by Gabi Moore
“Got it!” she said and this time I saw it, the couple beside us really were casting occasional curious glances over at us. I didn’t care one bit. The waves of dazed pleasure rippling through me nearly had me laughing out loud. I couldn’t help but pant a little under my breath, as I considered that that was likely the fastest I had ever come in my life. I looked at her in awe. Somewhere, down that sweet, perfect, pale little throat of hers, our secret was swallowed away, leaving nothing but her mischievous smile. The thought of what we had just pulled off here in broad daylight, out here in public just like that, was breathtaking. I clumsily reached under the table to zip up again and gather myself, but when I glanced over the table again at her she was still smiling to herself, looking pleased as punch.
“You’re really good at that,” I said at last.
“At what?” she said and smiled innocently at me.
“Dropping spoons on the floor. Picking them up again,” I said and returned her smile.
When the waiter came over to take our orders, I was almost certain that he had watched the whole thing unfold and put two and two together. I was still so flustered I could barely make eye contact. But Nora, little vixen she was, batted her eyelashes and simply ordered for the both of us, handed the menus over and then gave me a secret wink as the waiter walked off again.
“He totally knows,” I said when he left.
She shrugged.
“So?”
“I love your tongue.”
“I love your cock.”
“Yeah?”
“Mm. I love the way it tastes. I love how I can feel you get bigger right before you come.”
“Nora?”
“Yes?”
“Let’s finish up here quickly. I want to get you home.”
“Home? But I just ordered for us.”
“Sirloin steak can go to hell.”
“Sirloin? Oh no I didn’t order us that in the end. I told the guy we’d have the buffet instead.”
It was a fitting choice. Why have just one meal? How good could one meal ever be, when the world was full to bursting of delicious things? Nora and I weren’t doing that anymore. We were going for the buffet of life. We didn’t want to choose one thing and stick to it, we wanted a little bit of everything. And I do mean everything.
Chapter 11 - Nora
So, here’s how my happily ever after worked out, in the end.
When you first found me, I was Mistress Morgan, playing professional dress up and wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. And now, things have come full circle and… well, I still play dress up, I guess. If you had told me five years ago that this would be my world one day, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I don’t know you, dear reader, but I hope that you never have to endure a ‘happy ending’ in this life. Truly, there’s nothing worse. Because a happy ending is just that – and ending. When there’s no drama, no doubt, no difficulty at all, well, then there’s no story, either. No making up, no lost love regained. Just endless, boring days of nothing, forever after.
I loved Dean too much to let us have a happily ever after. What can I say, we weren’t the kind of people who could settle down and while away the rest of our lives together. So what could we do?
After that strange, dark day in a remote Bolivian village where I watched his father bubble away under the weight of a flood of water, I realized something: I had needed him. Dean and I both did. Not because he was good for us, but precisely because he wasn’t. I remember watching an old horror film as a kid, where a sinister woman warns the hero of the story: be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Well, I understood that now. The pleasure was in the wanting, the chasing. Why do the fairytales end promptly after the dragons are slayed and the princesses rescued?
Because nothing else happens after that, that’s why.
I had wanted to run. I had wanted to throw it all away, for him to take me and go somewhere far from everything, and start new. But soon even that story would end and we’d only land up in the same place again. So, what else could we have done? Our solution may not have made much sense to anyone else. Our ‘one month on, one week off’ routine is a ‘kink’ I’ve never heard described anywhere else, and I have trouble even explaining it to you now.
But I’ll try.
It’s like this: I loved Dean so much that one story wasn’t enough for us. I wanted the whole story buffet with him, I wanted it all. The drama, the thrillers, the sappy romance, the steamy stories, all of it. We had already tasted the court room drama and dabbled a little with horror, and now we wanted to push ourselves further. I loved Angelica and little Matilda with all my heart, and don’t get me wrong, I never wanted to forget that part of my life. But it’s not the only thing I wanted to do. Not by a long shot.
So what does my happily ever after look like? Well, like a lot of things. And it’s not quite done yet, either. My first story ends with me as the troubled and thorny young Megan Reynolds, part seductress, part innocent ingénue.
Don’t get stressed – it all works out in the end.
Chapter 12 - Nora
HAPPILY EVER AFTER NUMBER TWENTY-THREE
Toxteth, Liverpool, The Dog and Pony pub on Church Street
26 February 2018
I looked at my phone and sighed. He wasn’t late or anything. But the sooner I could get all of this over and done with the better.
I rocked my hips and back on forward on that bare, dirty mattress. Fucking embarrassing. But whatever. He kept paying me three hundred quid for these little meetups of ours, I’d keep pitching up I suppose. But it was the super sweet ones that always made me nervous.
The room was disgusting, but I knew for a fact nobody ever came around here. The council would tear it down sooner or later, but for now these crumbling, graffiti-filled walls were my little patch of peace and quiet. I was pretty sure that whatever twisted thing he was going to ask me to do this time, we wouldn’t need anything fancier than a dirty bare mattress and about ten minutes to do it in.
I checked my phone again.
