Hilda's powder-scent and warmth engulfed Paul Ray as he crowded against his intensely-female employee in the confining cubicle of the drug store window.
Sweet reliable Miss Hildegarde Wells, he thought, with a burst of affection, my everything while I'm at work: my drug More assistant, fountain girl, sales clerk, stock "boy", bookkeeper, fellow-worrier, girl-of-all-work, and still always looking for some other way in which to help me ... such as with this display to promote a new brand of aspirin.
First he had started to put up the display, then Hilda had gone to work in the window, but each time, business had rushed and the project never was more than barely begun. Now at closing time, past nine o'clock, with peace and quiet an almost tangible aura around him, Paul wanted to get the display completed before he locked the doors and went home for the night. Hilda, as usual, had insisted on staying as long as he did, to help.
He stepped up on the window shelf with her, trying to push past her. One of the ample bulges in her floral blouse brushed lightly, briefly, across his biceps. The width of her hips under that voluminous skirt she wore was difficult to edge past.
Paul hurriedly snatched up the pressboard cutout. It was a life-sized figure of a nurse in a starched white uniform and cap, wearing an inviting smile and holding out a package of aspirin. Breathing hard, Paul tried to set it upright. Not being able to budge it, he jerked impatiently, hoping to wrench the damn thing free from whatever it had caught under.
"Oh no, Paul!" Hilda gasped, in blushing confusion. "Wait. Please!"
Since Paul had little time, and almost no room to allow him to turn and see what Hilda was making such a fuss about, he slid a hand along the length of the pasteboard to feel where it had snagged. The back of his hand met the sleekness of nylon hose, encasing warm woman flesh ... way above the knee. The end of the cutout had somehow been hooked into the hem of Hilda's wide skirt, hoisting the skirt upward.
"Don't, Paul ... be care ful!" Hilda again protested, pushing wildly at his hand, under her dress.
The scented woman-smell she exuded was more pronounced now, because of excitement and the close quarters.
With immediate concern for Hilda's unmarried-woman-presumably-virgin modesty, Paul let go of the mount, intending to get his hand from under her skirt. It was too late. The upswinging length of the rising easel levered the hand right on upward, entangled in the laciness of Hilda's slip.
"Oh, dear ... watch out!" she squealed.
She glanced fearfully into the dusk-dimmed street, knowing that they were clearly spotlighted, there in the showcase. Any passerby could see them, with Paul's hand under Hilda's lifted skirt ... could draw his own conclusions.
There was no way in which the druggist could prevent what happened next. Up, up, the smiling nurse guided his hand, rubbing his fingers against the coarser threading in the garter tops of the nylons, literally forcing him to stroke the softness and the smoothness of bare skin above ... up into Hilda's panties.
Instead of the customary wide-legged filmy jobs or the snug briefs most girls wore, Hilda wore band-leg shorts. The accidentally petting hand was driven upwards inside the band, stopped finally by the quivering warmth between her taut thighs.
There was a bounce in Paul Ray's step as he walked home, after the fiasco with Hilda. It had been a good day for business, one of the best in a long time. Consequently, he felt a resurgence of assurance that he would be able to make a go of things in this two-bit crossroads town of River Junction.
Too often, since buying the ancient drug store he was struggling to modernize, Paul had been discouraged, feeling that he had made a sucker deal. This farmers' town just did not seem large enough to support a flourishing pharmaceutical business, not with all the competition from cut-rate chain drug stores in larger towns around the area.
He whistled now, striding along in the dewy night air. He felt the elation he used to feel, as a barefoot happy-go-lucky boy on a farm, at this magical time of the day.
As he turned from the road into his own front walk and surveyed his mortgaged little four-room cottage, the windows aglow with lights from within, possessive pride lit his gray eyes.
After three years of gypsy married life in a succession of upstairs apartments and furnished rooms, this charming bungalow on Douds Street, was the main thing Paul's wife, Eva, liked about their move to River Junction. It was good to be down on street level for once, to have a place all to themselves, and not to have to listen to irate fellow-tenants yell, "Turn down that damned TV!" or "If ya wanna fight, hire a cotton-pickin' stadium!"
This house meant more to Eva than did the store or the status of having the Ray name in neon lights across the front of it. To Paul, the store was everything, being an owner instead of a pharmacist, filling prescriptions in someone else's establishment, no matter how good the salary.
Too often, of late, Eva had found occasions to remind him of the mistake he had made in taking on such a financial burden, just for the pride of being a proprietor. She contended vehemently that this hick town was not worth it. Tonight after a cash-register-jingling day, Paul marched home to his wife in triumph, buoyed with a sense of victory to come.
He still was whistling as he allowed the screen door to slam behind him, additional evidence of his feeling of boyish abandon. Lights were on all over the house, but he found Eva in their bedroom. She was not ready for bed, as she usually was when he got home at from nine-thirty to ten o'clock. Instead, she was fully dressed.
With surprise, he surveyed the dressiness of her newest, nicest blue sheath, plus the glamour of sheer hose and of heels all of which meant that she had been out, that she must have arrived back home just ahead of him even though he had not been told that she had plans for the evening.
He stopped stock-still and stared at her, his aimless tunes winding up in a long-drawn-out wolf whistle of admiration. He meant it, too. His own wife excited him that much.
After living with her for three years, after knowing her body intimately for at least five years, he still was not used to the sensuous bliss of the relationship ... the way her sexy allure roused him each time he saw her, as much as it had the first time.
The sleek synthetic silk of her dress clung to her lovingly, emphasizing each of her physical attributes; the generous breasts that thrust out high and round and far apart, the balancing seductive bulges behind, stretching her subulba skirt, even the fascinating little dome of her paunch above the flare of her flanks.
Eva had good legs, such good legs that it took only the enhancing sheen of nylons below the prevailing short skirts, to make them truly glamorous gams, worthy of a pin-up.
This was his girl. He never had met anyone else quite like her, and he was sure he never would. That was why he had married her, after two years of "getting the milk free", so he never would lose her.
Tonight she pointedly ignored his noisy entrance, his worshipful ogling. The flush in her cheeks, the flare of her delicate nostrils, warned him that she was indignant. In fact, she looked ready to cry.
He approached, her, reaching for her, with a comforting gesture.
"Did you have a bad day, sweetie?" he asked, solicitously.
His awed gaze traced the ultra-femininity of her exquisite profile; the intelligent brow, accented by a wisp of chocolate-colored bang, the widespaced purplish-blue violet eyes the patrician nose the full lusciously-ripe lips, the stubborn square little chin, all just as he always had wanted his dream-ideal to be.
"Two-timer!" Eva spun out of his reach. "Playboy!"
Paul's mouth dropped open. "Evie, baby, what is it? What the hell brought that on?"
"Don't act so damned innocent!"
His own anger flared. "At least make sense, or is that asking too much?"
"I saw what you did, that's all!" Her ivory-pink complexion darkened so that Paul almost feared for a stroke.
"What did you see?" he roared, "And where in hell did you see whatever it is you're caterwauling about?"
Her face crumpled, and tears came into her eyes.
"After all the trouble I went to, to dress up pretty for you!" she whimpered. "I wanted you to be proud to be seen walking home with me."
So this sexy getup all had been for him....
"You came to meet me?" he asked, marveling.
She had not done that in a long time, and now that she finally had made a relenting gesture toward his business, a ridiculous accident had to spoil it. He decided to brazen it out.
"If you were downtown, why didn't you make your presence known?" he demanded.
"And spoil your fun with that goody-goody, sanctimonious old-maid bitch?" she sneered.
"Are you out of your mind or something?"
He was not consciously evading admitting that he knew she was referring to what had happened, involving Hilda and him in the store window. It had only been an accident, and because Hilda had been good sport enough to laugh it off, his subconscious was attempting to block it out as though there had been no such scene.
"You are the one who is out of his mind," Eva shot back, "to go for a thing like her!"
She flung herself across the bed, burying her face in the crook of her elbow and sobbing, heart-brokenly. The slim blue sheath pulled well up her nyloned thighs, outlining the grossamer-filmed mold of her knees against the yellow of the bedspread.
Paul stood looking down at her, overwhelmed by the rush of tenderness she always could evoke in him.
"Evie ... baby...." He put out a hand and softly stroked a brown curl at the back of her flushed ear.
"Don't!" she shrilled, rolling a quarter-turn away. "Don't you dare sully me with the finger you felt her with!"
The movement wrapped the blue silk still tighter about her wide hips, drawing it deep into the cleft separating the two provocative hillocks.
"How long has this been going on?" Eva wailed. "Am I, the wife, the last to know, as they always say? Especially when you're so brazenly public about your cheap little affair!"
"What kind of jealous cat fit are you having?" he protested. "There isn't anybody else for me, and you know it."
Paul didn't like quarreling, especially not with Eva. They were getting nowhere with all of this venomous shouting at each other. He decided to change tactics, to try mild irony.
"Child, I think you need glasses, I really do," he admonished. "I don't even know what you imagine you saw but I haven't done a damn thing to anyone!"
Eva caught her breath, wanting to believe him. Her blue skirt had twisted to above her dark hose-tops, revealing an inch of creamy-white flesh. Exciting though she was at all times, the sight of anything "forbidden" roused him even more quickly. He stood there looking at her, loving her, wanting her.
He would do anything to smash away this wall of misunderstanding between them, so they could be together again, their bodies, their moods.
He touched the fascinating hollow at the back of her knee and ran a caressing fingertip upward along the inner side of the nyloned thigh, crossing the garter band, to the warm skin beyond.
Eva writhed and whimpered.
This should have done it, should have melted her completely. The least little tickling in her erotic zones usually made her double up, squirming, seeking more intimate lovemaking.
Instead, she kicked him.
"Save that fondling for your Hilda-baby!" she screamed, rapping him with her spike heel.
He was sure that she had maliciously aimed for his groin, but he caught the kick against his hip-bone.
"What have you so suddenly got against Hilda?" he pleaded. "She works with me ... remember? We have to do things together."
"You do things together all right. Much too damned close together!"
"I've never made a pass at her," he vowed. "Certainly not intentionally."
"Don't lie to me, Paul. I can stand anything but having you try to deny what I saw with my own eyes."
In a desperate effort to relieve the tension, Paul once more tried his humorous drawl. "Messin' around with that old maid, baby, that would really shrivel up my innards!"
Eva flopped over to face him, staring at him.
"Paul, you mean that?" Wistful, tear-filled eyes searched his, pleadingly. "Do you really mean it? You don't honestly go for her?"
