Velvet is the Excised Skin of Night

Because "Giddy with Liddy Doesn't Seem Right"

This story was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a diverse, exclusive online club consisting of writers, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, etc. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. The theme for the upcoming May issue is “Death.”  If you are a strange soul who writes or creates, learn more about joining the STSC here.

If you are a regular reader of “I Won’t Keep You,” you won’t be surprised about the body-focused content of this piece, but be aware - not beware - that it is definitely more graphic than my other pieces. Also, for Symposium pieces, I often give myself an unrestricted word count. Enjoy!

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Before and beyond the Watergate break-in, Liddy had wackier plans up his sleeve. One focused on air-conditioning or, rather, the sabotage of air-conditioning. The plan was to compromise the a/c at the Miami Democratic National Convention in 1972. Imagine the disruption and the heat. Not just the heat of the saturated capacity of Miami’s humidity but of the saturated capacity of white men wearing suits in a south coastal July.

Brilliant, really, if you think about it. And he was thinking about it. It was one of the many random pieces of trivia his passed-away wife used to excitedly share with him. Sometimes he swore she talked just to drown out her own mind. It never occurred to him that her chatter was an apparently futile attempt at connection. Watching his new nude girlfriend on her knees in front of the forced air vent reminded him of this tidbit of conditioned air history. Faith’s barely-there pubic hair parted in the artificial breeze. She was as loyal as her name. Only a few months into their affair and just five days ago, she enthusiastically helped embalm his wife, Sarah, whose death was a quick kill by poisoning.

He remembered that night clearly, not the killing but the carrying. He was surprised at the fresh heft of Sarah’s slim body. “So there is a difference between playing dead and being dead,” he muttered under his labored breath.

“What, babe?” asked Faith.

“Nothing, hun, just thinking about burden,” he answered.

“Oh sure sure,” she mumbled distractedly. Faith was impatient for the reanimation of her new playmate.

He watched as Faith washed his wife with handfuls of excessively scented lather. A sudsy knuckling of limp flesh made his own flesh erect, and it didn’t surprise him one bit. While Faith was in charge of the prep and bathing, he was the one who was tasked with handling the abbreviated two-step embalming process, the best and least expensive preservation technique for their home-death. He expected Sarah to be plumper post-embalming, but she was simply lovely, and finally quiet.

Faith arranged the bedroom with romantic lighting and an effusion of flowers.

“I even bought new silk sheets,” she squealed as he carried the first of his two wives into their now polygamous wedding bed.

Faith positioned her warm body next to Sarah’s cold flesh; two pieces of driftwood in varying stages of decay. He straddled Faith first, and slid his big fingers inside her, an act he called cunt spelunking. He entered her as easily as slipping under the surface of a still, summer lake.

The way he made love to Faith was different than how he made love to Sarah; Sarah preferred to be teased, Faith preferred to be fucked. He and Faith moved in synchronous rhythm, from slack to rapid. She was soaked and squirming, a raging river under the bridge of his body. He fucked her until her head lolled as lifeless as his first wife’s, and then he abruptly pulled out. A panting frustration erupted from Faith’s gaping throat. He was now slow fucking Sarah. Her ambient body was cool and dry, a shocking and exciting change from the drenched heat of Faith.

Sarah’s cool, unresponsive vagina reminded him of his boyish obsession with fucking cartons of ice cream in the depths of the dark pantry. He’d cum into his own hand because stirring himself into the family’s dessert nauseated his sensitive soul. But he couldn’t give up the slop and clot of frozen cream.

Except Sarah wasn’t the silk of heavy custard, she was rough friction. At least it made up for her looseness. Faith whimpered, begging him to fuck her instead of his first wife. 

If I only had two cocks, he thought, not for the first time. He fell back onto Faith, bundles of her blond hair filled his fists as he slid into her heat. His cock was cold after making love to his first wife, and Faith thrilled at the temperature difference. She’d fucked herself before with a dildo made of ice, but where ice melts, the worst flesh does is deflate, so she shoved her body towards his, wanting to be glacial, wanting to increase the retreat of heat. He shoved back, forcing her hips into the bed, pulsing into her like a throbbing heartbeat. As they both came, Faith released a scream that melted to a moan, a rattle from her own little death. Sarah lay listless, her eyes ever on the ceiling.

