The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook Read Online Free Page A

placatingly on the young man’s chest. Yes, it’s true; I’d reached the point that it
     built my ego when I could so much as get a girl like her to sit down with me! The blond’s broad shoulders seemed to sag, as
     with disappointment, and the girl with the spiked hair entered the scene, taking her arm, and drawing her toward the clique
     of young Goths.
    She recoiled into a rigid stance, ankles together, clenched fists against her hips, in obvious anger. What I saw next I could
     hardly believe, when she actually stamped her foot. Then, as if in unbelievably slow motion, she turned and strode purposefully,
     high heels clicking, toward the bar.
    The young man had turned red in the face, but it was Spiked Hair who ran after, catching her at the entrance to the bar area.
     I still couldn’t hear what was being said, but her annoyed dismissal was audible to the whole room, “Bite me, twice!” The
     other woman stared with disbelief as she came ahead, tossing her hair, and perched on the stool she had vacated earlier, next
     to
me
at the corner of the bar.
    ————————
    E VEN THE CLOCK STOPPED FOR A MOMENT.
    I don’t mind telling you that this pumped me up like nothing I’d experienced for a long time. Breaking a date is one thing,
     but a young woman blowing off peer-group demands is quite another. Even so, the green eyes that seemed lit by a pale fire
     from within were intensely appraising me. Heads up! Somehow I’d been teleported to first base, but it was a long way to home.
     Like a drink “mark” in a hustle bar, I already had my wallet out, ordering her another martini.
    Seen close-up, the chain and bracelets were as captivating as the woman they adorned. They were real silver; old, old hand-beaten
     stuff—no doubt hammered over some base metal. With a smirk, she crossed her bare legs in a blatant tease. She was showing
     off the thigh band to be of braided leather thongs, twisted so tightly that they must have bitten painfully into her smooth
     flesh.
So that’s the deal,
I thought.
She really is into Norman’s slave mystique.
    Joe and I had recently laughed over a West Coast sex posting on the Net that hilariously proclaimed, “Once you’ve experienced
     true Gorean slavery, nothing else will suffice.” Well, I could do this, so I promptly set into a discussion of Norman’s books
     and how an erotic publishing house was bringing his suppressed series back out. I was trying to waste no more time, yet come
     off as both intellectual and titillating. Become a master of the art of dominance and submission; not to sound frightening
     were she a novice, nor boring if she were heavily involved. A thin line, but I knew how to do it, I hoped.
    Something was still not connecting. While my conversation didn’t seem to be repelling her, her interest was tepid. If I had
     read this wrong, what were the chain and thong signals all about? Without the punker mask her features would have been almost
     sweet—were it not for the whiff of something primeval, as if her heritage led back to some wild, remote place that couldn’t
     be defined by geography.
    From books to film. No surprise that she was a fan of the work of Tarantino and Rodriguez, still… Reality smirked at me when
     I mentioned Bogart and she volunteered her preferred “old dude” to be Mickey Rourke. Her full lips grew petulant, almost pouting.
     As I felt slipping from my grasp possibly the hottest chance I’d had with womanhood in years, she grew openly distracted and
     fished in her purse. She unfolded a sheet of paper and, as the card I’d given her tumbled from within, I recognized the paper
     as my notice that I’d posted on the message board.
    “This is you,” she stated, rather than asked, with abrasive flatness. “You down with cyberpsycho shit, or what?”
    There are moments when you know your life is about to change. Ordinarily, we know these divergent and convergent junctions
     only in hindsight. Sometimes, the path