IN HIS BOOK, AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION, MAX LERNER WRITES: "BY COMPARISON WITH the restoration period of sexual license in England and the eighteenth-century sexual revolution in France, the new American sexual orientation is far more pervasive ... The important fact here is that a shift has taken place from the commercial to the private sexual releases outside of marriage." Mom needed release. Her husband, Frank, was not very handy with tools, so to speak, and she was tired of do-it-yourself projects. It was perfectly natural that she would want to join a class where ideas on techniques of getting things done could be swapped. A raised dais showed things off to a good advantage.
CHAPTER ONE
MONA WAS HOT.
The snow was piled up on the ground outside, and the fire had long since died out, yet the fire inside her was still high and hot.
She stared at her high-cheekboned face in the mirror, brushing back a luxuriant lock of golden blonde hair. Her full, red, sensual lips puckered tentatively, and her clear blue eyes glistened back at her with an unholy excitement.
It wasn't a bad face at all. She could have been a Parisian tart, or maybe even a high-priced Vegas call girl.
But she was neither. She was Mrs. Frank Durham, and the closest she ever got to feeling as excited as she looked was the yearly club banquet and dance.
Sure, Frank brought home the bread, but she had a raging oven within her that needed tending too. And yet there he sat, reading one of his damned law books, completely oblivious to this sensual animal he had taken for a wife three years ago.
At first it had been all right. Never heaven, but tolerable. Frank was a competent, if methodical, lover. And even if he left her gasping and writhing in voluptuous frustration from time to time she usually found the means to satisfy her desires after he had fallen off into a snoring, choking, contented sleep.
For a time she had thought that was abnormalor that perhaps she herself was. Could she really be craving it too much? Could she actually be some kind of nymphomaniac, the kind she and her girl friends had read about and snickered at when she was in school?
But then she found out that Frank was sneaking out, that he was getting a little-maybe far more than a little-on the side.
Her eyes traveled down the mirror, past her face, over her throat, down between the hollow of her full, throbbing breasts.
Those breasts, with their luscious roundness, their amazingly erect nipples that no blouse, no bra even, could hide-just the sight of them made her blood pulse faster through her veins. Every guy in the neighborhood, every one of Frank's friends, had tried to sneak his hand around them at one time or another, had stared with his tongue hanging out, unconsciously licking and sucking the air around his mouth as he did so.
Her gaze reluctantly traveled down across her flat, firm belly, beyond the flare of her hips. It caught on the creamy whiteness of her naked thighs, and was drawn up as if by some gravitational magnetism to the deeply out-lined juncture where thigh met thigh and ecstasy resided.
God! How many men-and women-had tried to lay an inquiring hand there. How many men were lying awake right now, squirming in their beds, turning away from their wives to think of the delicious fruit, the V above those thighs concealed. They didn't completely conceal it, either, she smirked.
Yet looking directly at the slight protrusion of pink, erect flesh from within the luscious center of herself, still, there was Frank, sitting there, pouring over reports and briefs, jotting down notes, satiating his lusts with other women, piercing deep into their bellies, panting and slavering on their ears, their necks, their nipples. Although she knew he'd never go past the nipples.
Was the man out of his mind? Didn't he realize that he had the best, that anything he wanted she'd give him, that she'd kiss his feet-make love to themif he told her to?
But he hadn't told her to. Not his feet, not anything else. If it wasn't those goddamned law books or other women, it was something else.
So, like every other night, Mona was hot.
Her body trembled, and she brushed talcum on her face to hide the little beads of sweat that kept popping out.
"listen doll," called Frank, from the living room. "I'm going out. I'll be at the law library for a couple of hours. You don't mind, you, you?"
"Of course not," said Mona, minding but resigned.
"Oh, by the way-Travis Bland is coming over later to borrow a couple of books. They're on top of the bookcase in the dining room. Just let him look around for them. He knows which ones they are."
"All right," Said Mona to the back of Frank's head as he strode out the door.
She closed her housecoat, and poured herself a drink, a stiff one. It didn't do much good, so she had another. By the time she had downed a third, none of the knot in her stomach was undone, none of the warm eager tingling between her legs had vanished.
She opened her housecoat again and looked at herself in the mirror. Her nipples were already hard and erect. The liquor had only made them more so.
She put a finger to her wet, open mouth and touched it to the pulsing tip of her breast.
It was as if a bolt of electricity had gone through her. All at once she was on the floor of the bedroom before the mirror, her thighs squeezed tightly together, her hands manipulating the nipples of her breasts as if her very life depended on it.
She tried to keep her hands up there on the luscious globes that stood out so proudly even when she was lying flat on her back, but within less than a minute she couldn't stand it any more. One feminine hand snaked down across her below to that no longer so tiny hidden bit of miracle pinkness below.
"Oh, yow," she moaned as she touched it. Her pulsing nipples were now forgotten as she teasingly and at the same time more and more violently manipulated it between experienced fingertips.
Soon the feeling was making itself felt. At first from far away, like the roar of a tidal wave miles out, then closer, closer, so that you could see the first whitecaps, and finally. Then she remembered. Travis would be coming. Tall, slender, bespectacled Travis, who was someday going to run for mayor of New York or something like that. Travis, who's little Southern wife, Sue Ellen, was the biggest slut on the campus-but who knew how to keep her man happy nonetheless.
She slipped into a modest terrycloth robe, something to cover the black shorty nightie that Frank hadn't bothered to notice, and sat down by the cold, empty fireplace.
She thumbed through the TV forecast. Nothing good was on, so she just leaned back and stared at the ceiling, letting the liquor take effect, letting it drive the quivering desire from her.
She almost had it in the palm of her hand when someone knocked on the door.
"Come in," she called hurriedly, closing and buttoning her housecoat and walking to the living room. "It's not locked."
"Never can tell what kind of an orgy I might be walking in on," Travis grinned boldly, as he entered and closed the door behind him. She saw him notice the flush in her cheeks, "Just doing my exercises when you knocked," she said.
"Mighty cold out there," he said, changing the subject. "I guess Christmas is coming a little early this year."
"I guess it is," said Mona, shifting in her chair. Her robe rode up the white expanse of her thigh as she did so.
"It'll be here in another three seconds or so if you don't adjust that robe," remarked Travis, turning his head away in a grotesque display of false modesty.
"You can turn back now," said Mona, after adjusting herself.
"That's just what I said to Sue Ellen a little while ago. My very words in fact," he grinned.
"Have all would be lawyers got dirty minds?" she asked wearily, hoping to imply that Frank's was just as normal and dirty as anyone else's.
"No," replied Travis. "We have precise minds ... Say, that drink looks good. Do you think I might have one before I pick up the books?"
She nodded, arose and walked to the kitchen, for a fresh glass. When she came back she found Travis seated on Frank's easy chair, his stockinged feet up on the leather hassock.
"All the comforts of home," he smiled, lighting his pipe.
"Not quite all," she reminded him, bending over to fill his glass.
She "was aware of his eyes on her now, and the grin on his face was no longer humorous. It was an obscene leer and she realized that he was looking down her robe, hungrily feasting his eyes on the soft, round, large, throbbing globes of delicate flesh that swung freely not a foot from his face.
She knew that this was wrong, that she should tighten the robe around her and tell him to take his books and leave, but the tingling had started all over again, the quivering of the soft, luxuriant flesh of her loins, the hungry, thirsting, crying need for what a man-any man-but especially this man could give her that even she could not give herself.
He caught her eye, and in a single second before she could put on the mask of impassivity, he knew.
He read every line of the longing, the passion, the unfulfilled desire. And as he read it, the grin grew wider and wider.
"Thanks, lady," he said, downing his drink. "What kind of exercises do you do?"
"Just, the usual," she said, struggling to control herself.
"Ever do 'em when Frank's around?"
She caught the meaning, and the aching twisting knot ballooned to her stomach.
"Well, you can go get your books now," she said tentatively.
"Let me give it a little time to settle," he said, "Why don't you sit here beside me and we'll talk for a while?"
"There's not room," she said, yet her voice was trembling with eagerness.
"There's always room for one more," he said.
He reached out and took hold of her arm. Then, changing his mind, he started to tinker with the belt of the robe. At last it fell away and she stood before him, shaking and quivering in her black, transparent shorty nightgown.
His eyes drank in every inch of her, slowly, confidently, feasting over every secret curve and hollow. He was amazed by her wild nipples-so long and hard. And he was even more amazed by what was down below.
At last he looked up, the grin more lusty than ever.
"I always said you were a real blonde."
"I'm cold," she whispered, almost inaudibly.
"You?" he said, smiling.
She was drawn to his lap, slowly but forcefully. And suddenly his lips were covering her face, racing across her throat and shoulders, to come to rest at last on her breast.
He took the nipple between his teeth, flicking it teasingly with his tongue. She moaned and held him tighter.
He bit her gently, playfully, and she writhed in ecstasy, grinding her "buttocks down against his straining manhood.
Suddenly he had slipped her out of her housecoat completely, and began removing his shirt.
"Not here," she whispered. "The bedroom. Carry me into the bedroom."
"Why wait?"
"I'll make it worth your while." He did it, though the waiting was torture. But in a few seconds they were there, and he was caressing her hungrily again as she stood before him, naked.
He. was kissing her breasts, then her flat tummy, as she pushed his head down farther, farther, pleading with little animal sounds as she did it.
Finally he was there, and it was like nothing she had ever known, nothing she had ever given herself. Even Frank had never given it to her.
"Oh, yow...." she moaned as her fingers gripped his hair in tight little bunches and urged him on.
She knew it would happen soon and she wanted it to, wanted it to with every fibre of her body. But at the same time she wanted to experience every tingle and shock she could out of it, and he was doing it so fast, sohard ... it was going to be upon her before she knew it.
"Wait!" Mona said.
"Wha-?"
"Turn around. That's it. Like that. Now do it. Like that again. But let me ... put my hands around there ... yes, yes ... that's it. I want to watch. I want to watch in the mirror. I want to see it. I want to see you do it. See it happen to me. See what it's like. Oh, yes. Oh yes, that's it. Mmmm. Mmmm!"
She watched the figure in the mirror, the tallish, voluptuous blonde figure with a hunger she had never known before; a hunger that any instant would be satisfied. She watched her giant breasts bob up and down as she twisted and jerked to the too-sensitive sensations that were running through her as his mouth took her in, so that she was no longer giving herself to him now, but taking, moving in and out inside him, grunting and breathing with lust.
Then she felt it. it oozed up within her so that nothing could stop it, even though it would not happen for a few seconds.
"Move away!" she screamed. "Ah! Ah! No-don't stop touching me-just move away a little so I can see. that's it. Ah ... Ah. Aheeeeeee!"
She sobbed as she watched it happen and then when even she could no longer stand it she closed her eyes and dropped to the floor, hysterically crying for him to do something before she went stark raving mad.
He took her then with all the power that was in him. Once. Twice. Then again.
When he finally lifted himself off her and fell heaving on the floor beside her, Mona's thighs and pelvis were still twitching with pleasure.
They lay there for a long time.
"Oh, damn!" he exclaimed, suddenly jumping up from the sweat-drenched floor. "What time is it?"
"There's a clock in the kitchen. Why?"
"They lock up the library at ten-thirty. Frank ought to be home any minute!"
But the clock said nine-thirty, and so they still had an hour to kill.
"You had better pick up those books before you leave," said Mona, "or Frank will know what has been happening."
"He wouldn't care."
"Why do you say that?"
"How often does he make a touchdown, Mona?"
"Every night," she said defensively. "That's a lie, Mona. I can tell from the way you acted."
"That's my business," said Mona. "You get your stuff and go."
"Same time tomorrow?" he grinned.
"Not tomorrow or any other time." She was safe now. She could afford to send him on his way.
"It's a little late for morality and fidelity, isn't it? I mean, after all, you just laid your husband's best friend."
"Go to hell!" she said viciously, her loyalty returning.
"Any time, baby. Wait'll I tell Sue Ellen about you. We might even invite you and Frank to the club."
"I'm not interested in your country clubs," she spat at him.
"It's not that kind of club at all, Mona. They'll love you at this place. Literally. More studs than even you can handle. And with our budget, we can even afford a few more mirrors so that you can get your kicks."
"I've never done this before," sighed Mona, "-and I'm not going to do it again. Now get out of here. Go brag to your little slut and tell her about what a great conquest you made."
"It wasn't such a great conquest," said Travis, with that disarming modesty again. "Anyone could have done it tonight with you. You were just ripe for the picking. In fact, your husband is lucky he doesn't have a dog in the house." He ran his hand lazily down her body, coming to rest at last at the pulsing juncture of her thighs. "Right?"
She knew he was right. She wanted to spit at him, slap him, rip his groin with her nails for saying it, but as the warmth began spreading through her again, she knew that she couldn't do any of those things, that she couldn't even lyingly deny the truth of what he said.
"See you around," said Travis, and suddenly left her standing there, alone and naked against the bitter wind from outside.
She poured herself a drink and hoped that somehow it would stop the pulsing between her thighs and in the erect nipples of her breasts.
But as the liquor went down her throat, she knew she was going to go to the bedroom and do it again.
She didn't want to.
"How many times a day can I do this to myself?" she asked aloud. "Where does it stop? I'm worse than a nympho right now."
The words had a hollow sound, though. It was the feeling within her that was real and deep. She belted her housecoat tighter, as if to keep the urgent feeling locked inside, but it didn't do a damned bit of good.
She paced the floor in the living room for another minute or two, turned on the TV and tried to get interested in something, then turned it off and went into the bedroom.
She shivered with hungry delight when the housecoat fell from her shoulders to the floor. She stepped out of it and picked it up, hugging it to her jutting breasts. Slowly, purposefully, she began rubbing it against them. The friction made her nipples stand out even more, and she moved it harder, faster against them.
She was hot again. Just as hot as she could be.
But she wanted more than before, more than even Travis had given her.
There were a couple of things she'd always wanted to do to herself, but the urgency of her desire and the little bit of inhibition she still had left inside her had always stopped her from doing them.
Now she decided to hell with it.
She walked over and sat down, straddling the overstuffed chair in the corner of the bedroom. Her thighs tightened around it as she took one ripe, big breast in two hands and lifted it in offering.
To herself. it was almost upon her, and she rocked and moaned with it and finally laughed with tears in her eyes as it shook her from head to toe with its force and feeling.
It pounded in her for many seconds, and then the hollow feeling within her cried out for what even she could not give herself, the only thing she couldn't give herself. She saw it lying on the sink and took it in her hand, lowering herself, almost throwing herself on her back into the streaming shower.
"Gee," was all she could say at first when she felt it. But then, the bittersweet word turned into guttural grunts of pleasure as she gave herself a second tremendous but different orgasm. him, half to herself, pulling Frank down to the bed beside her.
"Aren't I always?"
She said nothing, but pushed his head down to her flaming nipples.
"You're the boss," he said, beginning to explore the mysteries of her eager body.
His mouth moved over the tips of her breasts, but it wasn't the same. It was something, it was something good, but the hunger and excitement in her that had been there when Travis let her watch him do that to her in the mirror, and when she had put her own mouth to her breasts, was missing.
He went on, the same as he had dozens of time before, spending a certain amount of minutes-she wondered if it was exactly the same amount every time-on her breasts, then moving into her and spending the same amount of minutes in the act itself.
She moved with him at first, but this time-even while in the throes of passion-a new idea came into her head. It was an idea that was built on hate of him and the high passion she had known earlier.
Why should she waste it on him-that wonderful feeling?
Why should she let him bring her to an orgasm that was weak compared to the one she could give herself?
To hell with it again! She thought.
She moved with him, but held back. It wasn't easy. The fires were burning inside her for any kind of release, no matter how half-baked. But she did it. She pretended when it happened to him that it was also happening to her.
When he moved from her, she kissed him perfunctorily and went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
But she did much more than that. Still burning, more than ever now, she turned on the shower loud and hot, so hot it almost burned her at first when she sat down straddling the smooth tub.
Oh, it was good. So good.
He was such an ass, she thought, as she repeated the ritual she had begun less than half an hour ago. And this time she knew she would repeat it to the finish.
He's such an ass, she thought, as her thighs pressed against the sides of the tub, almost threatening to crush it with their woman's force. She bit her own nipples ever so slightly and screamed a little with the pleasure pain.
She did it again and could not supress a little moan.
Mmm, so good. So goo ... ood.
Sometimes, she thought fleetingly, she would do that other thing. But tonight, this was enough. This was too much, In fact. It was coming upon her now, fast and furious, almost to that wonderful point where it hadn't happened but nothing could stop it.
She bit her nipple once more.
"Are you all right, baby?" Frank said through the door.
It was worse than if he had taken a thin knife to her. She raised her head, gathered all her self-control and said a constrained, "Yes. Fine. Be out in a minute."
She felt the hot water beating down upon her again and noticed for the first time that it was all over the bathroom floor. She'd have to wipe that up, she thought, but the idea soon vanished from her mind as another idea drove in.
The idea of what was happening to her.
The feeling hadn't left It was strong now, Her head bent lower, lower, her blonde hair falling over her chest in a golden splendor. Her tongue flicked out and touched the erect nipple that was being pushed outward between her fingers.
"Oh, I never thought...." she said.
She did it again.
"Ohh. Ohh!"
She began moving her lips hungrily over her own bosom. "Oh, oh, oh, oh."
Her thighs began to press down and together at the same time. She looked like she was riding a rocking horse, frantically, like a child would, her head bobbing back and forth, her thighs up and down, her breast held rigid.
She was that way when the sound of the front door opening somehow reached her flaming ear.
She quickly got up-though it took every bit of her willpower to do so-threw. on her housecoat and patted her face with some powder while walking into the living room.
"Hi, doll. Did Travis come by?" Frank asked.
"Yes."
"Give him what he wanted?"
"Yes." She walked back toward the bedroom. "Good. I'll be in bed in a few minutes. I just want to arrange my notes for tomorrow ... "
"Come no," she said. "What?"
"Now. Come to bed now."
"It'll only take a minute."
"Get up early and do it in the morning, she pleaded, putting her arms around his neck, drawing his lips down to her panting, eager mouth.
"Who am I to resist?" he laughed, following her into the bedroom.
"Be good tonight, baby!" she whispered, half to
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS TWO DAYS LATER THAT MONA FINALLY summonded up the courage to leave the house. Frank had left a number of books home and asked her to return them to the law library.
She had of course said that she would-but she knew what would happen.
Travis Bland would have talked, of course, bragged, "Did you hear what I did to Mona Durham? Yeah, that's right, Frank's wife. Well, let me tell you, if I ever write a book about that broad's panties, I'm gonna call it 'Fondly Farenheit...."
Not that Mona really minded the talk. She didn't. After all, you don't have private sessions with yourself and openly go down for your husband's best friend with any hopes of retaining your dignity or your honor.
No, that wasn't it at all. All the cheap, degrading glances in the world couldn't have upset Mona's poise.
In fact, her problem was just the opposite.
What if Travis was there waiting for her? What if he was keeping a watch on the house, and followed her?
What if he went up to her in the library and insisted that she sit down next to him?
She couldn't refuse. He'd just make a lot of noise and draw everyone's attention to them. Maybe even Frank's.
And once she sat down with him, what then? GodI She got hot just thinking about it!
What if his leg started brushing against her? A normal gesture, an innocent gesture-but the mere thought of it now, the slightest anticipation of it, sent tiny needles of pleasure shooting up her leg, brought her nipples to erect attention, and forced tiny beads of sweat to the palms of her hands.
So it took Mona two days to get around to returning the books to the library. Two days of worrying, two days of brooding, two days of pleading silently with Frank to make love to her, to put his goddamned textbook down and just let go with everything he had.
But everything he had wasn't enough, and if walls had eyes, the bathroom's walls would have turned red half a dozen times.
She stood before her mirror in bra and slip, putting the finishing touches onto her face. A dab of powder here, mascara there, lipstick to outline the warm, sensual mouth that screamed silently for passion each night under the cover of darkness.
I should have dressed first, thought Mona. .Just looking at myself is starting to turn me on. I wonder if anyone was ever this horny? And if they were couldn't their husband's see it? Did she have to dress up like a whore and practically shove a red-tinted nipple down Frank's throat, bury his face in soft yielding flesh, before he even began to get the idea?
But with a sigh, she knew the answer, and the answer was yes. Last night, when he had come to bed, she had even had to grab his hand and bury his fingers in her before he had the slightest idea that she wasn't as sleepy as he was.
"I'm sorry, doll," he had said, as she rubbed his fingers in and out, in and out, "but I'm too bushed for a long session. Why don't you start without me and I'll be along for the finale?"
And with that-and an innocent kiss-he had taken her hand and placed it where his own had been.
Mona wanted to scream, wanted to scratch his eyes until the blood gushed out of the pupils-but she couldn't. She couldn't do anything except manipulate herself just as he had directed her to.
Writhing and moaning on the bed, she had started without him-and when she discovered that he had dozed off for a minute, she finished without him too, climaxing in a growing crescendo of animal sounds which finally succeeded in awakening him.
"Ready?" he asked, smiling.
"Ready," she said resignedly.
He had rolled over on her then, penetrated her and soon began jerking his body spasmodically.
"Come on, doll!" he grunted. "I can't wait for you."
