Carried Away

by Whitney Williams

  I pulled my long, loose braid over my shoulder and began combing it out with my fingers. Back then I wore my hair as long as I could grow it. It was jet black, full and gently curled from always being in the braid. It felt a little anachronistic with that outfit, so I rolled it up and hid it under a slouchy knit beanie. Add some ruby lipstick, just a touch of eye shadow (mustn’t look painted), neaten up the chapeau. I was a new woman.

  I slowly closed my suitcase, stood up and took a deep breath. The game was afoot.

  I took the elevator back downstairs and walked straight to the front desk. The clerk certainly noticed me that time. “I’ve a flight to catch, sir, and I’m running a tad late. Could you please call me a taxi?”

  I had never even seen a taxi in person, but a little smile and some eyelash batting got me a ride on their courtesy shuttle. This was way back when a plane ticket was an actual thing rather than a confirmation number, and I had purchased one to a major hub. I had never seen the inside of an airplane before either, so the flight gave me some time to practice acting cool and natural despite feeling terrified and desperate.

  When we arrived, the airport was entirely overwhelming, but I was locked on to my singular purpose: find the first-class lounge. “I’m traveling coach today, sir, but I’ve a dreadful layover. Can you perchance sell me a day pass for the club?” Eyelash bat. “Really? Oh, you’re too kind! Thank you so much!” I was in.

  The place was unimpressive. I don’t know what I expected—dashing gentlemen sipping cognac, thoughtful curls of smoke rising from their pipes, feet up on ottomans in front of the hearth? There were a few library tables on one side of the room and a scattering of chairs and couches on the other. I walked up to one of the coffee tables, stepped out of my pumps and knelt at the table with my back to the door, opposite one side of its corresponding sofa.

  After retrieving a deck of playing cards from it, I set my suitcase flat on the floor next to me and stacked my shoes neatly on top of it. Sitting on my feet with my stockinged toes dangling out behind me exaggerated my hips and waist. Leaning over the table, my blouse hung tightly to the contours of my back, and with my back to the door, my hypothetical handsome prince would be able to ogle me at his leisure. He would see me playing solitaire and offer to join me in another card game. Then nature would take its course. At least, that was my plan.

  In the reality of it, I felt like a piece of meat. “Yes, I’d like a pound of ham, deli sliced, and a whore.” I waited for the butcher’s gloved hand to grab my ankles and pull me out of the cooler, deftly fold me in wax paper, slap a label on my rump for the cashier to ring up: “WHORE / NET WT 87 lbs.”

  As I said, I am a slight woman. I stand well over 5’3” barefoot. I’m not short, just small. From a distance, I look tall and trim if I’m not standing next to someone for scale. I sometimes get mistaken for a child if I wear a heavy cloak that conceals my figure.

  I did meet a few men that evening. They were nice enough fellows, but no Princes Charming. I knew I would only have a few hours that night so I was undiscouraged. I passed the wee hours playing hearts with a family from Australia who had missed their connection. The next day was more of the same. I started to worry that the attendant who had let me in might come in for another shift and see me still there. I made a handful of good contacts of the “look me up next time you’re in New York” variety, but as that second night lengthened, I began to doubt.

  I was an obvious impostor. It was all a silly fantasy. I had no choice but to go back and flush myself down the toilet I came from. That was the half-dozing nightmare from which I awoke, kneeling, head in hands, a little before 6:00am when another post-preppie playboy sat down across from me.

  He looked well dressed but disheveled, the male doll from a fairytale romance set, found in a thrift store bargain bin a little worse for wear, separated from his mansion and plastic love interest. His face bore strong features obscured by what would have been a five o’clock shadow eighteen hours and six time zones prior, with the vapid and disingenuous smile common to his species. His suit jacket hung open before he sat to accommodate the trailing arm that had just parked his briefcase and roller board by the far end of my coffee table, but his tie’s nicely plump half-Windsor, so tied years before that knot became the common fashion, still held fast to his comfortably tailored collar.

