The Novelist

Copyright

The Novelist

Copyright © 2023 Rollie Lawson

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-312-61387-4

Chapter 1 - Mommy Porn

Jonathan Harcourt nodded to his security team as entered his Fifth Avenue condominium. His nose was immediately assaulted by a delicious aroma. “Something smells good!” he told the woman who greeted him.

Maria Fernandez smiled. She was the cook and chief of staff for the Fifth Avenue residence. It was Friday evening, and since no parties or dinners were planned for the weekend, the staff had been given the weekend off; Maria was the last of the staff still present. “Gracias. Dinner tonight is an Irish lamb stew, with small loaves of fresh sourdough bread as trenchers. The stew is on warm in a CrockPot.”

“Sounds excellent! Where’s my wife?”

Maria smiled and responded, “Mrs. Harcourt is in the library. She asked that you join her there for a before-dinner drink.”

“Okay.” Jonathan gave a curious look at that.

“And I’ll be going now. I’ll be back on Monday morning.”

“Thank you, Maria.”

She smiled and went to the closet, taking her coat from the closet before leaving. Jonathan nodded as she left and turned towards the library. He dropped his briefcase on the couch and walked down the hall.

He entered the library and said, “Before dinner drinks?” Then he stopped dead in his tracks. Brenda Harcourt was standing there wearing black fishnet stockings, ankle-strapped black stilettos, a transparent black baby-doll top, and a smile. That was it. In between where the top was held together by a single tie and the elastic tops of her stockings the most noticeable thing to notice about Brenda was her five-month baby bump.

“Welcome home, Jonathan.”

“I am loving the look! Uh, did you come down the hallway dressed like that, and if you did, what did Maria say?”

Brenda blushed. “No, I had on a robe. That’s behind the desk. I think she got the idea, though, since she saw I was wearing fishnets and heels.”

Jonathan smiled at his wife. “You have to watch out for women running around in fishnets and heels. What made me curious was the bit about before dinner drinks since you aren’t drinking these days.”

Brenda went to her husband and put her arms around his neck. She kissed him deeply and then pushed him backwards. “Take a seat. Did you want me to make you a drink?”

Jonathan sat down in an armchair. “It’s not critical. I am guessing I am having my dessert before dinner?”

Brenda sat sideways on her husband’s lap. “Maybe, if you get lucky, you can have your dessert after dinner, too. How was your day? You haven’t even asked how mine was.”

Jonathan wrapped his arms around Brenda’s waist. “How was your day?”

“Busy, very busy. First, I had an appointment with Doctor Morgenstern…”

Her husband placed a hand on her baby bump. “And how is little Charlie?” Their future son was going to be named Charles William Harcourt.

She patted his hand. “Just fine! Anyway, after that, I went to the spa and had a massage and a facial and a mani-pedi. I even got a fresh Brazilian!”

Jonathan smiled. “I noticed. It looks very enticing.”

“Doctor Morgenstern thought it would be a good idea.”

Her husband’s eyes opened wide. “Your gynecologist thought a Brazilian wax was a good idea?”

“Well, not exactly. She told me, though, that orgasms were excellent ways to release hormones that would be good for me, and I figured that since anything that was good for me would be good for Charlie, a nice Brazilian would make you want to give me orgasms! I did it for the baby!”

“You got a Brazilian for Charlie? You want me to tell him that some day?” he laughed.

She took one of his hands and pushed it down between her legs, sighing at his touch. “Jonathan, doesn’t that feel nice and smooth? I always get so hot and wet when you touch me!”

Jonathan began rubbing his fingers around the smooth skin of his wife’s pussy. Brenda spread her legs apart and whimpered as her husband touched her. His index finger and ring finger spread her pussy lips apart and his middle finger slid into her slit to rub circles around her clit. “Very hot and very wet,” he commented.

Brenda gasped and shivered as he diddled her clit. The arm around her back kept her in position as he fingerfucked her. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” she babbled as the pussy juice flooded his fingers and her natural scent blossomed. “Stop! Stop! It’s too much!”