And so, for the hundredth time-or was it the thousandth?-she had faked her orgasm, simulating all the sounds and movements that Travis had forced from her before, pretending not that he was Travis Bland, but simply that he was Frank with the skills of a fifteen-year-old schoolboy.
"That was wonderful!" said Frank, with an exhausted sigh as he rolled back off her.
"Yes," she lied softly.
"You know," he went on, his enthusiasm beginning to build, "maybe we ought to try it like that more often."
"Like what?" she had asked absently. "You know," he had replied. "Self-starting, so to speak."
She hadn't answered him, but instead had closed her eyes and feigned sleep.
"Poor kid," were his last words before drifting off almost instantly. "Maybe we ought to go a little easy on the sex if it wears you out that much."
She arose before he did and hid her pillowcase so that he couldn't see all the mascara that had run off during the night.
And now, she thought, still staring at the mirror, I'm supposed to go out there and play the sexless housewife. I'm supposed to pretend that any married woman is getting more than enough at home, and that every man I meet on the street or in the library is no different from every woman.
She laughed just once-a soft, harsh, bitter laugh.
Then with a sigh, she turned to her closet, chose a sweater and a skirt, and slipped them on.
"Won't do," she muttered, looking at her half-concealed breasts; at those bare, heaving, semispheres that seemed to be trying to flow over the top of the scoop-neck. Walking back to the closet, she removed the sweater and replaced it with a cardigan.
She took another look at herself in the mirror, and satisfied, picked up the books and went out.
The snow was everywhere, and the wind, though it should have cooled her off as it whipped through her skirts and across her naked thighs, it merely made her more aware of the fire that drummed ceaselessly between her legs.
Here and there she saw couples walking hand in hand, and once she passed through a deserted section of the campus where a boy was keeping his girl warm by the simplest and most direct method he knew, slipping his hand inside her jacket and rubbing vigorously.
Mona should probably have been shocked, or at least outraged, as any good housewife would have been. Instead, she simply stared, biting her lip unconsciously until the pain forced a little whimper from her. The boy turned hastily, quickly withdrew his hand, and, grabbing the girl by the arm, walked off as fast as he felt he could while retaining his dignity.
Mona clasped the books to her, hugging them to her bosom, rubbing them against her breasts. It was starting again. If that kid would leave his shack-job and come over here, she knew, he could have her right on the snow, and she wouldn't let him leave until he was through, even if Frank and half the damned law school came out to watch.
It was, she knew, going to be a long afternoon.
Finally she arrived at the law library, looking cautiously around for any sign of Travis Bland, though she didn't know what she would do if she saw him. She only prayed that she would have enough self-restraint to wait until he took her to a private room somewhere, because now she felt like ripping her clothes off and having him-anyone-right on one of the libary tables. She shuddered at the thought of it, more from desire than disgust, and walked up to the door. Taking a deep breath, so deep that her breasts rubbed against the books once more, she entered the building.
She walked through the foyer, trying not to notice the hungry glances she received from the few students who were milling there, trying to work up enough courage to go out into the cold, and went up to the librarian's desk.
"Yes?" asked a pert, red-headed girl from behind a dating machine.
"I want to return these," said Mona, grateful that she wouldn't have to speak to a man.
"Name?" asked the girl, without looking up.
"Durham. Mrs. Frank Durham. My husband took these out last week."
Suddenly the girl looked up, staring at her curiously. "You're Frank's wife?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Oh, nothing," she said, still staring brazenly at Mona. "Frank and I are old friends."
"Very old?"
"No, not very."
The redhead took the books, checked the date-due card, and looked up again. "You owe fifty cents."
Mona began digging in her purse for the money, but the redhead interrupted her. "Forget it," she said. "I owe him that much at least. This one is on the house."
"Do you sleep with him often?" Mona blurted suddenly.
"I never sleep with him," replied the girl levelly. "How about you?"
Mona clenched and unclenched her fists spasmodically, but said nothing. She stood facing the girl as if hypnotized, then finally tore her eyes away and turned toward the door.
Suddenly she felt a firm hand on her arm. A masculine hand.
She didn't have to look to know that it belonged to Travis Bland-but she looked anyway, amazed by the intensity of the undisguised lust on his face.
"Miss me?" he grinned.
"Let go of me!" she snapped, but already she could feel herself weakening.
"Come on, baby," he whispered into her ear, sending a sensual tingle of anticipation through her. "Don't make a scene here. What would Frank say?"
"I don't give a damn what Frank says!" she shouted. Heads turned toward, her, and she writhed in embarrassment before the curiosity of the crowd.
"Let's get out of here," she whispered, heading for the door without looking back.
"Where to?" she asked him, as they walked back through the snow.
"I've got just the place," he replied as he directed her toward one of the buildings. "Frank is having class in here right this minute."
She gave him a curious look, but he just grinned and continued walking. A moment later they were inside, brushing the snow from their coats, and walking down a door-studded corridor.
"I thought Frank's classes were on the third floor," she said.
"They are," replied Travis, "but we can't just walk in during the middle of a lecture. Ah, here we are," he concluded, stopping at the end of the hall and pulling out a key.
"What is this?"
"A teacher's lounge," he said.
"But we can't just walk in here!" she protested, though she knew, and she knew that Travis knew, that of course she could walk right in anywhere if he gave her what she wanted.
"I borrowed this one night," he said, holding up a key, "and had a copy made. No professors are in the building now except Frank, and he's got two more classes when he's done."
With that he opened the door, turned on the light and, after Mona followed him through, turned and locked the door.
It was a large room with a fireplace on one wall, curtains covering a window on another, and a series of class photographs on a third. Scattered about the room were a number of leather-cushioned wing-arm chairs and a huge leather couch.
"They certainly like their comfort, don't they?" remarked Mona, folding her overcoat over one of the chairs.
"So do I," Travis said.
"Look, Travis," began Mona, "I'm not sorry about the other night, but there's not going to be a repeat performance-and certainly not in this building where just anyone can walk in."
"Okay, Mona, if you say so," said Travis, running his fingers very gently up and down the back of her neck.
"I mean it," she said.
"You just stop me when you think I'm getting out of line," he grinned, bringing both hands into play now, moving them up and down her sides, over her hips.
Mona still had her back to him, but she began to squirm under his touch nonetheless. His prick was erect and ready, pressing painfuHy into her back despite all the layers of clothing which blocked it from it's ultimate goal.
And suddenly she found herself on the couch, not quite sure how she had gotten there, but not caring either. Frank was fumbling with the buttons on her sweater. Finally he mouthed a curse and pulled it up over her head.
The bra went next, and he lowered his lips greedily to her erect nipples, making gobbling noises deep in his throat.
Mona wanted to move her body against him, to grind her softness against him, but he held her motionless to the couch, his head buried in her breasts, kissing, licking, sucking, nibbling.
She was almost out of her head now, babbling incoherently and pushing his head downward, downward.
Finally, reluctantly, he yielded to her. His hands relinquished her breasts, slid down to her knees, then up again beneath the harshness of her skirt.
When they came to her panties they stopped. An inquiring finger snaked its way delicately, deliciously beneath the elastic legband, searching, probing, finding.
She moaned again, twisting her hips and torso spasmodically. He took her panties with both hands and pulled gently, while she raised her soft, quivering buttocks to allow the silken material to pass beneath them, to caress her thighs on its way down.
Then he pulled her skirt up until it was half-wrapped, half-rolled around her waist. He was kneeling on the floor beside her, his hands working hotly on her body.
Wordlessly, she grabbed his head between her hands and guided it to the juncture of her thighs.
"I thought...." he began, but he got no further than that, because Mona shoved his mouth back violently to where she wanted it, where she needed it.
His hot, moist lips snaked in between the lips of her throbbing vagina, and his tongue sought out her hard, erect clitoris. He flicked it slowly, casually, then ever faster and harder.
Finally he drew it into his mouth, applying suction to bring it to still greater erection. He rolled it around on his tongue as he had done with the nipples of her breasts, then bit it gently.
She emitted a sobbing moan, and Travis moved his head slightly. His tongue still flicked and darted out of his mouth, but now it began missing her clitoris ever so narrowly, until she was a writhing mass of flesh, striving desperately to place his lips back where they belonged.
"Oh, Travis!" she moaned. "Oh, more, more, more!"
Suddenly she rolled on her side, facing him, and reached out for his belt buckle. Only one of her hands was free, and after struggling fruitlessly with it for a moment, she settled for his zipper, pulling it down past the huge erection which was struggling for freedom.
"Oh, it's coming soon, Travis! It's coming soon!" she whispered urgently. "Quick! Get on top of me!"
"Just a minute," said Travis, disengaging his mouth from her pussy and standing up.
She lay there, eyes shut, body trembling and tense, tryng to fight it back, trying to wait for him.
But Travis made no movement, .did not get on top of the wild, panting form on the couch.
She opened her eyes and saw him standing, his fly hastily zipped over his still-huge prick. He was about ten feet away, staring at her, grinning from ear to ear.
"Travis!" she screamed. "Quick! I can't wait."
"Don't mind me, lady," he grinned. "I'm just a spectator."
"What are you talking about?" she gasped, in shocked disbelief.
"I miss my natural surroundings," he said. "Are you mad?"
"Not at all. Just lonely. Remember that club I told you about? When you want to finish the scene, just give me a call and I'll tell you where to meet us. Bring Frank along; he might get a kick out of it."
"Travis. Please...."
He turned and left her then, but she didn't see him. Her eyes were shut tight, and her legs were closed just as tightly over her hand, while her body jerked in a barbaric and spasmodic rhythm.
CHAPTER THREE
JOEL HANKINS LOOKED llP AT THE CLOCK on the library wall and sighed. Almost four. He'd have to be getting back to his room before long if he was going to keep that date with Kaye.
He turned his eyes back to the huge tome that lay before him, his gaze racing across the pages, trying to take it all in before leaving, but he knew even as he started that it wouldn't work. He wasn't like Travis or some of the others who could get top grades without even seeming to work at it. Things came hard for Joel.
Therefore, he reflected grimly, I should appreciate them more, but somehow it all seemed just that much crap. Travis would appreciate his law degree every bit as much, and God knows he spent one hell of a lot of time appreciating everything in skirts while Joel was boning up on torts and counter suits into the early hours of the morning.
No, nothing came easy for Joel. He could still remember his family doctor reassuring his mother, "Well, Mrs. Hankins, it looks like you won't have to worry about him getting an elbow in the eye under the basket." Then, as everyone else grew taller, and he just grew older, it was, "Really, Mrs. Baaktos, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Lots of boys do all their growing late." And, finally, at seventeen, came the final comment from the medical profession, "You're in fine shape, Joel. Healthy as a bull ... Ah, by the way, I see that Willie Shoemaker and Bill Hartack made more than five million dollars between them last year."
Joel thanked him for the diagnosis, overlooked the stupid attempt at subtlety, and took some faint joy at the fact that the army didn't need serious-minded young men who towered five feet and two inches above the ground.
Then there had been the thing with Blanche. It was strange to begin with. After all, who ever heard of a Blanche except in A Streetcar Named Desire? And to find a Blanche who was just aching for it, who would give him five minutes to get her bra off in the car and if he was a little slow would do it for him-he could hardly believe his luck.
And it was precisely that luck that led to his temporary undoing. Because one night, in the back seat of the car, Blanche decided she didn't feel like stopping at their mutually-drawn line, and began fumbling with the zipper of his pants.
"No," he had mumbled. "No, I ... I can't."
"Sure you can, baby," she whispered, lowering her lips to his erect organ.
"That's not what I mean," said Joel. "I mean I won't."
"What are you talking about?" she demanded, straightening up.
"Look," he stammered, sweat pouring down his face, "I'm no prude or anything, and if you want to go around screwing every guy you know, I'm not going to tell you not to. But ... what the hell, I'm waiting for...."
"Marriage?" she asked contemptuously.
"Not necessarily. Just for someone I think I love," he had answered, and immediately felt like an infantile fool for saying it.
"Oh, God," said Blanche, to nobody in particular. "A religious nut."
"That's not true," he said softly. "I just got to do what I think is right."
"Why don't you help me out and do what I think is right, just for tonight?" she asked him, rubbing his pecker vigorously.
He couldn't explain why, but he was young then, and he thought it wouldn't do any harm to go back to petting, to kind of console her for the disappointing evening.
Well, he grinned wryly, it was a noble enough motive, but of course she hadn't begun to understand it before she assumed he had given in to her. In another second she had torn all her clothes off.
"I told you," he had repeated, "I can't, or won't, or any way you want to put it. Would you like me to take you home?"
"Shove it in me first," she had panted, "then you can take me anywhere you want."
He moved over to the wheel and started the engine.
"You get between my legs right now," she had threatened, "or I'm screaming rape!"
"Scream all you want," Joel had said, and stepped on the gas, heading off in the direction of Blanche's house.
She had grudgingly put on her clothes during the ride, and left him at her door without uttering another word.
And that, he had thought grimly as he drove away, was that.
But of course he was wrong.
He was lying in bed in his room that night when his mother told him that he had a phone call. When he picked up the receiver, it was Paul, his best friend.
"Hey, buddy," Paul had said, sounding a little nervous, "I got a huge exam coming up in solid geometry tomorrow, and I got problems. Can you let me take a look at your notes?"
"Why sure," he had said. "Wait 'til get my clothes on and I'll bring them over."
"Uh ... I'm at Rosembloom's Drug Store," said Paul.
"Out kind of late, aren't you?"
"I didn't have the guts to go home until I was sure I could pass," said Paul.
"See you in ten minutes," Joel had said, and hung up the phone. He threw on a shirt, a pair of shorts, and some dungarees. Then, slipping into his loafers, he headed off for the drug store, his notebook under his arm.
It was two blocks to the drugstore and he stopped outside the house to pull a forbidden cigarette out of his shirt pocket to light up. His mother knew about them, of course, but as long as he didn't smoke inside the house, she was willing to feign ignorance.
He inhaled deeply, reveling in the feel of the smoke in his lungs, then blew out two thin streams of smoke through his nostrils.
He was getting close now. Just one more corner, an alley, and then there was the drugstore thirty feet beyond, the huge neon sign lighting up the side walk for blocks in each direction. He got as far as the alley.
Then a hand reached out, grabbed him by the neck, and jerked him out of the light.
Fists began pummeling his body. The cigarette fell from his lips as he doubled over, trying to catch his breath, to collect his wits about him.
Another blow fell upon his temple, and he struck out blindly. His fist hit flesh, bruised itself on bone, came away sticky with wet, warm blood.
Three more blows came down upon him, and again he lashed out, clutching in the darkness. His hands came into contact with hair and, grabbing it, he drove his knee into where he thought the groin would be. He was rewarded by a groan of anguish.
"Hey!" laughed somebody. "Hold onto the little bastard! He thinks he's Willy Pep or someone!"
Then they had his hands behind him, and blow after blow after blow rained down upon him. He opened his eyes after blacking out for a minute and saw Blanche, her face contorted by some obscene combination of pleasure and rage, urging half a dozen beardless warriors on.
Then he was on the ground, but still the blows continued, falling one after another across his kidneys.
"Turn him over," snapped one of them, wiping some blood from his lips with the sleeve of his leather jacket. "We'll cut the damned thing off."
They began turning him then, but not before he had jammed a thumb into one of their eyes (and gotten it back in both his eyes in return).
"Ahhh, don't bother," spat Blanche, "He never uses the damned thing anyway."
She walked off then, stepping over him, grinding her spiked hell into his shoulder as she did so.
The boys followed her, but one hung back for a moment.
"Just to square accounts, kid," he grated, and smashed his foot into Joel's groin.
The next thing Joel felt was water, tons of water, pouring over his face, flooding his nostrils, choking him.
He coughed and turned over, groaning from the pain of his movements.
Then a pair of hands were on him, helping him to turn back and sit up. It was Paul. His face was white with horror, and his hands shook. I
"Are you all right?" he babbled. "Can you hear me?"
Joel nodded, closing one eye as the blood poured into it from a gash on his forehead.
"They held a knife on me and made me call," sobbed Paul, trying to wipe some of the blood from Joel's face.
"They would have killed me if I...." His voice broke. "Oh God, Joel, I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
He still winced at the memory of the next ten hours, of having Paul help him walk to the hospital because he didn't want to upset his mother, of calling her and trying to keep from fainting as he explained that he was spending the night at Paul's, of sneaking out of the emergency ward the next morningand trying to stagger home and pretend nothing had happened, only to find an ambulance parked in his parents' driveway and a doctor waiting to take him back to the hospital.
After that, he had decided to go as far away as possible from home, as far from the memory of that night as he could.
He had also avoided women for a while, no sense sticking your neck out when you're full of scars, to say nothing of being the next best thing to a midget. Then his folks had gone deep into debt, and he had to quit school for a year to get some money together. He blew half of it on a girl who ran off with a trumpet player, and worked another four months to get it back.
He still didn't know why he'd chosen law, though if he were painfully honest with himself, he would venture to guess that he didn't have the guts to go out into the world after getting his bachelor's degree. The decision having been made, he determined to be as good a lawyer as he possibly could, which was why he was hurrying home now, late as usual for his dinner date with Kaye.
Though to call it a dinner date was perhaps pushing it a little. It was, more accurately worded, a visit to the kitchen of Kate's dormitory, where he (and those other charity cases who could induce their girls' to give them a handout) went to eat whenever possible.
Kay was more than a soft touch for a meal, however. In fact Joel had the feeling that one of these days he might even ask her to marry him. They had a lot in common-they both liked the same books, they dug the same records, they were both broke.
And they both had a hard time keeping their passions in check.
Kaye was a hell of a girl, fun to be with and hell on wheels as far as looks were concerned. For the first few dates, they just enjoyed each other's company, but it became increasingly harder to keep his hands off her each time. And when he gave in, it became harder to keep his hands out of her. And when he gave in to that, too, it became harder to keep only his hands in her.
He licked his lips as he remembered the taste of her breasts, the feel of her erect nipples floating around in his mouth, throbbing and trembling and growing beneath his tongue. He shook his head vigorously in an attempt to erase the memory from his mind.
He would stack her up against any woman on campus too, he decided, hoping that if he couldn't get her out of his mind, he could at least think of something besides her body. Even Sue Ellen Bland, who had laid almost every male student on campus as well as half the faculty, wasn't one whit better-looking than Kaye. And Frank Durham's wife-what was her name? Mona?-didn't have any more class, bright as she was.
He tried very hard to think of Kaye's intellect and intrinsic class all the way home, but his fingers kept twitching spasmodically, anticipating the moist, warm passages they would be exploring before he returned to his books.
Frank Durham strolled slowly across the campus, nose buried properly in the huge law book he held in his gloveless hands. Somehow, though, concentration came hard.
Maybe he had been working too hard. Maybe he ought to take it a little easy for a day or two, just relax before a fire and let the heat melt all the tensions from his lead-hard, masculine body.
Yes, he had to admit it: He was tired. There had been just too many long hours put in on the books. Thank God he had the interest from his father's estate for him and Mona to live on. Otherwise they'd never have a chance of making it.
And Frank was determined to make it.
Not that he had any great love of the law, or even a moral inclination to defend it or practice it. He personally couldn't give less of a damn if people wanted to go around stealing and raping and killing, as long as they left him alone and sought their twisted kicks elsewhere.
No, law held no fatal fascination for him. But becoming a lawyer took considerably less time than becoming a doctor, and after living in a middleclass home and associating with middle-class friends all his life, he intended to make the most of what he had.
And what he had was a fertile mind-and his father's estate. Maybe it was cruel and heartless, but he felt like celebrating the day he learned that his parents had died when their car struck a lamppost and folded up like an accordion while they were on their way home from an orgy. The papers had called it an orgy, but the papers didn't know Frank's parents and he did. Besides, the orgy was at Jim Cuthbert's house, and Jim was worth a million a year in advertisements. And newspapers don't throw a million bucks out the window for the sake of a detailed story.
So Frank had gone to college and had gotten his degree, and when he discovered he could support a wife on his income, he married Mona.
It had been all right for a couple of years, too. Sure, she never seemed like she was living in paradise, and it was her fault that he got a little on the side from time to time (after all, a fellow can't feel guilty all the time), but still, it hadn't been too bad a marriage. No kids-not until he setup practice-but certainly there were enough things on campus to keep Mona occupied; lectures, concerts, and the likes.
Of course, they weren't quite enough to keep Frank occupied. Not all the time, anyway. Not like Mona. For instance, there was little Sue Ellen Bland, the hottest little bit of fluff to twitch across the campus in years. He hadn't taken her yet. Travis was always around when he wanted to make his play. But someday he would. Someday soon.
What would she be? Number thirty-five? Thirty-ix?
He had lost count months ago. He used to keep a diary enumerating his conquests in vivid detail, but it seemed like a good idea to burn the damned thing when he got married. After all, Mona was just a little too proper to understand something like that. She had gone to an all-girl finishing school, and hadn't had a chance to start dating in college before he took one look at her and decided to make her number something-or-another.
He was amazed when she gave in to him that first night in the car. Probably she thought it was the only way to have a social life in college-and in a way she was right. Just the same, he felt guilty about it, guilty and somehow ashamed.
So he dated her again, and then again, and before he quite knew what had happened, he was a married man.
