The Other Woman

The Other Woman

Threnody Aschere, having no necessity for a real career of her own, instead made a career of being ‘The Other Woman’. With haughty, high-cheekboned features that befit her class and smoky eyes with a hunger that belied her breeding, Threnody had slept with nearly everybody over the age of fifteen in the sleepy little town of Cedar Falls. At least once.

Men, women, old, young, single, divorced, engaged, married, it didn’t matter; sometimes family pets, and at least once a hermaphrodite. Threnody’s appetite was nigh insatiable. She was not averse to menagatrois, to groups, to several different rendezvous with several different partners in the same twenty-four-hour period. She drank hard and she fucked hard.

But Threnody had the divine veneer of a polished aristocrat. Her jet-black hair was never out of place—unless it was fashionably mussed—her wardrobe was invariably couture and immaculate, everything was waxed, polished, and manicured expertly.

She and her twin brother Zenith had been brought up by a team of accountants and various staff who had been charged with maintaining and cultivating their significant trust funds and the multi-billion dollar corporation and priceless mansion, all of which was bequeathed to the twins upon the sudden death of their very rich and very eccentric parents. There were no relatives to speak of, only an immense fortune, a tutor, a nanny, and unseen legal guardians guarding their investments and stock options somewhere in the city.

As the stories go, Zenith had seduced the nanny before he was fourteen and Threnody had sucked the tutor’s cock at the ripe age of twelve. Rumor has it that the twins lost their respective innocence to one another, locked up there in that spacious Aschere mansion on the top of Cedar Crest—but neither zenith nor Threnody have ever given a direct response to this subject. A wry smile, a lazy wink, a ghost of a laugh, but never a word to either confirm or contradict.

Yet never in all her various and sundry sexual escapades had Threnody Aschere ever been charged with the name Whore. Nor slut, harlot, tramp, or hussy. Because she was rich.

In her society she was considered ‘a vixen’. A siren. The Other Woman. Common women might be whores when they do the things Threnody does, poor women may be labeled sluts, but a woman of her exceptional wealth and breeding was never less than ‘an independent woman’, ‘a seductress’ or best: ‘a woman who knows what she wants’.

Her brother, who had a sexual appetite to rival her own of course, was among the most eligible bachelors in the region, in fact in the country—despite the fact that he made no secret of his rapacious, insatiable and often taboo sexual appetite. Women didn’t seem to mind the reputation that came attatched to his millions.

They both had narrow, chiseled features that tread the line between fashionably gaunt and what might turn the stomach. Hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes, and boney jaws were runway chic but also uncomfortably reminiscent of the photos of death-camp survivors; the only thing that distinguished them from those unfortunate souls were their designer clothes and flawless teeth.

It was part of public lore in Cedar County how the Aschere’s parents had died, leaving the twins an empire and a life of parentless excess and indulgence at the age of five. Around campfires boy scouts swear the mansion to be haunted, and the handsome couple to have been victims to vampires living in the cavernous secret tunnels beneath the estate. Teenagers at slumber parties tell of a suicide pact wherein the couple took their own life by driving one of their many Mercedes’ off cedar crest and into the falls. In college the tale gets more lurid, with Mr. & Mrs. Aschere dying accidentally in some freak erotic asphyxiation mishap, and housewives are sure they met their end while skiing in Aspen. Only the town elders really remember for sure.