"The only time a man could go for that little witch would be on a real dark Halloween!" he clowned.
"Oh, Paul! Paul, darling!" She bounced off the bed, laughing and crying at the same time, hysterically. "Does she really seem that way to you? You would much rather have me?"
Eva hurled herself against him, hugging him possessively. Her lips and breasts and belly and thighs and knees sought him, hot and demanding. He knew, from past experience, that worked up emotionally as she had been while quarelling with him, she would be a wildcat tonight.
She yanked down the zipper of his business-suit trousers. She raked at her own skirts with one hand, worming her hips impatiently, the narrow blue tube of her skirt yielding upwards reluctantly along the fullness of her thighs. "Please, please!" she begged, backing toward the bed, pulling him after her, an arm around his neck.
The edge of the mattress pushed her knees out from under her. She fell backwards across it, trying to yank him down upon her. He broke free and stayed on his feet, between her knees.
She spread her nyloned thighs as wide as the hem would allow. He tried to help her with the skirt.
"Better take the dress off," he advised. "It's too nice to get all wrinkled."
"The hell with the damn dress. I can't wait!"
Instead of undressing and getting into bed as any sensible married couple should, having the entire night for lovemaking, she wanted to be taken hastily, as a sneak lay.
He could hear the seams perhaps even the fabric of the blue sheath rip as she continued to jerk at it. She fought her way downward through the tubular sack until it was bunched at her flanks and the white V of her panties was visible.
To get the panties off, out of the way, from under that tight skirt would be a hell of a problem. Paul tugged at it.
"Hurry, hurry!" she moaned, as though in pain. She hooked impatient fingers into the legedging of the scanties, stretching them aside, thus opening up her clamshell to him.
At a time like this, she wanted no lovemaking preliminaries. She was as ready as he was, more so. He could plunge straight to the target.
All the fury of her jealousy now was transformed into wild animal passion. There would be no sleep for him tonight unless he could get her quited down, cooled off-worn out.
He held himself as still as he could, letting her thrash and toss beneath him, telling him, "Damn you, damn you, move! Move with me!"
Sweat dampened her forehead, dewed her upper Up. He could feel sweat on the only naked part of her body, her legs, but he knew that it must be moistening all of her, that, if they both were naked, they would be glued together.
He felt her stiffen. Her moaning rose to a shrill, almost agonized scream, then as she got the last wild thrill she so wanted, she let him have it as fast as she could move, and he, too, thrust hard to a frenzied finish.
As he rose, wearily, he thought, well, that ought to hold her, at least till bedtime.
CHAPTER TWO
Paul looked at Hilda Wells the next morning as he had never looked at her before.
She came in at seven-ten, although he had told her often enough that her day did not begin until eight o'clock. He couldn't afford to pay her for overtime.
As for him, he had to put in long hours. People expect a drug store to be open evenings. Also, Paul liked to open up at seven to catch the early morning trade, people on their way to work.
Hilda kept stubbornly insisting that there was plenty for her to do, too. Re-stocking the shelves, helping him with what she could do of the re-modeling ... things like that.
Gradually, he was rearranging and re-decorating the place, trying to completely modernize it. Since he could not afford to pay for the work, he was doing it himself. Sometimes, early in the morning was the best time to work, uninterrupted. He often stayed, long after nine o'clock, continuing the remodelling work.
Hilda's approach was heralded as it usually was, by greetings that were called to her all along the street. "Hi, there, Hildy ... how's my best girl this morning?" or "What kind of pep pills do you take?"
Everybody in town knew Hilda Wells. Everybody kidded her. Mostly because she always had a sharp retort, giving everyone as good as they sent.
Coming in the open doorway, she laughed happily. That, too, was characteristic of her. She enjoyed life, or at least she pretended to. She was an everlasting ray of sunshine, in spite of having had a difficult background.
Right now she was responding to a parting jibe from Andy Jansen, a mechanic in the garage on the corner. To most people he was a grouch, a hurried and worried greasy fellow who took himself too seriously. With Hilda, however, he was quite the kidder. It was noticeable to Paul that their paths always crossed at this time of the morning, as though the brief exchange of banter was highly welcome to both of them.
Paul always had considered Hilda rather shapeless. This was partly due to the fact that her dresses always were too big. They dragged far too long for style. Since she was a heavily-framed woman, this gave her a matronly appearance.
Her tawny hair was cropped short and combed straight back to get it out of the way. She wore very little makeup, which made her seem pale, drab, as compared to other women.
Paul realized that he had subconsciously thought of Hilda as being older than his own twenty-eight years, even though he knew, from having consulted her old filled-out application blank, that she was his junior by three years.
When he had bought the store, she came with it. Even when Eva had helped, Paul had considered Hilda a necessary part of the set-up. What else mattered? What did Paul really care what Hilda looked like, how she dressed? People who did business here were used to her; they liked her, and that was the important thing.
Now, as she bounced into the doorway, with a swish of her too-long skirts, Paul sucked in his breath, sharply. To him, the flouncing of skirts always would be a fascinating feminine mannerism. A man sometimes missed the old-fashioned feminine teasing amid the too-obvious leg-show brought on by high hemlines.
The thin cotton print of Hilda's homemade dress shaped itself to her knees, her thighs, her flanks, her belly, as she walked briskly along.
Suddenly, he was vividly recalling the episode in the window last night which he had not allowed himself to remember while quarreling with Eva. It was all the more provocative to him, since Hilda was the sort of a girl who, he was sure, would not permit such liberties.
Yet ... he had had his hand right on it. His fingertips still tingled with the memory of all that softness, all the warmth and moistness of her secret recesses.
"How many rolls of film do we get here each day?" Hilda demanded, walking directly up to Paul, her eyes sparkling.
There was no embarrassment, no indication that anything had been amiss between them last night.
"You know as much about that as I do," Paul countered. "You package them."
Negatives were sent out daily to a photo-finishing plant at West Cedar.
"Do you think I could learn to develop the negatives?" she asked.
"What makes you think you couldn't?"
Man, there were sexy curves he never had noticed before in the dress she was wearing today, a simple thing in lavender print. She was amazingly big-bosomed, even though her bra confined the soft, bulging flesh. She was wide across the beam too.
The way her loose skirt had temporarily become lodged upon the projection of her generous buttocks, revealed the belling line of real woman-hips.
"Would you trust me to try to do them for customers?" she asked, her eyes sparkling.
"What? Develop and print twenty rolls a day?"
"If it's one way I can help the store make money."
"You can't. It would be a waste of time."
"I could take them home and do them at night."
"We would need far too expensive equipment, especially for the jumbo prints. It's cheaper to have them done elsewhere. We can't compete with the automatic photo-finishing equipment such as the big plants have."
Hilda sighed, hopelessly. "I want to learn photography, and I need practice."
"Then get yourself some developer and start developing pictures."
"No. I couldn't waste materials like that for just a silly hobby."
The big hazel eyes were somber.
Of course, Paul reminded himself, Hilda and the maiden aunt she lives with are quite poor. They can't spend money on anything but necessities.
"If you learned to make pictures, nothing would be wasted," he told her.
"I could take more snaps then, couldn't I?" Her enthusiasm grew as she envisioned it. "Like when I see a cute little toddler, I wouldn't have to limit my shots. I could just follow him around, catching every single thing he does."
"Candids." Paul nodded.
"If I made the prints myself, nobody need know how many turned out bad, now would they?"
"That's the big advantage of doing your own processing."
Hilda turned away to wait on a customer. Paul watched the way her long dress slapped the back of her calves, with each step she took. Why did she continue to hide what she had in that kind of a get-up? Didn't she have a mirror so she could see what she looked like, as compared to other girls?
A lot of Hilda's "oddness", Paul knew, could be blamed on her aunt. Miss Jessica Barnes had been disappointed in love while still in her teens, and she had shut herself away from the world ever since. When she had to take her sister's child to raise, she had tried to bring the little girl up according to the mores and the modes of her own childhood.
It was town legend that Miss Jessica still was a virgin, that she still wore long flannel bloomers, that she never had allowed any man to take them off or even to get inside them.
"You've made pictures?" Hilda asked, bringing Paul back to the present day.
"Well ... sure. I've at least played around with them, whenever the whim struck me."
"Then you'll teach me? .You'll help me?" Hilda asked, excitedly.
He gestured toward shelves, filled with photographic supplies. "Just get a beginner's kit and start in. The only place to start is at the beginning."
Hilda sobered. "The cheapest is nine dollars and sixty-nine cents."
So she had been looking them up, considering buying them.
With sudden resolution, she opened her palm and extended a wadded-up twenty-dollar bill toward him. It was as though she had come in this morning, intending to make the purchase, but could not get up nerve enough to so forego thrift and go through with it until she had debated the issue with him.
She had taken the long way around to get him to confirm what she, herself, wanted.
"Take a kit," Paul said, with a smile. "It's yours, on the house, compliments of Ray's Pharmacy."
"You can't afford to give stuff away."
"Can't I? After all you have done for me?"
"I ... I-" She was having trouble breathing, which caused quite a commotion in the front of her blouse. "I can't accept gifts from you."
"No, I'm just your employer, that's all. I can't give you any bonus as a reward for all the extra hours you have put in here mornings and evenings."
"I'd rather pay for what I take. Honestly."
"As a long-time employee of this illustrious organization," Paul spieled, eloquently, using humor as he had in his argument with Eva, "you are entitled to special discount terms on merchandise purchased through our world-wide service. On this particular package, the price to you is no down payment, nothing per month. Those are the terms. Take it with you, baby."
"No, Mr. Ray." Flushing, she sidled away.
"Look, photography apparently means a lot to you," he protested. "Don't let silly pride stand in the way of your getting started."
Stars were once more back in her eyes. Did he imagine it or did her bodice tighten with the flood of her emotions? She walked to the cash register, placed a greenback under the wire bail, and triumphantly rang up a sale for nine dollars and sixty-nine cents.
"And now," she cried, delirious with excitement, "I just feel like having a large sundae!"
She added another thirty-one cents on the register.
Wednesday night in River Junction meant shoppers' night. All of the stores stayed open late to accommodate farmers or laborers who could not get in during working hours.
"Want to go downtown tonight?" Paul asked Eva at the supper table, his mouth full of macaroni, hamburger, and tomato.
"Whatever for?"
"I've been hoping you might feel well enough by now to help in the store again. The bandstand will be right in front, and we are bound to have a rush of business."
"I don't feel that well!" Eva snapped.
