Junior Year Abroad Pt. 10

This is Part 10 of the Survivor Revival Challenge, organized by Tara Cox. This is the story of Jim & Marybeth, and eventually others, of course. You can expect daily installments.

***************

Jerome has seen the pictures of Marybeth. He picks her up.

****************

Finally! Marybeth was alone. She could relax.

Marybeth had shared the taxi Eric took to the airport, and he was on the airplane, flying back to the States. Denis was still busy with Sally, who had extended her stay for a second week, and he was even complaining to Marybeth that Sally was relentless, draining him dry every day, twice a day, and thrice on Sundays. Jim was off on a field trip with his anatomy class (what kind of field trips do anatomy classes take, she wondered?), and she was ALONE. She was surprised at how good it felt, finally to be alone.

She had made love with Eric every day of his visit, the price she had to pay for dumping him, after she had made the mistake of getting engaged to him. Sally had helped out, also sleeping with Eric quite often, and so had Hélène, so Eric had enjoyed the sexual time of his life, and that softened the blow, she hoped, of losing the love of his life, namely her.

Marybeth knew that Eric, handsome, talented guy that he was, would have no trouble finding another girl to take her place. It might take a while, but it would happen. Paris had changed Marybeth. She just wasn't anymore the girl that fell into paroxysms of joy when Eric had proposed. She had become a full-blown woman, one who had explored her sexual boundaries, and behaved in ways she never thought she would, could, or had even imagined.

Now she could relax! It was a five-day holiday, she had no schoolwork, and for once the weather was nice. She sat outside at one of the grand cafés of Montparnasse, where many famous writers and philosophers had once also enjoyed a coffee, or a drink, or whatever. She had a book, but she enjoyed more watching all the people walk by. Humanity was so very varied.

Marybeth was taken aback, when her idyll was disturbed. An American man, speaking English, asked if he could join her at her table? She had never seen him before, and there were lots of empty seats, so it made no sense for him to want to join her. Before she could politely say no, she needed to be alone, he spoke.

"I'm a friend of Eric. I sat next to him on the airplane over here, from New York. He spoke highly of you, and showed me pictures of you. I'd love to sit with you just for a bit; I only have fifteen minutes. Would you mind, terribly? I'm Jerome, by the way," he said. That changed things.

"Pictures? What pictures did he show you?" Marybeth, always the suspicious one nowadays, asked. Since she replied, even if it was only by asking a question, Jerome sat down. He ordered a beer, even though it was 11AM.

"What pictures did he show you?" Marybeth asked again.

"Oh, you know. Pictures of you. He was proud to be your fiancé," Jerome replied.

"He no longer is. We broke up," Marybeth said.

"I'm sorry to hear it. He seemed like a great guy," Jerome said.

"He is a great guy. I'm not a great gal, however," she said. Then she repeated her question, a third time: "What kind of pictures?"

"Oh, you know, the kind of pictures boyfriends take of girlfriends, that sort of thing," Jerome said, with a dismissal wave of his hand. "It looks like they were taken inside one of the rooms of the Hotel Bristol."

Oh, my! This guy was good! He knew enough about Parisian hotels to recognize the interior of a bedroom of the Bristol? Admittedly, it was one of the most exclusive of the Parisian hotels, but still! Eric didn't know where the pictures had been taken, so he could not have told Jerome. Marybeth was impressed.

Marybeth bit her lip. She now knew what pictures Eric had shown this man. He was around 30, or 35, maybe older, also over six feet tall, like Eric, and had a fit body. He would have been handsome were it not for his ears. She wondered if he could flap them and fly, like the elephant Dumbo, her favorite Disney character when she was a child?

Jerome's ears kind of disarmed him, and made him look lovable, and not like a jackass trying to pick up a bimbo of whom he had been shown naked pictures by her asshole former fiancé on an airplane! He looked at his watch. Maybe he really did have a place to go?

Marybeth felt as if she had to assume Jerome had not only seen pictures of her naked, and even posed in hopelessly sexy poses, showing all of herself, but that probably he had even seen the obscene ones, too. Yet he had somehow managed to look at her face in the pictures, not just at her tits, pussy, and ass, and even enough to recognize her, here in Paris, sitting at a café.

Most men would have had to see her sitting there, naked, with a big black dildo sticking out of her cunt, to have recognized her from the pictures. This guy must have also looked at her face!

