Bill Wilson had dreamed of an orgy involving three delicious girls, and he woke up with an almost painful erection. He snuggled closer to Amy and rested his hand on the long, high curve of her hip. She was soft and warm and she smelled like freshly baked bread.
She lay with her back toward him. He propped himself on his elbow and looked down at her. The early morning sunlight, the only sunlight they ever got in the bedroom, struck gold glints in the light brown hair shielding most of her face.
He had lost the bottoms of his pajamas in last night's restless sleep. That usually happened. He knew he would never grow accustomed to wearing pajamas, but Amy wanted him to wear them. Her long flannel nightgown was hitched up around her hips. Inching closer, he was able to press his bare prick against the taut, silken skin of her inner thigh.
He knew where this was going to lead. He knew from bitter experience that it was hopeless to try to make love to Amy in the morning. But maybe this was the one morning in a thousand when she would turn toward him, soft and submissive and willing, even eager to fuck.
He squirmed a little higher. She slept with one leg straight, the other flexed, in the shape of a "4." He was able to ease his pulsing prick into her crotch. Soft curls and even softer flesh tickled the head. He took his cock in his hand and nudged it upward, pushing it against the point of entry.
"Oh, Bill!" she snapped in her rusty morning voice, jerking violently away from him and sitting up on the edge of the bed in one motion.
"Shit," he muttered as his fists twisted into hard knots.
"God, what a way to wake up!" she croaked, finding a cigarette on the night-table and lighting it with brisk, angry motions.
"There are better ways than that to get oral gratification," he observed.
"Oh, shut up! Instead of getting married, you should have just hired yourself a visiting whore."
He was startled. She sometimes showed irritation when she refused him, but she'd never before made such a bitter remark. He was too hurt and puzzled to be angry.
"I'm sorry, Amy. I love you. I want to show it, that's all."
"You could show it a lot better by letting me get some sleep once in a while," she grumbled, getting up and stalking to the window with tightly folded arms.
He sighed and slumped back on his pillow. He remembered his dream: the blonde one was just going to blow him when he woke up. It was still vivid in his mind. He tried hard not to think about it. He turned and looked at Amy. Her shoulder blades protruded like rudimentary wings as she hugged herself and stared down at the back garden of the first-floor apartment. She always stood as if trying to minimize her breasts, as if their size embarrassed her. She was a strange girl. Her breasts were beautiful. She....
He winced and squeezed his eyes shut as he remembered what he'd done last night. It made him feel guilty and unclean in the light of day, and he wished he could crawl inside himself and disappear.
He'd had a hard day yesterday, and he'd stopped off for a few drinks before coming home. Then he'd had a couple more drinks at home before dinner. And a few more after dinner. Amy, pleading a headache, had retired early, rejecting his suggestion that they make love.
Feeling sorry for himself, he sat up drinking for an hour longer. Gradually he talked himself into the idea that he should go and take what he wanted. He was a normal, healthy young man. He had needs. Amy had no right to refuse him so often; she had no right to put so many finicky lit tie restrictions and qualifications on their screwing! He ought to go into the bedroom arid fuck the stuffing out of her, whether she liked it or not! He had succeeded in convincing himself.
He snapped on the bedside lamp. She appeared to be asleep. "Amy," he said, "I want to fuck you-and we are going to fuck."
She didn't stir. He removed his clothes and hung them neatly over a chair, pleased at this evidence of his sobriety. He sat on the bed a little more heavily than he'd planned and shook her shoulder.
"Wake up, honey. Fucking time. This time we're going to leave the light on, too. I want to see what I'm getting into!"
He laughed hard at his own joke, but she lay like a dead woman. Apparently she'd taken one of her damned pills, the last line of defense against his amorous advances. They knocked her out cold. Cold. It was ridiculous. She wasn't frigid. That might have been easier to understand. She liked sex well enough, once it was well started, but she did everything she could to keep it from getting started. Psychologists say that people are unable to remember pain, but Amy seemed incapable of remembering pleasure.
He stared down at her, and her beauty was like an ache in his gut. She had a heart-shaped face with a cute little dimple in her chin. Her lashes were long and silky, darker than her light brown hair. A fine dusting of freckles seemed to enhance the perfection of her rosy-white complexion. She was twenty-two, fourteen years younger than he was, and he loved her so much it hurt.
He couldn't remember making any conscious decision to do it, but his hands had lifted the edge of the covers and he was pulling them down. Her nightgown reached all the way to her ankles. He hated that chaste, pink nightgown. She wore it when they made love. Sometimes he could convince her to roll it up beyond her breasts so that he could fondle them and kiss them, but most often she would pull it up only to her waist. And always in the dark. Married for more than a year, he had never seen his own wife naked. He began pulling the nightgown up from her legs.
"We shall see, Amy. At long last, we shall see."
He stopped. He had rolled and tugged the pink nightgown up to her thighs. What on earth was he doing? She was helpless, drugged. He was committing a despicable act that blended rape and necrophilia. If she woke up, she would denounce him for the slimy pervert he was. He might lose forever, what little he had of her.
He rejected those ideas. She knew what he wanted, what he needed, and she'd denied what was his by right. She had no one but herself to blame for her helpless condition. He knew that these were specious arguments, but the act had by now gained an irresistible momentum of its own. Most of his thinking was being done for him by his stiff, throbbing prick.
He looked down at the lithe, straight length of her legs. He'd seen this much of her before. Inconsistently, she had no qualms about wearing the skimpiest of string-bikinis when they went to a beach. But seeing those delicious legs now, in this setting, made them far lovelier than they'd ever seemed before. He tugged the gown hastily higher, revealing the wedge of fine brown fleece at the bottom of her flat belly.
Gently, he pushed her legs apart. He might have been playing with a rubber doll or a wax mannikn. He felt a sudden wave of desolation. This was sick. He should stop. But he didn't.
The lips of her cunt, peeking through the fine hairs, were plump and pink and clearly defined. He lowered his head and slipped his tongue in among the soft curls until it pressed the pliant flesh. He'd never done this to her before, and-oh, God, how he'd wanted to!
He licked up and down, slipping steadily deeper into warm, moist saltiness. Why didn't she want him to do this? He couldn't understand it. He'd never made love to a girl who didn't like it. The first time he'd tried to eat her had been on their wedding night, when he'd found to his delighted surprise that she really was a virgin. She'd reacted to the idea with-well, with fear and loathing. He'd been forced to give up. And ever since then, he'd been forced to retreat by a baffling defense of sharp elbows and knees whenever he'd tried it.
Maybe it was his imagination, but he believed that her formerly deep, even breathing had quickened and shallowed. He raised his head. It seemed to him that an even rosier glow than usual suffused her cheeks. Was it possible to excite a woman while she lay in a drugged sleep? Or was she faking her drugged sleep? He rejected both ideas. He was imagining things.
He pushed and tugged at her nightgown until it was rolled under her armpits. He knew how big and firm her breasts were, but he hadn't known what pretty pink nipples she had. He leaned forward and kissed one of them while he guided his cock to the threshold of her cunt, and he could no longer doubt that her nipples were erect with lust.
Maybe she was having a sexy dream, produced by his fondling of her body. Maybe that accounted for the physiological reactions. Her cunt was wet, and it wasn't just wet with his own saliva: his prick was sliding into it like a knife into warm butter. He felt an irrational twinge of jealousy as he wondered who was involved in her sexy dream.
Her lips were finely chiseled. The lower one was very full, suggesting petulance, even in repose. He kissed her. Her lips we're warm, but he detected no response at all. He slid his cock deeper into her moist, passive cunt. Her seductive lips seemed as if they'd been designed for blowing, he could just picture them enfolding his prick, but of course that was another thing that Amy would never do.
He slid his hands under the full, firm cheeks of her ass, twisting his hips, getting every last inch of his cock inside her before he withdrew and thrust home again. Her cunt was now just as moist and warm as it could be, but still she didn't respond at all. She lay totally limp as he escalated the tempo of his strokes, driving even deeper and harder and faster.
He wanted this to last much longer, he wanted to fuck her all night long, but he felt a shimmering tingle beginning to build up in his balls. It seemed that he almost always came too soon with Amy. She excited him more than any other woman had ever done, and she made him nervous with her nervousness; and part of it was due, he was sure, to the infrequency of their sex. But he had hoped that he would have contained himself a little better this time. Already the tingling in his balls had spread, his prick felt as if a million tiny needles were pushing at it from the inside, and he gasped aloud as hot splurges of semen began shooting from his cock to spatter in the depths of her pussy.
As he recalled those events of last night, he felt nothing but shame. Instead of exciting him, the memories had succeeded in withering the erection that his dream about the orgy had produced. He gazed at Amy's back as she stood and smoked by the window. He wondered if she knew. Of course she didn't.
"That was a pretty rotten thing to say, about how I should have hired a whore," he said.
"I know it," she said tonelessly, adding, after a pause: "I'm sorry."
"Maybe we ought-"
He was interrupted by the sudden, insistent buzzing of the alarm clock. He cursed under his breath as he staggered from bed to turn it off. He couldn't remember why he'd set it for eight o'clock.
"Do I have time to take a shower, Bill?"
"I'll be damned if I know. I can't remember why I set this damned thing. I have the feeling it was important."
She laughed. Her talent for organizing herself was almost inhuman. He had no such talent. She found his sloppiness and absent-mindedness endearing.
"You have to get out the car and go over to New Jersey. It's supposed to be the biggest opportunity of your career, remember?"
"Of course, yes. How in hell could I have forgotten that?"
She laughed again. "Can I shower first?"
"Yes, sure, go ahead."
He knew why he'd forgotten: he was preoccupied with his marital problems. But he didn't want to mention that, especially now that she seemed to have forgotten her earlier anger. Before the alarm clock had interrupted him, he'd been about to suggest that they seek some kind of professional help. Now, thinking it over, he decided that he ought to shop around by himself for such help before trying to get Amy to accept it. Whoever tried to change Amy's attitudes would need considerable tact and intelligence. If he brought her to some quack or charlatan the first time, she might not be willing to try a second counselor.
Bill thought about today's schedule. He was a freelance photographer, specializing in industrial work. Today he was supposed to take some pictures of a refinery for an oil company's annual report. It was the sort of job that would almost invariably be handled by the company's own public relations staff, but a recent shakeup had decimated that staff, and the job had been farmed out to Bill. He had done work for big companies before, but never for a multi-billion dollar international corporation. If he made them happy, his reputation would be immeasurably enhanced.
Nevertheless, the job shouldn't take long. Despite the disorganization of his private life, he was a meticulous workman. He had been over every inch of the refinery, and he had made a hundred preliminary studies with a Nikon that would serve as a basis for his large-format work. If he could cut short the inevitable lunch with boozing executives, he could be finished by three o'clock, leaving him time to check out one or two marriage counselors in the city.
The shower began crashing in the background as he leafed through the Yellow Pages.
CHAPTER TWO
The job went well. Bill was able to wrap it up and return to the city by three, but he returned in a sour mood. At the plant parking lot, someone had crumpled the fender of his Volkswagen. The culprit had left no note, and Bill had recently cancelled his collision insurance as an economy move. A traffic tie-up that immobilized him midway through the Holland Tunnel for an hour, coughing and gasping, didn't improve his disposition.
He had a strong urge to head uptown and plant himself firmly on a stool at his favorite neighborhood bar, but he resisted it. He could no longer postpone the resolution of his problems with Amy. They were drifting further apart each day, and the drift could eventually lead only to divorce.
He had a wide variety of marriage counselors to choose from. Some listed only their names, while others were represented in the phone book by little ads that purported to describe their services. The most subdued and business-like of these ads, Bill thought, was for an outfit called Life Adjustment Sciences, Inc. He got the impression that it was a large organization, where he would have more than one counselor to choose from, and the address in the east 50's seemed more plausible than some of the others.
The thirtieth-floor office was spacious and thickly carpeted. It featured spindly, understated furniture, modernistic contortions of glass and plastic. The receptionist was neither spindly nor understated. Bill found her disconcerting.
The first thing he noticed about her were her breasts, and he found it difficult to notice anything further about her for a long time. They were big, firm, and deliciously rounded, and they were completely accessible to his inspection. She wore a black mesh blouse with no bra beneath it. The whiteness of her breasts and the pinkness of her nipples were on open display. A short, tight, black leather skirt, black mesh stockings, and knee-high boots completed her unusual outfit.
Drawing closer to her glass and plastic desk, Bill got another surprise. Her amply displayed body suggested a tautly conditioned young girl, but the crinkles now visible at the corners of her eyes and at the edges of her wide, sensuous mouth indicated that she was probably over forty.
Her face couldn't have been called beautiful. It was a little too rounded and flat, and her mouth was a little too big for any conventional standard of beauty. Her bright blue eyes were slightly protuberant under dark brown bangs that covered her eyebrows. Those eyes, almost manic in their intensity, taken together with the hairstyle, suggested a dangerous and singularly unpredictable animal peering out of the undergrowth. The total effect was not beautiful, but it was striking-and incredibly sexy. Bill, always susceptible to the charms of younger women, now found himself flustered and half-aroused by an older one.
"It really would help if I had your name, and some idea of your business," she said. "Could you write them down, perhaps, or stamp your foot once for yes and twice for no?"
Bill's confusion increased as he realized that he must have been staring shamelessly, deaf to her previous questions. Her smile was dazzling though, and it seemed to draw the teeth from her sarcasm. He noted that the nameplate on her desk said "Ms. Julia Palmer."
"I ... that is, you're marriage counselors?" he said, annoyed at the croak he was using for a voice and wondering if it was due to Ms. Palmer or to his inhalations of tunnel vapors.
"That's a part of our service. We adjust men and women to life, to their own sexuality; Other adjustments follow as a matter of course. Or intercourse," she said, and she laughed a little too loudly at her own play on words.
Bill realized that her answer wasn't what he'd expected. If he hadn't been confused and slightly numbed by this woman's sexiness, he might have retreated and sought counseling elsewhere; but he didn't.
"It's customary to bring your wife to a marriage counselor," she observed.
"Yes. Well, I wanted to see ... sort of find out, you know, what it was like...."
"It's unimportant," she said, drawing what appeared to be a long questionnaire from her desk and proceeding to mark it rapidly. "You can enter into our course of therapy, and then bring her in whenever you choose. Or not. Some people change their minds."
"Therapy?" Bill asked, although this scarcely touched all the questions that her words gave rise to.
"Yes. Name?"
"Bill William Wilson. What do you mean, therapy?"
"Occupation?"
She was fast and efficient, and she managed to extract his vital statistics and a brief life history without giving away anything she might have told him about Life Adjustment Sciences, Inc., and the service it provided; nor could he determine how much it would cost.
"There are progressive degrees of adjustment," was all she would say to that question. "The therapist will discuss it with you. Would you please go into the examination room and remove your clothes."
"I beg your pardon!"
Ms. Palmer succeeded in looking more shocked than he felt: with her wide, staring blue eyes, she was perhaps better equipped for it. It disarmed him and made him feel apologetic.
"Life is not lived in the mind alone, Mr. WilBon," she said with a touch of smugness. "Among other things, I'm a registered nurse, fully qualified and accredited to give you a preliminary examination. Of course, we'll want certification of a complete physical checkup by a physician before you embark on the more advanced courses of adjustment."
"You will?"
"The examination room, please." Bill did meekly as he was told. Going through the door she indicated, he found a large room that was sumptuously furnished, in contrast to the reception office. The walls were covered alternately with crimson hangings and long mirrors. Plush divans and cushions were distributed around the room. It seemed more like a room from a fancy nineteenth-century whorehouse than anything else, and the sparse display of quasi-medical equipment was incongruous. He noted an examining table covered with a roll of paper, a blood pressure gauge, and an unfamiliar, complicated piece of gadgetry that might have been a prop from a low-budget science fiction movie.
He stripped to his shorts, acutely conscious of his repeated and many-angled reflection around the room. He noted uneasily that the ceiling, too, was a domed mirror of many large facets. Anyone in the room could view himself from almost every possible angle. He noted with approval that he seemed to be in pretty good shape. The beginning of a paunch on his long and somewhat gangly frame was nothing that a little exercise couldn't eliminate easily.
He chuckled as he tried to imagine what Amy would say about his adventure this afternoon. He didn't know exactly what he'd gotten into, whether it was some kind of screwball cult or out-and-out racket, but he surely intended to get himself out of it after this brief experience. Fortunately he hadn't signed anything yet, nor did he intend to. He thought about putting his clothes back on, but his curiosity got the better of him. He sat on the edge of the examining table.
He didn't have long to wait. Ms. Palmer bustled in and took his blood pressure and temperature, thumped him here and there, listened to his heart with a stethoscope, and made him say "ahh." She would have been the perfect picture of nursely efficiency if it hadn't been for her costume, the manic glint in her eyes, and the wicked little smile that kept struggling to form itself on her full lips. The experience was disconcerting. Bill was acutely conscious of her as a woman while she was examining him, and his cock began to swell.
When he thought she'd finished, she said: "Take off your shorts, please."
"My shorts?"
"Yes, please."
"Why?"
"So I can examine your penis," Ms. Palmer said patiently.
"Wait a minute. What do you want to examine my penis for?"
"Mr. Wilson, I presume your penis is what you use for sexual relations. You've come to us with a problem of sexual maladjustment. It's only reasonable-"
"Now, hold on! Hold it right there. There's nothing wrong with my penis. My problem is my crazy wife, and if you'd listen to me for one minute instead-"
"This is how we do things, Mr. Wilson," she interrupted, and she began tugging at his shorts. "It's essential to our course of therapy."
Short of using physical force, Bill didn't see how he could keep her from taking his pants off. She was both determined and energetic, and she had the element of surprise on her side. He gave up the struggle and let her do it.
Bill was slightly embarrassed to note that his cock was half-swollen. It was clear evidence that he hadn't been thinking of her in entirely professional terms. Well, he told himself, she can take it as a compliment.
She didn't, however. She said: "Don't you find me attractive, Mr. Wilson?"
"Huh? Yes. Urn. Yes, I do."
"And yet your penis isn't fully erect," she observed thoughtfully. "Do you often have this trouble?"
"What trouble? What are you talking about? I thought we were having a business-like thing here-professional, whatever-I mean, I've been trying to keep my mind off-you know, the fact that you're attractive."
"Oh, I see. Inhibitions. You'll be glad you came to us, Mr. Wilson. We'll be able to help you get rid of all these silly hang-ups-not silly, really, but destructive, life-destroying. When you see a beautiful woman, you'll no longer be plagued by such inhibitions."
Bill wasn't certain he liked the implications of that, nor that he understood them perfectly. While he was trying to sort out his attitudes, Ms. Palmer knocked him off balance with another question: "Would it help if I took my clothes off?"
"Help? Help what? What are you talking about?"
"Your erection, Mr. Wilson," she said, and he jumped as she reached out and tickled his half-hard cock. "I have to measure it in its fully erect state."
"No, you don't. What do you have to do that for? What kind of a place is this, anyway?"
Ms. Palmer was already tugging her way out of her mesh blouse. She paused to explain: "We have to know everything there is to know about our clients, otherwise we can't help them. Sometimes the cause of sexual maladjustment-often, in fact-is a feeling of inadequacy about the size of one's penis. We have to check and see if this couldn't be at the root of your problems."
"It isn't. Can't you take my word for it? And for the last time, I don't have any problems. It's my wife. We need to talk to somebody-a marriage counselor-not this-whatever it is."
Ms. Palmer smiled maternally, like someone humoring a lunatic, and finished taking off her blouse. Bill saw nothing he hadn't already seen, but he stared with renewed interest at the firm bareness of her tits. The flimsy wisp of mesh had given her breasts no shaping or support, for they were still as shapely and upthrusting as a girl's. Her pink nipples quivered provocatively as she began working at the fastening of her short leather skirt.
She shimmied out of the skirt. Not altogether surprisingly, she wore no panties, only a lacy wisp of a garterbelt to hold up her stockings. The suspenders framed the most copious abundance of pubic hair that Bill had ever seen on a woman. It began as a fine line at her navel, then rapidly thickened and spread to a forest of dark chestnut curls that swirled down between her thighs. He caught a glimpse of thick, pink lips in the dark curls.
She moved closer to him, between his knees as he sat on the edge of the examining table. An odor of cinnamon, mingled with a faint scent of womanly musk, filled his nostrils. He felt an overpowering urge to grab her, and he did. He pressed his fingers into the firm, taut texture of her big ass and pulled her closer, so close that his cock rubbed into the tickling swirl of her pubic hair.
"You're doing fine, Mr. Wilson," she murmured encouragingly. "Now just lie back on the table and relax, and I'll soon have you just as big and stiff as a flagpole." N
"I already am," Bill said, slipping one of his hands up to cup the smooth, cool weight of her breast.
"Now, now," she urged, pushing him back, "do it our way."
Bill complied. He no longer had any doubts about the nature of this place. It was obviously a high-class whorehouse protected by a legal fiction, a new wrinkle on the massage parlors and body-painting studios and health spas that normally cloaked such operations. The afternoon would be a waste, insofar as improving relations with Amy was concerned; but it wouldn't be a total waste, because he was going to get a nice, juicy piece of ass out of it. The only thing he had to worry about was the price. He was certain that the rates at a place like this would be steeper than any Times Square massage parlor.
His prick was now stiff and pulsing with lust. Contrary to Ms. Palmer's suggestion, it was bigger than average. She inspected it with open admiration for a moment. Then she bent over his supine body and slipped it into the red pucker of her full lips.
Bill gasped with pleasure. At first he thought that this pleasure derived entirely from the novelty of it, that it felt so good because he hadn't been given a blow job since he'd married Amy. Only gradually did it dawn on him that it felt so good because Ms. Palmer was an extraordinarily talented cocksucker. Her mouth was a swirling wet whirlpool of sexy suction as she pulled his prick deeper and deeper between her thirsty lips.
Just as he was relaxing completely, enjoying himself immensely, asking no further questions about what was happening here or why, Ms. Palmer pulled her mouth away with a wet plop of released suction.
"There!" she cried. "I think that's done it nicely."
Frustration, anger, and utter bafflement collided in him to short-circuit his centers of speech, producing a strangled cry of protest, when she took a tape-measure and began recording the dimensions of his prick on her questionnaire.
"Seven and a half inches," she said. "That's really quite remarkable, you know? The average is less than six. I once met a midget from a Cuban whorehouse, before the revolution, who had a twelve-inch phallus, but-"
"Hey!" Bill cried, sitting up as she began gathering her clothes. "What are you doing? What the hell is this?"
Ms. Palmer paused, apparently surprised by the vehemence of his outburst. "Why-that's all there is to it, to this part of it," she explained. "If you'll wait here, the therapist will see you in a few minutes."
"Fuck the therapist!" Bill exploded. "You can't, I mean you can't get me worked up like this, and just give me a little sample of the most terrific blow job I've ever had in my life, and then just walk off like that. I mean, I'm sold. How much do you want?"
"Do you think I'd do it for money!" she demanded, but she seemed more amused than offended.
"Well, I assumed ... naturally...." Bill choked, on the defensive once again.
"That was sweet, though, saying it was the most terrific blow job you ever had. Did you mean that?"
"Of course. I never even imagined it could be so good," he said, now consciously trying to butter her up.
"Well...." she glanced around as if she feared they were under observation. "It isn't usual-but I guess I can make an exception. Come on over to the couch. Don't tell the therapist, all right?"
"I wouldn't dream of it," Bill said, sliding off the table and guiding her toward one of the plush divans with his arm around her slim waist.
She lay back on the couch and spread her booted legs wide, making it obvious just what she wanted. Bill hesitated. He had screwed prostitutes on a few occasions, but he'd never been moved to eat one of them. The idea would have been repugnant to him. But Ms. Palmer had told him, or at least implied, that she wasn't a hooker. If she wasn't, then he had to find another explanation for his experiences in this madhouse; and that wouldn't be easy.
He decided to take her word for it. It was hard not to, while she was lying back on the crimson couch, her tongue flickering out provocatively to moisten her slightly pouted lips. He was fascinated, too, by her phenomenally furry cunt. He wanted to eat her, no matter what she was.
