Fifty Shades Fatter - A Sequel (Fifty Shades of Neigh Book 2)

by Anna Roberts

  "No, I'm not okay!" he says. "I'm covered in fucking barf. Jesus, Hanna - all over the carpet."

  I get to my feet. "I'll get some salt. I think you're supposed to put salt on it. Or is it soda? Do we have any soda?"

  He shakes his head. "Just...go clean yourself up. Oh my God, what is wrong with you? I leave you alone for twenty minutes and the first thing you do is drink yourself insensible in the bathroom and then ralph all over me."

  "Actually..." I begin to explain that it was eighty years in Narnia but decided that it's not worth it. I clean up and change my clothes, deeply aware of my disgrace. When I come back I find Crispian staring morosely at the stain on the white carpet, which appears to have got bigger and parts of which are now a repulsive shade of green. Did that come out of me? Maybe I should see a doctor.

  "You said soda would get rid of the stain," he says. He's holding a can of diet Mountain Dew.

  "Um...not that kind of soda."

  "Well, fuck." He sighs and slumps down on the couch. I sit down next to him. We stare at the barf stain for some minutes. He gags softly.

  "I love you," I say.

  "I know."

  "Do you...um...you know?"

  He sighs again. "I guess so. I'm marrying you, aren't I?"

  "Okay. Thank you."

  He kicks a cushion over the stain and gazes into my eyes. "Well, since you've ruined the carpet and you're already drunk, how about doing something for me for a change?"

  "Oh." I flush and get to my feet. "Do you want me to...?"

  "Drop 'em," he says, staring directly at my belt buckle. "The least you can do is put out."

  At last! He wants me! He loves me!

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her Awfully Wedded Husband

  After a clammy and unsatisfying reconciliation with the man she had pledged to settle for, Hanna hit the wine rack once more, blundered through the Stargate in the housekeeper’s ensuite and spent several traumatic years on a distant desert planet, reenacting Lawrence of Arabia and being felt up by aliens pretending to be Egyptian Gods.

  On discovering that the Gods’ promises of immortality came with the slight catch of having to have an alien parasite wrap around your brainstem and jabber hieroglyphics into your mind, she demurred on the grounds that she had enough voices in her head already, thank you very much.

  When she returned to Earth she found that her future mother-in-law had dropped off a handful of invitations to the Kleptocrats Only Masked Ball In Aid Of Filthy Rich Cokeheads, along with a rude note suggesting she get a manicure, a lip-wax and preferably a new personality.

  Of course, Hanna was consumed with guilt, following that Friday afternoon when she...

  ... - didn’t do anything untoward and it’s none of your business if I did anyway.

  Oh really? Because it kind of is. I’m your Inner Goddess, dude. It’s my job to wave pom poms and ice-skate and do gymnastic moves whenever you have an orgasm.

  - You’ve never done that before.

  You really want to go there?

  - No. Anyway, you never did anything like that, even when...you know.

  I know. I’m outsourcing. Besides, you try telling your Libido that she can’t hire a full sized symphony orchestra and choir after a twenty-one year dry spell. It’s a good thing I like Beethoven.

  I sigh inwardly.

  Huh. So that’s how that works.

  - Look, can we just get on with it, please?

  Okay. Cue the inane makeover scene.

  “Dude, you should totally have let that Dolores chick cut your hair,” says Kate, as she winds another chunk of my hair around the curling iron. “Your split-ends are serious business.”

  “Let her?” I try to jerk my head around but she grabs my chin. “She was a...you-know.”

  “Mongoose?”

  “No.”

  “Small island republic off the west coast of Africa?”

  “No. You-know.”

  “Vagina?”

  I grit my teeth. She’s determined to be obtuse. “She was a prostitute,” I say. “A lady of the evening.”

  “Yeah, well,” says Kate, pinning another curl in place. “How’s she supposed to retrain as a hairdresser if you throw a shitfit and throw her out on the street?”

  “That’s not my business. Anyway, how would you like it if you came home and found Jesús in the arms of a common streetwalker.”

  She shrugs. “Okay. Not gonna lie. There would be words – many of them dirty, but he wouldn’t do that.”