She had thought a week without sex here in Paris was just what the doctor ordered, and yet here was Jerome, out of the blue, a kind of farewell "gift" from her ex-fiancé Eric, who was flying home with her engagement ring in his pocket.

"Marybeth, I don't have much time. I'm in the business of reviewing restaurants, and I have to go out of town to review a Michelin Guide three-star restaurant, out in the champagne country. It's around an hour's train ride outside of town, maybe a little more. I think it would be much more effective if I had a beautiful woman on my arm, and I could pretend simply to be wining and dining a date, rather than being there to evaluate the place," Jerome said.

After pausing, Jerome elaborated, "It's a good cover, you see, and that way they won't suspect I'm a food critic and be trying just to please me, but rather they would be treating us like any other American tourist couple. All your expenses would be paid, including a night in one of the best hotels in Reims, if you would agree to be my date?"

Marybeth just looked at him. Was this guy nuts? Did he expect a line like that to work on her? To be fair, only a couple of months earlier she was a country bumpkin from Flora, Indiana, and such a line might well have worked on her. Plus, Jerome was ten years older than she was, at the least, and maybe twenty years older at the outside. True, she had often fantasized about dating an older man. Not too much older, though, only around ten years, or fifteen, tops. That is, someone just like this guy Jerome: He was one of her fantasies, come to life, now, wasn't he?

"I'm sorry to be so rushed. If you agree, you'll need fancy clothes. My assistant could take you shopping. You can keep the clothes after our date," and he used air quotes for the word 'date.' "Here's my card. Please give this number a call," Jerome said, smiling. He had a winning smile.

"My assistant's name is Claire, and she can explain everything to you. I'm so lucky to have spotted you. I think you'd be perfect. Oh, one more thing: you'd have to act like my date, look into my eyes adoringly, maybe even kiss me lovingly in full sight of the restaurant staff, that sort of thing. Think about it, please," Jerome said, and he put down two fifty euro notes as he got up. "For the drinks," he said, and he was off, leaving a stunned Marybeth in his wake. His beer was almost untouched.

Marybeth had made some girlfriends in the junior year abroad program, and she texted a few. Most were out sightseeing during the five-day holiday, but luckily her best friend of the girls she had befriended was around. Susie knew all about Jim of course, but also about Denis, and Eric. Susie must have thought Marybeth was an outrageous slut, but Susie was not a judgmental person, and that, Marybeth thought, was her best feature!

In fact, as Marybeth further thought about Susie, she recalled that Susie rather enjoyed hearing all about Marybeth's often outrageous sexual escapades, and that she'd enjoy them in her mind with a kind of voyeuristic pleasure, imagining them happening to her, even if she was much, much, too uptight to ever do most of the antics Marybeth had gotten up to!

A half hour later, Susie was at Marybeth's table at the café, sitting in the same chair previously occupied by the mysterious man, Jerome, his mostly untouched beer still there, as if it were waiting for him to return to the table.

Susie had long blonde hair. It was a dark blonde, sometimes known as a dirty blonde, and she brushed it obsessively, so it never had a tangle, and it also had a sheen. She had a nice figure, even features, a good complexion, and a pretty, even a very pretty, smile. She smiled a lot, and she flashed one of her best ones for Marybeth as she sat, joining her at the table. Marybeth had long since pocketed Jerome's two € 50 notes, which was around $112, at current exchange rates.

"What's up?" Susie asked.

Marybeth inhaled deeply, and then told her the entire story about the airplane, Jerome sitting next to Eric, Eric irresponsibly and annoyingly showing her the highly compromising pictures of her to the stranger Jerome, and then Jerome finding her in the café purely by chance, on the very day Eric left, and Jerome's proposition to go to Reims for the night, with the bribe being a three-star meal.

Susie thought for a while. "What about Jim?"

"He's off in the Massif Central on some kind of anatomy field trip. I texted him, and he told me to go for it. But you know Jim; he'd sell his own soul to be treated to a three-star meal," she said.

"Maybe Jerome is on the level. Have you called his assistant Claire yet? I mean, does she exist? Maybe meeting her could give you an idea about Jerome? I mean, why couldn't she be his 'romantic date?' Maybe she's on the South Beach diet, or allergic to butter, or something? I mean, you should find out?" Susie said.

Susie had this annoying habit of always saying "I mean" all the time, but the normally grammar Nazi Marybeth let it go, since she loved Susie.

"If he's not on the level, and makes a play for you, you can always say no, right? He's American. American men understand the word no. Most of the time, that is," Susie said, and she nervously giggled. She recalled her own experience when her date had seemed quite hard of hearing when she herself had said no.

