FICTIONALIZED SERIES
Lost In A Charm Offensive
No Consent #6: 28 February 1994: The corporal — The moment he launched his charm offensive, she was lost.
Series content warning: Mental and physical abuse, grooming and
gaslighting, bigotry and shaming, naivety and immaturity.
This is a fictionalized story of real events.Start reading here
She was in the office of her commander when the phone rang in Annie’s next-door office. Annie grabbed the receiver from the phone on the desk in front of her, typed in a short code, and picked up the call from next door.
“Sergeant Annie Bancroft speaking. Good morning.”
“Sergeant, this is Corporal Paul White speaking. I believe we have a mutual friend. He works in the same buil…”
“Corporal, may I ask you to call me back later? I’m in a meeting,” Annie interrupted the man when she realized that the call was personal.
“Of course. What time can I call you, sergeant?” he asked demurely.
“In about an hour.”
Exactly an hour later, Annie spoke to the same man.
“What I tried to say earlier is that our mutual friend works in the same building as you. He promised you would go out with me.”
“Oh, and that’s a fact?” Annie asked, sarcasm dripping from her voice.
She instantly jumped to a conclusion of who this mutual friend might be, and it was someone she would definitely not call a friend.
“Come on, sergeant, are you really going to refuse an evening out with me?”
“How old are you, corporal?”
“Twenty-one, sergeant,” the self-confident voice quickly answered.
“That’s far too young for me.”
“So what?” the smart-ass asked.
“That means,” Annie said, with clear irritation in her voice, “I will not go out with you. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever! And, if the mutual friend is whom I think it is, he has a lot to explain. So if you will excuse me…”
“Annie, Annie, c’mon! Wait! It’s me! Fred.”
Struck dumb, Annie went quiet, still holding the phone to her ear. She knew exactly who the man on the other side of the line was.
Fred.
The owner of the smallholding.
The smallholding where the party was two days earlier.
She clearly recalled the last image of him where he lay on his bed wearing only his underpants, which did nothing to hide the impressive bulge. Annie also recalled the first moment she saw him, his piercing blue eyes, his dark hair, the strong facial features and his lean, muscular body. He wasn’t younger than her; in fact, he was almost ten years her senior.
“I’ve read the letter you sent Fran, and when I did, I really wanted to meet you. Who had thought that would happen at the party? I never expected that! I watched you all evening and I am pretty satisfied with what I saw.”
He paused for a moment, as if waiting for a reaction, but continued before Annie could say a thing.
“You were by far the cutest and sexiest woman at the party. The moment you and your two friends joined us on Saturday, I knew it: this is the woman we want. I want to know who this woman is. This is a woman who can be trusted, who we can allow into our lives. You are definitely the one for us.”
His confident, charming words were more than Annie could handle. While he talked, she noticed herself warming to him.
A lot.
Being as lonely as she was and wanting so much to hear a man say all those wonderful things to her, she was an easy victory for Fred.
When the call ended, she sat there staring at the phone, aware she had just made a date to go to the movies with Fred on Wednesday evening. He would pick her up at six, and had even asked what her favorite wine was.
Why?
Annie didn’t know.
Her thoughts were a mess, but not once did she think about Fran, Fred’s wife.
Continued… No Consent #7
Find all chapters here
This is the rework of a fictionalized auto-biographical story, self-published as a book in 2008, and rewritten for this platform. The story comes with a content warning of mental and physical abuse, misogyny. Names of characters have been changed, not to protect them, but to protect me.
Another series written by me:
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