Lois Aimes was two different persons, both wrapped in one lovely, luscious package. The nice, sweet, lovely person in her was evident very early. By the time she reached high school, older people-teachers, neighbors, storekeepers, parents of her friends-commonly referred to her as "that lovely Lois."
By the time she'd reached her junior year in high school the luscious Lois was very much evident, too, especially to the boys. But they couldn't get to her, couldn't get into her pants, anyway, because the nice, lovely Lois got in the way. Got very much in the way. Nice, sweet, lovely Lois was always in command, always in control, at least with other people. So the boys just lusted after the unattainable, and kept their Lois-inspired hard-ons to themselves, or slipped them into girls more readily available for a fast grass-stained fuck.
It wasn't that lovely Lois wasn't aware of the other Lois. She was all too aware. If the boys were calling her luscious Lois, among themselves, she was calling herself lascivious Lois, maybe at the same moment, in private. She was doing her own private jiggling, strutting walk around her big bedroom, all by herself, and standing naked sometimes in front of her full-length mirror, doing an occasional bump and grind, watching her tender young pussy purse and pout in its honey blonde nest of fur. It was ready and she was ready for a hard young cock-oh", so ready.
She had to get out of this town, she knew, as soon as possible after graduation. She had to get somewhere where luscious Lois, the other Lois that nobody knew except her-could find some heavy fucking.
Then lovely Lois, she knew, would be a much happier person.
Harold Amour had used his own key to enter the apartment that evening, and so was able to bide the small cake box in the foyer closet without Lois being aware of it. He waited until after the main part of their meal-when she had cleared off the remains of the steak dinner and was in the kitchen preparing the coffee-before he brought it out and opened it. When the girl reappeared, the cake was sitting on a plate in the middle of the table with a single pink birthday candle placed on its chocolate and marshmallow topping.
Lois' blue eyes lit up and she stood stock still with the coffee tray still in her hands. She tossed her head back so that her honey blonde hair glinted in the overhead light. "You're sweet," she said.
"I'm sorry it's so small," the man told her, grinning. Though he was in his mid to late forties, he still managed to look like a little boy when he grinned. "I would have put twenty-three candles there if there was room."
Lois set the coffee tray down and kissed the man on the cheek. Her nostrils caught the scent of his cologne. "This is the perfect size for the two of us," she said. "Anyway, what woman wants to admit her age?"
He laughed with real amusement. "Your age. I'm still trying to understand why a girl like you would want to have anything to do with an old fogy. And a married one at that."
The girl turned her head away to hide the pain that came briefly into her eye. "Maybe it's because I love you," she said softly.
And that just happened to be true. She was overflowing with love for him.
Oh, she knew only too well what the other girls in the office (and many of the men, too) said about them: Harold was the president of Arnour Advertising, Inc. And he was a rich man. And he had taken a newcomer who had only recently graduated from journalism school and groomed her to be his assistant at a salary that her fellow workers could well envy.
Ergo: it was her body he was hiring. She was his paid mistress. A kept woman.
Their jealousy had made them all blind, she thought angrily. They refused to comprehend the fact that she was doing a real job at the office. They refused to credit her with being a good copywriter, an efficient secretary with better shorthand than most of the prune-faces who worked with her, a person with sharp ideas. And if they had been told that Harold bad given her the job of his assistant before they had made love-that their love affair had come about through their mutual work rather than the other way around-they would not have believed it.
Yet that also happened to be true.
There were times when she wished that she weren't so much in love with this tall, well-muscled man with the laughing brown eyes, furrowed brow and greying black hair. There were times when she wished she was as cold and calculating as she was made out to be.
But she mustn't allow herself to think about that. She was in love with him.
She straightened her shoulders now, so that her well-developed bust thrust hard against the silken material of her blouse. As she turned back to her chair, her short skirt molded itself to her hips and thighs, and she knew that Harold was looking at her with admiration.
"Do you want me to cut the cake?" she asked, happy in the knowledge.
"You're the birthday girl ... But wait a minute." He held out his hand to stop her as she started to reach for the plate. "Let me light the candle first."
She laughed as he held a match to the wick and sang "happy birthday to you" in an out-of-tune voice.
"There," he said when he had finished. "Now you can blow it out." She did so.
"Have you made your wish yet?" Harold asked her. "My wish?"
"Your birthday wish. Don't you know that everyone gets one wish granted on his birthday?"
Lois closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again with an emphatic nod. "All done," she said.
"What did you wish for?" the man asked, as Lois cut two large hunks out of the cake.
"Isn't it supposed to be a deep dark secret?"
"But you can tell me." Harold winked at her. "I won't repeat it to a soul."
The girl nodded. Then her face grew suddenly grave. "What do you think I would wish for?" she asked.
A hurt, sullen expression flickered over Harold's handsome face, to be quickly veiled by a studied blankness.
"Have you spoken to Martha yet?" the girl persisted after a few moments.
"No." The blank look was replaced by one of helplessness. "Darling, I know I promised to, but I just couldn't. Not now."
This time it was the girl's turn to remain silent.
"Sweetheart, if it were only Martha and myself," the man said, almost plaintively, "I wouldn't hesitate. But there are the kids. Harold, Jr. is still in college and Elsa is engaged."
Lois nodded. "But what about us?" she asked. "What about me?"
Harold spread his hands. "You and I will just have to be patient."
"But for how much longer? That's what I want to know. For how much longer?"
"Not for too long," the man told her. "When Elsa married and Harold, Jr. leaves school...."
"Then there'll be another reason," the girl interrupted, accusingly. "Won't there?"
The man shook his head. He and Lois had been over this same ground time and time again. All he could do was remain reasonable and hope that Lois would do the same. "I don't think so," he said in answer to her question. "I hope not Martha and I are married in name only. All the love-the passion-went out of our lives years ago."
"So you keep telling me," the girl put in.
"Because it's true," Harold assured her. "Martha and I ... we merely live in the same house. We don't ... interfere with each other. But we did decide to keep up our home for the sake of the children."
It sounded so neat and tidy, Lois thought bitterly. All wrapped up in a nice little package. And the worst of it was that she couldn't even fight back without sounding grasping and unreasonable.
"Are you still mad at me?" Harold asked then. "For not demanding a divorce?"
The girl did not reply. He wants sympathy, she thought with a new flash of anger. He wants me to tell him that everything's all right and that I understand
"Are you?" he repeated.
"I suppose not," she said, with a little smile of resignation.
"That's my girl," he said, grinning with relief. "Now you have to eat up the birthday cake."
"All right," she said, putting a forkful in her mouth. "Mmmnn. It's good."
He laughed teasingly at the slurred sound of her words. "Don't talk with food in your mouth. Didn't your mother teach you that?"
"My mother taught me a lot of things. Mainly about men."
"Ouch," Harold said. "I guess I asked for that one."
Lois had forced herself to come out of her unhappy mood by now, and they teased and joked with each other as they finished their coffee.
"Do you know what we need now?" the man asked, as he lit an after-dinner cigarette for the girl.
Lois batted her eyes in mock horror and placed her hands in front of her bosom. "Oh, no, sir. Not that...."
Harold laughed. "I wasn't thinking of that," he said. "I mean, I was ... But first we need a glass of brandy."
Lois enjoyed the other's confusion. "You'll find a bottle in the cabinet," she said.
He went over to the Danish styled lowboy and selected the bottle. "You have good taste," he remarked, as he poured out the amber liquid. Then he removed a small package from his pocket and set it beside Lois's brandy glass.
"What's this?" the girl asked.
"A birthday present. Something I thought might suit you."
Lois looked first at the package and then at her glass. Finally-to the accompaniment of Harold's delighted laughter-she decided to open the package.
It contained a slender bracelet that was delicately encrusted with diamond chips.
"But this is lovely," she gasped. "Beautiful...."
She looked at him. "It must have cost too much...."
"For a beautiful woman," the man said soothingly, "no price is too much."
Lois jumped out of her chair and ran around the table in order to give Harold a kiss. "Thank you, darling," she murmured. "I don't know what else to say...."
"Don't say anything."
The man picked up his drink and held it aloft for a moment. "To you," he toasted her. "To the loveliest birthday girl in town."
"Only in town?" she teased gently.
"In the country, then. In the whole damn world." He took a sip of brandy.
"You're sweet," Lois said. "Or have I told you that already?"
She went back to her seat at the table and held up her own glass: "To a sweet man."
Harold finished his liquor and went over to stand behind her. He placed one hand lightly on her shoulder and stroked her soft, honey blonde hair with the other.
Lois cooed. "I feel just like a kitten," she said.
"You are a kitten." He bent down to kiss her ear lobes and the back of her neck. "My kitten."
"Ooooh ... That makes me feel all shivery."
"I've got a pretty good case of the shivers myself," he told her.
Harold took the girl's arm and guided her gently to her feet. Their lips met and their bodies strained towards each other. She could feel him come alive against her-grow strong and demanding.
Right at that moment, nice lovely Lois vanished, evaporated, floated upward and disappeared into thin air. Luscious Lois, took over, came into command. Nice, lovely Lois not only was not in control any more, she didn't exist for the stretch of time right ahead. She had found out something else about herself, too, since those frustrated high school days when she'd titillated herself in private in front of her bedroom mirror. When she felt like it. When she wasn't in any hurry, craving cock, needing to be fucked.
And she was in no hurry now. She had all the time in the world, with Harold. She did love to tease Harold.
She reached down and stroked the hard ridge of his stiffened cock through the gabardine of his trouser leg. Warm moisture was forming at her cunt lips, she knew, but it would keep.
"Make yourself another drink," she said, nodding toward the brandy bottle on the coffee table. "I'll be right back."
In the bathroom she stripped off her clothes in a sort of calm haste and dropped them to the floor. She sat down on the edge of the tub, pulled off her shoes, and looked around. The stiffened nipples crowning the heaving, bouncing white globes of her full, firm young breasts pouted up at her.
She took a short, transparent white robe hanging from a hook on the bathroom door. She slipped it on, drawing it close in front and tying the slender cord around her waist.
The garment concealed nothing. Her lithe, luscious body seemed to gleam through it with extraordinary whiteness, her nipples suddenly a bright contrasting crimson. Her soft, dusky pussy lips peeped out from their blonde frame. She could almost see her moist cunt quivering through the transparency of the robe.
Harold would be seeing it soon enough. She wondered if he'd suck it. He didn't, very often, even though she was glad to suck his cock, any time. Lois loved the taste and feel of hard cock in her mouth, loved the action itself. And what it led to, of course. She loved to suck a cock up to a point, then have it slide into her cunt, thrusting, fucking her, coming inside her, deep inside her, not in her mouth.
Well, she'd know soon enough whether or not he'd eat her tonight. She opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the living room, then walked slowly across to where he was sitting and stood in front of him, her legs apart, her open cunt beckoning.
Some of his stuffiness started to melt. Lois could see, along with the melting, a stiffness reappearing in the ridge of cock-muscle down his left trouser leg.
She stood still, waiting, her hand perched on one uptilted hip. She wanted to be fucked, yes, wanted that big cock of Harold's to slide its way into the hot quivering tightness of her cunt. But she was still in no hurry. She could wait. As long as she knew it was there for her.
Harold reached up and drew her gently toward him, his hands behind her hips, squeezing the ripe round globes of her ass. The wispy nylon opened. Harold's tongue appeared, licking his lips.
Ah, Lois breathed. Yes, he would. He would lick her pussy. He would eat her. She knew the signs. Now.
Harold's tongue extended farther and tickled its way upward on the soft curve of her belly. Not downward, as she'd expected. Upward. You never could be sure about Harold. He came up with some surprises, once in a while.
His tongue found its way to her navel. When she looked down, the contrast between his deeply tanned forehead against the snow flake texture of her belly sent a shiver of ecstatic excitement through her."
"Harold," she said softly, and touched him gently on the cheek with her fingertips.
"What?" he said, looking upward at her, his tongue still busy exploring the inner rim of her navel.
"Please get out of those clothes," she said. "I want to look at the rest of you. I've been hot all day just imagining you, taking your clothes off with my eyes. Now I want to see you for real. In the hard-on flesh."
Lovely Lois, she thought again, smiling a fleeting inward smile. Talking like that. What would the teachers say?
"All right," he said, and stood up, his hands busy with buttons and zipper.
She sat down on the couch and watched in lustful appreciation. For a man his age, Harold was in great shape, what with his racquet games and gym work.
His hard-muscled body came gradually into full view. His shoulders were wide and slightly sloping, his chest broad and deep and covered with wiry, matted dark hair flecked with gray. The muscles on his arms and upper body were long and smooth. As he dropped his pants and undershorts he turned his back, playing his little joke, smiling at her over his shoulder as he stepped free of his lower covering and stood looking away from her for a moment, completely nude. He had a big one, all right, she had to admit, and there was some tease in Harold, too.
Waiting for him to turn, Lois' eyes traveled up from the floor, tasting the sight of his strong calves, his powerful thighs and lean concave buttocks. He turned toward her then, and she took a deep suck of air. It was part of their game.
His large rigid cock stood at an upward angle, the swollen purple head challenging her. Lois' mouth opened voluntarily. She closed it with a conscious effort and smiled up at him.
"Wheel that cannon of a cock over here," she said. "Please." She smiled, but it was an effort. She didn't feel like smiling. She felt like chortling aloud in sheer pleasure, the pleasure of anticipation.
Harold smiled, too, but it looked like an effort on his part. After he'd stepped toward her, she sat still for a long moment, staring with satisfaction at the awesome shaft aimed at her. Behind and below the taut skin of the long, thick shaft was a forest of curly dark hairs. No gray there. His cock was almost the thickness of her wrist.
She touched it with her fingertips, as if it were new to her, then held it between both hands. It was the color of seasoned oak, and just as hard. She had an uncomfortable moment, then, as her imagination ran riot and she thought of the rough bark of a tree trunk against the sensitive walls of her responding cunt.
"It's magnificent," she said, as if it were the first time she'd seen it, held it. It was part of a ritual he never tired of, and she never did either. She gave the sturdy limb an affectionate squeeze with her hands. The way she felt at that particular moment, she could have thrown her arms around it. "I can't take my eyes off it...."
"You're going to have to take your eyes off it...."
"You're so right," she said, and bent forward and kissed the shaft, licking the underside with her tongue, then taking the soft folds of skin in the gathered wrinkled shawl below the shaft between her lips, moistening the unresisting sensitive mass with tiny, soft, sucking kisses.
She got to her knees before him and shrugged off the robe, then sat back on the couch. Her taut pink nipples poked up toward him.
He dropped to his knees beside the couch and pushed her gently back. His open mouth found her mouth's warm welcome, and his tongue plunged in and began a frantic sliding tango with hers. His hands were all over her, sliding, squeezing, stroking, pinching at her hard tingling nipples. She felt his finger sliding urgently into the welling wetness of her cunt. No tongue tonight. Ah, well. She didn't need it now. She was ready.
She tore her mouth from his and lay back on the couch with an in-sucking gasp, opening her legs, spreading her thighs in a wide, wanton welcome.
"No," he said, looking deep into her eyes. He seemed to be smiling, faintly.
"No what?" She was squirming.
"Not on the pouch. On the floor. There's more room."
He arched over her, bracing himself on his elbows, and she slung her legs happily around his lean hips, hooking her heels behind him. His tanned face, smiling gently, was directly over hers, his eyes looking steadily into her own. She reached down and swung the length of his massive cock toward her, bringing the hard clenched fist of the head against the hot swollen outer lips of her silently screaming cunt.
He eased the stabbing shaft forward an inch, two inches, until part of the head was engulfed in her wet quivering pussy. Then he stopped, his hips immobilized. That, too, was part of the game. Two teasers.
"Oh, please," she almost sobbed, playing her part. "Please. Put it in."
"All of it?" He was smiling broadly now.
"All of it. Every long, lovely, thick, hard fucking inch of it...." It was almost a prayer, the way she'd learned to say it.
He began to slide the long, velvet-feeling log of a shaft into her then, slowly, an inch at a time. She unhooked her heels from behind him and let her legs lie wide apart, spreading the red carpet of her cunt for his royal entrance, but as the thick rigid pole of his cock approached the end of its first trip into her cunt-depths, her knees jerked up spasmodically and her legs began to flail around behind his back. Lois wasn't putting on an act, now. Not luscious Lois. She meant and felt every fucking move.
When the long, thick shaft was fully imbedded, to the hilt, his pelvis grinding strongly against her mound, she hooked her heels behind him again and raised her hips, pushing herself even tighter against him. His hands came up behind her, holding her shoulders, as he drew the shaft slowly outward, then plunged it in again. It seemed to reach even deeper, as the walls of her cunt opened wider to accommodate the length and width of his great surging prick.
"That's it," she said. "Fuck me deep. Deeper."
He began to fuck her deeply, with long, slow, driving strokes, and her hips rose and fell in perfect time with his own slow rhythm, her lower lips clutching and sucking and holding the slippery shaft as if reluctant to let go, on every stroke squeezing and embracing the deepening plunge to her inner depths. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she could hear only the sound of his deep breathing, mingled with her own panting moans. Then, slowly, she became aware of the sound of her own hips and buttocks pounding on the carpet, and she knew that the rhythm had increased. She heard a slapping, sucking sound, too, and knew that it came from the wild pounding of his heavy balls in the moist crack between her pumping buttocks.
Her own moans were louder now, changing to gasping little screams, and she knew her fingernails were raking the smooth skin of his back. But she couldn't stop help herself, couldn't stop, couldn't stop anything she was doing. The pounding of her hips increased with the frenzied struggle. Then her climax was on her, searing, pounding, choking her in a wash of sensation.
"Now!" she screamed. "Oh, God, now!"
He drove deep into her in a pounding fury of lightning strokes, as she shuddered and jerked convulsively as she felt his hot juices spurting into her, gushing deep, flooding her.
She put her arms and legs tight around him and just hung on as he kept the hard core of her ecstasy buried deep inside her, letting the diminishing waves of her passion wash over it as it slackened, then softened, then shrank.
She lay still on the rug, her legs apart, as he withdrew. Her cunt oozed contentment.
Moments later she was her other, usual self again. Lovely Lois, nice Lois. But even nice Lois could get angry.
"Do you have to leave now?" she asked, as he began to dress.
"Yes."
"To go home?"
"Of course."
"I do wish you could spend the night here ... just once."
Harold's face had turned petulant. He was annoyed with her, Lois knew-He was always annoyed when she pleaded with him like this. But she couldn't help herself.
"I'd like to stay over," he said patiently. "You know that."
"Then why don't you?"
"Because it's impossible." He looked as if he was going to say something else, then seemed to change his mind. "I wish I knew why it was so important to you."
How could she answer him? Should she tell him that his running away as soon as they made love left her feeling like an object? A thing whose own wants and needs were of no account once she had satisfied his?
No, she thought, and the bitterness of that thought surprised her. If he had reached his present age without understanding that for himself, her explanations would do no good.
She heard herself sigh. "I'm just being silly, I guess."
"Of course you are."
He came over and kissed her.
His nose performed an involuntary pucker. He had put on some fresh cologne, she noted, while she still must smell of sex. The kiss was a duty. Almost an unpleasant duty.
Hell.
Did all men react like this afterwards? she wondered. Did every fervent lover behave exactly like Harold, once there was nothing to be fervent about?
Hell. Hell. Hell.
But he was speaking now. "Goodnight, darling. I'll see you tomorrow at the office. And happy birthday."
"Goodnight."
TWO
Lois Aimes remained absolutely still until she heard the front door open and dick shut again. Then she sat up in bed and lit a cigarette.
The upper part of her leg had begun to itch. She hunched her knee up and rubbed the spot with her knuckles until the tanned skin began to turn red. It didn't do any good. The itch merely started to spread.
What was wrong with her tonight, anyhow? Why did she feel so on edge? So dissatisfied?
She flicked an ash into the tray that sat on the night table and tried to calm herself. There was no reason to be so bitter just because Harold withdrew after lovemaking. That was part for the course with men. They went into some sort of depression that left them completely drained after sex. She remembered reading that in a book someplace-or maybe it was her roommate in college who told her about it.
And as for the other ... the fact that he wouldn't spend the night here ... So what? She knew all along that he would have to return to his wife. That was one of the penalties a girl paid for having a love affair with a married man.
And she had to admit that Harold was sweet and generous. That bracelet he had given her today. It must have cost him at least two thousand dollars. Maybe more.
And she had nagged him.
What did she want? To make him fall out of love with her? If she wasn't careful, that's exactly what would happen.
She stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray so that it went out amid a shower of sparks. Then she swung herself off the bed to pace the deep yellow carpet that covered the bedroom floor.
The itch in her leg had turned into an irritating tingle that was traveling around her body. She rubbed her sides and the lower part of her back.
Perhaps a bath would help. It would be good for her nerves.
She entered the bathroom and turned on the water. She got into the tub as soon as it was filled and let herself soak there for a few minutes. Then she picked up the soap and a wash cloth and began to scrub.
This was a pleasant feeling, she thought after a while. Just to he here and dream.
And all things considered, she was a lucky girl. She had an interesting job which brought her a good income. She lived in a lovely three-room flat in one of the modern apartment houses that was springing up in this mid-western city. And she had Harold-at least part of the time.
Yes, she was lucky. If she was another woman, she realized wryly, she would envy herself.
She had come a long way from the small town of Zephyr, where she had been born. It had not been an easy road, either. If she hadn't been willing to struggle, in fact, she would still be there-married, no doubt, with several children to look after.
Her parents would have liked that. They had been frightened and disapproving when she'd insisted on going off to college in the first place.
Lois could almost hear their voices, now, as she remembered the way they had tried to dissuade her from using the scholarship to State University that she had won.
"I just don't see what's so important about going away, darling," her mother had said one evening. "Your brother never felt that he had to go off to college. And he's a boy."
"He's a mechanic," Lois reminded the older woman.
"What's wrong with being a car mechanic?" her father demanded.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. But...."
"He's a first rate one," the man continued. "One of these days he's going to have a service station of his own."
"That's not the point. Dad," the girl explained, wearily. "Tom didn't have to go away. And he can earn a good living right here."
"Exactly what I was saying."
"But what could I do in Zephyr? Work as a waitress in the Tiger Cafe?"
"You could get married," her mother snapped. "If you'd get some of these high-falootin' notions out of your head."
Lois did not reply. To her mother, the very idea of leaving town was "high-falootin'."
"We know one young man who would love to have you right now," the older woman said then. "Don't we, Stanley?"
"Yes, Mattie," her father grinned. "We surely do."
The woman turned back to Lois. "Do you have anything against Len?" she asked.
"Of course not, Mom," the girl replied. "I like him. Really I do. It's only that...."
"It's only that he's a darn sight too good for you, young lady, if you want to ask me," her father interrupted to say. "He's already managing his dad's store."
"He could give you a fine life," her mother added.
"I know," Lois said. "And maybe later, after I leave college...."
"What makes you think he'll wait for you that long?" her father wanted to know. "I'm sure there are a lot of girls who wouldn't mind being Mrs. Leonard Ashton."
"That little Annie Haddleford, for one," Lois' mother said forcefully. "She's had her eye on him for a long time."
"I know," the girl said.
"But you don't care."
"Mom, it's too soon." Lois was conscious that her voice was strained. "I don't want to get married yet. Not to anyone." She paused. "And it's not as if I was going to the end of the world. State's only a hundred miles or so from here."
Her parents nodded. Patently unconvinced.
"I'll be coming back here for my vacations," the girl said then. "And afterwards, of course...."
"Don't make promises you won't be able to keep," her father told her.
"We've known a lot of young people who have gone off to State," the older woman added. "'very few of them come back to Zephyr to live afterwards."
Al) three of them were silent for a while. Stanley Aimes began drumming on the kitchen table with his fingers. "Why?" he said, after several minutes had gone by. "Why do you insist on using that scholarship?"
"You'd think it was a crime," Lois responded, hurt. "I ... I hoped you would be proud when I won it."
"We are proud, Lois," Mattie Aimes said, after exchanging glances with her husband. "But we are naturally worried. I grew up in Zephyr and never felt the need to move out. And your brother is staying here...."
"I never left Zephyr, either," her father said, "except while I was in the Army."
"So you can see," her mother concluded, "that this is something new for us. We don't understand it and we don't like it. Even though we are proud that you won the scholarship."
Once again there was an interval of silence, and once again it was her father who broke it.
"That scholarship," he said. "It only pays your college fees, doesn't it?"
"I have an allowance towards my books."
"Yes, but you'll still need to pay for your room and board and clothes, won't you?"
Lois nodded.
"You only know that your mom and I won't be able to help you very much there. I meant we ain't ... we're not in any position to...."
"I know," Lois answered, upset by her father's evident embarrassment. "I plan to get a job."
"Think you'll be able to?"
"Yes. There's an employment office there for students. And you know that I took typing and shorthand in high school."
The man gave an emphatic nod. "Yeah. You're a hard worker. I got to say that much." He rubbed the bald patch on the top of his head. "And you're dead set on going?"
"Unless you and Mom forbid it."
"Hell!" The man suddenly looked abashed. "Excuse me for saying that, Lois, And you too, Mattie. But I never did believe in standing in the way of what a person really wants to do. And Lois, you're a grown woman now." He looked down at the heavy work shoes that covered his feet. "I just wish you felt different about things is all."
"I wish I did too, Dad," she said truthfully.
Then the back door opened and her brother came into the kitchen, eager to talk about his plans to borrow money from the local bank in order to buy his way into a service station.
That night Len did his best to change Lois' mind again.
They were sitting in the front seat of the man's car and he had his arm around her. "I love you, baby," he whispered. "And that's the truth."
Lois wished that Len would not keep talking. It was so pleasant to sit quietly next to him, with the car radio playing softly.
"I never did anything wrong, did I?" he asked, accusingly.
"No, Len." She almost wished that he had.
"I mean, I never tried anything. You know...."
"I know," she responded patiently. "And you never did."
"It's not that I didn't want to. But ... well there are some guys who take a girl out and try to get away with everything they can. They get a kick out ruining her reputation. You know what I mean?"
"Yes."
"But I'm not like that. No sir. Not with a girl I respect."
"I appreciate that, Len," Lois told him. But she was thinking that it might have been better if he hadn't respected her so much. If he had tried to get away with everything he could. Perhaps the only thing worse than too little respect from a man, she thought sardonically, was too much!
"I want to marry you," he said.
Lois sighed. If she did agree to marry him, she wondered, would he keep her on that same cold pedestal? "Let's not talk about it now, dear."
