Free It by Stephen King

starve.”
    â€œFiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett,” Stanley said when she told him what her father had said. She had been furious, near tears, but now she began to giggle, and Stanley swept her into his arms.
    Hot they had been; starved they had not. They were married on August 19th, 1972. Patty Uris had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. She had slipped naked between cool sheets at a resort hotel in the Poconos, her mood turbulent and stormy—lightning-flares of wanting and delicious lust, dark clouds of fright. When Stanley slid into bed beside her, ropy with muscle, his penis an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair, she had whispered: “Don’t hurt me, dear.”
    â€œI will never hurt you,” he said as he took her in his arms, and it was a promise he had kept faithfully until May 28th, 1985—the night of the bath.
    Her teaching had gone well. Stanley got a job driving a bakery truck for one hundred dollars a week. In November of that year, when the Traynor Flats Shopping Center opened, he got a job with the H & R Block office out there for a hundred and fifty. Their combined income was then $17,000 a year—this seemed a king’s ransom to them, in those days when gas sold for thirty-five cents a gallon and a loaf of white bread could be had for a nickel less than that. In Marchof 1973, with no fuss and no fanfare, Patty Uris had thrown away her birth-control pills.
    In 1975 Stanley quit H & R Block and opened his own business. All four in-laws agreed that this was a foolhardy move. Not that Stanley should not have his own business—God forbid he should not have his own business! But it was too early, all of them agreed, and it put too much of the financial burden on Patty. (“At least until the pisher knocks her up,” Herbert Blum told his brother morosely after a night of drinking in the kitchen, “and then I’ll be expected to carry them.”) The consensus of in-law opinion on the matter was that a man should not even think about going into business for himself until he had reached a more serene and mature age—seventy-eight, say.
    Again, Stanley seemed almost preternaturally confident. He was young, personable, bright, apt. He had made contacts working for Block. All of these things were givens. But he could not have known that Corridor Video, a pioneer in the nascent videotape business, was about to settle on a huge patch of farmed-out land less than ten miles from the suburb to which the Urises had eventually moved in 1979, nor could he have known that Corridor would be in the market for an independent marketing survey less than a year after its move to Traynor. Even if Stan had been privy to some of this information, he surely could not have believed they would give the job to a young, bespectacled Jew who also happened to be a damyankee—a Jew with an easy grin, a hipshot way of walking, a taste for bell-bottomed jeans on his days off, and the last ghosts of his adolescent acne still on his face. Yet they had. They had. And it seemed that Stan had known it all along.
    His work for CV led to an offer of a full-time position with the company—starting salary, $30,000 a year.
    â€œAnd that really is only the start,” Stanley told Patty in bed that night. “They are going to grow like corn in August, my dear. If no one blows up the world in the next ten years or so, they are going to be right up there on the big board along with Kodak and Sony and RCA.”
    â€œSo what are you going to do?” she asked, already knowing.
    â€œI am going to tell them what a pleasure it was to do business with them,” he said, and laughed, and drew her close, and kissed her.Moments later he mounted her, and there were climaxes—one, two, and three, like bright rockets going off in a night sky . . . but there was no baby.
    His work with Corridor Video had brought him into contact with some of Atlanta’s richest and most