Moody for You (Lisa Wu #02)

I was in a mood. But that's every girl's right, isn't it? I remember what my mother used to say: she's in one of her moods again. It meant I'd done something bad, which was all too easy back then. But this wasn't like that at all -- this was a good mood, sort of. Restless and irresponsible, with no good cause. A just-let-out-for summer sort of feeling.

By rights I should have been weary from a full-on day at work. And I was. Perhaps I was overtired, another of my mother's expressions. I had pushed on through tiredness and out the other side to a state of manic energy.

We'd finally closed a deal we'd been working on for weeks. All the work I'd done would now be handed over to other people -- who would no doubt make a complete mess of it. But right now I couldn't care less. All that time spent teasing out from the customer what it was they really wanted, something only tenuously related to what they thought they wanted, or (queue eye roll) what they said they wanted -- it was as if all that had been done by some other Lisa. The Lisa of the past and she wasn't me anymore. I was free.

My job here is done, I could have said as I sauntered out the door. I didn't say it but I did saunter, kept sauntering all the way to the bus stop, again for the short walk back to Paul's house. It was that sort of mood.

I let myself in and there he was, slumped on the couch, peering into the screen of his phone. "Hi honey, I'm home." Mood I was in, it sounded kind of witty. I slipped off my shoes, then I stopped. I was still wearing my work clothes -- a prim business suit. I had no idea what I wanted to do next, but whatever it was, I didn't want to be doing it dressed like this. Problem was, I hadn't officially moved in with Paul (not yet) and I couldn't remember whether I had left any casual clothes here to change into. Never mind, my mood told me, there's an easy solution to that. I unhitched my skirt and slid it off, followed by my pantyhose. After carefully hanging the skirt on the back of a chair so it wouldn't get crinkled, I skipped across the room and parked myself down next to my man.

I'm proud of my legs, and I've every right to be. Not especially long, but shapely and silky smooth. All sorts of wax and potions have been expended on them over the years and yet they spend the bulk of their time hiding shyly beneath my sensible career-lady skirts and stockings. Today was a day for getting my money's worth.

I didn't say anything, just let out a gentle sigh as I wriggled into place, hands around a bicep and head on shoulder. A tiny bit of that weariness seeped out from behind my defenses and that only made it better.

"How was your day?" he asked.

"Dunno." My head was still buried in his shoulder. "Don't care. It's over and I never intend to think about it again."

"Um, okay."

I opened my eyes, peered up at Paul's face, noting that his eyes were directed downwards, in the direction of those legs stretched out before him. I gave another little wriggle, just for the sensation of those puppy-fat thighs and sheer calves of mine sliding over one another, rubbing against the rough surface of Paul's jeans. Some people have high blood sugar levels -- me, I have naturally high levels of vanity.

Then I did an impulsive thing.

I don't know where it came from, a spinoff of this peculiar mood I suppose, and from thinking about my mother. The thought just popped into my head from some rebellious corner of my mind, went straight for my mouth before the more sensible and censorious parts of my brain could stop it.

"I've never told you about my wedding night, have I?"

"Are you sure you want to?" Paul angled his head around to look at me. "What are we talking about here -- a horror story?" He raised an eyebrow. "A comedy?"

I thought about this, gave a sly grin. "It's what it says on the label, hon. Erotica."

"You want to tell me about how you fucked?"

"Aren't you curious?"

What on earth had I been thinking? That I had briefly been married wasn't a secret. Paul knew, too, about how I had grown up in a religious community. But we had never really talked about it. I'm not sure why. It's not like it's some deep dark secret I keep repressed. The subject just hadn't come up until now. That's all.

Like more than a few of the fabulous ideas that pop into my head, this one wasn't faring so well in the daylight. Given the chance, the more sensible parts of me would have voted to bail out now before it was too late. But I'm a girl who finishes what she starts. Paul's concern was touching, but I also found myself a little irritated that he wasn't showing greater curiosity. This was an important chapter in the story that should matter more to him than any other: me, myself, and Lisa. I was damned if I was going to back off now.

