There was a trick to smiling at people you didn't care about without letting it look fake. After five years playing the good hostess at her husband's parties, Diana had it down perfectly. "So how did you two meet?" she asked the couple in front of her, the ones she seemed completely unable to find an excuse to slip away from. Lizzie and...Alison, she recalled. Knowing names was another important trick. You never knew when the woman whose name you were forgetting was one of your husband's important clients. (Although it was more likely that the woman whose name you were remembering was hoping to get a better deal by ingratiating herself with her agent's wife.)
The two of them looked at each other, sharing one of those dreadfully romantic secret smiles. "Well," said Lizzie. Alison joined in and the two of them said, in perfect unison, "that's...complicated." Diana tried not to let her smile sag.
"You see," Alison said, her eyes twinkling with a hint of sinful merriment, "I had just moved to the West Coast to be with Carrie, who was an old friend of mine who came out to California to find herself and discovered after three years that she was actually bi. And after I was here for three months, she decided that she was also poly. Well, we negotiated that for about six weeks before long story short, we agreed to each open up the relationship to one other person."
Diana nodded, already opening her memory hole wide so that she could let the story pass directly into it without touching her brain. She didn't have anything against gay people, she really didn't, but she couldn't help noticing that all of them thought that their personal life just seemed so terribly interesting. As though nobody ever slept around except them. Diana had heard a dozen dozen stories where the interpersonal connections looked like one of those conspiracy diagrams, and they never got more exciting just because more people were involved.
"Meanwhile," Lizzie said, "I was just getting out of a stage production in Minneapolis, and I was also just getting out of a three-year relationship with my director. And trust me when I say that putting a couple thousand miles and a chain of mountains between myself and that break-up was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life." She gave a mock shudder, her face momentarily contorting into theatrical disgust before shifting back to a grin.
Oh, and they talked in rhythm, too. That was good. That was just perfect. There was nothing anyone liked more than being the third person in a two-way conversation delivered at them at a machine-gun pace. Diana thought about pretending to spot a crisis in another part of the ballroom, but the party was moving too smoothly for that. She was a prisoner of her own murderous efficiency.
Alison jumped in right on the tail of Lizzie's sentence. "So now I have a hall pass good for one other person, and nobody to use it on. Remember, I've only been in LA for about four months, and three of those I was being a good little homebody and not even making eyes at another woman. I'm completely at a loss. So I fall back on my oldest dating strategy, going all the way back to high school-I go out for field hockey. I know, it's so cliche, right? But trust me, it works."
Diana wondered if they rehearsed this or something. It certainly had the feel of an old anecdote delivered so many times that whatever actual memories it was based on were long ago supplanted by the narrative. Although looking at Alison, Diana could definitely believe that she played sports of some sort. She was wearing a strapless evening gown that showed off some definite muscles across the shoulders-not bodybuilder levels of physique or anything, but definitely someone who exercised beyond simply jogging on the treadmill every day. It was a significant contrast to Lizzie's sylph-like figure.
Lizzie cut in smoothly with, "And here I was, back in LA and running through my cash supply pretty quickly. I got a few parts here and there, which helped pay the bills and keep the lights on, but I definitely had more time than money. Which means the club scene was out. And I already decided over the course of my long Drive of Shame that I was not getting into another relationship. So I decided to solve all my problems at once by picking up some clients at a kink club."
And just like clockwork, the kinky sex part of the anecdote kicked in. Diana managed, with the kind of heroic effort that attracted her husband to her in the first place, not to roll her eyes. Again, she didn't want to make any mean-spirited generalizations, but straight people didn't volunteer this kind of detail to total strangers at parties. From her husband's straight clients, she got 'we met on the set of our last movie', or 'we met in college and moved to LA together', or 'he's my coke dealer and screwing him is cheaper than paying for drugs'. (Okay, not that last one. But there were times it was pretty fucking obvious.)