Jonathan laughed and continued his assault on her pussy. “I’ll let you know when it’s too much.”

“Oh God! Oh God! I’m cumming! I’m cumming!”

After another few minutes, Jonathan stopped fingerfucking Brenda and she sagged against his chest. That didn’t mean he was finished with his wife. He brought his hand up from between her widespread thighs and pulled the tie holding her babydoll top together. As always, he marveled at the perfection of her naked breasts, so large and full, pale yet with huge puffy dark coral nipples. He twisted his face down and began licking the nipple closest to his lips, and then used his moist fingers to toy with her other breast. Brenda pulled his head against her, trying to force her tit into his mouth.

Jonathan continued his pleasurable torment for another ten minutes, alternating breasts as Brenda moaned. Finally, it became too much for him. Pulling his face back, he ordered, “Stand up and bend over the desk!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” She climbed off Jonathan’s lap and skipped over to the desk, bending at the waist and spreading her legs.

Jonathan smiled at the sight, especially when he noticed the shiny black butt plug in place between her impossibly perfect asscheeks. He stood and quickly stripped naked, and then moved behind her. Slipping his impressive erection into Brenda’s pussy, he reached down and jiggled the buttplug. “Is this part of the after-dinner entertainment?”

“Oh God! Fuck me! Fuck me!” Brenda began begging her husband to fuck her fast and hard.

Jonathan smiled as Brenda begged him to fuck her. One part of him wanted to extend his pleasure as much as possible, but the truth was that Brenda had turned him on immensely since she had lured him into the library. He jiggled the buttplug again and that pushed his wife over the edge. Gasping, she collapsed onto the desk as her pussy muscles clamped down on his cock. He gave a final shove and began spurting his cum deep inside her.

It took a minute before Jonathan got his breathing under control, and another minute before he extracted himself from his wife and straightened up. Brenda pushed herself up off the desk and said, “I think that will do for now. I’m going to need a few more treatments later.”

Jonathan laughed. “Sure thing, dear.”

“I’m just obeying the doctor’s orders.”

“Right. Okay, I am going to clean up. When I am back, we can eat dinner. Don’t change. I am going to need some motivation for dessert.”

Brenda Harcourt giggled. She quickly kissed her husband and headed for the bathroom. A quick sink bath and then she would go into the kitchen to finish preparing dinner. It was going to be a fun weekend.

***

Day 0, Thursday

Jack Watson reviewed what he had been typing, nodding to himself silently. He ran the file through a final spell-and-grammar checker, and then saved it. He loaded his mail program and sent it as an attachment to his editor. In the text block, he typed, ‘Final version. Send me back the R and XXX versions and I’ll review. I can start the variants next week.’ Then he closed his laptop and stood, stretching and scratching. As always, when he finished a book, he wondered how in the hell he had ended up a writer.

Jack hadn’t planned on becoming a novelist when he was younger. He had always enjoyed reading and had even taken a creative writing class in high school, but he was smart enough to know that it was exceptionally unusual for somebody to make any money as a novelist. For every Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway, there were ten thousand assholes nobody would ever hear of. When he went to college, he decided on a degree in history. He knew that was another useless degree, but it had to be less useless than English literature; English literature became a minor.

What had changed him was an internship the first semester of his junior year. He got a job with a publishing company, Passionate Allure Publishing Group, as a junior editor. It paid peanuts and involved spell checking, grammar checking, and fact checking. Passionate Allure published romance novels, and Jack was assigned to the historical romance department, where he used his historical knowledge and skill to fact check stories. He found himself informing the editor he reported to that a certain story was incorrect, in that modern bras and panties weren’t available in the mid-1600s. The editor had grumbled and rolled his eyes, but promised to contact the author, and assigned more stories to the college junior.

Some of the errors he found were comically bad. The Irish didn’t lose the Battle of Culloden; the battle was between the English and the Scots. Modern metallic cartridges for firearms weren’t common in America until after the Civil War, and smokeless powder wasn’t common until the late 1880s. Other common errors included when particular styles of clothing were invented or where, when and why certain cities and towns were founded, and any number of other odd facts where needed.

