Watersheds.
Copyright 2004,
RVRaiment
(rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content
may not be copied or used
in whole or in part without
written permission from the
author.
Copyright 2004,
RVRaiment
(rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content
may not be copied or used
in whole or in part without
written permission from the
author.
Watersheds.
by R V Raiment
Copyright 2004, rvraiment@yahoo.com
Uptight bitch.
Eleanor knew that that was how people saw her, and she regretted it, but what could she do? Life had made her
that way. Experience had made her that way. Not just one experience, but the multiple experiences of life over
time, the millions of springs, tiny watershed moments, that fed the tributaries of experience which washed,
eventually, into the river of her life.
Watershed moments: the moment she saw her chubby little best friend in tears because a boy had called the
child fat, and the myriad subsequent connected moments which had made it clear beyond all doubt to her that to
so many people fat meant ugly, period.
The moment she first consciously experienced her mother’s wrath, when she somehow felt the very threat of a
slap and flinched, yet was not struck. Nor was she reasoned with. The moment she learned, instead, that her
mother’s chosen form of riposte was denigration and humiliation, the moment she learned that she could be
despised by someone who professed to love her.
There were, for Eleanor, endless such moments, as there are for us all, yet it was these two tributaries to her
present river which would shape the newest, and for her the strangest, of all her most recent experiences,
produce the watershed that would change her life forever.
Barely comprehending what it had meant to see little Margot in tears, Eleanor had long determined to remain slim
and in good shape, even before puberty and adolescence would add new experiences, reinforce her belief that
slim meant beautiful and, in terms of prospective relationships, improved her marketability.
From that early start she had watched and observed, listened and learned, and out of those actions had
established what she needed to eat – and not to eat – and what she needed most to do in order to retain a
delectable slenderness. It did not earn her friends as a small child and teenager, surrounded by others who lived
for the gratification of candy, soda and fast food, but she stuck to it.
Her mother’s bile, of course, assisted inadvertently. Constantly at war with her own weight, her Mom affected to
despise even the most famous of beautiful women to an extent which would often leave any audience gaping,
and Eleanor was rapidly learning that anything her mother dismissed was something most others would aspire
to. The rich, for instance, were frequent targets of her vitriol, and might at times have been deserving of it, but
Mommy’s bitterness was the acid of personal envy, in which any sense of universal injustice played not the
slightest part. Nor did the child early identify the envy of her youth, freedom and intelligence which informed her
mother’s dismissiveness, her siding with her daughter’s embittered brother, endlessly applauding his modest
achievements whilst apparently scorning Eleanor’s own. It only made her more determined. Mom might call her
‘skinny’, her lips twisted in derision, but it only made her more her Daddy’s girl.
She was determined to be slim, and determined to avoid humiliation. Her mother’s humiliation of her had proven
unavoidable, irreparable by anything she might try to do, so it had to be lived with. Daddy was different. A quiet
man whose face grew troubled sometimes, when Mom was at her most acerbic, he rarely spoke out against her
bitter undermining of their child, and when he did so did so timidly at best. But he called her his princess.
Delivered softly and with a smile one day when she put on a brand new party dress, his was the first wolf-whistle
she ever heard.
He applauded her beauty, her hair and slender physique, quietly told her not to mind her Mom and assured her
that boys would one day come flocking to her loveliness. Intimate moments, quiet shared conversation,
exchanged gentle glances, were warmest with him. He was her rock, till he left her.
Hardly surprising that such a gentle man should tire of her mother’s bitter tirades, nor that someone else would
turn to him with and for the warmth that lay within him. But it cost Eleanor dear. Separation and divorce gave
Eleanor a brand new status in her mother’s life, a weapon to wield against her father, something she could
manipulate in law at a cost to him greater than any Alimony judgement.
A hard-working man and provider, a profound believer in duty, he lacked the ambition and marketable skills which
might have made matters easier. Instead, his burgeoning hunger for love in his life and one of too many failed
quests at fiscal self-improvement left him struggling in relative poverty, if happy within his relationship, at the
further end of the country. Between the economic duress that was natural to his station and that inflicted upon
him by his vindictive ex-wife, travelling to see Eleanor was impossible. Or, at least, it was almost impossible.
The child Eleanor knew nothing of the causes, of course, and was left only to wonder that she never saw her
daddy and that he never wrote or sent a card. And the hurt of being twice told “Your dad was in town last week
on business,” and knowing he had not come to see her, not knowing that her mother had engineered the failure
of encounters he had prayed for, nurtured in her the sense that it was she whom her father had abandoned and
that the regard he had once shown her was the figment of her imagination that Mommy said it was.
Bitter waters in such tributaries, but commonplace.
Eleanor remained slender, then, and growing up, and growing in her knowledge of the world, fought harder still to
develop a physique that would appeal to men, eating ever carefully, sometimes almost frugally, and spending
many hours at arduous work in the gym. Only if she looked good enough would she win the kind of man she
knew she wanted.
That second little stream, though, was ever blended into this. Routinely humiliated by her mother, and certainly
no less so for having been Daddy’s girl, Eleanor had early determined to be the best she could in everything in
order to keep indignity at bay.
In a backward-looking school with a forward-leaning curriculum she had witnessed corporal punishment, watched
little girls and boys receive smacked bottoms. That the little girls wore skirts and were compelled to lift them
above their knickers, at just an age when underwear had first become a cause for snickering, and having been
maternally taught that everything contained in underwear was really not very nice, did nothing to restrain her
terror of that punishment. That the ageing vice-principal too, only shortly before his early retirement, had
punished a girl in front of the class by placing her over his knee and drawing her knickers down to her ankles,
scorching her buttocks red with the repeated impact of his large, gnarled hand, did nothing but increase her
horror.
Too young to understand, had anyone sought to teach her the illegitimacy of his action rather than play it down
and pretend in that adult way that it had never actually happened, it would take her a long time to discover that
this would probably never, ever, be allowed to happen again. And school being school, a place of arbitrary
punishment in which children could be punished both collectively and individually for sins that were often
committed by others, she lived her young school life in dread of it.
