... a classic tale of liberation through eroticism.
Arthur Alexander, once a mild-mannered man of finance, meets the beautiful and restless Marianne. Their intense pleasure promises new vistas of experience for them both. But first Marianne must be freed from the Sapphic blackmail of Agnes.
A story of escape, self-discovery and freedom that fights against conformity and possessiveness-a tale of sexual frenzy and fulfillment.
PROLOGUE
My name is Arthur Alexander. I am thirty four years old. Until three months ago, I was a familiar, if unexciting, figure often seen around the financial district of Boston, Massachusetts. I had an office on the thirty-eighth floor of a building surrounded by other buildings. For eleven years I have worked in the accounting department. I had always preferred things to be orderly, and, when the time came, I chose a line of work which would grant me that. Others in the department found it necessary to exhibit their rebellions against the firm reality of numbers by dreaming up means by which they might divert whole slabs of money into their own coffers, but I never went along with their silly schemes. Not that any of them actually attempted such a thing, no. Instead, they spoke loudly and braggingly of what they were going to do someday. I-allow me to assure you of this-was never very interested in "someday." My life was small, perhaps, and yet I have searched my memory for any hints of dissatisfaction, and I have found none. I had an apartment on Beacon Hill where I kept my books and my music. I had a small circle of friends-or perhaps I ought to call them acquaintances: I have been learning something about friendship recently-with whom I dined infrequently and with whom I discussed fine points of aesthetics. We prided ourselves on our taste and our decorum. I might even be tempted to accuse us of making a fetish of decency. I have an image of myself which is not especially flattering, I suppose, but which does accurately symbolize my way of living back there in Boston. Picture for yourself an ordinary looking man with sandy hair and a long face sitting before a small fire of birch logs. The apartment around him is quiet. Nothing disturbs his repose. Beside him is a glass of deep red wine, about which he is more keenly aware that it is from the eight-year-old bottle of St. Emilion he has been hording than he is of its taste. He raises the glass to his nose, swirling the wine gently as he does so. He inhales the fragrance. He holds the glass toward the fire to watch the play of light through the wine. Satisfied, he raises it once more to his lips and rolls a small portion onto his tongue. He savors the taste. He swallows. And then-and this is what characterizes him-he turns his face slightly so that he is watching his own eyes in the mirror behind a spray of cyclamen, and he smiles at himself a vain smile. I was; I'm afraid to say, rather a tiresome fellow.
I was not aware of the fact then, but this carefully constructed and assiduously maintained ambiance was far and away less stable than I ever dreamed. It has taken a mere three months to vitiate completely the habits of eleven years. This book is an attempt to report the true events of those three months, mostly, I confess, for my own sake. I am still stunned by the quickness of it all. I must say, I would not cavil if you chose to regard this as a fiction. Indeed, were it not for the sun shining so strongly on my head this very minute, or for the wind, or indeed for the thrilling blue of the sea, I might well believe myself that I had made all this up. The whole thing is so like a fantasy, after all, that I might have dreamed it. Perhaps-I think this less now than I , used to, but it does still occur-perhaps I will wake up and find myself back there in front of that sterile fire, amusing myself with a lonely bottle of good wine, having drunk too much and slept. I despise the idea of such a thing so intensely that I have been having trouble sleeping right here. Often I rise and climb up to look at the stars, standing barefooted on the dew-covered deck, and I marvel that they are the same stars which may be seen from Boston. Well, from somewhere outside Boston. I think of the people, those acquaintances, whom I have left behind. I bend my mind upon the office. I do miss the gossip: that's a genuine feeling, although I never took part in the gossiping that seemed to qualify in everyone's mind for work. I do miss the little stories, the small questions-does she, or doesn't she?-which I used to hear. But they do not make me homesick. How could such a paltry satisfaction hold sway over the attraction of this wide sea, the stars? How, also, could the memory of my few relationships-what a constipated word for love I-with the receptionists or the secretaries attract me away from Marianne? I like a woman to have something to say. That was the trouble with the office girls: their slender bodies matched perfectly their inadequate minds. But Marianne! Firm, strong, womanly are the words that come to mind. Her voluptuous form mirrors a rich mind, a burning inquisitiveness, such an aggression as would have shocked me before. I would have run from her. I would have run until I was in no danger from her and then turned around and sneered. How stupid we are! Thank God she came when she did. To choose death, or, to be less melodramatic, to choose blandness when one might have vigor: such is the stupidity of those legions upon legions, of men, the mawkish, the dun, of whom I was once one.
Perhaps I should set the scene. It is early April. Marianne and I are living aboard her thirty-six foot sailboat, Moth, while we shake her down and stock her up for a run across the mid-Atlantic to the Caribbean. Moth is a cutter, double-ended, something rather like an old Colin Archer design. She was built eighteen years ago in Denmark, but she has lived in the Mediterranean for the past ten. Her hull is of wood and has been well maintained, her mast is Norway spruce, her mainsail is new, and over the past four days we have been installing a home-made self-steering rig. Such technical details will not be of interest to my general readers, but I have found a great satisfaction in accustoming myself to the jargon of nautical life. There is that about the precision of Moth's performance which sits well with a mind attracted to orderliness, and the endless technological details of the rigging, the stowage, the engine repairs, the ground tackle well, everything really-is an undiminishing fascination to me.
We are in Greek waters. Once the funeral and all its attendant details were over, we left Istanbul, and we lie now in the Piraeus. In two days we leave for a week's cruise around the near islands, a last attempt to get everything cleared away before the beginning of the voyage. The winds have not been particularly good-it will not surprise me again that the Greeks invented the bireme with its rows of oars rather than the caravel-but Marianne and I are not in any hurry. Everything has been done, and that which we were unable to do simply has been left behind. (I say that so cavalierly, and yet only three months ago the idea of leaving any string untied would have been anathema. Well, the idea of doing this at all never would have occurred to me then.)
Greece! I, Arthur Alexander, right this very instant, am looking across the dirty, dark waters of the Piraeus at Greece! Three months ago, Greece was Homer, retsina, and shepherds on the sides of Olympus. Greece was mythic, then, and now she is real. Oh, the myth was perfectly real as well, I imagine, but ... well, just look around me! I hear the valuable voices of the watermen, the thumping of engines. A Japanese freighter which came in last night is pumping her bilge and clearing away her gear so she can discharge. Two tugs are passing. The water roils brown in their wakes. Our topsides are becoming streaked with oil. The skyline is jumbled, unplanned, getting along as best it can. The sun is hot. The day is still. There is a hard glitter everywhere, a brassiness about the horizon, which, they say, portends a wind. Marianne is ashore with the dingy, seeing about some boson's stores, and I am left, having finished my job of hand-stitching the boltropes and the cringles of the new mainsail to jot down here a few thoughts in the sun. How proud I felt, sitting on the doghouse with my palm and beeswax and the dun-colored sail spread out around me! One of the voyaging crowd, I felt one of those rootless people whose lives are spent being blown forever over another horizon. Beyond and beyond, for day after day, month after month, following the lead of the wind. The sun beats on my arms and shoulders. My skin, which had been red, turns slowly to brown. I sport a mustache for the first time in my life, and it becomes quite a walrus. My hair begins to curl around my ears. I Bit, and sew, and the crews of the barges, the pilots, the tugs look at me with envy on their faces. Yachtsmen burbling past in their weekend-shiny Clorox-bottle yachts see the sturdy lines and the heavy gear, and they know I am different from them. I am one of those albatrosses, they think, who float on their wide wings above the tops of the long, grey swells of the southern ocean, around and around and around the world, never stopping, never seeing any land, never bothering with anything save the wind, and the waves, and the sea.
I would never have suspected such romanticism in myself. My history has been one of small pleasures, small thoughts. The great oceans of the world have meant little or nothing to me. Awe itself has played but a marginal role in my life. It is through Marianne that such things becomes possible for me. I must, I suppose, have had an incipient leaning toward the magnificent. Maybe we all do. But it took the discovery of Marianne-a chance occurrence-for me suddenly to realize just how much I had been missing in my former life. The explosion came through sex, yes, but I am not so much a voluptuary as a pilgrim. I feel that I am just now beginning with my life, that I have taken the first steps along a path which I hope will never to come to an end. I am looking for experience. I am not striving in what is a demonic way, however, for the experiences themselves are of little value. It is the manner in which they enlarge my own capacities that makes them valuable to me. I can, for example, say that sex with Marianne is a. holy experience, but it is made so not through its heavenly quality-which it does have, of course-but through its love. Love, at least like this, is something I have never felt before. I am transformed. Ideas occur to me, capabilities become apparent, that have never even entered my life. I recall that as we sailed finally into the Aegean from the Sea of Marmora, after we had gotten clear of the shipping and were coasting along the hillsides which Alexander once knew, Marianne, who was at the tiller, turned to me and said that life cruising, the sun and the sea, were essential for existence. This was no revelation to her. This was a statement of simple fact. Life without these things was nothing. Now, it had never occurred to me that such importance could be placed on these things. I had sometimes enjoyed a short summer's sail around Boston Harbor or off Cape Cod, but what I had thought of as the essential realities of life, the getting and spending, so overshadowed these vacation moments that they were in my memory like the faded photographs which gathered dust while recording them. But, with Marianne, these things have become essential to me as well. I understand now that my former life was one of meekness almost unheard of. I was no man then. I had no force. My greatest ability was to lie over on my back and be trodden upon by everyone who came my way. An entirely new conception of manhood is becoming available to me, one which grows out of Marianne's intense femininity and out of the life which we have begun together. All the old qualities-strength, decision, courage which we men have so easily learned to vilify are becoming the cornerstones of Arthur Alexander's new manhood. Where I am strong, Marianne is weak, and vice versa. We reveal in our difference, not in our similarity. There is no unisex style aboard this ship, thank you very much. I am a man, and she is a woman. I have no desire to grow a cunt, nor does she pine for the day she may sport a cock. I go out, she goes in: the difference is important as well as profound.
But I see her rowing out toward me now, threading her way through the other yachts which have taken shelter here in the navel of Greece. We'll be leaving soon on a short trip, and then on a longer one. Perhaps we'll never return to the Piraeus. Civilization began here, at least for we Westerners. Or in Egypt, or Mesopotamia. I'll see Alexandria before I die, and the ruins of Nineveh. Civilization began beside this hot, still sea: our stem when we are sailing cuts through the furrows left by Darius, Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar. The sea is crossed, and scarred, and checkered, and hatched. Civilization began here, and so do I.
CHAPTER ONE
I have been wondering just when my escape began. It might be claimed that it began only when I went to the window and purchased my ticket for the train. On the other hand, the impetus for that act came during my few minutes of browsing in a Left Bank bookshop, where I found the album of magnificent photographs of the Alps. And why did I go into the bookshop? The rain, the cold, the bleak and brittle air of another evening drove me into its lighted recess. So perhaps one might say that it was the weather which caused it all. I am sure I would not have indulged myself in my half-formed plan had I not awoken the next morning to discover that the rain had turned to snow and that flakes were still puffing down from a low sky. It was the snow which triggered the memory of those impossible alpine peaks, and it was the memory which sent me out, only half-certain of what I was doing, to buy a ticket on the next train. This was, for me, a moment of exceptional daring. I was departing from my itinerary in a way which ordinarily I would have thought entirely irresponsible. Should the office try to contact me during the week, they would be dismayed to find me gone. My bags were still piled in the entrance hall of the apartment I had borrowed, but no one in the entire world knew where I was right now, and they would not be able to find me for an entire week.
The snow was wet, slushy. It clung to the edges of the walks, but passing footsteps had trodden it into water along the paths themselves. The city seemed quiet, however, because of the muffling effect of the snow, and there was something intensely pleasing about walking to the station through the sharp air, my rucksack upon my back, my freedom before me. Seven days!
"A Geneve?"
"Oui, M'sieur. A la droit."
"Merci bien."
I pushed out of the station into a world of tracks and steam. None of the snowflakes penetrated so far under the canopy as the ends of the lines, but the daylight out where the engines waited was muted by its curtain of white. The air smelled of iron, and dust, and oil. Voices, the whistles of the porters, the rumble of wheels under the baggage trucks, these sounds created a romantic din. Disengaging myself from the crowd, I paused at a stall and bought four or five oranges. I began casually to peel one as I looked about me. The expanse of gleaming rails and chuffing engines was crowded with travelers bustling about. Our Geneva train was due to leave in twenty-five minutes, and many of this crowd seemed to be going with me to the mountains. The luggage cars were loaded with skis. Some travelers already wore their brightly colored ski jackets and caps. We were a cheerful group, streaming along the platform, calling out to friends, herding children. I started to eat an orange as I made my own way down the long line of wagons-lit which made up our train. In one of these was a compartment all my own.
Switzerland! A land grown fat on chocolate, grown slumberous to the ticking of cuckoo clocks. Arrogant, rich, beautiful Switzerland, full of lakes, and slopes, and peace. Up there, above the turmoil, above the wars, above the struggling small passions of men and machines, I was going to a land which is out of this world. And no one knew I was going. As I climbed up into my wagon-lit and was shown to my compartment, I was swept once again with astonishment over what I was doing. Never in my life had I done anything before I checked every detail. Never had I gone anywhere without leaving behind an itinerary. And here I was, actually boarding a train which would take me through the rest of the afternoon and the night, high up into Switzerland. I had only bought the ticket this very morning! It was a whim. It was crazy. I knew no one in Switzerland. I had no hotel reservation. I had no plans. I carried almost none of my luggage. What was I going to do when I got there? I was tossing aside the habits of a life. I was acting like a callow youth, like those college students and hippies with their beads and their painted clothing. For a moment, I now regret to report, I actually toyed with the idea of throwing the whole thing up. I could return to the apartment. No one would know of my failure. I could tell my self I had been to see a movie.
Thank God, I did no such thing!
Instead, after my moment's hesitation, I unpacked the few things I might need during the journey. I laid out my oranges, my bread and cheese, my two bottles of beer, my toiletries, and my Homer. I pulled out a sweater and put it close to hand. Finally, I opened the window just a bit to allow the voices and the whistles to come to me. Then I sat down upon the settee. I was ready. We could go to Switzerland, and I was prepared to enjoy myself on the way. Carefully, I barred my mind from wondering what would happen when I arrived. I anticipated, yes-I allowed myself that-but I did not worry. I picked up Homer.
Presently, there came a shriek of steam. This was followed by a whistle. The cars jerked once, twice. A voice was heard calling something. Another voice answered. I put down my book and stood before the window, hands in pockets, watching the station and the crowds as we jerked once again, and they began to move away from me. Very slowly, there came the first clickety-clack of the wheels. We had started.
I opened the window all the way and leaned my elbows on it. I watched forward as we moved out of the covered station toward the late afternoon light. People waved as we gathered speed. Shouted farewells echoed in the clammy air. Suddenly, a flurry of snow blew into my face and a downdraft brought me the smell of our exhaust. We were out in the snowstorm now, moving easily through the backyard of Paris. Seen from the tracks, cities are never at their best, nevertheless the haphazard, down-at-the-heels aura of this side of a city has always pleased me. Here, there is no showing off. This is just life: rough-and ready, turbulent, unsentimental.
A shouted greeting made me turn my head. A woman was hanging out of the window of the compartment behind mine. She was smiling at me, and she waved a buoyant hand. I saw only that she was beautiful, dark, with a tanned face. Curly black hair escaped from underneath a yellow stocking cap. Her throat was swathed in a black-and-yellow scarf, and the collar of her coat was turned up.
"Hello," I called over the chugging of the engine.
"Wonderful, isn't it?"
"Yes. Cold though."
"It'll be colder where we're going."
I realized suddenly that we were speaking French.
"I hope so," I answered.
"So do I. It'll be exciting to be back"
"Back ?"
"Yes. To Switzerland."
"Oh. You live there?"
"Yes. And you?"
"I'm an American."
"You speak beautiful French."
"Thank you."
I was trying hard to think of something more to say which would keep this attractive woman's attention when she gave me an airy wave and ducked back inside the window. I stepped back inside my own as well, and shut it thoughtfully. Perhaps I could knock on our connecting door and invite her to share an orange and some cheese? But what would we talk about? She had seemed gay enough for a minute there, but perhaps she was married. Maybe her husband had been right there beside her all the while.
I was, you see, feeling acutely conscious of the fact that I had made only one sexual conquest during the course of my vacation in romantic Paris, and that had been of a brunette whore in Place Pigalle. The assignation had cost me seventy-five francs, and it had been brightened by only one human moment. As I was following my whore upstairs in her rickety hotel, another man, dressed just like me in heavy overcoat and cap, was following his whore downstairs. The stairs were narrow, and we were forced to turn sideways and brush each other's stomachs in order to pass. Only for one second did our eyes meet, but there was more communication during that small intimacy on the stairs than there was in the next whole hour of clutching and fumbling with my pneumatic young woman.
There didn't seem to be any way of opening a further conversation with this woman and being graceful at the same time, so I sat down instead and picked up Homer. Outside my window, the buildings became fewer. Now and then, there were fields, mottled with the melting, wet snow, and the trees began to come back into their own. The engine picked up speed. Under me, the wheels settled into their industrious and soothing music. I began to nod over Homer. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. The vibration of our passage swept over me. I was warm, comfortable, alone. How long I sat, I do not know. The wheels rumbled on. Now and then, I looked out, and I saw that the daylight was growing dimmer, more and more blue, and then, soon enough, there didn't seem to be much daylight at all. The tracks curved one way and then the other. Now we climbed a little. Now we descended. Now we slowed as we made our way through some town or other. Through the sleep I was pulling around myself like a cloak, long cries from the horn seeped into my dreams.
I had lain down, covering myself with a blanket, and my mind flowed into the wheels of the train, echoing their clickety-clack, their never ending clickety-clack. Dimly, I heard the ringing of the dinner bell, but I had my food, and anyhow I was too warm to stir. I went back into the rails and the wheels, round and round, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. I realized that I had an erection. The constant vibration of the train, and the mesmerizing effect of the sound-not to speak of my warmth, my solitude, and my joy at escaping-all were combining to make everything very erotic in this hurrying darkness of a compartment somewhere out on the countryside of France. Slowly, as the wheels turned under me, I wound my way into a lubricious dream of hair trailing over me, lips brushing my skin, pale nipples rustling across my chest. I felt her naked arms smoothly flowing about my shoulders, felt her humid exhalations bathing my neck. Now, her mouth enclosed my whole ear, and soft, wet words were wafted against it. I felt the tip of her tongue following the words, pressing its heat against my ear hole, titillating the sensitive hairs around my ear. Delighted with her ministrations, I laid my hand gently upon my stiff cock and decided to employ some ministrations of my own. I slipped my zipper down and opened my belt. I wore no underwear, and my fingers were eager as they began lightly to dance upon my wide cockhead. My sex felt hot and fat in my hand, unusually so, and the pleasure of masturbating began to grow. I wrapped one hand around the long shaft and stroked it up and down. Ah! I was so stiff, so smooth, so easy for pleasure!
I felt my woman's mouth breathe softly down my neck. Her lips slid damply across my shoulder, her nostrils whuffling at me, her eyes closed. The tip of her tongue came to rest in the crease of my armpit, and gentle pressure forced my arm away from my side. First with faint fingertips, and then later with her tongue, she stroked and caressed the sensitive flesh she had exposed. Her fingers remained caressing in my tingling armpit while her lips slid across my chest and fastened on one nipple, sucking it, rubbing its small erection with her tongue. For a moment, I wished I had a woman's breasts for her to suck on, warm, soft mounds of white flesh which she might sink her face into, breathing perfume. But her excitations were transmitted from my nipple to my groin, each sweep of her tongue arousing my cock still farther, making my balls ache with their need to pump my hot sperm out in long, white gushes. Her tongue was making me forget the desirability of feminine breasts: my own were well enough. And now, as her head moved to the other nipple, her hand left my armpit and trailed down my side, raising goose bumps all the way to my hip. Her long, cool fingers settled over my own masturbating hand, and she gently encouraged my manipulations. With small cries of excitement, she urged me on, running her fingertips again and again over the widening eye at the end of my cock, feeling the welling of my slippery pre-come, spreading my effluvium across my whole, shining head. While she continued to enhance my masturbation, she placed her other hand behind my head and lifted my face toward her own. As my vision grew full of her wide forehead and dark, closed eyes, I felt her nipples and swaying breasts brush my chest. Her flesh flattened against me, and then our tongues met. I closed my eyes with the ecstasy of her wet tongue licking mine. She drank my saliva off my tongue, sipping it from the inside of my lips, running her tongue-tip along my smooth teeth. Our warm breath was mixing, flowing around our nostrils and cheeks. I felt her breathing hasten as she sensed my body grow increasingly excited. My masturbating hand was moving more quickly now. I felt myself beginning to climb toward an orgasm. I knew I was approaching the moment when my come juice would shoot again and again, lurchingly, wrenchingly, from the straining end of my cock. And as I knew it, so too did she, and her face rose above mine, away from our kiss. For a long moment, expressionlessly, she looked down into my feverish eyes. Her pupils were enormous, dark, compelling. She drew my mind up out of me and sucked it down into herself. I was lost in her. My vision clouded over as I felt the climax approach still nearer. Then her face was no longer above mine. For a moment I felt the movement of arms, the sliding of legs, and then, unendurably, I felt her hot lips and soft tongue close over the almost-coming end of my cock. A deep groan was forced from the recesses of my lungs. I heard myself begin to moan. I dropped my masturbating hand as she clasped the rigid base of my cock and her mouth began its hard, wet pumping over me. I no longer knew where my cock and her mouth were different flesh: it was all one, a wonderful, excruciating, building, hastening, coming, coming thing!
As her thirsty mouth sucked each hard blast of bitter semen and swallowed it down her aching throat, I felt my hand and my naked stomach flooded with that same semen as my masturbating achieved its end.
For long minutes then, as the train thundered under me, I lay in a kind of stupor. My cock slowly wilted in my hand, its last sperm running in a small stream out of its end and across my pubic hairs. I felt the warm, thick come I had jetted out across my belly grow liquid and run down my sides to soak into the settee. And, as I toyed with the idea of rising to clean myself, I slept.
I was awakened by gentle knocks on the connecting door between my own compartment and the one behind me. It took me a long time to rouse myself: the wheels seemed to have overcome me with their insistent music. I felt drugged, vague, as though nothing were quite understandable. The knocking ceased before I mustered attention enough to answer it, but I managed to call out a croaking, "Hello? Yes? What?"
"Excuse me," came a voice through the door.
"Yes. Just a moment." I swung my legs over the side of the settee and placed my feet on the floor. My heavy sleep would not go away. "I hear you. Just a minute."
"I don't want to disturb ... "
"No. No, I'm just coming."
I stood up and realized as I did so that my trousers were still open. Hastily, I covered my sticky and withered cock with my zipper, buckled my belt. As I stepped toward the door, I ran a fevered hand through disordered hair, trying vainly to shake off my befuddlement. "Yes. I'm just there."
It was she.
"Yes?" I asked. "Yes, what can I do for you?" And as I spoke, my barely stirring brain was flooded with an overpowering miasma of perfume. I closed my eyes against this invasion, for the scent was so thick it made them water.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, "you were asleep."
"Yes." Courtesy was in short supply while I tried to rally my scattered attention.
"I'm so sorry."
"It's nothing. Please. What is it?"
"You see, I've been so stupid. I was opening the scent bottle, and, well, there was a jolt, and I've spilled everything. It's all over my clothes. It's awful." She wrinkled her nose. "I see you've noticed it."
"Yes." I blinked my eyes rapidly several times. "Yes, I had."
"Such a waste of good perfume, don't you think?"
"Um-"
"No. No, the point is that I've opened my window to let the air come in and clear it away. But there isn't enough draft, don't you see, and I thought maybe ... "
Her voice trailed away as she saw that I was not responding to her hint. My brain was maddening me with its refusal to function. I saw this lovely woman before me-a sort of vision in white and green, a Mediterranean luxury-and yet I was unable to gather any charm to myself. I was unable even to treat her politely.
Making an effort, I continued for her, "And you would like me to open my window as well, is that it?"
"Yes. Oh, I'm sorry for disturbing you." She adopted a very pretty expression of apology. "It's awful of me, I know, but you seemed so nice ... Well, what I mean to say is that I thought perhaps you would not have retired as yet, and ... "
"Yes. Yes, of course."
I turned away from her and walked to the window. Reaching up to pun it down, and the blast of rushing cold air which attacked me when I did so, served to revive me somewhat. I began, very slightly, to enjoy myself. I turned, and we were standing awkwardly, too close together, near the door. She broke the impasse by moving back into her room. The air blowing around me, and the gradual retreat of the waves of perfume, was having its effect.
"You're so kind," she said.
"Not at all. It's my pleasure."
"And you were asleep too."
"It was time for me to wake up. If I nap too long, you see, I have the devil's own time getting to sleep again at night."
"Really? You too? How interesting."
It wasn't interesting at all, but we chatted in this imbecilic manner for another few minutes while the perfume smell abated. Presently, I turned back into my compartment to close my window.
"I can't get this shut," she called from her room. "Can you help me?"
Let me tell you, there is nothing like getting injured in the chivalrous service of an attractive woman to break any ice which might remain between you. Just as I was slipping her window up, the train jolted severely across some points, and I was thrown toward the wall. My thumb caught in the track of the window, and the closing metal sliced its ball open. Immediately, blood spread across the glass, and I vented a pained yelp. And then, before I quite knew what had happened, I was seated on one of the settees of her compartment, carefully cleaned and bandaged, sipping a cool glass of Cinzano, and talking languidly but with feeling about the literature of Knut Hamsun, for which we both had a strong liking.
Her name was Marianne. She was Greek, and French was the only language we shared. My vocabulary was being tested severely by her literate discourse, yet I enjoyed the stretching of my linguistic muscles. Several times she complimented me on my French, saying that she had thought me foreign, yes, but not an American. If anything, she said, I spoke with a slight Spanish accent. Her compliments pleased me, and I accepted a second glass of wine.
Have I described Marianne already? Probably. But allow me to say that my first impression on the train was of her vivacity and her intentness of mind. She prattled on about Hamsun and other things while I watched her. Her mind lept from thought to thought with a wonderful impression of freedom from constraint. I admired her adeptness. Nor was I blind to her other qualities. As she sat across from me, lit only from behind by a shaded, yellow light, she seemed a perfect specimen of womanhood. I guessed then that she was in her late twenties, but it turned out that I under estimated her by four years: she was nearly my own age. The years did not seem to have troubled her particularly though, for her face and her body were as attractive as anyone might wish. A wide mouth, a flashing smile, which with her dark eyebrows and grey-green eyes made her features perfect. She was not beautiful in any standard sense of the word. Rather she was ... interesting, and, may I say, all the more beautiful for that. Her fingers were long and translucent as she held her chunky railroad glass, articulate in their movement. She wore no make-up that I could see. Her curly black hair framed a square oval face with an aquiline nose, and freckles. There was nothing of coquettishness about her. I felt her to be frank, and I realized that she had character. She was comfortably dressed. She wore an unbuttoned Irish cardigan over a tight grey jersey. Her breasts were large and unencumbered by a brassiere. Occasionally, as she grew especially animated about some point or other, her nipples erected, and I was treated to the sight of their hard prominence pressed against the cloth. Her ample hips and thighs were encased in light green lounging pants with widely flared legs. Being especially attracted to a shapely ass, I had not omitted to admire her rear view while we stood talking earlier, and I amused myself now by thinking of what an opulent big one it was.
I poured myself a third glass, drank deeply, and topped it off once more. The compartment had grown warm, and we lounged now with complete ease. In fact, what with the melody of the wheels always under me and the warmth of the aperitifs in me, I was verging on drowsiness once again. I responded less quickly and with less energy to Marianne's points. Eventually, I swung my legs up onto the settee and settled into a more comfortable, if less formal, position. Marianne did not seem to mind, however, for she took up a copy of Pan and began to read me a passage. Her softly burred voice fitted perfectly the northern, bleak prose. Hamsun's harsh words mixed with the sound of the train, and for the second time that evening I was swept away.
Her reading went on and on. Long since she had passed the portion she had intended to read to me. Now we were both enjoying the endless sound of her voice as she caressed the words.
I had noticed in my warm contentment that every now and then her voice faltered slightly, and that there was a short pause before she went on. I did not think anything of this, for the pace of her reading did not suffer from it, and the rhythm of the train in any case dominated my senses. Finally, however, an especially long pause caught my attention, and I opened my eyes to glance across the dim compartment at her. What I saw electrified me. Instantly, my heart began an almost painful pounding. Blood rushed to my head, and the sound of it roared in my ears. I found it increasingly hard to draw a full breath. My palms grew sweaty, and my armpits prickled.
For across from me, not six feet away, Marianne with casual elegance was masturbating her cunt!
One hand held the book before her face. Her head was leaning back on the arm of the settee. The light above her eyes shone down on her lovely mouth and throat, but it left the rest of her in near darkness. I saw though that one leg was drawn up along the back of the settee, bent at the knee, while the other was splayed wide and rested with her foot upon the floor. The swaying of our wagon-lit kept opening and closing this thigh somewhat, and perhaps it was that which originally excited her. Whatever it was that 'had caused such an astounding thing, I saw that Marianne was now completely absorbed in her slow masturbation. She had opened the zipper of her pants-it was in the position of a man's fly-and wormed her pants down off the first wide swelling of her hips so as to make more room for what her fingers were so busily doing at her hot center. I saw her naked belly-so soft, so round-below the waist of her jersey, and I saw laid over this the inward-turning elegant bend of her long, white wrist. Her fingers were away from my gaze, however, for they were inside a pair of whispy, pale panties. I saw that her knuckles were working in slow caresses: her, hand almost looking as though it were chewing and eating her cunt. Now and again, she squeezed her fleshy thighs tightly together, trapping her hand as it cupped her cunt, forcing her breath to wheeze from her lungs and her eyes to shut. I watched her face at one such moment, and I saw her mouth loll open with the pleasure of her hand rubbing her cunt. Her tongue came out and made its wet and shiny way across her lips.
I was stunned! I hardly dared breathe, not that I could with this terrific weight on my chest, for fear she might be startled out of her incredible revery. She must have forgotten my presence entirely. In some way, she had grown so wrapped up in Hamsun's words that she didn't know where she was. She was acting as though she were completely alone. My God, what would she do beyond this? Dare I hope that she might actually make herself come right before my eyes? I realized that my cock, newly aroused, was achingly stiff inside my trousers. Would she come? Oh, Jesus! How I longed to see more of her tantalizing cunt. Now and then, I caught a glimpse of stray, dark hair under her palm, and once, when she tipped her cunt slope ecstatically upward to meet her skilled fingers, I saw that her thatch was very wide and extended its dark triangle way upward toward her belly button. But perhaps she would slip her pants down some more. Perhaps if I were totally still ... Oh, Jesus! Oh, shit, what's this? She takes her hand from out of her cunt and I see it shiny and soft, her fingers coated with secretions, as she raises it to her face. In the yellow light, I watch her lay her masturbation-coated fingers under her nostrils and smell her own cunt odor. Am I fooling myself to think I can smell it as well? That acrid, sharp, musky smell in the air: is that her cunt? Marianne's cunt. The cunt of this woman, this stranger, who lies across from me and masturbates as she reads me pan? Oh, my God, what's going to happen? Does she know I'm here? Has she forgotten me? Does she know I'm watching her? Oh, Christ, if she should turn her head and see that I'm here! If she should remember me! Please, God, please, don't let her turn her head. Don't let her know I'm here. I want to watch her masturbate. Oh, I do! I want to see her hand in her cunt. I want to see her stroke and caress, and smooth, and hold her cunt until she has to come. I want to see her come! Oh, yes, oh, my God, yes. I want to see her come! Yes, there her fingers go, back in her cunt, down in her hairy, hot, wet, reeking, hungry cunt. Her pussy, her quim, her cunt! I'll bet it's so wet. Yes, I'll bet her cunt juice is flowing, wetting her panties, shining on her thighs, making her fat, hairy cuntlips slippery for her masturbating fingers, for her Oh! Is she looking at me. No. Yes! Is she? Oh, shit, is she? She is! I'm caught. What will I do? She sees me. Oh, Jesus Christ, what will I do?
"Are you alarmed?"
What? What did she say?
"Alex, are you all right?"
What is this? Her hand is still there! She's still masturbating! What kind of woman is this? What-
"I said, are you all right? Does this alarm you?"
"I ... "
"Yes? What?"
"I ... Well, I ... "
"I feel so dreamy tonight."
"Um ... "
"You needn't be upset, you know. I nearly always do this when I read. It makes me feel so good, you know, with the reading and all. And especially on a train. Trains are sensuous, don't you think so?"
"I don't know. I, well, I don't know."
Here she squeezed her thighs together once more, and again her eyes closed. Her face was a perfect picture of calm sensuality. She was completely undisturbed by my presence. Her hand moved caressingly over her damp sex, running its slippery fingers up and down in her hot, furry slit. A long sigh escaped her, and, when it was done, she looked back at me. "I'll stop. I won't do it anymore, if you object."
"No! No, I don't, I-"
"I find it so pleasant."
"Yes. I'm sure."
"I've always enjoyed it, my own body, my caresses. I like to do it frequently, for it makes me feel very fine."
I could only nod at this amazing manifesto.
"Such pleasure in my fingers!" She demonstrated this claim by widening her thighs even more and running her wrist the farthest I had seen it go down into her panties. A vivid picture of her long fingers probing down through her hot, wet, oozing folds toward her cunt hole swam up before my eyes, and I longed to be pressing my own fingers down that lubricious path.
As she recovered from the groan which her masturbatory probing elicited, she withdrew her hand from her panties and, putting aside the book, she made as though to slip her pants down farther off her hips. She hesitated though for an instant and glanced over at me. "You don't mind?"
I could only shake my head, too stunned to speak.
"You're certain? I don't want to discommode you."
Christ, wouldn't she ever take the thing off? Come on!
"Some people are embarrassed easily, but I don't think you're one of them. You aren't are you?"
"No!" I nearly shouted. "No, I'm not."
She smiled at me. "That's good," she said, and she directed a significant glance at my crotch, "for I see that you're not entirely disinterested."
Guiltily, I tried to disguise the huge tent my rigid cock was making in my trousers. "Urn, well ... "
She winked at me, and grinned, and then she simply slipped her pants right down and off!
