Corrupting Power
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Brewster's Brood - Part Ten
🕑 Added 2022-02-23 21:24:55 +0000 UTC(I will be updating this post a bit later with the requested epub 1-10 version, so if you're looking for that, keep an eye out on this post over the next few days. Still figuring how to get chapters to show up. Until then, the PDF attached to this is parts 1-10 & the Cast list.)
Part Ten
Mrs. Churchill – 3/7/2017 – Tuesday – 9:02 pm
“How's our boy doing?” Mrs. Churchill asked as she reentered the control room. Around the time that Max had started his little professor fantasy, Mrs. Churchill had tapped out to go and grab dinner. The man's endurance had been remarkable thus far, but pretty soon she was certain he was going to have to tap out for the day. By this point, she suspected he was close to firing blanks anyway, but there wasn't any harm in letting the girls continue to try and milk a few more chances out of him, as long as they didn't kill him.
That was still a matter of concern, because if they ended up harming Max over the course of the game, Mrs. Churchill knew she and the rest of her team would be the designated scapegoats and that the overseer of the late Mr. Brand's estate would spend the rest of his life destroying each and every one of them as thoroughly as possible.
“He looks fucking exhausted, boss,” Jacinda told her. “He's had sex with six different women in the last twenty-four hours, seven if you count the beej that Kelly gave him under the table. He seems like he's about to fall over. I know all these crazy bitches want to get their pound of spunk but it's a goddamn marathon, not a sprint, and if he balks out, we're all screwed, so maybe you can give them a warning to pump the brakes a little instead of the man's dick, so that it's still functional by the time Juliet group shows up?”
Mrs. Churchill removed the dark framed glasses from her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger as she nodded. “You're right, you're right. A reminder to all the girls couldn't hurt, so they remember they have 90 days to do this, and overwhelming the poor boy's only going to spook him. I'll send out a video message to all of them, but you know how it is, wanting to be let loose on a target and being told to wait and stand down.”
Jacinda rolled her eyes, gnawing on a plastic straw that she'd mashed into wreckage with her molars, a way to keep from fidgeting too much. “I know I've been impatient from time to time, Mrs. Churchill, but I've never been so gung ho that I've been trying to find a way to circumvent the rules. A couple of the people from later groups have been having conversations about whether or not they could get into the game earlier, if they were just trying to be near Max without making contact, and whether or not we'd consider that a violation of the rules.”
“If they're just trying to be seen by him, that's fine, but if they're trying to draw his attention, that's where we have a problem, not that I expect some of these women to be able to make that distinction, so perhaps it is better that they all simply keep their distance for the time being.”
“That was my assertion, that the minute we let one infraction slip, they'll all start pushing and we'll snap under the weight of it,” she sighed. “We did point all of these baby crazy women at one man and told him what he's worth, so I get why they're acting the way they are, but they're all just thinking of themselves rather than the game as a whole.”
“That's our job, Jac,” Mrs. Churchill said. “We have to see the big picture for them, have to do their planning for them, or least prevent them from killing one another while we're trying to get this fella over the goal line. So tell them not to get into his airspace until they've been given the green light, or we can make their lives living hell, or remove them from the game entirely, and that they agreed to that in the contract they signed as part of signing up for this madness. That'll put a bit of fear in them, especially if they go back and read the actual language of the NDA they signed. I had no trouble discerning which had skimmed the document and which of them who'd read the whole thing.”
“The ones who read it looked more nervous?”
“They looked fucking terrified,” Mrs. Churchill laughed, “but they also looked fascinated why anyone would threaten them with such grievous bodily, mental, emotional and financial harm for what they thought was a television show. That's why they wanted to stay and see what was going on.” She turned and looked over to Lynne. “Any problems with the streams?”
“Not a one,” the heavy-set black woman told her. “We have a handful of people who have it always on and a lot more than tune in and out at any given moment. I think the majority of the audience is waiting for the daily highlights reel.”
“You put together the package for day one yet?”
