You know how some girls get talked about, through no fault of their own? They don't. want to be talked about, usually. It just happens that way.
It happens, mostly, to girls who are much prettier than they have a right to be, or brighter, or livelier, or more open and honest in the way they talk.
Lynn Lautrec was one of those girls.
She had all the qualifies that trigger tongues with a tendency to wag: she was far prettier, far brighter, far livelier than any other girl in her high school, a bottomless well of bubbling vitality. She delighted in talking openly, candidly, joyously, of everything that interested her, including sex. And who was to know that her cheerful chatter was as often based on fantasy as on fact?
Another thing: Lynn Lautrec was blessed--or cursed--with a ripening, luscious, leggy body that was a magnet to male eyes; she had every straight male in school--student and teacher alike--grinding his teeth at the sight of her.
When girls started malicious talk about her, it was simply because Lynn Lautrec aroused envy.
When boys started gossip about her, it was be-cause she aroused erections, stimulated yearning young cocks, raised hope and hard-ons. But mostly hope, at least until her senior year.
So a lot of the gossip about Lynn Lautrec was started by boys out of sheer frustration. Out of their frustration, they told tales of how they'd fucked her, and how often, and how Lynn loved to fuck, and that she was crazy about cock; the tales the boys told were pure fantasy, not fact. Most of them, any-way.
But it was out of those malicious fantasy tales that Lynn's nickname was born, a nickname that stuck to her with all the adhesive tenacity of Elmer's Glue. She learned of that nickname in the spring term of her senior year, and almost dropped her art course, out of respect to the memory of a long-dead, de-formed, dwarfed French artist whose first name was Henri, and the second half of whose hyphenated last name was the same as hers.
The name the boys were calling Lynn--behind her back, of course--was "Too-Loose Lautrec."
"Too-Loose." Jesus.
They couldn't have been more wrong.
* * *
The few lucky boys who knew what they were talking about could have testified to the outrageous falsity of the "Too-Loose" slander about Lynn and her prized pussy. Those few lucky boys knew ecstatically well what a lie it was. They knew positively that Lynn Lautrec had as tight a twat--a few disadvantaged Presbyterian virgins aside--as any girl in school, as warmly, squeezingly snug a cunt as ever clutched a slender young cock. Not only was it tight, as tight as you'd want, but it was a supremely talented twat, a twat that did exquisite little tricks, a twat that, like Lynn herself, was full of surprises.
But the boys who knew better never said a word to correct the "Too-Loose" lie. They knew too well that their authentic testimony, however loyally motivated, might get back to Lynn. And not one of them wanted to run the risk of spoiling a good thing. A very, very, very good thing.
So when they heard other boys--under-achievers all--refer to Lynn as 'Too-Loose Lautrec," they smiled smugly, and r said nothing. And when the frustrated came up with other, triter, nicknames for Lynn, like "The Panting Pussy," and "The Pussy That Purrs," the select, knowledgeable few ignored the slanders.
One of the frustrated boys who never made it with Lynn dubbed her "The Velvet Vulva," pretending he'd experienced that heaven he was never to know. He went on to a career in medicine, and al-ready in high school was trying to speak in correct anatomical terms. But there was more than an element of truth in that accidental nickname, "The Velvet Vulva." Lynn's pussy was celestially soft and tender and moistly receptive; yes, warmly welcoming. Warmly welcoming, hell. Her squirmingly eager little twat was downright deliriously, hotly hospitable, once she'd made up her mind to fuck.
But the boys who had slid their lucky cocks into Lynn's lovely labyrinth ignored that nickname, too, uncannily accurate a guess--as it was. The luxuriant growth of hair around it was silky soft, and the pouting, delicate, dusky-pink lips of her pussy, moistly parted to embrace an entering cock, were exquisitely tender, gently yielding. Not unlike velvet. With "The Velvet Vulva," the doctor-to-be had chanced on a valid, very descriptive diagnosis.
On the few occasions when Lynn complained mildly to her few real fucking friends about the "Too-Loose" nickname, they'd say, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt . . . " and they'd kiss her opening mouth, and touch her slandered part And Lynn, as she spread her legs wide and opened her oozing prize of a pussy to greet their hard, thrusting, eager young cocks, would have to agree. Sticks and stones, she'd think idly, as her hips began to pump her gulping little cunt upward to welcome the in-thrusting shaft, may break my bones....
Even Lynn's friends "on the fringe came in for nicknames. "Group" or umbrella" nicknames, you might call them. Like all active, popular girls, Lynn was an ever-bubbling spring of vitality, and she drew around her a close little group of disciples, . a group which gradually took control of most of the school's extra-curricular activities. Lynn's inner circle came to be known around school as the 'City Hall Girls." Which, in turn, brought a new twist on another chestnut, "If you can't lick em, join 'em." But to understand that one, you need a little back-ground.
In her next-to-last year in high school, Lynn had not yet committed herself to all-out fucking--at least as far as anyone at school knew, and what she did at home with her doting stepfather was only her business and his--but on dates she did, take a very healthy interest in her escorts' cocks. The cock at hand, so to speak.
Hand was the word for it. When a boy's-demands on her became urgent, she'd give him a hand job, pretending to do it reluctantly. In truth, she loved the act of jerking boys off, loved the feel of the soft sliding sheath of skin over the hard shaft of a boy's pulsing cock. Depending on her mood, she masturbated them with quick, squeezing, expert strokes, swiftly and efficiently; or slowly, deliciously, letting her warm hand tease and hesitate along the throbbing shaft; and then, as the boy started to come, pumping her hand firmly up and down the bursting cock as it spurted and squirted, milking it forcefully in its diminishing throes until she'd squeezed out the last pearly drop. That's what she especially enjoyed, watching a cock as it suddenly came, spurting and jetting its juices from the loving grasp of her warm hand onto the dashboard, or onto the floormat, or onto the ground, or wherever.
Often, toward the end of that school year, she was tempted to take one of those delicious, hard, squirting hoses into her soft, moist, hotly hospitable, thirsting mouth. And maybe oftener, she--was tempted to take those hard young cocks into the juicy warm welcome of her oozing, craving little cunt. But, that year, she was still too conscious of how the boys had a tendency to talk around school. And so, that year, she never actually fucked anyone in her own age group. Or sucked a cock in her own age group. Until one night in May.
Her mother and stepfather were out somewhere that night, and she was alone in the house with her date, which was unusual. What was even more unusual was that she was wearing a skirt. A very short skirt, but a skirt, all the same. And she was feeling horny. That was not unusual, in itself, but for Lynn to be feeling horny in her own house even when her stepfather. wasn't there was a bit unusual. So unusual that it seemed to make her unusually horny.
Her date that night was a tall senior, a basketball player named Neal. His last name. His first name was Leonard, but Lynn had never heard anyone call him that. His basketball-player friends called him the Dribbler, and most of the kids shortened that to Drib. It was a good name for him. As good as any. Lynn had never been out with him before, and he was at the house now because he'd wanted to look over her records. They seemed to have the same taste in music.
He was sitting in an easy chair going through a stack of record albums on the floor in front of him when Lynn's hornies got the best of her. She got up from where she was sitting, went out through the archway of the living roam to the hall, stepped out of her underpants, and dropped them into an empty flower vase.
When she walked back into the living room, the air felt good against her pussy. The skirt she was wearing stopped only a few inches below her crotch.
She was glad to see that the Dribbler looked up from the records as she came back into the room, and was watching her as she sat down on the couch across from him. She raised her bare feet to the coffee table in front of her, seemingly careless for a moment about the angle of her legs, making it seem that if he did get a glimpse of dark fur between her thighs, it was an accident.
As she looked across at the tall boy, she saw that he'd lost all interest in the record albums at his feet. Lynn was not unaware of the magnet for his eyes the soft, shadowed undersides of her thighs had to be, especially for a healthy, growing young basket-ball player. She swung her knees slightly, keeping the warm young flesh-magnet of her legs minutely in motion, but angled slightly away from Drib's line of vision, so he could see at most only a shadowy hint of hair, not her pussy or any vital part of it. Lynn was very excited now, but she didn't know quite what she dared to do about it. He's only a boy, she told herself, my own age. And boys talk too much. She tried to concentrate on her iron-clad policy of never doing anything significant with boys who might talk.
"Jesus, Lynn," Drib said, staring fixedly at the flesh-feast of her luscious legs, "there's only one word I can think of for the way you look right now."
"What's that?" Lynn asked, her curiosity aroused, along with everything else. She kept the tantalizing, open display of her breath-stopping legs minutely in motion.
"Delicious," Drib said, choking a little on the word. "You look good enough to eat."
And that did it. She swung her knees directly toward him, together still, but the shadowy pink crease of her cunt was clearly there for him to see, under. the crept-up lower hem of her short skirt.
"Well?" she asked, and smiled at him. She knew exactly what she'd do, now. Exactly what she'd try to get him to do. It seemed at the moment like the most exciting thought she'd ever had.
The Dribbler didn't say anything. He just sat. And stared.
"Well?" she asked again. She let her knees come slightly apart, feeling the moistening lips of her twat part with them. The tall boy stared wide-eyed at the parted, pink, fur-fringed delicacy openly displayed in the soft warm frame of her under thighs.
Lynn saw him lick his lips, and had a glad surge of anticipation. But Drib didn't move.
"What's wrong?" she asked softly.
"I've never done that before," he said, in a tight, squeezed voice, tearing his eyes upward to look into her face as he said it.
"All the more reason to try it," Lynn said. "I've never had it done to me either." Which was a lie, but what she meant was she'd never had it done to her by a boy her own age. None of her cunt for con-temporaries. So far. No way. But this was different. Lynn thought she'd never been so excited.
She moved her bare feet on the coffee table, letting her knees come further apart, giving Drib a better angle, a dear view between the soft tempting swell of her upper thighs at the pouting pinkness of her cunt lips in their dark nest of dewy fur.
"I can't look at you," Drib said, and made a token motion with his eyes toward the ceiling.
"I want you to look," Lynn said, feeling herself begin to tremble in her excitement. She pushed the coffee table aside then, using both bare feet, and slid over to the end of the couch, directly across from where Drib was sitting hunched over the forgotten record albums on the floor. She raised one knee and draped her leg over the low arm of the couch, letting her other leg spread wide. She could almost feel the lips of her pussy parting wider, opening an invitation to the tall boy she was sure he couldn't refuse. An invitation to dine.
"Oh, God," Drib said, but he brought his eyes down from the ceiling, and he looked,. and he looked. His jaw muscles bulged. So did the front of his pants.
"Like it?" Lynn asked, her voice shaky.
"Love it," he moaned. "I told you. Delicious is the only word for you. And for--it." Jesus, she thought. He can't even say the word, can't even say cunt when he's about to get a mouthful.
She slid forward to The edge of the couch, spread her legs farther apart, opening her now-oozing cunt even wider.
"Well?" she asked again, when he sat unmoving, just staring. She wasn't shaky anymore. Just excited, to the boiling point.
"I told you," he said, sounding. hoarse now. "I never did that before."
"Don't you want to just kiss it hello?" she asked. Despite her excitement, she realized that suddenly she was enjoying herself.
He moaned.
"It'll kiss you back. I can make it kiss you back." He wrenched his eyes upward again.
"Just one little lick?"
His tongue was moving across his lips, his eyes casting wildly about the room. But always coming back to the glistening, bright-pink, moist magnet of her open cunt.
"No." He sounded as if he were choking.
"I'll open it up for you."
"No."
"Make it easier."
"No."
"Tastier."
"No."
"Tenderer." She was whispering now, as she moved her hands down and with the tips of her fingers spread the soft yielding lips, exposing the tender pink folds of moist membrane, the swelling little twig of her clitoris.
"I can't," Drib said. His lips said it. His throat made no sound.
"Don't you really want to suck my cunt?" Lynn asked softly.
"Oh, yes." He was trying again to look at the ceiling.
"Kiss my cunt?"
"Oh, yes."
"You said it looked delicious. Don't you want to taste it? Eat my delicious, warm, tender twat?"
"Oh, God," he said, staring upward.
"I'll suck your cock if you do." She hadn't meant to say that. It just bubbled out.
Drib brought his eyes down from the ceiling and looked at her.
"You will?"
"Yes. Afterward."
Drib stood up slowly and drew himself straight. God, he was tall. And trembling.
Lynn lay back on the couch, trembling again herself, her legs wide apart and her thirsting twat thrust upward, waiting.
She didn't have long to wait. Drib stepped over the pile of record albums and stood in front of her for a brief moment, looking down, then sank to his knees, his eyes drinking in the soft delight of her ripely swelling inner thighs, terminating in the dark nest of silken fur around her moist, pink, open cunt.
His trembles miraculously gone, he kissed his way gently, worshipfully, up along the insides of her calves, her knees, then along the incredibly soft expanse of her inner thighs.
Lynn felt her skin tingling at the touch of his tongue and lips, and she felt herself oozing. Then his fingers were parting her twat lips, tenderly--what good instincts this boy has, she thought crazily--and she watched as the tip of his tongue appeared, coming out further and further, until it touched, very tentatively, the tender pinkness just below her tingling clitoris.
Then, all at once, his whole mouth covered her open slit, in a deep, sucking kiss, and his tongue delved deep.
"Oooh," she said, and shuddered. She brought her warm thighs together softly over his ears.
He began licking up and down the tender, responding inner folds of her slit, along the whole inner length of her neat little quivering cunt. She felt her hips begin to move, all on their own, and she put her heels behind his back, to urge his tongue deeper.
"That's it, Drib," she murmured. "Lick my cunt. Eat my cunt. Gobble my cunt."
But she knew he couldn't hear, with her soft warm thighs embracing his ears. It didn't matter. He was lapping at her twat like a man slaking a desert wide thirst, with his tongue, his mouth, his lips. Her hips were thrusting and bouncing in wild abandon on the coarse fabric of the couch.
She wanted more, much more, than his plunging, probing, licking tongue, his hungry, sucking mouth devouring her cunt, but at the same time she didn't want him to stop, didn't want the warm, pulsing sensation in her rapturous twat-depths to cease even for a moment, ready and willing as she was now to be fucked.
So she put her hands behind his head, spread her thighs wide as if she were being fucked, and ground her cunt with spasmodic thrusts up against his mouth and tongue, literally fucking his face.
Drib was game at indoor sports other than basket-bail. He gobbled heroically, lashing her panting pussy with his tongue, lapping, probing, sucking, gobbling, And all at once, shuddering and whimpering, she came.
"Ooh," she murmured weakly. "Aah." Over and over again.
Finally, when her spasms had subsided, she looked up at him and smiled.
"That was beautiful," she said. "Thank you."
"You haven't forgotten?" Drib asked, looking down at her with a worry crease between his eye-brows. His pants bulged.
"No," she said, reaching for his belt buckle, smiling. "I'd love to suck your cock."
* * *
And she had sucked Drib's cock that crazy night in May, sucked it deeply, warmly, expertly, and had swallowed his spurting come, every last drop of it. And that, she thought later, was what had done all the damage toward the end of her junior year in high school.
Because Drib had talked, and he must have told the boys everything. She knew it when she heard the line the boys were using about the City Hall Girls. Not just about Lynn, but about her whole group.
"If you can't join 'em, lick 'em, the boys were saying.
And it was an easy step from that, the next fall, when she actually started to do a little discriminate fucking with a chosen few of the boys, to her unshakable nickname. Too-Loose Lautrec.
She was very glad when Graduation Day finally came.
And gladder still that she was going to college in another state. A faraway state.
CHAPTER TWO
It was Lynn Lautrec's first week in her new job, her first job since graduating from State, a month before.
As number-one associate to the head librarian of the public library in Delmont, she took pains to look the part, to give every outward appearance of a young woman with a degree in Library Sciences. She pulled her long, dark, luxuriant hair . severely back, and fixed it in a bun at the base of her neck. She wore large, horn-rimmed glasses, although she needed eyeglasses about as much as she needed an extra asshole. She could spot a rising erection half a block away. But she stuck with the horn-rimmed glasses, theorizing that no man could get horny over a girl wearing horn-rims.
Not that she was against sex in her new life. Cod knows she'd had an active and 'joyous sex life through her four years at college, to say nothing of the high school semesters before. But life at college had been free-swinging, liberated, and both disapproval and gossip had been as obsolete as the mandolin, the running board, and Yes We Have No Bananas.
But Delmont, Lynn knew from experience, would be different. Delmont was a small town, not much larger than the town she'd grown up in, where the Too-Loose Lautrec nickname had been pinned on her so unjustly. It had been a tough nickname to shake, even though now it existed only in Lynn's head. So she decided she'd be a model of discretion in her new job, her new life--particularly in how she looked So she dressed and walked and talked the part of the sexless librarian.
She hoped, all through that first week, that she was playing the role well.
But it wasn't always easy. Especially around the tall high school senior who helped around the library, putting books back on shelves after school hours. His yearning glances toward Lynn made it all too clear that he saw through her disguise.
She managed to ignore him and his glances all through that first week. But sometimes it was difficult. He was not only tall and lean and muscular, and walked with the grace of a jungle cat, but he stood very erect, as if in evidence of inner pride.
More and more often,. Lynn found herself wondering if his cock stood so tall and erect on specific occasions.
And she wondered, unavoidably, if that's what he stood so proud of.
* * *
The only man she unbent with at all, enough to appear friendly, was a man named McNally, who seemed to be quite a reader for that town. He came into the library almost every day that first week she was there, returning or taking out books.
He was a pleasant, friendly man, with a good sense of humor, and Cod knows to return his friendliness couldn't have started any gossip, or have given anybody any ideas. Especially McNally him-self.
Mr. MacNally was a chunky, middle-aged widower with a graying beard who taught English at Delmont High School. That's all Lynn had learned about him when he stopped at the desk around dosing time on that first Thursday afternoon.
"It's good to see that somebody still reads Ring Lardner," she said, stamping the card of the book he was taking out. "In fact, in this town, it's nice to see that anyone reads anything at all."
He grinned at her. He had a nice grin, framed in the trimmed hedge of his beard.
"You sized this town up pretty quick," he said. "I didn't mean.... "
"Don't apologize. You've sized it up right. For anyone my age who can't stomach television, there's nothing else to do in this town but read. And play poker."
"I love poker," Lynn said, keeping her voice. library-low, even though there was nobody else around. "Or I used to, when I was a kid."
"Play a lot of poker when you were a kid?" Mr. McNally looked amused.
"No. I used to love to watch, when my father and his friends played." Her stepfather, but she didn't see any point in going into that. "I used to love to watch the men's faces when they played. They were so serious and intent, and then when a hand was over, and they relaxed and sipped their drinks and laughed, they were so different. It was like the sun coming up after a cold black night."
"I never knew anyone who found any poetry in poker," McNally said, looking at her without smiling.
"I didn't think there was anything poetic about it. I just liked watching."
"Well, young lady," Mr. McNally said, picking up his volume of Lardner short stories, "you're welcome to come watch my friends and me play poker any time you want. Any Monday evening, that is. We play every week, on Monday."
"Nice of you," Lynn said. "I'll think about it."
McNally started for the exit with the book under his arm, then came back, slowly and hesitantly, toward the desk.
"I just remembered something," he said. "We're a lazy bunch, my poker-playing friends and I. So we usually have a girl come in and play hostess for us while we're playing. You know, open beer and fix drinks and serve sandwiches as the evening goes along."
"Sounds like fun," Lynn said. "Good clean fun, in a quiet, old-fashioned way."
"I guess the girls don't find it too much of a chore, and we usually. pay her a share of the two biggest winning pots of the evening. Beats the going rate for baby-sitting, they tell me."
"I'll bet it does."
"Usually the girl is one of the students. One of the prettier students, I have to admit. Most of the men are younger than I am, you see."
Lynn didn't say anything.
"Anyway, the girl who usually does the honors won't be with us this coming Monday. You won't be insulted if I ask if you'd like to take her place? You can do all the watching you want. And I know the other poker players would be delighted to have you."
She thought about it, but only for a couple of seconds. She wasn't doing anything next Monday evening. Or any other evening.
"Why not?" she said. "It might be fun."
"Our pleasure," he said, and wrote his address on a page in a notebook he took from his pocket, then handed it to her. "We start around eight. It'll be our pleasure if you can make it."
"Should I shop for anything before I comer she asked. "Bread? Cold cuts? Beer?"
"You're a good girl," he said, smiling at her. "But we'll be stocked with supplies when you get there." He lifted his hand in a small wave as he turned toward the exit.
"See you Monday," she said, watching the door close quietly behind him.
CHAPTER THREE
Lynn found where Mr. McNally lived without any trouble. His apartment turned out to be the second floor of a big old house in a neighborhood of tall old elm trees and spacious lawns, and what looked like at least four generations of absolute respectability. From the street, anyway, that's how it looked to Lynn.
There were lights on all over the top floor, but the ground floor of the house was dark. She rang the up-per doorbell, and saw Mr. McNally coming down some stairs into the hallway to let her in.
"You're right on time," he said. The last of the poker players arrived just a minute ago. There are only five of us tonight, and the thirstiest poker player isn't here, so you won't be very busy. I'll find you something to read."
"I'll just watch the game, if you don't mind," she said, following him up the stairs. "That's the main reason I'm here, you know. I like to watch men's faces when they gamble."
"Wait'll you see this set of faces,' he said, ushering her into a large dining room. "You'd be better off watching television. The stakes aren't much and the faces are even less."
He introduced the men around the table, one at a time.
"And this is Lynn Lautrec," he said, putting a paternal hand on her shoulder. "Nicest thing to hap-pen to any public library since they invented the printing press."
She tensed a little when his hand settled on her shoulder, but decided he didn't mean anything by it. She was just too sensitive on the subject, being so new in the town. Anyway, she had her glasses to scare men off.
"Please call me Jeff," the host said, leading her into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator. "I like to leave that 'Mr.' business behind, in the classroom."
The bottom two shelves of the refrigerator were crammed with canned beer, and another shelf held what looked like wrapped cold cuts and assorted spreads.
"There doesn't seem any likelihood of you and your friends starving to death this evening,' she said. Then she noticed the full whiskey bottles and two ice buckets standing on the sideboard next to the sink. "Or dying of thirst, either," she added.
