Elle
He was late.
Elle blew out a frustrated breath and smoothed her palms down her black pencil skirt. It crackled under her fingertips, the fabric thick and luxurious. Her blouse was the exact opposite; cream water silk. She’d discarded her bra so that her nipples distended through the material. She’d donned the thigh high stockings Jackson liked, with the black line running down the calves, and black pumps—Louboutin knockoffs, complete with the red backing beneath the shoes.
Aside from her prominent nipples, she wouldn’t have looked out of place in any Melbournian office, but these were Elle’s dress-up clothes—each item bought with the specific purpose of embodying a role. A role that drove her boyfriend rabid with lust. A role she could only fulfill once he got home.
Unable to help herself, she glanced back up at the clock. Ten minutes late.
Anxiety always made Elle’s skin itch, and she began scratching her neck. Jackson was always on time, even when he wasn’t anticipating hot sex, it was one of his defining attributes, like being handsome, or knowing a lot about cheese. Was he caught in a traffic jam? Had he been held up at the office by a difficult client? Or was he lying in his car, his neck bent into a ninety degree angle, the airbags deployed all around his magnificent face?
“Shut up,” Elle said aloud, forcing her hand away from its phantom itch.
It was quiet in their Docklands apartment, and while she usually relished quiet, she’d forgotten after all these weeks with an unwelcome houseguest, what it felt like to be home alone.
Although, suppose she wasn’t alone? Suppose Valeraine was hiding in the pantry, plotting to burst out right when Elle and her son were in flagrante delicto.
“Hello?” she called. “Mrs. Chevalier?”
There was no response. It seemed despite her personal mission to be as big a ball-ache as possible, Jackson’s mum had gone to the ballet.
Valeraine had abandoned her oldest son and his father in Australia when Jackson was eleven. Once back in her native France, she remarried within a year, and had three more children with her new husband.
While she and Jackson had managed to establish and maintain a relatively good relationship in his late teens, Valeraine had stoutly refused to visit him in ‘that horrible place,’ as she referred to all of Australia. She was happy to host Jackson at her château when he flew back to Lyon, but she was done with the Great Southern Land.
At least that was her story until Jackson went and got himself a bona fide girlfriend.
Elle didn’t think it was a coincidence that Valeraine had shown up for the first time in literal decades, two months after she and Jackson moved in together. It was her belief that Valeraine Chevalier had been closely monitoring her son’s romantic situation from the other side of the world and had at first dismissed Elle as an anomaly. She was Jackson’s first long-term girlfriend perhaps, but no real threat to her infamously slutty son’s love and loyalty. After all, she was just a classless, flat-chested Australian who had a job working outside of all the unimaginable things. How could her elegant, well-educated and charismatic son possibly settle for such a female? Valeraine had probably assumed Jackson would give her the old heave-ho before they reached their one-year anniversary.
To be honest, Elle had kind of thought the same thing. She was okay—if you were into blondes and road rage and not touching huge boobs—but Jackson was unbelievably handsome. He could charm the paint off the Sistine Chapel and had a tongue like a washing machine on spin cycle. His father was loaded and his mother owned a château. As much as she loved the guy, and she loved him with every single fibre of her person, she stayed braced for the inevitable end.
“You’ll change your mind,” she was prone to telling Jackson when she was really, really tanked. “What you feel for me will wear off and you’ll go back to having sex with girls on your face-level.”
“Ellie,” he would always say in his buttery French accent. “I am yours, I will always be yours, there is no one I find more beautiful than you. You still have doubts, but that’s okay, in time I will prove to you there can never be anyone else. Now please drink this glass of water or you’ll be very unhappy tomorrow.”
He was right, about the water and about their love. They’d stayed wonderfully, blissfully, effortlessly together. It was stupid really, how happy Elle was. How happy Jackson made her. Entering a room and seeing his smile never failed to take her mood from a three to at least an eight.
They meshed in ways she never could have anticipated—the small, stupid things that were so incredibly important when you were a couple, like the temperature you liked the apartment kept at and the kind of bread you preferred for toast.
Elle found herself adoring the weirdest things about her boyfriend; that he grew stray hairs on his back which he plucked, that he said ‘perhaps’ instead of ‘maybe,’ that he helped her overcome her crippling cheese phobia by finding a Dutch edam she now couldn’t live without.
And Jackson had changed for her too, buying a compost bin and not making constant allusions to his own good looks, telling his mates to knock it off when they said something sexist instead of laughing awkwardly and then feeling guilty later.
Best of all, Elle had convinced him to start following football, actual Australian Rules football, not stupid soccer, and was gratified to find his love of the Hawks soon outstripped her own. But better than that. The sex.
