She spread her legs wide, her knees elevated. Her open, wet, joyous pink slit smiled up at him. He felt his Ups going dry, and licked them. There was a monstrous lump in his throat.
"Jesus," he heard himself say, in a choked voice. "You're lovely"
"Please, tight now, Paul," she said. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Screw me now!"
He dropped his robe to the floor and mounted between her legs. He guided the swollen, glistening purple head of his dick to her wet, welcoming, warm nether lips, and held it there, between them, filling her eager entrance.
He slid his meat halfway in through the snug, moist portals of her willing twat. It seemed to move forward of its own volition. Her hole wrapped the thick, stiff shaft in a tight, warm embrace.
"Ooooh," Karen said, her hips rising, her box seeming to gulp in more of his erection all by itself....
CHAPTER ONE
Paul Beck fidgeted through the second half of the football game with a recurring hard-on. He knew that five days of campus-bound celibacy was partly to blame, but the rest of the blame lay with the strutting, writhing, leg-tossing drum majorette during the half-time show, with the baton twirlers and their trim, rounded asses and bobbing breasts, with the bevy of cheerleaders in their micro-miniskirts, flashing their legs and smooth thighs around, putting their panties on display. Later in the season, when the weather turned colder, he worried sometimes about the girls catching pneumonia of the crotch, but now, in balmy early October, with one eye on the game and the other on the display of animated flashing young flesh, Paul was thinking only about cunt And he was blaming his hard-on on the wholesome bouncing bevy on the field.
His friends said that everything made Paul Beck think of cunt, anything gave him a hard-on, but they were being unkind. There was a lot of poetry in Paul, a lot of sensitivity in his souL and in his nineteen-year-old worldliness, it took something special to give him a hard-on. Like the sight of falling leaves, or birds in flight, or a Volkswagen passing, or a rainy day, or sudden sunshine, or the sound of violins, or the rumble of trucks.
Driving Sally back toward her school, after the game, Paul was homier than ever, and Sally didn't help his condition any.
"Would you like to go to bed with my roommate?" Sally asked, as they were easing out onto the turnpike.
"You can talk plainer than that," Paul said.
"Would you like to fuck my roommate?"
It should have been a rhetorical question, Paul knew, but it wasn't. Not from Sally. She was full of surprises, especially when he was driving. He knew Sally would like nothing better than for him to have a small lapse at the wheel and dent his gleaming, mint-condition 1941 Packard Phaeton, his mother's profound gift to him on his nineteenth birthday. But Paul Beck kept his cool. He also kept his eyes on the road. Sally had a hatful of distracting tricks she could play with that lithe, sensuous, leggy body.
"Michelle?" Paul said, looking straight ahead at the line of swiftly moving traffic.
"Of course, Michelle. She's the only roommate I've got."
"What makes you ask?"
"She'd like you to fuck her." Paul kept his eyes straight ahead. "Anything else?"
"She'd like you to go down on her."
"WhatI" Paul took his eyes from the road to glance quickly at Sally. He'd never heard her use that expression before.
"She'd like you to kiss her pussy. Lick her twat. Suck her cunt. Is that clearer?"
"Somewhat," Paul said, driving carefully.
"She'll be glad to suck your cock. As a sort of exchange of favors."
"How do you know all this?" Paul asked. He was stalling now, feeling his way, not quite sure what to say next. Michelle looked to him like the liveliest, loveliest, most mouth-watering little cunt in the whole goddamn sorority house. Outside of Sally. But there was nothing little about Sally.
"She told me so," Sally said. "Any time, any place."
"How would you like it if I did?"
"I wouldn't like it," Sally said. "I wouldn't like it if you just snuck off someplace and fucked and sucked with her. But I'd like it if I could be there. It would be kind of exciting to watch."
"Fucking is not a spectator sport," he said.
"Who said anything about being just a spectator?" Sally said, moving closer to him on the wide green, leather seat. "You could lap my cunt while you were fucking her."
"Christ," he said. "You've really been turning tins over in your mind, haven't you?"
"Yes," Sally said. "I've been flunking about it all week, ever since Michelle told me she wanted to fuck you."
He felt her hand moving slowly into his lap.
"Your roommate, Michelle," Paul said, trying to con centrate on the traffic, "sounds like she's out of her whole bird. Is she some kind of virgin or something?"
"What's that word mean, virgin?" Sally asked. "You don't have to talk like you're in the Middle Ages just because you drive this mint-condition stagecoach."
He tried to shift away from her hand but it was too late. Her fingers touched the hickory hardness of his straining cock.
"Oh, ho," she said. "The big Paul prick is ready again. Hard as a rock, your cock." Sally had poetic tendencies.
The tips of her fingers drummed a gentle tattoo up and down the side of his stiff shaft, against the stretched cover of his trouser leg. He squirmed, fitting his back tighter against the back of the seat. Goddamn this Sally. Goddamn this traffic. He pushed her hand away, tentatively. She put it right back, and gently squeezed his cock.
"Listen," he said, trying to change the subject. "Don't knock this great old car."
"Why not? It's beautiful, all right, and it smells nice and leathery inside, but it's as conspicuous as a nun in a whorehouse. Besides, it was more than ten years old when you were born, for God's sake."
"You know as much about cars as you know about nuns. Or whorehouses." Her hand still lay against his rigid limb. Not moving. Not clutching. Just there. "My mother knew what she was doing when she gave me this car." He wondered for the first time where she'd found it. Nobody had to give him an oil painting of what she'd probably done to get it. His mother knew how to drive a hard bargain with her still-lovely, thirty-six-year-old body. Her toast-of-the-continent cunt.
"What do you mean, she knew what she was doing?"
"Well," he said. Jesus, this girl had to have everything explained to her. "Did you see that couple we passed a while ago, in the Triumph? And all the couples in the Mustangs and Cougars and MG's and every other cute little bucket-seat modern monstrosity?"
"Yes?" There was a dawning of enlightenment in her eyes but her hand stayed where it was.
"What do you suppose they do when they get an attack of the instant hots? When they want to fuck, right away?"
"You mean if they can't find a motel?"
"Yes."
"Hand job, I guess," she said. "But most of them probably get off the road and get out into the woods, this time of year."
"Damn right," Paid said. "Right now they're pounding the fall foliage flat all the way from here to Northampton."
"Now I see," she said. I've been pretty dense. In this lovely, wonderful 1947 Packard, with these great big wide uninterrupted seats, we've got a motel all our own, just you and me. A motel on wheels."
"You got it," Paul said.
"Just you and me," she said, and took her hand away, leaving his prick to pulse on its own. "Or just you and any girl you happen to be with."
"Sally, for Christ's sake," he said.
After a long moment, she moved over and leaned her head against his shoulder, and the clean smell of her long, tawny-blonde hair filled his nostrils. Her hand reached out again and started moving in a slow caress along the entire length of his stiff, raging, imprisoned cock.
"Can't we do something? Like fuck?"
"Soon. I'm looking for an exit."
"Slide the seat back," she said. He felt her free hand fumbling to find the tab of his zipper.
"Jesus, no," he said. "Don't. As soon as I find a place to turn off we'll find a back road somewhere and fuck like crazy." She'd destroy him yet, this girl. Once when he was driving he'd slid the seat back, and she'd unzipped him and taken out his cock and sucked him off, and while he was coming he'd almost hit a telephone pole.
"Why?" she said, teasing, still stroking the caged monster with her hand. "Don't you like me to lick your cock, Paul?" He'd taught her to talk to him like that, damnit "I'll just tickle it a little, with my tongue. I'll just take the head in my mouth, just the red part, and hold it there, and suck on it a Utile."
"Please wait," he said. "Please."
"All right," she said, acting hurt. "Most boys like me to suck their cocks." She moved away from him along the seat.
He looked over at her. She was leaning back against the door on her side of the car, smiling, her mouth open slightly, her lips moist and red against the white of her teeth. Her eyes were big, wide open, a clear guileless gray over the tip-tilted innocent nose, and one knee was up against the back of the seat, opening a long spectacular slant of her upper leg. She had taken off her panties somewhere along the way. The bright pink inner lips of her petal-soft cunt smiled coyly at him from the dewy-blonde nest framed in the welcoming white velvet softness of her inner thighs.
He forced himself to look back at the road, and an exit appeared ahead. Good thing, he thought. In another minute he'd be ready to leave the road and take off cross-country.
Once off the turnpike, he drove slowly, with one hand on the wheel, looking for a likely looking back road. Sally moved closer to him on the seat, still keeping one knee up and her legs open. With his free hand, he caressed the slender ankle near him, the smooth, swelling calf, the exquisite roundness of her knee. He let the backs of his fingers slide sensuously down the softness of her inner thigh till his hand touched the moist nest of her pussy. With the side of his forefinger he diddled with the swelling twig of her clitoris, then turned his hand over, palm up, and slid his middle finger all the way up into her warm wet cunt, his other fingers pressing into the yielding white globes of her ass.
"Don't tease me, Paul," Sally said. "I don't want to be fingerfucked. I want your big hard cock in my cunt, not your finger."
She leaned over and reached for his prick again, squeezing its throbbing thickness just below the rockhard head. He saw a dirt road then, meandering off to the left, and took his hand away from her hungry cunt and put it back on the wheel as he steered the car out of traffic. He held his slimy middle finger up off the wheel.
A half mile along the deserted road he slowed and pulled the car into a leaf-strewn clearing among the trees, turned off the ignition, set the parking brake, and reached down for the lever to slide the seat back, all in one fluid motion. He moved over to the middle of the seat, unbuckling his belt and unzipping his fly.
Sally leaned into his arms, her face up toward him, her mouth open. He kissed her hungrily, his tongue probing and entwining wetly with hers. He reached down with one hand and pushed her sweater up to her neck. She wore no bra, and the pink, pouting nipples of her proud, firm young breasts seemed to be winking at him. He kissed and licked and sucked them, one at a time, until they were bright red, and wet, and hard as marbles.
"Now, Paul," she said. "Please fuck me now. I want to fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!"
He shoved his trousers and underpants down to his knees as Sally straddled him on the wide seat. She raised herself on her knees and held the angry purple head of his cock between her fingers as she positioned herself over him, then placed it between the swollen pink lips of her cunt entrance, and let herself down slowly, impaling herself on the steel hardness of his spear.
Paul groaned as his shaft slid to its full length in the tight, warm embrace of her squirming twat. She raised herself again, and held still, squeezing the neck of his cock with tiny contractions of her inner cunt lips.
"Ah, you're wonderful," he said, and meant it. She had more talent in her twat than practically any girl he'd ever fucked.
She began to slide up and down the length of his shaft, with a long, slow, rhythmic motion, and he arched his hips, thrusting to match every plunging descent of her gulping cunt. He was lost, adrift in a sea of wet, warm, clutching twat. He cupped the deliciously round, white globes of her palpitating ass in the palms of his hands, urging her to a faster rhythm as he drove his rigid prong deeper and deeper up into her bottomless, soft-sided cave of a cunt. Her mouth was over his, her tongue thrusting into his mouth in time with the rhythm of their fucking. He moved one hand over and slid his little finger into the tiny tight aperture of her asshole, and got the response he wanted. With a sharp intake of breath, she increased the rhythm of her plunging descents on his hard slippery shaft, and moved her mouth away from his.
"Oh, fuck," she gasped. "Oh, shit," as her quivering, clutching cunt lunges became more frantic. "You're going to make me come, darling. Can you come with me?"
"If you want me to," he grunted, driving his great cock up into her with a reckless fury. "Come now, baby. Now. Fuck fast, and come."
She went wild, her hips moving up and down and around with furious abandon, and as she groaned and gasped and shuddered, he let himself go completely, and felt himself explode inside her. Skyrockets went off in his head, as he felt her shuddering, clutching, wild orgasm going on in waves.
She lay against him limply, still straddling him, while the waves of sensation diminished and the clutching of her cunt subsided. After a long while she lifted her face to look into his.
"It's been such a long week without you, baby," she said. "A very long week."
Tor me, too," he said gallantly.
CHAPTER TWO
Sally was very relaxed during the rest of the trip, not saying much, srniling to herself a lot. She looked almost demure with her pants on, Paul thought once, looking over at her as she sat quietly glancing out the windows at the restaurants they drove by. She suggested, then almost simultaneously rejected, the idea of stopping for dinner at several of them.
They decided to wait and have dinner at Pete's, a hang-out in Sally's college town. In the parking lot outside Pete's, Sally turned to him and smiled.
This place is Michelle's special bag," she said. "She practically lives here. Suppose we run into her?"
"Suppose we do?"
"What'll I tell her?"
Tell her about what?"
"Don't act dumb. About you fucking her."
"Oh, tell her sure, I'm honored. We can cross swords at dawn."
The pink of Sally's tongue appeared between her open moist lips, and then she smiled broadly, lewdly, looking into his eyes.
"Dawn's not a very good fuck time," she said. "Except for roosters. But I'll tell her."
The place was crowded, as always, and they had to wait a long time at the bar, drinking beer and talking with the animated bunch there, before getting a table. When the harried, heavy-hipped, sweating waitress finally got to them, the kitchen was fresh out of everything they ordered. They could have the lamb chops, she said, but they'd take a while. They had no other choice. They were starving.
It seemed like an hour before the waitress put the plates in front of them. They ate, like hungry people everywhere, without speaking. Paul had just ordered coffee when he saw Michelle come through the door, followed by a faceless date. Sally and Paul were in a booth, with Paul on the side facing the entrance, and Michelle saw him immediately. She stopped and looked at him, her dark eyes flashing, her cheeks flushed from the autumn air. Then she laughed and looked away, pulling her date by one hand toward the bar.
"Your roommate just arrived," Paul said, his eyes following her across the room. Sally turned arid looked, too.
From the rear, Michelle was a petite brunette with a trim figure, exquisite fluid-motion hips, and spectacular legs. From where he sat, across the room, Paul had an overwhelming desire to kiss the dimpled backs of her knees, above where her calves swelled, then tapered into her short boots. "How do you like her?" Sally asked. With an effort, Paul pulled his eyes toward her. She was smiling at him.
"I've met her before," Paul said evasively.
"You didn't pay such close attention. And you're not answering my question."
"I can only see her from the rear."
"You'll see her from the front," Sally promised. "All there is to see."
Paul could not control the swelling erection that had throbbed to life under the table, or will it down. Sally, looking into his eyes, sensed something, and reached her hand under the table and ran her hand up its rigid length. She laughed aloud.
"Shall we try to arrange something for tonight?" she asked.
If you like," he said. "If she likes." God, he was horny. He should have had sense enough not to settle for one quick one with Sally before coming here.
I'll talk to her now," Sally said, starting to slide out from the booth.
"Don't," Paul said, putting his hand out to stop her. He needed a chance to settle his cock down and think coolly. You got into more trouble, he learned, going off half cocked. He couldn't picture the back seat of the Packard for the scene he had half formed in his mind.
But Michelle had seen them, and stayed only for a brief moment at the bar. She came over to the booth, alone, leaving her date with a beer and a worried look at the bar. Her breasts, swaying magnificently under a snug purple cashmere sweater, looked even larger than they actually were, because of her supple slenderness. They were precisely at the level of Paul's eyes, as he sat, and he made a feeble attempt at looking away. What the hell, he thought. He looked, in open admiration, and smiled. When he finally raised his gaze above breast level he was looking into Michelle's dark smiling eyes. "We've met," he said.
"Yes." His hard-on throbbed uncontrollably. "That's enough of that," Sally said. "For now." Michelle looked at her roommate. There was a question on her face.
"Yes," Sally said. "We've talked it over."
"And?"
"His answer is yes, of course. You knew it would be."
"When?"
"Tonight, if we can figure something out."
"Jesus," Michelle said. She made an almost imperceptible backward motion of her head, indicating her date, who was leaning against the bar, casually pretending not to be watching them.
"We can't talk here," Sally said. "Shall we?" She slid out of the booth, and the two roommates headed for the ladies' lounge, picking their way through the crowded, smoky room.
Paul watched them go. So did the boy at the bar.
They were gone for a long time, it seemed to Paid, but women in pairs in ladies' rooms always took a long time. He tried to think of other things, and gradually his hard-on subsided. By the time Sally got back to the table, alone, he was able to hold a cigarette without shaking.
"Well, obviously," Sally said, sliding back into the booth, "there's nothing civilized she can do about getting rid of her date before he takes her back to the sorority house. And he knows the witching hour is one, on Saturdays, as well as you do."
"What the hell," Paul said, trying to appear as if she'd just said they had no pistachio ice cream, would vanilla do? "Another time, maybe."
"However," Sally said. His heart, as they say in the Rover Boy books, leapt. Not only his heart.
"However?" he said. "You girls will slide down the drainpipe?"
"Not exactly. You'll slide up it."
A recollection started forming in his mind.
"You remember that time Michelle was in the infirmary with the flu?"
"I sure do. I didn't leave your room till dawn's early light. But I almost walked into the arms of some insomniac lady biology instructor on the walk outside."
"How do you know she was a biology instructor?"
"She wore sensible shoes."
"You can leave earlier this time."
It--had really been very simple. The room Sally and Michelle shared was in the rear of the sorority house, on the second floor, with the fire escape running right by the window. All you had to do was get a short run, jump for the bottom rung, and haul yourself up. You didn't have to be Tarzan to do it, all you needed was to be in fair shape, and have balls. Paul qualified.
They'd been fairly quiet, he remembered, he and Sally, the night Michelle was in the infirmary, and they hadn't even found it necessary to turn out the lights. Then he thought of something else.
"Listen," he said. "That was a weekday night Wednesday."
"It was Tuesday," Sally said. "But Saturday's no different. The girls come in later and noisier and talk longer, is all."
"It's different" Paul said. "There'll be two of you this time."
"You chicken?"
"No, I'm rooster. It's just that I don't like that business of not being able to lock the door."
"I told you, we hang a bra on the outside knob. It's the only thing we ever use a bra for. Nobody'd ever walk through a bra'd door."
Paul suppressed a laugh. He didn't want to spoil her. Then he took a deep breath and let it out. Too good to be true, he thought. Michelle and Sally both, tonight All of a sudden, a plethora of pussy, the loveliest pair of pussies in the whole damn' school. A little risky, maybe, but what the hell. It was worth it. Ten times over, it was worth it.
"Okay," he said. "Wonderful. When do we begin?"
"Michelle will get her date to take her home a little early, and you do the same with me."
"Why?"
"So we can, you know, get ready for you. Girls have certain little feminine niceties to attend to, you baboon."
"Then what? After I take you back to the sorority house?"
"You go out and kill some time, lap up a beer or two. And then, right after the witching hour, trot around back and up the fire escape. Don't even knock at the window. It'll be wide open. So'll everything else."
He waved to the waitress for the check.
"What's your hurry?"
"I thought we'd spend a little time in the old Packard, just you and I. Just for old times' sake." His zipper was about to burst.
"Oh, for Pete's sake," she said. "Can't you wait?"
"No," he said.
"Look at your watch."
He did. It was ten after twelve.
"I'll be goddamned," he said. "I didn't know it was so late. Just barely time for a quickie."
"Save it, pretty poppa," she said.
Paul stayed close to the building, out of the fallen leaves, and made no noise. He was pretty sure no one had seen him coming around the side of the house. There was a little moonlight, and he could make out a shadowy growth up the back wall of the building's vintage brick. He looked closer. Ivy. I'll be a son of a bitch, he thought. That's pushing tradition a little too far.
He looked at the luminous dial of his watch, which didn't work in the moonlight. Fuck James Bond, he thought, and flicked his lighter. One twenty-five. High time for the fire escape.
He caught the lower rung on his first jump, swung up and got a heel hooked. Change fell out of his jacket pocket and fell to the ground, tinkling. "Shit," he said, to nobody. Leave it for the sweeper. He struggled out onto the first platform, thinking, I wonder how many second-story men work with hard-ons?
He climbed, his crepe-soled shoes silent on the iron rungs. Sure enough, the window was raised halfway, and there was a fight from a lamp inside.
He stuck his head through the window and they were sprawled on the twin beds, grinning at him. He raised the window, carefully. Thank Christ it didn't stick.
He stepped inside, awkwardly, almost knocking over the lamp, and closed the window behind him.
He turned around.
He had lost most of his erection during his exertions, but when he looked at Michelle it rose again, rigid and ready.
She was standing at the foot of the nearer bed, smiling at him. She was wearing a white transparent thing that stopped just below the hips. It had a demure little ribbon bow at the throat and the ribbon was the only thing he couldn't see through. The deep red nipples crowning her full, high, swelling breasts were already erect, in the fight from the one lamp from the window, and the wisp of a garment seemed to be suspended from them. Her hips flared roundly from a tiny waist; and clearly visible beneath the transparency of the filmy gown, starting on the lower curve of her belly, was a truly magnificent pubic bush, jet black, luxuriant.
Paul reached out for her.
She backed away, as if startled. Then it was evident she was not startled, she just had her own plans about how she wanted to play this whole scene.
"No," she said. "Please. Get undressed first."
"She's been asking me how you're hung," Sally said casually from the other bed. She was propped up against the pillows, smoking a cigarette, wearing pajama tops and no bottoms. Her long white legs, moving lazily, made no attempt to conceal the pink dusky lips of her cunt in their shiny, dewy blonde nest.
Paul undressed in a hurry, tossing his sports jacket over the back of a chair, then his tie, then his shirt. He had to sit down in the chair to get his shoes off, and Michelle sat on the bed and watched him with an odd sort of fascination-as if the whole operation gave her some variety of intense excitement. Her lips were slightly parted, and she licked them occasionally. Like she's waiting to see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Paul thought. I'll give her, her pot of gold.
Once out of his shoes, he stood up and dropped his trousers, and Michelle's eyes and mouth both opened wider. The left leg of his blue shorts stood straight out, stretching to contain the upthrusting surge of his stiff straining cock.
He peeled off his T-shirt and thought he might get some nicker of admiration for his chest and shoulders and biceps, from the girl, but she never took her eyes from the awesome limb down below. He bent to peel off his socks, then straightened again, wearing only his shorts, with the grotesquerie of his enormous hard-on making the wearing of them nothing less than ludicrous. Michelle still sat there on the bed, staring, with her filmy short negligee still held demurely by the ribbon bow at her throat.
"Aren't you going to take them off?" she asked. "The shorts?"
"While you sit there fully clothed?" Paul asked, answering a question with a question. Two questions. "What do you think I am, immodest?"
From the other bed, Sally laughed.
"Jesus," she said. "What a scene!"
Michelle stood up, fumbled at her throat, and the diaphanous white wisp fluttered to the floor. She kicked it deftly aside, and Paul got a glimpse of a small red orifice opening and closing in the thick red clutch of her black cunt hair. She turned completely around, once, for him to see the perfection of her whole body. In all its smallness, it was superbly sculpted, the contrast between her tiny waist and the sudden flaring of her hips and her wonderfully pouting round ass a throat-lumping sight Paul tried to swallow, and couldn't.
Michelle sat down abruptly on the bed.
"Come here," she said. "Please."
Tentatively, Paul took a step forward, then looked over at Sally. She was smiling broadly, one knee raised and moving slowly back and forth. One hand was on her Stomach and Paid noticed that the middle finger was very close to the upper opening of her pussy.
"Go ahead," she said. "This is Michelle's party."
He walked over then and stood directly in front of Michelle, where she sat on the edge of the bed. She reached up her hands to his hips on either side, tucked her fingers inside the elastic of his shorts, and slowly brought them down, until they hung up at the thick root of his hickory-hard cock. She pulled the elastic out in front, then, her eyes widening, and managed shakily to get Paul's shorts the rest of the way to the floor. He stepped out of them. Michelle had lost her cool, he noticed.
"Oh, my God," she breathed. "It's beautiful. Cest magnifique. Sally, you never told me."
"I told you," Sally said, from the other bed.
"Not the whole truth," Michelle said. "You never told me how really big it was."
"I told you it was pretty big," Sally said. Paul's back Was to her and he didn't turn around. She sounded Smug.
"You know damn well it's more than pretty big," Michelle said. "It's gigantic."
Paul looked down. His rigid cock, at an angle above the horizontal, looked squarely into Michelle's face. The eye in the middle of the head, he knew, should be winking a vertical wink at her, but he had no control over that. A pity, he thought. There would be the parlor trick to end all parlor tricks. Beautiful, Michelle called it. From where he stood, there was nothing beautiful about it. It was just long and broad and very hard. The skin was brownish in color, except for the head, bigger than the rest of the shaft, in diameter, which was dark and red and swollen and glistening; the tender skin stretched tight, as if it were ready to burst Under the velvet-soft skin of the shaft a blue vein ran a meandering course, like a river on a sectional map.
"It's so beautiful," Michelle said again, still staring. The rich scarlet areolas capping her breasts had contracted and puckered so that the nipples stood out, cylindrical and flat topped, like tiny rigid erections.
"Well, that much I did tell you," Sally said, behind him. He heard her weight shifting on the bed.
"Are you girls going to leave me standing here while you talk all night?" he asked plaintively, putting his weight on the other foot. It was Michelle's move. It was her party, Sally had said.
Michelle reached up a hand, slowly, deliberately, not taking her eyes away from the stiff object of her immediate adoration, and put her thumb under the base of his cock, pushing gently upwards. The angle of erection sharpened abruptly, exposing the soft-skinned, sensitive underside of his cock. Michelle leaned forward, the tip of her tongue appeared, and she began to lick the underside of his cock, barely touching it with the tip of her tongue, from the base right up to the wrinkled soft shawl of loose skin around the neck. She was at his cock's very throat, he thought. The most vulnerable part. There she lingered, licking.
