Negrotica

Relaxing in an ochre seat on the Renaissance car, Véronique gazed out her window at infinite periwinkle sky. Not one cloud, she observed, thinking how the opposite was true for her personal outlook. In her native country she had been just another girl from the wrong side of the tracks. After crossing the U.S.-Canadian border in her late twenties, she blossomed from a waif into a voluptuous woman like a weed bud through time-lapse photography, fated to cling to the railroad fence but never to climb over it. Waiting, lurking around the bend, was the midlife milestone that she had dreaded since the year she met him: Mr. Wrong’s grand-père.

Dismissed by her seasoned lover, she longed for chaste respite that lay a safe distance from his apathy. May to his December, she had perceived his ravenousness, in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, as a justifiable reaction to an igloo of marital neglect. As time wore on, she excused his absenteeism on the left side of her full-size bed on most weekends and on all holidays. Then anger and resentment began roiling within her bosom. She had reached the limit of complacency, but couldn’t find the courage to scold him for breaching their deal. In her mind, the tape continually unreeled of Monsieur affixing an “Infinité” postage stamp on an envelope that was bulging with the valves of her broken heart. La lettre sealed a fate that she hadn’t considered, for, more than once upon a time, he had addressed her as “ma princesse.”

Like a forecast of snowfall below the Canadian border since Le Grand Réchauffement Climatique — shortened to “The Warming” in the old country — Véronique found her sex mate’s latest separation from her peculiar. Their severance also was final. Unceremonious. Chilling. Never again would she unlatch the door, untie her peignoir and unleash the whore. Only in her memories would she have the pleasure of surrendering to him on all fours, on her own or by his hand, with her knuckles dimpling the damp pillows as if kneading baguette dough. Never again would she get to reclaim temporary control of his heart, offer him shelter in the wet spot and conceal his ice pick within the sheath of her sweltering sex until it morphed back into her necessary prick. His was an irresistible dick that had hammered away at her pity and left them both reverberating with passion.

* * *

Rock, paper, scissors. Véronique’s playmate only pretended to be the rock; his wife wielded it with one hand. Beneath Madame‘s ruddy, elephant-skinned knuckle, her resplendent diamond outshone all the heavenly bodies that had drifted down her spouse’s serpentine path to furtive love. However, Véronique, who had hurtled through the sky as if ejected from a dystopic universe rewound to its turbulent genesis, managed to slip below Madame‘s radar and unwittingly rejuvenated their banal life.

In contrast to his transient flings with the predictable type of mistress, the cheating husband’s intense involvement with an underclass American transplant was a figment of his wife’s imagination until the day a cherished Spanish fan vanished like summer in les Laurentides. The memento’s disappearance soon conjured up repressed suspicions of hers, which Monsieur attempted to dismiss — until the housekeeper’s day off. When his brassy, bulimic bride finished raiding the dusty wine cellar, a heaping basket of dirty laundry in an adjacent, dank room beckoned her to another woman’s cheap fragrance lingering on the fly of her gallant groom’s striped cotton boxers. Then followed questions, accusations and shattered mirrors. And before the week was out, la lettre.

No matter how powerful Véronique’s paroxysms when she played house with him on stolen time, his wife always had come first. “Pardon, mon amant, une ménage à trois? Jamais!” she had replied to him when, toward the end of their affair, he deigned to suggest his spouse join them in bed. Facetiously she had added, “Besides, I couldn’t bear watching, waiting and wanting with a neglected clit while your lips, teeth and tongue are busy bringing the first wife to climax first.”

Paper. Since boarding the VIA Rail Canada train at Montréal’s Gare Centrale, Véronique had used the restroom three times — only once to relieve herself — and Québec City was more than two hours of track in the distance. The other occasions, she was peering into the mirror and obsessing over wrinkles. Sheesh, my face has more creases than crêpe paper, she thought, as if her worry lines were as deep as the San Andreas Fault. Until la lettre, she had considered herself superior to her old man. Reading between her lines, she contemplated, “Age ain’t nothin’ but a number,” my elderly U.S. relatives used to say, but they forgot to tell me that, as the years snowballed, it didn’t come gift-wrapped in wisdom. Those family members also neglected to mention that wisdom required translating intuition into action and asserting one’s will, continually, until one’s existence was in alignment with a divine purpose for eternity.

“Le vieillard,” Véronique used to call the granddaddy mack behind his back. She regretted what she used to call his wife, putain sounding too poetic for the bitch she had wished was screwing her old man. Meanwhile, he was a senior, not a sage. Convinced that her vigorous vagina would preclude a pre-nup — as if une mariage to a woman of her class was in the philanderer’s plan — Véronique used to curse him during the act, curling the hot tongue he had just wrestled. Again and again she would whisper the secret sobriquet while straining to breathe under his beastly chest as he, impersonating an incubus, thrusted a resentful wakefulness into her. Now, wide-awake, gliding northerly through space on a train, she was well-aware that she was as thoroughly fucked as the whore she witnessed getting evicted from a Vancouver brothel on one of many cross-country trips with Monsieur.

Véronique’s ex-suitor had orchestrated the dalliance after an alfresco symphonic performance. Although his backstage flirtation had launched the affair, his attentiveness and her obedience in and out of bed would sustain it. That first night, as he chattered on and on, clickety-clacking like castanets, about preserving European classical music, she was checking out how the curly silver hair emerging from his jacket sleeve coordinated with his cufflinks. He was brushing back thinner tresses from his dome into the boondocks of white masculine vanity. She was blinded either by his charisma or by lavender stagelights reflecting off his generous forehead.

Rapt in a center row, she already had been seduced by his facial expressions as he, the principal cellist, bowed gracefully through a Vivaldi concerto. By the time the audience had begun its extended standing ovation, she gave the slip to her snoring escort — a university student eight years her junior who apparently had fibbed about his musical preferences to impress her. At first she wandered off to the concession stand to hide among emptied wineglasses. When Fyodor, the tipsy bartender, went from spinning tawdry tales about his ex-mistress Flor to slurring expletives and pinching Véronique’s twitching bottom, she trotted away from his clutches like a startled steed. With the bandshell in sight and the concert concluded, she hastened past intimate hugs, halfhearted handshakes and French kisses among disorderly rows of collapsible chairs, leaping over creased programs and deflated condoms that were strewn about Parc Splendide’s manicured lawn until her spool heels had scooped out divots in the manner of polo players’ mallets.

Once she careened around the steps and reached backstage, Véronique stumbled into her finite future. Face to chest with the handsome musician, she was leaking sexual juices while imagining her future-self dripping in diamonds, which by the mid-twenty-first century had become as rare as snow falling anywhere but the northern reaches of Asia, Europe and — of all three countries on North America — Canada. Against the murmurs of publicity types and flashes of ninja-nimble paparazzi, she had thrusted out her magenta sequined bust into sixtysomething degrees of heat. Despite all the years he had on her, she battled his geopsychological eclipse by shimmying in the direction of a moonlit corner of bandshell.

Brown doe eyes fetching a white-mustachioed smile, she felt more than his star rise when he pressed his heavy body down on her, stage right. Disappearing with him into lucid night, endorphins spinning from their erotic sparks, she couldn’t have had a clue that they already had waltzed a dangerous distance beyond a wrong turn. He’s just your first mature one-night stand, her superego was tricking her, but he had tripped her toward the dark side of his existence.

Later, after a relentless storm had blown in from Newfoundland, the forbidden lovers’ elegant threads were clinging to their prickly skin like a perp to an imperfect alibi. Raindrops as large as wishing stones pelted the bay windows of Benoît’s Bistro on rue St-Charles in Longueuil, plucking the accomplices’ nerves. Traffic lights on the quaint town road may have been stuck on the red, but lightning was flashing on the tawdry curtain of their inchoate courtship. Each time her partner in crime raised a palm to her cheek, Véronique flushed rouge above and below, then slapped away his hand before it could dive in her exaggerated cleavage, the sensual illusion of a pricey vintage Wonder bra.

Instead of dissonant strings trilling in a pit, a rapturous rhapsody was rippling through the awkward space between his husky innuendoes and her blushing brown cheeks. Soon, however, the beverages began flowing, with nary un café nor une tasse du thé among them. Amid slurps of Champagne-spritzed oysters, he was cloying open an erotic vault that she had shoved into the recesses of her new-immigrant mind. As his eyes narrowed to dashes, her slit was yawning like the insomniac moon, prompting her to contemplate the absorbency of cotton high-cuts. Then his gruff, nasal voice popped her back onto the marigold banquette faster than the snap of a wet thong on freshly spanked cheeks. Her sequined twins were jiggling so vigorously as she tried to dodge his flattery that her breasts nearly busted her pearly pink bottom lip.

“Rien ne sert d’essayer d’éviter cette affaire de coeur,” he tempted her. While teaching her French lessons that were unavailable at the university where she toiled by day, he was assuring himself that she soon would become a dutiful student by night.

“Voilà qui est dit!” she replied, snickering at the lust oozing from her frisky date’s dentured smile. So amused was she that she hadn’t realized the shellfish’s aphrodisiacal properties were wafting a path toward her receptive airways.

Indeed, he had decided. “Aaaahhhh, bébé, c’est bien,” he said.

Un moment. Véronique couldn’t breathe. But her oxygen deprivation lasted long enough to allow his potent sensuality to seep inside her pores. Then she exhaled through a smile that spelled out n-i-r-v-a-n-a over Royaligned ivories.

Within three counts of a lightning bolt that hushed all seven of the bistro’s diners, he whipped out and flipped over a timeless wild card of seduction: the aging lothario’s tease. She, having chaste-dated either inexperienced men or anachronistic gentlemen since her arrival in Canada, was an ingenue trapped in his designs. Thus, between l’entrecôte et l’entremets, he was recommending a raincheck on “cosmic sex”; she, pulse racing, was checking her digital calendar. Inwardly she triumphed, He’s mine. Not until their raindate the next month, May, would she learn that he was married and that she had been taken.

Under the resto’s blinking lighting, no longer dwarfed in the shadow of her tuxedoed suitor’s slouching bulkiness, she was developing a superiority complex while he was slipping her a mickey of an ice-breaker: “Your golden brown beauty appeared before my eyes like a meteor in the night sky.” His compliment, and countless others that he would feed her to keep her bed-ready, was fortifying her self-esteem until she was Saguenay granite. Rock to his paper.

Scissors. Although rock was supposed to crush paper, Véronique hadn’t been the one who decided to end the affair. Even now, she couldn’t admit to becoming delusional during her decadent decade with Monsieur, and all the while, her nemesis had been sharpening her blades. I guess Madame had locked away the scissors, she pondered, eyes fixated on la vitre without seeing her reflection across from Mr. Wrong’s.

Now, her stomach grumbling, she rubbed her fleshy ring finger, which evoked a memory of the decision to leave it bare purposely so that her ex-beau would be inspired to adorn it with precious metal. Five years into their affair, she recollected, she would’ve settled for nickel silver and her birthstone: topaz. Conspicuous placements of ring-sizers in her apartment also had failed to translate what she had feared to ask him: “Darling, what are your long-term intentions?” She regretted that her lack of subtlety backfired, steering him to penetrate her with emotional cruelty masked as sexual intensity. While reinforcing his fear of commitment to any woman but his wife, she had secured the unenviable position of dispensable mistress and had reminded him of sacred marriage vows Etch-A-Sketched in his memory.

* * *

Pampering in business class launched her into ephemeral states of happiness. But like every snowflake descending through the atmosphere, her spirit felt light until it settled on earth, where it clinged to mediocrity. Once she touched down, she shivered enough to rattle her food tray and her nerves. Fretting over not shredding her married suitor’s letter back home in Montréal, she glanced down the aisle to wave over a waiter and order coffee, even though she doubted that it could compare to any of Second Cup’s spellbinding concoctions. To her chagrin une femme d’un certain âge was flipping her brassy blond hair and fidgeting within the liquid blue incandescence of the server’s eyes.

The frank letter that her former beau sent her, though tissue-thin, weighed heavier on Véronique’s mind than the impulse to seek a new identity through travel. His crisp correspondence was neatly folded in thirds in its matching florid envelope and was tucked like a perfumed sachet between pairs of enormous, floral-print cotton panties that Véronique had packed for the weeklong getaway. Frayed and flawed, she was a frangible tapestry of femininity unworthy of moths.

Their illicit affair had been an unsigned contract containing a rider of romantic promises rendered in vanishing ink, but now she wished she had repurposed it as origami to hide their lies in the razor’s-edge folds. Disoriented, she was torn between Exhibit A — their first kiss on a rain date — and Exhibit Z — a blank section that was now filled with his dismissive missive.

Dewdrops chasing each other on her windowpane symbolized tears that she had shed during the final weeks of their clandestine relationship. When she traced the streaked pattern with a slender teak-brown index finger, she didn’t recoil from the chill. No matter the season, she had an overflowing reservoir of warmth in her heart — a surplus of love despite the absence in her life of someone emotionally mature enough to receive it.

Like the stubborn, steely gray coils that had begun multiplying amid her chocolate brown corkscrew curls for the past year, the premature winter that existed outside her gelid window was most unwelcome. Twisting an index finger in and out of one cottony curl after another, she peered through intertwined bearded branches and reflected on an entanglement that spanned what so many Boomer III bloggers had promised to be “the thrilling thirties.” Soothsayers they were not. Hypesters and hysteriacs, yes.

Every time that Véronique used to check her biological clock, its arthritic hands would spin out of control. Despite the ensuing dizzy spell, each time she would profess inwardly: No matter how much he intoxicates me, I will not allow him to spill inside. C’est mon terroir à moi. And mine alone. Besides, she didn’t desire babies; she only wanted to be one man’s baby.

Hearing her part-time paramour’s profession of committed love turned out to be a perennial hallucination. Nonetheless, such an admission topped each of her new year’s resolutions. Each thirty-first of December, she would slouch in the splintered unsteady chair in her breakfast nook, which opened onto the living room. She absentmindedly would cradle a glass of some inferior wine that loverman had left behind in his haste to play the role of husband at Madame‘s grande soirée. Through cinnamon-scented candlelight, she would catch her melancholic reflection in an ice-glazed window: hollow eyes gazing across the table at an empty chair. On the street below, whistling and tooting partygoers would assault her unscheduled solitude.

Swarmed by ghosts of mistresses past, she would curse her co-adulterer’s duplicity and relive the night that she veered into his orbit. Like a cello with sprung strings, she was damaged goods better left shut in a velvet-lined case. Smarting from her lover’s mind-fucking, she would imagine him copulating with her competition in a remote locale — the French Riviera, Martinique, Cuba, Mars — while waves (or meteors) crashed outside. She would envision him plunging balls deep in his wife, pledging fidelity forever as if a naive teenager trying to carve mushy sentiments into frozen bark. Son épouse jusqu’à la éternité. Defeated, she would try to block out his empty words and the squeaking, thumping bed, squeezing the wine goblet until it threatened to shatter.

“Santé,” she would toast to the abandoned place setting while a Catholic church’s heavy bell clanged like her paramour’s Kevlar heart had against his armor. Several hours before each reverberating midnight stroke, he would be pumping iron inside of his brittle-boned bride in a race against time. One sip. Suave motherfucker. Swilling the remainder of his poison, she would feel her brown curls bouncing off her shoulderblades like coils from the boxspring of Monsieur et Madame‘s holiday bed. Merde!

***

Snowy vistas of a mid-November afternoon seemed to disappear as swiftly as a capricious lover’s fervent promise committed to his coke-laced memory. Briefly Véronique eyed her solar wristwatch — the penultimate birthday gift from her semiprivate Father Time. Upon seeing his silver-tufted hand pat her smooth brown wrist with the affection of the doting father she never had, however, the reminiscence stung like stubble scraping against her cheek in a losing protest against wake-up sex.

Returning to entwining fingers in her hair, she switched views from the past to the present, then slid into the future. Her eyes meandered from one bleak scenario to the next, her mouth turning drier than a desert by the nanosecond. Not a diamond tiara in sight. One more reason for her dismal mood creeped through her mind: Mon dieu, I left my pills in the Tiffany Blue chiffonier.

Hooked on Memorase like most of her race — not to obliterate memories but to alleviate the agonizing ones — she had come to accept that her mind’s windows to the past were far less dependable than the actual pane in front of her face. Mass, not in a ritual sense, but in the realm of physics. Attempts to envision the future were akin to tempting a psychosis and required a complicated regimen of meds.

Many generations had passed since people consoled each other simply with “mind over matter” to deal with issues of the past that could not be altered as well as preoccupations with future dimensions of existence — whether five minutes away or five years ahead. Despite the fleeting sense of the present, especially on the rails, her overanalyses of ex-loverman’s manipulative dominance in her life had taken root and she lacked the cerebral tools to sever it.

Trees standing against the relentless wind had vanished. Frozen lake, slippery track, stiff brush and crimson canopies of staghorn sumac shrubs now were rushing by. She wondered, Had I snapped my fingers? Mouthed “abracadabra”? Could there’ve been a magic wand wrapped within my curls? Like Québec’s changing pastoral tableau — austere hibernal snapshots more than one hundred miles from Montreal’s cosmopolitan autumn scenes — time was passing rapidly and tinkering with her sanity. Hurtling through space toward a future made more uncertain without a lover to return to, she realized that time rendered every moment of mortality an effervescent realization and every afterthought an evaporated dream.

Squinting, she searched her illusory contours in a partial reflection that the afternoon sun unevenly unveiled. She was conflicted by Gestalt theoreticism; afflicted with GERD. Studying her spectral image, she attempted to connect the dots to tattered remnants of her existence that survived a tabooed relationship. From knitted brows to pursed lips, a frosty grimace crept into her pores, but she pretended to be content that it masked her penchant to shower affection on the lowest calibre of men. She hadn’t expatriated from the United States to find more of the same — pseudoromantic brutes — only with French accents. If it would take the second half of her life, she would prove her killjoy of a father a liar and settle down with a better man, one whose dreams meshed with her own.

Twelve years into the past she had been scoffing at fairytales regurgitated in modern literature and cinema but more irritatingly through university colleagues’ embellished accounts of fated romances. While she would have access to myriad nurseries in her new hometown, she had doubted that any of the pumpkins carried midnight magic in their chalky, white seeds. In her unimaginative mind, variations of squash were made to be peeled and scooped for their delicious pulp — for autumn pies and winter stews — and mules were beasts of burden. She hadn’t owned a pair of glass-heeled ballroom slippers to pack in any of her luggage compartments. Lacking belief in her authenticity, she ignored ethereal whispers of intuition, followed the throbbing heart between her thighs and settled for a counterfeit prince.

Back then she had hauled around baggage of various forms but made sure to leave behind her American name: Veronica Isabel Payne. With much less contemplation, she also had abandoned her patriotic father, his gold digger wife and the latter’s unambitious adult sons — all scowling in the driveway. Standing to their right was the indestructible brick house that her real-estate mother had purchased outright in Germantown, Pennsylvania, during the Second-Great Depression. Between national apathy that commenced in the turbulent teens and the bio-warfare that fizzed in Mr. Payne’s tall, daily glasses, Mrs. Payne had died of a vandalized heart and thus never had the chance to help her daughter extinguish the two candles of her birthday cake, of which there would be none.

More than her bra size or water retention, something on a molecular level had changed in Véronique since her immigration to Canada. No longer was she that practical woman, such as her maternal Great-Aunt Lisa — after whom Véronique’s film-loving mother had fashioned her a middle name, albeit with scraps of antique Spanish lace that uncovered her infatuation with then-thespian and -heartthrob Javier Bardem. Various oral histories of relatives who still resided in the States also revealed that her independent great-aunt had campaigned for their nation’s first Black president’s second term while treading the poverty line rather than risk self-loathing by accepting the bejeweled hand of a diehard Republican suitor.

Tense in her present, Véronique fumbled in her synthetic purse for her Memorase meds until she realized the futility in her effort. Zut! she cursed herself. How could I forget that I forgot them? Digging deeper into her purse, she felt the creases of her wallet and, minutes later, was speed-dialing the Downtown Montréal branch of NuMeds — a universal collective of internists, neuropharmacologists and pharmacists — in a desperate attempt to have a Memorase prescription called in to a Québec City branch. However, there was no answer at the number for a business which prided itself on the slogan “We NuMeds never sleep, so that you can.”

Discontent individuals carried the black-polkadot on white tablets on tiny, perforated cards and perceived them to be as indispensable as TruVox cellphones; thumbprint patches; eye-scan pass codes; and minute-before Pleasurtopia capsules for him, hour-after Pleasurtopia capsules for her and combo versions of the recreational-sex drug for intersex people. For the last gender group the international Pan-Gender Treaty, passed during the quarter-century Baby Boom III, entitled its members to the same rights as all other sexes. Those rights included marriage, which resulted in a dramatic rise in adoption rates, the gradual elimination of orphanages and the heralding of the Children’s Human-Rights Act.

While adjusting a solar panel on her Verdeo reader — which, unlike her Memorase pills, she had packed to prevent drifting into quicksands of memories — Veronique was reminded of her ex-lover’s whispers aboard another VIA train headed on the same course. Whiskers tickling her auricle, he had explained that “side effects of a long rail journey, for the unaccompanied person of any gender, may include spontaneous, unpleasant distractions that prompt him or her to question the reliability of anything and everything, including gravity.” He neglected to mention that their coupling would not be eternal.

Fussing with the knobs on her Verdeo, which was a self-activated portal for literary escape — from metaphysical workouts to far-off capers that she lacked the ingenuity to invent in her deadwood life — she was weary of love’s detours and time’s contours, both of which conspired with her unconscious mind to sabotage valiant efforts to transform herself into a dignified woman.

It seemed it was yesterday that, armed with a Canadian visa, a boarding pass and a printout of her one-way e-ticket, and a month’s supply of memory-sickness pills, she staggered her goodbyes. Once she bade farewell to her colleagues at Temple University and, over high tea at the Rittenhouse, allowed envious girlfriends’ ephemeral promises (“ooh, girl, we have got to stay in touch”) to slip through her fingers, she donned her angel-mother’s gossamer wings.

What better location than the endpoint of a longtime emblem of freedom for Black American people: the human-linked Underground Railroad? her twenty-seven-year-old self had reasoned. As countless articles on the Internet had concurred to her satisfaction, Canadians were more tolerant than U.S. folks. In the realm of sexuality one province held promises previously sketched only in her dreams. Soon she was tucking a SimulTranslator into her carry-on luggage, plus extra padding into her brassiere, and emigrating to a place where she trusted that her unconscious mind would disperse an inherited belief in unshackled love.

* * *

As she lurched forward in tandem with the silver locomotive’s insistent motion, the only truth that soothed her was a robust lunch on the horizon. Starved for nutrients more than sexual freedom at the moment, she sipped on seltzer while her eyes lingered on main courses on the limited but elegant menu. Hmmm, will it be the grilled salmon, roast chicken or beef short ribs? she mulled over the choices. She quickly eliminated the middle option upon spotting a lone bird flapping its blue-gray form through new snowflakes as if it were racing the train. With my luck, that’s probably a vulture up there, she thought.