  I glance up at her in the mirror. “How do you know? He’s a man. He has needs.”

  “He doesn’t have time for needs. Between me and the Kindle porn he’s a busy busy boy. Besides, he doesn’t do freaky shit like yank it to My Little Pony.”

  “No, he just dresses up in women’s underwear and writes pornography about alien hive queens with double F-cup breasts.”

  Kate leans forward, her mouth full of bobby pins. “The F-cup boobs are totally artistically justified,” she says, through clenched teeth. “Hold still.”

  “Really?”

  She pins a large clump of curls to the top of my head, so that my hair falls down my back in a cascade. I didn’t know she knew how to do things like this. “They’re like symbolic,” she explains, taking the last pin out of the corner of her mouth. “And anyway, you can’t compare Sex Queens of Boobulon Twelve to Cloppy’s fucking hobby. Jesús is in the adult entertainment business. It’s not like he’s taking something pure and innocent that’s meant for little eight year old girls and turning it into something gross, sick and depraved.”

  “It’s still pornography. It still debases a sacred act.”

  Kate wrinkles her nose. “Dude, give me a break. They told me all that shit in Catholic School. If you seriously think there’s something sacred about squirting a few body fluids into someone else then you need to do more peyote. Now that shit was real.” She stands back to admire her handiwork. “Okay. Not bad.”

  The girl in the mirror is a stranger to me - a beautiful stranger. Her large blue eyes are artfully shadowed and fringed with painstakingly applied false lashes. Her lips are pink and glossy, her cheeks warmed by a soft blush. Chocolate brown hair curls in gorgeous profusion around her delicate, heart shaped face and her slender figure is flattered by a simple but expensive silver sheath dress.

  "Hot," says Kate. "Now just remember not to talk, or everyone will find out you're an asshole, okay?"

  "Rude."

  "Honest," she says, adjusting her cleavage in the mirror. Kate has gone for the more obvious look - bright red with plenty of chest and leg on show. Sometimes because she's my friend I forget that she's a blonde. "Is that boss of yours going to this shindig?"

  "Tim? No. Why would he?"

  "Tim," she says, managing to cram a world of innuendo into the three letter word. "I had no idea you were so friendly."

  "We're not. I hate him. He's a creep."

  "Okay," says Kate. "He just called for you like twice this afternoon. Said you weren't answering your phone."

  I flush. "I was busy."

  "Doing what? You're never busy. You spend like seventy-five per cent of your waking hours staring at your thumbs and the other twenty-five per cent re-reading Twilight and inventing things to worry about."

  "If you must know," I reply, snippily. "Crispian and I came to an understanding. About several things. And after that I was...indisposed."

  "Indisposed?" she says, in a pretend British accent. "Who the fuck says 'indisposed'? You so need to update your vocabulary, Hanna. It's like Victorian London around here every time you open your mouth. Which is fucking worrying because like I keep expecting Jack the Ripper to turn up and cut off my tits, yank out my uterus and try to cram it in my fucking ear or whatever it was that floated that sick fuck's boat."

  "Look, we were occupied, okay? We were...you know."

  "Vagina?"

  "No."

  "Prostitute?"

  "No!"

 
"Metamorphosising into a pair of ballet dancing pandas who performed selections from Coppelia before huffing their own bodyweight in helium and floating off the balcony into the rainy skies above Seattle?"

  I grind my teeth. "We were making love, okay? Do we have to go through this every single time?"

  "No," says Kate, slipping on her shoes. "Just until you learn to start using words like 'fuck', 'vagina' and 'whore' when you mean to say 'fuck', 'vagina' or 'whore'."

  "Great. Thanks. I'll bear that in mind." I gather up my purse.

  Kate sighs. "Hanna, seriously - how fucking small is his dick? Because you do not act like a woman who's getting some and getting it good."

  I ignore her and go out into the great room. Crispian and Jesús get to their feet when they see us. "Wow," says Jesús. For once he's wearing men's clothes - a tux. He looks annoyingly handsome.

  Kate twirls. "I know right?"