He lowered himself to the couch over her. It was a big, wide couch, and he could comfortably straddle her head with his knees as he leaned forward for a closer look at her hairy crotch, framed by the taut black suspenders of her garterbelt. He parted the chestnut curls with his fingers and revealed the outer lips of her cunt. They were plump and pink, firmly defined in outline and coloring.
His tongue tickled its way up and down the length of the warm, wet slit, tentatively at first, just a teasing exploration. Her pussy seemed juicier than most of those he'd eaten, and it took just the first touch of his mouth to make it even juicier. Syrup flowed as if he'd pierced it with the point of his tongue, as if it had been ready to burst with its oozy ripeness. He drank, guzzling, not wanting to waste a drop, but nevertheless feeling the excess trickling sluggishly down his chin.
She was matching his own actions, not sucking his prick yet, but licking it all over with her moist tongue. Her fingers tickled an intricate little rhythm up and down its hot length while her tongue swirled around the swollen head.
"Deeper, get it in-deeper!" she groaned, twitching her hips to rub her pussy more firmly against his mouth.
He did as he was told, slipping his tongue more firmly into the soft cleft, sliding it downward to explore the secrets of the hot hole that was the source of the wet, odorous ooze. The texture of her cunt became even softer under his tongue, slicker, and then it gave with an unmistakable squishiness. He made a stiff rapier of his tongue and slipped it deep inside.
He sucked, drawing the flaccid petals into his mouth and thrusting his tongue deeper, until almost its full length was sheathed in hot, quivering cunt-flesh. His nose, mouth, and chin were buried in the soft thickness of her pubic hair. He could neither see nor speak nor breathe, but he pressed forward, sliding his hands beneath her to hold the luscious globes of her fleshy ass while he drove his vibrating tongue in and out of her pussy.
She was matching his own efforts as she worked on his prick. She was no longer just licking it, but had sucked it deep inside her mouth. She couldn't seem to suck in enough of his cock. He could feel her sucking on it, dragging on it, pulling for more and ever more of it as her mouth made squishy noises of salivating greed around the hot pillar of flesh.
Now that the first impact of surprise and delight at her incredible talents had worn off slightly and Bill had regained some measure of control over his surging phallus, he began to move his hips to fuck her in the mouth. He slipped his prick partway out of the constriction of her lips, then slipped it inward again, tingling at the light touch of her teeth on his ultrasensitive flesh. He responded to that touch by giving her swollen clitoris the faintest possible nick with his own teeth. She squirmed beneath him, reveling as he was in an exquisite combination of apprehension and sensuality.
The faint reservations he'd felt earlier about kissing her pussy had been completely driven away now. He wallowed in it, smearing his face in the sweet, greasy juice of her cunt as he probed it with his tongue. He didn't resist when she gripped his head tight with her stockinged thighs and jammed him even deeper into the bubbling flow of her hairy crotch. She began bucking her hips against his face as if she were actually fucking.
Fucking-the word, crossing his mind, sent an electric tingle of renewed excitement straight down to the hard rod that filled her lovely mouth. He realized that he hungered to fuck her, that he wanted to thrust his prick deep into her delicious cunt and screw the stuffing out of her. But her blowjob had excited him so much that he was sure he couldn't have lasted more than a minute inside her pussy, and he wanted to make it last for a long time when he fucked her.
He thrust his prick deeper into her mouth, until he felt his balls pressing against her nose, but she didn't object, despite the unusual length of his cock. She took every inch of it, squirming with delight, raking his belly with the hot, hard nubs of her breasts. She bucked her oozing pussy even harder against his face.
He would have loved to reach down and grab her tits, to play with the hot spears of lust jabbing his belly, but it would have taken a wrenching effort of will to tear his hands away from the lush delights of her ass. The big, creamy swells were running with sweat and pussy-juice and saliva, their firm muscles coiling and straining under his fingers as he pulled the crease wider apart to open her cunt even more to the assault of his hungering mouth.
He slid one hand higher, through the taut elastic of the frilly suspender that held her stocking up, and caressed her pussy with his fingertips while his tongue moved up to work exclusively on her clitoris. Even though he wouldn't get a chance to put his cock in there, not this time around, he could at least explore the red gash that tantalized him so much with his fingers.
She moaned and sucked harder on his prick when he slid the tips of two fingers into the steaming mush of her slit. They slid in easily, until the first two joints were buried in warm flesh. She was wide open, receptive, and he kept shoving until both fingers were buried to the hand in her pussy.
Suddenly her cunt tightened around his fingers, constricting them from every side, molding its soft flesh perfectly to their shape. It strained and sucked against his fingers, and the thought flashed through his mind that they were trapped, that he couldn't have pulled them out if he'd tried.
That one squeeze would have been enough to demonstrate to him that her cunt was every bit i as talented as her mouth, but she didn't stop there. Now that her pussy was plastered to his fingers like a second skin, she began to move it and roll it and shake it in quivering waves. His fingers sank deeper, as if they were mired in a sexual quicksand that swallowed anything it seized.
"My God!" he grunted, and he felt her giggling around his cock at this spontaneous testimonial to her ability.
She eased the clasp of her educated pussy for a moment, and he slipped his fingers part of the way out. They glistened with her juice. He slipped them back in again, then slipped them out, slowly building up a rhythm that complemented her squeezing surges. She threw herself completely into the job of blowing him, sucking and pumping with her lips in a determined effort to make him come. Her tongue moved like a moth around a candle, flickering in constant motion around the shaft of pulsing meat in her mouth.
He no longer tried to restrain the orgasm that had been trembling at the edge of explosion for so long. He moved his hips faster, stroking his cock deeper and harder between her lips, pumping himself toward completion. He lashed his fingers in and out of her pussy and worked on her clit with his lapping tongue, striving to take her where he felt himself going.
Before he fully expected it, his climax broke Over him like a wave. It started as a glimmering tingle in his cock, then became a glow, then a conflagration that swept over his whole body. He writhed, groaning against her pussy, as hot pulses of jism jetted out of his prick while she struggled to swallow it all. She kept up the mouth-fucking rhythm with her lips, slipping them up and down the length of the shaft while she gulped and swallowed.
She relaxed the grip of her thighs and let him slide from her body. He tumbled from the couch to the thick rug, but he hardly noticed. He touched his fingers to his lips. They were sore from the clamping rubdown she'd given his mouth with her cunt. Almost immediately, the strong odor of her juice still lingering on his fingers brought back his hunger to probe the depths of that sweet hole with his cock.
He looked up and saw that she was putting her clothes back on. She favored him with a slow, lazy smile as she wiggled into her mesh blouse.
"Wait a minute," he said. "Why don't we-"
"Please, Mr. Wilson," she said firmly. "I don't normally do even this much for our clients on their first visit. You have a lot to do. You have to meet the therapist and learn all about our organization and your place in it. But I'm already sure you have a brilliant future ahead of you."
What the hell did that all mean? he thought. He could only stare at her, not knowing where to begin asking questions.
"Just make yourself at home now," said Ms.
Palmer. "The therapist will be along now at any moment."
Bill watched her go. It was only when she'd left the room that he realized she'd taken his clothes with her.
CHAPTER THREE
Sitting alone again in the quasi-medical bordello room, Bill began to feel progressively more uneasy. It was one thing to take off his clothes for an examination-if that's what it could be called-by a woman who professed to be a registered nurse, but quite another to wait naked for the arrival of an unknown marriage counselor. Bill had a dim vision of a tweedy, pipesmoking, horn-rimmed individual with graying hair. Did he normally find his patients or clients or whatever in this state?
He thought of getting up and going to the door and asking Julia Palmer for the return of his clothes, but that prospect was almost equally unsettling. Suppose there were new clients in the reception room? He had to content himself with the thought that she must have taken his clothes for a reason, even though the reason might be that she was crazy.
He tried to sort out what he'd learned thus far, and he had to acknowledge that he hadn't learned much. He had succeeded in half-convincing himself that he hadn't stumbled into a high-class version of a massage parlor. If that were the case, Ms. Palmer would surely have mentioned money before this. He was struck by the disconcerting thought that his money was in his wallet, and his wallet was in his pants. Perhaps he would never see her again.
Bored and nervous, he got up and made an inspection tour of the room. He stopped first at the gadget that had first caught his eye, the apparatus that looked like a prop from a science fiction film. It consisted of a large rectangular box sitting on a narrow table. Two straight chairs faced the table from either side. On one side of the box was an array of dials that made no sense to him. On the other side, two metal cylinders the size and shape of tomato-paste cans were attached to the box by wires. The box had a line cord that was plugged into a wall outlet. "Ah, Mr. Wilson! Good afternoon!" Bill was jolted by the woman's voice, but that surprise was nothing, compared to the one he got when he turned and looked at her. She was sweeping into the room in a long gown, making a theatrical entrance, hand extended, teeth gleaming in a thousand-watt Hollywood dazzle. Everything about it, the entrance, the smile, would have been laughably phony, if it weren't for the fact that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life. He gaped.
She was tall and slim, with honey-golden skin and hair like spun sunshine. Her eyes were an unnerving shade of green, like sunlight striking into the depths of ancient icebergs. Her round, rimless glasses made them seem unnaturally large and penetrating.
Her pale green gown seemed terribly formal for a business office, if that's what this could be called, but it was almost drastically simple, vaguely of ancient Grecian design. It bared her tan arms and was cut all the way to the navel in front, revealing most of her big, shapely breasts. As she got closer, he saw that it was almost completely transparent:
He took her extended hand uneasily and let her dazzle him a bit more with her smile. Then she said, "What seems to be the trouble?"
"I don't have any clothes, for one thing," he said.
"Don't let that bother you," she said, dismissing the subject. "I meant to say, why are you here? But do sit down. I see you've been examining our F-meter."
"Your what?"
"Our F-meter. It's central to our program of adjustment, an invention of mine. It's the only accurate measurement of human sexual response. But forgive me. My name is Wanda Fleurette."
"Ms.?"
"Don't mind Julia," she laughed. "Just call me Wanda. If you're interested in my qualifications, I hold a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago, and I've done advanced work in Switzerland. But titles and honorifics are just ways of obstructing communication between two people, and communication is all that matters. May I call you Bill?"
"Sure," said Bill, slightly shaken by the intensity of her manner. It wasn't the manic intensity of Julia Palmer, but it was equally effective: when Wanda spoke to him, it seemed that nothing and no one on earth mattered to her as much as he did. He supposed it was a gimmick she'd learned, but that knowledge didn't destroy its effectiveness.
"Seven and a half inches," she murmured aloud. She was leafing through the form that Ms. Palmer had filled out. Before Bill could react, she looked up at him and said: "Why have you come here, Bill?"
"Well. See, my wife. We've been married a little more than a year-"
"Why did you marry her?" Wanda interrupted.
"I was in love with her," he declared forcefully. "I still am."
"I see," Wanda said, with the tone of one whose darkest suspicion had been confirmed.
"And anyway, she just doesn't seem to take any pleasure in sex. She never wants to-experiment, or anything."
"What sort of experiments do you have in mind?"
"I don't know. I mean, for her there's only one time and place to make love, and that's in bed at bedtime with the lights out, as infrequently as possible. For instance, on our honeymoon, I wanted to take a shower with her, and she wouldn't let me. She acted as if I was suggesting something depraved and unnatural."
"Hm," Wanda said, frowning. "How old is she?"
"Twenty-two. She's younger than I am. Fourteen years younger. You'd think she'd have an entirely different attitude-I mean, the sexual revolution and all that. When I met her, she seemed liberated, intelligent, unconventional. And she is, in a lot of ways. But she's got this thing about sex. She isn't frigid. She likes it, once it gets started. But she'll use any excuse to keep it from getting started."
Wanda studied the questionnaire a moment, then said: "Maybe she thinks your cock is too big. Did she ever complain about that?"
"My what?" asked Bill, genuinely believing that he'd misunderstood her.
"Your cock. Surely you've heard the word?"
"Yes, but...."
"Don't talk about your wife's sexual hang-ups, if the sound of a simple English word distresses you. Maybe you should go see Dr. Joyce Brothers, or write a letter to Dear Abby, instead of wasting my time with your puritanical quirks. Well? Is your cock too big for her?"
Bill felt that he'd been unfairly used. Hearing ladies use unlady-like language was no novelty to him, and he didn't care about it one way or another. He simply hadn't expected the word from her in this setting and situation, and he'd misunderstood. But he was too startled by her vehemence to defend himself, so he merely said, "No, that doesn't bother her. At least she never complained about it. But sex is something she doesn't like to talk about, either."
"Where did you find her, anyway?"
Bill didn't like her tone nor her choice of words. They implied that Amy was some kind of freak. It was difficult for him to get angry with a beautiful woman on first meeting, but he found himself prepared to make an exception in Wanda's case. But he forced himself to stay calm. His curiosity was stronger than his anger. It would have been unthinkable to go this far without finding out what these people thought they were doing.
"I picked her up, sort of. She was sitting in Washington Square Park, reading a science fiction novel that I'd read, and we started talking about it."
"It? You mean, you started talking about fucking each other?"
"My God, no! We started talking about the book that we'd both read."
Wanda looked disappointed, but she said: "You see, it's hard to keep track of what people are talking about if they don't use plain English. Getting used to the idea of saying what you mean will be one of the first steps toward adjustment."
Bill smiled ruefully. Maybe there was something in what she said. In Amy-language, a cock was a "thing," tits were "things," a cunt was "there."
"What are the other steps?" he asked.
"You'll come to them as you go along."
"Now, wait a minute. I won't come to them unless I decide to sign up for whatever it is you're selling. And I don't intend to sign up until I find out what it is. So far, nobody's been willing to tell me. You're listed in the phone book under marriage counselors, but it's pretty obvious that something more than that is going on around here. I think I've been pretty patient up until now, but it's about time I got an explanation."
Wanda leaned back in her chair and produced a cigarette. Bill reached for his lighter and was embarrassingly reminded that he still had no clothes on. She studied him for a while as she smoked. Her gaze was not unfriendly. In other circumstances, he might have thought there was a sexy invitation in her deep green eyes. He tried to take his mind off that possibility. It was difficult. He noticed that the dark round badges of her nipples were visible beneath the flimsy green material of her gown. He felt his prick beginning to swell again.
"Human beings," Wanda said, "have lost touch with their animal nature."
Bill found himself struggling not to laugh. Her statement was hard to reconcile with the fact that his prick was getting harder by the minute.
"We've tried to convince ourselves that we aren't animals, that we're some kind of gods," she continued, "perfect, plastic deities who don't go in for such nasty activities as screwing or shitting or bleeding or dying. This attitude is wrong and dangerous. It's forced us out of touch with the cycles and rhythms of the universe. It's forced us out of touch with ourselves. The only way remaining open to us to achieve unity with Nature is by fucking. In an age when so many misguided people subscribe to the belief that we aren't animals, it becomes a religious obligation to fuck, with as much passion and intensity and frequency as we can muster. Desires must be gratified. Repression is sickness and death."
Ms. Palmer might look like a fanatic, but Wanda certainly sounded like one. He was so preoccupied with the unnerving conviction and intensity of her delivery that it took a moment for the meaning and the implications of her words to sink in. But before he could question her, she was off again:
"The world is an unpleasant place, Bill. It might be compared to a burning building that we're all trapped in. We can't escape. Some of us are going to be reached by the flames sooner than others, but we're all going to die. The best and noblest thing we can do in this situation is to reach out to as many of the other victims as we can and touch them, with love and understanding, with the only real means of communication we have available to us, namely, with our cocks and our cunts.
"But we've wandered so far astray from our animal nature that we've forgotten how to use our bodies. We've bound them up with chains customs and laws and religious restrictions and tribal taboos. What I do, Bill, is break those chains. I put you back in touch with yourself. I can do the same for your wife. If you want to define that as marriage counseling, I suppose you could."
"Well," Bill said slowly, and this time he couldn't restrain a nervous laugh. "Well. I guess I see what you're driving at. Maybe I even agree with you, up to a point. But I just can't see Amy ... I mean, you don't know her. To put it bluntly, she'd think you were a nut."
Wanda didn't take offense. She laughed. "I didn't start teaching my philosophy yesterday, Bill. I've made hundreds of-well, converts, if that word doesn't make you uncomfortable. Men often come very rapidly to a superficial acceptance of my ideas. They see my vision as a convenient excuse for getting a piece of ass, but it doesn't touch them profoundly. Women, although slower to accept, are often the most thoroughly converted-especially the sort of unfulfilled, repressed woman that you've described. Many people think I'm a nut. I've been persecuted unmercifully, driven from one place to another, hounded with petty legalities-well, that's unimportant. Just take my word for it: Amy sounds like a very likely candidate."
Bill found all that a little hard to swallow, except perhaps the part about being hounded by the law. For one thing, all this experience would have had to be crammed into a span no longer than twenty-eight years-and that was his absolute outside estimate of her age. Without the glasses, without the artfully understated makeup, she could have passed for a girl ten years younger than that.
"You still haven't told me what all this involves. I mean-well, what does it cost?"
"There are different levels of adjustment," she said, echoing the rigamarole that Ms. Palmer had given him.
"Yeah, but how much?"
"It depends on what you want out of life, Bill. And, of course, it depends on what you get out of my therapy. There would be nO point in continuing, if you found it unhelpful, or distasteful. The first level of adjustment would cost you a hundred dollars, and it generally takes no more than five sessions. Successfully completed, it entitles you to the designation of Class A Seeker. After that, for a similar fee and a similar investment of time, you become a Pre-Adjusted Seeker."
Bill considered. Her rates were far cheaper than a psychiatrist-or a massage parlor. Unless she had a vast following, it was hard to see how such rates could earn her this suite of offices.
"And then what?" he asked.
"Well, ultimately, if you follow the process of adjustment all the way to the end, you become what we call a Perfect. It can take from two to five years, although some people have achieved it much more quickly. And some, of course, can never achieve it, but they'd be weeded out early in the process. And before I can even sign you on for the first course of adjustment, you have to pass your qualifying test on the F-meter," she said, patting the instrument that sat on the table between them.
"Well, what does that cost? Becoming a Perfect, I mean."
She laughed. "By that time, you wouldn't be worried about money. You would be totally adjusted to your own sexuality. You'd have complete control over it-or it would over you-but it's silly to talk in those terms, you see, because you would be one indivisible unity. As a matter-of-fact, we'd be paying you by then. Your principal interest would be in converting others, and you'd be an employee of Life Adjustment Sciences, Inc. But it's a little early to start thinking about all that."
Bill thought. He could pull out whenever he chose. If it proved to be a fraud, he'd be out only a hundred dollars-or two hundred, assuming he could recruit Amy. It seemed worth it to satisfy his curiosity.
"All right," he said. "Bring on the F-meter."
CHAPTER FOUR
Not for the first time this afternoon, Bill Wilson felt like a fool. Here he sat, naked, a tomato-can clutched in either hand, while a beautiful fanatic in an inappropriate evening gown fiddled with switches and dials on the opposite side of the apparatus. He realized it was a testimony to her salesmanship that he hadn't asked for his clothes, or even questioned why they were being withheld from him. And he knew that he was going through with this whole ludicrous charade because Wanda Fleurette said that he ought to. He wondered if the time would ever come when he would be able to draw the line and resist her sales pitch.
"What does this thing do?" he asked.
"Essentially, it measures your sex drive. It tells us how strong it is, and where it's directed."
"You mean, if I'm not sexy enough, I don't get to sign up?"
"Not necessarily. Your urges might be inhibited, and perhaps we could overcome those inhibitions," she said, again displaying her talent for answering questions without imparting any information.
Finally satisfied with the settings on her control panel, she sat back and said: "Now. What's the sexiest thing you can think of?"
Bill answered, quite honestly, "You."
"Don't be flippant."
"I'm not. You're a very beautiful woman. Your dress covers you about as effectively as a dim green spotlight would. You've been telling me all afternoon how great fucking is. I'd have to be some kind of a pervert, if I told you that something I made up in my head was sexier than you are."
"Very flattering," she said. She smiled. "But be more specific. Think about what you'd like to do with me. Try to picture it as clearly as you can, in as much detail as possible. Start right from the beginning. What do you see first?"
As she spoke, her voice lowered to a husky whisper. She sizzled him to a crisp with the full voltage of her green eyes. The metal cylinders felt slippery from the sweat on his palms. He tried to moisten his dry lips with his tongue, but his tongue was dry, too. At last he said, "I guess I see you standing up. Taking your dress off."
"Yes," she said. "I'd stand up. I'd ask you to unfasten it for me. You didn't see, but it's very low in the back, so low that most of my ass is bare. People tell me that I have a very pretty behind, Bill. When you undid the fastening, you'd be able to see it all, and touch it. Are you an ass man?"
"I like the whole works. I'm not partial to any particular part. I mean, assuming they're all in the right place and everything."
"That's very good," she said, even though he thought his answer had been inane, and she made a mark on a chart. "Then what would you do?"
"At that point, I think I would just let nature take its course, assuming you were willing."
"Oh, I would be," she breathed.
"But assuming this is my sexy fantasy, and I'm trying to draw it out as long as possible, I'd sit back and watch while you took your dress off. I'd ask you to do it slowly."
She raised a neatly plucked eyebrow and made another mark on her chart as she read the dials on her panel.
"Yes," she said, "I'd tease you a little. I'd take a long time baring my breasts, and then I'd push my dress down very slowly over my hips. You'd follow it with your eyes, and you'd see that I'd shaved my cunt, so that it's just as bare as a little girl's. Then I'd ask you what you wanted me to do next."
Bill wondered how he was able to stand this excruciating torture. He lusted to feel her tits, and here he sat holding these two damned tomato cans while she spoke of lascivious delights in her sexy, throaty voice. His cock felt as if it were ready to burst out of its skin.
"I'd much rather do it than talk about it," he said.
She nodded. "That's a very good sign." She made another mark on her chart. "But we have to complete the test. Go on and tell me what you'd like me to do next. I'm standing in front of you, nude, willing to do anything you ask. Anything."
"Since this is my fantasy, I guess there's no point in exerting myself," he said with a touch of asperity. "So I'd ask you-no, I'd tell you, you damned exasperating cock-teaser, I'd tell you to step right up and sit on my cock."
She smiled at his outburst as she marked her chart. "Would you want me to face you, or would you rather put it in from the back?"
"I don't think it would make much difference," he said, and he tried to swallow. "No, I guess I'd want you to face me, because even though you are a damned exasperating cock-teaser, you're a very pretty one, and I'd like to kiss you while I was fucking you."
"That's nice," she said. "So I'd come forward until I was standing right over your lap. I'd put one hand on your shoulder to balance myself, and I'd reach down with my other hand to hold your prick up at just the right angle-or would you rather do that yourself?"
"No, I'd be perfectly willing to let you hold my prick," he groaned.
"Then I'd lower myself until I felt the tip of it nudging into my cunt. I'd work myself down slowly, because you didn't even bother with any foreplay, you selfish bastard, and so my pussy would be very dry and tight. It wouldn't take long to loosen up though, and get nice and wet, so the last part of your prick would go in very, very easily, like a knife cutting warm butter. And then what would you do?"
"I'd kiss you. On the mouth, and on the neck, and then down to your tits."
"Ooh, that sounds good! And I hope you'd hold my ass in both hands, to help me move up and down on your prick, because it would be hard work to do it with my legs alone, squatting like that," she said, sounding positively eager.
"If you asked nicely, I would."
"Do you like women to tell you how much they like it when you're fucking them? I mean, would you like me to tell you?"
"If you meant it, I would."
"I'm sure I'd mean it," she said, continuing to mark his chart. "There's nothing I like better than a big long prick, one that's able to really fill me up, and you're certainly okay in that department. So I'd whisper in your ear, and I'd tell you how good your big cock felt in my cunt, and I'd beg you to move it around and really ream me out while I was bouncing up and down in your lap. I have a terrific cunt, Bill. Maybe I sound vain, but too many men have told me that for me not to believe it. My pussy would fit you just as tight as a rubber glove, it would be like a second skin on your prick, all juicy and wet and hot, and I'd make it squeeze you and rub you and give you the fuck of your life."
Bill had never before considered himself capable of raping a woman. Reading of such crimes, he had thought that a man capable of taking a woman against her will must have a truly beastly streak in his nature. Now he knew that he himself was capable of it. It was only through a violent effort of will that he restrained himself from leaping across the F-meter, grabbing the sensuous Wanda, and socking the blocks to her.