He shuddered. Jesus, this Michelle. Phi Beta Kappa material, for sure.
She drew her tongue away, and he saw her open her mouth wide as she released the pressure of her thumb. His cock resumed its normal angle and the whole head disappeared in her mouth. It was a strain, but she made it. Her eyes were rolled up, looking at him.
"Hey," Sally said, from the other bed.
Michelle drew her mouth away, her lips reluctant, lingering wetly at the tip of his stiff, tingling prick.
"I only wanted to kiss it hello," Michelle said.
Paul could stand no more, and could stand up no longer. He sank to the side of the bed, scooping up the little brunette and lifting her to deposit her on her back in the middle of the bed. He leaned over her, resting on one elbow, and covered her open mouth with his own.
Her quick darting tongue vibrated in his mouth with the rapidity of a hummingbird's wings, fluttering against his own probing tongue. His free hand kneaded the firm proud hills of her breasts, squeezed the hard, jutting nipples. His hand moved down over the gentle yielding swell of her belly, around the delight of her hips, and cupped and squeezed the delicious white globes of her buttocks. His little finger, exploring, touched the bottom of the tender lower extremities of her cunt lips, and came away wet. She was ready. She'd been ready all along.
He moved his hand around between her thighs, and his middle finger found her clitoris-swollen, slippery, evasive as a tiny eel. He arched over her, his weight on his knees and elbows, and she reached out and guided the bursting head of his cock to her eager, wet, open little twat entrance. She placed it squarely in the embrace of the swollen outer lips, and Paul began to ease it into her, slowly.
"Oh, sweet Jesus," she said, and her legs spread wide, then clung to him, her ankles locked behind his hips.
Christ, she was tight, Paul thought. When his shaft was halfway in, he stopped to let her get used to the thick stiffness, but her butterfly hips beat a soft tattoo on the bed as his giant pin impaled her further. When he had buried it to the hilt, she was squirming, and writhing, and gyrating, all in one motion. He withdrew it to the head, and plunged it in deep again.
"You've forgotten something," he heard Sally say, from somewhere.
He'd completely forgotten about Sally.
Driving his prick firmly home, holding the base of it squashed tight against Michelle's squirming cunt, he hooked an arm under her waist and swung her out from under him, turning as he did so, holding his cock jammed tightly into her. When she was on top of him and he lay flat on his back, she got the message, and began joy riding up and down the length of his shaft, gasping and groaning the while.
Sally, standing beside the bed, smiled down at him.
"You're so clever," she said, and raised one long lovely white leg and stepped up on the bed. Carefully, she placed one knee beside his head on the pillow, the other knee on the other side. He found himself looking straight up into the moist dark valley between the pink swollen outer lips of her twat She let it descend slowly, his tongue extended to meet it, and then his tongue, his mouth, his face, were buried in her wet velvet cunt.
He sucked, and licked, and gobbled, while Sally shuttled her hips and groaned. His own hips were pumping and thrusting up to meet the squirming descents of Michelle's tight, clutching twat. Licking, sucking, fucking, fighting for his breath, he felt as if he were thrashing about in a great sea of quivering cunt, a swamp of cunt, an ocean of cunt, a great steaming jungle of wet cunt.
The bed was bouncing and creaking and groaning, Sally was gasping now, on the verge of coming, and he heard Michelle screaming aloud as she went into a series of palpitating orgasms. He wanted to tell her to quiet down, but his mouth was full. Anyway, he was coming himself, exploding like a giant rocket into the warm suction of Michelle's gulping cunt.
He was taking one final lick at Sally's sated pussy when he heard the door open.
He made one convulsive move to rise, but lay back, knowing how futile it was. Sally lazily raised her twat from his face and stood up at the side of the bed, trying inanely to cover herself with her hands.
Mrs. Halsted, the housemother he had charmed so carefully, stood in the doorway. She had turned on the overhead light, flooding the room in baleful brightness. He had never seen such a rapidly shifting set of emotions register on a human face. Shock. Horror. Lust. Delight.
He smiled at her, wetly.
"Mr. Beck," Mrs. Halsted said, looking quickly away from him and the girls as if they were a ghastly street accident. "How nice of you to pay us a visit."
She backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
CHAPTER THREE
He was not a bad guy at all, the Faculty Advisor who had to kick him out of school.
"She was pretty graphic, that Mrs. Halsted," the Faculty Advisor said.
"Must be her imagination," Paul said. At that point he had some vague notion that he might bluff his way through the whole thing.
"Hell of an imagination, for a New England lady."
"It's that Puritan background," Paul said. "It twists their minds. Witch burning and stocks and bundling and all that jazz."
He saw that the Faculty Advisor was laughing, and stopped.
"Well, shit," he said. He laughed too.
"You know, there was an undercurrent of venom in everything she said. Almost jealousy, or envy of the girls. I think she felt left out. Everything would probably be all right if you'd just invited her to join the festivities."
"Don't talk like that," Paul said. "I have a delicate stomach."
The Faculty Advisor laughed again. Maybe he enjoys kicking guys out of school, Paul thought. Or maybe I'm just an enjoyable guy to kick out.
"You know, we might have been able to squash this whole thing if you'd been with just one girl in that room. And had been indulging in what they call a conventional act."
"Nothing wrong with a little cunnilingus between friends. Or among friends."
"Well, there's that," the Faculty Advisor said. "What with the Puritan mind and witch burning and all that jazz. But two girls, at once."
"Well, hell," Paul said, "how else would you take care of two girls at the same time?" He uncrossed his legs and started searching his pockets for cigarettes. He was a little embarrassed, for the first time. When he finally got a cigarette into his mouth, the Faculty Advisor leaned across the desk and lit it for him.
"My boy," he said, "I admire you. But don't tell anybody I said that."
"I won't," Paul said. Nice guy, he thought. He must be a bitch on a double date.
"It could probably be squashed anyway," the Faculty Advisor said. "Except that the two schools have always enjoyed a very close relationship."
"I was enjoying a very close relationship."
The Faculty Advisor laughed again. He was a laugher, this one.
"I meant the board of directors and that sort of thing," he said. "And the faculties."
"Don't you suppose the faculties go in for this sort of thing, as part of that close relationship between the schools? In an intramural way, I mean."
"Maybe. But they don't live in sorority houses."
"You have a point," Paul said.
"Anyway, as you've gathered, it's been decided that you've got to leave this school, and the sooner you get out, the more comfortable it'll be, for everyone."
"I can leave today," Paul said. "I'm practically packed."
"What about transportation? Can I have this office arrange for plane reservations, or train reservations?"
"Thanks," Paul said. "But I have a car. What about my tuition?"
I'll do what I can. You should get at least a partial refund."
"You have my mailing address," Paul said, "in your records." He stood up.
The Faculty Advisor stood too, and came around the desk to shake hands.
"When you make application to other colleges," he said, "use my name as a reference here. I won't be as graphic as Mrs. Halsted."
"I don't think I'm going to any other college," Paul said.
For the first time, the Faculty Advisor looked shocked.
"Why not? You're much too bright to be a dropout at this stage."
"I'm much too bright not to be," Paul said, and left the office, closing the door behind him.
He was packed in an hour. His textbooks he left for his roommate to dispose of, his papers he threw into the wastebasket, and aside from his tennis racket and his jock strap, there was little personal stuff, aside from his clothes, left to pack.
He was totally devoid of feeling as he closed the trunk lid of the Packard. All he could think was, what a waste of space. I could move a family of six in this thing.
On impulse, he took a Stamford exit off the Merritt Parkway, and found a pleasant, afternoon-deserted bar, got himself a bottle of beer, and put a collect call in to his mother in Beverly Hills. He didn't expect to reach her, although she'd be up by now, it was almost noontime in California. But he felt like talking to somebody, and he and his mother had been on speaking terms ever since she'd gotten him the Packard.
Oddly enough, she was home. She answered the phone herself.
"Paul!" she said. "For God's sake! Don't tell me. You're going to be a father."
"You're a sentimental old fool," he said. His mother was thirty-six. "Nothing like that. I got kicked out of school."
On the other end, his mother was quiet for a long moment
"I'm sorry, Paul," she said.
"I'm not."
"What for?"
"What for what? Not sorry?"
"What did you get kicked out of school for?"
"I got caught in a room in a sorority house."
"That's a very small infraction to get kicked out of school for," his mother said. "What happened to the girl?"
"I guess they got kicked out too."
"They?"
"It was a sort of compound infraction."
"Oh," his mother said. "Paul, I don't know what I'm going to do with you."
"You're not going to do anything with me," he said. "You never did."
"Do you need money?"
"Not yet."
"What college will you try for? You ought to be able to make the Spring semester."
"No college. I think I'll get a job."
"Paul, you're making a mistake."
"No, I'm not I'm fed up with school and I'd like to do something."
"I'm going to get on the plane tonight, with Bill. I think Bill ought to talk to you."
Bill was the man she'd married before she'd left for California.
"What the hell do I want to talk to Bill for? He'd just tell me to do whatever I wanted to do."
His mother was silent for another long moment.
"I suppose he would," she said. "All right, what land of job do you want to get?"
"Some kind of a job in advertising."
"Oh, no."
"Oh, yes."
"Why that miserable business?"
"I understand they make a lot of money."
"Don't be mercenary," his mother said. "Money isn't everything."
"Only people who have money say that," Paul said. "I bet when you were my age you were mercenary as ... well, I hate to think about it"
"Don't" his mother said.
"Anyway, I want to get some kind of job in advertising and I thought you might know somebody for me to call."
He could hear his mother thinking "Call Sam Wycliffe," she said. "He's at Norman, Wade and Gelder. At least he was, six months ago."
"What's his number?"
For the first time since he'd picked up the phone, he heard his mother getting mad. She sounded so natural, at last that it made him feel all warm inside.
"You talk like a boy with a paper asshole," she said, "They're in the phone book You'll go a long way in that business if you can't even look up a phone number."
"Sure I will," Paul said, happy that she'd blown up at last.
"Call us if you need anything."
"Us," she'd said, Paul noticed. That meant that she and Bill were still getting along together, after two whole years. Remarkable, "And, Paul?"
"What?"
"Cut out that two-girls-at-a-time stuff. You're a growing boy. You've got to save your strength."
"For what?"
"For later. Listen, itll stunt your growth."
"All right," Paul said. I'll be a monk. I'll bake bread."
"Make brandy," his mother said, and hung up. Good old Mom, he thought, as he left the telephone booth. American as apple pie.
Back on the Merritt Parkway, Paul's mind kept wandering back to thoughts of his mother, as it often did. She had been a big influence in his life, and not in the stereotyped way, not in the apple-pie, chicken-broth, wear-your-rubbers way. Not by a long shot. If she told Paul to wear his rubbers, when he was younger, she meant Trojans or Sheiks, to be pulled over his precocious young prick, before the Pill became popular in his set. His mother never worried about his catching a cold.
She had always talked to Paul as if he were an adult, and a swinging adult, at that, even when he was preschool age, especially about sexual matters. Dianne Beck had divorced his father shortly after Paul was born, but Paul had never needed a father to tell him about the birds and the bees. Naturally bright, and wiser than his years, he had always found himself gravitating to the company of boys and girls older than himself, and had always felt himself accepted as an equal; at least, as an equal. But miraculously, with his mother's instinctive swinging guidance, he had never fallen into the category of smartass.
Now, ruminating and occasionally grinning to himself as he drove, Paul remembered the time he had first actually seen his mother in action. He remembered the scene as vividly as if it were being projected in glorious wide-screen Technicolor on the Packard's windshield, right before his eyes.
Paul had been fourteen at the time, and had brought home a seventeen-year-old friend of his named Marty Brinegar for dinner. Dianne Beck had been a model all her life, since her late teens, but she had never been exposed to a live consumer's gaze like Marty's. All through dinner, Paul watched in amusement as his friend's eyes ate his mother up. Marty ate his food without tasting, and only to be polite. Paul and his mother did all the talking. Marty was a total conversational loss, but Paul was sympathetic, even at that age. How can the poor guy talk, he thought, with his cock clogging his throat?
After dinner was over the three of them went out to the living room and just sat around. Paul decided it was up to him to break the ice. He knew his mother would be ready for a drink: she'd had three Martinis before dinner.
"Can I shake up a Stinger for you, Dianne?" he asked. He'd been calling his mother "Dianne" since he was four.
"Sure," she said, smiling at him. She melted grown men with that smile. Marty started to shake, visibly. "And maybe Marty would like a beer?" She looked at him, questioningly. Marty only nodded, numbly.
Paul wasn't allowed to drink, yet, not even beer, but he knew how to make drinks. He got out ice in the kitchen, made a Stinger plus a dividend in the shaker, opened a beer, and carried the whole works back to the living room on a tray.
Marty took a grateful gulp of beer, while Dianne sipped at her Stinger.
"Good," she said, glancing at Paul. "God, it's hot. I think I'll get into something cooler, if you gentlemen will excuse me."
She got up and left the room, with a flash of gorgeous tanned legs under her short summer dress. Marty stared after her, his Adam's apple sliding up and down.
"Don't take it so hard," Paul said. "You get used to her."
"Not me," Marty said. "I never would."
Paul heard his mother coming back down the stairs before he'd found anything much else to say to his friend. When Dianne came back into the room Paul saw she was wearing a short filmy white thing and highheeled red slippers and not much else. Hell of a costume, he thought, considering the shape Marty was in already. The nipples of Dianne's still high, firm breasts showed pinkly through the sheer material, the long curves of her body were clearly out-lined, especially the enticing round ass that men had rhapsodized over. "Succulent," her mother had told Paul they called it. And "celestial." And when she sat down on the couch, the filmy hem fell around the slender swell of her hips. When she crossed her spectacularly sculpted legs, anyone could see why she was in such constant demand as a leg model.
Marty tried to look away, but couldn't. Paul felt sorry for his friend.
"It is awful hot" Paul said. "Sure is," Marty croaked.
"Why don't you go upstairs and take a shower, Marty?" Dianne asked. "It might help."
The coldest shower in the world wouldn't help Marty, Paul thought, the shape he was in.
"Maybe I will," Marty said, putting down his beer, but he didn't stand up. Paul knew why. His hard-on would show.
"And Paul," Dianne said, turning to him. "Why don't you go out and get us some ice cream?"
"Ice cream? With you drinking Stingers and Marty drinking beer?"
"Why not? You like ice cream, don't you?"
"My bicycle's on the blink," Paul said. "I thought I told you." He had, too. He knew he had.
"Well, you can walk."
"In this heat?" Paul asked. "It'll be half an hour before I get back. At least."
"No hurry," Dianne said. "Walk slowly."
While they were talking, Marty got up and moved toward the stairway and the cold shower. Paul looked at his mother. A vague awareness of something was growing in him.
"Chocolate or vanilla?" he asked, feeling in his pocket for money and moving toward the front door.
"A pint of each," Dianne said. Even Paul was conscious of what an overpoweringly stimulating sight she was, all legs and breasts and smile, as he closed the door behind him.
He walked silently around the house, keeping to the grass, climbed up on the railing of the sun porch, then swung himself up onto the low roof.
At the gutter at the far end of the sun porch roof he squatted, staring in the darkness toward the windows of Dianne's bedroom, only a few feet away.
He didn't have long to wait. After only a couple of minutes the ceding light flooded on, and his mother walked to the center of the room, moving slowly, smiling, and turned on the bed lamp. She paused a moment, then turned on the floor lamp and turned it so its light focused on the edge of the wide double bed. Then she went back and turned off the ceiling light.
Paul had a clear view of her as she came back to the bed, sat down, then raised herself and took off her frilly panties and tossed them aside. Paul had only a glimpse of her pussy, but saw that the fur was of the same dully-gleaming, luxuriant jet blackness as her hair.
From where he crouched, at the edge of the sunporch roof, Paul heard the sound of a door opening, and then Marty came slowly, hesitantly into his range of vision. Dianne must have called to him in the shower. Marty was wearing only a bathtowel, and appeared scared to death, but the bathtowel was poking 'way out in front. Paul turned his attention back to his mother.
She was lying back against the pillows at the head of the bed, smiling gently, her legs apart, one foot still on the floor. Slowly, she raised the knee that lay on the bed, and lazily let her leg sway outward, giving Marty a full open view of her pink-lipped cunt, looking moistly, vibrantly alive in the soft frame of black, rich, silky-looking pussy fur.
Paul had a clear view of Marty, in profile, licking his lips.
"Go ahead," he could hear Dianne saying clearly, smiling at his friend. "Do anything you want I'll like it"
Paul saw Marty lick his lips again. Paul's hand went to his own throbbing cock. He couldn't help himself. Dianne had moved to the edge of the bed and lay back with her legs apart and her knees raised, her feet in the air. Her cunt was an open moist pink slash in all that black fur.
"Go ahead," Paul could hear her saying. "Kiss it" Paul opened his fly and squeezed his cock as he watched Marty drop to his knees, his head between Dianne's open thighs. Paul could only see the back of Marty's head now as it moved forward, blocking his vision of that open tempting twat
"Lick it," Dianne was saying softly, seductively. "Put your tongue in there. Lick up and down. Then suck my whole cunt. Lap my cunt Eat my cunt Gobble my cunt"
Pulling at his freed pick, Paul watched Marty begin to lick, and suck, and gobble. He could hear his friend groaning in excitement
"Ah, there," Dianne was cooing. "That's it. That's a good boy. Now, get into me. Fuck me now, Marty. Please, quick, fuck me now."
Stilling his hand, Paul watched as Dianne got back onto the middle of the bed with her legs spread and Marty, naked now, knelt between her thighs. He saw his mother take Marty's straining cock between her thumb and forefinger and guide it to the wet, welcoming lips of her cunt Paul's hand began to move again on his cock as he watched Dianne move the head of Marty's rigid prick up and down in the bright pink entrance of her visibly moist twat, lubricating it.
Then Paul saw his friend's flanks convulse as he thrust his cock home. Dianne's legs snaked around Marty's back, holding him.
"Slowly, now, Marty," she said. "Fuck me slow, slow, slow."
But there was nothing to slow Paul's hand on his own hard, tingling shaft. His sperm spurted out into the soft summer night, over the edge of the porch roof.
Paul almost fell off it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Paul got home around three-thirty, and had to let himself in with his key. There was no one in the house. The Humboldts lived frugally with their two girls away at college; they had fired the maid, and the cleaning woman came only on Tuesdays and Fridays. Vickie Humboldt would be off playing bridge somewhere, with a dark brown drink by her side, and Frank would be knocking his brains out down on Wall Street, or wherever it was he knocked his brains out. They were sure knocked out by the time he got home at night.
Home, to Paul, since his mother had gone to California two years before, had been the spare bedroom upstairs at the Humboldt's where he kept his books and his records and his out-of-season clothes. For rune months of the year he was away at school-or had been-and for the other three months she usually managed to be somewhere else. Frank Humboldt, about ten years older than his mother, was her second cousin. "Dear Cousin Frank," his mother would say, talking about him, and laugh in that odd, lewdly amused way she had-and Paul had had to call him "Uncle Frank" till he was about six, when he'd kicked the habit. His mother had something on Cousin Frank; so he had a mailing address and a place to keep his books and records and a place to stay, when there was absolutely no other place to go.
He liked Frank all right, but Vickie was a pure pain in the ass. She hated his mother, for one thing-maybe she knew what it was his mother had on dear Cousin Frank and she let it show in the way she behaved toward Paul. He couldn't have cared less. He spent as little time as possible in the house in Scarsdale. Squaresdale, he'd called it, when he first moved his gear to the Humboldt house, but he'd soon learned to call it Screwsdale, as the rest of the natives did. With reason.
After he'd gotten his luggage out of the trunk of the Packard and brought it up to his room, he found a Manhattan telephone book on a shelf under the telephone table in the hallway downstairs. He found the Norman, Wade and Gelder number without any trouble, and Sam Wycliffe was in, but he had some trouble with his secretary, had to give his name three times before Sam Wycliffe got on the phone.
"Paul Beck," he said. "Dianne Beck's boy?"
That's me."
"Hell. I remember you. I met you at your house when you were about thirteen or fourteen. You were on crutches. Broke your leg playing football or something. Sure, I've met you."
"I remember," Paul said. He didn't, but it didn't matter. And he hadn't broken his leg playing football, he'd broken it jumping out a bedroom window when a neighborhood mother had come upstairs unexpectedly, but that didn't matter either. "How's your mother?"
"She's fine. She's out in California, you know."
"I know," Wycliffe said. "She up and married some bastard of a screen writer."
"He's a pretty nice guy," Paul said.
"I didn't mean anything by that" Wycliffe said. "It's just the idea of your mother marrying anybody makes him a bastard to me."
"I see," Paul said. Another one, he thought.
"I hope not," Wycliffe said. "Anyway, what can I do for you?"
"I talked to Mom on the phone a while ago and she told me to call you. I'm looking for a job."
"Aren't you still in school?"
"I was," Paul said. "Until today."
"What happened?"
"I'll tell you about it when I talk to you."
"Fair enough," Wycliffe said. "How about tomorrow morning, around nine-thirty?"
"I'll be there."
"Got the address?"
"It's in the phone book."
"Eleventh floor," Wycliffe said. "See you in the morning." He hung up.
Maybe I'm going to like that business, Paul thought, putting the phone in its cradle. For a guy in the bullshit business, there didn't seem to be much bullshit about Wycliffe. But then, he was a friend of Mom's. It figured. She wouldn't spend two minutes of her time on a phony.
He caught the 8:36 out of Scarsdale in the morning, and didn't like one minute of the ride to Grand Central. When ol' Charlie and ol' Steve said hello or good morning it sounded more like congratulations, and the well-fed, well-dressed atmosphere of the smoking car reeked of self-satisfaction. He'd be moving out of Screwsdale, he decided. Quick.
The train was ten minutes late getting into Grand Central, but it was only a few minutes after nine-thirty when he walked into the Norman, Wade and Gelder reception room. The walls were lined with framed full-color ads, for what products he didn't stop to find out. The receptionist was a young Katherine Hepburn with tits. She put on large horn-rimmed glasses to look at him when he stopped in front of her desk. She had a smile that came wrapped in cellophane.
"Mr. Wycliffe?" she asked. "Have you an appointment?"
Top," he said, and she frowned. She didn't like that. Fuck her, he thought. In time. He walked over to one wall to look at the framed advertisements. They were mostly for cosmetics of one kind or another. Peachy as a son of a bitch.
"His secretary will be right out," the receptionist said to his back, and he nodded without answering. He could feel her eyes on him.
The secretary came out. She was a little redhead with a real smile, not wrapped in anything.
"Mr. Beck?" she said, cocking her head to one side. He was the only one in the reception room, for Christ's sake. He looked around.
"I must be," he said, and the redhead laughed. "All right," she said. "If you'll follow me?"
"Glad to," he said.
She had a determined, jaunty little strut, and her firm rounded ass bobbed a little with every step. Jesus, he thought, I'd love to work in this place. Just for the fringe benefits.
At a comer office she stopped and indicated an open door.
"He's in there," she said.
Sam Wycliffe was a big man, gray at the temples, and he stood up and came around the desk when Paul came through the door. He looked to be in pretty good shape, like a man who'd rowed stroke on somebody's crew once around World War II. A lot of gin had gone under the bridge since.
"Any son of Dianne Beck's is a friend of mine," he said, and put out his hand. Paid shook it. Corny old son of a bitch, he thought.
"Now," Wycliffe said, indicating a chair for Paul and going around his desk to sit down, "exactly what happened that you're all of a sudden out of college?"
"I'm a dropout," Paul said. "By request."
"As simple as that?"
"Not exactly," Paul said, and told him what had happened. All of it. Right up and through Mrs. Halsted.
Sam Wycliffe looked at him steadily for a long time after he'd finished. Paul recrossed his legs, his discomfort mounting. He'd figured candor would go a long way, but maybe he'd let it go too far.
Then Wycliffe laughed. He laughed for a long time, and there was nothing phony about the laugh.
"Dianne Beck's own son," he said. "I'll be a son of a bitch."
Paul didn't say anything. Talk about heritage and family tradition, he thought It looked as if he had it where it counted.
"Lots of imagination and lots of balls," Wycliffe said. "That's what we need around here."
"I've only got two of them," Paul said.
"You're at least one up on most of these guys," Wycliffe said. "How old are you, Paul?"
"You probably know how old I am so I won't He to you," Paul said. "I'm twenty."
"You could be twenty-four or five, easy," Wycliffe said, musing. He seemed almost to be talking to himself. "It's probably the dark complexion that does it"
Paul was still deeply tanned from the summer, but he didn't say anything.
"Black hair, black eyes," Wycliffe said, still talking to himself. "Good shoulders. Hell of a good-looking boy." Paul squirmed in his seat and started searching his pockets for his cigarettes.
"How tall are you?" Wycliffe asked suddenly. "Six feet?"
"About. Or a shade under." Paul was suddenly sore. "What the hell has that got to do with the high price of oats?" he said. It was an expression his mother used to use.
Wycliffe laughed.
"Nothing," he said. "I'm sorry. I was just thinking. We could use you around here."
Paul felt a sudden surge of elation. Fuck Mrs. Halsted, he thought, and his stomach turned over at the flash picture in his mind.
"We could use you," Wycliffe said. "And I don't mean in the mail room or as some kind of trainee or any of that half-assed crap. We could use you in client contact."
"What's that?" Paul asked.
"Never mind," Wycliffe said. "You can learn all you have to learn to begin with in about three days."
"Well, thanks," Paul said. "I'm glad you think so."
