Emily & Ellen's Bet Ch. 01

This is a re-write of Emily & Ellen's Bet, originally posted in April of 2011. The effort is part of re-writing the entire continuous story arc of Ellen's Bet > Roberta's Bet > Dani's Bet > Emily's Bet > Ellen & David's Bet > Emily & Ellen's Bet. I re-wrote these stories for two reasons. First, I wanted to clean up some sloppiness in the writing. Second, I wanted to take the six stories, only two of which were planned to any degree at the beginning of Ellen's Bet with the others conceived and added later, and create better internal consistencies, and plot and character consistency, between them. At this point I think a reader could look at these stories as one tale comprising a six-part novel. Emily & Ellen - Part III: Emily & Ellen's Bet - Chapter One Ellen The rest of my Sunday with David and the girls was blissful, except of course for the misery of the dull ache that had taken up temporary residence in my body from my whipping the night before. This determined hurt manifested itself in particular ways. My welts gave off a constant throbbing. I could feel beats of my heart from the blood that seemed to course through them. Occasionally the ache gathered itself into a temporary agony that suffused my whole body before dissipating. When I gave my wales a good reason, such as insulting them by rubbing or bumping against a wall or a piece of furniture, they fought back with a tortured distress that took a while to settle down. I peed without sitting on the seat. However, I was willing to bear the pain from the welts on my ass in order to sit and not have to drop number two from mid-air. Occasionally my imagination would play tricks on me. The five of us were watching a show on cable that evening. As an ad for a pain reliever was ending I would swear that the lithe and toned young woman who was the announcer, holding up a container of the product so her manicured fingers didn't block the label, had concluded the commercial by saying, "Advil provides twelve hour pain relief. Remember that the next time you're whipped senseless, Ellen." I'd looked over at David, but he apparently hadn't heard the same words. I excused myself early for bed. I kissed all the girls, pushing forward my head and lips to avoid any hugs. I found some left over vicodin in the bathroom chest, popped a couple, and went off to bed in search of pain free unconsciousness. Monday morning my aches were still with me as I stood in the walk-in closet and pondered which pantsuit to wear that day. My pantsuits and long-skirted business suits would be getting a lot of mileage in the next week or two. The walk of seven blocks to the office was pleasant: the spring air fresh, a breeze blowing off the lake. Bright sunlight sent long, early morning shadows across the streets to shade nearby buildings and to make their descent from lofty heights as the sun climbed higher. When I arrived at the office my assistant was not yet there. This was not too unusual. On Monday she often took the next El after her usual one and got here a little late. I don't begrudge her the time. She's diligent, and repays the lost time many times over in extra hours, effort, and an abundance of skill and talent. I was at my desk wading through emails, my attention focused on my computer monitor when her hands suddenly gripped my shoulders and her head was close to mine. The contact was unexpected but not unwelcome, except for the minor pain it elicited from my injuries. We've become close friends in the six years we've worked together and share most of our personal lives with each other. The welts in my upper back began to buzz angrily, but I forgot them when I heard her news. She brought her mouth near the side of my head and said softly, "Ian and I made love this weekend." "Emily!" I said, disengaging myself so I could turn to face her. "Oh, my God! That is such good news!" I knew a hug was in order. I knew I would suffer for it, but this was news worth some discomfort. I stood and embraced her, both of us giggling. When we broke the hug I asked, "So how was it?" She just bent her knees, swooning a little. It was enough to get her point across. I just had to press for details. "A weekend is a long time," I said. "How many times?" "Well," she said, "there was the blow job on Friday night. Then lovemaking Saturday morning. And again Saturday night. Then there was yesterday afternoon. Oh, I almost forgot last night. Well, no I didn't really almost forget it. That was just a manner of speaking. If I'm walking a little bowlegged today at least you'll know why." I smiled at her again, happiness deep in my soul for her. She deserves this. When her most recent relationship had ended almost a year ago she'd told me that some of the men she's dated have satisfied her sexually, and some emotionally, and some intellectually, but none had come even close to hitting the trifecta. I looked at her again and asked, "So is he hitting three for three?" She got a bashful look on her face and looked down. When she looked at me again her