"Listen," he said, his voice a dry rasp, "I don't think I can take much more of this. I mean, you said that repression was a sickness, and right now you're repressing the hell out of me. I've got to lay you."
She pouted thoughtfully. He regretted that his pitch had been so blunt and clumsy, but he was tantalized by the hope that she might actually be weighing the idea of letting him screw her. After all, Ms. Palmer had come across; and Wanda had stated that free love was one of the tenets of her philosophy.
Apparently, though, she'd just been thinking of an easy way to let him down, because she said: "Bill, I know this is rough on you. These readings on the meter are truly amazing. They tell me, even better than your words do, how horny you are. But we have to go through with this. If it's any consolation to you, you're doing just fine on your test. Nevertheless, we have to complete it."
"And then?"
She gave him an up-from-under smile that completed the job of turning his bones to jelly. All their rigidity seemed to have been transferred to the aching, pulsing torment of his erection. It was red and purple with lust, glistening with the beads of dew that steadily oozed from the quivering tip. Wanda's eyes flickered down to it for a moment, and she wet her lips with the pretty pink tip of her tongue.
"Let's get back to our imaginary lovemaking, Bill," she suggested, evading his question. "Would you want to come in my cunt, or would you want me to suck you off?"
"Yeah," Bill groaned. "Either way."
"It doesn't take much to get me off," Wanda said. "I can have an orgasm at will. That's one of the advantages of being a Perfect. Once you've reached that stage of adjustment-assuming that you do-you'll be able to produce a hard-on simply by willing it into existence, no matter how much fucking you've been doing, and you'll be able to maintain it as long as you want. Hours, if necessary. You'll be able to satisfy a dozen women, or a hundred."
This was the first truly extravagant claim in Wanda's sales pitch, and Bill found it a little hard to swallow. It sounded like the kind of sexual fantasy he'd had when he was twelve years old. Since then, he'd become aware of human limitations. Now he would have been content merely to satisfy Amy, and to gain satisfaction from her. He felt a twinge of guilt as he thought of her, but he was able to assuage it by remembering that he was, after all, doing all this for her sake.
"What I meant to say," Wanda continued, "is that it would be perfectly all right with me if you wanted me to blow you, because I already would have had a couple of orgasms from bouncing up and down on your cock. I really love to suck."
"Then why don't you do it?" he gasped.
"Get your mind back on the test, Bill," she urged. "Just think about me pulling myself up off your cock. I suppose you'd have mixed feelings about it, wouldn't you? I mean, you'd be sorry to have me taking my cunt off your prick, but on the other hand, the air would feel nice and cool by contrast. Maybe you'd get your second wind, and you'd know that you'd be able to stand my blow job for a while without coming immediately. I bet you'd like me to kneel down in front of your chair and start licking your prick. Is that the way you'd like it?"
"Sure. Whatever you say."
She frowned slightly, detecting a faint note of disgust in his voice. He was getting tired of this game. It had been exciting at first, but the novelty was wearing off, especially since she gave no indication that she actually planned to do any of the things she was so interested in talking about.
Apparently trying harder to keep him interested, Wanda made the steady gaze of her green eyes even more sultry, injected an even sexier note into her husky voice as she said: "I'd start off by licking your cock all over, Bill, like a little girl licking an ice-cream cone. I'd just go up and down with my tongue and get every last inch of it, and I'd lick your balls, too, everything I could get my tongue on. Would you like a rim job while I'm down there?"
"What's that?" he asked.
Wanda gave him a sly smile. "I'd stick my tongue in your asshole. Didn't a girl ever do that to you?"
Uncertain whether he liked that idea or not, Bill shook his head.
"Well, you just don't know what you've been missing. It's a delicious feeling. I'd expect you to return the favor some time, of course, but I'm sure you would, once you knew how nice it feels. You'd have to move down a little on your chair, and scrunch forward, and spread your legs to let me get in there. I'd stick my tongue right up your ass and wiggle it around, and I guarantee it'd make your cock stiffer than it's ever been in your life. You wouldn't be able to stand much of it, though, because all this while your prick would be rubbing against my face and getting tangled up in my hair, and you'd be just begging me to suck it into my mouth. Maybe I'd tease you for a little bit longer, but then I'd just slurp your cock into my mouth and start sucking."
Bill wondered if it would be possible for him to ejaculate spontaneously, with no friction at all on his hard prick. He felt light-headed, and he felt on the verge of coming just from listening to her words and watching the suggestive pucker of her sexy lips.
"If you thought my cunt was good, wait till you try fucking me in the mouth," Wanda breathed. "I told you, I just love to suck, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that I'm probably the best cocksucker in the world. I've been working at it for a long time, and when I don't have the real thing to suck on, I do special exercises with my lips and tongue to keep me in shape."
Bill tried to say something, but he sounded to himself like a man gargling with sand. Julia Palmer had amazed him with her talents as a fellatrice, but somehow he knew that Wanda would be even better.
"Just imagine it, Bill. There I'd be, kneeling m front of you, sucking and licking you like nothing you ever felt before. You'd be squirming around on the chair, trying to give me every last inch. I'd be able to take it, too, I know the trick of opening up my throat so you could stick your prick right down into it. Would you want to come in my mouth, or would you want to go back to fucking me again? Or maybe you'd like to touch all the bases, and fuck me up the ass. I'm very good at that, too, even if I do say so myself."
"I think," Bill said, and then paused for a moment to clear his throat, "I think I'd like to come in your mouth."
"That's a good choice," Wanda said, making another notation on his chart. "From my point of view, anyway, because I just love to eat come. I'd have to slip your cock out part of the way so I could feel it and taste it on my tongue, and I'd suck until I got every last drop. There's a line in the Kama Sutra to the effect that only bad girls swallow it, so I guess I'm a bad girl by Hindu standards. I always swallow it. I have a theory that it's good for the complexion."
He wondered if there was any end to her crazy theories. But maybe she knew what she was talking about. Her smooth, golden, glowing skin certainly couldn't be faulted.
"Now that we've finished talking about it," Bill began, starting to put down the two metal cylinders he'd been holding all this while.
"We're not finished," Wanda interrupted. "Keep holding the F-meter. We have to go on to the next phase of the test."
CHAPTER FIVE
Wanda stood up, and once again Bill's hopes began to rise. They soared when she reached behind her and began undoing the fastening of her green dress.
"Not quite as it was in your fantasy," she said, "but it's essential that you keep your hands in contact with the F-meter."
He had developed a positive hatred for that machine and the smooth metal cylinders, so different in texture from the soft flesh he lusted to grope. Just the mention of its name could produce a twinge in his brain like an incipient headache.
"What's going to happen now?" he asked suspiciously.
"We've tested your reaction to a sexual fantasy," she said, "and I must say you scored pretty well. But now we have to try you out with a little bit of reality. It's fortunate that the object of your fantasy is right here-me, I mean."
Bill struggled not to let his hopes get too high, but he couldn't resist asking: "How much reality do I get to try out? Are we...?"
"One thing at a time, Bill. I really hate to keep repressing you like this, but it's essential for the test."
"Damn it, you're not repressing me, you're torturing me!" he exploded, throwing the hateful metal cylinders to the floor. "There wouldn't have been anything to repress if you hadn't gotten me into this state with all your sexy talk and your bedroom eyes and your hints of more to come. I'm not some kind of sex-maniac who goes around with a hard-on all the time. I don't go chasing after every pretty girl I see. I've never even been unfaithful to my wife. Not until today, anyway. I've had enough of this crazy test. Either quit teasing me and come across, or else take your goddamned F-meter and shove it!"
Bill had risen to his feet and was shouting at her across the desk. He trembled with barely controlled rage and lust. Just as he had realized himself capable of rape a few minutes ago, he now knew that he was capable of murder. The knowledge scared him enough to take some of the edge off his anger.
Wanda took it all in stride, cool as an affectionate but strong-willed mother facing a child's tantrum. She caught him off balance when she spoke: "What do you mean, you haven't been un faithful until today? You don't consider this test an act of infidelity, do you?"
"Well, I ... that is...."
She leaned forward on the desk, seeing her advantage. Her green eyes held a twinkle that might have been malicious. "Are you really so scrupulous that you think you're committing adultery simply by talking about sex with another woman, or getting one up for her?"
"Yes!" Bill said, his voice sounding louder and more forceful than he'd intended.
"Bullshit," Wanda said evenly. "You've been playing around with Julia, haven't you? Admit it."
He knew that he was a poor liar. The moment of hesitation that it took him to reflect on this made the lie sound even less convincing than it might have: "Of course not I"
"Now sit down like a good pussycat, and stop trying to lie to me," she said.
Bill sat. He was too pleased and flustered at having been called a pussycat by the imcomparable Wanda Fleurette to resist her orders. But he winced inwardly at his treachery to Julia Palmer, who'd asked him not to talk about their session of sixty-nine.
"Julia's a rat," she stated with no special acrimony. "She figured you wouldn't be able to become aroused for the test, after she'd finished with you. That's why I ask her to try to control herself during the preliminary interview. But she just didn't realize what kind of a stud she was dealing with. It's a good thing I found out, Bill.
This really sends your test score right through the ceiling-or it will, if you stop acting foolishly and finish what we started."
He tried to resign himself to the knowledge that he was incapable of resisting her flattery. But he scowled, avoiding her eyes, and he made no move to pick up the fallen components of the F-meter.
"Come on, Bill," she urged. "Please. I want you to succeed, honestly. I know that's not the sort of admission that a detached and objective therapist should make, but I'm really pulling for you. I'm looking forward to when you can cast aside your repressions and become one of us."
He couldn't restrain a wry smile at her description of herself: she was about as detached and objective as a leech. But her tone of voice and her eyes promised pleasures only hinted at by her words, and it was impossible to try to hide the way he felt when his cock was sticking up before her as stiff and hard as a poker.
"Oh, hell," he said lamely, bending forward to pick up the handles of her gadgetry once more.
"Wonderful," she said. "Did you enjoy Julia?"
"She was pretty good," he admitted, not wanting to displease this vision by over-praising another.
Wanda snorted, dismissing this little deception. "She's probably the best you've ever had," she said. "She's reached the Perfect stage of adjustment."
"How long did it take her?"
"Not long at all. She was already practicing what I preached, more or less, when I met her. It was just a question of providing her with a philosophical basis for her natural instincts," Wanda said, and Bill got the impression that she would have preferred converting more difficult subjects. She confirmed this by brightening visibly when she added: "Her daughter was another matter entirely. She was actually a virgin when I met her, even though she was fifteen years old, but I succeeded in bringing her around completely. She's almost at the Perfect level herself."
Bill found something disquieting about this sketchy tale of two generations embracing what seemed to be a fanatical sex-cult. Stripped of the jargon, considered from a legal point of view, what Wanda had just admitted was the corruption of the morals of a minor-with the aid and comfort of the girl's mother.
"Kathi's problem-she's Julia's daughter-was that she wanted to fuck her uncle, but she had a terrible hang-up about it. Once I made her see how silly she was being, she was well on her way to mental health," Wanda continued.
"You got her interested in boys her own age?"
"No, of course not. I got her to fuck her uncle."
"Good God!" Bill exclaimed, but Wanda, apparently distracted by some unpleasant thought, seemed not to note his horrified reaction.
"Her uncle was Julia's brother, and-oh, but I'm sure you're not interested in hearing stories about people you don't even know. We have a lot of work still to do. Where were we?"
Bill was on the point of saying that he was glad he didn't know them, either, but Wanda's question distracted him from all other considerations. He was quick to supply the answer: "You were just about to take your dress off."
"Oh, yes. Of course. I hope I haven't distracted you with my reminiscences-" here she paused to look at the dials on the control panel of the F-meter-"no, I see that I haven't. You're a very single-minded man, Bill."
He forgot his reservations about her sordid story of incest as he basked once more in her approval. She smiled down at him as she finished undoing the zipper at the back of her gown and peeled down the flimsy straps that covered her golden breasts.
Bill's first acquaintance with female breasts had come through the pages of the glossy jerk off magazines that he'd studied on the rack of a neighborhood luncheonette each month before opting for his usual purchase, a copy of Astounding Science Fiction. Those pictures had led him to lust, he had come regretfully to acknowledge, for a fruit that had never ripened on earth: Playboy was the true purveyor of science fiction. Experience with women had taught him that, unfortunately, they just weren't built that way. Experience in photography had shown him how posing and lighting and subsequent retouching could create the illusion that they were. He had managed to make his adjustment to a world where women were not built like goddesses.
In the context of those lowered aspirations, Amy was delightfully constructed, anything a man could wish for in the tit department; Ms. ; Palmer's tits were somewhat bigger, of course, I and they were remarkable for having retained their youthful shape and firmness, but the only real difference here was a matter of quantity rather than quality. Ms. Palmer and Amy were both first-rate representatives of pectoral pulchritude in the world that he had come to accept as the real one.
But now, as Wanda lowered the translucent coverings from her breasts, he was introduced to another world entirely, one in which the heroic masturbation fantasies of adolescence were made flesh and dwelt among us. He could have compared them to peaches, in the delicate shading of tones from golden tan to rose to darker red, but that would have given only a hint of their coloration, without suggesting their size or texture. Grapefruit might have been an adequate gauge of their size, but it would have done an injustice to their shape, suggesting a symmetrical roundness that had nothing to do with the more complex symmetry of these incredible curves. As to their texture-he thought of silk, he thought of rubber, he thought of plastic, but all these had inorganic overtones that jangled inharmoniously with the warm, living, female reality before him. He had to confess that he was a photographer, a visually oriented person whose eye could see with aching clarity but who could not find words to describe what he saw. But words and vision were equally inadequate in this situation: what he wanted to do was touch ... kiss ... fondle ... feel.
"Bill!" Wanda cried sharply, and it was only when she did that he realized he had risen purposefully to his feet and was stalking her around the table with the intention of fulfilling his desires.
"Just touch ... a little ... I can't...." Something about the incoherent single-mindedness of his lust must have touched something in her that more rational appeals had failed to warm. "If you promise to go with the test, Bill," she said, nodding.
Perhaps she had planned to add some qualifier to that offer, but he didn't wait for it. He closed the remaining distance between them and was groping her tits before he had time even to think about it. His hard prick rubbed her bare belly as his lips sought hers, and she seemed to invite the touch of his cock-head, undulating herself against it and moaning with pleasure at the contact.
The feel of her beautiful boobs beneath his hands was maddening. Good as they were to look at, they were far better to feel. The metaphors that had come to his mind now seemed ludicrous. Silk was as sandpaper, rubber was as mush, grapefruit were as grapes, compared to the swells of delicious flesh that filled his hands.
Her kiss was dizzying, a tongue-tangling orgy that seemed on the verge of sucking out his soul, but he couldn't keep his mouth away from her tits for another instant. Kissing as he went, caressing the long column of her throat with his lips, he lowered his face to her breasts. Her nipples were already hard and erect, but they hardened like diamonds at the touch of his tongue. He lavished his licks on first one and then the other, switching back and forth indecisively as he tried to determine if one was tastier or more desirable in any way than the other, but he had to conclude that they were equally matched in their appeal to his concupiscent osculations.
Now that his mouth was fully occupied, his hands found other work. They slipped down under the low-cut back of her dress to knead the fleshy globes of her ass. They were more than mere handfuls, an opulent abundance of womanly buttocks, but they were as hard and muscular as any trimly conditioned girl's. She clenched and unclenched her ass, letting him feel a writhing strength like serpents beneath silk, tormenting him with the promise of what her fucking would be like.
His fingers probed down lower and lower into the deep cleft between the cheeks of her ass, down and under. He tried hard to verify her assertion that she shaved her cunt, but she refused to let him get that far. He had no doubt that she finally would, though, because already the tips of his fingers were damp with a slick seepage of oozing pussy-juice. She had apparently been just as thoroughly aroused by their lubricious conversation as he had.
She whispered urgently in his ear: "I have to take a reading, Bill."
"Huh?"
"It's absolutely essential. I don't think you can possibly get any more worked up than you are now, and I've got to know the maximum figure."
"What are you ... crazy?" he gasped, so shocked by her concern with matters of routine at a time like this that he actually let her go. He knew that she was every bit as excited as he was, that she wanted to fuck as much as he did, and still she was able to think about her snake-oil racket and its gadgetry.
"Pick up the electrodes, Bill. Please!"
Dazed and demoralized, denied ecstasy that had seemed to be in his grasp, he could only obey. He sank back into his chair while the bare-breasted Wanda made a flurry of hasty notations on his chart.
"A nut," he muttered to himself. "The most beautiful woman in the world, with nothing at all but sex on her mind, and she turns out to be a nut."
"Bill," Wanda said, her tone gently chiding. "Do you think I enjoy doing things this way?"
"Yes! I think you do, I think you're a fucking sadist. No, I take that back. You're a sadist who doesn't fuck. That's how you torture people. And I don't know why the hell I'm letting you do this to me. I didn't think there was such a thing as a terminal case of lover's nuts, but I believe that's what you've given me. Is it okay with you if I jerk off?"
"No, it isn't okay," she said firmly. "Playing with yourself-denying another person the joy of sexual contact-that's the worst thing you can do.
When you come, Bill, I'm going to make you come."
His heart leaped. That was the closest thing to a firm promise he'd heard yet. He wondered if she planned to blow him, or if his aching prick would cool itself in the quicksilver slipperiness of her hairless slit. He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair, as if that motion could in any way moderate the burning of the thousand hot wires that seemed to skewer his cock and balls.
She had stood up again. She was in the process of peeling her seductive green gown downward, baring her hips, the tops of her thighs, the. ... She paused, a pretty frown creasing her brow.
"Oh, damn."
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"If I keep the promise I just made, then we won't be able to finish the test today. At least, I don't think we will. Wouldn't you like to fuck Julia? She's really quite good."
"No, damn it! I want you. What the hell is all this about?"
"How about Kathi, her daughter? She's very pretty, and-"
All the unpleasant words that Bill had ever heard collided in his throat at once, producing a sort of strangled scream. He felt as if the top of his head were about to blow off.
Wanda looked at her dials with alarm. "Calm down! Please. All right, all right, but it means you'll have to come back and finish the test later."
"Why?" Bill asked, surprised at how reasonable he was able to sound.
"The last part of the test consists of actually fucking someone."
"So what's the problem? Give me the last part of the test. Hurry!"
"I couldn't very well read the dials if you were fucking me, could I?"
"How the hell should I know? Why can't Julia read them, or her daughter?"
Wanda smiled indulgently. "Interpreting the F-meter is more of an art than a science. What you suggest would be like-oh, like having two cooks work on the same omelet. It might work, but it probably wouldn't."
"I want you," Bill persisted.
Wanda sighed. "You've got great promise, Bill, but I can see that you're going to have to work awfully hard. Exclusivity-wanting one person more than another-is at the source of most of our sexual maladjustments."
"Bullshit. Some people are more desirable than others. You, for instance."
Wanda's voluptuous mouth seemed to harden into less than voluptuous lines when she heard one of her tenets described as bullshit; but perhaps the fact that he had wrapped his dissent in a compliment softened its impact, because her tone was mild when she said: "That's because you haven't even begun the process of your adjustment yet. Everybody is desirable, because what we desire is contact with another soul, and all souls are beautiful."
"You can't screw souls," grumbled Bill, who would have denied the existence of the soul if he hadn't thought that such a denial would be too silly to bother with.
Wanda smiled smugly, indicating that argument was beneath her dignity too. She ended further discussion by letting her dress drop to the floor.
She smiled, confident, unashamed, then stretched, letting it all ripple. He gaped. It was more than a visual experience, more than the sight of a naked woman. It was a dislocation of the whole atmosphere, a jarring shift from the mild air-conditioning of a quasi-office to the torrid steam of jungle heat. The air he breathed had become a musky fog of lust. He could have struggled through an analysis of the impact she had on him. There was, to start with, the perfect proportion of her body, its ideal coloration-but others had that, or at least approximated it. Then there was her obvious youth, with its traditional connotation of innocence; and the contrast between that and her delightfully dirty mind, between her rosy-gold skin and the serpent-green eyes that had been old before Egypt. But no amount of analysis could account fully for the impact of her nudity. He felt feverish; he trembled ; the pressure in his cock and balls built up to an unbelievable, alarming degree.
He had told her that no part of the female body appealed to him more than another, that it was the totality that counted. Nevertheless he found his eyes consistently drawn to the bare delta between her rounded thighs, where paler flesh shaded to the pink of a prim little slit. It was more than merely youthful. It was the cunt of a scarcely developed girl. It seemed an astounding contradiction of her words. Could she be a psychotic virgin who raved about things she'd never even done?
She slid her hands down her body in a slow and sensuous gesture. He noticed for the first time that her fingernails were long, and that they were painted silver. Inevitably her fingertips slid to her hairless cunt and caressed it. A brief glance told him that the expression on her face looked dazed, that her lips were slack and moist.
Her fingertips depressed her cunt-lips slightly, parting them like the petals of a flower that showed a darker red inside. Her clitoris now protruded like the tip of a saucy little tongue. She moved around the desk, padding close to him on her bare feet until she stood over him.
"Kiss it," she whispered. "Kiss my pussy."
He leaned forward. He felt sweat from his face dripping to his thighs. He couldn't resist her request. But it had been no request, it had been a command. He no longer seemed to have a will of his own. He made no motion to drop the electrodes and hold her, simply because he knew that she didn't want him to. He raised his face as she spread her legs a little wider.
He pressed his lips to her slick, rigid clitoris. She gasped. She trembled all over. He heard her sobbing for breath as he extended his tongue and slipped it up and down against her hyper-sensitized love-button. Her fingers held his hair tightly, painfully, and she made rhythmic little moans deep in her throat.
Probing lower with his tongue, he found that her appearance of virginity had been deceptive. She was wide open to receive him, a canyon with fluttering walls that suddenly crushed inward with explosive force and seized his extended tongue. Her hips wiggled for a long, rhythmic moment as she rubbed her clitoris against his face and he thrust his tongue in and out of her juicy hole.
"I'm getting off," she gasped, "now!"
She subsided, drawing her breath in long, shuddering groans. He wanted to lick her cunt some more, but she drew back from him and walked behind the desk, running stiff fingers through her hair. He wasn't surprised when she sat down again on her side of the desk and made another notation on her chart.
"That was very good," she said.
"I'm glad you liked it."
She smiled. "So did you."
He started to say something. Whether he was going to argue with her comment or renew his pleas that she do something about his agonizing erection he didn't know, because at that moment all thought was swept from his mind by a touch at once shocking and delightful: the touch of bare, soft skin on his naked prick.
It was unbearably pleasant, but also totally unaccountable. She was seated across the table on which the F-meter sat. She smiled at him. He looked down and saw that she had extended her lithe legs and was caressing his bare cock with her toes. He didn't know how he should react. Somewhere in the back of his mind he felt that this gesture was somehow demeaning, that all of her sadistic cockteasing had culminated at last in a final act of contempt for him. But that insight was merely an intellectual bubble bouncing on top of a deep, surging sea of lust. No matter why she was doing it, he loved it.
Like everything else about her, her feet were beautiful. The instep was delicately arched, the toes were little pearls, the wrinkled soles were soft and pink. She pressed his burning prick between both feet and slowly began peeling his agonizingly tight skin up and down.
"No!" he gasped. "I can't ... you-you're going to make me come!"
"I promised I would," she purred.
"Damn you! God-damn-you!" he choked, boiling with frustrated rage even while he squirmed in the grip of impending ecstasy.
"Don't fight it," she urged. "Just relax and enjoy it. Come!"
Perhaps, somewhere in the world, there was a man with enough pride to resist this contemptuous touch; perhaps there was a man with enough will-power to pull his prick away from the rubbing of her soft feet, the tickles of her little toes; but neither man was Bill Wilson. He ceased to resist. He invited her touch. He pushed his prick against it. She massaged him more quickly, more deftly, more firmly.
It didn't take long. His cock was on a hair-trigger after a long afternoon of frustration. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned with delight as the pressurized load of come in his balls at last erupted, hurling itself forward along the electrified path of his prick.
"Eek!" Wanda squealed.
