Good morning guys. As promised, here's an exclusive sneak peek from Chapter 4 of "The Higher Learning Curve," the erotic novella that is consuming all of my time as I write through these sleepless nights to finish in time to meet my deadline. Enjoy.
Priscilla sat on the stone steps in front of her home, naked as the day
she was born underneath her red, silk robe. Between her index and middle finger
she casually gripped a Newport 100 cigarette. As she brought it to her lips,
she stared up at the same night sky that had caught Marlon’s attention from
Vickie’s bedroom window many, many miles away. Ever since she was a little
girl, there was always something about the mysterious, infinite darkness that
fascinated Priscilla. All of that emptiness, populated by so little was
alluring and seductive. To her, space was a vast canvas that had hardly been
touched and desperately needed a cosmic paintbrush to stroke it with colors. Sometimes,
it also made her very sad that there was so much darkness in the sky but so
little light. The pale moon was full and as she admired its glow, the
silhouette of a commercial airliner slowly crossed in front of it. She wondered
what part of the world it was headed to, packed with hundreds of passengers,
mostly strangers, on their way to live out hundreds of different lives.
The smoke she
exhaled formed fake clouds in front of her face and above her head against the
backdrop of a cloudless night sky where only a few stars twinkled weakly along
with the moon, in defiance of the dense layer of smog that constantly hung over
the city. She savored the taste of her cigarette as she rubbed her sore wrists.
Her husband had been in a freaky, kinky mood earlier and had tied her to the
bedpost while they had sex. She hadn’t really been in the mood for the bondage
games they occasionally played but, she saw that the Mr. wanted that and needed
that, so she let him have his way. She understood that that type of compromise
was just a part of the constant push and pull of a happy marriage; one that
actually stood a chance of lasting well beyond the typical expiration date of
most modern matrimonial arrangements. Priscilla had adapted her mom’s philosophy
on maintaining a healthy marriage, the old cliché that
a good wife absolutely had to be a lady in the streets but a freak in the
sheets for her husband. As an extremely attractive single mother of five
daughters, Priscilla’s mom always had a long list of suitors, despite what many
men would consider too much “excess baggage.” When her mom eventually chose a
husband, things were good with them for a very long time. He worked hard, came
home every night, didn’t beat her, hardly ever raised his voice and never
cheated.
Priscilla was
thirteen when her stepfather passed away and it was the third most tragic thing
that had ever happened in her life. In the few years that he had been a part of
their family, he had done more for her than her biological father ever had. He
had never done any of the horrible things that her own father would eventually
do, after loneliness caused her mother to give the man that had abandoned them
years before a second chance. The things that happened weren’t good for her
current psyche so she kept her past as disconnected from her present as she
could. It felt like the only way to maintain her sanity so she did what most of
us do. She buried the bad old bones that would only serve to haunt her.
She continued to
smoke and just when she was close to finishing her cigarette, a completely
random thought popped into her head. One of her students entered her thoughts
seductively, like the soft touch of a familiar pair of lips on her cheek. For
no reason at all, she looked up at the moon and wondered what the young man who
always sat at the front of her World Arts lectures was doing at that exact
moment.
“It’s been a long
time since you smoked a cigarette after sex. My question is, was it that good, or
was it that bad that you need one?” Charles, Priscilla’s husband, asked as he
sat down beside her on the front steps of their home.
“After all these
years, I still can’t believe you ask questions like that,” she answered and
took his hand in hers.
One of the things
Priscilla had always loved about Charles were his hands. She believed that a
woman could tell a lot about a man from the size of his hands and the strength
of his grip. Charles smiled when he felt her tender touch. It had been weeks
since she had touched him in that way, or shown him that kind of gentle
affection. He raised her hand to kiss it and saw the marks where he had tied
her wrist earlier.
“Did I hurt you
earlier?” he asked as he kissed Priscilla’s sore wrist. “Was I too rough?”
“No, not at all,”
she answered with a smile.
“I could feel that
you weren’t really in the mood for…that,” he told her.
“And I could feel
that you needed that. Rough day?” she asked. She had assumed that he needed to
let off steam because of how aggressive he had been in the bedroom.
“No, actually, my
day was pretty good,” Charles answered, looking up at the same moon his wife
had been staring at just a few moments before.
“So, why’d you make
me do it?” she asked.
“I guess I needed to
make you see me, and feel me. Lately, I’ve been feeling like a ghost, like I’m
not real, as if you don’t even know that I’m here,” he answered.
“You’re such a
silly man. I always know that you’re here,” she told him and kissed the course
stubble on his cheek. “Come on, it looks like it’s about to rain and I’ve
finished my cigarette. Let’s go inside.”
Copyright
© 2015 Keith Kareem Williams
All
rights reserved.
COMING SOON - NOVEMBER 2015
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