**WARNING**: This story contains the following potential triggers:
– Nonconsensual sexual activity
– Blackmail
– Spousal infidelity
—
#Grainy Video from the Office Storeroom
The room was stone-floored, uncarpeted with bare-brick walls. It was small, not much larger than a utility room in an apartment basement. There were no windows – a naked bulb hung from the ceiling, its brilliant light casting shadows in disorganised patterns on the floor and walls, the shifting dark profiles of the sparse but functional furniture. Alison was standing, her knuckles tightly gripping the back of a rustic wooden chair staring at the grainy black and white images that played on the monitor on Jack’s desk. Jack himself stood by a filing cabinet in the corner opposite the only entrance; there was no reason for him to view the images that flickered on the screen, he had seen them multiple times before.
Even beneath the thick layers of her make-up, Jack could see the colour draining from Alison’s face. Her lips were tightly pursed – thin at the best of times, but now compressed like shards of sharpened crystal. Her knuckles whitened on the back of the chair, her stomach churned and her eyes were fixed – glinting brown irises swelling with a dawning realisation.
From the moment Jack had intercepted her on the way from her building to her car, her journey to his office had been one of anxious confusion. It was the kind of predictable anxiety that accompanied being asked by the work security to go to their office, only it was worsened by the rumours that circulated regarding the security staff. None of the women in the call centre liked them – particularly not Jack. They were leery, lecherous; in the office, where Alison now stood, they openly displayed their pornography – bold images on the back wall, a collage of centrefolds and smaller pinups with legs spread, pouting lips, come-to-bed expressions and oversized breasts. And of all the security staff, Jack’s reputation had been the worst. On several occasions, he had asked some new-starter or agency worker to come into the office, making them take off their jacket, searching their bags, overly-familiar touches, say, helping them with their coat, patting a shoulder, shaking their hands or brushing against them. It had never been unprofessional – nothing that could be reasonably reported, but every woman he’d done it too had felt uncomfortable and joined the rumour-mill on leaving the office:
“Don’t you think that guy’s a bit creepy?”
“Ha-ha, she’s met Jack!”
“Fuckin’ weirdo if you ask me!”
“He does it to all the new-starters.”
…and so on.
Alison (though not herself a new-starter) had thought she was in for the same treatment when he’d escorted her across the car park and into the small brick building. But no, he’d simply positioned her in front of a small screen and pressed ‘Play’ on some kind of connected device. She’d asked several times what all this was about. He’d said nothing. As he’d pressed ‘Play’ and moved away to lean against the filing cabinet, she’d met his eyes again, her own imploring him to grant her some sort of explanation:
“Jus’ watch it,” was all he’d said.
The video had started with what looked like CCTV footage from the stockroom – empty but for the racking and shelves which contained the office stationary. Oddly, the time displayed at the bottom-right of the screen was 23:33, long after the call centre would normally have closed. The date, (23 Dec) had not registered with her until the stockroom door had opened and she’d seen a man enter (‘is that Kieran?’) The man had been immediately followed by a woman who she had not recognised straight away. It was the dress that finally did it – short, stylistically familiar, even without it’s colour; the woman seemed a little awkward at first, nervous. ‘Don’t I have that dress…’ she’d thought, ‘Actually, that is my dress,’ and then at last a wave of nausea and the revelation: ‘It is me!’ The footage had been taken on the night of the office Christmas party from 3 months ago, and in the very next blink of the eye, she knew exactly what this video was about to disclose.
The rest of her time was spent stood frozen, watching in brutal detail the confirmation of her worst expectations. She had been drunk that night – very drunk, having consumed far too much wine. For more than a year there had been a weird flirtatious chemistry between her and Kieran – a chemistry she would have never dreamed of acting on had she not been so drunk and had she not already been having some problems with her husband. They’d been arguing a lot, she felt more like a wife than a lover – neglected, taken for granted – all that soap-opera crap; as a desirable being, she barely existed, and Kieran had rekindled in her that feeling of being desirable. It was as a sort of joke that he’d pulled her into the storeroom – they’d run into each other coming out of the toilets (maybe Kieran had even followed her to the toilet, who knew?) On their way back to the conference room where the party was being held, Kieran had taken her arm:
“Let’s go in here,” laughing.