Alison took up her part of the chorus. "After about two weeks of field hockey, I got three or four nibbles. Not literally, although yes, Sharon did give me a hickey in the locker room that I had to pretend happened during a game to avoid embarrassing questions, but that's a whole other story. I decided that I might as well jump in with both feet, so I started dating this girl named Melody who was about six inches taller than I was and looked like she bench-pressed minivans to get a workout."
Diana sincerely hoped there wasn't a quiz. She'd picked up that the two of them probably got together while in relationships with other people, but beyond that it was all just a blur. Thankfully, she only had to smile and nod and pretend to care. As long as her eyes didn't literally glaze over with disinterest, she could get away with just the occasional change in facial expression. The other two clearly didn't want any actual input anyway.
Lizzie picked up right where Alison left off. "I don't want to brag, but I definitely had some admirers at the club. Actually, I want to do more than not brag, because there are some people I met through my fetish that I still know today, and they'd probably just as soon not talk about where we met. Let's just say it was an exercise in networking as well as a BDSM thing and leave it at that. The point is, I made money off the boys and had my fun with the girls, and I was pretty sure that I was going to leave it at that."
Diana wished sometimes that she wasn't so very good at looking interested in other people. It was a great skill as a socialite, and it certainly made her a very good partner for her husband; he could always find someone younger and prettier in LA, but he wasn't going to find someone who could help keep three hundred egos placated at a time. But it did mean that when she ran into someone who loved to dominate the conversation along with their wife, she was stuck with it for the duration. Diana was simply too well-trained in the arts of politesse to escape.
Alison continued with, "After a few weeks, Melody and I were getting along pretty well. And by that, I mean..." She fanned her face theatrically, and wiggled her eyebrows. "I mean, I never thought of myself as vanilla, but that girl was insatiable. She practically taped my hand to the flogger by our third date, and I got a better workout beating her ass than I ever did playing hockey. Which was good, because Carrie had started to spend a lot more time with her new girlfriend Jo, so I was on my own a lot of nights."
Diana refused to let any reaction show. She was already half convinced that the whole thing was their way of entertaining themselves-find the richest, classiest woman in the room and tell a bawdy lesbian sex story to see if they could get a rise out of her. Well, that wasn't happening. Diana had no great interest in fetishes herself, but she'd certainly accommodated a man or two in her lifetime. She was no prude. She simply retreated a bit further into herself and let her automatic 'good hostess' persona take over.
As if on cue, Lizzie stepped in with, "Now, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering whether women even paid for the services of a dominatrix. You'd be surprised. A lot of women really feel like they get a better experience if the person topping them is also female. Not that we're more sensitive or tender or anything-trust me, people who come to a fetish club don't come looking for sensitive and tender. But we are very empathetic. That's important when it comes to sex and kink. You always want to guide someone into a submissive state very naturally, so that they don't ever feel uncomfortable or strange with the process. I always had my choice of clients. And if I started seeing some of them privately, for free, outside the club? Well, nobody complained. Especially not them."
Diana just let the words wash over her, her mind fully disengaged from the situation. It was honestly numbing, being the constant recipient of this non-stop dual-channel blast of personal information with no way to involve herself in any of it. She felt like the two of them were sandblasting her brain to mush. But she was going to continue to be the perfect conversationalist, even if she wasn't actually being allowed to participate in the conversation. She continued nodding in all the right places, maintaining eye contact with the speaker, and generally acting like she was listening even though she'd long since stopped thinking about anything the women were saying.
She glanced over to Alison as the woman continued. "It was about four months after I met Melody that she started bringing me along to her play parties. Which was weird, because technically speaking I wasn't allowed to play with anyone but her, but I got a full view of the floor show every night while Melody went at it. It was so weird-she was the kind of woman you'd peg for a total top from a mile away, but she went completely into subspace the second you even touched her. Anyone who pegged her for a top usually wound up pegging her in a very different way, if you get my drift. Which you probably don't, but that's okay because you can just keep nodding like that."