The torrent of that stream, of course, had its uses, eroding what little resistance she had to concentration and
endeavour. Avoiding punishment and humiliation was best achieved through approbation, through delivering the
politeness and academic results by which her mentors set such store, by being a good little girl.
Eleanor was a good little girl, and Eleanor excelled.
Yet excelling, still, her fear was never dammed entirely, her skin forever thin. She grew manipulative, without
wanting to, was not always as honest as she wanted to be in acknowledging the contributions of others to what
was deemed her own success. She needed to be approved of, yet the desire to be approved of could tempt her,
if she were not careful, into actions which, found out, would cause the very humiliation she most dreaded.
And she created, of course, her own double-bind, her Catch 22. Gifted by nature and perfected by endeavour,
she had a face and a body which turned men’s heads, and some women’s too. Closeness, however, was a
dangerous thing. Closeness made it all the harder to conceal from others the awful truths – the sterile order of
her apartment which had ever to be so smart and clean and tidy that the mother she never saw and who never
saw the apartment could have found no fault in it. Closeness raised the spectre, too, of being found out, of being
discovered so lacking in something important that her mother had never truly loved her and her father had not
loved her enough to keep her near.
Intimate closeness, also, meant ruffled bedclothes and stained sheets, sweat and semen, invasive, clumsy
interactions of that ‘not nice’ world within her panties and his shorts. No less importantly, it would require the
demonstration of skills she had never had the opportunity to practice. In bed she could fail.
Excelling brought her everything – a high-flying career, an apartment the envy of all her friends, every labour-
saving device in every ultra-modern incarnation, expensive holidays and the perfect car, a bank account
seemingly impervious to every assault by her purse. It brought her some confidence, too which, erudite and
articulate, she could use to slap down anyone who sought to undermine her.
Cab drivers and policemen were unfailingly polite to her, even called her 'ma’am', and everywhere people
deferred to her.
It brought no warmth, though. And in that failure it brought something altogether more fearful, a sharp and
acerbic tongue which began, in her ears, to sound altogether too much like her mother’s.
Beyond the armour of her apartment walls and the glass walls of her office, Eleanor could see a different life in
which she played no part. Knots of men and women gathering, laughing, stooped in earnest discourse, sharing –
dancing the dance of life to which she had not the music. She saw Thornton, the senior partner who would
shortly become her peer, repeatedly caress his secretary’s ass, his hand slipping up beneath her short smart
skirt, and she saw his secretary beam. Even the deep-scooped necklines Jodie, her secretary, wore, she wore
for Thornton as much as any man.
Why did they see nothing sordid in themselves? How was it that they could so easily participate, it seemed, in
those grubby, sweaty endeavours that, from time to time, resulted in the collection envelope appearing on her
desk and, later, in some glowing female absentee employee turning up on the 20th floor with a baby in her
embrace?
The tributaries kept on flowing and the river of Eleanor’s life ran straight as a canal, up to the day that she met
Locke.
It was the day that she had made partner – the youngest in the company’s history – and after congratulating her,
Thornton had asked her a special favour:
“I hate to ask this, Eleanor,” he’d said, being sure to call her Eleanor and not Elle or Ellie; “but David Locke got in
from Chicago this morning. You know David, of course?”
She’d known of him. Few in their business didn’t. Famously handsome, famously rich, famously powerful; the
company would have to be courting his business.
When she nodded, Thornton explained: “Fact is that I promised to show him around, this evening. Miriam and I
were going to take him to Vitelli’s and then on a tour of the sights at night. Anyway, Miriam’s not up to it – she’s
had one of those massive migraines since yesterday – so I wondered if you could step in?”
“Me?”
“You’re a partner, now. You know the city and you know our business. He’s not likely to ask anything you’re not
qualified to answer.”
Eleanor had agreed, reluctantly, certain that Miriam’s migraines would ease a great deal if Thornton could get out
of the habit of feeling-up, and more than feeling-up, the company’s hired help, and certain, too, that she was
being used a little. Locke was on his own and new in town. She knew she was being set up as a date of sorts,
but she knew she could not say no. Not today, perhaps not any other day.
And so they’d met.
She had seen his face on magazine covers, even the TV screen, and had read several bios of one sort or
another in the business press and elsewhere, but nothing she read prepared him for the nature of the man.
Athletically-built, quiet, firm-spoken, he radiated the kind of confidence and strength that she had tried so hard
and for so long to build in herself. People called him sir and meant it. Obsequious at other tables, with diners
they hoped to impress, waiters were quietly, efficiently attentive. This was not a man easily fooled.
He smiled readily, and his eyes, always alert, reflected the smile on his lips without effort. He was complimentary,
courteous, respectful, and she was smitten.
When their elegantly sumptuous dinner was over Locke broached the one subject she had been dreading, that
of her escorting him on the sight-seeing round. In fact, she knew the city, but she knew it as a place of the day,
not of the night. Museums, galleries, book and coffee shops, she could have guided him around the whole day
long, statues and monuments too, but these are not the sights a man-about-town has his heart set-upon in a
notorious city at night.
“I’m afraid I am not very good at nightspots,” she had had to admit. “I really do not socialise very much at night,
other than at home.”
“You surprise me,” he had answered, and had evidently meant it. “I would have thought a woman with your looks
and personality would have had a very busy social life?”
The word ‘personality’ had thrown her a little. Rashly emboldened she had smiled a sophisticatedly cynical smile
and confided:
“You’re very kind, David, but most people seem to sum up my ‘personality’ very quickly, usually with the phrase
‘uptight bitch’”.
Why had she said that? She’d never made such an admission before to anyone but herself, and despite her
carefully manufactured smile it hurt and she knew that it showed.
“Ouch!” he said quietly, then; “Really?” and just gazed at her a moment. She felt very vulnerable under that
gaze, decided she would be glad when this was over, and yet…
“I’m only here for a few days, Eleanor, and I would like to give the night-life a look-see, but I’d really rather not do
it without company. Would you really very much mind going on with me?”
