As his knees made contact with the silk stockings sheathing her lovely legs, Brenda begged him silently to let her go. Caught between fear and desire, she saw the glint of the madman in his eyes. "Let me see it!" he ordered. "Everything. Strip!" There was no escape now, no responsibility she could take for what was happening. As she unzipped her pleated skirt, she felt the first rush of pleasure, of freedom.. .her thighs opened-and he moved in. He threw back her skirt and beheld her bare, white thighs above her stockings. The beating of his heart frightened him. He thought he would suffocate. He closed his eyes involuntarily; his empty head was spinning; he ground his teeth, opening and closing his eyes, and shaking his head nervously.
He was unable to believe his good fortune and was trying to awake from his thrilling dream. He couldn't help but think of how this situation began.
On his bed in his hotel room Lew had found a writhing, naked girl, avidly watching a jacketless boy who was about to unbutton his pants. The latter was a stranger but he had seen the girl once or twice in the company of an older couple, presumably her parents, and in the hotel itself.
"You! Are you a resident of this hotel?"
The boy had already picked up his leather jacket from the bed.
"Get out of here!"
The boy hastened to obey. Lew followed him into the corridor.
"Before you go, you'd better give me your name and address. I shall have to report this."
The lad begged him not to report the matter to the management, to the police, to his parents; and Lew, soft-hearted Lew said "All right! I'll have that watch. Give me your wallet! A thousand francs! I'll keep this. Here's your wallet! If I ever set eyes on you again, watch out!"
When Lew re-entered his room the girl was frantically re-dressing herself. Without a word he went to the window, opened it and watched for the frightened boy, who emerged from the hotel and fled, turning his head at the corner of the street without slowing down.
"Cowardly bastard!" he hissed, and turned at the sound of the girl turning of the door handle.
"Before you go, Mademoiselle, I think you owe me an explanation. Close the door!"
Obeying, she turned to him.
"What can I say, Monsieur?"
"How did you get in here?"
"I gave the chambermaid five hundred francs. She said you were away for the day and she would tidy up before you got back."
"You're staying in this hotel. What's wrong with your own room?"
"My parents are away for the day too, but I thought.. .if they happen to come back early.. .in my own room they'll catch me, but in another room.. .well, they'd think I'd gone shopping or something like that; and then.. .I didn't want him to know who I was, where I was staying. He didn't know how to arrange it and neither did I; so, rather than run the risk of going to a strange hotel where they might have asked awkward questions, I asked Yvette.. .that's the chambermaid's name.. .she's a good sort.. .I hope you won't get her into trouble..."
"I shan't get her into trouble. She's done that herself-with your help. From your friend I got a watch and a thousand francs as the price of my' silence as far as he's concerned; but I'm still bound to report Yvette to the owner of this place and it's my duty to warn your parents that I arrived just in time to prevent your having a bit with that lily-livered lout who'd just run away leaving you to face the music."
"If you let him get away with it for a watch and a thousand francs, I'll give you two thousand." He shook his head. "No. Strip!"
"Horrified, her eyes wide and bulging, her jaw sagging, she shook her head from side to side, while her parched lips struggled to form the word Never.
"Strip.. .or else!"
He took a step in her direction, pulled her roughly to him, and pressed his parted lips to her resisting mouth.
"All right!" he snapped, and reached for the telephone.
"No!"
"Take your clothes off! Be quick about it! Every stitch!"
"I can't. I'll give you every franc I have but you mustn't tell the manager, and get Yvette sacked; and my parents-my mother would never get over it and I tremble to think of what my father would do. Please! I'll give you all the money I have. You're an Englishman. You couldn't be so mean. I'm English too-well, half and half. Daddy is English and Mummy is French, but I'm British. Don't you see what it would mean to my parents?"
"Your parents will never know about you and that other chap or about you and me," he said, re-moving his jacket. "You were ready for it when I came in. I saw you. Well, I can give it to you better than him. Get your pants off and we'll have some fun 'til your parents come home!"
He unzipped his trousers.
"Take all the money I have," she begged, "and go with a prostitute! Ten thousand francs! You could get one who'd do it much better than I. I know nothing about.. .love. It'd be much more fun with a professional."
The fact that he had dropped his trousers to his feet and was stepping out of them convinced her that her entreaties were falling on deaf ears. He re-moved his shirt and singlet.
"Whores are all right when there's nothing else to be had, but I've taken a imagine to you and I assure you that as little as you know about lovemaking, I can squeeze out of you between now and nightfall a hundred times more excitement than I'd get out of the most famous pro in Paris. I shall teach you more today than you'd normally learn in ten years-unless you'd rather I report this whole business to the manager and your parents..."
She turned, and made a dash for the door but he caught her, thrust her away from the door, which he locked. He took out the key and threw it on top of the wardrobe.
"I'll deny it," she cried, frantic. "You've no witnesses."
It was one of his unlucky days. Indeed, most of his days were unlucky, sexually. It was true that he had no witnesses. Yvette would certainly deny that she had let this girl and her mythical lover into his room; and even if the manager believed him and sacked Yvette, what benefit would Lew derive from it? Yvette was a "gold digger" but Lew admired such women. She had always made him pay for the pleasure she had given him but he had spent some thrilling nights with her and he looked forward to having more fun with her. There was nothing to be gained from engineering her dismissal; nor could he see any sense in causing trouble between this young girl and her parents. If they accepted his account of the circumstances in which he had discovered their daughter and her prospective lover they would box the girl's ears, stop her pocket money for a few weeks, and keep her henceforth under stricter control; but Lew always thought of Lew and he was not interested in making others miserable, except when he derived some personal benefit from their discomfiture. He admitted to himself that this slip of a girl "had him by the short hairs."
But, Lew! Lew, you son of a Cockney bitch! What about the time-honored art of bluff!? Get in there, boy!
Out of the despair came the voice of hope, and the keen ear of the "spiv" (everybody has their dishonest streak, after all) was not deaf to the ringing of Bow-Bells (as if the bells of Bow Church could stop him now!).
Lew peeled off his underpants and his erect phallus throbbed and glowed under the amazed gaze of the no-longer-so-victorious virgin.
"No witnesses!" he exclaimed, forcing a laugh, "and you think Yvette is on your side? Listen, kid! I've got Yvette in the palm of my hand. If I tell her to spill the beans she'll do just like I tell her. She loses her job, who cares? She only has to snap her fingers and she's got another job. And anyway, I've friends here in Paris who'd always find a place for Yvette. Listen! It's time to cut out the talk. It doesn't take me long to take off my shoes and socks. If by then you're not stripping, I'll be after ringing the old guy manager about you and your boyfriend."
He stepped out of his shoes and tugged off his beige nylon socks. Naked, except for his watch and a flashy ring on his right hand, he approached her. She retreated until the calves of her legs made con-tact with the edge of the bed and she was forced to sit. His naked knees touched the silk of the stockings which sheathed her lovely legs.
Her eyes involuntarily adored his pulsating penis. She was being forced to surrender, but she also longed to taste him. She could have resisted the longing but she might have run the risk of allowing him to cause a scandal. Her fear and longing together turned her to a trembling jelly.
Brenda took hope from his hesitation. She wanted a man, but this one would not insist upon having her. Was he beginning to regret his attempts to force her to surrender to him? If only that were true! Perhaps he was not such a bad sort after all. Silently, she begged him to let her go, but he laughed hoarsely and in his eyes she saw the glint of the madman. Her trembling was that of a woman afraid, not that of a human bitch "in heat." She was terrified at the thought of his debauching her but she no longer dared resist him and decided that she ought to appear cooperative.. .try to make him enjoy his possession of her.
"A nice pair of thighs!" he hissed, "but the treasure is between them. Let me see it! Everything! Quick! Belly, tits, the lot! Strip!"
There was no avenue of escape. The circumstances relieved her of all responsibility for what was happening. and she rejoiced in her imposed freedom, deriving a certain pleasure from removing her blouse in a man's presence. She knew her body was lovely and she was proud to have even this loathsome, ugly little brute admire it. Eagerly, she unzipped her pleated plaid skirt and eased it down her long, slender thighs. Lew took it rudely from her and threw it into the only armchair in the room while she removed her white nylon slip.
Lew croaked, his throat as dry as dust.
"Look at that!" Christ, you'd make good eating! Just that little bra, those panties and.. .what's that thing that holds up your nylons?"
"Girdle! Suspender belt!"
"Get 'em off! Come on! Struth, this is my day! Get in there, Grace!"
His was the first penis she had ever seen and in truth it delighted her. She wondered at the size, stiffness, and glow of it, and she thanked God that He had given her the power to make it quiver so and reach for the clouds in that impatient way. Noticing that she was staring, he patted the under-side of his rod with the palm of his right hand.
"It's all yours, sister," he gasped.
'very carefully she peeled off her bra and then her stockings, raising first one foot and then the other to within a few inches of his nose. He took the second foot in his hands, kissed it, nibbled it, sucked her toes, and bit her heel.
"You're naughty," she sighed, warm now.
Again that crazy laugh. "You ain't seen nothin' yet."
With the simultaneous removal of her panties and suspender belt, she was beautifully, virginally bare and so defenseless that he unintentionally risked throwing away his big chance.
"Jesus! Am I going. to make you suffer! You'll scream, lady! Come here!"
Suffer? Scream? Escape! Not a hope! The door locked and the key on top of the wardrobe! He would kill her, she thought. Why, Valerie's finger had always seemed excruciatingly thick, but what he was going to push into her was four of five times as fat as her beloved Valerie's beloved finger. Valerie, ma chere Valerie! If only you were here, my little tigress! You would claw this lion to death.
Lew pulled Brenda to him. His hard, cruel lips assaulted her soft mouth, which had hitherto known only the chaste kisses of boys and the sweet caresses of Valerie's tongue. His mouth was wide and his tongue vibrant. Brenda parted her lips and advanced her tongue to meet his. She licked his large, rarely brushed and rotting teeth; she felt his vivacious phallus against the smooth curve of her belly. She wanted him, but she wanted him to die-on top of her, afterwards, if necessary-but preferably before he had the chance to sully her utterly.
His fingers found her jewel, and her teeth at his earlobe thanked him for the rays of pleasure which went out to all her private parts from the tips of his ne'er-do-well digits. Her clitoris swelled and she knew he was her master. Her body writhed under him and he knew she was his slave, and as if she were a book into which he could delve at will, in search of thrills and escape from the monotony of everyday life, he opened the book at the middle and began "reading" aloud:
"My finger explores your sex, which is open, moist, inviting. As my fingers delve deeper into you I feel the beating of your depraved heart, which pumps out the message 'Ready!' I've been ready for years; ready, waiting, masturbating and throwing away money on whores; waiting, dreaming-dreaming wet and hoping-screaming my hope crying my desire.. .in vain. To hell with God, the lousy bastard! Long live Satan! Long live this! And this and this AND THIS AND THIS!"
He was in her. He was deep. He was deeper. He was big, bigger, biggest. He was pain and joy. He was shameful joy. He was blood and joyous shame. Disgusting, cruel, evil, delicious. Blood escaping, bloody thighs, bloody bellies, bedclothes drinking blood and her humiliation, her release and her ecstasy. She was asunder, but she remained concenrated around and about his driving merciless, advancing, probing and retreating pole. It was total, his having her. He gave her the salt in her open wounds but she wrenched from him the honey demanded by the greedy tongue of her young loins. She opened herself wider and wider, painfully but happily, and she swallowed him, hated him and blessed him. It was all too wild. She didn't know how to roll the nectar round her vaginal tongue; and if he had ever known how, he had forgotten. It was a glutton's "bean-feast," a meal for peasants, not an occasion for a gourmet's rejoicing.
Afterwards, she dung to him, regretting her initial reluctance, grateful that he had chased away her adolescent boyfriend and that he had so nastily forced himself upon her. With Valerie at boarding school, it had been thrilling, but not one tenth of this. She had long wanted a man and only fear had prevented her having one earlier. And she had never imagined a man could be so much more satisfactory than her beloved girl. What a pity this one was such a horrid man! Imagine what it would be lie with a man who combined his erotic power with the charm, sweetness and tenderness of a Valerie Cordell. Oh, Valeria! It hurts so down there. Lick away the pain! Kiss me, my darling!
Lew stood before her, holding his penis in his right hand.
"Suck it dean!" he commanded.
She almost vomited at the thought of it and she shook her head "No."
He repeated his order, more curt.
"I couldn't. I'm sorry, but-"
"You'll do everything-everything-I tell you to do. What you've just gone through was the beginning, a slight foretaste of things to come. Get this straight! I command, you obey-or else! Do you lick or do I telephone?"
As she moved her lips obediently towards his growing phallus he squeezed the greasy pipe so that her tongue received the final globule of sperm from his recent orgasm. Disgusted, she turned her head away to spit, but his agile hand seized her chin and his mouth swooped down to her ear.
"Swallow!"
Since she had to obey she decided to taste his gift before allowing it to drop into her stomach. She rotated her tongue in her mouth, obeyed his command, and licked her lips. He smiled and thrust his sex into her mouth, obliging her to savor the mixture of his cream and the juices of her own lust. Voluntarily, she would not have done such a thing, but obliged to do so she found it by no means unpleasant. The taste was neither agreeable nor other-wise, but Brenda liked the feel of his throbbing, eager "peninsula" in her mouth; and she went down on it until its helmet blocked the aperture of her throat. Her eyes turned upwards, and observed the look of victory on his cruel, ugly face. She was surprised to discover that slavery, erotic slavery, was thrilling.
Still, she could not help hoping he would soon set her free. She knew escape was out of the question and she was afraid to suggest he let her go, since his hurt pride might lead him to carry out his original threat of reporting Yvette to the manager and her to her parents; but, having learned how delicious copulation can be with a scoundrel, she would have liked to leave without his taking her again, so that she could keep her second orgasm for a different sort of man, a man worthy of her affection, one who respected her and saw her as some-thing more than a gaping, dripping vagina. Brenda knew her hopes were vain.
His fingers returned to her sex.
"You're crying out for it," he exclaimed.
It was true. At the touch of his fingers, her longing for his further use of her drove out all thought of escape. The weight of his hard body on her belly was welcome, his hairy chest crushing the fragile fruit of her desire-inflated breasts. She was no longer the greedy, fearful ingenue. She felt the second assault of his manhood on her tender tunnel and she voluntarily opened herself to receive him so that every millimeter of her vagina made acquaintance with every hair, every ripple, every intoxicating vein of his straining staff. She was at peace this time, knowing more or less what was coming, and determined to taste it, not just have it thrown madly into her guts without having it pause on her palate.
As he rode her strongly, deeply, slowly, she rode him as well, making her rhythm conform to his so that they were really together, just like a couple who have been lovers long enough to be in tune with each other, but not long enough for the melody to have become a bit of a bore.
For Lew, it was good; it had never been as good before and it went on and on, deliciously rising, rising all the time, reaching the top, which was never the top, but just a springboard for the assault on a still higher (and hitherto invisible, unimaginable) peak. There was the odor of sweat and loin-oils, the sound of smacking lips coming from the fusion of his sex and hers; there were sighs and breathless groans, there were grunts of energy expended (but not wasted) and there were whispered words: "Never dreamed.. .like this; Yes, oh, yes!; More!; Just how it should be!; Really got this one!; Wide open!; The whole lot inside!; Come soon!"
When it came, the nigh simultaneous coming was long, easy and sweet. It was almost like the world-no beginning and no ending; or like the old solider-no dying, but a gentle fading away; fading, fading, exquisite fading, her flaccid, grateful lips seeking his, and him continuing to ease his deflated pride in and out of her serene satisfaction. She didn't want him to stop nor did she will him not to stop; and he did not bring his fornicating to an end-they just fizzled out, peacefully, into a sort of open-eyed, fully-aware sleep, which lingers on after the song is ended.
Their appeased bodies remained in contact. From time to time one's mouth would find the others; and his hand would squeeze her breasts or buttocks while her delicate fingers traced invisible designs on his skin.
Within her his phallus began to grow again, to harden and throb, to reach out for the bottom of her pit on iniquity. Feeling it, Brenda trembled in anticipation of the joy in store for her. She pulled him closer to her, her fierce, hungry arms crushing the breath out of him. He moved slowly deeper into her and then almost entirely out of her; her crotch rose to him as he pushed and her bottom re-treated as he withdrew. The tempo quickened and two sweating beasts roared, writhed, bit, spat, and dissolved in the flames of their own passion.
Exhausted and painfully hot, they fell apart, panting in triumphant and happy discomfort.
Brenda cut into a long silence with the suggestion that Lew take her to lunch. The rat bared its teeth.
"Where the hell d'ye think I'm going to find the nickels to pay for it?" he snapped. "All I've got is the 'hush money' from your boyfriend."
"I've got enough money. I want to celebrate-to eat and drink as never before. I've got it! Make it a Dutch treat!"
"All right! We'll go to a bistro quite near here, which I know well. Get a good meal there for five hundred francs!"
"You can't celebrate in a cheap cafe. I want to drink champagne, have caviar, sweetbreads, a feast, a party! If you'll take me to 'I'Ecu de France,' I'll pay for both of us."
Triumph for Lew! He knew' he could get her to buy him a "slap-up" lunch, to feed him in style, if he played his cards cunningly.
In the taxi she slipped a ten thousand franc note into his hand.
"For the lunch!" she whispered.
He put the note in his pocket.
"I'll keep this," he said, "and you pay the bill with what else you've got. It'll be a new experience for me to see a waiter's face when a lovely young bird pays for my eats."
Lew thought it was definitely becoming his lucky day. After having transacted a good bit of business at the Cafe de la Paix, he had robbed Brenda's would-be debaucher of one pound sterling and a wristwatch and then spent almost two glorious hours with a passionate, beautiful young woman. He had swindled her out of ten pounds on the way to a smart restaurant where she was going to buy him a better and more expensive meal than he had ever consumed. Furthermore, after lunch she would still be his for four or five hours. His heart sang "It's a great day for the barrow-boys."
In restaurants Lew rarely (if ever) ate what he fancied. His choice was always dictated by the price-cheapness being the criterion. At "I'Ecu de France," however, he chose the most expensive dishes and wines, merely because they were dear, and in spite of the fact that he could have preferred two or three thick, juicy pork sausages, crisp, golden brown chips, and green peas with a print of Truman's Best Bitter Beer, followed by a chunk of apple pie with a bit of Cheddar cheese and a cup of strong tea with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar. After a French vermouth (Noilly Prat), they both had lobster soup, which is guaranteed to upset all but the steeliest of stomachs, salted roe of Russian sturgeon accompanied by a glass or two of 'veuve Clicquot (a costly, but mediocre, effervescent white wine from Champagne) and "sole norrnande," with which they drank a bottle of Chateau Yquem. Brenda asked for "ris de veau" and Lew ordered a beefsteak "Chateaubriand" with "sauce bernaise." With these two dishes they drank a bottle of Rothschild. After a delicious new cheese, Bleu de Bresse, and a bottle of Beaujolais, Brenda and Lew had coffee and liqueur de Calvados. Lew felt good and he seemed to grow to twice his normal size when Brenda paid the bill and the waiter cast envious, admiring glances at the stunted Cockney whose slave she was.
Having allowed Brenda to pay for the taxi which took them from the hotel to the restaurant, Lew saw no point in denying her the privilege of meeting the cost of their return. He did protest, how-ever, when (upon their arrival at the hotel) she endeavored to slip away to her own bed, leaving him to regain his own room alone.
"You've only paid half the price of my silence," he insisted.
"But I've had too much too drink. I'm too tired to be of any use to you. When do you leave Paris?"
"Tomorrow at midday."
"I'll try to get, free to spend the morning with you-a couple of hours."
"You won't TRY. You WILL get the morning free to come to me. But in the meantime you're coming with me until your parents come home."
The tone of his voice contained the threat that her failure to comply would lead to her denunciation and she didn't dare risk that.
She felt so great a need for sleep that, in his room, she undressed upon receipt of his command. She thought that the sooner they had tired each other the sooner he would sleep and allow her to creep away to her own bed. He too removed all his clothing. Instead of throwing her on the bed, as she had expected, he dragged her roughly to a small round table which stood at the foot of the bed. He forced her backwards across the table, opened her thighs, and hitched her legs over his shoulders. His eager penis nudged the aperture of her sex, which it found moist enough to enable an easy invasion; and he was about to enter when she turned her hanging head towards the window and emitted a horrified howl. She fell from the table, escaping from his grasp, and crawled away from the window.
"Close the curtains!" she cried. "They've been open all the time-before lunch, too. Look at all those people on the other side!"
Unashamedly bare, Lew looked out the window and saw, on the opposite side of the narrow street, ten or twelve men, women and teen-age girls staring into his room from the wide, high windows of what was probably either a studio or some sort of workshop. He smiled and waved to them and most of them laughed and waved back. He turned to Brenda, who was dressing as quickly as her inebriated, frightened hands would allow.
"Come here!" he shouted.
"Close the curtains, you idiot!"
He moved quickly to her, slapped her face sharply and dragged her back to the round table.
"The curtains stay open," he said. "Get your skirt and panties off in double-quick time!"
"Not with all those people watching!"
"They know neither you nor me. If they don't want to see, let 'em go to hell. If they do want to watch, it can do us no harm-in fact it'll add a bit of spice. Hurry up, unless you want me to get on the phone!"
Hating him, but secretly thrilled at the thought of receiving him under the jealous gaze of a dozen strangers, she hurriedly removed her slip, brassiere, and panties. On the table again, her head hanging downwards while her thighs formed a wide, beseeching "V," she shuddered with joy and pain at the first, wicked onslaught of his proud sex organ, which found the very bottom of her love-tunnel. She soon became so excited that she just had to come into closer contact with him: she raised her head and shoulders until she was sitting on the table, her hands gripping the back of his head and pulling his face close enough to hers to permit a kiss. Her tongue struggled sloppily with his and her loins broke down into an orgasm which caused her to sink her teeth into his lips. Feeling his own warm blood on his tongue, Lew began to batter her sex with more fury and soon, crying out, she reached another climax almost at the same time as his seed finally seethed and gushed into her.
Brenda had forgotten that she and Lew were not alone but he was more of a trouper than she. His public applauded him. He withdrew his slimy sex from hers, turned to the watchers and bowed, holding his scarcely reduced phallus on the palm of his open right hand. He roused Brenda from the stupor of sexual satiety with a slap on her bottom and at his command she very reluctantly joined him in front of the open window. He wiped and squeezed his manhood with his right hand, from which he obliged her to lick the mixture of his sperm and the fluid of her own vagina. The onlookers clapped their hands excitedly until Brenda closed the curtains and floated into her loathed lover's arms. After a long kiss, he carried her to the bed, where they slept until eight o'clock.
After another long session of fornication, Brenda said she really must return to her own room before her parents came back. Lew shook his sand-colored head, forcing his lips into a sneer which was, in fact, an inversed grin.
"I've got to go, damn you!" she said angrily. "I've gone through hell since noon to persuade you not to tell your childish tales to Mummy and Daddy. What'll be the sense of all that horror if I don't go home now? As it is, I've got to make up some fantastic story to explain where I've been all day-what I've seen and done; but if they're al-ready in their room, or if they get home in an hour or two and find I'm not yet in, what do you think I'm going to tell them to explain my absence? I know Daddy will jump to the conclusion I've been with a boy and then the feathers will certainly fly. Do what you like! You've had a good time. The least you can do in return is keep your part of the bargain. I debased myself on condition that you would not inform my parents and the manager of the hotel that Yvette allowed me to receive a boyfriend in your room. And now you expect me to run the risk of their discovering I've spent the day with you. No fear! I'm going now, before they get back."
He said nothing more until she was dressed. When she was about to leave, he rose from the bed and took her in his arms, almost tenderly.
"Come back for an hour or two when they've gone to sleep!" he begged. "You have a room of your own? Well then, they'll never notice if you're away for an hour. Come back and I promise they'll never know anything about today!"
"Be reasonable, Lew," she said, touched by his sex-starved need of her. "We've had fun together. If I go back now, they need never know about it; but leaving my room during the night, for longer than it takes to go to the toilet, is too risky. I'd like to do it, just as much as you'd like me to, but I dare not. Kiss me and let me go."
He opened the door and she stepped cautiously out into the corridor.
"If you don't come back," he hissed as he closed the door, "your parents and the manager will receive phone calls tomorrow."
Brenda had been in bed more than an hour when her parents returned, but she had not slept. Recalling the thrills Lew had given her, she had lain in bed imagining her surrender to two or three boys and men whom she liked, and hoping some way could be found of their realizing she was theirs for the asking without her having to cheapen herself by taking the initiative. What a pity, she thought, that she should owe such ecstasy to so revolting a creature as Lew Grace! How strange, too, that she could hate a man and yet delight in the things he did to her and made her do to and with him!
Feigning sleep, she made no reply when her parents first knocked, but more and harder rapping brought her, yawning, to the door.
Mrs. Crosland, failing to see through her daughter's deceptions, put Brenda back into bed, tucking the clothes well around her, and tiptoed out of the room.
"The poor darling was asleep, George," she said to her husband. "She's tired and so are we. We'll have a good gossip over breakfast in the morning. Good night, cheri!"
At midnight Brenda was still awake, and at one o'clock and two o'clock she had not yet slept, so occupied were her thoughts with the events of the day and with her impatience to have a lover, not a hateful man who could thrill her lips, her breasts and her loins without touching her heart (except to fill it with bitterness) but one who would lust after her flesh while holding her in affection, a man whose desire for her would not prevent his respecting her, even in the comment of his triumphant possession of her and afterwards. Her thoughts ex-cited her. Her fingers wandered from time to time to her vagina, whose warm, moist, open vulnerability betrayed her urgent need of a man.
It was almost three o'clock when she glided into sleep, Lew's final threat ringing in her ears.
Lew had less difficulty falling asleep. He was not accustomed to copulating five times in nine or ten hours. Physically tired, and well pleased with his day, he wanted to get as much sleep as possible be-fore Brenda returned to pay the final installment of her debt to him. He'd need a few hours sleep if he was to fulfill his intention to give Brenda not a minute of peace from the moment of her arrival to that of her departure.
"Half past five? What does that silly bitch think she's up to? If she thinks I'm bluffing, she's in for an unpleasant surprise. Fallen asleep probably! Damn and blast! Why didn't I ask her for her room number? If I knew where to find Yvette, she'd help me. The night porter? No, he'd never dare tell me.. .more than his job's worth."
