La Principessa

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church; which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; (Turning water into wine—you call that a miracle? People do that every day. If you add some grape juice and yeast it’s called fermentation. Now, turning water into a harpsichord—that’s commendable. Though I’m sure some of the religious significance would be lost. “And for his first miracle, he turned water into a harpsichord. And lo—he played Scarlatti.” ) and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men (Honourable? Oh no, Lord Beckett, I do not believe you received that memorandum. And why are they even mentioning St. Paul? Didn’t he say that marriage is a second-rate alternative to virginity?) : and therefore is not by any to be enterprised (too late), nor taken in hand, unadvisedly (check), lightly(check), or wantonly (double-check), to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites (Oh, I’m counting on that one), like brute beasts that have no understanding (How naïve. The church hasn’t counted on the idea that men can be enterprising, wanton and dishonourable in a deliberate, calculated fashion. My, do they have a lot to learn from Beckett.); but reverently (nope), discreetly (nope), advisedly (nope), soberly (unfortunately), and in the fear of God (The only things that he fears are creditors. The only thing I fear is him.); duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained (Convenience).

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, (Already ahead of you on that stipulation) to be brought up in the fear of the Lord (and its father), and to the praise of his holy Name.

Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin (Last I checked, greed, avarice and murder were still sins), and to avoid fornication (Psht. I don’t care. After tonight, the more whores he fornicates with, the less he’ll try to pry into my orifices); that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body (wait—the member of Christ’s body. Oh, I’m really too old for such childishness).

Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society (ha), help (ha), and comfort (oh, I’m laughing so hard my sides will just BURST), that the one ought to have of the other (yes, he will have of me all that he desires, with my consent or not), both in prosperity and adversity (I’m about to inherit both at once, ironically). Into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore if any man can shew any just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace."

“EGO SUM EVERTO MAMMON. SI ILLA DUOS MATRIMONIUM, EGO MOS VOMICA IS VILLA PER FAMES, PESTILENCIA, DYSENTARY QUOD LIVENCIA IN SUUM…ER, NAUGHTY BITS!” The voice bellows with the concussive thunder of a bass drum booming sforzando. Plaster dust rains from the rafters, and the volume echoes through vibrating flagstones.

When the bellowing ceases, the congregation falls into anxious silence. The only discernable noise is the lazy droning of flies hanging like coal smoke over the pews.

“W-wot did ‘e say?” a voice pipes.

The priest is nowhere in sight—vanished(!) it seems—except for a shivering black lump of linen huddled under the altar. Apparently, mad with fear, the old prelate pulled the cassock and surplice over his head, leaving a skinny pair of shriveled flesh-saggy legs poking out like sprouts out of a blighted potato.

“H-h-he said…” the old man’s voice has swiveled to a dangerously shrill pitch. He coughs, which evens the pitch of his voice, but does not infuse enough courage in him to emerge from the protective cassock. The cassock bristles, “He said that he is the demon Mammon. And this if this marriage is allowed to proceed, he will curse this village with famine, pestilence, dysentery and lice on your, erm…naughty bits?”

“PRECISELY!”

The congregation collapses into chaos and breaks onto the door in a flood, each pushing and shoving, desperate to get himself out. Every man for himself!—unfortunately the sheer volume of the press clogs the exit and prevents anyone from escaping. The large double doors are deceptively sized. Yes, they are twenty feet tall, but when thrown open they are less then two meters wide, so that two men could not walk abreast to the outside. Additionally, there was the added complication that one door had been bolted closed during renovations.

For a moment, the clamor ebbs, as the gentle folk of Port Royal remember themselves and their social graces, and slowly people begin to trickle out in a courteous, orderly fashion.

“WOT’RE YA WAITIN’ FOR!? ’E’S GARN TER GIVE US CRABS!” arises from the crowd, re-invigorating the hysteria, shoving the tidal wave of congregants against the door—with the Priest bringing up the rear, shouting “Two weeks from purgatory for letting the priest out first!”

Eventually, the second of the double door snaps off its hinges and crashes, spilling the mob into the street.

“Mercer” Beckett says, not quite in a calling volume, but Mercer materializes—just behind Elizabeth. She gasps. That man needs to learn to announce his presence.

