With This Ring, I Thee Bed. Alison Tyler

and chaste deprivation. It wasn’t.

      Avery gathered the dress up in front. She did not want to wrinkle it, but, she thought to herself, with sufficient care the crinoline could be smoothed down and she’d get a chance to admire herself.

      Lord! Was she actually wearing that? This outfit was filth, pure and simple, raw savage depravity in white satin and pretty pink lace. She looked like a whore, which was kind of a turn-on, this being her wedding and all. And when, brightly, her mind filled with thoughts of dear Michael removing the twelve-hundred-dollar dress to find an eight-hundred-dollar see-through white thong with lacy pink flowers and a white, embroidered-rose garter belt, not to mention the seamed white stockings that said “Spread me” in the language of lingerie—when she thought of that, Avery Jacobsen soon-to-be-Vance went wet to the knees, put her hand where she shouldn’t, and sighed.

      It was true, then; she was a whore. Shameless, insistent … Good God, that feels good. She steadied herself against the mirror and rubbed faster, wondering if somehow she might get away with a quick one, spread wide on her back with the wedding dress gathered—no, no, fucking no, she’d just wrinkle it. She looked hungrily into her own eyes and rubbed herself gently—just a few more strokes, not a full wank or anything….

      Oh my God, being shaved makes you sensitive, Avery thought as she struggled with whether she ought to come.

      No, of course not, she decided: Tradition. Wasn’t that the tradition? Get all worked up before the wedding, sure, but wait to come until your new husband fucks you. If it’s not a tradition, it should be, right?

      She’d been to plenty of weddings. Brides and grooms in the modern day seemed to change into jeans and T-shirts before hopping on Kawasakis or into rented Porsche convertibles for a honeymoon in Napa. Not so with Michael Vance’s new bride; she’d been told in no uncertain terms she would be spirited away in a Holsman 1907 High-Wheeler reproduction, built from scratch for this occasion—with her very own crackpot inventor at the joystick. She was two-thirds convinced that the thing wasn’t street legal, despite Michael’s assurance that it was. The fact that he’d promised to follow that drive from the Jacobsen home to the Vance Bed-and-Breakfast with a bride’s carry over the threshold if she was good—or a fireman’s lift if she was bad—made her molten inside. Thinking about that cave dweller’s threat-promise would have made her rub faster, if she hadn’t already moved on, in her thoughts, to the growl of his voice at her ear, the warm breath on her neck as he told her with vigor what he’d do to her once he had her inside.

      Vance Bed-and-Breakfast: in the family for four generations. Forest luxury. Redwood tubs. Steam showers. Four-poster beds.

      Avery bit her lip, panting. Maybe just a quick toss. Just a quick one. Kris could smooth out the wrinkles, right?

      Someone fiddled with the door.

      Avery gasped. Her heart pounding, she removed her hand quickly from the one place it should really not have been on her wedding day at 11:00 a.m., then adjusted her thong and pulled down her dress.

      “Leave me alone, I’m getting ready!”

      Whoever it was still fiddled. She could see the knob turning; they hadn’t even knocked. Panicked, Avery checked herself in the mirror. Her dress looked okay. No signs of her recent adventures, other than the almost terrifying pinkness of her face and her cleavage, and the peaks of her nipples showing through the dress.

      The door opened.

      “Michael!” she cried. She seized a shoe from the nearby rack and threw it at him. He faced it down fearlessly as it struck the door next to him; she hadn’t really been aiming, and in any event, with her glasses off her groom was mostly a blur. Damn that lost contact! She threw another shoe, which clunked at his feet. “Don’t you know—”

      “It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride—yes, yes, yes,” said Michael, slipping inside. He closed the door and locked it. “But my dear, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

      “This is bad luck! It’s tradition. Get out! You’re dooming our marriage!”

      Avery seized another shoe and threw it, half laughing, as Michael, grinning, closed in on her. He was a hell of an easy target, at six foot four with broad shoulders, but she didn’t really want to hit him—black eye on his wedding day? She’d never hear the end of that one. Nonetheless, Michael got the message—as he’d gotten it before he ever opened the door: This was transgression, raw transgression, the breaking of an ancient taboo to which Michael himself had repeatedly proclaimed his devotion.

      It was, therefore, more filthy than anything they’d ever done. And after Avery and Michael’s eighteen months together, there was some serious competition for that slot.

      Michael seized Avery Jacobsen and very nearly slammed her against the wall. The feel of his muscles against her made her go loopy. He stooped low to kiss her, and she pursed her lips and turned her head.

      “It’s bad luck!”

      “Is that right?”

      “Yes!” Avery cried. “The worst kind of bad luck!”

      “You don’t say,” murmured Michael, and put his hand into her hair, grabbing tight.

      Avery gasped, looked up into his eyes, and watched as his full lips turned back in a sneering smile. Her own lips trembled with hunger. He pulled harder; her gasp became a whimper.

      “There’ll be lots of this soon, Mrs. Vance,” he growled.

      “Not yet, Mr. Vance. I could still change my mind. And some bright bird might object.”

      “Let them try.” He grinned, shaking his fist as he looked into her eyes.

      Michael kissed her.

      She went limp in his grasp as his mouth savaged hers. She no longer resisted, exactly; her squirming struggles against his bulk were familiar and comforting, half weak and half fierce. It was really his hand in her hair that did it. In the weeks before the wedding she’d kept from soliciting his feedback; the comfort of their coupling came from the ease with which she assailed her femaleness, eschewing femininity whenever she thought it unnecessary. With her shorts and T-shirts, her little round glasses, her love of bicycling and her adoration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer in the original Middle English—which she could recite from memory with a clarity utterly shocking to everyone except her and her professors—Avery was not a high-maintenance girl. She did not intend to be a high-maintenance bride.

      Nonetheless, on the matter of her hair, she had craved Michael’s opinion. I think maybe up? she’d mused one day out loud.

       No, Avery, down.

      Really? Down? she had asked him. He’d answered with his hand in her hair, pulling cruelly as he kissed her with enough ardor to shock Chaucer’s merchant.

      So it was that on this, her wedding day, she had surrendered to a sort of a tomboy-chic look, figuring traditionally prim bridal beauty could be forgone at her groom’s request. Now she knew why: the son of a bitch had planned to kiss her like this from the first, to sully their marriage day with the—holy Christ, he was pulling her corset down.

      “You can’t do that,” she whimpered. “Everybody’s waiting. My parents … everybody.”

      He silenced her with his mouth, hard upon her, his tongue against hers as first one, then the other, teacup tit popped out with nipple already hard, responding to his thumb with goose bumps that went shimmying down her spine and deep into her sex. He thumbed, stroked, kneaded, pinched; she went loose against him, and when his lips left hers there was a string of spit stretched for a moment between them, just as in her favorite-ever movie kissing scene. Fresh, filthy, wet, sloppy—just like their sex life, forever.

      “They’ve waited twenty-six years for this day,” Michael said. “Let them wait fifteen minutes while I fuck their girl senseless.”

      “You may not,” Avery declared, half convinced, half