Time's Harlot: Corrosive Jealousy Blossoms into a Poisonous Suffocating Weed: A Sophia Werniczewski Thriller, #2

By Brenda Kuchinsky

A capricious affair and a poisonous past.

When Sophia, a South Beach psychotherapist, decides to give up her lucrative second profession, she upsets her equilibrium.  She has been catering to the sexual needs of the Mamma's Boys of Miami Beach since her husband's murder two years ago, when he left her destitute.  Now she is rolling in money but depleted in spirit.  She meets Maria, a magnetic woman who draws her into an unprecedented affair.  An affair characterized by unpredictability, danger, and instability. Sophia is hooked.

Sophia's life is further complicated by her parents, Holocaust survivors who keep stumm about their past. Divorced in their sixties, living in the same ramshackle apartment building on the beach, and leaning on Sophia heavily, her parents make Sophia feel she is the parent and their roles are reversed. Ada, her mother, is enthralled with her decades-younger, gay boyfriend, Rudy while Max, her father is infatuated with the flirtatious histrionic Mathilde, a fellow survivor.  Sophia is not so sure Rudy and Mathilde aren't malignant forces in her parents' lives.

While Maria is becoming more and more enmeshed in Sophia's life, Sophia meets a man who becomes her new love interest.  Will Maria give her up without a struggle?

Time's Harlot, set in 1999, fifteen years prior to Time's Hostage, elucidates Sophia's paradoxical self-destructive and caregiving nature, two warring forces within her, often causing her to ride a roller coaster of battling emotions.  Her caring can deplete her and become a ruinous force. Will she disentangle herself from Maria and her parents' emotional hornet's nests? Can a self-defeating caregiver begin to care for herself? Life is full of surprises.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oedipus Press
• Release date: Aug 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386663522

Book preview

1

Rivulets of tears soaked her back. She hoped snot wouldn’t follow.

Sophia, wearing a becoming emerald green teddy, which complimented her sparkling green eyes and mahogany red curly mop, was kneeling doggy style on the vast bed heaped with velvet pillows, while the young man, helpless in the face of a flaccid penis, gripping her futilely from behind, was crying her a river, sobbing, moaning, and sighing. Broken hearted.

Okay, Donald. Are you ready for your milk and homemade cookies? Mommy baked them just for you, she consoled, turning around and taking him in her motherly arms.

I’m sorry, Mommy. I want to make love to you so much it hurts. I just can’t today, he stuttered out in between pitiful gasps.

Sophia handed him a tissue box, appraising his nakedness with a cool clinical eye.

Nice cock. Not too big. Not too small. Great body. Hard and muscular. No spare flesh or flab. But then again, he’s twenty-five to my forty-three. These Mamma’s Boys. It’s all in their heads of course. I never thought they would be so difficult. What do I know? I’m only a shrink with a twenty-year-old daughter.

Donald was happily munching away, unselfconsciously naked with a creamy milk mustache adorning his face. His tears all dried up now that he didn’t have to perform.

Now Donald I’m going to level with you. I didn’t think providing sexual services to you boys would be so difficult. This Mommy hang up is quite a stinker.

I’m sorry, Mommy. Now can I sit on your lap?

She hugged him tightly, naked on her strong supporting thighs, getting a tiny bit aroused, unlike Donald. He just wanted to be loved like a son right now.

This felt like the Pieta tableaux gone awry. Maybe this would make great performance art. An irreverent scantily clad Madonna clasping a naked Son who was thinking incestuous thoughts. It wouldn’t pay as well as sexual services. She had needed the money, or she wouldn’t be bending over for these snotty nosed kids.

He came over and handed her the five hundred dollars in five crisp, satisfyingly crackling one hundred-dollar bills after he dressed.

Two weeks. Same time?

Yes, Donald. You can count on it. Be a good boy. The full hour? she asked, pecking him on the cheek.

Yes. Of course.

She closed the door, leaning against it with a long, drawn out sigh, surveying the spacious bedroom, which had started out with standard whore’s décor, lots of red and black velvet, and ended up with a more Eastern flavor, Indian and Thai silks, elephants, teak, gold and brown. Much better. She didn’t want to be a cliché. One more tonight. This was the thousand-dollar trick. A Mamma’s Boy who liked to be punished. Corporal punishment.

There was actually less sex than she had imagined involved in her latest business venture. When she started OEDIPUS INC a year ago, she assumed she’d be exhausted from screwing not from either coddling or punishing these boys. They wanted forbidden sex with Mommy and they could afford to pay for it. But it was a lot more complicated than that. This was becoming more psychologically demanding than her day job as a psychotherapist.

