"Marlene has stolen my heart, but they have taken Marlene. Now I'll do anything to get her back!"
Chapter OneThe Port of Miami was one of the busiest ports in the United States. It serviced thousands of shipping container freighters coming in and going out of the country. Tourists loaded up on seven different cruise lines. Lorenzo stated...
"How much do you love them?"
Two lovebirds, holding hands, heads together, smiling into each other's eyes."She thinks he's her boyfriend," the director said. "At night, she goes into his room."She looked at me, no sign of recognition."Are they intimate?" I ask."Yes. Does that bother you?"That...
"Charlie gets a handjob in the bathroom from his boss and is instructed that if he wants more, that he needs to meet her the next day at the office."
My father had long ago drilled into me the idea that arriving 10 minutes early was on time and arriving on time was late. Bree expected me at 10 am on Saturday morning, so I made sure that I would...
"Second acts and second chances"
Half an hour later, with a couple of glasses of wine in him and a beer-and-a-half in me, we both loosened up a bit. The two of us had sat at my kitchen table–the dining room table hadn’t been delivered...
"(Five Days Later)"
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in the quiet classroom, casting a sterile glow on the rows of tiny desks and colorful posters about shapes and letters. It was after hours, the school hallways empty except for the faint echo of...
"Returning home silently, a husband discovers a massive stranger stretching his wife to her physical limit. Frozen in the doorway, he watches."
The floorboards in the hallway didn't creak. I knew exactly where to step—a habit honed from years of coming home late—but today, the silence wasn't mine. It was broken by a wet, visceral schlick-thwack sound coming from the master bedroom....
Last Friday night the wife was having a girls' night in with a few of her friends, a few drinks and some food. After I'd opened a couple of bottles of wine, three of her friends arrived: two blondes, dressed...
The bar was noisy, filled with the dull hum of conversation and clinking glass, but Dylan barely noticed. He swirled the ice in his rye and coke, already feeling blurry around the edges, his thoughts drifting to the night before,...
"After the punishment, a moment (or fifteen) of reflection"
I shouldn’t have said that to him.Even if I had said it, I shouldn’t have used that tone.If I’d said it but hadn’t used that tone, he would have given me a Look. And the Look is terrifying, but it’s...
"In Cold War–era West Germany, a former Stasi operative working in a Kaiserslautern brothel spirals into paranoia as she realizes the surveillance state she fled now lives inside her own mind."
The brothel crouched on a quiet side street outside Kaiserslautern. Its faded yellow stucco melted into the perpetual Rhineland fog drifting down from the Pfalz hills. December 1982. West Germany simmered with unease. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech from March still...
