Page 22 of Shameful Addictions

She wasn’t done yet with those regrets, either. She still had to go see him and talk to him in person.

Sniffling a bit, she sat up. She swung her legs out of bed and bent to pick her clothes up off the floor. She sighed out, breathed in, and smelled the muskiness of her recent sex in the air, faint but present, like a secret no one wanted to discuss.

If she went to see Mamba while smelling of sex, well, that would be the most awful thing imaginable. That would be like shooting herself and then jumping into an ocean. She’d attract sharks.

She’d attracthim.

A look at her clock confirmed for her that she would have enough time to shower before she had to get on the road. She shed the rest of her clothes on the way and hopped in. She took no pleasure in the hot water trailing down her skin, the soft suds of soap perfuming the air with the sweet scent of lavender. It was all business, all purpose.

Climbing out, she dried off and focused on putting herself back together. Her eyes and nose were red from crying. She covered it up with concealer and foundation, and applied a bit too much lipstick until she looked like a teenage girl just beginning to play with makeup. By that point, she didn’t have the time or patience to fix it, so she added eyeshadow to match. She also spritzed herself with some perfume, and then a little more, enough to make the entire bathroom smell like a floral arrangement on a hot summer day. Even then, she thought she could still detect the smell of sex around her. It surrounded her like an aura.

There wasn’t any time to do anything else. She grabbed her car keys and her burner phone and left her apartment to go haggle for her life.

Chapter nine

Entertain me

Charlottehadneverbeento the very top floor of CM, had never had reason to. All her dealings had gone through Damian. He represented a sort of ceiling, since she’d never had reason to go above him. Now she had ascended him, past the attic, into a spiraling tower that went up and up. What she would find at the very top, she didn’t know, but she had a suspicion she wouldn’t like it at all.

Once she stepped out of the elevator, she found herself in a spacious waiting area. The floor shone like a polished mirror. She could see her reflection. A glance down between her feet confirmed that she didn’t actually want to. A slight warping of the light turned her purple-lipsticked mouth into a garish, clownish slash.

A huge flat white desk took up an entire corner of the lobby and behind that desk sat a bespectacled secretary. She was the secretary Charlotte had spoken to on the phone. She had no doubt about that. This was a woman who would absolutely call herself Princess, who would throw the pitch of her voice up an octave to be pleasing to pen. Her hair was silky and brown with blonde highlights, parted and swept over to one side. A black-and-white crop top strained to contain her breasts, leaving her smooth, tanned stomach exposed. That was all Charlotte could see of her with the desk in the way and it was more than she had wanted to.

Princess shifted her glasses to peer over the tops of them and narrowed her eyes. “He’ll be with you in a minute. Take a seat.”

When she shifted her glasses, the light reflecting upon them didn’t warp, as they would have if the lenses were a prescription. They were fake, part of her sexy secretary costume.

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, her mouth dry. She crossed the floor, her heels tapping a staccato beat, and sat down on the couch. It was a long winding stretch of cushion that ran the length of the wall, with ottomans placed near each concave curve. Plush pillows lined the couch back. She couldn’t relax, refused to relax, and kept her spine stiff and straight.

Expensive pieces of abstract art covered the other walls, even high up above a window showing an impressive view of the city below. Charlotte found herself particularly attracted to a square painting, mostly gray in coloration, with swipes of blue above and green below. Twists of darker and lighter gray and splashes of red brought to her mind some sort of battle, perhaps Medieval.

She wondered how much it had cost. She wondered if this was what the top floor always looked like, or if Mamba had changed it to suit his needs.

How much has he changed? Was I just the first adjustment he made?

Princess spoke, butting into her thoughts. “He’s ready for you now.”

Charlotte got up and went to the door, all that separated her from the man trying to ruin her life. Recalling the instructions she had been given, she watched the clock on the wall and timed her knock with the first tick of the new minute.

“Enter,” his voice called. When raised, it had a rough undertone.

Knowing she had no hope of preparing herself, Charlotte shoved his door open and thrust herself into his office.

The room unfurled around her, cavernous in size, lined with gigantic photographs and paintings of scantily-clad women in all sorts of scandalous positions. Backs were arched unnaturally, thrusting out their breasts and asses, which were all too large and perfectly round to be natural. Platinum-blonde hair, always platinum-blonde, spilled over their shoulders, down their backs, trailed over their rotund asses. Their lips were plump, unnaturally so, and shiny with makeup. Their faces were blank, lustful, high color in their cheeks as they arched and stared upwards.

Even in the paintings, those details were clear. The artists had rendered their models with hyper-realistic details,

Charlotte stood there, framed on all sides by the pornographic images. They showed her what this man was really like, what he really wanted of his women, as if she’d had any doubt. He saw all women as the same, all women as whores. She was another whore to him, too. A money whore, come to try and suck him dry.

Mamba sat far across at the other end of the room, in front of an entire wall of window panes, showing the city below. Shorter skyscrapers, office buildings, clusters of stores, strip malls, and the roads that wove through it all, covered in cars and rimmed with pedestrians; he lorded over it all like a king at his throne. He even wore the modern man’s equivalent of king’s clothing, an expensive suit tailored to fit his tall, muscular body.

“So you’re smart enough to listen to instructions,” he said, and gave a dry smirk that chilled her to the bone.

Charlotte clasped her hands in front of her and held her head high, trying not to show him that she was intimidated. She took a step forward.

“Don’t come closer,” Mamba said. His voice was still so smooth and measured and he still smiled, but it was an obvious command.

Charlotte froze where she stood, heart thundering in her breast. As much as she didn’t want to, she had to obey him. Her future depended upon it.

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