Setup level: long af.
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## The Ring, Saturday
Eileen knew she would not find her ring in the drawer, but she wanted Mark to see her searching anyway. He said nothing and prepared himself for bed as she conspicuously inspected the drawer, bending over to peer inside it and then looking away as she felt around in it with her hand. Once she was certain that he had noticed, she waved a hand as if exasperated and then crawled into bed beside him.
The ring was a gift from Mark on their anniversary one month prior, and it was lost. He purchased it from a craftsman living in Westlake who made rings by hand, and only a few of each design. It was made of fake opal and granite carved into lizard scales which all pointed in line with the finger. No one could mistake it for another jewel, which is why Eileen had not been at ease since early that evening, when she saw another guest at the party they had attended wearing a ring of the same design. She was sure that Mark would notice. He would then ask her about her own ring, and when she told him it had been lost, he would go to work connecting dots that had no need to be connected.
Mark had a tedious eye for coincidences. Sometimes when he and Eileen were talking about their day over dinner he would say something that seemed like the beginning of the story, something like “this morning I met with a client named Harry Brock, and in the afternoon I met with another client named Lisa Brock.” Eileen would look at him expectantly, and eventually he would say “I just thought it was interesting that they had the same last name is all.” The man noticed things. Eileen wondered whether his tendency to notice meaningless things came at the expense of noticing meaningful things, or if he just noticed more things in total.
The possibility of Mark noticing the ring was dangerous for Eileen because the hand wearing the ring was owned by a man named Taft. They met Taft through a mutual friend, and they had heard enough gossip for Mark to know things that would not help her case. He knew for example the Taft did not introduce the women he dated to his friends, because they were invariably married. He also knew that in university Eileen and Taft played at the same pickup soccer games. Almost 100 people showed up every week for the pickup soccer games back then, and Eileen and Taft at most said hello a couple times before ending up on different fields, but just as this information became important it became impossible to provide it without suspicion.
Taft approached them to say hello when they arrived because there were few familiar faces in the house. When Eileen noticed the ring on his hand she excused herself to get them drinks. She did this so that in the chance that Mark did notice the ring on Taft’s hand, he would not be able to look at Eileen’s hand to check whether she was wearing hers, and also because she wanted to pick out a cup for Taft’s drink which would be low contrast with the ring. Only red solo cups were set out, so she searched the cabinets for a properly colored mug.
By the time she found a mug which would camouflage the ring, she was not relieved because it had occurred to her that someone might say “wow, that cup completely matches the color of your ring!” The odds of it being noticed were lower, but the cost of it being noticed was higher. Though she did try, she could not identify her best move. Maybe a lower contrast cup would only help if everyone at the party had different cups. If everyone had a red solo cup, and Taft was carrying a blue cup, the cup itself might stand out enough to neutralize what she gained from the low color contrast. Maybe the mistake had already been made. Maybe her best move would have been not to introduce any cups.
She felt a tension in her chest, which was a familiar problem. She closed her eyes and took breaths slowly, imagining electricity moving slowly along a wire folded in a square, taking four seconds to traverse each side: inhale, pause, exhale, pause. Her heart slowed some, but the tension did not retreat. At least by catching it early she had prevented the usual tingling sensation from numbing her face and hands.
Mark did not say anything if he did notice the ring against the red solo cup in Taft’s hand. He did not say anything at home afterward, either. But still Eileen felt the show of searching for her own ring before bed would become an essential part of her defense. It would be an important callback, evidence she expected to find her own ring at a time after the existence of Taft’s had been noticed, which would be a strong counterpoint to the implication that Taft’s was the same ring, possibly acquired as a gift from Eileen herself.
Eileen did not know when she lost the ring but she knew that it did not matter either. She once wrote an article about a man who spent four years in prison because he sometimes tilted his head to the left in small but violent sputters. This was technically not his only crime, as the muscle spasms were result of experimentation with a research chemical, a synthetic opiod, he ordered online from a Canadian website to help him cope with the stress of writing his doctoral thesis on the dangers of synthetic opioids. Law-enforcement did not know about that part though.
What they did know about was what the drug dogs, which the Dean invited to some part of campus each year as a political stunt after an embarrassing event a few years before, found above the man’s ceiling tile in his office. It was an old shoebox with a lighter, a pipe, and a little bit of methamphetamine. Just the tiniest, littlest bit. To human eyes it looked like an empty bag and clean pipe, but law-enforcement had machine eyes, and the machine eyes won in the end. The man tried to explain that he knew nothing about this. That shouldn’t have been all that difficult to believe, because the embarrassing event a few years before was another professor getting arrested in the same office for smoking meth. The man volunteered for a drug test and came out clean. Having learned a hard and externally visible lesson in his past, he abstained even from light beer. Any reasonable person would have believed that it was just a leftover artifact if it weren’t for that neck twitch. The movement was not even characteristic of meth use, but most people don’t know that many things about meth, Eileen included before she wrote that article.
