The Pleasure Contracts-Contract #1: Temptation

by Medium McClusky

  Dossy Hannah possessed distinct, fine features. Her hips and legs matched her broad but lean shoulders. Her breasts were medium. That day she wore a plain white satin blouse and a straight gray wool skirt. Her lips were generously colored with a pale but bright red lipstick which accented her blue eyes. She wore a ribbon in her hair, pulling it back from her face.

  “Hello. You are the McQune boy.” Mrs. Hannah licked her lips. “You come by here every day, don’t you?”

  Rory nodded, suddenly losing his usually talkative nature in the face of his memory of the black bunting over her door.

  “I am wondering if you would have time one day to help me move some things in my house. My husband, Ben is gone now. I need to change....” Her eyes filled with tears. “I am so sorry.” She turned and nearly ran into the house.

  Rory told his parents about the incident. His father, a tall Frenchman who still bore an accent said nothing but his mother told him to offer any help he could. Kate McQune, his mother was an Irish woman who had agreed to marry Pierre the Frenchman with the understanding that he would take her name and thus be allowed to remain in the United States. She did, he did and they did. Rory was the result. Both were peaceful people and lived with each other in peace but without passion. She was his mother’s son and Pierre regarded him as a stranger and treated him with a stranger’s polite interest. His mother interacted with him and was his present and persistent parent. She told him it would be a kindness to help Mrs. Hannah if asked and he should do it if he liked.

  The next time Rory passed by, Mrs. Hannah stood on the porch waiting for him and this time she called his name. “I apologize for the other day. My husband is four months dead and I miss him so much! But that is not what I wished to speak to you about. I have some chores, things to move and packing to be done and I need some help. I would pay you, whatever you like to come help me from time to time.”

  Rory stuttered but agreed and suggested Saturday morning at five dollars an hour but Mrs. Hannah insisted on paying more, but she did not stipulate just how much she was offering. He accepted and so began their relationship. For the first few visits to her house, Rory spent most of the time sitting and watching her sort through boxes, caressing books or photographs or talking about when and where they, she and her husband whom she called “Ben David”, bought some knickknack or other. Rory sat and listened.

  At first he fidgeted and wished himself any other place than sitting there swathed in the sadness that suffused the woman as she spoke of her past with her passed husband. But finally he felt her sadness in a way that let him relax and watch her tears track down her cheeks as she talked, seemingly oblivious to his presence. He found a curious peace in being present but feeling neither opportunity nor compulsion to inject himself into her meandering reveries. He sat and watched, letting her be sad before him.

  They started cleaning a closet one day and she sent a fine overcoat home with him. It was a half a size too large but he was still growing. His mother insisted he take it back but by the time he returned from doing so, his mother was on the phone with Mrs. Hannah. She came in and sat on his bed, nearly catching him looking at porn on his laptop and actually catching him with a hard cock which he had to cover with a pillow.

  “At first, I thought you should not be taking her things.” Rory’s mother began. “She, Mrs. Hannah, is heartbroken but she explained that she is giving them to you because she does not want to just cast them off, tossing them away to some stranger. She cannot keep them either but it feels horrible to just discard it. She cannot bear it. Mrs. Hannah says she wants you to have her husband’s overcoat because then she can part with it without feeling like she is throwing it away. She says you have been a great help to her, that you listen and laugh and she feels like she is finding her way back to life with your help. You are doing a good thing, working for Mrs. Hannah, Rory. Whatever she gives you, you just thank her and bring it home. Never mind what I told you before.”

  She hugged him but Rory was too conscious of his persistently erect cock to appreciate the moment. His mother was a statuesque woman, with pale white skin and large breasts which affected the men around her in ways she chose to ignore, not excluding her teenage son. She granted him acceptance of his initial judgment, that his decision to take the coat was a good one. He did not feel it at the time because his hormones were torturing him but later, he felt the full import of her words and gesture. From that moment onward, his mother granted him a great deal of leeway when it came to Mrs. Hannah.