face was thoughtful and there was a little extra moisture in her eyes. "Yeah, Ellen," she said in a soft and sober voice, "yeah, I think he is." I've never met Ian, but have heard a great deal about him. He's an English gentleman, here working in the Chicago office of his London investment bank. He's gotten Emily addicted to Guinness beer. "So how did all this come to pass?" I asked. I was expecting a happy story and my voice was a little giddy. Unexpectedly, a troubled look crossed her face and she looked away. "What?" I asked. "It's, um," she started, and then was at a loss for words. I was truly bewildered now. I knew she's been interested in Ian for quite some months. She's been spending many evenings at a neighborhood pub both of them enjoy and frequent. She often tells me about the evenings they spend there, the gaggle of friends not in attendance some evenings allowing them to focus on each other. She tells me how their conversations have turned to more personal subjects and how she knew that feelings on both sides were as yet unexpressed. Well, now those feelings had obviously been expressed. Repeatedly! I'd been expecting a cute story they would tell over and over again until their kids couldn't stand to hear it one more time. So why the troubled look? Emily continued, but in a halting and hesitant way. "It's just, ah, well, something else happened Friday night, you know, before..." and she trailed off. I gave her a questioning look that I hoped was full of concern and love and had no trace of morbid interest. She ended lamely. "Let's have lunch. Can you do that today? I'll tell you all about it. I promise." I nodded my head. "Yeah. Lunch it is," I said. She left me to start into some work that needed completing before close of business. I turned back to my desk and made a lunch reservation. Then I sent an email to the troll in Legal. I was supposed to stop by his office at lunch time. He had some issue to bring to my attention and insisted on doing it over lunch. It and he could wait. When lunch time came we ditched out a little early and took a walk to Italian Village. After we'd been seated, we were looking over our menus when I glanced over the top of mine and saw that Emily was looking over the top of hers looking at me looking at her. "I know what I want anyway," Emily said, putting down her menu. "Yeah, me too," I agreed. "So," Emily began, "well, I met Ian at the bar along with a few other guy friends Friday night. Um. It was kinda fun. I, uh, well, I got one of them to strip there at the bar." "I'm sorry?" I asked, shaking my head and a little uncertain. Had I had heard her wrong? "Did you say you got one of your friends to strip at the bar?" Emily looked down and her face got very red, but she had a guilty smile on her face too. When her head came back up she said, "Well.....yeah. Actually I did." "How did you get him to do that?" I asked. The wait person came to our table then and we placed our orders, answered the usual questions about salad dressing and side orders and drinks. I answered quickly, wanting the waiter to leave so I could find out what this was all about. When we were again alone I raised my eyebrows and held up my hands, palms facing the ceiling. "Ah, it was a game of pool," she explained, and then took a sip of her water. "There was me and four guys I know and I got the one I know to be the worst pool player to play me. I dumped a little and then made a bet with him that the loser of the next game had to take off their underwear in the middle of the bar and hand them to the winner." Frankly, I was impressed. I had no idea Emily led this interesting a life, and her tale of winning her bet and obliging a guy to strip in public sent a little thrill through me. I laughed out loud at the image in my head. "I wish I could have been there to see that," I said. In spite of her embarrassment at these personal revelations Emily began to smile, and then she laughed along with me. "Well, I've been doing this kind of thing ever since I was in high school," she said, sounding sheepish and hesitant. "Um, I started playing strip poker in high school, and I kept playing in college, and still play from time to time." This was completely unexpected, but I found the ignition switch to my sexual engine had just been engaged, my motor revving into action like a car engine with the go pedal to the floor. "It sounds as if it might be interesting and fun," I said. It was an honest reaction: what she was telling me struck a chord, and I paused to consider that perhaps this was that undefined commonality I've sensed between us. After my horrible experience in Baton Rouge this all sounded quite tame enough to be very enjoyable. "It is," Emily said, "but, you know, after high school, well the games began to get a lot more interesting." I raised my eyebrows to express my unspoken question. "Well, um, in college and now when I play it's not just that the loser has to get naked," she said. "Usually they have to do some sort of forfeit." "Like?" I asked. "Oh, you know, they