Wedding Heat: One in the Hand

  eXcessica publishing

  Wedding Heat: One in the Hand © April 2012 by Giselle Renarde

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental. All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.

  This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be access by minors.

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  Cover design © 2012 Giselle Renarde

  First Edition April 2012

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  Wedding Heat: One in the Hand

  By Giselle Renarde

  Cora glanced into the back seat to see what the kids were up to. Nobody had said anything in a while, and she always found silences unsettling. “Hard to believe little Maggie’s getting married.”

  Joey didn’t even look up from his video game thingamajig. “Yeah Mom, you’ve only said that forty times.”

  “Don’t speak that way to your mother,” Dan shot back.

  All these years married and Dan was still Cora’s white knight. Her heart always felt full of affection when he came to her defense. She reached across the bench seat to stroke her husband’s thigh.

  “We all know Mom has a mind like a sieve,” Dan went on with a sly smirk. “No need to remind her.”

  Cora smacked Dan’s leg, then pulled her hand away, folding it in her lap. What a nerve.

  “But if we didn’t remind her, how would she remember?” Joey laughed in that snotty way of his. Cora had hoped he’d grow out of it by the time he hit adulthood, but no such luck. Her son had always been a pest, and age only strengthened his snark.

  “Fine.” She tried to think up some comeback that would really impress them, but she didn’t have it in her. “Just… fine.”

  The boys were still laughing when Vanessa piped up from beside her brother. “Maggie’s not that little, Mom. She’s two years older than me.”

  “I know,” Cora said, even though she’d forgotten that as well. Off the top of her head, she couldn’t even recall precisely how old Vanessa was. Twenty-four? No, twenty-six. God, the kids were getting up there in age. When the heck did that happen?

  “What was the deal between you and Maggie?” Dan asked, glancing at their daughter in the rear view mirror. “You were like two peas in a pod when you were little.”

  “No we weren’t,” Vanessa snapped.

  “Sure you were.” Dan wouldn’t let up once he got his hooks in, but Cora was glad she wasn’t the target of his mockery this time. “Come to think of it, you had a bit of a crush on that cousin of yours growing up.”

  “Shut up, Dad!” Vanessa was a toddler all over again, shouting in that pouty tantrum voice she brought out for just such occasions. “No I didn’t. Jesus, can’t you just… ugh, you are so annoying.”

  “Vanessa had a crush on our cousin?” Joey cackled, still without looking up from his video game.

  Dan turned his head and nodded. “Huge crush.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road!” Cora reached for the steering wheel just in case. “And leave Vanessa alone. You know she’s sensitive.”

  “I’m not sensitive.” Vanessa’s voice was steeled, but the echo of a pout remained. “I just don’t like being accused of something that isn’t true, okay? What’s so wrong with that?”

  “Dad, did Vanessa really have a crush on Maggie?” Joey asked again, as though his sister wasn’t within earshot. He was such a little instigator.

  And his father was no help.

  “Oh boy, yeah,” Dan chuckled. “Remember, Ness, you used to dress up like little brides and say you were going to marry each other when you grew up?”

  “That never happened.” Vanessa wore a scowl, but Cora could see the embarrassment underneath. Nobody liked to be reminded of childhood follies.

  “I’ve got pictures somewhere in the basement,” Dan teased. “I’ll dig them out after we get home from the wedding.”

  “That’s enough, now,” Cora hissed, but nobody in this family ever listened to her. How could she change the subject? Anything to protect her daughter from yet more humiliation. “Hey kids, this wedding will be the first time you meet your new Aunt Farrah. Remember not to call him Uncle Ralph anymore—I mean, not to call her Uncle Ralph.”

  “Who’d have thought good old Uncle Ralph was a tranny, huh?” Joey clacked away at his video game.

  “Umm, how about everyone?” Dan said.

  “Don’t use that word,” Cora scolded her son. Sometimes she felt like that was all she ever did, scold and chide, but she’d always been the first to rise up in her brother’s defense—her sister’s defense. “Your Aunt Farrah is a male-to-female transsexual, and she doesn’t want to be known as Ralph anymore, so we’re not going to call him Ralph anymore. Capisce, kids?”

  Joey couldn’t seem to unglue his gaze from that damn machine for even two seconds. “Hey, you saw him at Great-Aunt Geraldine’s funeral, didn’t you Dad? What did he look like as a chick?”

  “What did she look like?” Cora corrected. And then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “As a woman.”

  Cora braced herself.

  But Dan said, “Good. Really good.”

  Of course, just when Cora was about to lean in and kiss her husband on the cheek, he had to go one step further and say, “I’d trade him for your mother in a heartbeat.”

