The Light Between the Trees Ch. 01

[Author's note: The story contains themes of female submission, edge play, risky sex and finding love the hard way. Discretion is advised: please check the story tags to see whether this a series you'll enjoy.

The introduction has now been turned into an Audio story by the talented Seraph_nocturne, please check it out here: The Light Between The Trees Intro.

This story is a little different from my other work, I hope you enjoy the change. Long-time readers note that these are the events referenced in the beginning of No Such Thing As Free]

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LIFE AND DEATH

If you're reading this, then I'm gone.

As planned.

You remember the café siege, yeah? It was across all the channels for days. It would have been hard to miss. The breathless commentary, the expert opinions, the endless, endless fucking assumptions. Even if you don't remember all the facts, or the motivation for that fucking bastard to do what he did, chances are you remember the end. That footage went once around the world, the hostages all running for their lives in the dead of night. You could see the terror in their eyes. It was must-see viewing.

If you do your research on that evening, what they don't tell you, because nobody knows, is what happened in the thirty seconds before the stun grenades went off. Only the three of us were there to witness it and of course the other two are both dead. You wanna know?

Really?

You sure?

Okay, grab the popcorn, you twisted piece of shit, and I'll tell you. I'll lay it all out for you, so then you can go tell all your fucking friends you know the real deal.

Let's go.

---

There I am, just there on the floor between the tables. She's next to me, Kaylee or Carly or whatever. She's kneeling too. The fat fuck is standing over us with the pistol, wearing his fake suicide vest, with the wires jammed into modelling clay, and that fucking awful shit-eating grin all over his face. He's enjoying this, riding a caffeine pill high that's kept him awake for nearly sixty hours, talking about how they'll all have to listen now, how they're all paying attention to him. He's famous beyond his wildest dreams and he's loving it.

I know he's a nobody, a loser with a brain that's just wired wrong, the guy that no-one ever liked talking to, even when he was a kid, even way before he fucked himself up on a diet of bad information and late-night videos, convincing himself that the world is gonna end unless he stops it. He got the vest idea off some discussion forum, and the pistol from some place way out west where there were people who, at least for a moment, listened to what he had to say about justice and restitution and whatever the shit he's been reciting every hour since he marched into the café, opened his jacket up and locked the doors on us.

He got real pissed when everyone left the party. Marten threw a chair through the glass door the moment his eyes drooped, and everyone ran. Kaylee, like me, we didn't make it, cut off from freedom even as the other five bolted. I tried to knock him down, but he's big. He swatted me like a fly, making my head spin, laying me out on the floor. Kaylee hadn't even moved. I remember being sprawled out on the floor with my ears ringing from the slap, looking up at her and just seeing the horror on her face.

That's when he pulled us both by the hair, caveman style, both of us kicking and screaming, deeper into the café, out of direct line of sight from the outside. He made us kneel, and that's where I am now, looking up at that awful grin as he shows me the pistol.

"You run, you pay," he hisses, "Like I told you."

The muzzle points at me, then at Kaylee, then back to me, like he's deciding which one of us to pick. I watch the little circle of his muzzle-tip lock onto my head, see his finger on the trigger, and all I can do is wait. Pleading, crying, screaming, that's what he wants. He wants to feel my fear, to choose the one who has to pay based on the terror in our eyes, to give him his sick, fucked-up power kick. He's the judge, the jury, and the executioner, in full control, presiding over the fate of the two women kneeling in fear before him. He's probably got a boner the size of the Eiffel Tower in those baggy green combat pants.

The circle drifts away from Kaylee towards me, and I tense, waiting. There are no angles here, nowhere to run. If I make a move, that'll be enough. He'll pull the trigger. He's so wired up on sleep deprivation and the alertness pills, he won't even think about it until it's done. I wait for him to point back at Kaylee. She's sobbing now, the tears streaming down her face. She's babbling over and over again that she doesn't want to die. She's making herself a target.

