If I'm Honest

Chapter 6 -- Athena & Rita

For the rest of the week, I did everything possible I could to tamp down the power of the bracelet, to keep it in check. I wanted to make sure I wasn't getting completely wrapped up in the power of this thing, letting it take total control of my life, but I was still getting hit on far more than I used to.

I was starting to wonder if this is what it's like to be one of the gorgeous people. We all have that innate curiosity, if that hot girl who's always bitching about people just judging her on how she looks is making too much out of a small thing, if that stud dude with the six pack ever gets bothered that he's mostly just considered a himbo for women to drool over but not approach.

It wasn't constant, but it was

a lot

to handle.

At least once a day, I was getting hit on by some random woman. Most of the time, it was someone I didn't know in the least, but from time to time, it would be someone I'd never thought about in that way before. The worst day of my week was Wednesday when I had to go stop in a Lucky's to get groceries, and I got hit on three times before I made it back to my goddamn car.

The forty-something housewife in the frozen food section was more than a little aggressive about it, grabbing my dick through my jeans before she'd even said something to me, but I was adamant that she wasn't my type, so eventually she left me alone, having a slightly dazed expression on her face when she did.

The nineteen year old check out clerk was definitely cute, but she was too young and skinny for me. After I turned her down, her "honest" statement was that she'd probably have stolen my wallet to buy meth once I fell asleep anyway. So bullet definitely dodged there.

On the way to my car, a woman named Jenny came up to me to tell me that when she was at home masturbating, if she wasn't thinking about her husband, she was thinking about me, and that if I wanted to, I could rock her world once, just to get it out of her system. She would do any freaky thing I told her to. Instead, I told her that her husband, Billy, was too nice a guy for me to bang his wife on the side, and that she should just stay loyal, so she went home in her car and I went home in mine.

Don't eat where you shit.

When I was at my place alone, it seemed like I had a bit more control over it, as there weren't women randomly knocking on my door at all hours. Maybe proximity played a large part of it, I'm not sure. Ken had called a bunch of times over the last few days, asking me to come out with him, to see if I could score with women well out of my weight class. His big idea was to take me to parts of high society we didn't normally dally with, just to see if I could pull from the snobs and uptight, elitists who normally wouldn't give us the time of day.

I told him maybe later, but not for a while.

I mean, I get it, right? I understood

why

he wanted to do it. He's a lawyer for the ACLU, meaning that the people on the other side of the courtroom are inevitably New Empire people. They're owners of mega corporations, businesses so large that they've all set an amount that they consider a death to be worth, in terms of legal cases.

That means, if the problem is killing, say, twenty people out of five hundred thousand, that means the deaths are below a single percentage point, and therefore, it's cheaper to either buy them off or bury them in legal costs than remove their product or change their service.

(In particular, Ken says he's gone after a

lot

of police departments, and you can imagine how many of them feel about being sued by a well-educated outspoken black man.)

As such, I'm sure Ken couldn't wait to drag me to all sorts of political parties so I could screw over (or maybe just fuck senseless) the lobbyists and fixers who'd been making his life miserable for decades. But the thing he kept forgetting was that I'd actually have to be the one to fuck them, and I suspect that those at that echelon are either terrible in the sack or into some truly

freaky

shit. Probably both, in a lot of cases. So yeah, pass. Pass pass

pass

.

Over the course of the week, though, I tried expanding my ability to use the bracelet's power intentionally. Turned out I was majorly sucky at it, but at least I hadn't fucked it up in any way that was going to cause me real long term problems, except, I guess, not being able to go back to a restaurant I didn't like anyway, and, y'know what, fuck those people.

(Saying over and over again "you should comp my meal," got me chewed out, so maybe that made me the asshole, but this was also a restaurant that went out of its way to refuse any modifications to an order from anyone, because they just didn't want to be fucking bothered doing extra work. I told them once I didn't want any mushrooms on my steak, and you'd have thought I called the waiter a dickless shithead who looked like he was too dumb to use words with more than four letters in them. I

didn't

but believe me, I really wanted to...)

