Fifty Tints of Beaver*
Chapter One
I look in the mirror. I'm wet, wet and dirty all over. My old grey sweatshirt with a picture of a poodle on it's disheveled. The bitch is peeling off, and I don't look much different. I look like a tramp who's taken a long roll in the warm, moist, sticky hay. It clings to me, to my thighs, to my fingers. Ugh. Why today? Why did I choose today of all days to mow the lawn? My female pattern baldness is apparent. The Bio-Matrix Strand-by-Strand hair treatment I got at Hairclub isn't taking hold. It's all falling out again. Part of me hates myself and wishes someone with authority would just throw me up against a radiator and remind me what it is to be a woman. Or, if I can't have that, maybe at least the kids could call.
I go the kitchen table and sort casually through a stack of books I got at the public library. I'm filling in for Tina today, who normally runs our book club. Today of all days. On the day when we have to choose our next book. Tina's in Costa Rica on her honeymoon. She's young and spunky, with perky breasts and nubile thighs. I imagine her husband grasping those slender, muscular hips, their hard bodies thrusting together beneath satin sheets. I imagine her tying his wrists and climbing on top of him. He sits up and takes her nipple in his mouth, reckless now like a wild beast, leaving a trail of man spit along her neckline. My pussy jumps into my lap and snaps me out of it. I can't think about Tina and her husband right now. I have a book to choose.
I sift through the options. We've already read Frozen Heat by Richard Castle and Love Unrehearsed, book two of Tina Reber's "Love" series. They're both in the top 13 on the New York Times Bestseller List, but my encounters with them left me and the other ladies passionately unfulfilled. I try to make an offhand gesture of dismissal, and my hand accidentally scrapes my nipple through three layers of clothing. I feel a twinge I haven't felt since Al met Candee at the Vines Gentlemen's Club, where the women are purported to be high class. I beg to differ. Al didn't want a high class woman. He wanted an insatiable young slut who's up for anything, who'll put anything in her mouth and roll it around with her tongue. All men are like that. They want a girl with a touch I've never had, a princess who will run her dirty toes along their shafts. They want someone who will give and never ask in return, who will never need them to mow the lawn or pick up the kids from camp. They don't want kids, in fact, and they certainly don't want to conquer the mother of those kids. Not anymore. All men are blind to the needs of a real woman. They don't even know how to recognize her.
Now I'm feeling stretched-out and angry. I stop treating the books gently. I throw them around, abuse them. It feels good. I take a copy of A Farewell to Arms I found on a back shelf and hurl it against the oven. I tear three pages out of The Grapes of Wrath. I put The Chronicles of Narnia under my foot and step on it. I grind it into the kitchen tile like I'm a police officer and it's my incarcerated subject, helpless before my wrath. I wonder for a minute why in all these 58 years I've never bought any knee-high leather boots. I decide that changes today. Right after I feed the cat.
. . .
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* It's a Crayola color, you perv.
