by Seth King
MRS. ROBINSON
BOOK 1 IN THE MRS. ROBINSON SAGA
SETH KING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seth King is a twenty-five-year-old American author and contradiction. He enjoys reading, lifting weights, spending time with his nieces and nephews, playing the piano, and bondage. His family calls him Seth, but his readers are more than welcome to call him Daddy. For more shameless selfies like the one above, you can find him on Facebook at Facebook.com/sethkingbooks.
Prologue
Ben Bradley
“This isn’t like one of those romance novels you read, is it, Mrs. Robinson?” I asked my client as she moaned under me.
“No,” she breathed, making me grin against her skin.
“I know – it’s better. This is real life. I’m here, I’m young, I’m horny, and – best of all – I’ve got a really big dick. Now sit back and hold on – this is gonna be like nothing you’ve ever read before.”
As Mrs. Robinson moaned once more and did as she was told, I slid my tongue south and wrapped my lips around her nipple, which hardened deliciously under my tongue. I hadn’t expected to like my client this much, but now that I was here, I couldn’t fucking get enough of her. I bit her nipple lightly, relishing in her groan again as she arched her back and took a breath, and it wasn’t until I headed still further south and placed a few kisses around her navelthat the bravado started to melt away and the guilt began creeping in.
I had to do this. I knew that. I needed this paycheck more than anything, and my sister was depending on me to save her. Everything was riding on this beautiful stranger riding my face after I fucked her. But as I placed my dick against Mrs. Robinson’s clit and prepared to torture her with the tip of it like my thoughts were torturing me, I couldn’t help but wonder: how in the hell did I let myself become a male prostitute tonight?
I didn’t have too much time to wonder, though, because suddenly a pair of blazing headlights careened through the window from the driveway outside and lit the opposite wall like the devil’s smile, making us both sit up straight on the bed.
“Who is it?” I scream-whispered at her, my high crashing immediately. “Is it your kid or something? You didn’t tell me you had a kid!”
“I wish it was my kid,” said Mrs. Robinson, terror dripping from her every syllable.
“Why?”
She turned to me with the fear of a thousand gods in her eyes. “Because I think it’s my husband.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“And Ben?”
“Yes?” I asked as my ears caught the paralyzing sound of someone pounding up the front steps and inserting a key into the door, trapping us upstairs.
“There’s something I forgot to mention. My husband is a congressman.”
1
Ben Bradley
Earlier That Day
“Fuck.”
I stopped on my front porch and glared down at the eviction notice hanging from my door jam, taunting me as it fluttered in the September breeze. I grabbed the paper, skimmed over a few key phrases – failure to pay rent, forcible eviction assured in ten days if payment not received – and ripped it in half and tossed it onto the grass just as quickly. No need in fretting over the inevitable.
I unlocked the door and tossed my backpack onto the side table, which was piled high with bills and student loan paperwork. I cursed again under my breath and picked at a stray string on my ratty old Polo shirt as the walls seemed to close in around me. Sometimes I wanted to shank whoever had fed me the lie that growing up was something to look forward to, that independence was some shining castle in the clouds, because so far the “real world” had been one giant letdown after another. Someone should’ve told me that “adulthood” was actually just one big fucked-up charade, and that everything I had been promised had come with an asterisk. Like, Hey, Ben, welcome to college, enjoy your freedom!*
(*Now cough up fifty thousand dollars a year or you’re getting kicked out.)
Or, Good job on getting your associate’s degree, Ben, welcome to the job market!
(*Now get ready to aimlessly drift for months because all the entry-level jobs are being taken up by either forty-five-year old recent layoffs with multiple degrees, Bangladeshi teens working in sweatshops, or computers.)
Or even, Congrats on finally getting your first job, Ben, you’re a real-life working man now!*
(*Now immediately watch your paycheck be divided away to nothing to cover the cost of being alive.)