might have to streak or masturbate," Emily said. I giggled a little. "That sounds like fun. Well, I suppose as long as you're not the one who has to do it," I said. "Also, well, sometimes we've played that maybe a guy and girl lose and might have to do oral on each other or have sex outright while the other players watch." This still sounded rather tame compared to my experience down south in which I essentially became a sex slave for a night. Emily began giggling uncontrollably, trying to keep the sound down by covering her mouth. "There was this one time..."she began. As she got her snickers under control she went on. "No, you don't want to hear about that." I gave her a look and said, "You can't just leave me on the hook like that. Trust me, I wanna hear this." Just then the waitperson brought our salads. I always hate it when you have to pause in a conversation when food or drink comes. The waitperson knows you've been talking about something very personal that's for the ears at the table only. So you fiddle with your napkin or adjust your silverware while he or she delays having to leave the table. We went through this little pantomime now. When he was at last gone I asked, "OK, you were about to proffer a for instance?" Emily I rolled my eyes at Ellen and smiled. I wanted to seem hesitant and bashful, but truthfully this is one of my favorite stories from my glory days in college. I'd never had occasion to tell it before. "OK, you sure you're ready for this?" I asked. Ellen just looked at me and speared some salad with her fork. She put the leaves and a piece of pepper in her mouth, propped her chin on her hand, chewed, and waited for me to begin. I told her a story from my junior year. My home was several hundred miles from the small liberal arts college in the South I attended. There were several other undergrads that used to play sometimes in our games, and our homes were all within a radius of about twenty miles. We all spent spring break that year at home and we made arrangements to get together once during the week. One of those friends, a girl named Allison, was anxious to get home when her classes were finished on the Friday before break. Her father was going to be gone on a business trip all the following week. The trip was entirely unavoidable, and he had to leave early Monday morning. So Allison wanted to make it home Friday evening so as to be able to spend at least a couple of days with him before he left. Allison's father was forty-five, but the step-mother, Brenda, was thirty-one, just ten years older than Allison. The family dynamics were, let's just use the catch all, 'dysfunctional'. To me it seemed as if Allison loved her father well enough. I'd seen them together just the previous winter break, and it seemed as if her feelings for him were genuine. When Allison's father had divorced her mother after nineteen years of marriage, Allison eighteen at the time, the shock had been quite a load to handle for an only child just out of high school. She'd thought her parents' marriage to be solid, had not seen it coming at all. Brenda was at the center of it, or more accurately the affair her father had been having with Brenda for the previous two years. Then a year after the divorce Allison's father was walking back up the aisle, a new wife and Allison's new stepmother on his arm. This was two years previous, when Allison was nineteen. By now, a couple years down the road, I couldn't imagine how Allison couldn't see that her father was really at the center of the breakup of her parents' marriage, or at least as responsible as Brenda. I guess Allison had just decided to save her venom for Brenda. She viewed Brenda in the role of home-wrecker, and took that view whether or not there was any actual evidence. Whoever had done the pursuing in reality, in Allison's mind it was Brenda chasing down her father and destroying the marriage. None of this had boiled over, though. Allison hadn't had it out with Brenda. She simply avoided her. Allison didn't spend much time at home. She was there for at least part of winter break, but the two summers since the wedding she'd spent at school taking summer classes. For this spring break Allison was planning to see her father for those two days before he left, avoiding Brenda as best she could. Then she would be there for the rest of Monday, and Tuesday morning she was flying out to the coast to spend the remainder of spring break with her mother. On Monday, per arrangements, I and a couple of the guys from school arrived at Allison's in the late morning. We went out for a hike for the afternoon. We pulled into Allison's driveway in the early evening after stopping on the way back for a bite. We mounted the stairs up to Allison's second floor room and shut the door. Well, you know how one thing leads to another and we soon decided that a game of strip poker was in order. Allison didn't have any cards in her room so she went downstairs to hunt up a deck. I went with her, wanting something cold to drink. The boys wanted something