The memory of the playhouse seemed to permeate everything, like a jagged red thread running through a tapestry. The minute Faith saw Tom Taylor pull into the long driveway of his parent's home next door, she thought of the playhouse.
His convertible scattered the gravel of the drive. Their gardener wouldn't like that, she thought; he would be picking white gravel out of the grass for days. Tom must have changed since she saw him last, on that hideous day three years before, that day when the earth seemed to split open and the skies to rain down judgment. On that day he had been meek and dazed; he would never have scattered the gravel of the drive with his car.
Faith was in the fourth-story attic of her house looking out of a small window with diamond-shaped panes of glass. She could see her own eye and the line of her cheek reflected in the pane. Through the reflection, as in a dissolve in an art film, she saw Tom jump out of the car, slam the door and go up the front steps.
She moved back slightly. He was not-likely to look up, but she retreated all the same, and padded barefoot to the center of the attic room, leaving little high-arched footprints in the dust of the floor. So he was home.
She said it aloud, softly and dreamily: "Colonel and Mrs. Taylor's son, Tom, has come home for the holidays."
Standing in her black sweater and shorts, bare legged and barefooted, her long blonde hair falling straight to her mid-back .Faith closed her eyes and slipped her hands up to caress her own breasts. Holding them, she smiled. "Home for the holidays," she murmured. "It is Thanksgiving, and we are all thankful."
Again she thought of the playhouse. It was in the woods at the pebbly shore of the lake behind the houses. In summer the woods were all green and the playhouse was like a fish tank inside, green and ripply. There were little chairs and dishes there, and a little bed, large enough for a girl of twelve-that was the age she had been, three years before, when she had last been inside the playhouse, when she had last seen Tom.
Mrs. Marlow opened the attic door and called up the stairs, "Faith, darling, are you up there?"
Faith stood still, holding her breasts. "Yes," she said.
"Darling, what are you doing? Isn't it drafty?"
"Very drafty," said Faith. "I'm working on increasing my tolerance to cold."
"Is it something to do with school, kitten?" called Mrs. Marlow. "I'm not sure it's wise, in this weather. Couldn't you wait till summer? Anyway, it's time for you to dress. Come down, sweetheart."
Faith massaged her breasts firmly and languidly, cast a final look at the diamond-paned window where twilight was beginning to dim the view, and then went briskly down the attic stairs.
"Look at you," said Mrs. Mario. "You've got dust in your hair."
"Yes, I've been lying on the floor."
"But why, kitten? Something else to do with school?"
Faith looked deeply into her mother's watery blue eyes. "We do not really leave Miss Brigham's School, Mother. At least not in spirit. Miss Brigham herself said that in assembly. Don't you think it's a beautiful thought?"
"I suppose," said Mrs. Marlow. "Heavens knows, if Miss Brigham says it, I'm sure it's awfully educational." Mrs. Marlow, herself, had not graduated from college. She was overawed with anything that seemed educational. Miss Brigham of Miss Brigham's School for Young Ladies, graduate of Smith, summa cum laude, class of '09, could literally do no wrong. If she had elected to teach her Young Ladies Advanced Abbatoir Techniques and Comparative Cunnilingus, Mrs. Marlow would automatically have approved.
"I don't know about educational," said Faith. "It is to form character, Mother."
Mrs. Marlow sighed. She was thinking about the hair now. "I suppose if you brush it briskly..."
"No, Mother," said Faith, following her conversational gap with ease. "I must shampoo. Shampoo three times, rinse three times."
"But kitten, it's 6:30. You know how the Taylors are about people being late to dinner. The Colonel has to go through his martini-mixing ritual and all..."
Faith lifted her chin with a determined expression. Mrs. Marlow glanced at her daughter's ice blue eyes and knew when she was defeated.
"Well, if you must," she said. "But please hurry as fast as you can. Eloise Taylor can be a perfect tigress when people are late."
Faith walked through her white-carpeted bedroom, shedding her clothes and dropping them on the carpet. She got in the shower and stood, eyes clenched closed, with the spray beating full on her upturned face. It hurt slightly. She liked the sting of it. There were so many things that she wanted to do and could not; she felt as if she were wrapped in a spider's web of limitations. She wanted to fling off every stitch of her clothes and run outside into the streets. She wanted to tell her mother that she was a fatuous idiot. She wanted to hire a man to rape Miss Brigham. She wanted to go down the path, over into the Taylor's yard, burst into the playhouse and...
Rain on the playhouse roof was like bells. And when there was a strong wind, it came in around the little blue door, and if the painted rocking chair was placed in just the right spot, it would rock back and forth by itself. If one were lying on the little bed, the sound of the rain on the roof directly overhead was the most cozy, lulling, sensuous thing in the world. Lying there, one could put out a hand and feel the texture of the cypress of which the wall was constructed; then touch the old satin-lined throw that served as a bedspread. If one lay naked beneath the throw, the satin was like a caress, like long, slow kisses.
She shampooed three times and rinsed three times. Then she messed her hair with clean towels until it was dry. She brushed it back and put on a black velvet hair-band, and then stood looking at herself in her long full-length bedroom mirror.
She often looked at her naked body, not with any particular feeling of pleasure, but with intense curiosity. This was what it was all about. This was the Pandora's box that let loose all the confusion, anguish, delight, horror and ecstasy. Or at least this was half of it-if she had a nude male beside her, that would complete the picture and represent the totality. She moved her hand down over her taut little stomach, past the wispy, adolescent hair of her pubis and cupped the full, fleshy lips of her crotch in her hand.
Overcome by emotions, remembrances, intimations that she could scarcely bring coherently to her consciousness, Faith stood staring at herself, mute, trembling and desolated. The image in the mirror suddenly became more than she could bear. It triggered too many things in her emotions. She jerked her hand away from her pubis and turned quickly away from the mirror. It was the playhouse-she wanted so desperately to be in the playhouse as she had when she was twelve, before Tom had gone away, before she had been sent to Miss Brigham, before any of it had happened.
By seven-thirty she was dressed and ready. Mrs. Marlow came in wearing pale blue crepe and adjusting the catch on a diamond wrist watch. "I thought you were saving that black velvet for the tea dance at the Club tomorrow, kitten."
"I may be dead by tomorrow," said Faith calmly.
"Kitten! What a horrible thought. But I suppose the dress is all right-dinner's to be sort of an occasion. Tom's home. Eloise just phoned over to tell me." She tried to appear not to be watching Faith for her reaction.
"Tom? Tom Taylor?" said Faith, frowning.
"Of course Tom Taylor," said her mother with a touch of exasperation. "What other Tom could I possibly mean?"
"Does Father know?" asked Faith. Mrs. Marlow closed her eyes and sighed. "Faith, darling, I wish you wouldn't be deliberately like that."
"Like what?"
"You know what I mean. What difference does it make if your father knows or not? No, he doesn't know. I'll tell him when we leave. I don't know why your mind is so ... well, I don't know what to call it. Your father's a fine person, Faith. I wish you'd remember that."
Faith knew how fine a person her father was. She knew all about it. There was nothing about her father's virtue that she didn't know. She decided not to beard her mother on this point. Faith felt sorry for her, with her desperate and pathetic little pretense that nothing had ever happened. She decided to bug her about other matters-almost as a means of relieving her own irritability and frustration.
"May I have a sherry before dinner?" she asked.
"I suppose. But not if Tom doesn't. I don't think it would be ... maidenly, feminine."
"Can't I be maidenly and not smoke."
"But you don't smoke anyway."
"I know, Mother."
Mrs. Marlow looked quite puzzled. "Oh, well, watch Tom and see what he does."
"Then whatever Tom does, I may do. Is that right?" It was with effort that she suppressed a wry smile.
A look of anxiety touched Mrs. Marlow's face, as if she might be walking into some kind of trap. "I'll be glad when you're twenty-one," she sighed. "We won't have these constant decisions then. Wear your little ermine jacket; your father-likes it." As an afterthought, she added, "When you're older, kitten, you'll appreciate your father."
Faith gazed deep into her mother's eyes. Mrs. Marlow could not meet her look. She got up nervously and went to the door. "Turn out your lights when you leave. We'll be going in five minutes."
It was less than a hundred yards from their door to the Taylor's door, but Dr. Marlow had the car brought.
"I think I'll walk if nobody minds," said Faith, looking up at the brilliant stars flashing in the cold sky.
"Get in the car," said Dr. Marlow.
"I think," said Mrs. Marlow hesitantly, " ... I think it's something to do with school, dear. Miss Brigham encourages..."
"Get in the car!" snapped Dr. Marlow.
Faith stood tall, hugging the ermine jacket close around her, looking coolly at the man who was her father. "But you haven't opened the door for me."
"Very good, darling," said Mrs. Marlow. "A lady always waits for a gentleman to use his manners."
Dr. Marlow stared at his daughter motionlessly for a moment, then jerked open the car door. Faith and her mother got in. He slammed the door brutally, then went around to the driver's side and got in. He drove slowly and with a heavy authority.
At the Taylors', Dr. Marlow came around and opened the door for the women. Faith got out and stood waiting. Mrs. Marlow hesitated with one foot thrust out. "Dear, I forgot to tell you-young Tom is home. He just came this afternoon. Isn't that lovely? Eloise phoned."
Dr. Marlow gripped the door handle harder. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"I-it slipped my mind, dear." She tried to smile at her husband. There was silence. "Jason, I'm sure it will be all right. Really I am. I'm sure he's settled down very decently. Anyway," she said in an undertone not meant for Faith to hear, "what can possibly happen? With all of us here?"
"We're going home," said Dr. Marlow. "Get back in the car."
But at that moment the Taylors' front door opened and Eloise came out in a turquoise dinner dress that was too bright for her fox-red hair, and said, "Here you are! Come in, Colonel's mixing the martinis."
There was nothing to do but go in.
The room looked warm and gracious. They had lit a fire and there were flowers in a silver vase and Colonel Taylor was stirring the martinis in a glass pitcher.
Tom was standing by the fireplace and when Faith walked into the room, the adults paused in their greetings and watched alertly.
Faith said, "Hello, Tom. How's Exelon?"
"Great," he said. "Best of the preps. How's Miss Brigham's?"
"Marvelous," said Faith. "I've met some simply super girls."
There was a silence. Mrs. Marlow cleared her throat and said, "Well. It's so nice to be all together again, isn't it? I knew it would be."
Dr. Marlow looked at her venomously, then sat down and lit a cigar. The Colonel gave them all martinis, and the women began to talk.
Faith wanted to go and warm her hands at the fire, but it would have meant moving closer to Tom, and the adults were all watching even though they were absorbed in their conversation. Instead, she wandered to a chair a little apart, on the far side of her mother, and sat down.
The Colonel said, "Tom, laddie, would you like a sherry? It's on the tray."
"Thank you, sir," said Tom.
The Colonel looked at Dr. Marlow. "What about Faith? A sherry won't hurt the lass."
Dr. Marlow gazed at his daughter as if weighing evidence.
Eloise Taylor lit a cigarette. "Oh, unbend, Doctor. This is a holiday. And we're all here together."
"All right," said Dr. Marlow. "One."
Tom poured a thimble-sized glass of wine and took it to Faith. "No thank you," she said politely. "Miss Brig-ham doesn't recommend alcohol."
Tom glanced at her with a startled look on his face, then looked away. He stood awkwardly with the two glasses of sherry, then finally took one back to the tray.
The adults had two martinis each. Eloise and Dr. Marlow had started on a third when the cook announced that dinner was ready. They carried their glasses to the table, arms linked, talking almost exclusively to each other, while Vera Marlow and the Colonel followed silently.
With food in his stomach, Dr. Marlow began to talk. "The problem of this age," he said in a voice that was beginning to sound thick from the martinis, "is morality. There is a taint of corruption that runs through politics, government, from the highest to the lowest, all the way down..." he looked at his daughter, " ... to the level of the individual citizen."
"You're right, of course," said Eloise Taylor, finishing her martini. "But what can you do? People are animals, you know. They are what they are, and they do what they do, and you might as well accept the fact."
"To accept is to condone," said Doctor Marlow grimly.
"Oh, I don't know," said Eloise, looking at her son Tom. "I don't think it's the same thing at all. You do what you can to avoid things to prevent them. But that's as far as you can go."
"Appeasement," said Dr. Marlow. He leaned across the table dramatically. "In fact, my dear Eloise-complicity!"
Faith had been very calm, but that final word shook her. It was a word she remembered all too clearly from the incident three years before.
"It was her complicity," Dr. Marlow had thundered to his wife in the living room that night, "her depraved complicity that makes her even more guilty than he is, and God knows he's guilty enough, the depraved little bastard!"
Faith had crept to the head of the stairs to eavesdrop on their conversation. Only half an hour before, her father had dragged her from the playhouse, up the hill, and home. She was still crying softly. He had slapped her repeatedly when he had found her and Tom. Mrs. Taylor, who had been with him, had tried to stop him, but she could not.
"Surely the child didn't know what she was doing," Faith's mother had pleaded.
"Didn't know what she was doing?" her father thundered. "She had his goddamned prick in her hand!"
Faith's mother gasped.
"And where," he continued, "where do you think he had his grubby little hand? Knuckle deep in her goddamned little pussy, that's where!"
The words seemed to reverberate in Faith's head as she sat at the dinner table, listening to her father argue morality with Mrs. Taylor. The humiliation of the past seemed to wash over her anew. After the disaster, she had been humiliated repeatedly by her parents. First her mother had questioned her closely. Faith had sworn that feeling each other was as far as she and Tom had ever gone; that, in fact, she didn't know for sure if there was anything else boys and girls could do together.
Mrs. Marlow, not wanting to clue her daughter in to anything that she might not already know, did not pursue the topic. But Dr. Marlow's questioning was less delicate.
"Don't lie to me-he's done it to you, hasn't he?"
"Done what, Father?" Faith had asked.
"Put his dirty little prick into you!"
"What's a prick, Father; I don't understand."
Although Dr. Marlow had raged and threatened, Faith did not waver in her testimony: she and Tom had simply been curious about each other's bodies, they had investigated, and that was all that had happened when Dr. Marlow and Mrs. Taylor had chanced to discover them.
"But what were you doing in the playhouse at nine o'clock at night?" Dr. Marloxu demanded triumphantly.
"I had left my diary there," Faith explained in an exhausted voice. "I didn't want anyone to read it by mistake, so I went down to get it. Tom was putting their cat out just then and he saw me go down, so he followed to find out what I was doing. We started talking. That's all."
Dr. Marlow seemed ready to cross-examine her till doomsday, but Mrs. Marlow had finally managed to call him off so that Faith could get some rest.
Dr. Marlow had called a council meeting the following morning with Colonel and Mrs. Taylor. Faith did not know what had been said, only that it had been decided that she and Tom should not see each other again, and that they should both be sent away to school. Tom had left for Exelon within a week. Faith had not been allowed even to say good-bye to him. Two weeks later she had gone to Miss Brigham's.
Faith let herself look closely at Tom for the first time. He was eating slowly and he kept his eyes fixed on his plate. He had not changed much except that he had learned how to make his face a blank. Three years ago, he had not known how to be detached; everything had shown instantly on his face. But now he had developed a mask.
But what if it weren't a mask, what if it was now his true face, what if he was a stranger?
Just then Tom looked at her. For the first time their eyes met, and she saw a flicker that reassured her. He, like she, was waiting. He was playing a part, concealing his true self from these hostile adults. Faith breathed deeply and looked down at her plate. She was trembling with relief.
"Dessert and coffee by the fire?" Eloise asked. They filed back to the living room and Dr. Marlow sat beside Eloise as she poured coffee.
Mrs. Marlow soon complained of a headache and went upstairs to lie down for a few minutes. Dr. Marlow and Mrs. Taylor had their heads together in intimate conversation. The Colonel put down his brandy and went frankly to sleep in his armchair.
Tom looked at Faith anxiously and with a trace of embarrassment. He hesitated, then came over to her. Eloise and the Doctor halted their conversation.
"I have some snapshots of the school if you'd like to see them," he said awkwardly.
"Yes, I'd love to," she answered politely. Her father and Eloise looked back to each other and continued their talk. Dr. Marlow's hand was resting on Mrs. Taylor's ample hip.
Tom got an envelope of snapshots from a table drawer and handed them to Faith one by one, explaining what each one depicted and the lens setting he had used.
After ten minutes, Eloise and the doctor, now exceedingly drunk, had their heads even closer together and were apparently oblivious to their surroundings.
Quietly Faith said, "It's stuffy in here. Let's get a breath of fresh air."
Tom looked uncertainly at his mother and her father. "But..."
"Go in the kitchen," said Faith softly. "I'll get my jacket and follow you."
"But what if they..." he started to say, but Faith silenced him with a look of purest command.
Dr. Marlow was reciting with lugubrious intensity some maudlin trauma from his childhood to Eloise Taylor, who, although her eyes were open, seemed to be only semi-conscious. They did not look away from each other when Tom left the room, nor a few minutes later when Faith left.
The two went very quietly through the house and out the back door with Tom not exactly hanging back, but somehow communicating his reluctance all the same. It had begun to snow lightly. They walked down the long slope and the rock steps that dropped down to the lake front, not touching each other.
"Where are we going?" Tom asked, and his voice cracked on the last word.
"The playhouse," said Faith.
They came to the edge of the woods and there it was, like an abandoned gingerbread cottage. Tom tried the door but it wouldn't open. "It's locked," he said with something of relief in his voice.
"They talked about tearing it down after you left, before I went away," she said. "Father seemed obsessed. But in the end they didn't."
She hugged the little ermine wrap close around her slender shoulders. Her light hair was beginning to be spangled with dry, frosty snowflakes.
"If I remember right," she suddenly said, "the latch will slip if you lift hard enough. Try it, Tom."
Obediently, he bent his knees and lifted with all his strength and the door gave and he opened it. A little moan of doom escaped his throat.
"Are you sure we ought to?" he asked.
Faith didn't answer. She simply walked past him into the dim interior of the little house. She stood in the center of the room, a pale wraith in the reflected snow light, and her voice sounded dreamy and unreal.
"All the little flowered dishes," she murmured. "I suppose they're still here. And the music box that played Londonderry Air. There's the painted rocking chair, and there's the clown doll I played with when I was a child."
She turned slowly and then stopped. "And there's the little bed, the little bed that was yours when you were tiny..."
Tom stirred uneasily as if he wanted to flee, but was constitutionally incapable of leaving her.
" ... the little bed," she crooned. "The little bed where you fucked me and fucked me and fucked me, Tom. I remember every single time you did it, Tom. I've never forgotten the feeling."
"Faith, my God!" he croaked. "My God, don't talk like that. I never heard you talk like that before." He was trembling with shock and strange stirrings of passion and his face had gone white.
"I always talked this way," said Faith calmly.
"No! No, you didn't. You might have said damn or hell once in a while, but you never said-that other."
"Fuck? Maybe you're right, Tom." She took a graceful step or two toward him. "Maybe we didn't talk about it; maybe we just did it. Do you remember all the times we fucked, Tom?
"Jesus, Faith, will you stop that?" He was in genuine distress now and his breathing had become ragged and uneven. "What if somebody heard us? What if your parents came down? We better go back to the house."
"No," she said softly. "We aren't going back to the house yet. We are going to fuck, Tom. I've waited three years. We're going to do it now."
"Oh, God!" he cried. "Faith, your father...." He rubbed his hands over his face in a helpless gesture.
"We are going to," she said. "It's too cold for us to undress, so we'll have to do it with our clothes on. Come here, Tom."
She went to the youth's bed and stood beside it. She hooked the little ermine jacket so that it would not slip off and then she reached for Tom's fly.
His hands fluttered vaguely around hers as she unzipped him efficiently and groped in his shorts for his cock, as if he wanted to prevent her, but could not bring himself to. Faith found his penis without difficulty inasmuch as he was now, whether he liked it or not, fully aroused, his organ engorged to its fullest capacity.
Faith pulled it out and it stood stiffly away from his body, looking somewhat ludicrous. He was dressed in flannel slacks, a tweed jacket, button-down shirt and striped tie; with his prick extending wantonly, throbbing slightly with desire, he seemed like an overdressed Priapus. Faith tapped the swollen head and it bobbed slightly.
With a quick motion, she hoisted her dress and tucked it up around her waist. She seemed to have nothing on but the waist-length ermine jacket and a pair of fragile nylon panties. Her adolescent figure was lithe and boyish, with a firm muscled abdomen, long clean-lined thighs, and delicate legs. The softness and femininity of her figure lay in the tender fleshiness of her pubic mound; it was as soft and pouty as a child's lips, and the indentation of the slit could be seen through the fabric of her panties.
Tom stared, hypnotized, at the sight. Now he remembered with vivid clarity the things that he had felt, for three years, he should forget. He remembered her childish pussy, as it had been three years before-bare of pubic hair, since she had not started to mature physically at that time; its hotness, its incredible hotness. He remembered the delicious ecstatic delirium of pushing into that wet channel, and his knees began to tremble.
Faith stripped down her panties without ceremony and stuffed them into the pocket of her jacket. She sat down on the edge of the little bed, right on the very edge, and planted her legs far apart, so that although her buttocks rested on the extreme edge of the mattress, her cunt was free-floating, as it were, and open.
"You'll have to get on your knees," she said, her voice beginning to be breathless. "I don't want to lie down for fear of mussing myself, and then everyone would know what we've been doing."
She looked up at him as he stood, almost unconscious from his powerful conflicting emotions, and she saw that she would have to give him the added impetus he needed.
"Come here," she crooned. "Come here and fuck my pussy, Tom. See, it's waiting for you." She put her legs even further apart and slid her hands over the insides of her silken thighs, delicately pulling apart her labia to entice him. "Come and put your big prick in it, Tom. Come on."
With a strangled moan, Tom fell to his knees. In his haste, he first fumbled at her cunt with hot eager hands, but she took hold of them and moved them around back to cup her buttocks cheeks. She grasped his cock and guided it so that the tip just touched the mouth of her vagina.
Tom lunged forward. His stabs were so rapid and so nearly hysterical that no rhythm could be established for a few moments, but then he steadied somewhat and began to pump into her cunt in hard but carefully measured cadences. She curled her hips upward to take more of him and, indeed, his penetration was so perfect that with each ingress his testicles thudded against her rectum.
"Oh God Oh God Oh God," she whispered endlessly.
Tom clutched her buttocks. Feeling himself close to a climax, he attempted to pull out for a moment, but Faith lifted her legs and dug her heels into his buttocks, ramming him deep again.
"No," she gasped. "I'm ready. Fuck, Tom. Fuck hard."
Needing no urging, Tom pistoned his hips backward and forward, thrusting himself wetly into the sucking vortex of her hot flesh. The slurping sound of it made chills run up his backbone, and then in the next instant, he felt the hot-cold quicksilver of climax begin in his guts and tear its way through his penis.
Faith hunched closer and hung on in a paralysis of ecstasy as The Feeling gripped her, shuddered her flesh into dissolution, wracked her soul with hard joy, and left her clinging weakly to Tom, mindless, her pussy swollen to twice its normal size, her soul empty for the moment of conflict.
The playhouse was in business again.
CHAPTER TWO
As they climbed the snowy path, Faith clung to Tom's arm with a feeling of fierce joy. Her clothes were perfectly in order, her hair was smoothed down, even her lipstick was hardly smudged. Everything prim and in perfect order. While beneath her velvet skirt, that throbbing little demon, with such an intense life of its own, was temporarily satisfied. It seemed to sleep quiescently, like a fat tabby after a large meal of rich cream.
It thrilled Faith wickedly to be aware of herself as capable of circumscribing two such diverse intelligences as her cool mind and her raging cunt.
I must be an extraordinary person, she thought. To her mind the sex was nothing, a trifle, a cat's-paw device that she could use whenever she wanted, for whatever purpose she wanted. But to the strange, warm, fur-trimmed part of her, sex was everything: copulation was the epitome of its wild, hungry existence.
Her mind and her quif stood like two discarnate personalities, each surveying the other with mild disdain and mutual misunderstanding.
I am split, she thought, without any fear or misgiving, only a sense of intense wonder. There are two people in me. Maybe Eros and Agape, she thought, remembering her school lessons about ancient Greek mythology. I am a Goddess and a Daemon, she thought triumphantly.
Tom stopped suddenly as they approached the house.
"What if...? "
"What?" she prompted.
He licked his lips nervously. "What if you got pregnant?"
"Don't be silly," said Faith. "I won't." He relaxed a little. "The pill?"
"No," she said coolly. "Mind over matter. Things never happen to me if I don't want them to."
"But-but, that's dumb. You can't think your way out of getting knocked up." He seemed to be annoyed. "I mean, you've got a lot of will power, Faith, but ... hell!"
She was unruffled. "Yes, I do have will power. I can keep that from happening, or anything else I don't want to happen." He seemed unconvinced, so she smiled benevolently. "I am a witch, Tom."
"Aw, for ... I mean, look, it's bad enough-what happened tonight. With your father and all. But if you didn't even use anything...! "
Unaccountably, Faith felt rage envelop her. "You're sorry we did it, aren't you? You didn't like it! You've had dozens of other girls, and you find me second-rate."
"No!" Tom croaked . "I didn't mean ... How the heck did you get that out of what I said? I'm just worried about the possibility of your getting knocked up. Christ, think what that would do to us."
"What would it do to us?" she demanded hotly.
Under her fanatical gaze Tom backed down somewhat. "Well, they would all be ... mad at us," he said meekly.
Faith laughed sharply at his dwindling spirit. "I don't give a damn who is mad at me, Tom. I am beyond such things."
He blinked rapidly and rubbed a hand across his mouth. "Gee, you've sure changed in the past three years. You didn't used to be like this."
Faith could not determine if she heard a note of wistfulness in his voice or not. "Oh, shut up," she snapped.
She flounced up the steps to the back door and brushed aside Tom's efforts to hold the door for her. One part of her mind was asking, Why am I so angry? It was a good fuck. It's what I've been wanting for months. It was fine. Why am I in such a rage?
There was no answer. Whatever motivational forces now controlled her emotions were outside the ken of her conscious mind.
She went ahead of Tom, tip-toeing through the dark kitchen and moving quietly down the hall. Tom stopped her halfway down and whispered, "Gotta go to the bathroom."
Faith nodded permission and slipped off her wrap, motioning for him to put it upstairs as he went.
When he had disappeared up the carpeted stairs, she turned to the living room and walked serenely in. The first sight that came to her vision was the Colonel asleep in his chair. His head was resting on his chest, and his baby-pink lips puffed gently out at each breath.
Faith turned to speak to her father, but he was not on the sofa where he had been half an hour before. She looked around the room and located him in a far corner, on a window-seat in the shadows of the far side of the room.
Her eyes widened as she comprehended the detail of the tableau spread out before her. The Doctor was atop Mrs. Taylor, at least partially atop her. They were kissing with absolute concentration and quite a bit of noise, while the Doctor's hand roamed over her marshmallow abdomen to the prominent pubic mound below.
The fire crackled in the grate, and Eloise Taylor emitted rhythmic moans-otherwise there was no sound.
Faith looked wildly at the sleeping Colonel, hoping desperately that he would awake. But he slept the dead sleep of the innocent. She could not awaken him without, she feared, alarming the lovers at their play.
But somehow she had to take advantage of this situation that had been so unexpectedly and fortuitously granted her. She withdrew cautiously from the room, slipped off her shoes, and raced upstairs.
The sanctimonious old fart! she thought. Crucifying me, while all the time he's been...
She reached the door of the Taylor's guest bedroom and went in noiselessly. Her mother lay on her back on the four-poster with a wrist over her eyes. Her shoes were off, but her skirt was chastely pulled down. Even in sleep she was a model wife and mother.
Faith slowed her own racing pulses by an exertion of will and went softly to the bedside.
"Mother? Mother, darling, wake up. There's something I want you to see."
"What?" murmured Mrs. Marlow. "What is it, Kitten?"
"Get up, lovey. That's it. Here are your shoes. Come with me, now."
Mrs. Marlow struggled to a sitting position and looked foggily at her daughter. "What is it? Are we going?"
"No, Not yet. But you must come downstairs, very quietly. There's a surprise for you."
"For me? What do you mean?"
"Stand up, that's it. No, let's leave the Shoes off. See, mine are off too. Now come on, I'll hold you up."
"But I don't understand," complained Mrs. Marlow gently. "What is it? Where's Doctor?"
"Downstairs," said Faith, leading her mother out into the hall. "Waiting for you."
Mrs. Marlow let herself be led noiselessly down the stairs and into the living room. When she saw her husband-who was now thrusting rhythmically at Mrs. Taylor with his pelvis, although he was obviously not in a position to penetrate, even if they had been unencumbered by clothes-Mrs. Marlow merely gasped softly and put her hands over her mouth. "Say something!" hissed Faith.
Mrs. Marlow shook her head mutely, her eyes wide with the horror of a situation she did not really care to face.
Stymied, Faith looked from her mute mother to the sleeping Colonel. Neither, apparently, was going to raise the alarm.
Bracing herself, she suddenly cried loudly, "OH NO! NOT MY OWN FATHER!"
