Title Page
SECRET IN THE OPEN
Rigel Madsong
Publisher Information
Secret in the Open
published in 2014 by House of Erotica
an imprint of Andrews UK Limited
www.houseoferoticabooks.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © Rigel Madsong 2014
The right of Rigel Madsong to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Foreword
There are good reasons to take seriously the genre of erotica. Sexual expression is embedded in the genome. It is both an inborn part of human personality—and therefore personal satisfaction—and an important player in the Darwinian survival of the species. Aside from the connection we all feel to sex on the page and the pleasure we derive from thinking erotic thoughts there is a need give this genre its rightful place in the literary cannon.
Thus, any writer of erotica should bring to the page all the heft one can muster from the field of literary tradition. I have offered what I can. Yet craft alone will not do the trick. The stories must resonate with legitimacy, with truths that are often covered up or held hostage by society’s firm hold on sexual expression. We all need that refreshing feeling that comes from hearing someone speak with the courage it takes to tell the truth.
Thus, the subject requires a no-holds-barred, frank and open investigation of human behavior and how that that behavior conflicts with, filters through, and alters the wide range of human experience. In the process we may hopefully learn more about ourselves, our passions and our impediments and pathways to joyful living.
A good measure of any experience is its capacity to contain joy. Occasionally, we must let ourselves go to get there, to just go out and have fun, else we forget what it is to be human.
Having said all this, let’s go have some fun!
Rain
Lying under the skylight, half-asleep in early morning, she thought of Rafael. It had been raining all night and she slept and woke and slept again in that ocean-like feeling of motion in which she was contained but not grounded.
Now in early light, the impacts the drops made were visible to her, exploding and sliding a ballet of dancing circles and rings drifting toward the roof edge.
It would be raining on Rafael’s house, too, the crepitations over his head the same as over hers, a cellophane of rainfall that wrapped them in a tight chamber of sound.
She had never been in the same chamber with him, at least, not alone. But she knew in the sudden way that truth sometimes reveals itself, unexplained, that he loved her. Loves me, she almost said out loud. Then silent: Loves me... then added... though he may not know it yet.
Maybe the rain would wash away the opaque dust of schedules and rituals and lap-tops and palm-pilots, clarifying slowly, as, in the same deliberate manner it moved the two small oak leaves on the surface of her skylight, patiently, persistently toward destination. Small increments, luxuriously slow, inevitable.
He would be waking now, rolling over to stretch the sleep out of his arms and legs. Then perhaps, closing his eyes again to listen to the music of the rain. She imagined his lips swollen with sleep, his eyes puffy from the force of dreams, his hair matted over his forehead like a confusion of time and place.
Maybe he would think, just for a moment, he was in her bed, pleasantly surprised to awaken from loneliness into the embrace of her body. He would remember vaguely how he got there, the party, the conversation about how difficult it is to be a screenwriter in a town where everyone is a screenwriter, waiting to be discovered by some famous agent who would apologize for not discovering him sooner. How, through this rare tennebroso of understanding, he could talk to her without restraint, could voice his complaint, his passion.
He would find it hard to leave her, even for the moment it takes to get a drink or respond to other conversations passing the edge of their illumination. Increasingly, he would narrow the circle of perception around them, like turning down the wick of a lamp, until they stood alone in its light.
He would leave with her and driven in by the rain, seek shelter in her apartment.
Next morning she would wonder at which moment his spirit entered her, before or after her body opened. And what would the body feel? - a tight closure on his risky intrusion? A permanent awakening? A taking in to her darkness, his darkness and his light? What would she keep of him, never giving back, never the same afterwards?
The large branch of the live oak over her skylight was stretching out of the hillside reaching for a filtered brightness. She marveled how its curved spine could withstand the weight and watched as rain fell into it, some of the drops slipping through the interstices between leaves and branches, pocking the skylight with their small rings, that, measured by the volume of the droplet, grew corpuscles and dimes. The larger drops gathered themselves first on wavering surfaces then fell, visible as they fell, but unpredictable, entering her vision from all sides as objects might bend over the eye of a fish. They made rings as large as oranges and it was they that, when the impact was perfect, propelled the two leaves, jumping in small bips and blops down the incline of the glass.
She saw the trail of folded water below each leaf, extending down the skylight, the wake behind a stationary boat in a moving ocean.
She felt that way sometimes, standing still in a current of men rushing by her, in place, against the indifference of their motions, as if waiting for the perfect collision. You have to kiss a lot of frogs... her mother told her. She understood. She could have gone to bed with frogs many times. But had not. She was a virgin. Shock of shocks. Who would believe it? Others might be embarrassed. She knew it was because she was particular and because she had seen no angel like Rafael.
