The next week I emitted about fifty letters with CVs and paper abstracts to a wide range of researchers in a very narrow slice of research. I met Lucy and Phil for lunch on Saturday, and Lucy asked, “So you’re off to the fair tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a pure-bred cattle call. As I’ve told you before, I think…yes…You’re basically to show off the wares for the guys and gals like Hollywood starlets. Basically you have to prostitute yourself. Not literally, but almost literally. Remember: There’s a flood of PhDs on the market before you whose degrees and best days are four or five years old and losing ever more luster each year. You two will probably not get a job offer anywhere good even with my help, quite possibly no job offer at all, and this year is your best chance to actually get one. You can best understand it as the perfect embodiment of Marxism as run by Marxists who never actually had to make a Long March anywhere but the line to the government-academia teat.”
Phil shook his head and smiled, “Taiwanese intellectuals.”
She smiled back, “Are more cultured than you two will ever be, so show respect to your elders. —As I was saying, the Marxist elite has it cushy and sweet, and they run the system like a New Class by exploiting the committed cadres and low-ranking Party members in a system so exploitative it makes a sweatshop in the current PRC look like brain-dead American pseudo-intellectuals’ fairy tales about Swedish social democracy. They just mint new PhDs like hyper-inflationist ministers of finance and mouth words about social justice while not doing a damn thing to ensure social justice in their own bailiwick as otherwise unemployable academics flood the market with shoddy intellectual wares and crap research. They want intellectual grunt workers who mouth the Party’s latest slogan and don’t talk back.”
I smiled, remembering other tirades as her peculiar smile spread until even she couldn’t contain the laughter at the end. “I can never be sure how serious you are when you get that look on your face.”
She laughed and nodded. “You should hear me in Chinese! Verbal ability can paint pretty pictures no one believes, not even the artist, can’t it? It’s the secret to academic success, even in the sciences, alas, so take to heart the facts I told you and laugh at the rest. It’s sweet cynicism to make the pill go down better, because as western and westernized intellectuals, there’s nothing more intoxicating than slightly world-weary cynicism, is there?”
We then dined and retired to her house, and eventually I left to launch myself into the cold world outside the harsh, oppressive, alienating poverty of what I now saw was the cozy academic womb of grad school to fight red in tooth and claw for a meal ticket and post-doc servitude that, if I was lucky, would lead to the first well-oiled rung of a tenure track.
The job fair lasted five days and I went to every interview I could finagle. By the end of it, I was sick of the universe and returned home to crash on my couch for a day before calling Lucy.
“I’m really busy right now and can’t see you. Maybe next week.”
Surprised, even a little shocked, I hung up. I spent the weekend preparing more application materials as the first refusals starting seeping back to me. Sunday I crashed in dismay on my couch and woke up in the gray dawn of a wretched Monday. Feeling the need for friendship, I called Lucy but was sent straight to voicemail. I got up and checked my email and saw a note from her saying to meet her on Tuesday in her office at 10 AM sharp. I, of course, had absolutely no desire to see Phil and there was no one else worth bothering with my presence, so I took the day off to listen to music and unwind, and I slept and woke early.
I had never seen Lucy so cold. She glared at me and said, “On time. Good. We have a short meeting.” She led me into her office, where two administrative drudges sat in wait.
The first faced me and after introducing himself and his colleague said, “We went through your materials, and we found several discrepancies and omissions.”
“Falsified data, quite simply,” Lucy added.
They glared at her and said, “We have yet to make a determination on that point, but we would like to inform you that we are starting a full investigation and you will have an opportunity to defend yourself when notified.” He handed me a card. “You will probably desire representation, so…you might take this under advisement.”
Startled, I asked, “So what exactly are you considering?”
“Whether to strip you of your doctorate, of course. Other penalties might not be necessary.”
I sat there numb as they prattled more administrative weasel chat and took their leave. I looked at Lucy, who glared at me furiously. “You should leave. Forever,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Bullshit. I saw the evidence. You used me. You lied through your teeth, faked evidence, and set me up to be the fall girl when it came out.”
“No, I didn’t. Won’t you listen to me?”
