Now I knew why I was paid double, it was Kai's way to say goodbye.
After reading Kai's note I was terrified of starvation for my family which was always close but was now right up in front of us. I had much to think on during the walk back home so I did not notice the rain. Lucky girl.
Earlier in the year, somewhere in the hellish game of pass-the-misery that is the new global economy, a very modern factory opened someplace, to strangle our local 50-year old factory. The stores where factory workers shopped soon closed. I worked for the cleaning service those stores used. Kai kept me on as long as possible, he said I was his hardest working and most dependable employee. He might have wanted me for a wife if he had the courage to ask and Father did not kill him. But now that was over.
I have worked part time for Kai since I was 10, to help feed my family. Two years ago I ended my schooling to work full-time at night so we could eat. When I started working full-time, Kai felt bad because I quit school, so he gave me a unused laptop computer. The wi-fi at one closed store still worked (it was hard-wired in, with a contract) and I had a password (I used to clean the office of stupid lazy managers who wrote on the wall) so I could connect if I was nearby, for as long as the power stayed on (also a contract).
Losing my job was a serious problem for me and my family; my meager pay was the only cash we took in. I lived with my unemployed widower father and my three younger sisters (14 year-old Bop and the 10-year old twins) at the outskirts of town. We were very poor, the house we live in was abandoned by the owner after part of it collapsed due to shoddy construction and an unfortunate misunderstanding with an elephant.
The home's original owner was an ill-tempered American expat who misunderstood what happens when you say bad things to somebody who has an elephant. Elephants can hear very well, and while they do not understand Americans they do understand their owners. This elephant went into the expats bedroom without the benefit of a doorway. There he did something very rude and smelly on the owner's expensive bed. After that the elephant left. You would too.
The American had left his home country after "the worst person imaginable" was elected president. (I am not sure if it was Clinton or a Bush.) He was a very unreasonable man who used bad words often. He had this house built. After "the elephant incident" he abandoned the house and moved to an island someplace, possibly the Seychelles where ocean-front property is cheap and elephants are scarce. He will probably give a shark indigestion someday.
Two or three days after the American left, Father was out walking his M-16 and a bag of chickens he found. At the time we lived in a tent and a small trailer home at the edge of the jungle. A man with an elephant told my father that somebody had abandoned a house. Perhaps the man thought that, with my father and his M-16 living there, the American would not change his mind and come back. We have lived in the house ever since; Father calls the former owner's bedroom - he has knocked out the two external walls and put up screens to keep out insects - our "four season" room. It is a dry place to play outside.
To help feed us, my unemployed Father goes into the woods looking for food, mainly he snared birds and shot monkeys using a atlatl (spear thrower), a compound bow or a crossbow (both bows may have been "borrowed"). He has M-16s, shotguns, and some pistols, but bullets are expensive and noisy. Father makes his own spears, arrows, and bolts, forging his own nasty twisty barbed points. Sometimes the birds he brings home look like tame chickens; he said they were "free-range" chickens that cost extra in a store but were sometimes found wandering, homeless. You know, they do taste good!
Father often talks of places like Wisconsin, where deer and geese and even giant turkeys run free, "like a supermarket on legs." He had heard of these wonders from an older uncle who traveled to an airplane convention there, and saw these impossible wonders with his own eyes, all on the same day. Also, Uncle swore they did not have a rainy season. We agreed it sounded too wonderful to be true.
We needed my income to buy things Father could not hunt for, like rice and salt. But without my job the food we had on our shelves would not last. We had no savings, and we owned nothing of value that we could sell, so we would all starve. It would be a tragedy, I was sure.
I did not eat that night, I crawled into bed very worried.
The next day, when my sister Bop came home from the library, I noticed she had a Jane Austin book. When I saw such books I always thought of arranged marriages. Suddenly I got an idea. We did have something to sell: my virtue! Not as a prostitute, Thailand has enough beautiful girls and pretty boys who look like girls plying that trade; I could not hope to compete in the flesh markets. But I could sell myself as a wife!
Muslims recognize "temporary marriage" which, if you think about it, is not much different from prostitution, except that it is written and blessed. Indeed, in some places, one can marry a temporary bride for a single night. Traditionally, the groom pays the father a lump sum at the start of the contract, and the groom pays the bride a lump sum at the end of the contract. This is written. Perhaps some such arrangement might save my family. But how to arrange such a marriage? That is where the laptop came into my inspiration.
I knew that in the west there were "dating websites." Places like India and Japan have "matchmaking websites" but I know of nothing similar here. In any event, I could not afford such things. However, I wrote and spoke the English taught in our schools, I was the best student in these courses. Plus I knew that English-language "erotic story" sites were read by many people around the world. I confess to reading such stories myself; since I did not go to school I considered it self-education, and since I did not date anybody reading stories in bed also helped fill another, more private need which you might guess.
My revelation was to combine these ideas.
In desperation I dashed out a poor story of a willing virgin with a deformed leg who seeks a temporary marriage to a man of modest wealth. She attaches her plea to an erotic story and posts it on a story site. The white man who reads the story and answers her is not muslim, but the idea of a temporary marriage to a woman of the Faith appeals to him. He is the college-educated son of a wealthy white landowner, with an office job in Bangkok. He has little hope of attracting a wife because his foot is deformed, and his scarred face is less than attractive. Plus he is white. In my story they meet and marry because the man wants a housekeeper/cook in his house during the day and a woman's body in his bed at night, when it is dark, for the usual purposes. Her deformed leg and his foot and face are not a problem at night, when she is serving as her Faith commands.
When they first meet the man is pleased with her ripe body, which he plans to use often for lust. But during negotiations he realizes he really wants a wife who will be "faithful as a muslim." The couple has a rocky start to the day-to-day parts of marriage, but with lots of sex at night - sex which they never fight about and both come to enjoy - it is successful. Over time they start to know trust, friendship and eventually affection. At the end they happily agree to extend the marriage another 5 years. People like happy endings so I hinted at a blessed event on the way (for female readers), and some kinky revisions of their sex contract (for male readers). They were thinking of holding a second marriage ceremony, only having it naked, with sex for friends! (Cliffhanger: would they find a naked Imam to officiate?) The promised second payment is made to the father instead of the wife, allowing the wife's sister to entertain a traditional arranged marriage. Rich people always have close relatives and friends. The plot left openings for additional sex stories, should they be needed. Maybe the younger sister will thank her sister's husband. Or maybe her sister!
There was a problem, while I could outline and write the story, I could not write a sex scene to save my life! I lacked experience, I had never even kissed a man.
I was desperate, so like my father I hunted - for sex scenes! The sex parts added to my story were mainly the hottest, most disgusting vaginal sex scenes which I adopted from other stories, as I have no personal experience. They included tongues and fingers going in disgusting places before, during and after the penis-in-vagina sex. I was very sorry I stole from other authors who thought of these disgusting things, but I really felt I had no choice. In every case I changed some things around, like when lips touch a breast, or a finger touches someplace special, or who kisses who. In one draft I actually mixed up who had the penis! But I caught that and changed it. Also, I always changed the name of the sex parts, thanks to clever people who have actually made lists of words for parts and actions.
Once I had 'bagged' the sex scenes it took me little time to modify/copy/paste the story. Then I sent it to two story sites.
