The Desire Principle Ch 02

Chapter 2: A Special Delivery

Jake pulled away the shower curtain and began to gingerly towel off his freshly cleaned body, careful around the half dozen cuts and dozen and a half bruises that would be there tomorrow. He glanced through his open bathroom door and across the hall to the clock on his bedroom wall. A little after three fifteen in the morning.

The cops had been nice enough to give him a ride home after his happy-birthday mugging and car jacking. He'd had some awful birthdays in the past, but this one took the cake. And he didn't even

get

a cake. He slumped down on his stiff bed and lay his head on his pillow, a thin and lumpy mat that had long since lost its fluff. He sighed heavily, just glad to be at home. But he couldn't sleep.

As he listlessly gazed at the slightly uneven color of the plaster on his ceiling he recalled the first interesting event of the evening: watching a guy sitting a few rows ahead of him in the movie theatre get head. Jake's little Jake perked up a little, and as the cool breeze of his AC unit began to circulate, he enjoyed the sensation on his naked skin, particularly on his genitals. He was beginning to enjoy it even more until his memory reminded him of the other interesting event, the golden heart.

He stood and ran a few fingers through his drying yet still damp light brown hair as he wandered down the hallway and toward the front room. He had been so exhausted and generally fed up when he got home that he had practically sheared his clothes off on his way to the shower. He found his coat and fished around in the inner pocket until he felt the cool metal. Drawing it out Jake inspected it, dropping the coat again and retreating to the bedroom for better lighting.

He lay down on the bed, at first on his stomach until he felt a rather large bruise on his lower abdomen and rolled carefully onto his back. He inched his way up and placed his head on his limp pillow, and relaxed as much as the firm mattress would allow. He silently lamented that he would not be able to replace the aging bed anytime soon, having no reliable source of income aside from the meager check the government would make sure he received for his unemployment status. Attempting not to sink further into depression, he focused his attention on the heart.

The little trinket was almost definitely real gold. Jake's knowledge of fine jewelry was admittedly limited, but he'd spent enough time admiring inherited (and yet to be inherited) watches to gain a fair understanding of what to look for. He couldn't be sure of course, but he imagined that if this little lump of metal was solid and not just plated, it was probably worth a pretty penny.

It wasn't long before Jake was getting drowsy though, and focusing his bloodshot eyes on a tiny piece of jewelry wasn't helping. He closed his lids for just a moment to relax, and set his hands on his chest with his fingers laced together. The little golden heart was nestled right at the center of his sternum, held in place by his tightly woven fingers. Though cool when he first picked it up, it now felt warm to the touch. Jake almost wondered if he felt it heating up, but with the day he had just endured, he would wait to resolve that mystery until tomorrow.

He had never really been able to get a good nights rest on his dreadfully uncomfortable bed, but with how exhausted he felt tonight that couldn't be an obstacle. Sure enough he felt himself gently drifting away, not even caring that he had forgotten to pull the blankets over himself. His breathing deepened and he felt as if he was floating on a cloud, the lumpy pillow and too-hard mattress a distant memory.

*****

Jake woke from a restful slumber as the morning light softly filtered in through his thin curtains. He was enjoying just stretching out on his bed when he noticed that he must have pulled the blankets up during the night. It wouldn't be the first time, and with the AC turned up he probably got pretty cold while he was sleeping. He pushed the blankets down slightly and stretched again, noting that the course wool didn't feel as scratchy as it usually did.

As much as he would have loved to spend the entire day in bed, Jake needed to relieve himself. He pushed himself up on his elbows, then on his hands, and found that it was a lot harder to extract himself from his mattress than usual. The bed seemed to absorb his weight rather than push it away as it usually did. Jake blinked his eyes once or twice, attempting to gain a sense of his surroundings. He felt a weight on his chest and looked down. There hung the golden heart, suspended from a fine golden chain that he had never seen before in his life.

