift toward him, and responded instantly.

  “Could it be you?” she said. Everything strident in her tone was gone, leaving her vulnerable and tempting.

  “I would love that,” he said, meaning it. “But my duties will keep me here this evening.”

  “It’s not because you’re noble.” For some reason Maix’s comment came into his head with some insistence. “It’s just because you like to be the boss.” His old friend’s jibe was true enough but not the reason Malcolm had been spending so much time downstairs. Mechanically, he glanced at both the door and camera image of the empty street outside. No movement and the vehicles were all accounted for.

  “This evening someone else will have the pleasure of your company,” he said. “If you come another night, you can ask for me, and I’ll be ready.”

  “Ready to be ready.”

  “That too.” He smiled into her flirtatious eyes.

  “Is it true Bods have to fuck to survive?” interrupted her friend.

  “Not quite.” Malcolm kept his smile. Inwardly he winced a little at the nickname. He’d told himself a hundred times to let it go. Bod was just a harmless shorthand—a hip truncation of the word body and a soundalike to bawd—both of which were fair
enough associations. Half his cohorts at the Body House used the word themselves. And still he thought the designation much too close to pod—a trigger to a paranoid Earth fantasy foretelling alien annihilation. Those associations didn’t do his brethren any good. Less so now that Earth First protests were increasing. Every day, demands for alien expulsion grew more violent in tone. Malcolm let his gaze shift quickly back out to the street.

  “We can survive without sex,” he said, sticking to the strictest truth. “Sex is necessary only if we want to thrive.” He stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go summon your companions.”

  “Do we have to say yes?” The tall one was still looking at him with obvious longing.

  Why didn’t he just take her? Call another host and go upstairs with her? He wanted to. If he were certain his replacement would be vigilant where safety was concerned, he’d do it in a heartbeat. Malcolm took the woman’s hand and felt the pull of her submission. “You don’t have to say yes to anything,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  She nodded. He looked at her smaller friend, who shrugged as if to say she never did as told in any case—a fact that he believed.

  “Two men will be here soon. If there’s an affinity, they’ll know what to do next.”

  “What if we don’t like them?”

  “Ah.” He looked at the scrawled slogan on the wall. In the three years since the brothel’s opening, not one single man had ever been sent back.

  “If not, we’ll try again.”

  Malcolm let go of her hand and took his leave, exiting reception into the dark hallway. Once alone he placed a finger on the scanpad by the door. The back screen lit up.

  Red.

  He stared at the silent alarm. Never a good thing to see.

  Checking the time stamp, Malcolm gritted out a curse. Whatever crises it announced had started twenty minutes earlier. Delays like this were unavoidable, as he well understood—you couldn’t be a lover worthy of the name if you allowed yourself to be distracted by a buzzing scanpad. But it still worried him that so much time had passed. No problem he’d ever encountered had improved with age.

  Chapter Two

  Malcolm abandoned the idea of messaging the watchman in favor of a quick trip to the Box. He took the stairs two at a time and entered the black room, glancing at the wall of screens for some sign of a problem. Nothing was alarming, nothing he could see at any rate.

  Then Fino turned, and Malcolm thought he understood.

  “How long’s it been?” he said, taking in the young man’s obvious discomfort.

  “Sixteen hours.”

  Malcolm recognized the telltale look that indicated a strong need for sex—Fino’s shifting gaze was reminiscent of an animal about to sit on its hind legs and howl. “I’m taking you off duty,” he said. “You can’t abstain for a full day. There isn’t any shame in that. Until you’re ready, we’ll split your service shifts in two.” He looked at the young man again. “Or three. Right now you need to bed someone. And,” he added, lightening his tone, “as luck would have it, I just left two women downstairs. Take the smaller one. She’ll want convincing; then she’ll want it all.”

  At that description Fino’s nostrils flared—a starving man who’d just been read the perfect menu.

  “For the other, I think Arch would be best.”

  “He’s off-site,” said Fino, reaching for the door. “If it’s someone with your looks she’s after, Haden’s free. He’s a little bigger but…” There wasn’t any need to finish that thought. Bigger never seemed to bother anyone.

  “You did the right thing to alert me,” Malcolm said, dismissing him. He checked the service roster for someone to take over the watch.

  “Oh shit,” said Fino.

  Malcolm turned. An unpleasant tingle started crawling up his back.

  “I forgot,” Fino said.

  “You forgot what?”

  “The alarm.”

  “What about it?” Malcolm’s tingle got a little worse.

  “Amin Clay is here.”

  Beyond blindly repeating that surprising statement, Malcolm had nothing to say. He stared, dumbfounded, and waited for an explanation, which came grudgingly from Fino, whose hand still gripped the door.

  “He came in through the private entrance. I saw it on the screen—some big guy in a fucking mood. I knew he looked familiar, but I didn’t know he owned the place.”

