Timothy looked wistfully at the doorway that led to the living room, then said, “What the fuck. Let's just get out of here.” He snatched Roy's wrist in his left hand and Stan's in his right. He was quick as a cobra and powerful as a python. Before either of the other men could react, he was pulling both of them through the open front door.
Roy didn't resist. “Come on, Stan. Don't fight it. The game's over.”
Stan pulled but couldn't get his hand back from Timothy. “What the fuck,” he said with a note of resignation and let Timothy lead him out into the hallway. As soon as Stan released the spring-loaded door, it began to close. There was no sense trying to stay inside when Timothy was determined to keep your hand in the hallway. By the time it slammed shut, all three men were outside.
“Is it locked?” Timothy asked.
“Yeah, it locks automatically when it closes. A lot of doors in high rises do that for security,” Stan said.
Timothy tried the knob. It was locked tight.
Roy shrugged. “That's it, then. She wins, we all lose.”
“I hate to lose,” Stan said bitterly.
“Me, too,” Roy said, but added, philosophically, “but at least you didn't have to lose to one of us. It was a rigged game from the start.”
“You got that right.”
The three men rode the elevator down to the lobby and then exited the building together, the outer door also locking behind them.
“You parked on the street?” Roy asked the other men.
“No,” Stan replied, “I parked in the first spot that I found empty. It belongs to someone but I figured that if they weren't using it, then I might as well take it.”
“I got a visitor space,” Timothy replied, looking at Stan with disdain. “There were plenty of open spots.”
Roy said, “Well, I'm parked on the street around the corner. I hope that I don't see you guys around.”
“Me, too,” Stan replied.
Roy walked away from the other two men.
A few minutes later, Felicity heard her front door open, heard someone walk in, then heard the door slam shut. She watched Roy walk into the living room. He was alone. “You didn't go to the bathroom, did you?” she said.
“No. I looked around a little and found your purse by your vanity in your bedroom. I hope you don't mind that I borrowed your keys. I came back to return them as soon as I could.”
“I hoped that you'd win all along, you know. I love a smart man.”
“That was why you chose me,” he said dryly. “Timothy was the strong guy, Stan was the handsome, charming one and I was the smart one.”
“You sounded like a genius in that meeting a couple of weeks ago. That's why I gave you my number.” She rattled the chain that held her in place. “Now, are you going to unlock me so that we can start having some real fun? You've earned it.”
“I'll unlock you in,” he glanced at the clock on the mantle, “another four minutes when the alarm goes off. I won't have won officially until then and, when things are going so well, I'd rather not disturb them.”
“That's smart. I guess I'll just hang around here and wait on your pleasure,” she said with the cutest little pout.
“You know, when I got your keys out of the purse, I had a quick look in your wallet.”
“Naughty boy. Nobody likes a nosey parker.”
“You don't mind if I call you Barbara, do you?”
“That is my name, so you can call me Barbara if you like, but I don't think it sounds nearly as much fun as Felicity.”
“You're a student at Irvine.”
“A graduate student, actually. I'm just starting my Ph.D. thesis.”
“Which department?”
“Psychology.”
“Is this some kind of experiment?”
“Life is just one damned experiment after another. But if you are asking if you have been a subject in an official scholarly study, the answer is, 'Of course not.' The ethics violations alone would be staggering. Not only could I not get it published, but I'd risk my entire academic career if I tried to submit a report. No, this is just a game I decided to play. It was a one-off experience. I've never offered to have sex with strangers before and will probably never do it again. I didn’t come up with this game out of thin air, though. I began with the hypothesis that a woman would find a man more attractive if he was successful in competition against other men. I proved that hypothesis to my satisfaction. I can hardly wait to fuck you.”
“Me, too, but we’ve got a few minute left before I can unchain you so why don’t you tell me why I got the impression at that meeting that you worked for Barton Kinematics?”
“I don't even know who they are. I just walked through the engineering department and noticed your meeting. Everyone looked like they were strangers because they were all introducing themselves, so I went in and sat in the nearest open chair. It happened to be between those two guys so everyone else thought that I was with them.” She giggled. “It was no big deal. What was the worst that you could do? Politely ask me to leave. That wouldn’t have been all that traumatic.”
“Hmm.” Roy paused for a minute to digest that little chestnut. Then he said, “One other thing, I noticed that you have a different address on your driver's license. Your real apartment is a lot closer to the university than this one.”
She shuffled her feet a little, trying to get more comfortable in her heels. “Yeah, well, I'm sure you understand why I borrowed this one. I didn't exactly know you guys so I wasn't keen on you all knowing where I really live. This is my officemate's apartment. She's at a conference in Alaska and won't be back until tomorrow evening. I've got to get the place cleaned up before then.”
“I can understa–”
The clock on the mantle began dinging loudly and repeatedly, cutting Roy off in mid-sentence.
“That's it!” Barbara shouted over the dinging. “You've officially won the key to my most intimate parts. You'll find it taped to the bottom of the clock.”