Lynne threw up a single hand in the air, shaking it about. “Other than tacking on this last little encounter, it's basically done. I've been updating it a little bit at a time, trying to cut it down to the very essentials. But it'll be a nice 90-minute package that'll be available to all our streamers for twenty-four hours, from 10 pm local time until the next package goes up, so that the people who too busy to tune in all the time still feel like they're getting their money's worth. It'll have a little bit of the buildup, but mostly just the steamy stuff, like your own little pornographic version of Love Island, without any commercials or anything.”
“Can you imagine if we tried to get a sponsor to run ads?” Maia laughed. “Knowing our demographic like we do, what would we even want to advertise to them?”
“Catheters?” Lynne said.
“Divorce attorneys?” Jacinda asked.
“Tax shelters?” Maia said.
“What do you try to sell to the people who have everything?” Mrs. Churchill asked. “I guess nothing, and we just let them watch their dirty flicks.”
“That is what they're paying for,” Jacinda agreed.
“No, what they're paying us for is the chance to watch for things to try and embarrass the newest member of the ruling elite, but they don't really know Max like we do,” the older woman said. “They think they're going to tell Max about how they watched him pretend to be a college professor and fuck a couple of co-eds, but by the time Max gets to that point, he isn't going to care in the slightest, and if anything, he's going to see it as a sign of weakness that the person told him about it, because now he knows something he can use against them. No, while I do think Max's physical health is something we need to keep tabs on, his mental health is going to hold up just fine.”
“Speaking of mental health, we've got a couple of inquiries about how soon people can start getting tested for pregnancy?” Jacinda said. “I've been saying ten days after their first encounter with Max, but a couple of the girls seem to think we can detect it sooner.”
“If we wanted to spring for a couple hundred dollar test each time, we could theoretically find out as early as a week or so in, but it's invasive, it's uncomfortable, it's expensive and, frankly, it takes some of the sport out of the whole thing, so no, we're just going to use the good old fashioned pee on a strip kind of thing women have been at for decades now, and anyone's who's bothered by that can take a long walk off a short pier.”
“That's about what I figured,” Jacinda said. “I'll reiterate the point to all the women involved and that should calm them down a little bit.”
“Who's giving you shit about it?”
“Who do you think?”
Mrs. Churchill sighed. “Fer fuck's sake, Cara, if looking at men was that much of a problem, you shouldn't have gotten involved in the bloody game.”
“Let's just hope our boy's been working well.”
“Conception's a tricky thing, Jac, you know that. The doctors told us that if we were lucky, we might get twenty to thirty success stories out of this, and I told them I wasn't going to let a thing like human biology stand in my way of a payday.”
“I still think your ballpark guess of fifty or so is insanely high, but I guess that's what the pool's there for,” Jacinda responded.
“You think her pick is high? That's gotta make Danny's insane.”
“Well, Danny is insane,” Jacinda laughed, “but in a good way. But 60-70? He's overestimating the limits of this dude's body. Besides, at some point, he's going to start freaking out by the number of different women he's had sex with, and that's going to slow him down some.”
“Which is why they have three months at this, Jac,” Mrs. Churchill said. “Mr. Brand might have been crazy, but he'd given this a lot of thought and planning, even if we didn't agree on the timeframe. I argued that we would have a higher return on investment if we gave the girls a full year to play, but Monty told me that would give his relative too much time to think. He didn't even want Max to have time to catch his breath.”
“Let's hope we don't give him a heart attack like this.”
“Heart attack's not our biggest concern,” Maia said. “If we're talking physical problems, a stroke's more likely, but we're doing what we can to help buffer against that. I know the girls have been smuggling tiny bits of aspirin into his food, and they're using a mix of caffeine and alcohol to keep him riding a wave of highs and chills.”
“I'm not too worried about Bravo group,” Jacinda said. “We're still a ways from the truly big troublemakers getting thrown into the mix, and I tried to use the Bravo group as sort of a firebreak, so we could ease him into the idea of more and more women being piled into his available pool, and thankfully they generally seem okay with waiting.”