In the meantime, as Jack read the stories he was reviewing, his overwhelming thought was that if Passionate Allure was paying idiots for the dreck he was editing, why not him? He could write at least as well as the crap he was editing. At night, he began writing a historical romance of his own. Pride and Passion was set during the Civil War, with a Union officer vying with a Rebel officer for the heart and hand of a beautiful widow in border state Kentucky. Going back to his high school creative writing class, he had an internal conflict, involving the romantic triangle, and an external conflict, the war, where the two men eventually faced each other on the battlefield.

He mentioned his book to his boss, who rolled his eyes but smiled and promised to read it. Jack printed it out and gave it to him the next day. The next day the senior editor, Harry Reedling, came to him and asked, “You wrote that?”

Jack didn’t like the look in Harry’s eyes. “Yes, sir. Not very good, I guess.”

Harry smiled and shrugged. “It wasn’t half bad. It was actually kind of compelling. I read it last night, which is why I need some sleep. It’s not Faulkner, but it’s not bad. When did you write it?”

Jack explained how he had written the story and how he had done it at night. “Do you think it’s good enough for somebody to publish?”

Harry crossed his arms and nodded. “It needs some editing and some rewrites, but maybe. Spice it up some. We publish romance novels here. This is not great literature. This is mommy porn. And you need to change your name.”

“My name?” asked Jack.

“Women don’t want to read mommy porn written by a guy. Jack Watson can’t write this. Jacqueline Watson, maybe. Or Jacqui-with-an-I. And it’s too long, too many pages. Break it into a trilogy, before the war, during the war, and after the war.”

“Really?” Jack couldn’t believe Harry wasn’t throwing it in the trash!

“Really.”

With that, the professional editor and the college student began a discussion that would lead to a twenty-year-plus collaboration. Over the next two years, as Jack finished his degree, he spent nights and weekends rewriting Pride and Passion into a trilogy, adding sex and excitement, and developing his talent. By the time he graduated, he had a commitment from Passionate Allure as their newest author.

Along the way, Jack learned about the business aspect of the romance novel business. It took discipline to be a writer and make a living at it. He couldn’t simply sit down at his computer and write ten percent of the time and play solitaire ninety percent of the time. He had to do a certain number of words a day and a certain number of chapters a week. He had to develop a plot and block out the chapters ahead of time, and then he had to stick to his plan. Then he discovered a way to multiply his productivity immensely.

The Pride and Passion trilogy was published shortly after his graduation, with a volume coming out every eight months. According to Harry Reedling, that would maximize his income stream since it built anticipation among the readers. Some readers would skip the first book, then buy the second or third book and go back and buy earlier books. Every time Jacqui Watson published a story, there would be a bump in sales for earlier stories.

Jack’s next story was a contemporary romance, defined by the publishing house as something set after World War II. Love and Ashes was set during the Vietnam War and involved a love triangle with an officer and a sergeant vying for the affections of a beautiful anti-war protester. The two men ended up in Vietnam together, in the same outfit, and the officer proved to be a cowardly idiot, with the sergeant being the hero. The sergeant survived and came home to woo and win the protester, kicking out the long-haired hippie trying to get in her panties.

Harry decided that Jacqui Watson couldn’t write this story. Jack’s contemporary romances would be written by ‘Anna DeVeere’ and ‘Jacqui Watson’ would write American historical fiction. ‘Jacqui’ rewrote the story in a Mexican-American War setting. Then, ‘Amber Hawthorne’ could rewrite the story in Regency England, with the conflict being the Battle of Waterloo. Finally, ‘Cecilia Reynolds’ wrote the story in the mid-Victorian period in India, with two captains chasing the niece of the Governor during the Sepoy Rebellion. Harry explained that many readers were quite specific in the types of stories they would read and the periods they wanted to read about. The odds that anybody would notice and complain were low.

“It’s like the Hallmark Network, Jack.”

“The Hallmark Network? On TV?”

“Precisely. Ever seen it?”