My heart pounded so heavily I feared I might faint. My throat was constricted. My sex throbbed. I realized I was sweating profusely, and the smell of my nervous perspiration aroused me still farther. Would I die? I thought I might, but I didn't care. Oh, don't let her stop! Please don't let her stop. Make her keep going. Let me see her hairy cunt. Let me watch her come! Please! Ok, please!
With a contented sigh, Marianne lay back comfortably, her legs pressed together now. Saving her panties, she was naked from the waist down. Her feet were pointed, her calves and splendid thighs tensed with her excitement as she lay one hand upon the big, high mound of her cunt where it nestled fatly between her thighs, and with her other hand she squeezed one large breast. "Oh, Alex, this feels so good!"
Her panties hugged her cunt mound tightly, so tightly in fact that I could see the deep crease of her crack when she raised her hand off herself, but she was keen to make the wet nylon encase herself even harder. She pulled the front waistband of her panties up and up until the material sank stickily between her hairy, pouting lips, forcing them apart, and giving me my first real view of the wide, intimate, hairy flesh of her cunt. Reaching underneath herself, she pulled her panties up behind as well, making the hot nylon a tight band against her sensitive asshole. And now she pulled it alternately backward and forward, the juice-coated material rasping all the way from her asshole to her clit. Her legs began to writhe with the pleasure of it, and her torso humped and tensed.
"Oh, I could come," she began to moan. "I could just come! I love the way this feels. It feels so good. My cunt. Oh, my cunt! I love the way my cunt feels. I love to make it come! Oh, come. Oh, yes, to come! Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"
I thought she was actually going to come right then, but suddenly she stopped the motion of her maddening masturbation and looked across the room at me. She smiled. "Won't you pleasure yourself as I do?"
"But I ... "
"You would like to, wouldn't you ?"
"Well ... "
"It feels so very stiff in there, doesn't it?"
Her boldness in mentioning my cock made my heart beat even faster than it was already. What was going on here? I had never been this excited before. What kind of woman was this who reached out her creamy cunt-covered hands toward me and urged me to beat myself off so that she might watch me come?
"Marianne, I-"
"Yes?"
"Well-"
"Were you going to ask if you could touch yourself? Was that it?"
I wasn't even certain what I had been about to ask. Merely, I think, I had wanted to speak her name.
"You'd like to touch yourself now, wouldn't you, Alex? I can see that you would. That hard cock of yours in there is so very stiff. You'd like to take it out of your pants and stroke it, wouldn't you? Especially if you can watch me caressing myself too. Isn't that it? You'd like to watch me make love to myself with my fingers-I'm sure you would-while you stroke that long, hot cock of yours in your hand."
Her voice was mesmerizing me. It oozed on and on, through the atmosphere of the room, caressing my mind as her fingers were caressing her splayed, wet sex. She lay on her side, with one knee raised, and her hand was inside her sheer, soaked panties titillating her hard clit. Her eyes never left my face as she spoke to me.
"You may, you know. I'd like to take off my clothing now and make myself feel good for you. I'd like to. I have always liked doing that, and men have always liked watching me do it. It makes me happy to have you watch me with my fingers in my cunt. It's a nice cunt, don't you think? So hot, so hairy. And so big! Don't you think it's a big one? I like it because it's so big. And it gets so wet! My God, I'm wet right now. You wouldn't believe how slippery my cunt is right this minute."
With this, she withdrew her slowly masturbating hand from her panties and raised it once again to her face. I could see the light shining on the thick cunt water her fingers were coated with, and I nearly swooned when she smeared this slippery secretion upon her lips and around her nostrils. Her fingers then dipped into her flooding gash once more, and again she repeated the coating of her lips. As her hand slipped down her belly for the last time, her tongue came out, and very slowly, looking at me deliberately all the while, she licked her cunt juice off her own lips.
"I love the taste of my cunt, and the smell! Can you smell it? Perhaps you can. It's a wonderful smell, isn't it'? It makes me so excited, that smell.
It makes me know that I'm going to come soon. To come! And I love so much to come. I want you to watch me come, Alex. I want to make myself come right here before you so that you can see my fingers rubbing down in my hot, red slit. You'll like it, I know you will. You'll adore the sight of me with my hands up in my cunt and my orgasms chasing over me. I can make myself come again and again, you know. Over and over again. And each one is better than the one before. Each time I come it gets better. Oh, to come! Oh, Alex, I'm so close to coming right now! It feels so very good, my cunt in my hand, my wetness, my hairy lips, my tight, stiff clit in my fingers! Oh, Christ, Alex, I'm so close!"
Again, she slowed herself down. She removed her hand from her sex and laid it under her nose. With closed eyes, she inhaled her own heavy odor. But then again she looked across at me.
"I'm going to make love to myself, yes, but I want you to do the same thing. I want to see that hot cock in your hand, and I want to see your white juice come spurting out of its end. I love to watch it come bursting out that way. Perhaps you would make it splash on me, on my hands as they stroke my cunt. Would you like that? Would you like to come all over me? I have a beautiful body. You could come across my big tits, and between them, and all over my belly. You could pump your hot come onto my cunt and my masturbating hands. I love to feel hot spurts of come raining down on me. It makes me come to, to feel those wet splashes of your come. It makes me come. Oh, so soon to come!"
I was putty in her hands. I could not have refused her for anything, nor did I want to. I stood and dropped my pants down my legs. I kicked off my shoes and socks, and then I too was naked below the waist. I was acutely aware of my cock swaying stiffly in the light as I moved around and I realized that her eyes never left its long beauty.
"Ah, there it is! That's what I've been waiting for. There's that long, hot cock of yours. How proud you must be of it, so stiff, so fat. Why, you can hardly get your hand around it!"
I had sat down by this time, and, encouraged both by her eyes and the fact that she had commenced masturbating once more, I closed my hand around my cock and began to beat it off with, to me, almost unbelievable pleasure.
"Take off your shirt too."
"Yes."
"Oh, you have such a chest! What muscles. And so hairy. I've always liked hairy men."
I couldn't remove my eyes from the sight of her hand cupping and caressing inside her panties. I could smell the nervous, aroused sweat in my crotch and armpits, and, in an excess of lust, I dipped my nose toward one of my armpits and inhaled the rich odor.
"Mmmm," Marianne groaned appreciatively. "I'll bet that smells good. Come here."
I rose like a sleepwalker, commanded by her voice, and stepped across the few feet which separated us. As I did so, Marianne swung up until she was sitting on the settee, her thighs spread and her heavy, pouting cunt hanging at the edge of the seat. Her face swung forward until all I could see was the top of her curly, black head.
"Oh, what a wonderful one it is!" she exclaimed. "What a cock!"
I had dropped my hand to my side, and her own cunt-smelling hands gripped me at my base and pointed my long, stiff cock right at her face. Her red tongue came out and licked once, very delicately, at the hole in its straining end. A small shininess of pre-come had collected there, and she worked it onto her tongue and then pulled it back into her mouth. Again, her tongue came out, and this time she laved the entire head of my cock, working her mouth smoothly over my enflamed flesh. Her warm breath bathed my hair and my balls and her clasping fingers. Her mouth opened into a tall 0, and she slipped it down over my head, farther, and farther, and still farther, until the whole fat length of me was embedded in her throat. I felt her tongue slide erotically across my sensitive flesh.
In a frenzy to have her naked, I began pulling clumsily at her sweater. She let go of my cock in order to help me get it off, but her jersey, which had to come over her head, made her more reluctant. Finally, I persuaded her to release my cock from her slowly sucking mouth long enough to slip the tight material over her head. I did so quickly, for I was desperate to have a view of her excitingly jiggling tits.
"You like what you see?" she smiled at me, leaning back so that the light played all over her.
"Oh, yes!"
She rested with her lovely arms crossed atop her head, her torso relaxed, her thighs spread. Her arms were as lovely as her hands and fingers had promised they would be, round, white. She didn't trouble to shave her armpits, and thick tufts of kinky black hair grew there. Her exposed armpits looked like small cunts to me, and I longed to bury my face there, to suck her sensitive flesh, to inhale the rich, erotic odor which would cling to her hair. And the line of her arms and her armpits drew my eye lower to the slopes of her wobbling, great breasts. Shapely, crowned with big, pale nipples which were aroused now into tight points: the sight was indeed beautiful. And from her breasts her body drew my eye still farther downward, down to her bellybutton in its rich roll of fat, down even more to the long descent of black hair which composed her cunt. Her panties were still pulled hard into her, and sitting as she was upon the edge of the seat increased the pressure. I could see her entire anatomy seated heavily and wetly in the cup of her panties. The sight of her was so indescribably erotic that I began to masturbate slowly as I watched her. Equally slowly, she dropped her hand to cover her pantie-cupped cunt and manipulated her stiff clit for my pleasure.
This forced her tits together, deepening the valley between them, and I was suddenly overcome with the desire to press my stiff cock in their embrace. I knelt forward against the front of the seat, holding my cock out toward her.
Immediately, she understood my intention. "Yes!" she cried when the heat of my rod touched her swaying breast flesh. "Yes, push your hot cock against me, darling!"
She grasped the heavy weights of her full globes and tightened their softness around me, masturbating me gently with their billowy warmth. Her face was pressed against my belly, and she began sucking and chewing on the flesh there.
My hands were on her back and her neck, holding her tightly against me, and dimly it occurred to me that this was the first time I had touched her with my hands all evening. To have grown so excited without even touching this woman! What a creature she was! I whispered "Marianne" to her perfumed hair. The sound of her name must have done it, but suddenly I realized I was about to come. Her masturbation was having its effect. My hips were jerking against her increasingly erratically. My breath was coming in gasps. I felt the exotic tickling all through my cock which presaged an orgasm. I felt the come building along the length of my straining cock.
"I'm going to come," I managed to groan against her. "Do you want me to come?"
"Yes, darling," she moaned. "Come against me. Come on me. Come between my breasts. Oh, please, come all over my big tits. Please!"
I needed no further urging, and I felt the climax sweeping over me. My cock bucked against her soft flesh, jerking and quivering with its own rhythm. I felt the rubbing pressure of her warm breasts stroking me, rubbing me, until I lost all conception of what was happening. Then I was all cock, nothing but cock, and I felt the orgasm take me in its electric arms. The first hard spasm of come juice spurted up through me like an explosion to drench our joined flesh. Spasm after spasm emptied my great load across her heaving breasts. I seemed to be bathing in my own spend, and I drew back enough to grab my cock in my hand and pump out the last few smaller heaves with my fingers, watching the droplets dribble across her shining, soaked breasts.
"Oh, darling!" she cried, and her hands immediately rose to cover the rivulets of hot sperm which ran across her tits and down her belly to soak into the top of her panties. "Oh, darling, your come!"
In an ecstasy still, a kind of continuing orgasm, I dropped my face to her soaked breasts and began licking my own salty, bitter semen from her rounded body. Her fingers were coated with my sperm as they slid over her own flesh, and I sucked them into my mouth as well. She pulled my face up, and for the first time that night, we kissed. Her mouth was wide open, and she sucked my tongue deep into her red cavern and licked my sperm from it. And as we tasted my come juice together, her breathing grew more frantic, and I understood that she was about to come herself.
"Take off your panties," I urged her.
"You take them off."
I dropped between her parted thighs and lay a wet kiss on each thigh up toward her hairy groin. Then I took the top of her panties and peeled them downward across her wide forest of long, black hair. The scent of her sex was thick and heavy in the air between her legs, and I realized suddenly that my cock was engorged once more. That almost never happened, but the smell of her arousal, and the sight of her hair and her fat, sexy cunt lips did the unusual.
She had to move her thighs together and raise her big ass off the settee in order for the panties to slip over her hips, but then she relaxed back and allowed her thighs to part once more as I peeled the panties from her drenched lips themselves. The nylon was so wet that it clung to her flesh as though it had been glued there. Watching avidly as her thick, red, hairy lips parted and allowed it to escape, I drew her panties down her legs and off. She was naked then, and a more lovely woman I never expect to see.
I was about to bend forward and begin sucking on her flowing pussy when she stopped me. "No. I want to beat myself off first, so that you can watch me come. That's what I promised you, and that's what I want to do. I want to make myself come with my fingers while you watch me do it. Please, darling? May I please?"
As far as I was concerned, she could do any thing in the world. Everything, with her, was wondrous. Everything was making intense love, whether we were touching one another at that moment or not.
I knelt back, happily holding my cock in my hand, and raised her reeking panties to my face. With my eyes on her softly lit form, and especially on the great, dark mound of her cunt, I inhaled the deep odor of her wet juices, and I began to masturbate in time with her flying fingers.
"Oh, yes!" she cried, seeing my nose and mouth pressed against her most intimate garment. "Smell me, darling, Smell my cunt on my panties."
With one hand she held her cunt lips open so I could see inside her red, wet slit, and with the other she gently caressed her clit in a smooth circle: "Oh, God," she groaned, "this is so nice!"
"Yes, Marianne, yes. Make yourself come now, darling. Make it come."
"I'm going to come soon. So soon. It feels so good! I'm going to come. I'm about to come, darling! I'm coming! Yes, I'm coming! Oh! Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh ... Oh, God! I'm coming! I'm ..."
She brought her legs together, and her entire body tensed toward release. Her thighs quivered, her great breasts slopped across her chest, her fingers skimmed faster across her clit. The tendons in her neck stretched as she arched, and arched ... and arched into an orgasm. Her neck and shoulders and breasts grew suddenly flushed with dark blood. Her belly rippled once like a wave. Her fingers plunged frantically. And her voice was lost in a long, keening wait As the orgasm claimed her, her body thrashed entirely out of control, battered itself against her fulfilling fingers, and then, gradually, grew still.
She lay back, completely limp, her swollen cunt lips spread by their own suffusion of blood her copious hair matted away from that red mouth her shining fingers inert upon her lax thighs.
Watching her orgasm had catapulted me into the beginning stages of a second climax for myself. My hand flew. With hardly a thought in my lust-filled brain, I bent forward in the altar of her spread thighs. The scent of her recent convulsions filled my nostrils. Sweat, cunt-juice, my drying semen, her overheated flesh, all these added their unique pungence to the atmosphere which wafted up from her hot and hairy sex. I dropped my face into this rankness. She hardly noticed my motion. She lay back, spent, moist, her head rolling slightly with the rocking of the train. For all I knew or cared she might have been dead. Her massive inaction fevered me. I squeezed the end of my tight cock in ecstasy as my nose touched the first wet kinks of her cunt hair. My cheeks pressed her flaccid thighs wider in order to admit my caress. Once again, very deeply, I inhaled the keen redolence. My God, she smelled good! Her exhalation was sufficient in itself to launch my orgasm. I felt it gather all along the nerve endings of my body. My hot cock grew more stiff in my hand, curving long and rigidly up toward my hairy belly. My thighs tensed, my eyes were clamped shut. I breathed against her steaming cunt with slack mouth and lolling tongue. At the last instant before I was overcome, I pressed my features deeply between her still oozing cuntlips. Her thick secretions clogged my nostrils, coated my lips and tongue, and then I reared back, completely rigid, as the climax swept down my back, and through my ass, and came blasting out along the length of my straining sex. I felt the great heaves in my hand. Dimly, I watched long, white streamers of come splatter upward against the backs of her thighs and the wide, dark mound of her cunt. As the last heaves wrenched at me, I dropped my exhausted face back toward her spread pussy. A sticky gob of sperm swung heavily where it had caught against her cunt hair, and I engulfed the bitter liquid in my mouth as my lips closed around her flushed cunt. I tasted her acrid effluvium and my own semen, and then I knew no more.
Such, then, was my introduction to Marianne.
CHAPTER TWO
Dim light woke me. I felt the shaking of the train, heard the endless clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.
Time passed.
Again, I woke. This time stronger light was coming through the drawn blind. I felt the light upon my face. It was day out there. I felt sluggish, and I peeled my eyes open slowly. I made an effort to roll onto my side so that I could see out the window. Some weight, something heavy and soft, was pressing down into me and keeping me from moving. What was it? I moved my arms to investigate. What ...
And at that moment I remembered Marianne. An uncomfortable flush of embarrassment rushed through me. At the same moment, I realized what the weight was which held me down, and I recalled the details of the night before. I looked down at the untidy, black head nuzzled into my shoulder, and I felt horror. Who was this woman? Good God, here I was waking up in bed with a woman whose name I only just barely knew ... What was the matter with me? It was ... it was disgusting really. Disgusting. With a shudder, I remembered what we had done. We didn't even know one another, and we had sat there doing those awful things ... I recalled pumping my sperm across her big breasts and then licking it off. Jesus! What must she think of me? What must I think of myself?
Perhaps I ought to make something clear. This was not the first time I had ever woken up in bed with a woman I didn't know-not, thank God, that it had happened very of ten-I could hardly have avoided the situation through all of ten years of bachelorhood in Boston. What astounded and shocked me was the memory of a passion so unbridled as had been mine the night before. I truly had gone far beyond the limits of decency. Decency! Funny that there should be such a concept in relation to events like that, but there is. Or, at least, I have always imposed codes of behavior upon myself. Sex with an unknown woman ought to be antiseptic, professional, and, in any ultimate sense, passionless. I don't say professional to refer to sex with what our Victorian forebearers used to call ladies of the evening. No, I mean professional in the sense of one who has studied all the Joy of Sex literature, one who's achievement is not that he loves his bedmate but that he can make her come thirty-three times in forty-five minutes. One-night-stand sex, I have al. ways felt, is little different from masturbation. Now, it must be clear by this time that I love masturbation, but I would say that I have rarely felt I was doing anything else when with a woman. I hold out the possibility that there is something more to the business than I have experienced, but I have always believed that we ought to begin things-if we have to begin them in bed-with a sense of decency. One ought to do nothing but what is normal. One ought to be deodorized, cleanly shaven, freshly trimmed as regards hair and beard, sufficiently tanned, and masterfully competent. That is only courteous, after all. We may fuck more regularly than did our ancestors although even that is doubtful-but I have always felt constrained to fuck politely.
And that frenzied lust of the night before had been anything but polite. Chivalry had been the last thing I was caring about as I-Oh, God-as I pressed my face deep into her sweating, runny cunt and beat myself off. Remembering her coated membranes glued to my lips, her hair stuffing my nostrils, I shuddered. I could still smell her, on my body, in the room. It was awful. Such lechery. I had a sudden picture of my straining cockhead and the long, agonizing streamers of sperm gushing from its tip to splash against her open cunt. All that sperm, all that white sperm coating her slick cunt. Jesus, it was terrible what I had done. I tried carefully to pull away from this horrid woman. I was beginning to sweat. My movement wakened her though, just a bit, and she murmured something, rubbed her moist face into my shoulder harder, and tightened her grip around my waist. I was trapped.
I lay as still as I could, hardly breathing, dreading the moment when I must face her. How could I have acted so? I'm just not that sort of a man. I care about women. I'd rather have a woman as a friend. I'd rather treat her with respect than suck my own come off her rolling body. If ever I did such a thing with a woman, she'd never ... But wait a minute! I had done those things. Right here, last night. No. Maybe I hadn't. I couldn't have! Not me, not Arthur Alexander, not cautious, civilized, retiring, precise Arthur Alexander. It must have been a dream, an especially satisfying masturbation. I dreamed it all. Of course, that was it! It was just a fantasy. Just a-
Marianne stirred again. This time she slid one thigh up across my groin. I felt the sharp pressure of her crinkly sex-hair against my hip.
No, damn it, it had not been a dream. There was a woman in bed with me. Her name was Marianne, Marianne ... something. She was Greek. Yes, and she spoke French. We had spoken French together. She liked Hamsun and Durrell. She had talked of Cavafy. Now, that was an interesting juxtaposition: Scandanavia and Africa. I wonder ... No, but get back to the point. She had given me drinks. I had cut my thumb. And then ... and then ... I recalled the thick hair in her pretty armpits, and I wondered what it smelled like. Idly, I mused that it might be nice to kiss and suck her there, to take the soft flesh and hair into my mouth and lick it as I trembled a finger tip just on the end of her clit. She'd like that perhaps. She'd arch her pelvis up toward my hand, seeking more pressure, her own lips near my ear, breathing my name, breathing hot breath, breathing ... and her tongue.
But what was I thinking of? I didn't even know this woman. In a moment, she would wake up, and she would be sickened to remember what had occurred. The sight of me would appall her. With icy formality, she would banish me from her compartment-if I were lucky. If I were unlucky, and there was no reason why I ought not to be, I realized that she would call for the conductor and together they would alert the police. An hour from now, I would be in jail on a charge of rape. No decent woman would allow me to do what I had done to her last night and get away with it.
But hadn't she begun it?
It was a small voice which whispered this to me as I lay and sweated and heard the judge reading the charge. It was a small voice, but it told the truth. She had started it.
I had heard about women like that. She was what was the word?-a nymphomaniac. She couldn't help herself, poor woman. She was sick. It was like a disease with her, really. Sad. And so attractive too.
It was obvious that she couldn't get enough. All that talk about beating off while she reads. Pure sophistry! The poor thing can't stop thinking about sex, that's all. I wonder what they can do for you when you're like that. It must be an awful burden to bear. Needing to do things with every man you come across. It would be terrible. The shame she must feel! And how-exhausting it must be. Poor thing.
"Darling?"
Oh, God! She's waking up! What will I do?
"Darling?"
"Yes?"
She raised a lined, puffy face and looked toward me. She said something, but it must have been in Greek.
"What?"
But she dropped her face back and was asleep almost before her head touched my shoulder.
She looked so helpless, so open. Nearly every other woman I have known would have popped up and done something about her appearance. I mean, we were, after all, strangers. She hardly looked fit to receive a stranger. But there was something touching about it anyway. I hadn't noticed it last night, but she could be kind of cute. She had looked like a little kid just then.
Ha! Some little kid. I remembered the feeling of her tight, hot mouth slipping slowly down over my cock, the sensation of her tongue brushing itself against my tingling flesh. There had been something turned inward about her as she sucked my stiff flesh. I felt that she was all alone then, totally concentrated, completely defenseless. It had been both absorbing for her and obsequious. I realized she was sucked my sex with desire for it to penetrate all through her being-and it had just been for a moment of time. I tried to picture it again: her bent head, her hunched shoulders, her naked, splayed legs hugging my calves, the jiggle of the train throwing her slightly backward and forward with my stiff penis up and up in her mouth. I had felt tall then, towering over her, always in command, willing her to suck me. Her slow laving was a worship of this stiff thing I had, and a worship of me, its possessor. I wielded the rod: I thrust into her wet, tender mouth my emotionless, illimitable cock. I fucked her in the mouth, making her face crush itself against my hard pubic bone. I forced her to suck me; and would have made her drink me too. I would have gobbed her throat with thick semen, jetting it deeper and deeper into her poor body until she was swimming with it, until it rose up behind her eyes and dribbled from her nostrils. I would have done this, but I chose to strip her of her clothing instead. I chose to make use of her tits. I chose to ejaculate my sperm across those big globes with their tight, pale nipples. I chose to withhold my hot come from her mouth and to water her instead on the outside. I wanted her to have it on her. I wanted my sticky semen to cover her so that she could feel me dripping and oozing across her big jugs, and I wanted to suck it back into myself once more, to pump it through another time. I wanted to use her but to give her nothing. I wanted to suck her, to lick her, to taste her, but I wanted the skin I used to be running with my juice, my come, my sex. She was nothing to me. She meant nothing to me. She was a cunt only. A big cunt. She had breasts and a mouth. That was all. Just a cunt, a cunt to worship myself with, a cunt for my pleasure. A cunt, a big pair of knockers, a round ass, a mouth to suck me with: what more was there to her? I knew her not at all. I neither liked nor disliked her. She was a cunt, and she would be used as a cunt and I did.
And I realized I was tumescent. I would use her again.
It was her wet breath misting me perhaps, or her squashed soft breast against my ribcage. In any case, my sex once more desired release through the medium of her body. One hand lay lightly on the neat small of her back, just before her flesh swelled outward into her hips. Her flesh was very hot underneath the covering of sheets and blankets. My fingers slid easily, my palm rubbing just at the ends of the light hairs which downed her spine. Presently, as my caress continued in its small circle, she breathed deeply, sighed, and placed a flaccid kiss upon my chest. The thigh she had draped over me snuggled closer, hugging my hips. "Don't stop," she commanded me without waking up.
Putting aside all my doubts about the situation I fixed my mind on the image of what her rear must look like just now. I saw her strong thighs rising, one next to mine, the other laid across me rising in their sweeping lines of opulent flesh to the deep crease which must divide her white ass. I thought of what her big cunt would look like from behind that way, of her ass again-always of her ass. Her ass would be pale, and wide, and loose against me. Her big ass, her fine ass, her magnificent ass!
I think I mentioned before my affection for a beautiful posterior. Marianne's, as I recalled it in her tight slacks of the night before, was sufficient to restore the life of a man ten years dead. I slipped my hand down across one of her cheeks until I held the whole of her wealth of heavy flesh in my grasp. What delight! I felt her small hairs. Her skin was smooth and humid from the heat. I trailed my fingertips lower until they brushed down onto the back of her thigh. Those creases are as beautiful to touch as to see, and they are as engrossing to see as to kiss, but perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. This was my first exploration of Marianne's ass, and for all I knew, it would be my last. Accordingly, I took my time.
There is something about an ass-how can I explain it? When, perhaps I need no explanation. We're all ass-men, aren't we, as offensive as that expression may be. I think it is that the ass is the foundation of it an, literally as well as figuratively. Of course, it is, as they used to say, the sit-me-down-upon. That makes it the physical foundation. The legs rise into the ass. The back descends to the ass. From behind, a woman is a beautiful object (as, certainly, she is from before). But the ass is something else as well. Animals fuck from behind. Apes fuck from behind. For how many hundreds of millions of years has the sight of a lovely ass been sufficient to excite a male? And not just the sight. With my antiseptic lovers of the past, sight had to suffice. But it is smell that does the trick. No self-respecting dog keeps his nose out of his bitch's ass, nor would the bitch make a point of perfuming herself with the essence of roses. There was a woman once, a swampy hippie, who had the most delicious odor ... She also made good sauerbraten. She was a bore, though, in the end (or, it was in the end that she wasn't a bore; she was a bore eventually). But the smell of an excited cunt mixed with the smell of a loose asshole: ah! C'est bon!
And one may always anticipate. Here was Marianne's great ass under my fingers. She had smelled good last night. I was sure she smelled and looked-and tasted-as exciting from behind as she did from the front. I dipped a long finger unctuously along her crease until I slid it across the crinkled hole of her ass itself. Her breathing changed again then, and she slipped her thighs more widely apart, at the same time tilting her hips backward so that her bottom was more openly stretched. From then on, her shammed sleep fooled me not one bit.
I proceeded in my manipulations, and her breathing grew more quick. The top of her crease dove between her cheeks at a certain angle, and then it dipped around her tail-bone and slid down toward the back of her cunt. That's where her asshole lay, and that's where a faint film of sweat had gathered, due, no doubt, to the heat of her body under its coverings. My middle fingertip slid across the smooth rim of her asshole again and again, as though it had been oiled. There was a soft padding of hair around her asshole, and this crinkled against the smooth skin of her cheeks, but the main attraction was the gradually loosening rim of her hole itself. Before long, I had dipped one joint of my finger into her body and was rubbing repeatedly at the muscular walls inside her. Marianne's face pressed deeper into me, as she elevated her hips the more, and I enjoyed the sensation of manipulating her entire body with the intrusion of one small finger in her ass. I felt as though I were shaking her soul as I wriggled and twisted my way more deeply down her tight, narrow passage. Now two joints were inside of her. She was pinioned by me, helpless, flung. Her hips pumped upwards and then down, pressing first her ass against my palm, and then her cunt against my hip. Her asshole was eating my finger. She was working me into her rectum with the clinging rim of her hole. I allowed myself to be sucked in. Allowed? No. I pressed in my stiff finger myself, fucking into her ass until I was all the way there, until her bowels opened up and I was into their recesses.
And now I really had her. Now she could not move away from my finger. Now she was planted. Now she was fucked. I controlled her quite. I rubbed myself up and down in her slick, tight passage, masturbating her asshole, causing with each plunge a great exhalation and a moan. Her legs were twitching and thrashing. Her torso bumped and heaved upon mine. Her mouth sucked my skin, bit, clung, kissed, panted, and then sucked again. Her arms hugged me tighter and tighter. She began a breathless litany of "Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes yes!"
I felt her frenzied squirming to place her clit in contact with something that would rub it harder and harder as she was being ploughed in the asshole. I took pity on her. It was awkward, but I managed to worm my unoccupied hand under her soft belly and down to the nest of hair she kept between her heaving thighs. As my fingers closed over the whole hot mound of her sex, she groaned against me and her mouth came up to plant itself, wet and frantic, upon my own. Our teeth rubbed against each other, our gums were slippery upon one another: the kiss was hurried, inexpert, searching for something beyond the possibility. She needed to have it all, all sensation, all the holes of her body filled with me. Her tongue battered at my lips, slobbering her saliva across the lower portion of my face. Her moaning was almost constant now, and she flung her body wildly. My finger in her asshole was growing stiff with its exertions, but I continued to masturbate her clinging anal canal while the bulk of my titillation was undertaken by the fingers I used upon her clit. And her clit, allow me to say, was enormous. I had never encountered such excitement in a woman, nor an organ which could swell to such a size. It was nearly as big as a marble, trembling erotically at the top of her loose and running lips. Oh, the joy of caressing her there!
And now words were pouring from her, senseless, endless, without thought: "Yes, darling, yes! You are making it come. Oh, you are so hard in me. In my ass. In my asshole. In my asshole! You are in my asshole and making me come! I-oh, Jesus!-I love it. Yes, my asshole! Oh, my ass. Make my ass come. Make it come! Oh, darling, make it come for me!"
I redoubled my efforts, fucking her before and behind with an energy which came from her excitement. My imagination soared. My cock was stiff as a board against her thigh. My own hips were beating a pulse of their own against her wrenching flesh. My finger was almost numb up her asshole with the tightness of her clenching and the long, loose sucking which alternated with it. It was actually as though her asshole were dragging me deeper inside her bowels-and then she came. Her teeth happened to be on my chin at the time, and they bit hard as the climax swept across her. Fortunately, my face was slippery with sweat and her saliva, so no damage was done. But her orgasm was such as to blind her to all other things except her own pleasure.
As her terrific convulsions ceased, I pulled my long, sticky finger from her asshole, feeling her channel clench itself all behind my length. And then I was out of her body, and she curled herself into a fetal ball and was asleep before I realized what was happening.
She had rolled so her back was toward me. I looked down at her unconscious head almost with love. There was again that complete defenselessness which I had noted before. This woman was extraordinary! At one moment, she was begging me to fuck her asshole harder with my finger, and in the next, totally calm, she was asleep, leaving me to think and do anything I wished. She never seemed to need the business of defending herself, such a business as most of us spend most of our time doing.
But I was unrelieved. My cock was rigid still, although it might have lost some of its tightness after her orgasm. But the memory of her still stirred inside me and kept my sperm anxious to be out and away. Likewise, the smell of her cunt and asshole, newly anointing my hands, enlivened me.
I began rubbing the underside of my wide cockhead against her back. I didn't want to waken her, but I wanted to maintain some sort of contact with her while I masturbated. The feeling of her warm skin was enough to make me realize that it wouldn't be very long. I tightened my hand around myself, pumped up and down a few times, and almost immediately I felt the gathering of sperm and the beginning of the orgasm. It came out of me fatly and hard, and I looked down to watch the semen splash against her back from the red opening at the end of my straining sex. There wasn't much-I had been rather active over the last twelve hours-but the sensation was terrific. All my needs seemed to have been fulfilled. And I have always enjoyed watching come run across a woman's body.
Or, let me say that at that time of my life which I have to remember as the beginning of my life-I had always dreamed of watching come puddle and smear. Everything I had done with Marianne in the last twelve hours had been like some long fantasy to me. I had always wanted to do those things, but I had grown accustomed to the realization that I never would. Additionally, and I do not think I am reading anything into the event from the point of view of what I now know happened after all this, I began to feel the first stirrings of an understanding of what sex is really all about. Never before had it occurred to me that such intimacy was possible with anyone who was not even a particularly strong acquaintance. I knew not the first thing about Marianne, but, for example, my hang-up about masturbation my love of it, that is-was being fulfilled without guilt or remorse on either side. The fact that she liked it herself took away any of the lingering doubts of my maturity which I had always harbored because of my practice. Now I could indulge in it with a clear conscience. Not that that in itself was to the good. The benefit of all that was that I could then operate with her-at least upon the sexual level-as fitted my true personality. I didn't have to pretend, and therefore I was free both to enjoy the present and to anticipate some real growth in the future. What had always been a' practice that stirred but was ultimately disappointing-sex, I am speaking of-now promised to be much more.
I suppose that I too must have slept, with my wilting cock glued to her back. At least, I recall nothing more until I realized that she was awake and dressed; that the sun was streaming through the opened window, that the Swiss mountains were everywhere for the eye to see, and that it must be nearly the middle of the morning.
"Hi,"
Her voice was cheerful, her smile frank, and her face lovely.
"Hello."
"Want something to eat?"
"Well," I looked around to get my bearing some more. "Where are we?"
"Between here and there. We'll be in Geneva in a little under two hours."
This reminder of our imminent parting did me no good, but the day was bright, and there seemed to be no recrimination in her manner. I decided to take my cue from her.
"Sure," I answered her former question. "Let's eat."
CHAPTER THREE
I think it is possible that even then, even when I was sitting across from her and drawing her out about her life, I was falling in love with her. Certainly there must have been something unusual in our companionship. We hardly knew one another, except through the limited medium of the bed, and yet my entire life has changed because of her. My life has changed, and it could only have been those two short hours which changed it. Now, I do not recall much of what actually transpired between us. I am too aware of the vast emotional distances which we have traveled since then to remember just what were the details of any single occurrence. I learned about her in the ordinary way, of course, what she did for a living, what her personal history had been like, etc. But all I really retain from those hours is an impression of her dark, translucent beauty framed by alpine scenery. Clouding this though-and here is a distinct feeling and perhaps a key to my later actions-there grew a sense of tension. I was hard pressed to draw any information from her about the situation in which she worked. Her reticence was unnatural, I felt, in one who about everything else was as effusive as she was. Something was slightly wrong, something which kept her preoccupied and ill at ease whenever the talk turned toward the area of her life which was outside of this train and outside of her Parisian vacationing. My curiosity was piqued, and I was surprised to recognize in myself a rush of protectiveness. It was a small one, and undirected, to be sure, but it did exist.
