Carried Away

by Whitney Williams

  Carried Away

  Erotic Romance by J. Whitney Williams

  Copyright (c) 2015-2017 J. Whitney Williams

  All rights reserved.

  Second Electronic Edition

  ISBN: 978-0-9971062-0-6

  Edited by Michelle Josette:

  Mjbookeditor.com

  This is a work of pure fiction suitable only for adult readers.

  www.jwhitneywilliams.com

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One – Push for Ice

  Chapter Two – Shipping and Receiving

  Chapter Three – An Artist and a Prop

  Chapter Four – Everything She Ever Wanted

  Chapter Five – A Day at the Beach

  Chapter Six – Choose Your Words Carefully

  Chapter Seven – I Hate Paris

  Chapter Eight – Water and Stone

  Chapter Nine – The Present

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Chosen Path

  About the Author

  Author’s Preface

  One of the penalties for trying to improve is that your older works becomes unsatisfactory to your own standards. That is certainly the case here. Furthermore, this book began as pure erotica. I wrote six chapters before realizing that the story had a dramatic arc to it, a dynamic heroine, a conflict, a resolution. As a consequence, it starts slowly and heavily laden with gymnastics play-by-play.

  No sharks get punched until chapter five. No one gets set on fire until chapter six. Real drama only comes to the fore in chapter seven.

  Although many readers have loved the story cover-to-cover, some have gotten bored with it and stopped reading before encountering what one reviewer called “pockets of brilliance.” If the initial pace of this book is not to your liking, I humbly suggest you might find this novel’s sequel, Chosen Path (of which an excerpt is included here), more entertaining.

  Though I have decided to leave this text in its original form, I added one important feature. Wherever the point-of-view character changes, I include that character’s name as a section heading. Only after much deliberation have I done so. The heroine’s given name, Sally, did not originally appear at all. She remained anonymous until acquiring the name she uses as an adult, Eurydice.

  Please note that Sally and Eurydice are the same woman. This becomes important in chapter seven when she grows up.

  All that said, I thank you for having a look at my novel, and I hope it provides some entertainment in return for the time you invest reading it.

  - J. Whitney Williams

  Prologue

  --Yumiko--

  I don’t normally shower after sex with Kosei. I like to keep the scent of him on my skin, to smear our salty residue all over me. Fucking him makes me feel clean.

  Leaning into the spray rakes warm rivulets past my hairline, through my long hair. I can feel them slithering down my back where they cling to me and follow my body’s contours all the way down to the floor drain. The hot water feels good. It’s a pity I have no time to heat bathwater. I could use a good soak. The last few weeks have been busy. I suppose I could say the same of my entire life. Turning to let the water pound the back of my head, I hope it knocks loose and washes away some of the spare thoughts caked and dried on the inside of my skull.

  I didn’t leave myself much time to get to Narita for my flight, but there are other departures to Hong Kong. I can sleep on the plane or maybe in the grave. The only place I ever really sleep is under Kosei’s strong arm. He isn’t bulky, just strong enough for me to lay my head comfortably on his shoulder. He has a way of slowing me down, driving away my frenetic thoughts, letting me be still. I can’t find that kind of stillness anywhere else. Maybe I learned this tempestuous mind in America. A good Japanese girl ought to have spent enough time at the temple to find stillness in meditation.

  Reading is my meditation: contracts, laws, judgments. I have to remember it all, to synthesize it and use it later. It doesn’t help me learn to let go.

  Kosei does. Whenever I’m with him, I sleep soundly until he wakes me. He sleeps a good eight hours, though, and I can’t afford that more than once or twice a week. He likes it when he falls asleep alone and wakes up with me in his arms. At least he says he does. I can tell he does, if you must know. He is as simple as any man. I just don’t like to read him that way, to intrude upon the privacy of his thoughts. Working a man like a puzzle-box isn’t relaxing. Everything feels so natural, so easy, with him. I need that in my life.

