When the man was gone, she lay naked in the bed, idly tracing her fingernail over the skin of her belly, leaving fine white lines that faded away into the returning pinkness. Her nipples were still tender and she could feel the man's semen seeping between her legs there, wetting her thighs. She thought she should be getting up. She should go in and clean herself, wash. She shouldn't just lie there.
She didn't move. Outside, she could hear, a truck was going by in the street. Somewhere, she could hear a siren.
There was the happy feeling of lethargy in her now. She was satisfied. Her body was warm and tired and the tingling from her orgasms still hadn't faded completely away.
She wondered what the man's name was, whether he was married... .
She wondered whether he would tell anyone about her, about having picked her up in a bar. He had looked so surprised when she suggested going to her apartment, as if he couldn't believe his own good luck.
Well, why should he have believed it? After all, she was beautiful. She knew that. Mirrors don't lie. She was twenty-seven now and that's past girlhood. She was a grown woman. But it's better to be a woman than a girl, just as it's better to be a man than a boy. So she didn't care about that. And her mirror told her that her figure was at its peak, that she had never looked better. Her belly was flat and firm. Her breasts were just large enough, but not so much that they sagged. Her thighs were perfectly formed, rounded, firm, with not even one broken vein to mar their beauty.
So why shouldn't that man have wondered at his own good luck? Women like her weren't often found in bars for men like him to find. Women like her didn't take strange men home with them, to fall naked into bed, to suck greedily at startled, staring penises, to wrap full, drawing thighs around anxious bodies.
Maybe he wouldn't tell anyone. Maybe he would think that no one would believe him anyway.
Thinking about that, she smiled. She ran her hand between her legs, feeling the wetness there, sensing her own returning desire. But it was muted and she knew that she would sleep before it strengthened.
Her name was Wanda Fixx. Days, she worked as a secretary in an advertising agency in midtown New York, where she was known mostly for her reluctance to permit anyone to know her. It was said that she was cold, frigid, perhaps even lesbian.
The truth was that there simply was no one at the agency who interested her physically. She had no feeling about mixing business and pleasure. If there had been someone there who was capable of arousing her when she looked at him (or her; she had been known more than once to try that) she would have done something about it. She was an excellent secretary and money didn't hold any great charm for her, once she had enough to live on, so she knew she wouldn't ever have any trouble finding a job. For the right man, she would have lifted her skirt and dropped her panties right in the executive conference room. But the right man wasn't there.
Nights, she wrote. She wanted to be a playwright. She was working steadily on a manuscript that was just about finished now, and she thought it was good. No, she knew it was good. She didn't know whether anyone else would recognize it as good, but she knew it was.
No one at the agency knew she was writing a play. If anyone had, he might have wondered why she continued working as a secretary instead of trying to become a copywriter or something else more creative. Which was why she had never told anyone. She didn't want to do anything during the day except make a living, and she certainly didn't want to commit herself to a job to that extent. All she wanted was a living.
And she was happy with her life, so far.
Sometimes, Wanda wondered, it seemed that everyone was wrong about life. Religion, philosophy, even common sense, on occasion, implied that human beings are free, that they have will, can make choices.
But then, they don't make choices. Their lives are ordered for them by something outside. They choose, they go to school, they play, they work, they plan and dream, and things happen they can't control, and they do things or become things, and when they study the things they have done and the things they have become, they are surprised.
That wasn't what I intended, they say. I never became what I wanted to become because of. . . what? Something.
Strange. Her sister, for example, who came to New York with her, intending to be an actress (in fact, to star in the plays Wanda was going to write) married a Jewish stockbroker and went to live in Scarsdale with never a backward glance. Which was strange because first her sister had been thinking of becoming a nun. She gave that up when she discovered the intense pleasure of an orgasm (brought first to her by Wanda's exploring fingers). And from being a nun, she turned to bedrooms. Many bedrooms. Many men. She loved them all, intensely, with fire and passion, consuming them with her own hungers and discarding them to move on . . . until she was twenty-four and found herself pregnant by a Negro stockbroker (who worked, as a matter-of-fact, for the man she ultimately married).
The man paid for her abortion, which she underwent in a suite in one of the best hotels in New York. Two days after her abortion, the police raided the suite and arrested the doctor and his two nurses. None of the women there were arrested, but they all had to go to the station to make statements (according to reports in the Daily News). That frightened her. What if that had happened to her? What of the humiliation she would have experienced? Rita Fixx, girl jailbird.
From that day on, she turned to money with the same intensity that she had previously directed toward sexual pleasure. Not that she abandoned sex, but she stopped being promiscuous, and she started being much choosier about her partners. Which meant they had to be rich.
When the Jewish stockbroker asked her to marry him, she accepted, knowing that she didn't love him (whatever loving someone meant, she thought) and knowing that he knew she didn't and didn't care. He was older, about fifty-five, and she was exquisitely beautiful, so she got what she wanted-and so did he. How many other marriages, she asked Wanda once, so obviously filled their members' needs?
Wanda had her chances to marry too, of course, but she didn't take any of them. She didn't want to be married, at least not to any of the men who asked her, and at least not when they asked. Then when she passed twenty-five there were days when she wondered whether she was letting life (real life, as lived in the pages of McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal) pass her by, whether she was some kind of monster because she wasn't yearning for the love of a good man and the patter of little feet.
God, she thought once, how could I stand that?
Then", too, she knew it would be hard for her to stand going to bed with only one man. She was at least as sexual as Rita, probably more so because she didn't think it would be possible ever to sublimate her desires in passion for money, and she didn't think it would be possible for her to remain faithful physically to just one man for very long.
She just liked sex too well, varied sex, with different partners. She always had. Ever since the night she lost her virginity in the back seat of a I952 Ford that was parked in the garage, back of her house.
The boy's name was Chuck Khonle. He was an end on the high school football team and later he went on to play professional football. Even then, at seventeen years of age, he had a man's body, thick and strong. But he still had a boy's lack of experience and there was no way for him to know that she had decided to take him, decided cold-bloodedly while lying alone in her own bed, because she reached a decision that it was time for her to do this.
Virginity, she thought, was probably an over-rated thing, but it was a thing (she was sensitive even then) that she wanted to be rid of. She could feel that virginity would become more and more burdensome, that the act of carrying it could be almost a lifework. And she didn't want to be bothered about it. From her own explorations, she knew a great deal about sensual pleasure. She knew how it felt when she manipulated her own body, and now she wanted to know how it felt to be penetrated by a man.
She sometimes trembled when she thought of that. How would it be?
Once, she started to do it to herself with a cucumber. She even took the vegetable up to her room and lay down on the bed with her pants off. But when she spread her legs and touched her vagina with the cucumber, it was still cold from the refrigerator and she shivered suddenly and felt ridiculous.
This night, though, she was determined.
They were in his car, parked in her garage. He had wanted to go somewhere out into the country, but she was afraid to do that. The other kids were-likely to catch them. Bushwhacking, as they called it, was a favorite sport. The kids would go out looking for parked cars, so that they could rock them, upsetting the lovers, and then they would hoot and laugh. She didn't want that to happen to her.
But her parents were out for the evening and she knew there was plenty of time for them to go to her garage. There, with the lights out, he kissed her awkwardly. When she parted her lips, though, his tongue came into her mouth, hard, penetrating, ravenous, and she knew he wanted it as badly as she did.
He didn't touch her, though. She knew he was afraid to. So when he kissed her again, she let her hand drop into his lap. She felt him jerk at her touch, but she didn't take her hand away. She could feel his hardness inside his pants. It made shivers run up her back. It felt so much bigger than she had expected.
He said, "My God, Wanda, don't you know what you're doing to me?"
"What?"
"You keep teasing me and you expect me to keep my hands to myself."
"Who said so?"
"What?" He drew back and looked at her.
"You think you're the only one who wants something?"
He put his arms around her then and pulled her up close to him. She could feel his breath. His chest was rising and falling. She thought, don't get too excited. She had read how a man, especially a young man, can become so excited that he will come too quickly, and she didn't want that to happen.
He put his hand on her breast then. Her nerves jumped. He massaged her there and she knew her nipples were erect and taut under her clothes.
She wished he would hurry. She didn't know why he was taking so long to get to it. She could almost feel an orgasm coming already, just from waiting, and she didn't want that to happen. She wanted the orgasm to explode when he was in her. She didn't want it all to be over before it even got started.
He put his hand down inside her blouse. Then he took it out and put it on her leg, up under her skirt. He waited for a moment, his palm flat against her thigh, as if he expected her to stop him. But when she only waited too, he moved his hand up to cup her pussy, there between her legs. Again, she felt the orgasm starting to build in her.
"Hurry," she whispered.
He hooked his fingers in her panties and tried clumsily to pull them down, but she had to raise up and do that herself. She slipped them down over her hips and dropped them onto the car floor.
When she looked at him then, he had opened his pants and his sex was standing up hard and firm, like a white rod coming up from a thick black bush. The skin of it was pulled back from the head by his erection, so that jhe could see him clearly finally in the light from the streetlight in the alley back of the garage. He was so long, thick there, that she didn't see how he could get into her.
Now, suddenly, he wasn't even a person to her. He was just sex-and she didn't even think of him when she reached out tentatively to touch him there.
She was surprised at how soft it felt, like the texture of velvet. He winced at her touch, and when she rubbed her fingertip over the head of his tool, she could feel semen seeping there.
"Will I get pregnant?"
"No," he said, "no, I'll pull out."
"No, you won't," she said. "You'll get me pregnant."
"No, honest."
"Don't you have anything with you."
"Have anything."
"A rubber."
"No, I didn't know you were . . . "
"Hurry," she said. "Come on, hurry."
He laid her back then on the seat and came up between her legs. She expected it to hurt when he went into her, but it didn't. There was just a moment of pressure, like something was stretching, and then he was into her, moving back and forth, in and out of her, opening her, probing her.
Her orgasms started immediately, like warm blasts of water from a strong faucet. There was a great difference in them and in the ones she had given herself with her fingers. These were stronger, deeper, and there were more of them.
That's what surprised her. When she had done it to herself, there had never been more than one orgasm. Just one and then she would quit. But now they were coming one after another, increasingly strong, until she couldn't keep from crying out.
Her legs were up high on his back. His tool was slashing at her. She thought now it would never end, that he would be able to go on forever, and she almost giggled thinking about how she had been afraid it would be over too soon. But then he exploded into her. She felt the hot semen splashing into her and when that happened, one last orgasm crashed through her with such force that she was never sure afterwards that she hadn't blacked out for a moment.
Then she said, "You told me you'd pull out before you did that."
He was easing back out of her and she glanced down and saw the moisture glistening on his softening sex.
"You promised," she said.
"I couldn't help it."
"But what am I going to do if I become pregnant," she said. "What will I do?"
"I'll take care of you," he said.
She was still spread open before him and she saw he was looking down at her opened pussy. "Am I bleeding there?" she said.
"A little, I guess."
"Well, wipe me off."
He took his handkerchief obediently and wiped at her there. Then he dropped it onto the floor and probed at her with his finger.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"I want you again."
She looked at him and saw that his rod was coming up hard again. "I didn't know you could do it again so quickly," she said.
"Yes."
"Did you ever do it with anybody before?"
He didn't seem to hear her. He was working his finger in and out of her rapidly and she caught his hand and pushed it away. "Not like that," she said. "I don't want to come that way."
"Did you come before?" he said.
"Yes. More than once."
"Really?"
"Yes. Did you ever do this with anyone before."
"No."
"I don't believe you."
"It's true," he said. "I really never did do it with anyone before."
Amazingly, she laughed, and she didn't blame him for the sudden look of puzzlement that he gave her. She didn't understand her amusement herself, so why should she expect him to?
Then she said, "Why haven't you ever done it with anyone before?"
"What?"
She reached up and caught hold of his tool. It was hard again, as hard as before, but she didn't think it had swollen quite to the size he had enjoyed the first time.
"I said, why didn't you ever do it before? Didn't you ever want to before?"
"Sure?" He was still puzzled and his voice made a question of the word that he had intended to sound sophisticated and cynical.
"Then why didn't you? Didn't anyone ever want you before?"
"Sure," he said.
"Who then?"
"Lots of girls."
She laughed again. "And you didn't do anything?" She was working the skin back and forth on his tool. "You mean to tell me you had this for other girls and they wanted it and you didn't give it to them?"
"Well, I thought you'd be mad if I told you I'd done it before."
"Why should I be."
"Lots of girls would be."
"Why?"
"Well, you know how girls are . . . "
"No . . . " She laughed. "How are they?"
"Well, they all think they want to get married or something. I mean, you kiss them and right away they think they own you."
"I'm not that way," she said. "I don't want to get married."
His confidence was returning now. He didn't understand what she wanted in the long run, but from the way she was squeezing his rod, he knew what she wanted now.
"You're different from other girls," he said. "That's for sure."
"You think so."
"Sure."
"What do you think I want."
"You want me to do you again."
"No."
"No?"
"I want you to eat me."
He drew back some. "What?"
"You heard me. I want you to eat me."
"No, I won't do that."
"Why not?"
"I just won't."
"You really never did that before, did you."
"No, and I'm not going to now."
"Why?"
"I just don't want to."
She cupped his balls in her hand then and tightened her grip on them, gently, and then she massaged him there. She thought he was at least as big now as he had been before, maybe even larger.
"Would you like me to suck you?" she whispered.
"Yes, but I... "
"Then," she said, "you lick me first."
"No."
"You get down and lick at my pussy and I'll suck you off into my mouth. I'll give you anything you want, any place you want, any way you want, but first you have to eat me."
"I can't do that."
". . . and if you don't, you'll not only never get to screw me again, you'll never even get to take me out again."
"Come on, Wanda," he said, "don't be that way."
"Eat me."
"Wanda. . . "
"I mean it, now . . . eat me."
When he was on his knees in front of her, she stretched back to feel what he was doing. It was so good. She wouldn't have thought anything could be so good. But what was even better was the soaring pleasure she obtained from the realization that she could make him do anything he could just in return for a promise that maybe she'd keep and maybe she wouldn't. She liked that, the feeling of power, the idea that her vagina was like a passport to freedom. As long as she had it, as long as she could count on it, she could have anything, she could be anything.
She loved it. God, how she loved it.
And later, when she bent down over him to take his penis into her mouth, she even enjoyed that, because she could tell from the way he groaned and reacted that this was even more power, that this was something a man would sell his soul for, this pleasure, this fleeting thought that he possessed her. When, in fact, it was she who possessed him, by virtue of the fact that he would do anything for her, for what she could give him.
What a lesson, one she never forgot, even in the later years, when she had everything and there was nothing a man could give her that she didn't already have, except his penis, and they were all willing to give her that.
CHAPTER TWO...
Rita, her sister, said, "Honest to God, Wanda, i don't see why you keep scribbling away at that play. Who do you think is going to produce it? I mean, it takes money to produce a play."
"So why do you think I have a rich sister?" she said. She was toying with her martini glass. She was bored. Anyway, she thought, she didn't like her sister much. She wondered why that was.
"Don't do that," Rita said.
"What?"
"Try to sound Jewish."
"Was I?"
"You know you were, just because of the man I married. You're jealous, that's what, because of the money I married. I never would have expected that of you."
"Don't be silly," Wanda said. "How could I be jealous of you?"
"You just are."
She shrugged. "All right, so I am."
"Now you're trying to cut off a discussion. You're not agreeing with me at all, you're just trying to get me to shut up."
"So why don't you?"
"Wanda, I don't know what's to become of you, you're so different from the girl you used to be."
Who did I used to be, she wondered. How can I be that woman, that girl? That girl is dead, and no sadness need be wasted. I'm me now, not the girl who used to be.
Then she giggled. Banal. It would never, never carry a second act.
The agent said, "Have you ever been published."
"No."
"Nothing at all."
"No."
"So why do you think you can write a play."
"Without reading it, how do you know I can't?"
"I don't have to read it," he said. "I've read too many plays. I don't judge plays, I play judge."
"You also create bad aphorisms."
He looked surprised and then he laughed. "Yes, undoubtedly, but no one pays ten dollars a ticket to hear mine."
"Now that," she said, "is good. I think I'll steal that for something." She laughed.
"I like you," he said.
"Marvelous."
"You know, what I really do, I judge people. If I like a playwright, I think I'll like his play, so I take it and read it. If I don't like him, I wouldn't be happy as his agent even if a wonderful thing happened and I got rich from him."
"But, you wouldn't mind being rich?"
"No, who would?"
"No one."
"That's right, no one. But at least I'm different," he said. "I admit my prejudices. I love money, but not quite enough to put up with people I don't like."
She thought he was an idiot, but she left her play with him. Everyone said he was a great agent, that if he couldn't get her play published, no one could. So what if he acted and talked like some bad movie version of Walter Brennan or something. If he could get her play published, that was all she was interested in.
Marjorie April called her and said, "What are you doing tonight, darling?"
"Just watching television."
"Just watching television. What kind of way is that to spend an evening? Come on over and get screwed."
She knew the party would be going full blast by the time she arrived. She didn't know exactly why she enjoyed Marjorie's parties so much. She even know why she thought of them as Marjorie's parties... a wife-swapping party would more normally be considered the husband's idea. But in this case, she was sure she was right.
And maybe she was right about all cases. Certainly no wife-swapping activities could take place without the wife's consent, and certainly it would be to a wife's benefit to convince her husband that the whole thing was his idea in the first place.
Marjorie met her at the door. Marjorie as usual was wearing something that made her look even nakeder than being truly naked would have. This time it was a pale blue see-through dress, with nothing under it, so that you could see her breasts and the black bush of hair above her cleft, while still feeling that there was something more to see. Wanda liked that.
Inside, she found Marjorie's husband, Tom April. He was mixing drinks. He hadn't yet taken off his clothes, though most of the others at the party were either naked or half naked. Wanda took a drink from him and then she said, "What's planned for tonight?"
"Nothing, really," he said. "Marjorie just got up this party sort of on the spur of the moment. I think she was just bored. But there's no real theme to the party."
"All right."
"Tonight, we'll just sort of relax about it."
She laughed. "You have such a quaint way about you."
He didn't laugh. He looked serious. He always did at the sex parties, as if (almost) this was a form of religion to him. And you certainly don't laugh while your religious ceremonies are being performed.
"Listen," he said, "how about if you and I are first tonight."
"No."
"Why not?"
"You know I won't stand for being put on exhibition."
"But you screw in front of other people. I've seen you."
