Prequel Two: Nora
Nora Henderson was always told that she could be whatever she wanted to be as long as she put effort into it.
Even when she was a little girl and all she wanted to be was a princess, her father would pull her into his arms, hold her close, and tell her that if she wanted to be a princess, she could do it.
"Dream big, baby," he'd say. "The world needs more princesses."
When she came to him and told him she wanted to be a pirate, he'd laughed, leaned down, and ruffled her hair. "What kind of pirate?"
"What do you mean?" she'd asked, head tilted to one side.
"Well, most pirates are bad, you know? They go around stealing things that don't belong to them and they keep all the profits for themselves. They aren't very nice."
And little Nora had screwed up her face and thought about that. She didn't want to be mean to people, and she knew stealing was wrong. So instead she nodded her head and declared "I'll be a pirate pirate!"
"A pirate pirate?" her dad asked. "What's that, butter bean?"
"A pirate who steals stuff from other pirates and takes it back to who it belongs to."
And her dad had laughed, but been so proud of his smart, sweet little girl that he'd taken her out for ice cream.
Nora didn't understand how a person could just want to be one thing and stick with that for their whole lives. When she was old enough to understand that her parents had jobs that they did, she'd asked them how they'd decided on these jobs. How did they know that these were the things they wanted to do forever?
"Because I paid a lot of money to go to school and learn how to do it," her mother had told her. As a CPA, she was ever practical and money minded. "And I'm good at it."
"But is it fun?" Nora wanted to know.
Her mother smiled and shook her head. "Not always. But it's nice to be good at something."
Her father was an architect, and she knew that he had been responsible for helping some of the nicest places in the city get built. That sounded more interesting than what her mother did, dealing with numbers all day, and she went to him with the same question.
"No one says you have to do the same thing forever," he told her. "You can change it up as much as you want, as long as you can still make ends meet. I like what I do. I get to build different things all the time, and even when I'm gone, there will be evidence of what I did in the city left behind."
"Where are you going?" Nora had asked, confused.
And that was an entirely different conversation.
By the time she was seventeen, Nora had worked twelve different jobs. She'd gone from lemonade stands to car washes to her aunt's ice cream shop to her cousin's food truck, just to name a few. Her summers were a blur of activity, learning new skills and trying to figure out what she liked best about them.
Of course, working so much meant that she had plenty of money on hand, but it wasn't about that for her. She was into it for the experience, not the cash. But the cash was nice, she had to admit.
Her parents were proud of her. 'Good work ethic' they said. Her grandparents worried that she was working too much, but she always reassured them that if she didn't have something to do, she would go nuts.
She spent the summer before college working in a mechanics shop owned by the older brother of her high school boyfriend, Jared. Before then, she'd only known how to change a tire, but she left that summer with a brain full of knowledge, as well as a new car that she'd helped put together and knew she could maintain herself.
She did not leave with Jared, although she knew that his older brother thought she looked good in her little shorts.
“So you just...Jesus decided to come back for a visit? All....mmm...spur of the moment and stuff?"
Nora laughed into her arm where her head was pillowed on it. She hadn't really intended for the night to go like this, but well, she wasn't going to complain. There were worse things that could have happened than her ending up bent over a workbench in the mechanic shop she'd worked in a year ago.
And Paul, her ex boyfriend's older brother, was still as attractive as ever, all stubble and deep voice and rough hands that seemed to have no problems grabbing at her even though she'd once gone out with his brother.
"Is that a problem?" she asked, sounding just as breathless as he had when he spoke.
Now it was his turn to laugh, and he shook his head, one hand slipping from her waist to palm the curve of her bottom. "Definitely not a problem."
She really had stopped by just to check in and see how the place was doing. Many of her fondest memories of that summer were in this shop, and Nora had just wanted to see how things were coming along. And then Paul had been there, shirtless, grinning, and wiping grease from his hands, and well. One thing had led to another.