“That whole thing with Song was hot,” Lynne said, fanning herself with one hand. “And he didn't recognize her. I still can't believe he didn't recognize her.”
“I told you he wouldn't,” Jac said, annoyance in her voice. “Sure, if you live in Korea, you'd know exactly who she is, but most of those shows barely see air over here.”
“There's quite a few Korean ex-patriots living in the Bay area, Jacinda,” Lynne replied. “So hopefully she continues to lay low and limit her exposure.”
“Relax, Lynne. She doesn't want to get found out here anymore than we do. If she gets spotted, she's going to probably slip out of the game, and that means if her first shot didn't take, she wasted all this time for nothing, and that's absolutely not what she wants. The K-pop press would have a field day with all of this, but if she can successfully have a kid without the father being anyone that they can track down, it's a mysterious story she can stretch at least an extra decade out of her career from.”
“So it looks like he's finishing up his dinner over at Ironwood,” Mrs. Churchill said, trying to draw the conversation back to the present.
“Yeah,” Jac said. “He basically told Jenny that he didn't want to have any more sex tonight, but he would be okay having dinner there at the club and talking with people as long as everyone was understanding that without Viagra, there was no way he was getting it up again tonight. The girls were remarkably understanding and while a few of them have joined him and Jenny for dinner, most of them are being respectful of the fact that he looks like he's run a damn marathon. And just because they aren't having sex doesn't mean they aren't talking about sex with him.”
“So at the table, that's Jenny next to him, Esme, LaTonya, Lisseth and Diane. Quite a diverse bunch. I'm surprised Anya's not over there, since there's a complete lack of blondes at the table right now,” Mrs. Churchill said.
“I think she's pouting,” Lynne chuckled.
Jac smirked. “You're not wrong. I think Anya was expecting that he'd be drawn over to her, and she's been sitting alone at the bar all night watching the television, expecting Max's head to be turned.”
“And instead?”
“Instead he's barely even had a chance to glance over at her,” Jac snorted. “She's very much used to being the prettiest person in the room, and now that she's one of many beautiful women in Max's airspace, she hasn't yet realized she's going to have to pick up a few new tricks along the way. She'll get there. Give her time. I told you I sort of expected this to happen, that she was going to think she just deserved to be the center of Max's attention, and that eventually she was going to come around to having to do the leg work.”
“You're assuming she's even got game,” Lynne muttered. “Women who look like that usually don't know how to go get what they want, and if it ain't coming to them, they convince themselves they didn't want it none in the first place.”
“Well, we all know that ain't gonna work here,” Jac said. “So I guess we see how long it takes for it to register to Anya.”
“I'll give you two-to-one odds she snaps tomorrow,” Mrs. Churchill said.
“I'll take a piece of that action,” Jac replied immediately. “She's gonna last at least three or four days.”
“I'm with Jac on this,” Maia said, fishing a twenty out of her purse, handing it to Mrs. Churchill. “Her patience can't be that short. You want in on this Lynne?”
The rotund woman scowled for a moment, then shook her head. “Nah, I think it's too close to call, and she already looks pissed off that he's not flocking to her. If it's not tomorrow, it'll be Thursday, but it could easily be tomorrow, and I ain't about to risk money I ain't got to spare.”
“Wise woman,” Mrs. Churchill said, scribbling the bets in her little black book before tucking the money into her pocket.
Dana Weismann – 3/7/2017 – Tuesday – 9:47 pm
“So what do you think, Zoe?” Dana said over the FaceTime call. “I'm sure you spent the whole day watching the feeds like I did.”
“When you weren't in them, anyway,” Zoe laughed.
“Hey, one of us has gotten a turn on the ride and one of us hasn't, so no words of complaint out of you.”
“I thought it wasn't the right point in the month for you to want a ride.”
“No,” Dana said with a smug grin, “I said it wasn't the right point in the month for a ride to have a high degree of success, not that I didn't want the ride.”
“Got a little jealous watching him have a go at all the other girls, did we?”
