BUSINESS TRIP

PART 8

A BLAST OF country western music startled him back to consciousness. What? It was morning? How was that possible? He was still snuggled in against Ann, still inside her. And he really, really needed to pee. He pulled away, which provoked a little shriek.

“Need to pee.”

“Me too.” She went sprinting off through the side door, into her own bathroom. What if they only had one room? There was always the sink by the closet, which he went for anyway because he was not going to make it as far as the toilet.

“Sorry about that.” She ran back in at almost the same speed she had left, and got back on her side. “Let’s try this again.”

“What?”

“Give me a nice back rub.”

“You are one crazy bitch.” Okay, no way to brush his teeth. Just swish out his mouth at least. Put the rubber back on? It was smelly, slick with her juices, but what the heck. Just going to get that way again. He lay down beside and pushed back in. No need for pretense.

“Rub. I want a rub.”

Okay. What the hell. She was a lot skinnier than Jane. Hard to find any flesh to rub on that bony back. And she was dozing off. What? She was going to take a nice little nap now, after she’d blasted him out of bed in the middle of the night? f**k her, f**k the b***h. And he did, harder and harder as she snored away. Finally he turned her over on her belly so he could get more leverage.

“What happened to my rub?”

“You fell asleep. Again.”

“That’s what I wanted. I wanted you to f**k me while I was sleeping.”

“I was f*****g you while you were sleeping.”

“Oh. I don’t remember.”

“Women.” God, they were all alike.

“Okay, just get it over with. We need to get to breakfast.”

What? As if it was his idea in the first place? “What do you want?”

“I want you to not care what I want. I want you to use me for your pleasure while I lie here helpless.”

“Really? Like this?” He moved his knees to pin down her legs, grabbed her wrists behind her back with one hand, her hair with the other.

“You’re pulling my hair.”

“This better?” He freed her hair and used that hand to swat her ass instead. She gasped, and started to spasm around him, milking him. He gave her a few more hair tugs and butt slaps just for safety’s sake. “Enough?”

“Bastard.” She squirmed away from him and went sprinting back into her own room. Leaving the side door open. He trailed after her. She was sitting on the toilet, sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” he ventured.

“No you’re not. You were enjoying every second of it. You were enjoying hurting me.”

“Only because you asked for it. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“You didn’t have to be so f*****g enthusiastic about it. Promise me you won’t ever do that again?”

“Unless you ask me to.”

“Even then. I never knew you had such a nasty side. Do you ever do that to your wife?”

“Jane is not into that kind of thing.”

“Oh. We should get to breakfast.” With that she closed her eyes, visible strain on her face, rocking a bit. He beat a hasty retreat.

A few minutes later they were downstairs at the breakfast, at a table off in the corner.

“So tell me true, how many girls have you ever spent the night with?”

“Four, including you.”

“Four. Okay your wife would be one. That student who seduced you?”

“Good guess.”

“The college girl who turned into a slut?”

“Yep. Although never in college. Out in Berkeley. The summer after I graduated she went out to stay with her sister. I went out there for a few weeks. There were five ladies staying in the house and I was the only guy. I remember the mother of one of the other girls came to visit and she was looking at me like I was ultimate hippie.”

“You? I’m finding this hard to visualize.”

“Well the girl friend thought this was the perfect opportunity to loosen me up. She bought me a pair of blue jeans; she made me grow a mustache. It was like hippie makeover time.”

“Guess it didn’t stick.”

“My whole generation went from hippie to yuppie. We took a trip down to Big Sur with the sister and her friends, and you would have said, yep, those are hippies all right. What about you?”

“Me? Never into the hippie thing. That was before my time.”

“No. How many guys have you spent the night with?”

“Two. Including you. I guess we should get going.” They gathered up the bag with clothes for the lake and headed outside.

“So tell me, why did you get married?” Ann asked that as they got into the car.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. Why did I get married? Why did I start going to church again?” Brad gave a sigh. “I know my second girl friend, the crazy student, was more or less living with me. We would go to her apartment for a f**k and then dinner, and then back to the hotel to spend the night. And she was trying to turn it into a marriage, cooking for me, wearing a nightgown. Even talking about a baby. It was scaring me.”

“Is that why you broke up with her?”

“I didn’t. But it did contribute to the breakup. She was pushing too fast. Then there was this other girl. One I knew from high school. She’d been the steady for one of my best friends, but that sort of faded when they went off to college. We would go out over the summers all during college and the summer after.”

“Even though you had this serious girl friend?”

“Well we always had an understanding that we would date other people over the summer. So anyway, that same summer I wound up home again, and I looked this girl up. Well, she was pretty, but always a little chubby. Something had made her lose a lot of weight and all of a sudden she looked like a supermodel. So we started to do our drive in thing again and she was getting into it a lot more than she ever had before. Then she invited me over to dinner; to meet her parents. And her father is talking about how he needs someone to take over his oil heating business.”

“Oh no!”

“Well we both went back to school, far away from each other, and that was the end of that. She wound up marrying someone else the next summer. And so did I.”

“So why did you get married?”

“Why did you get engaged?”

“Oh, well, when we got out of college our parents sort of said we should at least get engaged if we wanted to keep having a relationship. So we did. I think the idea was that we would move in together, but that never happened.”