It was an arranged marriage, of course, but I was past the age of consent so it wasn't like any laws were being broken.

I call it a religious community in polite company but that's just to spare my dignity. It was a cult, pure and simple. Not that I bear it any huge grudge. For one thing, it was thanks to the cult that my parents were able to move here in the first place. They got mixed up with some missionary back in China and ended up having the community sponsor their emigration. They arrived when I was just four, so for my childhood the community was all I knew.

You couldn't call me innocent -- I'd had it drubbed into me from an early age that I was a sinner like the rest of us. But I was naïve. And there is a sense in which weddings are wasted on adults, can only be fully appreciated by teenage girls.

"Hmm," said Paul, filing this observation away for later reference.

There was a clique of us. Four girls, all in our late teens. Being slightly older than the others I was the first to be chosen for marriage, and as you could imagine we talked about nothing else for months beforehand. Vanity has never been far from my nature, and being the focus of all this gossip and clucking only dragged me deeper in. I can't say I wasn't a willing participant.

But we didn't talk about sex. You may find that hard to believe but we just didn't. To that extent the brain-washing had worked. As close as we got was my girlfriends cooing about how handsome my prospective husband was. I'd reached such imperial heights as clique-leader and attention center by this point that they wouldn't have dared to say anything else, but the truth was he wasn't that bad. His face was unobjectionable, if bland, and the community was big on manual labor. That can have positive effects on a young man.

This -- that he looked good from a distance -- was about as much as I knew about the guy I was about to pledge my life to. He hadn't grown up in the community but joined in his late teens, rescued from somewhere or other. So although he was only a few years older than me, I had never spent much time in his company. Looking back, I suspect I was a reward, offered up to help keep him loyal.

Anyway, cut to the chase. The wedding day happened and was over and then the wedding night came. Suddenly I was on my own. All my jabbering friends melted away, leaving me, no longer queen of the court, just a girl in a frock, property of this man I didn't really know -- and worse (as far as I was concerned) not entirely sure about what would happen next, nor -- worse still -- how I was expected to act.

After a day that had been minutely choreographed, if only in my own mind, I was now in a situation for which I had no script to follow. It wasn't that I had no sense of what was to come, the possibilities must all have been there at a subliminal level. It was rather that my conscious awareness was split between, on the one hand, trying to appear innocent and demure (so naïve was I that I had no idea there was no need to act), and on the other a fear of doing something inappropriate that would reveal just how naïve I truly was. I became entirely passive, not because that is my nature (it isn't), but as a hastily improvised strategy for getting through this situation without embarrassing myself.

Whatever I might have expected from him, it wasn't a lecture on theology.

He had carried me over the threshold, plonked me down in the middle of the bedroom. "Let us pray," he announced.

I was surprised to put it mildly. But at least this was something I knew how to do. I put my hands together and bowed my head.

"Dear Lord, I ask you to give your blessing to this union. I ask also a special favor of you -- to send down your grace to your child Lisa. She will have been taught about the sin of fornication ..."

I hadn't actually. I guess the men's Bible class covered different ground to ours. Still, there was something in the sound of the word that hinted at what it meant. It wasn't that I was ignorant of the basic facts of marital consummation, just its finer points and its etiquette.

"... that fornication is a temptation sent by the Devil. But the Devil is incapable of true originality, can only work by corrupting that which you Lord have given us as a gift. Where the Devil turns love into sin, the sanctity of marriage turns sin back into love. Help Lisa, I beseech you Lord, to welcome the physical love between a husband and wife as your gift, one that is not to be spurned. Lisa may feel uncertainty, Lord, about what is about to happen. Maybe even fear. I ask you Lord to take away her fears and her concerns, to help her to understand that to truly worship you she must accept your grace in all its forms, to open herself up to the full intensity of the Holy Spirit, even as it manifests itself as physical sensation.

"Finally, Lord, I thank you for Lisa's great beauty, for her innocence and her purity of spirit. I accept these things, dear Lord, and promise to cherish them I as would cherish anything that is your gift. Amen"

"Amen," I echoed.