"Do you drink?" McNally asked.
"Sure."
"Beer?"
"Sometimes. When I was still in school, it usually depended on my date's finances. I like Scotch better than beer."
"There's plenty of Scotch, so help yourself. Don Winthrop is the only one here, besides yourself, who drinks Scotch. He takes soda with it. I drink bourbon and water." He made himself a drink while he talked.
"Seems easy enough to remember," Lynn said. "Even without a card file." She knew who Don Winthrop was, even before they'd been introduced. He'd been in the library a couple of times. He was an art instructor at the high school, and was the youngest looking of the poker players. He was a tall, lean, intense-looking man of twenty-seven or eight, and she'd never seen him smile.
"You're on your own," Jeff McNally said, and left the kitchen, carrying his drink.
Lynn built herself a Scotch and soda, pouring the whisky with a free and expensive hand. Beer for three of them, the host had told her. She opened three cans, found three tall glasses and a tray, and carried the whole works, including a Scotch and soda for Winthrop, in to the men.
The game was under way. A big man named Bellows was dealing. "Big queen," he was saying, dealing cards face up, in what she recognized as five-card stud. "Big nine. Tray. Four." She put the Scotch and soda in front of Don Winthrop and the tall glasses on the table beside each of the others, with an opened can of beer beside each glass. The men nodded their thanks. Tough job those girls had, she thought, and pulled up a chair to sit down near one corner of the table, watching the cards as they turned up.
"You like poker?" Don Winthrop asked.
"I like to watch. Is it all right?"
"Our pleasure," he said, and the other men looked at her and smiled.
She realized all at once that she'd taken off her glasses while making the drinks, and had left them in the kitchen.
CHAPTER FOUR
After an hour or so of bringing in drinks and watching the men play, she became bored with the game. With the game, not with the men. There was something fascinating about the men's faces, so studiedly impassive, as they registered the worth and possibilities of each card dealt in their minds, then made their bets. Their concentration seemed complete, and there was something at the same time frustrating and exciting about being left so completely out of the activity that engrossed them so.
But just the reality of her being there, the only woman in a room full of men, excited her. The sound of their voices alone had an aphrodisiac effect on her, and she found herself crossing and uncrossing her legs, squeezing her warm, moistening pussy. Occasionally, one of the men would glance appreciatively at her long, smooth, sensuous legs, so openly on display under the short skirt she was wearing, then look back at his cards. She began to feel an unreasoning, intensely female jealousy toward the cards.
After about two hours of watching, she decided to do something about her inanimate rival, the lifeless oblong bits of plastic the men seemed to find so fascinating. But just as she was considering what move to make, Don Winthrop, as if he'd read her mind, gave her the ideal opening. She realized when he spoke how strong she'd been making his drinks.
"You ought to be congratulated, Jeff," Winthrop said, addressing himself across the table to McNally. "Lynn is the loveliest hostess we've had here yet."
She hadn't put her glasses back on after discovering that she'd left them off in the kitchen.
"Isn't she?" McNally said, looking pleased. Like Columbus after he'd discovered America, Lynn thought.
The other men around the table turned to look at her, nodded, and smiled. Lynn flushed, but she was pleased and excited. Why, she thought, should compliments courage straight down to my crotch?
"Thank you," she said, and got up out of her chair and did a little-girl curtsy. Except that there was nothing so little-girl about the way her breasts jiggled and bobbed, the upper slopes swelling whitely out of her low-cut peasant blouse. It was the only thing she'd had handy to wear that evening.
"Lovely, Don Winthrop said, looking unabashedly at the softly bobbing swells above the top of her blouse. "I can think of only one thing that would make Lynn lovelier."
"What's that?" the large Mr. Bellows asked innocently.
"If Lynn were topless. You hear a lot about top-less waitresses these days. I'll bet Lynn would put them all to shame. Or back into Mother Hubbards."
Ah, Lynn thought. So that's the real game. Not poker. But strangely enough, she didn't feel flustered by the veiled suggestion.
"I wouldn't want to interrupt your game," she said boldly.
"It wouldn't interrupt the game," Jeff McNally said, putting down his cards.
"Even if it did, it would be a worthwhile interruption," another of the men said. Mr. Denthos, his name was. Taught Latin or Creek or something at the high school. He was almost as old as McNally.
"You must be putting me on," she said. But she knew they weren't putting her on. Especially Don Winthrop. He kept crossing and re-crossing his legs, much as she'd been doing, and looking both eager and uncomfortable.
"We're not putting you on at all," Mr. Denthos said.
"Not a bit," Winthrop said. Lynn noticed that he had started to sweat on the forehead and upper lip.
"You're so incredibly lovely," Mr. Bellows said. "It would be a great pleasure for all of us to see more of you."
"If it's modesty that's making you hesitate, my dear," Jeff McNally said, "forget it. Modesty went out with bathtub gin."
"It isn't modesty, exactly," she said. "It's just that it's all you men, and I'm the only woman."
"But such a lovely young girl," Mr. Denthos said. "You should be proud of your body. Happy to let us see it."
"Some of the other girls have done it," Mr. Bellows said, and she looked at him sharply. "We've made it worth their while," he said hastily, "with a part of every winning pot. It can add up to a sizeable sum, especially when you compare it to the going rate for baby-sitters."
Lynn saw Jeff McNally look over at Bellows and frown. She was about to blurt out that she didn't care about the money, she couldn't be bribed to take off her clothes, but she thought better of it. She was very excited at the prospect of having all these men looking at her body. And she could pretend it was the money she was after. What did they know about a librarian's salary?
"Well . . . " she said.
"That's a good girl," Jeff McNally said, a satisfied smile appearing suddenly in his beard. He sounded as if he'd said the words before.
"Who'd like a drink?" she irked.
"I'm ready," Don Winthrop said.
"Me, too," Mr. Bellows said. Don Winthrop gave him a long look.
"One at a time," he said. "Custom-made service, from here on in. Don't you want Lynn to keep busy?"
"I see what you mean."
"You don't yet," Lynn said boldly, taking Winthrop's empty glass. "But you will."
She took her time making Winthrop's drink in the kitchen, thinking, how can you face all those men, bare-boobed? What will they think? Well, other girls have done it, obviously. Much younger girls, too. And men that age must just like to look. Except maybe Don Winthrop. He'd had a discernible hard-on for the last half hour.
She hesitated for a long moment after the drink was made, then reached back and took the clip from her hair in back, then shook it loose, letting it fall down her back and around her head along the sides. She felt better already.
She took off her blouse and the wisp of a half-bra she'd put on for the occasion. Her breasts sprang free, pouting upward, the nipples tightening and winking pinkly. What have I got to lose? she thought, and carried the drink into the other room, her breasts bobbing joyously.
They all stared as she put the Scotch and soda on the table next to Don Winthrop's right hand, bending over farther than. she had to. The hand on the table twitched, she noticed, but stayed where it was.
"Gorgeous," Mr. Bellows said.
The teacher named Denthos said something in what sounded like Greek.
"I could use a drink now, Lynn," Jeff McNally said, watching her rose-tipped bosom bouncing as she came around the table to take his glass. "In fact, I think I'm going to need this drink. I feel a losing streak coming on."
His hand very casually brushed one nipple as she took his glass, and she looked down to see it coming tautly erect "Now, now," she said. To the deepening, hardening bud. Not to Jeff McNally. When she got back to the kitchen she found that she was shaking a little in her excitement They kept her busy, bringing their drinks one at a time, and they drank much faster than they had earlier in the evening. They presented her with half the winnings of the first two hands after she'd taken off her blouse and bra. She didn't want or need the money, but she took it as if that's why she'd consented to make the topless scene in the first place.
The second time she brought Don Winthrop his Scotch and soda with her bare bosom bouncing he reached up and cupped her near breast gently in the palm of his hand before she could straighten up and away from him, and kissed the quivering stiff bud of the nipple, tonguing it tenderly.
"Oooh," she said, involuntarily, but didn't jerk back or show even a token flash of anger. "You're playing poker, remember?"
"I forgot, for a minute," Winthrop said, picking up his cards.
The fifth player, a Mr. Montagna, had had little to say all evening, but the next time she brought him a beer, she felt his hand slide up under her skirt, in-side her thigh from the back. She gave no outward sign to the rest of the men at the table, but brought her legs together, squeezing his hand softly between her thighs, before he reached her pussy. It was all wet, she knew, a dead giveaway to the way she felt.
"You're still wearing too many clothes," Mr. Montagna said, keeping his hand between her thighs, squeezing the smoothness against his palm.
"I second that motion," Mr. Bellows said. "The whole pot in this hand is yours, Lynn, if you'll give us a better look at that wonderful body of yours."
"We'll see," Lynn said, and went back into the kitchen.
It didn't take her long to make up her mind. Her wonderful body. She knew what they wanted to see, and touch, probably, but she didn't care. Her excitement had taken over. A reaction, maybe, from her week of horn-rimmed glasses and tight-back hair as the sexless librarian. Oh, well. Tomorrow a librarian again. But tonight's tonight. And she wasn't, kidding herself. She was enjoying the whole scene, all that attention, worshipful attention, from a room full of men.
She opened a can of beer, then took off her skirt and hung it on the back of a chair. Her panties were bikini-style, cut high at the hips, making her legs look even longer than they were, the swell of her thighs more voluptuous in their graceful, curving ripe perfection. Through the almost-transparent white nylon of her panties, she knew the swelling mounds of her ass and the crevice between the cheeks showed through clearly. Her crisp brown bush was very evident through the transparency, and even the dusky pinkness of her cunt lips was clearly defined, made even more evident by the dampness at her crotch.
Well, if they wanted to look, she thought, they'd have plenty to look at. She went back into the dining room, carrying the beer.
"Good God," Don Winthrop said.
"You're too much for the poor . people," Jeff McNally said.
She found that she was absolutely un-self-conscious about her near-nakedness as she set the beer on the table. Her breasts bobbed, her nipples perked up pinkly, and her twat fairly twinkled at them through the sheer nylon of her panties, but she found that she didn't mind a bit. She was enjoying herself thoroughly as she pranced around the table in her high heels, her long white legs flashing, and picked up another emptied beer can.
In the doorway to the kitchen, she turned to them. Five sets of eyes were riveted to her lithe young body, and without knowing why, except that when she was very excited she had a compulsion to tease men, she did a slow, tantalizing grind and bump. At the end of the bump she held the position for a moment, her pelvis thrust forward and upward, the lips of her pussy open and moistly visible, she knew, through the adhering non-concealment at her crotch. Then she turned swiftly and disappeared from their lecherous view into the kitchen.
When she returned to the room, the deck of cards lay neglected on the table.. They had given up all pretense of playing poker.
"Lynn," Jeff McNally said, "would you do us the honor of going one step further?"
"Why not?" she said, smiling broadly. She felt completely wild, abandoned, totally wanton. She slid her panties down along the outside of her hips, tantalizingly, then bent and slid them all the way off and stood tall, her legs apart, her almost visibly quivering cunt thrust forward and upward.
"Lynn," Don Winthrop Said, shifting around in his chair to face her squarely, not taking his eyes away from her pouting, pink-lipped pussy, "you can't stop now. We all want you."
"Want me?" she asked, still teasing.
"You know. Want you."
"Want to fuck me, you mean?"
She looked at their faces when she said it, and some of the stiffness went out of their expressions. But not out of their pricks, she was sure.
"Yes. To fuck you. In the vernacular." That was Mr. Jeff McNally, the English teacher, speaking.
"Not in the vernacular," she said. "There's a better place than that.'
"There certainly is."
"Would you like to be the first, Jeff?" It was the first time she'd called this nice, respectable library lover by his first name., "Honored," McNally said.
Smiling, she moved around the table to him, and perched the yielding white roundness of her ass on the edge of the green felt table covering. It felt warm and itchy against the smoothness of her skin.
"There's something I'd like you to do first," she said, looking down ',into his bearded face, intent now, not smiling. He licked his lips. He had the idea already.
"What?" he asked.
"You know," she said. "Kiss it first"
He hesitated a moment, looking around at the other men watching him, then bent forward and very slowly extended his tongue, then gave the open lips of her wet cunt a long, deliberate lick, stopping--it the tender swelling twig of her clitoris and stiffening his tongue against it.
"Oooh," she moaned softly, almost gratefully, and lay back with her elbows on the table and spread her legs wide. 'That's very good, sir. Now lick it. Suck it. Gobble my whole ever-lovin' cunt."
He spread her twat-lips wide with his fingers and began to lick and suck the tender pink mass of quivering pink membrane his fingers exposed. She squirmed her hips, and heard them begin to make bumping noises on the padded table top. His beard tickled the sensitive skin on the insides of her upper thighs. More than just tickled. It itched.
"That's enough," she said, squeezing his head between her legs. "You know what to do now."
He withdrew his head reluctantly, giving her now-pulsing clitoris one last diddle with the stiffened tip of his tongue, and stood up. He dropped his trousers and undershorts together to the floor and stepped out of them with the hasty agility of a much younger man.
Lynn looked immediately at his cock, expecting it to be flaccid or semi-erect, but it wasn't. It was at least as rigid and stiff as any she'd seen in some time.
And it was a good-sized one, Mr. McNally 's cock, with a knotty purpling head and a mottled thick shaft. He settled the-head directly in her moist, welcoming cleft, moved it up and down in the soft crevice a couple of times, getting it wet, then drove it home with one long, unhesitating, slow plunge.
She gasped, and locked her heels behind him. He drew back and then began driving his thick, hard shaft into her with long, slow, even, relentless strokes. She fell into his rhythm immediately, and surged forward to meet each in-stroke, moaning happily. She was dimly aware of the other men standing in a semi-circle around' the English teacher, watching intently as his shaft slid in and out of her clutching cunt-lips.
She was surprised at herself, at her total lack of self-consciousness, surprised that having those eyes on her intensely personal pleasure did nothing to detract from it. In fact, their watching seemed to heighten her delight, intensify the soaring heat of her sensations.
Jeff McNally lasted a long time inside her, fucking her slowly, expertly, his cock plunging deeply, insatiably, into the gulping soft wet oven of her steaming twat. She held her own climax in quivering check until she felt his thrusts speed up, his heavy, unrelenting crowbar of a cock seeming to reach deeper into the welcoming well of her cunt with every slamming stroke. She screamed, thrusting up to meet him, holding his thrusting hips tight with her legs, as she came to her shuddering orgasm and his sot liquids spurted deep inside her.
She lay back then, shivering, and let the after-math of her orgasm wash over her in diminishing waves of sensation, releasing the grip of her legs around his body. He straightened, and his softened, sated prick slid from her warm, wet cunt with a tiny plopping sound.
"Mmmmmm," she murmured softly. "Beautiful."
CHAPTER FIVE
Lynn's eyes were closed, her legs apart, when she felt another stiff cock slide unannounced between the unprotected portals of her slack, tender pussy-mouth.
Her eyes flew open. Don Winthrop stood between her legs, the head of his long, slender dong already imbedded in the entrance of her warm, open cunt. His hips hung in the balance, his prick poised for the long, delicious plunge into her sensitized, quivering emit-depths.
'Please,' she said. 'Not yet. I want to rest a minute.'
"I can't wait, Lynn," Don Winthrop said, plunging his hard stabbing cock deep. "I can't wait one more second."
She put her legs around him, automatically, not feeling anything, but moving her hips in sympathy with his thrusting, driving need.
He was right about not being able to wait. He came, in a frantic, shuddering, gasping orgasm, his swiftly shuttling cock whipping the wetness of her twat to a rabid froth. She squeezed him close with her legs while his pumping spasms subsided.
"Later," she whispered to him. "Later. When you can take your time."
Maybe later was all right for Don Winthrop, but it wasn't all right for the Messrs. Bellows and Montagna and Denthos. Mr. Denthos had taken off every stitch of his clothing and was leaning back against the wall, smiling, his body relaxed in every line except for the startling, long white erection that stood out from his body at an angle above the horizontal. It was an amazingly long cock, Lynn noticed, and seemed even longer because of its slenderness and the unmarred snowy whiteness of its entire length. Only the head showed a delicate, blushing pink at the very tip-tilting, pointing end.
She wrenched her gaze from the fascination of Mr. Denthos' remarkable dork, wondering inanely whether he thought in Greek or Latin while he fucked. At the side of the table next to her, Mr. Bellows stood with Mr. Montagna, both naked from the waist down, both with hard, fully erect cocks. Good-sized, stiff, panting, eagerly expectant cocks, she noticed. Mr. Bellows' was blonder in shade, and possibly a trifle thicker, like Mr. Bellows himself, but aside from that there was nothing to choose between them.
They were intently engaged in cutting the neglected deck of cards.
Mr. Montagna cut first.
"Nine," he said, his voice trembling a little, his eyes on Lynn's damp, beckoning, pinkly parted slit. She drew her legs together, but the small concealment her thighs afforded did nothing to dampen their ardor. They knew what was there, waiting for them.
Mr. Bellows cut the cards, deeply.
"Jack of spades," he said, and smiled triumphantly at Mr. Montagna. "I'm next'
He put his hands between Lynn's knees and pressed them gently apart.
"I'd really like to rest a while," she said, but she didn't try to resist the pressure of his hands.
"I'm sorry, dear," Mr. Bellows said. "You can rest later. And this won't last long, I'm afraid."
He didn't last long, either. Not much longer than Don Winthrop had. But by the time Mr. Bellows did come, Lynn's hips were pumping again in earnest, not in sympathy, and she was disappointed that he came so soon. She'd have been able to come again herself, and her cunt clutched at his withdrawing limp pecker.
But her disappointment was over in a second. Mr. Montagna slid his probing rod into her immediately, and took up the rhythm where the big man, Bellows, had left off. Lynn wrapped her legs around him happily, and began to moan as she pumped her hips, driving her welcoming cunt-lips tight against his pounding pelvis.
Mr. Montagna lasted a long time, and Lynn held herself at a high level of ecstatic pleasure until his rhythm increased to a wild, ungovernable pace; then she came with him, gasping and groaning in her deep delight.
She lay back in complete exhaustion as Mr. Montagna backed off and withdrew his limp, slimy, tired prick.
Her eyes were closed when she felt someone else move between her spread knees. For the moment, she'd forgotten Mr. Denthos, the Latin or Greek or whatever teacher, but when she opened her eyes, he was there, smiling, his long, slim snow bank of a prick poised at her closing wet pussy-portals.
"Oh, please," she said. 'Not now. Later. Please, do it later."
"I can understand that you're getting bored," Mr. Denthos said. "Perhaps you'd like some variety?"
"I don't know," she said, weakly. "What I'd really like is a little sleep."
"Of course, my dear," he said softly. "In another minute or so."
He was raising her legs slowly, resting her calves on his forearms, until he'd lifted her legs completely upward and the backs of her ankles rested against the front of his shoulders. She felt the hard, slender, pointed tip of his rigid prick slide downward, between her wet twat lips, down the entire length of her slippery, softly yielding crevice, and out again at the bottom end. The small, diamond-shaped, diamond-hard head of his cock was now lodged between the swelling, soft, white mounds of her ass.
"Oh, no," she said, "don't bugger me. Don't fuck me up the ass."
But it was too late. His hands had hooked up under her hips from the rear, and his own hips pushed forward, thrusting with a steady, relentless pressure.
The tiny aperture of her asshole constricted, indignantly resisting the invasion of the stiff, pointed spearhead. Then it seemed to relent, through no will of hers, and she felt the head of Denthos' cock enter her utmost intimacy.
Involuntarily, her hips rose upward, aid she felt the stiff shaft sliding deep, through the smooth mounds that twitched nervously, but only served to welcome the invasion, rather than repulse it Then, his flat belly was mashed tight against the yielding mounds of her ass, flattening them, and she heard herself utter a long, quivering moan, deep in her throat.
He flicked .her up the ass, then, with precision and control, and a strangely disciplined delight. He seemed totally unconcerned by the wild flailing of her legs, the ungovernable thrashing of her hips, and when he finally did reach orgasm, there was a dreamlike look on his normally austere countenance.
When he withdrew from the tight puckered em-brace of her usually chaste anus, she drew her legs up and rolled over on her side on the felt-covered table, ready to go to sleep right there, like a travel weary child.
But the fatherly Mr. Bellows took her tenderly by the hand, helped her off the table, and led her to a dimly-lighted bedroom, down a dim hallway. The wide bed, with its fresh white sheets and the blanket turned back, looked like heaven to her. She fell into it, face down, and went to sleep without turning over.
She awoke when the weight of a body slanted the mattress down toward one side of the bed. When she opened her eyes, she saw that it was Don Winthrop sitting there on the bed beside her, stark naked, with his hard, twitching cock slanting upward toward a corner of the ceiling.
"Good morning," she said. "How long was I asleep?"
"Not long. Maybe an hour?!
"I guess I needed it. The sleep, I mean."
"I guess you did. Do you feel better now?"
"I didn't feel bad before. Only a little drunk, or something. And tired."
"And you're not tired now?"
"No."
"Are you ready for some more, ah, exercise?" The upward pulsing of his rigid dork seemed to quicken, and the head seemed to be swelling. She could see it even in the semi-darkness.
"Well," she said, "I can try. And this is a little more civilized than the top of the table. A little more ladylike." She laughed. What had gotten into her tonight? She answered her own question. A lot of things. A lot of cocks, all sizes and shapes.
She lay back, contentedly passive, with her legs spread wide, ultimately accommodating. But Don Winthrop stretched out beside her, propped on an elbow, and bent over to kiss her. She opened her mouth in surprise, and his tongue found hers. She reached down without hesitation, and grasped his throbbing shaft. He broke the kiss to come up for air.
"It's all right," she said. "I'm ready for you, ready to fuck, right now."
And she was, she knew, as she guided the eager, rock-hard head of his taut prong to her warm, wet, gulping cunt. From now on, she thought, as he slid the shaft home, she'd always be ready....
The poker players took turns fucking her till two in the morning. She was numbly, but contentedly, exhausted when she drove home.
Nothing mattered, she thought, as she fell into bed. She didn't care if tomorrow never came. She was asleep without any further thought.
