Dear Readers,
Its been a while and I really hope these next two were worth the wait! For the next two installments, I changed things up, well, I changed everything up, prose, genre, perspective, tense, etc. all things I wanted to experiment with and had yet to try. We left off with Dennis and Amy at the beginning of their road trip and pickup with Dennis continuing his story on the drive, where he takes us down another level, with Ashley telling her cautionary tale. I incorporated some new kinks, and some new themes. Instead of our traditional male sub protagonist, get read for a female sub protagonist. This chapter is a bit slow, but pay attention, it foreshadows what's to come in the next one and is meant to lay the groundwork of new themes and new characters along with a little world building for installments down the road.
As always, reading the previous installments is suggested but not necessary. Enjoy!
"Since it's going to be a little late when we get to the hotel, how about story time during the drive?" Amy inquired, she smiled wide, her eyes bulging just a bit.
"Not a bad idea, but I'm warning you now, I've only got one more chapter, so don't be surprised if I don't have time to crank out another one by tomorrow evening." He explained.
"Don't worry about it, I'll take my story tonight. Besides, we've got a busy weekend planned, and I doubt you'd have time to crank anything out, even if I did unlock you." Amy jested, punctuating the innuendo with a wink and a backhanded tap on the solid lump hiding under his pants. Dennis lazily went through the ritual of opening up the document on his phone, and as they whipped down the interstate in the amber light of the setting sun, picked up the story right where it left off last night.
'With trepidation, I sank to my knees and positioned myself between Ashley's legs. Using the most tender guiding touch, she grasped my hands and used them to fold my arms across her knees, then gently pressed my chin down onto my forearms.
"Good boy," Ashley cooed. "Now, for the cautionary tale of Christine, I guess I should start with a little bit of background..." she trailed off.
'Christine and I grew up on the same block, two houses apart in a small suburban enclave outside of Biloxi, Mississippi. Now, if you've never been there, which most people haven't, Biloxi is one of the bigger cities in Mississippi, although compared to what it's like here in the northeast, it would be considered a big township, not a city. Anyway, proximity was about the only thing Christine and I had in common, but it was enough to cause us to fall into a comfortable friendship, first from a young age, then on into adolescence.
By the time we hit high school, our differences had grown to extremes, as we each vehemently pursued our own teenage images. While Christine was the epitome of the good child, I began fashioning myself into a rebel against all that my parents held dear. At first glance, she was the Enid to my Wednesday in aesthetic and attitude, however our relationship lacked the vicious rivalry which was supplanted by a friendship bordering on kinship. Light and dark, yin and yang, our childhoods were spent bouncing between each other's homes and yards. We each served the other as playmate, confidant, and partner in crime.
As we grew older, our circles of friends grew more and more distant until we were the only overlap. It never caused much of a problem though. In such a small community, our respective cliques were more than hospitable to the occasional honorary outsider. The rift that ended up separating us began our senior year of high school, with Christine bound for a small religious college in Louisiana, while I railed against the education system with a weapon engineered around abstention. In place of school, I chose the strange counterculture of the underground rock scene, and by the end of Christine's first semester away at college, I was roaming the Southeast playing groupy to whichever band would drag me along to a new city. On our last encounter, Christine was a conventional beauty with the aesthetic of a down home southern girl next door.
She was short, probably around 5'4" with hair the color of a cornfield that just felt it's first cool autumn breeze, golden blonde with hints of soft brown that made her blue eyes glimmer like two crystal pools. Where I was mostly skin and bones, she was filled out in a way that was healthy and fresh, as if when the great creator had her on his slab, he decided he didn't need to ration his materials so tightly, that she deserved a little extra in every way that would flatter. The same policy that was applied to her body was evident in her face, high cheekbones, sharp but petite nose, yet her cheeks were full, her lips plump as if to suggest something juicy underneath the swollen flesh of a just ripe enough peach. At least, that's what she looked like when we parted ways for the last time before the fall of her first year in college.
