"You really want to make it hard on me, don't you?"
Virgil realized he'd been holding his breath while he stared at the dark, ragged edges of the inch-wide abyss between her legs.
"I don't know," he panted. "Do you want to make it hard on me?"
Pinky stared at his crotch. "It looks like it's pretty hard already. If I'd thought for a minute that my sweet step-daddy would become physically excited by a demonstration of smuggling technique, I can assure you I would have been shocked."
Virgil made an effort to meet her eyes with his. Pinky could tell he was straining. "Oh give it up," she said. "You see my face all the time. Look at this instead." She lifted her skirt to her waist, smiling wickedly.
CHAPTER 1
Virgil Blakesley undressed. His wife Julia continued combing her long hair with her back to him. He climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. It was a child-like gesture, rather out of character for a thirty-six year old Professor of English Literature, but he indulged himself in it because it expressed the way he felt for a brief moment: vulnerable, confused, and shy.
Julia laid her comb down carefully on the antique ebony tray that had sat in its place on her bureau during the entire eight years of their marriage. For the first years the tray had constantly been cluttered with lipstick tubes, powder puffs, hair brushes, curlers-all the paraphernalia of female beautification. But then Julia's things had gotten up and gone trotting around the globe with her. Occasionally Virgil's female guests had left things on it, but the original effect had never been approached. Well-now Julia's things were starting to creep back again.
Virgil's wife, still wearing the skimpy halter and tight scarlet shorts she had chosen for the train ride home, turned and paced to the bedside. She lingered there for a brief instant, and once more Virgil was dazed by the strangeness of her presence.
He still knew Julia. The striking, almost too-perfect features, the low forehead flowing with hair that changed from umber to a mossy grayish-blonde in the sunlight, the smooth, strutting rhythm of her gait reminiscent of the movements of a flamenco dancer, were things he had captured in his memory long ago. Julia, now thirty-five, somehow seemed ageless despite the fact that she had borne and raised an eighteen-year-old daughter.
In a flash Virgil saw Julia as he had come to know her when it had seemed terribly important to him to unravel the mysterious puzzle of her face. He played back to himself the ways he had once learned to characterize this woman whose looks left most men saying simply, "She's beautiful. If you want to know how, you'll just have to see her."
Julia's face was a study in subtly contrasting features which only a true connoisseur could fully appreciate. Superficially she was what one might call "foxy." Her eyes were slanted imperceptibly upward. Her strong, straight British nose turned upward noticeably. Her upper lip arched to give her wide mouth a secretively lyrical ascent. But the directness, in fact the artlessness, of her manner contradicted the "foxy" impression immediately, and left one with nothing. Besides, her lower Hp pouted warmly and sensually downward, and her chin was straight and firm as it swept back to her wide jawbones. These features all but destroyed the impression that she was a shrewdly calculating vixen against whom one had to guard one's heart skillfully. To the perceptive eye Julia's features and bearing struck a balance that was spectacular but puzzling.
The puzzlement could only be increased by staring into her eyes, which were an unnamed color of brown best described as matching her hair. They seemed to betray a disembodied intelligence that sailed through life without reflection or self-consciousness, and a sensuality that was either very small, or very large and far away. Virgil knew the impression of small sensuality was cultivated. Julia's lusts were in fact immense; overpowering. Though at times far away, they could be retrieved at the speed of light.
Julia paused by the bedside. She reached up behind her back. "Would you like me to take off my halter?"
When Julia talked her mouth opened roundly to pronounce syllables that betrayed her English upbringing. Her animated red lips composed themselves in promising shapes around the wide, straight rows of her teeth. But men who were captivated by these promises at cocktail parties, in stores, on the streets, soon learned that they were not there. Whatever Julia said, she said out loud in plain English. As for the rest, she could not-and would not-be responsible.
In answer to Julia's question, the devil suddenly was tempting Virgil to say, "Sure, but I'd rather see Pinky take off hers."
Virgil doubted that Julia's daughter could possibly compete with her mother in the bedroom or in the bed. But it had been years since Virgil had encountered Julia in a state of total abandon. And besides, he had seen her tits before.
It was time to say something.
"Why not?" he smiled, rather like an old geezer at a strip show. "I've never complained about looking at your tits." The word, spoken out loud, jarred him slightly. Virgil was ever sensitive to the delicate aesthetics of a situation. But as Julia's expression told him, it had been just right for her. Not quite the stodgy old Virgil she had once known. Well, he thought to himself, he wasn't.
Julia let the straps of her halter slide teasingly down over her slim, tanned shoulders. The cloth that covered her immense breasts came loose.
She clamped her arms to her sides, staring into Virgil's eyes to be sure she saw the proper measure of pure animal excitement as she clung to the brief garment. At its edges, lines and crescents of un-sunned skin flashed out at him.
Slowly she lifted her arms.
The halter fell softly to the deep pile rug at her feet.
Two candles flickering on the hardwood mantle over the bed provided the room's only illumination, and Julia's breasts, perfectly round, glowed in their light like two moons. They were so huge that her clothing, when she wore it, pressed in on them from the sides, while at the same time their cleavage was narrow and deep.
High on the centers of her breasts, small, dark brown nipples painted daring contrasts with their pure luminescent flesh-earthy openings for the glistening milky skinscape around them.
Virgil's eyes sucked the nipples. When he had drunk his fill, his gaze wandered out over their surrounding globes, sliding easily over goose-bumps, pores, and invisible tendrils of filmy blonde hair.
Julia's breasts stood out so boldly, yet so calmly, on her slim torso that Virgil was moved once more to ask himself how she supported two such enormous udders and made them look as if they were really hers.
When he had finished adjusting to the shock of the brazen nakedness that challenged him in the candlelight, his body was quivering all over.
All day Virgil had been aroused by Julia-and by Pinky-parading around the usually barren house with almost nothing on. Buttocks had crept out from beneath shorts. Breasts had dangled behind thin veils. Crotches had bulged with mounds of soft hair and softer lips barely contained.
Now his arousal was coming intensely into focus. From his crotch a warm, loaded sensation pulsed expectantly.
For the moment, past sexual experiences with Julia were banished from his mind.
She moved a step closer to him. She took her breasts in her hands. She looked down at one, then the other. She reveled in their fat, shining surfaces.
She raised them with her fingertips. Her slim wrists looked too weak to support their weight. Her nipples pointed straight at Virgil's face.
She let her breasts drop. The nipples danced hypnotically up and down. The flesh bounced, swayed, jiggled to rest.
Absorbed in her own body now, forgetting Virgil, she ran her hands down over her belly, fingering a few gentle, erotically ripe ripples of extra flesh.
"Would you like me to take off my shorts?"
This time no reply was necessary. Virgil pulled down the covers, baring his solid barrel chest and gathering the cloth at his waist.
Images of Pinky flashed once more into his mind. But now, instead of competing with the images of Julia, they complimented them. The thought that these two women were mother and daughter loosed a new stream of erotic fantasy. Pinky was there beside her mother, copying every action, learning the alluring secrets of femininity from one of the most essentially feminine of women.
Julia glanced down at the button and zipper of her shorts as though she had forgotten how to work them. Virgil's eyes were with hers.
She arranged her grip carefully. She pressed the cloth around a bright blue button that glinted in the candlelight. It looked like a reflection of her smooth, deep navel above it.
The button disappeared into a slit in the scarlet material.
Virgil's eyes wandered down over Julia's legs. He leaned forward in bed so he could see their full length, from the slim waist that flared out to prominent hip bones all the way down to the toes that curled into the depths of the carpet at her feet.
Virgil noted with some surprise that Julia's feet were rather ordinary. They were not spectacularly slim, delicate, or aristocratic. It was almost a relief to find something about her that was ordinary.
Then his gaze moved up again, flying in the space between her legs.
Virgil had never known whether to say Julia was slightly bowlegged. There was indeed a pleasant opening-out between her legs. But perhaps one was almost tricked into thinking she was slightly bowlegged because of the way her flaring hips broke away from her narrow, straight torso. From the waist down, her figure resembled a bud vase, narrow stem opening out at the top to a perfectly machined fullness.
Virgil's eyes completed their odyssey. Julia attended to his face closely. By now he was staring at the red-polished fingernails that still rested on her zipper. She directed her attention there too.
She drew the zipper downward. Virgil could hear each click of the opening teeth. They seemed almost to be forced apart by the strong downward curve of her stomach. The top seam of a pair of bikini panties, clinging softly to her belly, came into view.
Julia stood still for a moment, appreciating the shape of the opening as it pointed suggestively downward.
She raised her hands to take her breasts in them once more. An index finger sought out each dark, puckered nipple. She massaged gently at first; then harder. Delicate circling gave way to up and down rubbing. She pressed her tits together and her dark eyes blazed as she stared into the deep shadow of the valley between them. She pulled them apart, dissolving the shadow and showing two separate, irresistible masses of femininity.
Her nipples were fully erect and puffy and crimson beneath their brown tips. Shocks of pleasure ran across her creamy skin, visible and sudden. Beneath the bedcovers Virgil's hand gravitated toward his crotch. Julia's eyes jumped to the mound of sheet between his legs as it moved rhythmically up and down. She devoured its motion. Her breath hissed heavily in her throat. Her chest and neck were flushed. She dropped her breasts and ran her hands down her sides.
Suddenly something warned Virgil, and his mind jumped away. Could this really be Julia?
The Julia he knew could indeed be seductive, abandoned, wild. But she had not been those things with him since the first year of their marriage. Virgil had long since become philosophical about this, which was largely the reason for her compulsive globe-trotting. He had even come to accept the situation with something like healthy humor. He had from time to time wondered whether it was intrinsically more appealing to be fucked in the moonlight on an Algerian beach by some swarthy, gun-toting revolutionary than to make love with one's tweedy husband in a colonial house on the edge of an Ivy League campus. Virgil knew that asking such a question should have been as good as answering it, at least by the usual measures of what sex was all about.
But somehow he had not been able to move to Algeria, buy a gun, and attempt to overthrow the government just so he could have a good night in bed with his wife. In her absence he had had plenty of good nights with a variety of very attractive, very enthusiastic bed partners. He doubted whether in this respect he had fared any worse than Julia. But now he asked himself-was Julia getting some kind of perverse kick out of emptying her libido in what she considered a totally prosaic setting? Or was there really something deep down in her, uncovered by her restless meandering, .that now allowed her to return to him?
At this moment Julia reminded him of Roberta.
Roberta was a trim, athletic-looking graduate student.. She was what one would have to call disgustingly healthy. Which was why, Virgil supposed, she was also the closest thing he had ever seen to a nymphomaniac.
An image of Roberta spread-eagled on his bed-an image just two days old-flitted onto the screen of Virgil's fantasizing and made his groin tighten. Now dreams of his stepdaughter and his erstwhile mistress intermingled with the spectre of Julia's undulating figure before him. In a new rush of desire, his head filled till it overflowed with dirty pictures and the words that went with them; tit, cunt, asshole, suck, eat, lick, fuck.
Julia turned her back to him. She pulled her shorts down. She stepped out of them.
She had one of those rear ends that always seemed somewhat suspended in the air, like the back end of a cat in heat. The cheeks of her ass, slim and hollow at the sides, were full and heavy as they drooped down at the rear, hanging in the warm late summer air beneath the flimsy cloth of her red panties. The natural spread of her legs that Virgil had explored from the front carried through to the rear. Her ass-crack was tight and deep at the top, but it widened out as it swept down toward her crotch. The handfuls of buttock on either side were held apart by some mysterious force. At the crack's bottom, her panties tightly out-lined the shape of her cunt, pressing its delicate, sparse, brownish-blonde hairs against her.
After a moment's pause Julia paced away from him. He stared at her buttocks as they rubbed against each other and jounced and jiggled.
She arrived at her suitcase on the floor next to the bureau. She bent over, waving her ass in the air, and searched in it. She came out with a large, flat paper bag.
Straightening up, she searched the room to make sure the stereo still sat in its old place next to the door to the bathroom. She walked over to it, removed a record from the bag, and put it on.
"I'm going to show you something I learned-in my travels." She walked to the center of the room as it filled with the first throbbing sounds of belly-dancing music.
"I don't have a jewel in my navel, but you'll just have to imagine."
Her hips began to rotate. Her feet spread and her pelvis jabbed forward.
Her knees flexed and the tendons in her thighs tightened, drawing strong lines up to where her thighs hollowed out to form a nesting place between her legs. A dark blotch of dampness appeared as the cloth of her panties clung tightly to the bulging lips of her cunt. Traces of perspiration appeared on her torso, making her body glisten. Her arms climbed slowly upward. Her fingers spread and pointed at the ceiling.
The tempo of the music increased. Her hands came together in an arch above the flying strands of her shoulder-length hair. Her belly sucked in and undulated in a strong wave that sucked everything up into the slit between her legs.
The deep shadow of her navel gyrated, flexed, stretched, closed to nothing. Her hips bumped. She was thrusting herself down upon an imaginary organ. She bounced her clit on something solid as she came to the end of its shaft Virgil could almost see her hole opening to let the organ in.
She circled. She broke into a series of back and forth stridings. They carried her from end to end of the large bedroom.
She grasped her panties firmly and stripped them off.
Her naked cunt caught Virgil off guard. He leaned forward to devour the pouting pink lips that lurked, swampy and tender, beneath a thin mat of transparent hair.
Julia bumped and ground her way to the bedside. Virgil watched her climb onto the other end of the bed and kneel. Her breasts bobbed like huge balloons.
She clasped her hands over her head once more, and her legs spread. Her belly drove into a series of soft convulsions that lifted her cunt up to open at him. He stared at the dark shadow of her slit as it tossed between the mounds of her hairy outer lips.
Her hands fell downward. They stroked her hair, her shoulders, her sides, her hips. Then they turned and headed inward. The red polish on her nails glinted strongly in the candlelight as they passed through sprouting fields of hair and arrived at their destination. She placed her fingers on her cuntlips. Her hips churned.
The tempo of the belly-dancing music reached an urgent pitch. The brassy sound banged in Virgil's ears.
Julia's body bent back. Virgil lost sight of her face. Her breasts hung off the sides of her body like jellied sacks.
A finger eased into the crack between her cuntlips. It rubbed up and down high on her pussy. From far away Virgil heard her moan.
Her fingers jumped outward. They tore the lips of her cunt aside and opened a long red gash. Her movement stopped. She was still. The pit of Virgil's stomach dropped out. The pearly pink satin of Julia's cunt, inflamed with desire, dripped thick juices. The subtle brown deckle at the edges of its inner lips looked almost purple. Her clit, free at last from its damp prison, stood out hard against the wavy lines that surrounded the entrance to her hold. It throbbed as the electricity of approaching orgasm coursed through it.
Her fingers gripped hard, and she spread her hole wider.
Now she came down off her knees and lay flat on her back. Drawing her legs slowly up, she pointed her feet at the ceiling. She let her legs fall toward her head. Her crotch split wide from the top of her ass-crack to the mound of her pubis. The gaping hole of her cunt was a cavern. Its edges were hung with delicate, soaking flowers of private flesh. Below, the brownish pink knot of her asshole tightened and loosened in time to the music.
Virgil stared at her asshole for a moment. Its slick doe-colored skin sprouted with tiny scattered hairs. At the very center, the hole, tiny as a pinhead, seemed to pull inward with creases of flesh. , Virgil's eyes flitted back and forth, watching first Julia's cunt as it heaved up toward him, next the sucking of her asshole as she drew it and her pussy closed again. Her fingers moved down until her nails surrounded the hole of her ass. They clamped down lightly to get a grip. Then she spread her asshole out. The hole widened to the size of a match head.
Now she forced herself outward, inward, outward. Each time the hole grew wider, expanding magically un til it was deep and dark, and the ridge of flesh that had surrounded it was flattened to nothing.
Virgil, pumping on his cock, had to fight himself to keep from shooting. He had a better place to put it.
He moved toward Julia until his face was inches from her crotch. Her cunt was like a valley now, and he set out to explore it.
He plunged his tongue into it. The smell of pussy-juice filled his nostrils, and the feeling of slimy skin covered his face. His tongue was swallowed up. Julia's hole was so wide that his tongue could not fill it. For a moment he wondered whether even his own huge cock could fill it.
He licked the sides of her hole as it bobbed up and down and circled around against his face. His upper lip, thinly veiling his teeth, rubbed up against her clit, catching the hard little nub and wrenching it back and forth in time with her thrusts.
Julia's body went wild. The ragged jabs of her pelvis came in hard uneven rhythms. Her arms thrashed. Her legs kicked and shoved and buckled. Her back arched.
She scrambled around. She pounced on him. The full weight of her tits fell on his chest. She squashed the hard nipples into him.
Clawing at her crotch, she ripped her hole open and rammed it down over his cock. Three hard, insane jabs and he was up to the hilt in her. His balls bounced against the cheeks of her ass as they came smacking down.
Virgil was off and fucking. But he couldn't keep up with Julia's hard-driving pace.
At first he thought he would come. But Julia left him far behind. He struggled to catch up, chasing the ghost of her passion as it whirled before him and then danced away.
In a blasting, hurricane rush, Julia came.
Her cunt gripped Virgil's eight inches so hard that he was afraid she would tear it off. Her pelvis smacked against his with bone-breaking fury.
There was a long, siren-like sigh. Julia drew her breath deeply. A shudder like a huge ship running aground wracked her body, and then she was staring off at the ceiling, a dazed look in her eyes. She was panting. Her chest was bright scarlet. Her mouth was open, and her tongue hung out from between her smeared red lips like a dog's tongue on a hot day.
Virgil found himself far away, wondering whether Julia was thinking what he was thinking: if only he had been there....
His hips kept pumping as he tried to bring himself off. But to Julia, he was no longer there. His cock could have been a stake sticking up out of the ground.
This was the way it had always been before. Either Julia was off in a fantasy world of her own, and Virgil was trying desperately to bring himself off, or Virgil was lying there satisfied while Julia went crazy. He wondered what it had been-what it was-about their two minds that made it impossible for them to be together. Disappointed, Virgil let the burning of his hips fade. He turned his head to the pillow as she dismounted and stretched out beside him. She put her hand tenderly on the back of his neck.
Virgil's mind reeled with confused feelings. It had been such a good start. Perhaps another time he could hold onto her-if she could hold onto him.
Virgil waited until Julia was asleep. An aching tension wracked his balls. Then he got up, and put on his clothes. He had a right to be satisfied. There was a way for that to be done.
He padded downstairs, words from that afternoon echoing in his ears; words Roberta had spoken to him on the telephone as he waited for the train to bring Julia and Pinky home.
The train, as usual, had been fifteen minutes late. Virgil had passed the time wandering up and down the tracks reading a newspaper someone had left on one of the weathered old benches.
He had called Roberta-mostly to assure her that although his wife and stepdaughter were coming back, the rendezvous they had scheduled for a few days later was still on.
Virgil had allowed that he was not anxious to spend a very long time without Roberta's enthusiastic and expert ministrations. Roberta, for her part, had allowed that she was very horny. The way she had put it was, Tin about to shove this goddamned telephone receiver up my cunt."
But Virgil had thought he'd better allow for the un-likely circumstance that Julia would find him the biggest stud on earth. After all, he assumed she had tried all other types and was about due to come around to his again. In a typically philosophical mood, he had informed Roberta that bearing full responsibility for her satisfaction would tax his genitals to the utmost.
"Just wait," he had told Roberta. "Julia will treat me like a cigar store indian with VD, and by the time I see you again I'll have saved up enough to blast you through the wall."
Roberta had returned that she was in no need of a savings account for sperm. What she had in mind was a checking account with an unlimited balance.
Virgil had countered that if she and Julia were to start making withdrawals on his account at the same time he would lose his balance altogether. Just then the 5:10 had rattled into sight down the tracks.
Now Virgil reached the kitchen. He lifted the phone from its hook by the back door and dialed Roberta's number.
He knew Roberta would answer the phone on the second ring. She was a night person, and she seldom went to bed before three or four, or arose before noon.
The enthusiasm in her voice was like manna from heaven.
He left the house quickly and walked two blocks to her apartment house in the moonlight By the time he reached her door it was open.
Roberta was dressed in a flimsy pink negligee. Considering her slender, darkly tanned, athletic figure, she could barely get away with such frills.
"What happened?" she asked as he flopped down on her bed and exhaled limply.
"Never mind what happened," he replied. "Just pull up that fucking nightgown and sit on my face."
"Ok."
She walked over to him and lifted the pink cloth.
"How do you want it-back or front?"
"Back. I want to stick my tongue up your cunt and asshole and I want you to hump the shit out of my face with that tight little pussy of yours."
The dirty words flowed out of Virgil's mouth in a hard stream whose tone Roberta knew had nothing to do with her. That was fine anyhow; she liked it hard.
She turned around and stripped the negligee off. While it floated to the floor she rammed her ass into his face.
The blonde hairs of her pink pussy squashed against his cheeks, and its lips were warm and squishy. Virgil fought to get his fingers to them so he could spread them. For an instant he stared at the panorama of pink pussy and tight, pink asshole, joined by a bridge of flawless, shining flesh. Then he dove his tongue deep into her.
He parted her asshole and inserted a finger into it.
Roberta, her face poised over his crotch, pulled down his pants and gobbled his dick down her throat. Had he not been smothered himself, he would have screamed.
He spent a long time wandering in the depths of Roberta's slick little hole. Then he moved his face upward, pulled his finger out of her ass, and pried at the already loose hole with his tongue. She reached her hands back to spread her ass-cheeks and soon his tongue was buried to the hilt in the narrow channel.
She squeezed, forcing his tongue out. Then she relaxed, drawing it even deeper. Between his legs she was groping for his asshole. Soon her tongue was buried as deeply in it as his was in hers. He squirmed, and already that leaden tenseness that forecast orgasm was spreading outward from his genitals.
Now Roberta slid her tongue out of his asshole and, substituting a finger there, began sucking at his balls, taking them into her mouth one by one and caressing their wrinkled, hairy sacks with professional gentleness.
Virgil returned to her cunt to give her clit a few lingering licks. The tense flesh of her tight, well-shaped little ass bobbed before him. The churning of her hips drove him wild.
He grabbed her by the arms, pulled her off him, and turned her around. He spread her out on the bed and dove onto her tits. His lips sucked insanely. She flopped and writhed and groaned in ecstasy, her flat stomach heaving with her deep, gasping breaths.
She grabbed her own legs and tore them apart. Virgil reached down once more to finger the salivating lips of her cunt. Spreading them as far as they would go, he aimed at her hole with his dangling rod. He hit the bull's eye with incredible fury.
"Aaaaagh," Roberta breathed. Her clenched teeth came apart to show him the depths of her gaping throat. She moaned and wriggled to work his cock deep inside her. "That feels so fucking GOODI"
Virgil always came with Roberta-right with her.
They stared deeply into each other's eyes. The slightest change of expression orchestrated the chaotic, thrusting fuck.
Virgil dug his fingers into her back, and felt tension in the muscles there. He moved his hands down to grasp her buttocks, thrusting her cunt upward.
She waved her legs in the air and wiggled her ass back and forth in a frenzy.
They fucked for ten minutes, teetering on the brink. Then Roberta buried her face in his shoulder.
Ripples of orgasm began spreading through her.
Virgil blasted into her like a cannon. The cheeks of his ass clenched tightly as his hips pressed. He made sure she felt every last convulsion of his exploding cock.
Now she sucked at him from the depths of her womanhood, drawing sperm out of him even after there was none left to draw.
She collapsed into a disheveled heap beneath him.
Heavily he rolled off her and surveyed the mangled scene between her legs. Come dribbled out between her cuntlips and seeped down to soak the bedsheets.
They lay there for several minutes.
As usual, Roberta turned her attention to his cock again, expertly raising it up from its fallen state with the teasing tip of her practiced tongue.
She got it fully erect. Then, with Virgil still on his back, she turned away from him and squatted. She spread the cheeks of her ass wide, and, wetting her finger in her slippery pussy, made a few probing motions up her asshole-first with one finger, then with two. When she was ready, she sat down on Virgil's cock, forcing it slowly up the slim tube of her ass. She humped up and down. Virgil came again. She let his organ go limp inside her. Then she squeezed it out and got up.
Virgil lay dazed, staring at the ceiling. Through the fog of his dimmed vision he saw Roberta rise. He knew she was ready to come again, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He also knew that it was okay.
"All right, Mr. Sperm Bank," she said. "Now I'm going to show you what I did this afternoon after you hung up the phone. You remember I said I was so horny I was about to shove the telephone up my cunt? Well that's just what I did. Want to see how I did it?"
Without waiting for an answer, Roberta walked over to where the phone sat on an end table and picked up the receiver. She sat down in an armchair and pointed her legs up at the ceiling. "This is how I did it."
She rammed the receiver into her crotch, and then moved forward to sit on it. Rubbing the edge of one of its rounded ends up and down in her slit, she stared at him. From inside the phone the dial tone turned to a long, constant wail.
"I hope the phone company sends somebody over to find out who's playing with their equipment," she said, as her breathing became feverish. "Because you can be damned sure I'd play with his equipment, too."
For the next few seconds the silence was punctuated only by the squishing sounds of the receiver against her pussy.
"Motherfucker!" she breathed, staring hungrily at the cock that began to rise once more between Virgil's legs. "MOTHERFUCKER!"
Her brow furrowed and a desperate look came into her eyes, as if she was chasing something that was just out of reach. "Do you know what?" she nearly yelled, as she rapidly caught up with it. The black plastic moved so fast that Virgil could not focus on it. "THIS FUCKING LINE IS BUSY!"
She got off. She humped up and down like a madwoman, wrenching the black plastic shaft back and forth, up and down, around and around.
When she was done she held it limply in her hand for a moment and then replaced it in its cradle.
"Best damned use that thing's ever been put to," she said. She returned to sit beside Virgil on the bed.
He stayed at Roberta's house another hour, indulging in every fantasy that came to his mind. They balled in six or seven positions, and he ate her out in six or seven more. After three or four more orgasms for himself and countless others for Roberta, he left.
He was satiated. But as he walked home, images of Julia and Pinky plagued him.
There was something about Julia, and perhaps because she was Julia's daughter, something about Pinky, that made him want to get to them.
CHAPTER 2
Virgil was impatient with thinking about Julia. It was a hard, knotty problem, petrified by years of misunderstanding, missed connections, missed everything. He turned his attention to Pinky. Who was she, really?
The daughter of a wealthy New York stock broker and socialite who, since breaking up with Julia, had gone through two more marriages. A girl who, after living her tenth and eleventh years in Virgil's house, had spent winters at boarding school and summers following her mother's worldly paths. Virgil was transported back to that afternoon at the train station once more.
The train had rattled into sight. Julia and Pinky had been the only ones on it Their car had pulled up directly in front of Virgil, and he had found himself face to face with a magnificent pair of breasts trying to escape from a shockingly small halter. "Odd," he had thought, "that such a magnificent body should belong to my very own wife."
Julia, stepping gracefully down a ladder that a gawking trainman at first placed backwards before her, smiled and nodded. "Hello, Virgil," she said. She turned over her shoulder as Pinky descended.
At first Virgil was hard pressed to identify this 18-year-old girl with long, flowing, un-cared-for red hair that cascaded down over the shoulders of a battered army surplus jacket. He had not seen her in over three years.
Her face, it was true, was beautiful. But it took a second to notice it. It was not a self-consciously spectacular face like her mother's.
Pinky said a warm "Hello" to Virgil. She even threw her arms around his neck and gave him a prolonged kiss. As she reached up toward him, Virgil realized he had expected her to be taller than 5' 2" or so. He didn't know why. She was plenty tall enough.
"Jesus," Pinky said as she threw a duffel bag into the Volkswagen and looked around, "It sure is weird to be back here. Everything looks so small and flat."
"Compared to what?" Virgil asked, coaxing the old engine to life.
"Compared to just about everything. New York, Paris, London, Rome...."
Julia leaned majestically back against the car for a moment as if wondering whether she should commit herself to its rattling, cramped indignity. Finally she poked her long, slender legs into it and maneuvered her body to a sitting position. Then she muttered, "First thing on the agenda is a new car."
Virgil nodded diffidently. "It's all right with me," he said. "I don't use the damned thing more than once a week, so I don't care. Get one for yourself and I'll keep this."
"I'll let you use mine," Pinky offered from the back seat.
Thanks," replied Virgil with the appropriate sarcasm.
"No, really," Pinky protested. "Frank's buying me one. He says a college girl should have a car of her own. It's on order. I'm picking it up in a week." Frank was Pinky's natural father.
"What's it going to be, a Maseratti?"
"No, a Chewy pickup," Pinky retorted with satisfaction.
That's great," Virgil countered. "Is Frank going to have hayseeds flown in from Kansas for you to put in your hair?"
Pinky laughed refreshingly.
"Come on. Really. What's it going to be?"
"Christ, I don't feel like I can tell you now."
"Come on. I know ifs got to be something ridiculous or Frank wouldn't burden you with it."
"A Porsche."
"I might have known. A red convertible, right?"
"Ah, you bullshitter, you knew all along. Did you talk to Frank?"
"Now, now," Julia reprimanded mockingly, "We mustn't get into the habit of calling the Joshua T. Gloomey, Professor of English Literature, a bullshitter."
"Well, he's a bullshitter," Pinky laughed. "I calls 'em like I sees 'em."
"Yeah," Virgil said, "But you sees 'em wrong. Don't you know that every rich brat whose father gives her a Porsche to study in gets a red convertible?"
"Ah, well I don't mind being a proletarian like all the rest," Pinky sighed, leaning back and sticking her elbow out the window. It was really quite charming the way the wind blew strands of red hair across her face.
Virgil wondered what Pinky would look like behind the wheel of a red Porsche. "What're you going to study? Auto mechanics?"
"Fee-low-sow-fee," she intoned musically. "Kunts and Neetschees and Shopenhoovers."
"My, you are a dirty little girl," Virgil exclaimed mildly. Philosophy. That was interesting.
"I want to see if this set I've got up here can pick up any Ultra High Frequency vibes." She tapped her forehead.
Virgil shook his head. Pinky had a quick wit all right, and a nice, easy manner. He'd put her three years ahead of most entering freshmen. Of course, that still made her ten or fifteen years too young for him. Probably.
He decided he'd better talk to Julia for a while. "What have you been up to lately, dear?"
"Well, aside from the usual, preparing courses.
Julia was finally going to use the degree she'd picked up years before.
"How's it going?"
"Quite trippingly, thank you."
"Taking lots of drugs?"
She laughed. "If there's a memory drug, I'd better get a hold of it. I'm lucky if I can remember who Proust was."
Conversation proceeded in this vein until they arrived home. When they finally pulled into the ancient concrete drive whose two separate strips of concrete had originally been poured for Model Ts, Pinky leapt out and flopped down on the lush grass of the front lawn. She found herself looking rather nostalgically up into a maple tree she had loved to climb during the years she and Julia had lived with Virgil. Julia sat in the car for a moment and peeked somewhat timidly at the immaculately white facade of the rambling, gabled house. "Home, sweet home," she muttered.