  He is also relaxed. I need that too. He sits sprawled out on the floor, unkempt, not quite wearing a yukata as only he can, watching me put my suit on.

  “Where to this time?”

  “Hong Kong,” I answer.

  “Again?”

  “Yes.” It’s so cute how he whines and complains whenever I go away.

  “Entertaining?”

  “Yes.” That isn’t cute. I enjoy performing. It’s a good break for me, exercise for a different part of my brain, also for a different part of my body. I could have told him it wasn’t sexual—a geisha’s performances never are—but I don’t like lying to him. That would make him like everyone else. I don’t love everyone else.

  Personally, I only do the illicit sexual performances, and only when I can line up higher stakes than a couple of sticks of incense. Playing the shamisen all night doesn’t get my blood pumping. Besides, I know the art, but I like to follow through with it. I always run up the score. To me, sex is a weapon, and I give no quarter.

  Except with Kosei. Sex with Kosei is peace.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Always wish for more wishes first.” I know he isn’t comfortable with it, but he has never pressed me about it before. This is not the time. I’ve made arrangements. This time, the weapon is going to bleed its target for about 50 billion yen over ten years. It’s not every day you get a clean shot at big game. No, hunting is not the right metaphor. It’s more like culling the herd. These fools and their fortunes should have been parted a long time ago.

  “I love you Yumi, and I want you all to myself.”

  No. Kosei, please don’t do this! Please, no!

  While I sink slowly into the gravity of his tone, an idle platitude rolls off my tongue. “One must measure love’s depth at its shallowest point,” I parry.

  “What must I do for you to promise me this will be the last?”

  “Tell me to lie to you.” I will, Kosei. For you, I will.

  “I will give you everything if you will give me just this one.”

  Please, please, my love, take me back! I’ve never met anyone like you! I’ve never felt so calm, so safe, as I do in your arms! Please don’t take that from me! Please, I beg you, don’t leave me!

  I exhale then speak, voicing my final answer with the dregs of my breath. “I have suffered for my art.”

  As I open the door to his flat, I look back at him, too afraid to hope for forgiveness.

  I can see it on his face. I knew it. I’ve known it from way he held me, the way he inseminated me. I could hear it in his voice and smell it on his breath. He decided this a month ago, and I struggled desperately to ignore it, to deny it, to wish he would change his mind before he did it. He wants to marry me, but he is an old-fashioned romantic. He wants his wife to be his alone. He is so sweet! I would have married him. We would have been happy.

  “If you love me, promise me.”

  Kosei, my dear, sweet love, to whom I’ve always given my whole truth, “Now you know.”

  The bullet train leaves in 17 minutes, plenty of time. I really should learn to let go.

  --Gretchen--

  Dear Diary,

  The funeral was today. I’m gl
ad the two were combined. I don’t think I could manage to live through this day twice. I didn’t think I’d be able to manage it once. I didn’t manage it, really. One of the secretaries from Father’s firm made all the arrangements, even came to pick me up and bring me to the service. She was very nice, but I didn’t want to talk. I still don’t. It’s even hard to tell you about it.

  At first, no one would leave me alone. The police, the coroner, the funeral home. Everybody kept asking me for things, like I was supposed to know what to do and how to make all the decisions. I’m a smart girl, but how can they expect me to do everything at a time like this? Then a social worker came and told me I could stay at an orphanage until they found me a foster home. That was too much. They couldn’t even wait until my parents were in the ground?

  It all stopped yesterday, all the questions. The phone calls since then have only been friends with condolences. I quit answering the phone, but I sat next to the answering machine and listened to people record their messages. I heard all the same things in person today, again and again. Everybody wants me to tell them I’m OK so they don’t have to worry. They’re selfish. I’m selfish too. I told them I was OK so they would leave me alone.

  One of the men from Father’s work was nice. He didn’t make me pretend everything was fine. He just asked if he could stand next to me. Then he just stood there.

