Sarah, Seductress: Pagans on Fire

It was nearly ten by the time Sarah got home, and Bryan was as far from pleased as Portland, Maine, is from Portland, Oregon. Not 96 hours ago, the two of them had argued so loudly about Sarah’s job meaning more to her than her family that Hypocrisy, their middle child, and far most sensitive than either of the twins, Pharisee and Piety, had come into the living room with tears streaming down her pretty cheeks. Bryan’s impression had been that Sarah was no less ashamed than he about that, and had believed her promise that only the awfulest emergency would keep her from getting home in time to help him read the kids Biblical bedtime stories — that is, before 8:15. In the four days since, she’d arrived home at 7:58, 8:12, 8:41, and now 9:56. 

Bryan hadn’t forged a career as a consultant to Republican political candidates by repeating the same mistake. The more stressed she was, the more Sarah’s eyes tended to go in different directions. It looked to Bryan now, at 9:58, as though her vision must scan 180 degrees. 

Symmetry is thought to be be globally perceived as a key element of facial beauty, but Bryan had always found asymmetry much more of a turn-on. Back when they were both working on Sarah’s pop’s 2008 presidential campaign, it had been her eyes pointing in different directions that had bewitched him, and inspired him to think impure thoughts. At first, he’d been embarrassed and self-conscious about his preference, but Pastor Johnson had pointed out that, within certain parameters (like those at which the lesbians and so-described gays scoffed), variety was the spice of life. If one fellow was entitled to be more turned on by huge breasts (the Mrs. Johnson’s had apparently been surgically augmented) and his neighbor shapely  gams, it was just fine in Jesus’s eyes for Bryan to be “turned on”, as the young people put it, by asymmetry. 

Bryan had thought admitting that asymmetry turned him on might hurt her feelings. What he had admitted, early on, was that he was hugely turned by what she did for a living — lying to protect an unmistakably evil, un-Christian man. Admitting that her daily bearing false witness, as forbidden by nothing less than the 9th Commandment, aroused him sexually, he'd felt as though his face was afire with shame. But Sarah's had turned an even deeper shade of red, and they’d made love like pagans on fire. There hadn’t been too less godly young Americans from sea to shining sea that night, unless you counted the LGBT deplorables.

Bryan had discerned over the course of their marriage that in her days at Ouachita Baptist University, Sarah had secretly ached not to be perceived as having the best personality on campus, and the most famous daddy, but as being…hot. She’d have eagerly traded being voted Most Sanctimonious in both her sophomore and senior years (school rules precluded a student winning in consecutive years) for a couple of the cuter white jocks trying to hit on her. The…hotter Bryan made her feel, the more she seemed to love him.

Following her into their bedroom the night of her 9:56 return from the White House, Bryan didn’t scold her for being late, as she’d been dreading his doing, but offered her a vodka martini on a tray, as though a server at a political grip-and-grin, and then, from behind his back, a gift-wrapped package. Her defensive, don't-dare-remind-me-of-the-promise-I've now-broke-three-nights-in-a-row scowl turned into a smile. Her eyes got 10 degrees nearer agreement. 

The package turned out to contain a red lace corset from a place of which Sarah had never heard, Agent Provocateur, one of whose advertisements Bry had seen in an awful, sinful magazine he'd confiscated from one of his interns, and then examined at length to get the full measure of its ungodliness. Now he yelped in anguish as she held the garment up to contemplate it. “I should have ordered stockings too! What a knucklehead I am!”

“Not to worry, big boy,” Sarah said in her bedroomiest voice, one never heard in the White House’s James Brady Press Briefing Room.  “It just so happens that I have some, for a moment just like this.”  She loved how that made Bryan moan, and then tremble. And here he’d have expected she might throw his gift back in his face!

Sarah returned to the bedroom, not just in fishnet stockings and her new corset, but also some of the garish harlot’s lipstick she’d had her aide buy her at Walgreen’s the first day earlier in the week she knew she was going to come home well after the children’s bedtime. She’d wanted to be able to take Bryan’s mind off his anger, as she spent her days taking the press’s mind off her boss’s ever less ignorable dementia.