(allegro)

Sketches of You, PART 1 (Allegro)

A story about love, trust, and a dog named Sebastian

This is a longer (60k+ word) story that leans pretty heavily into the "Lit" aspect of Literotica, so it may not be to everyone's taste. That being said, it does have some elements of erotica in it as well, so friends and family, be warned. It is structured like a concerto* (shoutout to the music theory nerds out there) and I will publish it in three parts. Even though each part fits best in a different Literotica category, I wanted to publish the whole thing in the same place, so I defaulted to 'Romance' since that's where my other stories are found and where this one ends up. It just takes a little while to get there. With those caveats in mind, I hope you enjoy it, and as always, I look forward to your ratings and comments.

CGN

*A concerto is a piece of classical music that typically has three movements: the

first (Allegro)

, sets up the main themes and introduces the solo instrument; the

second (Adagio)

, offers emotional depth and contrast; and the

third (Allegro)

, brings the piece to a dynamic conclusion.

CHAPTER 1

"Don't worry, Richard, there will always be a place for you at Karlson Industries."

It was both a statement and a dismissal. A statement about my value to the company where I had worked for the last twenty years. And a dismissal of the notion that my contributions to said company would ever be acknowledged or rewarded.

I left the office of Edgar Karlson the Second (or EK2 as I thought of him, both for brevity and to distinguish him from his son, Edgar Karlson the Third or EK3), the CEO of Karlson Industries and my father-in-law, in a bit of a daze. As the door closed on EK2 and his son, I could hear their laughter celebrating the appointment of the next generation of Karlson as the new CEO, succeeding his father at the beginning of the new year.

To be fair, I didn't think that their laughter was directed at me. I doubted that either of them even realized that my decade-long ambition to become CEO of the company had just been thwarted in a five-minute courtesy meeting. After all my careful planning, I didn't even have time to make my case or play my trump card. I was just called into the meeting, told to congratulate EK3, and then invited to leave.

Being overlooked for CEO was bad enough, but I was stunned at the choice of EK3 in my place. He was equal parts arrogant, oblivious, and incompetent—the kind of man who was born on third base but couldn't stop bragging about how he had hit a triple. He was a terrible manager and a worse leader who had the opposite of the Midas touch—anything gold that he touched turned to lead.

It should have been impossible for someone to make the wrong choice as consistently as he did, but somehow, he did it. He was a savant at making the wrong decision for the wrong reasons. It was like he had taken the lesson of Robert Frost's famous poem to heart and decided that he would always take the road less traveled, even when that road had neon flashing lights and warning signs saying that it led straight off a cliff. Time and again, however, EK3 avoided the consequences of his disastrous decisions by foisting the blame on someone else and taking credit for other people's successes.

The two divisions of Karlson Industries that he currently ran had over three times the turnover as the rest of the company, and they consistently missed on their profit and revenue targets. And yet, he was being rewarded by being made CEO.

To be fair, he did look the part of a CEO—tall and handsome, with an easy smile and a full head of hair. He wore tailored Italian suits, kept his collars and cuffs pressed, and his gleaming white teeth had seen more peroxide than a Hollywood starlet's hair. And despite his lack of any discernible skills or interest in learning, he had somehow managed to graduate with a degree in business, and he had an executive MBA from one of those East Coast MBA factories.

EK3 knew many fancy business words, and he wasn't afraid to use them. He would sit in senior leadership meetings and pontificate, "We need to focus on our value proposition and operationalize our customer-centric framework to capitalize on game-changing opportunities."

When asked for his view on a key issue, he would confidently state, "Let's take a deep dive into our scalable solutions to identify low-hanging fruit that can move the needle on our strategic alignment."

His philosophy of leadership could be summed up in one sentence: "Deals are made on the golf course and not in the boardroom." He made sure that he was out there making deals as often as he could. He was so dedicated to making deals that during the winter, he would often fly to fancy resorts in Hawaii or Mexico to pursue them—all on the company's dime, of course.

