As Long As They Both Shall Live
a vignette inspired by the life of Julia Pastrana, by Hyel

She's so small.

The hair on Julia's side is soft, soaped and silky under his touch. Her mouth is wide and wet, and her beard tickles his chin, but her lips are soft as any woman's. He doesn't dare to slip his tongue into her mouth, to touch her teeth. Not yet.

He closes his eyes tight, fighting the unexpected lurch in the pit of his stomach. His cock is hard as steel.

In the morning, he is gone before she wakes.

...Julia remembers washing maiden-blood off other women's sheets, years ago, when she was just a girl. She pulls hers off her marriage bed and leaves them for the maid to collect and wash. As she drops them and watches the red splotches disappear under cascading cloth, she knows that she has everything she ever dreamed of, and more than she knew to dream of, back when she danced barefoot on the hot hard road of her hometown.

She washes and begins to cloth herself, pulling the stockings on carefully, smoothing her hair with strokes before each inch that climbs up her leg.

It is a prettily shaped leg, she decides.

Her husband - my husband, her heart sings - has told her not to dance barefoot in the garden. She neglects to put on her shoes for just a while longer, opens the window, and dances to the silence and the green wet breeze of English morning, in her underwear, clean and washed and rich and married.

She knows she will be happy, now, and for the rest of her life.

-end-