Holy fucking shit, the sex was awesome. Not just occasionally awesome, always awesome. She’d been worried that having only one bedmate would grow boring for Jackson, but he’d relished learning what she liked and exactly how to nudge at her boundaries. They both had. Left to their own devices, they’d become experts at fucking one another, causing new worlds of pleasure to open up for both of them. Far from sinking into monotony, Elle regularly had the kind of climaxes that left her so swollen and satisfied it was hard to pee afterward.
Yes, after two years it was undeniable; she and Jackson had found a priceless black pearl in the shitheap of life. They were meant to be. So Elle had finally done what Jackson had been begging her to do from the moment they started dating; she’d moved into his Docklands apartment.
Cue Valeraine Chevalier.
A former model of some renown, Jackson’s mother was the obvious source of her son’s beauty. Her lush figure, dark eyes, and angular cheekbones were coupled with a charm that would have made Stalin blush. Not that Elle had ever experienced said charm. No, from the moment Mrs. Chevalier’s suede boots came tapping into Jackson’s apartment, it was clear his mother hated the ever-loving fuck out of her. And Mrs. Chevalier wasn’t anyone you wanted hating you. That woman knew how to fight dirty. At their very first meal together she refused to speak anything other than French, despite Jackson’s request they stick to a language his partner could understand.
Whenever Valeraine did deign to speak Elle’s native tongue, it was to make observations like ‘your eyes are veree far apart, why is that?’ and ‘such leetle hips Jacq, how will she ever give you babies with such teensy-tiny hips?’ She refused to call Elle ‘Elle,’ instead using her hated full name: Eloise. ‘I like it betteah, it reminds me of the leetle girl from the stories.’
Mrs. Chevalier had refused to ask ‘Eloise’ anything about her job, life, family, and throughout an agonising five course meal, behaved as though someone had placed an inconveniently human-sized origami crane beside her and her glorious son.
“I don’t know why she's acting like this,” Jackson whispered as they lay cuddling in bed later that night. “Perhaps she and Marius are having trouble? It would be just like him to act like a selfish mule.”
Marius was Jackson’s wealthy stepfather, whom he hated for reasons Elle never fully understood. Jackson was prone to saying things like “he’s not a bad man, he’s just a *series of incomprehensible French swear words*.”
“Maybe,” Elle said. “Or maybe your mum’s upset about something else? Are your brothers and sister okay?”
Elle had spoken to Jackson’s half-siblings a few times on Skype. Unlike their forbearer, they were always friendly, interested in her job, accent, and relationship with their older brother.
“Yes, as far as I know,” Jackson said, kissing her cheeks and neck. “Amboise is in Hamburg with work, Teddy is still backpacking in South America, and Therese just started university.”
“Where is she studying again?”
“ENS, École Normale Supérieure.”
“Is that in Lyon?”
“No, Paris. She’s living with one of my cousins, I think.”
“Hmm.”
It occurred to Elle that after decades of motherhood, all of Valeraine’s children had just left home. Experience had taught her this was often hard for parents, especially those who didn’t have a lot else going on in their lives. Her best friend Tory’s mum had gone on an insane Paleo diet when Mel, her youngest daughter, moved to Berlin to be an artist’s model. She eventually gave herself IBS and had to go on Valium.
Elle thought about telling Jackson about her theory, then decided to keep it to herself. Despite her chequered history and obvious faults, Jackson loved his mum, and Elle had seen enough sitcoms to know that openly criticizing a man’s mother was welcoming hell into one’s home and vagina, and she really liked both of those things. She made a decision to, for the first time in her uncompromising rageaholic life, bite her tongue.
“I don’t mind how your mum acts,” she told Jackson. “It’s only for a week. I can suck it up.”
But as one week folded into two, and then three, the situation only got worse. Valeraine started openly announcing that Jackson, who’d just opened a boutique consultancy firm, needed a better job. Like one in France working for her husband. And maybe a new car, apartment, and girlfriend to go with it.
“I like Melbourne, Maman,” Jackson said with ever-increasing exasperation. “I do not wish to live in Lyon, or anywhere else. My friends and business are here, not to mention Papa.”
The subject of Jackson’s father, if nothing else, shut Valeraine up. But not for long. Elle’s fresh nemesis couldn’t seem to stop mentioning how odd-looking, charmless, and just generally shit she thought Elle was. She mentioned it in French, but Elle could tell from Valeraine’s sidelong looks and Jackson’s scowls what was being discussed. As a feminist, she’d always struggled to criticize women, especially for stereotypical things like cattiness. That Mrs. Chevalier was being such a mother-in-law cliché was a huge source of irritation for her. Why did she even care who her thirty-year-old son was humping, and if that person looked a bit like an albino? It was none of her damn business. Yet, Elle was determined not to ruin true love by going full rage-troll on her boyfriend’s mum. She nodded blandly, she hummed ballads in her head, she ignored the constant bitching, but as the three-week mark came and went and Valeraine showed no signs of booking a flight home, the cracks began to show.