Funny, he reflected, that Mona was the only girl he ever went back to. Oh, sure, her body was great and nobody could ever forget those bare burgeoning breasts and taut, erect nipples-and that something else down lower that so few women had-but he'd known lots of girls with great bodies-bodies every bit as soft and yielding and eager and willing as Mona's. And yet, one roll in the hay, one night in a car or a shack, was always enough. Something was always missing afterward, some sense of total satisfaction. He sensed its absence, and he was pretty sure the girls' sensed it too.
So he kept looking, searching, seeking the girl who could give him what he wanted, whom he could give what she wanted. He hadn't found her yet, Mona included, but he was still looking. Someday she'd turn up, someday ecstasy would be more than just a word in a dictionary-and until then, the searching was enough fun to keep his interest up.
Once in a while he'd think of telling Mona his problem, but he always rejected it. She was too innocent, too sheltered. It would be beyond her ability to understand.
But maybe this one tonight would be the answer. Maybe she could deliver the goods. Maybe maybe, maybe....
Frank buried his face between Arlene's heaving breasts, nuzzling the still-soft nipples.
"Hey!" she squealed, laughing and pushing him away. "Careful there! You need a shave!"
He stopped, straightened up, and stared at her. Was she teasing? Should he stop and shave? What did she want?
"Aww," she purred, giggling in spite of her self. "Did I hurt little Frankie's feelings? Let me hold his hand."
Saying that, she took his hand and slipped it firmly between her legs, clamping them together over his probing fingers.
"That better, baby?" she cooed.
"Yeah," said Frank, sweat pouring down his face. "Yeah. Much better."
"Then do something!" she laughed, but it was only half a joke.
Something in the other half scared him.
It had been a bad scene right from the start. For one thing, Arlene was living with a guy. Not married, just living with him. He was out somewhere, studying or maybe getting a little variety in his love life, but Frank didn't like it at all. Maybe he'd have chanced being interrupted with Sue Ellen, but he hardly knew this chick, and if that joker came back too soon, he was in a bind. A bad one.
Then, too, there was Arlene herself. Maybe she wasn't quite a hippie-she said she wasn't-but she sure as hell behaved just like one.
She was naked when she met him at the door. "I don't believe in pretension," she had said. "You came here to lay me. Get on with it!"
And then there was her insistence on the light. The room was bathed in lights, and she just sat, cross-legged and open, and stared at him while he slipped out of his clothes. She had the courtesy not to simper or giggle when at last he pulled off his shorts, but that damned staring was enough to unnerve him all by itself.
Once, he recalled, Mona had awkwardly hinted that she'd like to watch it in the mirror, but Frank just assumed she was drunk and never mentioned it again. Neither did Mona, and he had preferred the guiltless anonymity of the dark ever since.
Then, after five or six minutes on the couch, she had excused herself, saying that she had to powder her nose. It had seemed so out-of-place that he had burst out laughing, his tension gone-but she had done just that; gone to her purse, pulled out a powder puff, and applied it to her nose. It was the most eloquent comment she could have made about his lovemaking methods.
"Okay, big man," she had said, replacing the powder-puff in her purse. "Everybody deserves a second chance."
It took him a few minutes to get over that, even with her help, touching, handling, kissing.
Now he was ready again, but now she had decided to tease him. She was turning him on and off like a faucet, playing him for a hick, and Frank knew it.
"If you don't do something pretty damned quick, I'm gonna have my fun without you," she laughed. "And poor little Frankie will be left all alone, out in the cold."
She lay back and spread her legs wide apart, gyrating and rotating her hips. Mad as he was, he couldn't refuse the invitation, but before he got there, the legs had closed again.
"Trying to draw blood?" she asked, rubbing her thigh-and something inside of Frank snapped.
With a roar that was more animal than human, he grabbed her by the hair and threw her head back against the pillow. Then he was on top of her, edging his knee between her legs.
He twisted his leg, forcing her thighs apart, and swung his body between them. He tried to kiss her, found her mouth tightly shut, and bit her lips, drawing blood. His hands grabbed her full, ripe breasts, squeezing them hard, rhythmically.
Then he was inside her, pushing farther and farther in. She moaned, half in pain, half in pleasure, and his body took up the rhythm on his clenching and unclenching hands.
"Is that the best you can do?" she asked levelly, licking the blood from her lips. Frank wanted to answer her, to tell her that she never had it so good, that he was more man than any woman deserved, but his orgasm was upon him, and all that escaped his lips, in rhythm with the spasmodic jerking of his hips, was "Bitch ... bitch ... bitch...."
Mona stared up guiltily at the bathroom mirror. That was Frank's key in the lock, no mistake about it. Rubbing herself against the rim of the tub one last time, squealing out one last cry of frustration, she hastily arose, wrapped her robe around her, and went out to meet him.
"Hard night, honey?" she asked, pretending to blow her nose and keeping her face buried in the handkerchief until some of the red had subsided. When the light no longer blinded her she knew her pupils had contracted to normal, and she placed the handkerchief in a pocket.
"Catch a cold today?" asked Frank.
"In a way."
"Do we have any beer? I'm thirsty enough to drink a whole keg."
"No wonder. Look at the way you're sweating."
"It was so cold I ran all the way home from the library," he lied. "Did Travis return that notebook I loaned him yesterday?"
"I haven't seen him all day," she said.
"That's a lie!" he snapped.
"How do you know?"
"Pam told me."
"Who's Pam?"
"She works in the library. A redhead."
"Oh."
"Well?" he demanded. "Well, what?"
"Aren't you going to say something?"
"What should I say?"
"Well, for God's sake, I just caught you lying to me!"
"So what? Unless the snow gave you a kiss on the way from the library, you've been lying to me, too."
"I ... uh ... had to drop something off at Tim Rothchild's, and his wife gave me a kiss. Big deal."
"I could call the Rothchild's right now," she said, placing her hand on the telephone.
"You do that!" he bellowed.
"All right. I will."
She picked up the receiver and began dialing. Frank stared dully at her for a moment, then took the receiver from her hand and replaced it.
"Was she good, Frank?" asked Mona.
"I hardly knew her. I ... Well, I just...."
"Did she come?"
"Did she what?"
"Come, damn it! I want to know if she came!" screamed Mona, tears of hysteria racing down her face and neck to be lost in the hollow between her heaving breasts. "That's what a woman always wants to know!"
"What's the matter with you?" asked Frank, dumbfounded. "You never talked that way."
"Was she pretty, Frank?" babbled Mona, her words coming so fast that they ran on top of each other. "Did you play with her nipples, Frank? Did you kiss them? Was it good and hard? Were you eager? Did you drool just a little? What did she give you that I can't? What...?"
"Look, Mona," he interrupted, "it was just one of those things. I still love you. Honest, I didn't...."
"But then, I don't really care what she gave you, Frank," continued Mona. "It doesn't matter. She can't give you anything I can't give you-anytime you want it. I don't care about that. I only want to know one thing: what did you give her?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Were you good, damn it! Did she come? Was she shaking all over until you felt like you were going to fall off? Did she scream? What did you do to her that you can't do for me?"
"What are you trying to say, Mona?"
"What's wrong with me? Why can't you make it with me, Frank? Everybody else on campus can-or didn't you know that? Hell, Travis Bland just has to look at me and I jump into bed. Sure, I jump into bed with you, too. But when Travis takes me there, I don't have to get out until morning. I don't have to lock myself in the bathroom and make love to a hairbrush?"
"You mean you and Travis...?"
"You weren't listening!" she screamed. "It's not Travis, or anyone else! It's you! It's you!"
Frank swallowed hard, then walked slowly over to the liquor cabinet. He brought out the bottle of Scotch, poured himself a double, and downed it in a single swallow.
She was still standing there, crying and moaning, her robe wide open. He poured himself another, then replaced the bottle carefully, straightened a pile of books atop the cabinet, and walked back into the living room.
He sat down in the easy chair, fumbled for his pipe, decided on a cigarette instead, and lit it with a slightly trembling hand.
"Sit down," he said slowly.
She did so, still unaware of her robe.
"Do you want a divorce?"
"God no!" she blurted, still a bit hysterical. "I don't want a divorce. I want a husband."
"All right. What do you suggest we do?"
"l don't know," she said. "If I'd known I'd have done it years ago."
"Do you intend to keep sleeping with Travis and the others?"
"There haven't been any others ... yet."
"Yet?"
"I mean I can't help myself."
"Maybe you should see a doctor...." he began slowly.
"A doctor?" she laughed harshly. "Sure, doctor, my husband keeps turning me on and then pulling the switch off. Can you make me like it?"
"Knock it off!" Frank snapped.
"Look, Frank, I'm no nympho or-anything like that. I just like sex. I've got to have it. If you can't deliver the goods, then no matter how miserable it makes me, I'll have to go elsewhere until you can. After all, you haven't exactly played the faithful husband."
"Where would you go to find it?"
"I don't know. Travis mentioned some club, a place he and Sue Ellen belong to where they.,."
"I know it. It's nothing but a goddamned swap club, Mona."
"Maybe we can go over there just once, just to see what it's like."
"Are you really serious?"
"Yes."
"What the hell," he shrugged. "Maybe I'll find it over there."
"Find what?"
"What I'm looking for," he answered softly. "Maybe you will."
She leached out, took his hand, and placed it on her breast. The nipple went erect at once, all one inch of it. But Frank was staring at the fire, an expression of infinite sadness upon his face.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS DARK OUT. THERE WAS STILL A CHILL in the air as the 'wind-whipped through the naked trees, but most of the snow had either melted or been shoveled off the walks.
Mona and Frank approached the house slowly, hesitantly. They had scarcely spoken to each other since that night of revelations a week ago. Frank had taken her just once, and this time Mona didn't even bother to sneak furtively to the bathroom. She simply gratified herself in bed while Frank watched, upset but unbearably fascinated. Of course she didn't do it in the usual wild way.
"This looks like the address," he said at last.
"Well, let's go in," she replied. "We'll never find out by standing here."
Frank rang the bell twice, and a moment later Travis Bland opened the door.
"Well, well!" he beamed. "So little Mona couldn't keep away any longer?"
"Watch what you say," growled Frank, ominously.
"Knock it off, Frank," said Travis. "After all, that's not exactly a tea party going on inside there. If you can't stand the thought of someone else having your wife, you shouldn't have come."
"Maybe I shouldn't have."
Well, nobody's making you come in-though we're all looking forward to it. Especially me," he added, running his fingers lazily down Mona's cheek.
"Besides you can have Sue Ellen. I know you've been dying to get into her pants for months. And right now she isn't even wearing any I"
Frank made no reply, and Travis ushered them inside, through an empty foyer and into a huge living room. All the furniture had been removed, and in its place were half a dozen huge, king-sized mattresses. In one corner was a slightly raised platform, perhaps a foot above the ground and this, too, was covered by a mattress.
There were six couples in the room, all in varying states of undress. Sue Ellen was completely nude, strutting about with her huge, firm breasts thrust forward.
Hey!" cried one of the women. "New blood!"
Everyone turned to Frank and Mona. Frank just glared back at them, but Mona tried to shrink into herself. She was scared, and she grabbed hold of Travis's arm for support.
"Okay, boys and girls!" boomed Travis. "I want you to meet Frank and Mona Durham. Mona's the one with the boobs," General laughter. "They want to join our little club."
"My little club wants to join them!" laughed one of the men, pointing his red erection at Mona.
"I'll give you more joining than you can take," said the woman next to him, swaying her bare breasts tantalizingly close to his hot-wet lips.
"Frank and Mona, I want you to meet the gang." He pointed a thumb toward a copulating couple in one corner of the room. "Those love birds are Dave and-who you with, Dave-oh, yes, Ellen. That bare-assed little slut wiggling around the floor is my ever-lovin' Sue Ellen, who will do more than her best to make you feel at home. That's Sam and Jeannie, there's Tim and Karen...." On and on he went until the informal introduction was over.
"Still want to join?" asked Travis.
"Yes," said Mona softly.
"No need to whisper," said Sam, removing his lips from Jeannie's breast long enough to get the words out.
"Yes!" Mona shouted, startling herself with the fervency of her answer.
"Then you'll have to go through the initiation," said Karen, who was caressing her partner's organ even as she spoke.
"Yes!" chimed in another woman. "We have to have an initiation!"
"You didn't tell me about any initation," said Mona to Travis.
"Uh, didn't I?" he answered. "Must have slipped my mind. Anyway, new members always have to go through an initiation. You'll like it. It's great for getting rid of inhibitions."
"Does Frank have to do it too?" asked Mona.
"You bet your little round ass he does," said Sue Ellen. "I've been waiting for this."
"Things could be worse," laughed one of the men. "I guarantee you won't have to put up with the kind of paddling you suffer through in some fraternity initiations,"
"Just look at it as kind of a get-acquainted session," said Travis.
"All right," said Mona. "What do you want me to do?"
"We'll let you know," said Dave. "And don't look so damned frightened. The world isn't coming to an end, you know. In fact, you just might end up enjoying it."
"That's right," chimed in Ellen. "After all, we all had to go through it ourselves."
"Come on over to the platform," said Sue Ellen, taking Mona by the hand and leading her across the room. "You can go first. Frank still looks a little shy."
Mona stepped up onto the platform.
"Why don't you take off your coat so we can get a good look at you?" asked one of the men.
Mona did so, letting it drop to the floor.
"Nice figure," commented Tim.
"Is it for real?" asked Sam.
"I can testify to that," said Travis.
"Was I asking you?" said Sam.
Travis grinned and turned his eyes to Mona.
"Well kid, do like the man says. Prove you're for real."
Slowly, timorously, Mona unbuttoned her blouse and laid it neatly on the mattress.
"Better move it off of there," called one of the men. "It's going to get pretty crowded up there before long."
She did as she was told. Then, unbuckling her skirt, she drew it up over her head and placed it next to the blouse beside the mattress.
The shoes came next. Then she reached her hands behind her back, unfastening her bra, and a stony silence swept over the room.
Mona had been to bed with only two men in her life, Frank and Travis. No one else except her doctor and one boy in high school had ever seen her bare breasts, and suddenly she became panicky.
"Hey!" called out Ellen. "I've got to teach a class tomorrow morning at eight-forty."
Taking a deep breath, Mona pulled the bra away.
A gasp went up from the men as they viewed her full, ripe breasts, swaying slightly, capped by rose-tipped, amazingly long nipples.
Nobody said a word. They just stared at her exposed flesh, the men licking their lips hungrily, greedily. A slow flush of embarrassment spread over her body. She became aware of it, tried to surpress it and fight it back, but that only made it all the worse.
"If you blush now," said Jeannie, "whatever are you gonna do later?"
"Let's find out!" added Karen.
The room fell silent again, and Mona knew what they were waiting for. A little thrill surged through her body, warming the flesh and sending little shocks of anticipation into her loins. Suddenly the blush was gone-and a moment later so were the filmy panties, sliding down past her hips, over the broad expanse of thigh, and down to the floor.
For an instant, in the face of all that intent attention, she was tempted to cross her hands in front of her, to make one futile attempt to regain her modesty. But there was Travis, standing almost within reach, leering at her. There was no love in that face, no tender emotions, only lust-and the thought made her all the more anxious to have him. To have someone-anyone.
Turning back to the others, she slowly and deliberately moved her legs until she was standing, facing them, with feet apart, exposed for all their inquiring glances.
"Didn't I tell you she was for real?" boomed Travis.
Everyone muttered or nodded their agreement and for the first time now she could see lust and desire written as plainly on Frank's face as on the others'. But she had seen that look before, hundreds of times before, and it had never made any difference.
Her legs still wide apart, she blew Travis a kiss.
That was enough for him. In a second he was on the stage beside her, his hands running shamelessly over her body, touching, squeezing, probing. To hell with the rest of them! she thought. To hell with everything! She returned his embrace. Their lips met, parted, and their tongues intertwined.
"Stop the music!" yelled Dave. "That's not part of the initation. Not yet, anyway."
She grabbed him, and held him all the harder, ground her body against his thigh, but he extricated himself and turned back off the stage.
"Do you blame me?" he asked the couples on the floor.
"Hell, no!" came a group response from the men.
Mona was standing there naked and panting, on the stage, her breasts bobbing to and fro as her breath came in quick passionate pants.
"Lie down," said Helen.
"Why way?" she asked.
"So that we can see you," said Jeannie, staring at her as lustfully as Travis had.
Mona lowered herself to the mattress, hanging her legs over the edge of the platform.
"Spread 'em wider," said Jeannie.
Mona did so.
"Now do it to yourself."
"What?" asked Mona.
"Masturbate."
"No."
"Look. I can see how much he turned you on. Nobody's going to help you out until you do it to yourself first."
Mona's hand moved down her body, past the soft flatness of her stomach. It found what it sought and started manipulating it in plain view of everyone.
For a few seconds nothing happened. She couldn't stop thinking of all those people staring between her legs while she played with herself.
Then, as it always did, it began to get to her. She rubbed harder, twisting and squeezing and pulling, undulating her torso against her will.
"I think we really got a live one here," remarked Karen.
"Look at her grind those hips, will you!" whispered Tim to no one in particular.
Suddenly the climax was upon her. She bit her lip to keep from screaming out, but the scream came anyway. It was a full minute before she could once again control her body's convulsions.
"Now, that wasn't so terrible, was it?"
Mona sat up, leaning her hands on the edge of the platform. She shook her head, her eyes still glazed with the ecstasy of orgasm.
"Okay, Sam. It's about your turn, isn't it?"
Sam nodded and clambered up onto the platform, wearing nothing but his left sock and a wristwatch.
"Fellate him," said Sue Ellen.
"Do what?" asked Mona. "I don't understand."
"Suck him off," said Jeannie, still not taking her eyes from the flat triangle of hair between Mona's legs. "And you be very gentle with him. If you bite it off, I'm gonna have to get me a new husband."
A few of the women laughed at that, and Sam knelt down beside her, offering his cock. Mona cautiously lowered her lips to it, and tentatively touched it with her tongue. Sam closed his eyes and shuddered.
Mona peeked out of the corner of her eye, looking for Frank. He was staring intently at her, looking neither jealous nor angry, mostly just hot.
Suddenly Sam grabbed her head with his hands, pushing it forward, pulling it back. Mona got the idea, took up the rhythm. A moment later he gave a convulsive shudder. Then he was moving with her, mumbling incoherently between short, gasping exasperations.
When it was over, even before Sam had regained his composure, Sue Ellen turned to Travis. "Okay, stud, it's your turn now. Do your stuff."
Travis climbed back onto the platform. Mona rose to kiss him, but instead he gathered her up in his arms and carried her to a mattress in the middle of the room.
"I thought you might be getting lonely up there," he grinned.
Mona didn't answer. She simply drew him down on the mattress beside her and tugged at his shorts.
Two or three feminine hands reached out to help, and soon Travis was as devoid of clothes as Mona, Everyone backed off a bit, and sat down in a circle around the impassioned couple. One or two held drinks in their hands, Tim lit a cigarette, and Jeannie began moaning and masturbating herself, timing her movements to fit Travis's.
Mona lay back and closed her eyes, content to let the pleasure of the contact with Travis's body surge over her.
He seemed to be a thousand places at once, licking her tautly erect nipples, kissing her ear, running his hand over her stomach and thighs.
He lowered his hot, eager lips to her nipples once again, and she grabbed his head, clutching it tightly to her, moaning and writhing, twisting her body towad him.
Then his hand was on her thigh, sliding up her leg, prodding probing, pleading for entrance. She accommodated him, and then his fingers were lost from sight, exploring, seeking, finding things she never knew were down there. She relinquished her hold on his head, only to begin pushing it down warm.
His lips ran across her belly, his tongue flicking out here and there, kissing, licking, sucking. He paused just below her navel, panting for breath.
"Get down there, damn you!" she hissed, raising her hips to meet his face.
And then his mouth was there, and she began twitching and writing again, arms and legs flailing the air.
"Soon! Soon! Soon!" she murmured urgently, and he shifted his body once again, climbing on top of her.
His hands linked behind her neck and shoulders, but she tore them apart and guided them back to her breasts. His legs were pumping now, his back arching, and falling, holding and then biting, fighting, panting.
"Soon! Oh, soon!"
He increased his tempo, harder, faster, harder, faster, harder, faster.
"Now!" she screamed, in a voice he couldn't recognize. "Oh! Now! Now! Now!"
And then he was caught up in the warmth and wash of her ecstasy, oblivious to all, to everyone, even her, as he yielded at last to the tension and the passion of his own heaving, driving body.
Suddenly it was over. Quickly, as quickly as it had started, it subsided.
Travis rolled off of her, his hard, hairy body drenched with sweat, and Mona just lay there, arms stretched up over her head, one knee raised slightly, alternately sighing and gasping.
"Good as ever?" asked Travis, smiling down at her.
"Mmmm."
"Jeannie," said Sam. "If you can stop playing with yourself now, we're going to welcome Mona to the club."
"Welcome her yourself," said Jeannie, her eyelids clamped shut, her back to the group. "I'm busy!"
"Well, kid," said Travis, helping Mona to her feet and offering her a towel to wipe his hair and sweat from her body, "you're in. You're one of us now."
"That's all there is to it?" she asked. "You want more?" laughed Dave. "Give me a few minutes to rest first," she smiled, looking him square in the eye.
"Well, now that that's settled...." began Tim. "Just a minute," Mona said. "What about Frank?"
"Who?"
"My husband."
"Where is he?" asked Dave.
"Why, isn't he here?" she asked. She looked around the room, but there was no sign of him.
"Sue Ellen is missing too," noted Travis.
