Chapter 3

For days after my dalliance with Ellie I tried to come up with some explanation for these strange events, and all I could come up with was that there was something preternatural about that house. I decided I needed a test.

Most people don’t realize how much time real estate agents spend in an office. For every house we show, we have to perform a considerable number of emails, phone calls, and database searches. For every house we sell or buy, there’s a mountain of paper work. Don’t get me started on fax machines. Sure, we spend a lot of time out in the city, but we also spend a great deal of time in the office among our coworkers.

Isabella was the one coworker that all of the rest of us desperately wanted to fuck. We also all knew that she was way out of all of our leagues. To look at just her head, you might think that she had supermodel good looks. She had short black hair in a European style, emerald eyes, and a face perfectly honed by estrogen. To look at her body, though, was to realize how flawed mere supermodels are. Isabella had the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real-life Barbie body: long legs, a wasp waist, with hips and a chest that bring out a man’s primal nature at a glance.

Isabella wasn’t overly friendly with anyone there, myself included; but she was a team player. She had offered to help me practice some of the fine points of selling houses in my new city. For two weeks I resisted the urge to lure her to this magical aphrodisiac house I had discovered, arguing the morality in my head. Where was the line between loosening inhibitions and rape when the circumstances defied reality? I had mostly convinced myself that the house was perfectly ordinary and all moral concerns were moot when I made my move.

“I’d like to take you up on your offer to coach me, if you’re still up for it,” I said to Isabella one day. “There’s this old place on Havenhurst...”

The room exploded into riotous laughter. “Geez, John! Why don’t you ask her to drop to her knees and blow you right now?” Fran teased.

“I don’t understand,” I said to the room, baffled.

“Everyone knows about the Sex House, kid,” Rodney explained.

“That’s where things started between me and Trisha,” Calvin added.

The peculiarity of the Sex House, as they called it, was well known to the city’s real estate community. They didn’t bother telling newcomers because nobody ever believed it until they experienced it for themselves. It had become a sort of coming of age ritual in our industry. The house used to belong to a woman who had penned erotic fiction under the name of Deirdre. A pioneer of the Internet sex stories movement, she had written hundreds of stories, almost always involving ordinary people thrust into surreal sexual circumstances outside of their comfort zones. The house must have been infused with the spirit of all those stories, my fellow agents explained to me.

“You’ve got to be careful, though,” Rodney mused. “The house doesn’t just loosen your inhibitions: it pushes you to do what the other person wants deep down.”

“Or maybe it’s not what either of you want,” Alex hypothesized, “maybe it’s what the house wants.”

Rodney nodded support for this theory. “Either way, you could end up doing things that you never thought you would do.”

“Like that one guy from Hollister Realty,” Fran interjected. “That poor schmuck!” The room murmured in agreement.

Isabella hadn’t said anything the whole time, and I had been so caught up in this strange revelation that I had forgotten to think about her reaction. How would she respond to my foiled plan to house-rufie her?

“Yes,” Isabella said, her voice ringing like a bell. The whole office fell silent. “One o’clock on Friday. Don’t keep me waiting,” she said.

When I arrived on Friday I found Isabella waiting for me in the master bedroom - naked, cross-legged, in an easy chair. Next to her stood a well-built pale man with swept-back platinum blond hair down to his shoulders. His envy-inspiring erection was pointing at me, but his face was expressionless.

Isabella rose and spoke: “John, meet Christopher. What happens here today stays between the three of us. I don’t need to threaten you with consequences, do I?” I shook my head. “Good. Now strip and let me see what you’ve got.”

Once I had taken off my clothes, Isabella looked me up and down and nodded approval. “Good. Now go shave,” she said, tilting her head toward the bathroom. “I want all of your pubic hair gone when you come out. Christopher will help you if you wish.”

“No thanks, I’ve got this,” I told her.

I helped myself to a razor and shaving cream in the bathroom. Shaving my balls was at once easier and harder than I had imagined. The razor glided over my scrotum’s foamy skin without ever snagging, to my surprise. But the bulbous shape and excess of loose skin made it difficult to tell which areas had been shaved adequately. Visibility was a problem until I found a hand mirror. I took Isabella’s request - or was it a command? - to heart and made sure I had done a very thorough job before I exited the bathroom.

When I did return, Isabella was lying on the bed, reading something on her phone. Christopher was standing at attention, still erect, next to the bed. She put her phone away. “Shall we begin? I want one of you on each side. For now, you will just touch me.” Christopher and I sat beside her and ran our fingers over her body lightly. After a time I leaned in to kiss her, but she shoved me away and lightly slapped me. I went back to rubbing my fingers under her breasts and across her neck.

“Mmm, good,” Isabella said. “Christopher, you will fuck me first. John, stand by the bed and wait until I call on you. Keep yourself ready, but neither of you may ejaculate until I tell you to. John, do you understand?”

“Yes, Isabella,” I said as I took my position.

Isabella spread her legs wide as Christopher climbed on top of her and began pumping her, like a machine. His butt clenched with every push. He never made a sound, but Isabella eventually started vocalizing calm “Mmm” and “Ahh” sounds. She came, but you would never know it from her voice; nonetheless, the snake-like ripples of motion from her neck down through her body were unmistakably the result of sexual climax.