I say that my life was changed because of the events of those two hours. That is not entirely true. It would be romantically attractive to maintain such a belief, but it would be philosophically inaccurate. I don't believe that the course of anyone's life can be altered in such a short space of time. Oh, perhaps in the event of a cataclysm, yes, but I am speaking of changes in one's personal life, not changes in the nature of human, life as a whole. I must have been prepared for a Marianne to enter my life for some time before she actually did. Perhaps I was ready for as long as a year before the event. I recall what seems now to have been an ancient sensation: as much as a year ago, if not earlier than that, I discovered a fatalism in myself which I had never expected to find there. I had always struck myself as an optimistic fellow: I always thought that the glass was half full. But, and this occurred without any great event having transpired to cause the change, that glass seemed always to be half empty instead. I was past thirty, and what had I done? I thought of Alexander, dead at twenty three, having conquered the entire known world. I thought of Jesus, dead at thirty-three-just my own age--having conquered ... what? Well, let's not get into a theological discussion. Having conquered something anyway. The demonic in man perhaps (to take the stance of an ethical humanist), or death itself (to take a more Christological stance). Anyway, I wondered what had become of the last ten years of my life. When I was twenty-four, I was fond of saying glibly, "If I were Keats, I'd be immortal now. But I'd also be dead." Such sophistry was fine when I was but a callow fellow, but at thirty-three it was beginning to wear thin. Accounting had become a job, that most banal of all things, and what had begun as a perfectly logical way of life had become a bore. For years I had been looking to fine wines and chic women to fill the gap which was yawning between my expectations of life and that which I truly received. But the wines were less spirited than they had been. There had once been a time when a bottle of California cabernet had been enough to make an Evening of an evening; often now a Premier Cru Bordeau-there was a 1961 Chateau Margaux I remember-fell flat. And the women seemed to fall just as flat. To be honest, I was not as active as I had been in college, nor as I had been led to expect to be as a swinging young bachelor about town. But I had maintained a more-or-less steady series of relationships (as they are called today in the mealy mouthed argot of trendy psychology), and these were beginning to pall. The last one of these sorts was with a modern dancer named Arlene. She was, well, comfortable would be the word. She was available to me when I wanted, usually, and I was available to her when she wanted, again usually. We made no demands upon one another. We were ... comfortable. She wore a wrist watch while she made love, and with a cynical, bitter little twist of the mouth I thought this symbolism beautiful. But it was all getting stale. Arlene's harping on non-involvement was a symptom of that, I think, in a reverse sort of way. Since we both wanted to bury ourselves in another person so badly, I suspect that we paid more niggling attention to the process of doing just the opposite even than was needed to keep us going along and just being ... comfortable. A massive boredom overcame me.
I recall a girl who was pleased to inform me almost upon our meeting that she possessed thirty nine inch breasts and that she liked to fuck from behind and would I be interested? Well no thank you very much. But I did take her home, and I did fuck her from behind, and she did have gorgeous breasts, and she would have been a wonderful woman to be in love with if I had been a man who wanted to be in love with her. But even that wouldn't have worked in the end for she, I am sure, had no interest in being in love with me. There was an emptiness behind her eyes somewhere. She found two pornographic magazines beside my bed, one of which featured a long picture essay of the afternoon assignation of two statuesque lesbians. My friend (?) grew excited looking at the pictures and lay at my side masturbating while she crooned over the details of this lesbian lovemaking. For myself, I got up, and put on a record, and made some coffee. She was still beating herself off, again and again, when I walked back to the bedroom. Her orgasms were repetitious, and small, and I saw that she wasn't even paying much attention to them. She wanted to blow me then, but I kicked her out into the night. Actually, I drove her home to her apartment, but the effect was the same. I never saw her again, and I saw Arlene only once more, and two months later I came to Paris.
So Marianne didn't change my life as though she had been an unwanted bolt from the blue. On the contrary. If there had ever been a time in my life when I was looking for a Marianne, that Parisian vacation was the time. I find it symbolically appropriate that I did not find my love until I had extended myself even farther from my old life in Boston than Paris. Here we were, eating delightful food in the elegant dining car of a train winding its way through the lower Alps on its way to Geneva. My body ached with the exertion of her, my face and mouth smelled of her effluvium, and I had only known her for something under twenty hours!
Certainly, also, our lovemaking had not been particularly significant in itself. She was not the first one-night stand I had stood. It had been her energy and her abandon last night and this morning which characterized her own brand of lovemaking as something entirely different from anything I had encountered before. That tit-girl had masturbated before me with a casual air, but there had been a lethargy about her which was offensive and which penetrated through any of the sorry little masks I had been used to keeping up in the face of the endless glare of the lonely eye. Poor little tit-girl, trying so hard to play with her grown-up toys. Somewhere or other she had lost her way in the great morass of the world, and the life force was dead in her. That great, Lawrencian power of life, that lust, that awe, that blaze of the sun shone no more in her. Already, her skin was turning grey, and, pathetically, she knew it. She was one of the already dead ones, the ones who stumble blindly through their unwanted lives, petulant, resigned, useless. But Marianne! Through her translucent skin shone a warm and soothing glow. Here was a woman who was not satisfied with the marginal in life. Here was a woman who went to the heart of the matter, who grasped that heart, who dragged it out, and who ate it raw on the top of a pyramid, hot blood dripping down her chin.
Not that she looked like such a blood-thirsty young women as she sat across from me and tore at a roll. Her fingers were too delicate for that. But she was alive. That was the thing. She was alive. Lord knew what sort of complicated situation she had gotten herself into in her work that which made her reticent-but it didn't matter to me. She was a breath of cool wind on a hot and dusty day, and that was enough.
What I did learn about her was this: she taught history at an all-girl finishing school near Chateau d'Oex called Chateau Diableret. The odd name for the school is explained by the fact that one can see the Diableret itself rising its ten thousand foot head above the surrounding ridges and peaks when one climbs the slope behind the school. She had been there for two years, and she was in the process of rethinking her choice of place. She mentioned that it was isolated, and that she sometimes felt in philosophical conflict with the powers that were, but I felt-as I have indicated-that there was more to the disenchantment than these factors explained. Her Greek background, and her self-imposed exile from her homeland by way of political protest, made her, from the school's point of view, an excellent history teacher. Everything comes from Greece-at least, everything in the rational dimension comes from there. The irrational (or perhaps it would be better to say "the emotional," in order to avoid any pejorative connotations) comes across the Bosphorous from Asia, from Palestine, from Egypt, from Syria, from India. Marianne had grown up in intellectual environs in a country which is steeped in a history so ancient by comparison with our own that we in the New World are but babes to her. Events from five hundred years before Christ impinge upon her everyday consciousness as do events from 1850 impinge upon ours. Talking with her these last few months has been an eye-opening experience for me. If I make a comment about some event in the news she is apt to draw a comparison between it and something which transpired between the Athenians and the Spartans. She does not do this as an academic exercise. It is by this method that she discovers for herself what is the true significance of what has occurred. And sailing with her among these time-heavy islands! At this moment we are anchored off a small beach on the southwestern coast of Amorgos. We have been here for three days rerigging, sail stitching, and repairing a sprung plank in the dingy which came from her getting loose of her moorings and riding up on the rocks. Moth is shaking down well, as, I think, am I. But my experience has been made far richer than it would anyway have been by Marianne's commentary on the history of the places we have touched or sailed past.
(The other half of the experience, of course, has been living on the sea these past ten days. Moth travels slowly the prevailing winds being contrary and light. Neither of us are in any hurry however, and that is good. It has occurred to us that, if we can't miss the hurricane season in the Caribbean this year, we may just lie along the Moroccan coast for a year and then proceed, or perhaps we'll go down to South Africa work a while, and approach the Pacific by the old clipper route. In any case, we are free as birds, and we live like birds, and we love it. Now and again we have been passed by the magnificent toys of the rich, great two-hundred-foot yachts, and have seen them on their foredecks with their peaked caps and their blazers, and it has occurred to us that their surroundings can be no more compelling to them than they would be on a postcard. They steam along in a vibrating, smelly, noisy ship at twenty knots or more, and they see very little. They hear almost nothing. And they smell even less than that. Unless one of us climbs the mast, neither of us are more than three feet from the surface of the sea. At all times, we are aware of the slightest motion, the slightest breeze, the very tiniest activities of the fish and the birds. The sun, the wind, the rains, the flicker of a moon-path across black water, Orion just over the bow and Sirius peeping from behind the jib luff, hiding, and then peeping again: these things make us remember who we are, and where we are, and they begin to show us why we are as well.)
But back to Arthur on the train. Or Alex. She calls me Alex. There is something rather nice in the fact that she has made up a new name for me. It's almost as though she were creating me anew, but then, that's what she has done. I am Alex in the light of my new experiences, not Arthur. That boob Arthur was too silly for words.
I say I felt something unusual when I was' sitting there. I have the feeling that knowing her as intimately as I did in a physical sense made me all the more aware of the strength of her personality in other dimensions. It was as though the physical between us were done with. We both knew what had happened and where it could go in the future, if it ever did. It was the non-physical, the perhaps more important elements of the woman, which occupied us during that breakfast. I had grown too used to having little to say with a woman on the morning after the night before. Here, I talked little, I think, but I listened much. I was very disconsolate when the train came down out of the mountains and chugged its busy way into the Geneva station. Amidst the throning skiers I kissed her. It was like a hello. I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and then she went away.
And then, to make a long story short, the next time you looked around for Arthur Alexander, you would have found him hugging both his rucksack and his memories to his chest as he sat in a slow train making its way along the feet of the mountains to Lausanne and Montreux, and then, finally, by a smaller gauge, to Chateau d'Oex. A day and a half had passed. r had seen the cathedral, the museum, the shops. I had walked through the Old City. I had fed the seagulls. (How do gulls get all the way up into the Alps? Do they follow the Rhone? Enterprising birds.) I had spoken only once or twice, and then it was to the concierge of my hotel. I could stand it no longer. I had taken the next step in my escape.
Chateau d'Oex isn't much of a town in terms of size, but its situation at the base of the long valley gives it a spectacular view. The skiing is good, if not as swish as it is in nearby Gstaad, and I had the pleasant sensation that most of the people crowding the small streets and the road out to the lifts were long-time residents. The sensation seekers had gone on to Gstaad in hopes of catching a glimpse of Brigette Bardot, or perhaps of the Burtons. Generally speaking, the town was clustered around two main streets and two cross streets. Residential roads fanned out and up the slopes, and the farms were strung mostly along the valley side of the railway line. Chateau Diableret, I was told, was six kilometers out along one of the main cross streets. I managed to thumb part of the way-it was the road to the lifts-but then I had to walk the last few kilometers.
When I saw the place, I was impressed. There was shoulder of the mountain sticking out over the valley at this point. The road I was following ducked inside of it, topped it, and continued on along the base of the mountain. However, on the right of the road there was perhaps fifteen acres of attractive hilltop before the land dropped sharply all around. The Chateau was situated on this piece. I could barely see the roofs from the road, the evergreens were so carefully spaced and tended that they obscured the view. I had an impression of hugeness, though, and this was not dispelled when I had walked far enough along the drive to see the building itself. The Chateau was in the shape of a U, with its open end facing me. The wing on the left was a later addition to the whole, and architecturally speaking it was an unfortunate one, but the snow frosting over all, the well-kept look of the place, the prosperousness of several Mercedes sedans parked in the front, and the late afternoon light bathing the Bernese landscape behind were enough to overpower any slight misjudgment on the part of the remodelers. The air was very clear. The wind blew gently. There was no sound at all.
"Marianne? Of course. If you will just follow me."
The young woman, wearing what r took to be the school uniform of white silk blouse, pleated navy blue shirt, and navy blue knee socks, led me into an imposing foyer, furnished with an eye both for the hardships imposed by gangs of adolescent girls and a tasteful appearance, and up a flight of curving stair to the right. r had the opportunity to admire the turn of her calves as she climbed before me, and r realized that she must be about eighteen and was likely to be chaffing against the indignity of having to wear such clothes as these. One could easily imagine her gracing the high balconies and the salons in the latest of fashions: her slenderness was just the body those people seem to design their things for. My sympathy went out to her as my imagination pictured long battles with stern parents who desired their daughter to be brought up in the old style. Touched with a finger of age, I felt for the instant as though I knew everything. How impatient was youth, how humorless! But then my mind turned to the more immediate problem of Marianne. How would she react when she saw me? She had had no warning of my visit. What would she say to the resurrection of thoughts about an experience which she might just as well be happy to forget? And the fact that she had not mentioned him did not preclude the possibility of her being involved with some man on the staff here. How would he react to the tail-wagging stranger? Knowing her as I did, as little as I did, still I realized that any man would be a fool not to have put his attention on her the moment she have into sight.
My guide knocked on a door, and I was told to enter.
I expected to see Marianne, and I was wearing a disarming smile, but the woman who rose from behind a wide desk to greet me was a stranger. She was tall, and blonde, and beautiful, and ordinary. I immediately grew ill at ease. My clothes were baggy. I carried an old rucksack over one shoulder. I was unshaven. I supposed I must smell. The woman's calm exacerbated my condition. She remained standing behind the desk. Floor to ceiling windows dominated the wall behind her, and late light backlit her. A small desk lamp threw a yellow spot across some papers she had been examining, but it did not reach her face. r found it hard to focus on her.
"I am Agnes Meyer," she said, her voice controlled and low.
"How do you do!"
"May I help you?" Her English was accentless.
"I'd like to see Marianne."
"Marianne?"
"Yes."
We stood in silence for a moment while I felt as though I were being examined with none too favorable an eye.
"And who are you, if I may ask?"
"Oh! Sorry. My name's Alexander. Arthur Alexander. I've just come up from Geneva, you see ... "
"From Geneva."
"Yes. I'm a friend of Marianne's. I met her on the train, and-"
"-and you followed her here." The woman's voice was flat. Now that she believed she understood the nature of the relationship, she had lost interest in me.
"Well, yes, actually. I thought I'd look her up, you know, just to say hello."
"You thought you'd look her up."
"Yes. To see how she's doing, don't you know."
"What is the nature of your business, Mr., ah, I beg your pardon ... "
"Alexander."
"Mr. Alexander?"
"I'm on vacation, you see. I'm an accountant, from America. I am vacationing in Switzerland, and I met Marianne on the train, and I just thought ... Look here, is there some reason why I can't see her?"
"We attempt to discourage visitors during term."
"But I ... But that's absurd."
The woman, who had begun to sit down, straightened again. Her voice contained great dignity as she replied, "I am not accustomed to listening to such claims."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. But all I want is to speak with her for a few minutes."
Now she did sit. "I have told you the school policy."
"But, Mrs. Meyer, I-"
"Ms. Meyer."
"I beg your pardon. Ms. Meyer. But I don't see why. Look, I simply want to say hello to her. If she has a class or something now, I can just wait."
"I'm sorry, we don't allow that sort of thing."
"What sort of thing?"
"You know what sort of thing, Mr., um, and now I think you had better go."
"I've never heard of such a thing. I'm a visitor to your school. I'm ... "
The woman's attention had returned to her papers, and she spoke without looking up. "One of the girls will show you through the public portions of the building if you like, but then, I am sorry to say, you will have to go. Term is in session. We do not allow any variance from our rules. I will tell Marianne that you stopped in and asked after her."
I was feeling stunned. I had been concentrating so hard on what I would say to Marianne when finally I saw her that I didn't quite know how to counter this situation. "But," I began stupidly.
"That will be all"
"Damn it, I've come all the way from Geneva just to see her, and I will-"
The door behind me opened and the same girl who had brought me upstairs entered. She stood beside me, and her presence broke my train.
"Josephine, show Mr ... this gentleman out."
"Yes, miss."
"I will mention your concern to Marianne," she said, looking at me for the last time.
"You can't do this. I don't believe this is happening. I'm just here on a visit. Ms. Meyer, damn it, I think-"
"Josephine."
"Yes, miss. Come along now, sir."
"God damn it--"
"Sir!" Her voice was sharp, and took my arm. I wrenched it away, but she took it again, and somehow or other she made the grip burn all the way up my arm and into my shoulder. "Come along."
"But, I-"
"Come."
I came. It must have been one of those oriental things, for she certainly could make me move when I didn't want to. I followed her down the stairs and through the foyer. When we reached the door, she pushed me politely, but most firmly, through it.
And that was that.
CHAPTER FOUR
I was fortunate in the moon. It was an early, slender crescent which shed just enough light for me but did not allow enough so that I would be visible to anyone else. I was concerned with such things, you see, because I was attempting to break into the chateau.
Stated boldly like that, it is a statement which amazes me still. Burglary had never been my line, nor had breaking and entering. Even trespassing, which I was also doing, had been something at which my well-regulated imagination quailed. And yet, I found myself, carefully clothed in dark, comfortable garments, wearing my climbing boots, huddled under the shelter of a copse of pines about forty yards from the back corner of the older wing of the school building. It was ten-thirty by my watch, and that was the time I had decided upon. By then, most of the lights ought to be out. I was correct. Most of them were, and those that remained were clearly coming from the instructors' apartments. One of those would be Marianne's. Before, I had just looked at the chateau with interest as the building which sheltered Marianne. Now, I had looked at it with the eye of him who would steal its secrets. Unaccustomed as I was to this manner of work, I thought it shouldn't be too difficult.
Choosing a moment when the moon was behind a cloud, I slipped from the cover of the trees and darted across the open snow field to the corner of the building. With beating heart-more from the tension than from the exertion-I crouched and looked above me. The corners of the building were ornamented with stone, and I had the idea that I could climb the stone to the second and the third floors. From there, I felt that I could probably work my way from balcony to balcony until I found the correct apartment. I would have liked to have had the advice of a good cat burglar right about then, but, as there were none about, I was forced to proceed on my own. One difficulty, of course, was the tracks which I would leave behind me wherever there was snow. In order that there not be a line of prints ending at the corner of the building, I deliberately walked along the wall until I came to a pathway. From there, I retraced my steps, using the same holes in the snow, and leaving what I hoped would be the impression of someone having wandered in an absent-minded sort of way around the building. Then I began to climb.
The stones were cold and rough and sometimes icy under my fingers. I had elected not to wear gloves since I felt I could climb more carefully without them, and soon my hands were stiff and chilled. I found the going easy enough for all that, and it was not very long before I was level with the first balcony. I had noted earlier that there seemed to be balconies along the faces of the larger windows, and I guessed that each of the living apartments would have such accommodations. I had also guessed, without any knowledge, that I could get from one to the other easily. Now was the moment. If I could not even get onto the first balcony from where I hung on the corner of the chateau, I would have to descend and figure out another plan. But it was all right. After some delicate rock work and a moment of panic when I reached blindly for something to hang on to, I swung my legs over the stone railing of the first balcony and paused for a breather and a bit of investigation. The snow on this particular balcony had all been trodden down and presented no danger as far as tracks were concerned. The light was not bright, and I imagined that I would probably be invisible if I didn't move very much. The apartment before me was still lit, but its interior was shielded by heavy curtains, and I couldn't see into it. It had occurred to me, of course, that I might not be able to see into the rooms, but I had decided to cross that bridge when I came to it. Now was the time to do some crossing.
As silently as I could, I examined everything that might provide a view, but I was unsuccessful. Whoever the occupant was, she was enamored of her privacy. The windows were actually French doors, but I could think of no way to open them silently and without causing a draft, even had it been possible to open them in the first place. I was stymied.
I decided finally to go on to the next balcony. I was somewhat disheartened though, for I felt my plan crumbling. I could envision myself stealing from place to place for the rest of the night, never finding any clues to Marianne's whereabouts, and, statistically at least, running an ever greater risk of being caught. The folly of the whole thing began to be clear to me. Certainly, Ms. Meyer had rebuffed me. Likewise, my phone calls had made no difference. The questions about Chateau Diableret I had asked around the inn where I had taken a room gave me no light. Just a school, they had said, which tried to have little to do with the village. Uppity, they thought this, but not particularly significant. And now here I was attempting to breach what I had come to think of as the Meyer bastion. What I was doing was illegal. I had no indication whatever that there was anything out of the ordinary about this place. In seeing me, The Meyer had seen a moocher, a bum, a pick-up artist, someone not for her girls to associate with. Her rejection of me was logical perhaps, if unjust. Though now, with this action, I was proving what she had seen in me to be true. I have no real explanation for why I continued to search that night. Nor have I any reason to offer for my actions at all. Something was different about me, that is all I can say.
Anyway, I did continue. I traced my way along the entire wing of the building without once finding a window through which I could see. Movement from one balcony to the next was reasonably easy, and, judging by the way the snow was trodden, I was not the first to make the journey. It would not be unlikely for the girls to have secret parties in each other's rooms and to travel by this means, and I began to fear that I might be standing on some balcony when its inhabitants suddenly popped out to climb up, down, or across. I had a vision then, like something out a bedroom farce movie, of all of us shifting from balcony to balcony without ever seeing each other throughout the long night.
Upon reaching the end of the wing, I discovered that there were no balconies on the back of the central portion. I was forced to climb the corner once more until I reached the third story. Here my luck was better. In the first two rooms I came to, I was able to see instructors at their ease. Perhaps, being higher off the ground, they cared less about their curtains. At any rate, I watched one woman in a bathrobe smoking a cigarette and painting her toenails what I thought of as an awful color of maroon, and another most fetchingly displayed in her underwear lying on her bed, twining her ankles in the air, and reading a book. As might be expected, I spent an extra minute or two on that particular balcony.
The third balcony was dark, but the fourth offered much of interest. The interior of this particular room was dimly lit by a table lamp which had had a red cloth draped over it. I saw a bed, a desk, many, many books, and a wall dominated by hanging plants of various kinds. There were paintings on the walls, of the kind one knows are the work of the room's inhabitant, and interesting knick-knacks were scattered here and there. It was an attractive room, and I was disappointed that the owner was not at home. I would have liked to see her. But then, as I was on the point of stealing across the balcony and trying the next, the door to the corridor was opened, and two women came in. It was not only their looks which caught my attention. There was an atmosphere of tension and almost of furtiveness between them, one scuttling in through the opened door while the other looked back along the corridor. Immediately the door had begun to open, I had dropped to one knee in the snow and hugged myself against the wan beside the window in the .hope that I would not be seen. I guess I was not, for the two women spent a moment in quiet conversation after their door was closed, but then one of them began walking right toward me! Her face was staring right at me, and it was only when she reached the window itself that I saw that her eyes were preoccupied. There was nothing I could do except hold my breath and pray that she would not look down and see me. I was only two feet from her, through the glass, when she turned and spoke to the second woman, who had sat upon the edge of the bed. "What can we do," was what I think she asked.
They were keeping their voices low. The woman on the bed-who, incidentally, was thirty-five-ish, well dressed in a suit, and dark of hair and complexion-answered the question with what appeared to be another question. The woman with her back to me-younger, blonde shading-to-honey coloring, with slim hips and slim arms-replied, "But Agnes won't allow it. You know she won't. You remember what happened when Marianne tried it."
There was such an air of plaintiveness in her voice that it sounded as though she were about to weep. Her stance, also, betrayed her tension. But Marianne! I had begun to fear that she didn't even exist. I strained my ears to hear more, but the blonde woman moved slowly away from the window then, and I lost the sound of her voice. The two continued to talk animatedly, though apparently with some fear of discovery, and I stayed where I was, my knee gradually growing wetter and colder, in anticipation of hearing more.
Several minutes had passed when the blonde again approached the window. This time, however, she unfastened the catch and pushed one side open a little way. I saw that she had an unlit cigarette in her mouth, and I assumed she was opening the window to spare the other's air while she smoked.
"We'll just have to stick it out," she murmured as she struck a match, her back once again to the glass.
"I suppose so," the dark woman replied.
"No one would believe it anyway, and I don't suppose it's so bad as we sometimes feel it is."
"Perhaps not."
There was silence for a time while the two looked at each other intensely. Then the blonde said "Damn" vehemently, and she stubbed out her cigarette.
"Yes," her friend replied.
"Damn, damn, damn, damn!"
"I know."
"Oh, Marsha!"
With small, tottering steps, the blonde walked toward her friend. She seemed suddenly to have become awkward and disjointed as she approached, and then stood over, the woman called Marsha. "Marsha," she repeated. "Oh, Marsha."
"Yes, darling."
Marsha placed her hands upon the blonde's hips, and she pulled her slack body close into an embrace. She placed her face against the blonde's belly, hugged her hips, and spread her knees so that the blonde's thighs were between her own. In her turn, the blonde hugged Marsha's head against her abdomen, bending over so that her small breasts were pressed tight into the embrace. She kissed Marsha's dark hair and whispered into it, "What will we do?"
"I don't know, Celeste. I just don't know."
She withdrew her head from the hug, and, looking up into Celeste's face, she smiled some what sadly and continued, "But I do know one thing."
There was implication in her statement, and Celeste smiled back through her tension. After holding the smile for a moment, she asked "What?"
The faces of the two were close together, and their intensity of staring was beginning to affect me. I grew embarrassed. There was something going on here that I had no business watching but I was unable to move away without attracting their attention. The silence had grown enormous.
"You can guess," Marsha whispered coyly.
"Never."
"I believe you can."
"I don't know what you mean." But Celeste was smiling slightly and all the disjointedness had focused now, and she seemed poised for some explosion.
As a reply, Marsha deliberately removed her right hand from Marsha's hip, dropped it between her knees, and raised it again all the way up between her thighs, lifting the hem of her skirt with her forearm. As her hand reached its goal, Celeste's head tipped back in a shuddering ecstasy, and her entire weight seemed to drape itself over that supporting hand at her hot center. Her eyes closed, and her nostrils widened, and her breath came out in one long, hissing sigh.
"Now you know what I mean, darling," Marsha crooned, and she dropped her face back against Celeste's belly. "Now you know what I mean."
The tableau held like that for a time. Celeste placed her hands lightly on her friend's head. Whatever was going on inside the skirt caused her hips to undulate ever so slowly. Her eyes remained shut, and the smile on her face betokened a gentle and fulfilling reverie.
I was torn. What was going on in there was their own business. That it was exciting me, I had no doubts, but taste and gentlemanliness dictated that I withdraw. On the other hand, I could always convince myself that any movement would alarm them and bring ruin to my cat burglaring schemes. In fact, they were so absorbed in that unctuous masturbation that I might well "have been able to walk right in on them without their realizing it, but I allowed myself the treat of watching on the grounds of safety to myself. This was wrong, I knew all along, but the wrongness of it somehow added to the thrill. And I could always pretend that they might say something useful about Marianne later on. I did take the opportunity of their involvement very slowly to rise off my knee and, creaking, to stand upright. The night, fortunately, was warm enough so that I could be happy where I was. And had it not been, the scene inside might well have warmed me by itself alone.
The tableau had broken now. Celeste's skirt was of the wrap-around variety, and Marsha was unfastening its clip at the blonde's waist. Their eyes were locked on one another once more, and I could almost feel the hammering hearts beneath their soft breast flesh as my own increased its speed. As Marsha's slow fingers drew her lover's skirt from her body, I found that my breath was short, and that I felt suddenly dizzy. My eyes glued themselves to the woman's pale skin as it was revealed to me. The skirt fell away from her slender ass first, showing long lines of rising leg, beautiful columns in the rosy light, which terminated in an attractively molded bottom, now hugged by a skimpy pair of pale panties. And now the skirt fell away from her in front as well and was carelessly draped on the edge of the bed. Both Marsha's and my own eyes were eager to examine the rest of the form before us. I felt as though my eyes followed the smooth trailing of Marsha's fingers and palms as they spread lightly across Celeste's gently swelling belly and then slipped downward along the front of her thighs to pass by her delicately encased vee. Her cunt hair must have been a slightly darker shade than the hair on her head, for I felt that I could see the outline of the darkness inside her whispy, light material.
Marsha continued to trail her fingers up and down the front of Celeste's thighs in a caress which grew maddening for the latter. I watched as she found herself unable to do other than roll her hips the more and pout her cunt forward toward her friend's face. She lifted her hands to her own breasts and began rolling them slightly beneath her sweater. Finally, unable to contain herself any longer, she whispered, "Come on: Oh. come on. Hurry, darling. I want you to do it to me. Please."
"Well ... "
"No, don't tease me. I'm excited enough, for God's sake. Make love to me. Come on."
Both women were grinning now, and Celeste pushed her friend back on the bed. Without pausing a moment, she tossed Marsha's skirt high, revealing handsome, womanly legs, and pressed her face between them on a high and wide cunt. It didn't surprise Celeste, but it surprised me, to see that Marsha was wearing nothing whatever under her skirt. Her dark cunt hair spread wide across the bottom of her belly, and her red slit, what I saw of it before Celeste's face was pressed to it, looked wet and deep. Celeste's face sank lusciously into that hairy groin, and Marsha moaned as she felt her lover's tongue and lips working deeply inside her.
Celeste was kneeling on the end of the bed, her slim loins in the air, her ass pointed in my direction, and I could see the side of her body sunk between Marsha's wide-spread and gleaming legs. I saw Celeste's pretty face dipping up and down in the juicy cunt of the other woman, and I realized that she must be sliding her tongue repeatedly from asshole to cm. I imagined the coated nostrils in which would be suffused the heavy musk of Marsha's cunt. I longed to press my own face into that hot and yearning cunt, to lick it and to suck it. I wanted to drink down her thick cunt water. I pressed my hand against the end of my slowly engorging cock and felt a wonderful sensation of lust and eagerness,
Celeste herself was growing vibrant in her excitement. I saw that her panties crotch had ridden up tight into the crack of her ass. Her white cheeks shone pink in the soft light, and the straining of her thigh muscles as she humped herself in the air was plain to see. As I watched, I saw her fingers cupping her hanging, hot cunt, and I realized that she must be beating herself off while she ate her lover's cunt. Her fingers churned in her wet, clinging folds, pressing her nylon strap deeper into her sex until it nearly disappeared from view, so deeply had it sunk. Now her ass was even more excitingly divided, the material pressing her crease apart and disappearing in the working, writhing center where her fingers rubbed and rubbed at her drenched lips.
As I pressed my cock once more with my fingers, I heard Marsha moaning and crying. Her head was lashing from side to side, her dark hair tangled.. "Oh, yes, darling. Darling, yes. I'm ... I'm ... Oh, darling!"
She must have come then, for Celeste slowly raised her shiny face from Marsha's crotch, her eyes dancing with joy, her tongue out and licking Marsha's cunt juice from her lips. Marsha herself lay quietly for a moment, but then she sat up suddenly and took Celeste in her arms. "Oh, I love you," she whispered. "I love you, Celeste."
But Celeste was too close to her own orgasm to respond well. Her fingers were still working on her cunt, only now, as I saw when she turned over and slumped back against Marsha's comfortable form, her hand was inside the top of her panties. She had pushed the band back out of her slit so that her fingers could sing their song upon her clit. Now Marsha lay her hand upon her friend's masturbating wrist and whispered love words in her ear as she held the wrist more tightly against Celeste's lower belly.
"Come now," I heard her urge Celeste. "Come now, my darling. Make it come. Make it come so very good. Make it a deep, deep one for me. Make it a good one, and I'll come too."
With that, she slipped her hand between their bodies, and I saw her eyes close and her lips twitch as she massaged her own cunt close to another orgasm.
Both women were now on the verge. I squeezed my cock again as I watched them top their climbs, shudder, jerk, and grow still. I realized that I might have masturbated as well, but the oddity of the situation continually impinged itself on me, and I was self-conscious.
Marsha and Celeste lay still for some time after their orgasms had ended, but presently they rose and undressed each other completely. Celeste's body was as I had envisioned it, blonde, slim, small, straight. Marsha, on the other hand, reminded me of Marianne. She was voluptuous, round, heavy, womanly: a Michelangelo. I couldn't stop myself from staring at her. Once she was naked to the extent of wearing only a bra, she was enough to make my cock stir once again and to make me forget my self-consciousness. Her ass was rounded and wide, her thighs were shapely, her belly descended to a wide, dark, hairy cunt which cried out to be fucked. And then Celeste reached behind her and unfastened her bra, and I was treated to the sight of substantial breasts and long, dark nipples. I didn't see them long, for Celeste's blonde head intervened then, and she never again released her sucking lips from Marsha's tits until the women were lying down once again. Then they reversed themselves and I watched Marsha's terrific ass descend over Celeste's eager face. She spread her knees wide in order to press her succulent cunt down on Celeste's mouth, and I very nearly came at the sight of her from that direction.
In fact, I did then allow my stiff cock to come out of my pants, and to be stroked in the cool night air. The show went on for a long time, and I came heavily, jetting my hot seed against the side of the building and dribbling it down into the snow.
After my orgasm, I grew aware of my surroundings again. Clouds had slid across the sky, and the first hint of snow was in the air. Marsha and Celeste seemed to have dozed off. At any rate, after their last event, they lay still with eyes closed, Marsha's handsome hand cupping Celeste's small, pink-tipped breast. As I began to move away, Celeste sleepily reached for a comforter to draw across their perspiring bodies. The light clicked out as I slipped across to another balcony.
By this time, I reckoned, it must be after midnight. The moon was gone, but I estimated, it at about one in the morning. Snow slid down from the dark sky increasingly thickly. There was only one more light on in the row of balconies I was climbing along, and that was in the last room next to the corner. I decided to investigate there and then climb down again before I got caught in the snow storm. The snow muffled any small noises I may have made as I climbed. I had grown stiff and cold from standing so long on one balcony, and the exertion of climbing was a relief to my muscles.
The last balcony showed an empty room. Again, it was a comfortable-looking room. It had a fireplace in which the embers of a fire were still glowing. The color was blue and cream, the walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs of rocky headlands, ships, harbors, and mountain scenery. Over the head of the bed hung an embroidered cloth, of many colors; done in a stylish design of animals and flower shapes. There was a blue and black and white peasant-type rug on the floor. An armchair, a rocking chair, an antique desk and desk chair, bed tables beside the wide, blue-covered bed: it was all tasteful and warming. Books covered one wall, and there were papers spread about here and there. A French edition of Proust lay open on the floor beside the armchair. The whole was so inviting that I longed for my comfortable bed back in the inn. I swung one leg over the edge and began groping for the stone ornamentation down which I was proposing to climb, but at that moment Marianne walked into the room.
