Sandcastles

by April Hill

  “So may I take that as an apology?” she whispered, running her fingers through the hair on his chest and her tongue around the hidden nipple.

  He kissed her and smiled. “I’d be careful if I were you. Pushing your luck while stark naked and weak as a kitten can be dangerous.”

  She laughed. “I think I read that somewhere in a fortune cookie.”

  A few minutes later, he pulled her beneath him as gently as possible and Gwen winced only slightly as she raised her hips eagerly, wrapping her legs firmly around his body as he entered her. “Does it seem to you,” she whispered in his ear, as he thrust more deeply, “that we’re just a little complicated couple-wise?” But if there was a reply, she didn’t hear it, the sound lost amidst their combined groans of pure pleasure.

  * * * * *

  When she woke the next, morning it was raining again and Josh was already up. She lay on her side for a long while, watching the rain slash relentlessly against the window and trying to untangle her feelings about Josh and about what had happened last night. Sex, yes, but for her at least, there had been something else, as well. What, she didn’t know and wondered if Josh had sensed the change, too.

  Gwen had never really been in love before, and if she was in love with this man she knew that noting about it was going to be easy. She tried to think of the couples she had known who had gotten it “right” and could bring to mind only two: one of whom was a pair of gay guys she knew from college still together after twenty years and seemingly blissfully happy and well-adjusted, despite the stupid and vengeful laws that prevented the legalization of their union. Her Aunt Janet and Uncle Don seemed to be the same way—like newlyweds, preferring the company of one another over anyone else in the world. Gwen found herself remembering a quote she had once read that compared a good marriage to a long conversation that ended much too quickly.

  As a college freshman, enamored of Thomas Hardy, she had promised herself that when she married her wedding ceremony would include the lovely promise Gabriel Oak had made to Bathsheba:

  “And at home by the fire whenever you look up, there I shall be

  And whenever I look up there will be you.”

  Throughout the years Gwen had stumbled along, meeting a fair number of men whom she liked and who liked her but every time she tried to convince herself that a specific man was “The One,” she hadn’t been able go through with it. A lifetime was a very long time to spend with someone you had simply settled for especially if you have the feeling that he had also “simply settled.” Gwen didn’t want to settle. She wanted what Aunt Janet and Uncle Don had. Of her several brief liaisons, none of them had been more than adequate for either party, and soon she began to find the artifice and required groping unsatisfying and ultimately depressing. Finally she concluded that the problem was with her—that she had set the pole too high, so to speak.

  With little else to do, she threw herself into her “work” and dispensed with push-up bras and the weekly routine of polishing her toenails. During this same bleak period she began to write again, committing to paper the experiences she often wished she could simply forget. Instead, she fell into a pattern of rearranging these moments into short stories, which when complete, she could tuck away in a folder and forget. The matter had been dealt with.

  The possibility that she was in love or heading rapidly in that direction with Joshua Denning was unnerving to someone like Gwen, who had learned after these years alone that is was usually less painful to ignore her situation rather than try to change it. And now, just when she had settled for being alone—not happy, perhaps, but content—Joshua Denning had appeared and screwed up everything.

  Just as she stubbornly fought the need to cry when she was being spanked, Gwen had fought the urge to tell Josh how she felt about him. When she had broached the subject, there had been no reaction at all from him and despite his obvious pleasure in her sexually and otherwise, he had never expressed deep feelings for her—a reluctance she attributed to his lingering obsession with a dead wife.

  Gwen had always disliked and carefully avoided competition. Competing for a man had seemed for her not only demeaning but frankly futile. Competing with a ghost as beautiful a ghost as Susannah Denning was more than she could imagine tackling.

  Until now.

  She got up and showered, then dressed and went downstairs. On the kitchen counter by the steaming coffee pot was a note from Josh. “Out. Back by three. Finish the proofing on the last story. JD.”