At this ear-splitting exclamation several things happened at once: the Colonel awoke, instantly alert, like the old soldier he was, and immediately grasped the situation. "Good God!" he cried;
Dr. Marlow raised his head, saw that he was observed in his diddling, and went momentarily into something like a catatonic trance: he froze, eyes wide, nostrils flared, hand enmeshed in his lady's crotch;
Eloise Taylor closed her eyes for an instant, bit her lower lip, and then began struggling to regain an upright position-apparently under the impression that with it she would regain her now-dashed reputation. But the doctor was heavy on top of her, and she thrashed unsuccessfully for several seconds.
The Colonel heaved himself from his chair and advanced on the guilty pair. "But this is monstrous," he said gruffly. "Monstrous!"
Eloise Taylor at last regained her seat (and her crotch, as it were, by removing the Doctor's limp hand) and patted her hair, trying all the while to project an atmosphere of composure.
"Doctor was just telling me ... that is, we were discussing..."
"Discussing, my ass-hole!" thundered the Colonel. "Don't we have eyes to see, woman? And with the lassie here and all. It's monstrous. I should think you'd have the decency to keep your dirty philandering from the eyes of children."
"Oh, Rog, do be still," she snapped, hoping to intimidate him into silence.
"Don't 'Rog' me, you harlot! At least when you were sniffing round that bloody tennis player, you had the civility to be discreet. The year we were married, too. I should have known then."
"I will absolutely refuse to listen to any such talk," she began, still confident that she could redeem the situation by sheer bravado, but just then the Doctor regained his powers of locomotion and rolled off the window seat to end up seated on the floor.
As luck would have it, his fly was open, and before the eyes of the astonished onlookers, his peter popped out.
"Oh, my God!" shrieked Faith, almost as much from a wild desire to laugh as to play up the dramatic possibilities of the moment. The Colonel turned quickly and pressed her to his chest, shielding her young eyes from the monstrous sight.
Doctor Marlow was still bewildered. Half-drunk, half-bemused by passion, he had not yet fully grasped what was afoot. His kind wife, who even in her distress maintained her habitual empathy with her lord, murmured, "Jason, dear-your thingamabob is showing."
Dr. Marlow looked down, gasped, and hurriedly thrust the offending member back into his trousers. Or almost. As he speedily attempted to zip himself up, the inevitable happened.
"Ahhhg!" he screamed, as the zipper caught the loose skin of his penis.
The spectators lost, momentarily, their attitudes of self-righteous condemnation, and moved unconsciously closer. After all, a man with his peter caught in his zipper was to be pitied under any circumstances.
The Colonel released his hold on Faith and moved nearer, his hands automatically outstretched. "No, no, man, don't run the bloody thing up. Easy! Zip it down carefully, there's the lad."
Eloise Taylor leaned over anxiously. "What about vaseline? If we could lubricate the little teeth of the thing..."
The suffering man's wife took a step forward. "Jason, shall I-call a doctor?
"Shut up, you bitch!" he screamed. "God, it hurts, it hurts!"
"There now," said the Colonel. He knelt beside the wounded physician and fiddled with the zipper. It sprang free and the mutilated penis hung limp but unencumbered, a bright drop of crimson blood gracing its wrinkled visage.
Faith had stood helpless while the farce played itself gradually from a scene of outrage to a more gentle one of tragedy: Dr. Marlow was now, psychologically, the victim of Fate, and as such, automatically compelled a certain amount of sympathy, rather than the damnation she felt he deserved. Quick work was called for to retrieve the situation.
She cried out, "Oh, my God! To think of my own father, and Mrs. Taylor!"
This brought only a perfunctory "There, there," from the Colonel and a dark look from her father. Her mother took her hand and pressed it meaningfully. Harsh measures were obviously needed.
Faith moved back from the group and stationed herself in front of the single lamp burning in the room, so that the light came from behind her.
"What will Miss Brigham say?" she intoned in a voice heavy with awful import.
Vera Marlow turned instantly, like a mechanical doll, her eyes wide with horror. The Colonel rose slowly to his feet and stood as if cowed. Dr. Marlow zipped his fly up firmly, but obsequiously, and hoisted himself to sit meekly beside Mrs. Taylor.
"Miss Brigham?" said Faith's mother with trembling lips.
"When she learns that I have been a witness to my own father fucking-that is the word, isn't it?-yes, fucking another woman! Oh, I don't know," she cried brokenly, managing a sob. "My training has not prepared me for this-this travesty!"
"Miss Brigham," said Faith's mother again, her voice rising. Her ordinarily dim eyes began to blaze with something like fanatic fervor and her chin lifted. "Good gracious, Miss Brigham!"
She turned to her errant husband with all the power of an avenging angel. "Jason Marlow, this is the last straw. The absolute last straw."
"Vera, be quiet," he said, but it was without conviction. Although he was no longer drunk, he had a throbbing head and his prick stung unmercifully. He was in no condition to do moral combat.
As if possessed by the disembodied spirits of sacrificed martyrs, Vera Marlow blazed at her husband and the astonished Mrs. Taylor, "The two of you! Don't think I haven't been aware of what's been going on! I've known all along. Even when you chastised my darling daughter and poor, innocent Tom, I knew. I knew why the two of you were at the playhouse that night, how you just happened to be there to discover the poor lambs in their childish, unthinking play. Because you were keeping a tryst, that's why! You were there to do-to do-what she said," gesturing toward Faith.
"Well, I won't stand anymore of it, do you hear? You know very well, Jason, that the bulk of our income is from the money Aunt Jennifer left me. I've never said a word about the way you administered the estate-but that's all going to be changed now. The investments are in my name, don't forget that."
Doctor Marlow, at last realizing that the situation was crucial, tried once more to resume his former role of commander in chief. "Vera, if you don't shut up..."
"You'll what?" she screeched. "Everyone knows you couldn't support a cocker spaniel on what you make from your practice And who would come to you if I divorced you for adultery?"
Dr. Marlow sank back. Clearly, the trumps were all hers.
Mrs. Taylor, who felt she must at least give it a try, said, "Oh, Vera darling, don't be so upset. Doctor and I are only friends, I swear it."
Mrs. Marlow, transfixed by the intoxication of speaking her mind for the first time in twenty years, turned on her friend and yelled, "Shall I mention what I happen to know about Cunningham, the gardener you had two years ago? Shall I, Eloise?"
"Oh, my God," said Eloise Taylor involuntarily.
The Colonel looked from the guilty pair to Mrs. Marlow with renewed interest. "What about Cunningham...? " he began, but at that moment he was interrupted by young Tom coming into the room.
Seeing an opportunity, Faith flew to his arms, sobbing. "Oh, Tom, when I think of what they did to us! The hypocrisy of it! And all the time they were fucking!"
Tom turned fiery red, as did his father. "Faith, dear," said the Colonel, but it was of no use-she was clinging to Tom in a paroxysm of what seemed to be grief and shock.
"Oh, Miss Brigham," she moaned. "What have they done to you?"
This tableau held for several seconds, until Mrs. Marlow suddenly barked, "Jason! Get the car. We are going. I leave it to the Colonel to deal with you, Eloise."
She turned maternally to the bewildered Tom. "As for you, my poor, dear boy-please think of my home as yours. If you wish to come to me, or to Faith, for guidance and counsel-or even just to breathe pure air, un-contaminated by bestial lust-feel free to do so."
The Doctor, still somewhat dazed, struggled to his feet and followed his women meekly out of the room.
Eloise Taylor, seething with frustration, adjusted her dress and got up, under the menacing stares of her husband and son. She walked silently into the hall and went upstairs.
As the Marlows departed, Tom and his father were left alone. The Colonel poured sherry into two glasses and handed one to his still-confused son.
"Drink up," he said grimly. "It's been a dirty business. I reckon the old girl won't have it all her way from now on. And as for Marlow," he laughed mirthlessly. "I don't envy the poor bastard the life he's going to lead. The old girl's got him by the balls on a morals charge, and she holds the purse strings as well. Lord love us, I don't envy him."
Tom drank down his sherry, piecing together in his mind as best he could the events of the latter part of the evening. He couldn't totally appreciate the fall of Dr. Marlow because of his concern about a tell-tale stain on the fly of his own trousers. But his father seemed not to notice, so all was well.
With an intensity born of relief, he said passionately, "The old bastard!"
"That's the boy," said the Colonel, pouring out more sherry.
"The old bastard," murmured Faith, smiling. She had locked herself in her room and stripped off all her clothes. She went to her full-length mirror and viewed the naked body reflected there.
Overcome by a sudden exultation, she ran to her bathroom and turned the shower on full force. That did not yet express her wild mood. She raced to her bedside radio and turned it on full blast. The room shuddered with the sounds of ear-splitting rock and roll music and the steady roar of water. Her voice masked by the high decibels, Faith ran around the room screaming, "Fuck, fuck, oh, fuck you, you dirty old bastard. Shit piss cunt, prick!' she shrieked. "Oh fuck your filthy ass to hell."
Suddenly she recovered from her fit of obscenity and went coolly to turn off both the shower and the radio. She knew full well that in another part of the house her mother was screwing verbally, her misbegotten father. "Sock it to him, mother dearest," she murmured.
Faith pulled the covers of her bed carefully back and slipped inside the smooth envelope of snowy sheets. She reached over and turned out the bedside lamp. In the darkness she lay with folded arms, like a regal mummy.
"Goodnight, Miss Brigham, wherever you are," she said reverently.
Into her now-bemused mind floated a vision of the playhouse. She already knew what she was going to do tomorrow....
CHAPTER THREE
The following morning, Dr. Marlow went to his office. It was not his custom to go in on Wednesday, but this particular morning had to be an exception. He left the house like a threatened animal going to earth.
When the morning light had awakened him in the bedroom he shared with his wife, the first thing that had popped into his mind was that it had all been a nasty dream. After a few moments, he realized that it had been real, but he thought that despite all he would put up a bold front and whip his wife back into obedience.
He rolled out of bed, went to the bathroom, dropped his wine-colored pajamas, and stared gloomily at his injured penis while he voided his bladder. The pinched place looked better this morning, but it was still painfully sore. The raw spot was about the size of a thumbtack head, and he realized that when a scab formed it would be a tricky business to engage in any extramural sexuality. He resolved to administer penicillin ointment as soon as he was in the privacy of his office.
Feeling somewhat his old self with the characteristic lapse into medical diagnosis and prescription, he hoisted his pajamas, put on a light robe, and went in search of his wife. No doubt she was in the kitchen keeping his breakfast warm, as was her usual custom. Although the Marlows employed a daily cleaning woman, a gardener and sometime-chauffeur, and brought in various maids and bartenders when they entertained, the doctor insisted that his wife prepare his meals with her own hands.
He descended the stairs with dignity and went down the hall to the kitchen. Vera was not there.
Adjusting his twinging penis more comfortably, he went through the dining room, into the living room, and finally into the study. There he found her.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded. "What about my breakfast?"
Vera Marlow was dressed, her hair was neatly done, and she sat in a poised manner at the desk. It was several minutes before she condescended to look up.
"I am going over the bank books and accounts," she said icily. "I haven't time to coddle an adulterer."
"Now see here..." he began, but she stopped him with a raised finger. "One thousand dollars," she said. "That's what you netted from your practice last year, Jason, after expenses, upkeep of the office, salaries, your various club memberships, your trip to Canada to hunt moose, your trip to Scotland to fish for trout, nine medical conventions, several large sums marked 'gifts for staff,' and the cash purchase of a new Cadillac for your personal use."
"Oh," said Dr. Marlow.
"I have already spoken this morning to a lawyer about divorce proceedings-although I will not do anything definite about it if I can arrive at an unmistakable understanding with you about how things are going to be from now on. So go in the kitchen, Jason, and don't bother me. There are Wheaties in the cabinet. I have more work to do."
Dr. Marlow turned like a sleepwalker and went back over his previous route to the kitchen.
Vera had lied, actually. She had no more work to do. She was now engaged in writing an account of how she felt. It was almost akin to automatic writing, in that she was not entirely conscious of what her hand was scrawling on the yellow legal pad before her on the desk. Thoughts that she had dared not think for two decades were bubbling to the surface: Jason is a prick. Dirty word. Don't say that, Vera Jones Marlow. Jason is a prick and you always knew it. Yes but Papa wanted me to marry him. Papa was a prick. Papa was a prick and Mama was a cunt. Fuck you Jason Marlow. Fuck you Papa and you Mama. Little Vera wants to kick your asses. All your shitty old asses...
And so on, in that vein. She smiled the gentle, radiant smile of a Madonna, and went on with her writing.
In the kitchen, Dr. Marlow ate Wheaties and milk, his mind spinning like a hamster on a treadmill. When he had finished his meal, he crept back upstairs, showered and dressed, then crept down again. He fled for his office.
His car pulling out of the driveway woke Faith. As she became conscious, she realized that her right hand was snuggled in her furry, soft pussy, and she considered a quick masturbation before getting up.
"No, no more of that," she thought. "I've had nothing but that for three years. Now I've got the real thing available."
With that admirable thought in mind, she started to flip the covers back and get up, but her cunt, having been reminded of its function in life by her playful fingers, demanded a total release. It throbbed maddeningly and began to swell up like a fur rabbit.
"Oh, all right," sighed Faith. She popped her middle finger, right hand, into her wet little mouth and then thrust it, sweetly dripping, into that voracious hole between her legs. She jockeyed the stiff finger around for a few seconds, warming to the task. Almost immediately her whole body began to throb and tingle as the blood rushed through her veins. With her left hand she grasped her satiny breasts and squashed them together.
The Feeling began to steal up on her.
"Oh, goody!" she whispered and spread her legs wide.
Having amused herself in the hole for a few preliminary moments, she now turned her attention to the pulsing little projection at the front of her labia.
"Hello, clit," she saluted it fondly. This member responded by throbbing deeply a time or two. Faith settled down to a steady circular rhythm of massage, her hand flying in her impatience to reach bliss.
As her excitation increased, she involuntarily arched her hips up, lifting her round, pubescent fanny off the mattress. She could dimly envision a male phantasm with an enormous pink prick descending on her. Jerking her pelvis upward toward this vision of delight, she murmured through clenched teeth, "Oh, screw me, screw me."
Her body jerked, goose bumps sprang out on her thighs, and the awesome feeling of utter deliciousness flooded her being. The spasm throbbed for a breathless moment throughout her whole body, its flood of violent energy seemingly centered on her open, proffered cunt-then it waned suddenly, like water swirling down a drain.
She lay breathless for a few minutes, then her sanity began to return. She patted her damp pussy condescendingly.
"Not bad for an eye-opener," she murmured. Then she got up and went to her bathroom. As she soaped her lithe young body in the shower, she pondered on the possibilities of a male anatomy that would be so shaped as to fulfill all her latest desires at once.
"He would have to have an enormous prick," she mused dreamily. "One with a big knob at the end. And monstrous balls with lots of springy hair on them. Of course I would want his hands to be tender so as to caress my breasts at the same time he was screwing me. However," she thought, with a worried frown crossing her smooth brow, "I would want his hands lifting up my ass at the same time, so he could screw deeper."
The only solution to the dilemma seemed to be a virile being with an uncommon penis and four hands.
Then, too, there was the matter of cunnilingus. While Faith had never actually experienced this delight, she had read of it in books smuggled into the dormitory at Miss Brigham's. While it seemed somewhat unsanitary, she was still eager to try it.
"But I wouldn't want him to stop fucking and start eating," she thought. "I would want everything at once."
She considered for a moment that a midget with unusual masculine development might be capable of this feat of contortionism, but gave up the thought. Being fucked by a midget seemed unaesthetic, however satisfyingly obscene it might be.
"Oh, well," she thought philosophically. "I suppose one can't have everything. I will have to settle for being fucked awhile and then licked awhile and then fucked again."
Having solved her impasse, she stepped from her bath and went to her dressing table, little breasts and buttocks bouncing merrily.
In the Taylor household things were strained. The Colonel, upon awakening, had lain thinking that perhaps he might be able to turn the last evening's misadventure into a sexual advantage for himself.
"By God, I hold the whip hand now," he told himself. "The old girl will have to do what I say, no matter what it is."
Early in their marriage, his wife had performed certain ministrations to his masculinity which he had found enticingly erotic, but with the passage of years, she had begun to refuse on the ground that it was "discriminatory." When the Colonel had offered to return the favor, his wife had complained that his moustache scratched. Gradually, therefore, their forays into the more exotic forms of sex had diminished and finally died out altogether.
Now the Colonel thought that this practice might be resumed.
"Ducky," he called softly to his spouse in the twin bed across from his. "Come here, there's a love. I want you to do me."
Eloise Taylor opened her eyes and looked at her florid, fat-paunched husband. "Do you what?"
"You know," he said, somewhat embarrassed by his own daring. "Do me. The way you used to. Before all the bloody tennis players and gardeners got into it."
"I don't know what you mean," said Eloise haughtily.
"Come on, love. Give it a suck, why don't you? It won't hurt."
"Oh, be still," snapped Eloise.
The Colonel sat up in his bed with round, wounded eyes. "Now look here, woman. It's you who have transgressed. I'm the wronged party. It's only right that you should do what I say from now on. Come on, I said. Suck it."
"Suck it yourself," said his wife and turned over.
The Colonel considered this for a moment, then got out of bed and marched to the bathroom with regal bearing.
"It isn't right," he mused as he urinated. "Tisn't right at all."
In another room, young Tom awoke and lay stiff as a board. Had it all been real? Had he actually been with Faith, under the noses of their respective families? Had the scene with his mother and Dr. Marlow actually take place?
His conscious mind told him that it was all true. A new feeling of freedom flooded him. Why, now that this had all happened the old darkness and guilt of the past would diminish. He was no longer the nasty boy who did unspeakable things. That ogre, Dr. Marlow, was no better than Tom, himself. And as for his mother ... he shut his eyes momentarily. That was something he didn't want to think about. Safer to think of his father-his poor father, wronged by an unfaithful wife. Yes, that was better. He need not bring his mother into it at all.
And Mrs. Marlow had invited him to the house. He could, with perfect impunity, go over as often as he liked. Probably he could even see Faith alone. It was not impossible. Maybe an occasion would arise where they might actually make out.
Exhilarated by the prospects that his future suddenly seemed to offer, he leaped from bed, threw on clothes, and loped downstairs.
No one was around except the rotund black cook, Dolores.
"Tommie, you want breakfast?" she asked from the sink where she was washing last night's dishes.
"Glass of milk," he said, opening the refrigerator door.
He gulped down his milk, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and went out the back door. Dolores shrugged and went on with her dishes.
At the Marlows' back door, Tom hesitated. What if he was assuming too much? What if the situation wasn't as relaxed as he supposed? Maybe the doctor would shoot him if he showed his face inside the house. Maybe Mrs. Marlow would sense that he was trying to get next to Faith. Maybe Faith, herself, never wanted to see him again.
Shaken by these possibilities, he started to back away from the house, but at that moment, Mrs. Marlow appeared at the door.
"Tom, dear, do come in. I'm so glad you decided to come over. We've finished breakfast, but I'll fix you a nice warm cup of Ovaltine. Come in this minute."
Gulping, Tom climbed the three steps and entered the warm kitchen. Mrs. Marlow steered him to a chair at the kitchen table and put on milk to heat, chattering all the while.
"I think you may have suffered from the events of the past," she said, blushing a little, "but I want you to know that that's all over and done with Things will be different now, Tom. I spoke to the doctor only this morning. He sees my point of view perfectly. And Faith-oh, I can't tell you how glad I am that you two sweet young people have been drawn to each other. I think the acquaintance will be uplifting for both of you. Let me call the dear child-I'm sure she's up."
While Tom gulped down the tepid Ovaltine, she went to the hall and called her daughter. Faith came down dressed in a demure, long-sleeved, pink miniskirted dress. She held herself very erect and nodded gently to Tom.
"Now you two just make yourselves at home," gushed Mrs. Marlow. "I want you to forget the awful implications of the past. Things have put themselves to rights now. I want you to remember that."
"Thank you, Mother," said Faith softly. She bowed her golden head and remained silent for a moment.
Tom said, "Uh-maybe we could-uh-do some crossword puzzles together or something. Faith." He had been thinking up this subtle scheme for getting alone with Faith all through the Ovaltine. Surely her mother would get tired after a while and leave them to themselves.
"Lovely," cried Mrs. Marlow. "Come in the study, both of you, and I'll bring in more Ovaltine in a moment."
Faith stopped her mother. "I'd like to take Tom to the attic," she said. "There's a darling little window with diamond-shaped panes of glass there. It's like something from a fairy tale. He's never seen it, Mother. May I show it to him?"
"Darling, please do," urged Mrs. Marlow.
Faith bit her tender pink lower lip for a moment. "You-you don't mistrust us, do you, Mother?"
"Please, please don't ever think a thing like that again," said Mrs. Marlow with great intensity. "Of course I trust you, my darlings. Of course I do. The influence of evil suspicion..." she glanced out the window in the direction her husband had taken when he left, " ... that influence is gone. Forever, I trust. You adorable young people go right up to the attic, and don't tarry a moment."
"I do so want Miss Brigham to get to know you better," said Faith tremulously. "Thank you, Mother. For everything."
"I've things to do in the study," trilled Mrs. Marlow, blinking rapidly to hold back her sudden tears of exhilaration. "Enjoy yourselves. I'll yoo-hoo when lunch is ready."
Faith turned and walked down the hall, her head held high. Tom followed. Mrs. Marlow watched them until they disappeared up the stairs to the second floor, then shook herself slightly and, with a fond smile, went to the study.
Faith led Tom up to the fourth floor attic.
Tom's knees were shaking slightly. "We'll be alone ... maybe I can manage it ... I'm sure she won't mind ... Or will she?" he was thinking feverishly. "She's a high strung girl ... maybe last night was just an accident ... maybe I'd better go slow."
They entered the attic, and Faith closed the door. The space before them was pointed at the top like an alpine cottage, and splotches of green, blue and red fell on the floor as the light shone through the diamond-shaped panes of glass at the window. It was quiet there, and had an air of being removed from the world. It breathed the still, sacrosanct air of a Flemish cathedral.
Faith turned and faced him. Her green eyes were half hidden by her dark, feathery lashes. Her white skin glowed with unearthly light in the dim atmosphere of the attic. Her tender lips, palest pink in the dim light, moved softly.
"Tom," she whispered.
"Yes?" he breathed, caught by the hushed magic of the room.
"Is it possible...? " she said softly, then stopped. "I t don't quite know how to say it."
Tom was suddenly touched by her uncharacteristic reticence. He took her hand awkwardly and held it gently. He would have liked to kiss her forehead, she had suddenly made him feel so paternal.
"Go on, Faith," he said huskily. "You can tell me."
She gazed into his eyes, her own darkening with subtle emotion. "It's just that I wondered if it's possible for you to eat me at the same time you fuck me."
Tom snapped backward as if he'd been jabbed with a cattle-prod. His eyes went wide. But as one world crumbled, another came instantly into being, for under the fabric of his trousers his lusting prick sprang into tumescence.
"Eat ... while ... I ? " he stammered.
"Yes," breathed Faith, already reaching behind her for the zipper of her dress.
Faith need not have stripped. They had screwed before while clothed, with only their pulsating genitals bared; in the days of their childish frolics in the playhouse, they had been completely naked once or twice, but it was always under covers, groping and blushing. But a quite sophisticated, brittle mood now seemed to envelop Faith. She was not there to giggle and spy, or even to nestle warmly against living flesh like a puppy or a kitten. She was not reaching for romance, and she knew nothing of love. She was, in fact, quite adult: she wanted to fuck. Dimly she sensed that it was something else, something that stood behind fucking, which she was straining toward, but she had no words, nor even any conceptualization as yet, of the nature of that entity. The closest she could get to its actualization was the harsh act of fuck-a bone-hard prick pounding relentlessly into her vagina; a male creature bent to its lascivious task over her sweating curves; gasps and little bestial cries in a mindless fog of sensuousness. That was all she knew about consciously and all she asked for.
For Tom it was, at once, simpler and more complicated. The dichotomy in his nature was total. Awake and sexually unexcited, he was quite a prude, and a bit of a coward. After all, what about her father, his father, the world? What would people think? If her mother only knew what was going on, and so forth. The dichotomy expressed itself, however, at the first stimulating sight or word or action. At those times, his mind and training and conscious morality closed themselves off entirely, as if he were walled up in brick and concrete, and the entity that ran the whole show was some essence of physicality, something residing in every cell of his body, something constant and immutable, something which culminated in the sex-trance that now gripped him.
He watched her twisting her lithe body to run down the zipper of her dress. Her young breasts swayed and pressed themselves against the pink fabric, her body arched, her pelvis thrust forward for a moment as she maneuvered, sending a shaft of scalding sexuality through him from throat to groin. He could dimly sense some great slavering beast gradually taking over his mind and body, and he was aware only of the urgent determination to plunge his live and hungry, thick-stalked penis into the wet hole between her legs; to feed on the heat and pungency he would find there; to ram again and again into that electric heat until his expanding hunger was fully satiated.
Unable to wait until the formal disrobing was effected, he grabbed for her waist, bending her toward him to press his prick hard against the eternal woman-cunt that awaited him. He hugged her ferociously and ground his hardness against her in the full tempest of rut.
For Faith it was something of a shock. Her sexuality was brittle and, in a sense, dirtier than his. She was accustomed to taking the lead, luring him into fornication, playing on his witless passion like a clever gamine teasing a retardant. Now his dim, moronic sexuality had developed a will of its own, and he was taking over. His lust threatened to be stronger, and less human, than her hard little fuck-urge.
"What are you doing?" she asked snappishly. But already she sensed intuitively exactly what he was doing. Biting her lip to keep hold of her temper, she modulated her voice carefully and said, "Tom, dearest, wait until I get my dress off."
Tom did not bother to reply, since he was past words anyway. He slid a hand down between her legs and snaked a finger into her pussy, thrusting and rotating roughly, his back bent, his eyes half-lidded.
His head bent lower, and he pushed the unzipped dress down to bare her breasts. She had worn no bra, clever girl! He found the tender teats with his mouth and sucked in a pink, tight nipple. She was entangled in her dress and could not push him away. He fed loudly on the baby-soft flesh, meanwhile getting another finger or two into her cunt.
For the first time, Faith felt a tingle of fear concerning the possible consequences of sex. She had no great strength, but she had a mind that was suddenly very clear. She wrenched away from him in one sudden twist, and stood back, alert to his reaction.
Tom was panting, his hair was down on his forehead, and his face hung slack and slightly puffy from the effects of his passion. He was poised to attack again, only a moment was needed.
"I-I think I heard my father's car," said Faith quickly.
Tom blinked, and a tiny sliver of rationality played about his mind, although it did not entirely penetrate.
"Yes," she added, getting quickly back into her dress, "I'm sure I heard something. Go to the window, Tom. See if he's come home."
Tom was not entirely biddable in his present condition, but the fear of Dr. Marlow that been instilled in him three years before was still a potent motivating factor. He turned blindly and stumbled toward the window. While his back was turned, Faith finished getting her dress in order and moved soundlessly to the door. She opened it.
"Maybe I was wrong," she now announced. "But I did hear something."
Tom turned and came back to her. The fit of passion was abating. He was still not fit to be seen by either of their parents, but he was at least a bit more conscious than before.
"We shouldn't have tried it here," said Faith. "It was stupid of me. We'll have to go to the playhouse, Tom. It's the only safe place."
Without waiting for a reply, she went through the door and down the narrow, steep steps. Her timing was perfect. Tom was still dazed enough to follow her without question; his mind was not connected yet. All he could sense was that he wanted to fuck-really fuck-and that if he followed Faith, she would find a place for them to do it.
She went lightly down the stairs, listening to be sure that his footsteps came after her. She knew that in the five minutes needed to get them to the playhouse, Tom would cool down a little. Also that in that time she would have a few moments to reorient herself.
That they would screw like minks when they got there, she was perfectly well aware, but she calculated shrewdly that in the old familiar surroundings, where she had always before been dominant, Tom would fall back into his accustomed pattern. They would fuck, but it would be on her terms. His sexuality would be allowed to come to the fore and glut itself, but it would be under her suzerainty. In the playhouse, she would be the directing will and Tom the tool of its satiation-not the other way around, as here.
They crept quietly through the house and to the back door. Her mother was nowhere around. The sun had warmed the ground and they didn't even bother with coats, but went out and headed down the slope. Through the trees they saw the child's-dream shape of the little gingerbread structure before them. There they could do what they were determined to do.
CHAPTER FOUR
For Tom, too, it was the first time in three years-except for the brief experience of the night before. Something in him ran wild as an untamed horse at the first touch of the heated flesh of her loins and upper thighs, and plunged blindly into rutting.
He was not driven by any masculine personality factor, such as a need to subdue or possess a woman; a bit of that had popped up in the attic, but now it had been replaced by the raging life of his genitals. He was prick-guided, prick-motivated.
He first straddled her warm thighs and pressed his engorged penis between her legs, jockeying back and forth to enjoy the satiny friction against her skin. Faith wriggled a little and tried to ease him up so that she could open her thighs, but he held her clamped while he feasted on the sensation. He knew the full satisfaction would be forthcoming; he was enjoying getting there.
The winter sun shone through the little windows of the playhouse like pale gold. It was not really very warm there, but they were already overheated by their own passion and needed no covering.
Tom got on hands and knees and dragged his tingling member the length of the long furrow created by her thighs being pressed together, then dragged it back the other way. His bare butt was pointed skyward, but he was entirely without self-consciousness, since all his conscious awareness was zeroed in at the penis.