When she busted an intern referring to her friend Tory as ‘a woggy heifer,’ she shouted at him until he cried.
Incidents like that were starting to break out like small fires in the forest of her life and she was worried the whole thing was set to blaze to the ground. Tolerance of other people’s cruelty had never been one of her strong points and her legendary temper was only growing worse now that Valeraine—demon that she was—had successfully railroaded Elle’s sex life.
Elle was a Domme, or a Top, or whatever you wanted to call a woman who liked taking the reins in bed. And because the universe occasionally got things right; Jackson had apparently been terraformed to cater to her needs. He got off on being tied down, punished, teased, and fucked hard. Together they’d managed to channel a lot of her natural aggression into blisteringly hot sex which they’d had pretty much whenever they were alone in a room together.
Since moving in they’d fallen into a particular routine. Elle arrived home from work first, showered, changed into something sexier than canvas pants and Blundstones, and sat on their bed, planning what she was going to do to Jackson. Then the instant her boyfriend walked through the door, she jumped him. Once their sweat had cooled, they made a lateish dinner, drank wine, talked about their day, snuggled, and then fell asleep, content with the world and their own insignificant roles within it.
That was not what was happening now.
These days, Elle arrived home, tired and covered in dirt, to a look of utter contempt from Jackson’s mother. When she got out of the shower, which lasted three times as long as it usually would so she could avoid talking to Valeraine, Jackson would give her a forehead smooch, and he and Mrs. Chevalier would resume babbling away in French.
The three of them would go out to dinner at one of the trendy waterside restaurants that populated Dockland, so Jackson’s mum wouldn’t be forced to endure an evening at home or—God forbid—eat something Elle cooked. Together they would consume little bits of food on large plates and Elle would drink between four and nine glasses of wine so she wouldn’t leap onto the dining table and start throttling the woman standing between her and all that was good in the world.
Trying to have sex when you were full of croquettes, alcohol, and bitterness was hard, but she and Jackson managed a speedy, watered down version of their usual play. At least, until the fifth night of Valeraine’s stay, when she’d come into their bedroom and found Elle sitting on her son's face and screamed as though all the bats of hell had flown into her mouth and eyes.
Credit where credit was due, that had been pretty disturbing. Still, the woman shouldn’t have come barging into their bedroom at eleven o’clock at night. Unless of course, she’d heard sex noises and decided to disturb them on purpose, thus ruining the only pleasure Elle still had in her life.
Elle generally thought the worst of people, because people were generally the worst. And while Jackson maintained his mother’s night-time visit was an accident, she remained convinced Valeraine was upgrading her attempts to sabotage her and Jackson’s relationship, which was why she refused, point blank, to apologize for subjecting Valeraine to the sight of her hovering naked over her kid’s face.
“What does she want me to say?” she’d asked Tory as they examined bandicoot crap the next day. “Oh, sorry your adult son was performing a sex act on me behind a closed door in our own fucking house?”
Tory laughed good-naturedly. “That is pretty messed up but maybe you should say sorry, just to try to keep the peace?”
“Fuck that.” Elle pulled up her goggles so Tory could see how serious she was. “I’ve tried to play fair. She’s a butthole. The sooner she buggers off back to France to hassle her other kids, the better.”
Tory did not seem very surprised by this declaration. Then again, she had known Elle since university, a place where she’d gotten into more nightclub punch-ons than most football players. She set aside her tweezers and pulled up her own goggles. “Look man, I get why you’re feeling frustrated, this situations sucks, but are you sure you want to go to war with this woman? From what Ben’s told me, she’s one mental biatch.”
Ben was Tory’s husband and an old friend of Jacksons. Elle flicked a piece of scat off her thumb. “How would Ben know? This is the first time she’s come to Australia.”
“He and Jackson were mates when they were kids,” Tory reminded her. “He met her when she and Franco were still married. He also heard her getting shitfaced and screaming about how she wanted to go back to Lyon. She threw an ashtray at him once. Franco that is, not Ben.”
Elle gaped at her. “And people think I have anger problems, Jesus.”
“Yeah, apparently it happened all the time. Ben said Jackson used to play in the shed so he could try to ignore them.”
Elle pictured a young Jackson camping out in a shed, probably getting covered in spiders and fly-crap, and her anger toward Valeraine trebled. “God, I hate her. If she was a great mum and she thought I was a waste of space that would be one thing, but she’s been such a shit mum and she still has the nerve to criticise me literally all of the time. I wish I could point that out and then drop-kick her onto a plane back to France.”
“Elle,” Tory said in a warning voice. “You can’t.”
