Page 9 of Emily

Tipping his head back, he stared up at the sky. Though he couldn’t feel the wind, he could see the clouds moving across the clear blue. For a long moment, he watched them. With such a big damn universe, his problems felt so tiny.

“I’m going to BDE tonight. I don’t know if I’ll find someone there, but I know I need to start looking.” He hesitated, but if he couldn’t tell Anita, who could he tell? “I’ve been having inappropriate thoughts about Emily. Remember Don and Elizabeth? That would be their daughter. You only got to meet her once when she was a baby. Yeah, the same age as our daughter, and if some old asshole my age was having the kind of thoughts about Katrina that I’ve been having about Emily…”

He’d fucking kill the man.

Probably.

Make sure our daughter has a happy life.

That was one of the last things Anita ever said to him. Make sure Katrina has a happy life. And if she came home with a boyfriend that was Damian’s age, but who made her happy?

Go-with-the-flow Anita would have gone with it. Damian sighed. She’d probably talk him down from kicking the guy’s ass and into accepting him because it made Katrina happy. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t a dirty fucking pervert. He could only imagine what Don and Elizabeth would think if they found out he was lusting after their daughter.

Scratch that. He didn’t give a fuck what Don thought. The asshole had turned into a complete piece of trash over the years. Damian had held onto the friendship because Don had been such a support to him after Anita died, but eventually, even he couldn’t keep putting up with the toxic shit that spewed from Don’s mouth. He’d somehow gone from being a decent guy with occasional asshole tendencies to being a racist, homophobic, misogynistic piece of crap, then he’d started drinking and gambling on top of it. When he’d gambled away his trailer, it had been Damian who stepped in and saved him—not for Don, but for Elizabeth and Emily.

Unfortunately, that had just left Don free to start gambling again. Then he’d gotten pissed at Elizabeth for trying to stop him, cheated on her left and right, and eventually, she’d ended up turning to drugs to help her through her life. Don had turned her in, retaliating when she wouldn’t hand over her paycheck. Something Damian was reasonably sure Emily still didn’t know, but Elizabeth had told him when he’d paid for her lawyer.

So, yeah. Fuck Don. There was still a part of Damian that instinctively cared what his old friend would have thought… but that old friend was long gone and had turned into someone else completely.

He still cringed when he thought about Elizabeth. He’d visited her a few times and kept in touch with her after she was sent to prison. Trying to picture her reaction to hearing her loser husband’s former best friend was with her daughter?

Yeah, no. Fuck that. He couldn’t imagine that going over well in any scenario, no matter how open-minded a person was. He still felt guilty for not having done more for her, even though he wasn’t sure what else he might have been able to do.

“Anyway.” He leaned his head against the cool stone. “I’m going to BDE tonight. I need to get Emily out of my head so I can stop feeling like such a pervert. Find a date who’s age-appropriate. Someone I can have a future with.”

After another long moment, he patted the grass again and straightened up.

“I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back, though. I promise I won’t forget to visit, even if I do start dating and even if I ever get a second wife.” He didn’t intend to ever make Katrina feel like he’d pushed her mom out of the way in favor of someone else.

Heading back to his garage, his lunch break over, he waved to his workers on his way in.

“Hey boss, that part you were waiting for arrived,” Brad, one of his techs, called over to him as he passed.

“Thanks.” Damian nodded his acknowledgment and picked up his pace a bit. Losing himself in work right now felt like a good thing.

Emily

The auction website was everything Sasha said it would be. Emily used the password Sasha had given her to get in and look around. There were all sorts of people—not just women—of all shapes, sizes, races, and ages. If someone had a fantasy they wanted fulfilled, they’d be able to do it there.

Some of the descriptions of what the participants were offering made her cringe.

There was a whole section for virgins but only two listings under it. That meant there wasn’t a lot of competition, which meant more money. Maybe because there weren’t that many virgins around the area. At least, not ones who were over eighteen.

The next auction was on Friday.

If she wanted in, she needed to get herself uploaded onto the site by midnight tonight, which didn’t leave her much time to decide. At least she’d been able to go to the library today to use their wi-fi, so she could upload her application through her phone—if she decided to go through with it. Hopefully, she didn’t introduce a virus or something into their system, but… she didn’t have many other options. She was going to run out of data before the end of the month if she didn’t keep a careful eye on it, then where would she be? The library was the best place for her to get free wi-fi.

Scrunching herself back farther against the bookshelf, Emily lifted her head to look around again, even though no one would be able to see the screen of her phone since she was in a corner. She still felt like she was doing something wrong.

Scrolling through the site, Emily pressed her lips together. Looking actually made her feel a little better. Some people showed their faces in the photos, some didn’t. Some had their faces cropped out or were wearing some kind of mask. That appealed to her. A mask would be good because then she couldn’t be recognized.

Which was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her until she’d been looking at the site and recognized one of the women offering a ‘night of being humiliated and verbally tortured.’ Emily didn’t know much about her other than her name was Amanda, and she liked to dunk her pickles in her tomato juice. The fact that she’d recognized anyone had taken her aback even more than what Amanda was offering.

Not that she used her real name. According to the description, Mistress Avery only offered verbal humiliation and torment. There would be no sexual contact whatsoever.

If only that was possible for her… but the guaranteed income from what Mistress Avery was offering was a lot lower than what a virgin would get. Emily had found the guarantees in the application section. A lot of them were kind of general, but enough for her to get the idea that virgins were a big draw.

Plus, there wasn’t much she could do to fulfill someone’s fantasy without sex, which meant she’d be giving it up, anyway.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com