Rewarding EK3 with the top position at Karlson Industries was going to be a disaster.

To be fair, I didn't really care that much about the company itself. It was owned by the Karlson Family Trust, and they treated it like a giant piggybank to fund the family's lavish lifestyle. What I did care about, however, were the hundreds of families across the state who relied on paychecks from Karlson Industries to support their families and the thousands of retirees drawing a Karlson Industries pension. Those families relied on Karlson Industries and would bear the brunt of EK3's missteps.

Although I felt a profound loyalty to the people who made our company what it is, the Karlsons took a very different view. I couldn't remember the last time that I had seen EK2 or EK3 out on a shop floor or on site at a job. The details of the day-to-day operations of the company were beneath their dignity. In their minds, they were the munificent overlords of Boise, Idaho who anointed their subjects with employment and prosperity. All they asked in return was adulation and unquestioned obedience.

For myself, I tried to spend half of my time talking to the people in my division, from the newest and most junior clerical assistant through to my senior managers and directors. As the head of Karlson Electric (a division of Karlson Industries), my job was to keep my finger on the pulse of the team, to anticipate and deal with risks and challenges, and to find ways to make everyone's jobs smoother and easier. I made it so that team members could choose their own vacation times (within reason), and book sick days and doctor's visits as needed. As long as the work got done, I trusted my team to do the right thing.

Oh sure, there was an occasional malcontent who chose to abuse the system, but my team rapidly developed antibodies that eliminated those cancers before they had a chance to spread. EK3 would not have lasted a week in my division.

I needed time to think. I could have just holed up in my office, but I wanted to get away from the office, if only for a few hours. I knew that my wife and daughters met for lunch every Friday at Fettucine's, an upscale Italian bar and restaurant not far from my office, and I really needed so see some friendly faces, so I decided to join them. Getting some hugs would be an added bonus and would go a long way toward making me feel better about an otherwise miserable day.

I didn't know it then, but that lunch would change the course of many lives, including my own, but not in the ways that I could have foreseen. Sometimes it is the hardest lessons in life that force us to grow the most. To paraphrase Red in "The Shawshank Redemption", sometimes you need to crawl through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side.

------

I was eighteen years old when I had sex with Kelly Karlson for the first time. It was late in the spring of our senior year of high school. Kelly was pissed off with Braedon Jameson, her boyfriend-du-jour and star of the football team and I happened to be at the party where she saw Braedon making out with Diane Beasley. On a whim, Kelly decided that I would be the vehicle for her vengeance. What better way to get back at your boyfriend than by fucking the class nerd?

Kelly and Braedon were both at the pinnacle of our high school's social hierarchy. They were seniors, and the world was their oyster. Kelly came from the richest family in town—you couldn't drive more than a few blocks in Boise without seeing the Karlson family name prominently displayed on a billboard or on the side of a building. The Jameson family wasn't too far behind, and the two families were well-acquainted from parties at the club or private evenings with the Lieutenant Governor at his mansion.

I did not travel in such rarified social circles. I was an only child, the son of a single mother, and a scholarship student at our exclusive school. Early in my freshman year, my father had taken his own life, leaving me and my mom to struggle through on our own.

I had been very close to my father. He was a veteran who, like so many of his comrades-in-arms, had come home haunted by what he had seen and done in the desert. Sure, he suffered from depression and PTSD, but he was as loving and kind a father as you could have hoped for.

When he returned from his last tour, he took up martial arts to calm and focus his mind, and he started teaching me what he had learned while I was very young. I still use the techniques he taught me to calm myself when I am upset and to slow my racing heart. The fact that he was such a kind and calm man made it even more shocking when he took his own life. There was little to no warning. One week we were a happy family. The next, he hung himself in a motel room while traveling for work, without leaving so much as a note of explanation.