"Not first, not while everyone is watching. After it's started, I don't care, but not first."
Just then Marjorie came over to them. "Listen, you two," she said, "I'm going to go first tonight. . . " She glanced at her husband. "Unless you want to."
"No, it's all right," he said. "You go ahead."
She looked hesitant, as if she sensed something from the tone of his voice, but then she smiled and said, "Wonderful."
She was naked now, spread-eagled on the living room floor. Everyone else (there were almost a dozen couples at the party) was standing around watching, silently. Except for one man that Wanda didn't know, who was standing naked over Marjorie. He had an immense erection and Wanda could see why Marjorie had wanted to go first.
Marjorie had a small pussy. Everyone said so. That was why all the men liked doing it with her. But she was crazy for large men. Once Wanda said to her that all the literature proved that penis size didn't make any difference to a woman's sensations, but Marjorie had only laughed and said, you don't know what you're talking about, darling. From that, she said, I'd almost gather you were a virgin, if I didn't know better.
Someone said, "Man, will you look at the size of that stud's equipment."
The man smiled and looked around the crowd. "How about that?" he said. "I may only be a taxi driver in real life, but I come across when it counts, don't I?"
Marjorie, naked on the floor, said, "I don't know, but I wish you'd hurry up and show me."
The man crouched down and knelt between her legs. He leaned forward to squeeze her breasts and she reached up to catch hold of his sex and work it back and forth.
Amazingly, the huge tool seemed to grow even larger in her hand.
Standing beside Wanda, Tom April said, "I don't know whether I'll ever be able to satisfy her after this."
Wanda looked at him curiously. His eyes were shining and he looked excited. She remembered at one party seeing him sucking at the penis of another man. At the time she had thought it was just something he was trying as an experiment, because she had been with him and he had been satisfactorily virile. But now, watching him as he eyed the big equipment of the man who was about to penetrate his wife, she wondered if maybe he really wasn't a homosexual at heart.
Wanda's knees felt weak as she watched Marjorie and the man and she knew her own pussy was wet with desire. She needed a man of her own now. She was tired of watching. She wanted someone.
She turned to look for Tom April, because he was the man here that she knew best, but he was gone. She thought maybe he hadn't been able to watch what was happening before him. Or maybe he had merely grabbed the nearest woman (or man?) and gone into a bedroom.
A man she had never seen before put his arm around her waist. "Quite a sight, isn't it?" he said.
He looked to be about thirty. He was tall, over six feet, and dark, with black hair that seemed to have a faint curl in it. She thought he was one of the best looking men she had ever seen.
"Yes."
"Why don't we join them?"
"There on the floor? I don't think they need our help."
His arm crept around and his hand cupped her breast. She didn't move away. She liked him and she liked the feel of his hand on her breast.
Her own hand dropped down and she caught his sex and squeezed it through his pants.
"All right," he said, his lips parting at her touch. "All right."
"You feel like a big man," she said.
He laughed and nodded toward the pair that was writhing on the floor. "Not as big as him, but big enough."
"Yes."
"I mean, I never had any complaints . . . "
She let go of him then and caught his hand and led him back toward one of the bedrooms. She had never learned to like undressing in front of a lot of people. She rather enjoyed these parties occasionally, and once she had her clothes off and had been screwed once, she could wander around naked, happily. But at first she wanted some privacy.
In the bedroom, she closed the door and turned to face him. As he watched she took off her clothes so that finally she was standing naked in front of him, her breasts pointing out at him, tipped with hard nipples that had come up in anticipation.
"Aren't you going to take off your own clothes?" she said.
But before she finished the sentence, he was already stripping down. And then he was naked too.
He had been right. He wasn't as large sexually as the man in the living room with Marjorie, but he was big enough. He was certainly bigger than most. She guessed that maybe he was about seven inches long, with massive thickness. And it was thickness that counted, she knew, not length.
He came over toward her then and she backed away and fell onto the bed. He stood at the edge of the bed, looking down, and then he said, "Do you want me to eat you?"
"Don't ask me questions," she said. "Just do things to me."
He knelt on the bed, between her legs, and buried his face against her. Her first orgasm crashed over her and she cried out aloud and caught at his shoulders.
He looked up quizzically then and she pushed him back over flat and bent down to take his organ into her mouth. She liked doing that too. Not that it gave her any pleasure really, but she enjoyed the reaction she could create in a man by doing this to him.
His rod was swelling in her mouth. She could feel it. So she stopped and let it pop out of her mouth. She didn't want him to come that way. She wanted him to come in her pussy, so that she could feel the hot semen splashing back into her. She didn't mind fellatio, but she had never really learned to like the taste of semen . . . it was like lukewarm sea water, she thought... and besides, if she did that, he wouldn't be able to screw her. At least, not right away.
He didn't seem to mind that she had stopped, though. He pulled her over flat and her legs opened and he came down into her, almost all in one motion.
She whimpered as he slammed down into her, because there was an orgasm immediately. Not a strong one, but strong enough to make it impossible for her to remain silent.
Not that she wanted to remain silent. She knew how exciting it was to a man for a woman to enjoy him so much that she had to cry out. But she was some surprised at the orgasm because it happened so fast.
He was very good at what he was doing, and he didn't show any sign of slowing down either. He was driving into her rhythmically, over and over, so that another, harder, orgasm was starting, and then exploding into her.
"Oh, God," she cried out. "So good, damn it, screw me harder, I need it, screw me harder."
Her orgasm was fading then and she shifted her weight to throw her legs higher around him, but he stopped suddenly and pulled out of her. She looked up, puzzled, and he caught hold of her hips and flipped her over onto her stomach.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
He didn't answer her.
She lifted her hips off the bed to give him better access to her. If he wanted to do it that way, she liked it too.
But that wasn't what he was after, she realized suddenly. He was pushing at her bottom, stretching open her anus with his shaft.
"No," she said, "you're too big. I can't take you that way . . . "
God, it hurt suddenly and she knew he had the head of his sex into her bottom.
No one had ever done that to her before. No one had even tried.
"Take it out of there," she cried. "You're hurting me. Please, take it out."
But he didn't. He just shoved down into her, evenly, without jerking, a steady, inexorable pressure.
And then the pain started to fade, so that it felt strange now, but it didn't really hurt, and she could feel an odd kind of warmth spreading over her.
She was in orgasm again, suddenly, and she cried out again, but this time it was in pleasure.
He could hear the difference too, because when she cried that way, he slammed on down into her, all the way, so that she felt his balls against the spread-open crack of her buttocks.
Over and over the orgasms wracked her, until she was too weak to keep her bottom raised for him, and she slumped down onto the bed, exhausted by the sensations.
Then she felt him coming into her there, hot and wet, and she came one last time, like an explosion of electric pleasure.
CHAPTER THREE...
"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" the man said.
"A place like what?"
"An agent's office."
"What's wrong with being here?"
"Nothing, for me. I'm a cluck who doesn't know better than to try to make a living by writing. But a nice, beautiful girl like you should be home in bed where she belongs."
She smiled. "Maybe you're right," she said.
The office door opened and the agent came out. He looked at the man and then at Wanda. "All right," he said to her, pleasantly. "Please come in."
Inside, she sat down beside his desk. He sat down facing her. There, on his desk, she saw her manuscript, beside another that she supposed belonged to the man outside.
He didn't say anything, so she said, "What do we do now?"
He looked at her. "Do you want me to be honest?"
"Yes, of course."
"This is not a good play you have."
"What?"
"I'm sorry, but in my estimation, it's not a good play."
"Well, your estimation is wrong then." She felt suddenly, coldly angry, as if he had somehow violated her privacy, insulting her.
He shrugged. "Perhaps. One never knows about that. But in my opinion, it is not a good play."
She stood up. "Then we don't have anything more to talk about."
He handed her manuscript across to her. "Would you want me to be dishonest with you?" he asked.
"That's hardly the question, since you don't know a good play from a bad one."
"That may be," he said. "Though I doubt it, being honest again. If I don't know a good play, then why did you come here?"
"Because I had heard you could find a producer for my play."
He nodded. "I could find a producer for a good play. That's why you have heard of me. Because producers and potential producers know me and they know that I do know good plays and if I say a play is good, they will listen, because many of them don't know anything but money. But if I change my way and I start pushing bad plays, what happens to my reputation? And what happens to the good writers I represent? I am no longer valuable to them."
"You're saying I'm not a good writer?"
"No," he said, "I didn't say that. I said you have written a play that is not good."
"What's wrong with it?"
"It's dull."
"What?"
"In my estimation, that is."
"What do you mean, it's dull?" He smiled. "Which one of the words is it you don't understand?"
"You don't need to talk to me that way."
"No," he said. "You're right about that. I'm sorry. I don't have to talk to you that way. I simply don't want you to get the wrong idea."
"About what?"
"Miss Fixx, I would have enjoyed representing you. You are a pleasant, beautiful young woman, and I'm probably right when I say that I could have slept with you if I had told you how wonderful your play is. And I would have enjoyed immensely sleeping with you . . . "
"You won't ever know."
"I'm sure of that. But Miss Fixx, I've done you a favor. You could have broken your heart over this play . . . "
"Never mind," she said. "What makes it dull, if that's what you think is wrong with it?"
"You think you can fix it?"
"Why not? I can take constructive criticism."
"Constructively, I would advise you to take up some other line of work."
"Why?"
"Because your play is so dull. Actually, your writing of it is not too bad. The words you choose are not bad words. But your ideas are dull. Your vision has been seen many thousands of times before, and with more clarity. Even assuming I could have found a backer for this play, and assuming someone wasn't smart enough to close it before it reached New York, the critics would have killed it here in one night."
"Why?"
Now he looked slightly exasperated. "Miss Fixx," he said, "I know what a blow I have given you, but why don't you just take my word for it and go back to Iowa."
"I didn't come from Iowa."
"Wherever. You could write for the local newspaper and express yourself that way and you could get married and have ten beautiful children."
"Why don't you go screw yourself?" she said.
She stopped at a bar. She didn't need a drink to fortify herself. She didn't even especially want one. Liquor was no hang-up for her. But where else do you go in New York when you just want to sit and think for a while?
What was she going to do? She felt drained, empty, and she suddenly realized how much she had been counting on the play. It didn't matter that she didn't have a husband and family. It didn't matter that she didn't really have any friends, not even her sister any more. Because she had been counting on the play. She had thought. . . no, she had known . . . that the play was good, that it was going to be a success, that everything in the world she had ever wanted was going to be dropped into her lap.
That was a strange phrase, though . . . everything she had ever wanted. What was that?
For my play to be a success.
But did you? Does it really matter? Think about it now. Are you really destroyed? Does it really hurt? Or are you manufacturing emotion? Are you sitting here being unhappy because you're really unhappy, or because you should be, after hearing that your play isn't any good?
She didn't know the answers.
But she had to ask the questions. What do I want? Before, she had thought that the answer to that was simple. I want my play to succeed.
But now she wasn't so sure. Now she thought maybe she hadn't really cared all along. Maybe she had just been manufacturing something to give her life meaning.
Now that meaning was gone and she didn't feel particularly sad about it, not now, now that she was out and away from the agent. Maybe she had just been embarrassed by his contempt for her play, by his obvious thought that she had wasted his time and that she should just go somewhere and get married like a good girl.
So now what?
Now what is there to give meaning to life? What is there to do?
Why do you have to do something? Why can't you just live? like an animal does, without any thought for the future, or without any concern beyond normal, day to day food and comfort.
No.
I can't do that, she thought. Because there has to be something that means something, something that I can care about, something I can be committed to. Without that, life would be too dull to bear.
Thinking that, she thought about her play, and then she knew that the agent was right. What she had written about, she hadn't cared about, because it was just the vehicle for what she really wanted (or thought she wanted). She hadn't really wanted to write at all, when it came to that. She had just wanted to be a writer, which meant that she had wanted to be able to say, I'm a writer. I'm not just a secretary, waiting to get married. I'm a writer, working on a play. And eventually, she would have been able to say, I'm a writer and my play is on Broadway.
Only, that wasn't going to happen. Now she was just a secretary, just another silly woman who had thought she could write a good play, who had thought that she could give some meaning to a life that has no meaning.
God, I sound like a cheap imitation of Simone de Beauvoir, she thought, and she laughed silently at herself.
"I could have told you that all along," her sister said.
"Rita, sometimes I think you didn't want my play to be any good," Wanda said.
They were sitting in the living room of Rita's house. One of the servants had made martinis for them and they had two already and there were third ones in front of them. Wanda felt pleasantly lethargic, which she knew was from the gin.
"Don't be silly. Of course I wanted you to succeed," Rita said. "I still do. But there's success and there's success."
"Meaning that now you would describe me as a success if I were to marry as successfully as you."
"Why not?"
"Well, mostly because you don't seem to love your husband."
"Of course I love my husband." She sounded indignant.
"Then why are you unfaithful to him."
"I'm not."
"Of course you are and we can't have any real conversation if you're going to lie to me."
"Well, then, since we're being so honest, why do you sleep around?"
"I'm not married. What difference does it make who I sleep with?"
"Are you having an affair?"
"You mean a love affair?"
"Yes. I mean a love affair."
"No, I'm not."
"Then it doesn't mean anything to you when you go to bed with someone. It's just something you do for release and pleasure."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Then why should it be different for me?"
"Because you're married."
"To a man who's older than I and who doesn't need nearly as much sex as I do. So why should I hurt for it when it doesn't hurt him at all for me to have it? I'm not depriving him of anything."
"You're depriving him of a faithful wife."
She laughed. "Do you think he cares about that? He knows I get around some. All he cares about is that I don't embarrass him and that I'm available for him whenever he wants me and that I don't object no matter what he wants to do to me... "
"What does he want to do?"
Rita laughed. "Why, sister dear, I do think you're indulging in a bit of morbid curiosity."
"I guess I am. You don't have to tell me." Wanda laughed too. She sipped at the third martini.
"I don't mind telling you. I mean, if you can't talk to your sister, who can you talk to?" She laughed again.
Wanda thought Rita was much friendlier now that the play was out of the way. In a way, she could understand that. Rita had always been much more ambitious than she. No matter what she said, it must have been hard for her to think of Wanda maybe being successful on Broadway when she had given it up for marriage.
"Listen," Rita said, "what doesn't he want me to do? I think he's getting to an age where it takes much more to excite him and he has to think up all kinds of crazy things to get a hard on."
"like what?"
"Well, like all the ordinary things, like having me eat him and letting him eat me."
"Everybody does that," Wanda said.
"Yes, I know, but not everyone-likes to screw in the bathtub."
"What's wrong with that?"
"And not everyone-likes to screw his wife in the ass."
Wanda thought about the man at Marjorie's party. "Maybe not," she said.
"Have you ever tried that?"
"No," Wanda lied.
"Believe me, it hurts some."
"I imagine you can get used to it, though, can't you?"
Rita laughed again and finished her drink and leaned forward to pull the top loose from the shaker on the table in front of her. She poured herself another full drink and sipped at it.
"Darling," she said, "you can get used to anything. You can even learn to like it."
"I would think so," Wanda said, laughing again herself, and reaching out to get more martini.
"And, darling, I don't really think he's all that faithful to me himself. Not that it matters . .
"As long as the money holds out, right."
"Right," Rita said, and she laughed.
That wouldn't do. She couldn't live that way. There was no way that she could imagine living the rest of her life that way. It was all right. She wasn't moralizing about her sister. Why should she? She had probably herself been in bed with at least as many men as her sister. But life that way wouldn't have any meaning either.
My God, what was she going to do?
The man said, "Do you come here often?"
"No, I was never here before. I just thought it looked interesting, so I stopped in."
"It's just a bar, I guess," the man said, "but I like it. It's quiet and you can always count on meeting some nice people here. I mean, they keep things pretty well controlled here, no rough stuff or noise."
"Yes, it's nice."
"What do you do?" the man said.
"You mean for a living?"
"Sure," he said, "what else? I mean, would I ask you about your hobbies?" Then he laughed.
"I'm a secretary." It was the first time in a long time that she hadn't described herself as a writer. It felt funny to be calling herself a secretary.
"An executive secretary, no doubt."
She smiled, half amused by him, not knowing why, and she said, "Why do you say, no doubt?"
"Because I never met a secretary yet who didn't say she was an executive secretary. It might be nice to meet somebody from the typing pool for a change."
"I'm not in the typing pool, but I guess I'm not really an executive secretary either."
He laughed, harder than her statement called for, and she knew that he was going to proposition her before very long. And why not? Wasn't that why she was there?
"My name is Andy," he said. "What's yours?"
In the apartment, later, when they were both naked, before they had made love, when they were just still exploring each other, he said, "You have a very beautiful body."
She didn't say anything.
"I guess you're used to having men tell you that."
"No one ever gets used to compliments," she said.
"No, I'm serious."
"A woman who has a good figure knows it," she said. "Mirrors don't lie, and besides, you have to work so hard to get and keep a figure that you certainly don't get a chance to be in doubt about it."
He smiled and trailed his finger down over her breasts and then her belly. He stopped at the edge of the black triangle of pubic hair and traced across the top of it, lightly, as if he were half expecting her to stop him there.
"How many men have you done this with?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Sure you know," he said. "No one loses track of the number of people he sleeps with, except maybe a prostitute. If it's not many, you remember, and if it's a lot, you keep track because in a way you're playing a kind of game. Either way, you don't forget."
"Well then, maybe it's none of your business."
"No," he agreed lightly, "it's none of my business. You're right. I just would like to know."
"Why?"
"Because it arouses me to think of a woman I'm with having been with other men."
"Does it? Why?"
He shrugged. "I don't know why."
She reached down to take hold of his penis. It was only half erect, but it was large and heavy in her hand. "Are you married?" she said.
"Now it's my turn to ask why. You didn't even ask my last name before letting me come up here, so obviously you're not falling in love with me at first sight or anything like that. So why should you care whether I'm married?"
"I don't," she said. "I just wondered how a married man would get along with that kind of taste."
"You mean wanting to hear about you and other men."
"Yes."
His hand moved down between her legs and she could feel him probing gently at her, just with the tip of his finger, spreading the lips apart.
"I was married," he said.
"But your wife hadn't been with any other men?"
"For a long time she said she hadn't, but then she told me she had. Three before me."
"That's not many."
"I know," he said. "I didn't care. But I used to like to have her tell me about being with them."
"I don't think I'd like that, if I had a husband."
"No, my wife didn't either."
"What happened then?"