“I’ve had enough of manipulative scheming liars fucking with my mind for one lifetime. Once is enough, twice is too much! Get out. Do not come in this building again, and never contact me again. Never speak of what we have done. Forget it ever happened. It was a mistake, a very gross mistake, and the sight of you sickens me. Remember, if I so much as see you where you shouldn’t be, I’m calling the police.”
I looked at her for one moment until her face flushed and she seemed on the edge of screaming, so I simply said, “I didn’t do it. Good-bye.”
“Go and be gone with you.”
I slunk out of the building before word came to expel me bodily, and to have something to do I went to the library and thought. And thought. And thought some more. I considered my options, which I realized was pointless without advice, and looked several times at Weasel No. 1’s card. Finally I called the number on it and made an appointment.
The next morning I was shown into a drab office to meet a middle-aged woman whose looks had clearly faded as her life curdled in the maze of academic administration. She listened to my tale of woe and asked questions for an hour.
She finally said, “Let me check your file. Fortunately for you, the mill grinds exceedingly slowly here, so you have plenty of time. However, you’re in limbo, you know. Proceedings have been started against you and you are essentially unemployable in academia with the black question mark they’ll automatically put beside your name if you apply anywhere. Any stipends you might still be drawing are frozen, and your university privileges are revoked. You’ll need to make plans to find a job somewhere; I suggest not using any references from the university. You’ll probably be restricted to blue-collar labor, so if you’re a typical academic I am truly sorry that I am not sorry at all that you might actually have to sweat for a living, but life sucks and then you die and doing something with your hands besides scratching your ass is a fate worse than death, I know.”
“Whatever. Just give me an application form.”
She warmed to me then and said, “That’s the spirit. I will be reviewing the records and seeing what options you have. I’m not optimistic about your chances, but we shall see. And remember, I am on your side.”
“For how long?”
She smiled sadly, “Only until you’re proved guilty. They have never put pressure on us to screw anyone over. We’re probably too powerless to be worth it, to be quite honest, but at least I can advise you if nothing else.”
Two days later we met and she said, “I have to say, your chances are very slim. It’s almost airtight, the evidence they have against you.”
“I recorded all my data in files as I generated it. It was automatic so I couldn’t have faked it…well, that way,” and I grimaced. “Perhaps a computer error? Faulty program?”
She nodded, “That is a possibility. If you can find someone to help, I’d encourage you to pursue that option. He would need to get permission from us as well as you to access your files, which are frozen, and who knows what he could find in the computer system in this place? It’s several dozen legacy systems patchworked together by underpaid computer science undergrads doing the work as extra credit or punishment, but if you can find anyone brave and whip-smart enough…”
She laughed hollowly and I sat up. “I think I can.”
“I hope he’s good.”
“She is.”
Sally greeted me with a hug and a smile and said, “Who died?”
“Me.”
She stared for a second and said, “I was joking. What happened?”
I told her the basic outline and she nodded as I filled in the details. She thought for a minute and said, “All right, I’ll help out. I’m sure it’s just that someone who skipped out of class the day that lesson came up screwed the pooch for you somewhere in the system. I can even think of two dozen candidates off the top of my head, but there are probably two hundred others who crapped in the system even worse. I’ll need a letter of permission, basically a limited power of attorney to represent you for all computer-related matters so the administration will let me dig around in things. You’ll be liable for any extra pay owing me beyond the basic schedule here…” and she slid over a worn sheet of figures, “But the period of payment is negotiable. I’m very flexible, just make sure you pay me some time before I retire.”
The next Monday I met with her again and she looked at me fixedly. “This will be a problem. People hate you, you know. And we need to talk long and hard and openly about your personal business.”
“That’s fine…though I don’t see why…”
“Dr. Chang, she has tenure, right?”
“Yes.”
“So her future isn’t threatened by this. You were her lover then, weren’t you?”
“One of them, yes. Why?”
“One? One? Interesting. Because she hates you viciously, and it’s not just disappointment or feeling tricked. The way she speaks of you, I figured you had been intimate. But what do you mean by ‘one’?”
“There were two of us.”
“Did you two know about each other for long?”
“We were an item, all three of us, for a few months.”
She stared at me for a moment and said, “You’ve certainly broadened since we were together.”