But he stops, and the muzzle of the gun advances towards me, until it's right in my face and I feel an icy prickle the entire length of my spine. He's made his choice, and I can't do anything about it. I hate Kaylee at that moment, the sobbing bitch, because he's going to choose that she lives and I won't, all to make good his threat to shoot a hostage if they mess with him. The muzzle nudges against my lips, tapping on my teeth, prising my jaws open, and slides into my mouth. I can taste the metal, the cold hard steel, exploring the hole in the end with my tongue.

I only came in here for a fucking coffee.

There is an explosion of pure white, a shockwave that strips me of my senses, and I understand that this is it, that my time is over. It's a relief to have gotten to the end, no more waiting, no longer the agony of uncertainty, the mental anguish. It's done and I don't feel any pain. My body surges, radiating pure bliss from deep in my core, waves of ecstasy washing through me, wiping me clean. It's like being fucked by an angel, everywhere and all at once.

My eyes register shapes, motion, and incredibly, I can still see him, standing over me. There is a crack next to my ear as loud as the end of the world, a flash, the strange burnt smell of fireworks, and I'm moving forward, pushing up with all my might, raising off the floor to smash into him. I close my eyes and at that precise moment, there's another detonation, bright enough to light up behind my eyelids in pinks and golds. I make contact with his body, but he's twisting, and I slip past, suddenly disorientated in clear air.

One foot goes in front of the other, but it's like a bad dream, running through treacle in a world with fifty times normal gravity. I take another step, my muscles screaming as I begin to accelerate, eyes opening at last to see the row of tables and then beyond them the smashed glass of the door. I register that Kaylee is moving too, both of us launched in the same trajectory, caught in a slow-motion avalanche of limbs.

There is a flash past me and a third detonation, bathing the entire café interior in a brilliant white light. I feel the shockwave, but there is no sound beyond the ringing in my ears. Kaylee is still in motion, over my shoulder, as we close the distance to the door. I count down the steps, eyes locked on the entrance, heedless of the peril behind me. I don't know if I've been shot, or whether he'd missed, whether my legs are gonna suddenly fail me as the adrenaline loses its war with my mortally-injured body. All I know is that my legs still work and I can feel no pain.

I reach the door, passing through the gap, crunching over the shattered glass, my leg smacking into the chair that Marten threw, but not stopping, fuelled by the terror of what is behind. There is a wall of faces, in helmets and shields, standing across my path. I can see guns, but it's too late to stop myself as I slam into them, watching the shields open to admit me, tripping, falling, twisting backwards. Before the shields close, I have a view directly back into the café, to Kaylee, wild eyed, running for her life, and then a bright red plume emerging from her chest.

I smack into the concrete, looking up at men in black uniforms, their faces lit by sudden flashes as they fire. It's all silent, each discharge revealing a snapshot of the faces above me, like some macabre strobe, but I feel nothing except the coldness of the ground beneath me as they surge forward, leaving me laid out like a broken rag doll in their wake.

I play back that moment in my head every night. I can't help it. It's too strong.

So, that's me. Or at least, the story behind that picture that got into the news, the one of me being helped up by a paramedic, the story behind that look in my eyes as I face the camera, my cheek blackened by the cordite discharge when the gun went off next to my ear. The paramedic wasn't too concerned about the other two: Kaylee had dropped where she stood; the coroner's verdict was that she was dead before she hit the floor. The guy, he choked to death when a bullet from the returned fire passed through his throat. In all the fire and the fury, they'd only managed to hit him once where it counted. Fucking heroes, all of them.

I guess I should wind back now, tell you about my childhood, or a romantic involvement, give you a few details to flesh it all out, so it feels like you know me, but, you know what? Screw that. Screw you. You'll get what I give you. This is not the circus, you did not buy a ringside ticket, I don't owe you an explanation. I don't owe you anything. I'm gonna tell you what happened next, but not because you need to hear it, not because I think it'll make the world a better place.

No, I just need to get it out of my head. I guess you're just the nearest target.

---

I met Toby a month after starting at Kikster. We'd been on the dating apps and we just matched, we met and we clicked. Not like we were made for each other, not like we were soulmates or anything, but enough that when he suggested moving in, I didn't hesitate. I packed up four boxes of my shit and went over to his place and made myself at home. He'd gotten himself a one-bed in the city, a pretty small place, but he was managing the mortgage and I chipped in. I felt like a proper adult for the first time in my life.

