J. Martin Crispian was totally preoccupied with the scenes of sin that were to be uncovered everywhere in the apartment building. Peering from behind drawn shades, he saw every sadistic act of perversion, the gratification of unspeakable fetishes. By spying from his window, day after day, he knew the depraved truths, the sordid shadow lives of tenants who dwelled in the degenerate apartment complex, wallowing in their evil rituals. The practitioners of lust would have sickened anyone-anyone but Crispian! For him, peeping had become a vocation that separated him from reality. In The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, William R. Reevy writes: "The tendency of the male to voyeurism is so well known that Kinsey makes the statement that 'There are probably very few heterosexual males who would not take advantage of the opportunity to observe a nude female' ... voyeurism is admitted to by the great majority of adult males...." But if Crispian was sick, what term could describe his neighbors?
CHAPTER ONE
The blonde girl was getting undressed again with the blinds open. Mr. Crispian caught his breath sharply. The blood began to pound at his temple. He was trembling slightly.
In a short while, he knew, he would be treated to the sight of her bare, luscious body! The ripeness of her breasts, the plump, delectable rounds of her buttocks, the firm columns of her thighs with their golden reflections.
He waited feverishly for the blonde girl to denude herself before his staring eyes.
Mr. Crispian knew that you could get into serious trouble with the law for being a Peeping Tom, of course. He didn't care about that. Or, to put it more accurately, the fact that he ran the risk of getting into trouble made it all the more exciting and stimulating to Mr. Crispian.
Window peeping was, so to speak, Mr. Crispian's only hobby.
For the last twenty years Mr. Crispian had lived in a big, old apartment house in a rundown section of town that once had been high class. The building had been constructed in the shape of an immense U around a deep central courtyard. The apartment that Mr. Crispian lived in was along the left-hand bar of the U, facing inward toward the courtyard. Because the building was so tall, the apartments facing the courtyard didn't get much in the way of sunlight, but Mr. Crispian didn't worry much about that. He didn't need sunlight. His kind of life thrived best in the dark.
He worked all day at the same dreary clerical job he had held for thirty years or more. When he came home at night, he fixed a simple dinner for himself and then sat down by the window to indulge in his one and only interest in life: window peeping.
Mr. Crispian had never married.
Mr. Crispian had not been to bed with a woman for many, many years.
He was a small, colorless, uninteresting man who had never had an adventure worth a second thought, never really been in love, never bet on the horses, never played the stock market. His life, to an outsider, would seem pretty much of a blank. Even to Mr. Crispian it was a blank, for he kept his inner torments hidden, as much as possible, even from himself. His one .purpose in the universe seemed to be staring across the courtyard into the other windows.
There were three or four windows on his approximate level that he watched with special interest. In those apartments, the people were a little lax about pulling down the blinds at night. Sometimes Mr. Crispian was treated to the dazzling view of a rounded white buttock, or the breathtaking sight of a ruby-tipped breast. Mr. Crispian had extremely good eyesight, and he had seen many interesting things in those windows.
But of all the windows he watched, the window directly opposite his own was by far the most fascinating for him.
It was the window of an attractive young woman in her early or middle twenties. She was a tall, willowy blonde who dressed very well, when she was dressed. Mr. Crispian sometimes met her going in or out of the house on weekends and shot her a quick, embarrassed glance.
When she was alone, she hardly ever bothered to roll down the window blinds. Some evenings she would get undressed at nine o'clock, some evenings as late as eleven. Mr. Crispian would sit entranced by his window, waiting for the arrival of the magic moment.
She would peel off her garments one by one, as though performing for him, hanging each item of clothing carefully in her closet before proceeding to take off the next. Finally she would be completely nude.
That wasn't the best part of it, though.
When she was totally naked, she would do a series of calisthenics. Her body would be in motion, breasts bobbing and heaving, stomach thrusting, buttocks pulling taut. That was a sight to see! She would twist and gyrate in full view for a long time, while Mr. Crispian's keen, admiring gaze took in her full, perfectly-formed breasts, her gently rounded stomach, her white thighs with their golden highlights, and her firm softly curved buttocks. She would be naked in front of the window for perhaps as much as fifteen minutes. On those nights, Mr. Crispian went to bed content with what he had seen, emotionally satisfied.
There were other nights when the young blonde woman had male visitors, though. Mr. Crispian didn't get his free show on such nights. The men would invariably draw the blinds, cutting off the view from the little man across the courtyard.
Mr. Crispian had become almost as familiar with the blonde girl's beaux as he was with her voluptuous, erotically provocative nude body. One of her visitors was there as often as all the rest combined: a broad-shouldered, burly young man with unruly black hair. There was also a slim, red-haired fellow with a crew cut, and a rather chubby man with thinning brownish hair. There were also others who visited only once, but the black-haired man was there two or three times every week. He saw none of the other men more than once a week, some of them less often.
It was early in the evening, now, half past seven of a spring night. The sky was light with lingering day. Mr. Crispian greatly preferred the wintertime, when the darkness descended early. It was very much easier to see into an apartment against a background of blackness than against the twilight haze of a spring night.
But he could see her fairly clearly, even tonight. The blonde girl had her blinds up. Mr. Crispian watched her as she moved around in the apartment. It was still too early for anything interesting to happen, he thought.
It was only quarter to nine. She never undressed before nine o'clock, except on rare nights when she wanted an early bath, and right now she was wearing a smartly tailored suit.
The minutes ticked away. Nine o'clock drew near.
She began to take her clothes off.
She unbuttoned her jacket and hung it away in the closet. Mr. Crispian's heart pounded furiously. In his mind's eye, he was already racing ahead, seeing her nude, doing her calisthenics, the white, heavy globes of her breasts jouncing before his dazzled gaze.
Now she was unzipping her skirt, stepping out of it, carrying it to the closet.
Soon, he thought.
Soon she would be naked once more. That would be the glorious moment! That would be what he lived for!
There's that creepy little pervert again, Ellen Dawson thought in annoyance, as she started to pull her slip over her head. There he is. Just like Old Faithful.
Glancing across the courtyard, she could make out the gnomish little face peeping from behind the drawn blinds of the apartment facing hers. Ellen knew that Mr. Crispian was there. She had seen him often enough. When they happened to meet in the lobby of the building, he would dart a quick, nervous, embarrassed glance at her. He was a real creep, Ellen thought. Sick, sick, sick!
But she didn't draw her blinds closed. Even though she knew that Mr. Crispian was staring at her, Ellen kept herself on display. Perhaps it was because Mr. Crispian was staring at her. In some way, it turned her on to let this lousy little old voyeur peep at her. She regarded it as an act of charity. What did it cost her? You threw a nickel to a beggar or a bone to a dog. And you let the creep across the way get his cheap thrill by looking at you.
There was more to it than just generosity, although Ellen didn't like to admit it. The fact was that she had always enjoyed showing her body off to an audience. It was the opposite side of the coin from peeping. Mr. Crispian got his kicks from secretly staring at a woman's exposed nudity? Okay. Ellen Dawson got kicks from exposing herself.
She pulled her slip off and carried it toward the closet to hang it up.
All she wore now was a pair of stockings, her brassiere, panties, and her garter belt. She could imagine the creep across the courtyard getting really hot, now. Ellen smiled. She turned to face the open window. Give him a good show, she thought; let him see so much that maybe he'll drop dead from apoplexy and disappear from the window.
She unhooked the bra. The cups fell away from her firm, ripe, rosy-tipped young breasts.
Ellen had beautiful breasts. Magnificent breasts that were large, ripe, and lush, set high on her chest and close together, with a deep, enticing valley between them. They had developed early. She was wearing a brassiere when she was ten years old, and by the time she was thirteen she had two neat little apples of breasts. In another couple of years they were more like melons.
Her boobs had been so big when she was fifteen that she was afraid they'd be ugly by the time she was twenty-five. She feared that they'd sag and droop like the breasts of fat old women. But now she was twenty-four, and her bust line was as spectacular as it had been in the middle of her adolescence. There wasn't any trace of a droop or a sag. Though her bosoms were so large, she still could get along without a brassiere and not look sloppy. The boobs stood up and out from her chest even with artificial supports removed.
Ellen faced the window. She took a deep breath, making the white, flame-tipped globes of her breasts rise in even more astonishing fullness.
Take a good look, creepo!
She smiled. She put her hands over the twin warm spheres of voluptuousness and massaged them with her fingers, tenderly, playfully. Her nipples were growing hard, now. They always did when she stripped in front of her window audience. They were turning into little pinkish-red turrets of hard nubby flesh standing away from the upper curves of her breasts. Ellen's fingers trapped the rigid nipples for a moment.
Then she rolled her white silk panties down.
Inch by inch by inch, down over the broad flaring hips, down over the deep-socketed navel, over the first golden reflections.
She was naked, now, except for the stockings and garter belt. They framed her loins and buttocks, a band of elastic at the top setting off the line where the plump cheeks sprang from her back, and the stocking tops below marking mid-thigh level. The tautly stretched bands of the garters were pink against the paleness of her thighs.
Ellen turned, giving the hidden watcher across the courtyard a full view of the firm, deliciousness of her bare buttocks. She brought one foot up onto a chair, making the firm cheeks even tighter, and examined her ankle to see if it had swollen at all, since she had turned it slightly that afternoon. No. No swelling. She put her foot down. Then she unhooked the garters from her left stocking and swept it off. The right stocking followed.
Only the garter belt remained to cloak her nudity, ever so slightly. Ellen swung round again, facing the window, giving Mr. Crispian a full dazzling look at all of her.
Time for calisthenics, now.
Time for the exercises that kept her body young, vibrant and beautiful.
First the toe-touches. Ellen brought her legs together. Then she raised her arms high over her head, a gesture that made the jutting mounds of her breasts flatten out as she stretched them. And then she brought her arms sweeping downward to touch her toes.
The deep-set globes of her breasts leaped and jiggled about as she swung forward, then upward, again and again. The heavy bowls of flesh swayed and jounced. The firm muscles of her stomach grew firmer.
Ellen counted off twenty touches of her toes. Good. Now the deep knee-bends. Hands on hips. Down! Down! Feel those buttocks getting tight! Yes! Down! Down!
Twenty-five deep knee-bends. Okay, she thought, straightening up. Sweat was making her body glisten, now. Droplets of perspiration ran down into the valley between her breasts. They ran out onto the fleshy globes themselves, dropping into space from the tips of her nipples.
Back-bend, now. Legs spread apart, good and wide, give the peeper a red-hot view. Fine. Now reach back, hands behind the back; try to grab your ankles. Back-back-breasts sticking up toward the ceiling, muscles quivering all up and down your body, thigh, stomach, back and buttock muscles. She could practically feel him staring at her. Let him stare, she thought! Let him stare.
With a grunt she straightened up. Push-ups were next. They were good for those pectoral muscles. Kept the boobs from dangling and sagging. Ellen was a bug on physical culture. At twenty-four, she looked no more than eighteen years old, and she wanted to go on looking eighteen years old for as much of the rest of her life as possible.
She flattened herself out on the floor, breasts crushing into the carpet. Then she began to lift herself. The big bare globes of her boobs tumbled straight below her, the tips of them touching the floor. "Up down. Up-down. Lift the bazooms clear of the floor, let them down to touch again. Up-down.
There were three or four more exercises in her nightly routine. The whole works lasted about fifteen minutes and left Ellen breathing hard and shiny with sweat. Which was fine. It tightened her muscles, kept excess flab from forming in the places where she didn't want to be flabby, and opened her pores to cleanse the insides.
The next thing on the docket was a bath. Ellen was having company tonight, as usual, and she wanted to be clean and sweet-smelling to greet him. Not sweaty from exercising. So she picked herself up and walked across the room into the bathroom. She gave her bare buttocks a little wriggle for the benefit of the peeper across the way.
She stepped into the tub and turned the water on. It began to swirl around her feet. Ellen stretched out luxuriously in it and leaned back, closing her eyes.
The warm water crept up.
Up around her thighs. Up to the hips and then to the hard-tipped globes of her breasts.
Ellen relaxed. In a little while, Jim would be here. Jim would seize and caress her breasts and put his lips to them. Jim would stroke her thighs and reawaken her sensuality, his masculinity drawing her as a moth to a flame. But that ecstasy was still an hour or more away. Now she would relax, drifting in the warmth of the bath.
Her hands crept to her breasts, cupped them lightly, played with the nipples.
Life was good, Ellen thought. If you were young, happy and attractive, the world was your oyster. It was just the pitiful creep who hung around the edges of existence who missed all the fun. Like the voyeur across the way, glued to the window, his eyes drinking in every detail of Ellen's nude and golden body.
Mr. Crispian had no complaints. Mr. Crispian felt well satisfied with his night's activity at the window.
He watched the blonde girl disappear into the bathroom. He knew that the show was probably over for tonight. After her bath, she would put on a negligee, which meant no more nudity for him, and sooner or later one of her boy friends would show up, and the blinds across the way would be drawn. So he had had it.
He straightened up and tugged at his collar. He was hot and perspiring from what he had seen. The exercises, in particular, heated him up. To see her bending and writhing, her big round breasts flopping around, the breasts that were so fantastically beautiful they seemed unreal, that was an overpowering sensation for Mr. Crispian.
Some nights, when the blonde girl disappeared from view, he would remain at his observation post, staring at other windows. But not tonight. He had had all the excitement he needed, tonight.
He walked across the room, shaking a little from the impact of his peeping. He closed his eyes.
In memory he relived what he had seen.
The gradual stripping. The body proudly bared to him. The high, rosy-tipped breasts. The flat stomach, the firm thighs, the dazzling gold.
And she was so shameless, Mr. Crispian thought!
She had turned toward the window to undress. She must do it deliberately, he decided. There could be no other explanation. Some people accidentally left their windows open, but that was a matter of forgetfulness. They didn't proceed to face front and strip in front of the window. If they noticed that the blinds were open, they would close them.
Not this blonde, though. She had been front and center, stripping for an audience. She had been looking right at the window, all except once when she turned her back, and that could have been deliberate too, to show off her luscious buttocks.
Does she know I'm there, Mr. Crispian wondered?
Does she know I'm watching?
It was a frightening thought. But at the same time it was an exciting thought, a stimulating thought.
Yes, he told himself. She knows I'm watching her, and she's deliberately showing herself off to me. She really wants me to come across the courtyard and make love to her. He laughed at the flattering fantasy. Her shamelessness, her boldly flaunted nudity, it was all an advertisement designed to break down his shyness, he decided.
He could imagine it, now. Watching her parade her bare breasts and buttocks before the window for a while, until he got so hot with desire he could no longer stand it. And then crossing the courtyard, knocking on the door "I'm Mr. Crispian. I live across the way."
"Yes, I know you do. I've been waiting for you, my darling. Why did it take you so long to come to me?"
"I had to be sure you wanted me."
"Yes, yes, I want you," would come the throaty cry of passion.
And then he would fling himself on the soft, throbbing nudity of her, and bury himself in the hot embrace of her body. He'd fondle the breasts that he had stared at from a distance for so long, and go rocketing off to pleasure on her quivering, voluptuous body.
Mr. Crispian smiled. It was something to dream about. It would never happen, of course. Never in a billion years. But he could dream about it.
He brushed his teeth fastidiously and got into bed.
Sleep came swiftly.
CHAPTER TWO
THERE WAS A KNOCK ON ELLEN DAWSON'S DOOR.
She glanced at the bedside clock. Five minutes to ten. He was a little early tonight.
Ellen had finished with her bath half an hour ago. She had shaved her legs and arms and had put little dabs of perfume between her breasts and in a few other interesting places. Then she had donned her filmy white negligee, the one that covered her body without hiding a thing.
Now she swept toward the door.
"Who is it?" she called.
"Jimmy. Who do you think it is?"
"Coming, coming!"
Ellen opened the door. A burly, dark-haired man in his late twenties stood there. He didn't smile. He simply nodded to her and stepped into the apartment.
His dark, gleaming eyes traveled over her body in as parent approval, lingering for a moment at the place where the deep bowls of her breasts thrust against the gauzy fabric of her negligee. Ellen closed the door and locked it.
"I just finished my bath," she told him. "Making myself nice and clean for Jimmy-boy."
"Yeah," he said. "Tonight you get nice and clean for me, and tomorrow you get nice and clean for Joe Blow., and the day after tomorrow-"
"Jimmy, don't start that again."
He scowled at her. "What else do you want me to talk about? This is tearing me apart, Ellen. To see you every third or fourth night like this-"
"It won't be for long," Ellen purred.
"You've been saying that for months."
"This time I mean it," she said. She glided across the room toward him, her breasts swaying voluptuously within the transparent negligee. She came close enough so that the erotic perfume of her body could be wafted into his nostrils to do its witching work. Her pale blue eyes stared intensely into his dark ones. "You haven't kissed me," she said, pouting. "You've been here almost a minute and a half and you haven't kissed me. I'm waiting."
"Sure, baby. Sure."
He reached for her. Ellen slid up against him, putting the lower part of her body tight against his close-fitting blue jeans. The extent of his masculine desires had been clearly visible, due to the tautly stretched faded fabric of the dungarees. Now she could feel the passion in his heartbeat.
She locked her hands behind his neck. She pushed the ripe cones of her breasts into his chest, flattening them out against him. Her nipples tingled with excitement. Her face was inches from his.
"Baby-baby-baby," he whispered hoarsely.
Their lips met.
Jim McHughes' style of lovemaking wasn't a subtle one. The moment his lips were covering hers, his eager tongue rammed like a lance and stabbed its way into her hot, willing mouth. She met it with the tip of her tongue. His hands slid down the back of her body, grabbing the negligee, bunching it up, the strong fingers digging into the ripe globes of her buttocks, kneading the flesh, gripping it.
They stood that way a long while, bodies locked in the middle of the room. When they separated, they were both flushed and breathing hard. Ellen's big breasts were going up and down within her negligee like two live cannon balls. Her breasts were hot and swollen with desire. The throb of lust was painful along the stretches of her thighs, and there was the dry taste of yearning in her mouth.
McHughes looked at her. "I haven't been here in three nights. It feels like three months, Ellen."
"I know. I've missed you so much, Jim."
"Then why can't I see you every night?"
"We'll talk about that some other time," she said. "We've got better things to do now."
"Yeah," he said.
He moved toward her again. Suddenly he dropped to his knees in front of her and caught the hem of her negligee. He began to swoop the gauzy garment upward, baring her shins then her thighs, and then the golden tones of her stomach, the long span of taut abdomen, the delicious mounds of her breasts, tipped with love-cherries that stood up in frenzied anxiety.
Then he pulled the negligee over her head and tossed it aside. She stood completely nude before him, her body proudly and unashamedly bare.
He seized her. He bent his knees and put his lips to her left breast, paying tribute to it with his tongue, creating a sweet suction that sent the fires of sensuality leaping high within Ellen Dawson. Then he moved to the right breast and did the same thing. When he was finished, both nipples were incandescent, and they were hard and swollen so that they seemed three times their normal size.
He knelt. His lips went lower.
He fanned his hands out over the cool cheeks of her bare buttocks, grasping them and pushing her body forward against him. Ellen stood with her legs set, and he pressed his kiss to her curvaceous torso.
He was very busy for a while.
"Oh, yes," Ellen murmured. "Yes, that feels so good, honey, that feels terrific!"
Nude, feet planted firmly on the floor, she closed her eyes, threw her head back, and breathed deeply as she accepted the homage he paid to her beauty. She ran her hands through his thick curly black hair, while his head moved frantically in the attempt to inspire even greater appreciation.
Then he stood up, after drawing a tickling trail of kisses down her thighs. His eyes were narrowed to slits of desire, and his craggy-featured face was scar let with stimulation.
"Get undressed," Ellen panted at him.
The suggestion was hardly necessary. McHughes was already struggling out of his clothing. Nude and heated up, Ellen waited impatiently for him to strip.
Jim McHughes had the build of a stevedore. He was a rugged, thick-bodied man covered with a coarse mat of hair practically from head to foot. But he wasn't a stevedore or a truck driver or a professional wrestler. He was a painter, whose pictures were hanging in more than one gallery. He was considered one of the better young, experimental American artists. You can't ever judge a person's profession from his appearance. There was nothing about Jim McHughes' physical self to indicate that he was a person of artistic temperament at all.
Ellen Dawson wasn't sure that she understood what his paintings were all about. But that didn't matter. She understood the things he could do with his body. In many ways, she and Jim McHughes had nothing in common, but when they got into bed they were of a mind.
He was almost naked, now. His undershorts dropped away, and then his massively male body was bare to Ellen's delighted gaze.
She clutched at his thick wrist. "Hurry," she said. "Oh, hurry."
"Just a second," he told her.
He reached around and drew the blinds shut. Then he followed her to the bed.
"You always leave them open," he complained.
"I'm forgetful," Ellen replied. "Love me, Jim!
Oh, love me hard!"
They sank down together on the bed in a tangle of arms and legs. He clutched at her and caught her, one hand cupping her right breast and the other getting her left buttock. He gave both tender mounds of flesh a good squeeze. Ellen squealed in pleasure.
Then she dropped her head to kiss his muscled chest and solar plexus.
His breath came out in a rush, and his brutish hands massaged her trapezius muscles, alternately pulling and pushing at her. The sensation was so excruciating she couldn't be sure if it was pleasure or pain.
He made a hoarse grunting sound of pleasure. Ellen wriggled around on him, rubbing her breasts from side to side on his hairy thighs as she loved him with dedication. She felt hot all over. He reached forward and got his hand on her; she felt his burning strokes encourage her mounting passions. Her eyes were closed, her heart was pounding.
She moved her head violently. She moved her hands up and cupped the heavy softness of him at the same time. And his hand went further, making her groan.
Then she lifted her head from him and looked up, a wild smile on her face. His virility was more evident than ever. He looked twice as virile, now that she had heightened his excitement.
He grinned at her.
Then he pushed her over onto her back and slid into position.
His big hands seized her thighs and he almost lifted her. His thick, hairy body approached her.
Then he plunged.
At the moment of contact, Ellen let out a long, low sound of satisfaction, a sound of pure feminine contentment at being taken.
He wasn't gentle. He wasn't delicate. He didn't take her in little, easy stages. Oh, no. That wasn't Jim McHughes' way of making love. He simply moved straight ahead, a single brutal stroke that struck the heart of Ellen's passionate emotions.
If Ellen had been a virgin, she would have been howling in agony at that terrifying pounding. But Ellen had left her virginity seven or eight years behind and she had been to bed often enough so that she could take any kind of masculine onslaught. Right now she was hot and eager more than ready, so when he moved to her it was as a more than welcome visitor.
"Oh, God, Jimmy!" Ellen gasped in ecstatic delight. "Go, man, go!"
Jimmy went.
He went quickly. His body was rammed right up against hers.
He didn't hold anything back. His powerful body rose and fell above hers. It plunged and reared and bucked and slammed at her again and again. There was the sharp sound of contact.
He held her tight, a bear hug, punishing her with the fervor of his embrace. The tender globes of her breasts were squashed flat and shapeless against his hairy chest. He held her so closely she could hardly breathe, between the crush of his arms and the shortness of breath that ecstasy induced in her lungs.
She tossed her legs. She drew them up, pointing her toes toward the ceiling. He put his hands on he buttocks to support her. In that position, Ellen's invitation was just properly presented for his acceptance His pelvis ground against hers. The room seemed warns er, fitting for his safari. She locked her legs arouiu. his back.
He seized her buttocks in a terrible grip. And hi attacked with vengeance.
He was like a blazing comet searing her. Ellen's femininity welcomed that, though. She was half delirious with sex, feeling the throbbing waves of delight sweep over her again and again. She wanted him as close to her as he could possibly get. She wanted every square inch of her skin to be in contact with his body. She wanted their embrace to be so ardent that it burned away all desire for hours afterward.
Stirring her round and round, making a drumbeat of passion pound for her, tickling the roots of her emotion with the promise of ecstasy. This was what life was all about, Ellen thought. This was why she was here. To lie under this bull of a man while he tried to become one with her, to subjugate her.
Yes! Yes!
She sucked in breath. Her scissors-grip on his body tightened. Her muscles flexed. His hands clutched at her buttocks more vehemently. Ellen dug her fingernails into the ridged muscles of his back.
Then she screamed.
It was a banshee howl of fulfillment, a wild insane cry of sheer ecstasy. Jim McHughes interpreted it the right way, as his signal to carry her into the final act of this drama of physical passion.
He thrust at her with all the strength of his musculature. Ellen felt him hammering at the vital passions of her, and she simply released her grip on the universe and let herself dissolve.
Pleasure engulfed her.
Her body moved blindly in the rhythms of the finish, and she felt the burst of his energy as he lunged. Then came the fierce, dizzying spasms of her ecstasy, as the muscles of her body writhed through the culminating moment.
The man above her thrust on, in decreasing intensity now, tapering off, bringing her down from the heights of delight, and they made the descent from the summit together, coming down into the afterglow.
It was over.
McHughes' heavy body now seemed only a burden, though she bad not felt his weight at all while he was loving her. He withdrew from her, breaking the embrace that linked their bodies, and rolled over to her side. One of his big arms slipped underneath her, tenderly cradling her shoulders. The other came to rest with the hand cupped over one of her bare, now soft-nippled breasts.
Ellen's eyes fluttered open. She smiled at him.
"That was good," she said.
"It always is."
"No, this was better than usual," she insisted. "I felt like I was exploding all over. I felt like one of the scenes in the things you paint. You know, with colors splashing off in all directions."
He laughed. "Now you know what it's like to be an abstract painting," he said. He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the tip of one of her breasts. It was an oddly dainty gesture for so big a man.
He looked more relaxed, now that they had made love, Ellen thought. He had come in looking like a thunderstorm, his brows furrowed, his face dark Now he was sunny again. But she knew it would not be long before he started harping on his favorite theme again.
It didn't take him long.
He trailed his hand down her bare body from her breasts to her flanks and said, "I wish I could be with you every night, Ellen."
"You will soon."
"How soon is soon?"
"Jim, please-"
"This is tearing me apart," he said. "Why doesn't your divorce come through?"
"It will. It will. The lawyer says it'll be just a few more weeks before the papers are final."
"And until then-"
"Until then I'm married to Ray Dawson," Ellen said. "I can't set up housekeeping with you."
"You could at least stop seeing those other men."
