Fruit of the Nub Club
Feb. 4th, 2023 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeLast year my flat was doing a Mills and Boon book club, one of whose activities was generating random titles using flash cards and then writing stories to match. I never knew why it was called the Nub Club, possibly it was going off a particular quote. The club only had two meetings, because fate ensured that after each meeting, someone in the club would have a sad breakup and not want to joke about romance for months, but I've just rediscovered this mildly NSFW parody in my drafts folder.
cw: billionaire.
*
Arabella von Jülich-Wassenberg had insisted to her aged parents that it was not sensible to keep the sixty-two lounges and twelve receiving rooms of Wassenbergstein Castle fully staffed. Most of the castle was locked up, its furniture languished under dustcovers – but for the sake of their mental health, Arabella had one heirloom or piece of mahogany furniture brought to her parents' wing every day, which always sent them into raptures of memory about the olden days when kings were kings and God was good. Arabella's parents did not know that after she showed them each heirloom, she would send it off to be sold, leaving only the labelled box or propped-up dustcover in its place. It was a way of letting them say farewell without forcing them to acknowledge that a family of fallen fortunes could not really afford to maintain sixty-two lounges, eight kitchens, and a servant whose only function was to spray napkins with lavender oil. In this way she had sold the faberge eggs and the Picasso and the mahogany dresser haunted by her great-great-grandfather's unquiet ghost (who had alarmed her terribly as a child by repeatedly insisting that it was her duty to avenge him by conquering Sweden). In this way she had installed appropriately dignified tenants in both the west and the blue wing, on the condition that they never made a racket. When her parents asked her about footsteps in distant parts of the house she told them it was the servantry; when they asked her about the odd little cars parked in the driveway she told them they belonged to tradesmen; and when one of the tenants held a lavish wedding and invited four hundred and fifty people to a marquee dinner on the lawn, she put on a Debussy record, sprayed more lavender scent around than usual, and told them it was the misty dream of a more rarified age.
But such strategies could not continue forever. A castle was a big thing to maintain, and the gullibility of her parents was vast, but not infinite. Sooner or later they would try to sit on a piece of furniture she had already sold, and the whole story would come out.
*
This was her situation when Barnham Moses Fooney, the multi-billionaire, caught sight of the castle of the Jülich-Wassenbergs from a helicopter while out on a corporate trust-building exercise in which each member of the board got to push one of the others out of the vehicle whenever they felt like it. At once, he decided to buy the castle and set it up as an augmented-reality tourist attraction on several levels of what he had recently taken to calling the Omni-futuristic Digital Rhizome. So wrapped up did he become in this vision that as the castle began rushing towards him, the wind whistling through his dark, expensively-cropped hair, and causing his brown lazer-honed eyes to water, it was almost too late before he realised that this was not just one of the usual symptoms of his monomaniacal enthusiasm, he had actually been pushed out of the helicopter. At the very nick of time he pulled the rip cord on his parachute. The bubble of chrome silk jolted upwards, releasing a cloud of hundred-dollar-bills to drift out around Barnham as, shining in the early morning sun, he descended toward the lawn of his future wife.
This was not a mere piece of foreshadowing; he had googled her on the way down. By the time his feet touched the gravel driveway, sending pet ermine rabbits whose ancestors had been hand-reared by the Holy Roman Emperor scurrying for cover across the dewy grass, he already knew that she was beautiful, so beautiful he absolutely had to have her – his lawyer had begun processing the divorce papers with his current wife – he already knew that she was innocent and efficient, two traits he admired desperately and wanted desperately to overcome. He yearned to stretch her tight budget with hot, extravagant expenditures as he taught her the ways of a world in which he, Barnham Moses Fooney, could do anything he pleased.
Arabella von Jülich-Wassenberg did not accept the hand of this importunate skydiving raconteur because he carried the lean, sinewy frame of a man who eats only protein bars and blueberries for sustenance and only molecular Michelin-starred degustation brunches for recreation. She did not accept his hand because the boyishly exuberant contours of his vividly piratical face were so perfect as to seem hewn out of bronze using his latest patented bronze-hewing 3D printer – nor because the first thing that piratical face said to her with its eyes focused on her like brown lazers was, “I want to buy you a yacht” – nor even because the aura of freedom and conspicuous consumption in every step of his platinum-toed sneakers called out to the innermost DNA of her molten aristocratic core, which knew it was her duty and her right to dispense more largesse, to wave more wildly out of the windows of more ornate carriages, to maintain not just one servant whose only function was to spray napkins with lavender oil, but several; to let them all, in a word, eat cake. Such things could never have attracted her. After all, this virile, exceptionally American magnate was new money, nothing but a crash caused by God taking his eyes off the wheel for a moment and running History into the ditch.
