Tom and Crystal

Author's note:

This entire story is posted only on literotica.com. Any other public posting without my permission in writing is a violation of my copyright.

Tom Rechtmann stepped into Tony's and looked around. The restaurant was designed for casual dining—it was licensed for beer and wine, but nothing stronger—and it was well-lit. At 5:30 there were more people hanging out with friends, drinking and maybe sharing appetizers or sweets, than diners. He had no trouble spotting Crystal—Crystal Wynde—with three of her girl pals, and he headed over to her.

Crystal was very pretty by anyone's standards, with long blond hair and a very slender build. Many men would have wanted more in the bosom, but Tom thought she was beautiful as she was. Maybe it was just his own tastes, but he'd seen plenty of women who flaunted their large breasts—wearing tops with low-cut and loose-fitting necklines and bending over to show off what they had—and he found the effect a turn-off, far too reminiscent of a cow's udder dangling and swaying. To Tom's mind, Crystal was almost the epitome of beauty and grace.

"Excuse me," he said to all of them, continuing after a moment, "Crystal, would you mind coming outside with me to talk for a couple of minutes?"

She stood up, looking somewhat mystified. They didn't really know each other all that well. Their paths crossed occasionally—Maplegrove Heights really wasn't a very big place—but they hadn't had any real interaction beyond friendly greetings since she'd graduated from high school. They'd had quite a bit of contact there, for a few months. He'd fallen for her back then, but he'd been shy and tongue-tied—about anything like asking a girl out, at least. He still was, for that matter.

At any rate, she followed him outside.

"I need to show you something, and it's better if your friends don't see," Tom told her. He fiddled with his phone for a moment, and then held it out to her.

She looked at it, and color and expression drained out of her face for a moment or two. "Where did you get that?" she asked.

He took the phone back. It showed a picture of her putting a small bottle into a silvery bag, and he closed the picture. "Is this really where you want to discuss this?" he asked.

She took a deep breath. "You're right, it's not. Where can we go?"

"Your place and mine seem like the good alternatives. Or I suppose your car or mine, and find a place to park and talk."

"My place, then. It's closer than yours. But I need to tell my friends I'm going. And they'll be dying of curiosity, and what do I say?"

He could tell that wasn't really a request for suggestions—more of a wail of despair—but he said, "You haven't had dinner yet, have you?" When she shook her head, he said, "Unless you'd rather not, tell them I'm taking you to Etienne's." That was about as formal and fancy as the town's restaurants got, but the outfits they were wearing—"dressy casual" business work clothes—would fit right in.

"OK. Thank you, I'd love that. When they get a chance, they'll ask me why you didn't just ask in there. Is it OK if I tell them you were shy about asking in front of them all?" He wasn't known as shy, but he hadn't dated anyone, even casually, for a couple of years. She had to know that—as mentioned, the town wasn't really big.

"Perfect. It's even true enough." He followed her back in.

Her friends sounded happy for her, with maybe some envy in one or two cases. Tom was pretty homely, but the general opinion was that he had more money than everyone else in town put together. That wasn't even close to true, as a little simple thought would have shown—there were some others who were pretty well to do, and Bill Gates he wasn't. Still, quite a lot of young women thought of him as a great catch—if he'd just cooperate in getting caught! Crystal finished her glass of wine and, they went out.

They drove separately the few blocks to her apartment building. It was small enough that it didn't have reserved spaces—which wasn't a problem unless something big was happening downtown. Normally, that meant about two weeks out of the summer, and the Christmas parade. They went inside, and she ushered him into her apartment.

"Do you want anything to drink?" she asked. "I don't really have much on hand, though."

"A glass of water's all I need."

They sat at the tiny kitchen table, not saying anything for a minute or so. He figured it was her move. Eventually she said, "Well, I really do mean it. Where did you get that picture?"

"You know what I do, don't you?"

