Author Jon Reskind's brilliant new novel, Housewife for Sale, will be considered a classic in its field, a cutting cross-genre work that will defy final categorization for years to come. This is the opinion of the publishers; we feel that perceptive critical circles will agree with us.
We realize however that the book will be met with a certain amount of shock, and without wanting to intrude on the author's creative integrity or the reader's interpretive facility, a certain parental pride compels us to point out a few facts about the interwoven theme of this complex piece of work.
Housewife for Sale can be taken on several levels, and perhaps it is all of the various things people will name it during the generations it will be read. First, perhaps it is an expose of the gambling world itself, or the underworld that controls at least those areas explored within this important piece of literature. Certainly the loser's compulsion that makes people play against the odds when they are losing money they can't afford is clearly drawn not only in the portrait of the heroine but the terse poignant capsule of minor character George Stanos.
It is also a psychological study in which the "compulsive loser" clinically speaking, meets "the frigid woman," such a long debated enigma in psychiatric circles, and they meet on the grounds that most vividly expose both syndromes: the body of a young woman, her body and her mind, jumping back and forth in symbolic hopscotch from the bed to the roulette table.
Surely some will call this novel a study in sadism and perversion, brutality, man's inhumanity to man. The author must wince as he writes these scenes, but the wince is omitted from the prose, conducted through vivid and unwavering description to the indignant readers.
But, our editors have wondered, are not the above themes merely devices, building blocks to compose perhaps the harshest metaphorical indictment of the time-payment plan by which America lives ever presented to the reading public? The author isn't saying, himself. (He refers to the book as a satire about a group of old friends, none of whom ever knew each other.) The reader will have to judge for himself. The reader will have to ask himself is he owes money on a car or is crushed under payments for a house or has ever had or seen a television half-paid-for repossessed for default, or if he knows anyone who has - the reader will have to ask himself if he is that different, that less irresponsible in one field of his financial dealings or another, from heroine Sharon Dolan, who finds herself so deep in debt that only her body will buy her out. We, the publishers, strongly recommend this book with the above interpretation in mind, but it would be hypocritical for us to recommend it be purchased or sold on credit. And under no circumstances should this book be given to the immature reader or one who is easily offended.
-The Publishers
CHAPTER ONE
Greater Los Angeles was suffocating under a heavy coat of brownish-purple smog. On the San Bernardino freeway, afternoon rush hour traffic crept along, stopped, moved again and stopped. There was a continuous blaring of horns. The heat was sweltering.
"I bet it will be even hotter in Las Vegas," redheaded Sharon Dolan remarked to her friend Kitty Parker who drove the little Volkswagen bug that now crawled along behind a smoke-belching diesel-burning truck.
"Honey," Kitty said, letting her skirt ride almost up to her panties, "Las Vegas is air-conditioned. All but the swimming pools, that is."
"Sure Kitty," Sharon said grudgingly.
A motorcyclist passed them on the right, glancing through the window to admire Kitty's thighs as he went by. "There's a man with the right idea," the voluptuous redhead said, shifting to low gear as the traffic slowed to a halt. Sharon wondered, curiously resentful, if her friend referred to his means of transportation or his appreciative look. Honestly, she couldn't imagine how Kitty could think about sex in this kind of weather. But the fact was she'd rarely ever seen a time when Kitty wasn't thinking about sex. "Anyway," Kitty continued, "you'd think with the goddamned energy crisis some of these people would join a car pool or take the bus or something." She shifted suddenly back to second and swung out around the trick as horns blared behind them. Sharon, aware of the trucker looking down through the window on her side, smoothed her own skirt over her thighs. "Cute, hunh?" Kitty asked. "What?"
"The truck driver. A good looking man."
"I didn't notice."
"Well, you should have." Kitty sighed. "Anyway, I think we should have driven straight from work to the airport. Now we're going to have to fight this same traffic all the way back."
"It's not this bad going the other way," said Sharon. "And we've got plenty of time." The slender twenty year old blonde sighed. "And I really do have to check my mail before we go. That's all there is to it."
"I know," said Kitty.
"In fact, I still don't quite understand why I'm going with you at all. You really should be taking Bill or somebody. I'm just..."
"You're going, Sharon, because if I go off for a weekend and leave you alone in that apartment with nothing but your husband's letters for company, I'll probably come back and find a vegetable on Monday. And what in God's name would I want with Bill in Las Vegas. I can have Bill here any night of the week."
That was the truth, thought Sharon. She sometimes wondered what Kevin would say if he knew her best friend and apartment-mate a little better. She couldn't imagine that it wouldn't bother her young husband to know that the girl his wife was going to live with until he'd finished Officer's School and flight training had a man staying with her almost every night of the week. And not always the same one either. But she recognized the fact that he might not even be surprised. Kevin certainly was more worldly than Sharon, broader minded in his outlook. And it had actually been Kevin who insisted that she not live alone. But she doubted that even he could imagine the sounds she was subjected to listening to night after night from the adjoining bedroom - the grunting, panting and moaning, the squeaking of bedsprings, the smacking of flesh upon naked flesh. Sometimes Sharon thought it would literally drive her out of her mind.
"At last," said Kitty, whipping back into the right lane as their exit approached.
Ten minutes later she swung the Volkswagen up the driveway into the parking lot behind the modern apartment complex where the two girls lived. As she pulled to a stop Sharon opened the door on her side and stepped quickly down, walking ahead of her friend to the entrance to the lobby where the mailboxes were situated. She took a deep breath, crossed her fingers, and inserted the key. There was a "click" and the metal door fell open to reveal the familiar white envelope hiding in the cubicle. She didn't need to look at the return address; she knew from the shape that it was from Kevin. Hugging it to her breast as though she were protecting gold nuggets, she hurried to the elevator.
"Hey, wait for me!" Kitty called behind her.
Sharon opened the letter as the elevator was ascending, let the two of them into the living room of their apartment when they got there then hurried on into her own bedroom. Unmindful of her dress, she threw herself across the bed and removed the letter from the envelope and began to read:
--Darling,
I'm really in the army now. All last week we played war games in the rain and mud, which I suppose is still better than getting mixed up in the real thing. I feel like some kind of slimy amphibian that crawled out of a swamp about forty million years ago, and that seems exactly where I am in regards to my evolution toward the objective that got me into this mess - becoming a flier. Furthermore, except for a dyke master sergeant in the WACS who ran me off the road in a Jeep a week ago, I haven't seen a female since I got here - except for your face which is constantly before my eyes, your naked body, constantly on my mind. I find it hard to believe that I ever allowed you to refuse to sleep with me for those first four months of our engagement. Those hundred and twenty wasted nights which we could never have made up for in the one short month after we finally wised up. And yet, thinking now about that first time it finally happened, remembering, almost feeling it and dreaming about it as I dreamed about it last night until the poor kid in the bunk below me woke me up and told me I was talking in my sleep. The whole barracks was listening to me and you know what I was saying? I was saying the same thing I said that night when you slapped me. . . --
Sharon thought she must have blushed even now at the recollection of the words that had prompted the slap Kevin was referring to, and she shuddered to imagine the embarrassment he must have felt at uttering them aloud in his sleep in a barracks full of men. And even now they echoed in her ears: Sharon, Sharon, I want to do something to you I've never done to a woman before . . . I want to eat your pussy. "
Then it was as though Sharon had unexpectedly taken a ride on a magic carpet, on a journey back through time and space to that night that now seemed so long ago. Suddenly she was away from Los Angeles. She was with Kevin again on that deserted stretch of beach south of La Jolla, parked in his Volkswagen van which had been converted into a camper with a bed in the back. She lay not fully clothed on her own bed, but there with Kevin, listening to the waves rolling rhythmically in.
She had known that Kevin was going to try to be intimate with her that night. He'd as much as told her so, and she by arranging to have her parents think she was staying the night with Kitty, had as much as told him that tonight she wouldn't resist. She had fought him off long enough, she'd decided. Now she hardly cared or had the strength to fight. Though she had inbred feelings of guilt about sex, there was a part of her body that wanted it as much as he did. And as their marriage date was only two weeks away it hardly seemed to matter whether they did it now or put it off to that arbitrarily arranged date. And they had already come so close so many times that it was probably a miracle that it hadn't happened already. There had been many nights when they had actually lain completely naked like this together here on this same narrow bed, their hands and fingers running all over each other's bodies. She had stroked Kevin to fulfillment several times with her hand curled warmly around his hardened penis, and she had not minded that his hot impatient love liquid had spurted all over her. But somehow she had always managed to resist penetration, wanting to save it until her wedding night. Kevin wasn't a virgin, of course, and that didn't matter to her. What he'd done before they met was his business; what he did after their engagement was announced was all that mattered to her.
Lying there with him that night, their nude bodies closely entwined, Sharon told herself that tonight she wouldn't resist if he insisted she go all the way. She wanted him. She wanted him so badly she actually hurt inside with a pain that was intractable.
With a low moan, Kevin rolled over on his side and propped himself on his elbow, staring down at her in the dim light of the candle they used for illumination in the bus.
"What's wrong," Sharon asked, knowing the answer already.
Kevin hesitated for a moment, then merely took her hand and placed it on his erectly throbbing penis.
"That's what's wrong," he said, his voice strained with desire.
Beneath her fingers, Sharon marveled again at the feeling of his hardened penis. There was an awesome power there. It was a living viable thing that seemed to have a heart and mind of its own. She could feel the hard fleshy ridges of its length, the soft rubbery hardness of the head.
Tentatively, her hand enclosed the trunk, and she began little up and down movements along the straining shaft, feeling the skin move but not the shaft itself. It was as though the flesh covered a warm flexible steel rod.
"Oh Sharon, I want you," he groaned, his thick rigid penis flexing in her hand. Then his mouth found hers and their tongues fought a heated battle for supremacy before he jammed his halfway down her throat with a viciousness she had never experienced in him before. He kept it there, and it seemed to her that his body tensed, and he moved closer to her so she found the stroking movements difficult because of the proximity of their two bodies. And still, she thought, waging a silent inner struggle with her own conscience, Kevin didn't know that she had vowed not to resist him tonight. He knew only that she had agreed to stay with him until morning. He knew only that this was his big chance, and now he was going to make his play.
After a moment her fiance's body seemed to relax somewhat. He pulled his mouth away and began kissing her neck, her shoulders, her ears. Breathlessly, Sharon waited for his mouth to find her breasts. She thought that excited her more than almost anything else he ever did to her. It was a terribly sensual thing when his lips enclosed her nipples, when his teeth bit into the hard little buds .. . not painfully, but gently, as if his mouth was the mouth of a nursing baby. But tonight he did something different. As Sharon moaned distantly, rolling completely onto her back and arching her shoulders to thrust her warmly tingling breasts even more prominently into Kevin's face, he hardly even lingered over them. His tongue continued its excursion down over the virginal plane of her abdomen, and she was so lost in the wonder of the sheer tantalizing sensation that for a moment, she didn't even realized that he'd reached her pubic hair.
It was only moments later that Sharon became abruptly aware of his intentions, and all of her moral upbringing suddenly screamed at her in the negative. She knew now what he was about to do, the most treacherous gambit ever employed in the seduction of an innocent female. After all, it was mentioned in most of the marriage manuals Sharon had looked at, and though some authorities referred to the act as perverted, there were several others who actually voice approval of its use in foreplay between consenting partners. He was going to put his mouth on her vagina!
Then, as Sharon was rolling on her side, closing her thighs and pushing Kevin away, he had gazed up with a lustful leer between the naked nipple-peaked mounds of her breasts and said those shocking words: "... something I've never done to a woman before ... I want to eat your pussy."
She still couldn't be quite sure she d slapped him. Of course, he'd never spoken like that to her during the whole time they'd known each other. Of course she went almost blind with shock at the perverted image his statement had prompted in her own mind. And in spite of all her shame she'd experienced a warped flutter of excitement far up in her own loins as she observed that image. But the slap had come as a reflex. She did it completely without thinking, feeling the sting on the palm of her hand, hearing the sharp crack almost before she realized she'd done it. Then Kevin merely raised up, glaring at her, and she drew her hand slowly back, her mouth open, searching for the words to say she was sorry.
And instead, she'd said, hardly even believing it was her own voice she'd heard: "No Kevin. You don't have to do that. I want to really make love to you tonight. I don't want to save it from you any longer."
Then she reached up to seize his shoulders and pull him down on top of her. He resisted for a moment, still angry or stunned, then he kissed her again, savagely as before. She felt his hands moving freely over her abdomen then his finger slipping along her desire-moistened cuntal slit, bringing with it something akin to rapture -exciting, pleasurable, sensual. Sharon splayed her legs wider, giving him freer access to her now open vagina, and after a moment, she realized that Kevin had put both his knees between her widespread thighs and was pulling them even wider apart. Abruptly, he pulled his mouth away from hers and he stared at her in silence for a moment, then seized her wrists to pin her arms above her head before growling: "Yes, Sharon. Yes, tonight I'm going to fuck you."
He grinned as her nakedly defenseless body tensed, but now instead of repelling her, the lewd phrase only brought additional wanton excitement to her body, a body that was already aflame with desire. And even as she struggled to free her arms, she said from what sounded a great distance away: "Yes darling. Do it to me. Fuck me!"
Kevin gawked at her in astonishment, releasing her wrists. Then as if fearing she would change her mind, he dropped one of his hands down between their bodies and guided his rigidly throbbing cock up toward the hair-lined coral-pink lips of her pussy.
Sharon's eyes widened as for the first time in her life she felt the spongy thick head of a male penis beginning to part the fleshy layers of her love-starved vagina. She could feel his penis throbbing with its hot lustful power as it began to sensuously stretch the hungrily quivering little outer lips, and she tensed with the first electrical contact between his swollen cock-head, and the sensitive edges of her fevered cunt.
The sensation was so powerful that she was shocked out of her wanton excitement and back to the stunning realization of what it really was she was about to permit him to do. Again her mind was flooded with the restrictions of her upbringing, and she suddenly felt that she was displaying a detestable weakness. Ever since she had known Kevin she had been firm in her unswerving resolution to retain the priceless gift of her virginity until her wedding night. She hadn't cared what other girls did or said. It was a gift that could only be given to one man and then one time only, and now all her previous rationalization faded. Her body stiffened, and she reached up, pushing against Kevin's chest.
"No darling," Sharon moaned softly. "I've changed my mind. I don't want to now."
"What?" Kevin gasped, staring at her as if he couldn't believe his ears.
"Please, Kevin. I want to wait. We've waited all this time and it's only two more weeks."
The color of sexual excitement seemed to drain from his face. It paled, then the color that returned was of rage. "Yeah. Only two more goddamn weeks. And only one more goddamn month until I go to Fort Ord."
"But Kevin ..."
"No. You can't do this to me. Besides, it's too late anyway," he added, dropping back down on her and pushing his hips suddenly forward.
Sharon groaned and cried out in pain as she felt the first really harsh pressure against her tightly resisting virginal opening up between her widespread thighs, the lewd pressure building swiftly to a point that was almost intolerable.
"No . . . Oooohh no!" she whimpered loudly, trying desperately to twist away as she felt the first blinding streak of white-hot pain in her resisting loins. It felt as if someone were ripping apart her thighs, shoving a burning axe handle up into her tiny little vaginal orifice. "Stop Kevin. You're hurting . . . me. Oh my God," she wailed. "Please stop."
Kevin's eyes were glazed, dimmed with lust.
They stared, unfocused, down at her. Then suddenly he shoved his hips forward in a vicious jerk, falling forward with his powerful hairy chest to crush the softness of her ripe young breasts. At the same moment his hips shot forward and the thick hot shaft of his implacably hardened cock slammed with a vengeance up into her virginal cunt. The soft warm flesh of her vaginal walls was no match for this barbarous intruder. They were forced to give way before it, and Kevin's long hard cock rammed relentlessly through the thin membrane of her hymen as though it were not there at all.
"Aaaggghh!" Sharon screamed. She was being gored to death. His cock was like a red-hot sword ripping her apart at the seams, and she was sure she must have been irreparably injured. She would never be the same again, and Kevin, oblivious to all her pain, continued to grind his way deeper and deeper up into the previously secret, untouched caverns of her cunt until suddenly, with a loud groan of rapture, he gave a last quivering lunge and buried his cock to the hilt in her ravaged loins, his scrotum slapping teasingly down between her tightly clenched buttocks and his thickly haired pubic mound pressing down hard against the tingling bud of her clitoris.
"Oooohhh!" the impaled young girl wailed, but Kevin acted as if he'd gone blind and deaf, flexing his monstrously throbbing cock deep up into the burning tightness of her violated cuntal passage to cause her whole body to jerk in agony. "Oh please," she groaned. "Please don't move."
She whimpered piteously, unable to stop the flow of tears streaming down her face. Never in her life had she experienced such pressure, such pain anywhere in her body. She felt almost as if someone had shoved a corn cob deep into her vagina, and she was positive that not only had her hymen been ripped, but that her whole vaginal area had been lacerated all the way from pelvis to anus. She could feel every swollen vein of Kevin's throbbing penis pressing and beating against her tortured cuntal walls and his massive cock-head seemed to have penetrated so deeply into her that she was positive it was now lodged far up above her navel.
Kevin lay atop her, and as the young blonde opened her tear-filled eyes to look at him, she could see he was regaining some of the sanity he'd lost during the excitement of his violent and almost forcible entry into her lewdly stretched little cunt. There was a look of near-despair on his face as though only now he realized the seriousness of what he had done to her, and perhaps even regretted it. "I'm sorry," he groaned, shaking his head from side to side.
Sharon stifled her own sobs. It was too late for sorrow now, she thought. The deed had been done. But she knew it was as much her fault as his and she had to share the blame. And though she hurt as she had never hurt before in her life, she knew that was part of the game, part of the ordeal it was a woman's lot to go through. And she loved Kevin, truly loved him in spite of what he'd done to her. But she had learned something about him of which she'd never been aware before: he could be brutal, selfish, even ruthless.
"I'm sorry!" Kevin repeated.
She loved him. She loved him. That was all that mattered, she tried to tell herself. And what difference did one or two weeks make. She closed her eyes and nodded then said in a pain-hoarsened voice: "It's all right, darling."
Again Kevin flexed to make his lust-thickened penis jerk powerfully far up inside her belly. This time she bore it stoically, shutting off the tortured nerve-endings down there, trying hard to ignore the pain, longing for the happiness, the beautiful feeling, the still inexplicable ecstasy she had always imagined a woman was supposed to derive from making love to the man she cared for.
Slowly, gently now, Kevin began stroking his long hard cock in and out of her. It was still painful, but not as much as before, and somehow she succeeded in letting her mind drift, almost blocking out her awareness of the act and of the passage of time itself as Kevin continued to slowly and rhythmically fuck her. Then she was snapped back to reality as she felt his pace drastically increase and heard his breathing become rapid and ragged. She guessed what was about to happen and instinctively she forced herself to grind her pelvis up to meet his powerful thrusts, falsifying an enthusiasm she did not feel. And abruptly she felt the pressure increase in her already stretched vagina as the mushroom head of Kevin's hardened penis ballooned even larger in size.
"Oh Jesus..." he groaned. "I'm cumming. I'm going to cum."