  "Baby, I'm almost glad you made me wear the pants tonight."

  She totters over to him on her four inch shoes. "Shut up. You look foxy as fuck. Doesn't he look hot, Hanna?"

  "Mm."

  I don't dare say more. Crispian is smouldering in the corner. He wears a slightly overlarge suit and a vest that's bulging at the buttons. Not for the first time I suspect him of gaining weight since he got out of prison. I'm sure his electronic tag is getting tighter.

  "You look ravishing, Hanna," he says, and steps forward with a box in his hands.

  "Is it a corsage?" I whisper. "I never had a corsage. I was never prom queen."

  "Yeah, we heard," mutters Kate.

  Inside the box is a ring, a tasteful cluster of maybe a hundred tiny diamonds. When they catch the light they glitter and sparkle like a rubbish vampire on a sunny day. "Oh my," I murmur. "It's so beautiful."

  "What do you say?" asks Crispian, opening the double doors into the next room. "Want to seal the deal?"

  My mouth drops open. The room is full of flowers. Standing facing the door is a minister with a service book in his hands. "Holy crap," I whisper.

  "For once she's appropriate," says Jesús.

  Crispian sticks out his arm. "Come on, Toots," he says. "What do you say? Make this official before we go any further?"

  "You may as well," says Kate. "You've got like three chapters left and I think we're going to be spending the rest of the book at this stupid fucking party."

  Jesús frowns. "Why?"

  "I don't know. Maybe shit will finally happen."

  "Pfft. I wouldn't bet on it. These books have more filler than a prison meatloaf."

  "Excuse me," I cough. "I'm about to get married. How can you say nothing happens? This is a huge event." Tears fill my eyes. "This is probably the most important day of my life."

  "Nothing like peaking too early," says Kate, hurrying forward with a Kleenex. "Don't cry, shitlord - your eyelashes will fall off. I don't suppose there's anything I can say to you to change your mind?"

  I sniff. "No."

  "How about 'He's gross, boring, jerks it to My Little Pony and is probably going straight back to the can after he's secured his right to conjugal visits in the clammiest, most-tryhard way possible'?"

  I shake my head.

  "Put a lid on it, Blondie," says Crispian. "Hanna knows what she wants, don't you honey?"

  I nod. "This is all I've ever wanted. Although obviously I hoped there would be more people. And cake..."

  He leads me towards the minister.

  "...and a carriage," I say. "Like Cinderella's, drawn by white horses. And like a big cloud of doves to be released at the moment when the minister said 'You may kiss the bride' and an ice-sculpture in the shape of a swan and the theme was going to be Disney and I was going to have a singing clock and a guard of honour made of forks and my dress would change from blue to pink..."

  The minister clears his throat.

  "Yeah, you'd better get this over with," says Kate. "Otherwise she's gonna go full Bridezilla and we're gonna have to page Mothra to keep her from stomping all over the city and biting lumps out of the Space Needle."

  Twenty minutes later I am a married woman. I feel light-headed and strange, like I did that time I ate all those brownies at Kate's. Nothing seems quite real.

  "Let the festivities commence!" says Crispian, handing me a silver domino mask. "To the masquerade!"

  "Shit, man," mutters Kate, pulling on a red satin mask that matches her dress. "I cannot wait for the festivities when mommie-dearest finds out what you guys just pulled." She slips on a headband with little marabou trimmed devil horns. Trust her to be tacky.

  Jesús' mask is plain black and for some weird reason makes him look even better. I kind of preferred it when he wandered around in trashy lingerie and cut-offs.

  Crispian dons an 'Anonymous' Guy Fawkes mask and leads the way to the door. Jesús stares at him for a moment and sighs. "I don't know why I'm even surprised," he says.

  "I thought it was a dinner and dance?" says Kate.

  "It is." Crispian's voice is oddly disembodied behind the mask.

  "So how are you gonna do the dinner part with that fuckin' thing over your face?"

  "I'll just push it up."

  "What? And pull it down between mouthfuls?"

  "Yes."

  "This I have got to see."