"But when can we talk about it? I mean, if you go away...."
Lois resisted the impulse to tell him that there was no "if" about it. "I'll be back for Christmas," she said.
"Sure. For a couple of weeks. Then what?"
"There'll be spring vacation, and two whole months during the summer."
"Big deal."
"You can drive down to State to see me," she suggested, feeling that she was being very patient.
Len brightened. "Yeah. I might do that." His face fell again. "But you'll probably be too busy."
"Not on weekends, silly. And not when you come there."
"You mean that?"
"Of course."
He took her in his arms then, and kissed her full on the lips.
He was clumsy, she noted. His hands were not skilled or gentle as they explored the bodice of her dress. But the very maleness of him-the strong, masculine feel of him-was beginning to arouse her.
Then, just as she could feel his muscles tense and grow, her pushed her away.
"Better not go any farther," he said. "You're the kind of woman who could make a man lose control."
Her skin tingled and her mind was dizzy. "I could lose control, myself," she murmured.
"That would be no good, baby," he told her firmly. "Not this way. You're the girl I want to marry."
"That's right," Lois said. "You respect me."
"Yes."
The girl retreated to her own corner of the car and tried to rearrange herself while Len started the motor and drove her home.
by the time they reached her house, she was back under control. But her body still felt strange and uncomfortable.
She did go off to State. And everything happened in the way that her parents had predicted.
Her parents still stayed in Zephyr. The only times they left it were on brief visits to see their daughter.
They still lived in the same house. Her mother still cooked the same meals she had prepared before Lois was born. Her father-though a little older, a little slower-still had his job in a nearby factory.
As for her brother, Tom, he had been able to get his bank loan. He'd bought the interest he wanted in a service station, only to sell it again the same year Lois had graduated from the university. He had used the money as a down payment on a brand new station of which he was now sole owner-along with the bank, of course.
In the meantime, he had also gotten married and was the father of two children to whom Lois sent Christmas and birthday presents.
Len Ashton had taken a wife, too. As Lois' mother had foreseen it, it was Annie Haddleford.
Lois had attended their wedding which came about during the summer that feel between her freshman and sophomore years at State. And when she saw Annie walk down the aisle, she had to admit that she suffered a pang of jealousy.
When she had thought about that feeling, even a few days later, she had to be amused. Contrary, that's what she was. There was no room in her life, then, for any serious thing with a man. She was trying hard, and succeeding, in concentrating on her classes at the university's school of journalism, while holding down a part-time secretarial job.
There were men in her life at school, naturally. But although they did not keep her on that cold pedestal that Len had propped under her, they meant even less to her than he did. She stayed her nice, lovely Lois self-probably because she was so busy-and kept the men from scoring. It was close, sometimes, with a boy named Hank, and Hank was the only one to ever ask her for a second and third and fourth date. Persistent, Hank was. And horny. But for some strange reason, even with Hank, she stayed nice, lovely, frustrated Lois. Luscious Lois never came really alive, never was given a chance to take control.
Until that late Saturday afternoon nap....
When she woke up there was the sound of rain against the windows, but all she knew was that she was horny. Quivering, itching, horny. Nice, straight, lovely Lois had gone away while she slept.
She raised her left wrist to look at her watch. Quarter after seven. Quarter after seven on a Saturday night, and no date. She'd had a date with Hank, and she'd broken it yesterday, saying she had to go home for the weekend.
Hank, horny Hank. Well, the hell with her pride. She, luscious Lois, would give Hank the fucking of his young life. If she wasn't too late. If only she wasn't too late.
She slipped into her loafers and ran downstairs to the wall phone and gave the operator the number of Hank's frat house. Hank's college was only thirty miles away. He could be here in forty-five minutes, she thought, even with traffic. If he's there. Dear God, make him be there, him and his stiff eager young prick.
On the third ring, a young man's voice answered.
"May I speak to Hank, please? Hank Palmer?"
"He was going out," the voice said. "I think he already left, but I'll see."
"Please do," she said stiffly. Oh, God, if he's left, what do I do? I'll cruise the streets, that's what I'll do. She squeezed her legs together. The yearning itch was worse than ever.
The voice came back.
"He's in the shower. He'll be with you in a minute."
She felt suddenly cheerful. She laughed-at herself. "Hello?" It was Hank's unmistakable reedy tenor.
"This is Lois," she said. "That family thing is off for the weekend and I didn't have to go home at all. This is the first chance I've had to call you."
"Jesus, Lois, that's too bad." He was young and awkward even on the phone.
"Why is it too bad?"
"Well." There was a long silence and she could picture him looking for a cigarette while he thought of what to say. "I made another date."
"Oh, well. Then it is too bad." But she hadn't given up. Not this Lois.
"But I sure would like to see you."
"And I'd like to see you," she said, squeezing her legs together again. "'very much."
"Tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow. It's tonight that I'd like to see you very much."
"Has something come up?"
"Something will come up, if you see me."
"I know it will," he said. He sounded pained. "But you'll never let me do with what I want to do."
"Tonight I will. I've been very bad to you and I want to start making it up to you."
"You mean...."
"That's what I mean," she said. Wow, it took him a long time to understand.
"Yes, yes, yes," he said, "But what'll I do about my date?"
"Break it."
"It's a hell of a time for me to call off a date."
"Your aunt in Toledo just died. You have to get home right away."
"I haven't got an aunt in Toledo." God, he could be slow.
"Don't be dense," she said. "Practically everybody has aunts in Toledo-all of them dying like flies."
He laughed. That was better.
"All right," he said. "She was my favorite aunt, too."
"Hurry. It's urgent." She'd never spoken a truer word. "We have a lot of catching up to do."
"I'll be there in about an hour."
"I told you it was urgent."
"Less than an hour."
"Urgent, I said. I won't even be wearing anything under my skirt."
"I'll be there in thirty-five minutes," he said, and hung up.
Lois trotted up the stairs, humming.
After she'd showered Lois opened a drawer, took out a sheer white blouse, and put it on, not even considering a bra. The blouse had only two buttons, the top one midway between her nipples, which poked out darkly through the sheerness. She'd wear a sweater around her shoulder, she decided, and button it around her only if they had to meet anybody.
She bent and got a sweater from a bottom drawer, along with a flared skirt that stopped short between her crotch and her knees. If they did see people, she thought, she would snap their pictures with the quick-opening, quick-closing shutters of her cunt camera. It was a little joke the other girls had. "Just to encourage him a little," they'd say, "I took his picture. Snap. Like that. You should have seen his face."
Nice, straight Lois had been mildly offended by the whole joke. Luscious Lois liked it, she found. Maybe she'd take some time exposures of Hank. She could just see his face. She slipped into the sweater and went poking in the closet for the right kind of shoes.
She was just stepping into high-heeled pumps when there was a tap at the door. "Your date's downstairs."
"Be right there." She took her raincoat from the closet, turned off the lamp, and left the room.
Hank was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up. She came down the stairs with an exaggerated prance, raising her knees like a drum majorette. All she needed was a baton, but Hank had that. She could almost see it rising in his pants. He did a fast take, then stared. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. His awesome Adam's apple rose up and down in his long skinny neck. To Hank right now, she knew, her pussy was incandescent.
"Jesus," Hank whispered when she stood before him. "You'd give King Tut a hard-on." He was taking a course in Egyptian history. "Let's go," she said.
Out in the car, Lois silently cursed the bucket seats in Hank's old sports car. She let her left hand drift into his lap. His long hard broomstick of a cock poked upward, straining against the fabric of his trouser leg.
"My word," she said, coyly, as he put the car into gear.
"What do you mean, your word?" he said. "You should have seen yourself, coming down those stairs."
"Can we afford a motel?"
"Yup."
"Planned to spend a lot of money on your date tonight, I suppose." She was only teasing. Something about Hank made her want to put him in awkward positions, just to watch him flounder.
"Nope," he said, glancing over at her. "Made a fast touch off one of my wealthy fraternity brothers, right after you called."
"That's very good thinking," she said. "Where'll we go?"
"I know of a place. Out on Route Six."
"Go there often?" She was still teasing. She couldn't help herself.
"You know better," he said, watching the road. "I heard about the place from some of the guys."
When they stopped for the red light, she shifted around to put her back against the car door, raised her left knee, and started to snap his picture. He started to look at her as the shutter opened, and she caught him full-face.
His eyes got very big in the glow of streetlights.
She made it a time exposure.
Hank finished his negotiations in the dim little motel office in less than a minute and came back to the car with a key in his hand.
"We can leave the car where it is," he said. "We have Cabin Eleven. Second row down."
Once they were in the cabin, it looked even smaller than it did from the outside. There was just room for a big double bed, two straight chairs, a bedside table and lamp, and one floor lamp. No dresser, no closet. There was a stall shower in the bathroom.
When she turned from looking into the bathroom Hank had taken off his coat and thrown it over the back of a chair. He was unbuttoning his shirt.
"What's your hurry?" Lois asked, smiling at him, leaning back on her elbows on the bed. She felt relaxed now, still excited and horny and itching, but some of the urgency had disappeared. She raised one knee slowly, lifting it high and wide, giving him a leisurely look at the shadowed furry crevice between her thighs and crossed it over her other knee.
Hank was staring, his mouth slightly ajar. His Adam's apple rode up and down like an elevator gone berserk.
"What's my hurry?" he asked. "You said over the phone that it was urgent. Now it's urgent for me too." He finished unbuttoning his shirt and threw it toward the chair. It slid to the floor, but he didn't notice and didn't care. He was busy stepping out of his pants.
"But there's no hurry now," she said, swinging her foot. He was too eager, she knew somehow, by instinct. It was as if she, the other Lois, was a woman of experience, had been through scenes like this with men many times before. She knew with certainty now that once he got that too-eager cock inside her he wouldn't last more than a few seconds. She did know, in actuality, from her necking experiences as the straight Lois, that over-eager boys did come very quickly sometimes, in their pants. Now, she could see Hank's poked-up hard prick pushing out the leg of his shorts at a grotesque upward angle.
Calmly, Lois uncrossed her legs and let her knees drift slightly apart. The hem of her skirt had slid up around her hips. Hank stared down at the dewy blonde fur above her pussy, partly concealed between the velvety shadowed walls of her upper thighs.
"Do you like what you see?" she asked, feeling very much in control, not only of herself but of Hank. A woman of the world, and a boy.
"Like it? I love it. I wanted to climb up and kiss it when you were coming down those stairs."
"Why don't you?" she heard herself saying.
"Why don't I what?"
"Kiss it."
She opened her legs a little wider, suggestively. His Adam's apple took an upward leap and disappeared.
"Jesus," he said.
"The tongue, Hank. The tongue." She was very excited now. He dropped slowly to his knees before her as she lay back and opened her legs wide.
She started to tremble all over, almost imperceptibly, as she watched his head move slowly forward. His mouth was open and he stopped to kiss the smooth softness above the inside of one knee. The tip of his tongue traced its way wetly upward, and his mouth made soft sucking sounds against the yielding warmth of her inner thighs.
Lois' skin was tingling at the touch of his mouth. His fingers touched the swelling, soft-furred lips of her pussy, and she felt the gentle pressure of his fingertips parting them, exposing the silently gasping delicacy of her thirsting cunt entrance.
She felt the tip of his tongue tentatively touching the squirming swollen bud of her clitoris and she groaned happily, embracing his head with her warm thighs.
"That's it, Hank," she breathed. "Lick my lollipop."
He began licking the widening pink opening with long, slow, deliberate strokes of his extended tongue, putting pressure at the end of each stroke, on the heat of her clitoris. He'd done this before, Lois knew, also instinctively. But she was nothing but grateful.
She began to moan, deep in her throat, but she knew he couldn't hear her. Her all-enveloping thighs covered his ears, clutching his head in their frenzied, tight embrace. She felt the licking stop as his stiffened tongue probed deeply up between the channels of her new ecstasy.
She reached down between the wide V of her upraised thighs and she took the back of his head in her hands.
"I love it, Hank," she said gasping, releasing her grasp on his ears so he could hear. "You're wonderful. Lick it deep."
Lois felt her hips pumping up involuntarily to meet every deepening thrust of his probing tongue. Her insides were a jiggling ball of fiery joy.
As her frenzy mounted, with Hank's eager mouth making sucking sounds now, she knew that she was going to come, and come soon, but she didn't want to come this way, not this first real time with a man. She wanted that long hard prick probing up inside her, fulfilling her, sliding deep, soothing her ovenhot inner depths. She felt spasms starting and her hips pumped spasmodically.
"Slip it into me, Hank," she hissed frantically through gritted teeth. "Now. Quick. Please!"
He drew his head away from the bubbling spring of sensation between her legs, and she saw his wet mouth smiling at her as she hitched herself back and lay across the wide bed, her thighs wide apart as he mounted her. She reached out to guide the knot-hard head of his long stiff cock to the wet kiss of her open cunt. His prick found its own way, it seemed, and slipped through the soft portals easily. With only a fleeting sense of tightness, of constriction, that melted away in a second, she felt her cunt gulping in the whole length of his sliding prick, feeding every hungry need in her whole body.
She was trembling inside, shuddering outside, as her hips pumped and thrashed. Hank's tongue had brought her to the brink of orgasm, now his pounding prick was driving her over that brink.
"Deep, Hank, deep," she gasped, as she hooked her heels together behind his neck and drove her hot, melting mound against the bone foundation of his cock. He pounded it in to the hilt, driving it in faster and deeper with each successive stroke.
Lois came then, in a delirium of ecstasy, a delirium that washed away a whole young lifetime of frustration.
"Hank, darling," she heard herself moaning.
But he hadn't noticed. He was busy corning himself, spurting hotly inside her.
She became luscious Lois with Hank, and with Hank only, for the rest of that school year. After Hank, at school, there were only two more men with whom she let herself become the other, lustful Lois, one in her junior and one in her senior year at State. Episodes with them were varied, satisfying, pleasurable to ecstatic-and meaningless.
In the meantime, she felt herself growing farther and farther apart from the place where she had grown up.
She did spend all three college summers in Zephyr. Her father found her a job at his factory and she dated several of the men who worked there. For the most part, however, she walked through everything-her job, her dates, her encounters with her family-as though she was in a dream. None of it held any reality for her. Her reality was in waiting: waiting to go back to State and prepare herself for the life she wanted.
What was that life? She could not have said for certain. But she knew that it would include luxury and sophistication. And that it did not include either marriage or spinsterhood in a small town.
Her family was aware of her aims even before she was herself. So when her parents, her brother and sister-in-law came to State in order to attend Lois' graduation ceremony, they were not surprised when she informed them that she would not accompany them back to Zephyr.
"Where do you plan to go?" her mother asked gently.
Lois' heart was pounding. She hoped that they all wouldn't disapprove too much. "To Capitol City," she said.
"And what are you going to do there?" That was from her father. "I'll get a job."
"It might be rough at first," her brother Tom pointed out. "Will you need a little money to tide you over?"
The girl felt a warm glow. She knew how much money meant to Tom, now that he was starting his own gas station. She shook her head, not bothering to hide the gratitude that was in her eyes. "I don't think I will," she said. "I've actually managed to save some, here."
"Well, if you run short you'll let me know, won't you?"
"Yes, of course."
They stood around a little longer in order to exchange banalities. But for all practical purposes the conversation was over. That same day, her family headed back to Zephyr while Lois took the bus to Capitol City.
She found a room there and began job-hunting right away. But though she did not have to write Tom for money, it was a close thing. She applied for work and was turned down by the city's morning and afternoon newspapers, by the weekly papers and by Capitol City's six local radio and two television stations.
That's when she started in on the advertising agencies and, after several interviews, was hired by Amour's as a secretarial worker.
"We've got all the copywriters we'll ever need," the personnel director said with brutal frankness. "But if you're sure that you can type and take shorthand...."
"Try me," Lois said.
They did.
From then on her path was steadily upwards. She moved out of the secretarial pool and was assigned to an account executive. After a few more months she was helping him plan ads. Then she caught the eye of Harold Arnour, who made her his assistant.
The two of them moved from a formal relationship to one of friendship. Then they became lovers. And that's when Lois learned what it was like to really fall for a man.
The girl let out a long sigh and trailed her fingers over the surface of the water. It was turning cool now. Uncomfortably cool.
How long had she been in this tub, anyhow? Too long, she decided.
She pulled the plug and stepped out.
She picked up a towel and rubbed until her skin glowed. There. That should do it. But why did she still feel so ... strange?
She felt incomplete, somehow. She felt....
"Damn it!" she said aloud, as the realization struck home with the force of a physical blow. "I feel like I need a man!"
But Harold had just been there. They had just made love. Did that mean she was some sort of nymphomaniac?
Lois had always felt that nymphos were dull, drab little creatures who went crazy for sex either because of an unhappy childhood or because that was the only way they could get a man.
But what about her? Despite a marked lack of money, her childhood was extraordinarily happy. And she never had any trouble getting men.
She examined her tall, slender figure in the full-length mirror the honey blonde hair. The face that-she had to admit it-was more cute and interesting than classically beautiful. The slender neck and athletic shoulders. The firm breasts with their pointed nipples. The flat stomach pulled taut under the rib cage. The gentle curve of the lower belly. The prominent pelvis, well decorated with its female mat of brown body hair. The graceful hips and slender legs.
There she was. Five feet, six inches of naked, man-wanting female.
She walked into the bedroom, conscious now of the sway of her breasts and the way her thighs rubbed together as she moved.
She put on a nightgown, resisting the impulse to enter the bed nude.
Maybe it's Harold's fault.
The thought came to her unbidden. But' once in her mind, it refused to follow her immediate orders and go away.
Maybe Harold wasn't man enough to completely satisfy her. Or maybe she was too much woman for him. Whichever it was (and it had to be one or the other unless she really was a nympho-and she didn't see why she should assume that) she had to do something.
She could take not having sex for a while. What she couldn't take was the kind of sex that left her feeling like this.
And she realized, now, that-except for the first few times-Harold always left her unsatisfied Perhaps not this badly, but definitely unsatisfied He lifted her halfway up the cliff-and left her then while he dove over the side.
She simply had to do something, she thought again.
But what? That was the real question.
If they loved each other, she told herself, they could work it out. They could talk about it. Harold could try....
She was kidding herself, she knew. Harold would only get mad if she mentioned it to him. It would hurt his ego and he would choose the other answer. That she was oversexed. A nympho.
And what made her so sure that they did love each other...?
All right. Earlier this evening she was sure. But she didn't realize how unsatisfied he left her, then.
Could any man as selfish as Harold really be in love? For he was selfish. With her. With his wife. In bed.
So maybe he didn't love her. And she?
She was too basic a girl, she thought ruefully, to love a man who didn't fulfill her physically. And Harold did not fulfill her.
She liked the man, still. She was fond as hell of him. She would feel a wrench when she left him. But ... Left him?
"Hold on, girl," she murmured to herself. "Let's take it easy, there. You've got a lot of the things you started out after. And it wasn't easy getting them: the nice apartment, the pretty clothes, the good job, the lover who brings you a gorgeous present on your birthday. You'd better be awful careful before you do anything...."
She yawned and turned out the bedside lamp. She was so sleepy all of a sudden. It was hard to concentrate.
Upward and onward, she thought. Time to split. From Harold and maybe from Capitol City, too.
Harold, she thought. What a nutty dream it was to have believed she would be his wife. He wasn't going to ask her. And even if he had, she would probably have backed out of it. Run away....
She could run away, now....
She had gone as far as she could go, here.
She wasn't meeting any wild new men, nowadays. No one who flipped her. There was only Harold....
She yawned.
She wasn't even hearing about any new jobs. It was time to explore new territory, she thought, as she drifted off into unconsciousness. Time to split. But carefully....
She must be very, very careful....
THREE
When she woke up the following morning, Lois decided that her thoughts about leaving were both morbid and foolish.
Maybe Harold wasn't perfect But so what? What man was? What woman, for that matter?
She was still getting a lot more out of life than she could have reasonably expected when she left college two years ago. A lot more than she could possibly hope to get by starting over someplace else.
She dressed, bad her morning coffee, and drove down to the office in her little second-hand sports car. She would be bright, cheerful and grateful for what she had.
Her determination lasted until mid-way through lunch, when she overheard a conversation between a couple of other girls who worked at Amour's. One of the girls was obviously a newcomer to the office, while the other was telling her the score. They were sitting in the booth behind Lois. But they had no idea that the honey blonde was there.
"Don't kid yourself about Amour's," one of the girls said, as Lois-her attention caught by the name-started to listen in. "They have no system of promotion. You were hired as a file clerk, dear. And if you practice real hard on your shorthand and typing, you may possibly wind up as a secretary. But that will be it."
"How come? I mean, some girls work their way up to real good jobs in the agency. Executive positions. That's what Mr. Arnour said when he interviewed me.
"Did he, now?" The first voice was scornful. "Yes, he...."
"Did he mention any names?" There was a pause. "I guess not." Then: "But how about Miss Aimes? She's done well."
"Oh, Miss Aimes has done beautifully for herself, darling," the first voice said scathingly. "But then Lois Aimes is another story altogether."
"How do you mean that?" There was curiosity here. The second voice sensed dirt.
"How do you think, darling? Our Lois might be a bright little thing, but her main talent does not he in the office."
"Are you talking about her and Mr. Arnour?"
"What I'm telling you is that her talent lies-or should I say lays?-between the sheets."
There was a gasp and a few bursts of giggles. "That's mean."
"I don't know." The first voice was judicious. "Lois has all the right equipment. And if a girl wants to get ahead that way, I suppose it's her own business. But just don't take her for your model. That is unless you feel that you also ... "
"I should hope not," the younger voice interrupted.
"Don't be so sure, dear. Maybe Harold has hidden virtues. And you don't have a bad little figure yourself."
"Audrey!" More giggles. This time of the shocked variety.
Lois felt the fury mount within her as her blood raced wildly through her veins.
It was Audrey Cloone, she realized. She thought she'd recognized her voice before.
Lois dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She had all she could do to resist the temptation to run around the booth and yank the hair from the scalp of that simpering little bitch!
But she couldn't do that, of course. It was all she would need. She could just hear Audrey tell the story, afterward:
"My dear. Do you know that Lois actually attacked me? In a public restaurant, no less. Oh, I admit that I might have been a little catty about her, but after all...."
Hell, Lois thought to herself. It might almost be worth it.
But the moment had passed. Her hands were shaking now, almost as though she had really had the fight. Her cheeks were starting to burn.
She paid her check quickly and snuck out. She hoped without being seen.
Lois was so upset for the rest of the day that she could hardly do her work. And the worst of it was that she wasn't sure why she should have been this affected.
It was not as though she hadn't heard nasty comments about herself before. And while most of them might not have been that blunt, they had the same unmistakable meaning.
But she was always able to ascribe them to jealousy. To ill-will produced by the other woman's lack of ability. She had never let them bother her like this had. Did she actually believe that there might be a bit of truth buried in that diatribe?
Of course not, she told herself fiercely. Anyone with a single brain in his head could tell what she contributed to the agency. Why the Howlothey Department Store campaign, the Capitol City Hotel campaign, the Zilwarch Cookie campaign-they were all mainly her brain children. And others. Many, many others. In the past year she'd had a hand in....
But who was she trying to convince?
No matter how she tried to reason with herself, however, she stewed about the subject all day. And that night, when Harold brought her back to her apartment from dinner, she tried to discuss the matter with him.
"Darling," she said as she sipped the Scotch and soda the man had poured for her, "am I really contributing to the office?"
Harold bunked at her. "Of course you are. What made you think you weren't?"
"Well, darling, today I overheard...."
"Excuse me, baby," the man interuppted. "Do you mind if I change the radio station? I want to see if I can get some progressive jazz."
"Of course."
Harold twiddled with the dials until he found the station he wanted. "There," he said. "That's better, isn't it? Now, what were you saying?"
"That I overheard some of the girls...."
"Oh, yes," the man broke in again. "About your contributions. In the first place," he grinned, "you are extremely important to the morale of the president of the corporation. And secondly, of course, there's that cute female brain of yours. Absolutely charming."
"Secondly...." the girl murmured.
"A very important secondly," the man said, his voice just a trifle pompous. "Now, what were you telling me about those gals you overheard? Who were they, by the way?"
"Oh." The man looked curiously at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Did I tell you about Harold, Jr.?" he asked.
"What about him?"
"Just that I found out about his college grades today. They're terrible."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"They were very good during his freshman year. Then they just fell apart. I don't understand it. It's not as if he wasn't bright...." His voice trailed off and he seemed to think for a moment or two. "You're only out of college two years, baby. What do you think? Is that normal?"
Lois gestured with her arms. She was in no mood this evening to commiserate with Harold about his son. "I wouldn't know," she said. "I couldn't afford to let my grades drop too far. I was at State on a scholarship."
"I guess that does make a difference."
"Yes," Lois said.
The man finished his drink and stood behind Lois' chair. His arms reached past her shoulders, and his hands held her breasts through her blouse.
Lois sat still, giving no sign of either objection or encouragement. According to Audrey, she was starting work right now, she thought. To hell with Audrey.
"What's wrong, baby?" Harold asked. "I just got through tell you how important you were to the president of the corporation."
"Harold," Lois said. "Do shut up for a minute."
"What...?"
"I'm sorry, darling. I'm in sort of a mood this evening."
"I'll say you are." The man grinned. "But there are ways of fixing that."
He stepped around the chair, took hold of her wrists and lifted-her to her feet.
"That's better," he said, kissing her and pressing himself against her. "That's much better."
It was better for him, she realized, as she felt his cock rising against the yielding warmth of her lower belly. But her own sensations were dead. There was no sign of lascivious Lois coming to life and taking over. She was strictly lovely Lois now. Nice Lois was in total control.
And the unbelievable thing was that he wasn't aware of the difference in her. He was confident that she was overcome with desire.
Lois moved her thighs slowly, letting her legs come apart in a charade of lust. There was no trick at all to being a prostitute, as thought, as she heard him sigh with pleasure. She could do a real good job of it.
"See?" he said, as he stepped away and started into the bedroom. "I knew I could get you out of that mood of yours."
In the bedroom she undressed mechanically, draping her clothes over the back of a chair. When she raised her head after peeling off her pantyhose she saw that Harold was already naked.
He was standing a foot or two from where she was sitting, on the edge of the bed. His chest was expanded and his belly held in to accentuate the maleness of him. It was almost as if he was saying, "Look at me, look at how great I am!"
The only great thing about him, his cock, was swollen and purple and standing out in front of him at an angle slightly above the horizontal.