  I would have thought him a worthy prospect the day before, but by then I was exhausted, discouraged, achy, certain of defeat and struggling to hold myself together enough to sit silently in the last remnant of my failed dream for just a few moments more when he said, “Go ahead and play the black seven. Don’t wait for a full stack.”

  A slight sigh escaped me as I gathered the cards and said I had played so many hands I couldn’t look at them anymore.

  “Yeah, Klondike isn’t so much a game as an overly ornate means of un-shuffling.” Doing my dead-level best to seem affable, I smiled (sheepishly, I’m sure) and asked what he liked to play.

  “Poker mostly,” he said. “One flavor or another depending on the table.” He started shuffling the deck while I said something about never having studied poker.

  “Gin?” he asked.

  I had given up. My heart just wasn’t in it anymore. It was all I could do to smile blankly.

  He reached over to an end table where there was a pad and pencil, and he moved them to the table between us. Then he dealt. We played a few rounds without keeping score and chatted a bit. I was starting to wake up. I stretched a little and got coffee for both of us. I felt a little bit better, enough so that when he said he owned a couple of casinos, I laughed and remarked that we should be betting on the card game.

  “What are your stakes?” he asked.

  “Oh, I haven’t any money to bet.” I must have blushed. I couldn’t even afford a bus home.

  “Of all that you might offer, money is what I desire the least,” he replied and cracked a tiny, wry, almost sinister smile.

  “Oh, I suppose my stakes depend on yours,” I said in my reinvigorated composure, remembering the stone-cold heartbreaker I had decided I was. I thought it might turn out to be a fun game after all, and two could play. “What do you say: a dollar versus a handshake, ten versus a peck on the cheek?” With a sinister smile of my own, I added, “A million versus my virginity?”

  We both laughed, and with arched eyebrows, he volleyed, “And what would you bet against ten million?”

  “For ten million dollars”—I leaned in with my hands on my knees, squeezing my breasts slightly between my arms—”I suppose I should bet myself entirely.”

  I thought I knew every type of smile there was—I had practiced them in the mirror—but his was different. His laughing grin didn’t fade, exactly. It deepened. Then it widened, as he gathered the cards and started shuffling, and with a voice that was somehow both playful and stern, he said the last thing I would have expected.

  “Very well. The game is Gin Rummy to five hundred points, according to Hoyle. The bet is freedom. If you win, you will have ten million dollars. If I win, I will have you.” He stopped shuffling and put the deck on the table in front of me. “Cut.”

  I was blown away. He was obviously serious, possibly mad. Yet there I was. I had leapt into the darkness, leaving the life I knew I didn’t want behind, plummeting through depths unknown and expecting to hit the ground at any moment. I was taken by the absurdity of it, the whimsy. I felt like I was standing in front of the looking glass, and in some part of my mind beyond thought and reason, I had to know what was on the other side.

  I cut the deck.

  As we played, we kept chatting. I have no idea what we talked about. I wasn’t listening. I watched the way he moved the cards and tallied, nonchalant but precise, as if he didn’t care who won but wanted there to be no second-guessing of the result. I started to think he actually intended to give me the money. Then I started to wonder what he expected me to do if he won.

  As the points added up, my veneer wore thin. I was indeed terri
fied and desperate. I was unconsciously fidgeting, preening, touching my face then my chest as if to fiddle with a pendant that wasn’t there, playing with buttons until they came undone, then holding my blouse tightly closed with both hands.

  I was ahead most of the time, but it was a very close game. By the last round, either of us could have taken the game in that hand. I only needed gin, but a fair amount of deadwood could have put him over 500. He looked as if he hadn’t a care in the world, but I’m sure I was a wreck, eyes darting around, breathing in gasps, up on my knees and leaning over the table.

  “Gin.” He had it on his third draw. My hands were clammy and trembling as I laid out my cards. He tallied the points, circled his 503, then quietly sat back and smiled.