I smiled sadly, “Yes.”
“Tell me about it. I need a time frame here, first of all.”
I did so, and she took detailed notes, occasionally going astray for salacious details in full salacious detail. Finally she said, “So all three of you were doing…everything…in every possible incredible combination…like middle-aged divorcées always do…and…was it just the three of you?”
“Most of the time.”
After a long stare, she laughed and said, “So two men weren’t enough for her.”
“Actually, we convinced her to let a woman join us.”
She nodded, “Yes, we’ve all been there.”
“Sounds like you’ve broadened too.”
“Oh yes.” She smiled happily and said, “All right. Dates and times and names.”
I gave her what information I could and she glared at the paper and said, “Mary…who?”
“Just Mary. We met her by sheer chance in a bar.”
“I see. You meet someone and fall into bed with them by sheer chance! No name, no phone number, no address, no occupation, no god-damn last name even?”
“Nope.”
“Idiots. How can you sleep with someone and not even know their last name? You’ve all been tested, right?”
“Yes.”
“Barn door. You’re lucky it didn’t hit you in the face. This time.” She shook her head and said very quietly, with a significant glance around, “Right, I’ll get started tomorrow. Remember, stay off campus and out of sight. Find a job and a hobby. I’d say find a new girlfriend, but it sounds like they drop namelessly into your lap just for the asking, so learn their names in the future, okay? And don’t tell anyone we were lovers back in high school, or my integrity will be called into question. I’ll be documenting everything and I’ll let you know as things come up.”
We shook hands and she leaned in before I left and said, “Take care of yourself, and stay quiet about this. Your reputation will go straight to hell in a fucking Easter basket if they find you guilty, but until then it’s hush-hush and you don’t want to do or say anything that might hurt your reputation now or in the future. And really, I’m so sorry about Lucy. I liked her a lot even though she hates you, but remember, she thinks she has every reason to hate you. Just forgive her for it and make peace with the situation.”
I nodded and she smiled. “And do you need your laptop? And can I get access to your link at your apartment this afternoon?”
“Is that necessary?”
“I’m thorough. As you might remember.”
We smiled at the memory of her learning about sex with me and teaching me as she went along, and she added, “And tell no one about me, even that you are involved with me in a professional capacity.”
“Why?”
“Just in case. I hate blabbering. Don’t, okay?”
I nodded and she smiled, “Good man!”
I went to the library for the day and found she had, as agreed, left my apartment key under a rock in the flower bed near my apartment door, and then I heard nothing from anyone for two weeks. I received a call from Sally on the same day I learned my father had gone into the hospital for heart trouble. Suddenly my troubles seemed not so much doubled as diminished by real life, and I went in a daze to Sally’s office the next day as I considered how quickly I could leave and what I needed to take and what to store.
“Thanks for coming in on a Saturday.”
She shrugged, “It’s a complicated case. I’ve been knee-deep in it. You brought your laptop?”
I handed it over as I asked, “How is it complicated?”
“You’d need a three-week course in the architecture of the computer network here to even begin to grasp the mind-altering up-fuckedness of the whole system. I think I found three spying systems on my second day delving around your department’s system, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s all a SNAFU after some scammer planted key trackers and other things throughout your department network. Thanks to that, I have full cooperation from the department to just look around at my leisure, and I swear, there’s so much…just…shit on stilts in there.”
The starry look in her eyes disappeared and we laughed and she said, “Really, except for Dr. Chang they’re a little less hateful about you after some of the things I found, but they want to make sure anything like that could really have happened that way from illegal access…and if I can trace everything out to the guilty parties, the bonus will keep me in deep clover.”
We went over the easier parts that she had found, and she asked more questions about the three of us and our foursome, and after she finally seemed to have satisfied her curiosity with every salacious detail, she said, “Wish I’d been there.”
“I didn’t know you still care.”
“Are you kidding? I love good porn!”
“Whereas in high school, it was, what, unrealistic jerk fodder for guys unable to get a real woman?”
“Lay off. It took, what? Two weeks? Three? of wheedling finally to get you to taste me.”
“But at least I liked it straight off.”
She smiled and gazed years into the past, and finally snapped back and said, “Mm, yes.” We walked down the hallway with staff pictures, and suddenly I stopped and stared. “Oh, hey.”
