New Beginnings

This follows on from https://www.literotica.com/s/elizabeth-339-invitation-only-ch-01

My apologies for keeping you waiting between chapters.

*****

In 1964 two smart men coined the word 'petrichor' to name the smell after rain. Specifically, the smell relating to the geosmin released from the soil following rain, rather than the ozone laden smell before the rain. After last night's gentle rain I wake to the serendipitous petrichor of this particular morning, wondering whether there is a similar name for the confused emotional hangover that remains after a good cry. "Lacriblution" I create from lacrimation and ablution. "Definition; the hangover feeling you get after crying all of your shit out." I test the word aloud and decide it sounds silly. Almost as silly as I feel this morning after my gushy homecoming.

Thankfully, I am alone with my embarrassment. Lisa is up already with the children. I can hear them going about their day already. I remember making love last night. Probably the first time in many years that it wasn't more like fucking. I remember talking for hours in the hot tub. I remember crying and talking and Lisa's questions and my awkward tentative steps into life as an emotional person. The intimacy of it embarrasses me still. I'm trying to internalise these memories when I am interrupted.

"Morning lover, I have coffee."

"Thanks." It's hot and sweet and dark.

"Oh... Feeling a bit awkward I guess?"

"Hmmm."

"You'll get used to it."

"It's good to feel something."

"That it is." She smiles wickedly and runs a hand up my hairy leg to rub my morning hardon.

"Kids are busy..." she raises an eyebrow in question and I put my coffee on the side table in answer. This brave new world has its perks it seems.

Afterwards she lays against my chest with me still inside her and talks about a trillion things, melodically flitting from one notion to the next, none of which I really listen to. I am nodding as she fumbles with my chest hair and I'm suddenly frightened by my lack of attention. Am I disconnecting again so quickly? I relax realising that I'm simply enjoying the intimacy of the moment.

I stir again inside her and she rides me to another orgasm. She gathers herself and with a gentle laugh, she rises, dribbling our creation onto the bed.

"Well I guess I'm washing sheets this weekend... Looks a bit like we lost a custard chucking competition."

We laugh and the weekend starts.

Just moments later, I'm mowing the lawn and it's Sunday afternoon already. The kids giggle in the pool and splash noisily with my lovely wife and all is good in my world. I feel the first frown creep across my face as the working week begs for a portion of my attention.

What will Monday bring with Susan? She saw me in the club. Do I even mention it? Will she even turn up? How did Lisa rationalise this? Oh, that's right, ripples. "Throwing stones into a lake makes waves. Some are big and wash things all around, some are just pretty circles on the water. You can only control what stone you choose and how you throw it then hope for pretty ripples." Warm sunlight and a droning mower swallow me back into suburbia for a few more moments.

...

I realise that I am nervous when I notice my hand shaking on the biro I'm holding. I will it still but it defies me and I put it down.

"Good morning boss. Cappuccino." Susan bubbles into the office.

"Ahem, Morning. Thanks."

She puts the mug on my desk and tackles me in a grossly untidy display of affection. "No, thank you." She breaks from kissing me long enough to speak, "It was everything to me, having you watch."

"Oh, um. I was a bit worried after..."

"Shut up and fuck me."

I oblige.

"Hold my throat." She offers tips insisting on much rougher play than usual. "Pinch my nipples... slap my arse... fuck me hard."

Sometime later, the phone rings. We are lying sweaty on the floor. Naked she rises and answers it. She has fluid down her legs, not semen but her own flooded wetness and our clothes are spread all over the office. The mess of it all adds to the aberration and I struggle not to clean up. "Enjoy the ripples..."

"Certainly Mrs Smith, I'll get him for you," Susan hands me the phone, "Your wife Joe."

"She showed up then?"

"Yeah."

"You two ok after the other night?"

"She's sucking my dick so I guess so."

Susan makes a horrified 'oh my god' face around the knob of my cock and freezes mid-suck.

"Gross Joe, details love... I like you sharing your adventures but I don't need the blow by blow - eww, pun not intended. Just ringing to remind you we've got dinner with the Millers this evening. You know what, put Susan on."

I hand the phone to Susan.

"Hi..."

"Seven..."

"Tie uhuh, cufflinks, okay, O'Riordans on 5th..."

"Haha, no risk of that."

"Bye."

