The Stranger

Trigger warning: this story mentions rape.

In general, she didn’t reply to messages from strangers of the kind that he'd sent to her. And, to be honest, she had no idea what made her reply this time. Boredom? The lack of sexual excitement that has been permeating her life recently? An appetite for trying something new?

It was not like his message was anything original. 

“Hi, I find your profile intriguing and I will be visiting your city soon. Would you like to meet for a coffee or a drink?”

His profile was not that original either. He did seem like a successful dominant looking at the level of attractiveness of women in his pictures, and how willing they were to be used by him. But then, the pictures could always be fake. And even if not, that did not mean that he was the right person to dominate her. He did claim to like intelligent women which was a good thing. But then again, in the Western societies of the current times who doesn’t claim that?

There was nothing particularly special about him and yet still, she responded to his inquiry, positively. 

She didn’t want to know much about him before they would meet. In fact, she didn’t believe that it is possible to get a feeling of someone through an online conversation. So, she simply proposed for them to meet for a drink once he arrives in her city. She was generous, not having spent that much time lately on men and relationships, she decided to risk it.

He suggested meeting in a bar of his hotel at ten in the evening. It was quite a straightforward proposal and quite an expensive hotel. He definitely didn’t seem to feel like he needed to play games with her. And he was right. She loved playing games but not of this type. Keeping up the appearances of not being interested was not her strong point. It required a will to be on top that she didn’t possess in the slightest. At least not when it came to men and sex.

For their meeting, she decided to wear one of her favourite dresses, made of soft velvet in subdued colours, and high heeled lacquered shoes in a hue of young cherries. The dress was quite long, finishing a couple of centimetres below the knee and had no cleavage in front, the fabric ending right at the bottom of the neck. The design was loose and did not accentuate her athletic yet feminine body, but on the back, there was a long v-shaped opening which was almost reaching her waist. She did not wear a bra and an attentive eye could notice the sight of roundness of her big ripe breast in the opening under the right armpit. The dress was not obviously sexy. In fact, it was rather uninviting, hiding more than it was revealing. At the same time, what it was showing and how it was doing it could be deliciously stimulating to a person who cared to look beyond the obvious. She was curious if he was the kind of person who did. 

Traveling to his hotel she was daydreaming (or evening-dreaming, to be precise) about what was going to happen to her. The soundtrack of her journey (from one of her favourite movies with a delicious final scene of rejection where the main character, dressed up and fabulous, waits for hours in a restaurant for her long lost love who has contacted her recently to meet. In the last scene, she is sitting in the restaurant, ordering one aperitif after another, hoping to consume the main course accompanied by him. In vain.) made her fantasize of rejection. What if he didn’t show up? She took a leap of faith and agreed to his bold proposal of meeting so late at his hotel. She made all that effort dressing up way over the top according to the standards of her city and clearly showing her interest. What if this was the only thing that he wanted?

She had heard stories like that. Stories of call girls wasting their time, going to see clients who never showed up. They expected them to get off on seeing them arriving at the place. Those guys did not actually want to fuck them. They wanted to play at their expense. And maybe even punish them for whatever they felt like they should be punished.

She was not a call girl but at that moment she was close to feeling like one. And she liked the feeling. She liked to imagine herself selling her body for money. She felt like it would be the right way for her to make a living. She even investigated the technicalities of this line of work (that is how she heard the stories) but after hearing how much time and effort she would have to put into it, she decided that it was too much of investment simply to have her desires of being used fulfilled. There were other, less laborious, ways to achieve it. One of them was meeting the stranger tonight.

So, what if he didn’t show up in the end? Or what if he did but did not reveal himself to her? He did know how she looked but she didn’t. In his profile, he did not show his face and she did not ask for a picture. She liked the mystery. And in fact, she did not care much for looks in men. At least not when they were separated from their personality. The looks themselves could not tell her anything about the traits that she was interested in, intelligence, cunning, slight coldness, and reservation. She loved men who had an aura of effortless power around them. Men who were followed not because they were demanding it but simply because it was impossible not to follow them. And that you could not see in a picture. A man like that, however, would not fulfill the scenario of rejection that her imagination was right now presenting to her.

In this scenario, she walks into the lobby of the hotel. The rhythmical noise of her out-of-place shoes turns the eyes of most people in the room on her. She looks ridiculously overdressed for this place. It is an expensive hotel but, in her city, people treat carelessness in appearance as a badge of honour. The fact that you look like you don’t care is an expression of being able to afford it. She takes off her coat and jacket, revealing the dress that she described so well to him. With that, she exposes herself even more to the judgmental eyes of the guests of the hotel in the hope that he will recognize her. She checks her phone but there are no messages. She sends him a text saying that she has arrived. A waiter approaches her and asks if she needs help. She says that she came here to meet someone. He advises to look around but at the same time mentions that he can’t recall anyone sitting alone at the bar. 

“How does he know that she is meeting just one person? Does he think that she is a whore?” she wonders.