My sensation upon seeing her there, after such exertion to find her, was enough almost to make me slip from my precarious perch. I hauled myself back onto the balcony quickly. She looked as beautiful as ever. Her hair framed her face as I remembered it doing. Her body was unbelievable: any lingering thoughts of Marsha were banished from my brain forever. She wore only a red-and white checked bathrobe, which she had been holding closed around herself with one hand. After she had closed the door, she picked a hairbrush from the top of the bureau and, looking at herself in the mirror, began to brush back her dark hair. Her motion was vigorous, and the robe, no longer secured, hung open. Reflected in the mirror, I was able to watch her from the neck to the tops of her thighs. Her great, dark cunt bush stared at me. Her breasts, so large and firm, jutted behind the material, sometimes seen, sometimes not. Her long, rolling belly, with its dark navel and its few stray hairs, was white and soft-looking. I longed to bury my face in her opulent flesh, and my aching cock began to stir erratically at the memory of how I had jetted hot streamers of come all over her there.
Watching her at her toilet, I was in an agony of suspense. I wanted to throw myself at her, but at the same time a great shyness came over me. Suppose I really had simply been a one-night stand with her. Suppose she had disliked me. Suppose there was someone else for her. What would I do if she had me thrown out? She would can the help of other women, and they would scorn me, and I would be justly humiliated. This sneaking around-like-a-thief-in-the-night business had its difficulties, I began to realize.
But the problem was taken out of my hands. Swiftly, before I had a chance to do anything about it, she left her hair brushing before the mirror and strode to the window. The catch was released and the window thrown open to the snowy night air, and there I stood on the balcony before her. For an instant, she was so startled that she forgot to cover her nakedness with the folds of her robe. The wash of light from inside was diffuse here on the edge of the night, but her great, dark pelt at the center of her being held my gaze.
As she turned to flee, I managed to stammer, "It's me, Alex."
She turned, hesitantly. "What?"
"It's me, Marianne. Alex. From the train."
She took a step closer to me. I realized that I was half covered with snow, and that she probably couldn't see me well. I shook some of the snow off my cap and shoulders and moved a step or two toward her.
Then she recognized me, and she spoke confusedly, "But what are you ... I thought ... "
"You thought I was something else, perhaps, and I'm sorry," I soothed her, as I stepped confidently toward the window. "I didn't mean to startle you. I've been trying to get through to you for what seems like days."
"I don't understand. I thought you were in Geneva."
"I was, but I couldn't get you out of my mind, and I decided I had to come along here and see how you were doing. Under the circumstances, I'm glad I did."
"What circumstances?"
"May I come in? It's freezing out here."
"Of course, I'm sorry."
I stepped into the warm room, shuffled most of the snow off my boots and body as I did so, and stood steaming in one corner of the fireplace, Composedly, Marianne sat in the armchair, collected her robe demurely around herself, and looked at me with expectation. "What circumstances?" she repeated.
"Judging from the fact that you didn't know I was here, I see that things are as absurd here as I feared. What kind of a place is this anyway?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, but she looked away, and her evasion told me that she knew something of what I was referring to.
"I have spent eight or ten hours trying to get through to you. I was here this afternoon-"
"You were here?"
"I was here, and that Meyer woman threw me out. What an icy lady she is, to be sure."
"Rather."
"And then I called all afternoon and all evening. I even hung around the gates hoping that you might come in or out, or that I might see someone who would get a message to you. I was pretty certain that The Meyer hadn't delivered my message. She didn't even trouble to get my name."
"She didn't."
"I thought not."
There was a pause. The heat of the embers was beginning to seep through the chill of my muscles, and I felt better. On the other hand, I realized that I was talking to this woman whom I had known so short a time with the familiarity and the assumption of agreement that I would employ with a long-time friend. How did I know what sort of relationship she had with The Meyer I What toes had I been treading on as I so glibly put myself in command of the situation? Judging by the standards of my former way of presenting myself to the world and to women, I might have directed a 'Who do you think you are?' to myself. But there was no time for that. Even in the event-the likely event, when you think about it-that my feelings for Marianne had matured over the last two days at a different rate from her feelings about me, I was not to be gainsaid. I bulled ahead, emotionally speaking, and let the devil take the hindmost.
"But why were you on the balcony?"
"I climbed up."
"How did you know which was mine?"
"I didn't. I checked them all out."
"All of them!" The humor and the absurdity of the situation was penetrating to her, and she was smiling at me.
"All."
"Jesus." She looked away, chuckling and shaking her head.
"Listen, Marianne, what kind of a place is this?"
"Just a school," but she avoided my eye.
"Some school. I've never heard of a place where I couldn't get a civil message through to a teacher."
"Well, it has its characteristics ... "
"I guess the hell."
Again there was silence. I grew aware that it must be late, and that I was probably keeping her from her sleep. I think it was only in these gradual steps that I began to realize what a ridiculous thing it was that I had done. Here I was, having climbed all over the outside of this building, in the middle of the night, in an unknown town in Switzerland, talking with a woman I had slept with on a train three days previously and had hardly had a decent word with since, who was sitting most fetchingly swathed in a thin robe before me, in a room belonging to some kind of a school or a prison or whatever out of which I had already been forcibly and painfully ejected. What, in the name of all that is wonderful, was I doing there?
Marianne, intuitive as she is, was right with me in my thinking. "What are you, doing here?" she asked.
When she had voiced the question, her eyes had been on the fire, but now she looked up at me with a penetration I found somewhat odd. There was a force behind the question which I didn't understand.
"I, well, I came to see how you were, don't you know."
"Yes." Her eyes shifted away.
"Marianne?"
"What is it?"
"What's wrong?"
"You just came to see me, is that it?" There was such vehemence in her voice that I didn't quite know how to take it.
"Um, well, and to help in any way I could ... "
"You just wanted to fuck me some more, isn't that it?"
"Oh, come now."
"Isn't it?"
"Marianne, I-"
"Admit it. You just want to fuck me."
"No. I like you, damn it. This isn't fair."
"Oh? Is that right? Well, listen here, buster, there are plenty of men around who aren't interested in anything except my cunt, and you're just like all the rest as far as I can see." She had stood up, and she was pacing back and forth, her body rigid with anger, her nostrils white.
"But I-"
She whirled on me when I dared to speak.
"Don't give me any of that shit, friend! I've had it up to here with men! Men! Ha. Some god damned men." Her anger was such that she had forgotten for the moment to hold her robe together, and her body inside it thrust its way into view. In addition to this, her face, when angry, was livid and full of light. She was, as is the conventional statement, beautiful.
"Look, Mari-"
"No, you look! I'm sick to death of men who can't get their minds off cunt. Do you understand me?"
"I understand."
"If you want cunt, I'll give you cunt." And with that, she grabbed the skirts of her robe and pulled it up and away to bare her legs and her hairy sex to my view. She was a magnificent sight, eyes flashing, breasts heaving inside their containment, thighs quivering, her big crotch with its deep red divide open and wet. I felt myself respond: and for the first time that night, it was with a genuine, and not a made-up, lust.
"See?" she jeered.
"No. Come on now. Put that away. Don't demean yourself."
"Demean myself! Demean myself, for God's sake. You haven't any idea about demeaning myself."
"Calm down, Marianne!"
"Calm down. He says 'Calm down." Goddamnit, Alex, how can I be calm? It's the middle of the bloody night, I find you standing on my balcony out of no where like a jack-in-the-box or something, and you tell me to be calm. You know what I've been thinking about for the last three days? You know? I've been thinking about your body, and I've been mourning you, and I've been wishing to god damned hell I could get away from this fucking school so that I could find you somewhere. And if you've just come for my cunt, buster, you'll get such a cunt as you'll never forget. But then I'll probably kill you."
This tirade had carried her around the room twice-all this intense bitterness was carried on sotto voce-and she now collapsed on the bed. "Oh, shit, Alex," she whispered, and then she began to cry.
I had been going through all sorts of things during her raving. At first, I was ashamed of myself, chagrinned that I should have come. Obviously, she didn't want me. It occurred to me even that she might be a lesbian, like those other two, and that the experiment on the train had been just that, an experiment. I hadn't actually fucked her, when you came to think about it. But then when she said that about my body ... well, egotist that I am, I realized right away that all problems were over. Everything would be all right, I felt, and, now that she was weeping quietly, I grew terribly tender and protective. I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. I put an arm around her shoulders and began gently kissing her hot and blotchy face. There is something about women in extremity-in tears, in anger, when vomiting, in any sort of overwhelming physical activity-which is exciting to the animalian male. It is a lust for the totally possessed woman that we respond to, the completely unthinking, completely passionate woman. I had to fight hard to hold back laughter at the sudden swelling of my desire for this woman. I had been right after all! I had followed the right one. I was going to have her, no matter what else had to change, forever. This was another point of my escape. Now, however, I was no longer working in the dark. Whatever happened after this time, I knew, deep within myself, that I was going to have Marianne to myself for all time, and that I would do anything to make that possible. She stood for my freedom and my future, but more than that, she was the vindication of the changes that I wanted to make. Without her I was powerless to stop being Arthur Alexander. With her, the world was mine. Take your mind into the mind of the leading dog in a race after some bitch in heat. He knows he has her. He knows that there isn't another dog in the country big enough and tough enough to take her away from him. His exultation was my own, but on top of his, I. was adding lifetime ideals, the gentlemanliness and courtesy without which I would shrink to nothing in my own eyes. My conquest of Marianne (at least in my own mind) was .more subtle than the dog's, for I was conquering her with the power of my willingness to do all things for her. This was not a sexual thing alone, or, to be more accurate, not a genital thing alone. It was all sex, of course, but it was not all genital sex. Much of it was man-woman sex in the classic manner, the acknowledgement of each other's fullness, and the fulfilling of each other's destiny. Such a philosophy, of course, is anathema in the chic, feminist society around Boston. We two sexes are different nations, is the cry, different tribes, and we have no real need of each other. We use each other for convenience alone, that is all. The castrated, powerless, subservient, willing males-one of whom I used to be-retreat to their bars for a bit of disgruntled male companionship, and they exert their ancient force with bouts of arm wrestling. But, other than that, there is nothing for them to do. No one wants a windmill-tilter, no one has any dragons to slay.
But Marianne struggled under the weight of dragons. She was trapped, and she cried out for a hero, and she didn't even know that she was crying out. Nor did she know that she had found someone who was willing to try his hand at sword-wielding. Whatever it was, I was delighted to gallumph out onto battle with it. Of course, she couldn't know that. Of course, she just knew me as a vacationing accountant, that least heroic of all unheroic things. But I would show her, I swore to myself, as her weeping ceased and she began to worry once again about her appearance, I would show her.
And so we made love.
CHAPTER FIVE
I broke off there because we had to move Moth. The wind had backed to southwest and was kicking up, and if there was a gale on the way, we would have found ourselves on a lee shore. One of the reasons that we stopped at Amorgos in the first place is that the port spreader worked loose. I repaired that during our first day at anchor, of course, but r wasn't entirely happy with the repair, and I certainly didn't want to have to claw off during a gale with a questionable spreader. As it turned out, the front passed easily enough-Force 5 at the most-and we needn't have moved, but I am just as happy we did. We're making for Crete now, there to replenish our supplies. Crete will probably be our last stop on this shake-down cruise. We'll return to the Piraeus from there, make our last arrangements and lay on our last supplies, and then we'll be off.
Right at the moment, we are becalmed. The mountains or Thira can still be seen dimly along the northern horizon, but all else is still. Occasionally a jet passes by overhead, but there is no other sign of mankind. We have been becalmed for three hours now, ever since dawn. There ought to be a breeze getting up in the early afternoon, but until then there is nothing to do. There is practically no swell, so we have lowered the sails and covered them to protect them from the sun, only a creaking of the tiller and a faint occasional burble along the hull can be heard. A flock of gulls swam near us for a while, but they have all departed now, except for one lone sentinel. He watches me-I am sitting in the cockpit-with one eye, waiting for some scraps, and with the other he watches whatever else it is that gulls watch along the misty surface or the Sea or Crete.
Marianne and I enjoyed a long, slow, rhythmical, deep love making as the sun rose and the wind died. It was a new way for us. We felt close and yet not terribly passionate, and the fucking was very, very slow because of that. We reveled in the sensation of my stiff erection slowly-so slowly!-penetrating the slick walls of her tight cunt, the wide ridge of its head rubbing at her. I held myself high on my arms, touching her only with my cock and my legs, and stared into her eyes all the while. When, after a long time, she grew closer to coming, she slipped her hand between us and masturbated her clit while I continued to slip myself in and out of her. Looking down and seeing her hand on her hairy belly, watching the working of her knuckles as her fingers slid over and over that sensitive, small button which I love, I found myself growing livid with excitement. Her own lust grew through the medium of her masturbation and the great hardness of me inside her womb, and I watched as she very carefully propelled herself into an orgasm. Her thighs yawned wider as her eyes closed and her neck arched. "I love you," I began to whisper to her as the moment came closer. "I love you, Marianne. I love you." And then it came. Moaning "Oh God, oh God, ok, ok, ok!" her first words in the day-she grunted herself up at me, propelling me with one heave deep inside her hot cunt, and her fingers were smashed against her straining clit by the pressure of our two bodies locked together. She had been sucking on my arm, and the intensity of this mouth work grew until she was biting me none too gently. And then, with a single thrash and a groan, her orgasm was over. Mine was yet to come, however, and as she fingered her now soaking pussy some more, I straddled her big breasts, and she masturbated me with one hand. She likes to watch the juice arching high from my cock when I come, and it was not long until I felt the rush of sperm all through me. My cock curved up and up, stiffer and still stiffer, while her expert fingers ran up and down it. Now and again she would tip her mouth up and smear saliva from her red tongue on my quivering flesh. I felt her own second orgasm coming closer, and the approach of her pleasure ensured my own. Just before she came, I arched and arched ... and then jets of hot come blasted from my cock to ring into the air and fall heavily, wetly across her face and throat. The splashes of sperm on her eyes and lips and cheeks triggered her, and she thrashed her legs around her trembling hand, her belly heaving under me with the force of her climax.
Now she lies face down on the foredeck on a woven mat, completely naked, propped on her elbows, reading a book. Her hair is tied back in a blue scarf, her sunglasses nearly hide her face all together, and there are smears of sun tan lotion on her thighs and back when it was not entirely rubbed in. By a curiosity of the sun, the shadow of the forestay and the jib halyard lies across the small of her back directly on the bikini line. As I look at her wondrous ass, I see her tanned and very brown to the left of that shadow and pale, rounded, voluptuous to the right of it. I love her ass! Seeing it nearly always makes me desire to lick her there, and as I watch it now, I am growing excited all over again. I am dressed simply in my bathing suit-Marianne likes the tan lines-and the nylon slip is filled with the heat of the sun and with the excited sweat of the last two hours of watching her move languorously on the foredeck. I have always liked the smell of my excited crotch, but now I am particularly aware of it. And wearing a bathing suit like this, this bikini, something that I never would have done before, is autoerotic anyway. I love the way my body is growing more slender and more strong. My arms and shoulders have never been so massive as they are now. I've decided to stop shaving all together, as has she, and I have the feeling I look piratical and dashing with my new beard.
I was going to describe the way we made love that first time in the chateau when I last put down this journal, and I suppose I'll go on with that now. Doing so will make me even hornier than I am already, and that will have a decided effect upon my actions after I am done!
I hope that Marianne is as excited as I am, because she's in for a surprise if she isn't. I saw her rubbing her belly and her breasts a little more than was necessary the last time she applied the lotion though, so I imagine that she is. Lying around nude in the sun has always made her feel sexy.
It's a delightful day, and there is nothing to do.
Well, back to the chateau, and winter, and Switzerland. (God, how long ago it all seems!)
Marianne was tired after her outburst. She slumped against me heavily. She had no way of knowing, of course, what manner of man I was or what sort of decision I felt growing inside me, but she was open to me to the extent of her knowledge. And that open quality in her was one of the things which first drew me to her. I felt a wave of love come over me, and I pressed my lips against the side of her poor, tired face. "Darling Marianne," I murmured, and she touched my arm with her hand. "Darling Marianne."
She turned her face into the hollow of my neck and threw one arm around my shoulder from the front. It was an awkward position, but we held it, as her breathing stilled, and her heart grew more steady. There was a profound warmth in her which beat against me, both literally and figuratively, and my desire to possess her grew. I wanted to lie her down on the bed. I knew that with her lying down the road to her body would be opened for me. I knew her lusts and her demands, but I felt a great quietness in her at that moment as she hugged me, and I had no wish to break such a tender moment. I reached to smooth her hair, and I murmured soft words of affection and security to her room. She hugged me tighter.
Finally, "Lie back," I said.
Supporting her shoulders with my arm, I lay her down on the blue-and-white coverlet of the bed. I propped myself on my elbow and stared down into her face. For a time her eyes were closed, and I contented myself with the sight of her and with the small kisses I thought were all she wanted me to plant on her brow and her nose. Presently, she opened her eyes, and their depths were especially blue. They mirrored a longing inside her, and they made my heart swell. I almost told her I loved her then.
"I'm afraid," she said. "It's too much."
"What?" I spoke as gently as I could.
"It. You. Here. Everything, Alex. I'm scared."
I didn't entirely understand this, but in the time-honored male manner I pressed her a little harder, asserting that it would all be fine, darling, and that she could trust me.
She allowed me to kiss her. Her lips were still, yet they were warm and not hard. I licked her lips. I licked the end of her nose. She didn't like that, and she squinched away, but it made her smile.
"See?" I teased her. "It's all right."
"Well ... "
"Of course it is."
"I guess so."
"We'll work it out."
"Help me."
"I will. Anything."
"Alex ... "
"Yes ?"
"Nothing. Just Alex."
For an instant I hesitated, reading the invitation in her eyes, and then I kissed her once more on the mouth. And this time, she was not loath to respond.
We moved around until we were lying at full length on the bed. Her mouth had grown more demanding in the process, and she attacked my own with growing abandon. Her tongue pressed between my lips and my teeth, and she licked my own tongue and the roof of my mouth. The sensation then of her tongue tip exploring the edges of my teeth and my gums was exotic; I had never felt such a thing before.
Our movement had caused her robe to pull open again, and she pressed her body against me, brooking nothing of the dampness of my outfit or the undoubtedly rough feeling of my heavy clothing. My hands moved eagerly to her great, heavy breasts, and I felt her nipples grow erect against my palms.
Ah, Marianne! The memory of it is enough to make the sweat start in my armpits. I watch you now as you roll over, heavy and slippery on your mat. I watch the loll of your big breasts as you settle back. I linger my eye on the dark tuft of hair you reveal as you raise your book over your face to screen away the sun. But mostly, my darling, my mind and my eye wanders over the brown, slow slopes, as you belly becomes the wide spread of your hips and thighs. Mostly my eye loves the opulence of you, the leonine power of your haunches, now stunned by the sun, the velvet fragrance of skin. And your sex! You raise one knee and allow your thigh to drop open. You allow the sun to stare his hot stare right into the very depths and center of your being. How gracefully that dark mound completes the promise of your thighs and your hips! How beautiful the folds and the wrinkles of it, how enticing its plumpness! And what a stunning forest of hair you possess to crown it with, now tipped with sunburn highlights by the bleaching of the Cretan sun. I love you, Marianne. I love you. I loved you then, too, although you did not hear me say so. I loved you that night as we lay in our little escape from the chateau, secretive, still, our rustling furtive. I loved you then, and I love you now, and I will love you always, for you have shown that you love me. You have taken me. You have chosen me, and there is a fierceness about your choice which makes me proud. You are a lioness: long, strong, sauntering, tawny body; playful, kittenish, wild. I love you.
I kissed you then. Do you remember how I kissed you, leaning over your eager body, stilling your trembling with my own? How frantic I was! How giving were you!
I kissed you. I recall the taste of your mouth, fresh from the toothbrush, fresh from your tears. I recall the pull of your throat as I kissed it, and the softness behind your collar bones. I remember how I lifted your round arm and planted long sucking, licking kisses in the hair of your armpit. Oh, beautiful hair! Oh, ancient hair! Oh, hair of my heart and soul! I sucked your there, do you remember?, and I rubbed my tongue across your sensitive flesh. I remember how you moved then, how your hips began their heavy roll of passion. I recall your hand holding me against your armpit, the warmth of your breast against my face, the mist of your breathing in my ear. With an eye, I watched you cupping and rolling your breast in one hand, watched you pull your big nipple until it strained in its desire to grow bigger still. Do you remember how you thrust your big globes against me? Do you recall the sensation of my taking them in my hands and nursing them with my lips? I do. I can feel it now, I look at you, so shiny in the sun, and I can feel those hot, smooth breasts as I felt them on that snowy night. I spent hours, it seems, lifting them, and shifting them, and caressing them, and sucking them. I bathed them everywhere with my mouth, licking the warm, white flesh, drawing on your nipples until I might have thought there was milk to drink. Oh, and I wanted to drink your milk! I wanted everything there was of you, your sweet, hot milk at that moment to come in my mouth, to ooze from your body, to sustain me, to make me alive. I sucked your nipples. I licked the deep valley between your breasts when you held them with a laugh tightly together, trapping my face in your warmth. You stopped my ears with the flesh of your tits, and yet still I could hear your laughter. I could feel it through you. I could feel it in the wonderful insides of you, bubbling over, making light of the worries, making love of our love. I could feel the happiness flooding you the way I flooded your flesh with my saliva and my sweat. And I loved that happiness. I would have died for that happiness at that moment. I loved you. You complimented me then, paying me more heed than I had ever had, and more than I had come to expect. Oh, Marianne of my life!
And there was your cunt now, all open and wet. I could smell the excitement in it, almost taste the running moisture in the air. And you were pulling at my clothes, and I was laughing, and you were rolling, and your robe was gone, and then my clothes were gone, and you ran a hand through your oozing slit and pressed the cream onto my face, and I kissed your hand, and dropped once more into your armpit, and you kept lifting your scent and your cunt water and sliding it across my face, laughing all the while. Oh! My cock was as stiff as a pole then, and my balls ached. My cock was hot, and you held it, and you loved it, and you admired it. I see you again, bending over me as I lay in a trance upon my back, your fingers sliding over it, your tongue tip now and then licking at it, your eyes only inches away as you studied and adored my cock. You pulled the eye open at the end, and you licked my spilled and dried come away, and you kissed that red opening so very tenderly. You stuck the tip of your tongue in it--I can see you now-and I nearly came once more on the spot. And I remember the way you looked at me, so happily through your hair, like a little kid with a new toy, content, excited, wanting to play.
And your cunt! I see once again your cunt, how it was. I look at it in the sunlight, so heavy the lips, so thick the hair, and I see it again as it was. T pressed my face to it. Do you recall the noises you made? Do you recall the frenzy you felt as my tongue opened you, and divided the hairs, and split you like a fig? Do you? I do. I can taste you again, right now, as I sit here with the sun and my hand massaging my cock. I can taste your cunt juice; I can smell the rich, fetid odor of your crotch. I want you now as I wanted you then. I wanted you then as I hoped to want you now. It is a circle, all these wantings, day after day, day before day; around and around and around she goes, and where she stops ...
Well, I stop in a place that I know. I stop in your cunt. I am always in your cunt, my Marianne, I am always fucking you with my tongue fingers-cock. There you lie before me, your cunt so full of the sun as soon to turn to butter and to melt and to dribble along the deck until I can lick you up with my tongue. You are fun of butter, and of glue, and of honey, and of all things slow, and thick, and oozing. You seep into me as your cunt seeps around me when I am into you. Your essence is creamy, and it coats me, and I drink it. I would be drowned in it if I could. You are ripe, oh Marianne, and as lush as cool water under the sun.
I remember the first parting of your heavy cunt lips. I opened them tremblingly with my fingers first, my face and nose only inches from your wet flesh. I pulled your sticky lips apart and look deep into the base of you. I saw your red, moist flesh, the inner lips of your cunt, that wonderful, hard nubbin of your clit. I ran the tip of my finger down from your clit to your cunt hole, and there I felt the deepest gathering of your juices. Oh, my dear, I love your flowing cunt juice! It is your fluid, your soul, your being that I suck. It is your truth. I pried apart your lips, and I seemed to release a thick glut of erotic odor, for I nearly reeled with the sudden heaviness in the air around me. I looked up into your smiling, encouraging face then, and I knew that you could smell yourself too. I smiled back at you, and saw your face drop down behind the high, wide mountains of your tits, so I placed my first kiss right into the open, red cunt of you. I kissed the gummy flesh there, and then my tongue came out, and I licked you, slowly at first and then more forcefully and more quickly, all the way from your asshole up to your clit. I raised your thighs higher and propped them wider, and I licked again and again over the ridge between your asshole and your cunt hole, my nose pressed all the while into the wet slit from which my happiness comes. I felt your juice coating my cheeks, and in an agony of desire I turned my face backwards and forwards in your running crotch, deliberately smearing your sap all over my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks, and my chin. You were moaning all the while, twisting and turning, humping your cunt against my face, calling on me to suck you harder.
And I did; oh, yes, I certainly did.
I sucked you, and I licked you, and I pressed my hot, wet tongue deep between your cheeks, slowly opening your asshole to its smooth intrusion. I felt your asshole tighten on my tongue. I felt you squeezing and relaxing, and with each relaxation, I pressed my tongue deeper into your ass. I was licking you now, my mouth running with saliva, my face smeared with your cunt juice, my nostrils thick with the mingled scents of your cunt and your asshole. I raised my head to admire you, holding your knees back against your breasts, your ass crease and heavy, flooded cunt tilted up toward me as though to kiss me back. I stared at your riot of dark hair, your red asshole where I had just been sucking your flesh. I bent and gently kissed the long, dark hair around your asshole. I licked you in a wet stream all the way from behind your asshole to your rigid clit. I felt the breath streaming in and out of you as I sucked your clit, and your breath was a mirror to my own beating lungs and heart. You were groaning, and twitching, and begging me to make you come, and I held off for a little while, torturing you mildly, running my tongue through your cunt hair and snuffling at your smell. Then I went back to your asshole-do you recall it?-and sucked you some more there. I felt the walls grow wet and open. I felt your insides with my tongue. And now, in desperation, you brought one hand down and began rubbing and milking your cunt with it. You held your tight clit between your thumb and fingers, and you rolled it around in its soft, oily, hot bed of flesh. I watched your masturbating fingers as I licked your asshole, and I thought that the sight would make me come once more myself. I was humping my aching cock all the while against the bedspread, eager to make my way deep into your body and yet loving the sight of your fingers and the taste of your asshole too much to move higher on you and fuck you. You were beating yourself closer to a climax, I could feel by the writhing of your body and the frantic humping of your cunt against my face, so I slipped my mouth up and sucked both your long fingers and your clit into it, licking them all indiscriminately, rubbing my tongue over and over again against your wet, cunt-tasting flesh. Looking up, I saw that you had stuck your other fingers into your own mouth, to fill that eager cavern too with flesh. You wished it were a cock, I knew, and I thought about the feeling of my cock in your mouth, and how it would be, and the heat and the friction in there. I wondered whether it was too late. I wanted my cock in your mouth. I wanted to have me deep in your throat when you came, and I wanted to come in your mouth myself. I hoped I could turn around before you came, and I slowed down on your clit. Do you remember the way you grabbed at my head, begging me over and over to let you come now, that you would die if you didn't come? Do you remember how you gasped and twitched and battered your cunt with your hands and my face and anything you could get close too? But quickly I turned and knelt over your face and pulled back your thighs until I could catch them under my armpits and hold them back against your breasts. I recall the frenzy with which you took my cock in one hand and guided it deep into your mouth. I can feel it slipping in still. I can feel the battering of your tongue, and the hard sucking of your throat, and I can feel also the response in you when I began fucking your mouth. And all this while, darling, I was licking your cunt hole again, sucking its bubbling liquor all from its depths. And your asshole some more, and then your cunt hole again. Back and forth, back and forth. And I fucked you harder, and I sucked you harder, and soon your hand was back on your clit, masturbating frantically, and I felt the deep agony of another come welling along my thighs and back, and your fingers were going like mad, and my mouth was dribbling saliva into your asshole and your cunt, and you were overflowing with moisture, and my face was wet with you, and I knew you were coming, and I could feel your body in the beginning
of its heaves, and I felt your urgent sucking, and I wanted to come as you did, and I plunged my face into your cunt so that my nose was jammed in your asshole and my lips and tongue and everything were sucking your hairy, hot, wet, red, sweet, dark, gaping, coming, coming, coming, coming, coming, coming CUNT! Oh! The juice burst from me. I felt it leap into your throat so hard. Jerk after jerk. Again and again. I must have flooded your insides all the way from the bottom up. I must have gorged you with semen, splashed you with sperm. The tremors kept on, and on, and I thought I would never stop pumping the thick, white juice down your throat, and I thought I would die, and I thought I had died, and then you came again.
I recall the great relaxation which came over me after Marianne had come for the second time. She seemed to slip into a dazed sleep, such as I recalled her entering on the train, and I lay on the bed and felt the warmth of her body beside me. I could still taste her-her juices were drying all over my face-and I enjoyed the olfactory memory of what had happened. I also felt, and this was the most important part, completely in command of myself, my future, and Marianne's situation. I still didn't .know what it was about this place that made everyone so uneasy, but I did know that I was with this woman forever, and that, together, we could do anything that we hoped to do. It might be true to say that from this point on, my escape was over, and Marianne's was beginning.
Well, I must say that writing the above has made me awfully excited, here in the sun. The Cretan sky still shines above us without the breath of a wind, and the sea is as empty now as it was before the creation or man. Only fish and birds live here. We are as though cut off from all civilization, from all time. There is nothing about Moth which is modern or gimcrack. She is heavy, solid, comfortable with the years. I strip off my slight bathing suit and stand, tall, powerful, naked, erect.
"What's that I see?" comes a happy question from the bow.
"Adam, at your service."
"Well, Adam. Is that who you are? I was wondering. You look pretty good for a handful of clay."
"Much obliged, I'm sure."
"And what was that you said about service?"
"I'm at yours, old thing. Anytime."
"That's what I was hoping you'd said!"
"Your place or mine?"
"Well, how's the weather where you live?"
"Sunny, hot. Increasing cloudiness with northeast winds predicted for the afternoon."
"Same here. I can't see that there's any advantage one way or the other, so far as the climate is concerned."
"Shall we flip a coin?"
"Sure."
"Do you have a coin?"
"Do I look as though I have a coin? Where would I keep it?"
"Oh, I can think of a few places."
"Where ?"
I climbed up out of the cockpit and began walking toward her. "Well, if you have so little imagination that you can't think of any places yourself, I guess I'll just have to show you."
"I don't know what you mean by a lack of imagination, my dear sir. Other people have always felt that I was bright enough."
I was now standing over her, looking down at her hot-looking body. My cock, engorged before, was less hard now, but it still swept out from my body like a wing. Marianne had propped herself on one elbow, and she held one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. The sight of her nakedness was exciting to me, and I felt my cock growing stiff again in anticipation of what was coming. She had a charming grin on her face, and, as my erection swelled in size, I understood that she was grinning at it, more than she was at me. I have never known a woman who was as interested in cock as my Marianne.
"Oh, I know that you're bright enough," I said as I stood over her, gently swaying my hard prick from side to side. "You're bright enough, you're just not energetic enough to think. I believe that the sun has halved your capacities."
"Oh, you think so, do you?"
"I do."
"Well, you bring that idiotic pole of yours down here where I can reach it without much effort, and we'll see just who has diminished capacities."
"Lazy bones." But I knelt down readily.
"Why work when people just keep bringing you nice things to eat? Here, lie back"
I did, and I had the pleasure of feeling Marianne drape her hot and slippery body against my side, her back to my face, and take my cock in her hand. "Ah, lovely morsel," she said, and then she began to suck me.
I love it when she does it that way. I can't feel her teeth, and that's nice, and she also has plenty of room to use her tongue on the wide head and underneath the head where I'm most sensitive. It's slow. She likes the feeling of having my great, cock filling her mouth, and she does her best to prolong the ecstasy. For me, the position is also pleasant, for with one hand I can caress her wide buttocks and, by bending somewhat, get a finger down into her asshole. If she feels like coming herself, which the activity often makes her feel, she usually arches her back and opens her thighs to me, and I can masturbate her from behind. We have found ourselves in some very contorted positions as she tries to open herself more to my fingers while still retaining my cock in her mouth. I would not have believed that she could twist herself into those shapes had I not known the diligence with which she goes about giving herself orgasms.
Well, I lay there in the sun, my mind rolling slowly among the images of the morning's love making and the memories of all the earlier events which I had loosed by writing a few minutes ago, and I groaned with the feeling of her tongue titillating my tender flesh. She was not moving her head yet. Only her tongue made a wet friction against my swollen skin, urging on the thrills of ecstasy, making my body grow tenser and more vibrant. Shudders began passing through my stiff muscles like ripples of wind across the water. I heard myself commence to moan. My heart was thudding like mad. The sun burned through my dosed eyelids, turning everything red.
And now she began bobbing her head, her wet lips slipping up and down along the whole length. I could feel the beginnings of my orgasm deep inside myself, and I reveled in the knowledge that I was about to come in her mouth.
I looked down at her to discover that one knee was propped in the air, opening her cunt, and that the hand that was not holding the base of my cock was masturbating her clit. I reached around under her spread ass and gently caressed the back of her flying fingers. Her own breath now began to match the pace of my own, hot wafts of it bathing my cock and balls. I slid two fingers as deep into her vagina as I could, caressing the walls, and I had the satisfaction of seeing her hips and thighs begin their marvelous orgasmic dance.
I turned my attention back to myself, and I felt her mouth now flying up and down my cock. I was as rigid as I ever remember being, and I realized that the climax was nearly upon me. How I adored the feeling! How I loved to pump my steaming, heavy come juice into the sucking, eager redness of her mouth! And I could feel it coming now. Yes, there it was. Yes, there it came. My body was as tight as a bowstring. My lungs stopped breathing. The moment came closer. I felt I would die of the tension. Her mouth was indistinguishable from my cock. It was all one coming flesh. The explosion was ... it was ... oh, God ... it was NOW!