Just enough time for a quick shower, a Johnny Walker Double Black, and a new teddy. Or, did this one want her in black robes with Enigma booming in the background?

2

A famished and fatigued Sophia emerged from the nondescript two story building smack in the middle of Lincoln Road. She was hiding in plain sight on the second floor behind the bustling offices of Miami Models, where she had renovated a long forgotten small office suite into a haven for rich boys, who hankered after a piece of Mommy’s ass.

Three boys a night. Three nights a week. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Therapy on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Kurt was complaining about not seeing her on weekends. But then again, Kurt was always complaining about something.

What mattered was that she could pay the mortgage and keep Lili in school. Morton, that no good bastard, had left her destitute and in debt. Even though he had been murdered, it was a stretch feeling sorry for him. That scoundrel jumped into bed with anything that moved. It had been his undoing. Call it Karma. Call it poetic justice.

I’m turning tricks. I can dress it up and plead that it’s a private boys’ club or specialized services or, however I want to fancy it up. Of course, it’s sex therapy if I ever get caught. I’m still fucking or flogging or attempting to fuck half-baked Mamma’s Boys with more money than sense and it’s wearing me out. Six more months. If the money continues to be this good, I’ll pack it in. Or I’ll have to start laundering money. My day job should support me by then. I’ll be way out of the hole.

Lost in self-confessional thought, Sophia didn’t notice a gesticulating black clad angular figure fast approaching her from across the street.

Mommy, Mommy, he shouted amidst the bustling midnight throng milling about on the carless street, a pedestrian haven. He stopped short, inches from her and locked onto her arm.

She began involuntarily pulling on her left ear with her free hand, an unconscious habit when she was stressed.

It’s Bernie. Your best boy. You must remember me from two nights ago. You rocked my world. I can’t wait for our next session, he enthused, leaning into her, sweeping his loose black hair out of his glacial blue eyes so he could fix her with them, searching for something from her. She felt like a butterfly impaled on a lepidopterist’s cardboard, imprisoned by his penetrating gaze.

Bernie. I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on. Nice to see you. She flashed on his skinny, flabby white ass under her. He loved having his buttocks kneaded.

I have to run and grab a bite. See you later. I believe we set up our next session. Don’t tell me. Mommy on top followed by brownies and hot chocolate. Brownies just the way Mommy makes them. With hazelnuts.

Hold on, hold on, Doc. I’d love to treat you. Let me buy you dinner. Van Dyke’s is still serving upstairs, he said, waving in the general direction of her favorite jazz café’s bulk, a block down the road. A six-story behemoth on a street of one and two-story buildings.

Why are you calling me Doc? she asked. Her antenna was up. This guy knew about her day job.

You’re the love doctor, aren’t you? he asked, an electric current illuminating his eyes. The reek of desperation was assaulting her senses. This guy stunk of neediness.

He had seemed tame enough in bed. Her traditional dominant position. His crying about how great it was to be with Mommy while Daddy was out of town. She had stopped listening after a while. The unfettered talking, buttocks’ kneading, and hazelnut brownies were more important than the uninspired sex.

Come on. One meal can’t hurt. I’ll pay for your time, he urged, his handsome features overlaid with something unsavory.

Against her better judgment, she relented. This wasn’t like therapy where her boundary maintenance was impeccable. He had worn her down. Her body was thrumming with anxiety, but her stomach was growling, and she couldn’t utter another word without some food and drink in her.

She let him steer her across the road, past the pleasure-seeking crowds, seated at the outdoor café, into the cool enveloping arms of the familiar dim interior, and up the stairs to the jazz. They found a tiny spot jammed into a gloomy corner in the steamy room heaving with the music-loving crowd clapping, flirting, eating, and drinking. The smell of countless colognes, booze, and sweat was curiously comforting.

Sophia sat back in her seat, sighing deeply and relaxing into a semi-stupor.

Let’s have steaks and scotch, Bernie, big man on campus, commandeered, peering at her considerable cleavage possessively.

I’m a vegetarian. How about pasta and champagne? she countered.

Bernie happily took charge, taking her suggestion and ordering pasta primavera for both of them. He followed that up with an order for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. He was like a slobbering puppy, ears at attention, tail wagging furiously, drooling to please his mistress.

This kid has money to burn. He can throw some of it my way. I don’t mind. She smiled tightly at him, too exhausted to speak. His sharp, woodsy cologne, competing with all the other aromas, was wafting her way. Vetiver, she registered appreciatively. Just like Kurt.