"Don't start up, Jim. Everything was so nice until you brought it up again."
He clenched a fist. "I can't stand the thought of you being with other men, Ellen. Is that so hard to understand?"
"Listen," she said. "I'm just about to escape from one marriage. After I've escaped from it, I'm heading right into another marriage-with you. Don't you think I'm entitled to a little freedom in between?"
"Don't you love me?"
"Of course I do," Ellen said.
"Then how can you sleep with other men?"
"First of all, who said I'm sleeping with anybody? Just because they come to visit me doesn't mean anything. Second of all, I think I'm entitled to do as I please until we're married, or at least until I'm clear of my last marriage. You're free to do as you please, too."
"But I don't want anybody but you," McHughes said.
"You haven't been to bed with anybody else but me in the past six months?" she asked slyly. "Well-"
"Have you?"
He scowled blackly at her. "If I have, it's only because you've turned me away from your bed. I can't help it, Ellen. I've got desires, too. I'm a human being. And if you won't see me more than a couple of times a week, while telling me you want to marry me, is it my fault if I have to turn to other women on occasion?"
"But that's just my point," she said. "Of course it isn't your fault. It shouldn't be considered a matter of faults. We're both free adults. We ought to be able to sleep wherever we please. After we're married, I think we should stay faithful to each other. But until then-"
He shook his head. "I can't agree with that."
"Please, Jim. Don't spoil a lovely evening."
"But-"
She shut his mouth in the best way she knew how. With her kiss. Her tongue lanced deep into his mouth. At the same time her hand slid rapidly down the front of his body and then she had him. He was relaxed., but not for long. Ellen moved her hand teasingly a few times, and he responded with the incredible instant virility that was so characteristic of him.
The conversation was over. More urgent matters had to be attended to.
He rolled over, and his body was above hers. Ellen grinned up at him, her eyes wicked, shining with invitation. He smiled back, all tension forgotten.
Her body bloomed for him.
Yes, she thought. Yes. This was the life. She felt sorry for all the people who were missing it, like that poor creep across the courtyard who got his jollies by staring at naked chicks from a hundred feet away. How could he even say he was alive?
The big man on top of her lunged.
Their bodies pressed.
Gasping and panting, Ellen Dawson clung to him, her body sensitive to his manhood, and as her hips gyrated in the feverish rhythms of love she closed her eyes and let joy engulf her once more.
CHAPTER THREE
Mr. Crispian had not always been a voyeur.
That is to say, he had not always been only a voyeur. He had always liked to stare at pretty women, and in that he was not exactly unique. But there had been a time when his peeping had formed only a part of his sex life and not the entire bulk of it. That is to say, he had been more or less a normal individual once.
But that was a long time ago.
It was hard to imagine it, looking at him now. You looked at J. Martin Crispian, and you saw a tired, washed-out little man in his fifties, and it was impossible not to think that he had always been a tired, washed-out little man in his fifties It took real imagination to picture Mr. Crispian as, say, a smudgyfaced boy of nine, hunting frogs at the edge of a country pond. It wasn't easy to think of Mr. Crispian as a fourteen-year-old, just turning into manhood, surging with the vigor of new adolescence. It wasn't a simple matter to realize that this shell of a human being must once have had dreams and ambitions and yearnings, that he might have thought of founding a family or of running a business or of being elected senator. No. It was a tough challenge to look at Mr. Crispian and realize that he was as alive as anybody else, with memories, a past, and longings that had not been satisfied. It was too easy to think of him simply as someone who had appeared on the face of the earth as a tired, washed-out little man in his fifties.
But he had changed. Life had him behind, but once he had been a living, breathing human being, who wanted to be Somebody.
The trouble was, he was shy. He had been a slim, short boy, and he grew up to be a slim, short man. Nobody noticed him, ever. He could get lost in a crowd even if there were only two other people in the crowd.
He didn't have much force or vigor. The trouble was, it seems, that all the vigor had been drained out of his family by the time he was conceived. Mr. Crispian was the youngest of eight children. The other seven were all girls. He grew up in a house of women.
Mr. Crispian's father had once been a rip-roaring, rambunctious hellion, who could sleep his way through a mob of women and come out raring for more. But he had worn himself out with early exploits. By the time Mr. Crispian was born, his father was fifty-twoyears old. It was impressive enough that the old boy could still sire a baby at that age, but he was still pretty well burned out by then. He didn't pay much attention to the baby boy of his late middle age, especially when it became apparent that the boy was going to be spindly and shy. His father died when J. Martin Crispian was eight-years-old, and after that there were just women in his household.
Eight women. A tired, run-down mother in her fifties, and seven sisters. The oldest sister was almost twenty-five when he was born. She had been married a couple of times already. Now she was divorced and living at home again. Then there were other sisters, ranging down to one who was only eleven years older than Martin.
His sisters had been accustomed to going around the house naked most of the time before he was born, since there were only girls in the family. They didn't let the presence of a young brother inhibit them any. Wherever young Martin turned, he found a naked sister.
He shared a bedroom with his two youngest sisters. By the time he was six, they were seventeen and eighteen. They had big breasts and even bigger backsides. His life was full of their jiggling boobs, their fleshy buttocks. They had no shame. He'd be brushing his teeth to go to bed, and one of them might come into the John and plunk herself down.
No, he didn't need to be a voyeur then. Naked women were all around him. It was a boring sight, because it was so common. Flesh all around.
The third-from-oldest sister was a little retarded mentally. Because she was so slow-witted, she didn't go out with boys. She was about twenty-five when Martin turned ten, and she was very frustrated. So she would play with him. She would come naked into his room at night and put her hand into his pajamas and rub him back and forth.
"See how you get?" she would say, laughing. And she would take his hand. "Put it here. Squeeze my boobies. I like it when you squeeze my boobies."
Martin was frightened and ashamed by these attentions. He knew it was wrong to let his older sister touch him like that. Even though it felt good when she rubbed him under his pajamas, and when he squeezed her big, firm breasts.
Then she started making him put his hand over her legs to stroke her. She was warm and eager. He was shocked by that. She would lie on his bed next to him and move her hips back and forth while holding his hand trapped; she would gasp and moan, and her big buttocks would jump around, and then finally she would let out a long sigh and lie still.
When he was about eleven, she tried something else. She took his pajamas off and caressed him. Then she pulled her nightgown over her head and lay down on his bed She tossed her legs, and he stared.
"Get on top of me," she ordered.
"No-I don't think we ought to."
"I want you to."
Around the household it was understood that this sister was to be humored, because she was slow-witted. Martin didn't want to hurt her feelings. So he lay down on top of her naked body. She was big and warm and fleshy, and he was small and thin; it was like a minnow lying down on a whale. She put her hand on him and tried to guide him to her.
"Here," she kept saying. "Over here."
He was too fragile to be able to do her any good. She made him move, approach and retreat. He was terribly embarrassed. And then suddenly his oldest sister came bursting into the room. She slammed him in the face so hard it knocked him to the floor.
"What do you think you're doing?" she screamed at him. "Of all the disgusting things!"
He got a good beating for it. They hit him so hard he cried half the night. They didn't punish the sister who had seduced him, of course. She was a moron. But tie was supposed to know better.
It wasn't fair, he thought. How was he supposed to know that he wasn't supposed to put himself into such a position? With everybody running around naked in the house, it was hard to know what was right and what was wrong.
The memory of the beating stayed with him. He was forever frightened that his dumb sister would try something like that again, and he would get another beating. But she never tried it another time.
He was afraid of sex, now. Afraid of naked women. Afraid to touch bare breasts or to use his hand too freely over a woman's body.
The next time a woman made overtures to him, it wasn't one of his sisters.
It came about through his lifelong habit of staring at women. Not that he had been staring very hard. With all that naked female flesh running around his house, Mr. Crispian didn't have any of the usual small-boy curiosity about the bodies of women. He knew all too well what a woman's body was like, and some times wished he didn't.
This happened when he was thirteen years old. He had just about reached his full growth, now, although he didn't realize that fact yet. He stood about five feet four and weighed a little over a hundred pounds. He didn't need to shave yet, but otherwise he was on the threshold of adolescence.
It was a fiercely hot July day. He was riding the bus home from the library about half past eleven one morning. There weren't many other people on the bus. But there was a woman sitting across the aisle, and he found himself staring at her.
She must have been around thirty. He wasn't very good at judging ages, but he figured she was about as old as his oldest sister. She was a dark-haired woman, rather plump. Almost fat, as a matter-of-fact. She was wearing a white blouse and a dark green skirt.
Two things about her caught Martin's attention as he sat there with his armload of books. For one thing, she was sitting with her legs crossed, and her short skirt had ridden all the way up to the middle of her thighs. He could see her legs. She wasn't wearing any stockings, and he had the feeling that she might not even be wearing any panties.
That excited him. Even with all the women naked around his house, the sight of the plump woman's calves and thighs across the aisle of the bus excited him. After all, she was a stranger. The others were his sisters. He had spent all his life with them. They didn't have any novelty about them. But this woman had a strange fascination.
There was a second thing that fascinated the thirteen-year-old boy. The plump woman didn't seem to have any brassiere on, either. He found that awfully hard to believe. Every woman wore a brassiere when she was in public, didn't she? Yet the evidence was hard to deny. Perspiration had pasted the plump woman's white blouse to her skin in front, on this hot summer day. Martin's staring eyes could detect the dark circles of aureoles under the blouse, and the small mounds of nipples right in the middle. He was sure that he was actually seeing her breasts under there and not just the pointed tips of a brassiere.
No stockings? No panties, maybe? No brassiere? She really believed in comfort, didn't she?
He couldn't take his eyes off her. The bus jounced along from stop to stop, and the plump woman's unbound breasts jounced right along with it. He watched her. And after a while he became aware that she knew he was watching her.
She didn't seem annoyed about it. She smiled pleasantly at him, as though saying: Nice little boy, go ahead and peek all you like. But Martin was embarrassed. Hastily, he pulled his eyes away from her and aimed them at the floor in front of them.
He kept them there for two stops. Then, gradually, he raised them again. The woman did a provocative thing. She stretched and yawned. Since her eyes were closed while she was yawning, Martin was able to take a good, slow look at her bust. The yawn pushed her breasts out against her sweat-soaked blouse, and this time there could be no doubt about it at all. She might just as well have been sitting there naked to the waist. The outlines of her breasts were clearly lined through the blouse, two big globes of flesh tipped with dark, hard, upstanding nipples. No bra. No bra at all.
Martin planned his next step with care. He was wildly excited at the thought that this woman would go into public dressed so casually, even on a hot day. He knew that in another three blocks the bus would have to make the big curve at McAllister Boulevard. So he carefully arranged some of his library books so that they would fall from his lap onto the floor when the bus turned.
The bus got to McAllister Boulevard. The driver swung it in a sharp left turn. Three books went skittering onto the floor. Martin got down to pick them up.
While he was on the floor, he took a good long look up the plump woman's skirt.
She made it easy for him by uncrossing her legs at that precise moment and crossing them the other way. So he saw quite a lot. He saw the undersides of her thighs right up to the place where her buttocks began, and he saw the little crease that ran horizontally along the bottom of her buttocks. He was right that she wasn't wearing any panties. None at all.
And in the moment when she was uncrossing and recrossing her legs, Martin saw a lot more. Then the view was cut off, leaving him blinking and dazed on the floor of the bus. He picked up his books and sat down again.
He felt the excitement surge in him. He was glad that there were books on his lap, because otherwise it would have been embarrassing to have his excitement revealed so publicly. He glanced across at the woman. She was smiling at him again. She seemed to know that he had seen under her skirt, and she didn't care.
She didn't care at all! That was the astonishing thing, Martin thought.
Another two stops along, she got up and started to walk toward the exit. A sudden impulse struck Martin, and he got up too, ever, though his own station was still another dozen blocks away.
He didn't want to lose sight of her. He had a wild hope that if he followed her as she walked through the streets, there might be a sudden gust of wind that would sweep her skirt up around her waist and give him a clear view of her big round pink buttocks. He found that thought terrifically exciting-the idea of seeing a woman's naked backside right out in the open street. Seeing your own sisters running around the house wasn't interesting at all. But in the street! That would be something worth walking a few extra blocks for!
So he got off the bus with her.
The moment he got off, he knew that he was bound to be disappointed. There wasn't enough wind blowing to flutter a handkerchief, let alone to lift a woman's skirt higher than her thighs. He had wasted his time, and he was going to have to walk all the way home from here for nothing. He thought of stepping right back on the bus, but it was gone. He stood there in the fierce heat, regretting what he had done.
And then the plump woman turned around and said hello to him.
He wasn't expecting that. He had just been standing there at the corner where the bus let him off, and she had been a few steps ahead of him. waiting for the light to change; she seemed to notice him, and she turned to him, those big breasts jiggling inside her blouse, and she said, with a soft, sweet voice "Hello."
"H-hello." He wanted to run.
"What's your name?"
"Martin," he said.
"You don't need to be afraid of me," she said. "I'm Jenny. Come walk with me. Martin."
He was too frightened to do anything else. Tucking his many books under his arms, he strolled along beside her. His head just about came up to her shoulder.
She said, "Hot weather, isn't it?"
"Sure is."
"Makes you feel all hot inside." She laughed. "You were looking at me, weren't you?"
Martin did not answer. His cheeks were blazing a hot scarlet.
"You don't need to be afraid of me," she said. "I don't mind that you were looking at me. A woman likes a man to give her the stare. It's when they stop looking at her that she starts to worry."
No one had ever called Martin a man before. And she had seemed to mean it. He clutched his books tightly and strode along stiff-legged beside her.
She went on, "But you were looking real hard. What's the matter, you've never seen what a woman looks like under her clothes before?"
This time he did not keep silent. "Sure I have!" he blurted. "Plenty of times!"
"Really, now!"
"My sisters," he said. "I've got loads of sisters."
"So you know what a woman's built like." She chuckled again. "You're a real man, aren't you? Let me ask you, Martin, how'd you like to have a glass of nice cool lemonade?"
"Well-"
"My place, it's right over there, three steps away. Come on in. I've got a whole quart of lemonade in my icebox waiting for somebody to drink it."
He was too shy to say no to her. So he let her steer him right into her apartment. It was a small place-just a living room with an adjacent bath and kitchenette section, and a little bedroom. He put his books down on a hall table and stood restlessly, in confusion and fear, wishing he had never gotten off the bus. She was busy at the refrigerator, with her back turned toward him.
When she turned around again, there was a tall glass of lemonade in each of her hands. But she had also unbuttoned her blouse all the way down the front. It was hanging open far enough for him to be able to see the inner globes of the big, soft-looking, pale breasts, and even the corner of one dark pink aureole.
"Whoo-ee!" she exclaimed. "Such weather! Here, Martin. Here's your lemonade." The blouse fell further open as she handed him his glass. He got a clear view of one huge round hard-tipped breast. He was very excited, now. The fact of his excitement was apparent. He was standing up, and without books to shield him.
He gulped his lemonade.
Then she said, "Now you do me a favor, okay?"
"What?"
"I'm all sticky from sweating. A fat girl liked me, I sweat a whole lot. Suppose I give you a wet towel, will you swab me off with it?"
He shrugged a noncommittal answer. She turned away from him again, took a towel, and held it under the cold water tap until it was soaking. She wrung it out and handed it to him. Then, with a warm smile, she casually slipped out of her blouse and stood bare-breasted in front of him.
Her breasts were huge, but they weren't sloppy or dangly. They were big, round and hard. She was a fairly fat woman, and she certainly couldn't be called pretty, but she had a terrific pair of boobs on her.
He was a little frightened by the exposure of her nakedness. He felt that he was her prisoner here. But he dabbed the towel at her breasts, on her back, and under her arms while she hissed in pleasure.
Then she seized one of his hands and clapped it to her left breast. Crispian remembered, a couple of years ago, how his slow-witted sister had done almost the same thing to him.
"Squeeze it!" Jenny hissed. "Grab it tight! Oh, do you know what it means to be lonely? Come here and sit down next to me." She swept him to the couch, her big breasts jiggling and swaying. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were narrowed to little slits. "I'm not so ugly, am I?" she asked. "I don't smell bad, do I? Do I?"
"N-no."
"Then why can't I get a man? Be my man, Martin. I need one so bad."
She caught his hand and thrust it under her skirt. He felt her all naked under there, the warm round stomach with its folds of flesh, the heavy thighs, and the heat. She pushed his hand to her. Then with her other hand. She began to unbutton his clothes and unzip him. Her hand dove and seized him.
"You're a man all right," she murmured. "How old are you, fourteen, fifteen? That's old enough. Plenty old for Jenny, all right."
He didn't want to tell her that he was only thirteen. He didn't want to tell her that he was scared half out of his wits, either. So he just glided along with the situation, letting her run the whole show as she had been doing since she had said hello to him at the bus stop.
She stripped off the skirt that was her only garment. He stared at her big, generous, naked body. It was almost funny to think that half an hour ago he had deliberately knocked his books off his lap so that he could steal a quick glance up her skirt. Now he was free to look at every inch of her body, the big heavy breasts and the huge rounded buttocks, the solid pillars of the thighs and the shadowy contours.
Then she stripped him, too. He didn't like that much. He felt ashamed of his skinny, half-developed body. Even around his sisters, he tried to hide himself as much as possible. Being naked in front of a strange woman-well, it was almost like being naked in front of the girls at school, and he would never let that happen to him.
He couldn't keep it from happening now. She took off even-thing he was wearing. Then, laughing heartily, she put her hand on him. He had never seen himself so strong. When she closed her hand, squeezed, he became vastly excited. She moved her hand. It made him feel funny.
She was breathing hard. Her breasts were leaping around wildly. Her huge body was oiled with sweat.
"Into the bedroom," she panted.
The next thing he knew, she was lying sprawled out on the bed with her legs tossed, and he was on on top of her, cushioned on the meaty softness of her, wallowing around on a continent of flesh. He wasn't sure what to do. But she was running the show. She took him to her.
It felt good. It felt wonderful.
She let out a long, low sigh of contentment. "Oh, Martin, honey, you don't know how much I need that. Just move around, now. That's it. Oh, oh, God, that's good! Oh-"
He rocked and ricocheted. At first he moved so fast that he fell away several times. But she seized him and took him back, and after that he was more careful. He was getting the knack of it quickly. His thin body moved fast. She put her hands on his skinny buttocks to push him closer against her. He moved faster and faster.
She was making strange moaning sounds, now. And he could feel her body wriggling.
Weird sensations rushed through him. His cheeks felt hot. He had to close his eyes. He pressed his head down against the mountains of her breasts. Suddenly he felt as if somebody had slapped him in the small of the back, and an instant later there came a kind of vibration, and he clung to her, dazed, as he let go for the first time in his life.
When it was over he felt tired and embarrassed. He got off the fat woman and could hardly bear to look at her body after what he had done. She fixed more lemonade for him while he got dressed. She was still naked. Her enormous breasts danced like melons in front of his face.
"Don't forget the address, you hear?" she told him. "You're a real man, now. And anytime you want a man's kind of fun, why, you just stop here."
He got out of there fast, snatching up his library books.
He felt stunned and confused. He knew that he had left childhood behind in that moment of ecstasy, and that frightened him. He was afraid that he might have formed some sort of habit, or that people would find out what he had done. Yet he had tasted passion, and he had enjoyed it. He was all mixed up, a thirteen-year-old, no longer a virgin, who didn't know what it was all about.
He ran all the way home. When he got to his room, he closed the door and prayed for a while, in in case he had committed a sin. Then, he took off all his clothes and washed himself very carefully. And afterward he had a tall glass of milk and sat down to try to figure out what it all meant.
Forty years later, J. Martin Crispian still wasn't sure. But he had never forgotten his introduction to sex, He had never forgotten the frightening and yet fascinating truth that if you stare at a woman's body, she may give herself to you in eager ecstasy.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next night, the creep was watching her window again. Ellen Dawson wasn't surprised. He was always there, night after night, sitting behind his blinds across the courtyard. That was something you could count on, like Tuesday coming after Monday. He was Old Faithful.
Didn't he have anything else to do in the evenings, Ellen wondered? Didn't he ever go out to play pinochle with the boys? Didn't he ever have company, a woman in his room, maybe? Didn't he prefer sometimes to sit and stare at his television set, instead of squinting out his window?
No. Apparently not. He was always sitting there, waiting for her to strip.
The poor creep, she thought. He was really hooked on peeping, wasn't he?
Well, she wasn't in the mood to give him much of a show tonight. She was too tired for that. Last night had been a busy one. Jim McHughes had stayed until almost four in the morning, and he had taken her three times. Getting loved three times by Jim McHughes was like making love nine or ten times with any other man. He really used a woman up when he got to her.
So they had rolled over in the clover until the small hours, and when he left, Ellen was as limp as jelly. What a man! She had grabbed a couple of hour's sleep, and then it had been time to go to work.
That had been rough, too. Ellen worked at a theatrical booking agency. All day long the phone jangled, with indignant people wanting to know this and that and treating you as though you were just part of the machinery. And you had to be polite to them, of course, or get kicked out on your bottom. It was a taxing job even for somebody who was well rested when she got to work. And since Ellen was usually up half the night with her men friends, the job was twice as hard for her. This particular day had been really brutal. She wasn't sure how she had managed to get through it.
And to top it all off, her husband, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, had phoned her three times, pleading and whining for a chance to see her. She had turned him down, of course. But it was emotionally exhausting to have to argue with him.
Finally, Ellen had stopped off for dinner at the little Italian restaurant where she ate five or six nights out of the week, and then she had come home at half past eight. She didn't have the strength to go through her round of calisthenics, and she was willing to bet that the creep across the way enjoyed her back-bend exercises most of all. She rarely skipped the exercises but tonight would be an exception. She had had enough exercise last night in the arms of Jim McHughes to last her a week, anyway.
So she would simply undress, a treat for the creep, anyway, and take a nice relaxing bath, get into bed, and read the mystery novel in the new Cosmopolitan until ten o'clock or so. Then it would be lights out For once, she'd have more than eight hours of sleep under her belt when she showed up at the office tomorrow.
Ellen started to undress.
Happy dreams, creepo!
Off came jacket and skirt. She hung them in their places. Ellen was a neat girl, always had been. Off came blouse. Off came slip.
She glanced toward the window. It seemed to her that she saw a quick movement in the window across the way, the Peeping Tom, hastily ducking out of sight. Ellen grinned. She turned her back toward the window and slowly, provocatively, began to pull her panties down.
She rolled them down over her flaring hips, rolled them down another inch to bare the adorable dimples just below the small of her back, then another couple of inches to display the beginning of the luscious cheeks. And then the full cheeks came into view, firm, plump, delectably squeezable mounds of taut youthful flesh.
Take a good look, creepo!
Reach your hands across the courtyard and grab yourself a feel!
Ellen smirked. She stepped out of her panties. Then, just for the hell of it, she bent forward and touched her hands to her toes a couple of times. Her buttocks were still aimed toward the window. That gave the creep a good view of what she had. She could imagine him biting his nails in a dither of vicarious desire.
She straightened up. Enough fun and games for tonight. Quickly, Ellen stripped off her brassiere to bare the double globes of her voluptuous breasts, and got her stockings and garter belt off.
She headed into the bathroom and let water run into the tub, warm and soothing.
The bath felt fine. The warm water walled up around her breasts and loosened all the tensions that the day had instilled in her. She got out and toweled herself dry, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, seeing the pink-and gold nudity of herself, watching her breasts jump around as she moved the towel.
It was good to be pretty, she thought.
And good to be young.
She padded back into her bedroom and slipped a shortie nightgown on over her nakedness. She didn't bother with the panties part. The nightgown came down to her hips and didn't hide anything in particular, but Ellen had never really been concerned with hiding anything. Half her buttocks were exposed, and also her upper thighs, and you could see the ripe globes of her breasts through the filmy fabric.
She picked up her magazine. She switched on the nightstand light and got into bed. She opened the magazine to the right place. The doorbell rang.
Oh, no, Ellen thought. Her first guess was that the creep from across the way, the window peeper, had gotten up enough courage to pay her a visit. After all, she wasn't expecting any company tonight. So who else could it be? Maybe he was disappointed at not having gotten a view of her body during a calisthenics session, so he was coming around to register a complaint.
She was half amused at the idea. Ellen was always on the lookout for new adventures.
She got out of bed and walked toward the door.
"Who is it?" she called.
"It's me," came a low, half-murmuring voice. "Ray. I came to see you Ellen."
Ellen stiffened. Anger shot through her. Her husband! Her stinking weakknead nothing of a husband!
"I told you I didn't want to see you," she said sharply. "I meant it."
"I couldn't stay away, Ellen," he answered in a whining tone. "Please let me in. Please."
"You're a pest, Ray."
"Is it my fault I love you?"
"You're still a pest," she snapped at him through toe closed door.
"I'll get down on my knees to you, Ellen. Just let me in. Please, darling!"
She scowled. She knew that it was just what he wanted to get down on his knees to her. That was the kind of character he was. He loved to be punished. He loved to be kicked at, literally or figuratively.
What the devil, though. She didn't have the heart to turn him away. Besides, her bath had made her feel a whole lot more invigorated. It might be amusing to have Ray here for a while. He was always good for laughs.
"All right," she said.
She opened the door.
He stepped into the room. She was wearing nothing but her shortie nightgown, which left her thighs and buttocks exposed and her breasts hardly covered at all, and she was even more provocative that way than if she had answered the door in the nude. The effect on the man who entered was immediate and emphatic. He gaped at the luscious contours of the woman who had been his wife, and opened his mouth in a wordless little gasp of surprise and delight.
Ellen closed the door behind him, giving him a view of her firm round buttocks as she did so. Then she turned to face him.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"To see you. To touch you. To make love to you, Ellen. That's what I want."
"We're almost divorced."
"But we're still man and wife. Until the papers come through, Ellen."
"You know what would happen to our divorce if anybody found out you were coming here to visit me? They'd throw it right out of court."
"I can't help that," he said. His eyes were glittering as he surveyed her almost revealed body, the forbidden contours at the rim of her shortie nightgown, the pink cheeks of her buttocks, the heavy globes of her breasts scarcely concealed at all. He said, "I want you so much, Ellen. I wish I hadn't lost you."
"You wouldn't have, if you hadn't been such a damned fool. But then you'd have been somebody else, wouldn't you? Stop staring at me like that!"
