The invitation was cream colored, engraved, and anonymous by design. A charity masquerade at the old hotel on the hill, black tie, masks mandatory, names optional. I chose a gold mask and a black gown with a slit that should have required its own invitation, and I went alone, because a masquerade is the one room in the world where a woman like me can be exactly as mysterious as she actually is. Within the hour, a man in a black mask had guessed my name wrong three times on purpose, just to keep the conversation alive.
"You are stalling," I told him, over champagne neither of us was drinking anymore.
"I am savoring," he corrected. "There is a difference, and you of all women should appreciate it."
Oh, I appreciated it. We danced twice, the second time slower than the music required, his hand at the small of my back radiating heat through silk. He smelled of cedar and good decisions made badly. When he suggested the library, where the hotel keeps the books nobody reads and the door that locks from the inside, I did not pretend to misunderstand him. A masquerade is a roleplay the whole world agrees to, darling, and I have never once been the girl who leaves the story at the door.
He kissed me against the bookshelves with our masks still on, which is a particular kind of hunger, all mouth and mystery, my gold mask pressing his black one as our tongues met slow and deep. His hands found the slit in my gown and the bare thigh inside it, and I let the kiss go on and on while his fingers climbed, because a masked man who kisses like that has earned every inch he is given. When his fingers found me, I was soaked, and when I sighed it into his mouth he smiled against my lips like a man whose whole evening had just been confirmed. He turned me gently, lifted my gown, and knelt behind me on the library carpet, and the first touch of his tongue against my pussy, slow and flat and reverent, made my knees soften against the shelves. He ate me standing, one of my legs over his shoulder, his mouth working me with a patience that bordered on worship, until I came with my hand pressed over my own mouth to keep the ball from hearing, my whole body shuddering in a black gown in a locked library.
Most men would call that the climax of the evening. He simply stood, straightened his mask, and led me to the chaise by the fireplace.
I laid back on that chaise and pulled him down by his tie. He pushed my gown up to my waist, spread my legs, and slid into me in one deep, unhurried stroke that pulled a gasp out of both of us, and then he fucked me the way the evening had promised, slow and thorough and masked, his eyes locked on mine through the slits of that black mask while my heels dug into the chaise and my hands held his face so the masks stayed kiss close. I came again around him, clenching, and whispered for him not to stop, and he did not, not until he followed me with a groan against my neck and the room went quiet except for the orchestra leaking under the door. We never did exchange names. The ball was ending. He kissed my hand at the library door like a gentleman from another century, and I drove home with his black ribbon from his mask in my clutch, which I had untied at some point I choose not to specify.
I still have the ribbon. I think about that library more than a lady should.
Now, darling. Have you ever wanted a night like that, a stranger, a mask, a locked door, and a woman who will describe every inch of it in the voice you are imagining right now? Masks are honest that way. All our girls are in costume this season, and the whole wicked menu is on the Halloween page. Find me on PhoneBuckFuck, a dollar a minute for halloween phone sex with a woman who keeps the ribbon. If you like my elegance with a beat underneath it, read how I move when I dance just for one man. Then call, and tell me what your mask looks like. I will tell you what happens in the library.