Jamaican Beauties Jaunt Ch. 01

Denise's admission shocked Will, but Lars' behavior bothered him so much he couldn't find the words he needed to comment on it.

Denise continued, "My European boyfriend did not and could not love me, just as my mother had tried to warn me. Then, to make matters worse, as I've already told you, the day after our tour my lover dumped me, by email!"

Will was again appalled and mortified at the European's boorish behavior, lack of respect, and disregard of common courtesy.

Denise added, "At the time, I prayed that if there was a God, and I believed there was, Lars should have to suffer the way he had made me suffer."

Will immediately replied, "Denise, I too know there's a God. However, I believe God works for us rather than against. I believe God will give you what you need, but I don't think what you need is to have Lars punished. First, you'd probably never find out about his punishment if it did happen. Secondly, if you did find out that Lars had been harmed as a result of your prayers, I'm sure you would feel guilty."

"Yes. I guess I would," she admitted.

Will added, "Would it change how you feel about yourself? I think NOT! Again, I believe God helps us. I also believe that rather than making Lars suffer, you should ask God to help you get over your pain so you can move on with your life. I believe you should focus on being a better, not a bitter person."

Denise confessed, "I am still very bitter about what he did to me. He destroyed any progress I'd made in improving my self-esteem and becoming more open to life and sex when he sent me that email saying he no longer wanted to have anything to do with me. I was devastated when I subsequently learnt Lars was shagging other women whilst he was with me on our tour of Jamaica."

Will searched for the right words to console her, but could not come up with anything that would convey his sadness and regret for what Lars had done to her and how cheated, used, and rejected she must feel as a result. What he wanted to do, but couldn't, was to give her a hug. Instead, he told her, "I'm sorry Denise! If I could, I'd give you a big hug and hold you until your pain was gone."

"Thank you, that is very kind of you. Perhaps someday, we will be together and I can accept your hug. In the meantime, I will go to sleep tonight, imagining a gentleman hugged me in an effort to make me feel better. Thank you for that thought at least."

* * * * *

Goals Attainment

As they continued their online chats, Will frequently offered Denise advice similar to that her mother often gave her, "Denise, you need to loosen up and enjoy your God-given beauty and intelligence." In addition, Will continually encouraged Denise to appreciate that she had a good paying, part-time job as the lead accountant for a large construction company. Reminding her that her job provided her enough money to live comfortably and sufficient time off, that should she desire to do so, she could engage in her often expressed interests in writing poetry, becoming a licensed masseuse, preparing articles describing Jamaica's beautiful scenery, and showing people Jamaica's beauties through her stories, photographs, and perhaps, in person.

As their friendship grew, Denise learned to overlook Will's chides that she was a prude, as well as his constant use of sexual innuendo and double entendre. She even came to appreciate the many other things he shared with her and the help he willingly offered. With Will's frequent urging, words of encouragement, and useful advice, which often echoed the advice her mother gave her, Denise began to appreciate that she needed to get over the loss of her European boyfriend and to once again enjoy her life.

Denise soon accepted that Will and her mother might be right about many things. They had both repeatedly told her that she needed to stop reliving her past and worrying about what she'd done wrong. They both pointed out that she needed to decide what she wanted in life and then strive to attain it. They agreed that she needed to stop dreaming about achieving her goals, hoping something might happen, while only taking actions with a low probability of success, and then complaining that it was too hard to do anything. The two of them believed, and told her, she should start taking positive and reasonable actions toward attaining her oft-mentioned lifelong goals.

When Denise provided Will a list of her goals and gave him examples of her previous (lackadaisical, as Will saw them) attempts to achieve them, he chided her, "It's no wonder you so rarely achieve any of your goals. If you don't have a plan you don't have a goal, you have a dream. To have a goal, you must have a plan, with steps and objectives that will allow you to achieve your goal. So why don't you make a list of your goals, then put together plans for achieving each one, plans with clearly identifiable and measurable objectives that will help you attain your goals. Then, take the steps necessary to accomplishing each of those objectives, and thus begin making progress towards achieving your stated goal."