“Hmph. More like realizing how long it's been since some strapping fellow tossed one up me, that's all. But that's fine. I'll get mine next week, and since I'm the owner of the local chapter of Ironwood Estates, he'll see me as a less troublesome figure. But you didn't answer my question. How do you think he's holding up?”
“I was a little surprised that Jenny got him into that little professor scenario as easily as she did, but once he got into it, it looked like he checked most of his concerns at the door. That seems to be a running theme with him. So as long as we keep him from every stopping to catch his breath, we can probably keep him from looking behind the curtain for too long until he's well and truly in it. You sure he's going to be back up again tomorrow?”
“Yes and the day after that. Tomorrow he'll be up here, figuring out logistics for running the food truck out of here in Thursdays, seeing what he'll need in terms of supplies and having delivery trucks coming and going. We need to make sure he's doing gangbusters business in addition to doing our business while he's up here, so that we can have the food truck on site for a guaranteed one day a week, so I've been busy reaching out to all my friends, working to set it up so that Max will be swamped with remote orders on his first day running the truck from up here.”
“Considering how damn good the man's food is, that'll probably hold in terms of keeping the food truck there for Thursdays,” Zoe said.
“I thought you'd never eaten his food,” Dana replied.
“I haven't, but you don't get this many good write-ups without having insanely good food.”
“If he's such a good cook, why wasn't he able to find a backer to reopen his restaurant?” Dana sniffed dismissively.
“Because he didn't want to give up any portion of his ownership, and I think I can respect that. Besides, did you read about how he got dicked over with his restaurant burning down? That would be enough to put anyone on tilt.”
“Mmm, I suppose.”
“Anyway, you should hit him up once more before he heads home for the night, make sure you've got it cemented that he's supposed to do site inspection tomorrow, and stress how good it will be for business for him, how it'll let him get his food in front of lots of people who haven't been exposed to the truck before. He's not a great businessman, but he'll see the merit in that.”
“Yes yes, Zoe, I do know how to string a client along. Toodles!” Dana said, hanging up the call with a sigh before tucking the phone back into her clutch.
Dana had spent the last few hours on the second floor of the building, continuing to establish their credibility as Ironwood Estates, getting all the paperwork in order and making sure that it would withstand at least a cursory glance of their back history. She didn't expect Max to do any digging, but business developments in the Bay had a tendency to draw attention if they weren't handled right, and the last thing Dana wanted was anyone taking a deeper look into this building and what it was going to be up to for the next three months.
It wasn't like she hadn't opened businesses on the sly before, but the sex club trade was one she didn't have any actual experience in. She had heard that they could be decently profitable, but the idea of having to be cloak and dagger about her day-to-day operations wasn't something that massively appealed to her, and she was certain that opening the business wasn't the hard part – it was drawing and keeping the clientele.
The Bay had a long history of this kind of thing dating back to the sixties, with the gay community struggling to connect with one another in a time when it wasn't considering a polite thing to be. Of course, San Francisco had been the most open and welcoming city, and the gay rights movement was practically born near Haight & Ashbury, where the Grateful Dead and the love revolution had gotten its start.
But the AIDS crisis had forced some of it deeply underground, and the government's response to that plague had been a setback of decades to sexual and personal freedoms. The last twenty years, however, had started to see a second sexual revolution, with same-sex marriages being performed at the San Francisco City Hall before most places in the country.
Dana had also heard tales of a strong BDSM scene running in the warehouses of San Francisco, and while she didn't have any personal experience with it, she'd been privy to some of the conversations about them, so she knew the places were real, and that they ranged from high end dominatrices to whips and chains in dirt-lined corners.
At some point over the club's three months of existence, she was going to have to let a few of her high society friends know about it, simply to provide smokescreens for her investment. She would let it slip that it was a business experiment she was dabbling in, but that she didn't expect it to have a high success chance. She would implore them to come and visit, which would practically ensure they would never set foot on the property.
There was nothing the business elite despised so much as desperation.