"Hello," I take the phone back.

"Susan will update your calendar and get a gift for Stuart. Try and get some work done okay?"

"Okay, love you."

"Ha, It's still good to hear you say it but I don't know if it counts when you're getting head from your secretary... Love you too."

"No risk of what?" I hang up the phone and inquire of Susan.

"Haha, she said 'He's mine, use him well but don't fall in love with him.'"

It's almost morning tea time when Susan and I finish fucking. I sit naked at my desk. Susan lays across it panting equally naked

.

"Elizabeth sends her regards."

"Oh?"

"She has quite an interest in you."

"Ok."

"I wasn't certain how to feel after my um... 'show', so I spoke with her later. She said you were equally disturbed and aroused."

"You could say that."

"I need that sometimes you know. The rough, the pain, the reality of it. All week I am a grey little bird making all the right chirping noises. But at Elizabeth's I am whoever I want to be and people take notice."

"Geoff?"

"He is a lovely grey part of my life too. I don't think he'd be able to share that world with me. He's pretty vanilla. But you - you came into that world so I don't have to hide from you anymore. That's a massive relief."

"Hide from me?"

"Be Miss Missionary, Plain Jane, hashtag secretary, hashtag office fuck."

"Oh, are you resigning?"

"No silly. I need my grey life too."

"Good, I couldn't replace you. You know my business as well as me."

"And I suck a mean cock."

"Ha, that you do."

"Sooo... At the club I am Heather."

"What?"

"It's my play name. You'll have to choose one too eventually I guess."

"Ok. Sounds a bit childish."

"Hmm. It gives a little anonymity and clarity. Puts a line between reality and play."

"So Elizabeth isn't really her name either?"

"For a highly educated businessman you can be a little slow sometimes..."

"It's a lot to internalise. Just last week I was happily married, casually fucking my secretary then I find this crazy fuck club where everyone is ..." I gesture exasperation. "My world is out of order and I'm trying to put the pieces of the jigsaw back together without really knowing what it's a picture of. On top of that I seem to have cracked some personal wall and found emotions that are really hard to control and understand."

"Baby steps then... Heather wears a collar. Sometimes it's a pretty lace scarf, sometimes it's a dirty leather dog collar, sometimes a simple necklace. Susan never wears anything around her neck. When I am Susan, I am that grey little secretary and I want to hide. Even from you some days please. When I am Heather, treat me like Heather Ok?"

"Ok."

"Heather likes to be told what to do. She likes her boss, bossy. Can you manage that or do I have to constantly lead you around by your dick?"

"I can try."

"Good, Susan has a lot of tidying up to do; Heather wrecked your schedule... We'll talk more if you have questions, otherwise Elizabeth is keen to meet for lunch soon."

"Okay then."

"Oh, and don't be afraid to call for Heather occasionally on the intercom, sometimes she gets very bored shuffling paper and phone calls."

She smiles demurely and winks as she gathers her clothes and again becomes Susan, the well-groomed, grey suited secretary. As she wanders from the office I watch flashback pictures of her in my mind. She's tied to a chair screaming with electric probes in her vagina and anus. Forced to orgasm so violently she spurts onto the glass wall.

It's hard to think about finance and business with her taste still in my mouth so I flick through emails, procrastinating.

While I'm reading reports and figures a new mail notification pops up and I check. It's a note from Elizabeth. "I hope you don't mind, Susan was kind enough to give me your email address. I have enclosed some documentation on the tests your doctor will need to finalise and hope that you can find some time to meet for coffee this afternoon. I have so much to tell you and very little time before Friday. I'd like my new pet to be well trained before I present him to my friends... Perhaps you are familiar with the small café on the wharf at central? Reflections it's called and seems a likely place for us to reflect on a lovely night and make some plans for another play date."

"Your 'pet' acquiesces... I look forward to coffee." I reply curtly.

I ponder the attachments, most I already have complete.

I page Susan, "Susan, can you schedule a visit to Doctor Rogers at his earliest. Standard scans and a physical of sorts. I'll forward paperwork."

"How does three pm sound? I took a liberty and made a tentative appointment. If you're agreeable, I'll confirm."

"..."

"Boss, I'm sorry, have I over-stepped?"

"No, no, I'm feeling a little..."