CHAPTER SIX
In the morning, Lynn woke up filled with remorse. It was if her conscience had returned and crawled back inside her while she was asleep. Whatever had possessed her, she wondered, after all her resolutions to play the role of the sexless librarian, to indulge in a gang fuck with a bunch of middle-aged poker players? High school teachers, at that?
It had to have been more than the Scotch she'd been feeding herself so liberally on her trips to the kitchen. She had to be out of her mind. She certainly had been out of her mind last night.
But she should have been on her guard against letting anything crazy like that happen. In this sleepy little town, of all places, where she was the new librarian and the natives were watching and waiting for anything to trigger their tongues, set them to wagging. Well, the tongues had plenty to wag about, now, if one word got out about last night. They looked like a pretty discreet bunch. But they drank. Oh God.
How'd she ever face any of them if she chanced to meet them in the street, or in the library, in the supermarket, on their way to church or wherever they went where people might be watching them? She closed her eyes, and scenes from the night before flashed across her mind, like scenes from an old X-rated movie running through a faulty projector. Their faces, their hands, even their cocks, were much too distinct. Mr. Bellows. Mr. Montagna. Jeff McNally, Don Winthrop, Mr. Denthos ( the projector stuck for a long moment on a scene of a smiling Mr. Denthos with his long white broomstick of a cock up her ass). God, in a town this size, she had to run into them, again and again--in the drug store, the car wash, the parking lot by the library. How would she ever face them, even if none of them talked, ever?
In the shower, she had her answer: she wouldn't face them.
* * *
Lynn could move very fast and with firm decision, once her mind was made up.
Her first stop, when the doors opened at nine that morning, was the Delmont Savings Bank. In it was the whole nest egg her stepfather had left in trust for her when she reached the age of twenty-one. She'd had her twenty-first birtliday the week she'd graduated from State, and she'd put her whole nest egg in the Delmont Savings Bank, never to be touched unless she really needed it. Well, she needed it now. Half of it. From what she'd heard, she could live for quite a while in Spain on the half of her nest egg she took from the bank.
Spain, she asked herself in wonder as she left the bank, why Spain? Well, she'd never been there. That was reason enough.
The head librarian took the news of her instant resignation in a state of numbed shock and mystification.
"Something's come up," was all Lynn told her. "An emergency. A serious personal emergency. I'll write you about it when I get the chance."
She wouldn't, of course, but what difference did it make? She had to tell the poor confused woman something.
She was packed in less than an hour. Fortunately, she had nothing in her efficiency apartment except her clothes, and her summer clothes should be just fine for Spain.
When she called the airport eighty miles away, she learned that there was a flight for New York at three that afternoon. She'd make it, with time to spare. She'd call someone to come and get her car to take care of it for her, while she was waiting for her plane.
And the rest of her thinking and planning she'd do after she got to New York.
Right now, she didn't want to think at all. She just wanted to keep moving.
There'd be plenty of time for thinking later.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It took her a little while to remember where she was when she woke up in the hotel in New York in the morning. She was in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, she remembered, as her head cleared the sleep away. It was her favorite hotel, when she had to stay in a hotel in New York, right at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, above Washington Square, in Greenwich Village. In the shower, she found that she felt very good, very cheerful, for a guilty girl. She had a whole new life ahead of her. Screw Delmont. It could take its public library and stick it.
After breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs, she walked around to a travel agency she knew about at Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street. Both women agents behind their desks were busy with clients, so Lynn took down a couple of folders from a rack near the entrance. "Come to the Colorful, Carefree Caribbean," said one. "Fun in Sun Land" rejoiced the other. She leafed through them, then put them back where she'd gotten them. Never mind Fun in Sun Land. She'd settle for sunny Spain, where people lived, not just vacationed. And where life was serene, she'd heard, and civilized, as well as cheap.
She looked again toward the nearest desk. The chair beside it was empty now, and the woman smiled and waved her toward the chair.
"What can we do for your she asked, smiling broadly.
"I'd like to make reservations to go to Spain," Lynn said. "For right away. Or as soon as possible."
"That's easy enough," the woman said. "Whereabouts in Spain? Madrid? Malaga?"
"Isn't Malaga down in the southern part, on the Mediterranean?"
"Yes."
"That's where I want to go."
"For how long?"
"I don't know."
"Well, the longer you stay, the cheaper the round trip. How about eighteen to forty-five days?"
"That ought to do it. And if I decide to stay longer?"
"Make your arrangements over there for your re-turn trip."
"Fine."
"You have a passport?"
"Yes." She dug it out of her bag to show the woman. "I went to France last summer."
"Then it's all up-to-date. But you'll have to get your shots.
"What?"
"Inoculations. Vaccinations." The woman wrote an address on a slip of paper and slid the note across the desk to Lynn. "You can do that this after-noon, if you have time. And I can get you a flight on Iberian Airways that leaves at ten tomorrow evening."
"Fine," Lynn said. "The sooner the better."
It was as simple as that.
Walking back to the hotel, she felt as if she was flying already.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Since Lynn was being thrifty with her nest egg, she wasn't traveling first class. When she found the row of three seats with hers in it, there were already two people in the other seats, a young man in the aisle seat, a young woman in the middle one. They both looked tall, even sitting down. Lynn looked them over for a second before saying anything.
The man was about thirty, lean and good looking if you were used to that much hair. There was a wedding ring on his left hand, and she had a secret disdain for men who wore wedding rings, but who was she to complain about Squaresville when she was fresh out of Delmont?
The girl was a slender, striking brunette, probably a few years younger than the man, but who could tell about those things? Her long, graceful legs were crossed and very much in evidence. The man's hand lay lightly on the top knee.
"I beg your pardon," she said. "I'm the body that fills the other seat."
They looked up at her and smiled in unison, then sat upright to let her slide by. She tried to make the move as unobtrusively as possible, but she heard the man take a deep breath as her rear end slid past his eyes.
"All seats should be filled with bodies like that," the man said softly.
"Now, dear," the girl said.
Lynn sat down as quickly as she could and fastened her seat belt. She felt that they were both looking at her, so she looked back.
"I'm Rita Coombs, and this is my husband, Chris," the brunette said, smiling. The man's smile was broader and warmer.
"Lynn Lautrec."
"Don't you think I should sit in the middle?" Chris Coombs said.
"No, I don't," his wife said, but she was smiling.
"Only trying to be friendly."
"Sure you are."
"Ever been in Spain before?" Lynn asked.
"No," Chris Coombs said. "Have you?"
"No"
"We've heard an awful lot about it," Rita said. "From friends. And Chris speaks some Spanish, or thinks he does."
"Speak it like a native," Chris said.
"All I know about Spain is that it's a long way from Vermont," Lynn said. "And that's good enough for me."
They made awkward, sporadic conversation until they were airborne and halfway through their first drink. Then Lynn saw Chris Coombs put his drink down on the tray in front of him with such force that some of it spilled.
"Aw, shit," he said.
"Aw, shit, what?" his wife asked, frowning slightly.
"You know what I forgot to pack?"
"What?"
"My goddamn swimming trunks."
"I knew you'd forget something. You were so proud of being all packed so far ahead of me."
"I know. Goddamn it."
"Never mind. You can buy a pair of swimming trunks in Malaga."
"Sure, but what kind of swimming trunks? Probably look like something Columbus wore."
"Did he wear swimming trunks?" Rita asked. "I never saw any pictures of Columbus in swimming trunks."
"He was Italian, anyway," Lynn said. "He would have worn Italian swimming trunks. It was Queen Isabella who was Spanish."
"I never saw a picture of Queen Isabella in swimming trunks, either," Rita said.
"Whatever kind of trunks I get in Malaga, they'll probably be pretty primitive," Chris said. "No sup-porter, or anything like that."
"Don't you know how to say 'jock strap' in Spanish?" Rita asked.
"No."
"Some native you speak the language like."
"They don't teach you how to say 'jock strap' in the Berlitz course."
"Maybe you could make some sort of hand gestures," Lynn heard herself saying. "They'd get the message."
"Or get him arrested," Rita said. But Lynn was conscious of the woman smiling at her broadly, and all at once the ice was melting.
It kept melting, all the way to Malaga, in the conversations between naps.
Everywhere but in the drinks.
* * *
They took a cab together from the airport into Malaga, and Rita and Lynn waited with the luggage in a sidewalk cafe while Chris went into a men's store that was just opening up for the day.
He came out a few minutes later grinning and waving a package.
"Primitive Spanish," he said. "Jantzen."
"How much?" Rita asked.
"'Three hundred pesetas."
"How much is that?"
"Beats me," Chris said.
"About five dollars," Lynn said. She'd been reading her Spanish tourist booklet the night before.
"From now on," Chris said, "I'll buy all my swimming trunks in Malaga."
"Sure you will," Rita said. "Let's order a drink.' "At this hour of the morning?"
"Why not?"
"You're right," Chris said. "Why not?"
* * *
Along about the third glass of red wine they'd had together, Lynn found that she was enjoying her two new friends as she never enjoyed a married couple before. They had a nice warm way of baiting each other, working up to minuscule quarrels, and making it all up, in a few sentences. They seemed to keep each other on their toes. Lynn stayed on her toes automatically. It was her nature.
"I don't believe you're really from Vermont," Chris said, looking at her over the rim of his glass.
"Why not?"
"You don't sound like Vermont', "
"I try not to. I got rid of most of the New England twang while I was in college. It was a State university, but I stayed away from other New Englanders like they had trench mouth or beriberi or something."
"I don't mean your speech, your accent. I mean the way you talk. The quick way you react. You're much too with it to be from Vermont."
"Au courant," Rita said.
"You do and you'll clean it up," Chris said.
"What makes you think everybody from Vermont is a rube?" Lynn asked. She was pleased, but she made a show of defiance.
"Aren't they?"
"Yes," she said.
"Well," Chris said, looking pleased with himself. He motioned to the waiter for more wine.
"Anyway," Lynn said, "I've left Vermont. You're not carrying a tin cup. You can see that."
"For good?"
Lynn thought for a moment.
"I think so," she said seriously.
"Why don't you come to New York?" Chris asked. He and Rita lived in New York. She'd learned that on the plane, although they wouldn't have had to tell her.
"Your head is a walking goldfish bowl," Rita said, eyeing Lynn's luscious curvature across the table. But she was laughing as she talked. "You're sup-posed to get the seven-year itch after seven years of being married. Not two."
"I was only.... "
"I know," Rita said. "Being friendly. Why don't we have some more wine?"
"It's coming."
"Well, at least you're discreet about ordering drinks."
"Discreet, your ass," Chris said. "I was waving my arms like a madman."
Another crisis detoured, Lynn thought. She was enjoying herself more every minute.
Time passed quickly, and as the wine went down the sun rose higher, along with their spirits. And the subject of Vermont came up again. The further away she got, Lynn thought, the more it came back. She decided to put a stop to all that talk about her rube background, the first chance she got.
"What do people do in Vermont?" Chris asked.
"The visitors ski. The natives make maple syrup. Everybody knows that."
"There must be more than that going on."
"They go to church. Sing in the choir."
"More than that."
"Yes, there's more than that."
"What did you do?" Chris asked. "Did you have any hobbies?"
"What are you, a cop or something?" Rita asked.
"I think we should get to know this girl better. You know the first thing I noticed about you on the plane?"
"My ass," Lynn said promptly.
They both laughed.
"How did you know?"
"They used to call me 'Angel Ass.' When I wore stretch pants."
"Hell of a good name," Chris said.
"Chris is an ass man," Rita explained, unnecessarily. "He's a leg man, too, but most especially he's an ass man. Like most men."
"That's nice," Lynn said.
"So anyway, did you have any other names be-sides 'Angel Ass'? "
"Sort of. In high school they called me the 'Last Virgin in Vermont.' " The hell they did. But she wasn't about to tell them about Too-Loose Lautrec.
"Are you?" Chris asked. "Or what I should say is, were you?"
"I'm not in Vermont'
"Don't be such a jackass, dear," Rita said to her husband. And to Lynn, apologetically, "Men are such assholes. This one, especially."
"That's all right," Lynn said. "No, I'm not a virgin, whatever that obsolete word is supposed to mean. Several times removed." She found herself stifling an urge to burst out laughing. All at once the whole thing was funny, the whole thing she was. running away from. "Half a high school faculty removed," she said.
"You didn't answer me about hobbies," Chris said. "What do you like to do?"
Here it was. Her chance to get rid of Vermont and the country-innocent image.
"I like to fuck," she said.
"Only like to?" Chris sounded disappointed.
"I love to fuck."
She was aware all at once that they were both beaming at her.
"Anything else?" Rita asked.
"Everything else," she said, not knowing what she meant particularly and not caring at all. There was a stirring of torment between her legs; she squeezed her thighs tightly together but it didn't do any good. She could do with another faculty gang-bang right now.
"Now we're getting somewhere," Rita said. She looked at her husband, who was sitting at the side of the table, between them, as they sat across from each other. "We can make this a great second honeymoon, can't we, dear jackass?"
"Sure can," Chris said, looking at Lynn. She dropped her eyes modestly, and saw a swelling and stiffening down the inner side of his pants leg. She wanted to reach out and squeeze it, just being friendly, but she managed to restrain herself.
"You mean you want me to join in on your second honeymoon?" she asked, twirling her wine glass, not looking at either of them.
"Absolutely," Rita said.
"The second we get settled," Chris said.
Why not, Lynn thought? The wine was wonderful. The whole country looked wonderful, from where she sat. Everything looked wonderful "Wonderful," she said, and now she did reach out discreetly and give Chris's cock a friendly squeeze. God, it was hard. And long. Rita smiled at her across the table.
"I forgot to ask," Chris said. "Where are you staying?"
It was a good question.
"I hadn't even thought about it," Lynn said. "I just bought a plane ticket to Malaga. I figured I'd find where I wanted to stay after I got here."
"We have reservations at a hotel in Fuengirola, right on the water," Chris said. "Want me to find out if they have a room for your "Sure," Lynn said. "I'm easy to please. But where's Fuengirola?"
"A short ride from here, they tell me," Chris said, standing up and looking around for a phone. "I'll l be right back."
He walked hunched over slightly, with his hands in his pockets, but his hard-on showed anyway, to anyone who was looking.
And Lynn was looking.
CHAPTER NINE
Lynn was deep in conversation with Rita when Chris came back to the table, and didn't even see him until after he'd slid back into his seat.
"It's all set," Chris said, looking hungrily at Lynn. 'They have a room for you. But the conversation was a hell of a strain on my Spanish."
"Well, I thank you, if that's any reward," Lynn said, smiling at him.
"Let's get a cab," Rita said, "and at least find out where Fuengirola is."
"How 'm I going to go out and look for a cab in this condition?" Chris asked plaintively, looking down at the small mountain his erection was making in his lap.
"You can't, with that hard-on," Rita said. "We'll get a cab and come back for you."
Without another word, Lynn followed her out to the street. They found a cab after walking about two blocks, around a large, open, park-like square, and with hand motions instructed the driver where to go to pick up Chris and their luggage.
He came out to the cab as he saw them pull up at the curb. He was carrying two large bags at his side and one small suitcase in front of him. He left the luggage behind the car with the driver, who was outside to open the trunk, and got into the cab and sat down between Rita and Lynn.
"It would save me some embarrassment," he said, "if you girls got the rest of the luggage."
Giggling like schoolgirls, they got out and went into the cafe and brought the rest of the luggage back to the car.
"You're very considerate, both of you," Chris said. "It's probably against the law in Spain to have hard-ons in the daytime."
"What about during siesta?" Lynn asked.
"Then it's all right," Rita said. "That's probably what the siesta was for, in the first place."
"Fuengirola," Chris told the driver. "Casa del Sol."
The driver nodded and slid closed the old, clouded glass partition that separated the driver from his passengers in the ancient vehicle. From the back seat, all they could see was the fuzzy outline of his head. He couldn't see them, Lynn knew, even if he turned around and stared. Rita's mind was evidently working in the same direction as Lynn's, but Rita was just as evidently more cautious, or discreet, or proper, or some damn thing.
"Put your head down, Lynn," she said in a low voice, "between me and the driver. I have to do something for Chris, after all that horny conversation."
"It wasn't all my fault," Lynn said, leaning for-ward past Chris and talking into Rita's ear. Girl talk, for the driver's benefit. As if he could see anything or hear anything.
Rita's slender fingers had Chris unzipped already. Lynn watched as the fingers reached in deftly, and suddenly Chris's privacy was no longer private. It popped stiffly into full exposure, very long and slender and hard, with a triangular pointed head. Like a spear, Lynn thought, feeling Chris's hand going under her skirt in back as she leaned, stroking the smoothness of her ass.
Tenderly, slowly, Rita's warm mouth engulfed the head of Chris's cock, and her head began to move up and down. Chris's finger was pressing into the slippery wet nylon between Lynn's legs, and she raised her top leg slightly. Chris's finger found its way around and inside the nylon, into the wet warmth of her slit.
"Let me have a lick," Lynn heard herself saying into Rita's ear. Like two little girls with one ice cream cone between them, she thought.
Rita's mouth left its employment with a soft sucking sound of farewell, and her head moved until it was between Lynn and the driver. Lynn leaned further, extending her tongue. Using only the tip, touching lightly, she worked her way deliberately up the long obelisk of muscle along the velvety underside, from the rock-hard base up to the pointed, expectant tip.
Shifting her position, feeling Chris's probing finger slide deeper inside her cunt, she took the head of his cock into her mouth and let her tongue flutter down-ward along the route it had taken up.
"Good God in heaven," Chris moaned.
"This is a hell of a time to get religion," Rita said.
"Oh, shee-it," Chris said.
"That's better."
Lynn felt Rita's hand touch her shoulder. She was too busy to stop what she was doing, but she could hear Rita's voice in her ear.
"Don't finish him off," Rita whispered. "Let's save him for later."
Reluctantly, Lynn took her mouth away, giving the spearhead one soft, sucking farewell kiss. Chris was quiet for a long moment while the girls kept their heads between him and the driver.
"For Christ's sake," he said, arching his hips. "Don't leave me like this."
"You can wait till later," Rita said.
"How'm I going to get out of the cab and into the hotel? How'm I even going to get this back in my pants?"
Lynn had never heard such desperate urgency in a whisper.
Her mouth went back to where it had been, and her head began to bob again. It wasn't long before Chris's hips arched violently, and he groaned, deep in his throat somewhere. Lynn could see Rita's Adam's apple moving as she swallowed, and swallowed again, and again, but she didn't take her mouth away from Chris's cock for a long time.
When she finally did, Chris's prick, limp and drained and wan and shriveled looking, was ready to be tucked back in his pants without any resistance. Rita took care of the chore with wifely efficiency, and zipped him up carefully when she'd finished.
Lynn was touched. So was Chris, evidently.
"You're a good girl, dear," he said.
He patted his wife on the shoulder and settled back for the rest of the ride. His finger had left Lynn's cunt minutes before; and left Lynn in a mood to rape the driver.
CHAPTER TEN
The Casa del Sol was a disappointment when they first saw it from the back as they came upon it along the narrow, cluttered old main street of Fuengirola. It wasn't named Main Street, of course, but it was Fuengirola's main street, Lynn knew, by any other name.
But when the cab had brought them around front, with the beach and the blue Mediterranean stretched out on one side of the--car, the place looked considerably better. It was almost modern--a low, spread-out system of wings and walkways.
"Looks like a brand-new plastic luxury motel in jersey City," Chris grumbled as he paid the cab driver. "One of the more deluxe hot-sheet joints.'
"Why don't you wait until you've really had a chance to look the place over," Rita asked him, "be-fore you start bitching?"
Lynn was disappointed in the looks of the place, too--she'd pictured something more exotic or picturesque or at least old, in picturesque old Spain--but she didn't say anything. She had something else very much on her mind. Or, rather, on the area embraced by her upper thighs. The combination of the conversation in the cafe and Chris's fond finger while they were in the cab had inflamed her, and the last ten minutes in the cab hadn't been nearly enough time to cool her off.
And Rita was apparently in the same frame of mind. Amazing, sometimes, how she and Rita seemed to think alike. While they were going through the doors into the little lobby, Rita brought up the subject, stopping Chris with a hand on his arm.
I know you've lost interest in this," she said, "but remember that little service we performed for you in the cab a little while ago?"
"Fondly," Chris said, smiling benignly.
"Well, when we were doing that, we were forming a tacit understanding with you."
"Is that what you were doing? I thought you were sucking my cock."
"Sshh," Rita said, frowning and looking around. Like in the Delmont public library, Lynn thought. But no one was listening. The lobby was deserted, except for the girl behind the desk.
"We were forming a tacit understanding," Rita said firmly. "What we were doing for you, you will do for us."
"Certainly," Chris said.
"Both of us," Rita said, looking at Lynn. Bless the girl.
"Certainly."
"And as soon as possible."
"Absolutely. Right here, if you like."
"Not right here, you asshole. But as soon as we get to the rooms."
"Absolutely," Chris said again.
* * *
The bellboy trundled his cart up and down an inclined walkway for what seemed like a long distance, until they arrived at 212, Lynn's room. He took the bags she indicated and went in ahead of her to turn on the lights or open windows or what-ever bellboys did.
"We're in two sixteen," Chris said, looking at the key in his hand. "It should be on the same wing, two doors down. I told the man over the phone we wanted to be close."
"Did you, now?" Rita 'said.
"So join us as soon as you can," Chris said, ignoring Rita's gentle dig.
"But slip into something more comfortable," Rita said, smiling.
"If I don't slip in the shower first," Lynn said. "I'm all nerves. All ending you know where."
"Easy, girl," Rita said, patting her on the shoulder. "It'll be worth waiting for."
When the bellboy came out, she tipped him with a fifty-peseta piece she'd picked up in Malaga, waved fleetingly at Rita and Chris, went into the room, and closed the door behind her.
It was a bigger room than she needed, and looked comfortable enough. It was noisily air-conditioned and had two twin beds and a door that opened, she saw through the Venetian blinds, onto a terrace. No wonder they'd had room for her in Casa del Sol in Fuengirola, she thought. Nobody'd ever heard of it. From what she'd seen so far, she and Rita and Chris were the only guests in the place.