“I know, I’m just saying I have no idea why she hates me. We barely even spoke before she came here and I am—seriously, Tory, I mean it—so nice to her.”
Her friend tapped the end of her tweezers against her chin. “Wasn’t she pissed off because Jackson didn’t go home to France last year? That was your fault, remember?”
“Shit! I forgot about that!”
Ever since he was twelve, Jackson had flown to Lyon every winter to maintain his tan, accent, and relationship with his mother and siblings. But last year, he had stayed home. Elle couldn’t take any time off work, and Jackson had refused to spend six weeks without her as he had in the first year of their relationship. Valeraine had apparently been devastated when he told her he wasn’t coming, something that was a lot easier to not care about when she was safely in France.
“Fuck,” Elle whispered. “I broke an eighteen-year tradition.”
“Exactly,” Tory turned an unusually hard piece of bandicoot crap over in her gloved hands. “You’re a huge threat to their relationship. You have real influence over Jackson’s behavior, and you’re his top priority. Plus, if you guys get married and have kids, he’ll never emigrate back to France, which I bet is what Mrs. Chevalier always wanted—what?”
Elle made a face. “Just, you know…marriage and kids. Seems so fucked up.”
“What’s fucked up about it? You and Jackson are living together, surely you’ve discussed getting engaged?”
Elle gave another involuntary grimace. “I dunno. We joke about it sometimes, but the idea of actually doing it. Of having to like, wear a diamond ring, and be all ‘neeeeeh I’m engaaaaged. Have you met my fiaaaancé?’ It makes me wanna die.”
Tory rolled her eyes. “You know you don’t have to act like a pretentious twat when you get engaged, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say and yet I never see evidence to the contrary.” Elle shook her head. “Anyway, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about Jackson’s mum and why I should throw water in her face and see if she dissolves.”
Tory sighed. “You know, maybe, instead of waterboarding her, you could just ask her to leave?”
Elle laughed and even to her own ears it sounded like the laughter of the damned. “Good luck with that. When Jackson hinted she was staying longer than she said she would, the woman cried for three freaking hours. No. If I want any time alone with Jackson I’m going to have to stoop down to her level.”
Tory’s eyebrows drew together. “Elle. Seriously. Flying ashtrays. Hitting you in the temple and killing you.”
Elle stared at her friend in disgust. “Do you even know who you’re talking to, Tory?”
“A person slowly going insane through lack of sex?”
“No,” Elle said hotly. “A woman who was once thrown out of a Violent Soho gig for shoving too hard in the mosh pit. Do you know what that means? I’m not afraid of anything. Not flying ashtrays, not climate change, and not some ex-model trying to ruin my relationship with a son she abandoned so she could chill on the other side of the world for eighteen fucking years.”
“Elle—”
“Because I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough cockblocking and nit-picking and general horribleness about the way I look—”
“Elle?”
“My eyes are not that far apart, Tory!” Elle slammed her fist onto the desk, making bandicoot crap leap into the air. “Jackson happens to think I look like a seraph!”
“Um, okay,” Tory said. “But do me a favor? Lay off the Red Bull?”
Elle, who’d already planned on returning to the vending machine, didn’t answer.
That afternoon Elle came home and she and Jackson went down to the shops ‘to get milk.’ Instead, they had a fight, one of the first real fights of their relationship that wasn’t about cheese. Elle told him his mum wanted to break them up, Jackson said she was being paranoid, his mother was leaving soon, and they just needed to be patient a little longer.
Finally, they agreed to disagree and concluded that if Jackson couldn’t get rid of his mother in the next three hours, they needed more alone time. STAT. So Jackson purchased Valeraine and a friend from her ashtray-throwing days tickets to the ballet, followed by a cocktail-tasting event. After first expressing her surprise that Melbourne exhibited anything more sophisticated than kangaroo fights, Valeraine agreed to go, and Elle and Jackson began planning their own evening of indulgence, which wouldn’t be the least bit sophisticated.
Except now that Elle was all gussied up and waiting for the pièce de résistance—Jackson’s cock—its owner was missing in action and was now seventeen minutes late.
Undistracted by sensual pleasures, Elle realized her roleplaying pumps made her feet sweat, a decidedly unsexy sensation.
She kicked them off, sat down at the dining table and studied the shining wooden surface. Upon it, she’d placed a spiral bound exercise book, two pens, and a long metal ruler. It was in perfect mimicry of how she used to do up her desk at school, except on the front page of the exercise book, she’d written two lines.
‘I will behave in class.’
Please repeat one thousand times.
She stared at the words, so lovingly crafted to begin one of her and Jackson’s favorite scenes. Another glance at the clock told her Valeraine would be home in three hours. Dear God, she hoped Jackson arrived soon.