Attachment Read Online Free Page B

least take a look.

T he cyber café was unusually crowded. Jean got the corner computer, beside a black teenager whose forehead glistened like a polished plum. He was typing one-sentence replies to one-sentence questions: instant messaging. She knew what this was—one new skill she didn’t feel called on to acquire. She checked her work e-mail first, and then the joint account set up by and mainly for Victoria. The boy beside her didn’t look up as she finally typed in the new account name, naughtyboy1, and the password, munyeroo. And there was 69, a lonely pair of inverted spermatozoa, each chasing the other’s tail. The sender slot was discreetly blanked. Steeling herself to click and open, she looked again at the letter in the white envelope. Munyeroo. Jean immediately thought of the Australian at the gym, the blond woman with the spectacular natural frontage. But there was Italian here as well—that ciao bello. An Australian of Italian descent, that’s it, Jean thought. She remembered Mark joking, many years ago, that the primary appeal of Australian girls in London was their departure the following morning for New South Wales, forever. But the letter had originated in London. Thing 2 didn’t play by the rules.
    Jean opened the attachment. It took a long time to download. Luckily the boy next to her left before the full-screen image appeared.
    Jesus! Australia didn’t waste time. She wondered how much a chest like that might weigh. At almost life-size, it was a not-so-good pair, she thought—big nippled and uniformly bronzed. Jean believed in the essential sexiness of untanned triangles—the idea, at least, that not just anyone enjoyed this view—not that her skin ever turned anything but redder, or that she ever wore a bikini. But these were undeniably young and undeniably large. And what was that black thing? The edge of a tattoo? A whole generation of young people—including Victoria with her lizard—in painful pursuit of decoration and emphasis, just what they didn’t need. Their inkings should warn off persons from their parents’ era, Jean thought. In fact, that might be just the sort of boundary tattoos were there to demarcate—noli me tangere.
    There were a couple of other photographs, all with elaborate captions. “Giovana” promised Mark L.O.V.E.—long overdue experience, even fucking that up; but then Giovana with one n couldn’t even spell her own name. Which was probably Joan anyway. Or Jean—who just now remembered that, when she was about fifteen and yearning for instant glamour, she’d briefly insisted on being called Gina.
    Giovana thanked him for the “replacement” underpants, which she gamely modeled on her round bottom— fat, Victoria would’ve said, taking her mother’s side. A red ribbon was threaded through chubby cheeks—buried, actually—reappearing at the top to bloom into a triangular swatch of white trimmed with red, like a yield sign. What happened to the first pair? Were they the same, or cut to resemble a different traffic warning: a red octagon of phony protest (stop!), or maybe a slinky something in yellow and black (slippery when wet)? Helpless against the tide of imagining, Jeanstolidly went on, in punishing detail. So, underpants #1, given, and kept, as a souvenir? Ripped by his teeth in the heat of the moment? Tossed from a moving taxi? Ridiculous. Right?
    Another photo—headless like the first two—gave a side view of the same body, this time pantyless and bending at the waist, wearing a frilly white apron that served as a sling for heavy breasts, with a giant birthday-present bow tied at the back. An unfamiliar hand trained the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner on the crescent seam of her buttocks. What was Jean supposed to make of that? Had Mark put in a request in the housewife department? The crassness of these offerings stunned Jean, though she couldn’t say if she’d be any less stunned by tasteful nude shots of Mark’s lover. Her ability to think