A few weeks ago I published an excerpt from Cold Tequila Comfort, an erotic fiction/crime thriller hybrid I’ve been working on. The response was huge. I received emails that made me squint such was the intensity of the glowing praise within, mailed underpants, several awards, eight marriage proposals, an offer from a condom company (they wanted to name a new brand of prophylactic devices after me: Haught Naughts) and numerous other things that I can’t mention here because my wife reads this blog.
The resounding message was “we want more”, so here it is:
(From Chapter 6, titled ‘Best Laid Plans’)
“I’ve been thinkin’,” said Brunden.
“Mind you don’t hurt yourself,” said Dierdre.
They laughed as heartily as an old-fashioned steak and kidney pie with a thick crust. They both had good senses of humour and could deprecate one another without fear of violent reprisals. And anyway, they both knew Brunden was smart. Real smart. He was, after all, a chartered accountant and knew some French.
“I’ve been thinkin’,” Brunden repeated, “Dierdre… it’s such an uncommon name these days.”
“You don’t like it?” Dierdre asked.
“No. That is not what I meant,” Brunden assured. “If I had to guess I would say it was German for hot – VERY HOT!”
And then it was on. Again. For the fourth time that morning. And as Brunden eased his hulking juggernaut into Dierdre’s humming inlet the fact that Dierdre was actually an Irish name meaning sorrowful meant precisely nothing.
They had intercourse three more times that day, for a total of seven.
***
“Where the hell have you been, Brunden?” Davis growled. If he hadn’t been so handsome, you might have mistaken him for a werewolf, such was the gruff, dog-like quality of his voice.
“I’ve been having sexual relations,” Brunden replied.
“I don’t need to hear that,” Davis said, shaking his head.
Brunden had a grin on his face that only a man who had vigorously and repeatedly used his corporal javelin earlier that day could sport.
Brunden had become a police informant, sometimes known as a “snitch”. But the word snitch didn’t seem to befit Brunden, who had licorice brown hair like the mane of a horse that used product.
Davis had short hair that was dishevelled and smelled slightly unpleasant because he had not been home to wash for three days.
It was a poignant contrast.
“You ready to do this?” asked Davis, who had led Brunden into an interview room. He was holding a tattered blue clipboard. It was one he had been using for seven years. The police just didn’t have the funds to spend on stationery.
“Your clipboard is tattered,” said Brunden, sitting down on a chair made from cheap aluminium. The small area of subtly-pinstriped trouser now touching the piece of furniture was more valuable than the chair itself.
“So will your career be, if you keep up with that,” Davis shot back. He was sharp, sharp like a stone age cutting implement and just as rough around the edges.
Brunden raised his hands in a show of apology and tried to subdue his grin. It was a grin that could moisten a woman standing up to forty metres away (Brunden himself had conducted scientifically rigorous experiments to prove it), but it did not stir anything in Davis, who was not a homosexual, other than bitter resentment. Bitter like a chinotto.
Davis clenched his jaw, painfully swallowed his pride like it was a large, unripe, unchewed strawberry, and got down to business.
“Let’s do this thing,” he said. He sometimes liked to use the vernacular of a younger generation when talking with informers. He felt it got better outcomes.
“OK,” said Brunden.
“Talk to me about Vince Tricalico, my main man,” said Davis.
It wasn’t strictly a question, but Brunden answered anyway. “They call him “Vinny”. He plays golf on Sundays. At the Royal Oaks.”
“I think that’s enough to go on, dude,” said Davis, and promptly ended the interview. “Interview with Mr Brunden ended at 2.36 pm,” he said.
The clock ticked over to 2.37.
***
Felicity Montgomery was the daughter of the Establishment. She sometimes rode in a horse-drawn carriage, even though that mode of transport had been obsolete for more than a century and was extravagantly expensive and exceptionally inefficient. She had hair like a flowing waterfall of molten bronze and eyes like two shimmering orbs of cobalt, except with some white (the white) and black (the pupil). Her eyes not only looked like cobalt, they also had a cobalt-like radioactivity, and although they could not cause cancer in a man, they could certainly make him very ill indeed. Ill with love.
Felicity had a fine pair of buttocks.
Felicity was in a sauna. It was a male-only sauna, but she was not there by accident; she knew what she was doing. She knew big time.
In walked Whorl Broxell. At first he didn’t notice that anyone else was in the large sauna. It was steamy and Felicity had deliberately settled, like a very attractive troll, in its darkest corner. (Soon she would be probed in her own dark corner.)
Thinking he was alone, Broxell, as was his wont, let his towel drop to the floor and began to dance. It was the dance of a confident man. Confident in his movement and in his body. Confident in his ability to make the music his companion, even when there was no music to befriend. He bucked and swayed and sometimes there was a pelack-ing noise like a cold pancake hitting a slab of granite.
Felicity, who had spent the last three weeks planning for this moment, suddenly melted, transformed from a calculating woman who knew she was the master of her own destiny to a beguiled schoolgirl believing that the man in front of her was not only the centre of her universe, but had the right to use her and discard her like an object with little intrinsic or sentimental value – a cheap spatula, or perhaps a paper napkin that had been used to pick up a dead bird.
Words entered her head that hadn’t been there since she had been a teenager, words like “beefcake”, “love-sponge” and “diddle”. She found them both sickeningly juvenile and profoundly appropriate.
Her heart felt like it was beating faster than the wings of a hummingbird (it wasn’t, as she would have died instantly if it had been). Goosebumps dimpled her skin so intensely that she felt like a human golf ball. A pink one. Sweat slid down her face in rivulets. They would have been there even if she had been outside in the freezing St Kilda morning.
Felicity Montgomery’s best laid plans had most definitely gone to waste.
Want more? Of course you bloody do.
Cold Tequila Comfort on Twitter:
Haught fact of the day:
Horses can’t use product because their legs are rigid.
Such pith!…in the words of Donna Summer…*..more more more…* lol…
<3 your style. 🙂
Are we meant to comment ironically? If so, ‘Bravissimo!’ is in order. If not, “Turd! Turd! Like Gina Rinehart’s poetry! Turd, I say again! Turd!”.
You know, Mamamia (the popular women’s blog) is currently running a competition for the best opening chapter of an erotic novel. Winner gets a full novel published. You should enter.