Consummation
The Final Chapter of my Series, but I can’t resist the urge to write it now. The first chapter Location is Real and the second Seeking Grace are available on my substack for free.
In the hilly mists of Uganda, a fourteen-year-old gorilla found his niche. For three seasons he had wandered alone, glimpsing the women through the vines.
He had fled at the first sight of the silverback. Today, the old tyrant was nowhere to be seen. The exile moved uphill through the fog, terror succumbing to lust, chest swelling with the smell of musk and wet bark. At forty meters he saw the mothers and their young; at twenty, the air quivered with their scent.
Necessity reigned over body and brain. If gravity was the original sin, this was perdition. But the world is not that precious, and Darwin certainly isn’t.
He stood erect, phallus perpendicular. The women shrieked. He seized a suckling baby by the legs and whipped its head against a tree, then mounted its mother. Before she knew her baby was dead, his splooge was in her.
In Mughal India, marriage occurred in childhood and was consummated soon after menarche, or, failing that, in a girl’s fifteenth year. Sex with the unmarried was a flogging offense; adultery was capital. Within the zenana, wives and concubines lived in guarded splendor, their fidelity a matter of imperial prestige. It was the code of a warrior elite, its writ ended between capital and village.
Among Hindu peasants, marriage was arranged soon after a girl’s first bleeding, often before her sixteenth year. The ceremony was brief—an offering, a thread, a meal before kin—and the bride remained with her parents until the fields ripened. Only after the first good harvest did she join her husband’s bed and household. Adultery was rare, punished by expulsion and the slow vengeance of hunger. The seasons governed more than any priest, and the body was trusted to know its own time.
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San Angelo was a place Phil had driven through countless times but only knew a little. In the naughts, he’d stopped near the university for a couple of booty calls on the way to or from UT; the internet had been fun then. As a legislator and a married man, the town offered him little more than gas and fast-casual dining. Now, Phil was tired. He was through with politics, and if the thought of booty crossed his mind, he knew it would be easier to find a single mom in his hometown than score a college girl at his age. He passed through San Angelo without stopping. Just beyond, where the Concho River watered an oasis of sorghum and hay, he paused for gas.
Phil swiped his credit card, started the pump, and went into the minimart for a coffee. The clerk looked up from a book, blinked hard, and locked eyes with him for a second longer than was strictly polite. Phil didn’t mind. She inhabited her store-issued polo with a quiet grace, brown hair tantalizing her perky mid-sized breasts. She looked back down at her book and began writing with her pencil, grinding out the general solution to a second-order differential equation. Phil wracked his mind for a pickup line but couldn’t think of one for a gas-station clerk.
He poured his coffee slowly, but his mind was blank. Speechless, clueless, he felt like he was barely in his own body. Then gravity intervened. His open cup snagged on the corner of the coffee bar and spilled onto the floor. The clerk got up slowly, her face tightening with exasperation.
“I’ll clean that up for you. You need to study,” Phil said.
“The mop’s in the men’s room.”
Phil wanted to jerk off but that would take too long and look suspicious. He walked briskly, grabbed the rolling mop bucket with a single stroke, and got to work. He had nothing better to do than mop a floor for a bookish coed and took his time. At first she ignored him, but after three minutes she started looking up, each glance less furtive than the last.
Phil returned the broom to the bathroom and walked toward the exit.
“No coffee for you?” the clerk asked warmly.
“I’ve messed up your floor enough, ma’am.”
She smiled. Phil rolled the dice. “If a clumsy old man wanted to buy you a coffee when your shift is over and if he promised not to spill it on you, would he have a chance?”
“If he was the man who made Texas safe, he might,” replied the clerk.
Phil’s pulse quickened. “When does your shift end?” he asked.
“Ten. You can come back then if you don’t mind a girl in gas-station clothes.”
“I don’t mind them on you,” Phil said. “I’ll be here.”
As he drove west, the restraint that had felt wholesome, even warm, in her presence tightened inside him until it seized him like a horse pulling a sled. He held the steering wheel in his right hand and his dick in his left. As soon as he was 100 yards from a building, he pulled over. He thought about the clerk whose floor and bathroom he had honored and whose smile he meant to earn, and as the dark settled around him, he thought himself a gentleman.