And she, too, I realized dimly through my thudding spurts, was making herself come. Her fingers and mine were driving her wild. I felt her orgasm-which was so violent it pulled my fingers from her cunt-and then she stilled as she sucked the last of my wilting cock dry. And then, her mouth and chin still gobbed with my sperm she raised her face and kissed me, long and deep: I felt and tasted myself rolling down out of her mouth into mine, and the heat, the bitterness, the exoticism of it began to arouse me all over again. Marianne was certainly ready for more, and while still kissing me, she lifted one thigh over mine. Holding my stiffening cock in her hand, she fitted me into her cunt as she sank down on top of me, her knees pressed into my sides. Her tongue went berserk in my mouth as we both drank my come, and she rode my hard cock faster and faster. Her moaning rose to a feverish pitch, and she rose up blindly, her torso gleaming in the sunlight, her magnificent breasts joggling, her nipples wide and red. Her face was arched back toward the sun, her neck was corded, a flush began to spread across her shoulders and breasts under the suntan. I slammed my cock up into her, knowing she was about to come again, and slipped my fist into the hot nest of hair at her cunt, rubbing her engorged clit with the backs of my fingers. Her mouth opened and meaningless words and sounds poured out. She clasped her massive tits in her hands and squeezed them until the flesh stood out white between her fingers, and then she came.
CHAPTER SIX
The real trouble was that we fell asleep. The early Swiss winter sun was already casting shadows across the new snow cover by the time that we stirred. Somehow or other we had managed to get under the covers and were warmly snuggled in the middle of the bed. Marianne was sleeping with her back to me. My loins were pressed against her homey ass, and one of my hands was underneath her naked arm, encircling her breasts. We had been lying pressed together like that for so long that we were somewhat stuck by sweat.
I awoke first. I wasn't at all certain of what awkwardness we were courting by thus foolishly sleeping through the night, but I realized that I could hardly withdraw from the school in the same unorthodox way that I had come in. For myself, I was no longer especially concerned with the reaction of the others-The Meyer and her minions-but I realized that Marianne might feel differently. Because of this apprehension, I tried to wake her slowly and with a gentleness which would make her happy for the first moments before she realized our predicament. However, no sooner had I whispered to her tangled hair that I loved her-yes, I said it-than she was wide awake and alarmed.
"But what does it matter, really?"
Naked, her body still soft with sleep, she was pulling the drapes which covered the tall windows. A dimmer light suffused the room when she was done. Absently, she stood before the mirror and combed back her hair. Her movements created the most wonderful activity of her breasts and her haunches that I had ever hoped to see. The fact that she hadn't slipped on a robe told me that it was not my presence per se which upset her, and that was gratifying. It seemed that she was distressed by the fact that she did not know how to get me out of the place without being seen.
"So what if I'm seen? I don't care."
"But you don't understand."
"What don't I understand?"
"Do you know what this place is?"
"A finishing school. What else?"
Here she walked to the bed and sat down beside me. I trailed a finger or two along the smooth slope of her thigh, but she was not interested in my manipulations. There was a great tension in her which kept her distant.
"You don't know anything about me, do you?"
I didn't, of course, but I was feeling defensive by this time. "I know enough."
"No, you don't."
There was a pause. Outside in the corridor I heard the noises of the building waking up. There was chatter from one end and the slamming of a door. Someone laughed.
"Well?" I encouraged her.
"I don't know what to say really. I never expected to have to explain it. I thought I could get away from it first."
"Marianne, come on. Have a heart. Tell me what it is, and if there's anything I can do, I'll do it."
"Don't make any bargains you don't want to keep."
"If you're trying to make me nervous, you're beginning to succeed. Whatever it is, it can't be any worse than I'm starting to fear."
I pushed myself to my feet and took up my trousers. Whatever this was all about, I felt it would be better to be dressed. Marianne, too, felt the same way. She pulled on a pair of flowered bikini panties and slipped a robe over the rest of her nakedness. The sounds from the corridor were louder now, and she quietly slid a bolt across her door and locked it. I raised an interrogative eyebrow at her, but she refused to respond.
"I left Greece," she began, pacing back and forth and gesturing to the landscapes on the wall, "with my father and with nothing else. We lived in Athens. We weren't rich, but we were comfortable, and my father was proud of the work that he did. Be took these pictures. I found them in a book in Paris, and I hung them up yesterday. Anyway, we left. It was a political thing. We weren't the only ones. Everyone left who had any character. But they wouldn't let us take anything with us, so we came from there without money, without prospects, and with very few contacts. We went to Istanbul. My uncle there put us up for a while, and he was able to get Papa started again with his photography. But then he died. My uncle, I mean. My father is still there. He didn't have much when he died, and he had a family, but he left my father a small sailboat that he owned, and he left me a bit of money. It was that money that brought me here."
Marianne sat down next to me on the bed. She looked at me with a slightly quizzical expression, and then she asked, "Does any of this make sense?"
"Yes. I can understand your predicament, but I don't see what it has to do with the ... thing which is hanging over you now."
"Just wait."
"I'm waiting," I smiled at her. I reached to press her thigh, but she was impatient.
"Well, I couldn't get any work anywhere. Eventually, I took the money that Uncle left for me, and I began traveling around. I'm not really a teacher, you know. I was training to be a lawyer when the new government came in and suddenly all the freedom that women had won vanished. Anyway, I couldn't find anything until my money was about to run out. I was in Geneva by that time. I thought there might be some paralegal work I could do. I have a background in international law, you see, and Geneva is the center of things in some ways. But I couldn't. There wasn't, and I couldn't. Instead, though, just as the year was beginning-the school year-I stumbled on this job opening as a history teacher in this place. They were looking for someone like me, and I was looking for something like anything at all by that time, and I leapt at the chance. Too bad I didn't check it out more carefully."
The noises in the corridor were dying down again, now that all the women had left for the morning meal. "Don't you have to go anywhere?" I asked.
"No. I don't teach until ten this morning. It's okay."
"Well, go on."
"Yeah. So I took the job." She stood up again and paced. "I took the job, and I didn't know what was going on until about a month ago. I had sensed that there was something somewhat strange about it all. I'm not dumb, you know. Just unprepared to believe what this place is all about."
She turned to me and there was a mixture of anger and amusement in her face, as though she didn't quite credit what she was about to say but even the thought of it infuriated her. "This so called finishing school is nothing but a militant lesbian training camp?"
"Really?"
"What do you think about that?"
"I don't know. What am I supposed to think?"
She threw up her hands. "You could at least react."
"Okay. I'm surprised. How do you know?"
"You don't believe me?"
"You said yourself that you found it hard to believe."
"Well, that's true. But I'm right. Hell, I'm not inexperienced. I know when there are lesbian overtones in a conversation. And, if you want the truth, I had a few trysts with Sappho myself when I was younger. But that was all on a private basis. This entire school is run by and for lesbians! It's like the educational policy here. I knew there was some fooling around that went on between girls of this age, especially in isolated communities like this, and that's why I didn't spot the extent of it earlier. But everything was so weird that I began to take notice of things. All the instructors, all the staff, the kids, everyone, they're all lesbians. And their mothers! You should see their mothers."
Now again she sat down. "And that's not the worst of it. There is another woman here like me, an innocent, Claudette Simon. She lives right down the hall. Well, she was the one who told me about this. She had tried to quit, and that bitch Meyer wouldn't let her do it."
"What do you mean? Anyone can-"
"Not here you can't. I can't either. They have us trapped."
"Marianne, come now. Isn't that a bit melodramatic? Sure, you need the money, but-"
"It's not the money, Alex, it's ... something else."
"What?"
"Well ... "
"Tell me. I can't help unless you tell me."
"Well, I mentioned my father, didn't I?"
"Yes."
"He's an old man. He has very, well, rigid ideas about some things, about sex. He has a bad heart. Meyer's idea is to let my father know, in some way, some sneaky way, that I am teaching at this lesbian school-he's so proud of me and of this job-and it would shatter him."
"She's blackmailing you?"
"Yes."
"And this other woman, this ... "
"Claudette."
"Claudette?"
"Yes. She has a fiance, you see."
"But what's the purpose? What can she possibly expect to gain? I'd have thought she would like to keep people like you and Claudette out of here completely. You can't be kept here forever, and the madder you get, the worse for her eventually."
"She's more devious than that. She's been in this position before. I told you it was a militant lesbian school. She expects to change us, Claudette and me, to turn us on to her way of thinking, so that we'll want to stay."
We were silent for a moment. "Wow," I said finally. "Incredible."
"I know. It sounds like the plot for a B-minus movie."
"C, I'd say, at the most."
She grinned at me. "So there you have it, buster."
"And you want out?"
"Damn right."
"And you can't go without protecting yourself against her."
"That's the picture."
"What do we do?"
"You were the one offered his services, friend."
"You're right. Damned hasty of me, I think"
"True." She laughed a rueful laugh. "And there's the other problem."
"What's that?"
"What do we do with you right now?"
"Hard to say," I said, and I moved along the bedside until I was able to kiss her.
At first, she didn't want to be kissed, but after I nuzzled her ear a bit and made her giggle, I felt that she grew more responsive. We played around a bit, kissing and giggling like kids, until I began opening her robe. As her wonderful, full breasts fell free, her nipples already aroused, I cupped them in my palms like the delicious fruits they were. "What cantaloupes," I whispered.
"Pears."
"Too big for pears."
"Eggplants, then."
"Well, they have the same dark veins ... "
"Eggplants don't have veins, idiot."
"But they look like they're hanging and bursting."
"Mine don't hang, and they aren't about to burst."
Testing the heavy weight of one of those soft globes in my hand, I replied, "It feels like it might be ripe enough to burst."
She held her hands around my own cupping palm, our fingers warm on her warmth, and teased me with: "Would you like to be showered with the juice when it does?"
"You bet."
"Succulent it would be."
"Warm."
"Full of sunshine."
"And vitamins."
"Organic."
"Just as you say."
I applied my lips to the swollen, red tip of one of her breasts in an effort to taste imaginatively some of that luscious serum, and I must have sucked hard enough to impress her, for she gently pushed my mouth away and lifted my lips to her own.
"Taste me here," she whispered, and her mouth was wide open.
Instead of tasting her immediately, I slid one of my fingers into her mouth and rubbed the surface of her wet tongue with it. I continued the caress around the edges of her tongue and down into the soft, cunt-like folds underneath. I soon had three fingers all caressing her in the mouth, dripping with her saliva, running along the ridges of her teeth. Then four, and she was sucking my hand. Her eyes were closed the while, and I nuzzled and excited the tiny hairs around her ear with my lips and soft exhalations. "You like to suck, don't you, Marianne," I whispered to her, and she nodded her head excitedly without opening her eyes. I felt her tongue smoothing over the pads of my fingers, working its pointed soft way between them so that she could lick the crotch of them. Her breathing was faster on the back of my hand.
As I was whispering to her, I spread the leaves of her robe open and away from her body, pushing the robe back so that it finally slipped off one of her arms. She shrugged out of the rest of it, and now there was nothing left except her flowery panties between me and her fine flesh. I liked to look down between her moving thighs and feast my eyes on the swelling of her cunt bone and the wide expanse of her cunt mound as it was so delightfully encased. Her thighs were working against mine, and she was at the same time rubbing them together, doubtless in the pleasure of thus manipulating the gently stirring lips of her cunt and, more subtly still, the slowly rising eminence of her clitoris.
Slowly drawing my soaked hand from her clinging mouth, I hovered above her, staring hypnotically down into her now open eyes. Her face was blank with passion, her mouth slack. "You like to suck, my darling; I know you like to suck. And I love your lips and your tongue when they suck."
Her tongue tip came from between her ripe lips and licked them as she nodded slowly and dreamily over this. Her eyelids grew heavy again. I felt her fingers move across her cunt.
"I like your lips on my body, Marianne. I like them on my cock. Would you like to have my cock right there now? You would? Yes, you would. I can see that you would. You'd like to feel my hard cock in your mouth, pressing against you, swelling in your mouth, moving back and forth, in and out, faster until it comes. You'd like to have my hot come spurting into you right now, wouldn't you? Down into your steamy throat. Down and down, gobs of thick, white come oozing all around your pretty, soft tongue, dribbling from your lips, coating your chin and your cheeks. You like the feeling of come running over your hot body, don't you? And into you. You like it pouring into you and over you and around you, until you are sticky and wet and gobbed with it, don't you?"
"I do! Oh, I love it! I love to suck?"
"Yes, my darling. You still taste my come in your throat from last night, don't you? You still have my sperm in your throat and your belly, and you can taste it."
"Yes, Alex. I can. I can."
I was lying along her side now. Her eyes were closed again, and I slipped my hand down across her soft belly and under the rim of her panties until I was able to tickle her at the edge of her pubic hair. Her own hand now lay quietly cupping the heat of her pantied cunt from the outside, but she moved it over and opened my fly so that she could begin masturbating me. The more I talked, the faster her encircling fingers flew on my erection and the more I angled my body so that she would have access to me.
"That feels so good! Oh, darling, that feels like ... I don't know what it feels like, but ... oh, don't stop! I love your fingers on my cock. I love my cock, and I love your fingers, and I love the feeling of your hand, and I'm going to come again, darling; you're making me come I"
My legs were twitching with the nearness of it. I was astounded somewhere in me-although I couldn't think about much-that it was all happening so fast. But there I was, almost there! Her hands were just right, just tickling enough, just that one spot, just one more time ah, ah, ahhhh, OHHH!
And then I was wilting ecstatically amongst my own juices against her soaked thigh and belly. She spread the come across her belly and the rising, mound of her pantied cunt, grinned at me with mischievous eyes, and kissed the tip of my nose. My sweating face dropped down upon her shoulder, her arm encircled me, and I felt myself dozing in the warmth of her embrace.
I came from my dreamy state what seemed like a few minutes later to discover my hand covering her cunt and a long, shuddering, undulating motion running through and through her body. She was very excited and she wanted release, and my hand, in its dazed state, was not doing all it could. My own excitement grew again as I pressed somewhat upon her wet panties, burrowing very slowly and in time with her motions, down through the wetness and into the interior of her, pushing the material before me. As her humping grew more erratic, I had the pleasure of watching the thick, hairy lips of her cunt from behind their flowery covering as her panties sank into her cunt.
She came, and then she was still.
Later, I ate her, sucking her hairy pussy of its thick secretions, and I made her come once more. This was the final one, though, and I saw her then rise and dress and slip away. She had a class to meet.
We had determined that the easiest thing was for me to stay in her room during the day and make my escape by the same route as before when night fell. She promised that she would smuggle me something more substantial to eat than the old crackers she had in a bureau drawer. There was a carafe of a pleasant white wine, common but good, and one of cool water available, so there would be no problems in regard to liquid. And there were books to read-Here's a new edition of Hamsun's Victoria, she said with a smile of reminiscence. Now, if you will be all right ...
I was alone.
I dressed, brushed my hair, ran a finger along my jaw and wondered whether it mightn't be a good idea to grow a beard instead of indulging in this barbaric habit of scraping my face with an edge of sharp metal every day, paced a bit, drank a glass of water, looked carefully out of the window at a view which was magnificent, thought of Greece, of Alexander, of Socrates, of Byron, wondered idly what it must have been like when she sailed with her father and uncle on the romantic, half-Asian waters of the Bosphorus, grinned at the memory of her eagerness for a man's love, wondered what the hen I was going to do about The Meyer, and then sat down. Then I stood up, paced, thought some more, poured a glass of wine but didn't drink it, began to have the glimmerings of a plan, and sat down again. And so passed several hours.
Then she was back. She had with her half a loaf, a sausage, a wedge of cheese, and three apples. It was a very respectable repast, and she helped herself to part of it along with me.
"Have you any ideas," she asked as she swallowed the dregs of her wine.
"Perhaps"
"Elucidate"
"Not until I have it all. How was teaching?"
"Okay. My mind was not entirely on the machinations of Xerxes, however."
"I imagine not."
"Those girls ... I used to like them so much, Alex, get so damned concerned about the growth of their minds. I look at them now, for about the last month, and I just feel confused."
"I shouldn't wonder."
"I've no objection to what they're doing here per se. There's nothing wrong with it in my mind, really. I told you I'd explored in the same way myself. But it's the forced nature of it, the lack of perspective, the lack of humor. Old Meyer is as humorless as they come. That's why she's always so jittery, you know. She's famous for not being able to have a conversation with anyone because she can't stop shouting her own position. It's like a record that's been scratched, the way she comes back again and again to the same breast-beating posture. She'd like you to believe that there's nothing in the least bit funny about what she's doing, no sir. It's very serious business."
Marianne was strutting around with her chin pulled in and a comical look on her face, like someone imitating Mussolini. We grinned atone another, and she continued, "Meyer's little lesbian farm. But the thing is that there's nothing really to get one's finger on. I sounded pretty paranoid about it all this morning-and everything I said was true-but, when you look at it, this is really just an ordinary finishing school, in an ordinary little village, in the ordinary Alps. There's nothing to it. Just a very subtle pressure in the direction of lesbianism, feminism, man-hating, and demagoguery. But the pressure is all underneath the smooth surface, don't you see. It took me months to discover the ... the organized nature of it. That's what's so bad. It's the organization that's behind it all. The planning. If these were isolated instances, okay. What do you expect healthy girls from fourteen to nineteen to do with their sexual pressures, especially in as publicly erotic an age as this, when they are kept continually from the company of young men? A bit of hanky-panky can be expected. But when there's a perfectly palpable, though for the most part unstated, school policy in the direction of this man-hating business ... well."
"I can see what you mean about the subtlety of it all."
"Yeah. I probably made it sound like a prison. That would be too easy. It's not. It's just a school. But there's something rotten here, and it's kept under such loose wrapping that there's nothing really to touch. You thrust your hand into the thing, expecting to come up with a real core of evil, and everything just evaporates. What? Just a school for girls. Some can be found in each other's beds? Well, so what? An interest in feminism, you say? "Well, this is 1974, and these are young, international girls. Of course they're interested in feminism. You say there's a malicious quality in their politics. Okay, show me where it is. Point out to me this plot, this conspiracy of man-hating you talk so much about. Point it out to me, and then I'll do something about it. Then I'll complain. Then I'll take my daughter out of here. Then I'll call for an investigation. But you've got to show me first."
"Well, what about that blackmail threat to Claudette?"
"Threat? Did I say threat? There wasn't any threat, really. It was just the atmosphere. She got the message, she did, but there was no threat, nothing you could point to. No words. No writing. No violence. It's too subtle, and Meyer's too clever for that."
"But the kids. Don't the kids complain?"
"Them! They're too young. The first thing you have to understand about' adolescents is that they're the most conservative people on earth. They think alike, they act alike, they believe alike. The truth is that you really can't tell one of them from another."
"I know what you're saying. And it isn't just the kids. It's the whole youth-culture syndrome. I've got acquaintances back in the States who are part of what they like to call the swinging scene, and, my God, they are absolutely, appallingly, the same. Carbon copies of one another."
"Yeah. But I'm talking about the girls. Beautiful, and so many possibilities, but conservative. They find themselves doing things that they don't really believe in doing just because they don't trust themselves enough to stand up and say 'No.' You can't expect them to, of course; they don't have any personalities of their own, but you have to treat them with care during this time, not propagandize them into being lesbians!"
"True."
"There's a new girl this term, Mallory Starr. I have her in my ancient-history class, the one this morning. For some reason or other, she's really latched onto me. I don't know quite why, but she talks to me a lot between classes, and she's always trying to sit with me at meals. She's so fragile, Alex. Such an innocent child. She's sixteen, but she's been secluded for years, and my heart goes out to her now because here she is in the midst of these vultures, and she hasn't any real defenses."
"Poor kid."
"Oh, Alex, take me away from all this!"
I looked at her with a grin and found her grimacing back, alluring, hoping, and yet knowing she was being an idiot. "Well, if you put it that way ... "
"I'll make it worth your while, mister."
"Sure you can?"
"I?" she asked archly. She walked over until she was towering over me and looking down at me across the outthrust mountains of her breasts. "I?"
Waving my hand and looking away, I said, "That stuff doesn't interest me anymore."
"I'll bet."
"It's the truth." But I grabbed her around the hips and pulled her down into my lap. After kissing her soundly, I asked her hair, "Where do you want to go?"
"I don't know. I've got a little money now. Anywhere, I suppose. I don't know. I haven't made any plans because I just assumed I'd stay here for a few years, and now that I want to leave, I've not been thinking about much except that I do want to leave."
"Istanbul? I've never been there."
"I'd like to see Daddy. How long is this vacation of yours going to last though?"
"I'm not sure. I'm not certain that I'm ever going back."
She was silent for a while, looking into my face. Finally she sighed and cautioned me, "Don't do it for me. You don't know me."
"I know. It's for me. I've had it with that life. I feel as though I have been dead for the last four or five years, and that's a lousy way to feel. I'm only thirty-three!"
"How old should one be to feel dead comfortably?" she asked with a smile.
"Never, ideally."
"Yeah. Hey, I know what."
"What?"
"Let's sail around the world."
"Okay."
"Let's climb Kilimanjaro."
"Sure thing."
"Let's hunt tigers in India."
"There aren't enough tigers left."
"True. Well, then, let's hunt-"
"Why hunt anything?"
"Okay. No hunting. But let's see the sun coming up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay."
"I'm with you on that."
"And make love in a Rousseau South Sea jungle."
"Check"
"And dive on the Great Barrier Reef."
"Right-o."
"Oh, Alex."
"Yes?"
"There's so much to do!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
The morning's fine and high sky degenerated into a cloud cover which poured over the ridges above us and descended until the evening grew thick and blue with its heaviness. Snow was in the air again. I had been fed on the remainder of the luncheon. After making an appearance at the evening meal, Marianne had done the last' of her tutorial work and returned with a stack of papers to correct. My plan was to wait for the cover of midnight and then to depart as I had arrived the night before. I looked forward to the freedom of movement I would have outside. I no longer felt that being all day in one room was sufficient for my taste. There had been years when I was content with the embrace of four walls, but space called out to me now, space!
The room, as rooms go, was comfortable; Marianne sat in a pool of yellow light at her desk, her face bent studiously over the short essays her students had presented to her on "Any topic concerning the religion or philosophy of Egypt." The fireplace, its mantel wrought with cherubs, demons, and beasts of all descriptions, contained a fire, now quieter than it had been in its spitting youth, of pleasant-smelling wood. By placing the mattress on the floor and building it up behind with pillows, Marianne had created something like a couch before the fire, and it was on this that I now sat, leafing idly through a French translation of Herodotus, reading battle descriptions. Marianne had brought back from dinner some red wine, and I enjoyed a slow glassful in the light of the flames. Over the soft crackling of the fire, I could hear the wind leaning against the eaves of the old chateau, playing with the nooks and crannies, and then tearing it self away to find some other game. Snow dashed itself against the tall, curtained windows, and I could easily imagine the cold and the exhilaration which later would be mine as it blew round my face. Sounds from the rest of the chateau were dying down. There had been a time after dinner when Marianne received several social calls from other teachers, and one or two girls had come with problems in their assignments-I had always slipped into the closet, just like some lurker in a bedroom farce-but the time for society was drawing to a close, apparently, and the corridor outside was still.
Lulled by the scratching of Marianne's pen, the wind, and the heavy prose of my historian friend, I spent a period in a light and drifting doze. I was awakened by a log falling and a shower of sparks fluttering up the chimney. A welling of heat swept across me. I rose to put another log in place, and then I wandered around until I came up behind Marianne's shoulder.
"How's it going?"
"Well, they're pretty good, on the whole. I'm nearly done."
I dropped a kiss on the top of her bent head and felt her smile.
"Thank you," she said.
"Any time, old thing."
"Want some more wine?"
"No. But can I get you more?"
"No, thanks."
I ambled away from her and pulled aside the drapes over one of the windows. The footprints I had left on her balcony the night before were all but obliterated now after the snow in the early hours of the morning and the snow this evening. There wasn't much to see. The coldness of the glass radiated against me, however, and the slithering of snowflakes was louder. "Still coming down," I murmured.
"Hmmm? What?"
"Still snowing."
"Uh-huh."
I closed the drapes. I ran my finger along the backs of a row of books in the case as I tottered my way back to the couch. Every inch of my body felt lazy, warm, and comfortable. I collapsed with Herodotus again and was immediately back in a doze.
The first intimation that Marianne had finished was when her husky voice whispered in my ear, "Are you asleep?"
"No," I grinned. "Not now."
She was kneeling behind the pillows, her shoulder supported by her arms beside me. Her eyes were alight, and her hair spilled around her face, highlighted by the fire.
I reached and grasped her shoulders, and before she had a chance to resist, I pulled her across the pillows and swung her around so that she lay on her back with her head in my lap.
"Now I'll have my way with you," I chuckled. "Oh, please, sir. I'm a poor girl, unable to give you anything."
"Oh?" I asked meaningfully, and my hand dropped to rest upon her beautiful left breast. "Nothing?"
"Well, nothing that would be valuable to a big man like yourself."
"I can hardly believe that," I laughed as I cupped her soft flesh in my hand. She laughed too, and I felt her squirm her head more deeply into my lap. Her entire body seemed open to me.
For dinner, she had changed into a tight black sweater, which flattered her shoulders, her arms, and her braless breasts. A wide black belt supported a full-length black and red kilt. Her feet and calves were encased in high-heeled black leather boots. The firelight played softly upon her form in my lap. She was beautiful.
I pulled the pins from her hair, one by one, and as it came loose, it spread down around her face and across my lap. After I had removed the pins and she had shaken her hair free, I began caressing her forehead and her chin and cheeks with my fingertips. Her eyes were closed. I ran my fingers lightly over her lips and her ears. I explored every inch of her face, gradually tracing the ends of my fingers down along her smooth throat. Minutes flew by. Her breathing grew more regular. I felt perhaps that she was falling asleep. Certainly, she was growing entranced. Part of the time I watched the fire, and part of the time I watched the glow of the firelight on her.
While one hand continued to play around and about her face, I dropped my other hand down across her throat and her chest until I was running my fingers under the swell of her left breast, round and round, slowly climbing up toward her nipple. I watched my fingers tracing their slow, light pattern upon her wide breast, and as they grew closer to the tip, I observed that her nipple was becoming harder. It pressed out through the warm cloth, erect. She did not stir as my fingers gently closed upon the thing, but when I squeezed lightly, a tiny sigh escaped her.
"You're awake," I murmured.
"Mmmmm," she answered, without opening her eyes. "This is lovely."
I continued my caress, just barely touching her, teasing her again and again, up toward her nipple and then away, up toward her nipple and then away. I did it until both nipples were standing stiffly in their black, tight bond. I urged her onward, touching nothing save her face and her breasts, promising a fuller caress and never delivering it, teasing with my light touches, my soft sounds. I was listening to the sound of her breathing, listening to her rhythms. I made her listen to them, too. By playing her nerves and her skin with the delicate pads of my fingers, playing her like a violin, I turned her in and more in upon herself. Then we were both listening to the feeling of her, tasting the sound of her, touching the look of her.
Presently, her mouth opened and words came out: "You think I'm putty in your hands, don't you?"
"Yes." I smiled.
"You seem to feel that all you have to do is touch me and I'll get all squiggly."
"Squiggly?"
"Uh-huh. I don't know what it means, but that's how it came out."
"Then squiggly it is. Are you feeling squiggly now?" For the first time, I pressed somewhat more solidly on her breast. "Eh, are you?"
"Oh," she answered with assumed casualness, "I'll tell you when I am."
I chuckled. Her eyes were still closed, so I slipped my fingertips over her eyelids, caressing her eyes as they trembled in their sockets. I stared into the fire and watched the coals glow as the logs slowly reduced to nothing.
After more long minutes had fled, she stirred slightly and said in a soft voice, "This reminds me of those times when I was younger that I was mentioning."
"Mmmm?"
"So peaceful. I've never felt this sort of peace with a man. I never knew you could. I just hoped so." Her voice trailed away to a sigh, and she raised one hand to lay it lightly upon the back of my own, which at the moment was very gently rubbing circles on her belly, just below the wide pools of her breasts.
We were quiet for a while, and then I urged her, "Tell me about it."
"What?"
"When you were younger."
"Are you sure?"
"Sure, I'm sure. I'm interested."
"Well, I was about the age of that new girl, Mallory. About sixteen or seventeen. I was shy with boys. It was hot. It was summer. We were at the beach for the month. There was another girl there, a year or two older than I. Melina."
She was silent for so long then that I thought she had finished, but as I continued to smooth my hands over her-l was touching the tops of her thighs now, along with her face-she began again. "I remember mostly the heat. It was so still that summer. There was never any wind. We'd go for a sail, perhaps. Now and then there was a hot puff which would fill the sails lazily for a moment or so, but generally we'd sit in our silent boat with the sails hanging like washing to dry, growing brittle and frayed under the sun.
We listened to the radio all the time. I can still hear those tiny little radios as they twanged across the beach. Everyone had one, and we all listened to the same sounds, you see. We all lay on our blankets, and saut�ed ourselves with suntan oil, and listened to the radio. I was angry with my father and my mother-she was alive then because I wanted to be back in Athens. Even though it was hotter there, I still felt there was something to do there. There was a boy I wanted to have something to do with. Or perhaps I just wanted to want to have something to do with him. Anyway, it was something to talk about with Melina. She too wanted to be elsewhere, and she too was tired of her parents. We lay on the beach, or we rowed out in our sailboat to try to catch some wind, or we swam a little out to a raft that someone had built, some of the boys-they were always bun ding things. We were disdainful of the boys, and we criticized them an the time but we each wore as small a bikini as our parents would allow, and we sauntered around the boys' end of the beach, where they were always fighting or kicking a ball around. We'd saunter by and roll our gawky bodies at them, and they'd sneer, and we'd sheer back, and then we'd go away happy.
"And we talked about sex. Good God, Alex, you wouldn't believe how much girls talk about sex! We talked and we talked and we talked. We were both virgins, and it was the most fascinating thing in the entire world to us that there could be something-something, well, whatever it was that would make us not virgins. We lay in the sun, and we talked about sex, and we wondered about the boys, and ourselves, and everything. Everything made us giggle. Except when the sun got too hot, and we couldn't giggle anymore but just lie there stupefied, yet still talking about it. It. Always it.
"I imagine that something was bound to happen with all that heat and the importance we placed on our bodies. We were always rubbing oil into each other's backs. And I loved her, I think. She was older than I and she was more physically developed, but she had the same questions I did. Our basic shyness of boys united us, and I was flattered by her age. So then one day when my parents were not at home, we walked up to my house during the hottest part of the long afternoon to get something cool to drink. We got our drinks and we climbed up to my room. It was a room with a wide balcony, a shaded balcony, with open glass doors, looking out over the sea. I can still feel how sensuous and cool it was, lying there--there were two beds-with the wicker blinds half drawn and the sunlight muted and dim. Bars of light lay across us, but we could hardly see each other, so bright had it been outside, so dark and cool was it here. And we were still talking about sex. I was excited. I was always excited. It was so dark, and so cool, and I loved her, and I felt so safe there, that I did something very daring. I crossed my ankles and pressed my thighs together again and again, trying to put a bit of pressure secretly on myself. Well, one thing led to another, and soon I was stroking myself more and more openly. I couldn't seem to breathe very well, the air was thick and pressed down on my chest, and I longed for Melina to realize what I was doing, and I was terrified that she would realize what I was doing. It was wonderful and awful at the same time. And then just about the time I thought I would die if something didn't happen, I suddenly understood that she was doing it too."
Marianne was silent for a few moments then, and I shifted my fingertips so that they lay just along the groove of the outsides of her sex. I delighted in the feeling of the warm wool of her kilt slipping smoothly upon the nylon which encased her heavy-lipped mound. Her attention was on the story she was telling, but her body was responding to my caresses-perhaps aided by her memory of these summer-afternoon delicacies and I noticed that she slipped her thighs apart so that I would have more room to caress her on the rich downward slope of her pussy.
"We lay there," she presently continued, "for a long time, each of us stroking herself through her swimming suit, each acutely aware of any sounds, any breathing that the other made, each with her heart hammering nearly hard enough, in my own case at any rate, to choke her. I couldn't really see much of what Melina was doing, and I tried not to look at her too hard for fear that she would look at me, but I knew that she was looking at me anyway, and I loved the fact that I dared to do this awful, intimate thing while she was there and knew I was doing it.
"Well, you can imagine what happened in the end. Melina slipped her suit off and lay on the bed masturbating and no longer in any way trying to hide her sounds. That really excited me. I lay there and listened to the wet sounds and the slapping and the moans from my best friend, and I found that I was coming. It was excruciating. I loved it. I came, and I came, and I came. And she must have known I was coming, for she rolled over then so she could watch me, and I adored the feeling of her eyes on me in the dim room, and I was almost electrified to see the shape of her naked body. Her sex was so much more hairy and so much bigger than my small thing! And her breasts were fuller as well. She really was a woman, I realized, and I was all the more impressed with myself at being her confidante. And then she came too, and I had never seen anything more beautiful. I was so moved that I jumped off my bed, lay down next to her and found myself kissing her before I had any idea of what I was about. And that began everything. All the long exploration that cool afternoon. She let me feel her and examine her all over and she did the same to me. She taught me several things about my sex and about masturbating that I didn't know, and she did it for me, and she showed me how to do it to her.
"It wasn't until ten days later or so, and we had been doing it every day during the time, that we discovered about sucking each other. That was our own discovery. We had never heard of anything like it before, and we thought ourselves very wicked, but it was a great secret between us, and every chance I got, I used to lie down between her long, tanned thighs and part her soft, furry lips, and lick her juices until she came against my tongue."
Her eyes were dosed still, and as my hand drew closer to the plump mound of her sex, she began to move her hips languorously.
"Now I'm feeling squiggly," she murmured with a smile.
Her thighs opened slightly, and she raised one knee a bit. The movement pressed my hand down more fully onto her cunt. Her cunt lay in my hand like a fat fruit, tightly hugged by her panties and loosely covered by the warm, smooth wool. Her rotating hips seemed to tilt the mouth of her cunt upward toward me, opening her deep slit against the pressure of my hand. I imagined the gentle loosening of her membranes as they grew suffused with her ooze of moisture. I pictured the wide depths of her vagina as they grew ready to receive something, anything, into their reaches. Her clit, I knew, would be preening in its slick folds, anticipating the flickering pressures of my tongue or fingers, which would bring it by slow manipulation to an orgasm, one, and then another.