“Of course not, I would love to. But I really know very little about…”
“No matter,” he dismissed her protest with a smile. “I’ve yet to find a city in which the limo-drivers don’t know
where the hotspots are.”
It had been an extraordinary evening.
It had ended too soon, too, and politely, his limo stopping outside her apartment block, David escorting her into
the soft-lit foyer before bidding her goodbye. And he had kissed her hand.
She stood dumbfounded for several moments before she became uncomfortably aware of the night security man’
s presence and moved toward the elevator.
There was the beginning of a heat in her, a wanting in her, which she had never felt before. There was an
emptiness in her apartment greater than she had ever felt before. And as she went to sleep, Eleanor cried, not
this time for the father who had left the aching void within her, but for the absence of a stranger – a stranger who
had somehow, for a while, made her feel almost whole.
It did not end there.
In the office the following day, Thornton enthused about the impact she had made upon this most valued
potential client and assured her that Locke would like to see her again. Mid-morning Locke himself had phoned,
apologetically and not wanting to impose, and invited her out again.
Five days, including the weekend, she had spent almost all of her free time and no little work time in the company
of a man who turned every woman’s head and showed every sign of turning hers. Out and about and in public,
though, there was little opportunity for intimate closeness, and such little opportunities as he took, she knew,
caused her body to bridle against her will, inner armour thrusting outward to contain and protect the growing fear
within.
And short a time as five days may be, it is too long a time to keep a wanting man waiting without the slightest
signal of warmth from a woman he desires, and she knew it.
The last evening before his departure – which departure, she knew, would certainly be final – he found them a
quiet, soft-lighted restaurant, where wood and glass and deep pile carpet muted every sound and colour.
David talked, his rapier wit and sharp intellect gleaming in the subtle light of candles and Eleanor fenced, as she
had all along, meeting every gentle probe of his with an equally gentle, long-prepared riposte until he asked her:
“Eleanor? What is it that you are so afraid of?”
The question hit her like a physical blow, knocking the wind out of her, yet he waited silently for her to answer, his
expression friendly, concerned.
“What am I afraid of?”
“Yes.”
A pause for breath, willing herself to take that desperate gamble called truth, and suddenly:
*“Everything!”*
She sounded so helpless, to herself, and felt almost dizzy.
“Everything?” he smiled. “Doing what you do, and as successfully as you do it, you can hardly be afraid of
everything, lovely lady. So what is it really? Are you afraid of someone getting to know you?”
The question made her chest ache.
“Yes.”
There was a sadness in his smile, now:
“Do you really believe you are so awful?”
When she did not answer he said, softly:
“Someone must have hurt you awfully bad for you to feel that way, Eleanor. Can you tell me about it?”
She had answered, with difficulty, “Not here…”
On the limo drive to her apartment he had held her hand in his own, watching her quietly. She had let him.
Terror roiled inside her, trembled in her knees, so that she had walked quite unsteadily to the elevator and,
afterwards, through her own apartment doorway.
“What a beautiful place, Eleanor.”
“Thank you.”
Checking the thermostat unnecessarily, fixing their drinks, choosing nibbles for the segmented silver dish, were
delaying tactics she performed whilst knowing they were hopeless. She was going to answer his questions. Just
once she was going to tell someone her truth, or as much of it as she could, and the thought turned her smooth
belly liquid.
“So tell me,” he prompted, easing back into the leather armchair. And she did.
She told him what she knew and understood, of course, which is always less of ourselves than we think. She told
him she was an achiever, driven to prove herself, but she did not know, and could not tell him, exactly why. She
told him that she was always in search of some undefined approval, too, though again she either did not know or
was not prepared to divulge the true causes. And she told him she was afraid of sex.
She told him, of course, more than she intended and, indeed, more than even she knew. Locke was a man who
had waded, like others, in dark streams of his own, and who had made it his business to understand those
currents on which others, less fortunate, floated struggling forever, sometimes only inches from drowning.
She was weeping, in his arms, at the last, discovering for the first time what it meant to be held by someone who
cared for her, feeling safe yet, increasingly, coming to feel less so. She had opened shutters in his presence, let
light in upon a darkness she had guarded overlong, and doubts began to worry at her about what exactly he
could see, about what use he planned to make of it.
Wrapped in his arms, seated in his lap, she felt a thrusting of that something hard beneath the fabric of his pants,
the signal that he wanted her, and more – that given the opportunity he would use her.
She tried to make a joke of it, to play sophisticate:
“I notice things are stirring…”
He smiled wryly:
“I am sorry about that.”
What on earth did that mean? He continued:
“You are a very beautiful and very desirable woman, Eleanor, and since you’ve told me your truth I must tell you
a simple one of my own. “What is happening down there is something that just happens to most men when they
are very close to something warm and stimulating, as you are. But it is my cock, Eleanor, and not my brain. I don’
t think with it, and it doesn’t think, it just reacts.
“Right now I’d stop it, if I could. Not because I don’t want you – I do, more than I have ever wanted any woman in
my life – but because I don’t think it is appropriate at this moment.
“I think if I asked you to make love with me tonight you would say yes, but I don’t know what would happen
afterwards. I might accidentally hurt you, or I might waken ghosts for you that you don’t want waking yet.
“I want to see you again, Eleanor. I have to return to Chicago in the morning, but I can be back and soon, and if
you’ll allow me to I would like to spend more time with you, get to know you better and have you get to know me
better. I want you to feel safe with me. Absolutely safe with me.”
He had begun that night.
Even knowing she was in excellent shape, undressing in front of him had been unbelievably hard. It was not an
unknown experience, not something she had not done before, and she was not a virgin, but the twice before,
scarcely out of her teens, had been bad. She had given in to trophy-lovers, boys the other girls at college were
always ready to swoon over, and had given in in the desperate hope that here and in this she might find that
ultimate approval. The boys had come, messily, clumsily and painfully for her, but she and the realisation of her
hope had not.
