The Winners Circle by Christopher Klim Read Free Book Online Page B

another lousy notion, bouncing around his brain, fighting to take hold. He’d never, ever done this before. Chelsea always lit his fire. He always delivered.
    She used her hand, but his penis grew limp, a completely useless device for the occasion. He heard the grandfather clock chime the half hour. He was losing, and he tried forcing the blood to his groin. Damn, he actually wasn’t going to do this.
    “ Jerry?” She crawled up his to stomach. Her lip curled. “Is everything okay?”
    “ I’m fine.”
    “ Are you sure?”
    He didn’t like the tone of her voice, but he didn’t look in her eyes. Even though she lay across his stomach, he never felt further away from her. He grabbed onto her shoulder. He tried to recall the first time. He tried to remember it being new again. It was in his head somewhere. Somehow he could reconnect the past to the present.
     

 
CHAPTER 5
     
The Last Laugh
     
     
     
    “ We need to do more of this.” Chelsea held the wheel of her new hunter green Jaguar sport coup. The car emerged from the Holland Tunnel. The burl walnut appointments on the dashboard glowed beneath the overcast summer sky.
    “ I don’t see why?” Jerry was cramped in the passenger’s seat, ferreting extra space for his feet and knees. He felt uncomfortable in the baggy pants and sport coat that Chelsea instructed him to wear. He should’ve put on his old wedding suit and been done with it.
    “ You promised you wouldn’t complain.”
    “ I know.” He recalled his last public outing. His former workmates had rushed him into a bar for the afternoon—his least favorite activity. ‘You’re buying,’ they said.
    “ I want you to mingle.” Chelsea checked her hair in the mirror. “These are our peers.”
    “ We’ve never met them before.” He watched her steer onto the Westside Highway. The skyscrapers infringed upon his peripheral vision, slicing it up with towers of stone, steel, and reflective glass.
    “ It’s a party for lottery winners. They’re millionaires like us. They have our issues.”
    He studied her profile. Her lips were plump and sexy, awash in desert rose. Her larger breasts hung firm and high. A black cotton shirt detailed her tight torso. A matching skirt hugged her hips and the sleek contours of her thighs. She’d spent hours with a personal trainer and even more time with a clothes designer and makeup consultant. Jerry feared that merely touching his wife might ruin the finish.
    “ I’m doing this for you,” Jerry said.
    “ You should be doing it for yourself.” She shot a sideways glance, insouciant yet disapproving. She was a living, breathing glamour photo of herself. She’d pulled off the miracle, acquiring the face and body of a star, and she’d done it without him. “Sometimes I worry about you.”
    He sat up, bumping his head on a rib in the convertible roof. “I’ve told you one thousand times that I’m alright.”
    “ You’ve been on the farm for the whole summer. You need to get out.”
    “ I’m out this afternoon.”
    “ Under protest.”
    “ I’m here.”
    “ What would you do if ...?”
    He waited for her to finish. He hated when she didn’t. It drove him crazy. “What would I do if what?”
    “ Nothing.” She pulled into the barbed-wire parking lot for The Manhattan Cruiser. A hulking orange and blue ferry rocked beside the pier.
    “ Finish your sentence.”
    “ Don’t you have any hobbies?”
    She was his hobby. He cooked gourmet meals for her. He managed the farmhouse. “I’m a gentleman farmer.”
    “ Then where are the crops? How about those horses?”
    “ I’m working on it.”
    “ I thought so.”
    “ What’s that mean?”
    “ Don’t sulk, Jerry.”
    “ I’m not sulking.”
    Chelsea presented their passes to the man at the gate. She tossed the keys to the kid by the valet station, as if she’d done it hundreds of times before.
    “ Oh no,” she said. “Did you pop a pill?”
    Jerry rolled down his window. A stale sea