Chapter 7

I put the last of the breakfast dishes in the automatic dishwasher under the counter next to the double sinks in the black-granite counter along the tall west wall of the Loft. I pulled up the door and closed it before I started to walk around to the breakfast table toward my sexy new girlfriend, thinking I would have to start the dishwasher when there were more dirty dishes to clean. I usually did my dishes in the sink right after I finished eating.

But from the look on Jhoni's face, clean dishes were going to be just about last item on my Honey-Do list.

Jhoni watched me coming and picked up the green-nylon moneybag from where I'd left it on 10 o'clock breakfast-table chair, "now... where are we going to count it?"

"On the bed in the video room," I told her. "Follow me." From the other breakfast chair I pick up the bag of Pharmacy goodies and held it against the right side of the chest of my bathrobe in my right arm.

Jhoni followed me away from the kitchen area, over the hardwood flooring, past the matching wood-clad pillar and along the high privacy wall on the south side of the Great Room as the morning sunlight poured down through the skylight making the room around us a warm, appealing, and comforting space. It to me seemed as if all the rain from the day and night before had not only cleansed the atmosphere, but everything else in my world as well.

"Why do you have, you know, a bed in a room you call ... the video room?" Jhoni asked me in her sweet innocent voice as she walked up beside me.

"You will see," I replied as we walked side by side along the high privacy wall that separated the bathroom and the laundry-pantry room from the Great Room.

"So ... mmm, Suzi called to discuss a business deal?" the twenty-five-year-old woman asked me. The green of the gym bag was dull in contrast to the dark-green silk robe she had belted around her voluptuous body.

"We'll talk about that as we count money, if you want," I said and we walked past the east end of the high wall. I gestured to our right. "There is my electronics projects and guitar repair shop area. We didn't make it this far on our last tour."

Jhoni slowed down her pace and turned to checked-out my work space. She came to a stop and really started to look it over. So I stepped back beside her and looked too, moving my left arm up to help support the goodies bag as I moved it to the center of my chest.

Beyond the east opening to the privacy corridor was my work area, with a long bench against the right white-painted wall that was this side of the bathroom-laundry-pantry block and went up to the open storage area over the finished rafters of the ceilings of that group. There was a pipe railing along the open edges of the storage deck.

Along the back wall of my shop area was metal shelves. There were four shelves, not counting the one at floor level, and they were filled with small boxes of electrical components, tools, guitar parts, a plethora of other items, and old amplifiers. The shelves ran along the old brick of the Loft for twenty feet before ending close to another heavy, dark-red metal fire-escape door. Suspended from the west-to-east slope of the red oak ceiling above the front of the shelving was a long sturdy four-foot wide, yellow aluminum pull-down stairs that was hung on a counterbalance and hinged to the storage area landing. Two thick pull-activation chains for the stairway hung down at the end corner of the shelves near the fire-escape door.

There were several pieces of electronic test equipment, an oscilloscope, and a large soldering station on the work bench against the painted wall. On top of a waist-high locking-wheeled cart, resting a few feet out on the hardwood floor from the bench, there was a black Fender Precision bass guitar with a prominent gold anodized pick-guard laying flat on the dark-blue velvet, padded work surface of the cart. The four bass guitar strings had been removed. Half-way up the back of the maple neck of the bass, a height-adjustable padded-butt the size of the end of a 2x4 came up out of the velvet work surface. The hemispherical scallop in the top end perfectly cradled the bottom radius of the guitar neck without lifting any part of the body of the old bass off the flat rectangular velvet work table. The head stock where the heavy string tuning keys were mounted to the end of the bass neck was suspended over a deep depression in the dark velvet platform.

"I like how heavy this bag is," Jhoni told me as she turned her head from my work space and smiled at me. "Do you have any scales over there? We could weigh it?"

I chuckled and shook my head at her inquisitive face, "what would that tell us about how much money is in the bag? We've got to at least look over the bundles and see if there's the same number of bills in each one. We could get a good estimate that way, if you don't want to count all of it."

