Synopsis:

A sensuous journey into the heart of sex and passion, exploring the demands of emotion, the conditions for intimacy.

In The Price of Passion, Simone -- the orphaned, emotionally neglected daughter of a wealthy family -- must earn her inheritance by traveling the globe, delivering a message to her dying grandmother's lesbian lovers.  The young woman hopes the pilgrimage will help her reconstruct her shadowed family history -- the shape of lives lived without her.

Simone discovers a universe of sexual initiation, lust, love, and desire, of great possibility and limited options, through a series of erotic encounters linked by her familial passions and worldly experience.  She learns that there is a price to be paid for the emotions one is willing to feel, the truths one is capable of acknowledging.

Book Excerpt:

The Price of Passion by Jess Wells 

           

Simone regarded the rippled side of the oily train as if it were the face of a loved one.  It was over now, her incredible journey toward lust and connection, a lifetime of travel, and the sensations ran over her skin: the smell of warm arms, the press of lips against her thighs, the aroma of wet hair, the touch of silk and burlap, of cotton sheets still hanging on the line as her body was pressed into them. Whose breath was it that she could feel against the soft skin between her lip and nose? All of them, the lovers who let slip the acrid smell of calamari, the sweet of Schnapps on clean teeth, the musk of wine and nutty tobacco, all sighing against her face, their tiny breaths full of gratitude and self-absorption.

At 66, she was tired, home finally in Boston but more disoriented than if she had missed a connection in Zimbabwe.  She swayed unsteadily as the train wrenched itself from the station, gathering speed, tearing her past away from her and leaving her coated with a cindery dust and the stench of diesel.  Simone turned, caught by the sight of her own name scrawled on a placard and she took a step backward when she saw that the sign was being carried by a thin young woman in khakis and a white shirt, whose mane of black hair was exactly the color that her own had been when she had been that age.  The eyes, the nose, this woman walking toward her was Simone, a memory whose hair was shimmering like her own hair, forty years ago, that had made people on the sidewalk lean into her to inhale the color, had made women beg to sleep all night in her tangles.  This vision in the train station held Simone’s placard more as a nameplate, as an identification of herself than as a way to find Simone and the old woman thought that time had finally turned back upon itself, that through her travels she had been looking for her past, her mother, her lineage, her purpose and place, to construct herself, weave herself and now that her journey was over, she was back to being the young woman she had been when she stepped onto a train with the name of her first destination clutched in an envelope in her hand, unawares, uninitiated, an unformed woman without identity who would have gladly carried a sign like a breast plate if it could have made her identity real and given her a home.  Simone, watching herself approach her, thought that time had bent once and for all, that her mind had slipped into the jet stream of her vagabond life and had whirled in a full circle, bringing her back to her own youth, because this young woman proffering her little cardboard sign was Simone except that this time around, Simone strained to see, the girl had full knowledge of who she was, didn’t she? 

Simone took a step backward as her knees buckled.  No, there in the young woman’s eyes was the same lonely vortex that Simone had had in her eyes when she had first begun this journey.  The young woman’s eyes were dark and bitter with neglect, eyes that sucked in compliments and gestures of affection like insignificant dust particles.  Eyes that showed Simone a longing so old and unfulfilled  that it ...

Write a Review »

Topics/Categories:

Erotica, LGBT, Love, Romance, Travel, Women's Interest

Genre:

General Erotica

Type of Work:

Novel

Publishers:

Firebrand Books

Purchase From:

Purchase an autographed copy from Jess Wells

Original Publish Date:

October 1, 1999

Formats:

Paperback

• Share With:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•