“Why?” nervously laughing.
“Jus’ c’mon,” insisting.
She’d followed him in, half resisting, half led by an anticipatory fascination. Were they sober, she’d definitely have refused, but there was a nervous passion in her, a dizzying sense of transgression which saw her reluctantly allow him to pull her into the room. Once inside, he was touching and kissing her – she resisted and said “no” several times, but the resistance was slight and frequently undermined by her own submission to his touch. In the end, they were on the storeroom floor and by the time Alison had made her mind up that this was definitely the wrong thing to do, her underwear was down and Kieran was inside her.
The video itself revealed none of these details. The event as depicted in no way resembled the way it had happened in her head. From what Alison was able to see, there was no resistance at all on her part – she seemed nervous on entering the room, sure, but were someone to have watched this on TV with sound, even though the dialog could be believed to have contained such lines as, “We shouldn’t be doing this,” or “What about your wife?” (for Kieran too was married), most of the rest was her arms around his back, their mouths kissing then unkissing, their hands grasping and clutching at intimate parts and then their bodies falling in passion to the floor. When Alison did finally stop participating and tried to push him away (for since the event, she had repeatedly told herself she had not truly consented) the video showed no sign of it. On the video, she was almost entirely obscured by the body that was driving her, the only visible parts of her being the legs around his waist and her head which every-so-often appeared with an expression that could just as likely be ecstasy as pain.
After letting her watch herself being fucked for 20 seconds or so, Jack approached the desk and hit the Pause button. The image trembled on the screen, the bare ass and wire-haired thighs of Kieran suspended mid-thrust, Alison’s head tilted to the side at an oblique angle. Seeing herself like this, in so compromised a position, so shamelessly wanton, was, even without contemplating the inevitable fallout (for the consequences were only just beginning to dawn on her), utterly mortifying. For a moment she was silent, heart racing, a cold perspiration soaking through the back of her blouse and moistening her forehead.
“Thank you for showing me this,” she spoke robotically, unable to remove her eyes from the screen.
“That’s alright,” replied Jack.
“Can you erase it?”
She managed to dislodge her eyes from the screen to meet his. He was bald, his face a swollen mass of ill-formed putty, over-weight, only an inch or so taller than Alison. What remained of his hair was grey and white and existed only in small tufts around his ears and the back of his neck.
“I’m afraid not,” he said officiously, “the video’s company property.”
“What will happen to it?”
He shrugged, “I’ll file it away,” he said, coming to stand next to her, placing one of his unnaturally small hands on the shoulder of her coat.
“Will anyone see it?” she’d asked, not responding to the hand on her arm – she was too numb, too bruised by the exposure of a memory that she had tried very hard to bury.
“Who can tell?” he’d answered, “I’ve seen it. I don’t think anyone else on the team have seen it yet. Aren’t you with someone? Married even?”
He’d seen the ring on her finger – he’d noted that even as he’d accosted her in the carpark prior to bringing her in here. Her eyes flicked from the screen and back to his, an animal panic he’d never seen in a person before. Instinctively, her hand went to clutch her wedding ring.
“It’s alright,” he said, “I ain’t judgin’ – that shit’s all over anyway. No one believes in honouring that stuff anymore.”
“I do,” Alison said, a tightness in her throat, her eyes beginning to burn with tears. She was looking back at the screen, unable to believe what she had done. Jack’s eyes followed hers:
“I can see that…” he’d grinned, tightening the grip on her shoulder as an act of parodic consolation.
She shot her eyes back to his – “It’s not like that… It wasn’t like that… The video doesn’t -”
“Doesn’t what?”
“It doesn’t show what happened… I -”
“You sayin’ he raped you? He don’t look like he’s rapin’ you.”
His answer was blunt – shockingly blunt. Alison replied instinctively:
“No … Not that … I don’t know … it just wasn’t that simple.”
