Small Town

No restraints, no hood, but she could still act out her fantasy. She teased him a little longer, then moved to squat on her haunches, positioning herself over his face. “You can open your eyes now,” she said, and she let him look at her for just a couple of seconds before she lowered herself onto his mouth.

Afterward, he couldn’t get over the nipple rings, the waxed loins. “I knew something was different. I thought you were going to show me a tattoo, a butterfly on your thigh, something like that. I had no idea you were so kinky.”

“I’m a work in progress,” she told him.

He made her stay the night, which was a first, and demonstrated a propensity for kinkiness all his own. The next day she skipped lunch and went on a buying spree at the Pleasure Chest. The sales clerk was a gay man with a physique straight out of Muscle Beach, and he was delighted to put names to all the different items on display, and explain their functions.

He helped her get everything into a cab. “Have fun,” he told her. “But, uh, don’t use everything at once.”

She was a work in progress. The phrase had sprung glibly to her lips, but later she realized how appropriate it was. A work of mad folk art, perhaps, but very much a work in progress.

And not off-the-wall mad, because she was able to choose what was to remain fantasy and what was to be enjoyed in the flesh.

So she didn’t dart under the table at Correggio, or let the lunch conversation amount to anything more than the lightest sort of flirting. Gregory Schuyler’s good opinion was far too important for her to jeopardize it for whatever rewards his pale body might provide.

She was back at the gallery in time to receive a call from Reginald Barron. Uncle Emory had completed another piece, and would she want to include it in the show?

“And he’s working on another. He’ll do like that, one right after the other, and then he’ll just stop for a spell. I know you were talking about having a catalog prepared, so you’d need to have everything by a certain date.”

She thought of his youth, his broad-shouldered masculinity, his adorable shyness. I have gold studs in my titties, Reginald. I have a hairless pussy. Do you want to come over and play?

“That’s very thoughtful,” she told him. “Suppose we use the end of the month as a cutoff date? I’ll arrange to come by then and pick up whatever’s completed.” And then she’d make another run to Brooklyn a week or two before the show; the catalog would already be closed by then, but if there was any Emory Allgood work outstanding, she wanted it in her storage locker, not where some smooth opportunist could snatch it out from under her.

After she’d hung up she had a thought. Suppose she rang him back, asked him if he could possibly come in today with the piece he’d called about. If it wasn’t too big, if he could get it into a cab...

No, the only reason she thought of that was because, if he brought the piece to the gallery — or, even better, to her apartment — she could have him out of his pants and into hers in nothing flat. And that was something she was determined not to let happen.

Not until after his uncle’s show.

She sent Chloe home at five, stayed on herself for another hour and a half. She walked home, detouring to pick up half of a barbecued chicken at Boston Market. She ate it at her kitchen table — she had an eat-in kitchen, Marilyn Fairchild had found her a sweetheart of an apartment — and then drew a tub and soaked in it. Lying there, she felt herself stirred, and touched herself. Just a little.

She dried off and got in bed and played some more. Not all of the paraphernalia from Pleasure Chest required a partner, so she tried out some of her new toys. But she reined herself in, didn’t let herself climax, because it was Friday night and she felt adventurous and you could have a good time all by yourself, you could have an orgasm as powerful as the best anyone else could give you, but what you couldn’t have was an adventure.

She thought about the men she could call, and a woman or two she could probably call, but none of them were what she wanted, not tonight. She wanted a stranger.

Marilyn Fairchild had found herself a stranger, one who’d turned out to be a little stranger than she’d bargained for. God, what an awful thing. And what could it have been like for her, those last few moments?

Maybe she was unconscious, passed out. Maybe she never saw it coming, maybe it was over before she knew it.

But maybe not.

She imagined hands on her throat, a weight pressing down on her. Asphyxiation was supposed to have an erotic element, God only knew how many idiots died every year hanging themselves to intensify their orgasms. It was probably safer with a partner — if you wanted that kind of thing, and if you trusted the person to know when to stop.