Mothers and Daughters Pt. 02

Shopping Spree

Pavlina awoke at one in the afternoon. She discovered herself disentangled from the other bodies during their sleep, so she was able to deftly slide off the large bed without waking Nate or Briana.

Pavlina tiptoed across the short side of the loft bedroom toward the bathroom. She stopped and looked back to the bed. Nate was sleeping on his back, and Briana had rolled toward him with her left breast resting gently against Nate's chest and her arm slung over his far shoulder. To Pavlina, Briana's sleeping face appeared peaceful, content.

Pavlina padded quietly into the bathroom and shut the door. After she flushed the toilet, Pavlina checked the bathroom for medicines or other items out of pure curiosity. The only thing she found of interest was some women's makeup in the third drawer of the vanity. There was none out on the counter, suggesting it was leftover from a past girlfriend.

She opened the bathroom door quietly, and peered around the corner toward the bed. The duvet position had changed, now covering the sleeping pair more thoroughly. Nate, still on his back, had rolled his head toward Briana. Pavlina couldn't be certain, but the contours of the thick duvet suggested Briana's arm was now draped lower across Nate, with her hand possibly near his hips.

Pavlina crept down the stairs without a sound. Aware that sounds in the living room might be easily heard in the open loft bedroom, she stealthily moved about the first floor apartment. She came across Nate's folded pants, and felt through the pockets. Pavlina found what she was looking for, and pulled out Nate's wallet. There were 60 Euros folded inside – not enough to warrant a breakaway, given Pavlina's need for over 5,000 Euros by Friday. She found a Canadian driver's license, and looked at the picture of a younger Nathaniel Edward Traymore, born 17 February 1970, who lives in a city called Ottawa – she had never heard of it. He had eight credit cards, two of them gold and one platinum. Some were Canadian issued, some US, and some European.

Palvina found another official looking government card. Her English was not good. It had something to do with arms of fire. She put the mysterious card back.

Pavlina put back the wallet in Nate's pants and folded them back onto the chair where she found them. She looked about the apartment, and headed for the office. Still naked, Pavlina remembered the washing machine, and opened the bi-folding doors to the laundry closet. Their wet clothes were in the washing machine, having finished its cycle. She moved them to the dryer, and started it. In the meantime, Pavlina put on her short, white robe.

Pavlina closed the dryer and closet doors, and walked into Nate's office. Looking about, she considered where to start. There was a laptop case beside the desk. Pavlina rested the case on the office chair, unzipped it, and found two laptops. She removed the first one, a Toshiba. She placed the laptop on an empty spot of the desk. Pavlina gently rested the laptop case back on the floor with its other laptop still in it, sat on the chair, and opened up the Toshiba laptop. To her surprise, she was challenged for a password the instant she powered up the computer. Normally it takes a few seconds or even a few minutes for the operating system to splash up the password page, but this laptop required a password on power-up. Pavlina was out of her depth – she didn't know about power-on passwords, or how to get around them. She hit the return key without entering a password – maybe there was not password. The screen issued a big warning on a safety yellow background:

PASSWORD MISMATCH. You have 2 more attempts. Your picture has been taken and recorded.

Pavlina read the English message carefully. She parsed it three times until she was certain she got it right. "Souložit!" Pavlina swore too loud. She powered off the laptop, closed the lid, stowed it back in its case, and returned the zipped up case to its original location. Now she looked around the room more carefully. There, hiding in plain sight in the upper back corner of the room, was a surveillance camera.

"Souložit!" she said again, whispering this time as she stared straight into the security camera lens. Not good. Pavlina quietly stepped out of the office. She found herself in the living room, shaking badly. It wasn't being caught snooping. It was the whole thing. She's used to love-em-and-leave-em guys, like the boys from Amsterdam, but for someone to steal all her money and phone was a new low, even for a guy. And now she was whoring herself out to some whack job in Hamburg to raise enough money to pay for a bogus fine because she took shelter in a train station during a rain storm and fell asleep on a bench. And the bitter icing was she had to pay her own way back to a country that she fled to escape the midnight prowling of uncle Jakub while Pavlina's mother lay in her bed in the next room.

It didn't help that little miss suburbia was living out her adolescent crush. Briana had no idea what real life is like. Pavlina suspected Briana felt safe surrendering to Nate, even though to Pavlina, he was just another Jakub.