He put on his garish dressing gown and went out to wander along the corridors, hoping to recognize as Brenda's, one of the pairs of shoes outside the doors of the various rooms. There were several rooms before which stood smart ladies' shoes, but he saw none which seemed more- likely than the others to be Brenda's, so, having explored all the corridors of the hotel, he returned to his own room, which he was about to enter when he noticed a slim figure emerge from a room at the other end of the dimly lit corridor. He remained at his door, hoping and almost sure the hurrying young lady was making her way to his bed. His hopes were justified and he was so thrilled at the sight of her night gowned legs flicking open her dark-blue dressing gown with every hasty step she made that he forgot to chide her for being late. He threw her onto the bed, dragged her dressing gown and diaphanous nylon nightie off her and at once exerted his mastery over her tender, eager body.
It went on and on, climax following climax. He had her slowly, smoothly. Then he took her brutally.
She was lying on her back and she gave herself as a bitch receives the amorous visitations of a dog.
He knew this was his last chance of having her and very probably his last copulation for many months with any female other than a prostitute, so he made every effort to keep the promise he had made to himself-to give her not a minute's peace. But he lacked the necessary stamina, and so did she. Although such a thing was far from the thoughts of either of them, after more than an hour of scarcely interrupted, varied and mutually delightful loving, they sank into a kissing, fondling doze which developed into a sleep, in which their satisfied bodies were as one mound of warm, perspiration-moistened, sperm-flecked flesh.
Lew awoke eager to resume the game of love, but when he roused her from sleep, she immediately noticed that the room was flooded with natural light.
"Good God!" she cried, looking at her watch. "If they haven't noticed my absence, it's a miracle."
He tried to restrain her, but she slipped her nightdress over her head, pulled her dressing gown quickly around her trembling body, and fled.
Her nervous fingers had no control over the key of her door. She dropped it, picked it up, tried to put it in the keyhole, dropped it again, and was picking it up for a second time when her parents emerged, in a state of extreme agitation, from their bedroom.
"Brenda, not dressed. Where've you been?"
"Toilet."
They followed her into her room and closed the door.
"Which toilet?"
"Third floor. This one was occupied."
"But your mother's been to look for you in this toilet," her father said. "And the one on the first floor, and the one above this. Brenda, where've you been?"
Her blush deepening, she turned her head away from her beloved and very loving father.
"But, Daddy," she whispered, "I've told you I was at the toilet."
"How long, darling?"
"A long time, Mummy. My tummy's a bit up-set."
Brenda's French mother was just as anxious as her English father: And guessing the truth, she, Brenda's mother, wanted to get him out of the way as quickly as possible so that she and the girl could save whatever was salvageable from the wreck.
"Ma pauvre petite cherie, you must always come to me when you're not well. Get into bed, and keep warm! Leave us for a few minutes, Georges!"
George, whom his spouse insisted on calling "Georges" in the French manner, was not ready to retire. As Madame removed their daughter's dressing gown, George approached, and cast admiring glances upon the young breasts which were half-exposed by the decolletage of the girl's insubstantial nightie.
"Mady, a girl who's not feeling well doesn't disappear for more than an hour and then turn up, in her nightdress, cling to have spent the entire hour in a toilet you yourself visited twice during the time without finding her. What's that?"
He pointed to the base of Brenda's neck where Lew had bitten her and then sucked the wound until her pale skin bore a red blemish about the size of a sixpenny piece.
"It's a fever-spot. George. Go and order break-fast in our room! I'll be with you in a few minutes."
George looked more closely at the red spot on Brenda's neck. Then he looked her in the eyes. Guilt was written on her face.
"Get up Brenda and stop worrying your mother! You're not ill. Mady, you know as well as I do what that red spot is. She's been with some monster, who hasn't been content with depriving my little girl of her innocence, but he had to go whole-hog, and practice his filthy, sadistic tricks on her. I don't care if he's half my age and twice my size, I'll break him in two, the filthy blackguard. Brenda, who is it? Tell me his name, his room number! I'll have him chased from this hotel. I'll have him branded for life. Who is he, Brenda?"
"Keep calm, Georges! Whatever happened, and whoever's to blame, you're not helping matters by getting hysterical and telling the whole hotel about it. Anyway, Georges, Brenda's not a child and she's pretty enough and attractive enough to please a quite normal man. She hasn't complained of being raped, so she and he are equally guilty or equally innocent of offense. Why make a scandal and get your 'block' knocked off into the bargain? Let Brenda and me talk the matter over, as one woman to another!"
"I'm the person to settle this matter. There'll be no scandal Mady, you've tried to make me look small from the day we married, but I assure you that although I'm a peace-loving man, I'm in position to teach this man a lesson he'll never for get. Brenda, I want his name-at once!"
"I can't tell you, Daddy."
"So you admit there is someone? But you refuse to tell me who he is?"
"Yes, I refuse. I'm not proud of what's happened and I'd have done anything to avoid giving you both the pain of knowing about it. I love you both and I'm proud of you and I always want you to be proud of me...."
". . . and yet you, my daughter, whom I've cherished more than my own life-you throw yourself at some filthy, syphilitic stranger, who had one girl the night before last, you last night, and he'll have another tonight. Who is he? No answer? 'very well! Mother, will you leave us alone, please!"
Mrs. Crosland looked from her daughter to her husband, scarcely able to believe that they were the two people who formed her one reason for living. She was broad-minded, but still she was shocked by her daughter's conduct; and she was even more shocked at George's suggestion that she leave the room. She knew what it meant.
Her thoughts went back twenty years to the last time George asked her to leave him alone with one of their children, Francis, who had died in a German concentration camp in 1943. There had followed an Edwardian beating which had brought screams even from the throat of brave young Francis, whose excessive courage and sense of fair play had later cost him his life. Even if a mother admits that her husband may spank their fourteen-year old son, must she also permit him to chastise corporally an eighteen-year-old daughter, who is sufficiently adult to have a lover?
Permit? Mrs. Crosland never hesitated to give George her views on any subject under the sun, but he accepted or rejected her advice as he thought fit. Without being a tyrant he reserved for himself the last word on all really important matters and al-though he was not a narrow-minded man, she knew that he regarded his beloved daughter's defection from purity as a tragedy of the first importance. Mrs. Crosland decided not to augment her husband's anger by questioning his authority and' she left the room.
"Are you going to give me the man's name?" George Crosland asked, along with his daughter.
"I'm sorry, Daddy," she said. "No."
"I want one point to be quite clear in your mind," he said. "Furious, disgusted, and disappointed as your mother and I are by your unwholesome liaison with.. .whoever he is, what really upsets me in that you won't tell us who he is. We have a very good reason for wanting to know and you're not yet of an age to adopt this independent attitude-as though you lacked confidence in our judgment. No father-likes to thrash a daughter of your age, so I want to give you a final chance to spare me this unpleasantness."
Brenda had not the slightest intention of telling her father with whom she had spent nearly all the previous day and part of the night. To do so might have spared her a spanking, which would be physically and psychologically as painful for her as her father insisted it would be for him. Why did she insist on holding her tongue? To protect a man she despised? Yes, to prevent her dear father from annoying the repugnant individual to whom she had hurried shortly before dawn-not because she feared him and wanted to silence his libellous tongue, but because she desired and needed a man and he was the only one immediately available. After an after-noon and evening of thrills to which she had submitted reluctantly, he had bestowed upon her at daybreak delights to which she had submitted, joys which she had sought. Hateful as he was, Lew, in satisfying his own bestial needs, had soothed the sexual suffering which had prematurely sundered her from her psychological slumber. And she was grateful to him. Her flesh cried "Lew Grace!" but her lips and tongue would have withered rather than utter his name.
Her silence convinced her father that the anonymous one was "Prince "Charming" who held sway over both her heart and her body, and jealousy took complete possession of the loving and jealous male parent, whose wife had long lost her charm. Brenda was young and extremely succulent in her low-cut, transparent nightie. She knew the intoxication of carnal love and she was as ripe as the many shop-girls, shorthand typists, maid-servants, and factory girls in whose direction he daily cast concupiscent glances.
Forgetting that desirable Brenda was his own daughter, he dragged her from her bed, upon which he seated himself, laid her across his trembling knees and raised the skirt of her flimsy nightdress until his eyes were able to feast themselves upon the rosy fruits of her pretty buttocks. Resisting the temptation to pull apart the cheeks of her posterio and plunge his tongue into her anus, he delivered five or six smart, but not very painful, blows to her bottom with the palm of his febrile hand. His final blow differed from the previous ones in that it was somewhat harder and in that it was not followed by the instant removal of his hand, which remained on the smooth, meaty curve, stroking, adoring, wanting, but not daring.
He fingered the ripe peaches and the drops of satisfying his own bestial needs, had soothed the sexual suffering which had prematurely sundered her from her psychological slumber. And she was grateful to him. Her flesh cried "Lew Grace!" but her lips and tongue would have withered rather than utter his name.
Her silence convinced her father that the anonymous one was "Prince-Charming" who held sway over both her heart and her body, and jealousy took complete possession of the loving and jealous male parent, whose wife had long lost her charm. Brenda was young and extremely succulent in her low-cut, transparent nightie. She knew the intoxication of carnal love and she was as ripe as the many shop-girls, shorthand typists, maid-servants, and factory girls in whose direction he daily cast concupiscent glances.
Forgetting that, desirable Brenda was his own daughter, he dragged her from her bed, upon which he seated himself, laid her across his trembling knees and raised the skirt of her flimsy nightdress until his eyes were able to feast themselves upon the rosy fruits of her pretty buttocks. Resisting the temptation to pull apart the cheeks of her posterio and plunge his tongue into her anus, he delivered five or six smart, but not very painful, blows to her bottom with the palm of his febrile hand. His final blow differed from the previous ones in that it was somewhat harder and in that it was not followed by the instant removal of his hand, which remained on the smooth, meaty curve, stroking, adoring, wanting, but not daring.
He fingered the ripe peaches and the drops of saliva rolled inwards from the corners of his mouth to the middle of his lower lip, from where they fell, as one large tear, onto the roundness of one of her posterior globes. He lowered his lips to her ass, to kiss away the brilliant jewel of spittle, which re-treated from his advancing mouth and ran down the crease between her buttocks. Pursuing the disintegrating drop of saliva, his snout came to contact with Brenda's sex, for she, instinctively or with willful perversity had turned over on her father's lap, and opened her legs.
His tongue invaded her vagina and his lips and teeth tugged gently at her swollen clitoris. Her thighs closed about his head and she groaned, her whole body racked with joy, shame, and desire. Hotter and hotter, higher and higher, deep, deeper, deepest, she rose to the summit of . pleasure, squealing, entreating and shivering in her apogee, and then she sank into the bitterest depth out of shame at her own conduct and disgust at that of the man whose tongue had just thrilled her.
Flinging herself from her debaucher's knees, she buried her weeping face in her pillow, and her strangled voice reached his ears.
"Go now! Quickly! I want to be alone! All day!"
He crept out of the room, and rejoined his wife, who, having heard no screams of pain or sounds of savage beating, made a move to plant a grateful kiss upon his lips; but he turned his face and rubbed her cheek with his, fearful that, kissing his lips, she would taste the juices of their child's loins thereon.
"She's all right," he said, "but unhappy, humiliated, and repentant. She'd like to be left alone. We'd better keep our appointment with the Vandenburgs. On the way out I'll ask the receptionist to send lunch up to her room; and we won't stay away longer than is necessary."
Mrs. Crosland wanted to go in and comfort Brenda, but George insisted that the girl had specifically asked to be left undisturbed.
Brenda waited until she heard her parents leave their room before beginning the hurried packing of her suitcases.
She left the hotel and took refuge in a nearby cafe, from which she telephoned Lew, asking him to meet her there as soon as possible. He, thinking her summons; indicated her readiness for another farewell session of fornication, assured her he would be with her in five or ten minutes.
Waiting for his arrival, she scribbled a note to her mother, explaining that she would never again live under the same roof as a father who was capable of smacking the bottom of his eighteen-year-old daughter; that they must not worry about her, since she was going to join a very good friend-from her boarding school days-a girl who lived in Normandy with her parents. She promised to write of-ten to her mother, adding "If you love me, and I know you do, please don't pursue me! You can't imagine how humiliated I am by what I have done, by your finding out about it, and especially by Daddy's beating me. He didn't hurt me physically, but his lifting my nightie and playfully slapping my behind made me . feel even filthier than the other man's complete possession of me had done. Don't be offended with him, Mummy! He did what he thought his duty. I shall go on loving him, but I'd rather not see him again until all this is far be hind us. Au revoir, ma chere Maman!"
She was addressing the envelope to her mother at the hotel when Lew arrived.
Running eagerly to him, she surprised him by throwing her arms about him and kissing him lewdly, seemingly indifferent to the stares of the waiters and two or three clients.
She poured into his ear the tale of her parents discovering her misdeed, of her father beating her (but not of the other liberties he had taken with her body) and she told him she had run away from them and was going to accompany him to Great Britain.
Lew shook his head, his cynical upside down grin on his ill-shaven face.
"No go, girlie! I'm all for a bit of dirty fun with a tart, but I've no use for the clinging type. It's hard enough for a guy to make enough to keep himself, without having to feed and clothe a judy an, all.
"But I'm not the clinging sort, Lew. And I don't expect you either to pay my fare or to support me. I'm British, you know, so I can get work in Great Britain-"
"You mean in England?"
"I mean in Great Britain. You and I can have lots of fun together. You'll be able to mess about with me at all hours of the day and night. We'll go fifty-fifty in the rent, food and all that sort of thing. I've got enough money to keep me going until I get a job, and when you're tired of me, you can throw me out, because once I've had time to look around a bit and get to know people, I'll find room somewhere. Anyway, I've got a very dear friend in London. We were at boarding school together in Aberystwith, my dear ignoramus, is in Great Britain, but not in England. You'll like Valerie. She's a scream. And I'll let you into a secret. You are my first male lover, but Valerie was previously my female lover. We had thrilling times together, talking about men, although we were both afraid of them, and each being the other's "man" to the best of her limited ability."
"What are you ,going to drink?" Lew said, suddenly agreeable. "Coffee? Un cafe et un Ricard a Pearl, Over plate! Well, I'm all for it, but don't forget, fifty-fifty, and don't look to me for 'elp if you get into difficulties! And listen! I don't know much about the law, but I'm too wide to take any risks. You're not twenty-one yet and I don't want anybody accusing me of-how do they say it?-enticing aminor, or something like that, so you're going to England on your Tod."
"'On your Tod' "
"On your Tod! On your Tod Sloan! On your own!"
Brenda shrugged her slim shoulders.
"I understand." she said. "We travel to Dover quite independently of each other and we meet for the first time on the train to Victoria. A pick-up!"
He winked at her admiringly and raised his right hand to the level of his brow, forming as regular a circle as possible with his thumb and forefinger."
"Don't forget," he insisted, "you don't know me, never heard of me. I'll find you on the Dover-Victoria train, and we're total strangers. You don't use my name until I give it to you, and vice versa, O.K.? "
She nodded her assent and leaned across to fuse her lips with his. He thought his great day was expanding into his great week, month, or year.
"I'm 'aving a bit of a job ter get all my stuff in me bags." he then said, as casually as he could. "I don't s'pose you've got room for a few o' my fings? Y'ave? You're a good kid, you are. I'll look arter you in London, you see if I don't. I'll nip 'round ter de of doss-ouse, and be back in two jiffies."
Upon his return, Lew handed her several items, including the mysterious and precious package he had collected from Hank's flashy dory at the Cafe de fll Paix. She tucked all he gave her into the folds of her exquisite lingerie.
Lew left her to pay for her coffee and his "anisette," and she did not see him again until a "total stranger" (whose name happened to be Lew Grace) said to her, on the Dover-London train:
"Excuse me, miss! Haven't we met somewhere before?"
If we must have cliches, can we not at least have some original ones!?
CHAPTER TWO
"Hello! Richter Hospital speaking. Valerie! Hello, darling! How's my girl? Yes, I'm fine. Loving it, darling... only been working here a fort-night and it, seems everybody's my friend.. .doctors, nurses, patients, everybody. Get together this evening? Of course, darling! Six, six-thirty, that suit you? You sound so mysterious, Val. I'm intrigued. 'Bye, sweetheart!"
Slowly, dreamily laying the telephone horn back in its cradle, Brenda wondered what Valeria could have to tell her that was so urgent and so confidential. Her impatience to know what was on her friend's mind made the afternoon seem painfully long, so that for the first time since she started work in the secretariat of the hospital, she longed for the hour at which she could put her typewriter to bed until the morrow.
At half-past five she hurried to the underground and shortly after six o'clock she ran eagerly up the stairs leading to Valerie's cozy apartment. Her finger had scarcely touched the bell-button when Valerie opened the door and they threw their arms about each other, the hand of each wandering luxuriously over the curves of the other's shoulders, waist, bottom, hips, and thighs. Open-mouthed, they kissed-with much tongue action-while each gently caressed the buttocks of the other, pressing their crotches into the closest possible contact. When finally their sensuous embrace came to its lingering, sighing close, Valerie preceded Brenda to the sofa where they sat, almost rec-lined, very dose together. Brenda's hands paid tender homage to Valerie's proud, fine breasts, while the hostess caressed her guest's cheeks, chin and mouth, one of her fingers stroking the visitor's teeth and seeking her sprightly tongue.
"Will you have tea with me, or do you have to hurry home to feed your brute?" Valerie asked after several minutes of almost silent communion.
"Kiss me, darling! I'll stay to tea. Lew's rarely home when I arrive in the evenings. He comes home at midnight or later and I neither know nor care where he's spent his evenings."
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I know where he's spent three evenings during the past week. Your surprise at my knowing doesn't surprise me. Listen, darling! The last thing I want to do is to spoil whatever there is between you and Lew, but you don't sound very enthusiastic about him, nor does he about you."
'Was it so obvious at a first meeting?"
"I felt it, darling, but it's become clearer since. You see, I've seen Lew three times since you introduced us last--? Thursday, wasn't it? The following evening he knocked on my door and I let him in, supposing he'd brought some message or other from you. I made tea and even an hour later he hadn't given me an inkling of why he'd come. I opened a couple of bottles of beer, and then a further couple. He wasn't at all what you'd given me to expect. He was polite in his own 'gauche' way, very friendly and considerate, quite gallant; in fact, almost like an awed young man visiting the object of his hopeless affections. He complimented me on my face, my figure, my gait, my taste in interior deco-ration, and my intelligence. I felt myself attracted and at the same, ,lime in some sort of danger. I wanted to ask him why he'd come, but I was afraid to give him the impression he wasn't welcome. What you'd told me about him made me fear that if he thought I was hostile to him, he'd take it out of your hide. Hoping you and I were going to see a lot of each other I supposed I'd be seeing him often as well and I wanted him to feel I approved of him, which, in fact, I do. I can't think why you find him so-so unpresentable..."
"I know the real Lew, darling. He got me with-out much of a struggle, so he's never had to play the lovesick swain with me. He has me and he takes me for granted. But he's out to get you and he's smart enough to be as charming as he can until he's firmly installed between your thighs."
"If you find him so loathsome, why stay with him? It's not like you."
"He comes home every night, having tried to get another, but always having failed," Brenda said, her hands fondling Valerie's thighs, under her skirts. "He's full of what he's taught me to want. We have great nights, of which I'm neither proud nor ashamed. I'm just glad to have him; but he's not so important to me that I'm going to fight to keep him. I shan't leave him but I shan't weep if he throws me out. I've got a good job and I think I can find a room or a couple of rooms somewhere without being dependent on Lew or any other man. I think I'd welcome his giving me up. I haven't the courage to risk a quarrel by leaving him-that or I just can't be bothered to change, but I'd really like to be free, free to flirt, have friends, be courted, be tempted, resist for a long time and then, perhaps, surrender deliciously."
"Do you mean you wouldn't mind if I filched your lover?" Valerie asked, raising her lips from the firm nipple of Brenda's left breast.
"Lew and I aren't 'lovers:' We just beast it together. And don't think I undervalue our nights of lechery! He transformed my curiosity about sex into lust; but I detest him and he doesn't give a fig for me. Apart from the uncomplicated act of getting together in bed, on the bed, on the kitchen table or on the carpet, there's less than nothing between us. Far from being indifferent, I loathe his uncouthness, his spivey, his secretiveness, his indolence, his manner of speech, his smart, informed ignorance; and I'm what he most hates, a prissy middle class Miss with an evening gown, a cocktail frock, and a one-guinea accent and memories of our finishing school in North Wales."
"This is the first time my fingers have touched your pussy since he befouled it. It's just as soft, moist and warm as before; and yet I ought to hate him, because he's rendered me unnecessary to you. Brenda, darling, I can't hate him. I think he's very nice. It may be a trick of his. I don't care I think-I think I'm in love with him."
"Love him then, gosling! Love him! Take him from me! Set me free, but don't say I haven't warned you. Love me? Bless you, darling! Let's go to bed! Darling! My honey! Sweet! Valerie! O, my Val!"
CHAPTER THREE
As usual, Lew was not at home when Brenda re-turned at six o'clock. She knew he spent two or three evenings each week with Valerie, but she wondered, without caring, where he passed the rest of his time. He seemed neither to work nor to be desperately short of money. He was permanently "up to something," something shady which is why she called him a spiv. Brenda hoped to, be free of him before the bomb exploded but she would have liked Valerie to be out of it too. She'd spoken to Valerie many times, but to no avail. Innocent, unsullied Valerie imagined herself purely loved where she herself loved as purely as any human being can love.
More than ever before, Brenda wished Lew would come home, if only for a few minutes. For the first time since she had become his "thing," she had tentatively accepted an invitation to go out with another man, with Peter Buxton, one of the general practitioners at Richter's. She had promised to meet him at the Martinez at eight o'clock, but warned him that she might have to telephone him, either at home or at the restaurant, to tell him she was unable to keep their appointment. Foolish girl! If Lew had appeared, had thrown her across the bed or the kitchen table, she would either have forgotten Peter or at least have telephoned to break her appointment with him. Lew was busy elsewhere, vainly endeavoring to seduce Valerie, who loved him too deeply to cheapen herself in his eyes by allowing him to have his way with her.
Peter was waiting in front of the Martinez Restaurant, in Swallow Street, to pay for Brenda's taxi as she stepped out of it, resplendent in the cream satin, calf-length evening gown which she was wearing for the first time since she fled from France.
After a thrilling Spanish dinner, Dr. Buxton took her to the Cafe de Paris, to hear Shirley Bassey (the "Tigress of Cardiff's Tiger Bay") to drink champagne and to dance to the music of diminutive Bert Ambrose. She enjoyed herself immensely but that did. not prevent her insisting that Peter take her home at one o'clock. She would have lilted to stay until dawn. Peter danced so well-and Ambrose is still King; but she did not want to arrive home too long after Lew, who was accustomed to finding her in bed and open-thighed when he re-turned from his abortive campaigns of seduction.
At the door of her building Peter kissed her for the first time. It was a chaste kiss, which gave Brenda the delightful sensation that she was a virgin again. She ran up the stairs as light hearted as a college girl coming home after her first innocent date.
Lew was in a bad mood, a very bad mood. He had taken Valerie to see a sexy Italian film, with ludicrous, oh so very English subtitles, and then he had hurried her home to her apartment, quite sure she would invite him into her living room, into her tiny bedroom, into her single bed, and in between her thighs. Valerie, however, suspecting him of being in a dangerous state of mind and matter, had pleaded migraine and had gently, lovingly insisted on his contenting himself with a series of rather audacious kisses outside her door. Their kisses had in-creased his already considerable lust after female flesh.
On the homeward underground he had made several unsuccessful and humiliating attempts to make acquaintance with this girl and that, and had finally hurried home knowing that the ever faithful Brenda would take all he had to give.
Holy Christ! The filthy bitch had failed him. Women! Cheap whores! A man turned his back, and his "steady!' was up the first dark alley, taking off her panties for any "gigolo" or pimp who wave a large penis under her infidel nose!
Fuming, swearing, kicking the furniture, opening one bottle of stout after the other, Lew had worked himself up to the pinnacle of frustration and jealous anger, which was not in the least diminished by Brenda's smiling, bright eyed, almost dancing interruption of his accusatory soliloquy.
"Where the hell have you been?" he screamed, before she had time even to greet him.
"In the West End! Dinner in a wonderful Iberian restaurant just off Regent Street. And dancing at the Cafe de Paris."
"So, now you do it for food and champagne!" he sneered, thrusting his distorted face to within six inches of her.
"Do what?"
"This!" he exclaimed, throwing her backwards across the table and thrusting his hands under her skirts to clutch crazily at the most exquisite panties in her large, thrilling collection. She fought him off, punched his nose with all her strength, and sprang furiously out of his reach.
"Keep your filthy hands off me! Stay where you are and listen to me, or I'll scream for help and have you put away for five years! There's been nothing like that this evening. I've been out with a man, not a beast; and I shall be going out with him a lot from now on, unless you start taking more notice of me and less of Valerie."
"You're not going to boss me about." he mumbled, pouring another bottle of stout into his glass. "I shall see as much of Valerie as I want. That's what you want-she's told me as much. But as long as you're living in my flat, you'll keep dear of imagine boys in their white ties and tails and you'll be here when I get home. O.K.? "
"Idiot! I'm a fool to tell you this, but I came home at six o'clock having warned my friend that if you were at home and if you were prepared either to stay home with me or take me out some-where, I'd phone him to break my appointment. As usual you were out, you gave me no idea where you were or when you'd be back and you hadn't shown up at half past seven, so I went out with a new friend rather than spend the evening alone, waiting for you to come home and make love to me merely because your ladylove wouldn't give in to you. I don't mind your running after Valerie. On the contrary, since she's got you under her skin, she's welcome to you. But if you think I'm going to stay here twiddling my thumbs until you throw me out when Valerie agrees to come and take my place, you're crazy."
"Big-head! Where d'ye get this idea of yourself? Valerie'll come here whenever I ask her to. Only she doesn't want to drive you out. I've got other bints too, so I'm not depending on you."
Brenda knew he was boasting stupidly, but she pretended to believe him, as an excuse for setting herself free of him.
"All right," she said, "I'll get out and clear the, decks for you and all your female admirers."
Two or three long steps took her into the bed-room. She locked the door behind her and began frantically to pack her suitcases. She ignored his pounding on the door, his shouted threats and his entreaties. When she returned to the living room, Lew was dozing in a dilapidated armchair. He stirred as she went around the room picking up odds and ends which belonged to her. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.