"Yes, Kevin," Sharon cooed seductively, bucking her hips even more wildly, now longing to end her ordeal. "Cum," she pleaded. "Cum in me now!"
An instant later, Sharon felt the first hot impatient spurts of his semen spewing wildly into her vagina. He racked her body with a final energetic assault, grunting and laboring above her as she feigned her own excitement beneath him.
Then gradually he slacked off and sagged in weariness on top of her, nuzzling his face in the curve of her neck before lifting his head to peer down at her apprehensively. "Did you?" he gasped, still trying to catch his breath. "Did you make it too?"
Sharon nodded her head, lying. Then, weeping again, she put her arms around his chest, pulling his sperm-drained naked body back down against hers, clinging to him for comfort in her inner shame and guilt.
Of course she hadn't really suspected the seriousness of her problem then, Sharon thought, as the memory evaporated and she went on reading her husband's letter. Failure in her first experience had seemed only perfectly natural. The sheer pain of the act of defloration should logically have been enough to prevent a woman from achieving an orgasm. She'd assumed that with a little experience, she would have no trouble climaxing as a result of the sex act with a man.
But it hadn't happened. Never! She and Kevin had made love almost every night for the next month that followed that first experience. Then he'd gone to boot camp, and when he'd returned for leave they'd taken a hotel for two weeks, and still, though they had sexual intercourse often two or three times a day, nothing happened. She wasn't any closer the last time than she had been the first.
She could only conclude she was frigid, that she needed help. But that help she could not even ask for. She'd lied to Kevin the first time; thereafter she had continued to lie to him, to assure him that she was wonderfully satisfied.
Now, if she admitted to him that untruth, he would feel cheated, betrayed. It was the kind of admission she could not imagine a man with Kevin's pride would ever be able to forgive.
CHAPTER TWO
"Come on. We've got a plane to catch."
Sharon was snapped suddenly from her reverie by Kitty's voice. She rolled over onto her back, looking up in seeming confusion at her friend, who'd already changed clothes for their Las Vegas flight.
"Yes, all right," she said after a moment. "Just let me dash out a quick letter to Kevin."
"Kevin, my ass!" Kitty snapped. "You can write Kevin from Vegas. I'm not going to miss that flight because of... " Kitty's voice trailed off and she smiled at Sharon tenderly. "There's nothing wrong? I mean, you didn't get some kind of bad news in the letter?"
Sharon shook her head. "No. Just the same old thing. I was just thinking about him."
"I think I know what you've been thinking about," Kitty said. She shook her head, looking at Sharon with mock reproval. "I swear, if I had it as bad as you I think I'd go straight to the bathroom and apply the old middle finger treatment. Either that or go out and find a man."
She turned and went out of the room, leaving Sharon to stare at her open mouth, half angered and half embarrassed. Sharon wondered if Kitty could ever guess how close to truth she'd hit on that last statement. Not that she would ever under any circumstances consider sleeping with another man other than her husband. But she had yielded on several occasions to the temptation to finger herself to orgasm, though at the time she'd rationalized that shameful and degrading action as an experiment, the results of which had been at once encouraging and disturbing, depending on her point of view.
For in the act of masturbation she had achieved the climax that had eluded her when making love with Kevin, and she couldn't quite understand what the significance of that was. On one hand it seemed to indicate that she was not entirely frigid, as she'd come to fear. But at the same time it seemed a sign of some perhaps even deeper psychological fault.
In any event though, she supposed she didn't have time to worry about it now. If she was going to Las Vegas, their plane definitely would not wait for her to work out her own secret inner turmoil, though she still wondered why she'd consented to accept the invitation. Kitty had won the three-day holiday for two in a company sales competition at the department store where they were both employed. Though there were any number of eligible young men she could have taken along, she'd insisted from the beginning that Sharon accompany her, and she refused to take no for an answer. Sharon hadn't been strong enough to resist and, of course, she had been willing to admit that she was spending too much time in the house, too much time alone, too much time wrapped up in her own dreams. She did need to get out. She needed desperately to see some new faces, as with her job in the sales promotional department she restricted her contacts almost exclusively to the people she worked with, her roommate, and the various men she brought home.
But she didn't have the slightest idea what she was going to do in Las Vegas for three days and nights. Kitty, no doubt, would immediately find herself an attractive male friend and have a fling, an option that wasn't open to Sharon. Also, Kitty would be able to do a little gambling, as part of the prize was a hundred dollars worth of chips at the casino in the hotel where they would be staying. But as one of Sharon and Kevin's first goals after he completed his tour of duty was going to be the purchase of a house in the country, hopefully on a beach somewhere as they both loved the ocean, she had vowed she would not gamble any of her precious savings. She'd read enough to know that gambling tables didn't have to be rigged to be in favor of the house. She also knew that a person in her particular mental condition, frustrated, bored and lonely, was exactly the kind who could get hooked on the games, who could lose all sense of perspective.
"Sharon, get a move on it!" Kitty called from the living room, snapping her from her second moody reverie. Sharon rose quickly from the bed and went into the bathroom to wash up. She quickly unbuttoned her blouse and removed it, then hesitated, naked from the waist up except for her flimsy, tightly constricting lace brassiere. For a moment she contemplated her reflection silently. Her face could be considered beautiful, she thought; more than one person had thought so, though she sometimes tended to under-estimate her attractiveness. It was slightly oval, with delicate features accented by her large, deep blue eyes, which alone were enough to make any male turn for a second look when she passed. Her nose was dainty, a slight "ski-jump" shape which blended perfectly with her full ripe mouth with a slightly protruding lower lip that reminded one of a little girl's pout. Her complexion was lightly tanned, yet smooth and healthy from her outdoors childhood on the sea. It was a face that sent well with her long, sensuously graceful body.
Chiding herself for her vanity, Sharon put the water to run and leaned over the sink to splash it onto her cheeks and into her eyes. She washed with a mild soap and dried quickly, then applied a few fine lines of mascara. Then she went back to the bedroom and quickly stripped down to brassiere and panties before putting on the T-shirt and tight bell bottom pants she'd decided to wear for the flight. Air-conditioning in Vegas notwithstanding, Sharon knew their trip from the airport to the hotel was going to be hot and uncomfortable. She would shower and change again after they got there, then, of course, change into something much more elegant. At least, she thought, that was one bright spot in the trip. She would finally have a reason to get dressed up, for a change, something she'd missed very much since Kevin had gone. Though it seemed somewhat a hollow thrill, as she didn't really have anyone to dress up for, and the last thing she was interested in was attracting the sexual attention of any of the strange men she might encounter.
Sharon was just closing her suitcase when Kitty came in, expressing exaggerated gratitude that her roommate was finally ready to go. They locked the apartment and took the elevator back down, then went quickly out to the car.
The drive in the opposite direction was, as Sharon had predicted, much more rapid and they reached the airport with plenty of time to spare. After checking their bags they went to the economy lounge for a cocktail, where Kitty chatted excitedly about Las Vegas in most of the cliche terms ascribed to it by media. By the time they boarded the plane, Sharon was in relatively high spirits, almost even excited.
After they took off Kitty insisted on ordering them two more drinks, which a short, dark-haired middle aged gentleman with a New York accent insisted on paying for. "You girls going to Vegas or Denver?" he asked, toasting with the beer he'd purchased for himself.
"Las Vegas," Kitty said.
"Figured so. Divorce or gambling?"
Sharon flashed an automatic angry frown, but Kitty simply giggled. "Well, since I'm not married and my friend here is hopelessly in love with her long lost hubby, it's not divorce. I won a company sales competition. The prize was a three day weekend for two."
"Whatcha sell?" the man asked shrewdly.
Kitty giggled again. "In fact, I sell women's lingerie." She arched her shoulders back in a teasing display of her full high-set breasts.
"Too bad," the man said. "If you'd been in some other line I might've said you was lucky."
Now, perhaps partly because the second drink was relaxing her, even Sharon laughed.
"And what about you?" Kitty asked.
"P.T. Barnum said there's a sucker born every day," the man said. "I'm just one of the statistics." He sighed as both girls laughed. "George Stanos. That's Greek, short for something you girls probably couldn't even pronounce. You wanna hear a story, sort of long and sad with a moral to it?"
"If you're dying to tell it," said Kitty.
"I'm just dying to get to that crap table at the Sands. But the story will tell you why, and maybe help pass the time." George Stanos cleared his throat. "I'm a cook. Greek food. You know the stuff. Except for three months last fall I've been a cook since I was twenty years old, and that counts four years in the army though the food wasn't Greek. The most I ever made in my life was last summer. Knocking down a little better than a hundred and a half a week. But I've got a house back in the old country. Nice little place in the Turkish Port, where I won't be able to go live because of this story I'm about to tell." He paused and cleared his throat. "You probably want me to get on with it? The last time I came to Vegas was about this time last summer. I had two weeks off and with some savings and vacation pay I had six hundred dollars, which I figured, given the house advantages on the crap table and the cost of a babe or two in this town we're going to -begging your pardon, ladies - might last me my two weeks and then might not last the two weeks. But I wasn't worried. Cooking's hard work; I wanted to blow off a little steam.
"Now I walked into the Sands that first day. Just about broke even. I lost a hundred the next day. Figured I better go ahead and get myself a gal that night, just to be safe. Got to have something to tell the dishwashers when you go back on the job. I guess that gal was luck for me, though. She left about one; I was feeling pretty good, went back down to the tables. That's when the first streak hit. Sevens and elevens. Sometimes I needed a point, almost always six or eight. Rolled ace-deuce back to back twice in a row. Walked out at six in the morning with ten thousand dollars."
A large swallow of vodka and tonic went down Sharon's windpipe. She coughed so violently she spilled the rest of her drink. Tears filled her eyes. She stared, embarrassed, at the rather comical looking little man sitting across the aisle opposite Kitty. The first time she tried to speak she had no voice and what she wanted to say came out only in a whisper. The second time she managed better, though it was still only barely audible: "Ten thousand dollars?"
"Now don't get excited," said George Stanos. "This is just the beginning." He signaled the stewardess to bring Sharon another drink, then continued: "The next morning I tried to decide whether to stay or get out of town with a new hat. But I felt lucky and any gambler will tell you the worst mistake you can make is setting a limit on how much you'll let yourself win. Set the limits on your losing, but don't turn down any chances to break the bank. And I woke up feeling lucky, shrewd even. I had a nice big steak for breakfast and a manicure and a massage by a big Swedish blonde. I went down to the casino, where a lesser man would have gone straight to the crap tables. But I walked past a roulette table and just as I was going by I saw a color: red. The wheel spun and it was red. I still saw red so this time a bet I hundred and won. I let it ride and won again. I backed off for a few plays, until I saw another color, which was black. And so on. Once I saw a number, which happened to be thirteen. That's the way it went. Thirteen was my lucky number because when I quit for dinner that was how many more thousand dollars I'd won at the roulette table."
Sharon took her drink from the stewardess and drank half of it down in a gulp. She was computing the incredible sums the man mentioned in her mind. Twenty-three thousand dollars. That was better than half the full cost of a house in California, though with today's inflated real estate prices not necessarily the maximum one could pay even for a modest piece of property. And somehow, incredible as the story seemed, she sensed that every word of it was true.
"Well I don't want to bore you ladies," said George Stanos. "To make a long story short, I went back to the crap tables. I stayed three more days. The best day I had was seven thousand. My total profits for the trip were forty-one thousand. And I woke up one morning with the sure knowledge, though for the life of me I don't know where it came from, that my luck was over. I dropped a post card to one of the dish washers back in L.A., told him to tell the boss that George Stanos, Big Shot, had had enough Greek cooking to last him a life time and was going home. I bought a one way ticket to Athens, with layovers in Nice and Venice. I won another ten grand in Nice, though it took me four nights to do it and by this time I was getting to consider that hard work for deflated wages. I lost six grand in Venice, which took me a week and was a downright frustrating experience. Any fool would have known the run was over. I got back on the plane. I looked around Athens for a week, checked the real estate racket, picked out my little place and stayed in it two nights. Then I went back to Monte Carlo." George shook his head, laughing softly. "The house cost me seven grand. Fact is, it's really what we'd call an apartment here in California. I had three pretty good months in Italy and France. Few dames. Some good food. Lot's of casinos. The American Consulate there in Nice, good sympathetic people, took care of my plane ticket back home and gave me twenty dollars pocket money and a receipt for my passport. I still had ten dollars of the pocket cash when I got back to L.A."
CHAPTER THREE
It was dark by the time they landed. They took a limousine into the neon jungle of the city, down the wide strip lined with the famous hotels, The Sands, The Dune, a montage of bright and contrasting color looming up out of the flatness of a seeming boundless desert. The limousine let them off at their hotel, the name of which attested to the generosity of their company, and a snappy bellhop took them up to their "suite", two adjoining rooms with a bath and a small entrance that in a brochure might have been called a lounge. By Las Vegas standards it was certainly nothing special, but it was a class well above anything Sharon was accustomed to staying in.
"It's really nice, isn't it?" she said after the bellhop had gone.
Kitty shrugged. "It's all right. Honey, this is not a cheap town."
"I know," Sharon laughed, still slightly high from the drinks they'd had at the airport and on the plane. "I've got a feeling I'm going to look like a ragdoll in comparison to the way women are dressed around here. Did you see those gowns standing around the lobby?"
Kitty scowled. "Those hookers!"
"What?"
"Honey, those were whores! If you showed up in the casino dressed like that with your angelic face the whole town would probably turn over and stand on its head in sheer confusion. You look exactly as you're supposed to look, and I'll guarantee if you're really serious about remaining faithful to Kevin during these three days you better prepare yourself to fight them off with a stick."
"Kitty!" Sharon exclaimed in legitimate indignation.
Kitty laughed. "I'm just kidding, honey. Do you want the bath first?"
"I don't care."
"Go ahead."
"All right."
Kitty went into the bath and quickly stripped off her T-shirt and pants, then brassiere and lacy bikini pants. She turned the shower on and waited until the water was hot, then stepped beneath it and took the bar of soap and began briskly scrubbing over her softly glistening flesh. George Stanos's story had been troubling her ever since she heard it. She couldn't imagine how a man could be so irresponsible with money to do what he had done. She supposed greed was a basic part of the nature of mankind. Wealth bred a desire for more wealth. But she knew what she would have done in his situation. If she had found herself forty thousand dollars ahead after a few nights in a casino, she would have taken the money to a real estate agent and bought the house she and Kevin were so anxious to have. Then it could never have been taken away from her. But she could see how it would be different with a man like George Stanos. He was a nice enough guy, of course, and in no way had he gotten fresh with either of the girls on the plane ride or the trip into the city. But she didn't doubt for one minute that when he gambled, he was playing not so much because he wanted the money, but because he wanted to play the game. Perhaps, without even realizing it himself, he was playing because he wanted to lose. She knew that some psychiatrists had drawn a connection between what was called compulsive gambling and sexual maladjustments, and though she hated to make such a snap judgment about any man, Sharon could not help but believe that George Stanos's case must be typical of this particular syndrome.
But there was one thing Sharon did know as surely as she knew that night followed day: If she had a chance to play roulette, which from George's story had seemed a much easier game to play than craps and certainly had a more acceptable name, she would be playing for one reason and one reason only - the money.
Sharon chose a sleeveless gown that came just to the knees, dressed and brushed her hair while Kitty showered. Then they went down for dinner, which was included with their room. They decided to take it in the dining room tonight, then go straight to the casino; tomorrow night they would have it in the club and catch the musical revue.
"That George Stanos," Sharon remarked, cutting into a thick rare steak. "Can you imagine losing all that money?"
"I can't imagine winning it," Kitty said. "But I guess he was telling the truth."
"He was telling the truth," Sharon said with certainty. She hesitated, then continued: "I made a decision not to play at all. And that story only re-enforces it. I brought just enough cash for the expenses that aren't covered with the hotel, and I'm really glad I did that. There's something weird about this town. I can sort of feel it. All this money around. Las Vegas is just the sort of place where someone could be tempted to do something foolish. I'm glad I decided not to play before coming."
"Not to play?" Kitty asked. She'd been listening to Sharon open mouthed. "But, of course, you're going to play. You can't come to Las Vegas without playing the tables."
"I can and I am," Kitty said firmly. "I told you. I didn't even bring the money to play."
"But your chips," Kitty said. "You get a hundred dollars in chips. It's part of the prize."
"That's yours f"
"We each get a hundred dollars." Sharon looked up sharply at her friend. "Each of us? I didn't realize that." A fantasy darted like a bolt of lightning through her mind. Then she got control of herself and shook her head. "But that's still yours, Kitty. And I don't want it. I really don't."
"Sharon, I won a three-day trip for two and we split it straight down the middle. You have a hundred dollars in chips at the Casino coming and you might as well play them. You can't eat them, you know."
Sharon shook her head. "It would be different if we were a married couple, or something. That's what they have in mind when they make the prize a trip for two. But if I played with those I'd feel as if I was playing with your money."
Sharon returned her attention to her steak, realizing that had been one of the most difficult things she'd had to say in a long time. Because she would have liked to try the tables under those conditions - when she and Kevin had nothing to lose and everything to win.
Kitty laughed softly at her friend and ate a bite of her own steak before she spoke: "Sharon, I'm going into that casino for one reason, to get laid. I'm going to stand around and look sexy, sipping a drink and playing one chip at a time until somebody I like picks me up and takes me to a room. Now if you're doing the same, all right, you don't have to take your half of the chips. We can give them to one of the little old ladies feeding quarters into the slot machines in the foyer."
Sharon looked up, hesitating. She blushed red, knowing her grudging desire must show in her eyes. At last she looked away, nodding self-consciously. "All right. I'll play half the chips . . . but if I win I'll pay you back the hundred."
Kitty giggled inwardly. Sharon was funny sometimes. Probably came from not getting enough cock, she thought.
The naive young blonde bride experienced a unique surge of excitement as she and Kitty walked into the expansive and elegant casino. The air was filled with cigarette smoke; there was a constant din of voices and laughter, the shuffling of cards and the rattle of dice; there was an air of calm desperation about the place, of wealth and worldliness about the men and women who peopled it.
Kitty went straight to the cashiers and changed the two hundred-chip vouchers. The distinguished, expensively dressed change-man pushed out two stacks of twenty-five dollar chips, and she shoved one to Sharon. Sharon hesitated before taking them and shoveling them into her purse. Five dollars per bet seemed somewhat extravagant to her, as she earned somewhat less than four dollars an hour at her job in Los Angeles, but she thought it would probably appear in bad taste for her to ask for something smaller, if in a place like this that really existed. Then the two girls ambled among the various gaming tables, Sharon excitedly observing the play, Kitty looking about like a rubber-necked tourist, not at the games but the men. As they passed the first roulette table, Sharon slowed, then stopped, and her friend seemed to pause only reluctantly. Perhaps this was understandable as there were only five players, two old women and one elderly man and a very attractive well-dressed blonde with lots of diamonds. Sharon picked a color, black, and watched the wheel turn.
The ball seemed to settle into red as it slowed to a halt, at the last minute skipped out again. The machine stopped; the ball dropped on black.
"I won," Sharon said, giggling. "How much does a color pay?"
"Even odds," the blonde woman said without looking back at her.
Kitty smiled and leaned over to whisper in her ear: "She seems to see you as competition. The man must be loaded." She shrugged. "But I didn't come up here to hustle. Let's look around."
