Susan Carter

A helpful wife

CHAPTER ONE

"Tim! No, please don't!" Melanie Cartwright protested.

She struggled for a moment with his hand, pulling it with hesitant force from beneath the top of her thin, low-cut dress. Tim Cartwright resisted somewhat drunkenly, and then let his hand be pushed limply away.

"Melanie, for God's sake!" the young man thickly hissed. "We're married, aren't we? Jesus, you act like we were still going steady."

"Oh, darling, it's not that," she moaned in a soft whisper against him. "It's that we're in a public theater, that's all."

"What's that got to do with it?" he growled in a low voice.

"I mean… I mean, it's not even a drive-in! We can't… we can't make a spectacle of ourselves in front of all the others here. We're not teenagers any more, you know."

"Not by very much," he chuckled wetly against her ear. "I bet you just don't want your new boss to see you necking, right?"

Melanie flushed slightly, feeling her rosy cheeks flare with heat in the darkened movie theater. "No," she protested, "it's not that at all. Mr. Andersson is a married man. He knows all about love." She dropped her head to his shoulder and began to sigh gently, trying to show her husband she wasn't such a prude as she sometimes sounded. "We'll have plenty of time for loving later, when we get home!"

"Think you can stand seeing sexy films like this every night while I'm gone?" her husband, Tim, whispered suggestively.

"You… you know I don't like them, Tim," she replied, stiffening. "Besides, I'll be out in the lobby all the time I'm working. Now hush and watch the movie. You're the one who wanted to see it so badly."