Pleasure Quartet

I always knew I was different from other women. An eminent psychiatrist has established there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When Dominik died, I experienced none of these. I initially found myself reeling in shock, and then all I could do was miss him, miss him and miss him over and again.

It took years for Giselle to complete the journey from Orleans to New Orleans. Her mother had given birth to her a week or so earlier than her parents had expected, while the family were staying at their country villa in Orleans, in the French provinces by the curve of the Loire River. Throughout her childhood she would hear people, relatives and friends, speaking of New Orleans in America and she always imagined it as a newer, cleaner version of the sleepy regional city where she was born.

Dawn broke that morning in the same way that it did every other day, but I knew nothing would ever be the same again. The shore resembled a scene after battle. Bodies were scattered haphazardly across the sand, nude, lithe, breathing in unison as if the scene we had all witnessed had unified the crowd in some unearthly way.

He was everything that Alice wanted in a man, or everything that she had thought she wanted - until the moment arrived when they were destined to be joined at last, and she knew that she didn't want him at all.