So saying, his hand roughly drew back the scratchy coverlet, exposing Chastity’s creamy pearl thighs to his gaze.
“My lord!” Chastity gaspingly cried, her cheeks and eyes ablaze with new flames. “How dare you . . . and she fumbled for the words of indignance, regretting her wanton behavior of a moment ago and the shameful degradation to which it would now undoubtedly—surely, how could it not?—lead. She moistened her lips and arched her back in a delicate show of maidenly modesty.
“Ah, yes,” whispered his lordship, slowly lifting the hem of her gown. “This is what I wanted. . . . ”
And as Chastity’s eyes closed and rolled up in her head in a near-swoon, Lord Hawk plucked the ruby from her garter and sprung from the bed.
“Come, Chastity! We have no time to lose!”
Middle of Chapter 18
, with a kiss that fell on her drenched mouth like a rain of fire.
She ran her hands across his cravat and made noises like a wounded kitten. His gigantic hands stroked her firmly, surely, up and down the bodice of her gown in the back and on the sides. And then his fingers brushed almost within an inch below the most womanly part of the bodice, and she felt herself flush and blush hot and cold with electricity which hadn’t yet been discovered unless you counted its sudden appearance on Chastity’s flesh.
“Oh, my lord,” she sighed, losing her senses to what was right or proper anymore as his hot breath bathed her neck.
“Chastity,” he groaned, as an emotion like an arrow with a thick volcanic shaft pierced the very center of his manly feeling.
Suddenly, he pushed her down onto the emerald grass, his muscular form soon closely joining hers as he covered her with his virile hardness and scent.
“What is it, my darling?” she whispered, tossing back her hair and panting like a randy jackal.
“Oh, I’ll show you what it is,” he husked in his warm, moist baritone. Reaching over her supple form, saying, “I’ll show you what it is, all right . . .”
Lord Hawk pointed at the horizon.
“Highwaymen, coming this way. Stay down! I’ll be right back!”
Somewhere in Chapter 23
ripped off her bodice, crying, “Oh, my darling, here it is!”
And she quickly wrapped the sprigged muslin around his bloody head, wondering if she’d ever see him conscious again, just when she’d started to think that she realized she didn’t hate him so much after all.
Somewhere Near the Beginning of Chapter 30
And so he had finally explained it all, and she couldn’t be mad at him any more. “The fortune was rightfully mine all along, and he was a spy for the King!” she thought again, smiling contentedly.
Middle of Chapter 30
“Come sit on my lap, my lovely bride,” he rumbled. Just then, Lady Dogatha trotted in with a whole litter of adorable puppies following behind. Chastity’s musical giggle tinkled in harmony with Duke Ian Hawk’s low chuckle as they laughed and laughed.
Page 297
Up the stairs, onto her satin-coated bed.
“But wait,” she said, suddenly remembering. “Whatever happened to the . . .
Page 300
very, very slowly and softly on her brow. And then he sat up and removed her first slipper, stopping to remark on the daintiness and petite rapturous beauty of each toe.
Page 301, which is the last damned page and had better be good
“My darling, darling, darling Duke of Hawkston,” she groaned musically as he caressed her swollen bosom through the silk-ribbon-embroidered microfiber of her shimmery lingerie. Her miniscule hands traveled along his rippling chest while he buried his head into the vastness of her cleavage, kissing her there with wistfully delicious abandon. Then, with a swirling phantasm of pleasure, he unbuttoned the top of the gown and exposed her glorious orbs for all of himself to see.
“You’re so, so beautiful. You’re the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen,” he whispered tenderly, moving his fingers lightly along the sides of her large, free-standing mounds. And then those same fingers touched the tiny buds of passion, causing a torrent of molten ecstasy to course through her blood like a freight train.
“My darling!” she moaned orgiastically. “Have all of me! Have all of me now!”