  Crispian steps out into the upstairs lobby. This time his tag doesn't go off and we are quickly flanked by two large, bulky jacketed men with earpieces. This was part of the deal Helena Handbasket negotiated, although I have no idea if she managed to extend it to a kind of honeymoon. Holy crap. I'm married. Me. Married. Who would have thought it?

  Meh. It was this or drag your tepid honeymoon out into a large chunk of book three, and nobody wants to see that.

  - You might congratulate me after everything we've been through.

  Okay. Mazeltov. Enjoy being queen for a day.

  - Thank you.

  God knows you'll be a drudge and an afterthought for the rest of your life, but fuck it - enjoy your brief fleeting moment as the centre of attention.

  - Why do you have to be so cynical? I didn't do it for attention.

  Oh, I know that. You did it out of guil...

  - Okay, that's enough. You can go now. You don't have to bother me for the rest of the book.

  Are you tripping? I'm just getting warmed up. You know I love it when your conscience starts gnawing at you.

  - What has my conscience have to do with anything?

  ~Oh, this and that.~

  - Um...and who are you?

  ~me? i'm your conscience.~

  - You have a voice too?

  ~yes, but it's small and faint.~

  And all too often drowned out by your libido.

  I should fucking think so too.

  Oh my God. I think I'm going crazy.

  subsequently cats

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bridezilla Attacks!

  The approach to Crispian’s parents’ house is lined with trees, trees from which Chinese paper lanterns hang in soft shades of pink and yellow. There are tiny pinprick fairylights strung around the bole of each and every tree and the effect is stunning, dazzling, beautiful etc, not to mention a jawdropping waste of electricity.

  Crispian stirs in the limo beside me, his face contorted with pain.

  “Guys, seriously,” he says to his federal bodyguards. “Can someone take a look at this thing? It’s on way too tight.”

  He hitches up his pants leg. The flesh of his calf is squeezed either side of the tag, so that his leg looks like a fat lady in a too-small corset.

  “Can you move it down?” asks the taller of the two guards.

  Crispian shakes his head. “I can’t feel my toes.”

  He slides off his shoe and wiggles his toes. The guards wrinkle their noses. They’re not used to it.

  Before they can protest any further, Crispian yanks his socks off. His toenails are turning blue.

  “It’s deactivated anyway,” says the tall guard. “And he’s n
ot going anywhere.”

  “I might,” says Crispian. “I’m wearing a mask. I might just melt away into the crowds and you’ll never see me again.”

  “In that mask and that hat?” says other guard. “Unlikely.” He unfastens the tag from Crispian’s leg. “I know this is probably a personal question, but how do you manage to make a four hundred dollar tux look like you bought it from Target?”

  “I wore this suit to my senior prom,” says Crispian.

  “Watch out, honey,” says Tall Guard, leering at me. “There’s probably a condom in the pocket that expired in 2005.”

  "We're married," I murmur.

  "Yeah," says Crispian, with a brief, tight smile. "Maybe keep that on the down low for a while, Toots. You know what my Mom's like."

  Our entrance at the party is dramatic, largely due to the guards who flank Crispian at all times and also due to Kate pulling in ahead of us and denting the driver's side of her car against one of the decorative stone walls that flank the stairway to the front door. One wall ends in a stone cherub; the other has just been rendered cherubless by Kate's terrible driving.

  "The fucking thing's stuck," she yells at Jesús, who is attempting to push the car free from where it has somehow lodged on the broken stone pedestal.

  "I know that! You've hit it so hard the axel bumped over the top of the thing!"

  She sticks her head out of the window. "Well, can you fucking move it?"

  "Dude, do I look like fucking Superman? You're gonna need a truck to come get this off."

  The general murmur of horrified excitement only increases when Kate is forced to climb out of the window of the car, which is as indecent as anyone might expect, given that she's wearing a tight red dress with a split up one side. The stares of the crowd are rendered all the more unsettling by the fact that many of the people seem to be wearing animal masks – cats, foxes, badgers and hares.

  “What’s with the masks?” I murmur.

  “No fucking idea, man,” says Jesús, looking nervous. “If you see Christopher Lee wearing a dress anywhere around here then run like fuck – you know what I’m saying?”