"It's too late to go tonight." he whined. "Wait till tomorrow, and I'll help you with your bags! We can have a nice night together and part on good terms."
"There's no point in our hating each other. We're both friends of Valerie, so we shall meet from time to time, but you've hurt me. I never minded your seeing Valerie. I love her, and she-likes your company, so it was all right by me. But when you come home after an evening with her and start abusing me because I've spent an innocent evening with one of my colleagues, well that's the last straw, and I must get away from here-at once. I would just like to ask you to let me leave my big case here until tomorrow."
He shrugged his shoulders to express reluctant granting of her request. She picked up a suitcase in each hand and walked towards the door. He sprang to his feet, and reached the door as she stepped out onto the landing.
"A farewell kiss'" he suggested.
"A farewell 'kiss, yes. But none of your kisses which start something instead of ending it!"
He took her roughly' in his arms and tried to bestow upon her closed lips precisely the sort of kiss she had refused. It was not easy for her to break away without responding to his fervor. Her flesh wanted him but her spirit and her head insisted upon her cutting cleanly the bonds to which she might otherwise have remained enslaved. She pushed him back against the wall and was halfway down the stairs before he was in a position to pro-test her abrupt flight.
In her tiny room at the Commercial Hotel she felt really free for the first time in her life and she silently vowed to guard her freedom jealousy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Brenda found London's underground as exciting as the Metro in Paris. She was always thrilled when a score of anxious, angry, cursing, sweaty travelers successfully insisted on forcing their impatient way into a carriage whose occupants were already standing, breathless, on one another's toes. Young, healthy, full of joie de vivre and free as the birds in the trees, she delighted in the peak hour crush. Why spend money on Turkish baths and a massage when you can sweat it out in the underground, your excessive pounds pommelled away by the agitated rumps, hips, thighs, breasts and bellies, or with a handsome male stranger-as happened one early evening when she was on her way from Richter Hospital to Valerie's apartment and birth-day. A too sudden halt forced each passenger into intimate physical contact with another member of the human species. Brenda counted herself lucky that the person who broke her fall was a tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged gentleman whose tweed suit, thinning gray hair and clipped, sandy moustache combined to create a military impression. She was pleased and flattered that he availed himself of the occasion to outline with his hands the curve of her shoulders, waist and hips and to dig his fingers into the sparsely clothed flesh of her buttocks. As all the passengers regained their equilibrium she smiled at him.
"Can't honestly say Pm sorry, young lady," he said in a voice as clipped as his major-like moustache.
"I can honestly say I'm glad you don't regret a thing."
"like a gal with a 'tongue in her head! Lovely bottom you've got!"
"And a wicked tongue you've got. Must leave you now. I get off at the next stop."
"Me too!"
"Coincidence!"
He shook his head "No," and pressed her so close to him that she felt the stirring of his fertile sex.
"You'll have to gate-crash a birthday party."
The train stopped. He stepped out and offered her his arm. "If hell had gates, I'd crash 'em."
If Brenda had invited a dozen unexpected guests to Valerie's party, they would all have been welcome; but Bernie made a bad impression from the moment of his gallant arrival. He overplayed his role of "pukkah" officer and blase gentleman and the name behind which he hid his real identity came too obviously out of a magazine for women. Who ever heard of an army officer with the name of Bernard ("the chaps call me Bernie") Fitzallan-Al-Ian? He could talk of nothing but "bosses," fast motor cars, and the devastatingly beautiful and "Oh-so-naughty!" Honorable Penelope "This" and Lady "That."
It happened that Valerie had been taught to ride a pony as soon as she could walk, that one of her guests, Nadine Beaufort, wrote the society column for one of London's most distinguished daily news-papers, and that Basil Kent, another guest, was a designer of cars, including racing models. Neither Valerie, Nadine, nor Basil was able to converse with Bernie, who insisted he knew more about horses, high society and motor racing than they did when in fact he had only the most superficial knowledge of any of these subjects.
He had lots of charm and he managed to convey the impression that he was "a helluva whisky-man" without drinking half as much as the other guests. He had so much success with several of the girls that he rarely moved across to Brenda to remind her tacitly of their unspoken contract to spend the night together.
And Brenda was so busy flirting, dancing and chattering with first one and then another of Valerie's guests that she scarcely noticed that her phony major was slipping away from her.
As the party broke up there was a certain amount of horseplay, which resulted in Brenda's shouting "Bye-bye, darling!" to Valerie from the shoulders of three or four men who had taken care to lift her high enough to permit everyone to get a good view of her pretty legs. Laughing, singing and more-than-shoulder-high, Brenda left her friend's flat waving her hand invitingly to Bernie, who happened to be so intent on telling a tall story to the Heathcoat twins that he did not notice her. Brenda was halfway home in Nadine's car before she be-came aware of Bernie's absence.
"Don't worry, darling! He'll be along soon, in Basil's crock. Basil's dropping the Heathcoats a couple of minutes from here. Then he'll join us here, drop Bernie, and then the two cars move north in convoy."
Not long after, at Valerie's apartment, the Heathcoat girls continued descending the stairs, while Basil ran back.
"Can I drop you somewhere, old boy?" he asked Bernie, the only remaining guest.
"No, thank you! I'll stay and keep our hostess company."
Basil was flabbergasted. A few seconds previously he had left Bernie saying "Good-night and thank you!" to a virtuous girl who obviously loathed him and here was the same Bernie announcing the same Valerie's intention of letting him share her bed for the night. Basil, however, was no more astonished than Valerie, who, having taken as little notice possible of Bernie throughout the evening had de-voted the past minute to nothing more than the courteous acceptance of the gate-crasher's expressions of gratitude for a most enjoyable evening. What!? She had not invited Bernie to stay a little longer, nor had he suggested he wished to prolong his visit. Nevertheless she smiled resignedly at Basil, and dismissed with a pulled shrug of her shoulders.
In his consternation Basil forgot to close the door of Valerie's apartment, and not looking where he was going, almost .knocked down the stairs a young woman who was making her way up to her own apartment, which was immediately above Valerie's. He apologized absently, recognized her, ex-claimed, "Miss Paignton!" and hurried down to where the twins and his car awaited him.
Sadie Paigntori, tired after her evening behind the bar at "The Crown," paused at Valerie's door and leaned against its frame. Her lassitude was driven out of her bones by the sight of the silent Bernie, in silence, unbuttoning his hostess' blouse, which he pulled out of the waistband of her black skirt. She watched, hypnotized, as he pulled the blouse backwards off Valerie's unresisting shoulders, eased the straps of her slip down to her elbows and unfastened her brassiere. Valerie was naked down to her navel and neither she nor her seducer had given the slightest sign of awareness of Sadie's presence. Sadie was torn between the desire to avoid detection until she had witnessed the performance in full and the more perverse hope that the handsome stranger and Valerie, knowing she was there, would indulge, merely because they were excited by her presence, in a performance which would otherwise never have entered their heads.
In fact, both Valerie and Bernie had known she was there from the moment Basil collided with her; for Valerie it was not the moment to allow petty details to deflect her from her course, while Bernie was working on the principle that two birds in a nearby bush are worth one in the hand.
Having feasted his eyes on the merchandise he had just uncovered, Bernie looked at Sadie for the first time. In her glistening eyes he saw congratulations, admiration and, he thought, an invitation.
He pulled both Valerie's arms behind her back, gripped her wrists in one hand and propelled her to within a yard of the onlooker. Moving his hands up to Valerie's biceps, he forced her elbows closer together, bringing her shoulders back, so that her hard, thrilled breasts thrust forward their inflated, pink nipples. Sadie felt herself challenged and mocked by the inebriating beauty of her neighbour's arrogant nakedness. ' Furthermore, the stranger's cold, gray eyes and the hard line of his mouth seemed to conspire with the quivering nostrils of his pseudo-aristocratic proboscis to convey to her an unspeakable command. Obediently she raised her hand to the height of Valerie's face, pause long enough to warn Valerie of her intentions, then slapped Valerie sharply across the mouth. Her hand continued its curved movement until it came to rest on her own left shoulder. She remained as she was, statuesque, only her eyes running from Bernie's face to Valerie's. She knew what was expected of her. The second time it was the back of her hand which struck the right cheek of the defenseless virgin.
Even before Bernie drew Valerie 'back into the room, Sadie felt that he had no more need of her brutality and she wondered whether he wished her to stay or to retire, until a peremptory jerk of his head banished her hopes of witnessing, for the first time in her life, a copulation of which she was not one of the participants. Nevertheless, she remained where she was, as Bernie kissed Valerie tenderly. She noticed that his hands caressed Val's face as though he wished to soothe the pain of the two blows. After the long, gently lewd kiss and a few seconds of his stroking Valerie's bruised lips, he looked to Sadie and seemed to ask "How could you strike and hurt so sweet a girl-and she your neighbor who had done nothing to provoke you! Are you a woman or a beast?" He was all love, pity, and repentance.
He repeated his silent command that the intruder should withdraw and Sadie obeyed, but so slowly that she did not step out onto the landing and close the door behind her before seeing him unzip Valerie's skirt and open the fastener of her suspender belt, so that the skirt dragged the slip down to the carpet and the belt sagged on top of them.
Bernie stepped back a couple of paces and appraised his docile companion. Short and slimly sturdy, she was a handsome sight, bare from the knees upwards, except for her black panties of such fine nylon that her flesh shone through them and imparted to them a misty violet glow. They were both silent, tense: she, motionlessly delighting in his lascivious admiration of her body; he, tigerishly circling her, staring hard at his succulent victim, seeking to embarrass a girl who had never previously been naked in the presence of a man (other than a doctor and her father). She scarcely breathed. There was pain in her chest. Her throat and lips were dry, scorched by the heat of her desire which "irritated" her loins. She was tempted to scratch herself, but she did not feel free to do anything without Bernie's command. He had to make the first move.
He approached her again, kissed her lingeringly, making her writhe and groan. He picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. He lowered her gently onto the bedspread, peeled off her stockings and let them drop. On the bed, alongside her, he stuck his tongue into her mouth and sent his hands on an independent tour of inspection of her shoulders, arms, breasts, belly, thighs and buttocks. One of his hands slipped under the waistband of her panties, his manicured fingernails combed her pubic hairs, and one finger touched the mouth of her sex, which seemed ,to open moistly and invitingly. His finger found her. clitoris, which gave her a small electric shock. Her sigh was almost a hiss. She threw a thigh over him and sank her teeth into his lips. He gripped her jaw, forced her head back, so that her back curved away from him, and pressed her still-pantied crotch closer against his fully clothed loins. Under her chin, his lips and teeth nibbled her. In a fit of passionate frustration, she broke away from him, buried her face in her pastel blue, Koln wassered pillow, and thumped the bed a dozen times with her feet and fists. He flung her over onto her back and liberated her from the prison of her panties.
Then Bernie proudly showed Valerie his penis-longer than average, straight and on the slender side, which slimness justifies his calling himself "the virgin's best friend." He caressed it, toyed with it and tacitly invited Valerie to pay eye-homage to it. She would have liked to touch it, but he did not order her to do so, and he was her "master." She had to content herself with a visual feast, and what joy she had! Her lips formed words, but she did not dare say "It's beautiful, Bernie. I love it. Give me it, Bernie! Quick. Fill me! kill me, if you must! but have me! Give! Take! Bernie! Bern! Burn!"
Hoping he didn't notice, she forced her thighs further apart, stretching her vagina. Her silent prayer fell not upon ears which most certainly were not deaf to vestal entreaties. The mouth of her tunnel of sexual lust tasted, for the first time, the scalding, pulsating helmet of a phallus, and it was better than Brenda's fingers, more thrilling even then Brenda's tongue. Her fevered hands tried to transform his head into potted meat. Her mouth, in the closest possible contact with his, was wide, flabby and abandoned to wickedness. Her two "mouths" were one. His tongue deep into her mouth and his sex about to plunge upwards into her belly were but two aspects of the same disgrace: Vive le deshonneur!
Bernie's boast to be the ideal liberator of virgins was not idle. He could be brutal, but he knew when his masculine duty lay in the direction of prudence. Generally speaking, a girl whose flower Bernie plucked, became his slave until he was frightened away by her devotion, whereupon she would lose no time in finding another man who might have been as gentle as Bernie was at first or as a brutal as he was later; and Bernie could be a beast.
With Valerie he was anything but ferocious. He nursed her into it. He fed his nourishing meat into her with all the patience of a father giving the bottle to a recalcitrant baby; and baby wanted it, yearned for it, but seemed unable to stomach it. Patience incarnate, Bernie eased himself into her, advancing an inch, retreating three-quarters, going an inch deeper, withdrawing completely prior to gliding in to a depth of two inches, of which every hairsbreadth was a mutual joy.
A second emergence, followed by a deeper invasion. After much biting of lips to stifle her agonized cries, Valerie screamed. Bernie felt her warm blood on his rejoicing phallus and realized that his cavalry-twill trousers were in danger. He sprang to his feet, turned off the light, took off his Harris tweed Hackin' jacket, his beige slacks and his underpants, rolled up his shirt and singlet and threw himself on top of wide open, bleeding, impatient, warm, soft Oh Valerie! Valerie. Oh Bernie, Bern! Valerie.
He went into her, halfway into her, and out, further and back, deeper and away, to the depths and the heights of joy. Her blood was between their bellies. It oozed over her thighs and his. Tears were in her eyes, songs in her heart, and frenzied perfection in her loins. Neither spoke.
Complete silence would have reigned but for his energetic grunts and her happy squeals and sighs.
"Forgive me, Bernie!" cried her conscience. "I love you, always have and ever will, but this is.. .this is.. .more! More, you filthy bastard! More! Tear, break, kill, annihilate, fill, explode, disintegrate, but do, do, do! Ber ... nie!"
He was as far in as he could go. He was utterly her master and she was sundered from innocence and virtue. She was in paradise and she imagined herself at the summit. Smoothly he delved into her guts, heart and throat, from above and below, his tongue and his penis worked as if one phallus. Nothing could surpass this. Nothing! Nothing!
They were rhythmic. He lunged in and lisped out. Her belly heaved. Her ass muscles knotted to jerk her groin up to him and loosened to let her sink into the bed when he thrust again. She was jelly, shivering. Nothing could be more thrilling.
She was his, then and forever; and if not his, then the toy of any and every male who might lay claim to her. She understood heaven and hell. They were and are here on earth. Hell is woman without naked man. Paradise is a woman full to overflowing of overflowing male sex.
And he filled her with sex, but not yet with brimming. The gushing was to be perfection of perfection; but not yet. Long and tender it was, up and ever up, up to joy and gladness and then on to gibbering, howling, sweating, groaning, sighing madness. She stiffened, but hung on to life, refusing to sink into death's inviting pit. His muscles hardened, hurting her belly and thighs. Her agony walled like an oriental priest calling the faithful to sing a dirge for the dead. If she had known completion, what did she know in that moment? His liquid poured into her, washing away innocence, pain and shame. Within her a too-long-tied knot unravelled itself. Her chastity melted and poured out to her liberator, whom she kissed sloppily as he continued to enjoy his mastery of her becalmed loins. After excitement came delicious pleasure. They went on loving into sleep.
Feeling empty, incomplete, Valerie opened her eyes, and foggily saw Bernie buttoning his leather-elbowed jacket. Puzzled, but proud, she pretended to sleep and allowed him to creep out of her apartment. She knew she would never again feel his weight on her belly and taste his masculinity in her femininity; and she wept bitterly in her noisome bed as Bernie, her first man, climbed the stairs to the apartment occupied by Sadie Paignton, who had satisfied her first man when Valerie was a crawling tot of humanity.
Sadie, expecting a visit from Valerie's top-drawer lady-killer, was resting in her cool, rose-odored bed, exotically perfumed, wearing an exciting nightie which was reserved for special occasions; and the dressing gown which was draped over her bedside chair was also the sort which revealed more than it concealed.
She knew that the early morning knocking on her door announced the arrival of Valerie's friend, but put herself in the mood to receive Valerie her-self. The result was that she played her role quite convincingly when she greeted Bernie.
"Well! And I thought it was Valerie come to seek refuge from her caveman!"
She opened the door as wide as possible, for no other reason than that the arm movement involved pulled her dressing gown so far open that one side scarcely overlapped the other. Thus she was almost naked from the waist upwards, and she noticed that his eyes took instant cognizance of the fact. He stepped forcefully into the room which she called her "boudoir;" it was, in fact, an attic serving as bed-sitting room, with two of its corners cut off by wooden partitions, the one for a tiny kitchen and the other for a water closet.
"Refuge? You wouldn't say that if you'd seen her just after you left. At the moment she's lying there in a contented stupor, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, breathing heavily through her nose, and her thighs wide open and besmirched with sweat and other kinds of filth."
"I'll soon have her back in shape," said Sadie, making an exaggerated movement in the direction of the door.
Bernie stepped deeper into the room and looked around possessively.
"She's all right," he said. "Just needs a little sleep!"
Pretending to be embarrassed and puzzled, Sadie stood seductively in the middle of the room waiting for him to declare the reason of his visit. He had expected a different sort of welcome and he was as nonplussed as she gave the impression of being.
"If Valerie really doesn't need my help," she asked after a long silence, "why did she send you?"
"She didn't. I came of my own accord and I doubt whether she even knows I'm no longer with her."
She shrugged her shoulders questioningly.
"To a gentleman," he said, "a promise is a promise, even if it's a tacit one. Without speaking, you and I promised each other we'd meet again. You're all dressed up for the occasion, and you see I haven't let you down."
He tried to take her in his arms but she per-formed a pirouette which not only carried her out of his reach but also undid the sash of her dressing gown, so that between her ripe, lovely body and in eyes there was nothing but a transparent, knee-length nightdress, so low cut that the real top of the bodice was just below the nipples of her breasts, which were half hidden from view by nothing more than a lacy frill about half an inch deep.
"There must "be some mistake." she said, inhaling deeply, so that her well-developed breasts grew even larger and more provocative. "I'd never dream of inviting a man, least of all a total stranger, to visit me at this hour of the night. And I certainly didn't intend to give you the impression that I hoped you'd come."
"Come now! Let's not be coy! It's written all over you. And downstairs you left no room "for doubt that I was your sort of man. You could hardly drag yourself away. If I'd dropped Valerie, I could have had you on the spot."
"In her presence?
"Yes, even in her presence."
He sat down in the settee and beckoned her to his knees. She sat in the only armchair in the room, opposite him, her thighs parted. The thin, black nylon of her nightdress clung to her belly and legs, flatteringly exposing the outlines of her well-fleshed body. She knew herself to be attractive and she did all in her power to render herself irresistible.
"As far as sex is concerned," she said, her voice low and seductive, "I can never say from one moment to another what I'm going to do-advance or retreat, defend myself or surrender. But I'm pretty sure that downstairs I was yours for the taking. The three of us might have had an unforgettable night, but you thought you could have Valerie privately, after having excited me by your disgusting exhibition, and then come up here and repeat with me what you'd done with her.. . "
"Disgusting exhibition?"
"Look, I don't know what sort of people you usually mix with, but Valerie, as far as I know, and I are normal, decent people, not above a bit of fun, even if it leads to a bit of fun in bed. We are not accustomed to come home in the evening to find men stripping women under our very noses. I bring friends home too-not often-but my friends and I are discreet. Once inside this room we have a hell of a lot of fun, as dirty as you can imagine. Ask Valerie if she's ever had cause to complain about indecency! I'll give you a bit of advice. On the rare occasions when you get a willing girl in your hands, give it to her fair and square, front and back; but don't boast about it to the neighbors and don't make her force her naked attention on them just to convince everybody that she's your slave!"
"You've been masturbating yourself. There's no other explanation. Now you're all Salavation Army and Sisters of Virtue, complaining about people making exhibitions of themselves. But when you arrived at Valerie's door, I was only undoing the buttons of her blouse. If you'd done the decent thing-gone up to your room as though you'd seen nothing-you would, in 'fact, have seen nothing shocking. Instead, you stayed on even after I'd given you the sign to leave us alone, and even then you weren't keen on going. Why the sudden change? You were as hot as hell then. You've been giving yourself some finger thrills and you've had so much of it that the whole thing disgusts you."
"What disgusts me is the man who's too sure of himself-like you. For conceit and selfishness you'd take some beating. You want Valerie and me, and both on your own terms; and when one of us looks like we might be slipping out of your grasp you get peevish and start throwing nasty accusations around. It's none of your business whether or not I play with myself, but you might as well know that except to please one of my boyfriends who-likes to see me doing it, I haven't done it since I lost my flower and that was eighteen years ago and when I was still at school. Anyway, that's a different subject. What I want you to know is this: although I've had eight or nine lovers-if you count those I had only one go with as well as those I went with for months-I've never taken part in anything resembling an orgy.. .never wanted to until this evening when you and Valerie put the idea to my head. I've never seen a man strip a woman before and I've never seen two people kiss like you did. It was filthy but it got to me. You let me hope I was going to see you get into her and you made me want to see it, although normally I'd be horrified at the thought of a girl looking in while a man debauched her neighbor. I've rarely in my life been so excited by the prospect of something and then you turned me out. I'm sure that if you'd said I could stay, Valerie wouldn't have objected, however she might have loathed the idea. She didn't like any part of my being there, I'm almost sure of that; but she was like somebody who'd taken dope and lost her willpower. She'd have done anything she thought you wanted her to do. She'd have submitted to any humiliation from me if she thought you approved. Well, you chose to send me away and now it's my turn to send you away; and I hope you'll feel as frustrated as I did."
He had not attempted to interrupt her tirade, preferring to let her purge herself of her grievance-without words from him. If that was her only reason for being cold toward him, he was sure soft words and tender caresses would restore her former interest. He rose, stood over her, overtly looking down at her full breasts. She noticed where his gale was directed, deliberately pulled in her stomach, in-haled deeply and pressed her shoulders back, forcing her lovely pectoral mounds to swell and strain against the delicate stuff of her bodice. He took her gesture as one justifying his confidence in his seductive powers.
He gently pulled her to her feet. She did not resist, even when he put his arms about her and tenderly, but greedily, stroked the curves of her back and squeezed her fleshy buttocks. When his eager lips sought hers she did not turn away her face, but surrendered to him a mouth which, al-though it refused to open, was soft and warmly encouraging.
"Why didn't you let me stay?" she asked and continued without giving him a chance to answer. "While you were slamming it into her, I could have made a fuss of you, fondling you and kissing you all over. I'd have pulled your buttocks apart and stuck my tongue into you. You'd have had almost as much pleasure back as front and when you'd reached your climax, I'd have rolled you off her belly, and licked you clean. Together, Valerie and I would have soon got you warmed up again and then you'd've had me, then her, and then me again. It would have been wonderful."
Her whispered obscenities had the desired effect, fanning the flame of his lust into a raging conflagration., "Let's go down, and let Valerie see us at it?" he suggested hoarsely "Afterwards, you can see me taking her."
His trembling hands tugged the shoulder straps of her nightdress down to her elbows, baring her thrilled and thrilling torso. He could not wait until they got to Valerie's apartment. His hands squeezed her breasts, and his teeth nibbled a nipple. He raised his right knee between her thighs until through the material of his trousers and the nylon of her nightdress he felt the warmth of her sex. His hands left her breasts and eased her dressing gown off her shoulders prior to pulling down her only remaining garment until it was an exquisite fetter. She was bare. She was his to do with as he pleased. Her body quivered in its need of him. Her naughty tongue nervously licked her negroid lips and his fingers told him her vagina was wide, warm, and wet.
Unzipping his trousers, he released his penis, at the sight of which her eyes glowed. In his arms, with the moist head of his sex against her belly, she was a weak female, who allowed herself to be lowered to the floor and pulled into a crouching, dog like position, with her knees apart and her gaping sex invitingly defenseless. On his knees behind her, he aimed his manly spear at her pink wound. She felt the knob parting the lips of her sex. He lunged forward, determined to sink himself completely into her with the first thrust; but at that moment she sprang to her feet, grabbed her dressing gown and opened the door before he could intercept her.
"Go now!" she hissed, struggling into her dressing gown. "You're about as hot as I was when you sent me out of Valerie's rooms. You can probably appreciate how I felt."
He seized her wrists, pulled her back into the room and tried to get his arms around her waist and shoulders.
"Leave me alone! I'm not playing! Get out. I mean that."
"Little fool! You want it as much as I do. Why deny yourself and me, just because I misjudged the situation downstairs? If it's orgies you want I'll arrange something more exciting then you had in mind; Come on! This little struggle will make us enjoy it even more. Look at the size of him now!"
"Go and stick it up Valerie! No amount of per-suasion will make me take it and if you don't leave at once, I'll scream. Go on! Clear out, and don't come bothering me again!"
He grabbed the lapels of her gown and pulled them apart. His strong arms encircled her naked body, and he forced a kiss upon her. Wild lights shone in his eyes. He was going to rape her. Would he strangle her afterwards? She responded passionately to his kiss, and wriggled voluptuously against his burning torch of manhood. He laughed cynically, loosened his grip on her and celebrated his fresh victory by lewdly fondling her. Her right knee shot up sharply into his genitals. With a cry of pain he stepped back a pace. Her right fist crashed into his face and her left into his stomach. She rushed to the door and opened it, simultaneously seizing-a 'shillelagh, absentmindedly left be-hind by one of her boyfriends some months previously. His arms raised to protect his head, he sprang upon her but her cudgel came down so hard on his right wrist that he dropped his guard. Slip-ping by him, she gave him a sharp push which sent him hurtling against the banister at the head of the stairs.
Trembling, she locked the door, and leaned breathlessly against the wall. She heard him begin his heavy-footed descent of the stairs and bitterly regretted her success in getting rid of him. She was kneeling on her bed before she realized that she was still carrying her former lover's stout cosh. She looked down at her perspiration-moist body and stared for a few seconds at the smoothe, shiny black head of the stick.
"I've never had a colored man." she muttered aloud. "I must find one."
She slipped the black, oaken phallus of the distant Angus into her aching, hungry vagina and made fierce love to herself until her bed sheets were sticky with the juice of her unhappy pleasure. And she went to sleep with the shillelagh sticking out of her like a long, thin, gnarled penis.
"Sadie's loss was Valerie's gain, in a manner of speaking; for Bernie, cursing his failure to gain possession of the experienced barmaid's body, went back to the girl whose loins he had used two or three hours earlier. He would make her pay for her neighbor's spurning him. He had broken Valerie in gently, but there would be no more tenderness. He would split her asunder, heap upon her every humiliation he could conceive, including a couple Sadie had mentioned. He would, he would, he would-but he did not.
