“Really?” I took a sip from her glass and said,” But this doesn’t taste like pineapple, dumbass! Or is there any problem with your taste buds?” I asked, out of curiosity.
She tasted it again and responded, “Oh, yeah, it tastes good. I wonder you are still easily susceptible to my jokes!” She laughed.
Hillary and I had agreed to go window-shopping at Fulton Mall, each of us driving our own car because Hillary wasn’t sure she could return to my apartment once we were done with the outing.
Fulton Mall, as expected, was visibly a chaotic place as shoppers milled around from one store to another. Our first stop was at a dress shop; they displayed some imported dresses from different countries, mostly from Europe. After trying one of the dresses on, Hillary couldn’t hide her disdain for its old style. And as we moved to the next store, which sold all manner of casual shoes, she burst out lambasting those dresses’ old-school designs.
“You know what? I can’t imagine myself sleeping in any of those dresses notwithstanding going out to parties or social functions in them,” she said.
“How do you mean?” I prodded her further.
“They looked like what European ladies wore in the sixteenth century. Do you remember those cowboy movies with their women in bell-bottomed gowns that reached down to their ankles?” She said, jovially.
Her sarcasm about the dresses was very funny, but it wasn’t unexpected. Hillary was the goofiest person alive that I knew!
I had never noticed that Hillary was a sucker for good shoes. It was hard to get her out of the shoe shops once she was in. Most especially, the brand shoes made her restive the most.
“I’m not accustomed to boasting, but do you know I own thirty pairs of shoes?” Hillary revealed.
“That’s a lot, Hillary. I have just four pairs,” I told her.
We went into a café to have some coffee, and possibly enjoy some talk as we had tactically avoided going into any serious discussion since we met five hours before.
“The issue of Steve Berk appeared to me like a twenty-first century ghost story,” Hillary said as he munched her meat pie. The top of her cup of cappuccino shimmered in the glowing noonday sunlight.
“We at the Human Resource Department couldn’t understand how an employee that came to work only for one day but reportedly said to be following the CEO around during his wife’s funeral could end up being fired just like that. Everything in this story appeared to me like a scam,” she said, laughing.
“I’m quite surprised, too. And to think that a guy who showed so much love and truly appeared to have got a considerate heart could disappear from my radar that way tells me more about men’s cruelty,” I said, a little angry.
“That’s why many ladies decided never to marry. They’ve had enough and aren’t ready to keep being on the receiving end,” Hillary said, thoughtfully.
“It’s impossible for anyone to say precisely that Mr. Russell set you up with Steve. You can only find that out if you agree to follow the advice I’m about to give you,” Hillary said, looking straight into my teary eyes.
“What’s that, Hillary,” I urged her to continue.
She drew a long, thoughtful breath before uttering the strangest advice anyone had ever given me. “Jan, you’ve got to act like a whore as far as Mr. Russell is concerned,” she said, squinting.
“Act like a whore? What did you mean?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked around to be sure no eavesdropper was listening. Two guys in the corner of the café were staring lustfully at Hillary’s half-covered body.
“Here is the unfortunate situation you’ve found yourself in right now, girlfriend: is either you agree to date Mr. Russell or you can decide to watch your career suffer before your very eyes,” she advised. “You may want to choose to quit and start looking for a banking job elsewhere. But you and I understand that the current employment situation in this country is in dire straits, and seriously unpredictable,” she said.
Hillary’s advice struck me as a huge surprise, but I knew she was always frank about things. She probably had got some good reasons for offering such a piece of advice.
“Let me tell you something that may interest you. Mr. Russell once dated a lady in our Department; she said all he was just looking for was a one-night-stand. And once he’s done with that, he will surely let you go free. Be matured in your approach to him, Jan,” Hillary finally concluded.
One night stand! The words rang in my head like Christmas Bells.
Paying The Devil His Dues
After thinking hard and long about Hillary’s advice, I decided I would give it a try. In the back of mind, if things turned out wild and life-threatening I knew how to stop Mr. Russell cold in his tracks: I would invite my uncle in!
The very first task ahead of me was to turn myself into a whore. Hillary had left me to figure that out by myself. Unsure of what to do, I searched for “a whore appearance” on Google and it stunned me to have discovered plenty of information about what kind of clothes a whore put on, and the kind of gait (walking manner) they adopted in order to make their curves jingle and appear very seductive. They usually let their breasts jut out of blouses, swishing here and there like a suspended mango. And they shake their buttocks rhythmically like a leaf on the surface of a restless stream.
The types of clothes that matched the description of a whore’s attire in the internet resembled those I used to wear in my college days. But I had since stored them away in my closet. High-heeled shoes, yes! And a skirt that split up to the middle of my laps, exposing my flesh. I retrieved all those college-day clothes and tried them on in front of the mirror. I applied some make-up on my face to make it more beautiful (I seldom used make-up). The result was stunning: I now became a proper whore!
The first time I appeared before Mr. Russell in such a manner, he exploded into a thunderous laughter. And being a seasoned womanizer, he quickly took up the challenge by showing me a pretty catalogue.
“Have you ever travelled to any of the Caribbean islands?” He asked.
I shook my head as I quickly flipped through the catalogue’s gloss pages—they contained information about tour packages and travel arrangement to the Caribbean. The pictures of warm and cozy weather, beautiful gardens and parks greeted my inquisitive eyes. Without any hesitation, I cycled Bahamas with the red pen in my hand.
“If I have the opportunity, I’ll like to visit here, the Bahamas,” I said, indicating my chosen destination with an index finger.
“You got it!” Mr. Russell bellowed.
“What?” I thought I had heard wrongly.