“What?”
“Who’s that?”
I pointed at a picture of an awards ceremony and Sally said, “Mary Galloway. She’s a recent grad.”
“She’s also really good in bed. With both men and women.”
Sally stared and said, “Are you sure?” I nodded and she said, “That ice queen?!?”
“What?”
“Just the rumors. Huh. Amazing! I never would have thought of her doing that…” She was lost in thought for a minute and then a worried look crossed her face and disappeared. She then said, “So, again, I’m so sorry about your father. When are you leaving?”
“Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“I won’t be done with your laptop by then. I’ll contact you when I’m done. It might be a long while though.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. It doesn’t really matter much now.”
“Send me your address or an email when you get there or something.”
However, life is not always so easy. I arrived a couple of days before he passed on, and for the next three months, I was buried in wrapping up his estate and his business matters, all complicated by great differences in state laws, wrangling with his widow and my mother over the pickings each demanded, both of them vicious and petty and cruel, and working part-time at a liquor store in the belief that if I saw winos every day I’d lose any desire to become one. I stashed my bequest and gritted my teeth and gladly left his old house to the widow and decamped for an apartment in a different town without a forwarding address so I would never have to see them for at least a year. And I then discovered that once the dragging business of death was finished, the dragging business of life was waiting patiently for me to get started so it could laugh at my puny efforts to make something worthwhile of myself.
For the next ten months I worked, ate, slept, worked, ate, and slept, stashing my pay in the bank and doing nothing but what could be done for free. While my future in academia was dead and to hell with it, the real world lay open before me, and nothing interested me enough to want to do anything besides recuperate mentally, build my funds, and contemplate what might actually be a rewarding career down the road.
One day about three months in, wandering through the library, I chanced into the East Asian literature section; this being a largish town, the offerings were slim enough pickings I wasn’t scared to dip a toe in them. I browsed and eventually checked a few out, a couple of collections of Chinese poetry in translation but mostly Japanese literature chosen out of a perverse desire to prove to myself I had broader interests than I wished to accuse myself of. I studiously avoided thinking of the immediate past and focused on centuries and millennia before, and like beaten people I had known who had found solace in austere white art galleries and austere music and lush or austere nature with no one around, I lost myself in grand surroundings that really had no place for me but were wholesome to visit because no one but their creators haunted them when I was there. They had no interest in communing with me, but they let me eavesdrop on their thoughts, and that was enough.
On a cold drizzly Friday evening a bit over a year after leaving, I pulled a fleece blanket over myself and wondered what to read. I had the weekend off and planned to burrow in and hibernate except for short feeding expeditions. Suddenly my screen door opened and a swift knocking ruined the quiet. I harrumphed my way to the front door and turned on the porchlight before opening the door.
“Good evening, Doctor,” Lucy said. “You’re a hard man to find.”
“As you wished.”
After a second she nodded. “May I come in?”
“I’d just have to throw you out again.”
She stared for several seconds and said, “We need to talk.”
“Bit late for that, wouldn’t you say? Seems you had a perfect chance a year ago. When opportunity knocks.”
“Please, it’s cold and I’m wet.”
I looked over her thin coat and shawl and after a second pulled the door open and stood aside. She shivered and removed her coat, but fortunately her outfit was mostly dry. I went to my hall closet and pulled out another blanket and handed it to her.
“Wrap up.”
She looked around my apartment and said, “Smaller than your old one.”
“Small town living builds character.”
She smiled while I looked blankly at her, disgusted at seeing her and tamping down my anger. She looked at the books on my coffee table, picked one up, and smiled. “Not a good translation.”
“No doubt.”
“I’m glad you’re doing well.”
“Are you now.”
She sighed. “We spent the last, I don’t know how many months looking for you. Sally and I. You just disappeared. No forwarding address, no email, no phone…”
“Unlisted. I don’t like talk.”
“You didn’t even tell your mother where you moved.”
“She neither asked nor cared.”
“She was worried.”
“Why? Did she need to chisel a few more pennies from the widow’s palm?”
“Probably.”
Despite myself, I smiled and she smiled back. We said nothing for a minute and then she looked at the couch and sat down. I sat down in my armchair and watched her.