A narrative was a slime-mold-ish thing, emerging from whatever details people noticed first. And the truth, the truth about who someone is and what they deserve, was important and worthy of protection. But the natural forces of narrative are fickle and their allegiance to the truth protean, so when circumstances for total honesty were no longer enduring, certain less valuable truths should be sacrificed to protect the ones that really mattered. And the truth that really mattered was that Eileen was a faithful fiancée.
## The Book
Two days later, notably the shipping time for an order placed online the night they returned from the party, Eileen found a book on their coffee table titled “A More Sustainable Sex Life”. She declined to mention it at dinner and so did Mark, until they were tucking themselves in for the night and he asked her “Did you notice the book on the coffee table?”
“I did notice the book on the coffee table.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read the book.”
“I mean, what do you think of us reading it together, working through it?”
Eileen did not know what inspired Mark to purchase the book. She considered it might be possible that Mark had noticed her waning satisfaction before she did herself. But where another man might have suggested they watch and imitate a porn together, Mark wanted to read a book, and could hardly even suggest as much without her meeting him in the middle. Where another man would have taken care of at least this part of their relationship, Mark wanted her to shoulder the responsibility for him.
He eagerly raced through each chapter, and they tried the exercises every Sunday night like it was a book club. At first Eileen read along with him, but never mentioned it without him first asking, and provided lazy answers when he did. He learned something, because he stopped asking. When Eileen stopped reading it gave him the freedom to pretend the book’s suggestions were his own, which he enjoyed and Eileen allowed.
On the fifth Sunday night, after kissing her on the neck three or four times and removing her shirt, he said “Oh, I almost forgot!” He reached into the bedside drawer and retrieved a pair of fluffy handcuffs.
Eileen knew he had not forgotten for a moment. They were unwrapped, ready within arm’s reach, and he couldn’t wait but forty seconds before retrieving them. But cuffs were cause for optimism, so she offered him a chance and said “Oh no, what are you going to do with those?”
“Oh, do you not want to use them? I thought it would be fun to try. You’ll be able to reach the hook on them even when cuffed so it’s completely safe.”
She felt the dissapointment in her gut. She sat up and said “Actually Mark, I’m having a bit of a stomach ache. Let’s do this tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry! Do you want me to make you some hot soup?”
The book’s final chapter suggested that Mark take Eileen out to shop for lingerie. It was one of the better suggestions. As she presented herself in different underwear for Mark’s judgement, she felt that he saw her as a sexual object for the first time. He inspected her body coldly, as if it was just material to work with, with a complete indifference to her as a person.
It always came to an end when he hesitantly discouraged a selection by saying something like, “Let’s keep this on the short list. Do you want to try another?” But still, the brief moments showed her that he had the capacity to improve. He asked her to wear the selected pair on Sunday night that weekend, and in her new hope she did not even mind his habit of scheduling sex like a calendar appointment. When Sunday came, she would teach him.
## The Laundromat, Wednesday
Every Wednesday since they moved into the new house, Mark gathered their laundry and drove it to the laundromat in North Gate, 20 minutes away. He loaded all of their clothes in together without respect for color or material. While the wash and dry cycles ran he sat in one of the chairs against the wall and read a book. He called it his “reading time”.
When he knocked on the door to Eileen’s home office and asked for her clothes to wash, she said “Mark, you own a house and it has a laundry hookup.”
“It’s just until I buy a washer and dryer. I don’t mind; it gives me some–”
“Reading time, yeah. Mark let’s buy a washer and dryer.”
“I think they’ll be cheap in the Spring; we can get an old model when the new ones come out.”
“Mark that’s months from now. You want to sit in a public laundromat every Wednesday until Spring?”
“I’m not seeing the issue, Eileen. I’m the one that does it and I don’t mind.”
It was this same kind of thinking that obligated Eileen to purchase clothes on his behalf. Left to his own devices Mark would lead a utilitarian existence wanting for taste, art, and narrative. Finally she said “don’t go today. I’ll get us a washer and dryer this week.”
