“If you like that, Mr. Keller, I have something else you might like to nibble on,” the carefree, brazenly bare Maisy offered in a sultry tone. She nailed him with the hottest come-hither look she could manage, while skimming her body with her hands, molding her breasts, waist and hips as she worked her way down to her pussy.
As if she weighed no more than a dainty Snickers bar, her buff dream man lifted her into the air, high enough to align her clit with his mouth.
“Oh yes,” she told him. “Closer…closer…you’re almost there.”
Just as he was about to swipe his tongue over her eager flesh, a bony, ghoul-like apparition of Sharon Fitch Morganfield pranced through the air toward them from John’s grave.
Her scraggily red locks transforming into hissing snakes, Sharon erupted with cackles sharp enough to crack glass blocks. Spitting venom and fire, with a wave of her gray-fleshed hand, Sharon turned all the opulent chocolate daffodils into doll-sized replicas of John who were actually squirming squids in disguise.
Horrified, Maisy locked her arms around Mr. Keller’s brawny neck only to discover that the stud had become the mighty squid king. Dropping Maisy like a weighty sack of rotten potatoes, he propelled himself to Sharon’s side, groveling adoringly at her skeletal feet.
Waking up with a start, Maisy jettisoned the tattered remains of her bakery box against the television, smacking Rock Hudson squarely in the kisser.
Chapter Two
Infused with a mega-chocolate hangover, Maisy crawled out of bed an hour early to get ready for work. Several brisk facial attacks with an ice-cold washcloth did little to hide the puffy, telltale traces of yesterday’s calorie-packed indiscretion. Dispirited, she let out a sickly groan upon discovering every outfit in the whole damn closet fit too snug.
Left with no choice, she invaded the just in case you become a big fat ass again boxes of multi-sized clothes stored under her bed. The navy blazer and slacks she settled on were a roomy one size bigger.
“It’s just about that time of month,” she announced, studying her bloated reflection in the bedroom’s full-length mirror. “So it’s because of PMS.” A creeping sneer emphasized the fact that her valiant attempt at being convincing was failing miserably. “It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I stuffed my face with a month’s worth of chocolate in one sitting.”
Crossing her hands over her puffed-out belly, a sigh of disgust escaped Maisy’s sneer. As she performed a final mirror check, sucking in her gut so hard she almost passed out, she noticed Hershey assessing her while he sat with his head quizzically cocked to the side.
“Yeah, I know,” Maisy said. “Your mommy’s not a very pretty sight this morning, is she, Hershey?” Responding with a mournful whimper, the pup turned on its heels and scampered away. Maisy laughed and returned her attention to her reflection. Curling her lip, she heaved a dispassionate shrug as she slapped her hand against the wall, flicking off the light switch.
Her thoughts were such a blur, Maisy hardly remembered the drive to work. All she could focus on were the chanting chastisements from her ever present know-it-all conscience. Damn, how she wished she could ball up that sanctimonious goody-two-shoes inner voice and hurl it from her car window—and then back over it a few times just for good measure.
Once settled behind her desk at the Persimmon Travel agency, Maisy attempted the near impossible, to organize the germinating mountain of work and the murky sea of her jumbled thoughts at the same time.
Scanning her telephone messages, she noted Dawn Farley and Rob Lyons were stopping by to pick up the documents for their honeymoon cruise on the Sunset Dawn. They were convinced finding a cruise ship with the same name as the bride-to-be was a good omen. A good omen. Heaving a sigh, Maisy couldn’t help but smile.
“Poor, starry-eyed kids,” she muttered to herself while checking her email. “They’re such a cute young couple, innocent, sweet and so much in love. I hope to God their lives together will be better than mine and John’s.” A sneer twitched at Maisy’s lip. “Of course that wouldn’t be much of a stretch.”
An email from the Pavchek sisters said they’d be in to pick up documents for their all-inclusive vacation to Jamaica. Maisy chuckled as she eyed their paperwork. Vera and Alma Pavchek were the wildest, gaudiest pair of wrinkled old spinsters. But, God bless ’em, the cheeky sisters really knew how to relish life. The sad part was that the old gals’ love lives were packed with more vitality than Maisy could even imagine. Love life? Hah! What love life?