"You sound very enthusiastic," Virgil commented dryly.
"No, I mean it. I guess I just can't say anything without sounding cynical anymore." She turned to him with a surprisingly warm look. "But really, I'm glad to be back. I had fun, but-I was getting tired."
Virgil went around and opened her door. "You don't seem to have grown old before your time," he observed, glancing rather pointedly at her figure.
She sat up straight, her shoulder-length hair swirling on her shoulders. "Thank you." She gave him a quick, fleeting grin, and unexpectedly kissed him on the lips.
Virgil went inside and brought out a bottle of scotch and some soda, ice cubes and three glasses. He joined Julia and Pinky on the grass under the tree.
Pinky removed her army jacket to reveal a buxom torso covered only by a worn T-shirt. The bra with the C cup she had learned to wear in her girlhood had been transcended in favor of no bra at all. She was her mother's daughter. Two round, ample, perfectly shaped breasts poked their dark nipples brazenly against the sheer cloth.
"Soda, Julia?"
"Please."
Virgil poured.
"Pinkyr
"None for me, thanks."
Teetotaler?"
"No, silly. No soda!"
Pinky took the glass and stared at the limpid amber liquid swirling lazily among the ice cubes. She took a healthy gulp and then pushed her bedraggled hair back over her shoulders. She stood perfectly still, gazing upward in a sort of mystical, hypnotized silence. Her striking green eyes seemed to mirror the emerald hues of the leaves as the late afternoon sun filtered through their delicately veined tissues, creating a mosaic of green and brown and gold.
Without a word she moved to the tree's trunk and put her hand on a low, thick branch a foot or so above her head. Taking another sip of scotch between her pale, full lips, listening to the ice tinkle against the sides of the glass, she reached upward and felt the place where the branch parted from the trunk. Finding it flat, she balanced the glass on it. Then she quickly grasped the branch and swung her lithe body up.
"Better watch out," her mother taunted. "You're not as young as you used to be. You're likely to fall out of that friendly looking tree and bust your delicate little socialite ass."
"Socialite my-private parts," Pinky retorted. "The only thing I ever came out of was my jeans, and you know it. Besides-you didn't object when that stupid Bavarian count you fixed me up with took me up the side of a mountain on his motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour."
Her mother desisted.
Retrieving her glass, Pinky worked her way upward through the branches, climbing rapidly but surely and stopping to sip scotch now and then.
"If you get stuckup there," Julia insisted, "I'm not going to call the fire department to get you down."
"What do you think I am-a cat?" Pinky jibed, surveying a long, straight branch that jutted out clear of the others near the tree's top.
"I won't take the cheap shot," her mother cried after her. Julia turned to Virgil. "She likes to set those up and then mock you when you take them."
Virgil nodded. He could see mother and daughter had a high level of mutual understanding and appreciation.
The empty scotch glass floated down through the branches and thudded onto the thick turf, spraying ice cubes in all directions. Pinky moved out onto the branch. Sitting sideways, she hooked her knees firmly over it. Then, grasping a nearby limb for support, she swung until she was hanging upside down by her knees thirty feet from the ground.
The cloth of her T-shirt, felicitously obedient to the laws of gravity, slid down across her stomach. It caught on the nipple of one breast but not the other. For an instant one of Pinky's upside-down tits hung fully exposed like a pale, ripe fruit that the tree had rather strangely produced.
Pinky giggled a quick, "Oh, shit, is anybody looking?"' She pulled herself back up.
Virgil replayed the picture of the freely-hanging breast, its weight stretching it down to hang almost in Pinky's face, as Julia yelled up, "Yeah, Mr. McGrorty's on his front porch with a telescope."
Pinky giggled again. "Fuck," she said, "It'd probably do him good."
"Fuck," her mother mimicked, "It'd probably give him a heart attack."
Virgil was inclined to agree with Julia. Mr. McGrorty was seventy-five and couldn't have lifted a telescope if he'd had one.
Virgil and Julia sat talking while Pinky made her way slowly back to the ground.
"I thought," Julia offered, "that we should give Pinky the south wing of the house to herself. Let her have some privacy. Her own driveway and everything."
The south wing had been added somewhere around the turn of the century. It was a single story with a sitting room, bedroom, bath, and private entrance that jutted off the kitchen.
"What's wrong with her old room upstairs?" Virgil asked blandly, thinking to himself that maybe it would be nice to have Pinky a little closer. At times he'd rented out the south wing to produce a little extra income, but it hadn't worked out so well because he'd had to share his kitchen with the tenants. Also his parents, who were not so good at climbing stairs any more, used it during their visits.
"Come on, Virgil," Julia goaded, giving the impression that perhaps she saw through him. "If your parents come she can move upstairs. Didn't you think you were ready for your own place when you were a freshman in college?"
"Oh, certainly I did. But my parents and the school disagreed." He smiled and made a lame joke. "Maybe they knew just what I'd do with it."
Julia gave him a "you-can't-be-serious" grin. Then she glanced suggestively up at her daughter, whose supple young body was just swinging out of the tree onto the grass. "Do you think maybe she doesn't know what to do with it?" she whispered.
Virgil chuckled. Maybe things were better than he'd thought. "No," he said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "I certainly don't think that."
The next morning Virgil awoke unusually early. Like a young boy whose father is about to take him on his first fishing trip and has told him he will have to awake at 5:30, his eyes popped open of their own accord and he sat up trying to remember why his mind had been instructed to interrupt his sleep.
A noise from downstairs in the kitchen provided the answer. With a glance at Julia's provocatively prone form by his side he slipped out of bed, put on his robe, and went down.
It was hardly the middle of the night. The robins had long since plundered the lawn of all its available break fast food. The neighbor's small children had screeched off to school, the milk on the front porch was trying to go sour, and the commuter traffic reports on the radio Pinky was playing at nearly full volume were trailing off. But Virgil's customary rising hour was eleven, and had Pinky not mentioned the night before that a local pawn shop was going bankrupt and she was going to try to pick up a guitar at the auction that began at ten, he would have stayed in bed even longer making up for the strenuous exertion of the night before.
Virgil pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen to see Pinky in a threadbare, carelessly belted blue terrycloth robe opening a can of Minute Maid on the electric can opener.
"Morning, Dad," she said, dimples appearing at the comers of her mouth as she smiled. "Don't you have a regular can opener around here? I feel decadent using this thing."
"Not half as decadent as you look," Virgil offered as he slumped into a chair and reached across the formica table to turn the radio down until it was only moderately deafening. It was strange to hear Pinky call him Dad. He had, in fact, legally adopted her, a circumstance to which she had adjusted a good deal better than he.
"Ugh," Pinky responded. "No wit at this time of the night, please." She found a pitcher and proceeded to mix up the orange juice.
"You look perfectly awake and able to defend yourself to me," Virgil remarked blandly.
Pinky shook her curls. "All show," she said. "Actually I'm sound asleep, just as innocent and defenseless as can be." She knelt to get a frying pan from a bottom cupboard. Her robe fell from her knees and split open nearly to her crotch. Virgil was glad he didn't have an indicator light on his forehead that flashed every time his cock jumped.
"You don't look so innocent to me."
Pinky followed Virgil's gaze downward and faked an I'm-surprised-at-you-Daddy" look. With exaggerated primness she wrapped her robe back over her knees. "Untouched" she said. 'Virgin flesh. Men may have coveted it but no man has ever laid hands on it. I think I shall remain a virgin forever. Perhaps I shall become a nun."
She overdid the lofty air and she and Virgil laughed.
"I'm glad to hear you feel that way" Virgil said. "I agree heartily that a young girl must not allow herself to be soiled by the groping hands-and so on-of lecherous men. Perhaps you would not be so prone to temptation if you had your bedroom upstairs next to ours instead of out in that lonely wing of the house where perhaps some man might come in a window in the dead of night and offer to molest you."
"Whew," Pinky said. "These English professors sure put together long sentences." She cracked two eggs into the frying pan and then noticed she had neglected to turn on the burner. "But surely you realize that I would be even more prone to temptation if I had my bedroom there. After all, I could hardly help hearing the bed creak when you and mother decided to-do whatever it is that people do that make beds creak. And then my mind would begin to plague me to know what it was all about. I might even be tempted to sneak up to your door, which as I remember you always leave open a crack, and try to peek in. And if I saw anything, I might get excited and start to masturbate. And think how horrible that would bel I mean, once you start to do that, you're well on the road to defoliation. I think a minister once told me that, anyhow."
Virgil grinned. "True enough," he said. "One taste of the pleasures of the flesh and the immortal soul is a sure goner. But what makes you think you would be tempted to sneak around peeking through doors like that?"
The eggs were finally beginning to sizzle.
"Oh," Pinky said, "because I used to do it all the time when we lived here before."
"Huh?" Virgil chortled incredulously.
"Sure. When I was-let's see, twelve or thirteen, when you and Mom first got married, I used to listen for you to start up. You know the hall was always dark, and you left that little fight on by your bed."
Virgil couldn't think anything to himself but "Holy shit."
"I used to go down the front stairs and then up the back ones and come down behind that banister from the attic. I'd just creep down a little way and lean back and watch you between the bars. One night when my friend Cindy was over we even did it together. Cindy was the one who taught me to masturbate.
Virgil roared. Pinky giggled as she slid the eggs onto a plate. "Watching people ball can really turn you on," she said. "Besides, I got quite an education."
"Is that right?" Virgil was gasping for breath. He supposed he should have been shocked to know that the intimacies he and Julia had shared with such abandon in the first year or so of their marriage had been so closely observed. But the thought of a twelve-year-old girl squatting on the stairs working away at herself to the time of the music struck him as so hilarious that he couldn't be bothered with typical reactions. 'Well," he said, "If you tell me what subjects you studied, perhaps I can have them credited toward a diploma."
"Oh, I guess they come under the general headings of kissing, feeling, eating, sucking, and fucking. Of course you could divide some of those up according to orifices. Like fucking in the ass could be a different subject from fucking in the cunt. Anyhow, I studied all those things in all the possible sub-divisions. Do I qualify for a degree?"
"Oh, well, you know you've got to have a little more than observational experience in order to qualify."
Pinky's robe sagged away from her torso as she put her breakfast down on the table across from him and leaned for the salt. One of her pendulous breasts swung free, the tip of the small brown nipple brushing against the nap of the cloth. She didn't move to cover it but let it swing back behind the robe as she sat. "Ah," she said, nodding her comprehension. "Well that requirement could be filled in one of two ways. Either I could provide the institution granting the degree with references from the men I've kissed, felt, sucked, been eaten by, and fucked-or I could simply give their representative a demonstration." Pinky leaned forward, chewing and grinning. "For instance, I could just slip under the table and suck you off right now."
Virgil's mind fritzed out. He could feel Pinky's warm, wet red lips closing over the hot tip of his cock; her wide, eager throat sucking down the whole length of his throbbing organ. He could feel her big tits swinging against his knees, hear the sticky sounds of his come mixing with her saliva. As he sat and stared into her playful, challenging, ambiguous eyes, he could hear her throat working as she gulped down his come and he could see the remnants of it dripping at the comers of her mouth.
But this was not the time. Virgil didn't know whether Pinky was really being serious or whether she was playing with his mind. And he saw that she did not want him to know. She played a strange game, all right.
A fast and loose game. Maybe if Virgil said, "Go ahead," she would. But maybe she wouldn't.
"Well," Virgil yawned, stretching his arms over his head, "that certainly would be pleasant, but of course that isn't the way it's done. I mean, these things are always handled in very strictly controlled situations, by appointment, and so on. Scientific method and all."
"Just as well." Pinky cocked her head. "I do have to get to that auction." She opened her mouth and licked her lips.
Julia walked in. She was still in her perfectly transparent nightgown. Her tits bobbed under it and swayed back and forth as she sauntered to the table. Good morning, all," she breathed as she sat down next to Virgil. She crossed her legs and the mound of fluff between them disappeared from view.
Pinky smiled at Virgil and whispered, "Outclassed."
Virgil rolled his eyeballs in a kind of "Who knows?" expression.
"What's that?" Julia asked. "You two have some kind of secrets?"
"Sure," said Pinky. "But we'll let you in on them. We're having a party tonight. Want to come?"
Virgil screwed up his face in a way that showed Julia he didn't know what Pinky was talking about.
"Party?" Julia asked. "Why, we've just got here. What do we want to have a party for?"
"Oh, to renew old acquaintances. I had a sort of a mixed-generation thing in mind. You know, my old friends that I haven't seen in years along with friends of yours and dad's. Just to let people know we've arrived."
"I don't think it'll be any secret once you start buzzing beer parlors in your red Porsche," Virgil said.
Julia was thinking. "You know, that might not be a bad idea. What do you think, Virgil?"
"Oh, sure. I could round up all the old fogies in the department and a couple of half-dead graduate students and pay off all my social debts for the last six months."
"Well then, it's settled," Pinky pronounced. "Anything that will allow daddy to pay his debt to society simply must be done."
"And as quickly as possible," Julia added, "before Virgil has to dig some of those people up out of the grave to give them a cocktail."
Pinky went off to the auction.
Virgil and Julia sat regarding each other somewhat uncomfortably. "You didn't get off last night," Julia said. "You noticed."
"Yeah. But I was too wiped out to do anything about it. I'm sorry."
"That's the breaks, I guess."
"You went out."
"Yeah. Took a walk."
"A pretty long one."
"Yeah."
Julia decided not to ask where. "Want to get off now?"
"Huh?"
"I said, do you want to get off right now?"
That was the most predictable thing about Julia. She was totally unpredictable.
"Well," Julia said, taking in his mildly confused grin, "Suppose I just go over to the counter and lean over it and pull up my nightie and open up my hole. And then we'll see whether you're interested in getting into it Okay?"
Virgil remained speechless. Julia uncrossed her legs and planted both feet firmly on the floor and stood up. Her nightgown swirled around her legs as she crossed the red fake-brick linoleum. She chose a lowered part of the counter that served as a desk off to the left of the sink. The formica met her just at the pelvis. She leaned forward, ducking her head under a cupboard and thrusting her magnificent rear end out at him. Then her hands reached back and gathered the material of her gown upward, little by little, bunching it in her fingers and pulling it around in front of her to rest on the counter.
As the curtain went up on the protruding hills of her buttocks Virgil glanced toward the back door, wondering vaguely whether she could be seen from the Petersons' lawn.
But finally Julia's ass was bare, and the filmy hairs of her cunt escaped from the dark diamond-shaped shadow beneath it, and Virgil didn't care who else was looking as long as he was.
She let her fingers slide gracefully back around to dig into the flesh of her buttocks. Then, with a sudden, dramatic motion that almost jerked Virgil up out of the chair, she tore her ass-cheeks apart. She pulled up and out at the same time, and it looked for all the world as if her gaping cunt hung suspended from some invisible hook in the air.
Her hole was dark and deep and wet Her fingers inched in toward it. They stretched it until it was two inches wide.
Virgil got up. He unbelted his robe and let the weight of his huge, inflamed organ push it aside.
Julia, her face squashed against the counter-top, her golden-flecked brown eyes staring back at him over her shoulder, started to work three fingers at once into her cunt. She moaned as she saw him stroking his cock up to its full erect length and wiggled her ass at him. The three fingers were all but gone. Now she pulled them out with a sensuous squishing sound.
Her cunt was flaming red-partly from excitement, partly from the hard, grinding fuck of the night before. She grasped her ass-cheeks even more firmly and seemed to pull herself onto her tip-toes as she held her cunt as high and as wide and as far back toward him as she could.
I want you to just fuck the hell out of it," she said. I don't want you to think about anything but how good it feels going in and how good it feels when you're screwing the shit out of me and how good it feels when you come. Just take me, Virgil. Don't worry about whether I'm going to come or any of that shit. None of your ideal aesthetic love-making crap. There's the cunt. You can see it So just fuck it"
Virgil did.
He cradled his cock in his hand and watched as its smooth rounded tip and needle-eye disappeared into the shadow of Julia's gaping hole. The hole was so wide that he got in up to the sharp ridge of the crest at the head of his dick before he actually made contact with her. When he did, the sticky hot electricity sent waves of pleasure jolting out through his body. His knees buckled.
The vacuum of Julia's pleasure-cave sucked him in all at once. His cock rammed up to the hilt in her. "Unnnh!" His breath rushed out of him, flattening his stomach and sending him even deeper. It was like stirring paint. The warm liquid tissue of her cunt clung to him, tugged at him, leased at him, wherever he lunged.
Julia shifted her feet on the floor to get a better stance.
Even Virgil's balls swung up into the long slit of her pussy, brushing against her tiny flaming clit.
For an instant Virgil thought he was going to come right away. He felt the heavy charge of hot sperm welling up from his balls, warming his crotch, ready to shoot.
Then, automatically, he slowed down. Instinctively he reached around Julia and down from the front to put a finger on her clit
"No," she panted, "don't play with me now, just FUCK ME!"
Virgil felt a brief flash of anger. God damned Julia, always running the show like some bitching ringmaster.
The anger made him look down at her curving back and her ass-cheeks split wide open, white where her fingers dug into them.
Suddenly it wasn't Julia. It was just an ass and a cunt and it was hot and watering, and he had his big fat hard cock in it. That first huge surge was still there, hovering just beneath the surface. It wanted out. And it wanted out right now.
He rammed his cock up so far into her that he thought it would come out her throat. He thought maybe he'd hurt her. She tensed and grunted but she didn't complain. He rammed it in again. This time the hot smearing of her pussy on his stomach and balls answered hungrily.
Virgil liked to fuck fast and hard. He knew Julia liked it slow at first but this time he was doing the fucking and he was going to do it like a mad dog.
He felt the come rising and he blasted her up against the counter. It shook and rattled like a speeding train. He locked his arms around her waist and buried his head under her arm and humped as hard and fast as he could.
Here it came. It was coming. That hot cunt was really in for a bath. A shiwer. A shower from a fire hose. It was coming fast It was very close, and Virgil was closing in on it. He was panting tiny, quick pants. His hips were rubber as they whipped in and out. "Aaaahl Aaaahl Aaaah!"
Swirls of ecstatic dizziness took Virgil away. An orgasmic whirlwind sucked the harsh animal cries out of him. His cock jerked and spurted, pumping out come-hard at first, in thick heavy jets, and then slowly and more softly. Finally, like a hose with the water turned off, it dribbled out.
Virgil and Julia were frozen together over the counter.
Virgil's breathing started to become more regular.
He straightened up. He staggered to a chair at the table and slumped into it.
Julia stayed where she was. Come and cunt-juice trickled out of her and dripped from her matted cunthair or ran in a thin gray stream down her leg, forming beads and puddles on the floor.
She got up and her expression made Virgil forget that for a second he'd been angry. "Mmmm," she said, as if she'd just had a gourmet dinner.
Virgil didn't see why she was so satisfied. She hadn't got much out of it.
She came over to him and pushed her belly up against his cheek. Then she took his head in her hands and ran her fingers through his hair. "Sometimes," she advised him, "it's best to ride that first wave."
Well.
"I've got a secret for you. Sometimes I like to be just plain fucked like that. I mean, most of the time people are trying to fuck and get fucked all at once. They try to fuck with each other. I'm not knocking it; it's the best. But sometimes it's nice just to fie back and dig someone really going out of his head balling you. Sometimes it's nice if you think that at the moment when he comes, he doesn't even know who the hell you are. You're not "a woman" anymore-even if the woman you happen to be is you and not somebody else. You're Woman. Some women consider that an insult to their own individuality." She lifted his chin and smirked. "I don't."
She turned away. "Want some breakfast? Some eggs or pancakes or something?"
CHAPTER 3
Pinky came home that evening with a guitar and a station wagon load of friends. It looked to Virgil like a transplanted beach party as arms and legs gyrated their confused way out of the overloaded vehicle. Virgil was sitting in a lawn chair under the maple liberally applying a "Bullshit" stamp to a graduate student's paper. The paper had been due the previous spring and had just arrived with an apologetic covering letter as illiterate as the "Critique of The Wasteland'" itself. He'd already decided to give it a C-. He hadn't read the last six pages. He leafed through them randomly stamping "Bullshit" here and there. He dropped the paper to the grass.
"Look what the fuck I got" Pinky said, holding a guitar up in front of his face. "Twenty dollars!"
"Lovely," Virgil replied, feeling somewhat stifled as six or eight kids in shorts surrounded him. He was actually staring past the guitar to the protuberances in Pinky's T-shirt.
"No, it's not lovely, it's fantastic! Do you know what this is? This is a fucking Martin guitar!"
Virgil grinned as though she'd told him it was a MacDonald's hamburger.
"You boob," she laughed, "you don't even know what I'm talking about. This fucking guitar is worth about five hundred dollars. It's got to be twenty years old, and it's in perfect shape. Wait till I get the strings on it. You'll see."
Virgil wondered whether she knew what she was talking about. $500. "By the way," he asked pleasantly, "do you play?"
"No," she jibed, "I piss in the sound hole. And I don't sing either. I croak like a sewer-frog."
"My, you are a filthy-minded little girl."
Pinky looked something like the Pied Piper as she led her entourage toward her side entrance. But it did not escape Virgil's attention that those she was leading were far from children. In fact, the last one, a tall slender girl whose hips blossomed out roundly and whose pale buttocks bunched up and flattened again beneath the indecently high hem of her cut-offs, looked positively alluring. Virgil tried to catch a glimpse of her face as she disappeared around the side of the house but was left with only the impression of long, straight, sinning brown hair and a smooth oval face. He wondered if Pinky's friends would be staying for the party.
Virgil sat meditating in the shade of the maple until Wally Jones and his wife Cerina drove up. Virgil had told people the party would run pretty much from sundown to when the last person went home, and he didn't expect the real whiskey-guzzling, loud-talking, bottom-pinching, poker-playing pros to show up until after ten. But he wasn't surprised that Wally and Cerina had arrived while the sun had yet to touch its rim to the horizon. They didn't like parties but hated to turn down invitations.
Cerina wore her usual fashionably short skirt. Virgil swore she went out and bought everything she saw in Vogue without the slightest notion that a crotch-level skirt was of any greater interest to men than a double weight suit woven out of steel wool. She bounced up the lawn two steps behind Wally and slightly to the side, like a dog who enjoys heeling. But Virgil wasn't fooled. He knew Wally, and he knew who heeled in that house.
Virgil got up. "Hi! How are ya? Listen, let me get a couple a chairs outa the garage."
Sometimes he enjoyed playing the typical beer-bellied suburban host. He was about to commence with, "Coupla brews? Whatcha say?" when Cerina plopped her plump rear end down on the grass.
"Don't bother with the chairs," Wally said with a vague wave of his hand. He let himself down beside his wife, being careful not to grass-stain his ten-years-outof-fashion madras pants.
Virgil threw up his hands and tried not to look as Cerina lifted one knee and wrapped her arms around it, clearly revealing a plain pair of pink cotton panties gripping the pouting bulge between her legs. He dropped back into his chair. "How about something to drink?"
The milky whiteness of Cerina's thighs and the careless sensuality of her squashed buttocks lured Virgil to sneak another glance as Wally looked toward a sound from Pinky's wing of the house and answered, "Well wait till you're ready to get yourself another one. No sense you making a special trip."
Virgil managed to be looking straight at Wally by the time his friend turned back and asked, "Is that Pinky? You told me she and Julia had come."
"Yeah," said Virgil. "Her and about a hundred friends.
This is going to be an interesting party." For some strange reason he was beginning to believe it was. "It's going to be what Pinky calls a mixed-generation affair."
Cerina giggled. "I hope there won't be too many affairs."
Virgil had been trying for three years to decide whether Cerina was really as dumb as she seemed just exactly half the time. The trouble was that when she wasn't making silly jokes that would make an empty headed seventh grader seem like a pro she was talking seriously and intelligently about politics or religion or economics or something. He'd often wondered what she'd be like in bed. Virgil happened to believe you could tell a lot about a person from what they were like in bed. Maybe a quick tumble with Cerina would let him make up his mind about her once and for all. However, as well as he could tell sex was the furthest thing from Cerina's mind-when she seemed to have one. He knew of at least one affair Wally had had recently, but he also knew that Wally was a staunch upholder of the Double Standard and would not approve of his wife doing the same.
"I'm always ready for another drink. What'll you have?"
"I'll just have beer," Wally said. He turned to Cerina as though she needed an interpreter. "Honey?"
"Oh, I don't know." She talked to Wally and not Virgil and Virgil had a quick moment to appreciate the slight shift in her posture that pulled her tight panties tighter and forced the edge of one generously loose cunt-lip out of them. He surpressed a gasp. He really wouldn't mind getting into her. Those innocent-looking ones; they could sometimes be real tigers in bed.
"Maybe a scotch and water-very weak?"
Wally nodded his approval.
"How about a scotch and water not-so-weak?" Virgil suggested. Wally and Cerina were confused. "Look, I'll just bring out some booze and ice cubes and water and glasses and let you play with them." He hesitated a second. "Hey Wally, how about if I bring a six-pack and a couple of shot glasses) and we drink boilermakers for a while?"
Virgil enjoyed shocking Wally. He was so timid. Also Virgil was interested to know what he and Cerina were like when they were drunk.
He was interrupted by Pinky's voice behind him. "If I bring the stuff, can my friends and I join you?"
"Sounds like a good deal to me. Why don't you bring out that case of Bud in the bottom of the refrigerator and a bottle each of J&B and Jack Daniels. Got somebody to help you?"
A tall lanky boy with a thick mop of fine, silky black hair meandered around the side of the house from Pinky's wing. He looked like a basketball player. "Hey Jeff, wanna help me get some booze?" Jeff and Pinky went off.
"So that's Pinky, eh?" Wally said in a speculative tone.
"Seems to be," Virgil admitted. Wally hadn't seen her in four years. "They do get chesty, don't they?"
Cerina blushed and giggled into an open palm. Wally, caught off guard, huffed a little and then chuckled, as much as to say, "What am I going to do with you?"
"Well, Wally," Virgil said, as if to bring things down to earth with a particularly weighty question, "How're preparations going for that new creative writing course?"
"Huh?"
Virgil could see Wally had had other things on his mind. Like maybe Pinky.
"Well," Wally said, half clearing his throat, "I don't know how much preparation you can do, really...."
Cerina broke in suddenly and somewhat uncharacteristically. "Wally hasn't had much time to think about things like that. We've been having some-discussions."
Considering the leading tone of her last phrase Virgil could hardly not ask, "Oh really? About what?"
Cerina pronounced her answer clearly, definitely, and even somewhat loudly. "Marriage."
"Is that so?"
"Listen, Cerina," Wally interrupted, "can't we spare our friends the quite possibly boring details of our personal lives?"
Virgil snorted. When English professors got upset they always talked on stilts.
"This isn't a personal matter," Cerina said loftily. "It's a matter that concerns everyone who's married. It doesn't have to be about anything to do with us in particular. It's sort of a philosophical question."
"Not when it comes to my wife balling other guys," Wally muttered.
These were the times when Virgil was hardest pressed to make sense out of Cerina. When she sounded intelligent you could never tell if she was reciting something she'd read in the Sunday Times Magazine. But that didn't concern him so much because he was too busy trying to sort out what she'd said. He came to the obvious conclusion and was tempted to say, "Ha-Ha Wally, Women's Lib gonna get your momma." Instead he said, "That's very interesting."
"I think it is," Cerina agreed. "I've been reading a book called Open Marriage."
Virgil figured that if anything could turn Cerina on it would be a book.
"I've heard of it," he said. "The idea is that even if you're married you can still fuck who you want, right?"
Cerina was predictably shocked. "That's not what it says at all. It talks about marriage in all its aspects, and makes it quite clear that...."
"But that's what it says in essence, right?" Wally interjected.
"Oh!" Cerina was all frustration. "For a supposedly intelligent man, you are so narrow-minded!"
Virgil wondered how long Wally could keep up the facade of injured innocence while sitting across from somebody who knew very well what he did after depart mental meetings that broke up early.
Pinky and Jeff appeared with enough alcohol to supply County Mayo for a month and soon Wally, doubtless in an attempt to banish his wife's philosophical meanderings from his mind, decided that he would drink boilermakers. He was soon incompetent to mix his wife's drinks and the task fell by default to Pinky. Half an hour later Cerina was well on her way to East Oblivion.
Jim and Marsha Milhauser drove up in their brand new green Continental. Jim swaggered out like a baseball pitcher who's got a no-hitter going into the ninth. Marsha bounced out after him, tennis tan showing beneath the hem of her knee-length jumper. They walked arm-in-arm toward the gathering, which by this time numbered ten or twelve including all of Pinky's friends and Julia, who had finished preparing some unlimited number of dainty sandwiches with the crusts cut off and not much inside. Cerina, by this time, had floated over to sit by Virgil and her long exposition of the finer points of Open Marriage interrupted when Jim Milhauser reached over her to grab a scotch bottle by the neck the way a woodsman grabs a hatchet. "Hey, boy, how'ya doin?"
Jim liked to play the degenerate suburbanite too. Only he did it better than Virgil. He could even eat hard salami. From looking at him you'd never guess he had a piece of a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
"Pretty good, Jimbo old pal." Virgil mocked." Grab yaself a hunka whiskey there an' get happy!"
"Don't mind if I do."
Virgil noted Pinky looking up from a rather intense discussion with Wally to survey Jim Milhauser's towering, square-shouldered frame.
By the time it had gotten dark the party had moved inside. Virgil was far too drunk to relate decently to her by the time Roberta arrived with a delicate-looking oriental friend named, of all things, Bertha. Virgil knew that Roberta had all kinds of appetites and could swing in any direction she wanted, but somehow Bertha-Virgil had to surpress a guffaw every time he pronounced her name-didn't seem like the type Roberta would like to go down on. She certainly didn't seem like the type who would want to go down on Roberta.
Virgil gave Roberta a big hug and assured her that Julia had not the slightest idea they'd been having an affair in her absence-not that it would have mattered-and showed her to an under stuffed sandwich, then to an overstuffed couch in the living room.
Things were looking pretty hazy to Virgil, who had consumed half a dozen shots of Jack Daniels and as many beers, but not so hazy that he missed Julia appreciating the sheer white slacks that clung to Roberta's finely fashioned legs and trim little buttocks. He'd often suspected his wife of being able to maneuver in all directions but he'd never had any concrete proof and hadn't asked her directly. Julia came over and was duly introduced. Virgil had the bizarre sensation of being left out as the two women's eyes met briefly and then drifted suggestively downward. Roberta introduced Bertha, and to his surprise the three of them engaged in a mile-a-minute repartee of cocktail-party questions rapidly leading to discussions of other subjects such as pornographic movies, the price of panty-hose and the dubious value of men in general. Virgil was more than free to wander off in pursuit of whatever he wanted to pursue, and he did.
