Aunt Penelope's Harem Read online

  Aunt Penelope’s Harem

  Chris Tanglen

  Melanie Clover has a lousy job, no boyfriend, and neighbors who like to have ridiculously loud sex. She is too shy to handle the dating scene, and has resigned herself to a chaste life spent playing mindless video games.

  But when her beloved Aunt Penelope dies, Melanie inherits her home and everything in it. Now, instead of a cramped one-bedroom apartment, she has a mansion with a swimming pool, a tennis court, luxurious furniture, spacious bathrooms, a wide-screen television...and a harem.

  Yes, a harem. A harem with eight handsome, muscular, sexy men, all willing to cater to her every need. Melanie is outraged to discover that Aunt Penelope's joyful nature and unmatched zest for life took this kind of direction, but her outrage turns to curiosity, and then to temptation. After all, how often does a girl have eight love slaves to call her own?

  Aunt Penelope...you just got to love her ;-)

  Aunt Penelope’s Harem

  Chris Tanglen

  Chapter One

  “Oh, God, yes! Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Harder! Harder!”

  Melanie Clover really wished that she were the one making those requests instead of the one lying alone in bed hearing them through the thin apartment wall. Here she was, halfway through her twenty-third consecutive month without sex, being forced to listen almost every night while her neighbors went at it in a frenzy of nymphomaniacal glee. Though at least tonight the woman wasn’t shouting out Olympic-style ratings for each pelvic thrust.

  She tried to ignore them and focus on the handheld video game she was playing, Milton Monkey’s Banana Quest. She’d gathered two hundred and eighty-seven bananas, her all-time record, and if she found thirteen more she’d move on to level six. This was the highlight of her day, made even more pathetic by the fact that she’d gotten this far by using a hint guide she had downloaded off the Internet.

  “Oooooooh, fuck me, you stud! Sledge that hammer! Sledge that hammer!”

  She sighed deeply. Life was so cruel. Why did this neighbor lady, who stole Melanie’s newspaper every morning, deserve to get bed-breakingly laid while the closest Melanie had come to sex in the past year was catching a brief glimpse of the cable repairman’s butt crack?

  It just wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t like she was unattractive or bitchy or foul smelling. When she was a kid she’d hated her curly red hair and freckles, but she’d long outgrown that phase and now at age thirty she only hated the way she could get sunburned just by looking at a picture of the sun. Sure, she’d put on a few extra pounds from her childhood discovery that chocolate tasted really good, but she carried the weight well. And she had big tits. So why was she dateless?

  That is, aside from her unbearable shyness and the fact that she rarely left her apartment except to go to work. Kind of hard to get laid without going out to meet the type of gentleman who would graciously lay her.

  She successfully maneuvered Milton Monkey past the mutant coconut creature and acquired another banana. Yes! She was the Banana Queen! Hail Melanie! All kneel before her might!

  “Ooooh…oooooh God…oooohhhh…”

  A different voice, coming from a different spot. Now the neighbors on the other side of her apartment were having sex. That was just mean. Had they no sense of compassion? No simple human decency?

  “Harder! Harder! Fuck me with that rocket!”

  “Oooohhhhhh…oh Lord, yes…oooohhhhh that’s sooooo goooood…”

  “Fuck me, baby, fuck me! Ram me! Show me no mercy!”

  “Oooohhhhhhhh yeeeeessssssss…”

  “Harder! Give me all you’ve got!”

  “Oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…”

  “Okay, it’s Joey’s turn now!”

  Milton Monkey fell into the lava pit.

  Melanie shut off the game, closed her eyes, and mourned his tragic loss.

  * * * * *

  She walked into work at exactly 8:30 a.m. as always. Another day at Lavin, Inc. She’d be creating many a spreadsheet, reconciling many a financial report, and drinking many a caffeinated beverage. The job itself wasn’t really that bad. Melanie liked working with numbers, and she was good at what she did. But they’d recently hired a new vice president who had initiated a program called Our Employees Suck (not its real name), which basically revolved around the concept that this was a place of work and nothing else.

  So all but the most innocuous decorations had been removed from everybody’s cubicle (each employee was permitted two family pictures, provided they didn’t exceed the 5x7 size restriction), birthday and holiday celebrations were eliminated, and the entire fourth floor now had an antiseptic, half-dead feel.

  Last week, the new VP had instructed Melanie’s supervisor to write a report exploring the reasons for low employee morale.

  Melanie sat down at her desk and booted up her computer. She was the first one here, which was odd. There were twelve other employees in her department, and she was usually the last one to arrive. Maybe they’d scheduled a meeting or something and nobody told her.

  She checked her e-mail and voice mail. Nothing interesting.

  Around nine o’clock, she started to get worried. She hadn’t missed daylight savings time, it wasn’t a holiday, their systems were up, and the other departments didn’t seem to be missing anybody…so what was going on?

  Had somebody died?

  She flipped through her Rolodex and looked up the cell phone number for Tracy, the giggly middle-aged brunette who sat right next to her. Tracy answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Tracy? It’s Melanie.”

  “Melanie, hi! How’re things going?”