Dana headed down the stairs and found Max was seated in the bar area, holding court of sorts, and she was absolutely thrilled to see that Danny and Liane were among the people he was talking to. She'd only met Danny a few hours ago, but he was a hard shot of normalcy, and the man had a natural ease to him that seemed to relax all the girls. She suspected a few of them were hoping he might be available, but Liane had put the fear of god into all them, stressing that he was her man, and that they should keep their eyes on their own prize, unless they wanted her taking a swing at Max.
The girls had all been nothing but polite and cordial to Danny since.
“So, wait,” Max laughed, “you're telling me that you had an Iraqi insurgent trying to intimidate you with a SuperSoaker?”
Danny grinned, one of his boots pressed against the edge of the table to keep his chair precariously balanced on two legs. It had made his pants hike up just enough so that one of his prosthetic legs was visible. “I mean, he'd spray painted it black, and it was vaguely rifle shaped, so I think he was hopin' it would be enough that no one would take a good close look at it, but c'mon, I was a trained soldier.”
“Hopefully this story doesn't end in you shooting the guy and walking on,” Jenny said, “because if it does, I gotta tell you, that's not a great way to tell a bar story.”
“Nah,” Danny said, shaking a hand. “I mean, I knew it wasn't a threat, and I told my guys it wasn't a threat, and so we just sort of ignored the guy for a little bit, continuing our sweep of the area while he was acting confused why nobody was respecting his weapon or his defensive position. After about five minutes, he realized his posturing wasn't going to do any good, so he put it down, and we shared a cigarette. He wasn't a bad guy, and it turned out, he wasn't even really an insurgent. He was just a guy trying to protect his house. We told him to get himself a real gun if he was that nervous about it, but also pointed out that we had basically secured the area, and so he didn't really have anything to worry about.”
“That happen over there?” Max said, gesturing to Danny's exposed prosthesis.
“Nah, got that shaving,” Danny laughed. “Yeah, 'course it happened over there. Sucked, but at the end of the day, s'pose I was actually one of the lucky ones. IED took off both of my legs just below the knee. Had it gone off half a second later, I'd have been another statistic instead of walking around on titanium, so while I used to be a bit bothered by it, I've come 'round to thinking that I was blessed in how little long term damage it did to me. And if I hadn't gotten these,” he said, tapping one of his prostheses with his can of beer, “I wouldn't have met the love of my life.” He reached over and squeezed Liane's hand, as she blushed a little, looking back at him. “So I think I did alright.”
“This place doesn't strike me as your scene, Danny,” Max said to him. “I mean, guy like you was used to having to keep everything hush hush, right? So what are you doing at a sex club?”
“Having sex, obviously,” the ex-soldier grinned back at him. “Liane likes being an exhibitionist, gets off on having people watch, so who am I to tell her no? Besides, both she and I are people watchers, so the idea of watching other people having sex gives us a bit of a thrill. What about you, Max? What brought you here?”
Max laughed, a good genuine laugh, and Dana suddenly realized this connection Max was forming might be one the best things they'd stumbled into today. “I mean, Jenny brought me up here because she thought I was in some kind of sexual drought and that flooding my life with it might help me get back on the horse.”
“You're no Chris Evans, but you're not a bad looking dude,” Liane said to him. “Why were you in a drought?”
Max threw his hands up a little. “I had a restaurant a while back that burned down, and when it went up in flames, I think maybe my ambitions went up with it. I'd sunk so much of myself into that place and to have it just be gone one morning, and for everyone to claim it wasn't their fucking fault and they weren't going to pay for their mistakes, maybe all that just broke me. Not just professionally but personally. And when I started up this food truck with my friend, I was the walking dead, just going through the motions, afraid that if I got optimistic about anything, that it would all fall apart. Maybe that extended to my romantic life too. I'd been in a relationship when the restaurant burned down, but it was new, and within a week, it had fallen apart as well, because she said I was wallowing in it, when I was fucking processing, you know? I think maybe I figured once I got the food truck established, and I didn't feel like I was living paycheck to paycheck, I could start thinking about getting back into the dating scene, but while the food truck's been doing well, it's still not what anyone would call stable.”