A couple of glasses of the bubbly animated her, dissolving the numbness that had crept over her entire body and soul. By the second bottle, alcohol’s resuscitating fingers chafed her cheeks to life. She began to stir her legs.

The crooning Brazilian singer, wearing a clingy red dress, just a few feet from them, was charging up the room with Astrid Gilberto favorites, which she was stringing out sexily for maximum effect.

As Bernie talked and she ate and drank, he began to look appealing. Downright desirable. The bland handsomeness and feral longing had magically transformed into disarming winsomeness. She was shocked when she realized she wanted him right now.

She leaned over to tip her breasts into his gaping stare while taking his hand and thrusting it between her thighs, where, when reaching her mound, he began pushing her silky panty crotch aside, scrabbling like a mouse working to attain a prized piece of cheese stashed in a difficult corner. After a few sure strokes right on the bullseye, he withdrew his glistening fingers, threw some bills on the table, and proceeded to hustle her out of the place.

Once they reached his virginal white hump-backed Porsche, crammed into the overflowing lot behind the place, he flung her into the passenger seat, scrabbled on top of her, unzipping and thrusting, coming with a bellowing leonine roar in no time.

The throbbing Sophia was still waiting for closure. She grabbed his mane and crammed his head between her legs where he began sopping up his own liquid as he sucked on her clitoris with all the vacuum power at his command. This did the trick and she bucked vigorously as a tidal wave of delight surged her to an obliterating climax.

When she roused herself, she noticed two people clapping, leering through the windshield. They had enjoyed the performance. The woman bared her tiny breasts to show solidarity before they walked away.

Let’s get out of here, she breathed, noticing Bernie collapsed in the driver’s seat, grinning from ear to ear.

3

I’m driving you home, Doc. Give me your address, Bernie insisted.

What the hell. Bayshore Drive, 4822. About thirty blocks and on the bay. I walk it all the time, she relented.

That was much better than that stuff in your office or bedroom or whatever it is. That was off the cuff spontaneous hot stuff, he babbled. You might cure me of that Mommy thing I have going on.

Bernie, I just got way too excited. And like a nice lad you helped me out. Let’s not get carried away. It’s back to buttocks and brownies and our bimonthly appointments, Sophia said. "You like the way Mommy gets on top when Daddy’s away. Let’s not spoil that. Forget this ever happened. It was great fun, but it was just one of those things. Turn left here and then the next right," she said to the pouting Bernie.

They were at her house in no time. The beloved forest green gate was gleaming its bosky welcome.

How about a nightcap, Doc? I heard that in an old movie. I wonder why they called it a nightcap. I like it, though. It has a nice ring to it. Bernie gazed at her with pleading eyes.

The allure had fled. The odor of clinging wretchedness assailed her nostrils. It disturbed her that he had replaced Mommy with Doc.

Darling Bernie. Mommy’s had a long day and needs her beauty sleep. Let’s call it a night.

She attempted a peck on the cheek. He took her head in both his tense hands and with his proficient tongue pried her lips open, gaining deep entry. After a prolonged wrestling match with her reluctant tongue, he appeared satisfied, withdrew and waved as he watched her unlock the gate and the front door before driving off in a Porsche flurry.

Sophia rushed upstairs, poured herself her scotch, customary on her whoring nights, while struggling out of her clothes. She needed a shower first. Then phone messages.

Wrapped in a crimson kimono, her unwieldy breasts threatening to topple out of the silk, a gift from her kimono-loving mother, Sophia tackled her phone messages. She wanted another scotch but knew better. Maybe some champagne before bed.

There was the weekly message from her daughter Lili, away in the Big Apple, studying fashion design at Parsons. Lili used to crank out kimonos in a quaint shop’s back room on Lincoln Road, working away in a windowless space like an enslaved nineteenth century seamstress in Lowell, Massachusetts. The shop was aptly named Kimono. Lili eventually woke up, quit, and began creating unique kimonos in her tiny kitchen, tripling her income and enjoying the work.

Sophia would call her tomorrow. It sounded like all was quiet on the Western front. Although, would she ever know if Lili had problems? They kept the relationship superficial, always skirting issues and teetering on the slippery surface. She was spending the summer at Parsons before heading for a semester abroad in Paris. Should she take it personally?

