Carol (Carol Schmidt Series)

by Cook, Lori

  CAROL

  a novel

  by Lori Cook

  The human body is the best work of art.

  Jess C. Scott

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 Lori Cook

  Cover design: Stuart Bache

  This book is a work of imaginative fiction. Characters, names, places and all events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or are used to add authenticity to the work. Any resemblance to real events, locales, or people is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Lori Cook.

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About Lori Cook

  A short essay on genre, erotica and anonymity

  Chapter One

  There weren’t many people in the place when she arrived. Over to her right, sitting alone at a table, was the Cardinal, his laptop open in front of him. He looked up, saw her, then turned his eyes toward the bar.

  She followed his stare. There was one guy there, tall, good looking. He was taking a drink from what seemed to be a bourbon on the rocks, a cell pressed to his ear.

  It was him.

  The Cardinal was never wrong.

  She hoisted herself up onto the stool at the end of the bar, a hand flattening down the skirt of her navy blue business suit, and fussed around with her purse.

  By now, the Cardinal had slipped silently out into the night. He didn’t much care for this part of proceedings. Plus, he trusted her completely. She had never let him down.

  “You need some company?” the guy at the bar said, stepping some way toward her, but keeping at an unthreatening distance.

  “Oh,” she said, looking up. “I... I guess.”

  He smiled, his white teeth just a little crooked. His suit was good, light grey with an expensive sheen to it. He’d loosened his necktie, which she was pleased to see was modest. She hated men in loud, brash ties; it made her want to strangle them in vivid Technicolor.

  “Brad,” he said, slipping onto the stool next to her.

  I know.

  “Carol,” she said, smiling in that way that shy girls do, nodding their heads a fraction as if in nervous agreement with themselves.

  “You’re from out of town, right?” he said.

  She looked a little confused.

  He grinned, held up a hand, and counted off his fingers as he spoke.

  “One: you’re in a business suit and you’re carrying a briefcase. Two: you look as if you don’t know this place. Three: you’re alone at seven-thirty on a Friday evening. Someone as attractive as you never has to be alone on a Friday night. Not in her own town. Am I right?”

  She did that girl thing with her hands, like she was trying to waft away the blushes. But all the modesty in the world couldn’t hide the fact that she was extremely attractive.

  Brad tried not to look too hard. It was a perfectly symmetrical kind of beauty, something that didn’t need much in the way of embellishments. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, some way between a tulip cut and a Louise Brookes.

  The waiter arrived. Brad made a big thing about getting her a drink. She asked for a tonic water.

  “Sure you don’t want a little squirt of vodka in that?” Brad asked.

  For a moment she paused, as if unsure. A vodka? Could she, her indecision seemed to say? Should she?

  “Heck, why not!” she said. “And make it a large one. I’m celebrating, I guess...”

  Brad was in his element. He got himself another bourbon and started imagining how he might do some of that celebrating with her.

  “So, what is it?” he asked. “State lottery?”

  “No. I just got out of jail. Ten years. Second-degree murder.”

  Her drink arrived. She took a sip. Brad was just about managing to keep his winning smile going.

  “Joke!” she said. “Divorce anniversary. Twelve whole months today.”

  “Here’s to you, Carol,” he said, holding up his glass, his body relaxing. “I’m two years down that road myself.”

  They chinked glasses.

  “It’s also,” she said, looking down at the ice in her drink, “I mean, it sounds a bit weird, but it’s the first time I’ve done this, since before I was married.”

  “This?”

  “Y’know, sitting at a bar.”

  Brad snorted. “And talking to a guy who already knows you’re way out of his league...”

  She laughed. “Yeah!” A pause. “The bit about talking to a guy in a bar. You’re not out of my league, I mean, at all.”

  For the first time she looked him right in the eye. She wasn’t afraid. She was confident, just confident enough.

  “Nothing complicated,” she said. “I’m not looking for anything complicated.”

  “I hear you.”

  “You’ve got kind eyes, Brad. That’s all I’m looking for. Someone I can trust.”

  “For one night only.”

  “Yeah, kind of. Y’know what? I walk right in here and you’re the first person I meet. Perhaps I did win the lottery!”

  Outside, the Cardinal was sitting in a large black Mercedes, the laptop now on the large leather passenger seat beside him. He watched, the sound on the live video turned down, as Brad chatted amiably to his new friend. He didn’t need to hear all that crap. It wasn’t as if Brad was going to say anything unexpected, nothing out-there, nothing interesting. No, Brad was going to play this strictly by the rules.

  Although, of course, Brad was not his real name.

  The Cardinal looked closer at the screen. There was a glint in Brad’s eyes, and a smirk right across his mouth as he talked easily to Carol. The smirk said it all: he could hardly believe his luck.

