Out on a Limb

Risk v Reward

Don's heightened physical state wasn't uncommon in these moments of preparation, and while relieving the tension in his groin would take the edge off, it would also dull his senses and make him less attuned to his body and his surroundings. Holding the energy within would keep those senses razor sharp and force him to channel his lust, turning throbbing need into lightning reflex and feral speed.

Patience was also crucial to his hobby, and he could proudly say (at least to himself) that he'd gotten so much better at the virtue over the years. His evolution began long ago with ill-planned desires and premature ejaculation as he enthusiastically and frenetically strangled a strung-out homeless girl when he was just twelve years old. He mentally shook his head at himself and thought, Was I ever that young and stupid?

Years of perfecting his talents had unlocked pleasures the likes of which his younger self could never have dreamed of, and he often wished he could go back in time and teach his younger self to appreciate life's little moments. But Don knew the old adage that youth was often wasted on the young, and like so many before him understood his wisdom was ironically only made possible because of the blunders of his youth. It was the compilation of life's little experiences that allowed him to appreciate the finer moments. Moments like a session of marathon fucking his waif of a wife while her wrists were tightly bound together with the same Hermés silk scarf he used to wring out the last fatal sigh of one of her nipped and tucked, bloated and Botoxed acquaintances just a few years prior.

Sultry little Lisa.

Tonight, his reward would be just as plentiful. And once his task was finished, he would head home to Constance and fuck her front to back until she collapsed and begged for mercy, just as Lisa had. He would use the soon-to-be memory of killing her father to feed his desire all night long, and he planned on taking his full of her until her knees wobbled and she couldn't stand on her own two feet.

And when word reached her of Ferguson's death, her grief would overtake her and arouse him even more, and he would do it to her all over again. She would cling to him for solace and be heart-broken, inconsolable even. Grief-fueled intimacy was something Donald had rarely experienced, and he found himself near giddy at the thought driving himself into her while reliving the moment her father died at his hands. She would be filled with anguish and heartache, metaphorically torn in two from his sexual ministrations and mental torture, and his pleasure would be all the greater for it.

But there would be time for that, he told his body, and forced his painful erection to calm itself. For now, his focus was on his father-in-law, the decrepit, liver-spot ridden and generally nauseating Ferguson Chatterton.

Don often secretly hypothesized the man had died a decade or two previously but didn't care for the prospect of leaving anyone else in charge of business or God forbid his money, so he simply rejected the notion and carried on with his days. Never mind the fact that Ferguson's body continued to rot and gravity pulled the flesh from his brittle bones, paper-thin, sagging, dry and flaking like a snake caught in a perpetual season of moulting. No, no, no. Ferguson Chatterton had an empire to run. Death would simply have to wait.

Even now, Don could picture the eighty-two-year-old hunched over his desk when he should be decaying in a gilded box in his family mausoleum. Or even better, he daydreamed, Ferguson should be laying deep inside some unmarked hole where the maggots could freely dine on his flesh instead of competing with the other insects that seemingly held his living corpse together beneath his ten-thousand-dollar suits.

Instead, the crumbling man sat fifty feet above Don on advanced security locked floor (to which neither Don nor half of the company's executive staff had access to) while reviewing the work of underlings he neither liked nor trusted, scrawling furious notes in the margins that only his equally foul and equally geriatric executive assistant could decipher. The man revelled in the bile of his hatred and was universally known as much for the bow of his osteoarthritic form and fetid aroma as his fondness for publicly shaming others and those closest to him (if there were such a thing), and for the special kind of glee he demonstrated when it came to tormenting one Donald Fancy in particular.