Callie Kim and the Measure of a Man

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is a new angle on the kind of story that I've written several of over the last few years. Readers of mine will know that I write first person stories about women with submissive tendencies, almost always from the woman's perspective. Over the years, I feel that I've done a lot to explore the psychology of these women, myself very much included. But one thing that I haven't done is explore the male side of these stories.

Some of my readers have been justifiable critical of the dominant men in these stories, and I'll concede that at times--for all of the guile and physicality and big dick swagger that I can't seem to get enough of--these men can come off as cartoonish and one-dimensional. This story, which is told from the male perspective, represents my first attempt at exploring the inner life of these men.

However, because this story is told from the male perspective, I want to call attention to its categorization as NonConsent/Reluctance story. Since my previous stories were told from the woman's perspective, it was possible for the reader to know what the narrator was feeling, to see inside her mind as she grapples with the complex relationship between submission and consent. In this story, however, we cannot know her thoughts, and as such, I think it would be inappropriate to assume any implied consent beyond her words and actions.

With all that being said, the same general disclaimers apply: My stories are longer than most, but I try to invest in building tension and realism because I think it makes for a hotter payoff in the end. The girls in my stories don't just fuck at the drop of a hat because I don't just fuck at the drop of a hat. You need to earn it.

This story is purely fictional. As always, if you like these characters, then let me know. I read all comments and emails. Enjoy.

...

When I was a teenager, back in the days before the internet and smartphones, I used to pass time by daydreaming about what I'd be willing to do in order to get with whichever girl I had a crush on at the time.

Because I was an awkward kid with no concept of how to talk to girls, these idle musings often drifted in a bizarre direction, utterly removed from anything that would actually help me attract them. I would never admit this to anyone in real life, but I often thought of them in the form of "trades" or "bargains" that I would negotiate with myself:

Would I give up videos games for a year to make out with Jessica Foster?

Would I eat from the litter box for the chance to play with Daniella Molina's tits?

Would I cut off my earlobe for a blowjob from Allison Connors?

Would I sell my soul if it meant that I could fuck Stacy deMarco?

Recalling these thoughts makes me cringe, because I know they are wildly juvenile, the immature navel-gazing of a lonely teenage boy with low self-esteem. But I mention them here, at the start of my story, because they get at a more basic question, one of that every person has to ask themselves at some point:

How far would you go to get what you want?

Back then, I was thinking in terms of the pain that I might endure, the sacrifices that I would make, if only they had the power to bring my fantasies to life. But these trades that I'd imagined, these deals with the devil, they don't exist in real life.

In real life, what matters isn't so much what you're willing to endure, or how much you'll sacrifice. In real life, the question that actually matters is:

How far are you willing to push other people? How much pain are you willing to inflict? And who are you willing to hurt?

Because in real life, every deal with the devil unfolds in front of a mirror.

...

I was a lonely kid in part because my family moved around a lot. I was an Army brat, and for the first ten years of my life, we moved from one base to another, hopscotching across the U.S. and around the world. I was born in Stuttgart, Germany, but we also spent time in Italy and South Korea before my Dad was re-stationed in Texas. We moved one more time, to Kansas, before he finally left the service for good.

I was born in the late 1979, but like a lot of military families, my parents had an old school dynamic that was pulled straight from an earlier generation. My Dad worked and my Mom didn't, an arrangement that seemed to breed resentment in both of them. My Dad provided for our family, and as far as he was concerned, that was where his responsibilities ended. As long as he brought home a paycheck every two weeks, he saw fit to do more or less as he pleased, and his pleasures mostly involved brown liquor.

My Dad wasn't always an angry drunk, but as a kid, you only have to see him lose it once or twice to learn to be afraid. The first time, I was in elementary school, and my Mom had made him a cake for Father's Day. He'd barely touched it--the man didn't have much of a sweet tooth--so over the course of the next week, I'd been eating it one piece at a time.

On Friday, he'd taken his paycheck directly to the bar down at the base, so Mom and I had eaten dinner without him. Afterwards, while she did the dishes, I helped myself to the last piece of cake.