I was too baffled by this unexpected turn of events to pay all that much attention to the exact wording, though I expect I got the general gist. That bit about my great beauty didn't go unnoticed either.

You could be forgiven for thinking that spontaneous outbursts of prayer like this would be entirely normal for us in the community. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Prayer, in my experience, had always been more like recitation. Ad libbing was strongly frowned upon. More than that, our formal devotions were so onerous that the idea of praying on our own time simply never crossed our minds. Not mine at least. It would be like continuing your day job as an evening hobby. It just didn't happen.

I can only assume my husband grew up in a different tradition.

Compounding this oddity, there was also something flat and metronomic about his delivery, suggesting that maybe this was something he was reciting from memory after all. Just not from any prayer book I had ever encountered.

He hadn't finished. "Do you know what the greatest gift a wife can give to her husband?" His tone was still somewhat stilted, some of the words catching huskily in his throat, as if they didn't quite have a legitimate right to be there.

While not to speak is hardly my natural state, the oddity of the situation had rendered me wordless. I managed to eek out a tentative "No."

"It is to feel pleasure at his touch." He intoned this like he was Moses coming down the mountain (the Sunday school play version).

I looked up to see him peering down at me, as if looking for some sort of response. "Let's get you out of that dress," he added, dismissing my impassive blankness with a resort to more practical matters.

My dress was rather plain by wedding dress standards, still the best the community had to offer. It buttoned at the back and required another person's help to remove. I turned to give him access, holding still as he fumbled his way from one button to another. The dress finally fell to my feet and I stepped out of it. Underneath I was wearing a chemise, light but still modest enough to pass as a summer dress.

"Stay there," he instructed. He picked up the wedding dress and carried it over to the wardrobe, hanging it carefully on a hanger. It seemed an oddly meticulous act for a man and I awarded him a small mark of approval on behalf of the sisterhood. That dress was far from new and would see service on many girls after me.

Returning, he stood in front of me, briefly looking into my eyes before I turned them down, an act more of embarrassment than submission. "Hands up," he said, bending down to take my chemise by the hem, lifting it up and over my head. A wriggle of my elbows and it was free. He disposed of the garment, this time by tossing it over the back of a chair.

"Turn around."

Again I obeyed. The whole performance was a perfunctory echo of the pre-wedding preparations -- when I had suffered to stand like a clothes mannequin as my mother and friends fussed about with pins in their mouths. Then I had been full of instructions and opinions; now I was grateful that things appeared to be progressing without requiring any input from me.

He unhooked my bra and cast it aside. My hands twitched, an instinct telling them to cover the nakedness of my breasts, to hide their smallness. An effort of will brought them back by my sides.

Still behind me, he knelt down, unhooked my girdle and slipped a finger of each hand under the elastic, sliding my underwear down my legs. Again I stepped to one side so he could take the garment and place it on the chair beside bra and chemise. My stockings followed soon after.

There I was, entirely naked and exposed. The sect doesn't believe in luxury, certainly not central heating, so as much as I understood the erotic potential in the scene I was equally as conscious of the chill in the air. My nipples had reacted to one or the other and were protruding taut and firm, making their presence felt as a subtle tension.

"You really are incredibly beautiful. Turn around."

I did as I was told, slowly rotating under his gaze. A rebellious image flashed through my brain: the chickens-on-a-spit at the reception.

"Mmmm, roast chicken," said Paul, interrupting my flow. I shushed him and continued.

"Does it feel good to be admired?"

Under normal circumstances I liked nothing better. These were not circumstances I had ever experienced before. I whispered, "Yes." It seemed the right thing to say.

"You're turning a little red in the face. That's perfectly natural, you know? I'd expect nothing less."

"Yes," I repeated. I was bursting to speak but could find no other words to offer. This inability to contribute to the conversation was only adding to my embarrassment.

"Don't be so hunched," he told me. "Shoulders back, chest out. Like a soldier on parade." He touched me on the upper arm, the first touch that hadn't been part of the perfunctory undressing. "Don't fight your blush. Let it have its way. That's right, adopt a more open stance. You are showing your husband all there is to show, opening yourself up to me totally. It's meant to feel good. Does it?"