Or rather, her shameless ogling had led to him teasing her, which had led to her kissing him, which had led to him backing her up against the bench, which had led to her being bent over it, her skirt hiked up around her hips and her panties pulled off and flung somewhere.
He was pushing into her again and again, the slow drag of his cock against her inner walls making her weak at the knees.”
“God,” she groaned, pushing back against him and biting her lip.
He laughed again. “No, my name is Paul,” he teased.
She went tight around him just to tease back and enjoyed the yelp she got in response.
“You’re in trouble now,” he said, and he grabbed for her wrists with one hand and held them tightly at the small of her back.
Her heart leapt into her throat at being held down like that, and she moaned almost involuntarily. No one had ever done that to her before, and she found that she liked it a heck of a lot more than she had been expecting to.
Paul seemed to pick up on that, and he tightened his fingers just a bit, his tone cocky as he asked “Oh, you like that, don’t you?”
All Nora could really do was moan in response because it seemed rather obvious that she liked it quite a bit. She could feel herself getting slicker for him, her legs spread just that bit wider, and she began to push back into his thrusts even more, almost like she was begging for him with her body.
He liked that, obviously, if the low, throaty chuckle he gave in response was anything to go by. The hand that wasn't keeping her wrists held tight slid down again, and he slapped her butt hard, making her jump and cry out.
"You're so pretty, did you know that?" he murmured, bent low over her body so he could speak into her ear. The feeling of his warm breath tickling the side of her face made her shiver. "I used to watch you when you worked here. Walking around in those little shorts and tank tops. I was so jealous of my brother. He didn't know what he had."
Paul punctuated his words with a particularly hard thrust from his cock, and Nora cried out, trembling under him. "He didn't have me," she managed to gasp, so dangerously close to falling apart for him. "I wasn't his possession."
He chuckled at that, and she was gratified to hear that he sounded just as breathless as she felt. "No," Paul said. "You weren't, were you? He had the privilege of being with you, and he didn't even realize how special you were."
"Were?"
"Are," Paul said, laughing outright. "How special you are."
They were pretty words, but Nora was more interested in the heat that was building between her legs as he pushed into her again and again. It wouldn't be long now, that was for sure, and she could already feel the low tightening in her belly as he worked himself as deep as he could, taking her closer and closer to her climax.
"Come on," he grunted, his thrusts growing erratic. "Come on. I want you to come for me. Come on, pretty girl. Let me see you come."
Even if she'd wanted to make him wait for her pleasure, there was no way she could. Already she was gasping and falling apart for him, moaning his name as she came, shaking and choking back a little sob at the sheer force of it.
It felt so good, and when he came, she stayed slumped over the workbench, trying to remember how to breathe.
"That good, huh?" Paul asked, taking care of the condom in the trash can and then fixing his pants back into place.
"I plead the fifth," Nora replied. She finally managed to stand up, and she tugged her skirt down, glancing around for her panties before giving them up as lost forever in the mess of the shop. No doubt someone would find them later, giving Paul ample reason to brag about what had happened, but she found that she couldn't really bring herself to care all that much. If he wanted to tell people that he'd had her over the bench, then so be it. She'd allowed it, and she wasn't ashamed.
See, the thing about Nora was that she fit in pretty much anywhere she wanted to. She could hang out and sleep with guys like Paul, guys like Jared and her other male friends. She could hang out with the girls on the cheerleading squad at her school, the chess club kids, the tech kids, the science kids, the theater kids. She could move between each group with as much ease as anything else, but she never really felt like she belonged anywhere. None of the hobbies that she picked up, or the odd jobs, or the skills ever seemed to click with her, and as she got older, she started to wonder if there were some people who just never found their thing.
"You're thinking about it too much," Kenya said as she laid back on the bed. "That's your problem. It's like the boiling water thing, you know?"
Nora frowned, looking at her with her head tilted to the side. "The...boiling water thing?" That was a new one.