He could see the tears welling in her eyes. She looked lost, at the mercy of a universe whose forces and flows were well out of her control or understanding. She’d heard it all before – certain kinds of women and Self-regarding sex specialists telling you that “If you’ve said ‘no’ and a man doesn’t’ stop, then it’s rape”; you’d hear some women tell similar stories and say “it took me a long time to admit I’d been raped,” but in this case, it wasn’t rape. Hearing Jack say the word made this obvious to her – in the privacy of her heart, she could tell herself it wasn’t her fault, that she said “no” and “we shouldn’t” and “Come on, just stop, we’re married,” but she had made countless decisions that night, made countless choices that were based on passion, desire, pleasure and a weakness of character and will which had led to the final act. To call that rape, to tarnish him with such an appalling crime when she’d been so obviously complicit in what happened, well, it would have been a disgusting and utterly self-serving thing to do. It felt like a betrayal of her desire, not to mention his.
“Don’t worry about it sweetheart,” Jack had noticed the tears, the trembling countenance, “yer not the first ‘nice girl’ to find ’emselves behavin’ like that. No one can resist this shit anymore, not really. Yer just another in a long line of unfaithful sluts.”
Angry and wounded, she pulled away from his touch, turning to face him:
“I’m not a slut! I regret it! I’ve regretted it ever fuckin’ since!”
The man shrugged, taking a step back from her to look her over. She was about 5’7 in her heels, a red blouse with a lacy trim, a black skirt that hung just below her knees and sheer black pantyhose. Her hair was a light-brown, healthy-looking, impossibly fine and layered into a shoulder-length bob so as to give it greater volume.
Jack smiled at her, “Anyone watchin’ that video would think you were a slut. I bet yer husband would think you were a slut if he saw it.”
Alison fidgeted with the ring on her finger, “It’s none of your business,” the crick still catching her voice, tears emerging in the corners of her eyes, helpless to the shame and the guilt that she’d tried so hard not to process.
“Listen,” Jack said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You do me a favour and I’ll do you a favour.”
Alison stared at him in silence; Jack made his way to the office entrance:
“You gimme a bit of what you gave Kieran there, and I’ll make sure no one sees this video.”
“Excuse me?”
Jack took a key from his pocket and locked the office door:
“Gimme a bitta what’s on that video -”
Alison stepped back horrified and shook her head.
“I can make that video disappear Alison, but it could cost me my job. Really, I’m obliged to tell head-office if I find anything like this on the tapes.”
“I’m -” Jack was approaching her in slow steps “I… No, I can’t.”
She’d backed against the wall, her whole body trembling.
“It’s up to you,” he said, “I wanna help you, but I’m not losin’ my job for nothin’.”
“Please,” she said.
“Make yer mind up,” he said.
He was standing no more than a meter from her. She was backed into an alcove created by the two outer walls and the table with the VDU to her left.
“I can’t.”
He extended one of those grotesque small hands and placed it against her breast.
“You jus’ say the word sweetheart an’ you’re free to go.”
“Please,” she repeated, incapable of making a decision. Jack had begun unbuttoning the blouse, starting at the top, one button at a time, a measured pace.
“You’ve nothin’ to lose,” he said, eyes slick with lascivious oils, “you’ve done this once already. It’s not like you got any standards to uphold.”
And that was it. Alison snapped, shoved his hand away from her blouse and tried to push past him:
“No, I’m not doing this! Let me out right now!”
Jack’s body turned to follow her progress, letting her pass and make her way to the door. His eyes were small and squinting, watching her ass beneath the coat, her legs in the nylons; the feel of the breast and the momentary power over her had him aroused and he didn’t relish the idea of losing her.
“Then I should just report this video?”
“You can do what you like with it!” she was pulling at the door handle, forgetting that it was locked, “let me out right now.”
Jack approached her, “Alison,” he said, “yuh need t’calm down ‘n’ think about this.”
“There’s nothin’ to think about! Let me outta this room or I’ll scream the place down!”
Her fingers were frantically redoing the buttons of her blouse, her countenance straining with a neurotic impatience to be out of the room.
He took the key from his pocket: “If yuh say so,” approaching the door before turning back to her for one last try. “I think yer bein’ pretty selfish though.”
