Gestalt Ch. 00.2: Angel Trumpet Flower

Aside from the film work, he also picked up side gigs doing personal security, mostly for lower eschelon celebrity figures related to various film projects and agents he'd been involved with, and soon I was tagging along, earning my street creds as a bodyguard. At some point the clientele shifted, and rather than glamorous socialites, we were providing protective muscle to more unsavory figures involved with his drug connections; the pay matched the increased risk. With my background, I was far better at running security details than he was; he might be able to come out on top in a fistfight but he wasn't particularly aware of details of his environment that clued potential threats, tending to be more reactionary than precautionary. But he was the one with the contacts that brought in the jobs, so I remained vigilant while he schmoozed with the clients.

My GI Bill had run out, and I abandoned academia without anything coherent enough to earn a degree as I'd spent all my time exploring the fringes and ignored the core studies considered crucial by the university. I began to have some concern for my future wellbeing, which I took as a rather optimistic sign. We were making decent money but I figured that with a bit more discipline we could build it into something substantial if we pooled our resources. I had a grand idea, and with a little research I found a suitable suburban property under foreclosure on the outer edge of Arkham; I had just enough savings to make the minimum down payment and knew our combined income would easily cover the mortgage.

I took him to see it and he agreed that the three-car garage would make a good dojo where we could offer personal self-defense training and I outlined my idea to incorporate as a personal security consulting business to provide legitimacy for our lucrative but shadowy business transactions. With three bedrooms we could each maintain a private sanctuary while the master suite that shared a wall with the garage and opened onto the back patio/pool area, could be converted to an office and reception area for clients while doubling as a guest bedroom and our mutual sex-play zone. He praised my ambition and vision and agreed immediately, his only stipulation being that we should consider getting married for the financial and legal benefits.

Three days later our offer was accepted, and while in escrow we visited the county courthouse to file for incorporation of Reliant Security Services LLC and complete an application for a marriage license, followed by a swift, simple civil ceremony that rendered us man and wife in the eyes of the state. We visited the house often, consulting with contractors for the garage remodel and jacuzzi installation and consecrating our matrimonial vows in every room.

When escrow closed, the attractive young realtor met us at the house for final signing and to officially hand over the keys; she also produced a split of decent champagne and three glasses and proposed a celebratory toast for our prolonged enjoyment of the property and her own satisfactory commission. He brought out a small baggie and she was surprisingly accommodating to the admixture of bubbly and blow. By the time the bottle was empty we were mostly naked on the empty living room carpet, her tongue tunneling up my twat while he rammed her hard from behind, viscously slapping her shapely bottom until he blasted her depths with his spunk. He pushed her aside and unhesitatingly speared his pulsating, fuck-slicked meat-stick into my well prepared passage and pounded me thru a series of earthshaking orgasms while she straddled my face, oozing their mingled slime into my suddenly insatiable mouth. It was my first time tasting another woman and as I clutched the globular cheeks of her ass tightly I wondered why I'd never gotten around to this sooner. The novelty affected him as well and he pulled out of my snatch to plumb her pink pucker while I fervently lashed and sucked my way through my thorough investigation of her ladyparts. He let loose another salvo in her bowels and retreated, leaving me with another mop-up operation in her gaping anus, another intriguing first foray for me. I felt him positioning himself between my thighs and without much ado he slid his slightly flagging erection back into my well-thrashed cunt; I prayed with little conviction that he had at least wiped it off on some random clothing, but the deed was done and I persevered until he finally gave me, his lawfully wedded wife, a fair portion of his dwindling seed.

I got a yeast infection and a UTI that put me out of commission for a couple weeks. He was pissy about moving all our things to the house without my help as well as getting cut off from sex; I stressed the importance of proper genital hygiene if he ever hoped to play with me in that manner again in future. I was certainly agreeable to the idea; aside from his faux pas, which I could understand given his intoxicated excitement and general lack of precautionary foresight, the revelation of my inherent bisexuality was something I greatly anticipated exploring. It's not like we were really in love, we were just business partners with benefits.

The remodel was simple and went smoothly and soon our business took off. We hired trainers for more entry level defense classes and we focused on advanced weapons training. Demand for our personal security services increased; with our new legitimacy, we applied for concealed carry permits and I began to amass a small armory of practical weaponry that necessitated the installation of a gun safe, which begged for further acquisitions to fill it. I began offering firearms safety and marksmanship training, conducting the live-fire end of it at a local range where I made more contacts with my impressively tight groupings.

Within a year we had established a well-respected presence within the community. We also captured the attention of a higher eschelon of black-market dealers planning more high-stake operations that could easily require the backup of precision firepower. I was slightly hesitant to engage in the support of obviously illegal activities, so I consulted with a lawyer and was informed that the business provided us a certain degree of legal shielding as independent contractors, regardless of the legalities of our clients' other dealings, about which I was advised to officially know as little as possible.