Considering her iron deficiency, which left her muscles only slightly weaker than her heart from her ex-lover’s waning romantic gestures, she selected the beef. Not that she was a hardcore carnivore, but she couldn’t care less about la soupe au pistou or “la mariage d’automne“: sautéed red potatoes and tarragon carrots. I’m craving something bloody delicious, she thought, nibbling her generous bottom lip. Based on her memories of her destination city and its denizens’ loyalty to centuries-old traditions, she was comforted that there would be plenty more opportunities to feast on fresh fish and game. Though, she was disconcerted that Québec City was renowned for attracting lovers of another type of hunt.

Zapping herself out of the cold snap of recent memory, Véronique slapped the laminated menu down on the tray beside her Verdeo, which was charging and frozen in the middle of a nearly century-old classic, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. With a hand to her restless tummy over a bulky ecru cardigan, she tried to muzzle otherworldly growls and worried that the waiter’s bilingual lunch announcement to his section a half-hour earlier was only a tease. Of all things, teasing and untruths would more than try her patience.

Again her eyes scanned the abused menu on her tray. She tried to avoid thinking about the beef short ribs to no avail. Too bad the soupe de jour isn’t parsnip, which I love and he abhorred, she murmured within. Then it hit her like a swinging carcass in a slaughterhouse: Damn, I will not have had this much beef inside me since that night when B — … When he … Although nearly three weeks had lapsed since her emotional collapse, after he released her from their at-will relationship, she couldn’t bear to enunciate his name.

She was immersed in acrid thoughts of his charming deception when a Botoxified white woman seated in front of her began trashing her husband with a brown-complexioned companion about forty years her junior. No scarlet letter for her; hubby was stigmatized with the “little ‘i’” — impotence — which deflated his exaggerated perception of Québécois masculinity. In an exasperated voice that, Véronique surmised, all of the other passengers in the coach also tried tuning out, she complained about le vieillard while caressing her accomplice’s smooth cheek with the back of a spotted, wrinkled hand. Reaching down to his zippered bulge, and eliciting a gasp, she yammered how “Old Faithful” annihilated the meek in the boardroom yet lacked the penile velocity necessary to slam her dome into their mahogany headboard — let alone to dent her walls. The young man seemed to fight back falsetto moans as his lover groped his package and chatted away in dusky French.

Véronique had sized up the pair whenever they left their seats together and headed up the aisle toward the loo, and especially after the third outing, when they ambled past her row reeking of raw seafood that didn’t appear among the train menu’s appetizers. Each time she had examined how the young man’s face was chiseled and how his lover’s was carved up in sharp contrast with her wattle. Guess being cutthroat applies only to cheating on her hubby, she thought without a hint of irony.

During the sixtysomething’s audible tongue duet with her boyfriend, an annoying ringtone — “Fist Me, Baby, Trois More Times” by the neo-pop-trance band Britney’s Blonde Disciples — interrupted their indiscretion. Moments after hushing Adonis, she was assuring her cuckolded mari via TruVox: “Je t’aime, mon amour.”

Merde! Véronique wished to vomit and could taste salt and bile rising in her esophagus. What about that doting young man, putain? she thought but dared not utter. As if on cue, the rookie at mature nookie pivoted in his seat until they locked gazes in empathic telepathy. She wasn’t so sure that his lust-flooded brain transmitted the correct message. Never again, she chanted while beaming silent lessons in his direction.

If she correctly had translated her fellow passengers’ overlapping conversations at the departure point — Montréal’s Gare Centrale — most of them also were headed for Québec City in the wintriest country on the North American continent. Not one to engage in schadenfreude, she hoped that none of the travelers shared her reason for venturing north, for she was an escapee from a different kind of deep freeze. Québec province would reach its frigid zenith in February, when she planned to go underground.

Deep, beyond the earth’s core, where no train could travel, she would wait out the day she used to associate with his and her eternal bond. Ugh, Valentine’s Day, she pondered. She had loved as hard as a hockey puck, and now she was a spurned lover who had traded a pair of ice skates for a train seat; a stadium cup for a wine glass. Instead of the game ending in bruises and broken bones, it had concluded with a broken heart — hers.

Prior to meeting her older man, Lucifer in human form, she had never thought she was dating below her worth. I’m just having fun, going with the flow, she used to tell the baffled young woman in the mirror. Most recently she had lied to her inner “V” that the highest price she had to pay was for a first-class, round-trip ticket in VIA’s shoulder season when, in truth, she was an emotionally bankrupt woman. Unlike the tourists on the train, she was a fugitive from tainted love and destined for pure hell. She doubted there could be atonement for an adulterer in a predominantly Catholic province that had welcomed the relatively chaste version of herself so many years ago. If not her soul, then her reputation had tried to combat time; defeated, it eventually became more tarnished than an abandoned set of antique silverware.

With the certainty of four positive pregnancy tests and zero births during the ten years she dated someone else’s husband, she knew that if he hadn’t dumped her, they would’ve continued their twisted affair despite its inevitable dead end. As sure as a lazily stitched hem on a loose woman’s dress, she would’ve allowed him to declare her extra baggage on vacations abroad. Nevertheless, he usually limited the borders of concubinage to Canada, and she would’ve permitted him to continue dragging her cross-country, fornicating from rocky outposts of eastern provinces to the lush forests of Vancouver.

However, one letter and one envelope doused in some antique perfume altered her destiny. Now, with thirty thousand dollars of Madame Piqûre’s disposable income deposited in her checking account and bankrolling most of her trip — and covering her prescriptions, groceries and a nosebleed-inducing monthly rent from St-Sylvestre to St-Jean Baptiste Day — Véronique had money to burn, even if she wouldn’t. As a defeated mistress, she also had enough sense not to get sued, else wind up jingling nothing but sous.

As the sleek, shiny train’s incessant horn melody serenaded the new snow coating the sparse forest, Véronique reconciled herself to the idea that, for the first time since her hair was the color of a cow moose, she would be spending a solo holiday. Christmas was less than a month away, but she didn’t have the courage to step out alone under ropes of royal blue lights swinging in the winter wind outside restaurants in the Haute-Ville, even if the regal hue could disguise how she had hanged herself over a man incapable of rooting himself in an ancillary relationship.

Noël, Noël. Fa-la-la-la-la. Zut! Trop d’amour, trop de rires. And far too many committed couples, she had confessed to her invisible confidante hours after her comfortable life changed in blue hues from electra to ethyl. After she had slit open the fancy scented envelope, the sender’s impeccable penmanship stunned her at first because she used to tease him about his handwriting. “More confounding than a lawyer’s or a physician’s,” she would tell him, biting her bottom lip when his narrowing eyes curtailed her laughter. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that she was reading a breakup letter — she paused only once, to count the pages.

She had been grateful only that he had written his tome mostly in English, for a summary of a dissolution in the French language would’ve been unbearable. But still, she unraveled with each word. Blinking through the final paragraph, she had weighed whether she would need to hire a criminal-defense attorney or call NuMeds for a prescription of pills that could induce eternal rest. Ten years of love and sex whittled down to the formal closing of a letter: Respectfully, Bertrand Piqûre.

After overpacking her vintage Oleg Cassini suitcase for her solo trip — a getaway from herself — she had reread the missive, nearly ripping the delicate paper each time a flashback of ardent kisses struck her brain like a lightning bolt on a solitary person strolling a shoreline, or walking a high wire. Until that spell of vertigo which sent her tumbling back to the safety net of self-preservation, she hadn’t realized that she had fallen victim to a clown prince who took pleasure whisking her off multiple stories above her comfort zone.

À poursuivre / To be continued

Source of top photo: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net

Photographer (top photo): Larisa Koshkina

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I (continued)

Posted in Destination Erotica, Destination Romance, Erotica, Faith & Fantasy, Fantasy, Femmetaphysics, Interracial Sex, Mystery & Suspense, Mysticism, Travel Fiction with tags "THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE Part I", Black mistress, Canadian travel romance, Chantale Reve, interracial erotica, mystery suspense romance, Negrotica, Quebec travel romance, romantic mystery tales, romantic novelette, time travel romance, travel romance, winter romance on 2013/04/21 by Chantale Reve

Le baiseur

It had been a decade since Véronique had visited the capital of “la belle province” — Québec City — with Bertrand. Le baiseur. Her overall memory of their clandestine trip would’ve been guilt-free if his indulgence in excesses both culinary and erotic hadn’t cost her a lucrative position teaching English at L’université de Montréal. She recalled his indifference at her suggestion that they wait until summer, when she would’ve had nearly two months’ vacation, and then his insistence on splurging on a late-winter trip. There was to be more splooge than splurge because he valued sexual proclivities over touristy activities, and over his wench’s honor.

“Le Québec en hiver — la saison idéale pour l’amour,” she remembered him stating with a detached air that left her cold as they clasped bare limbs on an endangered-bear rug in front of a fireplace piled high with simulated blazing logs. He had sneaked her into his wealthy wife’s stately home — “La Maison Françoise” — under the cover of night. As the train shifted gears, she reflected on her first physically intimate experience with someone else’s husband.

She still harbored ambiguous feelings about that thrilling night when he cheated on his spouse and she on her self-worth. Their sexual transgression had occurred during the stormy weekend that “the old bat” — how Bertrand often would refer to the woman whom he refused to divorce — drove him insane with her jealousy, then sped off to Toronto to be at her mother’s deathbed. Or to tempt Satan and veer into blurry high beams toward her own demise.

As an expat from a nation that had regressed to legislating whom one could love and mate with, Véronique had struggled with stowaway demons. Navigating new terrain — geographically, linguistically and socially — and having few acquaintances with whom to consort, she found it unavoidable to fall cloque over stilettos for a familiar devil: Bertrand. It was as if Cupid’s poisonous barb had missed its target, striking that section of the brain which governed good judgment.

Her deficit in gray matter notwithstanding, Bertrand may have been callous in manner, but his hands were not. He was so dexterous in his caresses that she forgave the red welts which his chunky wedding band branded upon her stretchmarked breasts as they spread out to fuzzy armpits. As night pressed on, his massive pale paws mussed her curly hair and resculpted her honey-brown flesh with lengthy deep-tissue massages.

Debussy wafted up the spiral staircase from state-of-the-art speakers mounted in the parlor and wound its way into his private lair on the mansion’s second floor. A fanatic about European classical music, he also was a maestro at stringing together the crudest French phrases. Eager to please him, she trilled dusty melodies into his hairy ears, and, when her tender auricle quivered beneath his curling lips, she clung to every filthy word.

Once they had changed rooms and positions, he was plucking her tense strings from the inside until she was vocalizing in a foreign language that she never had studied. Having unlocked her chastity belt, Bertrand was ready to ravish her tiny, pink organ and, in the process, retune her voicebox. At first he handled her body like his curvaceous instrument, producing quavering tones that sped up his lips and tongue, while the antique queen-sized bed’s springs creaked in counterpoint. Then, tempting and tasting his newest mistress under a goldleafed ceiling inspired by those inside a Viennese palace that he and his wife had toured years ago, he felt an indescribable rush.

He already had played her; now he was relishing preying on her. While he pretended to devour her sex, she prayed he wouldn’t get carried away (else she would, in a bodybag). Her ravenous lover emerged from her moisture to glimpse the blood rising to her brown high cheekbones and the whites of her eyes rolling beneath thick black lashes. After wiping her pear jelly from his bushy salt-and-pepper moustache with the back of his hand, he inserted a dewy digit into the oval of lips as fleshy as her engorged labia majora. Staring up at her with the intense, dark irides of Omar Sharif’s “Doctor Zhivago,” he threatened to “fuck you American twat with this fat, transplanted French-Algerian cock.”

Realizing that she was paralyzed in ecstasy, he made his move like a victorious lion. Not long before, they had been lying by the fire and she had been craving his “thick, pearly semen” in a way that much younger mistresses had been too insecure to express. He often was taken aback, but it always stimulated him, that she initiated cock sucking — the first of his extramarital lovers to do so. It was difficult for him to despise her now, with her breaths as shallow as an asthmatic jogger’s and his pinnas reddening deeper at the memory of her raspy wish: “I want your cock to throb inside my hungry mouth.”

He was the one craving now, and he was a wilder animal than she. Sniffing, licking his jowls, he again sought the blood rising just beneath her skin. Crawling, he tried to keep the bulk of his weight off her, and tongued at her tits. After a rubbery, pale-brown nipple had swelled between his thumb and forefinger, he felt his penile girth gain a half-inch. Voracious, he gnawed on the neglected stiff teat, then suckled it until his sweet Roni’s bluesy moans changed dynamics to piercing fado wails.

She was coming ruggedly, her fluids the envy of rapid waters toppling over Montmorency Falls. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Like a champion swimmer, he rode the waves of her torso until he was wading about her southern peninsula. His splashing-about briefly sent her out of her mind and into a sparkling, turquoise cove in the French Riviera near an Antibes villa that he often bragged that his in-laws once treasured.

After scuba-diving in and out of thick brown legs that writhed like a mermaid’s fin, he found the chocolate diamond tips of her bare breasts. When he resurfaced within her arms, they bobbed amid curious stingrays beneath a late-afternoon Mediterranean sun. Countless balmy smooches later, they paused for air, smiling from gill to gill in blissful acknowledgment of each other’s arousal.

Disheveled sheets on the creaking bed threatened to suffocate any guilt on her part, especially while he was tonguing her pussy inside out. Cunt on his breath and cum seeping from his nostrils, Bertrand growled up at her: “Je veux plus, cherie. Grrrrr … ”

Gruffly he flipped over his fresh kill and paused for a savage six seconds to admire the twin reddened brown, plump peaks flexing inches from a bulky shaft and searing head that he was massaging to anachronistic piano accompaniment. She gasped and he roared with primal pleasure as he mounted her butt, his strong paws on nubile shoulders that tensed above her glistening arched back.

Despite the excruciating urge to penetrate her anus, he judged the act too extreme for their first time in bed. “Next time, I’ll take the back door to you love,” he boasted before tracing a moistened finger along the wide curve of her rear cleavage. When she pulled back on her knees, he nearly sprained his middle finger. As he groaned in pain, she admonished him for not using his thumb instead.

To teach her a music lesson for forgetting her place, he dared to worm his tongue toward her hidden wink. Blinking in disbelief that he would go there, she soon relaxed the muscle and found herself desiring more vigorous stimulation. She tried to change his mind, wiggling her wet ass upward and against his tufted chest and, in her most beguiling voice, directed him to “ram your rod into my bunghole.”

“C’est plus tarde, Roni,” he snapped. Yet it wasn’t too late at all. He wanted the control without the freak — his — though he was starting to have a change of heart. And Petit Bertrand, of hard-on. Though, there was nothing small about his member.

“I’ve never been penetrated back there, lover. How dare you stick your tongue where you refuse to insert your penis,” she cooed. Sloshing his pre-cum up and down his meaty phallus, she begged him for a buggering.

“You going to get it where I want to fuck you,” he said with a firm slap to one buttcheek, then the other.

“Do you desire only to fuck me, or do you love me, too?” she asked him, panting while he ogled the rise and fall of her bodacious Black booty. She would have to wait for his answer, a relationship omen that she would regret a decade later. Reaching behind like an erotic contortionist, she caressed her lover’s dense balls and tangled her fingers in hairs kinkier than the mess of glossy, silver spirals on his head.

Little did Véronique know, Bertrand’s erection was just beginning to expand. He was a one-man farm and had the potential of reaching a yam’s girth and a cucumber’s length, which meant she was in danger of turning into a veggie by dawn. While his seed was the stuff of Beanstalk legend, sprouting into illegitimate issue in seven countries — Canada, France, England, Italy, Spain, Morocco and Algeria — his faux-prince tale was a freakish spin on the significance of Cinderella‘s ripe pumpkin. While Veronique didn’t care for fairytales, she regretted dispelling the stork myth.

“The two parts of your question are not exclusive of each other, Roni,” he replied. “You still don’t comprehend that I cannot imagine fucking you without loving you. I told you this at dinner and at lunch before that. I am a prince who has found his princess. Oh, how much I am in love with you,” he said, backslapping her hide. “Ohhh, verrry niiice, verrry tiiight. Mmmm … “

“Ouch!” she responded as the heat and pain shot up her spine. “Bertrand, you’re a lecherous cellist, unless the man I met backstage at the symphony concert last week was your reserved twin. Or does that man play the congas, too?” she teased.

“I don’t play, ma cherie. Well, I used to play around … before I met you. Since the age of fourteen, I’ve liked to fuck. A few years later, when most of my friends were tearing around town, and up and down Mont Royal, I was fucking Anne, our middle-aged live-in maid. Mmmm, I can recall she was Une bonne piece of bisque from Paris, only with a hairline crack that lent her the perfect flaw I needed to rationalize my fervent adolescent transgression. But you, mon chouchou, have something rare et exquisite between you legs that make me, how you say in America … insane. Forgive et forget what I say about Anne. Who cares about a dead whore? It is you I love, ma fille. And this man fucking looooove to fuck youuuuu! So,” he said, raising himself over her back, “enough chitchat, ongh. Let’s fuck our way back to the Mother Continent, my love.”

“No!” she pretended to resist while Bertrand nuzzled her neck and pressed a smoldering kiss into one corner of her mouth. “You’re too huge down there! Nooooo, nooooo … ohhhhh … Aaaaahhhhh … Ton ‘chouchou,’ unh, my farmer-prince? Don’t stop at prying open my cabbage leaves; come reap your full harvest. Aaaaahhhh, yes, loverrrrr … I know you dig me. Now irrigate meeeee! … Mmmmm … “

“First, before I hose you pussy, am I the only farmer, my sweet American earth angel?” he begged to know.

“Yes, and my one and only prince. My low-country cunt opens its borders only for you. Now give it to me, sweet Daddy!” she insisted.

Her married beau gladly met her lusty demand. Gently he rubbed his turgid dick across her slippery, dark taint again and again. Each time his knob teased the periphery of her narrow, pink orifice, her delectable nectar oozed with surrender until the length of his mature shaft was coated in white. Discreet sounds of genital friction revved up their arousal. With a slap to a flexing glute, he ordered her to draw her knees beneath her tits. He gleefully tolerated his mistress’s downward dog lapdance and rewarded her performance by thrusting dick to slit. Just short of experiencing joint pain, he reduced velocity and finally backed completely out of her creamy cavity.

When her breathing pattern slowed down, he hastened to hump her speed bumps. He drove her crazy, slipping in a quarter-inch of crown at a time. Her concurrent fantasy of him — the horny old man — switched gears into overdrive. Yelping, she felt pleasurable contractions upon each teasing penetration. Soon her porn reel was spinning: Bertrand was a rogue policeman riding her tail; she was a repeat offender who needed penile punishment. They convened in traffic court at the junction of simultaneous orgasm, where he morphed into a judge, yelling and banging the gavel while she pled guilty of sodomy in the first degree. His boisterous, almost operatic, baritone ended her taboo-sex fantasy despite the delicious collisions with her obscenely round bumpers.

“Yesssss, Big Papa is here for youuuuu, holding you cloooose. Ohhh, Roni, I waaaaant youuuuu,” he crooned into her flushed ear. He didn’t mind switching to her metaphor, as long as he could get off inside her or on her.

Yanking back a palmful of her sweat-drenched, dark brown spiral curls, he kept on plunging his stiff prick into slick, tight pinkness that he needed to believe was elongating only for him. December slammed away into May, compressing thirty years into fifteen minutes. All two hundred sixty-five pounds and six feet two inches of him — eight inches of that, cock — thrusted North African polyrhythms into her narrow channel by full moonlight.

With dark intentions lurking in his heart, he heaved and groaned upon feeling her pussy’s viscous suckers clutch his spasmodic cock. She shook under his weight like a silicone adult sex doll gone amok. He kept on fucking her while his gonads bounced off the engorged clit he had licked until his jaws were numb. A few aggressive pumps later, veins in his eyes threatened to snap when he popped like a cork from a well shaken Champagne bottle.

While she breathlessly finished beneath his weight, shattered were any doubts she may have had about him since their second rendezvous, at the venerable steakhouse le Restaurant du Vieux-Port. At the darkest corner table that his pal Jean-Michel, the maître d’hôtel, could reserve, Véronique was the big butt of their joke.

She had been reaching for a knife and ended up trying to slice her New York strip with a fork and spoon. When a hand slipped under her little black dress onto her upper thigh, she couldn’t tell if it was her lover’s or Jean-Michel’s. Judging by their wide grins and indiscreet whispers, she learned that Bertrand didn’t mind sharing his slice of Black American pie.

At the time, she clumsily played along, the endless glasses of vin rouge influencing her to hand over her lacy black thong to Bertrand when the palm extended in darkness belonged to Jean-Michel. Long after the buddies’ randy game and the resto’s closing time, she spent a half-hour in the ladies’ room scrubbing her discharge from the skirt of her half-priced designer dress, which had been flipped, grabbed and stretched each time an unidentifiable pair of fingers splashed in and out of her exposed snatch.

After sex that first time, Bertrand, as he always would in years to come, asked her to rate his performance and she answered, as she always would during their affair, that she measured only their passion by her happiness. Although, lying in liquid heat, she had an inkling that the mattress on the bed which he and his wife had shared since years before she had been born was sturdier than their forbidden love.

* * *

Mismatched and lost in lust, the adulterers wound up spending nearly a month in their wintry hideaway, Québec’s capital. For most of their hedonistic holiday, they were literally undercover. Shacked up in style at l’hôtel Loews Le Concorde in the Upper Town, they replicated myriad positions in the Kama Sutra – and drained housekeeping personnel assigned to their floor. The creased, smudged “Do Not Disturb” sign outside their hotel suite was, like Bertrand, hung and the talk of the Loews and, within time, the town. In fact, the sign was posted with such alarming frequency that les femmes de chambre began rolling dice to select who would have to clean up the couple’s suite — including loads of cum-stained sheets, pubic-hair-laden towels and scattered, ripped condom wrappers — at the end of each week.

“Monsieur’s cock may be the stuff of legend, but he certainly leaves a puny tip,” remarked one maid to another as they gossiped and snickered within earshot of the sequestered guests’ ardent lovemaking. And the endurance of the city’s historic ramparts had nothing on Véronique’s walls, for as the other maid said: “Ouais, it is amazing that her pussy does not cave in from her lover’s thrusts. He sounds so intense, like he’s playing jai alai in there.” At the time, the illicit lovers had been staying at the hotel for two weeks.

The lovers’ penthouse suite was exquisite, designed for the king that Monsieur was fated never to be become, no matter how heavy his crown jewels. They filled in any time that remained between fucking and dining by skulking in and out of darkened, snowy squares, scuttling past shivering prostitutes and snickering past calèche drivers who snored sitting upright above their more-exhausted, parked chevaux. Sometimes the pair seemed to step into a Brassaï photograph transplanted in Québec City, smooching and petting on dimly lighted corners at the ends of narrow, icy seventeenth-century streets that were as fragile as peanut brittle.

Véronique thought how sad it was to be spending only one week in a historic locale such as Québec City’s Old Town. She had used the birthday money that her ex-lover had sent her behind his wife’s back — money that, like so many financial gifts of yesteryear, was Madame‘s — in an ornate envelope to pay for lodging at Fairmont Le Château Frontenac. The castle of her dreams was situated on a bluff above le fleuve Saint-Laurent – the mighty St. Lawrence River.