Valerie's door was locked. He knocked loudly, imperiously, and heard her approaching. He declared he could hear eagerness in her steps. She would be wild with impatient longing for him and she would voluntarily throw herself into every kind of grossness to prove her enslavement to his phallus.
"Go away, and let me get some sleep!"
"Valerie, it's Bernie."
"Bernie's made his bed. He must lie in it. Bernie, it was delicious and I shall never forget you. I'll al-ways be grateful. But I wanted you again, wanted you desperately and you weren't beside me. I reached out to grab your cockerel but he was crowing elsewhere and he'll never get into my yard again. Good-night, Bernie! Love to Sadie!"
Valerie went back to bed, but between her and sleep was the ever-changing vision of Sadie, with-out a stitch of clothing, her thighs wide open, her legs in the air, joy in her eyes and a savageness in her squealing, perspiring enjoyment of Bernie's thirty inches of scarlet, blazing, endlessly gushing sex flashing in and out of her five hundred times per minute.
Bernie took his frustration back to his hotel, where until sleep took him in its tender arms, he consoled himself with daydreams of Sadie and Valerie fighting, for possession of him and allowing him to end their battle by copulating with one first and then the other, while she who was not being served by his penis tongued his scrotum and his anus.
CHAPTER FIVE
"What'll you drink, darling?"
"Bitter, please."
"Two pints of best bitter, please!"
Brenda paid for the beer and carried the two glasses to the table at which Valerie had seated her-self. She kissed Valerie's cheek and discreetly squeezed her thigh. Valerie responded by stroking Brenda's knees under the hem of her skirt. Each raised her glass to the other and they drank. Brenda was surprised to notice that Valerie half emptied her glass at once and she smiled as the thirsty one gasped and used her nether lip to re-move the moustache of beer.
"I needed that. I've got a whacking bit of news for you-I'm up the stick."
"You're.. .? "
"In the family way."
For a few seconds Brenda stared incredulous at the smiling monkey face of her little friend. Then, grasping the horrible significance of what she had just heard, she took Valerie's head between her hands, burying her fingers in the pregnant girl's honey-colored hair.
"Darling! Does Lew know?"
"No. He'll find out when everybody else does."
"But, Val, he has the right to know before any-body else. Why have you allowed me to think you and he--? "
"We're not. I'd have told you, if we were. It's Bernie."
"God! And we're not even sure of his name. Does Sadie know where he lives?"
"Don't take it so tragically, princess!" Valerie said, smiling broadly like a brave child trying to calm the fears of a dear adult. "Lots of girls have bastard babies whose fathers can't be traced and they get by. I don't want to find Bernie. I wouldn't impose such a husband on myself or such a father on my child."
"You don't know him well enough to judge."
"He's shifty, can't look you straight in the eyes, a boastful liar, with Seductive Bounder written all over him."
"You take an instant dislike to a man and then let him flop down on top of you. You fall in love with Lew, almost at first sight, and he's not even allowed to titillate your titties."
"Were you so deeply in love with Lew when you let him spill your blood all over a Parisian bed? I know the circumstances were rather special but you went on letting him have it morning, noon, and night when you were quite free to tell him to stick it up the chimney."
"Because I loved his sticking it up my chimney even though I loathed him. I suppose you and I are even more similar than we thought. In fact, I wasn't favorably impressed by Bernie either, but I was all in favor of his taking me home and messing me about all night."
"I've felt guilty about that, Brenda. This may be my chastisement."
"Goose! Kiss me and to hell with people's suspicions! Darling! In a way, I've a right to your baby. If you hadn't pinched my bit of pick-up gate-crasher, the sperm would have washed my guts in-stead of yours. But then there'd have been no baby because I took Bernie to your party knowing it was my safe period. That you should have been so careless is beyond my comprehension."
"Mine too. Let's have some more beer!"
Valerie got their empty glasses refilled.
"Prosit!" she said. "It was just one of those things which can't be explained. You went out with the gang and I think Bernie got the idea you were slipping out of his grasp. Without consulting me he announced he was sleeping with me. Did I already want him to? Did I already hope he would, and could he sense it, or was it just his brazenness that won me. I felt incapable of resisting, mesmerized. I suppose I could have told him not to be a bloody fool and sent him away with the others, but I said nothing. I felt a sort of gratitude that I was going to get it without committing the sin of willfully and consciously reaching out for it."
"You sound as though you've had more than one pint of bitter, but I think I can understand. It's a sort of magnetism some men have. It doesn't work on all women, or even on any woman all the time. Such a man has the luck to be, from time to time, in the presence of a vulnerable woman in her rare moment of weakness. And then prudence is thrown to the winds and a decent, virtuous, discreet girl becomes the sort of bag who'll let a perfect stranger strip her on a park bench with a dozen people looking on."
"A park bench may be going a little too far, but I knew somebody might come back to look for Bernie. And I knew Sadie still had to come home. She might have had a friend with her, but it didn't make any difference. Bernie didn't close the door or tell me to, so I left it open and if he hadn't sent Sadie away when he did he could have had me in a dozen different positions and he could have had her too. And I daresay anybody else could have had me, if Bernie hadn't ordered me not to let 'em."
Brenda wished they were in some secluded spot, so great was her desire to have Valerie naked in her arms. She wanted to give her tall, slender, black-haired body to her sturdy little sweetheart and she wanted to taste again the juices of the vagina in which Bernie had sown his seed. More than that, she wanted Bernie. She envied Sadie that she had seen him taking off Valerie's clothes. Had she been in Sadie's position, she would have refused to leave the room. She would have done what Sadie had hoped to do-stay, witness Valerie's bloody initiation and then take her place underneath Bernie. Brenda knew lots of men whom she found more attractive than Bernie but his virtue was that he had fructified Valerie. What a pity that Auntie Brenda would never be able to say to Valerie's son or daughter "My loins too have tasted sperm from the spring from which you originate!"
"Enough of your erotic reminiscences!" Brenda exclaimed, one of her hands resting in Valerie's lap. "Let's be practical! Hasn't Lew ever hinted at marriage?"
The negative shaking of the blond head was not so much an answer to the question as a rejection of the proposal behind it.
"We'd probably have married eventually," she said sadly, after taking another swig of her beer. "But we've never directly discussed the subject. Now, of course, I must give up all hope of that. When he gets to know about this he's going to be hurt and furious. It'll be the end of our courtship, and if he doesn't thrash the living daylight out of me by way of adieu, I shall be surprised."
Brenda was raising her glass to her lips, after a pensive moment of silence, when an idea came to her.
"Why not surrender to Lew the next time he tries," she said, lowering her glass to the table. "Then wait a couple of weeks and tell him you're a few days overdue?! If he's been thinking of marriage it might give him the necessary push. And only you and I need ever know that Lew's seven-month baby is really Bernie's nine-monther."
"And what if it really is a seven-monther?" Valerie replied, laughing. "Anyway, I couldn't do that to Lew. What I had in mind for us was the sort of marriage which is based on faith and honesty. I'd rather lose him altogether and keep pleasant memories of him, than go through life with him knowing I tricked him into marriage by a lie which I repeat, even if only by my silence, every minute of every day."
"Darling, I didn't know you read shoddy novelettes! That sort of junk sounds noble in films, but it's dotty on the lips of a normal intelligent woman. If you can get your kid a daddy, and you do all in your power to keep daddy happy in bed, as well as regards his food and other comforts-why should you reproach yourself that you hoodwinked him into marital bliss? You'd be doing Lew a favor if you gave it to him regularly without being to fussy about his getting a little bit elsewhere from time to time. He'd be looked after and he'd eat regularly, which is what he needs and also what he wants, though he doesn't realize that himself."
"I shall break it to him as gently as possible, and try to get him to forgive me," Valerie said, as they got up to go. "If he wants to go on seeing me after-wards, he might eventually decide it's better to sleep with me and bring up another man's child than never get more from me than a chaste kiss."
Brenda and Valerie parted company at the Charing Cross underground station, the former having an appointment with Doctor Peter Buxton, while Valerie hoped Lew would visit her later in the evening. (He did not do so, but the following evening he took her to a public house for a few drinks.)
Normally a heavy drinker, Lew drank in moderation when he was either with Valerie or intent upon meeting her. He had drunk two pints of brown ale and she two small glasses of bitter when the landlord of the "Grantley Arms" called "Last orders, ladies and gentlemen!" Faithful to tradition, Lew ordered another pint of brown ale and a small glass of bitter which he and Valerie drank at their ease-until about eleven o'clock, at which hour they walked arm-in-arm to her home, stopping every twenty yards for a kiss and cuddle. Was she a little warmer, softer, less reserved than usual? He thought so. And when she acceded to his request to be allowed to accompany her to the very door of her apartment he was sure their relationship was taking a turn for the better. She usually insisted on their good night kiss taking place on the footpath before the entrance to the building. When, how-ever, after climbing the ill-lit stairs they halted on the first landing at the door of her rooms and he sought to bestow upon her a kiss of the sort capable of weakening the will of the most virtuous of maidens, she protested in a good-natured way.
"Be a good boy, Lew, or I shan't let you come as far as this in the future, assuming we have a future together."
Inarticulate, Lew could only gesticulate and grimace to express his puzzlement.
"I have something very important to tell you. But it's not going to be easy and I'd like to be sure you're not going to get upset and rush off without giving me a chance to explain."
Although he had a feeling he was going to learn something disagreeable, Lew was not inclined to miss an opportunity to weaken Valerie's resistance to his immoral advances, so he unhesitantingly suggested they go into her apartment and discuss the momentous matter in comfort. It seemed to Valerie to be a good way of making sure Lew gave her a chance to appraise him calmly of her condition. If he should take unfair advantage of the intimacy of her apartment to make a further attempt at her seduction, it was no longer as serious a matter as it had been. What she had to tell would almost certainly be the end of their friendship or the real be-ginning of a deeper love, so that if circumstances led either to her angering him by refusing to surrender or to her becoming his mistress, no great harm would have been done.
Valerie opened two bottles of beer and allowed him to take a deep, refreshing draught before sticking the dagger into his pride.
"You and Brenda are my best friends so I wanted to tell you both my secret before it reached you from another source. To you it's of special importance, because I would like you never to think I'd been wasting your time or trifling with your affections. I'm going to have a baby"
"When?"
"What you really want to know is when did the misconduct occur. About seven weeks ago. On my birthday."
He rose abruptly to his feet, knocking his chair over.
"Yer mean since we've been goin' out regular?" he stammered, flushed.
Ashamed, she nodded her head. "I hadn't realized you thought of us as going out-regular. I thought you were just after my body and that once you got that you'd cool off."
"Well, what's wrong with a man going after a bit of fun? The other guy, whoever 'e is, has had his lark wi' yer and I bet that's all he were after. Me, I come straight out. I've been after yer ring, but if I 'adn't been fond o' yer, I'd have given up trying long back, 'cos I know I shall never get it without marrying you."
"Would you have married me, Lew?"
"Why not? Got to settle down some day and you're more than a good looker. I reckon you'd make a good wife for somebody."
"But not for you?" she said shyly, scarcely daring to hope.
"Why not?"
"You mean-even with the child?"
Without realizing it, Lew had come to the verge of making a marriage proposal and Valerie was in a mood to give him the gentle push which would have him swimming in matrimony. He hedged.
"Well, a man looks a bit of a fool marrying somebody else's castoff when the other chap's got 'er in trouble. Anyway, who is the other chap and 'ow does it come 'e can have a bit and I can't?"
She told him how she had come to lose her virginity and then explained why she had refused to become his mistress while allowing a stranger to have his way with her.
"I love you, Lew; and I want you to love and respect me. I've hoped we'd marry almost from the start-I mean before it became more or less necessary for me to get married. But I didn't want to marry a man who'd found me easy to get. I wanted you to know I was decent, so that you'd always trust me and take pride in my fidelity. I cared about what you thought of me and I still do. I wanted you terribly, in the physical sense; and of-ten your kisses made me so wild with desire that I had to get away from you to prevent myself from dragging you into my bed. But I took a dislike to Bernie the moment I saw him and I didn't give a damn what he thought about me. When he made it clear he wanted me I gave in without a struggle. My need of a man had been getting more insistent with our every meeting and I thought that letting Bernie give it to me would cool me down for a bit. I never intended seeing him again and I certainly wouldn't have gone with him a second time. He was just an unimportant stranger who could render me a service and then be of no further value or interest to me. He got me easily; he thought I was a bag. Well, I didn't care what he thought as long as you went on thinking I was good."
It was all very difficult for an uncomplicated animal such as Lew, but he at least realized that Valerie loved him and wanted him to think well of her, whereas she loathed the other man. Having given him time to think it out, Valerie went on.
"Lew, if we got married soon, people would think the child was yours. We could have children of our own as well. And I'd be a good wife to you."
"I know yer would, gal. If only I could be sure folks wouldn't know it wasn't my brat. I don't mind about Brenda. She's a bitch, but she'd hold her tongue to please you. Nobody else knows, do they?"
She moved close to him, knowing he was her man and determined to devote her life to repaying him for the service he was willing to render her.
"Sadie and Basil both think Bernie had me that night," she whispered, running her fingers through his sandy hair, "but they can't be sure. And only Brenda knows you've never touched me. So there's no reason why people shouldn't think you've been slipping it into me regularly and that the state I'm in is a result of your slipping it in once too often and not taking it out quick enough. Kiss me, Lew, and say you forgive me!"
Ignoring her second command but eager to obey the first, Lew drew Valerie down to his knees and into a reclining position, his right arm pillowing her golden head. While his lips rejoiced in her softness, his tongue darted in and out of her quivering mouth and he toyed with the hem of her frock.
"That's the sort of kiss Brenda warned me about," she whispered.
"The sort of kiss she liked too," he answered, slipping his hand between the white nylon of her slip and the beige nylon of her stockinged thighs.
"She said what came after was nice too."
Her mouth opened and relaxed and her tongue lazy, she kissed him. The first contact of his fingers with the smooth pink-white flesh of her thighs above her stocking tops sent a shiver of anticipatory pleasure through all her flesh.
"Lew!" she moaned.
"What?"
"She said you did it ever so well."
"Did what?" he asked, chortling victoriously as his gross hands mauled her silk protected belly.
A frightened baby, she clung to him, almost sobbing.
"I daren't say it, darling. I do love you, Lew. Crush me!"
His lust-distorted mouth swooped down on hers. His kiss was long and brutal. She wanted to forget Bernie, but she could forget neither what he had done to her nor the joy he had poured into her. She wanted it again-had to have it, whether Lew married her or not; and at that moment she did not care if he despised her. If her heat was contemptible, it was better he should know of it before publicly declaring his willingness to bind himself to her for life.
"Stay with me!" she cried and opened her thighs wide.
His claw shot upwards into the angle of her crotch and a drop of his forehead perspiration burned her inflamed cheek. His fingers felt her vaginal moistness on the silk of her panties and even obtuse Lew realized that her body wanted him. She was no pregnant young spinster in search of security and respectability. She was a woman, begging her man to masculinate her screeching, oozing femininity; and Lew's hungry, frustrated, long-denied phallus yearned for soft, warm, humid, willing, unmercenary vagina.
Valerie was jelly, Lew's hunk of clay, to be molded, twisted, poked and pulled according to his excited whim. His hands were all over her, possessing her, dominating her, squeezing her fleshy parts, pinching her buttocks and breasts, and kneading her thighs as he muttered hoarse obscenities into her willing ears. Desire crazed her. She moaned, writhed, kicked, perspired and howled like a frantic bitch in heat and Lew enjoyed his power over her. He made her wait. His bottom and his own thighs agonized his over swelling sex. He feared he would ejaculate into his underpants, but he hung on grimly, torturing her physically and mentally, driving her into a desperate corner from which she would have to beg him to shoot her with his phallic pistol. Kissing lasciviously and fondling each other disgustingly, they whiled away a further half hour, during which they fell from the chair onto the carpet, where he slowly undressed her, careful garment by prudent item. She was a tropical flower slowly opening but oh, so luxuriously spreading her velvet petals. He was the sun-masterful, scorching, and adored.
Her panties in the valley between her breasts, her stockings torn to nervous ribbons, she tried in a frenzy to help him to bare his pepper-haired chest, his rarely-bathed belly and his pullulating penis. Under the table her eager oil darkened the Burgundy and beige carpet and her vagina made acquaintance with his hard, insistent rod of bone. It was so easy. Pain there was not, nor fear nor shame, but depth, pleasure, love and cries of de-light and encouragement. She was his as no woman had ever been. It was utter, ritual, godly and pagan. The hairs of his crotch fused with her groin's beard, and she raised her loins as his sunk into them. Slow, deep and rhythmic they devoured each other, violated each other and completed each other. Her thighs widened and widened, but her tunnel tightened jealously upon his sexual peninsula, occupying it, annexing it, liberating it. Their tongued, lipped, teethed mouths played a sonata, while an erotic symphony was composed by their screeching sexes.
"It was never like this," he cried, lunging.
"I know that my redeemer liveth," her clitoris sang.
She arrived, squealing ecstasy; and he went into her again, pulled out his slimy stick and thrust it into her harder than before. Her apogee only served to augment her excitement. like a wild female beast she gave as much brutality as her victorious man crashed into her. Her fingernails drew blood from his shoulders and with a conqueror's smirk on his ugly face, he rammed himself more strongly into her ever deepening, ever widening cavern. Her flesh dissolved into a second, flushing paroxysm and a few seconds later he fouled her fructified womb with his sperm, as if ripping Bernie's baby out of her guts and pouring his own child into the vacant niche.
In bed she loved him and he used her until the room was bathed in sunlight.
The next day Lew transferred his belonging to Valerie's apartment. Until and after their special-license wedding he exploited her flesh to the utmost degree, so that she said to Brenda that "Every day is Christmas."
CHAPTER SIX
As Lew burst into his and Valerie's apartment, eager for news of his wife, Brenda, who was there to help thought this is not the Lew I spent my nights with.
Aloud she said:
"Quiet!" she said. "Doctor Cole says there's no real need to worry but she must stay in bed until further orders. And above all we must do every-thing possible to spare her any sort of anxiety."
"I'm going to see her. What's really the matter?"
"Oh, the doctor said something about toxemia, but that's Greek to me. He thinks she ought to be in the hospital but he daren't tell her so, in case she gets unduly worked up about her condition. Be gentle with her."
"I'm always gentle with any woman," he whispered, placing his arms about Brenda.
Definitely, but with a smile, she resisted his at-tempts to kiss her.
He took his defeat gracefully and went into the bedroom where a weak and anxious Valerie greeted him with a brave smile.
After a few minutes of idle banter Valerie said that "the doctor says I'm all right, so there's no need to worry about me; but, Lew, IF I don't pull through, promise me you'll look after the baby!"
Wanting her, although he knew she was too weak to satisfy his desire, he kissed her ardently.
"Of course I will!"
"Yes, darling, I know you will, if you can. But if I weren't here, how would you manage?"
"I don't know, Val, but don't bother you head about it! I'll look after the baby. If it were necessary I'd find a way; but it won't be necessary. Old Kind Cole says everything will be all right if you rest and don't worryy So be a good girl and look on the bright side!"
"Lew!" she whispered a few minutes later, "Lew, Brenda is like us-like you and me-and a bit queer.. .you know what I mean? And she loves me.. .and you mustn't think she's got you out of her system-or that you've stopped finding her attractive. IF-I say IF-anything happened to me, couldn't you and Brenda look after the baby?"
"Brenda and me? Together?"
It was a pleasant thought but Lew couldn't imagine Brenda's devotion to Valerie going as far as that. She loathed him. Could one expect her to help him bring up even Valerie's baby? He was silent for several minutes, smiling and plotting.
"You'll be all right, love," he said after a bit. 'But IF you left me alone wi' t'brat, I'd see we're or right, even if I 'ad to go on me knees to Brenda ter 'elp me."
Eyes closed, Valerie was silent for some moments. When she opened her eyes, she spoke to Lew of her brother and her sister-in-law.
"Thank you, sweetheart! I just want to be sure that you won't let Alan and Sylvia take the child from you. He's a puritan and she's as nutty as a fruitcake. They want children but couldn't make one in a month of Sundays. They tried to stop us marrying by offering to adopt my baby, but I'd rather drown the two of us together than let them get their crazy hands on my child. Lew! Promise me, Lew! Lew, I beg you!"
She was almost hysterical. He remembered Brenda's warning that worry might have a seriously adverse effect on Valerie's health.
"Keep calm, darling," he crooned. "You can rely on me and Brenda to look after t'baby. We shall tell your brother and his missus where to get off. Brenda reckons as t'doctor says you got to get plenty sleep, so off you go!"
She pretended to obey him and he returned to Brenda, who silently, but forcefully, repulsed his attacks upon her lips and loins while she put the finishing touches to his evening meal prior to going-into the bedroom to kiss Valerie good night.
Having made Valerie a promise similar to that which Lew had earlier given, Brenda went home to her own apartment after a further struggle with Lew.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Valerie's mortal remains having been reduced to ashes, her brother Alan and his adoring wife Sylvia accepted Lew's invitation to lunch only after the little-moved widower had assured them that he in-tended offering them neither fish and chips with beer nor "hot dogs" and Coca-Cola.
"This is Brenda. She'll look after us, won't you, Brenda?"
"So you're Brenda! I'm pleased to meet you at last. May I present my wife-Sylvia. Sylvia-Brenda. You know, I feel I know you quite well. Valerie never stopped talking about you. Years ago, when you and she were at school together, it was Brenda said this and Brenda did that. Brenda, Brenda, Brenda! Then you both left school and you went back to France. She talked of little else but visiting you and your parents over there-or of your coming to us for a holiday. But one thing after another intervened until finally you come to London. Mother and Father died in the meantime and Sylvia and I saw less and less of Valerie, but when we did meet it was always the same subject-Brenda from start to finish."
Alan waxing enthusiasticly over Brenda did not please Sylvia in the least.
"It got so bad" Sylvia whined, "that we were quite surprised when she came and told us she had a BOY friend too."
Silence held sway during the drive to the apartment where Valerie had spent her last love-filled months with Lew and crossing the threshold, Alan lived up to his claim to be a man who did not believe in "beating about the bush."
"We appreciate your hospitality, but we didn't come here primarily for lunch." the big, handsome lawyer announced before Brenda had time to start setting the table for the lunch of cold meats and salad. "There are important matters to be discussed, Mr. Grace, as soon as Brenda leaves us."
Brenda halted in her tracks and Lew bristled.
"Such as?" he asked.
Alan and Sylvia both glanced in Brenda's direction as if to say "But she's still here!"
Lew's curled lips and his hands, resting lightly on his sturdy hips seemed to reply "And?"
For her part, Brenda whispered a rude word under her sweet breath.
Temporarily defeated, the otherwise ever-victorious Alan, whose wife was jealousy proud of his moral rectitude and his success in all things, accepted Brenda's presence.
"I spoke of matters," he said, addressing the judge, the juries, the press and the public, "but I meant, in point of fact, one particular matter-one overwhelmingly important matter-the baby, the child. The little boy," he added, tapping his fingers impatiently on the table.
Expecting this, Brenda inflated herself to one-and-a-half times her normal self. "The little boy?" she repeated innocently.
Instinctively, Alan felt that Brenda was his adversary and Lew his ally by default; so he addressed himself to the line of least resistance.
"Mr. Grace," he thundered, ludicrously refusing to admit that his brother-in-law had a Christian name. "I've always been straightforward with you. From the outset I've disapproved of you. To pre-vent my sister throwing herself away on you, Mrs. Cordell and I offered to adopt her baby but Valerie refused. She insisted she wanted both her child and you. Between you, you'd've killed her. The fact that she seemed to be happy with you doesn't pre-vent our feeling that you're not the sort of person to be entrusted with the care of the child."
"My husband is trying to suggest that you allow us to adopt the baby." Sylvia said, trying to be cunning. "We want children, and we can afford them, but it seems we can't have any. The obvious thing to do is adopt one and we'd rather have one whose parents we know than run the risk of trying to bring up a child whose lineage we know nothing about. If you let us have your little boy you'll be doing us a favor and you'll solve your problem at the same time."
Brenda's presence prevented Lew giving immediate vent to his own true feelings: he wanted to throw his fardel, his burdensome baby boy into his brother-in-law's hands without further ado, but he feared that to do so would antogonize Brenda, whom he entertained hopes of winning back. He tried to ride two horses simultaneously. Winking conspiratorially at Brenda, he thanked Alan and Sylvia for their generous offer and promised to think about it.
"I'll give you a definite answer before the end of the week," he promised.
"Why not give them the answer now?" Brenda snapped. "You promised Valerie you'd let nobody adopt the child. She wanted you to keep him, to bring him up yourself. You promised." She was almost crying.
"Even if Mr. Grace did give such a promise," Sylvia asked calmly, in viperishly honeyed tones, "how do you expect him to keep it? Although this is only our third meeting with him, it's obvious to my husband and to me that Mr. Grace has no profession or trade, no fixed source of income. No one knows how he earns his living and it's none of our business. But he doesn't seem to know from one day to another whether he'll be out days, nights, or not at all. Who's going to look after the baby while he's gallivanting about from one end of the-underworld-to the other?"
If Lew had had the least bit of pride, Alan and Sylvia between them would have ruined their chances of appropriating the baby, but Lew was not proud. To him, Valerie's baby meant one thing, it was the bait with which he hoped to lure Brenda into his trap.
"When I gave that promise I meant to keep it," Lew said, "and keeping all doors open, I would keep it if I could, but as you say, Mrs. Cordell, I'm not the sort of guy as can bring up a brat on his own; so I'm very grateful to you and Alan er-Mr. Cordell, for your kind offer. I don't see how I can refuse it, although it's not easy when you lose your wife to have to give up the only thing what she left you except, of course, happy memories."
Seeing through Lew's acting and despising him for his hyprocrisy, Brenda still had to react as he expected her to.
"But, Lew, surely you know I promised Valerie that as long as you agreed to keep her child I would stand by you, help you to care for him."
Lew's pale little eyes glistened and he could not restrain his tongue from briefly licking his lips.
"I know," he said, "but I thought you'd made your promise just to keep her quiet. I didn't know whether I could count on you."
"Well, you can. Keep your promise! I'll keep mine. And together we'll bring up your baby as Valerie wanted us to."