Sharon picked up her ten dollars and moved away only reluctantly. They stopped next at a crap table, where there was a young Latin type who aroused Kitty's interest. But he was obviously uninterested in her, completely engrossed in his play. Sharon couldn't understand the game at all and was relieved when her friend moved on. They watched blackjack for awhile, at which none of about seven players seemed to be winning, then came to another roulette table, just as a girl in a short skirt approached with a tray of drinks.
"Play a chip and get a free cocktail," Kitty whispered, tossing one of her own chips onto red.
Sharon fumbled in her purse, not prepared, not understanding about the drink, and also played five dollars on red. She felt a stab of disappointment as the ball settled on black. She'd completely forgotten about the drink, which Kitty thrust into her hand.
"We lost," she said, sipping absently.
"Not me," said Kitty.
"It's black, isn't it?" Sharon asked, watching the croupier sweep away her chip.
"Yes, but I have the eye of a very nice looking man. So would you, if you were in the game." She nodded at a tall, elegantly looking man of about forty, who was now toasting them with a drink.
"Oh," Sharon said without interest.
"I think I'll walk," Kitty said. "Want to come."
Sharon didn't take her eyes off the spinning wheel. "No, I don't want to cramp your style."
"O.K. Good luck."
"Yeah. You too."
On the next spin Sharon played even. She held her breath as the wheel turned, sighing deeply as the ball fell into the number two slot. She was back to where she started, and she suddenly had a feeling. She didn't even know where it came from, but she let the ten dollars ride and won again. Then she picked up her chips. This time she'd had no feeling. It would have been as if she were betting "blind". She didn't play for three more spins, during which red came up every time. But as she watched this she began to think about the law of averages. Black was due sooner or later. But it came not on the fourth spin, when she hesitated. On the fifth she thought she knew. She put down twenty dollars. She won.
It wasn't exactly the kind of night George Stanos had described on the airplane. But at sometime after midnight when Sharon pulled herself away from the table and cashed in all but the original hundred dollars worth of chips, she was just over four hundred ahead. She was also feeling a little woozy from the free cocktails she'd been served while playing, but she had her wits about her and she thought it was time to go. The young blonde took the elevator up to their suite, went triumphantly to the door and started to turn the handle. Then she hesitated, hearing a low moan from inside, followed by a familiar squeal.
Kitty was in bed with a man!
Sharon felt a surge of anger. The suite was too small, too intimate, and it would be more uncomfortable for her even than their apartment, where at least the bedrooms were separated by the living room. Then, miraculously, her anger turned to relief. As long as Kitty and her lover, whoever he was, were going to be keeping her awake, she might as well go back down to the casino. She hadn't left because she felt her luck was changing; to the contrary, she felt she could have kept on winning. It just seemed improper for her to be out so late, especially considering her husband's curfew at camp. It seemed so inherently unfair to Kevin, though she'd reminded herself that what she was doing she was doing for him as much as for her. Because whatever she won during their three days here in Las Vegas, no matter how great or how insignificant the amount, every cent of it was going into the savings account toward the purchase of their house.
Sharon returned to the same table where she'd played before. The waitress was just passing, recognized her and served her another of the gimlets she'd been drinking all evening. She watched five spins, the last four of which were red. On the next she bet fifty dollars on black. When she won she felt as if she could almost have hugged Kitty for having taken the man up to their suite. She'd known, even as she left, that it wasn't really time for her to quit.
Sharon had won two more fifty dollar bets, employing the same system of waiting until the law of averages had been severely strained before playing, when the man standing beside her first spoke: "It's not basically scientific, you know. But it does work as well as most of the so-called "systems" people apply to roulette."
Sharon turned to look with surprise at the tall, handsome, casually dressed gentleman. "What do you mean?"
"I mean black can come up a hundred times in a row if it decides to."
Sharon sensed immediately that the man must know the casinos very well. He seemed at home here. Nor did he seem to be making a pass at her; he was just talking. But she did know that she was having right now what must be termed beginner's luck. If she was going to continue to win during the next two nights of their stay here, it probably wouldn't hurt her to understand the game a little better. That, and perhaps the second cocktail she'd had since coming down, was what made her decide there was no harm in pursuing the conversation. "But I thought that according to the law of averages a coin flipped a thousand times will come up heads five hundred?"
"Maybe. Or maybe if you flip it a million times. Einstein says that two parallel lines will cross eventually at some point in infinity. It's a toss-up between black and red on each given spin, though eventually they will balance out. Well, not quite a toss-up." He nodded at the table. "You've still got your zero and double zero."
Sharon watched the croupier rake in the bets, all of the bets. The ball had stopped on the double zero. "Are you a gambler?" she asked. "You haven't even been playing."
"I play poker, but the game was stale tonight. And a little backgammon. Got a game in Monte Carlo on Sunday, as a matter of fact."
"You'll go all the way to Monte Carlo for one game of back - whatever that was?"
"It's a big game." The man took a chip from his coat pocket and pitched it casually onto the number thirty-two. Sharon's mouth dropped open as she saw that it was a hundred dollars. She watched the spin of the wheel, looked up at the man's unconcerned face. She gasped as it stopped and she saw he'd won; she gawked at his virtually disinterest as he accepted six five-hundred-dollar chips, plus three more for a hundred, and dropped them casually back into his pocket.
"You won over three thousand dollars just then?"
"Yes," he shrugged. "But it's blind luck. I couldn't do that again in a month, or maybe I could do it on the next play. No sense in trying though. There's a little gambler in me, but not that much."
"But you play poker and that other game?"
"Games of skill. A good man, the best man, should never lose twice in a row. Though even that happens."
Sharon had never been so astonished in her life. Her own play now seemed for nothing. It seemed almost a waste of time. She could stand here all her life betting the colors and she'd never get that far ahead. "I guess I should be playing numbers too?" she asked.
"I wouldn't advise it, unless you're tired of the game."
Sharon stared at the man for a moment. Then she found a ten dollar chip and played it on thirty-one. She turned and gazed up with a sense of exquisite triumph when she won and the croupier paid her three hundred and twenty dollars.
The man grinned. "We're cheating the gods. Are you going to let it ride?"
Sharon hesitated, then shook her head. "No. Maybe I'm not that much of a gambler either."
"Smart. And you're not a hustler either. I knew that the first time I saw you, and . . . believe me, that's a compliment in this town. What's your name?"
Sharon giggled self-consciously. She liked this man. She really did. He was sort of strange and nice and, she somehow knew, harmless as far as she was concerned. "Sharon. Sharon Dolan."
"Jack Golightly," the man said, then grinned. "I know it sounds corny. "In fact, it's Jack Golightly, Jr."
"It really sounds kind of fitting for a gambler," Sharon said.
The waitress came by and Jack Golightly plucked two drinks from the tray. "Careful of this stuff while you're playing, though," he warned as he handed Sharon hers. "You know, they don't hand them out free because they want to see you win." He toasted. "Been in town long?"
"Just tonight. I'm with a girlfriend," Sharon said, then added: "My husband's in the army. He's in O.C.S. now."
"Well, he missed the war. You can be thankful for that, anyway," Jack said.
"And I am. I really am." Sharon smiled nervously, then turned back to the table.
Sharon lost on black the next time she played. Jack advised her, pointing out that it still wasn't scientific, that the next time she decided to bet she should increase her play by fifty percent. She did so and won. She won three more times in a row. She now combined her system of waiting for the eventual adjustment of the law of averages, playing only when it had been stretched, with Jack's system of using a fifty percent raise to follow any losing bet. By three-thirty she was thirteen-hundred dollars ahead and drunk. By four-thirty, when Jack took her arm and led her against her complaints out of the casino, she was down to nine-hundred profit and staggering so badly he had to hold her up.
"We'll get some coffee down you," Jack said. "I've got a kitchen in my place upstairs."
"You're place?" Sharon looked at him stupidly. "I don't know if that is proper."
"It's proper, and furthermore you need it."
"You promise you'll let me leave."
"As soon as you're sober enough to walk."
"I guess I would have lost all my winnings if you hadn't dragged me away," Sharon remarked as they got on the elevator.
Jack didn't answer. They got off on his floor and he helped the swaying, now very drunken blonde housewife to the door. Sharon was impressed as she looked around at the elegant lounge they entered. Jack's suite made her and Kitty's place look like a studio apartment in a government housing project. The only problem was that it was spinning like a top around her. She stumbled to the couch, turned and fell into a precarious sitting position. Jack went into the kitchen and in a moment returned with a steaming cup of coffee. He sat down beside her and put his left arm around her shoulders to support her swaying torso in an upright position. She leaned against him, touching him with the supple warmth of her bare shoulder and upper arm.
"Here," Jack said. "Try sipping a little of this."
He held the cup up to her mouth until she had taken four or five swallows. Then she reclined backward and slipped slowly sideways into a prone position. As she did so the skirt hiked slowly up her thighs, and as she shifted to make herself more comfortable it was pulled all the way up to her panties. Jack could see her pouting little vaginal mouth through the near transparent lace, and she had put the panties on over her garter belt. .. that made them easy to come off. He smiled; it was that as much as anything else that made him decide to fuck her. Tonight, of course, would have been his only chance in any event, as he had to catch his plane to Nice tomorrow afternoon. But if the circumstances had been just a little different, he would probably have been unable to succeed even if he had made a play. But the knowledge that he had easy access to what he was dead certain was a beautiful love-starved cunt, with no drawn out ritual of undressing to impede the seduction, tilted the scales. He really wanted to possess this virginal young cunt, and he could see that this was his big chance to have her.
Jack bent down and lifted Sharon's limp, nylon-clad legs onto the couch, then pushed a cushion beneath her head. She smiled sleepily without opening her eyes. She was almost sound asleep now, lying flat on her back with her left leg slightly cocked at the knee. Jack could plainly see the shadow of her vaginal crevice and the full ripe mound of warm creamy flesh that denoted the beginnings of her deliciously proportioned buttocks. Softly curling strands of blonde pubic hair peeked out from under the tight elastic legbands of her panties. It was all he could do to keep from spreading her legs wide and tearing immediately into the young, hardly protected cunt lying so helplessly there before him, and it was only by exerting all of his professional gambler's willpower and patience that he was able to hold himself back.
Sharon was not aware of it when Jack eased her shoes off her feet and teased soft wet kisses along the bottom of one of them and up the sensitive back of her calf. Nor did she know what was happening when she vaguely felt her hips being raised, having not the slightest awareness of her scanty little nylon panties being drawn slowly down off the curves of her ripely contoured buttocks and the silken flesh of her smoothly tanned thighs.
She didn't feel her legs being spread apart or her right leg being bent and lifted until the knee touched the back of the couch, or the left leg being pushed off to trail to the floor. She didn't know anything about Jack's kneeling up between her thighs and sliding down so his head was almost at her ankles to stare with quickening breath up at her soft blonde pussy hair and the wide coral pink lips of her now completely open and defenseless young cunt. But to Jack her vaginal lips were like magnets, drawing his own lips irrefutably toward them. Her cunt called out, begging to be touched, to be kissed to be eaten like the most succulent piece of forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, and he could feel the hardness of his penis surging up in his trousers, an ache beginning in his cum-filled balls. He didn't know when he'd ever felt more alive, more excited, more determined to fuck a woman and make her like it, drive her out of her mind until she was begging for more and more, and he put his hands on her warm inner thighs to push them carefully even farther apart.
It was not until her smoothly tapered legs were completely spread that Sharon began to attain some semblance of a state of awareness, but it was at best only a vague feeling and she was still incapable of evaluating with any accuracy what was really happening to her. She knew her naked buttocks were pressed onto some kind of soft rough material, that her legs were spread wide apart and warm hands were stroking the insides of her thighs. She knew it felt good; beyond that she hadn't bothered to make anymore precise judgment.
But Jack Golightly sensed that Sharon was coming out of her stupor to some degree and he paused momentarily, waiting to see if there would be any kind of protest. He felt the sensuous blonde momentarily stiffen, then her legs relaxed to fall completely open again. He grinned and licked his lips. Maybe she knew, but more than likely she didn't. But either way she wasn't stopping him.
Then quickly he slithered forward until his face was just above the soft, wetly glistening little slit between her thighs. He didn't think he'd ever seen such a mouth-watering cunt; the vaginal lips were perfect, looking almost as if they belonged on a fourteen year old girl instead of a married woman, and her pussy hair was milk-maiden blonde, the tiny cuntal mouth it lined delicate and kind of timid.
Slowly, savoring every second, Jack lowered his face, his tongue creeping like the red shinning penis of a dog out from between his teeth. He licked once, slowly and gently, his tongue moving all the way from clitoris to anus. He was rewarded by a barely audible moan, and his tongue traced the wetly teasing path back up to where it had just come from. Now he felt the tendons of Sharon's inner thighs draw tight and her entire pelvis rose slowly up toward his face. Whether she was really unconscious or not, her sweet young cunt was responding. He could already taste the first slightly saline secretions of her feminine musk as of its own volition her pussy began to prepare itself for love-making by seeping out its warm, slickly welcoming lubricant.
Sharon was dreaming. Kevin was making beautiful love to her, doing it as he never had before so that now it felt wonderful instead of painful and distasteful, and she was responding as she'd never responded to anything before except the lewd manipulations of her own middle finger.
Then abruptly she was in full command of her senses.
Her eyes opened, her body tensed and she struggled to sit up. She found herself pinned to the couch and things were happening to her she couldn't even begin to comprehend. She was naked from the waist down; her legs were spread and when she tried to close them she met a resistance that felt like a man's head.
Then, raising her head to peer down between the ripe mounds of her still fully clothed breasts, Sharon saw. And the sight was almost enough to make her pass out right then and there.
"No, Jack!" Sharon gasped, still hardly able to believe her eyes. "No, you can't! You can't!"
Jack knew it was now or never, and instead of answering he drove his tongue the full length straight up into the warmly perfumed depths of her tight little pussy, at the same time using his nose to titillate her tiny, unconsciously pulsating clitoris.
"Aaaaggghhhh. No, oh God, no!"
Jack heard the girl's terrified cry of protest and knew that now he couldn't stop until she was so aroused she could no longer help herself. She wouldn't let him near her again if he let up the contact for even a few seconds, but if she continued there was a chance that pretty soon she would start to like it, and with this in mind he tightened his arms about her thighs to hold them wide apart and buried his rapacious tongue even deeper into her heatedly quivering pussy lips between her open legs.
Fear and repugnance were battling for supremacy in Sharon's jumbled mind. Instead of a sweet dream about her husband this was a nightmare too horrible to comprehend. But still the earlier pleasure of the erotic dream was not to be denied. Her nerve-endings were being serenaded by the velvet tongue that licked and sucked and caressed her all at the same time. It was at once wonderful and terrible, outrageous and beautiful.
But she knew she had to protest. She had to stop it right now no matter what mixed physical sensations she might be experiencing.
"No, noooooo!" she whimpered, flinging her arm up against her forehead and clenching her eyes shut as if in the hope that this would make the maddening sensation go away. "Stop. Oh God! Please stop!"
It was only now that Jack ventured to look up, and as he saw her contorted face he knew that at least he was making progress, and even as he stared at her he flicked his tongue down, thrusting it in a swift licking motion over the little quivering bud of her clitoris.
"Oh Jack," Sharon squealed. "Please don't. You can't do that. Please! It's horrible!"
Jack's tongue traced a zig-zag pattern down through Sharon's pubic curls all the way from her clitoris to her wildly puckering little anus as he'd done before, then came back up and speared into the seeping hole of her wetly pulsating cuntal opening. He repeated the same maddening process seven or eight times in rapid succession, flicking his tongue wildly in and out between the lips of her pussy, beginning to tongue-fuck in earnest as he felt her first signs of unwilling acceptance.
Sharon moaned piteously as she felt the powerfully jolting sensations overriding all other emotions and body functions. "Oh Jack! Please! My husband has never done that to me. Jack? Jack!"
The handsome gambler's teeth clamped down onto her sensitive little clitoris and began to nibble gently. Gasping, she fell back against the couch, weakened and confused by the intense feeling, experiencing a sudden and uncontrollable hunger that began down there between her helplessly trembling thighs and spread relentlessly over her whole body. But she had to make one last protest. She just had to, and after a moment she again raised her head. "Please," she groaned. "Please. I have a husband. And that is dirty and perverted!"
Jack looked up triumphantly, his face shining with his own saliva and Sharon's wetly flowing cunt-juice. He could hear the strength going out of her protest. He knew, already, what he'd won. Now it was time to hammer it in.
"You know and I know," he said through his own hastened- breathing, "that you're enjoying the hell out of what I'm doing to your hot little pussy."
"No," Sharon sobbed. "Don't talk like that to me. I'm married. I have a husband."
"So?" Jack asked with a grin. Again he lowered his chin and ran his tongue along one side of her outer layer of cuntal flesh, still watching her face as he did it. She grimaced, but not in disgust. She was desperately fighting to regain her self-control, and he knew the poor little bitch was losing.
She was his now. He knew it. He had her to do with as he wanted. She might think she was still capable of fighting, but her love-starved cunt was in command of her body, and it was going to betray her.
Satisfied with his victory, Jack let his eyes feast on the now fully blossomed pussy lips, which had grown considerably in size and richness of color since he'd began. There was life in those lips, and no masterpiece in any museum could ever compare with the picture before him framed so delicately in the soft blonde pubic curls. They were as beautiful as a royal flush betting into four aces, which couldn't even happen without a crooked deck, and the little single drop of seeping pussy juice clinging to one of the curls of hair looked like a little translucent pearl.
"Look down at me," Jack commanded.
There was something in his voice that made the erotically quivering housewife raise her head, and she watched, petrified, as he placed his thumbs on her vaginal opening and peeled her softly yielding pussy lips apart as though it were sections of succulent tropical fruit being separated. The soft golden curls of her pubic hairs gave way to expose the flaming beauty of her vertical little cuntal mouth to his lust dimmed gaze, and she moaned in shame as he breathed against the sensitive lips, the expelled air grazing the raw nerves. Then her entire body reacted in a spasm of shame and humiliation as he spoke down between her thighs, almost into the cuntal opening itself: "I'm going to eat your pussy, Sharon. I'm going to tongue fuck you, and if you're telling me the truth that not even your husband has done that for you before, then the fact is that I'm actually doing you both a great big favor."
Sharon saw Jack's face drop, his tongue coming out to probe wetly into her hotly throbbing vagina. Then she saw nothing. That last shattering jolt of delight was more than she could take. She was forced to let everything go and now her body responded automatically, jerking convulsively as she ground her buttocks down into the couch in an effort to escape his worming tongue as it wiggled up one side of her cunt and down the other in a maddening oral rape. A groan bubbled out of her throat and she jerked her head from side to side, her eyes tightly closed, her teeth gritted.
"Ohhhh my God! Jack, please, don't." The rapacious licking was more than she could bear, and she could feel her stomach muscles rippling like wind on water. She wailed in animal passion as his tongue scoured her inner thighs and made another hot swipe around the bud of her fully erected clitoris before snaking back into her cringing pussy lips. "Oh God, Jack! Oh dear God. Stop! Please stop before it's too late."
"It's already to late, baby. We both know it!"