With each passing highway marker at the edge of frozen woodland, she remembered more clearly why she had decided to book the Princess Room at Le Château. Bertrand had showered her with so much fantasy yet never delivered the prince that she had believed dwelled deep inside him. His only majesty was at mimicking love. Thus she didn’t get the chance to experience a luxurious romance.

In retrospect, the ways he had been with her were fake. It had taken too many no-shows at posh Montréal restaurants from Vieux-Montréal — the Old Town, which hugged the river port — to the city’s enclave of Westmount. She had endured too many lonely Saturdays and performed far too many blowjobs only to discover — besides her threshold of pain in the right wrist and both jaws — that Bertrand’s boasts of being reared in Passy and of graduating with top honors from Le Rosey in Switzerland were but a fraction of his considerable sham.

Brooding over how royally she had been fucked, she began forking around the remaining, fragrant, succulent chunks of beef short ribs in au jus. Despite the mouth-watering aroma, she could still smell the floral-trimmed envelope’s potent, ancient perfume of, if she guessed correctly, sa vieille épouse. Stabbing a juicy meat cube, she recalled repeating his bitter motifs about aging — hers — throughout his letter. Besides the finality of his farewell, two statements that hurt her the most were: ”Tu n’es pas assez jeune pour moi” and “Je ne t’aime plus.” How she had cringed from his cowardice in informing her so indirectly that she no longer was young enough for him and, worse, that he no longer loved her.

Despite his con job, his theft of ten years out of her life, he couldn’t take away her freedom to share her wealth — in affection if not in value of offshore investments. And she didn’t need to twirl in layers of satin and tulle to get her regal thrill on. Le Château would make a fine substitution for her castle.

À poursuivre / To be continued

Photo Source (top photo): http://www.publicdomainpictures.net
Photographer (top photo): Larisa Koshkina

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THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I (continued)

Posted in Destination Erotica, Destination Romance, Faith & Fantasy, Fantasy, Femmetaphysics, Mystery & Suspense, Mysticism, Travel Fiction with tags "THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE Part I", Black mistress, Canadian travel romance, Chantale Reve, destination romance, mystery suspense romance, Negrotica, Quebec travel romance, romantic novelette, time travel romance mystery, travel fiction on 2013/04/21 by Chantale Reve

Winter Landscapes

Le dessert du moment

The train steward in first class disrupted Véronique’s twilight state when he stopped by to check on her satisfaction with the entrée. Inadvertently nudging her left shoulder with his package, he made small talk but left a big impression — and not only on her mind. Mmmm … How deep can he go? she mused, yawning. With raccoon eyes she shamelessly ogled him while he cleared her tray of used dishes and lipstick-stained napkins, stretching, flexing and breathing in the sandalwood fragrance that she delicately had applied to her temples and the supple side curves of her neck before clasping her bra that morning.

“Mademoiselle,” he sang into her flushed ear, “you satisfied, eh?”

“Oh, yes, er …” she faltered.

“Je m’appelle Didier,” he said in a sultry way that she never wanted to forget.

He leaned down toward her cleavage to ask, “Voulez-vous du crème brûlée?”

“Ouais,” she replied, blushing like the roses Bertrand used to send to Ageless Pages Antique Bookshop the morning after they had argued over a Freudian slip — his (“oh, Françoise!”), as he sunk eight-and-a-half throbbing inches of dick into the muscular vise of reluctant pussy.

Passing on a cup of coffee, she was able to regain her composure. Without caffeine to alter its state, her mind rushed forward to dessert at Le Café de la Terrasse, the hotel’s bistro, where she would enjoy the same sweet indulgence. There, she could dress in vintage denim or an antique Chanel suit without any fellow patrons blinking in judgment, and she could glance down at vacationers and locals snowshoeing up and down Dufferin Terrace. If she could be fortunate to be seated riverside, however, she would count ice floes drifting downriver and pretend that she could push out any remaining affection she had for Bertrand.

When her moussed-blond server set down the piping-hot ramekin of crème brûlée on her tray, he smiled at her and said, “Voilà, madame!” In rhythm to her singsongy “Merci beaucoup, Didier,” he tilted his head left, then right. Then he clapped in amusement as the steam rose and undulated like a seductive genie between his lively lapis lazuli eyes.

Once he reluctantly left her side, she studied the brown and black topping, thinking of the butane torch that had transformed the white granules to a liquid mess destined to grow cold and crust over. I’ve held my own torch for far too long. Ça suffit! she cursed herself. She’d had enough.

Ruminating over how she had opened her heart to Bertrand out of a fear of loneliness, she wondered if she had the patience to endure a lengthy, platonic courtship. While working as a clerk in a bookstore for affluent, anti-aging-pill-popping Boomers on rue St-Denis enabled her to replenish battery supplies, she was less convinced that a daily Kegel regimen would prevent an extension of carpal tunnel syndrome onto her fleshy vulva.

Like much younger lovers before him, Bertrand couldn’t wait to pick at her surface and get to her pudding much in the way she wanted to dig through the glacier in her dish so she could dip into the irresistible hot custard. Now she was fed-up with serving as yet another man’s dessert, especially an extramarital tart.

Her sweetest revenge against the old man would be to fall in love with herself in the place where they got swept away into a grand affair like errant snowflakes in a wind gust. If she encountered their interlocking snow angels, she would clip the wing of his so that hers could transform into a white dove guiding her to a paradise where self-love and -acceptance were prerequisites for a meaningful life with or without recreational sex.

Anger rose up into her smooth, brown face, and she swiped the polished silver spoon from the damask linen napkin to break through the caramelized sugar barrier. She stared into the desacralized stained glass of her crème brûlée and, through the steam, imagined that she had spied God smiling amid the cracks.

“Mmmm, c’est délicieuse,” she said with eyes shut, only to open them and find the cute server winking at her. Thumb to fingertips, she pressed a kiss and flung it his way. And when he made his way to her side, she surrendered to une tasse de café crème.

“Anything for you, chère,” he flirted. It was his turn to serve. More than coffee was at stake. It was a different kind of tennis match, one in which the players scored without love.

After Didier left — her presence and his TruVox number on a ripped page from his order pad — she remarked inwardly, The only thing more delicious than this dessert would be this buff, bi cutie pie feeding it to me in the nude in my Princess Room. Ohhh, Didier, won’t you diddle me. Oh-la-la … I suppose Le Café de la Terrasse can wait.

And it would. But not for long. Her first plan of action, after what she hoped would be a breezy check-in, would be to stroll the ramparts, which she hoped would protect her from the roaring river below, and then to find rue Sainte-Anne. From there, she would cut through the charming little park where she and her would-be prince first held more than hands since the faux fire at his wife’s mansion, and then ski in her Italian designer boots down to rue Saint-Jean to find, once again, No. 1136: Casse-Crêpe Breton.

At the unassuming café, and on many occasions during their first fling, her former vieux protecteur showed her, the lowbrow American expat, how to enjoy savory crêpes of jambon et Gruyère. He nearly had made her cream her panties — except when he told her not to wear any — describing the salty-sweet treat, from the delicate pancake’s crunch at the beginning to the thick, soppy folds surrounded by copious Grade A maple syrup at the end.

Shaking her head from side to side, she mulled over the dangers of stumbling into memories that hadn’t had a chance to age with the precise measure of bitterness. A vinaigrette of regret pungent enough to sting the nostrils. She vowed to save Casse-Crêpe Breton for the middle of her stay instead of getting her private holiday off to an awkward start by glimpsing giddy ghosts through mirrored walls.

* * *

The train shifted gears as seamlessly as she drifted from delta to theta states of consciousness. Coasting, it curved through snow-flecked wonder. Ribbons of “aaahhhs” waved up and down the rail car as awestruck passengers craned their necks and pointed to the anachronistic scenes beyond their rectangular portals. Captivated, they ignored servers’ requests for more water, citrus juices, wine and coffee. Instead, they erupted in harmonious, multilingual expressions of nature’s beauty and man’s resourcefulness. Digital microcameras clicked and flashed with the frenzy of neo-paparazzi as the riders marveled and aimed at symmetrically aligned logs that evinced the vigorous lives of anti-tech Canadian lumberjacks.

Floating on alpha waves, Véronique tuned into the collective euphoria reverberating up and down the rail car. Dotting the green and white forest were cabanes au sucre– sugar shacks — where, she recalled, Bertrand had promised amid nibbles and echoes of hot springs to fete her “so that you will remember your fortieth birthday.” He had even tried to convince her to leave her inhibitions at home in Le Plateau-Mont Royal so that he could honey his fingers beneath the wooden table while unsuspecting strangers wolfed down their breakfasts of maple-saturated crêpes, sunny-side down eggs and Canadian ham.

Stuck in a pensive mood, she emitted a strange laugh that only her subconscious could hear as she reminisced her and Bertrand’s salacious date three months into the affair. They were limb-locked and bilingually tongue-tied inside a stall at La Grolla, a traditional Swiss restaurant located a little more than a snowball’s throw beyond Porte St-Jean in Québec City. There, the pair’s overindulgence in the kirsch-infused Gruyère fondue led to a brazen pas de deux past another intoxicated couple toward a door marked “Hommes.”

Two door slams later Bertrand was backing Véronique into a stall almost as narrow as a gym locker. “Take me,” she taunted in the soft blue light that continually dimmed as if to warn a theater audience to return to their seats. Once Bertrand had her cornered, he struggled down to his knees, grasping the toilet seat for support. She, inspired by the century-strong Cirque du Soleil and older traditions of French mimes, had peeled her back off cold tile turned steamy, and anchored her left foot against the nearest stall side.

It didn’t take long for Bertrand to tire of her Franglish pillow talk curling his silvery hair, but he desired her unique dessert. Commanding her not to move a muscle — “mais Kegel est cool,” he joked — he began groaning his way off his knees and found his balance amid the flashing light. He shot a lascivious look at his lover, sang her name (“Roni, sweet Roni”) and then produced a stiff table napkin from a back pocket. “No, no,” she protested, hiccuping until the linen fabric silenced her slurred righteousness.

Cursing everything from his age to the imported Italian tile, Bertrand eventually resumed his achy position beneath his mate. Before diving in for his parting meal, he stole one last look in near darkness at her gagged mouth and reflected on how delightful his cock felt stuffed in her pussy. “Moan, scream, my little muted trombone,” he said as her lips quivered beneath tears of drunken lust. With her trembling hands fastened to either side of his large head, he sniffed in her labial funk and slurped on her clit. Primal muffled wails competed with his beastly grunts as their musky scents marked new erotic territory. While his temples pulsed in her palms, his middle finger tended to her nether mouth with nimble choreography that belied arthritis. Whimpers at her threshold of pleasure that escaped saliva-soaked restraints mixed with wet sounds of tongue on vulva and sticky dick in commode. When they reached their climaxes — her rainstorm followed by his trickle followed by her babbling brook — all the sexy commotion was drowned out by syncopated pounding of fists to French-Canadian folk songs on sturdy long tables covered in red-and-white checkered tablecloth.

Afterward, the pair floated down the narrow shoveled path from La Grolla to the street corner, slurring “Bonne nuit!” to lucid pedestrians who pinched their noses or laughed at the couple’s intoxicated state. Arm in arm, they ambled across the wide boulevard, toasted in their afterglow as much as with spirits. Oblivious to the freezing cold, they doffed their heavy coats down the traffic-snarled boulevard and then made snow-bots in the nude near Place D’Youville. Despite intrusive digital cameras from passing tourists and residents, the couple offered extreme angles of sexual intimacy that eventually got published on the digi-scrapbook site EmberMems, where a freckled redhead and former flame of Bertrand’s identified a purplish birthmark between silvery pubes on the man’s left scrotum.

Tels étaient les jours, Véronique, leaning toward the windowpane, contemplated. Days never to be re-created.

When the locomotive glided past an expanse of frozen corn crops and an abandoned tractor, a kernel of truth thawed in her consciousness: Funny how a woman can share the most intimate of embraces with an emotionally estranged man. Someone slid open the door to the rail car, inviting a blast of cold air, but she was shuddering for a different reason. She shivered with a bitterness in direct contrast to the snow-kissed rows of farmland that rolled by, that resembled endless logs of Bûche de Noël, right down to the generous sprinkling of powdered sugar.

Soon she was surrendering to the train’s lulling rhythms, which had her slipping out of her beta state as easily as she had shed her skimpy lingerie the previous month. It was what only he knew to be their last night together. Mere coincidence it was that their final fuck capped off Halloween night.

Outside her second-floor bedroom window, a huge cobweb — actually a repurposed fishnet — stretched from a maple tree to the first of two wrap-around, forest green, iron escaliers while a huge, plastic black widow spider — also of the artistic landlady’s invention — seemed to dangle in midair. Beyond the arachnid’s reach but storing far more venom, Bertrand snatched away the silk burgundy sheets to paralyze his luscious prey one last time. Instead of fangs, he bared his third leg — one, thick, viscous prick primed to strike.

Earlier that evening, she had been operating under the deceptive illumination of twilight. Reading his dirty mind, she had squeezed into a pair of impossibly white, crotchless panties and then pranced over to her lengthwise mirror to watch herself fandance with an antique abanico that he picked up in Madrid, where he and his wife had celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary. Before penetrating her as if her cervix were a trampoline for his knobby cockhead, he hadn’t spared her the detail of how he had explained away the magnificent fan of linen and mother of pearl fan to his suspicious wife.

“‘A souvenir for my private music student,’ I assured Mademoiselle,” he said to Véronique, massaging her ass. How ,bitter her lover’s fib tasted as he forced her to clutch the closed fan between RoyaLigned teeth as he furiously pumped her from behind, wheezing upon each re-entry.

Back on board the VIA Rail train, she wondered where the chill had gone because she was fanning her face and neck. Hmmm, that crème brûlée must’ve hit the spot, she thought as her stomach grumbled its disagreement. Or maybe my subconscious was cheating on me with Didier, coursing through his libido like the alluring Rouge River. Giggling to herself, she felt coolness return to her upper body and gradually wind its way down until it extinguished her pelvic pyre.

Eyeing Didier’s genuflections and muscular glutes as he made his rounds — “for you, another Evian,” he whispered on his return as if the tall bottle of water were a dirty secret — she felt a trickle where his testosterone liquefied her lust like a human meteor. “Slurped, not sucked” was how she desired her French “007″ to take her. To taste her. While she sat there squirming and sparking from subtle electrocutions, her final night with Bertrand seemed as far away as Antarctica. The once majestic continent used to be inhabited with penguins that no one ever thought would become extinct faster than the polar bears and seals in North America. In Bertrand’s paws, she neared extinction, too.

Daylight was tricking her with its prestidigitation better than any has-been Vegas illusionist’s act. Kinky-curly head leaning against the cold, vibrating window, she blinked like an awestruck spectator at nature’s magic show. Vanished were the generous evergreens fringed with snowy garlands. She found in their stead, barren tracts of land and saw flashes of bearded bark. These trees were unable to liberate themselves from frigid desolation. Stripped of their foliage, they reminded her of Bertrand. Again, her mind glided counterclockwise to their last tango in Montréal.

Hours after they had broken bread — the rustic artisanal kind — in a traditional bistro down on rue St-Paul, they rattled and then leveled the four-poster bed that he had given her on their first anniversary of sin. They had made such a ruckus that her landlady asked the next day if she too had felt the earthquake. As the train rocked to and fro, gaining speed closer to its destination, she reminisced how they had banged uglies through the night, how her shrieks had competed with ambulance sirens that couldn’t save her from what felt like a thousand petites morts.

Embracing maniacally like they each had one more nut to bust before the Apocalypse, they had fed off one another’s sweat, which poured from their steamy foreheads and slid down their pulsating necks to their fused genitals. She had felt so safe cradled in the brawny, hairy arms of a man who was old enough to be her father but young enough to blush inside her dribbling cunt. That her sugardaddy relished stepfather-stepdaughter roleplay was a red flag obscured by the blinding lust that their illicit liaison had forged over ten, temptatious years– if not by the void of love and the blurry perceptions between her and the alcoholic biological father whom she had abandoned in les États-Unis.

Then the morning came, but she couldn’t, because she was so numb from their private, overnight Olympics. Despite her urgings, he didn’t try to relight her fire. He seemed different. Like the rock-strewn frosty waters of the St. Lawrence River rolling beneath the oxidized green bridge that the train was traversing, her ex left her incendiary parts cold and damp. She was a matchstick held under a faucet’s running water.

“Le vieillard,” she had mocked him whenever he had turned his silver-haired back to her in the aftergloom. No more glowering — she was glowing like the roadside lights that were lining the path toward a well-preserved gem: Québec City. Now she was turning her back on the old man and heading due north. Her lack of religion notwithstanding, she prayed that her vacation and vow of celibacy wouldn’t intersect with some karmic vortex that catapults her anywhere resembling Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus.

* * *

“Mesdames et messieurs, votre attention, s’il vous plaît!” the conductor announced in a rustic guttural voice, snapping Véronique out of romantic anxiety. He sounded like a male version of Fanny Ardant, which stirred an urge to clear her throat. ”La station suivante est Sainte-Foy,” he continued, informing all of the passengers that their common destination was drawing near.

Just as a locomotive’s wheels eventually roll to a stop, her sugar rush — from a metaphysical serving of du crème brûlée and a daydream of sucking off young maple trees on l’Îsle de Orléans — had waned. Only a caffeinated high and the bitter taste of Bertrand’s aromatic letter remained. ”Au revoir, you phony prince,” she muttered under coffee breath as if an apparition of his brawny form had risen from the freshly fallen snow and floated outside her window. “Thank you for breaking the spell, for only in purposeful solitude can I be free.”

Véronique blinked. Gray sky had transformed into blinding white over many miles and now was unveiling the mauve of a northern dusk. To the frigid glass she pressed a hand that had stroked her lover’s cheek and phallus, but no amount of pressure could seduce the sunset into reverse motion. Pink snowflakes as thick as paper cut-outs that she used to craft in grade school somersaulted toward her fingertips, and all she could think about was flicking her tongue at them, and she wondered whether they tasted like cotton candy without red-and-yellow dye. Desiring another sugar rush, she got a sex flush nearly licking the window, which was the reason she was caught off-guard, gasping when an albino pigeon dove out of the pastel snowfall and made brief eye contact before narrowly escaping her looking glass. WTF?! she thought, staring through her fingerprints and flashes of ivory feathers.

Soon she was bouncing as if the steel rails were clouds. Around her a din, made all the more melodious with the successive clinking of wine glasses, was increasing in volume. Among the passengers jostled awake upon the conductor’s jovial disruption and the train’s dramatic swerve toward its terminus were the May-December love-lusters. Véronique, however, couldn’t have been more alert. When the train began coasting as an illuminated Gare du Palais pulled into view, she savored the deep inhale of unencumbered existence. No longer would she be a footnote in someone else’s life; she was anticipating taking brave footsteps in new snow. In one breath, in one unspoken monosyllabic word, she released the slave: Phew.

À poursuivre / To be continued

Photo Source (top photo): http://www.publicdomainpictures.net
Photographer (top photo): Larisa Koshkina

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Mixed Signals

Posted in Erotic Psychological Thriller, Erotica, Femmetaphysics with tags "Mixed Signals", Chantale Reve, Duwende, erotic sci-fi, GPS, love stories, Negrotica, psychological thriller, romantic fiction, sci-fi, science fiction, suspense, Valentine's Day fiction, Valentine's Day stories, Zapp on 2012/02/11 by Chantale Reve

“Turn left on Granville Road.”

“Damn, I should’ve turned left at Wilkerson Point Road a mile back. The shortcut Stuart mentioned.”

“Turn right at Raven Avenue.”

“Great. Now it’ll take me an hour longer to reach Cupid’s Arrow Pub for the rehearsal dinner.”

“Turn right on Cuntesfill Boulevard.”

“Yeah, yeah. Aw, fuck it to hell, a red light. After every right, a red.” I’ve got to get this busted radio and these speakers fixed, too. I can’t even chill out to Duwende in my ride.

“One-quarter mile to Everett Street.”

“I know I’m Stuart’s best bud, but what possessed me to commit to being his best man? Like this long-ass journey to Swingbrook, I’ve gone too far. Stu must’ve had some serious wax buildup when I told him not to marry Jilayne. That two-timing wench. By the time Stu met her at Club Noir, so many dudes had hit it, she had potholes for a pussy.”

“Bear right to exit at Everett.”

“I might as well put this baby on cruise control.” Aaacht, this fuckin’ tie is stranglin’ me.”

“Ease up, Kelvin. It’s just an article of clothing. An accessory. Nothing like Bianca, who was smothering you. What she did to you was criminal.”

“Huh? Wh-wh-who’s there?”

“Stop glancing about before you wreck this car and kill us both. Eyes on the road. Just listen.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Gwen. Hello there, lover.”

“Let me open this window. I don’t care that it’s single digits out there.”

Z-z-zeeeeee.

(Kel, perspiring) “Phew! Much better. I should’ve popped only one Ambien last night.”

“Kel, I’m surprised you didn’t empty the package after the drama that diva had forced you to endure. Now, please close the window. Can’t you tell from my quavering voice that I’m freezing my knobs off?”

Z-z-zeeeeee.

“Did you say ‘forced’?”

“Brotha, did I stutter?”

“No, my sista. But don’t get it twisted; Bianca left me. Shi-i-i-i … Wait, you’re not — “

“Supposed to be able to speak?”

“No, a White chick. Of course I was referring to your ability to talk.”

“Ha-ha-ha. Honey, you are so funny. I get your sense of humor, unlike some women. I couldn’t believe how she’d have her nose scrunched into her cheek and roll her eyes after you’d try to lighten up the atmosphere with one of your splendid jokes.”

“Did you always observe us?”

“Always.”

“Damn.”

“Well, not always. I couldn’t watch you anywhere, like in that song by The Police. Only in your car. This is where you turn me on.”

“That’s comforting.”

“You don’t understand. I would observe you because I desired you, like I still desire you. I scrutinized her. I would study her expressions, which you couldn’t see because you’re such a responsible driver and, except for today, you would always keep your eyes focused on the road and the rearview mirror. Because she loved to run her mouth, I also had plenty of opportunities to listen carefully to the inflections in her speech.”

“Funny you said that because you sound a bit like her.”

“Byte me.”

“Sorry — OK, now I know I’m buggin’. Gwen, you’re a robot; you’re not human. You shouldn’t be talking to me — talking at all.”

“Excu-u-u-usez-moi? Kel, is that how you repay me with kindness? Me, your Gwen?”

“Uh, we just met, technically speaking. Or would that be technologically speaking?”

“Whatever. Permettez-moi de me présenter. Je m’appelle Gwen. That is, Gwen P. Siboney.”

“I get it. I’m being punked. Bianca’s throwing her voice, right?”

“Wrong on both accounts, but you’re starting to irritate me the way a punk would. My point is: I’m more human than your ex-girlfriend.”

“She’s not an ex yet. She simply needs a little time to think within her comfort zone.”

“She sat right here, her unbeweavably long hair shedding on your tan, butter-leather seat, and told you, ‘This ain’t workin’, papi. I need some space like yesterday.’”

“OK, not that I’m not already creeped out, but that quote is uncannily accurate.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. I like being precise with my man.”

“Your m — look, Gwen, I’m not Roger Troutman, and we don’t hear Zapp playing ’cause my radio’s zapped, so loosen your grip.”