Did the idea of sleeping with someone who wasn't related to her set her heart racing with a forbidden, kinky thrill? Did she have a bit of a thing for Californians? Perhaps! But that was not why. No, she accepted the man's hand for purely self-abnegatory and practical reasons appropriate to a princess of her station. He had offered to save the estate. New heirlooms would blossom under old empty dust-covers like children growing in a vampire's womb.
Yet though she was marrying him – it pained her to put the thought into vulgar words – for his money, it would not be appropriate for her to give in too easily to the gifts of this rampantly plainspoken fiancée of convenience. For all her twenty-one years she had demonstrated herself a capable husbandress of her estate – so precocious a saver that she had already been rejecting unnecessary repairs to her threadbare velvet-coated rocking horses by the age of two – and she would not allow herself to be swept away in this mogul's rootlessly heady tide of confirmation bias. She had seen grander fortunes than his squandered into nonexistence, and if he was to be the safe harbor in which her dynasty's fortunes sought shelter then she would not see him transform himself into the German fleet circa 1919.
The timetable of a Barnham romance was regular enough that his lawyer and his life coach had it laid out in a shared google doc. The phrase 'serial monogamist' was not to be found in this doc, but the phrase 'rapid-sequence high-generative dopamine returns cycle' occurred twice.
Now, as minutes turned into hours and hours into days, life coach and lawyer began exchanging concerned messages about deviation from this cycle and what it might mean for their client's ongoing milkability. Arabella was a unique case: having accepted Barnham for his money, she proceeded to reject every single one of his gifts. On their second meeting she invited him to tour her estate. While the stars glistered ashenly in the dusk over Arabella's mist-haunted family graveyard, he went down on one knee in front of the tomb of her second cousin's third dachshund and told her he had bought her a wedding ring made of the largest blue diamond in the world – but she lowered her eyes and said that such a thing overstepped the bounds of traditional modesty and she would be quite content with a mere 11-carat pear diamond in quite an ordinary gold band. On their third meeting, as he prototyped the digital scape of the castle while she walked demurely beside his telepresence hologram, wrapped tightly in a white linen gown which made the heaving breaths of passion difficult to breathe, he offered her a wedding plan which involved renting both Liechtenstein and the International Space Station. She only sighed and said that he was awfully good to her but that every Jülich-Wassenberg had been married in Wassenbergstein; and of course, she added with a little laugh, he had been joking.
At this stage they had not yet touched. Had he been physically present he would have been tempted to walk back to her and take her into his arms right then and there – and he never resisted temptation. But his schedule was very busy, and not only had she refused to come away with him back to America, when he sent her a box of the finest teledildonic sex toys she returned it without comment, unopened. So he could only turn to face her – his technological shade, so reminiscent of yet so much sexier than her grandfather's ghost, kindled in her a peculiar combination of lust and hatred for Sweden – and say with a blunt, almost boorish lack of murmur that he never joked about money.
“I begin to think, dear Barnham, that you are a joke about money,” said Arabella. Her heart leaped into her mouth at the words – they were, perhaps, too bold – but she straightened the spine which had stood its ground against peasant uprisings in previous generations and watched with a pretense of calmness as she watched his blood go cold, then hot, then icy, then volcanic. He who never failed to speak his hummingbird mind was, for a moment, stricken mute as a malfunctioning Zoom call.
“No?” she said, stepping forward till their noses were co-extensive. “Then show me. Come to me by commercial airline. Come to me by passenger bus. Come to me slowly like a Hapsburg over bad roads.”
He nearly dropped the call, nearly ended the engagement. She was being ridiculous, she was stuck in the past, she didn't know the value of his time...
...what to make, then, of this perverse duet his heart was singing with more primal regions?
“You've got a deal, Miss Jülich-Wassenberg,” he said, and vanished.
*
Five days later she received a letter in his own unpracticed handwriting reporting on the weather in Naples.
*
Two days after that she received an email from his secretary asking her in something of a panic whether she knew where he'd gone, since his GPS tracker had switched off in the vicinity of Zagreb and his fitness software was no longer updating. She reported her ignorance but suggested there was probably no reason to be concerned.
*
Three days after that, there was a knock at her door.