"You got a good voice. Talent's nice to have, and brains, but they don't mean a damn unless you have a good voice. A good voice wins out over brains and talent, any time. Sit in on a few meetings and you'll find out what I mean."
"I'll keep singing," Paul said. "I'll sing like a son of a bitch."
"Never mind the jokes, son." Paul shut up.
"Now, about this goddamn honesty of yours," Wycliffe said. "Honesty's a good thing, in its place, but there's no point in pushing it too far. Tell the truth, by all means, whenever it appears necessary. Make sure everything you say is the truth, under certain circumstances. But just tell the part of the truth that'll do you the most good."
"I think I understand," Paul said. I'm sure you do. Now, I can't hire you myself."
Paul felt himself starting to sink in the chair, and pulled himself erect.
"I can, but I won't," Wycliffe said.
"Why not?" Paul asked. He was glad to hear that his voice still sounded strong.
"Because in this business you never make a decision by yourself if you can avoid it. You get somebody else to say yes or no along with you, and that way there's always somebody else to share the blame if anything goes wrong. Like, if I hired you and you turned out to be a mainliner or something everybody'd say, You see what that silly son of a bitch Wycliffe did? Hired a hop-head."
I'm not," Paul said.
"I know," Wycliffe said, and grinned. "You never would've had the time."
"Thanks," Paul said. "There's nothing like knowing that people have confidence in you."
"So you'll have to see Bob Gelder. Hell do the actual hiring."
"Who's he?"
"He's the president of this agency. I'm what's called the executive vice-president."
"What happened to Norman and Wade?"
"Beats me," Wycliffe said. "When should I see Mr. Gelder?"
"Can you come after lunch? At quarter to three?"
"Sure," Paul said.
"I know he has no appointment then because he called a meeting for three o'clock. He'll be loaded when you meet him, right after lunch like that, but hell remember that he hired you afterwards. I'll go in and talk to him now, right after you leave."
"Anything else?"
"Yes," Wycliffe said. "You're twenty-four years old, not twenty. You just got out of school last June-you missed a couple of years on account of serving in Vietnam-and you're just starting to look for work because you had a bad attack of, let's see, pleurisy after graduaation. He doesn't know what the hell pleurisy is and neither do I but it's good enough. All that stuff will confuse the shit out of him but he'll like it You got it all?"
"Yep," Paul said. It was pretty simple.
"You'll have to work as an assistant account executive under Harold Dingman and share an office with him. He's a total jackass but you won't be working for him long, I have a feeling."
Paul got up and started for the door.
"You'll meet Bob Gelder this afternoon and you may not see him again for weeks, but whenever you're with him, keep one thing in mind."
"What's that?" Paul asked.
"He's a fuckin' idiot" Wycliffe said.
"I'll stop in and see you after I've talked to him," Paul said.
"Do that"
At the door, Paul stopped and turned. "See you later," he said. "And thank you, Mr. Wycliffe. "Call me Sam," Wycliffe said.
CHAPTER FIVE
On his way out through the reception room Paul noticed that the receptionist had taken off her suit jacket and draped it over the back of her chair. She was wearing a white sweater and against that slender, almost angular torso, her breasts were really remarkable, jutting out like pennants in a stiff breeze. She had good legs, too, Paul had noticed through the opening in the front of her desk, and all and all she was quite a good-looking girl, in an antiseptic sort of way. Paul had an uncontrollable urge to thaw that icy exterior, slide his cock into her warm interior. He walked back to her desk and stood directly in front of her.
"Would you have lunch with me today?" he asked her quietly. There were three men in the reception room, leafing through magazines, but he kept his back to them and knew they couldn't hear anything he said.
"What?" she said. For just a second, she looked startled. It was the first genuine expression he'd seen on her face.
"Lunch," he said, still speaking softly. "I have to come back this afternoon to see Mr. Gelder. I may come to work here and I thought maybe you'd be good enough to have lunch with me and tell me a little about the place."
"All right," she said. "Where?"
"You name it. I'm new in this neighborhood."
"There's Ratazzi's," she said. "But you'll probably need a reservation."
"Where's Ratazzi's?"
"Forty-eighth. Between Madison and Fifth."
"I'll be at the bar at twelve."
"Fine," she said, smiled her icy smile, and looked back at some papers on her desk. He turned and walked the length of the room without seeing anyone even look up. As he pushed through the glass doors he was aware that he was whistling, under his breath. "You Took Advantage of Me" was the tune.
He hadn't even had time to order a drink at the bar when she came through the door into the dimness of Ratazzi's. She looked much less severe out of the office. Her mouth was much fuller and softer than it had appeared behind her desk that morning.
He had reserved a table for two and the maitre d' seated them side by side in a banquette at the extreme rear of the place.
"I always feel uncomfortable, sitting like this," he said, waving away a menu. "Like I'm one of a row of birds on a fence."
"If you're trying to call me a chickadee," she said, "you can stop right now."
"Wouldn't think of it"
"I like sitting like this. You can watch people."
"Seems to me you'd get enough of looking at people, all day long."
"I never get tired of looking at people."
"What'll you drink?"
"A vodka Martini on the rocks, I guess. I don't usually drink them at lunch but it would be defying tradition not to, in this place."
The waiter had written it down, without any middle man.
"I'll have a Scotch and water," Paul told him. He turned to her in minute apology. "I don't want to fool with Martinis when I have to talk to the man named Boss this afternoon."
"You're very wise," she said. "This way, one of you will be sober, at least."
Her name was Norma and she was right about not usually drinking Martinis at lunch. Halfway through the second one, her hand was squeezing his leg. That was all right because his hand was squeezing hers, too, at a wonderfully soft, yielding spot he'd found just above her knee, on the inside. Nobody noticed anything because the tablecloth was long, but it was not long enough for what Paul had in mind. No tablecloth was that long.
"Are you getting hungry?" Paul asked her. Her hand was moving further up his leg, and any minute now she was going to strike gold.
"No," she said, and finished half of what was left in her glass. "Not at all. I always eat a big breakfast downstairs before I come into the office."
"I'm not either," Paul said.
"I hardly ever get hungry at lunch," she said. "Sometimes I don't eat at all." The edge of her hand, on its slow trip up his inner thigh, came up against the hard fist that was the head of his stiffened prick. Her hand recoiled, in a poor simulation of dismay, as she looked at him, curious about his reaction. Involuntarily, he felt himself grinning at her. She put her hand back, around the full thickness of the shaft, and her hand moved up and back, slowly, exploring the length of it. Her eyes widened in wonder.
"Now there's noontime nourishment for a growing girl," she said.
"Full of vitamins," he said, taking his hand out from between her moist upper thighs and motioning for the waiter. "Shall we go somewhere?"
"Yes."
"Where's your place?"
"On Perry Street, in the Village. It would take too long to get down there and back again and it's a mess anyway."
"On the way up from Grand Central I walked through a nice big impersonal hotel. It's only two short blocks down Madison. I'll get a room."
He paid the check and they got up and started out through the hum and the sound of ice.
"I'll call the girl who's taking my place at the desk," Norma said, "so she can send out for something before she starves to death."
"Tell her your aunt in Rochester had a heart attack."
"That's just what I'll do. I'll tell her my aunt in Rochester had a heart attack, so I'll be a little late getting back from lunch."
"Good sound thinking, all around," Paul said. "Then stay near the phone. I'll call you from the hotel as soon as I have a room number. What's your last name again?" He was a little embarrassed to have to ask, but she didn't seem to mind.
"Olsen," she said. "Can you remember it?"
"You're the one who had the Martinis," Paul said.
He had no trouble getting a room at the hotel. Without luggage, he had to pay cash in advance, but he'd known that. The bellhop insisted on escorting the key up to the room for him, to switch on the light and open a window and collect a tip. Paul called Ratazzi's two seconds after the door had closed behind him.
Norma must have been standing next to the phone booth. She answered the phone herself.
"Room 814," he told her.
"I'm glad it isn't 969 or something like that," she said. 1 would think you made it up."
"Eight-fourteen," he repeated distinctly. "Can you remember it?"
"The Martinis have worn off," she said. "But nothing else has."
He undressed quickly, down to his shorts, and had just finished hanging his suit in the closet when he heard her tap at the door.
She looked him over for a long minute after the door was closed behind her.
"You're beautiful," she said.
"So're you," he said, and put his arms around her and kissed her. She didn't open her mouth, and felt stiff in his arms. It seemed somehow depraved, standing there almost naked with his arms around a girl all dressed up in her good office clothes. It was probably bothering her, too, he figured.
"Why don't we get you into something more comfortable?" he said.
"You're full of good ideas," she said, and took off her jacket. He put it on a hanger and hung it in the closet. She slipped out of her sweater while he watched, stepped out of her skirt, and kicked off her shoes, and stood before him in only a bra and a half-slip.
Without the bra, her breasts still stood out like pennants, only now they jiggled, just with her breathing. Ha stepped forward, cupping them in his hands, and sucked each petulant pink bud of a nipple in turn. They came erect, pointing upward, two tight little wrinkled roses. She was staring down at the grotesque extension of the throbbing left leg of his shorts.
He hooked his thumbs into her half-slip and slid it to the floor. She stepped out of it and sat down on the edge of the bed, raising her long slender legs and pulling of her pants. Her cunt was a wet open gash in the brown silken curls.
"You've forgotten my lunch," she said, and reached out to pull his shorts to the floor. Without hesitation, she leaned forward, opened her mouth wide, and gulped in the head of his cock.
He put his hands behind her head and drove it back into her throat. She choked, and rolled her eyes up at him.
"Let's not waste it," he said, and tumbled her back into the middle of the bed. He kissed her, hard, and her mouth opened and her tongue met his. He drew away and kissed her throat, moved down, licked her nipples, pinching the hard buds with his lips. He put his tongue in her navel, and his hands wandered in a random caress all over the length of her long, neat body, surprisingly soft to the touch. He licked his way across her flat belly, down to the mound of fur at the base. There was just the hint of hipbones framing the belly. Slash you to ribbons, he thought, if you're not careful.
He tongued her cunt open and licked her swelling clitoris. He felt no discernible response but she was sopping wet. He'd stay away from those stabbing hipbones, he thought.
He stretched out at right angles to her and raised the slender white leg nearest him. His thighs clamped above and beneath the upper part of her other leg as he brought his hips up and in under her raised knee. The swollen purple glistening head of his great throbbing prick found the soft open lips of her cunt mouth without guidance.
His lips drove the stiff shaft inward with a powerful thrust, and it slid in easily, deeply, with the first stroke. He withdrew, to the very tip of the spear, and plunged it in again, to the hilt. His pubic mound jammed hard against her yielding twat lips. Her hips did not move.
Angered, he began to fuck her with long, plunging strokes, driving his cock deep, withdrawing it to the head, driving it in again, with a furious, pounding rhythm. There was no response from her hips, no sound from her lips. He stopped in mid-stroke.
"What's wrong?" he said, looking up at her face. She turned her head on the pillow, a pleading look in her eyes.
"Put it in the other way," she said. "Please?"
"What other way?"
"You know," she said. "Up my ass."
It won't fit"
"It'll fit."
"Roll over."
"We don't have to do it that way," she said, and reached up and pulled the other pillow down. She arched her back upwards, raising her hips, and settled the pillow under the round white mounds of her buttocks.
The soft wet lips of her cunt made a tiny plopping sound as he withdrew.
"Try it now," she said. "It'll fit."
He pushed, gently, and watched in amazement as his swollen prick head sank in and disappeared. It was as if a drawstring had loosened, and now tightened again around his oaken shaft. God, it was tight. But it would take more than a tight asshole to choke the life out of it.
He plunged it in, wonderingly, and the thick base of his shaft came to rest between the welcoming fleshy globes of her ass.
"Don't stop," she said, and he noticed that her teeth were clenched. "Fuck me hard, all the way up the ass."
Anything to please, he thought. He fucked her, hard, all the way up the ass, just as she asked. He plunged his prong deep, as deep as it would go, his pelvic bone slamming into her welcoming bottom, again, and again, and again. She was gasping and groaning now, her hands given over to a convulsive clutching of the sheet. He raised one hand and found her twat opening. His two middle fingers slid into the soft dampness, and he began fingerfucking her in time with the pounding of his prick.
A long, quivering, continuing moan came from her throat.
"That's it, baby," she said. "All the way up. Fuck me all the way up. I'll do anything for you. I'll suck you off any time. I'll lick you. I'll ream your ass with my tongue."
She was gasping now, her hips squirming and bouncing as he drove his long, piercing rod faster and faster, deeper and deeper, into the tight clutching channel of her anus. His fingers worked furiously in the moist quivering cave of her cunt, and suddenly she began to shudder, and a muffled scream started somewhere in her throat. He pumped his cock up into her ass with lightning strokes, and as she stiffened and began to flail her legs in orgasm, he came with her, squirting his juices up inside her, his belly glued tight against the wet globes of her grateful ass.
After a long while, he withdrew his limp pecker from the tight grip of her sphincter and lay back, wishing for a cigarette. She got up, shaking her head like a dog coming out of water; and, almost as if she were reading his mind, she padded over to the dresser and came back to the bed with his cigarettes. He thanked her, mutely, with his eyes.
She turned toward him from the open door to the bathroom.
"We must have lunch again some time," she said. "We will," he said. "I expect to be working there soon, you know."
"You might even come down to Perry Street It isn't so far to go, after work."
She closed the door behind her, and he heard the shower running. He looked at his watch. Quarter to two. That gave him time to eat before he saw Gelder.
Maybe this Norma girl didn't care about eating lunch, but he did. Paul was hungry.
He walked into Bob Gelder's office feeling totally relaxed, well-fed, and filled with confidence. If Gelder was loaded, as Sam Wycliffe had predicted, it didn't show, except maybe a little around the eyes. Gelder, like Wycliffe, was a big man, but older, and softer. His hair was pure silver; Paul wondered if he had it touched up. He looked almost distinguished, except that there was a cruel toughness balancing the weakness in his features. He'd never make it in politics, Paul thought Nobody over voting age would trust him.
But he was downright jovial when he got up and came around the desk to shake hands.
"Sam Wycliffe is damn impressed with you, Paul," he said. "Knows your family, but he says he never knew you'd turn out so good."
"He knows my mother," Paul said. "Or did."
"That figures," Gelder said, and looked out the window. "How old are you? Sam didn't say."
Twenty-two," he said easily. He knew damn well Sam did say.
"Ha," Gelder said, and looked out the window again. "You're a healthy looking specimen, I'll say that for you."
Too much clean living," Paul said.
"We'll soon put an end to that," Gelder said, looking back at him and smiling. He was a charmer when he smiled.
"Does that mean I'm going to work for you?" Paul asked.
"Sure. You look as if you could carry the ball for us."
"Great," Paul said. He meant it. All those fringe benefits he'd seen, bouncing around the place.
"You'll be working with Harold Dingman for a while, at least until you learn your way around. He's a good man and a nice guy. You'll get along fine."
"Mr. Wycliffe mentioned him," Paul said.
"You'll have a lot to do with Sam Wycliffe, too. And you'll get along with him, as you stay alert of his one overwhelming trait"
"What is it?"
"He's a fucken idiot."
"I'll try to remember," Paul said.
They talked about salary, and Paul hadn't the faintest idea how much to ask for. But Gelder took him off the hook, and when he told Paul what he thought would be a reasonable salary for him, just for openers, Paul was more than just pleased. He was close to ecstatic, but he tried not to show it.
"When do you want to start?"
Paul hadn't thought about that, either.
"Monday," he said.
"Fine," Gelder said, and they shook hands. "See you then."
He headed straight for Sam Wycliffe's office, and stuck his head in the door. Wycliffe was behind his desk, staring straight ahead at nothing. He looked as loaded as he'd predicted Gelder would be.
"I start Monday," Paul said. Wycliffe focused on him, then got up and came around the desk, motioning Paul inside. He shook hands.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. Gelder say anything about carrying the ball for us?"
"I think he did."
"Fucken idiot," Wycliffe said.
"He seemed like a nice guy."
"He always does. The first time you meet him. Paul?"
"Yes?"
Wycliffe lowered his voice.
"Around the office here," he said, "keep it in your pants, will you? At least during working hours."
"I'll take the vows."
"No need to overdo it," Wycliffe said. "Maybe a little, what the girls call a noonsie, once in a while, can't do any harm."
Paul felt a flush rising to his face, and was helpless to stop it
"What's the matter with you?" Wycliffe asked.
"Nothing," Paul said, and affected a strangled cough. "I got something caught in my throat."
"Drink some water," Wycliffe said. I'm due at his goddamn meeting." He left Paul standing in his office, coughing.
As soon as Wycliffe was out of sight, Paul stopped coughing. He reached into his side pocket for his cigarettes, and his hand touched the hotel room key. Shame to waste it, he thought He was enormously elated.
Wycliffe's little redheaded secretary looked up when he came out of the office. She smiled at him. She had a wonderful smile.
"I'm starting work here Monday," he told her.
"Congratulations," she said. "You'll like this place."
"I know I will." He had a thought It had been there all along.
"Will you have a drink with me after work? Sort of a celebration drink?"
"Well." She thought a minute. "Sure. Where?"
Paul thought for a long moment Not Ratazzi's. That might be a hangout of Norma Olsen's.
"The Miramar, on Forty-Sixth Street?" He'd met his mother there for lunch, a number of times. Back when he was young.
"Fine."
"What time do you finish work?"
"Depends on Mr. Wycliffe. I'm usually out of here by half past five."
"All right," he said. "I'll be at the bar at five-thirty."
"See you there," she said, and turned to her typewriter.
On his way to the elevators, he became aware that he was whistling again, under his breath. "World on a String," this time.
CHAPTER SIX
When Paul got to the Miramar shortly after five, the bar was moderately busy. While he was sipping his first Scotch, he gathered from the conversation around him that he was surrounded by broadcast people from the radio station across the street. From the window you could see the station's call letters mounted large in stainless steel above the entrance of the building directly across from the bar. It was hard not to now that they were broadcast people. Like the actors and assorted show people he had met among his mother's friends, they were always on; but they needed no microphones. Their voice level carried clearly from one end of the bar to the other, and back again. Most of their conversation was anecdotal, and very "in," about what Walter B. said to Henry, but it was amusing, even out of context. He was on his second Scotch and enjoying himself when the little redhead appeared, perky and smiling, at his shoulder. He realized for the first time that he didn't know her name.
"You're one up on me," he said, getting off the stool "You know my name."
"And you don't know mine," she said. "I wondered about that Eileen's my name. Eileen Fahey. And don't laugh."
"Why should I laugh?"
"People usually do, the first time they hear the name Fahey. Then they start singing 'Danny Boy' or go into some lousy Erin Go Blah accent."
"Not me," Paul said. He remembered something. "Anyway, Mr. Wycliffe told me not to do any singing."
"Why?"
It's a long story," he said. "Shall we sit down?"
"If you want to," she said. "But sitting at the bar's fine with me. I like to sit at bars."
"That's because your name's Fahey."
"There you go," she said.
"Let's sit down," he said. "These radio guys will be going on full network in a little while."
A waiter led them toward the back, and sat them side by side, again, at a table against the wall.
"I'll have a Martini," she told the waiter, while they were sitting down. "Straight up. No vegetables."
Jesus, he thought. It was some kind of occupational monkey they had on their backs.
"Scotch and water," he said.
"Don't you like Martinis?" she asked him.
"Sure," he said. "But it looks to me like some kind of conformity, and I'm not nuts about that. Besides, I have seen a lot of Martini drinkers on my mother's side of the family. I think they corrode the brain."
She laughed.
Then there's a lot of corroded brains lurching up and down Madison Avenue," she said. "So I've heard." The drinks arrived.
"Do you think you'll like this business?" she said, sipping.
"I know I will. Especially since you're in it"
"Oh, put a lid on that" she said.
"I mean it. You're the first unphony I've met all day. The other people I've talked to up at the agency are so goddamn down-to-earth that they just plain reek phony."
She was quiet for a minute, turning the stem of her glass. She seemed to be thinking. She also seemed pleased.
"How old are you, Paul," she asked. Twenty-two."
"Bullshit," she said. "How old are you, then?"
"You're never supposed to ask a woman her age."
"You're not supposed to only if it's apparent that they're over twenty-one. And you're not."
I'll be twenty in three months."
Hot damn, he thought. Practically what they call a contemporary.
"I was just twenty last month," he said.
"All right" she said. That, I'll buy."
She seemed unaffected by the first two drinks, but on the third one he noticed that she was slipping fast. For the second time that day the thought came to him that these girls were in over their depth when they started drinking Martinis.
Eileen was getting affectionate, in a clean sort of way-it was his hand she squeezed, not his cock-and it disturbed him. In his code of behavior, if he had any code of behavior, plying women with liquor had gone out with the mandolin. Not because he thought it was wrong to use liquor to get laid, but because he had found it totally unnecessary, and because he did not like drunken females, especially drunken young females. They had a tendency to pick fights, to vomit on your shoes, to pass out, or, at best, to be unresponsive when the time came. So, when Eileen got near the bottom of her third Martini, he motioned for the check.
"No," she said. I'd like another one, please."
"Well, all right But let's order some dinner along with It"
I'm not hungry."
It was the second time today he'd heard that "After this drink," he said, "I better get you home." Jesus, he thought you're a noble bastard, all of a sudden.
"I don't have to go home so soon," she said. "I called my folks and said I'd be staying in town for dinner."
In town for dinner? He'd assumed all working girls had apartments in New York. His plans for the future were now all shot full of holes.
"You live with your parents?"
"Yes, if you can call it living."
"Where?"
"Bronxville."
Holy Christ, he thought. A neighbor, practically. Now he'd have to get this crocked young broad on the train with all those goddamn commuters and take her out to where his car was parked at the Scarsdale station, and drive her back to Bronxville. And hold her up while he delivered her to her parents. He thought he'd graduated from all that middle-class suburban shit when he graduated from high school.
The drinks came, and she finished half of her Martini in one long swallow. She looked up at him with deep affection. The pupils of her eyes were swimming. Out of her depth, Paul thought. For God's sake, the girl was drowning. She leaned her head against her shoulder. Please don't pass out here, he thought. Please.
Then he had a thought. A noble thought. An honest-to-God noble thought. Jesus, but he was thinking like a gentleman tonight. Maybe the thought of being respectable and employed was too much for him.
"Eileen," he said softly. Her eyes were closed. She opened them.
"What?"
"How do you feel?"
"Woozy. Very woozy. I guess I'm drunk."
"I guess you are," he said. "Now listen to me. Carefully."
"I'm listening," she said. Her eyes closed, slowly, and she leaned her head more deeply into his shoulder. There was a smile of utter serenity on her face.
He raised her head upright, gently, with his shoulder. She opened her eyes. He was reassured to see that she recognized him. She reached out and took another long sip of her Martini. Big help that would be, he thought But it seemed to revive her, somewhat "Please listen," he said.
"I'm listening," she said again, but this time she kept her eyes open and her head up.
"I was planning to stay in town tonight," he said. "My hotel is only a block from here."
She stiffened abruptly, and sat rigidly upright. Her eyes widened and the pupils seemed to stop swimming for a moment
"Oh, boy," she said. "I should have known."
"It's not like that at all," he said. "What do I look like, Jack the Ripper or something?"
She looked at him woodenly.
"No," she said. "Not exactly." She squinted, to see him better.
"Try to understand me," he said, speaking distinctly, as if she were wearing a hearing aid he didn't have any confidence in. "I can't take you home the way you are. You're pretty loaded."
"Yes, I am," she said, attempting a haughty sort of dignity. She was starting to hiccup. Don't get sick, he thought Please don't get sick.
"But if you'll just go up to the room now and take a nap, you'll be fine in a couple of hours. Then we can go out and have some dinner and I'll take you home. My car's at the Scarsdale station."
"Scarsdale?" she said. There was too much to think about all at once. She was confused.
"I five there," he said. "Sort of. We're like neighbors."
The name Scarsdale seemed to reassure her. The poor naive girl, he thought. She doesn't know old Screwsdale.
"That's all you want me to do?" she asked, in a little voice. "Take a nap so I sober up?" She sounded six years old.
"That's all," he said, "so help me." So help him, that's all he did want, now. Two hours ago he had been planning to con her up to the room and fuck the belly off her, but now she wasn't fair game any more. His whole plan had gone up in smoke. Or in gin.
Well, hell, he thought, there'll be other times. I'll keep her on sarsaparilla.
"I guess it's a good idea," she said, and swallowed what was left of her Martini. "All right, you can take me up to the room for a nap. For a nap."
"For a nap," he said. "Scout's honor. Physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight."
It was a hollow joke; he felt a little sick.
"Just in case on your honor you're not morally whatever," she said, hiccuping gently, "there's something you ought to know."
"What is it?"
I'm a virgin."
He took a deep swallow of Scotch and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was real. He looked around him. The waiters were real, the people were real. He pinched himself, and looked at her.
"You're a what?" he said tonelessly.
"A virgin." She hiccuped again.
"Where'd you learn that word?"
"I read it somewhere," she said. "In an old book."
"You shouldn't read so much," he said. "You fantasize."
"Not fantasizing," she said, having trouble with the word, and drew a vague cross with her finger in the area of her left breast. "Cross my heart. Absolutely the truth." She had trouble with "absolutely," too.
"I'll be damned," he said. "You're the strangest girl I've ever met."
"What's so strange?" Her hiccups were getting worse.
"Nothing," he said, and motioned for the waiter. "I think it's time for your nap."
"Maybe I ought to have another drink to get rid of these hiccups."
"No. Please. Let's go."
"All right," she said. She was almost contrite. He paid the check and helped her out from behind the table.
