Content Note:
Incest
The Avenue, being only a few thousand miles from Cox Island, is a place I visited often while at college. My first date with Freya was to an opera there, and in my final year, following the severing of our love, I attended many concerts there - but never without a hateful misery. What joy could there be in music when my heart was broken.
No joy, but music is so often beauty from desolation. Music can take a broken heart and shatter it anew, and in doing so can heal it too. I was no concert performer, but the hours I spent pouring passion and grief into the piano that year helped me to continue.
Since then, I had declined my father's half-hearted invitations to join him and Eliza when they travelled there in search of culture and high society. For years, the Avenue was where Freya and I had been in love, and to go there would only reopen that wound.
But everything had changed. Freya had come back into my life. Perhaps there could be no mending the hurt I had caused her, but it had seemed to me, at The Beach, that her coldness towards me, the much deserved anger, had given way. To what, I could not say, but the idea of joining my father and sister in their new home on the Avenue no longer seemed quite so daunting.
I could not, anyway, live forever as Rosa's guest in her house on Kell Island, just as I could not live forever as Mara's guest on Ux. Like it or not, my home was still with my father and sister, and sooner rather than later I would need to face that reality. Or find some occupation that would gain me independence from the dwindling Elliott fortune.
What would it be like to work for a living? What would I do? What could I do, for that matter? Could I serve coffee and cake all day in a posh cafΓ©? Or be one of those young women who sell themselves for the pleasure of others? Could I be charming for a stranger, talk music over cocktails and poetry over dinner, and afterwards scream with pretended pleasure as I fucked professionally?
I'd always lacked the courage for that. It had been my fear of the great unknown, as much as my love for Rosa and my respect for her advice, that had persuaded me to accept chastity and deny Freya. Not a day had passed since that I did not regret that act of cowardice.
There could be no halfway ground. My father would not approve, just as he had not approved of Freya. Either I was his daughter and thus an Elliott, a product of privilege and above such trivialities as employment, or I was nothing to him.
For the first time in my life, a life without the Elliott safety net did not seem impossible. I was not, however, quite ready to dare it.
Outside of the cultural heart, the Avenue is arranged in concentric rings of houses. Each ring of houses has a distinct character, some a blaze of colour from carefully maintained gardens, some tightly terraced with avenues and parks all around.
The outermost ring is the wealthiest by far, grand houses within even grander gardens, belonging to families whose stratospheric wealth spans multiple star systems, and who visit O-Stred whenever the whim takes them.
The innermost ring, carefully concealed from view by tall trees, is a dense sprawl of small apartments and a huge variety of shops selling the basics of life to those with no fortune to subsist on. The cafΓ© waitresses and sex workers and all those in between. There life is bustling and energetic, in contrast to the sparse and sedate atmosphere of the outer circles.
The industry of the Avenue is catering to the wealthy. From the finest blends of tea and the most artistically decorated cakes, to the most deviant sexual perversions. A murmur of praise from the right lips can raise an unknown to celebrity.
One such was Mistress Clay, a practitioner of the ancient art of kinbaku, who I encountered on the steps of my new home. She had in the way she dressed and carried herself an air of precision, and an aura of confidence that I found a little intimidating as she watched me walk from the taxi to the house.
I was saved from my indecision about how to address her by the front door opening abruptly. "Mistress!" Eliza said with a happy cry, followed by frown of equally abrupt disappointment. "Ana," she added reluctantly, and opened the door for us both to enter. "Father!" she shouted up the marble-effect stairs. "Ana's here."
With that she lost all interest in me, practically dragging Mistress Clay into a large side room, and closing the door firmly. "Welcome, Ana," I muttered. "It's lovely to see you again. How are you? How is poor Lucy?"
Poor Lucy was out of hospital, and by all accounts physically well. "The accident has affected her," Mara told me. "The surgeons had to fit an exo-spine. It looks like a giant zip down her back. I actually think it's sexy, but you can hardly blame her for being sensitive about it."
"She's a lot more withdrawn now," Helen added. "I still get flashes of the old Lucy, but she's not letting me in like she used to."
The last I'd heard, Lucy had packed a bag and left home, leaving a note about going to Cox Island to confront Freya once and for all.
"Ah, Ana," my father called downstairs. "Come on up. We've saved a small room for you."
"Home, sweet, home," I muttered, and dragged my suitcase up to my new, small room.
*
As homes go, it was nothing compared to Kell House with its island-spanning estate, but it was sufficient in size. My father and sister each had luxurious chambers, my sister's on the ground floor, my father's at the very top. His room had windows looking out towards the mansions of the ultrarich, and windows overlooking the avenues and parks that separated us from the next circle of houses.
I visited him there the morning after my arrival, and found him half-dressed, idly stroking his huge, rigid cock as he stared out the windows in contemplation. A maid stood ready to help him dress, but clearly her duties did not include helping my father achieve climax.
"Ah, Ana, excellent," he said. "I wonder if you wouldn't mind...?"
The adoration of my father's cock was a task I was usually happy to leave to Eliza, but for once I didn't mind helping out a little. Pulling up a seat beside him, I wrapped a hand as well as I could about the hard shaft, and caressed its extraordinary length with a slow, steady rhythm.
"How do you like the house?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, "Without question it is in the best part of the Avenue. I would not like to live in a mansion and feel obliged to entertain daily. I do enjoy the occasional party, but they are entirely too much trouble to host."