Eventually, at Will's urging, which, as usual, echoed that of her mother's except that he expressed them differently, Denise put together the detailed plans and took specific actions towards accomplishing several of her unfulfilled, self-proclaimed, lifelong goals.

* * * * *

The first goal she wanted to achieve was one she'd often started after but had never accomplished. Since her last year in Secondary School Denise dreamed of becoming a masseuse. She'd overheard her parents talking about how relaxing and yet exciting it was to get a massage from a skilled masseuse. She thought it would be wonderful to have the skills people appreciated as much as her parents seemed to appreciate those of their masseuses. She frequently considered the benefits of being a masseuse and traveling around Jamaica working at the numerous hotels and resorts that offered spa services. The hotels and resorts would pay her to visit her favorite locations and in her free time, she could search for additional secret beauties of Jamaica.

She'd taken her first realistic step to become a masseuse three years earlier when she signed up for massage classes. Jacob Williams, the owner and manager of Jacob's Salon and Spa near her parents' house in the Melbourne district of Kingston, offered and taught the classes. For two years, she paid for and sporadically attended the classes to obtain the training and skills she would need to obtain a license. However, like so many things in her life, she did so without applying herself to the training or making an effort to complete the extracurricular lessons. Fortunately, Jacob was a friend of her parents, (of course, everyone in Melbourne was friends with her parents,) and he allowed Denise to return to the classes each time she became depressed about her progress and dropped out. Nevertheless, after three years of occasional, off and on classroom instruction, Denise was no closer to her goal, she was still not ready to take, much less pass the licensing examinations.

With Will's urging and her mother's help, Denise again signed up and paid for Jacob's next scheduled series of classes. She faithfully attended each class and, at Will's constant prodding, performed all the after class exercises Jacob assigned. After Will reminded her that her ultimate goal was to be appreciated as a masseuse and in order to achieve that she would need to learn everything she could and to fully develop her skills, Denise paid Jacob to tutor her once a week in the various techniques of massage including sensual massage. When she finished the training classes, she easily passed Jacob's final examination and received her certificate of completion. Denise immediately took the tests she was required to pass in order to obtain her masseuse's license. On a late August Saturday, at Jacob's insistence, Denise attended a small ceremony in Kingston along with several other recent graduates of Jacob's Salon and Spa, where she received her Jamaican license authorizing her to work as a licensed masseuse.

Having accomplished her oldest dream and with her mother's urging, Will's encouragement, and her newly acquired attitude, commitment, and desire, Denise agreed to take all of the necessary appropriate actions toward accomplishing several of her other goals.

During their chats to determine the next goal she wished to achieve, Denise mentioned that she'd begun writing poetry in primary school but never believed her poems were worthy of publication. Will, after she mentioned her poetry, convinced her, during numerous Internet chat discussions, to send him a couple of her favorite poems. Without telling her his plans, Will sent her poetry to an old acquaintance who was an English professor at Dallas Community College. At Will's urging, the professor reviewed the poetry and informed him that although the poems were not the best he'd seen, they were good enough for publication in any of several periodicals, and with a little additional training and effort, he believed, "the author could easily find a publisher for her works."

During a subsequent chat, Will raved to Denise about her skills and the emotion her poetry expressed, echoing the remarks of the English professor without telling her what he'd done. At Will's urging, and with his advice, actually the advice of the English professor, Denise reviewed and revised several of what she believed were her best poems and when she was satisfied, she mailed them to the publishers of several magazines and two Internet websites that she knew published the poetry of unknown authors. She soon had five pieces of her poetry published, two each in two different magazines, and one on an Internet site. Furthermore, the poems received several positive reviews and numerous, mostly positive, comments from readers.

Will leveraged the success of her poetry to urge her to write an article about her first love, the hidden beauty of Jamaica. She accepted his challenge and began researching and preparing articles about three of Jamaica's lesser-known natural beauty spots. They were locations that were largely unknown to the average tourist. In fact, Will, who thought he knew all the tourist locations in Jamaica and had been to most of them, was surprised that he had never heard of two of the three places about which Denise had written.

