Loinclothslave
slave to the whip
Wow! Such cliffhangers, it’s like you had this serialised already! Working so well as 1,000 word bites… I’m on the edge of my seat with anticipation! Just imagine if we hadn’t known the outcome? Wow!
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Taking Chances
- Thread starter BEThalia
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BEThalia
Executioner
Thank you, L. Glad the shorter bites are working for you, and thanks for the excellent advice in that regard.
They weren't really serialized. I wrote the entire story/novella/novel and then published them whole on smashwords. That was 10 to 12 years ago. But in writing I (like many writers) tried to find the cliffhanger points to end chapters (gotta keep those pages turning!). I've gotten lucky in this chapter 3 as I was able to find good places within the chapter to find cliffhangy sorts of places to break.
I'll get the third part of chapter 3 up tomorrow. And I know for writers like you and Barbaria1 that I'm not fooling you for a minute. I like to think I've set the reversal up well, but you guys know it's coming.
Last edited:
BEThalia
Executioner
Fiction Writing 101 - Lesson 1, Hour 1, Minute 1 >>>>> REVERSAL
Fossy
SEXPIOGENTUS
Yep ... I got that my friend
BEThalia
Executioner
Chapter Three (Part Three)
I had taken off my scarf earlier when I’d gotten a little warm and had put it on the bench next to me. I picked up the scarf now and began to step into the aisle.
"Where are you going?" Patrick asked.
"Well, that's the end of the game, isn't it? The other team has won once all the time is gone."
Patrick explained to me that was not the case. It seemed there was something called a ‘forty-five second play clock’ and a team was required to start another play in that time or be penalized, stopping the game clock. This information was somewhat disappointing to me. I had to put my inner celebration on hold, at least for a few more minutes. I didn’t see the teams lining up for a play.
"So, are they going to make another play?" I asked. Patrick said they wouldn’t. They would just let the play clock expire; take the penalty, and then punt. That was the surest way to avoid mistakes and the best way to get the game closer to its conclusion. He explained that after the punt our team would have the time to run a play, maybe two.
"But the other team is going to win, right?" I asked.
Patrick finally twigged. "You sure are wanting to be reassured that the other guys are going to win."
"No. No, I'm just wondering. I mean, it seems that way."
He told me it would now take some sort of miracle for our team to win, and I felt warm and secure.
The game clock continued to decrease until at thirteen seconds it stopped. I saw the referee throw into the air a little yellow handkerchief and move the ball back five yards. It was placed on the fifteen-yard line, and the other team lined up for a punt.
The punter shouted for the ball, and even I could tell something didn’t look right. The ball sailed above the punter's head. He was standing just behind the goal line, and he reached up his hand to try to get the ball. It brushed off his fingers, dropped to the ground, and waddled off sideways toward the middle of the end zone. One of the players on our team slid into the ball, grabbing it to his stomach. Our side of the field went crazy.
I asked Patrick what had happened, and he explained that because the ball was loose in the end zone where we score, and we had picked it up, we had scored a touchdown. My face felt numb as the numbers on the scoreboard changed, finally stopping at 22 to 21. Three second remained on the clock.
"So, what happens now?" I asked Patrick.
He looked at the field and told me the kicker was not going into the game. That meant our team would try to get two points. If they made the two points they won the game and if they didn't they lost.
"But the other team is still going to win, right?" I asked.
He gave me a very puzzled look but told me it was now fifty-fifty.
The two teams lined up and the play started. Our quarterback held onto the ball going backward, and I knew he was going to try to throw it. He did, but a player on the other team grazed the ball with his hand. The ball veered way off its original course, up in the air, twisting wildly. The ball's lame flight took it to a back corner of the end zone.
One of our players was standing there. No one was near him. He did not have to leap or dive or stretch or even move. The ball ended its crazy flight by nestling gently into his arms; he looked at it as if he were holding his first-born.
Our side of the field was in pandemonium. I watched as the numbers on the scoreboard changed from 22 to 21, to 22 to 22, to 22 to 23. Then I threw up my two fully loaded hotdogs into the aisle. I couldn’t hear the splat for all the cheering.
I had taken off my scarf earlier when I’d gotten a little warm and had put it on the bench next to me. I picked up the scarf now and began to step into the aisle.
"Where are you going?" Patrick asked.
"Well, that's the end of the game, isn't it? The other team has won once all the time is gone."
Patrick explained to me that was not the case. It seemed there was something called a ‘forty-five second play clock’ and a team was required to start another play in that time or be penalized, stopping the game clock. This information was somewhat disappointing to me. I had to put my inner celebration on hold, at least for a few more minutes. I didn’t see the teams lining up for a play.
