Best of Best Women's Erotica Read Online Free PDF Page B

bed in Chandra’s closet, where they lie together, curled around the baby.
    â€œEverything’s changed,” Monica whispers to Chandra. “We’re what’s left over. We’re safe now, safe,” she sings like a lullaby, her lips pressed to Chandra’s belly.
    Chandra doesn’t believe in change, which is why she stays home when Monica goes out to do what she can. Still, Chandra stays up all day now, turning on the television often enough to know that she and Monica and their guys no longer matter.
    She cooks dinner for Monica and whomever she might bring home, usually Mike, but often a fireman or two, firemen who aren’t Bob, though they knew him and still hope to find him as they search for bodies in the ruins of the collapsed buildings.
    â€œHe was there when it happened,” says one of them, a guy
with dark, curly hair whom Monica watches with eyes that seem to possess as they caress, letting Chandra know that he’ll be next in her bed.
    Chandra calls herself Sandy now, and no one questions that, or her presence in Monica’s apartment. The city is full of refugees. She’s cut her hair short and her face is as round as her belly. She’s becoming someone else.
    Fascinated by the talk of searching for bodies, she bursts into the conversation: “Someday they’ll find a body and say it’s mine.”
    Everyone at the table looks at her.
    â€œI am officially missing,” she explains. “I might have been in one of those buildings. Or anywhere, in another city. But when they find me, it won’t be me they’ve found, because I’m here.”
    She puts a protective arm around her belly. She hasn’t thought much about the baby for the past few weeks, except when it occasionally kicks her ribs. It’s her only family now. She feels removed from her old family in California, the people to whom she’ll never return, and distant, too, from the baby’s father, whom she thinks of now as its non-father. When she notices the curly-haired fireman looking at her while Monica watches him, she blushes and looks down at the lasagna she’s made for their dinner.
    Monica is offended. “There are people who really are dead,” she says. “You aren’t missing, you’re right here. You could go home anytime.”
    â€œNot anymore. I’m not who I was,” Chandra/Sandy murmurs to her plate, feeling herself dissolve, feeling she’s invisible, even to those beside her, eating the food she’s put on Monica’s table.
    â€œHey,” says her new fireman friend, running a hand through
his thick dark hair. “We all have our reasons for wanting change.”
    Monica looks away from him, stuffing a chunk of sausage into her mouth.
    What will happen? For this evening, Sandy will take the curly-haired fireman into her closet. He’s married, he has three kids, he makes love to her rising belly with a sort of worshipful admiration that almost makes her giggle. He says he loves pregnant women. His tongue massages her belly button, then finds its way down the slope to her cunt, which he licks as clean as he licked the dinner off his plate. She puts her hands over his furry back while he rubs his hairy legs against her smooth ones.
    He worries she won’t be able to get up off the futon on the floor, but she shows him how easily it’s done, rolling onto her hands and knees, then standing up, panting only a little.
    â€œIt’s excellent exercise,” she tells him. “Pregnant women go to the gym to learn to do this. I’ve seen them.” She lies down again, snuggling her face into the fur of his chest.
    Monica, in her bedroom with Mike, has become the voyeur now, paying more attention to the sounds from the closet than to her own. What will become of this new person, Sandy, and her baby? She still worries about them, but senses they won’t need her. Like everyone else, she wonders what