Friends, Enemies, and Exes Ch. 11

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Hey there kids, it's your lovable rapscallion writer here. I just want to thank you for reading this far and for bearing with the lazy attempts at prose and structure. This was an endeavor made up as it went along. Very little planning from the start, hence, it got a little too big for its britches in my opinion. I apologize in advance for inconsistencies, loose ends, or shark jumps.

The next chapter will be the last, no matter how long it is. So please do throw some comments in once you finish reading this one, and I will be able to take all constructive criticism into account as I complete the finale. You can even comment without an account, it will just pop up as "Anonymous."

Even if you just want to tell me your favorite character or your favorite pairing or how you think it's going to end, go for it. I'd love to hear anything you have to say, positive or negative or non-critical. Thanks again, and I look forward to delivering the conclusion.)

Penny

Despite her efforts, Penny cried all night. The shame of her orgasms only made things worse. He told her she had to stay until all the girls made her cum, and they did. As soon as he said it, she thought they'd never be able to. How could she cum when the love of her life was running off? But she was too wet to begin with, too deep into six months of unfiltered lust. Charlie's ex-girlfriends all made her cum, and by then he was long gone.

All three of them stayed with her that night, Lauren especially holding her tight and catching as many tears as she could with a kiss. This girl loves me, she reminded herself, looking through the thick blurry flood of tears in her eyes at the deep red hair she'd been given. She loves me like I love Charlie. And no one told her to, did they?

It was sad, she felt. Penny loved to play with these girls. She found joy and lust and comfort in their bodies. She'd come to love the feel and taste of another woman almost as much as a man. But she could never truly love any of them. Even without Charlie in her life, Penny knew she simply could not develop those kinds of feelings.

So she nuzzled into Lauren's neck while she could. Alex came in behind her, arms around her waist, and Lanie spooned behind Lauren. Penny was surrounded by the care of all the women she once thought of as enemies. It almost made her smile.

That night, she dreamt again of Charlie on a shining throne, the women of the world worshipping his visage, and the mysterious woman sitting beside him. This time, her face broke through the blinding light, and she stepped to Penny with a vicious smile.

"You're..."

Katie, she wanted to say. But she was so taken aback that it stopped there. Charlie's first girlfriend, the one he never spoke about, the one who never came. She knew the rumors from freshman year, but none of them sounded plausible. Except one.

"Come find me," Katie said. She was beautiful, dressed in a sheer silken robe with a single breast exposed. Every part of her glowed with heavenly warmth. "Come east and find me, little Penny. And together we will prove to Master that he deserves us all. Bring everyone. Bring more. Bring him the world."

"Bring him the world," the women below chanted. "Bring him the world. Bring him the world. Bring him the world."

Penny woke up just after dawn, sweat clinging to her hair. The girls stirred as she hopped off the bed and started throwing clothes into a suitcase. "Mistress Penny?" groaned Lanie.

"Everyone up. Start waking up the girls. Tell Ashley we're all going on a trip."

"All of us?" Alex asked. "Where are we going?"

Penny opened the door. "East," she said.

**********

Katie

Oh how the sun shines today...

It was cold up in the mountains. Snow blanketed the mountaintops, the breezeless air hung still. It stung at first, even hours into the daylight. But Katie didn't mind. She laid in the backyard of Emily's home completely naked, feeling sun on her skin like she hadn't felt in almost a decade. The cold gave her goosebumps, hardened her nipples into gemstones, but she was not numb. She could feel everything. And everything felt wonderful.

That's what Master is. Everything. I feel everything, and everything feels wonderful. I feel everything, oh every little thing, and everything feels...

They were coming. She could feel that too. Penny rounded up the girls and they were already on their way east. Faintly she could taste someone on her lips, dripping into her mouth. Lauren, she thought. Little Penny loves to treat her Lauren well.

"Be careful," said a delicate voice from the house. "It's cold, but you can still get a sunburn."

"I didn't know," Katie said. She sighed happily and turned her head to the sliding glass door, where a semi-clothed Emily stood, biting her lip nervously. "Can you help me with that?"