“I suspect that the ignorant townsfolk are going to have a riot. Make sure that the house is well secured.”

Mercer nods and flies from the church. Must have picked up that non-verbalization habit from his master.

“And what of the demon?” Elizabeth demands. Surely, she holds no great affection for Mercer, but even she has the grace to admit that there are times when it is no bad thing to have an assassin on hand, and as it stands Elizabeth and Beckett are quite alone in the little church, having even been abandoned by God’s servant.

Beckett pauses at this, and rubs the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger as if staving off a massive headache.

“Since we have already established your lack of proper reasoning faculties, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you entertain the superstitious notions of country simpletons.”

“OI! INSULTIN A LADY’S NOT GOING T’MAKE THAT PYGMY PRICK OF YOURS ANY BIGGER, MATE.”

Beckett smiles. “Right. A demon, Miss Swann? One with a command of bad Latin and bad English. Astonishing.”

“Given the acoustics of the building,” he wanders toward the pulpit, searching. “If someone shouted from a focal point in the building the sound should reverberate in such a fashion as to elude localization, meaning, Miss Swann, that we would be unable to pinpoint the origin of the voice if the speaker were located right—here.”

A shadow leaps from the rafters, startling Beckett backward.

“Jack!” Elizabeth shouts, eyes bright.

“Jack Sparrow. I might have known.”

“Well then y’should’ve said something, eh? Otherwise someone might think that yer just saying that you knew now that you know, when in the first place you hadn’t the foggiest, which I’m supposing you didn’t as I’ve yet to be accosted by a pack of marines y’ve got stuffed in those over-starched pockets of yours. Course I’d give ‘em a decent fight, swash some buckles, but through my superior wit and guile I would best said marines and escape unharmed with the bonny lass—and quite probably that fat purse ‘f yours, so you may as well just hand ‘er over and we can cut out those niggling middle bits.”

Beckett cracks a smile—a smile that is decisively not indicative of mirth. “Mr. Sparrow, when I branded you and left you in Dakar, I thought that I had finally inculcated some sense into you. I thought that perhaps I had tempered your brash idealism and shown you your place in this competitive, entrepreneurial world that has little sympathy for romanticism. I believed that either you would die, and thus be spared this harsh reality, or, quite miraculously, you would survive and, humbled by your disastrous foray into abolitionism, you would grow up and face the world like a man. I did you a charity Mr. Sparrow, and had I known that you would spurn the lesson and become a drunken, debauched and probably syphilitic pirate, I would have just killed you straight off.”

Jack grins, “Now thassa kinda charity you can write off from your taxes, mate.”

“I am not your mate.”

“Nah, yer not. ’M only mates with respectable thieves. Now, when you left me dyin of infection in that backwater port, you forgot one thing.”

“That you’re Jack Sparrow?” Clearly Beckett had heard the punchline before.

“No. Well, technically yes. But also, yer doctor was a quack cos all I had was a hangover.”

Beckett’s carotid thrusts upward, pulsing furiously. No doubt making plans as to maiming and torturing his former ship’s doctor. Not that he is going to start shouting and cursing, because Beckett’s simply not the shouting cursing type. In fact, he’s most dangerous at his quietest, because he’s suppressing the urge to yell and funneling it into plans for your destruction.

“Well Becky, much ‘s I’m enjoyin this catchin up between us two, I really must be going. Y’know, people t’rob, places to plunder. Now, if you’ll just hand over the bird, I’ll be on me merry way.”

“So arrogant,” Beckett takes measured steps toward Jack, “And so unlike I remember you. The Jack Sparrow that I recall was intent to please, effusively deferential to his superiors. You probably even had designs on becoming a salaried director, rather than just some lowly sub-contractor. But you must have known it was all for naught. You served us well as a merchant Captain, indeed, but to make the low-born son of a Portsmouth whore a meaningful part of the company? Suicide—“ Beckett’s hand flutters to his pocket.

“Look out!” Elizabeth shrieks, as the iron barrel peeks over his pocket.

With the pistol pointed at his guts, Jack draws his saber and parries the muzzle away. Too late!

Jack hisses, clutching his chest in his hands.

“No!” Elizabeth gapes in horror, desperate to tend to Jack, but Beckett pins her down with a glare, as if to say You have no more heroes to stand between yourself and I, so take care not to cross me.

