If I'm Honest Ch. 01-05

I'd been mostly disappointed by the other links, because they'd had nothing to do with what I was looking at, but this page was different. It was white text on a black background, with no real adornment to the page, no markers saying when the page had been uploaded, no contact information, nothing other than this wall of text that didn't really even have paragraph breaks. If I hadn't been intrigued, the sheer formatting nightmare of it would've driven me away right to start. But the first line of the page immediately caught my eye:

*Somewhere in the world, there is a bracelet with the words SOLAM VERITATEM on it, and it is changing the life of the person who is wearing it.*

I kept reading, curious to see what more whoever set up this page knew about it. I read for about an hour, making my way through the endless vomit of unfiltered text, and eventually what I gathered could be summed up thusly:

There had been a bracelet in ancient Rome, and there had been a woman named Flavia. Now Flavia was extremely beautiful, but her father, a wise blacksmith named Drusus, had not been able to figure out who deserved his daughter's hand in marriage, as she had many suitors. So many suitors, as it turned out, that Drusus grew frustrated. He asked Zeus for help, but Zeus would not help him. Same for Hera, Zeus's wife. In fact, Drusus went down the list, praying to any god or goddess who might help him keep his daughter safe and happy, but none answered, so Drusus went wandering throughout the streets of Rome, until he came across an unused well that had been boarded up, somewhere deep in the back alleyways of the city, rarely traveled.

From the bottom of the well, he thought he could hear a woman's voice, so he took his blacksmith's hammer and ripped up the boards. Sure enough, at the bottom of the well was a young woman in white, and she begged him to help her. So Drusus went and got a rope, tied it to a stake he hammered into a nearby rock, and then climbed down into the well, and helped the young woman up to the top of it. There, she revealed herself to be Veritas, the goddess of truth. In exchange for his help when none other had come to her aide, she granted Drusus a favor.

Drusus, being the dutiful father he was, begged Veritas for her help in finding who the best suitor for his daughter was. Veritas agreed, and told Drusus to go home and make a silver bracelet for his daughter, then to give the bracelet to Flavia, and the situation would sort itself out. A sound around the corner, a horse or something suddenly neighing loudly or whatever - it's not really clear but it doesn't matter - distracts Drusus and he looks away from Veritas for just a moment, but when he looks back, she is gone.

So, being a devout man who believes in the gods, Drusus goes home, and under the light of the full moon, makes a silver bracelet for his daughter. Now Drusus doesn't plan it to be anything elaborate, but when he takes it out of the casting mold, he finds the words SOLAM VERITATEM are etched on the surface of it. Truly, he decides, the work of the goddess. So he lets the bracelet cool and set, and the next morning, he gives it to Flavia, and tells her the story of how Veritas had guided his hand, and that it would solve her problem. Flavia seemed amused, but didn't believe him, until her first suitor showed up for the day, and Flavia said to him, 'Why doth thou seek my hand in marriage so intently?' (Look, I don't know how they talked in ancient Rome, so just go with me on all this. I'm paraphrasing anyway.) And then man says to her 'Why, you are a beautiful woman, Flavia, but what I truly seek is your father's blacksmith shop, for the Emperor intends to buy this land soon and will pay handsomely for it!' And then the man slaps his hand over his mouth and runs away.

For days, no, months, men approach Flavia and each time, they admit to her why they are seeking her, but also admit that Flavia would be unhappy being wed to them. The men, it seems, are unable to lie to her any longer. Drusus begins to get worried, thinking he's changed his daughter's life from having endless suitors to having none, until one day, a young man named Felix comes to ask for Flavia to consider him as a suitor. The young man is a little scruffy, but Flavia asks him whether the young man believes they would be a good match, and Felix responds that they would, and that he wanted to take Flavia with him on his adventures to the east. Felix, it turns out, was an explorer, just starting to make his way in the world. What Drusus had never known was that Flavia had a sense of adventure as well, and had yearned to see more of the world. So she agreed to marry Felix.