"I wonder if that means something," giggled Ellen.
From a room at the other end of the house came the rhythmical sound of bedsprings. "I do believe it does," laughed Travis.
"Is that his initiation?" asked Mona.
"Oh, didn't I tell you?" said Travis. "The wife takes the test for both partners. Frank's a member too-if he wants to be."
And, down the hall, Frank was doing his best to prove that he wanted to be a member, as Sue Ellen stared dully out the window and wondered if squirrels ever got buried in the snow.
"Hi, Kaye," said Joel.
"Hello, Joel."
Joel Hankins took a deep breath and let it out slowly, ending in a low whistle.
"Do you like it?" asked Kaye, whirling around a couple of times so that he could get a better look at her dress. Her rich, ripe breasts fought against the flimsy material, bobbing like two ripe melons ready for the picking.
"Like it?" he managed to ask, before his voice broke. "Is it legal to wear something like that."
"You're the lawyer," she laughed. "Why don't you tell me?"
"I think," he said, trying very hard not to smile, "that I'd better take you to my office for a brief conference."
"I thought you were taking me out to dinner," she smiled.
"Never try to interfere with the due process of the law, my dear lady," he said, taking her by the arm and leading her across the campus to his rented room.
"My!" she exclaimed upon arriving. "What an impressive office!" Her eyes fell on some pornographic pinups. "Clients of yours, I presume?"
"Actually, they're wives of clients. I took them in lieu of money."
She laughed at that and then, suddenly, they were lying on the bed together, his hands racing eagerly over her young, warm, writhing body.
His lips sought hers, found them, and his tongue slid through the moist orifice, probing the depths of her mouth. Her tongue responded in kind, and soon they were inserting and withdrawing them in a parody of the motions of sexual intercourse.
She pressed her body harder against his, her tight skirt slid up to her waist, and she drew one of his legs in between her thighs, grinding herself harder and harder against it.
Then his hands were at her dress. The neck line was so low, and her bra so scanty, that rather than removing her dress, he simply reached in and gently withdrew one of her burgeoning breasts from it's inadequate housing.
"Oh, Joel!" she moaned. "Don't stop. Please don't ever stop."
And for a few moments, he made up his mind that tonight he damned well wouldn't stop, that he would carry the ball all the way home for a touchdown. He lowered his hungry lips to her breasts once again, thrilling at the feel of her trembling response.
"Go on!" she begged him. "Please!"
He went on.
Down from her breasts, across her tiny waistline and well-rounded hips traveled his searching, fondling hands. They met behind her, in the furrow of her buttocks, and she squirmed with ecstasy.
Then he was pulling her flimsy panties off her and kneeling on the floor, his head buried between her legs. As his lips found her shining clitoris, she wrapped her legs around his neck, drawing his face still harder against her.
The legs shuddered as his tongue left her clitoris and began slithering its way up her vagina, and then she could stand it no longer, she rolled away and pulled him onto the bed beside her.
"Now!" she panted. " Do it now!"
"But we promised to wait," he whispered, fighting desperately to regain control of his seething emotions
"Promises be damned! I love you and I want you to take me now!"
"We can't, Kaye. You're a virgin. What if we broke up?"
"Then marry me tonight"
"I can't. I don't have any money. Come on, honey, don't make it any harder."
With a final hug, she released him and lay, face down upon the bed, panting. He brushed her sweat from his face and walked across the room to the sink on the wall, where he splashed cold water all over himself, mindless of the newly pressed suit he was wearing.
"Joel?" she said softly a few minutes later.
"Yes, Kaye?"
"You were right. I'm sorry."
"Are you kidding? Don't ever be sorry about wanting to go to bed with me. I'd be sorry if you didn't!"
"You know what I mean."
"Yes," he said slowly. "I do. But it was my fault. I'll just have to see to it that we're only together in crowds for a while."
"I'd better get straightened up if we still are going out for dinner," she said with attempted lightness.
"Yes you have," he answered absently. "Joel?" she asked, while standing before the mirror above the sink.
"Yes?"
"What are you thinking?"
"Oh, nothing."
"Come on. Out with it."
"Well," he began. "I was thinking of Travis Bland."
"That good-looking fellow I see you with in the law library?"
"Yeah, that's him."
"What about him."
"I just was wondering what makes a guy like that tick."
"I don't understand what that's got to do with us."
"Nothing. It's just that, well, he's almost got a lend-lease plan on Sue Ellen-that's his wife-and she doesn't seem to give a damn who he goes to bed with either. I just wonder sometimes how they can love each other and still go around sleeping with everyone in sight."
"Maybe they don't love each other."
"Then why the hell did they get married?"
"I don't know," said Kaye, putting the finishing touches on her hairdo.
"Me neither. Seems to me that if you love someone, you love someone. You don't want to go around laying everyone else who crosses your path."
"Maybe they have problems."
"You wouldn't know it to talk to him," he said. "Or to her, either."
"Are you going to spend all night telling me their problems, or are you taking me out to dinner?"
"Well," he grinned, "I've never been overly eager to spend half a week's pay on one meal, and while you may not look much like a horse, you've got an appetite like one."
She laughed and took a playful swing at him. He ducked, whirled her around, and swatted her on the buttocks.
His hand lingered there for a moment. Then it slid down beneath her skirt and up the inside of her thigh.
She turned to him, standing with legs spread wide apart to give him easier access. He manipulated her still erect clitoris then until that joyous moment of relief Was upon her.
"How about dinner, Romeo?" she smiled later.
He nodded his head and, taking her arm in his, walked out the door with her.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SUN SHONE IN THROUGH A SLIT IN THE curtains, and Travis Bland rolled over, burying his head beneath the pillow and mouthing an incoherent curse.
It had been a long night. A very long night, just like the weekly sessions usually were. A little voice reminded him that he had better get a move on if he wanted to make it to his morning classes, and, turning, he discovered with no great surprise that the voice belonged to Sue Ellen.
"Morning," he groaned.
"And how did you sleep?" came the cheerful response.
"Infrequently," he answered, running his hand over the stubble on his chin.
"Poor dear," she said, patting his shoulder. "Wish I could say the same."
"Huh?"
"I mean your good buddy Frank."
"Who?"
"You know-the Durham without the boobs."
"Leave us not be coarse and vulgar at such a godawful time of day," he said, making a concentrated effort to keep his bleary eyes open despite the pain of the sunlight.
"Sorry about the time, neighbor, but I'm really very well-rested myself. In fact, I do believe I took a nap while Frank was diddling me."
"That's a terrible thing to say," grinned Travis, but he leaned forward eagerly to hear the rest. "What's the matter? Can't he cut the mustard, or were his bombsights off, or what?"
"He's got a lot to learn, I'll say that for him. Never thought I would feel sorry for Mona, but I sure do now."
"Why don't you take my good buddy under your soft, ample wings and teach him?"
"Good Lord, the boy's a remedial case; it would take ages I Besides, I don't want to have anything to do with him. Now, if you asked me to teach Fred or Tim...." She let her voice trail off and licked her lips suggestively.
Travis gave her a friendly swat on her bare ass.
"Not as long as I'm the assistant dean of Bland University, you won't!" he smiled.
"Hey," she said, rubbing her backside, "you know, I kind of like that."
"My love," said Travis, slipping into his shorts, "I have yet to find anything you don't like, and it has always been my contention that you would be equally at home in bed with a man, woman or chimpanzee, provided all were equally potent."
He pulled his undershirt over his head, then sat down on the edge of the bed and began fiddling with his socks.
"You know," purred Sue Ellen, running her long, slim fingers beneath the elastic band of his shorts, "you could always skip classes."
"You mean you might just possibly be able to fit me into your schedule?" he laughed. "Somewhere between Jeannie and the milkman?"
"I might even cancel my schedule completely," she replied, grinning roguishly up at him.
"That would never do," said Travis, reaching for a shoe. "We might have to start paying for the milk and butter again."
"Sometimes I think you would have preferred a virgin," she chuckled, still manipulating his pecker with her hand.
"With soft white hands, blushing cheeks, and purple veins in her breasts," agreed Travis.
"Then why did you marry me instead?"
"My dear woman, you came to me with a cabinet full of top recommendations. How could I refuse such a bargain? Besides, if I did, you'd probably be turning yourself on in Frank's bathroom right now, just as I suspect poor Mona is."
There was a knock at the door.
"Come on in!" yelled Travis, and Jeannie, her face hot and flushed, entered the apartment and walked to the door of the bedroom.
"You might at least have had the decency to wait until I at least get out of bed before humping my wife," said Travis, by way of his own variety of friendly greeting.
"What makes you think she wants me?" interposed Sue Ellen. "Maybe she wants a. choice."
"There won't be anything left of me in about ten seconds if you don't get your shameless hand off my tool."
Jeannie's eyes dropped to Sue Ellen's hand. "May I watch?" she asked.
"Oh, hell!" said Travis, patting the bed. "Why not join in? You might as well, everyone else does."
Jeannie needed no second invitation. She unbuttoned her coat, revealing a perfectly nude body underneath it and, placing the garment neatly over a chair, walked over to the bed.
"Weren't you just a little bit cold?" asked Travis with honest curiosity.
"A little," she admitted. "That's why I'm here. Warm me up!"
She plopped back on the bed, her arms stretched out as if on a cross, and waited, lips moist, thighs trembling with eagerness.
Sue Ellen withdrew her hand and began brushing it slowly, back and forth, across Jeannie's hard, firm breasts. Back and forth, it went, tracing out every-diminishing concentric circles, smaller and smaller, until finally the fingers were doing' nothing more than lazily flicking the hard erect nipples.
Meanwhile, Travis had knelt on the floor at the foot of the bed, gently massaging Jeannie's feet. Suddenly he moved his arms onto the bed, supporting his torso on his elbows, and began kissing the inside of her ankles. Slowly, ever so slowly, his tongue crept up along the legs, touching the ankles, now the calves, then the knees.
Jeannie's face had turned bright red, and she gulped in huge quantities of air, holding her breath as long as possible before repeating the process. Silently, softly, her left hand reached out, found Sue Ellen's right nipple, and began rolling it around between her thumb and forefinger.
Sue Ellen moaned softly, but continued flicking the nipples another moment before, fastening her hand to one of them, she slowly, tantalizingly lowered her lips to the other.
The contact, when it came, was electrifying.
Jeannie gave a hoarse shout of pleasure, applying and releasing pressure vigorously to Sue Ellen's breast, and undulating her entire body.
With her free hand she reached down, wrapped her fingers in Travis's hair, and tried to pull his face still higher. But Travis only wriggled away, chuckled, and continued his frustratingly slow movements up her leg.
He had reached her thigh now, and she brought her legs together, holding his head there, urging it to greater speed, quivering at each touch of his hot, moist, darting tongue.
Sue Ellen had shifted her body around without relinquishing her grip on Jeannie's nipples. Now she was on all fours, hands supporting her, nipple still clutched lovingly between her lips, her knees on each side of Jeannie's head.
Jeannie released Sue Ellen's breast and dug her fingers into Sue Ellen's soft, flesh buttocks, dragging her down, down to the panting lips that awaited.
Jeannie's tongue shot in, exploring, caressing. Suddenly she moaned again, for Travis had passed the top of her thighs and reached the end of his slow but ardent search.
He reached down, grabbed her securely by her legs, and drew them up around his neck, simultaneously burying his face in her snatch.
Jeannie was shaking now, her soft white flesh fluttering as if a billion butterflies were trying to break out of it all at once. She paused to moan, to gasp for breath, but Sue Ellen lowered her body meaningfully and Jeannie went to work on her again, furiously, eagerly, urgently.
She felt something inside her, something too large to be a finger, felt Travis's hands grabbing her breasts, squeezing them, toying-with the nipples.
"Not yet!", whispered Sue Ellen. "Soon, but not yet!"
Travis slowed his movements to accommodate her. His face was only a few inches from his wife's, and he leaned forward, inserting his tongue between her lips, feeling the warm moistness of her mouth.
"Now!" Sue Ellen tried to yell, but Travis's lips were on her, smothering her little screams of passion. He moved his body furiously, and an instant later Jeannie was jerking her hips rhythmically back and forth, grinding, pushing, working all the harder to share her pleasure with Sue Ellen's.
Faster and faster became the beat, wilder and wilder became the frenzied action on the bed, until at last all three collapsed on one another, their nude, sweating, panting bodies still interlocked in the grip of fading passion.
"Gee!" sighed Jeannie long afterward. "It would have been nice if Mona had been here to make it a foursome."
"Hot about her, are you?" asked Travis avidly. "Sure. Aren't you?"
"You may not have noticed it, old girl," replied Travis easily, "But there is a subtle difference between you and I."
"And growing less subtle all the time," noted Sue Ellen, as she moved back slightly to leave room for her husband's rapidly-expanding appendage.
"Just the same," said Jeannie, the redness finally beginning to drain from her oval face, "she really turns me on. Almost as much as you turned her on last night."
"That was just my natural animal magnetism," said Travis. "But you'll notice that none of the girls managed to light the fire downstairs. The girl, much as I hate to be the one to break the unhappy tidings to you, is straight as an arrow."
"So are you," noted Sue Ellen.
"Somehow it's not quite the same thing," sighed Travis, rolling over on his stomach.
"Careful," giggled Jeannie, "or the sheet'll wind up looking like a piece of Swiss cheese."
"Speaking of pieces," said Sue Ellen, reaching over and toying with Jeannie's breasts, "I've got a wonderful idea."
"With all the wonderful ideas you enact," commented Travis, "it's a wonder you have any time left to think them up."
"Oh, I do it in my spare time," said Sue Ellen.
"Like when she's masturbating for lack of anything better to do," Travis explained to Jeannie, who broke out into uproarious laughter for, some reason known only to herself.
"See?" Travis taunted his wife. "There is more than one way to have fun by yourself!"
"Wish I'd have known that last night," laughed Sue Ellen.
Jeannie stopped laughing long enough to ask, "What was wrong with last night?"
"Nothing," Travis said.
"Nothing until Mona's boy took me into the back room and tried to prove that she really didn't need to get it anywhere else."
"I take it his proof wasn't too logical." , "He couldn't have passed kindergarten in the subject," groaned Sue Ellen.
"What did he do-weep on your bosom, bury his nose in your navel, and tell you it was shot off in the war?" asked Jeannie.
"Nothing of the kind!" said Sue Ellen indignantly. "I've got better plans for my breasts than to let them substitute for crying towels."
"So, what happened?"
"Oh, he has what it takes, all right. All the proper equipment, and all in working order. Not like this eunich here," she added, making a quick lunge and snaking her hand beneath Travis's hips.
"SO, what's the big hang-up?" persisted Jeannie.
"The big hang-up," answered Sue Ellen, "is that he has all the delicacy of an elephant. I mean, I'm not against being taken violently, but I'm not just a receptacle for sperm, no matter what Herkimer here seems to think."
"Ow!" cried Travis, rolling away from her prying hand.
"Good old Frank is like a bull moose in the rutting season. He knows what he's got and he knows where to shove it, but Lord knows he doesn't know what the hell to do once it's there!"
"Too bad," sighed Jeannie. "I was kind of thinking of inviting him over for tea and things."
"Nothing like things, I always say," put in Travis.
"Nothing like my things," agreed Jeannie. "Maybe you just didn't appeal to the poor dear."
"The hell I didn't!" snapped Sue Ellen indignantly. "Hell, the guy's been dying to stick his hand between my legs for over a year now. Every time we've gotten together he keeps giving me those secret bedroom looks, you know, like Clark Gable when Harlow or Turner turns him on. So damned cocky and masterful. Hell, he ought to go back to waching movies!"
"Such indelicacies coming from my little spouse," said Travis, feigning shock. "I really ought to wash your mouth out with soap,"
"Screw you,"
"I suppose I ought to anyway, even if you never utter another obscenity," he grinned. "Though I realize that'd be like asking Joe E. Lewis to give up drinking."
"You ever convince Sue Ellen to give up cussing or sex," said Jeannie, "and Sam and I will both rip you to shreds."
Sue Ellen smiled.
"Really, Sue Ellen," Jeannie went on, "You need a project. Something to keep your hands busy."
"My hands are busy!" she grinned evilly.
"I know. If they found every male on campus dead tomorrow morning, you'd be the only probable suspect."
"Why?"
"They'd all have your fingerprints on them."
"So what do you suggest I do with my hands-besides twisting your neck off for that crack?"
"You'll get a lot farther in life if you just keep 'em clenched up in your pockets," said Travis. "But since that would be asking the impossible, why don't you put 'em to a good use?"
"Such as?"
"Such as giving good old Frank a liberal education."
"I like the way he gives his wife away at every opportunity," interjected Jeannie.
"Nonsense. We'll be working as a team. While she's putting Frank through his paces, I'll be teaching Mona the intricacies of sex that my little Southern belle here could never hope to master."
"I got a better idea, Travis," said Jeannie. "Why don't you give Frank his catechism, and let me show Mona what makes the world go round?"
"You," he said to her, "can be replaced by a knothole and a jar of vaseline."
"And-what's so great about you?" she taunted. "I don't know, but I imagine you can tell me or you wouldn't be here."
"Talk about egotism!" smirked Sue Ellen, starting to run her hands over Travis's bare back.
"Well, what do you say?" asked Travis. "Care to make it a joint project?"
"Don't talk dirty," said Jeannie, racing her fingertips lightly over his legs.
"'What's the answer, woman?" said Travis.
"As I said before," she replied, "go screw yourself."
"That would be a little difficult," he said. "Why don't I choose the handiest object."
"I'm all hands, kid," offered his wife.
He rolled over on his back. Sue Ellen lowered her head to his abdomen, nuzzling him lightly, while Jeannie pulled up a chair to watch with avid interest.
Sue Ellen felt his hands on her, strong and eager, and she straddled him, her head facing his feet.
"Hiya, Joel."
Joel Hankins looked up from his books.
"Oh, hello Travis," he said, carefully inserting a sheet of note paper to mark his,-place and closing his notebook.
"What are you doing for supper this evening?" asked Travis, nodding a friendly greeting to a pair of girls who walked past.
"Oh, nothing," said Joel. "Kaye's hitting the books tonight, so I thought I'd just pick up a hamburger and pop off to my room to study."
"Make you a deal," boomed Travis, then lowered his voice as the librarian glowered at him. "Help me hone up on vegetable export tariffs for twenty minutes or so, and I'll invite you over to my place for a home-cooked dinner."
Joel had not the slightest desire to be bothered with eating at Travis's, and he certainly had no use whatsoever for Sue Ellen Bland's empty-headed company, but he merely smiled and said, "Sure, it's a deal."
Travis had always been a bit of a pain. The man simply bluffed his way through every oral exam, and a single look at someone else's notes was enough to implant them in his memory long enough to see him through a written test.
Joel's marks were better, almost all A's, but he paid the price for them in lack of sleep and, except for Kaye, lack of social life. He wasn't exactly bitter about people like Travis. It was just that they were so different that he seemed to have nothing in common with them.
And he was never more sure of it than when he walked into the Blands' house. It was only five rooms and couldn't have cost more than twenty or twenty-two thousand, but it was a palace compared to his barren sleeping room. The furniture was extremely modern, all iron and vinyl and contoured, and a huge nude painting of Sue Ellen hung above the false fireplace, smiling gaily out at the living room.
"Well?" asked Travis expansively. "What do you think of it?"
"Very nice," said Joel, looking around for some sign of a book, but finding nothing except jazz and folk records laid flat on the shelves, sticking out awkwardly.
"Hey!" yelled Travis. "Anything hot in the kitchen?"
"You better believe it!" shouted back Sue Ellen, and Joel sat down and tried to lose himself in one of his books.
"Well, stop sitting on it and get dinner cooking!" laughed Travis. "We've got company."
"My kind or yours?" asked Sue Ellen.
"Why don't you come out here and ask him yourself?" replied Travis, walking over to the records and pulling out a Miles Davis album.
Joel almost fell off the chair when Sue Ellen entered the living room. She wore a very conservative two-inch walking heel, a delicately-woven apron about her waist-and nothing else!
"Hi!" she greeted him, not the least bit embarrassed by her nudity or his glassy stare. "I'm sorry for being so, ah, informal, but we're having hamburgers, and the grease simply ruins my clothes. Besides, it's much cooler this way, don't you agree?"
She held the apron up and did a graceful little pirouette to show him exactly how much cooler she was.
"She used to be a blonde until clothes like this gave her away," remarked Travis casually. He placed the record on the stereo set and sat back on the couch.
"Look," said Joel uneasily. "If I'm intruding, I'll be happy to take a rain check."
He began to get up, but Sue Ellen plunked herself down on his lap, placing her arms around his neck.
"Nonsense," she smiled. "If you come some other day, I might not even be wearing an apron, and we can't afford any heart attacks in the house right now."
She laughed at what she evidently felt was her own little joke. The laugh began in her throat, but spread throughout her body, and she ground her bare buttocks against Joel's no-longer-soft lap.
"Ouch!" she giggled, jumping off him. Joel just sat and stared, and wondered if he had perhaps walked into a lunatic asylum by mistake.
"Cheer up, Joel, " said Travis casually. "If I don't mind her wiggling her ass in your face, there's no reason why you should."
"That's a terrible way to talk about your wife!" laughed Sue Ellen.
