I was going through old back-up discs today looking for a piece I wrote on Bastard Pop years ago when I came across a file named "dirty_story.doc". Sure enough, it was something I'd been working on (and reworking) for years. I had written and rewritten it for years, eventually reworking it into The Houseguest.
I'd like to think that my writing has improved over the years but I won't be so presumptuous.
It wasn't easy escaping a bad marriage. Lydia felt that she had to drive clear across the country to get out from under the oppressive hold of her husband. She felt horrible doing so, but ended up turning to her sister, Pam, for help. Lydia needed some place she felt comfortable staying and as she and her sister had grown up in the house where Pam still resided with her nuclear family.
It brought back a lot of good feelings for Lydia to be staying in the basement where she had had hosted several slumber parties as a teen (after her mother and father had the basement redecorated from something reminiscent of a Turkish prison to something a bit more chic). She got along very well with Pam's husband and her wonderful son, Louis. There was the usual strife in the household that came naturally to any family, especially with Louis getting ready to leave for college in the fall and Pam suffering from a bad case of "empty nest syndrome." Pam began feathering her nest with a series of book clubs, pinochle nights, and evenings out with her husband. This gave Pam a lot of nights alone in the house to curl up with a good book and relax – something she never felt capable of doing around her soon-to-be-ex.
Pam tried helping out around the house now and then, knowing that she could be an ungracious guest but wanting to be otherwise. She had done more than her fair share of chores while married and wanted a bit of a break from the drudgery. However, she found a lot of solace in vacuuming. She loved the white noise of the machine and the "patterns of cleanliness" she made on her sister's relatively new carpet.
A few weeks into her stay, Pam was vacuuming Louis's room when an odd thought struck her. This had been her room when she was younger and was curious if Pam had ever found the hiding spot where Lydia used to stash her pot and other sundry items unfit for parental notice. Overcome with a wave of nostalgia, Lydia knocked about on the wall of the room until she found the loose floorboard. Opening it up, she found that her stash spot was still in good condition and was currently in use by the room's current occupant. Aghast at what she found, Lydia sat on the floor, the sound of the vacuum still filling her ears, as she slowly started going through the new contents of her old hiding spot.
Now 18, she expected her nephew to have a pornographic magazine or two at his disposal but Lydia didn't expect to find them there. Moreover, she didn't expect to find the kind of magazines that she did. While she pictured her nephew as being more of a Penthouse kid or even a Playboy snob, she never had seen anything like Domina Express—a magazine filled with personal ads from leather-clad women looking for "slaves." As if it couldn't get more disturbing, as she leafed through the pages, Lydia found that some of the ads were marked with red pen and that there were letters of response from these ladies between some of the pages. Louis was actively seeking a relationship with these women.
Feeling that she had stepped far across "the line" with this perusal of such personal material, Lydia quickly snapped out of her daze and returned the scene exactly as she found it. She tried to go back to vacuuming but her mind was a jumble of photographs and descriptions from that magazine. Even after she put the vacuum away and sat down to read she couldn't concentrate on her book. No matter how many times she read a line, it always seemed to say, "Dominant Mistress seeks submissive slut for service."
She would never look at Louis the same way again.
As time went on, Lydia couldn't help but study what she had always considered an aberrant sexual preclusion. She wanted to know why anyone, especially her nephew, would find the idea of leather and spanking to be pleasurable. An avid reader, Lydia began to discover the answer in print. While it looked like Lydia was reading The Red Tent, she was actually reading The Story of ‘O'. When she'd hold up Memories of a Geisha, inside would be a copy of Macho Sluts.
Each day when the postal carrier would arrive, Lydia would flip through the letters, usually finding a note or two for her nephew. She could smell the cheap perfume on them. Soon, she started looking at the outgoing missives that Louis would leave in the mailbox. She inevitably found envelope after envelope addressed in his odd handwriting to different women. What really concerned her, though, was the shape and feel of the contents. She could swear that Louis was sending them money.
Convinced that her nephew was paying these women for their letters, Lydia took another look in the hidey-hole. Examining a few of the new letters inside the magazines pages revealed, sure enough, that Louis was now receiving instructions to send out $20, $30, even $50 to these women as "tribute" to them. Doing some fast arithmetic, Lydia calculated her nephew shelling out a sobering amount of money on these women. All of the money from Louis's summer jobs that should have been going into his college fund was paying for these foul smelling, poorly written, and unimaginative messages.
Something had to be done. However, Lydia blanched at the idea of confronting her nephew with everything that she had learned through snooping. Luckily, another quick flip through of the magazine provided Lydia with her solution.
The next month when Louis pored over the latest copy of Domina Express, he thought he had found the answer to his prayers. Finding himself completely captivated by the idea of Domination and submission, Louis knew that his life wouldn't be complete without being able to submit to a woman. Even when he was going out earlier in high school, he had felt compelled to ask his naïve Catholic girlfriend to handcuff him. From her reaction, he learned that he had a long, tough road ahead of him but also knew in his heart that he needed to be submissive the way a flower needs to bloom – it was his nature.
Most of the ads in the latest Domina Express were repeats from the previous issue. However, one new ad immediately caught his eye. More than the photograph of a stunning woman (dressed in a well-cut black dress, facing away from the camera), it was the words of the ad that stirred him. It took him five drafts before he felt he had a letter suitable for such a wondrous ad.
The prey had gone for the bait. Within a week, Lydia had Louis's first letter—sent via a mail forwarding service. Now she could put an end to her nephew's self-destructive behavior. She'd have him send her money, putting it into a fund for his college education. When the fall came, she'd be able to present Louis with what she'd secretly refer to as "The Submissive Scholarship." With this first letter, she also managed to get more of an insight on her nephew's desires. Such a raw look into Louis's aspirations proved as penetrating as it was disconcerting for as she read Louis's obviously heartfelt words, she felt herself beginning to feel oddly aroused.
When it came time to respond, Lydia felt oddly at a loss for words.
That's it - just a fragment. I guess I was also at a loss for words.
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