Erotica By Bravo - The Novella: En Garde: Seduction

Purchase it here: En Garde: Seduction (Erotica By Bravo)

Hi, faithful readers.

Michele Bravo has published her first novella on Kindle, called En Garde: Seduction. It explains how Peter Dighton and Sasha Forrest frst met.

It's 11,000 words, and costs $2.99. Order it by going to Amazon and conducting a search on En Garde: Seduction.
Here are the first two chapters.

Erotica by Bravo #1
En Garde: Seduction


Chapter 1

“There are three main types of fencing today,” Sasha Forrest told the five young people gathered in the high school gym. They were each clad in scruffy looking sweatpants and sweatshirts, with fencing foils and helmets at their feet. Sasha herself was tall and elegant in a white fencing jacket with a red heart over her left breast. The jacket itself was set off nicely by her black fencing knickers, stockings, and black shoes.

“There’s sport fencing, which is what you see in college and in the Olympics. In that kind of fencing, it’s a matter only of who touches whom first. The weapons – whether foil, sabre or epee – aren’t sharp, and so it doesn’t matter if anyone gets hit after they make their touch, they still get a point. Well..”

Sasha paused. She didn’t want to get too detailed in talking with high school students, but it was important to be accurate. “Epee is kind of different but I’m not going to go into that now!” she temporized.

She continued: “Then there’s classical fencing. That’s a type of fencing that harkens back to historical fencing – to dueling. In classical fencing – the points are sharp, and it most definitely matters if you get touched after you’ve made your own hit. The idea is to not get hit at all.

Then there’s stage fencing, which is what you see in the movies and on stage…and what I’m going to teach you. In stage fencing, the show is thing.”

Her five students – four guys and a girl – nodded.

“However,” said Sasha, “Let me point out that conditioning is just important for stage fencers as it is for any other type of fencer, if not more so. When you’re on stage you need to be able to remember the choreography, you need to be able to execute that choreography under bright lights, and under the eyes of 500 people. You have to be able to speak your lines at the same time or almost immediately afterward, and be able to be heard by those 500 people. So while I’m going to teach you the finer points of stage fencing, I’m also going to give you a pretty good workout in this class.”

Sasha gestured at the gym floor with the foil she held.

“As you can see, I’ve outlined three pistes on the floor in tape. Each one is 46 feet in length, and 6 feet wide. In competition and classical fencing, the competition takes place on the piste and you’re penalized if you step out of it. In stage fencing, as I told you, anything goes. You can stay on a piste if it’s called for in the stage directions, or you can be fencing up and down the aisles that run through the audience, or run up and down walls or things, whatever obstacles the set designer decides to put in your way.

But we’re going to start out today by learning our footwork and fencing terminology, and how to move up and down the piste. We won’t start applying what we’ve learned to stage combat until our next class.”

At that point, James Starling, a member of Sasha’s fencing club, entered the gym. He was dressed in a track suit and carried helmet and foil.

Sasha reached out and shook his head in greeting. “This is James, he’s a friend of mine. He’s going to help me demonstrate all the moves that I’m going to teach you. We’re going to do it two ways. First, we’re going to fence the way they do in competitive fencing. Then, we’ll open it up a bit and do it like stage fencers do.”

For the next ten minutes, Sasha and James bouted. As they darted up and down the piste, Sasha gave the names for each move she or James used, most of which was in French or Italian. In addition, and one thing she wanted to accomplish early on, was to impress her students by revealing her speed and precision on the piste. They could tell she was a skilled fencer who knew whereof she lunged, riposted, flechèd and balestra’d.

At the end of the ten minutes, Sasha shook hands with James again and thanked him for coming. “My pleasure," he murmured to her. Then he sketched a wave at the students, and left the gym. She’d buy him a Pepsi or something, next time they were at the Minneapolis Fencing Club.

“Okay,” said Sasha. “Let’s get started. Put on your helmets, please. We’re not going to do any actual fencing today, but I want you to get used to the feel of it, as you move around the piste. You will never, ever fence without wearing a helmet. Now, let me see each of you assume the en garde position.”

She watched critically as her five students assumed the position. Each of them was right handed, she noted with some relief. Good, so much easier to not have to give extra instructions to a left hander, she thought to herself.

Her students stood sideways and raised their swords in their right hands, meantime holding their left arms curled behind their backs, with their hands up high above their heads. They crouched slightly, with their right foot pointed forward, and their left foot turned sideways. Perfect en garde position.

“Very good,” said Sasha. “Now, let’s check out your conditioning. I want you to advance across the entire floor of this gym, and then retreat back to me. You saw how I did it while I was bouting with James, but let me show you again.”

She demonstrated how to advance, lifting the front foot and stepping forward about half a foot, while bringing the rear leg up to maintain the same distance between front and rear foot. Then she demonstrated how to retreat, by reversing the process.

“Okay, your turn,” she called.

Her students began to advance in unison.

They were drama students from the local high school, sixteen or seventeen years old, she guessed. School was out – it was summer – but they were attending summer acting classes given by the local Community Education center, and she was giving her time free to teach a class on stage fencing.

As she took them through a variety of other drills – learning how to advance twice and retreat once, how to retreat twice and advance one, how to lunge and recover from a lunge, advance and lunge, retreat and lunge, and so on, Sasha noted that they all were in pretty good shape. Fencing relied a great deal on the legs and on conditioning, and while they were breathing hard by the end of each drill, none of them was doing noticeably worse than the others.

By the end of this first class, Sasha was confident that her students had both the ambition and the ability to absorb what she was going to teach, and be able to translate it to the stage.

“Okay, kids,” she said. “We haven’t had much fun today, but when you come back on Wednesday, we’re going to take what we’ve learned and actually cross swords. So thanks for coming, and see you then.”

