“I’m back!” Robert replied with a noncommittal grunt. He sat in the study, focused on the screen of his laptop where multicolored lines of code refused to reveal their secret to him. A minute later, he flinched when ice-cold fingers found their way under his sweater. “Hey!” He tried to shrug off the attack, but the slim fingers slid even further up his back. “It’s freezing outside. Don’t be a wuss! Let me warm my hands a little.” ...
The body lay at the bottom of the ravine. An unnaturally twisted leg indicated broken bones. Sightless eyes stared at the distant sky. The man’s weathered face revealed that he had spent much time outdoors, maybe working on a ranch as his cowboy-style clothing suggested. Blood had oozed from his fractured skull, matted the greying hair, and formed a pool on the rocky bed of the dried creek. The side of his head was smashed in. Frank whistled soundlessly while he looked around. If the man had cracked his temple on a boulder, the latter should have been in evidence nearby. ...
No, I should not have kicked Dusty. That was definitely a mistake. The pivotal one in a chain of mistakes that has led to my current predicament. Come to think of it, disaster usually rests on supposedly inconsequential events whose combined consequences one fails to anticipate. Sure enough, it had all started pretty normal – normal for me, that is, although other people might beg to differ – with a weekend self-bondage session. ...
story continued from part one Part 2 Nina was paralysed with terror. Shit, shit, shit! For a while, she couldn’t and didn’t want to believe what had just happened and what it meant for her. She was in deep trouble! Without that key, she stood zero chance of freeing herself and being bound, blindfolded and almost unable to move she would not able to recover it, not even if she had a hundred years and already knew the hiding place of Christian’s hoard – which she did not. Given how she had put on the blindfold, there was no way for her to get it off her head and in this regard she could rely on a rich treasure trove of pertinent experience. She would not be able to operate her smartphone in this state and the locked front door likewise represented an insurmountable obstacle. No one would miss her before Monday and so her only hope was that her parents, colleagues, neighbours or someone else would notice her disappearance and alert the authorities before she died of thirst. Or was it more likely for her to die because of an embolism first? Nina realised that she had begun to hyperventilate and with an effort brought her breathing back under control. Fainting was only a reasonable survival strategy if there was a dashing hero around ready to save the distressed damsel. With some considerable effort she pushed her fear aside and gave in to her rage and anger instead. ...
Part 1 It was time once again. Nina had left for the weekend two hours early because she was certain she would burst if she did not do something about the frustration that had accumulated over the working week. Especially about the sexual frustration: She’d left Robert almost four weeks ago and had not had sex since. It was not the case that no willing partner had offered himself though; on the contrary, there had been no shortage of advances since word had spread that she was ‘on the market again’. If she’d accepted all invitations for coffee, she probably would not have been able to sleep for weeks - the customary fate of an attractive woman working in a predominantly male domain. Then again, nerd biotope would probably be a more apt description; Nina could not fathom why many of her colleagues apparently tried hard to match the characters from ‘The Big Bang Theory’ in both appearance and habitus. Consequently, among her would-be consolers, there had been mostly consolation prizes, and not a single man she would have considered fit to satisfy her very special needs. Those which Robert had satisfied like none before him - and perhaps none after. ...
The massive door closed behind her with a soft click, shutting her out from the plush office. She was dismissed. She had just been told to search for ’new challenges’ outside the company. Or more aptly put, she had been sacked. Alice took a deep breath to get a grip on her rage. Thankfully, the anteroom was empty, her boss’s, correction, former boss’s assistant having momentarily abandoned her fortified post behind the massive desk facing the entrance. Alice was grateful for the opportunity to regain her composure. She did not want to face her (as of now former) colleagues in a troubled emotional state, heck, she did not want to face them at all. She dreaded the thinly veiled schadenfreude of her rivals, who preferred to attribute her quick rise up the corporate ladder to her looks instead of her performance, and the palpable relief of her less intellectually gifted colleagues, glad at having been spared themselves. But most of all she dreaded the pity of the few people in the office she counted as friends. For the last two years, since the untimely death of her parents, she had thrown herself into her work and presented the front of an independent, tough, calculating achiever to the world. Now she feared she might break down, revealing the lonesome and frightened girl that still lurked inside. Better she held on to her rage. ...