“Tell you what, brother,” Danny said. “I've got my fair share of brothers in arms who are around the Bay, and since you told me you're gonna run the truck out of here on Thursdays for a while, I'll have them reach out to Dana and set up large scale orders for them and their crews, so you're always doing business, okay?”
“You don't have to do that, Danny.”
Danny flipped his hand in the air. “I don't have to do shit I don't wanna, but you're a good dude, my man, and I like helping people, so consider it my way of passing on a helping hand to someone else in need of cover during their recovery.”
“Fuckin' A, Danny. That's very kind of you,” Max said, looking genuinely taken aback by the generosity from this man he'd just met, and that was when Dana put it all together.
Max had tunnel vision.
He'd been struggling for so long to get his head above water that he couldn't see the forest for the trees anymore, and he was just unaccustomed to people being nice to him, and for the last day or so, it had been nothing but people being nice to him.
In addition to Danny, Liane, Max and Jenny, Dana saw that both Charity and Janet had joined the group, although neither was pushing to get to be the center of Max's attention, a good move. Zelda, Blake, Kelly and Anya were across the room, watching television, or at least pretending to, as Anya seemed to be regularly looking over to the table. LaTonya, Esme, Diane and Lisseth had all rotated out and were out at the pool.
“Maybe you'll be in a position to do him a favor back at some point,” Liane said to Max. “That's the way karma works, right? Put good into the world and hope it comes back to you?”
Max laughed. “Something like that, I guess, although what good I could to your Captain America boyfriend is beyond me.”
Liane shrugged, a sly smile on her lips. “You never know. Give it time and see.”
“She's not asking to sleep with you, dude, so you can relax,” Danny said with a wink. “If I'm not allowed to get a third wheel, she isn't either.”
“I never said the 'no side pieces' rule was hard and fast, baby,” Liane said, raking her short fingernails over Danny's arm. “We'll talk. Your birthday's coming up, so maybe we'll pick up a play partner here for a few hours.”
“Li, you know you're all the woman I need,” Danny said genuinely.
“Oh, I know I'm all the woman you need but it's okay to want from time to time. You too, Max,” she said, looking over at him. “Don't feel bad about enjoying all of this. It sounds like you've had some super shitty luck for the last several years, so you're due for a glut of awesomeness. So don't question it, 'kay? Just surf atop it like a badass and have a good fuckin' time.”
Max tapped two fingers to his forehead then whipped them out, a sort of half-tossed off salute. “Yes ma'am.” He finished off his beer before moving to stand up. “As fun as all of this has been, I have got to get home, before I fall asleep where I'm standing. You folks may be used to this endless debauchery, but I have to ease myself into it.”
“Let me walk you to the door, Max,” Dana said, moving to stand alongside of him.
“We should definitely get a beer some time, Danny,” Max said to him. “You swing by tomorrow and we can swap numbers.”
“Sounds good, man.”
Jenny moved to one side of Max, with Dana on the other, as they walked towards the front entrance of the building. “It okay if I crash with you tonight, Max?” Jenny asked him.
“Yeah, I guess, although it's just going to be crashing,” he said. “You gotta promise me that.”
“Scout's honor,” she said with a grin.
“Hopefully you enjoyed your first day here, even if you are exhausted, Max,” Dana said to him. “Go home, get a good night's sleep, then come back here tomorrow around lunch, and we can discuss what you're going to need to get the truck up and running here.”
Max nodded. “Will do, Dana. And thank you for the opportunity. I feel like I'm saying thank you a lot today.”
“Then it just means it was a very good day indeed. Sleep well.”
Tomorrow, Dana realized, the real challenge was going to begin.
Comments
SP Rupert
I'm happy to report that my conversion to a MOBI file for Kindle worked.
Brathadoir
If by easiest way to get chapters to show up you mean generate Table of Contents, easiest way is to load it up in Sigil (free epub editor), set each Chapter title to be a Heading 2 (I use Heading 1 for the book title) then just select Generate Table of Contents).
