The Anti-Vashti At My Purim Feast – Excerpt

Written by Adam Arotti. Adam Arotti is an author of Jewish-themed erotica, highlighting the erotic elements in biblical and Talmudic stories, as well as capitalizing on the taboos created by Orthodox Judaism. Fresh, provocative and educational, his anthology of biblical erotica is well under way. He lives on the West Coast with his wife and children. Visit his temporary home at adamarotti.wordpress.com to stay tuned for more excerpts, stories and submissions! For more Jewrotica writing by Adam Arotti, check out The Barren Wife, Through The Window, Under the Bed, Erotica, I Get – But Jewish Erotica?, and Coming Out Of the Toy Closet.

The following is an excerpt from Adam Arotti’s short story, “The Anti-Vashti At My Purim Feast,” which has been published on Amazon, and which, as of midnight tonight and through Thursday, will be offered for free as an early Mishloach Manot.

I stood for a while, eyeing the sign with a mixture of skepticism, distaste and amusement. He watched my face expectantly. Finally, I spoke.

“Fine. But it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to use the room.”

The freshly-printed sign taped onto the door of our guest room read:

I shook my head.

My husband cocked his head at me, as a gleam entered his eyes. How that look always terrified me! It was a look that always promised to upset the balance and the comfort-levels of my tidy little world.

“Would you be open to a little test?” he asked slowly, a cat playing with its mouse. “A chance for you to put your money where your mouth is?”

The way he said “test” filled me with a weird kind of dread; the kind that also made me feel a bit hotter, and that did funny things in the pit of my stomach.

“What kind of a test?” I did not try to hide my apprehension.

“Well,” he said, “it would be a very straightforward one. You think nobody will go in there. Maybe you’re right. Which means that if you go in there, you’ll be all alone.”

He watched me carefully, as he laid out his proposal.

“How about, at three different points during the seudah, you commit to going into the RAVE room, and staying there for five minutes each?”

I thought about it. That was indeed putting my money where my mouth was. Did I really believe that nobody would be interested in the RAVE room? I was actually pretty sure people would be very interested, and very curious — but solely from a voyeuristic point of view. They would love to see who might be coming in and out of the RAVE room, but I truly didn’t think that anyone would actually do it themselves. I nodded slowly.

“That sounds fair,” I said grudgingly. “Is this a test, or a dare?”

I knew that I shouldn’t have asked that as soon as I saw the gleam in his eyes intensify.

“Good girl!” he exclaimed. “I’m loving your attitude! Let’s make it a dare, shall we?”

He grinned wickedly.

“How about, if you are right, and if each time you are in the room, you remain alone for the full five minutes, then I will give you three full-body oil massages over the course of next week.

I raised my eyebrows and pushed out my lower lip as I nodded — the universal expression for being impressed.

“But,” he wagged his finger, “if I’m right, and if during any of your visits to the RAVE room you are not alone, then, during your next visit to the RAVE room — or, if it’s during your last visit that you find someone there, then you need to leave and come back — you will enter the room without your bra or panties, and wearing an easy-access skirt. Which you will roll up when you are inside. And you have to unbutton or roll up your top.”

My eyes widened as he spoke. How terrifying! Yet how very stimulating! I was conscious of the fact that I was blushing profusely, both at the thought of my husband wanting me to be in a pitch-black room with another unknown person with no panties or bra, and the thought of actually being in a pitch-black room with another unknown person with no panties or bra!

My mind — not to mention other parts of me — raced with the many ways this could play out. I certainly would not put it past my husband to try to manipulate the outcome of the bet. But what would he do?

“Fine,” I finally said.

He stuck his hand out to seal the bet with a handshake. I let it hang there for a moment, as I desperately tried to think of something to add to the deal to protect myself, but nothing came to me. Sighing, I finally shook his hand. The bet was on.

On Purim I was a pirate wench. This meant that I was wearing a faux leather skirt, with a tattered hem that just covered my knees. I wore boots over fishnet thigh-high stockings. On top I had a loose cream-colored, buccaneer-type shirt, underneath a tight brown-leather corset, laced down my center.

When I was picking out the accessories, I passed on the eye-patch, but I did pick out a long blond wig, with a couple of tresses braided and beaded, and a kerchief tied on top.

So I was looking fairly busty and hot. I was by no means the only one in a hot costume — I had several friends with higher hemlines, more provocative slits, and slinkier outfits. But I did get my fair share of stares and wolf whistles over the course of the day.