“Good God, no!”

“You should try it. Give you some story ideas. Anyway, they will do a story this year, a romantic comedy or drama, just like what you do. Then, six months later, they do the same story, only it’s not in New York but in Dublin. Six months after that, it’s in Paris. Then Honolulu. Same story, but some other exotic locale. Other times they do the same story but in a different time period. They just change the names,” explained Harry.

“Huh.” Jack decided to watch the Hallmark channels a weekend or two.

In any case, Corporate Takeover was finished and off to Harry for editing. Two versions would be published. The print version was the R version, with semi-explicit sex and abundant nudity. Readers could also buy, online only, the XXX-rated version of the story, with explicit, graphic, no-holes-barred versions. The scene he had just finished in Corporate Takeover was only available in the XXX-rated story; the R-rated version skipped the buttplug and the sex was mostly described in various euphemisms.

Jack stretched again, working out the kinks, and looked out of his office window. His wife was sunning herself by the pool. He looked past his wife and took in the house and grounds. The house was a Victorian design, two stories with a steep roof, a wrap-around porch, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a turret at one corner. Between his office and the house was a large pool, which was where his wife was lying face down on a blanket,

He smiled as he considered the house. The family joked that it was Watson Manor, a private family name that dated to the early days of the family. The first Watson was Zachariah Watson, a forty-year-old Yankee investor who came to North Carolina in the aftermath of the Civil War. He arrived with a carpetbag full of cash and promptly bought a large chunk of property between Durham and Hillsborough, an overgrown hill that wasn’t quite a mountain. The locals weren’t thrilled to have a Yankee as their new neighbor, but he paid his bills on time and in cash. Shortly thereafter, Zachariah met and married a buxom seventeen-year-old beauty, Faith Hoople, and they moved into a log cabin on the property. The two also decided to be fruitful and multiply, and over the next twenty years Zachariah fathered a dozen children, including four sets of twins, on Faith. When he died at the age of sixty, the town gossips snickered and said he needed the rest.

Over the next few generations, the Watson family grew, farming and timbering the property Zachariah had bought. They also rebuilt the log cabin several times, enlarging it as the family grew. By the Twentieth Century, the family was a typical Southern family, with Zachariah’s Yankee history conveniently forgotten. What really made the family fortune didn’t occur until 1905. The family patriarch at the time was Harry Watson, and he decided that the horseless carriage was more than just a fad. Harry talked Henry Ford into letting him open a dealership in west central North Carolina. It was perfect timing. Three years later, Ford came out with the Model T, probably the most important motor vehicle of the Twentieth Century, and the Watson family fortune was assured.

The Model T was an amazing car, durable, reliable, and cheap, the first car built by Ford’s new assembly line construction system. It was also easily modified. Harry bought a machine shop across the street from Watson Motors and put his eldest son, James, in charge. A Model T could be converted to a flatbed or stake-bed truck, a tanker, a delivery van, or even a tow truck. Harry could sell every Model T he could lay his hands on and then customize them however the buyer wanted.

Still, although the Model T was an amazing cash cow for the Watsons, what really made them wealthy was the Eighteenth Amendment and its accompanying Federal law, the Volstead Act. Prohibition was an act of temporary insanity by the United States and banned the production and sale of alcoholic beverages in 1920. The situation was tailor-made for a consummate schmoozer like Harry Watson. He didn’t make moonshine, but he knew men who did. He didn’t sell moonshine, but he knew men who did. He didn’t deliver moonshine, but he knew men who did. Finally, best of all, while he wasn’t in the government or the police, he knew men who were. Harry simply took a small cut from everybody involved. Harry Watson knew who to talk to and who to get together, and how to help people of all sorts make deals. He wasn’t involved in organized crime, just in organization.

Over the next thirteen years, Harry Watson profited from assisting bootleggers and sold Model T and Model A Fords, often to the bootleggers he was assisting. This was sufficiently lucrative that Harry was able to tear down the log cabin and build a large Victorian house, with running water and an electric generator, and bank the modern equivalent of several million dollars. That proved sufficient to allow the Watson family to survive the Great Depression. The funds provided investment income for another few generations.