"Ohhh," she sighed. "Open my skirt, darling."
I reached for the gilt pin which secured the halves of her kilt, managed to slip it free with one hand, and' pulled it from the material. I opened one flap and then the other, draping the heavy cloth down on the outsides of her white thighs. Her black boots contrasted startlingly with the soft luster of her flesh, made the more warm and glowing by the firelight playing upon it. Her strong thighs fell even farther apart now that they were freed of the strictures of the kilt, and I pulled the garment open enough so that her cunt, encased in its flowery bed, was visible to my eager eyes. Her thighs were open enough for her entire crotch to be available to me, so without preliminaries, I ran my middle fingertip hard upward from her asshole to her clit. The material of her panties was soaking already. I pressed down on her clit, and a great heave passed through her body.
"Ohhh!" she groaned. "Oh, darling, your fingers!"
The odor of her spread and moistening crotch was beginning to permeate the air. I commenced to flutter her fingertips along the lower edges of her lips, never getting near her clit, teasing her, teasing her until she squirmed and panted, trying to angle her self so that I would touch her where she needed the relief. Presently, I did press down on her hard, tight button once more, and she moaned. Her hands came up and grasped her breasts and squeezed them with an aching, agonized need for additional stimulation.
I returned my fingers to the lower reaches of her cunt, running them one after another up between her broadly spread and running lips, feeling the cloth press into her body and her gash open with every pass. Her panties sank slowly into her oily groin, and I delighted in the sight of her wet flesh and crinkly hair being exposed. My own body was terribly excited by this slow seduction. My cock was a rigid bar of hot flesh pressed against my stomach, and I rubbed it as best I could against the back of her head and neck. I was sweating from the armpits and the crotch; my own sexual smell was beginning to mix with hers. Never had a woman so excited me. It seemed as though we had been doing nothing except making love since I climbed in through her window, and yet here we were getting ready to do it again. My cock ached in its stiffness, and my balls felt empty, but I was as eager to press myself deep into her' flowing hole as ever I had been while in the sweaty back seat of a car at the drive-in, back in my teen-age years.
"Let me undress," I said.
"Mmmm."
I slid off the couch, and she layout flat, her hands slowly massaging her breasts while she watched me strip. I did the thing slowly and enticingly. I knew the firelight was showing off the muscles in my shoulders and chest as I slipped from my shirt. I dropped the garment languorously beside me, and, grinning, I did a few slow bumps and grinds. Marianne's eyes were sweeping over me, all the time returning to the great bulge in the front of my trousers, but taking in the whole prospect as well. One of her hands descended to her tightly split cunt and rubbed gently at her lips as I opened my belt and dropped my pants. My cock, long and engorged, sprang upward out of its confinement, and I saw her lick her lips for a second and press down harder on her clit.
"I'll bet that feels good," I encouraged her.
"Yes. Oh, it certainly does."
I held and massaged my own sex while watching her in the firelight. "I love your cunt," I murmured.
"I love it, too."
"Lick your fingers."
"I taste good," she sighed around a mouthful of her masturbating hand. She dipped the fingers down again into the wet maw of her hairy sex and brought them, shiny, to her mouth. "Oh, yes."
Her flung thighs were open to me, and her slit pussy was waiting there for me to approach. Instantly, I dropped to my knees and pressed my face into that steaming and perfumed groin. Her sex smell almost made me reel.
"Take off my panties," she begged. "I want to feel your mouth up inside me."
I straightened and began pulling her panties from her wide hips. She had to raise her ass to allow me to pull them away. The material was so suffused with cunt juice that it pulled away stickily, as though it were glued by the copious fluid that flowed from her reeking slit. I pulled the material down her legs, and she kicked it away onto the floor. Now her cunt lay bare and open before me, wet and shining in the firelight, a musky, hairy mystery which I longed to lick.
First, though, I raised her thighs until they were pressed back against her breasts. Her wonderful ass was tilted up toward me then, and I was treated to the view of hairy asshole and the back of her plump cunt lips. Inhaling the wondrous, strong, thick odor of her asshole and cunt together, I lowered my face until the tip of my tongue penetrated between her spread buttocks, and I lay still for a moment, right on the wet center of her asshole. Very slowly, I began to rub my tongue in a circle, running wetly around that widening hole, pressing more deeply into her body as I did so. Her taste was thick and satiating. I reveled in it. I lifted my fingers, wet them in my mouth, and commenced to rub them over and over her crinkled hole, alternating my tongue tip and my fingers until her moans and her clenching thighs told me that she was nearing an orgasm. And then, as she drew even closer to it, I began moving my other hand along the slippery slit between her two furry lips. I had raised my face several inches, so that I could watch my finger slipping and twisting deep inside her clinging asshole, and I began to speak to her in her ecstasy: "That's it, Marianne, make it come, make your cunt and your asshole come. Make them come, darling, like they used to come with Melina. Pretend I'm Melina, darling, pretend these are Melina's long, tanned fingers in you. Pretend it's another woman here making you come. It's Melina, darling, and I have a cunt, and you're going to suck my cunt soon and make me come. You're going to suck my hot, wet cunt. You're going to press your face into my cunt, and your own cunt will come and come. You miss it, don't you darling? You miss her cunt and the feeling it gave you? You miss her cunt."
It was an inspiration. I had listened to the way she told the story, as well as the repeated assertions that she found nothing wrong with lesbian sex, and I began to understand something about her reaction to the school which perhaps she herself didn't even recognize. She was jealous, in a way. She was lonely, and she was envious of her colleagues and students in their intimacy, and she remembered with increasing longing the wonderful, warm caresses of her lesbian lover long ago.
As I say, it was an inspiration. Immediately, she began to move herself more violently against my fucking fingers. I heard her moans grow faster and saw her thrashing grow more frantic. I fucked her asshole even harder-my own excitement was indescribable at that moment-and babbled words to keep her going. Her cries ululated higher up the scale.
"Her cunt, Marianne. Remember her cunt. You're going to suck her cunt, her hairy lips. You're going to suck her cunt juice. You love her cunt. Her cunt, darling! Her cunt. I'm her cunt! I'm her wet, red, dripping. cunt, and you're going to come, Marianne, you're going to come, my cunt, my darling, my life, my love. I'm her cunt, her long, stiff, red, hard cunt, her cock, her cunt, I'm her cunt, and I'm going to fuck you deep in the cunt with it and make you come, in your asshole, and your clit, and your gooey, slimy, coming lips-with my cock, my cock, my cunt, I'm fucking you with my cunt, Marianne, my cunt, my stiff cunt, in your soft cock, I'm making you come, and come, and come, and-oh, God, I'm coming, too !_yes, I make you come and I come, too, I'm coming in my cunt, my cock, my cunt is coming in your cock, my cunt, darling cunt, I love your cunt, my cunt, I love my cunt, my asshole, my cock, my-oh, God, my fingers in your asshole, my asshole, my cock, my fingers fucking-I'm fucking you, I'm fucking you, I'm fucking you-"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Instant tableau.
Her hands held her thighs tightly back against her breasts. My fingers were knuckle deep in her smoking holes: we teetered on the very brink.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
The sound came again, and this then was followed by ashy little voice: "Marianne? Are you there? Are you all right?"
She had to clear her throat twice before she could answer without croaking. "Yes? Who is it?"
"It's Mallory, Marianne. May I speak with you?"
"Um, just a minute, please."
We were still in the same ridiculous position. Her eyes pleaded with me from around her thigh. I thought I was going to be angry, but instead I found that it would be all right. All the more anticipation, and my body had come very frequently in the past day and a half. I could afford to stop now, as long as there were benefits later.
"Okay," I whispered.
"Thanks, darling. I'll make it up to you."
We began untangling ourselves. "I'm sure you will," I answered, and I was pleased to find that I meant it with perfect sincerity and with no sarcasm.
"What'll we do with me?" I asked, standing absurdly naked in the middle of the room, trying to gather up my clothes while Marianne struggled into a robe, my cock still erect, my body flushed and sweating. She had to skim out of her sweater. Her tits were lovely.
"In there." She motioned toward the closet.
"The old into-the-closet trick, eh?"
She grinned, kissed my cheek, fondled my stiff cock, pushed her own clothes into my arms kissed me again and said, "We'll laugh about this later," then patted my ass and pushed the door dosed after me.
I found myself in a small closet, smelling richly of her perfume, her clothes, her dirty underwear. The door was just barely ajar. Very quietly, for Marianne had now walked to the door and was on the point of opening it, I put down our clothes and stood naked, peeking through the crack in the door.
"I'm sorry, Mallory dear. I was asleep."
"Oh. I can come back later."
"No. I'd be asleep again. Come on in for a few minutes. Isn't it after bedtime?"
"Yes, but, oh, Marianne, I just had to talk to you. You see--"
"Well, wait a minute. You just sit there on the bed before the fire, and I'll drop on another log or two. There. That's better. They'll catch in a minute."
The girl who had entered the room was now visible to me as she reclined before the fire. She was everything that Marianne had said before, lovely, delicate, innocent, and, at the moment, she seemed distressed. Looking at her from only feet away, naked with an erection, tickled me, and I chuckled at the thought of her expression should I calmly step out of the door. Marianne walked away toward the other side of the room, and I heard the clink of glass upon glass. "Mallory, dear, since it's just we girls and this is unofficial, I'm going to have a glass of wine. Will you join me?"
"Oh, yes, I'd like that I"
"There you are then." Marianne walked back into the glow of the newly burning logs, her hand held out with a glass of wine in it. "You drink that-slowly, now-and you'll feel much better. My, you are all tensed up! Whatever can be wrong?"
She settled down on the bed beside the girl, sipped her wine, and looked expectant.
But Mallory was hesitant. "I like this bed," she said.
"Yes. I'm so fond of fires, aren't you? It just doesn't seem right to have a nice fire and be way over there on the other side of the room, does it?"
"No," the girl replied, but her mind was no longer on the matter. She picked nervously at the hem of her bathrobe for a moment, avoiding Marianne's eyes.
"What is it, Mallory? Is there something I can help with?"
"I don't know. I don't know whether I should tell you."
"Well, you may if you'd like to. I'm here to help, you know."
"It's just that-well, I don't know how to say it."
"Is it something to do with your studies?"
"Oh, no. It's nothing like that."
"Well, then, what is it?"
"It's ... well" She sipped again of her wine, and I had the feeling that she was on the verge of tears.
"Is it one of the girls?"
"Yes. Yes, I'm ... it's Annette."
"Isn't she your roommate?"
"Uh-huh. But she--well, she's all the time, well, you know, touching herself."
The words came out explosively, as though they had been dammed up inside for a long time. Mallory's lovely eyes turned finally to hold Marianne's, and there was a kind of pleading in them, a hope that Marianne would not be angry or jocular.
"Yes?" was all she said.
"I ... I've never done that."
"Well, it's all right either way, if that's what you mean."
"No. It's more than that. I don't know how to say this, but I think, well, I think that Annette wants to ... she wants to touch me!"
"You mean ... "
"Yes. That way. You know."
"Has she, um-"
"No! She's never done anything. I've ... I wouldn't, I ... "
"There, there," Marianne patted the girl's shoulder comfortingly, and she moved a little closer so that Mallory was encircled with her arm. "No, of course, you wouldn't. Not if you didn't want to. No one can make you do anything you don't want to do."
"I like her. I'd like to be her friend, but ... "
"I understand."
"You do? I knew you would!"
"Yes, I do. You see, I've been through this, too."
"Really?"
"Yes, Mallory. You're not the only one. It's very common, really."
"But it's ... but boys are, well ... "
"Yes. Boys are better."
The two sat silently for a moment, each sipping her wine. The fire leapt and crackled, and the highlights on their two faces were yellow. Presently, Mallory said, "I can talk to you. You understand."
"Yes. More wine?"
"Please."
Marianne left, and when she returned, she sat right beside the girl. She leaned back against the cushioning pillows, and, in a soft friendly way, Mallory leaned her shoulders back into the arc of my lover's arm. They were silent throughout the entire glass. My excitement had dissipated by this time. I was growing somewhat stiff with standing quietly and was beginning to feel the cold, and I wondered when Marianne would get rid of the girl.
Finally, Marianne asked, "Feeling better?"
"Much."
"I haven't said anything."
"It's not what you've said, it's your understanding."
"I'm always here. Do you want to go back tonight? I could arrange for you to have another room."
"No, I don't think so. I like Annette, as I said. It's just, well, you know. And I'll have to face this thing alone."
"As you like."
Mallory seemed on the point of getting up, and I was looking forward to stretching, when she stopped and asked very shyly, "May I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"It's a personal question."
"That's all right, Mallory. What is it?"
"Well, I was wondering, do most girls, you know, touch themselves?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. Probably half do and half don't. Nearly all boys do."
"Boys?"
"Yes."
"It never occurred to me somehow. What do they do?"
"Well-" I could see that Marianne was feeling a bit embarrassed now that she'd gotten herself into this, but I grew eager to see just what she'd say: the situation was a funny one, and I cupped my cock and balls with a grin-"well, they use their hands, you know, and give themselves orgasms."
"Orgasms? Is that what Annette has?"
"I suppose so."
"She breathes a lot, and she moans sometimes. At first I thought she was sick"
"No," said Marianne with a slow smile, "that's an orgasm."
"What's it like?"
"Oh, I don't know ... "
"Perhaps I shouldn't ask these questions."
"No, it's all right. It's just-I've never been in this position before, and I don't quite know what to say. Do you really want to know what an orgasm is like!"
"Yes." Her voice was small.
"It's a sort of explosion of feeling, a, urn, a blast. It makes you feel very good. It removes tensions, you understand. It makes you feel close, when it's with another person."
"And if you're alone?"
"It still makes you feel good. It's-there's nothing wrong with it. Everyone does it."
"Everyone? But you said-"
"I know, I just meant-"
"Do you?"
"What?"
"Um, do you? I'm sorry."
"No, that's okay. Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do."
"Oh." Mallory looked away, as though wondering how she might get out of the room now that she had thoroughly embarrassed herself.
"Hey! Hey, Mallory, it's fine for you to ask I don't mind, really, I don't." She reached to pull Mallory's face around toward her own. "Really. It's okay."
"I'm sorry, Marianne. I never should have-"
"Now, now, my dear. There's nothing to it. So what if I masturbate? I'm here alone, and I like to come, and I beat off."
"Come?"
"Have an orgasm. It's an expression."
"Oh."
"Look, really, it's just between us girls. No one else need know. This is strictly private."
This conversation was restoring some of my old lust. At the same time, Mallory's obvious shyness was making the situation awkward. I felt somewhat caddish, not that I could do anything about it, to be here listening to what the girl obviously thought were intimate and fragile things. I wished that Marianne would make her go away.
"Well, if you really don't mind, can I ask you another question?"
"Sure. Go ahead."
"Well," and now she looked bolder, she had come to the point, and she was just going to go ahead, "well, how do you do it?"
"How?"
"Please. I feel so damned dumb."
"Well, you manipulate your clitoris until-"
"What's a clitoris?"
"Well, it's-you really don't know?"
"No."
"Here, perhaps I'd better show you."
"Oh!"
"It's just so you'll understand."
Suddenly, the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed completely. Marianne and Mallory were speaking more quietly, more haltingly, and I myself was having a hard time drawing a breath. A weight seemed to press against my chest and kept me from inhaling. My penis began stirring in my hand like a serpent nosing its way upward, growing, swelling, arching toward the sun.
"I won't if you don't want me to, Mallory."
"I don't know, I ... "
"Would you like to see?"
"Well ... "
"Would you like to know?"
"I ... I guess ... if-well, yes."
"Of course, you would."
"Yes."
"This is just we two. No one will know."
"Okay."
Marianne pulled away from Mallory's shoulder and turned slightly toward her while she unbelted her robe. I could see slightly less of her now, looking as I was at her side and some little bit of her front, but Mallory had a better view. The girl didn't quite know what to do with her hands-she skittered them about on her demurely clenched knees-but her eyes grew as wide as saucers when Marianne pulled the halves of her robe open and: exposed her nakedness to the girl. I saw Mallory trying to swallow, as though her throat had suddenly grown dry. Marianne sprawled her thighs farther apart so that the girl would have a better view of her down there. I realized for the first time, and with a start, that she was still wearing her high, black boots. The picture was as erotic a one as I had ever seen. I couldn't draw my eyes away from the picture of my magnificently voluptuous Marianne, her red robe drawn partly aside from her body, her black boots akimbo, while the lovely, pale girl stared at her from only feet away.
"There now," she whispered, "there's what a woman looks like!' There was a well-deserved pride in Marianne's voice.
"Um ... "
"Yes?"
"Well ... "
"Watch." And I saw that Marianne's bands had dropped into her lap. I couldn't quite see what she was doing, but I did see her head drop back slightly and her eyelids sag.
"Oh! Yours is so ... will mine be like that?"
"When you're older, yes."
"It's so ... it's so ... "
"Yes?"
"Well, so big!"
Marianne's comfortable chuckle followed this. "Yes, isn't it?"
"And so hairy!"
"That too."
"Will mine be that hairy?"
"Maybe. You must have some hair already."
"Yes, but not so much as you."
"Well, mine is unusually hairy, but everyone gets more as she grows up."
In a very still voice, one I could hardly hear, Mallory said, "It's really sort of beautiful."
"Thank you."
"I ... " I like to look at it."
"Of course you do. And I like to show it to you."
"It's-"
"Here, see more."
"Oh I It's so red inside."
"That's because I'm older than you are."
"I like to see the redness and how hairy it is."
"And see this hard little nubbin?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's my clitoris. That's what makes me come."
"I don't think I have one of them."
"Yes, you do. You find it sometime. It's right in the same spot as mine. See? Right here between these inner lips."
"How does it do that?"
"What?"
"Make you, what you said, come."
"Well, I rub it. Like this, see?"
"Is that all?"
"You have to keep doing it for a while, but it makes you come. It's like a boy's cock, you see. It's the most sensitive spot."
"When they ... when they masturbate, is that what they do too?"
"No, no. They have cocks instead of clits, and they rub them."
"Oh."
"This is the way it's done, dear." Marianne's face was a study of lust, and the undisguised eagerness on the girl's face was enough to make me grow more avid in my self-loving in the closet. After a few moments had passed, and Marianne's breathing was louder while her hands moved more rapidly upon her slick flesh, she opened her eyes wider and stared at the girl. "Would you like to feel it, Mallory?" she asked.
"But I ... "
"I'd like you to, you know. You could just touch my hand."
"It's wrong. I don't want to."
"But you can't stop looking, can you?"
"Is this what Annette does?"
"That's right. She masturbates, just as I'm doing. And, you see, it doesn't hurt or anything. It's wonderful, in fact."
"It ... it looks nice."
"Come a little closer."
"Well ... "
"What's the matter?"
"I don't think I should."
"Are you frightened?"
"Yes."
"You needn't be. I'm not going to do anything to you. I just want to show you this thing so you'll know how your own works."
"But--"
"Come on, now." Marianne had stopped masturbating, but her legs were still open, and she held out one hand to Mallory, urging her to move closer."
Very hesitantly, Mallory took her hand. "Oh I" she exclaimed. "You're all wet I"
"Yes, darling. That's what happens when a cunt gets excited."
"It gets wet?"
"Yes. Hasn't yours ever gotten wet?"
"Well ... "
"Come on. We're friends, aren't we? We can tell each other everything, can't we?"
"Well, I guess so."
"Of course we are. Now, tell me, hasn't your little cunt ever gotten wet before?"
"I ... well, yes."
"Certainly it has! That wasn't so hard, was it?"
"No."
"That's right. Now come a little closer along the bed. Yes, darling, that's it. Now, just between us, tell me, isn't your cunt just a bit wet right now?"
"Oh, but I ... "
"Friends, remember?"
"But it's such a funny word."
"What?"
"What you said."
"Cunt?"
"Yes."
"You say it, too,"
"I couldn't."
"Yes, you could. What do you call it?"
"It ... it doesn't have a name."
"Yes, it does. It's called a cunt. Come on. You try it. What is this thing?" And she laid her hand once more upon her dark mound.
"I can't."
"A cunt. Try it."
"A ... "
" ... cunt."
"Cunt." Mallory's voice was very tiny. "A cunt."
"Your cunt."
"My cunt."
"Your nice cunt."
"My nice cunt."
"My nice cunt."
"Your ... nice cunt."
"What am I holding?"
"Your cunt."
"What are you looking at?"
"Your cunt."
"What am I stroking?"
"Your cunt."
"What is it called again?"
"A cunt."
"There, your fear is going, isn't it? It's not such a hard word to say, now, is it?"
"No." And to try it again, she repeated softly, "Cunt, my cunt."
"That's the stuff."
"Will mine ... will ... "
"Yes, darling? What?" Marianne had begun lightly masturbating her clitoris again, and the pleasure of it glazed her eyes.
"Well, I know you answered this already, but when will mine be big and hairy like yours?"
"Pretty soon. Pretty soon. Everyone's is different, but yours will certainly get hairier and looser than it is now. Why don't you let me see yours, and then I'll be able to tell better?"
"Oh, no! I mean, I couldn't. Well, really ... "
"But you're looking at mine, aren't you?"
"That's true."
"And since we're friends."
"But ... "
"It's just so I can answer your questions."
"Well, okay." Mallory slowly lifted the hem of her robe and nightgown over her knees and pulled it up to her thighs. She held it in her hands like a tent over her sex, just barely showing it to Marianne. Her legs, though, were already showing their soft womanly shape. She would be exquisite in a year or two. Now there was the slightest hint of the end of her gawkiness, but the smoothness and power were already there. She wore white knee socks. Her robe was blue, and her eyes were blue, and I nearly groaned as, encouraged further by Marianne, she lifted the hem over her belly and allowed it to drape down at the base of her small breasts. Her belly was white. Her hips were, like her legs, already full of their roundness, and she showed the wonderful young brown down of her pussy as she shyly opened her thighs.
"Oh!" exclaimed Marianne. "You have a very nice little cunt."
"Do I?"
"Of course, you do."
"It's not so nice as yours."
"Well, yours will get bigger if you do what I'm doing."
"You mean ... masturbate?"
"Yes."
"But I don't know ... well, what I mean is--"
"You're afraid."
"Uh-huh."
"And you're not sure you know how."
"That's right."
"Well, here now. You put your hand on mine. That's it." Mallory had reached her hand over easily enough, and I saw that she had her fingers touching the backs of Marianne's own masturbating fingers. "You just keep your hand on mine, and I'll show you how it's done."
"Like this?"
"That's right."
"Mmmmm." Mallory was smiling now, and, of her own accord, she reached out her other hand and laid it gently on the stiffened, red peak of one of Marianne's breasts. "May I?" she asked coyly.
"Certainly, darling."
"You have beautiful breasts."
"I know."
"So full"
The women were quiet for a time, the only sound the slick motion of Marianne's fingers as she languidly beat herself off.
Presently, she murmured, "Feel what I'm doing with my fingers?"
"I sure do."
"Now you do that."
"Me?" But this time Mallory needed no urging. As Marianne withdrew her soaking hand from her cunt, the other's fingers were more than ready to take up the job. "Oh, God," she groaned as she felt the full, deep wetness of Marianne's cunt for the first time. "Oh, my God, how hot it is!"
"Mmmm. You make me hot. Your fingers! Oh, Jesus, your fingers are making me come!"
"What should I do?"
"Just-oh, Christ--just keep doing what you're doing. Don't stop. Oh, please, don't stop. I'm getting closer! It's coming! Oh, my darling, you're making me come!"
"Yes, let me make you come. Let me make your cunt come. Shall I do it harder?"
"Yes. Oh, yes! Oh, play with your own cunt. Let me see you beat off. Please, darling."
"Like this? You like to see me playing with my own cunt?"
"I love it! I just love it! Now, oh, please harder. That's it. That's it! I'm coming now. Watch me come! Feel me come! Oh, feel me! I'M COMING!!"
There was a long silence after Marianne came punctuated only by the gradually slowing panting of her spent body. She was flung entirely naked upon the bed, her every muscle completely still. Mallory, her hand still laid on Marianne's steaming cunt, did not know what to do at first, but then, finally, she withdrew her hand, closed her robe about her, and sat demurely on the edge of the bed, looking into the fire with a troubled expression on her face.
Eventually, Marianne stirred. She looked as though she were coming out of a sleep. She was disoriented for a moment, and it was only gradually through the course of the following conversation that she regained her acumen.
"Mallory?"
"Yes?" But the girl didn't take her face from the fire.
"Are you all right?"
"I guess so."
Marianne sat up and touched the girl's shoulder."
"Are you okay?" she repeated.
"Oh, shit, I don't know." The curse sounded strange on her lips.
"I'm sorry I made you do that."
"Don't be." Here she turned toward Marianne. "I enjoyed it, don't you see? I 'wanted to do it."
"Well, that's all right, darling, because I wanted to, too."
"But what does it mean?"
"Nothing, really. It was just for fun. You needn't think of it again."
"But I will."
"Well, to be frank, so will I."
"It scares me."
Hesitantly, Marianne put her arm around the girl and drew her close. After a second of resistance, Mallory snuggled thankfully into the arms of her lover.
"You needn't be afraid."
"I don't want to be."
"You can trust me."
"But does this mean I don't like boys I"
"Of course not, silly. I love men myself."
"And you still ... "
"And I still enjoy a woman's body, yes."
In a shy voice, Mallory asked, "Do I have a woman's body?"
"Yes, darling." Marianne slipped her hand inside Mallory's robe and gently caressed her breasts. "You certainly do. A lovely, beautiful, exciting woman's body."
Mallory just smiled, and she snuggled deeper.
My own state by this time was deplorable. I was so excited that my cock seemed twice as long and fat as it had ever been before. It no longer seemed to be a part of my body. It was just a great handful of meat that I was rubbing endlessly. I was growing numb with the continual sensation, but I could not allow myself to come for fear of making noise. It was a wondrous condition. I knew that when finally I did come, I would jet my sperm higher and longer than ever I had before. I could feel the enormous, aching load of it that I was building up, but my cock, so long and so very fat, never did quite get to the orgasm before I slowed myself down. I was poleaxed with lust. Everything trembled in a small, continual tremor. My face was vacant, my features without character. I knew my mouth was sagging open. My lips were numb and my nostrils tingled. And, slowly and steadily, I masturbated, my eyes never leaving the movements of Marianne's hands inside Mallory's nightgown, my cock getting bigger with each single movement of my hand.
Marianne now was kissing and nuzzling Mallory's sweet, pale neck. The girl's blonde tresses mixing with my lover's black hair provided a contrast which was erotic in the extreme. Soft motions, they were, soft murmurings of love words, soft hands on soft breasts. Marianne's ready lips trailed through the girl's collar, causing her to drop her head back. Mallory's throat arched whitely in the dying firelight, its elegant curve traced by the pads of Marianne's fingers when she withdrew one hand from the girl's nightgown and bent her attention upon her neck.
The yellow light glowing on the two women showed now and then a glimpse of a hand, now a throat, now a pale breast, as they caressed each other. I saw Marianne's face dip into the opening of Mallory's nightgown, and it would seem that her lips must then have fastened themselves upon the girl's virginal nipple, for Mallory hugged her lover's black-tangled head against her and sighed a long sigh to the night air. And then, in the midst of their slow motion, Marianne's hand slid up Mallory's knee sock and underneath the hem of her gown. Complete stillness came to them both then. Not a movement, not a sound. The air of the room was thick with sexual tension; the luminous light lay on the tangled bed, the colorfully flung clothes, the jumble of smooth female limbs, and it showed nothing else of the room. They were as though divorced from the world, floating on a cloud of their own sensuality, connected nowhere with Switzerland, with Chateau Diableret, with The Meyer and her depredations. I felt as though I were watching the dallying of two goddesses.
After a long, long time, hours, seemingly, of complete stillness, Mallory groaned once and came.
Marianne held her for minutes then, while her small whimpering stilled, and then she allowed the pretty head to fall back onto the cushions. Only then did she withdraw her hand from under the girl's nightgown. I watched her pass the hand appreciatively under her nose; I watched as she tentatively licked her fingers.
"Marianne I" whispered a small voice.
"Yes?"
"Oh, my God."
"Mmmm."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Ahhh."
"Oh, what you did to me."
"It was what you did to me."
"I can hardly believe it." Marianne chuckled.
"So that's what it's all about."
"That's what."
"Can we do it again?"
Here Marianne hesitated, and then she said, "It's late."
"I know."
"Perhaps we should do it again tomorrow."
"I won't be able to wait."
"Well," answered Marianne with a grin, "now you know what to do if you can't."
"Now I know," Mallory smiled back. "Now I know."
In another minute, the two were huddled beside the door, kissing little kisses, and then Mallory was gone.
Marianne immediately ran to the closet door and pulled it open. There I stood, cock enormous in hand, speechless with lust.
"I'm sorry," she moaned.
But I couldn't answer.
"Oh, darling, I'm so sorry it took so long. But that girl ... " And she grabbed my hand and pulled me out into the light of the fire. My mind was in a whirl. I truly could not speak. I longed to tell her that it was all wonderful and that I loved her and that I would not have missed the last hour for the world, but instead all I could do was stand there, dazed, tingling, unfinished.
Without further speech, Marianne dropped to her knees on the bed and pulled me toward her. Her hot, soft mouth sank over my enflamed erection until the tip of my cock was embedded in her throat. The sensation at first was merely of heat. I was too numb to feel the more delicate titillations. I felt, however, the enormous gathering of my boiling sperm, and I knew I would probably drown her when I came. Her face began to bob over me, her hands cupping my engorged balls, rolling them lightly in their sack. My excitement was such that I knew one orgasm would never suffice. I would be coming for the next week, I knew, in an effort to still this storm that raged in me. Marianne's mouth was clinging wetly to me, up and down, and I was beginning to feel the entire length of her and me, and I knew I would come soon, when the door opened very quietly and Mallory walked in.
She had closed the door and taken two or three steps into the room before her eyes adjusted and she realized suddenly that there was a man in the place. I saw her puzzled look, her confusion, her embarrassment, but I could do nothing else than stand with my cock in Marianne's throat. I couldn't even make my face take on any expression. Nor could I communicate to Marianne that we were no longer alone. My hands fluttered ineffectually around her head, but she took that to mean I was about to come, which, in fact, was true.
Fascinated, Mallory came closer. Her eyes searched mine. She must have known what was happening to me. She must, from her new experience, have known I was about to have an orgasm, just as she had done, and she was drawn to the scene irresistibly. She stepped to the side of the bed. She walked round the corner and drew near. Marianne realized suddenly that there was someone else here, but she never broke her pace. She identified the girl, and then her hand reached Mallory's, and she drew Mallory down beside her. Still fascinated, speechless, the girl knelt beside Marianne, her eyes never leaving the base of my cock as it grew longer and shorter as Marianne's mouth fucked me. Looking down at their two heads in front of me, I knew that I was about to come. I knew that I was beginning. I felt the rushing of tension through me.
Marianne removed her mouth from my cock then, and I cried "No!" in my mind, and she swung the vast bar of flesh toward Mallory. The girl's eyes were like lanterns, they glowed so brightly. Certainly, she had never seen anything like this long, red, beautiful erection, and very gently, she closed her cool, thin fingers around the tip and squeezed.
It was too much. Without a sound from me, the orgasm swept over me. I was coming. Dimly, looking down, I was able to watch the first hard burst of sperm leap from my cock to fly between Mallory's clasping fingers and splash across her forehead in a hot, white line. The girl jerked back in surprise, and before she knew what to do the second stream burst forth. This hit her in' the cheek and down along her neck and throat. Marianne was feverishly trying to grasp my cock and turn it toward her mouth. She managed to get her opened, eager mouth close for the third explosion, and this went down her throat where she wanted it to be. Stream after stream of come jerked from the end of my cock, leaving Marianne's cheeks and chin gummed with my sperm, her mouth filled with thick, white liquid. She swallowed this while licking her lips, pumping the last drops from my straining, great cock and catching them with her tongue. Finally, I began to slow. Finally, the orgasm drew to its close, and my cock, wilting now, swung downward, dribbling a few thin streamers from its red mouth as it died.
Mallory had watched the whole thing, motionless, awed, and Marianne turned now to her and instantly began licking my semen from the girl's forehead and cheek. Marianne's robe had come open during the melee, and I dropped to my knees and opened her long thighs with my hands. Her cunt, very wide and red, was flowing with moisture so heavily that her hair was matted back from her deep gash, her inner lips swollen and shining, her clit as enormous as a marble. I lowered my face into her reeking sex and began to suck her liquor. I took her clit between my lips and licked its stiff, slippery top over and over again. Above me, I felt the girl collapse against us, her mouth in Marianne's mouth, her hands clenching and clutching, her breath whistling through her nostrils. Frantically, Marianne drew Mallory's nightgown up and from the corner of my eye I was able to watch her fingers begin to masturbate the girl into another orgasm. The smell of this other sweet pussy before me, and the sight of Marianne's slippery manipulations between its lips, served to stiffen my cock again. I felt as though I could fuck all night.
Indeed, we almost did. After I had made Marianne come with my mouth, I slipped up on her sweaty body and buried my cock in her. The while, she continued to masturbate Mallory. The girl came in the end, and then I turned Marianne over and fucked her from behind. Mallory lay and watched us during that, gently playing with her cunt, and then she came for a third time just as I did deep in Marianne's body.
After that, exhausted, Mallory and I were introduced. It was funny. We built up the fire a little, had some wine, chatted about this and that. There was absolutely no tension in the girl, and I wondered at that until she explained that she had been waiting for just this sort of thing to happen for so long that she was incapable of feeling anything except relief.