Sophia was transmitting what her mother had taught her. Her mother, a survivor of World War II ghettos and a concentration camp, was the master of the obvious. She was silent about her experiences or her emotions. Caustic remarks would escape her, burning deep, when the obvious became too stale or burdensome.

Her second message was from her mother Ada, reminding her of their visit tomorrow at her apartment on the beach. Sophia, abysmal at small talk, always had to fortify herself. Why was it such a strain sticking to small talk?

The third message was heavy breathing. She started pulling on her left ear.

The final message was from Jack. Jack Ryan, the brother she never had. A true friend. Thirteen years her junior, but she didn’t think he was looking for Mommy. They just had that amicable chemistry.

Jack, a homicide detective at the tender age of twenty-eight, working the case involving her husband Morton’s bizarre murder, and Sophia, putting in more than her two cents as the intuitive wife, drew them very close indeed.

He wanted to meet. He had something to tell her. Would she ever tell him about her shady enterprise? She was tempted.

Then she checked messages on her other cell. The secret cell dedicated to her underground life, pandering to young men in search of Mommy.

Two new potential johns, panting to be with an older woman, a sanctioned mother figure. They would have to wait. She was getting so much business, it was going to be difficult to shut down. I’m offering a valuable service, she rationalized to herself.

During her initial financial desperation, once the haze of helplessness had cleared like a dense fog lifting, a former patient, a bipolar woman, whose mania typically involved hyper sexuality, had alluded to an enterprise that catered to young men, Oedipal men, who yearned to fuck their mothers, and settled for a safe substitute. It was the brain storm of the woman’s unscrupulous boyfriend, a pimp really, who ran it as a side business, a splinter specialty, buried amidst a much more general whoring operation.

Sophia remembered her patient, an extremely attractive older woman. Vivid. A lot of bipolar people appeared to be larger than life. Magnetic. The pimp boyfriend wanted her patient to work for him, satisfying these Oedipal boys. Things got rough when she refused. She sported shiners and walked gingerly until she eventually extricated herself from the troublesome relationship and met a local politician. Perhaps a pimp of a different sort. Sophia remembered a drinking problem plaguing the new relationship. It was difficult to change familiar patterns.

This woman had also talked about a secret fraternity called MBMB, Mamma’s Boys of Miami Beach, and the pimp’s source for clients. Sophia had found this organization, advertising discreetly in the back pages of the New Times, that naughty liberal rag.

A lucrative business was born. She was transported back to her first client, his pitted complexion, sweaty hands, and furtive glances at her generous breasts. She guided his clammy hands, ignoring the miasma of fear he was exuding. His erect member between her breasts exploded almost immediately. She spread some of the semen on her face, taking advantage of that most restorative facial mask material.

Her first client. What a feeling of power and control. She felt herself growing ten feet tall, sprouting a cape, and developing nerves of steel.

4

The crystal clear verdant eyes were mesmerizing. She wanted to jump into their pools and swim away, deep inside, cool and cleansing. The red cat kept growing larger and larger, its enormous radioactive eyes continuing to beckon. Sophia wanted to talk to her.

You’re a cat. I can’t talk to you, she protested.

In dreams all things are possible, the expanding unperturbed cat pronounced in dulcet tones, philosophizing in a pleasant clipped British accent.

Are you Princess Diana? No, you can’t be. You died two years ago. Dream logic dictated to Sophia.

I’m Mimi.

I just want to hold you or drown in your eyes. Your carroty fur looks like velvet. Does it feel as good as it looks? Let me touch you, Sophia pleaded, stretching out her arms.

No!

The monstrous cat, while shrinking at an alarming rate, jumped down from her perch with a fluid acrobatic pounce and streaked away like a speedy hare.

No. Don’t go.

Sweaty, naked Sophia awoke with a racing heart, struggling with a pillow. One lonely tear snaked down her sleep crumpled cheek. She decided she needed another shower. Shaking off the debilitating languor engendered by the dream, she threw back the covers, leapt to the French doors to expose the balcony, baking under another scorching August Miami sun. As if orchestrated for her, at that moment three brilliant green and red parrots hurtled across the sky, piercingly squawking a cacophony of protests against the summer sultriness. Or maybe they were complaining about her dream. That cat was huge.

Phone calls would wait. It was Monday. She was off today. Like a hairdresser’s schedule. No therapy and no clients. Her Monday obligation was a date with Kurt, who was constantly complaining about being restricted to once a week. Maybe she could squeeze him in on Saturdays in the afternoons. It all was work, not fun.

