A Fucking Investment Ch. 14

"Sounds like a foot massage place." Jake growled.

"I like foot massages, very relaxing once you get accustomed to someone touching your feet." Antonio said, amusement in his voice. "We mustn't take ourselves too seriously. After all, we are going to be doing sex shows for our uh, clientele. Anything else?"

"That's all I have." I said. I glanced over at Mrs. Lewis and caught her licking her lips, her eyes shown with a light I did not recognize. She seemed unduly enthralled.

"Good. We're done." Mrs. St. James said with finality. "Thank you everyone. This discussion is over."

"Who do we send a schedule to?" China asked, her voice almost quavering.

"Jake. From now on, this is Jake's deal. Adele, don't you think we should let Jake keep the proceeds? He's right, he did find the songbird."

"I, well, all right. Crucius will appreciate that. Fine. Mr. Gale, you and Jake work out the details and you two split the profits. Jake, we'll get our cut out of your end. I have to go. We are done."

"We are done." Mr. Antonio echoed and disconnected The other's blinked off and I shut the laptop.

I looked around at Jeri. She sat staring at me.

I picked up her contract and laid it on the desk. "Sign it and leave it. When I am ready to collect on it, I'll find you."

"I'm at your beck and call then?"

I nodded. "That's about right." I muttered. I gestured at the contract.

Jeri moved over and picked it up. "Shouldn't I read it first?"

I shrugged. "It all ends the same. Read it or don't. You either sign it or I hand you back to Masters with a couple new suggestions."

Jeri glared at me. I remembered her moment of self-aware clarity and smiled at her glare. Hardly disarming but it made me feel better. Jeri shrugged and signed, and then she strode for the door.

"Jeri, have you ever gone down on a woman?" I asked casually.

She looked around at me. "No. Why?"

"You sure?"

She smiled a sarcastic smile. "I'd remember, I think."

"Who, if you had to pick, who would you go down on? I mean, who would you care to have sex with, of the women of Holdingsfield?"

Her face took on a grayish look. "Are you fucking serious?"

I gestured at the contract. "Its all there. You should have read it first." I said with a slight smile.

"Fuck you, Joshua." She said vehemently. Something in her eyes glittered though.

I wondered if she remembered all the things she had said to me. I doubted it. I remembered, though. "You, you have an admirer. I'd like you to stop by and see her and persuade her that you have signed with me and that you will abide by the terms of the contract."

Jeri waited, not moving and not speaking.

I admired that. "Go see Bethlynn Brazil. See if you can seduce her into going down on you and if not that, then go down on her. Okay? You need to practice because Aurora may be somewhat more demanding. Practice makes perfect."

"Christ!" Jeri growled and left us.

I waited for the front door to close before even looking at Mrs. Grayson.

She smiled at me, a supercilious smile laced with something illicit but mysterious. "Very interesting." She said softly.

During this session, I finally felt my plans for the Sawyers click into being. Like a little cosmic pop, a simple little idea appeared and it was expanding at the speed of light.

"I, I am going to go talk to Mr. Sawyer. Why, why don't you listen in." I took out my phone and hooked into the system. "You'll have to scan through to find us." I said. "I don't know the timing but, but I'd like to finalize things with them tonight, you know, so you can witness it."

"So kind." She said softly. "Then what?"

"If it goes well, I may have a proposition for you."

She smiled a little then. "A proposition?" She breathed. "Mr. Gale, not all of what you saw earlier was acting. I, I just must be careful about whom I show my tits to. Surely you understand."

"I am surprised you are still here. I think you must badly want to show me your tits." I said. "I'll be right back. If you are still here, we'll have a look at those tits."

She nodded vacantly but I saw the glimmer of interest behind her bland agreement but it was guarded with a slight bit of fear that puzzled me. She had a moment when she looked like she'd seen a ghost. I handed her my phone and she nodded understanding of the interface. I walked upstairs and found John Sawyer in Jennifer's room.

I opened the door and stepped inside. He lay on the bed, lying back with his feet still on the floor, his hands clasped over his forehead. When he heard me, he sat up.

"We are out of time, Josh." He said immediately.

