Chapter 1
Carol Mallatesta worked for the Credential Insurance Company as a claims investigator. Though she rarely left the home office of the Credential Company, she was the one who, based on data given her by field investigators, decided whether or not to pay a claim. It was a pretty straightforward job, and Carol did it to the best of her ability, which was to say, with a vengeance. Carol was a man-hater. She hated any and all creatures with a cock, from a fruit fly to a whale. As far as Carol was concerned, only the female of the species had any value to her.
Naturally, more than ninety-five percent of the claimants were men. The other five percent, the women, received their money almost immediately. But every man was put under careful scrutiny, and if Carol was able to find any reason whatsoever for denying a claim, she did so. As a matter of fact, she often denied a claim was valid, and the claimant, unaware he had recourse to the State Insurance Department, usually let the matter drop.
Now in her early twenties, Carol had discovered, against her will, that she was highly sexually oriented. However, hating men as she did, Carol did the only thing she was able to do under the circumstance; she became a lesbian.
Where she was a dominant figure at the insurance company, bossing men around, shoving underlings hither and thither, Carol was most definitely the cow-dyke in her relationship with Ann Mason, a sixty-two year old bull dyke with whom she had become friendly a year earlier. At home, Carol was extremely subservient. What made Ann a very powerful bull dyke was the fact that she hadn't discovered her lesbianism until she was in her mid-forties. Ann had fucked around routinely with men, but had always found it unpleasant. Then, immediately after giving birth to her illegitimate son, Albert Kalawrence-giving him his illegitimate father's last name-Ann had enjoyed a most satisfactory relationship with a hospital nurse. The nurse had, herself, been a cow-dyke, begging Ann to whip her, kick, and humiliate her, and Ann had discovered an immense amount of pleasure in doing so. As her son grew to adolescence, Ann began living with other women, and her latest live-in love was Carol Mallatesta. Ann had to admit, Carol was the best one of them all, to date.
What Ann enjoyed most was humiliating Carol in front of her growing son, whom she insisted keep his hands off Carol. Not that Albert was going to be a normal human being anyway. He was already much too short for his age, and he had a huge inferiority complex, especially when it came to girls, which pleased his mother to no end. The boy was a little jerk, and she detested him.
Carol also detested Ann's son, but the fat old bull-dyke's hold on Carol was, at that moment, too strong. Carol was unable to get away.
However Carol continued being a bitch-on-wheels at work. Most of her correspondence with claimants was through the mails. However, every now and again they called up on the phone to try and find out why she was denying their claim. Carol always recorded these phone calls. This way, if anyone claimed she was discourteous, she would always be able to play the recording back for her supervisor, a woman, and prove there was never any discourtesy on her part. But Carol had a way with words that aroused the anger in men so that they almost always ended up calling her some kind of unsavory name on the phone, which was all the excuse she ever needed for hanging up. She almost always knew what to say in her acid-sweet voice.
For instance, that was that conversation with that architect.