Well, she could have done worse. She took off her clothes in nervous haste and tossed them with abandon onto one of the beds.
The bathroom was big, with a counter along one wall. On the counter was an ice bucket, filled, and a corkscrew. Evidently, the management expected guests to arrive with a thirst. But hardly the kind of thirst she had.
After she'd showered and rubbed herself dry, she walked out into the room naked except for her sandals, lifted her big bag up onto the bed that wasn't strewn with her newly discarded clothes, and unzipped the middle section so the bag lay flat on the bed.
Folded in the middle was a short terry-cloth beach robe she'd almost forgotten, and had packed at the last minute. She debated a moment, then shrugged into it. The hem barely reached the tops of her thighs, and as she drew it around her to belt it, she noticed that her pussy seemed to be peeping moistly up at her, the damp fur gleaming darkly. If she stood up straight, she noticed, looking into the mirror over the dresser, no one could see anything, or would know that she was wearing nothing underneath. And she wouldn't have to stand up straight very long. Room 216 was only two doors away.
There was no one in sight as she left the room and closed the door tightly behind her, slipping the key into the pocket of her robe. She walked the few steps to Room 216, shivering with a strange excitement in the soft, warm breeze that seemed to reach insinuating hands under her robe to caress her nakedness. She was still shivering as she tapped softly on the door numbered 216.
Chris opened it as she raised her hand to tap again. He stood framed in the light for a second, grinning, before he stepped aside and bowed her in. He was wearing a terry-cloth robe like her own, only longer. Without touching him or even looking hard, she knew that he was wearing nothing underneath, either.
Rita was sitting in an armchair wearing an almost transparent negligee. Her nipples showed through, a startling shade of pink, but her knees under the long gown were demurely together. She was holding a drink. So was Chris. So was she a moment later as Chris slipped a cold glass into her hand.
She stood awkwardly, conscious of the short robe now, and sipped. She looked around. The room was much like hers, only bigger, and the two beds were double beds, rather than twin. So that's the difference between a double room and a single. Double beds.
"Sit down, for God's sake," Chris said. "What are you shivering about? I've got the air-conditioner turned way down."
"Nervous," Lynn said simply.
Chris grinned.
"I'd forgotten I affected women that way," he said.
"Balls," Rita said. "You've just got two horny girls on your hands."
Lynn sat, trying to make the robe cover her in front, keeping her legs together. But Chris saw what he was looking for, anyway. He grinned again.
"Lovely," he said.
"You're wasting time, dear," Rita said. "Either kiss her hello or come over here."
"Where is her hello?" Chris said, but as he was saying it, looking at Rita, the tall girl languorously raised one long white leg and draped it over the arm of her chair, slowly drawing up the hem of her negligee. From where Lynn sat, across from her, she saw the long white V of Rita's thighs open to expose a dark pink, long slit of pussy, framed in jet-black "Dear," Chris said, and crossed to her in two long steps. As he dropped to his knees in front of her, the pink slit opened, and the lips of her pussy seemed to purse to meet his deep, licking kiss.
"Aahh," Rita said. "Dear heart."
Chris interrupted his activities for a fleeting second.
"Dear heart, yourself," he said.
"Don't talk while you're eating," Rita told him sternly.
"And don't talk dirty," Chris said, going back to his labor of love. Like that old joke about the Chinese muff diver, Lynn thought, named Lickety Split.
She found the whole scene enormously exciting. From the way Rita was squirming and undulating, to her it was the supreme sensation, the ultimate intimacy. Lynn crossed and uncrossed her legs, squeezed her thighs together, but nothing helped the torment between them. Then Rita noticed her evident excitement, and put a hand to Chris's forehead and pushed him gently away. Rita noticed everything.
"We have a guest, dear," she said. "You're being most inhospitable. Ladies first, you know." She laughed. What was that supposed to mean, Lynn thought. Nobody'd ever called her a lady. Not that she could remember.
Chris turned his head and smiled wetly at her. His hair was in wild disarray but there was some-thing charming in his smile.
He crossed the room toward Lynn and sank to his knees. She kept her own knees primly together, feeling as shy as a six-year-old at her first somebody-else's birthday party.
Gently, Chris slipped his fingers between her knees, his fingertips stroking the softness there. Some of her tenseness went away, and her knees began to part all by themselves. She felt Chris's mouth, then, just inside and above one knee, moving slowly upward, with tiny, soft, sucking kisses.
She felt herself trembling slightly, and as the tip of Chris's tongue slipped lightly up between the opening lips of her pussy and tenderly touched the swollen bud of her clitoris, she shuddered all over. Then his mouth took her in, her whole quivering being, and his tongue went to work in earnest on and in her cunt.
"Oh God," she said.
"Now you're getting religious all of a sudden," Rita said from across the room. "First Chris in the cab, and now you. What is it with this group?"
"I've . . . never . . . been . . . so . . . devout . . . in . . . my . . . life," Lynn said, her hips pumping almost imperceptibly, her thighs squeezed tight around Chris's tousled head.
"I'm "sorry, Lynn," Rita said, after watching for another minute. "I can't stand it anymore."
She got to her feet and pulled the negligee over her head. She had a gorgeously slender, long white body.
"Tap out the message on his forehead." Rita was standing by the bed, one foot up on the edge of it. Her twat was wide open, a deep glistening pink.
With deep reluctance, Lynn pressed her fingertips against Chris' forehead. When he took his mouth away and looked up, there was a deep question mark between his eyebrows.
"On the bed, dear heart," Rita said. "On your back, on the bed. You can take care of both of us."
Without a word, Chris did as he was told. The well-trained husband, Lynn thought idiotically. She had been on the mindless edge of coming.
Rita got up on the bed, straddling Chris, her knees on either side of his hips, her open cunt directly above his slender, pointing spear. Without hesitation, she let herself down, and Lynn watched in fixed fascination as the tall girl's twat mouth devoured first the head, then the entire shaft. With the base of Chris's cock deep in her dark underbrush, Rita looked over at Lynn and smiled.
"Climb aboard," she said.
Obediently, if awkwardly, Lynn got up on the bed, letting her robe fall to the floor, and straddled Chris's face. She was burning with the need for that tongue again. As she lowered the open walls of her sensation, to Chris's waiting, open mouth, she felt Rita starting to ride up and down behind her, with a regular practiced rhythm, like someone posting on a trotting horse.
"Ooooh," Lynn said, as the tongue probed deep, and that was all she said for several long, mindless moments.
Then she was coming, in a strange series of fluttering waves, and Rita, at full gallop behind her, was coming too. Lynn could hear her moaning, from close behind her somewhere.
Lynn leaned forward on her elbows and rested, feeling suddenly very tired. Rita was leaning for-ward, too, and Lynn heard her whisper into her ear.
"His cock's still up," Rita breathed. "He didn't come yet. I told you he'd last a long time after that cab ride."
"Umm," Lynn said. Just for the moment, she wasn't interested. She freed Chris's face from the embrace of her thighs and stretched out beside him, resting.
With a sigh of satisfaction, Rita got up from the bed and went back to her chair and her drink. Lynn closed her eyes. But Chris had other ideas.
Lynn felt a hand under her, raising her, and there was a pillow under her ass. She was completely compliant as a second pillow joined the first. Then Chris was on his knees between her spread legs, and she felt the hard point of his cock probing in the crevice of her ass.
She started to wriggle away, but it was too late. With one strong forward thrust, Chris had her impaled. She opened her eyes, then, and wriggled furiously, but Chris only grinned. She stopped wriggling, then; it didn't feel bad at all, being fucked up the ass. Not this time, after Mr. Denthos, just the other night.
"I told you he was an ass man," Rita said, setting her drink on an end table. She got up and crossed the room and lay the palm of one hand on Chris's ass.
"Go, man," she said.
And, with Rita's hand encouraging him, Chris went, man. And went and went and went, with furiously pumping strokes. Then, without warning, he came, with a spasmodic burst of energy and warm fluid.
Lynn didn't mind much, being fucked up the ass. Didn't mind at all. She discovered, and the discovery amused her, that she actually enjoyed it.
And anyway, as Chris had first said on the plane, he was only being friendly.
They sat around afterward, balls-ass naked, wearily but contentedly sipping their drinks.
"We forgot about lunch," Rita said. "I wonder if we're too late to get something in the hotel dining room, or whatever they call it."
"I've eaten," Chris said.
"Oh, shut up."
"I'm not hungry," Lynn said. "I'm just sleepy."
"Well, I guess I'm not really hungry either," Rita said. "Why don't you just stick around with us for a while?"
"I'm just plain sleepy. That plane ride and the change in time, and all. I think I'll go back to my room and take a nap."
"Ho," Lynn said, and laughed. "Anyway, I have an old-fashioned notion that a married couple should have a little time just to themselves, once in a while."
"Well, I'll be a son of a bitch," Chris said.
"You are," Rita said. "Some time soon, though, Lynn, will you spend a night with us?"
"Of course," Lynn said, and finished her drink and stood up. "See you later. After siesta."
Five minutes after she got back to her own room she was deep in a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Lynn awoke the next morning, it took her a long moment to recognize the room and figure out where she was, but as soon as she did she felt wonderful. On her way to the shower she discovered a slight soreness in the drawstring-muscles of her ass-hole. That Chris, she thought, turning the hot and cold knobs at the same time, could turn out to be a pain in the ass, and she was smiling happily at her own private joke as the spray first hit her.
She'd forgotten about the slight anal discomfort by the time she found the dining room, located on a sort of mezzanine floor a short flight of stairs up from the main lobby. She was relieved to find that she and Chris and Rita were not the only guests in the hotel. There was a goodly scattering of people eating breakfast. They were spread about in small clusters at tables all around the room.
She didn't see Rita and Chris among the breakfasters, and hesitated for a moment just inside the wide entrance to the big room, wondering where she ought to sit. There was no sign of a hostess or maitre d'.
A man sitting at one of the larger round tables stood up and pulled out a chair. He'd noticed her uncertainty in that small interval, she knew, and she thought the gesture was very kind of him. It didn't occur to her that her ass was not her only asset. She had discarded her horn-rimmed glasses, and her hair swung luxuriantly free.
"Please join us," the man said. "We need a fresh member in this jaded group." He was in his middle thirties, she guessed, with lean, somewhat saturnine features in strange contrast to his open, ingenuous smile. He looked to Lynn like a dissipated minister.
There were three girls at the table and one other man. The girls didn't look as if they needed or wanted a new presence at all.
"Well, thank you," Lynn said, stepping over to the table and sitting down as the man slid the chair under her lovely descending ass. "But this doesn't look like a jaded group at all."
"Larry and I," the man said, "are the jaded ones. Not the girls. I couldn't mean that."
He introduced them one at a time, taking some care, but Lynn didn't retain the names for a split second. She never did. The dissipated minister's name was Curt.
"Are you from New York, Lynn?" one of the girls asked, pouring cream into her coffee. "It seems that most of the people here are."
"A long way from it," she said, and laughed. "If you'd heard me say a few words, you wouldn't have to ask."
"Boston?" the man named Larry asked. He had a good ear.
"Neither New York nor Boston. I'm from a town called Delmont . . . "
"Newfoundland," Larry said. "Famous for its seal safaris."
"Vermont," she said. "And it's not famous for any-thing, except maybe maple syrup."
"You'll meet a lot of people here," Curt said. "But nobody from Vermont, I'm willing to bet. You're about as rare as a virgin in a lumber camp."
"I'm not . . . in a lumber camp," Lynn said, starting out strongly but trailing off lamely.
Everybody at the table laughed.
"You're a good girl, Lynn," Curt said. "But even so, you'll get along fine with this depraved bunch."
"Even if there's nobody here from Vermont," Larry said. "Curt and I are from New York."
"We're from Boston," one of the girls said.
"Maybe you've heard the clich� that girls from Boston are cold," Curt said, looking at the girls like a fond uncle. "But they're not, really. Only their noses."
"Fuck you, Curt," the girl said sweetly.
Curt beamed.
"You're a delight," he said. "So ethereal."
Ethereal, Lynn thought. Jesus, what a word, on top of 'fuck you.' She was going to enjoy the Casa del Sol, after all.
"If you're from Vermont," Larry . said, "maybe you could get us some of that maple syrup you mentioned at a discount?
"You're from New York all right," another of the girls said. "Always looking for something wholesale."
They seemed to indulge in the same kind of insulting banter as Chris and Rita, Lynn thought. She could learn to like it. Without any trouble, she could learn to like it.
As they were leaving the table, one of the girls said to Lynn, "We're in one o eight if you'd like to sit around and rap awhile. We can tell you what we've found out about this place."
"'Thanks, but not this morning. I want to get down to the beach and get some sun."
"The sun's out every day around here."
"With my luck, it'll probably start raining this afternoon and rain for forty days and forty nights."
"You plan to be here forty days and forty nights?"
"I don't know.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Curt glance at her quickly. "But I'm not taking any chances with this morning. One sun in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"Be very careful with that damned sun," Curt said. "It's almost tropical. Take more than twenty minutes at a time and you'll be a walking blister."
"And a terrible waste that would be," Larry said. She smiled at him.
"I'll be careful," she said. "And I have plenty of sun oil."
"Smear yourself up good," Curt said.
Larry looked at her and shook his head sadly. "That's a terrible waste, too," he said.
She waved a small good-bye to the group and found her way back to her room.
She'd never felt better in her life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She spent more than an hour puttering around in her room, hanging up clothes and putting things away in drawers. She found that she was in no hurry to get to the beach, no hurry to do anything, in fact, and that surprised her. Usually she went at the smallest chores with dispatch and got where she was going as soon as possible.
When she'd finished with puttering, she debated with herself a moment before getting into her bikini: She had a new suit she'd bought during her after-noon in New York, right after her inoculation, and she didn't like bikinis, but right at the start it would give her more exposure to the sun. As well as to stares, if there were men on the beach, but she was used to that, bikini or no bikini. Angel Ass. Damn the silly boy who'd tagged her with that name, so long ago.
The bright blue Mediterranean was less than a hundred feet from the front of the hotel. As she walked slowly toward it, she had the feeling that she was dreaming. There was something unreal about the scene. It looked too much like color slides projected in a living room to make the neighbors envious. The sky was too blue, the wispy clouds too white, the sun too bright, the shrubbery too green, the water too sparkling. She thought of pinching herself, but decided against it. She bruised easily, and it showed in a bathing suit. Or when with people who wanted to be friends, like Rita and Chris. She wondered where they were this morning.
And then, there they were, coming toward her on the concrete walk up from the beach. They were fully clothed, in sandals and shorts, but they looked sleepy, Lynn noticed as they got closer.
"We went down to take a look at the beach before we got some coffee," Rita said. "Gorgeous."
"Did you sleep well?" Lynn asked. Maliciously. Chris had circles under his eyes that hadn't been there yesterday.
"We slept some," Chris said.
"After coffee we're going to rent a car and see what :there is to see around this part of Spain," Rita said. "Why don't you join us?"
"Thank you, but I'm going to get some sun, from now until lunch time," Lynn said. "Some other time I'd like to go driving and exploring with you."
"Any time," Chris said. "We're going to keep the car while we're here."
"See you later," she said, and moved on to the invitation of the clean, white sand and the cool, bright water beyond.
A couple of dozen people lay stretched out in an irregular row of chaise-type beach loungers, most of them in the shade of permanently placed, straw-thatched beach umbrellas. More than half of the loungers, she noticed, were men, some of them with-out wives or girlfriends by their sides; and as she walked along the sand along the row, she was aware of baritone comments, many of them clearly meant to be audible.
"Good Christ Almighty," she heard a man say, in a tone of prayerful awe, as she passed. "I'll give up everything. Martinis. The ponies. Gin rummy. Other broads. Smoking. If I can just go to heaven with that."
She tried not to smile, and walked steadfastly toward an empty chaise she'd spotted, next to the last one in the row.
"My mother never told me there were things lice that alive and walking around."
"Good God. They're climbing the walls at the monastery."
"Vows? What vows?"
"I'd climb a million stairways just to watch that girl take one little step."
"Think of the poor kids getting their kicks out of pot and hash and LSD."
"There's a trip that couldn't turn out bad."
"You wouldn't ever come back."
"I wouldn't want to."
When she got to the empty chaise, she found that Curt was on one side of it, Larry on the other.
"Looks like I'm surrounded by old acquaintances," she said, smiling at them.
"We've had a hell of a time saving this for you," Curt said. "Beating women off with sticks."
She let herself down and stretched out in the sun. God, it was hot. So early in the day, too.
"Where are the girls?" she asked.
"Resting," Larry said. "They like to rest a lot."
"More likely sitting around plotting your down-fall," Curt said.
"What for? They seemed like nice girls."
"They are nice girls. Who said they weren't? Cold noses, though. From Boston."
"It's just that they don't like competition," Larry said. 'They have no competitive spirit."
"That's Boston for you," Curt said. "Would you like a drink?"
"No thanks. It's too early."
She noticed that they both had long drinks sitting on their stomachs, each supported by one protective hand.
"It's almost eleven o'clock. And it's never too early to drink around here. Around the clock. Never bothers you."
"I'll find out later."
"You do drink, don't you?" Curt asked. He raised his head and turned toward her, looking worried.
"Sure," she said. "Don't let that Vermont business fool you."
"I'm trying not to," he said. "But you better get some of that sun oil on you. You'll be medium rare in no time."
"I forgot," she said, digging in her bag. She found the suntan lotion at the bottom of the bag, and care-fully anointed her face and arms and midriff, and then the front part of her legs.
"Now roll over," Curt said, carefully setting his drink in the sand. "I'll do your back."
"We'll do your back," Larry said, sitting up and looking over at Curt. "You selfish son of a bitch."
"You look tired," Curt said.
"Never that tired," Larry said. "Or they'd have to lead me out and shoot me."
"Not a bad idea," Curt said.
"Oh, shut up," Lynn said. "Go ahead and do my back." She rolled over onto her stomach and handed Curt the lotion.
They went to work on her back, Larry on her legs, Curt on her upper torso. Larry took special pains to see that her inner thighs were protected from the sun. She wriggled a little, but didn't say anything, until Curt started being protective about the area al-ready protected by the bottom strip of bikini, between her legs.
"The sun can't get to me there," she said, wriggling violently. "So you can stop rubbing me there."
"You never can tell about this Spanish sun," Curt said. "It penetrates everything." His oily hands were now moving across the soft mounds of her ass, under the light fabric.
"It's penetrated your mind," she said, and rolled over abruptly. "Thank you both."
"You're welcome," Curt said regretfully, settling back, reaching for his drink.
Larry sat upright where he was and finished what was left in his glass. "I think I'll go see how the girls are doing," he said.
"Good idea," Curt said.
"You trying to get rid of me?"
"Yes?
"Can't blame you a bit, old man," he said, and smiled at Lynn.
"Watch his left," he said, and got up and shuffled away through the sand, waving back over his shoulder.
""I'm sharing a room with him," Curt said. "Very old friend. But he can get to be a pain in the ass."
"I think he's very nice."
"Do you? I guess he can be, if he wants to. But don't trust him, Lynn. Never trust him for one sec. "But you I can trust?"
"Absolutely. Like an uncle."
She noticed a bulge at the crotch of his trunks that hadn't been there before.
"Some uncle," she said.
"What?"
"Nothing. What do you do in New York?" She knew it was a gauche question, but she wanted to change the subject.
"You mean what did I do in New York."
"Did?"
"I'm retired."
He had to be kidding.
"You've got a long wait for Social Security," she said.
""Thank you," he said. "But I really am retired, from the New York scene, anyway. For good, I hope."
She saw that he was serious.
"That's wonderful," she said. "To be able to afford to cut out at your age."
"I can afford it for a year or so, anyway. We'll see what the year brings in. Besides some disappointment. I expect that."
"What did you do in New York?" Now she was very curious, and didn't care about being gauche.
"You really want to hear about it?"
"Yes."
"Then you better let me get you a drink." He sat up, swallowed what was left of his drink, and got to his feet.
"All right," she said. Nothing wrong with a couple of drinks before lunch, she thought. She'd have to get Vermont out of her system.
"What'll you drink?"
"Whatever you're drinking."
"Just a wine cooler. Wine is the drink of the country, I guess, and when in Fuengirola, do as the Spaniards do."
"Sounds fine with me," she said. "With all the sun and sea and sand and all."
"Don't go away," he said, and went off toward the hotel, walking slowly in the bright sunlight. God, Lynn thought. You could forget that you'd ever seen a snow bank.
Curt came back, handed her a long, cold drink, and stretched out. She took a deep sip. The wine with soda ice was perfect. It went with the sea and the sky and the sun.
"Before we go into my life story," Curt said, "what do you do? In Delmont Vermont?"
"What did I do?"
"You retired, too?" He looked over at her. "At a senile seventeen?"
"I'm twenty-one. No, I'm not retired, but I was a librarian. A brand new librarian. It's what I took at school, library sciences. I graduated in June. But I took a leave of absence from my job for reasons of health."
"Reasons of health?" he said. "You're the healthiest looking goddamn specimen of young maiden-hood I've ever seen."
"Never mind that maidenhood bullshit," she said. "And never mind what reasons of health. Anyway, I'm not going back. To Vermont, anyway."
Curt looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Then he took a deep swallow and settled his glass comfortably on his flat stomach. He had a nice build, Lynn had noticed when he came back with the drinks. Lean. No fat on him at an age when most men were beginning to go soft around the middle. Not further down, though, she thought, and tried to push that train of thought from her mind immediately. Before it took root and started to grow.
"Well," he said, "to begin with, I'm a musician. A piano player. And maybe that's all I am. I intend to find out."
Lynn didn't know quite what to say, so she looked away from his face and at his feet. He had very long toes.
"Well," she said, "you have piano player's toes." He wriggled them and laughed, then raised one foot.
"I have, you know?" he said. "Voltaire once said any man who can look at his own feet without laughing has no sense of humor, but I think Voltaire must have had funny-looking feet. I can look at my feet without laughing. I have very good-looking feet."
She looked at them carefully.
"You have beautiful feet," she said. She was quite sincere. He did have beautiful feet.
