Paradise - Part Two (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant) (3 page)

“I wouldn’t turn it down. But it’s not exactly what we’re talking about here, is it?”

I can see the wheels turning. He’s going to kill me. He suspects me of something already. Maybe he thinks I’m a secret agent from the IRS, or a special agent of the FBI. He’s got a maddening look in his eyes. A look that makes the eyes of the ancestors in the
House of Usher
look like those of the seven dwarves.

Stafford smiles again and steps back, looking to the floor. He’s trying to play humble, disarming, shy even. Why the act? He’s a wolf playing a sheep. I don’t buy it. Not for a second. This pimp of stolen goods. Drug trafficker. Whatever sort of criminal he is—I detest him for it with every fiber of my being. And yet at the same time, for all this
mépris
, I feel an incredible animal attraction. Why am I drawn with more intensity than I have ever known to someone I find almost unbearable at the same time? Why do two people fall in love who, at the same time, can’t live with each other? This defines exactly how I feel about him. He is a contemptible monster, a beast. But I find with him, an incomparable lightness of being.

“With time, you will come to know more about my affairs. Perhaps all about them. But for now you’ll have to be content with seeing bits and pieces, wondering and fitting them together. That’s all I can offer you in that arena right now. Accept?”

“Accepted.”

“Glad that’s sorted.”

At this he starts to circle again. I feel an almost irrepressible urge to rip his clothes off, to tear them asunder, and push him to the floor. Once more, I marvel at the violent, sexual feelings I’m having. This isn’t me. I’m becoming someone else, I tell myself. And it’s partly true. The only part that’s not true is the part that allows me to be aware of the two selves, one emerging from the other like a cicada shedding her exoskeleton and leaving it on a tree branch. Something for the other animals to wonder at.

“Would you like a drink?” he asks as he wanders off to a bar near a waterfall and pool.

“What do you have?”

“Scotch, brandy, wine…you name it, I’ve probably got it.”

“I’ll take some red wine. Whatever you’ve got.”

“I don’t have any wine glasses up here. Do you care?”

“Never use ’em.”

“Good, me neither.”

I take a seat on a ledge along one of the pools.

He walks over with the drinks, sits next to me and sets mine down between us. I look at him, picking mine up.

“
Beaujolais nouveau
. Imported from Toulouse.” His French accent is quite good.

“I love this wine. One of my favorites.”

“I love it too. One of the few wines I really like. The only one that actually tastes like strawberries and doesn’t just say it on the bottle.”

“I once drank one that said on the bottle it tasted like bacon with a hint of burnt tire.”

Stafford lets out a deep, bellowing laughter.

“Who writes that shit?” he asked, curling forward with laughter.

“What are you having?”

“Brandy to follow up the vodka I had before.”

“You need to get proper smashed before hooking up with me, huh?”

“Naturally—” then, “Of course not.”

He displays that false modesty, the almost childlike humility that I find so disarming in him.

I lean in for the kiss. Fireworks explode across our lips, lightning passes in our heads. I’m so high now, I feel dizzyingly sick. An overload of feelings. I take off his polo. Then I help him take off my shirt. I run my hands up his torso, feeling his muscles that glisten even in the near dark of the room. He lifts my long skirt, rolling it up. I pour the last of the wine down the hatch before I help him get the skirt up. He reaches up my inner thighs, sending pleasure rippling up through the core of my being. I’m not wearing underwear. He fingers my front-bottom, tickling the five o’clock shadow I did not find time to trim earlier. My bottom grass. With two fingers he spreads the lips, all the while looking on me with a holy reverence.

Stafford touches the beady tip of the erect clitoris and flicks it once, then massages it between his inner forefinger and thumb. The pleasure is coming in waves now. My once tense stomach muscles seem to have vanished in a liquid pool on the marble floor. Instinctively, I tense and loosen the muscles throughout the lower region. Kegel exercise, I think it’s called. I breathe heavily, moan, then sigh. As I sigh, he kisses me as he plays with me down below. Touching gently along the edges of my down under, Stafford kisses down my long neck, along the inner collar bone, to the supersternal notch.