Like I've said before, I tend to work problems in a methodical and deliberate manner, so I was doing research, testing things. It wasn't pure scientific method, but I'm not sure how you'd apply that a magic mumbo jumbo bracelet that seemed to compel people to be overly honest.

I couldn't force anyone to do anything they didn't want to do, which was about what I expected. The bracelet's main power seemed to be bubbling up repressed thoughts, emotions and desires, and compelling people to act on them without getting all caught up in their head about it. Plus there was a limit to what I could get people to be honest about. Asking someone the worst thing they had ever done would get me laughed at; asking someone about the worst thing they did

today

would get me an "if I'm honest" answer. (So that ruled a career as a blackmailer

right

out. Probably for the best.) Based on that, it felt like I was limited to affecting things in the moment or close to it, short term cognition rather than long term.

I also found out that people didn't seem to think anything was odd about what they'd said or done in the moment where they were "being honest." If anything, they seemed to be relieved, as if they had gotten some massive secret off their chest. Colleen and I were still trading dirty pics on the reg, and Madi had come over to tell me that she definitely wanted another go around with me, but not for a few weeks, because she was still wonderfully sore. Nobody was mad or angry. Nobody had any regrets, at least ones they voiced aloud. Ashley seemed perfectly fine with me, but also hadn't hit on me again since then.

Once we'd established what they wanted, what I wanted, what worked about it and what didn't, everyone happily settled in to whatever they wanted it to be moving forward. I was a fuck buddy to Colleen, a sexual mentor to Madison, a one-off work fling for Ashley, and just a one-off experiment for Alina and Brenda, neither of whom I'd heard from since. (I was fairly certain Ken would drag me back to see Alina aka Diamond strip again, but I felt confident that while she might be a bit more contacty with me than she was with most patrons to the strip club, she wouldn't want another go at me, although she might fool around with me some in the VIP area. But another motel rendezvous was certainly out of the question.)

All of that led me to believe that the bracelet wasn't harming these women, or affecting other parts of their lives.

If anything, the person who seemed to be the most affected by the bracelet was me.

When I got hit on by the three women at the supermarket, it was easier to relax immediately afterwards, but that sense of ease quickly passed. Now, having gone almost a week without getting laid, I felt a growing unrest inside of me, almost like a spiritual constipation.

The bracelet

wanted

to be used.

It was

annoyed

to be idle.

I have power to make your life better, it seemed to say, so why won't you let me use it? Let me fix you. Let me help you.

I didn't want to abuse this thing on my wrist, but I also felt like if I resisted its power for too long, it was going to start exerting more and more control over my life, and the simply day-to-day stuff in living would be complicated by all sorts of unforeseen activities.

When I'd first gotten the bracelet, I hadn't really been trying to get laid, and it had just overwhelmed me like a tidal wave. So far, people generally faded from my life immediately afterwards, except for Colleen, who had been happy to keep in very regular contact. She'd even given me a few hints that I should plan to come up and see her, but she'd also told me that she didn't think we were exclusive, so if I was, in her words, "hitting up chicks on the side," she wouldn't be mad. In fact, she said she'd even be proud of me, "especially if they're super hot." She said "play the field like you fuck -- HARD."

That was just

weird

.

That sense of apprehension that was building again, the bracelet not having gotten its fix in days, and it was getting stronger faster. The tempo in which the pressure was building was escalating. I knew that I desperately didn't want to resist letting the power out for too long. I wasn't sure what would happen if it went boiling over, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be good for me.

I had an image of hoards of bikini clad women doing a Day of the Dead zombie swarm around me as I was trying to climb onto a helicopter. It made me laugh. I mean, right? It's a funny image. Er, it would be, up until they tore me apart.

Right, definitely a thing to avoid. It's only sexy until you're dead.