Roy looked at her for a minute, then said, “So if I just walk out of here without unlocking you, then you'll have to stay like this until your colleague comes back tomorrow night.”
She stared hard at him for a moment. “You wouldn't do that to me. I've held up my part of our bargain and I trust you to do the same. Now you owe me an evening of wild, passionate sex. That was the deal.” She rattled her chain impatiently, giving Roy the impression that she was anxious to get the cuffs and chastity belt removed so that she could make wild love to him for the rest of the night.
“You're right. I'll play fair with you, too.” He reached out and stroked her tits for a minute. “You feel great.” Then he hugged her and gave her a kiss. He expected it to be a slow gentle meeting of the lips, but she was fierce in returning it with as much passion as he had ever received. She leaned forward to press the length of her body hard against him. If her hands had not been locked over her head, she would have tried to squeeze him breathless.
He hugged and kissed and caressed her for a couple more minutes before he moved his hand to her chest to get the padlock key.
As soon as he unlocked her, she proved that she was telling the truth that she was desperately horny for him. She almost ran to the mantle clock, ripped the key free from underneath it, and unlocked the chastity belt from her waist.
She guided his hand between her legs and let him feel that she was dripping. She gasped at his touch and parted her knees to give him access.
After letting him stimulate her manually for a couple of minutes, she dragged him back to the bedroom and spent the next few hours showing him that she was as inventive in her lovemaking as she had been in her gamesmanship.
He proved to be her equal in bed.
And on the dining room table.
And in the bathtub.
Their evening did not end at midnight, as her rules specified. The next morning, she made him breakfast; then he helped her clean all the evidence of their passion from her friend's
apartment. It was the first night of a beautiful friendship that lasted until she graduated.
And it wasn’t the I-don't-want-to-fuck-you-any-more kind of friendship. It was the happy, lusty kind.
Suzie's Lessons
It began as a day like any other for Rob. He was sitting in front of his computer, typing up a storm, writing code as fast as his mind could think. And that was pretty damned fast.
Then, a strange woman walked into his office. That was not odd in itself. That happened to Rob all the time.
This woman was a little older than most, but not old enough to raise any red flags. He was not good at guessing women’s ages. If forced, he would have said that she was about thirty. Maybe thirty-five. Probably not late twenties, but he could be wrong about that. Like I said, he was not good at women’s ages.
But he was good at predicting women’s reaction to him because it never varied. They looked at his rumpled clothes and unkempt hair, rolled their eyes, dismissed him as a nerd, and walked away. Then, before long, maybe in a day or two, maybe not for a few weeks, they’d come back and ask him to fix their computer.
He would always agree to help and spend an hour correcting the problem, hoping that the woman would be impressed with his knowledge and skill. Not that he normally had to use much of his extensive knowledge or skill. Nine times out of ten, the problem was something that the woman had caused and something that she could have fixed almost as quickly as him if they’d only read the fucking manual.
But the women would never sully themselves by deigning to read a manual – that was beneath their dignity. Nor would they stay and watch how he fixed their computer – that was too boring. Nor would they listen to his explanation about how to avoid the problem next time – he was too boring. Instead, they’d gush a quick thanks and send him away, not thinking of him again until the next time they screwed up their computer. Chivalrous nerd errants garnered few real rewards in this world beyond hearing a few quick, empty words of insincere flattery as the no-longer-distressed damsels showed them the door.
It was not surprising that Rob's social skills tended to the perfunctory. Having a narrow range of experience, he gave back what he received.
The woman currently darkening his doorway looked distressed. Again, that was no surprise; every woman who came to his office was distressed about her computer. And they let their distress show because they believed that Rob would be more likely to help them if he could see it on their faces.
They were right.
When this woman spoke, she said about the same thing as the last dozen women who had come to his office. “I have a problem. I need your help.”
“What’s wrong with your computer?” he asked with a sigh.
She looked at him oddly and said, “My computer? Nothing. As near as I know, my computer’s fine. That’s not the kind of help that I need.”
“Oh.” That was Rob got his first inkling that there was something different about this woman. “What kind of help do you need?”
That was the moment that Rob’s day became a day like no other. The woman blushed. No woman had ever blushed in his presence before. Considering some of the stupid things that they had done to their computers, many of them should have blushed, but this was the only woman whose face actually turned red. “This is kind of embarrassing.” She paused for a moment then said in a rush, “I need you to remove my bra.”
“What?” He could not believe that she had said what he had heard.
She spoke more slowly. “I need you to take my bra off for me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What word don’t you understand?” she asked in frustration. “Bra or remove? A bra is a piece of underwear that a woman wears on her chest to support her breasts.” She raised her hands to her chest but did not actually touch her breasts. “Removing it requires unfastening it at the back.”
“I know that,” Rob snapped back. He interpreted her sarcasm as implying that he had never removed a woman's bra before. He never had – a fact that he would have been embarrassed to admit – but, if given the opportunity, he was sure that he could figure out how it was done. His technical competence was not limited to software but encompassed hardware as well.