  By the time everyone left, I realized I was hiding halfway behind him, holding his arm and pressing my face into his shoulder so no one would talk to me. I heard him talking sometimes, answering questions or telling people to do things. I didn’t want to open my eyes. When I finally did, we were all alone at the cemetery. I don’t know how long it was, but he just stood there with me the whole time.

  When I came out from behind him, he called me by my given name, Gretchen. Nobody calls me that. He said everybody needs people they can count on and from now on he is mine, that he will live or die to keep me safe. Those were his words. He said he would live or die for me. How can someone say that? What does it even mean?

  I guess, deep down, I know my parents loved me that way, but now they’re gone. He swore it. I don’t know why. I didn’t know what to say, but he put his arm around me and hugged me so it didn’t matter.

  He brought me home and offered to stay with me, said he could sleep on the sofa. I sent him home. I don’t need a strange man in my flat. It’s my flat now. I can’t believe that. It isn’t right. I guess it was nice of him to offer. I’m glad he left. I’m glad he offered to stay, too. He says he’ll come by in the morning to check on me.

  I hadn’t thought about what would happen in the morning. I guess I should go to school. I think I have a test tomorrow. I had been worried about it. Now it’s so far from my mind I don’t even feel like going. Maybe I won’t. I’ll let you know tomorrow.

  - gg

  --Sally--

  I can’t sleep. The first 97 minutes of my adulthood have been excruciatingly boring, counting flowers on the wall like that old song. I’m finally old enough to smoke cigarettes, but I’ve never seen an episode of Captain Kangaroo. Who knows? Maybe it’s good? There is a lot I haven’t seen and a lot I don’t know.

  Today is the day I’m going to find out. I only have to be trailer trash for another nine hours. After that I’ll be gone. I planned to spend the last few weeks having one last look at anything I might miss from this life, but I couldn’t think of anything.

  I couldn’t think of anything to write in the note to my parents either. All it says is, “I left.” If they can’t tell why, I don’t care for them to know. How can they have lived their entire lives without going more than a hundred miles from this one-horse town? Do they not believe the rest of the world is out there?

  I guess it all fits together. This place wouldn’t be the muddy pothole it is if it weren’t populated with people like them, people like me, like the girl I was yesterday, not the woman I have been for the last 98 minutes.

  I used to think the posters in the library about discovering new worlds were silly, but that was before I read the books. Of course, those posters are over by the fiction section, which, for the most part, I ignored. The ones in non-fiction say knowledge is power. That may be, but only insofar as it makes you sexier.

  Sex is the real power, or at least it is the power I have. So say the fantasies of the handsome prince riding in and sweeping the poor peasant girl off her feet. I’m not waiting around for him. I can sweep myself, thank you very much.

  In another nine hours, I am getting me the hell out of here.

  Chapter One – Push for Ice

  --Sally--

  It seems to me that most people are victims of their fates. Other people choose. It turns out that we can choose not only what to do but who to be. Sociologists write about the cycles of poverty and abuse and how people become trapped in their circumstances. Please understand that I mean no disrespect to those who must struggle for years to escape, but for those of us that do escape, I believe there is always a moment of choice.

  When did you decide that you would become another person than you were, that you would live in a different world than you knew? Everyone I have met who has created success out of adverse circumstances can answer that question with amazing specificity. They see or hear or do something that throws the features of their lives into stark relief, and in that fragile, fleeting moment of clarity, they make a choice.

  I can remember the moment I made my own choice. She said she was sorry, one hand on the counter to steady herself, her torso cowering aside, her face turning back up toward him. I cannot remember what they were fighting about, but now I know that it never really mattered. I had seen them act out the same scene a hundred times growing up, but that time, that one time, I noticed. It wasn’t when he hit her. It was when she said she was sorry.