More people kept arriving and although Virgil was determined to hunt down Cerina and have at the very least an earnest talk with her, he found himself constantly obliged to answer the doorbell and play the gracious if somewhat inebriated host. Clement Farnsworth, the doddering old chairman of his department, arrived with his wife Doris, and Virgil cleverly pawned them off on Wally, who was left muttering banalities to a couple who for all Virgil knew still thought Roosevelt was President. A few of his sallow and self-effacing graduate students showed up and he conned them into playing bridge with each other. Pinky's friends, by this time numbering at least two dozen, swarmed over the house like freshman at their first fraternity party. Virgil ignored the boys and managed to stumble successfully into six or seven of the girls, none of whom seemed to mind being stumbled into. "Oh, you're Pinky's father. I've heard so much about you. This is really a great party. Great idea, having all these young people and old people all together. Of course I didn't mean to suggest that you're old..And so on.
Virgil learned that the tall round-faced girl with the black hair in the indecent cutoffs was in fact Janet Oliver, daughter of a very successful but dubiously honest local judge, and talked pleasantly with her for several minutes. He was just about to start making suggestive remarks, which he realized would not be appropriate, when Don Dickerson, another colleague of his, interrupted to introduce his brand-new twenty-six year old wife Peggy. Virgil took one look at the sleek red-haired Boston socialite and decided he'd better get out of there fast before he fell into the cleavage of her enormous breasts which stared out at him over the top of a skimpy low-cut blouse. Jim Milhauser saved him by clapping him on the shoulder excitedly. "Sorry to interrupt," he said, "but your-uh-daughter is playing the guitar and singing out on the back lawn, and you've really got to hear her. She's fantastic."
Virgil excused himself thankfully and swam through his alcoholic haze out to the back yard, being careful to keep Jim's broad back in sight so he wouldn't get lost.
The pure, bright sound of Pinky's voice shocked him as he pulled himself together and tried his best to make his way through the crowd gathered around her without falling down. Virgil didn't know much about guitars, but from what he could hear Pinky had known what she was talking about. The instrument seemed far too big for her as she sat cross-legged on the grass and plucked delicately at its strings, bringing forth bewildering patterns of rich, resonant, mellow music.
Virgil was enchanted. He sank to the grass and closed his eyes and thought, "What a woman."
He didn't know how long he'd sat there by the time Pinky stopped playing and put the guitar aside. He opened his eyes and was surprised to see Cerina sitting by his side. Jim was just in front of him. All around him were Pinky's friends. There was a momentary silence as Pinky got up. Nobody wanted to break the hypnotic, dream-like mood her singing had created. Pinky did it herself. "Okay," she said, "that's that. Let's party."
Virgil wondered vaguely where Marsha was as Jim got up and congratulated Pinky on her performance, incidentally walking with her toward her wing of the house. The back yard receded gradually into a wood that ran several hundred yards to a farmer's field, and almost as if by agreement Virgil and Cerina remained sitting on the grass staring off into the trees as the rest of the crowd broke up and headed inside.
Cerina's pretty face was wrinkled into a pensive frown, and Virgil could tell she was thinking hard about something. He waited. Finally she turned to him. "I was serious before," she said. "I mean when I was talking about open marriage and everything."
"I didn't say you weren't," Virgil said noncomittally.
"I know." She lapsed into silence again. Looking at her fine, full legs as they curled alluringly under her, he certainly hoped she'd been serious.
The back door opened and Julia called, "Oh, there you are. Listen, some of us are going for a walk. Roberta and Bertha and a few others. Want to come?"
"No thanks," Virgil said. "You've got to be able to stand before you can walk and I'm not sure I can."
Julia laughed and disappeared. Virgil wondered where that group might be walking to.
"Mmmm," Cerina purred, "a walk sounds like a good idea. Maybe I'll go."
Virgil was busy thinking Oh Shit to himself, but fortunately he had something better to say. "What made you think I thought you weren't serious before?"
"Huh?"
Cerina didn't seem to have a very long attention span. Virgil laughed. "Wally didn't seem to happy about your, shall we say, philosophical interest in open marriage."
Cerina nodded. She'd caught up. "No," she agreed. "He's not. He has yet to overcome jealousy."
"I imagine it's not so easy to overcome."
"What do you mean, you imagine?"
"Well, if you've got it, I would think it would be pretty hard to get rid of. I don't have it, so I don't really know."
To Virgil's surprise Cerina nodded. "I guess we have more in common that I thought," she said.
That was an interesting comment "How so?"
"I don't seem to have it either." She looked up at him as though they were finally going to put their cards on the table. "I've known for a long time that Wally's been having all kinds of affairs. He has no idea I suspect but you must know it too. The funny thing is, I don't mind. I know he loves me, and he'll never leave me, and as long as he's a good husband to me, what do I care if he's having an affair with somebody else too?"
The words sounded just the slightest bit forced, not completely sincere. But Virgil didn't press her. "That seems like a good attitude."
She nodded. "I think so."
"You wanted to take a walk," Virgil said.
"Huh?"
"When Julia suggested a walk you said it sounded like a good idea. Well, I think I might be able to get up now. Shall we?"
Cerina stared directly at him as though she was looking for something in his eyes. Virgil tried to put on his most angelic face but failed. That seemed to be what she was looking for because she said, "Why not?" They got up and stood in the middle of the back yard for a second. The next question was-where to? But they both knew what they'd been talking about and now that Cerina had made up her mind to go, it was obvious where they were going. Virgil took a step in the direction of the woods and she followed. Marsha Milhauser, cracking open the back door looking vaguely for her husband, saw them disappear into the trees.
The path through the woods curved sharply to the left as soon as it left the back yard. Through the veil of broad leaves and thick trunks they caught glimpses of the back of Pinky's wing of the house. A phonograph blared out Jimmy Hendrix and though the windows were open and Virgil knew the room was full of people the party was strangely silent. Cerina noticed it too.
"Maybe they're playing bridge," Virgil said with a hint of dry humor. Cerina looked up at him and smirked.
"Maybe they're not," she said. They passed an opening in the trees through which they could clearly see the rear windows. "The shades seem to be just about all the way down."
They were about fifty yards from the house and just about to turn toward the pasture when Virgil caught sight of a naked back passing in front of a window. The shade was up about a foot and all he saw was tanned skin in orange light and the cleft of a shapely pair of buttocks, but it was enough to leave no doubts in his mind as to what was going on. "Did you see that?" he asked Cerina.
"What?"
"What passed in front of the window there."
"A person in a beige shirt."
"Hah. How good are your eyes?"
"I'm just a little near-sighted."
"That's what I thought. Are you really so interested in what's going on in Pinky's wing?"
Cerina's eyes lost a touch of their native innocence. "I don't know," she said. "What do you think is going on?"
"An orgy."
"Oh!" The exclamation was a strange mixture of shock, embarrassment, and fascination. Cerina stopped short. "You know," she said, "my mother would be shocked to hear me say this, but I'd kind of like to see what goes on in an orgy. Only I don't much like the idea of peeking in windows."
"If you've only got the shades three-quarters down, you only three-quarters care whether anyone sees what you're doing. Besides, if there are ten or twelve people in there who don't care if the others see what they're doing, they probably don't care if two more see either."
Cerina knitted her brow and thought. Then she cocked her head and looked up at Virgil as though they were about to go on a great adventure. "All right," she said. "Let's take a look. But let's not stay too long. And let's not let them see us!"
Virgil took her hand and led her through the underbrush beneath the tall maples to the edge of the lawn, only ten yards from the house at this point. Cerina's palm was damp but her grip was delicately determined. Virgil found himself thinking, "How the hell did I end up on my way to play Peeping Tom at an orgy-with Wally's wife?" Somehow life seemed to have got very strange since Julia and Pinky's arrival.
They had barely stopped to peek around the edge of an old oak tree when they heard a sudden squeal from inside and a pair of tits appeared briefly in the window. Their owner was bending down to pick up something and the pair of tits almost swung out the window at them. Cerina gasped as though they'd slapped her in the face.
"Mmmm, nice," Virgil whispered. Cerina was silent for a second. Then, "Do you think so?"
Virgil chuckled. The torso had disappeared and they were staring through the room to a poster advertising a rock group that Pinky had tacked to her wall. "Yeah," he said. "They were nice and round and full without being flabby. Nice nipples, too. Nice and big and pink." Virgil wasn't about to conceal the fact that the pair of tits had turned him on, but he wasn't going to come right out and say it.
"Do you think my tits are nice?" Cerina asked.
"I don't know," Virgil said. "I haven't seen them."
"Oh, you have in bathing suits and so on."
"That doesn't exactly qualify me as an expert."
They were silent for a moment, watching. There was a white blurr in the window and then a cock popped into view. It hung there, in perfect profile, balls dangling below it. Then a mouth rose up from the floor and closed over it. Virgil recognized the girl. It was Alice, a slim, freckled redhead who'd arrived wearing a long plain muslin sack through which you could easily see her red flowered bikini panties and the puffy red nipples of her pert little breasts. The sack had gone by the wayside, and now she brushed her hair out of her face as she went to work At first she came at the cock from below, letting it droop into the red aperture of her gaping lips naturally, swirling it around inside her mouth. But the hips started to pump, and the cock began to rise, until she was facing it straight on, and then coming down on it from on top. Her face screwed up as she strained to get it all the way into her mouth, down her throat and her eyes closed as she bobbed up and down on it.
Virgil all but forgot Cerina for a moment. He felt his own cock going rock-hard in his pants and his own hips starting to move to the rhythm of themselves. Then he remembered and glanced at the shy, quiet woman by his side. Cerina had her eyes glued to the cock as though she wanted to eat it alive.
"Do you want to move around that way so we can see from a different angle?"
Cerina nodded numbly. Virgil moved her still further toward the end of the house to a point from which he knew Pinky's bed would be in view. He could feel Cerina shaking with excitement. She was beyond pretending.
The bed was a writhing mass of naked bodies. Virgil's heart skipped a beat when he saw Pinky. She was locked into a violent sixty-nine with Jeff. She was on top, and her body rocked back and forth, her mouth sliding up and down on his cock as though she wanted to suck an ocean of come out of it, her cunt smashing down onto his face with a vengeance.
Cerina couldn't take it She put her hands over her eyes and looked away.
Virgil locked his eyes onto Jeff's tongue as it dove into Pinky's hole again and again. Pinky was ramming her clit onto his jaw as he tongued her and she was about to come. Suddenly her body went stiff for an instant, then thrashed wildly, then went stiff again, then thrashed again. Her ample buttocks shook and quivered.
She was just done with her orgasm when Jeff started his. Cerina and Virgil both heard the moan he let out as his cock exploded into Pinky's mouth. Pinky almost drowned with the first wave but she swallowed hard and hung on, her lips stuck tight to the glistening rod that worked in and out of them, her cheeks going hollow as she swallowed hard. Virgil remembered her invitation of that morning. He thought now that he probably should have taken her up on it.
Virgil looked at Cerina. She had managed to direct her eyes toward the action again. She was seeing a threesome next to Jeff and Pinky, one of them the tall girl who'd worn the sexy cutoffs, another girl whose face Virgil couldn't make out, and a guy. Virgil suddenly didn't want Cerina to see any more. The guy was Wally. Virgil could just see from his angle but unless Wally got up almost his entire body was obscured by the two bodies that sat astride it-one over his cock, the other over his face.
"Let's go," Virgil said. To his relief Cerina nodded and turned to make her way back to the path. She stumbled a little and Virgil grabbed her arm to keep her from falling.
The moon shed a dreamy golden light through the trees as Virgil and Cerina made their way out of the maples and through a stand of pines toward the pasture. Virgil didn't say anything.
"That was really something," Cerina finally breathed.
Virgil nodded. "Uh huh." They reached the pasture and stood overlooking it. The grass was deep and studded with cedars. "Why did you turn away?"
"I don't know," she said. "I guess it was because I saw Pinky. I mean-she's so young."
"She's a full grown woman," Virgil said. "It's just that all those things you imagined doing when you were her age, she does."
They walked down into the ankle-deep grass.
"Virgil?"
"Yes?"
"Would you like to see my breasts?"
A hard shock shot out from Virgil's crotch all over his body. Cerina was so ridiculous-so simple, so formal, so clumsy. And yet it was just her charming innocence that drove him crazy. He couldn't think of anything to say but "Yes."
Cerina sat down cross-legged in the grass and Virgil sat across from her. She pulled her white turtle-neck up over her head and reached behind her back to unfasten her bra. She wasn't being coy. There was none of the stripper in her. She was just taking off her clothes as if she was about to get into her nightgown.
She hunched her shoulders forward and her bra fell into her lap. Her breasts sprung loose and jounced and bobbed to rest. They were full and pale and upswept, with large, light, almost invisible nipples. She sat with her arms hanging straight down, her palms resting uneasily on the ground, watching Virgil stare at them.
"Beautiful," he said. Cerina could tell by his almost reverent whisper that he really meant it. She smiled shyly and looked down at them. Then she raised her hands and cupped them in her palms, pushing them up and together.
Virgil inched closer to her. He reached out a finger and ran it in circles on her left nipple. Cerina shivered and let her hands drop to the grass again. Her fingers dug into it as her nipple swelled and her breathing came short and hard. She gritted her teeth with the mock-pain of intense pleasure.
Virgil moved to her right nipple. When both were fully erect he leaned back. They were red now and he could see them plainly. Wonderful what a little stimulation could do.
"I-I think I'd like to take off my skirt and panties too," she said. "And I'd like you to put your finger in my vagina."
Virgil's pants were getting sticky. Cerina stood up and unzipped her skirt. She let it fall and stepped out of it. She pulled down her panties and pulled her legs out of them one by one. Her skin glowed like marble in the moonlight. The soft curve of her belly, the curves of her perfectly turned thighs, drew Virgil's eyes inward to the soft curls of her glistening pubic hair. The lips of her cunt, generously loose, hung down invitingly.
Virgil held his hand straight out and curved a finger upward. Cerina moved onto it. Virgil felt his fingertips plowing through the mounds of her flesh across the soft flap of her clitoris and into the slick dampness beyond.
Cerina stood still for a moment. Virgil looked up at her. The sight was incredible. She had an almost angelic smile on her face as she gazed around her beyond the pasture to the dark, dense woods and up at the clear star-studded sky. Then she looked down at him and suddenly all her shyness disappeared. She began to rock back and forth on his finger, rubbing her clit against it until it became hard. Virgil could feel it grinding up against his finger and slipping off again, and every time it did Cerina gave a low moan and gasped. Virgil let two fingers creep into her hole and pressed her clit with his palm. She rode his hand like a horse. The juices flowed out of her like water from a fountain, and Virgil could feel her cunt-hairs rasping against his skin in a hard, insistent rhythm. He pulled his hand out and reached around behind her to grab her buttocks and pull her cunt to his mouth. Her knees flexed and her legs spread as she got a good balance in the slippery grass. Then she was humping away at his face, the Bps of her cunt parting around his mouth and nose and chin, and Virgil was licking her clit and sliding his tongue in and out of her hole. He dug his fingers deep into her asscheeks and helped her press hard against him. His lips sHd back and forth on his teeth as she closed her thighs and gripped his cheeks with them. He let his hands fall lower on her buttocks and spread them and groped for her asshole with his fingers. He set his fingertips around the firm ridge of it and gently massaged it apart. Cerina was panting and her eyes were rolling and her knees were about to buckle and Virgil knew she was going to come.
He went wild. He shook his head back and forth like a bulldog with his teeth into something. Cerina's cuntjuice smeared on his cheeks, his chin, his nose, until his face was bathed in it. The overpowering scent of a woman in heat saturated him and he wanted to drown in it.
Cerina grabbed the back of his neck and he thought she was going to crush his face to pieces on her cunt and he didn't care if she did-he wanted her to.
She started to whimper like a spanked puppy. She plunged back and forth, and the cheeks of her fine, full ass opened and her asshole widened a little more with each stroke until Virgil was driving a finger two and then three inches up it. She sat down hard on his finger every time she pulled back and she smashed into his face every time she lunged forward and then she came. Her mouth opened as wide as her cunt and she clenched Virgil's face between her legs and froze.
She jiggled a little.
She froze again.
She let out a long sigh.
Then she put her face in her hands and released Virgil's head and sunk to the grass.
Virgil knew he had to give her time to recover before he fucked her. He was dizzy himself with the sudden onrush of her passion. But he was almost as dizzy with the idea that this was Cerina, the innocent, naive, shy wife of his friend Wally.
It took Cerina a few minutes to get her breath back. Having her come on his face had almost been like coming himself for Virgil-not a physical orgasm but something of a mental one, and he had long ago learned that the mental aspect of orgasm was ninety per cent of it anyhow. He knew that Cerina was just getting started. After what seemed like a very short time she crawled forward and put her head in his lap. She licked his cock timidly. It jumped. She didn't look up. She just licked it again. It jumped again, and this time stayed half erect.
She licked it up and down and probed the base of it with her tongue.
She reached out and lifted his cock up and took his balls into her mouth. Virgil lay back and stretched out.
Cerina knew what she was doing. Virgil didn't have any idea why Wally wanted to go elsewhere for his sex. She found just the right point on the side of his ball-sack and pressed the tip of her tongue into it. Virgil thought she would draw the come out of him in an instant. But she felt his hips rising and saw his cock snap upright like a soldier coming to attention and let up. Then she was at it again.
Virgil didn't think he ever wanted to leave that pasture.
Cerina spent a good ten minutes sucking his balls and making little side-trips down to run little circles around his asshole. Then she shoved a hand deep into his crotch and jiggled his balls and dove onto his cock. She swallowed it all. Virgil couldn't believe it. He was big. Very big. That meant that little Cerina had to have a very big appetite.
Virgil watched her lips as they spread a warm coat of lubricating saliva up and down the reddish-tan flesh of his cock. They were full and shapely and yet they stuck to him without ever letting him go. He watched her arch up over him to get just the right angle so she could gobble him all the way down her throat without choking. He knew she wanted a lot of come in her mouth. He knew she really wanted to taste it, smell it, feel it. He knew she didn't just want to blow him. She wanted to be fucked in the mouth. He began to answer her rhythm with his own, pumping up and down harder and faster, until she had to undulate her whole body to keep up with him.
Cerina was gasping for breath by the time Virgil felt the irresistible surge of come welling up out of him. Her delicate nostrils were flared like the nostrils of a horse at the end of a race but she wouldn't let go of his cock to breathe. She knew the come was on the way and she didn't want to lose a drop. She held on and churned up and down wildly with Virgil's frantic, involuntary thrusts and she got what she wanted. Virgil's groin turned to hot water and he gave her one, two, three-five, six-nine, ten long bursts of thick, gooey, warm, salty, vaguely peppermint-tasting come.
She swallowed insanely and sucked up and down on him until the twitching of his hips lost its hard-driving force and slowly ebbed away.
Cerina threw herself back and gazed straight up into the sky once more. Virgil had no idea what was going through her mind, but he was pretty sure she was going to be ready again as soon as he was. Her tits were flat against her chest and the nipples pointed out to the sides but they were still erect. She let a hand wander down between her legs and rubbed tentatively. Then, seeing Virgil was watching and enjoying, she spread the lips wide and drew her knees up. She lay there fingering her clit and spreading her hole until he dragged himself up and fell on top of her. He was already hard again and with the first plunge he was as deep into her as he could go. He felt the soft depths of her cunt swallow him up and he felt her pelvis grind hard against his. She reached around and grabbed his ass and shoved him even farther in. Virgil was Jost in a warm, slimy swamp. His balls banged against Cerina's ass-cheeks and the grass tickled and caressed them.
They rolled over and over, fucking as if they'd never fucked before. Virgil wrapped his arms around her and got his feet under her and picked her up. She hooked her legs over his hips and the sound of her cunt squishing down over him sounded as loud as a lost man sloshing his way through the bayous. Cerina went mad. She started to mutter things in his ear. "Come on, Virgil, fuck me. Fuck me hard, Virgil. I want your cock. I want all of your cock. Give it to me, Virgil, give it to me hard!"
They went down on the grass again and twisted and turned until Virgil was on top of her from behind, bouncing his thighs off the cheeks of her ass as she got up on her hands and knees and thrust her rear end at him. He reached his hand around her and grabbed her cunt and mashed her clit against a finger and she came. Virgil was caught by surprise but it didn't matter because after the clutching and little shrieks and hard pounding were over she just kept on going. She sucked at his cock with the inside of her cunt. She tightened it in long, rolling waves and in short little bursts like machine-gun fire. She rolled her hips in circles and she teased him, pulling her cunt away and matching the rhythm of her movements so every time he shoved forward she pulled back, keeping the tip of his cock just at the outside of her hole but never losing it. Then, suddenly, without warning, she gobbled him up again. She brought herself to the brink of another orgasm. She stayed there.
The air was turning slightly chilly and there was dew on the grass but Cerina and Virgil rolled in it warm and sweating, glued together from head to toe, bits of grass clinging to them, sticking in their hair, getting into their mouths as they breathed. They teased each other and played with each other, knowing they could both come at any time, always putting it off just a little longer. They lost track of the trees and the sky and the place where their clothes were. They forgot about the time and the place; forgot who they were. They listened to each other's breathing and felt every movement of each other's bodies.
Finally Virgil sensed that it was time. He was on top and Cerina's legs were wide open and pointing at the moon. Her cunt was burning and her tits were squashed up flat against his chest. We was biting her neck and she was raking her fingernails down his back.
She knew what it meant when he buried his head against her neck and his breathing quickened and quickened with the hard, short jabs of his cock into her. She rocked up until his pelvis battered her clit back and forth with every frantic motion and every time he drove deep up inside her she snapped her hips down hard. She locked into Virgil's rhythm and she felt her orgasm coming. She let her body go its own way and forgot everything else as the convulsions coursed through her. Her body melted into Virgil's and as his cock exploded and started to jerk wildly she felt its every tiny pulsation. She clamped down on it and she felt her insides opening up to receive the come. For an instant it was like a balloon expanding inside her-a balloon full of ecstasy.
Then she collapsed.
CHAPTER 4
It was eleven o'clock in the morning when Julia awakened. She was vaguely aware that some time during the night Virgil had stumbled in and collapsed across her, and now there were bits of grass in the bed. She didn't know what to make of that but she didn't puzzle long on it because memories of the night before started to turn her thoughts in erotic directions.
Julia always masturbated flat on her back with her legs pointed straight up in the air. It wasn't the most unobtrusive way to do it but for some reason it was the only way she got off. Some women, she reflected, were lucky. They could do it lying quietly on their stomachs, only moving their hips the slightest bit or even doing all the work with their fingers and keeping the rest of their bodies completely still. They could do it lying in bed next to their husbands after an unsatisfying roll in the hay and not get caught. Some of them could even do it lying in lawn chairs or on the beach in full view of hundreds of people. But she had to have her legs split wide and pointed straight up. Now, as she remembered her walk with Roberta and Bertha, she went to the door of the bedroom and listened down the stairs. Virgil and Pinky were talking safely away in the kitchen.
She went back to the bed and pulled the covers all the way down and pulled her nightgown up past her breasts as she lay on her back. She rested her fingers lightly on the closed lips of her cunt and let her memory run away with her.
The first image that came to mind was the moment when Roberta had suggested they head down to the river. It was only ten minutes' walk from the house and they'd already gone a few blocks in the right direction. In fact, Julia was sure they'd all been thinking about going that way. Roberta had been rather brazen about patting Bertha's trim little buttocks as they walked along and Julia remembered distinctly wanting to do the same thing but thinking, "It's just that I'm drunk. I'll get over it in a minute." Still, as she thought now of Roberta's long, slender fingers caressing the delicate mounds of Bertha's ass from beneath, drumming her fingertips up against them in teasing little rhythms and making them jiggle, she pressed a little harder on her pussy and her knees rose.
Next she remembered Roberta's suggestion that they go swimming. In September the water was still very warm and the party in the house had been smoky and stuffy and hot. That provided a good excuse for them to take their clothes off.
It had turned into a regular ceremony. They had stood by a sandy bank at a bend in the river beneath a willow tree and once they'd agreed to go swimming they'd all reached for their blouse buttons at once. But then they'd caught each other staring. Julia had dropped her hands and giggled and Roberta had glanced suggestively at her petite oriental friend. Bertha had taken the hint. As Roberta and Julia sat down together on a bench Bertha had begun a slow, deliberate strip.
She'd turned to the river and removed her blouse. She'd been braless and she'd given Roberta and Julia a fine chance to admire the smooth curve of her back and the almond glow of the moonlight off her girlish shoulders before turning to point her small, firm breasts at them.
Julia remembered Bertha's breasts perfectly. They'd been separate little symmetrical swellings on her almost skinny chest, with cone-like nipples jutting out darkly. Bertha had waited a second before dropping her skirt. She'd bent over to take off her shoes with it and then done a graceful pirouette down to the beach. There she'd pulled down her panties and, seemingly getting drunker by the minute although she hadn't touched any alcohol in over an hour, walked around pigeon-toed with them stretched between her knees. Finally she'd pulled them all the way off and waded up to her ankles in the water.
There was something about Bertha that really turned Julia on. She didn't know what it was. The narrow hips, the tight little ass-cheeks, the high pile of black fluff between her legs, were all pleasing enough, but not exactly the essence of sensuality. Maybe she turned Julia on just because she was at the same time girlish. By American standards she had the body of a fourteen-year-old. Maybe it was just that she seemed so young and fresh while actually being fully mature and quite experienced. As Julia thought about this her finger slowed in her crotch and started to circle instead of pressing and letting up again. Her knees raised further.
Suddenly she felt a sharp shock of pleasure from the hard little peak of flesh above her cunt-slit. It tingled and reverberated up over her belly and made her thighs shiver. She had meant to proceed slowly with her memories of the night before, savoring every image of Roberta as she followed Bertha and stripped and waded into the shallow water-then remembering the eyes of the other two women on her as she took off her own clothes and joined them. But her body had become anxious and her mind had played a trick on her, jumping ahead to pictures of the three of them throwing each other around like kids, toppling into the water, feeling it rush over their slippery bodies. She had pictures of tits flashing in the moonlight and frothy water dribbling off cunt-hairs and Roberta suddenly grabbing her from behind and pressing both hands down into her pussy as Bertha cornered her from the front and started to play with her tits.
And then she was in Bertha's tight little pussy. They were on the bank, lying on their sides in a triangle, and Bertha was rocking her hips back and forth and crushing her clit against Julia's lips while Roberta's expert mouth covered Julia's hole. She'd got a finger up Bertha's asshole and she remembered how it looked disappearing into the slick ring of tan flesh as Bertha had got off on her face.
Now her feet left the bed and pointed straight up and her hand whizzed back and forth over her clit. She got an image of Roberta lifting her hips and drawing her head back just a little so she could see the long tongue that darted in and out of Roberta's mouth like a snake's and jabbed at her clit. She got off on that, driving three fingers deep into her hole and clutching tight, curling them back and wrenching her pelvis up and down, listening to the squishing sounds of her cuntlips and the low, faraway creaking of the bed.
When she was done she lay there for a few minutes. Then she got up and went downstairs.
Pinky was prancing around the kitchen in only her panties. She knew Virgil must have heard her coming because he was staring assiduously in another direction out a window.
"Good morning," Julia said, looking at her daughters bouncing boobs with inquisitively raised eyebrows.
Pinky shook her shoulders and threw her left boob in her mother's direction. "Hi, mom. Glad to see you made it up."
Virgil was sitting at the table in dark pants and no shirt. He nodded to Julia and crossed his legs. As Pinky bent low to pick up a spoon she'd dropped on the floor Julia could clearly see the lips of her generous pussy out-lined in pink beneath her white lace panties. Her crotch crept up between her buttocks and with the bright sunlight she could see tiny goose-bumps on Pinky's buttocks. She noticed the extra little bit of pinkness where the flesh creased as she moved, and took in the thinning patch of hair that spread away from her luscious lovemound. She had no illusions as to why Virgil had crossed his legs.
"Don't you think that's a pretty daring costume for a family breakfast?" she teased.
Pinky turned to eye her mother's sheer nightgown. "If you can see more of me than I can of you I'm surprised," she said. "Besides, it's all in the family."
"Ah," said Julia, "but there's only one catch. I happen to be this gentleman's wife, and you, after all, are his daughter."
"Oh, I think daddy can handle it. Can't you, Daddy?" Virgil smirked and didn't say anything. "Besides," Pinky added, "after the party last night I didn't have the energy to lift anything heavier than a pair of panties."
Julia flopped into a chair next to Virgil's. "Oh? And what did you do at the party that was so energetic?"
That was a challenge. Pinky wasn't one to pass up challenges. "Oh, nothing more energetic than taking a walk with Roberta and Bertha for a couple of hours," she returned with mock diffidence. "A lot of drinking, a lot of dancing, a few party games. Things like that."
"Uh huh."
Virgil guessed Julia didn't need to be told what kind of party games.
"By the way," Pinky said, "last night really seemed to be a big night for taking walks. You took a walk, didn't you, Daddy?"
So, Virgil thought, she's after me too! "Oh, yeah," he said, "I wandered around a little. After you stopped singing and playing I was really feeling wiped out. Just sat on the grass for a long time. Finally I thought it would be nice to clear my head. I also thought of coming over to see how the younger half of the party was going but then I thought that maybe at that time of night the generations might not mix so well."
Pinky saw her father had her boxed in. She desisted. But Julia took up the interrogation. "The last time I saw you," she said speculatively, "you were sitting with Cerina. Did she go for a walk too?"
"Uh huh."
"With you?"
"Uh huh."
Julia was about to continue when Pinky decided to change sides. "As I said," she chirped, "it was quite a night for walks. Jim Milhauser went for a walk too. Did either of you run into him?"
Virgil saw the conversation was turning into a version of the old shell game. From Julia's hesitation he guessed that she had seen Jim. She saw that he'd guessed and so she said, "Yeah, we saw him. Ran across him on the way home." Julia knew that the game was to tell the truth without giving anything away. She didn't know whether emerging naked from the water to. see Jim leaning up against the willow tree grinning could really be called running into him on the way home. Actually what had happened after that would better have been called him running into her. She'd admired Jim Milhauser for a long time. She'd been marginally sorry to have had to share him with Roberta and Bertha but she didn't really care. She'd got all of him she wanted. Every time she remembered how much sex there'd really been the night before-they'd broken up their triangle on the beach for another swim, and when they'd come out Jim had been there-she was a little awed. She'd tried to count the climaxes she'd had but she'd stopped at around a dozen.
"Funny thing about that," Pinky said. "Jim going for a walk by himself. I invited him and Marsha to come over to my wing but when Marsha went looking for him she couldn't find him. So she came herself. She's really nice."