It was a very short walk to the hotel. She wobbled badly on her heels but nobody seemed to notice. She was a small girl, not more than five feet three, and he kept a tight grip on her and had no real trouble at all. They were the only ones on the elevator going up to the room.
He switched on a lamp on the dresser when they were inside, and when he turned around, saw the rumpled twin bed.
"I took a nap at noontime" he said, "when I got the room." But she was beyond noticing. She sat at the side of the rumpled bed, concentrating intensely on getting her shoes off by pushing the heel of one shoe against the other. He took them off for her and turned down the spread on the other bed. Take off your dress," he said.
"No," she said, and looked at him fiercely. Her hiccups were gone.
"For Christ's sake, you don't want to go home all wrinkled. Here, I'll help you."
She held her arms meekly over her head, and got to her feet, stepping on one of her shoes and starting to fall sideways. He caught her, and tugged the dress off over her head and hung it in the closet.
Like Norma Olsen at noontime, she was wearing a bra and a half-slip. Same goddamn sorority, Paul thought Martinis and half-slips. Her breasts in the white net bra were lovely-firmly independent, perky, pouting young globes. Not too big. Not too small. Just right. The most perfect breasts he'd ever seen, he thought. He couldn't bring himself to call them tits. The nipples winked pinkly through the white net.
He took her elbow and led her to the bed he'd just turned down, and she tumbled into it, gratefully. He couldn't help staring at her smooth bare legs, still tanned from the summer sun, as she swung them under the sheet. The firm smooth calves swelled symmetrically, the knees were exquisite. He felt his pecker start to stir.
Down, boy, he thought. Noble is the word.
She pulled the sheet to her chin and held it there, clutching it, only her face and her fingers showing as she looked up at him, trying to focus.
"What are you going to do," she said fuzzily, "while I'm out of it?"
"I could go out somewhere, if you'll feel safer."
"No. Don't leave me alone here."
"Then I'll take a nap too. I'm a little pooped myself."
"That's good," she said. He sat down on the side of the rumpled bed and took off his shoes, watching her eyelids slowly close.
He had been lying on his back on the other twin bed, looking up at the ceiling, and was just drifting off to sleep when he became aware of a weight on the bed beside him. She was sliding in beside him, drawing the sheet over herself. He was abruptly wide awake. She was shivering.
"I'm cold," she said. I'm so cold."
"It's the gin wearing off," he said, and raised his arm along the pillow to make room for her head on his shoulder. She lay her head down, half on his shoulder, half on his chest, and moved close to him, her arm across his stomach. Gradually, the shivering subsided, and she lay still. With his cock swelling and rising, he turned on the pillow to loss her.
She was asleep. God damn all women, he thought. God damn gin. Then he reminded himself, noble was the word. He had to laugh. His swelling went down, and soon he was asleep, too.
As he came slowly awake, he thought he was in the throes of a wet dream, being blown under a blanket at a football game. Woke up just in time, he thought, before I gum up the sheets. He raised his left hand and opened one eye and squinted at his watch. He'd been asleep almost three hours.
Then it seemed to him that his wet dream was still going on, so he opened both eyes. Looking down, he saw the sheet down at the foot of the bed. His cock was poking upright through the opening in his shorts, and redheaded Edeen, propped on one elbow, her ankles on the pillow beside his head, was running the tip of her tongue up and down the underside of his shaft.
He went traditional, for the second time that evening. He pinched himself.
He wasn't dreaming.
She saw that he was awake, and stopped what she was doing long enough to smile at him. It was an impish smile.
"This is a wonderful way to wake up," he said, making conversation.
"I wanted to do something for you," she said seriously. "I know it must have been hard for you. You've been such a ... a," she looked for the word, "gentleman."
"It's hard for both of us," he said, nodding toward his rigid, red-tipped cock. "Think of it that way."
"No," she said. "Not for both of us. I told you what I am." She seemed embarrassed now to say the word.
"An honest-to-God virgin," he said.
"It's true." She was all wide-eyed serious, her fingers around the base of his skyscraper of a cock as she looked steadily past the swollen purple head into his eyes. She was sober now, he saw. Cold sober.
"Do virgins ever take their clothes off?" he asked. "I haven't had much experience with the species."
"Why don't you take yours off?" she said, begging the question. "Your shorts get in my way."
He sat up and pulled off his T-shirt, then lay back, raised his hips, shoved his shorts down to his feet, and kicked them to the floor. She raised herself on one elbow and surveyed him, from head to foot.
"You have a beautiful body," she said.
"Not one tenth as beautiful as yours," he said. "Ifs a crying shame to conceal it."
"Well," she said. She leaned forward and took a long, slow lick with the flat of her tongue on the soft skin of the underside of his cock, from base to tip. He shivered, then sat up.
He reached out to the elastic of her mini-slip, at her waist, and drew it slowly down past her ankles and dropped it on the floor beside the bed. Her hips and belly flowed flawlessly into the soft curving lines of her upper thighs. Between her thighs, at the V, a faintly reddish shadow showed through the thin white silk of her pants.
He leaned further forward and reached around her. She didn't resist as he unsnapped her bra and took it off. She sat up in the middle of the bed, and he couldn't have talked if he had to. His throat wouldn't let him.
Her breasts were absolute perfection, the soft white upper slopes curving upward to the crowning pink tender buds of her nipples. He bent forward and kissed them softly, then sucked them gently. The tiny buds swelled and stiffened and rose to meet the touch of his tongue. His fingers traveled down across the smooth curving white softness of her belly, under the yielding elastic of her pants.
"No," she said, and rolled quickly away from him.
"I wasn't going to do anything," he said.
"Well that's enough anyway. I just wanted to do something for you."
"Don't let me be selfish," he said. "Let me do something for you first."
"What?"
"You'll see."
"No."
"You'll still be a virgin. Come sit on the edge of the bed."
He slid over, swung his feet down, and turned to kneel on the floor, looking up at her. He still had a rampant hard-on, but it could wait. Forever, if necessary.
Slowly, hesitantly, she inched her way to the edge of the bed and swung her legs down. She kept her lovely knees together.
"Let me take your pants off," he said.
"No," she said, for the third time. He caressed the smooth swell of her calves with the back of one hand. Her knees moved slightly apart, and he bent forward and kissed her just above one knee, on the inside.
"How're you going to learn about love if you stay dressed like a Puritan?" he said. The word "Puritan" made him think of Mrs. Halsted, and, involuntarily he made a face. She noticed it. She didn't miss much, this girl.
"If you don't like what you're going to do," she said, "don't do it." .
So she wasn't so naive after all, he thought. At least she'd heard of this activity.
He reached up with both hands, slid his thumbs under the snug elastic at both sides, and tugged gently. She didn't resist. She raised her buttocks, almost imperceptibly, and he pulled the panties off easily and dropped them to the carpet.
He was conscious of her wide-open eyes on him as he looked at her. The soft silken nest around her little opening slit matched the rich dark red of the hair on her head. Maybe it was a shade lighter, he thought, studying it. A tiny pink fold peeped through, between the tender swelling lips of her pouting, perfect little pussy, like the tip of an exploring tongue.
She opened her legs, instinctively, and he leaned forward and touched the delicate escaping fold of soft membrane with the very tip of his tongue. Then he opened his mouth wide, leaned forward further, and found that he could cover her entire cunt with his mouth.
He began to lick it, with long, slow, gentle strokes. Every few licks he would stop, and probe with his stiffened tongue, pushing it into the tight tiny entrance between her inner cunt lips. Her hips quivered, and she raised her legs and hugged his head with her thighs.
"Oh, golly," she said.
He reached both hands up, around the outside of her thighs, and reached back down. With his middle fingers, he carefully opened the tender pink outer lips of her cunt, and began to lick the sweet, moist, glistening playground of pinkness his fingers had exposed.
He increased the pressure of his tongue, and began to lick harder, faster. Every now and then he paused, stiffened his tongue, and plunged it into her tight little twat, as deep as it would go, out again, in again, swiftly, and then returned to his licking.
She was groaning and gasping, and writhing so much that sometimes his tongue found itself between the delicious round globes of her ass, sometimes his mouth was filled with nothing but hair. He held her hips then, to quiet her bucking, fitted his mouth squarely over her cunt, and began to suck and gobble in earnest
"Oh, golly," she moaned, the sound strained through clenched teeth. "I can't stand any more. Please come up here with me."
He kept on sucking, running his tongue back and forth across her clitoris as he sucked.
"Please, please stop," she gasped. "That's all I can stand for now." He couldn't hear clearly what she was saying, with her soft thighs embracing his ears. She sensed that apparently, and opened her legs wide so he could hear what she said.
"Ooh," she groaned. "Please. Come up here with me. I want to do you some more."
Then he understood, and he didn't have to be told twice. He gave her tender quivering, delicious little cunt one last lingering lick, and got up on the bed, on his back, his pulsing prick straining toward the ceiling. She got to her knees and opened her mouth and gobbled in the whole head, eagerly, hungrily, her hand around the base of his shaft, as far at it would reach, her tongue sliding up and down, tickling, licking, playing a tune along the sensitive soft folds of his undercook.
Every nerve in his body was singing. He'd never had his cock sucked with such affection. Such love. Such devotion. Or such consummate skill for that matter. His hands were clasped behind his head on the pillow as he lay back and let himself wallow in ultimate lazy pleasure. He watched the tumbled mass of rich red hair bobbing up and down, and listened to the hungry sucking sounds her mouth made sliding on the rigid wet shaft
"Do you like sucking cocks?" he asked, almost idly, forgetting his manners. It was a silly question anyway. He'd never seen a girl so happy in her work.
She lifted her wet mouth from his prong tip for a moment and smiled at him.
"Yours," she said. "I like to suck yours."
He stood corrected. Or lay corrected.
"Move around here," he said, reaching down to tap her on the rounded elevation of her ass.
She didn't understand. Her head kept shuttling up and down.
"You don't have to stop," he said. "Just swing your lovely little ass up this way."
She understood, then. By instinct, he was pretty sure. She'd heard of sixty-nine, he was sure, but she'd almost certainly never tried it. He was certain she'd never had a man's mouth on her cunt before tonight.
She swung around, still keeping his cock possessively between her lips, and straddled his face. He put his hands on the round white globes above him and pressed her down. She lowered herself, willingly, until the pink moist outer lips of her cunt were against his mouth.
He began to kiss her cunt lips, softly at first, then extended his tongue up inside her still palpitating pussy to her inner lips, licking deeply, urgently. With each forward probe of his tongue, his nostrils sank between her twin white globes, into her soft secret crevice.
She began moaning again, and the urgency of her sucking increased. He could feel her tight gulping mouth sliding faster and faster, up and down the stiff pulsing pole that was now an exquisitely sensitive antenna of pure sensation. Then the pressure of her cunt lips on his mouth, light until now, became heavy, demanding, as her hips pumped, shuddering. His nose buried in the crevice of her ass, his lips mashed flat against the quivering mass of cunt membrane, he felt for a minute as if he was smothering.
Then he felt the quivering spasms of her inner cunt lips contracting about his probing tongue, with almost triphammer speed, as she came to the crest of her orgasm. He heard her moaning deep in her throat, but the scream that tried to escape from her lips was stopped by the thick hard gag of his cock deep in her mouth. He let himself come, in a series of explosive spurts into the back of her throat. He could hear her gulping as she swallowed the hot squirting flow. He gave her wet quivering warm cunt one last, long, loving lick, and rolled his head away to watch her as she sucked his diminishing prick dry.
She raised her head and squeezed his cock upwards, with both hands, milking it. One pearly drop appeared at the tip, and she licked it off with the tip of her tongue, looked into his eyes for a long moment, and smiled happily.
"You know something?" he said.
"What?"
"You're the nicest virgin I ever met."
She laughed. No, he thought, she giggled. It was a girlish giggle if he'd ever heard one.
"I wanted to be good to you. I love your cock."
"You were good, Edeen. You sure were."
"You were wonderful to me," she said. "I never felt anything like that before. Never."
"And the nice part of it is," he said, swinging his feet to the floor and padding to the dresser for his cigarettes, "is that you're still virgo intacto, or whatever the hell the phrase is. You're still a virgin."
"Yes," she said. "Isn't that nice?"
"Not particularly," he said. "You're a virgin only on a technicality."
"But still a virgin."
"We can get rid of that technicality," he said. "Any time you say the word."
"We'll see," she said. She was still smiling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They caught the 12:32 White Plains local-express out of Grand Central, and Eileen was asleep by the tune they got to 125th Street. She slept, with her head against his shoulder, all the way to Scarsdale. He nudged her awake by lifting his shoulder a couple of times as the train was pulling into the station.
She was fully awake at once.
"Where are we?" she asked, trying to look through the window into the darkness outside the lighted train. "Scarsdale."
"I slept past Bronxville."
"I told you," he said. "I have my car at the station here."
"That's right," she said. "I remember now."
Even in the dark, she was full of admiration for the Packard. It gleamed dully in the dim lights of the parking area.
"It's gorgeous" she said, sliding back on the deep leather seat, listening to the solid, satisfying "thunk" as he closed the door behind her.
"Where'd you get such a magnificent old car?" she asked as he got behind die wheel.
"My mother gave it to me," he said, "on my twentieth birthday." He almost said "eighteenth." It was close.
"I have another question," she said, as he started the engine. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"I think it's great she gave you a classic car, or whatever they call them. But why such a big one?"
"It's a long story," he said. "I'll tell you when I know you better."
"You seem to have gotten to know me pretty well already," she said, sliding closer to him on the seat They were on the entrance to the Bronx River Parkway.
"I'd like to know you even better," he said.
"Well see," she said, for the second time that night, and leaned her head against his shoulder.
He thought she might say something about having a nightcap, on the drive home, but she didn't, so he didn't either. He was glad to know she was just a girl who overreached herself with Martinis, and not an incipient boozer. He had seen too many of the full-grown variety among his mother's friends.
He kissed her good night at her front door, and she kissed him back. It was a nice, warm, affectionate goodnight kiss, nothing more. She drew back when she felt his erection swelling against her belly.
"Don't you know you're not supposed to kiss on your first date?" he said, smiling down at her in the dim light from the front windows.
"It's all right," she said. "I slept in between. I consider this the second date."
Women, he thought, walking back to the car. They always had an answer.
He lay awake for a long time, after he got back to his room, thinking practical thoughts, for a change, not about Eileen in particular or women in general.
He was much cheered by the thought of the new job, and the quick and easy way he'd walked into it He knew, vaguely, that somehow he had his mother to thank for that. He wondered what his mother and Sam Wycliffe had had between them, and then dismissed the thought from his mind. His problem now was to find an apartment-not just to find it, but to find the means to get it-and move the hell out of Screwsdale. The prospect of staying with the Humboldts till his first payday was unthinkable. But he didn't have the money for the first month's rent, and security or whatever it was landlords wanted, and furniture. And he hated the idea of asking his mother for anything, unless he had a real deep-dyed emergency.
He slept but kept waking and worrying, all through the night.
But in the morning there was an envelope addressed to him from school. When he slid it open he saw a check inside, and a great happiness swelled inside him. Good man, he thought, that Student Advisor. Even before he'd gotten the check out of the envelope, he saw the amount-about three quarters of his semester's tuition.
But when he got the check out of the envelope and looked at it he started to choke. It was made out to his mother. She'd paid the tuition in the first place.
"Goddamn it," he said, and pounded the hall table with his fist. The full-blown image of Utopian life that had sprung into his mind had lasted less than three seconds.
He walked out through the front door and paced up and down the lawn in the cool Fall air. Vickie was home, in the house somewhere, but it would be no relief for him to bitch to Vickie. Telling her about something that made him unhappy, he knew, would have her coming in her pants, in spasms of ecstasy.
After ten minutes of pacing on the lawn he had calmed down somewhat There was only one thing for him to do. It was not yet eight o'clock in California, but there was no sense in putting it off. He went inside and put in a call to his mother, collect.
She didn't even sound sleepy, talking to the operator. Of course, she said, she'd accept the call. She somehow managed to sound both respectable and charming. Good old Mom, he thought. She had as many moods as a football coach.
"Paul," she said. "How is everything going?"
"Wonderful," he said. "I'm sorry I woke you, but I couldn't wait"
"You didn't. I'm having coffee. Bill just left for the studio."
"You've changed."
"Sure have," she said. "I'm thinking of joining the local Bird Watchers' Society, or whatever they call it."
"Bullshit," Paul said. "Listen, I talked with Sam Wycliffe yesterday."
"And?"
I'm going to work for them Monday."
"That's fine, Paul."
"I'm going to be some kind of an account executive. What's an account executive, anyway?"
"That's a very good question."
"Anyway, I want to get an apartment in town, as soon as posssible."
"That makes good sense. Vickie must be pretty tough to get along with. She'd make a point of it."
"I was going to use the tuition money to get squared away. The refund check came this morning. But the God damn thing is made out to you."
"I don't want it," she said. "Getting kicked out of school was your very own achievement."
"That's nice of you," he said. "But it's not the point The damn check is no good to me."
"You talk like a...." He thought she was going to mention his paper asshole again, but she didn't. "You talk like an idiot" she said. "You talk like an account executive already. Mountains out of mole hills."
"What am I supposed to do with the thing? It'll take days for you to get it in the mail, endorse it, and send it back."
"Have you still got that special checking account with the Screwsdale National Bank?"
"Yes," he said. "With seven dollars and thirteen cents in it. Roughly."
"Have you got a pen with blue ink in it?"
"Sure."
"Use it to scrawl my name on the back of the check, any old way, just so it's different from your own handwriting. Then when you get to the bank, use their pen to sign your name under it. Bank pens always have black ink, and itll look different, no matter how you write my name. They don't know my signature from Adam's, anyway."
"He keeps his account in a different bank."
"Who?"
"Adam."
"Oh, balls," she said. "Have a good time." She hung up. Good old Mom, he thought. What a banker she'd make.
Saturday morning the Humboldt girls came home for the weekend. Paul had never had much to do with them when they were small, and had seen very little of them since; and the few times he had seen them over the past couple of years, he'd paid them no attention.
But Saturday morning he had nothing to do with himself, and since both the girls were coming out from Grand Central on the same train, he volunteered to pick them up, as much to shock Vickie as for any other reason. He was amply repaid for his gesture by the look of numb disbelief on her face.
They were surprised to see him when they got off the train, and not especially pleased, he was sure, but they were polite about it. He took their bags as they walked to the car.
They were both blondes. Beth, the younger sister, was the lighter of the two, but in color only. She had always had a tendency toward what is known politely as plumpness, and that tendency had increased, if anything, during her year at college. She had a disposition like her mother's, except when she was grinding out what sounded like hymns on the piano, when it was worse.
Karen, the older sister, who had a year on Paul, had always struck him as the lean, scholarly, cave-chested type, but he noticed with interest that she wasn't cave-chested any more, or lean either. She didn't have big tits, but she did have tits. And her legs had rounded out, in long, tapered, athletic lines. She had a nice, firm, round ass and a springy, athletic way of moving. Paul wondered. It wouldn't be incest, really; they were only second cousins or something. Not that he had anything against incest anyway. But that was another story.
They sat three in the front on the short drive up from the station, with Karen in the middle. Every time he reached for the Packard's gearshift he became acutely conscious of the generous view of Karen's smooth, tanned legs afforded by her bunched up miniskirt.
"This is a great old car," Karen said, making polite conversation. Without her glasses, he decoded, she'd turned out to be a hell of a good-looking girl!.
"If it happened to be a couple of years older," Paul! said, "it would have a floor shift. Great car for a natural-born knee squeezer like me. Aren't you glad it isn't two years older?"
"Not especially," Karen said. "I have nothing against a little knee squeezing once in a while."
"You're awful," Beth said, frowning sideways.
Just like her mother, Paul thought. A natural-born pain in the ass.
But by the time they got back to the house, the relationship between Paul and Karen was so easy, so relaxed and pleasant, that an atmosphere of congeniality carried right into the living room. Even Vickie must have been aware of it; he had forgotten the girls' bags in the trunk of the Packard, went back out to get them, and when he came into the living room again, Vickie gave him a long, faintly confused look, and actually smiled.
"You'll be having dinner with us tonight, won't you, Paul?" she asked.
It was Paul's turn to be confused. When he'd first established squatter's rights on the room upstairs, they'd always asked him to eat with them as a matter of course, but he'd accepted the invitation so seldom that they'd long ago given up asking him.
"Why, sure," he said. "I'd like to very much."
"We're having a party this evening for a few friends," Frank said. "Will you stick around for that?"
Paul knew about those parties for a few friends. They were Christ awful. If you weren't a drunk already they'd make one out of you, out of sheer nausea. He hesitated.
"For God's sake, say yes," Karen said. "If nothing else, be my bodyguard. Otherwise Daddy's friends will be asking me to dance the Lindy with them, or whatever it is they do to that throw-away-your-truss music. They stomp all over a girl. And they have more hands than an octopus, as the evening wears on."
"Karen!" her mother said.
"Do all the girls at your school talk like that?" Beth asked.
They made quite a pair, Vickie and Beth, Paul thought. A compound pain in the ass.
"Sure, Pd like to be here for the party," he heard himself saying. "Besides, I like that throw-away-your-truss music. My mother brought me up on some of those old records, and that stuff was even before her time."
He looked at Vickie, defiantly, when he mentioned his mother, waiting for her reaction, but he saw none. Instead, Vickie turned and smiled at Frank, and he smiled back. It was almost as if they were both pleased to have him around, and it was the first time he'd seen them in accord about anything.
Karen must have said something nice about him while he was getting the bags out of the car, he decided. But what? Imaginative girl, that Karen. Worth exploring.
Dinner was almost pleasant. Miraculously, Frank and even Vickie were sober, that late on a Saturday. Not cold sober, but sober to a degree. It was probably the impressive responsibility of hosting the impending party. Parties were serious business, in Screwsdale, and the host and hostess usually did stay sober with the press of preparations, until the party started. Paul could never figure out why they went to all that effort, because invariably they were the only ones who were sober at the party's beginning, and they caught up with the guests' condition with remarkable swiftness.
He went upstairs to shower for the occasion.
After he'd stripped down to his shorts he looked in the mirror, debated with himself for a minute, and lost. He needed a shave. He got out his electric razor and worked his face over with leisurely care, humming all the while through the buzz of the razor, He was very cheerful. Even the ghastly prospect of the party about to start downstairs didn't depress him. He could ignore the old farts, and spend his time with Karen. He could enjoy himself with Karen, he was sure. Too bad the surroundings and the personnel were so confining.
After he'd shaved and put his razor away in the top dresser drawer he put on a terrycloth robe and slippers and walked to the bathroom he used, two doors down from his room at the end of the hall.
The bathroom door was ajar. He pushed through it and closed the door behind him. When he turned around Karen was just stepping around the shower curtain, dripping wet. She had a lovely, slender, athlete's body.
She stared at him for a second, stunned, and then laughed cheerfully. She reached unhurriedly for a bath towel and held it in front of her, casually, with one hand. One pink nipple peeked up at him.
"I should have closed the door," she said. "I guess I'm just not used to the idea of having you here."
"Don't apologize," he said. "The pleasure's all mine." He made no motion to leave.
"I think you better get out of here," she said, still smiling. "We'll scandalize the damn family."
"Well," he said, looking at the one exposed white globe with its winking, wrinkled pink eye, at the long gradual curve of hip into thigh, at the swelling graceful lines of her legs.
"If I snap your picture, will you go?" she asked. She seemed quite cheerful about the whole scene.
"Snap what?" he asked, feeling dumb.
"Snap your picture. It's a land of euphonistic expression the girls have, at the sorority house."
"Sure," he said. "Snap my picture." The words "sorority house" made him momentarily uncomfortable, but what the hell.
She placed one foot on the edge of the toilet bowl.
"Say 'cheese.' "
"Cheese," he said, and while he was saying it she dropped the towel and swung her upraised knee outward and back again, opening and closing the lips of her pussy like a cloudy-day exposure with a camera shutter.
"Click," she said.
He stumbled out through the door and closed it behind him.
She had the happiest-looking cunt he'd ever seen.
After the bathroom had been vacated, he took his shower, then loafed around his room for a long time, reading and listening to classical music on WQXR. Classical music-anything on QXR, for that matter-had a serene, calming, somehow ennobling effect on him, especially noticeable after an episode like the encounter with naked Karen in the bathroom. When he'd gotten back to the room, his prick had been turgid, tense, bunched in a semi-crouch, like a tiger ready to spring. No stripes, no fur, no claws, but a tiger just the same. The music had calmed him, and his serenity spread slowly downward to the area of his balls. Not that his pecker was guaranteed now not to become a tiger again, crouched or otherwise, as soon as he went downstairs and saw Karen again. Alone in his room, thinking about it, he shrugged his shoulders ruefully. He'd cross that bridge when he came to it. Damn his foolish commitment, anyway, to this party of middle-aged Screwsdale squares. Squares? He added a new dimension. Cubes, is what they were. His private little joke pleased him, and he got up and started to dress.
Karen had preceded him downstairs, and was talking and laughing with three grayed, paunchy men with drinks in their hands in one corner of the room. She appeared to be quite animated, quite happy, and just after he entered the room she said something that made the three men bend in a sudden burst of laughter. She glanced at him quickly and away, almost furtively, and raised and waved two secret fingers in a private hello.
Feeling minutely elated, Paul made his way through the shifting knots of noise and laughter, through the archway to the dining room, where the congestion was thickest, around a small bar that had been moved away from the wall for the occasion. Behind the bar was a sweating, unsmiling bartender in a white coat, also for the occasion. Paid managed to get a drink from him. A few friends, shit, Paul thought, looking around. There had to be thirty people in the place. He was certain the Humboldts didn't have that many friends. Not one tenth that many.