"So, are they going to make another play?" I asked. Patrick said they wouldn’t. They would just let the play clock expire; take the penalty, and then punt. That was the surest way to avoid mistakes and the best way to get the game closer to its conclusion. He explained that after the punt our team would have the time to run a play, maybe two.
"But the other team is going to win, right?" I asked.
Patrick finally twigged. "You sure are wanting to be reassured that the other guys are going to win."
"No. No, I'm just wondering. I mean, it seems that way."
He told me it would now take some sort of miracle for our team to win, and I felt warm and secure.
The game clock continued to decrease until at thirteen seconds it stopped. I saw the referee throw into the air a little yellow handkerchief and move the ball back five yards. It was placed on the fifteen-yard line, and the other team lined up for a punt.
The punter shouted for the ball, and even I could tell something didn’t look right. The ball sailed above the punter's head. He was standing just behind the goal line, and he reached up his hand to try to get the ball. It brushed off his fingers, dropped to the ground, and waddled off sideways toward the middle of the end zone. One of the players on our team slid into the ball, grabbing it to his stomach. Our side of the field went crazy.
I asked Patrick what had happened, and he explained that because the ball was loose in the end zone where we score, and we had picked it up, we had scored a touchdown. My face felt numb as the numbers on the scoreboard changed, finally stopping at 22 to 21. Three second remained on the clock.
"So, what happens now?" I asked Patrick.
He looked at the field and told me the kicker was not going into the game. That meant our team would try to get two points. If they made the two points they won the game and if they didn't they lost.
"But the other team is still going to win, right?" I asked.
He gave me a very puzzled look but told me it was now fifty-fifty.
The two teams lined up and the play started. Our quarterback held onto the ball going backward, and I knew he was going to try to throw it. He did, but a player on the other team grazed the ball with his hand. The ball veered way off its original course, up in the air, twisting wildly. The ball's lame flight took it to a back corner of the end zone.
One of our players was standing there. No one was near him. He did not have to leap or dive or stretch or even move. The ball ended its crazy flight by nestling gently into his arms; he looked at it as if he were holding his first-born.
Our side of the field was in pandemonium. I watched as the numbers on the scoreboard changed from 22 to 21, to 22 to 22, to 22 to 23. Then I threw up my two fully loaded hotdogs into the aisle. I couldn’t hear the splat for all the cheering.
Hope springs eternal ..
BEThalia
Executioner
Americans tend to like games that are just complicated enough that they can seem like a genius because they can explain the arcane rules.Honestly, I've never known such a complicated bloody game! Good job I was 100% focused only on the outcome
I've been watching the World Cup games lately and I'm going to miss them. Soccer/football is such a simpler and more uncomplicated game. And that's all to the good. Although I still have all sorts of questions like why and under what circumstances are all those people are allowed to be in the little goal keeper's box?
It was one of the disingenuous parts of this story I was a bit uncomfortable with that Roberta (just about to finish a graduate degree in the sciences) had to be made so clueless just so Patrick could explain things for the benefit of readers who think (justifiably) that American football is ridiculous and don't know all the rules, since specifically how we get to 23 to 22 is important.
You know:
Character 1 (almost without exception female): "Wow. I don't know. I never paid much attention in my science classes."
Character 2 (the almost without exception male Explainer): "Don't you understand?! It's the speed of light! The speed of light! The universe's absolute speed limit!"
Loinclothslave
slave to the whip
And that is it’s inherent beauty. I often say one can argue that American Football is the Cricket of the football codes. It lasts longer, it’s rule set is more bizarre, and the tension builds wonderfully.Honestly, I've never known such a complicated bloody game! Good job I was 100% focused only on the outcome
Who doesn’t love an all or nothing “safety” play? They should bring that in for Rugby league too!
Great chapter, @BEThalia
BEThalia
Executioner
I've never thought of it like that, L, but that makes a great deal of sense!
Glad you enjoyed the chapter.
Fossy
SEXPIOGENTUS
Was at the Rugby League yesterday Loin to watch Leeds Rhinos beat Warrington 26-24. Great game ... given the nature of the score's tooing and froing right to the end it would have made a wonderful game of jeopardy...
Loinclothslave
slave to the whip
I forgot how civilised you really are - to love both Cricket AND Rugby League! You’re a treasure, it’s a pity you’re English!
If you want to see the best Rugby League, you really must come watch State of Origin one day!
BEThalia
Executioner
Chapter Four (Part 1 of 3)
At 2:50 the next afternoon I parked my car. Dorm residents were not allowed to have cars on campus, so there was no lot at the dorm. I had to leave my car at the music building a couple hundred yards away. I deposited my keys in the little clutch purse I had brought and got out.