Jack raced his tongue even faster up into the dilated hole between the writhing blonde's open thighs. He used his nose with devastating effect to tease against the sensitively throbbing little clitoris, each nudge bringing a low moan from deep within the shamelessly aroused young wife's throat.
Again she raised her head to look down over her breasts. Now her mind was clear enough to see everything, the obscenely bobbing head framed between her widespread nylon clad knees, the inviting nakedness of her lower body, the unwilling jerkings of her own quivering ass-cheeks. Her dress was bunched up above her hips and she could see the black lacy garter belt holding up her sheer hosiery even as the gambler's face bobbed up and down over the soft blonde hair of her lions, and she watched the assault with horror and shame, her mind in a maelstrom of repulsion, embarrassment and unwanted desire. Above all else was the simple realization itself: This was no dream. It was really happening. Really happening to her.
The unwanted jolts of forbidden pleasure and little zephyrs of pure wantonness pervaded Sharon's entire being as Jack's powerful hands released her silken thighs and slipped under her buttocks to cup and squeeze the soft, yet firmly contoured flesh of her hotly trembling ass-cheeks. His tongue and mouth continued to grind further and further into the succulent valley of her defenselessly squirming cunt, and without volition Sharon dug her shoulders into the couch, sucking in her stomach muscles and raising her pelvis so that Jack's face buried itself even deeper. Debased sucking sounds of his labors echoed throughout the suite as his hands pulled apart the fleshy crevice of her buttocks, one of his fingers adventurously exploring up against the opening of her tiny puckered little anus. The feel of the finger there caused Sharon to clench her eyes tightly shut and ball her hands into a fist of frustration. But no longer did she try to convince him to stop.
She was thinking now of Kevin, of that time the first night they made love when he had offered to do this to her and she had refused. What a fool she had been! What an utter hopeless fool! But there was no way she could have even dreamed of the bliss her body was capable of. And now ... if she'd only known! If she'd only imagined! How different everything would have been!
At last, unable to hold back any longer, Sharon began to moan low in her throat, not even trying to conceal her lewd forbidden pleasure. The vision of Kevin faded completely from her mind as she began to let herself feel everything Jack was doing to her, began to arch and grind her hips even more wildly, and wantonly scissor her thighs open and closed about his ears.
"Ooooh yes," she moaned. "Oh it's so good. I can't stand it! I can't stand it!"
Jack heard the innocent blonde housewife's whimpers of delight as his hands kneaded the soft globes of her pliantly yielding buttocks, and the sound caused a surge of even greater lust to shoot through his own lions. He drew her limply co-operating legs far up high around his neck, continuing to orally fuck into her even more helplessly open-splayed pussy as he felt her lock her ankles together behind his neck in consent and voluntary submission. He ran his tongue in lewd circles around her fully erect little clitoris, nuzzling his nose back and forth as he rammed into her hotly pulsating pussy, feeling the soft, hair-lined lips push up against his mouth. She squirmed and thrashed, welcoming the maddening assault, trying to bring more and more of his hot hungering mouth into contact with her sensitive flesh.
Then she whimpered as his outstretched middle finger again sought out the tightly clenched ring of her anus, and a low moan was wrenched from her throat as he probed teasingly at the puckering little opening. Then abruptly his mouth moved down, down, all the way down where his tongue flickered like summer lightning against the anal hole itself.
Sharon's eyes bugged wide open as she felt the obscene touch and felt the wild sensational pleasure surge like a seismic wave through her body. This was dirty, she told herself. Evil. She must stop it. She must make him understand that he couldn't do it.
"Oh God," she cried. "Oh God, Jack! Don't do that. Please!"
But even as she protested vocally, she used her heels to bury Jack's head even tighter against her upturned buttocks as if endeavoring to rape her own tortured rectum with his slavering tongue. She flailed her head from side to side, trying to shake off her shame at the realization of her own treacherous submission. She began sobbing again in deep, unashamed humiliation as the hotly grunting man now wormed his heated tongue straight up into her forbidden rectal opening.
"Aaaagghhh!" Sharon cried. "Oh God!"
Her body was boiling with the exquisite tingling of raw nerve-ends as Jack started his voracious licking of her cuntal crevice again. She knew now that further fight was useless; she no longer wanted to deny this intense delight he was inflicting on her, and suddenly, as the nerve ganglions of her pussy began a wild vibration, she realized she was closer than ever to the kind of fulfillment she had never enjoyed with a man. Of her own volition she gave up the fight, spreading her thighs wider and shoving her desire-filled loins even harder to Jack's face. Now her only wish was to aid him and she ground her erotically pulsating cunt in complete abandon against his face, relishing to the pit of her heart and soul the insane delight surging through her loins.
Jack sensed that the end was near, and he knew that for Sharon this was a previously unbridged gulf. He wormed his middle finger deep into her saliva moistened anus, at the same time intensifying his tongue fucking over her hotly jerking little clitoris.
Sharon writhed and twisted, wild uncontrollable mewls of passion bubbling from her throat, her face contorted into a grotesque mask of feral lust almost frightening in intensity. She was close to orgasm now. She was so close she could hardly stand it. This was it. This was really it.
"Oooh! Oh God!" she cried as Jack screwed his tongue back up into her hotly clasping cunt. She was only vaguely conscious of his hands continuing to tease her anus and clitoris with fingers of flame, and she gasped hoarsely, wailing with a breath that came more and more rapidly as his tongue burrowed ever deeper into her wildly twitching pussy and she could feel it trembling far up inside her, touching everything, licking all of her hot inner warmth.
Then suddenly the towering storm of lust overcame the drunken young wife. She had made it. She was suddenly swinging wildly, soaring higher than she had ever thought possible. She was there, and from a distance that seemed too far away to comprehend she heard her own voice suddenly cry out in unashamed triumph: "I'm cumming! Oh, don't stop. Don't ever stop! Oh? Oh? Ah? AHHHHHHH! AAIIIEEEEE! I'M CUMMMMMIII NNNNGGGG!"
Jack's head was almost knocked off his shoulders by the violence of her pelvis thrust as Sharon jerked and heaved her wildly churning pussy up against his face. Her legs locked around his head and her heels beat a crescendo of sheer implacable lust against his shoulder blades. Then at last the storm ended and her ravished body settled back on the soft cushions of the couch.
For a few moments longer Jack continued to kiss and nibble at Sharon's vaginal lips. Then he felt the last delicate tremors subside and he pulled his head up to gaze at her face. "Well?"
The only answer was a sudden flooding of tears into Sharon's eyes. He ignored them and stood up and began to strip of his clothes, at last dropping his shorts around his ankles to leave himself completely naked before her.
She shook her head. "I'm so ashamed," she sobbed. "I'm so, so ashamed."
"Don't be. You needed that."
"But I'm married. And I love my husband."
Jack shrugged, then got back onto the couch and kneeled over her, his own face suddenly twisted in hungry passion. Then her eyes trailed down his broad chest and flat stomach to the erect penis standing up like a telephone pole from his brown pubic hair. She gasped as his hand began to stroke his thickened hardness, pulling the foreskin slowly back to reveal the weeping eye of the glans. It was so big! she thought. It was much bigger than Kevin's, and she was terrorized by the immensity of its girth and length. Remembering the pain of each insertion she'd experienced at the hands of her husband, she knew the worst fears of her first penetration now really would come true. It would split her apart, fill her with excruciating agony, kill her!
"It's my turn now," Jim said, watching her face fill with distress. "I'm going to fuck you. I'm going to fuck you like you've never been fucked before. And you're going to love it!"
Jack's obscene words both frightened and excited her, but she couldn't tear her eyes from that monstrous rod of flesh he held in his hand. Sharon gaped at it in terror as she found her errant mind wondering if he really could bring her again to completion. He had once. But could he do it again? And could she possibly stand the enormous penetration?
"Put it in for me," Jack ordered, leaning suddenly forward onto her.
"Oh no. Please, no! Don't ask me to do that!" Sharon whimpered.
"Take it," he snarled, and in his heated desire for her curvaceous young body he suddenly grasped her arm above the elbow and dug his fingernails into the flesh, and Sharon realized hopelessly that she had no choice. He was going to fuck her whether she wanted him to or not.
"Put it in!"
Knowing protest was useless, Sharon dropped her hand between their bodies to encounter the white-hot immensity of his lust-hardened flesh. "Oh," she moaned softly as her fingers entwined around the thick hardness, fear welling even stronger in her as she fully comprehended its enormity and power.
"Go on," Jack said, lowering his hips down between her widespread thighs.
Then he dropped heavily across her, the hardness of his mammoth cock pulsating against her upper thighs, his face looming almost angrily above her. Forcing herself not to look or think about what was happening, Sharon guided the thick fleshy shaft up to the passion-drenched mouth of her pussy. The bulbous head scraped electrifyingly against her ultra-sensitive cuntal lips, then pressed slightly inward, causing shivers of new unwanted pleasure to surge throughout her abdomen. She dared not move as she felt the pressure increase and her small, relatively unused cuntal opening starting to stretch. Pain came suddenly and sharply, but she was too frightened and shocked by what was happening to even venture to cry out in protest.
"Oh Jesus, you're a tight little cunt!" Jack breathed into her face.
He pushed forward again and the ponderous cock-head slowly forced its way up into her tightly resisting pussy.
"Please Jack," Sharon whimpered. "You're too big for me. I can't stand it. You're already hurting me!" It was a plea for mercy, as though in spite of everything that had already happened she still believed implicitly in his chivalry. And it was a futile plea.
Jack relentlessly continued the brutal impalement. He could tell he was stretching this naive little wife's pussy to the point it had never been stretched before, but at the same time she was so well lubricated from his tongue fucking that he knew he could not be hurting her too badly. She was just nervous, tense, frightened by the newness of what was happening. She would get over it soon, just as soon as she felt the full pulsing length of his long hard penis scraping at every hidden spot of delight up in that musk-scented honey-sweet little pussy, and he felt his cock-head swelling even larger at the mere thought of it.
Inch by inch Jack thrust deeper into Sharon's cringing cuntal passage. She was really weeping now, whether from pain or shame he couldn't tell and he doubted if she could either. The sleek sensual feel of her nylons and the roughness of her lace garter-belt against his hips and bare buttocks only served as a goad, and he could hardly stand this exquisite torture any longer. Suddenly he jerked his hips forward and in one final thrust his hard, hotly throbbing cock roared up into the previously untouched depths of her womb.
"Aaaaggghhh!" Sharon wailed as the implacably hardened pole of male flesh cut deeper up into her belly than anyone had ever penetrated before. He had filled her almost to the bursting point, and she could feel every muscular ridge of his thick corrugated penis through the tortured walls of her vagina.
The impalement completed, Jack lay still for a moment. Never before, not even with the virgins he'd deflowered, had he ever known such a tight little cunt. It seemed to grip his cock like a fist covered in a velvet glove, and he couldn't resist flexing to throb even deeper up into her.
Delighted with the subservient plea for mercy, Jack flexed again and again, hearing Sharon groan abjectly with each further twitch of his sunken cock. Then gradually he began short little movements in and out of her lewdly stretched cunt, and as her passage became more accustomed to his monstrous intrusion, the whimpers of pain and protest slowly evolved to little chants of pleasure. Now he began to rotate his hips, bringing his maleness down against her wetly clasping vagina until the mushroomed head was beating relentlessly against her tortured cervix. He rocked above her, thrusting with longer, smoother motions, rising and falling, rising and falling on her proud young breasts up and down between her lewdly splayed thighs on the couch.
Sharon had begun moving her hips up and down in unison with Jack's motions. Already she was beginning to feel little jolts of pleasure surging through her body. Already she was experiencing more sensations than she'd ever known with Kevin, and her mouth opened and closed in unvoiced comments, prayers for forgiveness and commands to her body to ignore this intense delight mingled with pleadings for more and more of the sheer raw sensation. Shining little beads of perspiration seeped to her forehead; her neck tendons grew taut; she panted with carnal joy and the room swirled around her as the gambler's giant throbbing cock buried so deeply up inside her vagina played a symphony of lust upon her tortured flesh.
Then, she forgot Kevin. She forgot herself. She forgot everything, and suddenly the whore in her voiced its final submission: "Oh yes. Do it to me. Don't stop. Fuck me! Fuck me!"
Those were the words Jack had been waiting to hear. He rammed his thick rigid cock violently inward as Sharon shoved her cunt lewdly up beneath him in final offering. She had never known anything like this in her life. She'd never imagined there could be such ecstasy between a man and a woman, such joy to be had from the lewd licking of her love-starved pussy and the penetration of the mammoth penis sliding so violently up into her slickened cuntal channel to ram at the heart of her womb. She was filled with the most insane pleasure she had ever experienced and she wanted more and more of it.
"Of fuck me! Fuck me, fuck me!" Jack did as she asked, thrusting into her with ever increasing force as her tightly locked young vagina continued to flood out the warming lubricant. He lengthened his strokes, drawing his engorged rod of male flesh almost all the way out of the fleshy cuntal sheath and plunging back downward with quickening strokes as her cunt hungrily devoured it. Jesus, he thought, she was really going wild. He heard her grunt in complete abandon, felt her squirm her wildly sucking pussy up and down on his throbbing cockshaft, taking the control of what they were doing away from him completely in her own mad rush to completion.
"Aaaaggghhhh . . . ooohhhh," Sharon moaned as his lust-thickened cock pistoned in and out of the quivering warmth of her loins. The wildly fucking man's sperm-inflated balls slapped down hard against the nakedness of her unprotected anus, and through his taut-stretched scrotum he could feel the delicious softness of her ass-cheeks and the hot dampness in the heated crevice where her warm viscosity and his own saliva had seeped down from her wetly pulsating cunt. His throbbing sac seemed surely to split apart from his mounting pressure and he fought desperately for control against the burning need to spew his white hot sperm up into the deepest depths of her churning little belly. He began ramming into her with increasing fury, determined to bring her to an orgasm before he came himself.
Sharon cried out with every punishing fuck-stroke up into her gratefully accepting young pussy. She screwed her tongue into Jack's mouth and throat in unison with each new thrust that buried his burning shaft deeper into her loins. She pulled her legs back even higher, offering him more and more of her femininity, and he glanced downward at his wetly glistening cock, watching it fuck in and out of her hair-lined pussy lips, certain he would go mad unless he came soon. Quickly, in an effort to bring her along faster, he slipped his hand beneath her buttucks and once again began to tease at the rhythmically flexing hole of her tiny anus.
"Aaaggghhh . .. oh, yes .. . put your finger in there. Hard!"
Sharon rotated her buttocks down hungrily against this new invasion, pressing and flexing with her stomach muscles as though she were trying to void something from her bowels, opening the rectum so it could accept even further this new and lewder degradation.
She felt a stab of pain as the palm of his hand rested flat against her naked ass-cheeks and the extended middle finger sank its full length into her clinging rectal passage and began moving in and out of the hotly skewered little opening in time with each thrust of his penis. Then the pain changed, mingling with pleasure until at last only the lewd delight remained. Before long she was consciously attempting to impale herself on Jack's middle finger all the way to the knuckle, shoving back against it at the same time she strained to devour more of his rock-hard cock up into her heaving belly.
Jack mercilessly dug into her tight little anus, his finger feeling the hard thrusting flesh of his own cock through the thin membrane separating her cunt and rectum. Beneath him the previously timid girl writhed in complete abandon. Her motions, together with the guttural croaks of delight and the tightness of her vagina, pushed him finally beyond the limits of self control and he realized his orgasm was only seconds away . . .
"Cum now," he growled, praying she would obey. "I'm going to cum inside you. Cum with me ... "
Hearing these obscene words, Sharon began grinding up and down even more frantically on the two simultaneously impaling rods. Her toes flexed and splayed out, her resilient young breasts heaved beneath her dress and her nylon-clad legs scissored wildly open and closed around his naked buttocks. Then her eyes opened wide in disbelief as she felt the first beginnings of her second orgasm.
Jack grunted and hammered even deeper as he felt the spasming walls of the shamelessly aroused housewife's vagina seeping the warm sticky fluid of her second climax. With demoniacal strength she shoved her pelvis completely up from the bed, rotating her softly haired cunt lips around his thick pistoning penis with renewed fury. Then she was screaming, "Yes, oh God! I'm cumming again. I'm going to cum. Cum in me. Cum in me. CUM IN ME!"
Sharon convulsed beneath the gambler in wildly fucking contortions, her mouth and cunt both sucking furiously as she covered his lips with her own, her panting, rasping breath breaking into great gasping sobs, her pussy clenching, milking him of his hotly spurting sperm, her anus expanding and contracting frenziedly about his impaling middle finger embedded far up in her rectal channel.
Spurred on by her continuing climax, Jack thrust deeper and deeper into her wildly convulsing vagina and anus, forcing her thighs even wider apart in his determination to impale her to the hilt. He fucked into her as though his pelvis were driven by atomic fury, wracking her ripe young body with shattering lunges. Then he gasped as he felt the sudden boiling waves of sperm break completely through his resistance, and he was instantly lost in incredible sensuality as the powerful spurts of semen spewed deep into the warm heart of Sharon's greedy little pussy, filling her hungrily contracting belly to the bursting point. The walls of her vagina continued to work in spasms around his penis as if they were trying to milk him forever dry, squeezing, massaging, clasping and unclasping to drain out every wonderful life-giving drop of his hotly ejaculating semen.
Then Sharon's wildly ravished body dropped suddenly back on the couch, her belly still rippling from the aftermath of her galactic upheaval. She stared up in almost delirious gratitude for a moment. Never had such bliss been experienced. She was fulfilled completely. She was finally a woman.
Then her eyes closed. Jack withdrew and slipped off the couch, looking down with continued appreciation at her half-naked body. She was sound asleep now. She was really satisfied. He knew that. Tonight had been a big night for her.
Might as well let her sleep a few minutes, he thought. She deserved it. He'd wait until he was ready to retire before taking her up to her room.
CHAPTER FOUR
The first thing Sharon felt when she awoke the next morning was pain. Her head felt as if someone were using a baseball bat atop her skull. She tried to open her eyes, but the blinding rays of sun coming through the window caused her to clench them shut almost immediately. She lay on the bed in torment, remembering after a moment that she was in her room in the little suite she and Kitty stayed in at the Las Vegas hotel. Then other various messages began to pour into her brain, things she could hardly sort out, hardly even bring herself to believe.
Her first really cohesive thought was that she was still dressed, lying atop the covers. As she dared to open her eyes again, she found a piece of paper lying on the bed beside her with a scribbled note in Kitty's hand-writing. Squinting, she read it:
--Looks like you had an even rougher night than I did. When you wake up. if you wake up, I'll be down at the pool. Join me. It might help.
Kitty
Then suddenly the whole horrible nightmare flooded back to her mind: She met a man named Jack Golightly. A gambler. No, a poker player. He seemed to think there was a difference. She was winning a lot at roulette, and drinking a lot. Then she started losing. He dragged her away from the casino and took her for coffee. They went to his apartment here in the hotel. She passed out on the couch and had ... a dream about Kevin and then she woke up and it wasn't a dream. It was really happening, and what it was that was happening was. ..
Jack Golightly was performing oral sex on her!