"Listen, my surly slut," he smiled, "Joel is too hungry and I'm too tired, so why don't you and your bobbing boobs slither back into the kitchen and get dinner on the table?"
"But he's such a nice boy!" she said, and Joel finally realized that this was all an elaborate act, that they had probably been bored earlier in the day . and had decided to enliven the evening by bringing him over and having a little fun with him.
Well, it was his own fault for coming, and with a sad shrug of his shoulders, he placed his book aside and decided to wait and see what comes next.
He didn't know exactly what to expect, but it certainly wasn't what happened.
From down the corridor he heard the sound of footsteps and, turning, he beheld a completely nude woman walking toward him.
"Is this one mine?" she asked, stretching languorously.
"Afraid not, Jeannie," said Travis. "He's his own man."
"A self-made man, you might say," added Sue Ellen.
"Self-made?" grinned Jeannie. "This I wanta see!"
"Joel, meet Jeannie," said Travis. "I won't tell you her last name because her husband is a pretty normal guy when he's not residing eight inches deep in Sue Ellen, and I would hate to have grief and shame befall were word to reach him of his spouse's detestable behavior."
"I'm pleased to meet you," said Joel, marveling that the words came out in the right order.
"Charmed," said Jeannie, with a slight curtsy, which, considering her condition, was amazingly obscene, "Aren't you beckoning him to enter?" asked Travis. "If you are, forget it. The boy needs a little to keep hiser-energy level up."
"I've got something he could eat that's better than food," giggled Jeannie, sitting down next to Travis.
"Nonsense," said Travis. "He needs fresh food, not Second-Hand Rose."
Amazing, thought Joel. I walked into a sexual funny farm, and everyone is behaving so matter-of-factly that I'm beginning to get bored with it all.
"Oh well," shrugged Jeannie, the act sending visual tremors through her breasts, "he's a bit on the small side anyway."
"The hell he is!" yelled Sue Ellen from the kitchen. "Let's see you sit. on his lap and say that. The dear little fellow almost split me in two!"
"Oh, I don't know," said Jeannie, casually unzipping Travis's pants and withdrawing his huge erection with her hand. "I don't think he can stack up to your husband."
"It's a bet," said Sue Ellen, returning with a platterful of hamburgers. "Whip it out, Joel."
"I'd rather not," said Joel, wondering if this were all some insane dream.
"Aww, he's shy." said Jeannie, "Isn't that cute?"
"Come on, Joel," urged Sue Ellen, walking over to him and standing with her breasts swaying tantalizingly just a few inches from his face. "Be a sport."
"No, thanks," said Joel. He reached out his hands to push her gently but firmly away, but she pivoted and bent over so that he suddenly found himself grasping her soft, pliant breasts. The nipples hardened immediately at his touch.
"Why, Joel!" she squealed. "I didn't know you cared!"
He withdrew his hands as if they had been burned. Travis suddenly guffawed at the sight of his face, and soon both women joined in.
"Have a hamburger," said Travis, walking over and handing him one, completely oblivious of his open fly and protruding prick.
"You know," said Sue Ellen, looking down at her husband. "We should have had shish-kabob instead. I'll bet you could skewer a five-pound roast all by yourself."
"I've put it to many uses," said Travis, "but somehow that one has escaped me."
"Joel," said Jeannie, "you really ought to get into the mood. Once you're married, you'll want to join our club-and how can we accept you if we think you're a prude?"
"What club?" asked Joel, in spite of himself.
"Oh, kind of fun and games," said Sue Ellen. "You'd like it," added Travis. " Frank Durham's in it, which means you can shack up with Mona any time you want."
"Talking about Mona again?" laughed Sue Ellen. "I do believe you're in love!"
"Mona Durham goes in for this?" asked Joel. "I don't believe it."
"Why don't you ask her?" said Jeannie. "Or ask any man on campus, for that matter."
"Hold it a minute," grinned Travis. "You're getting her mixed up-with Sue Ellen."
"No, I'm not," said Jeannie. "I didn't say to ask anything that breathes, regardless of race, religion, color, sex or species."
"I'm just well-rounded," grinned Sue Ellen, bending over in front of Joel to prove her point.
"It hurts to be honorable, doesn't it, Joel?" she laughed. "Come on. Admit it: wouldn't you like to reach out an grab a great big handful?"
"Truthfully?" asked Joel quietly..
"You'd better not," cautioned Travis. "She just might kill you."
"Getting back to the club," said Sue Ellen "we'll be happy to have you. In fact," she grinned, "I'll be happy to have you right now."
"Not a chance," said Travis. "Let's wait until he brings that little piece-what's her name? Kaye?-along with him. That's the gal for me. Small, but acres and acres of curves."
"You say anything else about her," said Joel softly, "and I'm going to break your neck."
"Say, he'd do it, too!", said Jeannie excitedly. "Just look at him. He means it."
"Oh, act your age," Travis said irritably. "After all...."
"After all, nothing," said Joel, still speaking calmly, but with a wild gleam in his eye which betrayed his tension. "Kaye is straight and normal. I don't condemn your behavior, or even give a damn what you do, but leave her alone. Not that she'd ever go to bed with you anyway, but I don't want to hear about her being bothered."
He rose and gathered his books.
As he was walking down the sidewalk towards his room, he heard footsteps running up behind him.
It was Travis, who had come out without a coat, though Joel noted that he had had the presence of mind to zip his fly.
"Say, Joel," he began, and it was the first time Joel Hankins had ever seen him flustered.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry about what went on in there. It got a little out of hand. The girls just wanted to see how far they could push you, and well...." his voice tapered off.
"It's okay," said Joel. "I understand."
"I'm not really interested in Kaye," continued Travis. "In fact, I doubt if I'd recognize her if I saw her. Though if you ever do want to join, we're always looking for members."
"Not a chance," said Joel. "I really don't know how the hell you people can live like that."
"I really don't know how anyone can be happy with one woman," Travis smiled, his confident air returning. "And I've never yet met a woman that could ever be happy with just one man."
"You've never met Kaye," said Joel, and turned once more toward his room.
CHAPTER SIX
THE STEAMING-HOT WATER RAINED DOWN UPON her soft, curvaceous body, seeping into the pores, racing down the entire length of her.
Frank stood a few feet away, facing himself in the mirror, shaving. He cursed as he nicked his chin, then cursed again as he applied the styptic pencil to the tiny spot of blood before it dripped down to his clean, white shirts.
It had been a long three weeks, he reflected. Long and hard. Ever since that first night they had joined the club every man he met there seemed to assume that they had as much right to Mona as he did-and that right didn't vanish when the club meetings broke up.
Twice this week he had come home to find Tim in bed with Mona. Once he was just getting up to leave, but the other time....
It was evening.
Frank had just returned home from a series of lectures, eager to tell Mona about some new theory or other.
Of course he hadn't bothered to knock. After all, it-was his own goddamned house, wasn't it? He just put the key in the lock, twisted it, and opened the door.
Mona wasn't in the living room, and so he had gone to the bedroom to see if perhaps she was napping.
She wasn't.
Tim lay under her, grunting and panting, while her legs were flailing high in the air, almost as if she were attempting to reach the ceiling.
"What the hell is going on here?" he had demanded.
"Oh, hi, Frank," grated Tim between his clenched teeth. "Be with you in a minute."
"Take your time," Frank said disgustedly.
"Love to, but the little woman's in a bit of a hurry."
She was too.
Her face turned red when she saw Frank glaring at her, but she was too far gone in her passion to relinquish her grip on Tim.
She returned his stare for a moment, a look of apology sneaking across her face. Then, suddenly, her eyes rolled back, showing nothing but the whites, and her face contorted in the ecstatic pleasure-pain look of sex.
She began whimpering, then laughing, and finally uttered one piercing shriek of utter fulfillment, punctuating its volume with wildly uncoordinated spasms of motion.
"Don't wait!" she had babbled, tears of pleasure streaking across her face. "Don't wait! Come now!" She punctuated it with the urgent motions of her body.
"I'm coming!" Tim had gasped, as the bed erupted in a fiery cataclysm of lust.
Afterward, when Tim had gone, she had walked up to him and said, "I'm sorry you walked in then."
"Ashamed?" he had replied bitterly.
"No. Not ashamed. Not guilty either. Just sorry."
And now, as Frank stared at his clean-shaven reflection, he would be taking her right back to Tim and the others, handing her body over to them on a silver platter.
There were compensations, to be sure. He had as much right to their wives as they had to his, and he exercised that right whenever he had a chance-which was often.
But Mona for Jeannie, for example, wasn't a fair swap as far as he was concerned. How could anyone compare Jeannie's firm, hard little breasts to Mona's big soft ones with the unique nipples? Why, a man could smother himself just reaching his tongue out for Mona's nipples. He needed a microscope to even find Jeannie's.
And Ellen! Did the girl do nothing but read Tarzan books and fantasize? Do it like a snake does it, Frank, or let's be elephants today ... when someone asked Ellen for a piece of ass, she took it all too literally!
Some of them weren't bad. Hank-Henrietta-especially, was something else in bed. But none of them had the body Mona had, and none of them, not even tight little Sue Ellen, could react the way Mona did.
Not that Mona ever acted that way with him. it took Travis or Tim or Sam or one of the others to really turn her on, but just the same, it was there, and he didn't like the idea of sharing anything like that with anyone else, no matter how much the idea appealed to Mona.
But it sure as hell appealed to Mona. Hell, she just might be a nympho at that!
Though he knew, when he thought about it, that she wasn't. She could say no, all right; she'd never once said it to him, but he'd seen her turn down Tim and even Travis on occasion.
Besides, nymphos weren't able to make it. That was why they couldn't turn a man down; they spent their entire lifetimes on the brink, so close to it that they could almost hold it in their hands, but somehow they could never quite reach it when the chips were down and the skirts were up.
Not that he asked Mona every day, but since joining the club, he had asked her often enough so that she would have had an excuse for turning him down if she had wanted to.
And that was the part he couldn't understand; one look at Travis and her panties were aflame, while her behavior toward him was no different than ever. Yet she did turn Travis down, and she did go to bed with him whenever he wanted. Why?
He sighed. If Churchill had thought that Russia was a puzzle within a riddle within an enigma, what would he have said of women?
It wasn't really jealousy or anger that he felt when he saw Mona swinging with one of the others, he decided. If that was the case, he'd have done something long before now. After all, when a man is burying himself between your wife's legs and sucking on her breasts like a baby, if you don't murder him then, you never will.
No, it was more a sense of frustration than any thing else. Sure, he took every woman in the club
(though if Ellen insisted that they play "treasure hunter" one more time he-was going to take the longest stick he could find and jam it clear up her precious "treasure"). Yes, he took them all, but more out of form than for any other reason.
Want a little sex? Go home. Wife humping with your best friend? Go to his house. His wife trying it a new way in the bathtub with a neighbor? Go to the neighbor's wife. Sooner or later you'll find an unoccupied field to plant your seed.
But it was all a reaction. There was no initiative. He never took a woman before Mona had made it with her husband, and while he enjoyed it nonetheless, he couldn't escape the fact that his actions, his sex life, his choice of bedmates, was predicted by Mona's.
Watching her reflection in the mirror, he watched Mona step out of the shower, stretch languorously, and reach for a towel.
"Want me to help you?" he asked.
"Sure," she smiled. "Help yourself, too."
"I may do just that," he answered, as he took the towel from her. All vague philosophical notions vanished from his mind as he began running the towel over her.
"My breasts are still damp," she said, turning to face him. "Dry them for me."
He ran the towel over them, gently and tenderly, squeezing and molding the flesh in his hands. Mona's body stiffened, her back arched, and she ripped the towel from his hands.
"I'm cold in here," she whispered.
He lifted her dripping body up and carried her into the bedroom.
"I have no towel," he said, as he laid her gently atop the bedspread.
"Improvise," she grinned.
He lowered his lips to her breasts, licking the tiny droplets of water from them. He reached up with his fingers, massaged and manipulated them, and finally took a nipple in his mouth.
He rolled his tongue tantalizingly around it, toying with it, flicking it until it stood erect, rigid and proud. Then he squeezed it between his lips, half-sucking, half-biting.
Mona clutched at him with her hands, fumbling with his belt. She reached inside his pants, found what she sought, and caressed it.
"Wait," she whispered, "let me please you now!"
Slowly she swung her body around, forcing him to lie back on the bed. Her fingers swiftly unsnapped the top of his pants, then caught the zipper and pulled it down.
In another moment he was lying nude, except for his shirt, with Mona curled up in a ball by his thighs, her head lowered to his pulsing cock.
Her lips clasped his peter at the tip, and her tongue teasingly raced across it. His hips lunged forward spasmodically, and with a low chuckle she moved her head back accordingly so that the tip of her tongue just barely touched him;
His whole body was covered with sweat now, as he fought desperately to control himself. Mona was thrilled by what she was accomplishing, and began racing her tongue sensually up and down the length of his tool, pausing occasionally to give him a gentle love bite.
Then she stopped to watch him. His eyes were tightly shut, his face contorted in pleasure, and she bent once more to her task. She slid her moist, hungry lips over the head of his prick, then leaned down. He groaned, and she straightened up and repeated the process in a regular rhythm, feeling the huge, swelling erection forcing its way further and further into her mouth, seeking out her throat, and still not stopping in its mad search for pleasure and containment.
Now not only her tongue, but her teeth as well were working on him, sliding along the entire length of his immense prick, kissing, licking, sucking.
"Oh, God!" he murmured. "Come back up here!"
"Soon," she promised. "But let me please you first."
"Now!" he whispered urgently.
"Soon," she repeated, lowering her head once again to the throbbing organ which reached out to meet her. .
"Hurry!" he moaned. "I can't wait-" He gasped like a dying man. "I can't ... I can't ... I can't...." Then it was over.
Mona got up and walked to the bathroom. "I'm sorry," he called to her. "It's all right. I liked it."
"Where are you going?"
"To brush my teeth, or maybe gargle with a mouthwash."
"We can try again, later," he offered.
"We'll be at the club," she said. "It's all right."
"When we get home then."
"You'll be tired."
"Are you mad, Mona?"
"You mean crazy?"
"I mean mad at me?"
"No," she said wearily. "I'm not mad at you. Not even a little bit."
"Damn it!" he exploded. "I said I was sorry."
"There's nothing to be. sorry about. I'll get enough at the party. I felt like an hors d'oevres."
"Yeah," he muttered. "I know. I can see those bastards now, betting about which one got you the highest. And I can see Sam, too, carrying you around like some fish he had impaled on a lance."
"Don't be bitter about it," said Mona. "After all, I didn't explode in your mouth. Not that I especially mind it, you know."
"For Christ's sake, I said I was sorry!" he bellowed. "If you hadn't had so much goddamned practice blowing every guy on the campus, maybe I could have...."
She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her.
For a few seconds she considered taking another shower, but decided against it. After all, she didn't really need one, and besides, the party would be starting in fifteen or twenty minutes.
She poured some mouthwash into a glass, filled it to the top with water, and sloshed it around in her mouth, spitting it out in the sink when she was done. It was light red, almost pink, and it slithered down to the drain at the bottom of the basin like a thousand tiny worms crawling hungrily across a corpse.
Mona's cheeks glistened wetly in the mirror. That's funny, she thought, I thought I had dried my face before ... well, before.
Then she saw that they were tears. Not tears of frustration, for she knew she would soon be sitting astride Dave or guiding Tim's eager organ inside her. Not tears of pain, for nothing hurt her. Not tears of disgust, either, for after a few sessions with the swap club, nothing surprised her any more.
Still, there they were, rolling freely down her cheeks, losing themselves between her freely swinging breasts, rolling down the quivering softness of her belly, and she couldn't understand them.
Oh, well, she shrugged. Soon I'll be there, and everything will be all right then.
She thought about everything being all right, and then she thought about the men who were going to make it all right, who were going to send her on a one-way trip to the moon, and pant in her ear while she fell slowly, lazily back through the stardust and clouds to earth.
Dave would be the first, probably. The past two weeks he had been saving himself for her. Partly balding, smiling, laughing Dave, who fancied himself as a wit. But he was good, very good indeed, and that made up for everything else.
She still blushed when she recalled last week's session. He had met her at the door, and helped her undress. Two minutes after she entered the house she was lying on the couch, with Dave humping and jerking his body on top of her.
He finished first, and even while he was still inside her, even while she was still biting him, digging her nails in him, wrapping her legs tighter and tighter around his waist, he turned to the others, chuckled to himself, and said, "Say, did I ever tell you the one about the...."
There was Tim, lean, tall, bushy-haired Tim, Who prided himself on his aloof expertise. He was good, too, better than Dave, better than most of them-but he was so damned concerned with his "artful craft," so interested in the effect that he was having on his partner that he remained aloof from the whole thing until the last minute. There was nothing wrong with the whole thing, to be sure, including the last minute. God knows he made her scream for more, but something was missing in him too.
Sam wasn't bad. A nice man, a doctor, with long steady, delicate fingers, equally adept at cutting a man's ear off or turning a woman's flame on. But all Sam wanted was a little bit of straight, normal sex. No threesomes, no back doors, no cameras, just a good roll in the hay. He was pretty adept at it but, even though she gushed with passion every time, it was somehow dull and out of place at a gathering like this.
Travis was another story. There was nothing he and Sue Ellen hadn't tried, with themselves and with others. He was no gourmet, but a sampler. Nothing failed to arouse his curiosity, no matter how unique or grotesque, and he never failed to arouse his partner, no matter how fat, flabby or frigid. Travis had a good, wholesome attitude about sex-it was all good fun, and if you wanted to add a little variety with him, his wife, or both of them, why sure, why the hell not? He alone of the men was her contemporary in both age and thought, and he alone could still turn her to water just by giving her a single good-natured leer.
But there was something lacking in even Travis. The others used her as nothing more than a plaything, an escape. Sure, they pleased her as much-more-than she pleased them, but when the pleasure was done, so was everything else. And Travis, though he never used sex as an escape from reality-it was his reality-viewed her as he viewed all women, even Sue Ellen, as a playmate, a good-natured chum. It was just a more mature level than football or hopscotch, but it was just a game nonetheless.
But she liked them all, some more than others, but the only reason she bothered with them at all was her need.
And now she understood the dampness on her cheeks.
Damn it! She didn't want to have to depend on them! There was no guilt, no shame attached to it, but no-woman should have to depend on other women's husbands to keep her happy. She loved Frank. He loved her. Why the hell couldn't they just go on alone, just the two of them? Why couldn't they see the Blands across a bridge table instead of beneath a bedsheet?
CHAPTER SEVEN
"SO POMPOUS OLD FRANK DURHAM IS IN A SEX swap club!" giggled Kaye. "Tell me more!"
"Not much to tell," said Joel, wishing she'd change the subject.
"You know," she said, "you never did tell me what went on that night you went to the Blands for dinner."
"Nothing much,"
"That's a lie, Joel Hankins," said Kaye.
"Nothing much that I participated in, anyway," he amended with a smile. "Tell me, do you know of a woman on campus, maybe forty years old, brown hair, about my height, named Jean or Jeannie?"
"Hmmm. It might be Jeannie Corwith."
"Who is she?"
"She's Tim Corwith's wife. He's the Dean of the Graduate Art School, and a member of the Board of Trustees. Why?"
"She was there," said Joel.
"At the Blands' place?"
"Yep. She was there, but for some reason or other, her clothing wasn't."
"Do you mean that she and Tim Corwith are...."
"Members of the club? Looks like it."
Joel then proceeded to tell her in detail everything he could remember of the night, and because he was Joel Hankins he left out nothing and didn't try to make himself seem less awkward and silly then he felt.
Kaye listened, engrossed, until his tale was over.
"It's fascinating," she said at last. "I mean, I know people sleep together. I've been dying to shack up with you for months. But to belong to a club like that ... and I know some of them! It's just too fantastic!"
"Travis was very adamant about wanting you to join," said Joel slowly.
"That's T. S. for Travis," she said. "Don't look so glum, darling. I'm keeping myself for you come hell or high water."
"Well, that's comforting," he smiled, and kissed her.
She returned the kiss, and his hands began to wander over her, seeking, exploring, caressing, until she was a writhing, panting animal, moaning in his ear and pleading with him not to stop.
She reached for his belt buckle, unclasped it, and managed to slip him out of his pants before he quite realized what was happening.
Then she lowered her head to his rod and took the tip of it between her teeth, caressing it lightly with her tongue.
Joel tried to go on kissing and touching her, but she moved her head down, sucking more of him into her mouth, and suddenly he couldn't go on, but lay back weakly in an ecstasy of sensation. Her tongue was active, racing back and forth across the iron-hard surface, circling the tip with an awkward expertise learned solely from books.
She bit him gently, barely touching her teeth to him, and despite himself he thrust his hips upward toward her.
Then, when he felt the pleasure beginning to mount like the surging of a distant waterfall, he withdrew from her and pulled her back beside him.
His hands reached beneath her sweater, met behind her, and unhooked her bra. In another instant both sweater and bra lay on the floor and his lips and tongue were racing hungrily across her breasts, biting, licking, sucking.
She grabbed one of his hands and guided it down her leg, under her skirt, then up to the darkened juncture between her thighs. She felt her panties give, heard them rip, but only pressed harder against him.
His lips were still glued to one breast, the fingers of one hand massaging the nipple of the other, and his other hand probing deeper and deeper into her, but always returning, after its sensual explorations, to the tiny mountain of pleasure which glistened eagerly.