So while the other kids at my college spent their time going to frat parties and hitting up two-dollar-Tuesdays at the Georgetown bars and such, I slaved away to keep my head above water – not that I wasn’t slowly drowning, anyway. In the past two days I’d been nearly kicked out of my gym for failure to pay dues, I’d had my debit card turned down at Subway as a crowd of people watched from the line behind me, and to top it all off, the girl I liked had told me she needed “time alone,” which probably meant she needed time riding her rich ex-boyfriend’s tiny dick again. But I couldn’t blame her – my life was a sinking ship, and I’d jump if I had the chance, too.
But at least Claire is somewhat stable today, I reminded myself as I crouched and started removing the boots I wore whenever I rode my motorbike. Not that “stable” was anything to write home about. That awful accident five years ago had not only left my older sister paralyzed from the waist down, but the damage to her brain had instantly transformed her from a normal college student into someone with the mental capacity of a fairly intelligent toddler. Every day was a challenge for poor Claire. I did all I could, and I’d even moved in with her last winter to help her full-time nurse care for her, but nothing seemed to help. I’d work all day to help pay for her medical bills and then arrive home to find ten more bills on the table, all for infuriatingly unnecessary hospital expenses like eighty-dollar Tylenols and three-hundred-dollar sponge baths. But two weeks ago she’d been kicked off Medicaid due to bureaucratic paperwork bullshit, and now that we weren’t even getting help with a portion of the bills, we were really fucked. I knew I needed to hire a lawyer to get her back on insurance and get everything paid for retroactively, but I couldn’t even begin to afford a lawyer in the first place. Worst of all, her caseworker at the hospital was demanding thousands up front just to continue Claire’s weekly treatments, or else she promised to send Claire to some low-budget government infirmary that housed invalids and hopeless cases, a place I’d heard nightmarish stories about…
Ping. A text from my MMA coach brought me back to my senses, and I shook my head and reached for my phone. Lately cage fighting had gone from a part-time hobby to being my only real release in the endless shit-storm my life seemed to have become. I loved the adrenaline rush fighting gave me; the explosive energy I felt from harnessing every ounce of anger and frustration and fury in my body and refocusing it into a single right hook I’d send flying into a stranger’s jaw. Since my life was a cage itself, I liked to feel like I was fighting back, even if I was still within the bars. (I guess that, as a secret book nerd, I never was one to miss a metaphor. Adulthood was screaming towards me at full speed, and lobbing a hit against an opponent’s head was sometimes the only thing that made me feel like I was battling fate instead of being swept away in the rush.) Technically you could say I was one of the best young fighters in the Washington metro area, but there were hundreds of cities in the country with fighters just as good as me, and I knew that rising to the top of the heap and making any money off my hobby one day was probably a pipe dream. So I fought on the side whenever I wasn’t taking classes at Virginia Community College, working part-time on Capitol Hill, and taking care of my sister. But tonight was my first big chance to turn m
y passion into a profession: I was challenging the number one fighter in my age group in Washington, and if I won, I’d go to New York and participate in a nationally televised fight in December. This was the chance of a lifetime, and it could open every door in the world – all I had to do now was show up and win. And if I could bet on anything in my increasingly chaotic life, it was myself, and my ability to step up and rise to the occasion. After all, I had no choice – my parents had left behind a nearly unfixable mess, and I was the only one left who was even trying to help. Don’t get me wrong, my folks weren’t dead or anything, and there was no theatrical, soap-opera-like story to explain their absences. In the end, they’d simply found a life of drinking whiskey in seedy bars and playing pool on cigarette-stained tables more appealing than a life with their children. They’d send me to my grandma’s house like clockwork, and weekend-long disappearances soon turned into weeks and even months of no contact at all. As soon as I’d turned eighteen and my parents were no longer legally bound to me, both of them had slipped away for good; my father heading to his family’s homeland of Texas and my mother running for the hills of the Appalachians. The last I’d heard, my father was frequently unemployed and an even-more-frequent visitor of Dallas-area jails, and my mother was a semi-homeless bar fly who haunted only the classiest establishments of Charleston, West Virginia. I tried to look past it, I really did; to bury the pain within me like I buried everything else, but to tell the truth, my mother’s abandonment of me in particular still kept me up at night like bad food poisoning. Her wrinkled, weathered face still screamed at me from the shadows and jumped out at me from the dark, and sometimes I wondered if I’d ever stop missing the love she’d never given me.