"Well, come on down then the way other women do, just for bargain-hunting and for gabbing with the neighbors."
"I don't know anybody in this town."
"All the more reason to get acquainted."
"Those stupid peasants around here?" Eva's nostrils pinched in distaste.
"They're our customers, the source of whatever prosperity we may have, don't ever forget that."
"You can have them."
"Since when did you get to be so superior?" This is fast building up to a quarrel, he thought in dismay.
"You want me to mingle in the mob?" she asked, disdainfully. "Rub sweat with all those dirty farm folks?"
"Now, just a minute. You were raised on a farm, weren't you?"
"I married a city man to get away from all that!"
"We're in the wrong-sized town to stay away from farmers."
"That's exactly what I've been telling you, what I've been objecting to."
"But, Eva! This was your idea, to get a business of our own so we could be proud of ourselves."
"Not in a crummy place like this," she said, coldly.
"It's all we could handle, financially. You know that And, if you would help with things, the way you promised, instead of dropping out as soon as the going got rough, we still could make a damn good thing of it"
"I'll leave that to Hilda." Eva said, sarcastically. "Let her play the slaving partner."
The high school band already was playing in the farmers' hayrack in front of the drugstore, before Paul got back downtown. They had a ready-made crowd of potential customers, the proud parents and the other relatives standing around the bandstand, beaming at their more-orless talented youngsters. Some of them continually were wandering in and out of the pharmacy, all of which was very good for business.
Paul found Hilda dashing about, trying to wait on three buyers at once, in widely separated parts of the store.
That was Hilda, always doing more and more, in the interest of the place. She had started out with the former owners as just soda-fountain help after school, but she would not stay behind the soft-drink spiggots. She kept running out to clerk in the main store. The aging Brawnsons came to depend upon her youthful energy more and more. As soon as she graduated from high school, they hired her full-time.
When Omar Brawnson died suddenly, it had been Hilda who had enabled Mrs. Brawnson to keep the doors open until she could sell. And it was Hilda who knew where every bottle of patent medicine was kept, who still made herself eagerly useful.
It looked as though it would be a prosperous night. Sometimes they made as much on Wednesday night as on all the other nights put together.
Still, Paul's heart was not in it. He realized, with a feeling of heavy depression, that Eva had no intention of coming back to work in the store as his helpmate. Her temporary not-feeling-so-well was lengthening "into a sick-of-the-whole-thing attitude.
For the first time tonight, Eva had spitefully linked Hilda's name with her own hatred of the store. She always had made fun of the way Hilda dressed and acted, but there had been no indication of wifely jealousy until the unfortunate incident of the show-window.
During program intermission, kids from the band came pouring into the store, jostling about the soda fountain. The more they came, of course, the more Paul's cash register would jingle.
Yet tonight, all of their horseplay, their yelling, seemed crude, boisterous, nerve-wracking. Instead of being delighted to get their trade, Paul felt like yelling at them to quiet down and go away, to act like sensible human beings.
Hilda, though, was in her glory dashing about, mixing up any kind of crazy concoction any kid happened to mention. Yet it was she who first noticed that Paul was driving himself with an effort, trying to wait on customers.
"What's the matter, Paul?" Hilda asked. "Didn't your supper agree with you? You look like a ghost."
Paul's supper had been satisfactory, as a fast, warm bite. All the fighting that went with it was what had upset him.
He shrugged. "I'll be all right in a moment."
"Go lie down somewhere. We'll tend store."
With quick-planning efficiency, Hilda comandeered help from the loiterers in the crowd. A girl Paul knew casually as Adelaide Sloan was put in charge of the soft-drink rush. A lanky beanpole commonly called Flat-Top, began taking money from and sacking purchases for some of the other customers.
"Get out into the fresh air," Hilda advised her boss.
"I guess I am sick," Paul admitted, fighting increasing nausea. "I'll go home."
"Oh no!" It seemed that Hilda protested too quickly, looking to the others as though for help. "I'm sure you don't need to do that."
A crazy babble began among the teen-agers. Paul suddenly was the center of their excited attention.
He was beyond caring now, beyond trying to understand.
A young voice hooted, "Send word ahead! Signal one if by land, two if by sea!"
"Shut up!" Hilda snapped.
"We should call," someone suggested, timidly.
"Who's answering any phone?" Hilda jeered.
The little cottage on Dowds Street was dark. That surprised Paul because Hilda had said nothing about plans for going out anywhere else when she had refused to accompany him downtown.
Let her take care of herself. All he wanted to do was to get to bed and to rest. Things were getting him down. Maybe he had been working too hard at the store, carpentering during late hours and all. Maybe this business venture was too much for him, at that.
He was startled to hear Eva laugh, a high-pitched, yet half-suppressed giddy peal. The very sound angered him. Eva usually was so sophisticated. He was not one bit proud of her when she descended to one of her moods of utter abandon.
Another voice-bass-rumbled low. An icy hand of apprehension clutched at Paul's heart. Could it be...? No, he must not let his jealous imagination run away with him.
He heard the twang of a bedspring, and rustling movements on the mattress.
Paul bounded across the living room in three strides. The first light switch he hit was in the bedroom.
The two naked figures on the bed unclinched and scrambled to pull apart.
CHAPTER THREE
The square body on top with the hairy back rolled off the side of the bed. Bare feet smacked the floor as the man leaped for his trousers, then crumpled in the middle of the room.
Pink-nude, Eva screamed and bolted upright, facing her husband, her eyes wild with terror. Her blushing breasts jutted out, as erect as two balloons, the tense nipples glistening with the dew of clandestine kisses. She trembled so hard that the bedsprings jangled, gulping open-mouthed for air as though there was not enough in the room for her to breathe.
The naked man's stealthy movements commanded Paul's attention. The intruder had grabbed up his gray-covert workpants, but not to put on. His hand snaked into a pocket and a knife appeared, the blade flicking like a frog's tongue. He spun to face Paul, bracing himself for a whirlwind attack.
What does an intelligent civilized man do, Paul wondered numbly, when he finds another man in his bed? Newspapers often carried stories of killings that were motivated by scenes such as this.
He stayed glued to the spot, yelling horsely, "Get out! Get out of here! Get out of my sight!"
A marked change came over the swarthy face of the trapped stranger. His look of guilty defiance changed to one of sneering contempt.
So he thinks I'm a coward, Paul, reflected bitterly.
He started toward the interloper, not running, not raging, but marching with menacing strides.
On the bed, Eva caught her breath in little moans of ecstasy, excited by the sight of two men fighting over her.
The courage in Paul's unarmed approach unnerved the enemy. His dark glance darted here and there, seeking a means of escape. He was short and squat, black, with a mat of wiry hair all over his body. Standing hunched, he looked more ape than man.
Of all the men in town, Paul wondered, how could she go to bed with an ugly brute like this? Anybody could see he would be selfish and crude in his lovemaking, direct as a snorting stallion.
Or was that what Eva sought? To be used and abused by the male animal? Had she tired of her husband's wooing rituals?
The very thought enraged Paul still more.
He had no plan of battle, only a fixation; the sanctity of his home had been invaded; his wife had been defiled. He sought retribution.
His psychology of playing on his opponent's nerves was working. The invader showed increasing panic, licking his lips, feverishly. He backed away, warily, rocking on the balls of his bare feet poised to strike out with that knife. His black eyes flashed hatred.
The wailing sounds emitting from the throat of the watching Eva were like the keening she did when in the throes of passion. Her hands rubbed her own body, erotically.
Paul had the short man cornered, desperate. The man's knife shot out. Paul flung up a suit-coated arm to ward the weapon off. In the same movement, he noted that one of the bare feet was on a small throw-rug. Paul hit the rug with his shoe, sending it skidding on the polished floor. His antagonist was split wide, thrown off balance, his thrust going wild.
Paul felt a sharp prick in his still-moving arm. His wrist whacked the hand that held the knife, sending the switchblade flying through the air. He heard it hit the floor and go skating away on the waxed surface.
The black eyes of the enemy lost all of their belligerence. Without his knife, he was nothing. Before an enraged husband, he was yellow. The only kind of fighting he knew anything about was dirty fighting. He feinted high with his left and drove his right savagely into Paul's underbelly.
Already sick, Paul doubled, gagging. A hail of battering blows descended upon his bent head, in an effort to drive him face-down to the floor.
On the bed, Eva screamed again. The springs danced with her agitation.
Feeling himself folding and going down, Paul's attention was riveted upon the two blackhaired legs like sturdy pillars, on the pendants between them. He grabbed with both hands and hung on, letting his whole weight drop.
The night air was split with the rasping screech of a man in mortal agony. The enemy-victim went into a convulsion of thrashing and kicking, tumbling to the floor with Paul.
"Ow! Don't-don't-no-.'" His every breath was a tortured bellow.
Eva joined in with shrieks of her own, her whole body writhing with the stimulus of the sadistic exhibition.
"Honey!" Paul called out, his calm deadly against the surrounding uproar. "Get me that knife of his!"
Her eyes widened with horror. "Oh, Paul, you wouldn't!"
"Why not?" Paul asked, in icy rage. "Then I'd be sure he would never bother you again."
There was the sound of running footsteps on the street, then the tap-tap turned in at their sidewalk. With only the briefest formality of knocking at their door, two women, neighbors, burst in upon the hectic scene.
"We heard you scream for help, my dear," Mrs. Killigan panted, staring at Eva's naked body her sharp eyes popping.
"We knew-I mean we thought-Mr. Ray was still at the store-" Mrs. Bendasek put in, breathlessly.
She stared, fascinated, at the unorthodox wrestling of the two men on the floor.
"Your husband came home just in the nick of time-to keep you from being raped," Mrs. Killigan said, smoothly, maliciously. "That's really awfully nice."
The guilty trespasser did not wait for anything more to happen to him. Bugling his pain, he wrenched away from Paul's fierce clutch. He staggered drunkenly to his feet, cradling his groin in both hands, bawling like a baby.
Nausea tore at Paul. A kind of trauma brought on by the whole disgusting episode, plus the low blow to his vitals, finished triggering the sick feeling that had been rapidly building up. He raced for the bathroom.
He was but dimly aware of all that was happening around him. The two gray-haired snoops still stood in the bedroom, taking it all in with big eyes and even larger ears. He heard his wife's lover, still stark naked, go bounding out of the house, slamming the screen door, then the slap-slap of bare feet as he ran down the sidewalk, through the crisp night air.
Outside a woman squealed, horrified, "A naked man!"
Another female voice gasped, "I saw him too-ran right by me...."
