The Hinky Bearskin Rug by Jennifer Stevenson Page B

couch trying to kick his shoes off, and she laughed until she got the
hiccups.
    And yet she
couldn’t forget that moment of vulnerability in his face. He was so darned
sneaky. If she were to take his sexual messages seriously — the heavy focus on
intimacy, the extreme vanilla quality, his slowness — she might almost believe
he had been making love to her all this time, while she’d been having sex with
him.
    That unsettled
her. This is not about l.o.v.e. Setting
aside his style in bed, Clay’s message came across loud and clear: I’ll go easy on you if you go easy on me.
    She would
never have to work at a relationship with him.
    On the other
hand, she might never know who he was.
    This whole
train of thought gave her the willies.
    They spent an
hour on the sofa in front of the TV. By the end of Onika’s girlie-porn movie,
Jewel felt sad and unaccountably lonely. Clay did his best but, every time she
looked over at the screen, she saw the girl from the bearskin rug, and her mind
wandered off, picturing the dreams that Velvita Fromage might be having while
she cavorted with Sancho and Randy.
    In the end, to
Jewel’s deep shame and confusion, she faked falling asleep.
    Clay took it
like a gentleman. She lay still while he got up and put his shoes and shirt
back on. As he bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead, she felt an urge to
drag him down on the sofa with her again. She kept her eyes closed.
    When the door
had shut behind him, she got up, got naked, crashed into bed, and pulled out
her battered vibrator, wondering why on earth she had turned down a perfectly
good man when she was horny.
    Maybe tonight
the vibrator made her feel more in control. She badly needed to feel in
control. Odd, because boffing random guys used to be her number one way of
feeling in control.
    Of course Clay
wasn’t random. Anything but. Her partner. She rationalized her decision by
invoking the don’t-fuck-your-partner rule, which hadn’t worked very well so
far.
    Maybe that was
why, as her little electric friend buzzed, she thought about Randy instead.
    o0o
    Next morning, as she checked her email, she had a sudden
attack of nosiness and inspected the register that kept track of Randy’s
activity on her computer.
    The browser
history was a mile long. Hm. Have to ask
Clay about this click-bot thing. Excel tutorial. Microsoft Word tutorial.
Good boy, Randy was building solid work skills there. Solitaire — he’d used the
most advanced form and had beaten the computer more than eleven hundred times.
    And a text file, eleven kilobytes, called “My First
Month, by Randy Darner.” She clicked on it.
    As she read
the first line, Jewel flushed. This is
private.
    Her mouth went
dry.
    She couldn’t
have stopped reading for a million dollars.

Chapter Fourteen

    “My First Month”
    by Randy Darner
    I was
twenty-six when my life ended and I became immortal. I didn’t know at the time
that this had happened. One moment, I was sneering at my mistress, my pride
stinging from her complaint, and the next, I was bodiless, blind, hearing her
voice pronounce a sentence that has yet to run its course. As judges will,
secure in their wigs of office, she ranted a good deal, but what I remember
vividly is this: Until you satisfy one
hundred women, you are a prisoner in this bed, an incubus.
    A hundred
women! From my lady’s complaint I was to understand that I had yet to satisfy a
single one. That stung worse than ever her vengeful magicks could.
    Come, Randall, this
is tedious. This is to be porn,not puling lamentation.
    Of my first
days as an incubus I remember little. I dreamed of whores, and the things
whores do. In time, with growing dismay, I realized that the brass bed in which
I lay imprisoned was situated in a brothel.
    Well, at least
my task should be easy enough.
    So I thought.
    My lady had granted
me magical powers, powers to enter a woman’s secret heart, be she never so
respectable, and sniff out, as a hound sniffs out a coney in its