"Anyway, my feet aside, I'm a piano player. I gigged around a lot after getting out of school, and got a small combo together. We played a lot of dances and weekend affairs, and had a couple of extended gigs at hotels. But it's really a hell of a way to make a living."
"I bet it is. Should be fun, though. You must meet a lot of . . . " she almost said "interesting people." Vermont. "You must meet a lot of flaky people?'
"Outright crazies," he said. "Anyway, I formed a partnership with another guy, and we went into business, making musical radio and TV commercials. He supplied the words, mostly, and I supplied the music."
"Sounds like a great business."
"You meet a lot of crazies in that business, too. Ugly crazies."
"I suppose so," Lynn said dubiously. He was talking about another world. Another planet.
"Anyway, I had a great partner. Wrote great lyrics, for a man with a glass eye."
"He has a glass eye?" Lynn was intrigued. She'd never known anybody with a glass eye, or anyone who even knew anybody with a glass eye. Spain had a lot to offer a girl.
"Yup. Lost his left eye as a kid when he walked between a couple of other kids dueling with golden-rod stems."
"Gee," Lynn said. She didn't want to sound so girlish, but she was impressed. Goldenrod stems she knew about. Radio and television commercials were something else.
"We had a couple of theme songs, my partner and I."
"What were they?"
"I Only Have Eye for You. That was one of them."
Lynn giggled. She hated herself, sounding like such a goddamn silly young girl.
"What was the other one?"
"Jeeper Peeper."
She didn't giggle this time. The song was from somewhere before her time.
"You ever write any songs yourself?" she asked. "Sure. Mostly sentimental ballads."
"Like what?"
"Up to my Ass in Love. That was one of them."
"That's enough to choke anybody up," Lynn said, getting a grip on herself. No more giggling. "Any others?"
"Who Gives a Shit About Spring."
"Any more?"
"Well, there's my favorite. It never went any-where on the juke boxes, and Lawrence Welk wouldn't touch it."
"What was that?"
"I hesitate to tell you."
"Tell me anyway."
"Don't Fuck Around with Love."
She thought that one over for a minute.
"I like that," she said. "But it's too damned pro.. found to be popular."
He laughed.
"You put your finger on it," he said. "Let's go for a swum.
"That's a very good idea," she said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On her way to have lunch with Curt, after showering and changing into a dress for the dining room, Lynn ran into Chris and Rita. They were coming up the ramp leading to the walkway to the rooms, just back from their drive.
"This is a great country," Rita said. "Judging from what we saw of it in an hour and a half."
"Will you have lunch with us?" Chris asked.
"I'm meeting a man I was talking to on the beach this morning. Why don't you join us?"
Chris started to answer with a fast yes, but Rita cut him off.
"No, thank you," she said. "You go ahead. You work fast, for a country girl." She smiled when she said it.
"I was only talking to him on the beach. He seems like a nice guy. Plays piano. Has piano player's toes, too. Wants to do some composing over here."
"That all he wants to do while he's here?" Chris asked.
"That's mostly what he talked about this morning. Very funny guy, incidentally. You'll like him."
"Watch these funny fellas," Chris said darkly.
"Oh, shut up," Rita said.
* * *
"How long do you plan to stay in Spain?" Lynn asked, as Curt was stabbing at his grapefruit.
"As long as I can stand it. I'm looking for some kind of cottage or shack or little house. I don't need a hacienda. I can get a small place very cheaply, they tell me."
"So I've heard, too."
"How long do you intend to stay?"
"I have an open-end reservation here at the hotel, I guess. But I have no idea, really. I'm in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything. I just wanted to get away from that job in that town as fast as possible, for as long as possible. Like forever."
"Why the sudden revulsion for your job and for Vermont?" Curt asked.
"It's a long story."
"Tell me some time."
"I will," Lynn said. But she doubted it.
"I'm going to spend the afternoon looking for a place to live," Curt said, over coffee. "I've rented a small Spanish car--a Fiat, really, but in this country they go under the name of Seat--to get around in. Would you like to come along?"
"I can't today. I promised some friends of mine that I'd spend the afternoon with them on the beach. Sopping up more wine, I suppose. They seem to like to drink." It was only a small lie. Lynn didn't like the idea of house-hunting with a man four hours after she'd met him.
"That's too bad. I wish you could come.'
"So do I." She surprised herself again. She meant it.
"How about having dinner with me tonight? That's a pretty expansive offer--on the plan I'm under, dinner's on the house, like breakfast. They don't call me Zircon Jim Brady for nothing.'
Lynn laughed. If he was nothing else, Curt was funny. She needed somebody funny, after Delmont. There was nothing funny about Delmont, except from a great distance. Like from Mars.
"Sure," she said. "Love to. What time?"
"Meet me in the bar around seven?"
"Fine," she said.
* * *
After lunch she took a nap in her room. A siesta. Something about Spain, this part of it anyway, the constant, soft, warm breeze, maybe, made her feel ready to sleep any time.
When she woke up she found that her bikini, hung over the railing of the little balcony outside her room, was already bone dry, and she put it on and walked down to the beach, still feeling sleepy, but knowing that a swim in the clear, buoyant water would wake her.
Chris and Rita were there ahead. of her, stretched out in the sun, glistening with fresh oil. She smeared herself carefully and stretched out on the empty chaise next to theirs, in the shade of one of the big beach umbrellas.
"Long lunch," Chris said, looking at her lazily. "Have a noonsie with your new friend?"
"No, I didn't have a noonsie with my new friend. Or with anybody else's friend. I took a nap, known locally as a siesta. This sure is a great country for siestas. They could be habit-forming."
"Taking naps alone is bad for the complexion," Chris said. "Siestas, too."
"What do you do in New York, Christ?" Lynn asked. The same gauche question she'd asked Curt earlier that day, but anything to change the subject. Chris was acting as if she were depriving him of something, the jackass. Him and his "just being friendly" on the plane.
"I work for an advertising agency." He named the agency. It sounded like a big one, with all the names, but Lynn didn't recognize any of them.
"What do you do there?"
"He's what's called an art director, if that means anything to you. He makes layouts."
"Layouts?"
"Designs," Chris said. "It's my job to make an advertising message look as intriguing, as appealing, and as attractive as possible." He sounded like a textbook for a moment. "I do my best to further the campaign to con the boobs into spending money they don't have on things they don't want or need."
"You don't sound crazy about your work."
"I'm not."
"Why don't you do something else?" It was a naive question, she knew as she uttered it, and Chris made it evident that it was a naive question by raising his hands in a helpless gesture and looking at Rita.
"I have to make a living," he said. "And I don't know any other way. To make as good a living, any-way. I can't do it by painting pictures. I'd like to, but I can't."
"You sound a little like Curt," Lynn murmured, almost to herself. "He didn't seem to like the business, either. The people in it, anyway, he didn't like. Doesn't like." She corrected her tense.
"Who's Curt?" Rita asked.
"Man I had lunch with. He had something to do with advertising. Made musical radio and TV commercials. Do you have anything to do with television in your job, Chris?"
"I do a lot of storyboards," he said. All at once he appeared a little more interested in the conversation. "What's the rest of his name, the guy named Curt?"
"Ammons."
"I know him," Chris said, looking pleased. "He did a bunch of beer commercials for us. Very jazzy commercials, but they didn't sell any beer, and the client finally killed the campaign and went back to showing clean-cut young virgins jumping around in the daisies, waving cans of beer. It's one of the world's lousiest beers. No kind of commercials can sell it."
Chris lay back, looking exhausted, as if the short speech had taken an awful lot out of him. Lynn suspected he got suddenly tired just thinking about working. He probably needed this vacation. All at once she felt a little sorry for Chris. For no good reason at all.
"I'm having dinner with Curt Ammons tonight," she said. And then, on impulse, "Why don't you and Rita join us?"
Chris looked over at Rita. "Want to?"
"Why not?"
"Curt and I may start talking shop."
Rita laughed.
"You may talk about business, or about the people in it," she said, "but you won't be talking shop. You won't be talking business. You never do."
"I guess you're right," Chris said. "Sure, Lynn, we'd like to join you and Curt Ammons for dinner. What timer "Seven," she said, "thirty." In the pause she figured it might be pleasant to have half an hour with Curt before they arrived on the scene. "In the bar, naturally. And in Spain, I understand, nobody gets around to actually eating dinner until around eleven."
"You're on."
Conversation died, and without even being aware that she was drowsy, Lynn fell asleep. She woke up with Chris' voice in her ear. He was leaning over her.
"How about a swim?" he was saying.
"Sure," she said, looking over toward Rita, but that chaise was empty.
"Where'd she go? In the water already?"
"Back to the room to take a nap, she said. I think this air gets to you, in the beginning. Makes you want to sleep all the fine."
"I think you're right."
"Instead of a swim, we could go to your room."
"No, we couldn't go to my room."
"For a siesta."
"Not for a siesta or anything else."
"Why not?"
"Well, for one thing, if Rita comes back to the beach and doesn't find us here, she'll know exactly where to look."
"You're right," Chris said.
"And I don't think she'd like that at all."
"I think you're right. She wouldn't like that at all. She has some archaic notions. Fun and games are fine for the three of us, not for the two of us. Not when the two of us are you and me."
"So let's swim."
"So let's swim," Chris said, ruefully.
His trunks were bulging out in front. He ran across the white sand, bending over, splashing into the water still on the run. He wasn't showing off for the loungers in the conventional display of beach virility, Lynn knew. Chris wasn't the jock-strap type. He was doing just the opposite--being discreet about his hard-on in its elastic prison.
She walked down to the water more slowly, in no hurry at all, and kept on walking when she reached it, with no tentative toe-touching and withdrawal. Walking out into this water was easy. It was not cold--cooler than the air, but comfortable to walk into. And it was gin-clear. Lynn had never seen such clear water, even in mountain lakes. Looking down from the float, anchored a hundred feet from shore, you could see the bottom clearly, and the water there had to be ten or twelve feet deep.
Chris was already on the float when she got there, lying on his stomach, breathing hard. He'd raced out, doing a fast Australian crawl. Probably trying to dissipate his erection, Lynn thought.
But she was wrong. He rolled over onto his back as Lynn lay down and she saw that he still had his bulge. It was more pronounced now, as he lay with his back flat on the board surface of the float. It made Lynn a little uneasy, that bulge, and she wished that Rita were there. She'd know what to do about it.
"Do you know about the elephants?" Chris asked.
It sounded like some kind of riddle.
"No. What about the elephants?"
"They copulate under water."
Copulate. There was a grand word for you. Chris was being phony. Madison Avenue.
"You mean they fuck under water?"
"That's right."
"Why? Out of modesty?"
"No. It has something to do with their great weight. The lady elephant can't hold up under the weight of the male on dry land, so she gets into the water and takes some of the weight off her back. The water holds him up."
Lynn thought about it for a second.
"He could take the weight on his elbows, like a gentleman," she said, and then relented. "But I guess elephants are pretty smart. Even besides their good memories."
"You're not getting the point," Chris said. "I think we should play elephant "
"I'm a registered Democrat," Lynn said. "Maybe the only one in the state of Vermont."
But all at once the excitement had started, the tingling was beginning between her legs. Just like yesterday morning, at the cafe in Malaga, and in the cab afterward, and in their room after that. She tried to think of something else, but the excitement mounted.
"Let's get into the water," Chris said. "There's no one here, and there's not likely to be. That bunch on the beach don't look like they'll stir till martini time. And they can't see us, if we stay on the far side of the raft."
Oh God, Lynn thought, she was feeling the same kind of curious excitement she'd felt as a little girl playing doctor and nurse. You show me yours and I'll show you mine. A new experience.
"All right," she said. "Damn you, anyway. I won't tell Rita if you don't."
"Do I look like a mental patient?" Chris asked, and got to his feet and dove off the float on the side away from the beach.
Being circumspect, Lynn dove discreetly into the water on the beach side, then swam casually around the float. Chris was treading water. He was holding his trunks up in his left hand and grinning.
"Didn't take you long to get ready," Lynn said, treading water and looking down. Chris' cock looked bigger today, and she remembered that water magnifies. But not much, she thought, as her hand reached down and closed around the swollen hardness.
She took a firm grip and found that she could move him around in the water at will, just by tugging gently on the convenient handle of his cock. She was feeling playful. And very excited, now.
"Cut it out," he said, reaching out to hold onto the edge of the float with his right hand. "Why don't you get out of the lower half of that damned bikini?"
She didn't answer him, just ducked and slipped off the narrow strip of elastic fabric, then held it aloft, triumphantly, in her right hand. With her left, she held onto the edge of the float, as Chris was doing. Treading water would be an interference and a chore, and a clumsy delay, and she was as ready as she'd ever be.
Chris reached out a hand and placed his trunks on one of the two-by-fours bracing the understructure of the float, containing the empty oil drums that supported it in the water. Both his hands were freed.
He reached and placed both hands on her hips, and drew himself close to her in the water. She felt the tip of his prick exploring underwater for her cunt, and she reached down her free hand to guide it, spreading her legs wide and hooking her heels behind his hips.
His shaft imbedded itself easily, deliciously, not needing the encouragement of her urging heels. And then Lynn made a big discovery.
Except for the feeble leverage he had with his hands on her hips, Chris was almost helpless. She had him almost completely in her control, with her legs locked around him, and she was able to regulate his fuck-strokes with the pressure of her heels behind his back.
"Jesus," Chris said, moaning happily, "it looks like I'm completely in your power, you empress of the sea. I'm all yours."
She toyed with him for a long time, bringing his cock deeply into her underwater cunt, then letting it out until only the head remained inside. She found the feeling deeply pleasurable, but it was all like an underwater dream. There was something missing.
She was nowhere near coming when she felt Chris spurting inside her, and she wasn't sorry.
After they'd struggled back into their formal swimwear, operating in underwater slow motion, they swam lazily back to the beach. Rita hadn't returned from her siesta yet.
"Tell me, Mr. Man-on-the-street," Lynn said, holding an imaginary microphone to her mouth after she'd finished drying herself, "How do you feel about underwater fucking?"
"It's like voting Republican," Chris said, leaning into her phantom mike. "You can't get a toehold nowhere."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lynn arrived at 'the little bar, in an alcove off the broad hall leading to the dining room, promptly at seven. Curt was there ahead of her, sitting at a corner table in the protective curve of the elbow of a red-upholstered banquette.
There was a large martini in front of him, straight up in a stemmed frosty glass, and it was brimming, untouched. Either it had been served him in the second before she'd arrived or he was ignoring it. He was smiling broadly at her as she slid in beside him, evidently in high spirits about something.
"I've found a place," he said, finessing a hello, as if they were very old friends. Or new friends who'd taken a cram course and knew each other very well.
"When can you move in?" She felt a tiny twinge of something like disappointment. An anticipation of some kind of personal loss.
"Next week," he said, and either he read her mind or he had the same feeling himself. "It isn't far from here. Walking distance, if you happen to be some kind of walking nut."
"That's good," she said, trying to read his eyes. "What's it like?"
"Too good for the poor people. White stucco, a hundred feet from the water. All you can see from the porch is sea and sky, different shades of blue. Three rooms. What are you drinking? Martini?"
"Scotch and water," she said, repressing a shudder. She remembered the last time she'd drunk Scotch.
Curt motioned for the waiter and gave her order.
"Now I have only one problem," he said, "and once I've settled that, I've got the world by the you knows."
"What's that?"
"A piano. I have to try to find a used piano some-where in southern Spain. A spinet, or an old upright The place I'm renting isn't very big."
"Don't fret," she said. "You'll find a piano. I have a feeling that once you put your mind to something, you can do anything you want to do."
"Thanks," he said. "I hope you're right What's a piano player without a piano? Or a composer? I can't very well compose something like the Grand Canyon Suite on a Jew's harp."
"Might be interesting. The Jewish Grand Canyon Suite."
"That's not a bad idea," he said, if you stop to think about it"
"Oh, stop it. Are you really thinking of doing something that ambitious?"
"I hope so." He was keyed up. "I'm pretty sick of doing musical commercials exactly sixty seconds long."
"And sentimental ballads? Like Up to. My Ass, et cetera?"
"Them I still like."
Her drink came, and she raised it in a toast.
"Here's to whatever it is you're going to do," she said. "And to your piano, wherever it is."
They sipped, and he smiled at her.
'Enough about me and my fantasized triumphs," he said. "What kind of afternoon did you have?"
"Just the beach, after a nap. With the two people I met on the plane, Rita and Chris Coombs. They're going to join us in a little while, for dinner. I hope you don't mind."
"Sure I mind," he said, but he didn't look as if he did. "Chris Coombs? I know that name from some-where."
"He's an art director with an advertising agency in New York. He says he knows you. You did some TV commercials or something with him."
"Long drink of water, kind of funky?"
"That's him."
"Sure, I know him. I used to call him the Dishonest Abe Lincoln. He didn't seem to mind. But in his heart, he's a hair-splitter, not a rail-splitter."
She choked back the first comment that came to mind.
"That's him, all right," she said.
Rita and Chris arrived at the same time as Lynn's second Scotch and Curt's second martini. The martini must have looked good to them. They ordered two for themselves without sitting down, before the waiter had a chance to get away.
She introduced Rita to Curt, but Chris appeared to be an old friend. Apparently, the stresses of Madison Avenue welded people close in short stretches of time.
"The guy at your agency whose name I'm trying to remember," Curt said, as the new martinis were set on the table, "is that account executive. The one with the paunch and the pin stripes."
"Harold Baum."
"That's him. He's all the account executives I've ever met rolled into one. A liaison man who's lost contact at both ends."
"You put your finger on it," Chris said. "He approaches every problem with an open mouth, Harold does."
"I've met him," Rita said, and shuddered visibly. "They should have rolled that rock back, quick."
"Did I ever tell you about the great idea Harold had for the Revel account?" Chris asked Curt.
"No. I don't think so. I didn't know he ever had any great ideas."
"Well, he does," Chris said, settling into .his chair and his martini. "Fortunately, they dissipate fast, or someone shoots them down, and then he sulks for a week. Anyway, the Revel people came up with a new reducing pill, guaranteed to work, and of course they wanted the lucky public to know about it. And Harold had his big idea. At the time, he knew a kind of fat has-been actress in New York who could lose weight at will, get as gaunt as she wanted to, any time she wanted to. So Harold suggested they put her on Revel's weekly quiz show, weighing her every week to show her steady weight loss with the use of Revel's new pill. He suggested test markets first, of course--Miami, Sioux City, East Pelvis--where they would have a lot of local flap with posters and spot announcements on radio, and air-planes with streamers, telling everybody to tune in for the weigh-in.' "
Lynn could almost hear the quotation marks. The story fascinated her.
"While Harold was telling me this," Chris continued, "I had a mental picture of the poor woman running around all week in the hot sun, wearing a rubber suit, with Harold keeping her going with a whip. Anyway, after he'd made this suggestion to the client, saying that after the test markets they'd go on full network with the weigh ins, the client said, 'Oh, you mean we'd get another overweight woman?' Harold said, "Hell, no. We'll fatten her up again. She likes to eat."
Lynn almost spilled her drink. Curt only grinned. Apparently, he was inured to that kind of lunacy.
"They shot his idea down?" he asked.
"Yeah, after a couple of upper-echelon meetings. Harold sulked for two weeks that time."
They drank and laughed steadily for almost two hours, until it appeared that they might miss dinner.
As they entered the dining room, Larry and the three girls Lynn had met at breakfast were leaving, along with-two older men. They all nodded and smiled at Curt, and he nodded and smiled back, but no one said anything. Lynn was very curious.
"Aren't your friends a little mad at you?" she asked Curt as they were sitting down at a freshly laid table. "For cutting out on them most of today?"
"Not a bit," Curt said. "Nobody owns anybody's time over here. What you do and who you do it with is strictly your own business. You don't get tangled up with anybody unless you want to." He looked at her steadily and she looked right back. They both smiled, almost imperceptibly, but Rita noticed it. Rita noticed everything.
"Well," she said, scanning a menu the size of a billboard, "the most important thing about dinner is the wine."
They consulted the wine list, much smaller and easier to handle than the menu, and ordered white wine to go with the paella.
All through dinner the talk and laughter went on, but the laughter was not as easy as it had been earlier in the cozier surroundings of the bar.
"Let's all go back to our room," Rita said, when they were drinking their coffee. "Chris bought a bottle of Spanish brandy today at a market here in town, for about half the price of a bottle of cheap gin, back home."
"I don't know," Lynn said. She'd been vaguely afraid of this. "I don't really feel like drinking any more."
Curt had looked as if he'd been ready to say it was a good idea. Maybe he suspected what Rita had on her mind. Lynn knew. After all, Rita had every-thing to gain, nothing to lose. So had Curt, in spades. But Lynn had the feeling that she did have something to lose. For one thing, she didn't want Curt to know about her and Chris and Rita and the episodes yesterday. For no good reason, she told herself, she didn't want him to know.
"You don't have to drink," Rita said. "We'll all take up the slack for you."
"I'm tired," Lynn said.
For once, Chris became the diplomat, instead of Rita. But then, Chris had something to lose, too. He just didn't want to share anything with his good friend Curt. Not Rita, and not Lynn either.
"We can use a good night's sleep, hon," he said to Rita. "The brandy and conversation will keep till another night."
"Well," Rita said. The poor little girl wasn't going to the circus tonight, after all. And she'd had her heart set on it.
Moments later, Chris signed their check and stood up. Rita stood too, but slowly, reluctantly. Chris bent and kissed Lynn on the cheek. So tender, she thought. Dishonest Abe Lincoln. The hair-splitter.
"Maybe after dinner settles down you'd like to take a dip," Curt said, after they'd left. "It'll brighten you up if ?you're feeling tired. Moonlight swims in southern Spain are the best thing in the world for tired blood."
"I wasn't--really tired," she said. "I just didn't want to go with them. Not tonight."
"Me either." She was sure he was lying, especially if he'd noticed Rita getting horny. But it was nice of him to lie.
They walked along the beach in the bright moon-light, staying close to the water, where the sand was damp and firm. They walked almost a mile from the hotel before they turned around. On the way back, Curt took her hand. They didn't talk at all.
