Reluctant Consent Read Free

punishment.   If you decide that isn’t acceptable –“
“It sure as fuck isn’t!” Her words were slightly muffled by her position, and her
hair.   Andrew was human.   He grinned.
    “I’ll
let you up.   But make no mistake,
Denise!”   He tightened his grip
again.   “Refuse discipline and our
relationship is over.”
    “Fine,
Fuckhead!   Like I’d marry a
perv!”   She gave a kick to
accompany her words.  
    Andrew
held her calmly until she stilled.
    “Are
you sure?”
    “Yes!”
    He
released her and stood up in one fluid motion, moving directly for the door.
    “I’m
very sorry, then.   I love you. ” He
looked her steadily in the eye, reaching behind him to open the door.
    She
had flounced -- there was no other word for it -- out the door that day and
once clear had screamed back over her shoulder:
    “Freak!”
    ***
     
    Upstairs,
in the bedroom she grew up in, Denise wore a path around the room, weaving
between bed and sofa, desk and entertainment center. A loom protruded into the
room in a manner that made it challenging to get to the bathroom, and a huge
crate that had once housed an orphaned wild raccoon and later turned into a
storage facility loomed over the head of the bed.
      It never occurred to her to accept the
will’s directive and marry Andrew the Penis Head, but she did wonder what on
earth had possessed her mother.   There was no use blaming her father or wondering about his
motivation.   The man had made it a
religious practice to agree with anything his wife suggested. So it would be stupid
to wonder why he hadn’t put his foot down for something as minor as forcing
their only daughter to marry a Neanderthal from the Stone Age.  
    Denise
reached for her phone and spoke the second it picked up. “I have to know the
best- the absolute King of Killer Estate Law-dude in town.”  
    “Jesus,
Denise.   Hang on.”   A thunk indicated the phone had been
thrown and footsteps slowly dwindled away.   She worried the feet wouldn’t return.   They did.
    “You
could have broken my eardrum.”   On
the other end of the connection Robert, her life long sidekick, stuck a bony
finger in his ear and wriggled in an experimental fashion.  
    “Did
I?”
    “No.”
      “Then find me the name of a Killer Law
Dude!”  
    She
explained the situation tersely though she left out the sick part about
Andrew.   Robert whistled.   While he didn’t know the exact reason
Denise had decided Andrew was a Penis Head, it was completely clear she
couldn’t marry him as long as she thought of him that way.
    “Damn.   Rock and a Hard Place.”
    “Name
of Killer Law Dude!”   
    ***
     
    At
first, when the relationship imploded, Denise thought she might die.   She’d been convinced she was
passionately in love with Andrew and devastated when the relationship
ended.   For days she couldn’t eat
or sleep or function and eventually she’d decided to completely banish the
entire episode from her life.  
      If she’d never met the man in the first
place, she couldn’t miss the way he solved so many of her problems before she
even realized a hurdle lay in her path.   If it never happened she didn’t have to remember how gorgeous and sexy
he was, or how she melted into a soft fuzzy pool at his feet when he touched
her.   If Andrew never really
existed anyway there were no confusing feelings and thoughts to buzz around in
her head about the weird ideas he might have held about marriage.
         Denise returned to
several of her favorite pastimes.   Once again she joined the girls for drinks after games in the intramural
leagues she played on.   She renewed
her close acquaintance with the various bartenders of the city and made many
men happy to be alive by returning to her favorite form of exercise, top of the
bar dancing.   And since she had
lost her driving privileges, at least temporarily, she fattened the coffers of
the local cab company.
    In
this way Denise had coped with