Almost instinctively Jake's gaze spun around the room. The door to his bedroom was closed, as he'd left it, and everything seemed to be in place. The only exception to everything being the norm was that he was very much so not in his bed. It was where his bed was supposed to be, and matched it in color and approximate dimensions, but nothing else about this bed was what he had gone to sleep on the night before.

The bedding was soft and downy, and if one were to venture a guess it seemed to actually be a down-stuffed mattress. The pillows, all five of them, were both fluffy and firm, and had been arranged to create an exceptionally comfortable angle and elevation for the head while sleeping. The covers on his bed were of the same blue they had always been, but where there was once a worn-thin sheet and scratchy blanket, there now lay a satin sheet atop which was a soft afghan which was in turn covered by a fluffy comforter which seemed to be as soft as the bed itself.

Jake afforded himself about thirty seconds to pretend that this was no different than the bed he knew and loved (to hate). When his allotted denial period had ended he flew from the bed with such speed that he was quite certain that he could have seen himself still lying in it had he turned around immediately rather than running to the door to put distance between himself and the pleasant yet entirely unexplainable new sleeping surface.

He groped at his neck and pulled the golden heart out to dangle it before his face and gawk at it in nearly pure doubt mixed with a little fascination. As if being recited by some mystic mentor from beyond the grave in an old sci-fi movie, Jake remembered the old man from the night before. His words, as best as Jake could recall, had stated that this golden heard would give him,

whatever the heart desires

.

Jake glanced back at the bed one more time, and had the overwhelming desire to say or do something that might dismiss the whole thing and return him to a sense of normalcy. There was unfortunately no

I don't believe in faeries

for phantom furniture, and so it seemed he would be stuck with it. He pinched himself once for good measure, having observed through various movies and television shows that pinching oneself would somehow make a difference if you were dreaming. There was no effect.

He attempted to keep an eye on 'his' bed as he gently eased the door open and squeezed out into the hallway, sealing the room behind him. Before taking another step he surveyed the hallway, looking for other changes. Finding none evident, he moved toward his second bedroom, where he kept some light work-out equipment and his computer.

By this point Jake had started to form some theories. More accurately he had thrown out a number of theories, and was left with the only one that made any real sense. Clearly some of his friends had heard about what happened to him, and had somehow gotten into his house and decided to pull a prank to try to lighten his mood. It must have been a challenge to get him out of one bed, disassemble it and replace it with another, and then get him back into it. With how tired he'd been though, he could believe it.

The chain for his golden heart was a little harder to figure out, but he quickly surmised that one of them must have noticed it fall while moving him and thought that they had broken the chain. The chain it was on now must have been one they found around his house or ran out to buy from the cheap impulse racks at a 24-hour convenience store.

His theories, though the only really plausible explanation, didn't hold up when he found no proof of anyone being in his house other than him. The door was still locked, his clothes from the day before were just where he left them (strewn across the path that any would-be pranksters would have had to walk), and his actual bed was nowhere to be found. And knowing his friends, they would more than likely be lounging about his house, eating his food and watching his television. Their absence alone almost single-handedly debunked his suspicion.

With little other choice, Jake sat down on the loveseat facing the bay window (with curtains currently drawn) and submitted to the fact that he had absolutely no idea what was going on. He reached for his cordless phone and dialed a number.

"Andrew? Hello?" He listened to what he assumed to be the sound of a tumbling phone. "Drew, you there? Yeah. This late? Oh." Jake swung his head around looking for a clock, and finally found that he could see the time on the microwave. It was pretty early, he supposed. "Well whatever, listen. Did you or any of the guys come over to my house last night? Just answer the question. Don't worry about that, just tell me if you were over here. Huh. Nothing. No, it doesn't matter. Go back to sleep." He ended the call and set the phone back on its charging dock.

Of course just hearing a denial of connection from one of his cronies wasn't exactly a true mark of innocence on their part. His gut didn't really tell him that Drew had been lying though, so he shelved his original notion of a fly-by-night prank and started seeking other alternatives.

