FLIRTING with the BNWO

SERENA STEELE MONROE

An Ollie and Linda Tale

 

FLIRTING

with the

BNWO

 

© Copyright 2025 by Mary Not Wollstonecraft

NOTE: This work contains material not suitable for anyone under eighteen (18) or those of a delicate nature. This is a story and contains descriptive scenes of a graphic, sexual nature. This tale is a work of pure fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously—any resemblance to actual persons, whether living, deceased, real events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

 

Flirting with the BNWO

 

Present Day

 

My name is Oliver, but most people call me Ollie. I’ve been married to Linda for almost five years. She’s 26 and I’m 28. My parents, and Linda’s parents, are wealthy—filthy rich, Linda would say, when she didn’t care that I could hear. But what she should’ve said was they were filthy from getting rich. All white wealth is nasty and was obtained by terrible means.

 

We come from the kind of family that people speculated about. The average person read about us in the news and the late-night shows as overpaid comedians made jokes about how undeserved our riches were. And the minorities believe people like us got rich by trampling on their rights. And yes, they are right.

 

I wanted to tell everyone I agreed with them, but it would never matter. I hadn’t the courage to say it loud enough. Even if I did, they’d never hear. When you live at the top, your voice can’t reach the bottom, not even when you’re shouting. Unless you’re their conquered, and you said in a flash of lightning with all the accompanying thunder to shatter their souls. That wasn’t me. The way the masters talked to their slaves.

 

Besides, I’d never yelled at anyone but sometimes myself. Sometimes, I begged Linda to understand.

 

Ours was the kind of wealth that even other rich people envied. The kind that builds and devours itself and multiplies again and again. I was embarrassed, constantly embarrassed. I was humiliated, always feeling like I needed to apologize for our easy lives. To atone for the fact that our house was the size of a hotel, that we profited from others’ sufferings, and that we descended from slave-owner whites of yesteryear. I was humbled by the fact that if she wanted, Linda could buy a whole row of designer stores instead of just one outfit from each.

 

We are blessed or cursed with the wealth that insulates us from the necessity to understand we’re not that special. Where we’re not burdened with the guilt that should accompany how the money was earned. Only I was, am, and always will be guilty and feel it in the pit of my darkened soul. The darkness inside whites is so much darker than the beautiful ebony flesh of the majestic black people of the world.

 

These little troublesome things didn’t bother Linda as much as they did me. I’ve lived with it in a different way than her. My parents are actual racists. While her’s were only passively racist and had no guilt for their good fortune.

 

Their bigotry changed me. So, it wasn’t Linda’s fault she couldn’t see evil in the white race.

 

She was who she was—raised with the expectation of affluence and power and knowing no other way to be. Sometimes, I wished I could feel the same. But that is the definition of entitled. Being so wealthy, the suffering of others doesn’t affect you. Maybe I was, once, the same as her. And perhaps that’s why the guilt swelled inside me until it was as big as the houses we called our homes.

 

I gave to causes. Causes were all I had to offer. Causes like Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, the BYP, and half a dozen other organizations working to help people who would never be, could never be, people my parents would admire. Even though they were superior in every way to my mom, dad, in-laws, Linda, and me.

 

This was my world from the time I realized why our wealth was wrong. I wanted to give more. But there were limits, and I could see them all. A world of limits stretched ahead of me with nowhere to run but into another family vacation or a protest, I had no right to join.

 

When Linda and I married, it was merging two business empires. Ungodly wealth heaped up and pushed down on the two of us like a sin of covetousness multiplied and squared.

 

Everyone said I was so lucky to have landed someone as gorgeous and generous as her. She’s the one who did all the work, they said. Linda was the one who gave me something special to come home to, and it was true. It was always true, and I’d always known it. From the beginning, I wanted to make her happy in the same way, to offer something different.

 

Therefore, from the beginning, I insisted we try and pay back those who’d been wronged by the white race. Believing one way, which would thrill me, was to see her with another man from another race. Especially a well-endowed black man.

 

One night in bed, I came clean with Linda.

 

“I’d love to watch you in bed with someone besides me. To be honest, I’d like it to be a black man. Why? Because I’ve always respected the Black race for how they’ve endured. For everything they’ve gone through. I confess to you I’ve always known I’m inferior to them. We whites are all inferior to them.” I said. “Can’t you and I pay them for the sins of our race just a little.”

 

“No, dear,” Linda said, laughing and rolling away from me. “You have such silly notions.”

 

I persisted, night after night. But no matter how much I pushed it or how many angles I came from, Linda always said no.

 

“No, and no, and no, and why would you want that, Ollie, and what would it change,” she asked. She wasn’t afraid to be honest with me, never had been, so she’d said, “I don’t see the point. I’m not looking to sleep with anyone else. You’re more than enough in bed. You’re plenty. You’re what I want.”

 

And I believed her. Because she never gave me any reason not to. I told myself it was okay, that she didn’t have to. But still, I would bring it up, and still, she would say no.

 

Maybe, I thought, I wasn’t clear enough. I’d come at it from another direction. “Listen,” I said and proceeded with a new mansplaining. “I know what I want, what would make me happiest. That’s for you to be happy, to be with someone like I could never be. Someone more of a man than me.”

 

She’d laugh, and the answer stayed the same.

 

I can be very stubborn when I want to be. So I kept bringing it up, at first all the time and then less. When it was clear she wouldn’t budge, the subject was discussed less and less.

 

When I brought it after months of nothing, she didn’t get mad. Linda never gets angry. I guess that’s one of the things I love about her. It’s hard to say. I have my faults, and sometimes, the rest of the world seems very distant. Maybe I’m misinterpreting.

 

But when she gave me the same answer over and over, when time passed, and it became a familiar and quiet little joke between us, I couldn’t help myself. I tried other angles, told myself, with the right mix of logic and love and timing, I could convince her.

 

That was me, a shy coward, convinced that everyone else knew what they were doing. That’s why, when Linda and I took a trip to Jamaica, I didn’t expect much of anything. We needed time alone as a couple. Without family around or projects, I pretended to care about our money and position. Linda didn’t seem worried I’d have any strange ideas about who we’d meet.

 

The truth is, I almost didn’t. I’d mostly stopped thinking about it by the time we packed our bags and left. But once we were there, once I was on a new, foreign, and vibrant piece of land, it came back. Small, quiet, in my head, whispering possibilities into the little place where I’d let myself believe things would change.