Ignoring his petulant complaints as nothing but more of the same, she picked up her purse. To her surprise, he grabbed her by the forearm and all but shook her. The purse fell between them, lost in the unexpected shuffle of feet.

“Damn it, Betty Jo! You heard me! This just isn’t right!”

“Hey!” she said, then frowned. She couldn’t remember the last time Carter had raised his voice to her. She yanked, trying to pull herself free from his grasp, but to her dismay, his fingers tightened.

“Carter! You’re hurting me!”

“So what?” he snarled, and shoved her backward onto their bed. “You’re hurting me.”

A slight panic began to surface. He never got angry. At least he never used to. Without thinking, she rolled over on her stomach to keep from messing up her hair, and started to crawl off of the bed. But turning her back on him was her first and last mistake. Before she could get up, Carter came down on top of her, pushing her into the mattress, calling her names she didn’t even know he knew.

Betty Jo screamed, but the sound had nowhere to go. The weight of his body kept pushing her deeper and deeper into the mattress, and when the bulk of him settled across her hips, and his shoes began snagging runs in her panty hose, she realized that he was sitting on her. In shock, she began to fight.

Flailing helplessly, her hands clenched in the bedspread as she tried unsuccessfully to maneuver herself out from under him. Panic became horror as his hands suddenly circled her neck. The more she kicked and bounced, the tighter he squeezed.

A wayward thought crossed her mind that he’d messed up her hair and that Dixie Red lipstick would not wash out of the bedspread. It was the last of her worries as tiny bursts of lights began to go off behind her eyelids. Bright, bright, brighter, they burned until they shattered into one great, blinding-white explosion.

As suddenly as it had come, the rage that had taken him into another dimension began to subside. Carter shuddered and shuddered as his hands slowly loosened, and when he went limp atop her body, guilt at his unexpected burst of temper began to surface. He’d never been a physical sort of man, and didn’t quite know how to explain this side of himself.

“Damn it, Betty Jo, I’m real sorry this happened, but you’ve been driving me to it for years.”

Oddly enough, Betty Jo had nothing to say about his emotional outburst, and he wondered, as he crawled off her butt, why he hadn’t done this years earlier? Maybe if he’d asserted himself when all of her misbehaving began, brute force would never have been necessary.

He smoothed down his hair, then wiped his sweaty palms against the legs of his slacks. Even from here, he could still smell the scent of her perfume upon his skin.

“Get up, Betty Jo. There’s no need to pout. You always get your way, whether I like it or not.”

Again, she remained silent. Carter’s gaze ran up, then down her body, noting as it did, that he’d ruined her hose and smudged her dress. When she saw what he’d done to the back of her skirt, she would be furious.

“Okay, fine,” Carter said, and started to walk away.

As he passed the foot of the bed, one of her shoes suddenly popped off the end of her heel and stabbed itself into the spread. He paused, starting to make an ugly comment about the fact that she was undressing for the wrong man, when something about her position struck him as odd. He leaned over the bed frame and tentatively ran his forefinger across the bottom of her foot. Her immobility scared the hell out of him. Betty Jo was as ticklish as they came.

“Oh, God,” Carter muttered, and ran around to the edge of the bed, grabbing her by the shoulder. “Betty Jo, this isn’t funny!”

He rolled her onto her back, and when he got a firsthand look at the dark, red smear of lipstick across her face and her wide, sightless eyes staring up at him, he began to shake.

“Betty, honey…”

She didn’t move.

He thumped her in the middle of the chest, noting absently that she was not wearing a bra, and then started to sweat.

“Betty Jo, wake up!” he screamed, and pushed up and down between her breasts, trying to emulate CPR techniques he didn’t actually know.

The only motion he got out of her was a lilt and a sway from her buxom bosom as he hammered about her chest, trying to make her breathe.

“No! God, no!”

Suddenly he jerked his hands to his stomach, as if he’d been burned by the touch of her skin. To his utter dismay, he felt bile rising, and barely made it to the bathroom before it spewed.

Several hours later, he heard the hall clock strike two times, and realized that, in four hours, it would be time to get up. He giggled at the thought, then buried his face in his hands. That was silly. How could one get up, when one had never been down? Betty Jo’s body lay right where he’d left it, half-on, half-off the bed, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.