Left with really nothing to go on, he reached for the chain around his neck again. There was a notable period of time, as Jake speculatively eyed his golden heart, that he actually started wondering if there was any credit to the notion that it was to blame. He couldn't really allow himself to fall entirely into that way of thinking, but he had to come up with a rationalization for a spontaneous bed, and this one was seeming less irrational all the time.

*****

Night was approaching, somewhat quickly thanks to summer, and Jake hadn't yet stepped out his front door. He originally had gotten dressed with the intent to do a few things today, but with the oddity in his bedroom he had resolved not to leave until he had a firm grip on the current state of affairs. His best solution to date was simple insanity as a result of severe head trauma. And if that were the case, he felt it preferable to be crazy in private rather than crazy in public, where people could laugh and make funny faces.

In the last few hours he had made a sizable dent in wearing a trench into the floor between his second bedroom and his living room. He wandered back and forth at a near constant pace, each second or third pass opening his bedroom door and confirming, as if it helped anything, that there was an invading article of furniture within. He was starting to wonder where he was going to sleep tonight. Not because he actually lacked a suitable location, he did after all have a number of relatively habitable surfaces to pass out on, but mostly he was concerned that whatever he slept on next would likewise be abducted, improved upon, and returned as if nothing was wrong.

Jake could have made a good deal more progress on solving his little quandary, but he took note of another issue, and even more a symptom of his one day stay in the world of the modern hermit. He was hungry.

A terribly displeasing side effect of not leaving the house was that, if you did not make a habit of keeping food in your house, you would get very hungry. Of course he had the usual junk. Still some yogurt cups, maybe a quarter gallon of ice cream, a few cans of soda and a jug of milk that wouldn't be good much longer. He had a more elaborate meal or two as well, but most of those would either require a lot of effort or one or two more ingredients that would force him to go out, which could be disastrous if he was really as crazy as he apparently would seem to be.

There was an alternative, however. He wouldn't actually need to go out, because there were businesses these days that would actually make the food come to you. A novel idea, and it was seeming more novel to Jake all the time. He snatched up the phone again and called the number by heart. His order was the same as it always was, and for a change he was feeling a little bit normal again.

With an answer provided for the immediate question of food, Jake could relax a little and spend some more time focusing on his increasingly unstable grasp on reality. He sat down in his loveseat again and stared at his mysterious trinket.

The crazy old coot had said that the heart would give him whatever he desired. He had actually chosen something of a nickname for the piece. He took to referring to it, in his mind, as the Heart of Gold. It wasn't quite an original idea, but it was undeniably a golden heart, and as simply accepting the unrealistic nature of the thing was a leap enough for him, he figured that accepting a slightly cheesy name wasn't much to ask of himself.

Jake mulled it over some more. He had come home early that morning exhausted, barely able to stand or walk, likely only doing so with force of will, and bolstered by a strong and directionless anger over the day's (and night's) events. He was so tired that any bed would do, but even so his back hurt the moment he had laid down. Jake remembered the pangs of depression he felt knowing that even his home, where he went to be secluded and secure, was somehow against him.

Even now he could almost feel the need for something to be right, just one thing to provide comfort to keep him from breaking down. He needed something on his side, in a way. He needed it, much more than he could have wanted it, in some basic and instinctive fashion. He became lost in that thought, and for what seemed like hours he stared blankly into space, contemplating the unfathomable.

As his mind drifted from one thought to the next he began to see a tenuous connection between his terrible discomfort at the hands (figuratively speaking) of his former bed. This drew him closer to the recognition that he had been told that possession of this Heart would result in his desires being realized. Therefore, if his desire had truly been to actually be comfortable in his uncomfortable bed...

The doorbell rang, and Jake sprang to his feet with part shock, and part revelation. His call came to mind. The call for food, which was being answered now, and not a moment too soon. Jake stepped toward the door, gladly forgetting his former train of thought, knowing that each pace brought him that much closer to being satiated, and able to reclaim another normal sensation in his suddenly abnormal world.