Suddenly she began to tremble and shudder. He continued another moment, then, with a sound that was midway between a sob and a sigh, he rolled away.
"Whew!" he groaned. "It gets harder to stop each time, doesn't it?"
"I was almost there, this time," she murmured as she snuggled up against him, feeling the pleasure of his body once again. "Oh, Joel, it's going to be so wonderful once we're married!"
"Well," he smiled, "nobody was ever more prepared for her wedding night. No virgin, anyway."
"Oh, brother, is that a banner with a strange device!" giggled Sue Ellen, and all the others joined in her paroxysm of laughter.
The object of their attention was Sam, who for once had had a little too much to drink, and was behaving in a most unmedical manner, strutting back and forth across the room with a bonnet taped on to the end of his huge erection.
"You like?" he leered at them.
"We love!" shouted Sue Ellen gleefully.
"Oh, boy, am I gonna have a time sobering him, tomorrow morning. And he goes into surgery at ten o'clock."
"Hope it's not anyone we know!" chortled Tim, grabbing Jeannie and pulling her down onto his lap.
"It won't be after tomorrow," laughed Jeannie, running her hands beneath his shirt and thrilling to the feel of his lean, muscular body.
Sam was laying on the couch, out cold, but no one seemed to notice or mind it. In fact, at the other end of the couch Dave was sitting down, leaning back, while Ellen sat on his lap with her back to him. His hands clutched the soft flesh above her hips as she maneuvered her body up and down. Sam slept through it all.
Jeannie and Karen were putting on a show for the men, writhing on the floor, each with her head buried between the other's legs. As nearly as Frank could tell, Travis was making book on which would come first, with the various spectators shouting encouragement to their favorites.
He looked, at a clock on the wall. Eleven-thirty. They'd be breaking it up with an hour, and then he would take Mona home and to bed, to make amends for what had happened earlier in the evening.
But where was Mona? He looked around the room, and couldn't see her. And, for that matter, where was Sue Ellen?
Goddamnit, if that little Southern slut had ...!
He sighed with relief. The two were standing across the room, almost hidden in the shadows. They were engaged in an animated conversation, both oblivious to the few remarks about their nude bodies that came from Travis.
Satisfied, Frank waited until Dave and Ellen were done. Then, as they walked over to watch the impassioned scene between Jeannie and Karen, he crossed over to the couch and sat down, content to watch from a distance.
"Keep your voice down, Sue Ellen!" said Mona from across the room. "I don't want anybody to hear."
"Okay," said Sue Ellen. "Shoot!"
"Well," began Mona hesitantly, "it's kind of awkward for me."
"I haven't blushed since I was seven," said Sue Ellen.
"It's about Frank!" Mona blurted.
"What about him?" Her eyebrows raised in curiosity.
"He's ... well, he's rather ... I mean, in bed, when we...."
"I get the point," said Sue Ellen. "He doesn't make it with me either."
"What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing I couldn't fix if I had the time and the patience ... and the incentive."
"Will you?" asked Mona, trying to keep the desperation from her voice. "I love him very much!"
"I've got the time and the patience," said Sue Ellen meaningfully.
"I haven't much money," said Mona.
Sue Ellen wrinkled her nose. "Who needs money?"
"What can I do, then? I can sleep with Travis," she said, clutching at straws. "I'll let him use me whenever he wants."
"He can use you whenever he wants now," said Sue Ellen pointedly, "Besides, who's going to show him the ropes: me or Travis?"
"Name any man you want and I'll get him for you: signed, sealed and delivered on your doorstep, or your bed, or wherever you want him."
Sue Ellen shook her head. "No."
"I love him!" said Mona, tears coming to her eyes. "Won't you please help me?"
"I didn't say I wouldn't help you. Of course I will."
"Thank you," said Mona, with honest gratitude. "And I want just one thing in return."
"What?"
"You," whispered Sue Ellen Bland. "You," she repeated, touching her lips to Mona's soft ear. "Your ankles, your shoulders, your calves, your breasts, your thighs, your nipples, your tiny...."
Mona moved away embarrassed.
"And it won't be so tiny when I get through," Sue Ellen said aloud, smiling.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FRANK DURHAM WANDERED MOURNFULLY Across the campus. His tall, stocky frame slushed through the thawing ice and mud, moving carelessly, aimlessly.
It had been a long day, and a bad one.
First there had been his seminar class with Mr. Danton. Old Danton, who had to give him a passing mark if he were to get a degree, and who had to give him a top recommendation if he wanted to begin as anything but an assistant to a third-class ward healer.
The college wasn't a big one to begin with. No major sports graced its stadiums or gymnasiums, no Nobel Prize winners listed in among their credits. In fact, very few people had even heard of it.
As for the law school, it had received even less acclaim than the other schools it resided amidst. Only a handful of years old now, those who had begun with its first term hadn't been practicing for two full years yet. No, it was a long way from becoming a rival to Harvard, and nothing short of top grades could ever get him an offer from the legal firms that scanned the graduating classes eachyear, making bids to those shining lights they wanted.
So what did he do? Exhausted by the party, and further undone by his private session with Mona earlier in the morning, he had fallen asleep in class.
Even that wouldn't have been so bad-in fact, it may have impressed Danton with his industry, with his willingness to burn the academic candle at both ends.
But he was sitting next to Travis, more from chance than choice, and when a firm hand grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him gently, he had said, in a disgusted voice loud enough for all to hear, "I'm not screwing your wife again. I'm too goddamned tired. Just take Mona for a quick one and leave me the hell alone!"
He opened his eyes and stared bleary-eyed at Travis. But it wasn't Travis at all. It was Danton.
"I'm sorry, sir...." he stammered, wakefulness returning faster to his body than his head. "I thought you were Travis...."
That broke everyone up, Travis included. Everyone but Danton, that is. And Danton proceeded to take his paper and rip it apart, point by point, word by word.
It was a good paper. A solid paper. Good for at least a B, and possibly an A if Danton was in a good mood.
But Danton wasn't. He was in a vicious mood. He found faults where none existed, proved that black was white and up was down, and carelessly slung the neatly-typed, carefully-footnoted paper on the floor when he had completed the butchery.
By noon the story was all over campus. Men and boys he had never seen before were approaching him, telling him that they weren't too tired to take Mona upstairs for a quick one-and some of them, too many of them, weren't joking.
Travis was doing a land-office business, joking with most, writing down appointments with a select few. He seemed wildly amused by the whole affair.
By two o'clock Frank was in a black mood, a vicious mood. The next guy who asked him, the very next one, and he'd....
"Hiya, Frank!" Joel Hankins had greeted him as he was walking from the coffee shop to the library, Frank nodded a curt greeting.
"Cat got your tongue?"
Frank. walked ahead, staring at the ground, fingernails grinding into the heels of his hands.
"Not that I really care about your tongue," grinned Joel. "Let Sue Ellen worry about that. But the question is whether the cat has got your wife yet. She-"
He swung without thinking.
Joel's books fell to the ground as he doubled up, hands covering his stomach.
Frank brought up his knee fast, felt it meet with flesh and bone, heard the bone crack as the blood began to splatter his coat.
He laced his fingers together, brought both hands above his head, and drove them down against the back of Joel's neck. Joel fell forward on the snow, and snarling, Frank went after him, throwing himself on top of the defenseless body that "lay still in the snow.
He turned him over on his back, grabbed his collar and slapped his face, drawing blood from his mouth.
"Say it again, you bastard!" he grated, punctuating it with another slap. "Say it again!"
Joel looked up at him, trying to keep conscious, trying to understand what was happening.
Frank stopped, his hand frozen in the midst of another downward arc. What was he doing? What had happened? This was little Joel Hankins, who had lent him money, given him notes for classes he had missed, who could not weigh more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds dripping wet.
And he was killing him!
"My God, Joel!" he exploded. "I'm sorry.."
He had half-carried, half-dragged him to the hospital, had left him in the emergency room, and had paced back and forth outside the door for half an hour.
At last it had opened, and a nurse had approached him.
"You can see him now."
"Is he hurt bad?"
"He took quite a beating, but he'll be all right in a few days. A few teeth missing, and he'll have a scar or two, but nothing too serious. It was just lucky for him that you found him when you did."
He walked in, afraid and ashamed. Joel was propped up in a sitting position, his nose and one whole side of his face swathed in bandages.
"Joel?" he said hesitantly.
"I'm okay, Frank," he said, grimacing in pain after a futile attempt to smile.
"What did the nurse mean?"
"I told her some hood mugged me," Joel lisped through his adhesive mask. "I don't blame you. It was a rotten thing for me to say."
"I had no right to do it," said Frank, wondering how much face was left beneath the bandages. "Other guys have been saying that to me all day. Look, if there is anything I can do...."
"Forget it."
"No, I mean it. I'll foot the bill, whatever it comes to. And anything else I have is yours too. Including Mona, if you'd really like her."
"Aw, hell no, Frank. Everyone flies off the handle once in a while."
Tears came to Frank's eyes. He wanted to throw his arms around the slight youth's battered body, to hold him, like a son, to beg his forgiveness ... but he didn't do any of those things. He just patted Joel on the leg and walked out.
And now he walked through the campus, vaguely headed in the direction of his home, unmindful of the drizzle that fell on his uncovered head and of the mud that seeped into his shoes.
Suddenly he found himself in front of his house. Tired, he pulled his keys from his pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped inside, absently shutting the door behind him. He slipped his soggy shoes off, hung up his coat and walked to the bedroom.
"Hi," said a low, sultry voice. "I was beginning to think you didn't live here any more."
"Where the hell is Mona?"
"Out," said Sue Ellen, drawing the covers up over her bare, throbbing breasts.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"Waiting for a taxi," she said with a throaty chuckle.
"Wait outside," he snapped, going to the closet and pulling out a cardigan.
"You're not going to put that on?" she asked. "Why not?"
"Because it's hot in here," she said, throwing back the covers and reveling her nakedness, "and it's going to get a lot hotter."
"It sure as hell is," he said ominously.
"What's eating you?"
"Nothing."
"May I?" she grinned.
"Beat it, slut!" he snapped, getting a fresh pack of cigarettes from his dresser drawer.
"I'd love to," she answered, undaunted. "Whip it out."
He turned to face her, his face contorted in an expression that was half rage and half disgust.
"I put a man in the hospital today, Sue Ellen. I almost killed him. I'm ... we, Mona and me, we're through with it. Done. Got that?"
"Nope," she said. "The only time we throw someone out of the club is when a girl puts a man in the hospital and almost kills him. And I'm not that type," she concluded, patting the bed where she wanted him to lay.
"Forget it! Or do you want a whipping too?"
"I'll try anything once," she said, kneeling over with her bare buttocks facing him. "Whip away."
"Goddamnit! I'm serious."
"So am I," she said, wriggling invitingly. "I'll do it!" he threatened.
"I wouldn't be wasting my time if I thought you wouldn't."
His muscles tensing spasmodically with rage, he unbuckled his belt, pulled it out of the loopholes, and let it dangle menacingly from his hand.
"I'm warning you for the last time. Get out of my house and out of our lives."
Her only reply was a tantalizing wiggle of her buttocks. "Can you see it all?" she asked, raising herself still higher, breathing a little heavily. "I mean ... all...."
He sucked in his breath, cocked his arm, and brought the belt down hard. She yelled as the leather tongue reached out and planted asearingkiss on her, but didn't move.
"Get out now," he said, staring, fascinated, at the long red welt that was already forming.
"Sooner death," she whispered, smiling despite the pain, "than dishonor."
The belt made its high, circular arc and came down again, harder this time, landing with a loud crack.
This time her legs gave way, spreading out slightly to reveal her pink, moist, throbbing center. Her entire body quivered with pain, but she brought her legs back under her and once again raised her welted bottom to him.
"I can take more of this if you can," he said, but most of the anger was gone from him.
"Try me," she said between clenched teeth.
The belt landed again, the sound of it reverberating throughout the room.
This time she flattened out entirely, squirming in agony on the bed.
Then, suddenly, she was still.
"Are you all right?" he asked, the last vestage of fury gone from him.
No answer.
"Sue Ellen?"
Silence.
God. Had he done it again? He dropped the belt and raced to her side, shaking her by the shoulders. "Speak to me! Are you all right?"
She groaned.
"Can I do anything?"
"Am I ... am I bleeding?"
He looked down at the red, swollen buttocks.
"I don't think so," he said. "Is there anything I can get you, anything that will make you feel better?"
"You caused me this pain," she said. "You make it go away."
"But how?"
"Kiss it away."
"Do what?"
"You heard me."
"You go to hell."
"Maybe I will, but if you don't kiss it away, you'll go to jail!"
Resignedly, he lowered his head to her buttocks, pressing his lips lightly against one of the red marks.
"Not quite there," she purred. "Lower."
His lips moved down the curve of her buttocks. Moaning deliciously, she spread-eagled her legs.
"Lower ... lower ... low ... oh...."
He did it, begrudgingly and harshly at first, but as his lips and then his tongue came in contact with her, as he felt the warmth begin to spread, his passion began.
"That's right," she purred, raising herself to her knees once again. "I'll even make it easier for you."
He stopped long enough to rip his clothes off, then returned to her.
"Not bad at all," she said, a beginning quiver of pleasure making her shoulders shudder.
Then he was beside her, trying to turn her over on her back and mount her.
"Not yet, stud," she smiled. "We'll do it when I'm ready this time."
She pushed his head back down to where she wanted it, reaching down and touching him with delicate, light, sensitive fingers.
"And we won't have any more talk about leaving the group, will we?"
He wanted to answer her that, no, we. wouldn't have any more talk about leaving the group, but his tongue was working too furiously to bother forming words. And as his tongue moved, her clit gave, and straightened as his own had, and finally quivered between his lips like a bobbing thing with a life of its own.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS PARTY NIGHT AGAIN.
Mona had been worried about Frank all week long, ever since the day she found out that he had blurted out all those things in Old Man Danton's class.
She knew about Joel Hankins, too, though Frank hadn't been the one to tell her. It was Joel himself who, the day before yesterday had called to thank Frank for sending a check for double his hospital bill. She hadn't known about any check-Frank had never mentioned one. And so she asked Joel what had happened, and he had told her, more ashamed of his remarks to Frank than angered because of the consequences.
So she was worried about Frank for those reasons. And she was also worried about Frank because Sue Ellen Bland was not one to play coy and modest unless she hadn't earned it yet.
There was a new couple being initiated tonight, a member of the school administration and his wife. Their names, as she remembered, were Herb and Mia Saunders (or was it Smithers?) and she should have been looking forward to seeing someone else on the platform, to being an established member of the group voting on the acceptability of a new pair of satyrs.
She should have been, but she wasn't. She was worried, worried about Frank, worried about Joel Hankins, worried about Sue Ellen.
The thing with Sue Ellen really bothered her. She didn't mind giving a complete stranger a blow job, or going Greek, or even taking on a pair at once-as long as they were men.
But she'd never made it with a woman, never wanted to, never even thought about it until Sue Ellen named the fee for her labors, and the thought of it turned her stomach. Not to feel the hard, throbbing warmth of a man inside of her, to feel soft, pliant breasts pressing against her instead of a hairy chest, to take, rather than to be taken. It was too alien, too strange and different, and she shuddered as she thought of Sue Ellen spreading her legs and commanding her to ... to what? She didn't even have the slightest idea as to what might be expected of her!
But Sue Ellen would tell her, make it very clear to her, of that she could be sure. Sue Ellen would explain it in agonizing detail, and would then very likely proceed to show her exactly what she had meant.
Suddenly the thought struck her: what if Sue Ellen decided to do it in front of everyone?
She couldn't refuse. Not only was it part of her bargain, but Sue Ellen might just decide to tell everyone exactly why she had promised herself.
If that happened, it would utterly destroy Frank completely-and despite this driving need for sex, for satisfaction he couldn't give her, she loved him.
On the other hand, if Sue Ellen suggested that they do it there on the floor in front of everybody, and she consented, Frank would probably never touch her again-which was also just what she didn't want to happen.
So, torn by apprehension, she entered the room with her husband.
They were a bit late, for Mia was already lying back on the platform, legs spread apart and dangling over the edge, her fingers working furiously on herself.
Mona nodded her greeting to all of them, then began slipping out of her clothing. She became aware of Herb's eyes on her, and the knowledge of it brought a tremor of excitement, the first flush of lust to her.
All the others were watching his wife, but Herb, who had kept his hair and his figure well into middle age, was a little tired of looking at his wife. He had lived with Mia for fourteen years, loved her for the first five or six, but now she was rather old hat to him.
Without a word he walked over to Mona, clad only in his shorts. His eyes asked the question; she nodded, and a moment later he was carrying her unprotesting form off into one of the bedrooms.
He was good-fast and good, just the kind of thing Mona liked to start the evening off with. She didn't have to spend too much of herself too early, and yet there was no denying that she had gotten her kicks-and had given as much as she had taken.
Herb was exceptionally large, and she had a little difficulty in accomodating him at first, a difficulty she wouldn't have had later on in the evening, but she simply moved a pair of pillows beneath her hips, and then she was able to take as much as he could give her.
She paused only long enough to arrange her hair, then walked back to the living room. Mia had taken her time, for she was just now corning out of the final throes of her masturbatory orgasm.
"It's Frank's turn tonight," said Hank, and then, seeing Mona standing beside the couch, asked, "Hey, Mona-where's that big, brawny husband of yours?"
"Isn't he here?" replied Mona.
"No," said Jeannie. "When we noticed the both of you were missing, we just assumed that you were off in a corner somewhere, frigging away to beat the band."
"Try to be a little less vulgar," said Sam. "Say it more respectably. Use a word like copulating."
"Sorry," said Jeannie. "So, like I was saying, we figured you were frigging away to beat the band."
"Which must have pleased the band no end," commented Karen wryly.
"Anyway," said Jeannie, "he's missing in action."
"Well, see who else is gone," added Travis, "and you'll know what action he isn't missing." He looked around the room. "Seems to be Sue Ellen. I feel honored."
"We'll have to get a substitute," said Dave. "I modestly volunteer."
"Can't volunteer if you're going to be modest about it," laughed Ellen, giving him a shove toward the platform.
He did volunteer, he wasn't modest, and five minutes later Mia and Tim were rolling and wriggling on the floor, grinding their bodies together in the last step of the initiation.
"How was he, honey?" Karen whispered to Mona. "Did he pass?" Mona nodded.
"Good!" sighed Karen. "I'd hate to vote a huge thing like that out of the club."
"There's a young lady here to see you," said the voice from the intercom. "Who is she?" asked Tim.
"She refused to give her name, but says that it's a matter of great urgency and importance."
"Oh, hell," said Tim, removing his feet from his desk and burying the Wall Street Journal beneath a stack of papers on his desk, "send her in."
Kaye entered the plush office.
Somehow, it wasn't quite what she had expected. It was modestly furnished, lined with photos of Tim at various stages of his career.
But then, she reasoned, he'd hardly have pornography all over the walls. When you're the Dean of the Art School and a Trustee as well, you don't advertise the fact that you and your wife join in swapping orgies with the student body.
"Does it pass inspection?" asked Tim pleasantly, and Kaye realized she'd been standing in the doorway. She pulled the door shut behind her and sat down in a chair facing his desk.
"Mr. Corwith," she said, "I've come to see you about an important matter."
"Oh?"
"It's about Joel Hankins."
"Who?"
"Joel Hankins. He's lying half-dead in a hospital right now."
"I can't place the name," said Tim. "Is he on the football team?"
"No."
"Well," he said, lighting his pipe, "what would you like to tell me about this Hankins fellow?"
"Nothing. I'd like you to tell me what you are going to do about it."
"I'm not at all sure we're on the same wavelength, young lady," said Tim with a frown. "You walk in here, tell me that somebody I've never heard of is in the hospital, and ask me what I intend to do about it. Aside from wishing my condolences, I don't know what you could possibly want me to do."
"You were responsible for it," she said coldly, "You and your group."
"My group?" he repeated. "You mean the Trustees?"
"No."
"The art school, then?"
"No."
"Young lady," said Tim, "you'll have to pardon the expression, but I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"You know very well what group I'm talking about," said Kaye. She reached her hand out to the intercom. "Or would you like me to flick this switch and tell everyone in your office where you and Jeannie were last night?"
"No!" he shouted, reaching out and ripping the cord out of the intercom. Then, sitting down, he struggled to regain his composure and finally succeeded.
"All right," he continued. "What's this all about now?"
"It's about Joel Hankins."
"I told you: I don't know any Joel Hankins."
"No, but Frank Durham does."
"Go on."
"And Joel knew that Frank and Mona are in your club."
"So?"
"So Joel made a comment about it, and Frank almost killed him."
Tim's lips tightened. "You have proof?"
"No, I haven't asked Frank, and Joel's been unconscious most of the time. When he's awake, he's been unwilling to say what really happened."
"Then what makes you think Frank did this to him?" asked Tim.
"I just put the pieces together and they fit, after Joel made a little slip. Frank had blurted out something about the club earlier in the day. Joel knew about it and probably mentioned it. Frank has a hair-trigger temper. And Frank was the one who brought him to the hospital."
Tim relaxed visibly.
"Pure supposition," he said. "You have no proof that would stand up in a court of law-and the college administration, which I happen to control, is not exactly a court of law to begin with."