Virgil's mind flipped over. He hadn't seen Marsha Milhauser in Pinky's orgy and he couldn't imagine her having been in it, but there was only one thing going on in Pinky's wing and if she'd been there she'd been part of of it.
"Well," he said, "this is all very pleasant talking to you half-naked ladies over breakfast, but of course I have papers to correct and courses to prepare and also the lawn ought to be mowed and I have to think about putting the storm windows on one of these days. So I think I'll just meander on about my business." He got up to go.
"See, Pinky, I told you he couldn't take it. You know, just because Virgil is thirty-six years old doesn't mean he's above being tempted by you wiggling your tits in his face."
"Bullshit," Pinky snorted. She walked over to the chair Virgil had vacated and stood on it. She was right in front of him and her tits were in his face. She leaned forward and wiggled them, bouncing the huge, firm globes gently off his cheeks.
"Now that's what I call wiggling my tits in somebody's face."
"Quite accurate, too," Julia chuckled. "And daddy's not in he least bit tempted by it. Are you, Daddy?"
"Not in the least," Virgil said. His knees wobbled and his legs turned to rubber as he turned and wandered with attempted casualness toward his study.
When he got there he sat looking at the shelves of books as though they were so many slabs of dried cow manure. He had to go over his notes for his Chaucer course but he had a week to do it in and since he'd taught it the same way for five years he practically knew them by heart anyhow. He decided to tackle another graduate student's paper but when he picked it up and read, "Being that in the history of modern literature we find many similarities among those poets whose work is superficially similar, notwithstanding the homonogizing effects of the technological revolution and its concomitant ease of communication," he threw it down and set about designing an 8" by 11"
"BULLSHIT" stamp which would have red, white and blue striped letters and a border of stars around the edge. When he had it done he realized that it would take three different ink pads and would have to be in three separate pieces and decided that expressing his feelings accurately wasn't all that important. He went out to mow the lawn.
Several years before, Virgil had still been clinging to his old hand mower, feeling vaguely superior to his neighbors as he got his exercise and they whistled along holding beers in one hand, following behind their power-mowers rather like a man follows his dog while walking it. But one day something had jammed in the blades and the handle had given him a good swift punch in the balls and before he'd got up from the ground he'd decided there were certain priorities. Now he went out and sat down on the seat of an ostentatious little tractor and started it up. He took a good clean breath of autumn air and felt the remains of his mild hangover disappearing as the rich, musty odor of freshly-cut grass filled the yard. He grinned to himself as he appreciated the contrast between the lusty abandon of the night before and the prosaic sub-urbanity of his present activities. "Sub-urbanity." He rather liked the sound of it.
He was about half done with the back lawn when Julia came out dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, cursed at the old Volkswagen a few times as it refused to start, and finally drove off to a meeting with her new department chairman. Seconds later Pinky emerged from the back door in short-shorts and a halter and began doing yoga in a patch of cut grass near the porch.
Virgil was actually the slightest bit distraught when Pinky folded her legs into the lotus position and then leaned back and raised them until they formed a triangle over her prone torso. Since Pinky and Julia's arrival it seemed to him he had thought about very little except sex. He firmly believed that sex was a vital aspect of life and afforded infinitely more pleasure than playing poker or going fishing. In fact he could say without question that some of the most beautiful experiences of his life had been sexual. To him a good, together fuck was just as beautiful a work of art as a Rembrandt painting or a Beethoven symphony. But surely one's life was becoming somewhat unbalanced when all one thought about and did was penetrate the panties of the females of one's species. Still, he said to himself, when it pours down rain you may as well drink a lot, because you never know when there's going to be a drought. He stopped the tractor, got off, put on his best "intellectual curiosity" expression, and went over to stare at Pinky's ass.
"Hi," she said, upside down. He could see that her position wasn't the best in the world for talking. Her chin was pressed up against her chest and she didn't really have room to move it Her words came out sort of squashed.
"What have we here?" Virgil inquired. "Hint of the Eastern Mystic?"
He knew exactly what they had there. They had Pinky's short-shorts peeling back off the cheeks of her ass, and the bones poking out to make the hollow between her legs seem deeper than ever. They had a few of her cunt-hairs sprouting out at the edges of her panties, whose seam showed beneath the shorts. In sum, they had Pinky's ill-concealed pussy and asshole about as wide-open and accessible as they could be. The position, Virgil was sure, was not meant by the yogas to be sexy. But there was something about having all the rest of her body tied up like a pretzel, virtually immobile, while her crotch waved in the breeze, that made her all but irresistible.
The closest I ever got to a Mystic was buying some Mystic Tape," she gurgled. She turned her head a little to look up at him and as she did her shorts and panties, now no more than a thin rope in the furrow of her cunt, pulled up and to the side. Suddenly her asshole appeared, a deep pinkish-brown well in the stretched-flat cleft of her buttocks. Virgil could see that somehow in that contorted position Pinky was very relaxed, because the ridge of firm flesh surrounding it was pulled tight and there was a deep black shadow in its center. He wondered whether Pinky liked to be fucked in the ass. But he didn't quite feel he could ask her, and she shifted again and it was gone.
"I'll tell you," she offered, "this is really good for you. You drink a lot of booze and smoke a lot of dope and pretty soon your body gets all polluted. If you don't exercise, your joints get stiff."
Virgil knew he wasn't exercising because his joint was good and stiff.
"And you really feel great if you do these breathing and stretching exercises. I might take a course in Eastern Philosophy the second term. That would be the closest I've ever come to getting an idea of all the shit that's supposed to be behind the exercises. Nirvanah or whatever it is. Satori. I forget."
"I don't know whether they let pretzel-shaped girls into Nirvanah," Virgil commented. Then he decided to pick up on something else she'd said. "You smoke a lot of-uh-dope?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of dope?"
"Grass. Mary Jane. Weed. Like, marijuana I guess you'd call it."
"I thought dope was opium or heroin-stuff like that."
"Not to people who don't use that stuff. When anybody I know says dope they mean marijuana. I've got some really dynamite shit that I picked up in New York. Want some?"
"Hmmm," said Virgil. "No, I don't think so. And by the way, you ought to be careful with that stuff around here. Do you smoke it in the house?"
"Sure," she said. "I don't go out to the garage."
Virgil was quiet for a minute while Pinky let herself down and started huffing like a walrus. He waited until she had done her huffs. "Does your mother know you have marijuana in the house?"
Pinky giggled. "Are you kidding? She has two lids of it herself. Columbian tops. The best. Would you believe Frank got it for me? Fifty bucks a lid. I couldn't afford it myself. How come mom hasn't offered you any?"
"She probably thinks, er, knows I wouldn't be interested. That's kind of a volatile issue in a college town. By the way, what's a lid?"
"An ounce. Don't you know anything?"
"Well, not being a drug user, I guess I don't"
Pinky was done with her yoga. "Drug user! Bullshit. It makes me sound like some kind of bent-out-of-shape junkie. Listen, you ought to get yourself good and stoned at least once just so you'd know that you didn't know what you were talking about"
Virgil put his chin in his hand and stroked his stubble. He'd been so anxious to get downstairs and see Pinky when he'd heard her in the kitchen that he hadn't taken time to shave. "Well, maybe I will some time. Only I wouldn't like your mother to know."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because she'd give me a lot of shit about it, just like I've given her shit in the past about smoking the stuff."
"Hah! Well, fair's fair, shit for shat and so on, but have it any way you want to." She dropped her voice to a stagey whisper and looked around as if to make sure they weren't being overheard. "We can sneak into my room in the dead of night and pull down all the blinds and nail towels behind them and under the door. That's so the smell won't leak out. And we can rig up a candle under a bushel basket so well have light but won't be able to see anything. And then I can take out my dope. I usually put it in my top drawer but I can have it wrapped in a plastic bag and stuck up my vagina just to make it look more secretive.
Virgil thought that was a terrible pun. "We can roll up some of that weed from the Devil's Garden in a piece of newspaper-we don't want to take the chance of buying rolling papers in town because after all the narcs might be staking out the stores and following everybody who buys two packs of Zig-Zags and no tobacco. And then we can turn on the radio and wait until they play the "1812 Overture." And while the cannons are going off at the end we can strike a match. That way nobody will hear it. And then-and then!" She grasped his arm and faced him away from the house and hissed into his ear. "And then we can just use that drug, man. Like, dig it daddy, we can become drug users!"
Virgil chuckled. The prospect certainly seemed appealing the way Pinky put it. "Ok, ok. The next time your mother goes somewhere for an evening we'll do it. Only I really think we should do it in the bathroom so in case the police-narcs, right?"
"Narcs. Right. The dirty narcs."
"Of course. So as soon as the dirty narcs come we can flush it down the toilet. And he should also burn some rotten eggs and old shoes so even if they break in on us they won't be able to smell it."
Pinky stepped back. "Mr. Blakesley, you are truly a great conspirator. I sincerely hope you rise in the ranks of conspirators to become the greatest of them all: the President of the United States."
Virgil bowed. "By the way," he asked, "are you by any chance under the influence of marijuana at the moment?"
"Naturally. Not only am I under the influence of marijuana-I am stoned right exactly out of my hot little panties." She turned and disappeared into the house. Virgil was left thinking, T wish you were."
CHAPTER 5
Three days later Julia had to go down to New York to see Frank about something. As she left she told Virgil she might be home very late that night or in the middle of the next morning. Pinky overheard, and as Virgil was on his way out the door she poked him in the ribs and said, "Tonight, huh? Wanna pull off the big conspiracy tonight?"
"Why not?" Virgil answered, trying to let no eagerness show in his voice.
He spent a difficult day trying to care about students who came to him for conferences and colleagues who came to him for even less, and by the time he got home at six he was more than ready.
Pinky was hiding behind the banister when he came in. "Pssst," she hissed. She looked over the rail and motioned him over. "I don't think you were followed," she said. "The radar didn't show anything and besides you don't smell like you're being followed. But we'll go up into the attic and come down the other side anyway just to throw them off."
She led him up the stairs and made him crawl through the attic beneath the level of the windows. They came down the far stairway and snuck into Pinky's living room. She was wearing an old dress of her mother's that he had never seen her wear except on Halloween. It was some land of slippery black material with lurid red and yellow flowers scattered around. The bodice was tight and gathered into pleats over the bosom, making her tits look as though they'd found their way into a pair of shiny black plastic bags. The skirt was straight and floor-length. The cloth stuck to her figure so that Virgil could clearly see the fines of her buttocks and the seams of her panties as she walked ahead of him. She looked as if she might be Greta Garbo doing a parody of one of her own movies. All in all it was not a sexy outfit. In fact, Pinky seemed to be playing "Let-me-show-you-anew-game-Daddy."
As soon as they were in her room Pinky actually got a hammer and tacks from under her bed and began tacking towels up behind the already closed shades and curtains. She proceeded to turn out all the fights and drag a bushel basket out from her closet and light a candle and put the basket over it. It threw surrealistic bars of light around the room as it sat on a coffee table.
She went to her top drawer and removed a baggie full of a greenish-gold substance. As she pinched some of it out onto a newspaper Virgil could see it was composed of hundreds of tiny little buds stuck together with their own resin.
Pinky produced a packet of rolling papers. "These were bought in Paris, so they're ok." She pulled one out and deftly creased it and dropped some of the marijuana in. With a few quick motions of her fingers she bent down and licked an edge of the cigarette that was loose and sealed it up. Virgil was mildly shocked to realize that rolling joints came as naturally to her as mixing cocktails did to him.
She handed the joint to Virgil. "Light it up, take a deep drag, and hold your breath."
Pinky had turned from playing child to tour director. She went efficiently about the process of getting Virgil stoned.
"It takes a lot more if you've never smoked before," she said. "On this stuff I can usually stone six or eight of my friends with one joint, but you may need as many as two jays to get a buzz on."
Virgil had a little trouble following her jargon sometimes. He sat thinking and waiting for something to happen. He and Pinky passed the joint back and forth until Pinky waved it away. "Whew," she said, "if I take any more of that stuff I won't come down for a week."
After ten minutes Virgil began to feel strangely lightheaded. He wasn't a smoker and at first he thought he was feeling nothing more than the effects of having less oxygen, but suddenly he blasted off and went up like a rocket. "My, my, my," he said, as colors suddenly seemed to become brighter and he had the distinct sensation of having lost his peripheral vision. For the first time in his life he suddenly realized what it meant not to be able to see behind him. It was as though all the solid objects in the world had disappeared and instead all there was was a movie playing right at the surface of his eyeballs.
"Yeah," Pinky said, as she relaxed back onto the sofa and noted with satisfaction that Virgil had slumped back in his chair in wonder. "This stuff will do that to you. Sort of takes a few minutes to sneak up, gives you just a little hint that it's coming, and then zap, you've taken the elevator to the seventieth story of a sixty story building. Nice, huh?"
The first thing Virgil noticed was that he was much higher than he'd ever been on alcohol but he didn't have the feeling of nausea that he would have had with booze. His arms and legs seemed very far away, but when he tested his ability to move them he thought his reflexes were as quick as they'd ever been. He had a strange sense of timelessness. Things seemed in a way to take forever, but Virgil found he was relatively sure of exactly how much time they were taking. When he sat up he felt like a marionette pulling its own strings.
Then he felt a warm burst of pleasure from his crotch. It was like a cherry bomb exploding in an ash can. It boomed out all over him with a muffled, brassy feeling.
After the first wave of amazement at his strange condition Virgil remembered what he'd really gone through the whole thing for. Only now he realized that the effect of the dope was to make everything more intense than it had been before-as if he had everything he turned his attention to under a microscope.
He looked across at Pinky and mustered what remained of his cleverly rational faculties. "Well," he said, "this is quite incredible, in spite of the fact that you didn't roll it in newspaper, didn't do it in the bathroom, hadn't hidden it in your vagina, and forgot the old shoes and rotten eggs. But since you had the papers anyway, and since bathrooms aren't the pleasantest of places, and since I doubt if that packet. ... What's it, a lid?"
"Uh huh."
"I doubt if that would have fit in your vagina, and since rotten eggs and old shoes are hard to come by, I guess it's all for the best."
"What do you mean I couldn't have fit that lid in my vagina? I took two lids to Europe that way when Mom and I went the last time." Virgil eyed her skeptically.
"Well, I guess I'll just have to prove it." Without further comment she yanked her skirt up to her waist, leaned back, lifted her hips, slipped off her panties, and grabbed the plastic bag. Virgil actually had been skeptical that it would fit because it was completely round and was about half again as fat as his cock. But as Pinky unabashedly gripped the edges of her cunt with her fingers and yanked it wide open he found it extremely difficult to get out the words, "No changing its shape, now."
She leaned back, her arms reaching under her thighs and around to continue to hold her hole open, and cocked her head. For an instant she was still. "You really want to make it hard on me, don't you?"
Virgil realized he'd been holding his breath while he stared at the dark, ragged edges of the inch-wide abyss between her legs.
T don't know," he panted. "Do you want to make it hard on me?"
Pinky stared pointedly at his crotch. "It looks like it's pretty hard already. Why if I'd thought for a minute that my sweet step-daddy would become physically excited by a demonstration of smuggling technique, I can assure you I would have been shocked."
Virgil made a big effort to meet her eyes with his. Pinky could tell he was straining. "Oh, give it up and stare at my pussy," she said. "You see my face all the time."
Virgil did. She spread it even wider. "Now," she said. "Don't you think that very small baggie full of dope will fit in there quite nicely?"
Without waiting for an answer she picked it up and popped it in. It disappeared. She let her hole snap shut again. "Mmmm," she said, "it sort of feels good to have something in there. Now I'll show you that you can do anything you want with a lid of dope up your cunt. Even run from the cops." She flopped to the floor and twisted herself up in the lotus position and leaned back, lifting her legs until she was in the same position as she'd taken that morning on the lawn. Her knees hung over her face and finally almost touched the floor above her head.
"See?" she said. "No sweat. No trace of it either, is there?"
Virgil got up and stood directly over her. He licked his eyes up her crack from bottom to top, letting them run in the smooth valley between her buttocks down to her asshole, just as relaxed and wide-open as it had been a few days before when he'd glimpsed it, over the ridge of flesh that formed the bridge to the curving bottom of her cunt "No," he said, "not even a little bulge."
"Want to take it out?"
"Sure." Virgil's hands were shaking as he placed his palms over her buttocks and then slid them down so that the insides of his index fingers lay along her cuntlips pointing toward her clit and his thumbs crossed each other on the bridge from her asshole.
"With your teeth," Pinky said.
Virgil's cock jerked to erection once more. He felt its loaded heaviness, its pulsating hotness, as at last he bent over the furrowed, slick, glistening landscape of his stepdaughter's cunt.
"There's a trick to it," she said. "It's like a safe. You have to have the right combination to open it. But since you've been around for thirty-six years I guess you can probably figure it out pretty fast."
Virgil was lost in Pinky's cunt. With the effects of the dope it seemed as if he'd never really seen a cunt before. The tip of his right index finger naturally slid up to where the little pink cone of her clit peeked out from beneath a flap of flesh that came down on it like a shade from above. He touched it and Pinky said, "Yeah, you're warm already. I thought you'd turn out to be a pro. You done many of these jobs!"
Even with his rod poking its way insistently, somewhat uncomfortably through the fly in his jockey shorts Virgil couldn't play witty games. It was one of the things that really turned him on about Pinky. "Yeah, well, you read about that time Brigitte Bardof s box was cracked in the middle of the night by a sneak-thief back in the fifties. I did that one. And then there was the Marilyn Monroe job, but I couldn't get the combination to that one. Had to blast it open."
"Too bad."
"I didn't mind."
"Well, keep your explosives to yourself this time. This is a real easy job."
Virgil could see it was. The weird light from the candle under the bushel basket made the tiny beads of moisture around the edges of Pinky's hole sparkle and glisten. His eyes probed into the folds of her outer lips. Some cunts, he reflected, had big floppy lips, and others were small and tight. Pinky had big floppy ones. It was amazing the way the texture of the flesh changed as you went inward. At first it was loose, almost rough as soon as you went from the pure white hairy skin of the pubis. And then it was darker, pinkish brown. It was like a swamp; almost as if it was covered with the skin of a baby alligator.
Virgil suddenly realized how completely stoned he was. He was thinking in very weird ways.
He continued to work inward, bending to tongue Pinky's clit now and pulling back to watch the renewed thrustings of her pelvis every time. Gradually the inner lips parted-like two wet tree-leaves being pulled apart Virgil ran his fingers up and down their edges and then in the valleys on either side of them. As he did, Pinky's hole widened and the pink jello marble of its entrance opened to the spongy lace of its interior. Beyond that Virgil could see only darkness. Until he began to work inside with his tongue.
Pinky was gasping and her stomach muscles were jerking spasmodically by the time Virgil caught sight of the plastic bag. He took a comer of it in his teeth and pulled. The plastic ripped.
He laughed.
"Oh," Pinky said, "I forgot about that damned thing!"
With his next try Virgil pulled it clean out. Now he could see all the way to the back of her hole as Pinky bent over double and he could see there would easily be room for two, maybe even three bags the size she'd put in there. He dropped the bag onto the coffee table again and Pinky untangled herself from herself and stood up. Virgil was sorry to see her dress fall back over her stomach, hips and legs all the way to the floor.
'Well, Daddy," she asked, "how do you like marijuana?"
Virgil shook his head. "Some stuff," he said. He was acutely aware that his cheeks were cool with Pinky's evaporating cunt juice and the taste of her pussy was strong in his mouth. They sat back down.
"You know," she said, "you ought to try fucking on this stuff. It's really incredible." She said it just as though nothing had happened-or as though Virgil's adventure into the depths of her womanhood had been in fact a purely scientific experiment. She was, Virgil realized, an excellent tease.
"Well, I just might take your advice some day," he said cagily.
"Gee, that's nice. I'll tell you what. For some reason I have an urge to have something up my vagina. If I'm not mistaken you have just the thing. Now I know you're my stepfather and all, and society would frown on it, but I think it would be just lovely."
She got up. She walked over and stood in front of him regarding him amusedly with her hands on her hips. "What I mean, Virgil, is how'd you like to fuck me?"
Her eyebrows raised with the question and stayed raised as she smirked and reached down and in one motion yanked her dress off over her head. She hadn't bothered to put her panties back on and she wasn't wearing a bra and she stood there totally naked.
"Now we have half of what we need," she said.
Virgil got up. He was still wearing his charcoal gray suit and blue and white striped tie and wing-tips, socks with garters, wristwatch-it took him quite a while to undress in his disoriented state. He hadn't felt self-conscious undressing in front of a woman in years but he'd had the feeling from the beginning that Pinky had been far more in control of the situation than he had-he could hardly say he was seducing her-and now he felt something like the old being judged by the young. He sensed that Pinky's appraising eye was satisfied by his broad, slightly thin shoulders, his deep, heavily muscled chest and flat stomach. He knew he looked several years younger than thirty-six. Still, as Pinky sat cross-legged on the floor beneath him, her head just below cock level, waiting for his organ to spring into sight, he rather wondered what she was expecting.
Finally he stripped his pants and jockey shorts off at the same time and his rod was dangling before her.
"Wow," she said, reaching a hand with delicately spread fingers up to stroke it. "Daddy, you are what's called well hung."
"It's only the jargon that has to do with dope that I don't know," he said. "Well hung I'm familiar with. Thank you."
"I don't know why Mom ever wanted to leave for all that time. If it was me I could sure see getting onto that baby every night"
"Well," Virgil said, feeling for the first time as if he and Pinky were more or less on equal terms, "Why don't we just start with tonight."
Pinky moved closer to him. "I owe you a blow job," she said. "Want it for starters, or you want it for dessert?"
"Whatever you prefer," said Virgil, rather as though he were telling his secretary it didn't matter which hour she took off for lunch.
"I'm good and hot to do it now," she said, her voice plainly showing the effects of her quickened breathing. Her lips flared out and her mouth opened and then Virgil's cock disappeared beneath her halfway combed mop of red shoulder-length hair.
Virgil watched her bob up and down twice on his rod and felt a flash-flood of cream threatening to break loose. Suddenly he realized that with most women who'd sucked his cock he'd got off more on the idea than on the actual feeling. Roberta was a good cock-sucker and so was Julia, but neither of them had the technique to give him the rushes of tight hot sucking feeling that Pinky was sending through him.
Or maybe it was the dope. Whatever it was Virgil's groin, his stomach, his inner thighs, were all part of a huge oil field that was about to be tapped and explode with the built-up pressure of centuries. After a while Pinky had him sit down.
At first Pinky's strokes had been short, choppy, driving. She had gulped at his cock as though she wanted to pump the come out of him in an instant. But when she had felt his excitement reach a peak she had suddenly changed to long, rhythmic strokes, stopping at the top of his rod each time to lick circles around its huge purple flared head.
She carried Virgil along on the crest of his wave for ten minutes. His whole body was sodden with totally relaxed ecstasy and every time he looked at the blue-veined shaft of his organ disappearing down Pinky's eager throat he wanted to shoot.
Then she started the short, driving strokes again. She reached her fingers up to goose his balls and race up and down his ass-crack. When she felt him thrusting out hard and knew he was about to shoot she snapped her head up and down. She was nothing but a blurr of flying red hair when Virgil felt the come blasting out of him. His breath went with it in a long, deep, rumbling growl. He collapsed against the back of his chair as Pinky milked the thick creamy goo out of him and swallowed it in voracious gulps. Then she was pulling back off him, lying on the floor, her tits floppy and sweaty, her mouth red, her pupils dilated, her body totally at rest.
Virgil sat in the chair for a full ten minutes recovering. Pinky got up and went over to the stereo and put on a record. "Not the "1812 Overture" with cannons at the end," she said, as the lilting tones of relaxed guitar music pervaded the room and soft voices in close harmony sang, "If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine, and my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, would you hear my voice come through the music? Would you hold it near as it were your own?"
"That's sort of nice," Virgil said.
"Perfect after-sex music," Pinky replied. "It's the Grateful Dead. You ought to listen to them closely some time. Some of their lyrics are pretty nice poetry. For instance, listen to the chorus of this song.
Virgil listened. "Ripple in still waters, where there is no pebble tossed or wind to blow."
"It's a perfect haiku," Pinky informed him.
"Pretty nice one, too," Virgil conceded. He couldn't believe the immense feeling of well-being that had overtaken him. It was as if everything was suddenly very right. He found it very ironic that he felt this way after having been blown by his 18-year-old stepdaughter. He had no doubt that part of it was just the release of tension at having got it together with Pinky after all his fantasizing. He supposed making it with an 18-year-old girl somehow made him feel younger, although he didn't like to admit to such ordinary kinds of feelings. But most of the feeling, he was sure, was the result of Pinky being who she was-a very beautiful, very intelligent, very lively young lady, who, although on the surface seemed cleverly evasive, sarcastic, hardly ever serious about anything, was deep down straightforward and burdened with absolutely no guilt, hang-ups, neuroses or worries.
"Well," Pinky said, "shall we go ahead and ball a while?"
She said it as though she were asking him if he wanted a cup of coffee but still the words reached right down into Virgil's crotch and heated it up again in a second. Maybe that's how easy sex should be-as easy as drinking a cup of coffee. If it could be as easy as that and still be beautiful it would really be something. Virgil realized that the marijuana was still affecting him strongly as he thought, "That's one of the things that's really fucked up about our culture. Sex is always so damned hard, so damned heavy, when really it should be-like this." He got up and laid Pinky on her back on the sofa. She hooked one of her legs over its back and let the other drag over its edge and opened her arms. Virgil's chest pressed up against her tits. She wiggled back and forth, rubbing her nipples into the thick mat of hair, making them hard and huge.
Virgil's cock found her hole as easily as a boat slipping down a set of tracks into the water. He could almost hear the splash as he plunged into the warm swamp.
Some women just lay on their backs and let themselves be fucked. Some of them had their own rhythms and took over demandingly, forgetting that the man's rhythm might be different than theirs. One way it was all the man's show and that was no good. Virgil got turned on more by turning on a woman than anything else. The other way it was all the woman's show. That was what all too often happened with Julia.
Pinky was different. She was better even than the kind of woman who subdy takes turns, fucking along with her own rhythm for a while and then letting the man have his turn for a while. Virgil could tell that, like most women, her pace of fucking would naturally be slower than his. But as he felt his cock enveloped by the pulsating sheath of her cunt he received subtle communications from her. The flesh of her pussy drew him in, clamped on him, let him loose. It flowed back and forth over his cock like a thick river. It circled and sucked on him like a lollypop. Virgil realized that Pinky was testing him, trying to find a rhythm that would bring both of them off. She was going about it quite consciously and she could do it because she had fantastic control over the muscles of her cunt.
That she was trying to do this excited Virgil. It wasn't like trying to reach a compromise in a meeting of a board of directors of a two-person fucking corporation. It was like trying to play music together. Pinky would clutch hard at his back when he did something that drove her crazy and she would let up so he could show her what he liked.
Virgil climbed up high on her so the shaft of his cock drove deep and the bone of his pelvis crushed her clit against her hard. Her legs spread wide and her mouth opened and he looked down her throat as she moaned That meant, "Yeah, I could get off like that." Virgil didn't know if he could. There was a lot of tenseness in his thighs that came with riding so high. He let himself back down and tried to shove his organ just as deeply into her, tried to lever his pelvis upward to rub at her clit from the bottom. She relaxed a little and then tightened up her thighs. She held her clit in place for him and waited until he tried shortening his strokes and keeping the pressure on it. She moaned again and the insides of her thighs slapped against the outside of his. If he kept the pressure on she could come that way too.
Virgil tried some circling motions that stirred his cock around inside her like a spoon in a pot of candy. She answered right away, rolling her hips in the other direction. On every cycle Virgil's pelvis smeared across her clit and every time she cried out a little louder and ground her pussy at him a little harder and breathed a little faster. Virgil could tell she could get off that way too but he couldn't.
He pulled up off her and she turned over. She waved her ass in the air and reached her hands back to spread her cheeks and cuntlips for him. He looked into the wide-open hole and its surrounding jumble of bright red flesh and sprouting hairs and then plunged into it. Pinky collapsed flat onto her stomach beneath him.
The feeling of his inner thighs against the cheeks of her fine, full ass drove him crazy. He reached both hands around to press them into her pussy and pummel her clit. "Ah ha," she said, as though he had displayed a sly knowledge of some inner secret that gave him a mysterious power over her. He could tell that she probably masturbated on her stomach with her hands like that and she would get off in about two seconds if he kept it up.
He eased the pressure a little bit while he raised his head to look down where his cock and thrusting in and out between the quivering pale white flesh of her buttocks. He continued to keep her on the edge of orgasm as he drew his cock out and let it slide up and down in her ass-crack, covering her asshole with the slimy fluid that dribbled from between her grasping cuntlips.
"Oh," she groaned, "get that fucker up my asshole for a little while. That would feel so nice!" With that she reached her hands back and dug her fingers into her ass-cheeks and ripped them open. Virgil lifted her from beneath, meanwhile pressing harder again on her clit.
Virgil took one look at her asshole and then let the tip of his cock dangle to graze it lightly. Pinky spread her ass-cheeks even wider and began to tighten and relax her sphincter. Each time it opened a little wider, and each time Virgil let the head of his cock rest on it a little harder. When finally it was open enough so that the head of his cock landed in it and stuck he began moving in circles to pry it further open with patience and gentleness.
Pinky began to shove it up into him, and he stopped moving and let her take it into herself at her own pace. The inside of her asshole was tight and slick and once or twice he pulled out of it and stared into its open red channel while he plunged his prick into her pussy again to lubricate it. Then he dove deeper into her asshole.
He still had his arms wrapped around her and one hand on top of the other, pressing hard on her clit. As he got one, two, three inches into her asshole, she raised herself up on her knees and elbows. Suddenly there was all the space in the world for Virgil to explore up her asshole.
"Ok, Daddy," she said, "fuck away."
He began pumping and she sucked at him with her ass-muscles. The channel tightened and loosened and every time she clamped down he went higher. Soon he was squashing her clit under his fingers with one rhythm, hard, slow, demanding, while he fucked her ass with another-quick, jabbing, rabbit-like.
"Oh, come up my asshole, Daddy," she breathed as his fingers brought her rapidly toward orgasm "Come on up my asshole, Daddy," she cried, spreading her cheeks wider and wider and shoving her ass back on his cock. "Oh, shoot that cream right up my ass, Daddy, shoot that fucking CREAM!"
Suddenly she got off. Virgil was all the way up her and when her hole tightened on him he let go. The narrow, slippery, hot tunnel of her ass gave him no room to heave up and down, back and forth, the way her cunt did, but the feeling of being pressed in hard all over, of penetrating the forbidden opening and forcing his way up it, drove him insane. When he fucked a cunt he felt as though he was shooting into an open cave with lots of room all around. He felt the pulsations of his own cock as it jerked but there was no resistance to them and then were lost in the cavernous space. With Pinky's asshole every jerk, every quiver, met the tight glove of her tube and came back to him, bringing on more jerks and quivers. He felt the hot load of his come bathing the head of his prick and surrounding it with jellied stickiness.