After the game, Patrick and I and our friends had gone for dinner and then hung out for much of the evening. When Patrick took me home he pointedly asked if he should come in. I had to lie to him for what is the only occasion that readily comes to mind. I told him I very much wanted him to come in. That was the truth. But I also told him I was feeling headachy and crampy from what I assumed was my imminent period. I felt bad about the falsehood, but that didn’t stop me from embellishing it with some bullshit about being resigned to a scorching night in the sack with a hot water bottle and some Midol.
Here's the thing about menstrual periods: they are messy; they are inconvenient; they are at best uncomfortable and at worst downright painful, on occasion even incapacitating. But it isn’t all down side. The fact of their existence – let’s just be totally honest here for a moment, shall we? – can sure come in real handy from time to time regardless of whether or not at that particular moment any blood-engorged uterine lining is actually engaged in the process of gravity-assisted sloughing. My hurling two hot dogs all over the football field grandstand helped sell my fabrication. I felt fine. I just wanted to have the resolution of this bet - now there’s a big, ripe euphemism for being obligated to fuck and blow two nineteen-year-old boys - in the past before I consummated my sexual relationship with Patrick. So, I begged off, suggesting we wait a few days or a week. Patrick, true to his sweet nature, put me and my feelings (however dodgy they might happen to have been on this particular occasion) first.
I had spent much of the night and Sunday morning debating with myself about just not showing up. It was so, so tempting. But I knew I was just entertaining myself with a hypothetical. I think that, like most people, I am fundamentally honest. I could play mental games all I wanted to, but I could never negate the fact that I willingly had made the bet, had agreed to the terms, and that I would have gleefully, enjoyably, boastfully, and without even the tiniest inkling of guilt collected from the boys had I won. There was no way they could make me pay off, just as there was no way I could do the same had I won. But I would have felt great guilt and would have difficulty in living with myself if I didn’t honor my commitment. The derisive ridicule, the snide comments, the outright mocking the boys would heap on me every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon would be nothing compared to the low opinion I would have of myself. So, I was here and I was paying off. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever find myself in a more humiliating and degrading situation, but I was consenting to paying off and enduring the pain, the shame, and the unimaginable disgrace.
As I walked toward the dorm, I felt like I was walking to my execution. In a few minutes I would be stripping in front of the boys, showing them my naked body, opening my mouth and my legs for their pleasure. The tension of the bet: between humiliation on the one hand and entertainment and vindication on the other had been resolved in favor of humiliation. My humiliation.
The dorm was constructed in a shape suggesting two sides of a square, equally long. On the inside of the square there were a couple hundred kids. It seemed like they were having an impromptu victory celebration. This was the only dorm on our small campus, four stories tall. The only other on-campus housing consisted of some apartments for married students.
I would never get to satisfy my curiosity about whether winning the bet and humiliating the boys would get me hot, but I now knew losing the bet was a complete non-starter. In fact, I was all but terrified. All my bravado of a few days ago was gone.
I was walking up stairs now, going to get fucked by two boys at once. I'd had my share of relationships. I enjoy sex. But having two hard dicks in me at once was never on my agenda, something I had never been remotely curious about. The fact of the two dicks was bad enough, but that I was a twenty-five-year-old woman who would soon be getting those dicks from a couple of nineteen-year-olds made it worse. To make it as bad as it could possibly get, the final indignity, I would be taking those two dicks in a dorm room!
Anyway, I was frankly scared and mortified that I had to do this, and I was as far from turned on as I could be. Their room was on the top floor, and before I went to it I stopped by the Ladies and applied lubricating gel very generously all along my labia and into my vagina.
Paul answered the door and told me they were extremely glad to see me. An NFL game was on the television. Hank switched it off. I put my clutch bag down on a chair near the door, wandered over to the room's sole window and looked out. Their room was on the inside of the angle, and I gazed out at all the kids gathered below me, more drifting in all the time. Freshman year, six years ago, I had lived in this building on the second floor. I turned back to the room, not quite sure what to do.
Hank supplied direction. "So, yo, Roberta, hi!" he said. "Strip."
God, I thought, it's starting. This is reality now.
At 2:50 the next afternoon I parked my car. Dorm residents were not allowed to have cars on campus, so there was no lot at the dorm. I had to leave my car at the music building a couple hundred yards away. I deposited my keys in the little clutch purse I had brought and got out.
After the game, Patrick and I and our friends had gone for dinner and then hung out for much of the evening. When Patrick took me home he pointedly asked if he should come in. I had to lie to him for what is the only occasion that readily comes to mind. I told him I very much wanted him to come in. That was the truth. But I also told him I was feeling headachy and crampy from what I assumed was my imminent period. I felt bad about the falsehood, but that didn’t stop me from embellishing it with some bullshit about being resigned to a scorching night in the sack with a hot water bottle and some Midol.