On the night before her wedding, Flavia was approached by Veritas, who showed up again as a young woman dressed in all white. "Before the birth of your first child, which will be a son, you must find someone in need of that bracelet and pass it on to them. You will know when the time is right." True enough to the goddess's word, when Flavia was traveling with her new husband Felix through Hispania, she came across a young man named Lucius, who was greatly despondent, as he had been spurned by woman after woman, trying to find someone to spend his life with. And Flavia passed the bracelet on to Lucius. Give or take, all of this happened in 40-60 BC, which meant the bracelet on my wrist was over two thousand years old, if I believed any of this. Lucius had experienced the same sort of behavior as Flavia had, with women confessing to him the true reasons why they would not work as a couple, which ranged from things as simple as 'I'm in love with this other dude' to things as complicated as 'I secretly yearn for the touch of my own father.'

The story gets pretty fuzzy from here on out, and there's a number of instances of the bracelet turning up all over the world, but somewhere around the 12th century, the bracelet briefly reappeared before disappearing again, on a man named John Garland, and the bracelet's effect seemed to have evolved. No longer was it just making people speak the truth, it was actively drawing attention to the wearer. Now, John Garland was a gay man, and that was still looked down upon in Europe at that time, so he'd gone out of his way to hide getting the bracelet, but men kept throwing themselves at him, engaging in 'coitus' as the webpage called it, and then and *only* then, would they reveal to him why a longer relationship would not work. The webpage didn't seem to know why the change had happened, but noted in quite detail that clearly something had changed during the bracelet's trips around the globe. The most recent sighting on the blog was from 1894, when a woman named Catherine Barker gained the bracelet on her trip to relocate to America. The webpage notes that the bracelet was in the woman's inventory when she arrived at Ellis Island, immigrating from Ireland. There's even a photograph of Catherine wearing the bracelet at her wedding in 1896, and the inscription can clearly be seen.

Sure enough, it's a spot on match for the bracelet on my wrist, although it looks significantly smaller. Maybe that's just the size of my wrist against it, though.

There isn't any report of who Catherine gave the bracelet to, but the website does have another picture of her from 1897, and the bracelet is conspicuously absent.

The webpage ends with a small screed from whoever created the webpage, asking whoever has the bracelet to contact them, but there isn't any email address visible, or contact information. It also ends with a small warning - not all those who found the bracelet at first thought of it as a gift. In fact, one young woman in Ireland around 1340 or so had been so frustrated with all the endless honesty that she had considered suicide. Thankfully, the page said, the woman had met the right man on her way to hang herself in a tree. Do not be discouraged, said the webpage. Simply learn to live within the light of truth, and do not be washed away with it. *Don't we all deserve a little more truth in our lives, if I'm honest?* read the last line of the webpage, which chilled me to the bone. I knew that phrase all too well.

I tried to do some basic research on the webpage, but it turned out it was an Angelfire page that had been created in 2004 and hadn't been updated since. There was no owner of the page, and no information about where any of the information had come from. I wasn't even sure where to validate any of the information, so I copied and pasted the entire raw text of the page, as well as the handful of low-quality.jpgs that were attached, and saved them all to my computer. Then I opened up another web browser and switched to my anonymous email client to send an email to an old buddy of mine, Yuri (not his real name, obviously). Now Yuri was a dark web friend of mine whom I'd never met, but we'd swapped projects from time to time, and when I needed information pried out of the internet, I sent it to Yuri, along with some bitcoin to pay for his services. Yuri never asked any questions that would reveal my identity, and never offered any details that would reveal his. In return, I also did favors for him from time to time as well, when it came to getting information on businesses. We both made out okay. I sent Yuri the whole block of text and asked him to find out if he could verify any of the information, and also included the picture of Catherine with the bracelet on her wedding day. It would be a week or two before I'd hear back from him, but if anyone could find something like this buried in the internet, it was Yuri.

When I looked up, I realized I'd been at it for almost 3 hours, and I was hungry. My body clock was set to who the hell knows when, but my actual watch said it was four in the afternoon, and that meant I hadn't eaten anything since Ken and I had gotten food over twelve hours ago. Astro was also pacing a bit near the back door, so I opened the door to let him run out into the backyard to do his business. I grabbed a package of sausages from the fridge, as well as a plastic bag to grab Astro's shit with, and headed into the backyard after him. On my back patio, I have a nice little grill that's part of the deck, so I tossed some charcoal into the bottom of it and lit it up before walking over to grab Astro's shit from my small backyard. Sometimes I just let it sit out there and let the weather pound it in, but I was back there anyway, so I figured, might as well do my part. Astro seemed happy enough to play fetch with me while I tossed a couple of sausages onto the now warm grill, as they started to sizzle immediately.