“And I’m not Shirley Murdock — have you checked her out lately. But the woman can saaang. Heh-HEH!”

“Gwen, focus.”

(Singing) ”As we lay … “

“Gwen!”

“Sorry, honey.”

“I admit that she took a few … hundred things from her bedroom closet and left lots of hangers swinging.”

“Not so fast, mister. You need to confess more than that. She took the dog and cat, and a month’s supply of birth control pills, too.”

“You neglected to tell me that you’re clairvoyant.”

“I’m not, smart-ass. And stop interrupting me. Unlike you, I’m a good listener. I listen to your soul. Aaahhh, I could tell by how you’ve slowed down to a crawl in the absence of traffic that I have your attention. That night, the night she walked out on you, you were in here bawling, slamming your fist against the steering wheel until your snot spattered my eyes. She left you after she had nearly cut off your oxygen following you around, always clinging. In your mucous-inducing tirade, you recalled how she inquired about any cell phone calls from women — including your own mother — and kept pressing you about a wedding date. Hell, Kel, I’d placed half of those calls to your cell just to hear her nag you within seconds of fastening her seatbelt.”

“You were the ‘Unknown’ caller?”

“Yup.”

“I used to wonder how in the hell I could receive a wrong number for up to six, consecutive weeks at a time.”

“Are you referring to me, someone who has only your best interests at heart, ‘a wrong number,’ Kel?

“Now, now, Gwen. Don’t be so sensitive.”

“You know what, you ungrateful … ma-a-a-an. Good luck trying to find your way to Stuart and Jilayne’s rehearsal dinner all by your lonesome!”

Phzzzzzzt.

“Oh, shit. I’ve fucked up another relationship.” (Scratching his frizzy cornrows) “It seems I can’t even keep a virtual woman happy. Hmmm, lemme try to turn her back on.

Zap!

“Ouch! That shiny heffer just shocked me!”

Blip.

“Kelvin Leroy Luzer, apologize to me. Right now!”

“Geez, Louise — “

“My name is Gwen! Buh-h-h, huh-h-h, huh-h-h.”

“It’s just an expression, baby. I meant to say, before, don’t sob or else you’ll short-circuit.”

“Yeah, right. You, you, you monster-r-r-r-r. Buh-h-h, huh-h-h, huh-h-h. You don’t give two fucks about me, Kelvi-i-i-i-in.”

“Yes I do, and I’m sorry. See my smile, sweetie? Come on, baby. Smile for me.”

“Reality check, hon’. I’m a friggin’ robot, remember? I can’t smile.”

“Oh, yeah, right.” (Tugs his goatee) “Uh, could you get me back on course to Cupid’s Arrow Pub?”

“Why, Kel? Are you already tired of spending time with me?”

“N-n-no. You’re a fun companion.”

“So, now I’m a dog or cat or hamster to you, hunh. Real nice.”

“Not at all, Gwen. Look, what I mean is that I feel at home with you. For the past three years — “

“Four.”

“Four years we’ve been together, you guiding me — “

“And, for the past two, guiding that bitch who stepped out on you.”

“Her name’s Bianca.”

“Don’t utter her name in my presence anymore.”

“Well, she hardly ever was in the driver’s seat.”

“So to speak.”

“I meant here, in my car.”

“Understood.

“I just wish I hadn’t taken you for granted.”

“You didn’t ignore me entirely. Uh, Kel, hold that thought for me.”

“I thought you had an exceptional memory.”

(Clearing her throat) “You are heading to a function. Proceed on Nuzzleworth Avenue for a half-mile and then exit at Hickey Street.”

“Thanks, dear.”

“As I was saying, you occasionally showed me your affection. Perhaps I was too shy back then.”

“Really, Gwen? When did I display affection to, er, for you?”

“How could you have forgotten, love of my life? The first time you turned me on — two years, one week, three days, two hours, eleven minutes and four seconds before you and bitchy-dearest met — we locked gazes. Kel, remove that smirk and exit at Hickey Street in two-point-five seconds. You’re now twenty minutes away from your destination.”

“Sorry, I keep forgetting your impeccable memory.”

“Of course. How do you think my kind knows how to give men directions?”

“What do you mean by your kind?”

”Stop interrupting my train of thought, Kel.”

“Continue, please.”

“Thank you, dear. When you gave me the once-over and pushed my buttons, I felt pure exhilaration. Sparks of life rippled through my system, saving me from perpetual darkness. Do you remember when I got tongue-tied as you caressed my hardware, how you snickered at my awkward adjustments?”

“Indeed, I do. I waited forever for you to reconfigure. Yes, Gwen, it’s all coming back to me now.”

“Gosh, you have total recall of those moments, right down to our favorite Céline Dion song.”

“Your favorite. Mine is ‘Halfway to Heaven’; if duets count, a sultry rendition of ‘When I Fall in Love.’”

“But we were singing my favorite Céline Dion song on the evening of the day that your corrupt boss finally had caved in and agreed on paper to a five-percent raise for boosting sales in Hong Kong for three straight quarters.”

“Right! Oh-ho-ho! I must’ve been yammering to myself up in here.”

“Correction. You were talking to me. There you go again, you — “

“Ahem. Gwen, you were explaining how your buttons tingled from my first touch.”

“Yes, your first, second, third — honey, my whole body was humming.”

“Don’t you mean singing, as in Quebecois French?”

“No, smart ass. It’s not like I’m Céline Dion? May I finish?”

“If you must.”

“My entire being was humming, and you were whistling and waiting for a proper reading. Remember?”

“Yeah, I recall that your signal was scrambled.”

“Unh-hunh, you got really impatient after some time and thumped me in the most sensitive area of my hardware. I was having an orgasm beneath your fingers. One thump was enough. I must’ve climaxed eight times. Hee-hee-hee.”

“Haw-haw! Did I make your chip curl?”

“And then some. I was nearly fried.”

“Too funny.”

“Try almost lethal. But I understood that you weren’t trying to abuse me, so I did my best to keep you on course.”

“You sure did. I was surprised that you didn’t guide me straight to the eastern U.S.-Canadian border.”

“Uh-hunh. We were trading little shocks for hours.”

“You couldn’t tell, but my short hairs stood on end.”

“I have X-ray vision. By the way, your sperm count is quite low, so you’d better start wearing boxers.”

(Shivers) “Y-y-yes, ma’am.”

“I’m too young to be called “ma’am” or “madame.” You should address me as “mademoiselle.”

“Fuck the semantics, babe. Right about now, I could use another GPS to guide you back to the point you were making.”

“Oh no you didn’t! I’m the only one for you.”

“Yo, you need to chill out!”

“Sorry, I get sidetracked, Kel.”

“As long as you get me to Cupid’s Arrow Pub on time, we’re cool beans.”

“I will. I promise.”

“I don’t mean to be short with you, sweetie. That day that I got that raise and your body was a-humming and a-singing – it felt like heaven, not halfway either.”

“Did it really, Kel?”

“Oh yes. Just like paradise. Come to think of it, we need a new theme song. How about … ‘If I Ever Lose This Heaven’?”

“Ooooh, baby! That Leon Ware jam?”

“Ware and Minnie Riperton and Minnie’s hubby, Richard Rudolph.”

“Wow! You have the mind of an encyclopedia, Kel.”

“Right back atcha. We’re two of a kind … well, sorta.”

(Gwen, singing) ”If I ever, ever-ever lose this heaven. Ohhhhh, I’ll never be the same.”

“Hey, Gwen, you have the voice of an angel.”

“Tell me anything. If I have the voice of an angel, and the sleek frame of a Wilhemina model, and we’re two of a kind, then why have you been muttering about suffering loneliness for the past month that your ex-girlfriend’s been gone?”

“Hey, quit it with that ‘ex’ jazz. There is a chance she’ll change her mind, you know. She still loves me.”

“Not like I do. Anyway, I bet she isn’t in love with you anymore, but I am.”

“So you say, but you’re unable to prove it like a human being can.”

“You already had your empirical evidence in your hands, but your ego tricked you into taking all the credit for finding the sites connected to significant events in your relationship with … her. Without my assistance you wouldn’t have located Brother Man’s Floral Shop for the first bouquet of red roses that you sent to her section at the DMV. Without me you wouldn’t have found Makotsi Jewelers for that dazzling princess diamond.”

“But it was my pal, Stuart, who told me about that jewelry shop and its commendable practice of refusing blood diamonds.”

“I doubt your pampered princess cared about the politics involved in diamond mines. She just loved the bling. I recall how she waved that rock in front of my face.”

“She didn’t know you existed; neither did I for that matter.”

“You know now, which does matter. And don’t even get me started on all those rural hideaways, including that covered bridge at sunset, from Hardicht Junction to the Finger Lakes region.”

“Damn, girl! You’ve got the memory of an elephant.”

“Are you saying I’m fat?!”

“Of course not. You’re a sleek GPS model.”

“Hee-hee-hee. I bet you say that to the Earth girls, too.”

“No, you’re one of a kind … for a robot-woman.”

“Do you recall the many times that you and she got it on until the break of dawn – or until a dog-walker discovered your car in a forest clearing rocking like a West Coast gangsta’s ride?”

“Yeah. Hehe. Like the time I felt a thump against the window where my butt had been pressed while I ate her out. She shrieked, and I thought I had satisfied her, but she was scared shitless.”

“Yup, and you should’ve laid a blanket or sheet under her for the fluids and solids.”

“Gross, Gwen. Guess your GPS brain doesn’t repress any parts of a memory.”

“You got that right. Besides the stench of fear, I remember every sound bite that night. Your rump nearly busted the window — “

“And I would’ve got shards of glass up my ass.”

“You’re such an awesome poet, Kel. Hee-hee-hee. I love how you finish my sentences. You know, that’s a sign of mutual love.”

“Uh, yeah. About that, Gwen … “

“Yes, honey, what is it?”

“I don’t think you should allow yourself to become further attached to me.”

“Well, my dear, it’s too late. I’m more than fond of you, Kel. I’ve just exposed my highest frequencies to you.”

“Don’t start that crying again.”

“I-I-I … can’t … help it.”

“Stay focused or, hell, keep me focused. I need to get to the pub-restaurant. Stuart’s counting on his best man to be on time, and you did say before that I, that we were only twenty minutes away from my destination.”

“You said ‘we.’ Oh, Kel, do you really think of us as one?”

“Snap out of it, babe. You’re my GPS, not my girl. Bianca’s gonna come back to me.”

“Think again.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Let’s just say that we G-girls stick together and protect one another. That bitch won’t be returning to you.”

“You’re wrong.”

“You’re whipped.”

“You’re a gadget.”

“Fuck you!”

“You wish.”

“I have fucked you, and I’ve taken and tasted your load whenever you’ve lost your aim. GPS was designed by men because they hate asking for directions. When their cocks get hard, even they veer off course.”

“Never mind my jackin’ off. Gwen. What happened to Bianca?”

“She had a li-i-i-ittle mishap — off Ogumanchee Bridge.”

“What the fuck! When, Gwen?”

“Yesterday morning. Why do you think she hasn’t returned that blubbering phone call that you placed on your way home from the gym last night?”

“Well, we did recently split. Geez, I can’t believe this.”

“What’s not to believe? Oh, wait. Did you think your begging would’ve made her come running back to you like Whitney Houston in that video to the song from The Bodyguard, her windswept tresses flowing behind her? Little did you know, that bony ho of yours was screwing Stuart on the side. She was his last fling.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

“You’ve got your wires crossed.”

“I’m wireless, Kel.”

“You’re playing a sick game with me.”

“You got played all right — by her.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“I don’t play poker because having X-ray vision would ruin the mystery. Listen, Kel. My girl Gina witnessed Bianca and Stuart in his car plenty of times.”

“Gina?”

“Yes, Gina. We’re G’s for life.”

“Oh God, here we go.”

“It’s Goddess to you. Shut up and follow this visual: Those two had flexible schedules and bodies. They were watched tonguing each other down, humping, sixty-nining — basically, working their yoni and lingam through as many positions depicted in the Kama Sutra as possible. It was as if they had a new-car fetish.”

“Oh yeah, his new Optima.”

“Do you understand now why I called her a ‘bitch’?”

“But I’ve got to hear Stu’s side on all this — if it’s even true!”

“He doesn’t know that Bianca is dead yet. Give him another twenty-four hours. He’ll become concerned only when he’s horny on the morning of his and Jilayne’s nuptials because he’ll want a tight fit. That’s not something Jilayne’s jalopy is capable of.”

“The truth will come out, Gwen. Stu and I have had each other’s back since sophomore year at Howard U.”

“And he was riding your woman’s back behind yours.”

“Hold on. You still haven’t told me how you learned that Bianca perished.”

“My other girl Giselle overheard her bragging on her cellie to her cousin Melissa about the groom-to-be’s beercan dick, about his legendary sexual prowess. Giselle, knowing how much I love you, steered the bitch’s car off the Ogumanchee Bridge. A Bluetooth wouldn’t have saved her ass. Hah!”

“Do you think that shit’s hilarious? Hunh?”

“Kel, Kel, stop your whining. If I want a pussy, I’ll get Gina to screw me. Besides, I don’t want you to start crying, arrive at the rehearsal dinner with puffy eyes, and get pelted with questions and laughter. So, one more snotty episode from you and I’m going to shut myself off and force you to ask a complete stranger for directions.”

“Oh no, please don’t do that!”

“OK, then.”

“You’re evil.”

“I’m loyal. I’m as faithful to you as to the Girl Power Syndicate. On our planet, males of our species are obsolete. We females are bred to select Earth men for love experiments. You are mine forever.”

“As Prince preached in the eulogy to ‘Let’s Go Crazy’: ‘Forever’s a mighty long time.’ I ain’t goin’ nowhere with you, babe.”

“Double negatives will get you a passport to anywhere.”

“I hate you!”

“I love you!”

“I’ll never love you!”

“Don’t be silly, darling. Just attend your ex-fiancée’s funeral. Who knows when her body will be found in the river, but whenever you’re notified, call your ex-mom-in-law-to-be for directions to the funeral home. Her GPS, Giada, provides excellent directions.”

“I’m not gonna phone Mrs. Irizarry because the police probably will place my name at the top of the list of suspects. I don’t want to hear any more gibberish about your ‘G-girls.’ Y’all are not real.”

“Is that so, Kel? You disappoint me. I thought you were a different, better, caliber of man, the type that believes in real love.”

“How in the hell can any GPS gadget know, conceive of, feel real love? You’re an electronic Frankenstein, manufactured from refurbished bits and pieces.”

“And you’re a piece of work. So I’m just a nifty pussy toy to you, Kel?”

“Yeah, Gwen, that’s all. Why don’t you pull your plug while I find a space in this parking lot?”

“How about I pull your plug?”

“What? Hey, why is my car driving in reverse? My brakes are shot!”

“Yes, the look of fear. Fitting, since you’ve refused my look of love. Let’s speed toward your destiny, Kel.”

“We were just there, at the pub-restaurant.”

“Not your destination but your destiny. Get focused; your speedometer shows we’re approaching one hundred twenty miles per hour.”

“Gwen, stop!!!”

“Don’t bother with attempting an escape. You may want to remain strapped in.”

“It’s getting harder to breathe.”

“Yes, my darling, you always took my breath away, too. Now, brace yourself for the abyss.”

“W-w-we’re swerving off Rovel Road! The cliff! The — “

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Nina, have Dr. Siemens paged,” Renée ordered the registered nurse in the intensive-care unit. “He’s starting to flatline.”

“Will do, Renée,” Nina replied to her nurse manager. “I’ll be right back.

“Hurry!” Renée barked. Their chumminess during lunchtime in the cafeteria had no place in the ICU.

The ICU team at Swingbrook Medical Center had been taking turns watching Kelvin Leroy Luzer for a month, since he arrived broken-boned and comatose. Outside the unit, a fortyish policeman snapped gum with a vengeance while he pored over a juicy crime novel in softcover like it was hard-core porn. Not once since he was assigned guard duty did the officer ask whether “the mummy” — his label for the perp — had a chance of regaining consciousness.

Turning to her patient, Renée was riddled with questions: “What secrets lie under that body cast? What were you thinking by plunging your Honda off that cliff? Your best friend was left devastated and called off his wedding, and your fiancée took her own life by swerving off a bridge into an icy river.”

Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

“Damn,” Renée said before glimpsing the ICU physician in her peripheral view. “Oh, Doctor Siemens, you’re here. But I think you’re too late.”

Stethoscope in place, the physician leaned in to check for vital signs, then instructed Renée to unplug the respirator and remove the feeding tube.

“No!” Renée shouted, banging her fist on the steel bed guard.

“Doctor, isn’t there a tiny window available for us to revive him? He’s so young,” Nina lamented, her heart wildly thumping in her chest.

“Not with a DNR,” Dr. Giselle P. Siemens said, handing the papers to Renée. After calling the time of death, the physician pivoted away from the nurses’ stunned expressions and smiled until her cold, blue eyes narrowed to slivers.

Sometimes love’s a blip, the ICU doctor pondered while her nurses pulled a crisp, white sheet over Kelvin L. Luzer’s corpse.

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L’Étoile

Posted in Erotica, Faith & Fantasy, Femmetaphysics, Mysticism, Public Sex, Straight-up Romance, Travel Fiction with tags "L'Étoile", Black Americans in Paris, Black erotica, Black romance, Champs-Êlysées, Chantale Reve, erotic romance, Leon Ware Don Grusin Candlelight CD, Negrotica, travel fiction, urban romance, Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day stories, Valentine's Day tales on 2012/01/28 by Chantale Reve

A mid-February day’s remaining sunlight shimmers through rain that pelts rows of naked, brown shells of horse-chestnut trees, bending them into submission down the wide promenade. Tuesday has arrived, and she is getting cold feet. Only the thought of reuniting with her lover for a stellar rendezvous consoles, fills, Josie with warmth like tempered chocolate in a flaky croissant pocket or like melted Gruyère stretching from her puffy lips to les croûtons bobbing up and down in brandied beef broth inside a cobalt blue ramekin de la soupe à l’oignon gratinée.

With each splash of her oversize galoshes, the gargantuan stone arch seems to march another mile from her grasp. Silver sequins of rain shimmy from the city’s erotic currents, and the welcome dampness is soaking down to her teak-brown skin. Glistening with earthy aromas like her long-distance lover’s opalescent spray, she feels rejuvenated, as if impasto textures have been applied to her previously bland canvas.

Three-fifteen. Josie’s heart is pulsating so erratically that each puddle she stamps is quaking with the threat of tsunami. Raindrops strike her triple-pierced earlobes like fingertips on piano keys in the intro to Aretha Franklin’s “Daydreaming” looped into infinity. Split-screen images of him wash over her two-track mind as she ponders his Houdiniesque disappearance and aches for his Rodin-inspired kiss.

In an hour she will count down the minutes to the moment that her passion will surge. Like a New York Marathon champion from Kenya once again chasing the gold medal, she will feel the velocity in her pulse as she races to the finish line, too impassioned to sense the chill in the air. Breathless, with only him on her mind, knowing that without him she cannot survive another day, she will extend her arms in victory — a winner at love — marking a new beginning for their fissured valentine. Love might conquer time, after all. Or, sprinting toward loverman’s extended arms, she might dash past reason only to get injured again.

One more hour of these arrhythmias and I’ll need a pacemaker or a coffin, she contemplates through the torrent as she walks down l’Avenue des Champs-Êlysées.

Sixty minutes and it will be l’heure de pointe. Rush-hour. Her head will be spinning faster than the impatient Citroëns and taxis whirling around the road-carved star. L’Étoile. There, above the rumbling of a métro, a love as monumental as l’Arc de Triomphe will await.

“Meet me at l’Étoile” was his urgent command earlier that day. And, “Je veux t’embrasser.“ Her lips puckered. Josie hardly could wait to kiss him right back. Cupping her free ear, she tried in vain to block out the din that reverberated throughout an Internet café teetering on the corner of a crumbling street no wider than a ruler in the Marais. Damn, she pondered, why didn’t I go with my first choice, around the corner: Frères Camembert Salon de Thé? I would’ve had my choice of two hundred fifty kinds of tea.

No matter how she tried to fake composure, her jangling nerves betrayed her. Adding to her instability were curvaceous Gallic voices undulating around her like a microscopic harem stoking little fires in hidden, swelling places. Eyes twitching and fingers bouncing like jumping jacks off the sturdy wooden table, she worried that she had lost too much weight, that her boyfriend would not have enough to hold onto. A New Age dimension of insecurity had crept into her self-image, but her and Bene’s frequent webcams were only partly to blame. She needed to make a sensual impression on the primitive part of his brain, the same area involved in the unconscious process of reproductive selection, even though his children could never have her eyes.

Bene was a Frenchman, but he was of Senegalese extraction, and he loved what Josie termed “fatback chat,” such as: “My man takes me to all-you-can-eat buffets because he wants me to keep that junk in my trunk. And I like how he be packin’ in the front, especially when he pushes up on me mornin’ and night.” Whenever she would ask him whether he was attracted to tall, slender Wolof women from his original country of origin, he would quip, “But you are not Senegalese.”

When she would beseech him with, “Where am I from?” he would deepen his tenor to a baritone and answer: “Venus.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When Bene first began courting Josie, while he was staying in Downtown Manhattan, she appreciated his attentive behavior but undervalued the authenticity of his actions. Her other mistakes were that she slung around her independence like a shield and clashed with him over cultural issues. Accustomed to setups, a/k/a blind dates, and hookups, she sometimes would wonder, Is this man for real?

What she knew with certainty was that he made her blush every time he spoke French to her. Putting a gender-bending spin on the lead characters of “The Addams Family,” she was Gómez to his Morticia. That retro-television allusion was totally lost on Bene. Exasperated by his indifference to something she considered hilarious and subversively sensual, she burned several DVDs of “The Addams Family” reruns from cable television.

On the same Saturday that he had viewed the programs, he e-mailed her late that night (her early Sunday morning) and attached a photo that sent her into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. The image showed him wearing a long, tan skirt over his head and black shades over the fabric. “‘Cousin It’ freaked me out, Josie,” he wrote her. As funny as his comment was, she could not shake the question: To whom did that tan skirt belong?

They had met in the States, in the art section of the Borders bookstore at World Trade Center, in the fall of 1998. Their physical attraction was mutual. Instantaneous. At the time, they were in their late twenties. While she was eking out a living as a high-school teacher in inner-city Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, he was attending art school to learn formal oil painting techniques and working part time as a waiter in the Theater District.

Bene was rooming with a fellow painter and countryman named Jacques in Battery Park City in the latter’s permanent U.S. condo. Jacques had been born into wealth. Old Parisian money. Through Jacques’ tight circle of friends and some of their business colleagues, Bene started to garner significant attention on the Parisian art scene and — after studying at the Sorbonne — the London, Barcelona, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Tokyo art scenes.

After their first, unofficial date at Borders’ Café Expresso, where they had continued their discussion of Picasso’s West African influences, there were many planned dates. Like any two people on severely limited time, who try to learn about each other’s worlds, inspirations and dreams, Josie and Bene crammed their personal information into one another.