Here's the thing about menstrual periods: they are messy; they are inconvenient; they are at best uncomfortable and at worst downright painful, on occasion even incapacitating. But it isn’t all down side. The fact of their existence – let’s just be totally honest here for a moment, shall we? – can sure come in real handy from time to time regardless of whether or not at that particular moment any blood-engorged uterine lining is actually engaged in the process of gravity-assisted sloughing. My hurling two hot dogs all over the football field grandstand helped sell my fabrication. I felt fine. I just wanted to have the resolution of this bet - now there’s a big, ripe euphemism for being obligated to fuck and blow two nineteen-year-old boys - in the past before I consummated my sexual relationship with Patrick. So, I begged off, suggesting we wait a few days or a week. Patrick, true to his sweet nature, put me and my feelings (however dodgy they might happen to have been on this particular occasion) first.
I had spent much of the night and Sunday morning debating with myself about just not showing up. It was so, so tempting. But I knew I was just entertaining myself with a hypothetical. I think that, like most people, I am fundamentally honest. I could play mental games all I wanted to, but I could never negate the fact that I willingly had made the bet, had agreed to the terms, and that I would have gleefully, enjoyably, boastfully, and without even the tiniest inkling of guilt collected from the boys had I won. There was no way they could make me pay off, just as there was no way I could do the same had I won. But I would have felt great guilt and would have difficulty in living with myself if I didn’t honor my commitment. The derisive ridicule, the snide comments, the outright mocking the boys would heap on me every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon would be nothing compared to the low opinion I would have of myself. So, I was here and I was paying off. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever find myself in a more humiliating and degrading situation, but I was consenting to paying off and enduring the pain, the shame, and the unimaginable disgrace.
As I walked toward the dorm, I felt like I was walking to my execution. In a few minutes I would be stripping in front of the boys, showing them my naked body, opening my mouth and my legs for their pleasure. The tension of the bet: between humiliation on the one hand and entertainment and vindication on the other had been resolved in favor of humiliation. My humiliation.
The dorm was constructed in a shape suggesting two sides of a square, equally long. On the inside of the square there were a couple hundred kids. It seemed like they were having an impromptu victory celebration. This was the only dorm on our small campus, four stories tall. The only other on-campus housing consisted of some apartments for married students.
I would never get to satisfy my curiosity about whether winning the bet and humiliating the boys would get me hot, but I now knew losing the bet was a complete non-starter. In fact, I was all but terrified. All my bravado of a few days ago was gone.
I was walking up stairs now, going to get fucked by two boys at once. I'd had my share of relationships. I enjoy sex. But having two hard dicks in me at once was never on my agenda, something I had never been remotely curious about. The fact of the two dicks was bad enough, but that I was a twenty-five-year-old woman who would soon be getting those dicks from a couple of nineteen-year-olds made it worse. To make it as bad as it could possibly get, the final indignity, I would be taking those two dicks in a dorm room!
Anyway, I was frankly scared and mortified that I had to do this, and I was as far from turned on as I could be. Their room was on the top floor, and before I went to it I stopped by the Ladies and applied lubricating gel very generously all along my labia and into my vagina.
Paul answered the door and told me they were extremely glad to see me. An NFL game was on the television. Hank switched it off. I put my clutch bag down on a chair near the door, wandered over to the room's sole window and looked out. Their room was on the inside of the angle, and I gazed out at all the kids gathered below me, more drifting in all the time. Freshman year, six years ago, I had lived in this building on the second floor. I turned back to the room, not quite sure what to do.
Hank supplied direction. "So, yo, Roberta, hi!" he said. "Strip."
God, I thought, it's starting. This is reality now.
Fossy
SEXPIOGENTUS
"Strip." - short, sharp instruction. The epitome of control. Should be followed by Paul adding ... "Now ...!"
And so here we go ...
BEThalia
Executioner
I appreciate the suggestion, Fossy, but I'd never considered going in that direction.
This is new territory for all of them, and while I think your take on it works for a lot of situations and characters this just isn't one of them. It makes them sound too in control, as if this is a dominant situation that is business as usual for them. But that's not the case. They're just a couple of goofy kids (running around doing improvised Laurel & Hardy routines!) who have no more experience with something like this than does Roberta and perhaps who realize just how lucky they've gotten.
That's my take on the scene and the characters anyway.
Fossy
SEXPIOGENTUS
It wasn't a suggestion, more just me thinking out loud. Your story is your story... I have no intention of getting in the way ...
BEThalia
Executioner
Just wanted to respond in some way, Fossy, so I thought I'd address it from the viewpoint of why I wrote the end of the scene the way I did.
Believe me, I wanted to try to do it without you thinking that I took offense, and without making you think that I thought you were trying to give offense, which I definitely didn't.
I think, all things considered, that I way way way overthought this.
Always nice to hear from you, and thank you for support and interest!