"Put some clothes on, if you don't want me to stare at you. You're practically naked."
"You really want me to cover myself up?" she asked, grinning a little.
"Not really," he said. "Not at all. Ellen, could I have a beer?"
"I guess I can manage that," she said.
She went to the refrigerator and got a can of beer out for him. She kept the beer on the bottom shelf, and she had to bend over all the way to get it. That made her nightgown ride midway up her back, completely exposing the bare white mounds of her buttocks to him.
Ellen could practically feel Ray Dawson's gaze passing over those twin mounds of sensual flesh. He never could take his eyes off her. He was a creepy sort, she told herself. Almost as creepy as that peeper across the courtyard, more or less.
She opened the beer and handed it to him.
She watched him as he drank it, thirstily, greedily, as though he hadn't had a beer in months. He was a good-looking guy, she thought. Always had been, always would be. That was why she had married him in the first place. She had let herself be befuddled by his looks.
He wasn't ruggedly masculine, in the style of Jim McHughes. No, not in the slightest. Ray Dawson was slim, almost delicate, a graceful man with long tapering limbs, a fine-boned face, and a deep red hair that he kept trimmed in a close crew cut. He was as agile as a dancer, and he had a kind of glamour and dash to him that had swept Ellen right off her feet.
That had been five years ago, when she was nineteen. It had taken a year for the dash and glamour to wear off. Then she had discovered Ray Dawson for what he really was: a pretty boy, a weakling, a zero. Even so, she had tried to paste the marriage back together every time it started to come apart. She forgave him for everything: all his little lies, the other women, the petty vanities. But at last she couldn't take it any more. She moved out. More than a year and a half had gone by since Ellen had left him. She had gotten a separation at first, but now the divorce was almost final.
Ray wouldn't accept the fact that he had lost her. He kept coming around, kept whining like a lonely puppy. She didn't love him any more, not a shred, but she was woman enough to take pity on him. She had slept with him whenever he asked her, even after the separation, even after the divorce papers were filed. She knew that she was probably going to sleep with him tonight, if he wanted it.
She wondered what was going to happen after she was married to Jim McHughes. Would Ray still come around, trying to snuffle up a little on the side? If he did, would she give in to him? And what would happen if Ray and Jim ever collided head on? Jim might kill him. Jim was the kind of man who had that sort of temper. There could be a real explosion if Jim ever suspected her of cheating on him with her first husband.
Ray put down the beer can. It was empty. He said, "You look so beautiful, Ellen. I never knew a girl who looked as lovely as you. With or without clothes."
"You should have thought of that while you still had a chance to save our marriage," she said. "You won't accept a reconcilation?"
"Don't be silly."
"How soon are you going to get married again after the divorce is final?"
"That's my business," she said.
He took a step toward her, stretching out his hands. "I'm going to lose you, Ellen, aren't I?"
"You've already lost me."
"Let me touch you. Let me hold you."
"Please, Ray. It's no use. Don't-"
But he ignored her protests, as he always did, and she could not refuse him. In a moment his long, tapering fingers were clutching at her flesh. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips against hers.
One hand seized the jutting mound of her right breast, gripping it firmly, making the nipple throb as he pressed it. The other hand slid down her body, pushing the shortie nightgown aside to cup the cool firm cheeks of her bare buttocks. The fingertips glided along the valley and toward her thighs.
She began to gasp and breathe hard. His tongue was probing her mouth. She closed her eyes and rubbed herself from side to side against him.
The lawyer had said never to let him into her apartment again, and certainly never to sleep with him. But what did the lawyer know about desire? He had his head stuck away in law books all the time. Ellen was a woman, and a passionate, fiery woman at that. She couldn't turn a man away simply because she was divorcing him. Okay, she couldn't get along with the guy; there were psychological things about him that made her dislike him. But she could dislike a man and still feel desire for him.
Her nipples were red-hot rocks. Her breasts were throbbing and swollen with yearning.
She let him push his hand down the front of her body until he held her. She moved her thighs, allowing him to caress her. He touched her lightly at first, delicately, coyly, with that oddly feminine grace of his that was so very different from Jim McHughes' bulldozer masculinity.
Then he sprang away from her. He began to strip.
Ellen pulled her nightgown over her head and cast it aside. Beads of sweat were popping out all over her body. Her breasts were heaving violently. There was the anguish of total need in her sizzling body.
Ray had his shirt off. He looked leaner than ever, almost skinny. A sprinkling of red freckles was dusted lightly over his pale chest. The thin, curling red hair looked almost purple in the dim light.
He started to drop his pants. Then he grinned and said. "The window blinds! You're always leaving the blinds open, Ellen."
"Maybe I like an audience when I make love."
"Well, I don't." He stepped past the nude Ellen and drew the blinds. Then he pulled his trousers and shorts off. His narrow, hipped body looked almost boyish. Except that he was too masculine to be mistaken for a boy. Ellen moved toward the bed, her body hot with desire. But Ray wasn't ready to go to bed yet.
It was the same old business, she realized. The crazy gimmick that she hated so much.
He stooped and pulled his belt out of his trousers and handed it to her.
"Hit me first," he begged her. "Give me a good whipping, Ellen! That's what I deserve!"
"You know I don't like to do that."
"Please. Do it for me."
"It's twisted. It's nasty."
"Make me happy, Ellen."
She scowled at him. He was such a toad, such a creepy perverted character! Ray had this masochistic streak running through him. He loved to be punished. He liked people to call him names, to insult him, to turn him into a ridiculous clown. He was only happy when he was miserable.
And in sex, the pattern carried through. He liked his women to dominate him. He wanted them to whip him, to hurt him, to injure him both physically and psychologically. Why, he was probably taking a twisted pleasure in the fact that Ellen was divorcing him. Even though it hurt him bitterly to lose her, it also gave him the masochistic kicks that he cherished.
"Hit me!" he pleaded.
Ellen grabbed the belt and held it by the buckle end. She wielded it like a whip. Although it made her feel perverted to gratify Ray in these desires, she couldn't deny that there was a kind of pleasure in it, too, to be a tyrant, to make a grown man grovel before her.
She lashed out with the whip. It caught him right across the thighs, in front, only a couple of inches below the one place where he was terrified of being hit. He gasped and leaped back, whirling around, presenting his flat buttocks to her. Ellen flicked the whip across both cheeks. He sucked in his breath in an expression of delight.
She hit him across the shoulders. It left a mark. He spun around, and she got him on the other shoulder, and then across the stomach. His eyes were glazed with ecstasy. He was taut with tension, testifying to the sudden surge of excitement within him.
Ellen was temped to direct her aim. He made such a good target. She had done it once, a couple of years ago, during one of these masochistic sessions. It hadn't been a very wise idea. He had grabbed himself and doubled up in agony, and afterward he hadn't been able to take her, so she was the real loser.
She kept the belt in control. But there were plenty of other places to whip. Ray Dawson sagged to the floor under the impact of her blows. He crouched there on his knees, with his arms crossed over his forehead to protect his face, and Ellen stood above him.
She brought the belt down again and again. Sweat oiled her nude body, making it glisten. The heavy globes of her breasts jiggled up and down with each stroke of the belt. It connected with Dawson's slim body. He didn't have much fat on him to cushion the blows.
Ellen felt a savage pounding of delight inside her. She stood with her legs set, and she could feel the heat radiating from her body as she took joy in the whipping. She was the slave-master, and he was the slave. She grunted in pleasure as she slammed the belt down.
"Yes-yes-" he whimpered. "Hurt me, punish me, Ellen! I deserve it! I deserve it!"
The marks of the beating were all over him. Still her arm rose and fell, still the round breasts shivered and shook with each motion.
Then he looked at her. "Now!" he cried. "Get down here, Ellen. Now, now!"
He rolled over on his back and beckoned to her.
Ellen dropped down on top of him.
This was how he liked best to make love. With the woman on top of him, dominating him. He didn't like to take the upper position himself. He preferred to let his partner take charge.
Ellen straddled him. She threw her legs out on either side of him and lowered the soft cushions of her buttocks against his thighs. Her body was wild, ready for love.
She seized him with her hand and guided him.
He went to her easily, for her always passionate body was eager. Ellen slid forward a little way, and he tried to help her. He lifted his knees to provide a seat for her.
She began to move.
She rocked up and down, around and about, moving herself with excitement and dedication. She watched his face. It was twisted and distorted with the play of delight. Her own face, she knew, must also show the powerful emotions that were coursing through her. There were many things to be said in favor of this sort of position, she thought, and one of them was that the lovemaking pair had a full view of one another's faces while they were loving. So long as they could keep their eyes open, of course.
He reached up. His delicate hands grabbed her breasts, gripping the two swollen globes of flesh like handles. She moved vigorously on top of him Her buttocks rubbed against his lean thighs.
The spasms were starting, now. The delicious muscular contractions of fulfillment.
Yes, she thought. Yes! Yes!
He smiled at her and closed his eyes. An instant later she knew the expression of his happiness, and in practically the same moment there came the culminating paroxysms of her own ecstasy. She gasped and moaned and writhed her way through the glory of it, and then, covered with sweat, limp and drained of passion, Ellen let herself slowly slump forward until her nude body was draped out like a blanket over the form of the man who had once been her husband.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mr. Crispian, huddled behind his window across the courtyard, was wondering what was going on in there.
He felt a little cheated tonight. He had gotten a glimpse of the blonde girl's naked body, true enough. He couldn't complain about that. She had undressed right to the buff in front of her open window.
But she hadn't done her calisthenics. She had robbed him of his nightly view of her wonderful body writhing and wriggling through the exercises. He particularly missed the one where she planted her feet flat on the floor and spread her legs and bent over backward to try to grab her ankles with her hands. That one made her breasts point to the ceiling, and gave him an unequaled view of her.
No, tonight she had skipped the exercises. She had taken off her clothes, allowing him to look at her supple, voluptuous nude body, and then she had gone into the bathroom for her nightly bath. The bathroom had a frosted window, so he couldn't see anything there.
Mr. Crispian had had another brief peek at her a little while later, when she came out of her bath. He had watched her put on a nightgown that didn't hide very much of her nudity. Then she had disappeared to get into bed, apparently. He couldn't see her bed from his vantage point.
Next, company had arrived. It was one of the regulars, the thin redheaded man with the crew cut who came two or three times a month. Mr. Crispian had watched them kissing. That was a hot one! He had seen the redheaded man grab a good handful of the blonde girl's bare buttocks, beneath her little nightgown. Then the blonde had taken off her gown altogether, and Mr. Crispian had sat forward on the edge of his seat, tense, hoping that he might actually see them make love.
He had seen lovemaking once, only once, since he had taken up the hobby of window peeping. The blonde girl's most frequent visitor, the burly dark-haired man, had loved her standing up, right by the window, and for once he had forgotten to pull the blind. Mr. Crispian had seen the whole thing. Her sharp eyes had seen him going to her, as he held her with her buttocks facing the window and tipped up a little so that Mr. Crispian could see the action and the two pale globes of flesh. He had seen, with his sharp eyes, the passion-distorted face of the blonde girl as the dark-haired man moved to her again and again.
Mr. Crispian had been so excited that night that he was unable to sleep. He had remained awake, seem" in his mind's eye the whole scene replayed again and again. But tonight he wasn't going to get a repeat. The red-haired fellow stripped to the waist and then he pulled the blind, shutting off Mr. Crispian's view.
Half an hour had passed since then. The blind had remained drawn.
They were loving, he thought. He was on her, or maybe she was on him. Their bodies were moving, and they were riding off to passion.
Lonely in his miserable sickness, he acted out in his mind the scene that he knew was going on across the courtyard. He stewed in the juices of his own sour frustration for a while.
Then, realizing that he had seen all that he was going to see of the blonde girl for this evening, Mr. Crispian began to survey some of the other windows that had produced scores for him in the past.
They were lit up. It was past ten o'clock, and he had a clear view into many apartments. He glanced at the one on the fifth floor. Two months ago, he had seen a naked woman in that window. True, it hadn't exactly been a sight for sore eyes. She had been about fifty, he guessed, fat and untidy-looking. But she had been naked. He had seen her big, long, dangling breasts, her dimpled, jiggling buttocks, and the pot of her stomach. For Mr. Crispian, who measured his life in such adventures, even that glimpse of sloppy, middle-aged nudity had been a triumph.
He hadn't seen her again in the nude. But he never gave up hope, once he scored with any window. If a woman would walk around naked in front of a window once, she might do it a second time. But there was no action up there tonight, Mr. Crispian saw. All he could make out was the blue glow of a television set. He wouldn't see any flesh.
His eye roved a couple of apartments over. Only last week he had had a real thrill there-a teen-age girl, dark-haired and beautiful. Up till now, the blonde girl right across the way was his most dependable and most attractive peeping victim. But this teen-ager had really sent his blood pressure soaring.
He had seen her around the building over the past few years, had watched her grow up and fill out. But he had never spied on her. Now and then, he had caught sight of her moving around in her bedroom, but she had always been fully dressed. All the same, he continued to survey her window, just on the off chance that some night he would be rewarded.
The reward, when it came, was spectacular. She appeared in the window totally nude. She was standing in front of the dresser, with her profile to him, and she was brushing out her lustrous black hair.
Thanks to the mirror on the dresser, Mr. Crispian got a perfect double view, front and side at the same time. The profile showed him her flawless figure, narrow at the waist, flat at the stomach, with her breasts high, firm and jutting out straight in front of her, and her buttocks curving attractively. The mirror showed him both breasts at once, twin round hills of delight tipped with small, dark-hued nipples.
He had watched her for fifteen minutes as she tirelessly ran the brush through her hair in stroke after stroke. Then she had finished brushing her hair. She turned and faced the window, and he got a direct view of the flat young stomach, the mounds of breast-flesh, the jet-black beauty of her. She was about fifteen or sixteen, Mr. Crispian guessed, and her body had the perfection of early maturity.
She had pulled the blind. And it was like a cloud shutting off the sun. Each night since then he had hoped to catch another glimpse of her, but no luck. Now he looked hopefully toward her window. It was dark.
She's out on a date, Mr. Crispian thought with the bitter jealousy of a loveless man. She's in a parked car somewhere, on the back seat. Her date is unfastening her brassiere. He's putting his hands on her breasts. Squeezing them. Playing with the nipples. They're like little buttons, hard and round. Now he's taking a nipple in his mouth. Drawing on it. She's gasping. She's still a virgin; this is the first time anybody's ever done this to her.
And now the date is pulling her panties down. She is exposed.
He's opening his pants. She gasps a little. She's afraid because he's so strong.
He moves toward her. He arranges her limbs and positions her.
Then he puts himself into position.
"Be gentle," she whispers. "This is my first time, you know."
"Yes. I know, darling."
He just goes just a little way. He retreats almost completely. Then he pushes again, a little further. His hands are holding her breasts. Her buttocks are bare against the upholstery of the car seat. She wriggles around. Excitement is taking hold of her. He's going to make a woman out of her! She thrusts herself against him.
There's resistance. She keeps on pushing, though. So does he.
Suddenly the barrier dissolves, and he's there; she's holding on tight to him and her eyes are closed; she's afraid and in love all at once, and he moves around, going further and further Mr. Crispian shook his head. He clenched his fists so hard that his nails dug into his palms, and pulled himself out of his fantasy of imaginary sex in a parked car. For all he knew, the dark-haired girl was at choir rehearsal tonight, or a basketball game, something completely innocent.
Sweat ran down the peeper's body. His eyes roved the other windows, hungry for a score.
Hey, now! What's this?
Second floor. It was the apartment where the Andersons had lived. Old Mr. Anderson had dropped dead in January, and the widow had moved out a month later. The apartment had been vacant for a while, but Mr. Crispian had heard that some people were moving in.
The light snapped on suddenly in the apartment. Mr. Crispian saw two figures.
Two girls.
They were standing in a bedroom. There was no furniture in the room except a bed. There weren't any blinds that could be drawn, because they hadn't been put up yet. The apartment still had that raw, not-quite-lived-in look. The open window, unguarded by any kind of barrier, radiated a blaze of sudden light into the courtyard.
The girls were kissing.
They were in a tight embrace. Mr. Crispian watched, startled by what he saw. This was a quiet, middle-class kind of house. They didn't get any beatnik kinds here, any Bohemians. Yet these two young girls, framed in the window, were unmistakably kissing. There was a brunette and a kind of red-haired-girl, and the brunette had her hand between their two bodies, obviously holding the other girl's breasts. And the other one was rubbing her hand over the brunette's blue jean-covered buttocks.
Lesbians!
It had to be, Mr. Crispian thought. Two girls who were just roommates or good friends might kiss each other now and then, he figured. But they wouldn't kiss on the lips, the way these two were doing. And they wouldn't go in for buttock-grabbing and breast-squeezing.
Well, well, well! A pair of dykes on the second floor! And no blinds at all on the windows!
How about that, Mr. Crispian asked himself! How about that!
He stared at them in bulge-eyed fascination. In all his years of window peeping, Mr. Crispian had never seen two girls making love to each other. He had seen one girl making love to herself, writhing on a rumpled bed with one hand gripping her breasts and the other one caressing herself. But that wasn't the same thing at all.
The two girls were getting undressed, now. They were stripping each other.
Mr. Crispian's apartment was a few floors above theirs, at just the right height so he could see deep into their room. Even when they stepped back from the window, he had a clear view of the bed where they obviously were going to act out their rite of forbidden passion.
They were taking each other's sweaters off, now. And the jeans were dropping. Bras. Panties.
They both were nude. Mr. Crispian clenched his jaws in tense fascination. Beads of sweat burst from the skin of his forehead. His heart was pounding so frenziedly that he was afraid it might leap through the cage of his ribs. His eyes were trained unwaveringly on the nude duo in the second-floor apartment.
They were built very differently.
The girl with the reddish-orange hair was shorter, plumper and cuddlier. She had a girlish, soft-bodied look to her. Her breasts were large and round, tipped with tall nipples rising out of pale aureoles that were so big that even at this distance they seemed oversized. Her stomach was curved and fleshy. Her buttocks were plump mounds. Her thighs were solid and round.
Next to her, the brunette Lesbian looked almost like a boy. She was tall and lean, with narrow hips and a slender waist. Her breasts were small and pointed, hardly more than two little swellings on her chest. Mr.
Crispian had watched a thirteen-year-old girl getting undressed across the way a few months before, and the brunette Lesbian's boobs were hardly bigger than hers. The brunette's buttocks were flat and boyish, with little sensuality to them. Her body looked muscular, energetic.
Mr. Crispian understood. It worked the same way with Lesbians as with ordinary people. One partner was masculine-looking and dominant, the other one was feminine, yielding, and soft. Mr. Crispian nodded. It was always useful to learn things about other people. If you were too shy to get out and mingle with the rest of the world, you could learn by sitting in your room and keeping your eyes peeled.
The naked Lesbian girls were going over to the bed, now, Mr. Crispian saw.
They were lying down together.
They were starting to embrace and kiss. The brunette was definitely taking the upper hand in the lovemaking. She had her mouth against the redhead's big soft breasts. Mr. Crispian could see that she was pulling on the big nipples. The red-haired girl was wriggling voluptuously, moving her hips as though inviting a lover to take her.
The brunette's right hand found its goal. Her fingers closed on warm, throbbing flesh. The redhead kissed the tiny breasts of the brunette and cupped the flat, hard buttocks.
Then the dark-haired one was wriggling down the other girl's body, and kissing as she went.
Mr. Crispian watched avidly. He could imagine the busy lips doing their work, flicking back and forth over tingling skin. The redhead lay flat on her back, passively accepting the situation for a while.
Then she seemed to come to life. She pivoted, and the two girls arranged things to their mutual satisfaction. Their limbs thrashed wildly as passion embraced them.
Mr. Crispian imagined that he could see the atmosphere in the Lesbian's bedroom growing steamier and steamier by the moment. It seemed to him almost as though he could hear the harsh gasps and pants of lust at this distance, the creaking of the bed beneath the two twisting, jiggling nude female bodies. He could almost detect the redhead's perfume, she being the more feminine of the two.
Almost. Not quite. But he had a well-developed imagination, Mr. Crispian did.
The redhead across the way was well developed in other ways, and all that development was being put to good use now. The brunette was riding high on her. They plunged and bucked, bodies intertwining, legs sliding between passion-charged thighs, hands grasping for sweat-shiny breasts, chests heaving, eyes slitted.
Now the brunette was on top, just the way a man would be. She lay over the redhead's body. Mr. Crispian could hardly see the redhead at all--just the top of her head, and the outstretched legs. The dark-haired girl covered her almost completely.
The brunette was undulating, body churning, breasts rubbing against breasts, leg to leg. Mr. Crispian felt himself growing hot under the collar. He watched the brunette's lean, flat, pale buttocks moving steadily, and tried to imagine the sort of sensations that must be coursing through the two Lesbians as they surged toward the peak of their illicit lusts.
His hands were shaking. Sweat rolled into one of his eyes, blurring his vision for a moment. Irritably, Mr. Crispian dabbed at the eye with his handkerchief.
He saw feminine flesh grinding together in a wild onslaught of passion. What was it like, for them? A sensation of delight as a soft body pressed against another soft body, hard nipples rubbing, stomach's going sideways in ecstatic stimulation?
Now they were quivering. Trembling. Shaking.
Reaching the culmination, Mr. Crispian knew.
The brunette half rose as though electrified and fell back into the welcoming arms of her soft-bodied breasty playmate. They lay still.
It was all over.
The girls had had their fun.
Mr. Crispian sat stock-still, his nerves wound up so tightly that they were silently screaming. What he had seen tonight was far more provocative than simply watching a nude girl doing calisthenics or brushing her hair in front of a mirror. He had witnessed a sizzlingly erotic scene, and now he felt the impact on his own nervous system. He was ferociously worked up.
He knew what he ought to do. Go out and get himself a woman, that was what. Get ahold of her and use up all the energy that had been building up in him while peeping at the Lesbians.
But he couldn't do that. He was afraid.
It was years since he had last slept with a woman. His courage had long ago left him. He preferred to hide in the darkness of his own apartment, skulking away where no other human being could intrude.
He looked across the courtyard. The brunette Lesbian had gotten up from the bed and walked to the window. He saw her framed in the window, her breasts still heaving. He tensed. Could she see his eyes peep through the slit in his blinds?
But she wasn't coming to look for him. She didn't even know he existed. She was simply glancing out the window, He saw her framed in the window, her breasts like little points of flesh, some curves in shadow, contrasting with the paleness of her skin. Then she turned the light out. There would be nothing further for Mr. Crispian to see tonight.
What will I do now, he wondered?
I know, he thought. I'll take a walk. A nice brisk walk five or six blocks in each direction. That'll help me get some sleep. And tomorrow night I'll have the blonde to watch again, and maybe the high school girl and the Lesbians too.
Mr. Crispian got up. He put a light jacket on, for it was past eleven o'clock, and he was perspiring from what he had just seen; at his age he didn't want to risk getting himself a chill.
He went out. Down flight after flight of stairs and out into the street.
He walked quickly, heading nowhere in particular. He smiled to himself as he walked, thinking about the Lesbians, reliving in his mind that glowing scene of forbidden passion that he had been privileged to see.
Yes, Mr. Crispian thought happily, things were definitely looking up.
He was in for a highly entertaining season of window peeping.
CHAPTER SIX
Ellen Dawson rolled to one side, pulling herself free of her ex-husband. Ray lay there grinning up at her in satisfaction.
"That was good," he said. "Oh, Ellen, baby, you're absolutely the most."
She shrugged. Nude, she stood up and walked toward the window. She stood behind the drawn blinds, letting the fresh, cool night air waft over her lust-heated body. Ray got up and walked over to her. He nuzzled his lips against the nape of her neck. His hands slid lightly over the firm mounds of her buttocks. Then hands moved them upward under Ellen's arms and clamped over her high jutting breasts.
"Don't," she said irritably.
"Don't what?"
"Don't put your hands all over me. I'm perspiring. I want to be left alone."
"But you're so good to touch, Ellen." He squeezed her breasts a little harder.
Like a woman plucking some unwanted caterpillar from her dress, Ellen forcefully took his hands and pulled them away from her breasts. She kept her back turned to him. Now, with their lovemaking over and all passion spent she felt guilty, stained, polluted. She should never have given herself to him tonight. Anything that once might have been alive between them was dead and ought to be allowed to remain peacefully in the grave.
"Go home," she said. "Its getting late. I want my sleep, Ray."
He cupped her bare buttocks again. "Let me stay here with you, Ellen."
"That's impossible."
"I won't even try to love you. I just want to sleep next to you all night."
Ellen sighed. "This is stupid, Ray. I'm divorcing you. You've got to make the break and get out into the world on your own. We're through. I'm sorry if it sounds cruel, but that's the way it is."
She opened the blinds a little to let the cool air through. Ray Dawson fell to his knees in back of her. He pressed his cheek against the silken-smooth mound of a buttock. Then he put his lips to the swelling rise of soft flesh. He clasped her around the hips, spreading his hands out on her thighs, and kissed her buttocks.
Ellen scowled. What a pest he was! She didn't want to hurt his feelings, but he kept asking for it.
He loved to be downtrodden and scorned.
She tolerated it while he kissed the firm satiny cheeks for a moment. Then she pulled his hands away from her thighs and shook him off, stepping free of him. Pointing to the pile of his discarded clothing, Ellen said brusquely, "Get dressed, Ray. Go home."
"But-"
"Go home. You want me to call the police? You want me to file a complaint saying my ex-husband is molesting me? How would that sound."
He made an almost feminine pout. "I'm not your ex-husband yet," he whined. "I'm just your separated husband. Please, Ellen, pretty please-"
"You make me sick. Get out."
He didn't move. He remained in a position of supplication on his knees before her statuesque nude form. Ellen looked at him in disgust. She caught him by a thin wrist, tugged him to his feet, and pushed him toward his clothing.
Looking ruefully at her in defeat, he began to get dressed. Ellen watched him, standing with her arms folded across the bare hillocks of her breasts and her legs apart and planted firmly. His eyes never left her. He was hungry for the magnificence of her body. But he had lost her, and the sooner he came to admit the fact the healthier it was going to be all around.
When he was fully clothed, he came toward her again, hands reaching for the taut globular womanflesh of her body. Ellen put up a hand and brushed him aside.