  Chapter 3: Seduction

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  The next time, Rory brought home the coat. After that came a steady stream of things which he genuinely liked. If she offered him a piece of junk he would scoff at her and mock her, saying that she was trying to get rid of him. Mrs. Hannah would shrug and usually threw it away. He brought home a switchblade with scrimshaw on it showing a longboat harpooning a great blue whale, all in gray shell. She gave him a cavalry sword from France and a German WW I corporal’s helmet with the spike on the top both of which his father identified for him. He dragged an old trunk into his room and he stored all the treasures Mrs. Hannah gave him in that trunk. He kept his real reason to himself, thinking that at some point, Mrs. Hannah could wish she had that stuff back and he wanted to be able to find it and return it when she did. She would never ask but he thought he might need to sort it out one day. The day came when his mockery made her smile and he felt a surge of satisfaction, a sense of triumph which surprised him.

  By May, Mrs. Hannah had cleared her husband out of her bedroom. Off the living room was a closed door which she referred to as the study but she never opened the door or offered to show it to him. They went upstairs and spent a couple days sorting through the drawers and closets in one of the two empty bedrooms, pulling old woolens from them, winter clothes and such from the closets and packing them for Good Will. When they completed that, they moved to the basement. It was a stacked, cluttered, clotted mess.

  Mrs. Hannah was a forthright woman, of considerable intellect and much more experience than Rory at first thought, since quilt-making did not seem a particularly rousing or worldly pastime. While they stood in the midst of the chaos in the basement, Rory muttered they should have started in the basement. That was when Mrs. Hannah said, “I had to get my husband out of my bedroom so I could get another man into it.”

  Rory had blushed furiously, not just because it was the first thing of that sort she had ever said in his presence during the two months he had been working for her but also because he was young and thought she was attractive. He found himself studying her, skin and form, body and breasts, ass and legs from time to time when she lapsed into musing silence, her eyes far away. He felt like he had vanished and he decided he could study her as though he were indeed invisible, so he did. She did not seem to notice, his inspections or indeed his presence.

  They spent several days just moving things around in the basement so she could see what was what. The order she used escaped him but finally she began to open boxes. She sorted box after box, sometimes merely peeking inside before setting it aside. Gradually, she began to talk to him, asking him about school. At first he felt awkward, speaking of his life in high school but gradually she drew him out and he told her about his feeling, his hopes and dreams, even talking about his love life. Then Mrs. Hannah had asked him if he was having sex with any of the girls they had discussed.

  “No, Mrs. Hannah, if you must know, the only person I am having sex with is me and I need a lot more practice.”

  Mrs. Hannah, laughed and laughed at that till she had tears in her eyes at which point she did in fact weep, large piteous tears. Rory sat in the seedy basement light with his hands tightly clasped between his knees, wishing he had kept his bloody mouth shut. Mrs. Hannah, however, dabbed her eyes with a pale blue handkerchief she kept in the pocket of her apron. She looked at Rory.

  “You do not understand why I am crying, do you, Rory?”


  For once, Rory was genuinely at a loss. “No, ma’am.” He said. Seeing her like that made his chest hurt.

  “I am weeping with relief. You made me laugh till I cried when I thought I would never laugh again. I thought my days of joy were all in the past. I owe these tears completely to you, young man.”

  Perhaps it was that moment of pride, that moment of feeling like he contributed something to her well-being, the feeling of being both valuable and valued which kept him coming back. Several times his friends saw him beg off from the random activities they engaged in with the explanation that he had to go to work. For a long time, he did not think about this fact.

  Rory was a junior in high school at the time and though he had plenty of friends and activities to keep him busy, he found that spending two afternoons a week, plus many Saturdays with Mrs. Hannah felt good to him. He grew comfortable with her and several times she rehearsed him for Chemistry tests which he loathed or his French tests which she spoke fluently. She admonished him that chemistry was the basis of civilization and that if the world fell into chaos she wanted to have a chemist with her to help rebuild the world. Without the knowledge of chemistry, they would all soon be living like savages again, she averred, “and you’ll eat better and safer with a chemist in your village.”