“Swashbuckling, and all such nonsense is a relic of the past,” Beckett re-assumes his didacticism, “And in the face of superior technology I fear that your find yourself wanting.”

Beckett advances, emptying a pinch of black powder into the muzzle and carefully dropping a smooth musket ball in after it.

“Gonna finish me off then, Becky?”

“Well, you’re Captain Jack Sparrow, so I shan’t be taking my chances.”

Suddenly, Jack jams his elbow into Beckett’s soft, slightly-rounded paunch, knocking the man backward onto the flagstones gasping for air.

Jack picks up Beckett’s pistol from the ground and trains it on the squirming body of the other man.

Beckett stills, lying prostrate, but doesn’t say a word. It seems neither begging for his life, nor making some impetuous dare for Jack to shoot him would become him.

“Oh yeah, forgot t’tell you. ‘M an actor as well. Funniest rendering ‘f MacBeth they’ve ever seen.”

It strikes Elizabeth that there is nothing funny about MacBeth—simultaneously it strikes her that if anyone were to find anything comical about him, it would be Jack.

“Now, I could shoot you, but ‘ve never had much love for pistols,” to illustrate, he tips the muzzle down, letting the powder and ball spill out of gun, “they don’t have ‘s much pizzazz as a sword. They lack a certain swishy quality. But since I doubt I’ll get such swishyness from such a soft, well-fed rat as yerself, ‘d suggest you run as fast as those short legs’ll carry you before I get it in me head to do me some one-sided swishing on yer person, eh?”

Beckett, torn between his desire not to be vivisected on the church floor, and his general aversion to taking the one-down from anybody, let alone a pirate, pauses, then wriggles to his feet and scampers out of the church. Years later, when enquiring minds asked after the incident, Beckett would be known to say, “I fought him with a remarkable display of swordsmanship, but he violated the rules of engagement and pulled a pistol on me. You can always trust pirates to cheat.”

Elizabeth leaps at Jack, embracing him from the side as tightly as her encircling arms can muster. In this moment she feels as if she can’t be close enough to him.

“Jack! I knew you’d come. I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t leave me to marry him. Oh Jack!”

She buries her face in his frock coat, and inhales deeply. Inhales the rum, dirt, grime—all the sour foulness of a tramp, except for the salty undercurrent that is sweat and the sea and Jack and in any other state of mind this would be rank, but relief, and knowing that it’s Jack makes it so welcome.

She squeezes harder and he gasps, saber and pistol clattering to the ground.

“Sorry,” she releases him. Reluctantly. As if he were in danger of de-materializing if she stops touching him.

“’s’all right. Just mind the lungs.”

He stoops and gathers his saber and Beckett’s pistol. Sheathing the former, and neatly stuffing the latter into his pocket.

“I thought you said that you don’t like pistols?”

“Course I don’t,” he scowls as if she’s censured his honor, “But I do like not dying.” He grins, “Life’s full ‘f compromises.”

“Jack I—“

“Shh.” He cocks his head like a dog. “You hear that?” he whispers. In the silence, a distant din howls from the distance, growing gradually louder. It must be getting closer.

“Seems the townsfolk have fired-up the torches and ‘re comin to find Mammon. We’d better be going.”

“Going!?” Immediately she realizes how silly the question is. He can’t just save her now, marry her at the church door on Tuesday and have her settled into her normal life in Port Royal by Friday. No. A life with Jack means abandoning her home. But her home is sick. Port Royal has been infected by the powerful influence of the East India Company with Cutler Beckett at the helm of affairs. He hasn’t been deposed, merely humiliated, and it is a sure bet that he will not take it too lightly. But there’s also her father, bedridden and in need of her care. She can’t just leave him. –But he’ll be dead before the month’s close, and then where will she be? She has no other option.

“Yes goin. ‘re y’comin?”

“Yes.” No hesitation.

“Then let’s not loiter like whores on a day-shift, eh?”

He grabs her arm and hurries her out the door at a pace her corset vehemently protests.

She inhales shallow, spasmodically, as if asthmatic and pulls the voluminous wedding gown off over her head.

“Knife,” she sputters, hyperventilating.