Shrugging, he said, "She divorced me. I guess she tells her new husband all about how queer I was."
"Queer?"
"Sure. Some man at a cocktail party who fancied himself a lay psychologist told her that I was a latent homosexual and that's why I wanted to hear about her with other men. He said it was because I really wanted to be screwed by those men myself."
"Is that true?"
"What, that he said that?"
"No, that you really want that."
"I don't know. I can say I've never had anything to do with another man and I don't think I've ever seriously wanted to, though I've had some erotic fancies that were something . . . "
"What about?"
His rod was coming up harder in her hand now and she knew he was beginning to feel the excitement of talking.
"Oh, about being a woman, about what it was like to be a woman."
"Do you want to be a woman?"
"No, I don't think I'd like it. In business and all, I'm too aggressive to be a good woman, but sometimes I've had daydreams about what it would be like to be a beautiful woman."
"It's fun," she said. She began to work softly at his tool, moving the skin back and forth. He hadn't been circumcized. She didn't think she had ever been with a man before who hadn't been, and he felt bulky in her hand and the skin was looser than on most.
"I mean, oh, I don't know, I'd just like to know what it feels like to be a woman and have a man going in you."
"I imagine the sensation is about the same for me and for you."
"How many men have you had in you?"
"Several."
"How many?"
"I don't know exactly. I really don't."
She felt him wince then, gasping, and she knew how excited he was getting because his penis was leaking semen at the tip of it.
"So many you can't remember?" he said, trying to keep his voice light, as if he were unconcerned.
"So many I haven't bothered counting them."
"More than ten?"
"Yes."
"More than twenty."
"Yes."
"My God, how many?"
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe thirty, thirty-five. I don't know."
His finger went deep into her then, probing at her, and his rod leaping in her hand let her know that he was almost to the coming point, so she let him go.
"Eat me now," she said.
"What?"
"Get down and eat me," she said. "I want you to lick me. I need it. I come best of all that way." He moaned hoarsely in his throat and twisted around to reach her. He buried his face against her pussy, stabbing at her with his tongue, and his excitement captured her so that her first orgasm exploded. She arched up against him, against the lapping of his tongue, so that she was spread open against him.
She knew how much he was enjoying it. He loved it. His tool was rock hard, as hard as any she had ever felt, and she just hoped he wouldn't come too soon, so that she wouldn't be able to get hers. But he didn't, because he stopped licking at her then and raised up to say, "I want to screw you now."
She tried to say, yes, yes, but the words wouldn't come. Her throat was dry with excitement now and all she could do was nod. When he shivered and moved to come up above her, he held there for a moment and she saw his tool. She wanted to eat him too, but she didn't want to wait for that. She wanted him deep down in her pussy, so she threw her legs apart.
He came down into her in one plunging motion. She took him, all, gathering him in, and then he stopped for a moment, panting, waiting to let the first excitement subside, so that he wouldn't come too quickly. She waited with him for a few seconds, and then she threw her legs around his back, locking him into her.
He started moving then, in and out, faster and faster. His penis was so hard that it felt larger than she really knew it was. It was so hard that she could feel every inch of it in her, scraping the walls of her pussy, almost raspy in its solidity, and her orgasms started immediately, one after another, increasing in intensity until she couldn't keep from shrieking with the pleasure of them.
He was moving like a machine now, rhythmically, without slowing. She remembered (dimly, in her pleasure) having worried that he wouldn't be able to keep from coming too quickly. But now she thought he would never finish. Now she thought this was as close as she would ever come to being screwed forever.
On and on, he went, like a plunging stallion. Harder and her legs trembled against him with the orgasms that had almost stopped now, because her strength was fading, because she didn't know how much longer she could keep from losing consciousness with it.
Then, suddenly, without warning, he groaned and slumped against her. She felt his rod leaping in her, the spasms pouring hot semen into her enflamed pussy, and she would have liked to move under him, to increase his pleasure because of the pleasure he had given her. But there was nothing left in her, no strength, no energy, nothing but the spreading lethargy that made her feel warm and tired all over.
CHAPTER FOUR...
Skyridge, Ohio, wasn't much of a town, as far as size went, but it was pretty. It was almost a perfect example of the potential in small American towns. Of course, she had come in May, which was one of the prettiest months of the year anywhere, and the town probably wasn't so heart-stoppingly pretty when gray February set in, but what town was? Now, at least, the trees were all leafed out and the air smelled fresh and clean and somehow she felt that she was a million miles from New York.
Go back to Iowa and work for the newspaper, the agent had told her. Well, maybe not Iowa, and maybe she wasn't exactly going back somewhere. She hadn't ever been to Skyridge, Ohio; she had just answered an ad from there that ran in Editor & Publisher, asking for a bright young woman reporter. But maybe, in principle, the agent had been right. Maybe she would be happy here.
Her editor's name was Tod Brower. He was both editor and publisher of the paper, and when she first spoke to him on the telephone, she couldn't help thinking that he was probably like that character on Peyton Place, running a small-town paper, butting into everybody's business, officious, much too serious about himself.
As it happened, though, he wasn't like that at all. He was an older man, about fifty or fifty-five, and he had originally worked for the old New York Journal American and then had bought this small paper after suffering a slight heart attack. "I didn't want to die in the city room," he told her. "I wanted at least a taste of being my own man."
Then he laughed when Wanda said, "What does it taste like to be your own man?"
She found a room, really an efficiency apartment, in a house on the west side of town. The landlord lived next door, in another house. Wanda was about the eighth tenant to move into the converted house that was now a series of non-connecting rooms and apartments. It didn't cost much, only forty-five dollars per month, and it was clean and comfortable. She had to take care of her own linens, but she didn't mind that. Actually, she thought she would have disliked having someone else prowling around her room when she wasn't there.
Learning to write newspaper style was harder than she had expected it would be. Tod Brower wasn't the hardest man in the world to get along with, but he judged writing by the big-city standards he had lived with all his life.
On seeing her first piece of copy, which was a report on the opening of the Red Cross fund drive for that year, he handed it back to her and said, "I wouldn't give that much space to the second coming of Christ. Cut it to about four paragraphs and leave out all the garbage."
She felt a flush of anger at his words, but he had turned and gone back out to the room where the typesetter was working. Then, as she thought about it, she didn't know what she would have said to him even if he hadn't turned away so quickly. He was right. The story wasn't worth the two pages she had given it.
God, she thought that day, what have I done, coming out here to the middle of nowhere to write four paragraphs about the Red Cross?
Living across the hall from her, she saw her second day in town, was a young man, younger than she, who was startlingly handsome. She almost bumped into him that morning when she came out her door at precisely the instant he came out of his.
They smiled and muttered apologies and then went on their way.
One evening, however, about a week later, she saw him again. They came into the house together, after meeting on the sidewalk in front. At first he didn't say anything but then, as if he had thought he had to say something just to be polite, he asked her how she liked living there.
She said it wasn't bad, but then it wasn't spectacular either.
He laughed as if she had said something witty.
Then he said, "I understand you work at the paper."
"Yes. How did you know?"
"Easy-there are no secrets in a small town. Besides, I saw your name in the paper. What do you call that, a byline?"
"Yes."
"So I thought to myself, gee, here I know a real reporter, just like Steve Wilson of the
Illustrated Press."
"Or more like Lorelei... whatever her last name was."
"I've forgotten too."
They laughed again about that.
Upstairs, he asked her if she would like to come into his apartment for a drink. She hesitated a moment, and then she thought, my God, what has small town living done to me already? I'm acting like a schoolgirl. "Sure," she said, "I'd like to."
He had a two-room apartment, with a separate kitchen that really made it three rooms, and she didn't need but one glance to tell that his furniture didn't come with the place. It was expensive, very expensive, and the placement of it, with the complementing pictures showed that he (or whoever had fixed it) had excellent taste.
Her face apparently showed her surprise, because he smiled and said, "Do you like my place?"
"Oh yes," she said. "It's so nice."
"Comfortable."
She walked over to sit down on the couch. As he fixed drinks, she watched him carefully. She had been right in her first evaluation of him; he was younger than she. Perhaps he was twenty-five, no more. But there was a sureness about him, a grace, that made him seem more mature than his years would have warranted.
Or was that a false impression created by the obvious fact that he had some money to spend on furniture?
And if he had this kind of money, why was he living in a small, converted apartment in a remodeled house? Why not in a better, newer place?
He brought the glasses over and put one down in front of her. "I hope you like scotch," he said. "I only drink scotch and that's all I have, because I wasn't expecting visitors."
She picked up the glass and sipped at it. "Scotch is fine," she said then.
He didn't sit on the couch beside her. He sat in the big chair across the coffee table from her, his legs crossed, smiling calmly at her as she sipped her drink.
In truth, she felt a bit disconcerted by his calmness. A twenty-five-year-old man, finding a woman like her in his room unexpectedly, ought to be a bit more excited than he was. "What do you do?" she said. He smiled. 'The usual things."
"I mean, what kind of work."
"I'm a salesman."
"For whom?"
"Many companies. I guess you'd call me a representative."
She nodded. She thought he was saying that he didn't work much. That was all right. Perhaps he was born rich and just worked to have something to do.
Only why would a man in that position locate in a town like this and avoid a discussion of his employment? Because that's what this man was obviously doing.
"You know a weird thing," he just said. "You haven't even asked me my name."
She jerked nervously, as if he had interrupted her train of thought, and then she laughed.
"You're right," she said. "You said you know my name, but I didn't even think to ask yours."
"Eric Wayne," he said.
"How do you do?" She laughed. She didn't believe that was his real name. He looked vaguely Italian or even Middle Eastern, certainly not like his name would be Eric Wayne. But what did that prove? A lot of people over the years acquired names that didn't fit with their ethnic backgrounds. Through marriage, or because a grandfather had been embarrassed by his name during the days when he was trying to be a one hundred percent American.
But still, there was something. This man just didn't ring true.
Only why, she wondered, was she so interested?
And then she thought, because I'm going to bed with him very shortly and I hate going to bed with mysteries.
She hadn't had any sex since being with the man who enjoyed hearing about other men, and that was almost a month. She hadn't been without sex for a month in years and the strain was beginning to make her nervous. Before, she would have laughed at the idea that she couldn't go without sex if she wanted to, but she was beginning to feel jittery, so much so that the night before she had seriously considered masturbation, and that was something she considered one step under the idea of screwing a big dog.
This man, undoubtedly, excited her. Perhaps that was only because she had been without sex for so long, but she didn't think so. It was his calmness, his assurance.
He said, "I haven't offered you a cigarette. Do you smoke."
"No."
"I don't either," he said. "I used to, but I quit. It was making me old before my time." He laughed. "But I have some if you would like one."
"No, thank you. that's one vice I never started."
He nodded. "There are plenty of others that require good conditioning. Smoking just slows you down."
She could feel a weakness coming over her legs. She knew that if he didn't soon make a play for her, she was going to have to make one for him.
And then he said, "You're not married, or anything, are you?"
"No. Why?"
He shrugged. "I just wanted to make sure you're unattached."
"Completely. Why."
"No reason."
She tried to laugh, but her voice was shaky. "You must have had a reason for wanting to know whether I was married."
He smiled at her and his dark eyes seemed to pierce her. She knew that he was totally aware of her nervous state and that he was playing with her now. Strangely, that didn't make her angry. She didn't care what he did to her, as long as it finished by her being on her back, naked with him.
"Of course," he said. "You're obviously the most beautiful woman within five hundred miles and you just happened to move in across the hall from me. A man would have to be insane not to hope you're available . . . "
"Available?"
". . . for friendship," he finished, smiling sardonically.
"What else would I be but available, living alone in a place like this?"
"Oh, perhaps newly . . . and temporarily . . . separated from a beloved husband. Perhaps the back-street lover of a rich man whose wife won't give him a divorce. There are all sorts of possibilities for your life that would preclude me."
"Where did you go to college?" she said suddenly.
"What?"
"Where did you go to school?"
"Why? Do you want references from my old fraternity?"
She laughed. "No, but you speak with a vocabulary . . . you obviously went to college and I just wondered where."
"New Haven."
"Yale?"
"Yes. I guess I give myself away when I say New Haven instead of Yale. If I'm vain about anything in the world, I guess it's Yale. I'm proud of having gone there."
"You should be. It's a good school."
He sipped at his drink and looked at her. "There are many good schools. I'm reflecting a social vanity, not an educational one. I like to think of myself as a Yale man because that makes me superior to other people socially."
She was a bit surprised at that. "I suppose it does," she said. "But I don't think . . . "
She stopped and he watched her for a moment and then he said, "You don't think what?"
"I don't think many people consider things like social superiority these days."
He laughed. "Is that really what you think?"
"Yes. I mean, we're living in a time of equality, aren't we? At least, we pretend to be."
"Ah," he said softly, "there's the difference-in what we really think and are and what we pretend to think and really are. That's a vast difference."
"Well then, if you're concerned about things like that, why do you choose to live here?"
"Why not?" he said.
"So far from the things you think are important."
"Not so far. Airplanes move quickly. And things are peaceful here. I like coming here."
"Yes," she said. "Things are peaceful here."
He was watching her intently and she suddenly realized, with shock, that he wasn't paying any attention to the conversation at all. He was just watching her reaction to him. He was playing her the way he would play a musical instrument, and now, suddenly, she knew that he was ready to move.
He said, "Come here."
"What?"
"Come here."
She stood up and walked over to him. He put his hands on her waist and held her for a few seconds. Then he moved his hands up over her rib cage, to cup her breasts.
She didn't move, but she said, "What do you think you're doing?"
He didn't answer her.
His hands tightened on her breasts. She could hardly breathe because of the desire that was crushing her. She knew her nipples were erect. She could feel the wetness in her pussy, between her legs.
"Please," she said. "Please what."
"Don't."
He laughed, harshly, down in his throat. "You don't mean that," he said. "You don't want me to stop."
He dropped one of his hands down to slip under her skirt. It moved up her leg to cup her. She was able to feel the warmth of his hand through the thin nylon of her panties.
"You're wet," he said. "I can feel you."
"All right."
"You want me to take you to bed, don't you?" She didn't say anything. "Don't you?"
"Yes," she said. "All right. I want you to."
He laughed again. "I knew you would."
She felt a sudden sweep of anger, but she couldn't show it, because her desire was stronger than her anger could possibly be just now. She had to have him.
"Kneel down here," he said.
She dropped obediently to the floor, between his legs. He stroked gently at her hair.
"Unzip me," he said.
She did. Then she reached in. His penis was hard already, pressing against the cloth of his shorts. She found the flap that let her in and then he was out, erect, bare and hard in her hand.
"Suck me," he said. His voice was low, controlled, but when she glanced up at him, there were beads of sweat across his forehead.
She wondered what he would do now if she were to refuse him. Now, when he was so excited. Maybe he would get violent. Maybe he would rape her.
She felt weak, shaky.
"Suck me," he said again.
She bent down to take his rod. She liked it. She wanted this to happen. She could feel him swelling in her mouth, but she knew he wasn't going to come yet. He was too controlled for that. He wouldn't want that to happen.
"Stop," he said.
She let him pop out of her mouth. She looked up at him expectantly. His tool was throbbing when she touched it with her hand.
"Take off your clothes," he said. "I want to see you naked."
She stood up and began to undress. Something like this had never happened to her before. She was just taking orders from him as if he were her master or something instead of just a young man, just another young man after all the others. Why was she wounded like this? Why was she so incapable of resisting?
But, of course, she didn't want to resist. She wanted it to happen. She wanted him to lay her down naked, to screw her. She wanted him to take her roughly, to dominate her, to control her.
Why?
She hadn't ever wanted that before.
Her panties slithered to the floor at her feet and she stood there naked in front of him. There were goose pimples on her breasts, but she wasn't cold. She was just afraid.
Of what?
He stood up then, his rock-hard, rigid penis standing up in front of him.
"Let's go in the bedroom," she whispered. "I like it better there."
He nodded, but he didn't say anything. He just took her hand and led her over into the other room.
When they were there, she stood at the side of the bed looking at him. She wished he would kiss her. Never in her entire life had a man attempted to make love to her without kissing her first.
But then, of course, she thought, he isn't making love to me. He's just preparing to screw me. There isn't any rule that says a man should have to kiss a woman he's going to screw.
She looked at him. There was something implacable in his face, something infinitely, frighteningly cruel. In all her life she had never seen a look like that on a man's face.
She shivered.
Then he took hold of her shoulders and shoved her back onto the bed. She lay there, her legs spread, her sex open to his gaze, and he stood beside the bed, staring at her as he undressed.
When he was naked, his penis looked larger. Still, it wasn't the largest she had ever seen, but it looked harder, more rigid and inflexible than any before. It frightened her some, and she wanted to laugh at feeling that way, but she couldn't. She was frightened even though she knew it was silly. How much damage can a hard penis do? She knew that. But still, she was afraid.
He came over her then and plunged down into her. He began moving immediately, hard, without slowing, even, rhythmically, and she could feel her orgasms starting immediately.
She looked up at him and his face was expressionless. He was slamming in and out of her without any sort of emotion. Either that, she thought, or he was lost in his own sensations to the extent of being perfectly oblivious to her presence.
Then she couldn't think about him any more because her own sensations were increasing in intensity. She couldn't keep her breaking nerves from shattering, and then she screamed in ecstasy and raked her nails across his back.
Her thighs quivered with the feeling he was giving her. But still his rock-hard penis kept slamming in and out of her.
Exhausted, they lay together in the bed. Now that it was over for the moment, his face had lost that hard, cruel look. She lay on her side, beside him, her hand lying softly on his belly, her fingers trailing down into the wild growth of pubic hair above his softened sex.
"You'd scare any woman," she said.
"Scare? Why?" he said.
"There's something so violent about you."
He was silent for a long moment and then he laughed softly down in his throat. "Women are all born poets," he said.
"Why do you say that?"
"Why did you say something about me being violent? I'm not really. I'm a peaceful man."
She smiled, not at him but at the secret something that lives inside a sexually sated woman. "No," she said. "You're not a peaceful man. I don't know what you are, but I'm sure you're not peaceful."
He laughed again, harshly, and then he said, "I'll never understand women."
"I hope not. No man should understand women."
Then he lay back flat and covered his eyes with his arm. She let her hand move down to cup his genitals and when she touched him there, she felt his perns move lazily against her hand, like a snake being roused from its sun-time nap.
"Why haven't you kissed me?" she said.
He didn't answer her. She thought he hadn't heard her because she had spoken so softly. "Why haven't you kissed me?" she said again.
