Scarred Beauty
By: Sam Crescent“Shit. I’ve got to take this,” Brad said and made to get up.
“Don’t worry. Answer your call. I won’t be offended.”
“Hi Noelle. ... I’m perfectly fine. Yes, I’ve met him. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. All right....”
Isaac could hear the concern Noelle had for his brother. He wondered what the woman was like. Did she have a family of her own to care about? Brad started laughing, shaking his head.
“I’ve got to go. I’ll be home soon. Take care, bye.” He ended the call. “I’m sorry about that. We usually call each other on a regular basis to make sure we’re okay.”
“She sounds like a wonderful woman.”
“She is. You’d like her, but I doubt very much you’d meet her.”
“How come?”
“She rarely leaves the apartment, especially during the day. I don’t want to talk about it as she’s my best friend, and her problem isn’t a part of this.”
“Then by all means, continue with what we talking about before.”
He listened to Brad talk some more and spoke with him. The problems in his own life were irrelevant as he sat drinking coffee and talking with his estranged half-brother.
****
Noelle placed the phone back into the cradle and stared out across the dark night skyline. The lights were switched off in the apartment, so she couldn’t see her reflection in the glass. Opening the doors on the fortieth floor, she stood on the patio and looked down at the street below. She saw people walking around, oblivious to their life being observed. Sighing, Noelle folded her arms over her chest and walked back inside the house. When Brad hadn’t phoned to say he was okay, she’d been worried half to death.
For the past three years, they’d been each other’s strength. She’s met him when she was seventeen, in the last year of high school. He’d been sat in an alley way as she walked past. Her gut had told her to stop when she walked in front of him, so she had knelt down. He’d stared at her with a vacant look. Her scars had meant nothing to him. His addiction problems meant nothing to her. Together they’d survived their painful pasts.
They could depend on no one but each other.
Winter was fast approaching, and soon she wouldn’t be able to leave the house without the added comfort of a hat, gloves and scarf. She picked up her romance book and began reading. The storyline was about a full figured woman who couldn’t find a man and ended up finding love through an escort service. The story was hot with massive amounts of tension and a gripping plot. The sex was dirty, which made her yearn to be the woman on the receiving end of such passion.
Putting the book down, she glanced around the room and saw Brad’s laptop sitting closed at the table. Curiosity biting at her, Noelle moved to the screen and pressed a few buttons.
In no time the internet was up, the search engine ready for her to type. She placed the book by the side of her and typed in some words. Male escort service.
The search bought up a huge list of sites. She clicked on a few and gasped at the naked pictures on some of them.
Being a virgin and never having kissed a man before, Noelle stared in wonder at some of the women being fucked on the screen before her. The only knowledge she had was the stuff she’d watched in movies and the television, along with the reading of the erotic romance books. Licking her lips, she searched through all of the sites available. No man had ever looked at her with pure, naked longing. For once she wanted to be able to be near a man and know what it felt like to be touched, to be cared for, and maybe even to be loved by a man.
Would she ever feel a man’s hands caressing her body? Touching and tasting her, spending the time to get to know what her body liked, the way they did in her books? She jumped back from the laptop and closed the windows she had open. Her heart pounding, she waited for Brad to appear in the doorway.
“Hi. Sorry I took so long,” he said as he pulled his coat off. “It’s bloody cold out there. You didn’t have to wait up.”
She glanced at the clock and saw it was after nine.
“I wanted to make sure you got back in one piece.”
He gave her a twirl. “I’m here, and I survived.”