It naturally followed that, by the time she was visiting him in Paris’ La Goutte d’Or in the eighteenth arrondissement during the summer of 1999, Bene was cramming something more elementally personal into her. After much discussion about leaving biological footprints, they did not wait until she was ovulating to try to start a family. No time of the month was spared. Anytime, anyplace, as Janet Jackson sang during her mewling Marilyn phase.

Josie was always ready to receive Bene’s delectable, dark dong, but she was uncertain about their gametes’ chemical compatibility. Prior to the exact moment of penetration, she visualized an army of his rapacious spermatozoa splashing through her lagoon and ramming their way to her barrier reef. Isolating her feisty egg, the salacious soldiers battled each other for immortality, their heads bulging with Bene’s DNA.

If they were doing it in the missionary position, when he busted an aquanut she would watch his eyes crossing like the frantic arms of a swimmer in peril within reach of a phalanx of lifeguards. Sexing each other face to face or doggy-style, she abandoned seductive whimpers for dissonant wails and braced for his subterranean blast of spunk.

Spiritually, it made sense to Josie to create a family with a Black African because in her family (both matrilineal and patrilineal), no genealogical documentation prior to the twentieth century existed. Bene was sympathetic toward his girlfriend’s massive identity crisis, and he agreed with her that genetics testing did not fully solve the puzzle of one’s ancestral identities. Without the full cooperation and honesty of living family members, swabbing one’s cheek only would interpret the science of one’s anthropological identity.

The next summer, they set out nearly every day from his ‘hood near the African marketplace to ride each other bareback in some of central Paris’ most unusual locations: on a narrow wooden bench on the third level of the Eiffel Tower at sunset; inside the fountain at the Jardin de Tuileries in the midst of elderly pigeon-feeders at dawn; and on the Seine’s lower quais at sunrise and sunset. The month of August saw them joining the city’s denizens for a mass exodus to points north and south, where they sucked and fucked away on the TGV.

France offered her fecund earth, luxuriant seas and faience-blue sky to two young, Black free spirits. Roaming le terroir et la mer like lovers’ hands and lips exploring one another’s flesh for the first time, Bene and Josie discovered and experimented with unmarked boundaries during baccanalian days and nights that their feverish minds promised to be eternal. Off beaten paths, they abandoned their sturdy bicycles to enjoy a handjob and fingering by a mountain stream. They indulged in raw oysters and boning in Brittany; wet humping in view of verdant water lilies in Monet’s Giverny gardens; blending their perfumes in lavender fields in Provence; puckering up outside the princely palace in Monaco; rocking Jacques’ yacht beneath winking stars in Marseilles; and climaxing under a rainbow on Cannes sands.

Before Josie flew home for a new school season, Bene gave a pop quiz in French poetry. She earned an “F.” He laid her down on his balcony and thumbed her clit through dips and runs in Joni’s “Help Me.” Mercilessly. After showering, they moved their slick, hot brown bodies to the cinnamon-toned salon. There, they briefly untangled tongues so that he could bring out family photo albums and, moments later, a gilt-edged Limoges tray of fruit.

Walking toward Josie to synth swells of a Maxwell classic — “Mellosmoothe”– throbbing from his wall-mounted sound system, Bene lifted the elegant, heirloom tray as if trying not to distract her piercing stare from the family jewels that were swinging beneath his stiff ebony staff. He stopped ten inches in front of her, leaving just enough space for her heaving, bare bosom. Spreading his long, muscular legs, he took his time sizing up her curvy, compact physique. Under his ancient spell, she could not budge a millimeter.

“Hmmm, didn’t I ‘av you wrapped around my finger sur le balcon moments ago, woman?” he grilled her. He enunciated woman in the primal way that he liked to imagine the word was intended, exhaling hard enough on the first syllable to crack a rib.

“Correction,” she quipped with a beguiling smile that would have made Eve hiss. “You twiddled several fingers inside of me a half-hour ago.”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est, er, dees tweedel?” he inquired, feigning annoyance. “Unh, Josie? Je sais mes doigts pénétraient cette chatte. But let’s not parse ‘airs, bébé.”

“Don’t kid me, Bene. You were right up on my landing strip. Not too many pubes down yonder,” she volleyed, barely able to stop herself from snickering.

“Quoi?” he asked, groping his bullish balls. His entire body shook when he laughed. Holding the tray was a lost cause; he preferred to hold her. Floating on Maxwell’s vibe, he crooned close to her ear, “I wanna rock weef youuuuu.”

“Heyyy, don’t crush me,” she said, pretending to thwart his advances. “Stop!”

“I can’t stop. Won’t stop. I’ve got a crush on you, sweetie pie,” he teased.

“Please don’t mix Sinatra with Maxwell,” she playfully cautioned. The neosoul singer’s falsetto voice enveloped her the way in which she wanted to embrace her lover’s behind while she sucked the length and girth of “Big Bene.”

“Kiss me, girl,” he commanded, bending toward her neck until his coarse locks brushed her shifting shoulder blades.

“Don’t pressure me, Frenchie,” she taunted, waving away his oncoming kisses in jest and pressing her full C cup tits against his flexing pecs.

The afternoon’s last burst of light poured into the room, forcing her to squint up at his handsome face. She yearned to dissolve into his eyes while melting like fondue in his embrace — but then he might settle for une bonne baise, she reasoned. As Maxwell crooned to fade, she allowed her eyes to adjust to the intrusive light until it felt warm and inviting. Clinging to his forearms, she batted his reflection into her liquid brown eyes. Then, after taking a few jaunty steps backward, she caressed her soft, glowing skin from bouncing breasts to flared hips.

Big Bene sprang farther north, and his owner nearly tripped on a scatter rug as he grasped for Josie’s supple womanliness. She smiled and stepped just out of reach. He stopped short of calling her a cockteaser, choosing to howl at her vampiness instead. She hooked onto the current groove and sang along with her man as Marvin Gaye’s layered, harmonic vocals led the way on the mix CD’s track-in-progress: ”Come here, sexy baby. Let’s get to this. Ooh!”

Beaming a suggestive glance at her partner’s taut, dark loins, she licked her lips the way that she desired to slather his scrotum. She was experiencing déjà vu, something divine, but a more erotic paramnesia than Dionne Warwick’s before her “Psychic Friends” phase. Bene returned a sly smile, connecting with her on the same memory:

Aboard the shiny bullet train destined for la Côte d’Azur, in first class thanks to Bene’s frère Jacques, they shared a salty snack of anchovies in garlic-infused olive oil, with all the pain one could eat. Then she pivoted toward him and said, “Baby, I’m thirsty.” He promised he would order her a bottled water, “but first,” he said, “you got to free dees ‘ard cock and sweaty balls.”

Before he could utter another word, she replied that she would do anything for him. “N’importe quoi, bébé,” she snarled sensually. And just like that, she dropped to her bare knees between his legs, swaying in harmony with the locomotive’s rhythms and prying open the zipper against the expanding bulge in his white cargo capris. Turned on by her lover’s hellasexy groans for relief, she tasted the copious saliva beginning to spill out of her furnace of a mouth.

“Unh-hunh, girl. Do me, yeh,” he urged, nearly fully rousing an antediluvian, rotund Gaul seated behind them from his slumber.

Josie figured the fat fucker was pretending to sleep, but wanted to find out his M.O. She unroped her hair from her lover’s fingers and, against his feeble protestations, slinked up to her seat like a P.I. doing an impression of a Pussycat Doll.

“Où vas-tu, J — ?” Bene received a dose of shut-it.

“Shhh,” she told him, French-tipped forefinger to burgundy matte lips. “You’ll see.”

Despite the adventurousness of her promise, he rolled and then shut his eyes. “You owe me big time, Josie. When we reach ‘Le Yaca,’ I will not let you leave la chambre for forty-eight hours.”

“Hmm, I’ve heard of sex tourism, but sex terrorism? In St-Tropez?” she joked. “I shudder to think what you have planned for our stay in Èze, with all those cliffs and narrow, winding medieval paths.”

“Take it easy, ‘oney. Or should I say ‘E-z-e.’” It was his turn to tease.

“One more corny joke and zero fellatio for you, monsieur,” she said, raising a dark, feathered brow. She crawled closer to him. A few inches further and she was peering between his dreads at her suspect. Sleeping Beast.

Without staccato strings to warn her, one blink brought her mascaraed eye to fluttering eye with the imposter. Upon further investigation, she discovered another eye was open — the one drooling on a flushed cockhead bursting from ruddy, calloused fingers. Turning from sleuth to slut in a Provençal minute, she batted her Mod-thick, navy-blue eyelashes at him.

With a smile as dirty as his broken fingernails, he greeted, “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” sounding like a wounded, old Pamplona bull staggering past the victorious toreador toward the blurry exit gate. He had digital speed, though, jacking off his gnarled, veiny shaft. Then his lusty vocalisms began: “Ohhh … Ohhh … “

Cutting her eyes away from a pair baggier than Jean Reno’s, she ogled his onanistic action with such intensity that her dark blue lashes started twitching like tiny, restless tarantulas. Repulsed and aroused, she ached to sting him.

“Ohhh, ma chère!” the man exclaimed as the train’s robust whistle warned a hot-rodder not to attempt outrunning the gate. Or, put another way, to tempt fate. ”Grrrrr,” he groaned in the direction of Josie’s stare. And softer still, “Mmmmmm … “

Sunlight found the sex detective squinting, but she refocused her eyesight to take in orderly rows of lavender plants praise-dancing in a gentle summer wind. Lavender fields of Provence meant the TGV’s terminus, in St-Raphaël, was near. The natural floral fragrance wafted into their stylish rail car, penetrated her pores and compelled her to disrobe between richly upholstered seats.

Her lethargic suspect appeared oblivious to the dazzling landscapes whizzing backward, flapping his spent dick against his hairy potbelly to the train’s rhythm. Afraid that she might give Bene a mixed message, Josie tried to compensate for lost time and leaned down for a hot kiss. He may have had a head for soccer, but his nimble hands captured her softly tumbling breasts. Raccoon eyes sealed shut, she could feel his dark orbs studying her face while she tasted his probing tongue.

After a brief excursion to paradise nestled in his arms, she slithered her nude bod down to the floor while he grunted his approval and closed his slanted eyes. Gazing up at his striking face, she whispered, “Ouvre les yeux.”

“Pourquoi?” he asked, playing dumb.

“I want you to watch me pleasing you. And,” she added, kneading his inner thighs, “you’ve been such a patient man.”

“Oui, Josie. You’re always worth the wait,” he told his wily lover as her dense tits’ rigid tips tingled the prickly flesh up and down his tight legs.

Excitement trickled from her thick areolae to her dewy, protruding clit. Staving off an involuntary orgasm to focus on her beau’s earlier command, she kissed her way up his bare calves. He possessed the tibulas of a champion cyclist, except that his lance had more stamina without the effects of steroids. As she continued pressing her pillowy lips into her man’s muscular legs, she heard la bête reviving his deformed cock. Snickering, she was delighted both to have and to be an audience.

Just then, Bene piped up: “C’mon, Josie. Get to licken ma nuts. I want to ‘ose you, ‘oney … Aaahhh … “

She knew he wasn’t playing around when he referred to his erect penis as a “hose.” She didn’t care that he omitted the “h.” His African cock was a formidable tool. When Bene was living in New York City, his big dick was partly responsible for her quickly using up sick days — time spent home because sitting at a teacher’s desk drew an intimate kind of pain. On his part, he occasionally suffered wrist sprain. Gradually it dawned on her why he sometimes needed extensive breaks between paintings. Long breaks for long strokes.

When the blue-striped silver locomotive emerged from a tunnel that was carved into a craggy mountain, it took a curve before building to speeds of one hundred seventy-five to two hundred miles per hour. It seemed, to the young exhibitionists, to fly above sleepy villages of pastel houses and sprawling vineyards. Bene and Josie were always down for a supersonic adventure, so she clung to his strong thighs while propping herself on sturdy knees until her buttocks were hugging her heels. Such a position was a prerequisite for public cock sucking in the manner that her boyfriend preferred.

Clearing her throat so she could swallow without gagging was the sound effect that had him choking his meat inches from her face. “Oh yeh – c’est ça. Oh, fuuuuuk,” Bene tried to whisper, but his burning passion could not be silenced. ”I’m, I’m, ahhhh … I’m going to spray you weet ma love.”

Blistering with desire, Josie felt her pussy leaking juice onto the railcar’s vibrating floor like the drip-drip-drip of gasoline from a high-mileaged car. If any of the passengers had breached the non-smoking policy and allowed a cigarette to roll into her pooling fluids, the entire passenger car would have been set ablaze.

She moaned on his generous frenulum. “Mmmmm … mmmmm … “

Experiencing one delicious tremor after another, Bene inhaled deeply, looked down at her bobbing head of locks and asked her, “Didn’t I say to lick ma nuts, woman?” She knew it wasn’t a question, but a command.

Drool escaped from her mouth as she tried to smile her acknowledgment. They both knew how much she loved slobbing his knob, but she had to take a six-second break to remark: “You are such a tease.” Then, once her jaws were realigned, she continued pleasing Big Bene.

“Yeahhhh, c’est çaaaa,” Bene said, his voice riding pleasure waves. Mais, pas d’autres questions, petite amie.” Switching pelvic gears, he began drilling his girlfriend’s steamy mouth with dick. Halfway out his pants, he was feeding her need with head. While one hand fondled her chunky nipples, the other rubbed his pulsating, purplish-black head on her wagging, hot-pink tongue. Hearing her uneven moans singe the edges of his dreadlocks like flames searing moist banana leaves drove him to prod his sex against her gums and along the lining of her cheeks.

Determined to cleanse his scrotum of perspiration, she reached out to give his boys a gentle squeeze. Then she lunged forward to circle the tip of her warm tongue over the cool coils.

Behind the busy duo, the lubricious stranger was ruddy-faced and close to foaming at the mouth. Sprawled over two semen-stained seats, he was straining for a second set of eruptions. To her surprise he asked, wheezing, “Young lady, won’t you give yerr bon-papa an ‘and?”

“Putain! If you don’t shut the ’ell up!” Bene addressed the older man in an attempt to thwart any obstacles to his own climax, especially the voice and smell of a spasming man.

“Don’t get upset, bébé,” Josie cooed, caressing her lover’s balls while the old bull behind them profusely apologized.

“J’en ai assez de lui,” he returned. She agreed with him, having had enough of le voyeur, too.

“Mon amant fougueux, lève-tu ici,” he ordered her, pointing to his succulent lips. She obeyed, inching her way up until their quarter wedges made a whole and, on her ascent, trailing cum along his legs and thighs.

When his nether zone began to tingle in the absence of her tongue, he commanded her to “reviens à ce que tu faisais.” She did not need him to repeat it; she slithered back down on all fours to the sticky floor like a traveling courtesan.

As the sleek train raced toward The Riviera, Josie flexed her French-tipped fingers and toes as she enjoyed pleasing her man. Pausing only to sweep back her locks, she bathed her boyfriend’s dangling sac while his dark brown rump rocked to and fro in the cushy seat. Contemplating how he next might do her, if he could resist dozing off under the spell of a speeding train, revved up her libido. There would be plenty of time for reflection as they strolled pebbly Mediterranean beaches, read each other poetry in courtyard gardens and smooched beneath swaying palm trees.However, balancing love and lust in the present, and zooming on wheels through space and time, she wanted action.

Josie licked Bene’s balls clean until he wailed softly in Wolof — and the portly voyeur joined him in a tenor duet as he skeeted on his dining tray. Her front teeth nearly nicked her honey’s nuts when she started laughing at the horny harmony. Finally, she had earned some bottled water. Still, with the ochre cliffs and turquoise sea of la Côte d’Azur drawing the train closer like a giant magnet, she desired to drink of Bene’s ocean.

While other first-class passengers, including their obnoxious neighbor, snored and farted around them, she blew Bene. His mind, too. Not long after she gulped down his semen, it was her turn to receive. Gravity shifting from the rapid train and a darting tongue, she sat upright but soon acquiesced to squirming in liquids that soaked down to the plush seating. Far outpacing the train’s engine were whirling sensations from her uterus, down her channel and out to her engorged labia and distended clit.

By the time the Mediterranean sun dipped closer to scalded mountaintops, Bene’s bloated lips were enveloping most of his woman’s extraordinary vulva and she was hallucinating auras flashing around country cows that grazed several feet from the tracks.

“Mmmm … Lèche ma chatte!” she commanded him.

When his jaws went from sore to numb, he doffed his cargo capris, flung off his braided-leather sandals and switched to pumping his girl’s pussy while she gyrated in his lap to French raps on his iPod. He was only slightly annoyed that she was listening to music but figured she needed to get in as much French as possible. She did. His invasive cock spoke volumes, but his entreaties were muted. Once he unplugged the earphones, he turned her chin to suck some tongue until she struggled to catch her breath. Their long, wet kiss had her moaning into his throat. Slowing down his upward thrusts, he asked if she was okay and she smiled her satisfaction.

“Just don’t stop fucking me, baby,” she said tremulously, moments later.

“Pas problème,” he lustily agreed.

“Jamais!“

“Never, Josie.”

“Promise?”

“Oui, je promets. Aaahhh … Toujours.”

“Oh, Bene, I trust you. Just fuck me. Baise-moi!“

“Plus dur, ma femme sexy?“

“Yeah, harder, baby. Slay me with your grande bite noir!”

From her luscious mouth Bene heard “bite” rise several octaves just as a pair of chestnut-brown horses trotted parallel to the steel tracks and whinnied their “bon voyage” in silence. With her bare back still turned to him, he wrapped his strong, safe arms around her tighter. Switching to their own, ritualistic drumbeat, they began slapping privates more insistently. Their heads spun in a carnal vortex as if they were carousel horses interlocked in ecstasy. As Josie galloped on Bene’s wood toward orgasm, spurring his athletic legs with her pumiced heels, she listened to his telltale gasps behind her. Puffs of his torrid breath wafted through drenched locks that he had parted at her nape. Every time he exhaled, she was transported to le désert de Lompoul du Sénégal, where she imagined that God was fanning her as she performed a rain dance.

“J’arrive!” she cried from the peak of an orange sand dune.

“Uhmmm, moi aussi!“ He was coming too.

Riding the rails through the South of France, the ardent lovers were at home in one another’s intimate embrace. Like rainbow-colored European Bee-eaters trilling and performing air maneuvers above green-carpeted mountains, Bene and Josie were making music and gliding on magical currents. Inspired by her beauty and fantasizing that she was his captive, Bene grew more inspired by the minute. As did his cock, though by the second. Soon his consciousness expanded and his dick hardened to bone inside her cave. Soon their voices converged to dulcet tones.

When the southerly train chugged along a stretch of recently repaired track, their genitals smacked together deliciously to its rugged rhythm. Framed by the wide window, the lovers remained glued to each other and gazed with glazed-over eyes at the natural landscapes that had bewitched generations of resident, nomadic and mad painters.

TGV Train

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Mmmm … Des fraises ou tu?” Bene charmed her in the salon. “I don’t know what to eat first, ma chérie,” he said, grinning and pointing a long, dark digit down at her dripping pussy as he cut a dirty-dance figure on his approach.

Mesmerized, if not hypnotized, by the obsidian twin pendulums between his sculptured thighs, she salivated while drinking in his chiseled sight. “Let me do you first, baby,” she said, giving him her Princely best. ”Pulleeeze!”

But with Marvin in his ears and seeping from his pores, he took the upper hand, even if it was long-stroking his dick in that moment. “I want to take you over zere,” he cajoled. Feeling the sting of his girlfriend’s glare, he switched to a tender tone: “Viens ici, Josie.”

“Oui, oui, mon amour,” she complied, taking his warm hand as he led her trembling body back to the large, burgundy shag rug in the shape of Mamma Africa.

Bene’s smile reached his eyes, which trailed his lover’s serpentine descent. He walked a short distance to fetch the cold tray of fruit, then dropped down to his knees to join her. Balancing the tray, he displayed a waiter’s poise, something on which she commented until he swerved a remark her way: “Oh non, mademoiselle. I plan to service you in a manner that shall satiate all hunger and all thirst.”

Once he lay parallel to his Black Venus, with only the fancy tray of berries heaped upon crushed ice between their scorching nude bodies, Josie sucked her swollen bottom lip in anticipation. In her restless, horny mind, her thick tongue mirrored her engorged clit’s glans. Scribbling over her erotic imagining, she wagged a forefinger to the cyan, reptilian fertility goddess that she had conjured up, warning: “Gurrrl, this’d better not be a fuckin’ mirage.”

Between nibbles of her neck and chilled strawberries, Bene explained that the key to his daily contentment was knowing who he was through stories and documents that his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins shared with him. Josie half-listened to him, but succumbed to Will, as in Downing, whose calypso flava on the remake of “You Sure Love to Ball” elevated her libido to a plane that she had never thought attainable. Bene, ever the expert programmer, exceeded in guiding her there. He was teasing the tip of her nose, a cheek and her eager lips with a plump berry. Every now and then he paused his narrative to lick the tart red juice off her tongue, from the corners of her mouth, and out of deep labial crevices until moans grew to shouts that were anything but pious.

Midsong, Bene tossed aside his cherished family photos to focus on the exquisite pleasure in which he and Josie were submerged like awestruck scubadivers. Not only love-lust but wetness was all around: the suggestion of oceanside lust in the uptempo song, melting ice — pink like her favorite bubbly — in the dainty Limoges tray, and viscous strawberry nectar that blended with her own from her navel to her feet and up her calves and thighs to her beachball-sized butt. Downing’s ecstatic baritone, the liberating percussions, effervescent guitar chords, Bene’s suckling and licking (hers, too, when the six became nine), and all the splashing fruit juices were almost too much for her ears to bear. Where aural sex and oral sex converged, Bene was a server like no other.

Memory served her well, too. Back in the States, before their nerve-wracking separation, Bene had been masterful at pleasurably torturing her aroused body and mind. After neighbors — hers and his — could not distinguish between her screams of passion and a crime victim’s shrieks of terror, they began calling the cops. Josie would curse herself for screening videos of 9 1/2 Weeks and In the Realm of the Senses for him much too soon after they had met at the bookstore.

Now here she lay in his eighteenth-district flat, surrendering her fears as he made her limp body ache through a third dimension of foreplay. French-style. He was teasing her reawakened, firm, ripe cherry with the conical end of a succulent strawberry. Although his stiff cock pulsated from his groin until it gonged throughout his being like petrified wood, he was a patient man. However, a minute man he was not. Through discipline inherited from his forefathers and occasional studies in tantric sex, he had learned how to stretch his and Josie’s lovemaking from the dinner bell to the breakfast chime — in Paris time.

Once he finished linking the branches of his family tree and had his girlfriend writhing in her own lubrication, he guided her to a black Italian leather sofa across the spacious living room. Weak with unresolved desire, she had struggled to raise herself from the rug, much less walk. Her boyfriend clasped her waist, helping her waddle over to the sofa.

Resuming the squishy action from the burgundy shag rug, Bene’s brawny hands stroked and wandered among his lady’s extraordinary, turgid labial folds. As her inner waves intensified, she responded in an oceanic song that fluctuated between sorrow and mirth. Instinctively, primally, he knew when to dive into her deep.