"I never kiss anyone," he said.
"No?"
"I just don't."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. I just don't like to kiss. It doesn't serve any purpose anyway."
"But women like to be kissed."
"I'm sorry," he said. "You'll just have to do without it for now."
"For now?"
"Yes," he said, "for now." She smiled. "You mean you might kiss me later, if I'm a good girl."
"Maybe," he said.
She raised up over him and began to massage him. She could feel it stiffening in her hand. His eyes were half closed with pleasure as he let her work on him.
Then she bent down to take him into her mouth there. She felt his penis jerk with tension as her lips touched him and then it swelled up hard in her mouth again.
And then she didn't think about anything but the sensation of him moving against her lips and tongue, hardening in her mouth, swelling, so that it felt like a fat piece of velvet. No, not like velvet. like something incredibly warm, with a life of its own.
She felt his fingers probing at her bottom, at her pussy and in back, around her anus. She felt her orgasms starting, and she knew he wasn't going to pull out of her mouth. She knew he was going to pump himself down her throat, and she didn't care.
Tod Brower said, "Your writing is improving a lot, Wanda. You're going to be a real newspaperwoman before long."
She felt faintly irritated at the idea that she hadn't been able to write well before, but then that feeling faded away. After all, he was paying her a compliment, and maybe he was right. There really was a great deal of difference between newspaper writing and any other kind of writing.
They were sitting in his office. She felt relaxed, at ease. The sun was warm where it slanted across her legs and the air was misty blue with the smoke from Tod Brower's cigar.
He said, "How would you like to work on something more substantial than what you've been doing?"
"I'd like that."
"Without even asking me what it is."
"It has to be better than Red Cross and Boy Scouts."
"More dangerous, perhaps."
"Dangerous?" She laughed. "How dangerous can anything be out here?"
"Maybe very dangerous."
She wanted to laugh again, but his voice was so serious that she couldn't. She leaned forward to look at him more closely. Then she said, "I don't think I know what you're talking about, do I?"
"No."
"Well then, why don't you tell me."
"How much do you know about this community."
"Not much."
"How much do you know about the Mafia."
"The Mafia?" She laughed again. "Come on now."
"How much?"
"What I read in Life Magazine," she said.
"I have reason to think there's a Mafia operation going on around here."
"What kind of operation?"
"Gambling . . . white slavery . . . "
This time she laughed out loud. "White slavery? Now I know you're putting me on. There's no such thing as white slavery, and for all I know there's no such thing as the Mafia."
"Believe me," he said. "There is."
"Well, all right," she said. "Assuming you're right, what is it you want me to do."
"I want you to do some investigative reporting."
"About what?"
"What we've been talking about."
"You mean you want me to do a story on the Mafia infiltration into this area."
"Yes."
She laughed. "No thanks."
He looked surprised. "What."
"I don't want any part of it."
"Why not?"
"In the first place, I don't believe it. I mean, I don't think there is any Mafia infiltration. In the second place, if I'm wrong and there is, then I don't want to be mixed up in it."
"I'm not asking you to get mixed up in it."
"Don't you read Life Magazine?"
"Of course."
"If Life is correct, the Mafia kills people."
"Not newspaper people."
This time she didn't laugh. "What are we, The New York Times'! What do I know about investigative reporting, as you call it? And if I uncovered something, what makes you think this so-called Mafia wouldn't simply kill me? Why shouldn't they? Who am I? Kill a big-time reporter, you might turn on a congressional investigation. Kill me, you get nothing but a two-bit investigation by the Forrest County sheriffs department, and I don't think they could find their way home without a roadmap."
"I think you could do it," Tod Brower said.
"I'm bloody sure I'm not going to try," she said. "I wasn't cut out for that kind of stuff. I'm no sob sister and I'm sure no reform-crazy reporter who thinks it's up to her to save the world."
He sighed. "All right," he said.
"And why would you want to take this on?" she said. "What does it mean to you?"
"What does the Mafia mean?"
"Oh, no," she said. "I'm willing to admit that any decent citizen has a stake in the battle against organized crime." She knew her voice sounded mocking, as if she were imitating a newsreel narrator, but she didn't care. "What I want to know is, why here? Why with this little paper? Why you? What are you going to gain."
"I don't know," he said.
Later, she thought maybe she had really hurt him somehow, that she had deprived him of something important. But if so, that was just too bad. If he couldn't live on a small paper, if he still had the instincts of a big-paper man, and if he wanted to get a reputation, let him do it all by himself. She didn't want in.
Still later, though, she wondered if maybe she hadn't passed up the thing she was searching, the commitment that would have lent meaning to her life. But when she thought that, she finished by laughing at herself. That wasn't her thing. Not social reform. Not battle against crime. She wasn't any Elliot Ness.
So then what?
She started seeing Eric Wayne regularly after that. Her job was going along well. She noticed that Tod Brower was paying much less attention to her now. Perhaps it was because he thought she didn't need much supervision anymore, perhaps because he was disappointed in her for not agreeing to the Mafia assignment. That was the way she thought about it, as the Mafia assignment, and somehow it always made her smile to say it.
She wondered if she were falling in love with Eric Wayne. Only how could she fall in love with a man who still hadn't kissed her?
CHAPTER FIVE...
Eric Wayne said, "What would you like to do this evening?"
She was some surprised by that. It was the first time that he had ever come to pick her up without simply announcing their plans for the evening. And she wondered if there was any significance to the fact that this time he had asked her for an idea. Then she wanted to laugh at the thought, the wild kind of 'What did he mean by that?' thinking that she had never engaged in before.
"Oh, I don't care," she said. "Anything you'd like."
He shrugged and opened the car door for her. "I didn't plan anything for tonight," he said. "I just thought maybe you'd like to go for a drive."
"Yes."
She got in and he shut the door. When he came around to the side, he got in. Then he looked at her and said, "If you'd rather do anything else, just say so."
"No," she said, smiling. She reached over and put her hand on his knee. "I'd love to just take a ride."
The road block stopped them without warning. Later, she thought she should have been suspicious of the blocked roadway, but she wasn't. She was sitting closely beside Eric and she didn't pay much attention, even when he said, "I wonder what that is."
They stopped and a man came alongside the car and shined a flashlight in the car.
"What's going on?" Eric said.
"Don't ask questions," the man said. "Just get out."
They both climbed out of the car. Wanda felt vaguely frightened, but not overly so. She thought they were policemen who had stopped them. Then she saw that the men were all wearing business suits and that they were driving two ordinary cars, without any police marking.
"What's going on here?" she said then.
Eric turned and looked at her. He was smiling. "I think they just want to ask us some questions," he said.
One of the men who had been waiting there on the road got into Eric's car and started backing it away.
"Hey," Wanda said, "what's that man doing?"
Eric came over and took her by the arm. "They want us to go into town with them," he said. "It's all right."
"They don't look like policemen," she said.
"Oh, yes, they are, I'm sure. I checked their credentials."
He seemed so calm, so sure, that she felt her fear drain away when he took her arm and led her to the waiting car. The other men followed after them. Two of them got into the car with her and Eric. The others got into the other car.
No one said anything. But the driver of the car, a big man with black curly hair, started the engine and moved away so quickly that the tires spurted gravel behind them.
"What's this all about?" she said.
No one looked at her, but one of the men in the front seat turned and said, "You keep her quiet."
Eric nodded, but he didn't say anything to her. She touched his arm, suddenly afraid again. "Eric . . . " she said.
He took her hand and squeezed it, but he remained silent.
They came back into town, at the south end, and the driver stopped the car under a streetlight. He looked back over his shoulder at Eric. "You," he said. "Out."
"No," Wanda said.
Eric didn't move and the other man in the front seat pulled out a gun from inside his pocket. He pointed it at Eric's head. "Now," he said. "Unless you'd like some more ventilation in your face."
Eric opened the door and started to get out. Wanda caught his arm and held him. "Please," she said. "Don't leave me."
"What can I do?" he said. "They'll kill me."
"No, please don't leave me."
"Go on, buddy," the man with the gun said. "Don't be a dead hero. It won't get you nothing."
Eric got out and the other man that had been in the back seat reached over past Wanda and pulled the door shut. "Just keep quiet," he said to Wanda.
She wanted to scream or cry. In all her life she had never been so frightened. She didn't know what they were going to do to her, but she was sure they would rape her. What else would they want her for?
"Please let me go," she said. "I'll pay you anything you want."
"You haven't got enough money," the man driving said. He didn't look back at her as he talked.
"What are you going to do to me?" she said.
No one said anything. She started to reach for the door. She could jump out even if the car was moving. There were worse things than breaking a leg jumping from a car, and once she was out she didn't think they would take a chance on stopping to pick her up.
Besides, though, by this time Eric must have the police looking for them. Surely he headed for the nearest house to report her kidnapping.
The man beside her caught her arm and held her. She thought his hands were the strongest she had ever felt. "Don't try it," he said. "You can't get away."
"Please . . . " she said.
"Take it easy," the man in front said. "There are worse things than getting screwed."
They stopped at a farmhouse on the far side of town. She thought now that they were going to kill her. They wouldn't be so quick to let her see then-faces or where they had taken her if they intended to let her go afterwards.
Afterwards.
It was strange, she thought, how quickly she had adjusted to the idea that she was going to be gang-raped. Now all she wanted to do was stay alive. As the man said, she thought, trying to feel safe in her joke, it doesn't hurt to get screwed. If I don't fight, they won't have any reason to hurt me.
And once I'm gone, it's just another bad dream.
Except that they weren't acting like men who were afraid she would be able to identify them afterwards.
Inside the house, she slumped down on a battered couch in the living room. The men (there were five of them altogether) sat around the room, watching her.
She waited. She didn't think there would be any reason to beg them for anything because she knew they wouldn't give her anything. But maybe, she thought, just maybe, if I keep my head and watch for a chance. . . .
One of the men said, "What time's the car come by?"
"About an hour."
One of the men who had been in the other car said, "What did the boss say about her?"
"Say about her?" one of the other men said. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, are we supposed to leave her alone or what?"
The other man shrugged. "He didn't say. He just said to arrange to get her down to Steubenville."
"Well then, why can't we have some fun with her while we're waiting?"
"You can if you want to. I don't like whores much."
One of the other men laughed. "She's not a whore yet."
"Yet," she said. "What do you mean, yet?"
They all laughed together. "She's really got a surprise coming, don't she?" one of them said.
"She thinks she's going to take a vacation maybe."
The man who had suggested having some fun with her said, "How about it."
"How about what?"
"Let's strip her down and see what she's like."
"Now she's getting the idea," one of the men said when she tried to press further back into the couch.
It's going to happen, she thought. They're going to do it to me. I don't want it . . . please don't let it happen to me . . . I don't want them to rape me, not all of them . . .
"Please," she said.
They laughed again.
They made her stand up and undress for them. She wanted to refuse, but she couldn't. She was afraid, terribly afraid, and she could see the savagery in their eyes. She knew they would hurt her if she tried to fight them. God knows what they would do to her if she didn't give them what they wanted from her.
When she was naked, they stood around her, watching her, making lewd, obscene comments about her. Then one of them said, "I get to go first."
"No . . . " she said.
But no one paid any attention to her. There, in front of her, the man who had spoken opened his clothes and she saw his thick, swollen penis staring out at her.
One of the other men said, "Is that all you got?"
"You show what you got when your turn comes," the man said. He reached out and grabbed her by the breasts. She tried to back away then, afraid, but the man pulled her down to the floor. When she fell, her legs parted. She tried to close them, but the man was between them, suddenly, jabbing at her, and then she felt him slipping into her.
Oh my God, she thought, I'm being raped. He's raping me.
And she heard her own voice, thin, like a little girl, saying, "Please don't, please don't. . . "
She heard them laughing at her, but she couldn't help it. The man was plowing into her as hard as he could and it hurt her because she wasn't lubricated there as she would have been normally. She was wetting now, despite herself, but it still wasn't like it usually was and she wanted to cry out with the pain.
But she couldn't stop saying, "Please don't, please don't!"
Then the man came, his semen splashing into her. She was wet then, his semen oozing out of her, and when he pulled back and out of her, she saw his softened penis, like a dripping sausage in front of him.
Another man came down onto her then, hard, his tool slamming into her before she could even catch her breath. Amazingly, she could feel desire building in her just from the continuous assault on her vagina. Her nerves were jangling. Her clitoris was being slammed over and over. How could she not react?
The man came and another took his place. She couldn't even see his face. She knew he was dark, heavy, and that he needed a shave, but there wasn't anything personal about him. He was just another slamming body.
In and out of her. Her pussy was sore now from the rape, but she had started coming too and it was hard not to show that. And she was determined not to show that. She didn't want them to know that they were making her come. That would have been the supreme insult, for them to know that she couldn't control herself better than that.
She didn't even hear the fourth man until he repeated himself. "Turn over."
"What?"
"Turn over," he said. "I'm not taking messy fourths for no woman."
She didn't understand and she just stared up at him stupidly until he reached down and caught her by the hips and flipped her over. Then, stunningly, he came down onto her, penetrating her anus with one stab.
She shrieked in shock and pain, but he kept pressing in on her, deeper and deeper, tearing her open with the size of him, until she couldn't control it any more and she sobbed in agony and humiliation as he thrust on down into her.
Then he screwed her that way, exactly as if he were in her vagina. He moved in and out, his hands on her hips for balance as he thrust at her, sliding in and out of her while she cried beneath him.
She didn't know how many seconds he was out of her before she realized that he was gone. She could feel the semen seeping out of her bottom, though, and there was a burning sensation there that she didn't think she would ever lose.
She rolled over and sat up. She thought that was all of them.
"Come here."
She looked over and saw the fifth man sitting on the couch. He had his pants still on, but they were open, so that his rod was standing up.
"No," she said.
"You might as well get broken in right," the man said. "I won't."
When she said that, someone kicked her hard from the back, flush on her bottom, and she fell forward onto her face. She raised up on her hands and knees and someone kicked her again, this time with the point of his shoe. She cried out in pain, but she kept her balance.
"You will," someone said. "It's not going to be healthy if you ever say you won't again."
She crawled on her hands and knees then, over to the man on the couch, and she looked up at him pleadingly. She wanted him to let her go. She willed it harder than she had ever wished for anything.
But he said, "Don't just squat there-get to sucking on it. And rub my balls at the same time. I like it that way."
"You like it any way," one of the men said, laughing. "I think you must be half queer the way you like it that way."
The man didn't appear to hear the one who was taunting him. He was staring at Wanda's face. "Now," he said. "Do it."
She bent down and took his penis into her mouth. What could she do? She had to do it. And she thought she was going to be better off if she did it as well as she could. What could she lose now? If she satisfied him, maybe they'd let her go then.
He groaned with the pleasure of it when she cupped his balls in her hand and squeezed them gently as she sucked. She hoped he would stop her before he came. Maybe he would want to come in her pussy instead-she hoped so.
But he didn't. And then he was exploding into her mouth. She tried to pull back then, but he caught her head and held her so that she had to keep swallowing as the liquid poured down her throat.
She couldn't remember later how many times all together that they had her. She knew they all went at least one other time and she knew that some of them went more than that. Once, there was one in her bottom while she was sucking another. She thought her bottom would never stop burning and she knew that she would never get the taste of semen out of her mouth.
It was late, very late, maybe almost dawn (she had completely lost track of time) when they finally let her get dressed because the car they had been waiting for finally had arrived. She felt drunk, only half conscious, and she could hardly walk without support when they took her out of the farmhouse and loaded her into the back seat of the car.
There were two men in the car, waiting, and when they saw her they said, "You guys sure had your fun with her, didn't you?"
"Sure, why not?" one of the men said. "What'd it hurt?"
"You could have saved us some," the one driving the new car said. He laughed and that made him look very young.
"You can't wear it out."
"Maybe not," the other man laughed, "but you can sure make it messy."
They all laughed at that. She was shoved into the back seat of the car and she slumped into the corner, only half aware of what was going on around her. Then the car door slammed and they were moving. One of the men was driving; the other was in the back seat beside her.
Oh, my God, she thought, what's going to happen to me?
But even as she thought that, she dropped off to sleep, exhausted by her ordeal. She was terrified, but even terror can only exert so much pressure, and when fatigue passes terror . . . she slept.
CHAPTER SIX...
Later, she wondered how it was that she realized immediately they had taken her to a whorehouse. There weren't any other women in sight and as far as the way it looked was concerned, the house was just a plain, battered-looking frame building about a mile off the town's main street. But she knew. She knew instantly when they shook her awake and moved her from the car into the house. And after she knew, a cold, numbing fear crept through her.
She sat on the flowered, lumpy couch in the house's living room. She watched the men, but they were watching out the window, not paying any attention to her.
"Where is this place?" she said.
They didn't turn to look at her, but one of them said, "What difference does it make?"
"Tell me," she said, "I have a right to know."
This time they did turn to look. "You have a right?" one of them said. "Where do you get this right stuff?"
"The FBI will be looking for me," she said. "Kidnapping is a federal crime."
The two men looked at each other and then one of them laughed. "Holy Pete," he said, "listen to her telling us about the law."
"Please," she said, "tell me where I am at least."
"It don't make no difference," one of the men said. They turned to look out the window again.
"Well, if it doesn't make any difference, what can it hurt to tell me?" she said.
One of the men turned back again to face her. He walked over to stand beside her. She didn't think he looked as hard or as cruel as some of the other men. But then he said, "Why don't you just shut up? You're here and you're going to stay here until they decide to move you somewhere else."
"Who?" she asked, her voice rising wildly. "Who's they? Until who decides to move me?"
"Your alternative to shutting up is to get knocked out," the man said, "and that hurts, whatever you might have heard before about it."
"Please," she said, "please."
"Oh, for God's sake," the man said. "I can see you're going to be the most popular girl in the place."
The woman said, "We took all the other girls out for a while. It's not good for their morale to see a new girl while she's like this."
The two men nodded and put their hats on. They were going to leave, Wanda saw.
The woman was about fifty, with dyed red hair. She was still well built, with great, thrusting breasts, but her face looked beaten and weathered, older than her body.
There was a large, thin Negro with her, but he hadn't said anything since the two of them had arrived in a car. He had just lounged against the wall, by the door, watching.
The two men who had brought her went out then. Wanda sat up straighter on the couch when the door closed behind them. "I was kidnapped and brought here," she said.
The Negro laughed then, sharply, barking at her sardonically. Then he lapsed back into silence.