"Runaway? Hijacked? I'm not meaning to push, just a little excited that you'll be joining us. I can cancel and let you have time to think."

"What's to think about? Three pm is good. Have you been able to fix my schedule?"

"Almost. Are you meeting Elizabeth?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll simply clear the rest of the day. That will give you time for coffee and doctors and back to work proper tomorrow okay?"

"Okay."

A new email from Elizabeth flashes on the corner of my screen.

"Now, now... Perhaps, "friend" is more suitable to my pet's delicate sensibilities. In any case, I'd like my new friend, to be as well informed and confident as possible so there are no rude surprises for him. Is Susan being helpful with appointments etc? I gave her some instructions to make Heather available to you as well. You will enjoy Heather as much as I do I hope."

"I have a feeling you will present me with more enigma than information. I do prefer 'friend', I was petulantly rankled by pet... but I think that was most likely your intention? Susan is being quite helpful if just a little bossy. I've been told about Heather and look forward to making her acquaintance." I shoot off in reply.

The control panel for my careful, sanitary world seems to be flashing lights and shouting, "Danger Will Robinson." I can't slow it down or steer it and quite frankly I am more anxious than I remember being for a long time. I took just one sideways step from my beaten path through life and have stumbled into some seedy alley where my wife talks with my secretary, who conspires with my fuck club acquaintance to run my schedule.

Susan straightens my tie as I leave and wishes me well. "You'll be fine Joe, she's lovely."

The taxi window shows me a foreign world. Strange people on the other side of a glass wall going about ordinary lives, hollow and vacant and automatic. How many times have I poked them like fish in a bowl just to fuck with their scripts and watch them wriggle in dissonance? I smile at the thought and Lisa's words, "Perhaps this is just who you are? Who says that it is wrong?" I'm not sure that I am 'wrong' but I'm a little overwhelmed by this new compassion and wish I could retreat back inside the safety of my old walls. I feel raw like a knight suddenly without his armour.

I wonder what made Lisa so smart with emotions as I consider her words, "Vulnerable is good, it means you are participating in a real world, you will be hurt, you will be healed, you will win and lose. As good as you feel, you will feel bad, as high as you fly you can fall. But ultimately, you are feeling now and that is being alive. Think on the rock Joe Smith; it is safe, unchanging, reliable and strong but it's also lonely, forgotten and dead. To know this world you need to be the rose; fragile, vulnerable, constantly growing and changing, resilient with thorny defences and above all, beautiful, changing and alive."

A new thought strikes me about these fishbowl dwellers. How many of them are like Susan, putting on a grey suit for the world and secretly living as Heathers when it takes their fancy? I wonder how the world sees me. I have hidden well in my own grey suit for so long I don't know who this is growing out of it now. What will I become? Or am I just constructing another puppet to put on a new show. I hope against hope that I am becoming a truer me. A new one that could have been all along had I not been so terribly tortured.

I close my eyes and see that 'boy' of me, hunkering in a confessional, speaking of sins which are not truly his but which condemn his carers. He looks much like my son and an anger I've repressed lest it overwhelm me in its magnitude rises from the depths of me... I would not suffer what was done to that small version of myself to happen to my son. How the fuck do I suffer it's continued punishment of my inner child? He's just as small and defenceless and needs protection from the very people who were supposed to be offering him that care and protection.

I see a cathedral spire in the distance and the hate boils in my heart. "St Patricks please. I've remembered another appointment. Is it much bother?" I ask the driver.

"Not at all. It's along the way. I can even wait."

We roll to a halt some minutes later in a long cobbled driveway on the church grounds. I'm not sure what I'm doing here but I'm struck by the familiar quiet and 'home' of it. I spent every morning in mass here. I lived next door in the orphanage. I sobbed tears on these wooden pews. I knelt in this confessional. My footsteps echo in the empty cathedral. The cloud of hatred and anger gathers around me like growing fog and suddenly I'm standing in front of the alter, looking up at an angry god on a cross. I can imagine a smaller me standing on this spot beside me so I take this small boys hand and open my heart loudly in prayer.

"Fuck you!" My voice is loud and rings back at me from every corner. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you, you."

"As god of my own world I promise you this," I wave an angry finger at the crucifix on the wall. "I will buy this so called holy ground and bulldoze this den of iniquity into a rubble grave. I will put an end to the cunts that serve you, you angry hateful fuck."