Before she could cajole him sweetly further, his mouth was upon those soft, hardened nodules of pleasure at the tips of her satiny globes. He sucked at them sensuously, eagerly, deeply, causing her blood to sing with molten joy. She didn’t think such joy was possible, not until, gently pushing her down among the silken heaps of pillows, he lightly parted her velvety thighs and, in a heated frenzy of titanic desire, inserted the male gloriousness of himself into her very core, all the way up to the fire-driven hilt.
Her head swam in the depths of a passion so intense, it was as if a thousand rose petals had floated down onto two thousand pink candles, igniting into a rich, fiery glow that infused her very soul with its turbulent, torrential, volcanic warmth. She felt herself falling over into an immense canyon of searing desire, only to be buoyed up again by a flowing current of dense, turgid, pure animal lust. And that sweet, gentle, soft lust slowly swelled beneath her, around her, alongside her, above . . . bringing with itself a need for something greater than herself. That sugary need, that soaring want, that heavenly aching within her most womanly center built and carried her higher. And still it built, and built, and built up some more. And then . . .
With one, final, soft kiss, the Duke of Hawklington, her new husband, rolled off of her and next to her side.
“My sweet darling Chastity,” he sighed, “you have just made me the happiest man in the world.”
With a brilliant smile, the new Duchess closed her pretty eyes and went to sleep.
Fin.
The Gai Jin Perspective
WORKING TITLE UNTIL I GET A JAPANESE OR CHINESE DICTIONARY
The second shot grazed his ear. By the third he was plunging into the icy cold water, moving downstream and out of range. He could hold his breath for seven minutes if necessary. But the bomb in his hand had thirty seconds left. If he emerged now he could throw it into the midst of the guerrillas and kill them all. He could also be shot. Better to wait until he’d reached the shadows under the concrete ledge.
There wasn’t much time left to consider the matter. His shoulder was starting to ache from the sword gash. The sharks were probably attracted to the smell. He kicked another one away.
Fifteen more seconds.
Just then he remembered: N always set the bomb timers wrong. Dangerous affliction, dyslexia. That meant . . .
Zero. The ashes rained down.
Major Anthony Kendrick—not his real name, of course; no one knew that—watched the woman from across the room. At first he’d thought her a local peasant but the unconvincing rhythm of her tread as she carried him to her hut made him suspicious. Once in front of the fire she removed her yak hide njingitsa, revealing a tight, short dress and five inch heels, and then he knew. She was probably a member of the American press.
She bandaged his forehead. Her breasts jutted before him like fleshy Z19 missiles—the missiles no one knew about but N, the Prime Minister and, of course, him.
“Water?” she asked.
“What’s your name?”
Her mouth was all over his. Her tongue moved in quick short thrusts. So much like the other woman. But that was so long ago. How could this woman know about that? So many years ago, and her breasts like grenades . . .
It almost worked. She had succeeded in distracting him for a moment but once he smelled the cordite and mercuric iodide residue in her hair, he knew.
This was the one he’d been searching for.
The only question now: what action would be best for the Crown? He could easily reach around to her right earlobe and smash with his fingers the lo-tsin-nguyen point just under the skin, killing her instantly. He could merely disable her optic nerve and then ransack the room. He could give her a really bad case of diarrhea . .
.
No. He knew what he would do. Three years of being Commander Kruskatov’s whore made a woman useful for one kind of punishment: Dosinjai.
The hand reaching to smash her ear instead gave it a hair-trigger-light touch that caused her to moan with intense pleasure. He followed this with a firm slapping motion on her left buttock that was in counterpoint to the rhythm of his pulse. Her moans became louder.
It was all coming back to him. All those years of training at the hands of Master Qxackwan and his many concu bines with breasts shaped like a wide variety of things. His years of studying Dosinjai, the ancient art of conquering a woman’s body with a man’s bo lo nai.
A deft touch here, a short caress there, a quick poke . . . he was done. She was finished. She had undergone a physical experience so potent it would leave her unable to respond to any other man. She would forget all about The Cause and wander the streets in delirium.