Faith let him play for a short while, but then she became impatient for attention and for goodies for herself. She managed to pull his head down to one of her breasts, arching her back at the same time to tease his lips with the firm little pink nipple.
Somewhat self-consciously, Tom took the taut little bud in his mouth and sucked lightly. Faith palpitated under him, so he knew the action was a success. He sucked harder, drawing the small teat deep into his mouth, elongating it into a different shape, and tickling the tip of the nipple with his tongue. He had almost the whole of her white breast inside his mouth.
Faith nuzzled him away, then presented the other breast for a like treatment. Tom squashed them together in his hands and attacked them alternately with his lips, tongue and teeth.
Meanwhile his prick was growing larger and larger. He rapidly reached a point where the foreplay, delightful as it was, began to drive him a little mad. He now wanted more than anything in the world to push into the warm, wet depths of her.
He began maneuvering to get her legs apart now. Faith understood what he was about and, although she might have liked a little more of the preliminary titil-lation, she acquiesced in the urgent need to get on with things.
He poked blindly just at the mouth of the long mysterious tunnel of flesh that was her feminine birthright. For a moment he couldn't find the proper angle of approach, and ran into unyielding flesh in all directions.
Then Faith tilted her pelvis slightly and raised up to meet him. He slid home with a sudden gasp of unexpected delight. Faith lifted up that way each time he plunged, and they met with a faint slurping sound, grinding their loins against each other at the extreme point of their closeness.
Tom settled himself more stolidly on hands and knees and fell into a thrusting rhythm that satisfied his soul and would lead, he knew, to the wonders of orgasm. Although he was young and still physically sensitive, and although he had not really gotten enough encounters under his belt to make him a fully-disciplined master of his craft, Tom was on the track team at Exelon. He knew the technique of pacing himself physically. Without putting it into words, he grasped the elementary principle that if he persevered with what he was doing, getting a little faster toward the last lap, he would eventually get to his destination.
Thus he fucked with a blank look of rising sensation on his face.
Faith, however, was dealing with different energies and different psychological forces. Now that they were doing it, she wanted to do it madly. She wanted vicious variety and searing sensation. A plodding copulation, however pleasant, could not quench the fires that burned within her. She tried, by subtle shifts of her body weight, to tumble Tom from his steady course of thrust-pause-thrust, but it did no good.
"Fuck!" she muttered through clenched teeth.
Tom, misunderstanding her intent, merely smiled, grunted in affirmation, and continued with what he was doing.
She raked her heels and fingernails along his body-that part of it she could reach-and began to moan a little, as much from frustration as from pleasure. As they proceeded on in their pursuit of orgasm, strange visions flicked across her consciousness, flashes of subhuman behavior, of bestial satisfaction, glimmers of violence and chilling cries of ecstasy. She did not exactly wish, consciously at least, to do those things that haunted her imagination in rapid shutter-stop flashes. She didn't know what she wanted. She felt some need for excess, a need so great and so subliminal that she could not find a conscious thought pattern for it.
Tossing under her lover like a wild Gypsy girl in rut, Faith looked down between their naked bodies and watched the long fleshy tube of his penis sink into her, then rise again. Beyond the frame of his legs and her legs and the pistoning cock, she could see the front wall of the playhouse and the door.
Some moments elapsed before, in her frenzied state, she became aware that she was looking at the figure of a man standing in the doorway.
With a choking sound, she went immediately cold, dropped her legs from their perch on Tom's hips, and struggled to sit up.
Tom stopped, his heart in his throat, and turned to look over his shoulder in the direction she was staring.
"Good God, Sir! Stop that at once," expostulated his father. The Colonel took a step into the room then stood, slapping his hands on his thighs. "Amazing!" he muttered. "Bloody amazing!"
The two culprits rolled loose from each other and clutched stray bedclothes and garments ineffectually against their nudity. Tom leaped to his feet in terror, then sat back down on the narrow bed to wad his shirt against his now-limp penis. Faith drew a blanket up to her collarbone and stared at the Colonel, scarcely breathing.
Now that they were all staring at each other, the Colonel found himself at a loss for exactly the proper words to use under such circumstances. He sputtered once or twice, then snapped: "Get into your clothes, you young scoundrel. And you, too, Missy." While he averted his eyes decorously, they hurried into their outer clothes, not stopping to struggle with under things. Buttoned and zipped, Tom stood up straight by the bed, trembling visibly. Faith could not work her zipper all the way up the back, so contented herself with holding the dress up in the front, effectively hiding all that should not be seen. She arranged herself primly seated on the edge of the bed and awaited what might come.
The Colonel finally came to himself, after a furtive glance to see that all forbidden flesh was covered, and walked toward them.
"I am inexpressibly shocked," he sputtered. "Inexpressibly."
"Father, I-" began Tom in a quavering voice.
"Be quiet, you," snapped the Colonel. "Good Lord, if your mother knew-and if the girl's people knew-why, it staggers the-"
It had not taken Faith long, after the first tremendous shock, to reestablish contact with her intellect, and with her rather formidable will. She now, although still shaken, was in possession of herself. She knew that extraordinary measures were called for to avert the consequences of this untimely discovery. She sensed at once that the Colonel, now that he had made the discovery, did not actually know what to do about it. Far be it from him to seize the occasion in order to play the self-righteous punisher, as her father would have-the Colonel was not the type. Nor would he be particularly keen to tell his wife, or Faith's mother, of the tryst he had stumbled on; he was neither a tattle-tale nor a Puritan. Probably he was, in fact, in a state of dilemma about exactly what to do.
Faith sensed all this in her shrewd way, and she knew that if she could find just the right approach, she could turn the whole business to her advantage.
"I really don't know how to deal with you," said the Colonel, as if echoing her perceptions.
"You will probably have to deal with him later," said Faith softly.
"Yes," nodded the Colonel. "I will deal with you later, you young scoundrel."
"He probably should be sent to his room at once," offered Faith.
"Indeed," pronounced the Colonel. "Go to your room at once, you wastrel. I will deal with you when I come up."
He glanced for a moment in bewilderment at Faith, as if wondering at this exchange, but she nodded gravely and pontifically, and he turned back to Tom with stern eyes.
His son, drooping noticeably, grabbed up his under-shorts, stuffed them into his pocket, and made a trembling retreat.
When the door closed behind him, the Colonel found himself facing the other half of the team of young criminals. He opened his mouth to order the girl home, but at that moment Faith jumped up with a look of utter distress and flew to him.
"Oh, I'm so glad you've come," she cried. "It seems like an act of Providence almost. I must talk to you."
The Colonel blinked and tried to readjust his thinking, but before he could make any headway, she proceeded swiftly.
"Come and sit down with me. Please! Here on the bed where we can talk."
She led him to the fouthful bed and pulled him down, all the while gazing earnestly into his face.
"But you really should-I mean, under the circumstances-"
"Yes, of course," she said smoothly. "You're perfectly right. You seem always to be right, to know what should be done. That's why I need so desperately to talk to you. You will talk to me for a few minutes, won't you?"
Gazing into her wide clear eyes with their feathery shade of silken lashes, the Colonel muttered, "Why, of course, Lassie. But whatever...? I mean, what is it?"
"Oh, it's so difficult," she moaned and put her face into her hands. She was close enough so that her long soft hair fell across his hands.
"Why, there there, my dear," he said. "Whatever it is, it can't be all that bad. Tell me. Tell me what's the matter."
She lifted her head, bringing her face close to his. "You won't ... be angry with me? You won't laugh me off as a silly child?"
"Certainly not," he vowed, looking closely at her flawless skin.
She stopped for a moment, as if diverted from her troubles, and looked at him critically.
"You know, you're very young-looking," she observed. "One would scarcely think you're the father of a teenage son. I had noticed that about you before, but I hadn't mentioned it. You look far younger than Mrs. Taylor, actually."
"Most kind of you," he blustered, turning slightly red. "Kind of you, indeed."
"Not really kind," she corrected. "Realistic. Looks can be very deceiving, can't they? To look at me, you'd think I was only thinking about school work and dating and clothes, wouldn't you? You'd think I was only preoccupied with adolescent things. You wouldn't dream that I have problems that are deeper, and stranger. Problems that many women don't face, or even think about, until they're much older. Would you think that?"
"No, I-that is, yes. I mean, you're quite right, my dear," he said.
"How wonderfully perceptive of you," she said. "It must be because you've seen so much of the world, traveled so many places, known so many different types of women-men too, of course-that you can see so well beneath the surface of things."
Faith continued on in this line of thought, her voice becoming slowly softer, more silky, more caressing. She was sitting against him closely. She wetted her full lips with the tip of her pink tongue from time to time as she spoke. She gazed into his eyes with a blind look of trust.
Although the Colonel did not realize it consciously, he was breathing in the distinctive aroma of all those juices that flow forth to make sexual intercourse possible. They were emanating from her firm young body. Rising in a cloud of musky, provocative perfume. His subconscious registered the fact, regardless of what his conscious was doing, and it began working on him powerfully.
His palms began to sweat and there was a prickling sensation in his loins. Some dim, obscene voice that he was unaware of, seemed to be whispering, "Why not? The little wench didn't get what she wanted, I interrupted and spoiled it. So, why not?"
As if hearing clearly the voice of his inner imp, Faith turned her conversation subtly.
"In India, for example, you must have known girls who weren't much older than I am now, who had problems of this sort? There was at least one, wasn't there?"
"Oh, I suppose there might have been one or...'
"Of course. That only shows me that you do know about these things, you do understand. What was her name? Please tell me."
"Well, actually," he began, and drifted off in reverie.
"Her name was...? " prodded Faith softly.
"I did know a dear little piece of goods named Kamala," he murmured. "Only about as big as you are, brown as a chestnut she was. But fiery, Lord! The girl was a-"
He broke off, remembering where he was. "No, no, I shouldn't be telling you these things," he said.
"Oh, but you should, you should!" she cried, slipping her arms around his neck. "If you stop, I'll know that you're really laughing at me, that you don't take me seriously at all."
The Colonel reached up to disengage the soft, warm arms that lay around his neck, but somehow found himself only patting them fondly, then drawing them a little closer as he talked.
"Oh, she was only a little native bit. This was after our forces had withdrawn, of course, but I stayed on as an agricultural advisor. She had no one except her father-he'd served as a sort of batman to the old regiment nearby-and the blighter all but gave the girl to me. She'd nothing to look forward to with her own people, except going on the streets, because too many of the British had used her. And she wanted the arrangement. She liked the pretties I could give her, and she liked the rest of it great well, too."
"What did she call you?" asked Faith, rubbing her breasts ever so lightly against his arm.
"Why, she called me Puka. From Puka Sahib, y'know. It was a sort of a joke between us. I took no offense. She used to come and cook a bit for me, wash up a few shirts, then we'd..."
"Yes?" breathed Faith. "Many different ways? What did she like best?"
"Oh, I don't know," he said, his eyes glazed with a vision of the past. "She liked a good many things. There was a basket arrangement we used sometimes. Silly thing, actually. Hole in the bottom. She'd sit in it, and I'd run the thing up on a rope and pully."
"Puka darling, was it good" whispered Faith.
"Smashing," he grinned. "An old Chinese invention, I believe. But a damned lot of effort, if you see what I mean. Me, lying on my back, hauling on the bloody rope, yanking her and the basket up and down. It took a lot out of me. I'm not sure I didn't prefer some of the quieter methods ... backwards, sideways, in a chair, that sort of thing."
"Backwards, Puka darling. Please, backwards this time," murmured Faith.
With eyes still glazed, the Colonel turned her around and pressed himself to her back. She slithered into position, face down on the bed. Her short skirt slipped up, revealing the naked delicacy of her buttocks and soft thighs. The Colonel plunged one hand into her hair, while with the other he groped in his opened fly for his cock and withdrew it.
"Shall I lift up, Puka dearest?" crooned Faith.
"That's a dear," said the Colonel thickly. "Just the way you used to do it. Give me the dear little ass to play with. Easy now, me beauty. Take all of him, that's the girl."
Faith arched her buttocks upward and felt the terrible delight of the hefty knob of his prick pressing at her anus, demanding admittance; while she had not quite envisioned beforehand what was involved in "backwards", she was by no means ready to stop until she had gained full knowledge of this method.
The Colonel steadied her hips with his free hand and pressed forward. The heft of his penis caused a most uneasy passage at first, but with patience and a series of small jiggling motions, he succeeded in thrusting himself into her incredibly hot, tight channel.
He poked in and out, shaking her whole body with the force of his thrusts. Faith felt totally breached, engorged, possessed. There was a small amount of pain, but it seemed negligible compared to the magnitude of the exotic thrill she received each time his massive cock plunged into her.
The Colonel, not yet quite at the peak of his transport, reached around and under, finding the tiny lobe of her clitoris. With moistened fingers, he played on that small, sensitive member until Faith began to tremble and buck under him.
"Blessed Brahma!" she cried out, digging her fingers into the mattress.
"Hail Britannia!" gasped the Colonel, as he thrust in, in, in to the deepest, hottest, tightest depths for the last time.
They collapsed like limp dominoes, and lay breathing heavily for a few minutes.
Finally the Colonel stirred. "Kamala, my dear," he said, turning the girl over to look into her face. To his utter consternation, the girl beneath him was his neighbor's daughter.
"God's blood!" he said in a dying voice.
Faith stretched luxuriously and regarded him with a look that was part satisfaction, part sarcasm.
"Puka darling," she said silkily.
The Colonel leaped up and hastened to re-deposit his cock, which had just committed statutory rape, in his trousers.
"But, I-Good God, I-" he sputtered.
Faith drew herself together and got up with the the sensuous movement and feline grace of a satiated tigress. She slid her skirt down and stooped to pull on her diaphanous panties. When she straightened up, she saw that the Colonel was quite pale, as if in a profound state of shock.
"Is something wrong?" she inquired.
The Colonel gaped, like a beached fish. "My child, you-you mustn't tell anyone about this. You wouldn't tell, would you? I'm sure you wouldn't, a nice young lassie like you."
"No, of course not," she said. For a moment she had thought of the fun she could have now that the Colonel was in the palm of her hand, but she quickly decided against such a course. The exquisite thrill of being done to, as he had just done to her, was by far the more valuable commodity. She went to him and kissed him lightly, just under the moustache.
"On one condition," she said.
"Anything," gasped the Colonel. "Anything."
"That we can meet again-quite often in fact-and do this same thing. Oh yes, and that you won't say anything to anyone about-well, what you saw when you came in. But you wouldn't, would you?"
"Never," said the Colonel. His terror overcome somewhat by his lust, he brightened slightly. "You enjoyed it? Did you really?"
"Smashing," said Faith. "Perhaps we can get a basket somewhere, do you think?"
The Colonel seemed dazed for a moment, as the reality of what he had just committed, the possible consequences should they be discovered, and the untenable position he was now in on several counts, seemed to flood his mind. But then the brilliant and exciting possibilities inherent in the situation overcame his timidity.
"Jolly good bloody show," he chortled.
He left the playhouse presently, walking up the slope with a new springiness in his stride.
After a discreet interval, Faith emerged and" climbed slowly to her own house.
Tom must never know, she had cautioned. The Colonel had agreed quickly.
No one must know, she had said. The Colonel had affirmed this with the utmost enthusiasm.
And we will somehow find a suitable basket, she had decreed. The Colonel had fallen to his knees and pressed a passionate bite into her softly mounded pubis.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tom had waited in his room for his father to come up and "deal" with him, but nothing had occurred. Alternately pacing restlessly before the window, and lying prostrate on the bed, Tom tried to be calm and adult. But the fact was that he was terrified.
To have been caught twice in the act of screwing Faith was probably more than even his even-tempered father could put up with. The first time, when they were kids, had been bad enough. But at least there was the excuse that they were so young they didn't know what they were doing; Now that excuse wouldn't hold.
"O God," thought Tom. They'd already sent him away to school; what would they do to him now? What if they wanted to get really ugly about it? There could be, for example, reformatories, prisons, maybe even a mental institution. Maybe they would decide he had to be crazy to get caught the second time with the same girl and in the same place.
Thus tearing himself apart with his imaginings, Tom waited for the Colonel to come and mete out justice to him. But the Colonel did not come.
Feeling better than he had felt in years, the Colonel had come back to the house and unearthed an old box full of snapshots and mementoes of his world travels. Suddenly he didn't feel like a middle-aged suburbanite anymore: he was once again the dashing young terror of the brothels in Calcutta (as he had once liked to think of himself.) He was once more the determined cocksman who had successfully made love to six native women in one evening while his comrades counted strokes and cheered him on. He was even-fleetingly-the devil-may-care who had seduced his current wife in a back pew of the parish church in a village in Surrey when she was a student-tourist and he a Captain home on leave.
Ah, memories! How rich and full of life they seemed. How Eloise had squirmed and whimpered under him, with the red and blue and green shafts of light from the stained-glass window coloring her naked belly and thighs!
Tom waited for more than an hour, then too restless to stay in his room any longer, he ventured forth to see where his father might be. Passing along the upstairs hall quietly, he glimpsed his father in a small room they used for storage, poring intently over a box full of pictures. The Colonel did not look up. Tom stood irresolute for a few moments, then continued on down the hall. He didn't know what the outcome of the day's activities was going to be ultimately; for the moment, he felt that as long as his father was occupied elsewhere, the better course of action would be to make himself scarce around the house.
He crept silently downstairs and went outside. As quietly as he could, he started the motor of his convertible and pulled out of the driveway.
Three blocks away, he stopped at a corner telephone booth and called the Marlow residence. As luck would have it, Faith answered the phone.
"What-what happened?" he asked, licking his dry lips.
"About what?" she asked casually. "After I left. What did he do? Is he going to tell your parents?"
"Oh, that. No, I don't think he's going to tell anyone."
"But-but how did you manage it? What did you tell him?
Faith paused a moment, then said, "I think we'd better meet so we can talk. Where are you? Can you pick me up now?"
"I'd better not come by the house," he said quickly. "Walk down toward Forsyth Street. I'll pick you up. Can you get away?"
"Of course," said Faith. "See you in ten minutes."
When he spotted her striding along in the later afternoon sun, Tom drew up by the curb and waited for her to get in. Unaccountably, he began to tremble.
"Drive on," she said airily as she settled herself on the leather-upholstered seat beside him. "Go to the golf course, around on the back road. We can talk there."
Although he was bursting with curiosity, Tom did as she said, remaining mute until they had pulled into the partial cover of a small stand of pine trees near the ninth hole.
He pulled on the emergency brake, then turned to face her. "All right, let's get it over with," he said. "I can't stand the suspense any longer. The old bugger was pasting pictures in his scrapbook or something when I left. Why didn't he come up and make a scene? Why the hell are you so calm? What's going on?"
Faith regarded him seriously for a moment, then she burst into laughter.
"What the hell are you laughing at? Didn't he threaten you? Aren't we in trouble?"
"Oh, Tom, you silly thing," she said. "There's only one thing we have to figure out at this point."
"What?"
"How on earth do a man and a woman fuck with a basket?" she said.
Tom also exploded with pent-up emotion, except that the question in itself intrigued him. He got himself under better control, and asked again, "What happened?"
"Between your father and me?" She thought of telling him all that had really happened, then decided against it. The situation was already sticky enough. To bring further ramifications into it might prove the undoing of her scheme.
"Oh, we had a serious talk," she said. "Father to daughter type of thing. I half-way convinced him that he didn't see what he saw. I told him how difficult it is to be an adolescent with all the adults being constantly suspicious of your motives. He counseled me. That's all."
"All?" asked Tom, not really believing it, yet wanting to. "And what's he going to do to me?"
"Nothing, silly. The best thing you can do is forget the whole thing. We won't hear anymore about it-if you keep quiet, that is."
"But this is preposterous," he said. "I mean, your father doesn't just catch you in outright fornication, and then just forget about the whole damned thing."
Faith looked at him steadily. She had thought that Tom would hold no attraction for her, that she was satiated for one day after all that had happened. But on the contrary, the sex she had enjoyed had merely created a larger appetite for more. She was surprised, and not entirely sure that she wasn't becoming a sex maniac, but she didn't care if this were the case.
"Older men are all right," she mused, half to herself, "but there's something about a younger man ... You don't know everything about it-just as I don't-and it's exciting to think what we can find out from each other, learn together."
Tom didn't know whether to be insulted or flattered. He felt himself turning on like some obscene light bulb at her words, at the nearness of her body.
"Now, look, I didn't come out here to do that," he said. "I came to find out what the hell's going on."
"But that is what's going on," she said.
She leaned over and brought her parted lips close to his. Tom was reluctant to catch her into a grinding embrace, and so held back slightly. Faith, amused at his attitude, moved closer until their lips just touched. She snaked out her pointed little pink tongue and traced the outline of his lips with the tip of it.
"Don't be a silly fool," she murmured throatily.
Tom felt the heat of ravenous desire come up full all through his body, and he pulled her closer. Bending her backward, he kissed her deeply, plunging his tongue deep into her satin-lined mouth, probing into the depths of her wet mouth that tasted faintly of wintergreen.
Groping blindly for her body, Tom slid her closer to himself. She began to suck on his invading tongue, draining it of the sweetish, musky saliva. His hands fumbled over her body, and she took one and directed it adroitly beneath the sweater she was wearing.
He had not noticed before that she wore no bra. Now he discovered the fact first-hand, as his palms encountered the soft balloon of curved flesh with the tiny, tensed nipple thrusting upward.
Tom had not been aroused, nor had he anticipated that he would be; but at the first touch of her flesh, he flamed into instant desire. He yanked the sweater up and plunged his face into the tender valley between her breasts. Squeezing the perfumed mounds together, he ran his tongue back and forth from one hot, hard nipple to the other.
She arched her back, giving her breasts to him with a mad abandon.
"Go on, eat them," she directed.
Tom fumbled among the breasts, licking, sucking and mouthing the treasures laid out to him with a mindless feeling of sheer freedom to do whatever he wished. But his attention could not be held there for long.
As she sprawled backward, he freed one hand and ran it up the length of her warm thigh. Miles and miles of satiny thigh, and then he reached the warm, fleshy apex of her femininity, where all the little hairs stood up wiry yet soft. She had not worn panties, either.
"You came expecting to be fucked," he said thickly.
"I always expect to be fucked," said Faith.
He felt about, looking for the entrance to the deep, wet hole that was the end of all his searching. Finding that incomparable cavern, he thrust a finger in, ramming it the full length. The flesh inside was wet with longing, hot with passion; it was only a moment in time before his now-aching prick could be thus buried.
Tom pushed his finger in and out, jockeying her into what he hoped would be a rapid rise of passion. Faith responded admirably, and nudged her pelvis out to meet his thrusts. His hand was now dripping wet and seemed to be at play in a field of treasures such as nothing less than the immortal female vagina could ever contain. He wanted his cock in there, very badly.
He began to shift his weight, moving his hard, young athlete's body over hers. But the car was too much for him-there simply was not room. Not room enough to do what he wanted to do.
Tom disengaged himself and slid over Faith, opening the door on her side. He pulled her around and positioned her body to suit him: her fanny on the seat, one, foot on the dashboard, one foot hooked over the back of the seat.
Quickly zipping down his fly, Tom shucked his trousers halfway down and bared his engorged penis to the cool air of twilight. Standing on the ground beside the car, he moved his hips forward until the tip of his cock touched the hot entrance to her cunt.
He plunged in. Holding firmly to both her hard little breasts, he pistoned his hips back and forth, ramming his masculinity as deeply into her as it would go.
Although Faith was deeply involved in what she was doing, she was aware enough to take note of her lover's face. His mouth had gone slack, his eyes glazed.
"I am fucking you," he breathed, as if to give himself the added pleasure of intellectual knowledge. "I am fucking your pussy."
Faith lifted her rounded buttocks off the leather seat with each thrust, straining upward to take more and more of his engorged length. Each time the heavy, knobbed head of his penis pushed against the mouth of her cervix-which was as far, anatomically, as it could go-she breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Each time it withdrew to the clutching mouth of her vagina, she breathed a thin sigh of disappointment.
Tom's face, which hung over her with its glowing look of physical enthrallment, was sheened with a fine dew of perspiration. She reached up and wiped the sweat from his brow.
Even as far gone as he was, Tom sensed instinctively that she was not as wrapped up in the fucking as he was. Something in him rebelled at her detachment. Grabbing her wrists, he forced her arms high above her head, and pressed them cruelly into the leather upholstery. With her thus held captive, he worked his will with his lower body, ramming into her with a new strength and a new show of dominance, more than he had ever exhibited before.
The headiness of the entire experience rose up in Tom like a tidal wave, and he nearly reached climax. Acting quickly, he withdrew, for he was not yet ready to give himself to the complete satisfaction of orgasm.
He waited a few seconds, breathing hard.
Faith looked at him inquiringly. Her eyes were glittering mysteriously, and her face was slightly swollen. Her lips were bruised where he had kissed her with more than his accustomed fervor.
Tom wanted something more, something less tame. He wanted to, somehow, win through to an as yet untapped reservoir of sexual savagery that they had not touched before. Although he didn't know exactly how to go about this, instinct-and a passage from the book he was currently reading-gave him a clue.
"Turn over," he commanded thickly.
"You mean-backwards?" said Faith, with a note of surprised delight in her voice.
"Just turn over," he ordered.
She swiveled around until she was on her stomach and waited breathlessly for the assault on her anus which she had now become used to expecting from men in the Taylor family.
Tom knew nothing of such things. Acting purely on instinct, he took his prick in his hand and probed around until he once more found the mouth of her vagina. He pushed in.
Faith thought for a moment that she was going to be disappointed, but as he rammed in further, she found that a new delight had suddenly been unveiled to her. On her upper body she had the confining scratchiness of her sweater; at her waist was the tightness of her skirt which had crept up and rumpled itself into an untidy girdle.
As for Tom, he was dressed properly from head to foot, with the exception of his loins; there he was free. Only his hungering cock was encumbered; only her hungrily receiving pussy was bare to the soft winds of evening. There was something maddeningly erotic about it. As he began to fuck lustily again, his flesh slapped against the full rounds of her buttocks; his testicles knocked softly at the downy fleshiness protecting her clitoris. Faith found herself bowing upward, presenting her posterior to him for total use, utter invasion, complete mastery.
Tom did something he would never have imagined he would do. Caught up in his ferocious passion, he slapped her fanny.
Faith uttered a strangled cry of pure pleasure. She had read about brutal acts, and had always felt a fastidious distaste for such things. But this was not pain; it was the most glorious pleasure.
"Oh, God!" she cried. "Hit me again."
Tom drew back his hand and fetched her a stinging slap on the buttocks. Then he fucked her deeper and harder.
Faith cried out in a voice that was scarcely her own each time he slapped her rosy flesh. She sighed deeply each time he forced his long prick into her. Massive waves of tingling delight coursed through her body with each movement he made, and she gave herself up to the incredible pleasure of the fucking and the slapping. She dug her nails into the leather and hoisted her beautifully moulded ass for further onslaught.
Tom once more felt himself approaching the zenith of his desire. But he was too greedy with this newly-found means of achieving pleasure to let it all end there.
With a tremendous effort of will, he withdrew and stood trembling beside the car.
Deprived in an untimely manner of her pleasure, Faith looked over her shoulder at him.
"For God's sake, don't stop now," she rasped. "Do it, you bastard! Fuck me!"
Tom was obscurely pleased by these words. It clearly meant that he had the upper hand. Whereas he could withdraw, she was begging for more. He thought momentarily of teasing her by holding back even longer, but the raging tide of lust in his own blood would not accommodate such a game for long.
Driven by such torrents of lust as he had never felt before, Tom grabbed her legs and pulled her from the car. He dumped her on the dewy grass on her back and fell on top of her.
"I'll get grass stains," she protested, trying to fend him off.
"Fuck your grass stains," he said through clenched teeth. "Fuck your pussy. Fuck your ass. Fuck everything."
He plunged, without preamble, once more into the pulsating channel of her quivering vagina and began to grind away, rotating his hips in a circular motion.
It did not take Faith long to pick up the rhythm of his love-making. She wrapped her long legs around his hips and rammed him deeper, smearing her coital fluid across his groin and onto each of his hairy thighs.
Tom laid his head on her breasts and slipped both hands down until he could lift her buttocks. Although it was an ungainly position, it provided him with the utmost leverage. He could lift up her fanny with each thrust, thus driving his penis more deeply than he had ever penetrated before.
Faith wanted him to come; she wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything before, for she herself was trembling on the brink of a glorious orgasm. At the same time, now that he had toyed with her in the way that he had, she had developed something of his own philosophy about plunging right on to the ultimate climax. Although her pussy was swollen to twice its normal size, and although her insides were quivering with the tremors of approaching bliss, she found herself emotionally on a sort of plateau.
"I can go on forever," she thought. "Or, I could come this minute."
This gave her some encouragement. She wanted to be able to come instantly, but on the other hand she relished the thought of being able to hold off for hours and hours until her lover was completely exhausted. Not just Tom, but any lover. While she had experienced orgasm practically every time she had made love, she still clung to the beautiful feeling that she could control things if she chose.
"Do around and around, like you were doing a while ago," she said.
Tom rotated his hips, and she felt the heft of his penis stroking the soft interior of her vagina from side to side.
"Now up higher, fuck higher," she whispered.