It was not long before the morning was to begin that Mallory left. I had no desire anymore to leave in the night, and after some thought, Marianne and I decided that I ought to stay another day. I don't believe that either of us cared about anything then except the wonderful prospect of sleeping in one another's arms.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Time seemed to stand still on the crisp, sunlit ridge. The air was quiet. Hardly a wind stirred the surface of the deep powder which had built up during the blizzards of the last two days. The Bernese Alps roamed away from me in all directions. Looking down the slope, I was able to see into the valley which housed the little town of Chateau d'Oex, but everything was made minuscule by the distance. I believed I did see the small, narrow gauge train as it wound its way slowly up the valley toward Gstaad and the other little villages-Schroenrid, Saanen, Saanenmoser. Gstaad was no little village, of course. Rumor had it that the Shah and the Empress of Iran were in residence there now. The Burtons were just getting together, or just getting divorced, or something-anyway, they also were reputed to be in their chalet. The stargazers consequently had gone up the line, which was all right with me, for it left the slopes nearly empty on this exquisite Saturday afternoon. The snow was very good. I had not before had the pleasure of skiing on open snowfields-the eastern United States is too low in elevation for there to be any true snowfields, with the exception perhaps of Tuckerman's-and I was awed by the prospect of the four-thousand foot drop before me. Endless virgin snow spread around me. I could ski anywhere. There were miles I could ski before I reached the forests four thousand feet below, where I would have to take one of the cleared trails.
I was sitting just then on a great, wide veranda, or deck, which was attached to the lodge at the top of the tram run from the valley. Two trams had arrived with their cargoes of eager skiers while I sat and nursed an icy bottle of Feldschlossen. The skiers, for the most part, disdained sitting around on such a lovely morning, and they immediately donned their skis and went schussing down through the powder. A minority, however, wandered over to the lodge, stacked their skis, and settled down on the deck for some beer or wine, some of the hot sausages and sauerkraut the kitchen dished out so generously, or just for a moment's quiet conviviality before the run. Most of them seemed accustomed to such impressive surroundings as they found up here, and they were more intent upon each other or their food than they were on the scenery. There were the tourists, of course, with their cameras, but in the main this was a local crowd, international perhaps, but local in the sense that they an knew one another and had been skiing around here for years.
It occurred to me that there probably are these communities of people an over the world who more or less do the same thing day after day and who make up a group with its own ethos. I feel that this is the case with the financial community in Boston, for example. It is a very small world. Everyone in the eastern banking set knows everyone else. Rumor and gossip are rife. The in-talk is endless and, I suppose, mysterious to an outsider. And, though it was in a more glamorous setting, this skiing group was the same. I imagined them as birds, flying from spot to spot, flocking together for their high, bantering conversations, following the sun and the snow, their eyes full of air, their faces brown.
They would have, perhaps, the same moments of ennui as any sedate banker. They would wonder where this was all leading them. They would feel anger at a trap of money, and snow, and unyielding talk about the technological developments of the latest boot and binding. Perhaps they would envision life as a lawyer, an accountant. Perhaps they would wish they were living what middle-class America, at any rate, likes to think of as a "normal" life. A house in the suburbs, two point three children, one point eight cars, seventeen thousand dollars per year. Perhaps ...
But why should they envy what I have, I wondered. What is the attraction of my job, my apartment, my debts, my small pleasures? Unless they are fulfilling to myself, or unless their maintenance truly gives the gift of life to someone I love, what is their use? Here was Marianne-well, somewhere on this mountain was Marianne-and she was willing to look to me for her happiness in the next many years. She didn't have any particular desires in terms of what we did to make a living. Anything was all right with her. Well, we could live on my savings for a while, eight months, a year, a year and a half, and then we'd have to make some more money somehow. But the main question-on can always make money-the main question is, what group do we want to belong to? Do we really want the sort of life offered by the bank and the accounting department? Do we want the life offered by European prep schools? Do we want the snowbird life? "Sail around the world," she had said. Yes, that would be a great thing to do. There's probably a community of people who do that as well, who meet now and then in some harbor, meet again on the other side of the world in another harbor three years later ...
If we could get a boat ...
But it was all too farfetched. We had to get her out of this school somehow first, take away the Meyer woman's hold over her. I thought again about the plan, and there didn't seem to be any way that it really could work. The whole thing was too flimsy. All we were trying to do was to out-blackmail Agnes Meyer. Marianne ought to be taking care of that right now, with a little help from Mallory. We had worked the whole thing out last night, the night after the great orgy. We three had sat around the fire after making even more love, and Mallory had been taken completely into our confidence. She was eager to help, and we discovered in her an unexpected subtlety as a conspirator.
After two and a half days of living in Marianne's room and pissing into a beer bottle so that she could sneak it out to flush it away, I was greatly relieved to climb from the window and disappear into last night. The inn where I had left my things was also relieved. They were beginning to think that I had died, and they were about to call in the police when I showed up. The story I told, with enough winking and nudging, convinced them that all was well, and I had the pleasure of changing into new clothes after bathing.
And now, here I was, atop the mountain, supplied with rented skis and boots, free to run down whenever I wanted to and to take another few runs before night fell. There was some possibility that Marianne might meet me on the slopes, but we had left it that I would see her if I saw her. We had no idea how long the blackmailing of The Meyer would take. I sipped at my beer, feeling the wonderful taste all through me. Switzerland was a revel of the senses. Marianne, Mallory, the mountains, the high air, the beer, the food. I could hardly imagine a more perfect spot.
I finished the bottle and determined to ski.
On this first run, I followed somewhat in the tracks of other skiers before me. We were all heading for a certain gap in the forest below, a gap nestled between the slopes of two slight rises on either side. But my tracks took me wide of the usual lane, and I felt light as I slid down. My skis hissed. The snow was perfect. I sat back and took a slope steeper than I should have dared. I skied faster than I knew how, and the snow flew around me. I felt it beating against me as high as my chest, pouring sometimes over my shoulders as I dropped into hollows, and I sped along. For a while, I was alone on the slope. Then there were others by me, and then I was alone again. We wove beautiful, dancing patterns down and down, the line of trees growing darker and more imposing as it rushed up to meet us. I took a line to the right, skimmed along the edge of a steeper drop, circled down into it once at the other edge. The sun was hypnotic as it splashed on my poles, the tips of my skis, the cloud of fine powder around me. My legs were trembling as I reached the top of the last long fall down into the woods, so I swung myself to a halt, panting, happy, my mind flung out along the slope behind, brilliant in the day.
And then the next slope, faster and faster, curving down in a long sweep to the hole in the trees. And then I was in the forest, too fast, too narrow. I shed speed as quickly as I could, edging this way and that, plunging over the more packed snow, weaving in and out of moguls like a ship in a rough sea. Finally I got my speed under control. The trail widened again and then narrowed. It crossed the fall line to the right and then back again to the left. For a time it leveled out until it was barely a slope, and I was able to make more long, sweeping turns. I stopped there to rest again, and a party of brightly dressed women went by whooping and laughing. One of them took a spill, but she was up in a moment, skating and poling after her friends, her sweater white with snow. At a more leisurely pace, I followed them. The trail then dipped for its last two-mile fall down into the bottom of the valley, and here was the steepest and the hardest skiing of the run. I found myself on the very edge of my ability, holding a line between too fast and too slow. I leaned forward, attacking the mountain, and I was almost delirious with pleasure at the way my knees, my ankles, my thighs took the challenge and carried the speed all the way down the last pitch and out again into the snowy, crowded base area. I came to a showery halt, skiing negligently backward for a few feet, and then stood, my face flushed, my heart beating, my body totally alive with the speed and the drop. Again, I heard my soul crying, do it again! So I did.
In all, I took seven runs during the day, three on that same trail, and then three more on other trails, and the final one again on my familiar terrain. Prudently, I stopped when I was getting really tired. The sun was dipping behind the clouds which had gathered above the rim of the Alps, and the long day was over. Tired skiers shouldered their skis and began wandering back down the road toward the village, a drink, and their suppers. I turned in my equipment, made a bit of conversation with the pretty girl who received it, and stood around for a while as the late skiers came down the final long schuss. It was exciting to watch them dropping down; they looked like toys as they tipped over the final edge, but then they got bigger and bigger, and finally they were right beside you, blowing, laughing, knocking the snow off their legs with their poles.
As we had arranged, Marianne met me on the road to the chateau and told me what had happened. All was well, she thought. She was not certain, of course, whether the plot had worked completely, but the first stages had gone off without a hitch, and she was pretty confident of the outcome. She told me that the girls were all supposed to attend a meeting that evening at seven-thirty, so that would be a good time for me to arrive. The chances were that she would be able to sneak me up to her room without anyone seeing and without my having to resort to climbing the wall.
I went back to the inn, had a shower and a bite to eat, packed my kit, stowed it with the concierge, paid the bill and left. It was just after seven-thirty when I arrived at the school. Sure enough, the girls were all sequestered downstairs in an auditorium, listening to a reading of medieval poetry, and Marianne was free to guide me up to the third floor unobserved. I took this opportunity to see the inside of the chateau. The appointments of the place were sumptuous. Nowhere was there the linoleum, the hospital green paint, the remodeling in the name of efficiency which characterize so many schools in the States. I saw busts of composers and artists, real paintings, heavy furniture made of wood instead of plastic and steel, carpets of an oriental design. The floors were highly polished, the tapestries were well preserved, and the chandeliers glowed with a soft light. In an, the place was startling in its beauty. There was the hushed atmosphere of solid money behind it. The girls, I began to think, must all be the most polished and tasteful of little princesses. They would be ripe for The Meyer's sort of conversion, realizing as they did that they were the very cream of the posh. I was not altogether attracted by a crowd of such kids. I had been reasonably well-off all my life, but a certain amount of worldly scuffling was still required, and I had always felt that it was probably a good thing. Too much ease is almost as much of a burden as too little.
We arrived in Marianne's room to find the fire cheerfully alight, and the room lit by candles in sconces. She had prepared an attractive and stimulating setting for what we hoped might occur later on, and I saw that everything was in order. She had to return to the auditorium, but she saw me settled with a glass of beer first.
As I sat there, I began to have some misgivings about what we were about to do. I was only taking Marianne's word for the fact that she was being, to all intents and purposes, blackmailed. Which is not to infer that I failed to trust her. I did trust her. It was just that we were preparing to break her contract to the school, and to my orderly mind such conduct was not undertaken lightly. Perhaps it would be better to finish out the last four months of school. She could always find a reason to leave in the summer. Then we could be together. This was untidy, and I didn't like the feeling of it. Oh, I understood the desperation that she felt. I remembered the story of Claudette. I recalled the tension over The Meyer felt by those two lesbians I had watched from the balcony. I still boiled under the collar a little at the way that I had myself been treated by the woman. But still, we were attempting to break a contract, an agreement made by my friend in good faith. This did not sit well.
And what did we really know about The Meyer? That she was a martinet we could be sure. But many useful and significant people are. The president of my company was something of one himself, and though people laughed at him for it, we all had to admit that he was as quick as a whip when it came to finance. We knew that The Meyer was a lesbian, and we inferred that she was a militant one. In this day and age, homosexuality is, if anything, chic. All the best people are gay, don't you know? Even the new word, gay, signifies a changed attitude we are supposed to have toward it. Well, my Marianne was not straight, as I had reason to know, and I would, if pressed, have had to own to a few scattered experiences myself along that line when I was in my teens. So then, what was so different about The Meyer? Was it simply the matter of degree? Why would that make so much difference? Her exclusivity as a lesbian ought to trouble us very little. It was, in the end, the cynicism of her campaign with the girls that troubled us. That was her real crime. It was a crime against the questing spirit. She was dedicated to decreasing the girls' capacities rather than increasing them, and this while living in the guise of an increaser, a teacher.
I rested my case. The verdict was clear. She was guilty of a crime against the human spirit, and she deserved the punishment of losing a teacher in the middle of the year. As well as the punishment of being muzzled in the particular way that we had in mind.
But I still felt troubled. No, we were wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right. Marianne had a duty to the girls as well as she did to the school administration, an even greater duty, in fact. It was for them that she was doing this. "The Meyer was simply the agency which paid. We could run out on The Meyer and perhaps carry away only a sense of unhappiness with the lengths to which we had been driven, but with the girls--with the girls we could not; in conscience, trifle.
Thus I sat and mulled as I waited for the program downstairs to end. The entire thing was complicated. Like many decisions in life, there was available less of a clear answer than I might have wished. I finished the beer and hesitated over whether to open another. They tasted very good-cold, from sitting out on the balcony-but I was not certain when Marianne would arrive, and I did not want to be unprepared for any conflict which might arise."
As it happened, I was spared the decision, for the noise in the corridor told me that the poetry reading was over and that the principals of this little drama would be upon me in a moment. Sure enough, the door rattled, opened, and there before me were Marianne, Mallory, and The Meyer. Marianne, of course, looked as splendid as she always did. Mallory was dressed demurely in. the school uniform. The Meyer, now that I was seeing her again after four days of thinking unpleasant things about her, appeared quite handsome, actually, in a well-tailored suit of grey wool, the skirt wide and just below her knees, her blouse pale blue silk. I had to admit that she was a prepossessing woman. There was an air of command about her, a businesslike feeling. Here was someone, you thought, who knew what she wanted, who had figured out how to get what she wanted, and who was in the process, with no nonsense, of doing just that. Humorless perhaps she was, but capable one would always know she was as well.
She didn't see me for a moment-the light was not bright-and she stepped briskly into the room ahead of Marianne, her eyes roving over the furnishings, until she stopped with a slight exclamation at seeing a man seated easily in an armchair before the fire. I was not certain whether she recognized me. Her eyes took in my face for a moment, and then she turned to Marianne with an interrogative lifting of an eyebrow. "Can you explain this?" she asked. Her voice, as I recalled, was cool and devoid of any dramatic inflection.
"I can."
Mallory sidled away from The Meyer and made herself inconspicuous against the far wall.
"Agnes Meyer, I have the honor to present-"
"I have made Mr. Alexander's acquaintance already. What I am interested in knowing is what reason there is for him to be on a floor closed to the public and in the private room of one of my teachers."
"Mr. Alexander is helping me with a certain matter which is of great importance to me."
"And that is?"
"Perhaps we ought to sit down?" Marianne indicated the bed and the third chair, and The Meyer sat somewhat stiffly on the edge of the chair. Marianne moved toward the dresser, on which had been set the wine decanter, and gestured toward it with a smile in her boss's direction.
"I hardly think this is the occasion for celebration."
"I'm sorry. I'll have some myself, if you don't mind."
I could see that Marianne was enjoying this baiting of The Meyer. It was somewhat hard on the woman, but I had to admit that she had some cause to be vindictive.
Marianne poured a glass of wine carefully held it up to the fire as though to check its color sniffed at the bouquet, and took a tiny sip. "We are negotiating from a position of power," she said.
"I don't understand what you mean."
"I am referring to my resignation."
"This is the first I've ever heard of such a thing."
"True. I tender it now, effective immediately."
There was a slight frown creasing The Meyer's perfect forehead now, but her composure was admirable. "Hadn't this better be discussed in private? I hardly think that one of the students and a man are necessary in a private discussion such as this is."
"Mallory and Alex will stay. They are part of my case."
"Case?"
"Case, Ms. Meyer. Both of us understand the strictures you can place upon me-as does everyone in this room-and I require the assistance of both Mallory and Alex in order to avoid the consequences of my actions here."
The Meyer now was silent. Her eyes lingered on me for a longish time, and I wondered whether there wasn't just the smallest hint of personal appraisal there.
"Ms. Meyer, I have evidence of what you were doing this afternoon. Mallory-"
"Is your agent." Here she looked at the girl, who stared back at her equably.
"True."
"And you just want me to know that she will speak out for you if anything should happen."
"Right again."
"I think I understand."
"That's good."
There was a curious, unresolved tension in the room. Marianne's wind had been stolen somewhat by The Meyer's last few comments, and my friend stood awkwardly on one foot, waiting for something to happen.
"I suppose you have thought of your responsibility to the girls," The Meyer asked. She stood and walked over to Mallory, upon whose shoulder she dropped a possessive hand. "Purely from the point of view of a teacher, I mean, leaving all the rest of it aside."
"I have."
"You are happy with yourself in this?"
"Not especially."
"You are liked here by the girls."
"I appreciate your saying so."
"It would be unfortunate to see you leave from their point of view, I mean."
"I understand that."
"Luckily, I have two applications on file for teachers to fill your position, women who can be ready immediately."
"You ease my conscience."
"That is not my purpose. I mean only to show that you are wanted, that you will be missed and that I would prefer to keep you on. I can, it is true, replace you without difficulty to the school but I would rather I didn't have to do so."
During this speech, The Meyer wandered away from Mallory, and she spoke as she made a circuit of the room. Idly, she examined the photographs on the walls. As aimlessly, she picked up and put down a knickknack or two on the dresser. She picked up the decanter, raised a questioning eye at Marianne, received her assent, poured herself a glass, and continued her tour. Presently, she stopped in front of me, examined my slouched form, and said, "A man."
No one made any comment to this.
"Are you the reason behind this?" she asked me.
"Perhaps."
"This is a school, you know. We have a responsibility here."
"I'm sorry."
She turned back to Marianne. "What will you do?"
"I don't know."
"Will you teach?"
"I may. I'm not certain. I'll be loose for a time, first of all."
"I wish you joy in it."
"Thank you."
This was the most maddening sort of confrontation, for nothing seemed to happen. The Meyer's demeanor was still unruffled. One had, I suppose, to admire her cool. And I found that there were others of her attributes which were admirable. Her calves, for example, were immaculately beveled. Her stockings took on a high sheen in the firelight.
Her course had taken her round once more to Mallory. Now she stood in front of the girl and gazed at her for a moment. "Ah, so sweet," she sighed theatrically. She propelled the girl away from the wall. "I've heard the conditions, Marianne. Might we let the child go to her room now?"
"I suppose so." Marianne had lost the initiative somewhere, but neither she nor I could see how to restore it.
"Go and sleep, my dear," said The Meyer soothingly. She ran her palm up and down Mallory's hip for a moment. "Sleep, darling, and we'll talk in the morning. Such an afternoon it was, wasn't it?"
Mallory nodded a bit, looked in confusion from Marianne to the headmistress, and left.
"Now," said The Meyer as the door closed now we can talk"
"There's nothing to say."
"Yes, there' is, Marianne, and I'm going to say it no matter what threats you make. Threats! Ha! Do you think that I'll be intimidated in my own school, by one of my own faculty? I'll be damned before I'll be."
"Well, damn you then!"
"How can you say that? Did I or did I not give you a job when you were penniless? Did I or did I not know you to teach as you wanted? Did I or did I not support your every idea about school policy? And now you turn around and stab me in the back, before one of the students! And you attempt to use her in a plot against me. I won't have it, do you hear? I just won't have it!"
"Ms. Meyer, I-"
"You've said what you want to say. Well, all right. Just be silent for a moment and hear what I have to say."
"Nothing you say will sway me."
"If that's the case, there can't be any harm in listening, can there?"
When animated, there was something quite striking about The Meyer. I watched this beautiful lesbian as she strode back and forth with short, quick steps, punching out her points before Marianne, and I found that the sight of her was exciting. This was hardly the reaction I had expected, but it was not displeasing. Her hips were very well accentuated by her skirt. Her calves I have mentioned. I began to respond to the mystery of a woman who loves only women. I began to wonder if maybe my capacities would be enough to ...
What egotism! But I couldn't help wondering.
"I began this school from scratch five years ago," The Meyer was saying, "because I thought there should be a place where girls who were of an international background could get the best education they were capable of getting while living with taste and decorum in the modern world. A school where beauty counted, I thought. A place where truth came first, and mediocrity only after that. There's a choice you have to make, Marianne, in this world, and that's the choice of whether to teach the general mass, or whether to teach the best. The best, Marianne. Think of it! A place where the best can get better. A place really to help those special girls to make something truly extraordinary of their lives. That's a worthy goal, my friend. That's worth the effort. It's worth a little confusion and a little difficulty with the average mind. We need these girls, Marianne. These are the girls who will be running the world in thirty years. Theirs will be the choices. Theirs will be the power to make or break. Theirs will be the future. We are teaching the future here! We aren't simply pumping mediocre minds full of meager thoughts. We are doing something great."
She broke off to drink a mouthful of wine. Her face was alight with the grandeur of her conception, and I felt myself growing even more stirred by her than I had been before.
"Certainly, there are philosophical problems here. I admit that. There is the idea that the best will develop anyway. They don't actually need us. But I refute that! How much more easily might the best develop, and to what more glorious heights might they climb, when we do help them. We need all the help we can get in this world Marianne. One of my girls might be the one who makes peace really possible. Or she might discover the way to make energy available to all, forever, for nothing. God alone knows what any of these girls might do!
"Than there's the theory that everyone really is the same, that there isn't any such thing as an exceptional child, and that all girls ought to be treated equally. Well, that's just romanticism, in my view. Of course people are different! Mozart was different from all the other snotty-nosed little kids around. People are different. Oh, I think they should an have equal access, yes. They all ought to have an equal chance for an education, but the special ones need special attention. Or deserve special attention anyway. You know how conservative kids are. They all want to be just like everyone else. I say that we ought to have schools in which it is an honorable thing to be an individual, that's what I say."
She stopped this tirade for a moment to pour more wine. I could see that Marianne was startled by these revelations. I was myself taken aback. Here was something entirely unexpected coming from the heart of this woman I had been thinking of as nothing more than an ogre for the last few days. What was going on? Somehow I couldn't hold onto the fact that she was depriving these girls of ... what was it, anyway, that I had decided she was depriving them of?
"And as for sex," she said.
Oh, yes, it had had something to do with sex.
"As for sex, well, there is nothing healthier for teen-age girls to be thinking of than sex. There aren't any boys here-" she looked at me pointedly-"and, as a result, their attentions are turned toward each other more than they might be otherwise. But they are exploring life! Their horizons are endless, their prospects are vast. Their exploration makes them wiser, greater, more capable of being in the world. You can't deny a vibrant young girl her right to her own body and its sensations. The Victorians were wrong. They had some strengths, yes, but they were wrong in terms of sex. Well, I am not going to be responsible for the imprisonment of any of my girls!"
"But the pressure," said Marianne weakly.
"They're under no pressure. Good God, they like to think that they are, but they aren't. Not from me, anyway, and I doubt very much whether they're under any pressure from any of the other staff. It's the 1970's that they're under pressure from. Every magazine, every book, every film, every newspaper is fined with nothing except sex. They can't get away from it. I provide them with a place where they live in a tasteful atmosphere. That's about all I can do. I tell them the facts as I see them. I provide a forum. They can ask questions. They can explore. And while they do so, they are kept safe from the most serious consequences of their actions. That's all I can do. I can't do any other. They're under no pressure, Marianne. Was Mallory pressured into my bed this afternoon? She was not. She was so eager I could hardly keep up with her. Someone had turned her on to sex with women and she was just joyfully curious. Someone else did that. I didn't."
This, obviously, was a telling point. Marianne grew quieter.
"I'm not going to ask you what pressure that girl is under from you, Marianne. But I just urge you to think about what it might look like from my point of view when you get her in here to confront me, she who spent the afternoon very willingly in my bed-and she who knows that there was no coercion on my part-and do a big number about how you are planning to ruin my reputation if I try anything underhanded about your resignation. Hell, woman, I don't care if you resign! Well, I do, for you're a good teacher, and the girls like you. But I don't care for any other reason. Resign if you want to. Go off with this man to some South Sea island, for all I care. I have enjoyed having you as a teacher, and I'm sorry that you're leaving, but you're not going to make me threaten and scream and tear my hair just so your guilty conscience can be assuaged."
"I'm sorry, Ms. Meyer-"
"Agnes, Marianne. I've told you that a hundred times."
"Agnes. I'm confused ... "
Indeed, she looked confused. She sat back against the pillows on the bed, and stared at the fire, and bit her thumb. My heart went out to her, but I kept looking at Ms. Meyer. (Her status had changed. in my mind. No longer was she The Meyer.)
"Don't worry about it, Marianne." The woman sat down next to my lover and patted her knee. "Don't worry about it. It's an occupational hazard of headmistresses."
"What is?"
"Having their teachers fall in love."
There was silence after this. Finally, to break the tableau, Ms. Meyer asked softly, "It's true, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Well, you needn't sound so miserable about it! It's supposed to be a case for rejoicing."
"But I don't understand," Marianne blurted. "Claudette said-"
"Claudette! I was wondering where you had gotten this idea. I can explain that well enough. I had to cut Claudette's salary. It was hard on her, I know, because she's planning to get married on that money, but I didn't have any choice. She was teaching one less course than she used to, and she was spending so much of her time in Gstaad with Henri that there was nothing really that I could do. I warned her several times that I might have to do that if she didn't take her teaching more seriously. There was a time when I even thought of canceling her contract."
"I didn't know that."
"Of course, you didn't. The grapevine in this school isn't as efficient as people think it is."
Again there was silence. Marianne eventually repeated herself, "I'm sorry."
"Oh, don't be, dear, I understand."
"No, but the thoughts I've been harboring about you!"
"Well, I hope they were exciting ones."
"Exciting?"
"Oh, I don't mean that the wrong way. I just mean that if I was able to get you all churned up, then I must be doing something which is important enough to get churned up about."
"That's very neat."
"It was rather, wasn't it?" She seemed pleased with herself, and she lay back sipping her wine. She even grinned at me. I took the opportunity to grin back and, since she was facing me, to admire the long legs she had shoved out toward the fire.
"Well, so you're going to retire," she said jocularly to Marianne.
"I'm not sure, now. You've rather taken all my reasons away."
"Oh no I haven't. There's still that big male over there grinning at me. I haven't taken him away."
"Better not," Marianne said with playful toughness.
"I wouldn't think of it."
"I would leave then."
"Sure you would."
"Oh, I don't know what to do. What should I do, Alex?"
"It's your choice. I don't want you if you come with misgivings, but I do want you. I want you with an open heart."
"Damn."
"Perhaps we'd better wait until the summer.
"Perhaps."
"The girls would like it if you stayed," Agnes said.
"You drive a hard bargain."
"I'm not bargaining. You're feeling the pressure inside yourself. And that's why you're a teacher worth keeping."
"Thanks, Agnes."
"Don't mention it," she replied, and she got up to pour more wine. She paused beside my chair as she wandered back and asked, "Did you really just meet on the train?"
"Yes."
"It didn't take you long."
There was an expression almost of wistfulness on her face as she said this. I suddenly had a sense of the loneliness that she must feel up here, alone "With her girls-as interested in their futures as she might be-alone with a community of girls who always stay the same age while she gets older. There would be the other teachers, of course, but they were hired for their teaching potential more than as companions for Agnes. There was something very solitary about the sort of life she had chosen for herself.
This was an odd evening, and I would probably not have asked the question I did had it not been so. I had hardly spoken. Marianne had been flummoxed by all the new thoughts about herself and Agnes and the school. Agnes had revealed herself in an entirely new way to us all. But we three had not been together in spirit until now, and the togetherness was something none of us had looked for. It had a unique strength because of this unexpected quality, and I traded on that strength by asking a very personal question: "Are you happy?"
"Happy?"
"Happy."
She glanced over at Marianne, who was still frowning into the fire, and then looked back. "Isn't that somewhat too enormous a question?"
"No. It's simple. Are you happy? Does what you do make you happy?"
There was a pause while she drank more wine.
Finally, "I don't know. I suppose it does. In some ways it does. Yes, I guess so."
I looked at her until her eyes dropped. She gulped the last of her wine and then walked to the bureau to pour more. "Besides, I'm providing a service," she said over her shoulder.
"To them, yes. To yourself? Well ... "
"They're my life."
"They can't be all your life."
"What is this anyway? I made the bed, now I'm going to sleep in it."
"I don't mean to pry. It's just that Marianne and I have been through such a lot of changes lately, and they all have to do with happiness. What it means, what it is, what to do about it. It's on my mind." I stood and followed her to the windows. I opened them to the night air, retrieved a bottle of beer, and shut them again. "I think people should do what makes them happy."
"So do I," she said in a small voice. "So do I." We were standing quite close together. Speaking for myself, I felt quite a distinct attraction to her, and her body language was indicating that she was not ignorant of my feelings. I decided to make a bold attack. "Do you only like ... girls?" I asked.
She looked me in the eye for a long moment. "Are you asking?"
"Are you answering?"
She raised her glass to her lips. Her nostrils were widened, and I thought I could see a flush creeping up her cheek. "I am, if you are," she whispered into her wine.
"Have some more wine?"
I took her by the arm and led her to the bureau. We were standing behind Marianne. I poured her more wine. Our bodies were nearly in contact. I could smell her. She was slightly shorter than I, and I looked down into her face. The tension between us was elastic. It was stretching so far that something would have to happen soon to break it. I leaned a bit forward. I watched her eyes all the while. She did not move, but then neither did she make any gesture of rejection. I came closer still. Her head had not moved at all. Silently, I brushed her opened lips with my own. It was not a kiss; it was a touch. I tasted her breath, thick with wine. I brushed her again. Still she had not moved. Her entire body was rigid, and I touched her shoulders with my hands.
"No," said a small voice, but she didn't draw away.
Once more, I touched her lips with mine, only this time I kissed her very gently.
Still no response. Her eyes now were not even looking at me. I could not fathom her empty stare.
I kissed her again. I licked her lips with my tongue. I breathed gently on her face. I tightened my grip on her arms.
And then a dam broke somewhere, and she plastered her mouth against mine so hard that I was afraid she might break my teeth. It was no kiss. It was an attack. There was nothing sensual about it. Her body was against mine; and she was straining toward me so hard that I knew she wasn't even aware of me, really. It was, perhaps, all men that she was grinding herself against. Perhaps this had been in her for years, this "kiss."
Or perhaps it was something entirely different. I mistrust parlor psychology, especially when it serves to enhance my own ego.
Suffice it to say that she kissed me back. It did turn into a kiss, you see, though it was always a very violent gesture.
"Hey, hey, hey! What's this? What's this?"
Marianne was standing beside us. I felt considerably shamefaced, and I tried to disentangle myself from Agnes, but she would simply not let go.
"You can't have the only man around the place all the time," Agnes teased.
I expected Marianne to be angry, or at least hurt, but I saw no hint of jealousy in her manner as she laid a hand on Agnes' shoulder and said, "He's mine eternally, but I guess you have a right to kiss the groom."
"The groom! Well, congratulations," Agnes said to me.
"It's the first I've heard of it."
"But you'll hear of it again," chuckled Marianne. "Come on, kiss the lady and have done with it."
So I did. Her lips, by this time, were soft, and the kiss was a deep one. Agnes seemed to be exploring a new sensation-which may have been true-and she took her time with it. And then Marianne kissed me, and then Agnes did again, and then Marianne, then Agnes ... They began giggling as they pulled me back and forth between them, and finally we were all in a big tangle of arms and mouths. There was a moment of stillness then, when Agnes kissed Marianne for the first time, but in another moment, all three of us were kissing all three, and the tension had passed.
There was, I must report, a certain false sense of "having fun." It was as though we were all trying too hard. I didn't know how Marianne expected me to act. I wasn't certain just how I felt about Agnes. I recalled our previous wondrous orgy, but that had come upon me unawares, so to speak, and I felt some hesitation in trying to repeat the event. Besides, until this moment, I had not become especially horny. I had had thoughts of Agnes, yes, thoughts which now were being augmented by the feeling of her round breasts against my chest, but they were thoughts only. And Marianne was mine, damn it. I wanted her for myself. It was exciting to see her in the arms of another woman, to be sure, but I wanted most to see her in my own arms. Everything, I reflected, about this entire evening had been slightly out of kilter, and this embrace was no exception.
I believe that nothing much more than this would have occurred had Mallory not walked back into the room. This was what happened before, and here it was again. The girl was dressed now in her robe from last night-and in nothing else, as it turned out-and she stood just inside the door, somewhat hesitant at seeing us all still there and in such a condition, wondering what to do. I had had occasion to be grateful for Marianne's habit of leaving her door unlocked last night but when I first saw Mallory this evening, I was put off by her presence. I had been thinking of bringing the embrace to a conclusion, and now here was this young girl, still aglow from her first two lesbian experiences, standing by the wall and staring at us. The possibilities that were swirling in her mind were clear for all of us to read in her eyes. My guess was that she had returned to the room for just the purpose that her glance intimated, and she was all the more Intrigued by the three of us than she would have been had it just been Marianne alone.
After watching for a moment-all of us watching each other-Mallory quietly closed the door snapped the lock, and began walking toward us. There was a heavy, swaying, awkward sensuality about her saunter. She reminded me of a sun-drenched lioness somewhere on some tawny plain. Her blonde hair was loose, her eyes were heavy-lidded, her stomach seemed to wallow like a ripe bursting thing. Her hands pulled the knotted belt of her robe loose, and the material fell open to reveal the cleavage between her legs, her scissoring thighs, her patch of pale brown pubic hair. The swell of her stomach and her young breasts was hypnotic to watch. As she approached still closer into the silence we had gathered around ourselves, she slipped the robe off her shoulders. The thing settled lightly to the floor, and she stepped out of its puddle as naked and hopeful as ever love could want her to be. Laying a small hand on both Marianne's and Agnes' shoulders, she murmured one word: "Let's."
And that was an it took. What had been a barely erotic moment before became frenziedly passionate. I have no idea how she did it, but Mallory had taken command of the situation. There was in her new grasping for sexual experience the energy which had been missing between the three of us. We all knew what we were doing; we could take it or leave it. Our requirements were different from Mallory's, and we had been content to pass up what would have been for us a session merely of sex. Had the three of us gone to bed, it would have been to release a biological tension. As adults, we had other concerns of a more important nature. But with Mallory, the biological was all there was-and all there should have been. And her electric anticipation as she walked toward us, dropping her clothes, was enough to give us all the common emotional ground upon which good sex has to be based.
Marianne's breath whistled from her nostrils as she felt Mallory's hands grope for her big breasts, and she turned her attention to the naked girl, folding her into her arms and allowing her hands to smooth their way down over the soft rounds of Mallory's young ass. In the meantime, unoccupied, Agnes turned her kisses back to me, and I had the pleasure now of probing her mouth with my tongue in a manner calculated to excite myself. I wanted to make this slow buildup of anticipation as engrossing as I could, so I spent a , long time in her mouth, kissing her, licking the end of her tongue with mine. I found that she tasted quite good, quite fresh, and I luxuriated in that. She was the opposite of Marianne. Where Marianne was big and full of a luminous heaviness, Agnes was slender, slim, a slip of a woman. Everything about her was tidy. In general, I prefer the unknown quality of Marianne's cyclical changes. Every day, and even every hour during every day, she smells different. Her taste is different, depending on the moment. One feels in touch with the inner truth of her body when one day her mouth is like a sea wind at dawn and the next it is stale with wine and garlic. Her cunt and her ass hole, too, go through their changes: fishy, musky, perfumed, bloody, now and then, soapy, bland, intoxicating. But I knew without even thinking about it that Agnes always smelled and tasted the same. I knew, too, what her body would be like, before I even saw it. I had admired the clean lines of her calves in their sheer stockings, and, in a sense, I knew that her whole body would be sheer and elegant like that. I was not disappointed.
