The nametape on his right breast said Thompson, but that could hardly distinguish between the two of them. His first name was James, but, aside from her, and from his blood relatives, no one called him that. She wore no tag or labeling, generally, but from time to time at the conventions, symposiums, and signings that she attended from time to time, hers preceded their shared surname with "Lucy." In her spare time—and their Spartan lifestyle and his career left her, all too often, with nothing but overwhelming, suffocating spare time—she wrote. Poetry, essays both fact and fiction, novellas ...everything that she had dallied in for her own joy, her own private pleasures—and she smiled inwardly whenever that pun showed itself—were now hers to enjoy productively.
And profitably, she reflected. Her income wasn't far behind his, and unlike Jason, a day's work didn't leave her with either odor or agony. She had polished off chapter seven of her current opus in the morning—after abrupt awakening and furious typing at five AM—and was rewarding herself with a long, hot shower. It had started just before 11:30, and she was toweling off slightly past noon. She hung the towel back up on the rack, and walked across the hall to the master, and only, bedroom.
If you or I had watched her pass in the full length mirror in the corner, by the bedroom door, we would have marveled at the perfection of her body.
Her skin was smooth, a color somewhere between the skin of an apricot and the flesh of a peach, and gave the appearance of being both slightly plump, and resoundingly firm, the figure of a person who ate properly, and exercised as much as any person could without becoming an athlete, bringing her tone and muscle to the maximal tone it could without making it look like she tried. Her belly was not quite flat—it had the slightest curve, which in her case, you would surely conclude, simply make her look, again, like an effortless beauty, blessed with a figure like a gift from above, freeing her to be a wonderful person, rather than an obsession that consumed her every hour, displacing the worthwhile activities of her life.
You would call ass and breasts where neither large nor small, rather place it in that wonderful middle, both sharing the remarkably precise dimensions that, when she stood still and bent over, they were exactly large enough that at their perigee, they kissed together. The puckered dimple behind her was just barely occulted by the two firm mounds she sat upon, and, if she were so bent, the two orbs that dangled from her chest looked like two pairs, just minutely overlapping at their broadest point. Indeed, the analogy of pears would reinforce itself, because at the same place as the brown nub on the fruit that marked the stem's antipode, on Lucy's breasts lay two small, crimson, perfectly round nipples. Ironically, and in perhaps the only parts of her body out of the ordinary—seductive, enchanting, average and ordinary perfection—were those pink nipples for their inversion, and her belly button that protruded out. In the case of all three, you would probably call them adorable.
Her eyes were green with hazel veins through them that seemed to grow and throb, or shrink and diminish with her mood. Her nose was sharply defined, upturned, small, and, for lack of a better word, pert. Her lips were pink, lighter than her breasts, slender when she grinned and fat when she frowned or cried or puckered. Her lashes were long, her brow thing, her hair smooth, straight, and silky, a light brown that in some light appeared blonde, in others red. Her ears were small, spirals and curves wrapped around one other, hidden under her locks,
Her hair below was the same way. Shaved into a small, thin strip, no more than an inch long and a centimeter wide, and that into a close cropped, thick, soft tuft, sat crowning a perfectly symmetric, fleshy crease. Sealed together, normally, as she became aroused it would bloom like a rose, the crease opening into a slit, the slit into a fissure, the fissure into a chasm, its walls in mirrored, pink folds with the smallest fringe of brown. As the petals spread thusly outward, at their peak, a bulb would appear, and the hood pull slowly back, until at last, no larger than a pea, would sit the naked, unprotected seat of her femininity.
All in all, Lucy's body was, to an impartial observer, perfect. Where she walked, trousers bulged. In her life, she had been pined for, worshipped, and, for more than one compatriot, an 'exception' to otherwise strict sexual preferences. Boys and girls in her high school, men and women with whom she had studied lived and worked in adulthood, had thought of her at night.
But she saw none of that.
If she saw herself in that full-length mirror, she would have turned away, her cheeks blushing not in bashful pride, but embarrassed shame. Her eyes saw her skin's shade as sickly, her eyes as achromatic, her hair hideously lacking curls or life. She saw asymmetry where there was none between her legs. She saw her limbs as amorphous lumps of fat, her forehead furrowed. Inverted nipples and an outie belly button were just freakish insult to hideous injury. But more than anything else about herself, she was hated and shamed by the fact that she did nothing to change it. In many ways she
wanted
to be anorexic or bulimic—at least then, she reasoned, she would have the motivation to 'fix' herself, misguided though it may be. She despised herself for lacking the will to change anything about herself—ironic, in consideration of the fact that, to any other observer, she was Venus incarnate.
