by Mimi Strong
Of course. His mocking tone. His I'm-so-wonderful attitude.
He was Smith Fucking Wittingham, author of the Smith Dunham detective series. He'd actually named the main character after himself, boldly owning up to the fact his character was his own disgusting fictional avatar. Smith Dunham bedded one or more ladies in every novel, sometimes at the same time. He made James Bond look monogamous. And people loved the books, of course.
My own mother read them and swooned over fictional Smith Dunham, discussing with her girlfriends what actor might play the detective if and when they made the inevitable movie or TV series.
I had read Smith Fucking Wittingham's books—while sitting on the toilet at my mother's house. The bathroom was where his books belonged.
And now I was stuck in the woods with him? For two weeks? The generous paycheck didn't seem at all adequate anymore.
“Moose do kill people,” he said casually. “In Alaska, some say moose kill more people than bears. The death toll includes vehicle accidents, but a few deaths are by trampling.” He paused, staring contemplatively at the antler chandelier above us. “What a novel way to kill someone and make it appear to be an accident. You wouldn't want to leave it to chance, of course, but find some implement that matches the hooves… perhaps through a taxidermist.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“No? Oh, of course not. Then the taxidermist would know, and you can't have a perfect crime if someone knows. Good point. The killer would have to kill the moose as well.”
“Am I here to help you type… a Smith Dunham novel?”
“Well, you're not here to sit around and look pretty, though it certainly would help. Perhaps if you unbuttoned a few more buttons.”
I shook my head. “I can't do this.”
“Of course you can! A hundred words a minute. We'll take it slow at first. And no, you can't record the session and transcribe later. I need to see the words on the screen or they're not concrete.”
I stared down at my hands. I'd done worse things for a paycheck—like the summer I'd worked at the meat-processor. My main duty was scooping up the floor meat to feed into a machine that made sausages.
That was it.
Smith Wittingham's perverted scenes and twisted ideas were just so much floor meat, and I'd scoop them up to make the sausages that were his bestselling novels.
After lunch, he showed me to my room, which was on the lower floor and the smallest of the three bedrooms in the cabin. I hung up my clothes and lay down on the double-sized bed with my tablet computer. My plan was to research my new boss and send some emails to let my friends and family know I had not been eaten by a moose. My tablet couldn't detect any wireless internet. Hadn't there been something in the contract about internet access? I should have read the thing.
I tried again to search for wireless connections, but found nothing.
Was this shit for real? No internet? Oh, no. No amount of pay was worth going two weeks without internet.
Smith knocked on my closed door. “Just so you know, there's no internet access here.”
“I gathered that.”
He chuckled. “If you don't mind, I'm ready to begin now. I have the first sentence in mind.”
I grabbed a pillow from the bed and muffled a scream of despair.
Two weeks. How much worse could it get?
I took a moment to brush my hair in the little bathroom connected to my room, then emerged, ready to type. Smith Wittingham had already gone upstairs, to where I imagined the office was.
I found him in the largest bedroom, which had a great view of the trees and a pricy-looking ergonomic desk.
Smith waved me over to my new chair, one of those mesh things with a hundred levers.
“Not bad,” I said of the chair, smiling over the first thing that had gone well.
His voice strong and sure, like a narrator, he said, “My client bowled me over at the door, the word 'moose' escaping from her luscious lips.”
I froze in my chair. “What?”
“That's the first line. I know it's not great, but you have to start somewhere.”
The computer was already on, with a blank document on the screen. He's messing with me, I thought, but I wasn't going to engage in his chicanery. I typed his words, verbatim.
I expected he would laugh and say the moose thing was just a joke, but he kept going. The woman in the story was breathless from an encounter in the woods with a moose. Stranger still, it sounded sexy the way he narrated the story, what with her bosom heaving and all.
As I typed, he paced the room behind me, his sock feet quiet on the thick carpet. I zoned out, focusing only on one word at a time, coming from a disembodied voice that moved around like sound effects on surround-sound speakers.
He used my moose, but at least the woman, Detective Dunham's new client, wasn't named Tori. She was Sheri, and she had waist-length red hair, unlike my own shoulder-length red hair. I had a bunch of freckles on the bridge of my nose, but she had a “smattering of delicious angel kisses.” Her chest measurements were also more impressive than mine, and yes, he did describe her bra size. On the front page. I found it difficult to type while rolling my eyes, but I forged on. I kept up my pace, never falling behind his narration, for nearly two hours.
At the end of the second hour, Smith clapped his hands abruptly. “Tori! Time for a break.”
“But… why did Sheri hire Detective Dunham instead of going directly to the police?”
I twirled around on my fancy chair to find a smug-looking Smith Wittingham, his face working hard to look even more self-satisfied.
“Gotcha,” he said. “Good to know. I'm off to take a shower. You can join me if you like, or do whatever your heart fancies for the next two hours, then we'll reconvene.”
My left eye twitched. Join him for a shower? He'd removed the light jacket he'd been wearing when I arrived, and wore only a tight-fitting T-shirt. The man either had good genes or spent some time at the gym—perhaps both. As I was watching him, he dropped to the carpet and started doing push-ups. “You should do something to get your heart rate up,” he said between presses. “Increased blood flow is good for the brain, too. Maybe go outside and get that scary moose to chase you around.”