A rising babble of feminine excitement rose all around, "Not a stitch on-"
"-the police-"-"Ee-ee-eek! "-saw him just as plain" What's the world coming to?"
"Come from that house, didn't he-that new couple-the druggist-"What a shame-and with her husband working so hard-"
At the toilet, Paul's contortions threw him to his knees, and his stomach seemed about to turn inside out.
Eva came running in, still completely nude. She crouched beside him, fluttering in guilty panic.
"Oh, Paul! Paul, honey! Please don't take it so hard! I never dreamed you would take it so hard!"
It was more than her infidelity that had brought on this horrible, wrenching nausea, but it was just as well that she thought her actions were the entire cause. Even without the tension and overwork at the store, her cheap philandering would have been enough to make him sick.
Eva reached out solicitous hands, smoothing his brow, trying to help and to comfort him.
A flood of revulsion, of bitter hatred, flooded his entire being. His wife was soiled, unfit to touch him. With an enraged sweep of his arm, putting all of his wrath behind the gesture, he knocked her away from him.
She tumbled backward, and he heard her skull hit the bathtub. She did not move to get up, but just lay there, inert. That frightened him, made him wonder just how badly he had hurt her. Still gagging, still clutching his straining stomach, he twisted around to look at her.
She sprawled on the floor, staring at him, half dazed, half awed, as though she just could not believe her always-loving husband would raise a hand against her in violence. He experienced fleeting regret. It hurt him to lose her respect, her love.
Her hands moved along her own nakedness. That infuriated him all over again. After all, he had just caught her in the worst crime a wife can commit against her husband. He should have hit her harder, should have deliberately and thoroughly beaten her, hard enough to teach her a lasting lesson.
He could tell that she had not been satisfied by the bout with that brute on the bed, mostly because of his untimely interruption. Her breasts still were swollen, the little maroon centers as erect as two knobs. As she watched him kneeling there, her skull still throbbing from the rap he had given her, her wantonness increased and she reached for him, stroking.
"Stop it!" he barked, appalled.
With a cat-like bound, he reached her, knocked her hands away.
The sight of her luscious body, jammed against the angle of the tub, started an inferno raging through his flesh. What she needed was a damned good working over.
He would show her. He was a better man any day of the week than that ape-man could hope to be. Eva didn't need any man but him, her own husband. Nobody else could satisfy, yes, even sate her.
He fell upon her, pinioning her arms against her sides, as though he had pursued and had caught her, as though he must force her. She tried to free her hands so she could reach for him again, but he kept them pinned as though she were struggling to escape.
He hooked her knee over the edge of the tub, pushed the lips of her pelvis apart, and rammed his hardness into her, with the total abandon of any male, seeking only his own enjoyment.
"Oh, darling-darling-" she sobbed. "You never were like this before!"
He rammed harder, straining as though he would reach the innermost core of her body.
"I love you!" she moaned, agonized. "I love you!"
In a few hard-thrusting moments, lightning struck, jolting through them, through both at almost the same shattering second. With a squall of utter ecstasy from deep within her throat, he had her thrashing about beneath him, while he continued to pound her body against the tub with his own. At last they slept, exhausted, still in that cramped corner.
CHAPTER FOUR
How does one go on, after tragedy? Paul wondered.
Get up in the morning and dress, the same as usual. Shave and eat breakfast, the same as usual. Try to talk to one's wife, the same as usual.
But their conversation was strained. Polite. Impersonal, dragging into painful silences.
The rapport between them was destroyed. Nothing, Paul was sure, would be the same, ever again.
Having betrayed him once, how could he ever implicitly trust her again?
All because she had seen him with his hand under Hilda's skirt and had wrongly imagined that something was going on at the store. She just had to get even, with a fling of her own.
To make matters worse, she had picked a man as much her inferior as she felt that Hilda was inferior to Paul.
He watched the clock, and left at the soonest possible moment, welcoming the chance to go to work, glad for any reason to get away from home. He could hardly endure the pleading, contrite glances Eva kept sending his way. He didn't even want to look at her, at her luscious curves that had lain beneath another man's body, at the tempting flesh with which she had sullied the perfection of their marriage relationship.
He wanted to hurt her in retaliation for the way in which she had deceived and disgraced him, but he could think of no fitting punishment, nothing except to let her wallow in the cesspool of her own remorse and self-recrimination. The anguish of her uncertainty would have to be enough retaliation for right now.
The River Junction dentist stopped in the drugstore to have his usual toothpaste formula made up.
"With all the good dentifrices on the market, why do you mix your own?" Hilda asked, curious.
"Because I want an effective whitener."
"Isn't that what everyone wants? Brighter teeth?"
Hilda, herself, was plenty bright and pleasing to the eyes this morning, Paul noticed. The taupe-colored dress she had on was more fitted than those she usually wore. Also, he was sure she had been doing something to her hair to soften and to shape it, as short and fluffy as it was around her pleasant features.
"I developed this for some patients of mine who have trouble with badly-stained teeth," the man in white patiently explained.
"Why don't you make it to sell, if it's that good?"
"I do. However, the path the world is beating to my door still is so faint I can hardly see it."
Along with everyone else, the dentist liked to kid Hilda. He could not talk seriously to her for long.
"Women like Mrs. Clan-I mean, my clients pay plenty for this."
"Put it on the market. Everybody would want it."
"Nuts. That's nickle-and-dime stuff. I couldn't be bothered, surely not on the small scale which would be all I could swing."
"Mind if I try?" Hilda held her breath, waiting for his answer.
"You?" The dentist's grin broadened.
Hilda reddened, not seeing it as a joke at all. She stubbornly stuck to her idea. "We could buy the formula from you."
"Feel free to go ahead and use it, honey."
"It's Mr. Ray's store, and since we'll be using his stock of chemicals, do you mind if we put his name on it?"
"Anything you say."
Hilda was off in a world of dreams. "Ray's Tooth Powder. How about a picture of the rising sun on the package.
Get it-brightening rays?"
"You're the promoter." The dentist winked at Paul.
"The name should be short and catchy, easy to remember Like Ray-White. No, like Raydent. That's it, isn't it? Raydent? How does that strike you?"
"Lover," Eva whispered, cuddling close to Paul in bed. "Why don't you act the way you did last night? In the bathroom?"
Her head was on his shoulder. She apparently assumed that his silence meant forgiveness, that they were back on their old togetherness basis again.
"You mean when I was furious?" he asked, astonished at her.
"You ought to get mad more often," she teased.
"Are you suggesting that I should injure you in the name of passion?" he demanded, indignant. "That isn't love!"
"You're a man, aren't you? All men like to force a woman."
"You mean you want me to rape you?"
Had that been what she had been looking for, getting mixed up with that hairy little beast? Pain? Did she pant to be violated?
"It felt so good, having you come at me, rough the way you did. Do it again!"
Her whole body wriggled at the thought of it. The breast nearest to him almost seemed to be swelling, the hardened nipple punching at his arm.
"But, darling," he protested, "our love isn't like that. We don't need violent action. All we ever have to do is touch and we light the fuse. Just connect, and we're on our way to the explosion!"
He always had been so sure that was what she wanted, all that she wanted. To lie in each other's arms, fastened together, letting the electric male and female currents flow through them until they melted in complete fusion. That, they had always agreed, was proof positive of the perfect affinity of their respective alchemys as man and wife.
"Why can't you be more like other men, honey?" she wheedled, pouting.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
For three years-no, for five-he had been considerate and tender, remembering how much caresses and endearments meant to a woman. He always took plenty of time for loveplay, no matter how late he came home from his overtime remodeling of the store, exhausted, on the very edge of slumber.
He still spent every effort to see that his wife was as aroused, as prepared for a wild hot finish as he.
He knew that he was a highly competent lover. He had made it a point to bone up on all of the variations, all of the tricks, because he once had heard a girl make the statement that all farm boys had only one thing in mind, to get it over with quickly, like a herd bull. Now, experienced, he could lead his sex-partner to the sublime, then madly on to utter abandonment.
What had gone wrong in his marriage-bed relationship with Eva? Something must have, or she would not take on another man.
Had he been too considerate, too restrained? Did she prefer her man masterful, dominant, possessive-even to the point of brutality?
"Kiss me hard, lover," she demanded, panting.
Their lips met. Hers felt feverish, swollen, moist, pushing. The dome of a breast pushed against his chest, turgid, tempting, through her thin nightgown. This was all it took, where her nearly naked femininity was concerned, to set the lust-fires burning in him. Already, there were maddening reactions in his loins.
He tossed off the light blanket and reared up on an elbow to look at her by the indirect light from a streetlamp near their window. Her eyes glowed in the half-dark, as though she loved the awakening lechery showing in his face. Her lips parted, slack and sensuous. He could make out the dark aureoles of her breasts through the illusion veiling of her nylon nightie.
She winced and whimpered, afraid of being tickled, although her body wormed in expectancy when he reached down for the hemline of the shorty gown. He rolled her hips slightly to work the gown up past the bulges of her buttocks, looking in appreciation at the pale length of her fine legs extending to the foot of the bed.
He tucked the gown above her bosom and wadded the surplus fabric under her arms. Distended with passion as her pink breasts were, they tightened and tilted still more under the skillful caressing of his lips and his fingers, the darker nipples like pencil erasers.
His petting hands roamed all over her exposed torso, seeking out those sensitive zones of armpits and ribs and midriff and navel where she was most vulnerable.
"Oh, darling, you're my man!" Eva half sobbed, trembling and squirming at his touch.
Was she trying to tell him that, compared to this, the thrills she had sought last night in the arms of another man were less than nothing to her?
When he ran an exploratory finger along her lower belly, she moaned and twitched. Now she really was on fire, molten with yearning. Anticipation as strong and as heady as hers had all of his glands flooding every fiber of his being with electric power.
He rolled on top of her, penetrating fluid lava. Her knees came up, sandwiching his waist.
Pushing, he doubled her body still more, lifting her buttocks from the bed.
"Oh, lover, lover, what are you doing to me?" she keened in feral wantonness, rolling her head from side to side.
Silently, roughly, cruelly, he threw his arms about her upraised thighs, forcing them on forward until her knees nearly touched her shoulders.
"Paul!" she screamed. "You're hurting me!"
She tried to toss out of his hold, but she was helpless. Now, she tried to resist him, for the first time showing fear.
He pinned her as she was, jackknifing her trunk until the dome of her belly met her inflated breasts. He poured into her all of the lust for vengeance he had been feeling since he caught her in their bed with another man.