She was not aroused. Dread was too deep a chill in her.
Watching him undress had not aroused her either, but hiding in her own objectivity she had been able to judge
his body as a good one – toned and well-muscled, enough of the ghost of a six pack to testify to his fitness. The
bulge in his shorts had frightened her, and sight of its source was almost terrifying. This huge, crimson, blue-
veined monster, leering out of its one eye, that he might thrust inside her untrained cunt, the dark heavy sacs
taut and laden with his white, wet seed, ready to spill within her, to dribble onto her sheets.
How confined a space her bed appeared, now. How threatening.
“Trust me, sweetheart,” he had said. “Know I will not hurt you.”
And he had not. He had said he would not fuck her and he didn’t. She had half-expected, perhaps even hoped,
that at the last he would be overwhelmed with his insensate want and take her. Perhaps she even hoped for
magic – the foolish magic dangled in front of so many women like some kind of sexual Fairy Godmother moment
– and that he would take her and it would be, suddenly and instantly, wonderful beyond belief.
He did not try. He watched her settle naked between the sheets and turn away from him, settled down beside her
and wrapped his arm around her, resting his hand softly on her belly. He raised himself once to kiss her on the
cheek and bid her goodnight, then nestled back alongside her.
Eleanor lay awake some time, conscious of the hardness pressed against her ass cheeks, feeling it soften and
subside as the minutes passed. Then safe in his arms, she slept. And as she drifted off to sleep he thought he
heard her murmur a single word;
“Daddy.”
Time after time they met, and time after time she made him hard and swollen, and time after time, too, they slept
together as they had that first night. As their encounters passed, Eleanor felt herself softening, feeling safer,
growing in trust of a man whose desperation for her was manifest in his hot and throbbing cock and loving eyes,
yet who never seemed to push her. When she woke one night with her ass cheeks wet and sticky, his ejaculate
testimony to nothing more than a dream of her beyond his own control, his apologies only made her smile and
she knew the time was coming.
It hurt though, when it did, and it hurt both of them. No MacBeth ever screwed his courage more to a sticking
place than she did, before she invited David to try. He had asked her:
“Are you sure, sweetheart?”
She had answered “Yes”, with her heart and mind, but a timid soul controlled her body. He had licked and
tongued her endlessly in seeking to provoke her wetness, her own sweet lubrication, but knowing he had not,
and with her consent, he had used a lube he’d brought. Even so it hurt her, the tightness in her still beyond
control, and hurting her had hurt him too.
The body she was accustomed to seeing in her mirror she regarded as an object, not unlike a Porsche or a Jag,
a diamond necklace or a valued Old Master. Only thus could she see it as faultless, and only thus was it real to
her, as something to be owned and possessed by the man who would somehow complete her. There was
discomfort for her in those natural functions which are the body’s own, for they seemed irredeemably ugly,
malodorous and crude. And to have a man there, tonguing one of those orifices as if it were to be celebrated, in
intimate closeness to all that she had learned to abhor, was a mystery without pleasure, such stirrings and
warmings and tremors that she felt seeming only a threat to the control she maintained so steadfastly.
Feeling soiled and uncomfortable, she could not but leave a loving man feeling very much the same.
The cold streams of her history merely swept her to a precipice, heartache and hurt in the long fall and rocks
below because she knew no man could sustain this pain forever. He wanted to make love to her, not to fuck her,
wanted more than mere release at any cost. And the inability to gain it was wearing at them both. Make-or-break
time, she knew, could not be long in coming.
It was not that they fought, and not that they did not fight because there was nothing worth fighting for. Rarely
had two people ever been better designed to be together, their interests and attitudes to so much so strikingly
similar or, occasionally so delightfully different. Eleanor loved him, deeply, and believed he loved her, deeply,
but he was an intelligent man with healthy appetites she could not meet.
She had wanted to free him, wanted to tell him it was okay with her if he satisfied his needs with someone else, if
only he would stay with her, but she could not. Not on the basis of any fixed morality, but simply because she
believed that David’s being with others could only lead to his drawing humiliating comparisons, even if he never
uttered them, that it would create an opportunity in which others might succeed where she was too conscious of
failing.
Their relationship had a terminal illness and medication and prayer having failed, both having done or tried to do
everything within their power to find a cure, they knew the time must soon come when the life support was
switched off. There was too much quiet pain here, too much unrequited longing, yet neither could quite bring
themselves to make the final desperate decision.
The invitation to Mike and Shannon’s party, trivial as it seemed, was one of the rocks, she knew, which could
finally make their stream divide. Everything would depend on her chosen course.
“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked her, deeply concerned. “Mike and Shannon are very good friends of
mine, but they’re very open, very sexual people. Shannon will probably make a play for me – she has before.”
“Did she succeed?”
“Yes, she did”.
An ache, there. She knew he had other women before, knew that as a sophisticated woman she should be able
to accept it, but each of them was a ghost in her frightened darkness. He had broken with none of them because
of the sex.
“You cheated with your friend’s wife?”
“No, sweetheart. It was entirely with Mike’s consent. He likes to watch.”
“And if she makes a play for you tonight?”
“She won’t, if she sees that you’re not into that.”
“And if I don’t go, you won’t go?”
“No, honey, I won’t.”
He meant it, too. Even now, even when they both knew that this – whatever it was that they had – must soon be
over, he would not hurt her if he could in any way help it. She knew what she had to do.
“We’ll go then, lover,” she smiled. “And I guess if Shannon makes a play for you, you ought to say yes. Not fair
of me to keep you on such a tight leash when I can’t deliver.”
She saw the hurt in his face:
“Don’t say that, Elle. I love you.”
“I know. That’s why we’ll go.”
“And if things get uncomfortable for you, you will tell me and we’ll leave, okay?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” she answered.
She had almost called it off, though, and perhaps she should have.
The letter from Sandy, her father’s wife, had arrived out of the blue and very much by chance. Eleanor’s mother
the initial barrier, time and distance had separated the lives of them all, their rivers running separate courses and
flowing far apart. Somehow Sandy’s letter penetrated all the dams that Mom and time and migration had set up
along its route, finding its way by devious routes, battered and torn, to Eleanor’s hand.