 
Chapter 2

Sasha walked into her apartment, set a bag of Chinese carry-out on the table, and turned on the TV.

She lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Minneapolis’s “West Bank.” The city of Minneapolis was bisected by the Mississippi River, and people who lived on either side of it distinguished themselves by being on the East Bank or the West Bank. Her neighborhood was located right by the University of Minnesota, in a subset of the West Bank called Dinkytown, and most – but not all – of the homes and apartments were rented by U of M students. Sasha lived in a high rise apartment building with two room-mates, one a secretary at Honeywell, the other a bank teller. Sasha was the aspiring actress of the group.

Sasha had gone to college in Richmond, Virginia on a fencing scholarship, and intended to earn a degree in business administration. But as was so often the case, she’d attended a production put on by the university’s theater school, became hooked, and switched her major to the fine arts.

After receiving her degree, she’d decided to move to Minneapolis, one of the cities that had a thriving theater scene, but which was a lot less expensive to live in (and safer) than Chicago or New York. And if her quest to gain roles immediately failed, she could always enroll in the University of Minnesota’s Master of Fine Arts Program.

But she’d wanted to spend the summer auditioning for plays, first.

Leaving the white boxes of takeout on the counter, Sasha went into the bathroom and took a long, hot shower. She soaped her long, clean limbs, and her pert breasts. She was five foot ten, with the musculature of a life-long athlete. Her short brown hair complemented her high cheekbones and long, straight nose, and her eyes were Siberian husky eyes, a crystal clear blue and her best feature. Her normal speaking voice was a soft southern drawl, but she had an excellent ear for accents and could speak Minnesotan already, not to mention a variety of British and Eastern European ones.

Sasha pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, then returned to the kitchen, heated up her sweet & sour chicken and chicken fried rice, and relaxed on the couch with her copy of the Twin Cities Call Sheet, the newspaper for the theatrical community.

So far, her quest for roles had not been a successful one. Since arriving in the Twin Cities two months ago, she’d gone to a dozen casting calls, with no success. Money was not a problem – she was a fencing instructor with the Minneapolis Fencing Club, who were delighted to have an Olympic caliber fencer on staff.

When the bank teller, Alice Kendrick, returned to the apartment half an hour later, she found Sasha watching TV disconsolately, the Twin Cities Call Sheet screwed up into a ball on the coffee table in front of her.

Alice looked at the remains of the newspaper. “Bad news?” she asked.

Sasha smoothed out the paper. “Look at that,” she said, pointing toward a paragraph which she’d circled several times with a red pen.

It was a call for male actors, who needed to be well-skilled in a German accent and knowledgeable about stage combat, “in particular, fencing.”

“So?” said Alice, looking at her.

“So, that role would be perfect for me, except they only want male actors to audition.”

Alice shrugged. “There’s got to be plenty of other roles here, Sasha. This thing has four pages.”

“But this role would be perfect for me. My fencing skills would put me over the top, not to mention my German accent.”

“Well, why don’t you pull a Tootsie, then?” said Alice with a laugh.

Sasha blinked at her. “Pull a Tootsie? What the heck is that?”

Alice stared back. “Didn’t you ever see the movie Tootsie, with Dustin Hoffman? He’s an actor, but he can’t get a job because he’s such a jerk and no one will hire him anymore. So he dresses up as a woman and auditions for the role of a woman…and gets it.”

Sasha looked at her friend, and then nodded. “You know, that’s not such a bad idea.”

“Uh…Sasha,” said Alice. “I was joking.”

Sasha sat up straighter. “No, I think it’s a great idea,” she said excitedly. “Why not? I can dress up like a guy, act like a guy. It’d be a kick!”

“No, no, Sasha. Believe me, it will end in tears.”

“Tears?” laughed Sasha. “That’s a bit melodramatic.”

“Not at all. I’ll tell you exactly what will happen. You’ll audition for the role, and you’ll get it. During rehearsals, you will catch the eye of a male actor…or maybe the writer or director of the piece, whatever, and you’ll fall in love with him. He will be interested in you, as well, only he will think that you’re a guy. There will be many exchanges of glances, and wistful lunches or drinks after work…but then you’ll reveal that you are in actual fact a woman, and he will walk away from you, his hands in his pockets, as it starts to rain…”

“Is that what happened in Tootsie?” demanded Sasha.

“Jesus,” said Alice. “How can you be an actress when you don’t even know the most elementary movies? That’s from Shakespeare in Love! Of course, in the movie, Shakespeare isn’t gay, and so when he falls in love with Gywneth Paltrow, she falls in love with him, too. No problem. So everything would’ve ended all right if it weren’t for Colin Firth’s character. He makes off with her in the end.”

Alice paused for breath.

“But the point is,” she continued, “in real life any guy attracted to you in your guise as a guy…would be crushed to find out you were a woman instead. And you’ll spend the rest of your life pining after a guy you could never have.”

“You’ve got a melodramatic mind, Alice.”

Alice grinned. “Thank you.”

“Anyway,” said Sasha. “It’s not going to happen. Should I be so lucky as to get this part, I’ll reveal myself immediately, of course.”

“You say that now,” said Alice, “but I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that if you are cast in the part, you won’t say word one about it.”

“You’re on,” said Sasha, holding out her hand.

They shook on it.

Alice, shaking her head and smiling, went into her bedroom. She wasn’t worried. She didn’t believe for one minute that Sasha would get the part.

Sasha, meanwhile, made a list of items she’d have to pick up in order to pull off her successful masquerade as a man.

The rest of it will only appear in the novella. Please purchase it to keep this blog funded. ; )