Then it all came back to her, every incredibly shocking detail, and the slow welling of tears became a torrent when she thought of Kevin; yet her mind kept going back, back, back to that first orgasm she'd experienced from the oral fucking of her naked cunt and then to the second, which she'd achieved after he was really fucking her, fucking her with his enormous penis that was bigger than anything she'd ever dreamed of, fucking her as she'd never been fucked before, fucking her as she'd never dreamed anyone could ever fuck a woman.
The crying continued for at least five minutes, deep, heart-rending, convulsive sobs of shame and humiliation. She was nothing more than a whore. But worse than a whore because she had betrayed her husband and her love. And what was worse was that she'd done it the first time any man other than him had really tried to seduce her, the very first time, as if she'd been waiting for it.
Then some half-rational part of her mind told her that the very first thing she should do was have a shower, try to stop the pounding in her head. After that she could figure out how, if ever, she could make up for last night's lewd betrayal of her husband and their love for each other. Quickly then, she got up from the bed and stripped off her dress, brassiere, garter-belt and hose. Completely nude, she inspected herself in the full-length mirror, venturing to reach down with her finger to touch the blonde hair where Jack's semen had glued the strands together. She flushed suddenly as she remembered the rain of kisses across her abdomen and inner thighs and, later, the tantalizing tongue-licking and fucking. Once again her heart speeded up its tempo and her breath lost some of its regularity. She stepped close to the mirror and peered deeply into her own eyes. Yes, there was a difference in them, but just what it was she didn't know.
In the shower Sharon alternated between fits of convulsive sobbing and moments that almost approached exhilaration as she remembered the excitement of Jack Golightly's awakening of her dormant sensuality. Emerging, she told herself she'd best be realistic about the whole thing. "I was too drunk to realize what was happening," she said to herself aloud, knowing even as she said it that drunkenness was no excuse for what she'd done and allowed to be done to her. Then, as she walked naked back to the bedroom and put on her flimsy bikini and, over it, a fresh T-shirt and the same tight bell-bottoms she'd worn for the plane ride from Los Angeles, she remembered the more important occurrence of the evening: She had won! She had won . . . how much? She didn't even know, but she knew it was a lot.
Frenziedly, Sharon opened her purse and counted the money. Kitty's one hundred chips were still intact. In addition to that there was the hundred and fifty dollars she'd brought with her for any expenses she might incur beyond what was covered by the company award . . . and nine crisp new one hundred dollar bills.
And before she'd gotten so drunk she didn't even know what she was doing, she had been much farther ahead than that. So she'd won, and she'd learned at the same time. She wouldn't drink tonight. She would accept nothing stronger than Coca Cola. She should be able to double her nine hundred, if not better. Then there was tomorrow night. Sharon realized, her heart pounding, that if she used her head she could fly back to Los Angeles on Monday with enough money for a down payment for a house. And that, she thought, was the only way she could ever possibly repay Kevin for the terrible wrong she had done him last night. And that was what really counted. It wasn't just the money any more. It was the principle.
Sharon descended quickly to the pool. In the dressing room she stripped down to the bikini and left her clothes and purse in a locker. The nine hundred dollars, plus her own pocket cash, she'd already safely hidden beneath the paper lining of one of the dresser drawers in her room upstairs. Then she went out to the edge of the pool and eased herself carefully into the warm, pleasing water. She swam out to the middle, treading water, and looked around for Kitty, whom she finally saw talking to several muscular men at the other end of the pool. She declined to join them and instead swam about alone. But Kitty, apparently having spotted Sharon, swam to join her in a moment.
"What happened to you last night?" the redhead asked as they climbed up onto the edge of the pool to sit with their feet dangling into the water.
Sharon was sure she blushed, but she forced out a little laugh. "I'm afraid I got very drunk. I was gambling and they were giving the free drinks and ... I... "
"Did you win?" Kitty interrupted her.
"I .. . " Sharon stopped herself suddenly. She started to tell Kitty about the nine hundred dollars, and in fact she was almost dying to. But a voice in the back of her mind told her that would be bad luck. There was no use bragging. Keep it all to herself. When she had what she wanted, the down-payment for the house, then she could tell Kitty everything. Everything, of course, except what had happened after she'd left the casino. "I was ahead for a while, just a little bit, but in the end I broke about even. I really enjoyed it though. I so appreciate those chips you let me have."
"They're yours," said Kitty. "But listen. About that show we were going to see ... I have a date tonight. And honey, this guy is a real dreamboat. I don't know why I've been wasting all this time with those duds back in L.A. The reason we were in our suite, if you heard us when you came in, is that / invited him. And he's loaded, and he wants to take me to a different, better show at another hotel." She paused. "He has a friend, if you're interested?"
"No thanks, Kitty," Sharon said. "I'll just stay here and play roulette and have a few drinks. I'm really .. . perfectly safe down in the casino."
"Suit yourself, love."
They were silent for a moment. "I think I'll try a few dives from the high board," said Sharon. "Maybe the shock will help my hangover."
She stood up and started to move toward the ladder, then stopped suddenly. A tall, gray-haired man wearing a very expensive suit and smoking a cigarette in a long-stemmed holder, flanked by two ape-ish looking types and trailed by a frail young man with glasses who looked like a junior executive, was staring at her. He was staring at her in a way she didn't think she'd ever been stared at in her life, though this was something she felt rather than saw, as the man wore dark glasses that hid his eyes, and something about his gaze almost melted her. She couldn't move, and though she was already very scarcely clothed in her skimpy bikini, she now felt completely naked and vulnerable. Then the man said something to the junior executive, who immediately started around the end of the pool toward her.
Sharon took another step in the general direction of the board, then stopped as she saw she would be intercepted.
"Hello, curie," the bespectacled man said as he came up to her. 'The boss sends his respects. Ah-hem. And informs you he'll expect you for dinner at nine. Upstairs."
"Is that a fact?" Sharon asked angrily. "And who does he think he is, to expect me? And just where in the . .. hell... is upstairs?"
"Heh, hen." The man had an almost haunting laugh. "Don't play coy, cutie. You know who he is. And upstairs is there, the top half of that building."
He pointed up at the modern glass and steel and concrete structure of the luxurious hotel where Sharon and Kitty were staying. Then she turned to gaze back across the pool. The gray-headed man removed his shades in an elegant gesture. He smiled the creepiest, most jaded and debauched smile she had ever seen. She stared at him angrily for a moment, then looked back at the junior executive.
"Tell your boss I said 'no thanks'. I'm a married woman and my husband's in the Army and I don't accept dinner invitations from strange men." Sharon turned abruptly away and instead of going to the diving board, as she'd intended, went back toward the dressing room. She heard Kitty calling after her, but she didn't look back.
Lance Quayle watched the slender shapely blonde with the voluptuous-looking lips walk away, her scarcely-concealed buttocks jerking in sensuous rhythm. His accountant, Harwood, had a puzzled look on his face as he walked back around the pool.
"And what, pray tell, did the lady say?" Lance asked as he approached.
The accountant made a face as if he'd erred in adding two single-digit figures. "She said .. . she said no. She said she was married and some such bullshit. I can't understand it."
Quayle smiled luxuriously and set the sunglasses back on his long, sculpted nose. He turned to one of the two goons beside him. "Have one of the boys keep an eye on her. No apes, I mean," he added to the man, who looked himself a first generation descendent of Africa's most dim-witted gorilla. "Find out what she's doing, and ... if she's a hustler, bust her. See she spends a few weeks inside before her trip to the state line. If she's waiting for a divorce, see she gets her ass screwed when she gets to court. And if she's gambling..." Lance smiled elegantly. "If she's gambling, see she loses. Then we should move in a more orderly fashion to the next stage of our relationship."
* * *
Sharon lost just a little under eleven hundred dollars that night. It was hardly one a.m. when she walked, dazed, from the casino into the lounge. She hadn't had a single drink during her six hours of play. Now she desperately wanted one. And it seemed the most ungodly irony that after refusing free ones all night she was now required to pay. She sat down at the bar, ghastly pale and almost in a state of shock, and tried to figure out what had happened.
She had had the most terrible conceivable run of bad luck. That was her first conclusion; then she tempered it immediately by asking herself if it had been luck or bad play that had beaten her.
She decided it was a combination of both, and that was the most heartbreaking thing about it all. Bad luck she might have accepted. That, she couldn't have helped, couldn't blame herself or the house or anyone - just fate itself.
But on reflection she realized the thing that really bothered her was that on numerous occasions, how many she couldn't even count, but ten or twenty or thirty, maybe more, she had predicted in her mind the color that would come up. She'd resisted the urge to play, waiting for an even more certain "feeling". Then when she had played, she had lost. Somehow her psychic had been deceiving her. Tonight she was not in tune with herself. She'd somehow closed her mind, shut herself off to her own telepathic intuitions. But she had felt them. She had been sure, so many times, and what she'd thought was the discipline of holding back had been the refusal to follow the guidance of her own subconscious. And it had cost her. It had cost her everything she'd won the night before and the hundred dollars in chips Kitty had given her and even some of her own money, money she hadn't even intended to play with. But except for the chips, which she'd always intended to give back to Kitty, all of it had been hers. The nine hundred dollars had been counted, mentally deposited in her and Kevin's bank account. In fact, as far as she was concerned it had already been spent, as part of the down-payment on their ocean-side house.
And for her to have lost it on the gaming tables by her own stupidity was as bad as if she'd embezzled the money from her office and lost it. And somehow she had to get it back. Not tonight. Tonight she was too jittery, almost in a panic. But tomorrow night she had to go down with the ninety dollars she still had, and she had to win. She had to play level-headedly, with caution, but unafraid to bet when the time came, and she had to win it all back.
Sharon allowed herself one more gimlet before starting out of the bar. At the door she stopped and put three dollars in a slot machine, then checked herself and hurried out. She knew about slot machines; they were really rigged. Still angry and depressed, she took the elevator up to their floor. She paused at the door, listening, hearing no sound from within. Then, glancing down at the floor she saw that a piece of paper had been slipped under the door. She opened and bent down to retrieve it as she stepped inside, staring incredulously at the paper.
It was a form, an application form for a credit and check-cashing card with the casino, which afforded the client chips to pay the tables with on a time-payment plan.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sharon might have remarked, as she lay awake thinking about it, that there was something strange about finding an application for credit stuffed under a door. But if she did so she put any doubts from her mind. She might have also found something suspicious in that there was only one application form for a suite with two occupants, but she ignored this fact. Instead she told herself that it was all a big mistake. The management of a luxurious hotel like this would perhaps assume that anyone who could afford to stay here was a good credit risk. When they found out that she was a guest here only because of a prize that had been given her girlfriend by the department store chain for which they were employed, her application would be turned down anyway.
But by the time she'd dozed off to sleep, Sharon had decided one thing. As long as she had the application, there was no harm in filling it out and turning it in. Then, if at sometime in the future she opened the mailbox and found she'd been mailed a credit card, she would have it in case she ever decided to come back here again.
Kitty stayed out all night and when she came back in the morning Sharon declined to tell her about the credit application. Kitty raved about what an absolutely glorious night she'd had, taking time to only briefly query Sharon about how she'd done at the tables. Sharon, far too ashamed to admit what had really happened, said that she'd lost a few dollars but that she still had enough chips left to play tonight. Kitty told her to go ahead and live it up with them; tomorrow they would be back in L.A.
Not wanting to risk a repeat of yesterday's disturbing episode, Sharon declined an invitation to join Kitty at the pool and explained that instead she just wanted to walk around town and see the sights.
"Just don't let anybody take you for a streetwalker," Kitty warned as she squirmed into her tight bikini and left.
Sharon waited until her friend had had time to get down to the pool, then filled out the application form, consisting of routine questions about employment, salary, bank accounts and references. She was certain she would be turned down; the information she had to give seemed so hopelessly paltry compared to the atmosphere of sheer luxury one encountered wherever one went here in the hotel, and she was almost ashamed to even take it to the office. At last, however, she mustered her courage and descended the elevator to the luxurious accounts office on the mezzanine. A security guard took a long look at her, but said nothing as she passed down a narrow carpeted hallway to the reception window. She handed a very good-looking brunette the application form and managed a sheepish smile. The brunette looked at her strangely, then noted the name at the top of the card and smiled back.
"If you would like to have a seat," the receptionist said, indicating a chair.
Somewhat confused, Sharon sat down. In a moment a rather handsome looking you man came out. "I'm John Davidson," he said, "assistant to the chief accountant. If you care to wait, perhaps have a coffee or a drink if you prefer, it will take us about ten minutes to process your application and stamp your card."
"You mean ... I get the card today?" Sharon asked, hardly able to believe her ears.
"Of course. Is there any reason why you shouldn't? Just a simple matter of verifying your references, all of which is done by wire with our credit-rating information bank in your home state."
Sharon could hardly believe this stroke of good fortune, but she didn't want to appear overly excited. "That all sounds so very efficient. Of course I don't mind waiting, and I would like a coffee very much. Cream and sugar, please."
"Cream and sugar," Mr. Davidson said to the receptionist.
Sharon was just finishing when he returned with a handful of papers.
"All set," he said. "This is just a standard promise to pay contract, if you will sign at the bottom." He chuckled. "Of course with a little luck you don't even have to worry about this aspect, now do you?"
Sharon skimmed quickly over the contract, then scribbled her signature.
"Now, if you will sign your card," the accountant added.
Sharon quickly signed the card, which looked about like any other credit card she'd ever seen. Then the accountant took it, along with the contract and the application, and straightened up. "If you would like to make a note of your credit number, which you will present to the cashier when collecting your chips or cashing personal checks, it's . . . let's see . . . 7961 A44."
Confused, Sharon scribbled down the number on a piece of paper. "But. . . don't I get the card now?"
"Oh no. The card remains on file here in our office. You need only to present your number to the cashier."
"But... I don't have any proof of my credit, do I?" Sharon asked, confused.
"This card is your proof, and it's always on file here at the office, and the office is open all through casino hours." He smiled. "What would you do if your card was lost or stolen and you woke up one morning owing the casino fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. Don't you see why it's much easier and safer this way?"
"Yes, I suppose so," Sharon said. Something still seemed a little strange about the arrangement, though. But after all, what did she know about the workings of casinos?
* * *
Sharon did not have a bad night, or afternoon and night, as she actually spent about thirteen hours at the tables. She started off by cashing a hundred dollar credit voucher, which she simply filled out with her name and credit number at the cashier's, and she was fortunate enough not to have to go back for more, though at one point she was down to only twenty dollars. She won with that and from then on gradually climbed. She peaked at four hundred profit, then declined. When she walked out of the casino at four-thirty a.m. she was a hundred and seventy dollars ahead for the day. She neglected to note that, counting the hundred she already owed the house and the hundred in chips she'd received from Kitty this left her technically a few dollars behind for the entire trip. In the morning, when she cashed in the credit-card chips and tried to give Kitty the hundred dollars, which her friend refused to accept, she announced that her winnings totaled about ninety dollars. She didn't think about the fact that she already owed the casino a hundred dollars. Not that she was unaware of it - she fully intended to pay that off painlessly out of future winnings.
Sharon had caught the gambling bug. Already she was plotting how next weekend she would tell Kitty she was going to stay with her parents, then catch a flight up here. To cut expenses she could stay in a cheaper hotel and eat in cafeterias. She could do all the gambling she wanted with her credit card. So she had nothing to lose. And sooner or later the law of averages would balance out. When they did, using her system, she would get back her nine hundred dollars - and more.
* * *
Sharon could hardly endure the long week of waiting. Work seemed such an impossible drudgery now, particularly considering the slave wages she was paid. She spent all her time daydreaming about the casino, seeing the turn of the roulette wheel in her mind's eye. When Friday rolled around and she finally found herself on the plane, even the short one-hour flight seemed unbearably long. At last they landed and she took a bus into town, then found a taxi driver who took her to a seven dollar a day hotel, some distance from the strip. She ate a cheap meal in a diner. By ten o'clock she was in the casino collecting two hundred dollars worth of chips. By the time she left for her hotel at six in the morning she was four hundred and fifty dollars in debt. By the time she caught the late evening flight back to Los Angeles on Sunday night, after playing all afternoon on practically no sleep, she was three thousand, seven hundred and eighty dollars in debt - for this weekend, as she'd forgotten all about the hundred she owed from the previous weekend. But Lance Quayle had not. On Tuesday morning he collected the vouchers and handed them to an "agent", giving his instructions about initiating collection proceedings - out of court, of course.
Sharon was desperate, but at this point for all the wrong reasons. It wasn't paying off her debt that was worrying her. It was simply that now, in order to get the money she'd originally set out after, she first had to win the incredible sum of her debt just to get even. She still maintained her faith in the law of averages, but she was beginning to wonder when the balance was going to reach. She hoped it wouldn't be too far into Einstein's infinity. It was on Tuesday night, after Kitty had gone out for a date, that she received her first inkling that the debt itself might be a problem.
When the doorbell for the apartment building entrance rang, Sharon buzzed automatically. She had no particular concern who might be coming to see her, and in any event, it was quite common for people trying to get into the building to visit someone in another apartment to ring her and Kitty's bell. They lived in a neighborhood where those things still happened.
But even when she opened the door and saw the two short, rough-looking men with faces that looked as if they might have come from a cave-man exhibit in the museum of natural history come walking down the hall, she made no connection to the casino. She simply thought there had been a mistake, and started to close the door. She was stopped by the rough bark of the first of the two men: "Just a minute, Blondie. This is Las Vegas business, very important to your personal organism."
"My personal organism?" Sharon asked, the very absurdity of the statement causing her to hesitate one moment too long.
"Yeah," the man said. Then his foot was in the door and they both came through. If she hadn't retreated out of the way they would have run over her. "Your body functions and all that. Your sex appeal. Your ability to stand up and walk, show your face in the street and breathe and all those kind of things some girls who aren't four thousand dollars in debt take for granted."
Sharon's face blanched as she put two and two together. She stared in pleading horror as the first of the two goons pulled out a stack of xeroxes of the vouchers and waved them in her face. "We got a collection order on this."
"A collection order?" Sharon couldn't believe her ears. "But I just got my credit card. It isn't even the end of the month. And ..." Her voice trailed off as she saw the look on the faces of the two men, both of whom she realized were probably low echelon gangsters.
"We're not a loan company, Miss," said the man who'd been doing all the talking. "We just collect unpaid debts. That's all we ever do. I mean we eat, sleep, have a few beers or a few dames sometimes, but during working hours we just go around collecting debts. You'd probably be surprised how much money is owed in this country, and how many people there are who wouldn't pay if it weren't for guys like us what devote our life to seeing people don't welch, that the unscrupulous ones don't take advantage and make credit tight for the honest hard-working people that always make it an effort to honor their promise to pay. That's all we do."
"But the casino offered me my credit card!"
"Who knows? They just give us this for collection and you got until next Saturday to pay."
"Next Saturday? But I can't possibly ..."
"Now I bet you possibly can. I just bet you can." He turned to his friend. "Don't you bet she can."
The other man shook his head. "I don't agree, Vince."
The man called Vince, hefty as he was, moved like a cat. His fist was a blinding streak of light, and the thump as it struck his partner's chin was delayed, like thunder delayed after lightning. Sharon's scream, as she watched the man crumple to the floor, was delayed only an instant more. Then she stared aghast as the man half raised up, rubbing his chin, a wounded look in his eyes, his head lolled half onto his shoulder.