He pulled the door open and stood face to face with a somewhat cute delivery girl, balancing a pizza box in her left hand while her right held a bill. She was new, at least since the last time he'd called for a delivery. Her medium brown hair poked out from the back of her regulation baseball cap, and curled in that special way that let you know it was natural. She was not pale, but certainly light in her current complexion. Jake guessed that she probably went tanning, and had been unable to make time for perhaps the last week. With her uniform polo shirt and matching windbreaker it was hard to make out much of her upper body, but her tight jeans gave proof that she was athletic, and naturally gifted with a pleasing set of curves.

Jake found that he wasn't really thinking about pizza anymore. She, on the other hand, was thinking only about the fact that all Jake would be able to do would be to think about pizza, unless he paid her the amount on the slip she proffered. This too had been something Jake would have forgotten, were it not for a reminder.

"Oh, money. Crap. One second," he said, turning and heading for his bedroom to find his wallet. He then realized that he was leaving her just standing in his doorway, holding his pizza. "You can just set that on the table, if you want," he called over his shoulder as he walked. "I'll grab the cash."

It didn't take him long to find his money. He had a very well thought out system of piles, by which he was always able to know just where his clean, dirty, and most recently dirtied clothing could be found. He got enough out for the bill and the tip, spared an awkward glance at the eerie bed that he could still not explain, and turned to walk out into the hall and back toward the pizza that would very soon be his.

"I'm sorry to make you wait. You've probably got a lot of other runs to make." Jake wasn't great with small talk, but he was sincere, and he felt a little bad about delaying her when he was aware that speed was essentially the top commodity in a business that promised its product free if it was late.

She smiled a charming smile. Her teeth were straight and clean, and there was something in the way she tilted her head just slightly to the side that made him feel comfortable. "No, actually. You're my last stop. From here it's straight home to bed."

Jake smiled in return, certain that it couldn't compare with hers. He nearly would have forgotten about the money again, but her eyes drifted to his hand and he could not help but recall it. He rather quickly extended it to her, saying awkwardly, "Yeah, it's all here. Tip and all."

Another glittering flash of teeth nearly knocked Jake off his feet, and she slipped the bills from his hand. "Thanks," she said, not at all callous or practiced. She turned with a gesture not that unlike a wave, and started her three step journey to the porch. This new orientation gave Jake a look at some other curves that she apparently was not lacking in the slightest.

Her perfectly sculpted rear was accentuated even more by the tight denim jeans she wore, and Jake was content to assume that it was just as firm without them. Her slender thighs rose up from her knees to the base of her ass, which curved away dramatically and sloped up to the small of her back. These upper reaches were outside of Jake's direct view of course, but he could imagine, and his imagination was rather good.

The inner walls of her legs didn't quite touch as she walked, apart from where the thighs brushed against one another slightly, and then they parted again until curling and connecting below her crotch. It was purely his mind's manufacture, but as his eyes froze on that small oblong space between her upper thighs, he could swear that he detected the slightest hint of a feminine aroma in the air. He felt the vigor of youth in his loins, and in a moment had constructed a plethora of lustful thoughts to keep himself occupied after she had gone.

It became hard for Jake to focus on her appealing buttocks, as he began to suffer a severe pain. Apparently a rapid onset of acid reflux, he grasped at his chest instinctively, and felt warmth. The metal heart he wore had become exceptionally warm, and he felt that it might actually be burning his skin. He glanced at it with concern, and then looked back up to see the exiting form of the delivery girl. He thought to call out for help, for fear that once she was gone he would be alone and in unbearable agony, but he hesitated. What would he say? He was clearly delusional, and in a few moments he was certain that his latest mental fabrication would fade. It would be much better to just let her leave, and attempt to save some of his decaying image. And then she stopped.

With one hand on the open door leading out of the house, she suddenly and abruptly ceased her departure, and turned her head back to look at him over her shoulder. Her look was one that Jake didn't see often. In actually it was one that he saw rather often, but not in person. He saw it on his computer screen, and he usually had to pay $12.95 an month for it. She turned completely, tossing the door casually closed as she spun, and began to make her way back to him with a distinctly lustful stare. Her expression was wanton, as if she had been denied for months and he was the only man who could satisfy.