On the other side of my wooden face, a voice called out to me. "Is that you, Mr. King?"

"Oh, hey Madison. Yeah, just back here grilling some sausages. You and your folks are welcome to come over and join me if you want."

"I'll be right over!"

Just a minute or so later, I heard the sound of my gate unlatching and then relatching again. Astro bolted over in that direction before running back to me, his tail wagging happily. He loved our neighbors. Around the corner walked Madison, my neighbor Bill and Carol's kid, who was a freshman at the University of Washington.

Normally, freshmen lived on campus, but Madison had wanted to save money for the first year or two, to keep her student loans down as much as possible, and her parents had said that was okay. I'd known she was coming and going, but I hadn't seen Madison since last summer, just after she'd graduated. If she'd been a looker then, she was even more so now, dressed in a UW cheerleading outfit - a white halter top with a large W on it that left most of her belly exposed, and a white and purple skirt that barely came half way down her thighs. Apparently the cool spring weather had been enough that she was also wearing thigh high white stockings, leaving a tempting narrow patch of exposed alabaster flesh between the bottom of the skirt and the top of her stockings. Madison, like her mother, was a redhead, with bright coppery locks down to her shoulders, and a face covered in a light dusting of freckles, and like her mother, she was insanely fit, slender and toned in all the right ways. I knew that she had complained to her parents that her boobs were too small, but anything bigger on her frame would've stood out. She had a small purse draped over one arm. "Hey Mr. King. Those sure do smell good," she said, walking towards the patio.

"Your folks aren't with you?" I asked, suddenly a little wary. Sure, Madison had been nothing but a great neighbor before now, but the bracelet on my wrist was making me paranoid about nearly everything.

"Nah," she said, hopping up onto the patio. "They're out of town until Monday, so it's just me and Logan, and he's probably still at school." Logan was her younger brother, who was a senior at Hazen High School. "He's in the school production of 'Damn Yankees' so he's going to be practicing right up until he goes out partying with his friends."

"And your folks are okay with that?" I said, turning the sausages.

"I'm his big sister," she said, sitting down on one of the deck chairs, folding her legs together. "I'm not gonna narc on him for having a good time. Just like he's not gonna narc on me." Madison was gorgeous, and the girl clearly knew it, flashing me a smile that would've melted sterner hearts than mine. "That's why I'm here, you see."

I took the sausages off the grill and put them onto a plate, before closing up the grill, so that the fire would suffocate itself. The wind was picking up as the sun was threatening to go down, and I didn't intend to eat outside, although I somehow knew inviting Madison inside would lead to trouble. I just didn't see a way out of it, or maybe I just didn't want to. "I don't really see. Let's go inside a bit. I imagine you're freezing in that get up. Did you just come from practice?"

As we walked inside, she nodded. "Yeah, we've got a home game tomorrow, and I'm going to be out there, shaking my tail, come rain or shine." Astro darted in with us, just before Madison pulled the door shut behind her. "Anyway Mr. King..."

"I told you, if you're old enough to vote, you're old enough to call me Derrick, or Deke." I set the plate down on my dining room table, then grabbed a second plate, as well as a beer for myself from the fridge.

"Can I have one of those?"

"You're too young, so not unless your parents tell me it's okay."

"I'm too young for a lot of things, but you're going to have to get over that, Deke."

She was leaning against my kitchen island, her back pressed against it, when I came back to the dining room table. "Madison, what *are* you talking about?"

"Look. Deke. It's real simple," she said, moving over towards me. "I'm here to get fucked. By you."

"Excuse me?"

"So the way I see it is this... either you *can* fuck me, and I won't tell anyone at all about it, or you can *not* fuck me, and I'll tell my parents that you did, and you'll get into a shitload of trouble." Now, what Madison didn't know is that at that very moment, she was saying all of this directly in front of the security camera that watched my back door. And the recordings had audio. So I now had evidence of all of this. "Look, guys like to fuck cheerleaders, especially pretty ones, and I'm pretty, aren't I, Deke?"