“If you are free this weekend, why don’t you we check it out. Bahamas is a cool place to relax for the weekend, Janet,” he said, his forehead wrinkled, not because of ageing but probably from his excitement that he had eventually succeeded in getting what he badly wanted.
It bothered me a bit to realize that this man had possibly been harboring some filthy thoughts towards me even when his wife was alive. The quickness with which he cajoled me into accepting a foreign trip with him despite having no overseas traveling experience irked me somehow. But since I was acting on Hillary’s seemingly robust advice, I had no intention to remain bitter against him for a long time. At least, once he got what he wanted—a one-night-stand romping sex, he would let me be on my own.
But, come to think of it that a person could be so hungry as a graveyard for sex truly amazed me. Was that all he occupied his mind with everyday, apart from running his businesses? I was lost in these thoughts while pretending to be enjoying the beautiful sceneries in the tour catalogue.
“I will make sure you get the full details about the trip by Thursday,” he promised.
“Thank you, sir,” my attempt to roll my eyes lustfully like a whore had caused some pain in my eyeballs.
“Do you mind giving me a peck, Janet?” He requested, unabashedly.
As I bent down to kiss his bony left cheek, my breasts flowed out of the small bras and rested on the
neckline of my blue floral-patterned blouse. He smiled lustfully and gave my teats a gentle pinch.
“Cool stuff, Janet. And they look yummy, too,” he patted my back.
*******
We arrived in Bahamas in the wee hours of Saturday. According to our schedule, we were expected to spend only a night in this beautiful Caribbean paradise.
In order not to raise an unnecessary alarm, I had kept the trip under wrap from my parents and siblings. Only Hillary got regular updates from me because my Blackberry could work as well in Bahamas. So, I kept sending her SMS messages.
We lodged into a suite of a five-star hotel, Cove Atlantis, a ritzy hotel that sat atop Bahamas’s two great beaches. The long flight from New York had made me a little tired so that I spent most of the day sleeping. But by evening, interesting things started to happen. The hotel, I learnt, organized periodic traditional entertainment or performance for guests, and for those of us in the suites, we could request for live shows by bringing the performers or entertainers live into our living rooms.
“I think you’ll be glad to see a snake charmer. Or is it a band of traditional dancers you are interested in?” Mr. Russell asked as we sat in the suite’s huge living room.
“Give me the snake charmer,” I humbly requested.
The snake charmer was a stout man with wiry moustache. He spoke broken English laced with Bahaman dialects. My body appeared creepy at the sight of a large python he whisked out of his plastic sack. He laid the snake across the floor and, for a while, I thought the animal was dead. But he began to make some incantations and blowing something that looked like a flute. All of a sudden the big snake rose from its reverie, shook its gigantic body and started to dance to the tune of the music emanating from the flute-like object.
“Stand up!” the snake charmer gave a command and the animal obeyed immediately.
“Sit down!” he said again. With awe, I watched the snake wilt into a sitting position by folding its big body into rims of skins.
We all clapped at the end of this short but wonderful performance.
I was billed for a massage session thereafter. In a matter of minutes, the masseuse, a French woman who had lived in Bahamas for a very long time came in to electrify my body with her deft fingers.
“You’ll need to lie down in your bedroom,” she said.
Following her instructions, I sprawled on my bed naked except for a small towel she told me to wrap around my waist. When she touched me with her nimble fingers, they felt like Acupuncture needles, piercing every joint of my body and connecting every yang and yin there. As she touched my scalp, back, hands, feet and knee-joints, I could enjoy a feel-good sensation coursing down my body system. And I didn’t know exactly when I slept off. The masseuse might have covered my naked body after she had completed her work. This experience was calming and indeed heavenly.
I didn’t stir a muscle until midnight. That was about six hours later. Oh, my goodness, it had been long since I enjoyed such a long, uninterrupted sleep. But when I woke up, I found Mr. Russell curling up beside me like a cobra. He was pulling the covers off my body and caressing my butt. I would have been woken up by the sensual sensation his touch was producing on my body.
“I never believed this day will ever come,” he whispered into my left ear, his breath reeking of alcohol.
I neither resist nor utter anything in support of his last statement. His hands, soft and warm, journeyed from butt down to my legs. He caressed them for like ten minutes before his fingers began to play around my pubic hair. I winced because of a slight pain I felt when he tried dipping a finger into my tight pussy.
“Still a virgin?” He whispered, his breath now coming in slow, painful rate.
“Yes sir,” I said, in low tone.
“Stop it! Don’t “yes sir” me. Call me Henry,” he warned.
“OK,” I replied.
He didn’t remove his hand from my vagina until he was sure that I had been wet. He then slid his hand up my belly, slowly and methodically like a professional sex machine. He cupped my breasts in his hands, gave them a suck in quick succession. I moaned each time he did that.
Not until when he climbed over me that I realized he was already naked. His penis, huge and taut, pressed against my belly, arousing some hormones around that section of my body. The feeling was good, I must confess. And by the time he entered into me, my core was already soft, wet and begging to be pounded. He gave it to me quite hard and long. It was like he was on a revenge mission, punishing me for all those years I had tactically eluded his catch. To be honest, all my previous disdain for him disappeared under his mighty pounding. And I secretly held a respect for his manliness now. It was a surreal experience.
Getting back to New York, Mr. Russell became a totally changed man. He related with me like nothing had happened between us. He transferred me from his office to the Accounting Department. He cut all communication links with me as it appeared he wasn’t interested in a risky long-time relationship with me.
Hillary was damn right on this: Mr. Russell was a man who could do anything to get his one-night-stand. And once he got it, he was off like a drunken bee!
Wall Street Blues (Swashbuckling Romance) Page 5