Taking a break, he removes his pants, underwear and all. Like lightning, I grab his saluting penis. It’s a brusque cock, a penis with attitude. Ever so gently, I run my fingers from the base to the tip and it throbs at my touch. Nice work, lieutenant, I think as I go for the base again. I feel Stafford’s hand on my wrist, moving it away from the lieutenant, as he eases me down onto my back with the other. The ledge I lie on is cool and hard and smooth. I spread my legs for him, welcoming him. I’m looking at the ceiling now—not even at the ceiling really, but into space—as he rubs the large throbbing head around the vaginal arena, brushing my labia and erect clitoris into the octaves of euphoria. Then comes that sublime moment: he slides the tip of the head into my wet slit. He rolls it around the entrance, as though testing the playing field. Then he slips it in. I gasp. He lumbers forth. Sliding it way past the entrance and all the way home. I seem to feel his penis pressing my insides up. Could this really be happening? Is it that huge? I sigh as this happens, then contort my face. He backs up. Then thrusts again. I glance at him.

Stafford’s sitting with his hands on the place where my thighs meet my hips. Pulling himself forward. Helping himself to his newfound obsession. All the while he’s looking down at the insertion point. I can feel myself gushing all over him. It must be like a waterfall down there. He’s drowning in it. But his water viper likes to go for a swim. And he studies it and studies it. The endless fascination. What is it about a penis entering a vagina? I feel the pleasure rolling in, in waves—the beginning of a crescendo that will take hours to peak, if given the proper attention. I don’t wonder what the draw is for me. But what about for a man? How does it feel to them? This one’s quite talkative, I reason, so maybe I’ll find out. The pleasure comes in tall waves now, I’m floating, and I stop thinking of anything but that.

After an indeterminate amount of time Stafford withdraws and strokes his long shaft. As with the experience at the waterfalls, I feel nearly out-of-body as he straddles his shaft in the air above me. Suddenly I am pelted with hot splashes of silvery fluid. It covers me from my vagina, all across my stomach, to my breasts. Conscious thought resumes, I see Stafford standing, looming over me, with an inquisitive look on his face. I extend one hand, which he takes and pulls me up with. I assemble my clothes as he puts his on. Out the window I see the first sign of encroaching dawn, a violet glow rising up over the horizon. Several hours have passed during our session, though it seems like minutes. I marvel at the thought of fucking for over four hours straight, which is what has to have happened, however unbelievable it seems to me now.

Dressed, I instinctively head for the door, feeling his burning eyes on me as I leave. I look back once at the door as I am about to exit. He does not smile or look stern. A calm, even expression graces his features as he watches me go. Out of the room with the dawn light pouring in behind me, I wonder how he could have held it in that long.

Chapter 6

Sophia Durant’s Diary (continued)

August 1, Eleuthera Island, Bahamas

I didn’t get around to looking at all the collected data till about a week after the upstairs meeting with Stafford. I hadn’t seen him, and, though I tried hard to put him out of my mind—at least during work—my mind kept coming back to the curiosity about his secretive business affairs. Via the spyware I had put on Stafford’s phone, as soon as he linked his phone to his computer, I was able to have a look at all the contents therein. Every keystroke he entered, every website he trolled, every email he sent, and everything else he did online or on his hard disk was copied to my MacBook via the Minerva program. It was untraceable because the route it took was disguising itself as part of the Norton Anti-virus software and, as it “updated” itself when he shut down, it secretly transmitted all the desired information to Minerva. The wonders of modern technology.

Returning to my room after a long day tending to an unquiet baby, I put in my earbuds, sat against the headboard of my bed and booted up the MacBook Pro. While I anxiously awaited digging into my lover/employer’s files, I turned on the TV and found something to watch in the film library. As I found myself in somewhat of an insular mood and it was raining quite heavily outside, I put on
The Maltese Falcon
with Humphrey Bogart. Watching the images of the streets of Los Angeles pretending to be the streets San Francisco, I felt a sense of the isolation of being on such a desolate island. The feeling had always been there on the periphery, but I had not really given it much thought till now. I loved the way Humphrey Bogart had all the smart answers on rapid-fire. Sam Spade’s adventurous search for the missing Maltese bird and the shadow of his dead partner made me wonder if there wasn’t a parallel to my life on the island, without Julie and searching for an almost mystical, idealized form of life that couldn’t possibly exist. The idea was romantic and depressing at the same time and I tried to shake it. The closer I got to Stafford, the more possibilities I saw for what could happen between us. But I couldn’t really get a good read on him. I didn’t know how he felt.

I used Minerva to open Stafford’s desktop as well as all the contents of his phone. For a moment I wondered why I hadn’t tried to do all this sooner. Then I remembered how hard I had been trying to put him out of my head. Also, and, for no good reason at all, I had wanted to try to preserve as pure an image of Stafford as possible in my mind. What I knew of his dealings didn’t help the image. They didn’t necessarily hurt it either, just added an element of uncertainty and distrust. I became increasingly uneasy as I prepared to open his desktop files and go through them. I made sure everything I was doing on my computer was heavily encrypted so nothing I did would have the slightest chance of even inadvertently getting out. I was extremely paranoid about security when it came to clandestine activity online.