Tom hoisted himself further up on her body and fucked at an oblique angle.
What neither of them had anticipated was that, at this angle, his hard groin was massaging her clitoris. Her mind wanted to say "no," to push him back down and resume a form of fucking that would not excite her so; but her body would not be denied any longer. The first edge of the orgasm brushed her consciousness, and she was powerless to call a halt.
"Oh, Christ!" she cried thinly. "Do it! Oh my God do it harder."
Tom fucked harder and faster, pistoning his hips with lightening-swift action.
Faith felt herself going over the edge of sanity, and she cried out, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!"
At the same moment Tom reached the limit of his power to hold back, and he dived irrepressibly into the flashing, dazzling maelstrom of fulfillment.
Their bodies bucked and hunched, united the loins welding together in an unbreakable fusion of lust. He rammed hard enough to give them both bruises, held that hard invasion, and shuddered to a halt.
Faith's vagina rippled and clutched around his blood-warm penis, drawing him deeper and deeper. The hot spurt of semen gushed from him and was swallowed by her inner caverns.
For endless moments of time, they lay locked together, their genitals glued together by the blinding wetness of coitus, while their blind eyes saw only darkness and their minds swam on translucent waves of unearthly pleasure.
At this point, a mosquito stung Tom on his naked buttock and he slapped, then roused himself and got up.
Faith lay light and fragile on the dark grass, her glimmering white thighs sprawled apart, the nest of pubic hair like a blurred small furry animal on her smooth flesh. Looking down, Tom could see the red slit beneath the fur.
"That's where I've been," he thought, and knew no more than he had known before-except that he had been there.
He reached out a hand and pulled her to her feet. Her skirt fell down around her hips, hiding the sight of that searing dream of gorgeous lust; but the smell of their encounter was still strong on the night air. He breathed deeply, pulling into his lungs, and into his consciousness, the odor of rut-a thick, pungent perfume of transport and fulfillment and dark, beautiful lust.
Silently he pulled up his pants and zipped up his zipper. She ran her fingers through her hair. They got back in the car. It was the time to light a cigarette and enjoy the intimacy of the aftermath of sex-but neither of them smoked.
He started the car and pulled out of the bushes onto the street. Faith sat huddled in her corner, staring straight ahead.
"Something happened," thought Tom. "But what?"
Of course, it had been sex. It had been screwing. He had fucked her. He had slapped her ass. He had fucked her on the ground. But something else had happened. What?
"Are you okay?" he asked tentatively. Faith remained silent.
"Was it all right?" he now asked. "Did you like it."
"Don't talk," she said. "Well, what the hell...? "
Faith brushed her hair back and seemed to straighten herself. "It's all right. I don't feel like talking. We'll meet tomorrow, all right? Come out and drive down toward Forsythe around four o'clock. I'll be walking. Okay?"
"Sure," said Tom, now completely unsure of himself. "Is anything wrong?"
"Nothing," she said.
They drove on in silence. He had intended to let her out some distance from her house, but in his confusion, he drove up into the driveway before he realized what he was doing.
As she opened the door to get out, he reached over and caught her arm. "Faith, is anything wrong? I mean, golly, you seem so strange."
She looked at him enigmatically, then smiled in an abrupt way. "Tomorrow," she said.
Tom sat feeling completely disoriented as she got out and slammed the door. She looked back into the car and said, "Drive around the block, will you? Just so no one will see us coming home together."
"Okay," he said. "You sure you're all right?"
"Perfectly all right. See you tomorrow."
Tom put the car into gear and pulled noiselessly out of the driveway. He could in no way fathom what was happening, what was in her mind, what might be wrong. The fuck had been the greatest. Hadn't it? Surely she had seemed to enjoy it as much as he had. Was he imagining things?
He drove slowly and without thought down the street.
Faith went quickly into the house. There was no one around. She could hear a radio playing upstairs, and she surmised that her mother was up there. Her father apparently was not home yet.
She went to the telephone and dialed the Taylors' residence. It rang five times and then the Colonel said, "Hello, hello. Who's there?"
"Meet me at the playhouse, now," said Faith and hung up.
She slipped out of the house and went down the path to the edge of the lake. The moon was up by then, and shone like moving fish-scales on the rippling water.
She opened the door and went in. The interior was quiet and dark, and it smelled faintly of rose petals. She stood in the darkness until she heard his footsteps on the gravel outside.
He came in, unable to see in the dark, and whispered, "Faith?"
"Here," she said, without moving.
He groped his way to her. When he reached out and touched her shoulder in the darkness, he stopped.
"My dear, we mustn't take chances, you know. It was very rash of you to call like that. What if the old girl answered the phone? I'm not complaining, mind you, but it's just that..." . .
"Be quiet," said Faith. "Take down your trousers. Get your prick out. I'm not here to talk."
The Colonel was stunned, but her words set him aflame. Reaching out for her again, he told himself that he should talk to the girl, at least make conversation, do something to mask the brutal honesty of her proposition. But the part of him that was in control laughed at this notion: it had found the perfect opportunity, and the perfect invitation.
The Colonel unzipped his pants and exposed his now-rigid penis. Groping in the darkness, he found Faith. She was in the process of hoisting her short skirt to bare her buttocks. She leaned over, her back to him, and clutched the arms of a small chair.
"I want to do it standing up," she whispered. "I don't want to lie down. Put it in my ass the way you did before."
"But-but, my dear girl, one doesn't just..."
"Doesn't one?" she asked sharply.
The Colonel knew she was right. She was the voice of pure sensuality and he was only mouthing platitudes.
Without another word, he found her exposed buttocks, quickly lubricated his cock with saliva, and pressed the head of it against her tightly-convoluted anus.
She pressed backward to meet his thrust, and he entered in with a smoothness, a wet sliding freedom that thrilled him. As he pumped in and out of her hot little ass, he leaned over pressing affectionate kisses on her shoulder-blades.
It was all so sudden; he did not know what it meant-any of it. Perhaps he was more than he had supposed; perhaps it was possible for a young girl to recognize the superiority of a more experienced man; perhaps it was all a thrilling dream.
As he thrust into her anus, his balls in their loose hammock of scrotum bouncing and slapping against her, he thought these questions and found no answers. But he did not really need answers. It was enough that she would let him fuck her.
Faith hung on to the chair and took his prick into her anus and felt satisfaction at both the tiny shafts of pain and the slowly spreading net of pleasure.
Tom, Goddamn him! had had her in a way she had not anticipated. Now she would have his father.
She was not such a megalomaniac as to think she could control the world. But she was shrewd enough, already, to realize that she could fuck its men. All of them, if she chose.
CHAPTER SIX
Dr. Marlow sat in his private office Thursday morning drinking coffee and viewing his appointments for the day. His head ached, his balls ached, and he viewed the schedule set out before him with uncharacteristic distaste. Usually he enjoyed his practice because it gave him a chance to play God with people; patients always responded to his pontifical air, his somewhat surly dignity, and his exorbitant fees. Almost without exception, they were filled with a certain awe and reverence for his supposed powers.
But today he could take no pleasure in the prospective sore throats, sprained knees, infected kidneys and nervous complaints of his patients-not while his personal life was as screwed up as it was.
He wanted to see Eloise Taylor. Ordinarily, he could go for a week without partaking of her fleshy thighs and rowdy appetite, and not feel deprived in any sense. But now, with the pressure on, he felt an illogical hunger for her constantly.
He had tried late Wednesday to call her, but the Colonel had answered the phone and Marlow had been forced to hang up. Early this morning he had decided to risk trying again, calling from home before anybody was up. But as he had picked up the receiver and started to dial, Vera had appeared at the top of the stairs and looked down at him with a knowing expression.
Now his gonads were tormenting him and if he didn't somehow arrange something with Eloise, he would be forced to masturbate just to relieve the pain. He detested being forced to play with himself as a last resort. It seemed beneath his dignity.
Just as he was feeling at the lowest ebb of his depression, his nurse came in and miraculously announced that Mrs. Eloise Taylor was in the outer office and insisted that she must see Doctor on an emergency matter.
Jason Marlow almost spilled the coffee over himself in his excitement.
"Yes, I'll see her. Right away."
"But Doctor, Mrs. Walton's in room two waiting. And there are three others in the outside office. I was just getting ready to put them in examining rooms," said the nurse.
"Let them wait," barked Marlow. "Mrs. Taylor's a neighbor, the least I can do is see her. Bring her right in. And don't disturb me until I tell you."
The nurse shrugged. There was no use in arguing with Doctor when his mind was made up.
In a few minutes, she showed Eloise Taylor into the private office and closed the door.
"Hello, Jason," said Eloise Taylor. "Oh, I know what you're going to say-you don't want me here, it's not safe-I know all that. But..."
She could not finish her statement because Marlow jumped up and took her hands in his.
"My darling Eloise, I'm tickled to death you're here. It's wonderful to see you. Come in and sit down on the couch."
"Why, Jason...! " she said in astonishment. He had never reacted like this before. "I'm delighted you're pleased to see me, but, my God, what brought all this on?"
Marlow could not control himself. His hands wandered greedily over her ample body pinching nipples and patting curves, while his eyes devoured all that part of her he could not gather into his hands.
He kissed Eloise, thrusting his tongue aggressively into her mouth, while his left hand invaded the area between her fat thighs from behind, and his right hand from the front.
Eloise broke away from his mouth, panting slightly and with her eyes suddenly starry.
"Doctor, what the sweet hell's gotten into you? I've never seen you so horny, so-well, unmindful of surroundings."
"It's crazy, I know," he said, biting his lip in consternation. "But this whole situation is driving me insane. That goddamned Vera watches me like a hawk. And there's nothing I can do. She does control the money, the bitch."
"I know, dear," murmured Eloise, rocking her pelvis back and forth slightly to meet his exploring fingers.
"Then there's that disgusting brat of a daughter. Curse her, this whole thing is her fault. If it hadn't been for her sly interference and all that fake emotionalism, we wouldn't be in this mess," he said.
Eloise sobered for a moment and moved away from him. She went and sat on the leather couch. "I know what you mean," she said despondently. "It's almost as bad at my house. Colonel's become absolutely impossible. He's making demands he hasn't made on me in twenty years."
"What demands?" Marlow wanted to know. "The bastard, if he molests you in any way, I'll ... What demands?"
Eloise rummaged in her handbag for a cigarette to calm her nerves. "Wants me to suck his tired old cock, that sort of thing. I just can't get in the mood. I don't know why, really. I used to rather enjoy such things."
"You won't do it, will you?" Marlow said violently. "Promise me, Eloise, that you won't suck any cock but mine."
Mrs. Taylor looked at him with astonishment. This was hardly the same reserved, restrained, rather formal lover she had gotten used to in the course of their affair. She had not guessed before that Doctor was capable of such passion.
"Well, ducky, I'll promise if it'll make you feel any better. But, my God, if I don't have some outlet-such as Colonel-I don't know what I'll do. Seeing that it's going to be practically impossible for you and me to meet when we want to."
Marlow got on his knees in front of her and ran his hand up her dress. "We will meet. I don't know how we'll arrange it, but we'll meet. I can't stand this doing without you, Eloise," he gasped.
He had hooked back the elastic leg of her panties and his fingers now encountered the plushy garden of delight between her legs. Rummaging hungrily, he found the wet place and sank his finger in.
Eloise let her thighs fall open, and her head sank back in the lethargy of passion.
"Jason, sweetie, you mustn't. I'll go mad. I know I will. If we can't meet somewhere where we can fuck, we'd better not fool around."
"We can fuck," he said passionately. "We can fuck here. We can and we will." He began to zip down his trousers.
Eloise sat up in alarm. "But my dear, you've always said it was impossible here, that the nurse or somebody might barge in, that you couldn't take the risk."
"I can take it now," said Marlow. "If the bitch shows her face inside that door against my orders, I'll kill her. I can't help it, Eloise. I've got to screw you right this instant or go mad."
Pleasantly overcome by this new recklessness on his part, Eloise let herself be eased back into a prone position on the leather couch. She could feel her nipples hardening in the cups of her bra, and a delightful tingle began to course through her entire body.
Marlow could not wait for such niceties as the removal of the panties; he ripped them off bodily and flung the mutilated wisp of nylon over his shoulder. Much as he wanted to be buried cock-deep in the fat pink cunt now confronting him, the sight was so intensely provocative that he plunged his face into it instead.
Eloise moaned with pleasure and surprise. Although Doctor had eaten her once or twice in the course of their adventures, it was not something he did regularly, and she had the rather demeaning feeling that it was because he considered the act unsavory.
Now he pressed his face into her crotch and began lapping like a canine in the excess of his emotions. Eloise spread her legs far apart, so that the lips of her pussy opened to lay bare the wet, pink flesh they concealed. Snorting and panting, Marlow thrust in his tongue and waggled it around, dipping now into the dark hole of her vagina and diddling now at the swelling lump of her clitoris.
Eloise found it hard to suppress loud cries of sheer joy as he nuzzled and licked her most intimate parts. To insure discretion, she bit down on her lower lip to keep herself from shouting and got a hard grip on her own breasts. She had never enjoyed herself so much with Jason.
Rooting mightily in her crotch, Doctor felt himself possessed by a frenzy of lust such as he had scarcely known before. He wanted desperately to mount her, but he could not bear to leave what he was doing, even for an instant. Maddeningly frustrated by the variety of lascivious things he wanted to do all at once, he suddenly thrust a finger up his lady's anus and gouged strongly while he was similarly poking into her vagina with his tongue.
Eloise, in transports of passion, experienced a mighty climax, which had left the doctor with a wet face but did not materially diminish her desire to have him fuck her in the good old-fashioned way.
"Get on, lovey," she said huskily. "That was beautiful, but now I want you inside."
Marlow scrambled to the couch and positioned himself atop her. Planted on all fours, he waited breathlessly while Eloise grasped his throbbing prick and brought it to the mouth of her vagina.
At that instant, the inter-office phone rang.
Marlow was frozen for a moment, then he climbed off Eloise, swearing under his breath. She was so startled that she sat up like a jack-in-the-box, flipping her skirt down and crossing her ankles.
Trembling, Marlow picked up the phone. "I thought I told you not to disturb me!" he barked into the mouthpiece.
"Sorry, Doctor," said the nurse. "But Mrs. Walton says she's fainting. I gave her a whiff of ammonia. What else do you want me to do?"
"Put her head between your legs," said Marlow. "I mean between her legs, you idiot. Keep the ammonia under her nose. I'll-I'll be there in a moment."
"Very well, Doctor," said the nurse and hung up.
Eloise had gotten to her feet. She stood looking anxiously at Jason, as if she were prepared to flee. "What is it?" she breathed.
"Goddammit to bloody hell. I'll have to go. No, I can't do it, I can't leave without..."
He pulled her to him and turned to place her buttocks against the edge of his desk.
"Put your legs around my waist," he ordered.
Clinging to him, Eloise hoisted her legs and wrapped them around his portly middle. His tumescent cock was pointed right at her open cunt, like a pistol primed to go off. With a heartfelt sigh, Marlow pushed in and sank the knob of his prick down, down, down into the warmth of her throbbing vagina.
Eloise bit the shoulder of his coat as he pumped in and out, ramming her naked buttocks against the sharp edge of the walnut desk. She closed her eyes and hung on while he fucked with all his heart.
It only required a very few minutes before the load of hot liquid shivered its way downward through his loins, along the length of his straining penis, and burst into her like a tidal wave.
They clung weakly together, trying to catch their breath. In a moment, Doctor disentangled himself from his perch and scooped up the torn panties with which to wipe himself off.
"My God, we can't go on like this," muttered Marlow. "We'll have to think of something."
"What a beastly situation," mourned Eloise. "I can't come here again like this, it's too risky. What will we do, Jason?"
"I don't know," he said, patting her shoulder. "I wonder how much time I'd get for killing my own daughter?"
They checked each other for tell-tale signs of the romp they had just enjoyed. Then they kissed lightly, and Marlow saw her to the outer office.
As he turned and went toward examination room two hurriedly, he was muttering, "I'll kill that dirty little bitch, it's all her fault. Goddamned little slut, screwing around, I know it. She's the cause of all my misery."
Marlow went on about his duties, and while he was thinking about his patients with one part of his mind, another part was pondering on the distressing nature of his present love life. He had been managing to conduct a casual, but very satisfactory affair with Eloise Taylor for about six years now, meeting her socially every week or two in the company of his wife and her husband, but finding the opportunity to screw her at least once a month during these neighborly get-togethers. The Colonel could almost always be counted on to fall asleep before the evening was over. Vera had her little headaches to keep her out of the way. A few martinis all round, and the way would usually be left open for a cozy little romp between Marlow and his lady love on the sofa, in the boy's room when he was away at school, in the back seat of their car during warm weather, or even (as had happened that one fateful time three years ago) in the children's playhouse.
Marlow, of course, diddled a nurse or receptionist from time to time, when he happened to have one who was of the proper temperament; and a man could always pick up available women in bars if one took the precaution of being discreet enough to go to the next town for such amusement. But these activities were essentially unstable by their very nature-and there was always the possibility of being caught out.
With Eloise, things were not only satisfyingly constant, but also her particular nature was just what Marlow wanted: she was immoral without being sentimental, passionate without being romantic, and depraved without being self-conscious. Marlow could not abide a woman who dramatized her taste for the obscene: it was beneath the dignity of a true sensualist, he thought.
He had never had any trouble with Vera over this relationship. Although she probably suspected everything, she would let herself confront nothing. Marlow had always kept her conveniently cowed, and while this domination did rob him of any pleasure she might once have given him sexually (since it tended to make her frigid), it compensated fully for that lack by making her equally submissive regarding money matters.
It had been a beautiful arrangement. Now, God blast it! the whole thing was shattered. And why? Because of his daughter. Yes, the more he meditated upon it, the more accurately he was able to pinpoint the whole cause of his downfall to Faith. If she hadn't whipped things up like that the night of the debacle, Vera and the Colonel would never have known-or at least they would have been perfectly willing to let it all go by.
And how, he asked himself, had this chit of a girl managed to effect this remarkable transformation in the balance of power? Somehow she had managed to get Moral Right on her side.
Marlow snorted. He knew well enough that she was basically as immoral as himself. He had not been taken in for an instant by her protestations of innocence after his discovering her in the playhouse with young Tom. No, the little bitch knew exactly what she was doing.
The remarkable thought now came to him that she must be still doing it! Yes, by heaven! The way was now clear for her, wasn't it? She was in the good graces of her mother, had been exonerated, and carried the whole numinous cloud of Miss Brigham's morality wrapped around her like a spotless cloak. It was the perfect setup for her to be indulging her senses to capacity.
A great weight seemed to lift from Marlow's life. The way was quite clear. All he had to do was catch Faith in something, reveal her guilt to her mother, and the situation would revert to the former arrangement, with himself on top.
He determined that he would at once stop creeping around the house under a cloud of condemnation. He would become watchful, he would become stealthy. All of this would have to be done in a manner that would not stir up Vera, of course. But he could manage that. All it needed was on instance-just one-of Faith's misbehavior which he could fling before Vera's startled eyes. Then where would be the foundation for her present uppity behavior? It would crumble back into the dust from which it was formed.
Marlow smiled to himself, an eager, wolfish expression. Yes, he would sniff about until he unearthed the little bitch in the middle of some adolescent rut with her legs spread open and the pimply-faced boy pumping away in his gangling fashion. And he would stick his fingers into the smell of it and rub it beneath his dear wife's nose.
He hurried home after all his patients had left, full of anticipation at the thought of how simple it was going to be to turn the whole situation over.
It was only a little after four when he pulled into the driveway. He had played with fantasies all the way home in which he crept into the house noiselessly and unseen, tiptoed up the stairs, and flung open the door to his daughter's bedroom. There she was, flat on her back, her face twisted into a mask of lust, with Tom Taylor plowing into her in great twitching lunges. Marlow would shout "Aha!" and seize his wife (who just happened to be nearby), drag her into the room and throw her to her knees on the carpet. Tom would flee, and Faith would fall prone before her father, sobbing for mercy.
But as he jammed on the brakes and opened the door, reality returned to him. They always heard the car pull in. He could not possibly get into the house without being seen or heard. Faith knew very well what time he usually came home, and any sins she might have been committing would be nicely terminated by now.
Still, it has been a satisfying fantasy. He liked that picture of Vera on her knees, and of Faith, naked and overcome, lying at his feet. Maybe he would take off his belt and strap her bare buttocks. It was no doubt something he should have done long before.
As he entered the foyer, Vera passed through on her way upstairs.
"Oh, it's you," she said, as if he were a painter or plumber that she expected.
"Yes, it is," he said somewhat sternly, trying to recapture something of his former role as master of the house.
Vera stopped on the first step of the staircase and looked at him over her shoulder in a cool manner.
"Jason, I would appreciate it if you would shave before dinner in the future. While you're at it, you might shower too. Your beard's awfully heavy by five o'clock. I'd like you to look better than you generally do when you sit down to dinner with your daughter. After all, that's the time of day when she sees the most of you." With that, Vera continued up the stairs.
Marlow stood with a great bubble of anger rising inside his chest. Before he could collect himself for a retort, she had reached the top of the stairs and was just about to disappear from view around the corner.
"Shave?" he exploded.
Vera looked down at him. "Yes. I think it's time you began trying to make a good impression on Faith."
"Well I will be Goddamned..." he began, but Vera stopped him with a raised hand.
"I meant to ask you later, but now will do just as well. Jason, whatever happened to those shares of Amalgamated Food that my father bought for me when I married? They're not in the safe where they're supposed to be."
Marlow turned slightly pale. The truth was that he had sold the shares by forging his wife's signature early in their marriage. "We-we can discuss that later," he managed to say.
"Yes. We certainly will," she said dryly. "You will remember to shave, won't you?"
Marlow found himself shaking after she had disappeared, partly from rage, partly from fear. Feeling a need to hide himself away somewhere and collect his forces, he went to the study.
What he needed was a stiff Scotch and soda to put his nervous system back in shape. He went directly to the table on which he kept a decanter and siphon bottle and began to uncork the Scotch. Some intuition made him turn toward the desk as he did so, and there he saw Faith-sitting in his chair, with his reading light turned on, leafing through an old briefcase that he kept hidden behind some books. There were only odds and ends in it, generally speaking, but as he looked at her, he suddenly remembered that he had a habit of concealing there from time to time certain items that he wanted to keep, but which were meant for no eye but his own-a particular red garter, for example; a tiny twist of auburn hair that came from a woman (but not from her head) which was tied with a black thread-he could not remember what else, but he had a terrible feeling that there might even be notes, an address book, possibly even letters.
"What the devil do you think you're doing?" he thundered.
"You do collect the most astonishing things," said Faith calmly. She swept the things spread in front of her back into the briefcase and closed it. "Does Mother ever look at these?" she asked in a conversational tone. "Perhaps you two go through them on rainy afternoons. Miss Brigham says it is the mark of truely noble relationship when husband and wife can share intimate thoughts and memories."
Marlow glared at his daughter, and met eyes fully as cold and calculating as his own. "What-what did you see in there?" he asked hoarsely.
"What might I have seen, Father?" she replied.
"That's not the point. Answer my question, dammit."
He advanced toward her, the bottle of Scotch still in his hand. As he rounded the corner of the desk, his arm raised without volition. He glared down at Faith.
She was not in the least cowed. She stretched herself upward, her face turned to him and her eyebrows raised coolly. For a moment they both stayed frozen in their strange attitudes. Then Faith said, "Do you intend to strike me, Father? Is that what you plan?"
Marlow came to himself with a start and jerked his arm down. "Don't be an ass," he said harshly. "Why should I strike you? You talk like a fool."
"Then why did you have the bottle raised over your head?"
"What bottle? This bottle? You talk nonsense. You're only a child and you don't know what you're talking about."
"Are you afraid of what I might have seen in this briefcase? Could that be it?"
"Dammit, I won't stand for anymore of this," he grated. "There's nothing in the briefcase, it's empty. Give it to me now, and I'll put it away."
"If it's empty then I'd like to have it, Father. To keep my homework in." As she said this, she slipped from the chair and moved around the desk.
Marlow moved to the right slightly, wary as a panther. "No, you can't have that one," he said. "I'll buy you a nice new one to keep your homework in."
"But why buy another when this one's not being used," she said moving back to the other side. Marlow went for her again, but she nipped nimbly around to the other side of the desk.
They faced each other, both breathing rather rapidly. "Give me the God-benighted-mother-fucking briefcase," he said through clenched teeth.
"I'll call for Mother, shall I?" she said tensely. "It's always better to have a third party decide a dispute." She opened her mouth to give a gigantic scream, but Marlow rushed her and clamped his hand over her mouth. He was not even worried about the briefcase now, only about keeping that terrible sound from emerging from her throat.
He still had the bottle in his hand. He could not possibly muffle Faith, take the briefcase, and continue to hold the Scotch all at the same time.
They scuffled awkwardly. Marlow was trying to put the bottle down carefully: if he dropped it on the floor it would be sure to arouse Vera. As they struggled, they fell against the desk and the lamp crashed down. There was a moment of stricken silence, then the door opened and Vera, herself, appeared.
Marlow sprang back from his daughter and stood with his eyes bulging.
"What's going on?" Vera asked.
Faith took a deep breath, then moved away from her father. She was still clutching the briefcase in front of her.
"Daddy and I were-talking," she said demurely.
Vera looked from one to the other, then to the broken lamp on the floor. "What happened to the lamp?"
"It must have fallen," said Faith.
Unsatisfied, Vera looked at her husband. "Jason?"
"As she said," he managed to mumble. "We were talking."
Vera walked into the room further and bent over to look at the fragments of the glass lamp. "Well, it's all very strange." She straightened and patted Faith on the shoulder. "Run along and get washed up for dinner, darling."
"Yes, Mumsie," said Faith. She slipped out the door, still carrying the briefcase.
Vera said, "Jason, if you must have a drink before dinner it's perfectly all right, of course. But I would have thought you would want your usual martini. Why are you drinking Scotch today?"
Marlow looked with glazed eyes at the bottle in his hand. Then he looked at his wife. Had she been more perceptive, she might have intuited that she was about to be bludgeoned to death. But innocent of those subtler impressions that impinge upon the consciousness of sensitive people, Vera responded at that moment to only the more coarse messages brought to her brain by her senses.
"Jason," she said, peering at him more closely. "Is that by any chance lipstick I see on your collar?"
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was Friday morning and Dr. Jason Marlow sat parked beside the golf course in his Cadillac and felt the exquisite and incredible emotions of a man reprieved.
In order to make his sense of deliverance even sweeter, he mulled over in his mind the chain of events that had led up to this happy moment.
Dinner the night before had been a nightmare, pure and unadulterated. While he had put up a good argument to his wife that the red smudges on his shirt were merchurochrome, he was aware that she had not been convinced. But before they could get into a really definitive argument about that, the cook had announced dinner, Faith had come downstairs looking both innocent and triumphant, and they had all gone into the dining room.
The next hour was of such a nature that he preferred to skip over it entirely. It was only with the greatest effort that he had managed to eat his dinner (what it had been he had no idea), drink his after-dinner coffee, and effect an early retirement.
The Little Bitch had played her part with truly awesome finesse throughout the meal. She had dined with perfect boarding-school manners, had spoken only when spoken to, and had kept her eyes demurely downcast. Except once, when Jason looked at her only to find her slitted cat's-eyes regarding him with amusement and evil triumph. For after all, she did have the briefcase, and there was no way he could get it back.
The most damnable part of the whole thing was that he could not remember clearly just what was in it. The garter, most assuredly-but that could have come from anyone, from Vera even. (At least this is what he told himself in his extremity-in actuality he knew that Faith knew her mother would never wear such an item of apparel.) The small curl of cunt hair was not real evidence-it could have come from a baby's scalp. Well, couldn't it? But notes, letters, even photographs (and there had been some, taken with a Polaroid)-God, who knew?
The question was, Would the Little Bitch tell the Big Bitch? This was what he had strangled with throughout dinner, and what he had taken to bed with him afterward.
Jason had known bits and pieces of hatred before in his life, but nothing that had ever approached the twofold hatred he felt burning inside his guts like live coals now. His wife, his daughter. He didn't know which one to hate most. But as sleep approached, it gradually became evident to him that the thorn in his side was Faith. Without her connivance, Vera would have had no ammunition. She was the authoress of his downfall, and of his present state of indignity. He began to give himself over to the searing manifestation of hate, and it eased his humiliation somewhat. Sleep came, and the hatred carried over and was woven into the texture of his dreams.
...There was this contraption, somewhat like his examination table and somewhat like a medieval rack, which was bolted to a floor awash with filth and excrement. It was situated in a monstrously large, dark chamber, and he stood before it feeling pleasant anticipation for what he was about to do.
On the rack lay Faith, her arms and legs chained in a spread-eagle position. And her flesh was white in the flickering light of the torches.
Marlow picked up a long whip in his dream-one that was cool and flexible to the touch, and which was studded at the ends with pieces of metal. He lashed the whip backward and forward, feeling pleasure in the power of it. He hoped the girl on the rack was trembling with fear. He wanted to make her more afraid than she had ever been before in her life. He cracked the whip, cursing loudly. Then he glanced covertly at the girl to see if she were trembling.
The slut seemed to be asleep. Ol this would never do!