Toby's the kind of guy who sits back and watches, so that when he does make a move it's because he's thought it all through. Hence the good job he'd found, hence the apartment and the mortgage, hence me, so he said. All in all, three happy years together.

Then the siege happened. After that, we lasted another two weeks.

I want to say that it was no-one's fault, but that's not true. He just drove me crazy, all the time just checking in to see how I was. I told him I was fine, that I didn't need babysitting, but each time it was like my words just weren't getting through. We had a blinding fight, then a fuck that went nowhere, then a long silence. The next morning, I said I was leaving and by that night, I was in a borrowed car with my four boxes all packed up in the back and nothing else to show for three years of my life.

It was the same at work, except there they had to give me some distance. Toby thought he had some God-given right to wade in, but at least when I was sitting at my desk I didn't have to fend off anything more than the cursory check-ins. A couple of the people I'm closer to took me out for lunch, but I shut that down pretty quickly. I'm not some charity basket case; I don't need people knowing my stuff, which is ironic given that I'm now laying it all out anyway.

I guess you'd need a few details of my job, seeing as how it sets the scene for what happened next. I'm a senior product manager at Kikster in the core engineering team. It's a fancy way of saying I'm an AI wrangler. I'm in charge of the artificial intelligence that selects what you see in your feed, based on the things you've already shown an interest in, the people you follow and then the things they show an interest in. If I told you any more details, I would have to kill you. No shit, that's how secret and important it is, the secret sauce that the company makes its millions from. You'd think I was working for NASA.

We call it the Everything Engine. It's the thing that's deciding what comes next, what's just over that little horizon at the bottom of your screen. We all have a clause in our contracts that will bury us if we ever reveal the why or how, but here's the big tip. Yeah, ready? Here's the truth. There is no secret sauce to reveal. We have no idea how it all works. The AI is vast, it's a black box sifting billions of data points and finding patterns in the noise that no human being would ever see or ever hope to understand. We act like we control it, but really, we just feed it data. That's my job: I feed the beast that lurks in the heart of our company and I don't tell anyone. Did you ever imagine it was such a process to provide you with your dumb fucking cat videos?

Anyway, getting back to it, I dump Toby and I fend off calls from him for weeks, getting steadily further apart as he gets the message that I don't need him to help me with my life. He's asking dumb questions like whether I've had a traumatic experience. Yeah, no shit. I ran for my life from a madman. What did it do to me? Well, judging from my ex's sad face, it's left me with a new perspective on life. I found out that life's for living, and if he can't grasp that basic fact then let's face it, we weren't meant to last.

I hit the apps again, and shit me, it's good to be famous. I'm not saying I'm the model type, but I'm not bad. I keep in shape, I can wear a short skirt and show off my legs in public and get looks. I mean, actual good looks, not as in the guy wondering how on earth I got the courage to go out in public. But now, after my fifteen minutes of fame, after the Everything Engine put my face in everyone's feed, I was getting pings from guys way out of my league. Greek gods with chiselled chins were pinging me back. Did I say no? What the fuck do you think?

I went on a spree. The advantage to these guys is that they weren't interested in anything but a fuck, and I wasn't interested in conversation either. After three years of showing my feelings, I was ready to just lay down under a guy and get pounded, watching the sculpted abs and the thick, meaty biceps as the guy went to his happy place on top of me. I lined up one a day, sometimes staying the night, getting multiple fucks in before the sayonara in the morning. It felt amazing, their cocks so hard inside me, feeling how I was desired by them, how much I was turning them on.

I'm gonna be honest here, I wasn't thinking further ahead than the next day, sometimes not even any further ahead than the next drink. They were giving me an easy time at work, and I admit I was milking that, spending my hours outside the office on my own entertainment. After Toby, it felt like I was released from prison and everyone wanted to know my name.