Emily nodded, disappeared into the house, and returned with lotion a moment later. Another moment and she was carefully rubbing it into her skin, from her feet to her legs. "Your hands feel wonderful," Katie cooed.

Emily blushed, more from the compliment than the cold. Katie could tell even without peering into her. The bright young doctor was beyond malleable. One light touch on her cheek, and she would shudder with desire. Anything more, and she would melt into a lustful puddle.

"It isn't too cold, is it?" Emily asked meekly.

"Would you warm up the mountain for me if it were?"

The girl blushed and added more lotion to her hands, sliding up Katie's thighs and reaching her hips. Her hands were lightly pinked from the cold, and the lotion was scarcely distinguishable from Katie's legs. Practically white, just like Master's cum. His little Snow White Whore.

"I'll make a good princess," Katie said aloud. Emily's hands found their way to Katie's stomach, ran lightly over her ribs, went back for more lotion. "It's going to be a while before the dust settles. But once the fight is over, you can touch me like this every day."

Emily's breath escaped her in a shallow puff of mist and she smiled without filter. But then her brow furrowed, and she dared to look into Katie's eyes. "The fight?"

Katie grasped Emily gently by the wrists and moved her slender fingers upward, until they rested on her breasts. The subdued doctor looked overwhelmed for a moment, and Katie began to knead her hands for her, until Emily was massaging her breasts independently. As the sensation of touch began to warm her, she spoke again.

"The women of this world... mmm... they need Master. It will take some time for them to see. But they will. The other men... may not see it that way. There will be resistance, naturally. Oh..."

God, your hands, Emily. You can feel how hard my nipples are. I missed this feeling so much...

She looked at Emily, lost in the joy of pleasuring her new Mistress. Katie giggled. "You'll be safe, I promise. I'll make sure to keep you close. Once Master sees what must be done, he'll never let anything happen to us. Now... Dr. Kisch?"

Emily snapped out of her daze. "Yes, Mistress?"

"You'll have to get my back. And then I think you'll need a good long taste of a real life princess."

When Emily's tongue dipped inside of her, Katie could clearly taste Lauren dripping onto her tongue. The heat of her loins radiated onto her face. I'm here, Katie said. Come get me, Penny. Come to Colorado and get me. There is so much to do. And I think our meeting is long overdue. I'll make sure Emily keeps me warmed up for you.

**********

Charlie

"I can still feel them," Charlie said, "Just a little. But for now I guess I feel... normal."

Joseph Ellis sat across the patio table, smiling sadly at his son. Charlie hadn't kept in touch since leaving for college like he should have, but this was not a man to hold grudges. They always had a strong relationship, and a bit of radio silence was not going to undo any of that.

"I never knew distance was a factor," Joseph said. "I think you know a lot more about this than I do."

Charlie nodded, looked into his cup of coffee, still untouched. It was steaming in the cool coastal air of New England. His father settled here once the nest was empty, to while away his time with whatever he could. I always wondered why he never remarried. I guess now I know.

"Maybe you can fill in the gaps. Or least give some advice. Can you tell me about Mom?"

Joseph sighed and ran his hands through his hair, finally fading into a healthy grey, one hair at a time. "I guess I should have told you a long time ago. I thought you'd never believe me."

"You also thought I wouldn't have it too, this... thing."

"Curse," his father corrected. "Let's just say it outright. Come on, let's go for a walk."

Father and son stood up, abandoned their cups of coffee, and walked down the steps of the sturdy wooden deck. The sky was overcast with an unbroken sheet of grim clouds, and the air of the sea whipped at their faces randomly. It was not a place familiar to Charlie, and that gave him some comfort. A new environment, a clear mind.

They walked slowly, quite a way from the water but still on the sand, able to hear one another without shouting over the waves.

"I first discovered I had the curse when I was twenty. Late bloomer, I guess. Girl named Katherine. Adventurous type for sure. You don't need the details on that. Anyway, I never really took much advantage of the situation. She came around my dorm all the time, and one day I just said I wanted to settle down and date someone. Turned out she wasn't really interested, so we parted ways."