The years with John had been a waste. Like a big black hole full of misery, angst and struggle for acceptance and affection.
As she sipped from her mug of strong coffee, Maisy recalled the Saturday night nearly twelve years earlier when she’d received a call from a real estate agent whose buyer wanted to make an offer on one of her listings. That was the night she met John Morganfield. At twenty-three, Maisy was fresh, young, attractive and naïvely idealistic. She couldn’t help rolling her eyes and giving in to a gargantuan sigh at the biting memory.
At a fit, well-proportioned weight, she was slender and a real go-getter. Diamond Real Estate’s top listing sales person for the region four months in a row.
“Ah, but that wasn’t my only youthful claim to fame.” Maisy chuckled as she flipped through her files. Back then, much to her chagrin, she was also probably the last twenty-three-year-old virgin in all of Chicagoland.
“What was that, Maisy?”
Snagged out of her musings, Maisy glanced up to see Yolanda Gladstone, one of the other travel agents, smiling at her. “Nothing.” Maisy returned the woman’s smile. “Just talking to myself as usual.” She sniffed the air and her eyes grew wide. “Chocolate! I smell chocolate.”
“Triple chocolate brownies,” Yolanda offered proudly.
Even with yesterday’s binge setback behind her, like a true addict, Maisy felt the familiar, lip-licking tug of desire take hold deep in her gut.
Offering a wicked smile, the plump, eye-catching Yolanda wagged her finger. “I know that look. Hands off, Maisy. These are for Felix Garcia. He’s coming in to book another trip this afternoon.”
“I see,” Maisy said with a knowing grin. Yolanda had been doing her best to seize Felix’s attention by wearing more provocative clothes and plying the man with home-baked goodies.
As she plopped into her desk chair, Yolanda nodded. “He’s going to ask me out this time. I just know it. I could tell by the tentative tone of his voice when he called me to tell me he was stopping by today. Plus Norman said he could feel it in his bones.”
“Oh, well then it has to be,” Maisy said with a warm smile. It’s not that she actually put any stock in her boss’s inexhaustible and supposedly psychic predictions, but she truly hoped Yolanda and Felix would finally get together. She was a darling and Felix seemed like a truly nice, albeit terribly shy, guy.
Why the hell couldn’t Maisy have fallen in love with someone like the sweet, bashful Felix instead of John?
Standing about an inch taller than Maisy’s five-feet-nine-inches, John Morganfield wasn’t what most women would have considered a knockout. He had a trim build, dark brown hair and black eyes—wild eyes, always darting this way and that, so as not to miss any action. It was his dynamic personality that initially attracted Maisy. Proud, charming, aggressive, flirtatious. He had an unmistakable air of power about him that she found impressive and exciting.
Little did she know he’d eventually use that power to keep her subjugated.
She breathed a sigh at the stinging memory. What a naïve kid she’d been.
John had wined and dined her, pressing her until she finally agreed to marry him. She’d offered herself chaste and eager to experience the fabulous exploding-rocket magic of passionate physical union for the first time on their wedding night. Almost immediately after their aisle-walk, Maisy’s life mutated into a hapless existence that finally left her emotionally bankrupt and void of any love for her husband.
> Exploding-rocket magic my ass. Maisy downed another sip of coffee. The only explosion she’d experienced during that night of cherry-popping sex was the thunderous collapse of her naïve, romantic expectations. Unlike romance novels and movies, real-life sex was something rushed, coarse, brutal and ugly.
John’s incessant badgering about her giving up the real estate career she loved and had worked so hard to build began on the honeymoon. After all, he couldn’t have anyone think he wasn’t able to properly provide for his wife, could he?
Caving in to the first of his selfish demands, Maisy unknowingly set her husband’s warped blueprint for their marriage into motion. It took years for her to realize what John really feared was the all-too-real possibility that his wife might defame him by proving herself to be the real estate star in the family.
By the time Maisy comprehended the situation, she’d already been sucked down into the dismal bog of John’s distorted vision and felt trapped.