“How d’you work that out?”
“Yer husband? Kieran’s wife? Ain’t they got a coupla kids…?”
Alison knew that; her face softened and a wave of terror replaced the anger that had previously possessed her. Again, reality like a great tsunami was crashing back down over her.
“All yuh need to do,” Jack spoke softly, “is gimme what I want an’ all this will go away. You’ve already betrayed your husband. Are yuh really so selfish that you’d wreck too marriages an’ a family jus’ for yer own stupid dignity?”
Tears poured from her eyes, “Please, just -”
“It’s a fuck; you’d ruin all them lives just to avoid a fuck?”
She remained silent, trembling, unable to work through the consequences and implications.
“You want me to open the door?”
The key was in the lock, Alison shook her head.
“Then you’ll do it?”
She neither moved nor spoke.
“Well?”
“I’ll report you for blackmail -” the words croaked out helplessly through a throat that was so constricted it could only just allow the passage of air.
“I’m not blackmailin’ you,” he replied irritably, “I’m givin’ you an out. Either I do my job an’ report you or I risk my job an’ get you out of this mess. You want me to just do my job?”
She shook her head.
“Then you’ll do it?”
Without even knowing she’d done it, her head moved up then down in a barely perceptible nod. Jack pulled the key from the lock.
“Good girl, now we understand each other. It’s not blackmail, it’s a trade. You do me a favour, I do you a favour. You understand that?”
Alison continued to stand in dumbfounded silence.
“You call it blackmail again, an’ you can get the fuck outta here right now. I’m not havin’ you accusin’ me o’ criminal shit when you’re asking me to clear up your fuck up. You wanna do this or do you wanna go? Your choice.”
Her voice cracked with what was probably another “please,” but it emerged only as a vague sound; beneath that sound however there was an obvious and defeated assent.
“Take yer coat off an’ put your purse down there on the table. You wanna call your husband an’ tell him you’ll be late?”
***
As instructed, Alison had removed her coat and draped it over the table by the VDU. She had used it to cover the front of a badly stained pornographic magazine which lay by the VDU’s side. The woman on the magazine’s cover, a brunette with vivid pink skin and large brown eyes was holding a pair of absurdly sized breasts and was staring down the camera with a cartoon-like expression that suggested she was shocked to have been discovered touching herself. The stains looked like coffee stains – various shades of brown – tan, chocolate, ochre – little islands with dark-coagulated perimeters of near-black.
Instead of calling Carl, Alison had texted him; she could not face a conversation with him and certainly wouldn’t have been able to keep all those emotions that tumbled through her heart out of her voice. Already, over the past couple of months, Alison had carried a memory that she could not share with him. Again, the secrecy of this memory, the fact it would never be discovered, had allowed her (even though she did regret it) to also compartmentalise it as something deeply personal to her. Now there was someone else who knew what she had done, the shame had become more real, plus there was a new pain, a new memory she would never be able to share with her husband: the fact she was about to have sex with a man she utterly detested. From here on, her husband would understand their relationship as one thing – faithful, tranquil, mutually secure; Alison on the other hand would always be compromised, a deceit she’d never be able to make up for. All that would come later though. She couldn’t afford to think about that now.
Presently, Alison was standing in the alcove between the outer-walls and table just as she had been when the man had first begun unfastening her blouse. He had approached her in the same way – standing about a meter or so in front of her, bringing his unnaturally small fingers and thumbs to her top button, unfastening one button at a time, taking a lazy pleasure in the slow exposure of the body beneath. Alison’s mind weighed heavy with just how wrong this was – a numbness of emotion that contrasted with the cold air of the room as it touched against the slow-emerging pink of her skin. The flaps of the blouse fell down either side of her breasts, the man untucking them from her skirt.
“There we go sweetheart,” he’d cupped her face in both hands and stared directly into her eyes, “now we got somethin’ to look at.”
“Just get on with it.”