"Sir, please..." A white robed man confronts me.

"Ah fuck off..." I'm spent. Shaking still and precipitously close to some new 'lacriblution' I leave. The cab is quiet and I'm back inside my fish bowl.

"Light a candle?" the cabbie guesses.

"Something like that." In my mind the whole building is on fire.

...

I see two small sparrows fighting on the oiled wooden boards. A potato chip divides them and they dance and bounce. The wharf is one of those reclaimed docks projects where old shipping precincts have been turned into trendy shops and clubs. The smells of mud and sea water, nearby trawlers and fuel depots remind me this was once a harbour city, existing only as a seaport and sprawling out around it as people required services and those services required more people and so on ad-infinitum.

A Hemingway sort of romance pervades what was once just a place of sweat and toil and sheer hard work. Rigging rings against masts and water laps against the moored vessels. They're mostly yachts now, not fishing boats as they once were. The sound of my feet 'clonking' on timber which must be hundreds of years old and from far off lands, tweaks a wanderlust in me. Part of me wants to sit on the deck with my legs swinging over the side and dangle a line in the water and another part knows I couldn't eat anything I caught anyway for fear of the harbours pollution.

The little shops were once fish markets, offices and goods stores and have been graced with a little paint and tidy up on the outside but damned heritage laws prevent any profound improvement externally. It's like going back in time from the busy neon street of the inner city some hundred meters away into a pirate movie cast full of hipsters. New age anachronism at its peak.

I'm early, so I order coffee from the twenty-something boy with his hair in a style that looks like he is part pigeon - part woman. He's pleasantly mannered so I don't mention his desperate man-bun and his similarity to a cockatiel.

"I'm expecting company. If a lovely woman about my age asks for a man called Joe, can you point her to my table please."

"Ah, Joe. She's here already, let me show the way."

He walks through the small shop to an alfresco area on the boardwalk. Elizabeth is reading. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face in a simple ponytail and she wears reading glasses. Fine fingers clutch a small novel thoughtfully and she sips water from a tall glass. Her smile is the first thing to find me, her eyes following the footsteps that announce me.

"Joe..."

"Hi."

She gestures to the seat across from her. "You're early."

"I was meeting someone special, got ahead of myself."

"You're good for the ego Joe Smith."

"You're healthy for the eyes my friend."

I look her up and down, she projects demure and classy, yet bundled like a cat ready to spring from grace to action. She wears a simple black skirt and a plain cream blouse that accentuate every curve she has by understating them dramatically.

"Oh Joe, If I could train men to do that with their eyes, I'd be very rich."

"Oh sorry."

"Sit, I half thought you may think better of meeting so I bought a book. Have you read E.L James at all, her works are playful."

"Um, 'Shifty fades of cliché?"

"Indeed." She smiles and it lights her face. I can't know why I wish to please this woman but I do.

"It's fun reading but ultimately flawed. The roles too concrete, lacking in communication and growth."

"My wife calls it a 'chicks flogger'."

"Should be sold with a sock..." She puts the book on the table and makes eye contact at last. I drink it in. "Do you like this place?"

"I'm not sure. It's very Hemingway with a dash of soy latte."

"I come for the latte, stay for the Hemingway."

Our eyes find the horizon together and play on the masts and boats and imaginations. A comfortable silence builds and I sip my coffee.

"You don't know this obviously, but many years ago I lived here."

"Here?"

"Yes, I was homeless for a period. The docks were busy and functioning, no-one thought to look underneath the boardwalk for runaways."

"You were a runaway?"

"I had a lovely family. I had nothing to escape from but boredom. I had met some children my own age who were very exciting and wild and lived in that world. I thought I'd chase the romance and try it on for size."

"Oh..."

"I went home after I was assaulted by a drunk. The romance sort of dried up."

"Oh..."

"You're a very well-spoken individual aren't you?"

"Ha. I'm not sure how to cope with so much personal disclosure. I'm very new to this compassion thing."

"A few days old in fact."

"Well. I guess. Susan? Said something?"

"Joe, my sources are far deeper than your little sparrow." She slides a manila folder across the table. "I don't want you to feel violated but I want you to know how seriously your company in our circles is appreciated. We want to know about you, want to grow you, to be a kind of family. So, we do some research."