When he got home a few hours later, I was watching TV on the couch, the empty plate forgotten on the table in front of me. He walked into the kitchen and I heard him open up the fridge. Then, he came back into the TV room.

"What's this?" he said, picking up the empty plate, breath sour with the smell of bourbon.

"What's what?" I said, my eyes glued to the TV.

"I asked you a question, boy," he said, his voice getting harder. "What is this?"

He held the empty plate up vertically. He took his finger and wiped it around the rim, his fingernail scraping up stale white frosting.

"C--cake," I stammered, realizing he was angry but not understanding why.

"Whose cake?" he said coldly.

"I--I..."

"Was this your cake?" he snarled, holding the plate in front of my face, blocking the TV screen. "Was this your cake, Nate?"

"I don't... I don't know," I shook my head, unable to think as my body entered fight or flight mode.

"That was MY cake," he spat. "Wasn't it?"

I nodded my head, too scared to speak.

"You ate the whole thing, didn't you?"

I was frozen in terror, knowing the truth but unable to admit it.

"You ate the WHOLE... FUCKING... CAKE," he said, his voice getting louder with every word.

Then, with a flick of his wrist, he hurled the empty plate across the room, shattering it against the wall. I was so shocked by the sound, by the splinters of ceramic littered across the floor, that I forgot to even cry, though the tears would come to me later.

"Clean it up," he growled menacingly. "Your mother and I are gonna have a talk about this."

He never actually beat me, but it often seemed like he might. It felt like he was constantly on the verge of losing his patience, of exhausting his restraint, of his rage finally getting the better of him. As far as I know, it never actually happened, but it always seemed like it could. Once you believe that your Dad is capable of violence, you can never see him the same way again.

I never saw him lay a finger on my mother, either, but he had other ways of punishing her.

It wasn't until middle school, when I first began to notice girls, that I started to hear the way my Dad talked about women. We would be watching TV, and a beer commercial with a bunch of pretty girls would come on.

"Which one do you like?" he'd ask me.

Even though the question made me uncomfortable, I thought at first that perhaps this was his attempt at male bonding, that this was the way men were supposed to talk to each other. But then I realized that he only asked me these kinds of questions when my Mom was in earshot.

Invariably, I would be too embarrassed to say anything, so my Dad would answer his own question.

"Look at that redhead," he'd say. "How about the body on her, huh? Bet you a thousand dollars she likes a man in uniform."

Sometimes, it was a redhead. Other times, it was a blonde. But he always made sure to single out women who were physically different from my mother: younger, skinnier, bustier than she was. And he always made a point of praising the features they had that she lacked.

Talking about the women on TV was one thing. But when he got really drunk--when my Dad came home from the bar staggering and slurring his words--what he liked to talk about then was his time in South Korea.

We had lived in Seoul for two years, when my father was stationed at Yongsan, the American military base in the center of the city. I'd been too young to have memories of our time there, but from the amount my Dad talked about it, he'd had the time of his life.

When he talked about those days, his stories seemed to jump from place to place, to meander around certain details while lingering on others. Maybe this was because he was falling down drunk when he told them, or maybe it's because I was too embarrassed and trying not to listen. Either way, when my Dad started reminiscing about Korea, it tended to come out in a jumble of fragmented comments that painted a blurry but unavoidable picture.

"God, there was this one, she worked--it was a soju bar, but she used to get up on stage..."

"You know, they had these clubs, and if you were in the military, they took you right into the back room, no questions asked..."

"It was all so cheap back then. Beer, liquor, girls... they might as well have been free..."

He'd been in his 30s back then, a younger man than I am now. Despite how rambling these stories were, the one thing that was impossible to miss was his enthusiasm for Korean women. They came up in every story, each one more beautiful than the last, all of them seemingly eager to drink with an American serviceman. Never mind that he was married, or that he had a child at home.

By the time I was old enough to hear these stories, to understand what he meant by telling them, we were living in Leavenworth, a place with very few Asian people. So as a teenager, through no fault of my own, my main impressions of Asia--and, perhaps especially, Korean women--came from my Dad's disgusting stories, told quite pointedly at my Mom's expense.