I finally asked, “How did you find me?”
“Someone in your father’s old town remembered you asking about this town, and he remembered you said, ‘Sounds as good as any.’ I’d have hired a detective if this hadn’t panned out.” I goggled at that but said nothing.
“So you know nothing about what happened,” she said.
“I know much about what happened. Like the Kamakura Period. Fascinating.”
She smiled and pulled a package from her purse. “Here’s your replacement diploma. All fresh and new, Doctor.”
I blinked and stared at it and after a minute she said, “I suppose I should be jealous of your old lovers, but Sally was a good choice. You must have treated her really well. Better than two I could name ever treated anyone. And very thorough—she dotted and crossed what needed it.”
I sat quietly, unable to speak, and then she pulled a small bottle of scotch from her purse. “Felix the Cat has nothing on me.”
“And when did you ever see him?”
“All the time as a girl. He travels well to other cultures, you know.” We laughed and she poured us a small glass each.
After she handed me mine, she sat down again and looked down at her glass for a minute. “So anyway, Sally said she knew something was off from the very beginning. She said you always teased her about all the old mysteries she used to read. It was just like them, she said, if a bunch of old British farts had known computers and were allowed to write about sex. Too many coincidences. She said, and I quote, ‘Believe me, you don’t have a foursome that easily unless someone’s rigging it.’”
I chuckled and she smiled and continued, “So…I don’t understand all the details, but the long and short of it is that Phil hated you so much that he got his latest cheap slut Mary to help him fake your lab data. At least twice he did that right after he left us, because he knew we’d be preoccupied for a while, I think; went back to the lab and tried to break into your account. Apparently some illegal key tracker recorded it with time stamps and everything, so yay for breaking the law. And Mary in the bar, that was a pure set-up. While she took on the two of us, he got your computer scoped out for her, and while he was using us, she installed some software on your laptop and through it into your account at school. Because we all leave that on, right? Then she waited until we were all dozing to shut off your computer and retrieve her stuff. I think if you had gotten up ten minutes earlier you’d have caught her.”
After sipping some more, she sat back and said, “Apparently Mary is really good at bad things, as well as really good at bed things.” I groaned and she smiled, “Yeah, I know. Sally loves atrocious puns, doesn’t she?” After another sip, she continued, “But Sally had supervised her work before and recognized a few traces she left. And she was able to access…oh, something. That computer system makes no damn sense to me. Anyway, she was able to track most of it down, enough to get a court order with the generous and happy assistance of the university to seize their computers and get every last piece of evidence she needed. They’re both in jail, actually, for all sorts of little property crimes with fancy names, and Phil is lucky he retained his MA. There was enough evidence he faked a bit of his dissertation research that we stripped him of his doctorate. Shame, that—it was good research, most of it, but even a tiny drop of sewage in a fine bottle of wine makes it all sewage.”
“And he took that lying down?”
“Oh, hell no. He was a vicious little shit. I’d have done what happened anyway to clear your name, wearing the entire alphabet in red on my chest out on the college green and shouting out what each letter stood for. I didn’t have to, though. He got all chummy with my colleagues in the hearing we’d called and acted like some stud in a smoke-filled back room, and told all the details like a smutty story, and surprisingly I didn’t die from shame. I don’t think I even blushed, and I smiled when I realized he had played his last card, and the look on his face when he saw that smile…It was a joy to behold him experiencing fear—shame and guilt are beyond him, of course. And when I said, ‘Yes, that’s right, every detail. And I might add that it was glorious. So now that the smut’s out of the way, what about the crime?’…he just collapsed. His game was up. But the look he gave me…pure hatred…after he’d had so much from me.”
“And Mary?”
“Oh, she turned on him with a little pressure. Sally met her privately and dug and dug. Phil was her first real lover, you know, the first one to set her on fire, so she would do anything for him. Very easily manipulated. He spun some guff about me stealing his research and she helped him get his revenge. Then after Sally started digging and got hold of her computer she realized all she had done and…I guess it’s a shame she had to suffer so much for being so blind, but somehow I don’t fucking care.”
