Page 48 of Total Exposure

But maybe I’m just in need of a good, hard fuck with a stranger?

The first boyfriend I ever had was in Phoenix. We’d just come back to the States and we were living with a family near Camelback Mountain for a summer. Huge fucking mansion on several acres. We stayed in the guest house. They had a son a couple years older than me. He was leaving for college in the fall and I was just starting to have… issues. I was there to play at a few parties they were throwing over the summer. My career was winding down. I had tits after all. The child prodigy thing was over. I think they were important people, but I paid no attention to who they were or what they did.

His name was Austin. He fucked me in every room of that mansion. Like… every room.

God, my clit is throbbing just picturing how he took me from chaste to insatiable in the span of a few weeks. His cock never got soft. Or so it seemed.

That was a long time ago. And there’s been no one since.

I didn’t love him. Nothing of the sort. I just liked what he did to me.

I come upon a tree swing in the corner of the yard. Ropes hang down from a thick limb jutting out of a massive tree that must be quite impressive in the summer. The swing is long enough to fit a family. This family. The older boy, and the middle girl, and the infant girl in the mother’s lap. The father in the center, surrounded by the people who make up his life, his arm around his wife on one side and his middle daughter on the other, letting them know they’re cherished.

I picture this perfect family for a moment. Imagine all the times they’ve sat out here on this swing and just… swung together.

I sit in the middle and feel the loss. The understanding of what I don’t have sinks all my easy thoughts in an instant, the empty space on either side of me glaring proof that I’m very much alone in this world.

It’s not a husband I want. Not really. A husband isn’t enough for me.

Nothing’s enough for you, Evangeline.

That might be true.

It’s the sense of belonging I crave.

I just want to fit in somewhere. The way the older boy fits into the space on this family swing. The way the infant daughter fits into the lap of her mother. The way the mother and middle daughter fit into the embrace of the father.

I glance at the perfect house that holds the perfect family in this unobtainable embrace. The tall, slender, arched windows that might actually be original from the look of the threads of lead separating the glass panes into smaller rectangles. The aged, but still beautiful, smudged look of the moss-green stucco that looks more like an Italian plaster wall than the typical exterior stucco you see these days.

And this garden. It’s so perfect, I ache just thinking about the mother and her daughter as they wander through, pruning dead petals in the summer and…

They must be somewhere else, I decide. For the winter. This house is half what it can be in the winter, surely. They are somewhere warm. The south of France. Or the Fiji Islands. Or maybe somewhere more exotic like the Maldives. Regardless, they are on a beach right now.

I sigh as my feet push off from the stone pebbles beneath them and the ropes creak with the effort of swinging.

I can’t even imagine going to a beach. Not during the day. Not unless it was some uninhabited island, far from the spying eyes of watchers.

The cold wind hits me suddenly and I wonder how long I’m supposed to sit out here reflecting on all the things my life is lacking.

Does he even care? Is he even watching?

The sun is mostly shaded with cloud cover. Just a pale yellow blob filtering through gray, high overhead. It must be noon already. I’ve been out here for hours. Lost in the lives of the perfect family and feeling more morose and melancholy by the second.

This is stupid, I decide, getting up off the swing. I’m going back inside. Nothing about this exercise is helping me. There’s no point to it. Just another excuse for Evangeline to throw her own personal pity party.

My feet crunch into the still air as I walk along the stone pathway towards the house.

I should leave. This is crazy. Playing stupid games with a stranger. Imagining him watching me walking around my room, naked. What the fuck was I thinking?

I’m sick. Depraved. And this craziness is perverting my thoughts and making me wish…

I see it as soon as I enter the ballroom. On a console table, propped up against a lamp, is a notebook. Written on the cover, in the same boxy print as the other letters he’s left, is a title.

It doesn’t say my name. It says, Jordan’s Game: Total Exposure.

I pick it up, open the front cover, and read the now-familiar handwriting.

Chapter Sixteen - Ixion