Eileen tried but failed to refocus on her work after Mark shrugged off. Before Mark, she dated men who knew how to conduct themselves in public. In her sophomore year of college she slept with Lenny at the end of fraternity parties. He always wore a tie and ironed button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the parties, both the same single color, red, teal, or light gray. For most of the party Eileen would entertain herself. Whenever she went to get a drink she enjoyed watching Lenny flirt with other girls, because she had no doubt at all that Lenny would come back to her place at the end of the night, and that made her a victor.
People wanted to sleep with Lenny, and it was Eileen who was sleeping with Lenny, and people knew that it was Eileen who was sleeping with Lenny. But it would never be more than a probably, and it could change any night if he took a liking to another girl. Even when he did come home with Eileen, he was too far gone to have any serious conversation. There was no question of spending time together sober. And yet a probably with Lenny won out over a sure thing with the other boy that she was dating at the time, John, an undergraduate culinary student well read in literary fiction who wasn’t stressed out about anything. He and his love were wholesome, but Eileen found it strange that he wasn’t stressed out about anything and she didn’t know anyone else who wanted to sleep with him. So she kept going to parties with Lenny.
That was college. To build a life at Eileen’s age people as fickle as Lenny were a liability. She was not nearly as certain that she would marry as she was certain that she would not be divorced and left for another woman. Mark may need attending from time to time to keep him well-dressed and out of public laundromats, but the sins that she would be unable to forgive were sins that he would never commit.
Mark may not have that same faith. Knowing about Eileen’s past and having no comparable adventures of his own, he may not understand the transition from roaming to committed as well as she did. At some point in her past, Eileen was more drawn to uncertain and drunk sex with Lenny than to a loving commitment with John. If the past did repeat itself, Mark knew he would play the role of John, left behind for someone more exciting. And if anyone came to his mind to play the role of Lenny, even before the ring, it would be their friend with an already impressive resume of home wrecking: Taft.
If he were believed, Taft did not premeditate his affairs. Mark and Eileen hosted a pot luck dinner, at which Eileen introduced Taft to her childhood friend Elizabeth and her husband. One week later Taft rented an apartment in South Lake Union so they could spend time together without customs agents seeing. Were they to see Elizabeth bringing a man to her marriage home, they might pursue her for greencard fraud, which was the sole purpose of her platonic marriage.
But Elizabeth and her husband were both born of citizen parents in Eileen’s home town in eastern Washington. She spoke no languages other than English, and she spoke that with a distinct Pacific Northwest accent.
“Why do you think she is from Germany?” Eileen asked Taft.
Taft said “Don’t worry. I know she’s an American.” And then he winked to reassure Eileen that he had been clued into the truth.
“Can she even understand German, Taft? Have you ever tested that?”
“Why would she understand German? She was born in Washington.” And he winked again.
## The Best Friend
Most of what Mark heard about Taft came from the same person all other gossip came from: his friend Angela. They met in an undergraduate literature class and Eileen suspected they became friends because Mark never gave her any reason to betray him. That is, he never did anything taboo enough for her to make good gossip out of it. As other friends confided in her that they got drunk and had regrettable sex, or purchased an essay to submit as their own, or started taking antidepressants, she would cast them in a story and entertain party guests with it. Of course they would abandon her after this trespass, and Mark would remain over the years the only constant in her social life.
Eileen first met Angela at a party Mark hosted in the first apartment he rented after graduating. Mark needed her help to furnish the party with guests, because as loyal a friend as he was and as loyal a friend as she wasn’t, she was still far better at making new friends. Though Eileen was certain it was the first time they had ever seen one another, when Angela opened the door she smiled, opened her eyes wide, and hugged Eileen while saying “It’s been so long! I’m so glad you made it!”
While Angela took her hand and pulled her toward the living room she explained to Eileen what Eileen already knew: that Mark was having a late housewarming party and that she had invited most of the guests, but that Mark was a good man. Angela further suggested that Eileen should try to get to know him during her time at the party because he could turn out to be a good friend.
No other guest showed up that looked so much like Eileen that they could be mistaken for one another even in that dimly lit apartment. In the four years of Angela’s parties that Eileen attended as favors to Mark, she never met anyone else that meaningfully resembled her. Eileen could only conclude that Angela didn’t really see people at all, probably a consequence of personality rather than trouble with eyesight.
Not all scandals were equal. With some stories, Angela could wait until a party or a dinner or whenever she next ran into someone willing to listen. With others, the phones would ring. Eileen learned that the greatest scandals were stories of justice. It was the cheating husband whose girlfriend left him and called his wife after his hair fell out. It was the girl that slept with her professor to pass and got pregnant. They were the kind of stories that parents tell their children to instruct them on the moral laws.
