• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1460 0

Sitting beneath it one morning, perched over his computer and thinking about starting another book, he listened to the sounds of his wife and son packing in Sam’s bedroom next door. He checked the time. Sam’s bus left in forty minutes. Mindy and Sam would be leaving any minute—as soon as they did, he would read Lola’s sex column. When he’d returned from the final leg of his book tour, exhausted and jet-lagged, he’d claimed he was too tired to even think about writing but had managed to get over to Lola’s apartment six times in ten days and, on each visit, had made fantastic love to her. One afternoon, she had stood above him while he spread open her labia and licked her firm little clit; on another occasion, she’d fucked him while he lay on his back, positioning her bottom in front of his face, and he had slid his middle finger in and out of her puckered asshole. In the evenings after these encounters, Mindy would come home and remark that he appeared to be in a good mood. He would reply that yes, he was, and after all his hard labor, didn’t he have a right to be? Then Mindy would bring up the country house. They couldn’t, she conceded, afford a house in the Hamptons, but they could find something in Litchfield County, which was just as beautiful, and maybe even better than the Hamptons because it was still filled with artists and not yet overrun with finance types. In her usual pushy way, Mindy had convinced him to drive up to Litchfield County for the weekend; they’d stayed at the Mayflower Inn to the tune of two thousand dollars for two nights while they looked at houses during the day. Mindy was, James knew, trying to be reasonable, limiting their choices to houses under one point three million dollars. James found something wrong with every one, but in an act of defiance, perhaps, Mindy had signed Sam up for a month of tennis camp in the tony little town of Washington, Connecticut, where Sam would be residing in the dorm of a private school.

Now, while Mindy was packing Sam’s things, James was wondering if he dared take a quick peek at Lola’s column. In her last installment, she had written about the time James had alternated between penetrating her with a vibrator and his own penis. Unlike Mindy, Lola had the good sense to change his name—calling him “The Terminator,” because he caused orgasms that were so strong, they could be terminal—and James was so chuffed, he couldn’t be angry. He had even bought her an enameled Hermés bracelet, which she’d been desperate for, saying all the women on the Upper East Side had one, cleverly paying cash so Mindy couldn’t trace the purchase. He looked longingly at his computer, anxious to know if Lola had written about him again, and if so, what she’d said. But with Mindy in the apartment, he decided it was too risky. What if she caught him? Valiantly resisting temptation, he got up and went into Sam’s room.

“Four weeks of tennis,” James said to his son. “Do you think you’ll get bored?”

Mindy was placing packages of white cotton athletic socks into Sam’s bag. “No, he will not,” she said.

“I hate this business of taking on the customs of the upper classes,” James said. “What’s wrong with basketball? It was good enough for me.”

Mindy snorted. “Your son is not you, James. As a fairly intelligent adult male, you should have figured that out by now.”

“Hmph,” James said. Mindy had been a bit curt with him lately, and since he feared her shortness might be due to a suspicion about his affair with Lola, he didn’t push it.

“Besides,” Mindy said. “I want Sam to feel comfortable in the area. We’ll have a house there soon, and I want him to have lots of new friends.”

“We will?” James said.

Mindy gave him a terse smile. “Yes, James, we will.”

James was suddenly nervous and went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. A few minutes later, Mindy and Sam kissed him goodbye and went off to the bus station; Mindy would go on from there to her office. The second the door closed, James rushed to his computer, typed in the requisite address, and read, “The Terminator strikes