Priceless! Paying for Pleasure

Chapter 1, Over and Over Again.Roxanne Cox had recently celebrated her 41st birthday. A milestone that was somehow more significant and meaningful than any other. The fortieth birthday party celebration had been one of those fun "over the hill" shindigs. She got a birthday cake that was a big black coffin with "one foot in the grave" written in white icing. All of her friends had laughed and prodded her, telling her she looked great and that women only mellow with age. It hadn't felt real. It had been fun and joke and lots and lots of booze. Now, after celebrating turning 41 years of age and still single being and childless, things felt really real. Too real, in fact. Roxanne had had big dreams of love. When she was just a girl, she always played house. She was a mother of three: two twin boys and that precious baby girl that finally came after years of waiting, just when she and her husband had almost given up hope. Her dream man back then had been a real white knight. Tall, Nordic, maybe an astronaut or a famous cross country skier. He would have had lots of money, gone for two hour jogs every Sunday after serving her breakfast in bed, and would be a wonderful father and a loyal husband. As the daughter of a single mom, it was an imaginary situation that brought Roxanne both happiness and escape. Her pretend husband was also the father she never had; even though it broke her mom's heart deep inside to watch her daughter play happy family, it also brought a smile to the poor single mother's face to see that her daughter never gave up hope. All that seemed to be changing now. Roxanne had waited a long time to date. Since her mom didn't have a lot of money for summer camps or after school activities, Roxanne ended up doing a lot of stuff with the local church. It was usually cheap if not free, and it substituted as a sort of child care situation while Roxanne's mom was away with some man on an adult's only date. She had really taken in the words of her neighborhood pastor and although many boys at the church had the hots for Roxanne, with her long black hair, her piercing green eyes, and her beautiful smile, she remained pure until college. Roy had been the name of the first guy to take her virginity. Roy had been class president at his private school before entering Greenwood Community College. Roxanne had never been at the top of her class, she was a bit too mousy and shy to really stand out like that, but she was a very serious and hardworking girl with a lot of deep thoughts in her head. The college environment (and the fact that she got a full ride to community college with a small stipend for living, which meant escape from her mother's home and refuge in a 4-bedroom apartment with three other young women) really brought out the best in her. She quickly attracted the attention of smarty pants Roy. For their first date, he invited her to a study session in the library. They were so into ancient history that when it turned ten p.m. and the library lights began to dim one by one they hardly even noticed. The librarian came to their table and told them in an apologetic tone that they would need to come back tomorrow. "We open at 8," she smiled sweetly. Roy and Roxanne packed up their books and hopped into Roy's old Chevy. When he rolled up to Roxanne's apartment, he leaned over and gave her a kiss. Unexpectedly, Roxanne made a move she never quite understood, even in reflection: she invited Roy to come up and see her room. It was a Thursday night, but all of her roommates were gone. Two of them were art students that tended to be gone from the house. They went to art sessions that were heavy on the acid, and when they were home they were often sleeping in their ripped jeans. The third roommate was from just out of state, and she was often homesick. Since she didn't have classes on Friday, she would usually make the three hour drive back to her parents' spot every Thursday right after her last class. So tonight, Roxanne had the place to herself. It was nothing to shrug at. Nothing to impress either. A well-decorated floor of a three-story home with its own separate entrance. She showed Roy around the kitchen, asked him if he would like a drink. Roxanne was only nineteen, but her artsy fartsy roommates had fake I.D.s and they kept lots of liquor on hand. Not really knowing how to drink, she poured Roy and herself a cup of vodka and dropped in a hunk of ice. "Cheers," they toasted. The vodka burnt Roxanne's throat. And Roy's long, slim member burnt her insides as it popped her cherry and then some. Afterwards, Roy held Roxanne in his arms. She couldn't see it, but he had an expression of extreme discomfort on his face—as if he was desperate to let go of this creature he was cradling and run—and he couldn't draw his eyes away from the small red stain on Roxanne's light pink bed sheets. Sure, Roy was an intellectual guy, but he was no virgin and he knew what it meant to get involved with one. It was nothing he wanted anything to do with. Once Roxanne had fallen into a peaceful slumber, Roy extracted himself from her arms, pulled on his pants, and excused himself from the domicile. He never picked up the phone for Roxanne again, and he stayed away from her in classes and on campus. Eventually, he transferred to a better private college and Roxanne never saw him again. Her relationship with Roy would establish a precedent for her life that would repeat itself over and over again. Nowadays they have a name for it: it's called "ghosting." When men weren't ghosting on Roxanne, they were using her for her money or cheating on her with any chick that would spread her legs. Roxanne had taken a break from the dating scene for the rest of her college career, but immediately upon graduation she fell for a young man at the real estate firm where she had first started out as an assistant. He was tall, dark, and handsome. A real cool drink of water. Everyone in the office was always joking that they would be so good together, a perfect match. Roxanne had long suspected he was a playboy—he was a mid-career agent and he always seemed to get older divorced women into homes that Roxanne could never imagine alimony being able to afford. Still, he had a smooth tongue, and Roxanne shoved