Never did a gentle letter strike its reader with such brutal force. Absent so long her father, she learned, would
now be absent forever, and for that she should have wept, though she could not, then. But it was the last
paragraphs above the gentle signature which delivered the lasting punch, which twisted her insides into a silent,
endless scream.
“Your father asked me, at the last, Eleanor, to try to find you somehow. He could not understand, for a long time,
that you ignored his cards and letters, and he began to believe that you had come to hate him, that you could not
forgive him for ever having left you. You cannot know, perhaps, how much that hurt him.
“Only a short while ago, though, I managed to contact your brother for the first time and he came to see us. His
separation from your father - and it seems from you - was his choice, however foolish, and I know that he regrets
it now, but he was able to tell us the truth.
“Eleanor, hon; your dad never missed a birthday up until the day he died. He sent you cards on every occasion
and wrote to you regularly in between. Your brother tells us that your mother intercepted them, always, and
destroyed them. Even knowing how mean she could be, we never expected that. It was, and is, just too horrible.
“We have tried so hard, Eleanor, to reach you, and it is now more important than ever, I guess, that you should
know the truth, that you were in the last thoughts your father had in this world, that he has loved and will love you
always.”
It seemed a poor joke, until she realised that it was not a joke, and when that realisation hit her, Eleanor, alone in
her apartment, staggered on her feet, stumbled gasping to a chair.
What should and could and later might be the foundation of a whole new way of seeing and of being for her, hit
her like a torrent, swept her down bruising rapids that were betrayed at first only in her eyes, and the way she sat
doubled-over, hugging the ache within her. He had loved her. Always. A tidal wave of knowledge, sweeping and
crashing toward the tiny child within her.
But what struck her most was that she had not been there for him, that he had been left believing for years that
she who loved him most in all the world had grown to hate him. That brought a jagged, retching cry of agony,
long-stemmed, an ancient wound made new again and bleeding in hot tears that seared around her eyes.
And having lost the one, not yet finding him again in the words that would come to mean so much, she knew she
stood to lose another, and every ingrained instinct that she had came clamouring to the fore. Eleanor repaired
her make up, practiced smiling, and when David at last arrived she told him nothing of the letter.
Something in her hoped for new beginnings, but she did not know how they would come.
They drove in silence, her hand resting gently on his knee, his troubled glances meeting only a far-away gaze
which remained steadfastly inscrutable.
Mike and Shannon, as one might expect, had everything, and they certainly were open. She had met them just
the once before, at an Episcopal garden fundraiser of some kind where manners and discreet behaviour had
been the strictest order of the day, and even there she had seen Shannon with her hand down Michael’s pants.
“Eleanor! Damn! You look fucking good enough to eat, lady!” was Mike’s hearty greeting, and lechery lit his
eyes like ten foot neons.
“Only guy who eats this girl is me,” David answered firmly, delivering a gentle hands-off warning.
“Damn shame, isn’t it, hon?” Michael laughed, glancing at his wife.
“Sure is, Mickey. Not sure I wouldn’t like a taste of Eleanor myself!”
Michael arched his eyebrows in exaggerated astonishment, but this was their standard form of repartee and, if all
that David had told her was true, Shannon was bi enough to have welcomed an invitation. Not picking up on her
words was enough to ensure that the matter would be dropped.
Eleanor hated being here, as much as she was even aware of being here, dazed as she was, among people she
really could not understand, but trusted still that David would keep her safe. It mattered to her that he was here,
too, for his own sake. Days or weeks from now she knew he would be talking about her with them, explaining
perhaps why it had not worked out, and she did not even mind that. He was entitled. It was not his fault.
The thought of that imagined conversation suddenly chilled her. She did not want to lose him. But she could not
help it, could she? She was a prisoner in her own mind and body, a recluse who had failed to be drawn-out
either by a short course with a shrink, abbreviated because, of course, he wanted to know too much, or by a lot
of love from a warm and wonderful man. She was a hopeless case. And if she could not make it with David?
There could be no-one else, could there?
She took refuge in a drink. A stiff drink. The only kind of drink that Mike and Shannon served, as a rule.
Dinner, pre-prepared by the same domestic staff who would clear and wash up the debris next morning, was
waiting in a heated trolley, hors d’oeuvres already on the table, laid out at the narrower end of the vast grand-
piano shaped patio which formed the roof of Michael’s huge study. Potted palms and small raised flower beds, a
discreet open air Jacuzzi too added colour to the imported red Italian stone flooring.
Ursula and Alastair were there, too, seated waiting at the table. Ursula was Swedish and a cliché from her long
blonde hair to her swelling tits and lilting accent. Alastair was a Scot, an expatriate like Ursula, welcomed into an
increasingly unwelcoming country on the basis of his bank balance and business acumen. His holiday home was
a genuine loch-side castle.
Ushered to the table, the newcomers and their hosts began to eat and drink, to talk of work and gossip, of share
movements, and the film score Mike was working on, and the little scandals of the wealthy. Eyes rolled, eyebrows
danced with merriment or pretended horror and mouths stretched wide in smiles and easy laughter around
gleaming, perfect teeth. Eleanor began to relax, but then the tide of conversation turned.
“Isn’t she wonderful?” Mike asked through a mouthful of lobster, catching sight of David glancing in Ursula’s
direction. “Wouldn’t you just love to climb between those legs?”
“We all know you would, Mickey,” Shannon laughed; “but you know that Ursula’s out of bounds.”
“Am I?” Ursula grinned. “I wouldn’t be too sure if I were you!”
Conscious of her own body, aware that everyone thought it exquisite, Eleanor could not help but appraise the
bodies of her female companions. It is not as if they were well-hidden, either. Ursula’s low cut number, slit to the
thigh, was made of gleaming golden fabric and moulded to her body as if it had been sprayed onto her. Shannon’
s outfit consisted of expensive black slacks and a gauzy, transparent silver top beneath which she wore no bra,
and when she moved around in the slacks she did so with the confidence of someone who knows her ass is to
die for.