Sylvia asked sharply, "How-together?" screwing her face into a revolting grimace of disapproval.
Brenda smiled and pretended not to understand.
"If Val had lived," she replied, sweetly calm, "she'd have cared for the baby and kept house for Lew, who, by hook or by crook, would have earned enough money to foot the bills. I can't breast feed our wee laddie, but in all else I'll simply replace Valerie to the best of my ability."
"Brenda-Miss er.. . .? "
"Crosland!"
"Miss Crosland, how long has this been going on?" Alan boomed in his artificially deep voice, like that of a talentless student who has just graduated from drama school.
"This what?"
"This irregular liaison?"
Brenda laughed, and determined to shock the puritan and his neurotically devoted wife.
"But, Alan, my darling, it stopped going on even before Valerie dropped her drawers at Lew's behest. You've got a filthy mind."
"How dare you speak to Alan like that!" Sylvia cried, furious. "Less than a week after this child has killed Valerie, Lew's planning to.. .Oh and you're in league with him, and you dare say Alan has an evil mind."
"Sylvia, what is Lew planning to do? You daren't say it, but you make it sound disgusting. What he's planning to do is his duty. He's going to try to bring up his own child with the help of its mother's best friend. You and Alan can insist until you're both blue in the face that Lew and I are going to sleep together and have dirty doings, and I say you're a couple of muckmongers. It's none of your business, but Lew and I will be sleeping apart. I shall look after the baby and Lew. And that's all....
Alan did not believe a word of what Brenda said, but he had no desire to antagonize her, since he realized that she was a greater obstacle than Lew to his and Sylvia's realization of their immediate ambition, which was to rescue Valerie's son from the moral squalor which Lew and (to a lesser degree) Brenda represented in their eyes.
Had he been honest, he would have admitted that he was somewhat less concerned about his little nephew than about his own marriage, which was in danger of foundering on the rocks of either his or Sylvia's sterility. He wanted children, but to say his wife "shared his desire" was an euphemism. She craved children, and she was insanely jealous of her friends and neighbors who had proved their reproductive capacity. If she could not bear children, she would adopt them and lavish her maternal and possessive instincts on the fruits of other women's wombs.. .Alan feared that his wife would lose her mental balance unless she were allowed to adopt children but he was reluctant to accept responsibility for babies of whose origins he was utterly ignorant as long as there was a chance of getting possession of his own sister's son. Gently, diplomatically, he assured Brenda, and Lew that neither he nor his wife believed what Sylvia had said in an unguarded moment.
"Our one desire is that the boy should be given every attention and the chance of a good education and a bright future. We have no children, but we're-how shall I express myself?-comfortably placed financially. And we think that the laddie would be happier with us-not because you are, individually or together, less capable of bringing him up than we are, but rather because he'd be more secure with a married couple than with a widower and an attractive young woman who admits quite frankly to having been his mistress..."
"But I've already said that was all over between us-before Valerie and Lew thought of getting married. It's finished and there's not the slightest chance of it beginning again. Lew has his bedroom and I shall bring over a bed-sofa from my flat an I shall curtain off a part of this room for me."
Her tone was tinged with anger. Alan therefore, hastened to apologize if he had implied that he suspected her and Lew of having immoral motives for planning to live together.
"I'm thinking more," he went on, "of what people will think and say. Not that I personally attach much importance to gossip, nor that I imagine you do; but there comes a time when 'a child is embarrassed and when his progress in society is hampered by the bad reputation of the household of which he's a member, even if the reputation in question is false. I'm sure neither of you wants the child to be pointed out in later life as the son of a man who's carrying on an irregular affair with his housekeeper. And with all respect to both of you I doubt whether it's possible for a young man and a lovely girl to live together for long, especially in such a confined space as this, without their falling victim to the normal human temptations."
Sylvia's shrewish insinuations would have been more than counterbalanced by Alan's suave reasonableness, had Brenda not decided. that, if allowed to do so, she would remain steadfast to the promise she had made to Valerie, and if Lew had not realized that keeping the child offered him the chance of reintroducing his loins to those of the idealist who insisted on keeping house for him and nursing the baby, he was deaf, dumb, and blind.
Brenda insisted that Lew must unequivocally reject Alan and Sylvia's proposal, but Lew was too cunning for that. Sooner or later he would probably need to avail himself of their offer so he wanted to leave the door open. He also realized that his hand would be strengthened, and Brenda's weakened, by the ever-present possibility that he, Sylvia and Alan would reach agreement concerning the boy's adoption.
As soon as Alan and Sylvia left the apartment Lew tried to consolidate his position vis-a-vis Brenda. They agreed that no time should be lost in her giving up her own flat, transferring some of her property to her . new home and selling the remainder.
Brenda was impatient to collect "Her" baby from the maternity hospital, but Lew preferred that she move into his apartment at once and leave the child in the hospital for a few weeks. He would have felt more free to enjoy Brenda's body in the boy's absence than in his crying, urinating, excreting, milk-demanding presence.
"The child is yours, Lew," she said, smiling in her appreciation of what he was after, "and it's up to you to decide when he comes home. But there are two things I'd like to say; I see no point in my moving in here until the baby comes-you're quite capable of looking after yourself as you did before you seduced me and later between my leaving you and Valerie's letting you slide it to her; and the other thing is that I shall be keeping house for you and looking after baby-I don't expect any salary, just that you provide the rent, food, and my clothes-I don't expect to be treated quite like a servant. What I really mean is that I don't want you interfering in my care of the child. In fact, I expect to be treated as your wife, except for the sex..."
He rose, and moved toward her. Standing over her, he buried his right hand in her dark hair while the other moved to her breasts. She pushed his hands gently away.
"Alan and Sylvia have gone," he said, gripping her shoulders. "No need to go on making it all sound so complicated! You look after the brat any way you like, just as if it was yours! You'll not be short of money, and it'll be just as if I'd married you instead of Valerie-just a married couple with one child and we shall take bloody good care there are no more."
"We certainly shall," she replied vehemently.
He took her words to mean that they would co-habit in the full, immoral sense, but that they would take precautions against their coition having a tangible result. Pulling her roughly against him and to her feet, he took labial possession of her mouth. She struggled, as much against her own blood as against him. Astonished and disappointed, he released her.
"Never do that again!" she cried.
"What? A little kiss! There's no harm in a bit of fun between friends."
Knowing his idea of a bit of fun was to strip her and flush her intestines with the milk of his man-hood, she pretended to think he referred to the innocent game of kissing.
"I don't mind an old friend kissing me," she said, "but that was no kiss. It was a challenge. If I hadn't resisted, I'd have engaged myself in a duel of fornication which would have gone on for years. As Alan said we're going to be living too close together. It's going to be difficult and you've got to help me to steer clear of the traps. Even the most innocent kiss or cuddle could lead us back to where we started-a pair of animals with no other thought than copulation; and I won't have that. Under-stand?"
"Why not?" he screamed. He was furious, unhappy, puzzled. "In the name of God! You used to like it. You volunteer to come live with me, just like old times; and now, thanks to those hypocritical, high-class bastards who've just gone out, you don't want it any more. You make me look a fool. I tell them I'm keeping the child and now I've got to go on my knees and beg 'em to take him."
"Keep your hair on! I never said I'd come back to you like old times. I'm coming here to nurse the baby, and to help you as much as I can; but I'm not coming here to be had and humiliated when-ever your other dories tell you to go to the devil. If you want me so much, why did you throw me over for Valerie? I couldn't even have an innocent friendship, but you could try every trick in the book to get into Valerie's bed. I didn't mind your running after her with your great big, flaming penis in your hand and I was glad when you married her. She wanted it and that was enough for me; but now that my dearest friend is dead, you forget her and you think you can have me back just like that-no courting, no compliments, no little presents, no politeness. You think all you have to do is give me a job without pay in exchange for the good job I already have and then you can rip my panties off without the least bit of ceremony and cram everything you've got into me? No! Lew, you taught me to like it, and how I liked it the way you did it to me! I'd have gone on taking it from you until the grave and wouldn't have minded you having other girls or your trying unsuccessfully to get them. But you thought, and you still do, that you were God Almighty. I could spend every evening at home, alone, waiting for you to bring home your frustrated phallus. If you were able to lay some other tart I had to go to sleep unsatisfied. Otherwise I had to be ready to do everything you wanted me to do, to let you do whatever thrilled you. I loved it. I loved being a filthy, cocksucking, slavish, unpaid whore, beaten and humiliated; but you went too far when you objected to my spending a virtuous evening out with Peter Buxton. That evening sex ended between us, and it stays ended, even now that I agree to live with you."
He rushed at her, threw her to the floor, his hands clawing at her thighs and silk-sheathed belly under her skirts. Kicking, thumping, scratching and biting, she managed to convince him that she really did intend to withhold her sexual favors from him. Panting and cursing, he got up. He was on the verge of telling her to get out and stay out but thought no! Let her sell her furniture, give up her job and get used to nursing the baby! She's tasted a man, but she's funning with him. Cooped in here day and night, without friends or other distractions, she'll come to me on her hands and knees, seriously and then I'll make her pay for what she's done today.
Ashamed, angry and bruised, Brenda returned to her own apartment to make arrangements for her taking up residence with the brute who was the only lover she had ever had, other than Valerie.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Emptying his glass, Lew smacked his lips to at-tract the attention of the girl who was sitting alone next to him, her back half turned from him. She cast a glance in his direction. He smiled. She was older than he had imagined but her vampish smirk and her half-closed eyes intrigued him as much as the provocative curves of her back and bottom.
Her answer, "Gin and lime," to his question "What are you drinking?" made him wince but he bravely ordered her drink and his own Double Diamond ale. As they drank she took care to let him know she was very much in demand by moneyed gentlemen who lavished presents on her, took her to the smartest clubs and most expensive restaurants and delighted in taking her to Brighton for extravagant weekends. She claimed to be the sort of woman who appealed especially to handsome, wealthy Americans. She went to great pains to ex-plain that although she liked going to bed with a man as much as the next girl, she was very particular and offered that reward only to a very small percentage of her benefactors As she had expected, Lew was flattered that so popular a woman should accept a glass of gin from him and he had her glass filled whenever he noticed that it was empty. Quite sure he would be recompensed (as were few of the men who paid for her drinks) he did not greatly mind his encounter with her having cost him thirty shillings. He was a little less happy when she agreed to allow him to escort her home only on condition that he called a taxi.
"I always say," she said, her Liverpudlian accent forcing its way up through her Mayfair veneer, "you can tell a gentleman from a hick by whether he orders a taxi or expects her to endure the under-ground. None of my friends take me home on public transport. Most of 'em have cars and the others go everywhere in taxis."
Lew did not like the idea of taking a taxi from the Strand to Holland Park but he was going to de-vote the whole night to squeezing thrills out of the slim body of a. "high-class dame," so another ten shillings would be well spent. In the taxi they kissed and cuddled, but less ardently and daringly then he wished, since, being a "lady" she associated only with the best type of man-who was very reserved in public however hot and wicked he might be behind closed curtains. Guessing that hitherto undreamed of refinements of obscenity and perversity were in store for him, Lew disciplined himself until he had dismissed the taxi at the door of her house. There, on the front steps, he grabbed her, and kissed her with all the brutality he could summon from the frustrated depth of his three months of sexual abstention since Valerie's death. That she was his, as much in need of him as he was of her, was evidenced by her open-mouthed tongue-and-teeth response to his ardor. He forced her uncorsetted body so far back that their heads were but two feet from the front steps of her house. His left hand, its fingers outstretched to their limit, wandered up and down her front, squeezing her firm little breasts, prodding her belly and thighs, and feverishly patting her crotch. When their mouths separated his inviting tongue licked her bruised lips and she breathlessly murmured "Good night!"
He laughed and reached for her again, thinking one more kiss like that and and he would have the courage to cross the threshold. But she was out of his reach and slipping her key into the door before the laughter died in his terrified throat. The door opened as he sprang up the steps but she did not hurry to enter the building or place the protective door between herself and him. Simply and coolly she repeated her "Good night!" and added "Thank you!"
"Aren't you asking me in?" There was incredulity mingled with an almost tearful menace in his question.
She clucked like a mother gently admonishing a slightly naughty child.
"Oh no, dear!" she answered "As I said, that doesn't happen often with me-only when I know a man's a real gentleman. And that takes time."
"You can't drink a man's liquor, let him spend half a nicker on taxis bringing you all this way home, and then give him the brush off."
"I agree, darling; but I'm not giving you the brush off. I let you kiss me and paw me in the taxi. And well the kiss you've just had-a little runt like you ought to think he's getting very good value for his quid or two if he's allowed to stick his stinking tongue into the mouth of a woman like me. Any-way, I'm not a whore. I don't sell myself, I give myself to the man whose generosity, looks, charm and manners prove him worthy to lie naked on top of me. It's about time somebody told you, you don't qualify. Ta-ta, wack!"
Alone, Lew thought of heaving a rock through her window, but what was the use! A spiteful god bestows looks, intelligence, wit, charm and wealthy, influential paints on one man while he thrusts another into the world too stupid to make an honest living, so small and ugly that women laugh him to scorn, and of such parentage that he knows poverty from his birth. The ill-favored one has to accept his role and achieve by evil means what is not his by right. Fits of temper don't help. Deeds do. And so-to deeds! He began divining his plan of action as he journeyed home-by underground.
Brenda was dozing before a dying fire when he entered his apartment. She was fully dressed. Whenever she had reason to believe he would re-turn at a reasonable hour she stayed up until he had gone to bed. She felt that fully dressed she offered less temptation to him than she would lying in herbed, within a yard of which he had to pass to enter his room. As long as she was not in bed and not attired for sleep, the room was no more feminine than any other living room, but her changing from daywear into a nightie, her opening the sofa, so it became her bed, introduced a womanly aura to the room, a maninebriating ambience.
She stirred, realized where she was and who had roused her and sprang to her feet, trying to be in attitude at last the business like person who would not awaken the animal in a man.
"Would you like some tea? There's some cheese."
His sullen "No!" told her that he had been disappointed either in a shady business deal or in his endeavours to seduce some female. As if to convince her it was the latter he put his arms about her, not so much roughly as with a sad sort of clumsiness. He had come home intent upon submitting her to something akin to rape; and she almost was defusing him by staying out of bed to brew tea for him on his late return. What he had planned was wicked he had a deep ache in his loins and she had the wherewithal to soothe his pain but proudly refused him even a little salve, although it was of such a nature that one could never empty the barrel, how-ever often one dipped into it. He had raped her in his room in the Parisian hotel, but then he had not known she was good, generous and loyal. He had found her there naked, her desire for a boy oozing out of her vestal vagina, and he had supposed she was a strumpet, so he had blackmailed her into giving her young body to him. He was going to do the same thing again but this time he could not use the excuse that he thought her loose. He was sure she spoke the truth when she said she had had no lover other than he, and so he also knew she had been heterosexually abstemious for more than a year. Could a man ravage such a woman and then defend himself by insisting she deserved no better? On the way home he had thought of many good reasons for gratifying his frustrated lust but in her presence it seemed to him unjust to make her pay the penalty for his Creator's spitefulness in making him repulsive.
He simply held her in his arms, one hand motionless on her waist, the other on her left shoulder. And she didn't struggle.
She was not struggling. Not struggling! Could he hope for a better excuse? A girl who has been a glutton for copulation (and she had been eager for it all hours of the night and day when she had lived with him previously) does not lose her appetite when she leaves her lover. Her yearning goes on and it grows. She either casts around for another stallion or she lets desire, like a worm in the bud, feed on her entrails until her guts can stand no more of it whereupon she either goes off her head or rubs her long dammed oceans of dam juice over the belly of the first man who grabs hold of her. Brenda had been too long between the shafts of the jaunting wagon called virture and Lew reckoned she was ready to kick over the traces. Haughty head held high, she would not give in he decided-least of all to him-without a struggle. He had to make her be good to herself-confront her with a situation in which she was obliged to cut the knot of her own denied desire by the simple act of lancing the abscess of his maddening lust. It had been on his journey home that he had perfected a hither-to vague scheme for "putting . on the screws."
What Lew did not know, could not have conceived, was that Brenda's surrender to his seemingly innocent and unhappy embrace was a gesture of compassion, not a symptom of any erotic struggle which he fancied was raging in her flesh. She was quite prepared to stagnate sexually as long as the only alternative was to give him the satisfaction of lording it over her body as he had done previously. If she pitied him in his frequent rebuffs at the hands of other women, her sympathy stopped short of according him the pleasures which they denied him-as he was shortly to discover.
His sad embrace developed into a lewd hug and his mouth sought hers. She turned her face away abruptly disgusted by the odor of stale beer. She exerted every ounce of her strength in an endeavor to throw him off.
So he could not even have a kiss! He cast off all remorse. He would teach her a lesson. He would have her crawling on her belly for the privilege of sucking his anus!
Fortified by anger, he forced her down into the armchair, her back against one of the arms. He pushed her head backward until it was hanging down almost to the floor. Fearing that she would fall on her head she pedaled her feet in the air, inadvertently shaking her skirts down onto her belly. The sight of her long, slender, agitated legs, the thighs glowing rosily in the light of the dying fire, and of her rainbow-hued nylon panties made his already erect penis swell even more; and the cloth of his trousers martyrized it. His cunning plan was forgotten. He was really going to rape her.
He ran his free hand up and down her thighs, first one, then the other, pausing to squeeze the up-per reaches above her stocking tops. He fondled her lower belly in its smooth, pretty envelope of many colors, saying to himself ". . .first the lean years, and now the fat years!"
He tried to stick a finger into her vagina without taking off her clinging, stretched-to-the-limit scan-ties.
"Let me go, you fool!" she commanded in a whisper. "You'll wake Ian."
He had forgotten the child. The sudden reminder of the boy's presence put him off his guard for just the couple of seconds Brenda needed to scramble to her feet. Sleeping baby or no sleeping baby, she slapped Lew's face with such indignant force that his head swung violently and his chin crashed into his right shoulder. Her blow shook out of his fuddled brains all thought of rape.
"Do that one more," she hissed, "and I swear before almighty God, I'll have you put away for a long time."
He adopted an aggressive and aggrieved attitude to hide his humiliation.
"It's your own fault," he replied. "You made me see red by getting all excited just because I tried to steal a little kiss. There was a time when you felt my kisses weren't enough You had to have the rest too and you used to lap it up. And now when I've had a few beers-well you can't blame me..."
"All right! Forget all about it! You're going to wake baby!"
"The baby can go to hell!" he cried.
"Lew! You should be ashamed of yourself."
"Well, I'm not. And we're going to have a serious talk about your bloody baby-here and now."
"Oh no! You're in no state to discuss anything without making a hell of a row-and the child is yours, not mine."
"You know bloody well it's not mine. I don't see why I should go on working for him and you when I'm getting nothing out of it-not even an occasional kiss."
Brenda knew what was coming and her misery almost sucocated her. She wanted to vomit. She walked toward Lew's room.
"Come in here," she whispered, "and close the door softly!"
The eagerness with which he sprang to obey her make her regret the suggestion. "and don't imagine you'll succeed in your bedroom where you failed out there." She said in warning. "Now, what's eating you?"
He threw himself on the bed and stretched luxuriously trying to suggest that his fortunes were taking a turn for the better.
"It's like this;" he said. "You know as well as I do that I'm hot-blooded. Highly sexed. And I'm not one o'them 'ypocrites as pretends it's otherwise. I need a woman and I'm going t'ave one, by hook or by crook. But on what I earn, how can I keep you, Valerie's blasted brat and myself and still 'ave enough left over to run after a skirt!"
Brenda said in all sincerity. "It ought not to cost you a farthing to get a woman,"
"If they knew you as Valerie did, and as I do, they'd pay you to lay them."
"Well, they don't," he hissed bitterly. "They laugh at me, because I'm small and as ugly as a horse's butt. Most of 'em, that is I know a few though as'd be very happy to go to bed wi' me-if I could provide the bed. Only they wouldn't come here. I can't even let 'em know about you 'cos they'd be jealous and embarrassed and I can't afford to take a tart to a hotel every time I want a bit o' that there. Besides, what a girl wants is a home. Some of 'em don't mind if I won't marry 'em as long as I give 'em a ome. And I can't do that as long as you and Ian are here; so you'll both have to go"
Brenda had known from the beginning that he would play just such a filthy trick on her but she could think of no way of preventing his breaking faith with her and, more importantly with Valerie. The only thing to do was to "play for time."
"What do you mean we'll 'have to go?" she asked feigning amazement.
"Man and Sylvia want Ian," he replied lazily, a cunning glint in his eyes. "You can always find work. Your doctor er?-Peter Buxton?-he'll get back into his hospital-and into his bed."
His last remark was intended to anger and hurt her but her mind and brain were too busy to heed his sarcasm. She was thinking of Peter as a solution to her problem. He would have been happy to marry her and adopt her friend's motherless child, but Valerie had insisted that Brenda should help Lew to rear the babe. And Brenda was determined to keep her promise, cost what it may.
"Lew, you and I both made a solemn promise to Valerie," she said., calmly, sweetly and reasonably. "And we're not going to let her down. I've given up my job and my lovely flat and I've sold most of my furniture, just so that I could help you with Ian. You couldn't turn me out now. So take your time!. . .don't try to rush your women! Work on them subtly and you'll find one here and one there who'll be very happy to invite you to share her bed. I'd rather you didn't bring any of them here, of course, but as long as Ian's too young to understand what's going on, I suppose I don't mind all that much."
He sprang to his feet with surprising agility, gripped the muscles of her upper arms until she winced.
"Shut your silly mouth!" he shouted. "I know what sort of woman I can get. Just as long as I'm keeping you and the kid I can't afford to go with whores and that leaves only deserted wives and women who can't get a husband and what they all expect of a guy like me is a roof, a bed, a table with food on it, a frock, a coat and a pair of shoes from time to time. They'll not come here as long as you stay. And anyway I can't afford to keep such women as long as you and the baby take all my money.. .so he's going to Alan and Sylvia and you'll have to look out for yourself."
She decided it was all a bluff and to call it.
"'very well," she sighed. "I'll leave first thing in the morning. But you must promise to take Ian to Sylvia without delay."
He was defeated but still had some good cards in his hands.
"I knew it'd be you and not me who broke your promise to poor Valerie," he sneered.
Brenda's Achilles heel bled profusely. She lost her head. "Bastard!" she cried, and the tears coursed down her cheeks.
He was now holding her sobbing body tightly in his arms. He whispered gruffly. His throat was scorched by his lust for her.
"I want to keep my promise to Valerie," he rasped, "but you make it too difficult. I'm only human. I've always k vi d you. There's really never been any other women for me-even Valerie."
He could scarcely have chosen words more injurious to Brenda than.. . "even Valerie." She pushed him vigorously from her and moved towards the door. But she stopped her hand on the cold door knob, and she asked herself "Why cut off Valerie's nose to spite her face. He doesn't mean what he said. Val was more to him than I ever was . or could hope to be. I must give him one more chance to prove himself worthy of her trust in him."
But when she halted he took it as his cue to play his trump card.
"I'll keep the child if you'll stay here to look after him," he said, challenging her with a double-edged sword, baiting her.
She rushed to him, her hands extended to him.
"You know I'll stay," she cried happily.
He seized her and drew her dangerously close to his boiling body.
"Stay then," he commanded, "but get out of your head all those imagine ideas about staying here to please me! You'll be his nurse and my house-keeper: I'll give you ten bob a week, board and lodging and you'll do as you're told."
"And you promise we'll keep Ian? For always?"
"As long as you take good care of him, of me and the flat. As long as you bear in mind it's my flat. My home and Ian's. I pay for it-for every-thing. And I pay you to look after it and to do as I tell you-just like any other servant. None of your interfering, criticism, pride. None of your reminding me of my "duty to Valerie" and all that. Either I'm the boss.. .The Boss.. .or you go your way and Ian goes to Alan and Sylvia, O.K.? "
She thought he was asking her to promise to do no more than she had hitherto sought. Why argue?
"Agreed," she said, smiling.
"Right! This is my first order. Get down on your knees, just like you used to, and beg me-beg me to give it to you!"
Horrified at his duplicity and suddenly ashamed of her own gullibility, she freed her hands from his grasp with one wild movement. Wild-eyed, mouth open and distorted by sorrow, she retreated from him until her back was to the wall.
"Lew!" she groaned.
And his broad, stunted right hand delivered two bloody blows to her mouth. Pressing herself into the resisting wall she waited for the third blow, knowing that even should he beat her to death she could never retract the silly promise she had so recently made to him. She had sold him her person as surely as Goethe's Doctor Faustus had sold his soul to Mephistopheles. His third slap did not fall immediately, his hands being too occupied with the ripping off of her flowered frock.
He threw her across the bed, grabbed the shoulder straps of her multi-tinted slip, and tugged down-wards until he was able to feast his eyes upon her trembling body clad only in brassiere and almost negligible panties.
"On your knees! Beg me!"
To appease him, she wanted to obey; and knew she had to. But something prevented her from doing his bidding.' Did fear or horror paralyze her or was she seeking to provoke him to agonizing delicious brutality? If she had to surrender to him again, why not go the whole way back to where she had been during her first weeks in Great Britain?-in those days she had been the deliriously happy slave of a demanding sadist and ever since, while her pride and her reason had kept her from his bed, her flesh had been sick with the nostalgic longing for degradation.
She writhed on the bed, cowering from the feared blows for which she yearned.
"Beg me!" he repeated.
She shook her head "no" and silently thanked God for finding ways of obliging a reluctantly girl to play the strumpet. He searched crazily for an instrument of correction until his eyes, and then his hands, fell upon her slip and the remnants of her frock. He twisted the two garments into a whip with which he beat her until she cried "come to me Lew! Into me! Lew! Take me! Give"
He stared down at her battered, sweating body, which was his body, one of his two bodies. He had always had a male body and mostly it was hungry and wracked with pain. But sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, his man-body had not been tortured with desire. Rather, it had been titillated by a lust which he knew could be satisfied; and those had been the times, the too infrequent occasions, when which could go into the other, stealing and giving he possessed two complementary bodies, one of odor-stealing and giving the aroma of sexual ecstasy. This was one of those moments. Flesh which knew his flesh, cried out for his flesh which was proud on that occasion. Brenda's cries constituted an informed recommendation; the satisfied client returns and thereby sets the seal upon the merchant's reputation.