The next major windfall to benefit the Watson family occurred in the late Twentieth Century. As the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area grew and the colleges located there became known nationally as the Research Triangle, the suburbs in the area expanded significantly. Jack’s grandfather, Thomas Watson, decided he really didn’t need to own an entire mountain. He set up a property development and real estate sales company, and then proceeded to subdivide the property on Watson Hill. Parcels were split off and turned into subdivisions and gated communities, though the main house on the top of the hill was kept in the center of forty acres reserved for the family. The money rolled in, and Thomas used it to put in a pool and completely modernize the Victorian house.

Now it was Jack Watson’s turn as the patriarch. There weren’t any other candidates, though, since the Watsons had mostly moved off the mountain, heading west or to bigger cities. Thomas and his wife, Catherine, only had a single child, Ronald, and he and his wife, Barbara, died in an auto accident when their only son, Jack, was barely two years old. Thomas and Catherine raised Jack but died shortly after Jack graduated from college, leaving the house and property to him.

While in college, Jack met a beautiful young woman when he came back from his internship. Sophia Dibiasi was another orphan and had been raised by an aunt and uncle. It was love at first sight, and the two married shortly after graduation. A year later, John Bonaventure Watson Junior blessed them with his noisy presence. Two years later, Sarah Ann Watson joined the party.

Jack had originally tried to write in his library, but that didn’t work out. Little Johnnie and Sarah tended to get into everything and make a racket of it, and Sophia, while a wonderful stay-at-home mother, also tended to interrupt his writing. Jack didn’t really mind the interruptions when the babies were napping in the afternoon and Sophia walked into his library wearing high heels and a smile, but while she was excellent for his libido, she wasn’t helpful for his productivity. Jack converted the pool house to an office and had an internet connection installed.

Writing romance novels proved sufficiently lucrative that Sophia was able to stay home after the kids started school. Most days Jack was able to spend eight or nine hours in his office, writing, editing, and rewriting various versions of his stories. He wasn’t a complete drudge, however, and at least once or twice a week he would invite her to his office for ‘lunch’, a euphemism for a hot and naked nooner.

Jack walked out of his office and headed towards the pool. The pool was an inground forty-foot-long pool surrounded by a chain link fence. He walked up to the fence and looked at his wife. Sophia was wearing a practically nonexistent string bikini, laying prone and propped up on her elbows, reading her Kindle. He let himself through the gate and sat down on the blanket next to her. “Whatcha reading?”

Sophia looked over her shoulder at her husband and smiled. “Persian Treasures.”

Jack smiled and nodded. Persian Treasures had been his most recent story, an Anna DeVeere romance set in the final days of the Shah of Iran. Sam Jackson, a CIA operative, was tasked with rescuing Yasmine, the young and beautiful niece of the Shah, and getting her out of Iran, even as she was hunted by both SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, and by fanatics sent by Ayatollah Khomeini. Along the way they also had to retrieve ancient treasures from a secret Pahlavi family vault filled with artifacts dating back to Cyrus the Great. By the end of the story, Sam and Yasmine had escaped from Iran with the treasure, gotten the differing spy agencies and fanatics into a gigantic battle, convinced the CIA they had died, and settled in the suburbs outside of Dubuque, Iowa. Of course, along the way, they fell in love and Sam seduced Yasmine in a number of very spice interludes. It had been split by his editor into two stories.

Over the next few months, Jacqui Watson rewrote the story with a Yankee captain and a southern belle, renegade Rebel bushwhackers, Indians who had left the reservation, and a hidden cache of Spanish gold. Amber Hawthorne did something similar with a Russian princess, a British foreign agent, evil French agents, Russian radicals, and Siberian Hun treasures. Finally, Cecilia Reynolds rewrote the story in Eighteenth Century India, with a British agent, an Indian princess, French and Russian agents, a fortune in Mughal artifacts, and a background of the Seven Years’ War. It had been a very profitable series of books.

“Persian Treasures, huh? Where are you?” he asked.

