To Be a Virtuous Wife, According to the Manual novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Nothing Forbidden

Dolores sets the pace on the wedding bed and Hal lets her; in the morning she tapes Rule 1 inside the cupboard.

The fourth button was the first one I helped with.

I reached behind me, found his fingers, and moved them down myself.

"It sticks," I said. "Marlene's sister sewed them on."

"I'll be careful."

"Don't be too careful. I've had eight months of careful."

He laughed against my collarbone and then went quiet, because the dress was sliding off my shoulders.

I had thought about this moment a great deal.

In my plans I was graceful and the lamp was off.

In real life I stood in a satin slip in a lit bedroom.

I am a size fourteen, with freckles on my chest and a stomach that has never once been flat.

I crossed my arms over it.

Hal took my wrists, very gently, and moved them to my sides.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"I waited a long time to look at you. I'd like to look."

So he looked.

He took his time over it, from my face to my feet and back up, and his breathing changed.

"Dolores," he said. "You're about the best thing I ever saw."

I had no answer for that, so I did what I'd planned to do.

I unbuttoned his shirt.

His chest was sun-brown to the collar line.

A pale scar ran along his left forearm, from the elbow nearly to the wrist.

I'd seen it before, when he rolled his sleeves to fix my mother's porch rail.

I had never touched it.

I put my thumb along it now, the whole length, and he went still.

"That's from a fence," he said. "Not from the war."

"I didn't ask."

"I know. I wanted you to know."

"Thank you," I said, and I kissed the inside of his elbow.

His whole arm tightened.

I found that I liked that very much.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders.

Then I pushed him flat on his back across the white spread, with his boots still on the floor.

"You're giving the orders," he said, amazed.

"Rule one says your comfort comes first."

"This is comfortable?"

"It's about to be."

He grinned at the ceiling.

I got his belt undone on the second try and his boots off on the third.

I am not going to pretend I didn't enjoy every inch of it.

When he was bare, he lay there and let me look, and neither of us said anything clever.

He was big and warm, his cock already thick and hard against his stomach, and he was trembling.

That surprised me more than anything else that night.

"You're shaking," I said.

"It's been a while. And you're..."

"Yes?"

"You," he said helplessly, which I decided was the best sentence anyone had ever said to me.

I took off my slip and my underpants.

I climbed up beside him and the mattress dipped.

He gathered me against him, skin to skin, his hard cock pressing against my hip, and the whole length of me lit up.

His hands were slow.

They moved over my back and my waist and the wide curve of my hip.

He touched each place as if it had a name he meant to learn.

"Tell me where," he murmured.

"Lower. And slower."

"Right here," he breathed, his rough hand parting my thighs to find my pussy already wet for him.

"Slower than that."

He stroked his fingers slowly through my slick folds, circling my clit until my hips lifted off the sheet.

I made a sound, and then I made a louder one, and I stopped caring what was proper.

His mouth followed his hands, along my throat, down my breasts, and down my belly until his shoulders wedged between my knees.

I put my fingers into his sandy hair and held on.

He licked a broad, hot stripe up my slit and sucked my clit into his mouth.

He took his time eating my pussy, as unhurried as a man reading a long letter.

His tongue flicked and flattened over my clit until my thighs shook.

At some point I cried his name, and I think I cried it twice.

At some point I stopped being able to say anything at all.

The heat rose and coiled tight in my belly as he slid a finger inside me and curled it against my front wall.

Then my climax broke open all at once, my pussy pulsing around his finger.

I laughed and gasped together against the backs of my hands.

He came up over me, his chin slick, his eyes dark and fierce and glad.

"I would like to do that again," I said, "right now, and on every day that ends in a y."

He laughed so hard he had to put his forehead on my shoulder.

Then he stopped laughing, his hard cock nudging hot and heavy against my wet entrance.

"Dolores. I need to be inside you right now."

I took his face in my hands and spread my knees wider.

"Now," I said. "Put it in."

He pushed his cock into my tight, wet pussy slowly, bracing himself on his forearms so I could see his face the whole time.

There was a sting, quick and sharp as his thick head stretched me open, and I drew in my breath.

He held himself buried halfway inside me, his jaw clenched tight.

He stayed there, his cock throbbing inside my heat, until my body adjusted to the stretch and ached for the rest of him.

I lifted my hips and hooked my heels behind his thighs.

"All of it, Hal," I gasped. "Fuck me."

He sank to the hilt with a low groan, and the sting turned into a deep, burning fullness, and the fullness became pure heat.

I wrapped my legs around his waist.

He groaned my name into my neck as he pulled back and drove deep inside me again.

I held him there and set the pace with my own hips, the way I had said I would.

Slow, deep strokes at first, and then faster, his pelvis grinding hard against my clit on every thrust.

The headboard knocked once against the wall.

We both began to laugh again and could not stop even as my pussy clenched tight around his shaft.

"The neighbors," he gasped, fucking me harder into the mattress.

"The neighbors can read a book."

I came again around his cock with a sharp cry, my inner walls milking him, and I felt him lose his hold at last.

He groaned into the pillow beside my ear as he came deep inside me, his cock pulsing hot cum into my body.

His whole weight settled over me.

I held him through every shudder.

Afterward he rolled us onto our sides and pulled the chenille spread over both of us, and we lay with our foreheads together and breathed.

His hand rested on my hip. Mine rested on his scar.

"Well," he said at last, in a ruined voice. "That's a lot more than one line."

"I improvised."

"I'm glad you did."

"Hal?"

"Mm."

"Was it comfortable?"

He thought about it seriously, which is one of the things I love about him.

"Mrs. Rausch," he said, "that was the most comfortable I have been in my life."

I slept better that night than I have ever slept.

In the morning he was already gone from the bed, and I could hear him downstairs swearing at the pilot light.

I put on his work shirt, which came to my knees, and went down to the kitchen.

On the shelf over the stove, where I'd left it, was my mother's green book.

I took a card from the recipe box and wrote on it in pencil, in my best hand.

RULE 1. A HUSBAND'S COMFORT IS A WIFE'S FIRST CONCERN.

Below it, in smaller letters, I wrote, SO IS HERS.

I taped it to the inside of the cupboard door, where only I would see it.

Hal came in behind me and read it over my shoulder.

He didn't say anything.

He kissed the back of my neck, and he put his hand flat on the book.

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