Pinky stayed in the same position as he finished and she finished and he pulled out of her. A bubbling rush of come followed and spurted out of her hole, down over the bridge to her pussy, out over her ass-cheeks and down across her thighs.
Still in the same position Pinky reached over and took a tissue from a box on the coffee table and wiped her ass with it. Virgil watched as the tissue grew dark with the gray fluid and Pinky's hole dribbled more of it out. Soon it was empty and loose and glistening pink again.
Pinky caught her breath as she turned around and sat on the sofa again. When she was breathing regularly she said, "Far out. Want to do up another joint?"
Virgil thought he'd better do something because he needed time to recuperate and get ready for the grand finale he knew was coming. Pinky certainly did treat sex like an eight course dinner. Everything from soup to nuts. With the accent on the nuts, he joked to himself.
Pinky rolled another joint and changed the record on the stereo. This time it was eerie jazz dominated by a haunting flute. "Forest Flower," she said. "Charles Lloyd. Know it?"
"Uh uh," Virgil admitted. "But it sounds very erotic. Flutes can do that, I guess. That piano is nice too."
Virgil had thought he was as high as he could go on the marijuana but as Pinky passed him another joint and he took a deep drag he found himself going higher still. The music changed tempo often and the drums and cymbals rolled along fluidly, taking him through quiet lulls and brassy crescendoes through which the flute sailed with liquid effortlessness. It took him through the I forest, brushing past broad leaves, winding around thick trunks with deep, scaly bark. It took him in pursuit of a wood nymph; a forest flower with willowy stem and graceful, big-petalled pink flower. The flower was like a huge tulip whose petals had flopped open. It was not moving but wherever it went it hovered in front of him, half real, half dream, the symbol of the wood nymph he would catch when he caught it. It took root in front of a mossy cave with mountain bluebells scattered before its entrance. It moved to grow beside a trickling stream, clear and cold, silvery above the umber and ochre tones of the pebbles at its bottom. Then it floated away down the stream, hovering over the surface of the water as it broke in transparent white-edged cascades over glistening rocks of gray granite. It danced through a meadow. When he moved for it the flute and piano music raced and the melody lines swirled in and out of each other like figure skaters doing a delicately choregraphed loveballet.
Pinky sat across from Virgil as the flute disappeared and the pianist marched his fingers up to his instrument's highest register. The notes tinkled like crystal bubbles of frozen mist that blew from tree-branches and burst with raindrop sounds. Underneath them a mellow, golden tide of saxophone notes moved in like a flat river of molten lava.
"Jesus," Virgil said, "that's just fantastic."
"It would be just fantastic if you'd fuck me," Pinky said, standing up. She turned and headed for the bedroom. "Shall we have all the comforts for this one?" Her ass twitched invitingly as she disappeared. Already Virgil could feel a tightening at the base of his cock.
Pinky pulled down the bedcovers and hopped in. Virgil, for the first time acutely aware of the age, the thickness, the hard fines of his body compared with the girlish lines of hers, stood for a moment at the bedside. Pinky rolled over and back playfully and her tits flopped after her, the right one coming to rest against a fresh white sheet as she lay on her side looking up at him. "Little pussy, Daddy?" she said, her child-like voice rising to a giggle as she gave her clit a few flicks of a finger.
"A little pussy. Yeah." Virgil climbed onto the bed next to her and saw her appreciating the finely sculpted lines of his tanned body unabashedly. She reached down and massaged his cock and then rolled onto her back and pulled it toward her hole. Virgil followed his captured organ until he was on top of her and she was holding it in both hands, squishing it around in circles over her clit. "Come on inside me, Daddy," she said, tugging at his cock and forcing its head into the opening of her cunt. "Come on inside and play."
They started off with a smooth rocking rhythm. From out in the living room the sounds of Forest Flower still drifted in through a wafting mist of marijuana smoke. They matched their movements to the rhythm. The music seemed to envelop them and carry them along effortlessly through a wonderland of pleasure. Virgil realized as he and Pinky churned their hips, stared deep into each other's eyes, clutched with their fingers and rubbed Pinky's breasts between them, that they were dancing. It was like the dances he'd seen young people do. They were holding each other close and rubbing their crotches against each other, their legs floating forgotten beneath them, all their concentration centered like a bright light on their genitals. That was where the dance was taking place. Only they weren't standing skirt to pants with his imprisoned cock sliding up and down the outside of her pussy, giving her little shocks and thrills. He was deep inside her and her cunt felt like a part of his cock. The part that it needed to throw him into unceasing ecstasy. Now it would seem strange not to have that pussy over him; strange to listen to the music without that other presence, those thighs, that shelf of squashed buttock jutting out beneath them, that lyrically responding movement that made him feel as if he were a butterfly copulating in mid-air.
Virgil and Pinky rucked for nearly an hour. Forest Flower came and went and other music followed. They fucked with Pinky on top, at first lying and then squatting. Then she turned to squat facing his feet and he watched her asshole bob up and down before him, his fat cock sliding in and out of her juicy hole, her legs flexing and her pelvis grinding. Without losing contact they slid off the bed and Pinky bent over a chair. Virgil slammed into her from behind and she brought herself off with her finger from the front while Virgil bounced her tits in his hands. They turned and Pinky sat on the chair and Virgil stood over her fucking away as she raised her legs and her cunt spread out until it looked like a pink porcelain funnel. She got off again when Virgil leaned over her and pressed his pelvis hard up against her clit.
They changed places on the chair and Pinky sat on Virgil's lap, her legs shooting up under his armpits. He threw her up with quick flips of his hips and she bounced down hard with rapid grunts of pure animal pleasure. Then Pinky swivelled and while Virgil continued to sit on the chair she crammed her ass down into the hollows of his groin as she shook and twitched her ass and sat down on his cock.
Then Virgil stood up and pumped her from the rear. She turned around again and with Virgil standing she gave a little leap and hooked her knees over his hipbones. She grabbed his shoulders and swung like a child on a swing as his knees flexed to help her and his fingers tickled her drooping buttocks and probed up her ass.
Then he let her down onto the bed again.
"Ok, Daddy, ball the shit out of me," she whispered in his ear. "Fuck me, Daddy, fuck me!" He felt her abdomen tense and her clit rise up to catch every tiny movement of his pelvis as he climbed high on her and took one of her buttocks in each hand. He wrenched her around on his cock, jerking her off on its base as he jerked himself off with her cunt.
He felt her cunt expanding inside, getting ready for the come. Its opening gripped him like a hungry mouth, grasping his shaft with hot, wet lips and sucking madly up and down.
He moved his fingers to spread them in a circle around her asshole and then started to pull it open. As he did he pulled the bottom of her cunt open too and stretched its lips tighter still around his cock at the top and bottom.
Pinky was whimpering and her eyes squinted. Her face screwed up and her neck muscles tightened as her whole body concentrated on the movements of her cunt and Virgil's cock.
She began to shudder.
She gave one, two, three long pulls on Virgil's cock; demanding strokes that told him she was open and parched as the desert and she wanted his come now. Her eyes were wild with wanting as Virgil plunged up and down on her like a jockey riding a horse hard for the finish line. Her lips tightened. Her whole body was rigid and quivering with high tension. She was a bomb about to go off.
Virgil caught the train right on time. Pinky was saying I'm going to come, I'm going to come soon" with her whole body. She was saying, "The minute I feel that hot sperm shooting inside me I'm going to go off like a million tons of TNT." And Virgil was saying, "If you want it, if you want it that much, as much as you're telling me, you're going to get it big and hard and fast. Right now."
A grunting gasp escaped from Virgil's lips as the sperm rushed up. He felt every nerve, every muscle in his body straining to. get behind it and combine force with it to shoot it into Pinky's deepest depths. His buttocks were metal as his jack-hammer cock filled with come and it burst out of him.
"Aaaaaah!" Pinky sang as she felt it coming and slammed her guts up hard to meet it. "Aaaaaah! Oh! Oh! Oh, son of a bitch, give me that fucking come! Ohl That fucking come! Oh Daddy, shoot it into me!"
The waves of Virgil's orgasm ran together with the waves of Pinky's. The rushes and the lulls came together perfectly to make the highs higher and the lows lower. In the stormy sea it took longer for the swells to subside. Just when Virgil thought, "This is the longest, most complete orgasm I've ever had, but it looks like it's fading...." another rush would hit him and he would be thrusting and pounding again, setting Pinky off again. Ten minutes afterward he still felt shudders and shivers and spasms echoing and re-echoing between them.
CHAPTER 6
The next weeks passed in a frenzied whirl of activity. Pinky got her Porsche, school started, and autumn progressed. Between stimulating but not always completely fulfilling sexual experiences with Julia, stimulating and always fulfilling ones with Pinky, dates with Roberta on the side, and two visits to Cerina while Wally was out of town, Virgil had all the pussy he could handle. Julia was caught up with moving into a new office, meeting her colleagues, and teaching five courses all for the first time. Pinky got a job singing in a coffee house which took up her weekend nights and on week nights she was either studying or out at dances and parties and, Virgil supposed, orgies.
Their house became a thoroughfare for Pinky's rapidly blossoming circle of friends. Virgil looked the girls over carefully. He was particularly taken by two sisters named Beth and Lillian who frequented the coffeehouse where Pinky sang. The place was so poorly lighted that the first time Virgil saw them wander over to have a drink with Pinky during one of her breaks he could not tell whether they were male or female. He slogged through the sawdust and beer foam on the floor toward them. They were wearing matching black turtlenecks and jeans with baggy rear ends held up by thick tooled leather belts. They had long fine blonde hair, but Virgil had long recognized that this meant nothing. When he got closer, however, he made out beautiful, smooth-skinned, high cheekboned faces, and could plainly see large lumps protruding from beneath their turtlenecks. He knew he hadn't made the trip for nothing.
Pinky said, "Hi, Daddy, I'd like you to meet two of the grooviest chicks in town. This is Beth," she said, pointing to the shorter of the two. "She's a senior-majors in chemistry and plays the drums for a rock group in town. This is Lillian, her sister. She's a junior and doesn't do anything but get stoned. Right Lillian?"
Lillian lifted a beer to her thin, playful lips and gulped thirstily as though that constituted an answer. Virgil took the fourth seat at the table and managed to snag a bearded, acne-plagued boy in a white coat who did after all turn out to be a waiter. After half an hour his two bottles of Guinness finally arrived and he had got to know Beth and Lillian quite well. Like many pairs of sisters he had known, they were quite different. As he had suspected from the first, Beth was sharp, witty, and loquacious, while Lillian was smiling and taciturn. The only marked difference in their features was that Lillian's face was slightly broader than her older sister's and her nose turned up a little more sharply. They offered Virgil what they called a "hit" of mescaline, and when he declined proceeded to pop large, rather official looking capsules down their throats and wash them to rest with gulps of draft beer. Virgil saw them a few times around campus and nodded politely, and Beth took to covering her mouth with the back of her hand every time she saw him and whispering, "Hey, Professor, want to blow some dope?" by which Virgil came to assume that Pinky had told her friends at least that he had smoked once with her. They showed up at the house a few times, and Virgil had a short talk or two with Beth while Lillian sat by looking interested-but in what he could not exactly tell.
There were a few from Pinky's original party who also became regulars. Jeff, the tall, lanky basketball-player type, occasionally left his battered old Chevrolet in Pinky's driveway overnight. Doris, the tall oval-faced girl whose buttocks he had noticed creeping from beneath her cut-offs when Pinky's friends had first piled out of her station wagon after her guitar buying episode, also showed up often. Virgil didn't know exactly what to think of her. She was the daughter of a well-known judge in town, and he thought that perhaps her father had made too successful an attempt to impress her with the responsibilities of what he undoubtedly considered to be his high social status. But under Pinky's influence she seemed to loosen up considerably, and at times rivaled Pinky herself for foul-mouthed humor. And then there was Jennifer, whom Virgil steadfastly refused to call Jenny, a sleek, sophisticated looking girl who looked like she had stepped off the cover of a high-fashion magazine. Virgil never saw her wear anything but "color-coordinated" outfits. She favored bellbottoms that grabbed her tightly under the buttocks and flared out to extravagant proportions at the bottoms. Virgil liked her mostly for her clear blue eyes, straight, delicately formed nose, and thin, almost haughty lips. But she seemed on the whole more concerned with not saying anything wrong than with saying anything right, and in a way proved less susceptible to Pinky's jocular manner than Doris had.
There were also four or five assorted guys Virgil saw on and off in the coffeehouse, coming and going from Pinky's wing of the house, or sitting around in his own kitchen. All of them seemed nice enough, and Virgil realized that on the whole Pinky's generation took themselves a lot less seriously than his had, while perhaps in the long run getting just as much acomplished. One of the things they accomplished with great expertise was having parties, and it wasn't long before Pinky invited Virgil to one. Coincidently or not, Julia was once more going to be out of town, this time in Boston at a lecture on Balzac.
Pinky picked breakfast, an hour during which she and Virgil were alone every day except Tuesday and Thursday, when Julia had to teach nine o'clock classes. This was a Friday, and Virgil had nothing to look forward to but correcting two dozen freshmen's tests. Wally had invited him over to play poker, but for some reason he hadn't been comfortable with Wally since the night he'd spent with Cerina in the pasture. Cerina had promised him that she would tell Wally, but she'd said, "Sooner or later. When it's the right time." Virgil had no idea how his friend would react, but until he found out he preferred to stay home.
"Come on, Dad," Pinky urged him through a mouthful of scrambled eggs, "You don't need to be self-conscious. All my friends really dig you, and if the scene gets too heavy, you can split."
"I don't think it would be such a good idea," Virgil answered. He had told Pinky about sighting her orgy through the back window, so they both knew what they were talking about "I just don't think it would be wise. You know, as little as I feel like a 36-year-old English professor when I'm around you, I do have to be a little bit careful about my position. If word got around that I was smoking dope and balling with god knows how many assorted girls from the college I dare say the President and the Board of Trustees and my department chairman wouldn't be terribly impressed. Besides, I've got about all I can handle already. If my horns get too long I can always pop over to Roberta's."
That night Virgil sat in his study numbly scratching checks and crosses on papers with a felt-tipped pen that didn't work. He heard people arriving, entering through the side door to Pinky's wing, and once he looked up and saw cars scattered in her driveway and in front of the house. By this time Pinky had thoroughly indoctrinated him to her kind of music, and when at about ten o'clock he heard doors opening into the kitchen and the smell of dope charged out to fill his nostrils he recognized the voice of Van Morrison blasting forth from his step-daughter's stereo.
At first he thought a couple of Pinky's friends were heading for the refrigerator to get more ice, and since he was on his fourth glass of scotch on the rocks, he was vaguely worried that they'd run out. But then he heard the pitter-patter of little feet leaving the kitchen and heading down the hallway toward him, and before he knew it Beth and Lillian were standing in the doorway to his study.
For the first time Virgil could remember Lillian was the first to speak. Virgil had to remember what she said and play it back to himself to get the meaning because it was obvious that both girls had put on their blouses especially to come talk to him and in whatever kind of stupor they had found themselves they had forgotten to button them up. Now he noticed a further difference between them-Beth's tits were somewhat larger and closer together, and consequently the nipple of the right one peeked out from beneath her blouse, while Lillian's were what Jim Milhauser had taught Virgil to think of as "slightly wall-eyed" and all he could see of them was the white of a cleavage and the edges of two mounds.
"We have come," Lillian said, seeming somewhat surprised that she wasn't stumbling over the words, "to abduct you to a den of sin and iniquity we know of, which, you will be surprised to learn, is not more than thirty feet from here-or three doorways, whichever way you want to count it."
Virgil thought it would be proper to put on a semi-officious air. "Well," he said, "my daughter has already kindly extended the invitation, and I have informed her...." Despite his intentions he broke into an amused smile. "I have informed her that I think it would be wisest if I not attend."
Lillian reached into the pocket of her jeans and produced two joints. She walked over and placed them in front of Virgil on his desk. As she did her blouse fell away and her tits dangled in his face. "If you can't make it to the party, at least you can get yourself good and ripped," she said. Then, glancing at the work he had in front of him, "What are those, tests?"
"That's right," Virgil said, well aware that Lillian wasn't in the least interested. He let the two joints He on the desk until he could decide what to do with them. He supposed he would save them and maybe smoke them with Roberta, or possibly even Cerina. He imagined that balling with Cerina while they were both stoned out of their minds would be quite a trip, as Pinky would say.
Lillian leaned over his papers and made a mild pretense to glance over a few answers. This time her blouse fell open and stayed open, and Virgil decided that since that was the game she was playing he might as well play too and stare at her tits. He could tell that she was really stoned because she braced herself on his desk with her hands and still swayed back and forth trying to focus on the piece of paper in front of her. "A dactyl is two long beats and one short beat." She looked up at Virgil. "Is that right or wrong? And what does it mean?"
Virgil laughed. "It's wrong. A dactyl is two trochopests and one anaream cemented together with whipped cream to make a version of flying reptile which has been extinct for ten million years.
Beth giggled. "I think it's more fun talking to you than being at that party," she said. "Do you mind if we take off our clothes and stay for a while?"
These girls certainly didn't beat around the bush. Virgil couldn't get together an answer before Lillian had her blouse off and her pants halfway down. Virgil expected to see a pair of panties but instead he saw a tan line.
Lillian's cunt hair was blonde as the hair on her head and completely transparent. Through it Virgil could plainly see a tight little pussy with inflamed red lips. It was one of those pussies that seemed like nothing at all-the kind, Virgil thought, which undoubtedly served as models for children's dolls and mannequins.
"Why Lillian, I'm surprised at you," Beth blurted. "Didn't Mommy tell you not to take off your clothes in front of strange men?" Since she had already dropped her own blouse to the floor on top of her sister's and had her own pants halfway down, the question didn't have to be answered.
Virgil took a long sip on his glass of scotch and said, "You know, you girls are making it quite difficult for a hard-working old professor to concentrate."
Beth picked one of the joints up off his desk and reached down to the floor to pull a book of matches out of one of the pockets of her discarded jeans. "Well, we haven't made it nearly as hard as we're going to."
"Oh Jesus, that was terrible," her sister said. Turning to Virgil-"But anyhow, that's a good question. How hard is it? Is it getting harder?" She stared down hard into the crotch of his pants.
Virgil decided that she didn't win the Subdest Woman of the Year Award, but she definitely got the job done. When she lit the joint he took it, and for a short and somewhat absurd time they sat in a circle, him fully clothed, them stark naked, passing it around.
When it was done Beth stood up and walked over to Virgil. "Well, it's about time we got back to the party. Are you corning?" She was practically rubbing her pussy in his face as she talked, swaying back and forth like a little girl who has asked her father for a lollipop.
Before Virgil could respond, a head had popped around the comer and Roberta's voice had said, "Come on, Virgil, don't be a bullshitter! Get your ass into this party and have some fucking fun!"
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
"Pinky invited me. So now that you know the party isn't made up of teeny-boppers like these two,"-she put her arms around them and by her tone Virgil could tell she was cashing in on some standard joke between them-"you can just drag your damn body over and stop being antisocial. Somehow we ended up with one more woman than man."
"I bet you're not the odd girl out," Virgil managed as he fought with himself.
"Not when I can help it," Roberta assured him. She was completely naked, but since Virgil was accustomed to seeing her that way and pretty much assumed that everyone else in the house was also, he wasn't even mildly surprised. He was now, however, completely stoned and in the presence of three naked women, and that was simply more than he had the willpower to withstand. He stood up. "O.K., you win. But of course I don't know how great an addition I'll be to this whole thing"
Roberta looked him up and down and then looked at Beth and Lillian. "I think we'd better see if we can get him a little more in the mood, don't you?"
Virgil felt he had definitely been the victim of a well-plotted conspiracy with a good many contingency plans. Roberta moved in on him and sat on his right knee, sliding up his pants on her bare pussy until she had her tits in his face. She began to unbuckle his belt. Beth reached down to untie his shoes and Lillian moved around behind him, draping her tits over his shoulders as she reached around to unbutton his shirt. Before Virgil knew it, he was stark naked and being lifted clumsily but enthusiastically toward a brown leather sofa on the other side of the study. When he was flat on his back, the girls lined up next to him and Beth said, 'Well, which one do you want to fuck and which one do you want to eat and which one do you want to feel?" As though it had all been choreographed Roberta, on his right, put her left leg up on the sofa arm his head rested on and Lillian, on the right, put her right leg up, and Beth, in the middle, put her right leg up too. They all reached down with their left hands and spread their pussies open.
"You can't expect me to make a choice like that," Virgil breathed a little tightly.
The girls had been prepared for any eventuality. Beth threw her leg up over the sofa back and inched down till her pussy was right over Virgil's face. He looked up into the curving slit, so tight that it almost looked puckered in, and then Roberta took his hand and shoved it between her legs as Lillian bent her mouth over his cock. Virgil just closed his eyes. Beth's pussy came down over his face and started rubbing, and then he had three fingers as far up Roberta's hole as they would go. After a few minutes of Beth's slimy pussy grinding into his face and his fingers probing up Roberta's cunt and Lillian sucking away at him for dear life, his chest was flushed and he was heaving and panting. Now Lillian stood over him on the sofa and squatted down, grabbing his cock and pointing it straight up and sitting on it until it was completely engulfed by her tight little pussy.
Virgil was just settling down to try to bring all three of them off at once when suddenly Beth jumped off him and reached down. "O.K.," she said, "are you ready to go to the party now?"
Virgil didn't have much choice as Beth turned and waved and walked gaily out of the room, and Lillian and Roberta promptly followed. The sisters managed to leave their clothing in his study. He left his there too and followed them.
Even before he crossed the kitchen Virgil was aware that the party was far larger than he had thought. There were at least twenty people there, and the low sounds of their laughter and talk buzzed in his ears as he moved self-consciously towards them.
But whatever self-consciousness he had left rapidly fled as he, at once saw two huge writhing piles of naked bodies and realized that no one but the girls who had brought him even realized that he had come in. He wondered first how Roberta had been able to count how many people were there let alone discover there was one more girl than boy. And then he wondered whether in fact that was true. There were three girls with him and still there seemed to be about half girls in the orgy that was laid out at his feet.
One of the piles of bodies was clustered around the sofa in Pinky's living room. The other was spread out over her bed. At the edges of both there were people talking quietly, smoking joints, and listening to music. At the centers there were people locked together in all imaginable combinations. Virgil could see calves and forearms and the backs of heads, but he couldn't see much else, because every sexual organ was covered either by a mouth or by an organ of a member of the opposite sex. He glimpsed Bertha, her mouth lost in the furry muff of a black girl he did not know, and her cunt filled by the cock of a slender boy Virgil knew only as Sam, who had for the first time Virgil could remember removed his thick plain black-rimmed glasses. Virgil thought he might once have had Sam in a lecture course on modern poetry but he wasn't sure. Now he thought back on Roberta's count and wondered how she had categorized Bertha. To begin with, there was some doubt in Virgil's mind whether her breasts were large enough or her hips and buttocks were full enough to qualify her as a woman despite the configuration of the area between her legs. Not that Virgil didn't find her attractive. He did, in a strange sort of way.
Beth took his hand and led him toward the bedroom. When he got there he saw Pinky sitting in an armchair beside the bed, her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette with a bottle of his best scotch on a table nearby and a healthy glassful of it in her hand. She, like everyone else, was naked. When she saw him, she put the glass down and put the cigarette out and looked up like a cat that has just taken an overdose of heavy cream. "Hi, Dad! I was wondering when you were going to get here."
With that, Pinky grabbed him and with the help of the other girls coerced him-or at least he made it look like they did-onto the bed. Soon he melted into the pile of bodies, and soon he was lost in it. It was like swimming through a river full of logs, groping his way through the tangle of limbs, twisting his body and crawling, making sure not to rest his weight on any tender organs, discovering smooth, shapely legs to be followed, and passing over the rough, hairy ones. At first he kept track of whose cunt he was reaching out for, who was putting her mouth or her pussy over his dick; but after awhile he gave up.
Virgil had never been completely surrounded by flesh before. He was lying on top of bodies and buried under bodies, and there were bodies on all sides. The marijuana made him feel strangely weightless as he maneuvered his cock into Lillian from behind and Pinky joined the pile and gave him a tit to suck on. By this time everybody was covered with come and cunt juice. Virgil was aware that after what must have been some kind of peak of orgiastic frenzy reached earlier everyone had taken a rest, and now the group was just starting to build up to another one. With so many writhing, undulating bodies around him, Virgil found himself unable to control his own movements with anything like the freedom of an ordinary one-to-one fuck, but this was made up for by the fact that he felt himself a part of a larger body, the whole thing a mass of sensual movement, and he found himself being pushed in and out of Lillian almost automatically, with only an occasional pull or twitch needed from him. He was lying obliquely across Lillian's back, and Pinky had shoved her cunt up under Lilhan's chin and leaned over to put her tits in Virgil's face. Meanwhile, a lanky, tall, well-built guy had managed to stand up and straddle Virgil's head while he fed his organ to Pinky, and Pinky at the same time had one of her hands on another cock which protruded from off to her right. Virgil felt another female body fall across his legs from behind and he could tell whoever it was was being fucked hard because his whole body started to rock up and down with the rhythm. From all around, and from the other room, there were the sounds of music and grunting and groaning, beds and sofas creaking, bodies slapping together. Virgil just floated along in it until he came. Then he extricated himself and sat in the chair Pinky had occupied, watching.
From the other room there was a flash of blue-white light and a cackle of high, rather unfeminine laughter. Then there was another flash. In a moment a head of tousled brown hair popped into the doorway atop a skinny, big-busted, rather short body, and a flashbulb exploded in Virgil's face.
"Jesus Christ," he said, putting his hands over his blinking eyes. He regarded the girl with some annoyance. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Taking pictures. Polaroids. Haven't you ever been to one of these parties before?"
"No," Virgil admitted testily.
Pinky saw the flashes and heard her father's exclamation. She emerged from the pile and walked over. "Dad, this is Helen-Helen Beasley. She's Mr. Lopstone's secretary. She's sort of a picture freak, but don't worry. It's sort of a gas to see Polaroids of these parties, and we collect them all up and burn them when we're done. She gets off on it. She's the official photographer."
Virgil, somewhat mollified, leaned back and took a long hit on his scotch. Mr. Lopstone was a tall almost hunchbacked old man who worked in the college's accounting office. He was sort of a prototypical Ebenezer Scrooge with what Virgil supposed psychologists would call a persecution complex bordering on paranoia. Virgil was hardly surprised that someone who worked for him would be a little bit bent out of shape.
"Well, Professor, would you and Pinky like to pose for the candid camera?" Helen chirped gaily. Before Virgil could answer-it seemed that people were always doing things nowadays before he could object-Pinky had walked around to his side and stood up straight and reached down to hold up his cock as though it were a trophy fish. Helen moved around to get the huge cluster-fuck on the bed into the background and snapped off a picture.
"How would you like to do one going down on your Daddy?" Helen suggested to Pinky. Pinky obligingly levered Virgil's legs apart and bobbed her head down over his cock. It felt so good that Virgil closed his eyes and was only dimly aware of his eyelids lighting up with the pop of the next flashbulb. apparently it turned Pinky on too, because she grabbed his cock and led him by it over to the bed, where she picked out a more or less empty comer and pulled him down on top of her. He had just gotten her legs up and his cock into her when POP! another flashbulb went off. As Virgil began humping hard he whispered into Pinky's ear, "Are you sure those pictures don't go anywhere?"
"You'll see for yourself," Pinky said. "We have a big ceremony at the end of the party when we burn them."
"O.K.," Virgil said, accepting Pinky's judgment. He reached underneath her and grabbed her ass and they were off and fucking.
But the surprises for the evening were hardly over. Virgil was just getting his rocks off when there was a stir from the other room and then some excited whispering, and then a loud chorus of "Shhhh." He sensed a presence in the doorway to the bedroom, but he was too busy pounding away with Pinky, staring into her eyes to make sure she was right with him and soaking up the feeling of her warm pussy over his cock to bother to look up. But when they made it right together and Pinky's head started to thrash back and forth he thought he saw her eye catch on something in the doorway, and as soon as he had extracted every last bit of pleasure from her delightful honeypot he turned to look.
It was Julia. She was wearing the gold raw silk suit she had put on a few hours before, supposedly to leave for Boston. Her hair was immaculately combed and a shiny black patent leather purse was slung over her arm. It matched her black patent leather spike heels. She stood there with a blank expression on her face, drumming her polished red fingernails against the side of her purse.
At first Virgil let an expression cross his face that was reminiscent of that of a kid with his hand caught in a cookie jar. But that was just because at first he couldn't avoid making the connection that Julia was Pinky's mother and he had been caught in all his professorial dignity balling an eighteen-year-old in the middle of a dope-smoking orgy. Almost immediately he saw that Julia's expression was blank because she meant to give him just exactly the moment of shock she had given him, and now she was trying not to laugh. Her face broke into a sly grin as she tried to paste an expression of sternness over it and said, "All right, Mr. Joshua T. Gloomey Professor of English Literature, this time you and your sexual organ have gone too far!"
Virgil looked down at Pinky and grabbed her legs and threw them back up over her head, opening her come-soaked pussy to the view of all and sundry. Peering into it he said, "It doesn't look like I've gone too far." Then, glancing questioningly up at Pinky, "Have I gone too far?"
Pinky glanced over at her mother. "He hasn't gone too far at all," she said. 'In fact, he's gone just far enough.
Besides, what are you doing breaking into my wing of the house in the middle of a private party?"
"Well, child," Julia said, the roundness of her British accent making her speech seem all the more dignified, "if you will consult that rather modest memory bank of yours, it will promptly inform you that you invited me. In fact, if I remember correctly, you specified this exact time-quarter after nine-and speculated that if in fact I arrived just now, I might be treated to the rather awesome but not altogether unpleasing spectacle of your father balling the hell out of you."
Virgil had been had. He shook his head helplessly and laughed, and stood up. He felt as if things were somewhat unequal with him naked and Julia dressed, and he proceeded to divest her of her pocketbook and lead her over to the edge of the bed. Roberta and Pinky helped with her shoes while Virgil carefully removed her suit jacket and hung it in Pinky's closet. Julia smothered a few mock protests as her clothing melted away, mostly for the benefit of the rest of the party, which had gathered around to watch the proceedings. When her enormous breasts burst out of her small, tight-fitting bra, there was something of a suppressed cheer. And when Virgil lifted her legs and Pinky stripped off her panties there was an enthusiastic round of applause. Throughout the ceremony Virgil was aware of Helen popping away with what on inspection seemed to him to be a particularly large and clumsy looking version of a Polaroid camera. He suspected that her boss didn't pay her enough to get a new one. When Julia was stark naked Pinky cried, "I think the master and mistress of the house are obliged to give a command performance!"
