NCS -Non Consensual Story (Part 1).

This is a work of fiction. 

Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. 

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and, frankly, undesired on the author's part.

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Joshua "Josh" Lightgow was a rich man.

He hadn't always been one, or even aimed to become one.

When he was young his dreams were much simpler. Marrying the woman he loved, have a couple of children, a house in the suburbs. Normalcy, as they say, in all its heinous glory.

It didn't work out that way - she left him for a guy with grander ambitions, a day-trader that worked at Lehman Brothers, that earned thrice as much as Josh.

As many of his colleagues, the guy had then lost everything when the Lehman imploded, but by that time she had moved onto a bigger mark... and Josh took a perverse pleasure in knowing it.

Yet , some day... some day she will have to pay.

Needless to say, when she left him Josh was really distraught.

It took him a couple of years, and a couple more of failed attempts at starting a relationship, to get back on his feet. When he finally did,  he managed to do so through a wholesome revision of his own world view.

The companions that he so desperately wanted do not exist. His drunkard father and crazily possessive mother, nuts as they were,  were right: women are, at hearts, whores looking for a wealthy man.

Thinking to build a life with one of them was foolish, completely.

His job had laid him out at the very start of his troubles, just after a month or so of his moping around. It didn't matter - the company went busted soon after, anyway, but the fact that the boss that decided to fire him was a woman didn't help matters.

John found himself writing cheap "romantic" novels for the likes of his "wife" - barely hidden rape fantasies and hyper-gamy unleashed, for dumb cows that didn't even realize how akin to bad pornography that stuff was.

The chicken idiots couldn't resist, and soon the pseudonyms Josh uses to sign his works - Valeria Steedle and Patricia Loughear - started alternating their presence in the New York Times Best Seller list.

Never above a comfortable centre-of-the-list, as to sell enough copies to pierce in the top twenty would require a lot more male readers than what Josh would care to have.

Because Josh wrote his books with the secret gusto of damaging, silently, his women readers, by trapping them in a mirror of his own unrealized romantic aspirations.

He sold copies, made money, invested it wisely, made more money, and so on.

Money begets money, they say, and it is true.

All this notwithstanding, Josh was merrily unhappy and unsatisfied. He really couldn't outgrow her and what she did to him, though a well padded wallet was a way better cushion than an empty one, upon which to rest while crying his pain out.

He went on for quite a while in this way, till he realized that he really needed a catharsis, a vengeance - to get rid of her, so that his heart could finally be sated.

Little did he knew, in reality, of freedom and life... his quest for vengeance wasn't something capable to set a man free, but what we ignore cannot save us fro our follies, and he set forth to plan the execution of his great vengeance.

Always a methodical man, he realized that he needed to arrange a dry run, a test run of himself in the new role of God of vengeance.

Maybe some smarter part of him, deep down where his eyes couldn't reach, was just trying to buy some time.

He decided to start with a morsel less dangerous than his socialite, well connected wife.

Not a bleeding liberal heart he was, yet he knew the difference between destroying some black dregs of a woman and a rich WASP, when it comes to law enforcement response, to be true.

The first would have maybe warranted a routine search, the second would have gotten far more media attention and drawn a full effort on the part of the police.

So, reason said him to start with someone that could disappear without being missed, one of the poor saps that read his drivel preferably - because, deep down, he hated them wholeheartedly - and, if possible, a black girl of particularly African looks. The less the white-looking, the better. 

Kyla was 12, when her stepfather decided that she was woman enough to meet his needs.

The next few years had been hell, as her mother - with a logic as insane as heartless - decided to hate her for having "stolen" her her man. He abused her time and again, while mother treated her more and more coldly, till Kyla found the strength - or the desperation- to run away.

Life in the street for her proved to be brutal, but still better than what she had at home, and she had an unexpected shot of luck.

One of her clients gave her a hand, a place to stay and helped her found a job as a cleaning maid - all she could get with her non-existent degrees.

She recompensed him with plenty of sex, of course, but he was kind of a right guy... he didn't choke her, beat her,  tried to rape her nor did he stole anything from her.  By the time they had met, in Kyla's book this already read as being, positively, a gentleman.

He was a lecherous looking guy with insane habits, so much so that he called himself "leach", yet he was a huge step upward from her stepfather.

They separated after a couple of years or so -  because she had grown up a bit and, with a better diet, she had finally started looking like a woman; a fact that profoundly disgusted him, as much as he tried to hide it.

His shortcomings notwithstanding, he had left her able to stand - shaky as she was - on her own feet, and she vowed herself to never come back to whoring again, so Kyla decided to keep cleaning houses for a living, study at night, and went through life baring her knuckles on a daily basis. She was a though young woman, yet she was not yet a cynic. In her moments of respite, she read romantic novels, and dreamt of wealthy guys with athletic bodies that could see beyond her wasted hair, her precociously wrinkled eyes and her sore hands.

She suspected these novels to be a pornography of the soul, written for and by sad women, but she didn't really care. As "leach" said the last time she saw him - skinnier than even she had ever been, even at the worst time of her life - in the hospital, toward his end...

- "No matter if it is stupid, shameful or even illegal, kid. Take whatever you need to go on, step by step, and the rest... let it go."

