Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(81)
After dinner — frozen beef stew, microwaved — he added a few logs to the fire and returned to his computer. He was arousing himself with videos on a porn site — disgusting, but he was needy sex-wise — when the doorbell rang.
Sally Rosewell, bundled up, grinning, was holding a bottle of real French champagne. She dusted the snow from her parka, marched in, and kicked off her boots. She looked good, rosy-cheeked. Maybe a little inebriated.
Lou did a hasty Command-Q, closed his laptop, and helped her out of her coat and scarf. He did that with some awkwardness, his stiff joint caught in the leg of his shorts. She was wearing a party dress with optimum cleavage, which didn’t help.
“I thought you’d be at the Willards’ Christmas Eve thing.”
Lou quickly turned away from her and waddled off to get wine glasses from the liquor cabinet. “I would have bummed everyone out. Feeling kind of blah.” He dipped into his pants, tried with limited success to adjust his obstinate hard-on.
“Hey, I’m all alone too, and I’m here to bring cheer.”
She popped the champagne cork, and, as she cheerfully watched it sail over her head, Lou bolted to the couch and sat, crossing his legs, causing major groin cramp, his pecker trapped, still engorged, still under the influence of the four-way orgy he’d been watching, and now on top of that here was the three-dimensional, touchable, fuckable reality of plump Sally Rosewell.
She poured, then sat next to him, close to the hearth, warming herself, hitching her skirt above her knees, a show of slightly parted thighs. She’d been on offer for lo these many weeks, but Lou had never quite been able to close the gap. They’d almost get past the necking phase, then he’d find excuses — he really liked her but he wasn’t ready, vague hints he was recovering from a broken heart. He’d put his wedding ring away, had never mentioned a wife.
She leaned toward him, and as they clinked glasses, her hand brushed the bulge in his pants. Her eyes widened. “Well, I know what I want for Christmas.” She downed her champagne, put her tongue in his mouth, and he inhaled her boozy fumes. Meanwhile, her hands worked furiously, unbuckling him, unzipping, freeing his cock, which sprang up like a scared jackrabbit.
Her fingers circled and grasped it, and it looked like she was about to go down on him, and he was about to explode with lust, on the razor’s edge of ejaculation, and he hollered, “Wait!”
She released him, startled.
“Sorry,” he gasped. “Too fast for me. Got to slow down. I’m only human.”
“Okay, got it. Let’s hit the sack.”
It took him a while to get his temperature down below boiling point. Two refills of chilled champagne helped. Sally’s extended visit to the washroom helped. Prepping, putting stuff in her or on her, whatever women did to prepare. He zombied his way to the bedroom, tried to make it look welcoming, straightened the sheets, lit a candle.
There could be no turning back. He was going to do this without a single twinge of guilt about Celeste, who had deserted him. He was owed this, reparation for his forced loneliness.
When he went back out for the champagne, Sally was leaning over his desk, wearing only a towel, and here came the erection again.
And then she said, “Who’s Celeste?”
The jewellery box with the silver necklace. His scribbled note. My darling Celeste . . . He’d completely forgotten it was sitting there, behind a monitor, wide open. He was struck dumb.
“Why aren’t you celebrating Christmas with Celeste?”
“She’s my wife. She left me. I miss my family.”
And that was the end of that. He started to blubber, and Sally began pulling on her clothes.
ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP / THE FULL MONTY
It was December 26, Boxing Day, so called because of the English tradition of the gentry presenting gift boxes to their servants and tradespersons in gratitude for their services and sacrifices. So Arthur had brought his barber such a box, containing a bottle of Hennessy VSOP.
Though it was a bank holiday, Roberto had opened up for him, enduringly faithful to his favourite customer, a regular from decades ago, when he’d started in a storefront with a striped pole on seamy Davie Street. He was then known as Bob the Barber. Now he was Roberto, out of the closet, with a select clientele of, mostly, ladies who lunch, and working out of well-appointed premises in the arcade of a downtown tower.
Arthur saw him on the eve of every major trial, a ritual he wanted to believe brought him luck, so Roberto was confused by this appointment. “But you have no trial tomorrow, Mr. Beauchamp.”
“Examinations for discovery. May as well be a trial. If it all comes out in the wash, the trial may be an anticlimax.”
“And you will finally be face to face with Satan himself. The battle of the century.”
“I’m afraid it will be more decorous than that. One isn’t allowed to cross-examine — a habit I have to keep in check.”
“We must do something with this ghastly moustache, you’re practically eating it. Something clipped, brisk, military. You are a general leading his troops into battle. And the hair! When did the cyclone hit? Over the sink, please.”
It was early afternoon. Arthur would comfortably make his flight to snowbound Calgary. Margaret was already there, being rehearsed by Nanisha Banerjee. Arthur had proposed to his companion for life that they take separate hotel rooms. “A brief divorce,” was the awkward way he put it, a jest that went flat. He explained that it seemed somehow improper to sleep with a client, that both of them would need undisturbed sleep. She protested, but finally, wearily, agreed.