Chapter Nine (Part 3 of 3)
* * * * * * * *
I wasn’t on campus until Monday. I avoided the student union for a couple days: gave the boys a chance to marinate. Wednesday I went over to the union for lunch. I got there early, sat so I could watch for the boys. They arrived about fifteen minutes later and spotted me immediately. As they approached my table their expressions were neutral. They sat, this time no backward chairs or sitting on a corner of the table looking down.
“So, Dani,” Ed began, “um, did I not hear you right about the address for Friday?”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m sure you went to the right place. Mrs. Police Chief answered the door?”
“What the fuck, Ed!” said Mac.
“That’s just what I was thinkin’, Mac,” said Ed. “What the fuck! Where does this group meet exactly, Dani?”
“Group?” I looked at them blankly. “Laurel and Hardy could out-think you two. There is no group. God, you guys are a real piece of work.”
“You fuckin’ bitch!” Ed said, anger filling his voice, his eyes taking on menace. “You God-damned fucking bitch. You’re going to be goddamned sorry…”
I had opened my backpack as he spoke, took out a couple of nine by twelve envelopes, tossed them one each in front of the boys.
I cut off Ed. “You just want to shut up and have a look at that.”
“Shit,” Ed said contemptuously. They each opened their envelopes, their faces turning white as they looked at selected video captures of highlights from their performance in the suite’s bedroom.
“I like the one where the cum is running out of the corner of your mouth,” I commented to Ed. “I think the composition is great. And the one with Mac’s dick in your mouth kind of making a bulge in your cheek. And Mac, the one where you’re lapping off the plate, and there’s that long string of cum running from the end of your tongue down onto the plate. What do they say? Priceless!”
“You fucking bitch!” Ed repeated.
“Oh, Ed, hey, can’t we be in the friend zone?” I asked. “Okay. I guess not. But you do want to be really nice, Ed. Mac. You want to be very, very nice. Because if you’re not, every one of your frat brothers is going to have copies of those, and more. They may get some video files, too. And I’m sure the sororities would just get a kick in the pants out of those. The ladies in the dorm.”
“So, what is this?” Ed asked. “Some kind of scam? Some kind of blackmail?”
“How clearly and concisely you’ve framed the situation, Ed,” I said.
“So, what do want?” Ed asked. “Money?”
“Me?” I asked. “Nothing. Well, not much. I just want you two to be good boys. Do you know what a Least Wanted List is?” They looked at me blankly. “You think girls on a campus this size don’t talk? Don’t compare notes? Your names are up in every ladies bathroom on campus. They’re there because you’re both date-rapists.”
“Yo, Dani, hey,” Mac said.
“Don’t even start,” I said. “Just stuff a sock in it. After your little adventure Friday night, I wouldn’t think there are any charges.” Their silence confirmed to me that was the case. “But I’d be willing to bet a session on the dick spit that your pictures and prints are on file. Maybe they collected a little DNA?” Again, they were silent. “Oh, you’re going to be very, very good boys. I have girlfriends, and those girlfriends have girlfriends. You do not want it getting back to me that you’ve been bad boys.”
“So, what?” Ed asked. “We can’t have a sex life now without your approval?”
“You can have all the sex life you want,” I said. “If you can find a girl stupid enough to get within a mile of you. If it’s all consensual. If she says ‘yes’ clearly and unambiguously. And I don’t mean because you’re pulling her hair out or because you have your hand around her throat.” I gave them each a level look. “Don’t you boys start getting the idea that you can work around this. You can’t. You just learn how to be good boys.” I put my head in between the two of theirs and lowered my voice. “Or maybe try a gay bar. Your dicks didn’t lie in that hotel suite. I think once you’ve accepted yourselves for who you are you’ll be a lot better balanced, and you’ll stop hurting people. But, hey, that’s just one woman’s opinion. No charge for the counseling session.”
I left them then. I ditched my class. Went home for the rest of my Wednesday afternoon. There’s a first time for everything.
When I got home, I went to my room. Lying on my bed I thought about the things I had done over the last few weeks in pursuit of my self-imposed assignment. I thought about my nude exhibition at the party. I thought about getting my ass whipped and how I could still feel a little remnant of soreness from my fading welts and bruises. I thought about my big bet with the boys, the memory of the risk I’d taken eliciting in me a delicious little shivery thrill. I thought of the shows I’d put the boys through: the victorious female dominating, enjoying her hard-won spoils.