“Good idea,” I said, stepping around him. I paused at the doorway long enough to get a good look at his butt, on display in that position.
I wondered how sleeping with him would change me, besides increasing the number of guys I'd been with, sexually. Despite all my big talk with my friends, and the dirty things I'd say over email and text messages, the truth was I'd only been with Todd through most of college. There'd been a few breaks and other people, but not as much experimentation as I'd hoped to have done by the time I graduated.
Todd and I had broken up half a year earlier, and I'd heard through friends he'd moved on. And on. He was dating his third girlfriend since me, last I heard. Wouldn't it be great if Todd heard about my affair with a wealthy author?
Smith finished his push-ups and jumped up, his face red from exertion, his sapphire eyes looking bright and inviting. “Shower time. You in?”
I turned and walked away down the hall. “Going for that walk you suggested! Have fun.”
“Oh, I will.”
His voice suggested naughty business, but it was all too soon. I ran away.
Once downstairs, I put on my shoes quickly and raced out the door.
From my vantage point out in the woods, everything that had happened in the cabin seemed surreal.
Was he allowed to flirt with me so brazenly? I'd signed so many documents, including one that acknowledged I understood the author wrote some scenes of a sexual nature. I'd agreed that I wouldn't be crying sexual harassment over typing some dirty words. The document said nothing about him inviting me to take a shower with him, though.
As I walked through the woods, I noticed a distinctive feeling happening between my legs. It was a sexy movie feeling, only the movie was playing in my head. I could
n't stop thinking about Smith in the shower, stroking his long, thick cock, his face contorted, then relieved, as he came in the water, his seed swirling down the drain.
Back at school, I'd always been disappointed when Todd took a long shower in the morning, because he'd be uninterested in making love the rest of the day. I'd wake up alone in bed, hot for him, but he'd rush off to class and leave me wanting, horny and desperate. Frustrated. Exactly the same way I was feeling at that moment in the forest.
Nobody was around, not even a moose, so I leaned back against a sturdy tree, took a deep breath of the fresh Vermont air, and slipped my hand down the front of my jeans.
Our second writing session of the day went even better, with us laying down a significant number of words. The mystery itself was convoluted, with a number of suspects in the “accident” that Detective Smith Dunham's sexy client Sheri suspected was a murder.
I found myself smiling and laughing internally at the dialog Smith gave Sheri. She wasn't just some cardboard sex object for him to bang, but a real person, with a sense of humor and a strong will. She was exactly the kind of woman he never put in his novels. I loved her.
This session went longer than the first, and by the third hour, I was exhausted and exhilarated. We'd fallen into a rhythm together, where I'd mostly sit and type, being his flying fingers, but now and then he'd pause as though searching his mind for a word. I wouldn't say the word out loud, but would type a suggested word on the screen.
For example, he paused when describing a hotel suite, and I typed the word sumptuous.
In a softer voice than the one he used to dictate the words of the novel, he said, “Ah, yes, sumptuous is even better than elegant. That word wouldn't come to mind because it was the wrong word. But you pulled the right word from my subconscious. You must be psychic.” He touched me on the shoulder.
I was so startled and excited by his touch, I moaned.
“Interesting,” he said softly. He resumed his pacing behind me, and the dictation.
He only uttered three sentences, and they were stilted and awkward.
I turned around to look at him and noticed his posture was drooping. “Time for a break?” I asked.
He collapsed on the nearby bed, face down. “Done for the day,” he mumbled.
He didn't move, and I wondered if he was playing a new game, or actually that exhausted. His eyes were closed, and he looked comfortable enough, so I got out of my chair and quietly left the room, shutting the door behind me.
Downstairs, I came upon a revelation: a land line telephone! I shook my head at my own stupidity. My cell phone had no coverage there, and there was no internet, but I was not entirely cut off from the rest of the world. I called my mother first, to let her know I'd made the journey safely.
My mother said, “Who is this mysterious author? I'm dying to know. Can you tell me?”
“I can't tell you, but she is a nice lady.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I was hoping it might be a nice man who'll take care of you.”
“Mom! I can take care of myself.”
“Of course. That's not what I meant.”
“It's still interesting work, Mom. And I'm having fun. It's nice out here in the country and I had a little jog today.”
“Tori, be a dear and give me the initials of her name, just so I can imagine.”
“Um, some of the letters in her name are C and J,” I said. It hurt me to lie to my mother, but I was sworn to secrecy. If it had been anyone else, I would have told her, Non-Disclosure Agreement be damned, but it was Smith Wittingham. My mother was in a book club dedicated to Smith Wittingham's books. Asking her to keep that secret would be cruel and unusual punishment.
As we chatted, with her filling me in on all the adorable things my cousin's baby girl did that day, I stretched the phone's long, curly cord to its limit and raided the kitchen. My meals were included in the contract, but I didn't know which of the portions in the fridge were mine. I didn't want to upset Smith, so I perused all the pre-packaged meals and sampled a small portion from four of them.