The flattered salesman may take certain liberties with his customers. Lew felt he could safely make Brenda wait for what she demanded of him. He had to wait-not minutes, but months. 'vengeance, how sweet is they breath!
On his knees, but not on subservient knees, Lew contemplated the dark patch on Brenda's delicate, pastel-tinted, multicolored panties. The spilled juices of her loins paid homage to him. He was omnipotent. He buried his nose and mouth in the moist nylon of her pantied sex, sending a thrill through her too-long-abstemious meat. His hands overwhelmed her thighs and belly, her bottom and breasts, her shoulders and mouth. Her entire body was submissive-even pleading. She was open, defenseless, obstinately vulnerable. She was asking for it; and not only "it," but everything. Lew would have been a fool had he not exploited to the full his long-awaited instant of power.
She groaned and sighed, but it was mainly the trembling of her hot bottom, belly and thighs which testified to her impatience to become his thing. Lew was in no hurry. If not the years, at least the weeks (and perhaps the months) were on his side. He peeled off her panties with such care as to suggest they were made of the most fragile cigarette paper. They lisped away from her flesh with a mucous lack of enthusiasm.
He was so deft hi removing her brassiere that he concluded instantly that her breasts were somewhat firmer and smaller than before. He couldn't be sure however, that the memory of his deceased little wife's tits was not influencing his comparison between Brenda's torso "pre-Valerie" and "post-Valerie."
While his lips and voracious tongue renewed their old acquaintance with her vagina, his hands fondled her breasts, making her already lust-inflated nipples swell and harden even more. Her humid thighs gripped his head and her loins jerked forward to meet his teething onslaught against her rippling clitoris. Her curses and prayers inebriated him, swelling his imprisoned penis to incredible proportions. Drops of his colorless penis "blood" spilled into his underpants and he became afraid he would throw away the seed for which Brenda's fur-row yearned. As he liberated his rod, Brenda raised her head, eager to see again that which she had loved and enjoyed many moons previously. The sight of it made her head swim. Admiring its throbbing, scarlet glow, she sank back onto the bed sighing "Mine!"
Her thighs opened wide and her sex was a wide, almost bleeding gash. The muscles of her loins made the mouth of her vagina open and close like a winking, bloodshot eye. The flaming blub of his phallus understood and blinded the would-be optic organ of her crotch with a ruthless poke which buried his scarlet skewer in tender, living meat.
Lew's "soldier" was not snatching forty-eight hours "leave." He had been "transferred" to the "reserve" and time was his-, ally. Having all the time in the world (and his bitter disappointment of a few hours previously washed away by the warm waves of success) Lew possessed Brenda in the most liesurely of fashions. The sweet depths of her pit were his to bathe in, and he dived down to her pearl-infested oyster bed.
She dung to him, rejoicing in the knowledge 'that her joy in his violation of her was equalled by the pleasure he smoothly, deeply squeezed out of her vibrant guts. Lew had been too long without a woman and the thrill of having a tall, slender, beautiful, young and devastatingly attractive female prostrate herself before him was more than his testicles could stand. He gritted his teeth in his endeavors to hold back the flood of his fertilizing fluid, but it broke down the barriers of his will and rolled into her, oceanic buffeting her, tearing her apart, reducing her into thousands of screaming, grateful chunks of quivering flotsam and jetsam.
Lew's first climax seemed to set him free. It was usual with his that when he got hold of a girl, after several months of famine, he reached the apex of pleasure too quickly but that after his first ejaculation he was able to settle down to a gentle confident rhythm of copulation which carried him and his mistress up to the exquisite pastures of an erotic paradise. Fortunately, on this occasion Brenda was in an even worse state of sexual privation than he, so that her apogee almost coincided with his. For her, as for him, it came so effortlessly that it was but the starting point for a session of real fornication. They devoted a tireless night to their divinely bestial activities. Words being quite unnecessary, they spoke only the sort of indecencies each knew would inspire the other to wilder and more revoltingly luscious excesses. When Lew wanted her to mouth the mixture of his cream and hers from his deflated penis he did not need to articulate his desire. She sensed it and having filled the hollow of her tongue with the muck harvested from his phallus, she pressed the tip of her oral lizard-tongue into his anus, seeking to pour into his rear orifice part of the slime which had issued from the tap of his sex. Her assiduous labial caressing of his rarely-washed posterior quickly brought back life to his limp genitals and she was quick to derive the maximum benefit from his restored virility.
Toward dawn they were both still eager for each other though Lew no longer had the energy for normal copulation and Brenda crept headfirst into bed, until her mouth was able to take possession of his penis. One of her long, slim thighs on each side of his head, she was thus in a position to surrender her clitoris to the blandishments of his lips, tongue and merciless teeth while she licked, sucked, tickled and gently nibbled his scrotum and penis until her mouth was full of his priceless filth, which she swallowed with the joy a connoisseur derives from drinking vintage wines and devouring fresh salmon or sturgeon roe. Brenda was as much a giver as a receiver, so that her tunnel of love did not fail, in the later stages of her ecstasy, to lubricate Lew's mouth with its pungent balm and to drip over his face and onto the Brylcream-scented pillow.
Having given the baby his early morning bottle of milk, Brenda returned to the bed in which Lew was sleeping soundly. She joined him in Lethe's arms and all too soon the sun was high and he woke her insisting on giving her anus its midmorning penisful of cream. Lying on her belly terrified she buried her face in the saliva-moist pillow to stifle her cries of agony as his white-hot, vermilion poker crashed into her tight sleeve of perverse love. She was his to do with as he pleased. He had bought her with a promise, so he was entitled to pillage any and every morsel of her body. He had the right to inflict suffering on her; she had given him that right. If in abusing her unnaturally he did her some permanent harm, she would have no cause for complaint. From one moment to the next she could re-fuse to go on. But she was willing to endure pain and run risks for Ian's sake (out of loyalty to Valerie) and she derived satisfaction from his excruciating boring into her rear passage. He would keep Ian as long as she played the role of slave and as long as her slavery was an erotic one, she was pleased that he forced her into it. If he could thrill her with the usual sex tricks, in addition to finding new ones, however humiliating, she would feel that their bargain was heavily weighted in her favor. She had been determined not to resume her former intimacy with Lew; but since she was his again, she wanted to be unstintingly of him, for him, under him.
As the pain of their unusual coupling diminished, his thrusts into her became less difficult. He was able to flash in and out of her, whipping her anal tube into a delicious frenzy almost equal to that which her vagina experienced when he took her as she supposed her creator intended she should be had by men. At the same time, the fingers of one of his hands rubbed and pinched her clitoris and he tried to push four fingers into the silky sleeve. The result was that her loins were entirely given over to pain and a double pleasure, the joy which is independent of anguish and the thrill which, for a girl like Brenda, has its origin both in the suffering it-self and in the knowledge that her lover is establishing or proving his mastery of her by deliberately hurting her.
The sensations within her sex mounted towards the inevitable. explosion and her rejoicing ass felt the moment to be imminent when his pipe would spew its soothing mess into her soreness. It was too much joy for two people to share. She feared her part of it would craze her. She had know delights in Lew's arms, but never anything like this double-barreled frenzy. She moaned, thrust her buttocks up to meet his ever more violent onslaught, and beat the pillow with her tightly clenched fists. The front pleasure fused with the back one and she was one big, dripping singing vagina. Bellowing like a bull, he fired a gigantic "salvo" into her. It "tore through her" and "scored a direct hit" on her "magazine" whose explosion was "fireworks display" to end all fourths of July and all fifths of November. Delirious, she ripped the pillowcase to ribbons with her teeth, creating a snowstorm of swan's down. When he pulled his reduced sex out of her, blood trickled down the her cleft.
Brenda swooned and Lew fell asleep until the cries of Ian roused them both. She sprang to her feet, but Lew told her to "let him cry himself to sleep! He can't be hungry again."
Paying no heed to her lover, she hurried to her charge who needed milk" and a change of diaper. Having attended to the child's needs, she took her sex-thirsty body back to the fountain of its only nourishment.
"Didn't we agree the baby was to be brought up my way," Lew demanded. "And didn't you promise to do as I told, you?"
There was no point in answering him. He did not really care whether she fed Ian or not and he wasn't angry because she had done so. She knew he merely wanted an excuse to beat her again and that was how it would be as long as they were together. He would beat her to warm her up for fornication and to put himself deeper in the mood for it. And he would beat her as a punishment, not because he was dissatisfied with her, but because he was her master who rejoiced in a proud, beautiful woman's subservience to him.
"Why can't you do as you're told?"
"Ian was hungry and he needed a clean nappie. Pull me down on top of you, Lew, and do it all to me again! I'll be a good girl in the future."
He got up and broke a length of willow twig off a dilapidated wicker chair.
"The trouble with you" he said waving it menacingly in front of his sneering face, "is you can't do as you're told. You had to leave home because you couldn't behave yourself. You're a bag, but you think your posh talk an' all them imagine high schools makes you better than me..."
His tone frightened her. He had only been looking for an excuse to thrash her but he had succeeded in convincing himself that he had a grievance against her and she feared that his bitterness plus the erotic frenzy into which he was trying to put himself might push him further along the road of sadism than he intended to go. She could not stop him from beating her, nor did she want to, but she prayed to the God in whom she did not believe to intervene when she had as good a whipping as was good for her.
"Don't torture yourself, darling! I didn't mean to offend you. It was just that I thought the quicker the baby was attended to the sooner you could shove it up me again. Piddle on me, Lew, like you used to!"
"You didn't mean to disobey me! That's what makes it worse. Your feeling of being better than the-likes of me is so deep that it makes you act superior instinctively! Even when it'd pay you to be a bit humble, even when you think you're being obedient and when you're trying to be. Well, I'm not standing for any more of it. I'll thrash it out of you and I'll go on giving you regular whippings until I see some change. Go down on your knees and beg me to whip some sense into you."
Much as she wanted him to give her a taste of the switch, she felt ludicrous kneeling before a man who was more inarticulate beast than human being; but she had no choice. She went down on her knees-so close to him that her breath warmed his genitals.
"I'm sorry I didn't do as you told me, Lew," she said, "and I want you to punish me every time I disobey or offend you. Whip me, Lew! Whip me. And when your arm aches, tell me I'm forgiven and then make me give you pleasure until I can no longer stand or keep my eyes open. Hurt me, Lew, so that I shall stop feeling guilty for having made you think I imagine myself better than you! Beat me! Beat me!"
Once on her knees, the scent of his loins in her nostrils, she had ceased to feel foolish and she was able to put into words her genuine longing. She was looking up at Lew, who glowed with pride. He ordered her to stand up. She hastened to obey. He fondled her lithe young body prior to giving her a long, lewd kiss, at the end of which he threw her roughly onto the bed, face downwards, His switch whistled through the air and landed diagonally on the upper reaches of her back, leaving a weal from her right shoulder to the left side of her waist. The impact of the blow caused her body to rise abruptly from the bed and then fall deeper into the disarranged pile of reeking sheets. The thin cane fell again almost immediately this time on her buttocks, and again and again, no part of her back being spared. Hoping to add to her suffering, he tried to concentrate half a dozen blows on one section of her prior to moving to another section, where he also delivered a number of brisk strokes. When the whole of her back was crisscrossed with scarlet lines the speed of his beating diminished, but then he whacked her six or seven times so hard that the redness turned to an ugly blue-black. Here and there the skin broke and blood bubbled out. That was the sign that the beating had gone on long enough. It had continued longer than Brenda had hoped, and she had not expected him to lay it on as hard as he had towards the end; but it was over.
Raw though her back was, she turned onto it offering her cruel lover the sight of her unblemished breasts, belly and parted, inviting thighs. He had tired himself, but her sensuous beauty put new life into him. He leaned over and spat on her sex. He did it to humiliate her but, proud of his insult, she voluptuously caressed the front of her body until her hands reached her pubic hairs. Her right hand went further, until her fingers made contact with his spittle, which she rubbed into her vagina and around her clitoris, which quivered at her thrilling touch. Her pawing of her sex made a moist sound, like a messy kiss, and her juices flowed onto her fingers. She needed Lew. She looked at him and knew he was as impatient as she was.
Raising her dripping hand to her mouth, she licked it clean. Then she reached out for Lew, who kneeled on the bed between her thighs, and sank the full depth of his staff of masculinity into her "throat" of womanliness. He was delicious and so was she and they went on delighting each other until dusk, when he went to his favorite bar for a few hours of beer drinking, while she restored some semblance of order and cleanliness to the apartment.
She was still occupied with her household chores, when he came home and dragged her unreluctantly to bed.
CHAPTER NINE
There is considerable truth in the adage "Nothing succeeds like success." Observe how a plain girl, believing herself loved by the man of her choice, acquires a glow akin to beauty! With men, it is slightly different. An ill-favored human male, whom the ladies do not find attractive, tends to be either too brash, or too humble and begging in his advances towards women. Fearing the public humiliation of a rebuff, he approaches the object of his affections or lust either flippantly (so that her pride is wounded) or slyly, (in which event he incites her to fear and contempt). A single success, however, will transform the cringing poacher into a heroic hunter. The knowledge that at least one woman either loves him or desires him physically gives him a confidence which usually expresses itself in seeming nonchalance and a moderate, suave pride which few women can resist. And so it follows that the man who is dogged by failure in amorous matters frequently spoils his chances by nervously trying to rush things, he who knows that a certain girl is very eager to give him what he wants can afford to bide his time with other women. A failure is no longer a tragedy since he can console himself with the argument that if young, pretty, attractive "Edith" is ever ready to bare her loins to him, why should there be no other Ediths willing to share their beds with him. This sureness of his own seductive powers enhances his charm, so that when he least needs a woman he can get one-perhaps not the first one for whom he casts his net, nor the second or third ... but time is on his side. While waiting for fresh conquests, he has his open-thighed "Edith" for the satisfaction of his immediate sexual needs.
Lew's "Edith" was called Brenda. Ignoring the fact that he had blackmailed her into becoming his mistress again, he was aware only that she quite obviously enjoyed their days and nights of copulation. He was proud of himself and his pride was destined to pay dividends.
A few days after regaining possession of Brenda's long, slender, passionate body, Lew received from his "chief" an order to meet a Norwegian seaman at an address in Stepney, to purchase from him, at a prearranged price, a valuable consignment of a substance about which it is advisable to say as little as possible, and to hand over the said package to one of the "lieutenants" in the Saloon Bar of the "Cavendish Arms," which is a stone's throw from Leicester Square; and behind the bar of the Cavendish stood Sadie Paignton, who occupied the attic immediately above the apartment Lew shared with Brenda and Ian.
Since Valerie's death, (and even previously) Lew had made several attempts to get on good terms with Sadie, who had always managed politely to keep him at a safe distance. He held no attraction for her but she had avoided offending him since she had no wish to antagonize her nearest neighbors.
"Hello, Lew" Sadie said greeting him in her friendliest tones. "What'll it be, love?"
Feeling for the first time that he could treat her as an equal, rather than as one who had something he wanted and could not have, he said grandly that he'd "have a Guinness and you'll have anything you imagine."
Having served him with his glass of black cream, she poured herself a dry Martini. She was about to engage him ins idle; chatter when two or three customers ordered drinks. She raised her glass, thanked Lew, quickly took a sip and went about her business, returning to him whenever she had spare minute. Sadie was, perhaps, doing no more than her duty-her barmaid's duty toward a client who had invited her to drink at his expense-and her social duty toward her neighbor; but Lew sup-posed that her devoting as much time to him as possible betrayed her romantic interest, which belief augmented his self-confidence to such an extent that he shone.
During one of-Sadie's busy periods, a burly, handsome, tastefully dressed man entered the bar, took in the entire scene with his sharp, black eyes, and moved to Lew's side.
"Give me a large Scotch!" he replied when Sadie asked for his order. "No! The sight of this gentle-man's glass gives me a thirst for Guinness."
Thus Lew recognized the newcomer as the person to whom he must deliver his dangerous parcel. As they drank their porter the two men discussed beer. It was almost dosing time when the hefty racketeer left the bar, taking with him the package of precious weed, in whose place he left a newspaper between the pages of which was hidden the envelope containing Lew's reward for the trouble and risks he had taken.
And moments later Sadie accepted a third gin and Italian from Lew.
"If you'd like me to see yer 'ome," Lew told Sadie, "I'll wait till ye've done."
Even with all his new confidence in his seductive powers, he had not expected her to respond favorably to his suggestion. But she did.
"I shall only be about half an hour. Shall I serve you another glass to keep you company while you're waiting?"
"Do that and 'ave another yerself!"
Shaking her head "no," the brightly smiling bar-maid filled another glass with brunette nourishment.
On the way to the bus Sadie clung to Lew's arm, making more than one person wonder what the auburn-haired beauty found to attract her in the sandy-haired runt who glowed with pride at her side. In the bus she snuggled cozily up to him, as though he and she had been sweethearts for many months. He was consequently surprised and hurt by her refusal to allow him to accompany her beyond the door of his own apartment and even more so by her turning away her head when he tried to kiss her. But he refused to give up hope.
After a few weeks his patience was rewarded in a slight degree. At the door of his apartment, one night he kissed her as audaciously as he dared, and the ardor of her response surprised him. He crashed his tongue through the defenses of her lips and her serpent advanced to do battle with his. Bending her backwards, he raised his right knee between her thighs, and exerted strong pressure on her loins. She groaned and sunk her teeth into his lips. Writhing and breathing heavily, they swayed together until they lost their balance and stumbled against the stairs leading up to her room. She broke away from him.
"Quiet!" she whispered. "Brenda will hear us and she'll be out to see what we're up to."
He pursed his lips pleadingly and motioned up-ward with his head. She understood.
"All right, but promise you'll behave yourself!"
In her room they could play with. fire to their hearts content; and they did so until she felt his hands roving constituted an "incendiary" menace.
"Don't, Lew! I don't feel strong enough to resist."
"Why resist?"
"I can't go on and on letting one man and then another strip me," she moaned seductively.
"Once more wouldn't hurt; and anyway we're friends."
"Lew, I want you as much as you want me.. .more..." she sighed pressing herself luxuriously against the length of his body and thrilling to the jerking of his penis, which she felt through his clothing and her own. "Because I haven't had a man-I mean er-really had one-in a long time and since you've been bringing me home I've given up all my old boyfriends. So you're all I have. But you've got Brenda. You get me all hotted up and yourself too. Then you go home and take it out on Brenda. I just have to suffer alone."
His hand fondling her thighs, outside her dress, he insisted that she did not have to suffer alone when he was eager to banish her solitude and soothe her pain.
"And Brenda?"
"What's it go to do with her?"
Everything, darling! How long do you think she' going to slave for you and your baby while you spend all your money and time on me? And Lew, you don't expect me to be satisfied with a quick session of loving whenever you can slip away from her for a few minutes do you? The next lover I have must be a real, full-time lover. I don't want to rush you or anybody else into settling down with me for life-but I'm no naive young girl. I've reached the age when a woman wants a man she can come home to-and a man who comes home to her. I want an All Night man, Lew. And I do really want you, Lew, but all night and every night and even at lunchtime on the dining room table."
Her words and her deep, throaty, sensual tones were music to Lew's sex, which grew and throbbed within the confines of his painful pants. He thrust his tongue deep into her slavering mouth and kissed her until perspiration prickled her whole body. She uttered little cries and clung desperately to him, longing for him to ravage her; but he underestimated his victory over her.
"But you don't understand." he argued. "Brenda will stay as long as I keep the child. She stays for him, not for me. She doesn't care whether I come home or not, as long as she has the child and enough money to get him what he needs. So I can come here whenever you want me to-nights and in the daytime too."
She got up from his knees but stayed near him.
"Lew, I want you to listen to all I have to say. I don't really feel like talking. I'd rather you were doing things to me but we've got to get things straightened out. I'm not a jealous woman. If you choose Brenda instead of me I shan't bear you or her any malice and we shall all stay friends, able to look one another in the eye but you must choose. You can keep her and leave me alone, so's I can spend my free time with a man who wants me and no one else!-I don't want to come between you and Brenda. But if you need me as badly as I need you, you'll get rid of her. Then I can give up this place and live with you. With what you can earn and my pay and only one rent we'd manage nicely and we'd have fun and games morning, noon, and all night. I'd teach you things you've never dreamed of, but it must be regular. Either of us can break it off whenever it gets boring, but as long as we're together it'll be love and I do mean love, all the way. What I won't have is a hole-and-corner romance, in which you pretend to be true to Brenda and creep up to me on the sly. She'd find out sooner or later and life for me would be such hell that I'd have to start looking for a room some-where else and I've got used to this one. I don't want to leave this room unless it's to live with you openly."
What Lew wanted was to lie down with Sadie every night, throw her across the table before and after her midday stint at the "Cavendish Arms," and keep Brenda downstairs as an insurance against Sadie's finding some other man more attractive than him. He realized, however, that Brenda was not the sort of girl whose motives for staying with him could be convincingly explained to a third person. Neither Sadie nor any one else would ever believe that Brenda so loved Valerie that she would not only care for her deceased friend's baby, but also bare her breasts and loins regularly to the onslaughts of the said friend's sadistic widower. He had to choose. And the grass always seeming greener on the other side of the fence, he decided to give up the girl with whose private flesh he was already utterly familiar rather than throw away a the chance of being master of a body of which he had no knowledge. Nevertheless, he saw no harm in making a final effort to gain possession of Sadie without accepting her conditions.
He drew her down to him and she came willingly, her mouth thirsting for fresh contact with him. As they kissed lewdly, his hands floated upwards inside her skirts until his fingers felt the moistness of her panties.
Her "No!" was so voluptuous that he was encouraged to press the palm of his hand hard against her steaming crotch. "No!" His hands rose until his fingers were at the waistband of her panties which they started to pull downward. She went on murmuring "No! No, Lew! Lew! No, Lew!" It was only when he stuck the crooked finger of his right hand deep into her oozing vagina that she uttered a "No!" which really sounded like a negative command instead of a positive plea. By then Lew was too excited by success to heed her order. He thrust in his thumb and drove her to a delicious frenzy by his tickling of her clitoris.
"Lew, you promised to be good. Stop it now!"
He did stop fingering her, but not in answer to her command. He felt that she was well and truly ready for him, whatever her lips said, and he was in a hurry to set WS' long ready phallus free to cut into her. She saw it, and realized that he was going to pierce her with it, go on jabbing it into her until it had spat its fertilizing seed into her receptive, baby-seeking womb. Afterwards, he would either have repeated the operation regularly on his own terms or contented himself with Sadie leaving Brenda to nurse her shame and solitude and perhaps a child as well.
"No!" she cried, "Save it till you've sent Brenda away with the baby!"
"Too late!" he bellowed, letting his full weight fall onto her belly. His dagger sought her sheath but she held him off, jerking her bottom from side to side so that his eager battering ram crashed first against one of her humid thighs and then against the other. The struggle added to her own excitement as well as to his, so that when he realized he could not hope to win and fell away from her, she begged him to bring her to her climax with his mouth.
Eagerly and without the slightest ceremony, he dragged her down to the carpet. He stuck his tongue into her sex and his manhood into her mouth, which he almost immediately filled with his sperm. After a few seconds the quivering of her belly and her sharp little cries of delight told him she too had reached the top of the glorious hill. He crawled round until his face was level with hers. He kissed her and she tongued some of his sperm into his mouth, nibbling the remainder appreciatively before allowing it to slither down her smiling throat.
"That's just a thousandth part of what it'll be like," she whispered tiredly, "if you choose me. Go now! I'm serious this time."
She got up, patting her clothing into of order. At the door she kissed him lasciviously.
"Don't come to see me again before she's gone for good. But for God's sake, do come back!"
Lew said nothing to Brenda about his discussion with Sadie, though she already knew her lover was passing a lot of time upstairs. Nor was she in a position to prevent his doing so. She knew he was spending money on his new friend which ought to have been going into the pockets of the landlord, the butcher, the baker, the milkman and the grocer.
Yet she never reproached him.. When she asked for money and received none, she made no comment, fearing that to anger him might cause him to go back on his promise to keep the child. This failure to criticize him gave him an opportunity to accuse her of sulking, which offense justified his thrashing her prior to their devoting a few hours to the appeasing of their mutual sexual appetites.
Bearing in mind the advisability of striking while the iron is hot, Lew was determined to waste no time in getting Brenda and Ian out of the apartment. He would call Alan the following day and suggest that he and Sylvia take immediate charge of the baby pending the legalizing of the adoption. Only when he was sure they were still willing to take the child would he break the news to Brenda. In the meantime she was at his disposal for a final, unsuspecting night.
Lew saw to it that she served her purpose and it must be added that what she was required to do and to permit him to do to her gave her at least as much pleasure as he derived from it all. He had taught her to be proud of her right to grovel in his filth and her own. Nothing he demanded, however perverse, unnatural or revolting to "normal" people, shocked or displeased her. He was her Master. And if he did not bore holes in her belly or cut off her breasts, it was because he was afraid to do so and not because she would have refused to allow him to do such things.
After a night more degrading and thrilling than any which had preceded it, Brenda struggled with her household duties, while Lew broke to Alan and Sylvia the good news that the sooner they took charge of the baby the happier he would be. Sylvia insisted to Alan that they should drive to Lew's apartment at once, but Alan saw the sense in Lew's suggestion that they give Brenda a few hours to get Ian ready. It was agreed that the would-be parents should collect their baby at three o'clock.
The only person whose wishes were to be considered was Lew. The hour decided upon gave him time for another session of fornication with Brenda prior to telling her that she had until three o'clock to prepare the baby for the journey to its new home. That also gave him the hope that, after Ian's departure with his aunt and uncle, he would be able to go up to Sadie, before she returned to the public house, and inform her that Brenda either had left or was preparing to leave for good. He fancied that Sadie would be so moved by his haste to fulfill her wish, that she would prostrate herself at his feet, begging him to squirt into her loins the last miser-able drops of his sap. The gods were on Lew's side.
Brenda, feeding the beloved child she was so soon to lose, smiled brightly at her highly satisfactory lover when he re-entered the apartment. He planted a Judas kiss on her wide open mouth. (Ian would deny all knowledge of her and her doings be-fore he'd miss a single drop of the bottle's nourishing contents.) "Mine hour is not yet come," she said, mocking Bible knowing but wait until my disciple has emptied his bottle! I shall put him in his manger and then it'll be come, come, come all the way.. .filling my belly and flowing over into the hairs of my crotch and onto my thighs."