Bill opened his eyes in time to see the startled look on Wanda's face. He saw that the first gout of creamy jism had hurled itself so far that it had struck her on the belly and was trickling creamily down to her pussy. The long-range fire kept up, with strand after ropy strand of semen spattering against her belly and thighs, even scoring direct hits on her otherwise inaccessible cunt.
Once her initial shock wore off, she was able to giggle about it. She kept rubbing his spurting prick with her toes, milking it for all it was worth, while the pressure in the pump gradually decreased. Soon he was shooting only as far as her dimpled knees, then her shins, and finally the last drops only oozed out to coat her toes with slime.
Bill left the offices of Life Adjustment Sciences, Inc., in a daze that was compounded of exhaustion and euphoria. He didn't remember collecting his clothes, but he was wearing them, nor did he even recall whether he'd seen Julia Palmer again. He was holding a card with the date of his next appointment, one week from now, and already that week's wait stretched like a grim and cheerless desert. He was, he realized, hooked; but he felt no urge to resist it.
It was only when he had walked a block and was waiting for a light to change on Lexington Avenue that something occurred to him that made him laugh aloud. No one seemed to notice.
"Soles," he muttered. "You can't screw soles."
CHAPTER SIX
Wanda Fleurette sat back in her chair, abstractedly wiping semen from her belly and licking it off her fingers. She would have much preferred to get a mouthful of it direct from the source, but she liked the taste of it so much that this was better than nothing.
She sighed. She would have loved to fuck Bill Wilson. She would have loved to fuck him all afternoon, taking only occasional time-outs to blow him. He had such a nice, big prick. More than that, he had control over it, and it seemed to work extraordinarily well. Not man men could have gotten one up so shortly after Julia had drained them; not many men his age, anyway, but Wanda's vocation seldom brought her in contact with younger ones nowadays.
However, she'd made a rule, and she had no intention of breaking it: not until a client reached the third level of adjustment, when he became a Probationary Adjustee, did he get the privilege of screwing her. It was a good rule. By the time the subject reached that level, he had gone through at least ten-well, to put it bluntly, cockteasing sessions with Wanda. By then she became a total obsession with the average man, and the consummation-even if she did say so herself-always exceeded the expectation.
By that time, too, the subject had become an accomplished lover, worthy of Wanda's talents, having been given expert guidance by Julia and Kathi and other talented members of the organization. The system worked well. The wimps-Wanda didn't care for that word, but it had infiltrated her vocabulary from Kathi's-were weeded out early in the rigorous training process, and no man who had ever achieved the stage of fucking Wanda had ever dropped out.
She sighed as she licked another smear of semen from her fingers, wondering if she'd sold out her ideals. She believed passionately that repression was wrong, that it was the source of all the evil in the world. Evil began with man's effort to hide his animal nature. He tried to hide it with clothing, with abstract ideas, with religions, with plastic and metal extensions of his ego. To admit that he was an animal, with the sexual and excretory functions of an animal, would be to admit that he would one day die. Death was the unspeakable secret underlying censorship and repression.
The deniers of life, the censors of art, the repressors of sex-they were the same ones who sup ported wars, applauded violence, clamored for executions. They walked, they talked, and in the darkened privacy of their bedrooms they even fucked, but they were dead. Fear had already I killed them, the fear of showing pain or pleasure, the fear of exhibiting anything to the world but a buttoned-down, plasticized facade of unfeeling Belf-containment.
It was easy for these naysayers to drop the bombs or turn the machineguns on their fellow creatures, because they saw themselves and their fellow creatures as odorless, sexless, plastic mannikins, mere embodiments of a variety of abstractions. Whatever unsettled this view of things had to be suppressed. Wanda had taken it as her mission in life to shake them up and topple their false idols.
Nevertheless, here she was using repression as a tool, forcing people like Bill Wilson to frustration when her heart ached to relieve them and satisfy them. Why couldn't people just fuck and be happy?
She knew now that they couldn't. She'd come a long way from her early idealism, inspired largely by her reading of the works of Wilhelm Reich when she'd been an impressionable freshman at Wellesley. In order to accept her ideas, they had to be led by the nose, bullied, coerced-in a word, repressed. For their own good, of course. She sighed again.
Originally, she had wanted to establish a commune devoted to the practice and promulgation of her ideas. If the world could see that her philosophy worked on a small scale, she reasoned, then it could be persuaded to adopt it universally. That's what she'd thought when she was twenty-two, anyway.
She'd started off by giving lectures, free, wherever she could get a hall, to whoever would listen. They had been dull lectures, she knew that now, dry and academic, but they had sometimes produced explosive results. The world wasn't ready for their content, nor was it ready for her insistence on calling a spade a spade. People could accept the idea of a pretty young girl giving a lecture on "sexual intercourse;" they couldn't accept the same girl giving a lecture on "fucking."
Minor riots had erupted. She'd been arrested a dozen times. Her academic credentials were impressive, though, and nobody had wanted to go to the time and trouble of prosecuting her seriously. Those credentials hadn't protected her, however, from being forcibly gang-banged by the police force of an Indiana town who wanted to see if she practiced what she preached.
During those early years, she'd attracted a small but devoted following. Their contributions had enabled her to keep traveling and lecturing. Eventually her following and her bank account had grown to the point where she'd been able to rent a house and set up her commune.
Some of the inmates of the commune were married men who'd abandoned their families and given her all their money in return for the privilege of frolicking with her groupies. Their scandalized relatives began exerting pressures. In addition, some of her followers made their contributions to the cause from the proceeds of prostitution-an evil that she didn't explicitly condemn because she knew that it would vanish once there world embraced her ideal of free love.
The result of all this was that her commune-it was called the Natural Meditation Center-was raided as a disorderly house. A varied assortment of drugs was found. Some of the girls were ridiculously under aged. Everybody was sent up, with the exception of Wanda, who was fortunately out of state at the time, lecturing in New Jersey.
It was while spreading the word at the Jersey Shore that Wanda was introduced to a whole new world of possibilities by Frank Weston, a seedy ex-newspaperman with a flair for public relations. He made an effort to jazz up her lectures He tried to coach her toward a looser style. He took her to see a few freewheeling, glory-stomping revivalists. She had never seen these Bible-belters in action, and she was impressed by their style and the effect it had on their followers. He took her to rock concerts where she saw how music and lights and visual projections could be used to excite a crowd. He showed her how carnival barkers used accomplices called shills in their audience to get the action going. She learned fast. Her lectures became shows that started drawing crowds. She gathered a new and larger band of disciples to replace those who had fallen into the clutches of the vice squad.
It was hype, it was hard sell, it was the commercialization and carnivalization of her most cherished beliefs-but this, after all, was America, where even the most humble child may one day grow up to be given the opportunity of selling out.
It was during this phase that Wanda attracted her most important Seeker, as she called her converts even then-although Frank Weston had the annoying habit of referring to them as "Suckers" in private-an eccentric millionaire named Teddy Sculthorpe.
Teddy was ripe for her teachings. At the age of twelve, he had been seduced by his slightly older sister. After a brief affair, she had cut Teddy off at the well, driving him to distraction. She was a wild, irrepressible-some said insane creature, as undaunted by larceny and arson as she was by incest. She subsequently married a junkie jazz-musician, was involved in the Cuban Revolution, and did all sorts of things that other rich girls only dream about. She never saw Teddy after her first marriage, but he continued to love her in a more than brotherly way.
Teddy eventually married a cool, refined icicle, a girl so cultured that she could say "motherfucker," as she often did, and make it sound elegant. After a few years of marriage to this nonesuch, Teddy was not unaccountably stricken with impotence. Having tried all else, his wife attempted to cure it by interesting him in pornography. She went to a shop on Forty-Second Street and told the proprietor, "I would like to purchase two hundred dollars' worth of profusely illustrated dirty books. Please deliver them to the Sculthorpe residence."
While examining this collection, Teddy came across a picture book featuring his own long-lost sister involved in every conceivable permutation of the sex act. It proved to be an immediate cure for his impotence, but it was not an unmixed blessing: he couldn't get a hard-on unless he was actually looking at the pictures.
Fortunately, he could screw his wife while doing this. She was in the habit of lying stiff as a board, eyes closed, while Teddy labored over her, occasionally making a little puppy-whimper in her throat that reassured him she wasn't really dead. Teddy would study the book, open beside the bed, while he fucked her.
This scene of domestic bliss was replayed many times, until the night came when Teddy, tipsy from a party, riffled the pages too loudly. His wife opened her eyes and seized the book. Recognizing the subject of the photographic essay from family portraits, his wife denounced him as an unspeakable pervert and divorced him. She went to live on the Riviera with a succession of young Latin lovers who, presumably, didn't have to look at pictures of their sisters in order to get it up.
Into this dark night of Teddy's soul came the shadow of a succubus, in the form of his sister's daughter, Kathi. She appeared at his door one day bearing a note from her mother, Julia: "Please take good care of my child, Teddy. I can no longer cope."
Teddy had been wishing that Julia would re turn to him. When he had wished for Julia, he hadn't been wishing for the unknown woman of thirty-five she then was, nor for the woman in her mid-twenties who'd posed for those obscene pictures, nor for the woman who'd run away to Cuba when she was eighteen, but for the wickedly carefree companion of his childhood: and here she was.
Kathi's eyes weren't blue, they were gray, and they didn't have the crazy look that had characterized Julia's. In every other respect she looked the same, though, especially after Teddy had arranged to have her hair fixed the way her mother had always worn it, in brow-concealing bangs. In personality, though, they diverged radically. Julia had been wild and unconventional, always taking the lead in their childhood escapades, whether it was climbing trees or shoplifting or burning down the garage with Uncle Dick's new Cadillac in it. Kathi was quiet and demure and well-behaved.
Teddy began devoting most of his time and attention to her. He bought her ten times more clothing and candy and toys and books and games and pets than any child could have handled. He took her to zoos and parks and movies and amusement piers. He lay awake nights, racking his brain for fresh ways of amusing her. She didn't object, as her mother had never paid her any attention at all.
Teddy's self-confidence had always been minimal. Most of his time and money had always been spent on new ways of avoiding people, because he could never say no to anybody. His wife's angry departure had torn away his last meager shreds of self-esteem. Her parting words had convinced him that he was the vilest creature on earth. As he continued to play his new role of doting uncle, however, he revised his estimate of himself upward: he couldn't be as bad as he thought he was, because Kathi Palmer didn't tempt him sexually.
But he mistrusted his subconscious. Prowling deep down inside his soul's .cage might be some beast that lusted for his little darling. He could never free himself wholly from the fear that it might break out. As a precaution, he destroyed his thumb-worn, dog-eared, yellow-stained copy of Julia, the book in which his sister so abundantly appeared.
He would scrupulously avoid touching his niece, beyond an occasional pat on the head that resembled nothing so much as a man testing the temperature of a hot skillet with his fingertips. He found it impossible to conceal his nervous confusion-his terror, even-when she gave him a sudden, spontaneous kiss.
As Kathi grew older, he insisted that she wear more modest clothes than she wanted to. This led to some friction, but she was invariably able to get her own way. From time to time he would talk to her about sin. He would express, without quite knowing what he was talking about, the hope that she would always be a good girl. He would hint darkly of the horrors of passion.
Sex had blighted his life, but at long last he believed that he had ascended to a serene plane of disinterested contemplation beyond the torments of tumescence. Thus he was congratulating himself when Kathi's body, like a bomb that had been ticking in his home for four years, exploded into nubility.
The beast in Teddy's subconscious came roaring and ravening out of its flimsy cage. He was tempted far more than he had feared he would be tempted. The maids sometimes looked at him strangely, wondering why he tore his blankets and chewed his pillows at night, wondering how he was able to use up so much Kleenex when he didn't even have a cold. Never in his life had he even imagined such lust as he now felt for his sixteen-year-old niece.
Kathi had Julia's face. She had Julia's voice. She even had some of Julia's facial expressions and mannerisms-but she was more beautiful, more shapely, more desirable. Worst of all, she was a much nicer person than her mother could ever have been.
At first Teddy's lectures to his niece about sin had been merely confusing, but now they began to become totally incoherent. While he spoke he would sweat. He would turn pale. He would wring his hands. He would rumple his hair, shade his eyes, bang his fist into his palm. He would groan. He would never say much. Kathi would sometimes interrupt one of his lectures to ask him, with genuine concern in her lucent gray eyes, if he was feeling well.
Kathi, beautiful, pubescent Kathi, trembling on the brink of a voluptuous womanhood that would one day have the power to snarl traffic Clear gray eyes that could stop your heart cold and turn your tongue to spaghetti. Her legs-no one could write about her legs. Thinking about them is dangerous. They extended from the vicinity of her hips to the surface of the ground, but they did so with such a smooth and harmonious arrangement of curve and plane and dimple and hollow that they showed you what God had in mind when he thought up the idea of female human legs; and showed you that he botched the job of making them for most females. She had a pair of tits that could fog a pair of spectacles at fifty yards. The ass men of the ancient world worshipped a goddess, Venus Callipygia, Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks: could those poor benighted heathens have caught a glimpse of Kathi's luscious buns, even veiled by skintight, threadbare jeans with an applique rose in the cleft, they would have broken up the statues of their goddess for bird-gravel and begged her to pose for new ones. Her face suggested early madonnas, not quite roundish, like her mother's, more oval, with soft planes, with a straight, classical nose. Mingled with all this perfection was one fault, one that Teddy never noticed, one that any man would overlook: Kathi was so dumb that she couldn't have found her voluptuous ass with both hands.
Teddy's little lectures about sex would have puzzled anybody, but they confused Kathi hopelessly. She didn't even know they were about sex, as a brighter child might have guessed. They painted a murky picture of something that might happen to her, or would happen to her, or had happened to her, something that had happened to him, something that had happened to her mother, something that was vaguely connected with the human body.
This was not only confusing, it was also alarming, since something had been happening to her body for the past couple of years and it had now reached an acute stage. It involved certain inward itchings and squirmings and tinglings and yearnings that had no precise focus but were nonetheless powerful. She suspected that Uncle Teddy might be warning her about some hereditary disease, and she was afraid that she was coming down with the symptoms. She wanted to comfort him and soothe him, seeking solace in return, sitting in his lap the way he would never permit her to do and smoothing his hair. Thinking about this brought on a fresh attack of itching and squirming and tingling and yearning.
Direct questioning, either about the lectures or about the strange percolations in her body, was impossible, she'd learned that long ago. Such questions would be referred to the dour and sour and monosyllabic housekeeper, Mrs. Ermold, whom she detested. On the question about bleeding, for instance-that one had come up about three years ago-Mrs. Ermond had merely grunted as if her worst fears had been confirmed, provided her with the appropriate countermeasures, told her how to use them, and advised her not to worry about it. "It happens," Mrs. Ermold had explained.
Sometimes her questions would have a disturbing effect on Uncle Teddy. He would start looking green around the edges, then he would excuse himself hastily and run for the bathroom. She feared that questions about her body and its symptoms had the power to bring on attack of the same hereditary disease in her uncle. Sneaking close to the bathroom door on such occasions, she would hear pitiful groans and strange thumping sounds. Her heart would go out to her afflicted uncle, and she would resolve never again to ask him why she was growing hair between her legs, nor try to show him the disturbing growth.
She couldn't ask any of the adults in the household. She couldn't ask her schoolmates, either, because she didn't have any. Julia had never bothered to send her to school, partly on ideological grounds-her mother believed that schooling destroyed spontaneity-and partly because they traveled around so much. Teddy had tried to remedy her educational deficiencies with tutors, and there was some talk of sending her to a private school next year, but in the meantime she had no one to ask but the "nice" girls that Uncle Teddy had arranged for her to meet. They were mostly younger than she was, they went in for crinolines and patent-leather pumps, and they knew less about it than she did. A truly nice girl, to Uncle Teddy's way of thinking, would have been raised in a Skinner Box to the age of fourteen.
There was one exception, a girl named Edith Snedeker, who wasn't as nice as she seemed. When Kathi was fourteen, Edith, then only twelve, had informed her that boys have appendages called wieners-" 'cause they look like hot dogs," explained Edith, who'd actually seen a few-and that they derive considerable enjoyment from rubbing their wieners against a girl's slit. The girls were at the time concealed behind one of the many junked cars that cluttered Teddy's suburban estate, and Edith had felt free to hike up her crinolines, pull down her ruffled panties, and show Kathi her slit, which was quite hairless.
Edith wanted Kathi to display her slit, too, ostensibly to make sure her eager pupil got its location right, but Kathi was extremely reluctant. She had all that darned hair on it! And she was certain that Edith would laugh at her, or even tell people about the freakish friend she had who was developing into a gorilla. Edith was extremely insistent, though, claiming unfairness, "I showed you mine, now you got to show me yours"-and threatening to withhold further information about the wonders of nature.
At last Kathi consented, pulling down the jeans she was almost busting out of-she resisted Uncle Teddy's efforts to dress her like Edith-and displaying her shameful wedge of fuzz. Edith's reaction was totally unexpected. She was vastly impressed. This only happened, Edith explained, when a girl was old enough to make babies. The younger girl was jealous, but Kathi consoled her with the information that this hair had started to grow when she was only slightly older than Edit was now.
Edith returned to her role of instructor. The boy rubs his wiener against the girl's slit until a white cream appears.
"How?" Kathi asked.
"How, what?"
"Where does this white cream come from?"
"I don't know. I guess it comes out of your slit."
"Oh," said Kathi, pondering.
"Anyway, the girl takes this white cream and puts it up her asshole, and it makes a baby inside her," Edith explained.
"If she doesn't put the white cream up her asshole, then it doesn't make a baby?"
"I guess not," said Edith and, reluctant to be questioned further on her weak points, added a new bit of information: "This is called fucking."
Kathi wondered aloud if this had any etymological connection with motherfuckingsonofabitch, a word that meant one of her mother's ex-husbands or soon-to-be-ex-boyfriends, and Edith was able to separate the word into its-component parts for her.
"Why don't you pretend your finger is a wiener and fuck me with it?" Kathi suggested. "'. want to see this white cream."
"It won't work, unless it's a wiener."
"How come? It comes out of my slit, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, but if you could just make it come out of your slit, then why do ladies need husbands to make babies?" countered Edith.
"Do it anyway," Kathi urged, standing up and taking her jeans all the way off. "I want to see what it feels like."
Edith was glad to oblige. Kathi leaned back against the car and spread her legs out, gathering up the tails of her shirt to keep them out of the younger girl's way. Edith placed the side of her forefinger lengthwise to her slit and began rubbing lightly.
"How does it feel?" Edith asked.
"It tickles. It feels good. Only push it harder," Kathi said.
Edith pressed her finger tighter against the lips. Kathi began to feel warm and squirmy inside, vaguely feverish outside. Edith's little blonde head, complete with braids, was lowered, her big brown eyes fixed on what she was doing. She seemed to be enjoying this satisfaction of her curiosity as much as Kathi was enjoying the less intellectual aspects of the contact.
"You're getting wet!" Edith exclaimed. "You're not going to pee, are you?"
"No, no, it's not that, I don't know what it is, it's something else."
"Don't pee on me," Edith warned, "or I'll tell."
"I won't, I won't, I promise."
"It's getting wetter," Edith reported.
"Ohhhh."
"Are you okay?"
"Yesssss! Do it!"
"It's not pee. It feels sticky," Edith observed, "Maybe it's the white cream!"
Edith held up her finger to examine it. Kathi saw that it glistened with some transparent fluid, not white cream at all.
"You have to rub it harder," Kathi suggested hopefully. "Then maybe it will turn white."
Edith didn't take the hint. Still curious, she raised the wet finger to her pert little freckled nose and sniffed it. "Oh, ick!" she squealed. "It smells like cod liver oil!"
Kathi was immensely annoyed. She'd taken a bath that morning. She didn't dare show her irritation, though, because she hoped that she could coax Edith back into rubbing her slit some more. She touched herself with her own finger. She was amazed at how loose she felt, how wet she was. The harder she pressed, the more her finger sank inside. It was as if an unknown cave had opened up. She was a little bit afraid.
"You're sticking your finger right inside it," Edith observed.
"Oooh. Yes. You do it."
"It stinks."
"Please, Edith, please. It feels better when you do it."
"Maybe it is cod liver oil, and that's what happens when you take too much of it, it comes out of your slit."
"Please, do it, Edith. You can wash your hands later. I'll even let you put on some of my perfume, the Shalimar that Uncle Teddy gave me."
"Well, okay," said Edith, "but this time you have to rub my slit, too. And not with your cod liver oil finger, either. I'm going to pretend that it's Donnie Osmond's wiener. What are you going to pretend?"
Kathi didn't know. She hadn't been pretending anything. She'd just been feeling. The thought of a wiener filled her with vague alarm when she applied it to anyone specific. She couldn't help picturing it exactly as Edith had described it, as a smooth red hot dog growing out of a man's middle, and she couldn't keep her perverse imagination from supplying it with a bun, relish, and mustard. She would have to get a look at a real one, somehow. It would be fruitless to ask Uncle Teddy if she could see his, she knew that, but maybe she could somehow arrange to peek at him.
Imagining that it was Uncle Teddy's wiener made the prospect seem far less scary, because he was the least intimidating man she knew. He reminded her of her teddy bear, and she thought he had been named most appropriately. Not that he was round and fuzzy; on the contrary, he was long and lank and pale and seemed to have been constructed without bones. But their personalities were similar.
She couldn't tell Edith what she was thinking. She didn't know why, but she knew that it would be wrong to imagine that her uncle was fucking her. Never a fast thinker, she could only say: "I'll pretend that it's Edith Snedeker's finger."
"That's dumb," said Edith, who always said what she thought. Kathi would have liked to have told her that she thought it was even dumber to think about Donnie Osmond, but living with touchy and unpredictable people like her mother and Uncle Teddy had already taught her a lot about tact. She didn't want to do anything that would imperil the continuance of this unexpectedly delightful game.
While Edith pulled up her skirt to display the bare little purse between her skinny legs, Kathi sniffed at her finger. Darn jit, Edith was right! Maybe her description had been a little extreme, but a definitely fishy odor lingered about her finger. It reminded her more of oysters. As a matter-of-fact, the firm but mushy texture of her slit, after Edith had rubbed it for a while, reminded her of the texture of oysters.
"Oysters," Kathi said with a touch of defiance.
"What about them?"
"That's what it smells like."
"They're icky, too. I had one once and I hated it. I bet mine won't smell like fish."
Kathi saw that it would be unwise to pursue this line with her exasperating little friend. She reached out with her left hand, the one she hadn't used to sample the odor of her own slit, and began fingering Edith's.
"Ow!" Edith cried. "Don't poke it. Rub it, like I told you."
"Okay. But I want you to poke me. I want you to push your finger into it," Kathi urged. "Only do it slow, okay?"
Edith grumbled that poking wasn't fucking, as she knew it, that fucking was rubbing, but she obliged Kathi's whim.
"You've got a regular hole in it," Edith reported when her finger had sunk in to the second joint.
"Unnnnhhhh," Kathi said.
"Are you going to be sick? Don't you be sick on me, or I'll tell."
"Do ... this," Kathi said, and, taking Edith's thumb-she noticed that it wasn't a very clean thumb, but she didn't give a damn at this stage-she pressed it against the top of her slit.
She didn't know why she'd done that; but somehow she knew that it had needed doing. The result was electrifying. Edith's probing finger felt good, but it was nothing compared to the pressing of her thumb. All the squirms and yearns and itches and wriggles and tingles coalesced at this point of ineffable contact.
"You've got like a little bitty wiener there," said Edith. "Maybe you're part boy. Maybe we should rub our slits together, maybe that will make the white cream come."
"Do you like it, when I rub you?"
"Yeah, sort of. Not as much as you do. I mean, I don't feel like moaning and groaning and wiggling around and looking like I'm going to be sick. But it feels nice. Sort of," she said.
"Stick it in deeper, Edith, stick your finger in-ow!"
"That's as far as it goes," Edith said. "Ow, shit, shit, shit! I want it in deeper, it itches in there!"
"It doesn't go any deeper."
"Try!" Kathi begged.
The little blonde girl was dubious, but she shrugged, took a firm grip on her pink lower lip with her upper teeth, and poked her finger firmly against the obstruction in Kathi's slit.
