(Author's note: Thanks for clicking. This is primarily a romance story, but you'll find strong themes of maturity and submission within. The first chapter contains very little in the way of sexual activity. If that's all you're interested in, skip to chapter 3. I think you'd enjoy it all much more if you read it from the top, though…)
*
"But... but..." Jenny blubbered.
"Listen, Jen, I know it's a cliché, but please believe me. It's not about you. It is one hundred percent my fault."
Jenny looked up at Tom with watery eyes.
"I did everything for you! I only tried to make you happy! I cooked, I rubbed your back, I even sucked your fucking dick!" Her blubbering was starting to turn into venom. "It was fucking disgusting, but I let you do it anyway because I thought that's what you wanted! Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you looking for?"
Tom sighed loudly. "I... wish I could say."
"How many girls do you think there are in the world that will bring you a beer, then strip for you, then give you a blowjob while you watch a baseball game?"
He rose from his now-ex-girlfriend's sofa. "Believe me, this is as hard for me as it is for you. You're going to find a fantastic guy pretty soon. You've got everything most guys are looking for. I guess I'm just not one of those guys."
Jenny rolled up into a ball on the couch and sobbed.
"
Jeez,
" Tom thought, "
how about a little melodrama?"
"Well, I better get going. For what it's worth, I always had a great time when we were together." He walked slowly to the front door.
Just before he closed the door behind him, Jenny called after him, "I don't know what you're looking for, but I hope you never find it!"
Tom sighed again and walked to his car in the driveway. "I probably never will," he muttered.
That was Saturday. Tom spent Sunday flipping through the channels. Some WNBA game on; meh. On the science channel they were searching for the lost ruins of Canada's oldest settlement. Yawn. He checked the guide channel, and discovered that the Rangers didn't play until 9:05 PM central. Must be a game on the west coast. He turned off the TV.
Shuffling over to the bookcase, Tom scanned the shelves. Terry Goodkind's series remained incomplete in his collection. Robert Jordan had gotten boring in the last couple of installments. He'd already raced through Michael Crichton's latest opus. With a sigh, he picked up Tolkien's first effort.
Staring past Bilbo's image, he thought about his life. Jenny had been a great girlfriend to him. She was beautiful; most men dream of having a blonde like her astride them, 36C tits swaying in their face. But she wasn't able to... something. Fulfill him? Satisfy him? Something.
"
What does that mean? Fulfill me?"
Tom mouthed to himself. "I'm starting to sound like a soap opera writer."
Tom put Tolkien back in his place, then flopped down and stared at Emeril for an hour. How many tired cliches can a guy use in an hour? At least 38, if tonight's episode was any indication. Tom clicked the television off.
Eight-o-clock and nothing to do. Sunday nights always dragged on. After The Simpsons had lost its edge, and Futurama had been cancelled, there was little to look forward to in those few hours before the new work week started. With a shrug, Tom arose from the recliner and walked into the second bedroom, which he'd turned into an office.
Tom shuffled his mouse around to chase away the screen saver. Soon his desktop blinked into view. A cat with a tiny tophat on. Jenny had picked that one out. She found it more appealing than the montage of Adele Stephens that Tom had chosen. Clicking his tongue, then his mouse, he opened Firefox. If he accomplished nothing else tonight, he'd find a wallpaper that didn't remind him of his ex-girlfriend.
A few keystrokes later, he was staring at the Google main page. Hm... how about... hell. When he sat at the computer, thought eluded him. He could think of a million great things to research on wikipedia while he was driving home, but the minute he had the chance to actually do it, his mind blanked. Sigh. He began to type into the search engine.
"Girls naked"
Six million, eight hundred forty thousand sites presented themselves. Abstractly, Tom wondered how you got to be the number one site on Google out of that many. Probably some payola involved.
Clicking on a couple of them, he found that the spammers had had their way with this particular search term. Every one he chose promised him naked horny teens if he could only fork over $29.99 for a month of access. He typed in another term.
"Girls naked -porn -teen"
Wow. That reduced the search field to five million, two hundred seventy thousand. This was getting him nowhere.
Then he remembered the link his brother had sent to him a few weeks ago. It was for a porn password site, allegedly one that had working passwords to adult sites. He decided it was worth a try.
Clicking on the link in his email, he was soon staring at a list of passwords. Amateurallure dot com. Hot teen chicks everywhere he looked. All in apple's .MOV format. Bah.
The next site on the list was called Amateur-facials.com. A bunch of mediocre looking young women with semen dripping off their faces. Intriguing for a few minutes, but still... bah.
Every other site he clicked on yielded similar results.
Bah.