The message which was just heavy breathing from last night flickered across her brain, triggering a few left ear tugs, before disappearing from consciousness to be replaced by visual and emotional vestiges of the peculiar dream. That cat was gorgeous.

Maybe I should get a red cat for the bordello. One with a cute English accent and swimming pool eyes, she speculated aloud. No more dreamy cats. Ada awaits. The other Monday obligation, she said to the four walls.

Her phone began an insistent ringing, Ma showing up on the other end, as if Ada had heard her.

Hi, Ma. I was getting ready.

Good morning, Zophitchka, her mother said, strain in her voice. I was getting worried. You’re late."

Sophia no longer noticed the Polish accent, the foreign nickname. She did register the worry. Incessant worry was her mother’s trademark. Anxiety kept her on the verge of hysteria. At a moment’s notice she was primed to explode with uncontrollable angst, ejaculating her unbearable fears into the atmosphere. Sophia thought of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, that Almovodar film.

I’m on my way. Give me an hour at the most. I just woke up. I’ll be walking over as fast as I can.

Intermittent epileptic seizures after long periods without symptoms had convinced her to give up driving. She was dependent on walking, her colleague Amanda occasionally giving her rides to and from the office they shared. She was thinking of striking out on her own and building a home office with its own entrance. She lived in one of the few areas in Miami where walking was an option. If she hadn’t always lived here, she would have had to move here. Although there hadn’t been a seizure in a long time, she had to be careful.

Get going. Get going. Get going, she scolded herself.

She dressed in black despite the oppressive summer humidity. Black jeans and a black v-neck shirt. The v-necks broke up the vast expanse of bosom in the best visual way. Sophia disliked her body. Her curves, attractive to so many, repulsed her. She exercised and exercised and exercised, but she couldn’t change her body type.

She rushed out the front door, deciding to forego homemade coffee for Starbuck’s. Carrying her black sandals in one hand, she stepped out barefoot and gasped with pain, when she felt a razor-like object cut into the underside of her big toe. She raised her right sole to survey the damage, which didn’t look too bad but hurt like hell, and spied a thorny single stem ebony rose, her blood smeared on the offending thorn, lying square in the middle of her welcome mat.

5

Ada, majestic and mountainous, overpowered the small shabby living room with her presence. Dressed in a massive cerulean blue kimono, adorned with two red dragons locked in combat, her girth swelled in rhythm to the aria she was practicing in the center of the room. Her wild ebony hair, dyed to perfection, the curls bouncing with a charged life of their own, complemented her gold flecked brown eyes, flashing with operatic emotion, and her alabaster skin, firm and smooth even at seventy-four. Her aquiline nose sprouted beads of sweat, attesting to the strenuous labor of singing opera.

She was projecting tremendously, mouth and throat stretched wide open, a luscious flexible soprano like Rene Fleming, lost in the Act One aria from La Boheme. Ada was singing Yes, My Name is Mimi.

Rudy, her number one fan and fag, for Ada was a consummate fag hag or fruit fly, if one wanted to be a bit politically correct, was perched on the edge of a tattered red velvet love seat, adoring and resenting Ada simultaneously. Having lost patience with vacating the hot spotlight to her, shivering like an abandoned child, he shouted over her vibrating lyrics, powerful enough to rearrange the dust.

You’re going to have to look a lot sicklier for that final act if you want anyone to even remotely buy that you’re dying of consumption. Too plump and pretty, he sneered, his meager lower lip, painted red, quivering with argumentative excitement. He didn’t dare say fat or he would suffer the full extent of her wrath.

Ada’s indignant straining breasts, trembling with outrage at the interruption, threatened to bounce out of her robe and attack Rudy with a full frontal, nipple to nipple assault. Or so Rudy fantasized, transfixed by her Jayne Mansfield knockers, not in a sexual way, but more in an envious way. He thought about them all the time. He even dreamt about them. Once they chased him down the Via Veneto.

A murderous pounding on the flimsy adjoining wall, followed by shouts in Yiddish to stop the noise, interrupted their incipient battle.

"Be a bubbala, Rudy and go tell off that alter cocker. He won’t let me breathe," she entreated, redirecting all her anger at the complaining neighbor.

Rudy, thin and tall, his Southern Italian dark good looks marred by an underhanded nature that shone through in the slant of the eyes and the tilt of the chin, slunk off to do her bidding.

She heard a few shouts and curses while she was mopping her face and cleavage with an oversized handkerchief.

I scared the shit out of that old fart. Rudy grinned. When he saw me in this full clown regalia, he went bananas. I think he thought he’d died and gone to hell."