I realized suddenly that as those thoughts had filled my mind my jeans had somehow become unzipped, my hand had somehow found its way into my underwear, and arousal was about to overwhelm me. After my orgasm, I fell asleep and did not wake until the following morning.
* * * * * * * *
So, as Aunt Roberta said, that’s my story.
I’ve started my e-mail to Aunt Roberta a dozen times and each time I’ve trashed it. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s an e-mail she’ll ever find occupying her in-box.
Letting Aunt Roberta be able to experience vicariously winning her bet from years ago? Doing my good deed for the day by reining in a couple of date rapists? Those were the two wellsprings from which this broad river of my adventure had sprung.
Have they started to sound like excuses to you, too?
You were probably way ahead of me. I think I had the same feeling too a few weeks ago when I dreamed this up, but maybe I just decided to fool myself. People do that a lot, even very smart people.
After four years of having what seems like half this campus unknowingly reveal their secrets to me, I’ve come to believe that the hardest secrets for a person to know are her own. It seems like the toughest person for me to get secrets out of is me.
I think of all the things I’ve done and experienced while pursuing my scheme. When I do that sliding, slippery feeling is in my stomach again, the one I had felt at thirteen when I’d discovered something private about my mom. Now that feeling is inside me again because I think the assignment I’ve really been on these last few weeks is to finally begin to learn something private about myself.
I know I’m going to do some thinking about this, do some exploring, do some doing. I believe I’m going to do all that even if it costs me a few A-minuses.
I can hardly wait to learn what secrets I have to reveal.
# # # # END # # # #
Other stories in Taking Chances
Volume One - Ellen's Bet: Ellen is a business executive based in Chicago, married twelve years to her husband, David, and the mother of three grade-school-age girls. While on a business trip to Baton Rouge in early February 2010 Ellen is invited by the local manager she is working with, Patrick, to come to his house to watch the Super Bowl. Three young men from the office also are in attendance. Before the game, one of the young men proposes a bet for a sizable amount of money. Ellen - with no other way to cover the bet and wondering from where the impulse may have come and where her prized sagacity and perspicacity have gone - proposes to cover the bets of all four men with her body. When Ellen loses her bet, she must spend the rest of the night at the sexual beck and call of the men. Patrick's wife, Roberta, is instrumental in helping her through her grueling night, and they become close friends. In this novella of about 24,000 words, Ellen spends a night like no other in her life, wondering from what dark part of her psyche had come the impulse to place herself so far out on so risky a limb, and how she will cope with the load of guilt and remorse that she will carry back to her home.
Volume Two - Roberta's Bet: In the first chapter of Volume One - Ellen's Bet, Roberta relates to Ellen in very brief fashion an incident she experienced as a graduate student. She believed her college football squad was bound to lose, as it had every year for a decade, to its gridiron rival. The two financial aid lab assistants, who helped her with her thesis research and were members of the football squad, disagreed. A bet ensued. This is the complete telling of that tale. In this novelette of about 13,000 words, Roberta tells Ellen and us about her motivations for making the bet, and of her mental explorations and musings: how will she ever handle the humiliation and degradation of losing, even though she knows that outcome to be beyond remote. And when she wins, as she fully expects, how will she react to her afternoon as a dominant female: the two young men who had proposed such a loathsome and vile bet at her mercy? We experience the game with her, and the result.
Volume Three - Dani's Bet: Dani is Roberta's younger niece. She is an academically gifted, sexually late-blooming college senior at Roberta's alma mater. In this novella of nine chapters and about 36,000 words Dani finds a way to satisfy her budding sexual curiosity: she discovers a way to learn the sexual secrets of others. Eventually, she comes upon the knowledge of her Aunt Roberta's humiliations from years before and determines to do something to make it right and give her aunt the vicarious thrill and catharsis of having won her bet with her lab assistants (Volume Two: Roberta's Bet). But to do this she must lure two campus date-rape predators into a supremely dangerous wager. Will she emerge victorious and unscathed, or go down to humiliating defeat, as had Roberta?