We wouldn't see one other again until a strange coincidence forced the meeting about 7 years later. By that time, my travels had landed me in Tampa Bay, where I'd moved in with a guy that had latched onto me like a deer tick somewhere in North Carolina. At some point between there and Tampa we fell into the type of naive love, if love could be the word to describe it, that can only exist in the spotlight of hard drugs and co-dependence. Tampa wasn't so much an attempt to settle down so much as it was a crash landing. It was a place we ended up, not someplace we intentionally arrived at, someplace to get our shit together just long enough to get into the sky for another crash landing somewhere else. It was a pretty brutal relationship. Abuse went both ways, lots of cheating, that sort of thing.
My "boyfriend" if you could even call him that, did odd labor jobs and guitar lessons at a local music shop to come up with his end of the rent. I danced at a topless bar four nights a week, which should have been enough to cover my living expenses if it weren't for the growing opiate habit I was developing, so I had to work at a few different restaurants a few days a week as a server as well. It was right around the time that prescription opiates, my drug of choice, were suffering from a supply crisis created by government crackdowns and fancy pharmacy software, the rise of heroin being the inevitable conclusion. Between the skyrocketing price of pills and the awful quality heroin that Florida is known for, I was almost always scraping along on empty.
Despite the stigma associated with it, I enjoyed dancing. My innate sexuality combined with a little talent made me a pretty good living on the pole, made better by the little extras I could pick up in darkened rooms and the club parking lot after hours. To top it all off, dancing seemed to be the only thing that took my mind off the stomach cramps and cold sweats that almost always seemed to be lurking around the corner. By the end of the first year, I'd amassed a decent crowd of regulars, the manager let me pick the best shifts, and often the owner tried to cajole me into taking the revolving door of new girls under my wing. It was early or mid October, because I distinctly remember browsing Halloween themed stripper ensembles when the owner came up to me trailed by a meek looking woman quietly padding along in his shadow.
She was fairly short, wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans that obscured her figure as best they could, but failed to hide how dangerously skinny she was. Her shirt was somehow almost too big, yet dangerously too small in all the right places. Its collar was gone entirely, so it drooped down low across her cleavage and hung off of one shoulder. The faded Metallica logo on the front was cut short, just above her bellybutton. The jeans she wore looked as if they were made for someone else, the fabric swayed in odd places and seemed like the only thing holding them on was a patchwork of adhesive hidden under the threads.
When she walked, the frayed waistband would catch her boney hips just enough so they didn't fall down, as if they were floating around her waist giving her the appearance of a belly dancer with a southern flair. She had a worn and weathered olive green messenger bag draped over her shoulder and across her body. The tattered strap cut a valley between her breasts, and the two mountains rising to either side of it dwarfed the rest of her features. Clear outlines of her nipples were visible through the formless shirt displaying her sharp nipples and the ringed jewelry piercing them. Her blue eyes had an intense, yet vacant feel, and when the lights of the vanities played their tricks, only a deep unsettling bluntness was revealed. Short Blonde hair sprouted from her head as if only recently planted and allowed to germinate and the distinct yet casual lack of styling cemented my assumption that this woman was far more accustomed to baldness. Below her sunken cheeks and faint, distant smile, there was an elusive sense of familiarity that compelled me to stare.
"Hey Ash, this is Princess. She's starting tonight and could really use someone to show her the ropes." Tony, the owner of the club, explained in his broad New York accent. Part of me wanted to ignore the request, but something beyond my comprehension made me agree. It certainly wasn't the middle aged greaseball owner, but something less overt in the woman before me that seemed to call to me. I showed her to the vanity next to mine, then gave her a quick tour of the maze of hallways and rooms utilized by the staff.
She didn't speak much, never without being prompted, and it was as if she was so used to the expectation of silence that speaking out of turn caused physical pain. When she did speak, the movement of her upper lip caused the thick three quarter ring in her septum to bounce and twitch. Her gauged tongue piercing flashed between her teeth, and it was clear that it was guilty of generating the artificial lisp that barely escaped my notice. Even though I knew this woman would be pushing in on my territory as the only alternative dancer at the club, I couldn't help but show her kindness that was otherwise foreign to me. I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew her from somewhere. Most of my time on the road was a blurry haze, a fast life made artfully opaque by drug use and an ever shifting crowd, and there were often times where I'd meet a person two or three or even four times before committing their face to memory and tagging it with a name.
"So, is Princess your real name?" I asked her. "We really suggest that you choose a stage name, mine is 'Lilith' or Lilly for short, but I generally don't mind being called my real name Ashley when we aren't out front."