"I know that," Jhoni told me almost dismissively, and looked back over at the items on the work bench. "But it would tell us how much the money weighs ... I've never had money, you know, by the pounds before ... I didn't realize it could be so exciting all the time just being around you, James."

"And I can truly tell you the very same thing, Jhoni," I replied, feeling a rush of affectionate emotion tingle through me in response to her.

Still looking for a way to weigh the money I guessed, my girlfriend giggled and smiled, and then shrugged. Finally satisfied with her perusal of my shop, Jhoni continued toward the east side of that end of the Loft. I could tell she was taking it all in as she continued to look around.

Just past the dark-red outside door to the south fire-escape at the end of the electronics storage shelves was a large barred-over window set in the thick brick wall of the building. Through the window we both could see the clear blue morning sky was bright over the roof of the warehouse across the narrow street.

Three-quarters of the way between the bathroom wall of my shop area and its east wall we walked over a three-inch-wide transverse yellow line painted on the polished hardwood floor. It looked like a refugee from a basketball court.

Jhoni stopped and looked down at the yellow line. Then she looked ahead of us.

Two-thirds of the long white east wall of my shop area was devoted to a bunch of shelving holding, beside lots of what I thought was obviously archery equipment, bunches of closed boxes of various shapes and sizes, and another long work bench. Over the work bench there were several Hoyt recurve competition bows. With their two removable fiberglass limbs mounted to each end of the light-weight metal handgrip-riser, and with their woven Kevlar bowstring unstrung, each bow was resting horizontally between two large sheep-skin wrapped wooden pegs on the heavy-duty pegboard mounted on the east wall above the length of the bench. There were a dozen dark-gray Easton arrow shafts with hot-pink fletching and translucent fluorescent-pink plastic nocks in a black-leather quiver on that work bench along with various tools and arrow jigs.

To the left side of the bench was 16 feet of white-painted wall with a large green door in the middle of it. At the north end of the east wall, it made a ninety-degree turn and extended ten feet back toward the Great Room before it made a right angle turn and became the back wall of the conversation area.

Jhoni turned and looked back across the Great Room in the direction of the northwest corner of the Loft. She pointed across that distance at the four-foot-round target butt and the thick triple sheets of foam backstopping protecting the two walls behind it in the far corner of the Great Room, "So ... ahh, you shoot at that target from this yellow line?"

"Yes, I do," I told her. "Sometime friends come over and shoot with me."

"Do you drink?" she asked me, slowly moving her shoulders forward and back while holding the green-nylon money bag with both hands in front of her dark-green robe. I could tell she was thinking of something else she wanted to ask me.

"Only afterwards and only sometimes" I told her, feeling a grin spreading out on my face. "Why?"

"Raychelle ... mmm ... she told me once ... that she was over here while you and, well, a girl from the archery club played ... you know ... strip archery. How does that work? Raychelle said she got drunk ... while you and the girl were shooting. Did you do that?"

"I was not drinking while we shot; only Raychelle was drinking at the time."

"So ... you did?"

"Did Raychelle happen to mention this girl's name?" I asked, remembering the night I had gotten Leanne Lesslee, who at the time was a blushing freshman, as well as Raychelle, down to just their sexy panties before the festivities moved into the video room for the rest of the night.

"No," Jhoni said with a frown, looking me in the eyes; and then she complained, "she wouldn't tell."

Last March, Leanne had asked to come over one Friday night and shoot. Raychelle had stopped by while we were shooting. I could tell she had been in one of her booty-call moods as soon as she'd shown up, and at first she'd been disappointed someone else was with me. But soon she had relaxed and, standing behind us at the firing line; she had started egging Leanne on, as the two of us took turns shooting at the circular paper target we'd attached to the brightly illuminated target butt that was diagonally across the lighted Great Room from us. Responding to Raychelle's encouragement, Leanne had started shooting better than I was shooting, and that was when Raychelle had bet me that Leanne could beat me in a shooting contest.

I had assured Raychelle I would win any contest against Leanne if there was a bet on the line. But just what was going to be the nature of this bet, I'd asked her?