He was like a kid, Lois thought, as she had so many times before. But this time she thought it without any trace of tenderness. She knew right then that she had no inclination whatsoever to lie back and have him slide that big cock into her. She had a thought.
"Come here," she said. It was almost a command, but he was too thick-skinned to notice.
Instead, a tiny wrinkled question mark appeared between his eyebrows as he moved closer to her. When she reached up and took the shaft of his cock between her thumb and forefinger, guiding it toward her mouth, the question mark disappeared.
"I want to do something for you," she said. It was a downright he. All she wanted was not to fuck him.
She let her lips slide over the shiny swollen head, leaving room for her tongue to slip underneath and lick the undershaft.
"You're a good girl, Lois," he said, standing straight with his hands on his hips.
Sure I am, Lois thought. She sucked his great prick warmly, gently, as if she meant it lovingly, for all he knew. She used her wet tongue frequently to tickle it under the head and lick up the thick shaft with long, slow strokes. She heard him breathing and moaning in utter contentment until his hips took on an urgency and his hands came up beside her ears. She knew then that it was a job well done.
"I'm going to come, honey," he said. Some news.
She kept on sucking, harder and faster, her mouth making soft slurping noises as it slid back and forth. And then he came, in a series of pumping surges, splashing his juices in gusts into the back of her throat. She swallowed again and again, mechanically, dutifully, until he was dry.
She licked the last drop from his now-limber cock and looked up at him, making a great effort to smile.
"Happy?" she asked.
"'very," he said, and shook his head from side to side, looking at her. "You're a very strange girl sometimes, darling. 'very nice, but strange."
"I suppose," Lois said.
As she had done so many times before, Lois waited quietly until after Harold had left the apartment.
Then she got up to run her bath water.
That was the end, she thought. That was really and truly the end. She had to leave Capitol City, now.
She laughed aloud. She was not cut out to be a prostitute after all.
Or at least a conscious one.
Brother, she thought with a touch of panic.
Supposing that little dame was right earlier today? Supposing the only way she could get and keep a good job was through the clever use of her body?
If so, she told herself resolutely, it was about time she knew about it.
She turned off the water and tested the temperature with her finger. Then she lowered herself into the tub.
Where would she go? New York?
The name of the city simply popped into her head for no reason that she could think of. But the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like the appropriate choice.
It was a place where a girl could make a new start; could live a wild, exciting life. Capitol City already seemed a nothing place in comparison. Once she got to New York she would get a good job where she could meet attractive men. She'd live the sort of life she wanted to live. She might even learn exactly what sort of life that was.
She realized with a start of surprise that her decision was already made. It was only a question of carrying it out.
And she wanted to do that as soon as possible. The quicker she left, the better. She knew that she could not stand many more nights with Harold.
In the meantime, she would tell the man that her curse came early this month. That would keep him from making love for five or six days at least. If she could only arrange to sell her car and sublet her apartment by then, everything would work out fine.
There was such a lot to be taken care of....
And she had to take care of it all in secret, she knew. She couldn't afford to tell Harold what she was going to do. She would not even leave him a forwarding address.
She giggled. As if she knew where she would be living, herself, she thought.
Well, at least, she had a little money put aside. That and the money she would get from the sale of her car should serve to keep her until she could find a job and get located.
She pulled the bathtub plug, stood up and wrapped herself in a towel.
She felt herself glow with excitement. She was anxious to get started. To begin making her plans.
She wondered what the airline fare was to New York. She was too much of a snob, she recognized, to begin her life there by arriving in a bus.
She hung the towel up and walked nakedly into the bedroom.
The episode with Harold was finished and Lois had too much else on her mind to be conscious of her body any more. She did not give it a thought as she sat down at her writing desk and-still nude-began making pencilled notes.
FOUR
"What do you trunk of Conquer Magazine, Aimes?" Barbara Fielding asked. "Now that you've had a couple of weeks to look us over?"
"I like it here very much ... Barbara."
Despite herself, Lois gave a mild start. She still found it disconcerting to hear herself called by her last name-even though she knew it was nothing personal. It was one of the mannerisms of the Broadway editor of Conquer to address every female who worked on the magazine in that same way. She reserved first names for men, and, of course, her friends and contacts in the entertainment business.
If Barbara were not otherwise so attractive, Lois might have resented the mannerism. But as it was, she thought it a charming eccentricity.
"You don't mind being stuck in the secretarial pool?" the editor continued.
"Not really," Lois replied. "I mean, I can still get interesting assignments."
"Such as temporary duties with the Broadway editor?" the woman asked with a smile.
Lois was taken off balance. "Well ... yes...."
Barbara Fielding showed her approval. She was a brunette with a perfect oval face and dark, wide-set eyes. Her hair was simply but expensively coiffed, and her make-up was tastefully delicate. Lois thought she was the most beautiful woman she had ever met.
"And anyway," the honey blonde went on, frankly, 'if I wanted to get a job on Conquer, the pool is where I had to start."
Barbara raised one of her finely plucked, black eyebrows. "I take it that means you don't plan to stay in the pool any longer than you can help," she said.
"Well, I...." Lois stammered in confusion.
"Keep your bra on, Aimes," the woman said, in that precise, well-modulated voice of her. "I would hardly have bothered with you if I didn't think you were ambitious." She rose deliberately from the seat behind her desk and lit a cigarette with a jewelled lighter.
Lois watched her with evident admiration. The black-haired woman was in her early to mid-thirties now. At eighteen she had been a member of a chorus line. Lois did not believe that her figure today differed by so much as a fraction of an inch from what it had been at that time.
Barbara smiled coolly as she noticed Lois' gaze. Everything the woman did was cool. Unlike most of the editorial staff of Conquer, she never blew up or lost her temper. When an impossible situation came up, Barbara could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to handle it. She would make, Lois thought, a dangerous enemy.
Her stories always went to the printer both letter perfect and completely accurate. Even the many victims of the woman's caustic prose had to admit to her accuracy. Since she had first come to Conquer ten years ago, Barbara had been threatened-with no less than two hundred and thirty-four libel suits. Only ten of those actually went to court. And Barbara had won them all.
She was almost as famous in her own right as the men and women she wrote about. And Lois was still amazed that she bothered with her at all. But she had. From the day the girl was hired, Barbara had befriended her.
She was still regarding the girl with a cool, knowing smile. "I can sense ambition in another woman, Aimes," she said. "I could see it in you the first time I ran into you. When you were wandering around the corridors, searching for the powder room."
Lois had to grin at the memory. That had been eleven days ago. But it seemed more like a century.
"Now then," Barbara Fielding said, "let's get down to business. You might have heard that my own secretary left a couple of weeks before you came to Conquer in order to get married."
Lois nodded.
Barbara's face took on an expression of distaste. "Her new husband insisted on her quitting. Perhaps he objected to the fact that I asked her to work certain evenings. But whatever his reason, I suppose it's none of my business." She paused. "Since then, the girls from the pool-including yourself-have been asked to fill in."
"Yes," Lois said.
"Now, however, I think it is high time I chose a permanent secretary once more. How would you like to try for the job?"
Lois felt her heart give a great leap. The offer was like a dream come true. Barbara Fielding was the sort of woman she wanted to be some day.
But before she could open her mouth to answer, the editor was talking to her again. "Think about it, Aimes, before you make up your mind. A job with me will not be easy. It's true that you'll be getting a little more money, and in a few months your salary will go up again. But you'll be working far harder than you have been. I wasn't joking about those evenings. If I don't work by the clock, I don't see why my secretary should."
"Long hours don't bother me," Lois interjected.
"I'm glad. For I can promise you an interesting time. An ambitiouis girl could find it a worthwhile experience. You would be doing some leg work for me, gathering information, and you also may find yourself doing a little writing."
Lois looked at her.
"As you probably know by now, Conquer is notoriously understaffed. Though I am called the Broadway editor, I have to cover all the entertainment news out of New York, including television. The only real help I get are free-lance reviews of legitimate shows."
"I thought you had an editorial assistant?" Lois ventured.
"Ah, yes. Dear little Sidney. If you've been observant enough to notice him, Aimes, you also must have seen that he's rather a lost cause."
Lois laughed uncertainly.
"Add to that the fact that I have to share him with the sports desk. Every time I want to send him out to talk to a VIP, I find that he has an interview set up with some hockey player or other." She shook her head in resignation. "No. I would be relying on you to a rather overwhelming extent."
"I would like to try the job," Lois said then, when she realized that the older woman had finished speaking.
"Good," Barbara smiled. "Try it for a month or two. If you don't work out by that time, or if you find that you can't stand me, you can go back to the pool or find yourself another permanent spot with no hard feelings."
Lois nodded. She would work out, she told herself. She was not going to admit even the possibility of failure. It was too important to succeed.
"When would you like me to start?" she asked.
"Right now, if you have no objection. I've already spoken to Andrew Hainward."
Lois grinned to herself. It was like Barbara to get the office manager's approval even before she spoke to me. Not that Mr. Hainward-or anyone else on the magazine for that matter-would fail to approve a Barbara Fielding decision.
"By the way, Aimes," Barbara was saying now, "have you found a place to stay yet?"
"I'm ... I'm still at the hotel," Lois said, trying to adjust to the rapid change of subject.
"I take it you have been looking around, however?"
"Yes. I have to find something fairly fast, before my bank balances reaches the grand total of zero. As a matter-of-fact, I've got an appointment to look at a place tonight. Something I found in a newspaper ad. You know: Three girls want fourth to share lovely apartment. One of those." She shrugged. "Maybe it'll be a little less drab than the last five lovely apartments I looked at."
Barbara laughed. "Well, if it doesn't turn out to be what you want, I might have a suggestion for you."
"Oh...?"
"I happen to have a spare bedroom in my apartment. The room itself is rather small, but the apartment is nice and you'd have partial use of the kitchen, etc."
Lois' eyes opened in delighted surprise.
"The former occupant was a publicity girl who left last month to spend a year in London," Barbara went on.
"How ... how much do you want for the room?" Lois asked nervously. She was sure that there was a fly in this ointment somewhere.
Barbara named a figure which, while more than Lois really wanted to spend, was still extremely fair.
"I'll take it," the honey blonde said.
"Sight unseen?" Barbara asked.
"If you knew the kind of places I've been looking at!" Lois responded frankly. "I don't think I could stand to examine another one of those."
"I didn't know it was that bad. Maybe I should have upped the price."
Lois looked worried.
"Easy there, Aimes," Barbara laughed. "I was just kidding you. As a matter-of-fact, I do know the sorts of places you were looking at. I wasn't always Broadway editor of Conquer, you know."
"Yes." Lois felt abashed.
"As a matter-of-fact, that's one reason I made my offer. You're an ambitious, bright young girl, Aimes. And I think you can go far if you're head in the right direction."
"Thank you."
"Forget it. Just bring your things to my place after work. And speaking of work, we'd better get down to it."
Lois smiled in agreement.
"These papes have to be filed and I want you to make some phone calls to the motion picture distributors for me. Oh, yes ... one more thing: you're coming to the publicity party for The Bedroom Fury with me tonight."
"The what?"
"The movie. The Bedroom Fury. They're having a pre-release party tonight and I want you to be there. You'll meet some very important people."
"Thanks...."
"I wish you'd stop thanking me, Aimes. I'm doing this for me, too. It doesn't hurt my own reputation to have a bright-eyed assistant in the office. And if I can get you started on the right path...."
"Yes?"
"Well make a great team, that's all."
Barbara Fielding went back to her desk and picked up the phone to indicate that the discussion was over.
Lois carried the papers into the outer office and began to file them in the metal cabinet.
Even now she could hardly believe that this was happening. It was too wonderful. Too much like a private daydream.
To be Barbara Fielding's secretary. And to share her apartment. It was just too much!
But then the moment she had applied for the job here at Conquer Magazine everything had been wonderful.
It was strange. Somehow she knew that things would work out when she had stepped out of the elevator and walked through the two glass doors that admitted her to Conquers New York editorial offices.
Outside the air conditioned offices, the heat from the fierce afternoon sun was intensified by the steel and concrete structures along Madison Avenue. It struck Lois like a blow to the pit of her stomach and almost knocked the breath out of her.
And it was still the last week in June, she reminded herself. Summer had only officially begun a few days ago. She wondered groggily what the rest of the season would be like.
She did not think she could bear the rush hour subway in this heat. She managed to hail a passing cab and gave him the address of her hotel.
Once there, she stopped off at the front desk in order to ask the room clerk to get her bill ready. Then she went upstairs to pack.
As she checked her dresser drawers for the last time she wondered, idly, what Harold was doing at this moment. Probably feeling betrayed, she thought. Maybe looking for a girl to take her place. She wished him luck.
She closed the suitcase. There. That was it.
She picked up the phone and called for a bellboy.
Barbara Fielding lived on the eighth floor of an East Side apartment building located in the lower Twenties. Lois rang the bell, waited for several moments and then was greeted by a refreshing breath of cool air that came from the apartment when Barbara opened the door.
The black-haired woman was wearing a red and white terry cloth robe. "Sorry to keep you waiting, Aimes," she said. "But I was sunbathing on the terrace."
"Oh...."
"Come on in." Barbara had an air of impatience as she took the suitcase from Lois. "We don't want all the cool to get away."
The apartment, Lois could see, was strikingly modern. Like everything else about Barbara Fielding, it was done in expensive good taste. The pictures on the living room walls were original abstracts. The sofa appeared to be custom made. And the low coffee table was of rare wood.
It made Lois' former flat in Capitol City seem gauche and tasteless.
The honey blonde followed Barbara into the smaller of the two bedrooms. The room was plenty big enough for her, however, and once again she had the impression of outstanding taste.
"There's your air conditioner," Barbara said, pointing to the unit which was humming quietly in its sleeve below the window. "It will help save money if we remember to turn off all the machines when we leave the apartment."
"Yes."
"And ... let me see. I left your key on top of the bureau. Now, I'll help you unpack."
"You don't really have to," Lois 'said, feeling overwhelmed.
"It's no trouble." Barbara was already opening the suitcase. "And since it's six-thirty already, we only have an hour before Eric Grass calls for us."
"Eric Grass...?"
"He's escorting us to the dinner party. You remember. For The Bedroom Fury."
"Oh, yes."
Eric headed the New York metropolitan desk, Lois recalled. Which meant that his duties were vague even by Conquer standards. When it came to the local scene, he appeared to overlap all the other desks on the magazine.
Lois wondered if Eric's duties were taking him to the party tonight. Or if he was simply going because of Barbara.
Maybe the two were lovers. He must be at least a few years younger than Barbara, she thought, but that wouldn't matter.
She considered Eric for a few moments. He was a tall, lean saturnine man with a sardonic wit and hair as black as Barbara's was. Personally, Lois did not find his type tempting. But she could understand how many other women might.
Barbara finished taking the last of the clothes out of the valise and stopped to grin at Lois. "You're right," she said, slyly.
"What...?"
"Eric and I are a thing."
"But how...?"
"You really ought to practice masking your face, Aimes. It's too easy to guess your thoughts."
Lois blushed, and then began to laugh. "Well, it was a rather natural subject for me to wonder about, wasn't it?" she asked.
"I suppose so," Barbara said, seeming to lose interest. She glanced at the empty suitcase. "Is that all you have?"
Lois explained about leaving the rest of her things in storage.
"Bright girl," the older woman said approvingly. "And you do have a choice of pretty dresses for tonight. And a bikini."
"Will I need that?"
"If you want to sunbathe on the terrace you will. Just between us girls, I would rather do my own sunbathing in the raw. But I hate giving free shows to the neighbors." She smiled. "Come. I'll show you around the joint. Then we can start getting dressed."
Barbara showed her the bathroom, then took her out through the living room to the broad terrace with its two reclining chairs. From there they went to the kitchen, which had an automatic dishwasher, a refrigerator-freezer and an electric stove.
"Well, that's about it," Barbara said, as she walked back to her own bedroom and stood in the door. "Not a palace, perhaps, but it's mine own. Yours too, now."
"It's lovely," Lois told her.
"Thank you." Barbara took off the terry cloth robe and turned around. "Undo this for me, will you, dear?"
"Sure." Lois unclasped the woman's brief bikini bra.
"I'll shower first," Barbara said, as she took off her briefs and turned around. "I won't be very long."
"Fine."
Lois stepped back. The woman was absolutely stunning, she thought. Her breasts were big and round with wide red nipples. Her waist was narrow, her hips were full and she had a lovely curve to her belly. Her tights were sturdy looking.
Barbara noticed the younger girl's appraising glance. "Do you approve of the body beautiful?" she asked ironically.
"You have a wonderful figure," Lois said frankly.
"Well, it's hell to keep it this way. I'll tell you that much, Aimes. When I was your age it was a snap. Nothing I did seemed to matter. But now there are the isometric exercises and the diets and ... you name it. Ugh." She made a face. "Then there are those ghastly morning inspections when you have to ask yourself if the breasts have grown more pendulous or if the hips are starting to grow an extra inch. Horrible!"
Lois laughed, "You don't have to worry."
"But I do. That's the whole secret. A woman's body is the big weapon, honey. And if she doesn't worry about keeping it in good condition, she's liable to wake up one day to learn she's lost the war."
Barbara smiled wisely and then walked into the bathroom.
Lois' eyes remained on the closed door for a few moments. Then she returned to her own room in order to undress and prepare the clothes she planned to wear to the dinner party.
Eric Grass was in excellent form that evening.
The trio was placed at a table near the dais. And Eric made a series of short, caustic remarks about the entertainment notables who were seated at the head table.
Lois was shocked by some of the things he said. Such as the comment about the famous screen lover who-according to Eric-preferred boys when he was not on camera. But she was also highly amused. The waiter kept refilling her champagne glass all through the dinner, and she realized that she was beginning to get drunk.
She didn't care. She was having too much fun.
Between courses, Eric danced first with Barbara and then with her. He was a marvelous dancer, Lois thought. She almost wished that he didn't belong to the other woman.
But that was the champagne talking. He did belong to Barbara.
Another man at their table also asked her to dance. His name was Gerry something, he said.
Gerry was short and stocky and had brown, curly, close-cropped hair. He was not nearly as clever as the sardonic Eric. But he laughed a lot and appeared to have a more fun-loving nature.
"What do you do on Conquer?" he asked, when they had been on the dance floor for a while. "Are you the pin-up girl?"
She giggled. "I'm Barbara Fielding's secretary."
He bowed his head in mock humility. "That makes you a 'very Important Person, ma'am."
"How so?" Lois asked, still giggling.
"Well, to someone like myself you're a 'very Important Person. I'm with the studio publicity department, you see."
"And...?" Lois asked.
Gerry had just negotiated a complicated dance step. For a stocky man, the girl thought, he was a graceful dancer.
"And it's important for me to get my releases to Barbara Fielding," the man said. "That makes her secretary a...."
"I know. A 'very Important Person." Lois sighed. "So you only want to use me."
"Baby, I'd want to use you if you were a hundred and five and fat. As it is, it would be a pleasure."
Lois stuck out her tongue. "Beast."
"That's me." Gerry grinned. "Why don't the two of us sneak out of here and I'll show you just how beastly I can be?"
"But we haven't even finished dinner yet."
"We can go after dinner."
"Well...."
"But before the speeches."
Lois shook her head violently. She was beginning to get looped. "That wouldn't be very nice," she said. "If a person is invited to a dinner party and she eats the dinner, she has to listen to the speeches, too." Lois paused to consider for a few seconds. "That is if she's a nice person," she added.
"I think you'd be even nice if you left," Gerry said.
"Really?" Lois sounded incredulous.
"Anyway, the speeches will be terribly boring. I'll bet that half the speakers duck out so they won't have to listen to themselves."
Lois giggled again. She was feeling marvelously lightheaded. "That's silly," she said.
"It's true."
"And Barbara would get mad at me. You wouldn't want Barbara to get mad at me, would you?" Lois asked.
"Isn't she an understanding boss?"
"Oh, she's very un'erstanding," Lois said, starting to slur her words. 'Terrific woman, Barbara...."
"In that case, she wouldn't get mad."
"Mmmnn...." Lois thought that one over. "No." She shook her head once more. "I couldn't do it. That's def ... definite!"
Lois wasn't sure what she was doing on the street with Gerry. She should be in the ballroom, still. Listening to speeches about what a great movie The Bedroom Fury was. She had kept telling him that. She didn't know how many times she had refused his invitation to sneak away.
But here she was.
She had seen him leave the table, returned his signal, muttered something to Barbara about the ladies' room and met him in the lobby of the famous hotel where the publicity dinner was being held.
Now she was outside.
"It's hot," she said.
"Yes."
"Where are we going?"
"Where would you like to go?" She tried to think. It was not easy. "Where we can have some fun," she answered at last. "There's a little joint around the corner...."
"Lead the way," she said, putting her arm in his. They walked for a block and a half and entered a small night club that featured a quiet, progressive jazz combo and a girl singer. Gerry tipped the head waiter to show them to a ringside table, then ordered drinks.
"This is nice," Lois a little while later. "I like it here."
"I'm glad."
"I wish it weren't so dark, though. Why is it so dark?"
"That's the atmosphere," the man explained gravely. "If it weren't dark, it wouldn't be sophisticated." He placed his hand on her knee under the table.
"Is it sophisticated?" she asked, not minding his hand at all.
"Can't you tell?" he laughed.
"No. I'm just a small-town girl. Did you know that I came from a small town, Gerry?"
"I had no idea."
"Well, I did." She began to tell him about Zephyr. Somehow the story got confused, though. And she was still trying to get it straightened out when the singer began a slow number about lost innocence.
Lois stopped talking to listen for a while. The song made her feel sad. She knew just how the girl singer felt.
"I'm getting blue,"
"she said. "Can't we go someplace else?"
"Great idea."
Lois watched dumbly as Gerry called over the waiter and paid the bill with a credit card. She admired the way he handled waiters. Even Harold didn't do it as well as this.
He led her outside where they got into a cab.
"Where to now?" she asked.
"A real great spot."
"Another night club?"
"One that's open all night."
"I didn't know there were any like that."
He grinned at her.
She nestled against him and closed her eyes. She was puzzled, but not painfully so. Gerry knew what he was doing.
She was still puzzled when the cab stopped and she opened her eyes to see that they were in front of a brownstone building.
The man paid the driver and helped her out.
"Where's the night club?" she asked, as they climbed the stone outer steps and entered a narrow lobby.
"On the second floor."
Her head was spinning as they climbed a flight of stairs. She wasn't the girl she used to be.
He unlocked a door and led her into a one-room apartment. "Hey," she said as she looked around. "I bet this is your place."
"You win," he admitted.
"That's a dirty trick. You can't keep me here. I'm leaving!"
But she made no move to leave. She sat down on the sofa bed instead.
Gerry flicked on the window air-conditioner. Did everyone in New York have air-conditioners? Lois wondered. Or just the people she knew?
"Like a drink?" Gerry asked.
"No," she said, meaning to sound brusque and angry. But the anger was leaving her, to be replaced by something else. "No, thank you," she said, mending her manners.
She found herself looking around the room, curiously. Then for no reason she could understand she got up and walked to the center of the big room, looking around some more in the dim light from one small lamp on an end table. It was spacious, for a one-room apartment, comfortably furnished, and far neater than she'd expect a bachelor's apartment to be. She assumed, in her boozy fuzziness, that Gerry was a bachelor. The only unusual feature of the room she noticed was a large, floor length mirror directly across from the wide studio couch.
And then she knew what her strange feeling was. All at once, she was turning into lascivious Lois again, for the first time in weeks.
What's more, she was glad.
When she turned toward Gerry, she turned into his arms. Well, why not? Why else was she here? She raised her open mouth to be kissed.
His tongue drove deep to slide along hers, over, under, around. He was not nearly as tall as Harold, she was acutely aware, as she felt the length of his oak-hard cock grooving sideways, making a place for itself in the soft swell of her lower belly. With her hands around the stocky, muscular man's neck, Lois kept up the straining suction of their mouths, the urgent melting of their tongues.
She felt Gerry's hands moving slowly, hungrily down the curve of her back, kneading the soft flesh mounds of her ripely rounded ass. Then she felt his chest move away, backwards from her, as his hand found its way into the low neckline of her dress. She wore no bra, with that dress, and he cupped her gently bobbing breasts, one at a time, tenderly squeezing the taut, hardened nipples. They came more firmly, furiously erect under his expert, teasing caress.
He broke the suction of their mouths.
"God, how I've wanted you," he said, looking into her eyes. "Since the second I saw you."
"You talk too much," Lois heard herself saying. She was squeezing one hand along the considerable length of his cock, through the fabric of his trousers.
He backed off and held her at arm's length.
"You're so completely lovely," Gerry said. "I can't believe you're really here with me. I just want to look at you, for a minute."
"That's all you want to do?" she asked, smiling demurely, wondering if he could hear the bubbling in the tingling lust-filled cauldron of her cunt.
"Come over here."
He led her by the hand to the edge of the wide couch and turned her around. This was more like it, she thought, and watched his face as he brought his hands upward along her outer thighs, under the light hem of her skirt, caressing the incredibly soft swelling curve of her hips. The look in his eyes was almost worshipful.
She smiled at him as she stepped sideways and out of her shoes. She reached cross-handed for the hem of her skirt to pull the dress off over her head, but he stopped her.
"Not yet," he said. "Please. I told you, I want to look at you for a minute."
She sat down on the edge of the couch and looked up at him, wondering. What was he, some kind of nut? He had seemed sane enough earlier in the evening.
She watched him, still wondering, as he turned from her and walked across the room, turning on lamps. Bright lamps, that seemed to focus on where she was sitting.
"Now," he said. He drew two hassocks toward the couch, a yard apart, and lifted her feet, placing one foot on each hassock. He stepped back and looked down, that look of what seemed almost like reverence on his face.
Lois looked beyond him, into the mirror, and finally saw what he'd been talking about. Somewhere along her boozy way, she had taken off her pants. Now the wide V of her thighs, opened at the knees and slanting inward and downward, led to the magnet of her pink open cunt in its dewy frame of shadowed curls. Lois stared, fascinated, at her own lewd image in the mirror.
"I thought it was me you wanted to look at," she said. "It's my pussy." She was beyond surprise at the way she talked when she was lascivious Lois. Never gave it a thought. "Twat," Gerry corrected gently. "All right, cunt," she said, and looked up at him. She was pleased to see that with all his worshipful starting at the wet welcome between her dusky swelling cunt lips, he'd managed to do something constructive. He'd taken off his clothes. As she watched, he stepped over and stood in front of her, then dropped slowly to his knees. He's pushing reverence and worship too far, Lois thought crazily, and knew that she'd sobered up considerably. His kneeling position looked for all the world like nothing more than an attitude of prayer.
