All the Rules Rearranged - Chapter 2

Let's face it, "Beneath a Moonless Sky" is not what happens when you put two complete sexual novices together without a knowledge of the basic mechanics. And the sheer amount of stamina implied would only be likely in the absence of actual culmination...

Credit goes to butterflydrming for this particular aspect of the plot, though I've written it here as angst-ridden drama rather than comedy.

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Chapter 2: Fathers and Sons

He’d taken insane bets before. Bets that she could neither understand nor forgive; bets that no amount of desperation or bravado could condone, that no man with a wife and child had any right to risk. He’d taken them, sometimes, because she’d begged him not to — just as he’d drunk himself into sottish fury in some schoolboy fling of defiance against his own conscience and all nagging wives.

But this bet... hurt.

Hurt all the more because she’d let herself believe in all those promises, those kisses — it was as if he’d known just how much of a fool she was, just what she wanted to hear, and gambled on that: on the idea that he had only to whistle, and she’d come fawning back to heel like some dog left by the wayside at her master’s whim.

And he’d been right. That was what hurt the most; tears, sudden, unwanted, blurred across her eyes. No wonder he’d shrunk from telling her. No doubt they’d laughed together, he and that other — and of that betrayal, she would not even think — at just how easy it was to win a woman’s heart. A moment of kindness, a few words of flattery, a tender kiss or a sweep of melody, and they could toss her back and forth between them in some jeu de paume, and stake her future on the outcome as if she were just one more sop for a man’s wounded pride.

How dared they? How dared they? And... how could she ever trust in her marriage again?

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