  In his line of work, Brad had to take what he could get, the rough with the smooth, the good with the not so good. In any case, a little variety was good for business. But tonight, a goddess had walked into the room and offered herself up to him, no questions asked. This was gonna be his best night ever.

  The camera in Carol’s lapel was high quality, and gave pretty clear images despite its size. She was keeping Brad in the picture most of the time, letting him do the talking. He was a good talker, too, and before they knew it there was a second round of drinks. The bar was now slowly filling up with evening drinkers. From time to time she panned around to take in the atmosphere.

  The Cardinal clicked over to the web. He logged onto BAD-DADDY-PICKUP.COM, one of the world’s most successful pickup blogs. Run by a single blogger, the self-styled “Bad Daddy,” every posting was a collection of images and secretly recorded video footage of his latest conquest. There was a new woman every night, and every night Bad Daddy would take things just a little bit too far with his unsuspecting pickup.

  How far? That depended on the girl, and on his mood. And that’s why the site got hundreds of thousands of hits each day, from all over the world: it was, quite simply, the real thing, played out before your eager, pining eyes.r />
  The Cardinal clicked on a video from last night’s offering, a young, plain-looking woman. She was eating a hamburger and fries, Bad Daddy’s own tiny lapel camera pointing at her secretly from across the table of the diner. She looked nervy, brushing her long blond hair from her forehead and smiling coyly. She might have been eighteen, twenty at a stretch.

  Below the video were some idiot ramblings from Bad Daddy himself, then more shots of the same girl in a bar drinking a cocktail.

  Finally, the main event. Three concealed cameras in a hotel room had been used, the footage roughly edited and presented without any commentary or embellishment. Bad Daddy had no video editing skills whatsoever. But that only added to the authenticity of his daily postings. It was as if, having gotten another victim into bed and taken her as far as he wanted, uploading the footage was almost too much effort, a job hardly worth doing. Just a bit of fun.

  The Cardinal shook his head as he watched it, his face expressionless apart from the slightest sneer of contempt. The session began predictably enough. They sat on the bed a while, chatting, sometimes laughing. Brad, it had to be said, knew how to talk to a girl. He could have written a book about that, a whole encyclopedia on chat-up lines, Mars and Venus, that kind of stuff. But his blog always focused on the main event of his nightly pickup.

  They started to make out, the young girl and Brad on the hotel bed, taking it nice and slow. She was keen, and he let her take the lead. Five minutes later they were down to their underwear and necking hard, clutching each others’ asses, thighs pushing up towards crotches, forcing legs apart. They were like two teenagers at a party.

  Fast-forward: twenty minutes later and what had started out as passion was turning by degrees into something else. Bad Daddy was now mauling her with increasing force, pushing her into new positions and holding her there while he entered her. Her moans were muted and submissive.

  The Cardinal flipped his laptop closed, not bothering to skip to the end and see how it finished.

  Meanwhile, in the bar Carol and Brad had taken a corner booth, where the lights were low and they could get to know each other better. As she listened to his vacuous chatter about a career that she knew for a fact he didn’t have, she thought she recognized him from the website. The videos posted there never showed Big Daddy’s face in any detail, but after a while you got a sense of what he was like: six foot, good build, athletic but not honed, just a naturally lean physique.

  It was definitely Bad Daddy. No doubt about it. His hair was short and well groomed, same as in the videos, kind of preppy and safe, the cut you’d have for a job interview. And here in the flesh there was something appealing about him, a smile that was meant to suggest vulnerability as well as a deep masculinity. He was, without a doubt, hot.

  Little surprise that he’d gotten into this game, then. For pickups, he was the perfect specimen. And his website was thriving. The Cardinal had estimated it was generating ten grand a month in advertising. That required a regular supply of one night stands, each one to be secretly filmed. Yes, Bad Daddy needed to be good at pickups; he had a business to run, and he’d hardly missed a day in over a year.

  Brad was a good choice for a name, too. It had a youthful ring to it, something friendly, a pal’s name, the kind of guy a girl might have as a friend. Problem was: Brad secretly filmed his pickups, night after night, filming those girls at their most intimate, and earning good money off of it.

  Payback.

  “And you guys just split everything down the middle?” he said. “That’s so cool!”

  They were swapping divorce stories, snuggled up in the coziest booth in the bar. Carol was making it up as she went along. But Brad had his story worked out in advance. When you pick up a new girl every night, you’ve got plenty of time to develop your sales pitch.

  He’d done a good job on it too. Really good. His ex-wife hadn’t understood the pressure he was under, he said. They’d just drifted apart. Brad, you see, was an attorney working for various non-profits: environment law, immigration, that sort of stuff. He was on the side of the little guy, fighting for what was right. He could’ve made more in commercial law, he said, but what the hell, he did pretty good.

  Then there was his parents. They’d died in a traffic accident, leaving him a beach house in Maine and an apartment in Boston. He liked nothing better than to take fishing trips up there on the coast, whenever his legal crusades on behalf of the world’s good causes permitted.