There were cheers and hoots and howls all around. Virgil saw Jeff and a basketball player friend of his named Hank moving toward Julia and in a moment his wife was borne aloft on their shoulders with five or six other sets of hands getting into the act, pretty much as an excuse to get acquainted with Julia's body on a more tactile level. Virgil had no idea where they were going but Doris and Bertha and a few others crowded around him as Pinky led the way, and he found himself in the middle of a procession headed for the dining room.
The dining room table was immense, a twelve-foot oval of polished oak. It had once sat in the board room of a company Virgil had owned a few shares of stock in, and when the company predictably had gone bankrupt, Virgil had ended up with it. There were a dozen straight-back chairs with leather seats around it, and as Virgil watched he saw Pinky directing half a dozen people bringing folding chairs and more chairs from the kitchen and study. But his mind was really blown when two guys-one of them a stocky, young-looking boy Virgil did not know and another, a thin, hard-looking type with steel-rimmed glasses named Jerry-came down the stairs led by Pinky, carrying a single bed mattress from the guest room. They slid the mattress on top of the table and Jeff and Hank placed Julia on it, and then the crowd gathered round, drinks in hand, and crossed thenlegs and chatted to each other as if they were about to see the curtain rise on a new Broadway musical.
Julia sat cross-legged on the mattress. Virgil thought she looked marginally confused. She undoubtedly had gotten something she hadn't exactly bargained for. But Pinky whipped out her little plastic bag of marijuana and her packet of papers and, bowing right and left, proceeded to glue at least half a dozen papers together. When she had the papers glued together she emptied what Virgil thought would have to be at least five joints worth of her fifty-dollar an ounce Colombian tops into it, and rolled it up into a huge cigar. It gave off billowing clouds of smoke and snapped, crackled, and popped like the sound of Rice Krispies amplified fifty times. She offered it to Julia, who took an overly ambitious drag on it and turned red, and spit out the smoke, coughing and choking. Virgil was a little more cautious but still he could not hold the huge lungful of acrid, resinous smoke in his lungs for more than a few seconds before he at once laughed and choked. The cigar circled the room three times, burning like a forest fire at first, filling the room with an incredibly blue haze, and after a while burning more slowly. After his fourth hit on it, Virgil was sailing right out of his skin.
Now people began to tap their feet lightly on the floor, demanding that the performance start. Helen was dragging her Polaroid after her, climbing barefooted on breakfronts and heavy sidetables and chairs, trying to get the best possible angles. The assembled multitudes commenced to clap lustily. Julia, beautiful and poised as ever, bowed to them regally. She reminded Virgil of movies he had seen portraying Cleopatra. She stood up on the mattress, spread her feet, squatted down and took her breasts in her hands, and reached around in a full circle. Then she stood up straight, bowed again, and lay down flat on her back.
Somebody put a chair in front of the table for Virgil and he used it as a stepladder to climb up. He walked over to where Julia's form was swirling in and out of a dizzy haze of smoke and stood over her. Her body looked very far away, as though he were seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope. But it also looked pretty damn good, and as he decided he'd better let himself down on it before he fell down, Julia raised her knees and spread her legs and reached down to open up her cunt, and suddenly Virgil's rod, which had been in a state of total collapse since his tumble with Pinky, jumped to life.
Some clown at the side of the table jumped up and in a shouted whisper cried, "O.K., let me hear a fuck cheer, a fuck cheer! Ready? F-U-C-K! F-U-C-K! F-U-C-K! YAY, FUCK!" Virgil had never fucked to a footballtype cheer before, nor had he ever inserted his organ into someone who was giggling at the time as Julia was. Julia was floating around someplace in a giddy cloud of her own, but somehow she seemed very real to Virgil as he went down on top of her. Her skin was soft and warm and her arms opened wide and wrapped around him, and as the tip of his cock pressed up against the opening of her hole she jerked up and down and tickled her clit with it.
"Mmmmmm," responded the assembled multitudes. Virgil thought he was the one who ought to be saying "Mmmmmm," and so he did, and Julia said "Unh!", and then sucked his cock deep into her. Vaguely Virgil wondered whether the feeling of absurdity that he and Julia seemed to share while still being prepared to try for that elusive ghost of the perfect fuck in public was what made her seem much more human, much more present. As soon as they began fucking she stuck her legs straight up in the air and pointed her feet at the ceiling, which Virgil knew was a good sign. She had not betrayed any great passion up till now, but suddenly she locked her eyes into his and took his head in her hands.
The audience quieted down considerably and started to watch Virgil and Julia closely. Virgil had not seen Jennifer before-he guessed she had been under the pile he had passed in the first room-and was rather surprised to see her here. He guessed it had taken quite an effort of seduction on somebody's part to get her to drop her rather formal facade, not to mention her bellbottoms. But she was sitting in the middle of the table, her elbow on her knee, and her chin in her hand, staring with unconcealed fascination at Virgil's organ as it pumped and out of his wife's hole. Now she saw Virgil glance at her quickly and focus his eyes between her legs, and she obligingly spread them and reached her finger down to start working away at her clit. All over the room people started to put their hands on each other, staring all the while at the spectacle on the tabletop. Virgil decided to ignore the spectators and get down to business. For some reason he felt as if Pinky was acting as a sort of bridge between him and Julia, and although he thought it would be very weird if they could really get off together among all these people in this bizarre situation when they could hardly ever do it alone in their own bed, he somehow felt Julia fucking along with him and trying to pick up his tempo. For an instant his stoned mind replaced Julia with Pinky. The feeling was very similar. Julia was clutching him tightly and rubbing her breasts against his chest, thrashing back and forth, and pulling at his cock with the soft, pliant inside of her cunt. If only she and Virgil could reach the same point Virgil had reached with Pinky-the point at which they were each balling along with the knowledge that the other's orgasm, whenever it came, would set them off.
Julia reached her hand around and began to stroke Virgil's ass crack, fingering his hole gently and sending liquid streams of pleasure throughout his body. He climbed up higher on her, digging her knees into the mattress deeper as he filled her thighs up with his. Pinky had disappeared from the room for a few seconds, and now she returned to stand behind Jennifer, reaching her arms over to fondle the slim girl's firm, nicely upswept breasts. The sounds of music emanated from Virgil's stereo in his living room. Forest Flower. Pinky definitely had something in mind.
Virgil was humping hard on Julia now, and the squishing sounds of his rod plunging in and out of her wet, grasping pussy filled the room along with the sounds of their heavy breathing and the little cries that Julia gave when Virgil came down just right on her clit.
With every stroke Julia dug her fingernails into his ass cheeks and rammed him into her harder at just the right instant.
The room started to spin as the hard-driving pace of their fuck combined with the immense amount of marijuana they had smoked to make Virgil dizzy. Everything around Julia became a blur. The mattress disappeared from beneath her, and she was falling through thin air, drifting in outer space. Virgil buried his face in the hollow of her neck and smelled the faint, flowery scent of her perfume through the earthy woman odor of her sweat and cunt juice. He felt his skin rubbing against hers in a hundred places, and at every point stars of pleasure burst and rained out bits of fire.
He felt his body being stretched out, dissolved in the void of outer space along with Julia's, and he felt its pieces reaching a limit of dispersion after which they would suddenly come racing, catapulting, plummeting, smashing back together again in a huge explosion of reunification. Every movement he made, Julia responded to, and every movement she made he responded to, until they were both moving so perfectly together that the dialogue became a monologue. Now they were telling each other, "Yes, that's right, we're getting there!" They! were urging each other on, stoking the fires of each other's passion, grinding and rubbing and thrusting and pounding and stroking at each other. The table was creaking and all around them now people were getting together themselves, locking into the spontaneously choreographed dance of erotic abandonment that was taking place before them. But Julia and Virgil were to tally oblivious. Years of bitterness and resentment, of failure and separation, were lost millions of miles behind as they streaked toward a monstrous orgasm. Virgil's lungs sucked in huge gulps of air as the muscles on the insides of his thighs hardened, and he gritted his teeth as he shoved down on Julia's shoulders to ram her up even harder against him. Julia felt the pre-orgasmic shocks spreading that final, enormous tension through his body. That was enough for her. Virgil had without words told her, "I'm ready if you're ready, and I know you are."
Julia felt her orgasm slam into her like a hurricane wave. She felt her cunt opening like a huge whirlpool to suck Virgil deep, deep, deep in, to milk his come out of him with convulsive, irresistible surges. And then, like a spike smashed into a huge timber with the single stroke of a pile driver, his rod speared into the center of her and stuck.
A river burst through a dam, and the milky white waters burst through in a magnificent roar of ecstatic freedom. Virgil seemed to melt away and flow completely out of himself as his cock sprayed hot jets of come. He became Julia, and Julia became him. On and on the orgasm went, in a wild din of flailing limbs and high, sharp cries.
Virgil had no idea how long they lay there, lodged together, lost in the forgetfulness of total orgasm. When gradually the surroundings began to creep back between new waves of orgasm he was aware only of the strains of Forest Flower drifting to them through an awed hush.
After many minutes somebody moved. It was Pinky. She crawled up on the table and lay beside them and put her arms around both of them. "Wow," she whispered. "That's all I can say-Wow!"
Then she got up. She stood on the table and put her hands on her hips and announced, "Well, I guess they showed us a thing or two. Anybody for some more booze-another joint-some more erotic festivities?"
The party spread all over the house. Virgil and Julia stayed close together for most of the night, recalling with disbelief their incredible experience. But toward the end of the party, as people started to drift away, a thought came to Virgil. He sought out Pinky and said, 'I'd like to see some of those pictures Helen took. Where is she?"
Pinky was lying on a throw rug in her bedroom in a complete daze. "Helen? Oh, yeah, Helen. Shit, I haven't seen her in a while. You didn't see her when you came through the other room and the kitchen?"
"No," Virgil assured her.
'Well, she could be anyplace in the house-I think there are even people scrambling around in the attic-or she could even be out on the back lawn or wandering around in the woods with people."
This didn't make Virgil terribly happy. He left Julia to join Roberta and Bertha and Hank in a free-for-all on Pinky's bed and went around looking. Jennifer told him she'd seen Helen forty-five minutes before sitting on the back porch. She'd gone out and taken a look at some of the pictures Helen had been looking at, and reported that they had been nothing short of spectacular. "She's really a weird chick, on the whole," Jennifer said. "She never gets into anything at these parties. Sure, she takes her clothes off, but all she does is wander around taking pictures. Every once in a while she disappears with them. Maybe she's going to jerk off."
Virgil hoped that was what it was. He talked to several others who had seen Helen and her pictures, and none of them knew where she had gone. But they were quite certain that she had not destroyed them yet. Virgil searched the house from top to bottom, even taking the trouble to find the keys to two locked closets. Then he put on his clothes and searched the yards and went back through the woods all the way to the pasture. When he returned, and there was no further news of her, he searched out Pinky and Julia and with a complete knowledge of what it meant, told them, "She's gone-with all the pictures."
CHAPTER 7
Pinky tried to call Helen for the rest of the night. At five in the morning she and Virgil drove over to the small brick apartment house on the other side of town where Helen had a single gabled room on the fourth floor. Her apartment was dark and she didn't answer her bell. They went back home and went to sleep.
Virgil was awakened at ten o'clock by the long, insistent ringing of the telephone. Although Julia and Pinky had tried to stop him from worrying about the pictures, and had told him he was being silly to be so worried, he knew that Julia did not value her position at the college as highly as he valued his, and that she tended to be almost as naively optimistic about people as her daughter. When he answered the phone, he had no doubt as to who it was going to be.
"Hello? Is this Professor Blakesley?" A flat, highpitched, rather firm female voice asked.
"Yes, this is Virgil Blakesley."
This is Helen-you remember-I was present at your house last night."
Virgil said, "Unh-huh," as he thought to himself, "Present at your house'-that sounds very weird.
"We both know what was going on there, you and I, don't we?" the voice said emotionlessly.
"Most people know what's going on at places where they are present, more or less," Virgil returned dryly.
"Well, you may be surprised to know that even though I was there and I seemed in a way to be participating, I did not approve. I think you should know that I have been doing my own private research on deviant sexual behavior for some time now. I have found it all but intolerable among the younger people, but then I had tried to keep a scientifically objective outlook on my research, remembering that after all, young people will experiment and can not be expected to have the maturity to realize that sometimes they are doing horrible and disgusting things."
Virgil was beginning to realize that Helen was a little bit crazy. He kept silent and waited. She went on. "But last night, when I saw you-copulating ... with your own eighteen-year-old daughter!"
"Step-daughter," Virgil corrected.
"You've adopted her, and anyhow, that's beside the point. It is the firm duty of any parent who suspects that his child is engaging in deviant behavior of the kind I witnessed last night to discipline that child strongly. When adults look the other way, that is cowardly. When they actually condone, then it's digsusting. But when they participate, and lead their children on in these revolting practices, that is the most despicable, revolting thing of all! I mean-your daughter sucking on your penis! You and your wife copulating on your dining room table in front of a whole crowd of people! Mr. Blakesley, it's enough to make one lose one's scientific objectivity."
"No doubt," Virgil muttered. "How much?"
The way he said it brought Helen up short. "How much? How much for what?"
Virgil knew because she said "for" that they were both talking about the same thing. But he said, "Forget it. Anyhow, why do you tell me all this?"
"Because, Professor Blakesley, I would like you to admit to the totally decadent nature of your activities, in fact your life in general, and repent!" Virgil once more remained silent, waiting for the rest. "And." Here it came. "I think that you should also make a large contribution toward supporting my research so that others like you can also be brought to see the error of their ways."
Virgil restrained himself from repeating "How much?" in the same tone as before. With crazy people, he knew, you could sometimes get somewhere by playing their game and babying them along. If only he could stall her for a while, hire some private detectives to track her down, and get those damn pictures back! He knew the ways of blackmailers, and he knew that unless he surprised her he would never stand a chance of shaking loose from her. If he gave her a good big hunk of money and she turned over the pictures to him, he could be damn sure she'd have copies. Insurance against a rainy day-or against the day when the money he had given her ran out. "That's very interesting," he said as flatly as possible. "What do you suggest I do?"
"Well I suggest," she said, "that you come tonight to the little Pentecostal church that just opened up downtown on Water Street near Willow. I suggest that you come fully prepared to repent of your sins and receive the Holy Spirit."
Jesus Christ Almighty, Virgil whispered to himself as he covered the mouthpiece of the phone and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He still had the receiver to his ear, and so he heard very clearly as she continued, "And I suggest that you bring a $2,500 gift to the church and another $2,500 contribution to me so that I can continue my research a while longer."
"Hmmmm," Virgil hummed into the phone, filling up the silence while his mind raced furiously. "And what will happen to the research that you've done so far?"
"Do you mean the research that I've done over the whole last year, or only the research that was done at your party last night?"
"I'm mostly concerned about the research you did at the party last night, but I'm also concerned about any other research you may have done on myself, my wife, or my stepdaughter."
"Oh, well," Helen said, assuming an almost breezy manner suddenly, "I understand your concern. You are afraid that someone would get ahold of the pictures that you wouldn't want to get a hold of them-like the newspapers, or the students, or the administration of the college."
"That had entered my mind."
"I can understand your concern, and if you are ready to be truly repentent tonight-and whether you are truly repentent or just faking I will be able to tell through certain powers of divination that have been granted to me-you really shouldn't be penalized for what has happened in the past. You shouldn't even have to be afraid that someday you might be. So if you are truly repentent, and if you choose to make the donations that I have suggested-in cash-then I will see to it that the pictures I took at the party last night are returned to you. However, if you also wish to obtain certain other photographs which are in my possession, photographs of Pinky at other parties and of your wife in certain compromising situations with other women as well as other men, I suggest you make another donation of $2,500. At least $2,500. You have no idea of the time and trouble I have to put into this research, and of course if I return it to you I will never be able to use it-say, for publication. I know $7,500 is a lot of money, but I'm sure you understand the value of what you would be purchasing."
"I understand it reasonably well," Virgil said. "But really, I can't come up with $7,500. I have-" he calculated quickly how to structure his lie so there would be no break in his speech-"$3,000 in a savings account and that's all. I am sure you are aware that college professors are not by tradition rich men."
"Oh, yes, I realize that," Helen said, her voice becoming hard again, "but I am also aware that your wife was once married to a very rich man, and I believe that he has been quite generous with her. Also I have been given to understand that she was independently wealthy before she met him. So it doesn't seem to me that it should be so difficult for the two of you together to raise $7,500. At least."
Virgil saw that there was no use in arguing over the amount. He didn't have any intention of paying it anyway, so he gave up. But as Helen said, "I have to hang up now. Can I expect to see you at the church at, let's say, eight o'clock?"
That gave Virgil ten hours to try to get a line on Helen. It wasn't enough. "You know," he said, "I have a very important department meeting tonight starting at seven o'clock and running until perhaps ten or eleven. Couldn't we make it tomorrow?"
"I'm beginning to be very unsure about the sincerity of your repentence," Helen snapped back. "Besides, I am preparing some of my research for publication and I have to know by tonight what I will be free to use and what I must dispense with. So you be there." She hung up.
Julia had awakened just at the end of the conversation. "What's that, dear?" she said, nodding toward the phone and narrowing her eyes at Virgil's grim look.
"That was Helen," he said. "She wants $7,500 for the pictures she took last night plus other pictures she says she has of Pinky-and of you. She wants it by tonight."
"Bullshit!" Julia snorted. "BULLSHIT!" She was furious. "Well that scrawny little bent-out-of-shape bitch isn't going to get a goddamn nickle out of usl She'll be lucky if I don't scratch her fucking eyes out! Who the fuck does she think she is!" Julia swung out of the bed and picked up a pillow and slammed it to the floor. She raved around the room for ten minutes, throwing her arms wildly and hollering.
"Well, what do you suggest we do?" Virgil asked when she had calmed down a little.
"What do I suggest we do? I suggest that you show up at that church tonight and tell her to shove it right up her shitty little ass hole. That's what I suggest. Tell her that blackmail is a pretty goddamn heavy crime and besides that, if you don't get those pictures back you'll break her scrawny goddamn neck. Shit, I'll go with you! I'll kick that little tin pussy of hers all the way to the river!"
When Pinky heard the news she was incredulous, but after her disbelief faded and she began to put together some of the things she remembered about Helen, her reaction was much the same as her mother's. Only she saw a certain logic in Virgil's insistence that they try to track her down before eight o'clock that night. I'll get every goddamn kid that was at that party, and every goddamn friend of mine, and we'll find that sour-cunted little bitch if it's the last thing we do. And well get those fucking pictures, too. I'll send Hank and Jeff over to the church to scout things out and see if maybe she's hiding someplace there already. And I'll have some other guys go over to her house and tear that motherfucker apart. I'll have all the hotels in town checked and I'll have people cruising around on the streets. I'll talk to everybody that knows her and find out where she's likely to hang out if she's not at home. If that doesn't work, I'll have about ten guys stake out the place when you go in tonight and just for the fun of it I'll have them bring a few baseball bats and chains, and when you've got the pictures, we'll take back the money."
Virgil didn't much like the idea of the chains and baseball bats, but he liked the rest of it.
"Go to work," he and. I'm going to hire a couple of private detectives to see what they can do. And-when you talk to the people who know her, you might try to find out at the same time if there's anything we can get out of her. I mean besides blackmail. Like, what are her own sexual habits? Does she have any police record? What's her family background? Things like that."
For the next ten hours they did all they could to track down Helen, but there was no trace of her. Jeff and Hank went to the church and found it to be a tiny cement block structure with the total area of no more than half a dozen outhouses. It had a metal door chained and secured by two case-hardened pick-proof locks. Its two tiny windows were barred on the outside and sealed with metal plates from the inside? They listened but they couldn't hear anything. They reported to Virgil that over the door was a small but dramatic sign painted in flaming red and orange letters on a plain white wooden board: Church of the Holy Spirit-Pentecostal. They had asked a few passers-by in the street what they knew of the church, but even after they spotted an old invalid lady across the street who informed them that she sat in her window practically all day and all night, they could find no one who had ever seen anyone come or go from it. From everything they could find out, it was a church with no activities and no congregation. "Just as I thought," Virgil said. "It's a front. There's probably a darkroom in there and that's it. Could you find out whether it had any cellar?"
"No," Jeff said. "It stands on the comer of a lot occupied by an old deserted shoe factory. I couldn't even track down who owns the property. It could be she's just taken it over and isn't even paying any rent on it. There could be a tunnel to the cellar of the factory-it's only about twenty feet away-but it doesn't look like it. I don't know what the "church" was originally used for. It just sits out there. There's no sidewalk to it or anything."
At eight o'clock that night Virgil, with a sackful of hundred dollar bills, drove to the comer of Willow and Water and parked beneath a bright streetlight. He knew that Hank and Jeff and Jerry and half a dozen other strong, healthy, pretty rough athlete-types were strung out around the church, in alleys, behind garbage cans, and in bushes on the overgrown lot.
As soon as he saw the door he saw that the chains had been removed. He walked slowly up to it and knocked. It was still firmly bolted from the inside, but at his knock he heard a latch spring open and the door fell back a few inches. He pushed it open and, looking right and left to make sure he wasn't going to be ambushed, stepped inside.
The tiny structure was empty. A single candle sat burning on a plain cement altar at its front, beneath a cross made of two thick tree branches lashed together and hung over it. In front of the candle was a note, and pinned to it was a picture. It was an excellent photograph of Virgil sitting in a chair with Pinky sitting on his lap. It was taken from the side. Virgil remembered it. It clearly showed both of their faces, and just as clearly showed his cock about halfway up her cunt. The note said, "I am nearby, and through the powers the Spirit has given me I am even now reading your thoughts. In a moment I will have decided whether you are truly repentent. If I think you truly are, the lid to the altar will fall open. You will drop your contribution into it. When I have assured myself that it is the amount we agreed upon and all in order"-that the bills aren't marked, Virgil thought-"I will send the research to you through the air vent in the ceiling." The note was unsigned. Virgil looked up and saw a round black hole fitted with a corrugated pipe in the ceiling toward the back of the church.
She really had him. He had expected a face-to-face transfer, probably with Helen surrounded by three or four burly goons. He had been nervous about that because for all he knew she wasn't working on her own. She might be an employee of the syndicate, and in that case her guards would be armed. But now he didn't know what to do.
He pulled a pad and pencil out of his jacket pocket and scrawled a note. "I am not going to drop $7,500 into a hole on the chance that you will then give me your re search.' You must make some arrangements whereby I can see the pictures and know that I will have them if I turn the money over to you." He actually wondered for a second whether he should try to make some repentent thoughts, or whether the altar would open at all. But his instincts proved right. After a few seconds the altar top collapsed inward. The candle blew out as it plummeted downward through a long chute. Virgil wadded the note up and dropped it into the hole. He waited for fifteen minutes, then went outside and walked up and down to show Pinky's friends that he was all right, and went back in for another fifteen minutes. Nothing happened. He picked up his sack of hundred dollar bills, went to his car, and drove home.
"What do you think is going to happen?" Pinky asked when they gathered with fifteen or twenty people in their dining room to discuss what to do next Virgil had learned that Jeff had managed to get inside the old shoe factory and make sure it was vacant, but he had been unable to get into the cellar where they suspected Helen had been hiding. Virgil knew it would be un-likely, even if Helen called again and arranged the transfer the way he had requested it, that she would use the church a second time. They continued to search for her and gather information about her all day.
At about five o'clock in the afternoon a distant friend of Pinky's came up with something interesting. She had known Helen as a girl when they had lived on adjoining farms about twenty miles from the college town, and she had said she always suspected Helen of doing strange things with animals. Helen's mother had been rumored to have been a prostitute who had "gone straight" and married a farmer about six years younger than she, only to be thrown out of the house and divorced by him when he learned of her past.
"Strange things with animals-that's weird," Pinky said. "Listen, Helen does have a German Shepherd. I never heard anybody say that she did strange things with it, but I know that she spends a lot of time at home by herself with that dog."
"If that fucking bitch is getting it from anybody, it has to be a dog." Doris said.
"We ought to follow that up," Virgil said. "Is there anybody here that has a camera with a long-range lens?"
Jerry spoke up. "Sure," he said. "I've got a zoom lens that goes up to sixty power. If you had your windows open at night I could count Julia's cunt hairs from a block away."
"That won't do any good," said Jennifer, who had been to Helen's house once. "She keeps her shutters closed tight."
"And anyhow, she isn't home," Jeff said. "And neither is the dog, or I'm sure we would have heard it when we tried to get into her place. You know, she had some pretty fancy locks, including a police lock, I think on that damned door."
"Wherever she is, she's got that dog with her," Julia said. "And if that's where she gets her sex, she's going to be getting it pretty often."
"Which gets us back to the original question-where the fuck is she?" Virgil concluded.
"Now wait a minute," Pinky said, slapping her hands on the table. "How about the farm? How about the farm that this chick was talking about? Does her father still run it? Might she'd be hiding out there?"
"Jerry, get your camera" Virgil said. "If she's out there, and if she's into what we think she's into, we're going to find out tonight."
Two hours later Virgil and Julia and Pinky and Jeff and Jerry and Hank rumbled down a dirt road in Jeff's old Chewy. They had a map that Pinky had come by somehow that showed pretty much the location and layout of the farm, and they had learned that Helen's father had put it up for sale and had gone to live in Chicago. They parked the car off the dirt road in the entrance to a dump and walked the half-mile to the farmhouse. There was a dim light burning from behind closed shutters in a second story window in the rear. Otherwise the landscape was silent and the house was dark.
"What do you say we do?" Jerry asked. "There's no way I can get an angle into that window that I can see."
"Maybe we ought to try to sneak in somehow and surprise her at it," Jeff suggested.
"No good," Virgil said. "You're not going to get a picture of her doing anything crazy with her dog ... Hey, wait a minute! Isn't that a car over by the barn?"
It was-parked under the overhanging boughs of an enormous lilac bush.
"Helen doesn't own a car," Pinky said. "Let's go have a look at it."
They circled far behind the barn and came up on the car on a side away from the house. It was a relatively late model Pontiac. Julia was the first to spot the college parking sticker on its rear windshield. And then Virgil thought to himself, "This car looks familiar for some reason." And then it came to him. "Hey," he whispered, "this is Julian Lopstone's car!"
"Do you think he's in on this?" Julia gasped disbelievingly.
That old bastard is just weird enough to think up something like this. But we can't really tell until we see him. Maybe somehow she's just managed to borrow his car. Anyhow, our problem now is to find some way to see what's going on in that damned room." Virgil circled away and looked back from the house to try to imagine whether he could climb a drainpipe or get a shot into the roof from the top of the barn. But he saw that the slats of the shutters were slanting up slightly and that meant that only a shot from above would be able to produce a clear picture of what was going on. Then he spotted a huge oak tree on a hill a hundred yards behind the house. He turned to Jerry. "Were you kidding about being able to count cunt hairs from a block away with that thing?"
"Sure wasn't," he replied. "Why, what do you think?"
Virgil pointed out the oak to Jerry and he said, "Sure, that's close enough. It'll be hard as hell to get high enough up it and get a clear shot through the leaves. But I'll give it a try."
Virgil and Julia stayed near the house, waiting to see whether either Helen or her boss would emerge, and the rest of the group trudged off to make the attempt.
A full hour later Jeff came racing back with Pinky close behind, and Hank and Jerry trotting along messing with the can of film and whispering excitedly. "We got it!" Jeff said. "Jerry couldn't get himself high enough up in the tree, but your crazy fucking daughter shinnied up a branch about an inch thick and about fifty feet from the ground and took a peek. She had to wait a long time but after a while, sure enough, there was old Helen lying on her back on the floor with her goddamn dog on top of her humping away like crazy, and for a bonus, Lopstone was standing over her with his fly down beating his meat like crazy. If these pictures come out, we can kick Helen so hard in her holier-than-thou little cunt that it'll squash that doggie's dick to a flatworm."
Jerry went home to develop the pictures in his darkroom and the rest of them went back to the house. When they got there a nasty surprise awaited them. Wally was sitting on the front steps turning something around in his hands. When he saw the car drive up he leapt up and walked hurriedly over to them. As Virgil got out with a questioning look on his face Wally took off his glasses and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. "Hey, Virgil, something really strange is going on," he said. "Look at this goddamn picture I got in my mailbox at the college today."
Virgil looked at it. It was a picture of him and Pinky and Julia, naked, lying together on a mattress. Virgil knew the mattress had been on top of the dining room table and the table had been surrounded by people, but all that had been cropped out
"What the hell's the meaning of that?" Wally wanted to know. "I mean, I didn't know you three were into that kind of thing...." Wally sputtered a little bit because he had been at Pinky's original orgy but didn't think Virgil knew. "But how the hell does a picture of it end up in my mailbox?"
Virgil clapped a hand on Wally's shoulder. "Simple, my dear man," he sail, "there was a party here two nights ago similar to the one you attended in Pinky's wing of the house a few weeks ago. Helen Beasley, that girl who works in the accounts office, was there, and she got her kicks by taking some pictures. Only now it turns out that she's some kind of religious fanatic, or doing a really good job of faking it and she wants $7,500 for the set of pictures she took, plus some others she claims she has.
"Jesus Christ," Wally said. "I think I saw her hanging around that party I was at! Only I didn't notice that she had a camera!"
Now Virgil was really worried. 'Is that so?" He turned to Pinky. "Was Helen there?"
"Yeah, for a little while," Pinky replied. "But she wandered out again pretty fast. I didn't see any camera. Come to think of it, I think I saw her again later in the evening."
"That doesn't sound so good for you, Wally," Virgil commented.
"Well, shit," Wally said hopefully, "nobody saw her with her goddamn camera! And you couldn't miss that camera either from what you say of it."
Jerry broke in. "I hate to give you bad news, but this girl looks like a real pro to me and I doubt that she has only one camera. I wouldn't be surprised if the Polaroid was especially designed to make two prints instead of one. She probably has a whole bunch of other cameras too. They make really tiny ones, and even ones with infrared flashes that allow you to take pictures in the dark. I would say offhand that everybody who's been near her at one of these parties is in the same boat as Virgil and Julia and Pinky."
Now Virgil turned to Wally. "Do you know anybody else who received copies of this picture?"
Wally didn't. But that night Virgil received a few phone calls and made a few more, and found out that everyone in the department from the chairman on down had received it.
"And this is only the beginning," Virgil sighed that night as he lay in bed between Pinky and Julia. "Be cause although that picture doesn't show any sexual activity, and although the table and the other figures were cropped out of it, you can be sure that the spicier pictures will get around pretty quickly if that fucking bitch doesn't get what she wants. I sure as hell hope that those pictures of her getting laid by her dog turn out and that she's sane enough to be scared by the fact that we have them. Right now this business is confined to one not terribly awful picture that's been circulated among fifteen or twenty select people. We've got to get to her before she prints up a couple of thousand copies of Pinky blowing me and leaflets the town with them from an airplane. I just hope to hell that she's going to call again, thinking that she scared us enough that we'll give her the money this time on her own terms."