Marybeth did not want to explain the difficulty she had saying no to men. She should have said no to Denis; she should have said no to Marc. She definitely should have said no to the two Dominiques! And what did she do? She instead happily did whatever they wanted her to do, she gave them blowjobs and she happily spread her legs for them, too. She was a submissive slut, and it had taken this trip to Paris for her to realize it. She had done Eric a favor by breaking their engagement.

Marybeth knew if she went to Reims with Jerome, and he wanted her, he would have her. That's what made this a momentous decision.

But maybe not? Maybe this was finally the time when she would learn to say no? She could have a wonderful time, give him a little sex, but train herself to say no when it came to blowjobs and fucking, right? A handjob might be okay, she thought to herself.

"Maybe he's gay?" Susie offered, as if she had been reading Marybeth's thoughts and her worries. "Aren't men into food so much, I mean, aren't they often gay?"

"He's not gay," Marybeth said.

"How do you know?" Susie asked.

"The way he looked at me. He undressed me in his mind as he sat in the chair you're sitting in right now. He's definitely interested," Marybeth replied.

"Are you interested?" Susie asked.

"Susie, I've been through the ringer this past week, having constant sex with two different men. I'm played out!" Marybeth said.

"Yeah, I'm sure. But are you interested?" Susie persisted. She would love, just love, to have Marybeth's dilemmas.

"Well, I hadn't asked myself that. Shit. Yes, I guess I am. But only to have a three-star restaurant experience, you understand!" Marybeth said.

"Of course," Susie said, with a slight smirk. Marybeth has all the luck, she thought to herself.

The two women were silent for a while, and then suddenly, Susie said, "Do you think you were set up?"

"What do you mean?" Marybeth had not seen this coming.

"Well...he sits next to Eric on an airplane. He sees pictures, and he gets interested. If those pictures are what I imagine they are, any man would get interested! He befriends Eric. That's easy to do, I imagine. Eric's naive and trusting. Eric's here for nine days, and only an hour or two after he leaves, this guy finds you in a café? A café near the hotel Eric was staying at? Your favorite café?" Susie offered.

"I mean, maybe Eric told him when he was leaving, and where it was likely to find you? Maybe he even told him what to say? Eric knows you better than anyone, you know," Susie said.

"Why would Eric do such a thing? I can't imagine him doing that!" Marybeth exclaimed.

"Yes, yes you can. I mean, maybe it's revenge? Maybe he did it for money? Jerome seems rich, and Eric absolutely loves money. You've told me that yourself," Susie said.

"Are you saying Eric sold me down the river, like some used up tramp?" Marybeth asked.

"Well, it must have hurt when you dumped him? His back-up plan with Sally seems to have evaporated too, since -- as you tell me -- she is in the thrall of the son of your host mother, Denis?" Susie said. "Well, it's something to think about, anyway."

**************

There was a pause in the conversation. Marybeth was lost in thought, and Susie was worried she had crossed some boundaries, somewhere. Susie broke the ice, finally.

"Hey, maybe Jerome has a friend? We could be a foursome for dinner?" Susie asked, just throwing it out there.

"I'll ask," Marybeth said. She realized she wanted a romantic date with Jerome alone, all to herself. But she said she'd ask, so she would.

"Call Claire," Susie said.

"Now?" Marybeth asked.

"No time like the present. And after the call, I want to see the famous pictures," Susie said.

"You mean the infamous pictures," Marybeth said, giggling to hide her shame, and she made the call to Claire.

**************

Claire invited Susie to come along, too, and the three women went clothes shopping. Marybeth was overwhelmed. She had never in her life seen such beautiful clothes.

"Jerome wants you to look elegant, and older than you are. What are you, twenty-years-old? He also wants you to look sexy. I'm glad we're bringing your friend Susie along. Her opinions will be valuable," Claire said, and Marybeth thought that Claire was everyone's stereotype of a dyke, if ever she had seen one. Think lesbian, not dyke, she scolded herself. Diction can be so important.

"I'm so jealous of Marybeth," Susie said.

"You'd like to go, too?" Claire asked her. Claire was looking her over carefully. "Excuse me please, might I ask you an indiscreet question?" Claire was so French, Marybeth thought to herself.

"Uh...okay?" Susie said, not having a clue where this was going.

"Are you lesbian, or at least bisexual?" Claire asked.

