Nonchalant, nonchalant, she commanded herself as she came out from around the camera counter. No customers were present so Veronica used this opportunity to momentarily excuse herself. Mike looked up, then Veronica waved daintily with her fingers and mouthed Little girl’s room, and scurried away.
Bing Crosby crooned more Christmas rhymes as she hurried to the back, to the employee’s bathroom, because that one had a lock. What would Mike say if he caught me back here! came the alarmed consideration, and then she giggled. Knowing him, it’d probably get him aroused. She wasted no time once she locked the bathroom door. All right, so I’m a little insecure, she admitted. She pulled down her work pants along with the wildcat-red Victoria’s Secret lace panties (Mike preferred quality underthings) and up over her 36C bosom came the blue work shirt. She appraised herself, as she often did, and was quite content with the appraisal. The alabaster-white skin glowed in its own healthy lambency, her abdomen sleek and flat, her full and equally lambent bosom dark-nippled and erect, her almost-bare pubis fecund in its form, vital in its feminine youth, and accentuated by the meticulous half-inch-wide strip of downy, ash-brown hair.
My body’s almost as good as the girls in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue! she realized, and she thanked God for so bestowing her.
Next she looked just as honestly as her face. Fine, a little nerdy in the face, but how can I complain? The hair atop her head hung shinily to the middle of her back and shared the exact same interesting hue as her spare pubic hair. The zit on her nose wasn’t very big and would surely be gone in a day or so. And tonight? Mike would be so distracted by her body, he wouldn’t even notice.
She felt tickly even before she reached into her purse for the Doc Johnson’s Mini Pocket Wand; she mustn’t take too long—Mike would wonder what she was doing. She turned the wand on low, then stiffened and hissed when she touched its manic end to her right nipple, following the circumference of her areola. Delicious, intense waves seemed to spill over her chest from the inside out. The tender papilla swelled at once, and felt nerve-charged and somehow connected to her awareness. Round and round, the tip went, then to the other breast, then back. In only a minute, the warm spheres of her breasts seemed to beat, the nipples gorging till they stuck out in a manner that was anything but inconspicuous.
Just what she wanted.
The groove of her sex began to slicken, yet she never once considered lowering the wand to actually pleasure herself. That would’ve been a sin; and would reduce to falsehood her own morality. In truth, Veronica had never even had an orgasm and this was not due to frigidity at all but via her own force of will. Again, she thought of minor sins allowed to serve a Godly end—and wasn’t this just more proof of her faith? Her entreating of Mike orally was only to demonstrate her own charitability; it was not some lustful need on her part. She knew this, and knew that God knew it too. She was saving her very first orgasm just as she was saving her virginity: something to only be experienced once betrothed in the eyes of God and with Jesus as her witness. Not many women would have such strength, no indeed. There had even been rare occasions when Mike had reciprocated with cunnilingus, whereupon Veronica had only feigned climax, knowing full well that such abstinence only proved more—still more of her faith.
Content now, and buzzing all over in her secret joy, she went back out to the show room, her nipples now fairly jutting beneath the Best Buys shirt. Mike was on the phone by the check-out. Archie stood on a ladder in the TV department, hanging Christmas decorations.
Veronica secretly smiled as she eyed Mike’s profile.
My God I love him SO MUCH…
However, at this precise moment, Veronica couldn’t have felt closer to her own spirit nor closer to God. Venal sins, be damned! It was only a matter of time before Mike saw the light of Veronica’s love and they were properly wed in the eyes of the Lord. She even dared to think: Maybe he’ll propose to me on Christmas!
Veronica would be pleased to know that her minor venal sins of fellatio and vanity would indeed be forgiven. But what she wouldn’t be pleased to know was this: she would have to pay for those sins first, and she’d be paying for them in a matter of hours.
She’d be paying big-time.
— | — | —
Chapter 5
(I)
“Maw? Maw? It’s me, Helton…”
Helton sat in the metal chair next to the convalescent bed, looking sorrowfully down at the wizened form of his 80-some-odd-year-old mother, Petunia Tuckton. The stroke last year had landed the noble backwoods matriarch here in the Daisy-Chase Nursing Home, and it was a place Helton could scarcely fathom, part of a system that for some inexplicable reason wouldn’t let dying people die. Upon entrance, he first noticed rows of hoppers heaped high with brown-stained linens. An unnerving silence was periodically broken by inane jabbering, hacking, and lone shrieks. Mostly overweight women who spoke not one word of the English language listlessly pushed medication carts from door to door. Several doors stood upon, revealing shuddering stick-figures beneath sheets, sunken-faced, hollow-eyed: seemingly cadavers that jabbered. No way to live, no sir, Helton thought. In one room, he saw the darnedest thing: a fat nurse in pigtails had pulled up the hospital gown of an absolutely ancient man. Bare, paper-white legs stuck out with knees the size of grapefruits. What kind’a pree-vert show we GOT here? Helton wondered, because now the nurse had the old man’s withered dick between her fingers, and what she did next…
What she did next was she began to insert a long clear plastic tube into the old man’s dickhole!
She pushed the tube down, down, down, and then, when it must’ve been in the poor old fucker two feet…the tube began to fill with piss. Helton’s astonished eyes followed that piss, which ran all the way down the tube and began to empty into a plastic bag…
Good God! They steal folks PEE in this crazy place!
Helton didn’t understand and didn’t want to. His big frame moved on past the nurses station over which hung Christmas decorations. A fella in white clothes sat asleep before a television where a bunch of tall, black fellas in the silliest little shorts and shirts were running back and forth on the wood floor, bouncing a ball. On a cork board, Helton spied an index card that read: HELP WANTED: YOU CAN EARN $10 PER HOUR CUTTING PATIENTS’ TOENAILS! APPLY AT FRONT DESK.
A dense, diarrhea-ish odor followed Helton to his mother’s room.
It pained him to see her like this, and pained him more to notice one of those bags of discolored urine connected to her bed as well. God in Heaven—they’se are even stealin’ my OWN MAW’S pee… Six-motherfuckin’-thousand-dollars a month is what this creepy, feces-smelling hell-hole cost, but Petunia had wisely never kept her cash in the bank; indeed, she remembered the “Bank Holidays” of the Great Depression and “that connivin’ closet Commer-nist FDR!” Too many good folks had lost everything back