They were the best bodies that money, good genes, comfortable surroundings and good diet, could buy, and her
own body was the same. Ursula was a former actress whose accent, thickening in moments of passion, had
limited her interest among English audiences of mainstream cinema. Otherwise apparently perfectly equipped for
the genre, Ursula had refused to become involved in the porn industry and, married to Alastair, had anyway no
need of employment. Shannon came from a background such that she had never needed to work either, but
after pulling strings she had found herself a place with one of the major studios and developed a serious career
of her own. It was the studio, and Mike’s involvement in composing several of their movie soundtracks that had
brought the two together.
“Ursula, you gorgeous thing! Do you really mean you’re up for it?” Mickey wanted to know, leaning forward in his
eagerness.
Ursula shrugged. “It is fine with Allie – and I know he would not need asking twice if Shannon offered – and I think
it is fine with me. Just ask me after a couple more highballs!”
Eleanor wanted to leave. Every centimetre of her, every atom of her mind and body was in conflict with this open-
ness, the sexuality that radiated around the table as something almost tangible. But if she left, David would leave
too. He would insist. And she did not want that. If she could not give him what he deserved, why should she
deprive him of what he wanted? Instead she clenched her knees together beneath her long emerald satin skirt
and poured another drink down her throat, scarcely tasting it.
They laughed a lot, at jokes the men made – Alastair in particular – at Ursula’s accent as the booze impacted
upon it, and at nothing – it seemed – at all.
“Anyone game to play?” Shannon asked, suddenly, giggling.
“Play?” Michael asked dryly; “Play what?”
“Cards, of course, like we did last time.”
Eleanor glanced at David, saw his rueful smile:
“Sorry,” he said; “Can’t. I think we need to get going soon.”
“There’s no hurry, David, really.” Had she actually said that? And if she had, and it looked – from the surprised
faces around her – as if she had, was it on account of the booze that was making her voice sound so throaty and
warming her so much? Or was it desperation. She gazed into her own man’s startled eyes. ‘I love you, David.’
The thought seemed almost to overwhelm her.
“Eleanor doesn’t need to play if she doesn’t want to,” Shannon spoke reassuringly. “Let’s begin, and see what
happens?”
The men cleared the table in no time, unsurprisingly. Alastair cut the cards and began to deal. When he
hesitated at dealing to her, card in hand, Eleanor nodded and gazed down fixedly at the pasteboard rectangles
as they fell, as if she hoped to read them through their patterned covers.
Ursula lost the first hand, though, and her own was good. Even so she wanted to run, wanted desperately to flee
this place and what was happening. But she could not. She tried to frame appropriate words in her brain, but
they would not come, and she knew that if she opened her mouth to speak the words that would emerge would
be garbled and senseless.
A tight, bright claw seemed to snatch inside Eleanor’s belly as Ursula stood, turned to allow a grinning Mike to
unfasten her, then eased her way slowly out of the dress.
Michael swore under his breath. Ursula’s bra and panties would have folded easily into a man’s breast pocket,
flimsy gold affairs of a net so fine that it seemed they must have come from the web of some wonderful, mythical
spider.
Eleanor gazed at her, hoping she did not seem to stare, realising suddenly what it was of which Ursula so
reminded her. A cat. A young, short-haired cat, lean and lithe, long and supple in the legs, the thighs long too,
and attenuated. Even her eye-colour seemed predominantly green, and the make-up she wore around them
seemed to suggest that even Ursula saw the cat in herself, lines drawn curving up and back.
Mike and Alastair lost the next two hands, each shrugging off their shirts and displaying their chests, since by this
stage of the evening no-one was over-dressed anyway. Alastair was narrow chested, pale and slim, too prone to
burning to have left behind the legacy of the climate he came from, a triangle of red-gold hair on his breast, his
belly taut. Mike was broad and sun-bronzed, his Latin looks perhaps betraying a soldier of Cortez among his
forbears, his black chest hair thick and matted, a ripple of comfortable excess gently overlapping his pants
waistband.
Now Ursula lost the next hand and stood again, flowing out of her seat and allowing Mike, his eyes almost on
stalks, to unfasten her bra, to touch spilling, perfectly golden breasts that had either known nakedness under sun
or sunlamp and betrayed no bra-lines.
‘I must go!’ But still Eleanor could not voice the thought, and next hand it was too late.
There was a sudden tension, altogether new, as if they all knew she was on the point of flight, anticipation and
eagerness mingled with their cultivated fear of a potential ‘scene’. Eleanor tried to breathe, looked into David’s
eyes and found a mystery there, drained another glass and rose, unsteadily, to her feet.
Mike let go a long slow whistle, Ursula clapped her hands. “Way to go, Eleanor…!” Shannon breathed, smiling.
Eleanor stood with her eyes downcast, looking at herself, afraid to look at them. The dress gleamed a bright
green pool upon the floor and legs, long legs, her own long golden legs, rose upward to her own white panties,
virgin white, and sweet and lacy.
David lost two hands in succession, hesitating only long enough to look at her for any sign that she wished to
stop now. She barely saw him. The knot within her was a heavy ball of seething lead, hot with the burn of
brandy. Her thighs were trembling, her arms too, and she wondered if it were cold, but the night was balmy.
The other girls applauded the bulge, enormous in his shorts.
Ursula lost again. This time she winked a most lascivious wink in Mike’s direction and stalked round the table to
where David sat, lifted his hands to the waist of her panties. Seated, drawing them down, David’s nose almost
grazed along her shaven pubis, must have caught a hint of her warming scent. Eleanor stared, startled at how
child-like the naked pubis was.
Ursula was entirely naked except, for some reason, for her shoes. Eleanor realised suddenly that she had kicked
her own off long ago.
