LITMIR.BIZ

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“go get me a tie.”

      “Why?” she’d asked.

      “Because we’re going to play Oval Office,” he told her. “I’m Mr. President and you’re Monica.” She’d laughed and laughed, until he convinced her to become his Secretary of the Interior.

      Tonight, though, Frank was playing no more games. He was his most tender self. Without preliminaries, he rolled over and onto her, holding his weight off of her by placing his elbows on either side of her chest. Then he lifted her two hands with his and, holding her wrists, placed their hands on her hair. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he asked in a whisper.

      She shook her head, though their hands held her hair so she couldn’t move it very much. “Tell me,” she whispered.

      “Only if I can be inside you while I do,” he whispered back.

      “You drive a hard bargain,” she told him, and shifted her weight to one hip. He still held her hands, but now with only one of his own. With the other he pulled up her nightgown, the satin bunching deliciously around their thighs. She was already wet as he pressed his flesh into her.

      “You’re like silk,” he whispered. “All over. All over,” he repeated. “I look at you sometimes and I’m amazed. You’re so beautiful. And every place I touch you is so soft.” He was inside her—still and hard—but he moved his hips just once so she would remember where she ended and he began. He looked into her eyes. “Is that enough?” he asked.

      She shook her head no.

      “You want more?” he whispered. “More?”

      She nodded.

      “You’re greedy,” he told her, moving his eyes from hers. She watched him look at her. “Your mouth,” he murmured. “Men would kill just to touch your mouth, just once, with the tip of their fìnger.”

      She smiled. A little shiver ran through her. “What do you want to touch it with?” she whispered.

      “With my palm,” he said, covering her mouth, but only for a moment. “With my tongue,” he added, and he licked the very corner of her lips. “With my teeth,” he whispered, and pulled her bottom lip into his own mouth, biting her gently but firmly. He knew the line just between ultimate pleasure and the slightest bit of pain and judged it perfectly. Frank changed the balance of his hips then and pushed deeper inside her. He kissed her at the same time, his tongue aping the intrusive, wet slide of his penis.

      “Your mouth is so beautiful,” he said, and it was almost a groan, “but it’s not the most beautiful part of you. Not even close.” And then he let go of her hands so she could pull him tightly to her. And she did.

      Later, when Michelle lay in the dark, her nightgown a ruin, her body loved and relinquished, she savored her happiness. She reached her hand out to Frank’s back, so dark, so broad. He wasn’t big, but he was beautifully, compactly built. She rested her hand on his shoulder. He was already gone, spent, but she didn’t feel alone. Their union was a lasting one, and the thousand times that he’d entered her, the thousand times she’d given herself to her husband, had built up a kind of bank balance, a kind of bonus of connection between them, even when they weren’t joined as one flesh. Lying beside his sleeping form, she didn’t feel alone.

      It was cold, and Frank shivered for a moment in his sleep. Michelle got up to close the window he insisted on leaving open. As she silently lowered it, she looked out at their quiet street. Then a limo, moving slowly, drove by. From her perch above, Michelle could see a face, white and drawn behind the glass. She could swear it looked up at her, that their eyes connected. She shivered and locked the window. Reflexively, for the first time in years, she crossed herself. Then she turned back to look at Frank, and almost ran to be beside him again in the haven of their bed.

      Frank had spent himself on her and their children, Michelle thought. He had built this house with his own hands and skill and strength for them. He fed them and clothed them. He taught his son how to throw, his daughter to dance. He taught all of them how to feel loved, how to be safe.

      I’m so very, very lucky, Michelle thought before she fell into another deep, deep dream.

      The next morning when Michelle woke up she found the ground outside covered in a deep frost. For a moment she considered climbing right back into the warm bed beside Frank but Jada, like some dark, heat-seeking missile, would just come up the stairs and drag her out. Michelle dressed with an extra layer, pulled her long tAngie of hair into a ponytail, and tugged on her boots instead of her sneakers. She was down the stairs and almost out of the house in just minutes. Pookie was already waiting there at the door, his brown eyes almost as pleading as Frank’s had been.

      “Okay,” she said, though she knew Pookie would slow them down. And Jada wouldn’t like that. Michelle loved Jada, but it had been odd at first to become friends with a black woman. There weren’t many in their neighborhood. And though Michelle prided herself on not being prejudiced, Frank and his family were … well, they certainly had special words and phrases that they used when they spoke about African-Americans. But they weren’t allowed to do it in front of Michelle, or her children.

      It was a luxury to have a close friend. She and Jada got along really well, but sometimes small things stood out strongly and marked the boundaries between them. There was something about the way Jada both excused and blamed her husband that was weird to Michelle. And there were the foods Jada served her kids, unhealthy prepackaged American things. Plus, the different television programs she watched, the different reactions to movies that she had. There were a few things like that that they’d both learned to stay away from. Now Michelle clipped the leash to Pookie’s collar and was out the door. She’d learned that if she didn’t make it a quick getaway at 5:40 every morning, she wouldn’t get away at all.

      The frost crunched under her boots and sent that little chill down her spine that everybody got when they heard certain noises. It wasn’t really cold, but the frost was a promise of things to come. Michelle loved cleanliness and she liked the freshness of the air in winter. It smelled clean. The dusting of snow, especially when it first fell, was also so clean-looking. Michelle walked down the street, almost reluctant to ruin its perfection with her boot prints and Pookie’s little paw spots. The tar of the street surface showed through starkly, black blots on the white sheet of road, as white and soft as confectioners’ sugar. Theirs were the only steps marring the perfection. That was the good thing about this time of the morning.

      Michelle looked up from the frost and saw Jada coming out of her house. She’d be in a grim mood. Jada hated winter. Well, Michelle was prepared to hear her complain and also ready to hear what was going on in the Jackson marriage.

      Jada pulled her hood tighter around her face. Gray flaky patches were already forming on the skin under her eyes. She wasn’t made to live in this climate, she thought, though she’d lived in the Northeast all her life. When she’d visit her parents in Barbados, her skin stayed moist. There her hair went into perfect jet ringlets and had bounce. She had what Clinton’s grandma called “good hair”—that meant it wasn’t nappy and didn’t need a perm to straighten it. Jada knew what it really meant was that it was closer to white people’s hair than it was to black people’s. She hated that kind of stuff, so she was disgusted with herself to find she was pleased that Shavonne had inherited her hair. It wasn’t as important that Kevon get it, and when he didn’t—his tight curls were a lot more like Clinton’s—Jada had accepted that. That made her a racist and a sexist, she figured. She’d decided she’d let God worry about Sherrilee’s hair.

      Jada reached for her Blistex stick. In the Caribbean, her full lips never cracked and chapped. She stuck her hand into the pocket of her parka, pulled out a tube of Vaseline and smeared it on her face and hands before putting her gloves on. It was the only way to keep her face from peeling off in little dry flakes all winter. She’d look shiny, but what the hell, nobody saw her but Michelle and Pookie, and the one or two nutjobs who ran past them in shorts, tearing their middle-aged tendons and ruining their knees.

      She was exhausted and probably looked it. She

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