Kathi knew that Edith could do it. She didn't know how she knew, she just knew. And she was right! She could feel the tip of Edith's finger squeezing in deeper, piercing her like a sweet little arrow, and she wondered if that's why Cupid was pictured with arrows, if that's what love was all about.
"You look like it hurts," Edith said.
"It does! It doesn't! I don't know what it feels like. Just do it, all right?"
There was an opening in there, sure enough, but it barely seemed big enough to accommodate Edith's little forefinger. She could feel it stretching, though, making way for the delicious intrusion. She put her free hand back on Edith's, making sure the other girl remembered to rub the swollen little button at the top of her slit, and that seemed to make the going easier. She kept rubbing away at Edith's slit, but it didn't get wet, nor did it open up significantly.
"I'm getting tired of this dumb game," said Edith. "Let's go watch The Dating Game on TV."
"Please ... more...."
But Edith wanted no more. She would not he urged, cajoled, persuaded-not even at the price of the whole bottle of Shalimar. They went inside to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watch TV while Kathi squirmed and itched and burned.
They drifted progressively further apart after that, and two years later, when Edith was fourteen, she dropped completely out of sight. A scrap of overheard conversation between Mrs. Ermold and a maid from another estate led her to believe that Edith, with the assistance of a young scapegrace named Victor Mosbacher, had succeeded in making a baby. Apparently she had ignored her own advice and rubbed that white cream up her ass.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The feelings that Kathi Palmer had experienced on that sunny day behind the junked automobiles when she was fourteen were nothing compared to those that burned within her almost perpetually two years later. She believed that she was losing her mind. Those vague, pointless feelings-Uncle Teddy's rambling, cryptic monologues that hinted of ancestral sin and an evil in the blood-the changes in her body, the blossoming of her breasts, the fuller furring of her crotch-there was no one she could turn to for help, no one who could answer her questions.
Her old experience with Edith had raised more questions than it had answered, questions that continued to plague her. Was she really part boy? Is that why she had that swollen thing at the top of her slit? Did she exude a unique odor of fishiness that constituted the Curse of the Sculthorpes? And ancient Mrs. Ermold, muttering her way through the dark galleries and ancestor-haunted halls-did she know what had made Uncle Teddy the dark, handsome, brooding recluse that he was today?
As one might suspect from all this, Kathi read a lot of Gothic novels at this stage in her development.
At least she'd learned one valuable lesson from Edith: that those unfocused yearnings could brought to a boil by rubbing her cunt. Sometimes she even achieved release from her tensions by doing this. Sometimes the release was even spectacular.
Uncle Teddy burst into her room one night armed with pistol and flashlight.
"What's wrong?" he cried.
"Huh?" Kathi asked, only her eyes showing above the sheet.
"You screamed. It was awful, a long, drawn-out wail, like you were being murdered," said Teddy with a shudder.
"Gee. Did I?"
"Certainly did. Scared the pants off me," he said, and then he blushed, apparently at his own choice of metaphor.
He gestured aimlessly with his pistol. He had turned on the light when he'd entered, and now he saw her red pajamas in a crumpled wad at the foot of her bed. He skittered a nervous glance across her eyes, conscious that she was naked beneath the sheet, every rosy, delicious, teenage inch of her.
"It's cold. You'll catch cold," he said.
"I'm hot," she said, hoping he wouldn't pick up her pajamas and notice that the crotch was soaked; then, perversely, hoping he would.
He was afraid to look at her, but he did. "Yes," he said. "You're perspiring." He inched forward until he could touch her forehead, then backed off, the old fingertip-on-the-griddle trick he'd perfected. "You're feverish. I guess you had a nightmare. That was why you screamed."
"I guess that must have been it," Kathi said, staring at the spot on his robe where his wiener was hidden and wondering what it looked like. She just couldn't picture him with a hot dog between his legs.
His eyes flickered down nervously, making sure his robe was tied. "An odd smell in here," he said. "Do you notice it?"
"Smell? Like what?"
Teddy sniffed. "Seaweed." He noted her narrowed eyes, her flaring nostrils. "Nothing personal, sweetie. The room needs airing, that's all. I'll have Mrs. Ermold look into it."
She wanted to say that she wanted him to look into it, maybe even poke around in it with his wiener, but her courage failed her.
"Should I call the doctor?" he asked.
"What for?"
"Your fever. Whatever. Do you feel all right?"
"I don't have a fever, I'm just hot," she said, and she undulated to rub her itchy backside on the bottom sheet. Teddy went pale. "Uncle Teddy?"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"Does the doctor always make a girl take off her bra when he does her with the stethoscope? Or is it just me?"
"I don't know. I wouldn't know. I don't know about that. He does, does he? When?"
"Every time I go there. Remember, the last time I went it was for a splinter in my foot, and he made me take off my bra so he could do me with a stethoscope. He did it for about fifteen minutes. When I asked him why, he just said that you could never tell in these cases, and he didn't go to Harvard Medical School for nothing, you know. Very snotty. Then his stethoscope wasn't working, or something, so he put his ear right here-" she pointed between her breasts, a gesture that made the sweaty sheet cling tightly on either side of her nubile, her eminently nubile boobs, and nearly gave poor Teddy heart failure-"and listened to my chest with his ear. Only he was breathing so loudly I don't know how he could hear anything."
"The son of a bitch! And I put him up for the Country Club! Goddammit, I'm calling him right now!"
"Don't, Uncle Teddy! He's a doctor, after all, so he must know what he's doing. If you listened to my chest, could you tell if I was sick?"
"God, no!" Teddy gasped. "Well, if you're all right, that is, I'll be running along, and ... good night."
"Wait. Please. Don't go. Sit on the bed with me."
"No, I ... it's late. In the morning, I have to...." His voice trailed off, for he had nothing to do in the morning, or any other morning.
"I had a nightmare, Uncle Teddy. I'm frightened."
Teddy had never learned how to say no, even when his best judgment demanded it, to his delicious niece. He perched gingerly on the edge of the bed. She promptly bounced over beside him, pretending to cover herself decorously while she molded the sheet to her body like a second skin. She noticed that he was sweating now, too, even though he'd told her it was cold.
"Let me tell you about my nightmare," she said. She hadn't had any nightmare, of course: she'd screamed inadvertently in the grip of a monumental orgasm while playing with herself, but she remembered one recent dream that ought to give him something to think about, especially if she embellished it.
"In the dream I was climbing this endless stairway made out of glass. I looked up and I couldn't see anything but flight after flight, all confusing with reflections and prisms and everything. Then when I looked down I saw the same thing, and I also saw that I was naked, I mean I didn't have a stitch on my body, Uncle Teddy, it was all bare. My breasts were naked, and my belly was naked, and-"
"Yes, yes," he croaked, "you don't have to .., go on like...."
"No, I have to tell you. See, I looked down, and I didn't have my bra on, or my panties, so the part down here with the hair on it, that was naked, too. And my legs were naked. But I was wearing high-heeled shoes, that's the funny part, because I've never worn them. And I noticed that they made my legs look nicer, for some reason, because when my foot was arched like this-" here she demonstrated by thrusting her naked leg out from beneath the sheet beside Teddy's thigh and arching her foot "-it seemed to make my calves firmer, and-does it?"
"Please, you'll catch cold, get under the covers, for God's sake!" Teddy gasped.
"Anyway," she said, snuggling closer as she recovered her magnificent leg, "the walls of the stairway were transparent, too. Outside I could see only fog, moving in slow swirls. No, it wasn't fog, it was liquid, sort of like a sticky white cream. What do you suppose that could be?"
"I don't know, it's your dream."
"Yes. Well, I told myself to wake up, and I heard my voice clearly, echoing in the stairwell, only I didn't wake up, and that scared me.
"Then I got scared even more, because something moved outside, in that liquid. It slid down past the stair where I was standing. Did I tell you I was all naked? Yes, well, there I was, all bare-naked, and this big thing like a giant hot dog came sliding down past the glass, like a great big serpent. It ignored me, and I guess it was blind, because it didn't have any eyes in its head, only a little hole in the middle, like a teeny weeny mouth.
"Well, the creamy stuff had sort of cleared up, and I could see way, way down, to the slimy bottom of the sea, or whatever it was. The bottom was covered with fleshy-looking red flowers. Each flower had two thick red petals, with like a slit down the middle, and they were surrounded with leaves that were dark reddish-brown in color, only the leaves looked more like hair than anything else. Can you picture them?"
"Clearly," Teddy croaked, clawing at his eyes.
"Well, the big hot-dog thing, it slid right down toward one of these flowers with the slit in it, and it pushed inside it. I mean, the slit opened up, and this big cylindrical thing slid right into it, until it was completely swallowed up. What do you suppose this dream means, Uncle Teddy?"
"I have no idea," said Teddy, who had gone to Harvard.
"Hold my hand. I'm getting scared again," she said, seizing it before he could object and holding it in his lap. "Where was I? Yes. Well, I was scared, so I ran on up the stairs, all naked in my high heels. There was just no end to those stairs! Then it got hard to breathe, because the air smelled heavy and musky and I don't know, sort of like cod liver oil, or seaweed.
"Then the stairway ended against this oval-shaped door that was covered with a furry rug. It's funny, the furry rug was the same color as my own hair, sort of a dark reddish-brown. At least I hoped this was a door, but I couldn't figure out how to open it. Then I pushed against the middle of it, and it was real soft, sort of rubbery, and a kind of slit opened right down the middle of it. Wasn't that a funny kind of door?"
"Funny," Teddy gargled.
"Well, it was hard to push this slit open, but I did. The walls sort of had the consistency of oysters, and this was where that smell was coming from, like seaweed, and when I stuck my head inside I saw a damp, red tunnel that curved away into darkness. The air inside the tunnel was thick and damp and hot.
"Well, you can imagine how scared I was. You wouldn't want to go inside something like that, would you? Would you, Uncle Teddy?"
He shook his head in violent negation and covered his eyes. She squeezed his hand and moved it further into his lap.
"Well, I didn't know what to do. I was frightened of the stairway, but the tunnel seemed even worse, so I turned to go back down the stairs. Then I heard these noises, far below me. It sounded like voices-no, it was the gurgle of water rising inside the stairway, only it wasn't water, I knew it was that white creamy stuff. And mingled with this was a sucky, squishy noise, kind of rhythmic, that sounded like ... suck ... or ... fup ... or like something in between them ... suck ... suck ... suck ... fup ... fup ... fup ... suck ... fup ... fuck ... fuck-"
"Wait a minute! What?" Teddy demanded, turning a panicked gaze on her.
"Oh, I got my tongue twisted up. That's not a word, is it, fuck! No, I didn't think so. But that's just what the noise sounded like, it sounded like fuck. Well, I just screamed. Maybe that's what you heard, I don't know. I was sorry I did, because those sounds got closer, and came faster, they sounded like the thing had heard me and was positively eager to get at me, making these fuck-fuck-fuck noises."
"Sweetheart," Teddy said, and paused to clear his throat before resuming: "Sweetheart, that's not a real word, not really, but it's not really a nice word for a little girl to say, not really."
"What? Fuck? Why not?" asked Kathi with a look of round-eyed innocence that would have curled the toenails of a plaster saint. "If it's not even a word, what can be wrong with saying it?"
"It's ... it's not a polite word, that's what I meant."
"What does it mean?"
"It means something that's not nice to talk about ... it means a certain ... physical ... having to do with the body ... in a way that ... crude people use it," said Teddy, surprising her by giving her the closest thing she'd ever heard to a straight answer out of him on the subject.
"Well, I won't say fuck if you don't want me to say fuck, Uncle Teddy. I always try to please you, and if it offends you to hear me say fuck, then, well, I just won't say fuck anymore. You can bet that's the last time you'll ever hear me say fuck. Only I wish you'd tell me what fuck means, so I won't ever forget and go around saying fuck by accident."
"Stop saying fuck!" Teddy screamed.
"I told you, I wasn't going to say fuck anymore. What does fuck mean?"
"You wouldn't understand. You're too young."
"I'm sixteen years old."
"Yes, and you're still below the junior high school level of achievement, according to Mr. Owen," he said, attacking her from an unfair direction, she thought. "You're too young."
"Mr. Owen is a wimp."
"That's not a nice word."
"Is it as bad as fuck!"
"I told you, stop saying that."
"You said it. You said fuck, just a minute ago."
"You-the sheet-" he cried.
Gesturing to emphasize her last remark, Kathi had let the sheet drop to her waist, baring her phantasmagorical knockers to her uncle's horrified gaze. He tried to pull it back up for her, since she made no move to do so, and he tried to do it with his eyes closed. She took the opportunity to let her hand graze, as if by accident, the bulge she'd noticed in his lap. All she could tell was that it was very hard, not at all like a hot dog, more like a Genoa salami. She permitted herself to be decorously redraped while Teddy squirmed away from her touch, trying to give the illusion as he did so that no touch had occurred and that he was not trying to squirm away from the nonexistent touch.
"You should put your jammies on, darling."
"Jammies," she sneered, knowing that he was using the word in an effort to escape back to her childhood.
"Well, anyway, you have to go to sleep now, sweetie. It's very, very late. Mr. Owen will want you to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning for your lessons."
"Mr. Owen has dates with boys."
Teddy had a coughing fit.
"He tells me about them, he tells me how he took Dennis to the restaurant, or Roger to the theater, or Lester to the museum. It makes me sick. If he can have dates with boys, why can't I?"
"That's not dates, that's friends going places together and it has nothing to do with you, because you're too young. Now, it's time to go to sleep."
"I haven't told you about my nightmare. I'm still scared."
Teddy shot her a haggard, red-eyed look that seemed to be a plea for mercy. But he patted her hand, edging it away from his lap as he did so, and nodded for her to go on.
"Where was I? I remember. This giant thing, like a big salami, it had gotten into the stairwell and it was chasing me. It had heard me scream. So I squeezed inside the cave. It was very, very tight, but the walls gave when I pushed them. They were all covered with this slimy stuff that smelled like seaweed, and pretty soon my whole body was all covered with it. I told you that I was bare-naked, didn't I? The tunnel was so narrow and tight that I had to crawl.
"Then this is the horrible part, I had to crawl very slowly, and I knew the thing was gaining on me. Then I felt something touch my behind. My behind was all bare. I screamed, because I knew that the hot-dog thing had caught up with me and was nudging against my bare-naked behind. Wasn't that awful?"
Teddy nodded, his face a twisted mask of agony, and he refused to meet her inquiring stare.
"I couldn't really turn around. I had to turn over and lie on my back so I could see it. It was squeezing the red walls of the cave wide apart, filling them with its big, round head, like a big ball with a teeny weeny mouth in it. I kicked at it with my high heels, but it just kept on coming and pushing me deeper into the cave.
"I was crying-no not crying, sort of moaning, actually, going, 'oh, oh, oh, oooh,' like that, and this thing kept following me and nudging me deeper. I fell, and I knew that it was going to crush me, so I clawed at it, tugging myself upward and holding onto its head. My bare belly was pressed right against the toothless little mouth in the thing's face. I felt the mouth oozing out some kind of white cream that flowed down my naked legs to mix with the fishy-smelling ooze on the floor of the cave.
"I had to hold the thing with my bare legs and my arms and mold my naked body right against it in order to avoid being ground beneath it. But as I rode it inward, hugging it like that, I began to feel different about the whole thing. I thought the thing was going to be cold and clammy, but it wasn't at all, it made me all warm and nice-feeling. Sliding in like that, with the tight walls stroking my naked body, gave me a delicious sensation. Then I did a funny thing. I pressed my lips right down on the monster's head and kissed it. Can you imagine that?"
"I thought this was supposed to be a nightmare."
"Well, it was, before. That must have been when you heard me scream."
"Then you're all right now, sweetie, right?"
"Yes, but I want to tell you the rest of my dream."
"Please. It's too late. And I have to go to the bathroom."
"Whenever anything ever gets interesting around here, you have to go to the bathroom."
Teddy winced. "Don't talk nonsense. Good night, dear girl."
"Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite," Kathi said, flashing a wicked flicker of white thigh as she bounced herself under the covers.
She went promptly to sleep and dreamed of lambs and lollipops and of a talking dog named Bob who persuaded her to run away with him on his motorcycle and join the circus. They went instead to Spain where they witnessed a colorful Horrida del Burros, aswarm with flamboyant piccolos, dashing matterhorns, fearless stevedores, all of them executing flawless graceful veronicas and betties, with an occasional archie thrown in.
Several times during the night she floated half way up from slumber and was dimly aware of Uncle Teddy's groans emanating from the bathroom. She wondered sleepily what he could be doing in there for so long.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The principal achievement in Teddy Sculthorpe's life had been his birth into a family that owned a newspaper, a radio station, a paper company, and several million dollars' worth of real estate. After his graduation from Harvard with a gentlemanly C average and his stint in the Army, where he served as a second lieutenant in a motor pool in Okinawa, he arranged to become Publisher of the Stateuride Press, the family's newspaper. It was a vaguely defined job with no particular duties that had been vacant since the death of his Uncle Dick a few years earlier from chronic gluttony.
Teddy installed himself in an office on the eighth floor of the newspaper's headquarters. Naturally reclusive-because he knew he could never say "no" to anybody-he made sure the office had a back stairway that enabled him to get in and out without being seen.
Employees were advised that they must not speak to Mr. Sculthorpe under any circumstances, and that they must pretend he wasn't really there if they happened to catch a rare glimpse of him. His secretary, whom he seldom spoke to, and Mickey Kinsella, the managing editor, were the only exceptions to this rule. Most of Teddy's contact with Kinsella was effected by memos. Teddy would spend three or four hours a day in his office, reading the successive editions of the paper as they came off the presses and thinking up memos to send Kinsella. These memos rarely had a thing to do with editorial policy. Typically, they would suggest that some piece of graffiti like "DEATH TO THE IDLE RICH" be removed from a washroom or that a panhandler in front of the building be moved on his way.
Kinsella never showed these memos to anyone else or revealed their contents, but whenever the managing editor felt like bullying someone, which was quite often, he would first make an elaborate show of thoughtfully studying one of the blue pieces of memo-paper that everybody knew issued from Teddy's isolated domain. Kinsella was liked and admired by the staff, who considered Teddy a maniacal tyrant.
Three or four times a year, Teddy would dabble in journalism by suggesting a possible story to Kinsella. The stories invariably involved some wealthy friend or neighbor or college chum of Teddy's whose daughter had recently made her school's honor roll or whose cat had just had kittens. These suggestions would become urgent assignments of the utmost priority as they filtered down to the lower echelons of the staff. Known as "Sculthorpe Specials," they would be thrust upon any luckless reporter who hadn't mastered the journalistic skill of looking busy while doing nothing. No matter how inane or dull the finished article proved to be, it would be splashed all over the front page with a spread of pictures. The appearance of these stories would reinforce Teddy's image of himself as a crusading newspaperman who would have been another William Randolph Hearst if his time hadn't been taken up by other interests.
His principal interest was collecting old cars and trying to make them run. These were not classic cars or antique cars, just old cars that could be bought for forty or fifty dollars apiece. He had been become interested in this hobby when he was twelve, and his interest had continued unabated for twenty-five years. As word of his hobby got around, more and more people would go to the Sculthorpe estate to buy spare parts or unload wrecks. Teddy didn't advertise what he was doing, nor did he even think of his hobby as a business, but he managed to convert his palatial estate into the largest automotive junkyard in the county.
His neighbors, mollified by publicity extravaganzas about their cute kittens or smart daughters, never complained. They would have viewed one junked car in the yard of a working class home as an intolerable eyesore or an environ mental threat, but they accepted Teddy's acres of mangled wrecks as a symptom of endearing eccentricity. On some dark mornings when the clock was empty and the bourbon bottle said three A.M., Teddy would suspect that without his inherited wealth, he would have been a marginally successful junk dealer or a second-rate auto mechanic.
After Kathi Palmer came to stay with him, Teddy had no time at all for the newspaper business. When his lawyers and accountants concocted a clever scheme for selling the paper to its principal competitor without violating the letter of the anti-trust laws, Teddy hardly noticed what he was signing; nor did he ever become aware that his stroke of the pen had rendered several hundred persons jobless. Had he been required to fire each of them in a face-to-face confrontation, he would have wound up giving them all raises.
Kathi disliked Teddy's reclusive habits, and she disliked even more his attempts to impose his life-style on her. She took to hanging around the garage, where most of the business negotiations connected with Teddy's hobby were carried on by the chauffeur-whose job title should really have been "junk dealer," since he never had time to drive anybody anywhere. He made a good living for himself by raking off most of the profits in the transactions. Teddy, whose financial expertise was on a par with his journalistic talents, never noticed.
Kathi had started hanging around the garage merely for the sake of seeing people, any people. Teddy and the chauffeur got into the habit of sending her on errands around the yard for tools and auto parts. It wasn't long before she developed a good working knowledge of which tool did what and which part went where. By the time she was sixteen, she was demonstrating a real mechanical talent. Teddy was pleased with this, not only because it gave them a shared interest, but because she was demonstrating no talent at all in any of the formal subjects she studied with Mr. Owen. She could tear down the rocker arm assembly on a 1957 Chevy and put it back together blindfolded, but long division baffled her.
Along about this time, however, Teddy began to wonder if he hadn't welcomed a Trojan horse into his junkyard by encouraging her interest. Among the regular visitors to the junkyard were a motley crew of youthful drag-racers, motorcycle gangsters and car-strippers to whom a girl who was not only breathtakingly beautiful but who also knew the difference between a carburetor and camshaft was irresistible. Any one of those louts would have been overjoyed to seize the opportunity of showing Kathi what a wiener looked like, but fortunately Kathi's fear of men was greater than her curiosity about them; Uncle Teddy was still the only man she really felt at ease with. The rougher element was also discouraged from hanging around by Mr. Owen, whose interest in them equalled theirs in Kathi.
Nevertheless, Teddy was in a constant state of apprehension that one of these hippies, as he called them, would quite literally sweep his niece off her feet. She was already accepting pillion motorcycle rides from a particularly wretched specimen named Bob Peterson, whose front teeth were all missing as the result of a collision with a beer-mug.
Therefore he was far less reluctant to consent than he might otherwise have been when Kathi asked him if she could take a beach club membership in the nearby seashore resort of Wesley Grove. He had resigned himself, however reluctantly, to the sad fact that he could never be her lover; he knew, although he would rather not have known it, that he couldn't keep her forever cloistered from contact with the opposite sex; and he reasoned that she would meet a far better class of young men at the beach club than she would at the junkyard. The idea of someone like Bob Peterson getting anywhere near water was unthinkable.
Teddy did draw the line firmly, however, in absolutely forbidding her to wear the miniscule bikini she'd bought. But she wore it anyway.
The attention that Kathi got at the junkyard in her greasy denims was nothing compared to the sensation she caused at the beach in her bikini. After her first few visits to the club, the manager made a special rule for her: she had to spread her beach-blanket out behind the lifeguard stand, because her presence between the stand and the water proved to be too overwhelming a distraction for the guards.
She might have learned something about sex if she'd made friends with some girls her age, but the girls detested her on sight. She was able to keep her numerous male admirers at arm's length with the excuse that her uncle didn't allow her to have dates yet. But contact with young men who weren't as intimidating as the latter-day Huns and Ostrogoths who hung around the junkyard was beginning to erode her fear of them, and it wouldn't have been long before she would have challenged Uncle Teddy's dating rule.
She would have-if her life hadn't taken a drastically different direction at this point. One day while strolling along the boardwalk, her eye was caught by a sign outside the Venezia Theater. It was a crumbling old Moorish palace of stucco, a movie house that hadn't shown any movies in years. Sometimes in the summer it was rented by evangelists, and Kathi thought that the poster was an advertisement for some such preacher.
The poster bore a picture of a woman who could only be described as stunning. She had long golden hair, and her lips were parted and her green eyes half closed in an expression that might have denoted religious ecstasy-some kind of ecstasy, anyway. The biggest print on the sign said: THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION-Kathi had heard about that, in a vague sort of way-and the caption under the woman's picture said: "Wanda Fleurette, a student of Wilhelm Reich." Further down, it said: "Let Dr. Fleurette show you how to liberate your repressed sexual impulses!" That sounded interesting. She had a lot of im pulses she didn't understand, and for all she knew they might be sexual. They were certainly repressed, except when she was rubbing her slit. In even smaller print, so small that she had to bend close to read it, were the words: "Free yourself by fucking!"