This time, he thought bitterly, I won't give her any chance to move. He knew that she could not reach an orgasm unless she could move freely, especially up and down, lustfully reaching and twisting, wanting all of his hardness, drawing herself away so that he was nearly out of her, then reaching upward again to take every bit of it.
Deliberately now, he pistoned hard and fast, exulting as his own heat rose, and he knew he soon would have had hij pleasure.
She snarled and sobbed, furious, but he held her immovable.
As soon as it was over and he released her, she slapped him, a stinging blow, then flung herself around so her back was toward him.
Even though the blow had hurt him, he smiled at her rigid back. Soon, he would take her from that position. She never had cared too much for that, either!
CHAPTER FIVE
"Until lately, we always believed that our teen-agers were safe from trouble when they hung out here at the drugstore."
The speaker was Joe Chrady, chairman of the Better Business Bureau.
He was a big wheel in town, owner and manager of Chrady's Mercantile, a department store handling everything from jelly beans to farm equipment, and so outstandingly successful that it was referred to just as "the store."
Even with all he had to do, Chrady still found time for his hobby which was taking part in civic organizations. Some people protested that he tried to run the town. Certainly, he stuck his nose into everything that went on in River Junction.
With him, making a protest call on Paul Ray, was Lloyd Schubert, another Better Business leader. He was assistant postmaster and a smart enough man in his own right, but he preferred to stand back and let the belligerent Joe do whatever had to be done.
"It has been called to our attention that our young people no longer are safe from corruption in here," Mr. Chrady said, pompously. , Paul glanced at Hilda, as though seeking guidance, asking for help. Two large red spots, like roses, bloomed in her cheeks.
"What harm can possibly come to them here?" the druggist countered.
"It's the evil ideas being instilled into their receptive young minds that we're talking about."
Paul shrugged and tried another question. "What can they learn here, in the way of wrongdoing?"
"If you have to have it spelled out for you, we don't want them exposed to sexual promiscuity," Chrady snapped angrily.
Puzzled, Paul threw out his hands and again looked to Hilda for counsel. Her eyes had cornered-wildcat fire blazing in them.
"Your personal moral standards are your own affair, but...." Lloyd Schubert put in, in a conciliatory tone.
The accused druggist whirled. "I haven't touched another woman besides my wife since I got married. No, longer than that ... not since I first started going out with Eva!"
Schubert recoiled before Paul's anger and moved back a few feet.
Chrady, however, did not budge.
"How about the moral standards of the other members of your family?" he asked, icily.
"Are you talking about my wife?" Paul blustered.
So that was it. The bad news was out.
Mrs. Killigan and Mrs Bendasek had done a quick job of reporting.
"Eva's moral ethics are as good as mine," he asserted angrily, if not quite truthfully.
The two callers exchanged glances and raised their brows. Hilda breathed noisily through her teeth, her lips curled almost in a snarl.
"If you mean the night before last," Paul challenged, taking the offensive, "everyone is entitled to one mistake. Everyone gets carried away sometimes by circumstances."
Chrady bristled. "We have the word of plenty of reputable witnesses that there have been other offenses."
"Sure! Sure! Every do-gooding biddy in town wants in on the kill."
Paul knew how fast gossip could travel in any small town. He knew how narrow-minded, pious-acting, how quick-to-condemn many of the women were. Already Eva's reputation, his reputation, the integrity of his business-image had been besmirched, perhaps totally ruined.
"It's a form of cannibalism, that's what it is," he continued, angrily. "A new woman shows her face in town, and if she doesn't conform, if she doesn't quite live up to the pattern laid out for every female, right away they pounce on her and tear her to bits."
Even big Joe Chrady was impressed by Paul's logic, but he still had to deliver his message. "We're warning you, for the first and last time, the people of River Junction absolutely will not put up with any more such lewd goings-on."
All this because a naked man had been seen running out of the Ray house.
At that, it was understandable.
"Don't worry. It won't happen again," Paul assured the two men. "My wife had learned her lesson. She has been hurt enough."
Timidly, Hilda Wells placed a pile of snapshots before the druggist.
"Something is the matter with them," she said, "but what? What am I doing wrong?"
Paul spread them out, bent over them, and studied them. They were obviously amateurish.
"Hm-mm, not bad for a beginning," he asserted, trying to cheer her up.
"But they're so gray!" She sounded ready to cry. "Even the edges."
"Fogged. Extraneous light is getting to your photographic paper. Are you. using the recommended safelight? At a proper distance?"
"I've tried to be careful, to follow all of the suggestions."
Standing so close to Hilda, Paul was intensely conscious of the warmth that radiated from her, that seemed to send an electrical charge into the air.
"Where is it that you do this work?" he asked.
"In the kitchen sink."
"What about light from some of the other parts of the house?"
"Oh, there isn't any, not a speck. Aunt Jessie turns out all of the lamps and goes to bed whenever I work with pictures."
The scent of Hilda's powder tickled his nose until he had a pleasant sense of giddiness, like near-sneezing.
Paul laughed. "Poor Aunt Jessica! Doubtless, she doesn't approve."
"Oh, she does, though! She thinks this is the most wonderful idea I ever had."
"I think it is, too." Paul tapped a picture, thoughtfully. "Do you cover the kitchen windows?"
"I hang a heavy quilt over them."
"Does any light filter through, as from a street lamp?"
"There isn't any street light that close."
She bent forward, leaning on an elbow to more closely observe a print.
The edge of the counter pushed her dress up under the nearest breast, outlining the huge dome of it.
"After you have been working at the sink for a while, and your eyes have grown more accustomed to the dimness of the safelight, do you detect any other glow or beam?"
"Well ... sometimes if a car turns the corner at just a certain angle, the headlights shine on the house...."
"That's it! Your undeveloped prints are getting a second exposure from those flashes."
Hilda sagged dejectedly across the counter. The shelf of it pushed her breast up and out still more so that, for the first time, Paul fully realized what an abundance of pin-up goodies she had there, if only she would uplift and display them.
"Oh, whatever shall I do?" she worried. "How can I build a darkroom?"
"What kind of basement do you have?"
"We do our laundry down there. That's about all it's used for."
"Ideal! Running water, floor drain, and all. Just get some wallboard and nail up a booth in one corner."
Dr. Fred Hill came into the drugstore. Certain old skeptics considered him much too young to be River Junction's only physician and surgeon, to take the health, even the very lives of people into his relatively inexperienced hands.
Yet, everyone loved him, as a man. He was that kind of a person.
Doc Hill had done a great deal, Paul knew, to help keep this out-dated drugstore open for business after Omar Brawn-son died. Fred came to the pharmacy to fill his own prescriptions and he was an advisor to Hilda in many ways.
Without his help, she couldn't have taken over and managed for the aging Mrs. Brawnson until the poor widow could sell.
Between Miss Wells and the physician from up the street there had developed a beautiful friendship, as Paul could see, any time the two were together. They continually ribbed each other, with sharper barbs than those which they aimed at others.
And, all the while, their faces were aglow with a joy so genuine they could not suppress nor hide it.
Today, Hilda ran directly to Doc and began chattering excitedly, like a small child.
"J.B. is letting me use his toothpaste formula!" she enthused. "Don't you think that is wonderful! I'm going to call it Raydent. How do you like that name?"
"Whoa, little one! Back up, then start running that tape all over again! Now what is it that you and that awful tooth-driller are cooking up?"
"You know ... that toothpaste formula he worked up! Well, we're going to manufacture it as a regular dentrifice. Raydent, you know, named for Ray's Pharmacy. And because it brightens like the rays of the rising sun."
"Somebody around here must have been doing an awful lot of thinking to figure all that out!" Doc teased. "Were you the one who put such a strain on her brain?"
"I just knew you would agree with me," Hilda rattled on, ignoring his teasing. "They're so skeptical, both of them."
"Both of whom?"
"Oh ... J.B. and Paul-who else?"
"Oh, those two ... they're so backward, they're not even sure what year it is, let alone what time." The doctor winked at Paul, then he patted Hilda's rear end.
"It will make money, won't it, Doc?" Hilda asked, anxiously.
"Why not? Some of the biggest dentrifice companies keep their shareholders happy."
"I know there will be expenses getting started ... but if people like it...."
"How much is a share of stock in the Raydent Corporation worth on today's market," Doc asked, seriously.
Hilda tossed her tawny head, pretending to be offended. "Don't you make fun of it. Maybe some day we will incorporate!"
Dr. Hill snatched up a pad of counter checks and scratched across the top one, with a flourish. He tossed it toward Hilda.
"There, does that make me a shareholder?" he asked, teasingly. "I want to be a charter member."
"I want to be a charter member."
Before she had the chance to pick it up and inspect it, he slammed out of the door, even forgetting the medicine he had come for.
Hilda turned to her employer, her eyes wide and starry, a tear glistening on her cheek.
"A hundred dollars!" she cried. "One hundred whole dollars! Oh, Mr. Ray, why would Doc give Raydent a hundred dollars? Can we really keep it ... use it?"
"You sure can, doll, but you have to make it pay dividends, return the investor a profit on his money."
"Oh, yes, yes! I will! I will!" Hilda kissed the check and danced around in a circle, stopping so suddenly that her full skirt tangled between her thighs. "There isn't anyone I would rather see get rich than Doc. Except you, of course. Gee, he really is nice, isn't he?"
* * *
Long after nine o'clock, when the last customer had left, Paul Ray saw Hilda Wells to the door and started to snap the lock so he could stay and do carpenter work, undisturbed. On the threshold, she whirled and firmly pushed her way back in.
"If you're working late, so am I," she declared, with finality.
"You've done your day's stint, more than you're getting paid for. Now, run on home."
"It's the toothpaste, isn't it?" she guessed, eagerly. "You're going to run up a batch, aren't you?"
Paul had been dreading the thought of taking on the extra burden of the toothpaste project, along with keeping the store open until nine, then trying to get on with his remodeling. But Hilda was right. If they really were going to follow through on her wild impulse, try to promote and sell the stuff in any quantity, they had to get started, and fast.
"I got us into this thing," Hilda declared. "I'll take care of the production end, at least."
"I'm the pharmacist around here."
"This is a factory, now, and I'm just a girl on the assembly line. I don't have to be licensed to know why I put in the ingredients ... all you have to do is tell me how."
By the glow of the dim night-light, her broad face was luminous, strangely alluring.
He kep his voice light, with an effort.
"Maybe you'll find time to start playing around with that tomorrow."