It's hard to say what role this played, years later, in what happened. It's not fair for me to blame my Dad for everything, to lay the responsibility for all of this at his feet.

He wasn't a very good husband, and he wasn't a very good father, but he didn't force me to become like him. I could've been a better man. And I did try, for a time.

But then I met Callie, and I finally became my father's son.

...

I graduated high school, despite the fact that I wasn't the most motivated student. My Dad had put whatever money there was for college into a bottle, a decision that he justified because the Army would put me through college if I signed up. But after watching what it had done to him, enlisting was the last fucking thing on earth I wanted to do.

I did one semester of community college in Kansas City, just enough to take one course on photography and another on film. All I wanted to do was get the fuck out of Kansas, and if I was gonna go somewhere, I figured it might as well be LA.

Turned out I was something of a natural with a camera. I'd always been a keen observer of people, which you have to be if you grow up in the same house with a drunk. Taking pictures of people is the same skill-set: you need to be alert, sensitive to detail, and able to anticipate what someone will do next.

I moved to LA thinking, like a lot of 19-year-olds, that I would on the set of a movie within a month. Instead, I ended up busing tables for six months, because that's how long it took me to sell my first celebrity photo. It was a shot of Sarah Michelle Gellar, walking out of a bar with some friends, celebrating her 21st birthday. I sold it to Us Weekly for $500 dollars.

Becoming a tabloid photographer was not the career that I had in mind when I moved to LA, but I could get work, and it paid a helluva lot better than busing tables. Still, it probably wasn't the healthiest profession for a naive kid like I was back then.

Being in that job changes the way you think about other people, especially young women. The incentives are almost sadistic: you either follow them around, or you lie in wait at their favorite restaurant, ready to ambush them. And when you see them, your job is to take the most shocking, revealing, or scandalous photos of them, because that's the photo that brings in the most money. It's a scummy job, but hey, at least I was getting paid to hold a camera instead of a gun.

But even if my Dad and I had different means of making money, we were spending it the same way. When you're 20-years-old and you're working a job like that, it's pretty easy to find out which bars don't card.

I spent most of my twenties drinking whiskey and chasing famous women with my camera. But by the time I turned 28, I'd realized neither one of them was doing me any good. In the end, though, I think the drinking problem may have been easier to fix than the way that tabloid job messed with my head.

I feel like I had more respect for women when I was younger. That's a weird thing to say, I know, but I just...

You can't take photos of women every day for a decade without it changing the way you see them. You just can't, especially if you're any good at it.

If you're paying attention to a woman, and you're watching her closely enough, you will start to see things in her that you didn't before. Whether for good or for ill, watching a woman with that kind of focus will change how you see her. And watching thousands of them can change the way you see all women, eventually.

I don't like that this is true, but it is. And it's why I knew, after a decade in LA, that I needed to do something else. That was the year that I finally stopped drinking, got my act together, and made the move to TV.

I got a job as a camera man on a local morning show in LA. (I won't say which one.) I loved that job from my very first day. I thought, "To hell with movies. I'm making TV."

...

I guess it's probably time to say a little something about myself.

I'm Nate. My Dad's Scots-Irish, but born in the USA. My Mom's folks go a few generations further back, but they're from somewhere in England, too, I guess. She never talked much about it.

I'm... middle aged, now, I guess? But I wasn't always. Honestly, I still feel young, and then I look in the mirror. Anyway, I was in my late thirties back when this story took place.

I had shaggy brown hair when I was younger. It's still brown, but a lot less shaggy now, and the grays started to come in strong these last few years.

I'm a big guy, physically, but I was never all that good at sports. I was 6'3 and 210 pounds back when I was younger, but these days I'm probably more like 225 or 230. I look like I could have been a tight end on the mediocre football team at your high school. Maybe I could've been an athlete, but I always preferred smoking cigarettes below the bleachers to playing sports. More of the artsy type, I guess, although that sounds pretty pretentious.