“They just escaped from Iran and are hiding on a private island in the Aegean, and he just drove her down to a very private cove to go swimming.”. his wife answered.

“Swimming, huh?”

“Swimming. She’s wearing a sheer white string bikini about three sizes too small, and he just offered to rub lotion on her back.”

Jack smiled. “He sounds like a very helpful sort of guy.”

Sophia replied, “More helpful than you. You haven’t offered to put any lotion on my back.”

Jack reached out and grabbed the tube of suntan lotion. “Sorry about that. Would you like me to untie your top so I can do your back and shoulders?”

“That would be a nice start.”

Jack rolled his eyes and undid the ties behind Sophia’s back and neck. He squirted some lotion on her shoulders and began working it in, eliciting a happy moan from his wife. After a few minutes, she pushed her Kindle aside and lay down on the blanket, luxuriating in her husband’s touch.

Jack rubbed lotion all over Sophia’s shoulders, back and sides, and then shifted. He ran a line of suntan lotion up the back of each leg and worked it into each. Sophia spread her legs apart to give him easier access. Jack untied the strings at her hips, peeling the strings off and down between her legs, exposing her completely.

“Mmmm…yes, please!” she murmured.

Jack squirted lotion on each perfect cheek, and worked it in. He finished by squirting lotion in the crack of Sophia’s ass and onto his fingers. One hand reached down between her legs from behind, to massage and penetrate her pussy while his other hand rubbed her asscrack and fingered her asshole. Sophia shrieked quietly and began humping off the blanket, trying to get Jack’s fingers even deeper.

Jack diddled Sophia through an intense orgasm, and then pulled his hands away as she rolled onto her back. “Do my front, too, honey.”

Chapter 2 - Education

Day 0, Thursday

John B. Watson Jr., Johnnie as he was known to his family and friends, was walking down the hall past his sister’s bedroom door when she called out to him. “Johnnie! You won’t believe it!”

“Hmmm? What?”

Sarah was standing at her window looking out over the back yard. “Come here!” she demanded. “Look!”

Johnnie walked into Sarah’s bedroom and went up to where she was standing. He looked out at where she was pointing and began smiling. “Yeah? What’s up?”

Sarah looked at him and asked, “Are they doing what I think they are doing?”

He grinned at her. “What do you think they are doing/?”

She lowered her voice to a whisper and answered, “Are they having sex?”

“Why are you whispering? They can’t hear you.” He looked back out the window. “Technically, this is foreplay. The sex comes next.”

Johnnie Watson was a good-looking teen, with his father’s face and brown eyes and average height, but with blonde hair as opposed to Jack’s brown, and a more muscular build. He was sixteen and would be a junior when school started again in the fall. Sarah, on the other hand, was almost the spitting image of her mother, with honey blonde hair, blue eyes, and a mouthwatering figure. She was only fourteen, so she was still shorter than Sophia, and wasn’t quite as buxom, being only a 36B instead of her mother’s 38D. Sarah would be a freshman in the fall.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “They can’t do that!”

“Sarah, they’re married. They’re allowed to have sex. Where do you think we came from? The stork?”

Sarah looked at her brother in amazement. “Outside? During the day?”

“So, I guess you haven’t caught them fooling around before. What disturbs you the most, that they are doing it outside during the day or that they are doing it at all? Did you think they only had sex twice, once for you and once for me?” Johnnie asked.

The girl blushed at that. “I know they’ve done it more than twice.” She pointed at the wall between her bedroom and her parents’ bedroom. “They get kind of loud sometimes.”

“And I’ve seen them skinny-dipping in the pool late at nights sometimes,” he admitted. Johnnie looked back out the window. “Oh, oh, looks like we are going to the next round.”

Sarah looked outside again and turned beet red. Her mother was in the process of pulling her father’s shorts off. The pair stripped naked and then she pushed him down on the blanket and then crawled over him in the sixty-nine position. Sarah couldn’t see the exact details, but her mother was bobbing her head enthusiastically in her father’s lap. “Oh my God!” she repeated.