Then I took a deep breath and dove in. Opening Stafford’s desktop, I found the usual shortcut icons—shortcuts for web browsers, Windows Media Player, Spotify, Skype, iTunes—and I found a folder marked “Images,” along with folders marked, “Desktop ’08,” “Personal,” “Taxes,” and “Hedge fund & derivatives.” The first folder I went to was “Images.” Inside were more folders with various dates spread over the last four years. Oddly, the images weren’t of Stafford or his family or even travel pictures. They were images of company logos, American and foreign. A lot of it was advertising too. I rapidly flipped through about four hundred images of ads and logos. I thought Stafford must’ve owned some of these companies or part of them and he must’ve been inspired by the advertising or logos of the others or perhaps they were companies he wished to acquire a piece of but had not yet managed to do so.

Next I opened “Personal.” There was nothing in it, waste of time,. “Taxes” similarly yielded an empty folder. One left on the desktop: “Hedge funds & derivatives.” Inside was one image file, which I opened. It was merely a circular, yellow happy face. “Desktop ’08” revealed similar contents to the newer desktop. The file folders were labeled exactly the same. I opened “Images” in “Desktop ’08.” It was completely cleared out. Likewise, “Taxes,” “Hedge funds & derivatives,” “Personal,” and “Images” were empty. Why did he even have a
“Desktop ’08” file if there was nothing in it? I looked for folders and files that might be hidden from view. One new folder came up in the “Images” file on the current desktop. It was called “Blog.” I opened “Blog” and found over 1,500 erotic and light pornographic images and a few pornographic clips downloaded off the internet. I watched one of the clips. A beautiful Asian woman, perfect figure—with what looked and moved like natural large breasts—was arched over backwards, on hands and feet, chest raised up toward the ceiling, as the male porn star came up underneath her and fucked her from below, thrusting almost straight up.

I closed Stafford’s computer out and went into his phone. As I did this, I found myself in the constant grip of a fear that Stafford would knock at the door. More than once I got up and went to the door, peeking out into the hall to make sure he wasn’t there. I wondered if I’d smoked too much AK-47 and Hindu Kush lately, causing a permanent paranoia. Or was I right to be paranoid?

Compounding the feeling of anxiety was the increasing sense of cabin fever I was getting being stuck on an island for so long with no recourse to any form of civilization more than Governor’s Harbour, which itself was so isolated that when I was there it often felt like some remote trading post on Antarctica. I decided I would smoke a bit less, drink an extra glass of wine each night, and perhaps take up meditation to clear up these anxiety problems.

To say I was mostly in the grip of paranoid feelings at this time would be to present a half-truth at best. I was still very much euphoric at the great changes taking place in my life. The irony that I felt so anxious and increasingly trapped at the moment of the greatest turn of luck and freedom from material concerns in my life doesn’t escape me. My newfound willingness to take on life in a new way came at a cost, and there was an emotional disturbance I had not been able to foresee. I now see, looking back, that my ability to live in this new, free way was unleashing some repressed memories, fears, and depression from the past. This venting, along with my secret fears about Stafford, contributed to my anxious state that was at once paranoid and euphoric.

Around this time a new idea was beginning to take shape in my mind. Now that I had achieved further freedom in the way I lived, I required a more solid direction in life in order to maintain these happy feelings surging from the wellsprings of my soul. What I really wanted I couldn’t have, or so I thought at the time. That was to be Savannah’s mother and Stafford’s one lover, if not his wife. This last, I wasn’t ready to admit consciously. Consciously, I believed I didn’t need anyone and wouldn’t permit any thoughts to the contrary. But secretly, deep down, I wanted Isabella’s life. I even began fantasizing, in states of semi-reverie, about how to get it. First, I daydreamed about being a sister wife alongside Isabella. Then I imagined Isabella and Mark getting a divorce that somehow I was the cause of. This was better than having to share him.

Stafford’s phone had five email accounts linked to it, and twenty-three bank accounts. This was what I was looking for. I should be able to figure something out from all these accounts, I thought. I half-imagined myself an FBI counterintelligence agent, looking through the phone of a suspected spy. Somehow it eased the tension, and made me feel less guilty.

The first thing I honed in on in his phone was an app entitled “Notes.” Inside, the most recent (in a series going so far back I would eventually have to scroll through it) was called simply “July 9.” I opened “July 9.”