Cheater's Anthology

Cheater's Anthology

Cheater's Anthology

The Type Prequel Series

The Type Prequel Series

1/34 - The Stalker Part 2

1/34 - The Stalker Part 2

Noon Tuesday June 26th, 2012

The next day, Richard texted her the next question, "If a man took your body in a public place, where would you prefer?"

Lyrou was playing stuffed toys with her infant in his nursery, as she read Richard's message she set the teddy bear aside. This time she put up no resistance and answered, "The most private of public places, and far, far away. I wouldn't like anybody who knows me or knows someone I know to see me."

"Then in the Rocky Mountain wilderness under the stars and tall trees. Or on an uninhabited tropical island under the bright sun with the waves clapping. Or..." he let her summon something within.

She needn't think long, she knew her ideal location parameters, "An abandoned barn in the countryside, nothing but cornfields and cows for acres and acres."

"You'd find your stallion and get bred like a mare in the stables." He must've been gratified to send that, she thought.

Doing her desires justice, "I was drawn to the free, wholesome, pure, wide-open country setting as romantic. You twist it into the bestial."

His text bubble appeared, "Right, you aren't a domesticated animal in your fantasies precisely because you're one in your reality."

"You speak like an untamed animal." She would like to have told him off in French for a cut to his bone.

"Come tame me." He sent, and she had enough.

⚜

⚜

Evening Tuesday June 26th, 2012

An entire day of taking care of her baby Alan and waiting for Garin to come home late passed, as normal as any day, with no further messages from Richard after his mare comment. Was she a mare? When Lyrou got pregnant and gave up her career, rather than take maternity leave, she refused to give up having an income of her own. With a down payment she'd saved from her time working right out of university, a great credit score, an impressive tax return, and Garin's pay stubs she secured a mortgage on a 4-unit residential apartment building in Grantwood. After budgeting for property taxes, saving for major repairs and replacements, paying landscaping and other expenses, she profited enough that it wasn't such a huge step down from her forsaken position with the desk and the benefits. This was her money to spend as she saw fit, on her child, on Garin, on her maman, and on herself. But it did require a bit of work; managing tenants and hiring contractors sometimes constituted a part-time job. Once a sewer line had clogged and flooded the basement with putrid, oily scum. She needed the line routed and the basement cleaned, and that had taken hours to arrange.

Before midnight, still no Garin, she slipped out of bed in her pajamas and into Alan's room just to lay beside him and pat his belly. Then startling her and Alan both her phone buzzed, "Incroyable... incroyable."

Checking the time she saw it was later than she thought, exactly midnight. She knew who it was before she read, "So, he didn't cheat. But you resent him for some misstep. What did he do, or didn't do, that hurt you the most?"

She replied, "I don't know if I resent him for it, or for anything at all. But the most hurtful? He left the maternity ward to take care of work, flown out to Chicago, and couldn't make it back in time to witness the birth of our son."

Bzzzz. "It's completely unfair of you to hold that against him. He was busting his ass for his wife and his newborn child, and his reward is.. his wife is bitter about it?" Richard spoke up for his fellow man, and he spoke in the language of man.

Lyrou typed back, "I'm completely appreciative of that, and yet it doesn't correct the basic fact that he wasn't there for the birth of our first child together."

The reply, "Give him a do-over, have another baby, tell him if he's not there this time you'll have a baby with a man who will be there."

Lyrou answered, "It's now at this second after midnight. Your one question per day is up."

⚜

⚜

Noon Wednesday June 27th, 2012

Garin took leave from work to see his mom in Clifton. She was ill with severe, advanced diabetes and more, and he took their baby boy along to see grandma. He was supposed to meet an agent about their condo and almost cancelled on his mom, afraid of losing the closing with no time to spare. But Lyrou promised to stay behind to see the agent for them. With Garin and Alan on the road, and then after handling the agent, she visited a store to pick up pepper spray, and she drove.

She was stopped at a red light when Richard's daily question came, "If two men came to blows for your hand, would you derive satisfaction from it?"

She wasted no time with a washy answer, "Only if I'd been unsure my man would fight a contender for my hand."

Before he could respond she texted again, "I want to meet you. Is that still possible?" She felt her hands go numb after sending it. Was that unwise?