He broke his mock religious trance to lean forward and kiss the yielding softness inside her right knee. Then his tongue moved slowly upward, making soft small circles on the responsive flesh of her inner thighs.
Lois thought she could hear herself purring as his tongue touched the soft globes meeting beneath the lower, infinitely tender flesh crevice of her cunt.
"Eat all of it," she breathed, her voice sounding small and tight. "Don't just taste here and there."
She let her knees drift farther apart as his fingers came up and gently parted the lips of her twat. His tongue came forward slowly, extended fully, and with one long broad stroke licked the entire mass of quivering, thirsting inner flesh.
Her hips responded, and his tongue probed deeper. His-lips closed over the elusive eel of her clitoris, and as he licked and sucked and gobbled, his whole mouth-lips, teeth, tongue-worked together on the little stormy sea of sensation between her furred shores.
Then she felt another sensation: one of his fingers probed at the tiny puckered entrance of her asshole. She let her spinchter go loose, instinctively, and his finger slid deep.
Her mouth opened and a gasp escaped, but she said nothing. Ultimate intimacy, from a stranger. She loved it.
Lois felt her hips rising faster and faster to meet the probing of Gerry's tongue, the suction of his hungry mouth; and she felt the added excitement of the fringe benefit of his finger. She reached a plateau of pleasure, and stayed there, deliberately. Gerry, hungry Gerry, the keeper of the oasis for the thirsty, kept on gobbling.
But Lois wanted more, now. Much, more now.
"Please, Gerry," she said at last. "Please."
He took his mouth a fraction of an inch from its tender, delicious sustenance, and looked up at her.
"What?" he asked. Two damp pussy hairs clung wetly above his upper hp, like some kind of insane mustache.
"I want your cock inside me. Right now. I think we should fuck. Fuck. Fuck!"
She liked the sound of the word, right now. But not as much as the act.
He moved his mouth back to her cunt for one last lingering lick.
"Ah, Gerry, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me! Sink your big cock in my cunt. Deep in my cunt. Now!"
She lay back on the wide studio couch, her knees raised, her legs spread open, inviting him.
Gerry knew enough not to waste any more time now. To strike while her cunt was hot.
He arched over her, braced on both elbows, and she reached out to guide the hardness of his swollen cockhead to the invisibly steaming welcome of her parted cunt lips. She felt him sink the entire length of his shaft, slowly, along the tender quivering walls of her inner cunt.
When he was fully imbedded, his long hard cock pressed deep and exploring, when they were jammed tight and hard against each other's pelvic knolls, they held themselves that way for a long loving moment, like old familiar fuck partners.
Then Gerry withdrew his shaft so only the head remained inside her, and began making his first slow plunges. Lois' hips rose, her cunt lifted, rejoiced, to meet every driving thrust.
This is what she'd needed, these long weeks. One whole, long, hard, stabbing cock.
'very gradually, Gerry increased the tempo, and soon she'd settled with him into a steady beat, meeting his every stroke with exquisite timing. Her hips kept up the beat without faltering, but her breath was erratic as she gasped and groaned and shuddered. A stranger, this Gerry, she thought wildly, and they were fucking each other as if they'd invented fucking.
Lois heard the groans starting in her own throat. The inferno in her cunt was all she could bear. She was at the brink of orgasm.
She signaled, with a flurry of her hips, and Gerry increased his pace to a frenzied, insane tempo, whipping her into a froth of delirium as she came, and came, shuddering and groaning. She felt him spurting into her depths then, and lay back, inert, letting the spasms subside like waves rolling back from a beach.
Many minutes later, when the sands were smooth, Gerry leaned forward and kissed her gently. Like an old friend.
FIVE
Lois Aimes felt awful. Her stomach was queasy, her mouth was dry, her head ached and her eyes felt as though they had been glued together.
She pried the lids apart with an effort and tried to focus. It was no use. Everything was spinning.
Where was she, anyhow? This surely wasn't her hotel room.
Oh, yes. She remembered now. She was in Barbara Fielding's apartment. Yesterday Barbara offered to let her rent the spare bedroom and then-last night-took her to a publicity dinner party.
A good woman, Barbara....
The party! She'd had too much to drink there and ran off right after dinner. With Gerry. What was his last name again? She made a large attempt to recall it, but found that she couldn't.
No matter what his last name was, however, he was quite a man. She might be hung over, but she was not so far gone that she couldn't remember that. What he didn't know about sex wasn't worth knowing. He should write one of those manuals....
She walked into the kitchen and placed a pot of water on the stove in order to make some instant coffee. Then she started to search for some rolls and butter.
"Here," Barbara Fielding said. "Let me do that."
Lois turned sharply. She had not heard Barbara enter the room. The black-haired girl had obviously been out on the terrace. Her terry cloth robe hung open in front to reveal the smallest possible bikini. There were drops of perspiration on her sun-tanned skin.
As Lois collapsed onto a kitchen chair, Barbara poured a glass of orange juice, put out the butter and a seeded roll and prepared two cups of coffee. The woman was so damned efficient, Lois thought, it was almost frightening.
"You look a mess, Aimes," Barbara said, as she placed the proper proportions of sugar and cream in her coffee.
"Gee," Lois responded. "And here I was just starting to feel better."
Barbara smiled thinly at her.
Lois sipped her juice slowly, relishing the taste, and buttered her roll.
"Did you have a good time last night?" Barbara asked dryly.
Lois felt vaguely guilty. "I hope you're not mad that I skipped out," she said. "Not mad, exactly. Just disappointed."
"Oh...?"
"I thought we decided that you were ambitious, Aimes. I suppose we should have spent some time deciding what you were ambitious for."
Lois deliberately finished the rest of her roll. She tried to hold down her annoyance. She was grateful to Barbara Fielding, certainly. But that did not give her the right to hold an inquisition; to act as judge and jury.
"I don't get you," she said, as she lit a cigarette and took a sip of coffee.
"Don't you?" Barbara asked, her voice as cool as ever. "Then perhaps I'd better explain. A girl these days can do one of three things with her life. She can be a career woman. She can stay home and have babies. Or she can be a sexual playmate for available males."
"I see," Lois said. She gulped her coffee and thought that the other woman did not seem to feel the need to skirt around her subject.
"Please don't misunderstand me, Aimes," Barbara continued. "A girl can do either well or badly at all three of those choices. A career woman, for example, can be a salesgirl at the local five-and-dime, or she can be on the board of directors of the same firm. A wife and mother can be a society hostess, or she can spend her days trying to sober up a drunk husband and getting her children out of jail. Even the playgirl can be a slut or the mistress of a great man. But the three choices remain."
Lois fixed herself a second cup of coffee. "Do you want one?" she asked Barbara.
"No. Thank you." The brunette paused. For the first time she seemed a bit impatient. "I have great confidence in you, Aimes," she went on with a hint of irony in her voice. "I'm sure you could make a success of any one of those three paths. The question is, which one do you choose?"
Lois blinked. "I don't know. I never really thought about it."
"Then perhaps it's time you did. I don't have to tell you which path you started oh last night."
"Now, look," Lois returned angrily. "Just because I left that blast early last night with a man ... That doesn't give you the right to tell me...."
"Not a man, dear," Barbara put in. "A particular man."
"What difference does it make who it was? I'm a big girl now. I guess I can choose my own company."
"I'm sure you are a big girl, Aimes," Barbara said caustically. "And as for choosing your own company ... Well, as long as you're aware of the choice you've made...."
Lois tested the coffee. It was cool enough to drink She wished that Barbara would shut up. Just go away some place and shut up.
"You see, Gerry Wolder is a very special type of man," Barbara went on. Her lips were curved in a smile, but her eyes were narrow.
Wolder, Lois thought incongruously. So that was his last name.
"He's the type of man usually known as a stud."
"A stud...?"
"Just in case you didn't know, dear Aimes, a stud is the kind of man who is guaranteed to give a girl satisfaction. He is so proficient in the bedroom, indeed, that he can wear out most women."
Lois gaped at her. "I know what a stud is," she muttered.
"Then what's the problem?" Barbara Fielding laughed suddenly. "Don't tell me that you thought of Gerry as your own discovery? I'll bet over half the females in that room last night have known the pleasure of Gerry Wolder."
Lois finished her coffee. "Have you?" she asked harshly. "Have I what?"
"Known the pleasures of Gerry Wolder?"
"Naturally." Barbara sounded surprised that Lois should have to ask. "A few years ago. I was curious and he obliged."
"So what difference does it make to you if I was curious?"
"Oh. If that's all it was...." Barbara's voice registered disbelief.
Lois rose abruptly. She didn't think she could stand much more of this conversation-this being attacked so subtly that she hardly knew where to defend herself.
"I think I'll take a bath," she said.
Barbara smiled. "I'll keep you company. That is, if you don't mind."
"Why should I?"
Barbara did not hear-or else pretended not to hear-the truculence in the younger girl's voice. She followed Lois casually, hung the terry cloth robe on a hook and perched herself on the closed toilet seat.
Lois removed her robe and nightgown and sat on the edge of the bath tub in order to run the water.
"The main trouble with Gerry," Barbara said, raising her voice slightly so that it could be heard over the running bath water, "is that if you are good enough, he'll pass you along to his friends."
Lois stared at the girl in the bikini.
"Men do that sort of thing quite a lot," Barbara said sarcastically. "They like to use women. We have what they enjoy."
"So I've heard," Lois responded with equal sarcasm.
"Since you understand that," the dark-haired girl went on, "you must realize that your only response is to use them, instead."
"You make everything sound like a jungle," Lois said with distaste.
"Life is a jungle, Aimes," Barbara told her, with the note of self-satisfaction that a teacher may use when she forces a not particularly bright pupil to grasp a point. "You have to decide the type of animal you want to be when you live in it. Which brings us back to those three choices."
Lois sighed. She had a feeling that Barbara was not done with that subject.
"You can be a soft little creature that depends on the fiercer beasts for protections," Barbara went on. "Or you can stay in your den and birth whelps...."
"Good heavens," Lois interrupted, as she reached to turn off the tap. "Supposing I don't feel like being any sort of an animal?"
"You have no choice," Barbara said complacently. "Look at yourself. You are a female animal, just like I am. Our bodies are built just the same. We have...."
"I know what we have," Lois said, with an expression of distaste. "Good then."
Lois lowered herself into the hot water. If Barbara would only leave, she could relax and enjoy her bath.
"What's your point?" she asked.
"My point is the third choice. If a girl can't be a lion or a tiger, she can be a lioness or a tigress."
"A successful career woman, you mean?"
"Exactly." Barbara stood up and began to pace the bathroom floor. "She can use her body instead of letting it use her."
"That sounds a little like being a whore," Lois put in.
"Don't be stupid," Barbara responded with real annoyance. "Your body is just one weapon. And the more sparingly you use it the more effectively it can be used. If men think a good-looking woman is nice, they will give her advantages because she is good-looking-not because she sleeps around."
"I see...."
"I was going to introduce you to some important people last night. If you wanted to have an affair with one of them, it might have been of help. But then you had to disappear with Gerry...."
"I'm sorry," Lois interjected. "I didn't think it would be important."
"In the jungle, everything you do is important. One mistake can be your last." She paused. "People call me ruthless and I suppose they are right. But I'll tell you this much. I rarely make mistakes."
"I can believe that," Lois murmured.
"I'll use anyone," Barbara went on. "And when someone-man or woman-threatens me, I strike first. My claws are sharp and I usually aim for below the navel."
"Is that what you think I should do?" Lois wondered.
"If you're going to live in the jungle, Aimes, it's what you'll have to do."
Lois nodded. "Why are you telling me all this?" she asked after a moment.
Barbara looked amused. "Do you resent it?"
"I'm not sure," Lois said frankly. "I think I appreciate what you're trying to do. But I can't understand why."
"I'm not sure myself," Barbara admitted. "Maybe I thought it would be fun to train another tigress to live in the jungle with me...."
"And you figure I'll be grateful enough so that I won't use your own training against you?"
"I never count on anyone's gratitude," the woman answered sharply. "However, you're not quite a tigress yet. Perhaps a cub with potential, but...."
"True," Lois said. "And if I should become a tigress?"
"If you should-and if you should decide to attack me-then you'd better start protecting yourself."
"Below the navel?" Lois asked with irony.
Barbara laughed out loud. "Are there any other questions?" she wanted to know.
"Just one."
"Well...?"
"Where does Eric Grass fit into your scheme of things?" Lois wondered. "How can you be using him? I mean, he's not very important, or...." The honey blonde's voice trailed off as she saw the other woman's face grow cold.
"Eric is my business," Barbara said, in words that dripped ice.
"I ... I'm sorry...." Lois stammered. "But I thought that as long as we were letting our hair down ... "
"Not to that extent," Barbara interrupted to state. She looked down at the girl in the bathtub. "Anyway, it's not your hair that's down, Aimes. It's your panties."
What the hell...?
"Sorry," Barbara said, with quick con triteness. "I didn't mean to be such a bitch. You caught me off guard, that's all."
"Sure."
"And there are some things a woman likes to keep to herself." Lois grunted.
Barbara took the terry cloth robe from the hook and held it under her arm "I'm going back to the terrace," she said. "If you feel like getting into your bikini and having a drink with me...."
"I'll meet you there," Lois answered, after a moment.
"Fine. Then well get the rest of your things out of storage this afternoon."
Lois watched the other woman leave. What had gotten into her all of a sudden?
Was Barbara actually ashamed because she liked Eric without being able to use him? Did-the existence of an unselfish romance throw her whole theory out of kilter?
Or was she-Lois-being naive? Was something else involved that she couldn't even guess about?
Whatever it was, she told herself, it was none of her business.
But that didn't stop her from being curious.
There were ways to find out, she thought. Not from Barbara, of course. That would only be asking for trouble. But she'd be willing to bet that some of the girls on Conquer would know. She'd never heard of an office yet where the details of an office affair could be kept secret from the girls who worked there.
She got out of the tub and began to dry herself.
Who would have thought that Barbara would have turned so touchy though?
She was a strange woman, all right. And her theories about life were even stranger.
But who knew. Maybe the girl had something....
Lois hung the towel up and walked back to her bedroom. Now to get into her bikini and have that drink....
It was Wendy Lassiter who gave Lois her first real clue concerning Eric and Barbara.
On the Monday following her strange conversation with Barbara, Lois happened to run into the platinum blonde on her coffee break. Wendy asked her if she had made any plans for the Fourth of July.
"Why, no," Lois answered. "As a matter-of-fact, I haven't." She paused. "Why?"
"A group of us are planning to spend the day together at the beach. Oh, it won't be anything fancy," Wendy hastened to add. "We always go to a little public beach down on the Jersey Shore. But it should be fun. Bunny Windome, Olga Gorlock and Sherry Johnson will be there, along with five men from the magazine."
"It sounds like I'd like it," Lois responded. "Who are the men in the case?"
Wendy named some names. "Our real catch is Eric Grass," she added.
"How so?"
"We tried to get him to come along with us all last year," the other girl went on to explain. "But he always had one reason or another for turning us down. He is a kind of lone wolf, you know."
"So I've heard," Lois put in. "What happened this time to make him change his mind?"
"Darned if I know. Alf Raeder talked him into it, somehow. But since Eric is coming," she added, "we'll be needing an extra girl."
"So I was elected."
Wendy laughed. "It was Alf who mentioned your name first, I think. Then Bunny and I said you'd be just great ... if you want to come."
"I'd love to." Lois took a sip of her coffee and looked at the platinum blonde. "What's he like, anyway?" she asked.
"Who? Alf?"
"Eric."
Wendy lifted an eyebrow. "I thought you were with him on Friday night?"
"I was," Lois answered. "But he's ... a hard man to figure out."
"If you know that," Wendy grinned, "you know as much as I do about Eric. He's the mystery man of Conquer Magazine."
"I keep wondering about him and Barbara Fielding," Lois said, persistently. "They make an odd couple. I mean...." She hesitated. "I mean, they just aren't a pair you'd think of as a match."
"I was going to ask you about that," Wendy admitted. "You live at Barbara's house now, for heaven's sake. Why don't you ask her? You know: woman to woman."
"I tried."
"And she's not talking?"
"Not about Eric."
The platinum blonde shrugged. "I've only been at Conquer for a year."
"I know."
"But the way I hear it, Eric and Barbara Fielding had a really torrid affair going before I came. They practically set the office on fire whenever they looked at each other."
"Yes?"
"Eric was the coming star then," the girl went on. "He was a boy wonder who had just come here from Washington, D.C. and was writing one story after the other which exposed the New York metropolitan scene. As for Barbara ... well, she was Barbara. From what I've been able to learn, she was just the same then as she is now."
Wendy paused for a few seconds, and then went on. "Like I say, the two of them really sizzled for each other. But suddenly the whole thing cooled off to practically zero."
"What happened?" Lois asked curiously.
"I don't know. Nobody does. Even Alf Raeder never found out."
"Still, they're back together now."
"Not the way they used to be," Wendy said. "But I'm just coming to that. Last year-just about the time I came to the magazine-Eric put his head in the noose."
Lois looked puzzled.
"Don't you know about Eric's famous boo-boo?"
"No. I don't."
"Oh. Well, you can look it up in the back issues, if you're really interested. But he was writing some articles about building financing, and he got onto T.V. Rudolph. You know who he is, don't you?"
"No." Lois shook her head.
"He's one of the big operators. During the past ten years or so he must have built half the famous office buildings in the city."
Lois shrugged. "I guess I'm just a country girl," she said.
"That's okay," Wendy grinned. "I wouldn't have known who he was either, if I didn't happen to work on Conquer. But, anyway ... Eric wrote some articles that accused Rudolph of not financing his buildings properly. Or maybe it was that he placed too big a mortgage on one building so that he could pay for the construction of the next building. I'm not sure. But whichever it was, he said that Rudolph's empire was going to collapse like a house of cards, and that his stockholders would be left holding the bag."
"I take it that the empire didn't collapse," Lois commented.
"Worse than that. Rudolph sued."
"But didn't Eric have any proof for what he wrote? Even I'd know better than to run that kind of story without proof."
"The way I understand it, Eric claimed he did have proof. But then there was some sort of robbery in the office and the proof disappeared."
"Ouch," Lois said.
"You can say that again, girl. For a while it looked very black. The magazine was going to be hung with a large law suit and Eric was going to be out looking for a job. It would have been a long search, by the way. I doubt if anyone else would have wanted to take a chance on him."
"How did he win the suit?" Lois wondered.
"The suit was dropped," the other girl told her.
"Barbara Fielding went to work on T. V. Rudolph."
"Oh?"
"Barbara can accomplish almost anything when she sets her mind to it. She not only talked Rudolph into dropping the suit, but also talked the publisher into keeping Eric."
"And that's when the affair started up again?"
"So it seems. But Eric won't talk about it. And you know how close-mouthed Barbara can be."
"I know."
Wendy shrugged. "At any rate, you'll see Eric on the Fourth." She laughed. "Maybe you can ask him."
"Thanks." Lois said dryly. "But no thanks."
Wendy looked at her wrist watch. "We'd better be getting back to work," she said.
"Yes. If I stay one minute longer, Barbara will be getting furious."
The black-haired woman was already impatient when Lois returned to her desk.
"What took you so long, Aimes?" she asked. "We have a great deal of work to do."
"Sorry," Lois replied casually. "I was just accepting an invitation for the Fourth of July."
Barbara's perfect face registered mild disapproval. "What sort of an invitation?"
"To go to the beach with Wendy Lassiter and some of the other people from the office."
"Which people?" Barbara asked.
Lois repeated some names she had heard. When she came to Eric's, Barbara did not betray any interest at all.
"If that's what you want to do, Aimes," she said with a sigh.
Lois had an absurd sense of guilt. "Why? Was there anything else?"
"I've just received a phone call from T. V. Rudolph," the older woman said. "He invited me to spend the day on his estates, and I suggested that I might bring you." Barbara appeared to hesitate before she continued. "It's not easy to get this kind of invitation, Aimes. It's a chance that doesn't come often. You've probably never heard of Mr. Rudolph, but he is a very wealthy, very important real estate man. Most of the guests there will be important, too. They could do you a lot of good."
"Well...." Lois stalled. The name "Rudolph" was enough by itself to make her consider going. And especially after Friday night, she did not want to disappoint Barbara.
"Still," the woman said coldly, "if you positively don't want to go...."
What the hell, Lois thought. She could always go to the beach. And there would be other times to get to know Eric. Whereas this....
"I'll tell Wendy that I had another date. That I'd forgotten about it," Lois said.
"Fine." Barbara smiled at her. "Now, we had both better get back to work, dear."
When Barbara Fielding walked back to her own desk, however, she was feeling far from satisfied. It was true that her plans for Lois were going to work out. But she was very annoyed at Eric.
He was supposed to have gone with them to Terry Rudolph's. You'd think that he would have wanted to be nice to the man who had dropped the law suit last year. But he just didn't seem to give a damn.
Barbara smiled bitterly to herself. It was as if Erie had a thing against gratitude. Any kind of gratitude....
She picked up the inter-office phone and dialed three digits.
A girl's voice answered: "Mr. Grass's office."
Barbara hung up the receiver without answering. She couldn't talk about this over the phone. She would see Eric, tonight.
At least Lois was starting to come along, she thought. She had chosen right, this time.
She always liked to have a girl in the spare bedroom-one that was young enough to take direction and good-looking enough to influence the right sort of man.
The last girl had been starting to get a little difficult before she left. But then most of them did. Barbara hoped that Aimes would work out. It was nice the way she had agreed to change her plans for the beach. If she hadn't done that, Barbara would have been terribly disappointed.
No. Lois Aimes might be somewhat foolish at times, and she was certainly a little strong-headed, but Barbara was sure she could handle her.
Now she had to make up her mind who to encourage the Aimes girl to be friendly with on the Fourth. Mitch Wallace was a likely prospect. As Conquer's lawyer, he could do Lois Aimes some good. But-even more important-an affair with Aimes would put him under an obligation to Barbara.
If only Eric would feel the obligation to come along and be nice to Terry Rudolph....
But that seemed to be asking too much of him.
She shrugged her shoulders. If she weren't such a stubborn woman she would have given him up as a lost cause long ago. But she never like to give any project up.
And that night, at his apartment, she was still stubbornly trying to change his mind.
"I can't for the life of me understand what you have against Terry," she said.
"Can't you?" He grinned sardonically at her. "He's a crook. He's a weasel. He's probably a thief. And, on top of all that, I don't like the man."
Barbara sighed. She glanced around Eric's apartment. It was small and bare. Shabby. She had been trying to get him to change it since the first time he had taken her here, but with singular lack of success.
It was as if he didn't mind shabbiness. As if he relished living this way. And that had been true before-when Eric had been the new hope of the magazine and she had been inching her way up the ladder.
"You never proved Terry did anything wrong," she reminded him. She instantly regretted the statement. It would not serve any purpose to get him angry.
He glowered at her. "I did prove it. But he-or somebody else-stole the proof from my files."
The woman shrugged. This wasn't getting them anywhere. None of their arguments ever seemed to get anywhere. They just went around and around.
In the old days, the subject of their fights would be the type of articles he insisted on writing. She would warn him that he was skating on thin ice and that he was bound to get into trouble.
Those arguments became so fierce that the two temporarily broke up. But even after the events had proven her right and they went back together again (though their affair was never again as wild as it once had been) he would not admit that she had been right. The louse stole my evidence, he would complain. If it weren't for that, I'd have put him in jail where he ought to be!
How could you reason with a man who thought like that? she wondered to herself. What difference did it make what might have been? Whether or not he once had the evidence to throw T. V. Rudolph in prison, the fact remained that it was T. V. Rudolph who won and who could have ruined Eric's career if he had chosen to.
"Terry did you a big favor," she said, "and you shouldn't forget it."
Eric grinned nastily. "He did you the favor."
"What difference does that make?" the woman retorted with anger in her voice.
"I'd say it makes a great deal of difference."
Barbara squirmed in the arm chair. It was a big, worn leather covered chair with broken springs and a musty smell. He must have gotten it from a used furniture store, Barbara thought. How she hated that chair.
"Don't tell me you're jealous," she said, starting to sound nasty herself. "Why should I be?"
"I couldn't say, darling. But you don't sound exactly delighted that Mr. Rudolph did me a favor."
"Let him do you all the damn favors he wants. Just leave me out of it."
She shrugged. "Get me another drink," she said, holding up her empty Scotch and water glass.
"Yes, m'lady."
He took the glass from her and refilled it.
"You won't change your mind?" she persisted, as she took a sip. "You prefer going to the beach with those ... silly people."
"They're not silly people. But, yes. That's what I prefer to do."
"You never wanted to go with them before, Eric," she said. "What made you change your mind this time?"
"I don't know." He refilled his own glass with straight whiskey. "Maybe I was wrong before."
"Oh?"
"Or maybe...." His grin was turning nasty again. "Maybe conditions are different now. That new apartment mate of yours may be coming along. And she's kind of a cute chick."
Barbara stared at Eric. The man was precisely four-and-a-half years young than she, and every now and again the fact rose up to gall her.
She bit back the angry retort that was on the tip of her tongue. She would not permit him to make her lose control. "Are you trying to make me jealous?" she asked quietly.
He took another sip of his drink.
"Because if you're talking about Lois Aimes, she will not be going with you to the beach. Repeat, not"
He stared at her.
"I've already asked her to come to Terry's with me. And she accepted."
He shook his head with something like admiration. "You don't miss a trick, do you?"
"Not if I can help it." She smiled slowly. "If you come to Terry's, Eric, you could see as much of Aimes as you wanted. If that is what you wanted."
"If that's what I wanted, I still couldn't do it." He laughed shortly. "You must have an assignment picked out for Lois already," he said. "You know: she's to be nice to some influential guys who may do you a favor, later on."
Barbara flushed. "That's a stinking thing to say."
"But true," the man said.
"I can't force Aimes to do anything. Maybe she'd take it into her head to try to cut me out with you." Now it was her turn to laugh. "But that's one thing you'll never know. Because you're going to the beach."
"That's right."
"You know something? You're a damn fool."
"And you're a bitch."
Barbara raised one shoulder. "Not like Miss Aimes," she said. "Not at all."
"It's too damn bad she's not here with you now!"
Eric grinned. He had gotten a rise out of her. Score one point for his side.
"It's a dirty shame," he said happily.
