Terminal Lust

The wedding had been confined to a civil ceremony. No guests. They'd both agreed that showy affairs were more bother than they were worth and that everybody they might potentially invite would likely invite some form of melodrama along with them. Faremis didn't approve but would no doubt send a card by way of acknowledgment.

Lucrecia had worn a green wrap dress and a pea coat. She wasn't much of one for tradition. She'd let her hair down, however, and Hojo had joked it was a stumbling hazard. The vows were rote from the judge's template. Both parties had asserted before that they knew the terms of their own relationship and hadn't much need to reiterate it before an official.

He did his best to appear chivalrous as he carried her over the threshold of the Nibelheim Inn and quite nearly embarrassed himself by knocking them both into a hat rack. The project was too uncertain for them to have yet established where they would eventually settle, and honestly looking at what the next year would have in store for them, Hojo didn't really care about such mundanities. He hoped that she knew where his love lay first, and frankly hoped that her heart belonged in the same place. He would be disappointed, in truth, if she loved him more than whatever lay at the end of her pregnancy.

She flounced onto their new quarters' double bed as he loosened his tie, her hair falling around her like a veil. They chirped several “I love yous” back and forth before she pulled him onto the bed and began to pull off his shirt. He smiled, happy to have a bride who didn't wear white.

In consummating the now notarized union, he was -as always with her- a gentleman. Unlike some people he kept his perversions subdued and compartmentalized. Yet, he would be a liar to say that his conjugal enthusiasm for his new wife lay entirely with her.

His mind wandered with each almost excessively tender caress of their lovemaking – thinking as to exactly who wasn't clasping her breasts or tasting her mouth. She would no doubt be unnerved, perhaps even repulsed, if she knew the content of his fantasies, but as a rational woman she had long ago acknowledged that every couple had their secrets. Each moan he drew from her wash over him as though he'd drawn blood, and when at last they'd both come and collapsed in a heap of sweat and sheets the visions which danced before him were only half of the panting woman before him.

In his mind's eye he saw a dark haired man strangling his sorrows in cheap Bordeaux, the irony of his life's strange course giving him the cat-like satisfaction of a child reassembling a puzzle box.