Bingo! It was a long time since she'd heard Edith Snedeker's explanation of what "fuck" meant, and she'd gradually come to the conclusion that Edith had been all wrong. She knew that the word "fuck" was in some strange way indelicate, but she believed it was a synonym for "defective"-as in, "fucking ignition,"
"fucking Fords," or, in the case of her mother's boyfriends, "fucking bastards." This was the first time since that afternoon with Edith when she'd heard the word definitely linked to sex.
She entered the theater, just in time to catch Wanda's matinee lecture. Kathi didn't know much about preachers, never having seen the inside of a church, but she still believed that was what Wanda was, even when she was talking about "fucking" and "screwing" and slinging words around like "cunt" and "prick," whatever they meant. She certainly wasn't using them to mean "woman" and "undesirable person" respectively, which is what they meant when Bob Peterson used them.
Wanda's thesis for the day was abstract love, which seemed an appropriate subject for a preacher, except that she was against it, which struck Kathi as rather unexpected. To have a love for mankind, or for any subdivision of it, was either meaningless or downright harmful. One should love people only in their specific individuality, and love had meaning only when it led to fucking. This jarred Kathi: the only person she really loved was Uncle Teddy.
Abstract love, said Wanda, the passionate urge to help people by making the world a better place to live in, was the force that had motivated Adolf Hitler; it was the cause of all inquisitions, pogroms, purges, and wars. The only way to serve humanity, Wanda said, was to fuck another human; the only way to help a disadvantaged minority was to take one of its members to bed.
Kathi caught Wanda in a transitional period, before Wanda had adopted Frank Weston's ideas for revitalizing her style with aggressive showmanship. But even then she was gifted with the rare quality of stage presence or charisma. She was the sort of person who could make a crowded room seem empty by leaving it. She commanded attention; people wanted to believe her. She could have sold cigarettes in a cancer ward. Her audience was sparse. A few of its members walked out, some of them pausing to hurl denunciations at the lecturer-"You'll burn in hell, you honey-tongued whore!" or "Go back to Russia, where you belong!" or "Wash your mouth out with soap!" To which Wanda would sweetly reply, "If someone hates you, you should make love to them." But those who stayed were hypnotized by her beauty and her personality; and none was more thoroughly hypnotized than Kathi.
Wanda's response to her hecklers reinforced Kathi's belief that she was at a religious revival. Mr. Owen, an ardent Episcopalian, had introduced her to the New Testament, and she knew that Christ had said you should love your enemies. She found it an extremely puzzling book, though. When he wasn't talking about loving enemies and turning the other cheek, he was flogging moneychangers, zapping fig trees, suggesting that millstones be put around sinners' necks and urging his disciples to buy swords. Wanda was equally puzzling, so she probably belonged somewhere in the same bag.
At this time, Frank Weston's principal duty was interviewing potential converts. After each lecture, two or three people would always drift up to the stage to ask questions about natural meditation, as Wanda then called her philosophy. They would be urged to contribute to the cause. The larger contributors would be invited to visit the Natural Meditation Center, Wanda's commune, as soon as she found a suitable place to reestablish it; the commune had recently been dismantled by the vice squad in another state. Young and attractive Seekers who had no money were eligible for scholarships that enabled them to visit the Center for nothing. Frank didn't publicize these scholarships, knowing that Wanda's detractors would twist the facts and make them look like bait for a white-slavery operation.
Most of the female Seekers, unfortunately, weren't scholarship material. A statistical profile of the typical female convert would have shown her to be a thirty-five-year-old housewife who had married at eighteen and given birth to a child within the first year of marriage. Her husband, a blue-collar worker, earned between ten and fifteen thousand a year and fucked her infrequently. She was looking for something more out of life, but she didn't know what it was; she only knew that her husband didn't know what it was, either, nor could it be found in church or on television or in her astrology magazines.
But today he was confronted by a girl of sixteen who looked like a younger and even prettier edition of Gina Lollabrigida.
"I have a question," she said. "I hope you won't think it's silly."
"I'm sure I won't. What is it?"
"What's a cock?"
After a long, incredulous pause, Frank said: "Come backstage, and I'll show you," and he did.
Kathi became Wanda's most enthusiastic convert. She not only found out what a wiener looked like that afternoon, she also found out what it felt like and tasted like. She was thrilled, she was dazzled, she was transfigured. She found out what a cunt was, and what that tasted like, too, because Wanda didn't believe in letting mere accidents of gentler get in the way of lovemaking. She could hardly wait to get home and tell Uncle Teddy all about it-an ambition which she blurted out, and which Wanda was able to dissuade her from doing. But she had certainly found a remedy for all the itchings and squirmings and burnings and yearnings that had been tormenting her for so long. It was infinitely better than lying around and rubbing her own slit.
While Teddy was out of town the next day, hot on the scent of a 1954 Studebaker, Kathi brought one of the lifeguards home from the beach club. They were lying in an exhausted pile of flesh on the living-room floor, murmuring sexy noises to each other, when Mrs. Ermold, the elderly housekeeper, walked through the front door and screamed with horror.
CHAPTER NINE
Apprised of the facts upon his return, Teddy did three things: he ordered Kathi to her room, he fired Mrs. Ermold, and he took to his bed in utter despair. When hunger drove him out of bed three days later, he found that Kathi had left home.
Teddy went to his study and stared for a long time at the portrait of Julia over the fireplace. Making sure that the revolver he'd brought from his bedside table was loaded, he pressed the muzzle firmly into his ear and began to squeeze the trigger. The phone rang.
Teddy picked up the receiver and held it to his free ear. "Sculthorpe," he said listlessly.
"Mr. Sculthorpe," said an unknown woman's voice, "this is Wanda Fleurette, of the Center for Natural Meditation. I-"
"Fuck off!" bellowed Teddy, hurling the receiver back in place.
He regretted this as soon as he'd done it. He'd never deliberately hurt another person's feelings in his life. Now, somewhere in the happy outer world, a good woman who had donated her time to raise money for some worthwhile charity had probably been reduced to tears by his outburst: Teddy Sculthorpe's last words.
He put down the revolver and began chomping morosely on a ham sandwich he'd left unfinished. He tried to remember the name of the woman's organization so he could call back and apologize to her, but it eluded him. It must have been familiar to him, otherwise she wouldn't have known the unlisted number of his study phone. He hoped she would call back. If she did, he would pledge a million dollars, and he would write that check before ending his life.
He scowled, remembering that he never carried more than a few hundred dollars in his personal checking account. He would have to make special arrangements, involving meetings with brokers and accountants and tax lawyers, if he wanted to give someone a million dollars. It would take weeks, and all of those people would give him incontrovertible arguments against doing it. Life's complicated tangle was reaching out to clutch him even in his grave.
He absentmindedly picked up the revolver and stuck it in his ear. He was about to pull the trigger when the phone rang again, shocking him into a realization of what he was doing. He put the gun down and picked up the phone.
The same woman said: "Please don't hang up, Mr. Sculthorpe."
"I can't give you a million dollars, goddammit!" he said. "Why can't you leave me alone?"
"That's okay. A few hundred thousand will see me through the weekend," she said, and her irony brought Teddy back to himself.
"Oh. I'm sorry. I was thinking of something else. I'm sorry I hung up on you the way I did."
"I thought that being rich was never having to say you're sorry."
He refused to let his irritation show, but his voice was cold when he said: "My time is limited. Please tell me why you called."
"I wanted to assure you that your niece is all right. We thought you might be worried about her."
He was jolted into sudden guilt. He hadn't given a thought to Kathi. He had failed Julia's trust.
"Who's wet" he demanded with growing alarm, as visions of the Symbionese Liberation Army danced in his head. "Who are you anyway?"
"Wanda Fleurette, of the Center for Natural Meditation."
No matter how hard he thought, that meant nothing. "And where is my niece?"
"I'm at the Venezia Theater in Wesley Grove," she said. "I'll be glad to discuss your problems with you after my eight o'clock lecture, which I'll expect you to attend."
"Are you insane? I don't have any problems. I have nothing to discuss with you, and I don't want to hear your lousy lecture. What have you done with Kathi?"
"More to the point, Mr. Sculthorpe," she purred, "what would you like to do with Kathi?"
She waited, but he could think of no reply to this painfully embarrassing question, and she continued: "The problem we might discuss first is your frustrated desire to fuck your niece. We can solve that problem for you, in a way you wouldn't believe possible. All things are possible, Mr. Sculthorpe, once you surrender yourself utterly to my system of natural meditation. I hope to see you in the audience at eight."
It wasn't until Kathi sought Wanda's protection after running away from home that Wanda found out who her uncle was; and Wanda knew all about Teddy Sculthorpe. A few years before this, a woman named Felicia Sculthorpe had come backstage after one of her lectures. The lecture had concerned what Wanda called the sin of exclusiveness-preferring one person as a sex partner above all others. Felicia hadn't been able to resist telling her about her ex-husband, a man so hung up on his own sister that he couldn't even screw his wife without looking at pictures of the sister.
Felicia had been amused rather than convinced by Wanda's lecture, and she thought that Wanda might be amused by the anecdote. She saw no harm in telling it, since she withheld her name; but Wanda, always on the lookout for rich prospects, took the trouble of finding out who Felicia was. Felicia had mentioned the name of the obscene picture-book, Julia, and Wanda managed to obtain a copy. Felicia remained unconverted-she viewed Wanda's philosophy as "sophomoric drive!"-but Wanda filed the book and the information for possible future use.
Wanda didn't know that Teddy had screwed his sister, but it was obvious that he'd wanted to; and it was also obvious to her, from what Kathi told her of his strange behavior, that he wanted to screw his niece, too. If she could use Kathi as a wedge to convert Teddy, she might get all the money she needed to reestablish her Natural Meditation Center in style.
Wanda dug out her copy of Julia. The resemblance between mother and daughter was striking, and she wondered why she hadn't noticed it when she'd first met Kathi. The book was a photographic essay about a typical day in the life of "Julia S., a fashionable young American in Paris." Accompanying the explicit photos were captions that embodied an elephantine wit. "Julia always starts off the day with a hearty breakfast" was the caption on a photo that showed her kneeling in front of two men and trying to fit both their cocks in her mouth at the same time. "Julia accepts a delivery at the back door" showed her being buggered by a black man in a messenger's cap. "Julia plunges into a busy social whir!" depicted her accommodating no less than eight men at once, with her cunt, her mouth, her hands, her toes, and her armpits.
Wanda's first step was to take photographs recreating the tableaux depicted in the book, with Kathi taking the place of her mother. Eager to follow in her mother's footsteps, the darling girl gave it her all. Then Wanda dusted off her old lecture about exclusiveness and put in a few pointed references to Teddy's problems. She incorporated all of Frank's new ideas in a light-and slide-show specifically designed to send Teddy into a state of deep shock, where he might be manipulated more easily by her forceful personality.
Teddy, of course, could be manipulated by anybody under any circumstances, so it was an example of drastic overkill. When the show was over, he walked down the center aisle like a zombie. Waiting for him, after the rest of the audience had left, were Wanda and three of her most voluptuous Seekers.
Over Teddy's halfhearted protests, the four women proceeded to give him a round-robin blowjob. First one and then another of the voluptuous girls would take his prick into her mouth, licking and slurping and sucking with a dazzling display of the skills that Wanda had taught them.
Sometimes one girl would suck on the head of his cock while two others licked either side. The fourth girl would lick his balls while this was going on. It was more than enough to make Teddy forget all about his insuperable problems, all about the successive shocks that had burst on him that evening. He began to wonder if he really had succeeded in shooting himself that afternoon, and if he was now in heaven.
After a quick dip in the mouths of each of the four girls, Teddy turned to shove it again in Wanda's mouth. He couldn't bear to keep his prick out in the cold an instant longer than he had to. He was certain that this time Wanda was going to eat his come. His stiff meat was so inflamed by their lascivious teasing that he wasn't even sure he could keep himself from coming into the empty air.
He turned hastily and plunged it between the next pair of provocatively upraised lips, presumably Wanda's. He had slipped half the length of his prick inward before he realized that the girl he was fucking in the mouth wasn't Wanda at all. She wasn't blonde. She had dark reddish-brown hair, worn in brow-concealing bangs. Her eyes weren't green, they were smoky gray, with amber flecks in their depths. She wasn't in her mid-twenties, she was ... only ... about ... sixteen....
"Kathi!" It was a strangled scream, a sound torn not so much from his lungs as from the depths of his tormented soul.
"Mmmm," she murmured, rolling her eyes up to stare at him with gleeful malice as she sucked harder.
'You can't do this to me! Stop it-no! No! Get away from me, Julia, or I'll tell!" babbled Teddy.
He struggled, or so he believed. He told himself that he could do nothing to evade this incestuous union. The other girls surrounded him, holding him, pressing him in place with the warm vibrance of their naked flesh. He could summon up no energy to resist them. All of his energy had drained away into the rigid column of flesh thrust deep into his lovely niece's mouth. His prick was doing his thinking for him.
He hardly noticed Kathi's technique. He couldn't have said whether she was as skillful as Wanda or the other girls. Skill had nothing to do with it. This was by far the best, because it was Kathi who was doing it: Kathi, who had usurped Julia's place as the great love of his life, who was more desirable than Julia had ever been.
He could stand only a few seconds of Kathi's swirling, sucking mouth-love. He writhed erratically as his cock began to pump its load into her mouth. He would have fallen to the floor if the other girls hadn't supported him. The sinuous muscles of Kathi's throat writhed under her ivory skin as she swallowed and sucked for more and swallowed again.
Thus came about the conversion of Teddy Sculthorpe, and for a while it seemed that Wanda had landed with her ass in butter. A Foundation for Natural Meditation was established, with Wanda Fleurette as the chairman of its board of directors, and Teddy signed over his estate and his money to it.
He was given the title of President, a post of responsibility similar to the one he'd held as Publisher of the Statewide Press. He installed himself in a small suite of rooms, convenient to a back staircase, on the top floor of his former home. A secretary was given strict orders to discourage those he didn't wish to see, a category of persons including nearly everyone except Wanda and Kathi.
The junkyard was closed down. Wanda insisted that the wrecks be towed away, with the exception of a dozen choice relics that she permitted him to maintain behind the garage. Her followers needed the space to frolic in, she said, nor did she want their uninhibited activities observed by customers of the junk business. Teddy didn't object very strenuously. He was willing to admit that his hobby had grown beyond manageable bounds, and he was glad to see what he thought was the last of the hoodlums who had frequented the junkyard. In this he was disappointed, however. Bob Peterson and some of the other habitues declared themselves converts to Wanda's philosophy and continued to hang around.
Wanda began to branch out. She established another commune at the Sculthorpe summer home on the shores of Horseneck Lake in Cattaquitpiss County, Maine. She wrote a book called Fucking Is Fun! illustrated profusely with scenes of life at the Center, and began selling it by mail. Wanda Fleurette Coloring Books, designed to give children an early grounding in her philosophy and a thorough knowledge of the possibilities of the human body, were another hot item.
Teddy's relatives had always thought he was the kind of Sculthorpe who would finally get religion, but they were scandalized by the faith he'd chosen to embrace. He was worse even than his sister, who'd never made a public spectacle of her promiscuity. They were ignorant of the book in which she'd appeared.
They bided their time, gathered evidence, and sprang, attempting to have Teddy declared mentally incompetent. Even while the board of directors was organizing itself to meet this threat, Bob Peterson revealed himself as an undercover detective for the state police and announced that everyone was under arrest.
Federal officials got in on the fun, too, charging Wanda with innumerable violations of the Mann Act and various postal regulations. All this publicity did no good for Teddy's civil case. Against the Freudians and Jungians that his family arrayed against him, he was able to produce only a couple of Reichian psychiatrists, whose sanity was itself suspect, in his own behalf. He was packed off to a bin and his money reverted to his relatives.
Although she hadn't been a party to the suit, one of the relatives to share in the dismemberment of Teddy's funds was Julia Palmer. She, in fact, got most of Teddy's assets. She had been out of touch with all these events, absorbed in her business: she ran a brothel called The American Way on the Street of the Monkeys in Macao. She didn't need to do that for money, of course; it was a hobby with her, like Teddy's junkyard.
Julia returned to find out what was going on, and she discovered a soul sister in Wanda Fleurette. Julia needed no conversion. She had been actively practicing Wanda's philosophy all her life, but it was a revelation to her to hear all of her basic beliefs put so clearly into words. She was grateful to Wanda, too, for having given her child such an invaluable education and instilling in her such a healthy outlook on life.
Kathi, meanwhile, had been declared an incorrigible child and sentenced to an indeterminate term at a girls' reform school. Julia was able to get her released in her custody: not only because Julia was able to produce the most eulogistic character references for herself that money could buy, but because the correctional authorities were only too glad to get rid of Kathi. They considered her a bad influence on the other inmates.
Backed by Julia's millions, Wanda could have dragged her cases through the courts for twenty years. But she was anxious to get the ordeal over with and be free once again to preach her philosophy, perhaps in some new and less legally vulnerable form. The lawyers that Julia hired were able to get the state charges, which were the more serious ones, dismissed-mainly because the state, having dealt with Kathi, wasn't terribly eager to get Wanda into its women's prison. Wanda had to serve two years in a relatively comfortable federal prison, where she drew up the plans for the F-meter and plotted her next incarnation: as a marriage counselor.
Her philosophy, of course, was dead set against marriage. She planned to break up as many of them as she could.
CHAPTER TEN
Women, Bill Wilson reflected, were very good at communicating disapproval with their bodies. By a certain stiffness in their spine, a certain set of their shoulders, a certain briskness in their step as they walked around a room, they could let you know, better than any words possibly could, what a shit they thought you were.
The source of these reflections was Amy, now emptying ashtrays and tidying magazines in their living room, ashtrays and magazines that had all been emptied or tidied at least once in the past fifteen minutes.
The trouble was, good as they were at this body language, they were never content to leave it at that. Though she was communicating her disapproval eloquently with every move of her body, Amy was shortly going to start giving him a piece of her mind; and her mind was the last thing he wanted a piece of.
He had been trying to read a book, but Amy's brisk progress around the room had been undermining his ability to concentrate. He knew this when he realized that he was setting out to read the same sentence for the third consecutive time. He closed the book with a sigh and began to wonder if he could slip out to the corner bar, pleading some other errand, before the storm broke.
He made an elaborate pretext of consulting his watch. "Damn," he said. "I almost forgot. I've got to go and see Gruber."
Gruber was the darkroom technician who did Bill's color work for him.
"You see Gruber every day," said Amy, with the air of a prosecuting attorney dismissing a clumsy subterfuge.
"You can't be too careful," Bill said. "Especially with the pix for the oil company. Look at Cartier-Bresson. He hangs out in the darkroom every step of the way, telling the lab men just what he wants done."
Amy looked at him as if she wanted to tell him that he wasn't Cartier-Bresson, but she had the decency not to. Her look said it, though.
Bill knew he was a lousy liar. He composed his face into a mask of injured innocence, although he knew that Amy knew this expression indicated he'd been lying.
"I want to talk to you," she said bluntly, not even bothering to deal with the Gruber story.
"Well, when I come back," he suggested vaguely, getting out of his chair and looking around indecisively for his jacket.
"Perhaps I won't be here when you come back."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. Bill, I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you now."
Bill sighed and sat down with a show of saintly patience. He would have greatly preferred to conduct this conversation with a couple of drinks under his belt, but he saw that that was not to be.
"You've been to that place again, haven't you," she stated. "I saw the appointment card in your wallet."
His self-control was sorely tried. He was vexed that she should refer to Wanda's office as "that place," as if she were referring to some house of ill repute; doubly vexed because, although she didn't know it, Wanda's office could have been regarded as just such a place; and vexed again because she'd been poking around in his wallet. In the old days he would have met this assault with a brisk counter-attack. But Wanda's philosophy taught that a soft answer turneth away wrath; that the war between the sexes could be ended by unilateral disarmament.
"Yes, I have," he said.
"I thought I made my feelings quite clear on that subject," she said.
He looked up. She'd perched herself on a footstool a few feet from his chair. She was dressed in the jeans and work shirt and sandals she usually wore when she had no place to go. Even in that outfit, she used to be able to make his heart flop over. Today he found himself looking at her with detachment. It was a new feeling, or perhaps a new lack of one, and he wondered what was happening.
"Amy, we need help. I love you. I want to stay married to you. But this marriage isn't satisfactory for either one of us, the way it is now."
He frowned. The last statement was true enough, but he wondered if the others were.
"Help?" Amy demanded. "Does it help to go and talk about us to some stranger? To tell her all our secrets? Don't you have any pride-any loyalty to your own wife?"
That was laying it on a bit thick, certainly. The only real secret they had was the fact that she didn't want to fuck. It took an even greater effort, this time, for Bill to retain his composure.
"Amy, you make it sound as if I'm going around collaring strangers on street-corners and telling them that my wife eats crackers in bed," he said, trying to sound jollier than he felt. "This woman is a professional marriage counselor. She's heard it all. It's the same thing as a shrink, or a priest."
"Or a lawyer," she added pointedly, a brittle glitter in her eye.
"Now, don't start that, sweetie. Please. The only problem with this thing is that you're not going too. Dr. Fleurette-" he always made a point of using that title with Amy, even though Wanda took it lightly "-is only hearing one side of the story. She's given me-well, a certain peace of mind. Calmed me down. Improved my outlook. But she really can't get at the root of the problem unless she talks to you too. Unless you talk to her."
Amy looked away, brooding. Some of the starch of disapproval had gone out of her posture.
"You do seem less ... aggressive," she admitted grudgingly.
That was the sorest trial yet to his self-control: she was complimenting him on his lack of sexual interest in her. As he felt the pressure of blood rising to his face, he understood the cartoon convention of characters whose hats pop off their heads in anger. Fortunately, he wasn't wearing a hat.
But he succeeded in telling himself that her concession, no matter how offensive, was still a concession. He believed that his tone sounded reasonable when he said: "You see? She's all ready done me a world of good. You're not happy, Amy. I know that. Why don't you give her a chance? Just talk to her. You don't have to tell her anything, and you aren't obliged to follow any advice she might give you. Just meet her."
She looked at him speculatively for a moment. "There's something disgusting about it," she said. "Talking to people about their ... sex lives. Playing God with other people's marriages. All right. I'll go and see her. Just out of curiosity, you understand."
The shift was so sudden and unexpected that Bill felt a touch of disappointment. He was left with half a dozen good arguments that he'd had no chance of using. He knelt beside the footstool and gave Amy a hug. She stiffened perceptibly. Thinking about it in Wanda's office the next day, he began to wonder if the projected meeting between her and Amy was such a good idea after all. Perhaps what Amy really needed were the attentions of a psychiatrist. Her morbid fear of sex and Wanda's total enthusiasm for it suggested no middle ground for possible discussion. Amy would be repelled, horrified, disgusted. The inevitable result would be that he would have to make an absurd choice: between his marriage and his marriage counselor.
He was pretending to read a magazine, but most of his attention was surreptitiously fixed on Kathi Palmer, subbing for her mother today behind the reception desk. He'd heard the outlines of her strange biography, but this was the first time he'd beheld her in the flesh.
The flesh was quite impressive. Wanda's appeal was that of a radiant goddess, a perfection more than mortal, an angel come to earth-while Kathi was more obviously a native of that planet. "Earthy" was the word for her beauty. Her every movement suggested a total awareness of her body and its sensuous possibilities, the kind of natural awareness that cats have. There was a certain sullenness about the set of her full lips when her face was in repose, as if she resented the waste of time not spent in violent sexual activity.
If he gave up his marriage counselor, it would mean giving up Kathi, too. As a fanatical adherent of Wanda's teachings, she wouldn't be able to refuse him.
He felt a twinge of annoyance with himself. He was beginning to get an erection from his speculations about Kathi. Talking with Amy last night, he hadn't felt anything for her except irritation and occasional anger. Now he was being aroused by a stranger.
Now that he thought about it, that was the extent of the emotions he'd felt toward Amy since he'd started his course of therapy with Wanda: irritation and anger, interspersed with periods of boredom. He had once thought Amy the most desirable-no, more than that, the only desirable girl in the world. Now he desired Wanda. And he desired Kathi. Amy seemed hardly in the running any more.