"I shall lash you with the whip!" he cried loudly. The sound of his voice echoed upward and down again from the vast chamber built of rock. He swung the whip over his head several times, then brought it down across her glistening white body. The strands of it cut deeply into her tender flesh and blood started up along the lines of the wounds.
The whole apparatus of the rack swayed with the power of his brutality, but the girl did not move.
"Blast it!" he muttered to himself, and raised his whip-arm again.
But just then a terribly formal lady came in and looked at him through gold-rimmed glasses. She was elderly, but incredibly correct. It seemed that she must, without doubt, be Miss Brigham.
"Now then, I'll just take that whip, shall I?" she said, and snatched the whip away from him neatly. Then she left....
Marlow half awoke. He muttered in his sleep, "No, by God, I won't have it." Then he sank again into the depths of unconsciousness.
... Again it was the stone room, the rack, and the white-skinned, sleeping girl. She lay open and defenseless, bent back across the wood and metal monster, with heavy iron cuffs on her slim ankles and wrists. He stood between her legs and regarded her gaping cunt. It seemed to be the overall shape of an almond, a symmetrical oval that sprouted purple fringe all around its perimeter. The white of her flesh blanched to an inhuman chalk color as he watched, and the purple pubic hair seemed to writhe like snakes or tongues of flame. He knew there was something inside that strange orifice that belonged to him.
Reaching back to the table with sterile instruments laid out neatly on a white towel, Marlow chose a stainless steel forceps and tried to fish out of the mysterious cunt what was his, but the shape of the forceps was wrong. Whatever it was, was slippery and he could not grasp it with the metal tongs. He wondered where his damned nurse was-she should have been assisting him in this operation. But anyway, he knew the approach was wrong, for he had decided against gynecology while still in medical school.
Just as he might have become absorbed in the cerebral problem of the removal of the unknown item from the nameless female vagina, the girl raised her head and looked at him, thus effectively brushing away all possibility of medical objectivity.
Her mouth opened and a pointed little purple tongue shot out. She was not sticking her tongue out at him, as children do; she was taunting him in quite a different context.
"This must be punished!" he said aloud. Indeed, it was incredible effrontery.
Somehow the instrument of torture was then in his hand, and it was glowing white-hot from the brazier where it had been roasting until he needed it. It was clever. Not only would it burn and cut, but it would pinch and tear at the same time. An ingenious design, thought up by a master inquisitioner.
Marlow was not sure it was sterile, but he decided to use it anyway, since this was not a time to quibble over medical niceties. He attacked her breasts with the glowing instrument and saw with satisfaction how they shriveled and smoked as he plied the hot steel.
She was showing great self-control, he had to admit that. Not once did she scream or even allow her face to twist into an expression of agony. As a matter-of-fact, her face was altogether too composed, and it made him wonder if he were, after all, being effectual. Just as he thought this, Vera walked up to his side, blew on the metal instrument to cool it, and slapped it out of his hand.
"You know you haven't paid for that," she said tartly....
Jason once more surfaced from his troubled sleep, and in a darkness of agony and impotence, grasped his penis through the fabric of his pajamas. The touch was comforting. He turned over, still cuddling his cock, and went back to sleep.
Now the girl was propped up on her elbows. He could tell from her expression that she had no intention whatever of giving him what belonged to him. It was not fair, it was not fair at all.
Some priest in a scarlet robe and a tall gold hat came to the door of the stone room and said, "You are a dirty old man, and this is a dirty old dream. Don't you realize that, you fucker?
Jason took his penis in hand and pointed it at the priest. He contracted his pelvic muscles and let forth a stream of piss that showered the priest and melted him down to an humble puddle on the floor.
Now that he had his cock in his hand, he suddenly realized that it was the instrument to be used. Yes, if he probed into the purple-lined cunt with his penis, he could easily extract what belonged to him.
"Listen, I shall go back to medical school and tell them that they've been using the wrong instruments," he said to himself as he advanced to the spread legs of the girl.
She watched critically as he edged his way between the moist, clinging flesh of her thighs. Suddenly the cock he held was of tremendous size-it was bigger than a loaf of bread, bigger than a sofa pillow, bigger than a submarine's torpedo. It was a giant cigar, and its tip glowed red with the living fire that burned there.
The girl lifted her hips a little, and her cunt began to open before his eyes. It enlarged until it was a great, red, throbbing cavern of musky-smelling flesh which seemed to convulse in ripples that would draw in anything that approached it.
'Shall I?" thought Jason. Then he knew that he would.
As his giant penis touched the mouth of this astonishing cunt, a tiny purple head shot out. It was smooth and hairless and it had a mouth full of vicious teeth. The teeth snapped at him violently, like a demented piranha.
He screamed. Then again. With each wave of sound, the rock walls of the high, vaulted room became more transparent. His cock seemed to have a will of its own and was lunging toward the snapping jaws which would prove its destruction...
Jason awoke just as he fell from the bed to land with a thud on the floor, entangled in bedclothes. He was still holding his prick, which was now tumescent.
As consciousness flooded back, the dream evaporated. He only knew that he had to do something with what he had in his hand.
With a glance at the bed opposite his, he determined that his wife was still sleeping. Disengaging himself Worn the bedspread, he got up and went to the bathroom. In the darkness, he jacked off viciously, cruelly, beating his flesh until it gave him the blessed-though painful-relief he sought.
By morning he had forgotten everything. He washed and dressed, ate breakfast and smoked a cigarette, in a dull state of moroseness.
Vera was not up yet. Faith always slept late. He had the downstairs to himself. It was only eight o'clock, yet he decided to go to the office to escape the depressing atmosphere of the house.
For no reason that he could name, he went to the front door to check the mail. It did not come, usually, until later in the morning, but he went to look anyway. On the polished floor under the letter-slot lay an envelope. It was addressed to Miss Faith Marlow. Lettered in red pencil were the admonitions "Personal" and "Confidential."
Marlow snatched it up and looked furtively about. There was no one in sight. He scurried with the envelope to his study; then he remembered that it was no longer a sanctuary. He grabbed up his briefcase and hurried soundlessly again to the foyer. He yanked down his overcoat and hat and slipped noiselessly out the front door.
The car was cold and would not start instantly, but he kept after it with a maniacal intensity until the engine turned over and it purred to life.
Racing along the slick streets, he drove to the edge of the golf course, where he felt sure he would be unobserved.
Leaving the motor running so the heater would function, he ripped oven the envelope and read the letter. My dearest little Kamala:
It was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! How can someone my age hope to express to you the glorious feelings I feel? Perhaps you'll laugh? Don't laugh, my darling sweet little pussy-girl. Life is golden for me, since we did what we did. I know it's brazen to write you like this, but I couldn't sleep all last night for thinking about you. I'm afraid to call you for fear the old bastard will answer. You know I have to be careful on this side, too. But come to me, dearest little cunt. Say one little word, wave one little finger, and I will fly to you-and to hell with the consequences. I shall shop, today, for a basket.
Your own true and ever passionate, Puka
Marlow giggled wildly. It was too perfect, too utterly, poetically justified! Here the Little Bitch had been clutching him by the balls with her moral superiority, and now he had in his very hand evidence of her fornication. A letter written in the very hand of her adolescent fucker.
"Someone my age." It was too deliciously funny. The pimply-faced little fart had given himself away completely.
Now, by God!, the tables would be turned. Now he had the actual instrument of her downfall in his hand.
Instrument of her downfall? A faint overtone of the dream reverberated through his mind. The instrument was in his hand.
He could not remember. Anyway, he had no time to bother with remembering. The gorgeous, overwhelming, beautiful fact was that he could now defeat the Little Bitch. And through her, the Big Bitch.
He put the car in gear and drove off, heading back toward his home. While he told himself that the ultimate goal of his vengeance was to crumble and disintegrate the power that his wife now held over him, he became muddled sometimes in his glee.
"The little bitch, the little bitch," he said over and over to himself. "By Jesus, I shall screw her ass royally."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Friday morning, Vera Marlow lay in bed for a short while after she awoke. She was thinking about sex. It was a subject she had tried to put from her mind for at least the past ten years, and she had succeeded remarkably well.
Although she was only forty years old, Vera had given up thinking herself a true woman still capable of physical response and had cast herself in the role of an old woman who no longer feels the hot promptings of the libido. Being Jason Marlow's wife had left her little choice. Very early, he had blocked whatever timid surgings of sexuality she had brought to their marriage. His domination had thoroughly robbed her of any desire to seek pleasure from him, although she still dimly remembered a certain excitement his thick body and horny appetite had aroused in her on their honeymoon. But Vera's sexual impulse had always been a rather pallid affair, and it had not taken much to repress it altogether.
Now, however, her long dormant desire had thrown off the bonds of the sublimation she had achieved. With the unexpected events that had brought Jason down and elevated her to the role of dominance, Vera's libido had come to life and was churning inside her with a new wildness and exhilaration.
like many women who come awake sexually only in middle life, she was beginning her journey into the realms of the erotic mostly by way of fantasies involving herself and a variety of unknown lovers. In the past few days she had begun to have wild, libidinous dreams every night which overlapped into her waking hours, when she transformed them into waking daydreams of erotic encounters. As a matter-of-fact, except for the bit of auditing she had done on the family accounts which had shown her that she actually had Jason in her power, Vera had done nothing else since the night of the dinner party except indulge herself in thoughts of copulation.
When her daydreams and fantasies became so insistent that mere thinking would not contain them, she had begun to bring them into actualization of a sort by the writing she was doing. At first it was almost entirely automatic; after having scribbled five or ten pages in a handwriting that she scarcely recognized as her own, she would have no idea at all what she had written until she read it over. It was so deliciously naughty that she found herself blushing and even giggling aloud at what she had written.
For years she had been straight-laced, frowning delicately at even the more common terms of profanity. When Jason would occasionally use profanity, she would avert her face with a small sigh. One of her most cherished accomplishments was, to her mind, that she had managed to raise their daughter to be pure, chaste and of a delicate nature.
Now Vera found her writings including terms that would previously have made her actually ill. Her scribbled stream of consciousness was liberally sprinkled with terms such as fuck, cunt, prick and screw. Each usage of these forbidden words seemed to break one more of the gossamer bonds of inhibition which had bound her in for so long.
The writings were becoming very precious to her, and she found herself drawn compulsively to her note pad all through the day.
As she lay musing in bed, visions of carnal involvement swam in a translucent hoard through her mind. Sighing loudly, she groped under the mattress of her bed for the notebook. She knew Jason had gone to the office and that Faith would not be up and about for at least another hour. She was perfectly safe; she could sit up in bed and enjoy the pleasure of reading over and over again the obscene and thrilling thoughts she had last put down.
The images and visions had started as thoughts, then been translated to written words. Now, as she read them over again, she began to feel emotional pressure building within her. She needed to express things even more concretely. Settled comfortably against her pillows, she took the ballpoint pen clipped to her note book and began to draw dirty pictures.
They were cramped and small at first, for one part of her mind felt a terrible embarrassment at what she was drawing. But presently she became engrossed in what she was doing, and the sketches became larger and more specific.
She drew a naked male torso and then, with a slight pounding of her middle-aged heart-added a penis and testicles. This done, she surveyed her work. She had done drawing when she was young, and even taken a course in portrait painting, so her sketches were not without some artistic competence. The genitals she had drawn did not seem adequate to her fantasy life, so she drew a larger set over them. Her manikin now had quite bold and virile masculine endowment. But this was not nearly enough.
Vera flipped over the page and began another little picture. She had a hot desire to see in visual form the act of intercourse. She tried drawing two figures coupled together in the customary posture, but somehow the legs hid everything that she wanted to depict most specifically. She began another sketch, using a different point of view. The picture was drawn looking upward from the feet of the reclining couple. She drew the wide-spread thighs of her feminine figure and then dashingly added the labia and the dark slit of the vagina. She scribbled a representation of pubic hair around this. Now for her male!
Vera drew a man atop her sketched woman, but the perspective was difficult and she could not get the thighs and buttocks right from that angle. But no matter. With gusto, she drew an enormous penis plunged deep into the slit of the woman, and a set of outsized balls dangling hairily above. That was better!
Vera gulped a little in her excitement and began another picture. In this one, a man stood with his penis engorged and erect, while a female figure crouched before him with the end of the penis in her mouth. Vera added a few beautifying details, such as earrings on the woman and a wristwatch on the man.
She sketched on for perhaps fifteen minutes, depicting all those erotic attitudes that she could think of or had ever read about. Meanwhile, without realizing it, she was stoking the fires of her own libido. Her nipples had hardened under the fabric of her nightgown and there was a suspicious wetness between her thighs. She was breathing rather rapidly now, and quite soon she reached a point where the pictures, rather than satisfying her lust, were frustrating it. Suddenly restless, she put the book away under the mattress and got out of bed. Quite without any conscious plan in mind, she locked the bedroom door and wandered back to the full-length mirror attached to her bathroom door.
Vera had never masturbated in her life. As a child, she had once mounted her brother's bike and inadvertently stumbled on the pleasurable sensation that could be gotten from jockeying back and forth on the bike seat, but that was as close as she had ever gotten to any real experience with autoeroticism. She had had a few boyfriends before Jason, and then the limited experience of her honeymoon before the steel door of inhibition was clanged down on her libido. But she knew vaguely that people could do things to themselves and get a thrill out of it. It had always seemed a very nasty thought to her, and she had tried not to think about it.
Now the thought was strong in her mind. She approached the mirror timidly and with almost as much embarrassment as if she were being observed by someone.
"I wonder if I'm too old for a man to find me attractive," she thought to herself. This seemed a perfectly acceptable thought, and with that excuse she felt that it would not be too wicked to take off her gown and look at her body. Purely to assess her physical merits, she assured herself.
Standing before the mirror, she skinned out of the nightie and confronted her naked image. She was not particularly pleased with what she saw.
Vera had never possessed a spectacular body, because she had always tended to be too thin. Middle age, which does such disastrous things to the normally fleshed woman, had actually improved Vera Marlow's figure, for now she had a breadth of hips and fullness of breast that was more erotic than the leanness of her youth.
She was reasonably firm for a forty-year-old woman and her skin had a delicate coloring that was quite pretty. At the moment, her nipples were tensed and erect, and a certain engorgment of her labia was enhancing her pubic mound by causing it to protrude gently.
"My goodness," she thought to herself, "I'm not bad, really. A man-I mean an older man, of course-might still find me desirable. Not that I would ever let a man see me nude, of course. But if some hypothetical man actually were to see me, I think he would want to fuck me."
With a gasp, she realized the word she had thought, and turned her back modestly on the naked image in the mirror. Looking over her shoulder, however, she encountered yet another erotic aspect. There was the gently curved line of her back and the full ballooning of her buttocks.
At the sight, her passion went up another notch. She could only think of some man's penis entering her from behind, pushing aside the full melons of her buttocks and plunging into the mysterious forbidden zones concealed there.
Almost choking at her own thoughts, she turned around again to dispel the obscene fantasy that had taken possession of her mind. Whereupon she was confronted again by the jiggling breasts with their nipples drawn up into hard nubs, and her restless, quivering thighs that sheltered the furry mound between them.
"Oh, God," she gasped aloud, for her right hand was stealing down to the furry mound, moving as if of its own volition. As she watched in fascinated horror, the hand slid between her thighs and encountered the wetness of her passion.
Automatic writing was one thing, but automatic masturbation was quite another. Poor Vera was deeply shocked at what her hand was doing, but she had no control over it. In fact, her whole body at once took on an autonomy of its own and began to do things she had never imagined herself capable of doing.
Her feet planted themselves widely apart, her pelvis rocked forward presenting her open snatch to the mirror, and her wise and wicked hand began to fumble among the folds of pink flesh for the seat of passion.
Vera could not bear to watch what her naughty body was doing. She shut her eyes tightly and refused to look. But she could feel. The brazen hand extended its middle finger and poked it into the first hole it encountered, which fortunately happened to be Vera vagina. Then that wicked hand began to thrust in and out rapidly and with as much finesse as if it had been doing this every day of its life.
With a great effort of will, Vera managed to exert her own command over her left hand; she placed it lightly over her eyes so she could not possibly witness what the lascivious hand was up to. The hand kept up its pumping motion until the hole it was laboring in began to clutch tightly around its extended finger. Vera knew from her limited experiences with intercourse that this signaled a rapidly approaching state of physical ecstasy.
While she moaned softly to herself, the sly hand withdrew from the now flooded tunnel of her vagina and slid upward until it collided with a firm, tumescent lump. Vera did not even know the name of this appendage, but under the circumstances it was not important. The rigid middle finger found this nameless little nub of erectile tissue and began to rotate it swiftly.
"Oh, you bad, bad, awful thing," she murmured, but the hand did not stop. Instead it craftily slid back to the wet hole and brought out moisture with which to lubricate its manipulations of the throbbing lump.
A terrible hot ecstasy swept over Vera and the lump she was diddling seemed to take on a life of its own. Imperiously it demanded faster and faster manipulation, and the obliging finger was only too happy to exert itself into even more frenzied rotation.
Quite suddenly the point came where Vera could dissemble no longer. Panting like a bitch being serviced, she yanked her hand away from her eyes and grabbed her left breast. The sight that confronted her in the mirror was one that she had never seen before, and she stared at it in complete stupefaction.
The busy hand moved faster and faster; the clutching hand clawed over first one breast and then the other. Vera's whole body began to jerk and quiver.
As the shattering impact of orgasm barreled into her flesh, her hips bucked forward as if meeting the thrusts of a phantom prick, and her head dropped backward in a near-swoon of ecstasy.
With that unlikely incantation, the glory arrived, and Vera shuddered to a stop. She staggered to the mirror and leaned her forehead weakly against it.
"What have I done?" she thought.
But some new personality that had only that moment awakened from its long sleep now came into her consciousness, and she knew very well what she had done. She had beat her meat, as the vulgar put it. She had jacked off. She had done that dirty thing which was reputed to cause hair to grow under the fingernails, insanity to blossom in the psyche, failing eyesight, loss of memory, and shortness of breath to ensue.
"I don't care," thought Vera, with a sly smile forming on her exhausted face. "I like it."
After a while she pulled herself together and went into the bathroom. A shower seemed to be indicated, just as after intercourse. She looked at her middle finger, which was still moist. Feeling even dirtier, she yielded to the irrepressible impulse to bring it up beneath her nose. Inhaling cautiously, she caught the musky fragrance of womanhood.
It did something to Vera, something that not even the dreams, the fantasies, or the masturbation had done-it galvanized her into a mood for action.
Although she dared not form the words, in her mind the thought was crystal clear: "I've got to find a man."
She got into the shower and soaped her body thoroughly, paying particular attention to the folds of her labia and the crinkles of her anus. She rinsed off and stepped out. For the first time in twenty years, she found sensuous enjoyment from the rough tongue of the heavy towel with which she dried her body. She enjoyed the feel of the cool tiles under her bare feet. She splashed icy cologne on her throat and around her breasts, feeling as provocative and irresistible as a French courtesan.
She went back into the bedroom and rummaged in her chest of drawers until she found a set of under things that she had once bought in a moment of psychic dislocation, but had never worn. They were not so terribly provocative; there was a modest edge of lace around the legs of the panties, and another around the hem of the slip. The matching bra was unadorned except for a small flower or two embroidered across the upper slopes of the breast. But at least the under things were pale blue, as opposed to her usually stark and antiseptic white. She felt quite daring when she had put them on, and as brazen as another woman might have felt in black lace with cutouts for the nipples.
She put on a soft jersey dress that clung to her figure. Although it had a high neck and proper sleeves, with her newfound feeling of eroticism, the dress served its purpose, for it seemed to caress the curves of her hips and breasts with ripples and folds that served as an invitation to the masculine eye.
Vera put on more makeup than she had worn ever in her life before, and was not displeased with the effect. Perhaps she looked a little overdone, but she didn't care. Instead of putting her mousy-brown hair back into the tight little knot that was her usual hair style, she simply brushed it back and let it hang loose. It looked a little youthful, but she put on earrings-which she ordinarily did not wear-and they transformed the overall picture to one of subtle allure.
Now that she was dressed, she realized she did not have a concrete plan in mind. It was approximately nine o'clock on a Friday morning. She knew of nothing she could do and nowhere she could go to find what she was looking for. But she determined to set out, at any rate, and hope that fate would lead her to her objective.
"I'll just go out and enjoy myself," she thought. "I'll window-shop till noon, then I'll have a nice lunch somewhere, then perhaps I'll go to a movie."
She got a coat out of the closet and gathered up her purse. Before leaving, she took a last look in the full-length mirror. There was a new element in her appearance. Rather than the dowdy, timid matron she was accustomed to seeing, she now gazed upon a mature woman with a provocative swing to her hips, an inviting arch to her back which thrust her breasts forward, and a sensuous gleam in her eye.
Slightly embarrassed, Vera told herself that she was, after all, only going out to enjoy herself for the day like any other housewife would.
But her new personality whispered in her ear, "You're going out looking for ass, my dear."
CHAPTER NINE
Friday morning, which had begun so auspiciously for Vera Marlow, and in another sense for Jason Marlow, began as a burden of discontent for Faith.
She lay on her bed, staring moodily out of the window at the cold landscape below. She was possessed by a strange feeling of ennui that seemed to originate somewhere deep in her bowels and to circulate its doleful way to the region of her heart. like most people who manage to conquer others, she was beginning to find that the ultimate reward of power is a taste of ashes in the mouth.
She could not determine why she felt so dull and lifeless. Ever since the humiliation of three years before, she had dreamed of some deed or series of events that would redeem her position. She not only wanted to be out from under the dead weight of her father's moral condemnation, but she wanted at the same time to be somehow free to indulge herself in those very acts for which he had condemned her. Now both these prizes were hers. But suddenly she had awakened this morning and found herself taking little joy in the accomplishments.
She thought of the Colonel and the unknown realms of erotic adventure he could offer her. It was an exciting prospect-or at least it had been yesterday. Now, something in her stubbornly refused to be satisfied with the possibilities inherent in the relationship. Yesterday he had seemed exciting. Now she said to herself, "He's fat."
She turned her thoughts to Tom, trying to whip up the flame of her enthusiasm. For three years she had dreamed of being free to screw with him whenever she wanted. During all that time, she had lovingly envisioned his driving cock, his firm-muscled body. Now she thought, "He's only a kid."
"I wanted to fuck," she said to herself. "Now I can-whenever and wherever I choose. Why isn't it exciting anymore?"
She could not answer the question. Something inside her churned and thundered for satisfaction, but she could not identify it or think of a way to appease it.
She had been awake since just after dawn. She had heard her father leave, then an hour or so later had heard her mother go out of the house. They had both forgotten her. This was an absurd thought, tinged as it was with self-pity, since Faith actually wanted nothing so much as to be out from under the mandates of both her mother's saccharine sentimentality and her father's condemnation.
"Fuck them both," she thought. But even this naughtiness did not bring her any comfort. She felt wild and mean, and she wanted to hurt someone. But there was no one to hurt. She had already screwed her mother by means of hypocrisy, and her father by means of dramatics; she had screwed Tom and the Colonel literally. What was left?
She flung herself out of bed and stalked about the room naked. Her curtain of silken hair flashed about her head like a silver fisherman's net as she paced back and forth, and her tender breasts jiggled invitingly. But
Faith was in no mood for poetry or the luminous images of sensuousness. She wanted to be dominant. She wanted to fuck someone-or something. But what? Or who?
She knew she was alone in the house, and for a moment she entertained the thought of running naked through the rooms, breaking lamps and overturning furniture. She might write vile words on the walls with a lipstick, or deposit excrement on the expensive carpets. She might paint the furniture with mustard, or set fire to the draperies. She could do anything, anything-there was no one present to stop her.
But her wildness suddenly settled leadenly into a weariness.
What was the use?
She knew that what she was so blindly groping for was to be found somewhere within the realm of sexuality, but she could not determine its longitude or latitude. Somehow, ordinary fucking-which she had thought would feed all the insatiable desires of her repressed lust-was not enough.
Wild with frustration, she grabbed a lipstick from her vanity table and went to the full-length mirror on her bathroom door. With a sort of viciousness, she outlined the nipples on her small breasts with the blood-red salve. Then she drew a rough perimeter around her pubic hair. She slashed a descending arrow from above her navel down through the feathery hair to the beginning of her labial slit.
Faith threw the lipstick tube down and surveyed herself in the mirror. Breathing deeply, she postured this way and that, cupping her lip stick painted breasts in her hands, offering them like obscene sacrificial objects to the mirror. It was all very well, but it brought her no comfort. Sighing deeply, she went into the bathroom and began to brush her teeth.
Over the sound of the running water, she heard her bedroom door thrown open and her father's voice call, "Faith Marlow! Where are you? Come here this instant."
Faith froze for a moment, then spat out the toothpaste. The bathroom door was pulled close, but not closed.
"What do you want?" she called, making her voice as cold as possible.
He was just outside the door. "I want you to come out this instant," he said loudly. "Where is your mother? I want both of you here. We're going to come to a little understanding about things."
Faith had a quick premonition that she was undone, but she kept control. She did not dare slam the bathroom door and lock it; in any case, she would have to come out eventually. Luckily her mother had gone out, so there was no need to fear some disclosure that would undermine her control in that quarter. The pertinent thing was that he was shouting and sounding like his old self, which had to mean that he had discovered something about her activities which he could use against her.
She tried to think quickly, to intuit what it might be that had given him this sudden courage, but she could think of nothing. If he had observed her in any encounter with Tom or the Colonel, he would have raised a hue and cry at the time, not waited till now.
Faith resolved to keep her head and try to bluff him out.
"Father, I am in my bath," she said in her best Miss Brigham's School for Young Ladies voice.
"Bath be damned," he shouted. "Get your tail out here, young lady."
Now Faith became genuinely afraid. It must be something really bad. But she kept control of her fear and moved cautiously to close the door.
As she pushed it, her father must have divined her intention, for he suddenly began to shove against the door from the outside. They engaged in a brief and unequal tussle for a few moments, then Jason succeeded in forcing the door open. Faith fell back again the toilet, naked and emblazoned with the fiery red markings of her lipstick.
"I have here a letter that will be of extreme interest to your mother," he panted, waving a paper in his hand. "I knew at the time that all your Goddamned piousness was sheer hypocrisy. Now I've got the proof."
He was so energized by his own motives that he seemed to be unaware, for the moment, of the remarkable situation in which he and his daughter found themselves. While he waved the incriminating paper under her nose, his overcoat flapping around his body, she leaned backward across the toilet, the seat of it hitting her just behind the knees, her body naked and marked in red.
"Get out," she said in a low, quaking voice. "Get out of my bathroom, you vile creature."
"Don't you 'vile creature' me, you little harlot. I always knew you were screwing around. Now here's the letter from that pimply-assed little bastard that proves it."
"Get out!" screamed Faith. She struck out at him, but her hand missed.
Jason grabbed her wrist and pulled her forward. "I'll teach you," he yelled.
He yanked her around in a paroxysm of rage. The most convenient seat available was the closed lid of the toilet. Jason sat down and hauled Faith across his lap. Her long hair fell down around her face as he pulled her across his knees with her naked fanny thrust upward.
"I should have done this a long time ago," he shouted as his arm flashed upward, then snapped down to land a stinging slap on her rounded buttocks.
The letter was dropped unceremoniously. Also dropped, without a conscious thought, was Faith's attitude of superiority. She yelled like the child she was, kicking and struggling.
Jason held her down by the neck and beat her fanny until its white flesh began to glow scarlet from the abuse it was suffering. Faith wept and screamed. Lying across his lap as she was, the more she struggled and writhed, the more she rubbed, unwittingly, against his loins.
Jason tried to keep his mind on the punishment. He tried to keep it all in the proper context: he was the father dealing out a just punishment for this errant child's transgressions. That was the whole sum and substance of it. He was spanking the child. She deserved it. He was dealing it out. It was right and proper. It was a father's prerogative.
But his prick suddenly told him otherwise.
To his utter consternation, he found himself getting a hard-on. He found his palm enjoying the contact with that rosy-fleshed posterior. He found his thighs responding to the lithe body of the naked nymphet who lay across him. He found his attention being drawn irresistibly to the luscious curvature of the inside of those twin rounds of her buttocks where he could just catch a faint glimpse of the nestled pubic hair.
He whacked her again, staring fixedly at the point where her thighs met between the sweet, trembling mounds of flesh. He raised his arm and tried to strike again, but his arm would not obey his will. Instead, it lowered without force and his hand slid between the warm twin curves of her upper thighs.
Faith felt the change instantly. She froze. She turned her crimson, tear-streaked face around and her eyes went wide.
Jason touched the wet, then his hand jerked away. He let go of her neck.
Faith scrambled awkwardly to her feet. She stood before her father shaken by violent emotion and smarting with pain. But he was no longer her father. He was an entranced male, one that she could lure with her sexuality, whom she could conquer.
Jason strove mightily to regain control of himself and to reclaim his valiance as the punitive father, but before him stood that vision of erotic fulfillment. She was slender and soft-skinned. Her hair fell in tangled cascades around her face and shoulders. She was marked obscenely in scarlet around her nipples and pubis, with an arrow of blood pointing to the inviting treasure nest of her cunt.
"Oh, God," murmured Jason. He knew in that instant that he was a doomed man.
Faith wanted to revile him, to call him "bastard" and "monster" and many other vile and terrible names, but some instinct stopped her outburst. She grasped instinctively that she must be quiet and let the spell weave itself out. If she spoke, she might recall him to himself.
