‘What’s wrong?’ Dan said sitting up and resting back on his hands.
‘Nothing, it’s just I can’t. I’m sorry.’ Emma said, her hunched shoulders pulling the zip of her dress wide open.
‘What did I do? Did I do something wrong?’ Dan said stroking her back softly.
She flinched at his touch. ‘No, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s nothing. It’s just me. I’m sorry.’
‘No, you don’t need to be sorry. I’m sorry for upsetting you. Was it too fast or something?’ Dan moved next to her at the end of the bed and put his arm around her shoulders.
‘It wasn’t too fast or anything. You did nothing wrong. It’s just that I like you and if we do this then I’ll like you a lot more.’ A single tear dropped to her knee.
‘I like you too. A lot. More than I should after such a short time. I don’t see what’s wrong with us liking each other though. I’m not just after sex.
‘You can’t like me though. You don’t know me really.’ Emma said.
‘I know you as well as you know me and you like me so what’s the difference?’
Emma turned to look at Dan, her tears had left mascara tracks down her cheeks. ‘I’ve got secrets and once you know them you won’t like me anymore and you’ll go like everyone else. It’s just easier if I go now before I get too deep.’
‘Everyone’s got secrets Emma. How do you know I won’t like yours?’ Dan said brushing the tear stripes from her cheek with his thumb.
‘Everyone’s got secrets but not like mine. You won’t want to touch me again if I told you. Best to just leave it.’
‘I don’t want to leave it though, I want you to stay. You’re worrying me though. You’re acting like you were a man or something. Were you a man?’ Dan asked growing concerned.
‘That would have been easier.’ She said. ‘It doesn’t matter’
‘It does matter.’ Dan said. ‘It matters a lot because I want you, I want this, I don’t think anything will change that.’
‘This will.’ She said, the tears starting to flow down her face again.
‘Tell me please. It won’t change anything.’ Dan said. ‘I promise.’
‘It will. It always does. Maybe not right away but over time it will.’
‘Well if you don’t tell me and you walk away it’s no different than if you do tell me and I walk away. We still end up not together. So tell me and trust me that I’m not shallow.’
‘I can’t. I don’t want you to hate me.’ Emma said.
He held her cheek and turned her face to his, he looked into her eyes which glistened with tears. ‘Tell me. I won’t go anywhere. I promise.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘I was raped.’ Emma said.
‘What?’ Dan said sure he’d misheard.
‘Raped. I was raped.’ She said spitting out the words.
Dan stopped. He felt as if someone had punched him in the solar plexus. He was stunned and breathless as the words sank deeper into his mind. He felt anger and disgust, anger and disgust at whoever would do that. Whoever would do it to anyone but especially to her.
Her eyes dropped from his and filled with tears again. He had the same look in his eyes as she saw every other time, she hoped he would be different but deep down she knew he would be the same. He might not leave her right now, he seemed too nice for that so he would probably stick around for a couple of weeks out of courtesy. Then slowly reduce the contact until eventually she didn’t hear from him again or he had issues with work or he wasn’t in the right place for a relationship. The thoughts of another man she liked being unable to touch her made the tears pour from her eyes Fresh ones quickly joining those that already streaked her face.
Dan sighed. ‘Ok.’ He said wiping another teardrop from her smudged cheeks.
‘What’s ok?’ Emma said lifting her eyes to meet his again.
‘What happened. Its ok. Well it’s not ok but I mean its ok with me. It doesn’t change anything. I still want you, want this. Nothing’s changed.’
‘Of course, things will change. They always do. You won’t want me now. I’m dirty. I’m used.’ She said sobbing.
‘You aren’t dirty or used at all. I like you and there’s no way something someone else did to you is going to stop me liking you.’
‘But its dirty. It’s horrible. You don’t have to pretend you still like me to save my feelings.’ Emma said looking at the floor.
‘I’m not pretending anything. Look at me.’ Dan said.
Emma lifted her face so their eyes met again.
‘I want you as much now as I did before. Nothing’s changed. Neither of us were virgins so you aren’t dirty because another guy had sex with you. Him forcing you makes him bad not you. This changes nothing. Ok?’
‘Ok.’ Emma said, wishing she could believe him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The hotel air conditioning tried its best to cool the room but failed miserably. Dan lay on the bed in only his boxers. A sheen of sweat glistened on his body that might look sexy in a posed black and white picture, in living colour it just made him stick to the sheets. It was impossible to sleep although Dan had been trying for an hour, it just wouldn’t happen. He checked the clock, almost midnight. He paused, trying to work out how Arizona time translated to UK time but gave up when he accepted it made no difference. He wasn’t getting any sleep and nothing would change that. The mixture of jet lag and Phoenix heat meant it was time to give up trying to force a sleep cycle and take a look online to kill some time and maybe tire his eyes.
Dan sat up and walked to the desk against the window of the room, he opened the curtains and took in the view. It was one of the most beautiful cityscapes he’d seen. A combination of flat land and low buildings spread out in front of him like a glittered floor until it hit the total darkness of desert.