Time to do something, Barbara thought. Not the time for words, for getting into a hassle with the man. She knew how 'to handle him.
"Be right back," she said, turning and going to his bedroom.
She undressed swiftly and pulled her new "outfit" from her handbag. She'd bought it recently for the express purpose of giving Eric a hard-on-or any other man who was about to give her a hard time. A hard-on always made a man forget about giving her a hard time.
The "outfit" was made of some kind of rose-hued gossamer cloth, as sheer, as transparent, as flimsy as the minds of most of girls in the typing pool. Barbara stepped into the bikini-style panties, pulling the elastic high on the breathtaking swell of her hips, and looked down.
The wispy material concealed nothing. The dark luxuriant growth of her pussy hair showed clearly through. She shrugged, slipped into the nothingness of the bra. The puckered darkness of her stiffened nipples poked through, laughing at the garment. She drew the short gown over her shoulders and snugged it at the waist. It came down just barely two inches lower than her pussy, only making the darkness of her twat fur shadowed instead of clear.
Tossing her head back, she stepped, barefooted, back into the living room. Then, feeling her own excitement mounting despite herself, she went back into the bedroom and removed the bra.
It seemed to her then that her nipples preceded her back into the living room, they poked out so far through the transparency of the gown. They were almost scarlet in color now, she noticed, looking down.
"This give you any ideas?" she said, looking squarely at Eric. "Any other ideas than being nasty?"
"You're overdressed," Eric said carelessly, but there was nothing careless about the way he looked at her. And his voice sounded choked.
She went back into the bedroom without another word, stepped out of the panties and pranced back into the living room, her pussy free under the short gossamer hem.
"That's better," Eric said, still sounding as if there was something wrong with his throat.
She did a pirouette in front of him, making the hem of transparency lift up and away from her-hips, putting her proud pussy on open display. When she'd finished the whirl she stopped, facing Eric, not three feet from him, her feet apart, and unfastened the front of the gown.
She did a small, exquisite bump as it fell away in front, and held the bump at its upthrust, her hips forward, her pelvic mound up, her glorious ripe cunt on ultimate display, the swelling dusky-pink outer lips parted in the rich oasis of dark fur, the moist inner petals tender and glistening, peeping through.
She saw Eric's tongue appear briefly as be licked his lips. Aah, she thought. The battle's won before it started.
"Look good enough to eat, Eric?"
Eric made a strangling sound in his throat.
"Bitch," he said.
She laughed.
"Wouldn't you like to kiss it hello?"
It was all a game. It was a game she loved. Eric was leaning forward now, his face two feet from her upthrust cunt. There was sweat on his forehead.
Barbara took a step forward, stood with her feet farther apart, and thrust her cunt to within inches of Eric's parted lips. He sat frozen for a moment, then his hands went up slowly behind her, cupped the soft resilient mounds of her ass and pressed her forward as his mouth fastened over her hospitable, warm cunt in a deep, probing, sucking kiss.
Despite herself, a shudder ran over her.
"Aah," she said, putting her hands lightly on the back of his neck. "Hello again."
Eric began sucking her cunt in earnest then, licking and gulping like a starving man. But Barbara bad bigger and better ideas, now. She not only knew exactly what she was doing, she knew exactly how to do it. Eric loved it when she talked dirty.
"I'd love to have you fuck me now," she said, dropping her voice to a low, vibrant whisper. "I'd love to have you spread my legs and play with my pussy and then slide your big hard cock into my hot, wet cunt-every thick, stiff, beautiful fucking inch of it-and then fuck me hard, fuck me deep, fuck me so deep, deep, deep."
With the tips of her fingers she had parted the lips of her pussy as she spoke, opening the wet warm intimacy of her cunt to Eric's unwavering stare.
Without dropping his eyes, he had been undressing. When he stood up, he had nothing on but his shorts. The left leg stood out like some kind of idiot tent.
In one swift motion, Barbara bent and drew his shorts to the floor. The velvet-feeling side of his bone-hard cock brushed her cheek as she straightened up.
No matter how many times she took her first look at Eric's cock, she always thought the same thing-God, he had a big one! It stood straight out. pulsing ft little, looking stiff enough to hang a heavy handbag on. She reached out and closed her fingers around it, as if shaking hands. It felt like a thick crowbar under a soft sheath of skip.
"I love your cock," she said, looking up into Eric's face.
"And I love your cunt," he said. "It tastes so good tonight, I want it squeezed around my cock."
"I want to taste your cock again with my cunt," Barbara said, keeping in mind how he liked that kind of talk. "It's like a mouth, you know, my cunt. It has lips, and a tongue, and a palate, a very soft palate, and it can suck and lick and gobble and chew and swallow. All in a nice gentle way, you understand. I have a very nice, warm loving cunt for that big wonderful cock of yours."
She still had Eric's cock in her hand. She was sliding her hand back and forth slowly, squeezing tenderly, moving the soft sweater of skin up and down along the iron shaft. His hand was behind her, feasting on the heavenly hills of her ass. She felt one finger sliding into the sensitive crevice between the mounds, wriggled, then sank to her knees.
"Now I want to taste your cock with my mouth," she said, looking up at Eric. "I want to kiss it hello. All over again."
She leaned forward, opened her moist warm mouth wide, and enveloped the swollen, glistening hard head of his shaft, letting her tongue slide underneath to lick back and forth on the wrinkled, sensitive shawl of skin just behind and under the purpling head.
"Mmmm," she moaned, taking his cock deeper into her mouth, sucking and licking at the same time.
"Aah," Eric said in a tone of ecstasy. No more fight in him. "Jesus."
She took her mouth away, giving the underside of Eric's cock one last, loving lick, and stood up.
"Lie down, Eric," she told him. "On your back."
He did as he was told, without saying anything.
She stood for a moment astride his hips, watching his face as he stared upward at the moistness of her ripely parted cunt, then shed her wisp of a gown. Slowly, deliberately slowly, she let herself down toward his granite-hard obelisk of a cock, feeling her twat opening wider in welcome as her legs spread and her knees touched the floor.
She reached down to guide the head of his cock to her open, oozing cunt-mouth, but it was only token guidance. That cock would have found that haven in total darkness. Her cunt was a flesh-magnet to that great steel cock.
A second before letting her cunt envelop the head of Eric's prick, Barbara looked down. Her rich dark triangle of fur was glistening with her wetness, the neat open cleft of her cunt lips showing the delicate, quivering little ridges of soft pinkness inside.
She lowered herself a little more, gently, until the large hard head of Eric's straining cock touched the open, wet outer lips of her cunt. She lowered herself farther, carefully, not touching the rigid shaft with her hand now, until the whole head was inside her, extending her inner lips.
Then, inch by delicious inch, she lowered herself on the long, thick, impaling shaft, feeling the hard warm rod of muscle going up inside her, joyously spreading her resilient cunt walls until it was all the way up, deep inside her, and her cunt was pressed hard against his raised mound. She felt completely filled, as if the head of his cock was in her throat. She couldn't have spoken if she wanted to.
She raised herself then, until her inner cunt lips were at the sensitive neck of Eric's cock, just below the .head, and squeezed, contracting her cunt muscles once, twice, three times.
"Holy good Christ," Eric said. His eyes were closed and he started to raise his hips, to arch his cock deeper into her ravenous cunt.
"Lie still," she said. "I'll do everything."
She let herself down again so the great hard knob of the head of his rigid prick was deep up inside her again. Then she began to fuck him ever so slowly, lifting her cunt away from him almost imperceptibly, the lips clinging to his shaft like a mouth, sucking. Then, when her cunt was up around the neck of his cock, she'd lower herself again, slowly, until he was fully imbedded. God, it felt wonderful, that gigantic, alive, rock-hard cock up inside her. Delicious was the only word for it. She could almost taste it.
Barbara kept it up for a long time, sliding up and down slowly, tasting every inch of the thick hard delicious shaft, and there were a lot of inches to taste. Every once in a while she stopped her sliding, up-and-down fuck trips to squeeze his cock with tiny contractions of her inner cunt lips.
Then, to her intense disappointment, she saw Eric's eyelids, squeezed shut, go smooth, and all at once she felt some of the swollen hardness diminishing in his wetly trapped prick.
Quickly, she wetted the middle finger of her right hand and reached down beneath her, behind her buttocks. She probed beneath the soft heavy sac of Eric's balls, found the puckered entrance between the cheeks of his ass, and pushed. Her finger slid into his asshole, to the middle joint. Eric's eyes popped open and she felt his cock become hard as granite again in her slippery cunt-grasp.
"Now, Eric?" she said. "Now?"
She slid her finger deeper into his asshole and began working it in and out, at the same time sliding up and down his shaft faster and faster. Eric's hips arched upward as he pumped his long, thick cock up into her, meeting her every descent.
Impaled as she was on that great hard javelin of muscle, Barbara still had the feeling of being in complete control, as if the great cock pounding up into her was her very own toy, to play with, to pleasure herself with. His instrument became her instrument, the bow to draw across the strings of her rapturous violin of a cunt. She was making beautiful music inside herself, sliding up and down in a rhythm of her own making. The great head of his cock became a drum thumper, pounding on the tom-tom of her inner cunt. She had a whole symphony going as she slid up and down on the thick, slippery shaft of his cock, but gradually her selfish vertical fucking took on a jazz rhythm, her finger working in and out of his asshole on the offbeat.
She began to ride her hips back and forth as well as up and down, giving Eric's pumping shaft a wild beating, but he was game, and his hips kept pumping his cock up into her, as if asking for more. Her swollen, sliding clitoris ground against the hard mount at the base of his cock with every squirming thrust. Her inner cunt lips were contracting, grasping, holding the still-sliding shaft, and she heard a quivering, gasping moan starting deep in her throat, muffled by the thick gag of joy in her throat.
She could hear Eric groaning, too. Her symphony was at a crescendo, reaching a climax of inner sound and rapturous sensation.
Then she was coming, and coming, and coming, and it was the best orgasm she'd known in a long time. Her cunt lips kept tightening and squeezing spasmodically. Her climax went on and on in a sort of clenching delirium. She could hear herself moaning and groaning in her inner agony of delight, but she couldn't help herself, and didn't care.
As she felt Eric gushing up into her, bathing her inner fires, she could feel her cunt thirstily swallowing the healing flow.
She slid sideways, finally, feeling Eric's slack prick slide from her sated cunt, and lay on her back, her cunt oozing, looking up at the man. She knew she was smiling.
Eric stared down at her.
"We make a great pair, you and I."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means whatever you want it to mean."
All it meant to Barbara was that she'd won. Again.
SIX
Lois Aimes found it surprisingly difficult to tell Wendy that she would not be going with her and the others to the beach.
The main problem was that the girl kept misunderstanding the situation. It was almost as if it was deliberate.
"Look," Lois said at last. "Barbara didn't order me not to go with you people. She merely accepted another invitation for me and didn't have a chance to tell me about it before you and I talked. She apologized, but...."
"But when her majesty gives the order, Lois obeys," Wendy put in dryly.
"It wasn't like that at all," Lois objected indignantly.
The platinum blonde shrugged. "Have it your own way."
"I will," Lois said.
She wondered what had gotten into Wendy anyhow. It couldn't make that much difference to her whether she came along or not. She could easily get another girl to take her place.
She walked back to her office, wondering if anyone else in the group would be that upset with her.
At least Bunny Windome wasn't. Lois learned that the following day when the little brown-haired girl stopped her in one of the corridors.
"I understand you're going to spend the Fourth of July with Barbara?" Bunny said.
"Yes," Lois replied, ready to be on the defensive.
"Boy, do I envy you," the brunette said. "You're going up to T. V. Rudolph's estate, aren't you?"
"Yes," Lois said once more.
"When I think of all the important people you'll meet. And to be with Barbara Fielding, too. Wow!"
For a second or two, Lois wondered if Bunny was trying to be sarcastic. But then she realized that sarcasm was the one thing the girl was not capable of.
She smiled. "Wendy Lassiter doesn't envy me," she said.
"Oh, Wendy." Bunny dismissed the slender girl with a wave of her hand. "She doesn't mean anything. You know how she is. I'll bet she's just jealous."
"Maybe," Lois replied doubtfully.
"Just don't let Wendy bug you," the brown-haired girl went on. "Any female in her right mind would give her eye teeth to be doing what you're going to be doing."
"I suppose you're right at that," Lois responded, taking her leave.
Wendy did accomplish one thing, however. Before she talked to the slender girl, Lois was still somewhat torn about going. She had wanted to try to get to know Eric Grass better. And she felt guilty about having to turn down Wendy and the others.
She had even thought about talking to Barbara again, and might have done so if she hadn't realized how much it would have infuriated the older woman. Now, however, she felt committed inside herself.
Barbara Fielding did not discuss her plans with Lois until the morning of the Fourth. Then she woke up the girl early and began what Lois thought of as a coaching session.
"Now, I can't say for sure who all is going to be up there," Barbara explained, as they ate breakfast. "But one of the men is almost bound to be Abner Groot."
"Who is he?" Lois asked.
"He's Terry's junior partner," Barbara told her. "He is youngish, good-looking and has an eye for the women."
"Oh?"
"He also has an extremely jealous wife."
"Oh, oh," Lois responded with a grin.
"Exactly. I'd keep away from him if I were you, Aimes. Unless you want a rather messy scene."
"No, thank you," the honey blonde said hastily. "That I can do without."
"I thought you might feel that way." Barbara smiled at her. "There will be one man up there you may be more than casually interested in," she added, as if by afterthought.
"Who's that?"
"Mitch Wallace."
Lois appeared puzzled. The name rang some sort of bell, but she couldn't seem to place it. "He's the head of the law firm that represents the magazine," Barbara said. "And he's also an important stockholder in the company."
"And he's a close friend of Mr. Rudolph's?" Lois asked.
"A fairly close friend." Barbara gave the younger woman a quizzical glance. "Why?"
Lois hesitated. She did have a reason for asking. But the reason was hidden someplace in the back of her mind, and she could not seem to get it out in order to examine it. "Oh, nothing," she said finally. "I just wondered, that's all."
Barbara decided to let the matter rest. "Mitch is quite young and handsome for such a successful lawyer," she told Lois. "And it wouldn't exactly hurt your future at Conquer to have him as a friend." She paused. "You do want to get on the editorial side eventually, don't you? Of course I'll help you as much as I can, but...."
Lois caught all the implications. Barbara had mastered the difficult knack of giving a complete description of a situation while not even mentioning the possibility of its existence.
"I understand," the girl murmured. "I gather that he's single...."
"As a matter-of-fact, he's separated from his wife. I hope that doesn't bother you, Aimes."
The memory of Harold Arnour flashed through Lois's mind. "No," she said, half-defiantly. "It doesn't bother me."
"Why should it?" Barbara asked, soothingly. "A situation like that can often be the least messy of all."
Barbara drove her car into the Rudolph driveway right behind the one belonging to Abner and Eleanor Groot.
They parked side by side. Then Abner jumped out and greeted Barbara with a wave and a smile.
The man had the build of an athlete, Lois saw. He had a fair complexion and an almost too-boyish air.
His wife also appeared fair and athletic. But it was as if she had started to age earlier than her husband. Her face was taking on a leathery look and there were heavy creases in the corners of her eyes.
Lois watched the woman's reaction as her husband threw his arms about Barbara and aimed his lips at hers. Then the look of anger faded as Barbara turned her head at the last moment so that the kiss landed on her cheek. Lois smiled in silent approval of the dark-haired woman's technique.
Barbara disengaged herself easily and turned to kiss Eleanor. "How have you two been?" she asked, taking on the role of old family friend.
"'very well," Eleanor replied.
"And your children?"
by now Abner was obviously beginning to wonder whether or not he had been put down. "Everyone's fine," he said. "And you're looking great, Barbara. More beautiful than ever."
"Thank you. I was just going to say the same thing about your wife."
Eleanor issued some conventional denials. But Lois could sec that she was pleased.
Barbara placed a hand on Lois' shoulder and introduced her to the couple as her "good friend."
Lois recognized the admiration in Abner's eyes as he examined her figure through the thin, short skirted dress she was wearing. But she took her hint from Barbara and saved her warmth for the man's wife.
They returned to the cars briefly, in order to take out their swimming outfits. Then all four walked over the lawn to the pool.
As they approached the area, Lois saw a stout man in a pair of swimming trans detach himself from a crowd of people in order to walk towards them. He was practically bald and must have been in his late fifties or early sixties. No one had to tell the girl that this was Terry Victor Rudolph.
He had a benign, almost fatherly mien as he exchanged greetings with the foursome. But his eyes were small and unsmiling. Despite his round, bouncing belly and the general air of joviality he strove to impart, Lois thought that he would make a dangerous enemy.
"You can join the others in a little while," their host said, after shaking Abner's hand and kissing the women wetly. "But first you will want to put on your swim suits. I 'll have Rosie show you where you can change."
At T. V. Rudolph's signal, a stunning if blank-faced brunette who was dressed in a skin-tight, one-piece bathing suit came up to lead them to the main house. This was a large, rambling structure that-according to Barbara-was built shortly after the Civil War.
"They knew how to build things in those days," Abner said. "Not like today, when nobody has any pride in workmanship."
The whole early part of the afternoon stayed that way-one deadly dull remark after the other. Lois kept hoping that something would happen to liven things up. And she kept thinking that maybe the dull conversation was just a mask, that there were really bright people under the facade. But she came to the conclusion early that she was wrong. These people were genuinely, sincerely dull, all the way through.
During the first few hours at T. V. Rudolph's place the only thing that showed any promise was a near-slapping episode between Derry Darling and Eleanor Groot. Derry Darling was a tasty dish of a movie star, with a lovely little ass and a lisp. She was T. V. Rudolph's prize catch, at least for the day. Abner Groot, of course, made a jackass of himself over the blonde tidbit. Eleanor Groot, after a slow simmer, then made a jackass of herself, threatening the girl with mayhem. Barbara and Lois teamed up to calm things down, Barbara taking charge of Darling, Lois talking to Eleanor while she soothed her down.
For Lois, that was the high spot of the afternoon. Until Mitchell Wallace showed up.
If Mitch did not turn out to be quite as young as Lois had hoped, she had to admit that Barbara had been accurate in terms of her own description. At forty, Mitch was young to be such a successful lawyer. And though his tall body was beginning to accumulate some extra weight, with his brown hair and regular features he remained quite handsome.
He seemed completely captivated by Lois. He brought a late lunch to her, made sure that her drinks were always freshened, and paid her some of the most subtle compliments she had ever heard.
She couldn't not like the man, and when Barbara got her alone, she admitted it.
"You were right about him," she told the older woman. "He's not hard to take at all."
"I know. I told you. And I don't think he's finding you hard to take either."
Lois smiled.
"But don't let yourself get too smug about him, Aimes," Barbara cautioned. "When a woman gets too smug and forgets to keep pitching."
"I'll do my best, coach," she said.
She said it with a smile.
Barbara gave her a look anyway.
It was late in the evening and the party had loosened up, to the point of coming apart at the seams.
Lois Aimes was soberer than anyone there with the possible exception of the host, but that doesn't say she was cold sober. Far from it.
She was also horny, probably hornier than she'd ever been in her life, she thought. Her other life, when she was luscious, lascivious Lois. She was that Lois now.
She was dancing with Mitch, if you could call what she was doing dancing. The other people in the big living room, trying to dance or just stand up, and those who were just sprawled, were either too drunk or too engrossed or both to pay any attention to Lois and Mitch.
Lois was solo-dancing in front of her partner, doing an exquisite series of bumps that tossed up the light hem of her short dress and gave Mitch rod-hardening glimpses of her nylon-covered pussy.
"I bet I know what you'd like to see," Lois said, feeling giddy and abandoned as well as horny, and not caring. She liked the man in front of her very much, and at the moment she lusted for him wildly. He'd led her in from the darkened poolside to dance.
"What?" Mitch asked, reaching out to hold her shoulders as her hips swayed and pumped to the rock beat.
"I bet you'd like to see me do this dance without clothes on," Lois said.
"Can't we get off this crowded dance floor?" Mitch looked around.
"This way," Lois said, and led him through a door and down two steps into the den. The lights were muted and there was no one else in the room. The rock sound from the stereo pulsed strongly through the closed door.
Lois looked up at Mitch for a long moment, smiled a dazzling smile, swung her head to toss her hair away from her eyes, and bent and tugged and stepped out of her pantyhose. When she resumed her dance, instead of sometimes revealing a demure triangle of shadowed nylon, she put her honey-furred, pink-lipped cunt on open intermittent display.
To Mitch, at that moment, Lois' pussy was an awesomely lovely, wondrously beautiful sight. A dream come true. And the dream became a stop-action dream, as Lois stopped one of her bumps on the upthrust, her hips pushed forward and upward, and held the front of her short skirt high on the incandescent whiteness of the gentle curve of her lower belly.
She looked at Mitch's eyes as they focused hungrily on the magnet of her moist vibrant pelvic mound, at the luxuriant growth of blonde hair that stood out like an oasis in that delicious soft white desert of yielding flesh, a bushy oasis of live foliage not quite concealing the life-giving pure spring of her almost-bubbling cunt.
Lois shifted her feet farther apart, opening to Mitch's riveted stare an unobstructed view.
"A pinnacle among pussies," Mitch whispered hoarsely, and dropped to his knees in front of her. "I have to kiss Mt. Everest." Looking up at her as she watched, he leaned forward, and his mouth covered her cunt in a deep, warm, sucking kiss. She felt his tongue slide up into her cunt entrance, and she raised up on her toes, away from it.
"Ooh," she said. "We have to get out of here. Somebody might come in."
"Upstairs?" Mitch was still on his knees in front of her, his eyes rolled upward, his mouth wet.
"No. Nowhere in the house. Too risky, all these drunk people wandering around."
"Where?"
"I don't know."
"I do."
"What?"
"We'll go swimming. In the pool."
"And fuck? In front of whoever happens to be lying around the pool?"
"Right under their noses. It's dark, and they're all drunk. They won't pay any attention."
"But we've been swimming. We just stopped swimming, a little while ago. After the third Martini. And I got dressed, upstairs."
"Get undressed again. Into a bathing suit."
"All right," she said. "I have a dry bikini with my things upstairs."
"A bikini," Mitch said. "Perfect. My trunks are in the cabana at the deep end of the pool."
"See you in a couple of minutes," she said, starting toward the stairs.
"At the diving board," he said.
He was waiting for her as she found her way in the dimness around the few scattered people who lay sprawled with their drinks on the grass beside the pool. In the darkness she couldn't make out who they were. She cared less.
"Longest three minutes I've ever lived through," Mitch said softly as she came up beside him.
"Me too," Lois said, feeling the dampness from within oozing in the crotch of her bikini. She stepped up onto the diving board.
"Ladies first," she said, and ran lightly if a little waveringly to the end of the board and dived in, consciously keeping her toes together. See? she told herself, with little-girl pride. I'm not drunk after all.
Corning to the surface, she couldn't feel whether the water was cold or warm. The water was of no significance whatsoever. When she looked around once her head was out of water, she found Mitch's head beside hers.
"Everybody out of the pool," a man's voice bellowed boozily. "Enough of good clean fun. It's booze time."
In the vaguely and sparsely peopled dimness of the lawn side of the pool, no one paid any attention to the bellower. Or to Lois and Mitch, either. Lois started toward the dark corner on the far side of the diving board, feeling that her pussy was making the water start to steam.
"No," Mitch said, into her ear. "That's the deep end. No good for fucking. Can't get a toehold.".
She changed course, swam to the middle of the far side of the pool. It was just as dark there, Lois noticed. Nobody could see them there.
In water that came up to his chest, Mitch stood, and his arms went around her. She felt his open mouth covering her own, his tongue entwining with hers. She pressed her hips forward, urgently, feeling the hard bulge of his cock under his trunks pushing into the resilience of her lower belly.
She felt his hands, moving deftly in the darkness, unfasten the top of her bikini, letting the end drop along her shoulder blades. As she felt his hand cupping the pouting, full globe of her left breast, she felt her nipples tauten and rise, eager for the touch of his caressing, softly squeezing fingers.
She bent her knees forward and apart, letting the water and Mitch's one arm support her weight, and opened her legs. She felt the hard bulge in Mitch's trunks press against her itching, eager, still bikini'd pussy as she brought her legs around and behind his hips, hooking her feet together behind him, for security. The rest of her just floated, while her straining cunt pushed at the fabric separating it from Mitch's imprisoned prick. Her mind seemed to be floating, too, along with her body, and in the same specific direction.
She felt Mitch's thumbs hook in the narrow strip of fabric at her hips.
"Let go with your legs for a second," he said, "and straighten them out."
Lois did as she was told, happily, eagerly. When she wrapped her legs around Mitch's hips again, she found that he'd gotten his own trunks off, as well as her bikini bottom. He had moved fast. She loved him for it.
His rigid cock, freed at last, poked between her inner thighs, searching for her twat in the watery darkness. His hands were clasped around her hips and upper ass, under her, supporting her. Joyously she reached down and grasped the rock-hard shaft poking toward her, between her thighs in the dark water.
"Aaah, oooh!" she said. Wow, it was big! And hard. At that moment, in the soft water, she thought she'd never felt anything so hard.
She forgot about Barbara, forgot about her job, forgot about the host, the house, the pool, the sky above, the earth beneath. She forgot about everything except that long, thick, hard thing poking, searching, between her legs. She hugged her calves behind Mitch's hips, spread her thighs wide, and let the open mouth of her hungry cunt gulp in the hard fist of his cock-head.
She felt the whole thick, marvelously hard shaft slide full-length between the portals of her pussy, without any guidance, deep into her swallowing cunt.
"Oooh, God," Lois moaned, hooking her heels tight behind his back, pushing the opening of her twat hard against the grinding mound at the base of his shaft. She slid herself out and in, up and down, feeling the delicious hardness slithering easily in and out of her fuck-famished cunt. Deep in the all embracing water, it was some new kind of dream, a wet dream of fuck-ecstasy. But this was no dream. Mitch's plunging cock was as hard and as real as the concrete pool sides. As her hips writhed and pounded, her greedy cunt sucking and chewing and gulping at the hard shaft of joy, water lapped around her chin, into her mouth.
"Oh, fuck me, Mitch," she burbled. "Ream my cunt with that great hard cock. Drive it deep, deep, deep."
She saw the small swells and waves their fucking created slapping Mitch in the face. He spewed water from his open mouth and grinned maniacally in the semi-darkness.