For the first time since his initial visit, he had serious thoughts about abandoning this course of "treatment." He'd come here with the intention of patching up his marriage, and now that no longer seemed to matter-thanks to Wanda's influence. The only thing that mattered, the only thing that kept him coming back for more, like a carrot held before a donkey as bait, was the prospect of getting into Wanda's pants.
He realized that he'd been staring at Kathi, no longer quite seeing her, while these thoughts had been churning in his head. Now she was returning his stare, smiling. By the standards of this place, she was dressed demurely enough, in a ruffled white blouse and short red skirt, but no costume short of a nun's habit could have really minimized the sensuous curves of her delicious body.
"Penny for your thoughts," she said.
"I was just thinking that you'd look sexy even in a nun's habit," he said.
"I thought you were thinking something like that. I guess you're ready for your session."
She stood up, beckoning him toward a far door. Bill never knew what to expect at one of these sessions, except that some form of sex would be explored-never yet, unfortunately, with Wanda. She usually stood in the background, taking notes or giving pointers, while he engaged in sex with one of her assistants or one of the other clients.
He'd progressed beyond the use of the F-meter. It had been a strange experience, fucking Julia while holding on to those two tomato-cans, as he'd been required to do in his second session. He'd determined that the F-meter measured the galvanic skin response. That was one of the physical responses measured by a polygraph, or lie-detector, and apparently it did have some correlation with emotional activity. He believed, however, that Wanda used it merely in order to make fools of her clients and put them in a properly humiliated state of mind in which they would be more receptive to her authority.
"Mmm, you are ready for your session," Kathi said when he came alongside her, and she gave his hard prick a quick tickle before the shock made him jerk away.
She pouted. "You have problems. Don't you like girls to touch you there?" she asked.
"Of course I do. It's just that you surprised me. It was unexpected, that's all."
"Defense mechanisms. Body armor," she said darkly. "You have to work at breaking all that down, so that you feel completely free with other people."
This little lecture annoyed Bill, who was already in a bad mood. When she turned away, he slipped his hand into her crotch from behind and gave her a squeeze. But he got no revenge that way: she merely looked over her shoulder, smiling at him, and made him feel foolish.
"You see?" she said, rubbing it in.
He'd been keeping himself bottled up too much recently, and now he couldn't resist the impulse to lash out: "Has it ever occurred to you that it might be anesthetized from overuse?"
He saw that he couldn't throw her off stride, no more than he could have done that to Wanda. "On the contrary," she said, "the more I use it, the more responsive it gets. It feels very good now, to have you holding it like that. But why don't we go inside, so I can take my panties off? It'll feel even better then."
Bill forgot about his attempts to regain his self-respect. Perhaps, as Amy said, he really had no pride, because now the idea of getting Kathi out of her panties took precedence over everything else in his mind. He'd been disappointed too often by Wanda to dare hope that this juicy little morsel would be his sex partner for the after noon's session. Even now he tried to keep some restraint on his hopes, knowing that Wanda might have other plans for him. But he couldn't keep any restraint on his prick, which bulged up to its full thickness and rigidity at the prospect of fucking Kathi. He didn't jump this time when she tickled it again.
"That's better," she said, walking to the door she'd indicated earlier as their destination.
Wanda had several "consulting rooms," as she called them, all of them done up in one way or another as bedrooms. Today he was ushered into the red-draped room, reminiscent of a Victorian brothel, where his first session had taken place.
He forgot about Kathi momentarily, because Wanda was waiting for them. She was lying naked on one of the couches, her pose perhaps consciously suggesting Goya's Naked Maja, with the exception that she was smoking a cigarette in a holder.
"Take your pants off, Bill, before you bust out of them," Kathi suggested.
She hardly needed to suggest it, because Bill had come to anticipate spending these sessions in the nude. Sometimes Wanda disrobed, sometimes she didn't, but he always did; he felt that this was another of her ways of gaining the psychological upper hand. The most important way she did this, of course, was in persisting to refuse to let him fuck her. He wondered if he would be able to break her hold over him once that happened. He doubted it.
As he draped his clothes over a convenient chair, he saw that Kathi had already removed hers. She stood waiting for him, her pose slightly hipshot and openly provocative.
"Do you like her, Bill?" Wanda asked, with a slightly proprietary air, as if she were showing off some newly acquired and impressively valuable possession.
"Obviously," Kathi purred before he could answer, her eyes fixed on his big, bare prick.
"Come over here, children, so I can get a good look at you," Wanda said.
"Sometimes I think she likes watching people fuck better than she likes doing it," Kathi murmured as she led Bill to the couch.
Bill wondered if that was meant to be a barb, but Wanda didn't take it as such. She stretched back on the couch and laughed. By what he'd learned from all his experience with Wanda, Kathi's statement was probably accurate.
As if they'd rehearsed the scene or at least prepared it-and Bill was sure they had-Kathi slid a straight chair in front of Wanda's couch and directed him to sit on it. He was hardly settled before Kathi was lowering herself over his upright prick, gliding it up into her cunt with her hand.
"Your fantasy from the first session, Bill," Wanda said.
Except, Bill reflected, that Wanda wasn't in it: but that consideration hardly mattered as the luscious teenager impaled herself on his hot prong and slid, wiggling, downward. She was wet and wide open already, demonstrating either a high degree of control over her pussy or else, more likely, a perpetual case of hot pants, from all that he'd heard about her.
He licked his dry lips with an even drier tongue as he feasted his eyes on the nude girl straddling his knees. Her face was slightly flushed with sexual heat, her lovely chestnut hair was slightly in disarray, with wisps of it falling carelessly over her forehead. Her long lashes were lowered on her rosy cheeks as she looked down to watch her crotch come slowly into closer union with the big, upright cock slipping into it.
His eyes wandered over the lovely curves of her body, noting how her golden tan shaded to ivory at the outline of the brief bikini she must have been wearing in the sun this summer. The whiteness of the skin at her loins contrasted sharply with the darkness of the fluffy bush on her cunt. Looking down beneath the curly shrub, he could see her clit peeking out, just as red and swollen as it could possibly be.
He held her luscious ass in his hands, guiding her down now, even though she really needed no guidance.
"Ooh, you're just filling me up already, and I haven't even got all of it yet!" Kathi exclaimed as she reached back to inspect the root of his prick still not sheathed in her slushy hole.
"Keep trying," he murmured, and he exerted pressure on her smooth hips until every last inch of his prick was buried in her pussy.
Without waiting for him to do anything, Kathi began moving up and down on his hard cock, gritting her teeth with her furious efforts. She humped up and down faster and faster, slapping her ass against his thighs every time she came down hard on his stiff rod.
His eyes were fixed on the sway and quiver of her big breasts. He drew her toward him until he could reach one of them with his mouth. He sucked in just as much of it as he could and went to work on the pink nipple with his tongue. At the same time he ground his hips around in slow rotations while Kathi pumped herself up and down on the hot column of flesh that filled her up the middle.
He kept switching his attentions from one of her big tits to the other. She arched her back to shove them right out and present them for his licking and sucking. She flipped her hard nipples back and forth against his face, giggling.
Suddenly he felt a new and entirely different kind of touch on his prick. He came to the ecstatic realization that Wanda was leaning forward from the couch and licking his cock whenever it appeared from the depths of the teenager's hot cunt. When it was buried inside Kathi's pussy, she devoted her attention to his balls, licking them all over and kissing them. It was the closest he'd come yet to getting a blowjob from the exasperating blonde, and it excited him even more than Kathi's fucking.
The combination of sensations was more than he could stand. He cried out as he felt his self-control dissolving, and Kathi gasped as the streaming, shooting pillar of flesh splurged its hot gism up into her pussy. Wanda buried her face into the unctuous junction of their crotches and licked them madly, sucking up the excess of juice that squeezed out of Kathi's pussy from Bill's erupting cock. At just the right moment, she inserted her hand into the squirming, rocking mass of soft flesh and wet pubic hair and clasped the teenager's swollen clit between two fingers. She gave it a rub that sent Kathi right over the edge to dissolve in the grip of a climax.
Bill and Kathi both wanted to keep hammering their bones against each other, but the rapid violence of their fucking and the explosiveness of their orgasms had left them without muscular strength or coordination. They sagged in each other's arms.
"Your cock tastes good, Bill," Wanda purred. "I think I'll have to start kissing it more often."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Marriage counseling: the whole concept was degrading, thought Amy Wilson. The idea of telling some third party all about one's most intimate thoughts and feelings, to describe to them the shameful and disgusting things that went on in the bedroom-it made her physically ill to think of it.
Bill had been trying to get her to go to the offices of Life Adjustment Sciences, Inc., for several weeks now. When she'd first heard about his visit to the place, she'd been on the verge of leaving him. To think that he'd aired their private life to some stranger!
But then her attitude underwent a change, largely because Bill was no longer bothering her for sex as often as he usually did. This decline in his maniacal sex-drive seemed to be connected to his increasingly frequent visits to the counselor.
The counseling couldn't be all bad, if it did that for Bill.
He always came home with such glowing reports about the counselor, too. To hear him tell it, she was a combination of Socrates, Wonder Woman, and Marilyn Monroe, although he never told her specifically what it was that Dr. Fleurette was doing for him. He insisted that she would have to go and see for herself.
With this two-pronged attack-nagging her and piquing her curiosity-he finally extracted a promise from her to go and see Dr. Fleurette. The fact that the counselor was a woman was probably the deciding factor. She could never have gone to see some man who thought he knew it all. The idea of Bill talking about their intimate lives with another dirty man would have been completely intolerable. She certainly would have left Bill if he'd been talking about their sex life with another man. They were all so coarse and gross and fleshy and lustful and dirty and smelly and disgusting.
Amy was embarrassed and terribly nervous when she entered the office, but she was partly reassured by the sight of the sweet young girl behind the desk. She was dressed demurely in a crisp white blouse with ruffles down the front. She wouldn't have been out of place sitting in a classroom of one of the more elegant eastern colleges, and she looked no more than eighteen. Amy would never have guessed in a million years that Kathi Palmer had spent the past eighteen months working energetically in her mother's brothel, The American Way, as a sort of post-graduate addition to what she'd learned from Wanda.
"Good afternoon," said Kathi, her voice a smoky contralto.
"Hello. I'm Mrs. Wilson. Amy Wilson. My husband, Bill..."
"Of course, Amy," said Kathi, her face brightening. "I've been looking forward to meeting you. You don't mind if I call you Amy, do you? My name's Kathi."
Amy was taken slightly aback by this. It seemed rather effusive and overly familiar for someone who seemed to be merely the receptionist. She wasn't offended, though: just surprised.
"Of course not, Kathi," Amy said, noticing what lovely legs the other girl had when she stood up behind her desk. They were truly spectacular legs, long and perfectly molded. She felt a twinge of envy. She was slightly surprised, though, because hot pants had gone out of style some time ago.
"We're very informal around here," Kathi said, and Amy didn't know whether she was talking about her outfit or her greeting, so Amy just smiled.
"Bill hasn't told me much-"
"He's making wonderful progress! Imagine, he's already on the verge of becoming a Probationary, after only three weeks."
"Hm," said Amy, who didn't know what she was talking about.
Kathi had seized her arm during her last effusion, and she displayed no evidence of an intention to let it go. She was half guiding and half propelling Amy toward a door on the other side of the room.
"Bill's told you about the physical exam?" Kathi asked.
"Well," Amy said, and she felt her cheeks burning, "yes."
"That's good. I hope you don't mind if I do it, do you? See, I'm not really a nurse-"
"Oh, please!" Amy said, embarrassing herself with the unexpected intensity of her own response. "I mean-I feel at ease with you."
"That's wonderful," Kathi said, hugging her arm.
Amy felt reassured. Bill hadn't given her any details, he'd just told her that there would be a physical examination, but she'd dreaded the idea. It had almost prevented her from coming here at all. Oddly, she was almost looking forward to having Kathi do it. She really liked Kathi, she realized. Bill had never even mentioned this girl to her. Probably a crude, coarse man wouldn't even notice what a sweet and delicately lovely and truly sympathetic girl she was. He probably just thought of her as that broad with the big bazooms, or something equally vulgar. They certainly were big. One of them was pressing companionably against her arm.
Her mind slipping naturally from breasts to motherhood to marriage, Amy asked: "Are you married, Kathi?"
"God, no," Kathi said with a touch of vehemence, and Amy thought that she felt a faint shudder of distaste flow through the girl's truly lovely body.
"Don't tell me you disapprove!"
"Amy, it's just ... well ... men, you know?"
"Oh, I know, I know," Amy sighed. "But it seems so odd, here you are in the marriage counseling business, and you disapprove of marriage Doesn't that seem-well, a contradiction?"
"Not at all. A psychiatrist can counsel a schizophrenic without approving of schizophrenia, can't he?"
"That sounds logical," Amy said.
Kathi opened the door and they passed into, surprisingly, a bedroom. It was done in beige and pink and white, with frilly white curtains on the windows and a canopied bed. It was a thoroughly feminine bedroom, the sort that Amy had always wanted to have: with no dirty jockey shorts on the floor or cigarettes in the ashtrays or beer cans on the night table.
"What a nice room," Amy said.
"We try to anticipate the taste of our clients," Kathi said.
Amy wondered what that meant. Kathi left her to go to a closet. Amy stood, ill at ease now that the younger girl was no longer clinging to her. Kathi returned with hangers.
"Now, if you'll just...?"
"Take off my clothes?" Amy completed, and, unexpectedly, she giggled. Kathi giggled. For some unknown reason, this was fun. Amy hadn't felt so giggly and girlish and unreasonably happy in a long time, not since ... not since she'd been married, as a matter-of-fact.
Amy was wearing a simple fawn suit that went well, she thought, with her slightly darker hair. Kathi put her jacket and skirt and blouse on hangers as she slipped out of them. It was amazing, but she didn't feel at all embarrassed, even though she was wearing nothing but her pantyhose and her white bra.
"Let me unhook your bra," Kathi suggested.
"My...?" Amy said, and she gulped. She hadn't been expecting that at all, but she couldn't summon up the nerve to question it. Instead she turned and felt Kathi deftly unhook her bra. Well, why not? Amy thought. She had nothing to be ashamed of, really. She wondered if Kathi would admire her body. What a silly thought! She slipped out of her bra, and Kathi took it.
Amy turned shyly, her arms folded over her breasts. Kathi waited. Amy felt a hot flush spreading all the way down to her naked breasts.
"Really ... I mean ... really!" Amy said, annoyed with the squeaky note that entered her voice. "What kind of an examination is this going to be?"
"A thorough one," Kathi said mildly, with a glint in her gray eyes that Amy thought somehow mischievous.
Amy lowered her eyes. There was no way around it. She couldn't slip out of her pantyhose without uncovering her breasts. Her arms moved down jerkily as she rolled her pantyhose down over her hips and bared her taffy-colored muff.
"What pretty tits you have!"
Amy's jaw dropped. "What did you say?"
"I said, you have very pretty tits."
"Well. Thank you," said Amy, struggling unsuccessfully to repress a smile. "But ... that's not a very nice word."
Kathi laughed at her. Amy tried hard to take offense at this, but she found herself giggling. "Tits," she said, and she giggled some more.
"Where did you grow up?" Kathi asked.
"I had pretty strict parents," Amy admitted.
"I was brought up oddly, too," Kathi said. "I didn't even know what a cunt was until I was sixteen."
Really, Amy thought, she had to put a stop to this. There was no telling where it would end. But she found it impossible to reprove Kathi while keeping a straight face. She sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled her pantyhose from her legs. She was completely naked now. She crossed her legs and covered her breasts again.
"Now, how on earth am I going to examine your pussy if you hide it?" Kathi demanded.
"My ... pussy!" Amy gasped.
"Oh, I know what's the matter with you. I'm making you shy and nervous because you're all naked and I'm fully dressed. We can fix that. Then you won't have anything to be shy about."
"Wait!" Amy cried. "Don't!"
But it was too late. Kathi was out of her blouse and her hot pants in two seconds flat, and she wasn't wearing a stitch underneath them. She raised her hands as if demonstrating that she had nothing at all to hide. She certainly didn't.
"Now, doesn't that make you feel better?" Kathi asked, smiling encouragingly.
"Well...." Amy said, not at all sure that it did.
"You're really being unfair, Amy. You're getting yourself a good look at me, but you've got yourself all twisted up like a pretzel. It's a shame, too, because you have such a lovely body."
"I do?" Amy asked timidly.
"Of course you do! Beauty isn't anything to be ashamed of, you know."
Very slowly, Amy disentangled herself, watching Kathi nervously. Kathi's eyes seemed to have gone very soft. They held hers. She felt strange. She tore her eyes away from Kathi's, but she still felt strange.
While her eyes were averted, Kathi had taken something from the drawer of the bedside table. She looked up. Kathi was holding a thick cylinder of white plastic. One end was tapered to a rounded point.
"What's that?"
"Now, just trust me, Amy," the younger girl said softly, and Amy found it even harder to tear her eyes away this time. She seemed to be sinking into them. She felt dizzy and weak.
Kathi knelt in front of her, gazing up. Her gray eyes held amber flecks in their depths. She was conscious of Kathi's hands on her knees, applying gentle, outward pressure. She knew that her legs were moving apart, but whether she was moving them or whether Kathi was pushing them she did not know.
"Don't," Amy whispered.
"You want me to."
"Yes. No! Don't. Please don't do this to me."
The shining helmet of Kathi's reddish brown hair sank between her thighs. She felt a soft, wet touch on her cunt. She gasped. Her hands knotted in tight fists. She whimpered, flinging her head from side to side in violent negation. She felt tears on her cheeks. Kathi licked delicately, like a cat lapping cream, subjecting her cunt to an excruciating agony of pleasure. She spread her legs wider.
"Eat me, Kathi. Eat my cunt!"
The scream echoed in Amy's ears. It took her a moment to realize that she had screamed, to realize what she had screamed. Kathi lapped, steady and insistent, working her tongue deeper with each stroke, parting the pink petals, electrifying Amy's tingling clitoris. She flung herself back on the bed, groaning, trying to pretend that none of this was happening. Kathi kept licking.
Kathi's tongue fluttered against her clitoris like a butterfly dancing on a flower. It stayed there for a long time. Then Amy felt a new sensation, the pressure of something hard at the lips of her cunt. It pressed inward, pushing the lips apart, squeezing them wide.
"No," Amy whimpered, "no, Kathi, please."
Kathi slid up onto the bed with the velvet grace of a serpent and lay half beside her and half on top of her. She could feel the warmth of Kathi's moist breath against her throat when she spoke.
"It's all right," Kathi said. "It's all right. Don't you want me to fuck you?"
Amy gripped her tight, seeking her lips. Kathi's kiss was soft and tender and sweet, not at all like ... that other. Her lips were yielding, her tongue slithered and probed. The hard fullness at her cunt increased, and Amy gave in to it, sought it. Her hips began to rock.
"Yes, fuck me," she whispered. "Fuck me, Kathi."
She felt her cunt squeezing wider as the shaft grew thicker, but she knew that she could accept anything that Kathi gave her. The end tickled the top of her womb before Kathi pulled it out, then pushed it in, pulled it out, then pushed it in, steadily building up to a more and more rapid tempo. Each slide was easier, slimier, more electrifying.
Kathi's lips were at her breasts, her tongue massaging the tips to delicious hardness. She arched her back, rubbing them against Kathi's insistent mouth.
Kathi stopped kissing her tits. She felt the younger girl moving, shifting her position. It didn't seem to matter. The hard thickness was still pumping in and out of her cunt, syncopating the rhythms of her own undulating pelvis, and that was all that mattered.
Amy opened her eyes. It was so close that it took her a moment to realize what she was looking at, the pink folds and ridges out-lined with fur. Little droplets of dew glittered in the dark tangles of hair. Kathi knelt above her, leaning forward on her elbows, her knees straddling Amy's head.
"Do you want...?" Amy whispered.
But Kathi said nothing. The decision would be Amy's alone. Kathi continued to drive the shaft in and out with her flailing wrist, and now Amy felt a new and even more exciting touch as Kathi lowered her face and began tonguing her clitoris.
Unable to resist any longer, Amy gripped Kathi's smooth, taut buttocks in both hands and pulled her crotch down almost violently against her mouth. She burrowed into it like a hungry animal. She had no thought for technique or style or anything else but the greedy urge to feel those slick pink surfaces and taste the sweet salt of Kathie's ooze.
Kathi seemed to love it any way she got it. She pushed down, rubbing even harder against Amy's sucking mouth, swabbing her nose and lips and chin with her slimy pussy. She redoubled her efforts with the plastic dildo, shoving harder and deeper and faster while her tongue tickled Amy's clit at a breathtaking pace.
Amy had experienced orgasms before. They had come almost against her will. But they had been pallid, bloodless things compared to the surging, symphonic tide building up now in her loins. She screamed against the muffling hair of Kathi's pussy as the surges began to crest and catch fire and turn her to glowing incandescence.
She felt Kathi moving away from her. She tried to make a grab for the voluptuous young brunette, but Kathi was too quick. Amy opened her eyes and then she screamed.
She saw that she had been viciously duped. Kathi had been blocking her line of vision, keeping her occupied, giving her the illusion that she was being stroked with a plastic dildo-while all the while something entirely different had been going on.
"No, no, no!" Amy wailed.
"Don't fight it, Amy. It feels just as good as it did before, doesn't it?" soothed Kathi, and she slid up and kissed Amy on the lips before the older girl could reply. "It must feel even better, because it's living flesh and blood, not some hunk of plastic."
Amy fought against the idea, but Kathi's kiss confused her; and so did the steady pumping of the hard rod that filled her up the middle. Against her will, she felt a return of the soaring feelings that had driven her up to ecstasy only moments before.
While Kathi had been distracting her with her lesbian lovemaking, a man had crept up on them-apparently from concealment in the closet. What Amy had felt pushing into her cunt had not been Kathi's plastic rod at all, but the man's hard cock as he stood at the edge of the bed, hidden from her sight by Kathi's nude body. She should have known the difference. After all, it was her own husband.
Amy wanted to tell them what she thought of them both, but she couldn't collect her thoughts.
They were shattered to a million fragments by the inferno of orgasmic delights erupting throughout her body. She could only sob while she clutched at Kathi and Bill continued to screw her with steadily increasing speed.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bill had to say one thing about Wanda's methods ; they were original. Whether they worked or not was another matter. Amy had been wandering around in a kind of stunned state, like the last survivor of an atomic war, after her first session. She'd been docile and submissive at home, putting up none of her usual objections when he suggested sex, but she seemed to be in a state of shock.
He was, too, when it came to that. He'd had no idea that Amy was horrified only of sex with men, that she'd been repressing lesbian urges all these years. He'd told Wanda everything he knew about Amy and all the details of their home life, and Wanda must have picked up her clues from there; but what they were, he had no idea. He was almost capable of crediting Wanda Fleurette with supernatural powers.
Maybe Amy had been docile because Kathi had been coming to visit them frequently. It was Wanda's belief that Amy needed intensive counseling, and Kathi's visits were in the nature of house calls. Bill didn't know quite whether to view this from his own standpoint as having an orgy with two women or sharing his wife with another person. It was fun, but it made him uneasy. The visits that Kathi made to his apartment while he was away at work made him even more uneasy.
He was discussing these things with Julia Palmer while waiting for his next session with Wanda. He had just made the mistake of asking Julia whether she thought Amy could be "cured," and Julia was smiling indulgently.
"Cured of what, Bill?"
"Well, of lesbianism, I guess."
"You ought to know better than that by now," Julia said. "Ideally, you ought to be able to make love to anybody, regardless of sex. If Amy really derives enjoyment only from other women, then we have to work through that desire, possibly even intensify it in the process. What you really ought to worry about curing is your own jealousy."
"I guess I'll never get to be a Perfect," Bill said glumly.
Bill had reached an intellectual acceptance of Wanda's philosophy, but he had not yet attained an emotional one. He believed that her ideas were right; he wanted to persevere along the upward path of instruction; but he was distressed by the knowledge that success would mean sharing Amy with the whole world. He couldn't very well practice Wanda's philosophy while she sat home with her knitting, not honestly, anyway; and total, brutal honesty was one of the cornerstones of Wanda's teachings.