"We could go for a swim right now," Curt said, when they were back at the beach by the hotel.
"Have to get into suits," Lynn said.
"What for? There's nobody here."
She looked around. There was not a soul in sight.
"I don't really feel like swimming tonight," she said. "I just want to sleep." God, she thought, what a prude I must sound like to him. She was sure nobody'd ever thought of her as a prude before.
"All right," he said. "Whatever you want to do."
He walked with her, slowly, to the door of her room, still holding her hand. She found her key and opened the door and turned to him. He looked puzzled.
"Aren't you going to ask me in?"
"Not tonight, Curt," she heard herself saying. She wanted to ask him in, right then, more than any-thing in the world. "I want to think a little. All by myself."
"All right," he said, not smiling, but not mad, either. He bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth.
"See you tomorrow," he said. "Breakfast?"
"Or sometime," she said vaguely, and closed the door behind her.
She moved absent-mindedly across the room and opened the doors to the little balcony outside and stepped out, into the soft, warm night breeze. From somewhere the sound of flamenco music drifted up to her--a strangely sensuous, insistent, insinuating beat. And all at once she wasn't the hand-holding, beach-walking prude of only minutes before.
She was all horny, and a yard wide. The tingling started in her pussy, spread upward, and came right down again, the cunt-core of all pleasure.
And she'd let Curt get away, only minutes before. She came back into the room from the balcony, closed the doors, and crossed the room and went out.
Headed for that insistent, beating, sexy sound.
Headed for what she needed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Like a hummingbird to a flower, like a moth to a flame, Lynn found her way down the concrete path that led to a round, roofed, open pavilion where the music was coming from. She sifted through the shifting little knots of people to the bar, and walked around it till she was on the side where the musicians sat, plucking and strumming their guitars and various unidentifiable stringed instruments.
Colored lights played across the dark features, occasionally catching the flash of a bright white smile, and Lynn settled herself on a stool at the bar to watch, to listen, to absorb. She smiled her thanks when a tall wine drink was set in front of her, with-out her asking.
Even in the dimness of the bar, Lynn was noticed. Before she was two sips into her drink, a man appeared at her elbow.
"May I join you?" he asked, climbing up on the stool beside her without waiting for her answer.
"I'm waiting for someone," Lynn said. "He'll be along any minute."
She smiled at the man when she said it, but turned her back on him immediately after the smile. She felt him leave a moment later. Other males at the bar evidently took the hint. No one else bothered her.
Lynn had her own ideas, right this minute. The darkly handsome young men in the little band fascinated her. There were four of them, all slender, all young, with features that seemed to have been cast from the same mold. And they were all very much aware of her, she knew. She'd felt their eyes on her as she'd climbed up on the stool. In her very short skirt, it would have been impossible for her not to have put her legs on display.
But once she was on the stool, they were careful never to let her see them looking at her. When she sipped her drink, she caught their covert glances, out of the corner of her eye, and felt excitement rising in her like mercury in a thermometer left in the open sun. She turned abruptly to the bartender, who hovered near.
"Does the band ever take a break?" she asked.
"For favor?" he asked, not understanding. He was the same dark-olive color as the musicians, but older. And much fatter.
"Do they ever rest? Between times, when they're not playing?"
"Ah, si," he said, smiling broadly. "One more rest, they take, before they finish playing."
"I'd like to buy them all a drink," she said. "I en-joy the way they play."
The bartender nodded, without speaking, and his smile disappeared as he started making four tall drinks. Lynn had a distinct impression that he knew exactly what was on her mind, and disapproved strongly, but she didn't care. She didn't care about anything at that moment, except to satisfy the craving in her cunt.
She moved restlessly on the stool, crossing and uncrossing her spectacular legs, giving the band every chance to view the soft, warm welcome of her inner thighs. The musicians stared, openly now. As her excitement kept mounting, she had another thought, a thought of utter, wild abandon for a girl who'd been prissily holding hands and walking on a beach and kissing It man carefully good-night a half hour before.
She slid off the stool, all legs, and made her way to the ladies' room, where she took off her panties and put them in her handbag.
Back at the bar, once up on her stool, she swung toward the musicians, so only they could see, smiled at them, hooked her heels in a rung ofthe stool to elevate her knees, and let her knees come slowly apart, putting her pussy openly on display.
The music stopped only moments later. Lynn saw the bartender indicate the four drinks at the bar to the musicians, and she got her knees and her wits together as they. left their instruments and came toward her. She raised her drink and smiled and, shyly, one by one, they all did the same.
"I like your music, very much," she said.
"Gradas," the tallest one said, hesitantly but seriously. "You are very kind."
She looked around. The bartender was at the far end of the bar, talking to an elderly couple. There were a few curious glances coining her way, but no one was within hearing distance, if she kept her voice low.
"When do you finish playing?" she asked quietly "A half hour more," the tall one said. "Maybe less."
"Good," Lynn said.
"Why do you say that? I thought you liked our music."
"I do," Lynn said boldly. "But I like you musicians better. Could you all come up to my room for a drink when you're finished playing?"
They looked at each other quickly, then back at her. She was relieved to see that they all understood English.
The tall one nodded, almost imperceptibly, but said nothing. She could feel eyes on her from be-hind, and for the first time, began to feel uncomfortable. Without saying anything, she held out her hand, palm up. In it lay her room key, with the plastic oblong attachment with its big 212 very evident even in the dimness.
The tall one nodded again, this time feeling for her with his eyes. She met his gaze solemnly, then slid off the stool, careful now with her skirt. She raised her glass again, as in a toast, and finished her drink in one long swallow.
"Half an hour," she said, and turned and walked from the bar, not looking at anyone.
Half an hour, she was thinking, could be an awful long time in this climate.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She was wearing her short robe and nothing else when the soft knock sounded on her door.
She crossed the room quickly and quietly in her bare feet. When she opened the door, she found only the tall, shy young leader of the band standing there, hesitant and visibly embarrassed.
She stuck her head out the door and looked both ways. There was no one else in sight. She tugged at the tall one's wrist, bringing him into the room, and closed the door behind him, smiling a puzzled smile of greeting. He looked even younger in the lamp-lighted room that he'd looked in the dimness of the pavilion.
"Where are the others?" she asked.
"They be here later," he said. "One at a time."
"Why?" she asked, but she knew, even as she asked. They were being polite. They thought she wanted privacy, with each of them. It wasn't privacy she wanted, she thought. It was their stiff young privates.
"Isn't that the way you wanted us to come to you?"
"No," she said. "But never mind. I don't even know your name." As if it mattered.
"Juan."
"Call me Lynn."
She took him by the hand and led him over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, letting her robe fall open, her breasts bobbing out, the nipples tightening upward.
She saw his eyes drop to feast on her body, and she followed his gaze downward. Between her slightly parted legs, the top portion of her slit was visible in its nest of dampening curls, pink now in the light. Her cunt had been shadowed in the bar, she realized, and let her legs fall farther apart, the now-pouting pussy lips parting too.
She looked up at Juan's face. He was staring, rapt, his eyes wide. He seemed so young, now. He was certainly the youngest of the quartet of musicians, leader or not.
And despite all the exposure of Lynn's luscious flesh, he was still shy, hesitant. All except for the rigid length now visible down one pants leg.
"Why don't you get out of your clothes, Juan?" she asked very quietly. "After all, I'm not hiding anything from you."
He hesitated only a moment, then drew his shirt off over his head. He looked at her then, a long, indefinable look of combined lust and worship, and turned his back and stripped off his tight trousers.
He wore nothing underneath. He had a beautiful body, lean and long-muscled, with not a gram of fat on the whole olive-ivory length of it. He hesitated another long second, then turned around toward her, slowly.
Her eyes spent little time on his splendidly muscled chest and shoulders and belly. Her gaze riveted on the length of his oaken cock, standing out stiffly from a thick growth of gleaming black hair, holding an angle of almost forty-five degrees above the horizontal. It was long, not thick and not slender, with a heavy collar of soft, mahogany-hued skin around the neck and the base of the head itself. The head was a deep brownish purple, and larger in diameter than the long cock shaft. Like a knuckle-less fist above a stiff, upraised wrist.
When she sat up straight, with Juan facing her directly, the tiny vertical eye in the center of his purple cockhead seemed to wink at her.
And yet, somehow, he was still shy, still hesitant. He just stood there. And all at once she knew what to do about that condition. Right that second, she knew just exactly what to do.
"Would you like me to kiss it?" she asked, smiling up at him. For the first time since entering the room, he smiled back at her.
"Si, senora," he said. "Si. Oh, yes."
She put her left hand behind his smooth, lean right hip and drew him closer to the bed. Tenderly, she placed her left thumb under his up-pulsing prick at the base, and applied a very slight pressure so it stood almost straight up.
She leaned forward, parted her lips, and with the tip of her tongue touched the soft wrinkling of skin at the neck of the shaft, just beneath the head, then gathered the sliding folds between her lips in a series of tiny, sucking kisses.
All she could hear was the drip of the shower through the open door to the bathroom, and Juan's breathing, fast and irregular, as if he were in pain.
She took her thumb away from the base of his cock and let it spring straight out, then took the head into her mouth and ran her tongue down under the shaft, licking, first back and forth, then side-ways. She folded her right hand around the lower shaft of his rock-hard dork. The soft glove of skin over the hardness of the shaft felt like velvet to her exploring touch.
Lynn put her hands around behind his concave buttocks and took the whole purple head and as much of the hard oaken shaft as would fit comfort-ably into her mouth, and started sucking, moving her head back and forth like a feeding bird, her lips soft but tight around his shaft, her tongue licking and smothering his undercook. His hips started thrusting forward spasmodically as he fucked into her mouth.
His shyness was gone, now, she knew. And she wanted that hard young cock where it belonged, deep in her hot, wet, squirming cunt.
She took her mouth away from his straining prick, lingering for one soft kiss at the tip, and smiled damply up at him.
"Don't you want to fuck me?" she asked. It sounded almost plaintive to her own ears.
"Oh, si, senora," he said. "Oh, yes, I want to fuck you. I want to fuck you very much."
"Well, fuck me very much, then," she said, slipping the rest of the way out of her robe and lying back on the bed, her legs spread wide, her knees up, in the classic pose of eager welcome. "Fuck me now. Fuck me very much."
As he knelt between her open thighs she took his straining, swollen cock between her thumb and fore-finger, holding it by the soft shawl of skin at the neck, just below the swollen head, and guided it to the wet, open lips of her soundlessly gasping cunt.
She moved the tip of his cock up and down in the slippery wet entrance, lubricating it, then guided it between the parted outer lips, then in, deep, between the impatient, clutching inner lips.
Juan took over then, driving the entire length of his eager dork into her, in one consummate thrust. She held him there for a second, her ankles crossed behind him, the base of his cock jammed against her mound, his hair pressed into hers. She held her cunt tight against him, grinding in small, sensuous circles.
Then she released the pressure of her legs behind him, gradually. He was so young, she thought, looking up into the tense face above hers. So young.
"Slow, now, Juan," she said. "Fuck me good, fuck me deep, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. But fuck me slow."
Delmont's own sexless librarian, she thought, she of the horn-rimmed glasses, telling this slim young guitar-playing Spaniard how she wanted to be fucked.
His cock was deep in her now, so deep, buried to the hilt in her tender, squirming, sensation-hungry cunt.
"Si, senora," Juan said. "I fuck you deep, I fuck you slow."
He drew his cock back until only the head remained inside her gulping, clutching cunt, and she tightened the inner lips around the neck of his shaft, once, twice, three squeezing times.
"Ooooh," he murmured, involuntarily, and began to pump his now-demanding cock in and out of her ravenously sucking cunt with deep, sure, firm thrusts.
For a time, then, she wasn't in this bed, in this room, in this country, anymore. She was somewhere else in place, and somewhere else in time. It was as if the inexorable, indefinable mechanism that kept time moving at its assigned pace had developed a slipping clutch, and Lynn was a teenager again, on her back in the scratchy grass among the blueberry bushes, watching a wisp of white cloud move slowly across the pale blue September sky. The wide spread of her legs now was the wide spread of her legs then, and the hard, eager, young cock plunging slowly, with such controlled deliberateness, into her now was essentially the same hard, eager young cock that had been plunging into her so furiously then.
She had come, she remembered, that first time. Even the first eager clumsy thrust had not hurt, and it certainly wasn't hurting now. And Juan had decided to pick up his rhythm, like a good flamenco guitarist, as if he knew better than she what she wanted.
And he was right. Her hips rose eagerly to meet every deep, quickening thrust of his hard, velvet-sheathed cock, the lips of her cunt grasping and sucking as her mouth had done before, the mass of ecstatic membrane of her inner cunt mouth licking and sucking the glorious invader.
Soon they were panting and gasping in unison, southern Vermont and southern Spain, olive-skinned and white-skinned, as one delirious being. His cock now was whipping in and out of her rapturous pussy with lightning strokes, and her hips were responding with exquisite timing.
Then Lynn felt her climax starting deep inside her, and held Juan to her and screamed silently as he pumped and pounded, then clutched at him and scratched his back with her fingernails in the ecstasy of her orgasm. He was spurting hotly inside her.
She lay still under him as the spasms subsided.
"Senora Lynn?" he said, finally, his cock still limply inside her twitching cunt.
"Yes?"
"You have one wonderful cunt. You' are one beautiful fuck."
Lynn thought she had never heard a nicer compliment.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was only moments later when there was another soft tap at the door. Lynn rolled off the bed and crossed the room without bothering to put her robe back on.
The eyes of the young man standing just outside opened very wide as she swung the door inward.
"Come in," she said, and closed the door behind him as he stepped inside. He was shorter, wider, and a few years older than Juan, or at least he seemed to be.
He was not shy or hesitant at all, but her total nudity, she thought, could be contributing to his confidence.
"Pablo, my name," he said, bobbing his head and dropping his hands to his belt buckle. He looked at her, questioningly, as if asking for permission.
"By all means," she said. "Take your pants off. All your clothes."
"That is Lynn," Juan said, by way of formal introduction, getting off the bed and lighting a cigarette. "You like for me to get dressed and leaver "Stay here, Juan," Lynn said, not taking her eyes off Pablo's descending trousers. "The evening's young."
Pablo bent to disengage his pants from around his ankles, and when he straightened up, his cock was suddenly the overwhelming presence in the room.
It looked enormous, standing straight out, the head a deeper violet shade than Juan's, the rigid broad shaft a dark, seasoned-oak brown. Where Juan's was light oaken in shade, Pablo's was old, dark oak. And it looked just as hard.
She reached out and circled the large, live, fresh cock with her fist, leading Pablo to the bed by it, as if it were a handle. He didn't resist at all.
Just the sight of Pablo's enormous cock had her all aroused again, she realized, as she lay back on the bed. Her cunt juices were flowing freely and it was almost as if she hadn't just come so gloriously with Juan.
She was delighted that Pablo sensed her excitement, and without preamble he dropped to his knees between her open legs and lodged the head of his massive dork between her wetly pouting cunt-lips. The head of it was the size and shape of a large lemon, she thought. Only the color and texture were different. So different.
She spread her legs wider and rose to meet his entering thrust. He worked his hard, swollen cock in slowly, an inch at a time, until her twat was distended and full, and his dork was all the way up, deep inside her bubbling warm well. She could feel her inner lips and cunt muscles involuntarily squeezing and contracting spasmodically about the thick, in-sliding shaft.
Pablo, grinning down at her, withdrew the entire length of it, slowly, leaving only the hard swollen head in her clutching cunt entrance, and held him-self poised with his cockhead just spreading her inner lips.
Lynn quivered, and tried to suppress it, but Pablo seemed to know--he knew that that second she was right on the brink of coming. He plunged his great prick forward, then, in one deep thrust to the hilt, and held it that way, stiffly probing inside her, filling her whole consciousness as well as her cunt with nothing but mind-stopping rapture.
And all at once she was coming, writhing, squirming, her cunt clutching and gulping as if to take in more of that huge, rigid shaft. She was moaning, deep in her throat Still Pablo held himself arched over her, letting her gorge herself on his immobile cock.
As her spasms slowly subsided, Lynn became aware of Pablo studying her face, smiling faintly. His huge prick, rigid and still inside her, was the be-ginning and end of her every sensation, the concentrated center of her being. He began to stir his hips slowly, moving his giant cock around inside her like a mammoth spoon in a small mixing bowl, grinding the base of his pelvic area against her tender mound.
"You like to come again, senora?" he asked, his voice very quiet in the silent room.
"Yes," she said. "Oh, yes."
And she lay very still, feeling his seemingly end-less, wrist-thick shaft sliding out of her, almost to the tip, then slowly plunging back in, filling her with cock and contentment.
She felt her hips starting to rise and respond, slowly at first, rising almost imperceptibly to meet each long, deliberate stroke. She had thought she was finished with all sensation for a while, but she felt the needful feeling building inside her again, an even deeper, warmer, rounder, fuller delight than before. It reached to the roots, not just the ends, of every responsive nerve in her whole luscious body.
Without being conscious of it, she moved her legs to hook her heels inside Pablo's, giving her the lever-age she needed to pursue the dedication she was formed for. The exquisitely tuned and oiled machinery of her hips began to fuck-thrust in earnest, then, complementing the slow, deliciously torturing shuttling of Pablo's enormous and accomplished instrument of joy.
They fucked slowly, deliberately, gloriously, for a long, long time, and Lynn lost track of everything except the delicately demanding suck of her cunt around Pablo's in-sliding thick rod of smooth, hard muscle.
Gradually, very gradually, in perfect accord, the rhythm of their strokes increased in tempo, and soon she heard herself gasping, unable to control the sound issuing from her throat. She was only dimly aware of the choked words that formed themselves in her throat and issued from her writhing, rejoicing lips.
"Drive your cock deep in my cunt, Pablo," she could hear herself saying. "Deep in my hungry twat In my fucking, sucking cunt, Pablo. My cunt is sucking your cock, Pablo. Can you feel my hot juicy cunt, licking and sucking your big lovely prick? Eating it. Lapping it. Oh, push that big hard cock all the way into my cunt, all the way up to my throat. Fuck me hard, Pablo. Fuck me harder."
He drove the great shaft into her with renewed fury, faster and deeper, it seemed to her, with every stroke. The.. was blind with sensation for a long second, and she had reached the point of no return.
Pablo held his great shaft still, deep inside her, as she writhed in her own exquisite agony, and then he came with her, squirting and pumping deep into her, bathing her inner fires with the balm of his spurting semen.
Moments later, just before he reluctantly pulled his diminished prick from her softly grateful twat, Pablo leaned down and whispered into her ear.
"Very lovely, senora,' he said. "Beautiful fuck. Best young fuck in whole country."
Pablo looked as if he knew what he was talking about, comparing her to every other fuck in the whole of Spain.
But, once more, she was very pleased. It was her second, deeply sincere compliment in the last half-hour.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Pablo had rolled away from her and gotten to his feet, she was astonished to see that the rest of the band had arrived.
Not only had they arrived, but they'd undressed, and now sat impatiently on the edge of the other bed, both vibrantly erect. Neither cock was as big as Pablo s, nor quite the size of Juan's, either, but they were obviously not lacking in rigidity or enthusiasm.
"That's Roberto," Juan said to Lynn, indicating the slimmer of the two who was sitting near the foot of the other bed. "And Manuel."
She nodded and smiled, but for a second she was uneasy. After Pablo she wasn't exactly eager anymore--at least for the moment--for the kind of Little League fucking these slim young pricks seemed to promise. But she had to be polite.
"Roberto and Manuel," she said, "you'll have to forgive me, but I'm all fucked out for the time being."
They nodded politely enough, but the apology did nothing to soften their cocks, which poked ceiling-ward.
Don't be such a prude, Lynn, she told herself suddenly. Be nice to your guests.
"But I can at least be friendly," she said, and moved over on the. bed to the very edge and patted the middle. "Roberto?"
The slim boy hesitated only for a second before he got up and came over to the bed.
"On your back," she said, and he did as he was told. Feeling his soft, brown Spanish eyes curiously watching her every move, she gently pushed his legs apart and knelt on the bed between them.
Leaning forward, she tickled his balls for a moment, cupping the soft sack tenderly in her palm. Then she extended her tongue, leaned farther for-ward, and licked the underside of his stiff, pulsing cock, slowly, with fluttering sideways strokes, from the pulse at the base to the glistening swollen tip.
Once the tip was between her lips, she opened her mouth wide and engulfed the whole head and a good part of the tense shaft, licking and sucking in earnest, as excitement rose again in her, along with the rigid prick now tickling the back of her throat. She increased the pressure of her lips, sucking the youth's cock deeper, harder, while cradling the length of it against the soft, wet, hospitable insides of her busy cheeks.
"Oooh, seniora," she heard Roberto moaning, and then she felt a weight on the bed behind her, and knew instinctively that it was Manuel, the fourth and so far neglected member of the band.
For a moment she wondered what he was up to, but only for a moment. She felt him take an unmistakable position immediately behind her elevated ass, and a second later felt the hard, shelving head of his thrusting stiletto of a cock press lovingly against the tiny, pursed orifice of her anus.
Instead of drawing away, she pushed slowly back against the probing invader, and kept her mouth busy sucking Roberto's thrusting cock. She felt Manuel's slender shaft slide deep into her ass, right up to the hilt, in one eager thrust. He began to pump it into her at a steady pace, as she busied her mouth sucking Roberto's grateful young cock.
But all at once she wanted more. More of everything.
She freed her mouth so she could talk.
"Let's lie down, Manuel," she said. "On your side, slowly. Careful. Keep your cock tight up where it is, up my ass."
Manuel didn't have to be told and he didn't ask questions, in English or in Spanish. His language and hers now were one and the same.
He stayed firmly imbedded as he rolled with her onto his side along one edge of the bed. Lynn. looked over to where Juan was sitting, and saw what she hoped to see. Juan was as erect as he'd been when they'd first fucked, and he had read her mind.
He came over to the bed and lay down on his side close to Lynn, facing her. She raised her top leg high in the air, opening her quivering pink cunt to him, and he inserted his hard swollen dork without hesitation, driving it deep into her with one long, firm stroke, holding it there, resting against Manuel's slim rod through the thin slippery membrane between Lynn's vagina and colon.
