Queen Of The Silver Dollar

"Would you like to see something really special?" The way Maude asked the question made it virtually impossible for Duncan to say no; her hazel eyes sparkled with flirtatious excitement, and she let the tiniest hint of a smile quirk at the corners of her full, ruby lips as if to promise that they would break into a perfect, kissable grin the second he agreed. Her voice teased him with its own hints of things to come, leaving him unable to stop thinking about all the possibilities that Maude left hidden behind the veil of 'something really special'.

Even if it was just another rare coin, it would probably be special enough for Duncan; he liked to think of his collection as pretty impressive, but now that he was moving in more rarefied social circles, he was beginning to get a new understanding of just what 'impressive' meant when you had the kind of money to indulge in your hobbies to the fullest. Duncan knew intellectually that he had that same kind of wealth now, but he still couldn't quite bring himself to spend more money on a single penny than his parents had paid for their house. Somehow he still felt like the whole thing was a dream, and he would wake up in the morning back in his little studio apartment-cum-workshop struggling to make rent instead of holding a dozen patents that were worth a collective $500 million.

"Sure," he said, trying to pretend his hesitation was the kind of cool nonchalance that Maude and all the other old money billionaires seemed to possess without effort. He could tell that she must be an heiress of some sort; she behaved with such casual ease among the ultra-rich guests at Julian Chase's soiree that she had probably never known what it was like to be in awe of wealth and power. (Duncan had already learned that rich people didn't "throw parties". They had soirees, or cotillions, or get-togethers. Parties were strictly middle-class.)

Maude's smile widened, her lips forming into a lush Cupid's bow as her eyes darted to a case at the back of the room. "Come on," she said, taking his hand in hers and tugging him over to the display. (Another thing Duncan learned about the rich-they got competitive about their hobbies. If a thing was worth doing, it was worth overdoing; why store your rare coins in a book when you could dedicate three entire rooms of your house to showing them in frames and cases?)

Duncan followed along, his face breaking out in a smile of his own as Maude's mischievous grin proved to be infectious. "And you're sure this is okay?" he said, as they approached the display case that was apparently the 'something special' Maude was talking about. "Mister Chase-Julian-he doesn't mind us in here?"

Maude giggled musically. She sounded like she had special training to make her laughter sound as charming as it possibly could. "Julian is fine with anything I do," she said dismissively. "He's used to me wandering off with charming young men by now."

That probably meant something to people who regularly visited one of the three richest stockbrokers in America, but Duncan still felt like a complete outsider despite the social opportunities his newfound wealth had gotten him. He didn't know if Maude was supposed to be Julian Chase's daughter (he was too young to have a grown daughter, surely?) or a wife who was casual and callous about affairs or a mistress with whom he had an understanding or just a friend, part of a tangle of interwoven interests that seemed to tie together every moneyed family on the eastern seaboard.

Certainly if there was tension between Julian and Maude, he didn't let it show; back when they were in the big ballroom, Julian kept looking over at the two of them with a beaming, radiant affection that Duncan normally thought of as being the exclusive domain of newlyweds and family pets. And Duncan was pretty sure he wasn't the target of that stare. Apart from a chance encounter at a numismatist's, Duncan barely even knew the man. (Another lesson learned about the very wealthy-being rich and having the same hobby was enough to count as 'having two things in common'. Not that Duncan minded getting invited to a swanky mansion to eat fancy food and rub elbows with the high and mighty, but...)

Duncan's train of thought derailed as he got close enough to see what was in the display case. "Is that a..." He leaned a little closer to the glass, studying the coin in detail. There wasn't a card, but Duncan had been studying coins since he was seven years old. "I'll be damned. It is. A 1901 P Morgan Silver Dollar. And in mint condition, too." He let out a low whistle. It wasn't the most expensive coin in existence, but it was certainly in the top ten. You could probably pay for a four-bedroom house with it in most parts of the country, easily. Duncan had never expected to see one in that kind of shape; the one he had in his book back home was worn so heavily that the face of Libertas on the obverse was barely even there, but this looked just as crisp and clean as the day it was struck.

Maude leaned up behind him while he stared, tiny ringlets of her soft brown hair brushing against his neck. He could feel her breasts pressing into his back as she whispered into his ear, "Would you like to hold it?"

Duncan almost wasn't sure he heard her right at first. "Sorry, what?" he said, his brain going on pause while he tried to process the last few seconds. He still wasn't quite over the shock of seeing a $400,000 specimen of rare coin, and feeling Maude's warm, almost feverishly-warm body tight against him was its own species of very pleasant surprise, and then she was seriously offering to, to, what was all this? Was this a joke? Was this the hazing process for the nouveau riche? "I, you, what?" he asked again, his brain moving from pause to rewind all on its own.