He took a moment to respond, but then, "Of course it is. Where do you suggest we meet?"

She set her terms, "I'm still afraid of you. It should be somewhere public, somewhere police can come to my aid if I need saving."

He answered, "Penn Station. We can have lunch. If I had known you wanted to meet, I would've asked a different question today."

She replied, "Ask it."

And he asked, "Why do you want to meet me?"

"Isn't it enough for you that I do?" she meant it.

He wanted to know, "Really, why do you want to meet me?"

She denied him, "Isn't it enough for you I've answered one of your questions already today?"

He gave up, content that she would meet him at all, his last text, "I see. And you'll see me in the lower level, the Hilton Passageway. 6-7pm."

⚜

⚜

Early Evening Wednesday June 27th, 2012

In the lower level of Penn Station she found him as he said he'd be, in the forenamed corridor. She approached, struck by how much taller he seemed than the tall man she remembered from the mall. The preceding weeks of texts-only had dephysicalized him, and now she was made to reckon with how large of a body he was. As she neared, in her fright she reached into her purse for her pepper spray. She would show it to him first of anything before he could speak, as a warning, and let him know not to try anything. He stood hand at his side, "No stroller, Lyrou?"

She stopped at a distance he would be able to hear her speak in the noisy subterranean train station, and pulled out her can of pepper spray. While she was far from within reach of him, the lanky Richard was just within reach of her can as she held it out. His long arm closed the distance, instinctively he grabbed the top of the can, and her hand under his, pressed and set it off. Not much had sprayed out, but the horrible sensation of it burn-misting onto her skin, face and into her eyes, then into her nostrils and throat. She could barely see, but felt Richard's hand around her lower back and wrist, guiding her. Then she knew the cold splash of water on her eyelids and down her neck, wetting her shirt.

She pried her eyes open enough to see he had her at a drinking fountain splashing handfuls of water onto her face, "I need to wipe it off!" she begged. She turned and scuttled over to the restrooms, but yellow tape and an out-of-service A-frame floor sign barred entry to the women's lavatory. Richard rushed into the men's restroom, and just as soon as he went in, he returned with wads of paper towels. She yanked some from his hands, he steadied her forehead in one wide palm and dabbed her eyes with the other. Bystanders passed around them, some slowing to see what was happening, some coughing lightly at the residual pepper spray in the air.

Having recovered sufficiently, a moment later Lyrou sat in a Penn Station donut shop, face pink, as Richard took a seat opposite her, placing an iced coffee and an open box of pastries down between them. Her vision clear now, and mouth agape, she regarded how red and pink Richard was. He could barely open his eyes, still. Lyrou, feeling herself at fault and pity for him, "It got you too?"

"Yes." he did his best to look composed.

"Why did you do that?" she blamed him.

"Drink. Eat a donut. You know, I thought you were going to preemptively spray me right there."

She looked over the sweets, obliged to take one appetite or not, choosing and plucking out a powdered jelly, "I wasn't. But I was scared."

Leaning back and doing his best impression of a man who hadn't any capsaicin bound to his TRPV1 receptors, "What's the topic of our meeting?"

"I've answered your questions, each day. How long does it have to go on?" she chewed and talked.

"Is it so taxing to answer one little question each day?" he shrugged.

"I don't even know who I'm answering." she objected.

"You'd feel better about answering my questions if you knew something about me?" he leaned in, "Or you'd have enough information to get an enforceable restraining order, maybe press charges if that doesn't put a stop to me?"

She nodded, "I don't want to talk to a stranger, not such personal things."

Richard leaned back, tapped the table, and smiled, "My mom... was an adult actress in the 70's. I'm myself a porn baby conceived on set that didn't get terminated like 99% do. I was 14 when it was brought to my attention by some boys at school that my mom looked just like the blowjob princess, the anal babe, the tip-seeking maid, and all these humiliating roles she'd taken in her previous life. My mom, the mother I thought I had was dead to me, and I was bereaved as if she had really died."

Lyrou winced at his info dump of dirt dug right down to his roots, at calling himself what he did, and at calling his mother what he did, "Mon Dieu."

Richard continued without a hiccup, "In shame, I ran away in the middle of the night, bus-by-bus and showed up at my dad's door in Los Angeles. I barely knew him, he tried to send me back to New Jersey but I refused. Unlike her, he hadn't turned away from the dirty VHS business."