  Gwen sighed, confused all over again. After last night, she had hoped for something a little warmer. She got coffee and an English muffin and wandered listlessly into the den to work. If this were a romance novel, she thought bitterly, he’d be out buying an engagement ring to surprise her. With a sigh she switched on the computer, ready to go to work.

  An hour later she was still staring at the tropical fish swimming languidly across the screen having accomplished nothing other than twenty minutes on the Internet, looking up out-of-date references to Joshua Denning and another forty minutes losing at Solitaire. Bored and restless, she gave up on trying to accomplish anything and went out on the deck. The rain had stopped and the fog was lifting, but it was still cold and damp and Josh wouldn’t be back for hours yet. She went back inside, crawled into Josh’s bed and fell back to sleep, hoping for an erotic dream at least. She got up after an hour after a complicated dream in which she was trying to get to an important appointment but she kept getting stuck in traffic, having flat tires, etc.. Even her dreams were frustrating.

  She cleaned the kitchen, did two loads of laundry, then played with the dogs for a while and let Charlie cram his great frame onto the couch with her. Soon, all three dogs had fallen asleep and it had begun to rain again. When being alone with her thoughts became one long thought about Josh, she turned on the TV, then turned it off again. What she really needed was a cigarette. Even if she had to smoke it in the damned pouring rain.

  Gwen got up from the couch and unearthed her remaining pack from behind a volume of Madame Bovary. To be on the cautious side, she pulled on a coat and went back outside to smoke the forbidden cigarette, which turned, as it so often did, into three.

  By 4:30, after smoking the three cigarettes in a cold downpour and spraying all the downstairs room with an entire can of “Fresh Linen” room deodorant and planning a romantic dinner in front of the fireplace, she finally ventured back into the den to do the edits Josh wanted. She had hurried through most of the proofing and was rechecking her work when she heard Josh come in the front door, whistling for the dogs. She smiled to herself as she remembered the engagement ring fantasy and got up from the desk to greet him. He was in the hallway, surrounded by leaping dogs and hanging up his coat in the hall closet when she dashed in to kiss him.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said, trying not to sound quite as eager and needy as she felt. “But I finished the proofreading. It’s about as good as I can make it without heavenly intervention.”

  “Good. Let’s have a look.”

  Gwen’s spirits dropped. After last night, and after being left alone all day, she had expected at least a short romantic interlude.

  “Can’t it wait ‘til after dinner?” she asked plaintively. “You’ve been gone all day, and I thought we could eat in front of the fire, with the rain and all.” She slipped her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately hoping to raise some interest in something about her, besides her inept grammar and punctuation. She succeeded, but not in the way she had hoped. Josh sniffed at her hair, then pushed her back.

  “Okay, where are they?” he demanded. “I thought I smelled smoke when I opened the damned door!”

  Gwen groaned. “It was only the one, Josh, I promise. I found it under a cushion on the couch—like a prehistoric relic or something.” It had always astonished Gwen how quickly and naturally a lie came to her. In this case, however, the lie would merely add to her troubles.

  “Nice try. Now go get them.”

  Sh
e did.

  “Is that all?” he asked, crushing the pack and throwing it into the fireplace.

  “Yes!” she snapped.

  “It had better be.” Denning unbuckled his belt and doubled it in one hand. “Pull your skirt up and get your bottom over the end of the couch.” She thought about arguing the issue, but the look in his eye dissuaded her. With a sigh, she leaned over the wide arm of the couch and waited while he jerked her panties down and then removed them completely.

  The belt landed across the breadth of her ass with a sharp crack, the solid impact drawing a shocked yelp of genuine pain from Gwen. Josh was not in a mood to be gentle, and after all these weeks of experience, Gwen could predict with absolute certainty what was going to happen next. She could only groan as he pushed her further down over the couch arm until her bared buttocks were at arm-level and totally accessible to the strong underhand swats he began to lay across the lower sections of her ass and the quivering flesh of her naked thighs.

  “Open your legs,” he ordered—also predictably—and she obeyed, feeling her stomach lurch in anticipation of the blistering swats he leveled between her legs.