The food wasn't bad at all. The typing and the fresh air really had inspired my appetite, and I had to go back for seconds.
After dinner, I stayed in my bedroom. We didn't have internet at the cabin, but there was TV, so at least I wasn't going to die of boredom. I heard Smith shuffling down the stairs and rummaging around in the kitchen, but I didn't go out to talk to him. I wanted to maintain some boundaries, some separation from him, and keeping to myself in my room seemed like the best way.
My room got chilly that evening after the sun went down—summer nights in the mountains were cool. I crawled under my sheets in my nightshirt and closed my eyes. With my eyes shut, my other senses screamed at me that I was not at home. The sheets felt nubby and foreign, and the sounds were all wrong.
I could hear Smith, moving around upstairs. The cabin had good soundproofing, but there was a squeak, and a tap. As I listened, the tap kept going, keeping up a rhythm. Was that his bed? Was he pleasuring himself?
I reached under my nightshirt and pinched my already-firm nipples. Electricity shot down to my pussy instantly. I rolled onto my stomach, one hand down in my panties, and thrust against the firm mattress.
The tapping from upstairs kept going.
All I had to do was go up there, go up those stairs, and offer some excuse. There I'd be, the young college graduate, in nothing but her thin nightshirt. Wasn't that exactly what he wanted? Was I really just there to type?
I rolled onto my back and thought it through. He definitely planned to seduce me, but he probably wanted to draw the tension out, then pick some dramatic moment—something that would fit into his story. His detective would protect his client Sheri from danger, and they'd bone each other senseless in a dirty alley somewhere, smoke still emanating from his spent pistol.
I wasn't Sheri, though. Nowadays, I made my own decisions about who I slept with, rather than letting it just happen. What if I turned the tables on him? What if I seduced him? On our very first night?
I jumped out of bed, flicked on a lamp, and rummaged through the clothes I'd brought. Nothing was any better than the nightshirt I had on, which showed off my firm breasts and youth. One of my professors was always talking about young, nubile flesh—so much, that I'd started to see myself and my friends the way older men saw us. Any girl at nineteen or twenty was attractive, even the ones who didn't think they were.
I freshened up in the bathroom and switched out my underwear for a black pair of lacy panties, the black showing through my white shirt.
My body was aching to be touched, my pussy already swelling at the thought. What if he turned me down?
No, Tori, don't think that way. We were alone at a cabin for two weeks. He and I both knew we were going to sleep together, and this way was better. We could get started immediately. Oh, the things we could do to each other over the next two weeks.
My body tingled with adrenaline, so much that I could barely feel the bottoms of my feet on the stairs as I crept up. I knocked on his bedroom door, which was closed, with a bit of light showing around the edges.
He called out, “Who is it?”
“Killer moose. I'm looking for Tori.”
“Down the stairs, first door on your right.”
I put my hand to my chin and leaned against the wall. That did not go as planned.
I knocked again.
He called out, “Yes?”
“What are you doing?”
“Reading a book. You should try it sometime.”
Well, now he was just being insulting. I shook my head, embarrassed for being so stupid, and started to walk away.
He opened the door, splashing light out into the hallway. His voice deep and sexy, he said, “Can't sleep?”
I turned around, feeling silly in my thin nightshirt. My hard nipples poked out like traffic cones.
I said, “I heard something tapping and I was curious.”
�
�Sometimes I kick my foot while I'm reading.” He stepped out of the room, wearing a pair of jogging pants and no shirt. He had a broad chest and a great build, a trail of fair-colored hair running down the middle of his stomach.
“That makes sense.” I backed away two steps.
“Tori, did you come up here to seduce me?”
“Is that what Sheri would do?”
“No. It wasn't at all what I had planned.”
I took two steps closer to him and cocked my head. I was trying to play it cool, but my heart was pounding, my mouth parched from nerves.
“I'm not Sheri,” I said.
“Would you like to come into my room? Once you step through this doorway, everything changes, Tori.”
I reached down and tugged nervously at the hem of my nightshirt.
“My bed is cold,” I said.
He stepped to the side, waving me into his room. “Then come in and share mine.”
My pulse throbbed in my ears. What was I doing? My voice of reason whispered for me to turn around and maintain my boundaries. I looked at Smith's face, from his all-knowing eyes to his wide, handsome jaw, then I looked down his defined pectoral muscles, his flat, muscular stomach, and to those navy blue sweatpants. The stretchy pants could not hide his secret. He was already erect, a sizable bulge growing for me.
I gulped hard and licked my lips, then I was moving, walking toward him, walking into his room.
I was barely past him, barely through the doorway, and he grabbed me roughly from behind. He sank his lips down on the back of my neck. I sighed and collapsed into him. His hands were everywhere at once, on my breasts and my hips and my legs. His cock pushed into me as he kissed my neck fiercely, holding me tight.
I twisted around within his arms, turning to face him, taking his mouth against mine. He growled against my lips and thrust his tongue into my mouth.
We were moving backwards, and I was pushed back against his bed. I closed my eyes and he yanked my panties off. The lights were on, the room bright.
Then he was on me, his jogging pants gone, the head of his cock against my opening.