"Now why'd you do that, Vince?" he asked in a voice that sounded as if it would momentarily crack. "I just stated a fact, that I don't think this dame can ..."
Vince's foot moved like a place-kicker's, straight at the face of the other man. Sharon screamed aloud, sure his head would go flying off his shoulders and straight out the window. But at the last minute he ducked and instead it was the coffee table that went flying across the room to slam into the television and only by some miracle she couldn't comprehend failed to shatter the glass over the screen.
"Jesus Christ, Vince!" the man almost bawled. "Now that woulda really hurt me.
That woulda been serious. Coulda impaired my thinking processes and everything."
"Coulda fucked up your whole organism," Vince growled, then looked back at Sharon. Suddenly contrite, he took off his hat. "I'm sorry, Ma'am. I really am sorry about that display of temper. But I don't like to hear anybody talk about a perfect stranger the way this. .. this gorilla was talking about you. Saying you weren't going to be able to pay. I always like to think of a person as innocent until proven guilty. I like to show faith in 'em, give 'em any kind of encouragement they need. Right up to the deadline if necessary." Vince bowed and put his hat on, then looked back at the man on the floor. "Now you get your ass up and apologize to the lady right now before I squash you into that rug like a lousy motherfuckin' cockroach on the bathroom floor!"
The man climbed warily to his feet, retrieving his own fedora, which had come off as he fell. He held it in his hands and bowed to her. "I'm sorry, Ma'am. I didn't mean anything and if I hurt your feelings by what I said I guess I deserved everything I got."
He smiled, then the smile became laughter, a convulsive and maniacal laughter, and the two of them turned and walked out the door and back to the elevator.
For a moment Sharon couldn't even think. Her mind was a blank. Then the question popped into her mind like the most terrible threat of a fascist interrogator: // they will do that to each other, what in God's name might they do to me?
It dawned on her at that moment what a terrible mess she was really in. She walked around the apartment in frantic circles for a few minutes. Her first inclination was to call Kevin. Then she realized what a foolish idea that was and decided to call the police. She'd opened the phone book and started to dial, then she replaced the receiver. What would she tell the police? She didn't even have the credit card to show them. She didn't have a copy of the vouchers. She had no proof the two men had even been here. And if she told the police what had actually happened, how one of them had beaten thy other up right before her eyes, they would probably laugh in her face. Then she remembered the men saying they had nothing to do with the casino and she hit upon what she thought was her only sensible solution. Call the casino and meet her problem head on.
Sharon got a long distance operator and put the call through. When she reached the casino she asked for the accounts office and when she reached that extension she requested that she be allowed to speak to Mr. Davidson. She was informed that Mr. Davidson was in Reno and wouldn't be back until the end of the week, then given instead to a Mr. Harwood. With a quivering voice Sharon explained her problem, recounting truthfully her losses, concluding with the visit she'd just had. Then she listened breathlessly to the short laughter from the other end of the line and almost sighed with relief as the male voice answered: "These collection people see a few too many grade-B movies I'm afraid. I have your file before me and all I see here is that you've been placed on an additional one thousand dollars maximum credit limit, extended until Saturday or demonstration of intent to pay, whichever comes first."
"You mean, I can still play, owing you all the money I do?"
"Up to the thousand dollar limit. As for the other business, those fellows are always a little melodramatic, though of course some of them are very rough characters. But I'm sure nothing will happen to you, provided, of course, that you do take care of the debt you've incurred.
Don't worry about..."
The line went dead. "Mr. Harwood? Mr. Harwood?"
Tears welling in her eyes, she let the receiver drop. What a terrible time to be cut off! Then she remembered. She still had a thousand dollars credit. She still had a chance to win back everything she owed. If she lost that, then she simply would have to demonstrate her intent to pay to Mr. Harwood. In the meantime, there was nothing she could do here. Las Vegas was the only place her problem could be solved. The only problem was, she couldn't wait until Friday. She would simply have to take off work and fly up tomorrow. That was all there was to it.
CHAPTER SIX
Sharon landed in Las Vegas on Wednesday night and took a room in the hotel where she'd stayed the previous weekend. After a quick shower she went straight to the casino without bothering to eat. She drew five hundred dollars in chips as easily as she'd always done before. She showed them to a waitress, got a drink and drank it before she began to play. Then she lost the five hundred dollars as easily as she'd lost before. As she cashed the second five hundred, her last, she reminded herself that she was now about to play for her life, or at least, as Vince had put it, for the welfare of her personal organism.
Playing for her life Sharon lost five hundred dollars. She cashed two hundred of the four hundred in cash she'd drawn out of her small checking account and lost that. But, foolish as she'd been, she was wise enough not to cash the other two hundred. She had to at least offer that to the accounts office as a demonstration, however meager, of her intent to pay. Mr. Harwood had sounded like a nice enough man. Perhaps somehow she could make him understand.
Before going up to the mezzanine, Sharon tried one more gambit, though she desperately hated to do it. She went to the desk and inquired if a Jack Golightly was registered presently at the hotel. She didn't know if she was disappointed or relieved when the clerk informed her that though Mr. Golightly maintained his suite, he was presently in Trinidad at a convention. She'd thought perhaps he could help, but in spite of her present difficulties, she could think of no one she would so dread having to face as Jack Golightly.
Resolved that she had no choice, that delay would only make matters worse, Sharon took an elevator up to the accounts office. A different secretary greeted her and told her to have a seat, explaining that Mr. Harwood would be out in a moment. Sharon waited nervously; then when the door of the inner office opened and a bespectacled face peeked out with a smile, she rose angrily from her chair.
"You!" she almost cried aloud.
It was the man who'd given her the dinner invitation on behalf of the other man that day at the pool. The junior executive type.
"Would you come in, Miss Dolan," he said politely.
Sharon stalked angrily toward him and through the door into the plushest office she'd ever seen in her life. Then she whirled on the frail man with glasses. "So this was all a put up? All because I wouldn't have dinner with some stranger, this 'man upstairs.' Well, if you thing ..."
"Let's not be hasty, dear. But I am afraid you're in somewhat of a spot. And my boss who lives upstairs, is one of the few people who can help you. Except of course for the real Man Upstairs. The one way up."
"Help me? If you think I haven't figured out by now that he's the one that got me into this."
The accountant smiled. "He didn't get you into it. You got yourself into it. And there are certain draconian types in this organization who feel we should be severe with people like you. Now listen," he said as Sharon started to interrupt. 'Those people who visited you do not work with the casino. But it's all the same network, the same umbrella, and there is interaction. These people act in their way and we act in ours. We've given you just under five thousand dollars credit and you've used it up. Now you have no choice but to pay. And if you don't you're in very bad trouble. You made enemies by causing friction between those two men."
"I didn't cause any friction!" Sharon cried. But she realized she was getting nowhere. "All right," she said, casting her eyes downward. "I have intent to pay. I brought the first installment. Two hundred dollars."
"Heh heh. You have spent a thousand dollars of our money here today and now you offer two hundred dollars. Tell me frankly Miss Dolan?"
"Mrs. Dolan."
"Very well, as you wish. What do you think are the chances of your meeting your debt by the deadline you've been given?"
"Why you must know that's impossible. I only make seven hundred dollars a month."
"Then I'm afraid you made a very bad mistake by ever coming to this casino. Certainly by accepting a routine offer of credit. And I'm not sure he'll help you, but the boss did find you attractive. I think your best bet is to at least talk to him. There might be some chance of an arrangement, I mean between us and this other faction that is crying for your extinction."
"My extinction? But how could that amount of money be that important to you?"
"Tsk tsk tsk. It's not the money, dear. It's Vince's death they're upset about."
"Vince's death?"
"Yes. Hadn't you read the papers? Vince went out last night. The hard way. There's a faction crying for blood, your blood."
Sharon was lead to an elevator on wobbly knees. They ascended, she didn't know how many floors, but they went up and up and kept going up. Then it stopped and when the door opened she found herself in a luxurious ultra modern penthouse lounge decorated in pinks and blues with plush cushions and inflatable chairs spread over the floor. Mr. Harwood shoved her gently forward, then the door closed behind her. She looked cautiously around the room at the blue sky that could be seen through the glass that made up most of the four walls. Then a sliding door opened at the opposite end of the room and the gray-headed, jaded looking man she'd seen beside the swimming pool walked in. He was wearing pajamas.
"Don't mind my dress," he said kindly as Sharon gawked at him in surprise and fear. "I just woke up. I seldom leave my sanctuary up here, and I keep odd hours." He paused for a moment, smiling warmly. "I think I'd as well come to the point. There's a man in the next room who wants to fuck you."
"Fuck me?" Sharon gasped, throwing her hand to her mouth.
"Don't worry, he can't hear you. The walls are soundproof. We can speak freely. His name is Joe Macaroni. It's not his real name of course. He calls himself that as sort of a joke on the Godfather image, to which he doesn't sincerely subscribe. He's not a friend of mine. But I have to try to get along with him. Vince worked for him. Let me try to explain the whole thing first. Vince is dead because of you. Joe Macaroni wants to take you out the same way Vince went. I like you, no matter how you feel about me, and I don't want to see you go out, especially the way he has in mind. So I told him so as gently as I knew how, and he said we might be able to make a deal. He said that on no account would he consider it unless he could fuck you. He wouldn't feel right at all without that. So I agreed. Then we hemmed and hawed and we finally struck a tentative bargain. Harwood goes out in your place. Macaroni fucks you to ease his own conscience about not setting it straight about Vince. I apologize to Mr. Marconi for having ever turned a lousy four grand note over to the agency. And everything is settled, except of course my deal with you."
"Your deal with me?"
"Yes. I want you to have dinner with me."
"I'll have dinner with you if that's so important. But if you think I'm going to prostitute myself..."
"My dear, one way or another you'll be in bed with Joe Macaroni tonight. It's just a question of doing it before you die or doing it before you don't die. As for the vouchers." From his pajama pocket he took out a handful of vouchers, ripped them into shreds and scattered them on the carpet. "The debt of course, is no longer your problem. Your problem is staying alive. And I assure you, you silly fucking stuck-up piece of cunt, that if you don't cooperate wholeheartedly, you will not stay alive until morning." Abruptly he smiled. "Now have a drink and think it over."
He walked to a bar against one of the glass walls and poured a tall drink of whiskey and ice, which he then brought to her. Sharon drank it quickly and handed the glass back. Saying nothing, he went and poured her another which she drank with equal haste. As she was doing so, she thought it over, though there really wasn't that much to think about. Just a choice between living or not living, and in spite of everything that had happened to her the last couple of weeks, she wasn't ready to die. So if that was the only way, they could have her body. They already owned her soul, though she would never have her heart. They would never have her love for Kevin. That was all she had left, and it was to that she would cling during the terrible ordeal that was to come.
"All right," Sharon said with a nod. "What do you want me to do."
"That's a smart girl. I thought you'd see it our way. Dinner will be first." He smiled. "Take off your dress."
"My dress? For dinner."
He didn't smile. "Take it off. You're the one who's going to eat."
Sharon looked at the man with abject pleading. She couldn't understand what he meant. But she could tell from the cold hard glare with which he regarded her that she had no choice but to obey.
Refusing to think about what she was doing, the terrified blonde wife lifted the hem of her dress and pulled it up over her head then let it fall to the floor. Clad in nothing but her brassiere and skimpy bikini panties and nylons, she stood and submitted to his leering inspection. His eyes were like twin spotlights sweeping her lushly ripened body, taking hungry note of the flimsy undergarments, the smoothly curved spheres of her white buttocks.
"Now take off your brassiere," Lance Quayle commanded. He watched her put her long slender arms in back of her, causing her proud full breasts to protrude even more prominently, and unfasten the bra snap. The undergarment hung loosely to the round high-set mounds of her breasts for a moment before she hunched her shoulders together and let it fall away completely.
He drew in his breath. Her firmly rising breasts were even better than he'd suspected from seeing her that day in her bikini. She was really a special female, even for Las Vegas, in that category. The breasts were big, but perfectly formed. The areoles were the size of brown half dollar pieces and the nipples were like pencil erasers, sticking straight out in tingling rigidity. Unable to resist, he moved slowly forward to the trembling young girl and reached out with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, rolling the little nipple bud between them as if he were tasting the fineness of a raw product. Sharon cringed her breasts away from his touch and began to draw back then saw the look of warning in his eyes and her shoulders slumped in resignation.
Jesus, Lance thought, she was really too good to be true. Already he was beginning to wonder what her little asshole was going to look like. "Now the rest," he said tersely.
Sharon hooked her fingers into the tight elastic waistband of her panties. She hesitated with shame, then reminded herself that her life was in the balance and slowly peeled them down off her quivering ass-cheeks and long nylon-clad thighs.
A low groan of lust issued from Lance Quayle's throat as he beheld his prey standing before him in only her high-heels, garter-belt and hose. Beneath the belt, he could see the swelling bulge of her pouting pubic mound and the thin silken growth of blonde cunt-hair. She was the real thing, natural, an item in increasing rarity the last few years, and the knowledge only increased his eagerness to watch her be completely subjugated.
Sharon knew how a female slave must feel when hauled before a cruel and unrelenting master. She was afraid to refuse a single command, but even more afraid to heed them. For it was obvious that no matter what Lance Quayle had said about dinner, it was really something else he had in mind. He wanted her to go to bed with her. Torn by the turmoil raging inside her, she waited trembling for his next order, still aware that no matter how repugnant she found him, she had no choice but to submit.
But for the moment Lance Quayle said nothing. Instead he pulled a string that loosened his pajama bottoms and let them drop to the floor at his ankles. He stepped out of them and the loose house slippers he'd worn and stood before her naked from the waist down, leaving no doubt that her worst suspicion had been well-founded. Now he still wore the pajama top, but it hung slightly apart over his groin, and as Sharon finally let her eyes venture to his naked loins, she was astonished to see that his penis was not more than three inches long, though it appeared to be erect. Beside this man, even her husband Kevin was superbly endowed, and the knowledge only reminded her that no matter what happened here today, she must not abandon her love for him.
Then suddenly the gray-headed man dropped to a sitting position on one of the inflatable chairs. "Now get on your hands and knees," he said.
Sharon couldn't imagine what he had in mind, but she dropped obediently to her all-fours, feeling the palms of her hands and her knees sink into the softness of the carpet.
"Now crawl," he said hoarsely. "Crawl to As though she were viewing some obscene horror film too disgusting to believe, Sharon saw the man's testicles and stubby fat penis and hairy loins drawing gradually closer as she crawled across the floor toward him. Then, still six feet away, she stopped.
"Okay, cutie. Now come here and eat," the cruel man commanded.
"What?" Sharon gasped, certain she'd misunderstood.
"Last week, or whenever that was, we were having hen pheasant which you were too impolite to accept. Tonight it's just cock." He snickered at his own lewd joke.
Sharon looked at the man in complete confusion. "I don't understand," she whimpered helplessly. "Honest, I don't understand."
"Then this is going to be even more enjoyable than I anticipated. Tonight baby, you dine on cum. You're sucking my cock for dinner." A spontaneous cry of terror and shame issued from Sharon's throat at that obscene prospect. "So crawl, cunt, before I decide to spare that nincompoop Harwood and give you to Macaroni for disposal."
Telling herself it had to be some kind of joke, Sharon crawled slowly the rest of the way toward the seated man. Only a foot away from him she stopped again, wondering if he could possibly be serious about giving Harwood to the other facet of the mob with which she'd so foolishly gotten involved. But one thing was sure; she wasn't going to shed any tears for any of these people. And she was going to get out, if possible, no matter what she had to do or who had to "go out" in her place - though by this time it wasn't that she valued her own life so much; she honestly thought that she could have accepted her own death if that had been the end of it. But how could she possibly know that in some investigation or other the whole truth of what had happened wouldn't come out? And she couldn't bear to have Kevin learn that about her, even if she were dead.
"Now, up between my legs," said Lance Quayle. Refusing to look at his penis, Sharon shuffled a few inches forward. "Now, put your hot little lips around it and suck. Right now."
Sharon was stunned. She couldn't believe the perverted obscenity she'd just heard. The man must be testing her. He just wanted to see if she would submit, and once she'd made a move to do so he would surely stop her. Clinging to this illusion, she resisted but a split second longer, then opened her mouth and moved her head forward, expecting her reprieve to come at any instant. Now, though, she looked at his hardened penis from up close for the first time, observing the obscene mushroom-shaped head, the tiny glans in the center where a white pearl of excited pre-ejaculate had oozed to the surface. The white trunk was laced with thin blue veins and she could see them swelling with each pulse-beat. And now closer and closer it came, so close she could no longer focus her eyes on it. Then, with a sudden feeling of even greater desperation, Sharon realized that this was not a test after all. This obscene old man really did expect her to do this perverted and filthy thing for him. He really did expect her to take his penis into her mouth just as if she was sucking a lollipop.
She had already started to pull back in shock and indignation when Lance reached out and put both his hands on her cheeks to hold her face and mouth captive. "No ..." she began, but her words were choked off as he suddenly jerked her forward and rammed the thick rod of flesh between her softly resisting lips and straight into her open mouth. She gagged and gasped, mumbling inarticulate protest as he drew her face even closer to his loins and began to fuck his cock in and out with hungry and powerful little strokes that jolted her head.
Gloating above the kneeling blonde with eyes almost vacant from the intensity of his lust, Lance began a rhythmic undulation of his pelvis, sliding the short fat shaft of his penis in and out of her mouth. Sharon tried futilely to twist away, but she was held mercilessly captive by his hands pressing against the side of her face, and as she continued to struggle, he leaned over and said almost at a whisper: "Remember Vince, dear. Joe Macaroni does. So suck .. . suck!"
Reminded of the total hopelessness of her situation, which during those moments of greatest shock she'd almost forgotten, Sharon let a black fog of acceptance descend upon her mind. She closed her eyes to block out the view. Moisture filled her mouth as saliva glands sought to dampen, dilute and identify the alien taste of this thing buried deep in her throat.
Above her, Lance stared down with lewd delight at the labors of the unwilling girl, the sight of his saliva-coated cock moving in an; out between her wetly ovalled lips driving him rapidly toward a frenzy of excitement. He held her head tightly as she coughed and sputtered with each powerful stroke of the swollen cock-head fucking back against her tonsils, delighting in the sight of her tender, lipstick-rimmed lips clasping tighter and tighter around the shaft as her muscles wearied and her warmly ovalled cavity became accustomed to the intrusion.
"Suck it," he gasped. "Suck it, baby, suck it."
Sharon was salivating so much now that his warmly pulsating penis slid in and out of her mouth almost effortlessly. She sucked until her cheeks indented grotesquely, until her throat muscles were flaming tendons of agony. She licked around the head, using her tongue, her teeth . . . acting automatically in the knowledge that the only way she could end her ordeal was by bringing this horrible man the obscene pleasure he craved.
And in her desire to please, in her ever-increasing effort, she became aware of something even more terrible than the act she was committing itself. Her naked young body was beginning to react! She could feel a strange tingling warmth in her vagina, a dampness up between her thighs, and the knowledge that she was being aroused by this oral degradation made her almost want to cry out for shame.
Then suddenly Sharon's thoughts were forced back to the man and the throbbing shaft of flesh that filled her mouth as she felt his loins crush even harder against her face and heard a loud animal groan issue from his throat. "Now suck it, you bitch. Make me cum. Make me cum in your mouth now."