When the hospital letter finally came in, telling her that she had won "the lottery" and she didn't catch the damned bug from the guy, she went out to buy the last Patricia Loughear novel, and hooked up to the shabby plot with a happy bliss. In her own way she was following his last, and only, advise.

When "leach" finally died, two months after, she finally wrote to Patricia Loughlear, unwinding all the stress, the tears, the troubles of her crappy little life, in a moving letter written with an earnest heart.

Josh read that letter, laughing all the time like an idiot, almost at every phrase - eager as Kyla was to improve herself, she was still a functional illiterate with a flair for excessive melodrama, and Josh had completely lost his ability to empathize with others - and he immediately decided that she was the right subject for the experiment.

Nobody would miss her.  She was already a zombie, in more than one way, no family, almost no friends... a living dead, waiting to be finally put to rest.

Josh felt obliged to help such a loving reader finally find the peace that she was so evidently longing for. And she had put her full address, on the envelope.

Josh found a flat, in the building in front of her, from which to observe his prey, while he looked for a bigger, more private place in the countryside around her city.

He replied to her letter, using a bright orange envelope, than flew to the flat, in order to be there by the time the letter arrived. This way, he was able to see that, indeed, she was the person that he deduced from the many clues that she put in her letters.

He soon bought a farm, in a small town not far from the city.

The place was quite secluded, the nearest construction being almost a mile away, and it was surrounded by woods. It also had an anti-atomic bunker, a remnant of another era when the U.S. was in the grips of hysteria, now used as a storage area for food.

Just seeing it, Josh thought plenty of better ways to use the ancient underground complex, so he was more than happy to pay a slightly higher price for aplace with such a marvellous dungeon.

The area was losing population, like the nearby town - people was driven away by the loss of jobs after the closure of the local plastic factory, and the fear of unrecoverable, long term environmental dangers due to the former's dispersal of toxic materials. Undoubtedly, it was going to become yet another ghost town, another monument to the backsides of the American Dream,

He rented an apartment in the palace in front of Kyla's flat, to keep an even closer eye on her, and proceeded to alternate living between there and the farm. He emptied the bunker, and bought some "furniture " for it,

Her life was even sadder than what he thought from her letter. Getting her rid of it was going to be, almost, a good action.

Josh decided to move calmly, writing a new Valeria Steedle book in the meanwhile, with two point of view characters, one for when he was working in the farm, one for when he was checking on Kyla - "Aftermaths"... it became a huge success, and it woke up a career that had grown quite opaque, much to the chagrin of its writer.


The last thing Josh wanted, right now, was the distraction of having to manage a literary success beyond his usual, comfortable middle of the list. For the first time, he had to contemplate using some kind of front-woman to play the role of Valeria Steedle... luckily for him, his agent had contingency plans for the case.

Valeria Steedle was soon played by a washed out theatre actress, without more hassle - for Josh - than jotting down some stage notes for the impersonator , every now and then. A drain of his energies, but not one so deep as he initially feared...

Meanwhile, his observation of Kyla's life led him to discover that she was taking a course in creative writing, at night, in a community college. He decided to enrol in it, to be nearer her.

He still  couldn't imagine how to kidnap her, without leaving too many clues about what had really happened. Initially he thought that he would have had to hide his literary talents, but he soon discovered that it was not necessary. Million copies sellers as he was, his writings did not excite any of the people in the course, least of all the teacher, one hard mean ghost writer, specialized in biographies, by the name of Liam Marder.

Josh had to fight, time and again, the desire of leaving the course after this or that cutting remark from Marder. In this, it was not any better than what Kyla had to endure... after a couple of months, Josh had managed to become friend of Kyla, united by their struggle with the mysteries of the English language.

By the end of the course, though, Josh managed to let drop that he was not going to follow it the next year - he didn't need to continue the charade any more, and didn't want his desire of abducting Marder grow any bigger.

He confided Kyla that he had found a job as a ghost-writer, but that he would have needed some help, and that everything was to be kept on the hush-hush: he didn't want to risk that someone of the others could steal his occasion.

After another month and a half, Josh contacted Kyla - he really needed a critical editor, someone who could read his notes and help him polish the style.  he offered her the job, a bit better paid than her cleaning work, but nothing otherworldly.


Initially, she worked at home, correcting what were the first chapters of Josh first - and only - foray into science fiction. Soon, she came to recognize that working with Josh, at the studio in the farm, was probably better. 

On a spring morning, she took the bus to Downtown, and climbed in Josh's old Roadmaster, with all the things that she had in a couple of bags, her heart full of newfound hope. Not having to pay the rent of her ludicrously small flat while having a more spacious room in the farm was a bonus she had decided to take.

She was going to be a writer, and was really happy of having this opportunity with Josh.

Josh was a soda maniac, so she had never saw him drink anything that was not carbonated and caffeinated.

When he finally made his move, she didn't realize anything was different - he never drank water from her same bottle, anyway. She fell asleep while redressing a particularly convoluted paragraph, one that reminded her of certain not so satisfying passages in Patricia Loughlear's works.

When she awoke, she was naked and chained to a bed, in a place that she had never seen before.

It was, of course, just the start.