  Cora slapped his thigh again, but smiled. “You’d trade her for me.”

  “Not really.” Dan turned his gaze to her, a soppy grin plastered across his lips. “I wouldn’t trade you for the world.”

  Though her heart skipped and her belly flopped, Cora bit her lip and shook her head. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “You’re just too good to be true,” he sang at her. “Can’t take my eyes off of you.”

  “Gross,” Vanessa moaned.

  For once in his life, Joey agreed with his sister. “Yeah, seriously! Get a room.”

  “We have a room,” Cora shot back. She finally had a zinger. “Unfortunately we have to share it with our two ungrateful children.”

  In the backseat, Vanessa slipped off her hoodie and curled it into a pillow, resting it between her head and the car window. “Why couldn’t we get a suite? There’s no way I’m sharing a bed with Jerkasaurus Rex over here.”

  Cora shuffled through the glove compartment, searching for the hotel booklet. “Joey will be sleeping on the pull-out couch. Your father and I will have one Queen-size bed, and you will have the other, Ness.”

  “Why can’t Vanessa sleep on the couch?” Joey asked, though he seemed to say the words by rote, like they were expected of him.

  “You fall asleep on the couch at home five nights a week, Joe.” Dan yie
lded for the first spot of traffic they’d seen in almost an hour. “You can take the pull-out.”

  “Anyway, it’s just sleeping arrangements.” Cora flipped through the pamphlet from Maggie’s wedding resort. She turned to show the kids all the glossy pictures, as though they were little again and it was a storybook. “Look at everything we can do at this resort. There’s a spa for the women, golfing for the men…”

  “Why?” Vanessa bellowed. Her absent voice was so suddenly huge it made Cora cringe. “Why spa for women, golf for men? What if I don’t want to go to a goddamn spa? What if dad doesn’t want to waste his day dicking around a stupid golf course? It’s all so fucking arbitrary. You’ve got a cock you do this, you’ve got a pussy you do that. I’m so sick of this world.”

  Joey muttered something about lesbian feminists, and Cora didn’t want to agree with him, but she couldn’t help herself, internally. The most she could say out loud was, “Honey, watch your language.”

  That moment of searing emotional intensity expanded into eternity, and Cora would have given anything to just open the door and roll out of the vehicle while it was still in motion. She could scarcely breathe in the midst of her daughter’s seething.

  As much as she loved her kids, she always felt at odds with them. Always. But Dan had this incredible capacity to bridge any gap. He said, “I agree with you, Vanessa. Hell, I’d rather get a pedicure than go golfing.”

  Vanessa smiled like the cat that got the canary.

  Joey mumbled, “Gay,” and Vanessa punched him in the arm.

  “Oww!” It must have been hard, because Joey dropped his video thingy. “Mom, Vanessa fucked up my game!”

  “Language,” Cora chided before turning her gaze on Vanessa. “Ness, violence is not the answer.”

  With a deep sigh, Vanessa leaned into her hoodie-pillow. “Whatever.”

  Cora’s heart hurt now, as it did whenever the family argued. Her skin felt itchy, too, and she scratched her wrist until Dan set a big hand across her fingers, a silent but necessary chastisement. “Why don’t you see if we get a radio station out here?”

  Good idea. Music would clear the air.

  Cora fiddled with the dials until she picked up a strong signal. By some miracle of nature, the station played a perfect combination of adult contemporary and classic rock. The kids didn’t complain, and when Cora at last worked up the courage to turn around, she found that Vanessa had fallen asleep.

  Even in those army-green pants and a T-shirt that read “Pussy Club, New Members Welcome,” Vanessa looked just like a doll. Such a pretty face. It was a shame she insisted on cutting her hair short, and refused to wear make-up.

  Cora had once asked her daughter, “Why can’t you be a lipstick lesbian? You don’t have to look a fright just because you go out with girls.” But Vanessa had responded by bolting to her bedroom and slamming the door.

  Joey had finally given his game a rest. Now he stared out the window as they drove past lichen-covered sheets of pink-hued rock. As much as she and Dan had complained about the cost of staying the whole weekend at some luxurious resort just to witness the marriage of their niece to a notorious good-for-nothing, she had to admit it was nice to get away from the city.

  “Maybe we could rent a cottage this year.” Cora reached forward to turn down the volume on the radio. Joey was now snoring in the back seat, a perfect complement to his sister on the other side of the car. “A little cabin on a lake, just the two of us?”

  Dan didn’t seem to take the hint. “All in all, this weekend’s gonna eat up our vacation budget for the year.”