She stood before him breathing rapidly, her eyes half-glazed with shock and the promise of an undreamed-of fulfillment.
As in a trance, Jason put out his hand and touched her belly just below the navel.
"No," he said in an agonized murmur, "I can't."
"Do it," whispered Faith.
He extended his middle finger and thrust it into the warm, clinging vortex of her cunt. Faith opened her legs ever so slightly. She moved her pelvis forward a fraction of an inch. Her mouth was slack, with the full lips parted wetly, and her eyes were without expression.
Jason began to breathe harshly, like a man climbing the last slope of a high mountain. His hand plunged in and out, pushing his rigid finger deeply into the tender hotness of her most intimate body.
With a strangled sob, Jason suddenly leaned forward and pressed his face into the soft fleshiness of his daughter's pubic mound. He rammed his finger as deeply as it would go into the dark, wet cavern and opened his mouth to bare his teeth against the crisp tangle of her hair. The rich smell of cunt assailed his nostrils, half-choking him with bestial desire.
"Oh, Gawd!" he cried again, falling to his knees.
He cupped his free hand around her buttocks and pushed forward with his chin until he had breached the barrier of her pelvic bone. His lips met the wetness of her inner labia, and he rooted until his out-thrust tongue found the hole that his middle finger had enjoyed the possession of. Jason pulled out his finger and introduced his eager tongue into the musky cavern of her vagina.
He cuddled her twin-mounded buttocks in both his hands and burrowed with his face until he had total possession of her cunt with his mouth.
Faith stood flexed lightly, her legs apart, her hands on her thighs. She looked down with glazed eyes as her father ate her cunt.
Moving up from his plunges into the mysterious channel of her womanhood, Jason let his tongue find the nub of her clit. He lashed and diddled it until her legs began to tremble with emotion. Suddenly he sank his face deeply into the hot flesh and sucked on the tiny appendage that was so rapidly becoming swollen and fiery.
Faith moaned loudly. She could hardly stay on her feet.
"Let me down," she murmured. "God, let me down. Stick it in me. Fuck me."
Jason released her for an instant, then caught her as she half-collapsed in his arms. He pulled her around until she was seated on the toilet seat, her head lolled back over the tank, her legs sprawled wide.
Hastily he unzipped his fly and brought out his engorged cock. Falling to his knees, he guided the head of his manhood toward the exposed pink flesh between the girl's legs. She was stationed too high up for him to enter. He poked ineffectually a few times, then moaned piteously.
Faith slid off the seat and lay on her back on the wooly bath mat. Jason mounted her without a word and rammed his prick into the yielding wet flesh beneath him.
He was encumbered by his clothes, including the heavy top-coat, but he pushed in and out repeatedly, finding the convulsing hole between her thighs with each thrust. His shoes slid on the tile floor, and he could not find purchase for his feet to give him leverage.
With a boldness born of frustration, he got up, pulling Faith along with him. He did not fear breaking the mood at this point: they were both too far gone to stop, no matter what the provocation. He pulled her along until they came to the bed. There he pushed her down, shucked off his overcoat, and mounted her again.
He was too enflamed to consider any qualifying circumstance: she could have been a nun or a female sheep for all it would have mattered at that point.
Cradled between her legs, he slipped his hands under her and lifted her hips high. When she was held in the position he wanted, he threw all inhibition to the winds and fucked harder and deeper than he had ever fucked a woman before. With each thrust, his prick slid into her cunt with a slurping sound that made the hair on the back of his neck rise up in waves of intense sensation. His heavy balls whacked against her anus with each ingress, giving him an added erotic satisfaction.
Faith slid her index fingers into his thinning hair and flexed her hips upward each time he plunged in. Thus, helping each other, and oblivious to the ramifications of their act, they fucked their way to satisfaction.
Faith had never stretched her legs so widely apart; Jason had never plunged his way so deeply into a cunt. Their bodies met and parted with bone-shaking thuds in a rhythm that lulled them both into a mindless orgy of eroticism.
Presently his prick began to swell even larger, and a shiver of ecstasy began in his loins. Faith's inner muscles began to twitch and grasp, and the convulsive motions of her cunt milked him dry of the blinding gush of semen.
Jason collapsed across the damp, flushed body of his daughter. He willed to stay in the darkness of oblivion forever, to float for all time on the black tide of fulfillment and never wake.
For, dear God! when he opened his eyes, he would have to acknowledge the fact of his incest.
CHAPTER TEN
As soon as the fire of passion died down in Faith's body-which was about as soon as the sweat dried on her skin-she became mentally alert. She began to hate and despise her father to a degree that made her former hatred of him seem pale by comparison.
But whereas she had showed her feeling before in wild caricatures of disdain and mockery, now her hatred was different. There was no longer any fear mixed with it.
She was fully aware of the damage she could do to him now. Even though she had no knowledge of legal ramifications, she did know that if she were to tell her mother, Jason in some way would be branded and outcast forever.
Faith lay thinking coolly of this as her father lay across her, struggling to get his wind back.
Jason finally was himself enough to roll off his daughter and, without looking at her, stuff his limp penis back into his clothing and zip up. It was insane under the circumstances, but he was firmly occupying his mind with professional thoughts, almost as if reassuring himself that he was a doctor.
"Now I must wash my hands," ran his ridiculous thoughts, "and then I'll check her out to see if there's any sign of disease. I am the Doctor. Yes, I must not forget that."
Jason got up from the bed, still with eyes averted, and went to the bathroom. He washed his hands and dried them, carefully avoiding the sight of his own eyes in the mirror. Then he came back to the bed to deal with the patient.
But the "patient," as he had thought of her, was not ill. She was not cowed, she was not in trouble, she was not supplicating. Instead, she lay propped up on a pillow and looked at him with the most mature, ironic and coldly contemptuous expression he had ever seen on a woman's face. Her body was just as he had left it, the legs sprawled and the genitals clearly visible.
Jason quailed slightly before her look. He still could not hold his eyes steadily on hers, but kept flicking them away.
"This whole incident has been..." began Jason, but he did not manage to finish the sentence. Instead, he began another one. "I think we can safely. . . "
He folded his arms in front of him and walked up and down like a physician with a difficult case. He was biting his upper lip and frowning as if he were actually in deep thought; in reality his mind was quite blank.
Even in the given situation, Jason might have found a way to make the best of things if he had not fallen back in to his old habit of bullying. It was the mistake he had always made in life; now his accumulated Karma caught up with him.
"You'll have to come down to my office," he said briskly and with a touch of belligerence. "I'll want to check you out for possible venereal disease. If you've kept yourself fairly clean and not screwed too indiscriminately, we can probably fix you up fairly quickly with an antibiotic. If there's anything else to be done-hysterectomy or abortion or anything of that sort-I have a friend who's in GYN and will assist me."
It is difficult to say who Jason thought he was talking to. Certainly his response was insanely inappropriate to the occasion. The effect on Faith was rather incredible.
A great tide of sheer fury rose up along her chest and into her throat. Her face grew dark red, as if the veins would burst. She scrambled up to her feet, still in the middle of the bed. As she rose to her full height and towered over her father, her hands came up into fists raised to heaven. The mouth in her contorted face opened in a terrifying grimace that was ape-like and as ancient as the memory of primeval rage.
Faith gave a terrifying scream that was partly a cry, partly a howl; purely an expression of utter and total outrage, of his insolence having gone beyond every boundary, of the final explosion of her mad, wild, violent urge to destroy him.
Jason involuntarily hunkered down; he had never seen anyone look like that, and he had never heard a human being sound like that.
"You filth, you piece of shit!" screamed Faith. "You Godless bastard! You dirty old child-fucker!"
Jason began to tremble.
"You fucked me, you nasty old bastard. It was you, you did it. Everyone will know about it. The whole world will know. Incest! Incest! Old man screwing their little children. I'll tell my mother, I'll tell my mother!" she screamed.
Jason collapsed on the bed, patting her feet, trying to shush her, bowing beneath the force of her invective. Faith finally panted to a halt. She had never experienced anything like it before, and she was slightly stunned. She hopped down off the bed and stood leaning for support on the nearby chest of drawers, surveying her father.
"I've always hated you," she said in a low voice. "You were always a bastard, always making life miserable for everybody, especially Mother."
Jason nodded his head. He could not even speak.
"Now I can kill you. It seems so odd that it should be me who will be allowed to do it. I never thought I could really ever hurt you. But now I can break you up in little pieces," she said.
Jason looked up at her. If it had been in his emotional makeup, he would have pleaded with her, but he had never exercised any side of his nature but the domineering function. He was quite without knowledge of how to reconcile, arbitrate, or negotiate without force.
Finally he collected himself enough to make one statement. "But you-you liked it, didn't you?"
Where Faith had been fire before, now she congealed into ice. "Yes, I liked it, you despicable monster. If I hadn't liked it, maybe I could forgive you a little. But I'll never forgive you now."
"I don't understand," cried Jason.
Faith did not really understand either, but she did not need to in order to act; her instincts were guiding her. She pushed herself away from the chest of drawers and went swiftly to her closet.
As her father watched numbly, she yanked out a pair of bell-bottom pants and stepped into them. Then she pulled on a shirt and began to button it up the front rapidly. She did not even bother about shoes, but came out of the closet blindly, heading for the door.
He jumped to his feet. "Where are you going? You can't go out."
"I'm going to find Mother," she said. "You can't stop me."
Perhaps neither of them had fully realized just how desperate Jason's situation was. They had both assumed, without thinking of it, that the situation had been already pushed to its ultimate limits. But now that Jason saw her about to actually go out of the room and spread the word of his unspeakable actions, something happened to break the torpor that he was in.
He did not think; he merely acted. He rushed for her.
In the same moment, Faith realized what he was going to do. She spun instantly and bolted out the door. She ran down the hall and flung herself down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.
Jason had only missed grabbing her by a mere fraction of an inch. Despite her youth and agility, he was propelled by utter desperation, and he would have caught her had it not been for the stairs. Fleet as an animal, she dashed down them, while he had to negotiate with all the encumbrance of a middle-aged body.
Instead of running straight out the front door, Faith grew muddled for an instant once she was in the foyer. She was looking for her mother. She veered off and ran into the kitchen.
This slight hesitation gave Jason back the advantage that the stairs had taken from him. He galloped into the kitchen after her.
When she saw him, she ran for the back door, but he got there first and threw his weight against it. Faith tried to run back the way she had come, but he grabbed a handful of her shirt and held her.
Not once did he say, "I am going to kill you," nor did he even allow himself to think it; but his muscles and sinews acted out this intention with a silent will of their own. He got his hands around her throat and began to squeeze, bending her body backward.
Faith struggled like a wild animal, but her beating and scratching were futile against his superior strength. She could not scream. As he bent her backward, her feet began to slip out from under her. What saved her life at that moment was that she did indeed lose her balance entirely: as she went back, she unthinkingly kicked out her forward leg to try and regain balance. As luck would have it, her hard, angular little knee cap caught Jason square in the crotch.
He cried out and involuntarily loosened his grip on her throat. Faith fell backward to the floor, while he doubled over, grabbing at his wounded genitals.
Faith had not yet been choked to the point where she was dizzy. She immediately scrambled away from him, sprang to her feet and ran as fast as she could out toward the front of the house.
Although he was in intense pain, Jason hobbled after her. She had to be stopped. Somehow, some way, she had to be stopped!
Faith ran to the front door and attempted to yank it open, but it only pulled forward a few inches then stopped with a jerk. In her frenzy she could not determine clearly at first why it would not open.
Upon entering the house, Jason had put the chain on the front door. Now Faith fumbled with it, trying to unlatch it, but she was too impatient to close the door altogether, which was the only way in which the chain could be undone.
Jason hobbled across the foyer toward her. In a panic of terror, Faith got the chain undone, but by then her father was almost upon her. Her nerve broke then and instead of running, she squeezed her eyes shut and screamed over and over with every ounce of energy in her body.
Jason grabbed her again. This time she struggled and fought, managing to keep him from getting his hands around her throat. He struck her with his fist, and she screamed again.
In the uproar, neither of them was aware that there was a pounding at the front door. The bitter fight went on. Then the door was pushed open and Tom Taylor stood there.
Jason froze, Although he was incapable of thought, some deep inner wisdom told him that the game was up now, there was no way to salvage things.
Faith broke away from him and ran to Tom, sobbing hysterically.
Tom said incoherently, "What are you doing? What the hell's going on? What's wrong."
"Get me out of here," cried Faith.
Jason rallied for one more attempt. He moved toward them menacingly.
Tom had no idea of what had happened, but his somewhat dormant masculinity made itself known at that point, and he instinctively moved in front of Faith with his hands coming up, clenched into fists.
"Get me out, get me out," sobbed Faith. Tom moved her out, keeping his eyes on her father, and closed the heavy door between them.
Jason stood like a man in a catatonic trance for perhaps twenty seconds, then he wheeled and went to his study. There was no time to think, no time to plan. Yet some part of his mind must already have been making arrangements for the future, for he went in a daze to a framed copy of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", swung it back and worked the combination of his wall safe. There were securities inside, but he didn't bother with them. He found his passport with a visa that was still valid from his last trip to Mexico for an international medical conference. There was close to four hundred dollars in large bills. He stuffed the money and the passport into his pocket, slammed the safe shut and replaced the picture.
Where would they go? Would that young fart take her to his house? Jason gambled that he would not, that they would creep off somewhere by themselves while Faith unfolded the whole horrible saga of how her father had "raped" her.
He dialed the Taylor residence, praying that luck would be on his side, just for this one telephone call. No one knows why sinner's prayers are sometimes answered-Eloise answered the phone.
"This is Jason," he said, without preamble," A crisis has come up. I've got to see you."
"No time to explain," he said. "I want you, Eloise. That's the sum of it. I want you-and need you-now more than I ever have in my life. I'm going to my office.
Will you meet me there?"
"Why, yes, of course. But couldn't you tell me just a teeny bit of what it's all about?" she wheedled.
"Not now!" he snapped. He paused, then said, "I may be going away for a while, Eloise. I want you to come with me. Will you? I'll do anything to make you happy. You know I can give you more pleasure than the Colonel ever could. I promise that my life will be yours, Eloise. Will you come with me?"
"Whew!" she said, letting out a long breath of air. "You sure know how to surprise a girl, don't you? Are you serious, Jason?"
"Dead serious. It's now or never. Can you get away? Are you alone now?"
"As a matter-of-fact I am," she said slowly. "Colonel's on the golf course and I don't know where Tom is-out mooning around somewhere, I suppose."
"Then will you pack a light bag and meet me at my office?" he pressed.
"But, I-" she stammered.
"Goddammit!" howled Jason. "Don't toy with me, Eloise. Do you have any money you can put your hands on?"
Her voice changed instantly. "My God, you are serious! I might be able to round up a few bucks. Where would we go, Jason? Would we be coming back?"
"I don't know for sure," he said. "I don't know anything, except that I have to run for it, and I want you with me. Are you willing to take the chance?"
She did not reply at once. He said, "Remember our last time, Eloise? That was only the beginning, my dearest. There's so much, much more I can do-for you, and to you. Let me show you, Eloise. Don't turn down this opportunity. You know there's nothing to look forward to in the life you're living now. One or two more years of feeble little fucks with the Colonel, playing golf with your girlfriends, watching your son turn into a young cunt-hound and finally settling on one little cunt and getting married. After that there'll be nothing left but babysitting with the grandchildren. Is that all you want out of life, Eloise?"
Eloise gave a great, tremulous sigh. "Oh, shit, Jason. I'll have to go, I suppose. When you put it like that, there seems no reasonable alternative."
"God, I love you," he panted. "I have to go now. Meet me at the office as soon as you can get there."
"All right, beloved," she breathed.
"And don't forget the money," he said in parting.
He then dialed his office and instructed his receptionist to cancel all appointments for the day and to lock up and go home. She was sullen and wanted terribly to know what was going on, but Jason barked at her angrily, and she subsided.
He raced out into the foyer and up to his room. He hauled down a light bag from the closet shelf and threw a few things into it. Then, carrying the bag, he went to Faith's room to retrieve his topcoat.
There was the rumpled bed on which he had committed the most unforgivable of all sins. In his mind's eye, he could still see her, sprawled on the bedspread, her lithe body open to his attack, defenseless and senseless. Then he remembered her standing in the bathroom with her legs planted far apart, her pelvis thrust forward for his eager mouth, her hair tangling around her swollen and tear-streaked face.
He wanted to howl out some inhuman curse that would reach to the ears of God himself, or maybe to the Prince of Darkness. The exact words of ril's cry of damnation were not clear in his mind, but in essence they conveyed the message which was burning like a glob of ignited phosphorus in Jason's heart: "It's not fair!"
Shaking his mind clear of this fantasy, he turned and went out, down the stairs, and to the front door. He opened it cautiously. No one was in sight. He walked briskly to his Cadillac and got in. The hue and cry had not yet begun, the posse had not formed, the lynch mob had not been collected. There was still time for him to get away-and take Eloise with him.
When Jason arrived at his office, Eloise was sitting outside in her car. She got out instantly and joined him.
"Doctor, whatever is it all about? You must tell me."
He motioned for her to be patient. Then he went to the door of his office. It was locked, as he had hoped it would be. This meant that his staff was gone and the patients cleared out. He took out his key, opened the door, and they went in.
In the dim outer office, Jason used the phone again, calling the local airport to check on flights south. There was a plane out in fifty minutes that would take them to Laredo, Texas. From there, they could make further connections. Jason reserved two seats under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Galen.
When he hung up, he went to his private office and dug an old strong box out of his desk drawer In it, along with a few Polaroid shots of a particularly cooperative woman patient whom he had seen late one evening after his staff had gone, were some scattered bills. He counted them out. Another hundred and sixty-three dollars.
Eloise had trailed obediently along behind him, but now she was bursting with curiosity. She put her hands on his shoulders, standing before him as he sat in his swivel chair, and demanded, "Now, Jason, tell me what the hell is going on. What have you done? Embezzled money? Performed an abortion? What?"
He sat back tiredly in the chair and looked at her.
"I-well, I-had sexual relations with a minor," he said lamely.
"Relations with a...? Oh, come on, doctor! Don't pull my leg. That's a rap you could arrange to get off from somehow. There's more to it. Tell me."
"It was with ... my daughter," he said in a whisper.
"You mean you-fucked-your own daughter? Faith?" she said with disbelief in her voice.
He fell forward and buried his face in his hands. "Yes."
Eloise began to laugh. It started with a chuckle, then grew into a full, deep, belly-laugh of sheer amusement. "Well, I'll be damned," she said. "I didn't know you had it in you, love."
Jason looked up, stunned. "It amuses you?" he asked wonderingly.
"Oh, my God," she laughed. "It amuses me, yes, but not for the reason you think. I really don't condone it, Jason, really I don't. One shouldn't go fucking around with teenage libidos-they're far too complicated and tricky. But it amuses the hell out of me that you finally had the guts to do it. You've always wanted to you know."
"Nonsense," he said stiffly. "That's a lie. I've always tried to be a proper father to that girl. I was stern with her. I tried to instill some notion of character and propriety into her."
"Propriety, my ass," said Eloise, lighting a cigarette. "You've wanted to get your prick into that baby fat for years. That's why you were so adamant about punishing the poor thing-and my Tom too, incidentally-three years ago. You lusted for her, Jason. I always knew that, even if you didn't."
"But that's monstrous," he exclaimed. "Monstrous! Unnatural!"
"Yes, of course," said Eloise. "Lots of sexual impulses are monstrous and unnatural. They're there, all the same. Oh, Jason, you're such a child. A grown-up little prig in so many ways."
"Thank you very much," he said in a wounded voice.
"Darling," she cooed, coming to sit on his lap. "Don't be hurt. I'm glad you finally did it. Really, I am. It's made heaps of difference in you as a lover, do you realize that? You were interesting before, but now you're-well, almost fascinating."
"Am I, indeed?" he asked, somewhat mollified.
"Yes, darling. Quite fascinating. Not every man should screw his daughter, but for you I think it was probably a very fortuitous occurrence. I think it may have unleashed you, if you see what I mean."
Jason took a deep breath. Somehow her easy acceptance put the whole thing in a slightly different light.
"But Vera?" he said, suddenly coming back to the harshness of reality.
"O, Gawd," said Eloise. She got up and began to pace, puffing furiously on her cigarette. "Yes, I see what you mean. And Faith, herself. Sweet Jesus, what a nightmare those two will cook up out of this."
"And Tom took her away. He rescued her, the little shit."
"Hmmmmm, that does make it bad," Eloise agreed.
"So you see," said Jason, "we've got to leave. We've got to get away. Vera will never let me live it down. My life will be quite unbearable at home. And word will get around, my practice will be demolished. We've got to go somewhere and start over."
"I believe you're right," said Eloise musingly.
"And you're still willing to go?" he asked.
"Oh, hell, why not?" she laughed. "I can't face the years ahead here. What you said on the phone is true-it will all end up babysitting for the grandchildren, and soon. I'm not ready to kiss the rest of my life good-bye. So let's try an expatriate existence. Lots of people do. I've heard you meet the most intriguing people in Mexico who are hiding out from something they did at home. It's quite an elite society."
"God, you're wonderful," said Jason, drawing her back into his lap. He began to fondle her heavy breasts and to kiss the full curve of her throat.
"Doctor, you bad thing," she admonished coyly.
"We've got thirty minutes before we have to be at the airport," he reminded her.
"Yes, but if they look for us, this is the first place they'll come. And our cars are outside," she said.
"To hell with them," he murmured into her neck. He pinched her nipples through the fabric of her dress. His cock was rising to the occasion, pressing upward through his trousers against the full roundness of the buttocks that were snuggled so warmly on his lap.
"Lover, do you think we should?" she said softly, reaching meanwhile to surreptitiously unbutton the neck of her dress.
"I know damned well we should," he said firmly.
He pushed her up and got to his feet.
"I want to strip down, mother-naked. We've screwed far too many times with clothes between us, Eloise." He began to take off his clothes.
Caught up in the excitement of the moment, Eloise also began to strip.
When they were both totally nude, Jason chased her around the desk, his genitals wagging enticingly. Eloise scampered out of his reach, her hefty breasts jiggling and her ample buttocks rolling erotically.
"Come here, you naughty girl," he coaxed.
"Come and get me, you old baby-fucker," she answered.
They met and merged into each other's arms near the old leather couch. They sank down upon it in a delightful pastoral of nymphs and satyrs.
"You're a hairy old big-balled brute," she crooned.
"And you're a delicious great vanilla pudding, just waiting for me to stick my thumb in and pull out a plum," he cooed.
Eloise started to pant as her juices began to flow, and she heaved her fleshy thighs wide apart to admit her goatish lover. Jason took his throbbing prick in hand and nuzzled it around in the warm mound of flesh, sparsely sprinkled with ginger-colored hair, until he found the entrance he was seeking.
He jutted forward, and his prick sank in to the hilt-down, down into all that warm, maternal and nourishing motherly flesh. God! it was good. Just like fucking an oven-warm bran muffin with lots of melted butter on it. He hefted her voluminous hips upward and thrust in and out, feeling that he would be forever grateful to Eloise not only for her sanity and matter-of-fact mind, but also for her possessing such a big, hot, cradling motherly body.
He fucked strongly, but with control, until her moans told him she was near climax. Then he sharpened his concentration and began to plunge in with a vengeance, determined to wipe away all the bad things that had happened by the vigor of his orgasm with Eloise.
At the moment of climax, Jason groaned so loud and shrilly that it was almost a scream. It was engendered not only by the pleasure of his spurting semen, but by another factor as well.
In his mind's eye, just then, there appeared a picture of the slender, tender, lithe body of his fucked daughter. It was not even Faith, now, but some universal psychic prototype of the eternal nymphet.
O! God! it will haunt me forever!
But the onrushing orgasm blocked all thought. As he swam in the dark quicksilver of sexual fulfillment, dimly somewhere in his semi-conscious mind, he was thinking, "Well, there are probably lots of young girls in Mexico. Brown little soft-limbed girls."
Eloise murmured, "Oh, doc, you've never been so good."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Tom had gotten Faith out of the house, he didn't know where to take her, because he didn't know exactly what had happened. Obviously her father had been trying to do her great bodily harm-but why? Had she done something awful and been caught in the act? And if she had, who had she been doing it with, since it certainly hadn't been with himself?
All of this was going through his mind, but it was no time for questions and answers. Faith was in terrible shape, still crying and looking wild and maybe even a little insane. She was leaning on him with her arm around his waist as they hurried unevenly across the lawn of her house.
"Where should we go?" he asked. "My house?"
"No," she sobbed. "Somewhere away."
"What about the Playhouse?"
She shook her head violently.
Typical of modern man, Tom's thoughts flew to the last and best symbol of refuge, escape and privacy-his car. He guided Faith across the yard and down the drive to where his convertible was parked. They got in and in a moment were away.
As he drove through the suburban streets, Tom glanced anxiously at the girl beside him. She huddled against the seat, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand, her hair in tangles and her bare feet dirty from the walk across the yard. She did not seem ready to volunteer any information, but Tom's curiosity was too great for him to let her alone just yet.
"What the hell happened?" he asked. "Was your old man trying to kill you?"
"Yes," she said.
"But why? What did you do?"
"Nothing. I was just trying to get out of the house," she said sullenly.
Tom cocked an eyebrow skeptically, but said nothing. He skirted around the business center of town and headed out a country road that led through a few miles of uninhabited swampy land before the next installment of suburbia began again on the far side. He had no idea of where he was going, and it didn't seem important at the moment. The principal thing was to be on the move.
"You were supposed to meet me, remember?" he asked. "When I couldn't find you walking, I decided something was up, so I took a chance on coming by your house. It's a damned good thing I did. Do you think he would've really killed you if I hadn't burst in on the scene just then?"
"I don't know," she said listlessly. "I suppose so. He would have been sorry later, when they put him in jail and so on. But I imagine he would have killed me if I hadn't gotten out."
Tom drove on a while in silence. He would get to the bottom of things in clue time; just now Faith seemed too beaten down and dispirited to badger for details.
He turned off the highway they were on and proceeded down a dirt country road, thinking to get further away from people and houses, and deeper into the wilderness.
After a mile, however, he found that the road intersected a huge, raw scar running across the face of the land that was the path of a new freeway being bulldozed through the swamp.
It was by then after five, and the mammoth earth movers and caterpillars stood temporarily abandoned. The workmen had gone home. The ravished land lay like some giant incision left gaping while the doctors ambled out of the operating room at the five o'clock whistle.
"Jesus, I don't know where to go," said Tom.
But just then he caught sight of an old farmhouse a few hundred feet along the freeway route. It was apparently in the process of being demolished to make way for civilization, for half of it had already been torn away. What remained was half a house with its rooms exposed, and one or two tumbled-down out-buildings on the far side among the remaining trees. Tom had a sudden inspiration that they could find shelter from the world there. It was Friday afternoon: work probably wouldn't begin on the freeway again until Monday. If they couldn't go to his house, or Faith's house, or the Playhouse, they could hide out here, at least for a while.
He turned the car down the rough freeway excavation and drove until he was able to cut off and draw up into the yard of the old house. He pulled the car around to the back, behind one of the out-buildings, and shut off the motor.
Faith roused up a little and looked around. "Where's this?"
"I don't know, but let's find out," he said.
They got out and explored the grounds, moving tentatively and silently as fugitives from the law. There was an old, gnarled apple tree by the house with a few somewhat leathery apples still clinging to its branches.
The exposed side of the house was depressing. There was worn linoleum still on the floors of the rooms, and a dingy curtain dangled forlornly from one window.
Tom helped Faith climb up, and they went through a door into a back room. It was still intact and held a pot-bellied iron stove. On the floor was an abandoned mattress, a litter of old paper and cardboard boxes, and a broken orange crate. The whole place was gaunt and bitter, yet somehow gave the impression of a haven.
Faith looked around her with a' strained expression, as if she wanted to cry again, but then her face went slack and she sank down on the mattress and hugged her knees with her face hidden by her hair.
"We could even stay all night," said Tom, surveying the place. "Nobody would ever find us here."
Faith did not answer.
Tom sensed that she was in a strange state of mind, maybe of shock. He was strongly impelled to question her further about the wild happenings at her house, but some instinct made him hold off. "You okay?" he asked finally.
She murmured something vague.
"Why don't you lie clown? I'm going to look around and check out this scene."
Faith obediently lay back on the old mattress and curled up with her knees close to her chest. Tom poked around the remains of the half-house. The only other room still intact was a kind of enclosed porch with a screen door leading to the back yard.
Outside he found only what had been there before: two rickety out-buildings that had once been used, apparently, for storage, the old apple tree and a concrete wall with a bucket and rope.
Out of a sense of novelty, he let the bucket down into the dark hole of the well until he heard it strike water. He hauled up on the rope, and the bucket arose heavily, filled to the brim with clear spring water. Tom drank a little from his cupped hand, then poured out half and took the bucket back to the house.
Faith was just as he had left her, huddled up on the mattress. It was growing dark, and a sense of melancholy seemed to pervade the old house.
Tom investigated the pot-bellied stove and then decided to risk building a fire in it. He crumpled up some of the papers lying around, added fragments of the orange crate, and lit it with matches from his pocket. In a few minutes, he had a bright little fire going. He opened the door at the front of the stove, and the sight of the leaping red and yellow flames seemed to transform the dingy room into a snug cave.
