Chapter 26

Back in Mama Mia’s, I returned to my booth where my half-finished vanilla milkshake was still waiting, along with some of my less valuable possessions. I booted up my computer again and resumed reading some older chapters in my swashbuckling novel, trying to get back into the flow of the plot.

At the same time, I realized I still hadn’t eaten lunch. I’d had a late breakfast, so I didn’t mind having a late lunch. I caught Josie’s attention and ordered an eggplant sandwich from her.

Happily, I was undisturbed by anyone for a long stretch. I finished lunch without incident, and managed to get caught up on my reading.

Sue Ellen seemed busy with her customers and made no attempt to come talk to me. I would have liked to talk to Josie and get to know her better, but I decided I should focus on writing, for once, and put all distractions aside. The mysterious Dolly was completely avoiding me, as usual. Paula was lurking around of course, but since I’d left her section she hadn’t spoken another word to me, and I was glad to keep it that way.

Not surprisingly, Sonia was nowhere to be seen. I figured she was avoiding me, and it would take a major restaurant crisis for her to come to the front near where I was, as long as I was there. I was okay with that. We’d had a significant interaction, and maybe I’d even started to get her to rethink her idea of me being so “evil.” I figured I also needed time, for her sexual interest in another sex session to grow.

That left me with just my novel. I even turned my cell phone off to eliminate distractions. After catching up on the recent chapters, I reviewed my notes on various ideas and my future plot outline. I was disappointed to see from those notes just how little progress I’d made on the novel in the last two weeks. I thought, What have I been doing? Having sex twenty-four hours a day?! Sheesh! Obviously not, but that’s not entirely inaccurate. I’ve been way too focused on sex. God! Where did the time go?

I really need to get back in gear. If there’s one silver lining to the total sex boycott, it’s that I should be able to go on a productive writing tear. True, technically it won’t be a “total” sex boycott if things go as I hope with Jane tonight, and also assuming she’ll want future dates. And Sonia is a wild card. Hopefully we’ll get it on again before the boycott is over. But my sexual activity is obviously going to go way down, and I’ll be away from my loved ones nearly all the time. What else is there to do but write?

I thought some more about the characters in my novel, especially John, Roxanna, and Morgana. Clearly, John the stranded sailor is a stand-in for me. He’s even wound up in a sultan’s harem, though he’s stuck in a Persian Gulf kingdom and finds himself entangled in a harem of over three dozen gorgeous women instead of “just” five like me.

Roxanna is Michelle, even though she had to be dusky skinned, brown eyed, and raven haired to be a princess from the local region for plot purposes. Since she’s a secret princess that has fallen into the sultan’s harem, she’s arrogant, prideful, and stubborn, like many princesses are - and like Michelle is. And she has an enormous, jutting bust and an insatiable sex drive, just like you-know-who.

Morgana is a version of Ruby. Like John, she’s young and English, and she’s wound up in a harem far from home. She has fair skin, green eyes, flaming red hair, and a mighty bust, just like Ruby. But in something of a twist, I made her the de facto head of the harem, putting her above Roxanna, flipping the way Ruby always follows Michelle.

I realized that I missed Michelle and Ruby a great deal already, and I’d be missing them more and more as the sex boycott wore on. But I could “see” and “interact” with them through my novel, at least. That gave me renewed interest in writing more soon.

One interesting thing I saw in my notes was that back on May 26, almost two weeks ago, Mindy suggested that I add a new character based on Jane Corlin. I thought that was a great idea, and I’d started to do so that very day. Since I thought of Jane as regal and almost like royalty, it made sense to make her the queen. However, this kingdom was ruled by a sultan, so that made her the sultana.

I hadn’t actually directly introduced her into the story yet, but I’d started dropping mentions of her and weaving her into the plot (insofar as the novel still had a plot and not just lots of steamy sex scenes!). I’d given her the name Jana - not exactly subtle, I know, but hey, I’m the author and I get to do what I want. She had been a harem girl once herself, but the sultan had fallen in love with her due to her outstanding looks, which closely matched Jane’s, including a stunning face, long, dark brown hair, and enormous, awesome breasts. But she’d also proved to be extremely clever, allowing her to survive and rise though all sorts of intrigues and even assassination plots, despite still only being in her late twenties.

The sultan had grown old and very sick the past few years, leaving a power vacuum. (That also explains why all the harem women were so hot for John, since he was the first man with a working penis some of them had seen in all that time.) Sultana Jana had become the de facto power behind the throne, capably ruling the kingdom in the sultan’s name. A couple of years ago, she’d had the sultan’s only children, a son and a daughter. She couldn’t take direct power herself, but when the sultan died, this set her up to rule as the “regent” in her son’s name for many years to come.

Jana got involved in the story because John realized that he needed to free his crew members who were still stuck in prison. He spent virtually all his time having great sex in the harem, especially with Roxanna and Morgana, usually as a threesome. (The two women had formed an alliance with each other to monopolize most of his time, bound together by their nearly endless passion for sucking his cock. I don’t know if any readers would find that even remotely plausible, but I could vouch for the fact that it was based on real characters and real events!)