  “Okay, but I’m the only person here. Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way to the Golden Grotto for breakfast. Everybody else is probably there already, but I’m running a bit late.”

  Melanie frowned. “Did I miss an e-mail or something?”

  “No, didn’t you hear? Our numbers came in.”

  “What?”

  “Our lottery numbers. You know how everybody but you pitches in for lottery tickets every week? We won! Sixty-five million split twelve ways!”

  Melanie stared at her pictureless cubicle wall for a long moment. “What?”

  “We all quit! You know those people who win the lottery and go right back to their jobs? We unanimously decided that they’re idiots! Sorry, gotta go, I’m pulling into the parking lot right now. Tell Harold I said hi.”

  Tracy hung up. Melanie continued to stare at her cubicle wall for an extremely long time. She blinked occasionally to break up the monotony.

  Sixty-five million. That wasn’t so much, split twelve ways. Not even five-point-five million each. And taxes would take half of it. To say nothing of the dollar a week it cost them to win in the first place. They really weren’t that much better off than her. After all, she was still employed.

  Harold, her supervisor, walked into the department a few minutes later, looking physically ill. “Ah, Melanie, I think I’m going to have to ask you to put in a bit of overtime this week,” he said.

  * * * * *

  “That really bites,” said Dawn, biting a green-and-yellow sour gummi worm in half.

  “Yeah,” Melanie agreed.

  “I mean it. That really sucks.” She sucked one of the worm halves into her mouth.

  “You know, the point of asking you to come over was to help me feel better,” Melanie explained.

  “Oh, sorry.” Dawn thought for a moment. “The suicide rate of lottery winners is fifteen times the national average.”

  “Really?”

  “No. If you were that rich you could hire somebody to kill themselves for you. This really blows.”
r />   “Please don’t blow the gummi worm onto my floor.”

  Dawn chewed the gummi worm and swallowed. “Wow. Bad news all over the place today,” she said, leaning back in the couch.

  “Why? What else happened?”

  Dawn shrugged. “I broke up with Ian.”

  “Oh no, really? You were together for fourteen months!”

  “Was it that long? Shit.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He proposed.”

  “He proposed…and you broke up with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  Melanie looked at her incredulously. “Why?”

  “He did it all wrong.”

  “How?”

  “By proposing to his fucking massage therapist instead of me.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  Dawn nodded. “He’s had another woman for the past three months. Her name is Vicki. They’re in love. She has a tight ass.”

  “Oh, Dawn, I’m so sorry.” She scooted over on the couch and gave her best friend a hug. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Nah. I showed him. I told him that he could marry the beautiful tight-assed masseuse, but it was over between us. That’ll show him.”

  Melanie smiled sadly. “We’re really pathetic, aren’t we?”

  “No. We are not pathetic.” Dawn stood up from the couch. She was a year younger than Melanie but looked like she was only in her early twenties, with a slim figure, adorable face, and long black hair. They’d been best friends since college, though Ian, who was cute but needy, had sucked up a lot of Dawn’s time over the past year. “Maybe we were pathetic, but no longer. This is the start of a new era for Dawn and Melanie. We’re going to get out into the dating world and have some really good sex!”

  “It wasn’t good with Ian? I thought you said it was.”

  “It was until about, oh, three months ago. He lost interest. I thought it was because he was worn out from having to work late all the time and going on all of those business trips. But that’s beside the point. The point is, we need to have some fun.”

  “I don’t know,” said Melanie. “I haven’t had sex in so long that I think I’m a virgin again. Doesn’t it hurt your first time?”

  “I’m serious. Let’s sow some wild oats. Let’s treat men like slabs of meat. I like meat, don’t you? There are plenty of guys I could set you up with if you’d just let me. What do you say?”

  * * * * *

  “My ex-girlfriend, the one before my last ex, she was such a skank,” said Chet. “She was always, like, whining and griping and stuff. And her hair was all nasty. She was on these meds that dried out her mouth, so she was always drinking water. I must’ve been really wasted when I slept with her that first time, because she was just a skank. You don’t look like a skank, though.”

  “Uh, thanks,” said Melanie, uncomfortably looking at the menu.

  “Oh, and my ex-girlfriend before that, she wasn’t a skank, but she was so bossy that you couldn’t even be in the same room as her. Do this! Do that! Don’t wear that! Don’t eat that! I mean, kiss my butt. Actually, she was kind of a skank, now that I think about her. Not as bad as my ex-ex-girlfriend, though.”

  * * * * *

  Terrence gestured angrily with his bread stick. “It’s not the Republicans who are the problem. It’s not the Democrats who are the problem. Do you know who the problem is?”

  Melanie shook her head.

  “It’s the goddamn third party candidates. I mean, make up your fuckin’ mind. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  * * * * *

  Silence.

  “The soup is good,” said Melanie.

  Brian nodded.

  Silence.

  “Where do you work?” Melanie asked.

  “I don’t.”

  Silence.

  “This really is good soup,” said Melanie.

  “Mine’s getting cold.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  * * * * *

  “I knew this guy who would eat any part of a cow. I mean, any part. If it was cow, this guy would eat it. But if he’d see a whole cow, you know, grazing out in a field or something, he’d always say how ugly they were. It was weird. Not many people liked him.”