Marianne and Mallory had moved to the bed before I finished kissing Agnes. As I nuzzled her throat and ears, she kept her eyes on their liquid movements before the fire. I slipped her jacket from her shoulders without, I believe, alerting her to the fact that I was doing so. Her blouse clung to her round breasts in a lovely way, and I found that my face was pressed against her there, my hands searching for the way into her skirt. I found the catch eventually and pulled down the zipper. The skirt dropped. I was astounded and delighted to see that she wore the old-fashioned stockings, real stockings, and that they were supported by a garter belt. Her panties were, like the garter belt, of a creamy off-white, very pretty, very chic, very translucent. Her dark muff showed through as a tantalizing, tumbling vee between her slender thighs. I wondered if she might truly be brunette, but then, later, I discovered that the hair between her legs was lighter than I had supposed at first.
All this while, Agnes had been watching the lesbian activities before her. Watching them myself, now and then, I saw that Marianne was now naked and that she was kneeling over Mallory's blossoming form, her breasts swaying erotically and just brushing the stiff, pink tips of the girl's breasts. They were grinning into each other's eyes, while Mallory's hand was occupied in the hairy junction between my lover's 'rich thighs. She was very, very slowly masturbating my Marianne, and the sight was a fantastic one.
"I want to go over there," murmured Agnes, and she walked away from me, as it were, in mid-embrace.
Agnes' blue blouse was a short one. The sight of her walking away from me, her blouse not quite reaching the top of her panties, her round ass beautifully accentuated by the satiny material, her garter straps descending to the, dark, tight tops of her sheer stockings: well, it was almost too much for me. I've mentioned before, I think, my reaction to a pretty ass. I pulled my clothes off as hurriedly as I could. Agnes was now standing with her back to the fire, looking down with a serene smile at the slow lovemaking of the two other women. Her hand very gently parted her blouse and slipped it from her shoulders. With a graceful, dance-like movement, she reached behind herself and loosened her brassiere. The white cups fell away from high, round, large-nippled breasts, big, but seemingly less so because of their unusual stiffness. She slipped her panties from her hips and thighs with the same economic grace, and the movement caused her breasts to sway not at all. Then, naked save for her garter belt and stockings, Agnes paused again to watch the activity at her feet. The heat of the fire must have been playing upon her back and the backs of her legs, for she moved languorously as a cat might that has found a warm spot and intends to indulge in a long, purring wash. She was a vivid woman, her shape, her calm, yet she was not as interestingly formed a woman as Marianne. Marianne was exotic, while Agnes was merely chic. As a man who, until the last ten days, had had no special success with women, and who found himself deeply entangled with one woman now, I was relieved to discover that Marianne's body stood so high in my estimation, even when faced with the stylish form of this beautiful lesbian.
While watching the activity before her, Agnes began, very gently, to finger a cunt which I saw to be long, narrow, and with well-developed inner lips. It was not a particularly beautiful cunt, but framed as it was by her lacy underwear, and caressed as it was by her flickering fingers, it had a distinct effect on me.
That effect was all that was required to finish the job of making me erect. Poor old cock, I thought as I started forward toward the clutch of bodies. Poor old thing, you've been overused these last few days. I found myself looking forward to the time when I could be in the same room with Marianne for more than an hour and refrain from becoming excited.
Agnes dropped to her knees, her hand still cupping her cunt, and began to press little kisses against Marianne's side and hip. The hand that Mallory was not using to caress Marianne, she now began using to smooth Agnes' tits until her wide nipples puckered and stiffened into long peaks. The three were totally absorbed in themselves for the moment, and I changed my mind. Feeling detached as well as excited. I chose to sit in the armchair and watch the show before me. I held myself lightly in my hand, masturbating slowly so that the ache would go away and the pleasure would begin. But I found that I was entirely content to sit there and be a participant only insofar as I was able to watch.
Marianne was approaching an orgasm. The continual flicker of Mallory's fingers over her wide, wet cunt and the soft teasing of Agnes' lips and tongue against her sensitive flesh were driving her higher. Her eyes were closed. Her face and breasts were flushing, and I realized that she had forgotten about her trick of swinging her tits over Mallory's. Instead, she was completely absorbed in the wracking approach of her ecstasy. Her torso was thrown back, reared high upon her stiff arms, and her great, melon-like breasts danced their dance for their own pleasure. Agnes had long since positioned herself behind Marianne, so that she was too far away for Mallory to caress. Mallory's hand now clutched Marianne's tit and squeezed it as she propelled the woman higher. Agnes' face was buried in the cleavage of Marianne's ass. God knows what she was doing back there, but the thought of what a lashing her tongue might be giving Marianne's hairy asshole drove the last of the ache and the stiffness from my abused cock, and I found that I was back in the swing of things. Now, my cock just felt good in my hand. I knew that I would come, and I knew that I would probably come again, and the feeling of that hard, long meat in my palm was wonderful.
Marianne began to mumble and cry. "Oh, God," she moaned. "Oh, Jesus God shit fuck! Oh, cunt. Ohh cunt!" And then she came.
She collapsed down onto Mallory's sweaty body. Agnes' flushed face appeared again, a happy grin on her lips. The headmistress rolled herself up onto the bed and burrowed down until she was lying in Mallory's young arms. The two women began kissing, my Marianne having been nearly forgotten. Marianne, indeed, seemed to have forgotten them as well. She lay on her side, her knees drawn up, her hands around her stomach, staring at the fire with sightless eyes. I began to think of going to her and making love to her right then, but the activity of the other two grew more rapid, and I stayed to watch.
Agnes made Mallory lie on her back while she firmly, insistently, pried the girl's legs open. Not that Mallory resisted the intrusion. She could hardly contain her arching and writhing body while Agnes positioned her the way she wanted her. Agnes' right hand alighted on the soft thigh nearest to her, and she caressed with parted fingers the satiny smoothness of the inside of Mallory's leg. She gave the girl a tender, sweetly prolonged massage, occasionally allowing her hand to stray upward and to brush tantalizingly against the curled muff of light brown pubic hair which nestled there. At each of these intrusions, Mallory's thighs pressed together a little to try to capture the wonderful hand down there where she was feeling so good, but each time she did this, Agnes withdrew her hand at the last moment, leaving the girl gasping for release.
This game continued for an extended time. Mallory tried very hard to move her hips in such a way that Agnes would have to stroke her hairy belly the way she wanted her to, but always Agnes resisted the temptation. And the temptation was great, one could see. Agnes' nipples were like fingers pointing rigidly at Mallory's body, they were so tight with excitement. Her own thighs were slowly scissoring back and forth, sliding her soft flesh repeatedly over the intensely alive nerve endings of her inner thighs and cunt lips. I could almost feel the soft, moist, squishy rubbing of those delicate lips as they were forced back and forth by her motions. My own erection was so tight in my hand that I feared I might come then and there and spoil whatever climax this agonizing masturbation before me was coming to. I certainly did not want to come, but on the other hand, my body was so engorged with lust that I was sweating and tickling and groaning without cease. I bent over and rubbed a finger down over my asshole, smelling the erotic odor of my crotch, reeling the jiggling of my anxious balls against the skin of my wrist. I lay back then and opened my legs more, so that I could slide a finger over and over my asshole. The sensation was exotic, and it had the additional benefit of distracting me from my cock. My impending orgasm came under control again. I continued to beat myself off, of course-nothing would have stopped that then-but the position was different, and I knew I could enjoy the spectacle for some more minutes before the crisis arrived.
That is, if their crisis didn't arrive before that. Agnes had now responded to Mallory's bodily pleading, and she had gently opened the girl's lips. Two or her fingers were sliding on the oily surface she had uncovered, insinuating themselves deeper between Mallory's inner lips all the while. I watched Mallory stiffen for a second and then resume her writhing more frantically still, as Agnes rubbed for the first time the straining tip or her aching clit. The girl moaned long and hard as she felt the fingers once more. Agnes was making a plucking motion now, two of her fingers pinching the little button of ecstasy again and again, while the remainder of her fingers wantonly tickled the wet, moist length of Mallory's hairy vaginal slit.
This was too much for the girl. "I'm going to come!" she suddenly cried. "I'm going to come!"
The voice woke Marianne from her trance. My lover rolled over to see what was going on, and a great smile swept across her face. "Yes, darling, come now," she crooned to Mallory, licking her face and her eyes. "Come now, Mallory, darling. Make it come. Feel it come. Feel your cunt come."
Agnes paused for a moment while she quickly shifted her position so as to be able to get her mouth on the girl's quivering pussy. Through lust-dimmed eyes, I watched as she sank her lovely face down into that straining crotch and took up the job on Mallory's clit which formerly she had been managing with her fingers. Her lips pursed, her tongue came out, and then her face was shielded from my view by the hairy thrust of Mallory's hungry crotch. A shattering moan told that her lips had found their target, though, and I watched Marianne, since I couldn't see Agnes. Marianne was excited again by the proximity of this orgasm. I could see that her body was alight with a sexual energy. Her tongue flickered over Mallory's face, invading her nostrils, her ears, her eyes, her mouth, washing across the broad, blonde reaches of her cheeks and forehead. Mallory's contorted face began to be shiny with Marianne's saliva. Frantically, the girl stuck out her tongue and licked back at whatever part of Marianne she could reach. It happened that as Marianne was licking her hairline Mallory was able to reach Marianne's armpit, and with a whuffling cry of ecstasy, she buried her eager face in my lover's warm, sweaty mass of hair. I saw her lips suck as much of the loose, wet flesh as they could into her mouth, and I supposed that she was rubbing her tongue over and over the long black hairs. Marianne lay with her armpit open across Mallory's face, her own face buried in the girl's hair, and with her free hand, not willing to waste the moment, snaking down her own front, until she was able to clutch her newly awakened cunt.
"Yes, Mallory," Marianne urged. "Yes, darling. Suck me. Oh, yes, please, suck me! I love your tongue. That's it. Suck me and come! Now make it come! Make it come, Mallory. You re going to come!"
She was correct. Mallory's hips suddenly began such a frenzied battering against Agnes' face that the latter woman was almost catapulted from her place. Mallory's entire body arched backward, her pelvis way off the mattress, and the position remained for perhaps half a minute, during which nothing at all moved except her thighs, which quivered like water under a soft wind. Then there came a huge, inarticulate bellow of escaping breath from Mallory, and the girl collapsed on the bed, completely flaccid. I am not at all certain that she was conscious at that moment.
Marianne rose from the crumpled bed and walked toward me, her eyes smiling at my scarlet cock. She seemed ripe almost to bursting, and I suddenly felt an overpowering desire to see her pregnant. I longed for the day when her body would be huge with our child, her great breasts sagging under their weight of milk, her belly enormous, her face softened by motherhood. Even at this moment, there was a pregnancy about her. All things came to a stop as she approached me. She brought with her a time of waiting, of hanging, of desiring to be plucked. She leaned over me, her breasts like fruits upon a tree of life, her belly and hairy cunt the ground in which I would plant my seed. There was a mystical quality in her presence. She inspired me to thoughts I had never expected to have. Easefully, she closed her warm hand around my manhood, and as she stood there smiling at me. I came.
I had leaned back when she took me in her hand. I lay still as I came. It was as though I had nothing to do with it. I watched, almost in calm as my rigid cock burst forth with a shower of hot, high semen. Marianne never moved her hand. Simply her warmth around me and the sight of her goddess nakedness above me were sufficient to make the orgasm come. It was excruciating. My cock kept squirting bursts of sperm up at her seemingly trying to bathe her where she stood' each wrench calling forth another to follow it: Gradually the spasms died. Thick, bubbly come oozed from the eye of my cock and rolled down to bathe Marianne's fingers. Her hand by this time was smeared with my effluvium. She never released her grip until the last of the fluid was seeping quietly from my hole. Then she raised her gummy hand and, standing with her legs apart and her enormous cunt suspended just above me, began massaging the sperm into her belly and her pubic thatch. Her eyes never left mine now, although mine were not on hers. I was absorbed in the spectacle of her hands, running so thickly with my come, stroking her white flesh. She stroked and stroked. I saw that she was 'gradually allowing her hands to drop lower and that her hairy lips, now hanging in their swollen openness, were being subtly divided by her fingers. I saw her reach her clit, and I saw her clit itself, stiff with a flush of blood.
At that moment there came a muffled groan, and I looked toward the sound to see Agnes on her knees, her pussy lowered over Mallory's mouth while her fingers sizzled upon her fiery slit. I realized that she had been watching me come and that it was the sight of Marianne covered with my dripping semen that was making her climax so beautifully.
I don't think Marianne knew that we were being watched. I am pretty certain that she wag too absorbed in her own world of the lust of sperm for her to know anything that was going on around her. She reached to pick up my long and now soft cock and to gather up a last fingerful of come. This she raised to her lips, and tilting her head back as though to receive a grape, she let the gob drop onto her tongue. She must have enjoyed that taste, for her next action was to lower herself between my thighs and lift my flaccid. meat into her mouth. She sucked very gently at me, her eyes closed the while, her attention entirely on the hose of flesh on her tongue. And it didn't take long for this manipulation to stir me once more. Watching, still in my composed frame of mind, I saw that my cock was growing. I felt the increased pressure of her tongue and the roof of her mouth as my penis swelled. She was still doing nothing save suck. Now and then her tongue .caressed the underside of me, but that was all. Aside from that, it was simply the sucking which was making me grow. I saw the way my cock stretched her lips more as it increased its size, and then it was clear that she had the entire hard length of it in her mouth, and she very gradually began to pump her face up and down. I loved to watch the long, shiny pole of my prick as it appeared and disappeared in her throat. I held her head gently and her hair out of the way so I wouldn't miss a bit of the lovely sight.
But after a while the moment passed. I felt myself growing smaller in her mouth. I knew I wasn't going to come again, and that knowledge kept me from turning the next corner, as it were, in my erotic mind. I stayed instead right where I was. The feeling of her mouth around me was enjoyable, yes, but of the former blaze of passion there was nothing left. I was interested instead in what was going on, on the bed. I pressed Marianne aside in order to see, and I discovered that Agnes was looking back at me. Or at Marianne's ass: it was hard to tell, my eyes and her ass were both on the same line, and it is an ass which, I have always felt, anyone would be a fool not to look at. Apparently Mallory had finished. She lay in a flung position, her body gently glistening, her eyes closed. I suspected that she was asleep. But Agnes, it would seem, was still going strong. She had been masturbating as she watched Marianne's ass and the way her mouth bobbed on my cock, but now she rose and walked toward us with every intention of taking us both by storm. Gracefully, and almost before Marianne and I knew what was happening, Agnes swung herself into the armchair, her knees straddling my shoulders, and pressed her wet pussy down on my face.
The feeling of her wet hair matting against my cheeks, the suffusion of scent which came with her, and the slippery friction of her stretched membranes against my lips arid tongue rekindled the lust I had been allowing to cool. Marianne felt the change in me, and I was suddenly happy to feel her increased pace. Her hands cupped and tickled my balls, and her mouth drank me faster and faster. Agnes' cunt was sharp in smell. This came from her recent orgasms, I was sure. I licked her loose inner lips apart and applied my lips to her clit. Her groaning was almost continuous now.
The sight of Agnes' spread ass cheeks before her face was too much for my Marianne, and I felt my hard cock now slip wetly from her lips as she raised her face toward this newer target. Her hand closed around me, and she masturbated me awkwardly for a while, but soon the soft sensation of Agnes' ass made her forget her dedication. I was just as happy. I was anxious to do a thorough job of eating the cunt of this slender lesbian, and I needed no extra stimulation to apply myself with a will.
Surprise, surprise! Suddenly, there was Marianne's face below mine, my chin pressing her chin, as I dipped my tongue into Agnes' flowing vagina and as Marianne did the same with the other hole.
Agnes was not unaware of the stimulation either: "Oh, yes, dearest. Oh, my ass! Suck me there! Please suck me there. Lick me. Yes, that's it! Lick my ass! Lick it. Oh, darling, yes!"
But the position was uncomfortable. I wriggled out from under the woman-to her distress-and pulled Marianne to her feet. Poor Anges was beside herself. Her staring face turned to me in an agony of silent pleading.
"Lie on the bed," I ordered her.
She stumbled in her eagerness to get to the bed, and she had flopped down, her legs spread and her hands creaming her pussy, before Marianne and I could get there. Marianne knelt at her side, her hand already trailing down the woman's shivering thigh, when I said to Agnes, "No. Turn over."
Marianne looked at me with a quizzical expression, but I was in complete charge of the situation. I stood tall, my erection violent, my eyes fixed on the beautiful buttocks that were revealed as Agnes rolled over. "Spread your legs."
Agnes opened her legs so that her cunt and ass crease lay in a plump, tempting nest between her white thighs. Marianne's attention immediately went to this tender area, and she dipped one long finger up through the entire length of, the flushed crease. Agnes moaned at the touch, pressed her hips backward against Marianne's hand, and raised herself slightly off the bed. Now her ass was spread open as far as it could be. I knelt behind her and, following the lead of Marianne's fingers, I pressed my tongue down into her seething crevice. Marianne's fingers I took for my guide. Whither they went, so went I. To Agnes' eternal torment, we played a game, up and down and around, never quite touching her stretched asshole, never quite dipping between' her clotted lips.
"Come on," Agnes began to moan. "Do something! I need it. Oh, please I"
Marianne reached to caress my cock while she continued to play her tormenting trade. But now she had a strange gleam in her eye. She was excited about something, and her hand began to work on me more quickly.
"What do you want us to do?" she asked Agnes in a soothing, coaxing voice.
"Anything! But do something."
With my lips fastened on Agnes' flowing gash, I was in a perfect position to see Marianne's fingers teasing the woman's asshole. This tight opening was stretched and red, naked, without the hairy clothing which covered Marianne's own fragrant hole. I watched as Marianne twirled the tips of her fingers on the sensitive place, and then everything was blurred as her mouth came down and she began to lick Agnes there. Her mouth went away again, and now I saw that she was probing her fingertip into the moistened hole. Slowly, to the groaning lurches of Agnes' lungs, she sank her finger deep into the blonde's aching rectum.
"That's it!" Agnes cried. "That's it! Deeper, Oh, deeper. I want it deeper."
But there was no possibility of that. Marianne's knuckles were pressed against Agnes' crease, her finger working in the very depths of the rear hole. In sympathy, I split her open from the front, my own fingers sliding into her dribbling vagina, until I could feel Marianne's finger through the thin wall separating the two channels.
"Oh, fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me darling darling fuck!"
Marianne luxuriated in the tight clasp of Agnes' asshole, rotating her finger and fucking it in and out, and all the while she was masturbating me with her other hand, driving me to a quivering peak. And then, when Agnes was almost beside herself with lust, Marianne withdrew her finger. There was a slight plopping noise as the air she had forced into Agnes' bowels escaped. Agnes' frenzied cry followed close upon this, and she attempted to twist her hips in such a way that her asshole would be in contact with something, anything, that would stimulate it. Very gently, Marianne began to rub the wet hole with her finger.
"What do you want?" she murmured.
There was a' pause while the maddening titillation continued, and then, in a burst of desire, Agnes replied, "Do it to me. Oh, please."
"Do what?"
"You know. Do it to me. I want it in me."
"What do you want in you, Agnes, darling?"
"His ... his thing!"
"His cock? Do you want Alex's cock in you?"
"Yes. Yes!"
"Is that what you said? You want his cock in you? You want him to fuck you?"
"Yes. Oh, God, please! Please fuck me. Make him fuck me."
"I'll make him fuck you, Agnes, dearest. But where do you want him to fuck you? Eh?"
I was on my knees now, my hands lightly resting on Agnes' widespread ass, my cock stiff as a pole, with Marianne's expert fingers still running up and down its length. I was staring at the tight red asshole of the woman bent over so slavishly before me, and I was all the while enticed by Marianne's lightly probing finger there. I knew now what my lover had in mind, and I was frantic with my desire to press myself down into that hot, tight, long channel. I wanted more than anything in life to impale this sexy lesbian up the ass with my enormous cock.
But something else was happening. Mallory was crawling toward Agnes on her hands and knees, her young body already shivering in anticipation. I'm not even certain that she was fully awake. It was the jostling of the bed, perhaps, or the moaning of all three of us, that had stirred her, and tormented by our lust, she was coming to get her own.
"Where do you want his cock?" repeated Marianne, all the while continuing her manipulations of Agnes' asshole.
"I ... I want him to fuck me, please. Oh, please!"
"Yes, but where?"
Mallory was swinging herself around before Agnes, and the woman took her thighs avidly in her hands and dragged the young, swollen cunt toward her face. She buried her mouth in that hairy crotch, and we heard her mumble an answer which was too full of cunt juice and soft flesh to hear.
"What?" asked Marianne.
Agnes raised her face out of the girl's wet quim for a second and moaned, "In my ass, fuck me in the ass. Oh, dear God, please do it ... NOW !" And she dropped her eager lips down onto Mallory's cunt once more.
"You hear, darling?" Marianne asked me. "You hear what she says? She wants it. She wants it in her asshole. You want to put this hard cock in her asshole, don't you? I'll watch while you do. I'll help. I want to see you do it. I want to watch as you fuck her tight ass with long strokes of your wonderful cock. I'll watch, and I'll help, and--oh, give it to her, dear. Make her asshole feel your big cock!"
And Mallory was moaning to the tune of Agnes' expert lips on her furry mouth, "Yes, fuck her there I Fuck her there! I need you to fuck her there! In her ass!"
"Kneel up," Marianne commanded Agnes, and she lifted the woman by the cunt until she was at the right height for my cock. Then she spent a few lustful moments sucking my cock, dribbling her saliva all up and down its length. She followed this by the same moisturizing of Agnes' asshole. And now she pulled me forward and pressed the tip of my cock softly against the wet red spot.
"That's it, darling," she encouraged me. "It's going to feel so good in there, so tight. Look how tight she seems! And you'll fuck her deep, so deep in that hole. Now push, darling, sink your long cock into her asshole."
Marianne reached one hand under Agnes' hips and began to masturbate the woman's clit. "Oh, she's excited, Alex! Her clit is like a balloon! She's going to come, darling. You're going to make her come with your cock. And you're going to make me come, too!" She was, of course, masturbating herself with her other hand, as she so much loved to do.
"Ooooooooh !" Agnes moaned as she felt the first wide thrust of my stiff head in her. I pushed harder, and her exclamation was repeated.
Mallory was watching, fascinated. Her hands were mauling her own small breasts, pulling at her nipples and battering the flesh. "Do it! Put it in," she cried. "Fuck her in the ass! Oh, I can feel it all the way through her and into me!"
I pushed forward some more. I felt as though I had a mile of hot cock to slip into her tight hole. Her ass clung so hard that I almost could not go forward. After each thrust, Agnes tightened her muscles on me and held me still for a second as she got used to the feeling of the great intrusion. Her breath was panting into Mallory's cunt, and I saw that her back and shoulders were flushed with blood. Her arms could no longer support herself, what with my weight on my hands at the small of her back, and her breasts and shoulders were forced down into the mattress. Her face was pressed into Mallory's cunt as much by my weight as by her own efforts. And her ass was tilted into the air at the perfect angle for my long cock to slip downward and into her. I felt enormous to myself and I suppose that I must have to her. She was inarticulate, however, her only sound the wailing groan which seemed to go on and on.
And then I was all the way in.
"That's it," cried Marianne, who had settled back on spread knees, sitting on her heels and was using both hands to masturbate. "Now fuck her!"
As soon as Agnes released me from her velvet clothes, I withdrew my cock almost all the way, feeling her anal canal cling to me as I did so, and then I plunged in once again. Agnes screeched with the awesome thrust, and then I repeated it. Again and again, faster and faster, her ass growing wetter with each lunge, I fucked her ass. I held her hips in a grip of steel, her flesh white between my fingers. I battered down into her while both Mallory and Marianne moaned their encouragement. Marianne came, and she went right on beating herself off, looking for a second. Agnes was screaming. Mallory was writhing. My own orgasm grew closer.
"Fuck me! Oh, fuck my ass! Harder! Please, harder. Make me come! I'm going to come. I'm going to come soon. Fuck it harder! Fuck it hard and come deep in me. Come all over the floor of my ass. Come all over me. Fill me with come!"
And with her last word, she began to come herself. She threw herself wildly about the bed, no longer caring for anything, for Mallory's cunt the girl promptly gripped her own clit and exploded---or for anything at all. She was coming. Her entire body was centered on the impaling stiffness of my cock. Her arms and head tossed wildly. Her screams were continuous. Her humping was entirely erratic. I felt my cock swell in her. Hurriedly, I slammed into her harder and harder, willing myself to come while her orgasm yet lasted. My ass clenched, the air was full of the smell of cunt and asshole, Mallory's fingers were quivering on her clit, Marianne was in the throes of an orgasm right then, everything was sex, all was coming, coming, coming sex: her asshole, so tight, so-oh, God-so-,so Oh, YES! there it comes; there it comes; there it ... Oh, Oh, AAAAAAGH!
I came with a whistling scream as Agnes' orgasm finished. Her body dropped uselessly onto the bed, her legs spread, her battered face and arms flung helplessly. There was no more motion in her, and I felt the hard, tight bursts of sperm erupting in her as I pressed my hips against her flaccid buttocks. Everything was tight, everything was hot, and as I pumped myself into her rectum, I felt her grow gooey and swimming with the hot fluid.
Very slowly, consciousness of my surroundings came back. Mallory once again had passed out, with her hand covering her pussy in a delicate gesture. Marianne was still on her knees, her fingers in her cunt, masturbating, her eyes closed, her ecstasy still flowering in her. Calmly, satiated with my orgasm, I watched as she fingered herself over the peak one more time. Her climax was wracking, and it left her lying on the bed, her eyes seeing only dimly.
"Hi," I smiled at her.
"Hi," she smiled back.
Gently, I pulled my cock, now loose and relaxed, from Agnes' asshole. As the head came free, it trailed after it a long, sticky ribbon of sperm which looped and then fell to soak across the small of Agnes' back and into the material of her garter belt. I noticed then that one stocking was unfastened and had fallen to her knee and that the other one was torn. I supposed, idly, that I had done that, but I couldn't remember when.
Heavily, I collapsed onto the bed beside Marianne. My entire body between my knees and my chest felt empty. I ached everywhere.
"Satisfied?" I asked her.
"Finally."
"Jesus Christ."
"You were beautiful when you came."
"So were you."
"It may be strange to say after all this, but, Alex darling, I love you."
And that, my friends, was the beginning of everything.
EPILOGUE
We're leaving tomorrow!
We were ready to leave this morning, but today is Friday and no sailor would leave on a Friday. Tomorrow is Saturday, and that will be fine. As in the old days, we leave with the ebb, and that will occur at 5:15 a.m. "We ought to have cleared the land by 7:30, at the latest, and our journey will have begun!
Trade winds, here I come!
Of course, we're not entirely ready. We never would be unless we simply made a date and stuck to it. I was talking with a Bulgarian yesterday. He has been living on his yacht for two years, all the while getting ready for the great moment.
He's almost ready, he says, just one or two more changes to make and then everything will be fine. He'll see us in the Caribbean, he says. This will be the season for him, and he'll be on our trail before we know it. I felt awkward hearing this. He so much wants to go, but his philosophy is wrong. He wants to have everything tied up on shore. He wants to leave without changing his style of living. He can't do that-I've discovered something about escape in the last months-and we'll never see him anywhere. If we should come back here in two or three year's time, we would find him still tied to the slip, still tidying things up for the great move, still talking knowingly about currents, storm patterns, the particular difficulties of the Bass Strait. He studies Voss, Slocum, Hiscock, Moitessier, but he has not even sailed to Crete. If you want to go, go. Pick a date, do everything you can to get ready before that date, and then-no matter what the weather, no matter if the new turnbuckles have arrived or not, no matter whether it is inconvenient for the friends who have invited you to a party next week-go.
We're going. Moth is as ready as she'll ever be. We'll be on our own in a week, stopping only when we want to stop, moving to the insistence of the wind. There are certain cosmic necessities: if you want to get to the Caribbean before the hurricane season, you have to start now. After that, there's the question of the downhill run to the Canal and then the Pacific. But it's no good worrying about what the timing will be for the Galapagos while you're still in the Piraeus. Get to Trinidad and then worry, or, better still, wait until you reach Balboa. Oh, you should have a rough idea. January and early February are best for the Galapagos, for then you'll perhaps catch a northerly breeze for the thousand-mile passage through an area which would otherwise be characterized by calms. But it's best to wonder about that when you have a real chance of getting there. My Bulgarian friend knows all the dates for the best passages: he just doesn't know the date for his own.
I suppose I should finish the story. The way to write a story, I remember being told by an irascible professor, is to start at the beginning, write until you get to the end, and then stop. There's no point in getting you all involved in the story of our departure and cruise until r have finished the story of the escape.
We left Chateau Diableret about a week after the events reported. The departure was a sad one, for we had grown close to Agnes in the mean time. But the most distressful aspect of it was that our departure was precipitated by the report that Marianne's father was not well. He had suffered a heart attack, and it was doubtful whether he would recover completely. We left immediately for Istanbul. The old man was indeed in a bad state when we arrived. Marianne spent hours by his bedside in the quiet hospital overlooking the harbor. I wandered about distractedly. The moment of my decision had come and gone. I had not returned to work when expected, sending instead a long letter of resignation, and the protest of friends and what little family I have was beginning to arrive. Each day it was my painful duty to compose another letter to an uncle or a friend, describing what I was doing, why I was doing it, and what I thought about what I was doing. Two insights came to me during this process which I am pleased to have encountered. In the first place, I learned that there were more people who would miss me than I had thought would be the case. This was gratifying, but I also discovered that there was a deeper, underlying sense of dissatisfaction on the part of my acquaintances than I had suspected. Nearly everyone hungered to use me vicariously as a legendary force in his own life. My escape had made the boredom of these people more clear to themselves, and they needed to trade then upon our acquaintance to convince them that they were, indeed, unusual. I saw myself being spoken of proudly back in the Beacon Hill cocktail circuit as one of them who had "made it," the knowledge making their own success more probable. Like my Bulgarian friend, it was, for them, just a matter of time. That house in the country, that little bookstore, that stable for prize Arabians: it was only a matter of time. The second insight had to do with my own reaction to the escape. I was satisfied; I was doing what I wanted to do. Marianne was lovely, even in her distress over her father. I loved her eternally. (To her father's gratification, we were married ten days after we arrived in Istanbul. I had never really expected it to happen to me, I suppose, and I found that I was so profoundly content with the new state that vast changes began to surge in me. It was as though some terrific energy of regeneration, which had been held in check, had suddenly been let go.) I was doing what I wanted to do, yes, but the sensation was entirely new to me. I did not know how to handle the emotional upheavals it caused. I found that what had seemed to be a glorious prospect before it had occurred, that is, my resignation and the beginning of a new life with a new woman and a new ethos, was, in fact, fraught with pain. I literally mourned my Bostonian friends. I was in terror over the prospect of not making a steady paycheck. I wondered whether I was crazy. I was furious with Marianne, and then loving again, by turns. After Marianne's father died-he and his daughter, fortunately, had had a period of almost three weeks during which he was not in much pain and they could talk or just sit quietly, he dozing, she reading, a peace hanging over them-and we inherited Moth, I was in agony over the incredible idea of making a life on the sea. Of course, I desired it. I wanted it more than anything in the world. But I was horrified at the prospect of actually doing something I longed for. To be happy at the most basic level of your personality is no easy thing, that is, when you have not been before. What would happen? I felt that anything might be possible, and the thought was frightening. The only thing that was not possible any longer, and this was the rub, was the everlasting (and so very comforting) procrastination and resentment of the unhappy man. Suddenly, there was no outside force keeping me from doing anything: I had to take the full responsibility for my life. An invigorating, though awesome, prospect.
But it is an addictive thing, this responsibility.
The more I took, the stronger I felt, and the more I wanted. Also, it is an inspiration to others. It is odd to speak without self-consciousness of being an inspiration to others, but this was the case. I am not vain about it, but then neither am I too modest. "False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent," as Emerson said. I make my case on the reaction that Agnes had to Marianne's and my happiness. She came down from Switzerland, very kindly I think, for the wedding, and she stayed on for a week after that. She had been doing a lot of thinking since we had left the school, and we did a lot of talking when she was with us, and the upshot of it was that she determined to make a new start with the school. She loved those kids (I mean in the intellectual way), and she felt that she had been wronging them. She decided to turn over more of the power of direction for the school's development to the staff, to make herself less the dictator. Instead of the school being caned Chateau Meyer (which Marianne reported was the case), Agnes truly felt that she wanted it to be Chateau Diableret, and that she wanted her own personality to encourage, rather than to compel, the girls. We were an delighted with the growth in her ideas which had occurred, and if any more pleasantness of feeling between us were needed, this stay accomplished it. Agnes Meyer, I can now say-and I say it with some wonderment-is one of my closer friends. Well, that about wraps it up. Soon after the funeral, Marianne and I left on the shakedown cruise. Mostly, everything was fine. We spotted a few problems, which we have either fixed or are keeping an eye on, but Moth is a sound boat. We trust her. We are beginning to trust ourselves. Life, I am delighted to report, is good.
Crete was wonderful. Morocco will be better. I long to sail through the Pillars of Hercules and out of this ancient sea into the Atlantic. The Atlantic! To cross the Atlantic in Moth, with Marianne at my side, and to have the clear warm waters of the Carribean to look forward to. God, what bliss!
See you in Martinique, eh what?
Or if we miss you there, we'll anchor off Taa Hu Ku on Hiva Oa (139� W, go 50' S) in April or May of next year and wait for you there. The river is beautiful, I've heard, as it burbles down over the pebbly shore, and the coconuts will be ripe ...