Now his attention turned again to Faith. Obviously he was going to have to do something about her. She couldn't be just left in the state she was in.
"Want some water?" he asked. "It's good. I got it out of a well outside."
She nodded. He brought the bucket and she drank a little from her cupped hands. Tom brought out his handkerchief for her to dry her hands on.
The cold water seemed to revive her a little. She dipped the handkerchief in and wiped off her face and throat with it.
"I'm dirty," she said, looking at her feet. "I'm dirty all over." But the effort was too great; she lay back again listlessly.
Tom took the square of cloth and began to wipe off her feet. A sense of pleasure began to steal into his consciousness, like faint music beginning to play, as he held each high-arched foot in his hands and wiped it clean. He gave attention to each toe, noticing for the first time how strangely and magically the human form is put together out of bones, muscles and flesh.
Her ankles were slender and delicate. He bathed them each in turn. She held out her arms then, and Tom moved up. He pushed back the long sleeves of her shirt and washed her arms, with their fine down of golden hairs. Then he unbuttoned the shirt and laid it back to get to the rest of her.
There were the smudged traces of the lipstick she had applied to her nipples. Tom said nothing, although he was beginning to have a feeling about what might have happened. He bathed her rounded shoulders with the clear water, and then moved down to her breasts. Each one in turn, he wiped slowly and tenderly with the handkerchief. He washed down over the rib cage, noticing the beautiful curve of her midriff as it narrowed into her taut waist.
Tom zipped down her pants so he could reach the rest of her.
On the firm plane of her belly, he saw the red, lip-sticked arrow pointing downward. Now his nostrils caught the faint musk of the aftermath of coitus, and suddenly he knew full well what had happened.
"Your old man fuck you?" he asked softly.
"Yes."
Tom hesitated, then asked, "Did you want him to?"
Faith turned her head aside. Her eyes were wide open, but without expression. "I guess I did," she replied.
"I guess that explains everything," he said, letting out his breath slowly. "Were you going to tell?"
"I hated him afterward," she said. "I was going to tell Mother."
"The old bastard," said Tom. But at the same time, he understood fully why the brutal scene of attempted murder had occurred.
He began to haul off her bell-bottomed pants. Faith lifted her hips to allow them to be shucked off, saying nothing. When he had her lower body naked, Tom began the bathing operation again. He scrubbed a little at the arrow, managing to get off most of it.
He smoothed the wet cloth over her hips, over the delicately jutting hip-bones, and down over her thighs and loins. The hair of her pubis was still wetly matted with the semen of her father.
Tom moved her legs apart gently, and washed the hair and the glimmering pink flesh lying beneath. He was face to face with the mystery and essence of femininity. It gleamed back at him like some strange visage, archaic and full of magical import.
He parted the outer labia with his fingers. In the dim light of the flickering fire, he could discern the small lump of the clitoris, the ruffled lips of the inner labia, and beneath, the slanting entrance to her vagina. He cleaned everything, wiping gently with the wet handkerchief.
Then he continued downward, bathing her thighs each in turn. He felt the double tendons behind her knees as he raised each leg to bathe the underside. He smoothed the cloth up along the full-muscled curve of the thigh to where it swelled into the lush roundness of her buttocks.
Faith lay silently, her face turned away. Her breathing grew more even, except when the coldness of the spring water on her most intimate parts caused her to gasp slightly.
Her pale flesh was beginning to tighten into chill-bumps. Tom took off his shirt and began to wipe her all over again, blotting away the remaining spring water until her skin was dry. The smell of her came to his nostrils again; still earthy and sexy, but also mixed with the cool spring smell of the well water.
Her breasts now stood up more tautly, with the pink nipples beginning to harden into buds of sensation.
Tom suddenly leaned down and opened his mouth against the firm soft flesh of her belly. He ran his tongue into her navel, and then trailed it along the course of the now-dim red arrow.
He brought his head back up, and moved his mouth to envelop her left breast. The tip of his tongue played with the tight little nipple, and then he bit gently. He moved to the other breast and rubbed his face against its satiny roundness.
Then slowly he got to his hands and knees and lowered himself very gently until he was lying over her, his naked chest pressed against her rising breasts. Her skin was cold, but there was warmth underneath, and he could feel the steady throbbing of her heart deep inside her body. Tom kissed along the arch of her neck and down the rounded shoulder. Faith turned her head then, and he kissed along the other side. Moving his mouth back upward, he let his lips follow the line of her jaw.
Now Faith moaned faintly, and turned her face up to him. Her lips parted, invited him there. Her eyes were still blank, half-hooded.
Tom took her proffered mouth, kissing her at length, slowly and thoroughly. His tongue sank into the depths of her wet mouth, exploring the warmness and the strangely good-tasting inner recesses. Her limp hands lifted and began to caress his sides ever so softly.
He had not felt a raging desire, but now his blood began to move more strongly, as if it were thicker and swifter. His cock began to harden between them and to press into the softness of her slightly parted thighs.
Tom rolled off long enough to divest himself of his clothing, then he moved back over her again. Their bodies touched from chest to toes in a stirring pattern of warm places and cold places, of touching and not-touching. They shifted their legs slightly, and a whole new pattern was created.
It was quite dark now, but they could see each other lined by the tongues of red firelight. Tom could see the burnished sheen of it on her hair, the softer glow on her cheek and shoulder, and the bright glitter when she opened her eyes. She parted her lips again, and the firelight reflected on the wetness of her lips and on the little pointed tongue that stealthily edged its way out between her white teeth. He sank into her mouth again, rummaging slowly and deeply to taste all its sweetness and darkness.
Tom felt he could burrow into the soft body beneath him a hundred feet, digging deeper, falling further, never reaching the bottom of the glorious sensation of flesh against flesh.
He reached down and felt his cock. It was hard enough for intercourse, and he placed the tip of it between her legs and pushed forward.
Her thighs spread open softly, as if by magic. She rocked her pelvis forward, presenting her vagina at an angle for him to enter without impediment. Tom pushed inward, and the shaft of his penis sank slowly into the firm warmth, clinging a little to the sides.
He lay quiet for a moment, savoring the sensation of being inside her body. Then slowly, he withdrew. Again the flesh of her vagina clung to him, holding him back, begging him not to leave.
He ran his now-engorged cock smoothly in and out of her in long strokes, feeling thrills race up his body with each move. Faith seemed to slowly come to life, and her response began. She lifted to meet each ingress of his cock, and the muscles on the inside of her thighs began to tremble slightly. Her hands came up and the fingers plunged into his hair, pulling his head closer for deeper and deeper kisses that matched the rhythm of their lower bodies.
Tom suddenly sank back so that he was sitting on his heels with his cock still inside her. He grasped her legs behind the knees and lifted them high, spread wide apart. Her hips and pelvis sloped upward to meet his impaling cock. Tom held her legs firmly and began to move his pelvis back and forth in a marvel of muscular coordination.
The whole of the girl's body was spread before him, like a scenic landscape. He could see the wet pinkness of the flesh of her labia beneath the soft muff of hair, where his penis was going in and out; the wide V-shape of her parted thighs; the slope of her quivering belly; the up-mounded breasts; her arms thrown wide while her fingers dug into the old mattress; her throat that was arched backward. Her face, which had been lifeless until now, began to glow with a rosy suffusion of passion. Her lips parted and she began to moan softly.
Tom pumped his manhood into her, feeding it to her in long, smooth thrusts. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he had gotten to the very heart of sex; was at its core; at the ultimate apex of its being. Faith seemed to sense this, for she opened her eyes and lifted her head slightly to stare at him.
Her look was enigmatic, fathomless. She merely stared and stared, watching him fuck her with a gradually rising tide of force and passion.
Then her eyes widened a little, and she held out her arms imploringly to him. Tom came forward, still holding her legs, so that her knees now rested close to her shoulders. With her femininity presented like that, she was endlessly, totally, maddeningly fuckable.
His body went wild and he pounded his bone-hard cock into her. With each thrust his loins smacked against her taut buttocks and thighs and his balls bounced against her anus. Tom rammed his force into her so lustily that with each prod she moved upward on the mattress a few inches.
Faith suddenly went into a frenzy. Her head rolled from side to side, her long hair lashing about like a silken whip. Her hands flew all over him, the sharp nails raking his flesh in light strips of fire. Tom's head seemed to explode; there was nothing corporeal about him any longer except the driving cock and the flexing thigh muscles; the rest was a column of flame.
They both cried out when the orgasm swooped down over them, like some immense dark-and-light entity with great powerful wings. Tom fucked in one last time, and his whole body shuddered to a stop while the ecstasy played up and down his frame like lightning over a metal rod.
Faith's mouth was contorted into a wild expression of pain and pleasure. She moaned again and again as her vagina throbbed and buckled around the shaft of flesh that it enclosed. Tom was dimly aware of letting her legs loose. They slid down and enclosed his hips between, and her feet hooked over the backs of his knees.
Then the true darkness closed in, warm and softly-breathing and safe and serene.
They slept until quite a while later. Tom roused once and glanced at his watch by the dim light of the last embers glowing in the little stove. It was almost midnight. Faith stirred and pulled him back so she could nestle her face against his neck.
"Should we go home?" he murmured.
"To your house?" she asked.
"I guess not," he said. "They'd be there."
"And we certainly couldn't go to my house," she said. "They'd be there too."
They snuggled closer and went back to sleep.
Oddly enough, "they" were not at either house. Both the Marlow house and the Taylor house stood empty that night, while their six assorted residents all sought-and found-refuge and solace elsewhere.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Vera Marlow, at the age of forty, was no sillier and no wiser than most other middle-aged but well-preserved women of her circumstances. She was a fool in some matters and a reasonably well-oriented adult in others. She could make a PTA meeting speech if required to; but she could not balance her checkbook. She played very good bridge-using the Italian system of bidding-but could not under any circumstances turn on her intellect sufficiently to read a newspaper editorial. Except for the fact that she had been sleeping with a man (her husband) only on an average of once every two or three months, she was a typical housewife.
But now sex had entered her life, and she was suddenly in very deep water, although she was not yet aware just how deep. Had it been cinema-screen sex, or slick women's magazine sex, there would have been no particular problem, for she, like her contemporaries, was steeped in that and hardly ever gave it a thought.
This, however, was the low, evil, rippling serpent of Sex, which is a symbol both of depravity and of glory. The thick, scaly body of this psychological serpent now writhed throughout her consciousness and slithered its way up, down and around all her thoughts. Its purpose was to awaken her.
As she sallied forth from her suburban home in her tight black dress and laceedged under things, she was moving toward that awakening. And every awakening, even from a light nap, seems vile and unpleasant at first.
She drove to the downtown section of their suburban "village" and parked in a shopping-center parking lot. It was early in the day and she had no idea of how to go about what she was determined to do. Aimlessly, she wandered through stores, looking closely and with new interest at bikini bathing suits, cosmetic displays, and men's underwear. Two hours passed in this unsatisfactory manner, and she finally gave up and decided to have lunch.
The place where she usually ate while downtown shopping was a neat, bright little restaurant where ladies gathered in droves because of the luscious desserts. Vera was on her way there when the serpent slithered through her thoughts, and she rebelled at the thought of a sterile, unsexy luncheon among all those women.
She began to walk. Even this model suburban citadel had its one or two seamy dives: places where men gathered-not decent, white-collar men, but workmen and drifters and truck drivers. It was something like that that she was looking for.
When she saw the facade of "Lester's", she knew instinctively that this was more in the order of what she was seeking. The plate glass in front was painted black up to shoulder height, the interior was dim, a neon "Michelob" sign shone red in the window, a juke-box was playing inside, and the door was open.
Vera took a deep breath and went in. At first she couldn't see anything clearly except the lighted juke-box at the back of the long narrow room. She groped her way to a bar that ran the length of the room and slid up onto a stool. There were booths on the other side. A few men hunched together at the far end of the bar, drinking beer and laughing, and a big-busted broad in a tight sweater served as bar maid.
The barmaid glanced at Vera, then studiously ignored her for five minutes. Finally it was her pleasure to amble up and place a coaster on the bar.
"What'll it be?" she asked.
"Do you have sandwiches?" asked Vera timidly.
"Grillcheese, salamionrye, hotpastrami 'n' hamburgers," intoned the bar maid.
"I'll have a grilled cheese," said Vera. "Oh, and a beer, please. A draft beer."
The barmaid closed her eyes sarcastically, opened them and went down the length of the bar.
The men at the end of the bar had stopped to look at Vera when she first came in, then had gone on with their conversation.
Occasionally they glanced at her to see what she was up to, but other than that they paid her little attention.
Vera began to feel terribly self-conscious.
The sandwich and beer came. With the greatest of difficulty, she managed to force down half the sandwich, washing it along with swallows of beer. Things weren't going as she had anticipated-not at all. Somewhere dimly she had had a vision of a movie scene, in which she caught the eye of a handsome brute in a white tee-shirt and a skipper's cap the first minute she entered the bar.
But there was no handsome brute. A searing feeling of inadequacy swept over her, and suddenly she felt like a complete fool. She was just ready to take her purse and leave quickly when a new man entered the bar. He lifted a hand in silent salute to the group at the far end-a salute that was not returned. He took a rapid inventory of the place in one sweep of his eyes, then came directly to Vera and slid up on the stool beside her.
She kept her eyes on her beer, suddenly hot with embarrassment. The newcomer seemed perfectly non-predatory. He said chattily, "Hey, do you know what time it is?"
Vera glanced at her wrist watch and said, "Two-thirty. Or almost."
"Hey, that's a nice watch. Do you mind if I look?" He reached over and grasped her wrist gently, bringing it closer so he could examine the watch. "My old man used to be a jeweler-you know, fix watches and that stuff. I always wanna look at everybody's watch. Guess it's hereditary, huh?"
He seemed so harmless and so casual that Vera found courage to look at him directly.
He was quite young by her standards, maybe 28 or 29. He was a smallish man with something rat-like about his face. His dark hair was long and looked a trifle shaggy around the ears, but it was thin and apparently not too clean. He wore a turtleneck banlon shirt and brown slacks.
Vera relaxed a little-he was obviously a harmless specimen.
"I've never seen you here," he observed. "I woulda' remembered. You got a nice face, you know that?"
"Why, thank you," she said. "You have a nice-that is, well, a nice face too."
"No kiddin'? " he marveled. "You really think so? I mean, I never thought about it. You know how it goes-you shave, brush your teeth; all time you're staring at yourself in the mirror, but you don't see nothing. You ever find yourself doing that?"
"Yes, I guess I do," she admitted.
His brows contracted with seriousness. "Hey, you ever find yourself lookin' at yourself in the mirror, and you wonder, like, who you are? Maybe you say out loud, 'Who-am-I?' You know what I mean?"
Vera nodded.
"It's weird," he said. "I do that alia time. like this morning, I looked inna mirror, and I said to myself, 'I don't know you. You're somebody different than you were yesterday.' You know what I mean, or does that sound crazy to you?"
Vera let out her breath in a shaky little laugh. "I know exactly what you mean. I really do."
"How 'bout that?" he marveled. "Goes to show you people are a lot alike."
The barmaid came and said, "What'll it be?"
"Schlitz," said the stranger. He turned to Vera as if he had just thought of a wonderfully original idea. "Hey, lemme buy you a beer, okay? No harm intended. Just on accounta we got something in common." Before she could answer he held up two fingers to the barmaid and she went away.
"I really shouldn't," protest Vera.
He looked seriously into her face and asked, "Why not?"
She was stumped for an adequate answer. "Well, let me pay for mine, anyway."
"Nah," he said airily. "Do me a favor. Let me buy a lady a beer. Okay?"
Vera smiled in spite of herself. "Okay," she said. She wasn't particularly happy with this encounter, since the serpent inside her was pressing her to seek stronger fare, bigger muscles, handsomer features-but at least his presence kept her from the horrible self-consciousness of sitting there alone. And really she had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
They chatted idly for a while: his name was Ernie, and he did "different things" for a living, and maybe one day he would be making it to California-that was a swinging state.
He learned that her name was Vera, that she didn't live nearby, that she agreed Schlitz was superior to Pabst, and that she wasn't doing anything in particular that afternoon but just taking a day off.
"Y'know," he said, compressing his lips after a luxurious swallow of his beer, "I like you. I mean, I really do.
Don't get any wrong ideas like I'm a mad sex-fiend on the make, that kinda thing. I mean, I just like you. Okay?"
"Okay," said Vera, feeling quite strange, but not uncomfortable. At least this was different from her relationship with Jason.
"Lassen, Vera," he said, watching her face intently, "would you like ta make a score? I mean, I'm cool. Nothin to worry about."
"A score?" she asked.
"Yeah. Tijuana Gold. Real heavy. I wouldn't shit you."
Vera sipped her beer to hide her bewilderment. "You want me to score something?" she asked in perplexity.
"Yeah, okay," he said, seeming obscurely to be satisfied with her answer. "No static. Everything's all right, okay?"
"Okay," said Vera. She seemed to be saying that quite frequently. They talked a bit further, and she told him only that her husband was a doctor, and that her car was parked at the shopping center.
Ernie now nodded vigorously to himself, then looked up at her. "Hey, Vera, look outside-it's a great day, huh? Pretty weather, really pretty weather."
She turned her head and looked out past the Michelob sign. "Yes, I suppose it is. Do you know, I really hadn't noticed." When she turned back, Ernie's hand was resting on the top of her glass. He removed it and pointed to the beer.
"Drink up, why doncha'? We'll have another."
"Oh, I don't think I should have anymore. I almost never drink in the middle of the day."
"Okay. So finish that one and I'll walk you to your car, okay?"
She shrugged and drank down the rest of her beer. Ernie sipped his and watched her with narrow eyes. The beer left an unaccountable sweetish taste in her mouth. She made a wry face and Ernie looked surprised.
"What's the matter?"
"I guess I've had too much," she said. "That last tasted funny.'
"I know whatcha mean," he said. "The bottom of the bottle sometimes gets funky. But I still say it's better than-'
"Than Pabst," she supplied and began to laugh.
Ernie laughed with her. "You're something else," he said in a friendly tone. "Lemme pay up, and I'll escort you to your car."
Vera took her bag and got down off the stool. She waited at the door while he settled with the barmaid. Then he came and took her elbow lightly and they went out.
It was five blocks to the shopping center. They walked along and Vera felt a faint trace of embarrassment to be walking with him. He was not quite as tall as she, and in the daylight, he looked a trifle unseemly. Not shabby or poorly dressed actually-she could not quite put her finger on what it was about him that made her hope they would not encounter anyone she knew. Nevertheless, it was a mildly pleasant experience to be walking down the street with a man other than Jason, especially one who had bought her two beers and a cheese sandwich, and shown her such unvarying attention.
Ernie was talking about California. Vera half-listened. The late afternoon sun was slanting across the street, high-lighting the shop fronts, the passing cars, and burnishing the leaves of the trees.
She was thinking that as soon as they got to her car, she would drive around for a while to clear her head, then she would go to another bar somewhere and try her luck. She liked Ernie, but the serpent wanted something better.
She gradually realized, however, that she would not get to her car because the street was narrowing into a mere ribbon. It was strange that she had not noticed this before, how Main Street narrowed down just at this point. The cars kept passing by, but as they proceeded into the distance, they narrowed down also, and became as thin and tall as cardboard cut-outs.
Vera tried not to let the strangeness of the street bother her, but finally she was forced to remark on it to Ernie. "I never knew about this street before," she said. "Do you know what the cars do when they get here?"
Ernie smiled slightly and took her elbow in a firmer grip. 'This street's blocked, huh? We better turn off, doncha think?"
Vera saw now that the street was blocked. Lying across it was a giant green garland of flowers. As the cars whizzed into the garland, they turned into little metallic flowers of blue, maroon, white and yellow. She took a deep breath and shoow her head slightly, and the street was normal again-only at the same time it was still crazy and blocked by the green garland.
"The beer," she said. She was telling herself that she had had too much beer in the middle of the day. When she finished telling herself that, she told it to the big glass of beer that was sitting on the sidewalk. The beer seemed to be totally unimpressed.
"I don't like its face," she said to Ernie confidentially. "It must be Pabst."
"Right," he agreed. "Come on, we'll go somewhere else."
"Yes, I think we'd better," she said severely. The arrogance of the big glass of beer was not something that she had to put up with. She was not that kind of woman, especially on this street.
They kept walking and sometime later they came to a garage with a staircase leading up on one side to an apartment above.
Vera tried to think back and remember what day it had been when she and Ernie had sat at the bar in "Lester's" and talked, but she could not sort out the time. It had been one day not too long ago, that was all she knew.
He led her up the stairs, but as she climbed, all the steps began to wave slowly. She held onto the railing, but it was like being on a ship in heavy swells and she could not be sure of her footing. Somehow they got to the top and Ernie opened a door. As Vera stepped inside, it came to her very clearly just for an instant that something was terribly wrong. She had been drunk before, but never like this. Something totally alien and horrible was occurring.
"God, what's happened to me?" she cried, staggering into the room.
Ernie closed the door and leaned against it. "You been raped, Doll."
"Raped?" she said blankly.
"Timothy Leary's theory," he said. "Psychedelic rape. Acid for the masses. Just ride with it, Vera baby. Don't fight. You'll goof up your head if you do. Let it take you. We'll ball awhile and you'll see pictures. Kingdom of God. Hell and all the devils. You needed this, baby, you really did. You're so straight it hurts. But you're tryin' to climb out, I can tell."
He started to undress, talking all the while. "You were lookin' for ass, anybody could see that. I dig you, Vera, even if you are an old Doll. You're tryin' to make it."
She stood transfixed as the rat-faced man skinned out of his banlon shirt, then zipped down his trousers and stepped out. He had on jockey shorts and his legs were hairy. He peeled down the shorts and laid them on a chair. He kicked off his shoes and came toward her clad only in yellow socks.
Vera tried to cry out, not because of him-since he was only a Spider Monkey with a long fuzzy tail that he kept curled over one wrist-but because the serpent was in the room.
As Ernie guided her to a low day-bed against one wall of the room, she saw the serpent rise up like a cobra in the center of the room. Its face was like an orchid. She could hear the rasping of its scales as it moved slowly backward and forward.
"O, God!" she cried. "No! Where am I?"
"Cool it on the noise," Ernie warned. The words blossomed in the air in various colors. Each word was a different shade and hue. They rolled around in space like various colored peas rolling down a curved glass tube. The serpent grew antlers and the glass tubes festooned themselves across the antlers. It was beautiful.
Then it was a long time later, she could not remember how long. She was naked. She looked down at her body and saw all that bare skin and she could not remember where it came from. Something was in her hand, and she knew that if she moved it around and around, words would be written somewhere that would explain everything.
"That's the way," said Ernie thickly as she massaged his prick.
The serpent somehow got into her hand and it suddenly stretched its mouth wide, showing its immense fangs. She knew it was going to sink those deadly fangs into her stomach, and that if it did, a shower of sharp jewels would cascade out. She began to cry, turning her head from side to side with her face contorted.
Ernie eased her down on the day-bed. Fucking a broad who was tripping was a real kick for him. They never responded straight, but it came and went with the variations of the trip. Sometimes they screwed like crazy, then suddenly they would lie like a corpse watching the pictures. He liked the bizarreness of it.
He pushed her legs apart and climbed on. With an acid-head, he didn't have to fuck around with preliminaries, since they didn't know for sure what was happening anyway. He hated to go through the warm-up stages of kissing, fondling and feeling. All he wanted was to fuck, and to observe what they were doing with their heads while he did it. He noticed that this one didn't have a bad body, at least for an old broad.
Vera was lying in a desert and strong winds kept blowing. She saw words written above her in the air, millions of words, but she couldn't read them because they kept moving so swiftly.
She came back to reality for an instant and realized that a man's cock was pushing into her. She looked down and saw that the little man from the bar, Ernie, was naked and on her, and that it was his cock that was raping her. She wanted to stop him and get him to explain what had happened, how they had come to be here, how it had all happened, but her voice wouldn't work. She asked someone for a glass of water, but instead, she was handed a plate piled high with brown shit.
"Oh, no," she said. "I won't."
"Tell me what you see, baby," said Ernie as he began to fuck. Tell me about the pictures."
"The snake," she said. "Get him out of the room. Please get him out."
"Okay," said Ernie breathlessly, "he's out. He's gone. No more snake."
To her surprise and immense relief, the serpent was gone. There was only the dense foliage of the jungle crowding in. Something was crowding her body, knocking into her, bumping her around. She thought it was the crowd of green plants, the fronds and leaves and tendrils of the jungle. Then she realized it was the man. He was on his hands and knees and was fucking her hard and fast.
She had felt nothing in her vagina until then, but now the sensation began. Her cunt was abuzz with feelings. She could hear the loud, ear-splitting buzz of it sounding throughout the jungle. Her pelvis swelled up until it was a great mossy lump that overshadowed everything. The trees with their trailing vines seemed small as they clustered around the mountainous cunt. The little man kept screwing away with a prick that grew steadily larger. Soon it was as large as a moon rocket and it began to blast white flames into the green hill of her cunt.
She tried to move, but the tiny arms, legs and head attached to the huge, mound cunt only wriggled like a spider's legs and accomplished nothing.
The air grew blue then, blue and serene. She had never seen so much blueness. Everything was quiet. She remembered dimly that he had ejaculated with a loud groan. She wondered how long ago it had been, and if he was still there. She opened her eyes to find him and saw his face hanging over her like a pale moon.
"How was it, Doll?" he asked. "What kinda pictures did you see?"
She told him about the mountain and the rocket and the green leaves as best she could.
His face grew soggy and degenerated into something like violet-colored cottage cheese as she talked. She could see the glittering black bones of the skull beneath. The whole thing rippled and pulsated. Then something came up from behind and swallowed the whole picture, and it was the serpent again, huge and giving off strange harmonic sounds.
The serpent was very wise, as all serpents are. It seemed to be speaking words of monumental import. Vera tried to listen and decipher them, but she was being moved around and could not concentrate. When the jostling stopped and she was lying on her face, then she remembered the words. They had been, "Turn over doll."
She almost knew what they meant, but not quite. She decided to think about them very hard so that she could get the meaning. While she was thinking intently, a train ran along a silver track that went into her anus, as if into a tunnel. The train was moving incredibly fast, yet it always stayed in the same place. Somebody lit a fire, and then others were spreading the flames back and forth as if they were painting it on with wide brushes. All the painters wore white caps with red neon signs that said "Michelob".
She came to reality for a moment. She was being buggered. It hurt, but it was strangely, horribly satisfying at the same time. "Oh, God, I've got to get out of this," she thought.
Ernie rammed it into her with great gusto. He hadn't had one before who had tripped out as far as this one. Jesus, he could do anything to her and she'd never know the difference. She would probably be up for another three or four hours, and he could do anything. He didn't want to keep at it too long, because when she began to come down slightly, she would begin to be aware of things like who he was, where she was, and what was happening. That was when trouble started. He had learned to gauge it fairly accurately, so that he could keep them while they were completely out, then dump them when they started to come down a little.
He was not an innately sadistic man, although he liked all the little "variations" as he called them. He didn't really want to hurt broads, but just be free to do his thing without their having heads on.
He fucked her in the ass until he began to feel the on-coming orgasm, then he slacked off. He knew he was only good for about one more, and he didn't want it to end too quickly. Trying to get a tripping broad to suck him off was no good, because they couldn't concentrate. There was only the choice of regular missionary-style fuck, or buggering.
Ernie knew the end was near, and he got slightly uptight. Cunt or ass? he asked himself. Somehow he wanted the cunt again, but that involved turning her over. The orgasm was creeping up on him, and he was undecided. He stabbed at her anus again, sank in, and felt the thrilling tightness. He decided to go for cunt in the same position they were in, although he preferred it face to face. He pulled out, grasped his cock, and probed for the vagina.
In his haste and excitement, he missed the mark. He hit solid, unyielding flesh. It was too late. The orgasm swept through him, pouring down his body like hot quicksilver, and spurted out his penis ineffectually against her leg.
"Oh, shit," mourned Ernie.
He sank limply down across her back, cursing his rotten luck.
A long time later, centuries later, Vera found herself standing on the street.
Pictures came and went. Then still later, she realized she was holding her purse in front of her. She wanted something from it, but she could not quite bring to mind what it was. With wheels of awful color spinning in the air all around her, she groped in the purse and came up with a round metal object. She knew what it was, but could not say the word.
Everything was clear for a moment. She was standing on a corner beside a phone booth. It was night. She had been a long time with that man, the little rat-faced one. She had been screwed.
She looked down at herself and found that she was clothed, that her shoes were on, that she was in one piece. All the horrors and glories that had been rampaging through her mind were becoming dim now. She remembered everything, but she was beginning to be conscious again. Fear flooded her whole being. She had been somewhere that no human being had ever been before. She was coming back now. But she needed help. Someone had to help her. Holding her mind steady with tremendous concentration, she managed to get into the phone booth and put the dime in the slot. She dialed her own home.
The phone rang for a long time. She remembered that it was Jason she was calling, her husband. He was rotten, but she had to have someone.
At last she accepted the fact that no one would answer the phone. She hung up and dime clattered down to the coin-return slot.