Lyrou feeling the unfairness to his mom, "But unlike your mommy, you were not embarrassed by your daddy?"

"No. Isn't that funny? By grace of gender double standards, I was proud of my hired gun pop in a way. He'd ascended the ranks from dumb stage dick to running his own studio. He lured in wannabe movie stars who'd come to LA from around the world, and told them he could get them on the screen if he could get them out of their clothes. I came up seeing all of that. The male performers, I hung around with them like they were my big brothers. The female performers, I felt like the luckiest boy in the world in their company. I wanted to help, and as teenager from the first computer literate generation I learned how to navigate the dark web and maintain anonymity to sell his highest grossing releases; the illegal stuff."

Lyrou's mouth parting, "Illegal? What kind of illegal?"

"I was at 15 a year too young to face any big boy penalties; juvenile intake, a social worker, a night in a locked unit, released to my aunt, sealed records. Not my dad, though. The DA wanted to light his ass on fire, had eyes only for him. He got busted hard and was dragged off by the LAPD and FBI. I should've gone home to my mom, but I stayed in LA. I worked minimum wage jobs to save up tuition, and I shared a car and an apartment with a buddy of mine to cut expenses. I picked him up one night, he asked to pull into the gas station so he could grab a fucking candy, he said."

Lyrou intuited where this was going, "Non."

"A few minutes later he came out the door shot and bleeding. I hadn't even heard a shot, but he was shot all the same. And he collapsed. I got scared, threw it in reverse and I drove away. The cops had me in the station by morning. I was put away as an accomplice to armed robbery, the getaway driver, and an attempted murder charge because the clerk had shot him in self-defense. My roommate-turned-robber was in a coma, and when he came out of it he was too brain damaged to speak or remember anything. I got 40 years, no parole. I reconnected with my mom by correspondence."

Lyrou's eyes welled up now, and she allowed it as if it was lingering post-spray irritation, "You must've tormented her for her to think you would never be free in her lifetime. C'est horrible."

Richard remembered his mom's letters, "She wrote me about how she had no better options when she was younger, that she was naïve, and that she didn't enjoy any of it, that it was demeaning, that the scenarios and the sex wasn't hot from a normal female perspective, and that it was made for pig-men. Her point was that I shouldn't blame her, but blame the broken ass men who made her and consumed her. My mom did everything she could to raise money to overturn my conviction, but I gave up and settled into prison life. No, I neither sodomized nor was sodomized. Yes, I joined a White-exclusive gang to stay alive in the carnage of the incarcerated, hence the Nordic and Celtic clout ink." He pulled his shirt collar down to display his runes and crosses.

"I wasn't going to call you a homosexual or a nazi, Richard. But how are you here and not in a cell?" she held her hands out at the little donut shop as if it were the grandest epitome of freedom.

Richard cocked an eyebrow, "Thanks to my mom, my case was finally reopened by new evidence of my ignorance preceding the crime, and a weighing of the lack of evidence that I was a willing participant, and the judge ordered me released. But this was after 5 years of thinking I'd be a grey old man before I saw the outside again. After 5 years of survival; fighting, bartering, bribing, exercising endless hours, reading books, reading people like books, and hoping, I wasn't the same fresh young guy anymore."

Lyrou imagined how those 5 years transformed him, "Where did you go?"

Richard pointed his finger down in gesturing right here, "Mike and Luke, a couple of the male performers under whose wing I'd grown up, had since gotten queer-married and moved back to NYC. They invited me to stay with them until I could get on my feet. Back in Cali, working for my dad, they'd affectionately owned the slurs and their favorite was butt pirate."

Lyrou smirked and tilted her head, "Butt pirate? Ass raider?"

Richard snickered, "Ass raider implies like a top who's a temple treasure thief with a whip and a brown rabbit-felt fedora. No, they wanted to go for a maritime, in the navy, renegade-&-gayed, seamen-for-semen vibe. So, they had opened their own studio and called it Swashbuckler Productions. I was tall, lean, and jacked, so they asked if I would act. I told them if it was straight. They said no problem, straight scenes only for big Rich. They had me wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffed me to jail cell bars as female performers in cop costumes punished me so good."