  With that in mind, he turned his mind to chemistry and found it much more interesting as he began to look for it in all the things he used in life. She quizzed him on his French as they worked. It improved and he found himself having halting conversations with his father in French, which gave him a curiously unnerving thrill. French, Mrs. Hannah insisted, was simply beautiful and beauty was its own reward. He had stopped to stare at her, his mind emptied by what his eyes saw. He stared at her till she blushed and turned away.

  At one point they cleared ancient books out of a large china cabinet. She wanted it upstairs so they had to get help to move it. Rory asked his father to help and together they moved it up the stairs into the living room. Two smaller pieces followed. Rory helped Mrs. Hannah pack up books from shelves in the living room, box them up and take them to the basement. He then moved six heavy boxes out of the basement. The next day he returned to find Mrs. Hannah sitting in the midst of disorder, open boxes with a variety of dishes, cups and plates of all descriptions.

  She smiled at him, her hair tied up and her face smudged. “I am a poor collector. I started buying old dishes and could not focus. Ben David made me put it all away till I could focus on one type of dishes or agree to open a store to keep it in. I just loved it, loved collecting it and had no rhyme or reason to what I got. If it was pretty, I bought it and I liked it all.” She held up a blue willow tureen with a fine ladle of porcelain. “See how beautiful?” They spent the day unpacking.

  When Rory left, the entire kitchen, dining room and living room was covered with china of all descriptions, mostly brightly painted with scenes of Chinese or Japanese women or bucolic country sides or ancient cityscapes. When next he returned, it was all cleared, displayed in the china cabinets, about half had been packed away into boxes again. Mrs. Hannah showed it to him proudly and she hugged him, pressing herself against him. Rory felt his body go stiff and so did Mrs. Hannah. She released him, but stared into his eyes while holding him by the shoulders.

  “Rory, you have brought me back to life. I owe you my life. You have proven very tender with my broken heart and I wish to be tender with your young heart in return.”

  For a moment, Rory did not know how to respond. Mrs. Hannah stood before him, holding him by the shoulders, smiling at him and gazing into his eyes. She seemed to be waiting for something. He did not move. The moment passed. Her hands slipped off his shoulders and she turned away, a slight blush touching her cheeks. They went to work in the basement. After a couple hours of moving boxes, opening them and then moving them again, Rory put his hands on his hips and said, “Mrs. Hannah, I am not sure you know what to do with all this stuff. I think I have moved this same box four times and opened it twice. What are we doing down here?”

  Mrs. Hannah straightened, wiping her dirty hands on her dress, leaving smears of gray on the summer dress. They stared at each other for a few seconds before she smiled, a sort of shy “I just got caught” smile. She nodded. She moved a box, tested it with her hands and sat down, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “Mr. McQune, are you objecting to my strategy in dealing with this chaos?”

  Rory smiled in return. He shrugged, “Dear Mrs. Hannah, it is not an objection so much as an observation. I would not call it chaos...exactly. It could be worse.” He returned. “My point is just that you do not seem to know what you want.”

  Mrs. Hannah cupped her chin in a hand, pursing her lips and squinting at him. “Young man, I know exactly what I want.”

  Her tone, her expression, her slightly open lips which glistened after her tongue ghosted over them...she left nothing to the imagination. Rory shook himself, breaking his stare and looking away from the woman before him.

  “What do you want, Mrs. Hannah?” His eyes drifted back to her. He spoke, feeling the implications of his question and trying to believe he did not mean what he meant, that he was not thinking what he was thinking, that he was not staring at her conical breasts and imagining.