And I should say, this being that kind of story, that along with being a big guy, I'm fairly well hung. Not some kind of porn star, but bigger than most: 7 solid inches on a good day, 7.5 inches when I'm at my best. But don't go thinking that this made me some kind of ladies man growing up. Having a big dick doesn't matter if you don't have the courage to use it, and that took awhile to develop.

In fact, it took me until 2017. It took until I met Callie.

I'd been working at the station for eight years when they hired her as a reporter. I'll never forget the first time I saw her. One day, the EP walked into the studio after we'd finished shooting.

"Everyone, I'd like you all to meet Callie Kim," he said. "Callie just graduated from Newhouse at Syracuse and she's going to be joining us this week as our new field reporter."

"Nice to meet you all!" she said, all sweetness and rainbows and light in her eyes. "I'm so excited to be here, and I can't wait to work with you all!"

Callie... my god.

She was, at 22-years-old, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. And that includes Sarah Michelle Gellar.

...

What you realize as a celebrity photographer is that there are certain people who just draw your eyes to them, who you almost can't help but gawk at. Callie was one of those people.

Her face was heart-shaped, with a graceful chin, a delicate upturned nose, and sharp, elegant eyes. Though her eyes were dark, they were still friendly and inviting, deep pools that seemed to open up the more you looked into them.

Callie had flawless skin, the color of milk tea, though it warmed to the color of honey as she adjusted from the weather of Western New York to the sunny skies of LA. Her hair was black and silky, blended subtly with light brown highlights, teased into cascading waves that fell past her shoulders.

When she smiled, her face became a beam of sunshine, her soft, pink lips spreading wide to reveal a beautiful row of gleaming, perfectly white teeth. Even her smile looked expensive, although I found out later that she'd never even worn braces.

She was 5'7, but in heels, she was never less than 5'9. (Woman on TV always wear heels, even off-camera.)

Callie had the look of somebody who you knew worked in front of a camera. But even if her angelic, perfectly-symmetrical face wasn't reason enough to put her on the air, her body certainly was.

Callie had what may have been the tightest body I've ever seen up close. In fact, the station manager had found her because she'd developed a moderate following on Instagram as a fitness influencer while she was still at Syracuse.

Her shoulders were slim, her arms lightly-toned, descending into slender fingers, the nails often painted bright white to match her smile. Her breasts were modest handfuls, but well-proportioned for her frame, and perky enough that her bra was just for show. She had a narrow waist that flared into the gentle curve of her hips, and a firm, gym-sculpted ass bringing up the rear.

That first day, she was wearing a yellow dress--bright colors for a morning show, after all--that was modest enough without being prudish, but it wasn't hard for me to see right away the kind of body she had hiding underneath. (I made a career looking at women, remember?)

Callie Kim was the kind of person you could get away with staring at, because... c'mon, who are we kidding? We all have to look somewhere, so why not look in the prettiest direction?

She was a 10, even in Los Angeles. It's hard to fathom what that must have made her in Syracuse.

The fucked up thing about LA, though, is you've got an entire city of women who were prom queens once upon a time. They've always been the prettiest girl in just about every room, and suddenly, they're not so sure. The irony is that a lot of beautiful people are among the most insecure.

That was Callie, except when she was on camera. As soon as she stepped in front of the lens, she was infectious, approachable, impossible not to like. She had a genuine ease with people--all different kinds of people--that is rare, even in an industry like TV.

It was amazing to watch her turn it on, because Callie was a different person as soon as the red light stopped blinking. She was still infectious, still approachable, still impossible not to like. But she became noticeably less confident, as if she had used up all of her verve on camera.

I know all this because when it was time for the station to pair Callie with a cameraman to go out in the field, they chose me.

They picked me to go with her for obvious reasons. I'm not much of a fighter by nature, but thanks to my size, I'm a "think twice" kind of target for any kind of physical altercation. You don't send a beautiful 22-year-old girl out there without someone who can throw a punch, or at least take one. Plus, I knew the city, and I'd been at the station for almost a decade by that time.