She went to the kitchen and opened the second drawer. There she pulled out a knife – the same knife she used earlier to slice tomatoes. It was a straight-edged knife, not serrated, and yet it sliced through the tomatoes cleanly and effortlessly. Pavlina had never handled a knife so sharp before. She held it in both hands for a long time, contemplating how this knife might find its mark.

"Are you looking for something?" Nate asked in English from the bottom of the stairs. Pavlina shrieked with a startled jump, dropping the knife on the floor.

"Jsem?ezání n?jaké raj?ata" Pavlina protested unconvincingly in Czech. Nate had no idea what she said, but he could tell he startled her badly. Now Pavlina looked at Nate. He was dressed in casual dark slacks and a button-up striped grey/black shirt. He was in sock feet, which explained how he descended the stairs without her hearing. Pavlina wondered if he could be carrying a gun right now. Perhaps Nate had an ankle holster – she had seen that on American TV. Canadians were just like Americans, weren't they? She couldn't tell looking at his pant legs.

Pavlina bent over and carefully picked up the fallen knife by the handle. She rested it back in the drawer, and walked to the living room, staring at the floor. She sat down on the couch without looking at Nate, and said nothing.

Nate remained standing at the bottom of the stairs. He looked at Pavlina, who was still staring at the floor. Her straight blonde hair tenderly adorned her slender shoulders. Without makeup, she was naturally beautiful.

Just then he heard Briana start down the stairs naked. Briana felt self-conscious as Nate watched her come down the steps, even though he had already seen everything up close. She continued down the stairs. "What's going on?" Briana asked when she got to the bottom.

"I don't know," Nate answered flatly. "I was hoping you could talk to her."

Briana saw Pavlina in her short bathrobe, looked around the room, and found the other one crumpled on the floor. She walked over and pulled it on and tied the fabric belt around her waist. Then Briana sat beside Pavlina, who was still looking at the floor. They spoke briefly, mostly because Pavlina offered only terse, one-word answers to Briana's questions. "She's not saying," Briana relayed what Nate already knew.

"Maybe this was a mistake – the two of you," Nate offered to Briana. She didn't translate, but she was thinking the same.

Pavlina blurted something out in Czech, stopped herself in mid-sentence, and started over in German. She spoke for some time before Briana translated a concise synopsis. "She said she went into your office and opened your computer. She is very sorry."

Nate smiled, now understanding Pavlina's unsettled demeanor. The security system on his laptops was very robust, and he realized she must have encountered only the first tier of a multi-modal regime. "Tell her I understand she is curious about me. If she wants to know anything about me, she should ask. But under no circumstances is she, or you, allowed to go into my office again without my permission."

Nate watched Pavlina nod as Briana translated. At the end, Pavlina looked up at Nate for the first time since they all awoke and said "Okay" in English. Then she said something to Briana in German.

"She wants to know if you're a cop."

"No," Nate shook his head. "I am a consultant." Briana didn't know the word for consultant in German. She translated the best she could, explaining he was hired to help companies do business. That was the full extent of Briana's knowledge of consultants. Pavlina nodded without really understanding.

"It's one thirty," Nate announced to the girls. "Our plan for this afternoon is lunch, then shopping." Then Nate stopped and listened. He looked at Pavlina. "Did you turn on the clothes dryer?" He immediately realized she didn't understand, so he walked to the closet and opened the bi-folding door. Sure enough the dryer was running. He turned to Briana. "Tell her thanks – I forgot to do that."

Briana translated to an expressionless Pavlina. "What kind of shopping?" Briana asked Nate without waiting for Pavlina's reply.

"You girls badly need some new clothes. It's part of your deal, remember?" Nate reminded Briana of her offer. Briana translated for Pavlina. The girls were happily agreeable to Nate's plan.

Nate went upstairs, two at a time. In the upstairs bathroom, he rummaged through the drawer with his ex-girlfriend's makeup, and returned downstairs with an eyeliner pencil. He told Pavlina to stand up, who did without the benefit of Briana's translation. Nate crouched in front of Pavlina, bringing his face within inches of her just barely covered pussy, and he used the eyeliner pencil to draw a long horizontal line across the inside front of her left thigh, half way between her crotch and her knee. Then Nate crouched before Briana and drew the same short horizontal line at the same position on Briana's left leg. "Okay," Nate nodded to both girls as he stood up, and shoved the eyeliner pencil into his back jeans pocket. The girls looked at each other with bewildered curiosity. "Let's have some lunch," he prompted without explaining the purpose of his markings, and walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge door, and surveyed its contents for ideas.

