BUSINESS
Summary: The wife of the curator of the British Museum meets Med-Jai warrior Ardeth Bay. Ardeth, OC.
Category: Angst, drama, romance.
Rating: M
Author's note: Please note that the "M (eventually)" rating has now changed to M. It's also going to get a lot darker from here on in. Thank you for reading, and please review! I'm grateful for any reviews, positive, neutral, or negative.
Chapter Four
After Ardeth Bay left the lobby Marjorie walked back into her room and sat at her dresser and watched with a detached interest as the woman in the mirror began to cry. She wasn't exactly sad, not in any way that was comprehensible to her. She hadn't cried in ages, it seemed, and now was a good a time as any. She patiently let the tears drip from her red-rimmed blue eyes and trickle into the spider-thin gullies that were forming at the edges of her nose and her mouth.
She noticed some strands of gray hair mixed in with the brown along her temples, and spent a good ten minutes foraging for them and placing them in a little pile next to the half-empty bottle of Chanel Number Five. By the time she was done, the tears had stopped, and she wiped her face clean with a tissue, and used the tissue and perfume bottle to sweep the gray hairs into the papyrus trash bin at her feet.
She cast a look into the mirror one last time before moving to lie among the thin cotton blankets of the unmade bed.
In the soft curtained light she thought she looked fifteen years younger. She had been twenty when she had married Alfred. Twenty and as thin as a reed, with hipbones jutting from her abdomen and breasts the size of young lemons. She closed her eyes and kept the image of her twenty year old body in her mind as she loosed the sash of her kimono.
This time she allowed her hands to travel along her skin, unhurried and aimless. Her ribs, her belly, her thighs. At first she did not think of anything in particular, but when she slid her fingers under the waistband of her panties, she began to think of Ardeth Bay.
He was a handsome man, but so was Alfred in his youth, with his green eyes and perfect cheekbones leading to a firm and shapely mouth. No, she found herself ruminating over his imperfections as she dipped her fingers into the nest of hair at the juncture between her legs.
His ears were too large, and his mouth was too soft, like that of a woman's. His shoulders were exceedingly wide, and when he walked she was reminded of the prowling of a wild animal. His scent, too, was that of an animal: dark and musky and bitter. The scent that her husband and his colleagues ritually cleansed themselves of in the shower every day, multiple times a day, scrubbing themselves until they were as odorless as a photograph.
And then Marjorie began to think of her husband, and of how he was shifting uneasily in the intolerably hot pews of the packed church, and somehow her arousal began to diminish, and she was only barely able to push herself to a quiet climax.
Tension, release.
She exhaled her disappointment.
It was hot and stuffy inside of the bedroom, and her hands were slick with her fluid. She unfolded herself from the bed and shuffled into the bathroom to wash.
TO BE CONTINUED…