Lyrou hand over her mouth, "Mon Dieu.."

Recollecting with a touch of pride, "They had me in star quarterback bangs the cheerleader roles, lumberjack discovers lost Trefoil Guild scout campers and gives them his wood, all that silly shit. Then out of nowhere Luke got throat cancer and died in 6 weeks. Mike was a shell and everyone saw he was ready to tap out. I slotted in and took over running most of the productions, and in time I took it all over with his blessing. I was honored, but I didn't want to make the same films my dad made obviously, or that Mike and Luke had made."

Lyrou realizing now, "You're a porn boss."

Richard nodding slowly, "My mom was right, women don't like skin flicks and stag films. Women don't like being in it, and they don't like watching it, because porn is made for men by men. What I really wanted was to amuse ladies, I don't say that facetiously. It became my curiosity-turned-creed. I wanted to make art that women would genuinely want to watch. I wanted women to want sex-on-screen. But for all my bluster of being a pussy magnet, I didn't know where to begin."

Lyrou putting it in safer terms, "You had writer's block."

Richard smiling, "For a long time, yes. Then I saw you in your misery, that angel of loneliness over your head, the patron angel of porn. In my digging, I could gather you've had such a cool clean life. Mine; crud from cradle to criminal, kink to camera. My mind is too filthy to ever understand what a good, normal, painfully isolated woman wants. I needed you to tell me. I had to have your mind. All the questions you answered, I followed to the letter, you have been my porn prophetess. You were my outside consultant, my secret window into the female fantasy."

In this minute Lyrou remembered the danger of all this, the danger of Richard, that he hadn't let her be still, and now she was here speaking to him, listening to him tell her about herself, "Secret window?"

Richard's posture straightened and his face glowed now, alive with excitement for... her, "My gratitude and respect, Lyrou. You have a taste worth acquiring." He stood, looking down on her still seated as if from high in a tree.

She looked straight up from her seat, how high over her he towered, "Are you going now?"

He pinched a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger, then letting it drop, "You won't get any more messages from me. I assure you. Farewell." And he turned to leave the donut shop, veering left and seeming to float off into the train station foot traffic.

Once Richard was clear and gone, Lyrou texted and they came from not far off to meet her in the same corridor she had met him, Julie and Nathalie. Taking Lyrou's hand and walking with her, noticing her reddened eyes and skin, Julie asked "A-t-il accepté d'arrêter de te harceler?" Nathalie also, "Est-ce qu'il va enfin te laisser tranquille?"

Lyrou exhaled, "Oui."

⚜

⚜

Late Morning Thursday June 28th, 2012

Lyrou had the condo and a coffee to herself. She fired up the desktop and popped it in the search engine; Swashbuckler Productions. The top search result was the link to the homepage. She plugged in her headphones and opened it, greeted by a warning, "Are you 18 years old and in a country that doesn't prohibit viewing of explicit sexual content? Yes - Enter on a welcoming green icon, No - Leave Page on a bold red icon.

She clicked to enter and was met with the tongue-in-cheek Jolly Roger logo, a cartoon pirate looking down his periscope into a wench's bursting cleavage, with the official tagline, "Hooked on Booty". She scrolled down to find several screenshots from Swashbuckler films, each with a fun synopsis.

The newest releases were arranged atop the page, and the farther down she scrolled the older the publication date. They went back years, and the very first were almost exclusively gay orgies with comically farfetched or lazily thought-through premises; a novice gangbanger gets street baptized and beat in... his ass. Or an undocumented pool boy gets taken on a floaty by the closeted gringo homeowner. Then as she rolled the page upward more heteronormative titles appeared, with higher view counts; honeymoon cruise, in detention hot for teacher, truck stop prostitutes, and other feasible but intriguing straight scenarios.

Swashbuckler was a business going for a wider market. Then she came to those videos that had been put on the site in the time since she had met Richard. The earliest of those made her heart skip to read; Bound and Spoon-fed. The screenshot featured a closeup of a woman's mouth open for an incoming spoonful of..

Clicking the screenshot she was met with a purchase page; a yearly subscription to the full site or a cheaper pay-per-rent specific titles. She wanted total access, she'd get the package deal. She entered her debit card details and just like that freely pressed play on each video that had her creative fingerprints.