"Let me hold you again," he begged.
"You got all you deserve tonight, and more than that," she said. "You boffed me, didn't you? Isn't that enough? Now you have to cop a feel too? Get out, Ray. Get out and find yourself another woman, and stay with her." She patted herself. "You better take a good long look at me, because you aren't ever going to see me like this again. Or touch or kiss me as you did. I mean that, Ray. From now on I'm going to listen to what my lawyer says about having relations with you. Verboten, you hear. Now go home."
"Ellen-"
"Out," she said, and shoved him toward the door.
He was just a bundle of bones. She didn't have any trouble pushing him through the door. She locked it behind him and walked slowly back toward her bedroom, thoughtfully rubbing her bare breasts.
It had been a mistake to give in to him, Ellen told herself. My lawyer would flay me if he knew.
I'm just too damned softhearted to live.
But what was done was done. She shrugged. He had come here, he had begged and wheedled a tumble out of her, and she had given it to him. She had given it to him in his own special way, too, complete with a nice healthy whipping that had stirred up strange, disturbing lusts within her in the process of turning him on.
But this was absolutely the last time she would play with Ray Dawson, she told herself. He'd just have to face up to it. They were finished, that was all.
Ellen glanced at the clock. Past eleven o'clock.
Well, there went her plan to get a lot of extra sleep tonight. But she'd still be able to catch up a little on her rest, assuming there were no more unexpected callers. Before she could go to bed, though, she would need a shower. That was the trouble with men. They got you so bothered when they loved you. It was always such a sweaty business.
A quick shower and Ellen felt cool, crisp, and clean once again. She popped herself into bed and switched off the light. For a little while she lay awake, wondering in a troubled way what would happen after she was married to Jim McHughes, if Ray still kept coming around looking for a little action. Jim would quickly teach Ray who her current husband was. But it could get pretty violent. Jim might beat Ray to a pulp. Jim couldn't control himself sometimes, when his temper ran loose. Poor Ray. He was such a schmoe. She didn't want anything serious to happen to him, though.
She made up her mind to let Ray know the risks he was running, the next time he came around here. If there was a next time, of course.
Ellen nestled against her pillow. She cupped one hand cozily over her bare breasts and let the other one rest on her cool thigh.
Sleep took her.
When she woke, she felt as well rested as she had in many months. She was cheerful, almost exhilarated. She got to the office bright and early, ready to face any sort of challenge the day might throw at her.
But her good mood didn't last past the first office break of the day.
Bad news presented itself fast.
Bad news went by the name of Paul F. Brubaker, who was her boss. Mr. Brubaker was a pudgy, red-faced, fiftyish man with thinning brown hair. He had a wife somewhere in the suburbs, but he didn't make a point of being particularly faithful to her, and he went to bed with his prettier employees as often as he could swing it.
He had been sleeping regularly with Ellen for more than a year, now. She wasn't happy about it. Ordinarily, she would never have let herself get into a fix like that. But he had moved in on her at a time of crisis in her life-about the time when she was breaking up her marriage to Ray Dawson, and before she had met Jim McHughes.
Ellen had been pretty confused about life just then, and Mr. Brubaker had seen his opportunity. With a paternal-sounding, "Tell me all about it, dear," he won her confidence. He took her out to dinner and used up most of a fifty-dollar bill wining and dining her, and it was a good investment for him, because by the end of the evening Ellen was in a boozy, self-pitying mood and needed company. When Mr. Brubaker offered to see her home, she accepted. Then it seemed proper to invite him in for a little while. He accepted. They had a drink or two. And then, of course, he had her.
Some time after that, Jim McHughes appeared on the scene. Ellen no longer had any need of Mr. Brubaker. But she couldn't get rid of him. He was her boss, after all, and he made it quite clear, without actually coming right out and saying it, that if she nixed his bedroom privileges he would nix her job. As simple as that.
Ellen didn't want to lose her job. Not yet. After she married Jim McHughes, she could quit and laugh in Paul F. Brubaker's face, because Jim's paintings were in great demand, and he made buckets of money. But there's many a slip on the way to the altar, and Ellen didn't care to jeopardize her economic security until that ring was actually on her finger. This was a good job. It was hard work and a headache, but it was also damned good pay, better than a hundred fifty a week, or about twice what she'd probably get if she had to find herself a new job at this point. She needed the money. She hadn't been able to save a dime during the years of her marriage to Ray, and now her legal expenses were running high. Divorces don't come cheap.
So when Paul F. Brubaker came over to her desk during the coffee break and said, "Doing anything tonight sweets?" Ellen knew what the answer would have to be.
He arranged to come over to her apartment around half past eight that evening. He didn't say a word about taking her out to dinner. That part of the deal was all in the past. Now that he had her lined up, he didn't care to spend any of his hard-earned money amusing her. She amused him instead. Ellen felt like a concubine, or maybe like a prostitute. But she didn't have any choice. She had to cooperate with Mr. Brubaker-or else.
That punctured her good mood. She felt so depressed the rest of the morning. And she was still feeling that way just before noon, when Jim McHughes called.
"What are the chances of getting to see you tonight?" he wanted to know. "Pretty slim."
"How slim?"
"Too slim," she said. "It's got to be tomorrow, Jim. I'm sorry."
"Who is it tonight, Ellen?"
"Does it matter?"
"Yes."
"Brubaker."
"He still won't let you alone?"
"I explained all that to you, darling," she said. "Listen, after we're married-"
"After we're married, after we're married! And meanwhile you flop for every-"
"Jim!"
"It's true, isn't it?"
Ellen took a deep breath. "There are special circumstances involved, Jim. We've had this discussion a million times, and I can't have it with you over the phone at the office. Will you believe me when I say that as soon as we're married there'll be no such problems? Now be a good boy, and get back to your easel. I'll see you tomorrow night."
"All right," he said bitterly. "Tomorrow night."
She couldn't blame him for getting sore at her. But circumstances were circumstances. Right now she had to go to bed with Mr. Brubaker. And there were other men, too-casual one-nighters that Jim didn't know about, specifically. She couldn't help it. She wanted her freedom for a little while. She wanted to be a bachelor girl. She had hopped into a miserable marriage before she was out of her teens, and with another marriage on the horizon right away, she had to experience some liberty first, even if it made Jim temporarily unhappy.
Tonight's date with Mr. Brubaker didn't represent liberty, though. It represented slavery. But there was no escaping from her servitude.
Glumly, she went through the rest of the day, conscious of what was going to be demanded of her in the evening. She finished her work, had her dinner, and went home to pretty herself up for the arrival of her boss.
As she stripped for her bath, Ellen caught sight of the peeper at his usual station across the courtyard. Good old peeper, she thought. As dependable as the sunrise. You need something dependable in your life; everybody does. She wondered if she'd miss her creepy audience after she married Jim and moved to another apartment.
She peeled away her clothes, giving him a good view. Breasts and thighs, hips and stomach and buttocks-everything. The creep! It seemed as though most of the men in her life were creeps in one way or another. Jim McHughes wasn't. He was normal when it came to sex. But there was Ray Dawson needing to be whipped with a belt, and this goofy peeper across the way ogling her so desperately, and some others too.
Including Mr. Brubaker. He had his kink, all right. That was one of the reasons why Ellen was de pressed about having to submit to him. She didn't enjoy his cockeyed style of lovemaking at all.
Ellen did a few exercises to give the peeper his final thrills for the evening. Her bare breasts jiggled about as she went through her routines. Then she scooted into the bathroom to freshen up for Mr. Brubaker's arrival. It was almost half past eight when she emerged, clean and sweet-smelling, perfumed and scrubbed.
She got into a negligee that she knew she wouldn't be wearing for long. She settled down to wait.
At exactly half past eight, the doorbell rang. Mr. Brubaker was an extremely punctual man.
"Evening, Ellen," he beamed at her. "My, you look lovely tonight!"
She took his hat like an obedient little slave. She took his jacket as he shed it. He walked across the room and pulled the blind shut. Too bad, peepo, Ellen thought. Mr. Brubaker smiled. He unlaced his shoes.
"A hard day today," he muttered "I thought the phone would never stop ringing. I could use a drink, Ellen."
"Bourbon?"
"Of course," he said.
Ellen started to go past him to get the liquor from the sideboard. As she did, he reached out and caught her, slipping his soft-fleshed, meaty hand deftly under her negligee to grasp the smooth, plump cheeks of her bare buttocks. He held her there for a moment, fingertips digging in. Then he released her. His ruddy face grew even more flushed than usual, and she saw the perspiration break out on the dome of his forehead as desires rose within him.
Slob, Ellen thought, keeping her face a tranquil mask as he fondled the flesh of her buttocks. Creepy Pig.
She got the drinks. She poured a stiff one for him and an even stiffer one for herself. Ordinarily she couldn't bring herself to play his little bedroom game unless she got half looped. The booze helped. It loosened her up, allowed her to cooperate.
While he downed the drink, he talked, a steady monologue about what a stupid witch his wife was and how nobody at the office understood him. In his own eyes, Mr. Brubaker was an extremely sensitive, intelligent man who with a little luck could have been a dynamic figure in modern American industry, instead of running a two-bit theatrical booking agency. Ellen didn't bother listening to him as he talked. She just nodded her head now and then at the proper intervals.
His little bloodshot eyes were fastened on her all the time. He stared at the big globes of her breasts, half visible under her negligee. He peered at the molding of her thighs and their golden reflections.
Then he put down his drink. He leered cheerfully at her and stood up.
"Time for fun," he announced, and began to take off his clothes.
Ellen didn't like Mr. Brubaker's kind of fun, because she knew it would hurt. She waited patiently as he undressed: undid his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, stepped out of his trousers, took off his shirt, dropped his imdershorts. He kept his shoes and socks on. He had never taken them off in Ellen's presence. Maybe his feet were deformed, she thought. Or maybe he had this thing about wearing shoes when he made love. Men could be awfully peculiar that way.
She looked at his nakedness. He wasn't terribly pretty. His shoulders were narrow, and his chest was hollow, and then he widened out toward the middle, with a little overhanging pot. His legs were thin as pipe stems. Ellen figured that when he was young he must have been thin and maybe even good looking. But he had thickened around the gut in middle age.
"Come here," he said.
She went to him. He took her negligee by the hem and drew it up, baring thighs and abdomen, stomach and breasts. He pulled it over her head and off. Then he fondled her body, running his clammy hands over her thighs and her buttocks, gripping the firm flesh sensuously.
He cupped her breasts and hefted them in his hands. Despite her inner feelings of revulsion toward him, Ellen felt her nipples starting to grow hard with desire. There was no escaping desire. Even with a man she disliked, a man who disgusted her, her body would respond when the right buttons were pushed. Her body was a traitor.
Brubaker pursed his fingers around the hard little nubs of her nipples. He pressed them, and he squeezed them, making them grow even harder.
Then he said, "You've been a naughty girl, Ellen."
Ellen sighed. Here we go again, the same old nutty quirk again!
"Have I?" she said obediently.
"Terribly naughty. Terribly, terribly naughty. You deserve to be punished, Ellen."
"Punished hard?"
"Punished to fit your naughtiness," he said. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Ellen. Being such a naughty, naughty girl!"
The baby talk made her sick to her stomach. And it was always like this, every time he came here. Brubaker's kink was just the opposite of Ray Dawson's. Ray liked to be whipped, to be hurt. Brubaker liked to do the hurting.
He was a spanker. That was his kick.
He said, "Lie down and take your punishment, Ellen. Right here on my lap. You've got it coming to you, you know, so don't try to wheedle your way out of it."
"Please don't hurt me," she begged, putting on a real act because she knew that that was what he wanted. He liked to feel that he was a real tyrant. "Don't hurt me, please, don't hit me hard!"
Brubaker gave her a Simon Legree laugh. He sat down on the edge of the bed and patted his knees, beckoning to her. Ellen went over. She stretched out across his legs. The bare globes of her breasts hung past his knee. She could feel the pressure of his flesh at the pit of her stomach. Her pink, delectable, nude buttocks were upturned, two tempting mounds of flesh exposed for his eager palm.
"Naughty girl!" he cried, and slapped his hand against her buttocks.
"Naughty, naughty!" He punctuated each word with a slap. The tender flesh of Ellen's buttock? leaped and quivered as his hand struck down. He hit both, cheeks at once, in short, sharp strokes that connected with maximum impact.
Ellen writhed and twisted uncomfortably on his lap. He wasn't just playing a game. He was slapping and spanking seriously, and it hurt. He was giving the ripe globes of nude flesh real punishment.
She gritted her teeth and bit down on her lower lip. The hand descended. Whack! Whack! Tears of pain began to crowd into her eyes. Ellen sniffled a little.
"Naughty girl!" he cried, idiot-like. Whack! Whack!
Her bare buttocks were blazing hot. The pain tingled all through her midsection. She had to fight hard to hold back the tears as he continued to belabor the tender cheeks, turning the milky-flesh an angry red.
And yet there was an erotic effect, too. For her as well as for him. There always was. Ellen wasn't immune to quirks. She couldn't deny that it turned her on to be spanked in this way.
She felt the warmth flooding her body, felt the tide of desire starting to rise.
The potbellied, middle-aged man above her was grunting and gasping, wheezing from the strenuousness of his exertions. But he went on walloping her. Ellen felt oddly like a child again. The last time anybody had spanked her as a serious punishment was when she was thirteen, she remembered. Her father had done it, after she played hookey from school to go to a carnival. She had been bitterly angry at him, because she felt that a girl of thirteen should not have to expose her body to her father that way. But he hadn't paid any attention to her indignant adolescent protests. He had flipped her over his knee and pushed up her skirt and pulled down her panties to lay bare her newly mature, voluptuous young body, and he had whaled away on the pink cheeks of her buttocks until she screamed from near hysteria and her mother had put a stop to it.
That was eleven years ago. Now she was grown up and supposedly beyond such punishments. But here she was, stark naked on the knees of a nude man, who was more than old enough to be her father, and here he was, slamming his hand down again and again on the succulent mounds of her buttocks.
"All right," Brubaker grunted. "Now!"
She got up. He pulled her over on her back, on the bed. His face was flushed beet-red and his eyes were wild, his manhood savagely aroused.
Her thighs moved. She was lathered and hot, and the spanking had turned her on so much that even Brubaker was an acceptable partner at this moment.
His meaty body descended to hers.
He slid into the sizzling, quivering position.
He moved in short jerky motions, and she answered him with countermotions of her hips and pelvis. She locked her legs around his ankles. Her bare-tipped breasts were pushing into his soft, fleshy chest. He drove at her, digging, invading, shaming her and possessing her.
The explosion of his lusts arrived.
And with it was Ellen's own fulfillment, sudden spasms of ecstasy deep within her, and she rocked and quivered beneath him, turning her head away when he tried to kiss her in the affection of his culmination. She lay there with tingling, aching buttocks and throbbing body. While the man above her went on through the first few moments of aftermath, and then he lay still, rolled free of her, and left Ellen lying there nude, alone with her shame and self-contempt.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mr. Crispian sat by his window, waiting for the nightly action to begin. So far it was shaping up as a pretty disappointing night. It was past nine o'clock, and he hadn't seen a thing.
After last night, with its views of the blonde girl and the unexpected bonus of seeing those two Lesbian girls making love, the disappointment was particularly keen. Mr. Crispian hopefully scanned his regular round of windows, without any luck.
He had missed out on his blonde tonight. For some reason she had decided to get undressed early. He had been sitting at his window waiting for her, and, sure enough, she appeared and started to peel. But she still had all her underwear on when Mr. Crispian's telephone rang, and he was called away from the window. What a frustrating bit that was! He had been tempted simply to let the telephone ring, on the theory that if it was an important call, and none of them ever were, the caller would try again later. But he didn't have the will power to ignore a telephone call.
So he picked it up, and it turned out to be one of his sisters, living in Philadelphia, calling up for her monthly how's-my-baby-brother call. Mr. Crispian simply couldn't get rid of her. Her husband had left her a lot of money, and telephone expense didn't mean a thing to her.
She talked endlessly. Finally he brought the conversation to a close and hurried back to his window. Too late! The blonde's blinds were drawn! So she had finished with her exercises, and taken her bath, and already was entertaining her nightly company.
Thwarted, Mr. Crispian gnawed at his knuckles. Damn his sister! Damn her! Why couldn't she have called an hour earlier? Why did she have to wait until the precise moment when the blonde started to remove her clothing?
Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He would just have to sit here and see what else the fortunes of the night would bring him.
Not much, it seemed.
He checked the window of the Lesbians. There was age girl. Dark. Wasn't she ever home? He decided that it had just been blind luck that he had seen her naked that time, anyhow. Probably it would never be repeated.
He check the window of the Lesbians. There was a possibility there. The lights were on, and he could see figures milling around in the apartment. But there were too many figures. Six ... seven ... eight. The dykes were having a party! They were showing off their new apartment. He wasn't likely to catch a glimpse of anything under those circumstances, unless the party turned into an orgy. Most likely, it would be two or three in the morning before the party broke up and the two girls who lived there went to bed. He might see something worthwhile then, but not before.
He checked the window of the fat middle-aged woman. Nothing here either.
A little desperately, Mr. Crispian checked the window of the thirteen-year-old girl he had once spied on. She didn't have much to offer, with her nubbly little breasts and her thin legs, but it was something. Except her light was out.
What am I going to do, thought Mr. Crispian.
He had come to depend on the blonde girl. Night after night, she had provided him with the vicarious thrills that his nature demanded. But tonight, thanks to the ill-timed telephone call from his sister, Mr. Crispian had missed his chance to see her. He was faced with the prospect of an endless evening of boredom.
He sat. He stared.
And then his luck turned.
The light flashed on in the bedroom of the attractive dark-haired teen-ager. She must have just come home from somewhere, for she was wearing a jacket as she entered the room. She took the jacket off and flung it into a far corner.
She's angry, Mr. Crispian thought. Maybe she had a fight with her boy friend.
He waited patiently, his pulse racing. Many weeks had gone by since his one view of her. There was no reason to think she'd let the blind stay open this time, any more than she had any of the other times except that once. But he could go on hoping, at least.
Come on, he thought. Take it off!
She looked really sore about something. She was stomping around the room, picking up things and putting them down. When would she notice that the blind was open, he wondered? Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe His heart soared.
She was taking off her clothes, and the blind was still open!
He strained his eyes to take in every detail. Now she was unbuttoning her blouse, removing it, hurling it into the same corner where she had thrown her. jacket. She was still angry. So angry that she wouldn't remember about the blind? Maybe.
She was wearing a yellow brassiere. Take it off, he urged silently. Let me see some boob-flesh, at least. But she didn't remove it, not yet. She unzipped her slacks instead and flung them after the other things.
Mr. Crispian's keen memory supplied the image of her nakedness from that other time. The lean, tawny, young body, the firm jutting breasts, the solid mounds of her buttocks. A healthy fifteen-or sixteen-year-old animal, in the full pantherish grace of her girlhood.
He wanted to see that body again. All of it. She was down to her panties and bra now. She picked up a hairbrush from the dresser and began to tug it in vigorous, angry strokes through her thick, lustrous dark hair. Mr. Crispian let out his breath in disappointment. No, he thought. First take off everything. Then start brushing your hair.
As though in direct answer to Mr. Crispian's thought, the girl slammed the hairbrush down after perhaps half a dozen strokes. Then her hands went behind her back to unclasp the hooks of her brassiere.
Ah, yes, he thought. That's what I've been waiting to see! At last! At last!
The brassiere came away.
The firm cones of her ripe young breasts tumbled into view.
Once again, Mr. Crispian could see them two ways at once. He had the profile view of the steeply out-thrust mounds, and he could also see them head-on reflected in the mirror, twin globes tipped with delectable little nipples.
She took the panties off, too. Crumpled them into a ball, flung them hard. She was steaming mad, obviously.
And now she was nude.
There was a dry coppery taste of yearning in Mr. Crispian's mouth as he stared. His beady eyes flickered from side to side, taking in the view of those succulent taut-fleshed bare buttocks, the haunches and flanks, the flat young stomach, the ebony shadows of delight.
Just a child, he thought. Fifteen years old, sixteen. Still a virgin, maybe. Beautiful! Beautiful!
Now the girl had picked up the hairbrush again. She was pulling it through her hair, taking out on those dark tresses all the resentment that for some unknown reason was boiling through her system. She gave her hair at least a hundred strokes before putting the brush down.
What now, Mr. Crispian wondered? Time for sleep?
No. She still stood by the mirror. Her hands were on her breasts, now. She was cupping them, hiding them from Mr. Crispian's view, but what she was doing was as exciting as being able to see her breasts. She was squeezing them, playing with them, stirring herself up. The sharp eyes of the watchful peeper saw her face in the mirror, and it seemed to him that her eyes were narrow with lust, that her full lips were thrust out in a pout of desire.
She writhed in front of her mirror. She rubbed her thighs together, wriggled voluptuously, fondled her breasts, made the dark rigid nipples stick out between her fingers. It was one of the most overpoweringly erotic solo performances Mr. Crispian had ever witnessed. The girl seemed to radiate sensuality and desire.
He pushed his face forward, throwing caution to the winds. This was too good to miss. Instead of peeping between two slats of his blinds, he stuck his head in front of the blinds for an unobstructed view.
The girl continued her self-adoring writhing before the mirror. Stroking her breasts, letting her hand steal down her flat stomach to the curved alabaster of her thighs.
Mr. Crispian began to revise some of his thoughts about her. Maybe she wasn't a virgin after all. Maybe she was one of the passionate, swinging girls of today, who start to make love at thirteen or fourteen. He could even imagine what she was angry about. Suppose she had been out with her boy friend, in a parked car somewhere, and she had asked him to make love to her. And he said no. Maybe he was inexperienced or afraid. So she angrily told him to take her home if he didn't have the guts to love her as she wanted.
And she came into her apartment still hopping mad and full of desires. Her parents didn't seem to be home; all the other lights in the apartment were dark. Furious, sizzling with frustration and anger, she stripped off her clothes, not even bothering to draw the blinds. And she began to play with herself, to ease the burning need within her.
It seemed plausible to Mr. Crispian. The peeper stared intently. The girl continued to gyrate and twist before her mirror. He imagined her gasping, breathing hard, throbbing with sensuality.
Then came catastrophe.
The girl turned away from her mirror, suddenly, unexpectedly. She looked at the window, as though noticing for the first time that the blinds were open. She didn't hurry to draw them, though.
She looked out across the courtyard.
And she saw Mr. Crispian.
He was trapped, in full view, his whole head in the window. He froze, not knowing what to do. If he ducked away quickly, he might attract her attention. He couldn't be absolutely sure that she was really looking at his window, after all. Maybe she was just staring vacantly into space. But he had to be careful. So far he had avoided all legal troubles while a peeper.
But he knew how embarrassing it could be if somebody filed a complaint against him.
The girl did see him, though. Not only that. Standing there brazenly naked in the window, her youthful body on display right down to her thighs, she smiled at him.
She winked.
She waved!
Mr. Crispian threw caution to the winds. He broke his freeze and got out of the window in a hurry. Dropping to his knees, he crawled quickly across the floor as though he were under sniper fire. When he reached the doorway he stuck a hand up and snapped off the hall switch, so that his entire apartment was dark, and not just the room in which he had been doing his peeping.
Then he crouched there in the darkness, shivering with terror, his heart pounding fearfully.
She had seen him. The smile, the wink, the wave-those were her mocking, jeering ways of letting him know that she knew what he was up to. He wasn't fooling her. She knew he was a peeper.
Right now, he imagined, she was calling the police. Filing a complaint. And soon The knock at the door. The police wagon downstairs. The arrest, the shame, the punishment.
Up till now, Mr. Crispian had remained detached, remote, like an observer on another world watching these courtyard people through a remote television pickup. You don't expect a person on a television screen to wave and wink at you. He had never had any contact with his victims while he was violating their privacy. But now-now, everything was different.
He found the strength to rise from the floor. He was trembling all over. What am I going to do now, he wondered? He debated leaving the apartment, trying to go out and establish an alibi for himself. He could tell the police that he had been in the corner saloon all evening. The girl couldn't prove that he had been peeping, could she? She didn't have a photograph. If he denied it, it was his word against hers, and what could they do to him.
He felt a little better at that.
Cautiously, Mr. Crispian edged toward a window, not the same one that he normally did his peeping from. He dared to take a squint across the courtyard, just a quick one.
The girl's light was out.
What did that mean? What was she up to?
He pulled away from the window and walked around his apartment like a nervous sparrow. Like a physical blow, the memory of that wave and that wink reverberated in his stunned brain; the first hint from the other side of the courtyard that anybody really saw him.
And now he would The doorbell rang.
Mr. Crispian almost had a heart attack. He reeled dizzily, clung to his balance, felt his skin starting to crawl. The police!
The police were here already!
Stay calm, he told himself. Don't answer. Don't even breathe. All your lights are out. They won't break in. Will they? Maybe they'll just go away.
The doorbell rang a second time, louder, more insistently.
Go away, Mr. Crispian prayed! Go away, please!
A voice said, "Come on, open up. You're not fooling anybody, you know."
It was a girl's voice!
Mr. Crispian still did not move.
"I know you're in there," she went on. "You didn't have time to go anywhere. I saw you peeping at me. Come on, let me in or I'll make trouble for you."
"I-I don't know what you're talking about," Mr. Crispian heard his own voice replying.
"Sure you do, mister. Open up. Open up or I'll start to scream bloody murder. If you do the smart thing, you'll let me in. You won't regret it if you do."
Mr. Crispian was almost paralyzed with fear. He could not think straight. He didn't want to open the door, but he didn't want the girl to start screaming either.
He forced himself to be calm. Open the door, he told himself. Act innocent. Deny everything. What can she do to prove it if you deny everything?
"I'm coming," he said.
He unlocked and unchained the door and opened it. The girl stood in the hall, grinning impudently at him. She was alone. She was wearing a tan trench coat, belted tight at the middle and buttoned all the way up, and her glossy black hair hung almost to her shoulders.
She was the one, all right. The one he had been peeping at just a few minutes ago, the one whose nude body he had ogled so breathlessly. She was very young, Mr. Crispian saw. Sixteen at most. Snub nose, full lips, dark, alert, shining eyes. A good-looking girl.
She stepped into the apartment.
"Hi," she said. "You're older than I thought you were. You're almost an old man. I should have known that a window peeper would be old."