Her girlfriends told her that a single girl in Los Angeles was a sitting duck. Virgins should just decide to get fucked one night and be done with it, accept a date with the guy she knew would do it, then leave him the next day. Spring training before the season opens.
The idea fascinated her, but she couldn’t abide that... well, okay, she was a romantic. There had to be some kind of connection, didn’t there? Around here, everyone was so anonymous.
Maybe it was Rafael’s background, maybe it was because his parents came from Spain. Or maybe his religious sensibility that even now, diluted by the rituals of a corporate life, marked him with a quality she recognized without recognizing what exactly it was.
She was in a volatile situation and she knew it - all this fantasy and obsession. She would probably turn him off with her saucer eyes. She may as well start looking for that mindless fuck-engine to undo her.
The rain was falling harder now. Larger drops. And more numerous. The wind with greater force swirled the lighter drops, glanced them against the glass in commas and pollywogs. She was entered by sound: The plick, plick of small drops, glop, glop of medium sized ones, ping and clack and scoosh - a symphony of bent notes fiercely unpredictable and precise.
She concentrated on distortion. Tree branches like kelp under tide waters. Light refracted into angular spicules through the kaleidoscope over her. A showering of sound and
light.
She felt herself merging with the wetness around her. She was inside the rain now, part of its folded spaces, its elegant allegiance to the downward motion, not minding the wetting of her, not minding its dissolving her down to her molecules. She spread herself like pigment, her waters now sister to the rainwaters and the great continuity of rivers.
She placed her arms around herself, imagining the pressure of light falling on her skin in articulate chains of luminance. She stroked herself in the manner of affection, hands touching with the reverence of prayer. She reached for herself where she, squeezing a pillow between her legs, 11 years old, found a greedy accident of delight.
She knew what to do. She would touch herself for Rafael. Through this telephone grid of raindrops he would sense what she was doing. He would travel through the wet branches to watch her, standing over her skylight, his rain-soaked body over her rain-soaked body, seeing her naked in river-bottom light.
The thought of his eyes on her, her eyes not on him, sent her into a chill in which her skin, now heightened, lifted into her touching. Rafael would be on fire watching her. Rafael would want to extinguish himself in her.
Her rapture would excite him. She sank into the affection of his gaze. Light danced beyond her eyelids like faint recordings of a world outside as when one is half-aware, half-sleeping, of voices down the hall.
She imagined her most beautiful self, face up in ecstasy, aroused, voluptuous, in that unselfconscious way that is most arresting to men in which the woman cannot restrain herself, unaware her breasts are rising between the tightening V of her arms, her eyes closed in submission, her body released from protection. To think of Rafael, enchanted, spellbound by her helplessness.
He would not be able to stop watching her, to see her moving in response to pleasure. This was her risk in the extreme. To do it for him.
And Rafael became an image of himself, a recollection of a reflection, locked, as she was, in the lift and chill and crepitation, riding the undersurface of reflections, her body in the pull of wind and tide, wave under wave, surge under surge.
And there came that sudden diminuendo in which everything around her falls away. Light, the sound of raindrops, the music... all falls, not from a diminuendo in the music itself but in the pushing through the pushing away that forms around her like the halo that floats the ovum into the crush of womb water, as when, driving late at night, tugged into the instant before sleep, the road noise drops away, then rushes back, then falls again...
... pressure and chill and blue quality...
... and mouth with breath in it...
and then that coiling... and chill...
... that tight coiling, and rising, and hovering until the silence is covered in seamlessness...
and the tremble begins... in air... like the crackle on the leading edge of lightning... and spreads into yards and yards of luminous lace...
And after a moment that could have been an hour, she falls back to earth. And lies half-sleeping. Oak leaves like hands of an unwatched clock moving down the glass.
She wakes herself by the saying of it, saying: I must get up. I must straighten the house, do a little shopping. I must be ready. Rafael will be here soon.
She was sure of it.
She had made love to him.
Song
“I’ve got a job for you,” she said, and sat down on the piano bench next to him.
Roger finished the phrase he was playing near the end of the first movement of the Mozart Partita #3, improvised a key-tickling farewell to the ivory, and turned to face her.
He was used to jobs. His father grew up on a farm before becoming a mathematics professor at Hamberson College, keeping his practical abilities at carpentry, husbandry, general fix-it man all his life, but also keeping the half-reckless attitude it took to tackle whatever came his way. Some of that rubbed off on Roger who was only too happy to carry his father’s role into the next generation.
Something in Katrina’s eyes told him this wasn’t going to be a familiar request.
“It’s Stella,” she said.
“What about her?” he asked, remembering their long friendship, dating from the Iron Railing Music Workshops in rural Maine when he and Katrina were new members on the faculty and she was the bright young cellist.