“Megan?”
I looked up and he was there in the doorway. Looking squeaky clean and nervous as a kicked puppy. I bet he thought he was the first guy to fall madly, stupidly in ‘love’ with me. He had it written all over his face. Truly, I don’t care if some poncey asshole thinks he’s living on the edge just because he knows a ‘girl like me’. Just as long he’s paying, the joke’s on him, right?
He stepped into that broken room and sat beside me on that broken mattress. His aftershave smelled pretty good, actually. Cold and green, like a fancy forest.
It was plain as day that he didn’t belong here. Truth was, I was maybe a little interested to be doing any of this with, well, a ‘guy like him’. I waited. I looked down at his legs inside his trousers. At his shoes. At the awkward way he held his hands in his lap. At the tiny hairs on his knuckles.
“I wish you’d let me take you somewhere nicer,” he said at last.
“I like it here just fine,” I said, and spread my legs out in front of me. It was a dump, but neither of us paid a penny to be here. Plus I knew all the exits. I had very little in this world, but I wasn’t about to incur any debts, if you know what I mean. I’ve learned my lesson with that one – I didn’t need some weirdo thinking he was taking me out on a date.
“So?”
He sighed and took out a notepad, as he had done all the times before, and I glimpsed his now familiar handwriting. I guessed it was just about getting to that time when his little pretense of being a journalist would wear thin. I waited. He immediately put it away again. I stared at his feet.
“Megan, can we just talk off the record for a moment?” he said.
Ah, there it was. There was an exit out to the right and one a little ahead down the passage and opening to the back alley.
“Sure.”
“You seem like… I’ve just been wondering…”
I waited.
“Is it true
, everything you said to me the last time? About the men in the bathrooms?”
“It’s true.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you do it? Why let men take advantage of you? You’re so beautiful, and smart and—”
“And I deserve better?” I said smiling wryly.
“Well, yes.”
“I deserve a man who would take good care of me?”
“Well…”
“So it’s one man who takes advantage of me a lot or a lot of men who take advantage of me a little. Same difference,” I said and let the smile fall from my face.
“Megan, don’t say that.”
“I’ll say what I like, thank you.”
He had tiny, almost invisible hairs just at the open triangle where his shirt opened. I wondered what his cock looked like. He was way, way too old for …well, anything. But a girl had to wonder.
“I’m sorry, I take that back. You’re right. I just…”
“You see this?” I said and thrust my arm at him. He looked down, a little taken aback.
“This was one of the first tattoos I got. I got it when I was fifteen. My first serious boyfriend. He threatened me with a knife one night. He said he was going to skin me alive because he was jealous I’d leave him. Of course, he cheated and left me within six months, but I got this tattoo of a knife to remember him.”
“Why would you—”
“And this one?” I said, now unbuttoning my leather pants and pulling them down to my knees. Oh, that had his attention alright. His eyes looked down at the blood red roses blooming on both of my upper thighs as though he was afraid he’d be arrested for it at any moment.
“This guy? Well, his weapon was a little different. I was still young. Seventeen or eighteen. I didn’t realize that in a way, it’s better to be stabbed outright than given a bunch of roses without knowing what they really mean, you know? I got these tattoos to remind myself of that fact.”
“Megan, please…”
“Now this one, this one’s pretty funny…” I pulled up my pants, and then wriggled my shirt up high to show a large ribcage tattoo of a little boy fairy admiring himself in the mirror. “Can you guess why I got this one?” I pulled my shirt down again and smiled cynically.
“You’re the most fascinating woman I know,” he said quietly.
“And you’re the most boring man I know,” I blurted. He smiled like my insult was nothing more than a kitten bite.
“What tattoo would you get because of me?” he said.
I snorted.
“None? You’re not worth the skin,” I said, and that’s when I fucked up. At the exact moment I said ‘skin’, I couldn’t help thinking about skin, specifically his, and before I knew it I was looking at that triangle of skin at his collar, and when he caught me doing it, I tore my eyes away and looked elsewhere. Too bad that place was his crotch. He saw that too. Fuck.
When I looked up again he caught my gaze and held it there.
“You like playing tough, but I don’t think you’re very good at it, Megan.”
Before I could argue he had taken my hand in his and I looked down at it hanging limply. He took his pen, clicked it and then pulled me closer. His hand was warm and dry. The pen tip hurt a little as he dragged it over the back of my hand, over and between the veins. I watched as he traced out some jagged shapes, but as the pen caught my skin and rolled out ink more smoothly, it became clear that he wasn’t drawing, he was writing. By the time I realized what the word was, it was too late. I yanked my hand away and stared at those thin, ugly letters. “CUNT.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I hissed at him, and began furiously rubbing away the ink.
“Only what you do to yourself,” he said.
I froze.
“Very clever. But fuck you. I’m leaving now,” I stood, but he grabbed my hand and his grasp was so firm and unexpected I staggered and fell back onto the mattress next to him.
“What’s the problem? That one you can at least wash off.”
Perhaps I had underestimated him. I waited.
“Give me your other hand,” he said.