“Back in a moment,” Johnnie said. He left the room, though Sarah barely noticed. She turned back to watch her parents out by the pool. He came back a few minutes later with several books. Johnnie watched their parents for a moment and then said, “Here, you can have these. I got them online a couple of years ago, after I caught them fooling around and wanted to find out what they were doing.”

Sarah looked at what he was holding. It was three books, a large hard-cover book, and a pair of paperbacks. She took them and stared at them. “What…”

Johnnie tapped one of the paperbacks. “This one is called The Joy of Sex. It’s sort of a how-to manual on sex.”

The girl opened it and stopped after a few pages. “There’re pictures in here!”

Her brother nodded. “Drawings, actually, but it gives you the idea.” He handed her the larger hard-cover book. “This one is called the Kama Sutra. There are real photos in this one.”

Sarah flipped through the pages, her eyes opening wide. A couple dressed like an Indian prince and princess were photographed in what looked like a royal bedchamber in a lot of different positions. “Oh my God!”

Then Johnnie handed over the paperback. Sarah recognized it as a romance novel titled Pride and Passion by Jacqui Watson. “Who’s Jacqui Watson? Is she a relative?”

“I’ll tell you later.” He glanced out the window. “Looks like Round One was successful.”

Sarah looked outside and saw her mother’s head was no longer bobbing up and down but seemed to be buried in her father’s crotch. A minute later and she rolled off him, and they snuggled in each other’s arms. “Are they done?”

“Maybe. Or maybe not.” Their mother had reached down and was fondling their father’s cock. “I think they are going for some more. Listen, you watch them and then read the books. It will probably make sense then.” Johnnie chuckled and left the room.

Sarah turned back to the window and watched her parents fondle and grope each other. It was too far away to see the details, but after a few minutes, it was her mother who rolled on her back and her father who got on top, only this time they were facing each other. Her father began pushing up and down, and her mother wrapped her arms and legs around him and buried her face in his neck. They stayed in that position five or ten minutes before they both began shaking, and then they pulled apart, kissing and hugging each other after which they grabbed their clothing and walked to the office.

***

Sophia headed to the bathroom. “I am taking a shower.”

“What makes you so special? I need a shower, too,” laughed her husband.

“I have the pussy, so I make the rules!” she told him. “Isn’t that what you said in one of your books?”

Jack snorted. “Anna DeVeere wrote that, in Modern Scepter, not me.”

“Sounds like an excuse to me.” Sophia replied. “Besides, didn’t the character who said that refuse to use her pussy? She wanted to save it for marriage, so she took it up the ass instead?”

Her husband smacked her naked butt, and she wiggled it back at him as she went into the miniscule bathroom.

Jack’s office had begun life as a pool house, but before that it had been designed as a single unit modular ‘granny pod’, an ADU or accessory dwelling unit designed to be a guest house. The theory was that it could be parked on a slab in somebody’s backyard, share the main residence’s water and septic, and let granny live on the same property but retain her independence. The overall concept overlooked two critical items. First, almost all zoning and building codes wouldn’t allow more than one residence on the same building lot without a lot of lawyers and variances. More importantly, most of the children who thought granny pods were a great idea had never actually discussed them with granny. When they did raise the subject, the response was almost invariably, “What makes you think I want to live in your back yard? Forget it! If I decide to move, it’s going to be to Florida!” usually followed by words granny didn’t want her grandchildren hearing.

In the case of the Watsons, once Jack decided he needed a stand-alone office, he got a friend who sold modular homes to get the blueprints modified. Instead of specifying that it was a one-bedroom housing unit, they redrew it as a pool house. The bedroom was reclassified as a ‘changing room’, the bathroom only had a shower, not a bathtub, the kitchen was ordered without a stove, just a small refrigerator and a microwave, and the living room was classified as a ‘pool lounge’. The design sailed through the zoning process and was installed a month later.

Jack had Time-Warner run cable from the house to the new office and moved his office from the library in the house to the changing room in the pool house. In the pool lounge he brought in a couch, an armchair, and a large television. The kitchenette he filled with a variety of snacks and alcoholic beverages.