  I sank back down onto my feet. My hands fell to the floor alongside my knees, and I bent into a fetal position. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. It felt like my throat was cramping. I sat like that, struggling to breathe, for what seemed like an eternity. Slowly, I sat up enough to straighten my arms with my palms still flat on the floor. My hat hung forward, low over my face, so I reached up with one hand, pulled it aside and dropped it. Looking down, I saw my hair hanging into a pile of curls on the floor, my knees slightly apart with my skirt ridden up just above them, my blouse hanging half open under my pendulous teats.

  Hadn’t I come looking to be swept away? Wasn’t this my ticket to anywhere? I felt a surge of defensiveness, my familiar reflex when I catch a stranger staring at me, but didn’t I meticulously fashion myself into an object of lust?

  I considered my options, withdrawing a bit from my full immersion in the moment, and realized this might be my best opportunity. At the very least, it should be interesting. All or nothing, I thought. After all, I hadn’t come here to do something safe and prudent.

  When I finally mustered the strange mix of courage and resignation necessary to cast my fate entirely to chance, I looked up at him. “How may I serve you, Master?” I thought that was a nice touch: all in!

  The sofa was reasonably plush and he was draped casually onto it, one arm along its back, the other on its arm. Sitting up, he leaned forward and reached across his body to the side edge of the coffee table. He pushed it straight to the side in one smooth motion, sliding it across the floor until it was even with my suitcase and shoes sitting next to me. He rolled his feet back onto his heels and pushed himself back deeper into his seat, eyes locked with mine the whole while, then leaned back into a more upright posture as he patted his thigh with one hand and motioned with the other for me to come closer. Hooking one hand in to push my hair aside, I started to crawl slowly forward.

  I had been seated close enough that I was right in front of him before I had to start moving my knees. As my thigh came forward, it stopped short and hobbled on the hem of my skirt, an unexpected complication. Unconscious gears seized and then slipped, bringing the other knee, then the first again, forward in quick succession to catch up with my torso’s momentum. The dominos of my recently recovered poise toppled quickly. As a lock of hair pulled taut, my head and arm abruptly jerked to give it slack. That arm had been supporting my weight while my other reached up to start climbing into his lap, and without it, my head and shoulders fell ungracefully to the floor.

  Laughing heartily, he caught my wrist and pulled me up along his torso until I could feel his breath down my half-open blouse. I didn’t notice that he had snuck his other hand under my arm and behind my back. With it, he pulled my hips around and to the side, as he lowered the wrist he had grabbed so I was sitting on his lap. He continued to lower my hand at the same, slow pace until it rested on his far shoulder. That was a smooth move, as if the whole thing had been painstakingly choreographed.

  I felt impressed down deep into my body, which eagerly anticipated what else he might do to me. Being physically handled so deftly and emotionally whipsawed between invincibility and despair, the only word I can use to describe myself at that point is “broken.” I relaxed into his arms, oddly relieved to feel under his control because it meant I could do no wrong.

  When he asked where I was traveling, I confessed. I told him everything. I think my voice was calm, but tears gushed from my eyes, dampening the collar and shoulder of his suit jacket.

  I had gotten down to the minutia of my dramatic escape when I felt his finger against my moving lips. I had been hushed.

  This is the story of how I took control of my own destiny, the story of how I knew my power and came to wield it. There I was, rocketing boldly off on a trajectory of my own choosing, and I had been hushed. The most surprising thing was how good it felt. Since then, I have spent every day of my life trying to get back to the calm I felt in that moment: free from the past, safe in the present, unconcerned with the future.

  I closed my eyes and relaxed deeper into his arms.