Though woman’s breasts looked more soft than hard to him. Not that he had ever touched one to know from first-hand experience.
At this point, I should tell you a couple of basic facts about Rob. He’s a young man, a month shy of his twenty-second birthday, who had just begun his master’s degree in computer science. He was not ugly but no one would call him handsome, either, especially when they saw him in his usual stained and rumpled attire. Even if he cleaned himself up in strict accordance to Esquire rules, he would still look quite average.
His appearance did not bother him, though. His main obstacle to happiness was that he had almost no social life. He liked people and would have liked to hang around them more, but had no idea how to relate to other human beings. Not all computer geeks are nerds, but some are and the nerd stereotype could have been based on Rob.
The only thing that was really wrong with Rob was that he was relentlessly boring. He could speak about little apart from computers. He never read books or newspapers, watched little television, and didn’t know one end of a football from the other. Worse, when he started talking about computers, he was excruciatingly pedantic, especially if he was speaking to a woman. He should be forgiven for that, though. In order to get him to fix their computers, women invariably acted like helpless children around him. Then, when he spoke to them as though they were children, they felt insulted.
It was a no-win dilemma.
It was not surprising, then, that he had never had a date with a woman. I was probably the only woman that had any kind of friendship with him and that was pretty much limited to a few dinners with groups of students in the computer science program. I was more likely to talk to him in an Internet chat sessions than in real space. I let him be one of my Facebook and Twitter friends mostly out of sympathy.
This woman, though, acted completely differently from any other woman that he had ever met. Rob as flabbergasted when she closed his office door and then began unbuttoning her top. She was wearing a heavy, shapeless, plaid flannel shirt that was probably the least sexy item of clothing that any woman had ever worn in the history of fashion. Her breasts were large enough to make their presence obvious but the shirt completely hid the fine details of her shape. And he was soon to discover that the details of her shape were exceptionally fine.
Despite the unsexy fashion, the fact that she was voluntarily stripping it off in the privacy of his office instantly made the lumberjack shirt the most sensual piece of clothing that he had ever seen on a woman. He might well spend the next decade fantasizing about plaid flannel.
As the buttons were released, one by one, the flannel began to gape open, revealing shiny black leather cups on either side of the woman’s lovely milky cleavage. When the final button was released, the woman reached up to pull the shirt off her shoulders, a movement that thrust her full breasts forward hard into the stiff cups. The bra cups were large but her breasts were big enough that they filled them completely. As the tender flesh pressed into them, she could not suppress a gasp. She moaned softly as she lowered her arms and relaxed her shoulders. It was a ragged, breathy moan.
Rob didn’t know if women normally wore leather bras or not. But he did know that he had never heard such an erotic sound as that moan in his life. This was the stuff of his dreams.
“Why don’t you take your own bra off?” he asked.
“I can’t,” she replied. “I need help.” She turned to present her back to him.
He was astounded to see that, instead of a simple hook and loop clasp, the bra was fastened with a small black in-line combination lock, exactly like his bicycle lock. Most likely someone had made this bra by taking a bicycle lock apart and re-riveting the lock to the reinforced bra straps. Now he understood why the woman had been wearing the
oversized flannel shirt; the lock would have made a noticeable bulge if she had been wearing a lighter, tighter blouse.
As well, he could see that the geometry of the straps in the back made it impossible to remove the bra until the lock was unfastened. The shoulder straps converged just below the nape of her neck to form a single strap that came down her spine to split again right above the lock where it was attached to the cross strap at either side of the lock by loops. The cross strap could only be pulled from the loops if the lock was unfastened. Furthermore, the cross strap curved upward to put the lock in the upper part of her back where it would be difficult for her to reach. It was a fiendish design.
“Do you know the combination?” he asked.
“Yes, but I can’t see to work it. I can’t use a mirror because the numbers are too small and I can’t get close enough.”
Rob could see what she meant. The numbers on his bicycle lock were painted white to stand out against the black rings. On this lock they had been repainted black so that they no longer contrasted with the background. You had to get within a couple of inches of the lock to read the numbers.
She explained further, “Besides, I can barely reach it. I can force my arms up there briefly, but I can’t hold them there for long enough to try all combinations. That’s why I have no choice but to get someone to release it. Please unlock it for me. The combination is five eight six nine.”
“Five eight six nine?”
“That’s right. That’s the combination. Five eight six nine.”
“Five eight six nine.” Rob wrote the numbers on a piece of paper. He noted that all the numbers had a similar shape that would make it even more difficult to read the right combination unless your eyes were within a couple of inches of the lock.
The woman’s predicament puzzled him and, when he was puzzled by anything, Rob automatically shifted into problem-solving mode. Rob’s insistence on being methodical was one of the characteristics that made him so good at debugging computer programs but which made him so boring around other people. Rob’s first step in solving any problem is to gather as much information as possible; a process that can be long and tedious, but is critical for success.
A Bestiary of Unnatural Women Page 3