"Would you like to hold it?" Maude asked. "In your hands. I know how to unlock the case, I can have it open in just a few seconds. Julian won't mind, I promise."

"I..." Duncan couldn't really make himself believe that, even with a beautiful woman leaning up behind him and writhing against him so slowly and gently while she talked that it was almost a tactile subliminal message. The coin was worth more than most people made in a year, more than some people made in a lifetime, and...and about as much as Julian Chase made in ten minutes of trading. Duncan forced himself to recalibrate his expectations of worth to the scale of people who'd been rich their whole lives. "Okay," he said, with a tiny gulp. "If you tell me where the gloves are, I can get them while you open the case."

Maude scoffed. Duncan had never heard someone actually, literally scoff before, but now he knew exactly what they were describing in all those old Victorian novels when they said that someone scoffed at an idea, because that was the exact sound Maude was making right now. "Gloves," she said. "We don't need gloves."

She leaned further in, pressing him a step closer to the case, and pushed a hidden button to pop the case open. "Just reach in and pick it up," she said, her cheek nuzzling his ear as she spoke softly to him. "It's not going to hurt it any." Her breath was warm, tickling him with every word. It was like she got turned on by mishandling antiques or something.

And Duncan knew full well that mishandling was exactly what it would be. Even if he was careful enough to pick it up by the edges instead of the face, the natural oils in his skin would corrode those perfect ridges. Only a tiny bit, perhaps, a bare millimeter here or there, but Duncan had only seen a few coins in such amazing condition, and certainly none with the kind of value of a Morgan dollar. Just picking it up, without taking any precautions at all, seemed almost like desecrating it. Julian had to have some cotton gloves around here if he was any kind of a collector, they just needed to find them and he could put them on and take a careful look. A very careful, very brief look.

That was what Duncan thought. But since he was also thinking about the way that Maude's hips swayed ever so slightly behind him, almost as if she was dancing to some unheard music, what he said was, "Um...I'm not sure that's a good idea." He could see his blushing reflection in the glass of the case, and he didn't want to do anything that might give Maude the idea to stop, but at the same time he couldn't just wreck the most incredible coin he'd ever seen. Deflecting with hesitation seemed to be his best option.

But Maude was having none of it. "You've been collecting these things for too long," she said, her hands slipping around to find a comfortable place to settle on his hips. "You've stopped really thinking of them as coins. Try to look at that silver dollar, Duncan, and see more than just a rare object. Think of the history of that coin. Over a hundred years of it, weighing down that ounce of precious metal."

Her hands moved with inexorable slowness as she spoke, like ivy crawling along a wall. "Just look at that bright silver coin, Duncan, and let yourself imagine what it must have been like to be the first person to hold it. Imagine the promise of that shining, gleaming coin, fresh from the mint to the bank, from the bank to the factory, from the factory right into the hands of a pretty young thing getting her day's wages in cash. That was a whole day's work, back when McKinley was President and America only had forty-five states. It could buy you a steak dinner and a whole bottle of wine, and when that girl held it, she felt like she was queen of the whole wide world."

Maude's hands massaged Duncan's chest now, but he barely noticed it on a conscious level. He was caught up in the mental picture she painted, stirred by the intensity of feeling in her voice. Somehow he never thought that something so simple could inspire such passion, especially from a woman who seemed as though she could lose a hundred dollar bill and never even notice, but he could hear the understanding dripping from her every word. The nameless, faceless woman from over a century ago came alive when Maude described her, and Duncan found himself staring at the coin with rapt attention.

"All that size, all that precious metal, it all made it feel heavier than holding four quarters," she went on. "There was something almost magical about it, the way that it always seemed like it was more than the sum of its parts. And when you held it, you knew that sooner or later you would have to break it up into nickels and dimes and feel that power run away into pennies in your pocket, but every day there was that moment of promise. That moment when it seemed like you had a fortune in your hands. Those people out there, they have their millions and billions but I promise you, Duncan. I promise you that nothing feels as good as holding a real genuine silver dollar in your palm."

Duncan could think of something that felt even better, and Maude was doing it right now. But somehow the way she whispered in his ear and the way her fingers crept down to brush against the tented fabric of his trousers tangled up in his head until the thought of holding the Morgan dollar took on an almost sexual pleasure in his mind. He couldn't remember the last time he had blinked; his eyes were fixed on the shining silver, bright and almost blazing under the lights of the display case. He felt almost paralyzed, caught between years of his old habits and the slow, sensuous promise of Maude's teasing touch.