Mike lost, and lost again, and lost again, his pants, socks, and now his shorts were forfeit, and the girls whistled
approvingly as he drew the dark fabric of his undershorts away from his rigid penis. ‘Not as big as David’s…’
The thought surprised her.
Mike swore: “That’s me out, I guess. Can I get anybody anything?”
One eyebrow arched, one side of her mouth drawn up in an exquisitely cat-like, predatory grin, Ursula purred
throatily: “You can stay in the game, Michael, surely? Just so long as you promise to pay a forfeit next time you
lose…”
“Oh shit.” Michael’s cock bounced in anticipation and as he returned to his seat Shannon reached down and
began to play with him gently.
Shannon lost her first hand, stood and removed her top, then bent and removed her slacks. “Not fair if I am the
only one in a two-piece,” she laughed. “I’ll keep my knicks and shoes on, just to keep things even.”
Shannon’s breasts were full and brown and silkily smooth, their nipples almost extraordinarily long in the
distension of her desire. And Eleanor realised that her own were filling. There was a heat there that she had not
known before.
She watched, almost feverish, as Ursula lost again and shed her shoes, David lost again and parted with his
socks. Then he lost again, and she watched mesmerised as her man, her David, turned to Ursula, watched
Ursula draw his shorts down round his ankles, heard the bellow of approval from Mike as Ursula took David’s
penis in her mouth for just a tantalising instant.
Only now Ursula lost again. Naked already, and, Eleanor thought, so very, very beautiful, so magically desirable,
Ursula owed the table a forfeit. The Swedish girl smiled around at them, enquiring huskily: “So what is it to be?”
Mike said; “I think the girls should decide.” When Eleanor, bemused by alcohol, preoccupation and her own
inertia, made no comment, Shannon said; “A film moment! I know! Let me fix it!”
Flitting from the table, her breasts undulating softly as she walked, Shannon disappeared and returned very
shortly afterwards. Michael laughed “Oh yes!” and watched as Shannon set a saucer on the floor, filled it to the
brim with liquid from a carton.
“Give pussy some milk!” Shannon giggled. No-one could remember the movie, but most everyone remembered
the scene. She said: “You’re in charge of timing, Allie..” and the Scot picked up his watch from the table.
“How long?” he asked.
“What’ll we say, folks – a minute?”
Eleanor gazed transfixed as the long golden girl, a man at either arm, carefully lowered her shaven pussy toward
the saucer, giggling. Ursula squealed at the sudden cold on impact, and writhed, her full breasts bouncing.
“Shit, det’s kolt!” she shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. The others began to clap, rhythmically, as the
seconds ticked away, and at the last Mike and Allie lifted her, pussy dripping, to her feet.
Only then, somehow, did what she had seen fully impact on Eleanor’s liquor-dulled senses and panic flooded
deep into her belly. But her legs would not obey her, her mouth would not obey her. She had come too far, let
things run too far, and suddenly she recognized the desperate truth. As frightened as she was of such a
humiliating act as that she had just witnessed, she was the more terrified, now, of being seen to back away.
Flight would be more humiliating both to her and to David now, she knew. She could only stay, and pray.
Not that Ursula was humiliated, either. The fleeting subjugation to the will of others seemed only to have
released fresh wildness in her, provoked greater warmth in the smiles of her friends, stimulated all the visible
symptoms of arousal, the men’s cocks lifting, Shannon slipping a hand between her own damp thighs. And
Ursula was standing up, bending easily backwards with her legs apart, offering her milk-damp pussy to Michael’s
tongue. But the cards were now in play again and Ursula returned to her seat.
The cards were against Eleanor, this time. David had to hold her arm to help her stand, but he could read the
grim determination on her face. Their eyes met, wondering and uncertain, and he reached around her to
unfasten her white brassiere. Her own breasts suddenly gazed up at her, her pert, up-tilted nipples dark brown
peaks and swelling.
She heard wolf-whistling and happy applause.
Allie, Mike and David naked, Ursula too, Eleanor had her briefs alone to shed, Shannon her briefs and shoes. It
was David’s turn to lose, and Ursula laughed “Revenge!” and disappeared from the table.
When she returned she was carrying something behind her back:
“One minute, yes?” she asked, eyes wickedly sparkling, and the others, trusting, agreed.
David gasped and Eleanor squirmed inwardly as Ursula drew the plastic container from behind herself and thrust
David’s full, hot, swollen cock into the tub of soft ice cream.
If David was cold, however, Eleanor was not. Heat was building in new places and new ways inside her as if
keeping pace with the growing dread in her. Still she watched with fascination as Ursula lifted David’s drooping,
dripping cock from the melting ice cream and brought it hard again, licking the cold confection from his penis with
grinning relish.
And the cards were against her, again. What hollowness within her, what terror and what heat as David drew her
panties down around her ankles, kissing the full dark nest of her as he moved. Sitting down, she felt her
nakedness acutely, the full lips of her labia, the long curves of her ass, pressing against the Alien fabric of the
seat.
Shannon lost her socks, then Michael, already naked, lost again.
Ursula chanted; “Suck, suck, suck…”
No minute in time had ever lasted longer than the minute for which Eleanor watched Shannon suckling on her
husband, Michael’s, cock. She could see Shannon’s mouth curved in a smile around him, see her throat working,
the movements in her cheeks as she fought to milk him within the minute given, and she could see Michael
fighting, not wanting to lose his load so early in the game and wanting to protract it all.
At the end of the minute, Michael, released, almost toppled, regained his balance slowly, grinning widely.
Ursula dealt.
“Your forfeit, Elle,” Shannon said softly, and Eleanor gazed at the cards disbelieving. Now, then, or never. She
wanted to run. She wanted so very badly to run. But something held her.
“You really don’t have to, if you don’t want to, you know?” Shannon’s voice was gentle, reassuring, giving her an
out if she wanted it. And she did, yet she could not bring herself to take it. The edge of a new precipice, now,
and the choice to turn or leap, and blindly, knowing that not to leap might carry her back to safety, yet knowing
no longer what safety was.
