chapter 1
fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
He sipped the last of his coffee very slowly, and when
her eyes spilled he leaned in to kiss her forehead. “Twentyfive,” he said. “Fine. Until November 1, though, and then
we’re back to regular. Okay?”
“November 8?” she asked, brushing dry her cheeks.
“Janet!”
She moved closer and pressed him desperately to her. “Our
love is wonderful,” she said. “I know that. I know it’s true.”
His nose pushed into the smoothness of her hair. “We’re
each other’s reward,” he offered, but she just dug her head
deeper into his shoulder and whispered blanks into the
caves of his neck.
“November 8, then,” he said. “And that’s it-it-it.”
“Thank you, Daniel,” she breathed. “You have no idea.”
After they hugged, he went to watch TV. She wrote it all
down carefully on the paper. November 8. Twenty-five dollars.
Seven-hundred and seventy currently. As if she would forget.
S
TARTING THE NEXT morning, she initiated sex
every day. If the week before had been largely
his fantasy enacted, now it was all hers. In the
shower, in the darkness under all the covers of
the bed, at his warehouse among the shoeboxes
in his work boots. It felt slightly pathetic to her that she had
to do four now to each one before to make the same amount
of cash, but she was ravenously hungry for contact all day
long and Daniel, who had grown accustomed—before the
previous week—to a steady but slightly lackluster sex life, let
her enthusiasm spark his own. He took a lunch with Edward
as a break, and only begged fatigue a few times when Janet’s
demand was kind of overwhelming, he said, since he’d just
gotten home and just this morning in the shower and he
needed some food and couldn’t they watch TV tonight?
She laughed with big red smudge-free lips and fed him
and bathed him and let him watch four sitcoms in a row,