"What do you want?" Mr. Crispian asked in a thick, tension-choked voice.
"Fun," she said. She giggled. "I'm Kathryn. Who are you, you old lech?"
Mr. Crispian moistened his lips. "Please-please, just go away."
She didn't go away. She took a step toward him and said, "Listen, I want some fun, you hear what I'm telling you? I saw you peeping at me. I've seen you sitting there all year, staring across the courtyard. You aren't kidding anybody, mister. Well, I've got news for you. There's something in life a whole lot better than window peeping. And I came over here to show you."
"No, look here-"
"You look here," she said.
She swept her trench coat off.
She wasn't wearing a stitch of clothing. That was how she had crossed the courtyard so fast. She had simply put the trench coat on over her bare body and come over.
Mr. Crispian stared in shock at her incandescently nude body, so unexpectedly revealed. It was one thing to peep at her with the safe distance of the courtyard between them. It was another thing entirely to have her standing here, stripped to the buff, a couple of yards away.
Waves of dizziness swept over him. His knees seemed to turn to water, and he fought to keep from toppling.
Her nipples were little buttons of lust. Her nude breasts were round, high and deep-set, close together, two melons of tawny, firm flesh. Her thighs, parted slightly, were smooth columns of desire. She turned on a slight angle, showing him the succulent globes of her buttocks. She seemed utterly shameless as she displayed her unclad body to him, flaunting it wantonly, almost shoving herself into his eyes.
She said huskily, "I had a date tonight, and my boy friend chickened out on me. He didn't give me what I wanted. Okay. You give it to me. Serve a purpose in the world. Give instead of taking, for once in your life."
Mr. Crispian's lips moved, but for a moment no sound came out. He could not take his eyes from the gleaming globes of those spectacular breasts.
He was pleased, in a way, despite his shock, to know that his guess had been right, that she had come home angry because she hadn't had what she craved. She was a wanton little minx, a tramp at fifteen. But she had invaded the sanctuary of his apartment, and that terrified him. Mr. Crispian wanted her to take her breasts, thighs, taut-fleshed buttocks and her shameless body, and get herself out of here as fast as she could.
But she sidled toward him.
"Come on," she purred. "Give in to me, mister. I'll do you some good. I'll make you feel young again.
What's the matter, you just good for looking? You don't like to do? Don't be a kook. I'm good. You may think I'm just a kid, but I've had plenty of experience; I'm real good. Try me and see. Just try me."
Mr. Crispian found words. "I-I don't want to. Go away."
"Take a feel," she said. "Nothing but the best here, all real genuine Kathryn, no imitations, no padding. Here. Here, cop a feel, peeper."
She seized his hand. She drew it up and clamped it over one of her breasts. Mr. Crispian gasped. He could not remember how long it had been since he had last held a woman's bare breast in his hand. And certainly he had not held many breasts like this one. It was firm and taut, almost hard, though the surface was soft as satin. It stood up high and proud, a girlish breast, though not girlish in size, just in texture and firmness. The nipple was like a hot little rock against the palm of Mr. Crispian's hand.
She slid her naked body closer to him. She was purring and crooning a whispered little song of desire to him. Her hand reached down, found the front of Mr. Crispian's trousers, began to move in a stimulating massage of sinful delegability.
"There you go," she said. "See? See how good that feels? Now all we've got to do is lie down, and you can get on top of me ... "
"No," Mr. Crispian said.
"No? What's the matter with you? Yon just Eke to sit there and watch?" She rubbed her thighs against him. The nearness of her naked body was almost overpowering to Mr. Crispian. The musky woman-smell of her in his nostrils was driving him wild.
How could he tell her that he was afraid?
Afraid of passion, afraid of sex, afraid of all real human contacts? Afraid to join his body to hers. Afraid to take a chance, to drive himself to the passion of ecstasy.
This hotshot teen-ager terrified him. She was like a hurricane passing through his quiet world. He had to get rid of her, he thought feverishly, before he destroyed him.
Mr. Crispian ignored her sinuous, twisting, sidling postures of provocation. He brought his other hand up and clamped it over her other breast. Now he held both smooth, firm, taut globes of youthful flesh in his hands.
Kathryn smiled. "That's it," she said. "You're getting the idea now!"
Mr. Crispian dug his fingertips into the twin mounds. Her breasts were so large that his small-fingered hands could not even begin to cup their entireties. Even so, he got a good grip on them.
He stood there for a moment, his eyes half closed, holding the girl's bare breasts, digging the tips of his fingers into the resilient flesh. His breathing was harsh and ragged, and he felt the unaccustomed drumbeat of desire within himself. But he was not going to give in. The force of lifelong habit was too strong.
He pushed.
He put all his strength together and heaved the girl away from him. Mr. Crispian didn't have much strength to muster, but it was enough, and he caught the nude girl off guard. Her naked body staggered backward.
Then she fell. She landed heavily, solidly, on the firm cheeks of her bare buttocks. She lay there a moment, seemingly stunned. Her legs were spread, and her breasts were heaving wildly.
Mr. Crispian picked up her trench coat and threw it at her. "Get out!" he cried frantically. "Get yourself out of here! Out! Out!"
"GodI" she said. "What a kook!"
"Out!"
She picked herself up. She rubbed the soft globes of her buttocks. Then, shaking her head, she slipped the trench coat on and went out of Mr. Crispian's apartment, slamming the door behind her.
Mr. Crispian, alone again, stood dumbly in the middle of the room. Then, like a man who has had a stroke, he sagged to the floor and huddled there. His body was drenched with perspiration. The image of the nude girl blazed like an atomic flash in his mind.
She was so beautiful, he thought.
I could have had her ... I could have had her....
He looked at his hands. They felt red-hot, where he had grasped her bare breasts. He could still feel the texture of those twin globes of delight, could still feel the way they had given in his hands as he used them as levers to push her backward.
I could have had her ... but I was afraid.
Hot tears flooded down his face. Mr. Crispian put his hands over his eyes and huddled miserably on the floor, sobbing convulsively, his thin frame shaking as the sobs racked and tormented him.
He had never despised himself so much as right at this moment.
Kathryn stood in the hall outside Mr. Crispian's door, shaking her head in astonishment and disbelief.
She had never expected that to happen. Not in a million years. But the world was kookier than she realized. At the age of sixteen, Kathryn had discovered a good deal about life, but she was only starting now to find out how much craziness revolves around the world of sex.
It was hard to imagine, though. She had walked into his apartment, thrown off her trench coat to stand naked in front of him-and he had refused her! He had put his hands on her breasts, taken a good feel for himself and then had pushed her on her bottom!
What a creep, she thought. Her buttocks ached from the fall she had taken. But that ache would go away in a few minutes, she knew. There was a much deeper ache within her, and it would remain with her unless she took some steps to satisfy it right away.
Kathryn was a hungry girl. And what she hungered for was a man.
She had discovered men two years ago, just after she had turned fourteen. Before that, she knew only that sex was something for grownups, something that she wouldn't be able to appreciate until she was much older. Kathryn's first experiments with sex had shown her right away that the grownups were lying, as usual. You didn't have to be over twenty-one to enjoy sex. Sex was the greatest kick in the world, and the only reason the grownups kept it to themselves was because they were cruel and selfish, and had been denied it themselves when they were young. They got even by denying it to the next generation along.
Kathryn was wild about loving.
Kathryn was wild in general, as a matter-of-fact.
At sixteen, she had been loved by almost twenty different fellows, some of them having had her many times. That was the track record for promiscuity among her set of girl friends at high school. She loved it. She couldn't get enough. She liked it every way she knew. She went in for some of the fancy sidelines, too, although she insisted that they all had to lead to the main event.
She didn't think her parents knew what she was up to. They didn't pay much attention to her. All they were interested in was that she got good marks in school, so she could get into a decent college. And Kathryn got good marks. She was up near the top of her class. That made them happy. In another two years, she would go away to some out-of-town college, maybe Radcliffe or Wellesley or one of those, and she would ball her way through the whole Ivy League.
But that was two years from now. Kathryn's immediate problem was getting some action tonight.
She had gone out with a guy named Freddy tonight, a senior at school. It was their first time out. Kathryn was under no illusions about the sort of reputation she had at school, and she knew that when a guy made a point of arranging a date with her, he was interested in getting made. That was okay with her. She was interested in getting made, too.
So she figured Freddy was hot for her lily-white body, and she figured correctly.
The only thing she hadn't figured was that Freddy, at the age of eighteen-minus-three-months, was a virgin. A scared virgin at that. He didn't like being a virgin, which was why he had made a date with Kathryn. "She's a nympho," somebody had told him. "You're certain to score. You don't even have to work at it. Just grab her boobs, and she'll attack you."
This was going to be the big night of Freddy's life. But Freddy goofed.
They went bowling. Kathryn was a fair bowler, and racked up two games with a 145 and a 139. But Freddy, who was big and athletic-looking and well coordinated, bowled a woeful 81 his first game, and dropped to a 72 the next round. That should have been a tip off to Kathryn: Freddy was scared witless.
They got into his car. They drove to a lover's lane at the edge of Federal Park, near the rhododendron garden. That was a traditional place for making out, and even the police had a kind of gentleman's agreement not to come snooping around there.
They parked. They got into the back seat and started fooling around. Freddy unhooked her bra. Freddy fondled her bare breasts. Kathryn's nipples were standing up straight and tall. Kathryn was nice and warm as usual. She figured the evening would end in the appropriate way.
But Freddy went on massaging her boobs, and on and on.
He didn't make any move to get below the belt. Kathryn got impatient. Kathryn reached out and started to unzip his trousers. "D-don't," he said. "Huh?"
"It isn't right."
"What isn't?"
"Putting your hand there," he said. He took his own hands away from her breasts. Kathryn looked at him and realized he was shivering.
"What's going on?" she asked. "You sick or something?" , "I think we ought to go home."
"It's still early."
"I-that is--well, it's the middle of the week. We've got school tomorrow."
"We've got lots of time. Time for a little fun."
"Kathryn, I don't want to."
"You what?"
"I don't want to. I mean, we shouldn't get carried away. A girl has to think about her self-respect. We shouldn't do anything we'd regret later."
"The only thing I'd regret is not making it," she said. Her breasts were swollen, her nipples were hard. "What kind of character are you? You get a girl all heated up, and then you say let's go home?"
That was when he blurted the whole thing out, in a flow of miserable words; how he was a virgin and had dated her because he had heard she was wild, but now that he was down to the crucial moment he was scared; he didn't want to do this after all, and could they please go home?
Kathryn blew sky high.
She called him a pansy and a fink and a lot of worse things. She roasted his ears for a while. The idea that a six-foot-two hunk of virile-looking man would chicken out so totally and ignominiously on a date of this sort was incredible to her. She really ripped into him. By the time she was finished, he was so demolished that he couldn't even drive the car. He gave her the keys, and she drove home while he curled up in a dark cloud of shame as far from her as he could get. , She was still in a cold fury when she got home. Her parents were out. Kathryn stripped off her clothes and took out some of her anger with her hairbrush.
As she thought it over, she realized that maybe she had goofed a little. If she had been tender and sympathetic to Freddy instead of chewing him out, she would probably have overcome his inhibitions and ended the evening with some boffing after all. But to hell with that. She wasn't going to be a nursemaid. Even if she had managed to get him, it would have been lousy anyway, wham, bam, and all over with before she felt a thing.
Naked before her mirror, she rubbed her aching, lust-tainted body, cupped her breasts, sizzled in frustration, rubbing her heated thighs together. Then she noticed the fact that she had forgotten, in her anger, to close the blinds. And she remembered about the peeper.
She had seen him before, sitting by his window, squinting out at the other side of the building. Kathryn knew what he was up to. She usually drew her blinds to keep him from getting a free show at her expense.
But now a mischievous idea came into her head. She was much in need of loving. And there sat this lonely kook on the other side of the courtyard. Why not go over there? Why not get from him what Freddy had been too chicken to give her? It might be fun.
Kathryn was willing to try anything once.
She didn't bother to get dressed again. She just got her raincoat out of the closet and put it on over her naked body. It was funny feeling to walk through the courtyard wearing practically nothing. The trench coat rubbed against her sensitive, throbbing nipples, too. But soon she was on the other side of the courtyard.
It wasn't hard for Kathryn to find the peeper's apartment. She had lived in this building since she was a baby, and she knew which windows belonged to which apartments. He was in the C line of apartments, and all she had to do was count to his floor and ring his bell.
He was older and kookier than she had figured him to be, a dried-out-looking little man in his fifties. But Kathryn was so steamed up by her need that she didn't let that stop her. Since she had bothered to come across and hunt him out, she would give herself to him anyway.
Only he didn't want her. That was the crazy thing. He looked scared half out of his wits, and he grabbed a feel, but then he shoved her over and told her to clear out. Kathryn had been so afraid that the little creep would go into wild hysterics that she left.
Now, as she made her way downstairs again, she was in a worse fix than ever.
Twice tonight she had been turned down by nervous imitiations of men. Two different sets of hands had fondled her bare breasts. She had shown her naked body to a stranger, given him a good look at everything she had, and the best he could think of doing was knocking her to the floor.
Now she had to have a loving. She'd go wild if she didn't. Two frustrations within two hours had left every nerve in Kathryn's youthful, passionately voluptuous body throbbing in wild yearning.
Where to go, though?
Ring doorbells and say, "Excuse me, but I'm loving my way through the building, and I was wondering if you'd like to take a tumble or two?"
Kathryn saw her answer. She wouldn't have to do anything as wild as that.
All she had to do was go to the superintendent.
The super was a young Cuban refugee, about twenty-eight or so, who had been working in the building for the past year and a half. He was sexy in a Latin way, very dark very sleek, very graceful.
He had flirted with Kathryn many times, with winks and grins and an occasional soft phrase in Spanish. He had never actually made a pass, though. He was smarter than that. It was worth his job to make overtures to the nubile young daughters of tenants, and he knew that jobs weren't so easy to find when you were a Cuban refugee.
Kathryn had a pretty good idea that he could be made, though. She would flip her wig entirely if he turned her down too. But she doubted that he would. He had the hots for her. And he was probably in a state of mind where he wouldn't object to a nice easy conquest. He had a wife, a skinny, worn-out little girl who looked twice her real age because she had had four children in five years. Right now she was pregnant again, blown up like a balloon, and Kathryn was willing to bet that with his wife in the eighth or ninth month the Cuban hadn't had any action for six weeks or more.
He'd be ready and eager.
She went down to the basement and rang his doorbell.
Then she waited. It was past ten o'clock at night, and the super didn't often get called to the door at that hour. Moments passed. She heard babies crying and the sound of a radio blaring in Spanish. She debated ringing the bell again.
Then the door opened. The super stood there, a slim, shiny-haired man who managed to look dapper even when, as now, all he was wearing was an undershirt and a pair of soiled khaki slacks.
"Yes?" he said. "Is something wrong?"
"Hello, Juan. I need you to do something for me."
Be frowned. "It's pretty late-"
"Take a look," Kathryn said, and opened the front of her trench coat. She gave him a good view, a clear glimpse of her high, swelling young breasts, her flat stomach, the firm thighs and dark allure. Then she closed the trench coat again. "Let's go somewhere private."
Juan looked dazed. The brief view of her nudity had been so unexpected that it stunned him. He started to speak, but the words came out in Spanish, and he had to change gears and start all over again.
"Do I understand what you want?" he asked.
"It isn't hard to figure it out. Come on, Juan. I'm lonely. You're supposed to fix all the tenants, troubles. So fix mine."
He shook his head in disbelief, then grinned at her Turning, he shouted a couple of sentences into his apartment, to his wife, who was not in sight. He spoke in Spanish. Though he spoke quickly, Kathryn had had enough Spanish in high school to get the drift of what he was saying. He was telling her that one of the tenants needed some emergency work done, and he would be back in a little while.
Kathryn smiled. It wasn't really a lie.
The superintendent stepped out into the hall with her and shut the door.
"This is not a joke?" he asked.
"This is not a joke."
"Will you get me in trouble for it?"
"Listen," she said, "don't ask a lot of stupid questions. I want you, and you want me. That's all there is to it. I'm not up to anything. Will you give me what I want, or do I need to go looking for a man?"
A muscle rippled in his cheek. "Come with me," he said.
Kathryn followed him through the dark, winding labyrinth of the basement. He produced a chain of keys and opened a door. They went into a musty-smelling storage room. The superintendent switched on the light. There were old bicycles and steamer trunks piled up everywhere.
There was also a mattress.
"Wait," he said. "I fix."
He found a tennis racket that somebody had stored down there and pounded it against the mattress. Clouds of dust rose and drifted toward the ceiling.
He went on pounding until the mattress was reasonably clean and almost all the dust was circulating in the air.
"Give me the coat," he said to her.
Unabashed, Kathryn slipped out of the trench coat and stood there in complete nudity, her jutting breasts rising and falling rapidly in sensual agitation. But the slim Cuban paid little attention to her bod ' at the moment. He seized her trench coat by the shoulders and waved it in the air, blowing the drifting dust away into the far corners of the room.
Then he spread the coat out over the mattress, covering it almost entirely. Finally he turned to Kathryn. His eyes sparkled with desire. He reached for her; she rushed to him, and his hands closed on her pulsating, throbbing breasts, and her body writhed against his.
She could feel the musculature of him through the soiled clothes he was wearing. Excitement coursed in her veins. He would not disappoint her, she knew. This long evening of frustration would have a happy ending.
His mouth covered hers. He kissed her ardently, passionately, the kiss of a man who has not been near his lazy, pregnant wife in many weeks, and who is seething with inner hungers. His hands groped at her breasts, her buttocks. His breath was not against her cheeks.
Then he let go of her. He stepped back. Without a word, he began to strip.
His naked body was everything that Kathryn expected it to be. He was lean and hard, impressively male. His hips were narrow and his chest was deep. There was practically no hair on him, and his Latin skin was gleaming brightly with perspiration.
He pointed to the mattress.
"Lie down," he said.
She sprawled out, back and buttocks against her trench coat, breasts and knees upturned to him. He knelt above her. Almost reverently, he put his hands on her breasts, gripped them a moment, then drew his fingers down the front of her body until they came to the warm, palpitating flesh of her yearning thighs.
He touched her. Then he put his lips to her.
He didn't stay there long. It seemed to Kathryn that he was not accustomed to that sort of lovemaking, and that he was doing it simply because he believed that an American girl would like it.
This particular American girl liked it very much. She tossed her thighs, closed her eyes and lay back, enjoying his intimate caress.
Then, slowly, his body slid down to cover hers. She felt him becoming insistent. She was wild and eager, and she thrust upward, capturing him. With a little sigh, he drove himself to her.
At last! Kathryn thought.
It had been a long, long evening. But now she was at the end of the rainbow, the pot of gold.
She moved beneath him, putting all the agility and energy of her youthful body into her thrusts. He met her with answering thrusts of power and poise. He was like a coiled spring, tensed, ready to unwind in a shimmering flash.
Most of the boys that Kathryn had been to bed with in her two-year career of infamy had been high school kids, sixteen, seventeen years old. They were enthusiastic and energetic, but they didn't really know much about the fine points of love, and their idea of lovemaking was to get aboard and thrash away clumsily for a few minutes. Usually they reached the finale pretty fast, though most of the time Kathryn had been able to get some satisfaction, anyway.
Only a couple of her sleeping partners had been what could be called experienced men: a college junior who had been around some, and another fellow who was in his early twenties. But now, in the arms of the Cuban, Juan, Kathryn discovered that she had never really tasted the ultimate joys of the body before. All her other lovers had been clumsy buffoons. This one was a man.
He had finesse.. He had inner confidence. He had a full ration of virility.
He slammed her, eased off, slammed again. His lean body was tight against hers. She felt the smoothness of the skin of his practically hairless chest against the deep bowls of her breasts. Her hard nipples dug into him. Her heels latched onto his calves. Her hips vibrated as she thrust against his virile assaults.
There was a burning sensation within her, ecstasy breaking loose, a conflagration of passion.
Kathryn felt the thrashing of his fullfillment.
In answer came the powerful spasms of her own.
As she writhed, naked, gasping and ecstatic on the musty mattress in the dusty cellar storage room, with the Cuban's hard, muscular body pressing down against her, Kathryn felt sizzling, incredible sensations of completion rocket through her. It had been worth the wait, she thought. Worth having to put up with Freddy and that other creep tonight. Because if they hadn't turned her down, she would never have experienced this, and this was an experience that she was never going to forget.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jim McHughes stared gloomily around the long, high-ceilinged room that was his studio. He didn't feel like painting. He felt like smashing things, like knocking down the walls with his fists.
He was in love. He had asked a girl to marry him, and she had said yes. So why was he alone here in his studio tonight? Why was Ellen in her apartment with Brubaker? It didn't make sense. She didn't seem to understand how cruel she was.
He could take only so much of this treatment. And then he would blow his stack.
McHughes could understand it if she didn't see any men at all, himself included. After all, she was in the process of getting a divorce, and you were supposed to live a pure life until your papers came through. So she could tell him, "I've got to keep away from men for a little while longer, and then I'll be yours." He could accept that.
But no. She slept around like a wildcat. She'd gave herself to him, yes, but she was also still falling flat for her ex-husband. and for other men too. Including this Brubaker, her boss: a fat, greedy sadist who got his kicks by spanking her pretty pink buttocks be fore he drove himself to her brutally to take his pleasure.
It makes me sick, McHughes thought.
I ought to have my head examined for putting up with a deal like this.
The trouble was. he loved her too much. And so he swallowed it when she told him that she wanted to have some bachelor-girl freedom before they got married, that she wanted to go out and sin. He had been tolerant about it at first. Since neither of them pretended to be a virgin, it wouldn't really harm things if she had some loving outside marriage before she got tied down again. But she was carrying it too far.
And the men she was doing it with! A weakling like her first husband, who couldn't seem to get the message that he didn't belong in her bed any more. And this Brubaker, who got her from sheer blackmail. Was that freedom? It didn't seem that way to Jim McHughes.
How long would this go on?
He had tolerated it for months. But now his patience was running out. Even though he was an artist, McHughes had certain old-fashioned ideas about marriage. One of those ideas was that the husband and the wife were supposed to sleep with each other and with nobody else. If he and Ellen were going to get married in the fall, it was high time that she got in a little practice in fidelity.
McHughes had been faithful to her, pretty much, since their engagement. At first, in the fine romantic flush of being in love, he hadn't even looked at other women. Later on, after Ellen quite honestly had told him that she still meant to sleep around for the next few months, his attitude had changed. Angrily, he had balled a couple of chicks just to show his displeasure. Lately he had been keeping himself in check again, trying to set a good example for Ellen.
Not that she paid any attention, though.
He was in a mean mood tonight. He felt brutal and angry. It was the second night in a row that he had had to do without Ellen's company. Last night she had been bouncing the bed springs for somebody, maybe the cast-off husband, and tonight she was with that slob Brubaker, and here he was, on the outside looking in.
He paced tensely around his studio. Finished and half-finished paintings were everywhere, the signs of his success. But success seemed pretty hollow tonight. What good was having the public wild about your work, if you couldn't keep your own love life in order?
McHughes had been painting about eight years. He had a natural gift for color, a natural eye for abstract painting, and his bold, dramatic, oversized canvasses had caught instant attention in the overcrowded art world. They had begun selling right away. Now he had five or six paintings in major museums, and sold everything that he put on the market. He was getting as much as 85,000 for a large painting, and he sold eight or nine paintings a year. He painted more than that, but he kept the rest on hand as a rainy-day fund. A kind of investment against the future. If you flooded the market with your own stuff, you'd only succeed in breaking your price, unless you were somebody like Picasso. Jim McHughes was good, but he wasn't Picasso. So he stashed his paintings away waiting for the strategic time to dole them out on the market.
He couldn't complain about the way his art career had worked out. He had started painting almost as a lark, and it had turned into a profession that was rewarding financially and creatively. He was a popular artist, and the people whose influence counted in the art world liked him personally, maybe because he looked and acted so little like the typical artist. But tonight he was willing to trade his fame for a better relationship with Ellen. He had to get this business straightened out before it tore him apart.
He looked at his watch. Half past nine.
Brubaker was with her now, he thought. He closed his eyes. The scene leaped unbidden into his mind. Ellen, stark naked, lying across the fat man's lap. Her pink, tender buttocks upturned, two curved, delicious mounds of attractive, succulent flesh. His hand descending, again and again, slapping the taut globes. The flesh leaping and quivering under the impact of each spank, growing rosy red.
And then Brubaker on top of her-taking her, soiling her McHughes ground his hands together, cracked his knuckles ferociously. He felt like a caged tiger.
I've got to get out of here, he thought.
Get some action. Get even with Ellen.
He hurried out of the loft building where he had his studio. It was a mild, pleasant spring night. Walking quickly, in his long, loping strides, McHughes turned the corner, headed for the little coffee shop on the next block. He had spent a lot of time there before he met Ellen. There were always girls there.
Available girls.
Old friends. Pals of his student days who wouldn't mind a loving with him now that he was rich and famous. He didn't think he'd have any trouble making a pickup to share his pad for the night.
He was right.
The place was swinging as he walked in. At every table he saw people deep in conversation, earnest-looking, bearded men, girls in leotards and black sweaters, the whole beatnik bit. Jim McHughes had never bothered to grow a beard. He didn't have to advertise that he was an artist. He would leave that kind of stuff to the arty types, the ones who talked a good game but never produced anything.
A bunch of people waved at him. Some of them looked familiar, the rest were just waving because he was the Jim McHughes and they wanted to associate with the famous man. McHughes waved back but didn't go over to any of the tables. He looked around carefully.
He saw what he wanted.
A slender brunette with high cheekbones and bright, sparkling dark eyes. Her deep blue polo shirt out-lined the jutting mounds of two provocative-looking breasts. She was an eye-catching chick, and she was smiling at him; she looked like she'd go like sixty. He knew her vaguely; her name was Cleo something, and she was a would-be artist of sorts.
She was sitting alone. She looked like she was very much available.
McHughes made a beeline for her. She would do very well to help him even the score with Ellen. She was stacked and good looking, and from what he remembered of her reputation, she was supposed to be a hot chick.
He looked down at her. "Mind if I sit down here a while?" he asked.
"Make yourself comfortable."
