Cry for Passion Read Online Free PDF Page B

tables bore the imprints of sweaty fingers. The flickering shadows reeked of male arousal.
    Stepping in between a gap of oblivious men dressed in wool coats and felt bowler hats, Jack randomly selected a postcard.
    A naked woman—lips curved in a knowing smile—with her left hand held apart another woman’s naked buttocks to expose a darkly puckered anus impaled by a thin nozzle. A short hose connected the nozzle to a bloated rubber bag. With her right hand, the smiling woman who exposed the compromised anus squeezed the douche.
    The dull throb inside Jack’s groin sharpened.
    He wondered what Rose Clarring would think of the picture. Perhaps, even, she had gazed at this postcard.
    Had it excited her? Repelled her?
    He wondered what the woman he loved would have thought of the act, commonplace in the world of male pornography.
    She had liked it when he penetrated her between her buttocks.
    Would she have been repelled if he had inserted there a syringe and directed warm liquid deep inside her? Or would it have excited her, as Jack was now suddenly excited by the thought?
    Disgusted at the desire that had not died seven months and three weeks earlier, he flipped the card onto the table.
    But he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t stop thinking.
    Would she still be alive if she had asked for a divorce?
    Jack moved away from the long table weighted down with boxes of postcards.
    A glass showcase monopolized the end of the center aisle. Stoically Jack studied the contents.
    “May I help you, sir?” enquired an impersonal male voice.
    Jack knew Rose Clarring had visited the Achilles Book Shoppe. But he did not know what she had purchased. He did not know what excited her.
    He did not know if the pain inside her eyes could be vanquished.
    “Lay them out on top of the counter,” Jack said shortly.
    Consternation laced the clerk’s voice. “Everything, sir?”
    Gaze slowly rising, Jack penned the younger man with the authority invested in him by the Commonwealth of England. “Only those items made for a lady.”
    The clerk quickly, efficiently laid out the requested articles—pings of metal followed by a click of glass and the thud of leather—then discreetly stepped backward.
    Hooking the grip of the umbrella over his forearm, Jack picked up a gold nipple bob and clipped it to the tip of his little finger: It pinched.
    The image of a translucent pearl earring flashed through his mind’s eye.
    Rose Clarring had small, delicate earlobes, he remembered.
    He wondered what size her nipples were. Were they smaller than the tip of his little finger? Larger?
    Would her breasts fill his mouth as had those of the woman he would never again suckle?
    The pain binding his finger spread to his chest; it did not restrict the flow of blood that thrummed through his testicles.
    Jack pulled off the nipple bob. A dildo snared his gaze.
    His fingers curled around hard leather.
    Did Rose Clarring fuck herself at night, he wondered, and imagine a dildo was the flesh of a man other than her husband? Did she thrust it deep against the mouth of her cervix when she came, and pretend it ejaculated sperm that hadn’t been robbed of its seed?
    The memory of wet, hungry flesh gripped Jack.
    Caressing his cock. Squeezing his cock.
    Drawing from his aching testicles one spurt of ejaculate . . . two spurts . . . three spurts . . .
    He dropped the dildo. He gripped the umbrella.
    He turned from the showcase.
    Everywhere Jack looked another memory surfaced.
    The pump of fingers. The lick of a tongue.
    The tangy scent of arousal. The slick taste of desire.
    A moan of satisfaction.
    Glass glinted; liquid glistened.
    Compulsively he crossed to a round wooden table artfully arrayed with crystal-stoppered bottles.
    Jack’s throbbing glans recognized both the brand and the substance: Rose’s Lubrifiant, a sexual lubricant he had purchased in the past, but not for a woman named Rose.

    Chapter 4
    Rose woke with a start.
    The wooden banister she gripped dissolved