  That was the moment I became a woman. That was the moment I made my choice. Even at her age, I thought she was beautiful, not in the way a daughter envies her mother but in the way a woman cannot help but hate someone that much more beautiful than herself. I was a pretty girl, pretty enough to know what kind of power that gave me. In that moment, I hated her not for her beauty but for what she did with it: nothing. I knew I would have that much power one day, but I would have something she did not. I would have freedom. I chose to be free.

  Thus was I teased and carded. Thus I dressed my distaff. But the spindle on which I wound my fate dropped years later. It was another of these moments that burns an indelible scar into one’s memory: the moment of volition, the one step toward a thousand miles, the single, simple act that changes the trajectory of a human life. I stood up. I stepped sideways into the aisle, turned and swung my right foot gently forward, probing the theater’s darkness for the rise and run of the aisle steps, sussing out what gait I could use to ride out of that hell hole. I told the chaperone I needed to use the restroom. That was no lie. I needed to be alone for a bit to let reality sink in. I needed to be in a small place because I had just stepped into a wider world, never to look back upon the life I had so recently known. I needed to move quickly before my body achieved its revenge against me for goading it into that uncertain future. I needed to vomit.

  People sometimes say things like “it happened so fast” or “it was all a blur.” In fact, it all happened at the usual speed and in full fidelity while I, crushed between paralyzing fear and inexorable resolve, between blinding exhilaration and myopic purpose, watched my life spool out like film from a free-spinning movie reel, slipping blithely past the projector’s lens and cascading down into a looped-back heap on the floor. That’s why the interstitial memories skim forward and bleed together. I’m not sure how much time had passed, maybe an hour or two, before I got far enough from the epicenter of my decision that I started to think and to perceive again.

  The first thing I noticed was “PUSH FOR ICE.” I wondered how many times Clark Kent had read the words “INSERT COIN.” A phone booth would be an awfully cramped place to change clothes, but at
least it would have a door. When I walked into that hotel, I looked like the plainest Jane of a farm girl who ever mucked a stall. When I walked out, I was an over-sexed, 11 of 10 knockout who ate innocence and shat lechery. That was who I chose to be.

  Let’s be as charitable as we can and call the circumstances into which I was born “pastoral.” I chose to be a woman so clearly out of place there that I would pop out like a fishing bob after the bait tears free of the hook.

  I flipped open my secondhand suitcase, which was only a little bigger than a briefcase and looked old-school enough that I figured it could pass for tragically hip. I already wore the black nylons and heels I needed. I stowed my typical prairie skirt, leaving me in the modest, charcoal gray pencil skirt I had hidden under it. Then I took off my shirt and brazier.

  I would have been quite a sight if anyone had walked by: the small-town girl kneeling topless over her suitcase to change into her big-city clothes. The alcove was a bit chilly from the icemaker and refrigerated vending machines, and a shiver ran down my spine with the cool air against my bare torso. A girl at school once described my complexion as “fish-belly white,” and that quickly became the preferred taunt.

  Laugh it up, Fake ‘n Bake. This many years later, those insufferable harpies are cackling through the cracks in their shoe-leather faces. I intended to be gorgeous, not cute, and I was playing a long game.

  My trump card was a short-sleeved, cream-colored silk blouse, simple and elegant. I wasn’t exactly in a position to waltz into the Nieman Marcus in downtown Nowhere, (you know, right next to the gas station with live bait) and buy this kind of garment, so I had found something close enough and re-stitched it myself. That was probably for the best because it ended up fitting fiendishly well. I wear a C cup, but I have a slight frame and tiny waist. If I overdress them, my breasts can look cartoonishly huge. This blouse was perfect. It didn’t bind or look like I was stuffed into it, but it left no bagginess either. Pulling my shoulders back as far as I could would draw the chest panels just tight enough to pop open the buttons (after I replaced them to be slightly smaller), but if I leaned and reached forward, it fell open enough to give an excellent view. It was fully opaque but lightweight enough to show my silhouette if I was backlit, sturdy enough to wear without a bra but thin enough to make it obvious. Perfect.