Tom closed Firefox and went to bed.
Monday morning. The radio alarm clicked on at 6:30 AM. Punching the snooze button, Tom rolled over. Nine minutes later, another rude awakening. The morning radio show droned on about some guys in Japan that wore funny masks while they robbed a bank. He came down with a heavy hand on the top of the radio.
Sitting up, he paused for a moment to let his eyeballs focus. The dog was laying beside him, snoring softly. Lucky bitch. He reached over and scratched her belly.
After showering and dressing, Tom moved rapidly around the house. He was almost perpetually late in the morning. It wasn't necessarily that he didn't like mornings; he just didn't feel any pressure to be in the office before 8:00 AM. His boss usually wasn't. Even if she was, he knew he wouldn't be in trouble. The office environment was relaxed enough that being ten, fifteen, thirty minutes late was always overlooked. It was more important to get your job done, and to get it done well. He dug that, and that's why he stayed where he was even though he could certainly make more money elsewhere.
Tom worked for a medium-sized engineering firm. Civil; anything else would just be stupid. That's what he liked to say at professional gatherings of other civil engineers. Classically, the joke went that anything else would be uncivilized, but Tom thought it was funnier the other way.
After letting the dog out for a few minutes, herding her back in, collecting his office cell phone, wallet, keys, and a bottle of water, he adjourned to the garage. His mustang roared to life, and within a few minutes he was on the interstate. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his glove box. Tom wasn't a heavy smoker, but he liked one in the morning to help wake him up. Flicking his bic, the Camel Light lit and glowed happily.
Two hours later, Tom stared at the spreadsheet in front of him. Goddamn numbers weren't adding up. A cursory inspection had revealed no problems-- oh. Someone forgot to put in the placeholder dollar sign, and that caused some incorrect values to be calculated. He fixed the problem and grinned smugly at his monitor when the correct numbers popped up.
"I fixed it!" Loud enough to be heard around the corner.
His phone rang. He saw on the caller ID that it was Sandy, his supervisor.
"Nuh uh. What was wrong?"
"Well, the autoexec dot bat file was wrong, and I had to hex edit the operating system to correctly handle the floating point operations, but it was nothing a little perl script couldn't--"
"Bah! Whatever, mister. Just email it to me, please?" She knew he was bullshitting her. She'd have probably been surprised if he hadn't.
"Well, ok, but I might have to adjust the uh... system parameters... to handle the... bitrate... uh..." He had already made the email and was clicking send. Over the line, he heard the notification program beep at her, and he knew that she had it.
"That was fast. Good work. Thanks, bye!" She hung up.
Ahh... another problem solved. Now it was time to play Windows pinball for a while.
Lunch at the pizza place down the street was always good. He tried to avoid it, but the lure of the baking dough was difficult to resist. If he could limit these indulgences to once a month, his waistline would thank him.
He sat in the back booth, contentedly munching on his calzone. Eighties music played mutedly in the background. Teenage kids from the university chatted at several tables nearby. Someone was playing Galaga on the coin-op machine in the corner. It was a nice place to have lunch. Tom speculated that in another life, he must have been a pizzeria owner, because this felt like home to him. He brought the calzone to his lips and took a bite.
Raising his head, he saw Sandy push the door open. She walked to the counter and placed her order. Looking around for a place to sit, she started toward an open table.
Tom pulled out his cell phone. Sitting in a secluded booth, she hadn't seen him there. He hit speed dial number two. Number one was Jenny. Cringing, he made a mental note to get rid of that. In a few seconds, he heard Sandy's ringtone drifting across the room.
"Hey, what's up?"
"That calzone is going to go straight to your thighs."
"Wha-!"
Tom saw her head poke up from the table she was sitting at.
"In the booth behind the jukebox. Come on over."
Sandy shuffled her way between college kids in chairs and slid into the booth across from him.
"My thighs are just fine, thank you!"
Tom was tempted to comment that yes, they were. Sandy was a beautiful woman, especially for a forty-four year old who had two teenage kids at home. Instead, he just grinned at her.
"Well, if you think so, that's all that matters."
She screwed up her face into a scowl. After a few seconds of pretending to be upset, she smiled back at him. That was something that Tom liked about her: she had a healthy self-image. She knew damn well that she could turn heads, and although she didn't flaunt it, she still knew she had it.
"So seriously, what was wrong with the calculations?"
"Someone, and I can't speculate on who, but someone forgot to put the dollar sign before she-- er, I mean, he
or
she, dragged the cell values down to the rest of the column."
Sandy stared at him impassively for a second.
"Well. That was certainly a newbie mistake, wasn't it?"