An hour later Jerry came over with the photographs. They were knockouts. From a distance of a hundred yards the powerful lens had caught every detail, and the louvers of the shutters at that angle were no more than thin lines that obscured nothing of the interior. Pinky had shot off an entire roll of thirty-six pictures in rapid succession. About ten of them hadn't turned out, but they were still left with a good two dozen juice shots, most of them including the dog, Helen, and her boss.
"Son of a bitch," said Julia when she saw them "And she had the nerve to give you that long spiel about morality and repentence!"
"Well, I told you, she's crazy," Virgil said. "She's stark raving loony. How the hell she concealed it for so long is what puzzles me."
They didn't hear anything from Helen that night-but they did hear from other people. A lot of them. Rumors about the pictures had begun to circulate around the campus, and although most of the people who received them said they had already put them in envelopes and sent them back to Virgil, and were of the attitude that it was a rather bad practical joke, a few demanded explanations and a few called him some healthy names. But as rumors about the pictures spread among the university faculty Virgil started to get other kinds of calls. Who had taken that picture? Had he known it had been taken? And-was he being blackmailed? Was that the idea? Virgil refused to answer these questions until one of them, a young graduate assistant in the Political Science department, admitted to being homosexual and to having been at a party at which Helen was present. He had not seen her take any pictures, but that morning he had received a very incriminating one in the mail showing him and an influential visiting professor from another university going at it together. A note had been with it demanding that he repent and ordering him to take $5,000 to the Pentecostal church in return for which he would receive six more pictures she claimed to have of him and their negatives.
As the evening went on Virgil began to get more calls. Howard Nathan, a wealthy architect in town who eventually admitted that he and his wife belonged to their own orgy circle, called with a story similar to the graduate assistant's. Only Helen wanted $10,000 from him. She had also alluded to Virgil's fate in her note, telling him that he could call any member of the English department to verify it if he wanted to. And then there was Robert Storm, a friend of Nathan's and a surgeon at the hospital, whom Helen's camera had caught in some very indiscreet positions with his nurses. How she had got the pictures was a complete mystery to him, because he didn't even know her.-And there was a lawyer named Sal Magliani who was quite open about being a member of Nathan's orgy group. By the fifth or sixth call Virgil knew that Helen had been doing her "research" assiduously for at least a year and a half and that she had suddenly decided to put the pressure on everyone at once. He was sure Lopstone had masterminded the whole thing. He counted up all the people involved and the money demanded of them and it came to over $50,000. And he was sure that there were many, many more.
Helen seemed to go after highly paid professional people. But why she and her boss had picked him as the one to put the pressure on first he didn't understand. Unless they felt that they had more on him than on anyone else or were counting on milking Julia's independent fortune for a good long time. If they had done their homework they could easily have found that Julia was worth somewhere between half and three-quarters of a million dollars, depending on the state of the economy and the stock market.
After a while it occurred to Virgil that it would be a good idea if all the people who were under the threat of Helen's "research" should get together and decide what to do and pool their resources to do it. If they all shared his thinking about blackmail in general and agreed that nothing could be more foolish than to give a blackmailer even the tiniest smell of money, and if they appreciated what he himself had on Helen, perhaps they could still beat her. She hadn't made contact with him, but they had appointments with her, and they could use them to slip her copies of the pictures. After that, it just might be a standoff. He started making phone calls.
The first one he made was to Howard Nathan, the architect, because he seemed to have been the most indignant and would be most likely to fight back. Nathan said that he didn't know yet how much of a scandal it would be if Helen's pictures of him and his wife were released and he hadn't made up his mind what to do about it. He did agree that they should all get together, and he suggested a house he had in the mountains about an hour and a half away as a good place to do it. Nathan called Sal, the lawyer, and one or two others on the list whom he knew that Virgil didn't. Since it was Saturday, Helen had not demanded money of anyone until the following Monday. That gave them all day Sunday to think and plan. After an exhausting evening on the phone Virgil counted sixteen people including himself, Julia, and Pinky who had agreed to meet at Howard Nathan's mountain retreat at eleven o'clock the following morning. In addition to Nathan and Magliani and Storm and their wives, and the Political Science assistant whose name was Donald Donaldson, there were also Elaine Olmstead, a partner in a brokerage house in town, Patricia Jackson, a black school principal, Jake Dougherty, a widower and owner of a large trucking company, Jake's daughter Diane, Larry Stimpson, another doctor, and his wife. Virgil asked Wally if he wanted to come, and he had Pinky call Marcia Milhauser and lay out the situation since she had been at Pinky's original orgy. But they hadn't received any communications from Helen-at least not yet and they decided not to come.
That night as Virgil got ready for bed he had time to reflect on his reactions to the blackmail threat for the first time since Helen had disappeared with the pictures. At first he thought his reactions-anger, fear, and bitterness-were only natural, and were the only ones he could have had. But when he thought to himself, "I never dreamed it could happen to me-I never thought I would do anything any blackmailer could take advantage of," he realized that the strength of Helen's hold over him came not really from anything he had done that she had photographed, but from a combination of his own latent guilt feelings about having had sexual relations with his stepdaughter and from the fact that others would certainly disapprove of them. He stood to lose a job and a social position which he had spent his whole life building. But as he tried to find whether there was really any reason for his suppressed guilt feelings, he began to become more resentful of society in general, because he could find no basis on which to decide that what he and Pinky and Julia had done was wrong. If other people-the townspeople, the president of the college, his colleagues-didn't like what he had done, it was none of their business anyway. He was beginning to think that most people who clung for dear life to a bunch of rules society had dreamed up for sexual morality quite possibly did so because they were unable to function sexually with success themselves, and wanted to lash out at those who could. He thought it quite possible that the combination of Helen's espoused evangelical puritanism and her own secret passion for bestiality was only an extreme example of what might be going on with thousands, perhaps millions of other people who could not meet the challenge of full and open sexual relationships with other human beings. Those few people Helen had sent pictures-who had harangued him on the phone-he had always suspected of being rather warped anyhow, of leading barren sex and love lives, and of turning what were basically good passions into twisted ones that served to harm other people in a way that his relationship with Pinky could not possibly do.
His thoughts wandered to Jake Dougherty, who he was sure Helen had somehow caught in bed with his own eighteen-year-old daughter. Virgil's case was slightly different since Pinky was not his natural daughter, but now he tried to find some way in which a reasonable person would condemn a man like Jake. It seemed to him that laws against incest had mainly sprung up to avoid the genetic consequences of inbreeding, which were the eventual production of retarded, crazy, or misanthropic people. But surely Jake's daughter was taking the pill, and surely there was no chance that they would ever produce offspring. So where was the justification for condemning them? Virgil couldn't see it. If Jake had anything nearly as beautiful a relationship as he had had with Pinky, why would anyone want to call him a deviate or a pervert and try to ruin him?
Of course Virgil had long since discarded the notion that Helen was truly interested in morality. Perhaps she did have some strange streak of religion in her, a sort of Angel of Judgment complex that her boss or whoever else was directing the whole plot took advantage of to use her. Maybe she really did think she was going to start some kind of Pentecostal church which would allow her to atone for her own bestial sins by causing thousands of others to be seized by the Spirit and repent. But one thing was for sure-she was also after money. It was a strange combination. It didn't exactly fit together. Anyhow, whatever the shape of Helen's bizarre psyche, Virgil had to decide how much he valued his job and his social position-whether he could afford to lose them, and what he would do if he did.
Suddenly he realized that in a way they had been a burden to him. He had always wanted to write novels. He was getting tired of teaching. He was losing patience with the endless empty meetings of the college bureaucracy. In his more whimsical moments, he now remembered, he had been tempted to quit and sell the house and buy a smaller one, perhaps on the seashore in Maine, and devote his time to writing. It was comforting to think that perhaps even if Helen did succeed in ruining him here some good might come out of it. He might be forced to do some of the things he really thought he should do.
He was still thinking in this vein when he heard the door downstairs close. The last of Pinky's friends had left. It was midnight, and they had to get up early in the morning. After a few minutes Julia and Pinky appeared together in the doorway.
IPull down the blinds and draw the shades," Julia said. "Pinky and I have decided that we need a little family togetherness in the midst of all this bullshit."
Virgil closed the bedroom up tight, wondering whether he could really get into sex at the moment while his mind was so preoccupied with other things. But his doubts left him as he removed his clothes and flopped down on the bed. Pinky romped up beside him and proceeded to unbutton her khaki Army surplus shirt and across the room Julia removed her clothes meticulously and hung them up in the closet. "They say that facing a common crisis always tends to draw people closer together," Pinky said. "We never have been much of a family, but after this we may not have any choice We may be all that we have left." She threw her shirt onto the floor and reached for the zipper of her patched jeans. "By the way, Daddy-I'm sorry I dragged you into all this. It was against your better judgment to go to that party in the first place, and I guess I shouldn't have sent Beth and Lillian in to seduce you. I just thought it would be a nice thing, but it didn't turn out very nice."
Julia, naked now, walked in a somewhat subdued fashion to the bedside. Virgil smiled up at her and she grinned back, and he realized that since that party they had become more husband and wife than perhaps they had ever been before. Pinky saw what he was thinking, and Virgil turned to her and nodded with contentment. It was a nice thing," he said. "Maybe it's just the breaks of the game that you always have to pay for anything nice you get out of this life. But in this case, I would say it was worth the price-whatever the price turns out to be."
Pinky, her jeans and panties now lying on the floor on top of her shirt, crawled over him to he on his right side as Julia climbed in on his left. He spread out his arms and slipped them under the warm, soft bodies on either side of him. He pulled them close and Pinky started nibbling at his ear while Julia stroked his chest and stomach gently. He moved his hands down until he was firmly clutching both of their asses-Julia's slim and hollow at the sides with that extra touch of droopy fullness at the rear, and Pinky's somewhat firmer, rounder, tighter. Pinky stuck her tongue into his ear and then reached out to turn his face to her. She kissed him on the mouth. Julia spread kisses over his chest, down over his abdomen, and as she finally reached his cock with her mouth her body turned and her pussy moved toward his face. Pinky reached out a hand, her tongue still in Virgil's mouth, to put a finger on Julia's clit, and rubbed gently up and down.
Soon Julia was pumping up and down on Virgil's cock, and Pinky was rubbing hard at her mother's clit, just a few inches from Virgil's face. Virgil drove his own hand up hard between Pinky's buttocks and felt her spread as he dove three fingers into her pussy. They worked away at each other gently at first, letting the sensual rhythms carry away their fears and anxieties. It was not long before hard squirming and heavy breathing began. Pinky rocked up and down on Virgil's finger and communicated her growing excitement to her mother by shoving three fingers up her hole as far as they could go and battering away at her clit with the palm of her band at the tempo of her own tense, hard movements. Julia in turn passed the growing electricity along to Virgil, bobbing up and down on his cock, sucking it hard, swirling it in circles, and occasionally letting it flop out of her mouth so she could jerk up and down on it with her hand while she sucked on his balls.
When they were all good and hot Julia let Virgil's cock drop out of her mouth and drew her cunt off of Pinky's finger and moved down to kneel above Virgil, facing his face and then squatting on his erect cock, driving it far up her. Virgil pulled Pinky around to sit on his face, looking toward her mother, and as she rubbed her clit over his wiggling tongue he reached up to spread the cheeks of her ass and insert a finger. Julia reached out with her left hand and grabbed Pinky's right breast and started massaging the nipple, and then bouncing it up and down. With her right hand she reached down to help Virgil's tongue on Pinky's clit, and Pinky rocked forward onto Julia's finger and then backward onto Virgil's tongue. When she rocked forward, Virgil shot his tongue far up her pussy and licked up her ass crack. Pinky reached out her own right hand to grab her mother's left breast and took the immense udder in her palm, rubbing it in circles. With her left hand she reached down and stuck out a finger and curled it up into Julia's clit, rubbing at it as Julia humped on Virgil's cock.
"Shit, does that feel good," Julia said, her long dark hair flying and her body working smoothly. "Pinky, that fucking finger on my clit feels so fucking good!"
Pinky shoved her ass back to get Virgil's tongue farther up its hole as her mother's finger whipped back and forth over her clit. Then she rocked back hard to wipe her pussy up across Virgil's chin, lips, nose, and kept on rocking back and forth, uttering little cries of pleasure. Virgil could feel her about to get off on his face and he could feel Julia about to get off on his cock and he was pumping hard and about to shoot an immense load into Julia. When Pinky suddenly broke into a long series of shuddering, grinding strokes across his face and Julia began jouncing up and down on his cock as though she was riding a jeep over a rutty country road, his insides turned warm and his crotch tingled and he let go.
Minutes later the three of them tumbled to an exhausted heap. Julia reached over and turned out the light, and they went to sleep.
CHAPTER 8
The drive up to the mountains the next day through the turning autumn leaves was pleasant and easy. They took Pinky's Porsche. With Virgil driving, the top down, and Pinky scrunched in behind the two front bucket seats, they proceeded easily through sunshine arcades of scarlet and gold, and it was almost enough to make Virgil forget what they were going for. With Julia reading off a set of directions that Nathan had given Virgil and trying to make sense out of them on a state road map, they took two wrong turns and did not arrive at the road that wound around Crystal Lake until quarter past eleven. Virgil was surprised to see that though the lake was a mile long and perhaps half a mile wide, clear and deep, there were not more than five houses visible around it. As he saw the first of them, a monstrous old Southern plantation style building with white columns, his expectations of a small, roughly made hunting and fishing lodge were replaced by somewhat more ostentatious ones. When they came upon a white shingle sign with Howard Nathan, Architect, on it before two pillars that guarded a thin macadam strip leading up a hillside away from the lake and saw across from it a low boathouse by the waterside that looked as though it had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, he began to realize that Nathan was a very successful man, and a very rich one.
Nathan's house was an impressive but tasteful study in hardwood beams and native stone set in poured concrete. As they rounded its circular drive and parked Pinky's Porsche behind a new Continental and took in half a dozen other luxury and sports cars, Virgil was glad he hadn't brought his old Volkswagen.
Virgil guessed the house had about fifteen rooms. In its center a twenty-foot glass panel showed off a winding wrought iron staircase that led to a second story and then up to a sort of turret that reminded him of the peak of a lighthouse.
Virgil knocked and a distinguished looking man of about forty-five with a hearty, weathered face and a salt and pepper beard opened it. He was holding a Bloody Mary in his hand and wearing a red satin smoking jacket. Behind him stood a slim, lively-looking bleach blonde in a white wrap-around dress that Virgil thought might possibly have been a very fancy bathrobe. The man stuck out his hand. "You must be Blakesley," he said. "Howie Nathan. Glad to meet you. This is my wife Joan."
"Glad to meet you," Virgil said. He liked Nathan's swift, firm handshake.
"Hi, Mr. Nathan," Pinky said. "I've seen a lot of your buildings. I really love your stuff. This is a fantastic house!" Nathan grinned at her and put his arm over her shoulder as he shook Julia's hand.
I'd show it off to you the way I always do to visitors if we weren't under such strange circumstances. The others are all here, all except for Patricia Jackson. They're in the dining room drowning their-whatever it is they have to drown-in Bloody Marys. Can I offer you some?"
He led them through a living room that was all chrome and glass tables and Eames chairs, potted plants and hand-woven oriental rugs. The feeling of opulence was almost overpowering. Off to his right Virgil could see a library with books from floor to ceiling, and then they passed through a sitting room with a stereo console complete with tuners and tape decks. Virgil noticed that there were switches for speakers all over the house, and even one for the boathouse. Then they passed into a dining room with a huge picture window that opened out over the lake and a breakfront prominently displaying a wide array of fine bone china. Around the solid teakwood table ten people were already seated and there were chairs for half a dozen more. Everyone looked up as they entered and Howie introduced them around. Then he said, "Well, I guess we may as well get started. We can fill Pat in when she gets here. Professor, if you don't mind, I'd like you to take over and sort of chair the meeting, since you're the organizer of this whole thing." He pointed Virgil to a seat at the head of the table. "I suppose you've had plenty of experience chairing meetings." He said that with a kind of sarcastically friendly tone that indicated he knew of how little use meetings were.
"I've chaired lots of meetings, all right," Virgil chuckled, "but about the most important thing they've decided was whether students should be allowed to have cats in their rooms." He sat down and glanced around. It was a very distinguished looking group. He was especially taken by two couples-Sal and Anne Magliani and Robert and Andrea Storm. The Magliani's were young-Virgil guessed about thirty. Sal was about five ten, with a handsome, somewhat round face and close-cropped black hair. He wore a powder-blue double breasted blazer. He seemed quick in manner and rather a dashing type. His wife was olive skinned and reminded Virgil of Sophia Loren. The Storms were older-Virgil guessed them at forty-two or three. Robert was the perfect picture of the brilliant surgeon and research doctor in the prime of his career. His face was angular, and his thick shock of medium length hair was prematurely gray, giving him a wise, experienced, professional appearance despite the almost boyish look of his smooth complexion. His skin was pale. It reminded Virgil of the fluorescent light he supposed the doctor worked under constantly, and made him feel that whatever Storm happened to be doing at a given time there were always microscopic photographs and chemical formulas running around in the back of his head. His wife was not what one would call stunningly beautiful. Virgil supposed it was her rather large nose that gave her face a somewhat horsy appearance, because he could find no flaw in the rest of her nicely balanced and aristocratic features. But there was something about her reserved manner, broken occasionally by extremely witty quips, that he found very attractive.
All eyes turned to Virgil as he spread his hands out, palms down, on the table top, and leaned forward. "Here's the situation as I see it," he said. "This girl has a whole lot of what she calls research on everybody here.
I doubt seriously whether any of us has any personal feelings of guilt about having done what those pictures show. But I don't think any of us has any doubt that if they were made public we would suffer. Now I suppose I should fill you in on two things that may be helpful before we go on. The first is that she's not working alone. Her boss at the college is in with her, and I'm pretty sure he's master-minded the whole thing. Helen herself is in my opinion pretty crazy, so I'm not sure any kind of rational resistance is going to keep her from doing whatever she has in mind to do. But maybe her boss is at least partially sane, and if we can get to him our problems may be solved. I'm sure he's using her as a front because he expects her to take the fall if anything goes wrong.
The second thing is-these pictures." He pulled out the pictures of Helen and her boss and the dog and passed them around the table. "As you can see, there's more than a business relationship between them."
Reactions ranged from gasps to giggles as the pictures were showed around. Donald Donaldson, who did not at all fit Virgil's stereotyped image of a homosexual because he was about six-two and rugged looking and moved with choppy, definite gestures, slammed the table with his fist when he saw them. "Son of a bitch! And you mean to tell me this fucking cunt spent half an hour lecturing me on the evils of being gay and screaming at me to repent?" He snorted and slapped the photos down hard and shook his head in disgust.
Elaine Olmstead, dressed not at all like a lady stock broker in a skimpy halter and tight fitting yellow slacks, stared at the pictures carefully, her finely drawn lips pursing thoughtfully. "This beats anything she has on me," she muttered.
The question now," Virgil continued when everyone had seen enough, "is whether the threat that we'll release these pictures will be enough to keep Helen and her boss from ruining all of us. One of the reasons I wanted us all to meet was that I haven't heard from her, and I wanted to ask whether the person who is supposed to bring her her payoff first would be willing to take her copies of these instead, along with an appropriate communication. We could also try to get them to her boss, but I found out that he's conveniently on vacation for two weeks and he told the people at his office that he was going to some unreachable part of Mexico."
Jake Dougherty, the burly forty-five year old trucking company owner who had plainly shaved his heavily jowled face with exaggerated care and donned his nattiest plaid sport coat for the meeting, spoke up. "My daughter Dianne is supposed to go to that silly Pentecostal church at ten o'clock in the morning on Monday with $5,000." He gestured toward a shy looking dark-haired girl who sat with her hands folded in her lap by his side. "If you really think we stand an even chance of beating her this way, I can have her take the pictures and the note. But it's land of tough for me. I don't care that much about myself. But first of all any scandal is going to affect Dianne for the rest of her life, and second, I don't want to put her in any danger. If there's any chance that she'd be hurt if she didn't follow this crazy bitch's instructions I wouldn't consider sending her. Personally, I was going to pay off and hope that I'd heard the last of it"
Virgil drummed his fingers on the table and stared into the grain of the teakwood. 'Well, that brings me to a little speech that I wanted to make. It's my opinion that if you're going to be prepared to give a blackmailer anything at all you'd better be prepared to give him just about everything you get for the rest of your life. Because you can be damned sure that if she gives you a bunch of pictures she's going to have copies of them." Jake nodded.
The discussion went on for several hours. Patricia Jackson, a tall, slender, strikingly beautiful black lady of about thirty-five with a spectacular afro came in at about noon. She sat listening quietly to Sal expounding on the possibilities of having Helen and her boss arrested for blackmail and the chances that if they did the information would get out anyway. She listened to Howie declare that whatever anyone else did, he wasn't going to give a cent and he was ready to go to the police right away-to Andrea Storm allow that she was opposed in principle to giving money to blackmailers and simply would not do it-to Elaine Olmstead say that she was inclined to pay but hadn't made up her mind-and to Larry Stimpson worry that his and Dr. Storm's licenses might be in jeopardy if they were involved in a scandal. Finally she broke in to offer her own opinion. I'll tell you what. I may be in the worst position of anybody here, because I have charge of about four hundred children every school day of the year and whether or not I've done anything illegal, at the slightest hint of a scandal the fucking PTA is going to be down on my black ass like a pack of hornets. But I can't see doing anything but telling this girl and whoever the hell she worked for that if any more of those pictures come to light, number one, the pictures of her making it with that pooch while her boss dangled his dribbling dork over her head are going to be spread all over town; and number two, her ass is going to be thrown in jail for about twenty years; and number three, it's highly probably that she'll end up at the bottom of the river in a cement dress."
"Bight on, sister!" Julia cried. "I vote that we don't take any more shit."
After another half an hour of haggling back and forth it was agreed that the group would stand united in its refusal to meet any of Helen's demands, that Dianne Dougherty would give her copies of the pictures and a note to that effect on Monday morning, that Jeff and Hank and some other friends of Pinky's would stake out the place as they'd done before to protect her, and that Sal would talk to a police captain he knew about the possibility of having her arrested.
"Meeting adjourned," Virgil said, picking up a glass of scotch he had obtained after having polished off three Bloody Marys. "And may I say that this is one of the finest groups of sexual perverts and deviates I have ever encountered, and it has been my pleasure to chair your meeting."
Howie got up and spread his arms, indicating that things were about to open up. "The bar's well stocked, there's an ostentatious urn of Acupulco Gold on the coffee table in the sitting room, there are pool tables and ping pong tables in the cellar, and the lake's a little cold for swimming, but the sailboat's rigged and ready to go. I would consider it an honor if those of you who have not been-er-part of our cozy little group would make yourselves at home and consider yourselves part of our, shall we say, extended family." With that he repaired to the sitting room to fill the bowl of an immense turkish water pipe with three or four teaspoons of finely ground golden marijuana.
Virgil and Pinky and Julia followed him, and Virgil was rather surprised to see Andrea Storm among the first on line to take up one of the eight hoses that led from the pipe's water bottle. Pinky was sidling up to Howie, and he could see where that was going to lead. Julia was talking to Sal. Andrea caught Virgil looking at her with an expression that appreciated the incongruity of her situation and smiled regally. She was one of those women who turned Virgil on just because she looked like the cold, sterile type who would say "vagina" instead of "cunt" if ever she was forced to refer to female anatomy and looked as though she would be more at home holding a teacup with her pinky out than a cock with her mouth over it. It was obvious that they were going to strike up a conversation, and Virgil was especially happy when Andrea made the opening move. "After we get good and stoned," she said, "we should go down and play some pool."
That wasn't just what Virgil had had in mind-or he thought it wasn't until Sal, who had overheard, turned from a careful scrutiny of Julia's eternally puzzling face and said to Andrea, "My, you are quite forward, aren't you." Then he turned to Virgil. "Playing pool is done in a rather special way around here. It's called strip pool You get four people-or more, but it takes longer that way-and you assign four balls to each. You shoot in rotation, and every time one of your balls gets put away you lose a piece of clothing. There's a water bed right next to the pool table for afterward. But you'd better be careful of Andrea here. She's an expert at hiding her own balls behind other people's and cleaning you out She'll have your clothes off you in no time flat without even taking off her shoes."
"I'd like to see her hide her balls behind mine," Virgil quipped as he took a drag off the pipe.
Pinky came over. "Howie and Joan are going out in the sailboat. I guess Larry Stimpson's going too. Are we staying long enough for me to go?"
"We don't have anything else to do today," Virgil responded. "And I've got myself into a game of pool, it looks like."
Pinky disappeared and Virgil saw Robert Storm approaching Pam Stimpson, a busty little brunette who looked a good ten years younger than her husband. Music started to pour forth from stereo speakers all over the house, and after ten minutes more of marijuana smoking and repartee Andrea led Virgil and Sal and Julia down to the game room.
"Ok," said Andrea as she picked a cue from a rack on the wall, hefted it expertly, and chalked its tip. "I'll take balls number one to four, Virgil can have five to eight, Sal can have nine to twelve, and Julia can start with thirteen to sixteen. Actually there are only fifteen balls but we have an extra number fifteen that we'll spot after the break. In this game as soon as a ball goes down it gets spotted up again. Now let's say that everyone has eight pieces of clothing-shoes, socks or stockings, two pieces of underwear, and two outer garments."
"Are you wearing a bra?" Julia asked her.
"No."
"Well make it seven pieces then, one undergarment, because I'm not either, and I can attest that Virgil's not."
"Done," Andrea said.
Sal had racked the balls and Julia was elected to break. She sent a weak shot quavering into the pack and knocked a few loose but nothing fell. A second fifteen ball was placed on the spot. Andrea had the next turn and, as Sal had promised, she looked the table over to find balls five to eight-Virgil's. The seven ball was one of the ones Julia had knocked loose. It hung against the cushion about three inches from a comer pocket, but one of Andrea's own balls, the three, sat between it and the cue ball. "Perfect," she said. Virgil knew that if it was perfect he was going to be in trouble because he could see what she was going to do. She leaned over the table and cradled the cue firmly but gently. The sensitivity of her slim fingers made Virgd wonder what they would feel like around his cock. He decided on a little psychological warfare and moved behind her to where her knee-length shirt was pulled up to the seams of her tight little flowered bikini panties. He was just getting a hard-on watching the delicately contoured flesh of her buttocks stretching erotically when she pulled off a combination shot that sent the three ball kissing off the cushion behind the seven. Virgil's ball rolled slowly into the comer pocket and the three spun off the cushion under the influence of a good dose of english and buried in the pack again. Virgil took off his right shoe and bowed as Andrea, having left the cue ball in perfect position to slam a shot into the pack and send Virgil's eight-ball into a side pocket on another combination, smiled like a cannibal chief welcoming the new missionary. The eight ball went down, and Virgil had two shoes off before Andrea, seemingly deciding that she'd like to strip Julia too, put away the fourteen and one of the fifteens. Julia lost her shoes. After she put away the fourteen again Andrea victimized Virgil once more picking the five-ball out of a cluster and sending it on a table-long trip into a comer pocket. Then she played it safe and snuck her two-ball in behind a couple of Sal's next to a cushion.
Virgil was glad that Sal had the next shot because he could see no way to get at any of Andrea's balls from where the cue ball was. He'd played a good deal of pool in college but not much since. Andrea was good, but if he could get back some of the old style he knew he'd be a match for her.
As Sal put away one of Julia's balls on the first shot and she stripped off her panty hose with a grand flourish, making sure to throw her legs high in the air to show off the bulging crotch of her polka-dot panties, Virgil thought he sensed a conspiracy. But on his next shot Sal missed one of Julia's and knocked a few of Andrea's loose. Virgil went to work. He put the one in the side, the four in the comer, put away one of Sal's to get it out of the way, and then came back to where the one and the four had been re-spotted and sank them both at once with a trick shot he'd learned long ago from a travelling pool hustler. Suddenly Julia and Andrea were even.
Andrea gave a low whistle. "I don't know who's hustling who," she said as she removed her shoes and stockings. Virgil took time out to watch her sit on the water bed and turn to the side with an almost convincing display of shyness.
"Stay right there," he said, lining up a bank shot on the three-ball. "You're about to lose your blouse. And if I get the draw on the cue ball right your skirt's going too."
"Cocky, aren't you?" Andrea said as she took his advice and lounged back. Virgil tried not to let the thought of Andrea's firm, round breasts distract him as he lined up the shot. The three rifled off a cushion and back into an opposite side pocket and the cue skidded back in perfect position. Andrea looked at him with resentful admiration and pulled off her blouse. As the cloth drew up over her milky white breasts and revealed their wide, smooth cleavage and large, pale, protruding nipples, Virgil took another look at her slender, willowy torso. Andrea had a perfect hourglass figure, with a waist so slim that Virgil thought he could encircle it with his hands if he pressed hard.
"Mmmmm," said Julia. "Things are getting interesting."
From her tone Andrea could tell that Julia would be almost as happy to get her hands and mouth on her tits as Virgil would. She acknowledged that this would be fine with her by saying, "I'll bet yours are much more spectacular. I can't wait."
"Oh, is that so?" Virgil smiled. "Well, it won't be any trouble to oblige you." He glanced at Julia. "You don't mind if I put away your blouse ball, do you, dear?"
"That would be lovely," she said. 'It's getting stuffy in these clothes." She had her own blouse off before Virgil even sank the thirteen. The two ladies sat on the water bed admiring each other.
"Shall we make the men jealous?" Andrea asked.
"Why not?" Julia agreed. 'It'll be good for them."
They began fondling each others' breasts. Sal's eyes almost popped out at the sight of Julia's immense, perfectly formed udders.
Virgil decided not to play around. "Now watch closely," he said in Andrea's direction, "because after these next few shots I'm going to watch closely." He planned out how to strip Andrea and Julia down completely. Four shots later and it was done.
"The winner!" Julia exclaimed, sweeping her arm toward her husband. Then she turned to Andrea. "Shall we?"
Andrea nodded. She unzipped Julia's skirt and the garment fell to the floor beside the bed. Then Julia stripped off Andrea's skirt and panties with one motion.
Andrea's hips were slim and her buttocks were some what flat. Her cunt was covered with the barest fuzz of brownish-blonde hair that did nothing to conceal its trim, erotically ripe lips. Her slit started farther down than Julia's but was already partly open and sticky with excitement.
Sal watched tensely as Andrea bent and, her face level with Julia's pussy, drew her panties down. Julia felt Sal staring at her from the back and bent over, jutting her ass and pussy out at him.