Once again Her Majesty’s kingdom was safe.
For now.
How to Be a Trailer Trash Housewife
The Choice
I picked sky-blue for the color of our doublewide, figuring that if I had to become trailer trash, I might as well do so whole-heartedly. The mortgage companies wouldn’t entrust us with even the lowliest of houses. My swollen womb called out for a nest. My prejudices had no say.
A thick buffer of half-dead grass separated us from the rest of the neighborhood, leaving me to spy on them in solitude. I saw that there were two clear paths from which to choose.
On the one hand, bright aluminum foil gleamed from windows below in which objects existed without explanation or shame. Beer cans, broken appliances, dogs, cats, carburetors, Christmas lights, cacti, old calendars, chickens, children, doilies, afghans, colored bottles, Easter baskets, tomato plants, seashells, tankless toilets—all of it splatterpainted across yards, living rooms, kitchen tables in not reckless but perfectly languid abandon.
Wasn’t it art?
Where else could an American be that free?
But how did one avoid the salmonella and the fleas?
My alternative, on the other hand, was the battle to legitimize mobile home living—to pretend it was middle class. A tidy beige manufactured home filled with slipcovers and cozies, imitation-wood paneling hiding the fact that it was all on wheels. All of it bought on credit from Wal-Mart or Fingerhut.
Fingerhut catalogues were (as required by law?) mailed to every trailer in the world every month. They showed us beautiful toasters, leather-look jackets, and gun racks available for just ten dollars a month, just ten years, for just ten times the price by the time the interest had all been paid. I heard someone accidentally call it Fingerfuck once, a most appropriate Freudian slip on the sweepstakes contests or the government-sponsored lotteries. They don’t just want to screw us out of our money, they want to tenderly, teasingly tickle it out of us, bit by bit, leaving cheap gifts on our plywood dressers in return.
I straddled the fence between the proud-to-be trailer trash and the modular-home gentry trash. It was so hot and dusty outside, so air-conditioned and mind numbing inside. Living in a mobile home made it easy to put off decision making for a while.
The Mail
Every morning, I went out tO get the mail. Sometimes I went two or three times a morning, then once or twice in the afternoon, becoming more frustrated and desperate if it wasn’t there. Calling the post office to bawl them out like you would a drunken husband.
After a while I stopped hoping for letters from friends or the notification that I had won a million dollars. But I could always count on the catalogs. Usually there were at least two or three, more on a good day. I would hug them tightly to my breast and run them through the flames shot down by the Hill Country sun, crashing through the front door and then safe to my bed, kids and cats calling far behind.
There was a procedure to follow. No straying or shortcuts allowed. First, I looked at the entire catalog, one page at a time. My favorites were the ones with clothing in my size—Lane Bryant, Roaman’s, Big Beautiful Fashions for Her. But I perused anything the mailbox awarded me: house wares, garden bulbs, cowboy boots, lingerie. After a long, leisurely flip through the glossy images, I had a good sense of what version of happiness they were offering: Affordable style. Timeless classics. Decadent luxury. Plain old sex.
After the last page, I would lovingly set the catalog on my bedside table, gaze at the ceiling for a while, then get up and resume my chores. Clothes always needed washing. Children wanted to be fed.
This gave the catalog time to rest, to regenerate, before I picked it up again. The second reading was a little more intent. Ostensibly, I was just doing the same thing all over again—flipping through the pages. But this time, I was choosing items. If I could pick one item from each page, which would it be?
That was fun. Some day soon I might have money to buy something, and it was good to be ready, wasn’t it? To take advantage of an opportunity before it slipped away. Picking only one thing from each page, whether it was something I wanted or not, made it a fun little game. Like the time limit that keeps the game show shopping spree from getting out of control. A necessary balance.
I liked to try to do the whole catalog in one sitting. If someone needed my attention while I was performing this ritual, my one bit of fun and relaxation of the day, I’d sigh, fold down the page’s corner to save my place, and hurry through my duties as quickly as I could. I tried to schedule my catalog games during propitious blocks of time, while the baby was nursing or, later, when all the kids were mesmerized by their favorite television programs. Once I got through the whole thing, the catalog was hidden away in a drawer until the third reading.