“She’s 35,” Katrina said.
“So?”
“She needs a baby right now if she’s ever going to have one.”
Roger could agree but he couldn’t see where this was going.
“Don’t you understand?”
“Sure, but, I don’t... ”
Katrina cut in, “So, I want you to get her pregnant.”
After the stun-gun effect settled he found himself searching for a word of response. Finding none, he made a few gasping noises.
“You know the problem,” Katrina went on. “She has a knack for picking absolutely terrible men. And she’s so sweet. Something about psychology, I suppose. But now she’s running out of time and there’s no one in sight.”
His first thought was that she was so good looking she could get knocked-up by anyone she wanted. But he decided not to introduce that concept just now. His second thought was artificial insemination.
Katrina went on. “She doesn’t want insemination,” she said as if reading his mind. “She believes that for the child to turn out right it has to start with a physical relationship between two people who have feelings for each other. I happen to agree.”
Roger wasn’t saying anything. He knew better.
“She didn’t come up with this idea, I did. You’re musical. She’s musical. You’re both attractive and intelligent. You like each other. You’ll make a great kid for her.”
Roger was struck first by the preposterousness of the suggestion and then, at the same time, the courageous generosity he felt from Katrina. He’d known her compassionate streak. He’d sensed it first glance and then watched it flourish in silent admiration over the years. So much was her inclination to assist, that she often sacrificed personal wishes for the benefit of others. Roger, at times, felt he needed to protect her from herself. On top of that she was a great beauty. A rare combination in a human being.
Theirs was second marriage, the kind in which all mistakes made in the first had been put well behind them. They had three children. Katrina was happy splitting her time between motherhood and teaching flute and, as a little extra - though no extra might be needed, conducting the chorus in the local community college. Roger had a concert career as a classical pianist. Everything was perfect.
“I don’t think I know what to say,” said Roger.
“Don’t say anything,” said Katrina. “Just get your ruddy butt on the red-eye to London. You’ve got a three-day break before your concert in Trenton next week and she’s about to ovulate. One thing more. I ask just one favor.”
Roger was too flabbergasted to respond.
Katrina may have sensed Roger’s predicament or maybe she just wanted to finish this off and be done with it. In any case she didn’t wait for him to find his voice.
“I don’t want to hear anything about it when you come back,” she said. Then she turned away from him.
For the first time Roger had a moment to ponder his own feelings about the matter. He loved Katrina. Nothing would change that, not even idyllic lovemaking in the English countryside. In fact, if anything, this magnanimous gesture endeared her all the more to him. If he refused, he would be insensitive to Stella’s need and thwart Katrina’s good will. If he agreed, it might suggest an unsavory eagerness to make out with Stella. His best bet was to trust what appeared to be a plan based upon good intentions, shut up and just do what they told him to do.
Stella had paid for the ticket. She’d inherited a hunk of dough from her Iranian grandfather and was living on a country estate
West of London. Roger was to spend twenty-four hours there. There were no plans, no rules.
On the plane he remembered the time he and Katrina first met Stella. They both thought she was about 15 years old but she was 24. She stood four foot ten and had that perennial quality of youth that, as best Roger could tell, came from the genes of her Near-Eastern father, generously mixed with the grace of a fine Parisian mother. Hard to believe she was 35.
That meeting had come not long after he’d first met Katrina and was very much in love or he might have pursued Stella. She was a great musician, had a quick, confident air and was drop-dead gorgeous. He still remembered his astonishment at the dress she wore the last night to the final gathering of faculty and students - black, mid-thigh length, hip-hugging with a subtle see-through top that, on close inspection, revealed her tight, bra-less breasts.
Roger looked around the plane. All these people here, he thought. And they’ve got no clue what’s going down, no clue whatsoever. He chuckled to himself in smug astonishment.
The plane was met by a distinguished looking chauffeur holding a sign with Roger’s name on it. The black Bentley glided with ease through the countryside to an estate that looked like something out of Jane Austin, about an hour and a half from Heathrow. Stella met them at the front drive and shook hands with Roger with an air of formality almost as if meeting him for the first time. But for the riding clothes she was wearing, she looked the same as she did the first time he saw her.
“Do you like horses?” She asked.
“Sure.”
“Then we’re going for a ride.”
It was mid-afternoon in the English countryside. Roger was a little off-kilter from the time change and the airplane food had left him with a queasy discomfort somewhere in that mysterious space down below his breastbone. But his excitement, however, was first rate. He had energy for horses.
They rode in wordless silence for an hour returning at four. As they dismounted she told him he would have time to settle in to his room and rest before cocktails at six thirty. Then she disappeared.
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