I closed the door and looked around, realizing I had not looked for cameras in my own house and had no idea where they were. If not for the perspectives featured in our little feature film I would have had no idea where to look. I wondered if Mrs. Grayson was seeing us yet. I went slow, to give her time to tune in. I had a feeling about her, beyond the basic desire to lay her down, lay her and lay on her and in her. God, what a woman! I grunted and closed the door, my brain divided between what I was doing, what I knew John to be about and what I wished to accomplish in the next ten minutes.

"There is always time if you have the money."

John stood up and shrugged. "I don't have the money or the time so I have to do something now."

"I know just the thing you have to do."

He looked at me, inquiry in his eyes. I had the feeling I was off script and he felt lost but had the presence of mind to improvise, not drop character and let me see that I was pushing him out into deep water with no water wings. "What do you have in mind?" He asked reasonably, which impressed me and at just that moment, I realized I liked the guy. My "like" had no hard dick involved, suddenly a vision filled me like fog in a forest. What I liked about this man was the feeling that I could share a woman with him, that we could blend with her pleasure and make her disappear in a fire of passion while we both took pleasure from her. The idea thundered in my head, roaring like an approaching tornado. My body shook.

I struggled. John watched me, a quizzical look in his eyes. I cleared my throat and began, altering my plan right from the start, feeling a delightful vertigo that filled me with the inutterable lightness of being. I floated an inch behind myself, watching what I did and said, each little nuance of behavior that I knew John was watching. With full conscious thought, I led him down the primrose path with equally sure knowledge that I would get what he wanted.

I told him about Cassie and her attraction to Rachel McKinnion. "I want you to copy Rachel's diary and the two others you said who wanted a visit in the night from a stranger with a hard cock and dark intentions."

John looked at me for a moment like I was speaking Swahili but finally nodded. "You want me to get Rachel's diary." He said softly.

I nodded. "If, if you can help me get her to open up to me and to Cassie, then, then maybe we'll have a basis for discussion."

He nodded. "But, but you, you will, you'll go to my house tonight, right? And, and do like I said, with Eve?"

I regarded him with some skepticism. "I don't know." I hesitated, needing him to persuade me, to urge me to take his wife.

He obliged me. "She, Josh, she wants it, she needs it. If, if you succeed with her, I think she'll do whatever you want and then, maybe, I can have a little of the pussy I have been denied all these years."

I felt for the guy. Living that close with Eve and doing without, that could not have been much fun, but then if the movie staring him and Jennifer was any indication, he had not done without at all.

"You have to do it tonight, so we can get the money tomorrow or we lose everything and you have to deal with Putnam Bank and Trust and not Eve," he stuttered then, "and me." He added himself to the picture but I already knew the lay of the land, of Eve, and of John Sawyer. I suddenly had a perfect idea.

I left him there, exiting the room, leaving him gaping like a landed trout. I realized he might prove more proactive than was healthy and returned, sticking my head in the door. "Wait here, John." I said. He nodded, a look of relief relaxing his handsome features

I went down to the safe I had installed in the office and under Mrs. Grayson's watchful eyes, took out five thousand eight hundred and twelve dollars, making up the last two dollars with quarters from my desk. I looked at Victoria. She regarded me with a half smile and sharply warm eyes. "Can you see?" I asked.

"And hear," she nodded.

My eyes focused on the flexing of tendons in her neck and I felt that whole-body arousal that begins with a blooming pressure in the chest and ends up making your knees weak. I still had no assurance that I could lay this woman down and plumb her depths but I had hope, and distractions aplenty.

I left her and returned upstairs.

John was sitting on the bed, hands around one knee rocking gently back and forth. The man had patience. I dropped the cash on the bed beside him. "One month." I said. "That will buy you time. No strings attached. No contract. Nothing is implied. I am buying me time. I do not like to be rushed."

He looked from the money up at me. Several emotions swirled together in his expression, like Monet's pinks and blues that blended flowers with the horizon. "Sometimes being rushed is wonderful." He said, his voice almost a whisper.

"Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be soon enough. This will buy you a couple days, if you get to the bank now. You go," I hesitated, took out a couple hundred dollars from my own wallet. "Get a hand scanner and scan her diary. I, I want to read it in her own hand but you should do it tomorrow." The feeling swelled in me, making it difficult to breathe. My thoughts pressed at me making my skin tight, trying to find a way out of me but I sealed them in. I could be patient too.