After my father's passing, my life consisted only of school and as much part-time work as I could find to help keep my family afloat. I needed to maintain the highest academic standard to keep my scholarship, while supplementing my father's meager military pension as best I could. I didn't get out much and, even when I did, I didn't have much in common with my wealthy schoolmates so was excluded from their social gatherings. By the spring of my senior year, not only was I still a virgin, but I had never even been kissed. I could only daydream about girls like Kelly from afar, and I avoided guys like Braedon like the plague.

So, when Kelly came over to me at that fateful party, grabbed my hand, and said, "Come on, let's get out of here," I just went with it. I had no experience with girls and couldn't even formulate a response before Kelly was pulling me outside and away from the party. It was still too early in the spring to spend time out in the cold, and ten minutes after we left the party, we were in the back seat of her car. Ten minutes after that, I was no longer a virgin.

I was overwhelmed and had no idea what I was doing. The thought of using protection never crossed my mind.

I didn't speak to Kelly for the rest of our senior year. Oh, I saw her around school and such, but as soon as Braedon "reclaimed" her (as I overheard him describing it to his teammates), her previous ambivalence towards my existence metastasized into an active and almost comically exaggerated hatred. Where before, I had just been one of many grayed-out faces in the B-roll of her life, now I was pushed into the spotlight and recast as a villain.

It's not like my life was great before my night with Kelly, but afterward it became almost unbearable. When the entire homecoming court decides to make your life a living hell, you best believe they can do so. My last few months of high school were spent trying to avoid a seemingly endless parade of bullying and humiliation. Pretty much the entire school learned that the easiest way to curry favor with the social elites was to make my life harder, and by the beginning of May, even my closest friends had abandoned me.

Things were grim, but I figured if I could just make it through the year, then I might have a chance to get away from Boise for college and make a new start. I made it all the way to June before things fell apart.

During the last week of school before exams, Braedon, in all his alpha male glory, decided that I needed a public beating. I am sure he thought I would be an easy mark since I weighed at least fifty pounds less than him and I wasn't a jock. But he brought a couple of friends along to help, just in case. He was not the kind of guy to fight fair if he didn't have to.

What he didn't know was that I had spent most of my life training in martial arts of one kind or another, first under my father's watchful eye and then, after his passing, at the local kickboxing club. It was the only outlet for the rage, grief, and loneliness that I felt after his death. While Braedon and his friends spent their time tossing footballs around and hitting the weight room, I spent my time trying to put my fists through punching bags and fighting endless rounds in the ring.

Unfortunately, real fights are not at all like what you see in the movies or on TV. Fighting three people at once is incredibly difficult and dangerous, no matter how skilled you are. A lucky punch from a muscled-up asshole can be just as fatal as a precision strike from a trained expert, and fighting three opponents meant three times the opportunities for a lucky hit. When you are fighting multiple opponents, you take at least one of them out as fast and hard as you can, and you worry about the consequences later.

Braedon's buddy Karl got an applied demonstration of that lesson. He was the first to rush me and the first to go down, with a shattered knee and dislocated kneecap. His other buddy Aaron didn't fare much better and was soon on the ground with a broken nose, mild concussion, and fractured orbital bone. I was later told that when he went to blow his nose at the emergency room, air leaked through the fracture and inflated his eye socket like a camping mattress.

By the time it was just Braedon and me, I was able to use more finesse, and I used an armbar to force him to the ground. I may have cranked on his shoulder a little harder than was necessary, but he walked away from our fight with no permanent injuries other than his bruised ego.

My life might have gone very differently if I had just laid down and taken the beating Braedon had planned to dish out. Someone from my part of town just didn't get to fight back against guys like Braedon, and we certainly didn't get to send two of the city's favored sons to the hospital, even if they started the fight. So, two hours later, the police arrived at our apartment and arrested me for aggravated assault, battery, and a laundry list of made-up charges, up to and including kidnapping the President and sedition. Braedon's family had a lot of sway in our county, and they weren't going to let anything as inconvenient as the facts get in the way of their vengeance on me.