She took a sip. “Mmm, I love Auchentoshan. Go on, have a sip. —You know, everyone knowing about us doesn’t bother me. At all. I thought I’d feel publicly naked, but…it’s just facts. Happy facts, really. Besides, I have tenure. I realized my rep might take a hit, but we didn’t start until you were no longer my employee, and when some of my colleagues started getting antsy, I just named a few names seemingly at random and they saw the better part of wisdom was to let me have my peccadillos and I’d leave theirs lie. In fact, I think they like me better now. Especially a couple of the women.” She grinned. “I think one wants advice and the other wants company.”
“That’s nice. I needed a good story. So what’s it to do with me?”
She stared at me in shock. “You have your life back! You’re clear! You’re free!”
“I have a life already. I am clear. I am free. What else do I have? No publications, a year lost, probably vicious rumors despite everything.” I shrugged. “Poisoned chalice, really.”
“Bullshit. You had a setback, so you’ll crawl off like a whipped dog?”
“Maybe I don’t want to go back. Cloud cuckoo land? Too unreal.”
She glanced at my coffee table. “Finally tasting the grit of real life, no illusions, working an honest day’s work for an honest hour’s pay…and yet you read this. Drunk failed scholars dancing with the moon and the bottle makes three and saying that’s reality.”
“A break from the everyday.”
She looked at me closely and sighed, “Perhaps. If you want to throw it away, that’s your right if it gives you no pleasure anymore. If you want to be so contradictory.” She paused as if choosing her approach and opted for the direct. “But I don’t think that’s so.”
“What do you think it is, then?”
“Me.”
“So it’s all about you.”
We laughed. After a long minute in which she gathered her thoughts, she said, “With you it is. It should be. Because I threw you away and kicked you in the teeth and tried to destroy you without listening to you. Because I…took Phil’s side after he’d poisoned my mind against you with nasty hints and backstabbing and then manipulated me into ruining you. It took him one week after he and Mary had planted everything to trick me into digging and finding their little trail of slime. He has an evil gift, that man. I had trusted you and he poisoned me against you. I am so sorry, and if you come back you will always have a position in my lab, at my side. Really, I am so so sorry.”
I had risen as she started her apology and paced the room. Finally I sat down next to her, my anger finally boiling over. “So sorry, like a little band-aid! Pull it off, it’s just the scab on a flesh wound! Oops, you’re bleeding again. So sorry!” After swallowing other words I continued, “And you expect to just make it up like that?”
“No. I want the chance to try. It will take a long time, I know. But I’ll do what it takes, if you’ll just come back.” I looked at her and she asked innocently, “This is the outer wall behind us. I didn’t see a light on in the apartment facing us…”
“It’s empty, and the two next to it. They’ll probably have to close or lower their rent.”
“I see.” Suddenly I did too and saw her anticipatory look. I grabbed her face and forced my tongue into her mouth, feeling her body shudder under the violence of my anger and lust. I undressed her slowly, feeling the soft cotton gliding under my fingertips as I reacquainted myself with the outline of her form, and then her buttons, and then her soft skin and plump flesh. Her bra was lacy when I finally worked my way down the buttons and stripped it off, her breath ragged as she stared at me in desire, the timidest she had ever been in bed, water glistening in the corners of her eyes before flowing down her cheeks.
Soon the lighter tan of her breasts showed as I teased myself with the sight, finally allowing her dark brown nipples to swim into view. I caressed them feeling them fill my hands for the first time in over a year, as soft and full as ever but somehow more beautiful. She held my head as I suckled happily, forgetting my anger until she whispered, “They’ve missed you.”
“Of course they have. Good sex is what matters to you, more than anything else, isn’t it?”
She smarted at that but nodded, “At times it was. I thought…I thought the more important things were covered, in the bank…”
I squeezed her breasts roughly as I sucked her tongue into my mouth and felt her shudder underneath me again. I held her tightly and posed her roughly as I reacquainted myself with every beautiful feature I had missed. My mouth took possession of every part of her body as I uncovered it. At times I wanted to hold her forever, then when she spoke I wanted only to use her fully and discard her. She reacted passionately, her whole body writhing in my arms and then under my weight as I dry-humped her, her thighs tight around my waist. I lifted off her long enough to strip us bare, and when I finally pulled off her panties I blinked as I caressed her new thicket. “Hair?”