However, John couldn’t fully enjoy himself due to the guilt he felt for his crew. Working through his harem connections, he managed to significantly upgrade their prison conditions to something approaching luxurious, but still, the worst part of a prison is the loss of freedom, and he hadn’t been able to change that. The brutal truth was that his harem women wanted to help him lessen his guilt, but not actually free his crew for fear that he would sail back to England with his crew, leaving them (and the harem) behind.

As a result, John decided he needed to try new options. The harem was built into the side of the sultan’s palace, and the more he grew familiar with the harem women, the more he learned of the palace and the political intrigues within it. His goal was to meet and befriend Sultana Jana, because she definitely had the power to set his crew free. But that wasn’t an easy thing to do, since Roxanna and Morgana didn’t want him to leave the harem for any reasons, especially not to meet Jana. Not only would that be dangerous if he failed in any way, but they would be equally worried if he succeeded, for fear that would lead to his departure. So he hadn’t even told them of his plan.

This was the build-up I had been working on, with John gaining intel from the other harem women while working hard not to reveal his intentions for fear that would get back to Morgana and Roxanna and he would be stuck in his gilded cage. But I hadn’t gotten far enough for him to put his plan in motion, because I just hadn’t been writing much new material since then.

My real-life encounter with Jane gave my writing new energy. Before, I could only speculate what Jane would be like physically. Plus, despite seeing her at so many parties and events over the years, her personality remained an enigma to me, due to her secretive nature. But all that changed after yesterday’s “pool game.”

I immediately changed the plot to allow John to meet Jana sooner rather than later, so I could channel my energy about Jane into my writing while I was highly inspired by her. It turns out that while he was scheming to meet her, she was likewise scheming to meet him, though for a different reason: lust! She eventually heard through vague rumors of a man who had managed to infiltrate the harem and was having sex with all the women there. This didn’t concern her at much at first, because even though that was supposed to be a death sentence, she knew the harem women had nothing to do with the sultan being so sick and old, so this man could be a diversion to keep those women busy, so long as he was discreet about it. She didn’t care much about the harem one way or another, since it had no useful benefit for her. Besides, it reminded her of her humble origins as a harem girl, a fact she wanted everyone to forget.

However, over time, her sources began passing on stories of this man’s unusual sexual prowess. Jana was still young and gorgeous and she had a particularly high libido. That helped explain why she got in the harem in the first place, and then rose to the top there. With the sultan no longer able to sexually perform whatsoever, Jana would have loved to take a lover, but the dangers were great, both for her and the lover. Although the sultan was sick and old, he was still alive and alert, and he was jealous and possessive. If he found out Jana was having sex with another man, he almost certainly would kill both of them.

Thus, so far, Jana found it hadn’t been worth the risk to have an affair with a man (though she did burn off her considerable sexual energies with some of her female assistants). All of the men she might choose from lived in the palace and thus were part of palace intrigues in one way or another, whether they wanted to be or not. Virtually any man she bedded would immediately want to start scheming to use her to become the next sultan, because that’s how men usually are.

However, as Jana heard more bits and pieces of information about the man let loose in the harem from her few friends she still had back from her own harem days, she found out that he was a white foreigner named John who came all the way from England, though he was fluent in Arabic. This was key, because it meant he could never aspire to be sultan in any circumstance. The public would never accept a foreigner as their leader, especially one that looked so different from them.

That gave her the green light to potentially use him as her sexual outlet. However, she had the problem of meeting him to find out if he was suitable for her purposes. She couldn’t simply send in a squad of soldiers to bring him to her. Doing that would lead to scandal, since some of the soldiers were bound to talk. John’s presence was still a closely guarded secret, and she only knew about him due to her personal former harem connection. If rumors started to spread, the sultan would find out, and then John would be a dead man, thus killing off her best hope of having a secret lover. John was tantalizingly close to her, physically, but still frustratingly far away.

She decided to change the situation to her favor. The sultan’s chambers had a secret tunnel directly into the harem, for obvious reasons. That tunnel broke into side tunnels allowing the sultan to spy on almost anywhere in the harem. Of course the sultan never used any of these tunnels anymore, since he couldn’t even stand without assistance, but back in the day it was useful for him to spy on the harem women to help him decide which one he was going to fuck next.

Jana used the sultan’s worsening sickness to get him to move out of his chambers, under the pretense that moving to a new locale with “fresh air” could help him get better. Once the sultan was gone, the sultana’s chambers were right next door, with connecting doors, so this gave her access to the tunnel into the harem. Before she dared to use it, she first tried out the various spy holes in the tunnel network to see John with her own eyes for the first time and determine if he was to her liking. Plus, she had a chance to find out with her own senses if his sexual reputation was justified.

She found his pale skin and different appearance off-putting at first, but it wasn’t long before she confirmed that he was an extraordinary sex stud. He spent nearly all day, every day, fucking and getting sucked! He seemed to have the sexual stamina of five very healthy men combined. Jana’s sexual side had grown dormant, but she had a wild harem past, and soon her sexual fires were relit and burning bright. There still was danger in meeting him, but she observed him for a full month whenever she had some free time (running the country kept her quite busy, naturally), and her desire for John reached such a fever pitch that she was ready to take the necessary risk.