I had known of a bet she'd lost that ended up with Raychelle stripping naked in her car and then running across ten aisles of a large grocery store parking lot at ten p.m. one fall evening, before jumping into the passenger seat of the guy who'd won that bet. He had immediately driven off into the night with her. I don't know why she'd expected him to just return her to her car once she was naked with him on his front seat and without her clothes. Raychelle could be so naïve and clueless at times; that was one of her charms, I thought.

So, I had suggested to Raychelle that the contest would be determined by the total score of the three arrows we each would shoot at the numbered circles on the paper target every round. The highest score would determine the winner of the round. Raychelle was the one who suggested that the loser of the round would have to remove an article of clothing and then shoot first in the next round. Getting into her spirit of maybe a booty-call evening, I had countered that whoever was naked first would be the overall loser and would have to do whatever the winner wanted for the rest of the evening. And Raychelle had not only agreed, but had also volunteered that she would take a shot of the Southern Comfort she had happened to bring along with her in her book-bag, each time I happened to win a round.

Leanne had remained quiet the whole time Raychelle and I were discussing the challenge and the terms. And she hadn't spoken up about anything concerning the terms of the bet the whole time. I had been able to tell, Leanne had wanted to fit in with Raychelle and me that evening, but she had been acting reserved, so I had been shocked when she just had nodded her head in agreement with the bet and went along with it. I couldn't believe my luck; I had the chance to get two sexy young women naked.

Since Raychelle was betting on Leanne's skills, I had insisted that when Leanne lost an article of her clothes, Raychelle would also have to take off something as well.

Leanne could hold her own shooting against me usually, but the terms of the bet had gotten her nervous, I guessed. I didn't loose any of the following rounds.

At first Leanne had been giggling along with Raychelle as they both took off their shoes, and then their socks when Leanne lost the second round. She became bashful when she had to take off her sweatshirt and I got to see the sexy pink-nylon bra she'd worn. I couldn't recall what kind of underwear Raychelle had worn that evening.

After that, Leanne's shooting skills had really eroded as her nice-sized breasts and prominent nipples started to be in danger of being scrapped by the bow string every time Leanne released an arrow at the target. Without her heavy sweatshirt to help hold them back and protect them, they posed a threat to themselves and Leanne's accuracy. We both had worn a heavy-plastic shield on the inside of our left forearm and wrist for protection from the bow string release and I knew most women wore sports bras when they shot for that very reason. I'd even seen a few women at competitions wearing a large triangular restraint of thick-nylon over the breast nearest to their pulling arm.

By then I had started to suspect that Leanne had come over to the loft that evening with more than practicing archery in mind; but I guessed she had never dreamed of someone like Raychelle showing up and being such a sexual provocateur.

Leanne had become shy and hesitant when she had to stand there in front of an almost naked and eager Raychelle, and me, and take her jeans down her long legs for us. Her blushing face had been a sight to see as she revealed the matching pink-nylon bikini panty she had worn under her clothing. Raychelle had actually walked over and had pulled Leanne's hands away from in front of her tight pink camel-toe and then made her pick her recurve bow back up.

Standing there, the leggy freshman coed had looked so sexy and vulnerable in just her pink underwear. She was holding her bow with its 28-inch long front aluminum weighted stabilizer bar and two nine-inch backward stabilizers screwed into an adapter attached to the front of her bow riser, just below the hand grip. Raychelle had then asked Leanne if she were ready for the competition to continue.

With the next round of shooting, both girls lost their bras.

During what would be the last round, Leanne had known that Raychelle and I were checking out her crotch and naked tits, so I hadn't been really shocked when she had almost missed the target butt with her final arrow.

When I won the last round, that would make the girls drop their panties for me, I looked at Leanne and smiled at her as she hesitated and pointed behind me. I knew there were lights on in some of the windows across the street, and twice Leanne had said she was very nervous that somebody in the warehouse over there would be able to see her through the window behind us. Raychelle was the one who had suggested the two girls go into the video room to take their panties off for me so nobody across the street would see them do it.

