Oletha at 23 — Piercings by Starr 69

 

Hula hoops of tongue

Wriggled Lelee’s shriveled cord.

Giggling urged release.

Poem:  ”Oletha at 23  – Piercings by Starr 69″   © 2013 Chantale Rêve   All Rights Reserved

Photo Source:  http://www.navelrings.biz/pictures-belly-button-rings.html

A Trim with Him

 

Slick with soap and lust,
Afro-puffed lips kiss cold steel
At the edge of trust.

 

 

 

Poem:  ”A Trim with Him”  © 2013 Chantale Rêve  All Rights Reserved

 

 

Plum Light and Pastis

Mauve waves crashing rock,
Glasses swishing liquid clouds,
Evoke dusky thrusts.

 

 

 

 

© 2013 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I

 

Souvenirs à travers la nouvelle neige

 (Memories Through New Snow)

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. Québec City lay more than two hours of track in the distance. The other occasions, she was peering into the mirror, swaying with the train’s dance 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 as the first rays of a Montréal sunrise made zebra stripes of their conjoined bodies through the angled slats of Venetian blinds. Again and again she would mouth the secret sobriquet between moaning and panting.

Straining to breathe under his beastly chest, she dug nails into mounds of flesh that rose and stretched through the salty mist of lazy morning sex. Though far from graceful, his moist back and shoulders reminded her of beluga whales that, like many other marine mammals, she only could dream about. Repeatedly allowing him to return to her bed — and especially to spend the entire night — she had deluded herself into thinking she could bear the weight of romantic sex disguised as authentic love. As his submarine barreled through the southern portal of her universe, she momentarily was set adrift. Confounding was the thought that true love could never become extinct although its creation, too, existed beyond mankind’s power.

Impervious to her dreams, meditations and philosophical meanderings, the old man would conquer her tranquillity by sea, twisting their history with the fragrant vocabulary of romantic love. His story of how they came to be buried hers threatened to suffocate her individualism in the way that his cologne-infused funk enveloped her natural feminine aroma. Then, impersonating an incubus, he would thrust a resentful wakefulness into her.

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.

Rubbing her fleshy ring finger evoked a memory of the decision to leave the digit 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.

* * *

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. 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 as he reached across the stand to pinch 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.

Their 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 Gemini 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.

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 id was whispering within her, but his black-and-white wing tips 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 Wonderbra.

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.

* * *

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

© 2013 Chantale Rêve
All Rights Reserved

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

Photographer (top photo): Larisa Koshkina

 

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I (continued)

 

 

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

 

© 2013 Chantale Rêve
All Rights Reserved

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

THE COUNTERFEIT PRINCESSE, Part I (continued)

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

© 2013 Chantale Rêve
All Rights Reserved

 

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

The-Rapist Chronicles: Second Entry

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.

© 2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

Photo Source:  kinderhelper.com

Napa Ever After

  

 

 

Oozing our pectin,

I reflect on punctured vows,

Martyred at his stake.

 

 

 

© 2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

 

 

Image Source:  en.wikipedia.org

Gianni and Moneefah’s First Tango

A bandonéon

Zings through a square where once strolled

Evita Perón.

 

Demure smile, bold gaze –

He extends an upturned hand,

Sets her palm ablaze.

 

Pure Porteño heat

Melts into silk Nubian curves

Down La Boca’s streets.

 

 

© 2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved

Image Source (top, tango partners):  http://www.publicdomainpictures.net

Photographer (top photo):  Bernardo Ertl

 

Image Source (bottom, concertina):  http://www.encyclopedia.com

 

San Telmo … Dessert … 3 a.m.

 

Tart Malbec tongue tastes

Pursed dulce de leche lips.

Rough paws trace flared hips.

 

© 2012 Chantale Rêve

All Rights Reserved