The wording on the travel documents in her hands blurred and Maisy’s gaze narrowed as she remembered John’s asinine series of edicts. Among other things, he’d demanded she refrain from any enhancement that might even remotely suggest she was something more than a living, breathing asexual lump of nothingness. No makeup, no form-fitting clothes, no shorts and no glimpses of her ample cleavage. From then on John was the only one who would see her curves.
She was not to visit him at his office—he didn’t want the other salespeople to think he was henpecked. His shirts and boxer shorts were to be starched and ironed. The sheets were to be washed and ironed twice a week. The house had to be beyond spotless and impeccably organized to please his manic neat-freak tendencies.
“Prissy, compulsive, controlling bastard,” Maisy found herself mumbling under her breath as she double-checked the Pavcheks’ travel documents.
Maisy’s real epiphany came one evening when she’d accidentally overcooked John’s steak. It was just cooked past the point of being bloody enough to moo an ouch when pricked with his fork. The man’s diatribe was deafening. Within minutes his verbal tirade was coupled with physical abuse. All because his goddamn steak wasn’t rare enough.
For some unfathomable, godforsaken reason, the previously plucky Maisy knuckled under rather than grabbing what was left of her self-esteem, shoving it into a suitcase and hustling like hell to get away from the bastard.
God, she’d been such a doormat.
Clueless back then as to how to prevent her spunky personality from vanishing, she’d turned to the only thing that gave her any solace. Food. With the velvety smooth tranquilizing effects of chocolate foremost on her list of densely caloric sedatives.
Forty-five cocoa-buttery pounds heavier and counting at their first wedding anniversary, Maisy was subject to John’s incessant ragging about her weight. Cruel, stabbing comments that cut her right to the core and had her clawing the walls until she could sedate herself with another dose of chocolate.
Maisy’s lips quirked into a half smile, recalling that a couple of years later, John had stopped having sex with her.
Hallelujah! She toasted the air with her coffee mug. Actually, John had shunned her sexually except when he came home drunk. It was difficult to judge his sobriety by his sexual performance, which varied little. Maisy would squeeze her eyes tight, clutching the bedding while John popped that swollen little thumb-sized doohickey of his out of his pants to impose his customary two minutes of brusque, selfish needs on her.
She was left bruised, red and swollen with no pleasure to compensate for the pain he’d inflicted with slaps, pinches and punches.
Pompous little prick. Maisy huffed a grim laugh as she slammed a desk drawer. Wham, bam, without the thank you ma’am. Lord, if she could only go back in time knowing then what she did now.
The fatter Maisy got the less John touched her—sexually or abusively—which was the only benefit of watching herself transform into a shapeless blob. When John started sleeping in his downstairs study, telling Maisy that being in the same bed with all those disgusting rolls of fat made him gag, Maisy sent up a jubilant prayer of thanksgiving to the benevolent god of chocolate.
On the weekends John was seldom home before four in the morning, which suited her just fine… Since the average real estate deal is rarely finalized between midnight and dawn, Maisy figured it was a safe bet that lover-boy was out screwing around. Why on earth any woman would actually want to purposely engage in sex with John was light-years beyond her comprehension.
“Thumbkin,” Maisy said, looking up from her paperwork and giggling as she wiggled her thumb, recalling her secret nickname for that annoying little member between John’s legs. She couldn’t even refer to it as a cock. His itty-bitty dick wasn’t deserving of the term.
Upon reaching a whopping three hundred pounds something finally snapped—besides the pine legs of a kitchen chair during dinner one night. A bloated, lethargic caricature of her former self, Maisy was desperate to recapture her sanity.
She’d enjoyed her years working in real estate, except for having to deal with overly aggressive, cutthroat agents. While the money was good, it was the feeling of satisfaction—of knowing she’d helped pair people with their ideal homes—that motivated her.
But Maisy didn’t want to work in the same industry as John. No, she needed to take her life in an entirely new direction. Travel! She’d always had a desire to see the world. As a travel agent, she could help people plan and book their vacations and business trips, as well as visit destinations herself. While the money may not be as lucrative as real estate, the sense of job satisfaction and happiness would match what she’d experienced selling homes.