Denise sent a draft of her first article to Will for his comments. She had written about and provided accompanying photographs of Reach Falls and a nearby bed and breakfast that sat on a cliff and its main building, as well as the small cabins on either side, had balconies overlooking a beautiful saltwater lagoon. Will was amazed at how well her words expressed the beauty she saw and had captured in the photographs that she'd included in the article. After accepting Will's suggestions on the first article's organization and some grammar and wording changes, Denise revised the article and announced she thought it was acceptable.

Denise again accepted Will's advice and submitted her first article to a newspaper and the Jamaica Gleaner accepted it. It became the first of a proposed series of articles on the often-overlooked beautiful locations of Jamaica. With her father's help, (he was a respected lawyer in Kingston,) she negotiated a contract with the Jamaica Gleaner to provide bimonthly articles on the overlooked beautiful locations in Jamaica as well as the secret jewels in already well-known Jamaican tourist locations, complete with her own byline. The paper published her first article in the series in its Sunday edition. She'd already submitted the other two articles she'd prepared at Will's urging and had revised and edited following his comments and advice. The newspaper was in the process of readying the two articles for publication in upcoming October and December Sunday editions.

With the confidence of accomplishing several long-standing goals combined with Will's prodding and coaching, after the publication of her poetry and her first travel article Denise decided she wanted and needed to alter her work schedule to allow her more time for her writing and other projects. She and the assistant bookkeeper at the construction company where she worked had irregular four and five-hour shifts that alternated between morning and afternoons each week. The girls each worked a nine-hour shift on Wednesday or Thursday and the other had the day off. Denise normally worked 32 hours a week and her assistant worked 31 hours. However, neither schedule allowed the ladies the time they each needed to do the things outside of work that they wished to do.

Giving up her swims during her daily workouts, Denise stayed late at work on Monday and Tuesday to talk with the assistant bookkeeper about her often expressed desire to go back to school and finish her accounting degree. Denise presented a proposed work schedule to her assistant that moved most of her work hours to the weekends and thus freed her weekdays for school. The assistant bookkeeper readily agreed to Denise's proposed schedule.

Denise approached the Office Manager on Wednesday to convince him to rearrange their work schedules, giving them each 32 and a half hour workweeks. Denise reminded her boss that the accounting workload increased daily from Monday to Wednesday, which was their busiest day, but fell off from Thursday to Sunday, the slowest day of their week. Under Denise's proposed schedule, the two ladies would primarily work nine-hour shifts. Denise would work Mondays through Wednesdays and five hours on Thursday mornings. Her assistant would work a five-hour shift Thursday afternoons and nine-hour shifts Fridays through Sundays.

Denise next explained that on Thursdays, which were usually slow, their five-hour shifts would overlap by one hour to allow them to transition work projects. That transition had often been a problem in the past whenever they temporarily misplaced account files during the almost daily transition between the two accountants, which normally occurred when one of them left a document on the desk and the other did not notice it there. Denise argued that the savings in customer complaints and time spent recovering from the missed deadlines or missed billings would make up for the extra hour and half paid the assistant bookkeeper and half hour paid to Denise to cover their workload transition.

She then pointed out to her boss, "You're always complaining because neither of us girls in accounting is here when you open shop or when you close and lately you've been especially unhappy because neither Sandra nor I can attend your luncheon meetings with the other department managers. With this schedule, one of us will be in the office from opening to closing and, except for Thursdays, one of us will normally be there and free for lunch."

Hating financial problems, hoping the new schedule would eliminate the problems they'd often had with the almost daily transitions between the two bookkeepers, and liking the idea of having either of the two good looking women free to go to lunch with him and the other managers, the office manager approved them to start working the new schedule the following Monday.

In the future, under her new schedule, Denise would be free from Thursday afternoon until Monday morning. That would give her the time she needed to provide massages to her few paying customers, research and write travel articles, or, what interested her the most, to prepare her own tours of the unknown beauties found in Jamaica.