She retrieved it and put it into the machine again. Whom should she call? She dialed and then tried to think whose number it was. It was only when the Colonel's voice said, "Hello?" that she knew who she had called.
"You've got to help me," she said.
"Who is this?" he asked in surprise.
She knew who she was, knew her essential being more clearly than she had ever known it before, but the words to identify it didn't match up. Finally she managed to say the words, even though they were not right. "Vera Marlow.'
"What's wrong?" he asked quickly. "I've been somewhere," she said. "I've been insane. A man screwed me. There was a snake. Help me."
"Good God," he gasped. "Where are you, Vera."
"I'm here," she said.
"But where? Where? In a house? A hotel? Where are you?"
"Here," she said. Then she realized. "Oh, I see. You mean where. What place." She looked out through the glass side of the booth and saw the street sign. "I am at Main Street. And at Third Avenue. I am at those places. Please say something to me. I'm afraid I'll go again. The snake."
"Vera, listen to me," he said rapidly, "stay right where you are. Do you understand? Stay there. I'll come right away. Will you be all right until I get there? Is there anyone around?"
"I'll stay here," she said.
He hung up. She stood holding the receiver. The serpent was still coiling,, writhing, slithering, but it was somewhat removed. She stood still, thinking that soon she would hang up.
Maybe it was several days later, or maybe it was in the next instant. Anyway, the Colonel was there. He led her out of the phone booth. There was a car with the motor running. They got in.
She was coming down then. She clung to him in terror of what had already happened.
"Don't take me home yet," she implored. "Please, just drive around for awhile."
"You said-said you'd been attacked," he ventured.
"Screwed. Fucked. Front and back," she said in a strange voice.
The Colonel swallowed rapidly. It was not fitting, not decent at all, that he should be suddenly aroused by her words. Damned inconvenient!
"There's an all-night drive-in sort of place on the other side of town," he said gruffly. "Some black coffee will help you."
"Yes," she said. Then she began to tremble violently. "Can I tell you about it? I've got to talk. Can I tell you all that happened?"
"Of course, my dear, of course." He put his arm around her. Dreadful thing, really. Bloody curs around waiting to take advantage of a decent woman. Beastly! How drunk did he get the poor woman? he wondered. He'd always thought of her as the mousy type, not the sort to inflame a chap with lust.
But as he drove, he glanced over at her. Dress hiked up quite far. Rather good legs, actually. Wearing perfume for a change. And then there was that other odor, fragrance of rut.
The Colonel swallowed again.
They pulled into the drive-in and parked. He turned to her and she began to talk.
He'd had a long day on the golf course, and had played badly. Then Eloise hadn't been at home when he got there. One o'clock and she still wasn't home. Vera Marlow wasn't the type to go running around like that-not unless, as in the present circumstances, held prisoner and raped by a mad brute.
Marlow didn't appreciate what a fine specimen of womanhood he had, even though she was pushing forty.
The Colonel ordered coffee from the car-hop. It came and they sipped it, steaming and fragrant. Then Vera began to talk about all that happened, leaning back against the seat with her dress still hiked up and her breasts heaving with emotion.
The Colonel began to feel his palms break out in sweat. She talked on and the night passed.
Nothing would ever be quite the same for either of them again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Vera talked for fully an hour. It took that long to tell because she put in everything about the colors and snakes and rippling stairs and Ernie's cottage-cheese face. In addition, she was not quite down from her trip yet, and she would have moments when the fantasy world would begin to materialize again. But it was quite insubstantial by now, only a sort of faintly colored shadow play.
The Colonel listened in amazement and interest. He had come across hashish while in India, and knew something about its effects. This, however, was something new to him.
"This scoundrel must have given you something in your drink," he pronounced. "It's absolutely criminal." He couldn't help thinking, however, that it was a damned clever method if one wanted to go about seducing otherwise inaccessible women. He put the thought from his mind-well, not entirely away, but only filed for future reference.
Vera's long discourse had brought them up to the hour of five a.m. The Colonel suddenly bethought himself that it might be the better part of valor to call her husband, just to let him know where she was.
He excused himself and went to the phone booth outside the drive-in. There was no answer at the Marlow house. Somewhat puzzled, he then called his own house, even though he did risk Eloise answering in a towering rage for being awakened at that hour. But again, there was no answer. Where were they? Where were the children? Where, indeed, was everybody?
He went back to the car and told Vera of his discovery.
"I was afraid of going home, but under the circumstances, I suppose it's safe," she said. "I wonder if Jason had an emergency at the hospital?"
"Possibly," said the Colonel. "But where could Eloise have had an emergency?"
He started the car and drove through the deserted streets to their neighborhood. Both houses were dark. He pulled up into the Marlow driveway and came around to open the door for Vera.
"You'll come in, won't you?" she asked anxiously. "I don't feel as if I could bear to be alone yet."
They went in and searched the house. Vera noticed that Jason's overnight bag was gone. Suddenly an odd look crossed her face. She led him into the study. When she had worked the combination of the wall safe, she discovered that the cash they kept for emergencies was missing.
"Perhaps you'd better check your house," she said.
He left her long enough to make a quick search. When he came back, it was to report that some of his wife's things were missing as well. And also a reserve fund of cash they kept in a steel box in the closet.
They went to the kitchen for more coffee, and as they sat at the table looking across at each other, the truth became impossible to avoid any longer.
"They've skipped," said the Colonel.
"Yes, I fear you're right," she answered.
Dawn was coming up now, and the windows began to glow with early morning light.
"You don't think they would have taken the children with them, do you?" she asked.
"Not-likely. The youngsters, if I know them, are off together somewhere."
"You don't think they...? " asked Vera delicately.
The Colonel coughed discreetly. "I shouldn't be surprised, Vera. After all, they're adolescent, you know. The blood runs high at that time. And I must admit, they haven't had-well, the best example in Christendom put before them, if you see what I mean."
He felt it was only decent to add that last, vaguely implicating even himself. He was, of course, not prepared to go into any further details. Certainly not about his own actions.
Vera did not press the point. She seemed despondent, and looked a little haggard from her night's wild adventure.
"Don't you think you should try to sleep?" asked the Colonel.
"Oh, I couldn't. Whatever it was that he gave me, it's got me wide awake. I feel as if I may never sleep again."
They sipped their coffee in silence as the sun rose out of a lavender cloud and inched higher in the sky.
"Do you mind so terribly?" asked the Colonel.
"About Jason? No, as a matter-of-fact, I don't mind too much. Perhaps things will be better this way. We were never happy. And it was going to get worse, I think." She looked at him sympathetically. "Do you mind about Eloise?"
The Colonel hadn't really thought of it. "I daresay I'll miss the old girl. But there were certain areas in our relationship that were quite unsatisfactory."
"She seemed such a-hearty woman," said Vera. "I suppose you had a very good relationship in bed?"
"Once perhaps. But she had rather a taste for tennis players."
"I see," said Vera. "Jason was partial to nurses."
"But he always fulfilled his duty as a husband to you, didn't he?" asked the Colonel.
"Oh, no," she said. "Not for years now. Except for an occasional time when he was drunk."
"Astonishing!" murmured the Colonel. "Dreadful for you, I should think-young as you are, still attractive, and so on. Didn't you miss it terribly?"
"Not until now," she said. "Now I miss what I didn't have in the past."
The Colonel mulled this over for quite a few minutes. Things were definitely shaping up in a way that he had not expected. New possibilities were rapidly presenting themselves.
"Forgive my asking, but how will you manage financially?" he asked.
"Oh, there'll be no problem there. All the investments were in my name anyway. Jason managed them, but they've always been mine."
"That's splendid," he said. Things were looking brighter and brighter. "I daresay we'll both be a bit lonely, but perhaps we can help each other muddle through."
Vera looked at him closely. Perhaps he meant nothing, but on the other hand perhaps he meant a great deal. To her consternation, she suddenly became aware of the shadow form of the serpent of Sex coiling itself quietly around in the corners of the room. It was not so much an hallucination, as an invisible projection of her own thoughts, feelings and desires. This time, however, it was not a tearful and vile apparition, but rather a comfortable old friend.
With! a sudden burst of energy, she said, "I feel so unclean. I'd love a hot shower just now. But I'm still a little afraid to be alone. The pictures and things might come back. You wouldn't mind coming upstairs with me, would you?"
The Colonel became instantly alert. Was it possible?
"I'd be happy to," he said.
They left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom.
"Make yourself comfortable," said Vera. "I'll just slip in and have a shower, then we'll see where we are."
"Right-o," said the Colonel cheerfully.
He settled himself in a boudoir chair while she went to the bathroom. Moments passed. He was wondering how he might move things along, when her voice called out from the partly open door.
"Colonel, I hate to bother you, but would you mind helping me for just a moment?"
He sprang to his feet and approached the door. The water in the shower was running. He pushed lightly on the door, not entirely sure of his ground.
Vera was barefoot, and the black dress was zipped halfway down the back. The zipper had become snagged at her waist so that she was a prisoner.
"This ridiculous dress-I can't get out of it. I think the zipper's stuck. Could you?"
She turned her back to him and he advanced into the warm steamy bathroom and began to tug at the offending zipper. Vera stood patiently, her head bowed forward.
The Colonel fiddled with the zipper, meanwhile taking a good look at the bare flesh of her back. It was smooth and flawless. The horizontal band of her pale blue brassiere bisected the while back in an interesting pattern. Under the clinging black dress he could see that her rounded hips were ungirdled. The Colonel's throat began to tighten and his palms to sweat again.
He worried with the zipper, but only made things worse. He was breathing in the smell of her body and his eyes were fixed on the vulnerability of her bent neck. He remembered that the Japanese consider the back of a woman's neck a most erogenous zone, one designed to create desire in the beholder.
"The bloody thing won't move," he said thickly.
"Then I suppose you'll have to tear it," she said meekly. "Tear it open with your strong hands."
"Dare I?" he breathed.
"I really think you must," she said breathlessly.
The Colonel gripped the sides of the dress in his hands and yanked fiercely. The zipper broke and the dress fell open down to her hips. Ase he released it, the black fabric slid slowly from her shoulders and caught on her wide hips. She continued to stand still in her attitude of docile submission, and the dress slid clingingly down, little by little, and finally dropped to the floor around her feet.
The Colonel feasted his eyes on her body. It was really remarkably good for a woman her age. The pale blue under things looked both kittenish and alluring. His breath was quite labored now, and there was a suspicious tautening in the area of his crotch.
"Shall I-undo this, too?" he asked.
She murmured something low and cooing, and he unfastened the clasp of-the bra. The ends swung free. Colonel blinked rapidly several times, then his hands seemed to move of their own volition. They reached forward and enclosed her warm sides. They slid forward until he was reaching around her to cup her full breasts in his palms.
Vera's head fell back against him in a swoon of voluptuousness, and she sighed deep in her throat. He pressed her backward against him and buried his nose in her hair.
"By Jove!" he murmured.
Vera suddenly turned in his arms and flung her body against his, face to face. She turned her head upward and offered him her mouth.
The Colonel bent down and plunged into a passionate kiss that was worthy of a Swedish film.
They clung together like that for several minutes, while his manliness hardened irrepressibly between them. He stroked his hands up and down her body, cupping the soft breasts, smoothing over the flare of her hips, and finally reaching around to grasp the twin moons of her nylon-encased buttocks and press them forward.
Finally Vera's initial spurt of fiery passion seemed to be quenched, for the moment at least. She broke away from him gently.
"Good gracious," she said. "My shower is still running. I suppose I ought to get in."
"But..." he expostulated.
"I still feel rather strange," she said, sliding the blue panties down and kicking them off. "Perhaps you'd better comcin with me. That is, if you wouldn't mind?"
He said nothing, only began to unbutton his shirt. She laughed gaily, slipped a pink plastic shower cap over her hair, and disappeared behind the shower curtain. He could see the faint image of her body as she soaped herself under the warm spray.
The Colonel lost no time in getting out of his clothes. By George! What a delightful frolic! He'd had no idea that Vera Marlow was such a nymph.
When he was quite naked, he stepped into the shower with her. He hadn't bathed with a woman in perhaps twenty years. He and Eloise had tried it a few times, but she afterward claimed it was dangerous to have relations in a tiled shower stall because, after all, one could slip down and break a leg. There had been an occasion, long years before, when he had gotten into an old porcelain tub that stood on legs in a London flat. His companion that time had been a youngish shop-girl with a very large mole squarely between her breasts, giving her the bizarre appearance of having three nipples. He remembered that he was fascinated by the sight. Nothing much had happened that time, except that they had soaped each other in forbidden places and giggled quite a lot.
He saw that this time, however, quite a lot was going to happen. Vera had a glazed look of sexual hunger in her eyes, and she was moving her body about in a most voluptuous manner.
"Do you think me terrible and wanton?" she asked over the din of the shower.
"I think you're ripping," he said loudly so she could hear him. "Absolutely ripping, my dear."
She reached out her hands, which were white-foamed with bubbly lather, and encased his penis between them. The Colonel gave a long sigh, and leaned back against the tile wall, giving himself up to the delicious sensations her slippery palms were creating. The whole shower enclosure was steamy and it sparkled with a myriad of crystal water drops.
Vera soaped his penis thoroughly, then began to massage the white lather through his pubic hair and upward across his belly. From time to time she would lean forward and place a light, wet kiss on his chest. Presently she became bold enough to nip at the tiny nipples on his chest.
Emboldened and regenerated by her uninhibitedness, he took the bar of soap, worked up a lather, and attacked her pubis. He massaged the fragrant lather into everything he could reach between her legs, then spread it in larger and larger whorls up across her belly and hips. It was an ungainly posture, with each of them having their hands busy at the crotch of the other, but they were not worried with esthetics just then. The sensations that were emerging from this mutual soaping were too delightful for any other thought to impinge on their consciousness.
The Colonel moved his hands up, encased in great gobs of white lather as if in large mittens, and began soaping her breasts. It immediately reminded him of a naughty limerick, but he put the thought out of his mind. This was serious business; no time for vulgar levity.
Vera arched her back, thrusting her breasts out, and the taut pink-brown nipples peeked out at him from a surrounding cloud of pearly lather. The Colonel wanted to bite them, but the prospect of a mouthful of soap held him off. He turned her gently and put her under the spray. She was washed down clean and shining, and now her breasts, as he massaged them, squeaked.
He exchanged places with her and rinsed himself. Then he turned to her. This was the moment of truth. Would she allow him to go further? Was it possible, at their ages, to copulate standing up? Would they use up all the hot water before they could work out the problem?
Vera banished these faint anxieties from his mind, however, by grasping his cock again.
"You'll think me awful," she began, "but would you mind terribly if I did-well, something quite naughty?"
"You may do anything, my dear girl. Anything," he said.
"Well, I suppose it's depraved, but I have a terribie desire to-pardon the expression-suck it."
The Colonel's world turned rosy and bright in that instant. "You mean you'd really like to?" he asked. "You're not just being nice to me?"
"Oh, no, I wouldn't do that," she said. "I mean, I wouldn't just be nice to you for the sake of being nice to you. What I'm trying to say is that I want to."
He beamed with pleasure, while the water ran down his face in rivulets and dripped off his moustache, and she beamed with happiness, and a rapport was established. Without further conversation, Vera sank down to her knees and timidly put the head of his cock into her mouth. After a few seconds, she became more sure of herself and took several more inches in. She was getting a great deal of the spray from the shower in her face as it bounced off his body, but she seemed not to mind. With eyes closed and an expression of intense satisfaction on her face, she began to suction lightly.
The Colonel went limp all over with the exquisite feeling, and he grasped the tile soap dish to support himself. Vera pulled insistently at his clean, rosy appendage with her demanding lips, while her busy tongue diddled round and round the head.
The Colonel gripped the soap dish more firmly, set his feet in a tighter grip on the slippery tile floor, and braced himself for a pleasure that he had long desired but which had not been forthcoming in his marriage. "Damn Eloise," he thought. "I'm great glad the bitch has gone."
Vera kept pulling, sucking and diddling until a trembling in her lover's knees told her that he was near climax. She was overcome with a feeling of sheer sexiness, and she grasped his testicles with one hand and stroked them to hurry him along. He began to pump his hips backward and forward, thrusting his delighted cock deeper into her mouth with each aggressive movement. Vera did not back off; she stood her ground and accepted the ingress, even when his cock threatened to go quite all the way down her throat.
Soon the gathering storm of ejaculation gathered in the Colonel's loins, and for a moment he attempted to back off, for he was not sure if she would be offended at his coming in the present position or not. But staunch Vera only pulled him closer by means of her grip on his balls, and mutely urged him on.
The pressure gathered inside him, then the dam burst and the hot tide of ecstasy streamed forth. Vera did not falter. True to the end, she swallowed heroically until the last of it had issued forth.
The Colonel, now weak as a kitten and ecstatic as a God, stepped backward, put his foot on the fallen soap, and crashed to the floor of the shower stall like a felled moose.
Vera screamed. They struggled to disentangle themselves and to rise, but the floor was too slippery. The shower poured down on them, uncaring and relentless.
They threshed about unfruitfully for several moments, then she had the presence of mind to get to her feet and turn off the water.
"O my God, are you all right?" she asked. "Have you broken anything?"
The Colonel lay panting heavily. He attempted to move, but a sharp twinge of pain in his lower back prevented any further efforts in that direction.
She pulled back the plastic curtain and attempted to help him up. With great effort, he managed to get to his feet, but he could not stand upright.
"Get me to the bed," he gasped.
She grasped him around the waist and slowly, clumsily, they made their way into the bedroom, where she deposited him on the bed.
"Oh, my poor darling," she cried. "What have I done to you?"
"It will pass," he said with effort. "Just an old war wound. I pulled my back once before. All it takes is a month or two in bed to get right again."
Vera stood dripping and naked beside the bed, still with her pink shower cap on.
"Oh dear, oh dear. How will we-I mean, if we should want to-Oh, you poor darling, you won't be able to, will you?"
The Colonel sighed deeply. "I'm afraid not," he admitted. "When the old back's out, it's out. Not much a man can do."
She regained her sense of propriety enough to remember that they were both dripping wet. She went for towels and came back to the bedside, where she dried both the Colonel and herself. Then she slipped on a robe and covered him with a light blanket.
"Will you be able to walk?" she asked.
"Not-likely," he said with some effort. "Can't straighten up."
"That means you'll have to stay here-in my bed-until you're well again. It could be days, weeks. Oh, dear."
"Dreadfully sorry," he said through clenched teeth. "I suppose we could get an ambulance, stretcher, that sort of thing. Men could carry me home."
"But the notoriety," she said. "And besides, if you were at home, who would look after you?"
"You're right," he admitted. "With Eloise gone, it's rather awkward."
Vera made up her mind instantly. "You shall stay here," she said firmly. "I will take care of you myself. We've got a heat lamp. That, and daily massage, should put you on your feet again in short order."
"Meantime, I'm afraid I won't be of much use to you, my dear. As a man, I mean. Terrible thing. Rotten luck."
"Of course you can't do anything," she said soothingly. "Your poor back would never stand it. But just suppose that ... well, if you were to lie quite still, and I were to climb on top ' ... I don't see why that wouldn't work. I could do all the strenuous part of it. All you would have to do is lie there."
She looked at him with a certain shyness. The Colonel blinked back an unexpected moisture in his eyes. He gripped her hand and they gazed at each other in perfect understanding.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Faith and Tom awoke at about the same time. They were still lying locked together in the relaxation of deep sleep. They snuggled closer for a few drowsy minutes, then he yawned and got up. He went outside in the early morning chill to relieve himself.
She lay thinking. Somehow she was at peace. It had all been done, now. Everything had been accomplished. She didn't even know exactly what, but there was a smooth, thoughtless void in her soul now where before there had been torment and frustration.
When he came back, she pulled on her clothes and went outside to find a bush behind which to crouch and answer nature's call.
Tom came out of the old house, stood in the yard breathing deeply, then stretched widely to unkink his restless muscles. She watched him with a strange emotion, a shy and delicate emotion that was new to her.
Coming out of the bushes, she went to him and he dropped an arm across her shoulders.
"I'm hungry," he said.
They wandered to the old apple tree, pulled down a few of the hard little late apples and nibbled at them.
"Do you think we should go home?" he asked.
Faith considered this. "I guess so. Somehow, it's all over. Do you know what I mean."
"No. But if you say so."
"I can't explain. But I don't think Father will be any more trouble now."
He looked at her quizzically, but said nothing. They went to the car and climbed in. He started the motor and they drove out of the yard, back down the freeway excavation, and onto the dirt road that led to the highway.
Faith thought about the sex she had had with Tom the night before. Somehow it was different from every other time. She respected him now, in some obscure way. He had been like a man, not like the boy she was used to. But she wasn't afraid of him, nor was she filled with the wild, hurting emotions that she had suffered from before. It was a mystery. She could understand nothing of it rationally; all she knew was that she felt better.
"Will you be sorry to get back to school?" she asked as they sped along.
"Not really," he said. "How about you? Back to old Brigham's prison for young cunts? How's it going to be?"
"I don't think I'll mind," she said slowly. "Not for a while, at least."
She looked at him obliquely. "Are you going to screw other girls when you get back to Exelon?"
He glanced at her and asked quickly, "Are you in love with me or something?"
"No," she said slowly. "I don't think I am. Not just yet anyway. I might be later on."
"Okay then, yes, I guess I'll screw anything I can get hold of. Hell, that's what it's all about. Why shouldn't I?"
"No reason."
"Do you care?" he asked.
"A little. Not really," she admitted.
He drove in silence, then asked, "What about you? I guess you're hot for it now. You've had quite a workout this vacation."
Faith let the wind catch her hair and blow it out behind her like a bright banner. "More than you know," she said, smiling, but the wind caught her words and blew them into the past.
"When we get home, what are you going to say?" he asked.
"I don't know. I'll think of something when we get there."
"You're not afraid."
"Not now."
He nodded gravely, as if he dimly understood.
They drove back through town and were approaching their respective homes before he spoke again.
"Listen, we've still got two more days. I want to see you tonight. And tomorrow night. Fix it so you can get out."
"I'll try," she said.
"Try, hell! You've got to. I'm going to fuck you at least two more times before we go back."
She looked at him solemnly. She knew that they would. And that it would be nice, very nice. She held up her extended middle finger gravely, and he burst out laughing.
When they arrived home, they went first to the Marlow house. They crept into the foyer, not too sure of what would meet them on their arrival.
Vera Marlow was just passing through on her way upstairs with a tray of food.
"Oh, there you are," she sang out brightly. "Thank goodness you're home. Tom, your father's upstairs. He's had a slight accident. Nothing to worry about, but the poor dear is in bed and can't get out. I'll want you to help me change his sheets. Faith dear, you look so wan. Go in the kitchen and eat something, darling."
Faith was stunned for a moment, then got command of herself enough to ask, "Where's Father?"
Vera halted for a moment. "Well, it's rather touchy. I don't know how to break this to you dear children, but-well, the fact of the matter is that he and Mrs. Taylor have ... gone on a little trip, let us say. I don't know when they'll be back. I don't think we should worry."
Tom sensed the truth before Faith did. 'You mean they've bugged out'? Together?"
"I'm afraid it is something like that. I hope it isn't too much of a shock to you, my dear."
Tom grinned and shrugged his shoulders. He looked at Faith. She was speechless for a moment, then she relaxed. It solved everything, really. She also shrugged.
Mrs. Marlow beamed on them. "Oh, by the way, where have you two naughty things been?"
Faith resumed something of her former self. "We were in the wilderness, Mother. I know you will find this hard to believe, but we made a-a pilgrimage into the heart of nature and we..."
"Yes yes," said Mrs. Marlow. "That's so sweet. Now, Tom, will you come with me? Your dear father needs us."
She sailed brightly up the stairs. Tom looked at Faith with a grimace of astonishment, and she shrugged again. Then the light broke and she again held up her extended middle finger.
Tom's mouth fell open. But then he grinned, and held up his fist with the thumb pointed up.
He turned and followed Mrs. Marlow up the stair. Faith wandered into the kitchen and began to construct a sandwich consisting of peanut butter, salami, tomatoes and anchovies. She sat at the table reading an old copy of Mad Magazine and washed down her sandwich with coke.
Friday morning dawned cold and clear. Just before dawn a light snow had begun to fall. Now the outdoor world was transformed into a fairy-vision of delicate black branches of trees feathered over with the icy down of snow flake frosting.
It was Thanksgiving Day.
Vera Marlow awoke in the guest room, where she had, for the sake of propriety, spent the night. It had been a lonely and barren night, for just on the other side of the wall lay the Colonel, with whom she hotly burned to be.
The Colonel opened his eyes to a happier world than he had inhabited for quite a few years. Although there was no woman with him, and had not been during the long night, he knew that one was nearby. One who delighted in sucking him off. The future looked bright. He moved luxuriously on the fine linen sheets and thought with complete happiness about the way things were going to be.
Faith opened her eyes in her own room, in her own bed. She looked forward to going back to school. It had been an incredible vacation-so much had been done, so much had been solved. There was still another day left, and she knew that before it was over she would meet Tom somewhere and they would do their thing. But she felt no wild emotions connected with the anticipation. She looked forward to it, but, frankly, her most intimate parts were a little sore. Her vagina felt weary, her anus felt used. She was, in short, all fucked-out. It would be soothing to be back with Miss Brigham-at least for a while.
Tom had been bedded down on the living room sofa. The adults wouldn't hear of him spending the night alone in his own empty house. He woke up restless and edgy. He had wanted to screw Faith that night, but no opportunity to get her alone had presented itself. Now with steely determination, he grasped his prick and began to rub his cupped hand back and forth down the length of it. It was rather a dry run, so he lubricated himself with saliva and diddled with increasing pleasure. In his thoughts, he conjured up Faith, then various other girls whom he had met at school dances, then a well-known Italian filmstar. At length, moaning and trembling, he brought himself to the point of ejaculation and spurted his seed all over the borrowed sheets.
Under the circumstances, Vera Marlow could not bring herself to fuss with a Thanksgiving dinner. At noon, she called a local chicken-shack and ordered fried breasts, rolls, cold slaw and french fries for four. They ate in the master bedroom so the Colonel would have company.
Afterward, the children decided to go for a walk. Vera and the Colonel readily agreed to this plan. She saw that they were both bundled up warmly, and waved them off with maternal smiles.
Fifteen minutes later, she was naked and astride the prone body of the Colonel, letting herself down slowly and deliciously onto his massive, upstanding prick. As the head of it entered her pulsating vagina, she threw back her head and moaned lustily. The Colonel dug his fingers into her thighs and restrained himself from bucking his pelvis upward to meet her. After all, he had to take care of his back. As she settled down snuggly against him, encompassing the whole length of his cock, he cried out happily, "O great good show, old girl. Bloody good."
They were both thankful.
In the Playhouse, Tom ripped off Faith's panties and rammed a rigid finger into her cunt. He plunged and jiggled it until she began to heat up.
"I'm gonna fuck you," he said breathlessly. "Fuck you, and fuck you, and then maybe eat your cunt for good measure."
"God, you've changed," she breathed.
"You better believe it!" he said triumphantly.
He withdrew his finger, pulled her roughly to him, and attempted to fuck her standing up. Faith overcame her gentle inertia and flamed up for a final burst of fiery passions. She locked her arms around his neck, then made an athletic leap and encircled his waist with her smooth legs. Tom cupped her buttocks in his hands, and pushed his cock deep into her proffered cunt. And they were thankful.
Somewhere in Mexico, Jason Marlow and Eloise Taylor were also fucking. But they were not fucking each other. In one double bed in a moderately priced motel in an outlying section of Mexico City, Jason lay atop one Lola Fuentes, a 16-year-old synthesis of Mexican and Indian characteristics, who had lithe, brown limbs and a bulbous, black-haired cunt.
In the other bed, some four feet away, Eloise lay beneath the slick, dark body of Jaime (last name unknown), who had first claimed to be Lola's brother, but who was more-likely her pimp. The two sets of bedsprings creaked and whined under the double onslaught of manifest lust.
Jason and Eloise had met them in a sleazy cantina. They had appeared as if by magic, once the two expatriates had talked drunkenly around to the point of confessing to each other what their real, secret desires were. Eloise and Jason had not abandoned each other by any means; rather, their strange union had been only confirmed and made stronger by the mutual confession of desire for others. Eloise understood that Jason needed, deep in his soul, to screw young girls. She didn't mind-as long as she was allowed equal privileges to act out her own inner, forbidden urgings. It had taken a bit longer to convince Jason that it was no discredit to his own manhood if his partner in fight lusted for dark, greasy, Latin types.
At last, with the help of quantities of tequila, they had come to an understanding. At that point, Lola and Jaime had come into their lives. Now Jason and Eloise enjoyed equal sexual thrills; Jason prodding it into the cunt beneath him and Eloise taking the brutal thrusts of the prick above her. As the hot afternoon wore on, and the slap of sweaty flesh against flesh increased to a primitive drumbeat of archaic rhythm, both Jason and Eloise felt fulfilled, assuaged, thrilled, grateful.
As for Jamie and Lola-unknown to the fat Gringo, Jaime had already lifted his wallet which without doubt contained many U.S. dollars and perhaps credit cards; Lola, who innately despised men, had the double satisfaction of watching the fuck of the toothsome, white-skinned Northamericana in the bed next to her, and of knowing with sly satisfaction that she was infecting the fat Gringo with her disease.