Charlie tried to imagine it. He'd seen pictures of Joseph Ellis in college. Besides a thin scar at the edge of his Joseph's left eyebrow, Charlie resembled his father at the same age in every way. Even the length of hair they kept was almost precise, though certainly not by design. Thinking of the only parent he'd ever known as a young, uncertain man, discovering a power unlike anyone had ever known, Charlie laughed.

Joseph looked at his son, puzzled for a second, but managed to chuckle as well. "Sometimes I thought what an idiot I was," Joseph said. "If you give a man a billion dollars, wouldn't he buy a nice car at some point? Or drop a couple thousand on one spectacular night? That kid I used to be was taking that billion and just letting it sit in the bank."

"But not forever," Charlie surmised. "Mom."

"Mom," Joseph echoed solemnly. "Thing about your mother... listen, Charles. I don't have any way of explaining it that leaves you in a position to really understand, so I'm just going to say it how I mean it and expect you to get upset."

Charlie wanted to correct him, but they'd danced around the topic long enough. I've been through a quarter of my life, or so I hope. It's time to know.

They came upon an empty lifeguard's tower and walked up the ramp to stand at the balcony. The white paint was old, chipping and flying away with a strong enough breeze. There wasn't much to see out on the ocean besides the odd sailboat hundreds of yards off. Even the seagulls seemed sparse. There was nothing to pull Charlie's attention away now.

"Her name was Nora Gilford," Joseph said. "About a year older. Met her at graduation. Kicked myself for not noticing her in four goddamn years of school, but that's how it happened. It seemed like everyone around us had a job waiting for them or something like that, but I was an English major and she was a Music major. Something more specific than that, I can't really remember.

"I asked her out pretty quickly since we had nothing much to do after the caps came off. Pretty standard story at first. Hit it off in half a second, went crazy for each other within an hour. This whole... power thing; it never crossed my mind as a bad thing because I had never really taken the opportunity to use it. I just knew it was there. I had a feeling of what it could do. And for the life of me, I cannot tell you why I decided to use it at all."

The road to hell is paved with the best intentions, Charlie thought. He couldn't remember why he'd started experimenting either. Worse yet, he couldn't really remember why he'd continued long after Katie. Surely he'd told himself that he would learn from his mistakes. But why didn't I just take that one last step and tell myself I'd be better off not trying?

Joseph continued. "It was just meant to be little things at first. I tried helping her forget about some of the less savory bits of her life. Certain family members and... you get the idea. But once all that was out of the way, I just... didn't stop. Made her fall a little more for me. Made her even more comfortable around me. One thing piled onto the next until I realized that I'd made her hopelessly obsessed. She could barely function if I wasn't around."

"You felt justified for long enough that you didn't see the point of no return," Charlie summarized.

"Yes," Joseph admitted. The shame in his voice spoke of all the pain, and all the times the pain was remembered. His words began to quiver, though his eyes would let no tears fall. "So I tried to undo it all. And the human mind turned out to be a little more complex than that."

That was something Charlie had not expected. Whenever he thought of undoing his own meddling in the minds of his girls, he figured it was a lost cause. The countless hours spent inside their consciousness taught him enough to know that he had tangled a web he did not understand in the first place.

"What happened?" Charlie asked.

"I couldn't put her back together. She just started to fall apart. Sometimes she would be regular old Nora, laughing at my dumb old jokes. Then she'd fall over and try to tear her clothes off. And some other day she could barely speak or sometimes even move."

There were only a few pictures Charlie had ever seen of his mother. She was so young in all of them, but always smiling in such a perfectly genuine way. There was little of her in Charlie's face. But the one thing he knew he'd taken from her was the thin ring of gold around her warm brown eyes. That was the unmistakable piece of her that lived on in him.

Charlie's throat started to close. His cheeks felt hot, his head began to ache. But he made no signal for his father to stop.

"She was pregnant, and I didn't even know it. I took her to a dozen doctors after I stopped meddling, but no one could figure her out. Finally she lost it at the mall one day and nearly clawed the eyes out of a security guard. So they had her committed, and I found out she was three months along with you."

"And she died," Charlie finally managed. He sounded like he'd been shot through the chest.

Joseph tried to compose himself, but his eyes were starting to water. "They said you were the easiest birth they'd ever seen. Quick and easy. She held you once before it happened. She..."

Just say it, Dad.