"I'm Jim McHughes," he said, sliding in opposite her.
"I know. I've seen your work. It's very good. I'm Cleo Morris."
"Hello, Cleo. Buy you a cappucino?"
"Sure-Jim."
He called a waiter over. In this place it was hard to get quick service, but obviously he counted-and ordered. Cleo was giving him the eye. She had bedroom eyes. Also bedroom thighs, he figured. Her breasts were going up and down nicely inside her polo shirt. He was eager to get his hands on those sweet, pink boobs of hers. That would help him forget what Ellen was up to at this precise moment.
He said, "After we have our coffee, what do you say we cut out of here?"
She winked. "Why not?"
"My pad's just around the corner."
"You've got a date," she said.
I'll have more than that, too, he thought. The coffee arrived. "Mud in your eye," he said.
Then someone else arrived, another chick.
She came out of the little girls' room in the back of the coffee house and made her way with switching hips toward their table. She was a leggy strawberry blonde whose loose plaid blouse was not loose enough to hide the fact that she was the possessor of a stupendous pair of bazooms.
She was wearing a puzzled smile, too. She came over and pulled out a chair, and suddenly Jim realized that Cleo had not been alone after all, that she had been sharing the table with a girl friend.
Cleo said, "Jim McHughes, Peggy Gardiner. Peggy's my roommate."
"The Jim McHughes?" Peggy asked.
"I was afraid you'd say that," he answered. "Yes, I'm the Jim McHughes. Want an autograph?"
She giggled. "I didn't mean to blurt it like that. The words just came out. I mean, I dig your work. That's all. I don't want to embarrass you or anything."
"Honest praise is never embarrassing," McHughes said.
Cleo said, "Peggy, Jim and I were just about to cut out of here and go over to his pad. You don't mind, do you?"
"Private party?" Peggy asked.
"I don't know," Cleo said. She looked at McHughes. "Jim, will three make it a crowd?"
That baffled him. Certainly she knew that he hadn't invited her to his apartment to look through his press clippings. Now she was ringing Peggy in on the deal. Did that mean Cleo was trying to get out of making love with him? Or did it mean-
He looked at them both.
I'll be damned, he thought. There was no mistaking the look on their faces. It did mean just what he thought it was supposed to mean.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, sure. Come one, come all. We'll have ourselves a ball."
They drained their coffee, and he led them out of there. Five minutes later he was letting them into his studio. He felt a little edgy about this. It wasn't that he was afraid he lacked the virility to swing it, because he knew he could make love half a dozen times a night and not feel winded. No, he was just puzzled by the protocol of the arrangement. He was built like most other men, in that he was anatomically capable of taking on just one chick at a time. In that case, how was he going to Play it by ear, he decided.
"Thirsty?" he asked.
"What's to drink?" Cleo said.
"Red wine, very dry. Interested?"
They were interested. He poured tall glasses of Dago red for them, put a Segovia record on the stereo, and let them wander around, digging his private collection of his own paintings. They were pretty perceptive. The comments they made weren't simply of the ooh and aah school of criticism.
After a while, McHughes filled everybody's wine glass a second time.
After a shorter while, Cleo took her polo shirt off.
She didn't make a production out of it. She didn't even say a thing, no little quips, no self-conscious remark about making herself more comfortable. She jusj peeled the polo shirt off and put it down on the back of a chair.
She wasn't wearing a brassiere. McHughes studied her breasts with an appreciative eye. If she wasn't abashed about showing them off this way, he certainly wasn't going to be coy about staring at them. They were nice boobs, round and white and firm, with the nipples standing up tall and hard. The twin globes swayed prettily as she moved around the studio.
McHughes figured that Peggy would find some way to meet the competition and upstage Cleo if she could, while still being as cool about it as Cleo had been. It didn't take long for Peggy to find a way. She asked McHughes where the John was.
He showed her. He was a little puzzled, because it was only an hour or so since she had come out of the John at the coffee shop. Did she have a weak bladder or something? But when she emerged again, he realized that she hadn't particularly been going to answer a call of nature. She came out with her slacks and panties draped over her arm. She put them down on a chair too, and stood there in just her plaid blouse.
"Is this one of your early paintings?" she asked, as cool as a cucumber.
Cleo had to grin. Peggy had one-upped her in spades! McHughes stared. There was something unusually erotic about a half-naked girl who was stripped from the waist down. He eyed the flat abdomen, the generous buttocks, the trim thighs, and the womanly contours. Cleo, simply displaying her breasts, had real ly lost the round. Because Peggy was showing off the essential stuff, and at the same time was managing to arouse more excitement by letting McHughes wonder about the contours of her breasts.
Of course, he didn't have to wonder long.
The three of them settled down on the rug in the long studio room. McHughes poured some more wine. He looked at Peggy and Cleo and said, grinning, "Between the two of you I've got one completely naked girl, huh?"
They grinned, too. Peggy leaned back and moved her legs in a not very subtle invitation. Cleo stretched, making her heavy breasts rise. They were turning it into a game. Well, he could play along.
He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off.
That was Cleo's cue. She removed her slacks and sat there in black silk panties.
Without breaking the smooth flow of the conversation, Peggy dispensed with the plaid, loose-fitting blouse, so that her only article of clothing was her bra.
McHughes took off his trousers.
Cleo got rid of the black silk panties. She was the first of them to be totally nude and she enjoyed it, stretching out voluptuously on the rug. Her legs were trim and shapely, her thighs on the lean side, making an odd contrast with the abundance of her buttocks.
Peggy ended the suspense by unhooking her bra. Her gigantic breasts tumbled free. There were red lines on the pale flesh where the bra had struggled to confine the globes of sensuality.
Over to me, McHughes thought. He disposed of his undershorts. The three of them, completely naked, remained chastely apart On the floor, talking about or art and pop art and serial music as though for all the world they were in the middle of a coffee shop.
Then McHughes decided it was time to speed things up. He saw both girls staring hungrily at him. They wanted him. and he wanted them, and it was appropriate to stop playing it so cool.
He reached over into a drawer and pulled out a deck of cards. Riffling out the deck, he extended it toward Cleo.
"Pick a card, any card."
She drew. Jack of diamonds.
"Now you," he said.
Peggy picked. Queen of spades.
"Tough luck. Cleo," McHughes said. "You've got to wait for seconds."
He reached out for Peggy. She moved to him easily and her nude, full-blown form glided into his arms. His mouth took hers. His hand went to her thighs. Her heavy breasts pressed against him.
But Cleo was not to be denied. Her fingers snaked their way between the two interlocked bodies and took a firm grasp on McHughes. She began to slide her hand. McHughes didn't want to disappoint her. He had one hand left, and he put it to good use.
Now he was exploring two girls at once. Not a bad life, he told himself. They crawled all over him, rubbing their hard-tipped breasts and hot thighs against him.
But the cut of the cards still ruled. In a few minutes, McHughes found that he could hold out no longer. He drew Peggy's white thighs to him and struck.
She was good. She was nice and warm, and she knew how to use her muscles. McHughes closed his eyes and began, loving her good and hard. At the same time, Cleo buzzed around the perimeter of the scene, and McHughes kept one hand with her, working hard on her. Then they made a Jim McHughes sandwich, with Peggy below him and Cleo on his back.
He rammed, paused, rammed again.
Peggy gasped and sighed. And exploded with passion. She thrashed in violent gusty throbs of delight. McHughes, his eyes closed and his jaws clenched, withheld himself, refusing to spend his passion so soon.
Finally Peggy collapsed limply, her huge breasts heaving, gleaming with sweat.
"Over here," Cleo called. "My turn!"
She was ready and waiting for him. Her knees were in the air and they were waiting for a partner. McHughes stared at Cleo's desirable body. Then he crawled over to her, still throbbing with incompleted lust.
He topped her and took her.
She was a wild one. Peggy had a better build, with bigger boobs and longer legs, but Cleo was infinitely more skillful in the use of the equipment. She churned and wriggled, writhed and pranced beneath him. Another man, who had already been with Peggy long enough to bring her to a peak, would certainly have succumbed to ecstasy thirty seconds or less after joining the hellion that was Cleo. But Jim McHughes was not an ordinary man. He gritted his teeth. He hung on. He rode right along with Cleo.
He rode her up the road to blissville.
He galloped away on top of her, clutching her to him, flattening the hot-tipped globes of her breasts out against himself. Her legs wrapped themselves around him, and her hips ground madly. Her body first spasmed and then surrendered to the conflagration. First for her and then for him, and this time he did not try to hold anything back. He let all the pent-up desire that Peggy had aroused in him spend itself with Cleo. Bolt after bolt of electric delight went through him.
He held tight to Cleo, ploughing with mighty strokes until he had taken her right to the absolute summit of her pleasures. She made a little whimpering sound deep in her throat, and fell away from him.
Three naked, sweating figures lay sprawled out on the rug, cuddling up close together. McHughes had his head pillowed against Peggy's big breasts, and Cleo had her head in his lap, and Peggy had her head in Cleo's lap. So it was all nice and cozy, ring-around-the rosy.
Pretty good for openers, McHughes thought. But the night was still young.
About fifteen minutes slid by as they rested and gathered their strength. Then Cleo twisted her head over a little way on his leg. Her lips parted in a lover's kiss.
Her head moved slowly, while she kissed away his fatigue. The strength of him increased rapidly as she worked him over. McHughes started to breathe hoarsely. Strength was returning to him, flowing back with each sly little caress.
He twisted his head, too, moving slightly to the side so that instead of cradling the back of his head against Peggy's big boobs, he had his mouth on them. Peggy sighed in pleasure as McHughes opened wide and fastened to her tenaciously. He felt the hard, throbbing nipple against his tongue. It was a good sort of thing to feel.
In another moment he was throbbing with virility.
Cleo flung one leg over him. Her satin-smooth body rubbed provocatively against him. He twisted his hips and rose to the occasion.
At the same time he held on tight to Peggy's bosom, making maximum use of those sweet, giant globes of lusciousness. Peggy gasped and sobbed in rising excitement. McHughes did his best to keep her on a hot fire until he was ready to take care of her.
His writhing, driving body sent Cleo over the brink of fulfillment.
Then he pivoted and hurled himself to the ready, eager embrace of Peggy.
A little while later, both girls were lying spread-eagled and exhausted, and McHughes was pouring another round of wine for everybody.
They rested.
Then Peggy and Cleo put on a little show for McHughes. He sat there watching while they loved each other up, for his benefit and theirs. They rubbed nipples, and then they rubbed everything from top to bottom. They grappled and rolled over and over, hips thrusting and boobs jiggling, and as the two beautiful girls went through a full routine of Lesbian passion for him, with such expertness that he got a little suspicious of them, McHughes felt physical arousal be ginning to take hold of him once more.
He was ready for action again.
And he could see that he would go right on through the night, taking these two chicks in turn, then watching them love each other until his energies recovered. A pleasant sort of amusement.
But boring, in a way. Because neither Cleo nor Peggy meant a damn to him.
Ellen was the one he wanted.
And Ellen was in another bed tonight, far away, making another man happy.
That left his mood grim. He made up his mind that he was going to have a showdown with Ellen very soon and get this thing straightened out between them, once and for all.
But in the meantime he had Cleo and Peggy.
"Again?" Cleo murmured throatily.
"Climb aboard," Peggy urged.
"Yeah," McHughes said. "Yeah."
He reached out and grabbed a handful of flesh with his big right hand. Then he stuck out his left hand and caught hold of two more jutting bazooms. Flesh filled his hands. He squeezed. He grinned.
Then he moved forward and lost himself in a writhing tangle of lustful limbs.
CHAPTER NINE
Ellen's buttocks were still throbbing from the spanking that Brubaker had given them. The tender cheeks of soft flesh ached miserably. He had been rough with her tonight, even rougher than usual. How she despised him!
And how she despised herself, for having to yield to his filthy lusts!
Sprawled naked on the rumpled, untidy bed, Ellen watched Brubaker getting his clothes back on. It was a little before eleven o'clock. He was manipulating his necktie. He looked every inch the proper middle-class executive, well fed and well paid. In a little while he would be on his way home to the suburbs, to his tudor-style house and his dull wife and quiet bed.
He had had his fun for the night. And Ellen's buttocks tingled because the pudgy, balding man had chosen her as the source for his satiation.
"Something wrong?" Brubaker asked.
"Oh, no. Nothing at all."
"You look kind of remote."
"Just sleepy."
He grinned at her. "Get plenty of rest tonight. Tomorrow's going to be a back-breaker at the office."
"As usual."
"As usual," he agreed. He came over to the bed and tugged her to her feet. He let his hands rest on the ripe mounds of her breasts for a moment, cupping the twin heavy globes lightly. Then he stroked the satin of her buttocks. "Did I hurt you tonight?" he asked.
"Not really," Ellen lied.
"It's awfully good of you to put up with my cockeyed habits," Brubaker said. "Don't think I don't appreciate it, either. I'm very fond of you, Ellen. You mean quite a lot to me, you know."
Ellen kept her face expressionless. She felt just a little sick to her stomach. If he started to come on strong with a maudlin gratitude bit, she was very likely to vomit right in his face, she thought. All she needed right now was for him to make a little speech about how wonderful and understanding she was, how perfect.
He had had his kicks and he had loved her the way he liked to love a woman. Why couldn't he Just go the hell home, now. and spare her the speeches?
But he didn't mean to be maudlin. What he did was worse than maudlin.
He let go of her bare buttocks and took out his wallet. Then, as Ellen stared at him in amazement, he said, "I feel I ought to show my appreciation in some tangible way. This is a gift for you, Ellen. Simply to indicate how happy I am with our relationship."
And he put a fifty-dollar bill in her hand. Ellen was stunned.
She was so taken aback by his sudden gesture that she did not do-what she later realized she should have done-which was to wad the fifty up and fling it into his jowly face. Instead, she just stood there, stark naked next to the bed, with her cheeks flushing, her buttocks hot and tingling and her mouth stupidly open, holding the money in her hand and gaping while Brubaker smiled politely at her and walked out the door.
A moment later, Ellen snapped out of her freeze.
She gasped and stared at the money in her hand, and crumpled the bill up and flung it to the floor. Then she dropped face-down on the bed, her breasts swaying and jiggling as she landed, and buried her head in her arms as bitter sobs of shame racked her body.
The louse, she thought. The filthy stinker!
He wasn't content to make a pervert out of her. He had to turn her into a doxy, besides!
Of course, it had always been a kind of hustling that she had done for Brubaker. The understanding had been that the only way she could keep her job was to play patsy for his spanking habits. There was only one word that could describe that sort of relationship, since in effect she was selling him her body.
Even so, the prostitution had been indirect. He hadn't actually handed her a paycheck every time she pleasured him. But now the thick-headed baboon had come right out into the open. He probably thought he was doing her a great service, too-parting with fifty crackers was a major effort for a tightwad like Brubaker. And in doing it, he had made her eat dirt. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am, here's your fee, and out the door. It spelled out the truth of their relationship with no subtlety whatever.
The sobbing stopped. The bitterness remained. Ellen sat up, rubbed her bare breasts, ran her hands along her thighs. The fifty lay at her feet. She was tempted to flush it down the toilet. But she was realistic enough to know that such a grand gesture was only cutting off her nose to spite her face. The insult, unintentional though it had been, had already been given. The wound was open and bleeding. Tt was too late to refuse the money, even symbolically. So she might as well accept it for what it was, the wages of sin, and make some use out of it.
She put it in her purse. Then she walked slowly into the bathroom and got under the shower. She didn't have the patience for a bath tonight.
She turned the hot water on, as hot as she could stand it, and let it come cascading down over her nipples and breasts, over her stomach, over her thighs. She let the fiery sprinkles pepper her buttocks, easing the discomfort of the spanking. She soaped herself, trying to scrub away the stain that Brubaker's fingers had left on her flesh. She leaned back against the wall of the shower, exposed herself to the downpour, tried to cleanse herself of her sins. But she still felt filthy when she turned the water off.
She dried herself and got into a nightgown. She switched off the light. The tingling of her buttocks was starting to die down, now.
But sleep was a long time in coming.
And with sleep came dreams.
Ellen, moaning, tossing and turning uncomfortably in her bed, dreamed that she was out in some desert somewhere. Barren sand stretched to the horizon. The sky was painfully, blindingly blue, and the swollen yellow sun seemed to take up a quarter of the heavens.
She was lying face-down on the hot sand. Her limbs were tied, and she was spread-eagled, staked out on the desert with her arms stretching toward the east and west, and her legs pulled far apart. Searing sunlight danced across her back and the pale globes of her buttocks. The heat of the sand throbbed against her tender nude nipples.
There was a man standing over her.
He was nude, too. He had the pot-bellied body of Brubaker, but the face was the face of Jim McHughes, twisted and distorted by hatred so that the features could hardly be recognized. He held a whip in his hand, nine leather thongs studded with nails.
He raised the whip high.
"No," the staked-out Ellen whimpered. "No, please don't, please-"
The whip descended across her buttocks. The nails raked into the tender flesh and left streaks of blood. Ellen sobbed with agony. She recoiled and quivered, but the bonds that held each of her limbs were too strong to break. She could scarcely move. She just had to lie there and take it.
The whip fell again. This time the thongs raked her back. She screamed out.
"Have pity! Have pity!"
The only answer from the nude whipper was a demonic laugh of satisfaction-and another stroke of the whip.
It caught her across the backs of her thighs. New gouts of blood spurted from her flesh. Another stroke. Another.
The whipper was merciless, and the whip seemed to have eyes of its own. It sought out the secret places of her body, not content simply to torment the obvious targets of her back and buttocks. The whip passed across her thighs, the tips of its lashes bringing torment to the soft flesh of her legs. It raked the sensitive flesh and made her howl in unspeaekable agony. It landed in the blood-filled channels of the earlier cuts.
And the sun grew hotter and hotter, baking and broiling her as she lay on the desert sand. Sweat mingled with the blood of her whip-wounds. The sand on all sides of her naked body was stained with red.
"Harlot!" the whipper shouted. "Naughty girl!"
Each word brought a new stroke of the whip.
"Please stop," Ellen begged faintly. "You'll kill me ... please stop...."
"All right," came the booming voice high above her. "No more whipping."
There was a thudding sound as the whip, cast aside, fell to the desert sand near Ellen. She let out a sigh of relief. Thank God, she thought, as blood dripped from her blazing cuts. Thank God, no more pain.
And then the naked man, with the body of Brubaker and the face of McHughes, dropped down alongside her. Ellen winced and quivered as she felt his hands roughly examining her wounds, squeezing her back, clawing at her, throwing sand into the cuts. He laughed.
He gripped her buttocks, brutally grasping the tender, throbbing cheeks.
And then his body covered hers. She realized that he was going to take her, but not in the usual way. He was going to brutalize her.
He drove forward.
Ellen felt an instant of incredible pain, far more intense than anything caused by the whipping itself. There was sudden fire in her body, as the man struck at her roughly and continued to drive, mauling her, violating her body, hurting her wounds.
It was agonizing.
The man was without mercy. His heavy body was crushing her, and her wounds were like strips of fire, and above all there was that battering weight, tormenting her, shattering her, sickening her with its loathsome, twisted, forbidden fulfillment. She was like an animal, writhing on the blazing desert.
Ellen shrieked.
With the last strength left in her tortured body she cried out from the depths of her being, protesting the shameful violation, the perverted action, the agony of her flayed body. She sucked air into her lungs and spewed it out again in a wild cry of pain.
The scream was echoing in her ears as she woke up.
Ellen huddled in the darkness. She was bathed in sweat. For a moment, she was lost. Where was the desert sun? Where was the whip, where were the thongs that held her bound and spread-eagled? What had happened to the man who had violated her?
She touched her buttocks. They were not bleeding. There was no pain.
It had all been a dream, Ellen realized in wonderment. But so real-so real.
She could still feel the desert sun beating down, the heat of the sand against her breasts and stomach, the pain of the whipping, the dripping of her blood. Above all, she could feel the impact of that sudden weight, her wounded buttocks.
She was quivering with fright. She was afraid to go back to sleep. Who knew what nightmares might still be waiting for her on the other side of the barrier of wakefulness? Agitated, trembling, Ellen rose from the bed and paced about her apartment. It was four in the morning.
She wondered if she ought to call Jim. He would come to her, comfort her, love her. In his arms, she might be able to escape the fury of the nightmare.
She decided not to. She was afraid to face him just now, now that she was ridden with guilt and shame. The fact that he had entered into her dream was sign enough that she was guilty about him, that she felt ashamed for having sold herself to Brubaker and turned Jim away. She didn't want to have to see Jim now, to blurt out the truth of her shame, to beg him for forgiveness. It was better to wait until she was in a calmer mood before facing him. A drink, she decided.
She had never put the bourbon bottle away after Brubaker's departure. Now she grabbed it up and poured an inch of amber fluid into her glass. She gulped it down without bothering about ice cubes or mixer. The whiskey hit her stomach, hard, and she gasped at the impact.
That steadied her. She poured herself another inch and belted it down just as quickly.
Then she walked to the window and opened the blinds to look out at the night. A cool breeze was blowing. She welcomed it, after the torrid blast of the desert in that all-too-realistic dream. She glanced across the courtyard. Most of the lights were out. One apartment still was lit.
It belonged to the peeper, Ellen realized.
Was he still sitting by his window, monitoring some scene on her side of the building? Was somebody still up, perhaps performing some scene of erotic fervor that kept the Peeping Tom glued to his station?
No. Apparently not. She didn't see the little man at his window. The lights were on, but he wasn't huddled down behind his blinds. Ellen shrugged. Remaining at the window, she thought she caught sight of the man, fully dressed, wandering around in his apartment. Maybe he had a bad case of insomnia, she thought. Keyed up after watching everybody undressing and unable to get to sleep himself.
She couldn't help smiling. Here am I, she thought, peeping at the peeper. Spying at the spy.
She closed her blind again. She poured herself another shot of bourbon, and gulped it down. Then Ellen got back into bed. The cold sweat that her dream had induced was all but gone. Her heart's fearful pounding had just about returned to normal. The bourbon had made her mildly tipsy, blanking out the worst fears.
Sleep came again. This time the dreams were the usual sort, fragmentary bits and pieces of visualization, nothing so sustained and terrifying as that earlier nightmare. Now she was running naked down a street, her bare breasts leaping about; now she was lying on a bed, coupling violently with some unknown man; now she was swimming nude through a lake whose waters were red as blood. But the images came and went quickly as she made her journey through the world of the night, and she did not awaken again.
In the morning, she felt shaky and tense. The nightmare still haunted her. She could not forget the blaze of the sun, nor the feel of those whips, nor the man with the wrong face.
Nor could she forget the earlier scene, the one she had not imagined but unfortunately had lived the plump hand descending on her bare quivering buttocks, and then the same hand putting a fifty-dollar bill in her palm.
When she reached the office, Brubaker was already there. He gave her a pleasant, impersonal smile-he didn't believe in carrying after-hours relationships into the office at all.
"Good morning. Ellen," he said cheerily, boss-to-employee tone of voice. "Did you sleep well?"
"Very well, Mr. Brubaker," Ellen said in a low, bitter mutter, and clung tight to her self-control as she slid behind her desk.
CHAPTER TEN
Mr. Crispian had had a pretty rough night too.
The encounter with that shameless young minx, Kathryn, had left him practically devastated. After he threw her out of his apartment, he crouched shivering and stupefied, on the verge of complete collapse.
He was stunned for a whole host of reasons. One of the biggest was that for the first time in his career as a window peeper, one of the peep victims had not only detected him but had come around to visit him. That jeopardized all his security. So long as he was safe in his anonymity, there was nothing to worry about. But when the peeped-upon started letting him know that they were aware of his attentions, he was at their mercy. Whenever they chose, they could call the police and bring down on him the cataclysm that he dreaded.
He was shaken up for other reasons too, though.
There was the fact that the girl had entered his apartment and had stripped off her trench coat to reveal her naked body. All that flesh, so close to him. It blinded him. Looking at her bare body, her revealed breasts, buttocks, thighs and hips, was like looking straight into the sun. Mr. Crispian was not accustomed to such sights at close range. It suited him to see nakedness with a courtyard's distance in between. It rocked him to have a naked girl actually standing a few feet away, flaunting herself.
And he hadn't just looked. He had touched. He had put his hands right on her nude breasts, had felt those silken-smooth mounds of flesh within his fingers, her nipples like little pebbles pressing into the palms of his hands. His hands still tingled from that.
She had offered herself. She had been willing to let him have her. That terrified him. Vicarious sex, yes, that was wonderful-stare across the courtyard at the two Lesbians, fine. But to do it himself? No. No. He was afraid. The act of loving held terrors for him that he could not even give names to.
So he had chased her away. She had been angry at that. Furious. She had actually wanted to make love with him. Mr. Crispian was baffled by that. Never in his adult life had a woman showed such passionate desire for him.
Of course, he didn't deceive himself into thinking that it was he, J. Martin Crispian himself, that the girl wanted. She would take anybody. She had an itch, and he was there to scratch it for her, that was all. That was why she had come bursting into the sanctuary of his little apartment, bringing havoc into his orderly life.
And what would happen now?
Would she go to the police and report that he was a Peeping Tom? Would she spread more trouble for him?
She might. She had nothing to gain from it, of course, since she couldn't be accused of modesty, not after the way she had shown her nudity to him. She didn't give a damn whether he peeped at her or not. But she might want to stir up problems for him simply because he had refused her. It would be her sort of revenge. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and so forth.
Mr. Crispian was terrified.
He didn't know what to do or where to go. Run away, move to another house, to another city? No. He couldn't possibly do that. He had lived here for many years. He had built his whole life around this apartment. It was his shell, his hermitage. If he moved somewhere else now, how could he be sure that there would be anybody to spy on, like the blonde girl whose display of nightly nakedness was so dependable, so important to him.
But if I stay here, he thought, the girl may make trouble for me.
He paced around the apartment, hands locked behind his back, shoulders hunched forward in an old man's slump. His throat was dry with fear.
Maybe I ought to go back to the girl, he wondered. Sleep with her after all. Give her what she wants, and then I won't have to worry about her telling the cops. I'll apologize to her for throwing her down on the floor, for tossing her out of the apartment. I'll tell her that any time she likes, she can come here and go to bed with me, just so long as she doesn't make trouble. She's a beautiful girl. I could do a lot worse in bed.