That suggestion hadn't surprised me at all. Raychelle had shown up at my place exhibiting all the signs that she'd intended the visit to be a booty-call; and she had been in the video room with me before. And I knew when we'd been in there together and I was taking photos of her getting naked for me, or when I had set up my new Sony Betacams so we could get videos of her giving me sexual favors, it had made her go absolutely bat shit crazy every time; plus, she'd already had six big pulls from her bottle of Southern Comfort with each round Leanne had lost. And she had been so willing, even giddily, to get nearly naked herself.

While we were putting our archery equipment away Leanne, wearing only those tight pink panties, had started taking big pulls off the Southern Comfort bottle at Raychelle urging. It had taken us about twenty minutes to get into the video room and by then, the girls were both officially under the influence.

Raychelle and I had discovered later that evening that Leanne was a fairly inexperienced virgin. But we learned that she was on the Pill and had been hoping to test its effectiveness—and the sooner the better as far as she had been concerned. She had easily admitted to both of us that she had hoped I would be the one to help her with her problem when she'd first asked to come over to the Loft to shoot with me. She had gone on to tell us that once she'd shown up, she hadn't known how to proceed with her seduction plan, until Raychelle proposed her terms of the bet.

The Pill worked great for Leanne. I have the videos to prove it; from several evenings; I managed to capture all of Leanne's sexual firsts on high-quality video. And only twice did she have to be convinced to try what I'd suggested. I could feel my erection growing at those memories as I came back to the present with Jhoni's blue eyes boring into my eyes.

"What else did that nasty old Raychelle tell you about that night?" I asked Jhoni with a chuckle.

"She said the girl was, mmmm, a virgin?" Jhoni asked, sounding like she wanted confirmation of Raychelle story.

"Did she say anything else?" I asked Jhoni. She made a pouting face and shook her blonde head no.

"Well ... come with me and see for your self," I told her and walked over to the wide green door and opened it. I reached to the right inside the doorway and flipped some light switches with my left hand across my bag of Pharmacy goodies. My frustrated sex-bomb girlfriend trailed after me on her oriental flip-flops carrying the green gym bag of drug money in front of her. "I think the video room will answer some of the questions you've asked me."

Straight ahead through the door was a ten-foot deep hallway, opening on some leather furniture on a carpeted floor. There were light-gray curtains covering the entire wall back behind them. Along the short hallway there was a doorway we walked past on the left that was opened onto what looked like a substantial dark walk-in closet.

We walked out of the other end of the hall and to our right was a big carpeted, nicely illuminated room. It was longer north-to-south than it was wide, and with the characteristic low ceiling found in my master bedroom. A king-sized bed was in the center of the video room. The bed had a heavy ornate brass frame, and the head of the bed was toward the west wall. The bed almost looked small in comparison to the space around it. That perception was reinforced because all of the walls were covered over with heavy floor-to-ceiling light-grey theater curtains that nearly matched the carpet on the floor.

Looking at the bed I was sure Jhoni wouldn't recognize the mattress was the perfect height for a woman to be bend over it and taken from behind.

At various spots around the outside of the room there were four expensive Sony Betacam video cameras on wheeled-tripods, some piles of neatly coiled cables, a small leather vaulting horse looking thing, two AKG C414 microphones on studio-grade tripod boom mic stands, and there were also four vertical carpeted four-feet-wide by six-feet-tall panels on wheeled supports. Against the north wall, near the opening of the hallway, there was a heavy cushioned rolled-arm chair, a leather shrink couch with one end raised and rolled and the other end low, with no arm rest and the couch had no back, that Jhoni first saw when I opened the wide green door.

"Is this room used, ahh ... for what I think it is for?" Jhoni asked me in a soft, almost squeaking voice, her blue eyes wide open. She was holding the green gym bag with both hands in front of her by the two loops.

"Have you, mmm ... ever made movies in here ... ahh ... on the bed?"

