PART FIVE - ALTERNATIVE ENDING
The 149th Slave
The next 6 days was pretty much legal work for Kat, Ferguson and me. Mann was sent out to replace Chiara although the kind of work we were doing is not really in his area of practice. He caught on quick, though. As requested, we let Jacobs and Redstone off at 5:00 PM. They had other duties to perform.
My evenings were divided between Boltzin and Mann. Sex can be very relaxing if you know you are safe and don't have to worry about finding a tolerable guy or social ramifications. I sure did not have to worry about commitment issues.
Crystal was in Bolry but mainly downtown with Lermanov and other government officials. The widowed Lermanov was fair game. On the other hand, while I don't think Crystal was consciously trying to outdo my scandal in the hotel lobby room after the 148th Lottery, she was photographed vividly positioning herself for doggie style sex over the hood of a vintage Zil in a government parking lot. The Zil is widely known around Bolry to be part of Lemanov's car collection. Another picture showed Crystal having sex with some anonymous man rumored to be Lermanov's chief of staff at the foreign ministry. Of course, the pictures did not make the controlled Bolry press but they did appear in the BLC Internet sent to its select customers under the headline "Lottery Participant gets ready for driving." Svetlana was highly amused. Lermanov reportedly was not amused at all.
The following Sunday afternoon, Svetlana organized a little party to show all of us from New York a bit of Bolry. "You'd hate to be a slave for the rest of your life without at least getting out a bit in your last week of freedom," she said to me, and Kat. Of course, it was too late for Chiara. Crystal came along for the ride.
There were mountains, lakes and forests that we saw in our trip in three state limos with Kat and me riding with Svetlana. Kat gave a blowjob to one of Svetlana's bodyguards. "Just for fun," Kat said. Svetlana indulged this but afterward, I think, made clear in Russian to the guard that she had only put up with this once and generally the gun he should have a the ready was his Uzi. She said in English, "that was fun and fairly safe where we are but our foreign visitors should remember that the guards are with us because there are people who don't like my brother Pyotr and his friends, guys trying to make up for their small dicks with big guns, violent ethnic minorities, religious fanatics, communists who actually believe in communism, and other dangerous people all over the country."
From a distance, we saw a beautiful resort on the sea. Svetlana said she'd once lived for years in the area and worked in the Resort for six months almost as a sex slave. Now she only visited occasionally to attend to BLC business and see several friends. Crystal said that Dawn, Stacy and Irina had told her that the view from inside the resort was really quite pretty and the beach was incredible. Svetlana confirmed this.
Another five days of legal work followed with another mandatory televised reception on Thursday. We met the Norwegian woman, named Inger, who was the replacing Chiara. She looked very blond and Viking.
We all smiled for the cameras, of course, and looked sexy but the level of tension and hostility had increased. For some reason, Madison had taken an active dislike to me. She said I reminded her of her high school class valedictorian who had suggested during her graduation speech that woman needed to go beyond cheering for the men to succeed and that she was proud to be part of a generation of women who could smash ceilings. Madison took that as an insult to cheerleaders and to her personally. I was the valedictorian of my high school and hoped the woman who upset Madison had made more of her life than I had of mine.
Meanwhile, Crystal said to a few of us, "Ashley's religious shit makes me sick." Also, it had finally sunk into Olivia that she was getting exactly what she had signed up for and being the bad girl might have some serious consequences. Mia's near miss had raised her level of anxiety and she swore these were her last two lotteries.
Margaret, at least, was calm, saying that it was amazing how quickly the twelve of us had created our own "situational culture" with its own set of rules and taboos. She also guessed, I think correctly, that Crystal had grown up in a fundamentalist family and that things that had happened with her father had really pissed her off. "Probably, a preacher's daughter," Margaret said, "and I bet she ran away from a bad situation and got into something as bad or worse."
After the reception, Svetlana, that bitch, absconded with Bolzin. Mann had gone back to New York that morning. After sizing up what was left for amusement at the reception, I went to bed with Anderson for the first time since the lottery viewing party in Mann's condo. That seemed long ago, although it was only about a year.
I could see now both why Crystal liked him and why she had left him. Anderson was rough as he thought he should be, and gentle in ways he thought I would like. For his age, he was in great shape. The experience was very positive but still it seemed like he was not enough of a savage, even for me. He was almost too eager to please. Also, maybe he had had some tragic experiences in life. There was a melancholy air about him that I realized no one would ever dispel. I could enjoy an evening of the guy but I did not think I could spend my life with him. Certainly, though, he seemed like less of an inexcusable, cowardly, fucking asshole than Ferguson.