too, so I became the designated waitress. As I passed the entry to the living room I saw Brenda sitting across the room in a chair, reading under the light of a lamp. I continued to the kitchen while Allison gritted her teeth and asked Brenda if there was a deck of cards around. Brenda told her to look in the kitchen drawers and she was sure a deck could be found. While I got a few drinks together Allison explored and soon found the cards. We started for the stairs, but as we passed the living room Brenda called out to Allison, asking her, "What do you want with the cards, Sweetie?" Allison was in front of me just a couple treads up the stairs. I was at the bottom. We'd already passed the point where Brenda would be able to see us from where she sat. Allison whirled around, a scowl on her face and her eyes slightly crossed and rolled up, conveying her frustration and anger. She put up a middle finger in the direction of the living room. In another circumstance I would have found the look on her face worthy of a good laugh. I restrained myself. This was bothering her, I supposed, on two counts. First, the presumption of affection suggested by the nominative Brenda had used. Second, the subordinate position that nominative implied: as if Brenda really were Allison's mother, or a personage akin to that status. "Be nice," I said under my breath. "Oh, don't worry about that," Allison said as her face cleared and she moved past me. Allison walked casually over and stood in the entryway to the living room, a shoulder leaning against the entry frame. "Actually, Brenda, we're going to play strip poker," Allison said in a frank way. "Oh," Brenda said. It sounded as if she were unsure if some expression of parental disapproval were in order. "Wanna play?" Allison asked. "Well..." Brenda began. "Yeah, I think you might be a little old for that," Allison said, as if just pointing out the obvious. "The game's really more for people who are, like, young." I had some admiration for Allison. She seemed to have some talents I'd not before suspected. All this takes on a different perspective recalled at my current age. Brenda was thirty-one at the time. I'm twenty-eight and just played the previous Friday evening, with an interlude for me to run around the apartment building bare assed. "Well, I don't know," Brenda said, sounding like she didn't want to cede too much to Allison in the young person activities department. "I used to play sometimes in college. Even a few times after." Brenda made her voice a little more confidential. "In fact, I even played once with your dad. It really got both our motors running." I could just imagine how welcome that confidence was to Allison. I wouldn't have been surprised to see smoke pouring from her ears. "Well, I'm in," Brenda said trying to sound eager, but her enthusiasm had a very forced quality to it. Maybe Brenda just didn't want to appear to be an old fuddy. Or maybe she looked on this unexpected event as an opportunity to have a bonding experience with her distant and borderline-hostile stepdaughter. Balancing my tray of drinks I proceeded silently up the stairs so that Brenda wouldn't know I'd been listening. A few moments after I'd entered the room Allison came in followed by Brenda. I'd not had time to explain to the boys what was happening. Allison made introductions. I'd met Brenda previously, but the boys hadn't. "So, Brenda's playing with us," Allison said. The boys made appropriate, testosterone-induced noises, and weren't too subtle about giving her the once over. It's not like Brenda wasn't worth a once over, or even a twice over. She had thick, naturally blonde hair that reached to the small of her back, full lips, and eyes that were set wide apart. They gave her a look of naivety, but she looked as if she might be able to hit a curve ball: some say that good major league hitters share the characteristic of widely spaced eyes that allows them to track a ball better in its rapid trip to the plate. Every specific of her body seemed solid, but pleasingly so. Her calves and hips were maybe a bit thicker than one might think pleasing, and yet that distinction made them attractive. Her ass also seemed wide and solid, but in a way that I supposed might make a guy want to get behind her with his boner and start pushing. Her boobs did not seem especially large, but seemed like they might be firm and attractive. Allison and I and the guys did an inventory of our clothing. We'd all taken our shoes off at the door and so were in socks and had top and bottom under and outer wear. Brenda announced, seeming just a bit hesitant or flustered, that apart from her dress she was wearing just a bra and panties. She said she would be right back and took her leave to go put on more clothing. While she was gone Allison sat down on her bed, and we all followed suit, parking our asses at different places around the perimeter. When we were seated Allison said, "Listen, just follow my lead and we might have an interesting night. Just leave that space for Brenda." She