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(Continued)
“Relax,” George said.
“Relax your tongue.” His take-charge voice softened into a low
chuckle.
Sheila curved her tongue
into the opposite cheek, and he reached into her mouth. His thumb
and forefinger burrowed deeper, circling the exact spot. As he
peered into her mouth, she understood: She must just give herself
over to him - George was the real thing. She sank down, her limbs
heavy with forgotten grace. She had just lost track of where her
own body ended and the lovely reclining chair began when she felt
a sudden explosive tug.
“Ahhh,” George said. It
was a deeply pleasurable sound, almost unconscious. “Ahhh.”
She could feel the shift in his weight as he pulled away from her
and lifted something up.
Sheila was afraid to close
her mouth or even feel around inside it with her tongue. It had
been like that with the others, too. She had always let them
move - demonstrating the bulge of their own muscles on the leg
abductor machine, flourishing the brush and the blow dryer,
turning the polished ship’s wheel - even as she needed to
stay utterly quiet, for fear of ruining their pleasure in what
might pass between them.
And then she saw what George
was doing anyway, without having to move. He was rotating the
little porcelain crown between his thumb and forefinger. In his
large hand, it looked small enough to be a marker for a game
board, like the leaden top hat for Monopoly.
“I want to see it,”
Sheila said suddenly, holding out her palm. Later she would
wonder, was that the first time she’d spoken? But right then she
was concentrating on cupping her palm: She needed to keep the
little thing from skittering away. Although when she felt it touch
her skin, it seemed perfectly solid. Solid and almost alive, it
rocked slightly in her hand. Sheila had never seen it quite alone
before - the white pearliness of it attached to the little collar
of gold that caught the light. Who would have thought that
something from inside her could have been so lovely?
She felt the little paper
bib against her face. Someone was using the edge of it to clean
her chin, to stroke the curve of her lips, to smooth the age lines
that angled down from her nose. Someone was daubing at the sheen
of tears on her cheek.
“There, there,” Malissa
said. “It was loose.” It was Malissa who patted the
little bib straight on Sheila’s chest.
“Thank you,” Sheila
said, though Malissa was too young to understand. Sheila didn’t
want to risk embarrassing Malissa, so she nodded at her. Really,
neither of them had to worry.
Sheila didn’t even need to
look to see where George was. He would have his back to them. He
would be studying his computer screen, admiring the images of the
work that he had already done in Sheila’s mouth - the gold
inlays, the veneers, the other crowns. Comparing it to what he’d
done in other, even younger mouths, for other women’s money.
“Number thirty-seven,”
George said. As he pointed at the screen, he sounded as if he was
ordering a lunch special.
Sheila didn’t move, except
to curl her fingers over the little crown. Behind her the virtual
teeth on George’s screen looked so far away some other woman
might have taken them for a curve of peonies, seen from the air.
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ALEXANDRA LEAKE lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her family. She has published stories in
Colorado Review, Green Mountains Journal, Passages North and other literary journals.
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