"Court be damned. I'll go to the papers-and I guarantee they'll know what to do with the story," she replied coldly.
"All right. Granting, for the sake of argument, that you can do what you say, exactly what is it that you want of me?"
"I want you to see to it that the University, or you, or the club, pays the hospital bills-they're going to continue for a long time-and I also want you to get Frank Durham to transfer away from here or expel him."
"Whew!" said Tim, forcing a smile. "You're not asking too much, are you?"
"I'm not asking anything, Mr. Corwith," said Kaye. "I'm demanding it."
"Listen," he said, "it'll take a little time to get in touch with Frank and to raise the money. The college can't pay it, of course, and I'll have to contact all the other members and see how much we can come up with."
"When will you have an answer?" she asked.
"Why don't you come to my home this evening around eight o'clock," he said. "My wife will be there for your protection, if you feel you need it."
"Why not at your office?" she demanded.
"My dear young lady," said Tim, "you have just jeopardized what it has taken me a quarter of a century to achieve. Please allow me to handle this in my own way."
"I don't trust you or your wife," said Kaye.
"I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about that," he replied, "I can never tell when someone will burst into this office while you're saying something which might incriminate me. And I assure you, you'll not be raped. I doubt that I could buy you off twice."
"All right," she said slowly.
"Fine. I'll be expecting you around eight."
CHAPTER TEN
KAYE RANG THE BELL AT PRECISELY EIGHT o'clock.
"Hello," smiled Tim, answering the door. "You're right on the button."
"Let's get on with it," said Kaye.
"Certainly," he replied, "but would you mind stepping into the living room? It's rather cold standing in the doorway,"
"Where are your children?" asked Kaye, looking around.
"At boarding school," replied Tim. "Not only do private schools offer a better and more balanced curricula, but I wouldn't want them to be unduly influenced by some of the things that go on around here."
"Really?" she said caustically..
"Really. I don't believe free love or swapping is good for everyone. I'll have no objection if any of them, even the girl, should want to go into it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to lead them into it.
Let them make the decision for themselves."
"Lead them? You mean you'd actually take them to one of your meetings?"
"Of course not,' said Tim, "But living here would influence them every bit as much as if we did take them to the meetings. There'd be no freedom of choice, you see."
"No, I don't."
"That's because you're rather young," continued Tim. "Are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Do you seriously think that you could have been anything but what you are? Your parents, or at least one of them, were the same and it was continuously drilled into your pretty little head that what you were was the one true religion. And, until you got out into the world, what opposing arguments did you ever hear?
"It's the same with this. If they watched us swapping, and saw that everyone derived a great deal of joy and pleasure from it, they would doubtless begin participating themselves, if not in our group then in some other. And they would thus never have the proper exposure to the type of life you seem intent upon living."
"So you see," he concluded, "We're not all the monsters you seem to have made us out to be."
As he finished speaking, Jeannie, clad in a conservatively high-buttoned blouse and ski pants, entered the room, bearing a tray with three drinks upon it.
"Thank you, my dear," said Tim, sitting down in a comfortable leather chair and picking one of the glasses off the tray. "You will join us, I hope?"
"Just one," said Kaye, taking a glass.
"Manhattans," said Jeannie. "But made with Scotch instead of rye or bourbon."
"I'm sure the young lady has more important things on her mind than the contents of your drinks," said Tim, pulling a pipe from his cardigan sweater and applying a match to it.
"Indeed I do," said Kaye, taking a sip from her drink.
"Fine," said Tim. "Everything is just about settled. Won't you sit down and we'll go over the details."
Kaye sat down on a recliner chair, almost spilling her drink as it moved back under her.
"Push that little button near your left hand," said Jeannie. "It's a vibrator."
Kaye did so, and was pleasantly warmed by the mild vibrations running through the chair.
"I believe I am changing my original opinions about you, Mr. Corwith," she said.
"Why, thank you. As I mentioned, we're really not ogres. I don't suppose you've changed your opinion enough to withdraw your demands?"
"No," she said firmly.
"Pity."
"Are you prepared to meet them?"
"Most of them. I got in touch with various members of the club, and all of them agreed to chip in on your-ah-friend's hospital bills. However, I did not get in touch with Frank Durhams."
"Why not?" demanded Kaye.
"First of all, he was unavailable. And then, upon thinking it over, I have decided he is far too superior a student to be forced to leave because of a single minor incident which, I might add, was not entirely without provocation."
"It couldn't be that you don't want Mona to leave, could it?" challenged Kaye.
"In truth, that is part of it, but that single factor alone would not have shaped my judgement. Jeannie," he broke off, "Would you get me another drink?"
Jeannie nodded pleasantly and left the room.
"All right," said Kaye after some consideration. "Frank can stay-but I still want the money."
"And you shall get it," said Tim. "However, won't we have to wait until all the hospital costs are in before we know how large a check to write?"
"Yes. I suppose so."
"You look uncomfortable," noted Tim, as Kaye pulled a handkerchief out of her purse and mopped her face.
"It's gotten a little warm in here," she replied. "Perhaps I should open a window," offered Tim, rising and walking to the window behind her. "That won't be necessary," she answered. He stopped by her chair, and leaned over. "Are you sure?"
"Yes," she said, her head beginning to swim. "Jeannie!" cried Tim. "I think she's going to faint."
"Probably not used to Scotch Manhattans," shrugged Jeannie, returning to the room. "Here, let me at her. The first thing we have to do is loosen her clothing,"
"No ... I'm all right ... really, lam." Kaye protested feebly, as Jeannie's quick, sure hands worked away at the buttons of her suit and blouse.
The chair was still vibrating, sending little electric shocks up and down Kaye's body. She could hardly see straight, and suddenly realized that the drink she had had been drugged.
"A Mickey!" she cried, gasping for air. "You slipped in a knockout drop!"
She panicked, tried to get up, to run away. to scream, but her body refused to obey her mind's commands. She just sat there motionless as Jeannie finished slipping her out of her suit coat, blouse and bra.
Jeannie slowly lowered her head to Kaye's taut, erect nipples, slurping hungrily as the passion began to pour over the beautifully formed little female.
Kaye fought her off, feeling nothing but disgust at the thought of a woman nibbling away at her breasts. Jeannie back off, shrugged, and left the room.
Then Tim came over, Tim, who was tall and lean and experienced, who was not a youth but only beginning to show his age. His hands expertly sought out her free, quivering breasts, massaged them, carressed the tips of the nipples.
Kaye got up one final burst of energy born of desperation and managed to stagger halfway across the room before he caught her.
His strong hands pinned her arms to her sides, and he lowered his sweating face to her breasts, not kissing or licking yet, but merely nuzzling them, letting the soft white flesh yield before him and come back to all but encompass him.
She seemed to see flashes of blinding lights and felt a surge of desire stronger than any she had ever known before. Then she thought of Joel, and weakly tried to free herself.
But Tim was too strong, too aggressive, too knowing. The effort died as suddenly as it had begun, and she collapsed in his arms, completely limp.
"Stand up by yourself!" he commanded her. She did so, wobbling slightly.
"Take off your skirt!"
"Please;..!...."
"Take it off," said Tim, running, his fingers lightly across her breasts, giving each nipple a gentle squeeze.
With a sigh, half of excitement and half of defeat, she pulled down the side zipper and let the skirt fall in a crumpled heap at her feet.
She stood before him now, wearing only her shoes and stockings, a garter belt, and a pair of blue cotton panties, which she had slipped on over the other things.
"The panties," commanded Tim.
"Oh, please, No!" she pleaded. "Please don't make me....I'm a virgin."
"I'm certainly not making you do anything," said Tim slowly. "I'm not using physical force, nor have I in any way helped you to shed your clothes thus far.
He stopped speaking and traced a line down her body with his finger, beginning at her neck, traveling down over her breast and quivering belly to the inside of her thigh. There it lingered, occasionally starting up the inside of her thigh, only to stop again an instant later.
She stood there, trembling so badly that her hair, which had been up in a bun, shook loose and cascaded down her shoulders.
Slowly, never taking her eyes from his, she pulled the panties down over the soft white curve of her hips and stepped out of them.
"You can keep the .stockings on," said Tim casually.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked, though she knew full well what lay ahead.
"Oh, just sit down and wait," said Tim, seating himself comfortably in the recliner, his eyes drinking in every exposed inch of her but always traveling back to the dark triangle between her long, white legs.
"For what?" asked Kaye.
"For you to beg me," he grinned.
She wanted to tell him that she would die before she'd beg anyone but Joel, that she found him the most repugnant man she had ever met, that he could wait until hell froze over before she'd beg him-but even before she could summon up the words and the fury to say these things, she was on her knees before him, clutching at his pants, tears of frustration streaming down her face, slipping into the soft crevice between her bobbing breasts.
"All right!" she moaned. "You win!"
"Not until you beg me," he smiled.
She bit her trembling lip for a moment, trying to fight back the words that would signify the ultimate humiliation, but he reached down and raced his fingers lightly over her breast for just a moment.
"All right," she whimpered, "I beg you."
"Beg me what?" he grinned. "To go to bed with me."
"To bed?" he repeated in mock amazement. "What has bed got to do with anything?"
"Then screw me!" she screamed. "Is that what you want me to say? Screw me!"
"My pleasure," he chuckled, lowering himself to the floor beside her.
She was like a wildcat in his arms, biting, scratching, demanding to be taken violently, brutally, but Tim pinned her arms and torso to the floor with one hand and with the other traced tiny patterns on her lower abdomen.
Kay moaned with rapture. Her head was spinning madly now, and a million tiny lights seemed to explode before her clouded eyes.
And still Tim's hand avoided the moist juncture of her thighs, flitting lightly from stomach to legs and back again. Finally she could stand it no longer and, reaching down, she buried her hand between her legs and began stimulating herself, groaning with the surge of her approaching passion.
Suddenly Tim had slipped out of his clothes and was beside her once again. Now he held both of her hands pinned rigidly to the floor above her head, and waited.
She writhed and squirmed, twisting her heaving body against him, mumbling incoherently between her clenched teeth. At last he mounted her, slid deep inside her, and began moving his body back and forth, slowly at first, then increasing his tempo.
She responded to his movements by gyrating her hips in a circular pattern, raising them high above the floor and pumping them shockingly hard against him, blindly striving to open herself still wider for him.
"Oh, God!" she murmured breathlessly, "It's happening! I feel it happening!"
Then it was upon her, and she exploded with a gushing cacophony of sound and motion. Tim finished first, then withdrew and watched her writhe crazily on the floor, arms and legs flailing the air as if undirected by any governing mental commands.
She reached out for Tim, tried to grab his now limp penis and shove it back inside her, but he backed away.
With a moan that was half ecstasy and half frustration, she lay back on her back, raised her hips, and oblivious to Jeannie and Tim standing there-watching her, lowered her hand along her body until her fingers sought and found her clitoris. She took it between her thumb and forefinger, pinching it slightly, and began manipulating it vigorously, triggering another orgasm.
As spasm after spasm of pleasure contorted her body, she moved her hand once again, trying to insert it all inside her vagina. It didn't fit, and without once ceasing in her ecstatic gyrations, she extended two fingers inside of her, moving them in and out with a regularity that perfectly matched the movements of her pelvis. The lights in the room reflected the glistening moisture of lust on her fingers as she withdrew them, only to shove them in again more fervently.
"No blood," commented Tim, looking between her legs.
"Probably busted it riding horses or something," said Jeannie, approaching.
Finally, her orgasm passed, and Kaye sat up, blinking, supporting herself with her arms.
And then she saw it.
The flashing lights she had thought were in the back of her mind were in front of her nose-for Jeannie had a camera and was still taking photographs as fast as she could replace the bulbs!
The party was going on full blast.
It had been a week since Mona had talked to Sue Ellen, a week of constant anxiety and fear, waiting for the telephone to ring or someone to slip a note under her door telling her that Sue Ellen was ready for her.
But Sue Ellen hadn't gotten in touch with her, hadn't given her the word, hadn't even noticed that she was alive. She wants me to be ready, Mona thought.
The only time they had spoken all-week was when Sue Ellen had arranged to switch places with her while Travis and Frank were attending a lecture.
Frank, too, had been morose and sullen, just as he had been since the day he had put Joel Hankins in the hospital. Something had changed him, butMona didn't know whether that something had occurred when he was smashing little Joel's face apart or when he came home and found Sue Ellen there. He never spoke of it, and she never asked him after he exploded the first time.
"You gonna join the loving tonight?" came a voice, and she looked down from where she was seated on the couch. It was Tim, who was kneeling on the floor in front of her, his hand buried between her legs.
"How long have you been there?" she asked.
"Damned near five minutes," came the response.
"I'm sorry," she said, forcing a smile-and a moment later she was smiling without forcing herself, smiling and laughing and crying in a delirium of pleasure.
"Thanks a lot, lady," smiled Tim. "It beats hell out of taking a hot shower. Very relaxing indeed."
'So I see," she said, looking down at him.
"If I wasn't like that, I'd trade you in for a newer model," he laughed, rising and walking across the room, goosing Jeannie casually as he went.
Mona looked around for Frank, found that he and Sue Ellen had gone off together again, and for the first time felt the pangs of jealousy rising within her.
It was one thing for Sue Ellen to be teaching him the ropes, but did she have to go off to the bedroom with him every time she saw him?
And Mona remembered, too, what Sue Ellen had said: that she just might take Frank home and keep him. It had been said half in fun and half to make Mona play ball-but it could happen, too.
Mona walked over to the makeshift bar in the dining room and poured herself a stiff drink. It burned as it went down, but she immediately refilled the glass and repeated the process with an air of grim determination.
She had never been much of a drinker. A martini or light high-ball before dinner was quite enough for her-and even then, she drank it more for appearances than out of any great liking of the stuff.
But now she was pouring and drinking it like it was going out of style. First she felt mildly warm, then hot and frantic. Finally she heard a faint click somewhere within her head, and all traces of bitterness and jealousy were gone. Now all she wanted was to have a good time, and she returned to the living room, determined to get it.
She stumbled as she entered the room and Travis caught her in typical Travis style-by the breasts. While he was setting her back on her feet she backed up against him, rubbing her bare bottom against his cock.
"I do believe you're trying to tell me something!" he laughed.
"You and everybody else," she said. "Hey, everybody!"
All eye's turned to her tottering figure.
"I'm a little typsy," she announced.
"We would never have believed it," said Mia.
"Well, its true!"
"No," said Karen in mock horror.
"Yes I am," , she insisted. "I'm tipsy or maybe even drunk, and I'm ripe and ready for love."
"Fine," said Travis, giving her breasts a friendly little squeeze. "Let's go."
"No," she said, shaking her head and almost falling over in the process. "There's something I always wanted to do, and now that I'm drunk I am damned well going to do it. Nobody could blame me if you took advantage of my inebru ... inubr.. drunken condition, could they?"
"Never!" Dave swore with mock fervor, "What do you want to do?" asked Herb.
"Take oh every man in the room," she gurgled triumphantly.
"You've already done that, or don't you remember?" laughed Tim.
"I mean at once. Altogether."
"Hey!'? shrilled Jeannie. "I'd like to see that."
"Me too," echoed Travis.
"Here I am," said Mona, laying down on the floor. "I'm ready whenever you are."
"This is going to take some planning," said Sam, studying the situation with the same care he studied a potential appendectomy.
Herb lay down beside her, pulling her unresisting body close against him. With one hand he lifted her leg slightly, then slid his tremendous erection deep inside her.
"Ohhh!" she moaned. "Don't move! Not yet! I can't come yet, not until everybody's here."
Travis was the next one down on the floor. He lay down, facing her back, and drew as close to her as he could.
She felt a strange sensation then, as he began entering her. She'd never had it there before, and for a moment she wanted to cry out in pain, to tell him that he would never fit. But before she could, she heard a soft, contented "Ahh!" from Travis, and he too was buried in her up to the hilt.
"Just what you always wanted?" he asked, his tongue darting around her ear.
"Oh, yes, yes!" she murmured, grabbing Herb's face and pressing her lips to his. His mouth opened slightly and soon her tongue was inside of it.
Sam knelt down beside the welded trio, lowering his panting lips to her breast. He found the hugely erect nipple, sucked at it, toyed with it, until Mona had to beg him to stop until she was ready.
"What's left?" asked Jeannie. "There's still two more guys here."
"Bring 'em over," said Travis. "We'll think of something."
Tim came over first, and knelt just beyond Mona's head. She grabbed his erect organ, ran her fingers lightly over it until she felt it grow still harder, then gently guided it into her moist, waiting mouth.
This was it, all right! Just what she'd always dreamed about, even when she was a girl! She'd wake up trembling in the middle of the night, ridden with guilt but too hot and excited to ever return to sleep. Oh, yes, this was heaven!
She reached for Sam's head with one hand, found it, and traced her fingers down his body until she came to the hot, hard, throbbing thing she sought.
She could barely move now, but she raised her one free hand blindly above her head. A few seconds later Dave's huge erection lay in it, and he closed his own hand tightly over hers.
"Well, everyone seems to be here," said Travis, fighting to keep the passion from his voice. "If there are no objections from the audience, let's get this show on the road."
There were no objections. The women sat around, staring silently, fascinated. Jeannie was masturbating herself furiously, but for once never took her unblinking eyes from the mass of flesh before her.
And suddenly the mass of flesh was a turmoil of motion. Herb and Travis began pumping until Mona thought she would split in half, but bursting with pleasure, she began grinding her hips in rhythm with them. Her nipple was sore from Sam's teeth and tongue, but even the pain turned into an unimaginable pleasure. She sucked so hard, took so much of Tim into her mouth, that she almost choked, but even this made her only increase her efforts.
And then it came, wave after wave of unbearable ecstasy, washing over the six of them almost simultaneously.
"Oh, God!" she half screamed, half moaned, "I can't stop! I can't stop! I can't stop!"
The next thing she remembered was Karen's cool hands touching her forehead. She was lying on the couch, and two or three of the others were gathered around her.
"What ... what happened?" she asked weakly.
"You passed out," said Karen. "From pleasure."
"And maybe from a little too much bourbon too," added Travis.
"No," said Ellen. "It was the sex. Too much of a good thing."
"Too much for me," said Travis, joking. "They all faint when I do my stuff."
"Maybe you should try a new deodorant," said Karen, and Travis laughingly threw, her naked body across his knee and spanked her.
"This'll teach you to keep a civil tongue in your head!" he said.
"Ow!" she laughed. "What the hell has that-got to to with my head?"
"It's more fun," he said, "and besides, I always said your brains were in your ass!"
"What all's going on in here?" said Sue Ellen, walking into the room with Frank. "Is this the only way you can get a girl to say yes, Travis?"
"Hey, did you miss out on the fun," said Jeannie.
"I did?"
"Ever see five guys humping one girl at the same time?"
"It sounds too delicious to be true," said Sue Ellen.
"Who was the girl?" asked Frank.
"Mona. She's a bit of a battle casualty, though," said Jeannie. "Kept rolling around on the floor, coming and screeching about how it was too good and she couldn't stop, and then all of a sudden she's out cold."
Frank glared at Mona, his fiery eyes piercing her more intensely than any of the five men she had accommodated. Suddenly the liquor was back, boiling and gurgling in her stomach.
"Excuse me," she said slowly, deliberately. "I think I'm going to...."
That was as far as she got.
She made a mad dash down the hall, turned into the bathroom, and lowered her head to the toilet bowl just a fraction of a second before her Stomach gave up the battle.
"Sounds terrible, doesn't it?" said Karen as the heaving, coughing sounds came back down the hall.
"Well, you really can't blame her," said Travis. "Let this be a lesson to you girls: never mix. your drinks. Especially-when they're whiskey and sperm!"
That broke them up, all except Frank, and-when Mona returned, her face pale and drawn, she found them all still laughing.
She wondered why Frank was laughing at her too, for she had seen the look on his face, but when she tried to find him she discovered that he had gone. Sue Ellen was still there as were all the others.
"Where's Frank?" she asked Travis.
"I don't know. Said something about having to study, put on his clothes,, and cut out. Not more than a minute ago."
"I'd better go after him," she said, searching around for her panties and bra.
"Nonsense," said Travis. "He's a big boy now. He can take care of himself."
"Just the same ... "she began, but he was holding her firmly by the shoulders, and the old longing began to build up within her, to permeate every fiber of her body.
"Please, Travis...." she said, but he merely smiled at her and lowered one hand down across her belly, losing it in the thick mat of hair below.
She wanted to stuggle, to race out after Frank and take him home and to bed, but her knees were trembling too much even to stand, and she had to grab hold of Travis just to keep her balance.
Then his hands were racing all across her, and with a little moan she lowered herself to the floor, pulling him down beside her.
"Still the same old Mona," he said, nuzzling her breasts. "You had me wondering for a minute there."
"I love him," she pleaded. "Do it quick so I can go after him."
"Just make believe I'm Frank," he whispered.
She closed her eyes and pulled his mouth up to hers. With one hand she guided him inside her. Once she felt him there, she pressed her legs together, moaning at the pressure she felt within herself.
And when it was all over and he gently lowered her back to the floor, Travis was surprised to find a stream of tears racing down her face.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"SPECIAL DELIVERY?"
"That's right, Miss," said the postman, easily handing her the package.
"Thank you, very much," said Kaye.
She-took the small package and returned to her room, staring curiously at it.
