Here's an edited excerpt from Degraded: In The Car:

 

As we walk out of my apartment and into the elevator you slide your arm through mine and I'm appalled - indeed, pleasantly so - at how disgustingly easy it was to manipulate you into doing whatever deviant act I chose for you to do this night and the last.

 

You smile at me, you laugh, you flirt, thinking that you have finally found a man that you can actually like, and one who might actually like you in return, totally oblivious to the fact that I am the type of man that you seek desperately not to attract. But you are a like a moth attracted to a flame. You know you are going to get burnt, but you just can't help yourself. Despite your better judgment you crave someone who is exactly like me. I am a man and you are only a woman and I treat you - or perhaps better said, mis-treat you - the way that nature intended a man to treat a woman.

 

My friend is the one who first told me about you. Laughing over drinks he described how pathetically desperate you were for a date. After all, behind a single mother, a MILF in his words, with a daughter in college couldn't be an easy task. And he almost felt sorry for you. Not sorry enough, however, to prevent him from taking advantage of you. He knew you were desperate for company, desperate for whatever scrap of affection you could get from a man and he decided to use you, even though he knew that your relationship - if you could even call it that - was not going to go anywhere save for whatever he decided to do to you that night.

 

What exactly did he do to you that night? My friend laughed, and I admit that at first I was repulsed, to think that a man would actually treat a woman the way that he treated you. But as he continued to tell his story I began to see the humor of it all, and eventually joined him in his laughter, with any of my mis-placed disgust banished from my mind.

 

You. When you told me the story of what he did to you, your version was even more amusing than his. Funnier, maybe not to you but certainly to me, was how deftly he avoided any contact with you once you discovered what had happened. There's no way you could have known this, of course, but you weren't the first woman, and very likely not the last, that my friend had done this to. He prides himself on this act. Although I've never seen it, he tells me that he actually keeps notches on his bed post showing the number of times he's 'left his mark' and escaped unscathed.

 

We walk through the lobby of my apartment building, past my doorman and we trade winks. He is used to various women coming and going from my apartment and I pay him very well should a female visitor that I bring back misbehave or disobey and need to be removed from my apartment. He lives vicariously through my stories of gratuitous acts with multiple partners and he particularly enjoyed the story I told him of what I did to you, last night.

 

Read the complete Degraded series: In The Bar, In The Bath and In The Car, or grab the complete collection, Degraded: Everywhere!