"Have you ever watched two people fuck, Jhoni? ... In person ... or in a porn movie?" I asked her, putting the bag of goodies from the Pharmacy down on the shrink couch and then turning back toward her. "Ever wondered ... what it would be like ... to watch your self having sex?

"Some girls and women find those images can be very powerful ... very liberating."

"Oh... my..." Jhoni whispered, her body giving a luscious little shiver under her dark-green silk robe at the prospect, I guessed.

"I've taken pictures of, and video taped, several college women and girls. About half of them brought up the idea of posing naked for me first. They were eager to see what they looked like nude, or having sex," I told my girlfriend.

Jhoni just looked at me, her eyes wide-open and her breathing shallow.

"If you want, Jhoni, you can see what happened in here ... that night Raychelle was telling you about. When I shot strip archery. I videotaped the evening. And you know, when Raychelle has been drinking ... and she is horny ... she can be talked into doing things with other women she won't do when she is sober. Has she ever told you any stories about those times we've been together?"

Staring at the bed in the center of the room, Jhoni slowly managed to unzip the gym bag without looking down at it, as she shook her head no. And then she brought the nearly full green-nylon bag up toward her cute face. She inclined her neck and face forward, and with her nose near the opened bag, Jhoni inhaled, her voluptuous body trembling under the dark-green silk robe.

"You want to watch, don't you?" I asked her. "Especially ... you want to watch a girl who really needs to be... convinced."

Jhoni shook herself and stood up-right.

"You know..." Jhoni growled in her low-pitched vixen voice as she hurried away from me across the carpet and stopped over beside the bed, " ... that I do.

"But first ... there is money to count, my sardaar."

Then, holding the green gym bag opened with a hand gripping each side of the undone zipper near the loop handles, Jhoni upended the bag of drug money over her side of the bed and shook it until all the rubber-banded bundles of cash had rained down on the comforter with little thumps. The fresh, stuffed baggie full of pot buds came out last and rolled down the heaps of neatly packaged currency.

From where I was standing, all of the bundles looked to be the same thickness, just less than half-an-inch thick, and all the bills were nice and flat. It was all well looked after money, I would have to say.

"I'll get a notebook and something to write with," I told my girlfriend as I headed toward the short hall and what looked like a walk-in storage closet.

Xxx

I quickly returned with one new green spiral-ring shorthand and memo pad; a bone-colored Texas Instrument calculator just a bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes; and a few pens, which I'd gotten at one of my banks. Jhoni was sitting on the bed with her sexy bare legs crossed, facing the master pile of cash with the pillows and ornate brass bed stead behind her dark-green clad butt, and she was already sorting the bundles by denomination. She had a separate growing pile for tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds going down the center of the king-size bed. So, I sat down at the other end of the master pile and helped sort. Some of the bundles were still damp from the rain the night before.

When we were done sorting we sat back and looked at the four individual piles of bundles going down the center of the bed for a few moments.

"You record the numbers," Jhoni told me speaking in her vixen voice, and nodding at the thin note book, calculator, and the pens near my left thigh on the comforter of the bed. "I want to count."

She started with the pile of tens, picking one bundle up at a time and putting each one down on the bed a bit further away from us.

"One, two, three, four..." she counted out loud as I counted along with her under my breath. With each bundle I scratched down a quick little tick mark on the first page of the lined pale-green paper under the small headline $10. Four short vertical lines in a tight group, one after the other, and then a fifth diagonal line running from the top of the first line to the bottom of the fourth line; then I started a new group of marks.

We worked quickly, and Jhoni the Vixen seemed like she was on a mission; counting through each denomination pile twice out loud. When we finished we had counted out 22 bundles of ten-dollar bills; 19 bundles of twenty-dollar bills; 16 bundles of the fifty-dollar bills and 12 bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

"I would estimate," Jhoni told me in a husky sounding voice, "there could easily be one-hundred bills in each bundle, like the one you divided-up last night."

"Let's count out one bundle from each pile as a quick check," I said, "and we will go with that number if all four bundles we count have hundred bills in each stack. What do you think?"

