“Unless you show him something else.”
“Something like Riley.”
“That’s right,” Jess schemed. “No more of these ridiculous one-night stands, public intoxication feats, and making my job a living nightmare,” she told me. “You’ve got to settle down. Find yourself a nice girl. An American could work… it’s an interesting but believable choice for you. Someone who challenges you… someone who can keep you in line.”
“And I have to marry her?”
“Of course not!” Jess laughed. “But getting a girlfriend out of her is a step in the right direction, wouldn’t you think?”
I dwelled on this a little longer.
“You think it’s her?”
“From the way you went all googly eyes when we were talking about her?” Jess asked, standing up from the chair and straightening out her outfit. “She’s a girl you sound like you actually respect. I think she’s a probably a good start.”
5
Riley
Unsurprisingly, the English guy had turned out to be an arrogant prick.
And the sex had been phenomenal…
Isn’t that how it always worked?
It wasn’t all bad… It’s just a shame that I didn’t have a chance to cut my proverbial tether and bolt before the woman showed up.
I wasn’t sure who she was.
A wife?
A girlfriend?
It didn’t really matter. I’d gathered up my things and just pushed my way out the door and the asshole didn’t even try to stop me.
It wasn’t hard to navigate down to the ground floor and out the door. He was staying at one of the halfway-decent hotels in the area, and within a couple of minutes I was already on my way back home to my apartment.
Oh well, I thought to myself. At least I got myself a great fuck in there before the sky came crashing down.
The further away from the hotel I walked, the more that I considered the night. It had been more than just sex. Lex had pushed me to my very limits. The Englishman knew just how to excite me in the best ways, ramping up my passion before letting me dangle precariously at that precipice… letting me drift back… and then pushing me again and again, teasing me, until I finally begged for release.
When the release came, it crushed me.
I didn’t reveal the fact, but I experienced my first multiple orgasm that night. Most guys hadn’t really been particularly useful in the orgasm department, either finishing too quickly or not at all… but it was rare that I got to ride the climax myself.
With Lex, I’d lost count of the amount of times he’d thrown me over the cliff.
He was so brutishly rugged, and then there was that English charm of his. Every breath of his accent excited me, forcing me to hang upon his every last syllable. When he asked me to come for him, I couldn’t help but oblige… and my fingernails had dug into his skin, riding out the intense heat between us.
And then he came inside me. It was the most incredible feeling in the world…
“Oh fuck,” I thought aloud.
I came to an actual stop on the sidewalk and considered the implications. What if he had been lying? I thought to myself. He told me that he was clean, and that he’d had a vasectomy… I had completely believed him without question.
What the fuck, Riley?
So maybe I wasn’t the first girl who made a mistake like that… I was better than this! I’d just cross my fingers and get myself tested. How did I let this happen?
I continued strolling back towards my apartment. After twenty more minutes of walking, I was ascending the stairs up to my humble abode and clicking the key through the keyhole.
It was time to see if my little taste of England had worked for my creative side… For the rest of the day, I decided to try painting. I needed something special if I wanted any chance of earning the attention from the one woman in the world who’s opinion really mattered…
Gloria Van Lark.
Van Lark was a legend in the museum world. As the head curator for the Spinnoc museum in San Diego, she was known for her tall, hawkish appearance and her fiercely volatile temper.
This was a woman who was not to be trifled with, and who took her time very seriously. Just obtaining enough of her attention for an audience got you accepted into a number of distinguished museums around the country.
Then, there was the significant hurdle of actually impressing her.
Gloria Van Lark didn’t care for resumes and histories. The fact that I had been gifted with an artistic scholarship to Finland, allowing me to take a full year to pursue an isolated artist’s retreat, would mean precisely nothing to her.
Neither would the gamut of smaller museums that already carried some of my work, or the fact that I’d been fully supporting myself through my painting since I was a young teenager.