I wasn't going to say yes for a third time so I gave a little moue of acceptance instead. He wasn't entirely wrong. I felt completely exposed. My mind threw in another perverse vision -- this time of standing in just this pose before the entire community, something I would never consider in a million years. And yet I was doing this because -- apparently -- this was how it was done. The rules of the game, whatever they might be. It removed any sense of personal volition or responsibility, a not unwelcome kind of freedom. He was right. Embarrassment is a powerful emotion, one that refuses to keep within its own bounds, leaking out to ignite others of equal or even greater power. The pit I felt in my stomach was evolving into something warmer and lower down.

He took his shirt off and that did nothing to spoil the moment. Like I said, all that working on the community farm had done him no harm at all.

He went over to the bed and pulled back the sheets. Returning he took me by the hand and led me to it.

"Lie down." His voice was husky. If it seemed like he was following a script, there was no doubt that the scene we were playing was having its effects on him as well as me.

Paul interjected. "I suspect hubby had been watching some videos that a good Christian boy shouldn't ought to be watching."

"You think?" I considered this for a moment. "The Beginners' Guide to Crash-Grooming Virgins, perhaps?" I ponded a moment longer. "When you think of what it might have been, I suppose I should be grateful. Shame nobody showed the video to me, though. I might have had a better idea of what I was supposed to be doing."

Paul just harrumphed, so I continued the story. As instructed, I was lying down now, flat out on the bed.

"Now stretch out your body as far as you can. Imagine you are a cat in the sunshine. Reach your arms above your head, arch your back and raise your hips. Clear your mind of all thought and focus solely on your body, on the sensations you are feeling."

Keeping my promise, I honored and obeyed.

"Big stretch ... now relax. Close your eyes and let every muscle in your body go loose. I'm still here. Open your legs slightly. Imagine you are a gift who's just been unwrapped, laid out for me to appreciate in all your glory."

Wherever he'd got this stuff from, it was doing its job. Meanwhile the chill air was like a million tiny needles, caressing every inch of my skin and reminding me of its presence. I was conscious of this, of my nipples pressing upwards, of the tension at the top of my thighs.

For a time nothing happened. He left me to bathe in this sensuous limbo, the time only making the sensations intensify.

I opened my eyes. I had done my time looking after children, small boys as well as small girls. But nothing had prepared me for this. Could such a thing fit inside me? The pit returned to my stomach with extra force. But the terror of being skewered by such a thing came with a beguiling sensation of anticipation. The pit in my stomach sunk south again, taking that added force with it.

Something of my reaction must have shown on my face. I had just paid my husband one of the greatest compliments a woman can pay a man -- albeit inadvertently -- and his smile told me it hadn't gone unnoticed. Meanwhile, still far from sure what exactly was expected of me, I continued to lie there as inert as he had commanded me to be. Perhaps I didn't need to talk. Maybe those upthrust nipples were saying all that needed to be said.

I wasn't an unwilling victim in all this, you understand? I was obedient, but I was also a young woman keen to enter the adult world, impatient to discover what this thing is that's so important nobody is allowed to talk about it. I wasn't ignorant of arousal, more that I had sublimated it. The same way our community had sublimated sex, or at least that part of the community open to teenage girls.

As for my husband, I was too oblivious of anything outside myself to tell you how he was rating my performance (except for the obvious indicator, which was pointing up). For all I know he was as nervous as I was, terrified that this long-fantasized moment would go off-script and spiral into disaster. I don't know. I was too firmly ensconced inside myself to pay much attention to him.

Mind you, the way he kept telling me how beautiful I was certainly wasn't hurting his chances of a successful reenactment.

"Someone must have tipped him off about you," Paul suggested.

Paul thought he was being smug, but I wasn't having any of that. "Maybe they did," I replied airily. What's the point of vanity if you can't feel vain about being vain? That's what I say.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, things were heating up. At his command I had closed my eyes again. I felt a fingertip brush across first one nipple then another, triggering a little shudder.