“Ah.” With surgical precision, he cuts the corset down the middle. The cool blade slides against her breasts through the thin cotton shift. Despite the adverse circumstances, it sets her loins aflame. He discards the corset on the road. She’s afraid to leave such evidence directly in the path of the mob, but all thought of protest is cut off as Jack drags her on.

A dot composed of hundreds of torches glows orange in the distance, dancing as if one united flame.

They run and sprint and open-mouthed sucking in air begging for the energy to push on through legs on fire and chest tight and ache of stitches.

“Jack…the docks…are…that…”

“I know” a heavy pant, “We’re not goin t’the docks.”

He stops short at a sheer cliff face. She’s fallen from higher, to be sure, but this is at least twenty feet up.

He grimaces. “The tide’s taken the longboat. The Pearl’s anchored about 300 meters out. When y’jump, keep your feet together, arms at yer sides.”

Elizabeth can’t respond except to gape in horror.

“D’you trust me?”

“No.”

“S’rry then, Bess.” He pushes her into the roiling black sea, and frozen in panic she falls in flat on her stomach with a half-screamed, half-drowned “oof!”

A few seconds after she surfaces she hears a splash behind her.

“Jack!”

He begins swimming in what she hopes is the direction of the Pearl.

“No time for rebukes now. Just swim.”

And she does, following as close behind as she can, but she’s slow on the breast-stroke, and the fastest she can swim is with a flapping rendition of a scissor kick, but even that can’t match Jack’s speed in the water.

Elizabeth falls behind and loses sight of him behind the black glass hills of sea.

“Jack! Jack!” she screams, her view obscured by the swells. For the eighth time in her life she thinks she’s going to die. But not by something glorious like undead pirates or sea monsters, but by something as mundane as drowning. Drowning! That simply won’t become her. She has survived all that Hell itself has thrown at her and she will not take this sitting down…floating…down. Whatever!

“Jack!”

“Over ‘ere love.” The sound is coming from up and left, and of course Jack is warming himself on the quarterdeck, while she slops around like a drowning rat in the sea.

They hoist her up, and Jack wraps a course blanket around her shoulders.

She slaps him.

“I deserved that.”

He slaps her back. Not hard enough to hurt her, just enough to drum into her the fact that he has slapped her.

“And you deserved that.”

Elizabeth knows why he does it. And strangely enough her hurt is overcome by a flood of relief, because she knows that this slap signals the end of an argument rather than the climax.

The crew, as a collective, pulses with indecisive energy, torn between throwing the lady into the brig for slapping the captain, and throwing the captain into the brig for slapping a lady.

Jack seems to sense the crew’s suppressed energy. “Easy boys. Disagreements arose, ensued, have been overcome. And what are all ‘f you doing awake at this hour? Should be passed out drunk er something.”

“Aye, Cap’n,” Pintel croaks. The crew rushes to obey an order—for once.

“Oi!—first, raise anchor and make ready to sale, then we’ll drink ‘rselves t’vomiting. ‘Cept for whoever’s on watch.” A muffled groan rises from a handful of crewman, but for the most part is drowned out by the cheer, welcoming the impending binge.

Elizabeth leans against the rail, and watches Port Royal sink into the distance. A column of smoke and fire rises from where she guesses the church must have been, illuminating the outline of her home. She knows that the only way she’ll return would be in chains, neck primed for the noose. After twenty years, she has yet to learn all of its secrets. Then she imagines how vast the world must be. If you can spend a lifetime learning a town, imagine the wonders of the rest of the Earth. You just scratch and see what’s underneath.

Jack’s arms snake around her waist. The ghost of an instinct tells her to pull away, but there’s nothing keeping her from him. Not polite society, not her father, not even Will.

When you’re treading water, you’ll cling to anything you think might keep you from drowning. As quickly as she thinks it, she buries it.

Leaning into his warmth, she imagines the rest of her life in this new context. Rootless, except for Jack. Killing, robbing, fighting, running. You can run from something, but still be running toward something else. Look forward, never back (because there might be someone chasing you.) She wonders if she can trust Jack to be her constant in a world of neverending, cascading variables—and decides that it would be better pondered at a later date. Maybe when she re-visits the notion, she will have learned to mingle with the flow.

