Read Paradise - Part Two (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant) for Free Online Page B

of women and yachts, jewelry and fast cars. As I further withdraw into silence, the old geezers get up one by one and leave me. Most of them are older than me. Fifties and sixties. They’ve had more time to make their money, but they don’t have near as much. And what does it all really mean; not a whole hell of a lot. Fuck all , as Gerry would say.
    Now I’m to have what could very well be my final meeting with him tomorrow. I’ve decided not to meet him in the same place for security reasons. I go over all the reasons for our meeting tomorrow. After all the fuckups he’s committed the bastard doesn’t have any reason to breathe in my eyes. He’s screwed so many of us and eaten our money and now it looks as though he’s about to screw me again. All the orders were a mess. Details were deliberately obscured. Gerry can tell me which orders are in play, but when it comes to the details, which I’ve asked him about again and again on various occasions, he invariably mixes up the facts. Makes me wonder if there are any facts at all. Or if it’s all made up. I’m not a killer but he makes me want to become one. No, leave that mess for somebody else, I tell myself. Let that be on someone else’s head.
    And then my mind inevitably turns back to Sophia. Thinking back on the drive to the waterfall and the passionate encounter that followed, I wonder if she’s some sort of witch. Remembering certain instances under the waterfall in the fading dusk light, I begin to think that what happened has slipped beyond my control. She’s doing things to my head. It feels like an irresistible force that’s greater than me. This is when the obsession starts. When this insanity of not being able to divert the attention away from her overtakes. Not being able to take a breath without seeing her in the mind’s eye. Even though no one will ever read this and I will delete it after reading it over in the morning, I feel embarrassed at even admitting it to myself. But I also feel that perhaps by admitting to it here I will finally, once and for all, be able to let it go.
    I put off seeing Sophia, and I put it off. True, I have much work to do, seemingly around the clock, and that does occupy much of my thoughts. Sophia takes up a lot of the rest of my thinking. Before I go to bed at night, my mind rolls around to her like clockwork. When I wake up, she is the first image that comes to mind. Even during the gaps in my sleep, when I wake up thinking over a problem in the middle of the night, I always eventually think I see her standing over my problem, smiling at me like she has the answer and I never will. Are these thoughts of one slowly losing his grip? The beginnings of an ensuing madness? An ultimate corruption of a mind that tried so hard for so long to remain level enough to accomplish the nerve-racking tasks that have led old Mark to this empty plateau of materialism. Of course I don’t really mean that, I am only trying to impress her with these thoughts, which are normally so foreign to my nature. I love to dominate and control, but I sense these instincts even more strongly in her than in myself and I feel the instinctive urge to bow to them. It is like an uncontrollable magnetic force that makes me feel this way, but I will not submit. Sophia, I will reverse this trend and overcome you. Of course I know it is a sign of my delusions when I begin to think anything about sweet Sophia is willfully attempting to dominate me. There’s nothing in her at all remotely capable of these thoughts and feelings. It’s me projecting myself onto her. I’ve got to stop. And with that, dear diary, I’m signing off.
     
    Sophia Durant’s Diary (continued)
     
    On finishing the entry I immediately went back to look for the prior entry I had read a few days before. It wasn’t there. I had it backed up on the MacBook of course, but it had been deleted from his phone. I looked for any previous entries. There were none. So Stafford was a cautious