The clock in Lew's pants crowed and Ian pushed the depleted bottle away. Bending over the now al-most sleeping boy in his cradle, nurse felt sweating hands on her bare knees and thighs, fumbling in the region of her navel. Feeling herself de-pantied and so liberated, she fell back into the arms of her lover, who took her tenderly at noon and continued to delight her until shortly after one o'clock.
"You'd better get all Ian's things together," he announced. "Man's coming to pick him up at three."
Tired and drugged by the joys of the past hour, she reacted as violently as though he had read a headline from a week-old newspaper.
"Why?" she asked vaguely.
"Sadie, upstairs, needs it badly." He replied lazily. "I want to ,give it to her but she says you've got to go first.. 'went to see Alan and Sylvia this morning. They'll look after Ian until they can adopt him legal like and they're comin' three o'clock."
Moving about in a dream, Brenda busied herself collecting all sorts of things her lost baby would need. When she saw something belonging to herself, she picked that up too.
"You'd like me to clear out as soon as possible? I thought so. If you'll give me time I'll put dean sheets on the bed. No whore-likes to have it shoved to her in a bed which stinks of the juice of her predecessor."
When all Ian's clothing, toys, plastic bathtub, and so on were packed, Brenda started getting her own accounterment together. As she did she began to think more clearly-to realize what was happening. The effect of the drug was wearing off so that the indistinct clouds in her head were taking the shape of a great unhappiness, which she must seek a way of escaping. Was there a way? Pleading with Lew would be of no avail. She had kept nothing back from him. Having given him all a man can desire of a woman, she had nothing to offer him by way of a bribe. Sadie had everything. She had given promises in the form of kisses. To get the rest, Lew had to toe the line, which was what he was doing. Brenda thought of asking Lew to remain the boy's legal guardian while allowing her to care for the child quite independently of him; but how can an unmarried girl earn enough to support herself and a baby and simultaneously look after the baby?-by cutting herself in two? She herself would have to go to a hotel until she could find a small apartment somewhere-and she still had to find work too. In the long run the baby would probably be happier with Alan and his neurotic wife who might in fact lose her neurosis in her preoccupation with the wee laddie.
As she was becoming resigned to the new situation, the idea entered Brenda's head of going back to the Richter Hospital. She had been happy there and she had left on the best of terms with her superiors, some of whom had even assured her that, should she ever wish to return, every effort would be made to find a place for her. Militating against her seeking reinstatment on the staff of the hospital was the probability that Peter Buxton was still there. It would be rather embarrassing to have to work again in fairly close contact with him al-though there was really nothing with which he could reproach her. She had not been engaged to him and they had talked of marriage only in the vaguest of terms. Furthermore she had not broken with him. It was he who had insisted they must cease to see each other in the event of her going to live, however virtuously at first, with a man who had once been her lover. He had forecast that she would eventually go back to Lew and had said that even if that did not occur, there was no point in a courtship when one of the parties involved considered herself bound by a vow which would, in all probability, bar her from marriage for twenty years. She had lad to agree that his arguments were reasonable and they had not quarreled. But she still felt that to be in a position where she had to speak to him several times nearly every day would be humiliating.
In her determination to leave Lew's apartment as soon as possible after Ian's departure, she packed her cases quickly and with little care. She had almost finished the task when Alan and Sylvia arrived. With the exception of Ian, everyone concerned was eager that his transfer from Brenda's care to Sylvia's should be effected with the minimum of delay and formality. Brenda wanted to get it over quickly because she was miserable and wanted to be alone when she burst into tears. Alan and Sylvia, believing possession to be nine-tenths of the law, wanted to get Ian away from Lew before Brenda persuaded him to change his mind about letting them adopt the boy, and Lew wanted them all out of the way as quickly as possible so that he could go up to Sadie and put his dirty mark on her. He was so impatient that when Brenda tried to give Sylvia some hurried advice and data relative to Ian, he suggested that she go home with them. "Tell 'em all they need to know about him and come back for your luggage this evening! I'll stay in t'elp yer with it."
Alan thought that a very good idea, so of course Sylvia also expressed her approval. To Brenda it meant stretching out her agony, but she would have endured worse than that to be sure that Ian was going to be looked after properly.
Brenda was the only member of the adult quartet who realized that the article being handed over from one couple to another was a small human being. To Lew it was just a useless and troublesome bauble left lying about his apartment by one of the women with whom he'd had fun in bed and else-where; Sylvia (and to a lesser degree Alan) acted more or less as though she were buying a puppy to amuse herself with and keep her company when-ever Alan had to absent himself from the house. Sylvia had acquired something. That was what mattered to her. Lew, on the other hand; literally rubbed his hands with glee, less at the thought of having freed himself from responsibility for the baby then in anticipation of his exploitation of a female body which had hitherto been denied him.
When he burst into Sadie's room without knocking and cried "It's all fixed. The baby's-gone and so has Brenda," she replied "What do you expect me to do about it?"
He grabbed her, hugged her, pawed her with lascivious crudity and gave her a short, hard kiss.
"Do?" he said with jovial seriousness. "Get them drawers off and let me give you a taste of this in the right place!"
"Don't be vulgar, Lew, and don't think I'm silly enough to make love with you without being sure you're on the level. You're not trying to pull a fast one on little old Sadie, are you, wise boy?"
by way of reply, he took her more tenderly in his arms. Their mouths met in a long, saliva-laden kiss, in which he begged of her and she promised to grant his request.
She playfully closed her thighs around his right hand, which was fondling the smooth coolness between the tops of her stockings and the frilly edge of her panties. Having whispered "take me down to see my new home," she stuck her tongue in his ear. He groaned and pressed her backwards until she was lying on the table, her thighs wide apart, his legs between them and the weight of ',his body on her abdomen. He jerked his crotch backwards and forwards in imitation of the copulatory gesture of the male of the human and certain other species.
"In case you don't know," he gasped, "that's how it goes, but wi' out pants and panties."
She drew his face down to hers stuck out her tongue to flick the tip of his.
"I bet I've had more of it than you have, honey; and enjoyed every minute of it," she whispered enticingly. "I'd like some more of it too before I go to work. Only first I want to go down and have a look at the apartment "
He was too busy clawing at the buttons of her dress to take any notice of her plea to see his apartment. He knew she only wanted to be sure he was not trying to trick her into becoming his mistress while Brenda was still queen of his castle.
"Lew, you are inviting me to live with you, aren't you?" she asked pouting prettily after a long, sweetly scalding kiss, of which she was the initiator.
"Of course, I am" he answered with complete sincerity. "I'd be a fool if I didn't."
"That's as nice a compliment as I ever had. Lew, it's a long time since a man saw me without a stitch on. Look at me that way!"
He was in no condition to make really virile love to her, but his mouthing of her sex the previous evening had brought her to the first apogee she had experienced in about a year, in fact since the occasion when, having thrown Bernie out of her room, she had masturbated with the handle of a walking stick. Consequently, her need was so great that gratitude diminished her critical faculties. Indeed she enjoyed Lew's easy loving sufficiently to post-pone her reluctant reentry into her exquisite undies and frock until her only hope of arriving at the "Cavendish Arms" before opening time resided in her finding a taxi.
"Has Brenda really gone? she called running away from him after a lingering kiss at the door of her room.
Halfway between her apartment his she paused again.
"You can tell me the truth now." she said. "It doesn't really matter. We're together.. .bless you! Come to the tavern and bring me home?"
"I will, if Brenda lets me."
"You bastard!"
He spat into her upturned face.
"Lovely bastard," she exclaimed. "Catch me be-fore I get to the door and you can have me on the footpath!"
She dashed downstairs with Lew in pursuit. He did not catch her, but she waited on the doorstep for a long, wicked osculation.
A happy young girl, in love for the first time, she hurried away from the handsome boy who had just washed away her innocence by pouring his virginity into her.
CHAPTER TEN
Brenda was ironing underwear when Peter Buxton knocked on the door of her apartment.
"Peter! What a lovely surprise!"
She extended her hands to him and drew him into the room. He noticed she was busy and apologized.
"As if a bit of ironing mattered at a moment like this!" She replied, laughing gaily.
"You should be pleased to see me," he said, "but do you realize I've come here to give you the sound spanking you deserve?"
He sat down in an armchair and pulled her.
"You wouldn't dare," she whispered challengingly holding his left hand in both of hers gently onto his knee.
"Why didn't you tell me you wanted to come back to the hospital?" he said pretending to scold. "My word isn't all that weighty but I'm sure they'd take you back without anybody putting in a good word for you. It's just that-well, when Jill told me this afternoon that you'd asked to be rein-stated, my first thought was that you must be mad at me, otherwise you'd have told me before going to the Old Man."
"I've hurt you again, Peter and nothing was further from my intentions." She said quietly, abjectly. "I just felt I had no right to expect you to be interested. My main reason for wanting to go back to the hospital was that it would give me a chance of seeing you again, of letting you know I was no longer with Lew. But I was afraid to force my attention on you."
His short chuckle was more bitter than amused. He was laughing at his own stupidity rather than at her.
"I ought to have-kept in contact with you," he said. "I knew you and Lew wouldn't be together long. I should've gone to see you sometimes, made you feel I hadn't turned my back on you. Forgive me?"
She answered with a kiss as innocent as adolescence but as lingering as maturity.
"Will you marry me, Peter?"
The tall, broad-shouldered doctor took his lady's. proposal with Shavian calm; he was the sort of heathen who refused to believe himself entitled to go to bed with the girl whose offer of marriage he had accepted.
The Brenda-Peter engagement was as chaste as it was long, and it was long. A house had to be almost rebuilt and completely redecorated. Peter was at least as eager to become Brenda's devoted husband as she was to be his voluptuous wife, but all sorts of things intervened to postpone the marriage; and Peter was not the sort of man to take a shortcut if the long way round was more honorable. A perfect gentleman, he failed to realize that Brenda was not so much a lady as a first-class woman. He treated her with the respect due to a fragile, priceless porcelain goddess, whereas she needed a man who appreciated her as a woman of soft flesh and warm blood.
In spite of his excessive correctness, Brenda felt herself bound to her finance by respect and affection. It was simply a pity that "nice" men were so dull. Brenda loved her Peter with admiration tempered by disciplined physical desire. She realized that a permanent union involving herself and Peter spelled contentment and security for both of them.
What she regretted was that Peter's devotion to her seemed to sever her from excitement. She had re-established physical intimacy with Lew very reluctantly, but from then onward she had been wholeheartedly his dory, enjoying almost to madness every minute she spent with him while simultaneously those very things which occurred between her flesh and his; and she would have been deliriously happy to go on wallowing with him in erotic garbage. That was no longer possible, but the weeks of extravagent sexual indulgence had given her an in-satiable appetite for fornication, an appetite which the months of her chaste engagement to Peter frustrated.
Brenda was tireless in her subtle endeavors to inveigle Peter to seduce her; but she knew she had to be extremely discreet. That Peter should consort with a girl who had cast away her virginity and that he should even contemplate espousing her were immense concessions to diabolic morality; but he was sufficiently magnanimous to pardon sins which belonged to the past. He would not however, condoned his fiancee's continuing along the road to hell. He had to believe that pure love had redeemed the sinful Brenda. Had she allowed him to suspect that her thoughts, desires and hopes were brimful of copulation, he would have felt himself under a moral and professional obligation to sever all connection with her.
Nonetheless Peter was not such a fool as to ignore the body's role in love and in marriage, nor was he the sort of hypocrite who Would deny that, during the months of his engagement to Brenda, his thoughts, dwelt often upon fleshy joys to come. The difference between his sexual images and Brenda's was that he licked his lips in anticipation of his licit delight in the fusion of his loins and those of his wife whereas she was impatient to open herself to his premarital invasion of her private parts.
She slyly tried to inject excitement into the kisses with which he greeted and took leave of her but he did not notice nor absent-mindedly fall into the trap. He rarely kissed her or fondled her other than at the moment of their meeting and when they separated and never without a reason. "Petting" or "necking" was out of the question. He occasionally brushed her lips or cheek with his to thank her for something or to congratulate her on a good deed, remark or suggestion. Beyond that he never went, persistent as she was in her efforts to warm him up without rousing his suspicions. Her most provocative dresses failed to raise his temperature and he never seemed to notice that her carefully careless crossing of her knees exposed an inch of enticing petticoat and a trifle too much nylon stocking. Inebriating perfume had no more visible effect upon Peter than the aroma of a carbolic soap has upon the majority of men and if he cast a glance at the rose-glowing mounds of her bust in the slightly too revealing decolletage of her frock, he quickly averted his eyes, wondering whether she were not running the risk of catching cold. How-ever naughtily she referred to such things as beds, underwear and babies, the upright young doctor experienced no difficulty in giving the sort of answer which brought the conversation back to the realm of decency. It is very doubtful that he realized what she was trying to do; but, if he did, one must admire his tolerance and his sang-froid which deprecating his stupidity.
Brenda was not a nymphomaniac for whom promiscuity held an attraction. She was a hot-blooded girl who needed a man between her thighs-but not just any man-and certainly not a different man every three or four months. What she wanted was a man who was really interested in sex, who delighted in and excelled at copulation and above all, one who would hold on to her long enough to get to know and appreciate her erotic rhythm. She did not expect any man to bind him-self to her for life; but she would have nothing to do with the man who thought he could squeeze her dry in a night prior to spitting on her and leaving her at the mercy of the next man who came along. Peter, a healthy, robust young fellow, could have been her man, either as husband or as lover, but he either did not recognize her need or willfully refused to satisfy it, and there came a time when the abscess of her longings had to burst.
Having promised, after weeks of prevarication, to spend a cozy evening with Brenda in the intimacy of her softly illuminated apartment, Peter arrived "in smoking jacket." He greeted his betrothed with the announcement that their tete-a-tete would have to be postponed.
"Nancy's asked us to go to dinner. Larry's getting the consulate at Antwerp but he doesn't know she knows. It happens he's going to her this evening for dinner" and she wants to surprise him by making it a party to celebrate his promotion. Audry, Hugh, Marge, Kate, Dianna, Harry, and two or three people we don't know. I'll give you fifteen minutes."
Brenda knew that Peter loathed Nancy and that he scarcely knew her brother Larry. None of the other people he had mentioned were particular friends of his. It was obvious that he had accepted an uninteresting invitation merely to avoid playing with the fire of her passions. Usually he was very expert at refusing invitations which did not appeal to him. He could quite easily have told Nancy he had a prior engagement. To do so would have been perfectly honest. That he had agreed to go to Nancy's fatuous party was an indication of his inability to appreciate the importance a girl attaches to the rare evening she is allowed to pass in the peaceful company of her finance. She was furious, but she felt a certain pity for Peter. He could not change her, nor she him; so there was no point in quarreling with him. What she would not do, how-ever, was to humor his childishly puritanical whim by accompanying him to Nancy's boring party. However diplomatically she excused herself, she hoped Peter would feel himself censured.
"I'm sorry, darling," she said sweetly, "but I'm afraid I can't go with you. I don't feel quite myself this evening. No, no, I'm not ill; but I'm not in a mood to endure the noise, the nitwittery and the drinking of one of Nancy's feasts. A quiet evening with you would have toned me up but of course if you've promised to go, you must."
Knowing she was merely feigning an indisposition, Peter nevertheless advised Brenda to take an aspirin and go to bed early. She meekly promised to do so and frigidly allowed her self to be kissed prior to his leaving her.
Having drank a couple of glasses of the champagne she had bought for the purpose of breaking down her finance's resistance, she felt somewhat less bitter. She recharged her glass and filled the glass she had put out for Peter.
"Your health, Peter!" she murmured drinking thirstily from the former.
"Yours, Brenda!" Peter's glass replied.
"Your phallus, Peter!"
"Your vagina, darling!"
"Your penis into my tunnel, Peter!" she cried hoarsely pouring the remainder of Peter's wine into her own glass.
She emptied the glass, nervously licked her chalk dry teeth, and refilled both goblets. She no longer knew which was hers and which was Peter's.
Not to be outdone, the other effervescent pond sang the praises of her hot, greasy, elastic, stinking tunnel.
Swaying dizzily, Brenda drank, stretched her arms to their luxurious limits and dropped her glass onto the carpeted floor. It bounced and rolled under the divan. Her hands flew to her knees, tightly caressed her thighs, pressed her sex, massaged her abdomen, squeezed her udders, adored her slender throat, out-lined he; desire-distorted face, and ruffled her short, black coiffure.
Her frustration "bellowed" like a speared bull. The empty champagne bottle cried "Peter " Under her skirts her fingers toyed with her moist panties and she thickly, beseechingly uttered the name of her first and only male lover.
"Lew!
"'Lew!"
A coat, out with the subdued, romantic lighting, down the stairs!
"Taxi!"
"Faster! Faster!"
"God, don't let it be Sadie's weekly evening off!"
"You may keep the change."
Mr. Droopy moustache taxi driver was so surprised that the quivering of his head shook the permanent dew drop from the sharp tip of his bluely shining proboscis.
Brenda hurled herself up one flight of stairs, rapped fiercely on Lew's door and strugged to re-gain her breath. The door opened.
"Lew!" she repeated.
In his arms, male hands all over her, his open mouth in violent contact with hers, their tongues doing ferocious battle, she trembled in joyous anticipation of-the hours she could pass with him until Sadie's return from the public house.
During their long, writhing kiss, Lew's paws, without disarranging her dress, remade acquaintance with her slim contours. Hard and cruel, his claw-like fingers appraised her body, pressing her brutally against his hard front. When they broke away from one another for breath, he twirled her round, and pulled her close to him again, this time with her back to him so that his yearning imprisoned penis nudged the globes of her bottom while his open-fingered hands cupped her firm breasts, wandered over her flat belly, dug into her crotch and stroked her thighs until they reached the hem of her white satin dress.
The odor of her hair was sweet to his nostrils. The back of her neck rejoined in the warmth of his breath.
"Sadie?" she whispered. "All clear!" he replied. "Has she left you?" she asked hopefully, misunderstanding.
"No, but what her eyes don't see, 'er 'art won't grive."
"She wouldn't mind your kissing an old friend!" she exclaimed mischievously.
He turned her to him, gripped her upper arms fiercely.
"P'raps not," he hissed. "but she might mind what you've really come here for."
"I don't see why she should. I've come to tell an old friend that I'm getting married next month."
"To what's 'is name? Peter Buxton? Well, yer can cut out the 'old friend' lark. I don't kiss my old friends like I just kissed you. And when a girl comes "round to tell 'er 'old friend" as'ow she's gettin' spliced next month, she don't grind her coffee like wot you just did. Is it just a final fling, or do yer want it reg'lar like?"
She hung her head, maiden sky.
"Last time, I hope, Lew, but I don't know," She whispered meekly. "I had to come. If it'd been Sadie's night off, I don't know what I'd've done. I just had to be with you once more. I only hope I shan't go on having to have you. It's like a disease-and I do want to be a good wife to Pete."
She felt his hands were raising the hem of her skirt toward her waist.
"I do want to be a good wife 'to Pete," she cried.
In defiance of her own seeming command, her very own hands rose until her fingers touched above her head thus enabling Lew to pull the hem of her dress up and up until a flick of his wrist sent the garment flying into a conveniently placed arm-chair.
One of the shoulder straps of her slip had fallen to her elbow, and her hair was slightly disheveled, so that she was the image of wantonnness. Lew gazed at her admiringly.
"Now you're really mine," he said. "This time you're the one who comes begging. Don't forget that! You came here and asked for it and you're gonna get it. Remember I used to make you go on your knees and beg me? I don't need that stuff no more, 'cos now ye're really beggin'. "
"I'll go down on my knees if you like Lew. When I came in I was drunk, crazy, with it. Now I'm sober. I'm not crazy, but-love me, Lew!"
It was a great opportunity for Lew. He had Sadie, who was sexually all that a man could desire; but it does a man no harm to have one of his cast-off paramours come 'round and implore him to throw her on the carpet. Brenda was so easy how-ever that to take her when she wanted it would have been wasteful. Time was, in fact, more strictly limited than she imagined, but Lew was in no mood to care about time. He was Alexander the Great, who still had many worlds to conquer. He took from the inner pocket of his jacket his case of "specials." A movement of his thumb opened the metal book whose every chapter was a pale-yellow cigarette. They exuded a sickly sweet frangrance. When he had chosen one and lighted it "sickly sweet" was expunged in favor of "intoxicating." He inhaled deeply and winced at the thrilling, painful emptiness which assailed his entire being. He deliberately puffed the smoke of his precious cigarette in her face. Grey-green, it seeped into her nostrils. As a stupid fish gnaws the fisherman's baited hook, so Brenda savored the insidious gas of her lover's "reefer". She had never smoked, but when Lew smilingly offered her the wicked weed her mouth shot forward eagerly. She sucked the smoldering "lollipop," scarcely realizing that it was not a cigarette like any other cigarette and the lightness which entered her made her wonder why she had waited so long before becoming a slave of the "Godness Nicotina" the frontier of whose domain Brenda had in fact not crossed. Eagerly she smoked the cigarette until her burned but ecstatic fingers reluctantly threw away the glowing remnant. Light as a balloon ( but knowing who and where she was and with whom) she eased her slip off her floating, wanting, begging, pleading, insisting body. like a snow cloud it floated in the green smoke-laden air until it was lost in the oblivion of his hands at her naked midriff and nylon-protected teats.
Her bust was about to bust when Lew saved the situation by undoing the restraining button. The dual cups fell to the carpet and his eyes told her she was all right.
"Cigarette!" she cried proudly.
"The same?"
"Same! The same, Lew!"
Flamboyantly opening his chromium plated case, he chose a cylinder a little fatter than its companions and passed it under her quivering nostrils. At the smell of it she licked her parched lips and then extended them in an imploring circular hole into which he thrust the cigarette prior to striking a match. To torture her, he held the flame less than half an inch from the extremity of her "reefer." Eager to taste again the maddening fumes, she thrust her face forward but the match retreated until the flame died, whereupon he unhurriedly lit another.
"Please Lew!" she cried.
"Please what?"
"Light my cigarette!"
"Light your cigarette, what?"
"I said, 'Please!" she screamed trembling with impatience.
He slapped her face so hard that her cigarette fell from her lips and she dropped to her knees to search frantically for it. When she found it she stood up, sticking it back in her mouth.
Knowing that she was not sufficiently enslaved to justify pushing her any further, he hastened to light her cigarette and he allowed her to smoke half of it before taking her in his arms again for a long, lingering, deep stimulating kiss, during which he deprived her of her panties and suspender belt. Brenda was on the horns of a dilemma, not knowing which she needed most; his kisses and caresses or the remainder of her cigarette. Lew, however, was as much a businessman as a hedonist. He gave her time to finish her dose of marijuana before giving her a further taste of his thrilling lips. His inquisitively hungry hands took full possession of her sex-starved body, which was crazed both by carnal lust and by the drug she had inhaled. She was soft, hot to the point of melting, and as pliable as the thinnest ribbon of rubber.
"Take me to bed, Lew!" she begged.
He picked up her naked body and was about to carry her to the bedroom when Sadie intervened. Her arrival did not astonish Lew. He had known she was only visiting a friend, who had taken over from her the second floor apartment; but even a bottle of champagne and two "reefers" had left Brenda sufficiently sober to realize that Lew had deceived her once more.
Once more or once less. Who cares!? Lew did not allow Sadie's return to deflect him from his plan to throw Brenda onto his bed and make love to her. He had Sadie regularly whereas it was perhaps his last chance of taking Brenda. If Sadie wanted to object, let her! Lew was sure he had the means to silence her complaints. He had his penis, whose slave he imagined Sadie had become. She was, how-ever, not the sort of girl who gives herself slavishly to a man. She had jots of fun with Lew but she was a proud women: Had she felt so inclined, she would have packed her bags on the spot, leaving Lew to enjoy himself with his temporary mistress, Peter's betrothed. Had she done so, Lew might have found himself the following day with neither Brenda nor Sadie, and who knows how long he would have had to search for another woman with a penchant for ugly little men whose erotic skill compensates for their lack of visual beauty?
Sadie, however, did not pack her bags. The sight of her lover carrying a naked woman into the bed-room thrilled her more than it angered her. Her twinge of jealousy was slight in comparison with the excitement which churned her guts. It was but the second time in her life that she had seen a man mauling a bare female other than herself. Nearly two years previously in that same room she had seen Bernie strip Valerie, and having been allowed to suppose she was about to participate in an erotic orgy for the first time in her life, she had been quickly disabused and chased away before the real fun had begun. She had had no right whatsoever to insist on Bernie and Valerie allowing her to stay, since she had been the interloper; but now she was no longer the intruder. She was in her own home, ethically, although not legally, and so she was morally entitled either to forbid her lover to copulate with the intruder or to witness the filthy act. And why forbid when the alternative is to witness and perhaps to participate?
"Come on, Sadie!" Lew cried determined to be on the winning side in all events. "Let's paint the town!"
That was all Sadie needed. Lew said she was welcome and as far as Sadie was concerned the remaining eight million inhabitants of the lovely little village called London Town could just jump into the Thames.
Brenda knew Lew hid fooled her; but she didn't care, provided he also assuaged her carnal thirst-either in Sadie's presence or in her absence. Brenda's need was too great to justify the splitting of hairs so her only hope was that Lew would not allow Sadie to dissuade him from "digging" his old love.
From Sadie came not a word. She merely smiled at Lew, who threw Brenda naked onto the bed.
"Give me a gasper!" begged Sadie, cooing like a lovesick dove.
Lew stuck three "specials" in his mouth, lit them, and gave the first to Sadie after he dipped the unlighted tip in Brenda's vagina juice. He gave the second cigarette to Brenda.
Drawing deeply on the third "reefer," he ordered Sadie to lie on the bed at Brenda's side and remove her panties. Sadie lifted her skirts before she realized that she had left the said garment in the second floor flat, which was occupied by her friend Rudi Cesaro. Lew was quick to notice the deficiency underclothing. Although he had known for some time that Sadie was romantically involved with the pseudo-Italian Espresso bar guitarist up-stairs, who made his living by singing exotically erotic folk songs to the pajama'd youth of Leicester Square and thereabouts, by selling his bottom in Shaftesbury Avenue and by hiring out his phallus in St. Martin's. Lane and the Strand, Lew was nonetheless furious at her more or less public acknowledgment of the fact. He revenged himself by ramming the lighted end of the third cigarette into Sadie's tunnel of love. She uttered a howl of anguish and quickly retrieved the instrument of torture, whose fire her juices had extinguished. Lew took it from her, and placed it on the mantelshelf to dry.