  By the time he had finished, each of Gwen’s burning cheeks was red from mid-butt to lower thigh. Her backside was quite simply on fire. “You have to be the slowest learner I’ve ever known” he said helping her up. “I hope to hell it was worth it.”

  He was right, of course. This was the fourth time she’d been spanked for smoking, and while she was a slow learner, she wasn’t a masochist in the truest sense. A quick inspection of her flaming rear end cinched it. This was very absolutely the last spanking she was prepared to endure for the dubious pleasure of a few puffs of the demon weed. So, although the evening had not gone as she had planned, it had not been a total loss. Gwen Walden was officially an ex-smoker.

  Chapter Seven

  After the whipping (Gwen refused to refer to it as a simple spanking) that finally cured her of smoking, Gwen could have been grateful, but wasn’t. It wasn’t only the fact of the spanking, but the timing of it that continued to irritate her. The romantic evening of shared intimacies she had planned and hoped for about had turned into an agonizing few minutes with Josh’s belt, and all for something she had a legal right to do if she wanted—pollute her lungs, shorten her life, foul the air around her with secondhand smoke, smell like an unwashed ashtray. All legal!

  Angry and dispirited and at a total loss about what to do about her feelings for him, Gwen went to her room immediately and stayed there, waiting for him to come and apologize or simply explain the mixed messages he’d been sending. At midnight she gave up and fell asleep, crying and swearing at the same time.

  By the next afternoon, she had more or less resigned herself to the ambiguous and thoroughly untenable position in which she had placed herself by her own conniving. Was she Joshua Denning’s student/housekeeper or his lover/soul-mate? And what was he to her? Her mentor/disciplinarian or the man she’d been looking for, without knowing it for her entire life? She was pondering these weighty questions when Josh strolled by and asked for her “revisions.”

  Gwen had forgotten. “What revisions?” she asked, genuinely baffled by the request.

  “The ones you promised to have ready today that were originally due last week and that you told me then would be ready three days ago,” he said, leaving her even more confused.

  “Oh.”

  Josh threw up his hands. “Do you want to do this or not?” he demanded. “I spend more time chasing you for these changes than you spend writing the damned things! I’ve had enough of this crap, Gwen!”

  Suddenly Gwen had also had enough.

  “You know what?” she asked pushing herself away from the desk. “You’re absolutely right. Who needs this crap? Maybe it’s time I went home.”

  He chuckled. “Home? And where might that be?”

  “In star-studded Hollywood, where else? I have a very nice apartment just off Gower, over a tattoo parlor, which meets all my domestic needs. I left rent before I left, which, if the check didn’t bounce, makes me only three weeks overdue. For me that’s normal, so I’m sure the place is still waiting for me, and even if it isn’t I’ll find another.”

  Josh sat on the edge of the desk and crossed his arms. “Using what for money?”

  Gwen glared at him. “I do have a career, remember? Ace reporter for ‘In Your Face and Up Your Ass’ magazine? What more could a girl want? Fame, fortune and the occasional death threat from some pissed-off celebrity.”

  “Yeah, your job-satisfaction is obvious,” he observed.

  “Well it does pays the monthly rent.” she said morosely. “Not every month, of course, but often enough to keep the wolf from the door.”

  “So money’s the only issue?”

  “Well not with some of us, obviously. Only with those of us who haven’t got any! God! I love rich people!” she whooped.

  Before she saw it coming, he had pulled her across his thigh and yanked down her pants to land several hard swats to her rear end before he released her.

  “Bastard!” she cried.

  “Rich bastard” he corrected her. “The privileged class enjoying one of its privileges—abusing the poor. Now pull your pants up and stop whining. If you don’t want this … if you’d rather go back to Hollywood and spend your days chasing Tom Cruise around, trying to get his picture in the nude, just say so.”

  “That’s not what I want and you know it!” she wailed.