The view was almost worth the heat until he sat on the chair at his desk. His back stuck to the black leather making him cringe at how many others had stuck to the same seat and what they were doing while seated. The advantage with leather was that it’s easier to wipe clean than fabric and Dan hoped the cleaner had done that because it was too hot to put on his t-shirt.
He opened his MacBook, it woke almost immediately but his eyes took a moment to adjust to the brightness in the dark room. Something Emma had said before hadn’t really concerned him at the time because it was part of a whole story of horrible. Everything had gone in but he’d been unable to focus on anything but the main point of Emma’s memory. Now though, unable to sleep and with his mind ruminating he needed to check.
He wasn’t an internet porn virgin. He generally stuck to mainstream stuff but knew there was a rule of the internet that said that whatever you imagined, there was porn of it. It wasn’t too hard to imagine people posting rape porn to the internet when he thought about how sick some people were but a curios voice inside didn’t quite believe that it could be true. He opened Safari and clicked the cursor into the search bar, he hesitated. Did he want to see if it existed or what it looked like? It existed, he knew that really and what could he gain from actually seeing it with his own eyes. It irritated him like a scab. He knew it would bleed and hurt but once you’ve thought about picking it you can think of nothing else.
The scab needed to come off. Dan typed quickly and hit return. In under a second Google brought back over sixteen million hits for rape porn. There was no way to check if there really were that many but even if a small percentage were real there was a lot of twisted people online.
Dan sat back in the chair, the leather felt clammy against his back but it didn’t distract him from his searching. He’d spent enough time online to know that most of the internet wasn’t searched by Google and all the really dark things lived where they weren’t easily found. He scrolled through the links, he had no interest in opening them and after three pages promising ‘hardcore brutal rapes’ or ‘real drunk forced sex’ with ‘unconscious teens’ he knew he’d seen enough. He felt sickened, most
of the links were most likely staged or fake but he knew that they’d be some in there for real and hidden elsewhere online would be the real evil. He’d seen the news stories about American teens being sexually assaulted at parties by High School football players and knew it’d probably been happening for years but now it could be documented. Once upon time girls probably wrote it off as just being touched up or didn’t even remember it in the morning. Now it was on the internet forever for other perverts to enjoy.
Dan closed the Safari window and then the lid of his laptop, the last thing he wanted to see in the morning was a reminder of tonight’s web browsing. He still wasn’t tired but he was put off the internet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Japanese school girl look was in. It seemed to have slipped from Japan into Western culture without complaint. Jaz wasn’t one to complain though, short skirts and long socks worked nicely for him. The innocence of the long socks, topped with the naughtiness of a short skirt sandwiching a slender stripe of soft, young, smooth flesh worked wonders for his imagination. He liked it too, because it proved what he already knew. He wasn’t alone in his likes. His sexuality was normal but kept hidden by most men. The number of teeny, Japanese schoolgirl, cheerleader or teacher/student porn proved that the only difference between him and every other man that he lived the fantasy rather than just watching it with one hand poised to close the browser should their far from porn worthy wife walk in. Hell, even pop was muscling in on the subject, from Britney Spears to Arianna Grande the women were looking younger and wearing less. We live in a world where porn milfs are anyone over twenty-five with no filthy stretch marks from carrying a brat. He rode the train in silence, looking at but not reading the newspaper he’d picked up from WH Smith’s purely to get his water cheaper. He looked around, there was no real talent on the train, it was too early. All he had for company was a few city workers who would spend their evenings looking at teens with pigtails or maybe even paying some fresh-faced Polish girl to polish their shafts on a business trip. The only difference between men and boys was the price of their toys, it was true no matter the type of toy. Poor men used porn and street skanks while the wealthier took full advantage of the EU’s open borders. It explained why London had been so anti-Brexit. No business man wanted to swap his nubile Eastern European girl for some gap-toothed grub from Grimsby and they certainly didn’t want anything slowing down their business trips to Romania.
There was one girl on the train. The one who had set him thinking about the Japanese school girls but she was strictly eye candy. She looked like the kind of girl who was popular and popular girls had high self-esteem and girls with high self-esteem weren’t easy prey. The only way to get to them was appeal to their sense of upsetting Daddy. No rich white man wanted his little girl risking a darkening of the family gene pool so there was always that chance. He wouldn’t bother with her though, upsetting Daddy only worked if Daddy knew and he certainly didn’t want Daddy knowing he was fucking his underage daughter. That brought the Police and the Police were who he wanted to avoid.
She would just be eye candy, he would watch her as she joined her friends. They would all be dressed the same, with the same makeup hair and eyebrows and all snapping selfies while he managed to fit them in shot of his pictures of the station. These posh girls would sometimes even pose for him, giggling at how naughty they were sticking out their tight little backsides and flashing more thigh. It was fun for them to tease men because they didn’t know men. They had been raised by men too busy working to pay them attention so they lapped up any male attention they could get. They’d been raised to perform, look cute for Daddy and batter those eyelids to get gifts.
The posh, confident girls were taught that love was conditional and men would give them what they wanted, they just didn’t know what real men wanted from them yet. They would learn soon enough but sadly it was rarely his pleasure to teach them.