For himself Lew lit another cigarette, whose mouthpiece he moistened with Brenda's sex juice prior to sticking it between his lips. He inhaled and it was no longer excruciating. His lungs were acclimatized to the hemp's strange perfume. He felt good. He had two "tarts" and enough "pot" to keep him going for twenty-four hours of uninterrupted copulation.
"Watch this, Sadie," he cried, "and don't think you'll be left out!"
He kneeled between Brenda's thighs, unzipped his trousers and produced his penis from the folds of his underpants. He would have thrust it immediately into the thirsty throat of his former mistress' loins, had his present paramour not cried for him to "strip first! Me too! She can wait."
In fact, they had time enough. Why rush it? Much better to do things properly from the outset! Within a few seconds Brenda was joined in her state of nakedness by Lew and Sadie. The latter, who had never previously been naked in the presence of another nude woman and an unclothed man, pawed Brenda's torridly humid sex.
"She's ready, Lew," Sadie said. "Bash it into her, the thieving bitch!"
A gasp of delight issued from Brenda's throat as her first and only lover flung himself powerfully into her to the full, hard depth of his pole. She was wide, warm, moist, so much in need of a man's meat and eager to both receive and to give. She wrapped her long, slender legs around him just above his buttocks and she shouted and squealed with the thrill of his slow, long, profoundly crazing probing of her guts. Contracting and relaxing the muscles of her bottom, she contributed to the rhythmic to-and-fro of their bodies. Her vagina sought his phallus, reached out for it, yearned for it, swallowed it greedily prior to spewing it out with a cat's certainty that the mouse would not escape.
Lew was glad Sadie had suggested he undress. He rejoiced in his thighs contacting Brenda's, in the flattening of her firm breasts against the ginger hair of his chest, in the slap-slap of his belly and hers, and in the ferocious intermingling of his crotch hairs with the soft beard which formed a bridge between her navel and the mouth of her cave of sin. Yes, he was grateful to Sadie for her advice.
He was grateful, but only when he had dipped his stick four or five times in Brenda's well did he realize that there is more to nudity than the feel of a woman's front against a man's. Sadie had once enjoyed a brief daydream of an orgy in which she did things to Bernie while he performed a certain operation on Valerie, but she had been dismissed before Bernie's knife of flesh had cut into Valerie's body. Since then the surgeon had disappeared and his patient had died, but a dream is durable and adaptable. With Brenda and Lew in the respective roles of Valerie and Bernie the daydream could be reproduced and Sadie was not the sort of girl who throws away a chance of snatching victory from the flames of defeat. Her trembling hands seized the hips of the cuckold (who was in the act of cuckolding her) and she lowered her head until her lips encircled the jewel hidden between the globes of his ass. The serpent of her tongue darted forth and invaded the aperture of his anus. She licked him, sucked him, and drove him wild with ecstasy. Her fingers tickled his quick-and-quicker thighs prior to juggling his nigh-to-exploding testicles. His tearing lips, tongue, and teeth attacked Brenda's howling-with-pleasure mouth which he confused with Sadie's. Brenda reached a delicious climax, which was communicated to Sadie through the body of their shared man. Brenda sighed, Lew ejaculated, Sadie groaned, Brenda squealed, and he uttered a shout of triumph as he rolled slimily off the belly of one woman into the arms of another.
Brenda, not yet half satisfied, writhed in anguish while Sadie's squeezing fingers and buzzard beak devoured Lew's defunct cockerel.
Happy and "high," Lew was in no condition to heed Brenda's cries of distress. So when the convulsions of his loins subsided, Sadie's lips went from his penis to her rival's clitoris, which her tongue titillated and her teeth nibbled into a frenzy.
"Come to me, Sadie!" Brenda cried.
Previously, Brenda had offered her loins to no female other than Valerie, but she was too much under the influence of the fumes of Lew's "special" cigarettes to realize that her call to Sadie was a betrayal of her dead mistress lover. The barmaid gladly obeyed the hysterical command. On the counterpane her knees described a half circle until they were one on each side of Brenda's head. She lowered her loins onto the face of the girl whom she feared had come to alienate Lew's affections and for the first time in her life, she felt a female mouth drinking the oil of her sex, a woman's tongue stroking the smoothness of her vagina and the teeth of a human bitch gnawing menacingly at her clitoris. She crooned with perverse exultation and gratefully doubled her efforts to please the al-ready frenzied brunette beneath her. Juices flowed, temperatures rose, summits of excitement were reached and Lew was forgotten.
If Lew's girls were too delirious to spare a thought for him, the same may not be said of him with regard to them. The sight, sound and odor of their shared pleasure revived him erotically, so that he was able to remind auburn-haired Sadie of his presence by fondling the globes of her agitated posterior. She welcomed his attention as he had thrilled to hers while he was taking Brenda. His fingers easing apart of her buttocks and toying with the bud of her anal flower combined with the brunette's labial caressing of her vagina to make her one ball of shimering, melting, hissing fire. She had never known quite such joy. She groaned and dug her tongue deeper, more fiercely and more thrillingly into the smoking gash of her mistress lover who reached a screaming apogee. Spent, Brenda fell away from her benefactress, at whom she smiled gratefully.
At that moment Lew's right hand slid between the thighs of his russet concubine, from whose sex it stole the oils with which to lubricate her aperture of sodomy.
His greased fingers filled Sadie with a hope which brought to her visage a glow in whose warmth Brenda could luxuriate. Sadie's rear passage softened, inviting his little finger to rape it. One after the other his fingers invaded her arsehole; then his thumb opened her wider still and his name is-sued from her lips in the form of a trembling plea, which he was eager to answer.
The hard, merciless bulb of his phallus rubbed her forbidden, but by no means forbidding, orifice, which breathed an urgent invitation to him. He advanced. She screamed, a prey to joyous pain and excruciating delight. Brenda's black head rose until two females mouths were fused in a perverse kiss. On hands and knees, like a street bitch, Sadie gave her willing lips and oral lizard to Brenda while her anal tube opened and closed on the scorching spear which her panting lord relentlessly hurled into her. The redhead would have collapsed onto the stinking, steaming counterpane, had Brenda not held her in the pose Lew required of his she-dog. The two girls tongued each other, the teeth of each lacerating the lips .of the other while in deeper, harder and more brutal went their man's throbbing penis. There was no more pain after a time. Sadie's tunnel widened and softened, giving and taking sensations. On and on the rhythmic, shouting, trembling ecstasy proceeded, writhing, groaning, entreating sweetness until a breathless quickening of Lew's in-and-out, sweating deep deeper fucking announced the agonized grunting orgasm with which he hurled his boiling mess into the bowels of his wailing lady. Sadie's juices dribbed happily down her thighs, and she fell heavily on top of the long, slender brunette. The collapse on the bitch broke the bugger contact between her and Lew, a spurt of whose sperm spattered the slopes of the valley between her buttocks.
Lew and Sadie were both in a state of glorious exhaustion, but Brenda was back in form, eager to serve and ready to be served. Her avid mouth took servile possession of the shrunken penis of her lover. Squeezing, licking and sucking, she cleansed him. Her hope that her labial attention to his loins would restore him was disappointed. Her need was not yet desperate so she transferred her hygienic energies to the buttocks of her auburn-haired rival. Her lips and tongue collected from Sadie's posterior cleft the cream deposited there by Lew's brutally deprived phallic fountain.
Realizing that neither of her companions was capable of joining her in any sort of obscenity, Brenda crawled to the chair over the back of which Lew ,hung his jacket. From the inner pocket she took his case of "special" cigarettes and his lighter. Having returned to the bed, across which Lew and Sadie were grotesquely spread, she stuck three "reefers" between her lips and lit them one after the other, handing, one to each of her partners in infamy. All three. inhaled and stretched themselves luxuriously. Silently they smoked and imperceptibly they moved closer together so that they finally dozed as a desiring trinity of which only one third was capable of giving and taking. That third was Brenda, who felt it would be to her advantage to give her friends time to get back into copulative condition before making demands on them.
They did not sleep; taking things easy, they indulged individually in erotic reveries.
Brenda was the first to rouse herself. She eased aside the unresisting Sadie and applied her fingers and lips to the task of putting life into Lew's limp penis. The more she tickled, licked, sucked and nibbled, the higher rose her own sexual temperature; but the instrument she hoped would satisfy her mounting desire scarcely reacted to her blandishment. It stiffened somewhat and grew a little, but it remained pale and soft like a sun-hungry plant which is kept in a cool, damp cellar. It was pathetic and contemptible. Brenda's need was be-coming imperative, but Lew's penis having shown vague signs of rising to the occasion was again overcome by fatigue. It curled back into the pale orange hairs of his crotch while its owner smiled apologetically and rather foolishly at her. A glance in the direction of Sadie sufficed to assure Brenda that the redhead, mentally and erotically alert though she was, could not be counted on physically. like Lew, Sadie was drained of carnal energy by the combination of marijuana and copulation.
In her urgent, frustrated need, Brenda moaned, howled, sweated and cried.
"Lew! Help me!"
Time after time she shouted her plea, distracting Lew and Sadie from their respective daydreams of incredible copulation and perversities. Her patience almost exhausted, Lew's auburn-haired love saw the light. The "light" revealed another apartment, whose occupant was a handsome, virile, athletic young man who had almost certainly spent the past two hours womanless. Her right heel de-livered a sharp blow to Lew's leg. He turned his head angrily towards her. Her conspiratorial eyes were raised in the direction of the ceiling. She tilted her warm brown curls doorwards and he understood.
When Lew rose painfully to his feet, slipped into his Oriental dressing gown and crept to the door of the bedroom, Brenda supposed he was going to the toilet. She took Sadie in her arms and fondled her curves, their mouths fused in a flabby kiss, until Lew returned.
Believing he had just vacated his bladder and hoping that operation plus the little exercise he had taken would have roused him from his stupor, Brenda released Sadie from her embrace, turned onto her back and offered her master a sight of her voluptuously squirming, nakedly inviting front. There was a veil before Lew's eyes and though swaying unsteadily, he signalled to someone behind him.
As the ginger-headed runt staggered further into the bedroom, his place in the doorway was taken by as beautiful a male as Brenda could recall having seen: About dye-feet ten inches in height, with broad shoulders, a slim waist and powerful hips, his only physical shortcoming tended to escape immediate attention. There was cruelty and weakness in his small, black eyes, his aquiline nose and his thin lips, which a nervous tongue was forever moistening. His gaunt cheeks and glossy, raven hair with its carefully negligent waves gave him a Latin charm which few women could resist. His ever half closed eyes would bore through female vestments, so that the girl he fancied was tempted to say to herself "to him I'm naked anyway-I might just as well take off my clothes."
Brenda's reaction was entirely different. Naked, urgently in need of a man, she tried to take refuge behind her hands. This admittedly exciting stranger she assumed had come to fornicate with Sadie, whose hitherto clandestine lover Brenda gathered he was. He was going to keep Sadie so busy that she would have neither the time nor the energy to distract Lew's attention from his former and newly returned dory. That was as it should be, but what a pity it had not been so arranged that she did not have to endure the inspection of her bare body by a man other than Lew, her first lover, her only and final lover prior to her entry into blameless matrimony with Peter!
Rudi Cesaro however had not descended from his tiny apartment to copulate with Sadie, who bestowed her sexual favors upon him almost daily. Sadie's vagina had thrilled to Rudi's penis only two hours previously, since which she had "tasted" Lew in her butt. What she wanted was Lew on her belly with his sex inside hers. Buggery is a pleasant alter-native to the real thing but it cannot replace an honest to God, belly to belly fornication. Similarly, Rudi represented for Sadie an exciting change from Lew, but the latter had become a necessity while the former was a not-to-be underestimated luxury. She had sent Lew to fetch Rudi for no other reason than that she wanted to be sure that, when Lew felt again that coition was essential to his well-being, he would lay hands on her rather than on Brenda, who in the meantime, would have been ridden to a standstill by the Espresso Bar Lothario. Rudi had entered Lew's apartment to take off his neighbor's hands an erstwhile paramour, who was proving too demanding; but one does not get rid quite so easily of a girl like Brenda. To her the word "monogamous" was as applicable as such an adjective can be to a human being. She returned to Lew while she was engaged to Peter-but the one was an animal, the other a man. With Peter she was obliged to act like a civilized person; Lew could use her only as a masculine beast exploits a feminine. Peter and Lew complemented each other, they were not rivals. She had not gone from one to the other; being with one, she held on to the other and between them she had one complete man with whom her relation was monogamous. Just as all her love was directed towards Peter, so was the whole of her base lust centered on Lew. The unknown Rudi could not hope to enter either the noble, human compartment of her life or the revolting cellar of her ignominy.
"There she is," said Lew.
The sight of Rudi caused Sadie to regret having to sacrifice sad magnificent a hung of manhood to her possessive lusting after Lew, but she urged Rudi to "give it to her" anyway.
"No!" cried Brenda, cringing against the wooden panel of the head of the bed. Taking no notice of her insulting refusal of what was offered her, Rudi hastily divested himself of his clinging black pants, his startlingly white shirt, his pink and white striped underpants and singlet. The urgent size and pulsating, scarlet glow of his released phallus was at least as thrilling to Brenda as it was to Sadie, who knew it well. Rudi's weapon was exceptional in . only one respect. Slightly longer and more slender than Low's it had a distinctive upward curve so definite that it was more like a scimitar than a rapier. Brenda, however, was suddenly interested only in the fact that it was hard and eager. It was as she wanted Lew's to be. It was as Lew's usually was and as she had tried to persuade Lew's to be again. She said to herself, "if only I could cut this one off and give it to Lew!" What really mattered to Brenda was not the penis, but the man who gave it to her. And Lew was her man.
Magnificently naked, but not excessively muscular, Rudi threw himself on top of her, his thin lips watering in anticipation of the kiss she was about to bestow upon them. Brenda turned her face away and fought him. Lew's bed was a Provencial hilltop on which the wolf and the luscious young she-goat were met in nocturnal combat. She butted him, rammed her knees into the most vulnerable parts of his anatomy, punched him, scratched him and besought Lew to rescue her. But Rudi had fought from the moment he had left his cradle, which had been an orange box. He had had no alternative. Resisting the thieving or purely malicious attacks of the bigger, older boys had taught him to defend himself until he had felt strong enough to go over to the attack. In the beginning his fists had sufficed, but an artist must evolve. Having become expert in the use of the fashionable "cosh," he had adopted the knife (which had ousted the motorcycle chain from popularity) but he had never forgotten how to use his fists, elbows, feet, and knees. Consequently, after a brief struggle, Brenda's right arms was immobilized by his left knee, his right leg lay heavily across both her thighs, and his left hand gripped her left wrist firmly. She spat and cursed, but she could not do more.
Rudi, however, still had his right hand free. With it he slapped her face until it was purple and blue-green. The impact of his knuckles on her mouth made her teeth tear her lips and sent trickles of blood down her chin. He halted his chastisement of her only when Sadie said "that if you think you're punishing her, you're crazy. That's just the sort of treatment she-likes. Ask Lew! He says she used to annoy him till he bashed her into a state where she could really enjoy a bit of you-know-what. Give it to her, Rudi! She's really ready for it now."
Sadie was wrong. As soon as Rudi released Brenda and tried to fondle her beasts and loins, she began to fight again, tearing at his face with all the the desperate ferocity of a she-goat who feels the moment of the wolf's devouring her to be near.
"Grab her!" cried Rudi. "Lew, you take her left arm and leg and. Sadie the right! I'll teach this teaser a lesson."
Lew and Sadie hastened to obey Rudi's commands. Deprived of the use of her arms, Brenda felt her legs pulled wide open. Her sex was defenseless. Before the fight she had been torrid down there, soft and moist. The struggle had added to her desire. Rudi's entry into her would be easy and she knew that once she had tasted his organ within her, she would respond with as much fervor as if the man between her thighs was the one she desired most from of all from those she had ever known. She decided to try one final ruse to avoid "a fate worse than death." She ceased to struggle, preferring to conserve the little strength she had left. Unwittingly, Rudi helped her. Certain of victory, he wanted to gloat over her helplessness prior to gouging out her intestines with his sabre. He leaned over her, smiling seductively at her. Only with difficulty did she restrain herself from returning his suggestive smirk. She wanted and needed a man. Lew had rejected her and Rudi was crazy with desire for her. Why not accept the latter, close her eyes and pretend she was being driven to ecstasy by the former? No, she would either have Lew or wait until Peter reached out for her on their wedding night.
After a long, lewd kiss, to which she contributed her share of tongue and saliva, she felt the tip of her would-be ravager's sex nudging her clitoris. The moment was nigh when she must either surrender deliciously or play her final card prior to having to submit anyway. The quivering bulb which sought to plant itself in her furrow moved forward slightly and then retreated in readiness for a deep thrust which would have buried it at the bottom or top of her pit. She waited until her loins' lips tasted again the desirable sweetmeat and then she called upon every muscle in her body to revolt against. the humiliation which was being inflicted upon her. Lew and Sadie were so thrilled at what they were about to witness that their minds were not entirely on the task Rudi had set them. Brenda's crotch shot up-wards, her legs rose abruptly and her right arm threw Sadie off the bed while her left arm dragged itself free from a surprised Lew's grasp. Rudi's lance lunged at nothing. He cursed and sprang to a counterattack. Her back against the head of the bed, Brenda defended herself as long as possible with her head, feet and hands. Within a minute she was captive again.
Sadie incited Rudi to strike again while the iron was hot, but his pride was hurt. Handsome and blessed with a seductive, half-Irish tongue, he was not accustomed to being rejected by women, at least not by the sort of woman he imagined Brenda to be. She had been Lew's mistress, so she was not fastidious. She had voluntarily returned to him after he had thrown her out in favor of another woman with whom she knew he was still living. In the presence of the other woman Brenda had given herself to her former lover, prior to indulging in Lesbian love-making with her rival and successor, and after all that she had the impertinence to re-fuse to surrender her filthy body to Ruth!
Shrugging his "shoulders, Rudi suggested that Lew and Sadie 'release their new respective grips on Brenda's legs and arms but at the same time he re-moved the black velvet cord from a dressing gown hanging behind the door. Taking the tasseled extremities of the sash in his right hand, he wound it a couple of times around his fist, so that a loop about half a yard long hung free. Brenda knew what was in store for her. She had been through it often with Lew-the ferocious whipping which so excited her that she begged to be loved carnally; but apart from her father, no man other than Lew had ever beaten her. She feared that if Rudi beat her into a frenzy of desire which Lew could not or would not gratify, she would be unable to resist a further onslaught upon her vagina by her would-be raper; and she was determined to have either Lew or no one.
"Lew, help me!" she cried. "Stop him, and you can do anything you like with me-anytime you want!"
Rudi turned to look at Lew, who was fondling Sadie so lewdly as to suggest that his appetite was returning. Brenda noticed that his growing, stiffening penis was nudging Sadie's thighs while one of his hands was almost buried in the opening of her sex. His evil grin left neither Brenda nor her tormentor in doubt of their host's intention to allow the performance to continue. No thought of escape entered the head of the convicted prisoner. She was prepared to take her punishment rather than leave before tasting again the flesh of her lover but she had not weakened in her resolve to deny herself to Rudi as long as her strength lasted.
The soft, smooth cord thudded across her belly and thighs. She winced in agony. What luxurious pain! She had never before been thrashed with velvet and she was happy to suffer-because Lew approved. Her submission to Rudi's beating was a measure of her sexual fidelity to the little man who was preparing to betray her before her very eyes.
Their hands wandering possessively over each other's private parts, Lew and Sadie kissed lasciviously, excited by the sound of Rudi's quickening and ever heavier blows on the shoulders and buttocks of the groaning, whimpering Brenda. Breaking away from each other breathlessly they gloated over her, reluctantly admiring her ability to take punishment. Perspiration poured from the flogger's forehead and he was obviously nearing the end of his energy; but the battered girl, covered with ugly weals from head to feet, seemed to be enjoying it all. She howled with the pain of each blow but she managed to smile enticingly up at Lew, whose pride in her devotion to him in the face of the competition of so. handsome a man as his neighbor urged him on to do what he was sure she least wanted him to do. He threw a very willing Sadie onto the bed, within two feet of Brenda, and thrust his phallus as deep into her wide gash as it would go. Sadie opened herself wide, devoured him while her bottom and crotch jerked to and from him in perfect time with his grinding and smacking of her noisome, loudly lisping tunnel of love. As her bed partners rode each other up to the apex of screeching pleasures faster and faster, the speed of her persecutors laughing subsided and lost its bite. A squeal from Sadie and a deep throated grunt from her benefactor announced that her melting womb was being splashed with his sperm. At that moment Rudi threw both his arms in the air, released his hold on his flagellating instrument and fell on top of Brenda.
"Reefer, Lew!" Rudi cried.
He tried to bring his mouth into contact with the lips he had battered out of shape, but Brenda exerted her penultimate ounce of energy in an effort to throw him off. She felt sick. She just managed to reach the wash basin in time to avoid spewing on the carpet. Her body ached and there was a bitter taste in her throat; her stomach trembled and her spinning head felt hollow. The stench was horrible. She raised her face from it and fell backwards in a faint.
Rudi had lit the "special" cigarette Lew had given him and was too eagerly filling his lungs with its fumes to bother about a woman who had humiliated him. Lew and Sadie were too intent upon kissing and cuddling to go to Brenda's help, but when she regained consciousness and rose unsteadily to her feet, Sadie took sufficient notice to goad her "second-string" lover.
"Go on, Rudi!" she said. "Now's your chance! Let her have it with all your might and then we'll chuck her out. She's not having Lew again, and that's certain."
Feeling slightly better, Brenda heard and under-stood Sadie's words. She realized that Lew's failure to protest his unofficial wife's possessive boast meant he accepted the implications of it. There was, consequently, no point in her tarrying longer, especially since to do so left her in danger of an-other attempt upon her "virtue" by Rudi. His sudden passivity surprised her. It vas also more than Sadie could understand.
"Be a sport, Rudi!" she urged, nodding her au-burn head in the direction of her rival. "I'd like to see her getting what she pretends she doesn't want. There's no fight left in her now, but once you're in her up to your balls, she'll fight like mad to stop you getting out before dawn. It's the chance of your life, Rudi."
Before replying, the weakly handsome pseudo-Latin drew deeply on his precious cylinder of illusions. "Sadie, I wouldn't do her even with my worst enemy's penis," he whispered with the weariness of a man who thinks he prefers a woman who gives herself to one who has to be taken by force.
Brenda began to wander about in search of her scattered clothing. Sadie realized that unless she acted quickly, she would be deprived of the thrill of witnessing Brenda's reluctant copulation with Rudi. It was of great importance to Sadie that she be present at Brenda's humiliation. This upper middle class trollol seemed to think she could have the man she wanted, when she wanted him, and still deny herself to Rudi, who was handsome enough and sufficiently seductive to have been Sadie's clandestine lover for several full and exciting weeks. Sadie's pride was hurt.
Brenda's attitude seemed to suggest that there was something wrote either with Ruth or with the fact of a girl being Lew's regular dozy while slip-ping upstairs from time to time for a voluptuous hour in the arms of the neighbor whom she had hitherto unconvincingly pretended she visited for'" no other purpose than to help him cook his meals and dust his apartment. Sadie was not prepared to tolerate Brenda implying that she either had no taste or was a promiscuous strumpet. The score had to be evened. Brenda knew Lew and Ruth were the redhead's lovers, so Sadie was determined to have the satisfaction of seeing the brunette thrilling to Rudi ravaging her long, slim body. Afterwards she would taunt her fastidious rival.
"You didn't want him," she imagined herself saying to Brenda. "Fought until you spewed your guts up; but once you felt him rifting you, you went at it hammer and tongs. If you could have seen yourself! Heard your groans, your obscene cries of entreaty! It was disgusting."
The opportunity for actualizing the purely imaginary insult was slipping by. Brenda was already in her underwear and was feebly trying to make out which end of her dress was the skirt and which the bodice. Sadie grabbed Lew's case of "reefers" and hurried to help her enemy to put on her dress.
"Let me do it, darling!"
She took the frock from Brenda's trembling hands and stuck a cigarette between her prospective victim's bruised lips. Thinking marijuana fumes would restore her to strength, the taller girl bowed her head towards the match the other had struck. She filled her lungs with smoke and smiled at her companion, who was lighting her own "reefer." Breathing in rolling her tongue around her burning mouth, Sadie seemed to be tasting this sweetness for the first time. Her fingers caressed Brenda's ill-used arms and shoulders and she raised her face, licking her lips invitingly. The black-haired innocent fell into the trap and lowered an eager mouth to sip the proffered kiss. A sip developed into a thirsty gulping. Naked body against a half clothed one, they crooned to each other, their hands making fresh acquaintance with each other's curves. Under Brenda's slip, Sadie tore off the flimsy panties, splitting them down the front and she gently fingered the tall girl's sex. Writhing and moaning, Brenda was soon prey to so urgent a lust that she could no longer stand. She sank to her knees, dropping her cigarette. She groped for it, sucked it avidly and slithered into an ungracious reclining position. Drawing deeply on the weed, she felt Sadie's mouth at the aperture of her vagina. Pressing the russet head deeper into her loins, she called upon Lew to relieve her. Her body was jerking as though possessed by a thousand serpentine spirits.
Sadie sprang to her feet and hurried into the bedroom, where her two lovers were peacefully smoking themselves into ecstasy.
"Come quick, Rudi!" she begged. "She needs a man. She's too hot to put up a fight and she's just ready to give you a really good time. Do it for me! Do this for me and I swear you'll never regret it."
He shook his head "no" his feeble lips set unusually hard. She gazed at him pleadingly, but his only response was to hold her close, his mouth opening yearning toward her.
They were twisting and perspiring in a long, delicious kiss when an agonized wail from the living room jerked all three of them to their senses. They all collided in the doorway, a mass of inquisitive, anxious nakedness. On the floor they saw Brenda lying on her back. She was as motionless as a ' corpse and her parted thighs were flecked with the froth of her apogee. Terrified, they moved toward her, each trying to push the other ahead. Reluctantly, Sadie knelt down and touched the girl they had murdered with their excess of marijuana. A loud gasp of relief exploded from her lips and her boys recognized it as their acquittal.
The rest, of course, is not as interesting-or for that matter, as unusual a story. It is all part of the hospital, court, and police records. But then, isn't that where most conclusions to fascinating stories end up these days!