Before meeting Angela, Eileen believed that a clean reputation followed from living a clean life. But as her stories transformed people Eileen once admired into tales of caution, she could not avoid the conclusion that a reputation was shaped by the people who write and share the stories that compose it, instead of by the people living the life it represents. Eileen would’ve preferred to keep her distance from people like Angela, but without any warning she had become deeply entangled. There was one woman in Mark’s life. Then he met Eileen, and there were two.
In the second month of their relationship, well before the Mark’s party, he had Eileen over to watch an old samurai movie called Yojimbo. Mark put his arm around Eileen, and she was struggling to read the subtitles with her head tilted to rest on Mark’s chest, but she didn’t mind that at all. She was also not disappointed to find out that the black-and-white scenes in the beginning were not just an intro sketch, and the whole movie was without color. She had settled into a warm and serene moment, a rare moment with nothing to be fixed and nothing to think about.
Then Mark’s phone rang. He apologetically said “that’s a close friend and they know that we have these plans, so it may be an emergency” and answered the phone. Eileen sat up and watched him console his friend. He mostly listened and occasionally said things like “what?” and “I’m sure that will be fine.” She saw that the warmth and safety she enjoyed with him was part of him, as reliable as character, accessible to anyone who would honestly ask.
Finally he did hang up, and excused himself to the restroom before they resumed the movie. While he was gone three text messages came up on his lock screen from a contact named Angela:
1. “I still have more I need to talk about.”
2. “Who is this girl?”
3. “Can I not count on my best friend?”
Eileen suspected that Angela intended to wait her out, but that was no longer feasible. Time remained before Eileen and Mark’s wedding the next Spring, time in which to intervene, time in which little incidents like the dissappearance of a ring and coincidental reappearance of an identical ring on another man’s hand are liabilities. These little details could be curated in service of any narrative, and any narrative of Angela’s was likely to be inconvenient for Eileen.
The story of Eileen would be the story of the dishonest fiancée discarded by the upstanding man. She must leave her partner’s house instead of it becoming hers in their wedding. Her writing would provide only modestly, and again she would struggle to make her way, at risk of destitution as a consequence of the smallest unfortunate event. Her friends, most of them his friends, would be obliged to choose the innocent party in the reallocation of loyalties. And the audience for this story would be the love of her life.
Challenges such as these did not scare Eileen if she chose them. She had considered leaving Mark before and these factors did not tip any scale. But if they came as a consequence of her betrayal, there would be no room for her to say “I was indifferent to the luxuries anyway.” To Angela’s audiences it would be simple justice.
## The Photograph, Saturday
Mark urged her to hurry. Eileen did not understand why punctuality was important for Angela’s pool parties, considering she threw one every month and rarely even noticed when they arrived. But she said nothing in protest and stepped out of the shower, hoping to carry the rapport they built while buying lingerie together into Sunday when she would put it to purpose.
“Do you have an extra towel?” she asked through the bathroom door as she packed sunscreen and her swimsuit in a bag.
Mark shouted in reply from where he stood in the entryway, “yes, I have two!”
Eileen had not yet gotten around to purchasing the washer and dryer she promised that she would. The laundry situation was dire. In haste, she told herself she would buy the machines the next morning and put on the only clean garments that remained, which were the lingerie.
“Mark! Eileen!” Angela yelled when they arrived, capturing them both in a hug Eileen thought was too enthusiastic to be sincere. Angela ran Mark through a special handshake she insisted they practice whenever they met. Two fist pumps, a slap, a low five, and a high five.
The pool was carved into the middle of a patio which itself was carved into the side of a rocky foothill on the north shore of Lake Washington. Most of Angela’s home was carved into the rock itself, and the living room opened up to this plateau. At the edge, protected by glass railing, was a view out over the lake, protruding enough that the sun could be seen both rising and setting if standing at the edge. Eileen did want to know where Angela’s money came from but would never flatter her by asking.
To look anywhere other than at the gratuitous handshake Eileen did a visual sweep of the party for any familiar faces. She recognized Taft at the far end of the patio, but no others. Her eyes settled on the surface of the lake in the distance. A young girl was trying to stand on a paddleboard, slowly rising from a position on her knees, causing the board to wobble side to side. Leaning forward on her paddle which she had placed at the front of the board, she managed to stand. But when she lifted the paddle to push forward in the water, the board escaped from under her and she fell into the water. Eileen returned her attention to Angela and Mark but they had not noticed that she looked away.