The man’s face approached – a badly scarred quarry of clay and rain-grey slag; his wet lips pressed against hers. She did not resist it, but nor did she participate. She just stood, closing her eyes tightly and letting his mouth probe against her. She thought about the rumours – his reputation as the workplace creep. Well, she had confirmation of that now, feeling her skin crawl to the sensations elicited by the hand that moved up her thigh and pushed up her skirt.
“You’ll need to get a bit more involved.”
Jack’s lips had pulled away. He was staring at her, but with her eyes closed so tightly she couldn’t see him.
“I don’t know if I -”
“Look lady, if you can’t get into it, you’re gonna have to go. I ain’t no rapist. I wanna bit of effort from you.”
Again, he began to kiss her, her heart pounding; she kissed back, terrified and disorientated. It was horrible – a strong taste of cigarettes and coffee, his tongue penetrating her mouth as she opened it; every-so-often she would attempt a slight moan, trying to give the impression of at least being a little into it. His hand was pressed firmly against her ass, the skirt bunched up against his wrist and around her waist, his fingers roughly clenching and unclenching the buttock. In his touch and the ferocity of his breathing, Alison could feel the growing force of his arousal. She, on the other hand, emotionally at least, couldn’t have felt more alienated from arousal; alienated from everything actually – alienated from him, alienated from the room, alienated from her body, alienated from her behaviours. She had become a creature of pure thought and pure consciousness; in those brief moments where she came back to herself and touched the world, there was an overwhelming emotional repulsion. To speed things up, she had moved her hands to his jeans and begun unfastening his belt and buttons. The more quickly she could relieve this guy, the more quickly she’d be out of this room and done with this whole nightmare.
“That’s right baby,” he was whispering between kisses, moving his pelvis to let her at his jeans, placing a hand on one of her breasts, “that’s more like it.”
The belt fell open with a slight jangle, her hand slid into his jeans; with only a little difficulty her hand was able to enter his shorts and free his cock with the brief flick of her wrist. With her other hand, Alison began lightly caressing his testicles and with the former she tried to masturbate him. The cock was stiff, engorged and extended to about six-and-a-half inches; the ball-sack was tight, somewhat small and rough-skinned; pubic hair curled wiry about her fingers. Because of her position, it was difficult to masturbate him properly – she had to work slowly, gently, her hand twisted in entirely the wrong direction to be able to do it efficiently. Still, he moaned as he kissed, surprised by the effort she was making, his tongue licking ravenously at her lips and face.
“Careful sweetheart… Oh yeah, That’s better… That’s nice… Oh yeah, that’s really nice…”
Her hand slid back and forth, her twisted wrist straining with the angle. Bit by bit, Alison could feel Jack’s emotions swelling – it was like she was inflating a large balloon, its thin skin becoming ever tauter, promising at some point to burst. That hand which had been mauling at her breast now pulled down her bra so as to expose its contents, the palm grazing against the small nipple when he began squeezing it. The hand that had been on her ass had moved around the front and was presently between her legs, diminutive chubby fingers prodding at the sensitive flesh beneath the nylons and panties. This new violation, this new intrusion of her most intimate area brought home to Alison just what was happening. At some point, were she to let it, this man would be inside her actual body and wreaking havoc on her most private emotions.
“I’ll suck him,” she thought, her thumb stroking over his glans, her other hand tightening around his testicles.
She started to slide down the wall, the man immediately understanding where she was going, amazed that she would initiate such a thing herself. For her, she just wanted this to be over; for him, he had no fixed point of view except for an overwhelming feeling of gratitude at the fact this woman was about to do this for him.
“That’s right baby, yer into it now. I knew you would be once you loosened up.”
Alison fell to her knees, moving her head forward. The man’s hands gripped the back of her hair, fingers twisting into the layers. She could taste the cock as it slid past her lips and over her teeth, into her mouth and onto her tongue. There was a moisture, a pre-cum; she started to suck, forcing down the revulsion and nausea, forcing down her thoughts. Her mind, from top to bottom, could be described in a series of layers. There were at least 3 layers in fact, 3 layers which the rocking back-and-forth of her head, the penetration of her mouth by his penis seemed, in their sheer physicality, to short-circuit and violate in nauseating ambivalent ways.
