Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 126154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 631(@200wpm)___ 505(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 631(@200wpm)___ 505(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
“Ted! I was only talking about you yesterday! We’ve missed you.”
I utter a load of bullshit apologies, tell her how I’ve been so busy, travelling across the country selling stationery, a lie I made up on the spot eighteen months ago and have upheld ever since. A conference, I tell her. No rest for the wicked, trying to plug my wares to hit targets. Boss is a ball-breaking wanker, blah, blah.
She tells me she understands. Tells me they hope I can come back soon.
I clear my throat and check my diary, and then I commit to coming back real soon.
“Tomorrow?!” she asks. “Wow, that’s great! We could really do with the help. Stacie’s son is sick, we’ve barely had enough hands to get the food prepped. You know what Fridays are like, Ted, always a nightmare.”
I tell her I’ll be there. Right on time.
And I will be.
I hang up and then feel a flash of concern.
It’s been months since I last put on my incognito jeans and baseball cap, and I haven’t seen them since, which wouldn’t be any reason for alarm should I not have a new cleaner, and should new members of staff not inevitably feel the need to deviate from just about everything their predecessors did. I head upstairs to search through my dressing room, and the crisis is averted as I find the clothes I’m looking for in the odds and sods clothes drawer.
I’d say I’d almost forgotten I have a new cleaner, but that would be a lie. There’s no way I could forget about the new cleaner, because the place looks impressively immaculate when I step through the door every evening. The old cleaner was good, but the new cleaner is something else, just as I’d hoped she would be.
The new cleaner turns the corner of my bed sheets back. An odd little touch that makes the bed all the more inviting, even if I still can’t get to sleep at night.
The new cleaner must have noticed the empty vases in the living room – the ones Claire used to fill – and has taken it upon herself to fill them with fresh white orchids to match the decor. It’s surprising both how much I appreciate them, and how much difference they make to the room.
The new cleaner is getting my eggs from a different supplier, and I’ve had two double-yolkers for breakfast this week.
It turns out that the new cleaner is also the reason I jerk myself off in bed on night four without using pornography. She’s the reason I shoot my load without any thought for some seedy guy’s asshole, and the reason I don’t feel the need to scrub my hands clean afterwards.
The new cleaner is the reason I abstain from looking at Claude’s string of messages, although that makes no rational sense whatsoever.
I’ve never even properly seen her face, but she’s there. A hazy figure at the edge of my consciousness, almost ethereal as I picture the meek little picture she cut as she shrunk away from me, the tenderness of her apology just a whisper in my memory.
I’m certain my sex-starved mind is distorting things – shrinking her stature and making her voice all the more reverent. The desperate fantasies of a man battling his demons, turning some poor little slip of a girl into a glowing figure of hope in my unconsciousness.
I smile at my own ridiculousness, my fingers still sticky with cum.
Chapter Eleven
Melissa
I had three days shadowing Cindy to drag every little scrap of information out of her. She’d tut and shake her head, giving me a look that made me feel even crazier than I felt already, but then she’d spill the beans anyway.
I guess she owed it to me after I sat and happily watched her scroll through the last four weeks of Alexander Henley’s porn browsing history.
She wasn’t lying, the stuff was… brutal. Not handcuffs and riding whips type brutal like I was expecting. The stuff Alexander Henley watches is not nearly so… I dunno… theatrical.
His porn tastes are dark and animalistic – grunts and pounding flesh and sweat, sometimes one on one, sometimes several men on one woman as she’s pushed and pulled and thrown around, fucked raw by big dicks in every hole. Many dicks in every hole. So many positions, so many settings – some gross and grimy, and some crazily plush, some with tiny little women and some with much bigger women. Sometimes they spit on her, and sometimes they slap her about, and sometimes they even… pee on her… but not all the time…
I wanted the ground to swallow me up as Cindy stared at me staring at a woman getting peed on on Alexander Henley’s giant TV screen, but it didn’t. I had to sit through it, all twenty minutes of that particular video.