That could and likely should have been the end of my story (and of this story as well,) but God decided to intercede on my behalf. He didn't do anything too flashy (I am sure he had way more important files on his docket than mine)—and there were no beams of light or angels smiting people with swords of fire. But he did see fit to make Edgar Karlson the First, scion of the Karlson family and controller of the family trust, a very specific kind of Christian. The kind who believed in hellfire and damnation. The kind who would not hesitate to disown a granddaughter who turned her face from God to have a child out of wedlock or, even worse, to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

The same Friday that Braedon and I had our encounter, Kelly was brought to the doctor because of a multi-day bout of nausea and vomiting brought on by a bad case of food poisoning. Or so they thought. When it was discovered that food poisoning was not the cause of her sickness, the family immediately moved to limit the damage that an unwanted pregnancy could cause. Kelly swore that she had never had sex with Braedon but admitted to her misadventure with me claiming that I had been the instigator of the entire thing.

As a result, a short while later, I found myself in a small room attached to the county jail with EK2 and his lawyer. EK2 looked at me over a small table and laid out two options.

"First off, let's be perfectly clear. You disgust me. What you did to my daughter was reprehensible, but we can't change the past. We can only look to the future. And your future looks mighty bleak, from this side of the table. Right now, you are facing enough charges to put you in jail for a good long time—we are talking decades not years. But I am here to offer you an alternative. It seems that you got my daughter pregnant and, as much as it pains me to admit it, she claims to love you."

That was news to me, but I chose not to interrupt.

"We can't have the father of our grandchild in jail, and my daughter can't have her child out of wedlock, so here is what is going to happen."

As he spoke his lawyer pulled out a small stack of papers.

"I have a wedding license for you and Kelly, back dated to earlier this Spring. It turns out that you kids were so in love that you couldn't wait to start your life together, so you got married but kept it secret from the family. But now that Kelly's pregnant you have decided to share your joyous news with the rest of the family.

"When you sign this license and the accompanying pre-nuptial agreement, several eyewitnesses to your fight will come forward to clear your name. If you don't sign, Kelly will come forward with the heart-wrenching story of how you raped her after a school party, and you will be convicted of sexual assault along with your other crimes. You have five minutes to make your choice. And just so we are clear, once you are married, if you embarrass my family in any way, you will not live to see your divorce."

I signed the documents.

For years afterward, I wondered why they forced me to go through with that elaborate charade. Although I will never know for sure, my guess is that they were worried that without the fig leaf of a wedding, the elder Karlson would disown Kelly anyway, despite the allegations of rape. He was the kind of man who believed that only sluts and whores go to parties where they know there will be boys, since boys will be boys.

Whatever the case, I decided that I would make the best of this offer. I was all too aware that if I stepped out of line, Kelly would progress from young mother to grieving widow.

------

It was an overcast day, so I grabbed an umbrella and let my assistant, Sheila, know that I was going out for lunch. Sheila was in her late fifties and had been with Karlson Industries for over thirty years, the past ten as my assistant. She was a bit of a throwback to a different time, fiercely protective of me and more of a second mother than an employee. She was surprised to see me going out at lunch since I rarely left the office on a workday, but she gave me a smile and said she would call if there were any crises brewing.

I opened my umbrella as I pushed through the front door and started walking toward the restaurant. It would have been faster (and drier) to drive, but I wanted to use the walk to clear my head and sort through some of my emotions. Walking also gave me a chance to drool over my latest obsession at the Volkswagen dealership that was on the way. I could see the row of brand-new California Oceans, their top-of-the-line camper van, from a block away. I know that some people prefer more traditional RVs with their larger interiors and fancier amenities, but for me, the California Ocean was perfection.

As a responsible husband and father, I could never justify the expense of buying one, but I loved just about everything about them. Now that the kids were almost grown, I daydreamed about traveling across the country in its understated elegance, exploring the backroads and hiking trails with my wife, Kelly, and our mutt Sebastian. It was only a dream, though, as Kelly had made it clear that she was not really the type to rough it in the wilderness. By the time I passed the dealership, though, I had a smile back on my face, and life didn't seem quite so bad.