By Friday morning, the pressure was starting to get to me. It was definitely beginning to affect my judgment and I felt like I didn't have my normal usual legendary patience. The people who work for me will tell you that I handle stress and adversity very well, and I never ever take it out on my crew. But for most of workday, I found myself having to hold my temper back. Because I wanted to yell. Fuck did I want to yell. I wanted to snap, to let loose, to vent these emotions building inside of me. I

didn't

but damn did I really want to. Shit that would normally just slide off me was like nails on a chalkboard.

My team could feel it, too.

I didn't blame them for giving me a wide berth for the day. They all wanted to avoid me, but still needed to get things done, so they kept their conversations short and sweet, and everyone was hypercompetent. I felt bad for wondering why they weren't always so on point. I realized how much my odd demeanor must have frightened them, so I actually told everyone to take off a few hours early, and apologized if I was short tempered.

That put everyone back at ease and they all took me up on the offer to head out early, with a couple of them saying whoever I was mad at, they hoped it wasn't them. I assured them that it wasn't, and that I was just on edge about some stuff in my personal life.

(Telling people "I'm under pressure because of a magic sex bracelet that I recently got given and can't take off. It wants me to be fucking all the time," would've probably gotten me committed to a sanitarium, where I would've been getting overwhelmed by sex addicts in recovery, I'd have guessed.)

I left the office early myself, and headed home, but I certainly didn't plan to stay there, nor did I plan to call up any of my friends or go to any of my usual haunts. That was the last thing I wanted to do with this weird tension building within my skull.

Friday night meant that there would be plenty of people downtown at all the clubs. I knew that I was

so

too old for this shit, but the chances of me running into anyone I know down at the clubs was an absolute minimum, which was just how I wanted it. I remembered when I was young and clubbing, there were always a handful of guys who were just slightly too old to be there, and most of the time, people steered clear from them, but those guys also seemed to head home around bar close with a hottie on their arms nearly every single time, to my shock and awe. Granted, some of those hotties were more than sloshingly drunk, but sometime you have to pick the best of your options.

All this raw sexual energy I could feel bubbling up inside of me -- I just needed to let it loose. Being around people I've known for long periods of time felt reckless, so the idea was to just find a bunch of twenty-somethings around whom I could just let the bracelet do its thing. Having regrets about fucking someone when you were drunk was a common enough story that it wouldn't stand out.

The place I'd picked to be my hangout for the night was a joint called Club Contour. I was at least a decade too old to fit in there, making me one of the old dudes in the club, but I'd put on a good black silk shirt and some nice dark slacks at least. I left the shirt open a bit at the top and put on a gold rope chain around my neck. The look was a little 'sleazy nightclub owner,' and, frankly, with the shirt open to expose the hair on my chest, I figured it would drive everyone but the most desperate away. It wasn't a good look on me, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror, as if I had all the right clothes but was wearing them all wrong. I didn't want to look so out of place that they wouldn't let me into the club, but I wanted to give off the vibe of the guy a hot girl could get to buy her drinks all night, only for her to leave him high and dry when she decided she'd had enough fun. Someone like that getting a slight push from the bracelet to actually fulfill the promises she'd been making all night to get free drinks still seemed a bit shady, but manageably shady.

My thinking was this -- if the bracelet expended power to bring people into my sphere of influence, then the more power I could make it burn out in one go before it all started charging back up again.

This damn thing was getting in my head, and trying to hold in it was eating me up inside. The last thing I could do was shut it down until it burst, because who the fuck knows what would happen then, right?

The people who are going out clubbing, they're looking to get loaded and have a good time. The dudes are trying to get laid. The women are trying to get free drinks, have fun dancing and find guys they think might be good fucks. Basically, everyone's trying to get something from everyone.

I knew I was going to be drinking quite a bit tonight, so I called an Uber to ferry me down to the club. The guy who picked me up in his silver Beamer scowled at my look, which meant that I'd nailed it perfectly. He was big and bear-like, like a lumberjack. "Aren't you a little old for Contour, man?" he asked me. "Usually I'm just dropping off twenty-somethings to check out some local DJ. You sure you don't want something a little more your speed?"