That’s why when he whispers that it’s bed-time there’s an offer hanging implicit in the air. One that she neatly plucks out.

It’s all right now. That precious net of membrane between her thighs has been broken. The one she had saved for God as a child, and for Will as a woman. She’s squandered her maidenhead, so there’s nothing to keep sacred anymore. It’s gone. There’s no blood to stain the sheets, to make her lover pause awkwardly. (No blood to make him weep buckets, convinced that he has damaged her irreparably. No, Will, it’s fine. That’s how you can tell that I’m pure and able to marry. Then he cries more because there’s no way for her to tell that he has been pure for her. Then having to explain that that’s God’s way of saying that it’s all right for men to carouse when they’re young so that they can be experienced for their wives—at least that’s what her uncle told her. And this is making even less sense of the situation, isn’t it?) Jack won’t treat her like a whisp of porcelain. Jack knows she’s made of stronger stuff. And most importantly, Jack can’t seed her. Or can he?

“Jack?”

“Yes, love?”

“Can you seed a woman who is already seeded?”

“And why, I pray, would y’want t’know?”

No lies. She’s been locked up with a molding truth for too long, and it’s a relief to air it out. Even if he’s too disgusted by the idea of making love to a pregnant woman.

“Because I’m quick with child.”

His shoulders relax, and he smiles. This must be good news to him. “No love. Once there’s a tenant, there’s no more vacancy.”

He strips. She strips out of the little clothing she has left. She lays on her back and unfolds her legs like dusty book covers.

Jack frowns, “’s this how dear William took you? A shame, that. I thought the boy was more gracious.”

From her understanding of the Story of Lilith, God ordained that when men and women copulate the man should be facing the Earth and Women should be facing heaven. That was her sum total of sexual instruction. Perhaps there is more to it.

He sits upright beside her and rests his palm on her belly, “Since one of me worries has been averted, least for nine months time, I can give you full instruction on how responsive your body can be under a more dexterous pair ‘f hands.”

To illustrate, he traces his fingertips down the curve of her neck. She shudders when they brush the base, and everything from navel to thighs has already begun to throb in a steady pulse, so loud like drumming in the silent cabin.

Further they drift, fluttering for a moment on her collarbone, but she’s already anticipating the feel of them on her breast. He has such rough fingers, could they hurt her more sensitive n—No. Most certainly not. Even the roughest hands can be whisper-soft with the correct application of pressure. He teases her, but now that seems part of the game. Enticing, promising, until the ache builds into a sort of agitated passion—then he’ll tease a little longer.

His index finger swirls lazy circles on the outer rim of her right nipple. But she can feel the exquisite sting of it all over her body. The crimson buds reach out, stretching blindly for something tactile.

Without warning, his palm rubs against the tip. She arches off the bed.

“T-too much,” she blurts, incoherent. She feels like any touch, anywhere would strike lightning in her nerves. In a good way, and in a terrible, painful way.

“Shh,” he eases her down, kissing her worry-crinkled forehead “You’re just a wee bit over-sensitized.”

“Wha—is—is there something wrong with me?” Frustration, fear and anxiety ball-up in her chest and she’s ready to sob.

“No, love. It’s me own fault. ‘M settin the pace too fast.”

Too fast!?

Jack bends down, and kisses the frustration from her lips. He tastes surprisingly sweet. Herb sweet. Must have been chewing licorice. Their tongues intermingle in a graceful rhythm, and gradually the anxiety that had edged her pleasure sublimates under the warmth of his mouth and his breath brushing her soft and simultaneously stimulating.

He breaks the kiss, but his lips find her ears and neck. Just his moustache grazing her neck ignites previously unchecked eroticism in her flesh.

Despite her lack of practical experience, or even scholarly knowledge on the subject, her body seems to know the primordial rhythms of sexuality.

Elizabeth feels as if her nether regions have been magnetized, ready to cling to anything that promises pressure, penetration. Jack absently rests his hand on the bed between her legs and that is enough to make hips her inch down the bed, grinding against his wrist.

He withdraws his hand, and she most certainly does not suppress the disappointed moan.

“Oh, Bess.” Jack studies the slick trail passion painted on his wrist. He licks it. She’s going to erupt. Tentatively, he dips his fingers into the epicenter of her needs. “You’re wet as the flood, little Missy. I should build me an ark.”