  * * * * *

  “I’ll tell you what, they’d better burn every one of those Harry Potter books before we turn into a nation of Satan worshippers.”

  * * * * *

  “No,” said Melanie.

  “Oh, c’mon,” Dawn protested. “Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy. He’s a nice guy.”

  “You’ve said that about every other guy, and I keep dating these…these creatures. You don’t get to set me up any more. That privilege has been revoked.”

  “You could still fuck them.”

  “No, because I don’t sleep with men that I don’t like.”

  Dawn sighed sadly. “Neither do I. God, I’m horny. Are your neighbors always this loud?”

  Melanie’s phone rang. She walked into the kitchen and picked it up. “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Melanie Clover?”

  “This is she.”

  “Did I get your last name right?”

  “Almost. It’s Clover, rhymes with lover, not the four-leaf kind. Don’t worry, everybody gets it wrong. Who’s speaking?”

  “Richard Campbell of Campbell & Campbell, attorneys at law. I’m afraid I have some sad news for you.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Your Aunt Penelope just passed away.”

  Chapter Two

  Three days later, on Saturday, Melanie relaxed in her first class seat on a plane from Wyoming to Florida. She’d never flown first class in her life, but the lawyer had explained that the terms of her aunt’s will included first-class travel for Melanie to her funeral, which sounded exactly like something that Aunt Penelope would do. The seat cushion was more comfortable, she had more legroom, and she wasn’t crushed between two portly gentlemen with flatulence issues…now this was the way to fly.

  Too bad it wasn’t for a happier occasion.

  She’d always loved Aunt Penelope, or Amazing Aunt Penelope, as she liked to be called. Aunt Penelope always had the best stories, bought the best Christmas and birthday presents, and took her out to amusement parks and rock concerts when she came to visit. Melanie’s parents had died five years ago, three weeks apart, and Aunt Penelope had been the greatest force in getting her through that terrible time.

  How could somebody with that much zest for life be dead? She was only forty-six.

  At least she went quickly. A heart attack. There wasn’t even any pain, the lawyer had told her.

  Melanie wiped a tear from her eye as she remembered that joyful, pretty woman who was the sweetest, kindest person she’d ever known, and who understood the importance of ample legroom and a lack of flatulence.

  * * * * *

  She couldn’t even begin to count how many people were at the funeral. Aunt Penelope’s only living relative besides Melanie was her daughter, Gretchen, who had inherited none of her mother’s warmth or sense of adventure. But Aunt Penelope had more close friends than most people had casual acquaintances, and they were all seated in the park on this sunny morning.

  A tall man in a bright green dress shirt took the podium and cleared his throat. “Last year, my beloved client Penelope Margaret Carlson told me that she had no intention of dying until she’d made the world record for the oldest, crabbiest wench on the face of the earth.”

  Some people laughed, but the man’s voice cracked as he continued speaking. “Sadly, she did not achieve that goal. But though she was taken from us far too soon, she lived a full life, a happy life, and I’m sure that she would want us to celebrate the life she lived, rather than mourn her passing. Though she had no plans to exit this world any time soon, she was also a strong believer in being prepared for any eventuality, and she left me this statement to read at her funeral.
”

  He began to read from a piece of paper. “‘Wipe those mopey expressions off your faces or I’ll come back to haunt each and every one of you. You know perfectly well that I’m not going to put up with a bunch of pouting at my funeral. This means you, Rebecca.’”

  A sobbing woman in the front row forced a smile through her tears.

  “‘Since I’m paying for this shindig, I expect you all to have some fun. And keep the eulogy short. Nobody likes to sit through those damn things. I love you all dearly, and I’ll see you on the other side.’”

  The man gestured, and the band played “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

  * * * * *

  Melanie sat across from the lawyer’s desk. Gretchen sat next to her, eyeliner smeared. She’d been the only person at the funeral to wear black.

  Gretchen resembled her departed mother in many ways. She had the same round features, the same blonde hair, and the same slight build. But she didn’t have the same spark. Even as a kid, Gretchen had been happy only when she was miserable. Apparently she took after her father, although Melanie had never met him and Aunt Penelope rarely talked about him.

  Richard Campbell, still wearing his bright green shirt, shook each of their hands. “As I’m sure you know, the two of you were Penelope Carlson’s only living relatives, and if you exclude several substantial donations to various charities, you two are the only beneficiaries in her will.”

  “How substantial?” asked Gretchen.

  “Exactly ten million dollars in total.”

  Melanie’s jaw dropped. She’d known Aunt Penelope was loaded. The woman had an uncanny eye for investments and she’d gotten in early on stocks for a couple of companies that had done extremely well, but ten million dollars? Good Lord.

  Gretchen winced as if she’d been struck. “She gave away that much?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, shit, they’d better appreciate it.”

  “I’m sure they will. Ms. Carlson, you have been left the after-taxes sum of exactly one million dollars.”

  Gretchen snorted. “Good to know that her own daughter is one-tenth as important to her as those charities.”