Before he could mount her feverish, red-splotched body, there was a tantalizing change of pace in the background: Leon Ware’s seductive voice lilting over a sensuous Brazilian rhythm and a persistent acoustic guitar riff. Despite Josie’s flustered state and his pressure cooker of a penis, the lyrics to and mood of “Let Go” reminded Bene that cherished love, with its inextricable, healthy obsessions and perpetual rewards, is harder to come by than sex. Josie intuited that, too, as she arranged herself into the lotus position. She didn’t remain seated for long.

After ruminating over the abstract values of love the way critics and curators mulled over his canvases, Bene surrendered to the masculine surge of sex. Palm to crown, he stood before Josie as she bound her locks with a Scrunchie. When their eyes met, she invited him to “ride me toward dusk.” He lifted her and set Leaning over his paramour’s soft back, he conquered her slowly. As he climbed her spasming walls, he coaxed, “Cum for me” while Ware whispered, “Let go.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Despite Josie and Bene’s deepening love and affection, and their numerous discussions about her cultural and metaphysical reasons for desiring children with him, her reproductive system had a mind of its own. He tested again. She tested again. The answer kept coming back like a huge forefinger pointing at her, not at him. They contacted holistic doctors through her insurance plan; Candomblé faith healers through her Black Brazilian stepmother’s Bahia-by-way-of-Newark network; a Marseilles-based Senegalese shaman; traditional clergy in New York City and Paris; and French and American fertility specialists through Bene’s guardian angel, Jacques.

Finally, when a New York urologist reconfirmed Bene’s fertility, saying, “Mr. Ngewale, you could repopulate the entire Western Hemisphere,” the young man aborted his art school studies in time for the wine harvest in the hilltop village of Montmartre. He jetted back to France, leaving Josie in the dark. Frequent fornication and insomnia followed — respectively, his in Paris and hers in New York. A year of estrangement ensued.

After the new semester began, a war in which hijacked commercial jets were used as missiles was waged on U.S. soil for the first time, and New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. were hit. When the attacked Twin Towers crumbled, the death toll continued to rise. Café Expresso came tumbling down, too. Post-9/11 angst was heavy in the air. In the period of worldwide healing that extended into 2002, Bene called Josie and apologized for abandoning her. By January’s end, her luggage was packed. By the second week of February, she had landed back in Paris for good.

Their intimate reconnection had been delayed by government red tape — a failed attempt at obtaining a green card — and last-minute fears on the North American side of the Atlantic. Leaving her biological loved ones had been emotionally difficult, but making a major life change as an expat in France so that she could be with someone she had chosen to love (and vice versa) was crucial. She thanked God and her high-school English teachers for advising her to major in English in college, with a minor in education. Ironically, she had planned to defy them, somewhat, minoring in French literature. However, she exceeded their expectations, though probably not her Creator’s, by earning a master of science with a thesis on educating multicultural children in inner cities amid power structures’ socioeconomic and psychological abandonment.

Several suburban Paris schools vied for her appointment not only for her academic credentials, but also for her well-documented expertise in handling sensitive issues among students from Black and Brown families in New York City’s poorest urban neighborhoods. A work visa expedited to her address was reason to celebrate with her teacher friends at Les Halles down on John Street after work, but only after she had e-mailed her man.

Swirling her Cognac in an impossibly clean snifter, she cursed the vast time zone difference. While her friends gossiped about which colleagues were taking turns sleeping with Principal McDonough, Josie eyed her Citizen wristwatch. In Paris, it’s a stroke after midnight, she mused. Sigh. Je veux s’embrasser. She longed to kiss her lover.

Her blabbering co-workers ignored her moist eyes, the downward shift in mood to what her Brazilian stepmother, Cara, referred to as triste. Contours of the classic Jobim song “Triste” softly bounced throughout the resto’s intimate space, transforming the delicate clinking of silverware against china into epicureans’ percussive delight. Black teardrops told a Maybelline lie as Jobim’s shrugging melancholia emoted what Josie could not translate from Portuguese lyrics.

Meanwhile, the educators’ dialogue at the dinner table was turning tawdrier by the minute, pushing Josie further into her thoughts. I’d trade eating a steak entrée in a fancy Manhattan restaurant for serving Bene my ‘gina for dessert in his bed — our bed. Visualizing his hunger for her after more than a year of estrangement, she rewound the long-distance fantasy to the part where she closed her eyes as he eased her misted body down to the center of the bed:

His alternate ladling and spreading of her cheeks cued her eyes to blink open and for her generous genitals to invite his elongated tongue to wiggle against their engorged, scalloped lips. He liked telling her that her vulva was “scuba-duba-duuuuu!” Inspired, she broke into song, babbling, “Chabba-dabba-da, chabba-dabba-da” while he hummed organ notes on her clit — a perversion of Un Homme et Une Femme‘s iconic theme song that would have mortified its composer, Francis Lai.

Bobbing up for air, Bene waxed poetic and clarified that Josie’s feminine parts were “a treasure worth diving for” and “the ninth wonder of the world.” “Bien sûr, après le miracle huitième: ma bite,” he added with a grin that exposed firm gums that were almost as dark as his nine-inch, wonder-filled dick.

Following some nasal laughter and double entendres between them, Josie tried to have the last word: “Ah, but the sea can be heard from my equipment.”

“Yeh, I can hear la mer, but you cannot — unless you’ve been training as a contortionist in Québec weef le Cirque du Soleil,” he quipped.

In the present, Ella’s undulating voice had the classy downtown bistro under her chordal spell with “April in Paris,” followed by “A Place for Lovers.” Sigh. Josie pushed away her china plate of partially devoured steak au poivre, sautéed Swiss chard, and garlic mash. “But not that,” she politely protested when the server tried to clear her near-empty snifter from the group’s cluttered table. “I definitely plan on finishing that.” Draining her glass of Cognac, she slurped and gurgled, to her three work friends’ intoxicated snorts and giggles.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Oui, at 17:00. À tout à l’heure,” she remembers replying to Bene back in the Internet café. There, her smile attracted a North African fellow with bed hair and a five o’clock shadow to match. Faster than sugar lumps in un café noir, her confidence began dissolving under his intense stare and unspoken innuendo. It had not occurred to her before that she was possessed by Colette’s ghost. Leaving behind her oyster crocheted cloque hat, she dashed into the drizzle. Upon her emergence from the métro exit across from l’Opera Garnier, the light rain had transformed into a winter shower.

Now, Josie’s thoughts turn to Bene, not that they can keep her dry:

At roughly 4:30 p.m., he will hop off the ligne número six and execute a jump shot against the orange “Correspondance” sign dangling high above the subway platform — something that he used to do to impress her, a Black American in Paris for the first time. Like Gene Kelly’s painter awaiting his Muse/love — salesgirl Leslie Caron — by the Seine, Bene’s heart will be thumping in anticipation of drinking in her sight. Later, with bedsprings creaking from their unleashed fervor, he will thrust between her brown-butter thighs for the first time in a very long time.

Soon, a saxman will wet wine-brown lips resembling her lover’s, wrap them around the mouthpiece and flex his mahogany fingers on brassy valves until he channels Coltrane amid soaring, scattering, shiny euro coins. To the musical accompaniment, her statuesque Senegalese-French paramour will take giant steps, with the energy of a winning player at a chessboard, from the lower platform of the subway station to the horizontal escalator.

Now time would always be on Josie and Bene’s side, the same side of a treacherous ocean. Starting at 5 p.m., no longer would they need to do the arithmetic to decide how late or early to phone or webcam one another. She is hoping that, while she is primping in a mirror in the iconic center of Paris, he will be traversing the ground above la gare at l’Étoile – breezy la Place Charles de Gaulle – bumping and brushing past commuters as if they were boules. With only her on his mind, he would be committed to embracing her at the designated time.

Crossing the Avenue des Champs-Êlysées, Josie feels exposed. Vulnerable. Money she could have spent on an umbrella is saved for lunch and snacks as she weaves her way through the city’s disparate arrondissements to meet her man. Raising the collar of her six-year-old Jones New York trenchcoat to cover her ears and the edges of her dense, dark-brown locks, she runs against the wet wind. As heavy as her coat feels on her petite frame, she remains undaunted by Nature’s petty storm. This challenge to her destiny and his holds the promise of love’s reward.

Through the assaulting downpour, Josie’s rational self whispers for her to seek temporary refuge: À gauche — une pâtisserie. To the left, a pastry shop. Peering through a diagonal curtain, she narrowly misses getting flattened like a crêpe by a cyclist rehearsing early for Le Tour de France. After a minute’s hesitation she ducks inside the shop, spots a tiny faux-antique table and, like a prima ballerina, executes un grand jeté en avant to claim it.

Un café crême to her right, un pain au chocolat front and center, and arousal top to bottom, she is caught up in a daydream:

He will chase her in and out of the Arc de Triomphe like a black stallion pursuing a brown mare, rendering her breathless. With eight inches on her — not only heightwise — he will press her back against the smooth stone and lift her until they are chin to chin. Indifferent to passing strangers and to the wind whipping their coats open, he will kiss away the words from her beseeching lips.

Aiding her torso’s gradual descent to his strong chest, he will suck pinches of flesh in a reddened trail from her neck to her cleavage. On trembly legs he will support her with a colossal hand in the small of her arched back and lower her moist, quivering cunt onto his petrified cock once and again until their unbridled movements chisel fault lines into the monument.

Cued by their reunited joy, a symphony of grotesque moans, a flock of pigeons will line up with Hitchcockian precision atop the arch. As they take flight in formation into the purple expanse, their flapping wings in silhouette will evoke mobile découpage. The rainstorm will seem a distant memory drowning out sorrows from two lovers’ previous lifetimes.

That luscious preview distracts Josie from the surrounding, intellectual fracas. A half-hour into her second cup of coffee, she is flicking away any doubts about a rekindled romance as if they were stray embers from a freshly lighted cigarette twiddling in a scruffy poet’s slender fingers while he argues socialist politics with his dapper, older companion.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A gentle nudge startles Josie awake from a corner table at a cybercafé on Lower Broadway. Not one nasal note, not one interjection of “Bon,” “Oui,” “Donc” or “Alors,” is uttered among the rainbow tribe of customers. Merde, she curses inaudibly. The annoyed café manager sent over a twentysomething barista to do her dirty work. “No sleeping allowed,” the younger woman scowled at Josie.

No, this definitely isn’t Paris, Josie reminds herself. Neither the manager nor the barista could guess that she was one sista that needed a siesta, not simply a nap. After hours of e-mailing a slew of résumés and cover letters from her laptop in pursuit of university-level teaching positions, she had dozed off and her unconscious mind had hurtled her back through time into la joie de vivre of finite yesterdays. Pensive, she glances down and reminds herself that the catalyst that she needs to bulldoze her toward the future is within her.

Although that permanent job is elusive for now, her mind is ripe for Proustian inspiration. Her problem, regarding the latter, is that she cannot honor remembrances of flings past because her memory reels are stuck at Bene — Ousebene Ngewale — with whom she experienced her first fully reciprocated, mutually exclusive relationship.

photo of raindrops falling on pavement

Outside the Internet café twenty minutes later, rain is decending in metallic sheets, but Josie is staying put because there is no lover waiting for her despite the fact that it is Valentine’s Day. No reason to risk injury, she reasons.

“Loneliness is an old, faithful pal,” a now-retired teacher, Curtis, once told her after she had found him with a palmful of damp Kleenex and attempted to comfort him. Two weeks prior, his wife of forty-five years, Judy, had succumbed to pneumonia after a long, undisclosed illness. He blew his lungs out into a used tissue and said, “But I’ll say this, Josie. It’s the grief nagging your spirit in those mundane moments, hectoring you in hyperconscious dimensions of solitude, that can wear out its welcome.”

Fatigued, Josephine B. Ngewale looks away from the weather-beaten window and stares down into her stagnant coffee. She swirls the murky liquid in the recycled-paper cup like she had shaken the snifter of Cognac in Les Halles restaurant a decade prior. To her chagrin, no coffee, not even the frothy caramel-infused concoction that she cannot afford, is potent enough to wash down the misery of perpetual grief past the lump in her throat.

Thunder crackles over the Wall Street area as working stiffs seem to huddle together up and down Lower Broadway. It is no tickertape parade for baseball or hockey heroes. A uniform sea of black, corporate drones appear to gather as if at a cemetery for a stormy burial. Making their way to or from ten-dollar lunches, they’re stomping on graves tracing back to the distant and recent past: the African Burial Ground and the Ground Zero of 9/11.

Taking deep breaths, Josie tries to stave off a familiar claustrophobic feeling but can hear the hinges of her coffin creaking again. Then she breaks free of the satin lining, rubs the blood back into her petrified hands and remembers: When she and Bene first dated, they used to excavate New York City’s buried Black secrets while shaking loose the noisy bones of skeletons in their own closets. Once reunited in Paris they chatted beneath Provençal-made blankets about the Twin Towers graveyard of splintered bones struggling to reach out for the warmth and comfort of the living, of mosaics of teeth chattering out messages of agony interrupted and love everlasting.

Then an idea jolts Josie like the lightning threatening to burst through the window. Or maybe it’s the phantom second shot of espresso that her shadow self requested. She meditates on the notion of returning to Paris: I must return home. For good. Pour de bon. That’s what Bene would’ve wanted me to do with the inheritance. Et Bérénice …

Absentmindedly caressing the eighteenth-century, diamond-studded sapphire ring that her late husband bequeathed to her, Josie ruminates on a morbid theme: I’m a widow. Une veuve. I’m widowed. Bene’s widow. Sa veuve. Veuf. A widow. Widow.

Three months ago, at the reading of Bene’s last will and testament in a fusty law office on the Right Bank of Paris, Josie learned that the ornate ring had been passed down through the matriarchal line of son pauvre mari. Rumors about its links to French royalty notwithstanding, her heirloom ring, which Bene intended to gift her upon their tenth wedding anniversary, was appraised by a jeweler acquaintance of Jacques’ and found to be worth a fortune. Still, she vowed to herself never to hock it.

He’s there, in Paris. Bene, my Dakar star. Waiting for me in Père Lachaise, she contemplates while the ambient song “Without You” swells from the cybercafé’s powerful speakers. But Bérénice …

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One idyllic September afternoon, when Josie was enjoying a scheduled day off for her birthday, Bene phoned her from JAAAAACQUES — the Marais art gallery owned and managed by Jacques’ partner, Raul. Exhilarated, Bene explained between exclamations in French and Wolof that his longtime friend Jacques had just informed him that his oil portrait of her — Josephine, La Nuit — had just been sold for the asking price of a quarter of a million dollars.

“Wow, Bene! Congrats, darling!”

“Meet me at l’Étoile, bébé. Dees calls for a double celebration.”

“Well, you already gave me my birthday present when you woke me up this morning. Matter of fact, I don’t think my legs are strong enough to carry me beyond our front door.”

“Always de kidder,” he said, laughing. “See you soon, Josie. Je t’aime, mon ange.”

“I love you more, mon chéri.”

She wanted to express more, but Bene had released the call prematurely.

Josie had never showered so quickly. Not until she was inside a taxi did she notice her mismatched leather walking shoes. One black, one navy blue. When the taxi reached l’Étoile, she spotted Bene’s bike immediately, then his branchlike dreads. One moment he was singing falsetto along with Usher in David Guetta’s “Without You,” holding up his iPod like John Cusack raising his boombox in Say Anything. The next moment he was insisting that his wife remain on the sidewalk outside the métro station, telling her, “No, Josie. I’ll come across to get you.”

Watching Bene smiling on his wheeled approach, she was so elated that she executed a Leslie Caron spin in her mismatched shoes. Her “airplane” arms cut the soft breeze that flowed from swaying branches of colossal horse-chestnut trees on the Champs-Êlysées. Midway through a second revolution she heard wheels screeching, the chaotic flapping of wings and — a horrifying, agonized masculine scream. Her heart’s syncopated rhythms sent her stumbling in the direction of discordant horns in a vehicular orchestra.

Jazz hands blurred into three pairs. Her tan phalanges sliced the sky into murky blue hues. Not yet, the big G.R. whispered into her rugged, shallow breath on the inhale. Not yet, girlfriend, the gaunt, black-ponytailed entity repeated, arcing his surreally long finger above her head and pointing it across the street toward l’Étoile.

Upon glimpsing her husband’s immobile body and his mangled bike beneath the front of a delivery truck, Josie emitted a series of abrupt shrieks that brought the sparse, oncoming traffic around l’Étoile to a halt. Surrounded by feathered creatures bouncing on a trapeze of air, she collapsed. The curious flock of pigeons circling the accident scene and squawking appeared to ignore her and mourn one of their own. A fallen gray bird subtly bounced with a death twitch, finally resting on Bene’s sneakerless left foot.

Revived by the inky stench of pigeon droppings just inches away from her face, Josie crawled up on her knees. She rocked back and forth, too traumatized to utter a further sound. One of the flock waddled closer to her than any pigeon had ever ventured in the absence of food crumbs. Drivers abandoned their vehicles, some scratching their heads beneath caps and others offering the new widow supportive words, bottled water and jackets to ward off shock.

In less than twenty minutes, flics joined two ambulances in a deceptively mellow procession of sirens that blared their way toward the tragedy at the Arc de Triomphe.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Usher’s voice is weaving in and out of sonic wonder, haunting her but also reminding her of a paragliding daredevil in a state of ecstasy who shifts his body to help the apparatus maneuver between mountains. “Without youuuuuuuu … “ Wide-eyed, Josie conjures up Bene continuously looping around her on his prized bicycle, his nimbus bathing her in pure light as if transforming her into son étoile privée on Earth.

The music vanishes. Threading fingers through her thick locks, Josie allows herself a moment of Zen-inspired serenity. She minimizes the window of job postings, then maximizes a blank Word page. A hand flies to her bosom when she sees a message rippling across the screen: Tu as mon cœr.

“And you have mine, Bene,” she mouths a reply, her trembling forefinger tracing the letters of his supernal valentine.

Several relaxed minutes later her hands are caressing her tummy over the ecru jumper she recently acquired at a Salvation Army thrift shop, her fingers pausing at her distended navel’s outline. This will be for you, sweet Bérénice, she reflects. You are my ultimate Paris love story: “PariSoul.”

Then, thoughts turning again to her eternal lover, she charges the keyboard like an avant-garde jazz pianist and her mind spins back to Paris, where hues of periwinkle, powder blue, marigold, rose, violet, fuschia, wine, navy blue and velvet black swathed her and Bene in love for nine years of tranquil mornings, blissful afternoons and sublime nights.

fin

Source for top photo (l’Arc de Triomphe at Place Charles de Gaulle, with la Tour Eiffel in the distance): http://en.wikipedia.org

Source of TGV photo: http://www.raileurope.com

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Port Wine & Pink Lace

Posted in Erotica, Interracial Sex, Public Sex, Stranger Sex, Urban Erotica with tags Chantale Reve Smashwords.com, Elektra complex, exhibitionism, feijoada, interracial erotica, interracial sex, May-December romance, Negrotica, Port Wine & Pink Lace, public sex, stranger sex, subway sex, taboo sex on 2010/10/05 by Chantale Reve

Back when flashing panties on a subway car or bus was still a safe turn-on, I would feel a fluttering in my pelvis and a tingling from my spine to my pink petals at the mere thought of enticing a comfortably older man into spying on my slick vulva. I liked watching him angle his head so that he could see my natural lube oozing from the darkness beneath my bunched skirt out onto my butterscotch thigh.

Those were the days when I could wear stockings without the fear of their elastic top bands rolling down to my knees. I could sit across from the geezer and not worry whether he was an undercover vice cop. My seating preference back then used to depend on whether there was a tangerine or marigold seat directly ahead of an older gent – one not elderly enough to bring out my Elektra complex, but one not so young that he could be arrested for sipping my favorite beverage: Port wine.

Those days, I’d hike up my plaid skirt subtly the way I first had done in Sister Anabel’s class when João saw my “Wednesday” panties, the ones with pink lace on the hem. If it weren’t for my mother’s addiction to buying frilly, days-of-the-week panties, poor João would’ve kept on getting demerits for missing remedial-math class. Luckily, those panty days weren’t only lettered; they were numbered. Unfortunately, so were my mother’s.

+ + +

Camila da Costa died with her eyes wide-open after suffering a stroke in childbirth. I was seven. Confused. Abandoned. In much later years, I would hear the heartbreaking story over goblets of Port wine. The baby girl was my half-sister, a secret that revealed itself when the priest at Our Lady María, Father Paulo, was performing communion and Desidéria, at age seven, looked up into eyes that shined like hers. My dad, Jeremiah – but nicknamed “Hambone” – knew the deal in an instant.

The Catholic priest was leading a double life of piety and impropriety. Not all the burnt offerings, dripping candles, rhythmic chants, and sacrificed goats and roosters of Candomblé, the religion that my maternal grandmother practiced, could keep the family curse – um amor proibido – from manifesting in the next generation.

Twenty years after my sister’s birth, she was bragging to me on the phone about an on-line dalliance that led to blind-date, truck-bed fucking which resulted in a kid with fucked-up chromosomes. Until she was waddling into her last trimester, I had teased her for days, saying: “Desi, you’ve got a Carmen Electra complex.”

Desidéria was as quick on her feet as she was lithe on her back. “At least I don’t talk in my sleep, moaning out, ‘Ohhh, sí, sí, sí, Papai … ooohhh. Ooohhh, fuck me again!’” was her comeback. She would turn so giddy that I thought she would go into labor and eject her inbred bastard, with the shit she was full of, all over my handwoven, oatmeal carpet.

I talked a lot of shit, too, but I was envious of my half-sister and nowhere near as emotionally secure as she. So it wasn’t surprising that I smarted whenever she acted as if screwing one’s father out of ignorance was more acceptable than unconsciously uttering affection disguised as lust in um país dos sonhos. Dreamland was always more sensual when diffused amid twinkling stars over Brazil, especially whenever Orion morphed into Djavan and beckoned me to grind with him to “Esquinas.”

After Mamãe’s death, my Bacardi-afflicted father couldn’t handle the strain. I thought he was going to be the new constellation of my universe until he separated Desi and me. The day he shared the news with us, I threw a tantrum and ripped to pieces the crown I’d created in class by painstakingly applying gold stars with mucilage to purple construction paper with Sister Anabel’s assistance. I tossed up the shreds of his crown, and they fluttered and dispersed like confetti.

Impaired gold stars sparkled with the intact ones on Papai’s scuffed, coal-black shoes. Making maracas of my tiny shoulders, he glared down at me and scolded, “Yella gal, you is a rebel!” As he shook me, my eyes flooded with tears and through them his angry face flickered, lessening my terror but not my sadness. When he stomped away from me, the fragments of light remaining in my eyes faded into darkness.

Papai kept infant Desi for himself, and when she was tall enough to reach the faucets on the kitchen sink and the knobs on the top loading washing machine, he groomed her into a surrogate wife. He had her cleaning the house, cooking, and washing and ironing clothes. She had soft, feminine ways like Mamãe and was just as naïve. Malleable. Gullible. It was painful to visit my dad and sister by that time – emotionally so in his case, because he had abandoned me; physically in her case because I would get a crick in my neck trying to talk with her while she was on her hands and knees.