The thrill of being back in mission mode with potential live fire threats was exhilarating. I was also enflamed by my lingering dalliance with our realtor; she had also succumbed to the yeast, tho not to the bacteria, and we had sweetly nurtured each other thru recovery and acclimated our chemistries in the absence of penile/seminal interference. It was obvious she was fucking him as well, tho we never teamed up again; she was easier to convince about genital hygiene considerations and it was convenient as I didn't have time for the dating scene and she already knew where we lived. I kept him on hiatus for several months to ensure my point was well taken and made him go get tested and bring back certification of his cleanliness before I finally consented to spreading myself for that gigantic cock that I had been confidentially craving.

We settled into a lifestyle that increasingly crept toward insane conclusions. He started slipping deeper into chemical dependency and began to host private parties for certain business associates among his dealer network; with the addition of a pool table, a full bar, low sensual leather furniture, and a decent sound system, our house often took on aspects of a bordello. We weren't making money off of the liaisons, but what small costs we incurred thru hospitality were worth it for the counterbalance it provided to take the edge off of our death-defying financial pursuits. Neither of us was phased to find the other shagging away in plain sight along with the others, and he happily took part in my inaugural gangbang with a group of hung, black thugs he brought over for a 'consultation' (yes, I stressed the importance of genital hygiene to them and brought out a box of disinfectant sanitary wipes for convenience).

Apparently we were immune to the vagaries of sexual contention that often gnaw at couples, but ultimately our union was doomed to failure based on the very force that had germinated it, the green-headed monster of mutual finances. Aside from teaching a few advanced weapons classes and a bit of dirty work for his dirty friends, he was actually somewhat of a slouch on the income aspect; I was willing to bear it as long as things kept running smoothly while I managed all the business administration, taught classes in advanced hand-to-hand and firearms defense, organized and conducted tactical training for our security agents, and managed the maintenance of our household/dojo/private sex club.

A few months after our second anniversary, I haphazardly discovered some curious deviations in our payroll account that had escaped my attention for several months prior, and a little digging uncovered a slew of unauthorized (by me) payments out to various recipients amounting to several thousands of dollars. I immediately changed the security and access settings on the payroll account, did the same with our primary business account, and shifted out the bulk of available funds not needed to keep operations running to a five year CD account, keeping it out of reach of vengeful shenanigans until I had determined the extent of his pilfering.

When I confronted him about it he opened with denial, then switched to defensiveness before finally caving in to a reluctant semblance of a confession. Allegedly he'd run up some serious gambling debts with some heavy hitters in the course of trying to capitalize on our business earnings, and rather than admit it to me he'd gleaned my password while I was logging in one day and figured out how to access the payroll account that issued his personal paycheck; apparently he was unaware that it was separate from the main business account. He'd always been overly ambitious in relation to his intelligence.

I put him on probation and let him know he'd have to cover his debts from his personal account, then I called in an attorney and a competent accountant to run a thorough audit of the LLC and all related records to root out any possible deceptions I had yet to uncover. I wasn't about to let the business I'd built come down because he fucked up something that created an unknown tax liability or had even a hint of possible evasion; I wanted my books as clean as anything was was putting in my pussy, and I considered the money spent on prophylactic analysis well used. After a few days of intensive nitpicking they returned some rather disturbing results: no further suspicious payouts had occurred beyond those I found, not even tweaking his personal disbursements, yet he had maxed out the insurance on our house as well as my life and disability insurance while dropping his own to offset the adjusted fees.

I may have been willing to forgive some desperate petty embezzlement, but these new revelations suggested that he'd begun to view me and everything I'd attained for us as expendable investments that could potentially provide for an early solo retirement; with our line of work and his personal connections, it wouldn't be difficult for him to arrange a credible 'work related accident' to precipitate a quick cash out. I immediately changed the combination on the gun safe, Betsy on my hip, and had my attorney file a TRO and preliminary divorce papers; he was served with both by a sheriff's deputy in front of the students of his next scheduled weapons training class, which promptly shut down that avenue of income for him.

Of course I was aware that my escalation of the situation might likely constitute a hazard to my personal safety, so I decided to take a vacation. I had gathered my meager important personal property, along with the main business computer and paper records which I put into storage, while handing the reins of daily operations of the business to my most trusted security-detail leader; I wasn't about to bankrupt my successful business and put good people out of their jobs just because my soon-to-be ex-husband was a greedy, nefarious bastard. I paid cash for a cheap but seemingly reliable used SUV with good-looking off-road tires and headed west without renewing the title or re-registering it.

He of course contested everything and petitioned for court-ordered mediation. My attorney countered with evidence of reasonable cause for threat to my personal safety and successfully negotiated the exchange of the house, which he had refused to vacate, including remaining mortgage, for his share of the LLC holdings, including the gun armory, all without me having to be in the same state with him. After the mandatory minimum processing period, our productive but unviable union was peacefully resolved on grounds of 'irreconcilable differences'.