“It was sort of like that. Jane wasn’t willing to go further without being engaged. And I said no, if we were going to go that far we were going to get married. So we did.”

“Oh. So you never really tried just being engaged?”

“Not really. Only long enough to get the marriage stuff set up. She’s from the Guyland.”

“Long Guyland?”

“Yep. She was willing to start f*****g once we were engaged, but I said no, let’s do it properly if we’ve waited this long.”

“Oh. You are a romantic, after all.”

“Why did you start f*****g Evan?”

“Oh, it was in high school. It wasn’t cool to be a virgin, for a cheerleader. For a while I was sort of faking it that we were doing a lot more than we were, but then I stopped stopping him, if you know what I mean. Even so it took him a while to work up the nerve to do it. And then we decided we were in love, that it was okay because we were in love.”

“Oh. And were you? Are you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Tell me, is it better with me than it is with Jane?”

“It’s very good with you.”

“I’ll take that as a no. It’s a lot better with you than it is with Evan. A lot better with Sam and Marty than it is with Evan. God we just go through the motions and he manages to come and I pretend to come and what’s the f*****g point of it?”

“You sound like my college girl friend.”

“She thought you were a lame lay?”

“Not exactly. But she didn’t have any points of comparison. That really bothered her.”

“So she started f*****g around? Just to do comparison shopping? Okay, maybe that’s what’s happening. Maybe you’re just a convenient c**k to try out.”

“That would be okay.”

“Bastard. Maybe you’re just getting your jollies out of me going into super slut mode.”

“Yep, that is definitely it.”

“Bullshit.” A pause. A sigh. “Do you think we can go back to being friends?”

“If that’s what you want to do.”

“Maybe. Not yet. Tonight, I want to pretend I’m an escort. You’ve hired me to do all the nasty things your wife won’t let you do. What’s so funny?”

“I’ve been working on Jane for a long time now. There isn’t much left.”

“I’m sure there’s something. Oh.” She patted his lap. “I can see you like the idea.”

“Stop it.” They were pulling into the parking lot for the office building.

* * * * *

ANN NEVER EVEN made it upstairs. Katie was there to swoop her up over to the coffee. “So tell me, tell me.”

“I spent the night with him. In his bed. With him cuddled up to my back.” Ann leaned forward to whisper. “With his c**k up my ass.”

“What? No way!”

“Way. We fell asleep like that but I woke up twice and brought myself off and he just was snoring away. Well, not exactly snoring. Making little sleepy sounds.”

“Sounds very romantic, in a really perverted sort of way.”

“That it does.”

“You don’t look all that happy though.”

“No. I guess not. I asked him a stupid question.”

“What?”

“Whether it was better with me than with his wife.”

“And?”

“He said it was really good with me.”

“Well at least he’s honest. At least he’s a gentleman.”

“Maybe. I sort of goaded him into hurting me. And he did. With relish.”

“He did? What did he do?”

“Pulled my hair. Slapped my ass.”

“Oh. I like that. Don’t you?”

“That’s not the point. You know what else he told me? You’d be crazy to transfer here.”

“He said that? Austin is really nice.”

“And this project is in really deep yogurt.”

“He said that?”

“Well not exactly. You know how Brad is. He said he really didn’t know how deep the yogurt was.”

“Oh.”

“And he thinks the company is falling apart. That there are going be more layoffs.”

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. Harry and I have talked about it and we figure if it happens we’re better off looking for jobs here than in Atlanta. What about Brad?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think he has, like, money. You know he bought a house when he started? As a junior programmer? Everyone thought he was crazy.”

“I guess it worked out for him.”

“Guess so.”

“Maybe it’s his wife who has the money?”

“Never thought about that. Well he’s making a lot now. Anyway, he thinks he has Atlanta under control but he’s not so sure about here.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, I’ve seen him pull some rabbits out of his hat. The first project we worked on together they decided to vendor out the coding and the vendor couldn’t deliver and he pulled us out of that one. Then we went into production and it was only me and one other girl doing support with him as the manager and he pulled us out of that one. Then no one liked the application and we had to do a rewrite. We got enough money to do it as a security upgrade but not enough time and he pulled us out of that one. By coming back out of management and doing the work of three or four programmers. And look what he’s done for Atlanta. But this rabbit may already be dead. Know what I mean?”

“He likes danger?”

“So it would seem.”

“Well make yourself dangerous then. Push his limits.”

“Not sure I can do that. The guy is a total pervert.”

“Really?” Katie leaned in close the whisper. “The next time you use the strap-on on him, stick the thing in his mouth.”

“He’d probably like that. I suppose we should get to work. What are we doing this morning?”

“Inventory report.”

“Okay. Let’s take a c***k at it.” They went upstairs. “You got those foils for me?”

“Sure thing.”

They went into a conference room, already full. Full of people waiting for her, Ann, the big time consultant. Maybe not as big time as Brad, but look at how they were staing at her in admiration. Or maybe they were just perving on her. If only they knew. She was wearing panties today. So far. They were talking, and she tapped her pointer to get them to shut up. “Good morning. Today we are going to talk about how to create a report using templates and macros. Some of you have already done this? Well we’ll go over it from scratch, for those of you who are new to it. Now, here is what the report looks like.” She put up the first foil. “Of course, the templates can’t generate the printer ready file, but they can generate any sort of text file, including a *********** file. So here is the underlying *********** file.”