First, there was a sort of base-context, a historical ground that provided the emotional atmosphere for everything in her life at this point: everything remembered and everything forgotten. There was her childhood and her relationship with her parents; there were her friendships, old and new; there was her working life, the girls in the call-centre with whom she chatted and the customers that she talked to about this and that. There was her steady and predictable home-life, the emotional reliability of her husband, and there was the sense of betrayal that spread out like a poison through these formerly secure foundations.
On the next layer, there was the overall physical experience. Though she did her best to ignore it, it nevertheless spilled-out into the adjacent layers. It consisted of the sleazy griminess of the room, the aching of her knees on the stone floor, the fingers that twisted in her hair and pushed and pulled her head, the moaning and grunting sounds of the man above her, the taste in her mouth, the feeling of being orally filled, the texture of the cock – veins, shaft, thin skin, swollen warm helmet – the cold of the air as it touched against the drying saliva on her skin. And then, at the top, there was the final layer of what she actually thought right at this moment, in the here and now:
“I’ve just got to get through this. Finish him off and we’re done.”
“If I finish him too quickly, will he have time to do anything else?”
“What time does he have to lock the place up? It can’t be long now.”
“My car will be the only one in the car-park – I hope no one notices?”
“Did Sarah call that guy back?”
“I can’t – that hurts – he’s choking me!”
“Hurry up, just hurry up!”
And cutting across this higher conscious layer was the apprehension of the future, all the consequences and feelings that lay as yet to be realised or unravelled. The force of mind required to repress these thoughts contributed an unbearable gravity to all the noise that clamoured through her head.
As Jack’s fingers gripped her hair and as his head fell back against the bare brick, Alison could tell the man was getting closer and closer to being done. She could feel that in the way his fingers twisted in her hair, his body stiffening, forcing her head forward, faster, more aggressively, choking her every so often. She moved her tongue over his glans, caressed his ball-sack, even squeezing a little, pressing a slender finger into his perineum. At last, the man let out an anguished groan and the seed burst from the head of his cock. Her mouth was filled, thick coagulant running over the back of her tongue and into the gutters of her gums.
‘Christ,’ thought Alison. The man kept her head held on him for some time, the penis reloading and ejaculating several times before the ebb and flow of the erotic wave at last ceased. And yet still he held her head in place, his hands relaxing some, letting her both swallow and spit, the disgusting fluid dripping over her lips wherever the penis-shaft allowed it to exit. She could feel the man softening in her, the tension of his body relaxing.
‘Was it over?’ Alison asked herself, the man stroking her hair whilst he recovered.
‘Yes, it was over.’ Alison could tell this from the way the man held her head – his grip relaxing, sharing with her a sort of shame. Through the fingers that once pressed so roughly against her scalp, she could feel the spread of a confused regret. On the one hand, what he had done, well, he was morally conflicted about it. He didn’t so much feel sorry for the woman (‘it was her own stupid fault she was in this mess’) but he did recognise that he’d locked himself into a very dangerous relationship with her – he had given himself over to a desire that could get him into very serious trouble. At the same time, he recognised that he’d squandered his chance to fuck the woman. It would be at least 15 minutes before he could go again and he was already late with his round.
Jack pulled the woman’s head away from his groin before starting to fix his jeans.
“You better go hadn’t you?”
Alison stood, turning from him, adjusting her bra and beginning to refasten her blouse. As she turned, her eyes caught the VDU – a grim and grainy reminder of why they were here.
“Will you delete it?” she asked, her voice impersonal.
“I’ll sort it,” he replied.
Alison moved her bag and picked up her coat, threading her arms through its sleeves like a resentful employee that had just been tasked with a job well beneath their contractual responsibilities.
“I’ll let you out,” the man passed her, brushing his arm against her body as he went. Alison picked up the clutch and fled the room the moment the door was opened.
—
This is the first part in a [multi-part series](https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/53764/?ref=BlackScreen). You can find many other stories that I’ve written [here at Smashwords](https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/BlackScreen/?ref=BlackScreen). More can be found on my Reddit profile too.
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/v9yaou/grainy_video_from_the_office_storeroom_mf_noncon