Actually, fighting wasn’t my only release, I noted as I got yet another text from some girl I’d met a few nights before who just wouldn’t leave me alone for some reason. Sometimes I engaged in slightly more carnal activities to let off steam. Anger issues manifested themselves in many different ways, after all, and mine usually led me straight to bed. I’d often find myself hitting up the bars around my gym after big matches, still buzzing from the fight, and with anger and adrenaline pumping through my veins, I’d set my sights on someone. I usually settled on older chicks, and sometimes I wondered if I was doing it because I was chasing something, but I didn’t really like to think about it. Anyway, before I knew it I’d have her legs wrapped around my neck in her apartment, and soon she’d be screaming my name louder than the whistles from the midnight trains…
I placed my boots against the wall and stood up. Suddenly my senses flared, and I noticed something didn’t feel quite right. A true fighter always had one ear out for trouble, my trainer always told me that – but what was wrong?
I looked around. For one, the house was totally silent. The nurse always left on Claire’s TV to keep her company whenever I wasn’t able to get home in time for the trade-off, and I hadn’t heard silence this loud in months.
“Claire?” I asked as I headed down the hallway to her room, which I soon discovered was terrifyingly empty. Shit, I thought as my stomach dropped and my vision blurred. Claire didn’t understand much, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to get out of bed alone – she could fall and lay there all day, and one skipped cycle of medicine could prove disastrous to her fragile health…
“Claire?” I asked as I paced back down the hall, my worry multiplying by the second. “Claire, sweetie, where are you?”
The glow emanating from our tiny kitchen made me freeze. The nurses always turned off the kitchen light before leaving – that was their signal to me that they’d been there, and that Claire was fine. This was really not fucking good.
“Claire?” I called, my worry blooming into white-hot panic. “Claire, where are you, baby?”
I took a sharp breath and turned into the kitchen, and that’s where I found my sister lying facedown on the floor, her broken wheelchair lying in a heap beside her.
2
Grace Robinson
On the night of my twentieth wedding anniversary, I sat alone in a dimly-lit Georgetown restaurant in a four thousand dollar gown thinking of how badly I wanted my husband dead.
Okay, maybe not dead. Badly maimed, maybe. Perhaps a baseball bat to the knees and a short hospital stay of a week or six would do. But that’s always the first thing I think of when I think of my husband – my grotesque, bizarre, all-encompassing hatred of him, and also of how strange it is that I somehow love him at the same time. Even though my distaste for him burns in my chest like bad acid reflux, I still need him and long for his affection and approval, and I loathe myself all the more for my weakness. He is my alpha and my omega, a quandary I cannot explain even to myself, and so I stopped trying. The second thing I think of when I think of my husband are his eyes – the way they’re black and beady but somehow bright at the same time, always one step ahead, bolting back and forth like a vampire bat in a cage, looking for someone or something to injure. Like his enemies.
His coworkers.
His employees.
Me.
Speaking of devils in Dior tuxedos: as the waiter appeared to pour me glass of wine number two, throwing me pitiful glances all the while, my phone lit up with a text from Richard, the man himself. The glow of the screen illuminated my tired face as I groaned and read whatever lie my husband had come up with this time:
Hey Gracie. Bad news- work is piling up for the night. Gonna stay at the office a little later than expected. Hope you’re not at the restaurant yet. We can definitely celebrate another night. Sorry, babe. Xoxo, Rich.
Go fucking figure, I thought as I tossed my phone onto the table with a little more force than intended, sending it sliding across the tabletop and crashing onto the Turkish rug below. A few diners glanced over at me, making me blush the color of my merlot.
“Sorry,” I muttered as I bent over and retrieved my phone, one hand still on my glass. “Bad night.”