Vickie came up to him, in the first high flush of bourbon and good will, and with a smile that looked pasted on only if you knew her well, she tugged him around the room and introduced him to people. He didn't remember one name one minute later.
He found himself with his shoulder blades against a wall near where Karen stood in the precise center of a knot of laughing men. As the knot untied and tied itself again, he had an occasional rear view of her, wearing a light, very short dress, snug at the hips, flaring at the hem. In the condition he found himself, even the backs of her knees were unbearably exciting.
He never saw her look his way, but she must have sensed that he was there. She untangled herself somehow and came over to stand beside him, looking out into the room, at the flushed, maniacally merry, determined faces, the prideful paunches, the ostentatiously threadbare Brooks Brothers sports jackets. Frank, Paul knew, was ten years older than his mother; but a lot of the people at his party were even older.
"Aren't they awful?" Karen said, without looking at him.
He didn't answer her question. "You seemed to be having a good time."
"I know them I get with the ones who really enjoy themselves."
"You give them something to enjoy. You light them all up."
"Thank you."
"Wherever you are," he said, "that's the middle of the room." He glanced down at her, and found that she was looking at him, steadily, not smiling.
"When the dancing starts, and that'll be any minute now," she said, "I don't want to dance with anyone but you."
"That's simple self-preservation," he said, and laughed. "Toe-and-arch preservation."
"It's more than that," she said. "You'll see."
And as she said it, Paul saw Frank heading for the massive console record player at the far end of the room. Karen sure knew her Scarsdale, Paul thought For some strange reason, since this afternoon he'd felt an unspoken bond between them, a warmth that had grown and blossomed in a few short hours, in the time between the drive up from the train and now. Yet he'd known her all his life, couldn't remember not knowing her. He'd seen her often, when she was a very small girl and dear cousin Frank had been a frequent visitor at the house. And now, all at once, he began to feel as if he'd known her all his life. He almost knew what she was going to say before she said it Maybe it had something to do with being cousins. He dismissed the thought immediately.
Sure enough, Frank started up the record player with the old Glenn Miller record of "A String of Pearls." Reissued on LP, from the sound of it. Recorded at least ten years before he was born, but his mother had it even though it was before her time, too.
"He's starting it off quietly enough," Karen said.
"I guess the throw-away-your-truss music will follow."
"As the night the day," Karen said.
Two couples got up and started dancing, their arms around each other in some ancient ritual. From the way they held each other, Paul surmised that they were all married to someone else. "Obscene, isn't it?"
"Sure is. Grabbing each other like that. Pushing against each other."
"You noticed?"
"You see me standing here with a tin cup and a seeing eye dog?"
"You noticed," he said.
"When the truss-away music starts, some of them here will start doing the Charleston and something called the Bunny Hug and the Black Bottom. Jesus save us. And the bric-a-brac."
"What they're doing now is called the fox trot. At least, that's just what they think they're doing."
"I know," she said. "My father taught me how to dance the fox trot, a long time ago."
"Can you still do it?"
"Sure."
"So can I. My mother taught me. Christ knows who taught her. She's a goddamn anachronism."
"I like your mother."
"So do I," he said. "Sometimes."
"My mother doesn't."
"You're kidding." She looked at him and laughed. "My mother's impossible," she said. "You're being polite."
"My mother's a pain in the ass."
"That's better," he said. "You took the words right out of my mouth."
She laughed again, happily.
"You want to try it?"
"What?"
"The fox trot."
"Only when it's necessary. To keep you from being trampled to death. Or pawed."
She frowned. She looked hurt
"You don't understand," he said. 'It's going to be a long evening, and I don't think I could stand it dancing with you like that, all that time."
She moved around in front of him and brushed against him, lightly.
"I see what you mean," she said.
"Does it show?" he asked, worried. His cock was straining at the leash.
"I don't know. I don't trust myself to look."
"Anyway, you understand why I don't want to start dancing with you so early."
understand," she said. "I feel the same way."
They did start dancing, though, much earlier than Paul wanted to. A tall balding man in tweeds approached, smiling at Karen, during the opening bars of the Tommy Dorsey record of "Marie."
"This is it" she said, and took his hand. They moved together out to the space where the rug had been rolled back for the dancing. The tall man stopped smiling, stood still, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled again. He moved off toward the bar. Good sport, Paul thought Old goat.
She fitted very nicely when he put his arms around her and they started to dance. Too nicely. Before the Dorsey arrangement got as far as the vocal, his rampant erection was prodding her belly, poking between her legs whenever he took a long backward step. She never pulled back, but kept her body pressed close to his.
"Jesus," he said. "Do you suppose anybody's noticing?"
"No," she said. "They all dance like this."
"With one major difference."
"I don't know. You notice that none of the men is dancing with his wife. You'd be surprised how many hard-ons this room is capable of producing."
"You know?"
I've danced with all of them."
"Old bastards." He looked around with new respect
"Yes," she said.
"You remember one of these old bands, I think it was Guy Lombardo, had a slogan. Or maybe it was Kay Kayser. Or Blue Barron. My mother told me about it Somebody told her."
"Well, what about it? What was the slogan?"
"Guy Lombardo and his makes-you-want-to-dance music."
"I've heard that"
"You know what this music is?"
"Makes-you-want-to-fuck music," she said softly, in his ear.
"That's my girl," he said, and held her tighter. "Probably any land of music would do that to you" she said, pushing against him. "Even 'Rock of Ages.'"
"I never thought of that," he said. "That's because you probably were never exposed to Hock of Ages.'"
"You're right. Speaking of rocks...." The record ended.
"Yes, isn't it awful?" she said. "Let's sit down somewhere."
They managed to sit out a number of dances, but Paul had to lead her out to the floor to dance every time they saw a gallant paunch approach. It was torture.
After about an hour, Frank started what Karen had called the throw-away-that-truss music, with Benny Goodman's long record of "Sing, Sing, Sing." Karen stood up suddenly.
"Excuse me," she said and headed for the bathroom in the downstairs hall. She had trouble threading her way through three couples who were trying, with precarious balance and bereft of beat, to Lindy.
She was gone a long time. So long that "Sing, Sing, Sing" was over by the time she got back, and Benny Goodman's "Savoy" was playing.
"I had an idea," she said, reaching for his hand without sitting down. "Let's go out and dance on the sun porch."
"Won't they notice?" he said, standing beside her.
"There's nobody out there," she said. "They're afraid of the dark. And nobody in this room will notice anything. They're all drunk."
Paul looked around. She was right. Hand in hand, they walked to the porch, two steps down, and into the semi-darkness. Paul looked into all the comers but there was no one else there.
He put his arms around her and they started to dance in the private dark.
"You know something?" she said.
"What?"
"I took my panties off."
He dropped one hand to the hem of her miniskirt in back, and reached up underneath. The palm of his hand lingered on the smooth yielding naked globes of her ass.
"Jesus," he breathed into her ear.
She drew away from him slightly. He felt her hand fumbling at the front of his trousers, and before he could stop her, she'd zipped him down.
"Put it between my legs," she said. "We can keep on dancing that way."
"Jesus Christ," he said. "You want me to get thrown out of here on my head?"
"Even if anybody comes out here," she said, "they can't see anything. We're just dancing close, in the dark."
His cock, pulsing with a will of its own, had poked its way out of his pants and under the front of her short skirt. He stopped dancing for a second and fitted it between the incredibly soft spots at the top of her thighs, the top of his cock pushing up into hair and the moisture of her open outer cunt lips.
They began to dance, moving their feet very little. "Savoy" was still playing. The song started with two lingering notes, the second higher than the first She started to sing along with the record, but instead of singing "Sa-voy" as the first word, she substituted her own lyric.
"Let's fuck," she sang sweetly into his ear. "Da-da-dada-da-da. Let's-fuck." She had a lovely voice. He stopped dancing, and held her still, in the middle of the sun porch. He was afraid he was going to come all over the inside of the back of her skirt.
"Enough of this junior-high-school agony," he said. "I've got to do something."
"What? Just what? You tell me."
It pained him to look into her face. She was hurting as badly as he was.
"I'll go up to my room. You can join me. Like you said, everybody's drunk."
"My mother may be drunk, but she is one sharp old bitch."
"You found the word," he said.
"I know. Say you're going out for cigarettes, and come around the house and in the side door and on upstairs. Nobody will see you."
"On the way out," he said, "what do I do, make a public announcement that I'm going out for cigarettes?"
"Something like that."
His hard-on had slackened somewhat. He put it back in his pants and zipped himself up.
"You know what'll happen? Some son of a bitch will say he has plenty of cigarettes, and offer me his."
"Don't buy that. You smoke that crazy brand."
"Spuds."
"Say you can only smoke your own brand. There's not one chance in a million that anybody here smokes Spuds."
"You're thinking good."
"And to make this whole thing look natural, you announce that you're going out for cigarettes. Ask if anybody else needs cigarettes. Or anything else."
"Like from the drugstore."
"That's the idea. All because you're such a nice, considerate type fella."
"I am, you know?"
"Oh, shut up," she said.
"Suppose some silly son of a bitch does want something?"
"Fuck'm," she said. "He'll forget." He started up the steps from the sun porch, then came back to her. "One more thing," he said. "What?"
"Your sister. Beth."
"She's in her room. She hates these things."
"That's what I mean. She's right there, upstairs. She might hear us."
"She won't," Karen said. "Anyway, she wouldn't go near your room with a tractor dragging her."
"There's only your mother for you to worry about, then," he said. "How come she's watching you so closer"
"I think it has something to do with your mother. I never found out just what."
"Neither did I," Paul said. "But I could guess."
"Tell me some time," she said. "But not now."
She pressed against him, hard. His prick swelled against the insistent mound of her pelvis through the thin fabric of her dress.
"Anyway," he said, "what're you going to tell your mother? Why are you leaving the party and going upstairs?"
I'll tell her I'm getting the curse." He looked at her, startled for a second. "Are you?" he asked.
"God, no," she said. "I certainly hope not."
"Come up in three or four minutes," Paul said.
He went out into the shrieking confusion of the living room waded through it, and made his statement about going out for cigarettes, did anyone need anything, in a random sort of way to the people closest to the front door. Vickie, he saw with satisfaction, was among them.
Nobody needed anything. Nobody even heard him, as far as he could tell, except Vickie.
"Hurry back," she said. She smiled fuzzily at him as he gave her an abbreviated wave and went out the front door.
He was naked under a terrycloth robe when Karen pushed the door open and slid silently into his room, closing the door quietly behind her. She turned and was in his arms. His open mouth fused with hers. Their tongues entwined.
"Oh, God," she said, breaking away. "This is going to be awful."
"That's a hell of a romantic thing to say." His swollen throbbing cock stood out arrogantly from the opening of his robe.
She stared at it. She seemed to have forgotten what she was going to say. The tip of her tongue came out, seemingly all by itself, and circled her mouth, moistening her lips.
"What's going to be awful?" he asked her, kissing her under the ear. His hands cupped the tender round mounds of her buttocks, under the skirt.
"We have no time," she said. "No time for anything practically."
"Why not?"
"Mother. She has a calendar for a brain, and she knows I'm not due for the curse. I said I'd lost track, it must just be a headache then."
"Isn't that good enough for her?"
"Not for her. I said I'd take some aspirin and He down, and she said she'd come up in a little while and see how I was. I said don't bother, I'd probably feel better and come back down in twenty minutes or so. But I don't trust her. She's loaded, God damn it."
Nothing was going to stop Paul now. He could have hung a suitcase on the end of his crowbar of a cock and it wouldn't have bowed. He took her by the hand, led her to the bed, and started to lift her dress off over her head.
She slipped away from him and lay down on her back on his bed, flat on her back, her knees in the air, her short skirt up around the soft gentle curve of her naked hips.
"There's no time for me to get undressed," she said. "No time for any preambles at all. Tomorrow we'll find a place where we can take some time."
She spread her legs wide, the knees elevated. Her open, wet, joyous pink cunt smiled up at him. He felt his lips going dry, and licked them. There was a monstrous lump in his throat
"Jesus," he heard himself say, in a choked voice. "You're lovely."
"Please, right now, Paul," she said. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Fuck me now."
He dropped his robe to the floor and mounted between her legs. He guided the swollen, glistening, purple head of his cock to her wet, welcoming, warm cunt lips, and held it there, between them, filling her eager entrance.
He slid his cock halfway in through the snug, moist portals of her willing twat. It seemed to move forward of its own volition. Her cunt wrapped the thick, stiff shaft in a tight warm embrace.
"Ooooh," Karen said.
"All-American girl," he said. "Likes to just plain fuck."
"Just ... plain ... fuck," she said, her hips rising, her cunt seeming to gulp in more of his shaft all by itself.
"You're my dream girl," he said.
"That's me." Her eyes smiled up at him.
He sank his great, thick shaft all the way in then, to the bone-hard base.
"Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh," she said again. It was almost a whimper.
For one awful moment, then, he thought he was going to come, right away. Please, God, no, he said to himself. It was a hell of a time to get religion, he thought, and the thought saved him. He clenched his teeth, and was under control again.
He began to fuck her then with long, slow, deliberate strokes, and she responded, with exquisite timing, to every stroke, pasting her pussy tight against his pubis with every in stroke, holding the very tip of his cock lingeringly in her lips at every withdrawal. He quickened his stroke, and she met every move with flawless timing. It was if they had invented fucking, he thought, just the two of them.
As the speed of their fucking increased, he found himself pounding his huge sliding, shuttling pole into her with a kind of manic fury, like some kind of enraged stag, and her hips and hungry, gulping cunt pounded back with a fury that matched his own. They were groaning together, gasping, moaning, writhing, squirming, driving, pounding, until they reached a crescendo he knew he could not stand a second longer. This was it, but please, oh, please, a second longer.
Then he heard the little breathless screams in her throat, the spasmodic clutching of her inner lips, the uncontrollable quivering deep inside the warm, wet cave of her cunt, and he came with her, spurting in a great mutual explosion of an orgasm.
And as they lay quivering together, panting, he heard the door open, and he closed his eyes. "Oh, my God," he muttered. Not again.
When he opened his eyes he half expected to see Mrs. Halsted standing in the doorway, and when he saw who it was, he would have welcomed Mrs. Halsted. Kissed her on both cheeks.
It was Vickie.
She was drunk, but there was nothing wrong with her eyesight. Or her vocal cords.
"Paul Beck!" It was a harsh, choked scream. "Out of this house!"
Even in his shocked despair, he had time to hate her. God, she was a corny old bitch.
"In the morning," he said. He was glad he was able to talk.
"Now," she said. "You have ten minutes to dress and pack. Frank will want to shoot you."
He got to his feet, his back to Vickie, and put on his robe. Karen still lay on the bed, on her back, a look of uncomprehending shock on her face. Her skirt was still up around her hips. Her wet, dosing cunt was no longer smiling.
"I'm sorry," he said softly, and reached out a hand. She took it dazedly and got to her feet, slowly. For a brief second, her ear was near his mouth.
"Be right next to the phone," he whispered. "Noon tomorrow."
She nodded without speaking and left the room, walking past her mother as if she didn't exist "No good-for-nothing, rotten, fucking bastard," Vickie said, and spat at him. She went out, slamming the door behind her.
Numbly, as if sleepwalking, Paul got his bags but of the closet. Two Saturdays in a row, he thought. First he'd fucked himself out of school, then out of a place to live.
He'd have to give up fucking on Saturday, he thought That's all there was to it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When he first woke up Sunday morning Paul had trouble remembering where he was. He'd been waking up in too many different rooms in the last week, he decided. It was time he settled down.
He was in an old residential hotel on lower Madison Avenue. He'd known about the place because he'd been shacked up there with an Easter bunny, his last Spring vacation, a girl with a real rabbity enthusiasm about fucking. Lucidly he'd remembered the place and phoned them from a booth in Scarsdale before driving into the city the night before, and they'd said, sure, they had a room. He had taken it by the week, and figured to stay there until he found an apartment.
The hotel room had other advantages beside privacy, a lock on the door and no Vickies or Mrs. Halsteds popping through it. He could ride to work in the morning on the Madison Avenue bus, and the best-looking girls in the world, he knew from his New York visits, rode the Madison Avenue bus. Not Fifth Avenue buses, or Lexington, or Third, and certainly not those West Side buses. Madison Avenue buses. He felt his morning hard-on coming back, as he pictured that vast smorgasbord of ankles and silken calves and rounded knees and shadowed inner thighs, under the miniskirts, and all those lovely, careful, composed young faces with their moist soft mouths. He got up and took a shower.
After he'd dressed he took the elevator down and bought a copy of the New York Times at the desk, and lugged it back to his room. He threw it onto the bed and went through it a layer at a time until he found the real estate section. He leafed his way to the section headed "Apartments, Furnished-One, Two Rooms," and started to read his way down the column.
He was dismayed. Some of the rents people were asking for one, two rooms were close to what he'd figured was a half month's take-home pay for him. But near the bottom of the first column he found a hopeful listing:
"Sublet, furnished, five months. Village vie. 134 rms. $150. Gentleman preferred. Call Sun. AM." And the number.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty, so it was still Sun. AM, he thought And he liked that Village vie, and the price. And he was certainly a preferred gentleman.
He went over to the phone, carrying the paper, and gave the switchboard the number. A female voice answered on the third ring.
"Yes?"
I'm calling about your ad in the Times."
I'm afraid I can't hold out any hope for you," the woman said. She had a pleasantly modulated voice. "I've had eight or nine calls so far this morning and I was about to take the phone off the hook. Four of the people are coming to look at the apartment this afternoon. So, as I said, I can't hold out any hope for you. I'm sorry."
She sounded so goddamn nice on the phone Paul was encouraged to make what they called in football a good second effort
"Maybe there'd be some hope for me if I came down to see the place before the other people," he said. He let himself sound faintly boyish.
The woman laughed. She had a very nice laugh.
"I'm not dressed," she said. "I'm still stumbling around the place with my hair in curlers, drinking coffee. So I'm afraid not"
"I had a mother once who wore her hair in curlers till the cocktad hour," Paul said. It was a he, but it might strike a nerve.
The woman laughed again.
"Wed," she said. "Give me an hour to straighten up a little."
She gave him the address and apartment number, and he said he'd be there, and hung up. Jesus, he thought wouldn't it be great if he got the place, even for five months. There'd be plenty of time to find something in the Spring. If he got the apartment it would mean he'd been kicked out of school, found a pretty good job, and a place to live, all in one week. His mother would be proud of him.
He tried to read the sports section of the Times, to kill half an hour before getting on a Fifth Avenue bus down to the Village vie., but he couldn't read. He kept thinking about Karen. He wished more than anything else that she could be with him, in this room, right now. He could picture what a terrible day she'd be putting in with Vickie, after last night, and was glad she had school to go back to. He could imagine her trying to live in the same house with her mother, day after day, week after week, after last night's episode. With him, Paul Beck She'd probably be forgiven if it had been anyone else-some random boyfriend, or the grocery boy, or the meter reader, or even one of her father's goat friends. But him, they'd never forgive her for.
He'd have to get his message across fast when he called her at twelve. Somebody, Vickie or Frank, would be nearby to snatch the phone right out of her hand. He rehearsed what he'd have to get across to her. The name of the hotel. Call when she could, from a phone booth. He'd wait. Two seconds, it would take. She could hang onto the phone that long. He was sure of it.
The apartment was in a well-cared-for brownstone on Tenth Street off Fifth. He pushed the vestibule beH with his thumb and the answering buzz let him in the downstairs door right away.
When he'd climbed the flight of stairs the woman was standing inside the open doorway to the right, waiting for him. The apartment was at the front of the building. He felt self-conscious, walking toward her. She was looking him over carefully, appraising him, he thought, like a cattle buyer in a Late Show Western.
She smiled, finally.
"Come on in," she said.
She'd gotten out of the curlers, he noticed. Her hair was piled neatly on top of her head. It was bright blonde, too blonde to be real. She was in her thirties somewhere, he figured. She wore a straight housecoat that hung from her Adam's apple to her toes.
"I'm just having a health-restoring whiskey sour," she said. "Would you like to have one with me? It's supposed to be a sign of something to drink alone."
He didn't; he hadn't gotten around to having breakfast yet. But this was one woman he wanted to please.
"Sure would," he said.
"Good," she said, and went over to a sideboard in the open kitchenette at the end of the room away from the windows and poured him his whiskey sour, in an Old Fashioned glass. Must have been one hell of a big whiskey sour she made for herself, he thought Sounded as if there was plenty left in the shaker even after his drink had been poured.
When she handed him the brimming drink he had to bend down and sip it so he wouldn't spill. "You can see just about all there is to see of the place," she said. "Except for the bathroom."
She closed the slatted doors that concealed the kitchenette, to let him see how the apartment looked that way, and he surveyed the room. It was a large room, very light very pleasant with an alcove big enough to hold furnishings not particularly feminine. He wanted the apartment badly. "Bathroom's in here," the woman said, leading him the few steps down a short hall. It was large, too, large enough to accommodate a long dressing table. The shower was one of those afterthought appurtenances people installed in old apartments.
They came back into the big room.
"Please sit down," she said, and he let himself down into a flowered easy chair. She sat at one end of a sofa against the wall across from him. It had to be one of those convertible jobs, he thought, that pull out to make a bed. A double bed, at that. There was no other sign of a bed in the room.
"Why don't you tell me something about yourself?" she said, smiling. She had put on lipstick as well as taking the curlers out of her hair. Her lips were very red. "You can understand that I'd be hesitant to sublet my apartment to someone I don't know anything about."
"Sure, I understand," he said. "Well, I just finished with school." He didn't see any point in telling her why.
"This is a strange time of year to graduate, isn't it?"
"I graduated last June," he said. "I just finished up some postgraduate work." Some bullshit, he thought Sounded good.
"Oh?" she said. "What will you do now?"
"I start tomorrow with Norman, Wade and Gelder. It's an advertising agency."
"I know," she said. "I have a friend who works there."
I've met only three people in the place," he said. "Well four." He just remembered Norma and her eager asshole. "Maybe I'll look him up. Your friend."
"Her," the woman said. "I'll give you her name when you leave."
"Fine," he said. "Anyway, that'll be my virgin job, in New York. And if you let me have this place, it'll be my virgin apartment."
The woman laughed.
"What a strange word," she said. "Isn't it?" he agreed. Agreeable, that was him. "I read it in some book somewhere." She laughed again.
"Let's have another drink," she said, and got up.
"Wonderful," he said. Agreeable Paul.
They were on their fourth outsized whiskey sour when he remembered Karen, but it was too late then. It was twenty to one. He didn't care too much. All that whiskey on an empty stomach was getting to him. Karen seemed very distant, in time and in space. And the blonde woman was looking better to him every minute.
Her name was Celia Waller. Waller was the name of her latest husband, she explained. They'd been divorced a year now. She was going to Majorca for the winter, for the five months she'd be subletting the apartment. She had friends in Majorca. She also had friends in Newport, in Palm Beach, in Santa Barbara, in Naples, in Nice, in Paris, and in Scarsdale. She had friends everywhere, Celia did. It looked very much as if her drinks were sloshing around in an empty stomach, too. Her conversation took unexpected turns.
"Do you have a good imagination?" she asked suddenly.
"Usually," he said, "but I'm having trouble now."
"Why?"
"I'm having trouble imagining what you look like under that housecoat."
"I thought you were," she said. "That's why I asked." He didn't say anything.
"How do you think I'd make out as a whore?" she asked. "I've always wondered."
"You'd be a sensation," he said gallantly. "But you'd be badly miscast You just don't look the part."
"You mean I don't dress the part," she said. "But I'm going to dress the part for you. I'm a frustrated actress among other things."
"You don't look like a frustrated anything," he said still being gallant. He didn't have the apartment yet.
She shook up another drink, poured one for each o them, and started pawing through drawers in a dresser When she'd found what she wanted, she smiled at him, waved gaily, and went into the bathroom, carrying her drink.
It was a long time before she came out, and when she did, Paul would never have recognized her as the same woman.
She wore high-heeled red pumps, a very short, tight red skirt, and a transparent white blouse. Under it she was wearing one of those imported bras with the middle of the cups missing. Her thumb-sized, jutting nipples were a startling crimson through the sheer blouse. He was sure she had touched them up with lipstick. She was heavily made up, smiling redly, and carrying a cigarette in a holder in one hand. In the other she held her big Old-Fashioned glass. It was almost empty.
She posed with one hand balancing the glass on her hip.
"What do you think?" she asked. She stuck out her tongue.
"Sensational," he said. "You'd be the most popular courtesan on the continent" He'd read that word somewhere, courtesan. "Any continent." Especially Greenland, he thought He'd heard that guys were very hard up in Greenland.
But her body was sensational. He'd found the right word. She was voluptuous without any hint of fat. Her hips were wide but not fleshy, curving in sharply to a teen-slim waist slanting gracefully down to her spectacular legs-long rounded thighs, neat small knees, full-swelling calves ending miraculously in tiny, slender ankles.
"Come here," he said, "please."
She came toward him slowly, with an exaggerated sway and bump of the hips, walking right out of a Mae West movie on the Late Show.
"You have gorgeous legs," he said, as she came close to him. She stood in front of him and stood still.
"You like my legs?" she asked.
"Love them," he said. He reached his hands out and ran his palms up the smooth flesh of the backs of her calves, her knees, her yielding thighs. When his hands touched the hem of her skirt, high on her thighs, he stopped and looked up. He reached up and took her by the shoulders, to pull her down to his open mouth to kiss her. She drew back.