"Not really, not in any detail. You're a 'security consultant,' whatever exactly that means. You've designed and patented a bunch of electronic gadgets along that line. I don't know if it's true you could just up and retire now, at what?—22? 23?—and live comfortably the rest of your life, but some people say that. I really wish you'd answer the question, though."

"OK. You're right, I design and build security devices, but at least in terms of time the biggest part of my job is working with my clients to identify security problems and the resources needed to fix them—or at least manage them—to install those resources, and to troubleshoot when there are problems. Sometimes that means calling in architects and builders. If so, I consult but don't do the work—that part of it, I mean. If there are gadgets too, I probably do them.

"Now, one of my clients is Brown's. A little over a week ago, they—in the person of Miss Reilly—called and told me one of their cams wasn't working. What she meant was that they weren't getting any data from it. So I took them a replacement camera, but no data came through from it, either. It turned out to be a problem with a cable, which I traced and dealt with.

"Rather than taking time unhooking the new cam and putting the old one back in, I just took the old one home. It needed to be checked out, anyway, of course—there might have been two separate problems.

"The cam checked out fine. It keeps a copy of what it's uploading to their server in real time—two or three days' worth, for this model—less if there's constant activity, probably much longer in that location. I downloaded that data, to take back to Brown's, but I thought I'd better scan through it to make sure. That can be time-consuming, even on fast-forward, but it automatically doesn't record stretches with no activity at all. In this case, the camera had been working the day before. Miss Reilly is thorough and careful, so she could say that for sure. Scanning for timestamp of that one day cut the job way down.

"Anyway, here's one of the things I spotted."

He took his phone and brought up a video. The clip began with Crystal bringing in a bin of products and sorting them into other bins. But after a minute or so, she stopped and just stood for a bit, then abruptly left. The camera timed out after two or three minutes. After a brief gap—less than five minutes, by the timestamps—the video resumed when the door opened and she came back in. She pulled a silvery bag out of a pocket of her dress, took a perfume bottle out of the bin, put the bottle in the bag, and put the bag back in her pocket.

She finished sorting the items, then picked up the empty bin and left the room.

Tom closed the video and put his phone away. He said, "I really should take this video to Brown's, put it on the server, and tell Miss Priss to look at it." Crystal looked shocked, and he said, "All right, Miss Reilly, if you prefer. You know how she is. I'm not putting her down when I think of her that way."

Crystal said, slowly, "I'm sure that's what you should do. So why are you showing it to me?"

"I have something I'd like you to do for me."

She seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she said, still slowly, "Tom, you're probably the last person I know I'd have expected to go for blackmail. But that's sure what this sounds like."

After a moment he said, "Thank you, I think. I'd like to think that's normally true. But if it's fair to bring it up, I'm pretty surprised to find you shoplifting—or I guess it's not that. Pilfering expensive perfume from your employer."

"Well, thank you, too. I've never done anything like that before. It was an impulse—something I really wanted, something I could never, ever afford. I've regretted it ever since. I'm not a thief, and I hate it that I made myself one, and I feel awful about it! I just used it once, to try it out. I can't take it back, even if I smuggle it in the same way—they couldn't sell it now that it's open. And there's this camera I never knew about, so I'd get caught if I tried, right?

"Even if I could afford to pay them for it, they'd fire me if I confessed. Miss Reilly would be sure I'd do it again—that I'd been doing it all along.

"So what is it you want me to do? Unless it's just what most guys always want from any girl?"

"Well, it is and it isn't, I guess. But you're still leaving me with a lot of questions. I mean, I'm sure Brown's doesn't overpay employees, but they're not Walmart, either. And you're lower-level management or something, right?

"But never mind that—tell me later, sometime. Here's the thing. I want you to be my girlfriend. For sure I want what you were thinking of, but I mean all the other things a girlfriend does, too. Go out and do things with me, spend time with me beyond that. Be visibly enough mine that you deter women who'd like to glom onto me in the expectation of getting a lot of lavish gifts.

"You can expect some showy gifts, though, once in a while. I expect to carry out the boyfriend's end of things, too."