The diners shared quietly knowing expressions and glanced away. Of course work was piling up and Richard wasn’t going to make it, I thought as I sat back in my seat and tried to regain some of my dwindling dignity. After all, that’s what things did in my life – pile up. Like the credit card statements full of plane tickets to romantic getaway spots like Napa Valley or the Bahamas that would show up when Richard was supposed to be traveling with lobbyists “for business,” the dinner receipts from fancy Italian places in Georgetown he would leave in his car from nights when he’d supposedly been at his office in Capitol Hill, and the bouquet of roses he’d even bought in New York with our joint debit card one weekend when he was supposed to be at his own aunt’s funeral in Boca Raton. I ignored all this, of course, just like I ignored the stares and whispers I’d get from the other women at the golf club on the rare occasion that Richard would actually take the time to treat his own wife to brunch. I knew he was making a fool of me – I could see it in the other womens’ eyes – but what was I supposed to do? There was no pre-nup, which would be a plus under normal circumstances, but Richard was not normal. He’d been the best trial lawyer in the state in his day and everyone knew it, and if I ever did try to divorce him, he’d lovingly find some way to drain every cent from our bank accounts and leave me with nothing but Bird, the annoying pet toucan that neither of us liked much anyway. That, and the scars I’d accumulated from pointlessly fighting an unwinnable war for two decades.
Unless…
As I sat there drinking in the dark, the word unless rang in my ears like a church bell on a Sunday morning.
Unless perhaps I could produce rock-solid proof of Richard’s indiscretions, find something besides random debit transactions and hearsay…
As Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel came over the restaurant’s speakers, I leaned back, took a long swig of wine, and told myself to chill. This was the hand I had been dealt, and I needed to take things one day at a time. My life hadn’t always been like this, of course. Just like anyone who hated themselves, I’d arrived
at this situation through many small changes and hiccups and unexpected turns in my path, little detours and such that I’d barely even noticed, until suddenly I’d woken up one day and realized I was living a life I didn’t even recognize. When I met Richard he was the hottest guy on campus, the proverbial big-dicked frat boy with the cocky smile and the family money that was older than God himself, and I fell in love with the gleam in his eye faster and harder than I would like to admit. I’d always had a soft spot for boys who looked like they would eventually make me cry, and Richard definitely fit the bill. He was an ocean, and I drowned. All my friends were crazy with envy when we’d had the storybook wedding in the biggest Methodist church in town, ivy-colored steeple included, little bursts of popcorn filling the air like lights in the July sky as we headed out those church doors and into our shaky little future. At first I’d been dumb enough to think he’d be my Great Big Love – you know, the kind of love you see in old black-and-white movies and feel silly even wishing for because it’s so unattainable; the kind that makes you get all dressed up and walk alongside rivers at night and dance next to cafes for no reason at all and wake up every day thinking that maybe the world was as good and as beautiful as you’d hoped it was as a little girl. And in the very beginning, I guess it was that big love. For one shining moment Richard and I were smiley and content and rosy-cheeked and ten million different kinds of happy, and we’d walk the streets hand-in-hand laughing at the secret we held between us, that love was the only truly great adventure left in this world. Soon I forgot how I had ever lived before him. While the rest of the cold dead world stumbled around in black and white, we loved in blazing Technicolor, and that made us laugh all the louder.
But like most of the adventures out there, this one had proved short-lived. I got the sense that Richard would never open the gates and let me in on that secret inner life that sparked within those captivating black eyes, and I was right. Of course he’d finished his degrees and gone off to work for a law firm a few years after the wedding, and that’s when the magic wore off and the drifting started and the lingering scent of other women started reaching my nostrils when he’d lie down beside me at night. And the sick thing was that sometimes it seemed like he barely tried covering his tracks, that he almost enjoyed twisting the knife and keeping me a pawn in his sadistic game. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t run. And I guess I wasn’t totally blameless – perhaps I’d been a bit distant and cold, a little prim, and maybe that was what had made him stray. But whatever the case, the hope that things would return to how they were during those halcyon days after the wedding in that little house on Braddock Avenue with the weathered wooden floors and the vivid blue drapes had kept the blinders on my eyes and the ring on my finger. Sometimes it felt like the memories of those days were the only things that sustained me, actually – those, and my books. So the seasons blended into years and the years blended into decades and now every night I sit on my sofa, pour myself some Sauvignon Blanc while the love of my life pours his love into other women, and lose myself in fantastically improbable romance novels about tortured billionaires with private helipads and red rooms of pain to spare.
