Linda stared at the text message. She and Josh had been social networking buddies for almost a year now. They had met because they shared an intense love of one of the games there. They had begun to battle for supremacy and share assets as well. Then they had actually started to chat on messenger there.
Just a couple of months ago when she went on holiday they had exchanged contact details outside of the social network since part of her vacation was swearing off the game for two whole weeks. It was torture and only Josh's text updates on his progress and that of friends and rivals had kept her going during that time.
Over that time they began to discuss things outside of the game too. Linda had been more than a bit shocked to learn that Josh was into kinky sex stuff. It just did not seem like the polite, intelligent, young man that she had come to know.
Her own sexual experience was woefully limited. Twenty years married to her high school sweetheart and only sex partner. Over the years, he had blamed her and her weight gain for his decreasing interest in sex. Not that his interest in sex had actually decreased as she discovered later, just that he was getting it somewhere else.
After years and years of that subtle mental abuse as she had come to think of it, her self-esteem and sexuality were eroded away to nothing. In the whole two years that they had been divorced she had not gone on a single date. Not one. The reason was simple...she could not even imagine finding the strength to get naked with another human being.
That was actually how all this had begun...the talk about sex. Josh had asked why she was always around the gaming site. Didn't she go out on the weekend? She had reluctantly admitted that she did not. Her friends were all married and she just was not into the dating scene. Of course, he wanted to know why. And the whole story had come out then. About her marriage, the infidelity and her insecurities.
His response had shocked her. CFNM he attested was the answer to her dilemma. She had never even heard of such a thing. Clothed female, naked male. She reluctantly admitted that the idea did present interesting possibilities. He explained that it was one of his favorite fetishes. That the idea of walking around naked in front of a fully clothed woman, especially a more mature one, always got him excited.
They had though moved back to the more comfortable subject of the game. But Linda found herself intrigued by this new idea. She found herself occasionally thinking about what it would feel like to have a naked man walking around the house, while she remained safely clothed. And if that man were younger, intelligent and handsome? She had to admit that the situation held definite possibilities.
She even began to fantasize about it. About him. She would masturbate almost every day to the idea of this young man walking around her apartment naked. About eating dinner together with him naked. Sitting on the couch together, watching television, talking...with him naked. About playing the game that had brought them together as friends...with him naked. Did he? Did he ever play the game naked? Did he ever masturbate while they played thinking about her fully clothed? She wanted to ask, but lacked that kind of courage.
Josh sent her links to a couple of erotic stories on the subject. Even though they were written exclusively from the male point of view, she began to imagine what those women must have felt. The excitement of having these young studs make themselves vulnerable like that...for their pleasure.
It might have well gone on like that forever...a shared, unspoken, hidden fantasy...except for that day. There are those days in everyone's life, days that are so pivotal that you can never forget them. Days that change you forever.
It had begun commonly enough. She had gotten up, showered, dressed and gone to work at the restaurant that she managed. The lunch crowd had been heavy, but it was Friday so that was to be expected. She was busy counting up money and preparing the bank deposit in the back office when they barged in. Three men in masks. Linda had given them the money. All she could think about was saving her life...and her staffs'. When they locked them all in the walk-in freezer, she was certain that they would be killed. But instead the men had simply disappeared.
The next few hours were a haze of EMTs and police. She had been interviewed at least three times, telling her story over and over to the cops. It was almost midnight by the time that she got home. She made herself a tall glass of red wine. She sat down in her darkened living room and just cried. She could be dead right now. Her staff could be dead. They could all just as easily be in freezers in the morgue.
What then? Linda was not sure what she believed about the afterlife. She had been raised Christian, but years in the church had shown her that Christians were the nastiest, most judgmental, two faced people you would ever meet. She had toyed with the idea of reincarnation, coming back to live life again. But considering how hers had gone, she was not so certain that was a good thing.
Staring down the barrel of those guns she had faced the mess that her life had become. She was not living. She was not sure she was even surviving. She worked and she played online games. She had a handful of friends but those had grown distant since the divorce. It was as if her friends were afraid that infidelity and divorce were contagious. Or perhaps it was just that she no longer had as much in common with those middle class housewives. The hard truth was...she was alone.
In that freezer as she rallied her staff, tried to keep their spirits up, cared for the elderly maître' d and the very pregnant waitress, she had begun to weight out her life. And it seemed abysmally lacking. Lacking in real purpose. Lacking in excitement. Most of all lacking in human companionship. Simply lacking. Sitting there in the dark, all of that seemed to consume her as the alcohol blurred her already tired and overwrought senses.