It bore a local postmark, and even without opening it, she knew what it contained.
She went to a suitcase in a corner, and pulled out a small bottle of whiskey. It was against dorm regulations, of course, but most of the girls had little caches of alcohol stored about their rooms. She got a glass from the sink, returned the bottle, and poured herself a stiff shot, swallowing it with a single gulp. She repeated the process twice more, and then opened the package.
She winced when she saw the photographs, and fought back a wave of nausea which engulfed her.
There were an even three dozen of them, all blown up to eight by eleven size.
There was one of Tim astride her. And another of her masturbating herself. And still another of Tim kissing her naked breasts while she shrieked in ecstasy. There were shots of her from every conceivable angle, and Tim was in almost everyone of them.
She stared dully at them for a long time. Then, rising, she walked over to her metal wastebasket, dumped them in, and set a match to them, watching blankly as they burst into flame.
She returned to the package. She had known there would be photos, and she had known too, that there would be a letter. She unfolded it and read it now:
"Dear Kaye:
I sincerely hope and trust that you enjoy the fruits of my wife's newest hobby. I have no doubt but that you have already destroyed them, which, while it constitutes a tragic lack of artistic taste, is not an incontrovertible crime. You see, on the assumption that you would react with your heart rather than your head, I have taken the precaution of preserving the negatives. If you ever want another set of prints, just ask.
Oh, by the way, in order to test out the efficacy of our dark room equipment, I took the liberty of making two more complete sets of the prints. I personally feel that they are quite up to your rigid artistic standards, yet I can only judge composition, not character. Therefore, I believe I shall send the two sets to those people who can best determine whether your true personality came through: your parents-and Joel Hankins, whom I understand is in surgery even as I place pen to paper.
Needless to say, the Trustees and faculty might tend to frown upon the fact that I also do some modeling on the side, and so I have also taken the liberty of changing a few of my facial features in all prints except those I sent you. (Incidentally, just in case you didn't destroy them, I should explain that I neglected to put any fixer on them, and, alas, I fear the image will fade completely within thirty minutes after being exposed to any light whatsoever).
Now, it is just vaguely conceivable to me that you may have signed an exclusive modeling contract with some other photographer. However, have no fears on that count. Not only weren't you paid for this job, but I shan't be making a single cent profit myself. In fact, if you are still on campus forty-eight hours, I shall happily act as your public relations manager by giving away literally thousands of these photographs at absolutely no cost whatsoever.
Sincerely, Timothy L. Corwith"
"Hello, Joel."
"Oh, hi, Frank," The homely little face lit up in a wide smile of welcome.
"How are you feeling today?"
"Pretty good. They'll be letting me out the day after tomorrow, though they could have done it the day after I got here as far as I'm concerned."
"Why didn't they? When you phoned and told me what your medical fees were, I thought you were calling from your apartment."
"I was just about to walk out of here with a clean bill of health, or so they tell me."
"What happened?"
"Oh, I had a dizzy spell riding down in the elevator. Fainted or something. When I woke up I was back here again."
"Did they tell you what it was?"
"No. Just gave me a lot of scientific mumbo jumbo. Amazing. Doctors and lawyers both throw Latin around like it was going out of style, and yet neither of us can understand a single term the other guy is using."
"How are you fixed for money?" asked Frank. "Got enough, or do you need some more?"
"Money? That reminds me...." He rolled over to the edge of the bed and took an envelope from his nightstand. "Here."
"What is it?"
"The money you sent me. I didn't need any of it. I'm insured."
Frank pushed it back into Joel's hand. "Take it anyway. It'll make me feel a lot better."
"Why don't you take it and blow Mona to a mink coat or something?"
"Please."
"All right," sighed the youth, placing it back on the nightstand. "But I warn you: I'll probably blow it all in a bar and wind up getting my teeth knocked out again." He laughed, displaying a row of shiny new teeth. "It'll be easier for the next guy. These even fall out when I'm eating."
"Listen, Joel," said Frank. "As soon as you get out, I want you to give me a call."
"Sure," answered Joel. "I'm really not mad at you, you know. I'd probably have done the same thing."
"Well, I'm mad at me, and that's enough," said Frank, rising to leave. "Don't forget to call."
"I won't," said Joel.
Frank walked down the corridor. He was waiting for the elevator to take him back to the ground floor when a middle-aged man walked up to him.
"Mr. Durham?"
"Yes."
"My name Is Binder. I'm on the staff here."
"Pleased to meet you," said Frank, extending his hand.
"I wonder if I might have a moment of your time," he said, accepting the proffered hand.
"Sure. Anything you say."
"Fine. Will you come with me?"
Frank followed him around a turn in the corridor, coming at last to a small, neat, tastefully furnished office.
"Have a seat, please," said Binder. Frank did so.
"I understand that you're a close friend of Joel Hankins. Is that correct?"
"Yes, I guess you might say so."
"Have you ever noticed anything unusual about him?"
"Unusual in what way?" asked Frank. "Oh, dizzy spells, fainting, severe headaches, that sort of thing."
"No, I can't say that I have. Why?"
"Because Joel Hankins has a brain tumor."
"You're kidding."
"I don't kid about such things, Mr. Durham. He has had the condition for some time. It was aggravated by his recent mugging."
"Is he going to ... will he be all right?"
"It's hard to tell. We'll have to operate again shortly. I'd say he has better than a fifty-fifty chance. I simply wanted to know if this condition had manifested itself prior to the attacks."
"No," said Frank, mumbling.
"Well, it would have become acute sooner or later. Just as well it happened this way, when we won't be taking him away from a business or a family.
"Does he know?"
"No, I haven't told him yet. I thought I'd speak to you first to see if you could supply any information which might prove pertinent. I'll be telling him some time today."
"When will it happen?"
"Before the end of the week, I should think, and we'll keep you informed."
"Would you ... send the bill to me, please?" asked Frank slowly.
"Why?"
"Let's just say that I owe him a lot."
"I have no objection," said Binder, rising and ushering him to the door. "It was pleasant making your acquaintance."
Frank thanked him, left the building, and began walking home. Once before he had walked home from the hospital, self-loathing prying at his brain. Once again he was doing it.
Sure, the tumor would have needed to be cut out anyway, and sure, he had a good chance to pull through. But if he didn't ... if he didn't ... Frank had robbed him of maybe twenty years he could have enjoyed before the tumor developed to the point it was at now.
He may have robbed him of a quarter of a century of life-and no matter what his law books said about it, Frank knew that was murder.
Slowly, ponderously, in a black, sullen mood, he trudged home across the barren campus.
Mona was busy drying the dishes when the doorbell rang. Wiping her hands on a towel, she went across to the living room to answer it.
"Good afternoon," said Sue Ellen, stepping inside and sitting down comfortably in Frank's recliner chair. "Beautiful day, isn't it?"
"What do you want?" asked Mona dully, knowing full well what she wanted.
"Three guesses," grinned Sue Ellen, reaching into her purse for a cigarette.
"Frank will be home in half an hour," said Mona. "Maybe later this week."
"Nonsense," said Sue Ellen. "A deal is a deal is a deal, or so Shakespeare would say if he felt like copping a feel."
"No,' said Mona fixedly. "I have my housework to do, and dinner to fix."
"Eat out. I'll treat the pair of you."
Mona shook her head. "No."
"Yes, Mona. I've done my job on your husband, distasteful as it was in the beginning. Now you'll do your job on me-and I guarantee it won't be half as distasteful to you.
She walked over to Mona, who had turned her back and was drying the dishes. The first inkling Mona had that Sue Ellen was no longer seated in the living room was when she felt those long, knowing fingers slipping around her waist, moving upward to hungrily grasp her breasts.
"Knock it off," snapped Mona. "Frank'll be home any minute."
"Then I'd say you haven't a second to waste," said Sue Ellen.
Don't you understand?"
"All I understand is that I came here for some of that fabulous pussy, and I'm not going to leave until I get it. If I have to have Frank hold your legs apart while I tinker with your too-much engine, I'll do it."
"Now, damnit, you get the hell out of here right now!" yelled Mona, turning on her with all the suppressed fury of a caged wildcat.
"Not a chance," said Sue Ellen.
And then something snapped inside Mona. Like a tigress, she snarled a curse at the leering, mocking woman standing before her and hurled herself at Sue Ellen's throat.
Sue Ellen was caught by surprise and tumbled backward onto the floor. Mona was on top of her in an instant, biting, tearing, scratching with her long, red nails.
"What the hell's gotten into you?" gasped Sue Ellen, rolling onto her side and trying to dislodge her fiery antagonist.
"I've had a bellyful of you!" grated Mona. She grabbed a handful of Sue Ellen's hair and yanked it with all her might. Her rival responded with a scream of pain, and jammed her thumb hard into Mona's left breast.
The sudden searing shock of pain forced Mona to release her grip, and Sue Ellen was on her feet in a second, kicking off her four-inch heels to maintain a firm footing.
The two women circled each other warily. Suddenly Sue Ellen's right hand shot out, grasping Mona by the throat. Mona struggled to break the hold, couldn't, arid swung a knee up into Sue Ellen's thigh. Sue Ellen reeled back, staggering, toward the bedroom door and Mona, picking up one of her antagonist's discarded shoes, hurled it at her head.
Sue Ellen ducked, then dove for Mona's legs. Mona went down in a crumpled heap, Sue Ellen on top of her. Mona's blouse was torn now, literally ripped to shreds, and both it and her bra came away in Sue Ellen's grasp when the latter missed a grab for her hair.
Sue Ellen saw an opening, lowered her head, and grabbed one of the bulging, heaving breasts between her teeth. Mona screamed as she felt the teeth sink in, felt Sue Ellen sucking the blood from her.
She reached out, grabbed for Sue Ellen, for anything that might help her put an end to the pain. One hand reached her hair, the other grabbed her dress. She yanked with both, and Sue Ellen's head came away from her nipple while her dress hung down from her waist.
Sue Ellen released her long enough to rip the hindering garment from her. Then she dove in again, scratching and biting as if her life depended on it-which it well may have, for Mona had found her other shoe arid was trying to use it as a bludgeon.
Suddenly Sue Ellen's hand slipped, she lost her support and rolled over on her back. Mona took advantage of her opportunity and straddled her, digging her heels into Sue Ellen's thighs.
Her nipples still smarted terribly, and seeing that Sue Ellen had a bra which hooked in front, she braved a few blows to the face while' releasing her hand long enough to undo the bra.
It fell away, revealing the voluptuous, throbbing breasts, breasts which had known a thousand lips, a million kisses. They had suffered' through love bites, too-but not like the one she was going to get now, swore Mona.
Holding her smaller opponent's hand firmly on the ground above her head, Mona lowered her panting lips to Sue Ellen's quivering, twisting, turning body. Soon she found the nipple that she sought, and she slowly brought her teeth together, careful not to apply the pressure too quickly, or to wrench the cry of agony too soon.
But Sue Ellen had not given up, even when the first drop of blood appeared on her nipple. She turned her body sharply to the left, and as Mona leaned forward to keep her grip, she brought her knee up into Mona's groin.
There wasn't room to deliver a kick, but she pressed upward as hard as she could, rubbing viciously against Mona's tender flesh.
Mona's grip weakened, almost imperceptably at first, but soon her lips left the nipple altogether. She straightened up and, swinging her hand high over her head, she brought it down full force on Sue Ellen's exposed buttocks.
Sue Ellen yelped in pain, but her leg was so firmly pressed against Mona that she couldn't straighten it out. Thus she remained exposed as Mona brought home blow after blow.
Finally she reached up her hands, fighting against Mona's restraining weight, and grabbed a firm hold of Mona's breasts. She squeezed them as hard as she could, rubbing her knee viciously at the same time.
Mona remained atop her for a few seconds, then, with a moan of pain, she fell off. Sue Ellen turned her on her stomach, pulled down her panties in a single motion, and began slapping the bare trembling buttocks.
Mona groaned and tried to roll over, but found that she didn't have the strength. And then, suddenly, she discovered that she didn't want to have the strength.
Sue Ellen's hand snaked down the cleft of her buttocks, her fingers no longer punishing, but probing, pleasing.
Mona spread her legs apart to make herself more accessible, and Sue Ellen moved her head down, licking, kissing, sucking, making strange little cooing noises deep in her throat.
Then she turned Mona over, her lips still glued to her, and shifted her position so that her feet were at Mona's head. Mona bent forward and placed her lips to Sue Ellen's moist, flushed, throbbing vagina, seeking and finding the erect little jewel within.
Her body was trembling uncontrollably now, and she felt Sue Ellen's thighs clamp together over her head, drawing her still closer to her goal. She added a finger, then two, to her tongue, and the little shudder of pleasure that permeated Sue Ellen's body was transferred to her own as Sue Ellen reciprocated 'the gesture.
With her free hand she reached blindly out, touched Sue Ellen's shoulder, and quickly found her way to her breast, toying gently with the wounded nipple. Once again Sue Ellen followed suit, and Mona felt the first distant waves of ecstasy rushing from the shores of oblivion, starting to wash over her body.
Suddenly, Sue Ellen started making strange sucking noises. Her whole body went rigid for a minute, and then she urgently wrapped Mona's legs around her head to hold it there during the throes of orgasm.
This triggered Mona's own orgasm. It came like a tornado, sweeping over her and carrying her along, unprotesting, in its wake.
And then, just as she was reaching still higher for the utmost pinnacle of pleasure-pain, she opened her eyes for a brief instant-and there, staring at her from the doorway with an expression that spelled nothing short of murder, stood Frank Durham.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MONA LOOKED UP FROM HER BOOK, ACROSS the living room to where Frank sat reading the paper.
She sighed.
He hadn't spoken to her in ten days, ever since the night he had come back from the hospital to find her and Sue Ellen locked in a Lesbian lovers' embrace.
He had eaten the meals she had prepared, had slept in her bed, had come home from classes each day-but he hadn't touched her, and except for an occasional grunt of affirmation or negation in response to some question, he hadn't given her any reason to believe that he knew she was alive.
As far as Mona was concerned, she would have preferred horsewhipping to this aloofness, but Frank hadn't horsewhipped her, hadn't even yelled at her.
She still trembled with terror when she remembered his expression when their eyes first met. At that moment, she wouldn't have taken any kind of odds on her being alive the next morning.
But Frank had just stared at her venomously, not saying a word, just stared and stared as she vainly attempted to cut short her orgasm, to force her body to stop its wild, uncontrollable gyrations, Then, it was over, and he had turned to Sue Ellen.
"Get out, slut," he said, almost too softly to be heard.
But Sue Ellen heard him and Sue Ellen quickly gathered her things together and left, not even bothering to try slipping her tattered dress on until she was outside the door.
"Oh, Frank!" Mona had babbled hysterically. "I didn't mean for you to ... that is, I...."
"Make me my dinner," he had-said, just as softly.
Mona had raced to the kitchen, terrified, not even bothering to cover her nakedness.
"Joel Hankins has a brain tumor," said Frank, as they sat down to eat-and that was the last thing he had said to her since that evening.
Now she crossed her legs, trying desperately to fight back the luscious anxiety that was centered between them, but the only thing the action accomplished was to push her panties up between the soft throbbing lips it covered. She tensed her thighs, then relaxed them, marveling at the sensation of the cloth being rubbed against her eager clitoris.
Did she dare ask him? She looked at Frank, engrossed in the paper as he had been a thousand times before. But this time it was different. Very different. There was a squareness to his jaw, a rigidity to his countenance; that boded nothing but trouble, and she sighed and lowered her eyes.
No, she couldn't ask him. She knew what he thought of women who made it with women, and she could never in a thousand years convince him that she wasn't a Lesbian; that-what he had walked in on was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things, a betrayal of long-aroused passions.
And yet, was it really just that? Was she sure that she wasn't a Lesbian? How often in the past ten days had she remembered Sue Ellen's eager, searching tongue and hand darting in between her legs?
With a sigh that was half a sob, she rose and walked off to the bedroom.
"She sure swallowed an awful lot of water before she drowned," said the burly, leather-coated policeman.
"That she did," agreed the balding little doctor. "You found her kind of quick. I'd say off-hand that she hasn't been dead more than-" he paused to look at the bloated corpse, then continued, "-three hours at the most. Probably closer to ninety minutes."
"I didn't find her," said the policeman. "Couple of kids saw a piece of paper floating around in the pond and when they went a little closer, they saw her."
"Must have shocked the hell out of 'em," said the doctor. "Obviously suicide. Well, we get 'em here from time to time; especially when exams are coming up. What was that you said about a piece of paper?"
"Oh, nothing," came the response. "Thought at first it might be a suicide note, but when I waded in and got my hands on it, it turned out to be blank."
He displayed the water-soaked paper to the doctor, then crumpled it up and threw it in the path of an orderly who was sweeping the floor of the emergency room.
"Dead?" Joel repeated unbelievingly.
"I'm afraid so," said the elderly man in the white doctor's jacket.
"But ... but I saw her just a little while ago!"
"I'm sorry."
And, for the first time in his memory, even including that far-gone night when Blanche and her friends mauled him, Joel Hankins wept.
He wept for a long time, and when he was through he staggered over to the closet, donned a robe, and went out of his room. He walked down the long corridor, and, when nobody stopped him, snuck out through the service entrance and walked out into the chilly spring night.
When he got to Kaye's dormitory he climbed the fire escape, almost blacking out twice from dizziness. Her room had been on the fourth floor, and when he arrived there, he found that the only way to leave the fire escape and enter the building was through the floor's lavatory.
Almost unconscious from the pain at the base of his skull, he forced a window open and entered.
A girl was just entering. Their eyes met for an instant, and Joel, with a speed and agility he didn't know he possessed in his weakened state, grabbed a water glass from the sink, broke it on the steel faucet, and confronted her.
"I don't want to hurt you," he mumbled groggily. "I don't want to hurt anybody, but if you scream or try to stop me, I'll slit your throat before anyone can prevent it."
She just stared, wild-eyed and terrified, at the broken glass in his hand. Blood was beginning to ooze out of the deep gash in his palm, but he wasn't aware of any pain there.
"Do you know where Kaye's room is?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Take me there."
"But there are other girls there," she said, finally finding her voice. "They'll see you."
"But they won't stop me," he said, blinking and reeling. He leaned a hand against the wall to steady himself. "They won't stop me," he repeated slowly, "or I'll kill you."
Trembling with terror, the girl led him down the hallway. A few girls saw him, but no one tried to stop him.
"Thanks," he said groggily. "Now get the hell out of here."
She backed slowly out of the room. When she saw that he didn't intend to stop her, she slammed the door behind her and ran, screaming, down the corridor, begging for help and yelling for the police.
Joel turned on a light and went to Kaye's desk. He didn't know what he was looking for, but there had to be a reason-and that reason would be here.
The dizziness was back, and he had to sit down for a moment. As he did so, he noticed the marks of a fire within her waste-basket.
She had burned something-but what?
And, according to the doctor who had broken the news to him, she may have written a note-but it was on blank paper.
What didn't she want anyone to see-or was there anything at all? Had she just gone off the deep end?
There was an answer here somewhere, a logic to it all, but his head was aching terribly. He couldn't think, couldn't reason, could barely keep his eyes open. Grudgingly, fighting the urge every second, he lowered his aching, throbbing head to the desk. If he could close his eyes, for just a second....
And then he saw it.
A torn manila envelope, taped onto wrapping paper. It had been a package. With a final effort of will power, he reached out and pulled the envelope over.
It was ripped, and there were stains on it, possible tear stains-but he could make out the return address.
Timothy Corwith!
Then it was blackmail! Tim was in the club, and he had something on Kay. He may have found some way to get rid of the letter and the pictures, or whatever it was he had sent, but he had neglected to do the same thing to the envelope. And of course he had to put on a return address: if it fell into anyone's hands but Kaye's, whatever he had sent her might ruin him.
He heard the sounds of running feet in the corridor. That would be the police coming to get him, he knew. But somehow it seemed unimportant to him now. All he needed was sleep.
His head began nodding again, but before he yielded to the impulse he found a letter opener. With his last ounce of strength, he plunged it through the envelope, sticking it to the desk.
Let them come now, he thought dreamily as he heard hands fumbling with the doorknob. They'd find the envelope, and when he woke up in the hospital and they questioned him about it, he'd begin settling his little score with the Dean of Men.
But first, he thought, as his head touched the table, I have to sleep....
The phone rang again.
"I'll get it," Mona said, walking over hesitantly and making sure Frank's back was turned before answering it.
"I don't know," said Mona, aware of Frank's intense stare.
"Why don't you know?" asked Travis.
"It all depends on my husband," she said.
"Won't he let you come?" asked Travis, then chuckled at his own inadvertent pun.
"Yes, he'll let me come," she answered, looking straight into Frank's eyes.
"Then what's the problem?"
"I'm hoping that he'll make me stay here," she said. "I'm hoping he'll carry me off to the bedroom right now, before I even hang up the phone, and I'm hoping he'll make me forget that you and every other man in the world exists."
Frank stared at her for a moment, as Travis babbled into the other end of the phone. Then, with an air of great determination, he got up, slowly walked across the room, took the phone from her hand, and hung it up.
Then he swept her up in his arms and carried her to the bedroom, depositing her gently on the bed.
"God, how I've been praying for you to do this!"
"It's all over?" he asked. "The club, Sue Ellen, all of it?"
"I'll never go back unless you want to," she said, pulling him down to her.