"Can we go out for lunch?" Briana asked.

"Sure," Nate shrugged, "but your clothes aren't dry. I figured we'd have lunch here while you wait."

"I wanted a shower anyway," Briana explained, bitterly aware of his jism that she spewed everywhere in her coughing fit that had dried into a crusty glaze on her face, neck, and in her hair, "and I'm guessing Pavlina does too." Pavlina looked up at Briana with paranoid curiosity when she heard her name in conversation.

"Sorry," Nate shook his head. "There is a one-shower per day rule in this building, you both had yours." Briana ran her fingers through her hair, stopping at tangles where bundles were cemented together by dried semen. Briana translated for Pavlina the one shower per day rule. Pavlina shrugged like she didn't care. "You don't have cum all over your hair," Briana whined in English.

Nate looked at the girls. "Coffee?" he asked.

"Ya, danke," Pavlina replied. Nate set up the stovetop espresso maker and lit the gas stove. He rummaged through his cupboard before finding a bag of ginger snap cookies – the really crisp and spicy ones, like his grandmother used to bake. He plated some cookies, and put the milk, sugar, and a few small spoons on a tray. As he waited for the espresso maker to steam its coffee, Nate opened the fridge again and took inventory. He would need a lot more food with three people living in the apartment.

When the coffee was ready, Nate emptied the espresso maker into three small cups. He brought the tray to the living room. The girls were sitting on the sofa. Nate set the tray on the coffee table. Pavlina put some milk and sugar into her coffee, stirred it, and took a sip. "Gut," she said in German, lifting her cup toward Nate in a salutation gesture, and took a cookie. Briana, still sulking from the no shower rule, took her cookie and coffee in silence.

Nate took a store-bought quiche out of the fridge and cut it into six pieces. He put the quiche and three plates and forks on the coffee table, and told the girls to help themselves. He took a piece of quiche for himself, and retreated to his office with his lunch and coffee. He set up his personal laptop – a Samsung, not the one Pavlina tried to turn on. It too had a power-up password protection system that was part of a whole disk encryption utility. Nate typed in his pass phrase, and watched the display grind through its start-up routine before the Windows log on screen appeared. He entered the different windows password, and checked his email – nothing significant. Nate scanned the local news portal while he sipped his espresso.

He finished his quiche, and returned to the living room to check on the girls. "Pavlina asked me why you do woman's work when you have us to do anything for you." Nate thought about Pavlina's view of the world, where her culture provides much clearer demarcations between women's work and men's work than Nate was accustomed to.

"I don't want her to poison me," he answered, thinking about discovering Pavlina holding the knife in the kitchen less than an hour earlier. Briana chortled a brief laugh, but then stopped with a deadpan face when she realized Nate might be serious.

"She's not dangerous," Briana argued Pavlina's defense.

"Everyone is dangerous," Nate corrected her, "in the right circumstance."

Briana took another piece of quiche, as did Pavlina. Nate took the last piece and returned to this office and continued reading the local news.

Twenty minutes later, Pavlina and Briana appeared at the door together. "Is our clothing dry?" Briana asked. Nate told her to check. His experience is the dryer often runs longer than it needs to. She opened the bi-fold door, and then pulled the dryer door open, which stopped the tumbling automatically. She reached in and pulled out some clothing at random, and felt them. They were warm and dry. Briana took her clothing out and went into the powder room across from Nate's office, and closed the door to change. Pavlina dropped her bathrobe to the floor while Nate watched, and standing naked she pulled her clothing out of the drier and put them on there in the hallway.