"We were all kidnapped here one way or the other," the red-haired woman said. "Why don't you just try to relax?"
"You can't keep me here," Wanda said. "You've got to let me go sometime."
"Not-likely," the woman said. "You're in the business for good now, so you might as well get used to it."
"No."
The woman smiled wearily. "My name's Chickie," she said. "You want a cup of coffee before the other girls come back?
She couldn't believe what was happening to her. She was locked in a bedroom now. Outside, she could hear people talking. Once in a while someone laughed. Once she thought of screaming, of begging for help, but she thought about the Negro and she didn't. When he locked her in, he had said that if she made any noise, he'd come back and hurt her.
Just like that. Make any noise and I'll come back and hurt you.
Then he closed the door, locked it, and was gone.
My God, she thought, my God.
At about midnight, the Negro unlocked the door and crooked a finger for her to come. She followed him out numbly. He led her back downstairs, into the living room.
Chickie, the red-haired woman, was there. So was another man, a big, powerful-looking man who was smoking a cigar. When he saw her with the Negro man he said, "This the one?"
"This is her," Chickie said.
The man looked at her curiously. "Good-looking broad," he said. "That why Pete sent her over, he couldn't make her or something?"
"No," Chickie said. "At least, he didn't say. He just sent word to pick her up."
"Weird," the man said. "There's plenty of chicks these days. Why snatch one. What's he think this is, Arabia or something?"
Chickie didn't say anything.
Wanda felt cold, afraid, humiliated. They were discussing her as if she were a side of beef or something, as if she couldn't hear them, as if she weren't even human.
"Pete send any instructions? He want her kept special or something?"
"No, he just said to put her to work."
The man shrugged. "Then why call me?"
"I thought you should see her."
"Why?"
"She's not exactly the usual type we get here."
"What's the usual type for a whore?" the man said. "Any broad can do the job."
"You know what I mean," Chickie said.
The man leaned forward and laid his cigar carefully into the ashtray on the table in front of him. "No," he said, "I don't have any idea what you're talking about."
"I don't know why he sent her here," Chickie said, "but she obviously don't belong in a whorehouse . . . "
"No." Wanda said, "-no, I don't."
"Who does?" the man said. "Maybe there's cops looking for her."
"There are," Wanda said. "You know there are."
The man shrugged. "I don't know about that," he said. "It doesn't make any difference to me anyway. How are the cops going to find her here?"
"How am I supposed to keep her here?" Chickie said. 'The minute I turn my back, she'll run like a scared rabbit."
"So don't turn your back."
"You can't watch anybody all day, every day. Nobody can do that."
"You'd better," the man said.
"I can't."
The man reached out and picked up his cigar again. He puffed slowly on it, his eyes piercing Wanda. She felt afraid of him, so afraid that she couldn't say anything. She could just stand there and let him look at her.
"What do you suggest?" the man said then, finally, to Chickie. He kept his cigar in his mouth and talked around it.
"Get her out of here," Chickie said. "I'm no housemother. I got no time for being a jailer or something."
"She stays."
"Listen . . . "
"She stays."
The man's voice was so cold, so final, that Chickie stopped talking. She leaned back on the couch and stared over at Wanda. Then she said, "I don't know. I just don't know what's going to happen out of this."
The man crushed out his cigar. "You sure he didn't say anything about keeping her special or anything."
"I'm sure."
"I'm going to take her upstairs."
"No," Wanda said.
The man spoke to her directly then. "What you think, that you're going to live in a whorehouse and not do any work? What do you think you're here for?"
"I'm not a whore."
"Oh yes, you are," the man said. "You may know better English than the other girls and maybe you look like you have more class than them, for now anyway, but you're a whore and you work in this whorehouse and if you think you can get away, you better think again." He laughed, grunting. "Now, let's go upstairs."
She wouldn't have gone with him. She kept telling herself that. If she could have avoided it, she would have. But he had taken hold of her arm and his grip was like a steel vise. She couldn't pull back. She couldn't do anything but let him take her up to the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.
In the bedroom, he said, 'Take off your clothes. I want you naked." Then he sat down on the bed to watch her.
Helplessly, she stripped off her clothes. She folded them as carefully as possible; they were all she had. Then she hung them on the back of the only chair in the room.
When she turned to look at the man, her eyes fell onto his lap and she saw the growing bulge there.
"You got quite a body," the man said. "You got to be the best here anyway. I mean, I like the way your tits stick out straight like that."
She wanted to cover herself, but she didn't. She just stood there stiffly in front of him, letting him look at her.
"Come here," he said.
She walked over to him and he reached up to cup her breasts. He lifted them carefully, as if he were weighing them. Then he let go of one of them and put his hand between her legs. She felt his fingers going up into her.
"Hey," he said, "you're all wet down here, like you really want me to do you."
She flushed, but she knew he was right. She hated him for her own desire (or whatever her emotion was) but she was keenly excited without knowing why exactly. Certainly she didn't really want sex, not normal sex, but there was something here, something that she couldn't understand or control.
He was working his finger in and out of her and she opened her legs further to give him readier access.
"I guess he knew what he was doing," the man said, almost to himself, speeding his finger. "Who?" she whispered. "Who?" he echoed.
"Who sent me here? Who arranged to have me kidnapped."
"The man."
"Who's that?"
"What difference does it make."
"I want to know."
"He runs this part of the country. He's the man."
"Runs it for who?"
He laughed and pulled his hand out from between her legs. "What do you want to know for? It's better for you not to know any more than you have to."
"I want to know."
He didn't answer her. He pushed her back gently, two or three steps, and while she stood there, naked and watching him, he unbuckled his pants and opened them. Then he pulled his shorts down, rising to get them down over his hips, so that his thick, thrusting penis was staring up.
"Go down on me," he said.
She didn't move.
"Come on," the man said. "I like it french style."
She still didn't move.
"My wife won't do that," the man said. "She-likes ordinary screwing fine, but she won't french me and a man needs that once in a while." He laughed and caught the thick stalk of his sex in his hand, so that he could point it directly at her.
"Come on," he said.
What else was there for her to do? She knelt down in front of him and when he arched up to meet her mouth, she opened her lips and took him into her mouth. He groaned some when her tongue touched him and then he leaned back, so that she could work up and down on him.
In spite of herself, she could feel her own desire growing. He wasn't especially large but he was thick and sturdy and hard, and she liked the way it felt in her mouth.
What am I becoming? she thought, angrily, then again, what's the matter with me?
He was panting now, waiting, and she knew he was close to coming. She held his bull shit in her hand, massaging them.
Then he was coming, hot, thick heavy spurts that filled her mouth almost faster than she could swallow.
She held him there in her mouth until he was through. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him.
He grinned down at her now. "You're going to make a fortune," he said. "You're the best at that I ever had."
When he was gone, she lay down, still naked, on her bed (her bed? why did she think of it as her bed?) and looked at the ceiling. She thought about what had happened to her and what he had said to her.
She was in a whorehouse. Willingly or not. And they expected her to stay there and work. But how could they force her to do that? How could they be sure that she wouldn't ask the first man who came to her for help? How could they know she wouldn't slip away in the middle of the night? How could they hope to hold her?
The door opened and the thin Negro man came in. She sat up and reached down instinctively for something to cover herself with, but there wasn't anything on the bed.
She said, "What do you want?"
He smiled, thinly, without showing his teeth. "What's a man usually want from a woman in a house like this?"
"No."
"Oh, yeah," he said, "that's part of my deal here, a hundred a week and all I can eat." He laughed. "Or whatever I want to do with it."
"No," she said, "I won't."
"Yes, you will." He came across the room, toward her, opening his belt as he walked. His pants dropped to the floor and he stepped out of them. He wasn't wearing shorts and she saw the size of his sex, suddenly, shockingly. It was the biggest one she had ever seen and it wasn't even completely hard yet.
He stood there, exposed, and unbuttoned his shirt and let it drop to the floor. Then he kicked off his shoes and climbed up onto the bed with her. She sat there stiffly and for just a moment she thought she was going to be sick when he touched her breasts and then ran his hand up between her legs, to penetrate her with a finger.
"I know that other man didn't screw you," the Negro said. "He never screws anybody. He just-likes to get sucked. So I know I'm the first since you been here. It's like you were a virgin."
She laughed bitterly when he said that.
"Touch me," he said.
She didn't move.
He took her hand in his and put it on his sex. She felt his huge organ jump tensely when she touched it. He let go of her hand and she tried to take it away, but he caught it and put it back again. She left it there then.
"Work on me," he said.
"What?"
"Jerk me some," he said. "That excites me."
She wanted to move away from him, but she couldn't. He was between her and the door. Behind her was only the wall.
She wrapped her fingers around his penis and worked it back and forth. It came up bigger and harder immediately, swelling in her hand like a balloon being inflated.
He had his finger in her, working it in and out of her as she worked on him. Then, suddenly, without warning, he came over her, forcing her legs open.
She said, "No," but then he was down inside her, forcing her open with that huge tool of his, forcing down into her, deeper and deeper, until he was further into her than anyone ever had been before, and she thought she would be split apart.
Then he was moving back and forth smoothly, forcefully, driving in and out of her with a relentless rhythm that she knew was going to make her come almost immediately.
Then she was coming, the first orgasm being ripped out of her with such explosive suddenness that she threw her legs and arms around the Negro, scratching at his flesh, crying out in her pleasure.
He didn't alter his movements any. He was in control of her now and she was coming one time after another, tortured by the monstrous weapon that was impaling her, and loving it at the same time that she hated herself for responding.
Over and over, she came. Until he exploded in her with liquid heat and his body slumped down on hers and she could feel the sweat that had built up on him.
After a long moment, he rose up above her and pulled out of her. His penis was shiny with moisture as it came out of her and she stared at it with morbid fascination, as she would have stared at a cobra that had just bitten her.
"You going to be popular here," the man said. "Not many girls work in cathouses really like it well enough to come when they're getting screwed. When the word gets around about you, men're going to be standing in line to pay for you."
"I didn't come," she said.
He laughed. "You tell that to somebody else," he said. "Me, I been with plenty of women in my time to know fake from real. You were coming like a machine gun, baby. You were taking every bit of my rod and eating it up."
He laughed again.
CHAPTER SEVEN...
Exhaustion caught up with her then and she slept, naked on the bed.
It was bright daylight outside the house when Chickie came in with coffee and woke her. Wanda sat up on the edge of the bed, bewildered at first, and then she took the coffee wordlessly and sipped at it.
Chickie said, "I let you sleep. I figured you were tired, what with everything."
"Yes."
"I think we'd better talk now."
"All right. Let's talk about getting me out of here."
"Listen, as far as I'm concerned, you could go whenever you want to. I don't believe in keeping a girl against her will."
"All right, I'll leave."
"I can't let you go, and if you try, I call Leon and he gets rough with you. You won't like that."
"Who's Leon."
"The Negro."
"What can he do to me?" Wanda said bitterly. "He already raped me."
"Being screwed doesn't hurt," Chickie said. "He knows some things that hurt plenty. I know."
"Did they kidnap you too?"
"No, I'm a professional whore." She laughed. "I made my own choices a long time ago. Now I'm getting too old to make much money hustling myself, so I opened this place. But you can't run a place without your friendly family giving you permission and taking a cut."
"You mean the Mafia?" She shivered. "I'm cold."
"I'll get you a robe."
"I don't have any clothes except what I was wearing and they're getting dirty and mussed up."
"Well get you clothes." Chickie went out of the room and came back with a blue robe. "Put this on," she said.
Behind her, out in the hallway, a dark-haired girl who looked Mexican or Puerto Rican went by the door. She looked in curiously as she passed, but she didn't say anything.
"That was Mary," Chickie said.
Wanda pulled the robe shut around her, still shivering. "You didn't answer me," she said.
"What about?"
"I asked you if the Mafia was what you were talking about."
Chickie shrugged. "Mafia, Cosa Nostra, mob, the syndicate, just the tough guys in town. Who knows what they are or what they belong to? All I know is that if I don't pay them fifty bucks a week, per girl, I don't operate."
"What'll they do to you?"
"Nothing. But the police will. You can't run a whorehouse in a town without the police knowing about it."
"You mean you pay off the police?"
"I never even see the police. I just know if I don't pay the men, the police will shut me down, arrest me, arrest all you girls . . . "
"I'm not one of your girls."
"Oh yes you are, whether you like it or not. But as I was saying, I pay my dues and I stay out of jail. I did ninety days once and I don't know whether I could do that again. I think I was screwed by every cop in the county while I was in that jail and I even got eaten by two dyke matrons. And I don't want to do that again. My motto is, if you don't get paid for it, sit on it."
She laughed.
"Listen," Wanda said desperately. "What can they do to you if you let me go."
"Are you kidding?"
"No, if you just tell them I escaped, what can they do?"
"They can kill me."
"They wouldn't."
"They might. Or worse, I might wind up working in a Mexican circus."
"I don't know what you mean."
"A circus is a sex show and somehow I don't imagine ending up my life screwing Shetland ponies in a Tijuana bar."
Wanda shuddered. "You have to let me go," she said.
"Well, that's what I want to tell you about. I can't let you go. You have to stay here even if that means I have to have Leon stay with you for every minute, even while you're taking your douche. But it doesn't have to be that hard. If you just relax and enjoy it, it'll be a lot easier on everybody."
"Enjoy it," Wanda said. "You must be crazy."
"Sure, enjoy it," Chickie said. "You enjoyed it with Leon."
"I didn't "
"I was watching, sweetie. You loved it."
"Watching? What do you mean, you were watching?"
Chickie waved over toward the wall. "There are two peepholes over there. I was watching through them."
"Watching me?" Wanda said. She felt sick and she put down the coffee cup.
"Sure. Maybe you never ran into one, but there are lots of men who don't want to do anything but watch. So if they pay the same price as if they were actually with a girl, we let them watch somebody who's got more balls."
"My God," Wanda said.
"It's not so bad. We split the money with the girl who's being watched while she's working and that's an easier way to earn your pay than actually giving it to somebody."
"My God."
Chickie looked annoyed then. "What are you playing so innocent for?" she said. "I told you, I watched you with Leon, and George said you were the best he ever saw, so what are you pretending to be so shocked for?"
"I'm not a whore."
"Oh, yes you are. You're a whore. W-h-o-r-e. A prostitute. Tonight, when we open, you're going to screw anybody who comes through the door with the money to pay for you, or you're going to eat them or let them eat you or do anything else they want to do. If some guy wants to stick his rod in your ear, you're going to smile and help him get it in."
"No," she said. "I won't."
Chickie sighed and stood up. "All right," she said. She turned around and went out. She closed the door behind her.
Wanda got up and ran to the window, but when she tried to open it, she couldn't. It was either nailed shut or stuck. She couldn't budge it.
She didn't hear Leon come into the room back of her, and she didn't know how long he had been standing there behind her before he spoke her name. He just said "Wanda" softly, and she spun around, startled, covering her mouth with her hand.
"You can't get out," he said. His voice was calm, softly thick with his accent. He was watching her carefully, but she thought he looked sad. "Please," she said. "No. I got to talk to you."
"I don't want to talk," she said. "You got to, the place is going to open pretty soon and you got to be ready to go to work."
"I'm not going to work," she said. "You can't make me be a whore."
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He stuck it into his mouth and lit it from a lighter that he took from his trouser pocket.
"No, but I can hurt you," he said. "I don't want to hurt you, but I can."
"You go ahead," she said, "but I'm not going to work as a whore."
He came toward her and she walked backwards until her legs felt the bed back of her. Then, when he kept coming at her, she sat down on the bed and stared defiantly at him.
"I don't care what you do," she said.
"Please," he said. His eyes were sad. Closer now, she could see that. "I don't like to hurt people."
"Well, you don't have to," she said.
"Yes, I do. This is my place. It's hard for a black man to have a place that he really belongs to, but this is mine and I got to do what I got to do."
"I don't care," she said. "I won't-"
Her voice trailed away because he had reached down to open the robe that she was wearing. It fell apart at his touch and he reached in to caress her breasts.
"You know how much it hurts to be burned," he said.
Her mouth went dry and she couldn't answer him. But she stared back at him without any change in her expression.
"Your skin is tender around the nipples," he said, one thumb moving gently over a nipple, as if he were teasing it to erection. "It hurts something fierce to be burned there and sometimes it even leaves a scar. You don't want me to do that."
"You won't," she said, her voice a harsh croaking sound that she wasn't even sure he could hear.
"Yes, I will," he said. "Unless you get up right now and get ready to work, I'll burn you."
"I won't," she said. "I won't."
He pushed her back flat on the bed then and held her with one hand while he took the cigarette from his mouth with the other. She tried to fight, but he was too strong. He just held her and then, amazingly, incredibly, he flicked off the ashes, so that the end was glowing bright red, and then he laid the fire of it against the nipple on her left breast.
There was one long, unbelieving moment of silence, and then she screamed once, shrilly, in terror and pain, in agony like nothing had been before in her entire life. Just once, and his hand closed across her mouth to shut off the sound.
"I told you," he said. "I didn't want to, but you didn't believe me."
He let her go then and stepped back away from her. She lay flat then, gasping. The pain was still unbelievable and she started crying with it. In all her life, no one had ever deliberately hurt her before. He was right, she knew. She hadn't really believed he was going to do anything to her, not anything like that.
"I can do a lot more," he said. "I can burn both nipples. I can stick a hot cigarette up into your cunt. I can burn big blisters on the bottom of your feet." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a knife. She heard a snicking sound and the blade leaped out, shining silver in the light. She gasped at the sight of it.
"If burning doesn't work, I can use this," he said. He smiled unhappily.
"No," she whispered. The pain in her breast was less now. It was like a dull aching now, like something that was never going to go away.
"You can imagine what it's like to have one of your nipples sliced in half," he said.
"No."
"I'll do it," he said. "You have to believe I'll do it. If she tells me to, I'll even kill you, or I'll cut off your fingers, one by one, or I'll put this knife into your asshole and then twist it around up there until you go crazy with how much it hurts."
"Stop," she said. "You stop."
He closed the knife and put it back into his pocket. Then he sat down on the bed beside her. He said, "Now, listen, there ain't nothing you can do about what's happened to you. I don't know how you came to be here, but you're here, so you might as well get used to it."
She looked at him with pain-filled eyes, but she didn't say anything. What was there to say?
"I'm always here," he said, "which is a good thing for you. I keep it quiet here. I make sure nobody comes in drunk and hurts you. I make sure nobody beats you out of your money. I protect you."