An instant later Sharon almost choked as her mouth was suddenly flooded with his heated sperm which spurted slickly down her throat in great pulsating waves of hot liquid roaring in jet-like torrents from his testicles and seminal ducts.
Sharon gulped and swallowed automatically; it was either that or strangle, and she swallowed every drop of it, taking it in larger and larger amounts as the pungent male elixir filled her cheeks.
Then abruptly, her jerking throat changed its rhythm and instead of swallowing out of necessity, she swallowed out of some perverse masochistic hunger, longing to even further debase herself in the pleasure of total subjugation. She wanted it, she needed it, her betraying body demanded it.
Then Lance ceased to cum and pushed her away. "That's enough," he gasped, leering down at her in triumph.
As Sharon trembled in naked shame on the floor, he got up and walked to the door through which he'd entered the room. He pushed a button and it slid open. Standing in it was a man in a black shirt and white tie, a Latin type with a cruel, but oddly handsome face.
"Okay Joe. She's worth all Harwood's hundred and eighteen pounds of flesh. It's a deal."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Joe Macaroni stared hungrily at the naked blonde kneeling on the floor. He licked his lips in a most obscene gesture, then suddenly crossed himself and looked up at the ceiling, but as though he were looking at the sky. "Vince! Vince, you fucking murdering goon, if you're up there looking down at us ... " Abruptly he shifted his gaze to his own shoes, complete with spats. "... or down there, looking up. You just gotta understand. I been watching that little pussy wig-wagging back and forth while this hungry little cunt was sucking Mr. Quayle and I swear, though I know you'd like me to send her to you, I just haven't got the heart." Suddenly remembering himself, he took off his hat and put it over his heart. "And anyway, I don't even know which direction the beautiful little whore would go."
Sharon didn't know what to think. She'd never been talked about in that manner by anyone. Then she watched in shame as the man began to quickly undress, stripping off his flashy clothing and dropping it all in a heap just inside the door until he was clad in nothing but his knee-length socks, shoes, and bikini shorts, within which she could already see the bulging hardness of the most gigantic cock in the world. Then, his wiry muscles stretched like cable over his spare torso, he strode suddenly forward. "Get up," he commanded. "Take the rest of that stuff off; I don't want no frilly crap getting in my way when I shove my cock into your hungry little cunt."
Mortified and humiliated, Sharon glanced toward Mr. Quayle as though seeking salvation, but the look of burning anticipation in his eyes assured her she could expect no quarter. She stood, still trembling, and unfastened her garterbelt. Using both hands she peeled the nylons off her right leg and stepped out of it.
Macaroni watched with excitement as the sensuous blonde peeled the sheer hose down from her other leg. Then she stood completely naked before him, eyes downcast and subservient. She was taller than he was by a couple of inches, but he knew that when he got through reaming out her proud little cunt she'd know a real man had fucked her. He glanced shrewdly around the room, then gestured with a tilt of his chin toward the couch. "Get up there, babe. This'll be easier if you're on a soft surface."
As if she were a zombie, Sharon moved to the luxurious couch and lay down on her back, her legs held tightly together. Then Macaroni quickly stripped off his jockey shorts and she was suddenly confronted with the awesome size of his penis. It was easily as thick as her wrist and in some obscure way it reminded the frightened young housewife of her can of aerosol hair-spray. She swallowed in terror, so frightened she couldn't even bring herself to look away.
Then Macaroni strode closer to the couch. "All right, cunt. Spread your legs. In Vince's memory I gotta find out if you're really worth saving."
Sharon knew there was nothing she could do but obey. There was no use asking these men for mercy or forgiveness. But as she observed the long thick cock extending out from the hoodlum's loins she knew she was going to be hurt as she had never been before. The pain would be even worse than the mental degradation, and she knew from the look in his eyes he was the kind of man who would enjoy hearing her scream, would delight in every groan of pain that was wrenched forcibly from her ravished body. And Lance Quayle, now resuming his seat in the inflatable chair, would equally thrill to her pitiful moans and pleas.
Sharon lay still, trying to think of Kevin and the fact that she was doing all this for him, waiting in resignation for the rape of her nakedly helpless body. Her belly quivered and she could already imagine the terrible pressure she would have to endure, the obscene stretching as his huge penis pressed demandingly against the open lips of her small, defensively clenched vaginal opening.
Then Macaroni bent over her prostrate body and without warning fastened his teeth harshly into the nipple of her right breast. In spite of all her resolve not to give him the joy of hearing her cry out, she groaned in pain and attempted desperately to twist away from the sudden sharp torture. But with her first movement of escape, Macaroni used his hands, strong powerful hands accustomed to breaking noses and jaws, to hold her tightly down against the softness of the couch. When at last she lay acquiescent again, his hands began playing over the softness of her thighs and hips and his lips roamed wetly over the wildly palpitating mounds of her breasts. Again Sharon tried to force her concentration to Kevin, but in spite of all her efforts she felt little currents of unwanted pleasure issuing through her in response to his lewd caresses.
"Go get her, Mr. Macaroni," Lance Quayle said in encouragement as he felt a new arousal beginning in his own loins from the sight of this aloof and lovely young army wife being subjected to the gross indignity of being treated like a common gangster's moll.
Joe Macaroni's lips slobbered over the soft sensitive areas of Sharon's body, and although there were moments when it seemed he was being gentle, his hard cruel eyes were greedy reminders as to what kind of person he really was. And his impatience was building every minute. He moved his left hand down across her abdomen and began to use his outstretched middle finger to explore her hair-lined cuntal crevice. She squirmed in shame on the couch, wanting to evade his touch though she knew she should be grateful he was taking the trouble to prepare her for penetration.
Then the gangster chuckled and looked back over his shoulder at the older man in the chair. "That blow job she gave you must have turned her on a little, Mr. Quayle. She's sort of wet and gooey down here between her legs, almost ready to fuck already."
Sharon gasped as the man teasingly rotated his finger up into the moistly heated furrow of her vagina. Then, even before she'd became accustomed to the lewd finger-fucking, a second finger wriggled into assist the first.
"Oh please," she groaned. "Please be gentle with me." Then she closed her eyes, trying to hold back the tears that filled them at her shame for voicing her pain.
"Gentle? Goddamn! This is what I call gentle," Macaroni said, beginning to viciously scissor his two fingers open and closed way up inside Sharon's vagina. Sharon bit her lips to keep from crying out, but she couldn't keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks from the corner of her tightly closed eyes.
Then, able to hold off no longer, the gangster jerked his fingers suddenly out from between the blonde spread pussy lips. "Spread your legs real wide, baby. I'm coming in and it's gonna hurt a little bit right at first until you get used to it. But before I'm through I promise you will be begging for more, or may my blood brother Vince be roasting in hell right now."
Macaroni peered down at the terrified girl. He could tell she was shocked by his words, but the whole thing really amused him, for reason's all his own - and Lance Quayle's, of course. But he was serious about one thing. He knew that once this girl got turned on - unlike the hookers and molls he was used to fucking - she really would be begging in earnest. He knew a girl with potential for getting heated up when he saw one, and this one had the potential like none he'd seen or fucked since he dropped out of school in the sixth grade to start running numbers in Hell's kitchen.
Knowing he was ready as he was ever going to be, Macaroni levered up over the cringing girl, his arms stiff, his hands resting on her arms to pin her down. He dropped one hand down between their bodies to take the pulsing hardness of his cock between his fingers and guide it forward, using the thick rubbery head to part her softly curling pubic hair and the warm fleshy lips of her naked cunt.
Now that the moment was at hand, Sharon turned her head to one side on the couch, closing her eyes with a shudder as she felt the first contact against the sensitive outer lips of her fevered pussy. She held her breath, lying absolutely still in utter subjugation beneath the man, not daring to breath, still as air before a storm.
Then suddenly she felt the first harsh unrelenting pressure against the tight elastic opening of her vagina and her breath rushed out of her body in one long sustained protest: "Aaaaagggghhhh," Sharon cried as the huge cock-head slipped through, brutally stretching the tight rubbery opening until she was sure that flesh and bones were being split like the wishbone of a chicken. Suddenly all her good intentions of bravery fled as the pressure continued and increased. "Oooooh God! Don't. You're hurting me. Please. YOU'RE HUR
TING....MEEEEEEEEE!" She screamed at the top of her lungs as the pain forced her eyes open and she saw him grinning cruelly down at her. He was killing her. She would die right here. Nothing could be more painful or agonizing than this, and what made it even worse was that the sadistic criminal was enjoying her piteous sobs, was enjoying the sight of her suffering beneath the barbaric brutality of his slow and relentless penetration of her tight young cunt, almost as if this, and not the bodies and heads he'd broken and the men he'd sent weighted with cement to the bottom of the East River, was his real claim to manhood.
Joe Macaroni listened with undisguised sadistic pleasure to Sharon's abject pleas. He had know ever since he first wormed his fingers into the warm moistened confines of her almost virginal pussy that she was going to go through a lot of contortions during the initial penetration. She had the tightest pussy he'd felt in years. A fourteen year-old junkie hooker he sometimes did business with was like a cow elephant compared to her, and he bet she hadn't really had that many peckers shoved between those creamy, widespread thighs. When he was through with her she'd throw rocks at that damned punk husband who hadn't even been well hung enough to break her in properly. Christ! Here she was squealing like a stuck pig and he hadn't even gotten more than the tip of his prick inside yet. She'd go absolutely ape shit when she felt all ten inches banging up against her ribs.
Abruptly, the grin on Macaroni's face faded, replaced by an implacable mask of sheer animal desire. The feral lust was really upon him now and he couldn't stand it any longer, watching this helpless and innocent young army wife spread-eagled beneath him with the head of his thickly pulsating cock disappearing like an ostrich into the softly curling hairs of her pussy.
He decided it was time to quit screwing around and to really get down to the serious fucking.
Suddenly the gangster's wiry body fell forward, crushing heavily down upon the warm, quivering softness of her breasts. He thrust his hips forward with a mighty shove and his long thick cock slid into her open cunt with a savage fury, mercilessly spreading the soft moist flesh of her tight vaginal walls before its lust-hardened head.
"Aaaaggghhhh," Sharon screamed, her eyes wide and unblinking in sheer agony. There was no stopping him. His mammoth cock thrust into her with all the force of battering ram, and her vainly resisting pussy opened wide against the ruthless onslaught. Down, down, it drove until with a loud groan of delight his testicles stopped heavily against the defenselessly upturned cheeks of her tightly clenched buttocks.
"Oooohhhhhh," Sharon wailed. She thought her vagina had been horribly stretched when Jack Golightly had fucked her in her sleep, but this gangster was like a stallion. He had filled her painfully impaled cunt to the point where it felt as if the handle of a sledge hammer had been shoved into her, as if his plunging cock had ripped and torn and defiled not only her outer parts but her innermost depths as well. He had lanced into her without forethought or mercy, sending a wave of pressure and pain roaring before his penis that was so great she thought she would lapse into unconsciousness. Now, an infinitesimal second later, his huge throbbing rod lay sunk all the way up into her belly, and she could feel every hard little ridge pressing tightly against the tender walls of her pussy. It was hot, huge and powerful, incredibly primeval, prehistorically reptilian and, above all, frightening in its sheer indestructibility.
The man and the woman lay in silence for a moment, both staring at each other, she afraid to move, he relishing the fear that held her still. He could feel the hotly pulsing walls of her cunt enclosing his penis like the strong hand of a dairy maid that squeezed and let up, squeezed and let up, and in response he couldn't resist a sudden flexing of his own hardness way up inside her, just to see how she would react to it.
"Auuuuugggh!" she grunted.
It was an interesting sound, thought Macaroni. He wasn't sure he'd ever heard anything quite like it in his life.
He flexed again.
"Ggggggreeeeeuunnth!"
"You ever think of a nightclub act? You know, animal imitations, maybe some ventriloquism?" he asked sarcastically.
As Sharon stared up at the grinning man in complete confusion, he began a sudden slow rocking motion between her thighs, the sheer raw sensation causing her mind to go blank and completely blot out the confusing remark. Each inward thrust was like a tiny explosion of a fire bomb inside her, burning and searing the soft, nerve-covered flesh until she could hardly stand it. And as his movements widened the tight narrow passage of her cock-filled pussy, he increased the length of his strokes until she groaned helplessly beneath him.
Now Lance Quayle stood up and moved quietly toward the copulating couple on the couch. He had seen plenty of fuck shows before, particularly at the old Chicago headquarters before he came out here, but there was something about this innocent blonde cunt that aroused him more than anything had in years. He grinned with sick delight as he watched the thick shaft of Joe Macaroni's wetly glistening penis, shining from the blonde's involuntary lubrication, pistoning relentlessly in and out of the coral pink lips of her tight little vagina. The hit-man was really pouring it to her, he thought as he watched the rapid rise and fall of Macaroni's buttocks and heard the sound of the naked flesh of their two bodies slapping violently together. And even as he watched, he sensed a change in the woman's physical behavior. Earlier she had tightened every muscle in her body, fighting the brutal penetration even though that may have increased the pain. She had tried without success to remain completely uncooperative, but already he could see signs of weaking, of submissive resignation. It was subtle. To a less intelligent man it might not even have been noticeable. But Lance hadn't missed it and it was beginning to turn him on.
Sharon knew her body was about to betray her again. She fought against it with all her heart and soul, praying silently for succor, but it rapidly was becoming apparent that prayers and will-power were useless against an emotion and need older and more primitive than mankind itself. Abruptly her body had taken command for her still-resisting mind and begun to react on its own. Lewd flames of desire were suddenly sparked and blown by the gale-like winds of her own wanton needs, spread through her abdomen and streaked through her veins until her entire body was consumed in the fiery lust. She no longer had the will or the desire to fight back; she had lost the battle, and she knew that in spite of all her bitterness at what she was being subjected to, she was about to surrender completely to this man who was unmercifully fucking down between her open legs with the biggest and most magnificent penis she had ever known.
Then Sharon looked up and saw Lance Quayle standing less than three feet of the couch, his eyes glazed in lewdly shining lust as he watched her. His hand was enclosed about his penis, stroking it automatically, as though he were mesmerized by the obscene act he observed, and the lewd vision of this man doing that to himself even as Joe Macaroni was literally fucking her to spiritual death sent helpless chills of unwanted sexual sensation running up and down the length of Sharon's spine.
Grudgingly, but helpless to resist, she began to twist and writhe beneath the rhythmically fucking gangster. With a low groan of submission and pleading, she reached up and locked her arms about his neck to pull his face down to hers. She shoved her tongue with a wanton abandonment deep into his throat as inarticulate mewls of slave-like acceptance bubbled from her lust-constricted throat.
Feeling the woman's body begin to react, Macaroni slipped his hands down over the naked curves of her hips, cupping them harshly with each hand to begin pulling her suddenly eagerly cooperating ass-cheeks up toward him with each his punishing inward thrusts. Sharon flexed and unflexed the muscles of her buttocks as she felt Joe Macaroni's fingers knead them as though they were pizza dough, and at the same time she pulled her thighs back farther to cause the desire-moistened hole of her cunt to spread open even wider in an effort to receive his mammoth cock to even greater depths. The pain had disappeared almost at the same time she had started to relax and respond, to be replaced by a wild sexual abandon over which she had no control. She closed her eyes, slavering her tongue up into the gangster's mouth, feeling his tongue fencing with hers, feeling his teeth, the roof of his mouth, savoring the faint taste of tobacco and whisky in his throat. Moments before the cords in her neck and thighs had stood out hard and tense as she fought him; now they were relaxed and it was from her own inner ecstasy that she writhed beneath him in the fevered frenzy of a nymphomaniac whore. And now there was no thought but the delicate delight of lying surrendered beneath this immensely-endowed man who'd begun but a short while ago to ravish her against her will. Now she wanted to give him back all the pleasure he was giving her and abruptly she lifted her knees and wrapped her legs around his laboring shoulders to pull his wildly fucking body even closer to her own.
Macaroni slaved above the responding woman, changing his technique as he felt her inhibitions slipping away. He leaned forward to scrape her clitoris with his throbbing cock-shaft, then backwards until his balls were slapping hard into the naked crevice between her ass-cheeks. He thrust into her with greater and greater force, leaving his thick rigid penis buried deep up inside her hot little pussy and making it jerk and jump in outlandish physical contortions against the tip of her cervix.
Sharon felt the gangster push his hand down between their two thrashing bodies to the soft curls of her pubic hair, and she jerked in a frenzied spasm as she felt him begin to fondle the soft fur-lined cuntal lips that milked at his rampaging cock. He continued to finger her pussy lips and clitoris until low lust-laden groans of animal desire gurgled out of her throat. Her widening vagina had accommodated his mammoth hardness to the hilt; now it seemed to be trying to devour the whole of his wonderful throbbing pole of lust-hardened flesh that was bringing her such sweet and unbelievable torment.
Marcaroni grinned knowingly as he felt the first fevered twitching deep in the velvety well of Sharon's tightly clasping cunt. The bitch may have looked and acted frigid and cold when they began, but she'd turned into a hot little number fast enough. She was really going out of her mind at the reaming she was receiving.
And now he was beginning to lose his own restraint. The milking of his lust-engorged penis was causing his control to weaken in spite of all the practice he'd had and he quickened his thrusts, putting his hands under her knees to push them back until they touched the couch on both sides of her head to make the plane of her wetly throbbing cunt wide and open to the brutally racking thrusts he began throwing to her. It should have caused her to cry out in pain to be penetrated so deeply. Most women did. But instead she was pleading for more and more.
The blonde's obscene language causing a new thrill to surge through his brain and cock, Macaroni began a sudden series of staccato pounding strokes, spanking her upturned buttocks with his hairy loins in a crescendo of fury. He ground harder and harder, deeper and deeper up into her belly as she continued to curse and chant beneath him, driving into never explored reaches of her most sensitive inner depths.
"Jesus, you are a hot little cunt," he grunted in admiration under his breath, and Sharon detected a genuineness in his voice, and the lewd compliment combined with the exquisite feeling deep up in her belly to drive her closer and the unbelievable orgasm surging in spite of everything far up inside her lions.
"Harder, goddamn you, harder!" The impaled young housewife cried out with a vengeance, no longer fearing anything but dissatisfaction and frustration, no longer caring what the gangster did to her afterwards as long as he brought her to a climax now. But now her words fell on deaf ears because Joe Macaroni was so close to his own release that he heard nothing but the sound of his own grunts.
Sharon panted and writhed, hearing the hoarse gasping of the man atop her breathing as though he had almost reached the end of a mile run. His long thick hardness raged and hurtled into her cock-hungry cunt, and nothing had ever felt so wonderful before in her life. She tingled from the tips of her toes to the back of her head. Then, without notice, the tingling became suddenly a convulsion.
"Oh!" Sharon gasped as it hit her. "I'm cumming. Oh God, it's beautiful. I'm going to cum! I'M... I'M CUMMMMMMMIINNNNNG! WWWHHHHEEEEEE!"
Even above the violence of her own orgasm as she bucked and ground up against the man above her, Sharon felt his wildly jerking cock begin to grow even larger in size and start suddenly to pump the hot thick cum deep up into her hungrily quivering belly. She locked her arms around his muscular body, wanting her present exquisite bliss to last forever.