  Oh yes, Brad was a pretty neat package. Some of those girls he picked up must have looked at the winning smile, heard his potted life story, and thought: this is it, madam, your boat has well and truly come in tonight! Even if you wanted nothing more than honest, uncomplicated fun, he looked like just the ticket. Not many girls would kick Brad out of bed on a cold night. And he knew it.

  Carol spun some bullshit about her own phantom divorce, whispering so he’d have to lean right into her. They were laughing, already on their third drink, and Brad was swimming in what looked like delirious happiness, but which Carol knew was in fact the smug satisfaction of knowing that he was about to bed the horniest woman ever to feature on his disgusting blog.

  Back in the Merc, the Cardinal had reopened his computer and was now watching as their inane conversation unfolded, getting bored and impatient. The lights in the bar had been lowered, and the images were not so good. But Carol had at least managed to get the lapel camera pointing in their direction, her jacket folded up neatly on the table in front of them. The audio was nice and clear, too.

  The Cardinal now hacked into BAD-DADDY-PICKUP.COM and streamed the whole thing there. Why not let all those fans see how a pickup plays out in real time for once, right from the drinks in the bar? And it would be just the once, he told himself as he clicked across to the site and saw a grainy image of the booth and two happy faces. Bad Daddy was laughing out loud, full of himself, the pickup master in full, nauseating flow. And although he didn’t know it, the world was finally getting to see what he looked like.

  She shifted closer to him, their thighs touching, even their shoulders and arms.

  “Brad,” she said, interrupting him and taking his hand in hers, “I don’t want to ruin this. Really I don’t.”

  She shook her head as if she couldn’t understand her own feelings.

  “Me neither,” he told her, his voice dripping with understanding.

  She squeezed his hand tighter, lowering it until it rested on her leg. She was wearing a knee-length skirt, but it had ridden a little way up her thigh. He felt her flesh against his fingers as she pushed his hand down.

  “No,” she said, “what I mean is, I don’t want to ruin this, but I think I’m going to. I haven’t been with a man for a year, Brad. I need you now. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  She moved his hand slowly up her thigh, sighing as if this was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

  Instinctively he spread his fingers, making sure they went under the skirt.

  She exhaled, one long but very controlled breath. It seemed that a year’s sexual frustration had suddenly been released, leaving her liberated, and desperate for gratification.

  “Touch me, please,” she said, guiding his hand, pushing it between her legs. The tips of his fingers moved along her thighs, finding them cool and soft, and slightly parted.

  She leaned into him, her arm resting on his shoulder, her mouth touching his ear.

  “If you touch me, I’ll come.”

  She inched her legs apart as his fingers found the edge of her panties.

  “This has never happened before,” she said, breathing hard into his ear. “I’ve never done anything like this, I promise you...”

  “Shhh,” he said, running the tip of his finger around in little circling movements, feeling the outline of her sex, but making sure he did no more than tickle its very edges.

  She squirmed as he touched her, trying not to make it too obvious to onlookers. But the two of th
em were pretty unobtrusive, there in their own booth with the lights down low, and no one was looking. Unless you counted several thousand Bad Daddy fans who had by now logged onto their favorite reality-sex site and discovered that today’s show was a little bit different...

  “Touch me,” she whispered again, trying not to move her pelvis, letting him take the lead.

  He pushed his hand further down, caressing her through the thin fabric of her panties, as lightly as possible. Then, with the caution of a surgeon, the tip of his index finger sought out the lowest point of her sex and followed it upward, creeping so slowly that his hand hardly seemed to move, apart from the tiniest vibrations, which made her gulp with pleasure.

  His hand was still outside her panties, but she could feel herself getting damp. Shit, this is some perk of the job! she told herself, closing her eyes and letting him bring her on, knowing that the camera was catching her every expression.

  His finger hovered there for what seemed like an eternity. All the time she was getting hornier, and she felt herself swell beneath the gentle touch of his single fingertip. In the end she couldn’t stop her ass from making little involuntary jumps, and she was begging him to finger her harder, to pull down her panties and feel the full warmth of her sex.

  But he didn’t. He didn’t even touch her clitoris, other than the faintest of strokes as he withdrew his hand, knowing she was just moments away from the inevitable.

  “I’m at the Omni, just down the street,” he said.

  She dropped a hand into his lap as if to steady herself, and felt his rigid penis down one side of his trousers.

  She squeezed it hard against his leg, making it clear how desperate she was.

  “Bring me off here,” she said, taking his hand and forcing it back up her skirt. “Please. I’m begging you.”

  So he did. He put two fingers inside her panties and let them slide into her pussy, which was gloriously warm, the lips pronounced and slippery against each other. It took no more than a few seconds. He took her clitoris between his fingers, nudging its little hood back as he teased it out of its hiding place, his hand already wet with her juices.