  “Yeah.” With a resigned sigh, Cora gazed out the window, watching the rock face recede and pine trees rise up in its place.

  “Doesn’t seem right to ask the family to dish out all this money just to come to their wedding,” Dan said. “Bad enough we had to buy them a four-hundred-dollar sugar bowl.”

  Cora laughed. “It wasn’t four hundred dollars, and it wasn’t a sugar bowl.”

  “We didn’t go overboard like this when we got married. We registered for the basics, for things we really needed.”

  “But we were establishing a household,” Cora reasoned, watching the firm line of her husband’s jaw as he chewed on her words. “Maggie and what’s-his-name have been living together for years. They already have everything they need. The rest is just gravy.”

  “Exactly! Gravy on my dime.” Dan cruised along, oblivious to Cora’s hand sneaking in next to his thigh.

  He was so handsome. Cora caught herself thinking so more and more these days. Men were lucky that way—they only got better with age. Dan was stronger now than he’d been when they got married, and the grey sneaking in around his temples made him look inarguably distinguished. She wished he wouldn’t dye his hair. It would look better if the silver took over completely, but Dan had his pride. Everybody did.

  When Cora’s fingers met the bare skin of his knee, he jumped and flicked her hand away. Cora was just about to feel hurt when he chuckled and said, “Sorry, I thought you were a spider.”

  Cora smiled and moved in closer. “You know, you shouldn’t have teased Vanessa like that.”

  “Like what?” Dan gasped when Cora petted his thigh, searching for something.

  “About Maggie,” Cora said. “Maggie was the first person in the world Vanessa came out to. They were only young then, maybe fifteen or so, but Maggie wasn’t very nice about it. That’s what caused the rift between them. It set Ness back terribly. She didn’t tell anyone else she was a lesbian for two years after that.”

  “I didn’t know.” Dan glanced down every so often, following the path of Cora’s insistent hand across the crotch of his khaki shorts. “Ness never told me.”

  “There are some things a girl only shares with her mother,” Cora consoled.

  “Still,” he said, obviously hurt. “I thought Vanessa and I were close.”

  Cora smiled. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” She found the button on his shorts and forced it through the hole.

  “What are you doing?” Dan hissed, pulling away, though he really had nowhere to go. “The kids are right there!”

  With a shrug, Cora pulled down the zipper on his fly. “The kids are fast asleep and, anyway, they’re not kids anymore.”

  Dan focused on the road. There were no cars around at this stage, but he seemed to pretend he didn’t notice Cora pressing her hand inside his shorts, finding his cock hard in anticipation.

  “What are you doing?” he asked again, stammering this time, his voice a raspy whisper.

  “Nothing,” Cora chimed back at him, coyly rubbing his erection overtop of his black jockey-boxers. He even wore sexier underwear than she did, these days. And, god, was he ever stiff, his cock hot and throbbing against his undies. She had to feel it against her skin.

  “Stop!” Dan chastised as she fished inside the slit in his underwear, pulling out his hard-on. “What if they wake up?”

  Cora glanced back quickly, but it was hard to look away from Dan’s big dick. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, just shut up and let me get you off.”

  There was a faint growl in the back of Dan’s throat, but he didn’t argue this time. He shifted in his seat, his knuckles white, obviously struggling to focus on the road. Cora, for her part, couldn’t keep her eyes off the bead of precum glistening at the head of her husband’s cock.

  It felt terribly naughty to be doing this. There were dozens of dirty words floating around Cora’s head. She wanted to say, “God, your cock looks good” or “If it wasn’t for that steering wheel, I’d plant my face in your lap and suck that hard-on until you filled my throat with cum.” Yes, she wanted to say those things, even whisper them, but she wouldn’t risk waking the kids.

  The thought of Vanessa and Joey knowing what their parents were up to in the front seat turned Cora’s stomach. She couldn’t begrudge Dan his trepidations. She understood. But the back of their bench seat was high, shoulder level,
and it stretched all the way from the driver’s side to the passenger’s. Even if the kids woke up right now, they could never see what was going on.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this,” Dan said in a low, almost inaudible voice.

  “Why?” Cora stroked his hot erection in her fist. “You married or something?”

  Dan chuckled, a strained, pleading sort of sound. She wasn’t going to stop, no way, no how. Gripping the base of her husband’s shaft, Cora squeezed as hard as she could, dragging the soft outer flesh of his cock up all the way to the weeping tip.

  Oh, she loved his cockhead. It was, by a slim margin, her favourite part of his dick. There was something about that red, glistening, bulbous mushroom head that turned her on beyond reason.