"I guess there's something you haven't learned," she said. "They say you're not ever supposed to loss a whore."
"You're not a whore," he said. "You don't look like one at all, even in that getup."
"I don't?" She looked and sounded disappointed.
"You sure don't. But you would be a howling success in that line of work, if you really wanted to take it up. And not just because you have that great body. Partly just because you don't look like a whore."
"You're probably right," she said, looking at him quizzically. "I read somewhere that there's a very popular whorehouse in Paris, or was, where the girls all dress like nuns."
"Probably gets a big play from the hornier Protestants," Paul said. "I read that somewhere, too. Maybe Henry Miller."
"I think it was Henry Miller," she said. "But I'm very disappointed that you don't think I look like a whore. I think I'll make us another drink."
Jesus, Paul thought, what a way to do business. He might wake up tomorrow and not remember whether he had an apartment or not.
But she did have a great body. Magnificent ass. He watched her getting out more ice cubes and pouring whiskey into the shaker with free-handed abandon. She was still reasonably steady on her feet. Paul wondered if he would be. Pretty soon he'd try standing up.
"Don't feel bad about not looking like a whore," he said to her busy back. "What you look is regal."
"What?" she said, looking around. She looked pleased.
"Regal. Queenly. A sexy-as-hell-looking queen."
"Like Catherine the Great?"
"I don't think she looked like much."
"And I never laid any ponies," she said, looking across the room at him.
"There's plenty of time yet," he said, grinning. But she was thinking of something other than ponies.
"Regal, eh?" she said. She came across the room, swinging those wide, inviting hips. Like a one-woman Welcome Wagon, he thought, and reached up for the drink she was handing him.
"Regal," she said again. "Lets see, I think I have something."
She went over to her dresser, put down her drink, and bent over to open the second drawer. The back of her short skirt barely covered the full-swelling globes of her ass. She wore no pants, and half of her cunt came into view.
His cock swelled, lifted, stiffened, throbbed. She closed the middle drawer of the dresser and opened the bottom one, bending over completely. The bottom of her ass showed snowy white in the light from the windows. The long, swollen red lips of her cunt were open, exposing a moist, glistening, uneven mass of tender pink membrane.
Never, Paul thought, did a woman's snatch look so vulnerable, so inviting, as it did from the back as she bent over. He wanted to cross the room, sink to his knees, and start lapping it, just for openers, but the insistent throbbing, pounding pulse of his rock-hard cock was too demanding.
Swiftly, he slipped out of his loafers, stood up, dropped his trousers and shorts to the floor, and bounded across the room. She had no time to straighten up, even if she'd wanted to.
He slid his hands around her and held the smooth sheathed handlebars of her hips. The swollen-to-bursting, shiny-hard purple head of his ramrodding prick found the soft, wet, open lips of her cunt of its own accord. He drove it in, the entire length of his oaken shaft, with one pile-driving plunge. His lower belly smacked against the warm round swells of her ass.
She gasped, made a sound in her throat that was halfway between a groan and a scream, and shuddered all over.
"Why don't you tell a girl?" she said, in a little voice.
He didn't answer. He drew his cock slowly outward between her sucking, grasping twat lips, till only the head and neck remained inside her warm, wet, squeezing cunt. He saw that her fingers were clutching the far edge of the dresser, her elbows braced on the top.
He set his feet, moved his hands to get a firmer grip on her hips, and started driving his cock into her with long, swift, machine-like strokes, his belly pounding at the end of each in stroke against the cheeks of her eager responding ass. She gasped and groaned, and squirmed, but he held her tight, the slippery channel of her cunt impaled on the thick, steel shaft of his plunging cock.
He fucked her that way for a long time, with long, steady, rhythmic strokes, as if timed by a metronome. Then, when he felt her begin to shudder violently, he increased his rhythm, pounding his prick home with a kind of controlled fury, whipping it in and out with lightning strokes, until a froth began to appear around her clutching twat lips, as they clung to the slippery shaft of his life-giving prick, with all the determination of a drowning man clinging to a stick of wood.
He felt her start to explode, in a quivering, gasping, gulping orgasm, and he drove his cock deep into her and held it there as her inner ecstasy constricted and swelled and surged around it. He let himself come then, letting his gushes of juice spurt over her private fires.
She lay draped over the top of the dresser, face down, limp, as her shuddering slowly calmed. His knees ran out of strength and he lay on top of her for a long moment, the whiskey a lullaby in his veins.
This is a hell of a way to take a nap, he thought. With an effort, he stood up and stepped back, repossessing his prick as he did so. She stood then, seeming to raise herself in distinct stages, like a local-express elevator, and turning unsmiling to look at him
"You'd just finished telling me I looked regal," she said. "Like a queen."
"That's right. You do." . "That was no way to treat a queen. Fucking me from the rear."
"But you're supposed to be dressed as a whore, remember?"
"Yes," she said, "but I was going to change that." She looked down at the bottom drawer of the dresser, still partially open. She bent and took something from it
"I'll be back shortly," she said, and headed for the bathroom.
She was gone even longer, this time, and for part of that time he could hear water ruing. Douching, he thought approvingly. If there was anything he liked, it was a nice clean cunt. He lay back in the easy chair, totally relaxed, sipping his whiskey sour. Time had lost all significance. So had the urgency of getting the apartment.
He sat up and tried to clear his head. Straighten up, boy, he told himself. You're sacrificing your lily-white body for a Cause. This apartment. Before you're too drunk, or Queen Celia is too drunk, come to an agreement. Sign something, like a sublet agreement. Give her a check for the first month, while you're still able to write.
But all his good, practical intentions evaporated when she finally came back into the room. She was wearing a transparent long gown and dainty, high-heeled slippers. Her bright blonde hair had been combed out and hung down her back in long easy curls, held by some kind of tiara. The great proud V of dark bush crowning the shadowed pink of her queenly cunt showed clearly through the negligible concealment of her gown, and her nipples showed only as a subdued blush. She had wiped away the whory lipstick.
"Your highness," he said.
She smiled, and moved gracefully toward him. Her hips had disappeared. Not really. He gazed at them through the gown. They were as wide and as welcoming as ever.
"Do you still feel up to it?" she asked. There was nothing very regal about the question, he thought.
"Sure," he said. "Or down to it I didn't have any breakfast this morning."
She laughed. It was a surprised, joyful laugh.
"Wonderful," she said. "That's a subject I wanted to get around to, but I didn't know any graceful way."
"What subject?" The whiskey sour was making him dull, he knew. He shook his head back and forth a few times, and it seemed to help
"You'll see," she said, and sat down on the couch facing him.
Very slowly, deliberately, she raised one knee and tossed the skirt of her gown aside, exposing the whole spectacular length of her long, curving, snow-white legs. He had a leisurely look up past the swell of her thighs as she lazily crossed her knees. The pink pursed lips of her pussy pouted at him, dewy-fresh as a May morning.
"I love your legs," he said.
"Anything else?" she asked, lazily.
"Well, yes," he said. "Your queenly cunt."
"The reason I ask," she said, "Is that I'd like to extract a little tribute. As a queen from a subject, you understand."
"I understand," he said. "Completely." His brain wasn't that fogged up. No matter how many whiskey sours she fed him.
He stood up and crossed the room and dropped to his knees in front of her.
"You do understand," she said. "You're a very bright young man. And very obliging."
"The pleasure's all mine."
"Not all of it," she said, and uncrossed her legs and sat very still, her knees slightly apart.
He sighted down past the swell of her inner thighs to the waiting wetness above, then bent forward and kissed her inside one knee.
She leaned back, slowly, and let her legs drift wider apart. The lips of her cunt parted with them.
He kissed and licked his way up the velvet white softness of her inner thighs, lingering for a long time on the incredible softness of the last inch or two, his tongue touching hair. Then he extended the tip to touch one delicate pink petal protruding from between the lips.
"Ooooh," she said. "Wait. I have a wonderful idea."
"Wha'?" he said, licking.
"You said you didn't have any breakfast." He felt her thighs closing warmly over his ears. He slid his tongue as far as he could reach into her twat, and began licking the inner walls of her pleasure channel.
"Mmm-hmmm."
"Do you like whipped cream?"
"Mmmm." He nodded his head, letting his stiffened tongue ride up and down between the soft gunwales of her neat canoe of a cunt.
She got her feet under her and stood up abruptly,, stepping over his bobbing head, leaving him kneeling in front of the couch with his tongue out. He retrieved his tongue and turned to look at her as she stood smiling down at him, her legs apart, her wet, glistening, pink cunt looking very vulnerable and faintly inside out, "I think that's kind of rude, for a queenly person like you," he said, 'leaving me sitting here with egg on my face."
"That isn't egg," she said. "I just thought of something. I'll be right back."
She went over to the low refrigerator under the sink, and opened it. As she bent to get something from a bottom shelf, her cunt winked at him briefly. She slammed the refrigerator door, turned, and headed for the short hallway leading to the bathroom. As her delicious round, white ass flashed out of sight, he noticed that she was carrying a tall can of something in the hand without a drink in it.
When she appeared again in the doorway, he knew what had been in that can. Whipped cream, or its equivalent, the kind you squirt out over the top of strawberry shortcake. She had squirted it all over her strawberry shortcake of a cunt. And filled it up inside, too, he was sure. So she was going to feed him breakfast, after all.
She sat down again on the couch, without saying anything. She was smiling broadly as she spread her legs wide to expose the frothy white stuff between her delectable soft thighs.
"Eat," she said. "Gobble it. Lick out every last little bit."
He began to eat the foamy mass, swallowing great mouthfuls, sucking it out from the roots of her wet twat hair, licking it from the open lips of her palpitating pussy. Soon he was back where he started, licking her cunt lips clean, sliding his tongue into the creamy white softness inside. He licked her inner twat walls clean, as far as he could reach with his tongue, and came up for air, swallowing the last of the cream from the tip of his tongue.
"I can't get to the last of my breakfast," he said, looking at her in mock apology. "Not with my tongue. I'll have to ream it out."
"Wonderful," she said, and swung her feet up and lay flat on the wide couch, her flawless knees bent and elevated, her legs spread wide apart. "I'd been hoping you'd fuck me the old-fashioned way."
I'm an old-fashioned boy," he said. "A lover of whipped cream." As he got into position between her legs he leaned forward and kissed her open mouth.
"But your cunt is like whipped cream even without the whipped cream"
"Thank you," she said.
He eased his stiff raging cock into her quivering, slippery twat. The whipped cream inside felt cool, soothing the hot, swollen, inflamed head of his prick.
He drove it in deep, to the hilt, withdrew it slowly, then pounded it home again. Her hips raised to meet him, her warm thighs closed around his hips as she raised her legs and locked them behind him.
"Oh, God," she said. "What a way to cure a hangover."
Paul remembered then what he was there for, and got down to the business of giving her the fucking of her lifetime. As he drove and pounded his great stiff probing shaft into her, she squirmed and groaned and held him so tightly in the frantic embrace of her legs and thighs he almost had trouble getting enough play for the plunging strokes of his javelin.
Then, much sooner than he'd expected in a woman of experience, she came to a shuddering, moaning orgasm, making little crying sounds in her throat and seeming to choke him with the soft vise of her clutching thighs. And as she shuddered and gasped, he kept his stiff cock jammed hard inside her clutching cunt.
Slowly, the waves of her orgasm subsided, and still Paul kept his stiff, thick shaft rammed deep inside her. She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was something like wonder in her eyes.
"More?" he asked. It was a rhetorical question. Her hips responded instantly to his first long, slow strokes. She was smiling, a beatific smile.
"Do I get the apartment?" he asked, and held his cock still, deep in her warm, squirming, grateful twat. "You fucking fool," she said. "You've already got it" He pounded her into a gasping, squirming mass of ecstasy, and as she came for the second time, groaning deep in her throat he came with her, skyrocketing his hot juices in a wet blaze of glory.
CHAPTER NINE
When Paul got to the office Monday morning, it was so early that Norma, the back-entrance blonde, was still arranging magazines on the low tables in the reception room. She was ideally budt for that part of her job, Paul thought. She had a remarkably neat ass.
She appeared startled when she straightened up and found that Paul had come quietly through the door. But her cool came back at once.
"Good morning," she said, all business.
"Good morning yourself," he said. "Didn't you know I was starting work here today?"
"I didn't, but I'm glad," she said, and her smile wasn't her professional receptionist's smile at all. He smiled back at her, happily. All in all the way he felt, this had to be one of the happiest days of his life. The fringe benefits, he thought. Oh my God, the fringe benefits of working for a living.
"Like they say on Madison Avenue," he said cheerfully, "we must have lunch some time."
"You're damn' right we must," she said. "And remember, there's always Perry Street."
"I have an apartment now, a lot closer than Perry Street." He had to tell someone.
"You move fast When did you get it?"
"Yesterday. Through the Times." Through the Times. The times should know. "I move in next weekend."
"I hope to see it some time."
"You bet your ass you will," he said. "Where do I go from here?"
"Nobody's in yet or practically nobody. You might as well wait in Mr. Wycliffe's office. Hell roll in around rime-thirty and bed you down somewhere. You should pardon the expression."
He walked inside, down the hall, and out into the big open office past all the empty sterile-looking desks to Wycliffe's office. He sat down on a wide leather couch in the dim office, crossed his legs, and lighted a cigarette. He remembered an old song he'd heard somewhere. Something about a bowl of cherries.
And while he was thinking about cherries, Edeen popped through the door of the office, looking more redheaded and bright eyed and cheerful than ever.
"Welcome aboard," she said. "Or whatever it is these jackasses say."
Edeen, the bright little Bronxville virgin. Four, five days ago, and it seemed like a year.
"What do I do now?"
"Nothing. Wait for Wycliffe, and there's a song tide for you. He'd drag you around and introduce you to a lot of people whose names you won't remember, but don't worry about it."
"I'm terrible on names."
"The best way is to keep listening for what other people call them. When they're not mad, I mean."
"Thank you," he said. She was as smart as she was pretty, this Edeen. He just had to remember to keep her away from Martinis. And to get that idiotic virginity notion out of her head.
Sam Wycliffe walked into his office a little after nine thirty. He looked very hung over but he managed to give Paul a large grin and a hearty handshake.
"Welcome aboard," he said. "Soon's we've had some coffee I'll show you around the zoo. The monkey house, the reptile house, the cat house. Jesus, the cat house."
Edeen came in as he was easing himself into his chair behind the big desk.
"Coffee?"
"Black for me," Wycliffe said.
"Black," Paul said. He liked it with cream and sugar but what the hell. Pretty soon they'd have him drinking Martinis.
"You won't have to be sharing an office with that lint head, Dingman, after all. I found you an office across from his that you can have to yourself. It's an inside office with no window but what the hell. A window's just a status symbol and you'll have one soon enough. To jump out of."
"You make this sound like a very happy business."
"Don't mind me, son," Wycliffe said. "It's just Monday."
"Well," Wycliffe said, when they'd finished coffee, I guess we might as well get started and get it over with. First guy you ought to meet is Harold Dingman."
"Ad right," Paul said, standing up. "But maybe you ought to ted me, who is Harold Dingman?"
"Oh. Yes," Wycliffe said. "Wed, Harold Dingman is the account executive on Seaton. Seaton makes Huggable Cosmetics and the whole Huggable line. It isn't the biggest account the agency has, not quite, but it's the biggest pain in the ass. By far, the biggest pain in the ass. They ought to have a companion line called Fuckable Fragrances."
Edeen bounced through the door, carrying some papers, as Wycliffe was talking.
"Excuse me, Edeen," he said.
"That's ad right," she said. She put the papers on his desk and bounced out again. "Nice girl, Eileen," Wycliffe said. "Yes."
"Lay off her," Wycliffe said. "She is a nice girl."
"I know," Paul said.
Wycliffe looked at him.
"How do you know?"
"She told me."
"Oh," Wycliffe said.
They left the office with Wycliffe steering Paul by the elbow. Paul didn't like having people put their hands on him but he resisted the impulse to shake Wycliffe off.
Harold Dingman, when Paul shook hands with him, did not appear to be the ad-around jackass Wycliffe had described. He was a tall, affable, middle-aged man, soft around the middle but not noticeably in the head, at first, at any rate. As the days went by, however, Paul studied him closely, trying to find out what made him tick. Dingman had an ingenuous smile and talked clear, unabashed Brooklyn, and projected all the natural, friendly, bumbling charm of a puppy. Also, he acted as if he were perpetually all fucked up and didn't know what he was doing. That was the core of his charm, his act, his schtick. And very soon Paul found out that his act was not an act at all. He was, genuinely, all fucked up, and very rarely knew what he was doing.
This was the senior account executive on the Huggable account. Paul was his back-up man, or junior account executive. Wycliffe, Paul found, was the account supervisor.
From Dingman's office, Wycliffe steered Paul to an area on the opposite side of the floor.
"The cat house," he said. "The female copywriters. You'll have a lot to do with them."
Paul looked at him, and Wycliffe caught the look.
"But not too much," he said. "I hope. They're the flakiest bunch of creatures on God's earth."
He let it go at that. Apparently he figured Paul could do his own introducing.
Harold Dingman took him to lunch and siphoned off Martinis while "briefing" Paul, he said, on the Huggable account. All Dingman talked about was a woman named Kay Lennen-Mrs. Kay Lennen, divorced and no goddamn wonder-who sounded like a combination of the Dragon Lady and a vampire bat. Kay Lennen was vice-president and advertising director of Huggable and Dingman swore she stood up to pee. Probably had claws in her cunt, Dingman said, and any man who ever went near her would surely wind up a soprano.
"What'd she ever do to you?" Paul asked.
"Nothing. But nothing is the word, with that broad. Nothing's any good, as far as she's concerned. You can't please her, no how."
"How does the agency keep the account?"
"That's a good question," Harold Dingman said morosely. "That's one good goddamn question."
He ordered himself another Martini.
After lunch, Dingman had his secretary supply Paul with a stack of large black books containing proofs of Huggable advertisements, past and present.
Paul leafed lazily through them all through the afternoon, and when Dingman stuck his head into Paul's office a little after five, he was still going through his act with the proof books.
"Why'nt you close up for the night?" Dingman asked.
'I'm in no hurry," Paul told him. "Some interesting stuff here." Interesting, bullshit. He wanted to try to get in a phone call to Karen up at her school. He hadn't been able to get her off his mind since the coitus interruptus by her mother on Saturday night.
"Nothing like being eager," Dingman said. "But it'll wear off."
"Suppose I want to make a phone call later?"
"Switchboard closes at six. Call them now and tell them to leave you a night line, if you're going to be here that late."
"I might be."
"Shmuck," Dingman said, shaking his head. "Good night." He left Paul flipping pages.
Shortly after six, Paul put in his call to Karen's sorority up at her school. He had some trouble locating her, but after a few wrong numbers he had her on the phone.
"I shouldn't talk to you," she said. "What happened to that call at high noon on Sunday?"
"Honey, I was frantic," he said. "I was in the middle of a deal to clinch an apartment, and if I'd left for one second I'd have lost it."
Some deal, he thought. She should have seen it.
She melted a little.
"Lovely Sunday I put in at home," she said. "It was the Crucifixion and the Spanish torture racks all rolled into one."
"I was bleeding for you."
"I did enough bleeding for myself. First my father'd get on me, then my mother, then both of them together. With that God damn psalm-singing sister of mine singing obliggato."
"For Christ's sake, who got her into the act?"
"My mother must have told her. She probably thought my sister would make a great little salt rubber. She was right."
"Honey, I can't tell you how sorry I am."
"About everything?"
"You know better. Just the way it turned out. Your bitch of a mother popping in on us." Karen was quiet a minute, at her end. "You know something?" she said. "What?"
"It was worth it."
"For me, too. You're wonderful."
"So're you. And I can never see you again."
"Bullshit."
"According to them, I can't."
"They better hire some big, strong, round-the-clock guards, armed to the teeth."
"I was hoping you'd say that" His mind was moving fast
"Anyway, honey," he said, "I got the apartment"
"Wonderful. When do you move in?"
"This weekend. Saturday morning. It's all furnished, but why don't you take the train in and we can push around some furniture together."
She hesitated.
"Well," she said, "I shouldn't"
"Why not?"
"Exams coming up, and all."
"All right," Paul said. "I'll come up there."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Well," and again there was a long silence, "I have a date."
Paid felt it was his turn for a long silence.
"Then I guess that's that" he said.
"I'll break the date," she said swiftly.
"That's my girl. I'll meet you in Grand Central Saturday. Call me here at the office when you know what train you'll be on." He gave her the number.
"Saturday, then," she said. "And we'll push ... a ... little ... furniture together."
He had to laugh. Even on the phone, she delighted him.
"And, Paul? One more thing."
"What?"
He felt a presence behind him. A finger ran lightly around the rim of his ear. He turned. It was Norma, the receptionist, smiling down at him.
"Between now and Saturday, behave yourself. I want you in good shape for furniture pushing."
I'll be a monk," he said, sliding his hand up Norma's inner thigh. "See you Saturday."
"Bye, darling," Karen said, and hung up. Paul put the phone in its cradle.
"You'll see who Saturday?" Norma asked softly.
"My uncle from Syracuse."
"Why should you be a monk for him?"
"He's a very funny uncle," Paul said. "What're you doing here?" His hand had run out of thigh on its trip up. Norma's twat was sticky wet.
"I left, but I came back," Norma said. "I had a feeling you'd be here. At least I hoped you'd be here."
She leaned forward and put her tongue in his mouth. His own tongue probed hers. He slid two fingers deep into her cunt
"Every time you went out past the desk today, on your way to the men's room, I almost came in my panties."
"Me, too, every time I had to walk past you," Paul lied. "What panties?"
"I took them off, just now."
Paul removed his fingers from her slimy cunt and slid his forefinger up her asshole. "Ahhh," she said, and squatted downward. Terry Street?"
"I have a roommate."
"Doesn't she like to fuck?"
"Better than eating," Norma said. "She does that, too."
"Then it's Perry Street," Paul said, retrieving his finger.
"Wonderful," she said. "But let's fuck first. I can't wait for Perry Street"
"In this place? Right in the goddamn office?" His first goddamn day? This goddamn broad was clean off her trolley.
"Nobody's here, and the cleaning women don't come in till eight o'clock."
"You're sure?" His cock was pounding in his pants.
"Sure I'm sure. Anyway, there's a lock on your door."
She turned, her miniskirt swirling around her long white legs, and locked his door. In one motion, then, she threw herself forward across his desk beside him and flipped her skirt up behind, exposing the neat swell of her white buttocks, the long pink, gaping wet mouth of her cunt.
Swiftly, Paul got to his feet and dropped his pants and underpants. In one smooth motion, he sank the length of his raging prick deep into the wet folds of her cunt, driving it home once, twice, three times, before she said anything.
"Please, Paul," she said. "You know what I want."
I'm just getting it wet" he said. "Just for lubrication."
He got it wet for a dozen more pounding strokes in the soft warm wet folds of her emit before he withdrew, reluctantly, and placed the head of his still-raging cock against the tiny puckered aperture of her asshole. He pushed, firmly, and again to his astonishment saw the enormously swollen, purple head disappear. He drove the shaft in deep, the entire length, until he was pressed tight against the yielding mounds of her ass.
"Oh, Jesus," she said. "Oh, God, how I've wanted that. All day, I've been waiting for you to do that."
He drew his flagpole out until only the head remained inside, then plunged it deep up her asshole again. She squirmed, and he grabbed her hips to give himself better leverage. Then he went to work fucking her up the ass, driving his cock deep in a furious rhythm, his lower belly slapping against the wet cheeks of her ass, his balls bouncing against the soft wet lips of her cunt. She started screaming as he pumped away, driving his stiff prick deeper with every stroke, and he hoped she was right about nobody being in the office.
She went into orgasm, flailing and thrashing on the desk, and he was about to come with her when a thought struck him. There's a long night ahead on Perry Street. He clenched his teeth, thought beautiful thoughts, and didn't come. His cock was still at the ready when he withdrew.
What the hell, he thought, it'll go down by the time we reach the street. And if it didn't, it would come in handy hailing a cab. They were tough to get, on Madison Avenue, at this hour.
CHAPTER TEN
When they got down to Perry Street it was apparent that Norma had not had the time or the foresight to tell her roommate that she was bringing a guest to the apartment. The girl looked startled when she saw Paul coming through the door behind Norma, but she recovered quickly, putting down her drink to snug the belt around her short, sheer, white robe. It was also apparent that she had nothing on underneath the robe.
Tat," Norma said, "meet Paul." Pat nodded and smiled. She had a nice smile. Paul felt he ought to apologize for her initial embarrassment, however fleeting.
"I'm sorry to come barging in like this. We should have called or shot up a flare or given you some kind of warning."
"It's all right. I'm used to surprises."
"Never mind," Norma said, sharply. "Would you like a drink, Paul?"
"Scotch, if you have it. With a little water."
I'll join you," Norma said, going through the doorway that apparently led to the kitchen. No Martini, Paul thought. What was the world coming to? Tat, can I freshen yours?"
I'm fine, thanks," Pat said, and sat down across from Paul, crossing her legs. Her robe fell apart at the knees. She had very slender, almost thin, legs. Nicely shaped, but very slim. The rest of her was downright thin. Her breasts were small swellings, really, making her chest look almost boyish. The nipples showed through the sheer cloth of the robe as purple and pointed. Paul got out a cigarette and lighted it, to have something to do beside stare at her. She had black hair and big, dark eyes. Disconcerting eyes.
She got up and brought an ash tray over to Paul. She was nicely built, with a high, round little ass, but she was definitely thin.