She sits at a low table near the entrance and sends him another message stating her exact location. She feels nervous and exposed. Nobody is intentionally looking at her but she can feel their eyes on her back. Minutes pass. He stays absent and silent. She looks around but does not see anyone who would pass for her image of the stranger of tonight. She begins to feel rejected, betrayed. She starts to doubt whether he is going to show up at all. Maybe he is hiding somewhere in this room, observing her. If that is the case, he is probably having an exquisitely entertaining night. Maybe that is his thing? Maybe he has had so many women already that he does not care anymore for fucking them? Maybe he developed a more refined taste for using people? Not through the power of his muscles or even his brain but through his absence? Maybe what gives him his power trip is the fact that women show up for him? The recognition that they are his? That he could use them? But he won’t. Denying them even that, basking in their anxious presence while staying powerfully absent.

She waits at the bar for about an hour, and, after drinking one drink she had to pay for herself, she leaves. She hopes that he’s gotten what he was looking for. That it was some kind of sick game of his. This thought makes her feel fulfilled. She likes to be played. And this might have been one of the most sophisticated plays that have even been performed at her expense.

Imagining this scenario made her excited and also conscious that no matter how the night is going to turn out, she would, one way or another, enjoy it. But then she began to wonder if there is an outcome that would be even worse than the one she had just imagined. What could be the worst to happen? (Apart from being raped and murdered which, as much as sexually somewhat arousing for her, was not a kind of fantasy she hoped to fulfill. Nor was she finding it particularly plausible. Even though she could not deny that the inability to absolutely exclude it from the range of possibilities was slightly adding to her excitement). And then, she realised what would be worse from him not showing up - him turning out to be a complete jerk. 

From the scraps that she had gathered about his line of career and his lifestyle, it was quite possible. He must have had something to do with business, money, and power, and although these traits in the D/s context are somewhat appealing, the people who are attracted to them in real life are often not the kind of people with whom she could connect. So what if it turns out that he is a rich senseless overachiever, caring only about his money and prestige, and able only to talk about his investments? What if he is brainwashed by capitalism, has no interests or opinions of his own, and is overconfident in an annoying (and deeply insecure) way?

“Now that,” she thought, “would be a real treat.”

Since her first BDSM experience, she had been fantasizing about being given away to another man by her owner (and even though at the moment she did not have an official owner, she was still fantasizing about it, the fantasy was about being given away and not the person performing the act). Why these fantasies felt so appealing to her was that they would give her a way to be fucked by people she did not willingly would get fucked by. The decision would not be up to her. And actually, being fucked by the people she did not want to be fucked by was exactly what she was so turned on by.

Like that time when she was tied up and blindfolded at a party and her partner allowed the other participants to touch and play with her. Before it had happened, she flirted with two guys, one of them turned out to be an obnoxious overconfident brute and the other was sweet, intelligent, and very interesting. During the play, immobile and blindfolded, she felt the touch of man’s hands on her breasts and a soft voice in her ear saying “It’s me,” which was supposed, she figured, to be reassuring (in her experience, people when presented with an opportunity to use her in any way they wanted tended to be overly careful and extremely unimaginative). She did not know, however, which ‘me’ it was, the brute or the sweet guy? And to her dismay, the thought of the ‘me’ being the brute was infinitely more arousing.

So she began to wonder whether she would be able to force herself to be used by someone she did not wish to be used by without being ordered to by someone else… It was an exciting possibility, the fulfillment of her darkest desires. Unfortunately, taking into account how bad she was at acting, it was highly unlikely. Yet, she could still entertain the thought.

She imagined hating him the moment they crossed their eyes, and not showing it. She imagined a conversation in which, in her head, she was countering his every word while on the outside smiling and giving him an impression of drinking the words from his mouth. She imagined him hinting at leaving the bar and continuing the evening in his room and her obediently swallowing his bait while her insides were screaming: “Get out of here!” She imagined following him in the hotel corridor. She imagined entering the room, being ordered to undress, and doing it obediently. She imagined hoping that he will take the lead and be forceful because she was not sure if she would be able to allow him to fuck her without force. She imagined him stepping up his game at least in that regard and entering her confidently and swiftly. She imagined closing her eyes and allowing her mind to drift away. She imagined him getting off on her, unconscious of the fact that she is not in the slightest enjoying what he is doing, or rather, enjoying the hilt all the ways in which he was unknowingly abusing her. She imagined her fake screams and moans. She imagined herself observing her body being plundered by a dissenter who did not deserve it in the slightest. She imagined him thinking that he does. She imagined her hating herself for allowing him to once more perpetuate the lies about his dominant masculinity that he tells himself. She imagined despising herself for being a cause of his complacent smile. 

And she loved everything about those images.

Finally, she arrived at the hotel. He was waiting for her in the lobby and turned out to be nothing of the kind she imagined him to be. Despite that, she allowed herself to be raped by him that night.