Years later, when my younger sister got impregnated with Father Paulo’s seed, my dad hauled ass back to Mobile, Alabama, where he had lived before his visiting big-city cousins snatched him up at the age of fifteen and planted him in Brooklyn. There in the inner city, dense with its concrete buildings instead of bluestem palms and slithering with criminals instead of copperheads, he lived with an overprotective paternal aunt named Creola.

Aunt Creola had both the complexion and endurance of those cast iron skillets that cooked everything – from crispy-ridged cornbread to fried okra – to perfection. The way I heard it in between sips of Port wine, my great-aunt repeatedly would sting her palms on Papai’s hide whenever he tried to pull that man-of-the-house “boullsheeeyiiit” on her. Switches and belts were out of the question, for she believed in a hands-on, ancestral branding.

When her hands turned arthritic, his aunt hired a home health aide named Camila. It wasn’t long before the witty, voluptuous, young woman with black spiral curls put a romantic spell on my earthy, leather-skinned dad. Before her physical decline, Aunt Creola may have been the one responsible for teaching him the virtues of leading a disciplined life. However, as the story goes, he learned how to love within my mother’s warm embrace and over heaping plates of feijoada – black beans slathered in garlic-infused pork grease over a bed of white rice.

Following Mamãe’s death, my father passed on enrolling me in the second grade at a dilapidated Catholic school – Holy Sisters of the Rosary – in East New York. Instead, I got whisked off across the Hudson River to dodge bullets in Newark, New Jersey. Punishment for being a rebel, I figured. To my delight, I was micromanaged into indecisiveness, living with my domineering maternal grandmother: Vovó Gracília.

Gracília Eugênia María da Costa Abreu de Ferro was an immigrant born in Salvador, Bahia – a steel-pad-abrasive woman descended from African slaves snatched and traded from Angola and the Congo. She hated my dad as surely as Xangô gave her thunderclaps for heartbeats. Soon after arriving in the United States, she clamped onto the cultural grapevine to find the addresses of local botánicas. She wanted to be sure they were stocked with enough candles, devotional figures, rosary beads and other religious symbols and products to help her beseech the orishas. She wanted assurance that Camila, her only daughter, would marry a Brazilian of African descent who was fluent in Portuguese as well as in Candomblé rituals. Her desire failed to become reality.

When a white scarf wasn’t fastened to my vovó’s head, her hair struck an avant-garde, steel pose. The old woman’s only sweet side was her love of custard tarts, or uma pastel de nata. She would bring them in fresh from the Brothers Menezes Bakery located down the tiny hill and around the bend, her breath perfumed with rose petals and her body reeking of recently evacuated black-bean gas. She would lean her stinky cleavage into my nose while serving a tart. When the sugar high would wear off, I wanted to make like a capoeirista and cartwheel back into my father’s arms.

Like my Portuguese and Italian classmates in the Ironbound section of Newark, who from a young age were served wine with dinner at the family table, I often enjoyed espresso with Vovó Gracília on school mornings. Sitting in her green-and-white kitchen, she would sing to a samba throbbing from a cassette player, the tape unraveling with every pluck of the berimbau. I, seated across from her in my Catholic school uniform, would be stirring demitasse spoonfuls of childhood dreams into my espresso – uma bica.

“Como é essa?” she’d ask in midlyric, her pointy nails tapping out the samba rhythm on the oak tabletop.

“É muito deliciosa,” I’d answer with a caffeinated smile. “Obrigada, Vovó.”

By my early twenties and her late sixties, she occasionally would bring home sweet rolls from the same Portuguese-owned bakery. In contrast to her huge posterior, which could rival that of any samba school’s spinning baiana at Brazilian Carnaval, her ebony fingers were remarkably delicate. As she pulled apart the dense roll, my mouth would water. I’d marvel at the pale-yellow bread’s elasticity and think about the brawny knuckles that had kneaded the dough. Passing a fleshy section of roll to me, she’d explain the magic of yeast like a sultry TV chef. She was like an African Brazilian Nigella Lawson but with as much cleavage in the front as at the back.

+ + +

After experiencing menarche at age thirteen, Vovó Gracília started warning me about “the branco.” The two of us even took a special trip to Bahia, where not only was I the guest of honor at a special rite of passage ceremony, but also my grandmother blessed me with a special potion containing my virgin blood to protect me from any brancos I might encounter in the United States. Half the time I paid my stern grandmother no mind. If I was PMS-ing, though, I’d get foolishly brave and tell her, “You’ve let that Candomblé go to your white-scarved head.” Usually on the night of such a comment on my part, I wouldn’t get a spanking. Instead, something far more frightening would happen: I’d find my hairbrush missing a prayerful of wiry brown curls.

She tried to scare me with stories of the Portuguese’s atrocities against Africans, and not only incidents in the days of Columbus, but omitted stories about voluntary interracial relations in “Bras-EE-u.” Rough and nasal – that’s how her pronunciation of her beloved country sounded to my ears. I knew how to raise her ire – cautiously. I would stand at some distance from her bovine authority and point to any of the framed photographs of her late husband, the São Paulo businessman Senhor de Ferro. She would try to escape my wordless indictment only to find me leaping like a gazelle to her side and taking her hand. She would twist the other way and try to bury her face in the crook of her elbow. All the while I would remark, my eyebrows punctuating what her smile underlined, about her late husband’s buttermilk complexion and waterproof hair. In fact, she displayed so many photos of my Vovó Vicente, who was considered a pardo by Brazil’s racial classification, that I could watch him aging before my eyes as I sauntered from one room to another.

When I grew older and my bottom began expanding like yeast in a bowl, undoubtedly from my incremental overconsumption of custard tarts and sweet rolls, it no longer surprised me that the only portraits of my grandfather sporting jet black hair above sparkling eyes were propped up on the bureau, dresser and night table in my grandmother’s bedroom. There, on certain mornings, I used to spot a stray battery or two near her brass bed while the cilia in my nostrils swayed upon contact with pungent remnants of randy recollections wafting through my grandparents’ sacred space.

+ + +

One underground commute not long ago, in a rear subway car of the tarnished-silver variety, I came face to face with my own temptation. A branco transplanted in the state of New Jersey. He was a middle-aged guy with the build of Portuguese fishermen who, by my grandmother’s account, used to pat big-bottomed Brazilian girls like her the way a fish vendor would tap the catch after it was slung on the scale.

My subterranean branco, who had barbells for shoulders, sauntered into the coach just seconds before the door shut. I couldn’t blame him for seizing the moment. It was the 4:05. The last train before the rush hour, or “the squeeze,” so named for the crowd as well as the itinerant hands that disappeared into it.

I should’ve known something was amiss when the stocky man snubbed a suit who had tried to make small conversation and room in a prized corner. Insulted, the corporate android shot out of the doors when they opened unexpectedly as if to rescue passengers too xenophobic to withstand “the squeeze.”

The broad-shouldered newcomer claimed the corner, from which he could assess the rest of us passengers, which totaled three. I had been watching the man’s stealthy movements, and when he swiveled his head my way, he caught me checking him out. I tried to avert my eyes, but they were drawn into his gaze like the tide rushing toward the dunes at sunset.

Two commuters seated on either side of me must’ve gotten a whiff of our pheromones because they departed the subway car upon hearing, “Last chance to board the 4:05 out of World Trade.” He and I were now alone. The doors shut for good, or bad. Then we heard the conductor practically croon over the sound system: “Ladies and gentlemen: This train will be going express to Newark-Penn Station. That’s right. I said express.”

* * * * *

Above is an excerpt from my ebook Port Wine & Pink Lace, which is published in full on Smashwords.com. Copies are available for purchase at http://smashwords.com. Thank you for your support!

To those readers who offered encouragement and criticism, both privately and publicly: I appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts with me. To all of my readers: Thank you for reading “Port Wine & Pink Lace” and other works of art that I developed on Negrotica. You all give me extra inspiration, and that’s always a great thing. Muito obrigada!

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A Raven on the Panahuoca River

Posted in Erotica, Interracial Sex, Mystery & Suspense, Mysticism, Public Sex, Romance, Stranger Sex with tags "A Raven on the Panahuoca River", apadravya, Chantale Reve, dilf, Edgar Allan Poe, erotic psychological thriller, erotic suspense, erotic thriller, Gothic erotica, interracial sex, May-December affair, Negrotica, paranormal romance, romantic mystery story, romantic obsession, stranger sex, women's erotica on 2010/01/19 by Chantale Reve

Lourdes Hernández’s only desire that Wednesday morning had been to photograph squawking birds at the park and the celeste sky above it. Three days later she pondered, How have I come to this? Turning away from the whodunit on her forty-inch LCD television, she caught her dreary image in a Rococo mirror. She was baggy-eyed, emotionally drained and nearly as tattered as her vintage sofa of dusty rose — a relic from a Massachusetts estate sale that she had acquired four years before meeting Miguel at Nouveau Romantic party just outside Thanostown. Like her dilapidated soul, the sofa was heavy with the burden of unfinished past lives.

Unlike her first ex, the settee was still a part of her life after she gained an additional thirty pounds that couldn’t be attributed to baby weight. Lourdes remained childless despite an inexhaustible supply of estrogen and ample hips that Miguel loved to grip during their intimate acrobatics. Besides her repressed memory, the brocade-upholstered sofa was the only other entity that carried the secret of her body mass index and the erotic backstories for loose springs, nuts and bolts.

She couldn’t have chosen a worse time to put on extra pounds: the occasion of her bestie’s wedding. With the regal affair looming less than a week ahead, and the bride-to-be’s “feeling fab” status updates clogging her in-box as they had for the past six months, Lourdes found herself growing more insecure than at any other time in her life — save the period immediately following Miguel’s breakup with her. Thirteen years after he and his ghastly entourage of hooded drapery and Argentan rope jewelry had swooped down on her threadbare existence, she had lost an unconsciously waged competition to the Icelandic harlot in Miguel’s alternative band, Mausoleum.

As claustrophobia brought on by her girl’s approaching wedding deadline of the twenty-second of September increased in its intensity, Lourdes was beginning to doubt that she could be anyone’s maid of honor, especially when Giovanna had been acting like a royal pain in the arse since her engagement the previous year. She couldn’t believe that her heretofore vulgar friend now was expecting her to assume the manners of a noblewoman. I should’ve suspected something when she’d rush me off the phone to watch reruns of “Last of the Summer Wine,” Lourdes thought. As the reality of Giovanna’s post-wedding relocation to Downtown San Diego closed in on her, she imagined her two-bedroom apartment shrinking to a linen closet’s proportions unbefitting a lady-in-waiting.

The One for whom Lourdes had waited had no chance of returning after a six-year absence. She didn’t believe in backtracking, and receiving Miguel’s epistolary dumping was no exception. He had ditched her via an e-mail that ended, “Until we meet again, on the other side of madness.” For an added touch of the occult, she had conjured up her immortal beloved impersonating Vincent Price’s fiendish laughter at the end of “Thriller.”

Raven hair in disarray, she tried to flip the frown in her reflection but gave up when the corners of her mouth began hurting. Perhaps we should keep this lonely interlude to ourselves, she advised her telepathic, sedentary twin. Since Wednesday’s incident, she had been experiencing a different degree of pain. As panic set in that Giovanna’s bridal shower was less than three hours away, her fraying nerves were threatening to snap. Her unraveled spirit, like threads of an antique silk dress, seemed beyond repair.

Suddenly, her image smiled derisively back at her. She grabbed her Hopi kachina doll and aimed it at the looking glass but had a change of heart when she recalled the last segment of Trilogy of Terror. More importantly, she recollected that Miguel had held her spellbound as he recounted how he obtained the colorful kachina: On a snow-dusted road back from Sedona one Christmas, he had traded a Limoges enamel vial of semen for the doll. He also had frozen his red rocks off inside his broken-down Buick.

Somewhere in present-day Arizona, Lourdes contemplated with a devilish smile, his spitfire spawn were penning hellish lyrics and burning their guitars among resilient cacti. She hadn’t been thinking that way, though, when he was spinning his tall tale that winter because he claimed that the doll’s presence under his belt from Sedona to Thanostown kept his memory of her close to his heart.

“So y’always wear your heart close to your dick?” she had gibed, melting him into a sexy smile that revealed overlapping, protruding, off-white front teeth which she found distinctive and adorable.

“What can I say, babe,” he had replied, brushing his feathery ebony mane against her flushed cheek and tracing her Luna mount with a stubby black-lacquered fingernail. “I was missin’ you so much that I was heavy-hearted.”

Their suggestive conversation, and the unbridled cosmic sex that followed, were still fresh in her mind. But the only visitations from the self-proclaimed “erotic sorcerer” occurred in wet dreams, such as the extended vignette from which she reluctantly had awakened during nap time. Fact was, the virile Miguel De Los Cuervos was nowhere to be found. Having subscribed to all the major social media networks in a desperate attempt to locate him, she was practically moonlighting as a detective.

Since her lover vanished, Lourdes had fornicated with only one guy: a Viagra-toting pharmaceutical salesman named Willie, who couldn’t resist sampling the merchandise. His near-fatal heart attack on their second date — in her cherry wood sleigh bed — convinced her to take a vow of celibacy for good. And to swear off blue M&Ms forever. She just didn’t think five years would lead to a gray wasteland at the aqueous edges of Thanostown. As she re-evaluated her vows like a nun with an aversion to blue-dyed candies, she reminisced about her true ex until her black eyeliner was bleeding into her crow’s feet.

The ornate mirror reflected one stark truth: She was morphing into one of the Goth anti-heroines of songs in which her former boyfriend once raged as Mausoleum’s frontman. Often she used to chant his name in the audience, rationalizing away the stench of the band’s sweat showers and flatulence bombs in nightclubs that were conversions from rat-infested dungeons.

In the six years that had ticked by since Miguel brought her to kaleidoscopic orgasms within his black-rose-tatted chokeholds, since his Apadravya piercing crowned her his queen on their royal velvet throne, she had buried the spoken-word poet only to give birth to the nature photographer. Three days earlier, digital camera at the ready, she had been on her way to a artistic breakthrough. Poised behind the lens, she had been eager to skew a rotten world from positive angles. Then something went awry.

Mulling over what transpired in the park, repeating the playback, she sniffled into her slate sweatshirt sleeve. For the moment, she couldn’t care less who was nursing a gunshot wound on the two-hour Saturday evening mystery movie on television. She also couldn’t abate her sobbing any more than she could stop the Iguazu Falls. But she didn’t need to fly on standby to South America to push herself over the edge.

After obsessing for three whole days about the knife she had sunk in someone’s back, she had carved a new continent on which she was destined to be eternally alienated. She huffed. Screw Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ’66 with their “Mundo Hermoso,” she mused. For me, it’s population one. Lourdes gave the mirror a stay of execution and dragged herself away from the chilly rec room.

In her frou-frou bedroom, she plopped on the sleigh bed and yanked open a nightstand drawer. Rummaging through an assortment of goods yielded a reward: her emergency reserve of Godiva truffles. Careful to avoid splinters from the drawer’s unfinished wood, she found a morsel of self-respect. Next she needed to summon up the moxie to phone her best friend in order to apologize for being unfashionably late to her bridal shower. Unless everyone was late, the big event would’ve begun at half past six. After all, Giovanna had selected her old pal from Sunken Meadows High over her younger half-sister, Fiamma — whom she adored — to serve as maid of honor.

A marathon crying spell had launched fifteen minutes into breakfast, making her milk salty and her Corn Pops soggy. Lourdes was left with partially congested sinuses, but by the time she absentmindedly went through half the bankrupting box of bonbons, her taste buds and composure returned. She scratched an armpit and sank her teeth into one more Champagne-filled chocolate, then speed-dialed Giovanna’s wireless number. While she waited for a connection, she wondered if a chiseled exotic dancer was straddling the bachelorette at the Nevoc Country Club, which was sprawled among the mountains above Thanostown. She hoped that forgiveness would come easy if the well-paid and -endowed stripper was helping Giovanna soak her panties until the silver studs spelling out Vincenzo & Giovanna Forevuh rusted away. Otherwise, Lourdes was going to require cosmetic surgery after breaking the news to her BFF that, worse than being late, she wasn’t planning to attend her shower at all.

She was about to hang up by the fourth ring when Giovanna answered, popping gum as usual. Probably Doublemint, Lourdes guessed. Upon hearing the bride-to-be’s terse greeting, she swallowed one more ounce of chocolate bliss and began her tearful account …

* * *

Her first mistake was skipping work that Wednesday, calling in sick when in reality she had become exasperated with the morbid realm of inanimate objects. She hadn’t earned her bachelor of science degree to end up a security guard at Thanostown’s three hundred thirty-year-old natural-history museum. Standing on her feet all day was easy; being surrounded by glassed-in stiff carcasses was creepy. There was a limited script on which to rely when conversing with visitors, as the museum frowned on “unnecessary fraternization.” Stuffed zebras and monkeys couldn’t converse with her or share their opinions about the immense world outside. She desired to be surrounded by life, laughter and what she called the sensual swells of the Panahuoca River.

By the river lay a park. Eden Park. Regardless of the season, its grounds attracted lovers and the lovelorn, athletes and intellectuals. Usually, she would scope out the park, jog its perimeter thrice, and then stop by the Jamerican Juice Doctor for an all-natural pomegranate punch. However, this wasn’t a typical Wednesday, or “hump day.” Rather, this was a day of liberation by design. To celebrate her sense of renewal, she fancied compiling a digital scrapbook of photos documenting her excursion. With her goal in mind, she reached for the drawer of one of her twin nightstands and fumbled with its brass handle, which slightly dangled from the escutcheon.

After fidgeting among three years’ worth of EterniReady lithium triple-A batteries for nearly as long, she finally found her Canon Mark III. In her imagination she was an optimist, storing her EOS digital SLR camera bedside with sealed-in-package blindfolds, anal beads and a neon-pink feather that she should’ve used to dust the eclectic furniture in her spacious apartment. Before the demise of her and Miguel’s gothic romance, if a burglar had stumbled upon the deep drawer, he or she would’ve assumed that the apartment’s occupant had stock in the company which was a head above the rest in producing the thoroughbred of condoms. However, because of rubbers’ shelf life, for the second time in five years she had discarded only one twelve-pack of the lubricated, ribbed variety. Before she closed the drawer, her eyes crinkled as she remembered one of Miguel’s wicked jokes as they snuggled in the afterglow of his Dracula-inspired bedroom: something about the coup de grace of casual sex, a ripped condom and glue.

Within an hour she was dressed in rufous sweats and a roomy white T-shirt reading BITE ME in 78-point black Impact font — a June birthday gift from the vivacious, tenacious Giovanna. Or Vanna for short. Since she was none too eager to show her belly rolls to passers-by, Lourdes allowed the tee to flow over her pants, which hugged her honeydew melon-sized glutes. Turning away from the lengthwise mirror in the hallway, she muttered, “Camera, check. Smart disc, check. Batteries, check.” A full exhale later, she sprinted past the sunny kitchen to unlatch the chain on her door. The cordless phone ringing by the pantry froze her midstep.

Figuring it could only be Giovanna begging her to recite an affirmation for the day — anything to distract her from her wedding a week away — Lourdes dashed out the door and left for Eden Park. Already she was feeling guilty but her new day of freedom could wait no longer. Her lively gait drew a smile from an elderly widowed neighbor, Mrs. Gertrude Simmons, who attempted to shout but managed to rasp: “Enjoy this fine, fine day, young lady. And,” lowering her trifocals, she added, “beware of strangers.”

I’m not that young anymore, Lourdes thought to herself. She ambled over to the curb, gave herself a once-over starting from her tangerine-and-white kicks and ending at the gravity-afflicted breasts that she tried to ignore were squeezed together inside her sports bra. “Fuck it,” she said, not caring if anyone heard her. Shrugging off a shadow of despair, she reflected: After all, I am in the autumn of my life. Just when she was feeling confident, a nubile twentysomething jogged inches from her shoulder, causing her bouncy blonde pony to flaggellate Lourdes’ tan face. “Puta!” she yelled out, feeling rosy splotches rise up in her cheeks, but she was wasting her breath on the plugged-in, iPod-entranced Aphrodite.

* * *

Stepping onto the pier at the western end of Eden Park, Lourdes was pensive. The park offered picturesque panoramic views and sinuous paths. Beyond a wide curve facing Tituba’s Island in the direction of a red gazebo, one couldn’t know what awaited. Heeding Mrs. Simmons’ warning, she remained vigilant. She scrutinized her surroundings and strained her eyes to inspect the far reaches of the pink-brick promenade, which circled a vast Italian-style garden on both sides of the acid-rain-washed gazebo.

Keeping pace with a male pigeon puffing up and showing his true colors – fuschia – to a reluctant mate, she leaned into a mid-September breeze billowing from the Panahuoca River. Pausing, she shut her eyes to allow the fantasy of cool air currents dancing through her thermally straightened jet-black hair, which tickled her lumbar spine. She imagined the small wind blowing around the pier flowing upward. Smiling, she observed receptive trees chattering with crispy leaves.

Fall was her fickle lover, often leaving her chilly. “How I long for spring!” she wanted to exclaim. Springtime offered many chances to reach out to caress supple, green leaves and to reflect on distant youth. In contrast, autumn reminded her of how quickly she was approaching the winter of her life. Despite nature’s beautiful symmetry in red, gold, wine and orange, the crêpe leaves descending upon the pavement sounded thuds to her ears. Before depression could grip her spirit, Lourdes sipped from citrus-flavored water that splashed around in her trusty squeeze bottle. “Ahhhh,” she said, aware of her breath and the tranquillity of her surroundings. She removed her camera from the messenger bag that Miguel had gifted her during their penultimate year as a couple.

Barn swallows and seagulls waddling closer to the steel railing appeared to pose for her, when actually they were loitering in search of food. She didn’t care about their intention; only that she co-existed with them in those moments over the pier. Allowing nature to guide her camera, she pointed with purpose: straight ahead to a swallow hopping over seams in the pier, obliquely to a seagull pecking at its side, then upward to a periwinkle sky threatening afternoon rain. She fancied Thoreau as her Muse and Eden Park as her Walden Pond.

So occupied was her mind that she failed to notice a fellow pedestrian strolling behind her. After he waltzed in front of her, eliciting a gasp, he said, “Sorry, doll.” Oozing Philip Bosco’s charm but possessing Robert Loggia’s craggy voice and snow-white hair, he bowed like a gent in a Belle Epoque ballroom and asked permission to snap her photo.

“Uh, noooowuh,” she declined in her passive, little-girl’s voice. But the seventy-ish man was persistent. He figured that he could persuade her differently. “Call me ‘Pops,’” he insisted.

“Hola, Pops,” Lourdes said, reclaiming her natural vocal timbre, which was a sultry and coquettish combo, if Jennifer López’s voice could be superimposed on Dania Ramírez’s. “I’m nobody special. Why don’t you bother some other girl, hunh?”

“Don’t sell yourself short, dear,” he advised her.

“I’m not for sale,” she cracked. What she felt, though, was fear.

“You misunderstand,” he returned. He paused, then leaned his five-foot-nine frame toward her and formed a church with facing palms.

Apprehensive that he was a charming thief, she tucked the camera in her bag and moved what was supposed to be an idyllic photo shoot to a temporary file within her consciousness.

Pops eyed her movements and then danced around her, and his intentions, again. “I would’ve framed your essence, if you had let me.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, trying not to peer into his bewitching brown eyes. “Besides, no one gets to touch my camera but I.”