"No! Why wait? Come on!" She grabbed his hand and pulled him past the different displays in the darkened store to the prescription booth. "Just give me the formula in measurements I can understand. And show me where the things are that I will have to use."
"Now, just one little minute! What quantities were you thinking of?"
"Well-if I can use some of that hundred dollars...."
"It's yours to use. Fred gave it to you for just that purpose."
"No, I won't consider that money mine. Let's never forget that this is your place of business, and all the money we take in here is yours!"
"What about the whole thing being your idea? Don't you think you are entitled to royalties for that?" Like so many of the other men, he was falling into the habit of addressing her in a fond, teasing tone.
"We need some of the money for publicity," she continued, seriously.
"Such as loud speakers on the streets? Or going on TV?"
"A weekly ad in the Journal, advertising our Wednesday night special would be one good idea."
"What special?"
"A trial package of Raydent ... free!"
"Then watch Ray's Pharmacy become the hub of the dentrifice world, is that the idea?"
They decided on little plastic vials as containers for the samples, and set a goal of a hundred vials for their Wednesday night trial run.
In the intimacy of the little booth, Paul found himself talking to Hilda in a personal way, such as he never would consider out in the public part of the store.
"How come?" he teased, to cover up the tenderness he was feeling. "Answer me that."
"How come what?"
"A wonderful girl like you still is running around free."
"I don't feel free. I've been a slave to work practically all my life."
"I mean free in a different sense-single-unmarried-"
She smiled, wryly. "Oh, you know me, Mr. Ray. My old-maid aunt all over again; I am Miss Jessica Barnes, the second."
She was almost feverishly gay, tonight, chatting and laughing easily. The slight flush that stained her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes told him that she liked having him glance admiringly at her while they worked.
"I never heard the story," Paul said. "What happened to Miss Jessica, the first?"
"Oh, she was disappointed in love. Unrequited, I think that's the word, isn't it?"
"How does a girl go overboard for one measly man so bad that she secludes herself from then on and just gives up?" he persisted. "Your anut must have had many other chances."
"She just didn't want any other man."
"What was so special about the first one?"
"He was her big love."
"Oh no, not that old fallacy about just one true love and that's all." Paul remembered how some dimly-recalled girl had gushed to him about that, away back in his early teens.
"With her, it was self-inflicted punishment," Hilda said, with a sigh. "A lifetime of penitence for letting him get away."
"We all have to fall in and out of love a few times, sometimes several, before we find a good mate," Paul said. "She should have given herself a chance."
Hilda shook her head. "She never forgave herself for allowing another woman to out-trick her at a game where she held all the winning cards."
Paul looked doubtful. "He must have wanted the other girl, or she wouldn't have been able to get him."
"He wanted in her pants, at least that's the way Aunt Jessica tells it," Hilda said, scornfully. "She used the oldest legal trickery in the world. She purposely got pregnant so he would have to marry her."
Paul laughed. "There's no monopoly on that. Why didn't your aunt try the same thing with the next attractive man she met?"
Hilda sniffed, giving Paul a sidewise look.
"I doubt that she'd know what to do with a good man if she did get him."
Maybe it was all of the slightly ribald chatter, perhaps it was the more-than-usually-provocative clothing Hilda was wearing, but Paul felt acutely aware of her as a woman, tonight.
The warmth that kept radiating from her filled the little cubicle they occupied with a faint but persistent aroma, like a spicy whiff from a bakery.
"Are you, too, a woman scorned?" Paul teased. "The way I hear it, your frustrated aunt chases all the boys away, so you'll stay a virgin, too."
"She tries. She does the best she can. I've never had a steady boyfriend ... just meaningless school dates." Hilda laughed in a giddy, almost hysterical way. "Poor Aunt Jess! She's been trying too hard, really, to keep me from getting my heart broken ... but it happened anyway, in spite of all her watching out."
A big tear rolled down Hilda's cheek. "Did this man marry another girl, too?" Hilda glanced at him sidewise again. "That shows what an utter fool I am, even more stupid than my aunt. The man I fell in love with was already married, and to a bitch of a woman, long before I lost my head over him."
Realization struck him like a stunning blow to the skull. Why, she means me and the Eva she never could get along with. This poor girl fancies herself madly in love with me ... that's why she works so hard to help me!
Beside him, Hilda burst into wailing sobs. Tear-blinded, she whirled, groping for a handkerchief, just as Paul stepped back.
They collided. The impact bumped him against the counter, and it rocked her off balance. Instinctively, he put out a hand to steady her. She toppled willingly into the curve of his arm.
For a full moment, neither of them moved. Paul's wrist rested against that yielding mound of woman-flesh inside her louse, startled again at its size, noting that it felt exactly as it had looked this morning when she had rested it on the counter, as though for his inspection. The electro-magnetism of female contact sent exciting currents along his every nerve fiber.
She glanced down, smiling, at his hand on her breast. Half-apologetically, remembering her virginity, he jerked the hand away.
She snatched at it and spread his fingers, then pressed his palm over the fullest part of her lush bosom.
Her soft, gray-brown eyes, dew-sparkled in the shadows of the booth, turned trustingly upward to his eyes. Her lips parted slightly, and her breath came in a sob.
The wonder of the situation dazed him: her declared love, the overwhelming gratitude he felt for all of her loyal devotion and her help, the consciousness of the woman-body she offered to him.
His senses swam. He sought her mouth with his, allowing his fingertips to trace the contours of the hemisphere within all the confining thickness of cotton clothing. The girl made the first suggestion to undress. She stretched out the neckline of her dress, indicating that he should put his hand inside. When that proved awkward, she motioned toward the zipper in the back.
He slid the fastening down and slipped the dress forward from her white shoulders, halfway down bare arms as plump, as sweetly-fleshed as those of a girl in some painting by the old masters.
A vest-like top of a white cotton slip still enclosed her. Pull-over style, it had no fastenings, so it could not be loosened. It could not be removed, so long as she had the dress abut her midriff.
Hilda solved that problem by working the slip up against the back of her neck so it loosened in front and plunged low.
But, under the slip was a breast-armor of quilted cotton, with built-up self-shoulders instead of straps. The design of the cups obviously confined and flattened the breasts to modestly hide their shape as much as possible. The bra unbuttoned down the back, a row of six buttons. Beneath the hampering slip it could not be removed, but only drawn forward, hanging suspended between her upper arms.
At the sight of the two round white loaves she presented to him Paul again was reminded of an old painting. The width of her breasts covered her entire chest. They stood up at attention under his gaze, the satin skin corded with internal pressures.
The nipples tilted upward, as big as thimbles, hard and baby-pink.
As his fingers caressed them, the nipples distended, swelling as though they would burst. She hooked a hand in back of his neck and drew his lips to her breast, holding his head there as she might support a sleeping child.
After a time, he started at the other end, running a hand upward under her too-long skirts.
She twitched ecstatically.
"Yes, yes, I've been wanting that!" she whimpered.
So she, too, had been unable to forget the fumbling up her leg in the window.
He found his way upward inside the shorts-like panties, but that was too confining to permit much caressing. He pulled his hand out and groped around higher under her petticoats for the waistband of the pants. They were buttoned on the side.
He began undressing her, from the bottom up, gathering up and rolling the fullness of her skirt. He crushed upward the protective-thick petticoat. He unbuttoned and pulled down the clumsy homemade underpants.
Her thighs, above the tops of her hose, were very white and very soft, the skin surprisingly child-like compared to that of other women he had known, such as Eva. Apparently, Hilda never had exposed this part of her anatomy to sun or to wind or to the gaze of man.
Her legs were more fully fleshed than were Eva's, the thighs ham-like in shape, tapering out from cute knees to the width of true woman-hips. Again, he thought of the women of an earlier day, with the dimpled chubbiness that the old masters loved to paint.
The mere fact that he had found such a one in this day of thin, flat-chested ladies drove the harem-seeking part of his nature half-mad with desire.
When he touched her, she shivered and sobbed. She reciprocated by fumbling at his trousers.
Then she shoved her flanks at him urgently, offering direct connection.
"Maybe we had better lie down," she whispered, deliriously. "It's easier that way, isn't it?"
He looked around as though expecting a cot to materialize. "Where in hell would we lie?"
"Right here on the floor."
She couldn't wait, sprawling over backward, jerking him down upon her, trying to guide him in, thrusting upward with her hips, all the time crooning, deep in her throat. He met pinching resistance that hurt as he tried to enter.
She giggled, nervously. "Now you know...."
He recoiled as the full truth hit his consciousness. "It's true, isn't it ... you are a virgin. You never ... Aunt Jessie did keep the studs away!"
"I don't care!" she whimpered, frantically. "This is what I want ... and I'm glad it was saved for you!"
With savage strength, she held him down, forcing him against her, tried to yank him forward.
"No, you don't!" he protested, resisting her. "I don't want you sorry afterward, maybe hating me!"
His hot desire wilted away to nothing.
"Oh, no!" she wailed, as though in mortal agony. "Not another disappointment!"
"I won't do it ... not to you."
He tore free and sprang up, straightening his clothes, glancing about wildly, afraid of being watched.
She rolled over, face down, smashing the white loaves of her breasts sidewise against the tiled floor. Her nyloned legs shimmered, beautifully full-curved, to the paleness of her thighs. Skirt and petticoat swirled about her waist, leaving the width of her bare buttocks turned up to him. Their generous soft-fleshed roundness quaked and quivered as she lay, wracked with torturing sobs.
For all his firm resolution, it hurt him to turn away.
CHAPTER SIX
"WE'D NEVER have any, if I didn't go after you for it," Eva accused Paul suddenly, from her side of the darkened bed.
Already dozing off, Paul resorted to feeble attempt at humor. "Maybe there's such a cottonpicking thing as overdoing it ... or didn't that ever occur to you?"
Usually, she snuggled against him as soon as he lay down. They often had jested that all they needed was a narrow cot, the way they always were tangled together. Tonight, he had been surprised, but nonetheless pleased when she decided to ignore him, even though he knew she had awakened as soon as he dropped wearily between the sheets.
"I'll be glad when that remodeling is done," she remarked, bitterly, "so you can take care of your homework at night."
Let her think, if she wanted to, that carpentering was what had detained him again tonight. A session with his tools actually had been his original plan. Now he still was in a rosy daze after the sensuous scene with his salesgirl. He drifted toward sleep, dreaming about Hilda, feeling her soft rich flesh.
He especially yearned toward the sight of that quivering buttocks.