"Sure," she said, "by burning me."
"I didn't hurt you much," he said. "If I was the kind of man who enjoys hurting, I could have done a lot more to you. But I had to make you believe me."
"I believe you," she said.
"That's good," he said, "because now I won't have to hurt you again. Now you can be friends with me."
She laughed. The sound burst out without her thinking about it. But when he said they could be friends, she had to laugh.
"What's the matter?" he said. "Because I'm black?"
"No," she said. "You come in here and torture me and now because I believe you'd do anything to me if it suited your own purpose, not just because I believe that, you think we can be friends now."
"Why not?" he said, shrugging. "You do your job and I do mine. You think there aren't things I'd rather be than a muscle man in a whorehouse?
You think I like being here?"
"Why don't you go away then?"
"And be what? I ain't got any education to amount to, and I sure don't look like Harry Belafonte or somebody. I'm just another black in a white man's world. Where should I go?"
"You're a free man," she said. "Go anywhere you want to."
He stood up off the bed and looked down at her. "No use arguing about that," he said. "You going to work or not?"
"What'll you do if I say no?"
"Burn you again, harder this time."
She shuddered at the thought of it. "I'll work," she said.
"Chickie said to tell you that you can use any of the clothes hanging in that closet. They was Harriet's, but she's gone now."
"Where'd she go?"
Absently, he said, "They transferred her."
"Transferred her?" She laughed. "This sounds like IBM or something. Where'd they transfer her to?"
"I don't know," he said. "All I know is, she was on junk, making trouble, and one night they came by and took her away to somewhere else."
She felt a shiver of cold fear go down her back. "Somewhere else," she said.
"I don't know where. Sometimes, there are things in this world that you're best off not to know."
He turned and walked over to the door then. There, he looked back at her. "Be ready to work in one hour," he said. "Not often that a John comes in so early, but you be ready anyway."
CHAPTER EIGHT...
There were four other girls in the living room when she went downstairs. She was wearing a blue dress that she had found in the closet. It fit her perfectly, but she felt odd in it because it was almost transparent and she wasn't wearing anything under it. Her own underwear was too dirty to put back on and there hadn't been any panties or bras in the room upstairs.
She had taken a shower and she felt more rested now. She didn't feel so terribly afraid any more. But also, she didn't see how she was going to avoid working this evening. Her nipple still hurt where Leon had burned her. There was a faint, moon-shaped blister there, which was only bad enough to be present, but not so bad that she couldn't be aware of the fact that he could have hurt her much worse.
She thought perhaps he was telling the truth when he had said he didn't like to hurt people, that he had only done what he had done because he had to.
When she walked into the room, the four others looked at her. They were all white, if she counted the darkest one, the one Chickie had said was named Mary, and she was white because she wasn't Negro. Maybe she was Mexican, Wanda thought.
One of the girls, a very small, blonde girl who looked to be only about twenty, said, "Welcome. I see you've decided to join us."
She didn't know what to say, so she just walked across the room and sat down in a stuffed chair by the window.
"My name's Alma," the blonde girl said. "That's Mary there; this is Helen, and that's Portia. That bundle of laughs over by you is Nicki."
The one called Nicki, a short Italian-looking girl with great protruding breasts, said, "Why don't you go douche out your mouth?"
Alma laughed. "You're just pissed because you missed your period this month."
"I'm going to shut your mouth for you," Nicki said.
Helen, a blonde girl, tall, slender, with very fair skin, said, "Why don't you two stop bitching at each other? You're making me nervous."
"That's too bad," Nicki said.
"Well, it's not anybody's fault but your own that you won't take the pill like everybody else," Portia, the fourth girl said, breaking her silence. She was red-haired, with bright green eyes, and a tight, cruel mouth.
"It doesn't make me feel any better to know it's my own fault," Nicki said.
Portia looked over at Wanda then and said, "I hear you didn't really want to join our little family."
Wanda shrugged. "I don't seem to have a choice."
"Don't you think you're good enough for us?"
They all laughed, even Nicki, and then Helen said, "No, that's not it, she doesn't think we're good enough for her."
Wanda sat still, looking out the window, not even listening to them, but when they lapsed into silence, she looked around the room at them and then she said, "I was kidnapped. I'm not really a prostitute."
"Neither am I," Alma said, laughing. "Actually, I'm the long-lost heiress of the Howard Hughes' fortune."
They started laughing again, chattering at her, and she turned them off, not listening, until they were quiet again. Then: "I'm serious. I really was kidnapped and brought here."
"So what?" Portia said quietly. "We all got here one way or the other. The thing is to get along with each other now that we're here, because we're sure not going to leave here."
"I am," Wanda said. "Eventually, I am."
"Maybe," Helen said. She looked around at the other girls. "Give her a break. It's tough working in a place like this at first. Even you people that started whoring when you were five should remember that. So leave her alone until she gets used to it."
"I may have started whoring when I was five," Alma said, grinning, "but if I did, it was because you taught me everything you had learned in twenty years of experience."
They all laughed again then and Wanda turned to look out the window.
The first man who took her wasn't a man at all. He was a boy, about seventeen. She didn't even think he had shaved yet because she could see the soft fuzz on his face.
Upstairs, in her room, he said, "What do I do about the money?"
The girls had told her that. "Give it to me."
"How much?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Half and half?" He made it a question, as if he were giving her a choice.
"Fifteen dollars for that," she said.
She felt odd, strange as if she were somehow outside her own body, watching, because this couldn't really be she. She couldn't really be dickering price with a seventeen-year-old boy, preparing to have sex with him.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out some bills that were folded together. He peeled off three fives and handed them to her. Then he looked at her expectantly, not moving. She thought he looked afraid.
"What do you want me to do?" he said.
"Why don't you take off your clothes?"
"All of them?"
"Whatever you want."
"Usually, I just take off my pants."
"Usually?" She laughed. He looked so young.
Now he looked half angry. "I'm no kid," he said. "I've been here before. I know how things go here."
"I never saw you here before," she said. "I never saw you here before either. You must be new."
"I've been here a long time," she lied.
"No, you haven't. There was another girl here, though, a pretty girl who looked Irish. Once I saw her wearing the same blue dress you have on, or one just like it."
She didn't laugh now. He had been here before, obviously. "Listen," she said, "you can help me."
"Help you do what?" he said.
"I was kidnapped and brought here. You can help me get away."
He smiled at her. "You're kidding," he said.
"No, really, I was kidnapped."
His smile faded. "Listen," he said, "I'm not going to get involved in anything."
She started to tell him to call the police, but then she remembered what Chickie had told her about the police, about how she would get arrested if she didn't do what the gangsters told her to do. So she couldn't get the police involved.
Eric Wayne, she thought. He must be worried sick, she thought. "Listen," she said, "will you just call one man for me, please? He'll tell you."
"I don't know," he said.
"Please," she said. "Just one man."
He looked at her curiously. Then he said, "What about my half and half?"
She laughed wildly then. "All right," she said. "All right, I'll do anything you want, but you have to promise me to make this one phone call."
He shrugged. "What can one phone call hurt?" he said.
She sagged with relief. Maybe it was going to be this easy. Maybe Eric would come racing in and take her away and that would be all there was to it.
Except that maybe he wouldn't want her any more now, now that she had been so used.
No, he wasn't that kind of man. She could tell.
"How about it now?" the boy said.
She smiled and reached out to caress his sex through his pants. He was half hard with excitement. She reached out again and unzipped his pants and slipped her hand in. When she got through his shorts and touched his bare flesh, she felt his penis jump in her hand like a live animal.
She took her hand out. "Take your pants down," she said. "I can't give you a half and half with your pants on."
He unbuckled his pants and stepped out of them. He was naked from the waist down then and she caressed his rod and worked the skin of it back and forth. He was bigger there than she would have expected and he was fully hard now, totally erect.
He pulled back then and sat down on the bed. "Aren't you going to take off your dress?" he said.
He watched as she took off the dress. When she was naked, she saw his eyes widen and he said, "I never saw a girl with a better figure than you have."
"I'm glad you like it," she said.
She felt silly now, young, giddy with excitement. She was sure that her ordeal was about over. All she had to do now was to survive until Eric got her message. Then he would come for her.
She knelt down in front of the boy and sucked his penis into her mouth. His hands were on her shoulders, gripping at her, and she knew that he was so excited that he could hardly stand it.
She stopped then and said, "Are you ready for the other half?"
"Yes," he said. "Get up here and lie down."
She lay down flat on the bed and he came over her. He jabbed at her once and she reached down and caught his penis and guided it into her. He went all the way down into her in one thrust, pushing at her with all his strength. She knew it wasn't going to take him long to come; he was too excited. But her own orgasms were rocking through her now, because she was so excited about everything.
Then the boy came into her, hard. She could feel the jets of semen against the flesh of her body, inside her. He was slumped down on her, panting, and she reached down and caught his buttocks in her hands, massaging them gently as the spasms took him.
The next man was fat, about thirty, with soft hands and eyes. She thought he looked like he should be an insurance salesman. An unsuccessful one.
She could hardly think about this now. All she could think of was that the boy had promised to call Eric, to tell him where she was. That was all the message. Just, Wanda is in a whorehouse in . . . and give him the address, which she didn't know. She didn't even know what town they were in. But the boy knew. Odd, but she hadn't remembered to ask him. She had been to excited. But she knew that he would tell Eric.
The fat man said, "I want it french and I want you all the way naked."
"French is twenty dollars," she said.
"It was only fifteen the last time I was here."
She reached out and rubbed his tool through his pants. He felt bigger and harder there than she would have expected, judging from the soft and flabby look of him.
"Twenty," she said.
God, she was excited. Now she wanted to do this. She wanted to wear off her excitement with orgasms. Now she was enjoying herself.
It amazed her to realize that, to admit to herself that she was enjoying these strangers. Of course, it was something that she would never tell to Eric. But it was true.
The man said, "All right, but it had better be worth it."
He said he wanted her to do it while he stood up in front of her. He said he wanted her to kneel down in front of him and hold him by the bottom while she worked on him.
"Wouldn't you be more comfortable on the bed?" she said.
"I paid you twenty dollars. You can do it the way I like," he said.
She smiled. "I don't care. I just thought you'd be more comfortable."
"No, I want you to kneel in front of me."
On the floor in front of him, his flesh in her mouth, her hands holding the softness of his buttocks, she thought she understood why he had wanted to do it this way. This way he was above her. He could dominate her. He could look straight down and see her there, see himself moving in and out of her mouth. He could watch her while she humbled herself in front of him.
Thinking that, she almost giggled. She felt so excited, so good. My God, how good she felt. She was going to get away from them.
The fat man was coming in her mouth, little, weak jets of semen all that he could manage, and he was groaning as if he were some great hero fertilizing a goddess.
When he was done, she licked her lips off and stood up in front of him. "How was that?" she said.
"Fine."
She could hardly hear him. He was pulling on his clothes, trying to dress quickly. He was embarrassed now, she realized, and she wanted to laugh at him.
"I hope you'll come back," she said. She smiled.
He nodded.
"We're in business just like everybody else," she said. "We have to have satisfied customers."
"I'm satisfied," he said. "I hope so."
When he went out the door, she laughed out loud before she went to wash.
The next customer who picked her was an older man, about fifty, who was well dressed and who looked prosperous.
When they were in her room, he said, "If you don't want to do this, say so. You don't have to do it."
"Do what?" she said.
"What I want you to do."
"I don't know," she said. "You haven't told me yet what it is you want me to do."
"I know that. But I want you to know that if you don't want to do it, I want you to tell me so. I won't enjoy it if I think you're doing it just because you want the money and don't want to tell me no."
"What do you want me to do?" she said. "I can't decide if you keep talking without telling me what you want."
"I want you to whip me."
She laughed. "What?" she said.
"I want you to whip me." He held up a hand.
"I know how crazy that must sound, but believe me, that's what I want."
She laughed again. "I don't have a whip," she said.
"You can just use my belt."
"I don't want to hurt you," she said.
"I want you to. I want you to whip me until I tell you to stop and then I'll lie down and you can make love to me."
"I can make love to you?" she said.
"On top. I like it best if you'll get on top."
She shrugged. "Top or bottom. It's all the same to me."
He smiled and started to undress. She saw that he was so excited rus hands were shaking.
He handed her his belt when he was naked. Then he got down on his hands and knees and hung his head. She didn't do anything at first and he looked back up over his shoulder. "Hit me," he said. "Please."
She hit him with the belt. He jumped a little, but then he said, "That's not hard enough. Please do it hard enough so that it hurts. It's not good for me unless it hurts."
She hit him harder the next time. But again he asked for her to do it harder. The next time, the belt whistled before it hit his buttocks. This time there was a red welt immediately. The man said, "That's good, like that, like that."
She hit him again and again then. He was writhing there on his hands and knees, wiggling with the pain, but she kept slashing and slashing at him.
Then he fell flat on the floor and lay there, panting. She stopped hitting him. She straddled his body and she said, "Turn over now. Right now."
He rolled over, so that he was looking up at her. She squatted down onto his rigid penis, guiding it into her body, and when she settled down onto him, he sighed in pleasure.
She held there for a moment and then she began to move up and down on him, guiding his thrusts with her own, so that all he had to do was lie still while she screwed him.
He was bigger and harder than she had expected him to be. She would have thought that a man who liked to be whipped would be lacking in some of his manhood, but this man wasn't. He was rigid and thick there and he wasn't too quick either. She had three orgasms before he shot his semen into her and they clung to each other on the floor, momentarily exhausted.
She fell away from him then and sat on the floor beside him, looking at him. He was lying with his eyes closed. Then he opened them and looked at her and said, "I'll give you twenty dollars more if you'll go down on me right now, without washing me off or anything."
She didn't hesitate at all. She bent down over him and took him into her mouth.
And then the door opened and Eric Wayne walked in.
CHAPTER NINE...
She didn't know what to say. She sat back flat on the floor, naked, her mouth still wet from sucking the man, and she just stared at Eric wordlessly.
The man sat up and stared at Eric too and then he said, "Who the hell are you?"
"Get dressed and get out of here," Eric said. "Who are you to give me orders."
"Take my advice," Eric said, "and get out of here. You'll be a lot happier man if you do. From the looks of you, you already got what you came for, so don't push your luck any. Just go."
Then he stood there at the door, silently watching, while the man gathered up his clothes and got into them.
When the man was gone, Wanda said, "They forced me to do that. I didn't think you were ever going to find me."
"I knew where you were all along," Eric said.
"After they kidnapped me, they took me to a house and they all raped me over and over-what did you say?"
"I said I knew where you were all along."
"I don't understand," she said.
"I'm surprised. I thought you would have figured it out long ago."
"Figured what out?"
"That I was the one who had you kidnapped."
"You? Why?"
"My motives are my own business. But I did it and I knew where you were all along."
"Did you know they were going to rape me like that?" she asked bitterly.
He shrugged. "I thought they probably would. A whore doesn't have a great many rights."
"I'm not a whore."
He smiled. "From the looks of you while you were eating that old man there, I'd say you'd get an argument from him. I'll bet he thinks you're the greatest whore he ever saw. I didn't know you were going to do that or I wouldn't have come in yet. I thought you were done."
She looked over to where the peepholes were. "You were . . . "
He nodded. "I was watching. I thought you did very well. But I didn't know you were going to decide to eat him during the time while I was walking over here from the next room."
"You're crazy," she said. "You can't keep me here."
"Why not?"
"People will look for me."
"Who?"
"Tod Brower, my editor."
"He thinks you went back to the city. All your clothes are gone and he thinks you just drifted on unexpectedly, the same way you drifted in. If he thinks about you at all these days, which I doubt."
"Why'd you do it?" she said.
"I told you, my motives are private."
"Well then, why didn't you just bring me here, if that's what you wanted. Why'd you arrange that phony kidnapping?"
"I thought it was a good idea," he said.
Her mind was beginning to clear now. "You're the one they were talking about," she said. "You're the one they called Pete. Your name's not Eric Wayne at all, is it?"
"No."
"What is it really?"
"You'll never know," he said.
"You're with the Mafia."
"There isn't any Mafia," he said. "I'm just a businessman." He walked over to stand beside her. "Get up," he said.
She stood up and he caught one of her arms and held her while he ran his hand over her body. He felt her breasts, squeezing them, and he probed up into her with a finger.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"I'm enjoying you."
"You could have done that without bringing me here. I was willing to go to bed with you any time, you knew that."
But that bored me," he said. "This doesn't." What?"
I enjoy knowing you're here," he said. You're crazy."
No," he said, "I don't think so." Then he stopped feeling her, pinching her.
"I told you, my motives are private," he said, "but I'll tell you this. That man who was in here before gets his kicks from being whipped. I get mine a different way."
"From knowing that I'm in here being had by Lord knows how many men, in every kind of crazy way?"
"Maybe," he said.
"From knowing that your thugs are raping me, hurting me, making me suck them off, doing everything to me."
He smiled.
"You're crazy," she said.
'Turn around," he said.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to screw you in your ass. You haven't been had there yet tonight. So that's what I'm going to do."
"No. I won't let you."
But he twisted her around, forcing her down. He held her with one hand while he unfastened his pants and then he pushed his swollen tool up against the crack of her bottom.
She was angry, furious, but there wasn't anything she could do, and when she felt the head of his sex penetrating her anus, she knew she had to try to relax to keep it from hurting so much.
He went all the way into her that way, deep, so that his balls were riding against the fleshy part of her bottom, and then he started moving in and out of her hard, rhythmically, and there wasn't anything she could do to stop him.
She was coming, too, but she bit her lip to keep from crying out because she didn't want him to know it. She didn't want to give him that pleasure. She didn't want him to know that he could do this to her, that he could humiliate her this way, hurt her this way, and still have her respond to whatever he did to her.
But then it was too much and he drove down into her one last time and she felt her bottom growing hot and slippery and she knew that he was coming in her there and she cried out with the intensity of it, and then she fell forward on her face, sobbing in anger at herself, and then, aloud, she said, "My God, what am I becoming?"
He was gone when she cleaned herself up and went downstairs. It was late because he had made her eat him after screwing her that first time. And then after that, he had sat on the bed, smoking, waiting to regain his strength, and then he had laid her down flat and had gone into her almost as if that were an afterthought.
Chickie was in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. All the other girls were upstairs, working, but there weren't any more customers in the house just then.
By the clock on the kitchen wall, she saw that it was almost three in the morning.
She sat down across the table from Chickie. "Why didn't you tell me?" she said.