  Time dilates around a moment like that until it seems to last forever, but by and by it fades. His arm came up under my knees and he wheeled me around until I was on my back with my calves up on the arm of the sofa. He still had an arm around my shoulders, but I could feel him looking down at me. His free hand gently touched my cheek and slid down behind my neck (I remember the feeling of his French cuff gently pressing into the hollow of my shoulder and neck), grabbing me just firmly enough that I suddenly felt the tension in my muscles and tried to relax.

  My lips were slightly parted when his first touched them. His left hand, already under my collar, turned slowly down my neck along my shoulder, sliding outward to enclose my shoulder while he drew his right arm out until he was holding my head again, now with his right hand. The arm I had around him fell limp onto the cushion over my head.

  I had been panting through my mouth, and as I felt his palm start moving down to my chest, I realized I had stopped. That would soon become a problem.

  You should know at this point that I am a swimmer. I can hold my breath for quite a while. I used to weigh myself down and lie on the riverbed, looking up at the stars through the rippling surface and pretend I was a mermaid who wished she could fly. The last time I did that, I came up for air to see three boys who had, I presume, stolen a case of beer and absconded to the riverbank to divide their plunder. They were standing in a clump around my clothing, and when they saw me, they started for the water. I swam completely underwater so fast and far that I had rounded a bend before I came up. I had to stifle a derisive laugh at the lummoxes so as not to reveal that I had gone upstream.

  Sometimes I think maybe I have always had a cruel heart. I don’t know.

  Anyhow, I had some time to figure something out, but it was complicated. Why do they never cover these important details on daytime television? When the need to know arises, it’s too late to ask questions! The skin of my chest clamored desperately for attention, glowing with urgent anticipation of the continuation of his caress, while my lips danced under a strong lead but to a step I did not know. Taking inventory, I realized I was squirming unconsciously, gimbaling my hips about. My skirt had a rear, clasp-and-zipper closure and a small slit in the back, and those seams were starting to tickle. You might say I was a bit preoccupied. Nevertheless I was going to need to figure out how to breathe in short order.

  With the infinitesimal attention I could spare, I worked out that I could exhale through my nose. Inhalation, my next problem, became suddenly more urgent, and my lips must have missed a step. He unlocked them and I gasped in a flood of oxygen. My chest heaved while he turned my head and commenced a labial survey of my face and neck.

  With the whole breathing situation resolved, I felt my white-hot arousal. His hand had slid down the side of my ribcage, still slowly moving as his cuffs teased my nipple with the rising and falling of my chest. My hips had stayed busy and by that time had recruited my legs to try to pull them more firmly into the arm of the sofa, yielding only enough pressure for me to know I needed more. His hand came up under my breast and his lips drew gentle suction around my nipple. On the down stroke of my now deep and steady breat
hing, the fall of my chest drew me away from his kiss.

  When I broke free and slipped away, my collapse into his hand’s support was too much for me to bear. That spark touched off an ecstatic spasm that rocked open my eyes and left me screaming with all my strength. Fortunately, with no more air for my lungs to expel, the only sound I achieved was a quiet “meep!” Everything but the arm above my head curled inward instinctively. His one hand finished off a solid grope while the other pulled closed my blouse, which might have had one or two buttons still fastened.

  Lingering just slightly in the moment when his fingertips left me, he stood, turning his head to look across the room.

  While I retrieved my outward arm, he walked across to one of the library tables that had a phone on it. He picked up the handset and started dialing with one finger spared from his grip on the handset. As he turned to look back at me, his other hand blithely pushed back his suit jacket and slipped into his pants pocket. I even caught just a glimpse of blood-red embroidery I hadn’t noticed in its lining before as the tail of his jacket rumpled: Mister GQ Casual. Perhaps I had developed a bias. After what seemed like more than enough dialing, he lifted the phone to his face and started talking to someone.

  I glanced around the room. A few more travelers had arrived and were assiduously minding their own business. The poor attendant, bless his heart, was trying heroically not to stare. I curled further inward, closed my eyes and felt the rising warmth of a full-body blush. I was mortified, not ashamed but embarrassed by the publicity of what I had just done.