Fortunate Son

Some of the things she told him were true, others the product of her imagination. When he tore off his clothes and fell on top of her she whispered, “And he has a really big dick and he could fuck for hours before he’d come. He’d have me coming again and again and begging him to come for me.”

This last part was too much for Drew. His orgasm was a painful, wrenching thing. He pounded so hard against her that one of the legs of the chair broke. She laughed and he kept pounding. She knew that he was past feeling it but didn’t ask him to stop. And he didn’t stop. He kept going until he found the feeling and came again.

And when he was finished and lay beside her on the floor, 2 1 2

F o r t u n a t e S o n

she asked, “Why didn’t you do me like that when you had a chance to keep me?”

Christie called and asked her grandmother to keep Mona for the next three days.

Drew suggested that they go into the bedroom, but Christie said, “No, that’s his bed,” and sneered as if daring Drew to respond. He dragged her in and mounted her from behind.

“Did he do it like this?” he asked.

She nodded, half in ecstasy, and said, “Only his was much longer and thicker, and when he did it he fucked my ass.”

All that night and for the next three days they made love like feral cats. Christie didn’t say one kind word in the first forty-eight hours. It wasn’t until the third day that she admitted that there were things she liked more about Drew than Eric. But even then she said that she was with Eric now and Drew should move on to someone new.

They slapped each other, pulled hair, and had deep orgasms that Christie never knew were possible. Drew had brought out an angry passion that fed on itself in the ex-cheerleader’s secret heart. She tied him facedown to the four-poster bed with an arm and a leg attached to each corner.

Then she got the Vaseline and a thick and muddy, blunt-tipped carrot from the farmer’s market. He screamed when she drove half the length of the root into his rectum.

“Stop it!” he cried, flailing around, trying to get free.

She didn’t remove it, only brought her lips to his ear and said, “Do you want me?”

He went still and nodded his head.

“Then you have to take it all the way,” she said.

She pressed the full length in and then left the room to have her private orgasm on the couch outside.

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Wa l t e r M o s l e y

She untied him an hour later and told him that she’d be his.

They’d take Mona and move to Connecticut. Eric wouldn’t mind. She really didn’t think he would. He didn’t love like other people did. There was something wrong with him. He couldn’t get close.

But now, as she entered the Palm Desert with the sun rising and shining through the red blooming ocotillos, Christie understood that Eric really did want her. He wanted to marry her and live together forever. He woke her in the middle of the night, as beautiful then as he had been on that tennis court years before. All of her anger disappeared in the morning, and she knew that she’d never leave Eric for Drew. All of that sweating and swearing, that wild abandon, was just a short phase, a transition, a shoehorn to help her slip into her real life.

It was on the fourth day that Eric walked in on them.

Mona had gotten back that afternoon. Christie and Drew were making plans to leave. She was to meet Drew the very next day — today — at two. He would have bought tickets for her and him and Mona. They would fly to New York City, where they’d be married and begin a real life.

But Christie wouldn’t be going to his house in Laurel Canyon, she knew that now. Drew had always been her backup, her second choice.

She had never let him be a man. He would never be a man while he was with her or even just thinking about her. Eric was her man. That’s all there was to it.

“ E ri c Tanne r N olan,” Thomas said into the receiver.

“N-O-L-A-N?” the information operator asked.

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F o r t u n a t e S o n

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“I have an ET Nolan on Wilshire. Hold for that number.”

After getting the number Thomas was afraid to call.

What if Eric didn’t remember him or if he didn’t answer the phone? What if Eric did answer and told Thomas not to call anymore?

Thomas felt that this was his last chance, that he hadn’t so much been wandering as looking for his brother, his lost life. He couldn’t let that hope rely on the chance of a single phone call.