It gave him a wonderful sense of freedom to have Eva leave him alone, for once. He had not realized how enslaving his marriage ritual had become, what with night-after-night cradling and caressing, with never a let-up. He was in no mood for Eva's blandishments tonight. Unavoidably, with two as passionate as he and Eva, the first touch led on to active sex-play, often lasting for hours, panting away the better part of the night before he could get any rest or sleep.
"You're an old man already," Eva complained.
"We don't have to experience an orgy every night, just to prove that I'm still young."
Eva tossed, angrily. "Damn it, why did I have to get stuck with an egghead? Other men are ready for sex all the time, any time."
"When have I ever failed to satisfy you, Mrs. Hot-pants?"
"You dread making love to me, don't you?" she flared. "You really have to drive yourself to it. I can see that very plainly."
She knocked his hands away, tangling the blankets. With great precision and breathing heavily, she sorted out the covers in the darkness, then wrapped them about her shoulders and flopped over with her back to him, on the very edge of the bed.
"You don't have to do it, ever again. I won't expect you to," he said haughtily.
He considered grabbing her and reasoning with her, in the only way she seemed to understand, through her erogenous nerves.
But, as tired as he was, he decided to play the game by her rules of the moment.
"All right," he agreed, speaking thickly, as though he were nearly asleep.
That made her mad, of course. He could tell by the tense way she held herself.
Now that they had quarreled, he could not sleep. Judging by the sounds she made, neither could Eva. She tossed and turned, becoming more restless, more irritable, hitting her head harder against the uncooperative pillow, as the minutes, as the hours ticked away.
To make her punishment more complete, he decided to feign the sleep he couldn't achieve either. He breathed deeply, sometimes snoring a little.
She reared up to listen, then she slipped a hand over stealthily to pluck at his arm. When he continued his pretense of sleep, she rolled near and ran her fingers, knowingly, over him.
To his surprise, wanting as much as he had been, to keep his emotions turned toward Hilda, he still responded immediately, glowing with manhood, aching for Eva.
She tossed off the covers and stripped away his pajamas. She threw a knee over him, then squatted upon him.
A wave of rebellion, even of revulsion went through him. Although they had, by mutual consent, tried everything in their marriage, he still must be a farm boy at heart, feeling that, as a rule, the male animal should be on top, in control, as in nature's time-tried way.
The sensations Eva drew forth in him kept him pinned to the mattress. He remembered reading that, in a large part of the world, where the role of the woman still is to please the male, her master, even if he is only the husband, girls are taught to do the work in the act of love, even to wooing the man to complete peace so that his sleep would be deep and complete.
Eva's sensuous up-and-down motion on Paul's hardness that was as awake as the rest of him was nearly asleep, wrought strange langour in him, a dream lovemaking that was keenly rapturous.
She worked a hot lustful magic, managing as her own passions rose, to whip his fire as high as her own, so that they climbed together, zoomed over the top together, with him still lying quietly, still fully sated.
"How expensive a camera do you think I should buy?" Hilda asked her boss, deep-planning as usual.
If she had any self-recriminations or any recriminations for him about last night's episode, she did not show it.
"How can I know that?" Paul parried. "I don't even know exactly what you're trying for."
"When I snap a picture of a kid, I want it to be well worth showing to his mother ... objective a sale."
"Not box camera stuff?"
She shook her head. "And I need an enlarger, too. Nobody ... just nobody ... likes contact prints any more. Jumbos have spoiled all that."
"Santy Claus! Santy Claus!" Paul chanted. "Bring me a cam'ra! Bring me a 'larger!"
He looked at the width of her flanks, under the looseness of her robe-like dress, today a rust-colored print. For an instant last night, when she had turned her delectable rear end up to him, all of the flames had leaped up in him again.
He wanted to fall upon her and finish the job that they had started. But he had resolutely walked away. She was too nice a girl; he would not corrupt her. Still, he doubted that he ever would look at her again without remembering her in the lush tempting beauty of her near-nakedness.
"Are these enlargers really good ones?" Hilda pointed to their limited stock of photographic supplies.
"Anything Ray's Pharmacy sells has to be good."
"But these are for amateurs," Hilda objected.
"You're professional?" Paul asked, humorously.
"I want picture quality." Hilda tossed her tawny head.
"The quality, my dear girl, is in the lens."
"All right. Now, which camera shall I get? Do I want a twin-lens reflex?"
Paul threw up his hands. "Do you have any idea what they cost?"
Hilda's mouth set in a stubborn line. "You can hold back part of my wages until every penny is paid."
"I won't keep back a cent of your salary. It's yours."
Paul loved that plain moon face more than he ever realized he could love any woman, other than his wife. Mostly, he suspected, it was because of the beauty of her inner character. Hilda's industriousness, her "helpmate" attitude toward him and toward his store, meant a lot more to him right now in his time of economic crisis than did all of Eva's beauty or her ability in bed.
"We'll work out a payment plan," Hilda said, very decisively.
"Well, well!" He retreated behind a shield of levity. "Our little girl really is flying high. From the first film developed to full studio ... and all of this practically overnight!"
"Get rid of that woman!" Eva snarled, when Paul came home for lunch at noon.
"What in hell are you talking about?" Paul asked blankly, even though he knew that his wife never used that tone of voice except when speaking of Hilda. Already he was gathering the forces of his emotional power to rise to the defense of his salesgirl.
Eva glared. "You'll tell that hussy just as soon as you get back to the store ... she's through."
He bristled, glared back. "Look, sugar, don't try running the business from this distance!"
"She's got to go! She's breaking up our marriage!"
Paul gave his wife a cold look.
"Why blame anyone else for the troubles we bring on ourselves?"
He was bitterly remembering a certain Wednesday night when he had come home a little too early and had caught his wife in bed with another man.
"You either fire that girl or I will!" Eva flared.
"You have nothing to say about who does or does not work in that store!" he thundered, now in a fighting mood to at least equal hers. "You wrote yourself right out of our partnership agreement. You quit the store and you have refused to help ever since!"
"Paul! You will just have to choose between that woman and your own wife!"
"What a silly thing to say. There's no comparison. My relationship to her has nothing to do with my relationship to you. You are Mrs. Ray. She is only an employee."
"Including special wifely overtime? Like last night?"
"Now what have you cooked up in the furnace of your unreasonable jealousy?" he asked, evasively.
It was uncanny that she should suspect that there had been something very different about last night.
"Why should she be so anxious to stay there in the store with you after you lock up ... when there's no one around to see what's going on ... or when you at least think there isn't?"
"If I have an employee who is so loyal she won't go home as long as I am working, what can I do about it?"
"Loyal? Is that a new name for hot pants?"
"You misjudge Hilda. You always have."
For the first time since the argument started, the girl's name came out.
"Don't lie about how she feels about you! This isn't the first time she pushed herself at you. I know what you two have been up to ... and I sure as hell know what happened last night!"
"Please tell me so we'll both know what this emotional hurricane is all about."
Strangely enough, he felt absolutely no guilt regarding his abortive attempt to possess Hilda, no more than he had felt regarding the accidental fondling of her leg when they both were in the window.
His reactions toward her had been natural, inevitable for a man constantly thrown into close proximity with a young, attractive female.
Bitterly aware that his marriage vows already had been sullied by the actions of his wife on that fatal Wednesday night, he felt that nothing he could do would be as bad as what Eva had done. Actually, he felt free to please himself. Surely, the love-starved Hilda deserved that much amorous attention from him as a man, if only as a kind of reward for her devotion, her helpfulness.
"You forget that a single light bulb throws a strong shadow on the wall," Eva told him, with a sneer.
"Look, honey, I don't know who your spies are-only that you must have them planted around to watch all the time-but I wish they would get the full truth about what they see before making their report, before they try to convict either Hilda or me."
"Everybody who happened to be passing in the street could watch your shadowgraph performance."
"Nothing happened," he insisted, stubbornly, "certainly nothing serious."
As long as he did not go all the way with eager Hilda, the whole thing seemed as innocent to him as the petting parties of school kids.
Eva was adamant, her mouth an iron line. "I got a detailed report of everything you did-undressing her-forcing her to the floor."
At seven o'clock the next morning, Hilda Wells and Andy Jansen, the next-door mechanic, held a hurried consultation just outside the door to the drugstore. Paul could see that Hilda had been weeping, and there were furrows of concern on the young mechanic's forehead.
The girl burst out sobbing. "But he wouldn't do anything wrong, Andy! He's a perfect gentleman!"
Andy patted Hilda's shoulder, awkwardly.
With an embarrassed glance at Paul, he scurried back to his job.
Hilda came dragging into the store, tears now streaming down her cheeks, unchecked. She walked all around, gazing fondly at different parts of the establishment, especially at the new display of Raydent toothpaste which she had laboriously designed and had set up yesterday. Now, she looked at it sobbing, as though her heart were broken.
All day yesterday there had been an ache in Paul's heart-and another in his loins-whenever he looked at his Girl Friday. He wanted very much to confide in her, as his working partner, to burst into an angry denunciation of his own wife as a meddling fool, but caution had held him silent.
No use making Hilda feel guilty which she surely would feel if she felt that she was the alienating third party. His family troubles were his own affair, beginning with the false accusation regarding that time when he had felt Hilda's thigh in the show window. He would handle Eva in his own way.
He was sure that Hilda's mournful air was connected with more recent misunderstandings in his home.
Hilda stalked over to him, confronting him. "I'm quitting! Addie is coming in today to begin working for you."
She began her announcement bravely enough, as a plain statement of fact, nothing more, but she broke down at the end and wept like a heartbroken child.
"You can't quit!" Paul exploded, aghast. "I won't let you!"
"I-I-already h-have!" she gulped.
"I have something to say about all this!" Paul yelled.
"I won't stand for it!"
"This is my resignation," Hilda insisted.
"Eva did this, didn't she?" Paul asked, angrily. "What did she say?"
"That I-I'm through-"
"There must have been more than that, much more. What did she do to you?"
Hilda turned away her head to hide her grief. "It-it-d-doesn't matter now, Paul."
"Now you look here, young lady. You listen to me. This is my store, and I'll do all the hiring and firing around here!"
"N-not in this c-case-"
He grabbed Hilda's shoulders, as though to hold her, to forcibly keep her from walking out. "I've told that woman of mine not to interfere."
"She-she threatened to divorce you-to name me as the other woman!"
"Divorce?" he jeered. ""Eva doesn't want a divorce, not in a million years. Why should she?"
"With the kind of alimony she could go after and most likely get, as the wronged wife? She could ruin you, Paul. She could take everything you have away from you, including this store."