"But John, I, I think I have an idea, a way that perhaps you can have something you want and give me a little help. There are twenty women in this development of which Eve is but one. Still, twenty is a big number and I am purchasing their bodies...I am inevitably letting them grow cold from inattention and that is not good for a woman. She needs to be kept aroused or she gets easily distracted."

John smiled a wan smile. "Distracted. Yeah, that's the truth of it."

"I have no wish to perpetuate your misery but I think it might be well if you, ah, resumed your, shall we say, activities? Without presuming too much? By that I mean, I think you should have a woman, one of my women."

The colors in John's expression swirled and darkened. He did not speak or ask after the exact intent of my words. He waited. He let me continue without prying at them to see what else there was. He let it trickle out.

"I, I cannot simply hand a woman over to you, just for your pleasure, you understand?" I waited for a response and when he realized, he nodded. "However, Mrs. Angorra is, shall we say, a fine mixture of curious and inexperience. One of her desires is to be had by two men. I suggest we give her that." John's face did not change. His eyes focused on me like two blue lights twinkling in the distance. "Now." I said the word. "Tomorrow night, tomorrow you copy the diary. After having her, you'll know what to look for." I smiled a wan smile of my own, a bit sheepish, a bit embarrassed. "Before I get to twenty women, I am going to need help. I think I have Mrs. Lewis all but signed. There will be more. The others. Even without Eve, I, I may need a little help, you know, to satisfy their...predilections."

The light in his eyes dulled and he stared at me.

"You, you want me to have sex with...?"

I nodded. "Share her with me. She wants to have two men at once, to have them use her together." I hesitated, not wanting to get too crass but deciding clarity at this point counted more than delicacy. "Front and back." I grinned. I couldn't help it. "Do you have a preference?"

He seemed confused. "Eve? Really?"

I shook my head at his confusion and the rattling anticipation his unintended suggestion inspired in me. "I mean Cassie. Mrs. Angorra."

He got it then. His response was immediate and unmistakable. "Oh gosh, no, I just love women! All parts of them. I think I could do their toes and get off, not always but, gosh, I'd try it and being unusual would be enough, once or twice."

I heard the enthusiasm in his voice.

He looked down at the money. "I'll take this to Eve."

I shook my head. "Take it to the bank. Don't tell her. She'll be nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. That will make it more fun."

John sobered. "What?" His voice twanged with eagerness, the tone you get just as the final documents for a big deal are being signed, just before you breathe a sigh of relief that the deal is done and its time to celebrate.

"The negotiations. I think we should sit down and discuss the situation in detail. If, if you two are serious and want to avoid selling Eve..."

John shook his head. "I haven't made myself clear. I want to. Eve, she, she is resisting but just to force you to force her. She, she wants you to lose your cool and storm her barricades and take her like a Frenchman tearing bread."

I shook my head. "I am not sure that is my thing. I rather like the simple, easy approach. I think of it like walking up a long drive way between a line of Cyprus trees. She watches from a balcony, knowing that I am going to arrive before her and offer to take her and that she will have to give me some small, minimalist sign that she wants to be taken. Untying the string that holds the shift together so that I can see her cleavage, if she has any." I realized Eve and cleavage did not fit in the same picture.

"I think having them know what is coming is foreplay and letting that dangle before them till she hums is great fun. Negotiating with you and Eve should be great fun."

"She'll never agree."

I smirked. "You think that and she thinks that. That is what makes it fun, for me I mean. I want to talk her, and you, into untying the first string on her shift and showing me a nipple. That moment of acquiescence, when everyone knows what is coming next, that is my prime directive."

"Star Trek. The prime directive."

I shrugged. "I cannot deny that. It is a valid idea." John was dissembling, stalling. I rubbed my hands together and had a thought. I reached in my pocket and tossed him the keys to my latest rental. I kept switching cars so that no one could mark my comings and goings and if someone new and interesting appeared, her car could be mistaken for my latest rental. I jingled them.

