Island Paradise
In Two Parts
By Joshua Ryan
This is a story about adults, and for adults only. It is entirely a work of fiction.
PART 1
Chapter 1: Greetings from Your Vacation Planner
I’d never heard of the place before Roger mentioned it. Roger was my online friend. We’d been chatting about BDSM stuff; that’s how I met him, on a BDSM site. That night. we were getting into prisons and chain gangs.
“But if you are seriously interested in the study of penal servitude,” he said, “I would recommend that you examine St. Bevons. It has, allow me to suggest, appropriate ideas on the subject of penal labor.”
That’s the way Roger wrote. I hadn’t been chatting with him very long, but I’d learned a few things about him. He came from an Indian family that had settled in the West Indies, and he’d been sent to school in England. It wasn’t natural for him to use contractions or not to spell an idea all the way out. “If you are seriously interested in the study of penal servitude . . . . ” I could imagine the way he pronounced the phrase: in-ter-EST-ed, PEE-nall, SERR-vi-tude. He never discussed his profession except to say that it involved “international investments, that sort of thing.” When I replied, “That’s what I did too, before I’d made enough money to quit,” he didn’t rise to the bait. He wouldn’t say much more about himself—although his reference to “staying in Switzerland for a while—business again” and his comment that “the hot men in Paris always seem to cluster around the Ritz, especially if they have no money” let me know what social class I was dealing with.
“What’s St. Bevons?” I asked.