Chapter Eighty-Eight
After coming gently in her mouth, Aloysius lay down and held Charlotte lovingly to him. He stroked her hair whilst she gagged it down, and kissed her shoulder when her hacking had ceased.
“It’s so peaceful,” he observed. The air in his room was thick with after-love. A mist took on the scarlet hue of the sunset outside. “This is what life is meant to be, isn’t it?”
“Do you love me?” she asked.
He squeezed a buttock (hers) to convey that he did indeed. But his thoughts quickly returned to himself. His life at the hotel had been an unending exercise in tedium, seasoned with the occasional, unsatisfying fling with a guest or maid. When he added it all up, the sum was zero; even if he checked and re-checked his maths, the answer was the same. And he knew what would be the terminal station on this track: a life lost to the hotel, as Voot’s had been. No idea could have been more torturous to him.
But if he could find a place to escape to, escape from having to think about things at all. . .someplace safe and simple in which to vegetate, where he would be asked to serve no one, where all his erotic requirements could be reliably met by one without a contrary voice with which to obstruct them.
He decided to risk it; he decided to trust her.
“I’ve got a lot of savings,” he whispered.
“Have you?”
He nodded. “I’ve been working here for years, saving up. . .I never need to buy anything. My bed, my food. . .I don’t gamble, don’t need to hire whores.” He fiddled with her nipple while he deliberated. “I had this dream, a while back. . .but I couldn’t do it by myself.”
“What’s the dream?”
“To open my own little bed and breakfast. Somewhere by the sea. Something small, not fancy, but pretty, and tidy.”
She brushed the hair on his chest with her eyelash. “That sounds lovely.” Despite herself, as he twisted her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, she became aroused once more.
“I’d need you to cook. You can cook?”
“A little.”
He nodded; it seemed enough to satisfy him. “And supervise the maid—I wouldn’t want my girl to do the cleaning herself, you understand.”
“’Course not.” My girl—Arthur had never called her that, not even when courting. Her thighs rubbed in rhythm against each other.
“And of course, all your kids would live there.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “I imagine you’d miss them terribly, otherwise. Am I right?”
The last impediment crumbled. Her disgust at herself didn’t matter, now. All the shame she’d been feeling—at her abandonment of her honour, her betrayal of her children, her unburied love for Arthur, and, most recently, her own climax experienced whilst swallowing her lover’s seed—became so many false idols to be smashed with an axe in light of the blinding beam of True Love come out of the clouds overhead. She moved to kiss him, forgetting the seminal sap still glistening on her lips, and he laughingly pushed her away.
“Not so soon, love! I’m only one man, you know.”
But, like the gentleman he aspired in his heart to become, he penetrated her vigorously with the leg of a stool.