Volume Four - Emily's Bet: Emily is Roberta's (Volume Two - Roberta’s Bet) older niece and Dani's (Volume Three - Dani’s Bet) elder sister. In this novella of eight chapters and about 25,000 words, we meet Emily, working a job she loves with a great boss in Chicago. While Dani had always been the wallflower, timid and socially withdrawn through her teen years, Emily was the party girl. She was exposed to, and came to like very well, stripping games because of the entertaining and bawdy sights they placed before her eyes. The fact that she never lost made them even more enjoyable. Through her late teens and college years she found herself in ever riskier games, always coming out on top. Now at twenty-eight years old her glory days are behind her, but one night the itch strikes, and she invites four male friends into a chancy game. Will her winning streak continue, or will she finally be defeated? And how will all this affect Ian, a Brit working at his bank's Chicago office, for whom Emily has been feeling the stirrings of romantic attraction?
Volume Five - Ellen and David's Bet: Ellen is back home in Chicago with her husband, David and their three daughters. The baggage she's brought back from Baton Rouge (Volume One: Ellen’s Bet) is weighted down with guilt and remorse: the product of her impulsive, foolish, irresponsible bet and its aftermath. How does she tell David - does she tell David? - about the horrendous night when she had to pay off her rash, thoughtless wager? In this darkest story of the Taking Chances series Ellen begins to tip-toe through that field of landmines seeking atonement and absolution. Every method of penance she tries comes up far short of what she knows is necessary for true forgiveness and freedom from the encumbrance of her transgressions. As it turns out, David has secrets of his own to reveal. Volume Five – Ellen and David’s Bet is a novella of ten chapters and about 34,000 words.
Volume Six - Emily and Ellen's Bet: Emily and Ellen work in downtown Chicago. In this novel of seventeen chapters plus epilogue and about 79,000 words, they frequently eat lunch at Grant Park's Buckingham Fountain. In early spring, just after Emily's experience with her friends (Volume Four - Emily's Bet) and Ellen's efforts to set things right with David (Volume Five - Ellen and David's Bet), the two women confide in each other about their recent experiences and discover their mutual interest in erotic wagering. Meanwhile, Ellen and David begin as a couple to explore David's secret desires. Emily and Ian begin to grow their nascent relationship. Emily and Ellen begin making a series of small-time bets with each other that result in low-level public exposure for the loser. But finally, Emily again encounters Marcy, a cruel and dominant woman who had found Emily vulnerable in her story (Volume Four - Emily's Bet). Now Emily impulsively challenges Marcy to a hazardous and supremely risky bet that will either settle the score or disastrously visit on her more public humiliations.
Volume Seven - Martina's Bet: We met Martina briefly in Volume Four - Emily's Bet. She had a larger role in Volume Six - Emily and Ellen's Bet. Now, in this premium length novel of thirty chapters plus epilogue and about 150,000 words, we hear Martina's heartrending story. In her adolescence, Martina had non-sexual experiences that had the effect of awakening in her a curiosity about the concepts of dominance and submission. Now as a young adult in her mid-twenties, Martina feels the urge to sort out those curiosities and desires and to discover who she is: a female domme, a submissive woman, or something in between. Men enter her life, and Martina must decide if her out-of-the-ordinary sexual tastes and curiosities will affect her relationships. We learn how Martina makes her discovery about her sexual identity, and if she succeeds in finding love.
Volume Eight - Alicia’s Bet: Alicia is one of Dani’s housemates (Volume Three: Dani’s Bet). She, Dani, and their housemates, Monica and Gloria, have traveled to Chicago to attend Emily and Ian’s wedding (Volume Four - Emily’s Bet). While in town, the women are introduced to the BDSM club Leather & Lace (Volume Six - Emily and Ellen’s Bet; and Volume Seven - Martina’s Bet). The club will shortly hold its annual Medieval Faire, during which one unlucky participant is chosen by lottery to be designated as the Lawbreaker, to be jailed, tried, and sentenced to the sort of public corporal punishments and humiliations that awaited criminals in Medieval England and the early American colonies. In this novel of forty-one chapters and about 82,000 words, Alicia has recently completed a degree in Sociology, with coursework in Anglo-Saxon societal structures of the Middle Ages. She eagerly awaits her opportunity to come as close as possible in the twenty-first century to witnessing the application of the fifteenth century system of criminal justice on an unlucky lawbreaker.