It was just past noon, however, and Lucy was naked in the bedroom. James had been gone since four Monday evening, and wasn't due back until two in the afternoon. He would be famished, she was sure, and yesterday she had raided the commissary, gathering what she needed for a feast. It would take an hour, perhaps, to prepare—cooking, after all, being far faster when no one at the table ate meat—and perhaps fifteen minutes to prepare herself. That left, she grinned, looking at the hall clock walking towards to kitchen, forty minutes to herself. Lucy slumped on the puffy living room chair and grinned, closing her eyes and sighing. There was no separation between the kitchen and their living room in the small home, and Lucy had no intent to get up and start lunch for at least thirty of her allotted forty minutes were consumed.
Thirty seconds later, one calf dangled off the chair's right armrest, the other off the left, and one of her fingers was invisible down to the first knuckle. Goosepimples covered her body, and she moaned contentedly, eyes opening and closing in lazy cycles, shifting her mind between imagined orgies and visible copulations as the porn's muzak came at her from either side, thanks to the 5.1 speakers.
Three minutes later, two of her fingers were unseen, and her pelvis began to happily buck. Her eyes clamped shut, and her moans grew louder. The rippled rides insider herself, tactile in spite of the slick wetness she emitted in apparently unlimited quantities. Her other hand was clamped to her breasts, twitching and flicking her body every which way as, in feeling inside herself, her insides began to detonate. Her moans coalesced into a single, pure, primal, high pitched whine. Her eyes opened wide as she crested, and, at the same time, she pulled her fingers out of herself, and pinched their dripping digits on her tiny, throbbing clitoris, like a bulging grain of pink rice.
Almost as quickly as her eyes flashed open, however, her cry died. On the chair across from her was James, calmly unlacing his right boot. His left was already off. She hadn't heard him come in over the music, nor seen him enter the room, thanks to the... diversion... of her attentions. She gasped in sudden terror, and gripped the armrests, clamping her legs together in front of her. Her chest heaved up and down, her heart racing, and she looked straight ahead, right at him. His second boot was off, now.
He stood up. She expected him to say something, yell at her, but he didn't. He was filthy, the tan, gray, and brown of his camouflage an almost undifferentiated muddy wall of grime. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Montana peaked hat—she slapped herself inside, correcting herself 'campaign cover'—on the end table. His expressionless face disappeared as he pulled the blouse over his head. His undershirt was technically green, but it more resembled the old, brown issue, so saturated was it with sand and muck. Seeing how clearly evident the last seventy hours exertion were, she felt suddenly indolent and cheap for spending it dallying in MSWord, showers, sleep, food, and, most recently, masturbation.
As if in synch with this sensation, James camouflage blouse at her, and, with a heavy thunk due more to the absorbed water dirt and mud than to any property of the cloth, it struck her in her naked chest, its sleeve whipping against her face. The slight pain of rough sand whipped against her nude form did nothing to dampen her own self-indictment of hedonism. Her eyes staring forward, focusing on nothing, she folded the blouse and placed it on her lap, struggling to control her breathing and get her pulse under control. James had taught her how a thousand times, but now, as ever, when she needed it the skill escaped her. In unfocused vision, she saw an object flying at her, and, without seeing it, she knew what it was. A black cloth belt, with one red stripe—indicative of the highest level of hand-to-hand fighting ability and training that the service awarded, and, furthermore, the certification to instruct others—its metal buckle leading the charge towards Lucy's face. She caught it without focusing her eyes, and rolled the belt into a tight clump, and placed it on the folded blouse.
By the time that task was complete, the trousers were flying at her, and before those were done folding, James walked over and placed socks, undershirt, and undershorts on the blouse. She finished folding the trousers, and slid them under the blouse. Her chest heaved—once, twice, three times—as she waited for the other shoe, proverbially, to drop.
Finally, he said something. His voice was hoarse, his throat sore beyond the knowledge or experience of even the most petulant child or energetic cult politician. But hoarse though it was, it still boomed, and carried on its wings power and dread.