  “He owns every place.” Pointless adding how moronic anyone would have to be not to know it. Infoscreens buzzed daily with the deeds of Amin Clay, a business powerhouse who’d been at the forefront of interplanetary trade since its inception. If there was such a thing as a true visionary, Amin Clay was it. He’d financed or arranged to finance almost every Backusian venture on Earth, but he never bothered supervising operations. His first trip to the Body House after three years wouldn’t be a casual visit. Amin Clay was not a casual man.

  He studied the service roster with a practiced eye and did some mental shuffling. “Go,” he said without looking behind him. “I’ll see him when I find another watch and host.”

  “You’ll need to take another Bod with you,” said Fino.

  Malcolm turned a second time and frowned. “Why?”

  “He asked for two.”

  “Two what?”

  “Bods.” Fino looked with thinning patience at the door.

  “Stop,” said Malcolm coming up beside him. “Start again, and this time tell me everything.”

  He waited while the young man closed his eyes and drew a breath. “I saw this huge guy come in through the garden into the private room downstairs. No one ever uses that door at night, so it was hard to miss. At first to me he’s just an angry blur, but then I recognize he’s someone famous, so I turn on the sound. Marc and Olly were down there playing Blood and Roses. They stop. Get up. Marc goes over to him. The man stares for a minute; then I hear him say he wants a bottle of Draggo and a pot of some weird kind of tea brought to a room. After that he says he wants our two best Bods to come and entertain his wife.”

  “His wife?” Malcolm’s eyebrows lifted higher at this second unexpected bit of news. “Where was she?”

  “He was holding her against him like he always does. She had a scarf around her head. I couldn’t see her face.”

  “This happened twenty minutes ago?”

  “Half an hour.” Fino glanced up at the clock.

  Malcolm cursed. “Get Haden and go downstairs. I’ll take care of this.”

  “Marc took them to Eros,” Fino said on his way out. “And remember, he said two. I wouldn’t go alone if I were you.”

  The door closed. Malcolm made quick work of finding reassignments. All the while he considered the real problem: the tiny matter of two men to fuck the angry owner’s wife. He’d go himself, of course, and for his ally…

  Raj.

  The name imposed itself immediately. There were no second thoughts.

  Malcolm left the Box in a hurry. He cleared the railing and jumped from the staircase to the floor. Better to skip protocol and find Raj in his lodgings. Less than two minutes later he’d arrived.

  The panel slid immediately open. Raj never locked his door. He rose from his chair, greeting Malcolm with a pleasant look of inquiry.

  Raj was the senior member of their company—both in years and service. On Backus he had been a Temple Lover, raised among the finest teachers on the planet, which meant that he was unmatched in both knowledge of the art of pleasure and the skill needed for proper execution.

  Also, though Malcolm hoped it wouldn’t be important, Temple Lovers were particularly deadly in a fight.

  Tonight, as always, Raj was dressed for service, wearing the traditional Temple costume—black trousers under a silk tunic. Tradition never suited anyone so well.

  Malcolm, on the other hand, preferred the business suits of his adopted homeland. The one he’d chosen for this evening was his favorite—also black silk, a pearl-gray tie closing a crisp white shirt und
er a single-breasted jacket.

  “Amin Clay is here,” he said, deciding he should get right to the point. “He says he wants two men to gratify his wife.”

  “Ah,” said Raj. He didn’t seem particularly startled by the news.

  “I hear he’s in a temper.”

  “I don’t wonder.” Lazily Raj reached a hand toward the nearest scanpad, and a wall-sized infoscreen lit up across the room. Malcolm took a step toward it. He recognized Clay’s hulking figure glaring at the cameras. His arms were closed around a woman. She buried herself against him, all but hidden by his size. Underneath the footage ran the headlines: AMIN CLAY AND HIS WIFE, EMERGING FROM AN EARTH FIRST ATTACK ON THEIR HOME EARLIER TODAY.

  “Attack?” Malcolm asked.

  What he didn’t have to ask was why. The so-called grassroots organization known as Earth First had grown increasingly violent in its attempts to shut down interplanetary commerce. Not surprisingly, they’d made Amin Clay’s multiple holdings their primary target. Until now organizers had gone only for his money—sabotage, protests, legal wrangling. The two associated deaths were claimed to be completely accidental. Now, however, Earth Firsters appeared ready to add murder to their list of bargaining tools. Or kidnapping perhaps.

  “What did they want?” asked Malcolm.

  “No one knows for sure. A group of activists broke into the Clays’ home and ambushed them. Held the two at gunpoint. It’s unknown if they were there to make demands, enact a threat, or film an execution. Whatever the original intent, it didn’t go as planned.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened?” Raj looked at Malcolm’s face with some amusement. “Amin Clay happened. He got his start in life as a street thug—you knew that, didn’t you? Apparently he hasn’t lost his touch. If you can believe what they’re reporting, he killed one man with his bare hands. After which he used the first man’s gun to shoot his stunned accomplice and then stood and watched the third man run away.”