Eventually, the big day came. Jana had one personal servant named Mina who also was a close friend and occasional lover (she had to let out her sexual energies somehow). Mina had been a harem slave, just like her, and when Jana rose out of the harem, she’d taken Mina with her. Jana was afraid to meet John all alone, because she had no idea how he’d react. So she had Mina dress up like a security guard, complete with sword and dagger, even though Mina had next to no training using any weapon of any kind. Like Jana, she was a gorgeous woman who had been trained in the art of sexually pleasuring a man.

Mina’s name wasn’t exactly an accident. As John’s harem story came to parallel my own real life harem situation in an increasing number of ways, I was becoming increasingly overt in who each character was based on. Mina was an obvious version of Mindy, and her looks were nearly identical, except for Mina having to have darker skin and dark brown hair so she could plausibly be from the Middle East. I gave her a sense of humor too, which made her a court jester of sorts for the sultana, as well as a trusted friend. However, I wondered how Mina would take it to find that instead of being in the head honcho role, as wife, she was the servant of Jana, who clearly was Jane! I hoped that could further my plan to get my wife worried about Jane as a legitimate threat who could replace her as my number one in real life.

I patted myself on the back for my cleverness with that idea.

Thanks to this burst of inspiration, I was writing up a storm. I wrote more new material in two hours than I had in the last week, at least.

However, right when I got to the point where Jana was going to meet John in the flesh, I had another interruption that I simply couldn’t ignore, and it stopped my writing “roll” in its tracks. I heard someone coughing to get my attention. I looked up and found Sonia, of all people, standing there!

She was still thoroughly covered in black, and she had her arms crossed under her breasts to show her disapproval of me. She also had a very annoyed expression on her face. At least she didn’t quite look like she was planning on killing me any minute, though her composure pointed in that general direction. Once she saw me look up, she asked, “What’s the big idea, asshole?!”

I held my hands up defensively, which was becoming a habit around Sonia. “I didn’t do anything!”

“And I should believe you ... why? Oh, that’s right, I shouldn’t! Whatever you’re doing, undo it NOW! I’m willing to tolerate your presence here, barely, due to the terms of our bet. But I won’t stand you for mentally torturing any of my waitresses! If that’s the way you’re going to be, you’re out of here!”

I shook my head, thinking, What now?! I gestured to the other side of the booth. “Please sit down. Obviously, there’s been some misunderstanding. You’re going to have to explain what you’re on about, so I can explain why you’re wrong.”

She huffed, “Fine!” Then she sat down. But then she crossed her arms again and just stared at me with irritation some more.

After some long moments of this, I asked, “Well?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I haven’t a clue. I’ve just been writing, not interacting with anybody.”

She raised her hands to the heavens. “UGH! Men! Either they’re heartless or clueless. I’m curious to see which you are, this time. Given that it’s you, it’s probably both.”

I gesticulation in frustration. “Tell me already!”

She leaned in and lowered her voice, even though by this time the lunch rush was well over and there were almost no other customers left. “It’s Sue Ellen. Look at her.”

I looked around for Sue Ellen. She had her back turned and was cleaning one of the tables. “I’m looking. And... ?! She’s busy waitressing. What’s the problem?”

Sonia pointed aggressively at me. “The problem is YOU! She’s been a MESS for the past couple of hours. She held herself together as long as there were customers, but since then she’s quietly broken into tears more than once! The other waitresses alerted me to the problem luckily enough, and I called her back to my office. I asked her what was wrong, and she wouldn’t say. But clearly, it has something to do with YOU! The mere mention of your name brought an anguished look to her face.”

She went on, “Now, I don’t approve of your freaky master-slave relationship with her, not at all. What you said didn’t sway me one bit. But I must admit that at least it’s had the happy side benefit of making her happy all the time.”

“She’s a naturally happy person,” I pointed out.

“True. But I knew her about a week before she met you, and believe me, there’s a big difference. She was happy before, but since then she’s infectiously happy. Meaning she’s so happy that she puts smiles on the faces of everyone around her, which is great for business. Before, she walked. Since then, she floats. But today is just the opposite. She’s acting like her mother died or something. She claims that you didn’t do anything, but I can see right through her. Whatever you did, undo it now! That’s an order!”

I sat back and shook my head slightly. “As I thought, there’s been some kind of big misunderstanding. I’ve been neither heartless nor clueless. I’ve just been totally absorbed in my writing. I’ve hardly even lifted my head from the screen in the last two hours. Josie will attest to that, since I haven’t really talked to her in that time, much less Sue Ellen. So how am I to blame?”

Sonia still glared at me. She waved both hands in annoyance, like waving off a buzzing fly. “I don’t know. It must have been something you did before. Undo it! She’s not just my employee, you know. I genuinely like her as a person. That’s why your enslavement of her bothers me so much.” She leaned in close, and hissed as if making a threat, “So put a fucking smile back on her face!”