blurring_the_edges_27_business_unusual birdmad Your little enterprise with Zoe and Dana takes on a peculiar life of its own. You discover that while you are not demanding any compensation for your services, Zoe and Dana are extracting some for their referrals of you and about three other guys. You are mildly annoyed by this, but you immediately see the upshot in that you haven't had to pay for anything in the way of wardrobe, weed, or your new favorite - valium, for quite some time. The funniest thing you run across at one point is a case where one girl, about 19, was already committed to the role of the beard for her nice, improbably well-educated and gay-as-a-carnival 21-year old fiancé, other than his boyfriends, she had been the keeper of his secret since they were barely out of junior high and let her love for him (fruitless as it was) lead her into living through a farce. His father, though likely to be understanding, was in a politically sensitive position where such openness and tolerance could prove harmful in the overwhelming conservatism of Scottsdale and the Valley as a whole. People in this state turned on that bastion of arch conservative right-wing thought Barry Goldwater when he suddenly grew a heart and a conscience and spoke out for tolerance. You have to figure, if that bunch is willing to treat one of its icons as a pariah for developing a mind of his own, imagine what they would do to someone on the other side of the political fence who "has one in their family." The girl, Allison, comes from a staunchly Republican family who unbeknownst to most have a few skeletons you've been privy to in the last couple of years. Her mother has remained silent on the issue, but her father is already having fits over her decision to marry into the family of "that liberal trash." Of course, Mister DiCarlo would never admit he is such a raving coke fiend that he would likely snort any house-dust the cleaning lady had in the dustpan on the off chance that it might contain a stray particle of his beloved Peruvian-flake, or that when his dick can be bothered to work inspite of the snow, he's more likely to slip it to one of his cute young interns who are no older than his daughter than to his seemingly devoted and quite lovely wife. Anyway, the young lady, disarmingly cute and apparently lacking much in the way of inhibition, chooses you from the evening's picks at a little cocktail party that Dana and Greg are having. That's right, bud, you're a "whore d'oeuvre." Meat on the party tray. Scarier still, you seem to be enjoying it. For now, at least. You exchange pleasantries and are en route to the guest cottage to do your thing, when Allison asks if you've ever been whipped? What was that, now? Oh man, you aren't really gonna let her do that are you? "Well, I'll try anything once, I suppose." "Hmm," she says, looking at you with a curious expression, "I'm almost disappointed that i didn't have to twist your arm to try it." She goes back to her car, and comes back with a slightly oversized overnight bag and proceeds to pull out a small cat_o'_nine_tails and a riding_crop when you are through the door. "Pick a word," she says, "something you wouldn't say normally." "Umm, how's 'Elvis?'" "Fine, now take off your shirt first and let's see how much you can take. The minute you can't take anymore, I wan't you to say 'Elvis' and that will be my cue to quit." Ooooookayyyyy, now. "You got it, ...or should i say 'yes mistress?'" "Shush, now... take off your shirt and put your hands on that wall over there." You do as she tells you, putting your hands on the wall that forms a sort of half-assed divider between the living room and the combined kitchen-slash-dining-room. You wonder as you glance about, stopping for the first time in many uses of this place to wonder if the decor appears to be more likely Greg's tastes or Dana's. Everything in clean and contemporary lines, a little chrome here, a little black there, some natural wood for contrast and the walls a shade of palest blue-grey, a big difference from all that Early-American stuff that your dad populated your house with, the table-legs turned on lathes to have those weird rounded effects like stacks of hour-glasses and always in the same dark, reddish-brown finish, like cherry-wood against the unfailing background of either white or some innocuous neutral paints. You are still pondering lapse in taste your dad had when he agreed with your then teenaged sister back before she joined the Army when you were little to paint the living room and one of the bedrooms a bright, disco-tacky shade of ...orange, when you feel the first sensation of leather crossing your back. Allison starts out with a few cracks of the crop, but she doesn't seem to quite get the feel for it. "Hold on a minute," she says, picking up the cat-o'-nine-tails, you look back for a second to see her caressing the handle like it was a cock. "Turn around, you," she chuckles, trying and failing to feign the severity of how either of you might perceive a dominatrix would. She cracks the tendrils of the cat against her hand with a mild slapping sound and says, "Ready or not, here it comes." Building intensity ever so slightly, she keeps up the lashing for a good few minutes, you are surprised by how easy it seems to be to endure, but you wonder if it's just that some of the things you've done to yourself have inured you to it mentally or if you've damaged your capability to feel it physically. You are more surprised that for such a strange stimulus to be enduring, it is also turning you on. "I'm not bleeding yet, am i?" you ask, sounding only a little bit worried about it "No, just some good welts,"Allison, matter-of-factly, "now drop your pants." Now you're getting somewhere. At one point, she asks you to turn around and gets in close, taking the whip to your chest. This does sting like a sonofabitch, and opens a small wound just a little left of the central part of your sternum and just a little to the right of your heart, but you take it as long as you can before you finally call upon the King to deliver you. "Whoa, Elvis! Ow." The sex that follows proves to be worth the lashings as she approaches the act with a raw energy you have not seen since the brazen couple on the couch at Trent's house up in Peoria out on the west-side. Before the summer is out, you will see her at least a dozen more times, swapping other appointments with your stable-mates. The funny part comes when one night, you aren't expecting Allison but when you get a call from Dana saying that Ms. DiCarlo would like to see you, you rush over. Dana takes you aside and says that apparently someone other than Allison referred Ms. DiCarlo to you and you realize that it isn't Allison but her mother, Denise. Getting in close, you realize that even for a more conservative family and time-frame, Denise DiCarlo must have been quite young when she had Allison. Without asking, you come to the conclusion that she can't be more than 38, and while for a split second you acknowledge that she may be almost twice your age, you don't see anything that distracts you from how gorgeous she is. If there was a dictionary entry for the phrase "sticky situation," you could rest assured that some pictorial attempt to capture the look on your face before you compose yourself and get to the business at hand would be the picture next to that definition. 030427 what's it to you? who go blather from