With their velvet heft, the closed curtains buffered the lovers from the rush of days, and each successive day was much like the first.

“Velvet is the excised skin of night,” he heard Faith whisper into Sarah’s ear as he fell asleep.

When Liddy came home the night of the Watergate break-in, his wife inquired after him, and it’s reported that he replied, “There was trouble. Some people got caught. I’ll probably be going to jail.”

Faith wanted Sarah’s body to be warmer. But the effort to increase the temperature of dead flesh was futile. He was coming to prefer the feel of cold flesh, and Faith knew this. Her jealousy led her to the air conditioning vent where he watched her while thinking about the convention in Miami. The blast of false arctic air hardened her clit, and she was wet with the idea of being a corpse. He stared past her, thinking about Liddy and his lonely wife.

“Maybe I’m not jealous of Sarah; maybe I want to be Sarah,” she said while rocking her pelvis against the vent’s unwilling metal mouth. Faith’s random realization woke him from his reminiscent a/c stupor.  

Faith loved being alone with Sarah when he was at work. She spent strings of minutes kissing and grabbing at Sarah’s body, but her vapid flesh gave no reply, so Faith lay on top of Sarah and jiggled her tits so that the rest of her jiggled as well. Faith’s cunt salivated at the gelatinousness of it all. But she desperately wished she could be the one to fuck Sarah for once, to penetrate her fully, to fill her not-yet-rigid body. On their sixth night as a family of three, he came home late from work to find Faith straddling his wife’s floor-board body. A normal sight for sure, until he squinted through the darkness to notice his first wife now had a cock. Faith hovered above a silicone dick that was attached askew to Sarah’s perfect pubic bone.  Faith shadowed Sarah’s hands on her breasts and ass, enjoying the icebox grip. Just as Faith descended onto the dildo’s inclination, Sarah’s body shook, and he walked his erection toward his two wives.

“Gemstone” was the code name for the program commanded by Liddy that included not just a/c sabotage but also sexual entrapment and the planned murder of a journalist. It’s difficult to think that even without Watergate, Liddy’s antics would’ve ended up undiscovered. Everything goes awry, but it doesn’t always soften the perpetrator’s confidence or mollify regret.

After a few weeks of intense passion, it became less about the sex and more about the relationship, which is what he and Faith wanted in the first place – a family. But the family was fracturing. When Faith was mad at him for coming home late or forgetting to call, she served Sarah first and then ignored him through the entire meal, all the while laughing and replying to the corpse’s unheard words.

On the night that Faith’s childish behavior finally became unbearable for him, he threw down his napkin and pulled Faith from her chair.  Her eyes widened as he pulled up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and bent her over Sarah’s flaccid lap. Faith yelped, and he growled at her, “Make a sound and I will have two dead wives.”

His stem of flesh grew towards the stream that trickled from between Faith’s thighs, and he pressed into her cunt from behind. She embraced him from the inside, a contraction of flesh and loss of thought. He grunted loudly and uncharacteristically as she muffled her own eerie exhales in her hands.

Her muscles began to relax as her shrill squeaks turned to sighs, but she couldn’t cum. He knew this, so he started to spank her with a cupped hand until her flesh went the inside of watermelon. Still, no orgasm. The rarity of this was frustrating for them both, but on top of being isolated by his two wives, this was sheer humiliation that began to build into rage.

“Temper your rage with love,” was what Sarah would always say. So he stayed anchored in Faith, static and steady.

Suddenly, she felt something cool and flimsy slap against her ass.

Thud, thud, thud.

The power of the smacks stung her skin.

Thud, thud, thud.

She was being hit so hard by something so soft that it rippled to the core of her.

Thud, thud, thud.

And at the moment she realized he was spanking her with Sarah’s dead, limp hand, Faith came hard in his first wife's lap and gripped his cock with a gush. He stayed motionless inside her so that his ejaculate wouldn’t drip from her body when she stood up. He didn’t like things that leaked.

Liddy was a member of the “White House Plumbers,” who were ever on the lookout for leaked information that could ruin the Nixon administration. Maybe they should have greenlighted the a/c sabotage and put Watergate on the back burner. But not all kitchens have stoves, and not all wives cook.

Chose this 10-year old pic to accompany this piece because of the vent.