Susie looked stunned by the question. She was a deer in the headlights.

"Susie's bisexual," Marybeth said. She pinched Susie's arm to shut her up. "Why do you want to know?"

Claire relaxed and gave a wonderful smile. She looked quite pretty, actually, when she smiled. "Well, it's a bit irregular, but Jerome thinks the ultimate test of the hospitality of a restaurant is how it treats two lesbians, going out to a romantic dinner. Remember this is France, not New York. France is a chauvin country. They can handle two gay men, but they have more trouble with lesbians. Jerome will be thrilled," she said.

"Thrilled that I have a bisexual friend?" Marybeth asked, and squeezed Susie's arm really hard to keep her silent.

Claire said, "Susie, if you could pretend you and I are on a romantic date, analogous to Jerome and Marybeth, then you could go too, as my date. I mean, only if you want. You could share the hotel room with Marybeth, or probably Jerome will spring for each of you to have your own rooms. The food should be spectacular, like nothing you've ever seen before, let alone eaten."

"I'm sure Susie would love that, right Susie?" and I pinched her arm so hard I thought I might be giving her a black and blue spot.

"Uh, sure!" Susie said brightly. Good for her, playing along.

"How'd you know I was bisexual, Marybeth? I've kept that a total secret here in France. I'm trying to convince myself I'm exclusively heterosexual," Susie whispered to me.

I was flummoxed, but I recovered in real time for once. "I am too," I whispered back. "You know -- it takes one to know one," I said, and thank goodness Susie bought that. In fact, I was bullshitting, figuring Susie could fake it for this amazing opportunity. "Claire's pretty, don't you think?"

"Yeah, in a dyke-ish kind of way," Susie said. She said it, not me.

"What are you two girls whispering about?" Claire asked.

"We're just excited, is all," I said.

**************

Claire was good at her job. I looked stunning in my outfit, and so too did Susie. Mostly we looked pretty, and yes, we did look older, but also we looked sexy as hell, but in an elegant way, not in a cheap, trashy, mid-north-central Indiana kind of way.

Jerome texted Claire. "Marybeth, he wants to take you out tonight, to get to know you a bit before the big date at the restaurant. Are you free, and willing?"

I wondered what she meant by willing? Did Jerome expect to get into my panties even before the restaurant? No! Not going to happen. I was not that kind of willing! But I was free, and I told her so.

"I'm free tonight, for a date, but nothing more, okay?" I said.

Claire looked puzzled by my reply. Susie jumped in, "Marybeth has had some men troubles recently. She's off sex."

"Oh, my! You misunderstand. This is just to deceive the restaurant! Jerome is a very correct man," Claire said. then she looked straight at Susie. She said, "Unlike me. I love sex with girls exactly like you, Susie. Here try on this outfit, and without a bra, why don't you?"

Susie winked. "Should I wear panties?" she teased.

"That won't change the look..oh!" Claire said, when she realized Susie was joking. Her face got cloudy. "Yes, try it on without either bra nor panties, why don't you?"

Susie took the dress and disappeared into the dressing room. When she emerged, with also a fresh application of her lipstick, Marybeth herself was ready to bed her, she looked that hot! She also looked pretty, but mostly she looked firecracker hot, as we say in Indiana.

Susie handed her bra and panties to Claire, a symbolic gesture if ever there was one. Then she twirled in a circle, the skirt of the dress flaring out, just a little. She smiled at Claire and Marybeth. "What do you think?" she said.

The women continued to shop until Marybeth was dead tired on her feet. It was fatiguing, but it was also tons of fun. The old canard about how much women like to shop for clothes is definitely true. Susie tried on all the rest of the outfits with no underwear, since her bra and panties were tucked away in Claire's purse. Some of the outfits needed a bra, and some looked great precisely because Susie was braless. Obviously, it was the latter outfits for Susie.

Claire became less interested in Marybeth, of course, but she knew her job, and she was the ultimate professional, so she devoted just enough attention to Marybeth to find her two stunning outfits: one for the big night at the three-star restaurant in Reims, and one for the preliminary date with Jerome. She also threw in the sexiest nightgown Marybeth had ever seen.

Marybeth had wondered why she needed such a sexy nightgown, but Jerome was paying, so why the bleep not? Then Claire said, almost salivating at Marybeth's body as she did a 360 in the nightgown, "Jerome is very correct, as I said, but in the final analysis he is a man, after all. This nightgown is just in case, you know?"