As she waited for the restroom to change into her swimsuit, Eileen daydreamed. She imagined that Angela pulled out a pistol. Wielding the gun, she spewed angry and jealous prose about how she wanted Mark for herself and how Eileen did not deserve him. Eileen then disarmed her, and two men at the party held her down on the ground where she cried until the police arrived. In scenes taking place later, family of party guests came to Eileen and Mark’s home with gifts of home baked cakes, cookies, and heartfelt letters of gratitude. One of them said through tears to Mark “if it were not for your brave and selfless wife, we may not have our son today.”
But how would anyone else have felt in danger if Angela was only upset with Eileen? Angela would have to shoot others arbitrarily to make the danger clear to everyone, and therefore ensure their gratitude and admiration for Eileen for disarming her. She was deciding whether in the next iteration of her fantasy Angela should shoot one or two people before being disarmed when the real Angela approached her and interrupted her thoughts.
“Oh Eileen, you don’t have to wait. You can change in my bedroom upstairs. It’s the door at the end on the left,” Angela said, and winked before walking off to greet more arriving guests.
Her precisely timed kindness introduced a brief self awareness, in which Eileen lost certainty about which of the two of them harbored petty jealousy for the other. But Eileen quickly ruled out the possibility that Angela had been sincerely kind as not only uncomfortable but also implausible. Angela wanted to demonstrate her wealth, or communicate a hierarchy by forcing Eileen to accept a favor.
House staff must have made the bed, because it had no wrinkles. They had tucked the sides of the blankets and duvet under the lower mattress. Smooth lines separated columns of carpet fiber leaning in opposing directions, left behind recently by a vacuum. No clothes, or anything else, lay on the floor or on any bedside table or dresser. Eileen didn’t see any evidence that a human inhabited the room.
Having locked the door Eileen did not feel it was so urgent to redress after she had taken off her underwear. Something about being naked in such a sterile place, Angela’s place, tempted her to enjoy it for just a moment longer. She lay back on Angela’s bed with her hands behind her head and felt the cool cotton against her skin.
A mirror on the wall adjacent the door caught her attention and she rolled on to her side to look into it. She traced the outline of her own body with her eyes, from where it came into frame just above her knees, curving up around her hips, down around her waist, and up again at her chest and shoulders. It had always been a reassurance to her that, whatever advantages Angela may have, Eileen possessed one that she never could, one Mark found important in a way he could never reason against: Eileen was simply more beautiful than Angela.
Unfortunately Angela was still beautiful enough to be a concern. Enough that she probably spent plenty of time looking in the same mirror, and Eileen thought it was unlikely Angela’s vanity stopped there. With how often she posted photographs of herself online, attempting to capture the rare moments in which she was satisfied with her appearance, it would be surprising if Angela did not have the same compulsion about what she saw in this mirror.
The first three drawers she checked hid nothing of interest: socks, weed pipes and grinders, and sheets for the bed. The five drawers of the dresser had stockings, duvets, duvet covers, pillow cases, and other dissapointments. But in the second drawer of the right hand bedside table, Eileen found a large manilla envelope. Inside that envelope she found Angela’s birth certificate, passport, and a folded piece of copy paper. Inside the folded piece of copy paper she found a regular letter envelope, and that contained the treasure.
Eileen pulled out a printed photograph of Angela and sat on the edge of her bed to admire it. In it, Angela stood with her left hand on her hip, her chin tilted up, and looked at the camera like she was challenging it to a fight. And most ridiculous, most amusing to Eileen, was that her other hand held a heavy sword rested on the back of her shoulders. Excepting some painted stripes on her cheeks Angela held the pose as naked as Eileen was as she studied it.
Suddenly Eileen had an insurance policy. She scanned the photo with her phone and returned it to its hiding place. After tying the strings of her two piece swimsuit she left Angela’s bedroom feeling invincible.
She played tips in the pool with some of Angela’s friends from university and dried off talking about politics with some of Angela’s friends from home.
When Mark found her he said “Where were you? Angela said you went upstairs with Taft.”
“What? I did not. Why would she say that?” Eileen’s heart sped up. She gripped the armrests of her pool recliner and tried to breathe through her nose to keep the numbness from seizing her hands and face. She tried to push out her gut to breathe deeply, and keep her shoulders in place.
Mark closed his eyes for a second before replying like he was summoning patience. “I don’t know. I’m feeling like going home though. Will you stay or leave with me?”
“I’ll leave with you.”
—
[Chapter 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/j2bt8z/pretentious_fianc%C3%A9e_blackmailed_coerced_to_strip/)
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/j2bszr/pretentious_fiancée_blackmailed_coerced_to_strip