And then, as she straightened up from putting the ash tray on the coffee table in front of Paul, he noticed her one outstanding physical characteristic. He couldn't help but notice it. It fairly screamed at him. It seemed to hit him in the face.
Her snatch. Or rather, her snatch hair. It blossomed forth blackly, starting halfway down her belly, actually pushing out the robe in front. It seemed to have a life of its own, to bush out and fill the room with its presence. Paul stared, transfixed, until she turned and went back to her chair and sat down. He took a deep breath and let it out in a long, quivering sigh.
"Do you work with Norma?" Pat asked.
Paul could hear Norma having trouble getting an ice tray from the refrigerator, but sat where he was. The ice was her problem. He wanted to sit right here with the forest primeval.
"I'm with her agency, yes," he said. "I just started a new job there today."
"I know you don't work with her," Pat said. "Nobody works with her in the half-ass job she has. I've been trying to get her to take some jobs from my agency, but she seems to like what she's doing. Which is nothing, and she has a point."
"What do you do?"
"I'm a fashion model." She laughed moderately. "Can't you see? Skin and bones and bird legs. We all look like this, more or less."
"I think you're lovely," Paul said.
"I have my points, but they're mostly hidden."
The hell you say, Paul thought. Norma came into the room and set a drink down in front of Paul, then settled herself beside him on the couch.
"Don't you think Norma would make a good-looking model?" Pat asked.
Paul looked over at her. She was a good-looking girl, without her glasses, and she did have a fine neat body, a bit on the lean side, but voluptuous compared to Pat's.
"She sure would."
"Thank you," Norma said. "But I'm perfectly happy with what I'm doing."
"Which is nothing," Pat repeated. "Exactly. I meet such interesting people."
"Like Paul?"
"You don't know yet," Norma said, "how interesting he can be."
"I'd like to find out," Pat said, sipping her drink and looking at Paul over the rim of the glass. Those eyes, he thought. Drive a guy nuts.
"I want to get into something comfortable," Norma said, as if changing the subject She stood up. "You've had a long day, Paul. If you feel like taking a shower, help yourself. Bathroom's in there." She pointed.
Thanks, I'd like to," Paul said, standing. He'd been wondering about that, remembering where his cock had been last. And his hard-on hadn't gone down completely since they'd left the office.
"Good," Norma said. He was sure she remembered where his cock had been last. It was a wonder the girl could walk. She went into the bedroom and came out carrying a man's terrycloth robe. She tossed it to him.
"After your shower, don't bother to get dressed. Put that on, and we can all be comfortable."
Smooth operation, Paul thought He liked smooth operations.
When he came back into the room, barefoot, wearing the robe Norma had tossed to him, she had already changed. She was wearing a short, sheer garment identical to her roommate's, and appeared completely relaxed. She should be, Paul thought after the workout he'd given her over his desk.
He, himself, was anything but relaxed. He'd gotten a rampant .hard-on after his shower, and the robe poked out in front of him as he crossed the room and sat down.
The robe didn't stay completely closed when he sat, and for just a split second the swollen purple head and part of the shaft of his prick popped into view. He covered it quickly, but not quickly enough to conceal it completely from Pat. Her great dark eyes widened. "Holy smoke!" she said. "Sorry."
That's nothing to be sorry about, believe me," Pat said.
Norma was smiling. She seemed to take some sort of proprietary pride in the size of his cock. And after all, Pat had seen only a small portion of it.
This robe is a little rough on my modesty."
"Fuck modesty," Pat said, sweetly. "Why must you be so formal?" He was carefully keeping his prick covered. The robe looked like some sort of tent in his lap.
"Well, you're being formal," he said. Her white slender knees were demurely crossed.
"So I am," she said. Slowly, lazily, she uncrossed her slim legs, opening a wide V as she casually lifted one leg and draped it over the arm of her chair.
That better?" she asked, smiling at him.
"Much better," he said, staring.
Through the great, dark, bristling bush of dark hair, the long dusky-pink lips of her cunt parted, and a brilliant redness showed through, glistening as though wet already.
"You're still formal," she said. Paul had been too busy staring.
"So I am," he said. He leaned back against the back of the couch and, slowly, as Pat had done, he lifted the flap of the robe and tossed it aside, spreading his legs slightly as he did so. His gigantic obelisk of a cock strained upwards, throbbing. My God, it did look big, he thought, even to him. And from where Pat sat, it would look even bigger. She'd be seeing the whole thing, from the pendulous ball sac to the base right up to the pulsing red tip.
"My God in heavenl" Pat said, "and this is heaven. I'd never believe it."
As he watched, the lips of her cunt parted further, like a mouth ready to take in food.
"Since we're not being formal any more," Paul said, "may I lass you hello?"
"What?" Pat said. She looked astonished.
"Kiss you hello," Paul said. He got up and crossed the room toward her, preceded by his great thick shaft. He dropped to his knees between her open legs, opened his mouth, and planted a deep, sucking, tongue-probing kiss into the mouth of her cunt.
"Ooh, ooh, ooh," she gasped.
He looked up at her and smiled wetly.
"Hello," he said.
"You're too much," she said shakily. "Let's get that dream of a cock of yours into the bedroom, quick. I almost came just looking at it."
"I was just going to suggest that," Norma said coolly. I'll join you in a minute." She got up and headed for the bathroom, dropping her robe to the floor. Her white ass twinkled out of sight.
The bedroom was large. There were two wide double beds.
"Don't do a thing," Pat said. "Just lie on your back on one of the beds. I'll do the rest. Oh, boy, will I do the rest"
He lay flat on his back in the middle of one of the beds and watched her as she stepped up and stood astride his legs, her great red cunt seeming to flame in the center of the dark jungle of her bush. Slowly, she bent her knees and let herself down in one long, smooth, unhesitating descent until the open wet mouth of her cunt engulfed the apple-hard head of his cock.
For a brief instant, Paul panicked. Pat went berserk. Totally ape. The effect was that of putting a plug in a socket. As her electric cunt made the long sliding descent down his thick crowbar of a shaft, she closed her eyes and screamed, then began to gyrate her hips in a wild circular motion, as if to escape the impaling, upthrusting sword, while her cunt, with a life of its own, demanded a deeper, and deeper, and deeper penetration.
He lay back, keeping his hips arched and his prick at the total disposal of her ravenous, gulping twat. There was no possibility of matching any kind of thrusting rhythm to her crazy grinding. He looked at her face, the eyes squeezed tightly shut, the mouth distorted, issuing groans and squeals that had no relation to any human sound.
The feel of her twat depths gave him the sensation that his cock was drowning in a warm whirlpool bath. Now and again she would lift herself, and her inner cunt lips would convulse, clutching and squeezing and strangling his rock-hard shaft with a death grip around the neck, just below the head. He watched her writhing throat, the Adam's apple riding up and down in a series of wild gymnastics related solely to the messages of hysteria sent up from below. Squirming, writhing, squealing, gyrating, grinding, pumping, the girl appeared to Paul to be in a perpetual state of insane orgasm. His oaken cock was an interested participant, but that was all. The referee at a prizefight. A member of the cast. But her electric, all-engulfing, devouring cunt was the whole show.
When God made this girl, Paul thought, feeling strangely detached from the paroxysms around his pole, He built a cunt. A supreme cunt, a cunt to end all cunts. The rest of the body was just an afterthought.
He became aware that Norma was standing beside the bed, and looked up at her. She was smiling calmly, watching her roommate's gyrations. She seemed amused, but only amused, by the whole tempestuous scene. She noticed Paul looking at her.
"She's never had anything like that inside her," Norma said. "Never."
He put a finger to his lips. Pat was gasping audibly now and making regular pumping trips up and down his shaft.
"Sshh," he said. "You'll wake the baby."
"She can't hear a thing. She's in another world."
"You sure?" he said, thrusting up to meet Pat's descents.
"You could shoot a gun off behind her and she wouldn't hear it."
He put out a hand to where she stood, and she put her round white ass in profile. He stroked the smooth globes, slipped his little finger between them, into her asshole. She wriggled. Jesus, his finger had slipped in easily.
Suspiciously, he withdrew his finger and raised his hand to his face. I'll be damned, he thought. Perfume and Vaseline. She wants a tongue job. What the hell, he thought. Every day you learn something new.
He smiled up at her, then extended the tip of his tongue from between his lips.
"Come here," he said.
"That's my Paul. That's what I was hoping for."
She straddled him, facing her panting, groaning roommate, and let herself down slowly. He parted her yielding white globes with his fingers. What a tiny, neat, puckered pink-brown thing a girl's asshole is, he marveled. Her cunt lay softly open and vulnerable beneath it, and he gave it a long, lingering lick just for old times' sake. Then, tentatively, with the tip of his tongue still holding the cheeks of her ass spread apart with his fingers, he touched the tiny puckered eye of her asshole.
She quivered. Slowly, deliberately, he started to lick it, tasting the perfume and the Vaseline, until the entire crack of her ass was wet with his saliva. Stiffening his tongue, he pushed at the tiny opening. It gave way easily, and his tongue entered. Norma moaned, and he probed deeper, licking and sucking, until his tongue was deep in her ass. She writhed, and a sound like weeping came from her. Her asshole, Paul knew then, was even more responsive to a tongue than a cock.
She writhed, and moaned, with joy-riding Pat flailing around in front of her, and Paul lost all touch with time and space. Then, from somewhere, he heard screaming, and knew that Pat had somehow reached the peak of her insane ecstasy and was at last in orgasm. He drove his cock deep, and let it explode.
Norma had already sagged away from his probing tongue. He rested for a minute, and when he tried to move, discovered that Norma was asleep, and so was Pat, her head on her roommate's back.
Paul was too weary to struggle out from under them, and after a while he slept, too. They slept that way, the three of them, like a bucket of tired eels, for two hours, and when they woke up they repeated the performance, with variations, and kept repeating it, with more variations, until three in the morning, when Paul finally got up and dressed and got a cab back to his hotel.
He slept like a baby.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The hotel switchboard let him oversleep, and by the time Paul got to the office it was around quarter to ten. He was ready to make apologies for his lateness but nobody seemed to notice. They had something much more important to worry about. Around Harold Dingman's office, there was a tensely gloomy air of impending tragedy.
"Looks like the honeymoon is over," Dingman said, when he saw Paul come in. Paul thought he had never seen such a frightened man. He looked like a puppet with all his strings cut.
"What's wrong?"
"Kay Lennen is what's wrong. Miss Huggable herself. The Bitch of Buchenwald."
"You told me about her at lunch yesterday."
"Did I tell you about the new campaign?"
"No."
"Well, I meant to. Every time I start thinking about that broad I gulp my Martinis, and when I do that I forget what it was I started out to say."
"What about the new campaign?"
"We gave It to her Friday to mull over, over the weekend. With her flunkies, naturally. She takes a whole goddamn retinue up to her place in Westport, some weekends. She just got back to the office this morning. Early this morning. She called here at rune-thirty."
"And?"
"She don't like it," Dingman said. Like news of a death in the family, Paid thought. For Christ's sake. "What don't she like?" he asked, straight-faced. "Everything. Mostly it looks like she don't like us."
"What now?"
"We go up to see her. Me, and Sam Wycliffe, maybe even Bob Gelder. I don't know. You might as well come along. It might be the last chance you'll get to meet her, and I wouldn't want you to miss that"
"When?"
"Four o'clock this afternoon."
"Why four o'clock this afternoon? Why not right now?"
"Because she's a sadist is why," Dingman snapped. "I would like to see you gentlemen in my office at four o'clock this afternoon, if you can spare the time,' she says. The cunt"
"How you talk," Paul murmured.
"Ah, shit" Dingman said, and stalked into his office, Paul followed him.
"What's the new campaign look like?"
"Like all the others."
"Then what makes it a new campaign?"
"New copy. It's introducing a new line of cosmetics that makes a broad glow in the dark or some goddamn thing. All new names for the shades. Cantaloupe coral. Pussy pink. Pomegranate puce. Names like that."
"Can I see the campaign?"
"She's got it, up at Huggable. All we've got are stats."
"I'd like to look at the stats."
"What for?" Dingman said, looking at him. In his nervous agony, Paul was just another aggravation.
"If I'm going up there with you, I'd like to know what the discussion's all about, instead of standing around with my thumb up my ass."
Dingman shrugged.
"All right." He turned to his secretary. "Get the stats of the new Huggable campaign and give them to Paul, will you, Karen?"
Paul jumped, involuntarily. Karen. Saturday. Behave yourself, she'd said. For the furniture pushing. Paul shrugged and went into his office.
Dingman's secretary brought the stats into his office and he leafed through them. Dingman was right. It did look just like all the other campaigns. Same type of layout. Same dismal broads. If the models weren't actually the same models, they looked the same. You couldn't tell one from the other. Maybe Kay Lennen had a point, he thought, although he knew enough already not to say anything like that to anyone in the office.
Well, hell, it was no skin off his ass. Or was it? If they lost the account, it could mean his job.
He started to stew about it, and stewed through the rest of the day. You silly son of a bitch, he told himself. You have the disease already.
At twenty minutes to four Dingman stuck his head into Paul's office, and the two of them walked over to Wycliffe's office. Wycliffe was ready to go. Dingman was a physical wreck. In the elevator going down, Wycliffe snapped at him.
"Harold, for Christ's sake, stop looking like you're going to a beheading. You just make everything worse."
"How could they be worse?"
"Ah, shit," Wycliffe said.
They took a cab to one of the new buildings on Third Avenue. Paul noticed that Wycliffe let Dingman dig around his pockets and pay the driver. Wycliffe was above all that.
They walked past the receptionist and down the hall and directly into Kay Lennen's office. It was a bigger office than Wycliffe's office, much bigger. She was standing behind her desk, talking to two men who were very evidently assistants of some land, from the way they listened. She was a tall woman, as tall as Paul, with jet black hair, in her middle thirties. A beautiful woman, Paul thought, and then she turned to look at them. Her eyes came to rest on Paul, the stranger in the trio. She had-the coldest, hardest eyes he'd ever seen on a woman. Green, they were. Ice cold green.
"Kay," Sam Wycliffe said, all warmth and charm, "we've got some new blood on the account. Meet Paul Beck."
She held out her hand and Paul took it. She kept her eyes on him, and he felt goose bumps starting on his back. Cut it out, he told himself. You'll wind up like Dingman. She's only a woman.
"Hello," she said. "But it may be a little late for a transfusion."
She waved for them to sit. She sat, and they sat. The two men she'd been talking to ranged themselves on the low narrow table running the length of the windows on one side of the office. Paul sat at one end of a long couch, near an ash tray. Dingman and Wycliffe took chairs in front of her desk.
"This new campaign of yours," Kay Lennen said, and waved her hand at the two men along the windows. They got up and propped up six stiff-backed comprehensives against the windows. The advertisements were the ones Paul had seen the stats of that morning. They looked a little better in color, Paul thought, but not much. Same dismal broads. Everybody's phony sister. Who needs a sister?
"Wild Watermelon," Kay Lennen said. "Apple Cheek. Plum Beautiful. That isn't an advertising campaign. It's a fucking fruit salad."
Nobody said anything. Not Dingman. Not Wycliffe. Certainly not Paul.
"Spring Peach. What's the texture of a peach?"
Still nobody said anything.
"Yellow and fuzzy, is what a peach is. You, Paul, you're a young man." She leveled her cold green eyes on him. She didn't bother him, now. Things looked bad but what the hell. He'd regained his composure after the handshake. "You're a young man," Kay Lennen repeated. "Do you like girls who are yellow and fuzzy?"
"I might, just for kicks," he said, reaching for a cigarette. "I never met any."
Wycliffe laughed.
"Paul's on our side, Kay," he said.
"You need all the support you can get," she said. She waved at the next layout propped against a window.
"Cherries in the Snow," she said. "Sounds like gang rape in a snow bank. Maybe the Queen of the Winter Festival, herself. You go to Dartmouth, Paul?"
She was looking at him. He discovered that he was enjoying himself.
"No," he said. "But I've gotten laid in a snow bank."
Wycliffe laughed again. Kay Lennen almost smiled.
"Stop trying to rattle the help, Kay."
"He doesn't rattle easy," she said.
"No, he doesn't. That's the main reason he's working for us."
"As I said before, Sam, I think your new blood got here too late." She was leveling the icy green eyes on the big, gray-haired man now. He took it well, Paul noticed. "I think it's a little late for a transfusion."
"What're you trying to tell me, Kay?"
"I think we are on the verge of a parting of the ways."
"You can't mean it. After all these years."
Paul looked at Dingman. He was shaking, visibly. He looked ready to cry, any minute.
"That's just it, all these years," Kay Lennen said. "The stuff you're doing looks tired. Tired in concept. Tired in approach. Tired in execution."
"I think we ought to take another swing at this one," Wycliffe said. He indicated, with his thumb, the layouts propped against the windows.
"Go ahead, if you want to. What I'm telling you is not final, and there's no hurry. We have plenty of time to get this Spring campaign into the works." Thanks," Wycliffe said.
Tut I ought to warn you, V. V. D. and O. has been smelling around. They'd like to have the Huggable account Round out their goddamn image."
Paul thought "smelling around" was a bad choice of words on Kay Lennen's part. The analogy made her a bitch in heat, and she looked like anything but.
There was nothing but silence in the big office. Any second now, Paul thought looking at Dingman, he's going to break up all this nice quiet He's going to start sobbing.
"Well," Kay Lennen said, "hasn't anyone anything to say?"
Shut up, Paul told himself. It's none of your business. But it was his business, God damn it. Anyway, what did he have to lose? What did any of them have to lose, him, Dingman, Wycliffe? What the hell?
"Mrs. Lennen," he said, "it just occurred to me that maybe you've been looking at these damn' campaigns too long."
She laid the green ice on him.
"Call me Kay," she said. "Everybody calls me Kay."
"All right, Kay," he said, hooking up with her stare. "I think you've been looking at these things too long."
"What makes you think that?"
"You know when you don't like something, but you don't know what it is you don't like."
"You have to realize, Kay," Wycliffe said, apologizing, "that Paul's awful new in this business."
"Shut up, Sam."
"Like this campaign," Paul said, indicating the windows with his thumb as Wycliffe had done. "I think you're right not to like it. I don't like it myself."
"You're refreshing already," Kay Lennen said.
Paul got out a cigarette and lighted it
"The copy doesn't bother me. I don't think it bothers you either, really. What the hell do you care about cherries and snow banks?"
She was still looking at him, but at least the cigarette had broken the locked stare.
"What bothers you?" Kay Lennen asked.
"The models." Everybody in the room looked toward the windows. "The goddam wholesome models."
"What about them? They're beautiful girls."
"Sure they are. But they all look like my sister, and I haven't even got a goddamn sister."
For the first time, Kay Lennen smiled. Her whole face changed. She had a wonderful smile. She was a lovely woman.
"Go ahead," she said.
"Well, hell, who needs a sister? The girls you're trying to sell this stuff to don't want to look like anybody's sister. They say there's nothing wrong with a little incest as long as you keep it in the family, but I don't think the general public is ready to accept incest yet"
"Really?" Kay Lennen asked.
"The lay public, I'm talking about. You should pardon the expression."
"What do you suggest?"
"I think the models should be girls who look like they could be laid maybe once in a while. Like after choir practice."
Kay Lennen smiled again, and some of the ice went out of her eyes. She was really a beautiful woman.
She stood up. The meeting was over. Everybody got to his feet Kay Lennen was still smiling when she looked over at Paul.
I'll think it over," she said, "about the models. Meanwhile, Sam, if you want to take another swing at this campaign, go ahead. But I have to tell you, things don't look good for your agency."
They were at the door when Kay Lennen spoke again.
"Paul," she said, "wait a second, will you?"
He came back to her desk while the others filed out She was looking at her desk calendar.
"Can you come up and see me around five o'clock Thursday? Just you. I want to have a talk with you." She did not look at him.
"Sure," he said, and turned to leave.
"Good night," she said, as he was going out the door.
"Good night."
Wycliffe and Dingman were waiting for him by the elevators.
"What're you trying to do to us, for Christ's sake?" Dingman asked. "Up your ass," Paul said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
All the world-shaking events that had transpired with Kay Lennen had taken so long that they were back in the office before five o'clock. Dingman was deeply depressed, but Wycliffe seemed to take the whole thing calmly enough. It was evident he'd been through this thing many, many times before, and it was nothing a few Martinis wouldn't cure.
Paul was strangely exhilarated by the scene in Kay Lennen's office, and by the knowledge that she'd been impressed enough by what he said to want to talk to him again, alone. In the cab, he'd debated with himself and finally decided to tell the others about his Thursday appointment with her. He thought it might give them a ray of hope, at least a stronger ray than they had.
But Dingman gave the news a bad reading. The way he was feeling, there was no such thing as good news, no such thing as hope.
"She probably wants to offer you a job," he said, gloomily. "In the mailroom."
Wycliffe had looked sideways at him in disgust, then looked at Paul.
"Hang in there, lad," he'd said, enigmatically.
Back in the office, Paul was still excited, and any time he was excited, he got horny. He walked around to where redheaded Eileen sat, outside Wycliffe's office. She wasn't there, and he had to go back three times before he found her at her desk. Each time, walking became more difficult. He was rapidly extemporizing plans for the maiden from Bronxville. Who'd ever heard of a virgin in Bronxville, anyway? It was an insult to something.
When he did finally find her at her desk, she gave him her Christmas-tree smile. She lit up all over.
"Can you have a drink with me after work?" he asked very quietly, with his back toward the open door to Wycliffe's office, "and maybe dinner?"
"I was wondering when you were going to ask," she said, in her clear cheerful voice. "I haven't forgotten last week, you know."
Paul hunched his shoulders in the scared gesture of a kid who thinks his baseball is going to sad through the greenhouse, and nodded his head sideways, indicating Wycliffe's office.
"He's left for the day," Eileen said. "Saloon bent, if I ever saw a man saloon bent."
"Well, can you?"
"Can I what?"
"Have a drink after work."
"Sure. I'll call home and tell them IT! be late. You don't just want to have a drink, do you?"
"No. Of course not."
"Me either." She smiled at him, happily. "I liked what you did to me last time. I loved it."
Paul looked down and shuffled his feet.
"You're so nice." She laughed. It was a merry little laugh. "You're embarrassed."
"I don't like to talk about it. Not here in the office."
"We could even do it in the office."
Paul was shocked. First Norma Olsen. Now this one. This guileless little redheaded virgin.
"Jesus, no," he said. "I still have my hotel. And after Saturday, I'll have an apartment."
"As long as you do it." She still had her schoolgirl srmle.
"Well see."
She frowned.
"I hope you'll do more than just see."
"We can't leave the office together. I'll go down to the Miramar."
"See you there in fifteen minutes."
She was putting the cover on her typewriter as Paul left.
At the Miramar she ordered a Martini, straight up, no vegetables.
"No," Paul said.
"All right. I'll have Scotch, like you." The waiter made the change on his order pad and went away.
"You remember what we talked about last time?" Paul asked.
"We talked about a lot of things. You probably mean about me being a virgin on a technicality. A technical virgin."
"Yes."
The waiter came with the drinks. He was probably the fastest waiter in New York, Paul thought.
"I told my mother that. That you said I was a technical virgin."
"You what?" This girl had shocked him at least three times in half an hour.
"I told my mother. I just said I was talking to this nice guy in the office about one thing and another and he finally came to the conclusion that I was a technical virgin. She thought it was very funny."
"Do me a favor," Paul said. "Don't repeat to your mother anything I say to you."
"She's all right. I tell her a lot of things."
"How old is your mother?"
"Thirty-eight."
"She probably doesn't believe it, about your being a virgin. Even on a technicality."
"She doesn't," Eileen said. "She got knocked up with me when she was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence."
"Where do you pick up antiquated expressions like that?"
"Like what?"
"Knocked up."
"From my mother. She's a swinger."
"She ought to meet my mother," Paul said. Jesus, what a gruesome thought. "They could form a Friendship Club and hold pre-menopause meetings."
"Don't talk dirty," Eileen said.
They had only two drinks but it was more than enough to get the little redhead's motor running. In the elevator going up to Paul's room they were alone, and she pressed against him urgently. When he bent to kiss her, her humming-bird's tongue went into his mouth and vibrated there until the door slid open.
In the room, she sat down immediately on the edge of the double bed, kicked off her shoes, raised her hips along with her skirt, and whipped off her pantyhose with a dazzling display of two-tone, tan-and-white smoothness. And red hair. The immodest virgin, Paul thought.
She sat on the edge of the bed, her skirt around her hips, her lovely legs slightly apart. Her neat round knees were slightly elevated as she held her feet extended like a toe dancers' to touch the carpet.
"Please," she said. "Please do it. Right now."
He couldn't say no. He wondered if all the virgins in Bronxville were so eager to have their clits licked, once they'd had a taste of it. All two of them. He knelt and kissed the soft swell of velvet skin inside one knee.
She inched herself forward to the very edge of the bed and spread her legs. Her tender little pink pussy pouted at him, as if it were ready to kiss him back. He leaned forward and licked it gently, then teased the tiny swelling bud of her clitoris with the tip of his tongue.
"Ooh, golly," she said. "If you ever knew how much I've been wanting you to do that."
He held the soft outer folds of her delicate cunt lips apart, and licked up and down, back and forth. Then he stiffened his tongue and probed deep, through the tiny aperture between her inner twat lips, putting his mouth over her entire eager warm little cunt, sucking. Then he gave it three more long licks and stood up. His rampant erection stood up with him.
"That's all for right now, honey," he said. "Let's get undressed."
She looked disappointed, crushed, almost, but she was undressed before he was, lying gloriously naked in the middle of the bed when he came out of the bathroom with a large Turkish towel.
