Richard, or a Life of Dick

This post is the continuation of a fiction series. Andra is reworking a discarded chapter from her existing WIP manuscript and sharing it in pieces here. If you missed the first installment, read An Unpolished Jewel Is Just a Stone before reading this post. Come back next Monday for another installment.

What might Jewel’s life have been if she hadn’t met Richard Betancourt? 

Richard blew into Jewel’s two-bit Texas town to train the local mortician – her father – on the latest embalming techniques. Jewel was still engaged to one mooney-eyed boy, but that didn’t stop her from noticing the fine cut of Richard’s suits or the way they clung to his fit, delicious frame. Modelesque and mysterious, he smoldered more than any man she’d ever seen.

And he was from another state – Virginia – not a neighboring backwater full of redneck bubbas. When his brown eyes burned into her and he shot her his lopsided smile, she actually had to go to the bathroom and wipe between her legs.

The nerve of that Richard. Weeks passed, and he never asked her out.

Never requested her phone number. Never brought flowers or left badly written love poems – An Ode to Your Cornflower Eyes, ick – outside her door. Richard Betancourt had the gall to ignore her.

Instead of appreciating her, he spent hours locked in the funeral home’s basement with her father, draining smelly fluids and sawing into bodies and other nasty things she didn’t want to think about. They always emerged from their morbid dungeon near suppertime. Jewel made sure to be home from work before they came up the stairs. She timed her walk through the foyer just as Richard was leaving, even if she had to go outside and return ten times.

No matter how much she hinted, he never suggested a date.

Jewel was undone by six weeks of his coolness. Ultimate destruction was her thoughtless abandonment of one simple dating rule: Never make the first move.

“Why don’t you ever invite me to supper, Richard Betancourt?” She kept her tone light and teasing, but her heart galloped beneath her Camelot silk shift while awaiting his reply.

“Your father told me you’re engaged to be married,” he responded.

“Oh. That. Well, not anymore. I ended it a while ago.”

Richard stood a little taller. His jaw ground against inscrutable emotions, like he dared to think her a liar. She held her breath until he said, “Hm. Seems your father would’ve mentioned it.”

Jewel resisted the impulse to giggle or toss her hair or touch his arm. She blushed at the thought of touching him, breathed a little faster. Richard was a man, at least a decade older. His woman would not be flighty or overly flirtatious. She kept her pretty face open, sincere, ravishing. “He doesn’t know. I didn’t want to break Daddy’s heart because he really likes the guy.”

Forty-five minutes later, she and Richard had sex for the first time.

She flushes now, how sinful and shameless they were, but it felt so good. She gripped the bathroom sink in the mens room at the Woolworth Diner. He ground into her from behind, purposely positioning them in front of the chipped mirror, two bodies a merging pornography.

And that was only the appetizer. They fled the diner without paying, their clothes still partially undone. In the privacy of his hotel room, he served her at least twelve courses, a dizzying procession of heat and acrobatics and unbridled pleasure. Together, they were molten lava, a nuclear explosion of passion the likes of which Jewel had never experienced in her podunk life.

The next day, Richard left town without saying goodbye.

TO BE CONTINUED…….

To see what else Andra has been writing in series fiction, visit The Aftermath of Death, She Was Venus in Fur, Grief Out of Balance, For the Love of a Gun, Death by Toilet, Biscuits, Gardenias and a Funeral and Everything Dies. She’s also on Medium with a new story HERE.