She considered for a bit. "I'll say yes. It's not like I have any choice! But why me—or why now? You could have asked me out any time in the past couple of years—longer, even—and you didn't. And to be blunt, at least three-quarters of the unattached women in town our age and up, plus some younger ones and probably a lot of the attached or married ones too, would jump at the chance of a fling with you. Some of them would marry you tomorrow without any need for dating ahead of time to get acquainted. You could have your pick, either in your bed occasionally or as an obvious girlfriend. It's not like you need me!

"I want an answer to that, too. I need to know! But we need to go get dinner pretty much right away."

He looked at her very seriously. "Crystal, you do have choices. You can say, 'Publish and be damned!'—and expect to look for another job, admittedly. You can call the police and accuse me of blackmail. There are certainly some others.

"But you're right, we should go." He stood up.

She said, "Wait. Give me two minutes." She vanished into the bedroom, emerging in not much longer than she'd promised with a suitcase.

"What's that for?"

She sighed, almost a sob. "If I'm going to start a new career as a whore, I want to get started. I don't want the prospect hanging over me—I'm sure the anticipation will be worse than what I have to do! Unless you have some kind of plans or obligations for tomorrow, I'll be staying overnight, and maybe tomorrow night, too—sometime very soon, if not tonight. I'll just tell my friends we really hit it off. They don't have to know about this." She hoisted the suitcase slightly. "That I planned to stay with you before we even went to dinner, I mean."

They went out to his car, putting the suitcase in the trunk, and headed off to the restaurant.

Tom thought Crystal enjoyed the meal as much as he did, and that she was surprised at that. They had plenty to talk about. In high school—her senior year, his sophomore—they'd sung a duet in choir. It had been intended for the district choir competition. The choir teacher, Mrs. Wallace, had done her best to give each entry the kind of judgment the singer or ensemble would receive in the competition, and Tom and Crystal had placed well above everyone else in this dry run. When they all were judged at district, the final results had been very close to her ratings and critique.

It had meant an hour or more after school, practicing, for several weeks. Then the day of the competition, they'd been together all of a long Saturday—traveling, warming up, an audition together plus one each alone, sitting listening to other people doing the same kinds of things, meals, the evening concert, and travel home.

Tom and Crystal had placed second, narrowly missing the chance to go on to state. This had gotten them some notice around town, for a few weeks—no one from Maplegrove Heights had ever done that well—and they were asked to perform their song before several different groups. The school drew students from the surrounding, rural area, but it still was smaller and less well funded than many schools in the city and suburbs. The music program just couldn't compete.

That had been Tom's and Crystal's only really close contact, but they'd come to like and respect each other through all the rehearsing and everything else—for Tom, more than that. They touched on that time during dinner, also catching up on minor events since then, and talking about his work and hers. Tom was very aware that they were generating curiosity among some of the other diners. For some time—years—neither of them had been seen out alone with anyone of the opposite sex, so there was probably a lot of speculation as to whether anything was in the wind. Certainly anyone watching them might have concluded something was! From time to time, she laughed at something amusing he said, and sometimes she reached out and put her hand on his, or on his arm, and gave a little squeeze. He did his best to make it easy for her to act her part—not primarily for that reason, though. He honestly wanted her to enjoy herself.

Eventually, dessert arrived, and the check. Tom paid—which might have been seen by interested observers as evidence, or maybe not. They went out to his car, and he drove to his house, which was somewhat out of town. She'd seen the outside many times, surely—it was on a good-sized parcel of land, and it was large enough to draw attention without being ostentatious in any way. Everyone thought of it as the biggest house in town, and Tom knew it was. He hadn't had it built, but when he was looking, it had been on the market long enough for the price to come down, and there was room for all the things he wanted to do. Crystal asked questions as they went. She hadn't ever been up to it, much less inside. She didn't realize just how few people had ever been inside it other than on business—but if anyone she knew was included, she hadn't heard. And though it was Tom's place of business, he normally went to his clients' homes or offices. He needed to see those in order even to make recommendations, of course.

