Chapter Four – Part 3
Allison lay on her bed. Red-marked computer-draft essay surrounded her. An unfinished gothic paperback lay open, face-down next to her pillow. Across from the foot of the bed, a crotchety analog TV nattered on, half-buried in stuffed animals. It was tuned to PBS and Tom Lehrer was going on about the latest difficulty around Pakistan. Allison wasn't paying much attention to it.
Instead, she was looking at the shoebox she had fished out of the closet. It rested on her lap, and inside it nestled a small stack of gaudy paperbacks that her mother would never approve of. Their covers bore no titles, only blurry photos of naked models in Victorian settings. The women were well endowed, and lounged amidst red velvet and white lace. Some models wore white gloves, some black. A few wore spiked heels. On two of the covers men were present, backs to the camera, muscular and equally nude. The titles on the spine were all The Passion of.. something-or-other. Allison had read every one several times, and usually just the sight of the covers could bring a catch to her throat.
The books were a secret embarrassment. Mostly because Allison didn't want to admit that a rather tame sextet of ancient yellowing paperback erotica could get her legs rubbing together like that.
However, at the moment, she was concentrating on another embarrassment she kept in that shoebox. In her hands were the last of the hundred and two pages of Restless Nights, her novel.
It had been calling to her all afternoon, and she'd finally given in. She was a fast reader, and she had managed to read through the draft— cry at the really awful parts— and reach the end all in half an hour. And here, the last five pages, she had slowed her reading to a crawl.
Mr. Lehrer droned in the background.
She felt her face flush as she closed on the scene where Randolph and Melissa finally met, after their years of separation. Randolph had managed to escape the Nazi prison camp, but not the false rumors of his treason. Melissa had survived the deaths of her father and her brother to become the chaste caretaker of the family home.
Allison might hate parts of the story, parts that were wooden and clumsy now, but every page, every single word, had been an arrow pointing to this reunion. She had written these last five pages in a white heat. A heat that wasn't entirely literary.
In one way it was so wrong, the book was supposed to be a dance, weaving Melissa and Randolph together. Melissa was chaste and virginal. Randolph was gruff and still had to prove himself not to be the traitor he was believed to be. It was 1944, and pre-marital sex was a naughty thing. It was a romance, and you don't have the hero and heroine do things like that before their happily-ever-after.
However, the second that Allison had written them into the same room, they had slammed together like opposing poles of a magnet. Allison had written through nearly to the end of the scene, and it was so hot and explicit that it scared her.
Every time she reached the end, she found her pulse racing and wondered at herself. I wrote that?
She was still frozen to the page, picturing Randolph's hands exploring Melissa's body, when she heard her mother's car arrive in the driveway.