  “I want you...” she began but uncrossed her legs and stood up, wiping her hands on her hips, smudging the dress more with the grim on her hands. “I want you...Rory...” she repeated and stopped, a slight smile on her lips.

  Rory’s breath caught in his throat. He swallowed or tried to, swallowing with a sticky dry mouth proved difficult if not impossible. He had looked away when she spoke so when his eyes found the woman again, she was staring directly at him. He waited for her to say more, to finish.

  “I want you, Rory, to stop calling me Mrs. Hannah.” She said softly.

  His hands shook but when he spoke, his voice lilted with bravado and weak-kneed hope. “Ah, okay. What should I call you?” Words flashed through his mind. He shivered while in his mind her voice echoed just those three words, ‘I want you’ and he imagined, he hoped, he feared, he desperately wanted her to want him. “What do you want,” he hesitated, “what do you want of me, what do you want from me?”

  And for the first time he confronted wanting her, seeing her finally as a woman, a female body and acknowledging it. He came face to face with the conundrum of desire, so strong he could not sense the world as it was and so could not determine whether any of his wishes were fulfilled in the world or it only existed inside his own head. It made him dizzy. For a moment he thought he had not spoken out loud and felt sure he could not say those words again. But then Mrs. Hannah blinked, as though disturbed, roused from a private reverie with a tingle of the sense of being caught thinking what she wished to keep secret.

  “I want you to call me Dossy.” She said softly.

  “Dossy.” He said aching to say more but she went to the stairs, speaking with her back to him.

  “I’ll get us something to drink. I am hot and it is dusty and dry down here.”

  They did no more work that day.

  Chapter 4: Desire

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  Rory spent the next couple days doing chores for his parents but his mind echoed with her breathy voice; “I want you”. He wondered if he heard her right, if she was saying what he wanted her to be saying. For many people, the presence of such a wish, the coursing of such a focused desire through the byways of the mind never finds satisfaction or is diffused by circumstances and events far beyond their ken or control. For Rory, his life changed the next time he knocked on Dossy’s door and not just because he turned eighteen the day before.

  For several minutes she did not answer the door. When finally, she did, just as he was turning away thinking she was not home, she appeared wrung out, stressed, perhaps frightened. Her face was a mask, crinkled like she was about to weep or strained by some inner tension. She did not even speak to him but stepped back, a tacit invitatio
n for him to enter her home.

  For a moment, Rory hesitated. He accepted her invitation and closed the door behind him. Mrs. Hannah moved backwards a couple steps but stood staring at him, wringing her hands before her. She appeared frightened. “Mrs. Hannah, what is the matter? You look....” He thought, “wonderful” which stopped him, slowing and slurring his speech. He drew out his confusion with a hiss while he searched for a word. “...distressed,” he finished finally.

  Mrs. Hannah froze for a moment but finally smiled. “Call me Dossy.” She said softly then turned and led him into the dining room where she brought two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade from the kitchen. They sat down. She poured and they sipped from their glasses together, as though performing the last step of a perfectly choreographed ritual, ending in a consummating toast. She stared at the table before her and he stared at her.

  Dossy looked up at Rory and smiled. “Yes, I am frightened.” She said softly. She sat her glass down. “I am frightened by what I am feeling, Rory. You are young. I am distressed by the loss of my husband and you have been present while I healed, lending me support I never thought I would experience again. I give you money for your labor as is right but you have done more for me than merely moving boxes around and rearranging furniture. How do I repay what you have done for me? What do you want?” She asked.

  “You.” Rory thought but the instant the word arrived in his mind, his body began to shake. He sat his glass on its coaster with a rattle and stuffed his hand into his lap so she would not see it shaking.

  “What can I give you that returns in kind what you have given me?” Dossy asked. Her face flushed. “I think I know. I know what I want. I want you to ask it of me but I know you cannot, will not. So, Rory, I want to give you something you might want, which I certainly want. If I am wrong, if this is not good for you, you must promise to stop me and we will forget this ever happened.”