"Ok," Andrea said when the women were both stark naked, "now we get to have some fun while you two play. You know, you can't take off your own clothes until someone else has sunk your balls, and since we've lost already we're out of the game."
Virgil shook his head. "Rules, rules, rules," he said as the women sank into the water bed and started a tentative, almost girlish examination of each others' bodies.
Sal wasn't in the mood to play any more pool. With a sweep of his arm he sent all the remaining balls off the table. "Ok," he said. "Let's get down to it."
Music floated softly through speakers high in the comers of the wood paneled room as Andrea laughed and Julia made a face at Virgil and the men proceeded to strip. Andrea stared directly at Virgil's crotch as he zipped his fly down in a curve over the bulge of his fully erect cock and drew down his pants. Julia, her fingers playing across Andrea's abdomen and down toward her pussy, said, "You'll like Virgil's cock. It's big and fat and straight as an arrow. And he can use it, too."
In minutes Virgil and Andrea were locked in a sixty-nine on the rolling surface of the water bed, and the vibrations of Sal and Julia already balling away travelled through them through the medium of the slightly heated water. Virgil at first spread Andrea's cunt wide with his ringers and stared down into it. Then he began teasing her with his tongue, running it around the edges of her wide oval opening, just missing her clit every time. But when the stately, sedate, sophisticated woman on the other end of the line suddenly fitted her lips over his organ and went down hard he stopped teasing and sucked voraciously on her clit, stopping only to rip her cunt-hole open and cram his tongue as deep into it as he could go.
Andrea and Virgil did the sixty-nine until they both came, and managed to do it just as Sal was getting his rocks off into Tuba's hot, loose woman-hole. After that Andrea said, "I've got a confession to make. I'm a freak for being fucked in the ass." She turned over and spread her cheeks and immediately her tight little sphincter began to expand. Virgil helped it along with his tongue, prying and levering until Andrea was waving her fine, tight buttocks in the air and her hole was big enough to gobble up Virgil's cock in one gulp. He rammed it in.
He came once up her ass and then, while Julia sat by fingering herself, he pulled out and got under her and shoved his cock up her cunt. He spread her cheeks for Sal and he took his turn up her asshole. Andrea, in the middle of a sandwich, was in seventh heaven. She came three times before Sal shot his load up her rear end, and Virgil, driven crazy by the feeling of Sal's thrusting organ through the thin layers of tissue, got his rocks off too. Then both men turned on Julia, who sucked Sal while Virgil balled her.
Only once or twice during the long orgy did the thought of Helen's blackmail plot cross Virgil's mind. When it did it seemed strangely unreal. He was in the midst of a whole group of mature, successful, happy people. Powerful people. People who were thought of as the pillars of society. If all of them agreed that Helen and her boss were just a couple of nuts-and perverted ones at that, more because they thought that blackmail was a fair way to make a living than because they got off on sex with dogs-then how could those pictures Helen had make any difference to their lives, no matter what she did with them? He was well aware that this was not a realistic attitude, that as cozy as their group seemed here in the isolation of the wilderness, it would be a lot less so in the harsh atmosphere of a college town seething with the cross-currents of scandal. But the thought did occur to him-"We've all got enough money to retire for life. We could all be doing different things than we're doing now. If things get too hot, what's to keep us from splitting and setting up our own community, where nobody else has a say in what we do or don't do in bed?"
While Virgil was thinking this, similar thoughts were running through the mind of Howie Nathan as he got up and pulled his cock out of Pinky and went above on the sailboat to make sure they hadn't drifted too close to shore. On his way he passed his wife bouncing nakedly up and down on Larry Stimpson's face. He gave her an affectionate pat on the ass. When he emerged from the small cabin and took a few steps on the deck, still naked, so he could see around the luffing mainsail, he saw that they were only fifty yards from shore. As he sat on a rail and brought the boat about, Pinky came up after him, stood on the deck for a second, and stretched. She bent over the rail and scooped up a handful of the chilly water and sloshed it over her crotch, cooling her battered pussy and washing away the streaks of Howie's come that glistened on her thighs.
She was just standing up again when she saw a pinpoint flash of fight from a clump of bushes by the shore.
She stared at it hard.
She saw someone fleeing through the trees. An instant later, as Howie leaned hard on the rudder to head for the spot, she saw a late model Pontiac flashing away down the lakeside dirt road.
CHAPTER 9
"It wouldn't have been too hard for her to find us," Robert Storm said that night as they met again around the dining room table. "She could have staked out any of our houses and followed us up here. With all she knows about us, she probably knew that Howie had this place and our group used it a lot. She could have tried to call a bunch of us and found out that nobody was home and taken a wild guess. But one thing's for sure. Now that she's seen us all together she's going to know damned well that we're plotting something."
"The phone's rung here a couple of times since this morning but nobody's answered it," Howie said.
'If it rings again maybe we'd better," Virgil said.
The news of Helen's appearance had deflated the orgiastic atmosphere like a pin in a balloon. People were drinking black coffee and muttering to themselves and each other about what Helen might do next. They had decided to stay where they were for the night-Howie had plenty of luxurious accommodations-and head back to town very early in the morning.
At ten the phone rang. Howie answered it and Virgil picked up an extension.
"You pigs!" Helen's voice screeched. "I know what you're doing up there! I've given you all the chance to repent and save your disgusting souls but you wouldn't take it! Now you're all together, doing more disgusting things than ever before! You're not going to make any donations to the church! You're not going to give me money so I can go on with my research! I'm going to tell the whole world about you and your Sodom and Gomorrah up there!"
"Now wait a goddamned minute," Virgil broke in, afraid that if he didn't she'd hang up and he wouldn't have a chance to stick it to her. "Let me tell you a thing or two. First, you're trying to blackmail us, and blackmail is against the law. We could have you put in jail for a hell of a long time. Second, we know you're not working alone. We know Julian Lopstone is master-minding this whole thing. And third, we know what you do with that doggie of yours. We've got pictures of you getting fucked by that german shepherd, and we've got pictures of Julian watching and beating his meat If one more picture of any of us is made public, if all the pictures and negatives and all the copies aren't returned to us by tomorrow at noon, the pictures we have will be all over town and you and Lopstone will be in jail. You may as well cut out this pseudo-religious bullshit and take a look at yourself as you really are; a filthy, psychotic, nasty little sexually perverted criminal."
Virgil heard Patricia Jackson growling her approval amid a chorus of confused rumbling behind hun.
Helen was silent. When she spoke again her voice was thin, eerie, strange. "So that's the way it is," she breathed. Virgil could tell she was about to crack. "You were right before about my not working alone, but you're not right now. I started my research by myself, but then Julian found out about it and started to give me advice. I felt guilty about the dog but he said he'd help me get over it. But he didn't. I found out that he didn't want to repent himself and he didn't want to help me. He just wanted the money and he was going to use it for himself. I found all that out today. I found out he's just as bad as the rest of you. I screamed and yelled at him and he got scared. He said I was going to ruin both of us. He threw me out of the car and said he was leaving town and leaving the country and he'd never be back. He said he was going to burn all his copies of my research so there wouldn't be any evidence against him. But he's a coward. He didn't want to do the work of the Spirit. So now I'm alone."
She was breathing heavily. "Release the pictures of me!" she suddenly screamed. "It will be a judgment on me! Send the police! They'll never find me! But the whole world is going to know about you and your filthy ways! Now!"
She hung up.
Virgil held the receiver numbly in his hand. He stared at it as though it were a strange object from another world. Finally, as Howie came running in from the sitting room, he replaced it. "Jesus Christ," he said. "We blew it."
There was a mad scramble as everyone ran to get their things together and head back to town. Sal put in a call to his friend the police captain and spilled the whole story. "Yeah," the captain said, T don't approve of all you did, you understand, but if you've told me the truth this is pretty much a straight blackmail case, and we'll try to pick her up and keep the evidence out of the papers until a judge can make some kind of a goddamned ruling. But I warn you, SaL if this girl's as crazy as you say we're not going to be able to keep a lid on it."
He was right. All the others had left, and Howie and Virgil were closing up the place and on their way out the door when the phone rang. It was a reporter from one of the town's newspapers. He'd found a packet of the pictures in his mailbox on his way in to work the night shift. He said he'd like to keep the story out of the news, but that a list of all the other people the pictures had been given to was included with them. When he read it off it was clear that the story was going to break somewhere. His editor wanted the scoop and there wasn't going to be much he could do about it. Howie gave him their side of the story, including the blackmail scheme, and told him to consult the paper's lawyer before running anything. The reporter said they couldn't print the pictures anyway, of course, but on the list of other people the pictures had been sent to was a regional smut paper that certainly would print the pictures with the genitals blacked out. The faces would all be recognizable and there'd be no stopping the story then. He said Helen claimed to have sent copies of the pictures of the president of the college, to the chairman of the local bar and medical associations, to every newspaper in town including the campus paper, and to ten or fifteen other influential people. "If Russia was about to drop an atom bomb on us," he said, "maybe nobody would care. But there's nothing else going on that's newsworthy, and people are going to eat this up. They love to see the mighty fall."
"Yeah," said Howie dryly. "Well, maybe you ought to tell them that when the mighty fall, they fall onto matresses."
Pinky and Julia had preceded Virgil home. When he got there three strange cars were parked in the driveway. As he went in the front door he heard raised voices arguing in the dining room. "Listen, John," one voice was saying, "this is bullshit. If the goddamned paper won't come out in support of these people, I can tell you the Political Union will. I've got a caucus scheduled for tomorrow afternoon to vote on whether we should have Professor Blakesley speak at a special session tomorrow night. If we don't hit back hard at this damned thing we'll deserve to be called a bunch of candy-assed copouts. Do you think this college deserves to have one of its best English professors forced out because of something he did in his own home with a girl who just happens to be eighteen and happens to be his stepdaughter?"
"Of course I don't. But you know we can't publish without money from the college, and you know that we don't get any if we don't fall into line on certain things."
Virgil stood in the hall listening to them argue for a few more minutes before he walked in. "Hi, Sol," he said to the chairman of the Student Political Union. "Mike, how are you." Also present but silent was the head of the Intra-Fraternity Council, Fred Beeman. They all stood up when he entered.
"Professor," Sol said, "we know all about this whole lousy blackmail thing. We're behind you a hundred per cent. I can tell you it's already started to get nasty. Look at this." He scooped up a leaflet that had been lying face down on the table in front of him. In it were printed six pictures of VirgiL Pinky, and Julia, with others in the background, in some of the most explicitly erotic pictures Virgil had ever seen. Their names were handwritten in the margin with arrows drawn to their figures and at the bottom, "English and French Professors make it with their 18-year-old daughter."
"Son of a bitch," Virgil breathed. "I wonder where the hell she got these printed."
"They're all over the campus," Sol said. "Mike sent a reporter over to the President's house when he got word some of them had been sent over there. There was a meeting going on-about this-and at the end of it the President said you'd be called on to resign. But...."
"Yeah, I overheard you talking about asking me to speak."
"I'm going to get up there and introduce you," Sol said, "and then you can say whatever you want. Something about sexual morality being someone's private business, about not letting blackmailers run the college-I don't know. And then when you get done I'm going to get up again and call for a student strike if you're asked to resign."
The phone rang. It was Wally. He said that Helen had called him and Jim Milhauser and told him they were next.
"I'll speak," Virgil said after he'd hung up. 'I don't think itll save anybody's ass but I'd like to give a few people an idea of what's on my mind. But I'll tell you, Sol. And I guess this will come as news to Julia and Pinky too. I'm not that interested in staying with an institution that takes this kind of attitude in the first place, if the going gets too rough I'm just going to say, 'Goodbye, you bunch of twisted hyprocrites,' and go off someplace where I can write some of the novels I've had running around in my head for a while."
Pinky and Julia looked up with surprised shock and admiration.
"And," Virgil went on, "since you're undoubtedly aware that we're not the only ones involved in this-that there are doctors and lawyers and stock brokers and school principals and all lands of other people under the gun with this crazy bitch, I intend to talk to some of them about splitting. I think we could set up quite a nice little community of our own somewhere with the resources we've got, someplace where we could be ourselves and just tell the world to go fuck itself."
Virgil was surprised at his own speech, but the more he turned it over in his mind, the more he liked the idea.
The hall was crowded the next night as Virgil followed Sol to the speaker's platform. He noted that none of the high officials in the college administration were there, but that some of their representatives were, seated with notebooks in hand. The student body was solidly behind him. Eight hundred students stood and cheered Virgil up the aisle. Also seated were a number of townspeople. All day Virgil's phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from reporters, from other members of the group that had met at Howie's, from strangers who said they also were being victimized by Helen's blackmail schemes, from enraged townspeople who had read the banner headline in the regional smut paper that read, "Leading Figures in College Town Caught in Orgy Group," or the third page story in one of the town's own papers that had been head-lined, "Blackmailer Releases Erotic Photos of Many Influential Figures." He was well aware that many of the townspeople gathered at the open meeting of the Political Union had come out of curiosity, to see the incest professor in the flesh, rather than to hear anything he had to say. That was fine. He hadn't prepared a speech, but he had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go. He was going to have some fun with it.
He took a seat behind the lectern as Sol got up and raised his hands for silence. The buzzing in the hall slowly subsided.
"It is the purpose of the Political Union to encourage open and free airing of all points of view on political topics of current and vital interest. Our last three meetings, for those of you who are not members and who have come only for this session, have been devoted to examinations of United States policy in Southeast Asia, to the economics of tax reform, and to the problem of the infiltration of organized crime into government Tonight as you all know, we have come to talk about a problem that is a little closer to home, at least at the present moment Broadly speaking, the question we will deal with is the degree to which society is entitled to impose sanctions on its members for certain types of sexual conduct. Professor Virgil Blakesley of the English Department has been one of the finest teachers of English Literature in the history of this institution. He is a distinguished scholar with many publications to his credit and for the past three years he has held an endowed chair. He is now being called upon to resign because blackmailers obtained pictures of him, the nature of which you all know, in the privacy of his home, and released them when he refused to meet their demands." The hall was buzzing once more. Sol was, Virgil thought handling this very well. "I have asked Professor Blakesley to address the Union and its guests tonight so he may confront those who wish him to resign in an open and public forum. I give you Professor Virgil Blakesley."
The students in the audience clapped and cheered enthusiastically as Virgil stepped to the lectern. He noticed Julia and Pinky entering unobtrusively at the rear of the hall, leading Sal and Anne, Howie and Doris, and a few others. He waited a few minutes while things quieted down. Then he looked up and produced a sly grin.
"Allow me to introduce myself," he said. "I am Virgil Blakesley: slobbering pervert, drooling deviate, child molester, and all-around bogeyman. Despite the cover-up attempted by my friend Sol, despite the august tides and facade of respectability, I am no more than an envoy from Satan. How fortunate it is for you and your children and your children's children that an upright young woman named Helen Beasley, filled with the Spirit and possessed of a gift for scientific research, has torn aside the disguise which has so long hidden my true nature from you and given you the chance to cast me into the outer darkness."
Laughter filled the hall. People were rocking up and down, slapping their knees, giggling into the backs of their hands.
"Now that the thread of truth has started to unwind I must reveal the whole of the monstrous fraud I have perpetrated upon you from the beginning. Perhaps many of you suspected from the moment you saw the pictures of my wife, my stepdaughter, and myself, that anyone who would do such things could not possibly have the slightest grain of intelligence, honesty, or worth. How, you must have asked yourselves, could such a man ever have gained an endowed chair in one of the oldest and best respected colleges in the world? Well, now I am free to tell you. I must admit that I know absolutely nothing about English Literature. All my lectures are read verbatim from Cliff's Notes, and all my publications have been dictated by my Irish Setter to my Siamese cat, who has written them up by walking on the keys of my typewriter. If I am forced to resign I would strongly recommend that they succeed me as the Joshua T. Gloomey, Professor of English Literature."
Some of the townspeople were betting angry. They were hooting and hollering over the laughter of the students. He was afraid fights would break out.
"My library," he went on, "is filled with esoteric titles. Troihis and Cressida. Paradise Lost. The Canterbury Tales. But the pages have been torn out from between the covers and replaced with pornographic photos. The X to Z volume of my Encyclopedia Britannica is actually a hiding place for an assortment of vibrators and dildos. The way I grade papers is to imagine the student standing naked in front of me and masturbate. I have lines drawn on the floor in front of my chair and the grade depends on how far I shoot. Since I am stubbornly heterosexual, men always fail."
Gales of laughter swept the hall. Sol reached out to turn the volume up on Virgil's microphone.
"Well," Virgil continued, "I could go on for hours revealing all the dark secrets of my twisted soul to you, but I think you've got the idea. Now I'd like to give you an idea of what your benefactor and protector, Miss Helen Beasley, looks like." He pulled out copies of the photos of her and strode to the edge of the platform to hand them down to a student in the front row.
There were screeches of hilarity as Virgil went back to the microphone, leaned over to regard the scene of mayhem at the front of the hall, and explained, "That's her under the dog. The man standing beside her some of you will recognize as Julian Lopstone, who runs the college's accounting office. Miss Beasley informed me on the telephone last night that she began her research with the purpose of cleaning up the world, that Julian Lopstone found out about it and offered to help, but that she just recently decided that he wanted nothing more than money and had a falling out with him. He is reported to be on his way to Mexico for a stay of indeterminate duration.
"Miss Beasley invited me to contribute $2,500 to a church she has founded to carry on her work, and an other $2,500 to her personally so she can continue her research. She upped the ante once, and had I wished to purchase all the 'research' she has done on me, my wife, and daughter, I would have had to pay $7,500. Numerous other leading figures on whom Helen has done 'research' have also been invited to contribute. They have also refused, so you will know who they are soon enough. However, if any of you wish to contribute to such a cause-and who knows, Helen's next research may be on you if you don't, as long as she stays out of jail-I would advise you to bundle your wheelbarrows full of cash down to the Church of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal, on the comer of Willow and Water. It is a modest church with, as I understand, no congregation, but perhaps some of you will find inspiration in it
"Now I suppose I should take a few hours to expound on the subject of personal sexual morality and the illegality of blackmail, and a few more to defend myself and my family, but instead I would like to ask you to reflect for a moment on the monumental absurdity of this entire situation. I am given to understand that all over the state people are oohing and aahing over copies of these pictures that have been printed, with minimal censoring, in half a dozen newspapers; that members of the college's board of directors are flying in from all parts of the country to see them. Members of bar and medical associations are burning up the phone wires, squandering thousands of message units trying to figure out how to get copies of other pictures Miss Beasley has taken. Soon PTAs and boards of directors of brokerage houses will be poring over copies of still others. Now I ask you-why should sane, presumably well-balanced adult human beings give up mowing their lawns, watching their televisions, playing with their children, going about their business, or even going to bed with their own wives, daughters, sons, cousins, lovers of the same or opposite sexes, or whoever they damned well want to go to bed with, to converge on our town and dwell for hours or days on a collection of erotic photographs? Are those pictures that exciting? And if they are, are they any more exciting than the land you can buy in any porno shop from here to San Francisco? What's the difference-that these pictures show real live people in candid shots that are somehow more stimulating than those of a couple of hookers picking up some spare change on their day off? I'll tell you honestly, it seems to me that this smacks of some land of weird perversion-the perversion of people who say, 'Ha ha, you got caught, and now we're going to stomp on your balls for a while.' In the meantime they're probably taking copies of the pictures into their own bathrooms with them."
Virgil lowered his voice. "I can tell you this," he said. "The sexual experiences I've had with my wife and daughter and other people lately have been among the most beautiful experiences of my life. And anyone who wants to look at pictures of us and try to see the beauty in them is welcome to plaster his walls with them for all I care. But anyone who wants to take the attitude of the poor, pathetic, psychotic, criminal girl who took them and is trying to use them to ruin our lives can take them and cram them right up their twisted little assholes."
He waited a second for the turmoil to die down. "This college has been my life for almost fifteen years now. If I had to leave I suppose I would be very sad. But if I'm forced out because of these silly pictures, I'll just have to say to myself, These people aren't the people I thought they were, and this college isn't the institution I thought it was, and I'll be well rid of the whole mess.' Because if the president and the board of trustees take the attitude that people say they're taking, I don't think in all conscience that I could work for them.
That's all I have to say. Thank you for listening."
Sol got up behind him as shouts of "Bight on, Professor!" and "Blakesley for College President!" boomed over the din of cheers and war-whoops and uproarious laughter. A number of townspeople got up and stomped out as Sol whispered, Terrific. You really laid it on."
Virgil glanced toward the back of the hall to make sure Pinky and Julia and the others saw he was going to leave by a side exit. He heard some of Sol's closing remarks. "I can tell there's a lot of support for Professor Blakesley out there. Now it might seem to you that the students of this college don't have anything to say about who gets hired and who gets fired, but there's one weapon that we can use if you feel strongly enough about it. We can start a student strike and shut this place down tight until...."
Julia and Pinky and a crowd of others were waiting for him in the hallway. Howie burst through the crowd and clapped him on the shoulder. "Great," he said. "No apologies, no martyr bullshit-just telling those bastards in the administration what you think of them if they hassle you." Patricia Jackson was there too but she hovered in the background and just gave him a firm nod and a warm smile.
"Listen," Howie said, "why don't we get away from all this crap and go on up to the lake. I don't think anybody who's under the gun wants to stay around and take this crap day and night. My phone's been ringing off the hook and so has everybody else's."
"Sounds fine with me," Virgil said.
A reporter pushed past Howie. "Professor Blakesley! I'm Sid Helman from...."
"I don't care where you're from," Virgil said with a smile. "I'm not talking to reporters at the moment. I'll be out of town tonight. Call me at home tomorrow evening and maybe we can get together."
Three or four other reporters, obviously important ones from national magazines, continued to hound him as he made for his car.
That night reporters besieged Howie's lakeside retreat. How they'd found it Howie didn't know, but five or six of them knocked on the door and when Howie wouldn't let them in camped on the doorstep. Finally Andrea Storm, who had showed up at about midnight with her husband, said, "Let me invite them in. You never know what a woman might be able to do in this situation."
After an hour or so of talk the reporters got themselves pretty drunk, and then some of them got pretty stoned. Virgil was sitting at the dining room table in the middle of a terrific discussion between Patricia Jackson and Larry Stimpson about experimental educational methods, thinking to himself that if the whole group of them should be tempted to chuck it all and start an alternative community someplace she'd be great to head the school, when Andrea came in and closed the door behind her.
"About those reporters out there," she said. "Julia and Pinky and I have been talking to them for some time, and they're really loosened up. I think some of them are leaning toward pushing their stories another way than they first intended. I thought it might be worth the gamble to try to give them a first-hand idea of what they're writing about. Only I thought I'd ask your opinion first."
Patricia leaned back and grinned widely. "I get what you're saying, sister," she said. "Just answer me one thing. Is that incredibly studly black guy from the Detroit paper still around?"
Andrea grinned at her. "Yeah," she said. "I sort of had my eye on him myself."
Patricia got up, stripped off her sheer blouse, rid herself of her bra, and put her blouse back on. "We'll sort out the who's and where's later," she said. "Right now let's ask them to play some pool."
An hour later Virgil ventured down into the darkened game room to see pads and pencils strewn around with cameras and suit jackets and trousers in a wide semi-circle around the sloshing water bed. In the light of a dim bulb that burned toward the back of the room he saw Patricia's lean, shapely buttocks churning up and down over the hips of the redoubtable Sid Helman, from whatever magazine he was from: Julia lying on her back under the black reporter from Detroit; and Pinky receiving attention at both ends from a couple of famous New York columnists. "Well," he muttered to himself as he climbed back up the stairs, "they say the national media are always more liberal than the local. .
He had received a call from Wally that he and Cerina had refused to meet Helen's demands and pictures of them had already appeared plastered to the walls of a downtown bus station. They didn't want to stay home, so Virgil was waiting for them to show up. They were bringing Roberta and Bertha and a few of Pinky's friends-Jeff, Hank, Jerry, Jennifer, Doris, and a few others-in a caravan of cars that also included Sol and Mike, the editor of the campus paper, who'd decided to tell the administration to go to hell and print what he really thought of the whole thing. When the three-car procession pulled in just after one in the morning Wally made no bones about wanting to get into the sack with Roberta, and Virgil and Cerina found a quiet guest room toward the back of the house and spent an inspiring hour together before finally falling asleep.
The next morning at eleven the whole thing blew up all at once. Sal arrived with the news that Captain Black, his friend on the police force, had received information that groups of townspeople were gathering for vigilante action. Helen had been spotted leaving a pile of leaflets outside a VFW post but she'd got away-temporarily. Still, her appearance meant that she wasn't going to leave town. She was going to stay until she got caught or got all her work done. And then, ten minutes after Sal's arrival, Captain Black called to say he'd dispatched two units to Virgil's house to restrain a mob that was gathering outside it.
The remnants of the previous night's orgies were swept away in seconds as Howie's house emptied out and people ran for their cars to speed back to town. On the way Virgil, driving his old Volkswagen, carrying three reporters as he tried to keep up with Pinky and Julia in the Porsche, turned on the radio to hear nothing but news of the growing unrest in the town. The college president, caught between angry townspeople and striking students, was talking with an interviewer, trying to equivocate his way out of the situation. Then he was interrupted. Someone had thrown a firebomb through his window. The interviewer sputtered and the president panicked and there was silence on the air until the station's veteran newscaster came on to say that the fire in the president's house was under control but that street fighting had broken out between student groups and groups of townspeople who attacked their picket fines.
"Jesus Christ," Virgil said. "I'm going to resign the minute I can get to a phone before someone gets hurt. Firebombs! Son of a bitch, how can anybody get that excited about this damned thing?"
The black reporter said, "You've been in your ivory tower too long, professor. Hey-if you meant what you said before, there's a phone booth over there."
Virgil made two calls-the first to the radio station, the second to the president's office. He was just saying, "Yes, that's right, he'll have my letter of resignation on his desk in an hour," when Marvin tore open the car door and ran over to him.
"They've found Helen," he said. "She's on the top of the Heinrich Building downtown. She says she's going to jump!"
Virgil slammed the phone back onto its hook and in seconds they were careening toward the center of town.
They were met by a police roadblock before they could get near the twenty story building that faced on the town's main square. Virgil tried to talk the cop into letting him through but it didn't work. The cop called Captain Black and came back with a message. "The captain says to get over to your house right away. There's a mob over there and we're not sure we have enough cars to control it. It's getting ugly."
Two of the reporters got out and used their press passes to get across the police lines but Marvin stayed. He put his press pass in Virgil's glove compartment and said grimly, "I'm not a reporter any more. I wasn't a Green Beret for nothing. If any of those honkies try any fancy stuff I'll be glad to squash a few asses on the sidewalk"
Virgil's car careened around the comer onto his block on two wheels. Ahead of them, Pinky's Porsche was pulled up onto the lawn at a crazy angle and a rabid crowd of a hundred was pounding on it, rocking it back and forth, screaming and kicking and shoving.
"Son of a bitch," Marvin said. He turned to Virgil. "Professor-were you ever in the service?"
"Uh huh," Virgil nodded as he slammed the VW down into second and aimed for the curb.
"What branch?"
Virgil leaned on the horn as the car cracked up over the curb and onto the lawn. "Airborne."
Then there was nothing but a crazy, whirling mass of bodies. A guy with a sledge hammer, cutting through the crowd toward the Porsche, saw Virgil's VW headed straight for him and leapt aside to bring the hammer down hard on the hood. Marvin had his door open and he was rolling out, cutting the guy's legs from under him, bringing a hard punch up under his chin, before the car skidded to a halt. Virgil heard another horn blaring and turned to see Jeff's green Chewy full of students fish-tail to a halt on the gravel in front of the house, straying stones up into die faces of half a dozen townspeople who scattered out of its way.
He yanked his door open and followed Marvin through the crowd toward the Porsche. The bodies flew right and left as Marvin laid it on with judo throws and karate kicks and Virgil, seeing nothing but red, his heart slamming away inside him, his lungs drawing deeply, blocked a wicked punch from a six-foot-two monster in a lumberjack coat and caught him square in the jaw with a withering right. Virgil felt little bones in his hand cracking as the guy went down.
Pinky and Julia were white, shaking, tear-stained, paralyzed with fear as Pinky unlocked her door at the sight of Virgil's face cutting through the crowd toward them.
There were two cops on the scene but they were around at the side of the house hauling away two teenagers who had tried to climb into a window with a canful of gasoline. Jeff's boys fought their way through the crowd toward the Porsche. One of them caught a board across the back of the head and sprawled, out cold, to the sidewalk.
There was a loud "crack!" and a tear gas canister exploded on the lawn. Marvin and Virgil pulled the girls out of the Porsche and bolted for the front door of the house. A hail of rocks followed them as they called to Jeff's boys to follow.
Choking in the gas, Virgil struggled to unlock the already battered front door. A bottle caught Marvin in the back as sirens wailed in the distance.
Then, from the lawn, a voice screamed, "She jumped, you bastard! She's dead! You fucking murderer! You cocksucking pervert!"
Virgil slammed the door behind them, his body quivering with pain, his mind reeling. Marvin clapped a firm hand on his shoulder. That fucking girl is dead," he said. "And this position-it's not defensible. Unless you got two .50 cal's in the attic. We gotta get our ass outa here fast."
Virgil, doubled over to catch his breath, nodded as Jeff and Hank carried their unconscious friend toward the back of the house with Julia and Pinky following.
The picture window burst in and there was a muffled explosion amid the sounds of spraying glass.
Tire bomb!" Marvin screamed. He picked up a chair and smashed it against a wall. With a three-foot club in his hand he raced through the kitchen, overturned drawers, and came out with a pair of carving knives. He handed one to Virgil. "Ok, Airborne," he said, as smoke billowed through the house and flames enveloped the living room, "we're going out. And God help the fucking honky that tries to stop us."
Marvin kicked out the back door and they saw figures flitting away through the woods. Half a dozen toughs in denim jackets brandishing switchblades and chains made a move to rush them as they started across the back lawn. "Come on, you chicken-shit little motherfuckers," Marvin screamed at them. "Who wants to get his balls carved off by a Green Beret?"
Another tear gas canister landed in the midst of the group. They fled.
Virgil led his wife and daughter along the wooded path toward the pasture. Behind them he heard fire engines clanging up to the house and the sound of crackling flames.
"My God," Julia sobbed. "My God...."
Half an hour later they sat under a tree in the deep forest a mile from their house.
"We're getting out," Virgil said. "We're going to our own place. Somewhere in the Caribbean maybe. If anybody else wants to go-Howie, Sal, Robert ... Wally and Cerina ... Roberta ... any of the students ... shit, anybody with a grain of sanity left-we'll take them with us. But fuck all this shit. We're getting out."
Pinky, her long red hair streaked with dirt and tears, sat numbly on a log staring at the ground. "I bet there'll be a whole hell of a lot of good people going with us," she said.