Jack made a pair of Seven and Sevens and carried them to the bathroom. “Coming in,” he announced and opened the door. “I made drinks.”

“Thank you. For some reason I am exhausted and dehydrated.”

“Probably from exercising in the back yard under the hot sun.”

Sophia turned off the shower and stepped out. Dripping water, she took a healthy swallow of her drink and took a towel off the rack. “Your turn,” she told him. “You smell like you’ve been fucking under the hot summer sun.”

“True, so true.” Jack hadn’t bothered dressing when they went into the office, so he simply drank some of his cocktail and stepped into the shower. It was too small to ask Sophia to join him, so he quickly cleaned up and stepped out of the shower. His wife was no longer in the bathroom, so he pulled his shorts back on and went out to the lounge room.

Sophia had pulled her bikini back on. “Do you think the kids saw us?” she asked.

Jack smiled and shrugged. “Maybe. Is that a problem?”

“Jack!”

“Wouldn’t be the first time somebody witnessed fornication al fresco in the back yard.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think I ever mentioned this to you, but I saw my grandparents around the pool a few times.”

Sophia stopped and stared. “You saw your Grampy fucking your Grammy out at the pool?” Jack grinned and nodded. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed.

“It was sort of like today. They were outside at the pool, and I got home from school early. I went up to my room and looked out, and they were sixty-nining just like we were.”

“Get out! For real? How old were they?”

Jack shrugged. “I was about Sarah’s age, so they had to be in their sixties. Anyway, sixty-nine was the least of it. After a few minutes they rolled apart. The next thing I knew, Grammy was laying on her stomach and Grampy was kneeling behind her lubing himself up with the suntan lotion.”

“Lubing himself…you mean…”

“As in he drove her down the Hershey Highway.”

“Oh my God!”

Jack smiled. “Oh, yeah. The window was open, too, so I heard everything. It was definitely not the first time Grammy had been down the Highway, either. She was very enthusiastic about the drive.”

Sophia laughed at that and finished tying the strings on her bikini top. “I would have never guessed. And what about you? Did you…” She made a pumping motion with her right hand. Jack simply smiled. “Men are such pigs!”

Jack just shrugged and smiled.

***

Dinner that night was cheeseburgers, with Jack grilling them on the patio and Sarah prepping the buns and warming up some baked beans. Johnnie had already left in his Mini Cooper on a date with his girlfriend; he would have preferred a larger car, but his father had told him that it was physically impossible for anybody to fool around in a Mini Cooper. Sophia spent an hour in the master bathroom preparing for after dinner. She came down when her husband yelled up the stairs.

“Wow! You look great!” Jack said.

Sophia smiled and said, “Thank you! You like?”

“Is that a trick question? A man might not like it?” Sophia was wearing a flirty mid-thigh-length strapless linen sundress with a tube top, along with ankle-strapped spike-heeled sandals.

“Wow, Mom! All dressed up?” commented Sarah.

“Dad and I are having a date night,” Sophia replied.

“Are you going out or something?”

Sophia smiled at her daughter. “It’s more like the or something.”

Jack coughed as he heard that, which earned him a smile from his wife. He just rolled his eyes at her.

After dinner, Sarah was assigned kitchen cleanup. Sophia and Jack, on the other hand, headed out to the pool house carrying a bottle of champagne and holding hands. Sarah hurried through loading the dishwasher and then headed up to her bedroom. She closed the door and pulled the books her brother had given her from the bottom drawer of her dresser.

She glanced at the smaller paperback. Pride and Passion looked like an average romance novel, with a studly guy wearing an open shirt wrapping his arms around a beautiful woman in a dress with a very low cut top. She wondered who Jacqui Watson was but set the book aside for later. The Joy of Sex was a larger paperback, and the cover was tame, but she had seen earlier that there were drawings of a couple having sex inside. The people looked odd, though, with older hair styles and clothing, like from an older time.

That was a preview of The Novelist. To read the rest purchase the book.

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