"You're very lovely, Madison, but I don't..."

"Shhhh," she said, hushing me still. "Eat your sausage while I tell you how this is all going to go down." Caught more than a little off guard (although certainly not as off guard as I'd have been a few days ago), I picked up a knife and fork and started to eat. "You're going to get a chance to fuck a tight young cheerleader, and I'm going to get a chance to have an experience with an older man who knows what he's doing. Because I want something in particular, and I don't want some fumbling boy to do it and ruin it for me forever." I arched an eyebrow, and she giggled. "Oh, you want to know what I'm talking about. Let me show you." She turned around and bent over towards my kitchen island, pulling the skirt up a little before she reached back and just gave it a sharp tug upwards. She wasn't wearing panties beneath it, but between the cheeks of her lithe ass, there was a small round red jewel poking out. "I've tried plugs, and I like how those feel, so I want the real thing now, but a bumbling college boy's just going to shove it in there and make it hurt, while you've probably fucked women in the ass before, haven't you Deke?"

I swallowed the mouthful of sausage with some effort before nodding. "A few times."

"See? So you'll teach me how to do it, how to take it, and in turn, I'll let you enjoy being my first. Don't you want to do that, Deke?"

I finished my sausages in record time, and had drunk most of the beer as well while she'd been talking. "And you're sure you want to do this, Madi?"

"Absolutely," she said, waggling her ass in my direction. "I could've changed out of my cheerleading outfit before I came over, but I figured this could be my little cherry on top. A cherry for a cherry. Every man loves cheerleaders, don't they? Of course they do. And every man wants to fuck a cheerleader. So you're going to get to."

"If I'm going to fuck you in the ass, Madi, I'm going to need some lube, and I don't keep that..."

"I brought some with me. In my purse. So what do you say?"

"Well, I'm certainly not going to do it in my dining room," I sighed. "Let's go upstairs then, I guess. If my choices are don't fuck you but your parents think I did, or fuck you and your parents never find out, I guess I might as well enjoy myself, huh?"

"See?" she beamed, standing upright, a wide smile on her face. "I knew you'd see it my way."

We walked upstairs as I was torn by doing all of this. Sure, I had her on tape admitting that she'd basically set out to blackmail me, but she seemed to genuinely chipper about all of this, I knew that I'd be letting her down if I'd just turned her away and shown the tape to her parents. And she was right - I'd always wanted to fuck a cheerleader.

As we entered the room, Madison kicked off her shoes. "I think I'm going to leave the stockings on, if that's okay."

"It's your show, Madi," I said to her, sitting down in the reading chair of my room, so I could take my boots off. "I'm just along for the ride, aren't I?"

She offered me a playful mock pout. "Now that won't do at all, Deke. I wouldn't ask just anyone to do this. Only someone I trusted. Someone safe and special." She hopped up onto the edge of the bed. "Do you want me to blow you first, or do you want to just shove it right in my tight young cunt to get started?"

"The mouth on you," I said to her, trying to sound scolding.

Madison shook her head with a mischievous giggle. "You can't fool me, Deke. I came downstairs once when you were over drinking with my Dad, and I heard you tell him you liked dirty talking women, so that's what I'm gonna be. That's what you really want, isn't it?"

"Madi..."

She slowly pulled her top up and over her perky young tits, barely a handful, but capped with perfect pink nipples that were as stiff as pencil erasers. "I know how guys look at me, how much they want to fuck me. You don't have to just look, Deke. You get to fuck."

"Are you sure you can handle me?" he said, moving over towards her. "I keep giving you chances to walk away." He placed his hand on her thigh, as she spread them wide for him. "You keep not taking them."

"I'm not going to, daddy," she purred. "I'm just gonna get you to fuck me until I'm out of my fucking mind." She thrust her hips up towards my hand, and so I brushed my fingertips across her tight, teenage pussy, which made her moan immediately. "I can't wait any more, daddy. I need that dick in me right fucking now." Her cunt wasn't just damp, it was fucking soaked, almost oozing onto my hand. Her fingers reached to my sweatpants and tugged them down to fish out my cock, whimpering as soon as her slender fingers touched it. "That's a thick dick, daddy. Can you jam it in my little snatch before you lube it up and stuff it in my ass?"