The Mistress Mistake (2 page)

"You need to quit worrying so much and just
chill a while. Everything will work out, it always does. I don't
know anyone as smart as you, Jess. And you know you can come home
with me for a while. There's a frat party tonight. I want you to
come with me this time."

"What for?" Jessica's voice was resigned as
she slipped a pair of ragged tennis shoes into a cardboard box.
Although she appreciated Allison's offer, she knew it couldn't be
permanent and it horrified her to be a burden on her friend's
family.

"Just because. You need to get out."

"I don't have a place to live. I've got shit
I need to figure out. I don't even have money for supper tonight
and I'm out of ramen noodles. I have no choice but to eat at the
cafeteria." Another jolt of distress hit Jessica when she thought
about how close she was to not having a meal plan anymore. The food
in the cafeteria wasn't great, but it was nutritious and just one
more thing that would disappear in a few days now that her
scholarship was gone.

"No, you don't. The guys are grilling
hamburgers. And even though you never go with me, you know the
drill." Allison's voice perked up and a glint of excitement
glimmered in her eyes. "There's only one rule, if you're female,
you get in free."

****

Five hours later, Jessica leaned against a
wall in the corner of a huge living room and nursed a beer that had
long ago gone warm. Her face and her eyes looked in one direction,
but her stomach was tied in knots and her mind was in shock as she
concentrated on eavesdropping on two sorority girls who stood only
a couple of feet away from her in whispered conversation.

"I'm telling you, Melanie knows a girl who's
done it. The dude paid for her tuition."

"Are you serious?"

"Yeah. There's this whole new industry
popping up on the Internet. Evidently, there are several websites.
They match sugar daddies with sugar babies."

"That's prostitution."

"Not technically. Morally, yeah, maybe. But
it's not against the law."

"How do they get away with it?"

"I don't have a clue."

"So is Melanie's friend a slut or
something?"

"Girl, no, she's not. She's pre-med and as
classy as shit."

Jessica strained her ears to hear more but
the girls had turned and walked out onto the patio together,
leaving her reeling as she sagged against the wall.

****

Later that night, Jessica sat in the library
at her favorite computer with her heart beating loudly in her ears.
It hadn't taken her very long to do a search on the subject the
sorority girls had been discussing and now she sat almost
hyperventilating at what she was reading and at what she was
considering doing.

Could she do it? Could she sleep with some
guy in exchange for financial restitution?

She didn't care what she'd heard earlier in
the evening.

It sounded like prostitution. Could she
prostitute herself in exchange for her college degree?

She wanted to say no, she was better than
that, but insidious pictures slammed through her head like a camera
roll. Vague images of her future with no college degree, no family
support system, and no credit line available to her to even buy a
car. Working in a fast food restaurant her whole life and having to
live close enough that she'd have to walk back and forth everywhere
she went. Then another set of pictures came to her mind. Memories
of what she'd seen that very night at the frat party. Drunken girls
walking off into darkened corners with guys from the party.
Inebriated couples hooking up and pairing off. She and Allison had
arrived early enough in the evening for Jessica to see who came and
went. Most of the girls had arrived with other girls, and weren't
in any type of long-term relationship with the frat guys that she
could see.

What she witnessed were just hook-ups.

Each couple had walked away, until the
bedrooms upstairs were filled and every corner in the house had
people making out in a heated rush. Alcohol flowed freely, and it
was not only because of the fact that Jessica detested beer and
alcohol of any kind that she'd stayed completely sober.

Sober enough to hear and remember that
conversation and to now be sitting in the library fighting her
conscience.

So, most of the other girls hooked up with
guys all the time. Even Allison did it. And Jessica tried her best
not to judge her for it. When Jessica had met Allison, the other
girl had had a boyfriend. But that hadn't lasted long. And now,
Jessica knew that Allison kept a count of the guys she'd hooked up
with. Nine so far. And Allison acted as if she were almost virginal
compared to the other girls she ran around with.

Jessica hadn't hooked-up with a single guy
during her entire time in college.

Now her mind was filling up with reasons that
would justify what she was contemplating doing. If Allison could
sleep with nine guys and Jessica only one, then that wasn't so bad,
was it?

Would that make her a whore or a slut? And if
she was okay with it why the hell should she care anyway? She
wasn't going to tell anyone. She wasn't going to broadcast it all
over the university.

Maybe she'd get really lucky and find one man
who was clean and nice and respectful and appreciative. A fairytale
began to form in her mind, of a handsome, rich man, but before it
could go any further, she shut it down, knowing she was only being
crazy and ridiculous.

She bit her lip and quickly set up a profile
before she could chicken out. She clicked a picture of herself from
her phone, set up an anonymous email account, and posted a bare
bones profile as quickly as she could.

Unease spread through her, but she tamped it
down. After all, she didn't have to accept anything from this. It
was just a lark. An experiment.

She walked away from the library feeling sick
to her stomach.

****

Connor told himself he was only going to look
one more time. He'd give the damn website one more chance, and then
he was done.

If nothing came from this, he knew he'd be
sitting in a bar in downtown this weekend.

He signed on and almost immediately was hit
with a spiral of lust so hard it shocked him.

The girl was new. Her account had only been
set up the night before, and from what he'd learned, new girls were
always in high demand if they were pretty enough.

He couldn't tell how pretty she was, because
she'd posted her picture in profile. But there was something about
the delicate curve of her jawline that was making him ache to see
the rest. Her hair was medium length and a medium color, but it was
cut at an angle that framed the lines of her face. It looked silky
and smooth, and he felt a powerful need to fist it tightly between
his fingers.