I didn't make smart choices, but that was part of it all. I got an IUD when I started dating Toby, and some of the guys I went with after were good to just take me back to theirs and fuck, no conversation, no protection. The first guy without a condom was some of the best sex of my life, the way he pressed my buttons, the way he brought me right to the edge, but it was something more than all that. I was fucking a guy I'd only just met on the app the day before, back at his place in some area I didn't know, and without any protection. It felt fantastic. When he shot inside me and filled me up, I came and came and came. I let him take charge, doing what he wanted with me, and he fucked me for hours, until I was sore, until I was awash.

Then he called me a cab and saw me to the street, like a gentleman, because he'd fucked me to his satisfaction and now he was done with me. I sat there in the back seat at two o'clock in the morning, sweaty, sticky between my legs from him leaking out of me, exhausted, drunk, my long brown hair in disarray around my face, and I felt something. For the first time since the siege, I felt at peace.

There had been something there in the café, at the point that the guy had the gun in my mouth, just as the stun grenade went off. I must have jerked back with the shock a split second before he pulled the trigger. It all happened at the same time, the noise, the light, the gun flash, and deep within me, that bright white release that shook every atom in my body. The hook-ups, the sex, they were echoes of it, after-images dancing on closed eyes after staring directly at the sun. I needed to feel it again, I needed to find it.

A week later, Travis popped up on the apps. He matched me back instantly, which was no surprise since we were both at Kikster. He worked on the same floor as me, we'd done projects together. I'd arranged a meet for the Saturday, working it out so that I could still keep my lunch date with a guy I'd been messaging for a week, after I'd met up with Toby for coffee in the morning to finalise a few last little details.

Toby was reserved, when I met him. We were in the coffee shop next to our old apartment, surrounded by couples who looked the same as us, some of them with designer dogs, some without, like the dark-haired girl and her tall, well-built boyfriend at the next table. I eyed him up, wondering idly how he would be in bed, waiting for Toby to show. I watched them talking, wondering what they were discussing. She seemed animated, and I could feel the buzz.

I guess that's what made me do it, feeling that itch. I talked to Toby for a while and then we went back to the apartment for me to collect a few things I'd left behind. I pushed him up against the wall and told him that I wasn't his problem anymore. I said goodbye properly, stripping off and mounting him, letting him fuck me one last time. It was a pity fuck, and I think he knew it, but I still came. Then I picked up the bag of my stuff and walked out.

The guy I met for lunch was breathtakingly good-looking, with the kind of dazzling smile that made my ovaries ache. I had to sneak a look at my app to make sure I had his name right, because I was calling it out an hour later, on his bed, with his manhood filling me. He took his time, bringing me to the edge, letting me feel his girth as he toyed with my body. When my orgasm hit, he pounded himself into me, pushing me further until I was climaxing again, feeling his cock surge and pulse inside me as he shot his load.

Afterward, I had to go home and clean up before I met Travis; I spent an hour in the bath, soaking. I put on my little black dress, showing thigh with bare legs, and black heels. I took time over my hair and my makeup, getting the effect just right. I'd selected a push-up bra that made the most of my modest cleavage, making sure that I was displaying my assets to full advantage. I wanted Travis to see who I was outside of work; I wanted his full attention. I hadn't intended to fuck my ex, but somehow it appealed to me, going for three guys in one day like I was going for the record, finishing up with Travis in a bar in the evening.

Travis is a front-end developer, working on the user interface. It's his code that shows you your endless parade of cat videos on the screen, after the Everything Engine has picked just the right ones to show you. He's established himself as the alpha male in the group, standing a head higher than almost everyone else when they get together for their morning huddle. He's broader too, going in for the body builder look, slick and smart among a gaggle of also-rans. I'd seen him eyeing me up on occasion across the floor, and he'd seen me looking too; I guess I finally decided to sample the goods.

So, there we are; let's just check in for a moment. You're up to date now, you got the backstory. Maybe you've got a feeling for the person I am, so you think. I'm standing outside the bar in my short dress, playing with my phone, getting my shit together before I walk in and give Travis the trip of a lifetime. I'm gonna fuck him tonight. I'm gonna make sure he remembers my name. I'm gonna make him beg. I look at the door, put my phone away and make my move.