Hollow blackness aching in her belly, feeling herself trembling as if with a fever, she fought back her final
resistance. She breathed:
“What do you want me to do?”
Shannon asked of the table; “What haven’t we done, yet?”
Ursula giggled: “Spanking!”
Not a word in the world could have sobered Eleanor more instantly, not a thought in time or space created the
instant terror of that word.
She whispered: “No, please, not that…” but in her fear of failure perhaps she had not the voice to make herself
heard and she allowed herself, somehow, to be gently led toward the upright chair that Alastair had fetched.
Darkness, of whatever origin, clouded round her eyes now, and she felt icy cold, an icicle hard and sharp as a
sword fixed within her chest. Was she expected to bend over the chair she wondered? And the others would be
watching? She almost stumbled, felt herself being drawn again, surrendered softly to the lap onto which she was
being eased, seeing Shannon’s black lace briefs and soft curved belly as she descended.
Shannon, then.
She heard her say: “Every 5 seconds. Allie, you count me in.” On the periphery of her vision she saw them
gathering round her, just naked feet and ankles, but she felt their gaze, sensed their anticipation. Breasts
overhanging the one side of the chair, she was conscious of nothing, felt nothing but her ass now, seeing it as if
in a mirror, round and full, the one eye peeping, and clenched her thighs to try to hide her slit.
The knot in her belly tightened, the desire to run thrusting upward through her, but it was too late, and she knew
it was. She could hear a happy voice, the voice of a delighted watcher, counting one, two, three, four….
Someone, Shannon presumably, was rubbing her ass, kneading it gently with warm fingers and smoothing it,
warming it, with her palms and parting her, too, displaying her to them. But on four that stopped, and on five
Eleanor felt the blow, stinging on her quivering cheek, and cried out in astonishment and pain.
“Seven, eight, nine…”
She bit her lip as the hand descended, hot on the burning heat around that first imprint, and whimpered, heard
the counting continue as the others gazed on the glorious mounds of her ass, watching it squirm, seeing it
redden.
It seemed relentless. Twelve strokes, five seconds apart. She closed her eyes in anticipation of the third, and
kept them closed for the rest. Warm heat spread through her buttock cheeks with every blow, and began to
surge now upward, flushing hot and prickly through her belly, melting the ice there and the ice that had been in
her mind too, for here, now, was resignation.
Like her mother’s verbal abuse this was a situation she could not escape without creating something far, far
worse. The hardest part of her soul, the frightened, angry child who had hoarded isolation to her, preferring
alone-ness to the putative love of those who could hurt and despise her, surrendered here and in this, finally
gave way at last.
She could feel the heat of Shannon’s thighs and belly against her skin, feel the prickle of Shannon’s perspiration
icy against the heat of her own hot flesh, feel the trickling and pooling of her own sweat in the small of her own
back. Again and again the hot hand descended on the peach shaped ass that felt inflamed now, everywhere,
and whose fire radiated to every nook and cranny of a body surrendered. Tested and tempted before by all the
strangeness she had witnessed, Eleanor’s nipples were true peaks of steel now, and hot steel too, her breasts
full and hot, her loins churning lava of wanting and need. The hairs around her vulva were prickling, rising and
stiffening, her labia flooding, and the drizzle of wetness that trickled down her inner thigh she suddenly knew was
hers.
“That’s it!” Alastair announced, his counting over, and Eleanor knew that it was.
Time moving on, it was decided that Shannon, in briefs, was the winner, and Shannon demanded her rightful
homage, a minute of suckling from each.
Eleanor, disoriented, bewildered, warm, suffused with a heat the like of which she had never experienced or even
imagined, allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the dream-like freedom of the fall that followed her hesitant
leaping, did not even hesitate or pause to think as she dropped between Shannon’s thighs, tasted the
indescribably sweet, warm, soaking-wet pussy and tongued it till the minute was up and eager arms lifted her
away.
At the end she helped lift Shannon, grinning, and heard her happy cry of “Fucking Time!”, watched the other four
walk arm in arm to the master-bed and descend upon it in a tangled mass of desire. But that was not what she
wanted, and she knew what it was that she wanted.
She led David, naked, his inflated cock bobbing like a fishing float on a stream, to a separate room, sat him down
and gazed into his eyes. Wordlessly, afraid to speak, she lowered herself across his naked lap, across the
hardness of his cock. He gazed on cheeks still warm and flushed with recent punishment and heard her murmur,
her voice trembling:
“Spank me, daddy, please, and I’ll be good.”
He did what her father never had or would have done, save that he loved her and she knew it now, save that he
made her feel safe, just as her father had once promised to do, and just as, at the end, he was finally able to do
again in a matter of words. And Eleanor was good.
The armour she’d worn against the mean and petty tyrannies of her life, building it layer upon layer to shield her
from new enemies, had become a prison, and tonight a friendly hand had led her through the door. And in the
midst of it, in the midst of a suffering not of pain, but of the fear of pain and the threat of being diminished, she
had found that both weighed far, far less than the armour had.
A loving hand, this time, had reinforced her understanding, broken the lock on her soul, finally, lastingly taught
her that she could don her armour again, tomorrow perhaps, or the day after that, and be strong and safe as she
had been, whilst here and now she was entirely safe without it, and free without it, to love and to be loved.
Smiling through her tears, her devils shed, her ghosts banished, she lay her beautiful body face up upon the bed
and spread her legs invitingly, confident that he would love what he would see, and he saw the moistness
gathered, the flushing lips, and descended softly, slipping his full hard shaft smoothly into her ready channel,
beginning to rise and fall to her, soft ripples of magic running the length of her body.
At the last a hungry, desperate kiss, mouth closed on mouth, tongue writhing on tongue, both of them liquid to
the souls of their being, riding their bodies as waves, she suddenly arching and crying but silent, her shout lost
within him, her breath lost within him, and him suddenly pulsing and gushing and filling, wet into wetness, stream
into stream, and afterwards floating.
She came, thus, to peace, and to him.
Copyright 2005, R V Raiment (rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or in part without written permission from the
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