Tonight, I was playing a character, someone else. I wasn't going to be Deke, the smart and accomplished businessman. Tonight, I was Fast Eddie, the kind of guy who'd tell girls he could get them booked as models or dancers. "Nah, brah," I said. "I wanna be where the hotties are, find a little cutie to break me a piece off of."

The guy (whose name was Brian according to my Uber app) rolled his eyes a little and shrugged. "Okay, dude, but I think you'll be wasting your time." He just turned up his music, and we didn't talk the rest of the drive.

I got to the club just about an hour before midnight, and it was clear that a rave somewhere near by had just let out, because there were girls in bright neon leggings and sports bras, with ribbons in their hair pulled into pigtails and glowsticks braided around their necks. I saw a number of them sucking on pacifiers, with fur cuffs around their ankles, weird fishnet sleeves on their arms connected to nothing... Say what you like about the rave kids, they've definitely got a look to them, and you can spot them a mile away.

It had started to rain, so they were huddling together, scrambling to get into any buildings they could, begging bouncers to let them in. The ones too young to drink were mostly scattering, heading home or diving into any place they could get a late night meal, while the older ones were just carrying the party onward in any port in the storm, quite literally.

Contour didn't have a line, which surprised me, but as I got to the door, I figured out why -- they had opened their back patio, which had a giant tarp over it, and lots of people were carrying on with their party there. They had room to spare, and if you can pack the people in, you can pack the money in. The guy DJing there wasn't the guy who'd been over at the rave, obviously, but apparently he was playing the kind of music the ravers were into.

To me, it all felt like basically minor variations on the same thing, but hey, I'm not judging what kids these days like. Shit, they're sampling the hip hop and punk of my youth all the damn time, so it's not like I'm completely in the dark here. But most of the time, rave music feels like cutting and pasting drum loops and keyboard synths in long sections designed to just blend together.

The giant bouncer at the door looked at me and decided not to even bother carding me. I'm not sure if I should've been offended by that or not. I stepped inside the door and found a girl in her early twenties manning the admissions booth, and boy, did she look like she'd rather be anywhere else. "Twenty for admission." She wasn't making an effort to draw the eye, dressed in a thick flannel shirt and hefty baggy jeans, like she just wanted to do her job and be ignored. I'd had those days and I empathized. Her makeup was heavy, her eyelashes thick and black, like some sort of Pacific Northwestern lumbergoth.

I reached into my pocket, fished out my wallet, pulled out a fifty and held it out to her. She went to get my change and I waved at her. "Keep it. Just don't let these kids get you down."

She took the ten and the twenty she'd been about to hand me and pocketed them, smiling sheepishly at me. "Thanks dude. I don't know if you're gonna find much of what you're looking for here, but good hunting, I guess."

I mean, she was absolutely right. I stood out like a sore thumb here, but that was fine. The music from outside was being piped in here, and like all nightclubs, the speakers were set to boomingly loud. Everywhere I went, I could feel the bass reverberating through my whole body.

Because most people were out on the dance floor, almost half of the small booths that lined the walls of the club were empty, so I decided to slide into one, and before I'd barely even got seated, a blonde, fae-like waitress in a short little cocktail dress shimmied over to the table.

"What can I get you?"

"Just a Guinness."

"Can okay? We don't have beer taps here."

"I mean, if it's what you got, it's what you got."

While the waitress headed to the bar to get my drink, I took in an eyeful of the rest of the people in the Club. The rave kids made up a lot of who was out tonight, but there were plenty of college students and early-to-mid twenty-somethings strewn about the place. At one of the booths, there was clearly some kind of bachelorette party, which the penis balloon crowns gave away immediately. Another looked like they were professionals trying to cut loose after a long week, and they sort of stood out even more than I did, with a graveyard of empty drinks scattered across their table.

More than anything, I just wanted to blend into the background, to enjoy my drink and see what happened when the bracelet was getting taxed by large numbers of people. I kept my eyes drifting over all the people I could without focusing, so it wouldn't have any specific person to latch onto.