His target today was the lame gazelle, like a cheetah his prey was the outsider. The girl isolated from the main group, the one who didn’t quite fit in. She would be the one without the boyfriend, the one who didn’t get attention from the boys her own age but hadn’t been dragged into the real world by an older boyfriend. She’d probably be a virgin, still tight as a paper cut and wanting to lose it like the other girls. They were difficult to catch because he didn’t want to be caught on camera stalking his prey but sometimes a little conversation one day would lead to them becoming comfortable next time they bumped into each other and eventually they would give him their Snap Chat or Instagram. Once that happened he would be able to add them to his list of potential partners and they would happily go along with his plans. He’d learned a long time ago that kids were taught to fear monsters when the real danger came from nice men who offered to protect them from the bullies or even better to give them an understanding shoulder for whatever teenage angst they were dealing with.
He would spend a little longer snapping pictures of the pretty girls and looking for the lame gazelle before the older college girls would pass through. They were a little too old for his liking but now the fashion industry had done away with pubic hair, a nice little petite girl would do fine should he get bored. They usually weren’t virgins so part of the thrill was gone but they often appreciated being picked up in a nice car and bought a glass of wine. Students were always poor and it was amazing what a girl would do for a little drink or a bag of weed.
Once he had exhausted his photographic outing he would do a little shopping and head home to relive himself of the excitement these trips built up and then perhaps login and do some work online. Social media made charming multiple girls a matter of spinning plates while sitting comfortably in his pyjamas or often only the top half of them. His move to a twenty-seven-inch screen had increased his ability to watch porn while keeping those plates spinning. Another hour and the college girls would be done and he would head home. Then he could ease the pressure he felt building inside.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dan squinted bringing his hand up to cover his eyes, the brightness of the sky retina burning after the dim light of the tunnel. Emma looked down, her eyes also struggled with the contrast. They climbed concrete steps, edged with diamond pattern brass worn smooth by millions of shoes climbing from the same tunnel.
‘Almost there now.’ Dan squeezed her hand as he spoke.
‘Is it? Anymore trains?’ Emma asked.
‘No, it’s just around the corner. If you come when it’s busy they’re sometimes queuing all the way round the street.’ Dan said.
‘Really? Do you think there’ll be a queue today?’
‘I think we’re too late for it to be honest, usually it’s the people trying to get in early so they have all day here.’ Dan said. ‘And school trips.’
‘Good, I hate queues. Could you really spend a full day here though?’ Emma asked.
‘Yeah easily, longer if you wanted to look at everything.’
They walked on along Cromwell Road against the black wrought iron fence. To their left stood a tall row of white Georgian townhouses, the kind that housed the bankers and lawyers in a Sherlock Holmes story. Ordinarily they would be impressive and in a different location they would demand attention but here they played a poor second fiddle to the building opposite. To many a trip to the Natural History Museum would seem like an odd Valentine’s date but Dan had surprised her with a trip to London and squeezed in a trip to the museum when she mentioned her love of David Attenborough documentaries.
Dan held her hand as they stepped through the gates and stopped, the grandeur of the building fixing them to the floor in awe.
‘Oh wow, it’s beautiful.’ Emma said shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked up to see the full height of the building.
‘I know it’s amazing but then I’m a big fan of Romanesque architecture.’
‘Roman what?’ Emma asked.
‘Romanesque, it’s the style. It was inspired by Alfred Waterhouse’s visits to th
e continent. He was the architect and spent a lot of time there and then brought back the style.’ Dan said.
‘I didn’t know that, how come you know?’ Emma turned to look at Dan.
‘I thought everyone knew to be honest, just like how the terracotta tiles which give it its colour were originally used to protect it from the Victorian smog.’
‘Seriously. I never really thought about it. You’re a nerd.’ She leaned close to him, touching her head against his shoulder.
‘I’m not a nerd, I’m just clever enough to have read Wikipedia last night when you were in the shower.’ He smiled, looking down at her.
‘You’re a bastard.’ She pulled her head away from him and pulled his arm. ‘You had me then you shit.’
He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close as they climbed the steps to the entrance. ‘I’m always glad to have you.’
# # #
‘It’s beautiful up here. Thank you for bringing me.’ Emma said.
‘No problem, I enjoy it too so it’s not like it’s just for you.’ Dan said.
They sat on the balcony of their Savoy hotel suite, they had a view across the Thames and London twinkled beneath them for miles with the occasional sky scraper rising above them in the distance. London is flat by comparison with newer capitals so you didn’t need to be very high to have an amazing view.
‘It must have cost a fortune though, you don’t need to spend this much you know.’ She traced her finger nail through the condensation on the outside of her Prosecco flute.
‘It wasn’t that expensive, they did a package and anyway I wanted to bring you somewhere nice.’ Dan said.
‘Well it’s definitely nice. Thank you so much.’ Emma said feeling silly about her doubts before. He wouldn’t have gone through this effort if he didn’t like her a little bit, maybe more. She looked at him, he was gorgeous and it felt like he just wanted to make her happy, or that he just wanted her. It was a good feeling and she would enjoy it while she could.
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