indicated a place near the head of the bed on the side opposite from the door. I was about to ask for more specifics when Brenda returned, now wearing a skirt and blouse combination and with socks on her feet. Brenda found the open spot and sat down. Allison shuffled briefly and began to deal cards. This was a long time ago, so it's hard to remember just how the early part of the game went. As I remember it now, all five of us lost a couple hands, so that we all lost our first sock and then our second before anyone lost any clothing beyond socks. Then I lost a hand and took off my shirt, something that with my habit of not losing these games was somewhat a rarity. Then Brenda lost two hands in a row and was obliged to remove her blouse and then her skirt. I looked for those little clues I like to observe in girls heading toward nudity in one of these games and found them in spades with Brenda. Her face reddened in a dramatic way, the flush reaching down far into her chest. Her breathing seemed to get just a bit shallower. When she'd lost the second of those two consecutive hands I'd noticed a definite tremble in her fingers as she reached for the zipper at the side of her skirt. Allison seemed to notice too and exchanged a look and a surreptitious smile with me. It seemed the game was going in a direction that was to her liking. Brenda sat there for a few moments, obviously extremely self-conscious in her bra and panties, everyone else but me essentially fully dressed. As one of the boys was shuffling cards Brenda's hands played with each other in her lap. Then she got to her feet and gathered her skirt, blouse, and socks into her arms. "Hey, ya know," Brenda said, "I imagine you kids have seen about as much as you want to of this old hag. I'll just let you kids finish." She began to walk around the bed toward the door. Allison had been sitting at a corner of the foot of the bed nearest the door and rose immediately to her feet blocking Brenda's path. When Brenda reached her Allison actually put out a hand and gave her a little push back. "Brenda," Allison said, her voice all business, "at our school we play to the end of the game. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever walks out on a game. Especially if they're losing." "But..." Brenda began. "Everyone here sat down with the possibility they might lose," Allison continued. "If one of these guys was likely to have to drop his shorts in the near future and you were about to get to check out his package I don't imagine that you'd be making tracks for the door. Now would you? People who try to walk out at our school don't end up liking what happens to them. Isn't that right, Emily?" I had no idea what she was talking about. What she'd said was entirely true: absolutely no one had ever done this in any of the games I'd ever played. Then I remembered what Allison had said about playing along, and I brought myself up to speed like a natural. "Oh, you must be talking about Dorie," I said, hoping Allison would pick up the responsibility for fabricating what happened to the fictional Dorie. "Just who I was thinkin' about," Allison said. "Why don't you tell Brenda what happened to Dorie." I groaned inwardly and got my brain in gear to manufacture some falsehoods. "Oh, yeah, right," I said, "good old Dorie. Yeah. Well it was last spring and she was right where Brenda is now: bra and panties, and she decides she was gonna take a walk. Remember, Allison?" I was hoping she would pick up the thread of the tale, like one of those chain stories. The boys were sitting there looking at us in bewilderment, but knew to keep their traps shut. Unfortunately, Allison had suddenly come down with laryngitis. "Um, and it was really early," I said, spinning my wheels and looking for inspiration. "We'd been up all night and it was like five-thirty. So when Dorie refused to finish the game there were four of us just like now and we took her underwear off her. We were playing at Ted's room. Remember Ted with his little collection of sex toys? Well, we shoved a ball gag in her mouth and carried her across to the cafeteria fifteen minutes before they were supposed to open and we handcuffed her with her back to the light pole right outside the entrance and left her. I don't know, Allie. How many kids had a look at Dorie's goodies before campus security finally got there and turned her loose?" "Hell, I don't know," Allison answered. "A few hundred? She sure had her minutes of internet fame, didn't she?" I gave myself a little mental pat on the back. 'Not bad,' I thought. 'It's not that hard to cook up a little tale of public nudity and humiliation. Maybe I should write some of this down and send it in to an erotic story site.' "So, Brenda, you wanna sit down and finish the game?" Allison asked. "Or do you want us to think up a little adventure for you tonight?" Brenda didn't say a word. She just turned around, walked back to her spot, threw her clothes back on the floor, and sat down. Allison gave me a little wink and a thumbs up. 14760 2.07/512345