Free Project Passion by Dusty Miller Page B

Everyone had their Mount
Everest—something that they just had to do once in their lives. At
least make the attempt.
    Deep down inside she wondered if there
was revulsion, and just what exactly made a perfectly sensible
woman ldo this to herself.
    Surely that must be it. It must be
personal revulsion.
     
    #
     
    After taking time off for a doctor’s
appointment, Heather stopped at a cash machine in a local strip
mall and took out three hundred dollars from an account that was
surprising in its liquidity. She had inherited a little money and
had no idea of what to do with it. A pilgrimage to Rome, or
Jerusalem had been suggested. Taking off her headgear in the car,
and with some objective observation, she thought she could pass for
an average woman, if she just kept her long coat done up. She was
merely plain, but not obviously a nun in Holy Orders.
    Heart pounding in raw fear much of the
time, she drove the house’s spare utility sedan eighty miles, and
at darned near eighty miles an hour too, to a regional town on a
dull, late autumn day. It was one where she was pretty sure she
didn’t know anybody. Having studied all the flyers online, she went
straight to Green’s Pharmacy, which was several hundred thousand
square feet in size and known over the tri-state area. The
supplies, as she thought of them, were inserted as an afterthought
in a long list of cheap items which included diapers and a famous
brand of tampons. She bought a case of Similac, some kind of baby
formula. She spoke to no one. She would blush or give the game away
somehow. The checkout girl barely looked up and she was out of
there in twenty minutes. Most of which was spent simply going up
and down the unfamiliar aisles. It’s not like she didn’t know
exactly what she was looking for. She had a list, or surely she
would have forgotten something in her hyper state of mind. She went
to two or three different stores in town, so as not to give herself
away buying panty-hose and condoms, hair remover and stuff like
that, all from the same teller.
    To run into a cousin or something
would have been sheer disaster. Most of the items she could donate
at a local drop-box. It was just cover for what she thought of as
The Project.
    Suitably emboldened, and after a while
a lot more confident that no one in this particular hick town would
ever see her again, Heather checked a phone book in a booth
standing in front of a Seven-Eleven gas bar and then went looking
for the lingerie store. In the end, she couldn’t stand around all
day looking in the window, and so, stammering and blushing
something fierce, she ended up not buying anything except a narrow
black ribbon with a bow on it for her neck. She wished she could
have been cooler then, but that would be her costume. A proper
dildo would have been priceless, but she just couldn’t do it. She
would be the perfect present for the right guy. Stealing jeans and
other small items from the rummage bin in the church hall front
closet was somehow easier to live with. It was a small package and
easy to hide in their big old building. Down in the basement, it
was tucked into the rafters, carefully leaving the spider webs in
front of the opening intact. She always used a chair from another
room and always put it back right on its giveaway little dust
circles. The long winter nights were used for research and
planning.
     
    #
     
    Heather shook her head. How brave she
was in bringing her packages home. To park the car, and walk in
from outside on knocking knees, loaded with shopping bags. To push
the button and wait for the elevator…it was all kind of a letdown
when no one came along and she had the lobby all to herself. Would
it have been better if Mother Superior was standing there with arms
crossed and right foot tapping?
    Oh, have you been
shopping?
    She hadn’t even been missed. Everyone
accepted her presence at face value. She’d been gone three of four
hours. No one said a word. When the elevator door opened,