"No," she said, looking at it.
"I don't want us to wrinkle the spread," he said. She raised her hips and watched him without smiling as he spread the towel under her. He lay down beside her and kissed her, his mouth open. Her tongue was wilder, much wilder, than it had been in the elevator. He ran his hands down her twitching back and squeezed the firm little globes of her ass. When he bent his head to suck her breasts, he found the nipples poking out, like the eraser end of a new pencil.
He put the tip of his tongue in her navel, and she quivered. His hand stroked downward over the smooth roundness of her belly, tangled in soft silken red hair. His little finger slid into the warm wet slit below. He started to get to his knees.
"No," she said, "please, no."
He got to his knees and then arched over her. Her legs spread without his touching them.
"Don't," she said. "Please, Paul."
He leaned forward on his elbows and kissed her deeply. Her tongue was a triphammer against the roof of his mouth. The underside of his long throbbing prong pulsed against the soft warmth of her belly.
"Please don't," she said again, but he felt her say it, rather than heard her. Her tongue was tangled with his, her mouth gulping his own. He raised his hips and fitted the taut glistening head of his cock between the wet warm lips of her little cunt.
"Oh, golly," she said. "Don't. Her hips, writhed, raised and pushed toward him until the clutching lips of her pussy had engulfed the whole head of his rigid prick.
He put on an almost imperceptible bit of forward pressure. She opened her legs wider, and tried to slide herself toward him with her hands. His cock moved into her, another inch.
"Oh, don't. Please don't." Her hips were starting a small, irregular pumping motion. He reached back, hooked her heels inside his, and pushed forward, with a slow, gentle, steady pressure.
Eileen screamed once, a tiny scream that was more a gasp, and that was it. His whole oaken shaft sank in, in one long, tight-squeezed, delicious trip. He held his cock still, all the way inside her, his pelvis pressed against the soft silken hair of her inflamed cunt. For just a second, she was still too. She looked at him out of wide eyes and tried to smile.
"It was nothing," he thought she was trying to say, but she was quivering so the words were only a short series of tiny gasps. Then her hips began to flutter and thrash wildly, the tight grip of her clutching cunt shifting erratically on his stiff slippery shaft.
He put a hand behind one of her palpitating hips and stroked it, gently. Like quieting a horse, he thought. Gradually, her fluttering and thrashing subsided, and he started fucking her with a slow, controlled rhythm, sinking his stiff, stern tranquilizer deep on the in stroke, holding it for a second, with just the head inside, on the out. Soon she was responding to every thrust with a thrust of her own.
He increased the rhythm, eliminating the pause that refreshes, and she fell into the new timing immediately, meeting the new pounding with beautifully timed counterpunches of her own.
Instinct, he thought, clenching his teeth and fucking his way happily in and out of her tight-clenched cunt, is a wonderful thing, and this girl's got it, in spades. Good breeding manifests itself, every time. Class will tell.
Then she was quivering, and gasping. Her squeezed-shut eyes and contorted face showed mortal agony. With a tiny, wrenching scream, she went into orgasm, unhooking her heels and throwing her legs into the air, pumping them frantically, as if in an inverted bicycle race.
Paul was nowhere near coming. He kept his cock inside her, holding it still, buried deep, while her spasms subsided. Then he raised one of her legs and lay on his side, careful to keep the connection intact, and started slowly, comfortably, to fuck her from that position.
"What do you call that?" she asked, her hips starting to move. She was smiling at him. She looked very
"Indian style," he said, fucking her slowly, with long, deep strokes. "You mean the Indians did it this way?"
"Supposed to have. Probably still do. With or without reservations."
"How can you make jokes," she said, starting to breathe harder, "at a time like this?"
"Why not?" He was pumping it into her faster, now.
"I don't know. I don't believe the Indians did it this way. They didn't have that much imagination."
"You'd be surprised about Indians," he said darkly. He was banging away with abandon, now.
"Sidesaddle, I'd call it," she said, gasping, and came again. She didn't scream, this time.
Paul came with her, bathing the inside of her inflamed little pussy with his soothing gushes. He didn't have to come, but he did, and not just to be sociable.
There's always another time, he thought.
He was right, about another time. The first one was like the first olive out of a bottle. After that they were all easy.
Easy, hell. Demanded. After they'd rested a while, he got her to straddle him. He thought he'd never seen a girl so happy as Edeen, sliding up and down his Maypole.
They went out to eat, and came back to the room, and he fucked her, a long, exhausting, delicious fuck, in the first position.
They had both taken showers and were getting dressed to leave when she decided she wanted to try it again, on the side.
Paul obliged.
Afterwards, she was quiet for a long time, apparently in deep thought. When she looked at Paul and spoke, finally, it was apparent that she'd made a profound decision.
"I like that the best," she said. "That's the best way of all."
As they were leaving to get his car from the garage on die corner, she touched him on the arm just after he'd opened the door. He looked at her.
"In the office some time, like before lunch," she said, "if I say 'side saddle' to you, will you know what I mean?"
"I sure will."
"Good," she said.
She smiled a smile of utter contentment.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On Wednesday, Paul rested. He rested all day in the office and after five o'clock he went back to his hotel and rested some more. After he'd gone out and had dinner he came straight back to the hotel and went to bed and slept eleven hours. Thursday morning, as his hard-on went down under a cold shower, he felt ready for the Olympics. If they had a fucking event in the Olympics, that is.
At the office, he spent most of the day going through proof books of Huggable campaigns, both present and past, and making detailed notes about what he thought was wrong with them and what could be done to make them right. In the cab on the way up to Kay Lennen's office, just before five, he realized that he'd left all his notes on his desk. The hell with them, he thought. He'd never paid any attention to his own notes, anyway, even in his public speaking courses.
Kay Lennen appeared glad to see him, in a cool sort of way. Not icy, just cool.
"I've thought over what you said about the models we've been using," she said, when he'd settled in a chair in front of her desk. "I hate to admit it, but I think you're right."
Paul didn't say anything. He was going through his ritual of searching for a cigarette.
"Do you think you could select the right kind of models for us?"
"Sure I could."
'It might not be as easy as you think."
"Why not?"
"Most models look that way. Chaste. Antiseptic. Virginal."
"That's the second time this week I've heard that word," Paul said. "Jesus, what a week."
"Suppose you couldn't find any models who looked the way you think they should look?"
I'd go out and find some. Some non-models. Some amateurs. Some girls who still do it for cups and medals."
"That sounds like quite an assignment you just dreamed up for yourself," she said. She was smiling.
"Isn't it? Scares me, a little."
"I bet," she said.
"It could get awfully expensive."
"Company money. The agency's, and Huggable's."
"I was just talking in the subjunctive," he said. There're probably lots of professional models who'd be just right for us."
Us. Get that, he thought.
"There aren't any," she said. "You're probably trying to carve out a little piece of heaven for yourself, right here on Madison Avenue."
"Third Avenue."
"You'd be operating on Madison. And operating is the word."
He didn't say anything. This goddamn woman was too bright for the poor people.
She leaned back in her chair.
"Why don't you tell me something about yourself, Paul?"
"Not much to tell," he said. He felt uncomfortable. "I have an idea." Ted me."
"Have you any more appointments today?"
"No."
"Why don't you let me buy you a drink, over at the Drake? It's a nice place." He'd been there with his mother. It was a nice place. Dark.
"Sure it's a nice place," she said. "But I was thinking of asking you up to my apartment so we could talk. The maid can make us a drink there."
"Well, thank you," he said. "I'd like very much to, later. But right now I'm still sort of on company time, and I think I'd feel more comfortable talking to you at the Drake. It's neutral territory."
She smiled again.
"You feel you're on enemy grounds, here?"
"Sort of."
"You're not. Maybe the others from your agency are, but you're not. You're a remarkable young man."
"Thanks," Paul said. Remarkable. She should talk to Mrs. Halsted. Or the Faculty Advisor who kicked him out of school. Or Vickie. There was a reference for you.
"All right," she said, and stood up. "Let's go to the Drake."
He ordered a Martini, straight up, to keep her company. What the hell, he thought He was hip deep in this thing now. He might as well go Madison Avenue all the way.
"You were going to tell me about yourself," she said, when the icy stemmed glasses were in front of them.
"I wasn't" he said, "but I suppose I have to."
He told her much the same story Wycliffe had told him to feed Bob Gelder. Kay Lennen let it all go without comment, and then started delving deeper. He didn't realize it at first, but after half an hour he knew suddenly that he'd told her an awful lot about himself. He felt tired.
"That's about enough interviewing, for now," he said. "Can't we just have another drink?"
"Of course," she said, leaning back. He motioned the waiter. It would only be their second Martini, and he didn't feel a thing.
"Why don't you tell me something about yourself?" he asked. "Up till now, this whole conversation has been a one-way street"
"Like what?"
"Oh, like, what's your proudest accomplishment?"
She thought for a moment. The waiter set the frosty, brimming glasses down on the table in front of them. Paul sipped. These could be habit forming, he thought.
"Well," she said, "I can install a new generator in a car, all by myself."
"That's a hell of a practical accomplishment, for a pretty girl," he said.
"So you think it's impractical. Why?"
"Because if you can get a new generator, wherever you get it there's somebody there who can install it for
"You're right," she said. "I never thought of that."
"It's about as practical as keeping two Spanish guitars in the house just in case a couple of Spaniards drop in."
She was laughing. It was the first time he'd heard her laugh. It gave him a different kind of goose bumps on his back. Her eyes were very warm.
"As soon as we finish this drink," she said, "let's go to my place."
"All right," he said.
Her apartment building was in the East Seventies, 'way over near the river. In the elevator going up he remembered Dingman saying something about her house in Westport.
"I thought somebody told me you lived in Connecticut?"
"Westport. I have a house in Westport. But I can't stomach the commuting."
"I understand a lot of people do, from Westport. I couldn't even do it from Scarsdale."
"That I can understand. On the New Haven line it's a different kind of disgust It's the Boola-Boola on the bar cars that gets to me."
He grinned at her.
"There're probably people who make the trip every day without ever going near the bar car."
"You mean there are other cars on those trains?" she asked, widening her eyes. She was very cheerful. The Martinis, or being out of the office, or something, seemed to have melted all the ice in her soul. Maybe she had two personalities, Paul thought, her office personality and her personal personality. What was the word? Schizoid. Damn good word.
"Anyway, I keep this little apartment in town. I come into the office from Westport on Monday mornings and go out again Friday nights, so I'm here just four nights a week."
The elevator doors opened and they walked down a long hall, past 4-N, 4-0, 4-P. At apartment 4-Q she stopped and started fishing for her keys. There's an apartment for you, Paul thought. 4-Q.
"It's really just a small place," she said, opening the door, "but it's all I need. And it sure beats Boola-Boola."
The apartment was not small at all. The living room was large, and doors at the far end opened onto a terrace. He walked to the doors and looked out, at the boats on the river and the myriad lights of Queens-he supposed it was Queens, anyway-but he didn't open the doors and go out. It was cold, for October.
When he turned, a tall angular woman with her hair dyed bright red, wearing a neat blue dress, had entered the room, apparently from the kitchen.
"Can I fix a drink or something, Mrs. Lennen?" she asked.
"If it's a Martini," Paul said, "I'll be glad to make them. I've had lots of practice. I've got an overdeveloped right forearm from stirring the things." He almost said, "for my mother," but choked it back in time.
"That'll be wonderful," Kay Lennen said. "Why don't you call it a day, Betsy? I can fix us something to eat later."
"Why, thank you, Mrs. Lennen," the woman said. She looked at Paul briefly, disappeared then reappeared, shrugging into her coat, and was gone.
So that's the way it is, Paul thought. Talk about fringe benefits.
As Paul stirred the third Martini in the apartment, he had forgotten all about Norman and Gelder and Huggable. He thought Kay Lennen was the most desirable woman he'd ever met. She had the longest good legs he'd ever seen, like Juliet Prowse only more so, and even under her suit her body looked more than promising. But it was her mouth that really got him. He brought the Martinis back into the room, set them down on the low coffee table by the couch, sat down beside her, and looked at her mouth again. His eyes had been mostly on her mouth for the last twenty minutes. It was entirely different from her tight, controlled office mouth. A schizoid mouth, he thought. It was wide and warm, the lips full, moist, parted a little even when she was not smiling. At one point she had gone to the bathroom and removed her lipstick, but it had hardly made any difference in the redness of her lips, their welcoming wet warmth.
He wanted to lass that mouth more than anything in the world, and for the first time in his memory he didn't know how.
"What are you thinking about, Paul?" she said into the silence, and the tip of her tongue appeared fleetingly between her parted lips. Paul controlled his voice, with a conscious effort "You must know," he said. "You're driving me right up the wall"
"I wouldn't want that to happen," she said. "The truth is, I wouldn't want you to have anything to do with anything vertical."
She leaned toward him. Or at least she seemed to lean toward him. He put his right hand on the back of her neck and, at last he kissed her. Deeply. Icy, he thought Icy as a blast furnace. She melted into him, and in the hot cave of her mouth her tongue licked his, lazily. Lingeringly. His prick swelled, pumped itself rigid, strained against his trouser legs.
Her hand brushed over it casually, as if accidentally, and abruptly she took her mouth away.
I'm going to get into something more comfortable," she said. "Why don't you?" She was looking deep into his eyes, and not smiling.
She got up from the couch and left the room, her hips swaying. Why don't you what? he thought Get into something more comfortable? He took off his coat and tie, hung them over a chair, and went back to the couch and sat down. He sipped his Martini. Habit forming, he thought. They sure were. But look at all the good they did in the world.
She came slowly back into the room wearing high heeled, fleecy mules on her feet. Nothing else. God, she was beautiful every long inch of her. Her proud high breasts, full, still young, jiggling slightly when she moved, were tipped with scarlet, startling against the snow-blinding whiteness of her skin. Her hips flared gently, then slimmed, flowing like cream into the endless, gently swelling line of her flawless legs. The long curve of her belly disappeared in the blackness of her incredibly neat, coiffured-looking, heart-shaped bush. She took it to the hairdresser, Paul thought inanely, every Monday and Thursday.
"I thought you were going to get comfortable, too," she said, smiling. She stood very erect, her breasts jutting, the nipples, like little scarlet rigid pricks, pointing in a slant toward the ceiling. She was proud of her body. Very proud. That changing of generators was a lot of horseshit, Paul thought
"Two minutes," Paul said, and stood up, unbuttoning his shirt.
"Leave your clothes in the bedroom, if you like."
It took him less than a minute to undress. He sauntered slowly, barefooted, back into the living room. His great long thick prick preceded him formally into the room, swinging, stiff, like the boom on a sailboat.
"Oh my God," she said.
"What's wrong, Kay?" he said.
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything's absolutely right. Just bring it over here. Please. Please bring it over here."
She was sitting on the couch. Her eyes never left the enormity of his pulsing prick as he moved slowly toward her across the room.
As he approached, she spread her legs to bring him closer. His gigantic stiff cock, above the horizontal now, throbbing as if in a fury, pointed straight into her face. The squinted eye in the swollen, glistening-tight, purpling head, he knew, would be looking her square in the eyes.
"Oh, God," she said again, and opened her mouth wide.
Her soft mouth enveloped the entire head of his cock, effortlessly, and her moist lips embraced it around the neck. Her deft tongue slipped along the underside of his vibrant shaft, encouraging to enter her mouth more deeply. He put his hands around the back of her head and shuttled his shaft forward, gently, until he could feel the tip touching the soft palate, above her throat.
Her green eyes rolled up to meet his, and she seemed to be smiling, even though her mouth was a horizontal red "O" around his thick shaft. Her head shuttled back and forth, like a fart-strutting rooster's, as she licked and sucked simultaneously, somehow combining joyous abandon with consummate skill.
The girl's enjoying her work, Paul thought wonderingly. No matter what her work happened to be at the moment apparently she believed in maximum effort.
He didn't want her sucking to the end, but he could feel his hips beginning to pump involuntarily, and he didn't want to be selfish. Not with this girl. And it looked like a long night ahead.
"You're wonderful," he said, taking his hands away from the back of her head. "But that's enough for now."
She kept on sucking and licking, her mouth making wet slurping sounds now, one hand squeezing and jerking at the base of his shaft. Jesus, he thought, he didn't want to come this way. Not yet. He had a thought. A completely unselfish thought.
"Please stop. I want to do something for you."
Her woman's curiosity got the better of her, and with one long, last, lingering suck, her lips came together and terminated their trip at the wet, purple, pointing tip of his pulsing proud prick.
"What?" she said, and smiled up at him. She let the pink tip of her tongue protrude from between her wet red lips, stiffened it, and moved it up and down.
"I think you have the idea." He dropped to his knees on the rug in front of her.
She spread her dazzling, snow-white legs apart, slowly, and inched her hips forward toward the edge of the couch. Paul looked up at the delicious, inviting soft V of her thighs, from the open end of the V.
He had never seen a more perfectly formed cunt. It was as unflawed as the frame of coiffured black bush that crowned and surrounded it. Her long, generous twat lips swelled full toward the center, like the calves of a dancer's legs. They glowed dusky pink in the lamplight, with an aura of joyous good health. The lips were parted, only slightly, but the deep glistening pinkness between them seemed infinitely capable of both giving and receiving enormous, ecstatic enjoyment.
He kissed his way up her inner thighs as she spread her legs wider, then reached his arms up and around her outer thighs, reaching down again with his fingers to spread the soft perfection of her cunt mouth. With the tip of his stiffened tongue, he touched the tender twig of her swelling clitoris, then moved his tongue to-and-fro across it in a series of swift fluttering strokes. He heard a quivering sigh escape from her throat, and extended his whole tongue and began to lick, softly, up and down the entire moist opening.
"That's my man," she said. "That's lovely."
He probed deeply into her cunt channel then, licking and sucking simultaneously. Her hips began to undulate, slowly, as her inner cunt lips began a series of gentle squeezes on his stiff probing tongue.
She threw her knees wide apart and changed the angle of her cunt so his tongue was plunging downward. Her heels touched the back of his neck, urging his tongue deeper. He probed stiffer and deeper, extending his tongue to its full length. Then he withdrew his tongue from its deep penetration and began licking, swiftly, up and down in her wet gorge of pleasure, diddling and sucking her firm, swollen clitoris at the termination of each long lick.
"Oh, God," she said, "I've got to have you inside me. Right now."
She rolled away from his mouth abruptly, stood up, and ran swiftly into the bedroom. He followed, slowed by his swinging stiff boom of a dong, and when he got into the bedroom she lay on her back, her legs spread wide, in the middle of a mammoth double bed.
"It's the size of a tennis court, this bed," he said, getting into position between her legs.
"You play a game with balls on it," she gasped, "but it isn't tennis." Her heart was not in making jokes. With both hands, she was guiding the apple-shiny, apple-hard head of his furiously stiff prick to the wildly welcoming wet lips of her hungry cunt mouth.
His shaft imbedded itself and made the whole long trip to her twat depths in one delicious, plunging stroke. She was quivering as he withdrew the entire length of the thick shaft and plunged it home again.
"You're too much," she said through her teeth. "Too good to be true." Her hips rose, he hooked her heels behind his, and her cunt rose rhythmically to meet his plunging strokes.
After he'd fucked her for only a dozen or so strokes, her hips broke the rhythm, thrashing and fluttering erratically, and he saw from her contorted mouth that she was reaching orgasm, too quickly, much too quickly. He drove his cock into the ecstatic anguish of her cunt, and held the rigid shaft still while she thrashed and fluttered, impaled. Her mouth opened in a series of short, shuddering little screams, and then she lay back, her head rolling on the pillow, breathing deeply and exhaling in long, quivering, interrupted gasps.
"You are too much, Paul," she said finally, "for just a poor working girl. I just couldn't control myself after you slipped that wonderful stiff monster into me."
"It's still there, you know." His pelvis was jammed tight against the hairy pink morass of her twat lips, his surging cock pulsing impatiently in the warm, clutching cave of her cunt depths.
"I know," she said. "Oh, boy, do I know."
Her breathing was regular now. Her inner cunt lips started squeezing the shaft of his cock as her hips started to move, almost imperceptibly. This was going to be a long one, he thought. He'd make it a long one. He put a hand under one of her ankles and raised her leg up over his head as he leaned over and lay on his side, pumping his prick into her with long, slow strokes. Indian style. Side saddle, Eileen called it.
He fucked her for a long, long time that way, and she came twice more, each time with mounting intensity, a sort of delirium. When he heard her starting to gasp and scream for the fourth time, he pounded his cock home with a furious rhythm and came along with her, spurting agonizingly into the warm depths of her ecstasy, her shuddering screams loud in his ears. As the waves of her sensation subsided, he went to sleep, lying on his side, his slippery dozing dong still inside her, held in place by the soft warm embrace of her clutching cunt lips.
When they both woke up, an hour later, he fucked her again, a long, lingering, delicious fuck, and again she came three or four times before he let himself go into orgasm. Afterwards they took a shower and she scrambled some eggs and made coffee. They ate, completely nude, in the kitchen, not saying much. She smiled at him, often. It was a warm, gentle, loving smile. He found it hard, to believe this was the same woman he'd first met behind a desk, in her own big office. After they'd eaten they went directly back to bed, leaving the dishes for the maid in the morning.
By daybreak, he'd fucked her four more times-four times to his orgasm, that is. She'd reached a peak of quivering, shuddering, insane screaming enjoyment at least a dozen more times.
This woman, he thought, watching the early, hard sunlight slant into the room, is going to kill me. Or die in the attempt.
But she didn't look as if she were going to die. She was lying on her back, sound asleep, a look of complete serenity on her face.
Even in sleep, she was smiling, faintly.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He stopped off at his hotel and shaved and showered and got into fresh clothes. He should have been exhausted, he knew, but he wasn't. He felt fine. Then he began to think about the early part of the evening, about meeting Kay first in her office and starting to talk business, and he recalled that, after the Drake, she hadn't once mentioned his agency or his job or her company and her job; and he started to fret. You could never tell about women. Maybe all he was to her was a great evening's roll on the hay.
It was after ten o'clock when he got to the office. On his desk was a note from Wycliffe.
"Please see me as soon as you get in. Sam."
Oh, balls, he thought I'm going to get chewed out for being late.
But when he walked through the door into the office, Wycliffe stood up and extended his hand. Dingman brushed past him and left. There was a stricken look on his face, as if he were ready to cry. He always looked as if he were about to cry, Paul thought. He ought to get into a different line of work.
"Congratulations," Wycliffe said.
He shook Wycliffe's hand, wondering.
"Kay Lennen called around three-thirty," Wycliffe said.
Paul dropped his hand. Oh, Christ, that was the end of his job. One week. Fired, just like from school. The handshake was all sarcasm on the part of Wycliffe, the son of a bitch. He didn't say anything. What was there to say?
"We're keeping the Huggable account Kay Lennen's ready to sign up for another year. Providing."
"Providing what?"
"Providing that you're the senior account executive."
"I'll be a son of a bitch," Paid said.
"No. You'll be the senior account executive on Huggable. At triple your starting salary. Effective immediately. And you'd move into Dingman's office. We're moving him down the had."
"What else happens to him, besides moving?"
"He's off Huggable, of course. He has two other accounts, and we're giving him another small one to handle."
"Which one?"
"Dr. Ayne's T-W."
"That's that patent remedy for rectal itch." These guys had no mercy in their souls.
"Perfect account for him," Wycliffe said. "He's had his thumb up his ass all his life."
"I don't know what to say," Paul said.
"Don't say anything. Bob Gelder will be in here in a minute and he'd have a lot to say. He may start blubbering. He looked at Paul sideways. I'd say you made quite an impression Kay Lennen."
"Must have," Paul said. He did not meet Wycliffe's eyes.
"You son of a bitch," Wycliffe said slowly, emphasizing each word, as if savoring the phrase. Paul looked at him quickly. He was smiling warmly. He put a hand on Paul's shoulder.
Paul began to remember his first interview with Wycliffe. "How tall are you?" he had asked. "Good shoulders. Hell of a good-looking guy." Paul could almost hear the words.
Wycliffe, he thought And he'd had him pegged for a simple sort of jackass.
Bob Gelder came into the office, beaming, his silver hair shining, and pumped Paul's hand.
"We knew you could carry the ball for us," he said, "but nobody expected you to score the winning touchdown your first week. But then, nobody expected this week to be the last minute of the last quarter, either."
"He scored, all right," Wycliffe said.
Paul looked at him. The big man looked out the window.
"You ought to have an apartment in town, with this new job," Gelder said.
I've got one," Paul told him. "I move in Saturday." With Karen helping him push furniture. He wished he could be with Karen right now, tell her all about it Mostly all about it.
"We'll foot the bill for a better one," Bob Gelder said. The agency owes you a lot. You might as well know it you've probably saved a four million dollar account, single-handed."
Single-handed, Paul thought. That was a nice way to put it.
"I don't think you'll be moving into your place on Saturday, Paul, anyway," Wycliffe said. "I forgot to tell you, Kay Lennen wants you to come out to her place in Westport for the weekend. Discuss the new campaign. She asked me to ask you to cad her."
"I've got a date this weekend."
I'm afraid you'll have to break it. It wouldn't be wise to cross Kay Lennen now."
"I suppose so," Paul said, resigned. What the hell was he going to tell Karen? And where, in the months ahead, was he going to get the strength to keep his job, taking care of Kay?
"You'll break your date, and make it out to Westport?" Wycliffe asked.
"Yes. I don't want to, but I will."
"Good. I know it's tough, but he who lives by the sword...." His voice traded away.