They sat down in the kitchen. She looked at him, and he looked at her. After a few moments, he said, "OK, you asked why you, and why not just ask for a date long ago. Fair enough questions! Not really that easy to answer, somehow.

"Back when we did that duet—. Um. I'd have liked to ask you out then, but you were near graduation and I was just a punk sophomore nerd. We got along—better than that sounds like—but I thought you were just being friendly. I still think so—you were habitually friendly and nice to everyone. You were beautiful—you still are, of course—stunningly beautiful and sophisticated, from my point of view. You had a date for prom, and I sort of assumed that meant you had a boyfriend. Maybe I was wrong—at any rate, that didn't look like it lasted beyond the prom. Then you were going out with other guys, all of whom seemed way beyond me at that point. I knew I couldn't compete.

"Eventually, over the next couple of years, you seemed to be firmly hooked up. Jim, then Bud. I never knew what happened to end things in either case, which I suppose might have changed my view of things. After Bud, it sure looked like you must be just turning everyone down who asked you. I'm sure some still are asking these days, even so.

"Anyway, besides all that, I'm not good with people—especially women. If I've got something definite we both want to talk about, I'm fine—whether it's where the opportunities for someone to break in are, or how to make a duet work. Or what I want you to do, when saying no will be hard for you, I guess. But when it's personal, and I don't know how people will react, I get nervous and I just can't do it. I can't handle the prospect of rejection, and it sure looked like that's what I'd have gotten.

"So I guess part of the answer's that I was attracted. I like you enough, for sure. You're really beautiful, but I think that may not matter as much for me as for some guys—other things are more important. You're a girl—a woman, now—that any guy could be proud to be going with.

"And now this dropped into my hands. I hope that explains it enough! But now, your turn. Why not just buy the perfume, if you wanted it that much?"

She looked uncertain. "First, let me answer your—your tangential non-question, from a minute ago. I thought everyone in town knew, anyway. Jim and Bud both cheated on me. In Jim's case, I heard it though the grapevine." She grimaced—a bitter little smile, maybe. "I heard it from a lot of different people—almost all girls, now I think about it. Apparently half the town knew! Enough that I thought there must be something to it. So I tracked him to her apartment, to see for myself. Then I told him off—in front of everybody!—the next time he came up to me all lovey-dovey. It didn't make the news or anything, but I'm still surprised you didn't hear about it.

"With Bud, it was actually worse, even though I wasn't ashamed in front of the whole world that way—the last to know, I mean. One day, I had to run an errand—for work—and I needed to stop by my apartment. And there he was, screwing her. In my own bed! If I'd had a gun in my hand, I'd have been up for murder, honestly—double homicide! I just saw red! I chased them both out half-dressed, screaming at them. I called in to—." She gave a bitter little laugh. "To 'Miss Priss.' You nailed her, for sure. I said I'd found an intruder in my apartment and needed to deal with it. I called the landlord, and told him I needed the lock changed that minute, and it was almost that fast. And I called Bud and warned him, and Friday evening all his stuff went out in the yard in a big heap. I just pitched it out the door." She looked as though she were having trouble not crying, and Tom just waited while she got control of herself.

"Anyway, that left me really turned off, as far as men go. Completely. Never mind 'girlfriend!'—I haven't even had anything resembling a date, until tonight. I've just said no. You're right, I'd have said it to you, too, without bothering to think whether you might be different. I might have thought you would, if I'd thought. Now, I don't know what to think."

They sat for a moment before Tom said, "I understand perfectly. They both—what? Said they loved you, I'm sure. Said you were the only one, no doubt.

"And you don't have any more reason to trust me, but on that I'll say flat out I won't cheat on you that way. Period. Ever. If it comes to that—to where I want someone else—I'll tell you first that we're though, and I'll give you at least a little time before I go with anyone else at all, so it won't look like I dumped you for someone else. If you decide to publicly dump me instead, at that point—it would depend on just what you said, but I'd probably accept that."