Joseph's fists clenched in white-knuckled rage. "They told her that she could see you again when she got better. It was like they'd cast a spell with those fucking words. Your mother just... deteriorated. Every day it got worse. She became violent, and then mute, and then went completely comatose, and..."

Joseph's knees buckled as his tears finally began to fall. Charlie bent down and caught him. Father and son held each other, choking back sobs. Between desperate gasps for air, his father finished.

"I couldn't sit back and do nothing. I reached out and tried to talk to her in a dream. God, she was beautiful. It was like she was her old self inside, but she just... couldn't find her way out. And I told her that I would never give up on her. She just looked at me and said goodbye. And it was over. They called it a spontaneous intracranial aneurysm."

"God, Dad..."

They took a moment to calm down, but one moment turned into two, and then five, and then it looked like the sun was setting. Wordlessly, they started to walk back to the house. It took all the willpower that Charlie had to walk up the wooden steps from the sand to the deck. Back inside, he wasn't sure he'd ever hear his father's voice again. Not until Joseph took a step into the kitchen and produced an unopened bottle of blended scotch. It was enough for them to share a quick laugh and dissolve the tension.

After a healthy shot for each of them, they sat in the den and tried to feel relaxed, at least physically.

"I can't forgive myself," Joseph Ellis said at last. "But at the very least I've been able to live with myself. I never imagined it was hereditary."

"I nearly did the same thing when I started."

"That little Katie? Christ... you were still a kid."

"Early bloomer," Charlie defended. "She's alive, but... obsessed. I never went back in to fix her. I guess that's what's keeping them all alive."

"Them," Joseph said, reminding himself of what Charlie had told him. "There's a lot of them. Don't tell me the number, I'll be embarrassed."

"I don't know what to do," Charlie said. "When they're around it's like... I know it's all wrong, but I don't care. And then when I get away it all comes rushing back, just this insurmountable wave of guilt. I have to do something but I don't know if I can even trust myself."

"I can't imagine it," Joseph said, laughing sardonically. "I wish I had an answer."

"Well now at least I know what not to do."

Joseph forgot the glass he'd brought for himself and took a quick swig of scotch straight from the bottle. "There is an answer out there. Unfortunately we are not the great minds required to discover it."

"Maybe we'll get lucky. It'll be something more emotional than intellectual."

"Worth a shot?" Joseph passed him the bottle and Charlie took a drink.

"Worth two."

Joseph sighed and let his forced smile drop. "I'm sorry, Charlie. I'm sorry I gave you this fucking thing."

"Not your fault. You don't suppose grandpa had it too, do you?"

Joseph started to laugh, slowly at first, and then hysterically. Finally he said, "I'll never know. I was adopted."

Charlie couldn't help but laugh as well. "No kidding. So was my daughter."

**********

Alex

The states really were a beautiful place when you took the time to drive through. The sprawl of industrial creation could convince anyone that there was nothing else to life but concrete and asphalt. The 10 going east was just one little piece of the country, but it was more than Alex had seen in most of her life.

The mobile homes that Ashley scrambled to prepare were massive, but not enough for all the girls in the house. Penny ordered her to acquire a few buses as well, though it turned out that a few meant a dozen. It's enough for hundreds of girls, Alex thought. And that's why it did not surprise her when Alex told her to make sure that the unused treats from CityScream came along.

I knew there were more.

Every stop, it seemed like they picked up at least one new girl. She would appear confused at her own decision to join a convoy of young women on a mysterious journey east, but the eventual induction by one of the others would remove any doubt and replace it with orgasmic bliss. Just one healthy bite of Lanie's treats, and anyone Penny wanted would hop onto a bus and open her legs.

One of the mobile homes served as the private tour bus for Fifth Manor. Natalie, when she wasn't pressed in between anyone's legs, was laying on a bunk bed and fiddling with her guitar while Ashley drove carefully at the head of the convoy. Miranda was constantly on her back in the big master bed at the back of the bus, usually running her fingers through Lauren's hair. Lily was the personal pleasure toy for Penny, who remained at the kitchen table whenever the wheels were turning. Poor Ashley, Alex thought. She hasn't had a turn since we left.