“Well you had better fuck me first!” She’s horrified at her own outburst. Jack on the other hand looks like control’s been wrested from him, and the best description of his self-control is a man wrestling a lion and Elizabeth doesn’t blame him because just the utterance of “fuck” charges her with erotic energy stemming from the very forbiddenness of the word of the thought of the act, that fucking isn’t the polite consummation of love but the frenetic satiation of lust.

Jack’s eyes darken to shadows in heavy hollows, “Aye” he whispers hoarse and shaky, no hint of cheekiness. Just something raw that both frightens and excites her in its intensity, where want transforms into need because somehow it’s gratifying, this change in the game, where he’s not controlling her, but the mutual commingling of desire makes them masters of the other’s passion and slaves to their own in synergistic tug-of-wars of power and it’s all fancy words orbiting an iron core where the sordid truth really is just that it’s a powerful feeling to be needed and to supercede the ego in a man’s control and reducing him to nothing but the overwhelming need for your sex.

His thumb massages her engorged clit, making her legs shake uncontrollably with every roll of the pebble against her pubis and suddenly she’s stretched open as two fingers delve into her sodden cunt, curving inward toward her belly massaging the spot deep inside of her that sets her abuzz from the inside out.

As suddenly as they probed into her, the fingers slide out.

She dry-weeps of frustration when he takes lays beside her.

“Is it over?” she demands.

“Just get on top of me.”

“What?”

“Straddle my hips,”

Tentatively, she climbs on top of him his prick nestles lengthwise between her lips. From this angle it seems that penetration is impossible.

She feels oddly exposed at this angle, with her body erected before his eyes. It makes her feel naked—well, yes of course she’s naked, but it’s as if all of her insecurities have been laid bare and she can’t just hide beneath the enveloping body of a man drumming her into the pit of a mattress.

She thought she had overcome her shyness about being naked in full view of a man with Will. But now she realizes how comfortable it was with Will, knowing that he’s not comparing her to a library of lovers cross-referenced in his mind. But with Jack, he’s known women. Hundreds. Enough to fill Port Royal. What has she to offer that he hasn’t had three score and ten times before?

In this position, it’s as if she’s expected to direct the proceedings, and she simply does not possess the confidence or experience to do so.

“What next?”

A sharp upward thrust of his hips is his answer, blunt and hot, into her very viscera and all the world collapses unthinking into an infinitely small, infinitely dense pulsating center of gravitational attraction and pleasure in sex isn’t a thing made of matter, but a warm wave of energy rippling down her belly, up her legs coalescing around his cock—if it’s a wave, she takes it like she takes the ocean, riding up its peaks and down its valleys until she’s her hips crashing onto Jack’s cock furious as the surf in a hurricane and his head thrown back and his ornaments jangling and the sweat slick sliding between them like dolphins feel, and all at once the sea inside rears up and she throws the sum total of her body, her heart and her soul onto Jack—

“Awh!” throat, face and vagina tighten infinitely taut—and the waters recede.

Elizabeth collapses onto him, and from a light nudge to her hip, takes the hint to disembark.

She rolls over, flat on her back, bathed in sweat and boundless love.

“I love you, Jack,” she whispers to the ceiling planks.

He turns on his side, and places his flat palm just below her belly button.

A thick, black flood bleeds out of her vagina, and floating on its surface, a crinkled lump no larger than a raisin wailing like a baby—

“Would you like your eggs scrambled, sweet Lizzie?” he whispers.

She shoots up like a spring and shrieks. But the blood is gone, and so is Jack—and she’s in her own bed, and Cook is shouting upstairs in her jolly Scottish burr how mistress would like her eggs.

Elizabeth’s chest tightens with sobs and she beats her pillow until feathers fly out of the seams and she’s tangled in her bed sheets from the exertion.

--But maybe it’s prophetic. The tears choke off. She’s never had so detailed a dream. It must be a divine intimation of what’s to come. She can feel it. Jack’s coming!

Knocking on the door, “Your eggs, Mistress?”

“Scr—Sunny side up.”

Fin.

A/N So...waddya think? This is my first foray into smut and I'm concerned about my pacing/diction/(everything). How'd I do?