*
The man escorted into her chambers by the butler was dusty and tousled and clothed in commercially available athleisure wear. He had gone for days without a nutrition consultation, days without professional skincare. Yet his face was still that of a boyish pirate, and those lazer-hot eyes, brown as mahogany, bored into her avid as woodworm. “Mr Fooney,” she said, and then the two of them were pressed together like a pair of lungs too long starved of oxygen, kissing wildly, recklessly, hopelessly. He had carried with him all the way from America a wedding ring made from the largest blue diamond in the world, and now she murmured, “Yes, yes,” as he slid it onto her finger, though it was difficult to pause from touching each other long enough to complete the motion and as soon as the ring was on, her hands dived back under the breathable synthetic fabric of his shirt and began roaming down toward the durable moisture-wicking polyester of his trousers and the lush, muscular buttocks there concealed. (At this point, the butler withdrew). Every part of Barnham was hot and willing and ready to produce sons; he extricated Arabella with patience he had only very recently learned from her silken gown and from the elaborate multiplicity of formal undergarments which, to spite frugality, she had bought herself a week earlier, and after a quantity of foreplay whose nature and duration is hard to pin down based on the vague and fragmentary textual evidence, he slid his pulsing magnanimity inside her, and they moved together like a ship moving on a sea, like an idea developing in the mind of a genius; sparks seemed to flood through Arabella's nerves like light on the wave-crests in the ship's wake, and Barnham felt deep in his core the flickering extrapolations which will give rise, any minute now, to the next big paradigm. The moment of their consummation was the moment when Arabella's father, out for a stroll, was caught up in the spirit of libidinal energy and wandered for the first time in over a decade into the castle's blue wing, discovering the upstart tenants contained therein; it was the moment when, in the distant apartment suite where his wardrobe had found a home, Arabella's great-great-grandfather's ghost let out a sound as of gigantic door hinges groaning and shouted “The child by whose might in arms I shall be avenged against Sweden is conceived!”; and it was the moment when the lawsuit about fatalities caused by the corporate practice of pushing people out of helicopters as a trust-building exercise reached the New York Times. But those are all stories for another day. There and then, in the arcing crescendo of white-hot pleasure, Arabella and Barnham could think of nothing but each other's bodies, which seemed in that mystical union to be almost the same thing as money: old money, new money, white-hot Capitalist spending power channeled by the generational wisdom of the feudal past into the orgiastic Omni-future of tomorrow.
cw: billionaire.
*
Arabella von Jülich-Wassenberg had insisted to her aged parents that it was not sensible to keep the sixty-two lounges and twelve receiving rooms of Wassenbergstein Castle fully staffed. Most of the castle was locked up, its furniture languished under dustcovers – but for the sake of their mental health, Arabella had one heirloom or piece of mahogany furniture brought to her parents' wing every day, which always sent them into raptures of memory about the olden days when kings were kings and God was good. Arabella's parents did not know that after she showed them each heirloom, she would send it off to be sold, leaving only the labelled box or propped-up dustcover in its place. It was a way of letting them say farewell without forcing them to acknowledge that a family of fallen fortunes could not really afford to maintain sixty-two lounges, eight kitchens, and a servant whose only function was to spray napkins with lavender oil. In this way she had sold the faberge eggs and the Picasso and the mahogany dresser haunted by her great-great-grandfather's unquiet ghost (who had alarmed her terribly as a child by repeatedly insisting that it was her duty to avenge him by conquering Sweden). In this way she had installed appropriately dignified tenants in both the west and the blue wing, on the condition that they never made a racket. When her parents asked her about footsteps in distant parts of the house she told them it was the servantry; when they asked her about the odd little cars parked in the driveway she told them they belonged to tradesmen; and when one of the tenants held a lavish wedding and invited four hundred and fifty people to a marquee dinner on the lawn, she put on a Debussy record, sprayed more lavender scent around than usual, and told them it was the misty dream of a more rarified age.
But such strategies could not continue forever. A castle was a big thing to maintain, and the gullibility of her parents was vast, but not infinite. Sooner or later they would try to sit on a piece of furniture she had already sold, and the whole story would come out.