Lynn was filled with burning excitement. And two stiff young cocks.
"Roberto," she said, "come back here."
She missed the cock in her mouth. Roberto brought it back to her mouth somehow, arranging himself along the pillow at her head. She held the base in one hand and took the hard, glistening head and most of the stiff shaft into her mouth in one long, deep suck.
She was filled with cock, she thought, everywhere in her body where there was room for a cock, front, back and above. Here, there, and everywhere. A cock up her ass, a cock in her busy mouth, a cock in her gulping, clutching, squeezing cunt. It seemed like more sensation than one girl's body could stand.
She tried to devote herself to Roberto's straining, supplicating prick, licking and sucking it with care and devotion, letting the lower locations of her rapture take care of themselves. Juan and Manuel began band-fucking her then, in exquisite harmony, team-fucking her, really, she thought, like a crew of rowers on a racing shell. Juan, in her cunt, was rowing stroke, and Manuel, his slim oar up her ass, matched the beat precisely, plunging deep, putting his back into it. Now, Lynn thought, I know where the word 'cockswain' comes from.
She was getting giddy with rapture, she knew, and she wanted to laugh out loud. But her mouth was full. And busy, with Roberto's thrusting cock.
Licking, sucking, gobbling the demanding shaft in her mouth . . . feeling the plunging, probing, driving thrusts of the stiff, relentless cocks in the wet, quivering morass of screaming membrane inside her . . . hearing, in her ears and inside her head, the growing and receding groans and moans and gasps in the room . . . Lynn felt that her brain was melting. She was one great palpitating mass of sensation, of rapturous feeling that transcended mere pleasure or fulfillment or mortal ecstasy. She wanted to scream, but she couldn't.
* * *
She had no idea how long the gang-fucking, gang-sucking lasted. Roberto was the first to come, squirting his hot young juices into her throat. She swallowed, swallowed again, and then licked and sucked him dry, using her hand to milk out the last pearly drop. But by then, the movements of her mouth were automatic. All sensation had shifted downward, to the plunging, driving strokes of the oars below.
Very soon after Roberto's sated prick had slid from her lips, she was at the quivering, screaming peak of orgasm. She could stand no more, she knew, without losing her grip, without slipping into unconsciousness.
"Now," she screamed. "Now! Manuel, Juan . . . now!"
They raised the tempo of their strokes to a furious, pounding series of lightning plunges. Lynn exploded and came, in a never-ending series of thunderclaps deep inside her. She could hear her own gasps and groans, and was powerless to stop them.
Then Juan and Manuel, with one last plunging, back-breaking stroke, crossed the finish line together. For the first time, they broke their rhythm, and their juices spurted raggedly, warmly, searingly, into her cunt-depths and her convulsing colon.
* * *
It was three in the morning when the band left, after fucking Lynn--and themselves--into a weary, happy frazzle.
The door had just closed behind them when Lynn realized that she hadn't even offered them a drink.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Lynn woke up late, and lay in bed for a long time, puzzling over her behavior with Curt the night be-fore. The interlude with the musicians had no more significance than a dream. It was her behavior with Curt that really bothered her.
What had gotten into her? Or what hadn't gotten into her? In the past two weeks, she'd been eager to fuck every Tom, Dick, and Harry, or every Juan and Don and assorted faculty members and musicians; but last night, with a man she'd really wanted, she'd behaved like a nun on sabbatical. Turned him away at the door.
What was wrong with her, anyway? She dragged herself out of bed at last and headed straight for the shower. Maybe some cold spray would clear her head.
There was no one she knew eating breakfast, and she was just as glad. As she was finishing her coffee she thought it might be a good idea to take a drive all by herself, and see what there was to see in this part of the Costa del Sol.
As she approached the desk in the lobby to find out about renting a car, the girl behind it slipped away and headed toward the door marked 'Ladies.' Lynn waited patiently for her to return, but after a minute or so a door lettered 'Manager,' to the right of the desk, opened, and a tall, tanned man stepped out. He was a good-looking man whose age was not apparent, with a neat Van Dyke beard. His hair was very light for a Spaniard. Sandy, almost.
"May I be of some assistance?" he said, smiling at her. His accent was an odd mixture of Oxford British and Spanish, and she sensed that he chose his words with a conscious effort.
"I wanted to rent a car for a day or two," she said. "I thought you might have a number for me to call here in Fuengirola."
"We have the number, yes," he said, going behind the desk in the girl's place. "But I am afraid it would not do you any good to call it now. All cars now are rented. After the weekend, early next week, there will be cars available again."
"Thank you for telling me," she said. "I'm in no hurry. My explorations can wait."
"There are bus tours for guests at the hotel."
"I don't think I'd like that. I'd like to explore on my own."
"A shame," he said, smiling again. He had a charming smile. He didn't have to speak English at all with that smile. "You are Miss Lautrec? In Room two twelve?'
"Yes. How did you know? I saw you when you checked in. I like to take a peek--is that the word?--at new guests. The peek I took at you was the most rewarding I have taken in six months here. Please pardon my hesitating English."
"You speak good English," Lynn said.
"When I only speak it isn't too bad. But when there are letters to write--to American travel agents, to American guests who leave things behind, and they leave much behind--then it is an agony."
Lynn had a quick impulse, and she didn't choke it back.
"Are there many letters?" she asked. "To Americans and to English people, I mean?"
"Never more than two or three a day," he said. "But to me, they are the hardest part of my job. I have been promised an assistant who is fluent in the English language--in writing the English language--but so far, nothing." He shrugged.
"I l be glad to write the letters for you while I'm here," Lynn said. "I'm sure you have an English or American-speaking typewriter in your office?"
"That I have," he said, with a smile of sheer de-light "It would be too kind of you. I couldn't ask it."
"You didn't ask, I volunteered," she said. "I'll stop in your office every day, right after breakfast or right after lunch, whenever I have nothing else to do. Those are wasted hours, anyway, before I go in for a swim."
"I must find some way to thank you," the tall man said. "My name is Rico Clemente, by the way."
She extended her hand, and he shook it. For a second, she had been afraid he was going to kiss it.
While they were shaking hands, the glass lobby door opened, and Curt walked in, smiling at her. Thank God, he wasn't going to be angry about the ridiculous way she'd behaved the night before.
"Today," she said to Rico Clemente as he let go of her hand, "it will be right after lunch."
"Very good," he said. "Any time you want to help me is very good."
The clerk had come back from the ladies' room, and Senor Clemente went back through the door to his office.
"What's so very good, any timer Curt asked as he stepped closer to her and reached up to squeeze her nearest shoulder.
"I've volunteered to help him with the hotel's correspondence, in English," she said. "Once a librarian, always a librarian. You can't get away from it."
"You've been doing pretty well up till now."
"It's really such a small favor for me to do. And he's such a nice man."
"I wouldn't know," Curt said. "He never knocked himself out to introduce himself to me."
"Did you want him to?"
"Of course not."
"Then what are you bitching about?"
They had moved out into the middle of the lobby, and Curt grinned at her suddenly.
"Did I sound like I was bitching? I guess Pm jealous. I don't meet .a Lynn Lautrec every day, or every week. Or every lifetime. I'm curious about what brought you to the desk in the first place. You didn't just waltz up to him and volunteer to help him write letters in the all-purpose English language."
"No. I wanted to find out where I could rent a car, so I could do some exploring."
"You're a nut," Curt said, looking pained. "I've al-ready rented a car by the week, and you know that I'll drive you anywhere you want to go. Or if you want to drive around by yourself, here's the key."
"Oh, stop it," she said. "I didn't have any burning desire to drive around on my own. I just forgot that you told me you had a car. Also, if you want to know the truth, I was pretty sure you were mad at me, after last night."
"No," he said. "It was my own fault. I was rushing things. But that has something to do with the climate. And the whole what-the-hell atmosphere over here. People have a tendency to shed their inhibitions. People just do what comes naturally, right away, without any of the old hat-dance they go through on their own home grounds. Boys and girls both," he said, looking into her face.
"Maybe I just haven't been here long enough."
"Well," he said, "that's better than telling me you're just not that kind of girl."
"Isn't it?" She laughed. So did he.
"Let's go for a drive."
"Now?"
"Why not?"
"All right."
"We can look for bullfighters on their day off," he said as they climbed into his little white rented Seat. "Also, I've discovered a couple of quaint little native bars, untouched by tourists. I've planted my flag in them."
"I bet you've done a lot of flag-planting over here," she said before she could stop herself. She was thinking of the three girls with him and Larry. that first morning.
"Now, now," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
They were driving on a road so narrow she didn't know what they'd do if they met a car coming the other way. There was a mountain rising steeply on one side, and a sheer drop on the other, so far down she couldn't make herself look.
After a while, the sheer drop was replaced by olive groves, in wide steps that looked as if they'd been cut into the slanting hillside. She felt more comfortable with the olive groves. You could fall down them in stages, one by one, all the way to the cool, blue Mediterranean.
"Forget what I said about people losing their inhibitions over here," he said. "That doesn't apply to you. And there's something you ought to know."
"You're married?"
"Divorced. Not that. The whole bedding down business. What I've come to believe about it. I'm pretty archaic about the whole scene, anyway. I don't believe there's such a thing as a man seducing a woman, or the other way around, in the classic sense, with the whole thing culminating in vintage wines and violins. When the girl is ready, she lets a guy know, is all. And the other way around, too. So let's drop the subject."
"You brought it up," she said. "I already dropped it, a long time ago."
He was quiet for a while, paying attention to his driving. On that road, right along that stretch, she was glad he was giving his driving all the attention he had.
After a while, the road flattened and straightened out, and he turned to grin at her.
"There's a little village near here," he said, "or rather a cluster of houses. There's no church and no gas station and no post office and no store. But what there is is a nice, dim, cool little bar. And that little bar makes up for all the other things the town doesn't have."
"Let's go," she said. "I'll plant a flag there, too."
He looked at her to see if she was needling him, but she wasn't. Right then, the bar sounded like a wonderful idea to Lynn. At ten-thirty in the morning. Goodbye, Vermont, she thought.
The bar was everything he'd said it was, dim and cool. And empty. The proprietor came through a curtained door on one side of the little room as they settled themselves on stools. He was smiling, but he didn't say anything, just stood behind the bar in front of them, waiting for their order.
"Ever try a Dutch beer called Amstel?" Curt asked her.
"No. But I'm willing to try it.'
"Two Amstels," Curt said.
The man, dug two bottles out of cracked ice, opened them, and set out tall glasses. As she sipped, Lynn was reminded of the morning in Malaga with Chris and Rita, and all at once she felt the level of lust rising in her, like the beer poured into her glass. And it wasn't an all-purpose, indiscriminate lust, like that morning with the Coombs. It was a very specialized, discriminating kind of lust.
She wanted Curt, wanted him badly, and to hell with everything else.
"After we finish this beer," she said, not looking at him, "I'd like to see the place where you're going to live."
"Sure," Curt said. "Wonderful idea, but I was afraid to bring it up' ,myself. It's only about a twenty-minute drive from here."
He finished his beer quickly, but no more quickly than Lynn did. She hadn't chug-a-lugged a beer since her freshman year at college. She wondered if Curt knew what she had in mind.
Not that it mattered. He'd find out soon enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
From the open porch of the tiny white stucco cottage you could see the red tile roof of the hotel, a mile or so away, but no other structure of any kind. Just the sea and the sky, Curt had said, in two different shades of blue.
Curt opened the front door for her to enter, with-out using a key.
"Why isn't it locked?" she asked, stepping inside.
"Nobody locks anything in this part of the world," he said. "Apparently, nobody ever thinks seriously about stealing. Anyway, what would they do with anything they stole? Where'd you look for a fence in the town of Fuengirola?"
"You're a cynic."
"No, I'm realistic."
The living room, running the full width of the cottage, was neat and clean, furnished with a couch and chairs and a table. On the floor was a carpet of woven straw, with what looked like buzzards in flight all around the border.
"Very nice," she said. "Why aren't you moving in right away?"
"First of the month comes up next week, and these people are very neat about everything, including their bookkeeping. Also, I'm paid up at the hotel for three more days. I sent them a check for a week's reservation, way back in June."
"If you'd made reservations that far in advance, you could have gone anywhere. Why Fuengirola?
"Because I'd never heard of it, and neither had anyone else I talked to.'
"That's as good a reason as any," she said, sticking her head into the neat little kitchen. Stove. Refrigerator. Everything anyone could need. She was surprised that the place had electricity.
"What reason did you have for coming here?"
"I told you before, that's a long story.'
She opened the door to the bedroom and walked in. All the way in. There was a chest of drawers, two straight chairs, a bedside table with a lamp, and a double bed, all made up, turned down at one corner, ready for occupancy.
Curt had followed her, aimlessly, it seemed, into the room. He was close behind her as she turned, and she looked up into his face.
"Remember what you said earlier?" she asked, her heart pounding against her ribs.
"About what?"
"About doing what comes naturally?"
"I remember," he said, and his arms were around her, pulling her close, and his open mouth was over hers. It was a warm, tender kiss to start with, but all at once their tongues had come alive, and she was aware of a swelling rigidity against her stomach. She broke the soft suction of their mouths and kicked off her sandals.
"Enough of this foolish lovemaking," she said, trying to make her voice sound bold, or at least lighthearted. But there was a quiver in her tone.
"Yes," he said, pulling his shirt off over his head as he stepped out of his loafers. But swiftly as he undressed, she was swifter, sliding naked between the sheets seconds ahead of him.
Her eyes opened wide in the brief moment he stood upright after stepping out of his undershorts. He had a glorious cock, the best she'd seen in her cram course of the last two weeks. It was easily as long as Chris's, maybe .longer, and much thicker, with a purple tinge to the swollen, glistening-hard head. If she'd seen that mammoth shaft protruding from the body of any man but Curt, she'd have been frightened.
But as it was, she was filled only with anticipation, waiting to be filled with much more. As Curt arched over her in the classic pose, she spread her legs wide and reached down with one hand to guide his fine, big cock to the portals of her pussy. Once the head was fully imbedded in the warm welcoming wetness, her last doubt disappeared.
She lay back joyfully, her hands clasped behind Cult's neck, and sighed as the rest of the thick, rigid dork slid slowly into her eager, open twat.
Curt stopped his progress when he was not more than halfway in by her estimation.
"You want it all?' he asked softly. "I don't want to hurt you, this first time."
"All of it," she said. "Every thick, lovely inch."
He pressed it the rest of the way home, then, until their matted damp hair was jammed fiat together, their pelvic mounds hard against each other. Then he withdrew his cock, all but the hard swollen head, and held himself that way for a long moment.
"Please?" she said, looking up at him, and he began to fuck her with long, slow strokes. Her hips responded involuntarily, matching his rhythm, adding a few wriggles and twists all on their own as she contracted her inner cunt lips to squeeze his cock fondly at the deep end of each long, thrusting stroke.
She had no idea how long it went on. She lost all track of time, and when she finally reached orgasm, moaning her joy, Curt came with her, and she knew it was no accident. He'd waited for her.
All she could think, as she drifted off drowsily into something like sleep in the bright, sunlit room, was that she'd never known anything could be so good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They were almost too late to get lunch back at the hotel, but not quite. Chris and Rita were just leaving the dining room as they came through the archway.
"Missed you at the beach this morning," Rita said.
"We went exploring," Lynn told her. "And found a fine little bar, without tourists, that's just perfect for morning drinking. And I saw the place where Curt will be living over here. It's a beachcomber's dream."
Rita reacted the way Lynn had known she would: with a long, knowing look.
"I trust you christened it," she said softly, so only Lynn could hear. But Chris heard, and once again, he was the diplomat.
"Like to see the place," be said, all Babbitty heartiness.
"Sure," Curt said. "Any time. But the best time will be the housewarming. I'll be throwing one next week."
"If we're still here," Chris said. "We can only stay for one week. I've got to get. back and work on a campaign for a new account the agency has the hots for. It'll be part of their presentation. You know about presentations."
"I know," Curt said. "But I'm trying to forget."
"See you at the beach?" Rita asked. She glanced at Curt briefly when she said it. Bright and perceptive as she was, Lynn thought, Rita could be pretty obvious. But she didn't mind, now. Fun and games with Rita and Chris would be fine now. She and Curt had a good thing going, a remarkably good thing, and it was completely mutual. She didn't feel that she had anything to lose now, exposing Curt to Rita. Exposing him? She almost laughed out loud. She'd like to see Rita's face, with Curt's equipment exposed to her. She really would.
"Sure, we'll be down at the beach. A little later. We have to eat first."
"Bad habit," Chris said, "but go ahead. We'll see you later." They ambled off, while Curt and Lynn found a table and sat down.
"There's something about that Rita," Curt said, after they'd ordered. "She's very intense. I keep getting vibrations from her, like she's trying to tell me something."
'You know damned well what she's trying to tell you.'
"What?"
"Don't you know?"
"No. I really don't."
"You're putting me on. She has the hots for you, is all. It's as simple as that."
"How do you know that? Did she tell you?"
"She didn't have to tell me."
"Well, that's pretty goddamned flattering, but no thanks. You're all any man in his right mind could ever want."
Lynn liked that. She was quiet for a minute, thinking.
"She's a very attractive girl, Rita," she said finally.
"Very." He agreed too easily. It annoyed her, for just a moment.
"And Chris is a very attractive man," she said. "Not to me, he isn't."
"I'm glad of that."
"What's that supposed to mean? And what are you getting at, anyway?"
"It's not what I'm getting at. It's what they'll be getting at, before long."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
"I think Rita and Chris go in for games. Swapping games, and I don't mean horse trading."
"That's interesting," Curt said. "How do you know? Did they talk to you about it?"
"In an oblique sort of way." Oblique. Good God. Curt should know.
It was Curt's turn to be quiet.
"I never got involved in that swapping business," Curt said, after a while. "Not that I have anything against it. But I had a wife with archaic ideas. Brought up in Ohio."
"I imagine they do some swapping in Ohio," Lynn said. "There's probably not an awful lot of other things for people to do there."
"There's something in that."
"Well," Lynn said, "if and when the subject comes up with Chris and Rita, I'll play it by ear. Whatever you want to do, I'll do."
Curt rested his gaze on her for several long, slow heartbeats--it was a level, studying look--before he spoke.
"You're a good girl, Lynn,' he said. "And you know that fun is where you find it. As long as you don't take it seriously, or take it for something else."
"I know," she said. "And above all, never feel guilty."
"You've got the idea," he said.
* * *
Chris and Rita appeared to be asleep in the shade of one of the beach umbrellas by the time Curt and Lynn made it to the beach, but they'd had the beach boy set up a pair of extra divans beside them. Curt and Lynn anointed themselves, carefully smearing each other's backs with oil and affection, and stretched out in the dizzying brightness. Chris and Rita had all the shade in that particular spot.
Chris opened one eye.
"Don't you two go to sleep in that sun," he said. "I don't like to see deep-fried friends."
"In about twenty minutes," Curt said, raising one wrist and pointing at his watch, "we're getting out of the sun and going in for a swim. I've set my mental alarm clock."
"I'll stay awake,' Chris said. "In case your clock doesn't work."
"No need. There's no danger of my going to sleep."
"You talk too much . . . all of you," Rita said, opening both eyes. "How's a girl going to get any rest?"
"All you've done is sleep since we got here," Chris said.
"Is that all I've done?" Rita said lazily, looking at him. "Where've you been?"
"I'm going to get us some drinks." Chris rose in sections and walked over toward the roofed-over bar.
"Now you're making sense," Rita said, to his de-parting back.
He came back with four of the tall wine coolers.
"These things are getting to be habit-forming," Lynn said, sitting up and sipping. "Like salted peanuts."
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They switched to rum drinks on the next round, and the rum drinks were habit-forming that afternoon. They all had two more before they went in for a swim, and two more afterward. Lynn could feel the drinks very strongly, but she didn't care. She had a pretty good idea of how they'd all wind up, and she was downright eager for the action.
But it seemed to her to be a long time coming. It was Rita, as she'd known it would be, who broke the ice.
"I've had enough booze in this heat," Rita said, putting her empty glass down in the sand. "Let's all go up to our nice air-conditioned room and do our drinking there."
"Good idea," Chris said, as if he hadn't been nursing the same idea himself, right along.
"Suits me," Curt said. "Lynn?"
"Sure. I've had all the sun I can stand for one day." Casual. Oh boy. She was getting good at this.
Curt collected the empty glasses and took them back to the bar, and they made their way to the Coombs's room, constantly shifting their formation like drunken birds in slow-motion flight.
When they got to the room, Chris went into the big bathroom with its handy service counter. Soon there was the sound of ice dropped into glasses, and Lynn thought it was probably the most heart warming, homey sound she'd ever heard.
It was very cool in the room, after the heat of the beach. Lynn and Curt were sitting in the two arm-chairs, Rita stretched out on one of the double beds, her head propped up against the bunched pillows, when Chris came back into the room with his hands surrounding four tall drinks.
Lynn carefully separated one of the glasses from the cluster and sipped. It was a fairly close approximation of the rum drinks on the beach. Not as good, but it didn't matter. Soon, Lynn was sure, there would be other pleasures to occupy them. Chris stretched out on the empty bed and looked over at Rita. She didn't waste any more time.
"I think I'll take a shower," she said. "Anybody like to join me?"
Slowly, she reached behind her and loosened a zipper down her back, then shrugged. Her straps fell down and her swimsuit slipped to her waist. Her breasts, in, snowy contrast to the rest of her torso, jiggled into view, the tips pouting.
The pink jutting nipples seemed to wink. Toward Curt. He looked over at Lynn, and she smiled a Mona Lisa smile and nodded, ever so slightly.
"I could use a shower," Curt said amiably. "Get some of this salt off me."
He started to get to his feet.
"Me, too," Lynn said, standing up abruptly.
"I'm sure there's room for four," Chris said, swinging his feet to the floor. "It's a pretty big shower space."
It was, too--a big, tiled, oblong space that looked as if the architect simply hadn't known what to do with the area at the end away from the shower.
But it wasn't such a roomy space with the four of them in it, all naked.
