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What really cemented their union, however, was the book. Not just any ordinary book, but The Book itself. Well, maybe a few explanations were in order.

In New Orléans he had discovered its existence quite by chance during one of his many business trips. Laurent loved the city with a French heart, the best one in the US for him, and couldn’t help seeking out its finer pleasures. Needless to say, they mostly concerned sex and doing it with a voodoo sort of witch was an experience all its own. With her amber-colored skin and Créole roots, Mélissane was exactly his type.

Met in a pleasure house, Laurent found her fascinating to the point of asking for individual services whenever he happened to be in town. And she agreed, going to his hotel and staying over for the duration of his trip, if necessary, or however long he required. Why shouldn’t she? I pay her more than she earns in a week in that rat hole. Since he was shelling out the hard piles of cash, he kept her to the bed, insatiable, to use her slender silhouette as he saw fit, in the dominating way he liked best.

It had become his usual routine with Mélissane, every free minute spent indoors except during Carnival, if Laurent was so lucky to catch it. Then he’d take her out and celebrate Mardi Gras as only a born and bred European could, having digested its traditions along with his mother’s milk.

No doubt about it, he could relate to it in a way he never had with Halloween. No, it wasn’t just a matter of dressing up in costumes, which people did on both occasions. It had more to do with the differences in their finalities. Unlike Halloween, the Carnival was the prelude to a very spiritual period emphasizing the connection to God, rather than that with spirits in general. Its feasts marked the beginning of Lent’s fasts, so the excesses in the celebrations were somehow justified by the rigors that would follow, to remind everyone God enforced a severe moral code on his promoters. Like Ramadan for the Muslims, so the Catholics had to observe a strict diet during Lent, the forty days preceding Easter, in order to purify their bodies and souls to make them worthy of Christ’s resurrection.

During Mardi Gras, some places tolerated promiscuity and outright sex in public, something Laurent naturally took advantage of. It was on one such occasion Mélissane told him about the book. Now how had things gone exactly? Oh, yes, now he remembered.