No. No.
What am I saying?
The girl's under age. Fifteen, sixteen-how could I touch her? They'd put me away for a million years if they found out a man my age was sleeping with a teen-ager.
Anyway, she'd laugh in my face. She doesn't really want to sleep with me. It was just her mood, her whim this one night. If I went back to her, she'd spit at me and tell me what she thinks of me. And then she'd likely call the cops on me for molesting her.
Besides-besides, he was afraid to go to bed with a woman for any reason, and that was why he was afraid to go back to the girl Kathryn and start anything.
Mr. Crispian sat down on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. And, though he didn't want to think about such things, he found himself remembering the very last time he had actually slept with a woman.
It had been almost half his lifetime ago. More than twenty-five years back. But he could remember it as clearly as though it had happened last week.
He had been in his middle twenties, then. The pattern of his life had already been set. The thin, shy, hesitant boy had grown up into a thin, shy, hesitant man. His sisters had gotten married, all but the feebleminded one, and his mother was dead. Mr. Crispian was living by himself in a small rented room. He had a job, a dreary clerical post that brought him enough money to pay for his food and rent and clothing, with perhaps two dollars a week extra that he could put away as his savings.
His sex life had also settled into a regular pattern. After his spectacular initiation into physical pleasures by the fat woman he had ogled on the bus, Mr. Crispian had gone through most of his adolescence without any further adventures. He never dated girls. He never picked up streetwalkers. He just went through his quiet days.
One by one his sisters moved away, until at last he was alone, and Mr. Crispian discovered that he had a powerful need to look at women's bodies. His immodest nude sisters, flitting shamelessly around the house, had filled that need for him. But now they were no longer around.
He bought little packets of girlie pictures and stared feverishly at the breasts and thighs on the glossy prints, and sometimes, when he bought the expensive kind, he could see more than that, too. But they weren't good enough. They didn't satisfy him.
By the time he turned sixteen, Mr. Crispian was already a confirmed window peeper.
He would keep his eyes alert all the time. A flash of flesh at a window, a breast that poked momentarily out of a housecoat, a bit of thigh, a passing buttock; everything was exciting to him.
He walked through quiet neighborhoods late at night, crouching behind parked cars or peering around trees. He saw lissome adolescent girls, pale and slender, standing nude before mirrors as they wondered worriedly if their breasts were developing fast enough. He saw sloppy fat women with jiggling buttocks stepping from their baths. He saw dark-skinned housemaids slipping out of their uniforms.
He saw a lot. He remembered it all, and lay awake in the dark hours, reliving his vicarious thrills.
However, he still hadn't closed the door on real life entirely, not quite yet.
Though he didn't actively go looking, for sexual adventures, Mr. Crispian didn't turn away from an opportunity when it knocked at his door. For example, when he was in high school he found himself working on a project to sell savings bonds, and he and a girl named Margie became a subcommittee within the subcommittee to draw posters.
And he and Margie had to have a subcommittee meeting somewhere. So they had it at Margie's house, and it turned out that there was nobody home but him and Margie.
Margie was a short, full-blown girl with mousycolored hair and a fondness for orange lipstick. She had a chunky build, with heavy globular breasts that were always encased in a sweater a couple of sizes too small. Mr. Crispian didn't know it, but Margie was regarded by most of the other fellows as a dog, and she had trouble getting dates.
Margie took advantage of him.
They drew posters for a while in her quiet apartment. Then she put her crayon down and said, "You're a funny fellow, Marty. Always so quiet and shy."
"Can I help it?"
"You act like you're afraid of girls." She giggled. "Have you ever done it with a girl?"
"It?"
"You know. It."
Mr. Crispian reddened. He thought of Jenny, the plump woman who had picked him up that hot summer day at the bus stop. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I have."
"You're kidding me!"
"I swear it." He hesitated. "It was a long time ago. A few years. But I did it."
He wished she would change the subject. Instead, she came dangerously close to him and said, "If you're such a lady-killer, how come you're afraid of me?"
"Who says I am."
"Here we are all alone, and you haven't tried to do anything," she said.
"We're here to draw posters," he reminded her. "The posters can wait."
Suddenly she was wriggling voluptuously and pressing herself up against him, and he realized that he was going to score whether he liked it or not; because if he turned her down he'd make an enemy and get accused of being a sissy, and besides, why not do it as long as he got the chance?
Margie stripped completely naked for him. Her squat, heavy-breasted body was not quite delightfully attractive, but it would do. He touched her breasts. He put his hand on her legs. She opened his pants.
Then he embraced her and took her. He wasn't very skillful at it, but it didn't seem to matter. Margie huffed and puffed and seemed to get her pleasure almost the moment that he slid to her, and he reached his own peak soon afterward. When he rolled away from her, he stared at her naked body with deep interest, but now she seemed embarrassed rather than wanton, and ran into the bathroom with her clothes.
She came out fully dressed, and her eyes lowered like those of an abashed virgin. "You won't tell anybody we did it, will you?" she asked. "I mean, I don't want anyone to get the idea I'm that sort of girl."
But you arc that sort of girl, Martin thought. He didn't say it. He went back to drawing posters with her, and never touched her again.
There were other encounters like that, accidental ones, where he found himself in a position where it was easier to go to bed with a girl than to avoid it. He enjoyed sex. He couldn't deny that. But what he didn't enjoy was the embarrassment of personal contact with somebody else, the emotional and psychological aspects. He hated to be involved with other people. He just wanted to be left alone. The dizzying, delicious sensations of lovemaking weren't worth the price and the effort of seducing girls and giving them the illusion that he was in love with them.
So his actual physical experiences were widely spaced. After he left high school, they were even less frequent, because now Mr. Crispian no longer was in regular day-to-day contact with girls. The women at the places where he worked were generally either married and faithful or unmarried and ugly. That was fine with Mr. Crispian. He went his quiet way, did a lot of window peeping, and every five or six months found himself slipping between the sheets for a oneshot bed encounter with some girl who had ensnared him.
He thought he would go along that way forever. But then a girl fell in love with him, which didn't figure in his calculations at all.
Her name was Joanne. She was a secretary at the place where he was working at that time. She was slim and delicately built, with trim legs, a good bosom and glossy dark hair, and she might have been an attractive girl, even a beautiful one, except that fate had dealt her a joker between the eyebrows and the chin. She had a horrid face. Her nose was flat and stubby, her lips were thick, her cheeks were pocked with the craters of old acne scars, her teeth were widely spaced and crookedly set.
What good was it to have lovely thighs and high, firm breasts if no man would ever look at you because of your face? Joanne was twenty-three years old, miserable, and unmarried. She wasn't a virgin, because m the past she had managed to find a few men desperate enough to take her to bed despite her face. And they had found that the old joke was true: you could put a sack over her face and boff her for burlap. But once they had done that, they politely bowed out of the picture so far as marriage was concerned. A girl could wear a veil at the altar, and love was made in the dark, but what about the rest of the time?
So Joanne had no prospects for a husband, and she wasn't getting any younger. She looked upon J. Martin Crispian and found him useful. He was no bargain either, in looks or in personality, but he was male, employed, and single. She set out in all possible ways to snare him.
She wore low-cut blouses and found excuses to drop things in front of his desk and then bend over from the hips to pick them up. That was fine with Mr. Crispian. He was a peeper from way back, and he enjoyed the glimpses of full white breasts that such moments provided.
She also managed to let herself be seen adjusting her garters. Her legs and thighs were fine, Mr. Crispian thought. He wondered vaguely about her buttocks. But unfortunately there was no convenient way that she could show her bare backside to him at the office.
She made a play for him outside the office. She traveled home on the same bus he took, and talked with him, and wiggled around so he could look down her blouse. She tried to get him to invite her to his home. Mr. Crispian was repelled by the plainness of her face, and frightened by the voracity of her physical needs. So he steered clear of any invitations.
Finally Joanne invited him. And trapped him.
"I'm having a party," she said. "It's my birthday. Won't you come? I'll be terribly unhappy if you don't."
Mr. Crispian didn't like parties, but he was a gentle soul and hated to hurt anybody's feelings. So he accepted. On the following Saturday night, he put on his best suit and went to Joanne's party and when he walked in he made the jarring discovery that he was the only guest.
Joanne's outfit was a little startling, too. She wore a kind of negligee that swathed her in folds of black silk, and it was just gauzy enough to give the very definite impression that she was nude beneath. In his first startled glance, Mr. Crispian thought that he could see the dark circles of her nipples. Then she turned, leading him into the apartment. He looked more closely, when she had her back to him, and he saw beyond a doubt the firm white cheeks of her buttocks, dimly visible beneath her garment.
Her face was plastered with make-up. She was trying to hide the acne scars, and she more or less succeeded at that, but she couldn't hide her nose or her mouth or her teeth. Or her giddy, eager excitement.
"Have a drink," she said, practically forcing a glass into his hand.
Mr. Crispian had a drink. He had several.
Then he had Joanne.
There was no way of avoiding it. The lights were low, they were settled down on the couch, he was mildly gassed, and she was hot and yearning. She slipped his hand into her negligee and he felt firm ripe boobs. Nothing repellent about those, he thought. It didn't take long before the negligee was off, and he was looking at her milky-white body, and eyeing her high, steep breasts, sweetly contoured buttocks, and neat thighs with admiration.
"I'm not so ugly, am I?" she said. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with my body. You're a man of the world. You've seen lots of women. Tell me, am I built badly?"
"You've got a lovely body," Mr. Crispian said truthfully.
They went to bed, and he took her. He didn't do a very satisfactory job of loving her. She was so keyed up that she moved in a wild, berserk fashion beneath him. and her frantic heavings and jumpings caused him to reach his culmination too fast.
She was obviously disappointed. But she kept her pique under wraps.
"We'll rest a little while and try again," she told him.
Soon her hand was working on him, trying to get his flagging virility to rebound, and when that didn't work she applied her kiss, which did. And he took her again, and this time the loving was extremely satisfactory. Mr. Crispian moved to her and grabbed hrr breasts and then her buttocks. He bobbed on top of her while she gasped and moaned, sighed and sobbed, and soon he felt the delicious little quiverings of her body and that drew a quick burst of fulfillment from him. Afterward, he lay with his head pillowed on the cozy cushions of her breasts, and it occurred to him that she was certainly excellent to make love to, provided you didn't have to look at her face at all.
In the rapturous moments of the afterglow, Joanne did most of the talking. She told him how happy she was at this very moment and how lonely she had been. She spoke of her desire to be a wife and a mother. She asked him if he had ever thought of getting married.
"Not really," he said vaguely.
"I've often thought I'd make a good wife for some man," she said wistfully. "If only somebody would give me the chance to show him."
Hint, hint! Mr. Crispian knew what was bugging her, and he was afraid that she'd never leave him alone. Sure enough, half an hour later she came right out point blank and proposed to him. It wasn't even Leap Year, either.
"I'll have to think about that," he said. "It's a big step, you know."
He couldn't come right out and tell her that her face made him sick, could he?
For the next few weeks Mr. Crispian had something very much like a love affair going. Joanne didn't miss a chance to make love. She invited him to her place, and she invited herself to his. She even got him at the office. That happened one day when he had gone into the stockroom to do some inventory work by himself.
She followed him in and locked the door.
"I've got a present for you," she trilled.
"Oh?"
"This," she said, and lifted her skirt.
He saw her stocking tops, and the straps of her garter belt, and a lot of Joanne. She had taken her panties off. As she did a pirouette, he got the front view and then a look at the firm, inviting white buttocks. Very pretty. Too bad about the face.
She came toward him. She sat down on his lap and fluffed her skirt out over his legs. She reached underneath and unzipped his pants. Then she began to rock, and soon her ghastly face was twisted and distorted with her sensations of passion, and then she was finishing and so was he, and pleasure came in hot electric bursts.
Mr. Crispian wasn't too happy about such things, except at the very moment of passion. The rest of the time he wished she would let him alone. She didn't. She followed him around the office, tossing looks of melting love at him. She went on flaunting her body at him. When she got together with him in his apartment or hers, her physical demands were merciless. What troubled him was that everybody in the office knew what was goir" or. and it was turning him into a figure of ridicule. After all, it wasn't a matter of pride that the ugliest girl in creation had fallen for him. People started smirking knowingly at Mr. Crispian. He wanted to tell them, "You ought to see her legs! She's got terrific boobs! Her behind's fantastic! And she's red-hot in the sack!"
A lot of good it would have done. The people in the office wrote Joanne off as a horror. And any man who was known to be carrying on with her must certainly be a desperate one.
Finally things came to a head after the affair had lasted close to a month. She was at his apartment; they had made love, and it had been pretty highly satisfying. He had driven himself to her passion-hungry body, and her churning thighs had clasped him tightly; her big, firm breasts had drilled into him eagerly as they went rocketing off to the abyss of ecstasy.
And afterward she said point blank, "I've got to know, Martin. Are you just taking advantage of me, or are you going to marry me?"
He tried to stall. He said he needed to think about it a little more. But she was insistent. Maybe she hoped to stampede him to the altar, the way she had stampeded him into this whole love affair. From her point of view, pushing the issue made sense, because otherwise he might just drift along for years, sleeping with her but not giving her the married respectability she craved. She had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being insistent.
Mr. Crispian panicked, though. He wasn't being allowed to stall. So he came right out and said, "I'm sorry, Joanne. I guess I'll have to be frank. I don't want to marry you, I'm afraid."
That was when it bit the fan.
She blew up at him. Ranting and raving, racing around the apartment nude with her breasts all aquiver, she accused him of taking advantage of her, of cheating her, of lying, of breach of contract, of a million deceitful things. Mr. Crisipan protested mildly that he meant nothing personal, that he simply wasn't the marrying type in general; he'd be glad to go on seeing her, so long as it didn't involve a wedding. She screamed at him. She purpled the air.
Finally she got her clothes on. He took his last regretful look at her bare breasts, her delectable milky-white buttocks. Then she was dressed and gone.
The payoff came later. The next week at the office, he started getting peculiar looks from everybody. Whenever he spoke to anyone, he was met with stares and odd giggles. After ten days, he finally found out the story from one of the other clerks, a reasonably close friend.
Joanne had been telling tales about him. All over the office.
She had told people that he was impotent, that he was a pervert, that when he made love at all it was in disgusting and unnatural ways. She had gone into great detail about their love affair. Most of what she had said, so far as Mr. Crispian could tell, was the product of her own warped imagination. But it was pretty hair-raising.
He was humiliated on two counts. The fact that he had touched the pariah, Joanne, at all was pretty shameful. And even if he had done only half the revolting things she said he had, he would be judged a pretty weird sort.
Mr. Crisipan quit his job on the spot. There was no question of remaining there, even though it was a fairly nice post. He couldn't bear to face any of those people again after the things they had been told about him.
For the same reason, he moved to a different part of the city. He had to uproot his whole life because of Joanne. It taught him a lesson he never forgot.
In the twenty-five years that followed, Mr. Crispian had stayed out of the arms of women. He missed the sex at first, but as he grew older it didn't matter that much. And he was glad to do without the risks.
When you slept with a woman, you became vulnerable. She might try to pressure you into marrying her. She might spread vicious rumors about you. Safer to stay away-and peep.
That was what Mr. Crispian had done. But tonight it had backfired. His peeping had brought a live, voluptuous naked girl into his apartment. She wasn't looking for a husband, either. Just for passion. But he had been too deeply mired in his habits to give in to her.
Now he was scared. The image of that gleaming naked body blazed in his mind. His body throbbed with unfamiliar desires. What would happen? What trouble would this Kathryn stir up for him, now that he had refused her so rudely, pushed her and thrown her down?
He paced around his apartment until almost dawn. Then, fearfully, he slept for a while. When morning came, he did not feel quite so edgy.
But the fear remained.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jim McHughes woke as sunlight splashed him in the face.
He woke the way most men simply dream of waking. His head was on the bosom of a lovely naked girl, and another lovely naked girl had her head in his lap, giving him a friendly little good morning kiss.
He grinned at Cleo. He grinned at Peggy.
But he didn't take them. He had had more than his quota of that the night before. Again and again, body thrusting at body, writhing, stirring. He had made it with Cleo, and he had made it with Peggy, and Peggy and Cleo had made it with one another, over and over. Then they had slipped into a quiet doze as morning neared.
"Upsy-daisy," he said. "Let's all take a nice shower and then you two chicks clear out and let me get some work done, okay?"
They were hazy with sleep. McHughes tugged them to their feet and shepherded them into the bathroom. They moved sleepily, two nude, statuesque females whose breasts swayed enticingly with every lurching step.
It was pretty crowded with the three of them under the shower, but that wasn't anything to complain about. They soaped each other up, rubbing the slippery stuff here and there with a lot of giggling and chuckling, and then, when they were all soapy and lathery, they washed clean and got out.
McHughes passed towels around. They got dry, with many a hobbling of bosom. They were a cute pair, these two. Stacked, lively and sexy. He couldn't object to the way he had passed his night.
Except that he hadn't passed it with Ellen. Broads like these, sexy as they were, were a kopeck a dozen. Ellen was special. Ellen was his. Or so he thought. But she wasn't his enough.
Tonight would be the showdown, McHughes vowed. For sure, he'd get things straightened out.
Cleo and Peggy wanted to stay and play some more. "Sorry, girls," McHughes told them. "The fun's over. Daddy's got to work."
"Can't you work later?" Cleo asked.
"Don't tempt me," he laughed.
He gave them each one last good feel as a parting gift. He ran his hands over Cleo's silken boobs and satiny bottom, and then he filled his hands with the incredibly generous ripeness of Peggy's bosom, and stroked the cool, tender mounds of her backside, and then he aimed both of them toward their clothing and supervised them while they did a reverse of the strip tease of the night before.
It was past eleven in the morning before they finally cleared out. McHughes went through the studio, opening windows, letting the scent of last night's orgy wash away in the clean morning air. Then he picked up his brushes and started to tackle his current project.
He didn't feel much like working, though. He wanted to talk to Ellen.
But that would have to wait till later. He forced himself to push the paint around.
In early afternoon, he phoned her. She sounded tense and tired, as though she had had a busy night last night with little sleep. McHughes felt bitter about that. He didn't like to think about the things she might have been doing. Even though he had scarcely been a dutiful fiance, balling two chicks at once, his conscience was clear. He would never have picked up Peggy and Cleo in the first place, if Ellen had not forced him to look elsewhere for companionship. And he didn't see how he could be blamed for doing what he had done, when she had He preferred not to think about that.
He said, "I'll be over around eight-thirty or nine tonight, okay?"
"Whenever you come, okay."
"You don't sound enthusiastic."
"I'm tired, Jim. That's all."
"Rough night?" he asked sarcastically.
"A busy day," she said.
"How late did he stay?"
"Jim, please-"
"All night?"
"He left before eleven," she said. "Are you satisfied? Do you believe me?"
"Then why are you so tired?"
"I didn't sleep well," she said. "Bad conscience?"
"Could be," she admitted.
Somehow he used up the rest of the day. He didn't spend it very usefully. He wandered around his studio, looking at the unfinished paintings but not even considering working on them. Mostly he rehearsed the things he was going to say to Ellen, going over and over them in his mind until they echoed in his brain.
He couldn't help seeing Cleo and Peggy before his eyes. The two naked girls who had spent the night here with him still throbbed in his brain. Forget them, he thought. After tonight there won't be any more such little amusements. Just you and Ellen.
After a skimpy dinner, he set out for Ellen's place.
He got there a little late, about quarter to nine. When he ran the bell, the door opened immediately, as though she had been standing behind it waiting for his ring. She glided toward him and into his arms.
"Ellen," he murmured. "Ellen, darling-"
She looked radiant, magnificent. She was wearing a pink, filmy negligee, but it didn't hide her body in the slightest. McHughes could see the white, ripe, luscious globes of her breasts within the material.
He folded her into a tight embrace. The deep bowls of her breasts crushed against him. His mouth sought hers. Her lips were soft against his, and his tongue plunged deep. She dug her fingers into the muscles of his back as they kissed each other passionately.
His hands roved Ellen's body. He cupped one thrusting breast, feeling it warm and hard-nippled through the negligee. Then he slid his hand down her back, finding the twin mounds of her buttocks and grasping the resilient flesh with the tips of his fingers.
Then he let go of her.
She was panting and gasping with desire. Her face was flushed, her eyes were glassy. Her breasts were heaving in agitation, and clearly visible through the gauzy fabric were the tall, hard, excited nipples, thrusting up like little red towers.
"Get undressed, Jim," she said in a harsh, passion-wrought voice. "Hurry up! Let's go to bed!"
He shook his head. "Not so fast. First we have some talking to do."
"We can talk later, Jim." She came toward him again, her breasts swaying, her lips parted, her tongue flickering between them.
He held up one hand as though to push her back. "I'm serious, Ellen. We've got a lot to discuss, and I want to get it over with before any distractions set in."
Ellen sighed. "All right. What is it, Jim."
"I think you can guess,"
"Are we going to have another one of those discussions, Jim?"
"We're going to have the last of those discussions," McHughes told her in a flat voice. He folded his arms and stared levelly at her. The lure of her almost nude body was a powerful one. He could see those ripe, swelling curves beneath her filmy negligee, but he refused to let the magnetism of her seductive thighs and breasts sway him from his purpose. He said coolly, "I want all this crud to stop, Ellen."
"I told you. In a few more months-"
"No. Now."
"Don't pressure me, Jim."
"Listen, Ellen, the kind of relationship we have now is absolutely crazy. You know what I did last night? I went out and picked up a chick named Cleo in a coffee house, and I took her home and balled her. And because Cleo happened to have a pal along, I took the pal home, too. Two of them. Cleo and Peggy. Peggy had a pair of boobs on her out to here. We made it maybe half a dozen times last night."
"Are you bragging about your prowess?" Ellen asked sarcastically.
"I'm telling you what you forced me to do. Do you think I enjoyed doing it?"
"It sounds as if you did."
McHughes shook his head. "I enjoyed the physical part of it, the animal part, sure. But that's irrelevant. What I hated was the fact that I could have been having you in my arms instead of those two wild chicks. Only I couldn't have you, could I, Ellen? Because you were here, getting spanked by Brubaker. Getting your fanny tanned by that fat, middle-aged, stinking pervert."
Ellen bit her lip. "I would have been with you if I could have been, Jim."
"You say that. But you don't mean it. Think about it, Ellen. Why were you with him? Because you didn't say no. That's all. If you had spoken up and told him to go to hell with his spanking-"
"He'd have fired me."
"What of it? I can support you."
"We aren't married yet, Jim. I can't take the risk of throwing up my job until I've got that ring on my finger. It's a damned good job. The pay-"
"To hell with the pay," McHughes said. "What is it, a hundred fifty a week? T'd pay you a hundred fifty a week just to spit in Brubaker's fat face!"
"That would make me a kept woman, wouldn't it?"
"Is a wife a kept woman?"
"Sometimes she is." Ellen replied evenly. She shook her head. "No, Jim. I don't want any money from you. I just want you to bear with me. If you'll be patient-"
"I can't be patient any longer. This is tearing me in half, Ellen."
"Just a few months," she said.
"Not even a few hours. Here's what I want, Ellen. Stop sleeping around. No more spanking parties with Brubaker, no more giving in to your sniveling wreck of a husband, and no more fun with oddball guys on the side. Give up all sex, except with me. I'll do the same. We'll act as if we're man and wife, except that we won't be living together until your divorce decree comes through. And then-"
"No, Jim."
"No?"
"I've explained this half a billion times," Ellen said. "I need these few months of freedom between my marriages. T want to hell around. You don't know how it is. You've been free all your life, and if you want to boff two chicks a night, or three, or seven, you just go out and get them and do it. But I've had it differently. I've been a married woman, and now I want my fling."
A muscle flickered in his cheek. Tension roiled his guts. McHughes said, "You've been separated from Ray Dawson for more than a year, haven't you? That's a pretty good fling, I'd say. You've had lots of fun. How much more freedom do you want? A year? Two years?"
"Just the next few months, Jim." She smiled thinly at him. "Let me have my adventures a couple of nights a week. And you have your Cleos and your Peggies. And then-"
"I don't want that, Ellen."
"But I do."
"Then we'll have to take some drastic steps," McHughes said. "Such as?"
He took a deep breath. "I love you very much, Ellen; that should go without saying. But I'm not going to let you torture me this way any more. It's got to be one way or the other. Either you stop going to bed with the other men or you stop seeing me altogether."
It was a bluff. He didn't know how he could possibly get along without Ellen as a part of his life. But he had to do something to spare himself this torment.
He stared levelly at her.
Ellen said, "You're trying to blackmail your way into getting a monopoly over me."
"All I want is what any engaged man is entitled to have from his fiance." he replied. "Decency. Fidelity. Old-fashioned things like that."
"And if you don't get them?"
"Then I'll walk out. And I won't be coming back," McHughes said bluntly.
"In other words, I give in or we break up?"
"That's it."
"I guess it's good-bye, then, Jim. You aren't going to push me around like this. I love you and I want you, but I'm not prepared to let you dictate to me about my life until the proper time comes."
McHughes gaped at her in disbelief. Was she bluffing, too? Was this a test of strength?
There was a red haze of anguish before his eyes. He couldn't accept the idea that Ellen was so wedded to her life of promiscuity that she would risk their breakup rather than abandon her wildness.
And yet she seemed serious.
"Do you mean that, Ellen?"
"I mean that. Yes."
Something snapped in McHughes. He knew that from this moment on, his love for Ellen was dead and could never be brought back to life. She had defied him; she had virtually declared war on him. He could not love a woman who openly admitted giving herself to other men, to weaklings, to perverts, to strangers. There were depths of evil in her that he could not begin to understand. And he saw that he had no assurance that she would ever stop sleeping around, even after their marriage. If he married her, he was letting himself in for constant uncertainty, for a cuckold's horns, for shame and torment and bitterness. He would not marry her.
But neither, he thought in a wild surge of emotion, would anybody else.
"All right, Ellen," he said in a voice so thick with passion that he could scarcely recognize it in his own ears.
"If that's the way you want it to be."
"Jim-"
He stepped toward her. Her eyes widened, and she gasped in alarm and tried to back up, but McHughes moved faster than she did. His big, powerful hands rose and clasped themselves around Ellen's throat.
"No-" she choked.
His hands tightened.
