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The parquet pressing into her palms and knees. She hated the part of her, small and hot, that enflamed itself being here, on hands and knees. Dirty girl. She burned. She made a vow: she would never crawl for another man. [The gods love to fuck with us, Mathilde would say later; she became a wife.]
"Another?" Ariel said. He dipped it, put it at the end of the hallway, twenty yards away. "Crawl," he said. He laughed.
The word wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip.
Weip means to turn, twist or wrap.
In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh.
Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.
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