Guffawing when she announced she was enrolling in school to become a travel agent, John offered his good wishes. “Who the fuck do you think is going to make any travel arrangements with a whale like you?” he’d graciously asked. “Hey, if they’ve got a chair wide enough to accommodate your big fat ass, then go ahead and knock your socks off, Moby Dick.”
Ah yes, the man had certainly had a way with words.
It was a Tuesday night, Maisy remembered as she scooted to the coffeepot for a refill. Computer training night at the Persimmon School of Travel. The computers were down and the class had been rescheduled. Arriving home about two hours earlier than usual, she heard what sounded like the television coming from her bedroom. She couldn’t imagine why John was up there watching TV instead of downstairs in his study.
Huffing and puffing the way she always did lumbering up that damned long flight of stairs, Maisy realized it wasn’t the television, but John’s voice she heard. John’s and someone else’s. A woman’s.
Reaching the doorway to her bedroom, she saw them. Some toothpick with chili-pepper-red hair halfway down her spiny back was straddling John. And they were fucking.
Her heart vaulting into her throat, Maisy froze. “John, what the hell is going on?” Her booming voice trembled with a complexity of emotions.
Jerking around to face Maisy, the anorexic redhead fell from John as he scrambled to sit up. Maisy immediately recognized Sharon Fitch, who worked in the same office as John, from her top sales associate photos in the newspaper. Her reputation throughout the real estate industry as a barracuda—cutthroat, aggressive, morally and ethically bereft—was unequaled.
“What the fuck does it look like, you fat, dumb bitch?” John said, clearly startled and pissed off by Maisy’s unexpected intrusion. “I thought you were supposed to be at school. What are you doing, spying on me?” Snorting, he took a swig from the half-empty Jack Daniel’s bottle on the nightstand.
“Shit. Who the hell is that?” the redheaded twig asked, giving Maisy an incredulous once-over. “Christ, don’t tell me that’s your wife?”
Sitting there, entwined in the brand new set of three-hundred-eighty-thread-count Egyptian cotton eyelet-trimmed sheets Maisy had just put on her bed that morning, Sharon didn’t even having the decency to cover up her perky little bee-sting breasts. Mai
sy knew she’d never be able to look at another set of Egyptian cotton sheets again—much less sleep on them—without envisioning the bee-stung twig.
John bobbed his head. “Yeah, that’s the little warthog, er, I mean, little woman,” he snickered. “In the flesh. They must have sent her home because they can’t afford to have any more chairs fractured by her fat ass.” Clearly amused by his malicious quips, John reveled in base laughter.
Eyeing Maisy as if she were a circus elephant, Sharon said, “I know you said she was a whale, John, but…holy shit.”
With John keeping Maisy all but cloistered, the women had never met. After her snarky comment, the naked twig had the further indecency to erupt with laughter. John immediately followed suit.
“What did I tell you, baby? It’s like living with Moby fucking Dick for chrissakes.” John pulled Sharon back to his side, offering her a swill of Jack Daniel’s, which she eagerly sucked back. “Here, Maisy,” he said, defiantly fondling one of Sharon’s mini-tits as an aghast Maisy stood paralyzed in the doorway. “Is this what you came to see? Well, get an eyeful and then get the fuck out of here, you fat, disgusting warthog. You’re cramping my style.” He and Sharon broke into maniacal laughter.
Maisy feared her shattered ego would join in a suicide mission with her pummeled heart and burst right through her chest.
Her vision blurring with tears, Maisy turned and was about to trudge downstairs with the intention of drowning her sorrow in a couple of Whoppers, fries, onion rings and a chocolate shake or two. But this time a tiny voice buried somewhere deep inside stopped her.
No, I’m not the one in the wrong here. I will not allow him to do this to me!
Ten long years of pent-up fear, hurt, anger and frustration churned in her gut and hammered at her temples. Suddenly Maisy heard herself shouting with authority and conviction.
Absolutely Not Page 3