He studied the side of her face, the slight
upward curve of her small nose and wondered why she hadn't taken
the full frontal picture. Of course, he had only posted a picture
of himself in profile, but he knew his reason was a stab at
anonymity. So her reason had to be one of two things. Either she
wasn't beautiful enough to compete with all the other women on the
site, or she was trying to do this incognito. She wanted to remain
anonymous on the Internet in case someone she knew saw her
picture.

So which was it? She looked pretty enough,
from the small amount he could see, but in a young sort of way. He
rolled the question of why she'd want to be secretive around in his
head. It had to be the obvious answer. She was uncomfortable about
doing this.

Hell,
he
was uncomfortable about doing
this.

He slid the bar down the page and didn't see
anyone else new or interesting.

He frowned and rolled the screen back up
until it rested on her face again. He knew for a fact since she was
new and interesting to him, that she would be interesting to
hundreds of other men as well.

If he didn't act on this now, she might
choose someone else.

He fired off an email.

There. It was done. Last chance he was going
to give to this particular avenue of sexual exploration.

Now all he had to do was wait.

****

Late the very next evening, Jessica sat in
the empty library in front of 'her' computer. The semester was
over, all the students were boxing their belongings up and heading
for home or internships in various cities. She was supposed to be
going on a field dig with the geology department for a month, but
she hadn't been able to come up with the four grand to cover it. It
wasn't too late; she could still go next summer if she could come
up with the cash.

She logged onto the new email account and
took a major hit of shock to the system. She had twenty-four
emails. Holy crap.

An emotion that resembled guilt slid through
her as she clicked on the first email.

Her eyes fell to the first picture. The man
was ancient, like fifty. The guilt in her stomach churned and
turned into nausea.

She clicked to the next email without reading
anything about the first guy. The second man was old, as well.
Older than the first one, like freakin' sixty. She didn't stop to
read their exact ages or anything about them, just took a guess
from their profile pictures.

She swallowed bile and clicked again.

She ran through the emails in rapid
succession. Old. Old. Old. Old. Old. Gross and old. Disgusting,
gross, and old.

She got to the twentieth email, clicked on it
and almost swallowed her tongue.

Holy shit, Batman.

He wasn't old, or gross . . . or
disgusting.

For the first time, she actually read the
information on his profile. It said he was twenty-eight and single.
Okay, so he was a bit older than she was, but she had already known
that was going to be the case going into this. And he wasn't nearly
as ancient as the cave dwellers she'd already sifted through.

He had dark hair, cut fairly severely around
the skull, and like her, he'd taken his picture in profile and she
couldn't see him directly. His lips were full, though, and the one
eyebrow she could see was a downward slashing slant over an eye
that contained not even a hint of a smile. Just like the rest of
his face. No smile.

Okay, then. A really good-looking guy, just
not a happy one.

She read the line he'd attached to his
profile.
Companionship is all I'll ever want.

Jessica rolled that around in her brain. It
was a warning. An advance warning in the form of a tag line.

She scrolled through the remaining emails and
found all of the men to be old, disgusting, or gross. Or all
three.

Clicking on the young guy's page again, she
studied it more closely. That warning fairly blared out at her, and
she wanted to know what the old geezers had put in as their
headings. Everyone who had signed up had all had to key in a one
liner when they set up their accounts, and she ran through them
now, comparing them to
the young guy's.

Love and affection to the right woman.

Companionship leads to . . .?

Will you be my princess for life?

Looking for the right woman to rock my world
and complete me.

The tag lines went on in that same vein and
Jessica analyzed them in her head.

It didn't take long to figure out that
companionship meant sex. And handsome dude was saying that sex was
all he'd ever want.

Okay, then. Noted.

She wasn't interested in a relationship,
either. She had school to get through and a career to build after
that. She hadn't chosen geology as a major simply off the cuff.
She'd chosen it because she loved science, it was a highly
lucrative career choice, and depending on how she wanted to use her
degree, she'd probably get to travel all over the world when she
got a job.

'Companionship' was fine with her. In fact,
she didn't want to have to make this any worse by lying to an old
buzzard and telling him she loved him or some such bullcrap. Not
that she could ever even contemplate doing this with one of those
other men. In fact, she knew she wouldn't. She'd flip burgers the
rest of her life if those were her only choices.

She studied his picture a while longer. This
guy wanted sex. She wanted an education and the hope of a decent
future.

Now the only question was, did she have
enough nerve to take the meeting he was asking her for?

Jessica rode the rail into downtown and
followed the map she'd printed out to the restaurant where she was
meeting him. It would be simpler if she had Internet on her phone,
but that was a luxury she couldn't afford. His name was Connor and
she supposed she needed to start thinking about him as being a
human being and not just a computer profile.

She was wearing her nicest pair of jeans,
with flat silver sandals and a red slinky shirt she'd borrowed from
Allison. A strand of beads hung around her neck. They were cheap,
from the dollar jewelry store. Again, it was all she could afford,
and she was damn glad that she and Allison had found the small
store in Addison, only a short drive away from campus.

Jessica had wanted to wear heels, for the bit
of confidence they would give her, but commuting through DFW,
having to catch buses and the rail and walking everywhere in
between, were things she'd learned long ago needed to be done in
flat shoes, if not in tennis shoes.

She couldn't bring herself to wear tennis
shoes tonight, so she'd compromised with the sandals.

Refusing to think too deeply about what she
was doing, she pushed it to the back of her brain and decided that
she was only going to think of Connor as someone who needed a favor
from her. Because not thinking about
it
was absolutely the
only way she'd be able to survive even this initial meeting.