And I was on shpilkes for the Purim seudah to start already!

As soon as our first guest arrived, I herded the kids outside, and Aaron went to put the sign on the door of the RAVE room, turned on the music and the red light in the hallway, turned off the lights in the RAVE room, and made sure that all the doors were closed.

I remember that as we passed each other, he gave me this grin and wink, and my breathing turned instantly shallow, and I shivered. How was I going to be able to function normally and play hostess like this?

I managed. Barely.

At some point, by husband came up behind me and palmed my ass. He whispered into my ear.

“Nu?”

I turned my head.

“Now?”

“Yup.”

I turned to look at him. His eyes were wide and mischievous. I touched my finger to his lips, and walked away from him towards the hallway. Sure that the ground was shaking with the pounding of my heart, I virtually tiptoed down the hallway, even though I knew how silly that must have looked in my cacophonous house.

When I got to the door to the second hallway, I gave a quick look back down the first one. There were several guests in my line of vision, but none of them were looking in my direction. Opening the door just a bit, I quickly slipped inside and closed it behind me.

The second hallway was empty, although I heard a couple of voices coming from the office to my right. To my left, I could hear the pumping music coming from the RAVE room. I took a pink bracelet from the hook. Then I took a deep shaky breath, opened the door slowly, and slipped inside, quickly closing the door behind me.

The room was pitch black, and the music was loud. I took a few steps into what I knew was the center of the room and just stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. They didn’t; there simply wasn’t any light to adjust to. All I could see was the faint glow of my pink bracelet. I just stood there, willing my breathing into a regular pattern, trying to figure out how much time had passed, whether my five minutes were up yet.

A couple of minutes passed.

It seemed like hours, but I knew that time was likely passing far more slowly than it seemed to my adrenaline-infused mind. I was determined to honor my end of the bargain, so I forced myself to stick it out for another few minutes.

The room seemed empty, and as the adrenaline started to drain from me, I suddenly felt incredibly weary. I figured that I had about two minutes left, and I should probably use them to sit down, after being on my feet all day. Nothing in our deal said that I had to be standing.

I groped my way forward toward the bed. My foot found the short leg of the night table. With my left hand, I reached out and felt the headboard. This allowed me to orient myself, as I turned around, and carefully lowered myself into a sitting position on the bed. I exhaled as I sank into the mattress, my hands on either side of me.

And then the mattress moved.

I froze.

For a moment, I thought that it must have been the aftershock of my weight settling on the bed, but then the mattress moved again, and I was certain.

Someone else was sitting on the bed. I was feeling the tremors of somebody else’s weight shifting on the same mattress that I was sitting on in a pitch black room designed to inspire naughtiness.

I couldn’t breathe.

Carefully, trying to make no perceptible motion at all, I squeezed my arms to my sides, and gathered my hands into my lap. I was sure five minutes was almost up.

The mattress moved again.

This time, when it settled, another thigh brushed my own, and I could feel another person sitting to my left. Sitting closely.

And I suddenly found that my eyes could see one other thing in the room: the glow of a blue bracelet.

Shit!

By contrast, here I was, obeying my husband, standing virtually naked in the RAVE room at our Purim feast.

If Vashti was a wicked woman, then doing the opposite of what she did should be a sound policy, right? Is displaying one’s body at a feast a Vashti-esque thing to do? Or does the fact that Vashti refused to oblige her husband mean that obedience is the better choice? Basically, was I more or less virtuous than Vashti with my body presented, as it was, to my husband’s friends?

An hour later, I steadied myself, and returned to the dining room. In the distance, behind me, I thought I heard another door closing in the echo of the hallway. I forced myself not to look in that direction.

My husband spotted me almost immediately, and a second later, he was at my side.

“Well?” he asked, expectantly.

“I did it.” I breathed.

Inside, I was positively triumphant. At this Purim seudah, unlike King Achashverosh’s feast of yore, I had answered my husband’s call for erotic entertainment — and now it was time to celebrate.

Vashti? Ha — Vashti had nothing on me. Whatever her ancient reasons had been, she had defied her husband, lost her life, and created a more oppressive home environment for women across the kingdom. I, on the other hand, knew that I had scored major points with my husband — not to mention my own self-confidence. And the experience itself wasn’t that shabby either. I decided that I was decidedly not Vashti; if anything, I was the anti-Vashti.

My legs still shaking, I rejoined my friends at the seudah.