Bill realized that his remark seemed to have made Julia as gloomy as he felt. She hadn't said anything for some time and was staring off into space. He wondered if she was reacting this way because she agreed with him.
"What's on your mind?" he asked.
"Oh ... just thinking of people who ought to be Perfects, but who aren't. Who never can be. My brother Teddy, specifically."
He knew all about Teddy Sculthorpe, because Julia had told him. Julia had visions of cosmic grandeur for the future of Wanda's ideas. She was firmly convinced that Wanda Fleurette would one day be revered as the founder of a mainstream religion; and, when that day came, that Teddy Sculthorpe would rank high in the canon of saints as an early martyr.
"Can't you send him a correspondence course in the bughouse or something?" asked Bill, not consciously trying to be funny. "Let him work up his credits that way?"
"Oh, he's out," Julia said. "He's getting an allowance from the estate, on the condition that he stays away from Kathi. He doesn't even know where we are, poor lamb. If he did, he'd be with us in five minutes."
"Then why don't you tell him? What's the problem?"
"Are you kidding? The family keeps us under surveillance, just waiting for a little slip. Some days it seems that half the people who come in here looking for marriage counseling are really private detectives trying to get some dirt on me or Wanda. They'd love to prove that I was crazy, too, financing an illegal or immoral operation, so they could arrange to get my money away from me. Fortunately I'd still have some private investments in the Orient, but it would be quite a blow. We don't even dare smoke dope around here anymore."
"I don't see how having Teddy around would make things any different."
"Because he'd want to take up right where he left off, fucking Kathi again. Me too, probably. Wouldn't that sound nice in court?"
"Well, you could always try not doing it," Bill suggested.
"What, and repress his desires?" Julia demanded, scandalized by this heresy.
Bill was grateful for the timely entrance at this point of Wanda Fleurette.
"Looks like a lively discussion," she observed.
"Bill was just despairing of ever becoming a Perfect," Julia said pointedly.
"Nonsense," Wanda laughed. "You'll be there before you know it, Bill. Come along now for your session."
He followed her, reflecting that he would have been wagging his tail if he'd had one. Thus far his instruction had meant merely learning how to let Wanda Fleurette tie him around her little finger. Lately her infuriating bouts of cockteasing had escalated to "sensitivity" sessions, where he was allowed to fondle her and stroke her and grope her and even kiss her-but nothing more.
She would always let him relieve the pressure of these sessions by fucking someone else, that was one redeeming social value they possessed. It was a different girl every time, sometimes one of the therapists and sometimes one of the Seekers. But it was Wanda he really wanted.
Nevertheless he was curious to see who would share the session with them today. He would have been quite pleased with the assortment he'd already sampled if it weren't for his maddening desire for Wanda. That, he knew, was the sin of exclusiveness.
She led him into the bedroom where he'd played that trick on Amy-which, to tell the truth, he wasn't the least bit ashamed of. He felt that he'd somehow gotten even with her by making her come so flamboyantly. He knew that the idea of getting even with someone through sex was another sin in Wanda's book.
He was puzzled to note that they were alone in the bedroom. Wanda wasted no time in discarding her simple white skirt and blouse and bouncing down on the edge of the bed, flouncing her long blonde hair behind her.
"What are we going to do today?" Bill asked suspiciously.
Wanda's green eyes glinted with mischief. She dragged the suspense out almost unbearably before she said: "We're going to fuck."
"Youmeawit?"
She nodded. "You've reached the next plateau, Bill. You're ready for it."
"You're damned right I am!" he groaned, nearly tearing his clothes off in his haste to get out of them.
He sat on the bed beside her, and she gazed up into his eyes with an intensity of desire that was almost frightening. She seemed to smolder in a way that he had never thought the cool and self-controlled Wanda could ever smolder. He felt himself beginning to drown in the green depths of her eyes. His hand slid upward to hold one of her big breasts and trace the rounded firmness of its contour while their mouths met in a dizzying kiss.
He groaned with pleasure as she began stroking his bare cock with one finger. Just her nearness and her kiss and the feel of her breast had produced an instant erection.
"Don't waste any time, Bill," she murmured. "Just fuck me."
She disengaged from his embrace and smiled as she lay back, stretching her long, lithe body on the bed. Slowly she parted her thighs, spreading them until he could see the pink lips of her pussy through the fine-spun sunlight of her pubic hair. Her hips began to move in slow undulations, as if she wanted to get off to a running start before he even inserted his prick in her cunt.
He knelt on the bed between her knees and slid his hands over the tight golden skin of her hips. Her eyes were fixed in hungry fascination on his big cock as it thrust forth above her belly.
Raising her dimpled knees, she exposed the wet lips of her cunt even more as she let her thighs droop apart. Her eyes left his prick for a moment to look up into his eyes, and once again he was almost scared by the unashamed hunger he saw there. Apparently those preliminary sessions of frustration had frustrated her as much as they had him, if not even more.
He felt clumsy with nervousness and desire as he fumbled his hands under her ass to cup the firm cheeks. He pulled her up slightly and felt his cock sliding into the wet clasp of her clinging pussy.
"All the way, Bill, all the way in-hurry!" she cried. "I can't wait anymore-I've got to have it-I want to fuck!"
He silenced her by pressing his mouth hard against the silky softness of her lips and thrusting his tongue inside. Regardless of what she told him, he'd waited so long for this ineffable moment that he wanted to relish every inch of the soft, inward slide into the firm juiciness of her cunt. He wanted to take it slow and easy and immerse his cock gradually into the scalding bath of her cunt-juice. She wiggled and humped and bucked as she desperately tried to speed up the action, but he gripped her ass firmly and retained control of what they were doing.
He pulled her luscious ass upward as he pushed his cock inward, ever deeper. She lifted her long legs and wrapped them around his back lifting her pussy even more to his inward thrust.
Now he was all the way in. His coarse pubic hair was mingled with her finer fluff in an indistinguishable tangle, his balls were pressing hard against her asshole, and there didn't seem to be another fraction of a millimeter of the thick root that he could possibly squeeze into her slippery cunt.
He broke off the kiss at last. She seemed dazed when she looked up at him.
"Any way you want to do it," she conceded. "Just do it."
Despite her words, she again began humping away, bouncing her hips up and down on the ruffled, frilly bed. She pushed her cunt up and down around his hard cock, making the bedsprings squeal in protest as she picked up the tempo and he followed it. He fitted the rhythm of his inward and outward thrusts to her humping. The soft walls of her delicious tool warmer pressed inward and fitted themselves to his cock like a warm wet glove around a finger.
He bent down and touched his lips to the pink halo of her hard nipple, licking around it with the tip of his tongue in a slow, circular motion. She grunted and twisted as her sexiness reached an even higher plateau of intensity. She flung her head back in an ecstasy of cock-crazed lust and arched her spine like a bow as she tried to jam her big tit into his mouth.
He pressed his lips firmly to her diamond-hard nipple and felt it grow even harder as her passion built up to an insane pitch. She writhed and wriggled and squirmed in a dozen different directions at once as she tried to ream every inch of her pussy on his prick.
He sucked her breast into his mouth, trying to get all the firm, rubbery meat inside his lips, but it was just too big to fit. He flicked her hard nipple with his tongue and grasped her other lovely tit with his hand, squeezing it and feeling it and kneading it as his excitement mounted higher. He began to feel a glow of heightened sensitivity in his prick that told him he was on the brink of coming.
Wanda's cries of encouragement had risen to screams, pure animal rutting sounds of unadulterated fuck-lust. She wrapped her thighs around him like a vise and squeezed his cock almost painfully with the clasping muscles of her incredible cunt as he banged his bones against hers.
Bill hardly noticed all the noise she was making. He had no room in his mind for anything but the thought of fucking her. His body and his brain and his soul were wrapped up in the rhythm they had developed between them, the heartbeat of the universe, and nothing else existed outside the universe of his cock enfolded in her cunt, sliding in and out at a faster and faster pace, going deeper than ever before as their sweating bodies slapped and rubbed together. His hands roamed all over the lush golden garden of her flesh, and he could feel her hands squeezing and feeling and stroking him.
He drowned in her cunt. He was lost inside it.
It seemed to him as if he was sinking deeper into a moist red cave, sinking forever into its depths as he felt its dripping walls breathing and squeezing in on him. Her golden hair was a dizzying cloud in his eyes, the tang of her sweat was on his tongue, her green gaze glowed with ecstasy as she succumbed completely to the relentless stroking of his cock.
She tried to say something, but she could no longer speak. She groaned, letting the delicious fuck drive her right over the edge as the hot jets of his jism pumped again and again into her slithery quim.
Bill experienced a moment of uneasiness, because he'd never come like this in his life before. Her cunt seemed to be sucking the juice right up out of his balls, making it spurt out in torrents. He thought that his cock was never going to stop pumping, and each separate throb sent a tingle of pleasure through his body that was almost an agony. He pulled her writhing ass tighter and sank his cock even further yet into her lubricious depths.
He tried to blend their bones together, tried to climb into her after his prick and lose himself entirely, but he knew that the end had come. The last possible drop had been milked from his balls. He realized that he was sweating profusely and gasping for breath. He heard her murmur with pleasure.
"What?" he gasped.
"I said, let's do it again," said Wanda.
He chuckled. His cock was still inside her, but it had softened. He knew it would be a while before he got it up again-assuming he ever got it up again after the wringer she'd put him through. He reached back and felt around the junction of their loins. Their thighs and their pubic hair were soaked. He must have shot a gallon of come into her, at least that's how he felt.
"Come on," she urged, "fuck me some more. You can do it."
He could feel her cunt moving around his cock, sliding and slithering in undulant wavelets. Her cunt was an incredible organ. It could float around his prick like a warm, wet fog, or it could seize him and gobble him like a hungry animal. Not even his wildest expectations had prepared him for the infinite variety and versatility of Wanda Fleurette's talented pussy.
"Fuck me some more, Bill," she said with a note of insistence in her voice. "I've left the whole afternoon free for you."
She wiggled her hips, and he expected that this motion would make his limp cock slip out of her. It didn't slip out, though, and he was surprised to realize that it wasn't limp. He could feel it swelling even bigger and harder in the moist clutch of her quim.
"How did you know...?"
"I always know," she said a trifle smugly. "I wouldn't have let you screw me if I didn't think you were ready for me."
His prick was good and stiff now. He clutched her buttocks and pushed it deeper. Wanda smiled and pulled her legs up until her knees were pressing his armpits, making sure that he got every last inch of his big cock inside her.
He took a moment to catch his breath and savor the feel of the warm bath that eddied around the full length of his stiff prick. At last he slowly pulled out, until only the knob at the end of his prick was clasped lightly in the lips of her steaming pussy.
"What are you doing? Ow, come back here!" she squealed when he pulled it all the way out.
Bill had no intention of keeping his cock out in the cold for long, however. He rolled her over on her fiat tummy and bared the rosy, sweating cheeks of her voluptuous ass to his lustful gaze. He rested his hands on the soft swells of her buttocks and parted them slightly while she propped herself up on her knees to give him access from the rear. He pressed the bulging purple knob of his cock down into the soft cleft of her cheeks and slid it lower, until it was pressing against the puckered pink bud of her asshole. He pushed against it.
"Oh, Bill!" she said impatiently. "I want to fuck. You can bugger me later, after I get off. All right?"
"I just want to see what it feels like," he muttered.
"Oh, all right," she sighed. "But you have to promise you won't come in my behind."
"Sure, I promise."
The tightness of the little pink lip relaxed and Bill felt the head of his cock sinking inward. This was something he'd never done before, and he was itching to try it. He would have bet that Amy would never be willing to let him to do such a thing, no matter if she became a convert to Wanda's teachings or not.
He was amazed at how easily his cock slid into Wanda's prim little asshole. It was much tighter than her cunt, certainly, but he met no resistance that he couldn't overcome. The fact that his prick was still gleaming wet with the lubrication of her pussy juice probably was what made it seem so smooth and easy.
He gripped her thighs and twisted his hips around, trying for an even better angle of penetration, and Wanda wiggled a little to help him. He had sunk half the length of the shaft into the secret depths of her delicious behind. Her anus was stretched red and tight around the bulging white rod.
"Wow," he said, reveling in the sensuous thrills that flooded him from the tightness and dryness of her ass.
"Don't get to liking it too well," she cautioned. "You still have to fuck me, remember?"
Despite the ease with which he'd effected the first part of his penetration, it now seemed as if he'd reached an impasse. He tried pushing harder, but he noticed only a slight motion in return for the painful pinch on his foreskin.
"You're probably just too big," Wanda said. "Why not give up and put it in my cunt?"
He wasn't about to give up that easily. Now that he'd tasted a little of this rare new delight, he was determined to have his fill of it. In a stroke of inspiration, he slipped his right hand up her thigh until his fingertips came in contact with the hot, swollen button of her clitoris.
"Oh ... you...." she gasped.
Apparently she'd been deliberately keeping his cock out of her asshole, but now that she was distracted by this mind-destroying touch she could no longer concentrate on keeping her rectum as tight as she had to. She yielded to his continuing pressure as more and more of his prick slipped inside. She moaned and whimpered at the sensations that flooded through her from his strokes on her hot little love-button.
At last he succeeded in burying every last inch of his prick in her asshole. He began humping her as fast as the tightness of the dry passage would permit, pushing it in and out while she continued to moan from the touch of his twiddling fingers.
"Yes-yes-all right! You can do anything you want!" she cried. "Fuck me in the ass, Bill-come on and do it to it!"
That was all he was waiting to hear. He took a firmer grip on her delicious body and began rocking harder on his knees, back and forth, driving the steely prong in and out of her squeezing rectum.
He wanted to keep it up forever, but the tightness of the hot tunnel worked against him. Before he was able to muster his self control his prick started blasting again, going off like a skyrocket and shooting hot wads of jism into the depths of her writhing behind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bill had thought it was a nuisance, and he'd been putting it off for weeks. To Amy it was like a little holiday, though. She managed to get out of the city so seldom that driving through the industrial desolation of northern New Jersey was a pleasure.
It would have been much easier, of course, to go to a Volkswagen dealer and get a new headlight to replace the one he'd busted on his last trip to this area. But Bill felt that economy was in order. He'd happened to notice an extensive automobile graveyard when he'd gone out here to take his pictures at the oil refinery, and he believed that a cheaper replacement could be had by getting one from a wrecked car.
Economy certainly was in order, now that they were both undergoing counseling with Wanda Fleurette and her crew. The fees got steeper with each progressive level of advancement, and the counseling took so much time that Bill hardly had time to do any work anymore.
Amy smiled and felt a delicious little tingle of private pleasure as she thought of the counseling. She certainly didn't regret spending the money, since it meant seeing dear Kathi so often. She squirmed in her seat and tried to put her mind back on her driving, but she could feel a growing dampness between her legs at just the thought of Kathi.
She'd almost hated her, after the first time when she'd tricked her so cruelly by arranging for Bill to fuck her when she thought they were making love to each other in privacy. But she didn't stay mad for long. Kathi had only done it for her own good, she saw that now. It was wrong to reject half the human race because they were crude and hairy and coarse. And some of the men whom Kathi brought around to her apartment when Bill wasn't home-men like Juan and Julio and Leroy, for instance-weren't at all crude or hairy or coarse.
She was even getting to the point where she enjoyed fucking Bill-and she made a point of using" that word when she thought of it, just as Wanda and Kathi would have wanted her to have done: fucking. It had a nice sound, Amy reflected, once you got used to it. She was beginning to realize that she'd wasted an awful lot of time in her life by rejecting it, but she planned to make up for lost time in a hurry.
Following Bill's directions, she soon found her self driving up to the tarpaper shack that served as the office of the junkyard. Acres of wrecked autos surrounded her in silence. It looked like a good place for gangland executions. The loneliness of the place chilled her, and she reflected a moment before switching off the ignition and getting out of the car. She only did it because Wanda taught that you can't love people if you're afraid of them. You can't be raped, she maintained, if you cooperate wholeheartedly with the rapist. Amy wondered if she'd ever be able to live up to such high principles.
She knocked timidly on the door of the office. She got no answer. She knocked a little louder. Still she got no answer, but the unlocked door swung open. A man sitting at a roll top desk stared at her guiltily and rose to his feet in apparent confusion.
He didn't look like a junk dealer. He looked sort of like Anthony Perkins. She decided that her first impression must be wrong, however, because she noticed smudges of grease on his button-down shirt. He must work here, even if he didn't look the part.
"Hello," she said brightly. "I'm looking for a headlamp for a 1972 Volkswagen. I wonder-"
"I'm sorry, the man isn't here," he said. "Oh. Don't you work here?"
"No, I'm the owner."
"Well, if you own this place, why can't you sell me a headlight?" Amy asked, and a touch of asperity crept into her voice.
"I'm very bad at selling things," he explained. "People always get the better of me."
"Not many people would admit that," Amy said, wondering if he was dangerous.
"You have to be completely honest with people," he said. "Otherwise, all human contact is meaningless."
That sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn't place it. She noticed that the room held a couple of extra chairs. "Do, you mind if I wait in here?"
He looked as if he wanted to refuse, but he said: "Not at all. Make yourself comfortable."
Amy sat. The strange man went back to his chair and indulged in a variety of nervous mannerisms. It made her nervous to watch him staring at the ceiling, examining his nails, tapping his toe, trying to whistle, rumpling his hair, rummaging through his desk and glancing guiltily at her, a rapid routine that he kept repeating in no particular order.
"When will he be back?"
"Who?"
"The man who sells things," Amy said patiently.'
"Oh. I don't know. I have no idea. I suppose...."
"Go on," she urged.
"I suppose I could sell one to you. I know where there is one. Do you know what it's worth?"
"No," Amy said honestly.
"Neither do I, to tell you the truth. I'll have to look it up," he said, and he stared at some big loose-leaf books over the desk as if the sight of them scared him.
Amy was beginning to feel more at ease. She'd reached the conclusion that he wasn't dangerous. He wasn't crude or hairy or coarse, either. On the contrary, he was kind of cute. She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs, letting her skirt ride up a bit higher than it might have. She withdrew a cigarette from her bag. The weird junkman was on his feet with lighter extended before she could begin to look for a match, reinforcing her impression that he was somehow out of place here. His hand shook slightly as she accepted the flame, and she steadied it with hers.
"Don't you get terribly lonely out here with nothing to do?" she asked.
"Oh, I have...." He looked around at the cluttered desk at a clock that wasn't working, at last year's Playboy calendar on the wall. He included them all in a gesture. " ... things to do. You know."
She noticed that the shack contained a rumpled cot and a stove. She would have been willing to bet that this man lived here all the time. He was good looking, he spoke like a reasonably well educated man, and he wasn't yet forty. She wondered what could have brought him to this sorry pass.
He saw that his answer wasn't quite satisfactory, so he added: "I like to tinker with cars."
"You mean, it's a sort of hobby?" Amy prompted.
He frowned. "It used to be. Now. ... I had a niece who was a wizard with engines."
He gave the last bit of information with obvious pride, but unexpectedly his face then crumpled into sadness. He hunched forward and stared at his shoes. A personal tragedy had brought him here? But the loss of a niece hardly seemed that much of a tragedy, nor did a junkyard seem the place to find solace.
"She could tear down the rocker arm assembly of a 1957 Chevy and put it back together blindfolded," he added.
"That sounds truly remarkable," said Amy; and it did, even though she didn't know what it meant.
"When you try to own someone completely, you always wind up losing them completely."
Amy was startled: it sounded like the sort of thing Wanda would say. Of course, Wanda didn't have a monopoly on common sense, she reflected. Even a crazy junkman in the wilds of New Jersey could come up with a good thought now and then.
"That's true," she said, and he nodded agreement with her agreement for a while.
"I suppose I ought to...." He looked in dismay at the loose-leaf books again, but he made no move to reach for them.
Amy was toying with a daring idea. She knew what Wanda or Kathi would have said this man needed if they could have seen him isolated in his nervousness and loneliness; and they would promptly have offered him the cure. But she wasn't supposed to be ready for that sort of thing yet. She was only a Class A Seeker, and it wasn't until she reached the third stage, the Probationary level, that she would be qualified to start practicing Wanda's philosophy actively. It was one thing to fuck the men Kathi brought to her apartment, but quite another to go out and start something-without Kathi to guide her. But it might be evidence to her teachers that she was ready to advance a grade. Bill was already way ahead of her.
She couldn't withhold it; she blurted: "Would you like to make love to me?"
She knew it wasn't going to be easy. After all, shyness and nervousness were his obvious faults, and he would do nothing to remedy her own shyness. He stared at her, his face pale. She found herself blushing. She should have waited until she'd reached the third stage of Wanda's instruction before begging into this kind of thing.
"What?" he asked.
"I said, would ... I said, would you like to ... um ... make love to me?" she squeaked.
"I haven't ... not since...."
"Well, would you or wouldn't you?" Amy demanded, stamping her foot in exasperation.
"Yes ... of course I would. I don't know if I can, that's all," he said. "Something happened...."
"You mean you were wounded in the war or something?"
"No, no, it's just-an emotional trauma. I lost someone. And since then I-I haven't even thought about ... doing that," he finished lamely, not even looking at her as he gestured hopelessly. Then he added: "It's a funny question for you to ask like that."
"I like you," Amy explained, although that was slightly less true, now that she had to go through this agony of explaining herself. "When you like someone you should-follow your instincts."
The junkman laughed silently and mirthlessly. It took Amy a moment to convince herself that he wasn't laughing at her, but at some bitter joke woven into the fabric of the universe.
"Your instincts can lead you to murder as easily as they can lead you to love-perhaps more easily to murder," he said. "Man is far from perfect."
Amy now began to see why Wanda wanted her Seekers to have more instruction before they went around offering love to people. She'd just offered this man a pretty good thing, even if she did say so herself, and instead of jumping at the chance, he was engaging her in a philosophical debate. If she expressed the anger she felt, anger stemming from her own wounded vanity, she would be going against Wanda's principles. She wished she'd waited until she'd been better prepared.
"You can't deny an instinct with words," Amy said, proud of how calm she sounded. "The instinct exists. The word is only a word, a noise, the vibration of your vocal cords conducted through the air. If I touch you-" and here she leaned forward and put her hand on his knee-"and you like the touch, it means more than any word, doesn't it?"
"The trouble with romanticism," said the junkman, rising from his chair, "is that the halfwits who started it had an inflexible moral code drummed into them. So that when somebody like Emerson says you should follow your instincts, he really means you should follow the Protestant ethic. We don't have any moral code. We were made orphans by Freud and Darwin. Anybody nowadays who's crazy enough to tell people to follow their instincts is nothing but an anarchist, inviting chaos for its own sake, and ought to be taken out and shot like a mad dog."
Amy burst into tears.
"What's the matter?'" the junkman asked, deeply concerned.
"I asked you-I asked you if-you wanted to make-love-" that word came out as an anguished wail-"and you-you-you-"
"God, I'm sorry! I really am. I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean to do that. You see ... you see...."
His words trailed off, but the contrition in his words seemed genuine. He was kneeling in front of Amy's chair, holding her arm, patting her hands.
"I used to know somebody," he continued. "What you said-it reminded me so much of that person, that I started getting angry at that person again. I didn't mean to snap at you, honestly. Please don't cry anymore."
Amy looked up. Seen through a swimmy lens of tears, he looked even more handsome than he had before. She could kill herself. She could die.
"But ... wouldn't you like to make love to me?"
He stood up again and turned his back. "I can't," he said. "I'm sure I can't. That woman ... her ideas ... my whole life...."
Amy managed somehow to compose herself. Her heart went out to him again. Her own humiliation was nothing compared to the depths of this poor man's problem. She'd been foolish to think that she could possibly do anything to help him from the depths of her ignorance. Possibly the only person on earth who could cure him and bring him out of himself was Wanda Fleurette.
"May I come and see you again?" Amy asked.
"Why?" It sounded hollow, like a voice from a tomb.
"I like you-and-I have a friend who-I think you'd like talking to my friend."
The junkman shrugged. "I don't know why you'd bother with...." He gestured at the broken clock, the outdated calendar.