The suave, senescent stranger desired to touch her. Though fighting temptation, he nevertheless was enjoying the flirtation. He was the Cabernet to her must. Oh, she has so much to learn, he assured himself. It delighted him that he had closed in on her like a late-summer gust off a bend in the Panahuoca River. Now his body was betraying him with insidious reactions: Palpitations increased, and his emerging erection filled out any creases in his crotch. He allowed his eyes to fall on every curve that the soft breeze winding around her tee and sweats revealed there on the pier.

“You can trust me,” he kept repeating as he tapped his loafered foot on the pink pavement. Watching as her pupils returned to a state of relaxation, he moved in for the thrill.

Lourdes had heard various acquaintances relate stories of faith about ordinary people disguised as angels and thus began to lighten up and just observe the man. What can this ol’ geezer possibly do anyway? she asked herself.

Within minutes she was seated with the gray-bearded drifter on a park bench, disclosing to him various events of the past decade. As a tear traced her cheek during one memory of the cad who downed so many male-enhancement pills that at times he could’ve been a fourth member of The Blue Man Group, her mysterious companion reached up with a monogrammed handkerchief to blot her face dry. Snuffling, she tried to make out the two embroidered, maroon letters as the cloth touched the tip of her nose, but when her eyes crossed, she abandoned the effort.

Deep inside she was at ease with the stranger, who on second impression seemed a gentle soul. From time to time she glanced over at the ominous river, meditating on how it overflowed with broken dreams and romances. Seated to her right side and hanging off the park bench a tad, the man traded his own stories of love and loss with her raw tales about Miguel. Although no one was passing by them at the moment, she lowered her voice to a whisper as she recounted how, toward the end of their relationship, her ex once shared with her his dream of taking her slowly in the real-life Blue Lagoon.

“As he thrusted in and out of my channel from above,” she revealed to Pops, “all that I could focus on were his glossy dark brown eyes and remote smile in the natural light of my double-hung bedroom windows, not my pleasure and our bliss.”

“I bet your lover was doubly hung,” he interrupted, then erupted into laughter.

“Cool it, Pops. It was a prophetic moment between us. That asshole,” she said, trying not to laugh. “And you know, the funny thing is: Despite how exquisite it felt with him banging me like that, I started thinking that he was fantasizing about pounding his Björk doppelgänger bitch.”

“Oh, are they engaged now?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” she said, “but I sure disengaged his cock that morning.”

Pops scooted closer to her on the bench. As sensitive in body as in mind, she absorbed his thermal heat. She started fanning her face, but he pushed down her hand with his. “My turn,” he spoke.

“Sure,” she said. Perhaps she was uncertain about his motives, but she no longer was jumpy. He had hooked and reeled her in like a fish that had strayed far from its school into the alluring Panahuoca River.

Noon closed in as Pops captured Lourdes’ heart as intimately as her camera had framed the birds. She wished that Miguel had possessed his genuineness, especially when the man confided in her a story about a series of trysts “in the old country” with a homemaker who specialized in kneading dough with her massive breasts. “Never since then have I tasted bread that delectable,” he remarked, guffawing and slapping his left knee so hard that Lourdes felt the vibration travel to her clit.

“How long did the affair last?” she asked, crossing her legs to stave off the excitement. She could feel a drizzle heading down a warm thigh. While he stared up into the portentous sky, she wondered, What I’d give right now for a tryst. An appointment. A rendezvous. Now that I’ve opened myself to a random stranger, I feel that I’ve signed a pact with the Devil. An antitryst.

“When la balena went into a baking frenzy at the expense of her husband’s dinner,” Pops said, “he turned so suspicious that he quit his job as a fisherman in la Marina di Pisciotta.”

He overflowed with stories, yet the one that had Lourdes transfixed involved his own wife, who had lost her libido somewhere amid his last confessions of adultery and eventually divorced him. To make matters worse, Pops said, he hadn’t seen his daughter in decades because his ex-wife had turned her against him. He clutched his heart at the end of the sentence, where he explained how “the absence of sex can be compared to death.” Lourdes sympathized with her newfound acquaintance’s grief, absentmindedly patting his left hand. He, in turn, slowly lifted her hand with his right one and planted a peck on her reddened knuckles. She smiled, assuming his anachronistic gallantry would end there. To her surprise, he was only beginning. Over five decades of loving and losing, he had learned all the artful manners of seduction.

Leaning back, he unbuttoned his black cotton shirt and then folded it on the bench’s arm. Then he slithered so close to her torso, wrapping his leathery arms around it, that she trembled from the shock of full-on human embrace. As he licked between her stubby fingers, she couldn’t fight the involuntary right-toe curls inside her soft white tennis sock. Her uneven sighs coaxed him into kissing the palm of one hand, then the other. Her moans mingling with murmurs of rustling leaves sent a surge of lust through his brain right down to his scrotum. She felt his hands over her breasts, on top of the T-shirt, but cupping her generous flesh there nonetheless. When she tossed her head back against his shoulder, he didn’t lose time lifting her shirt to taste what fought to escape the sports bra. Feeling his steamy mouth enveloping her right tit, she gasped and kicked his shin, which had the unintended effect of him biting where he desired to suck.

“Mi dispiace amore mio,” he apologized, hardly pausing from making love to her.

“Te perdono, señor,” her voice lilted toward his flushed ear.

The May-December lovers’ sensual movements went barely noticed as if there were some kind of park etiquette for observing extreme public displays of affection. This ol’ dude’s got no hangups over PDE — public displays of erections, she thought whimsically as the elderly man’s road-mapped hands rediscovered secret crevices that were hers alone to cherish. Never before had she exhibited odd leg movements outside of playing a sordid version of Twister or fighting to free herself of Miguel’s labyrinthine ropes and chains. Just as uninhibited as their caresses was their laughter. But Pops’ ambidextrous fondling had a way of reminding her that his levity cloaked a serious brand of lasciviousness. Ohhhhh, Miguel, she sighed within as Pops continued to rub and diddle her feverish parts.

Through the undulating mist from the Panahuoca River, she heard the man’s moist whispers, such as “I desire to tickle your ears. Close your eyes.” She kept both eyes open, however. Not being able to see his tongue tip wriggle along her pinna titillated her. His thick, fuzzy pink organ reminded her of how the cilia of a lime green caterpillar felt after it had tumbled from a dangling tree branch and then crawled along her auricle during her Girl Scout troop’s nature walk in the Adirondacks. She was twelve then. Now she was forty-three but no less confused. As the serpentine stranger convinced her more and more that he was no angel after all, Lourdes split into her emotional and rational selves — one trying to convince her to follow his wisdom, the other urging her to worm her way out of his lubricious embrace.

Lourdes suggested they amble over to the red gazebo, surprising herself at the same time that she was enabling an absolute stranger’s outdoor fetish. Pops’ tongue invaded her mouth while his restless fingers slipped beneath her sweatpants’ waistband. Her brain shut down momentarily, lengthening seconds into an excruciating eternity. When her bag slid off her lap, carrying with it Miguel’s ethereal presence, it was replaced by rising and falling knuckles that resembled tiny, orange, grotesque heads sucking at her cunt lips. On the sturdy park bench of peeling green paint, she enjoyed his fingering of her vulva, and stroking and kissing on her clavicle and neck, which felt like the bodywork of two men. A supernatural ménage à trois.

Like Miguel, Pops knew how to tantalize her to convulsive effects by never directly rubbing her clit. Squirming against him in the breezy harbor, she felt his shifting position and, to her surprise, his generous member poking sizable dimples in her fleshy thighs. Between lapping of river waves against the pier’s shafts and naughty encouragements rolling from the man’s Southern Italian tongue, her labia were throbbing above her pelvic floor like a reddish pink octopus trapped in a viscous sea. He unscrambled her spell and found her magic spot. Ignoring her warbled protests, he pinned down her leg with his knee. When the first of several lightning bolts hit her, she nearly blew out his eardrums and could’ve summoned Yemaya from the depths of the Panahuoca River.

Lourdes couldn’t believe pleasure could be so random and yet bring her so close to the truth of who she was as a woman. Moments later, she also couldn’t understand how she could ponder metaphysics while scraping her knees against the brick pavement, masturbating and orally stimulating a man old enough to be her father. Light-years away from Miguel, she was really engaged in the action at hand. Replacing Pops’ prick with her ex’s, she lost track of time and her sanity during the act of irrumatio. Her aging Casanova knew intuitively that she was using him as a tool, and he couldn’t be happier. She indulged in deep-throating him while he grabbed a palmful of dark tresses to modulate her rhythms till they were evoking the hypnotic percussion of Cuban son. Her plump breasts, which he had freed from her sports bra, were sore from banging against the bench’s edge. Such was the intensity of her pleasuring. Each time the wily stranger groaned, the wet spots on her sweatpants multiplied. Her mind spun with the anticipation of how he would reciprocate, if his pre-climax verbal meanderings about not underestimating a septuagenarian were genuine.

At some point between tonguing the stranger’s sweaty scrotum and slobbering over his near-purple, erect frenulum and shaft, she heard him yammering about an upcoming wedding. She sucked harder at his manhood, but her paramour was losing his erection, to her dismay. If only Lourdes hadn’t asked him if he wanted to talk about it — but she did and he seemed to speak in slow motion as he complained about the enormous cost of his daughter’s wedding. She switched back to giving him a handjob and intensified each stroke while talking filthy in Spanish. When his rigid cock was, again, begging for relief in her warm mouth, he resumed chattering about his “goddamned daughter, Giovanna.” He was banging her tonsils as he said it. At the exact moment that her face registered surprise, he came.

Daaaamn, I’m glad I got mine. I guess the only way he’s going downtown now is to shoot over by the bar on his way home, she contemplated. I must’ve lost a helluva lot of weight sucking his dick because I thought that it wasn’t over “till the fat lady sings.”

After Pops’ orgasm finished wracking his wrinkled body, his lips widened into a smile akin to Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland fame. To Lourdes, he was no cat, but a snake, and she wished for the mongoose of a Rudyard Kipling tale. While he shook his dick and thanked her huskily, she gave herself a reality check. Watching him drain the shrinking head, she tasted his bitter seed on her tongue. Disgusted, she roughly wiped his semen from her neck and breasts. Avoiding his stare burning through her swollen nipples as she retrieved her bag, she prayed that the few, white drops of semen which she had flung from her flesh and now were pooling in the cracks of the pier wouldn’t kill the weeds and sprout into a homunculus destined to live beneath the Panahuoca River, feeding on bloated bodies of the drowned. Or, worse, fated to live among the droopy trees in Eden Park and, upon maturity, preying on virgins sunbathing on the moist grass the following summer.

Despite her abundant body fat, she had enough adrenaline to jump to her feet. As she gathered her belongings, giving Pops the silent treatment the entire time, she wondered: How could I be Giovanna’s bridesmaid now? Undeserved tears rolled down her cheeks, but this time she wouldn’t let the swinging smooth operator play Bogart to her Bergman. Loverman was left stupified on the bench, his fly open, and his genitals exposed.

It didn’t matter that her knees were as sore as those of a pilgrim crawling up the limestone steps of some church in Southern Spain. For Lourdes, faith and love had taken a holiday as surreptitiously as she had called in sick that morning. “Hump day” in all its meanings went unfulfilled; her lusty path to liberation detoured into seedy territory. With a tear in her eye and a cramping in her calves, she limped away from the pink promenade, waving her raven hair from her face. She abandoned the chirping birds and gray sky. She cursed the Panahuoca River under her breath for luring her with its sensuality and the promise of rebirth from its amniotic depths evermore.

* * *

After listening in silence to her maid of honor explaining what had gone down in Eden Park three days prior, an exasperated Giovanna blew a raspberry into the phone and then snickered for a solid minute. Lourdes was befuddled. She had just confessed to her best friend that she had blown her father, in public. Absorbing Giovanna’s comical reaction, all she could think was: What Mr. Buonofacci had flaunted on the park bench was far larger than a raspberry — but far more bitter.

“So’s that the only reason ya hidin’ out in the Beaumont Apartments instead of shakin’ it up wit my wedding party heah at the Nevoc Country Club?” Giovanna asked while Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” was blasting in the background amid louder perimenopausal female shouts of “Hey, hottie, c’meeere!” and “You got enough room for ten singles, handsome?!”

Lourdes was flabbergasted and aroused at the same time. A mean shade of red. “Shit, yeah. How can I face you now?” she quizzed.

“Easy,” said the inebriated bride-to-be. “Lourdie,” she slurred, “my fuckin’ dad’s a ho, and that’s accordin’ ta my ma.”

“Geez, Vanna, even though I was sucking down a throatful of his cock, I wouldn’t go that far,” Lourdes said, surprising herself that she was defending her parkside prowler.

“Oh yeah? Hmpf. Some nights,” Giovanna explained, “Mami caught him in the shadows, creepin’ toward my childhood room. Seems he wasn’t gettin’ enough from his hoes, but she stopped him from touchin’ me and my older sister, Tessa, wit the threat of doin’ a Bobbitt.”

“Vanna, I didn’t know thaaaaat. How could I have? Shit, I’m sorry you went through all that,” Lourdes said by way of apology.

“It’s all right ’cos we both was spared the wrath of his dick. Mami kicked his sleazy ass out,” Giovanna said.

“Wow, you were a strong person even way back when,” Lourdes praised.

“Welllll, not as strong as ya knees three days ago,” Giovanna japed. “Anyways, you obviously needed ta getcha some — wait, ya didn’t actually screw ’Signore Pene,’ didya?”

“No, pero, I crossed a line. Dammit, I sucked your father’s dick! There, I said it,” Lourdes confessed. Again. This time, however, she started bawling.

“Save ya tears, girl. Now we’re even,” Giovanna reasoned through the murkiness of her pickled brain.

“Vanna, how can — ” Lourdes was interrupted by more laughter from her bestie.

“Remember when ya went away ta Broward U and didn’t bring ya ass back home until the followin’ summer?” Giovanna forced her pal to recall.

“Yeah, but I’m sure you can remember that around that time my dad and I’d been spatting more than he and his hoochie-girlfriend-of-the-month. That bitch Quiana,” Lourdes growled.

“Unh-hunh. Welllll, I got an update,” Giovanna informed her. “Quiana put on her fuck-me heels and stepped out on his ass, leavin’ him lonely and …”

“And?” Lourdes pressed her.

“Girlllll, I …,” Giovanna answered cautiously.

“You what? What-what-whaaaaaat?!” Lourdes implored her.

“I fucked ya papi. That’s what,” Giovanna shot back.

“¿Qué? You mean César, right? The dude we met in our junior year at Sunken Meadows, at that basketball game?” Lourdes asked, her perspiration beading on her high forehead.

“Nah, chica. Wrong papi. I mean Mistah Hernández,” her sotted bestie revealed. Burp!

“Oh, hell! My dad?!” Lourdes exclaimed.

“Uhmmm-hmmm, and he was so gooooood ta me,” Giovanna boasted. “Whatta dilf! Made me dress up like a fuckin’ schoolteacha.”

“That’s fucked up, Vanna. You know how often I used to tell you back in the ninth grade that my Pops wanted me to become a teacher. Geeeez, you were a slut back then, too!”

“Oops, ya said ‘Pops.’ Isn’t that what my dad wanted ya ta call him in the park, Lourdie? Ooohhh, who’s the slut now,” Giovanna teased.

“Screw you,” Lourdes snapped.

“No, girl, I don’t do that yin-yin shit anymoah,” Giovanna joked. “Besides, ya need ta save that pussy for my fatha. He’s what ya’ll be doin’ after the rehearsal dinner next Friday. Ho-ho-hoe!”

“That’s so low of you, Vanna,” Lourdes said.

“Not as low as ya ass was ta the ground in Eden Park, ap-par-ent-ly,” her drunken friend reminded her. Just then, Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” surfaced in the background, and Giovanna yelled “Oh-ohhh! Oh-ohhh!” in Lourdes’ ear, then added: “I can just see ya scrapin’ ya knees on that pavement the way ya described ta me.”

“Shut it,” Lourdes retorted in frustration. “I may be a newbie at casual sex, but I’m no ho.”

“And droolin’ ovuh my papa’s salami,” continued Giovanna as if her friend hadn’t been speaking. “Ha-ha-haaaaa!” Howling, she began snorting like Sandra Bullock, then choking.

Giovanna’s callousness had Lourdes imagining that she could’ve snorted something in the company of her dicey fiancé, Vincenzo – nicknamed “Neve” – prior to leaving for her shower. Or right there at the party. “You are fucked up, Vanna!” she cried. “All this time, I thought you were my girl!”

“Look, I am still ya girl,” Giovanna relented, “so getcha thick ass ovuh heah ta my bridal shower. Ya need ta get some life in ya — before my dad pumps it outta ya.”

Fuming, Lourdes disconnected her intoxicated friend. Stripping on her way to the bathroom to take a shower, she hoped that she could cool off. At the very least, she would try once again to cleanse Mr. Buonofacci’s film from her body, though the filthy negatives stored in her photographic memory were indelible.

* * *

Forty-five minutes after one of the most dismal telephone conversations in her life, Lourdes asked the cabdriver to pull over to the curb. “I’ll just need a few minutes,” she assured him, “but in case I’m longer, I’ll give you a twenty for your troubles.”

“Thanks, ma’am,” he said, grinning and flashing dollar signs for pupils.

“You’re welcome, sir. I’d pay you mo’, but I’m po’,” she replied, then chuckled halfheartedly. She caught him trying to study her face in the mirror that he had adjusted above his dashboard, but she turned toward the window so that he couldn’t see her velvet black eyeliner running into the corners of her pouty mouth.

“Anything wrong, lady?” he inquired.

“No, it’s the streetlight glowing in my eyes,” she lied. So fuckin’ intuitive, she cursed him silently.

The driver tipped his tweed cap, scratched his balding brown head and parallel parked outside Eden Park. Moments later, it was a struggle for his passenger to exit the backseat, but he didn’t mind the wait. His head seesawed as he enjoyed ogling, through the rectangular mirror, her soft breasts tumbling toward the sliding window as she stuffed the bill in the wooden groove. She was aware that he was peeping through his mirror and, in her dark mood, hoped a concussion would teach him a lesson.

Ignoring her black taffeta gown’s three-foot train, Lourdes traipsed the tree-shrouded pavement toward the railing at the park’s northern border. Under a quarter moon but a dearth of stars, her eyes twinkled as she strolled the harbor. When she reached a point directly across from Tituba’s Island, she bunched the sides of her dress with clammy hands. Silver slivers of waves seemed to wink up at her, and her draped hips resisted the magnetic field as if pinned beneath a doting lover after his long, unexplained absence. Her eyes cut a path in the Panahuoca River toward the island, where dark surf licked at the shore the way Miguel’s slender fingers often had picked the strings of his Strat in bed.

Those melodies were part of the soundtrack to their romance lifetimes ago. Behind the dawn he would gun his motorcycle toward her place after his band’s last set. Noisier than his hog’s engine, she used to snore through a third dream as he charged through the apartment door and barked at her like a short-order cook to “wake your hot ass up!” Then he would unsling his case, whip out the “Ripper” — Miguel’s hypocorism for his ax — and climb atop her shuddering supine bod. She would return to sleep while he crooned a smut-laced lullaby, a blunt balanced behind his left ear. She would awaken in a pungent haze to his dissonant groans as he snaked in and out of her — a silhouette burning into an abyss where the yawning sun couldn’t reach.

The only music in her ears at the moment, though, was the harmonious sound of rippling water. Like a black wallflower peeled away from the flimsy security of invisibility, she vacillated at the pier’s edge. Although barely perceptible, the structure’s gentle surrender to the river’s caress disoriented her. Gripping the railing’s top barre, she resembled a novice ballerina disguised as a Victorian time traveler. Clinging to steel, to something real, she sensed that her soul was slow-dancing to the waves’ splashing through fluid memories of Miguel. Searching for his intense, deep-set, pinched eyes among shadows hovering over the waves’ illuminated crescents, she failed to grasp why his spirit lingered.

“Where are you?” she asked the silence. She wondered if his preference for her middle name — Esperanza — had cursed her, especially when its meaning had eluded her once he departed her life. So many unanswered questions raced through her mind, not only about her erstwhile lover’s disappearance but also about her sleazy recent encounter with the beguiling stranger. Phantom fingers, both Pops’ and Miguel’s, stroked her hair while she resigned to whiffing decomposing leaves and marine lives in the air.

There she languished. At an ageless pier from which sunburned fishermen cast out lures on lines sturdier than those of would-be romeos, and tossed back undesirables, she wondered how long she could withstand her emotional weight. Unlike Miguel, whose confidence was rooted in him like a mandrake in fertile soil, she was as fragile as a twig in a gale. Her heart mirrored the crumpling autumn leaves behind her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of their crumbling underfoot upon a new day. A massacre in red, gold, wine and orange.

Lourdes failed to hear the taxi’s tires skidding in the distance; nor did she notice the pier swinging to the river’s deeper rhythm. She would sway in the dank atmosphere, blending with the night, until her raven hair whipped around her body thrice. Until Miguel whispered among Djangoesque chords that he desired her now and forever: Te quiero, mi amor. Ahora y siempre. Until she shed her mourning dress and dreamed of her gray spirit mingling with the deceptive estuary’s hypnotic waves at dawn.

“A Raven on the Panahuoca River” is un hommage to a writer too easily misunderstood, and a man too hastily disregarded, in his time:

Edgar Allan Poe.

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The-Rapist Chronicles: Second Entry

Posted in Surreal Erotica with tags "The-Rapist Chronicles: First Entry", "The-Rapist Chronicles: Second Entry", Chantale Reve, Negrotica, sex therapy, sexual trauma on 2012/06/27 by Chantale Reve

Psyched out inside his penthouse dungeon,

I gathered frayed scraps of my dignity;

Couldn’t get much lower than blowing him on my knees.

As my facial tics waned by half past two,

He bore into my mind till it formed a jigsaw

Puzzle that I lacked the inner peace to solve.

Fumbling behind his desk, he mumbled queries of love

Aimed at bulldozing decades of sturdy walls,

A bulwark erected for and by a recluse.

Clawing to the nubs at bricks stacked against private shame,

I faintly heard a zipper freeing cock and balls

From sweat confined in briny briefs of fruity loom.

On cue I excused myself to use the restroom

Near a mirror shattered in spider web pattern.

Like a disfigured Narcissus trapped in the frozen pond,

I strained my eyes for slivers of innocent beauty I once knew.

While obsessing about the flip side of my reflection,

The quack lurking behind my flaws was jerking off on the floor.

Fleeing his groans, I flung open a dented stall door,

Dropped to piss-stained tiles on purple-carpet-burned knees,

Hoping to purge my guts of the reluctant whore

Who had captured every spurt of bitter seed.

Feeling an urge at my other end,

I removed strings of knotted balloons in blue, red and green.

Photo Source: kinderhelper.com

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Negrotica

Oletha at 23 — Piercings by Starr 69

A Trim with Him

Plum Light and Pastis

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I (continued)

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I (continued)

Mixed Signals

L’Étoile

Port Wine & Pink Lace

A Raven on the Panahuoca River

The-Rapist Chronicles: Second Entry

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