"I agree," Jhoni told me, and nodded at the memo pad. "Don't forget to add that bundle from last night to your tally sheet, James."

That made 20 bundles of twenty-dollar bills. I added the diagonal tick mark under the proper headline and scratched out the final number 19 and replaced it with a 20. Jhoni already had the rubber band off a bundle of tens and was rapidly counting the bills onto a neat pile on the bed in front of her. I sat there and just watched her rapt face, feeling content, peaceful and joined with her, and not even counting along.

When she finished counting, she immediately started recounting the stack of bills.

I picked up an orderly bundle of hundreds, took off the rubber band, and started to count out the bills into stacks; ten bills to a stack. The bills were all well worn but looked as if they'd all been pressed or ironed flat. By the time I was done recounting my hundreds, Jhoni was just finishing one of the bundles of fifties. She had already counted and recounted a bundle of twenties also.

"I counted one-hundred in every bundle," Jhoni told me, sounding like she was trying to suppress her growing excitement.

"Same here," I replied as I reached for my trusty TI calculator.

I noticed Jhoni close her blue eyes with a look of concentration. Her lips started moving quickly. Shit, I told myself, she was starting to do the math in her head.

Accepting for now that each bundle did have 100 bills in it, I fired up my TI and started fingering in numbers from off the first page of the memo pad.

Xxx

While my own mind began processing the numbers, I started writing down the results coming from my TI calculator under each denomination heading.

So ... each bundle of tens contained a thousand dollars; twenties held two-thousand dollars in each bundle; fifties were five-thou a bundle; and each bundle of hundreds was ten-thousand dollars in cash. That translated to $22,000 in tens; $40,000 in twenties; $80,000 in fifties; and $120,000 in hundreds. Each new amount seemed to numb my brain a little bit more as I recorded the sums on the first page of the note pad under the proper headings.

The green gym bag had held a total of $262,000 my Texas Instrument calculator beamed out in its small red, glowing matrix numerals, agreeing with amount the back part of my brain had arrived at, also. Actually, I told myself, there was only $38,000 in twenties on the bed. I had the majority of the fifteen-hundred dollars from the bundle of twenties I'd divided up last night over on my catchall tray in the master bedroom. I didn't know what Jhoni had done with what remained of the five-hundred I'd given her to hold for me last evening.

"That is..." Jhoni announced, her vixen-voice bringing me back to the moment, as she slowly stood up by the side of the bed, her blue eyes ablaze with smoldering passion.

" ... over a quarter..." she muttered and the blonde twenty-five-year-old woman undid the silk belt around her waist and shrugged off her dark-green robe to reveal her prominent breasts held up by the sheer material attached to both ends of the silver ribbon going around her fine neck and suspending the empire-waist of her rumpled sheer silver baby doll nightie; which did nothing but shade the tiny sheer panties swaddling Jhoni's plump ripe mound under her oh so short lingerie.

" ... of a million..." she said as she stalked toward where I sat at the end of the bed, while reaching under the bottom hem of the nightie and pushing her thumbs into the waist band of her tiny panties. Slightly bending forward as she stepped nearer, Jhoni lowered her panties without once releasing my captured eyes from her wild wonton gaze.

" ... dollars..."

I gasped as my lower peripheral vision tracked that little bit of gauze, as it seemed to float down her shapely bare legs, over her cute knees, and momentarily settled at her delicate ankles ... where she easily stepped out of them without appearing to be aware of her graceful movements.

Breathing deeply, I became aware of the heady aroma of her rich excitement and felt my penis beginning to respond under my bathrobe while I kept my hands on my lap. Part of me was realizing the skin on the bottom right-side of my cock was tender and on the way to being sore, where it rested against my upper right thigh; I still couldn't tear my eyes away from the mesmerizing lock Jhoni held on my being as she stepped up to me.

I was hers, and my heartbeat increased in my throat and in my cock, in response to her as my lover raised her small hands to the collars of my bathrobe and pushed me over backwards on the bed, my left shoulder landing near the pile of hundred-dollar bundles.