The third reading was an additional process I developed over time, something extra fun reserved for when I was feeling particularly stressed by the demands of motherhood and household management.
The scenario was that the catalog company had awarded me a thousand-dollar shopping spree. Or five thousand dollars, depending on the scale of its merchandise. Or a hundred dollars if the mailbox had been infuriatingly barren that week and I’d had to resort to pulling drugstore sales flyers from the Sunday paper. I had to pick items that totaled as close to that limit as possible, even if it meant pretend-purchasing eighteen butterfly-shaped napkin rings in order to do so. Then I was the winner and all the time I had spent adding up the prices was well spent.
The third reading took longer than the first two, since I had to add the figures in my head and wasn’t allowed to use paper or even to write down the subtotal when the baby cried. When the baby cried, I’d just keep that subtotal in my mind until I could resume the game later. I’d chant it in my mind. Four thirty-seven fifty-three, over and over again. Sometimes I’d say it aloud when someone asked me a question.
Because of this side effect, I tried to save my third readings for late at night, when everyone else in the house was asleep. But it didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I had to do it during late afternoon or early evening, when my husband unexpectedly was working late. The most frustrating thing was when he came home at a critical point of the game—such as right in the middle of the buy two-get one-free pages. You see, he didn’t know about my catalogs and our special games. So, he would say, “What have you been doing all day?”
I may not always have been truthfully able to answer, “Cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, all day long,” like a good little housewife should. But I never implicated my secret friends, the catalogs, either.
On those evenings when he’d come home unexpectedly, right in the middle of our time together, I’d run and hide in the bathroom. When he banged on the door, I would plead digestion difficulties and beg him not to open the door. All the while, I furiously added up my prices, as fast as I could, until I reached one thousand. Then, I’d hide the catalog and calmly emerge to see what everyone needed me to do.
I know how it must sound. But try to understand—a young mother living out in the middle of nowhere needs t
o have her fun.
The Dishes
I never liked doing the dishes. Washing my own dishes is okay because I usually rinse them right after using them, so nothing gets crusted on and needs hard scrubbing later. Ever since, I was nine years old, though, I had to wash other people’s dishes, which were usually encrusted with Velveeta and surrounded by floating bread crusts, cigarette butts, and cellophane juice-box wrappers.
The only way I could stand to do it was with the radio on, because the music soothed the savage dishwashing beast. If I was alone, I would sing along to the songs in harmony or counterpoint and sometimes dance a little with just my hips or my shoulders while the water swished around. When I couldn’t listen to my radio because it would be turned off in in favor of the TV, I would resort to fantasy.
The fantasies were usually about rock stars. But sometimes they were about other things, too. Like how weirdly different my life would have been if I’d finished school instead of dropping out to start a family. Or how life would be in a real city or town, instead of in the middle of nowhere. Or how it would feel to have friends.
Something about the mechanical wetness makes fantasizing easy. I lingered over the suds, making the most of my sinkside sentence.
Keeping in Touch
Dear Letty,
We got a new van. It’s large. It used to be a daycare bus. It’s solid white. The kids love it because they can each have their own bench seat. It has AC vents all along the headliner.
The old van has to sit in the back yard now. It cries a little at night but I just scream “Shut up, damn you!” out the window at it. No one likes that stinky, sweaty, striped van anymore. No one likes a whiner.
Just kidding.
Last week I was thinking that I wanted to write a poem about Spiderman. I wanted to talk about his relationship with his wife because I always thought that the way he neglected her was shameful.
Now, however, I wonder why she never left him. Was the secret prestige of being Spiderman’s wife just too irresistible? Did she feel that she deserved to live that way? Could she think of nothing better to do with her life than sitting around waiting for her jerk husband to get home?
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him Page 6