*
This was her situation when Barnham Moses Fooney, the multi-billionaire, caught sight of the castle of the Jülich-Wassenbergs from a helicopter while out on a corporate trust-building exercise in which each member of the board got to push one of the others out of the vehicle whenever they felt like it. At once, he decided to buy the castle and set it up as an augmented-reality tourist attraction on several levels of what he had recently taken to calling the Omni-futuristic Digital Rhizome. So wrapped up did he become in this vision that as the castle began rushing towards him, the wind whistling through his dark, expensively-cropped hair, and causing his brown lazer-honed eyes to water, it was almost too late before he realised that this was not just one of the usual symptoms of his monomaniacal enthusiasm, he had actually been pushed out of the helicopter. At the very nick of time he pulled the rip cord on his parachute. The bubble of chrome silk jolted upwards, releasing a cloud of hundred-dollar-bills to drift out around Barnham as, shining in the early morning sun, he descended toward the lawn of his future wife.
This was not a mere piece of foreshadowing; he had googled her on the way down. By the time his feet touched the gravel driveway, sending pet ermine rabbits whose ancestors had been hand-reared by the Holy Roman Emperor scurrying for cover across the dewy grass, he already knew that she was beautiful, so beautiful he absolutely had to have her – his lawyer had begun processing the divorce papers with his current wife – he already knew that she was innocent and efficient, two traits he admired desperately and wanted desperately to overcome. He yearned to stretch her tight budget with hot, extravagant expenditures as he taught her the ways of a world in which he, Barnham Moses Fooney, could do anything he pleased.
Arabella von Jülich-Wassenberg did not accept the hand of this importunate skydiving raconteur because he carried the lean, sinewy frame of a man who eats only protein bars and blueberries for sustenance and only molecular Michelin-starred degustation brunches for recreation. She did not accept his hand because the boyishly exuberant contours of his vividly piratical face were so perfect as to seem hewn out of bronze using his latest patented bronze-hewing 3D printer – nor because the first thing that piratical face said to her with its eyes focused on her like brown lazers was, “I want to buy you a yacht” – nor even because the aura of freedom and conspicuous consumption in every step of his platinum-toed sneakers called out to the innermost DNA of her molten aristocratic core, which knew it was her duty and her right to dispense more largesse, to wave more wildly out of the windows of more ornate carriages, to maintain not just one servant whose only function was to spray napkins with lavender oil, but several; to let them all, in a word, eat cake. Such things could never have attracted her. After all, this virile, exceptionally American magnate was new money, nothing but a crash caused by God taking his eyes off the wheel for a moment and running History into the ditch.
Did the idea of sleeping with someone who wasn't related to her set her heart racing with a forbidden, kinky thrill? Did she have a bit of a thing for Californians? Perhaps! But that was not why. No, she accepted the man's hand for purely self-abnegatory and practical reasons appropriate to a princess of her station. He had offered to save the estate. New heirlooms would blossom under old empty dust-covers like children growing in a vampire's womb.
Yet though she was marrying him – it pained her to put the thought into vulgar words – for his money, it would not be appropriate for her to give in too easily to the gifts of this rampantly plainspoken fiancée of convenience. For all her twenty-one years she had demonstrated herself a capable husbandress of her estate – so precocious a saver that she had already been rejecting unnecessary repairs to her threadbare velvet-coated rocking horses by the age of two – and she would not allow herself to be swept away in this mogul's rootlessly heady tide of confirmation bias. She had seen grander fortunes than his squandered into nonexistence, and if he was to be the safe harbor in which her dynasty's fortunes sought shelter then she would not see him transform himself into the German fleet circa 1919.
The timetable of a Barnham romance was regular enough that his lawyer and his life coach had it laid out in a shared google doc. The phrase 'serial monogamist' was not to be found in this doc, but the phrase 'rapid-sequence high-generative dopamine returns cycle' occurred twice.
Now, as minutes turned into hours and hours into days, life coach and lawyer began exchanging concerned messages about deviation from this cycle and what it might mean for their client's ongoing milkability. Arabella was a unique case: having accepted Barnham for his money, she proceeded to reject every single one of his gifts. On their second meeting she invited him to tour her estate. While the stars glistered ashenly in the dusk over Arabella's mist-haunted family graveyard, he went down on one knee in front of the tomb of her second cousin's third dachshund and told her he had bought her a wedding ring made of the largest blue diamond in the world – but she lowered her eyes and said that such a thing overstepped the bounds of traditional modesty and she would be quite content with a mere 11-carat pear diamond in quite an ordinary gold band. On their third meeting, as he prototyped the digital scape of the castle while she walked demurely beside his telepresence hologram, wrapped tightly in a white linen gown which made the heaving breaths of passion difficult to breathe, he offered her a wedding plan which involved renting both Liechtenstein and the International Space Station. She only sighed and said that he was awfully good to her but that every Jülich-Wassenberg had been married in Wassenbergstein; and of course, she added with a little laugh, he had been joking.