The men both had semi-erections, Lynn noticed. Hard-ons at half-mast. But the swelling and lifting process was still going on, and she watched, fascinated, while Rita adjusted the spray.
"Let me soap your back," she said to Curt, holding up a cake of soap, and Curt turned around obediently under the lukewarm stream, bumping into all of them in the process. He couldn't help himself. There really wasn't much room at all, and when Curt and Chris had full erections, Lynn thought insanely, there wouldn't be room even to turn around.
Curt was grinning at her crookedly as Chris stepped out and came back with another cake of soap. He started working his way down Lynn's wet back, soaping with exquisite care.
"Thank you, Chris," she said, and then his soapy hands were cupping her breasts, soaping them too, and she felt her nipples tightening, rising. Some-thing else was rising, too, touching into the crevice of her ass, between the slippery, soapy white mounds. Chris's stiffened prick.
"Why, Chris," she said, over her shoulder. "I didn't know you cared."
He squeezed her slippery breasts with great fondness.
"You know now," he said.
Rita had turned Curt around to soap his chest and belly, and with what seemed like one great pulsing leap, his hard-on was complete. Rita, looking down, stopped her soaping motion.
"Good God in Heaven," she said. "Why girls leave home."
Chris looked, too.
"You're going to ruin everything for me, Curt," he said sadly.
"I've been told it isn't the size," Curt said. "It's the way you use it that counts.'
Neither girl said anything. Rita skipped the entire area of Curt's flat lower belly and started soaping his huge, stiff cock, starting at the head and working her way back.
"I've got plenty of soap on me now," Lynn said to Chris, who was now soaping her inner thighs and the outer lips of her cunt with the most reverent care. The spearhead that kept sliding up between her buttocks made her uneasy. "Let me soap you, now."
She took the slippery cake from his reluctant hands and soaped him quickly, efficiently, saving his proud, erect prick for last, then soaping it with a few swift up-and-down motions of her loosened fist. Chris was rolling his eyes upward when she stopped.
"Rinse time, scouts," Curt said, gently removing his rigid cock from Rita's possession. "Then I think it's everybody-out-of-the-pool time."
They rinsed themselves independently, took towels, and dried quickly, without help. Everybody seemed to be in a hurry all of a sudden, Lynn thought.
They moved out into the room in a cluster, their hands roaming over each other.
"Lie down on your back on the bed, Curt," Rita said. "I'd like to get better acquainted with you, be-fore we do anything rash."
Curt smiled at her, then at Lynn, but he . said nothing as he stretched out on one side of the nearest double bed. Rita pushed his legs apart and knelt between them, then leaned over slowly toward his awesome dork, rigid and immobile except for a small pulse visible at the base.
Lynn watched, transfixed, as Rita opened her mouth wide and took in the top part of the swollen, purple head. She'll have to unhinge her jaws, Lynn thought, like a snake swallowing a frog.
But then the whole head of Curt's cock, as well as part of the shaft, went out of sight in the tall girl's eager, gulping mouth.
"Why don't you come over and get acquainted too, Lynn?" Chris said carelessly, stretching out on the other side of the wide bed.
The "get acquainted" .got to Rita's ears, busy as she was. She raised her head and used her mouth to utter one word.
"Ho," she said, and bent down again.
Lynn was glad that was all she said. Just one little "ho" didn't have to mean anything to Curt.
Lynn assumed the same position as Rita, between Chris's legs, and leaned forward to take his rigid cock into her mouth, holding it lightly around the base with one hand. As she started to slide her mouth up and down, she felt a hand pressing against her outside hip, and rolled her eyes to see where it came from.
It was Curt's hand. He had moved around on the bed, his head toward her, and was urging her to move her lower body toward his mouth.
She let her knees walk her around and lay on her side, her upper leg raised, without interrupting her mouth's activity with Chris.
Curt's head cushioned itself on her lower thigh, and his tongue sought her cunt, first tenderly, then insistently. Aah. Now. It was doubly exciting, having Curt licking and sucking her cunt while she had Chris's thrusting cock between her own lips, responding to her own busy tongue, her sucking mouth.
She felt the mattress sink, as Rita made a major adjustment. Lynn rolled her eyes again, in time to see Rita making a slow descent with her hips. Curt's hard thrusting cock disappeared, completely now, in the open pink mouth of Rita's cunt, framed by damp dark hair.
Lynn shifted her gaze to Chris's face. He had his hands behind his head and was watching the whole scene with an expression of serene contentment. Lynn speeded up her fluttering tongue; her mouth resumed its sucking, with new enthusiasm.
Beside her, the mattress began to bounce wildly, as Rita's joyride on Curt's cock took on a manic violence.
"Too much," she was gasping. "Too much."
But judging from the sounds, Lynn thought, it wasn't too much at all. Only seconds later, Rita reached her climax, shuddering and moaning, and apparently the sight did something to Chris. He came, too, his warm juices spurting into Lynn's throat.
After a long moment, she took her mouth away, and looked up at Curt. His tongue made one last loving trip along her slit, and he raised his head and smiled at her, a wide wet shining smile.
"Come over here, dear," he said, and she got to her knees and straddled his still-stiff cock. Rita-had moved drunkenly to a chair and sprawled out, her heels on the carpet, her eyes closed.
Lynn let herself down and welcomed Curt's huge hard dork into the tight, warm, slippery embrace of her steaming cunt. She felt whole, entire, complete.
"Oooh," she said, to cover her emotion. "Rita has the right idea. I like it this way."
"It's a good way,, " Curt said, pumping his cock upward. "But there are other good ways."
"Shall we practice," she asked, starting her up-and-down horse-riding motion, "the other ways?"
"Day and night," he said.
She. thought she'd never heard such a good idea. By the time she reached her shuddering, pounding orgasm, she'd forgotten that there was anyone else in the room.
So had Curt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In the morning, on her way through the lobby after having breakfast alone, Lynn remembered her volunteer chore for the hotel manager, Rico Clemente. She changed course, and tapped lightly on his door.
When he opened it for her, she noticed right away that his appearance contrasted sharply with the way he'd looked yesterday, when he'd been more formally dressed in a suit with a white shirt and .a subdued tie. Yesterday he'd looked very much like a hotel manager, an exceptionally good-looking hotel manager. Today he was wearing a black knit sport shirt, open at the neck, and he just looked like a very attractive man, never mind hotel manager. Even his tan looked deeper.
He smiled broadly as she entered the little office, and his eyes held hers.
"I'm delighted to see you," he said. 'Even if you don't feel like giving me a drop of help with my English."
A "drop" of help, she thought, smiling, but not laughing at him. Maybe he did need a little help with his English. With his colloquial American, any-way.
"I'm glad to be able to give you any help I can," she said. "I can't just lie on a beach all day long."
As if all she'd been doing was lying on a beach. Rico Clemente should know what went on in his hotel. But then, he probably did. He was over seven.
She looked at him closely, at the trim waist, the unlined, somewhat craggy face. About Curt's age, she decided. Curt was thirty-four.
"I have just one letter to get out today," he said. "One letter in English, that is. The others are easy. There is the typewriter."
It was a big, standard American machine, not electric, she was glad to see.
"Do you work as a secretary?" he asked as she set herself in a chair in front of the typewriter.
"No. I'm a librarian, or was."
"The good Lord sent you," he said, with some-thing like reverence. "You've come to the right place."
He handed her the letter to be answered, and told her what he wanted to say. She was finished in ten minutes, but found that she was in no hurry to leave.
They talked, in a random sort of way, for more than half an hour. He was manifestly a lonely man, handsome as he was and surrounded though he was by people.
"They come and they go," he said sadly. "You get to know them a little, and to like them, and then they go. And you never see them again."
She found out quite a lot about him, in the short time that first morning. He'd been managing the hotel for a year, since his wife had died in childbirth.
"Will you have lunch with me?" he asked, as she was leaving.
"Why," she hesitated, "yes, I'd love to."
She hadn't made any specific date with Curt, or with anyone else.
There was plenty of time for Curt, later. After dark. Especially after dark.
* * *
Curt came into the dining room while they were having lunch, and started toward the table when he saw her, then stopped when he saw Rico Clemente. Rico saw her looking and turned his head.
"A friend of yours?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Please ask him over."
Curt came to the table when she smiled and motioned to him. Rico stood, and the men shook hands as she introduced them.
"Won't you join us?" Rico asked.
"Thanks, I can't today," Curt said. "I promised some friends. .
He smiled and left, and she saw him sitting down a moment later at a table with Larry and the three girls from the original breakfast.
But later, at the beach, Curt showed no sign of pique at her having had lunch with Rico Clemente. She brought up the subject herself, just to clear the air.
"He's a nice man, that hotel manager," she said, while Curt was devoting himself to his agreeable chore of smearing her back with suntan oil. "Also, he's a very lonely man."
"So am I," Curt said.
"So are you what? A nice man or a lonely man?"
"Both. Haven't you noticed?"
'Nice, yes," she said, twisting her head around to look at him. "But lonely? Hah."
"I am, though. Or will be, I'm afraid. I've been thinking about it lately. For a long time, I thought it would be impossible for me ever to be lonely, and then gradually I began to believe, even if I ever were, so what? Loneliness ' is the human condition. But right now, I'm not so sure I can always be philosophical about it. Not at night, in that desolate cottage, with the sound of waves on the beach. Days, it won't be bad. I'll be working. But the nights may be something else."
He was through with her back, and she rolled over and looked at him for a long moment. But she didn't say anything. She knew she was thinking the same thing he was thinking, but she'd die before she'd articulate the thought. Let him, if he wanted to.
But Curt didn't say anything, either. He got up and came back with two drinks instead.
Booze seemed to fill a lot of pregnant silences over here, Lynn thought Sometimes it was a good thing. Sometimes not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Three days later, on the morning of the day he was to move to his cottage, Curt tapped on the door to Rico Clemente's office, casually opening it as he knocked.
Usually, his actions would not have been any breach of manners. But on this particular morning, when he casually pushed open the door, Curt opened it on the middle of a tender love scene. The hotel manager was kissing Lynn for the first time.
Lynn had thought Curt unflappable, but his embarrassment at that moment was so acute, it embarrassed Lynn.
"I beg your pardon," he said, and backed out woodenly, carefully closing the door behind him.
The kiss itself had been as big a surprise to Lynn as the opening door. Nervously, she tried to be cool about it "Beautiful piece of timing that was," she said, not looking at Rico.
"Do not let that unfortunate intrusion disturb you," he said. He was holding her shoulders and looking into her face. She had to look back at--him, into the warm Spanish eyes. "I want you to marry me."
Lynn backed away from him and sat down abruptly, in the armless swivel chair by the typewriter. This was a little harder to play cool, but she tried.
"Things seem to happen very fast in this sunny climate," she said.
"What kind of an answer is that?" Rico's colloquial English was getting better already.
"It's so . . . sudden."
"Not so sudden for me. I've been thinking about it since the first time I talked to you."
"I just don't know what to say," Lynn said, feeling foolish. "I have to pull myself together. I have to think." She got to her feet, a little shakily, and Rico put his arms around her tenderly, and kissed her on the forehead.
"Of course you do," he said, and led her to the door, his arm around her shoulders. "Will I see you tomorrow morning?"
"At the latest," she said, and managed a smile be-fore she got up on her toes and kissed him swiftly on the mouth.
She was out the door before he could make an-other move.
* * *
She headed straight for the beach, but Curt wasn't there. Neither were Chris or Rita. Larry was there, with the holy trinity from Boston, and a couple of other men.
"Get your clothes off and join us," Larry said. "You ought to spread yourself around more, distribute the riches of your presence."
"Maybe later," she said, and headed for her room. She didn't feel much like making bad jokes with Larry.
Back in her room, she busied herself washing out a few things, then tried writing a few letters, but they didn't come out very well, and she decided against mailing them. Her mind kept jumping around. She tried to read out on the balcony, but that wasn't any good either. By then it was time for lunch.
She entered the big dining room eagerly, sweeping the room with her gaze, looking for Curt, but he wasn't there.
"Over here," Larry said, from a big table in a corner of the room. He had the same group around him that he'd had at the beach. She went over and sat down with them. It was better than eating alone. And if Curt did come, he'd settle at this table.
"Curt checked out half an hour ago," Larry said. "Took his luggage over to the cottage he rented."
"Did he say anything about swimming this after-noon?" Lynn asked, knowing she was giving herself away to this group, and not caring.
"No. He said something about looking for a piano this afternoon. Where would you go to look for a piano in the south of Spain?"
"In a whorehouse?" one of the girls suggested. "That's the classic place to find a piano."
"A whorehouse in Fuengirola would go out of business in a week," Larry said. "My Cod, talk about coals to Newcastle."
"Oh, shut up," the girl said.
Lynn got through lunch somehow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
She spent the afternoon on the beach with Rita and Chris, not drinking at all, talking very little, and thinking a great deal. Late in the atfernoon when they went up to their room and Chris suggested that she join them, she declined with thanlrs, but agreed to meet them for dinner. There had been no sign of Curt.
There was no sign of him at dinner, either. Rita found it impossible to contain her curiosity any longer. 'Where has your piano-laying friend been all day?" she asked. "He seemed so devoted to you."
"Looking for a piano," Lynn said. 'lie's just moved into his cottage. Checked out of the hotel this morning!'
'What does he need a piano for?'" Chris asked. "He's got that great big upright organ."
"Oh, stop it, Chris," Rita said. She sensed that Lynn was in no mood for bad jokes, and she was right. Lynn was grateful to her. She felt at that moment that Rita and Chris were the only friends she had in the world.
"I'll tell you what's wrong," Lynn said. She had to confide in somebody, and Rita would understand. "You know about my helping the hotel manager with his letter writing? Well, Curt happened to walk into the office this morning just when Rico Clemente was kissing me."
"That's all?" Chris said, looking stunned.
"That's all."
"I'll be a son of a bitch. He saw you doing a lot more worthwhile things with me and he didn't seem to mind at all."
"Shut up," Rita said. "That's different."
"It's something else, all right," Lynn agreed. "I thought of that, too, Chris. This must have looked sort of wholesome, in a sneaky sort of way, and Curt apparently can't stand that."
"Being sneaky, you mean?" Chris asked.
"No," Lynn said. "Wholesome."
"He's just jealous, is all," Rita said. "He'll get over it. But there's no sense losing any sleep over it, like a kid. Just take the bull by the horns, is my motto. That bull, anyway. He's worth taking by the horn." Lynn looked at Chris, but he didn't notice that Rita had dropped the 's'.
"How?"
"Go see him. Tonight. Right after dinner."
"Show us the way," Chris said, "and we'll drive you over."
Lynn hesitated, but only for a moment. "All right," she said. "Maybe it's a good idea."
"I know it's a good idea," Rita said.
"You women," Chris said, shaking his bead. "The poor horny son of a bitch hasn't got a chance."
* * *
They let her out of the car where the road passed within two hundred feet of the cottage, and she walked over a couple of sandy rises, her feet sinking soundlessly in the sand. She lost sight of the rear of the cottage, then regained it again. As she rounded the front and stepped up on the porch to knock, she had a chilling thought. Suppose he had a woman with him? just out of spite?
But it was too late to go back. He was opening the door.
"Did you find a piano?" she asked. It was the first thing that popped into her mind.
"I looked at one," he said, opening the door wide for her, but not smiling. "It had about six dead keys and hadn't been tuned in twenty years. I wouldn't play it at a Lions' Club picnic."
She stepped inside. No one else was there.
"Is that the only available piano in the south of Spain?"
"I've got two more to look at around here."
"You could try Malaga. More people there, and probably more pianos."
"That'll be my next move, I guess. Why don't you sit down?" She was standing stiffly in the middle of the room. "Would you like a drink?"
"Yes," she said, and sat.
Curt was back in--a minute, carrying two tall Scotches. He handed one to her without speaking.
"I didn't really come here to talk about pianos," Lynn said, sipping.
"I know that."
"I want to know why you're angry."
"Who says I'm angry?"
"Come off it."
"All right, I'm angry."
"But why?"
"It shook me up, seeing you kissing that big Spaniard."
"He was kissing me."
"You weren't putting up much of a fight."
"He took me by surprise.'
"Sure, he did."
"Well, what's so wrong about letting a man kiss me? He's very nice, and quite proper. He was kissing me out of gratitude."
"That's a good name for it," Curt said.
"What's got you so shook up? You saw me doing a lot more than kiss someone while you were living it up with Rita, and you didn't seem to mind one damned bit."
"That's different," Out said. "Excuse me a minute. I was drinking a lot of beer earlier."
He turned and went through the open door into the bedroom, whch led to the bathroom. She followed him through the door and sat down on the edge of the bed.
The door to the bathroom was ajar. She heard the sound of the seat bumping back against the flush box, then a strong sibilant sound of a thin stream of water running under pressure into still water. Sounded to Lynn exactly like her stepfather's pissing, when he was in too much of a hurry to be polite and aim for the sides of the toilet bowl.
"What's so different?" Lynn asked, talking loudly enough to be heard over the liquid static.
"He's so goddamned respectable, that hotel manager," Curt said loudly. Angrily. "It's sneaky. Slimy. Underhanded."
Lynn's hands moved very fast as she took things off.
"Its not underhanded at all," she said. "He asked me to marry him."
"What?"
Curt's voice was close to a scream.
"You heard me."
"The son of a bitch."
The toilet seat slammed down, water flushed into the bowl "How could anybody be so underhanded? Don't you see how sneaky he is? The slimy bastard has honorable intentions, for Christ's sake."
When he came back into the bedroom his shouting stopped. Abruptly. Lynn was lying on her back on the bed, stark naked, her head propped against the pillows, her knees elevated and apart.
She let one knee swing back and forth slowly, opening and closing the pink furred lips of her for-giving pussy. She hoped it appeared to be smiling at him.
"Shut up," she said.
"I'm all shut up," he said, in a choked whisper. He was almost as fast as Lynn had been, getting out of his clothes.
Moments later, as what Chris had called 'that great big upright organ' slid deep inside her and she was humping her hips to take it all in, she had one more thing to say.
"Let's not talk about it again, ever," Lynn said.
"Not ever," Curt said, with the tip of his tongue in her ear and his cock sliding deep in her cunt. 'Who needs talking, anyway?'
They did very little talking that night.
Lynn thought it was the greatest night she'd ever known.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was bright morning when Curt drove her back to the hotel, but not yet hot. The breeze was strong, and white wisps of clouds scudded across the deep blue sky.
He didn't drive her to the lobby entrance, but in-stead took a driveway that led to the wing where Lynn had her room. No matter what he'd said about Rico Clemente, Curt evidently had considerations for his feelings. He didn't want to wound the man. .
"It's silly, your staying on at the hotel," Curt said, "when I have all that room. That big bed. Just being practical, think of the expense of the hotel"
"Just being practical," Lynn said, getting out of the Seat, "the hotel manager said there would be no bill for me, on account of my invaluable services with his correspondence."
"Oh, shit," Curt said. "The evil, sneaky bastard."
'I said I wouldn't think of it, and he said, how was I going to pay a bill if I didn't get one? So what am I supposed to do?'
"You could stop helping him with his English."
"I hadn't thought of that."
"Listen, hon," Curt said, reaching for her hand. 'Come stay with me. Let's just play it by ear for a while.'
Lynn disengaged her hand.
"I have to think awhile," she said.
"All right. My housewarming's tonight. Tell Chris and Rita"
"I'll do that." She waved two fingers and turned and walked toward the ramp leading to the walk-way to her room, hearing Curt's rented Seat bumping away over the gravel.
Chris and Rita were on their way to breakfast when she got to her door.
"You've had breakfast so early?" Chris asked. Rita looked sideways at him, then back at Lynn. She was pressing her lips together to suppress a smile.
"Yes," Lynn said. "Just coming back."
"See you at the beach?' Rita asked.
"Certainly. Oh, Curt's housewarming is tonight. He wanted me to tell you."
"That's too bad," Chris said. "We have to leave to-day. Four-thirty plane out of Malaga'
'That's a shame," Lynn said. "I'd forgotten it was so soon. Can I drive you out, in your car? I'll return it to the rental place afterward."
"That would be wonderful," Rita said.
Lynn opened her door and stretched out on the bed. She hadn't slept much during the night. There had been too much else to do.
After she awoke there was time for a fast swim and a fast drink at the beach with Rita and Chris. After lunching with them, she knocked on Rico's office door, but there was no answer.
"He went to Malaga today," the girl behind the desk told her. "Some kind of business for the hotel."
She asked the girl for paper and an envelope, and wrote him a note.
Dear Rico, Stopped by your office after lunch instead of the usual time, heard that duty calls you else-where. I'll be busy tonight, but see you tomorrow. Still stunned, but trying hard to think.
Lynn.
She sealed the envelope and slipped it under his office door, first trying the knob to make sure it was locked. How noncommittal can you get, she wondered. Oh, well. Something about Spain made you casual about practically everything. The opposite pole from uptight Vermont.
On the way out to the airport in Malaga, Chris drove. Lynn had a sudden thought. Any time she felt anywhere near as good as she felt now, she was full of sudden ideas. Some of them were good ideas.
"When I. take your car back to the rental place,' she said, "I think I'll transfer the rental to my name and keep it for a few days."
"What are you going to do about your two men?" Rita asked, looking at her sideways.
'I don't know yet." It was none of Rita's business, anyway.
"String them both along?"
"I just don't know.'
"Well," Rita said. "It looks like nice stringing." Chris sighed, very audibly.
"What's wrong with your Rita asked him.
"I was just thinking of the cab ride to Fuengirola from Malaga. This is so different"
"Haven't you had enough fucking for a while?'
"I'm well rested," Chris said. "If you girls would like to, we could stop in some deserted, picturesque spot, for a sort of farewell.... " He took his foot off the accelerator.
"You're out of your gourd," Lynn said.
"Yes,' Rita said. "Shame on you.'
"It was worth a try."
He put his foot back on the accelerator. "I'm going to miss you both,' Lynn said. She would, too. Not that she'd be lonely. Not for a minute.
"Will you visit us?' Rita asked, "whenever you're in New York?"
"Absolutely,' Lynn said. "Whether I'm alone or otherwise.'