"Take my car. Run to the bank. Buy us time. Think of this as foreplay. For Eve. For me. Desire is wonderful by itself. It does not demand satisfaction to give us pleasure but most of us miss that about desire. We think every hole must be filled to be fulfilled." I tossed the keys at him. He caught them. "When you get back, we'll go visit Cassie and stretch her definitions a little. Just so you know, so you can explain the smell of pussy on you when you go home, if you are going to keep Eve out of my reach, I want you to provide me some real service and that will mean keeping my women happy."

He stood up. "Joshua, you understand that I, I want you to have her, right?"

I stared at him hard for a moment. "I understand that you are betraying her in saying that. I think you are in despair and I hate seeing that in another man. I think, if I am correct, when I am done negotiating with your wife, she'll lay down for you but I have to break her first."

"Break her?"

"She has to feel the desire running up the insides of her thighs, forcing them apart. She has to feel it so strongly that she refuses to resist even though it is against every idea she has in her head. She closes her eyes and her body ends all thought in the fire of a passion she cannot control. The ecstasy of being out of control controls her and she surrenders to your penetration. She has you and so far, John, you have disappointed her. I think she wants to compete for your affection. When she sees that to keep her knees together, she must watch you satisfy the other women around her, her legs will drift open and she'll wait for you to mount her like a stag mounting a doe. She'll want it but only if she doesn't have to ask for it and only if she competes for it."

Sawyer looked like I had slapped him with an open hand. "Oh god." He breathed. "My god, you might be right. If, she, she dared me to, to...but I never did. I thought she was testing my fidelity by teasing me with Shallow and the others but, oh god, she was trying to get me to..." His face crumpled. "Oh god, what have I done?"

I turned my back on him. "To the bank and back here." I said over my shoulder. "I am going to try to seduce my auditor." I went downstairs to the office. Victoria sat looking at me when I flopped into one of the chairs across the desk from her. She'd heard it all.

Neither of us spoke till we heard the garage door open and the vroom of my latest pocket rocket, a Chrysler Crossfire. John zoomed away.

"That was impressive." Victoria said softly, touching the computer to end the video audit session.

"Shit. I have to call..." I took out my phone and called Crowley and told him to call the bank. "I need a week. Tell them to give him a week. No more."

Crowley hung up on me, the shit.

I called him back. "Charlie, we need to start putting the Body Double into action. I may end up exposed so I need to be elsewhere."

"Right boss." He agreed. "I'll get on that too. You're right, of course. I should have thought of that too. Sorry boss." This time he didn't hang up on me. I hung up on him. When Crowley got maudlin I got uncomfortable. He loves Christmas so I always avoided him at Christmas parties because he liked to sing and with booze, it got awful quickly.

I looked over at Victoria. "I want you." I said softly.

"I know." She returned, a prim purse of her lips punctuating her words. "Do you really think that desire is a whole thing? And not half a sequence that ends with the convulsions of satisfaction?"

I stood up. "Come lay down with me. We'll see." I felt the reluctance in her, the feathery fluttering about me, like a butterfly near a flame normally frequented only by moths. I extended a hand across the desk and she rose, her eyes smiling but guarded. I led her back to my bedroom and lay down, dropping her hand at the edge of the bed.

"You need to conserve your strength." She said, lifting one knee and placing it on the edge of the bed.

"Come kiss me." I breathed. I am sure I saw a shudder through her body starting at her shoulders. Her breasts waved at me and approached. She lay against me, cuddling under my arm. She lifted her chin and I rolled onto my side and kissed down on her lips. Her mouth opened and we shared the flowering moment till we were both panting.

I rolled away from her, letting the tendrils of desire trail through me, pulled along by her presence, back and forth through me like an uncertain sea. She rolled against me, lay her head on my shoulder and sighed.

"Mr. Gale, may I call you that? I know who you really are."

I kept from stiffening. My pretense of an alternate identity was just that. If someone pierced the veil and found the little alien driving Joshua Gale's body, it would not matter much to me. Keeping them separate was a game. Putting them together would be awkward but out of awkwardness comes grace, egg to duckling to swan.

"I don't know what you are doing here or why. I am curious and, as you may understand better than anyone, Alan, curiosity can prove to be a valuable commodity to people like us. Very valuable indeed since boredom is so easily encountered when money is no object."