This is Part 10 of the
Survivor Revival Challenge
,
organized by Tara Cox. This is the story of Jim & Marybeth, and eventually others, of course. You can expect daily installments.
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Jerome has seen the pictures of Marybeth. He picks her up.
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Finally! Marybeth was alone. She could relax.
Marybeth had shared the taxi Eric took to the airport, and he was on the airplane, flying back to the States. Denis was still busy with Sally, who had extended her stay for a second week, and he was even
complaining
to Marybeth that Sally was relentless, draining him dry every day, twice a day, and thrice on Sundays. Jim was off on a field trip with his anatomy class (what kind of field trips do anatomy classes take, she wondered?), and she was ALONE. She was surprised at how good it felt, finally to be alone.
She had made love with Eric every day of his visit, the price she had to pay for dumping him, after she had made the mistake of getting engaged to him. Sally had helped out, also sleeping with Eric quite often, and so had Hélène, so Eric had enjoyed the sexual time of his life, and that softened the blow, she hoped, of losing the love of his life, namely her.
Marybeth knew that Eric, handsome, talented guy that he was, would have no trouble finding another girl to take her place. It might take a while, but it would happen. Paris had changed Marybeth. She just wasn't anymore the girl that fell into paroxysms of joy when Eric had proposed. She had become a full-blown woman, one who had explored her sexual boundaries, and behaved in ways she never thought she would, could, or had even imagined.
Now she could relax! It was a five-day holiday, she had no schoolwork, and for once the weather was nice. She sat outside at one of the grand cafés of Montparnasse, where many famous writers and philosophers had once also enjoyed a coffee, or a drink, or whatever. She had a book, but she enjoyed more watching all the people walk by. Humanity was so very varied.
Marybeth was taken aback, when her idyll was disturbed. An American man, speaking English, asked if he could join her at her table? She had never seen him before, and there were lots of empty seats, so it made no sense for him to want to join her. Before she could politely say no, she needed to be alone, he spoke.
"I'm a friend of Eric. I sat next to him on the airplane over here, from New York. He spoke highly of you, and showed me pictures of you. I'd love to sit with you just for a bit; I only have fifteen minutes. Would you mind, terribly? I'm Jerome, by the way," he said. That changed things.
"Pictures? What pictures did he show you?" Marybeth, always the suspicious one nowadays, asked. Since she replied, even if it was only by asking a question, Jerome sat down. He ordered a beer, even though it was 11AM.
"What pictures did he show you?" Marybeth asked again.
"Oh, you know. Pictures of you. He was proud to be your fiancé," Jerome replied.
"He no longer is. We broke up," Marybeth said.
"I'm sorry to hear it. He seemed like a great guy," Jerome said.
"He is a great guy. I'm not a great gal, however," she said. Then she repeated her question, a third time: "What kind of pictures?"
"Oh, you know, the kind of pictures boyfriends take of girlfriends, that sort of thing," Jerome said, with a dismissal wave of his hand. "It looks like they were taken inside one of the rooms of the Hotel Bristol."
Oh, my! This guy was good! He knew enough about Parisian hotels to recognize the interior of a bedroom of the Bristol? Admittedly, it was one of the most exclusive of the Parisian hotels, but still! Eric didn't know where the pictures had been taken, so he could not have told Jerome. Marybeth was impressed.
Marybeth bit her lip. She now knew what pictures Eric had shown this man. He was around 30, or 35, maybe older, also over six feet tall, like Eric, and had a fit body. He would have been handsome were it not for his ears. She wondered if he could flap them and fly, like the elephant Dumbo, her favorite Disney character when she was a child?
Jerome's ears kind of disarmed him, and made him look lovable, and not like a jackass trying to pick up a bimbo of whom he had been shown naked pictures by her asshole former fiancé on an airplane! He looked at his watch. Maybe he really did have a place to go?
Marybeth felt as if she had to assume Jerome had not only seen pictures of her naked, and even posed in hopelessly sexy poses, showing all of herself, but that probably he had even seen the obscene ones, too. Yet he had somehow managed to look at her face in the pictures, not just at her tits, pussy, and ass, and even enough to recognize her, here in Paris, sitting at a café.
Most men would have had to see her sitting there, naked, with a big black dildo sticking out of her cunt, to have recognized her from the pictures. This guy must have also looked at her face!
She had thought a week without sex here in Paris was just what the doctor ordered, and yet here was Jerome, out of the blue, a kind of farewell "gift" from her ex-fiancé Eric, who was flying home with her engagement ring in his pocket.
"Marybeth, I don't have much time. I'm in the business of reviewing restaurants, and I have to go out of town to review a Michelin Guide three-star restaurant, out in the champagne country. It's around an hour's train ride outside of town, maybe a little more. I think it would be much more effective if I had a beautiful woman on my arm, and I could pretend simply to be wining and dining a date, rather than being there to evaluate the place," Jerome said.