All at once Lois was unaware of the water around her. She felt that there couldn't be so much capacity for pleasure, so much nerve-shouting joy, in one body, in one cunt. She rolled and squirmed and humped, not feeling the water around her, not feeling anything but the in-pounding slow drives of the big hard cock that was transporting her into a world of rapture.
As the tempo of Mitch's liquid fucking increased, she found her rapture building to a climax that she wanted to hold off as long as possible. Her hips pumped and bounced in watery delirium, her cunt writhed and gulped at the long-sliding probes of Mitch's untiring shaft. Lois felt as if her cunt were chewing and swallowing the whole delicious stiff length of it, as if her twat-mouth were a living thing, with its own capacity to taste and to feel, to experience ecstasy, to feed and funnel that distillation of fuck-joy to every rapturous inch of her tingling body.
She was trembling inside, shuddering outside, as her hips pumped and thrashed in a heedless churning of the water, her cunt slithering and gulping and squeezing. Mitch was splashing his cock in to the hilt, driving it faster and seemingly deeper with each successive spraying stroke. She gasped. She moaned.
Then her cunt was out of control, flailing in the water, and Lois was aware that she was screaming as she reached an explosion of an orgasm, splashing, moaning, shuddering, as Mitch spurted hotly into her.
Her head went underwater briefly, then surfaced. "Nobody's noticed anything," Mitch said into her ear.
He kissed her tenderly on the cheek.
They were dressed and about to leave the house, unobtrusively, through the front door when a voice stopped them.
"Just a minute." It was T. V. Rudolph, coming toward them through an archway to the right. He appeared to be quite sober, at least sober compared to the rest of his guests. They were all quiet, wherever they were. Out of it, apparently. "I want to talk to you for a moment, Lois."
"Yes?"
Mitch moved a few feet away from her and stood with his hand on the doorknob.
"I understand that you have a room with Barbara Fielding," the stout man said.
"That's right."
"Listen to her. She's a very smart girl. If you pay attention to her you can go far."
Lois nodded. She wondered what the man was getting at.
"And that young man. Eric Grass. Do you know him?"
"Slightly."
"Tell him that I have no hard feelings. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, but Barbara knows him far better than I do."
The stout man smiled at her. "I told Barbara to tell him that also. But she has a lot on her mind. She might forget. I want you to tell him that I have no hard feelings. Hell understand."
"All right," Lois said.
"One more thing. Say that I wish he wouldn't keep refusing my invitations. Will you do that, too?"
"Of course," Lois said. "Good night. And thank you for a lovely time."
"Come again," T. V. Rudolph said.
SEVEN
On the ride back to the city Lois went over in her mind some of the strange events of the afternoon and evening at T. V. Rudolph's. She was the real Lois now, the normal Lois, nice Lois-although she was beginning to wonder which Lois was the real Lois.
She remembered talking to Eleanor Groot at one point, telling the woman she'd made a jackass of herself, but everybody make a jackass out of himself or herself sometime or other, so why worry about it? The woman had seemed to feel better then about her silly display of jealousy.
She remembered Mitch talking about her part in the early scene at the swimming pool.
"You're quite a woman," he had said.
"Why?"
"The way you calmed Eleanor down."
"Oh, that." Lois had shrugged. "Any woman there could have done it. I think that Eleanor wanted to be calmed down."
"I'm sure she did. But you had to be pretty smart to guess that."
Lois had shrugged again.
"The point is," Mitch had continued, "that none of the other women did do anything. Except Barbara, of course, and she had her hands full with her natural prey."
"You mean Derry?" She had been surprised. She had not thought of the movie queen as anybody's "prey."
"Who else?" Mitch had laughed. "Barbara's always after an exclusive story, isn't she? I bet she's got herself a beaut, by now."
"You're right," Lois had admitted.
"So that left Eleanor with no one to handle her. Until you popped up."
"Actually, I was waiting for Rosie or one of the others to do something. They all knew her better than I did. But when everyone just stood there...."
"You'd make a good lawyer," Mitch had told her.
"I wonder what that business was at the door about Eric Grass?" Mitch said, as they were turning into city streets.
"Couldn't have had any importance."
"It had to be of some importance or T. V. Rudolph wouldn't have made a point of bringing it up."
"I suppose you're right."
"He's a strange man, that Rudolph."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, if I'd been insulted in the pages of that magazine the way T. V. Rudolph was, I'd have hard feelings about the writer of the article. And I don't think I'd invite him to my home, either."
"Was it really that bad?" Lois asked.
"Worse. Read the issue some time. You'll find it in the files." Mitch trailed his left hand out the window and let the cigarette fall from his fingers. "I don't know how an intelligent man like Eric Grass ever came to write such a piece. And without proof...."
"I thought he did have some proof," Lois said. "And that it was stolen from his files."
"That's what he claimed. But there was no proof of that, either. If you ask me...."
"What?" Lois urged.
"Well, I'd say that it was a case of a too-eager young man going out so far on a limb it broke off behind him. It's just lucky he didn't bring us all crashing down." He paused, thinking. "I was an attorney on the magazine's side," he went on. "And I wasn't at all happy about that, I can tell you."
"What did you do?"
"I couldn't do anything, really. I tried to calm T. V. Rudolph down."
"You must have succeeded," Lois said. "I mean, Eric Grass is still on Conquer, and you and Mr. Rudolph are friends."
"I wish I could take credit for part of that," Mitch said. "It would have been the high point of my career as a calmer downer. But as a matter-of-fact, I failed miserably. Rudolph refused to even see me. 'Talk to my lawyers,' he said on the phone."
"Then how...?"
"Your friend, Barbara. She took over and made me look like an amateur." He gave a laugh of admiration. "I still can't say how she managed it. It wasn't pure sex. You just saw T. V.'s current mistress. Well, the one he had then was just as gorgeous and just as willing to give him everything he wanted in that department."
"Maybe it was charm," Lois suggested.
"Maybe. At any rate, the next thing I knew he was calling me on the phone with an invitation to lunch. Just the two of us. That's when he offered to drop the suit in exchange for a written retraction. I nearly kissed his feet on the spot."
"What about Eric Grass?" Lois asked. "I'm surprised that he wasn't fired anyway."
The lawyer nodded grimly. "If you want my opinion, he should have been. Getting us into a spot like that...." He shrugged. "But Barbara went to work on the board of directors with the same energy she used on Rudolph. After what she had just saved them from, I suppose they couldn't have refused her anything."
"Eric has his job, if that's what you mean. Though he is not as well trusted as he used to be. In fact, Trent Sloan checks over his copy himself."
"And Barbara has gone upward and onward."
"Naturally." Mitch paused. "In fact, there has even been talk about making her executive editor under Trent. Keep that under your hat, though."
"I will," the girl promised. "But what about Mr. Rudolph? How did you and he get to be so friendly?"
"Oh, he began to take an interest in the magazine. He's even bought some stock." Once more the lawyer hesitated. "He's also been feeling me out about doing some work for him."
"Are you going to?"
"Who knows? I haven't had a firm offer yet. Only hints."
Lois settled back in her seat. A few minutes later the car stopped in front of the canopied entrance to a Park Avenue building. The doorman helped Lois from the car and greeted Mitch Wallace by name.
"Shall I have the car put away, sir?"
"Yes," Mitch told him. "I'll take you home by cab," he said to Lois.
"Fine."
They took the elevator up to Mitch's apartment. It was not large, but it was beautifully furnished. Lois guessed that it had been done by a professional decorator. There was a piano in the corner of the living room, and Lois walked over to it and looked at Mitch inquiringly.
"I'm afraid that's just for show," he admitted with a laugh. "Though my kids play, sometimes."
"Is that them?" Lois asked, looking at a silver-framed picture of a boy and girl in their early teens.
"Yes," Mitch replied shortly. "They live with their mother."
Lois flushed. It was painfully obvious that Mitch did not wish to discuss his private life with a casual girl. Other people's affairs, yes. But nothing personal.
"Would you like a drink?" he asked, sensing her anger.
"Yes," she said. Why not?
Lois watched him as he stepped to the bar and stirred up two Martinis.
Now she knew who he had reminded her of earlier: Harold Arnour.
And that spoiled everything.
But she tried, once they'd reached the bedroom. She tried to get into her lascivious Lois role, but it just wouldn't come to her. So she tried a delaying action.
"Just he on your back," she told him. "I want to start on you."
He did as he was told, and she knelt on the big double bed between his spread legs and leaned forward and opened her mouth to welcome the hard glistening head of his big, swollen cock.
With more skill than feeling, she devoted her attention to Mitch's grateful cock, licking it ever so tenderly, sucking it ever so softly, kissing and caressing it ever so softly.
"Come to me, Lois," she heard him say, after a long while. "Over this way." She felt his hands urging her thighs toward him, toward his mouth.
Slowly, she moved around on the bed, letting his cock swivel freely in her mouth, and raised herself, opened her legs, and let her cunt down on his open mouth, straddling his face in the classic sixty-nine position.
Lois felt his fingers part her outer pussy lips, reach the inner lips. His tongue licked deeply, hungrily, along the inner walls of her cunt. His tongue probed deeper, his mouth sucking and gulping, as he gorged himself on the delicate inner folds of her cunt, on her tender, squirming clitoris.
She felt his cock, deep in her mouth, becoming even harder at the base. Her fingers were caressing it expertly there, when her mouth was busy at the head and neck. It was time, she knew, with a feeling of detachment, to put it where it belonged.
"Don't you think it's time to fuck?" she asked, as if she were asking what time the train was due.
"Umm," he said, and swung her hips around so her cunt was poised directly above his vertical, spear-like shaft. "Let's sink it, honey. Let's sink it deep."
She lowered herself slowly until his whole shaft was deep in her cunt, then moved her hips skillfully in a series of tight little circles, feeling his cock moving around against the resiliency of her inner cunt. But she herself felt no surge of joy, or pleasure, or even sensation. Well, hardly any, she bad to admit.
"Christ, Lois," Mitch groaned ecstatically, "you certainly do know how to hurt a fellow." He was making one of his rare jokes.
His hips arched upward, as if he were trying to penetrate even deeper up into her, up past the pelvic gate, where the soft warm portals had such a firm grasp on the base of his shaft.
"Shh," Lois said, amusing herself. "I'll do the talking. With my lower mouth."
To her, then, his deeply thrust cock felt like a thick warm bone going up inside her cunt channel. She raised herself, until her inner cunt lips were at the neck of his cock, and squeezed, automatically. Mitch groaned again, but said nothing.
Lois didn't know how long it went on. It must have been a long, delicious fuck for Mitch, but to her it was just a nothing, a blank, like going through the motions on an exercise machine.
When he came, in a flurry of pumping, she thought she could bear the gush of Mitch's warm sperm jetting up into her.
After a long few minutes, she lifted her twat up and away from him.
She thought she could hear his long limber cock make a soft wet plopping sound as her cunt lips released it.
EIGHT
Mitch Wallace did not take Lois home in a cab as he had promised, after all. Instead he sent her home-and insisted on pressing some money into her hand in order to pay for the cab.
That was all she had needed, the girl thought, to make her feel like a real prostitute.
When Lois entered the apartment, she found a night-gowned Barbara Fielding. The dark-haired woman was lying on her back on the living room couch and going over some notes.
At Lois' approach, Barbara straightened up into a sitting position. "Hi," she said. "Did you have a good time with Mitch Wallace."
"Yes."
"What did you do?"
Lois shrugged. For a moment she had to resist the temptation to test the theory she had thought of in the cab. She could almost hear herself saying that they went to Mitch's apartment where she managed to make out. But Barbara would merely look amused and file the information away for future reference. She might even ask for physical details about Mitch.
"Mitch and I stopped off in town for a drink."
"That sounds enjoyable," Barbara commented. "It was."
Barbara smiled. "Would you like to join me in a cup of tea, Aimes?" she asked.
"Don't get up," Lois protested. "I can make it for us."
"It's no trouble at all," Barbara assured her. "As a matter-of-fact, I was just about to have a cup when you came in."
Lois followed the black-haired woman into the kitchen and watched her put some water on the stove to boil and prepare the tea cups.
"How did you make out with Derry Darling?" the honey blonde asked.
"Marvelously," Barbara grinned with pleasure. "I was just checking over the notes from our interview. You'll see them when we get back to the office."
"Did you have to promise to keep today's incident off the record?" Lois wanted to know.
Barbara swung around. The upper part of her think translucent nightgown was pulled back against her full, round breasts and Lois could see the dark outlines of her nipples. "Are you kidding?" she asked.
"I just thought...." Lois began.
"Hell, Aimes. If I didn't write that whole affair up, she'd probably come into the office one day and shoot me! And you know something! I don't think I'd blame her."
Barbara went back to the stove in order to turn off the fire from under the now boiling water. Then she used a pot holder to transfer the water from the kettle to the cups.
"I don't get it," Lois conceded, as she jiggled her tea bag to make the stuff brew faster. "What don't you get?"
"Why Deny should want people to know what happened today with Eleanor and Abner."
Barbara got up again to shoe two quarters of lemon. "Don't get little Deny wrong, Aimes. She may lisp around like a helpless idiot, but she's really a tough little broad who knows all the answers."
"Oh...?"
"And one of the answers, as far as she's concerned, is for the movie-going public to think of her as a siren who just can't help it."
Lois looked puzzled. "Could you explain that, please?"
Barbara laughed and took a sip of tea. "In her films," the black-haired woman went on, "Deny plays a sexy little girl who is always taken advantage of. A man may leave his wife and family for her. But it isn't her fault. She doesn't do anything to make him stray-except be herself."
"I see."
"Now, it wouldn't do her box office returns any harm to have people think that she's the same way in real life."
"And that's the way you're going to write the story?"
"Why not?" Barbara wanted to know. "Oh, I won't use Abner or Eleanor's names, of course. They will come out as 'a prominent New York businessman and his wife.' And I'll use the incident as a peg on which to hang further revelations about Deny. But it will make a good lead."
"I suppose it will," Lois said, thinking. "But are you telling me that her hysteria was all faked?"
"Who knows?" Barbara shrugged. "Maybe it was all an act. Maybe she believe the act at the time. Who am I to judge?"
"In any case, she doesn't mind taking advantage of it," Lois remarked, as she stood up to put her tea cup in the sink.
"That's how you get to be successful, Aimes. By taking advantage of the right situations at the right time."
The women began to straighten up the living room and turn out the lights.
"Did I ever tell you how I got started in this business?" Barbara asked, after a while.
"No," Lois responded, as she started into her bedroom. "I don't think that you did."
Barbara sat down on the bedroom chair and lit a cigarette for herself as Lois began to undress. "Well, you must have heard that I was an entertainer at one time."
Lois grinned. "It's been mentioned a few times by the girls in the office," she said.
"I'm sure," the other woman replied. "But what I'll bet hasn't been mentioned is the type of entertainer I was."
Lois took off her slip. It was rumpled and Mitch had torn it slightly, when he'd removed it. But if Barbara noticed-and Lois would have been willing to bet anything that she did-she gave no sign.
"I ran away from home at fifteen," she went on. "Of course I told everyone, then, that I was older. And I had a body that was already mature. Sooo...." She made an ironical gesture. "I worked hard until I became a fourth rate dancer and a third rate stripper. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Finally-through much effort on the part of a gentleman friend-I became a member of the chorus line of a fairly long-running Broadway show. The problem was that I'd reached my peak."
"Why?" Lois asked, as she took off her briefs and slipped into her shorty nightgown. "If you had ambition and contacts...?"
"What I didn't have was talent. Or at least not enough. I could still do pretty well on amateur night."
Lois nodded.
"Lode, Aimes," Barbara said. "There were eleven other girls in that line with me. They all had great bodies. But there were only one or two of them with the talent to get anywhere-and they didn't have the drive."
"I guess you need both," Lois agreed.
"Damn right. But I was lucky enough to learn that I had another talent. One that I never suspected."
"What was that?"
"A talent for being talked to. Men and women both liked to talk to me. The stars of that show began to tell me things. And so did their friends when I met them at parties."
"Yes?"
"And that's when I began to write down what they told me and send those items in to columnists. I got paid for this, of course. Then I began to write for the fan magazines. What the hell, I thought. I'd let the other dames break their rumps trying to make it in show business. I'd sit back and write about them." She paused. "See what I mean?"
"I think so," Lois answered.
"If I wasn't in that show, and if I didn't take advantage of the situation I found myself in there, I'd never have gotten anywhere. I would probably be another Eleanor Groot today, with my figure going to pot."
"Eleanor doesn't have it so bad," Lois put in.
"If that's the kind of life you want ... "
Lois did not answer.
"But if it isn't the kind of life," Barbara went on, "you do have a situation you can take advantage of."
"Which is?"
"Mitch, of course. He's a powerful man, baby doll. And if you use that hot little body of yours in the right way, hell help you get anything you want on the magazine."
Lois stood up silently.
"I may get a promotion fairly soon," Barbara told her then. "Which will leave some editorial openings right down the line."
"Yes," Lois said. She did not mention the fact that Mitch had already told her about Barbara's prospective move.
"You could jump into one of those openings," the older woman said. "If you really wanted to."
"Maybe I could," Lois replied. She walked to the bathroom. "I've got to brush my teeth and climb into bed," she stated. "I'm exhausted."
"So am I," Barbara admitted, as she went to her own room. "It's been a day."
Lois said goodnight and shut the bathroom door. She put some toothpaste on her brush and ran the water.
What was she going to do? Keep making it with Mitch?
That would be the wisest course. She could make him feel like a big man and he would do things for her.
But how would that be any different from what she'd had with Harold in Capitol city? And she had run away from that....
She put her toothbrush away and cold creamed her face. Then she went into her room, turned off the lights and got into bed.
She had to think....
But she was too tired to think....
Oh, well. Tomorrow was another day.
But by tomorrow, Lois was still not able to make up her mind. And when Mitch called that evening to ask for a date, she put him off.
If she were to be completely honest with herself, she would have to admit that she was not happy about the prospect of his calling again. This whole thing with Mitch was becoming too complicated. There-was nothing spontaneous about it. It was all one of Barbara Fielding's plans.
She tried to tell herself not to be foolish. She did not have to idolize a man to enjoy herself with him. And if there had been no plan-if there had been no Barbara-she would not have had to think twice before deciding to go with Mitch, and using him if it came to that.
So why did it bother her now?
Because she couldn't kid herself about the situation. There was a plan. And no amount of self-argument would change that.
She stalled, therefore, until Barbara found out and began to get annoyed.
Then, when she finally agreed to a date, she claimed that it was her time of month. A sure-fire way to spend a Platonic evening-but one that she couldn't use again for another four weeks. And Mitch was already talking about spending the following weekend in the country with her.
She stalled again, and was saved by Wendy Lassiter who invited her to spend that Sunday at the beach.
"The same crowd is going that you missed on the Fourth," she said. "You can't turn us down a second time."
"No, of course not," Lois replied. "Thanks for asking me."
Barbara was not pleased when she learned about the plan. "I'm becoming very disappointed in you, Aimes," she said. "Mitch told me that he has invited you for a weekend. I don't understand how you can turn him down for a day at the beach with...."
"But, Barbara, it wouldn't have been right for me to have said no to Wendy."
"And why not?"
"Twice in a row?" Lois looked at the other woman. "She'd have thought I was some sort of snob."
"Does it really matter what little Wendy Lassiter thinks?"
Lois turned away. "There'll be plenty of time to have dates with Mitch," she said. "I hope so, Aimes. I sincerely hope so."
Although Lois was telling the truth when she said that she did not want to hurt Wendy's feelings, she had still another reason for insisting on going. That was Eric Grass.
The man's personality intrigued her more than she liked to admit. And there were also at least two mysteries there: his actions-incredibly stupid for such a bright man-in the case of T. V. Rudolph; and his relationship (hot, cold or whatever) with Barbara Fielding.
She had no wish to try to take him away from her friend. She could never do a thing like that. But he was still ... intriguing.
She drove down to the Jersey shore in Eric's car, along with Wendy and a sports writer named Greg Aurbach. On the way she did her best to make light conversation with the man whom-as the extra girl-she was expected to spend the day with.
But it was a bust. He replied to her attempts either with grunts or with one syllable, sardonic remarks which were worse than grunts. With they reached the beach, Lois found that she was far less at ease with the man than she had been at the start of the drive.
"What's wrong with him?" Lois whispered to Wendy after they had all left the car and the two girls dropped behind the men. "Is he mad at me about something?"
"I don't think so," the platinum blonde replied. "Eric's the one who first suggested your coming along."
"Really?" Lois showed her surprise.
"Well, not this time. But the Fourth he did."
"You didn't tell me," Lois complained.
Wendy grinned at her. "You don't have to know.
They waited at the entrance for the six others to show up, then the girls and men separated in order to change.
The women rented a large bath house which they could share and as soon as they locked the door and were along together, Lois realized what it was that she had missed with Barbara. It was pure female laughter. The laughter of healthy young women who weren't trying to prove anything to each other, but were simply out to have a lot of fun.
It wasn't as if Barbara Fielding did not have a sense of humor. But hers was a caustic, dry kind of wit, with more than a hint of the knife about it. Lois always felt that she had to be on her guard with her. She could not remember a time when she and Barbara had just plain giggled.
But here they were all giggling like mad. They made silly remarks about the men, about the magazine and about each other's bared figures. They even rumpled a few hairdos, and Lois found herself ticking a just-bikinied Bunny Windome in the ribs, only to be tickled by Olga Gorlock in return.
None of this would have been possible with Barbara, of course. Lois remembered having once absent-mindedly placed her arm about the other woman's shoulders. Barbara had moved quickly away. "I don't like being touched" she had explained.
The day became even more fun when the girls trooped out to join the men. Even Eric was relaxed now. His moodiness appeared to nave vanished when he put on his bathing trunks. He threw himself into a wild, uninhibited game of touch football, helped Lois learn how to ride the breakers in, and sunbathed with his head in the girl's lap.
For lunch they bought frankfurters at one of the stands near the beach. Then they sunbathed and swam some more. Lois felt sad when one of the men announced that it was five-thirty, and that they had better start to change if they wanted to start back to town.
"By the way," Eric asked Lois, as they headed back towards the changing area. "Do you have any plans for dinner?"
"No."
"You'll have dinner with me, then," he said. "Maybe we can eat with the others. That is if you don't mind."
If there was a certain return of sarcasm in the man's voice, Lois chose to ignore it. She was reluctant to break from her relaxed mood. "I'd love to," she said.
The man gave her a peculiar look. "Fine," he said.
When Lois left him to walk to the bath house with the other girls, Wendy Lassiter also brought up the plans for dinner. "We all usually eat together after a day at the beach," she said.
"I've already told Eric I'd come along," Lois replied.
"Really?"
"You sound surprised," Lois snapped. She stopped before the entrance of the bath house so that the platinum blonde would have to halt as well. "Would you rather I didn't come?"
"No. Of course not." Wendy appeared unsure of how to continue. "I guess I thought that Barbara might have -lined something up for you."
"Why should she have?" Lois demanded.
Wendy shrugged and walked into the bath house.
Lois waited for a moment and then followed her. She decided to keep the rest of what she had to say to herself. It had been too lovely a day to spoil now by a fight.
Later, however, on the drive back to New York, she could not help thinking of the implications of what both Eric and Wendy had said.
Did they believe that Barbara made all her decisions for her? That she told Lois who she could see and eat dinner with and who she couldn't?
That was so unfair of them. Barbara might be her boss in the office, but outside she was her friend. Of course it was true that she had sometimes followed Barbara's wishes instead of her own. But wasn't there give and take in all friendships?
Wendy had never liked Barbara, Lois thought. And-to be fair about it-she had to admit that Barbara treated Wendy somewhat condescendingly.
So perhaps that accounted for it. But why should Eric have implied the same thing?
Or maybe he hadn't, she thought wearily. Maybe it had all been in her own imagination.
During dinner at a West Side Italian restaurant, Lois was able to forget speculations. They had spaghetti and wine and lots and lots of laughs. It was fun.
Afterwards, though-when they had separated into couples and she found herself alone with Eric in the car-they came back to her with a rush.
It started with Eric inviting her to his apartment for a drink.
Lois shook her head. "I don't think so," she said.
"Why not?" His dark eyes seemed to burn through her. "I promise not to rape you."
Lois smiled. "It isn't that," she murmured.
"What is it then?" the man continued sardonically. "Don't you think Barbara would approve?"
"We are friends," Lois said. She felt her cheeks begin to burn and was angry to find herself embarrassed.
"What does that have to do with?"
"Well, friends don't...." She realized that he would think she was talking like a schoolgirl, but determined to finish the sentence anyway. "They don't go after each other's men."
Eric chuckled. "Is that what you'd be doing?"
"You are her man, aren't you?" Lois asked, though she felt more foolish than ever.
"Am I?"
"Well ... I'd heard...."
"We go around together sometimes," Eric said. "Is that all it is?" Eric did not reply.
"Does Barbara feel that casually about it?" Lois persisted. "After all, didn't she save your...?" The girl broke off, realizing that she had said more than she was going to say.
"My job, you mean?" Eric asked furiously. "Maybe she did." He started the engine of the car and pulled away from the sidewalk where they had been parked. "Hell, I only asked you up for a drink. But if you want to make some sort of case out of that, forget it!"
Lois felt suddenly contrite. She had acted like a damn fool. A little schoolgirl damn fool.
"I'm sorry," she said in a small voice.
"I told you to forget it."
"If you still want to give me that drink...."
"You mean you don't think I'll rape you after all?" Eric drawled.
"I said I was sorry."
"All right." Eric changed traffic lanes to turn a corner. "We'll go to my place."
Despite the shabbiness of Eric's flat, Lois surprised herself by liking it better than she had liked Mitch Wallace's expensively decorated apartment. There was taste here-casual but definite. The place was strong masculine and reflected both the strengths and weaknesses of the man.
At first she thought that it could have stood a good cleaning. But then she realized that it was clean. Untidy and messy, yes. But scrupulously clean.
"Scotch or bourbon?" the man called in from the kitchen.
"Scotch," Lois answered, as she was pulled out of her reverie. "With some soda, please."
"Right."
Eric came back a few minutes later and handed the drink to her. "You're lucky I have soda in the house," he said. "I take my bourbon on the rocks."
Lois smiled and raised her glass. "Cheers," she said.
Eric's grin was almost wolfish. "Here's to Barbara," he said. "Since she seems to be haunting us so much, we might as well drink to her."
Lois watched the man finish his bourbon while she sipped her drink more slowly. "Why do you sound so bitter about Barbara?" she asked some time later, when she had put her glass down.