At this stage they had not yet touched. Had he been physically present he would have been tempted to walk back to her and take her into his arms right then and there – and he never resisted temptation. But his schedule was very busy, and not only had she refused to come away with him back to America, when he sent her a box of the finest teledildonic sex toys she returned it without comment, unopened. So he could only turn to face her – his technological shade, so reminiscent of yet so much sexier than her grandfather's ghost, kindled in her a peculiar combination of lust and hatred for Sweden – and say with a blunt, almost boorish lack of murmur that he never joked about money.
“I begin to think, dear Barnham, that you are a joke about money,” said Arabella. Her heart leaped into her mouth at the words – they were, perhaps, too bold – but she straightened the spine which had stood its ground against peasant uprisings in previous generations and watched with a pretense of calmness as she watched his blood go cold, then hot, then icy, then volcanic. He who never failed to speak his hummingbird mind was, for a moment, stricken mute as a malfunctioning Zoom call.
“No?” she said, stepping forward till their noses were co-extensive. “Then show me. Come to me by commercial airline. Come to me by passenger bus. Come to me slowly like a Hapsburg over bad roads.”
He nearly dropped the call, nearly ended the engagement. She was being ridiculous, she was stuck in the past, she didn't know the value of his time...
...what to make, then, of this perverse duet his heart was singing with more primal regions?
“You've got a deal, Miss Jülich-Wassenberg,” he said, and vanished.
*
Five days later she received a letter in his own unpracticed handwriting reporting on the weather in Naples.
*
Two days after that she received an email from his secretary asking her in something of a panic whether she knew where he'd gone, since his GPS tracker had switched off in the vicinity of Zagreb and his fitness software was no longer updating. She reported her ignorance but suggested there was probably no reason to be concerned.
*
Three days after that, there was a knock at her door.
*
The man escorted into her chambers by the butler was dusty and tousled and clothed in commercially available athleisure wear. He had gone for days without a nutrition consultation, days without professional skincare. Yet his face was still that of a boyish pirate, and those lazer-hot eyes, brown as mahogany, bored into her avid as woodworm. “Mr Fooney,” she said, and then the two of them were pressed together like a pair of lungs too long starved of oxygen, kissing wildly, recklessly, hopelessly. He had carried with him all the way from America a wedding ring made from the largest blue diamond in the world, and now she murmured, “Yes, yes,” as he slid it onto her finger, though it was difficult to pause from touching each other long enough to complete the motion and as soon as the ring was on, her hands dived back under the breathable synthetic fabric of his shirt and began roaming down toward the durable moisture-wicking polyester of his trousers and the lush, muscular buttocks there concealed. (At this point, the butler withdrew). Every part of Barnham was hot and willing and ready to produce sons; he extricated Arabella with patience he had only very recently learned from her silken gown and from the elaborate multiplicity of formal undergarments which, to spite frugality, she had bought herself a week earlier, and after a quantity of foreplay whose nature and duration is hard to pin down based on the vague and fragmentary textual evidence, he slid his pulsing magnanimity inside her, and they moved together like a ship moving on a sea, like an idea developing in the mind of a genius; sparks seemed to flood through Arabella's nerves like light on the wave-crests in the ship's wake, and Barnham felt deep in his core the flickering extrapolations which will give rise, any minute now, to the next big paradigm. The moment of their consummation was the moment when Arabella's father, out for a stroll, was caught up in the spirit of libidinal energy and wandered for the first time in over a decade into the castle's blue wing, discovering the upstart tenants contained therein; it was the moment when, in the distant apartment suite where his wardrobe had found a home, Arabella's great-great-grandfather's ghost let out a sound as of gigantic door hinges groaning and shouted “The child by whose might in arms I shall be avenged against Sweden is conceived!”; and it was the moment when the lawsuit about fatalities caused by the corporate practice of pushing people out of helicopters as a trust-building exercise reached the New York Times. But those are all stories for another day. There and then, in the arcing crescendo of white-hot pleasure, Arabella and Barnham could think of nothing but each other's bodies, which seemed in that mystical union to be almost the same thing as money: old money, new money, white-hot Capitalist spending power channeled by the generational wisdom of the feudal past into the orgiastic Omni-future of tomorrow.