"Absolutely nothing, Duncan," she said, her lips caressing his earlobe as she spoke. "It's like borrowing a little touch of godhood for a moment or two, letting that silver catch the light and knowing that you've got someone's undivided attention. Whether it's a barkeep or a piano player or a ticket taker, everybody listens to the woman with the silver dollar. Oh, not forever-sooner or later the money passes on to another hand, and you've got to work another day until your fingers bleed just to get your next dollar. But that's all for later, Duncan. We're living in the moment, and that moment feels so sweet. You can feel it, can't you?"

"Uh, uh-huh," Duncan muttered, his hips jerking forward involuntarily as Maude's hand teased him to his full length. He was losing track of the conversation; the way she was touching him left him distracted and dizzy with pleasure. But he knew what she wanted. He could feel the urgency in her voice, even as she wove her words around him in a spell that kept him focused on the sight of the coin and the feel of her fingers insinuating themselves into the waistband of his boxer shorts. The details tangled and twisted and knotted up in his head, but he listened to the woman with the silver dollar just like she said he would.

"That's right," she purred. "You can feel it. Any time you want. You can reach out, pick it up, and feel it in your hand. That pleasure. That power. That magic. Right now, Duncan. Right now." Duncan watched his hand moving out of the corner of his eyes, feeling strangely like it belonged to someone else. It didn't seem like his fingers at all reaching into the display case, extending toward the silver dollar with languorous ease. Maybe they weren't. He knew he wouldn't pick up that coin, so of course it had to be someone else giving in to Maude's whispered entreaties. Which meant that he couldn't stop it from happening. He just had to keep watching, keep nodding, keep listening, and just let everything occur naturally.

Maude's fingers wrapped around his cock. And he picked up the Morgan dollar.

It felt amazing, even better than the tugging sensation in his cock as Maude began to slowly slide her hand up and down his shaft. It felt like the coin had such weight, such majesty. It was filled with infinite possibilities and infinite power, and Duncan found that he couldn't take his eyes off it. All he could do was very gently, very slowly tilt the coin back and forth, playing the shining lights of the display over his eyes until his vision became nothing but a blaze of blinding light.

"That's it, Duncan," Maude whispered, the pace of her strokes increasing. "You see it now, don't you? She found a way to make that power last forever. The silver dollar passed from hand to hand, but the magic remained with her. Everyone who touched it shared in the spell, felt the special desire that she imbued into her coin. That moment of pregnant possibility, when the world was hers, locked into the metal for all eternity. And everyone who felt it became a part of the enchantment. Everyone listens to the woman with the silver dollar, Duncan. Even when she's not holding it anymore."

"Ev'ry...one," Duncan mumbled, his jaw feeling slack and loose from the lazy bliss that overwhelmed his thoughts. The coin tugged at his mind, capturing his will and his volition and leaving in its place pure, thoughtless devotion. Duncan held the coin, but he understood that only one person in the world truly possessed it. All he could do was serve that power, never control it. It felt so good to serve, though. Duncan's legs slowly buckled under him, but Maude was there to lower him to his knees.

"That's a good boy," Maude said, her voice throaty and thick with triumph. "You understand perfectly now, don't you? I'll be honest, there were a few years when I wasn't sure I would ever have any followers again. It's so hard to keep a treasure like this in circulation the way I thought I could when I performed the ritual, all those decades ago. But the more valuable it gets, the more powerful that desire, that need becomes. I just needed to find a way to steer the right people to my precious coin. And you, Duncan, are definitely one of the right people. Doesn't that feel good?"

She punctuated the word with a tug on Duncan's cock, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he answered with a moan. "Of course. Of course it does, my good boy. You can feel all that resistance vanishing into the coin, feel my spirit inside it reaching out to make you mine. That woman in the coin, that powerful woman you can see in your mind...she's me, isn't she?"

"Yes," Duncan gasped, feeling his balls tighten as Maude worked the precum over the tip and into the head of his cock until it was slick and tingling under her fingers. "Yes I see her yes yes yes..."

"She's the queen of the world, isn't she, Duncan?" Maude purred, stroking faster and faster until Duncan's mind went white with ecstasy.

"Yes please yes I yes, please!" Duncan didn't even know what he was pleading for anymore. He only knew that begging was the right way to address Maude now.

"Good boy," Maude said, in a tone of sudden, irresistible command. She gave his cock one final hard stroke. "Worship your queen."

Duncan's cock spurted a gush of semen into Maude's hand. He sagged into her arms, the orgasm overwhelming him as jet after jet of his cum soaked into the fabric of his clothes. The coin finally dropped from his nerveless fingers onto the floor, but Duncan knew the truth now. Even if he let it go, the silver dollar would never release him from its grip.

THE END