"Do I sound bitter?" He considered this. "Maybe I do at that."
"But why?" Lois insisted. "When she did help you...."
"Maybe that's the reason," the man said. "Or maybe I've just run out of gratitude. Who knows?"
"Can a man run out of gratitude?"
"Damn right he can," Eric said with a sour grin. "The gratitude drain is one of the worst that a man can endure. But that's one of the things you might learn yourself some day, baby."
Lois stiffened. "Just one of the things?"
"Yes."
"What else do I have to learn?" she asked, challengingly.
"This," the man said, raising her from the broken-spring armchair and kissing her deliberately on the lips.
Lois decided not to respond. She let her body go limp and her lips were like two pieces of wax. Then his hand came up under the back of her skirt to massage her buttocks through her briefs. He forced her against him until she felt his maleness and despite herself, she was becoming aroused.
She struggled to get away, but his muscles were like iron. There was nothing she could do. Nothing. His hand forced its way between her thighs until it was at the very core of her womanhood.
And right then, nice lovely Lois stopped struggling. Luscious, lascivious Lois took over, and did anything but struggle. As the other Lois-the real Lois?-came into control, she smiled an unregretful, secret little smile of "so long" to the prissy Lois, little-goody-two-shoes.
Even as the personality transition was taking place, she was beginning to understand what caused it. This-man Eric turned her on. He wasn't Harold. He wasn't Mitch. And whenever she was really turned on, she became the horny Lois-maybe the real Lois. That one man could turn her on one time and not another was something she hadn't figure out, but it didn't matter. She had a suspicion that once she got to know a man too well-the men she'd known so far, anyway-she began to see through him, and began not to like what she saw. Oh, well. It was nothing to worry about now. There was nothing, in fact, to worry about now.
Joyfully, then, she reached down to feel the hardness of his cock, measuring it with her hand as she gently stroked it.
His hand removed itself from between her legs, did something with the zipper in back of her blouse. She felt his hands roaming her back, then moving around to her unbraed breasts, lifting, fondling, teasing the tautened nipples.
Her open mouth was responding to the mouth that covered it now, her tongue fluttering around his as it probed deep. When she stopped her appraisal with one hand let it join the other in roaming the long muscles of Eric's back, she felt the hard swelling bulge of his cock pressing against the swell of her lower belly, and pressed her softness more tightly against it.
One of his hands dropped and came up again, under her skirt in back, and tugged downward at the elastic of her panties. Lois did nothing to stop him. She helped, in fact, with a skillful little wriggle, then stepped out of the nothingness of nylon when it puddled around her feet.
Still keeping the suction of her mouth against his, still tickling and responding with her tongue, she moved her hips away from the pressure of his and slipped her hand between their bodies again to stroke the hard ridge of his caged cock. She could feel her juices oozing between the swelling outer lips of her pussy, and was glad when she felt his hand unsnap the waist of her skirt and draw the zipper down.
Her skirt slid slowly to the floor, and she stepped out of it, too. She set her feet slightly apart as his hand came up between her thighs, stroking, caressing. Then she felt a finger slide gently into the moist tenderness between her welcoming cunt lips.
Unerringly, his fingertips found the hardening, swelling bud of her clitoris, and she had to break the suction of their mouths.
"Ooh," she said, smiling up at him as she shook her head dizzily from side to side. "I only meant to kiss you a friendly sort of hello."
"Umm," he said, his mouth moving toward hers again. Lois held him off with one hand. She grinned broadly, joyfully. Lascivious Lois, again. She loved this side of her, this part of her life.
"Why don't you take off your clothes?" she asked. "So we can fuck?"
Eric looked at her, not smiling now, and unbuckled his belt. Lois unbuttoned his shirt as he was dropping his pants and undershorts and kicking off his loafers. She finished the job of getting herself naked while he was getting out of his shirt.
"The bedroom," he said, taking her hand to lead the way. "Let's be civilized."
She lay back on the double bed, crossways, on her backs, watching, waiting, willing, whatever his next move might be. Her legs lay parted.
As she saw his knees bend to let him to the floor, then his head, she spread her legs wider and wriggled herself so her ass was perched at the edge of the bed, her thighs wantonly, widely open.
Eric began kissing the quivering warmth of her inner thighs, higher and higher, until his tongue and lips touched fur. Lois raised her legs and draped them across his shoulders. She felt his fingers deftly part her pussy lips, his tongue delve deeply into the soft responding moistness of her cunt.
"Oooh," she murmured, embracing his ears with her luscious, yielding thighs. "That's it. Lick it. Suck it. Eat my cunt."
She wriggled on the bed as she felt his tongue probe deep, with rapid thrusts, and felt the rapture rising in her. Then, as her hips began to pump, she felt his tongue withdrawing, softening, as he licked back and forth on the lively squirming eel of her clitoris.
Then his tongue, still licking, moved slowly out of her cunt and sideways, and downward, tickling the insides of the tender globes of her ravishingly lovely ass.
Wondering, she released the pressure of her thighs on his ears and spread her legs wide, her feet waving in the air. She was melting with sensation, almost crazed with the desire for more, when she felt his tongue licking upward in the intimate crevice between the firm snowy globes of her heavenly ass.
Then his tongue stopped, stiffened, and plunged into the tiny tight puckered closing of her asshole. She felt the sphincter tighten, involuntarily, repelling the probing invader. She threw her legs wider, reached down and spread her buttocks apart with her hands, making a conscious effort to loosen the drawstring around her asshole.
Again, she felt the stiffened tip of his tongue probing, pushing, as her excitement mounted. Then, suddenly, it plunged in, deep into her utmost intimacy, and she shuddered all over with the newness of the sensation.
"Aaah," she moaned. "Oooh." She writhed as his tongue probed and licked, her buttocks clenching and unclenching, her open cunt a wet morass of desire.
"Now," she gasped. "Now. Put your cock in there. Now."
With one last loving lick, an all-purpose lick from her asshole along the whole length of her wet, gaping cunt mouth, he drew his head back and stood upright, between her spread legs. Lois glanced up for her first good look at his cock. She raised up on her elbows.
From that angle, it appeared to be looking back at her, out of the squinting vertical eye centered in the swollen purple head. It was another big one, she saw with satisfaction, a proud brute of a cock to do the job of filling her cunt with a good fuck. It was far longer than average, and thicker, with a swollen-to-bursting, shiny, purplish head. And it was very hard, standing out from its nest of wiry dark curls at an upward angle, pulsing and twitching with a tiny bobbing motion. As she leaned forward and reached out to take it in her hand, the head moved sideways, changing her view of it, and she saw a swollen blue vein running a tortuous route along one side and underneath the shaft.
"Beautiful," she said, closing her hand around the soft velvety skin enclosing the hardness beneath, moving her hand gently up and down the long length of the shaft, making the mitten of skin slide with her grasp. Then she pulled it tenderly toward the confluence of her spread thighs, guiding the head to the salivating hungry mouth of her cunt.
But Eric held back, and put one strong hand underneath her hip.
"No," he said. "Roll over. I want us to try something a little different."
She looked up at him, hesitating, then went along with the firm pressure of his hand and rolled over onto her stomach, in the middle of the bed now. Instinctively, teasingly, she got her knees underneath and raised her glorious ass, putting it on display. He seemed to like it.
He was mounted on the bed behind her, then, and she felt the hard head of his cock touching the moist portals of her pussy. She held her breath, moving her knees apart to open her cunt for the plunge of his swollen cock, but the plunge didn't come. She felt his hand brash her inner thigh as he grasped his cock, and then she felt the head sliding up and down, up and down, in the tingling swamp of sensation that was her cunt entrance.
Suddenly, she felt him move the head of his cock upwards, into the delicious crevice between the yielding mounds of her ass.
"No," she gasped. "Please don't."
But the hard knob of his cockhead was already pushing at the tiny puckered orifice of her asshole. She felt the slippery wetness of it, lubricated by her cunt juices, but her asshole tightened as he pushed, then pushed again. She wriggled, but he held her firmly. She was unable to roll over.
But the wriggling served its purpose. His spearing cock slid away from its tiny-pink brown target, drove harmlessly up the flesh crevice between her mounded cheeks.
"Please, no," she said again. "Please. Put it in my pussy, where it belongs. Fuck my cunt."
"Ah, well...." she heard Eric sight, and then she felt the head of his cock slide down to where it belonged, lodging between the wet, swollen, ravenous lips of her cunt.
She heard herself gasping with joy as he plunged the entire thick shaft home, into the slippery squirming depths of her rapturous twat. He withdrew the shaft, to the head, and began to plunge it into her with long slow strokes, his pelvic mound and lower belly making slapping sounds against the soft mounds of her ass at the end of each plunge.
In that position-what was it called, dog-style?-she was helpless to respond, to meet each thrust with hip strokes and cunt kisses. But her body shuttled slightly with every deep cock thrust and she found that she was loving it, enjoying every ramming, jamming thick inch of his cock's thuttling fuck-runs into her depths of pleasure.
Helpless as her hips were, her cunt became her entire fuck-instrument, squeezing his in-driving cock into a tight but slippery grasp, seeming to slide out and hold it with every out-stroke, hungrily gulping and welcoming it back with every plunge.
"That's it, Eric," she heard herself moaning. "Fuck me deep. Fuck me helpless."
As the tempo of his fucking increased, his cock driving ever faster, ever deeper into her, the searing intensity of her pleasure mounted. Her mouth was gasping, her cunt gulping and squeezing and sucking and holding his rigid, plunging shaft, her ass flipping and pumping, her whole body wriggling mindlessly in that unfamiliar, propped position.
Then, without pausing, without missing a beat in his furious fucking, he slipped a finger into the heavenly soft niche between the pouting globes of her ass, and found again the tight, tiny, puckered pink tenderness of her asshole.
"Aah," she said, tilting her ass farther upward. "Go ahead. Fingerfuck me up the ass." With a conscious effort, in her panting, grinding delirium of pleasure, she loosened her sphincter, and was instantly rewarded. She shuddered joyfully at the added sensation of his finger sliding all the way up the newfound pleasure channel of her asshole.
Eric fingerfucked her up the ass in perfect time with his cock's furious fucking of her cunt, and she let herself go completely into a mindless panting ecstasy. She writhed, and pumped, and wriggled and squirmed, in an absolute state of helpless happiness.
And then she was coming, in a series of building spasms, her cunt squeezing and clutching his pounding, shuttling cock, her body out of control. In her rapture, she heard sounds issuing from her throat, sounds she was as helpless to stop as the convulsive downward pumping of her hips, the joy-crazed inner spasms of her silently panting, gulping cunt.
Only then, as the whimpers were dying in her throat and her inner spasms were starting to subside, did she feel Eric coming, as he held the entire length of his thick cock plunged deep inside her, calm and still, but straining, for one long moment, until the explosions came, a geyser of warm sperm spurting into her depths, bathing and soothing the glowing coals of the dying fires of her fuck rapture.
She held still in her ass-up position as Eric withdrew his skilled finger from the tight possessive grip of her grateful asshole, his diminishing cock from the slackened, slippery clutch of her oozing cunt.
"I'm so glad we finally got together," he said. "And fuck Barbara." He said it as he was stretching out on the bed beside her.
"I agree," Lois said.
NINE
Eric Grass was on her mind all the next day. She thought she might find out more about him in the articles he had written about T. V. Rudolph. From what she had heard, it was those articles and what happened after them that had started the change in his personality.
She went to the files and looked them up.
They were plain indictments of Rudolph. According to what Eric had written, the real estate man would construct apartment houses and housing projects with the aid of city, state and federal mortgages. Crooked officials would overvalue those mortgages so that the different agencies would give him far more money than it cost him to construct the buildings. He would use this excess money to buy land options on which he would then finance office buildings and shopping centers.
One problem, according to Eric, was that Rudolph was operating with so little of his own money that he was creating an empire of cards. If a single project did not pay off, everything would collapse.
But Rudolph did not collapse. Instead, the series of articles came to an abrupt end. The promised proof was not forthcoming. Then, two months after the last article, came the long, detailed apology by Eric Grass.
How could he have done it, Lois wondered. How could he have dug himself into that kind of hole? She herself would have known better when she was a freshman student in journalism school.
"I see that you're reading my articles."
Lois gasped, then spun around in her seat. Eric was standing directly behind her. She had not heard him come into the magazine library.
She started to say something, then froze. Everything was so different between them, here in this impersonal place.
"Let's get a cup of coffee," Eric said.
"Let's get rid of these magazines first."
"On account of Barbara? She might come snooping?"
"Just being neat," Lois said.
"The thing I don't understand," Eric Grass said, after he'd ordered the doughnuts and coffee, "is why you wanted to look up those old articles. There's not supposed to be any truth in them. Or didn't you hear that?"
"I heard," Lois said.
"Well then?"
"Perhaps I wanted to decide for myself," Lois said, after the waitress brought the order. "Or maybe...."
"Maybe what?"
Lois shrugged. "I guess I thought they might tell me something about you. Why you are the way you are."
Eric was silent for a moment. He put some sugar into his coffee and stirred it absently. "Did you learn anything about me?" he asked then.
"Only that you're a good journalist," Lois told him frankly. "You seem to have a need to dig into things. You seem to have a drive to get at the hidden truth that lies beneath the surface of things."
"Some people have called it an obsession," Eric admitted.
Lois shook her head, appearing as bewildered as she felt. "That makes it all the more strange," she said.
"Makes what all the more strange?"
"That you could write a series of articles like that without having the facts to back it up. It's not the sort of thing that a person who respects the truth would do. I mean, even if you believed everything you said. Even if you were sure in your heart that you were right...."
"I'd still have no right to publish until I had certified proof of everything?" he asked in a flat, hard voice.
"Exactly."
"I couldn't agree with you more," Eric said. "Even if there were no such things as laws of libel, I wouldn't think it right to ruin a man's reputation on the basis of my feelings alone."
The two stared at each other for several moments. It was Lois' eyes that finally dropped.
"You said that you did have proof," the girl ventured at last.
"Yes."
"And that it was stolen."
"Yes." Eric's smile was bitter. "I see you don't believe me. I can't blame you for that, I suppose. You're in the vast majority."
"Wasn't it rather careless of you to leave important documents in your office where they could be gotten at?"
"They weren't only documents," Eric said broodingly. "There were tape recordings there, and photographs as well. And, no, it wasn't particularly careless. You see, I hid them in a locked drawer of my desk. Hardly anyone knew they were in that drawer."
Lois straightened in her chair. No one had told her that before. "Tell me what happened, Eric. Was your entire office ransacked?"
"No. Just that one drawer. It was a steel drawer and had to be forced open with a crowbar." He paused. "Whoever took that material-and I can't help but leap to the conclusion that it was T. V. Rudolph or one of his men-knew just where to go."
"But how would they know?" Lois demanded.
"How do you think?"
"You mean that somebody told Mr. Rudolph? Somebody from the magazine?"
Eric snorted. "Give the little lady a great big hand."
Lois frowned at him. "Save your sarcasm, please," she said. "If you recall, it was you who invited me to have this little talk."
Eric's eyes blazed. Then the fire died down and he shook his head ruefully. "Sorry. You're right. It's only that I keep going over and over the same ground."
"Just go over it one more time for me," Lois urged. "Who did know what drawer that stuff was in?"
"First of all, there was myself."
"But you'd hardly want to ruin your own career. Go on."
"There, there was my secretary."
"What about her?" Lois grew excited. "Do you think that she ...?"
"No. I don't," Eric answered firmly. "In the first place, I checked her out. And in the second, she wouldn't have touched anything dishonest with a ten foot pole. She's an idealist. As a matter-of-fact, she's no longer with Conquer. She quit a few months ago the join the Peace Corp s I just received a card from her from Asia."
"Was there anyone else who knew?" Lois wondered.
"Just one person: Barbara Fielding."
When she heard that name and read the unspoken message in Eric's eyes, the girl felt as though she had just been struck a physical blow.
"May I have some more coffee?" she asked Eric.
Lois waited until the woman had gone before she tried to start up the conversation again. "What were you trying to tell me?" she demanded.
"Not a thing. You wanted to know who else knew about that drawer, didn't you? Well, Barbara Fielding was the only other one."
"You believe that she tipped Mr. Rudolph off," Lois stated. "But why? Wasn't she in love with you? Isn't she still?"
"Love." Eric sneered. "You talk like a kid."
"Wait a minute...."
"Oh, I know. To you, Barbara is a combination of the Queen of Sheba and Joan of Arc. But to me...."
"Well?"
Eric waited until the waitress brought their fresh coffees, then: "Hell, you think I'm a cad anyway, so I might as well tell you. When I first came to New York I was as taken in by her as you were. She was intelligent, helpful and just plain wonderful. I don't think I could have lasted two weeks on the magazine without her help. And since she's beautiful to boot, I fell head over heels for her."
"And she with you," Lois said.
"How do you know?" Eric said. Then he shrugged. "Okay. I won't argue the point. In her own way, she probably fell for me, too. At any rate, she gave every sign of it. We had a wild, swinging affair. I won't go into the details, but...."
"Please don't," Lois put in.
"Okay. Take my word for it then. It was swinging. But gradually I began to see that all was not as it seemed. Underneath that glamor-girl exterior, Barbara was as tough as they come. She would cheat, he, steal and maybe even kill to keep what she had or get what she thought she wanted."
Lois didn't reply. She knew that side of Barbara, also. But still..
"So we began to have fights," Eric went on. "When I thought she was behaving in a particularly underhanded way, I'd tell her so. When she thought that I was bucking the wrong people-people who might help me advance-she'd tell me." He paused. "Oh, the fights were mild enough at first, but they grew worse. And worse."
"What happened?" Lois asked.
"Finally I decided that we'd better call it quits."
"You decided?"
"Yes." He grinned. "We've already agreed that I was no gentleman. So I decided."
"What about Barbara?"
"She took it coolly enough. She called me every kind of fool and for the next few months never missed an opportunity to get a dig in. Especially when I began planning those articles on Rudolph. She said that I had no proof and would land in the clink if someone didn't save me."
"Oh."
"One day I lost my temper and told her exactly what I did have and where I kept it."
"So you think that she had it stolen for revenge?"
Eric ignored the question. "Afterwards she kept teasing me-but more gently. Then she offered to speak to Mr. Rudolph for me."
"And she did," Lois said.
"I told her what she could do with that idea," the man responded. "But she carried through anyway. Nobody stops Barbara Fielding."
"Is that when the two of you got back together?" Lois questioned.
Eric shrugged. "She expected me to be falling apart with gratitude," he said. "I should be grateful enough to take her out to dinner. To take her to a movie. To make love to her. Hell!"
"That's a lousy thing to say," Lois snapped.
"Maybe it is," he conceded. "But you don't know Barbara the way I do. She went on about how grateful I should be until it was coming out of my ears."
"Maybe you should have been grateful," Lois said dryly.
"I'm not the grateful type," Eric told-as if she hadn't guessed. "Anyway, I was beginning to figure out that Barbara must have been the little bird who whispered into Rudolph's ear."
"Why?" Lois asked.
"Who else was there?" the man queried in reply. "Look what she had to gain." He ticked off the points on his finger: "One, she put herself in good with the powerful Mr. Rudolph-and with Barbara that's no small point. Two, she was in a fine position to save my job for me and lure me back into her arms with gratitude."
"I see that you're modest, too," Lois murmured.
"Not guilty." Eric grinned. "But even if I'm willing to admit there may be truth in the rumor about there being other men in the world besides Eric Grass, Barbara baby hates to give anything up once she thinks she owns it. She will fight like hell to keep any possession."
Lois sighed. Once again she had to recognize the truth-even though she didn't like the way it was being put.
"But now we get to point three," Eric said, "Taking yours truly down a few pegs."
"What do you mean?"
"I was the rising star back then, honey," Eric said with self-mockery. "My reputation was soaring upwards so fast that there was even a risk that it might pass Barbara's. She couldn't let that happen, could she?"
Lois looked at him. "And that's what you figure out," she said saidly. "Yeah. And I made a command decision."
"Which was?"
"That if Barbara wanted me for a playmate, I'd go along for the gag. Only I'd keep my eyes and ears open."
Lois gaped disbelievingly at the man. "And is that the reason you're having an affair with Barbara now?"
"What did you think the reason was? True love?" The girl shook her head as if to clear it. "It doesn't matter. I do know one thing though."
"What's that?"
"The reason you felt you had to hurt me so badly the other night. Had to shame me." She looked directly into his eyes. "You must hate yourself very badly, Eric. And all women, of course...."
"Stop with the phony Freud," Eric snarled. "I've been gone over by experts."
Lois kept looking at him. Then suddenly she began to laugh.
"What's so funny?"
"I was just thinking ... supposing you were wrong?"
"What?"
"Supposing Barbara had nothing to do with the theft. And you've been "miring love to her all this time just to keep your eyes and ears open!"
Eric looked blank for a moment. Then he gave a short, barking laugh. "I guess you're right. It would be funny. But I don't believe it. I think that Barbara's guilty as hell." He paused. "The trouble is, she's too damn smart to give me a clue."
"She doesn't even talk in her steep?" Lois mocked.
Eric regarded the girl with wonder. "You don't think she did it, do you?"
"I don't know." Lois rose from the chair. "I have to get back now."
But Eric was gripping her wrist. "What do you think?" he demanded.
"I tell you I don't know." Lois hesitated on the verge of anger for being placed in this position. "I suppose I find it hard to believe that Barbara could do such a thing...."
"When the chips are down, honey," Eric told her, "there's hardly anything Barbara couldn't do."
"Maybe you're right. I just don't know." Lois tried to pull away from him. "Now please let me go. You're hurting me."
"Sorry." He released her. "I didn't mean to get so intense. But I did want to know what you thought."
She faced him. "All right," she said then. "I'll tell you: I think it's a shame that a man like you has to be so ... so disgusting."
She turned on her heel and left him sitting in the coffee shop.
Despite her parting remark to Eric and her posture of indifference, Lois Aimes was haunted by that conversation for the rest of the day. She could not hear Barbara's voice or look at her face without the echo of Eric's words coming between them: "When the chips are down, there is nothing Barbara couldn't do!"
Lois did not want to believe it. She kept telling herself that no woman would have acted that treacherously towards a man she was supposed to love. But the echo refused to die away.
She was relieved when towards the end of the day Barbara informed her that she would not be coming home until after dinner.
"I have a date to meet a British star who has decided to try his hand on Broadway," the black-haired woman said with a thin smile. "He is supposed to be quite a ladies' man. I assume I will get the full treatment."
"Lucky you," Lois murmured.
"Smile when you say that, Aimes. If there's anything I can't stand it's a load of false charm."
"Is that why you like Eric Grass?" Lois ventured to ask.
Barbara regarded her steadily: "That man seems to be preying on your mind lately, Aimes. What gives?"
"Nothing." Lois was flustered. "I just thought that one thing he can never be accused of is using charm."
"Really?" Barbara considered this for a few seconds, and then decided to let the subject drop. "Perhaps you're right," she said. "But I'm still working on him. And, as I think I told you once, I never like to give up on a project."
Lois retreated to her own desk and busied herself with work until it was time to leave the office.
Once back in the apartment, she kicked off her shoes, turned on the air-conditioners and made herself a drink.
It was good to be alone. Now she'd be able to think things through without the distraction of Barbara, or Eric, or anyone else.
The problem was that she couldn't think. All the old questions were still in the air, still as unanswerable.
Was Barbara a complete bitch? Was Eric not only a cad, but a bar as well? And-most important if most unanswerable-what business was any of it of hers?
Why did she care?
Because she did care. Almost despite herself, she cared. Why?
Was it Eric? Was she more fascinated with him than she wanted to admit? Was fascination turning into something like (and brother how he'd sneer if he knew what she was thinking) love?
No! Because if that was true, she would run away. She wouldn't stop at another city then; she'd volunteer for a stretch at the South Pole! If she ever really fell in love it would be with a solid, upstanding citizen. Not with a man who was plagued by demons. Eric should have a boundary line placed about him like the ones that could be found at the edges of ancient maps: lines with the legend, "Beyond this place, there be demons!"
She finished her drink and poured herself another one.
She could not afford to be troubled on Eric's account, she told herself. It had to be on her own.
And she did have a right to be concerned, didn't she? She was living with Barbara. She was-she had to face it-one of Barbara's projects. If Barbara had done what she had to Eric because he challenged her, what would she do to her-Lois-if ever she crossed her?
Barbara had even warned her about that, once ... But now she was assuming that Eric had told the truth.
Wow, she thought. The whole thing was a jumble. Just trying to think it through made her feel woozy.
Lois drained her glass and set it carefully in the sink. That would be enough liquor for a while.
She walked into Barbara's room and stood just inside the door. She had hardly ever been in here, she realized. Barbara had been in her room often enough, but she rarely came in here.
Well, now she was. So what? What did she learn?
The room was as immaculate and tasteful as Barbara herself. And, like Barbara, there was something cold and hard about the modern furnishings.
She examined the different pieces: the bed that Barbara had carefully made before leaving this morning (while her own, of course, was still unmade). The chair that had been imported from Denmark and purchased at a small Third Avenue shop. The desk with its neatly stacked papers and letters....
She paused in her examination. One of the letters caught her eyes. The envelope it was in was marked with T. V. Rudolph's business address.
She slid the envelope out from under the others and held it in her hand. What was Rudolph writing Barbara on business stationery for, she wondered, and sending the letter to her home?
Now that certainly was none of her business. She should put the envelope back before she succumbed to temptation and opened it.
Hell. She shrugged and took out the letter.
Dear Barbara, Lois read. This is to inform you that I have placed in your name a fifteen percent (15%) interest in the "Sunnyweather Shopping Center Corp." At your request, I am holding the appropriate papers in my office until you have a chance to call for them in person and place them in your safety deposit box-a step which I advise you take as quickly as possible. I know that this is but a small repayment for all you have done to help me in the past. But you can rest assured that I will give you interests in other properties just as soon as that can be done quietly and without arousing comment. The letter was signed, Your friend, Terry K
Penciled across the top of the letter in Barbara's meticulous hand was the comment: Damn right it's small! But it is a start!!!
Lois placed the letter back in its envelope. Then she took it out and read it through again.
What was that all about? What did it mean? And what had Barbara done to help him in the past?
Was it merely getting a good story into the magazine? Would that have been worth a fifteen percent interest in a shopping center? She smiled cynically.
But what was Lois Aimes going to do about it? That was question number one.
Deed number one: replace the letter in the envelope for a second time, and replace the envelope in the stack.