* * * * *

Proof or Prude

With her mother's and Will's urging, advice, and assistance, Denise had accomplished several of her lifelong goals, including becoming a licensed masseuse, a published poet, a featured travel article writer, and rescheduling her work hours. Now she was hopeful and ready to change her life, to take on and accomplish new challenges.

Friday afternoon as she contemplated her next goal, Denise determined she most wanted to put an end to Will's teasing her for being overly straitlaced. To that end, during their chat later that evening Denise shared several stories about her nightclub escapades, telling Will how she often wore revealing clothes and danced with abandon.

When Will's responses indicated he was unimpressed or didn't believe her, she tried to convince him she was indeed an uninhibited woman by telling him, "As I've mentioned before, for many years I've danced in the annual Bacchanal Road March wearing very revealing outfits."

Will dismissed her argument explaining, "I just don't believe dancing on the upper deck of a decorated truck bed wearing an outfit similar to that worn by thousands of other girls in the Road March can be considered the height of uninhibited behavior and it certainly doesn't demonstrate your sexual freedom."

Denise became so frustrated that in the next evening's chat she repeated her confession of having shared a bed with her European boyfriend. However, in response to Will's numerous queries she expanded her confession explaining, "My former European boyfriend was usually unable to obtain an arousal. I mean, even with my assistance, he never got very hard. And, the few times we engaged in what can only be described as listless intercourse, to my knowledge, there was never any ejaculate in the condoms when he removed them."

Will, once again dismayed by her former boyfriend's behavior, replied, "I'm so sorry your boyfriend was an inconsiderate lover. I cannot imagine how any man could treat a woman as pretty, smart, and nice as you in such a horrible manner."

"Thank you for that," was Denise's simple response before she bid him a goodnight and signed off the Internet.

* * * * *

Having dismissed her revelations of her risqué behavior, Will continued to maintain that Denise was a "transplanted English prude."

Still glowing in the successes at having accomplished several of her lifelong goals, Denise again challenged Will's oft-repeated assertion that she was acting like a prude. In response, Will confronted Denise with a "Proof or Prude" dare. Intrigued with having an opportunity to prove to him that neither nudity nor sex easily shocked her, Denise asked him to explain the dare.

Will replied, "If you accept it, you will need to provide proof, a photograph or video, that clearly shows you being uninhibited, in order to win the dare. If you cannot provide sufficient proof that you were uninhibited and therefore not prudish, you will have to post an admission of such on your Facebook along with a photograph of yourself. That photograph will be one of my choosing. If you do not have a photo I find acceptable, you will have to pose for a photograph as prescribed and described by me. In either case, you will need to obtain my approval and acceptance before posting the photograph on your Facebook account."

Will had been intentionally vague as to what would constitute proof that she had been uninhibited. He knew from several stories she'd shared, that she had been quite uninhibited during several recent road marches. He hoped that she had, and would be willing to share, photos from those occasions. It was his expectation that if Denise offered a photo from a road march as her proof, it would be sufficiently revealing to permit him to declare her the winner. Then she could say she had proven she'd behaved in and unrestrained manner, and more importantly, she would have taken her first step toward actually freeing herself of her self-consciousness, she would be on the way to becoming uninhibited.

Denise never "officially" accepted Will's dare, yet she attempted to make all her old arguments to prove she was not a prude. In each case, Will used undeniable logic to dismantle each of her postulations. Eventually, in a last ditch effort to win the dare, she sent him several photos she believed proved she wasn't a prude and was, in fact, open and sensual. The first photo showed her standing thigh-deep in a lagoon wearing a low-cut, one-piece, swimming suit. In another, she wore a sleeveless blouse and an ankle-length wrap skirt as she stood in front of a restaurant. The third, obviously taken outside a Kingston nightclub, showed her with her arms outstretched and wearing a sleeveless tight fitting, mid-thigh, one-piece dress with a neckline that was low enough to reveal the top of her cleavage.