"You know," her friend insisted, raising an arm so she could flap it in her general direction. "That whole thing about how watched pots never boil. You need to pretend like you don't care and it will come to you."
That was easy for Kenya to say, all things considered. She had a law degree and plans to further that until she passed the bar and became an attorney. Knowing her friend and her voracious appetite for arguments and climbing the ladder the way she did, she would probably be a partner at a law firm before she was thirty.
And Nora was happy for her, she really was. She liked it when her friends were happy, and rarely was Kenya happier than when she was debating or doing mock trials or shopping for pencil skirts and heels designed to put the fear of God into a man's heart because of how sharp and tall they were.
At six feet and two inches, Kenya didn't even need heels to be intimidating, but Nora liked that she wore them all the same.
Kenya was beautiful, too, in an unselfconscious way that Nora didn't think she would ever stop envying. She had flawless dark skin, a mass of dark curls that she usually kept in two strand twists that fell around her shoulders, and deep brown eyes that were nearly always sparkling with some kind of mischief.
She didn't wear much makeup, and she always looked flawless. Nora had seen her in one of the pencil skirt/white blouse/blazer/kill a man heels outfits that she planned to wear every day at the office when she got her first real job, and Nora already knew that all the men there would be eating out of the palm of her hand before too long.
That wasn't even the part she was the most envious of, all things considered. Sure, Kenya was beautiful, but Nora wasn't bad to look at, according to the men she knew. It was the self- assurance. Kenya knew what she wanted, she had a plan to go get it, and she knew how it was all going to work out.
That was something Nora would have given almost anything to feel. She was young, just twenty-two, and there was a whole world ahead of her, but she didn't know what she wanted.
Her father had always told her that she could do anything she wanted, but it was impossible to feel any kind of joy in that when she didn't know what she wanted in the first place.
"You're actually really upset about this, aren't you?" Kenya asked, sitting up and peering at her.
"No," Nora lied. "It's okay. Just, you know, graduation makes everything seem like it needs to be already figured out, and I don't have anything figured out. My grandma has expectations, you know." She tried to say it lightly, like it was a joke, and honestly that part was the joke.
The only person with high expectations of her was herself.
She wanted to be somebody when she got older. She didn't want to be thirty and find out that she'd wasted her life doing something she didn't love. The issue was that she liked everything she'd tried just fine, but there was no passion there. Everything was tolerable, she could see herself being fine with doing it, but it was never something she knew she'd want to do every single day for the rest of her life. Or until she retired.
Looking back, Nora remembered the things her parents had told her that kept them going to work every day. The reasons they had gotten into their fields. She wanted to do better than that. She wanted a passion.
"Maybe you just need to get laid," Kenya said, which struck Nora as odd until she realized she'd said that part out loud.
"No," she countered. "I don't think that's what it is."
"Really?" Kenya asked, suddenly delighted. "Because you've been getting laid already? Spill."
Nora shook her head and rolled her eyes. "That isn't what I meant," she said.
"Uh huh. But you're not denying it. Just like that time you didn't deny it when Paul Sherman was telling everyone who would listen that he bent you over a desk."
"Workbench," Nora corrected instantly, absently.
"Details."
"Are important."
"The point is," Kenya said louder, sitting up just to spear her with a sharp look. "That you need something to take your mind off of this. It's the summer after our last year of undergrad. We're supposed to be having the time of our lives. Making memories now so we don't feel so bad when we don't have time to do anything but work later."
"Have you ever considered motivational speaking?" Nora deadpanned. "Because you have a knack for it."
Eyes rolling, Kenya pointed a finger at her. "Listen," she said. "You're one of my closest friends, and I don't want to see you work yourself into an early grave. Or worry yourself into one. So we're going to go out, and we're going to do something other than talk about this. Okay?"
It was phrased like a question, but Nora knew she didn't really have a choice in the matter. When Kenya was determined to make something happen, it usually happened.
"Fine, okay," Nora agreed. It wasn't as if she had anything better to do, after all.