Chapter One
Damien
It was a terrible ruckus. My fist, coming down like the hammer of Mighty Thor, smashing into the cheap plastic casing of the digital alarm clock with the force of an army. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps; I did have thespian blood traipsing through my veins, a trait which helped to no end when it came to my legal career.
I genuinely hated being roused before the sun was fully up. It went against my self-tailored religion; it was one of the very few things that did. I tended to go with my own sort of morality, understanding perfectly, certainly more than most, the difference between morals and ethics. Ethics were societal, arbitrarily imposed by people who think they know better than everyone else, which is a trait particularly found among politicians and the ultra-religious.
Morals, conversely, were a personal matter, decided on by each individual. The notion of being truly immoral indicates someone who is truly evil, unable to even recognize good enough to choose it over evil. Amorality, something I had been accused of more than once in my relatively short life, was really just bad decision-making.
I made a habit of taking things as they came, rather than following some rigid system of behaviour that will always work in every situation.
Sliding off my silk sheets – something even easier than it sounds – I hobbled into the en suite, tastefully tiled in white marble. There was a time I used to jerk off in the shower, the warm water making my skin even more sensitive… Then, I discovered girls, and the effort seemed rather worthless.
A lot of the guys at the firm had drivers, despite the fact that none of them actually owned limos. The sight of a suited and capped chauffeur standing alongside a fiery apple-red Audi did not have quite the same impact, which was one of the plethora of reasons I drove myself, traffic jams be damned.
Meeting with such a fate, despite the early hour, I settled in for the long wait, having been driving long enough to know there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it, aside from the crew working to clear the three-car pile-up that had caused it. It was not quite as surreal as the tanker truck of milk that had flipped on the freeway the month before (now, that was a mess), but it was a subtle indication that the universe might just be out to get me.
I pushed a button on the radio. A small beep emerged from the CD player. Within seconds, the confines of the Mercedes were filled with the delicate strains of classical piano.
I used to have sex in this car. It was a thrill, at first. The danger of it all. At one point, though, it got to be too much, not least because my bed was a damn sight more comfortable. I would occasionally get a blowjob en route, either to their place or mine, but that was where I drew the line.
I got more than enough sex, anyway. I couldn’t fully explain it, but women just seemed to come to me. I could flirt with the best of them; I never failed to coax a genuine laugh out of anyone I talked to, even at a funeral reception. That was likely part of it, as well as the fact that I was young, obscenely rich, absurdly well-educated, and wore charm like it was a fashionable hat.
What ever the reason, I was never alone at night if I didn’t want to be, sometimes getting two women in a single evening. Of course, with numbers like that, news of my proclivities traveled fast. Had I been the sort to give a shit about other peoples’ opinions of me, I might have been embarrassed.
As it was, I had long ago accepted my dominative tendencies as a part of who I was. The only things that annoyed me, though only a little, were the assumptions that came with the label, which were mostly based on ignorance or misinformation. The number of women willing to visit my bedroom decreased after that; not a lot, but enough for me to notice.
There was probably an assumption that I was some kind of flog-wielding maniac, beating unsuspecting women until they screamed. There were people who used flogs, though only on people who liked it; the whole business is more about the shared connection than the pain. For me, it was about control.
I never hit the women I slept with. I didn’t have to, but I also didn’t want to. I would be gentle with the vanilla types, and rougher with the ones who were into that. In every case, their utter physical submission to me was my end goal.
A lot of them told me that they liked it; the surprise in their tone and on their faces was truly priceless, especially if it was clear that they were the sort to blush at the very mention of underwear. Yes, there were virgins – and they remained so unless they specifically told me otherwise; it was neither a particular turn-on nor a deal-breaker for me. I took things as they came and made the best of it; those were the words I did my best to live by.