Deed number two: go into the kitchen and place some frozen shrimp in a pot in order to cook it for dinner.
Deed number three: turn the fire on under the pot.
Deed number four: stare at the thawing shrimp for a while, then turn the fire off.
Deed number five: go back into Barbara's bedroom and pick up the envelope once more.
Deed number six: march back into the kitchen and turn on the fire.
Deed number seven: walk to the telephone table and look up Eric Grass's phone number in Barbara's personal directory.
Deed number eight: dial the number.
Deed number nine: hang up quickly before anyone can answer.
Deed number ten: dial the number again. This time wait until a voice can be heard from the other end....
"Hello?" It was Eric. "Hello...? Who is this? Who's calling?"
"Eric...?"
"Yes. Yes, this is Eric Grass. But I can hardly hear you. Who is this?"
"Eric...." It was hard to forget her voice above a whisper. "Eric, this is Lois Aimes. I have to talk to you."
"What's the matter, Lois? Is something wrong?" He sounded as if he might really care if something was wrong.
"Not on the phone. Can I come over to your place?"
"Sure. But wouldn't you rather I came to you?"
"No ... really ... I'll be there as soon as I can."
When Lois drove up in a cab, Eric Grass was waiting for her on the sidewalk. He paid the fare, then helped her up the stairs to his apartment. Her face was white and drawn, and he would not let her say a word until she had accepted his offer of a drink.
"Now," he said, when Lois was settled in a chair and had a Scotch and soda in her hand. "You can tell me what the trouble is."
She looked gravely at Eric and seemed about to speak. Then, suddenly, she appeared to have another thought and her mouth gaped open. "Oh, my gosh," she cried. "The shrimp!"
"The what?"
"The shrimp. I'm sure I turned off the fire, but you can't refreeze them and ... She broke off, blushing furiously. "I was cooking some shrimp for my dinner," she added lamely.
"I see."
"No, you don't," Lois said. "But it doesn't matter. Either Barbara or myself will have to throw them out. But I only wish that was my most important problem."
"What is your most important problem?" Eric asked gently.
"This." Lois took the envelope from her handbag and held it out gingerly, as though it was too hot to touch.
The man took it and studied the letter carefully. Finally he raised his eyes and let them meet Lois'. "Well?" the girl asked. "Well what?"
The girl grimaced. "I expected you to say 'I told you so.' Doesn't it prove that you were right about Barbara's tipping off Mr. Rudolph about how to rob your desk and kill your story on him?"
"To me it does," Eric answered. "And, from what you say, I kind of think that it proves it to you, also."
The girl was silent.
"But it's not the kind of proof I'd like to take to a district attorney," the man continued. "Or to use as the basis of a magazine story."
Lois felt defeated. Had she done all this for nothing? Had she turned herself into a thief for nothing? "What's wrong with the proof?" she asked weakly.
"Rudolph can give away the whole shopping center if he wants," Eric said. "We think we know the kind of help Barbara gave him. But supposing I print this and he claims that he'd fallen in love with the woman? That the help she gave him was moral support when he was at a low ebb?" He paused. "He has the right to give his girlfriend anything he wants. And that letter doesn't prove that there's anything more to it than the normal gratitude of a man for a woman."
Lois nodded unhappily. "And if you claimed it did," she said, "everyone would believe that you'd decided to stick your neck out again."
"Exactly. And this time I'd get it chopped off for sure."
A grin flashed over Eric's face, looking into a ray of sunlight that sometimes fights its way between a pair of dark clouds. "I wouldn't say that, exactly. But let me first make a phone call."
He went over to the telephone that was sitting in a corner of the room, perched atop a stack of city directories. He dialed a number, then spoke so softly that the girl was unable to hear what was being said.
When he hung up the receiver, the girl gave him a frankly quizzical look.
"That was a friend of mine," he explained. "The head of a large private investigating firm who owes me a favor."
"Yes?"
"Call it guesswork or reporter's instinct," he went on, "but I have a very strong feeling that there may be something rotten about this whole shopping center deal. The way I see it, it had to be over-mortgaged. Otherwise Rudolph couldn't have afforded to have given up fifteen percent."
"Where does your friend come in?" Lois asked.
"He thinks he can get me a copy of the mortgage."
"How can he do that?" the honey blonde wanted to know. "Steal it from Mr. Rudolph's safe?"
"I didn't ask," Eric said with a tight-lipped grin. "But he does think he can get it for me. Maybe even tonight."
Lois nodded slowly. "Supposing he can?" she asked. "And you find out you're right? What good would that do you?"
"The mortgage must have been issued by a bank," Eric explained carefully. "If he is in cahoots with one of the bank's officers, I may be able to bring pressure of the officer to give me some more information. Maybe I'll uncover something else. Who knows?"
"That sounds almost like blackmail," Lois protested hesitantly.
"You could call it that," Eric told in her a cold voice. "If you want, you can leave here right now and put that letter back before Barbara knows it's gone. You don't have to be involved in this."
"I involved myself," Lois reminded him.
"So you did." Eric smiled once more. "And your doing so told me where to look for a lever on Rudolph. I've been knocking myself out for a year without getting this far."
Lois blushed.
"If I had a shopping center, I'd gladly give you fifteen percent," he told the girl with a chuckle. "But since I don't, how about some dinner? I take it from your tale of thrown away shrimp that you rushed over here without eating any."
"Yes."
"Well, I just happen to have a steak in the refrigerator. Do you think you could cook it?"
"I happen to be an excellent cook," Lois said indignantly.
"Well see."
As it turned out, Lois did a first-rate job on the steak. Especially considering the messy state of Eric's kitchen.
"I ought to have you around here more often," he said, as they finished coffee.
"As a cook?" Lois asked. "Or as a resident spy?"
"I don't know. You're good at both jobs."
"Well, let's see how good you are at drying dishes."
"Fair enough," Eric said. "But are you sure you wouldn't rather have me wash?"
"I could never figure out where the dishes are supposed to go," Lois told him. "Which reminds me. One of these days I'm going to sneak into this place all by myself and rearrange things."
Eric sighed.
"Just like a woman. As soon as she meets a man she wants to change him."
"No more stalling now," Lois said, and picked up the coffee cups and carried them to the sink.
The two worked side by side for a while. Then Lois washed the final dish, handed it to Eric, and emptied the water from the sank.
"My, it's hot," she said, wiping her brow with a paper towel.
"I have only a single air-conditioner to my name," Eric said, not looking at her. He appeared to be intent on stacking dishes in the cupboard. "And that's in the bedroom," he added, after a long silence.
They stared at each other for several long moments. They were only inches apart, but neither made a move. Each was too haunted by the memory of the wild abandon of what had happened last time. This was different, Lois knew. For both of them. And for her, she knew too, it was not just another wanton lascivious Lois episode. She was the real Lois now, she knew with certainty, whoever that real Lois was. Maybe in the next minutes or hours she'd find out.
Then, almost reluctantly, Eric took her into his arms. And, almost reluctantly, she went.
His lips probed hers, and his body strained against her body. She could feel the muscles of his upper arms contract while his cock came urgently alive, swelling and lengthening and hardening against the responding warmth of her lower belly.
Without speaking, he raised his lips from her mouth and led her into the bedroom, leaving her for a moment to turn on the air-conditioner. It started to rattle.
"Now you can keep cool," he said.
"That's a good word for the way I feel now," she said. "Cool."
"I only meant...."
"Never mind what you meant."
She smiled at him and turned down the bed.
He got out of his clothes like a man in a trance, and she was aware that she was doing the same thing the same way.
"You're lovely," he said. They were standing naked, facing each other. Lois' breasts felt swollen. Looking down, she saw the nipples darkening and point skyward.
"Please, Eric," she said. "Right away."
"It's rape," Eric said, trying te smile. Trying to make her smile too, she knew. But it was no time for jokes.
"Lie down," Lois said. "On your back, please." It seemed to her that she'd heard herself use those words before. But never this way. What she wanted most now was to do something for Eric. Wanted to more than anything.
He stretched out on the double bed, looking with some wonder up at her. His cock strained upward toward the ceiling. To Lois, right then, it was the biggest object in the whole room.
She knelt on the bed beside him and kissed him on the mouth, her own mouth open, her tongue darting in to find his. Their tounges met, entwined, wrestled wetly until Lois broke the suction to insinuate her tongue into his ear.
She began to kiss and lick her way down his body, kissing and licking at his chin, his neck, the hollow of his collarbone, the stiffening puckered dark skin of his nipples. She reamed his navel with her tongue, and drew a thin moist line down the middle of his belly, using her tongue as an artist does his brush.
Her cheek bumped into something hard, like a tree trunk. She turned her head and looked up, her heart pumping faster. At the top of the great shaft of his cock, the hard head perched proudly like a big shiny apple, the apple of her eye.
Lois changed her position, getting to her knees between his legs, and began to lick her way up the soft skin that sheathed the underside of his granitehard cock, wetting it with broad loving strokes of her tongue. Eric lay very still, and she could feel his eyes on her, watching the workings of her tongue, her mouth.
When she got to the head, she hesitated for a second. Then she opened her mouth wide and engulged the whole gleaming apple. Eric sighed gently as her tongue tickled his satiny underside.
Lois had gone as far as she could she knew, or her pussy would drown in its own juices. She got to her knees, straddling his legs, and moved forward up his body.
She raised one leg, as if mounting a horse, and fitted his prickhead into the wet open folds of her cunt. She held herself erect, then, and rode down the entire length of the oaken shaft.
It filled her completely. Reamed her. Cleansed her of everything bad that had ever happened.
"Ah, Eric," she said, and began her long, perpendicular, shuttling trip to paradise. Up and down, up and down, up and down.
Just for a moment, in the beginning, she saw Eric clasp his hands behind his head and smile at her.
Loving was the only word for that smile.
There was no way for her to measure time, no way to count the thousands of up-and-down trips she made. She thought at one point that maybe the sun would be coming up, any time, and she didn't care.
Then, all at once, she knew the moment had come. Eric was miraculous. His monument of a cock was as rigid as it had been at the beginning.
"Now?" Lois asked, almost pleading. "Can you come?"
"Sure. Can you?"
"I can't not," she moaned, and as she said it, Eric's warm juices were spurting inside her, and she was coming, and coming, and coming....
The doorbell rang as Eric was lighting a cigarette.
"That must be my friend," he said. "I better throw on a robe and see what he wants."
"Don't let him in here," Lois said sleepily, tucking the edge of the sheet under her chin.
"Of course not. I'll close the bedroom door."
A few minutes after Eric had left the bedroom, Lois heard the sound of voices. One of them was female.
Lois felt a strange, unfamiliar twinge in her stomach somewhere. She'd had no idea that the friend might be a woman. She began to wonder, despite herself, what the woman looked like. In the next second she knew. The door to the room was flung open.
In the doorway stood Barbara Fielding.
TEN
Eric pushed by her to stand between the dark-haired woman and the girl in the bed.
Lois clenched her fingers around the top of the sheet, as though for protection, and stared into Barbara's implacable features.
"You lousy little bitch," Barbara said in a cold, dangerously controlled tone. "You filthy, sneaking whore. How long have you been putting out for my man?"
"Shut up, Barbara," Eric told her, in a tone as dangerous as her own.
"I'm waiting for an answer to my question," Barbara explained, almost conversationally.
Lois had no strength to speak. She could only lie still, shivering under her sheet.
"If you really want to know," Eric told Barbara flatly, "tonight was our second time. And if you're curious about anything else, she could give you cards and spades in bed and still come out ahead. Now you can get the bell out of here."
A vein throbbed in Barbara's neck. But she gave no other sign of having heard. "You can take your things out of my place tomorrow, Aimes," she said, addressing Lois in a scathing tone. "I assume you have a place to sleep tonight."
"I thought I told you to go," Eric said, as Lois remained paralyzed.
"And Aimes," Barbara said, still trying to ignore the man, "you'd better show up at a time when I'm not there."
"Damn it," Eric exploded. "How many times do you have to be told to leave?"
Now Barbara turned on him. "And as for you, Eric, my love, don't think you're getting off scot free, either. I didn't save your job so you could take up with this little tramp."
"That does it." Eric took her by the elbow. "You can walk out of here now, or I can bounce you down those stairs On your butt. Which is what I should have done when you first threatened to break into this room."
"You're so uncouth, Eric," she said. But she let herself be led out. "Don't think it's been charming. Because it hasn't."
Lois heard the front door of the apartment slam shut.
Only then did she burst into tears.
"It's all right," Eric Grass was saying. "It's all right. She gone's now...."
"I know...." Lois gasped between sobs. "But she made me feel so cheap...."
"She made you feel cheap?" The man laughed bitterly. "That's one for the books."
"No matter what else," Lois sobbed, "she ... trusted me. She made me her secretary ... she gave me a room in her apartment ... and look how I repaid her: by plotting against her and stealing her
"In the first place," Eric said patiently, "I'm not her man, except. in her own mind. And as for plotting against her, Barbara practically invented the word."
"I know, but ... "
"And let's take all the things you say she did for you," the man continued in a firm voice. "Did she make you her secretary because she wanted to do you a favor? Hell no. At least that's what she told me at the time."
"But...."
"'That little Aimes creature has possibilities,' was what she said," Eric went on, doing a remarkably good impression of Barbara's accents. " 'She may be a little on the naive side, but that is all to the good. She thinks that working with me is glamorous, so she isn't likely to come sniveling with excuses when I ask her to put in some overtime. Especially if I make certain that she becomes involved with the right man-someone who will understand that the magazine's interest in Aimes must always come before his own.' "
Lois' sobs had died away while she listened to the man. Now she looked him straight in the eyes. "Was that really what she said?" she asked.
Eric laughed. "What do you think?"
Lois had to smile in return. "It does sound like her."
Eric nodded. "So then she did you that other great favor," he continued. "She installed you in her apartment where she could keep an eye on you and make sure that you got involved with the right man. Or am I wrong?" he wondered then. "Didn't she try anything like that?"
"Mitch Wallace," Lois said after another moment.
"Mitch? He's sort of a decent guy," the man told her surprisingly. "When Rudolph started the law suit business he was down on me, of course. But, hell, I didn't blame him. So was everyone else. And at least Mitch didn't get self-righteous about it. He thought I'd been a damned idiot and told me so." Eric grinned once more. "But he does put the interests of the magazine first, doesn't he?"
"I suppose so."
"And there you are," the man said. "Do you still feel so rotten about Barbara?"
"I just wish she didn't find me here like that," the girl replied in a low voice.
"That was my fault," Eric said. "She took one look at my bathrobe, the closed bedroom door and the cleaned up state of the kitchen, decided not to buy my story about preparing to take a shower. She just knew there was a woman in here. She has an unholy instinct about other people's sex lives."
"Yes," Lois said. She knew that this was true. It might even be the secret of Barbara's success.
"If I'd been thinking, of course, I'd have been ready for her to burst in to see for herself. But she caught me off guard. I certainly didn't expect her to come here tonight."
"Why did she?" Lois interrupted to ask.
"Who knows? Maybe it was that instinct I mentioned. Or that other instinct she has-the one for survival." Eric shrugged. "At any rate, I stood by like a jerk while she dashed around me and came in here. I'm sorry."
"You couldn't help it," Lois told him. "And maybe it's for the best. I'd hardly have felt right staying with her after tonight."
"No," Eric agreed. "I suppose you wouldn't. Anyhow, you are living here now. That's the one good idea Barbara had."
"I don't know," Lois said, trying to think the matter through. "This all happened so quickly. Maybe it isn't such a good idea to rush things still further by actually living together. If I took a room someplace we could still see each other whenever we wanted, and...."
Eric's laughter cut off the girl's flow of words. "I know tht I'm not the easiest man to live with, honey," he said, "but I promise never to beat you."
Lois flushed. "I wasn't thinking of that."
"What were you thinking about? If we don't get along, you can always move out again. I promise not to make any scenes, either."
"Well ... all right. We can try, I guess. I'll pick up my things from Barbara's place tomorrow...."
"Would you like me to go with you?" the man asked.
"Better not," Lois replied. "Although I will take Barbara's advice and get there early, before she domes back from work."
"Good girl," Eric said. "And now I think we'd better dress."
"Dress...?"
"I'm still expecting my friend," Eric explained. "Remember?"
"As a matter-of-fact," Lois confessed, "I somehow forgot all about it."
Eric's friend turned out to be a paunchy, white -haired man in his early sixties. His name was Raymond Towns. He wore a seedy, grey suit and a smile like that of a secretive cat.
He nodded at Lois, then turned to Eric and searched through a dilapidated briefcase. "Is this what you wanted?" he asked, handing Eric some eight by ten photographic sheets.
"They're perfect," Eric told him.
"I thought they would be," the man said. Lois thought he was actually going to purr. "I took photos of the documents, then had them blown up on the way down here."
"How did you do that?" Lois asked, interested.
"How did I have them blown up?" the man asked innocently. "I have a friend with a photograph lab."
"No. I meant how did you happen to photograph the documents?"
Raymond Towne smiled his cat-like smile at Lois, then looked at Eric. "She's young, isn't she?" he remarked.
Eric shrugged.
"She doesn't know."
"Know what?" Lois demanded.
"Know that you don't ask questions," Eric explained. He looked at the white-haired man. "As you said, she's young."
The white-haired man bowed towards Lois. "But attractive."
"'very attractive," Eric agreed.
Raymond Towne's smile grew almost beatific. "I wish you both joy," he said.
"Thanks," Eric replied laconically. "But don't you think we'd better get down to business?"
"Certainly." The man raised a white, bushy eyebrow. "I take it that you'd like to get this T. V. Rudolph?"
"I'd like to get him by the you-know-what's!"
"Ah ... of course. Well, perhaps I can make a few suggestions." He turned to Lois. "Would you be kind enough to prepare some coffee for us, my dear? I'm afraid this conversation would only bore you."
Lois went into the kitchen and ran the water in the sink so that she obviously could not overhear what was being said.
Towne might have been right, she conceded to herself. She might not have known enough to not want to know. But she was learning.
She could not help wondering about this man, however, who combined courtliness with seediness to such a confusing degree. She sensed an utter amorality in him-a ruthlessness that could be even more profound than Barbara's, if that was possible.
Yet she also sensed that he was loyal. He was not the sort of man to have many friends. But he would never sell out those he did have.
She wondered what kind of favor it was that he owed Eric.
Maybe that was just the sort of thing it was better not to know, she thought.
And he was just the man to help Eric. She would certainly hate to have him as an enemy of hers, Lois thought.
She saw that the coffee was perking. She waited until it looked dark enough, then poured the liquid into the cups and turned off the water that was still running in the sink.
"Are you finished talking?" she called in to the other room.
"Yes."
Eric came into the kitchen to help her with the coffee cups, and then found a packaged pound cake which Lois put on a plate.
"This is what I like," Raymond Towne said, as he looked happily at what had been sent before him. "After cogitation, a man needs nourishment."
"If you can call this nourishment," Lois murmured.
"Good company is nourishment in itself," the white-haired man told her. "Eric and I have just had a very interesting conversation," he added then.
"Have you?"
"We think we've found a lever to use against Mr. T. V. Rudolph. But in order to make full use of it, we need the cooperation of a certain bank officer who ... ah ... connived with him."
"I see."
"Do you?" Raymond Towne sounded pleasantly impressed. "In that case, you can probably also see that in order to gain his cooperation we will have to promise him anonymity."
"That makes sense," Lois answered cautiously.
"Which is why we can't tell you his name. It is certainly not from any hick of faith in your own discretion."
Lois thought that Raymond Towne would not have faith in the discretion of his own mother. But she merely smiled. "The fewer people who know his name the better," she murmured.
"Precisely," the white-haired man nodded. "I am glad to realize that you have common sense as well as beauty. Many young women-even bright young women-are too curious for their own or other people's good,"
"And curiosity can kill the kitten," Lois said lightly.
"Ah ... I wouldn't go quite that far...."
"You'd better not," Eric Grass grunted at the older man.
"I've already said that I wouldn't," Raymond Towne said chidingly. "In this instance, curiosity would be much more likely to kill the hounds."
"Well, there's no need to worry," Lois reassured him. "I'll do my best to keep my curiosity in check."
"That's well put," Raymond Towne said. "If you'd said you had no curiosity, I wouldn't have believed you. And women can usually find a way to convince younger men to gratify their wishes after older, wiser hands have left the scene."
Lois merely smiled at him.
"What did you think of Raymond?" Eric Grass asked, when he and Lois were alone in the apartment once more.
"He's an interesting man."
"He's more than that. He's the best private detective in the country. Maybe he doesn't look like Hollywood's version of the private eye, but give him the slightest lead and he can dig out most anything you want to know about most anyone you can name."
"Why hasn't he helped you before this?" the girl wanted to know.
"He's tried," Eric admitted. "But he didn't have that lead I told you about."
"If he found the documents tonight...."
"He didn't know which documents to look for," Eric broke in to say. "Rudolph is no moron. He tries to make certain that most of his dealings are perfectly ordinary and straightforward. It's only the key deals-the ones that make all the rest possible-that are on the shady snide."
"That makes sense."
"That's why your letter was so important, honey," Eric continued. "Even Raymond couldn't search through every business paper that T. V. Rudolph has. Your letter...."
"You mean Barbara's letter," Lois interrupted sweetly.
"Yes. Barbara's letter. Well, that led us to the right documents. With the lever they'll provide, we should be able to pry the lid off the Rudolph empire."
"That's nice," Lois said with a smile. "You don't sound very enthused," Eric protested. "Oh, but I am," Lois told him. "It's just that I'm also a kind of practical, down-to-earth girl."
"What does that mean?"
"We're not going to any more lid-prying tonight, are we?"
"No."
"Then don't we have better things to do in the meantime than talk it to death?"
"You got me there," Eric said with a laugh. He reached out and pulled the girl roughly onto his lap.
She squirmed happily there. "You're a bard man, Mr. Grass," she grinned.
His hands went under her blouse and into her bra cups. "And you're a soft woman, Miss Aimes."
"That makes it nice, doesn't it?" she giggled, her rear still wriggling against his lap. "Delightful."
She leaned forward so that he could undo the back of her blouse and take it off. "I'm going to need some more clothes before I go to work tomorrow," she said.
"New clothes? Hell, I'll get you a whole new wardrobe!"
"That's how I like to hear a man talk," she purred.
Eric laughed and took off the girl's bra, so that she was sitting on his lap bare from the waist up. "Are you after my money?"
"Of course," she sighed.
"I knew you were that type," he teased, kissing the back of her neck. He took her pink-tipped breasts in his hands. "Now, I've got you," he said.
"No," she said, reaching down between his legs. "I've got you. By the you-know-what's!" she laughed.
"What's so funny?"
"You were. Before. Couldn't you say the word in my presence."
He tickled the back of her ear with his tongue and played with her nipples.
"But you have them, don't you?"
"Not so," he countered. "You have."
"True," she giggled happily. "But let's get into the bedroom."
"What for?" he wanted to know. He undid her skirt and pushed that and her briefs down to the floor. Then he half-raised himself off his chair so that he could drop his trousers and shorts. "Don't you like to experiment?"
"Yes...." she breathed, holding him and guiding him. "Yes, yes, yes. Yes!"
"Let's do it Indian style, this time," Eric said softly into her ear. "Right here."
Wondering, hut willing, Lois slid to the floor. Eric slid downwards beside her, slid his hips under her near leg, and enclosed her other leg between his thighs. As she lay there on her back, with Eric on his side, his face and shoulders away from her and on a level with her hips, she remembered the position. But it had been a long time ago, in college probably, and she hadn't known it as Indian style. She hadn't known it as anything. And now she didn't care. All she wanted was Eric, his thick limb sliding into her, from any angle. God, how she wanted it. Her cunt seemed to reach out to meet it.
His cockhead pressed at last against the open lips of her twat, and she reached down and grasped the steel-hard shaft in its velvet skin-mitten and pressed ft up and down, moving the swollen head vertically in her wet, slippery cunt-opening, to lubricate it for the joyous entrance into the rapturous cavern of her warm, tingling twat.
She released her hold on his shaft, with the head partially imbedded between her spread cunt lips, and his hips began a slow, insistent pressure. The huge apple-hard, apple-shiny head was soon inside her happily straining soft entrance. Then, with a slow, oiled, fluid motion, Eric sank the entire length of his cock into the moist, clinging cavern of her cunt.
"Oooh," she sighed, and pressed her pelvic mount tight against the hard, hairy knoll at the base of his shaft. Lois was filled, to the throat it seemed, with sensation as well as hard cock.
Slowly, Eric withdrew the length of his shaft until only the head remained within the warm portals of her pussy, then plunged it home again. Lois found that in this position she could not respond to his plunges directly, but she didn't mind. Eric very evidently knew what he was doing with that master's tool of his.
She lay still, undulating her hips gently, as Eric began to fuck her in earnest, with long, slow, deep strokes. His cock seemed to reach deeper, in that position, than she had ever felt a cock reach before. She squirmed and twisted her hips in times with his strokes, feeling every inch of that glorious prick as it slid along the super-sensitive walls of her cunt, opening them, widening her horizons of pussy pleasure. She felt deeply fucked, deeply fulfilled, at the end of each long, plunging in-stroke, as she took his whole cock fully into her with every thrust.
He increased his tempo slowly, and her own hips responded, twisting and squirming in joy, her warmly grateful cunt mashing itself against his cock each time he drove his joint home.
She was completely filled, completely ... fulfilled. And yet, she was so fulfilled ... she wanted even more.
'.'Your finger, Eric," she breathed.
"What?" It was more a grunt than a word. He was sweating now, she saw, as he drove his now-slippery cock into her, faster and faster.
"Your finger," she whispered again, brokenly. "Slip your finger into my asshole."
She watched as Eric wet his middle finger in his mouth, then slipped it under her. She felt it explore the crevice between her buttocks, and made herself relax as the tip of his finger found her puckered, waiting anus.
He pushed, and she felt his finger slide up past the middle joint, then start to wiggle. She wriggled her ass in response, then shuddered all over.
She reached down to put a finger up Eric's ass, but couldn't reach far enough. Next time, she thought. I'll ream him out next time.
Lois was panting now, and could hear the sound of her hips beating against the carpet. And she heard Eric's moans mingling with her own. She couldn't last much longer, she knew. She Was reaching her peak. There was a roaring in her ears, a red curtain in front of her eyes.
"Ooh, now, now, now," she groaned. "I'm coming, coming, coming...." She couldn't stop her babbling as she came, came, came.
And Eric bathed her inner fires, hosing them down with great spurts of fluid as he came, came, came....