“I know you like it. I grew it for you.”
“Good, it might keep you from chafing too much from me fucking the living daylights out of you all night long.”
“God, please do,” she moaned. “Take me like you always wanted to.”
I lifted her hips and thrust straight into her, holding nothing back. I looked down at her body slathering for my meat and in a flood of anger slammed her body up against me to drive myself into her belly. I used her hips like an exercise machine, pulling her fast and hard into my pelvis as I thrust fast and hard into her.
“How can someone so beautiful be so cruel?” I said to her, angrier than ever. “You cold-hearted bitch, just using me and throwing me aside, not even listening to what I told you. Like I was a fucking leper.”
She looked up at me and nodded, which drove me even faster. I heard her whisper, “You’re right, I’m so so sorry,” which only pissed me off even more.
“You destroyed my future because you were so happy getting fucked up the ass by Mr. One-Minute-and-Done. He just used you, just used both of us, him and worthless Mary fucking Galloway, and you loved it, three blonds for you to play with. I thought you were better than that. Now I know you’re just looking for a man who’ll make you his toy.”
She suddenly came, digging her fingernails deep into my arms, and I just fucked her harder. “I’m your toy,” she whispered, “Use me.”
I bit my lip in anger to keep from coming, and she met my thrusts stroke for stroke. She stared up at me as I told her off, precisely exact but insulting only if the truth is an insult, letting all my anger and hurt out as she whispered, “Yes, you’re right” and “I’m so so sorry” again and again. Even though I was bitterly angry at her at that moment, I had no desire to degrade or destroy her, only to punish her for what she had done, and after a few minutes she said, “Hate-fuck me all you want, just never let me go.”
I nearly shouted, “I should hate-fuck your ass.”
“You should. Punish me like I deserve.”
I pulled off her and rolled her over without waiting for her assistance, and she whispered, “Purse, upper pocket,” and I pulled out our old tube. I lubed us up and lifted her hips and said, “You liked that piece of shit fucking your ass like you were a little rag doll, didn’t you?”
“I liked you there more…but yes,” she said in a mixture of fear and exaltation, and I pushed against her without hesitation, feeling her relax as I took better position. “I’ll give you an ass-fucking, you merciless…” and was unable to finish the sentence as she pushed back hard against me with all the strength of her arms and thighs, burying me to the hilt inside her ass in one stroke and screaming in pain and pleasure as she forced me to penetrate her. I grabbed her hips and fucked her hard, almost as if I were Phil thoughtlessly using anything good that stood in his way; and at that thought I held myself back from taking her any harder. She was writhing beneath me in pain and lust, saying, “Fuck me harder. Punish me. Waste my ass.”
In less than a minute I felt her climaxing around me, the strongest I think I had ever felt in her, and she moaned, “Fuck me, fuck my ass like I deserve, I was so wrong.”
I slammed her back onto me again and again and said, “It was so precious for me being with you. You were the best woman I had ever had, and you just used me and played with me and cast me aside when you thought you might get in trouble. You’re selfish, thoughtless…”
“You’re right,” she said as she started crying, “I did. I was.”
I pushed her down and fucked madly as she squealed in another orgasm. I felt myself building to the most massive climax of my life and chattered thoughtlessly, “God, I loved you so much, I loved you so much. I wanted to marry you and live the rest of my life with you. Every dream came true when I was inside you, and you just threw me away. I would have made you so happy, and all you wanted was fun and games.” I screamed and heard her squeal as we climaxed together, her ass receiving every drop I could pump into her, and all my anger drained out with my lust and never returned.
I passed out with the last spurt and came to a few minutes later on top of her, still buried inside her, as she cried softly underneath me. When she knew I was awake, she asked so softly I could scarcely hear her, “Do you still love me…too?”
“Yes.”
“I loved you too by the end. That was why I was so Never. NEVER hurt when I thought you had used me, lied to me, cheated.”
“Trust me from now on.”
“Yes. And you…You will never. . Fuck my ass like that again. I deserved it that time, but never again.”
“Of course not. Only your cunt.”
She laughed loudly. “Deal!”