Cindy and her fiancé, Raj, were standing in the small barn on her parent's property about a mile into the countryside from city's farthest suburbs. They had just finished supper and the last of the twilight streamed into the shadowy space at a low angle. This was not a working farm, but there were horses, a stable, and miles of bridal trails. The barn was used to store hay and other food for the horses.
She had been showing him around the property, accompanied only by MouseSlayer the Sixth and PoPo the Seventh, the latest in a long line of barn cats that had been earning their keep on the property since before Cindy was born. Raj thought this dark cool barn was the right place to stop and confront her about some things.
"Cindy," he said, "the property is great. I can see why you have so many fond memories of growing up here. And your father is great, too. Very impressive. Your mother is ... well, not so much."
"Oh, Raj," Cindy soothed, "I'm so sorry for the way Mother has behaved. Her bigotry is unforgivable. I told her months ago that you were from India, but somehow actually seeing us together was a shock to her. She comes from a time and place where it was simply unheard of for a white woman to marry a non-white."
Raj and Cindy had arrived here yesterday after a two day drive from the university where she was a twenty-one year old senior and he was a twenty-seven year old junior professor of engineering. They planned to marry right after her graduation two months hence.
It had been nearly love at first sight for both of them barely six months earlier when Cindy was a volunteer hostess at a welcoming party for new faculty. Within minutes of meeting each other, Raj was ignoring the other new faculty and Cindy was ignoring her hostess duties. They sat on the railing of a balcony at the university president's house and talked till the president's maid, up early to clean up the party debris, found them and told them that the party had ended hours before. Two months later they were engaged.
Cindy was a willowy blond, a smidgen taller and a bit thinner than the average woman, but still pretty curvy. Her hair was a very pale blond, thin, and hung straight to her mid-back. After years of perms and crimps, she had given up trying to put any kind of wave in it.
She was a creature of moods, Raj had discovered. Most of the time she was an intelligent, mature young woman who got excellent grades and could discuss the troubling events in India with him with unexpected insight. But there were times when she became willful and self-indulgent to the point of childishness.
Naked, her skin was so white that under soft lighting the outline of her body actually seemed to get fuzzy as if her skin were made of felt or suede.
Her breasts were soft, as well, very pale, and they seemed somehow lighter and less solid than the breasts of other women Raj had known. That lightness caused them to jiggle more, too. Even relatively slight movements when she wasn't wearing a bra would reverberate visibly through her breasts. And during sex, they would quiver and quake, mesmerizing Raj and the few past boyfriends lucky enough to have witnessed those shaking hills.
She did not often go braless, but when she did those jiggles never failed to get attention. Many times during her years in college a drunken, or just boorish, male was moved to exclaim out loud to her his appreciation for her mammary equipment. She had assumed that all women got that treatment until Raj explained to her that she had a well above normal jiggle quotient.
Raj was black haired with lightly brown skin. He did not work out regularly, but he didn't really need to either. He was naturally well proportioned and strong. The sight of him naked, especially in silhouette, always made Cindy smile. It wasn't just the shape of his muscles and certainly not the exposed skin. It was his solidity, his
lack
of jiggle, that turned her on.
When they made love his hands were gentle but his arms legs, butt, and trunk were all hard and uncompromising. When he held her, she had a sense of being trapped by a strength she could not overcome. And when their bodies came together it was always hers that gave way. Her breasts flattened under his chest, her bottom mashed on his pelvis when she rode him on top, and her thighs conformed to the shape of his when they tangled and squeezed each other's legs.
"I think it's more than just shock," Raj replied to her explanation of her mother, as he stood holding MouseSlayer, scratching him under his chin. It was human-to-cat male bonding.
"Your mother's reference to South Asians as 'you little brown people' and her remark that our food smells bad," he continued, "reveals a deep failure to make any attempt at all to understand foreign cultures. She reacts impulsively, negatively, and irrationally to anything that's different from what she is used to. You and I need to talk about this before we marry. But it's actually your behavior that concerns me at the moment."
Cindy had rarely heard him speak in such a sharp tone and never to her. Although he had moved to America from India as an eight year old and normally spoke English without an accent, traces of the accent and speech patterns of his native language crept into his speech when he was stressed, tired, or angry. She could hear those traces now. At such times he also became very professorial: he held himself straighter and stiffer, his voice became clipped and commanding, and his syntax became more formally proper as if he was reading an essay instead of conversing.
"Raj, what have I done?" she asked, genuinely puzzled.
"It was your behavior on the drive up here," he explained. "You wanted to stop at every little antique shop or gift store. And the way you spend money. There's something disturbingly impulsive and irresponsible about it."
"Oh, Raj," she almost laughed. "Is that all? I've always been like that. You know that. When I see something, I've just got to have it. You know, when I was growing up, there were times when Father would ... well, uh, never mind that."
"Yes," he agreed, "I have seen these traits in you before, and frankly it bothered me, but I figured that I'd have to live with it."
"I promise I'll do better, Raj," she tried to reassure him. "Don't worry so much-"
"Wait!" he interrupted her sharply. "Let me finish. I said I
thought
I'd have to live with it. But on this trip your behavior seems to have gone to extremes. The closer you got to home, the less mature you got. To be honest, I was having second thoughts about the marriage."
"Oh, God, Raj, don't say that," she nearly cried. "It would break my heart if you didn't marry me."
"Oh, I'm going to marry you, but I've come to realize only in the last twenty-four hours that I won't have to just live with your irresponsibility."
With that he put MouseSlayer on the floor, strode to a nearby bale of hay, and sat down.
"Come over here, Cindy ... now!"
Cindy obeyed. She had never seen Raj so ... so ...
commanding
. She felt a little afraid, but also a little mesmerized.
As soon as she came within reach, Raj grabbed her wrist and pulled her over his lap.