the idea out of her mind that he might be seducing all of these women and then conning them into buying dream homes where they could settle down and start a new life. When he asked her to dinner one day when she had stayed late at the office to finish up some paperwork, she found herself unable to decline. Boy did he have a smooth tongue—Billy was a lover and a giver, a true connoisseur of what other men might refer to derogatorily as 'seafood.' Roxanne fell for him harder than a sack of bricks. They dated for nearly a year without establishing much real closeness. Roxanne slept at his house a mere 2 times, and there were no toothbrushes left at either place. But he did have her working double time filing all of his paperwork for him. She really learned the ins and outs of the business doing all that work, for free of course, she never filed for overtime when she was putting in work for Billy. After several months of their sexually wet and romantically dry relationship, whispers were flying around the office that Billy had transformed Roxanne into his personal slave. Rumors were also flying about a hot divorcee that Billy was luring into a sale. She was a former beauty pageant queen who was now in her fifties and had a lot of work done. She also had tons of money, and Billy was getting set up for the biggest sale of his life. A commission that would top what he usually made in three years. He had poor Roxanne grinding out all the financial documents and the nitty gritty of the closing. They were just hours away from wrapping up the whole deal, when Roxanne realized that there was a signature missing on an important document. She was a notary, and she took a taxi and ordered him to fly over to the house where Billy and the beauty queen were doing a final inspection of the home. Turns out Billy was actually doing a final inspection of old faded glory. Nailing down the deal, so to speak. Roxanne walked in on him doing the dirty with Ms. Pennybaker, and she turned white with shock and almost fainted. She dumped Billy, but not before she helped him close on the big deal. She was a weak woman like that. Still, it had all inspired her to go to law school and study to become a real estate attorney. She moved out to California and enrolled in a small law school with hefty student loans to boot. In spite of falling victim to the numerous hunky male scammers that inhabited the Golden State (and who significantly added to her student loan debt), within 5 years of graduating Roxanne had managed to pay it all off and was living a pretty good life. She was 28 at this point and really feeling the need to settle down and get married. It used to be pretty unseemly for a woman to hit thirty and not have a man on lock. Roxanne turned to matchmaking, but she never quite found her match. Throughout her thirties she hit speed bump after speed bump in a myriad of failed relationships. And now she found herself here: 41 and alone. She was making good bread though, and she decided that maybe it was time to give in and become a sugar momma. There were lots of good looking young men at her local gym, too young to be wed. She decided that she would bait and hook one of them, just as they had baited and hooked her so many times in the past. She was a charming woman, fluent in both Italian, which was spoken in her home by her father (from whom she inherited her lustrous black hair) and also by her grandmother who used to watch her as a baby, and she had picked up Spanish after moving out to California. She was a well-payed attorney, and she was pretty fit to top it all off. It wasn't hard for her to attract a younger man. In fact, whenever she was at the gym she always could feel herself getting checked out; she could sense the men looking her body up and down with hungry eyes, checking out her breasts so tightly packed in her sports bra and her tight buns and rock hard stomach. They all wanted a piece. However, Roxanne usually preferred to keep her headphones on with the music on loud and she liked to stare straight ahead at her gym equipment or else close her eyes tight and meditate as she did the elliptical. Today, she decided to keep her eyes open. She was glad she did. There was a hunky young twenty-something with a nice six pack and a muscular build. He had sandy blond hair with long bang that he kept having to shake out of his eyes as he pumped iron. He had been checking her out since the second she walked in the door. She made eye contact with him while she was on the treadmill. Their gazes locked, unspoken words passed through their minds, and when she was done with her twenty-minute warmup and grabbing a drink at the water fountain he sauntered over to engage. "Hi, my name is Tommy," he told her, giving her a grin that could have melted an iceberg. "Nice white teeth," Roxanne thought. She smiled back, gave him her name, and shook his hand. "It looks like you really know your way around the weight machines," she told him, "do you mind showing me how some of them work?" Tommy agreed, and Roxanne pretended to play dumb so that he could teach her a thing of two about the machines. They ended up going for coffee after their workout, and Roxanne found that they shared a lot of common interests. Tommy was just breaking into the market as a realtor, and Roxanne had plenty of advice for him. They also shared a love of French flicks and French fries. "How about I treat you to the best burger in town tonight?" Tommy asked her with another one of his trademark grins. "You earned it with that workout," he told her. "Plus, the protein will help you build lean muscle mass." Roxanne agreed, and it was a date. Life with Tommy seemed to go swimmingly. After two weeks of dating, they had their first romp in the hay and boy did he have stamina. No wonder sugar mamas existed! Who wanted a tired old man d**k when you could have a hot, sexy boy toy making love to you for hours? Tommy never spent the night with her, but Roxanne didn't mind if things moved slower. She still remembered and stung from when Roy had vanished on her that one night. She didn't even want to offer Tommy the chance to suddenly vanish while she slept. Besides, things were going so well, Roxanne was sure it wouldn't be long before the two of them were living together.