I thought for a moment. I’ve made some pretty stupid decisions in life. I’ve been drunk and irresponsible, I’ve been sad. I’ve done things that, even as I did them, I regretted them. But this felt different. He wasn’t telling me. But he wasn’t asking either.
“Not where people could see it,” I said at last, and then we sat together in the silence to see where that left us. It had taken three interviews with this ‘journalist’. But now that something was happening I had to admit, I was a little excited. Was I going to do this? Sleep with some old guy on some old mattress? I mean, his pick-up technique was a little unorthodox, but I couldn’t deny I felt curious. Curious in my body.
“Show me somewhere else, then,” he said. “Somewhere you haven’t ruined for the sake of some asshole boy from the past.”
I thought for a moment. Thought of myself as some part-ruined, part intact girl. Patchy and marked. I lifted my shirt again, but this time took it off completely. I expected him to look at my breasts. At my black and turquoise lace bra that I had spent a week’s wages on. But he looked only at the bare skin on my belly.
“Lie back,” he said.
My heart skipped. Oh fuck. This is how girls end up in trouble, isn’t it? I didn’t care.
One of his warm, dry hands came to rest on my side and the other balanced the pen tip over my naked skin. I watched his chest rise and fall with each breath. I could see it, with him up this close: what he might have looked like, at my age. That he might have actually been pretty hot once. I mean he was hot now, in a kind of nasty way. Hot for an old guy. Nice in a way that grows on you, maybe.
The pen moved more quickly this time. The word was “WHORE” and it curved slightly round my bellybutton in large, straight letters. I looked at it, then at him, and then it happened. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me to explain it. But it was hot. Despite myself, watching him focus carefully on spelling that bad word over me felt …good.
“You like everyone to think you’re a bad girl, don’t you?” he said, not lifting his eyes to mine. He gazed around me, reading the rest of my flesh and looking for his neck blank piece of canvas.
“Yes, I guess.”
“Isn’t that what all these tattoos say? You’re bad. You want to chase men away I think, but a part of you also… wants them to come closer anyway?”
“Cum slut,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
All at once I flopped over onto my belly, giving him a good view of my backside.
“I have some un-tattooed skin on my butt.”
The smile on his face came slowly but sent a quick, delicious little thrill through me. I liked this. Not some sweaty fumble in a backseat. Not some sad fuck with some dumb loser from the bar. Not some desperate groping in a club that was boring before it even started. This felt fun. This was a game.
I closed my eyes and could feel that this time the letters were bigger. He dragged that sharp pen point up over the curve of my ass and then right down to the crease where my thighs began. One half of the word for the left cheek, the other half for the right. Cum slut. What a disgusting, filthy, perfectly wonderful word. And now that I was labelled with it, I imagined the ink seeping in and making it so. I guess I did want people to be intimidated by me. To think I was ‘bad’. I wanted them to stay away. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want them to look. And want.
My trousers came off easily after that, and I let him do it. I let him pass his hungry eyes over me, and lay there, and let him read. In my bra and panties, the best pair I owned, I lay back, stroked my hands over myself and then pointed to a blank spot above my knee.
“Fuck doll,” I said.
He nodded silently, the same secret smile on his lips, and got to work lettering my leg. Next came “bitch” on the other knee, and “cock slave” on my lower belly. The old, profess
ional, permanent tattoos were starting to share space with the new, amateurish, impermanent ones.
I looked down in amusement as I noticed him start drawing a huge, veiny dick on the side of my leg. I giggled but he was dead serious. I was almost certain I felt a stiffness as he brushed against me, moving here and there to reach around his wriggling canvas, but I couldn’t be 100% sure.
“You want to fuck me, don’t you?” I said at last, and the pen tip came to a rest. He didn’t look up at me though. He was hovering directly over me, still fully clothed, but he had yet to really touch me. The pen started moving again. He gripped my thigh hard and repositioned it roughly, allowing him easier access to the smooth, blank skin there. I squeezed my eyes shut and began to wonder if he could tell that I was getting wet.
When I opened them again I was surprised to see he had written the words, “you want to fuck me, don’t you?” down my leg.
“You’re sick,” I said, and this too was instantly scrawled onto me. By now he was grabbing me more firmly, twisting and angling my body this way and that way. I hated how turned on I was getting. How he stubbornly refused to even touch me there. If he was any other guy I’d be getting dressed again and leaving already.
“Touch me, please,” I said, without thinking. This he wrote in massive letters, across my chest. My cheeks burned.
“Oh, I will. But first, I want all of this pretty bare skin completely covered up in filth.”
How revolting. How exciting. Before I knew it, I was speaking faster than he could write, and every dirty thing that left my lips was etched in black, smeary ink over my body. The dirty words became dirty sentences, that now trailed over my squirming legs and arms. Every open space was lovingly vandalized with obscenity, the previous words smudging with the heat of my body, rubbing off slightly as he leaned over me, still fully clothed, still only catching my eye by accident, still smiling wryly. It was amazing. My heart thumped like it wanted to run away from me.