Then her legs went limp and splayed out obscenely on either side of his naked body. Her eyes fluttered shut and she took a deep sigh. Then abruptly her ecstasy faded, replaced by a wave of humiliation and shame. She opened her eyes, tears flooding anew down her cheeks as Joe Macaroni got to his feet, his penis now only half hard but still gargantuan.
"Oh my God," she wailed as he was turning away. "What have I done? What's happened to me? Why am I so terrible?"
Macaroni turned suddenly, glaring down in shock at the girl. In a single involuntary movement his penis twitched an inch and a half longer and grew considerably harder. "You mean you ain't cured yet?"
"Cured?" Sharon gasped. "I could kill myself. I could just die."
"The whole point of this was so you wouldn't have to die, my dear," said Lance Quayle mockingly.
"I don't get it," said Joe Macroni, his penis visibly distending as he scratched his head in confusion. "I just don't get it. You fuck a woman silly and she just about eats you alive with her cunt, and when your through she starts talking about dying of shame and all that bullshit. Merda! Makes a man want to give up, doesn't it." Then he grinned as his penis loomed back almost to full size. He looked at the sobbing woman shrewdly. "Maybe you haven't had enough, hunh? That it, kid?"
Sharon's eyes suddenly opened wide and she stared at the gangster first in horror, then in complete shock as she saw that he had an erection again, seemingly even harder and more powerful than the monstrous erection he'd displayed during her first cruel subjugation. Then a little gasp rose in her throat as he stepped back toward the couch. "No, Mr. Macaroni. Please! I can't take it again. I'm already feeling sore. And I promise you, I did have enough. It was really ... it was really wonderful." She managed a silly, unconvincing smile.
Macaroni shook his head. "Don't worry kid. I'm not a sadist and even if I was I wouldn't fuck you twice in the same hole the same afternoon. So you just be a nice girl and roll over, and it'll be just like we was starting again from the beginning." He brightened as if he had just thought about it. "Why, I bet your sweet little asshole's cherry." His monstrous cock jerked in excitement. "Now that's something to really look forward to!"
CHAPTER EIGHT
"God Almighty!" gasped Lance Quayle. This was going to be even better than he thought. Even he was getting excited again and it had been years since he'd had two erections in one week, let alone one day.
Sharon was paralyzed as a new wave of shame and horror swept over her. She had heard what the gangster said and she knew what he meant. It was the only thing he could have meant. But the idea was so impossibly obscene that some lingering puritanical trait of character in her nature made it possible to believe that she had heard correctly. "But you can't mean .. . ?" she gasped after an extended delay.
"What the hell do you think I mean, you fucking nympho cunt? If you don't appreciate it one way you're bound to appreciate the other. Now turn your fucking ass over before I go get my gun and shoot you."
Oh my God, Sharon thought. He really was serious. He was serious about having anal intercourse with her, and for all she knew he was probably also serious about shooting her. It was hard to believe that the kind of man perverted enough to do the former would have any qualms about doing the latter. Her only problem was to choose the lesser of the two evils. It was perhaps the grimmest choice of her life, and she would later think it must have only been the worthless cowardly nymphomaniacal whore in her that led her finally to choose sodomy over death.
Cringing in terror, Sharon rolled over onto her belly and instinctively pulled her knees up close to her body to thrust her naked ass-cheeks up in ripe invitation.
"Holy mother-fucking shit!" Lance Quayle gasped. She was even better than he could have believed. He felt like he was back in puberty again, as if he'd just finished masturbating and started to unlock the restroom door when he realized he was already getting another erection.
Joe Macaroni employed all the patience that had kept him alive for half a normal life span in the underworld to wait for his penis to grow to its absolute maximum - even larger than it had been when he fucked the young Army wife in the vagina. Then, feeling an inner click somewhere far up in his own rectum that told him he was there, he climbed up on the couch and positioned himself behind the fearfully quivering blonde.
Tears of shame built up in Sharon's eyes as she felt the strong hands opening her buttocks, drawing her tightly clenched ass-cheeks far apart. She tried to hold them flexed together but the pressure of the two thumbs inserted in the crevice was too great. They were pulled away from each other until she could feel the cool draft from the air conditioner rushing into the hot valley between her thighs. She knew Joe Macaroni wasn't simply tormenting her. He was really going to sodomize her. But she had to protest. "Oh no. Please. You mustn't. This isn't right."
Both men laughed in sadistic delight. Then Sharon shivered as she felt the tip of the gangster's finger worming around at her tightly puckered anus. She tried to clench the tiny sphincter ring in a futile effort to protect herself and prevent the cruel penetration she knew was coming. Macaroni probed for a moment at the edge of the brown crinkled flesh, then grinned and shoved his thick, outstretched middle finger forward, sinking it all the way to the first knuckle.
Sharon jumped from the sudden shocking jolt, but it was not as bad as she'd expected it to be. She had begun to relax when she felt a second finger probing her opening, then that one rammed suddenly in alongside the first.
"Ummmmmmmph!" she grunted, her face buried in the couch.
"Say that again," said Joe Macaroni.
"Hunh?"
He rammed a third finger in with the first two to form a cruelly stretching wedge.
"Ummmmmmmphhhhhh!" Sharon groaned, really feeling the hurt this time. She jerked her hips spontaneously forward on the pillow in an attempt to escape the painful invasion, but Macaroni merely wiggled the three-fingered wedge in her rectum, stretching it wider and wider.
"No please," Sharon gasped. "That hurts. Please ..."
She turned her head sideways to face back so the gangster could see her protest. Tears of shame and humiliation streamed down her cheeks from a seemingly endless well as she realized that her protest was having no effect at all. The act was really going to take place, as certain as her own murder would have taken place if she hadn't agreed to submit. He was going to push his long hard penis all the way into her virginal rectum in a parody of love-making that she thought must not even exist beyond the bounds of the harsh underworld in which these men lived. This, then, was going to be the finale of her humiliation and defilement, apt punishment for her sins of the flesh committed earlier as a result of her inherent moral weakness. Her body would be punished and used in the most obscene and degrading way imaginable. If she had the fortune to live through it she would still never, ever live it down.
Sharon attempted once more to scoot forward in retreat on the soft cushion of the couch, but it was useless as Joe Macaroni merely followed her with his hand, digging his fingers deeper and deeper into the heated depths of her rear passage, expanding it mercilessly in preparation for the coming brutal assault.
"Well," he remarked finally. "She's as ready as she's ever gonna be." Suddenly he withdrew his fingers, the elastic ring of the anal flesh clinging to them in seeming reluctance to let them go. He used his knees to force her legs wider, then bent down and deposited a mouthful of spittle in the forbidden anal crevice.
Sharon shivered as she felt the hairy loins pressing against her buttocks, as the hair of his legs brushed the insides of her thighs. She was held wide and helpless, completely at the man's mercy. Then for the first time since this stage of her ordeal had begun, she suddenly felt the thick hot head of his pulsating penis pressed up into the moistly naked split of her buttocks. She cried out in a whimper of fright. It was too big. She could never take that in her rectum without being ripped apart.
"Nooooo, please no, have mercy!" she cried as Joe Macaroni's hands roamed over her nakedly cringing buttocks. Then his thumbs were pressing suddenly on either side of the tight little hole to stretch it open as wide as it would go and abruptly she felt a harsh probing between the two thumbs as his rigidly thickened cock began a slow relentless pressure at the forbidden little opening.
"Jesus Christ," he groaned with surprise. "This is even tighter than I thought. Feel's like a fucking rabbit's asshole."
Sharon screamed piteously, but the sound went unheeded. There was no one here who would help her or have mercy on her and nothing existed for her in the whole world but the excruciating pain where the barbaric cock-head had unnaturally lodged itself in preparation for the most brutal assault in the anals of mankind. There would be no escape from her horrible degradation and the demented and perverted attack on her helpless body. She would submit and endure, or she would die the cruelest and most unnatural death since the Middle Ages.
The naked young housewife continued to groan incoherently as the straining gangster popped the heavy bloated head relentlessly inside her tight anal ring and pushed gradually deeper and deeper into her futilely resisting rectum. It even caused waves of pain far up in her stomach as the rigid thickness burrowed in. She was stretched as she had never been stretched before, as though impaled upon a flaming pole. Then, just when she thought the torture would never end, she felt the coarse pubic hairs smack into the softness of her buttocks, and she shivered with astonishment as she made a mathematical calculation and determined just exactly to where the impaling cock must have penetrated in her body. The cruel barbarian's fleshy sword was buried to the hilt and Sharon groaned in anguish, wishing desperately that she could pass wind to relieve the pressure and finding even that impossible.
The gangster's eyes rolled around his head with lewd delight as he began sawing rhythmically and without mercy deep into the warm rubbery depths of Sharon's rectum to provoke further cries of shame and pain from her contorted lips. Muttering his own hoarse obscenities and gasping with sadistic pleasure, he started to thrust the full length of his sodomizing rod of flesh in and out of her with smooth long strokes, feeling the tiny ridges of brown sucking flesh pull in and out as they clung to the punishing shaft.
Sharon's body jerked and quivered, convulsing each time an extra hard thrust speared far up into her tortured anus. She could hear the animal grunts of delight behind her, and she hated herself and her own body for the pleasure it was giving him. She wished she could see him destroyed, killed as brutally as he might have killed her, but instead she could only helplessly submit to the torment and degradation.
Macaroni was nearing ecstasy already as he felt the warm clasping flesh enveloping his sensitive cock from trunk to tip. It was as though he were fucking into a velvet-gloved hand that was trying to squeeze his cock until it burst. Now all the submissively kneeling young girl wanted to do was to end her humiliation as soon as possible, to get it over with and to show the good sense to make it appear she really was satisfied and liberated. She prayed for the strength to please and began to grind her smoothly rounded ass-cheeks back to meet each forward thrust of his impaling penis, rotating her hips in little impatient circles and deliberately tightening and flexing her anal ring in time with each humiliating stroke.
The gangster felt the sudden cooperative movements of her naked ass-cheeks before him and fucked into her rectal passage with renewed power. She was obviously trying to bring him pleasure, fucking him like a love slave, ready to do anything he wanted. There was no resistance at all left in her and she was impaled like a harem princess on his pile-driving cock.
Lance Quayle had an erection again, and he couldn't remember when anything had ever cheered him up so much in his life. He really congratulated himself on the ploy that had brought this innocent girl into his hands, and he was thinking she could actually be used to an even better end. He and Macaroni had the biggest deal of their lives coming up tomorrow, a joint venture that would make them both millionaires, not of course that they weren't already both millionaires but until a man got in range of the Big B he had to keep some arbitrary objective in mind for the sake of having a terminology to discuss the subject of making money. If just the right people could all be buried three days from tomorrow, this whole state would belong to him and Joe. And partners in a state like Nevada should at least be close enough to share their women - not in turn but at the same time. And it was only with the idea that a mutual climax was the finest way in the world to cement a relationship that Lance held off from running to the end of the couch and sticking his penis back into the aroused blonde army wife's mouth right this very minute.
Sharon could feel the underworld figure's long thick penis twitching and swelling inside her, and already she began to sense that he was nearing his orgasm. Longing for him to reach his final ecstasy and triumph, she began to grunt and groan, encouraging and pleading with all the motions of her wildly gyrating ass-cheeks for him to end it and give her an enema of his hotly spewing sperm.
Joe Macaroni was going insane with the approach of his climax. The intolerable pressure was building up in his cum-filled balls and the blonde's twitching anus only increased the tingling torment in his loins. He began to ram rapidly into her hot anal passage, buffeting her smoothly rounded buttocks with his pelvis and thighs, his brutal and savage strokes bringing new cries of pain and pleasure as he drove deeper and harder into her than he ever had before.
Then, gasping incoherently and sputtering like a madman, Joe shoved forward with one last mighty thrust that seemed sure to rip through the walls of Sharon's heaving belly, then began to spew his ejaculating sperm in rushing torrents deep up inside her forcibly milking rectum.
Seeing it was time to move, Lance Quayle literally bounded to the head of the couch. He pulled his pajama top aside to completely expose the straining rod of his newly erected cock. He winked as Joe Macaroni stared at him in surprise.
"We work together, don't we, Joe? One for all and all for one?"
Joe Macaroni was too excited to grin, but he managed a nod and a wink, then returned his attention to the nakedly squirming blonde on the couch before him.
Lance gasped from deep in his throat, then reached down to seize Sharon's long silken hair and lift her face up from the cushion. She resisted at first, completely astonished to find herself confronted again with the small cock-stub protruding from the gray tufts of hair.
Then she understood. This was just a little fringe on her degradation. Something between the two men. As she took his penis into her wetly heated mouth and felt it begin to twitch almost immediately as the sperm began its short dash up from the testicles to the glans, she told herself that it really made no difference to her at all. What she was concerned with, completely occupied with, was the final series of wracking lunges that were buffeting her body from behind, the great spurts of cum she felt pumped up into her anus which made the little drops squirting into her mouth seem insignificant.
As Sharon swallowed automatically, Joe Macaroni reached the peak of the greatest orgasm of his life. He squealed and bellowed, raging like a wild animal. Then at last he gasped, sagging heavily forward, lifting his eyes to the sky.
"You understand, don't you, Vince old boy? You understand?"
"Yeah, Joe. I understand."
Sharon heard the strange, yet vaguely familiar voice. She felt the man on top of her stiffen, felt the small penis slip from her mouth as Lance Quayle withdrew and whirled around.
She had to strain her neck and lean off the couch to look past him and see that the man named Vince, the man who had beaten up his partner in her apartment and the man for whose death she was supposed to be atoning, was standing in the elevator with a gun.
CHAPTER NINE
"Hey Vince," said Joe Macaroni, still mounting Sharon, his enormous penis still pumping the endless torrent of cum into the most inner depths of her rectum. "I thought you was supposed to be coming tomorrow?"
Vince shook his head. "Don't move, Quayle. No, buddy. I was supposed to go, tomorrow. 'Out', as you guys say. You're the one that's going today, though. But don't get excited. You can finish fucking the broad."
"Thanks, Vince," Sharon heard the man grunt behind her, gasping as he launched a final series of rapid staccato lunges into her already crimson-spanked ass-cheeks. Then he tapered off, and with a grunt sagged heavily on top of her.
"Oh my God," she gasped. "Don't shoot him yet. Please don't shoot him until he pulls it out and gets off me."
"You heard the lady," said Vince. "Where's your piece?"
"Under my coat, by the door," Joe Macaroni gasped, his penis still embedded deep in Sharon's ravished and forever stretched anus.
"You can make a run for it if you want. I won't let you get there but you might as well try."
"Thanks, Vince," the gangster grunted again, then a spontaneous moan issued from Sharon's throat as his penis was suddenly jerked with a loud pop from her seared ass-cheeks. Remembering something she'd seen on television once, she instinctively rolled off the couch and pressed herself flat on the floor, turning her head to see Joe Macaroni running naked toward the pile of clothing. She looked back at Vince, who was aiming from his hip, his face expressionless. It seemed that she looked back and forth four or five times, as if all of it was happening in slow motion. It seemed she even saw the slight twitch of Vince's lips as he pulled the trigger, but at the same time she knew for certain she was looking at Joe Macaroni when she heard the discharge, which was not loud at all, but muffled, just a little pop. The way she knew she was looking at Joe Macaroni was that she saw his naked buttocks, presented as a target as he bent to reach for his gun, and she saw the bullet hit them and blow them apart and send him sprawling toward the wall.
Then she looked back just in time to see Vince shoot Lance Quayle in the face without pomp or ceremony. Then the gangster looked at her. "Come here to pay your debt?" He didn't wait for her to answer. "Looks like you been working it off, hunh?" Then his eyes singled out something else and he squinted for a moment before looking back at her. "That's a bunch of torn up vouchers laying there, ain't it?"
"Y-y-yesss ..." Sharon croaked in terror.
"They yours?"
She swallowed and nodded, knowing she was foolish to dare to hope, knowing the killer was only playing with her and would kill her at any moment just as he had killed the two men.
Then, to her astonishment, he shrugged. "Then I guess I got no further business with you. Funny, too, I had a feeling right from the beginning you weren't the kind of person would welch on a debt."
Sharon swallowed hard. "You mean . .. ?"
"No, Ma'am. I ain't gonna blast you. More dangerous people than you'll ever talk to knew who'd shoot those two credit welchers even before they knew it themselves. My problem is just getting out of this building now, and staying out of those people's way later. I never worried about cops, but I don't figure you're gonna be that interest in talking to them anyway."
"No!" Sharon gasped. "I'm not! I'm really not at all. I could get in almost as bad trouble as you if I had to explain why I'm here."
"That's what I figured." Vince tipped his fedora. "There's a secret elevator in back there. Police don't know about it. Just ride it all the way to the bottom and turn the door handle. But you better knock first 'cause it opens to a stall in the men's John down in the casino. I took this one because I had a couple of other welchers to shoot on the way up." He smiled, a strangely pleasant smile on his primitive face. Then he pushed a button and the door closed. Sharon lay motionless for a moment longer, then scrambled suddenly to her feet and began to frantically put on her clothing.
* * *
In the men's restroom, Sharon waited in the locked toilet cubicle until the man who was washing his hands at the lavatory finished and left. Then she eased open the door and stepped out. There was another man at the urinal, but he didn't look back at her and she went hastily to the door. A gray-headed, elderly gentleman met her going out, apologized himself before she had a chance to explain she'd made a mistake, then turned and walked through the door at the opposite side of the carpeted lounge, though it was just as clearly marked "Ladies" as the one from which she'd driven him had been marked "Men".
That eased her nerves to some extent, though she was still in a considerable panic and was moving through the casino fairly at a run. She'd taken no time to inspect the bodies upstairs, but she'd seen enough blood to last her a lifetime, as she'd had enough fear to last her ten lifetimes. But halfway to the door she became aware that people were staring at her and some inner mechanism warned her that panic was the worst thing she could display now. Sooner or later the bodies would be found, a lot of questions would be asked, and if enough people could describe a woman who'd run panicked through the casino moments after the apparent time of the shooting there might be a way the authorities could trace her down. Sharon knew that the present situation called for a very clever gambit. And she knew just what would work.
The slightly disheveled blonde did not slow her pace, she merely veered slightly. And instead of going out of the casino she wound up at the last cashier's window. Anxiously she fumbled through her purse and found some bills. She bought fifty dollars worth of chips, walked with equal haste back to the nearest roulette table, and plopped down ten dollars on number thirty-two. She was hardly even surprised when her number came up a winner. Nor was there much difficulty in deciding what to do next. She simply shifted her three hundred and twenty dollar winnings, plus the original ten she'd bet, to number thirty-one, and waited for the next spin of the wheel.
The other players gasped in sympathy when thirty-two won again. But Sharon merely smiled and shrugged. She walked back to the cash window, changed her remaining chips back for cash, and left. She got a taxi out front and they were just pulling away when she heard the first distant sirens. But somehow she wasn't worried. She knew they'd never trace her. It was a feeling, nothing more or less, but she was sure of it. Just as she was sure she had learned something about herself, her sexual needs, her deep and still unscarred love for her husband.
She was also sure she'd never walk into another casino again.
