The Best American Erotica Volume 13: The Nasty Kind by Susie Bright

Author:Susie Bright
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Bright Stuff
Published: 2013-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

From Little Children:

A Novel

Tom Perrotta

Though it had lasted for almost twenty years, Richard’s first marriage had been wrong from the start, based as it was on a serious misunderstanding. Peggy had become pregnant during their final semester of college—this was in 1975, two years after Roe v. Wade—but they’d decided, in a fit of self-defeating undergraduate bravado, to do “the difficult and honorable thing rather than the shameful, easy one.” Actually, this was Peggy’s formulation; Richard just wanted her to get an abortion, though he never quite got around to stating this preference in so many words.

His silence and passivity in the face of an event that so profoundly transformed his life was something that still baffled him. He didn’t love Peggy, didn’t want to become a father. And yet he married her and accepted the burden of parenthood without a squeak of protest. To make matters worse, “the baby” turned out to be twins, a much more difficult and honorable project than even Peggy had bargained for. Their domestic circumstances were so chaotic and relentless for so long that Richard was in his mid-thirties before he realized how badly he resented his wife and children for imprisoning him in a suburban cage and forcing him onto the hamster wheel of corporate drudgery while his college buddies were off backpacking through Asia and snorting coke in trendy discos with high school girls who looked much older than they actually were.

By this point in his life, Richard had a night school MBA and a series of professional triumphs under his belt, mostly in the fast-food sector—The Cheese-Bomb Mini-PizzaTM and The Double-Wide BurgerTM were two of his notable achievements. He traveled a fair amount on business and consoled himself with a string of hotel flings, as well as a long-term affair with a client s receptionist in Chicago that went sour after he forgot her birthday for the second year in a row. She retaliated with a long, informative letter to Peggy, complete with surprisingly well-written excerpts from her diary.

His daughters were sophomores in high school when this bombshell struck; Richard and Peggy agreed to stay together until they graduated. Oddly, those last two years were their happiest as a couple, though they rarely slept in the same bed and kept their social calendars as separate as possible. Something about the expiration date on the marriage made each of them more generous than they’d been in the past—your spouse’s annoying habit becomes a lot less oppressive if you don’t have to imagine putting up with it until the day one of you dies. By the time they split, he’d developed a real affection for her, and still called once or twice a week to see how she was doing.

The envelope in the bag contained not one but three Polaroids of Slutty Kay wearing the polka-dot thong, each of them bearing a scrawled inscription. In the first one (Hi, Richard!), she was standing otherwise naked in front of what must have been her bedroom closet, looking unusually contemplative as she brushed her hair.

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