“Scarlet,” I said gently, “could you tell me what’s going on? What led to our meeting like this in a hotel lobby with your family all around you, with me not even knowing about your beautiful little girl until now? I can tell things have been difficult for you, and I don’t want to make it any more trying, but I’ve been blindsided by all this and need to understand.”
Scarlet looked at her hands as Ashley took the seat beside her. From her continued tears, it didn’t look like she could talk just yet. I glanced at the clock on the wall; it helped me decide that I needed to sleep sometime tonight, so I switched gears.
“Would it be better if Ashley tried to explain?”
Scarlet nodded, so I looked at Ashley. Ashley took a moment to compose herself before beginning.
Ashley talked for several minutes, and a coherent story began to emerge. It turned out to be a very long conversation. The gist of it was that what had started out as a lark for the two girls had wound up going south in a hurry.
The two had met their freshman year at Alabama when they’d both pledged the same sorority. Each of them came from well-established, moneyed Alabama families.
Ashley’s family was based in Mobile. There they had owned substantial dockside interests since before the Civil War. They’d somehow managed to retain them during Reconstruction. Later, they’d grown their holdings to the point where the family had its fingers in most of the transportation-related industries in Alabama.
Scarlet’s family was based more in western and northern Alabama. Their interests were in real estate, and they were probably one of the largest private landowners in the state. The vast majority of the family’s real-estate interests had been held on her mother’s side of the family. Her father’s family had substantial holdings of its own, but her daddy was a good ol’ boy at heart. He and his father had spent a lot of time and money creating a sportsman’s ranch. It included a huge lodge, a big lake for fishing, and about 10,000 acres of forested land used primarily for deer and turkey hunting.
The girls had become instant friends, each recognizing a kindred spirit in the other. They had elected to room together off campus at their earliest opportunity. They’d stayed each summer and had taken classes during the first two. From what I’d seen, I didn’t imagine Scarlet had wanted to spend her summers cooped up living in a more or less rural setting without her college peers. My guess was that it probably would’ve been pretty lonely for her, even with family around.
The girls’ off-campus roommate arrangement had continued up to the time I’d met them, and after. They’d stayed on during the summer after their junior year. Ashley had taken a summer job with the university’s athletic department as a volunteer hostess for high school football recruits.
Scarlet’s maternal grandfather had been the family patriarch. He had headed up the family until he passed on about five years before. He’d apparently ruled his family with a benign, but iron fist. Her grandfather had arranged Scarlet’s mother’s marriage to her father very shortly after her mother had graduated high school. Scarlet’s dad was similar to her grandfather in that he believed strongly that the father and the husband ruled the roost. The result was that both Scarlet and her mother had led mostly sheltered lives.
Things had changed a bit for Scarlet, though. Her dad had agreed that she could go to the University of Alabama to land a rich husband and further increase the family’s fortunes. This reminded me of the plight of the Wesleyan daughters and how their mother had tried to set them up. Once she was out from under her parents’ thumbs, however, she’d gone a bit wild.
Ashley had been happy to help Scarlet act out her fantasies; apparently, one of them was for her to be tied up and have sex with a stranger. I’d been selected as the unknown stud because I was easy on the eyes, outgoing, and seemed to know what I was doing. But most importantly, I was from
With the amount of partying that Scarlet had been doing, she’d apparently woken up hungover several times. As a consequence, she hadn’t been taking her birth-control pills as regularly as she should have. She’d also insisted that any guy she went to bed with had to wear a condom. She admitted that that to protect herself from the risk of disease than anything else.
On the night the three of us had gotten together, Scarlet figured that I was pretty safe on the STI front. Why she would assume that, I wasn’t sure. So, given her desire to have her bondage fantasy play out as realistically as possible, she’d told Ashley to forego her condom rule for the night.