He felt the softness of her skin as he gripped her. Like satin. Like fine silk. And the eyes, so blue. The hair, so golden.
Grasping her throat tightly, McHughes began to shake her, until her head rocked from side to side as if it would fly from her shoulders. Within the filmy negligee, the succulent, tantalizing white globes of her flawless breasts jiggled and quivered like mounds of jelly. McHughes stared fixedly at the globes of delight. But he did not let the provocative near-nudity of her distract him.
She fought-with ever lessening strength. She hammered at him and clawed him.
His hands tightened.
Her face was red and blotchy now. He felt a strange calmness. She would die, he thought, and then he would be free of his torment. He would no longer have to worry, each night that he spent away from her, that she was engineering some loathsomely perverse act of sensuality. He would be free at last! Tighter-Tighter.
She was sagging. Consciousness was leaving her now, McHughes realized Tighter.
The window! The window's open!
McHughes realized suddenly that in his single-minded determination to have it out with Ellen, he had forgotten all about the blinds. As usual, she had left the blinds undrawn, for in her shameless way she seemed to enjoy putting her nude body on display for any onlooker on the far side of the courtyard.
If Ellen wanted to show her naked flesh off, that was her business. But McHughes did not feel like having an audience while he committed murder. Perhaps he had been seen already In that case he was as good as in the electric chair. But maybe luck was riding with him, maybe there still was time to ring down the curtain.
He released his grip on Ellen's throat. She hung bonelessly from his hands. Not dead yet, he knew he could see the mounds of her breasts still rising and falling within her garment. Well, he could finish the job in a moment. He eased her to the floor.
Then he walked to the window.
He looked out. Was anyone watching? It seemed to him that he saw a figure sitting in a window across the way. McHughes bit his lower lip tensely. Had he seen? Or was he just an old dodderer, staring myopically into nowhere as he used up another night of a dull, useless life?
McHughes carefully pulled down the blind and made sure it was completely closed.
Now to take care of Ellen, he thought. To finish in cold blood what he had begun in murderous rage.
McHughes started to turn.
There came a sudden impact, unexpected and incredibly painful, and he went stumbling forward in surprise and shock his face twisting with agony.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A DAY HAD passed since the big crisis of Mr. Crispian's life, and he was just starting to think that things were going to get back to normal.
The girl, Kathryn, the one who had invaded the quiet of his apartment with her wanton naked body, had not caused any trouble for him-none that he knew of, anyhow. He assumed that if she had complained to the police about him, he would have heard from them by this time. Perhaps she had thought things over and decided that the safest thing from her point of view was to forget the whole business.
Of course, Mr. Crispian couldn't forget it. It was impossible to blank from his mind the fact that a stark naked sixteen-year-old girl had stood right over there, daring him to take her. Or that he had put his hands on her breasts and gripped those youthfully firm globes of seductive, hard-nippled flesh. Or that he had pushed her, and watched her land on her taut buttocks, with her legs flying apart.
All those things would remain burned into his memory forever. They would join such events in his life as his seduction by the plump woman, Jenny, so many decades ago, and the revolting things his feebleminded sister had forced him to do, and the episode of his love affair with Joanne. In a life that has had as few major events as Mr. Crispian's, nothing of such significance is readily forgotten.
But, he thought, he was going to have no other after-effects besides the memories. He would not have to move. He would not have to give up peeping, or expose his inner nature before the blunt, crude questions of coarse policemen. He would be able to go along as before, he hoped. He had his fingers crossed that no delayed-action booby traps would be waiting for him in the days ahead.
And so, when he got home from a troubled day of work and found that no policemen were lurking on his doorstep, Mr. Crispian allowed himself to slip back into the daily mold of his routine.
He settled down after dinner to scan the apartment windows on the other side of the building. Glancing first at the window of his most dependable victim, the busty blonde girl across the way, Mr. Crispian saw that her light was on. Good. Last night he had missed her, because of that telephone call. And then all his troubles had started.
He examined some of the other windows. Kathryn's was dark. She was probably out with some teen-ager, getting made in a parked car. Mr. Crispian hoped she had a successful outing and came back fully satisfied, all her lusts quenched for the time being. Heaven help him if she returned in another rage of desire. She might come across the courtyard and stir up more problems for him.
There was the blonde now, Mr. Crispian saw.
He watched her as she moved around in the apartment. It was a little too early for her nine o'clock bath, he told himself. Right now she was wearing a smartly tailored suit. He waited patiently, swinging into the mood of expectation that came over him each time he pursued his hobby.
And she was starting to get undressed.
Mr. Crispian frowned. This was one of those rare nights, evidently, when she didn't follow her usual timetable. It was only half past eight. Well, he didn't mind that. He'd get himself a good eyeful. And once he had watched her undress, do her exercises and get into her nightgown, he could safely turn his attention to the other windows without fear of missing anything.
The blonde girl went through her usual nighttime pattern while Mr. Crispian stared in eagerness. She took off garment after garment, carefully hanging each one in the closet. She seemed to be in a happy mood, moving in a gay, lilting rhythm as she stripped.
Now she was down to her slip and underthings. Mr. Crispian's heart raced. The slip came off. She walked to the closet with it. His eyes zeroed in on the cheeks of her buttocks, firm and plump within her white panties.
Now she was turning. Taking off her bra. Baring the mounds of her breasts, full and heavy, tipped with the little cherries of her nipples. Mr. Crispian's face grew flushed. The sight of those big. white breasts reminded him forcibly of another pair, just as beautiful. Kathryn's. The breasts that he had seen at close range last night. The breasts that he had held in his hands.
Which one had better breasts? Mr. Crispian wondered. Kathryn's were slightly smaller, he thought. Not much, though, since both girls had well-developed bosoms. The schoolgirl's breasts were perhaps a trifle higher, closer together. The blonde's breasts were bigger, but they were a bit more widely spaced. The effect of being ten years older than Kathryn, maybe. But in both cases, the bosoms were fabulous, and it was impossible to find fault with either one.
Now the blonde was rolling down her panties.
Though Mr. Crispian had seen this sight a hundred times, he never grew weary of it. The same thrill as always stole over him as he contemplated the smooth columns of the thighs, the flat drumhead of the stomach.
She turned, showing him the luscious mounds of her buttocks. Mr. Crispian waited for the exercises, now. Get down, he thought. Touch your toes, wiggle your hips, make your boobs jump around! But exercises didn't seem to be on the docket tonight. He was going to be denied that fifteen-minute session of twisting, curvaceous flesh.
She slipped into a pink, filmy negligee. Mr. Crispian let out a sigh of disappointment that the show was being concluded so soon. Not that it was entirely over, though. Even across the whole distance of the courtyard. Mr. Crispian was still able to see the white globes of her breasts jouncing inside the gauzy material of the negligee, and when she turned her back to the window he was able to make out the delineation of the cheeks of her delectable buttocks.
Then she vanished for a moment.
While she was gone from sight, Mr. Crispian scanned the other windows, looking for a new victim. Nothing doing. He would have to be patient and hope that the blonde gave him some additional thrills tonight.
He could see her again. She had returned to view, and now she had company. The burly black-haired man, her most frequent visitor, was with her.
They were kissing. It was the kind of kiss that could send sparks flying. Mr. Crispian was a little surprised that the window blinds remained open, because the black-haired man was always quite careful to close them. He had forgotten all about it, it seemed.
He had one hand on the blonde girl's breasts while he kissed her. The other hand was groping at the back of her negligee, pulling it up to get at the bare flesh underneath. Mr. Crispian watched the girl's thighs come into view, and then the lush mounds of her buttocks. The big man's hand clamped down over the white cheeks.
Maybe they'll make love where I can see it, Mr. Crispian thought. Maybe No. It didn't seem that way. The kiss ended, and the black-haired man released her. As he let go of her bunched-up negligee, it fell back into place, concealing the globes of her buttocks.
They were facing each other now, and talking. They seemed to be having an argument. When the blonde came toward him, holding out her hands in an obvious invitation to bed, her breasts heaving, the big man shook her off. The window was partly open, and Mr. Crispian thought he could hear the sounds of angry words passing between them, even though he could not make out the individual words. The man seemed to be doing most of the talking. It was obvious from the furious gestures he was making that they were having a very serious quarrel.
Mr. Crispian's ready imagination supplied a fantasy of what would take place next: Suppose, he thought, they have a fight and he strips her naked, right in front of the window. And then he rapes her. He throws her down into position and forces her while I watch. And then And then Mr. Crispian caught his breath sharply and snapped out of his fantasy as reality took over across the courtyard, the black-haired man put his hands around the blonde's throat and began to squeeze!
He's murdering her, Mr. Crispian thought in shock and disbelief.
Mr. Crispian saw the blonde girl's arms wave frantically, claw at the big man's shoulders, try desperately to push him away. Her big breasts were heav:? wildly. He was shaking her, violently throwing her around, and all the time his hands were locked at her throat. Mr. Crispian thought that he heard a thin, gargling sound that might have been her scream, or might simply have been a figment manufactured by his overheated imagination.
The blonde girl sagged limply in the big black-haired man's arms. They moved away from the window.
Mr. Crispian's eyes bugged. Hard as he peered, it was impossible to see them now. Obviously the black-haired man was finishing the job of killing her. Maybe she was dead already.
Mr. Crispian felt a great sense of sorrow sweep over him, an empty void spring into being within his heart. What if the blonde girl were dead? Whom would he watch undressing every night? She was part of his life, a big part, an essential part. It wasn't fair that some hulking brute should come along and subtract her from his existence so suddenly, so cruelly. I need her, Mr. Crispian thought! She-she belongs to me. She mustn't die!
A long moment passed. Nobody was visible at the girl's window.
Mr. Crispian felt beads of sweat running down his sallow cheeks. He wondered what he should do. He had built his whole life around the principle of minding his own business and keeping out of other people's troubles. Why should he butt in now? It might lead to all sorts of complications for him. On the other hand, the blonde girl's nightly shows of nudity were important to him, and if he sat by idly and let her get murdered, he'd have only himself to blame for the empty nights that followed.
Maybe I should call the police, he thought.
But what would he say to them? Something like, "I was watching a girl undress across the courtyard, and all of a sudden somebody entered her apartment and started to strangle her?" No, of course not. He shook his head. There was no need to tell them all that. He could simply say to the police, "I happened to glance out my window, and I saw this man strangling this girl in the apartment on the other side of the courtyard. You'd better come quickly. Maybe she's still alive, maybe you can catch the man-"
That was the thing to say. But Mr. Crispian didn't say it. He stayed away from the telephone. Instead of calling the police, Mr. Crispian remained by the window, fascinated and chilled, frozen in his seat. He wanted to see what would happen next. His desire to save the blonde girl warred with his fear of getting involved in anything, and lost.
A moment more ticked by.
Then the face of the black-haired man appeared unexpectedly in the window, peering out.
Mr. Crispian, jolted with panic, tried to pull back out of sight, but he was too late. He had been seen! There could be no doubt of it! The black-haired man's gaze seemed to travel across the courtyard on a beeline to Mr. Crispian's window. He stared directly at Mr. Crispian for a long moment, and then, with a strange smile on his face, the black-haired man reached for the cord that controlled the blind. He pulled down the blind with a slow, deliberate motion, ending the show.
Mr. Crispian gasped in shock and instantly yanked down his own window blind. Then he collapsed into his chair and sat quivering with terror, not knowing what he should do now.
This was bad. For the second night in a row, he had been seen by one of the people across the court yard. But this was much worse than last night. It wasn't any naked wanton teen-ager that he had spied on. It was a murderer.
He saw me, Mr. Crispian thought in panic. He knows I witnessed the murder!
What can I do?
Suppose he comes to kill me too?
The telephone beckoned. The police would protect him. But Mr. Crispian could not bring himself to make the call. He had always feared the police. He was certain, in a fatalistic way, that the police knew all about his activities as a Peeping Tom, and that they were simply biding their time, collecting evidence, waiting for the proper moment to arrest him. He could not bring himself to ask for their help now, even in this moment of danger.
But what else was there to do? Where to turn for safety and security?
Mr. Crispian paced his two-room apartment, walking in short, bird-like steps. He looked about for some weapon that he could use to defend himself with in case the black-haired man decided to come looking for him.
Mr. Crispian did not doubt that he had been seen. After last night's episode with Kathryn, Mr. Crispian was abnormally sensitive to the possibility that some of the people on the far side of the courtyard might be able to see him as easily as he saw them. This time there could be no question about it. In that frozen fraction of a second before he had been able to duck down out of sight, Mr. Crispian had been clearly in the path of the black-haired man's gaze. Their glances had locked on each other for an instant. The man obviously knew that Mr. Crispian had witnessed the strangling, and it was folly to pretend otherwise. And certainly the murderer would want to get rid of any witnesses, if possible.
How long would it take' for him to get here?
Mr. Crispian's apartment was midway along his arm of the U. It would not be very difficult for the black-haired man to figure out what apartment belonged to which window. Kathryn had done it easily enough last night. And then, Mr. Crispian thought, the murderer would certainly come around to pay a call on the window peeper.
The doorbell rang.
Mr. Crispian froze. His teeth were chattering with terror. What to do now? How had he gotten here so soon? For the second night in a row, his sanctuary was under attack. Last night he had been foolish enough to let Kathryn in, because she had threatened to scream if he didn't. What now? Sit still and not answer? The door was locked.
Suppose he breaks in?
No. That was absolutely impossible. The door was thick, made of metal. You would need special tools to break it down, a blowtorch, a crowbar, things like that. It couldn't be knocked off its hinges by a simple shove of the shoulder, the way they were always doing in the movies.
The doorbell rang a second time, loudly, much more insistently.
Cold shivers of panic ran through Mr. Crispian's slender body. His eyes nervously darted around the apartment, still hunting for some weapon that he could use to defend himself. He saw a kitchen knife lying on the dinette table. It was long and sharp, deadly. But Mr. Crispian knew that he would never be able to use the knife on anyone, and see all that horrible blood come pouring out.
Something else, he thought. Something that I could use as a club, something heavy.
He ran to his kitchen closet and flung open the doors. A heavy skillet lay on the shelf. Yes. Yes, that would be good enough. Mr. Crispian thought. Fine. He could open the door, allow the strangler to rush into the apartment, hit him over the head with the skillet and knock him out, and then call the police.
Mr. Crispian trembled. Did he dare open the door at all? What if something misfired? Perhaps the murderer would grab the skillet away from him and club him down with it. He was such a big man, so strong looking.
The doorbell rang a third time. Fists pounded urgently against the door.
A high-pitched voice said, "Won't you please open up? I know you're there and I need help!
Mr. Crispian blinked in surprise. It had been a woman's voice. The woman? The blonde? But that was impossible. She was dead. He had seen the big man strangle her.
It had to be some kind of trick, Mr. Crispian thought, a trick designed to make him open the door to the black-haired man, the murderer.
"Please don't turn me away!" she pleaded, with a sob in her voice.
Mr. Crispian hung indecisively. The voice sounded female, all right. He didn't see how anybody could be imitating a woman's voice so expertly. Maybe it was the blonde girl, after all. Maybe by some miracle she had escaped, and she was being pursued hv the strangler.
He could just sit there behind his locked door, of course. But he knew that he'd feel shame the rest of his life if he let her be killed when he had a chance to save her. He owed her so much, after all. She had given him so many nights of panting pleasure.
Impulsively, Mr. Crispian rushed to the door. He threw it open, keeping the skillet gripped tightly in his hand, ready for immediate use.
It was the blonde girl from across the courtyard.
The one that Mr. Crispian had spied on for so many nights. The one with the round, firm breasts, and the small pinkish-red nipples, the milky-white skin. The girl whom he had watched twisting and writhing in nightly calisthenics, her breasts leaping and hobbling, her flesh going taut.
He knew her nude body well.
And now here she was, standing at his door. She was wearing a housecoat that had been loosely thrown over her light negligee. She was breathing hard, the hillocks of her breasts heaving violently. She looked frightened and disturbed. There was, Mr. Crispian couldn't help but notice, a neat row of purpling finger-marks around her lovely throat.
He stammered incoherently, "I thought you were-I saw him-that is-he strangled von."
She shook her head. "No. It wasn't anything like that You've got to come quickly with me. My fiance-there was a terrible accident He's hurt very bad ly. I don't know what to do."
"But wasn't he strangling you?" Mr. Crispian asked inanely, staring at the finger-marks around her throat. He could not get that scene of violence out of his mind. "I saw it-across the courtyard-I happened to look out the window, you understand-"
She shrugged, almost casually. "We had a silly little quarrel, but it was over. Everything was all right. And then-the accident-" She reached for his arm, tugged at him, half dragged him toward the door. "Oh, please, you've got to come. Hurry!"
Mr. Crispian goggled at the creamy white flesh of her rising breasts, nearly spilling out of the front of her gown. He thought he could see her nipples. Except for last night, and the encounter with Kathryn, Mr. Crispian had not been this close to a woman this way for years.
Last night he had bungled it. He had had a chance to gratify his long-pent-up desires, and he had placed his hands on the hot-blooded young girl's bare, quivering breasts only to thrust her away from him in revulsion. Now, unbelievably, another woman had come to him. The blonde. The one whose body had made so many of his nights happy. She was all but naked under her wrap. He knew that he could see and touch her bare body if he wanted, that in her present state of near-hysteria he might do much more.
She had come to. him.
She wanted his help.
Maybe the time had arrived, Mr. Crispian thought, to stop peeping and start living. The fact that two women on two consecutive nights had come to him, nearly nude under their outer garments, might be a sign. His luck was running the right way. Why fight it?
The sight of her, her warmth next to him, her full, heaving breasts and sweet-smelling body, made him dizzy, made him grow reckless.
"Yes-yes." Mr. Crispian blurted. "I'll go with you-whatever you want."
She turned and led the way out of the apartment. Mr. Crispian started to put his heavy skillet down. Then he changed his mind and carried it along with him, for reasons that he did not fully comprehend. It just seemed safer to have the heavy pan with him when he ventured into a strange apartment.
The tall blonde girl strode rapidly along, and Mr. Crispian had to hustle to keep up with her, with his short legs and undynamic body. He could imagine the big globes of her breasts jiggling up and down with each stride that she took.
They circled through the hallway, around the bend in the U of the building, ran down the stairs, and headed for the blonde girl's apartment, directly across from the apartment where Mr. Crispian lived.
The girl produced a key from a pocket of her housecoat and opened the door. Mr. Crispian followed her in. When he stepped into the apartment that he had watched for so many months, Mr. Crispian involuntarily let out a little gasp of horror.
The man was lying sprawled on his face in the middle of the room.
A pair of scissors was sticking out of his back.
The scissors were embedded right up to the finger holes. The long blades, Mr. Crispian thought, probably penetrated five or six inches into his body. Cutting through lungs and heart, snuffing out life.
"Good Lord!" Mr. Crispian cried.
The blonde girl turned to him, her breasts heaving in agitation. "We were having this crazy argument," she said breathlessly. "And then suddenly we were fighting and he lost his balance; he fell over backward. The scissors were resting on that little ledge over there, and he fell right onto them. It was one of those freak things. One in a million. The scissors just went right into his body, all the way like that. I'm afraid he's dead!"
"What shall I do?" Mr. Crispian asked, half dazed by the excitement and by the nearness of the blonde's full-breasted body.
"Take the scissors out of him," she begged him. "Please. I'm afraid to touch them. You do it. Please take them out for me!"
Mr. Crispian looked nervously down at the man. He looked dead, though of course Mr. Crispian had no real way of being sure. He wasn't any expert on corpses. The big man didn't appear to be breathing. There was a little oozing blood around the place where the scissors had gone into his back.
"You think I ought to?" he asked uneasily. "I've heard it isn't a good idea to take sharp objects out of wounded people."
"Do it."
"Maybe we ought to call a doctor. Let him do it."
"No. I can't wait. I want those scissors out of him! Oh, Jim, Jim, my darling!"
"Have you called an ambulance yet?"
"I'll take care of everything. But first get the scissors out of him." She touched the front of her housecoat, and, as if by accident, the belt came loose. Mr. Crispian stared at her. He could see the negligee underneath, and he could see through the negligee as though it weren't there at all.
He saw breasts, round and red-nippled.
Thighs, twin firm columns.
The deep socket of the navel. The golden reflections.
He was hypnotized by the nearness of her body.
Maybe, he told himself, she would strip herself naked for him. In her gratitude for saving her fiance, she would reveal herself to him in all her glowing nudity. He would approach her, touch her breasts, feel the nipples hot and hard against his palm, and his lips would go to hers just as he had always dreamed; they would sink down onto the bed and her thighs would cradle him and he would glide to meet her passion.
"Take the scissors out of him," the blonde girl said insistently.
Mr. Crispian shrugged. Was it safe to do it? Maybe he was wrong-maybe if he didn't take the scissors out in a hurry, the man would die.
The blonde girl's body robbed him of all power to think rationally. She was commanding him, and he had to obey. His eyes rested for a moment on her thinly veiled body, drinking in the beauty of those breasts and thighs.
Then Mr. Crispian knelt. He put his hands OB the scissors. He gave an experimental tug.
The scissors did not want to come out. He tugged them back and forth and up and down, almost forgetting, in the intensity of his concentration, that they were embedded in the flesh of a human being, and suddenly they came away. A great rush of blood came with them, spouting wildly over Mr. Crispian's hands and over his trousers.
And just as the scissors came out of the fallen man's body the blonde girl hit Mr. Crispian across the back of the head with the skillet. His own skillet.
Mr. Crispian was stunned by the unexpected blow. He had been kneeling to work on the scissors, and he simply toppled forward in a heap.
His head felt foggy, and he saw bright spots dancing in front of his eyes. He was dimly conscious of the blonde girl standing over him, gripping the massive skillet, getting ready for another blow.
"You-hit me," Mr. Crispian mumbled thickly. "Why did you hit me? I was doing what you wanted. I was taking the scissors out."
She laughed shrilly at him. "You poor little creep! All these months, sitting there, watching me from the window! Well, I knew you'd be useful today. I knew you'd come in handy."
"I don't understand," Mr. Crispian muttered. Speaking was an effort. The pain in his head was tremendous. He could not get up. His legs felt numb. He wondered if she had fractured his skull. "Why did you hit me?" he asked. "I don't understand."
She smiled malevolently. "You don't think I want to fry for Jim's murder, do you?" she asked "Even if it was self-defense. And it was. You saw it. He was strangling me, he meant to kill me. But then I managed to grab the scissors when he went to pull the window blind. I stabbed him good and hard."
Mr. Crispian tried to rise. The skillet descended again, crashing against his skull with terrifying impact, and he slumped weakly back to the floor.
He lay there with his eyes shut, still grasping the bloody scissors in his hand, completely unable to move.
He heard the sound of a telephone being dialed. Then the blonde girl was speaking.
"Hello ... police headquarters? This is Ellen Dawson apartment 6-G, 1011 Rivington Drive. I want to report a murder. Yes ... that's right ... a murder. Of my fiance, Mr. James McHughes. McHughes. The artist.
"No, I didn't do it. You see, there's this old pervert living across the courtyard, who was always looking out his window at me, watching to see if I'd undress ... yes, that's right, a Peeping Tom.
"Well, this evening he rang my doorbell, and when I let him in he just went berserk. He started to attack me. No, not rape. He was strangling me, in fact. I've got the marks on my throat. And then my fiance came in--we had a date tonight-and tried to grab this little old guy, but the pervert picked up a big pair of scissors that I have and stabbed him with it. I was terrified, but I hit him over the head with a big metal skillet ... Yes, he's unconscous now. And T think Jim's dead. You'd better send someone over here right away ... please. I'm going to collapse any minute...." She hung up.
Mr. Crispian shook his head, trying desperately to clear the fog away from his brain. His eyes fluttered open. He said thickly, "It isn't so-I didn't try to strangle you, he did-and you killed him yourself, not me. I'll tell them that!"
"Who'll believe you?"
"The scissors. Your fingerprints are on the scissors," Mr. Crispian said.
She giggled. "Of course they are. They're my own pair of scissors, aren't they? Why shouldn't my prints be on them? But the scissors also have your fingerprints on them. And that's what counts."
Mr. Crispian put one hand to his aching head. He knew he was being framed, that she was using him to save herself. That while the black-haired man had gone to pull down the window blinds, the woman had gathered her strength and had rammed the scissors into his back before he could finish the job. Then she had gone looking for a convenient patsy.
Him.
She had gone to fetch him, knowing that she could have her way with him. And now he was going to pay the price for the murder.
She grinned at him and said, "Here. Here's a treat for you, to show I'm a sport."
She took off her housecoat.
And then, she grasped the hem of the negligee and seductively lifted it up, up over her shins and knees, past her thighs, past the flat stomach, past the slopes of her breasts.
She stood nude before him, wanton, alluring.
Mr. Crispian stared at her. His dimming eyes roved the contours of those lush thighs and shameless breasts. There was the dry, coppery taste of lust in his mouth. She did a slow pirouette, revealing to him the profile, the tall-nippled breasts thrusting out like globes from her body, the firm white mounds of the buttocks.
He saw everything. At close range. He could see the beads of sweat gleaming on her skin in the deep valley between her breasts. He could smell the scent of her. She was so close ... so very close.
Mr. Crispian tried to rise. He still held the scissors clutched in his hand. He wanted to strike out at her, to plunge the bloody weapon between those mocking white breasts, to see the crimson of her veins stain her nipples and her body.
He got halfway to his feet, then, with an effort, stood erect. He took an uncertain step forward, lurching and staggering, almost falling. She darted away from him, the spheres of her bare breasts swaying and jiggling. Her buttocks, her body, seemed to jeer at him.
"Oh, no you don't!" she cried.
Mr. Crispian swung the dripping scissors at her, aiming for those twin globes of sensual flesh. He might just as well have been trying to stab the moon. He missed by a wide margin and went sprawling forward, flat on his face, the scissors dropping from his fingers and skittering across the floor.
She was above him. He felt her warmth. He sensed the swaying globes of her breasts near him. He heard her silvery laughter.
Then the skillet descended once again, crashing into the back of his skull with fearful force.
Mr. Crispian's head dropped limply to one side, and he felt dark paralysis creeping up the length of his body. He lay there, conscious of the nakedness of the blonde girl somewhere nearby, and as he waited helplessly for the police to arrive he was thinking, I only wanted to look ... I only wanted to look....