***

Shortly thereafter, I received an email from my chief-executive-officer with a link to a local news article detailing the particulars of the devastating structure fire that had consumed the house and claimed the lives of what appeared by dental analysis to be him and his current sexual partner on the very night of our third anniversary. Despite the uncanny timing of the incident, I shed no tears at the news, knowing that unlike the incident in Afghanistan, this time I was not in any way directly responsible for the loss of lives. Authorities suspected the fire may have been associated with freebasing cocaine, a plausible conclusion, and even if there was foul play involved it was certainly related to repercussions of his own faulty decisions. If the timing was anything other than oddly coincidental, it simply indicated that someone close to us and sympathetic to my plight was the karmic agent responsible for the appreciatively poetic justice; regardless, my conscience remained clean.

The detective in charge of the the investigation, however, was not entirely convinced, especially in light of the timing of the fire, which did not escape his scrutiny. I was advised by my attorney that while there was no direct evidence of foul play, I was being considered a primary suspect considering the the coincidental timing and the discovery of the homeowners and life insurance policies that he had inexplicably failed to remove me from as sole beneficiary. I was directed to comply with the detective's request for an interview and flew back home for a meeting with him and my attorney, the results of which left him, if not entirely convinced of my absolute innocence, nevertheless eased in his resolve to rigorously investigate the situation in the absence of any direct evidence. Even knowing my innocence, I was grateful for the benefit of the doubt.

At least I could now come out of my relative hiding and resume life in a somewhat normal manner. Only I now had to reassess the definition of normal. I acknowledged that I had allowed myself to drift into behaviors that were ultimately untenable, my decision making too easily swayed by his demands and my desire to appease until the situation became critical. I still had a reasonably prosperous business that was fairly running itself and providing a meager but decent income with little demand on my time, yet I had no desire to return to its operation. A week of negotiations with my attorney, accountant, and the senior members of my staff led to a reorganization of the corporate structure as a cooperative, with half the controlling interest divested to the current employees based on their previous earnings and the other half held by me, with continuing dividends paid out to a revocable living trust also settled with the CD account and the insurance payoff.

With my finances set up in perpetuity, I checked myself into a reputable and rather swanky rehab facility in upstate New York to detox and attempt to come to terms with my current and future life situation. With no external stresses and all my basic needs met (including a workout room, pool and spa, twice daily yoga and meditation classes, and a host of therapeutic staff to gently tease apart the frayed tangle of my psyche) I allowed myself to meltdown a little bit. I spent a lot of time crying: in my bed, in the sauna, in the gardens, in adhomukhasvanasana. I thankfully never experienced the depths of numbing despair I'd felt during college; something in the experiences of the past three years had simultaneously toughened and softened me. I began to feel, for the first time since my boyfriend's death seventeen years before, that it might actually be possible to someday soon achieve a relative degree of emotional balance and sane rationality simultaneously in my life.

It was during my rehab stay that I met my therapist. I actually met several, but there was one in particular who seemed to exude a particular state of grace, understanding, and unconditional loving-kindness that allowed me to surrender to accessing my most relevantly fucked-up emotional and psychological flaws. We discussed all the aspects of my family of origin issues, past traumatic episodes, and general sense of confusion about my purpose in life. She seemed especially intrigued by my vendetta and my many years of self imposed sexual abstinence, as well as my recent discovery that I was actually both unusually erotically adventurous and decidedly bisexual. She assured me that this was a healthy development in exploring my innate and long repressed sexuality, and encouraged me to continue to experiment playfully in healthy and safe contexts with this normal aspect of human relating. This was slightly awkward for me because I had secretly found her incredibly attractive in a warm, matronly way that made me feel fluttery inside and wish that the therapist/patient relationship weren't so strictly delineated; she told me that was just because I was having transference issues with her and confusing sex with love, which is perfectly ok but it's something that I might choose to work on.

It was near the end of my stay that I met Chancy. She had just come off of a self-destructive binge episode and been deposited in the facility's care by her long-suffering genteel parents. She was fairly fresh out of college herself and had struck out to establish herself in her dream of working as an exotic dancer, not the end her mother had in mind during all those years of ballet, tap, and jazz lessons. She got a bit disoriented in the typical indulgences of that profession until an arrest on simultaneous charges of drunk and disorderly, public lewdness, and aggravated assault set her up for a timely intervention. Her father, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta, had managed to get her off with a warning and time served if she successfully finished a treatment program.

I suspect that it was love at first sight; something I'd never believed in before. something truly miraculous happened inside my broken heart the moment my gaze locked onto her dazzling smile and her soft brown puppydog eyes; it felt like all the little cracks in it were being filled in with liquid gold, like they do with those broken Japanese pottery pieces. I felt tingles course thru my entire body, my pulse started pounding like it was trying to pump all my blood out thru my ears, my nipples stood at attention, my vagina twitched and squirmed, and I began to sweat profusely around my eyes and on my upper lip; I'm not sure these phenomena are actually indications of true love, but that's what I'm going to call it until convinced otherwise.

To my great satisfaction she seemed to genuinely like me, and for my last few weeks, the first of her three month minimum stay, we spent every spare moment outside of our recommended treatment protocols holding hands and discovering our common interests and commiserating with the humor afforded by hindsight about the circumstances that led us to our current environment. It was a rushed courtship, no less sweet due to the time constraint.