"Tell you what?"
"Who he was."
"Honey," Chickie said tiredly, "I don't like doing business with tough guys any more than you do, but one thing you learn in a hurry is that if you do deal with them, you don't talk about them. You do what you have to do and you watch out for yourself and you keep your mouth shut. That's the rule for surviving, and I've survived a long time in this business."
"So I'm really stuck, aren't I?" Wanda said.
"I guess so."
"I mean, there's nothing I can do. You won't let me go. There'll always be somebody listening when I'm with a customer. There's just nothing I can do."
"I guess not."
"I don't mind it really," she said. "I guess I really don't."
After that, the days blended together for her, so that after a while she even stopped thinking about trying to get away. She didn't care any more. She fell into the pattern of the other girls, sleeping late in the morning, washing her hair, resting, playing gin rummy with Portia, rarely going out of the house for anything.
Once in a while, when she would go out to buy stockings or makeup, Chickie would go with her, and she always knew Leon was somewhere nearby. But really, it wasn't necessary. She tried to tell them that, but they didn't trust her. Only it was true. She thought if they had just left her alone, probably she would have gone straight back to the house anyway.
It was odd, even scary, to find herself thinking that way. She was surprised at herself. But the thing was that there wasn't any place else now that she wanted to go. She supposed that she could probably have talked a customer into calling someone for her. She had once; she had just picked the wrong someone. This time she could have a customer call Tod Brower.
But why should she? She was a whore. They had made her one. In the week after that first visit by Eric Wayne (she still thought of him that way even though she knew his real name was Pete something) she kept track of the men she was with, and in just that one week she was with forty-two different men.
They all paid her and she took the money.
That made her a whore. She kept half the money and gave the other half to Chickie, so she was building up quite a store of money, but she didn't know what she would do with it. There wasn't anything she wanted to buy.
So she was a whore and whores live in whorehouses, so she would have gone back to the house if they had left her alone.
Eric Wayne came to see her once a week. She knew he was coming once a week, because he always did, but she never knew when he was coming, and she always wondered, whenever she had a customer, whether Eric might be in the next room watching her through the peephole.
After a while, she got so she didn't even think about it. And after a while, she got that it didn't bother her no matter what Eric did, because no matter what he did, someone else had done it before, and probably with a bigger rod. So he was losing his only power over her as she lost her fear of him.
After all, what could he do to her now? Force her to stay at the whorehouse? That was nothing; that was something she would have chosen for herself anyway. So what could he do?
Eric Wayne said, "How long have you been here now?"
"I don't know," she said. She was lying naked on the bed, her legs still apart. She could feel his semen seeping out of her and she saw him keep darting glances at her swollen sex. "You tell me; you're the one who brought me here."
"You don't seem to mind it now," he said. He smiled cruelly at her and she stared back expressionlessly. "Do you? You enjoy yourself here now, don't you?"
"And what if I do?"
"You see?"
"See what?"
"You see how well I read your character? You were a whore from the first day I met you. You'll be a whore forever. Some women are just born whores and it doesn't matter what they spend their lives doing, they'll always be whores. You're just lucky I steered you to your proper vocation."
She laughed aloud and then laughed again at the look of surprise that sped across his face.
"I'm glad you think it's funny," he said. "It shows you're acclimated to your new life."
"My new life?" she said. "I'm acclimated to my life, that's all. As you say, I was pointed here from the day of my birth."
"Yes."
"So you're right, I really rather enjoy being here. As you say, it's important for everyone to find his rightful place in the world. Since God made so many whores, that must show that he meant for us to follow our trade." She laughed again.
He looked a little uncertain. Then he turned to go. She lay still on the bed until he had closed the door behind him. They had been together for less than an hour and that had been the first time in nearly two weeks that he had come by to see her. She wondered if he were losing interest in her. And she wondered what would happen to her when he had no interest left at all.
A few days later, early one morning, she was drinking a cup of coffee alone in the kitchen when Chickie came into the room and said, "I've been wanting a chance to talk to you."
"I've been here."
"I know, but it's so hard to get alone in this place. Someone's always listening. But everyone else is still sleeping now. We can talk now."
Wanda waved a hand languidly toward the chair across the table from her. She liked this early morning time. She didn't often get up to enjoy it. Her work kept her up so late that she usually didn't wake up until after noon. But when she did wake, she liked the morning. Things felt different in the morning.
She smiled to herself now, wandering in her mind, amused by the idea that maybe someday she would open a whorehouse that only functioned in the morning, to provide service for early-rising men.
Chickie said, "You're in trouble, Wanda."
Wanda didn't understand at first; she was: still daydreaming. But then she snapped her eyes wider open, staring at Chickie. "What do you mean, trouble?" she said.
"I think they're planning to transfer you."
"What do you mean, transfer me?"
"I don't know what it is you ever did that Pete is so down on you for . . . "
"What's his name? I only know him by Eric Wayne and I've heard you refer to him as Pete, but what's his whole, real name?"
"I don't know," Chickie said. "I just know him as Pete. But I know he's the head guy in this whole area."
"For the Mafia?"
"How do I know from the Mafia?" Chickie said. "What difference does it make? As far as you and I are concerned, he's the man, that's all. And for some reason, he's determined to break you up in little pieces."
"Why?"
"I don't know why. Why'd he send you here in the first place. You weren't the type for a whorehouse. You're too classy. If you wanted to be a whore, you could have made ten times as much money working as a call girl."
"I didn't want to be a whore."
"So why'd he send you here?"
"I don't know either. I just knew him . . . "
"Were you sleeping with him?"
"Yes, but not for money."
"I've heard that he really hates women, that's why he-likes the whorehouse business so much. You know, with dope and numbers and all the rest, they must make a pile of money. They don't need what little they get from us and the other houses. But I've heard that he just-likes this business so he won't get out of it, that he enjoys seeing women living this kind of life."
"Maybe so," Wanda agreed. Funny, but she couldn't get excited. She could understand intellectually that being transferred (whatever that might mean) would be dangerous to her. But she wasn't afraid. She wasn't even very interested.
"Anyway, you have to do something," Chickie said.
"What?"
"Get away from here."
"I thought you couldn't let me go."
"I shouldn't. But you've been here and I kind of like you and you've been here so long that maybe you could just get away and they wouldn't do anything to me. You've been here long enough so that I'd have an excuse for getting careless about you."
"What about Leon?"
"Leon's loyal to me. If I tell him you can go, you can go."
"Won't he tell the others?"
"No. He'd let them kill him first before he did anything that might get me into trouble."
Wanda looked at her. "Does he love you?"
"I suppose so. What does love mean?"
"Do you go to bed with him?"
Chickie flushed. "So what if I do? What difference does it make?"
"No difference. He's had everybody else here too."
"He hasn't had me-it's different with us. I don't care how many of you he screws and I'll give him anything he-likes. He's probably only the best friend I have."
"All right."
"So just don't talk about him."
"All right," Wanda said.
"But you better go, if you know what's good for you."
"I'm safe here."
"You're not safe here. Don't you understand what I'm saying to you?"
"Oh, yes," Wanda said. "I understand you perfectly, but apparently you don't understand me." Then she laughed, softly, and she thought, I wonder when it will happen.
CHAPTER TEN...
It happened about a week later. It was just before dawn when they came for her. Everyone else in the house, including Chickie, was asleep. She was sleeping naked, covered only by a sheet, when someone shook her roughly awake.
She would have cried out in surprise, but the man clamped a hand down over her mouth, keeping the sound back in her throat.
"Don't wake anybody else," he whispered. "Just get dressed, quietly, and come with me."
"Who are you?" she whispered when he released her mouth.
"Never mind who I am."
From the streetlight's glare that was coming through her window, she could see that he was someone she hadn't ever seen before. He was young, maybe about twenty-five, and blond, hardly the type to be cast in a movie as a mob gunsel. But then, there wasn't any argument with fact and there he was, standing beside her bed, his eyes flitting down over her body as she threw back the sheet and sat up.
"Did Pete send you?" she whispered. She didn't want to be gagged, so she kept her voice low.
"Never mind who sent me. Just come on."
"Where are we going."
"You'll find out."
"Can't you tell me? What can it hurt for you to tell me where you're taking me?"
He didn't answer. He just stepped back into the deeper shadows on the other side of the window and waited there.
There was another man in the car outside. He didn't say anything to her when they got in, but to the blond man he said, "It took you long enough."
"Just drive the car," the blond man said. "I don't need any instructions from you about my timing."
"We got a long way to go," the man said.
"We got forever to get there. We're not on a timetable, for God's sake."
"I don't like to be away from the boss," the man said. "What's to keep him from deciding he don't need us at all, we're gone so long."
The blond man turned to look at him. Then he smiled sardonically. "If you have a clean conscience," he said, "you don't have to worry about a thing. If you been dipping into the till, maybe you better stay down there when we deliver her."
"Go screw yourself," the driver said.
She knew they weren't going to kill her. There wasn't any point to all this if they were going to kill her.
After a while, the blond man got into the front seat with the driver and she curled up on the back seat and went to sleep. Just before she went to sleep, she heard the driver say, "These women are just like animals-as long as they're comfortable right now, nothing bothers them."
The blond man didn't answer. Or maybe she just didn't hear him because she was already asleep.
They drove steadily all that day, just stopping to eat, and then always at roadside diners, during off hours, when they were almost alone. She thought it was because they were afraid she was going to try to get away or call for help or something, but maybe that wasn't it. After all, if they were afraid of that, they could have just kept her in the car and brought sandwiches to her. Maybe they just didn't like crowds. Their business lives could have created that kind of feeling in them.
She giggled when she thought of that. They were in a diner and the blond man was across the table from her. He looked at her curiously when she giggled, but he didn't say anything.
They stopped for the night just before midnight, at a.Howard Johnson's motel. She stayed in the car with the driver while the blond man went to rent them a room. When he came out, he had two keys, but he took them all into one room so she supposed that he had rented two rooms just in case the clerk had happened to notice that there were two men traveling with one woman. Certainly they wouldn't want a visit from a nosey room clerk or hotel detective.
There were two double beds in the room.
While they were walking around, turning on the television set, looking the room over, she went into the bathroom and closed the door. She took off her clothes and went into the shower.
When she came out, she dried off and walked naked back out into the bedroom. The two men were still there, naturally. The man who had been driving was lying on one of the beds. The other man was sitting in a chair, watching the television set.
"What do we do now?" she said.
They looked surprised and then the one who had been driving said, "What have you got in mind?"
"Sleeping."
"Oh, yeah? So then why'd you come out here like that?"
"Because if you have screwing in mind, I'd like to get it over with. We've been driving a long time."
The blond man said, "You can go on to bed."
"The hell she can,'. ' the driver said. "She comes out like that, why shouldn't I get some nookie if I want it?"
The blond man shrugged. "Do whatever you like," he said.
The driver got up from the bed and started taking off his clothes. She went over to the bed closest to where the blond man was sitting and sat down on the edge of it. She glanced at the blond man but he was watching Johnny Carson.
The other man was naked now and he came over to her with his penis hard, jutting out in front of him. When he was in front of her, he thrust it toward her mouth.
She knew he was going to want that. They all did. Sometimes she wondered why it was that men seemed to like that so much. Of course, there was the sensation involved, but she didn't think that was all of it. The sensation of that couldn't be much better, if any, than the feeling of actual intercourse. How could it be? A vagina is designed to give maximum pleasure to a man's penis. How could a mouth be better? But all men seemed wild for that. From working in the whorehouse she knew that many men came there only because their wives wouldn't let them in their mouths.
But why did men want to do that? What was there about it that attracted a man so?
The man groaned when she cupped his balls in her hand and leaned forward to take him. She massaged him gently as she sucked at him. He was thicker than most there, but not as long, only that didn't matter. She knew perfectly well, from long experience, that what counts is the thickness of a man's erection, not its length, and this man was well endowed that way.
She stopped sucking and lay back on the bed. "Come on," she said.
He clambered atop her and she guided his tool into her. She had been right. He was so hard, so thick, that he spread her open with it and she almost had an orgasm just from his entry. She did have an orgasm within just a few seconds and then another as he kept pumping at her.
But he didn't last long. He jetted his semen into her and then he pulled back, panting. He got up from the bed without saying anything to her and walked back into the bathroom. She heard him turn on the water.
"Don't you want some?" she said to the blond man then.
"No, thanks."
"Why not?"
"I'm married."
She laughed when he said that and he turned his head sharply to glare at her. "What's so funny about that?" he said.
"Nothing," she said. "It's just that you're the first man I've ever known who would turn me down just because he's married, and you're a hood."
She thought she saw a flicker of anger in his eyes, but then it was gone. She thought probably he was going to go a long way in his organization because he had learned the knack of not living on the edge of his emotions.
"So maybe it is funny," he said.
"I could give you a blow job."
"No."
"Your boss says I'm the best he ever had that way."
"Did he?"
"Yes, he did. Not only that, he says I'm the best all-around screwer he ever had."
"I'm sure he did."
"You went to college, didn't you?"
He half smiled. "Why?"
"You talk like a college man."
"Do I? What's a college man talk like?"
"like he's read a book."
"Tell you the truth," he said, "I never even got out of the eighth grade. I just read a lot."
"Why did you join the organization?"
"Why not?"
"Do you enjoy the kind of work you do."
"What do you know about the kind of work I do?"
"like this kind."
The other man came out of the bathroom and flopped back down on the other bed. He didn't look at them. She thought maybe he was embarrassed now about having taken her while the other man could watch.
"I'm just making a delivery," the blond man said.
"A human delivery."
A faint smile crossed his lips. "As far as I'm concerned, a delivery is a delivery, no matter what the cargo."
"That's a handy philosophy, everything considered."
"Yes," he said, "I think so."
They drove hard all the next day. She tried to get them to tell her where they were going, but she couldn't. She thought they probably were under orders not to. Eric Wayne's orders, no doubt. That would fit in with his mind, with the kind of man he evidently was. She thought she would never understand him. She thought of the fact that she had never done anything to him but give him pleasure, and then she thought of what he was doing to her, and she knew she would never understand that.
They were heading south all the time, south and west, and she remembered what Chickie had said about Mexico. She thought about Chickie and the other girls and about Leon. She wondered what they were thinking about her.
As they drove, she watched out the window, but virtually everything looked the same to her. The towns, the states, the countrysides blended together until it was as if she were watching a movie that was running too fast. She would see people, and before she could tell what they were doing, they were gone and there were new people for her to see.
If they were taking her to Mexico, and she was almost sure they were, she wondered what that would be like. If they put her into a border town whorehouse, that would mean mostly American servicemen probably. On the other hand, if they took her further south, probably she would wind up in a smaller place somewhere, where the customers were mostly Mexican.
She didn't think they would put her into the kind of sex show that Chickie had called a circus. That would be such a waste of good girl flesh.
She giggled when she thought of that.
The blond man looked over at her when she giggled again, but he didn't say anything. Sometimes she wondered what it was that he thought of her. Maybe he thought she was crazy, the way she didn't seem to care what they were doing to her.
Well, all in all, she didn't.
They stopped in Arkansas at a private motel the second night. The blond man went to bed and went to sleep almost immediately. The other man made her french him again and then he screwed her. She didn't care. He was good at it, as a matter-of-fact, and the last two days were the first two in a long time that she had only had to take care of one man.
He slept in the bed with her that night.
She woke about three in the morning. Both the men were asleep. She got up out of bed and walked over to the window and looked out while she smoked a cigarette. She could see the highway. There were trucks going by every so often, but there weren't many cars.
Then she looked back at the beds, where the two men were sleeping. She crushed out her cigarette and went to stand beside the bed, looking down.
She turned then and walked over to where her clothes were and started to dress. She moved slowly, deliberately, without any haste at all. If someone had asked her exactly what she was doing, she couldn't have told them. She was just getting dressed. But she didn't know exactly what she was going to do after that.
When she was dressed, she took the roll of money that she had hidden in the little bag they had let her bring, and she went out of the motel room and closed the door softly behind her.
She stood there for a few seconds, looking around. She knew they would be surprised when they woke and found her gone. They had thought she was completely docile. That was why they hadn't been afraid to sleep. It hadn't occurred to them now that she would run.
And in a way, she wasn't running. She had just decided, in a vague way, not to go any further with them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN...
The truck driver who picked her up didn't believe her story. She knew that. But she didn't care. She told him that she had been dating a man who had taken her to the motel and that when she refused to go into the room with him, he drove away and left her there.
She thought that if someone had told her a story like that, she would have asked, so then why didn't you call a taxi or the police or any of your friends? Why should a nice looking woman like you come out on the road and hitch-hike? But he didn't ask her any questions. He just nodded and kept driving through the night. Once in a while, she noticed, he would glance over at her legs. Her skirt had slipped up high on her thighs. She didn't care about that either. She certainly knew now that the way to get a man to do what you want is to give him what he wants, or at least to let him think he was going to get what he wants.
She thought she would give the truck driver anything he asked for. Why not?
He said, "I'm headed into Mississippi, high-balling, no stops, but I can let you off at the next town up ahead."
"Where are you headed for?" she said.
"Biloxi."
"Why don't you take me there?" He glanced over at her and she saw his eyes shining in the light from the truck's dashboard.
"You running from the law?" he said. "No."
"Are you sure?"
"Do I look like a criminal?"
He shrugged. "What do criminals look like? Besides, I don't give a damn who you're running from-the law, your husband-makes no difference to me. But if the law is looking for you, I ought to know it if you're expecting me to help you get through them."
"No," she said, "not the law."
"But somebody."
"Everybody's running from somebody." He laughed. "Maybe you're right," he said. Then he said, "What kind of woman are you."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, you're a damn fine looking woman. You got a great figure, what I've seen of it, and your legs are really good. I'm a leg man myself." Then he laughed. "I mean, I pick you up in the middle of the night and you don't seem to care much where you go, so you must be running from somebody. Nobody knows where you are or who you're with, and I'm a single man who ain't had a woman in too long. But also, I'm too old a man to wrestle for it. So what I'm asking is this: Are you the kind of woman who'll play along with me if I play along with you, or are you just going to take a ride and say thank you?"
"No," she said, "whatever you want."
He glanced at her sideways again. His face looked faintly green in the light from the dashboard. "Whatever I want?"
"Yes."
"Anything?"
"Anything?" she echoed. "What do you have in mind?"
"Well, nothing in particular, but you know, I told you, I don't like to have to wrestle for it."