They found their shoes while Nate shut down his laptop. He checked his keys were in his pocket as they left the apartment. Nate used his key from the hallway to engage the second deadbolt lock. They walked down the long hallway, downstairs, and then stepped outdoors in the warm afternoon sun. Nate led them over a five minute walk to the Baumwall subway station, which was actually an elevated rail line at this particular point in its circuit. They climbed the stairs to the overhead train platform. Five minutes later they boarded the front car of an eastbound train, and sat near the driverless front, looking out the front windows. The modern, clean train passed over smaller buildings, and wove its way through the taller structures. The girls enjoyed sitting at the front, watching the world go by from this elevated view. After the next stop, the train started its descent, leaving its elevated tracks to return to its subterranean habitat. Ahead, Nate and the girls could see only water all around, and both Briana and Pavlina gasped with horror, knowing something had gone horribly wrong, as the train was about to plunge into the watery depths of the canal. Instead of crashing into the water, the train glided through a tunnel opening that rose above the canal water level. It was like driving down a huge inclined straw with its open end in the middle of a lake.

Three stops later, Nate shepherded the girls off the train at the Mönckebergstrasse underground station. An assortment of boutiques and cafes awaited them on street level as they climbed the subway stairs into the touristy shopping district.

At three in the afternoon, they walked down Mönckebergstrasse street to a department store called C & A. He led them down the stairs to the basement floor, which had clothing geared mostly to teenage girls. Pavlina observed Nate seemed to know his way around a department store well enough to go directly to teen girls' clothing – something she was unaccustomed to seeing in men. Except for not speaking the language, Nate seemed to fit in like a local.

"Okay," Nate explained to the girls in English. "You each have a budget of 150 Euros." Briana translated after each sentence. "You can buy tops, skirts, and dresses. No pants, jeans, shorts, or skorts." Briana didn't know the translation for skort, so she just said the word. Pavlina nodded. "No underwear, bras, shoes, jewelry, or accessories – only tops, dresses, and skirts. Also, you must choose at least one strapless top or dress, and at least one sleeveless top or dress. No long sleeves. And the bottom of every dress or skirt you choose cannot go below the mark I put on your legs." Nate waited for the last translation. Pavlina looked at Nate with a mixture of surprise, understanding, and condemnation when Briana translated that the mark on her leg meant she could only buy short skirts and dresses.

"I will come back in one hour to pay for your clothing. Remember the rules," Nate reminded them, "and you have a budget of 150 Euros each." The girls nodded. "I will pay for everything that meets the rules. The clothing you buy today is the clothing you will wear for the rest of the week."

Nate went up the stairs, and left the store to do some of his own shopping. He returned to the C & A teen department at four. He found the girls looking at some sundresses that were too long for his rules. They saw him, and walked him to two small piles of clothing they had selected. He picked up each garment, piece by piece. Briana had chosen a short yellow sundress with pale blue flowers, a white tube top, a black skirt, and a blue pinstripe short-sleeve button-up shirt. The dress and skirt appeared to be short enough. The total was 138 Euros.

Pavlina selected a long black tube top with a matching short tube skirt, a red skirt, a white T shirt, and a tie-bottom cut-off short sleeve dark and light blue shirt. Her total was 109 Euros. Nate paid for the lot while Pavlina casually tried to spy his credit card passcode, but he covered his hand with his wallet.

The clerk handed each girl a shopping bag with their items in it. Once everything was paid for, Nate reached into his own bag of purchases and pulled out two black thong panties with string hips and a center string up the ass crack connected to a small triangular patch of fabric to cover the front. There was barely enough material to cover a pussy. He handed one pair to each girl. He told them to take the underwear, and select one outfit from what they just purchased, go to the change room, take off everything they are wearing now (except their shoes and socks), and put on their new outfits. Briana translated, and the two girls discussed which outfits to wear. Briana selected the yellow sundress, and Pavlina selected her black tube top and tube skirt. There was only one change room available, so they went in together. Five minutes later, they emerged in their new outfits.

Briana's sundress was light and loose at the bottom hem. It swayed gently as she walked, suggesting a sensual schoolgirl innocence. Pavlina was just the opposite – her outfit was sleek and tight to her body. The top and bottom tubes overlapped at her tummy, and were so well matched in fabric and color, the ensemble looked like a strapless mini-dress. The clingy stretch fabric hugged the shape of her small, firm boobs and straight, narrow hips. Nate could just see his pencil mark on both girls' legs, confirming the dresses met regulation length. They were indeed short dresses, and both girls looked very sexy. He took their old clothing and dropped it in his shopping bag.