  He glanced at his watch. “All right then, I need those pages by three o’clock. That gives you an hour and a half to avoid getting your tail blistered by an abusive rich guy.”

  After he was gone, Gwen seethed for a few minutes, then went upstairs, changed into her one decent dress and helped herself to Denning’s car keys from the table in the hall. In her purse, the week’s grocery money was waiting to finance whatever adventure she could find.

  She drove north toward Monterey and then turned off the familiar coastal highway to explore the smaller county roads. Eventually, and without knowing exactly how she got there, she found herself in Wagner Springs—a community only somewhat less prosperous and exciting than Grove City. Wagner Springs, however, had one thing going for it that Grove City didn’t—a festive, giant banner strung over what was evidently the town’s only two-lane street advertised something called “Cowpoke Days.” Gwen parked and “poked” up and down the street, looking in shop windows for exactly nine minutes that more or less completed the central area on both sides of the street. “Cowpoke Days” didn’t seem to be turning out as big a crowd as the Chamber of Commerce had hoped for. Gwen found a park bench and sat in the town square for a while, admiring the artificial hot-pink roses someone had stuck in the dirt around a small bandstand while she waited for the big kickoff of Cowpoke Days. “

  She noticed a few shoppers on the streets, but no recognizable festivalgoers, and when it began to get dark she was about to go back to the car and drive on to another boring village, when the streetlights suddenly popped on. And then, as if someone had detonated a starting pistol, people began to pour into town; within minutes every parking place along Wagner Springs’ Main Street was taken. The exterior lights of a small bar flicked off and then on and then began to blink rhythmically. Soon afterward, the same bar’s jukebox roared to life with the sound of a whining country/western band. Gwen sat back down on her park bench and watched with interest as the town came alive, as if by remote control.

  The interesting thing about Wagner Springs was that everybody who lived there or visited appeared to drive a pickup truck. Blue or red or black with a sprinkling of other colors. Now and then an SUV drove in and parked, but mainly downtown traffic was composed of pickups. Dusty paint-skinned workhorse pickups with dented fenders and rusted or missing tailgates and gun-racks in their cabs. Glistening hand-detailed pickups with flames airbrushed on their sleek sides—but still pickups.

  Everyone in those pickups was drinking beer—when they arriv
ed. Gwen wondered how the several seedy bars along the main drag could possibly make money, when everyone in sight was already walking around town with a six-pack under his or her arm.

  Later Gwen would wonder with amazement why she hadn’t simply left. She didn’t like noise or beer or cowboys—the few she’d known—Hollywood cowboys, usually, with pickup trucks and a dog in the back with a bandana around its neck. She particularly didn’t like country-western music, and now she was immersed in it. Every pickup cruising slowly down the street had a blaring radio or CD player turned up to ear-shattering volume. And almost every window had a “cowpoke” hanging out one of the windows checking out the ladies and looking for action.

  Which is how she met A.J.

  “Howdy there, little lady!” He had opened with his best line, she suspected. “Somethin’ both’rin’ you?” (A reference to the fact that Gwen had her fingers in both her ears.) “I reckon these old boys do get kind of rowdy when they get likkered-up.”

  Gwen had been born and spent most of her formative years in Kansas and Oklahoma. Everything about this guy including his “shit-kicking” accent was as bogus as his fake made-in-China snakeskin boots. When he got closer, she could see that he had the hands of an insurance agent.

  “It’s just a little loud!” she explained, standing up to go to the car.

  “Well, now, you’re not gonna’ let a little thing like that spoil our very first evenin’ together, are you darlin’? And here I was just gettin’ ready to ask if you’d care to have a little ole’ beer or two with me over there at Arnie’s.” He pointed to the bar across the street.

  “Thanks,” Gwen stammered, “but I have to get home.”

  “Nobody goes home early durin’ Cowpoke Days!” he exclaimed. “I think it’s some kind of law or somethin’. C’mon now, just one. They got a fifty-inch television in there and cable. You wouldn’t want me to go off and die of loneliness, now would you?”