After pausing, Jerome elaborated, "It's a good cover, you see, and that way they won't suspect I'm a food critic and be trying just to please me, but rather they would be treating us like any other American tourist couple. All your expenses would be paid, including a night in one of the best hotels in Reims, if you would agree to be my date?"
Marybeth just looked at him. Was this guy nuts? Did he expect a line like that to work on her? To be fair, only a couple of months earlier she was a country bumpkin from Flora, Indiana, and such a line might well have worked on her. Plus, Jerome was ten years older than she was, at the least, and maybe twenty years older at the outside. True, she had often fantasized about dating an older man. Not too much older, though, only around ten years, or fifteen, tops. That is, someone just like this guy Jerome: He was one of her fantasies, come to life, now, wasn't he?
"I'm sorry to be so rushed. If you agree, you'll need fancy clothes. My assistant could take you shopping. You can keep the clothes after our date," and he used air quotes for the word 'date.' "Here's my card. Please give this number a call," Jerome said, smiling. He had a winning smile.
"My assistant's name is Claire, and she can explain everything to you. I'm so lucky to have spotted you. I think you'd be perfect. Oh, one more thing: you'd have to act like my date, look into my eyes adoringly, maybe even kiss me lovingly in full sight of the restaurant staff, that sort of thing. Think about it, please," Jerome said, and he put down two fifty euro notes as he got up. "For the drinks," he said, and he was off, leaving a stunned Marybeth in his wake. His beer was almost untouched.
Marybeth had made some girlfriends in the junior year abroad program, and she texted a few. Most were out sightseeing during the five-day holiday, but luckily her best friend of the girls she had befriended was around. Susie knew all about Jim of course, but also about Denis, and Eric. Susie must have thought Marybeth was an outrageous slut, but Susie was not a judgmental person, and that, Marybeth thought, was her best feature!
In fact, as Marybeth further thought about Susie, she recalled that Susie rather enjoyed hearing all about Marybeth's often outrageous sexual escapades, and that she'd enjoy them in her mind with a kind of voyeuristic pleasure, imagining them happening to her, even if she was much, much, too uptight to ever do most of the antics Marybeth had gotten up to!
A half hour later, Susie was at Marybeth's table at the café, sitting in the same chair previously occupied by the mysterious man, Jerome, his mostly untouched beer still there, as if it were waiting for him to return to the table.
Susie had long blonde hair. It was a dark blonde, sometimes known as a dirty blonde, and she brushed it obsessively, so it never had a tangle, and it also had a sheen. She had a nice figure, even features, a good complexion, and a pretty, even a very pretty, smile. She smiled a lot, and she flashed one of her best ones for Marybeth as she sat, joining her at the table. Marybeth had long since pocketed Jerome's two € 50 notes, which was around $112, at current exchange rates.
"What's up?" Susie asked.
Marybeth inhaled deeply, and then told her the entire story about the airplane, Jerome sitting next to Eric, Eric irresponsibly and annoyingly showing her the highly compromising pictures of her to the stranger Jerome, and then Jerome finding her in the café purely by chance, on the very day Eric left, and Jerome's proposition to go to Reims for the night, with the bribe being a three-star meal.
Susie thought for a while. "What about Jim?"
"He's off in the Massif Central on some kind of anatomy field trip. I texted him, and he told me to go for it. But you know Jim; he'd sell his own soul to be treated to a three-star meal," she said.
"Maybe Jerome is on the level. Have you called his assistant Claire yet? I mean, does she exist? Maybe meeting her could give you an idea about Jerome? I mean, why couldn't she be his 'romantic date?' Maybe she's on the South Beach diet, or allergic to butter, or something? I mean, you should find out?" Susie said.
Susie had this annoying habit of always saying "I mean" all the time, but the normally grammar Nazi Marybeth let it go, since she loved Susie.
"If he's not on the level, and makes a play for you, you can always say no, right? He's American. American men understand the word no. Most of the time, that is," Susie said, and she nervously giggled. She recalled her own experience when her date had seemed quite hard of hearing when she herself had said no.
Marybeth did not want to explain the difficulty she had saying no to men. She should have said no to Denis; she should have said no to Marc. She definitely should have said no to the two Dominiques! And what did she do? She instead happily did whatever they wanted her to do, she gave them blowjobs and she happily spread her legs for them, too. She was a submissive slut, and it had taken this trip to Paris for her to realize it. She had done Eric a favor by breaking their engagement.
Marybeth knew if she went to Reims with Jerome, and he wanted her, he would have her. That's what made this a momentous decision.
But maybe not? Maybe this was finally the time when she would learn to say no? She could have a wonderful time, give him a little sex, but train herself to say no when it came to blowjobs and fucking, right? A handjob might be okay, she thought to herself.
"Maybe he's gay?" Susie offered, as if she had been reading Marybeth's thoughts and her worries. "Aren't men into food so much, I mean, aren't they often gay?"
"He's not gay," Marybeth said.
"How do you know?" Susie asked.
"The way he looked at me. He undressed me in his mind as he sat in the chair you're sitting in right now. He's definitely interested," Marybeth replied.
"Are you interested?" Susie asked.