She reached over across the seat and squeezed his penis through his pants. He flinched at her touch and then adjusted his weight so that his legs were spread further apart.
She unzipped his pants and took out his rod. It was only about half hard, but it was already thickening in her hand as she touched it. She bent down over him and sucked it into her mouth as he drove.
"Holy mackerel," he said above her.
She laughed inwardly and kept sucking on him. He was completely hard now, and she worked up and down on it greedily. He was half thrusting to meet her. He was leaking semen now and she started sucking faster and faster.
He came into her mouth then, spurting once heavily, almost like an explosion, and then three or four times more. She took it all, and when he was finished, she sat up, stuffed his softened sex back into his pants and zipped him up.
Then she said, "When you want anything else, just let me know."
"Holy jeez," he said. He dug into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. His hands were shaking. "Holy jeez." He was fumbling with the cigarette pack and she took it from him and lit two, one for him and the other for her. When she handed his to him, he stuck it into his mouth and drew furiously on it.
"I didn't expect that," he said.
'That's my motto," she said, smiling, "always give them more than they expect."
"Well, you sure did."
In about half an hour, he stopped the truck along the side of the road and reached for her. She pulled up her skirt and slipped off her panties and he took her there on the truck seat. It was hard for her to do it well there. Her bottom kept sliding on the leather seat, but he enjoyed it anyway and so did she. He made her come four times before he came into her.
After that, she slept there on the seat beside him.
He wanted her to stay with him longer. He said he would be picking up another load there in Biloxi and that she could meet him then and he would take her up to Nashville. But she told him, no, thanks, Biloxi was fine, and he let her off on a street corner and drove away.
She stood there and watched him go until his truck turned a corner and drove out of her sight. Then she hefted her little bag and went into a drugstore for a Coke.
It wasn't that she wanted a Coke. She didn't especially. But she didn't know what to do now that she was here, now that she was alone, really alone, with no one to tell her what to do and no one much to care what she did.
She should call her sister. She knew that. Undoubtedly her sister was worried about her.
But she didn't want to call her sister, because she didn't want to have to answer any questions. And her sister certainly would ask questions. Where have you been? You were kidnapped! My goodness, let's call the police. Or, more-likely, I've had the police looking for you for months.
Then: What did the kidnappers do with you all those months? No one asked us for any ransom.
They kept you in a whorehouse? You mean . . . ? Oh, you have to tell me all about it.
That probably wasn't fair. Her sister probably really was worried to death about her. But she didn't want to call. She thought about it as she sipped her Coke, but each time that she started to get up and do it, her arms and legs felt so heavy she could hardly move.
She came out of the drugstore's air-conditioning and it was like walking into an oven. She had never been in the South before, except for Florida and that hardly counted, and she couldn't get used to the oppressive Mississippi summer day. The sun was so glaring that it hurt her eyes and the sidewalks were so scorched that they burned her feet through her shoes.
What was she going to do?
She saw a movie theater down the street and she walked that way.
When she came out of the theater, it was dusk. She was hungry, so she found a restaurant and went in. She had a couple of drinks and then a steak and she felt better after that.
She found a bar and went in. It was cool there and she drank beer and thought about things. She supposed she should find a hotel room or some place where she could rest and think things out, some place where she could try to decide.
She could remember enough of what she used to be like to know that it wasn't normal for a grown woman to be sitting here in this condition, completely unable to make a decision even to call her sister. But still, that was the way things were for her.
She didn't notice the man who had approached her table until he spoke the second time.
She glanced up, startled, and said, "What did you say?"
"I said, you seem to be a stranger in town. Perhaps I could be of service to you."
She felt startled, threatened, but then she began to relax. "I don't know," she said. "I'm just passing through." Then: "How did you know I was a stranger in town?"
"Well," he said, sitting down across the table from her. "You have a small case with you and you certainly don't talk the same way that residents of our town do."
She smiled. She thought, I'm being picked up. "You're right," she said. "I am a stranger and I really don't know what to do with myself."
"Oh? Why is that?"
"Well," she said, lying smoothly and surprised that she was able to do so, "I'm really on just kind of a rambling vacation. I've never been in this part of the country before. And I've suddenly become so tired that I can't even seem to work up enough energy to hunt for a hotel."
"It's the heat," he said. "The heat down here is enervating, if you're not used to it."
He was about thirty-five, she saw then, looking at him for the first time, handsome, with slightly hooded eyes that made him look as if he were potentially very dangerous. She thought, I'll bet Rhett Butler really looked like this and not like Clark Gable at all.
She smiled when she thought that.
"Did I say something funny?" he said.
"No, I was just thinking of something else," she said.
"My name is Randolph. Bruce Randolph," he said. "I've learned some things in my life that might be useful to you."
"Such as?" she said.
"Oh, where the best hotel in Biloxi is and where the best restaurants are and what things there are to do here that you might enjoy."
Then he smiled again.
"My name is Wanda Fixx," she said then, mocking him gently, amazed at her own ability to flirt lightly after all that had happened to her. "And I know some things to."
"Such as?"
"Such as, it's always a good idea to let a handsome man teach you the things he has learned."
He took her to a hotel and arranged for a room for her. Then he waited while she went upstairs to change and freshen up, as he put it. When she came back downstairs, he was sitting in the lobby, smoking a cigar. He stood up when he saw her coming toward him.
Strange, she thought, how light and young I feel, as if I have suddenly become five years younger all at once.
"You look lovely," he said.
She smiled. In all her life, no one had ever said she looked lovely. That was a word that belonged in bad movies and old-fashioned books. No one used it.
Except here. She loved the sound of it.
"Thank you," she said. "You know how to make a lady feel appreciated."
If there was a faint tinge in her voice, faintly reminiscent of Bruce Randolph's Mississippi accent, it was there unconsciously.
It was very late when he delivered her back to the hotel. They had danced some and then he had taken her out for a drive in the moon-drenched Mississippi night.
At her door, she fumbled for a key. He took it from her when she found it. He unlocked the door for her and then handed her the key.
She expected him to come in, but he didn't move to do that. He just looked at her and said, "I enjoyed this evening, Wanda."
"So did I."
"Are you planning to stay long in Biloxi?"
"I hadn't made any plans."
"I hope you will."
"I may," she said. "I think I will."
"There's no pressure on you to go back to New York. I mean, if you don't plan to work there any more . . . you could keep on writing plays here. Mr. Faulkner did rather well writing from Mississippi."
"Yes, he did," she said.
'Think about it. There are worse places to live than here."
"Oh, I know," she said. "I know there are."
Then he took her hand in his and squeezed it gently. He didn't even make a move to kiss her. He just said, "I would hate for you to go away now."
CHAPTER TWELVE...
As it turned out, Mr. Bruce Randolph was the richest man in that part of Mississippi and his marriage to the Northern girl, Miss Wanda Fixx, was the talk of the entire county. Wanda was a bit nervous about that. She wondered if maybe Eric Wayne wouldn't read the papers and see mention of it. But apparently, if he did, he decided it wasn't worth the trouble, because no one ever appeared to bother her or threaten her.
After having been in Mississippi for three weeks, Wanda called her sister to tell her where she was. Her sister hadn't even reported her disappearance to the police because she hadn't believed there was anything to worry about.
When Wanda said that she had merely drifted on, trying to find herself, and that she had eventually wound up in Biloxi, Mississippi, her sister's only reaction was, "Mississippi? My God, they're all going to think you're an outside agitator and they may lynch you or something."
But then when Wanda said she had met the most wonderful man, who just happened to own thousands of acres of land, and that she was planning to be married, her sister thought that was just marvelous and she said she would fly down immediately to help her plan for the wedding.
She only had one bad moment and that came some months after the wedding, and it was from a source that she hadn't given any thought to at all.
She bumped into the truck driver who had picked her up on the highway outside the motel where she had left the two men and who had driven her to Biloxi, and who remembered very well the girl he had picked up as he drove through one Southern night.
She was walking down the street one day in the late fall and she passed him there on the street corner without recognizing him at all. But he recognized her and caught her by the arm.
"Hey," he said, "look at you."
She jerked away, nervously, not understanding. Then he said, "Don't you remember me? I'm the guy who brought you to this town."
Then she did remember him. She flushed and looked around, but there weren't many people on the streets and those who were there weren't paying any attention to them.
"I remember you," she said.
"How about a beer? For old times' sake," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Listen," she said, "I paid you for what you did for me."
"You sure did," he said. "I loved it too." Then he laughed. He was in a good humor and it was obvious that he thought he had gotten lucky again, that he was going to be able to take her somewhere and make her once more.
"Well, that was all there's going to be," she said. "No more."
"No more? Why not?"
"Because I'm married now."
"Married?" he said. "No kidding? Who's the lucky guy?"
She started to tell him, without thinking, and then she caught herself and stopped. "Why?" she said. "What difference does it make?"
He laughed. "You think I'm going to call your husband or something and tell him about you?"
"What could you tell him?"
"You know what. But I'm not going to."
"All you could tell him was that you picked up a frightened woman who was in trouble and that you took advantage of that trouble."
His smile faded. "That wasn't the way it was," he said.
"I know and you know, but that's what hell hear."
"I told you anyway, I didn't aim to call your husband or anything. I was just asking to be polite."
"Well, I can't tell you."
"Okay." He shrugged. "Well, how about it?"
"How about what?"
"A beer. I asked you to have a beer with me."
"No, thank you. I can't do that. My husband wouldn't understand my having a beer with you or any other man he doesn't know."
"How would he ever find out about it?"
"I never lie to my husband and I don't keep anything from him."
The man laughed. "Well, hardly anything anyway, huh? I mean, I'm sure you ain't told him everything about your young life."
She turned and walked away, her heels making sharp stabbing sounds behind her.
She wasn't angry with the truck driver, though. Under the circumstances, what else could he have thought?
But she was nervous for several days after that, afraid the driver would find out who she was and try to cause some trouble. When time went on and that didn't happen, she began to wonder why she had thought that he would. He was probably a pretty nice guy who wouldn't want to get her into trouble. If he knew everything about her, he probably would say, she's okay, she just had a hard time for a while, but there's no reason why she can't enjoy her life now.
She didn't want Bruce to ever find out about the months in the whorehouse. She loved him. In a way, she was surprised to find that was true. She hadn't really expected ever to love anyone. But she loved him. And he was Southern in every drop of his blood. He was proud, hard in his pride, and she knew that he wouldn't be able to understand her or forgive her for not telling him if he ever found out what she had been doing in the months before meeting him. She knew that he would never be able to be sure in his mind that she hadn't married for his money or as an escape from her past. And she didn't want him to be worried that way.
She never ceased being surprised at his strength, though, at the fierce passion he used on her. She had thought, in a way, that nothing any man could do would ever surprise her again. But he surprised her. And because he did, she knew that she would never be unfaithful to him, that no other man would ever be able to touch her as long as he wanted her.
She remembered, and knew she would forever, how it had been that first night for them.
When he finally made his move for her, it was in his own home, where he had taken her to show her the things that belonged to him. She took him then, easily, as a mature woman who knows what her man wants.
They went upstairs to his bedroom and he undressed as she did, so that they were both naked at about the same time. He was big, not the biggest she had ever seen, but bigger than most, thick and strong.
When he touched her, it was gently. He put his hands on her naked waist and pulled her to him to kiss her. Her lips parted and her tongue met his. She could feel his penis against her, hard, probing, and one of his hands was on her breast. Her nipples were taut and erect, thrusting to meet his touch.
He laid her down on the bed and bent over to keep her flat while he kissed her breasts softly. He took one of her nipples into his mouth and sucked gently at it.
Gentle. Everything was gentle. She had almost forgotten the difference between lovemaking and plain sex. But everything was so gentle.
His hand went between her legs and she spread open for him, so that he could reach her with his fingers, and even that was gentle. Gentle, but increasingly demanding as his own passion rose, so that when she let her hand trail down to touch his sex, it was fully hard, immensely erect, ready for her. She wanted to bend down and suck it. She wanted to feel it in her mouth. She wanted to feel him responding to her that way.
But she didn't, because she sensed that he would be bothered by it. She sensed that he would want to feel that he had taught her that, and even then, knowing him no better than any woman knows a man she hadn't lived with, she could tell the strength of the pride in him.
He was working his finger around her there, so that she was wet for him She knew he was. But still he waited.
Until she couldn't stand that any more and she cried out, "Please, now, please . . . " and he went down into her, hard, plunging into her with all the strength of his maleness, so that she was made more female by his strength, and she threw her legs around him to hold in her. He was moving back and forth, plunging, thrusting, and her orgasms were welling up in her and crashing like waves on a beach, and there was nothing she could do but ride with his passion, because now it was hers. She was caught on the spear of his desire, caught and used, and she knew that she would always be there for him to use, because no man had ever made her feel that way before.
Then it was over, that first time, his semen part of her, being absorbed into her, and she remembered that she hadn't taken any birth control pills since her last period, so that maybe he had made her pregnant, but she didn't care about that. They hadn't talked about marriage yet, but she didn't care about anything. If she had his child, all right, she would have it, that was all, and there was nothing she could do about it because she wouldn't have had it any other way if she could have.
They lay naked beside each other then, the only light in the room the faint glow from the moon outside, and he trailed his finger down over her belly, toying with the mass of pubic hair that grew above her cleft.
He said, "I want to marry you."
She didn't say anything.
"I know it's quick for you," he said, "but I don't know how long it should have to take for two people to know whether they love each other."
She wanted to answer him, but she didn't know how.
"Listen," he said, his voice burring into the soft Mississippi drawl that she could hardly understand sometimes, "I know you love me too. I know you couldn't have responded to me that way unless you did."
"Yes," she said. "I love you." And it was true, she knew. She did love him. She couldn't have defined it. If anyone had laughingly challenged her, she couldn't have said why she was sure. But she was sure.
"Then we should be married."
"You don't know anything about me," she said.
He laughed. "My God, you sound like something from an afternoon soap opera. What is there to know about you that would make me change my mind about wanting to marry you?"
"Maybe lots of things."
"I doubt it. Such as what?"
"Maybe . . . " She was going to tell him right then, but she couldn't. When it came down to it, she couldn't do it, and she knew she would never be able to. Now, away from that life, it was hard for her to realize what she had been. Not that she had worked as a whore, but the way she had drifted into acceptance of it, into apathy, into silent agreement with it. Looking back, she hadn't even been escaping, not really, the night she left the motel. It was just that there had been nothing to stop her and no reason not to leave, and so she left. Maybe if they had told her where they were taking her, she would have stayed.
"Maybe." He laughed. "Maybe what? Maybe because you're not a virgin."
"What?"
"I could tell that."
"No," she said, "you're right. I'm not a virgin."
"Well, neither am I. We're both grown-up people. It's none of my business who you loved before me."
Who I loved, she thought. What about all the other men that I screwed? What about them? "I never loved anyone before you," she said. That wasn't a lie. That was true. She hadn't.
"Well, then," he said, smiling. "Why not marry me?"
"Why not?" she said. "All right."
He laughed happily then and rose above her to kiss her. He kissed her breasts and then down over her belly, finally to bury his face against her, probing at her with his tongue there, spreading open the lips of her pussy as he washed her with his mouth.
Finally, he raised his head and he said, "I never did that to anyone before." He looked a little shaken, but his penis was rigid and big again.
She knew he was going to ask her a question just then and she didn't want to answer it, because she didn't want to lie to him. Later, perhaps, she could tell him whatever gentle lies were necessary to keep him from knowing all the truth about her. But not right now. Not on the night that he had proposed to her.
She bent down over him and kissed softly at his weapon. He groaned a little with the pleasure of it even before she parted her lips and took it into her mouth.
But then he was lying back flat, enjoying it, and she was sucking on him gently, softly, without force, because she wanted him to think that she had never done it before, wanted him to be so sure of that that he would never have to ask her.
Then he caught her shoulders and pulled her back flat on the bed. "I almost came that way," he said.
"I thought you were going to," she said. "You wouldn't want me to do that in your mouth."
"I don't care," she said. "Whatever gives you pleasure, I'm willing to do."
He sighed when she said that. "I know that," he said. "I think that's why I love you."
"Do you want me to do it?"
"Take it in your mouth?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to do it."
"If you want me to."
"Well, I want you to. I never felt anything so good, but only if you want to do it."
"Why not?" she said. "You made me finish that way."
"Did you? When I was kissing you there?"
"Oh, yes," she said. "I came more than once."
He lay back then and she raised up over him to take him into her mouth again. She knew he was so excited that it wouldn't take long.
She was right. She sucked and massaged him at the same time and in just a few seconds he exploded into her mouth.
She took it all, and then she lay down beside him. He put his arm over and said, panting a little still with the force of the passion that had just wracked him, "There was never anything like that in the whole world."
"No," she said, "there wasn't."
Now, months later, mistress of the biggest house in the area, one of the richest women in the state, perhaps in the whole South, she could sit on the verandah of her home and watch the cattle in the field across the road from her, and she could think that nothing had ever really happened to her during those earlier months, when she had known people so strange as Chickie and Leon and Portia and Helen and Eric Wayne and the others.
Sometimes she wondered about them all. Once she even thought of dropping Chickie a letter, of telling her that everything was all right, that she had escaped to marry the handsome prince, to live happily ever after.
But she didn't.
She even learned to ride a horse, so that she could dress up in the new habit Bruce bought her, and go riding across the fields. In her own way, she loved the South there. She felt a bit like Scarlett O'Hara, she thought, and then she would laugh at herself. But in a way, she liked to think of her home as being named Tara and when she looked at the fields and the house and great, moss-covered trees that grew around it, she thought that she was happier than she had ever dreamed possible.
If anything, Bruce's passion for her grew with time, and as time passed and she didn't have to worry about him wondering where she had learned her sex techniques, she was able to show him things in bed that she thought he had never even dreamed of before. She was able to show him positions he'd never heard of. She was able to give him pleasure in ways he wouldn't have asked for. She was able to teach him things about the pleasure potential of his own body that he hadn't known.
And at the same time, he was able to show her that she didn't know everything either. He couldn't teach her anything about positions or techniques, but then, she learned, they aren't the things that matter. What matters is passion, is the desire that someone can create in you, and she was able to be aroused by him just by seeing him.
She wondered at that. It was such a marvelous thing.
And finally, as time went on, and as she relaxed and began to learn how to be a rich Southern lady, the other times faded until they hardly seemed real, until it was mainly like the memory of a movie or a book that had had a particular realism to it, but that hadn't, after all, really happened.