Paul couldn't accept that. "I just don't believe a thing like that of Eva."
"She's got us, Paul, honey. She knows all about how I feel about you-and I can't help myself there. You had better believe the worst."
She gestured back toward the prescription booth, as though their shadowy images might still be intertwined there.
Paul nodded at last, hard facts grinding into his brain. He had not believed that Eva could cheat on him, either-yet she had.
"Yeah," he conceded, dismally. "It seems as though we made some very interesting shadows on the wall."
Hilda resumed her nervous pacing about the store. "Adelaide will be here in just a few moments to replace me. I want to be gone before she arrives."
"I did not hire Addie nor anyone else," Paul said, coldly. "Until I do, this still is your job. Just go ahead with your work, the same as you always do."
He would make it a special occasion by putting her directly to work, mixing Raydent today. Getting so carried away by passion, during their first try at the manufacture of the toothpaste, they had accomplished little. When Hilda suggested staying overtime for more work on it last night, he had vetoed any possibility of becoming further involved with her.
"It's too late now-we've spoiled everything," she said, hopelessly, of her job.
"I won't allow Eva to persecute you this way!"
"It isn't only she, Paul," Hilda explained. "It seems we had quite a few observers. The whole town is ready to ostracize you."
She caught herself. "I mean-I know it was way more my fault than it was yours. The woman always takes the lead in affairs such as this."
"Don't speak of yourself as though you were a cheap little chippie...."
"If I'm out of the way, maybe Eva will come back and help you with the running of the store."
"I doubt it. She's spoiled and she's lazy. She's not like you."
With a wailing sob, Hilda whirled and dashed out of the door.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Adelaide Sloan was, indeed, a nice personality. Nice looking. Nice acting. A very nice dresser. With her side-swirled bouffant brown-black hair-do, with her soft brown eyes accented by blue-green eye shadow and mascara, with her pert, uptilted nose, she was a typical modern teenager. Her arms, in a white sleeveless blouse, were bare. Her pleated plaid skirt was so short that it barely reached to her knees. Her good legs were glamorized by seamless suntan nylons, by french-heeled pointed-toed skimmers.
Even though she had been seeing Paul Ray regularly whenever she was a customer on the other side of the soda fountain, and had even helped out behind the counter on that one disastrous Wednesday night, she approached him now, with diffidence.
"Mrs. Ray said I was to come in and see you about a job."
"Exactly what did my wife tell you?" The anger that surged through Paul was no fault of this child's, so he made his tone kindly.
The brown eyes still did not lift to meet his. "She said that Hilda was quitting, that you would need someone."
"Did she say why Hilda was quitting?"
"Well, no...."
Unable to control himself, in spite of his good resolutions, Paul found himself roaring at Adelaide, taking his frustration out on her.
"Does any of this make any sense to you?" he bellowed.
Adelaide backed away, slightly. "No sir."
"I want you and everyone else in this town to fully understand that there is absolutely no trouble between Hilda and me."
"Yes sir. I know. She always enjoyed working for you."
"Stop addressing me as though I were a warden or a military general!"
"Yes sir ... I mean yes, Mr. Ray." . "And stop shaking! I don't bite!"
"Yes sir. I always thought you were awful nice...."
Paul paced about, trying to take everything into consideration. "Hilda's gone, at least for right now. You can work, at least until I get things straightened out and can get her back here."
"I know there's been some ... uh ... trouble, sir. In fact, my folks are sort of afraid to have me work here."
"Why?"
"There is talk of ... well, of ... boycotting the place, especially for teenagers."
"So it's that bad, is it? Then maybe you had better not stay."
Having no help at all could be the one bit of leverage he needed to get Hilda back on the job.
"Oh no, sir. I'd like the job, honest! And I'll try awfully hard to be as much like Hilda as I can!"
"You just be yourself," Paul instructed, mildly. "We'll get along just fine."
Leaving an inexperienced girl in charge of the store which was something he would not ordinarily dream of doing, Paul Ray stomped homeward in the middle of the morning.
He was not sure of his plan of action, but he was sure that there would be plenty of it. He was infuriated enough now to settle everything with finality, even if it meant an end to his marriage, getting a divorce.
Eva had the ironing board set up in the living room where the cooling breezes that wafted through the open window and billowed the white net curtains, could afford her relief from the heat. She calmly pressed a band of lace, edging a ruffled nightie. The whole scene was so domestic, so pleasant, so wonderfully normal-looking ... idealistic, in fact, the way he always had pictured their marriage ... that his own mood of stormy vengeance suddenly seemed alien, out of place.
"Are you going to come back and help out in the store?" he asked, quietly.
"You have plenty of help. Addie will make a lovely salesgirl. She will put some class into the place."
"I don't want her. I want the experienced girl I had."
"Experienced? In how many ways?"
"You can't fire Hilda! I'm the owner of that store, and I'm the one who runs it!"
"I asked you in a nice way to get rid of her. You didn't see fit to comply with my wishes."
"The only way I will accept her resignation is if you will agree to come in and work in her place."
"I'm no career girl, not outside of my home. We found that out."
"Then why the working partnership we planned when we first considered buying the store?"
"If that business of yours can't even pay modest wages, maybe you had better close the doors."
"But a store like ours has to be a family business to pay. We should be keeping every penny that it makes, for ourselves."
"If it breaks even, that is," Eva sneered.
She gestured toward the pile of ironing, still to be done. "I think it should be evident, even to you that my place is in the home."
"In these times? You really are a dreamer. Few wives are kept women, now, not unless they have babies or very small children. A wife contributes to the common income and does her work of evenings. It's the only way in which most couples can even begin to meet today's high standard of living."
"What a lovely philosophy, especially from a man's viewpoint," Eva said, sarcastically. "Where did you get all of those high-sounding ideas? From Hilda, with her worship-my-master attitude?"
"Hilda is who we are talking about," Paul agreed, without raising his voice. "Compared to all she had done, you have just plain failed me in the everyday struggle to make a buck."
"Oh sure, she's an industrial wizard. How about her big ideas of setting up a studio?"
"She'll make a go of that, too. She's that kind."
"Well, better that than ruining our lives." Eva flounced around, putting away the ironed nightie, and testing other garments in the basket beside her for appropriate dampness for ironing.
Paul noted, for the first time, that she was wearing a very light duster, and as far as he could tell, nothing under the flimsy garment. No wonder she always was getting into trouble, if she let other men who chanced by, see her this way. Or was her attire now deliberately planned to get him emotionally involved so she could win him over?
"If you aren't coming in to help, then Hilda still has her job," Paul declared, angrily.
"Oh no, she does not! She understands that, even if you refuse to, and she never will come back to you!"
"If you're threatening me with divorce," Paul challenged, letting her know he was onto her little game, "I might have a few rounds of ammunition myself. How about that man I chased out of here, stark naked?"
"When my own husband neglects me for his sales-associate? I'll make you and that hussy wish you hadn't!"
"Why do you try to paint my actions as so much blacker than yours?"
"Everybody knows that our laws always lean toward the wife. Any court in the land will be sympathetic to me."
"Oh, you can talk big, all right, but I don't believe you would ever go through with it."
That night, Paul Ray knew for the first time what it really would feel like to be impotent. All of his senses seemed to have gone dead, as though an electric current had been turned off, as though the fuse had been blown.
He lay in bed with the sexiest woman he ever had known, who had everything it took to drive him crazy, yet he felt disdain for, rather than desire for her.
Here he was, still a young man, still in his prime, and useless in bed.
It was a frightening feeling.
As the night wore on and he still could not sleep, he hated Eva with a revulsion he would not have believed possible to feel toward her. He hated her most for this newest offense, depriving Hilda of her job when Hilda was the one person most qualified to help him.
He hated Eva for violating their marriage bed, for sharing it with that hairy ape-man, for bringing the wrath of the Better Business Bureau down upon their heads. He hated her for driving him to equally unsavory involvements that threatened their store with boycotts. Now, he hated her for this power failure within himself, robbing him of his feeling of self-confident manhood.
The woman held her body as straight as though it were a broomstick, her head high. Her severe black suit glinted shiny-blue in spots. She moved in short, hitching steps, one side supported on a heavy gnarled cane. Her hair, once the reddest of bright reds, now was mostly white, and she wore it in the dutchboy bob in which it had been cut for thirty years.
The cloche hat of ancient vintage descended down well over her face so that she had to peer out from under it.
"I am Jessie Barnes," she announced to Paul. "I am Hildegarde's aunt."
"Oh yes," he said, rising, holding out his hand. "How do you do, Miss Barnes? I feel as though I already know you well, just from hearing Hilda speak of you so often."
"Young man, you have been a fine influence on my niece."
"Hilda is easy to be nice to. She made herself very useful around here."
"I tried to bring her up properly."
"You did a fine job," he said, meaning it. "You gave her fine principles to live by."
"Humph! Don't try to flatter me, young man! I know what most everyone says ... that I'm just a mean old witch to treat that poor girl so!"
"Anyone who has done all that you have for Hilda...."
"Enough of that! What I came here for is to get those cameras and the other photographic equipment that Hilda wanted."
"Don't you think Hilda had better pick them out for herself?"
"You have been a photographer, Hilda says," Miss Jessie insisted. "She trusts your judgment more than she does her own to get proper equipment."
"Well...." Paul was reluctant to reveal the expensive dreamworld Hilda had made it plain she lived in. "She looked at this twin-lens reflex."
"Is that good for use in baby portraits?"
"With this better lens, which is priced at one hundred and nineteen dollars, it's as good as you can get."
Aunt Jessica gestured, impatiently. "We'll take it."
Paul Ray fell back a step and blinked. The old girl surely was not one bit phased by price.
"Now, the new kind of lights that flash," she persisted.
"Strobes?"
"She'll need three of them for background lighting, won't she? No, make it four, for fill-in spots, as she called it."
Again, he was practically bowled over. The better electronic flash units cost real money.
"You know what kind of enlarger she selected," Aunt Jessie went on. "And she wants more tanks and more trays. And a timer. And, oh yes, plenty of film, paper, and chemicals."
As a businessman, Paul became alarmed. Perhaps the old spinster was not quite responsible, and was just conjuring up false dreams for her niece. "I haven't added these up, but just summing them up in my mind, I would say you are suggesting close to a thousand dollar's worth."
Aunt Jessica shrugged. "Whatever it comes to."
"Oh course, if you want to set up a payment plan, I'll be glad to work one out...."
"Figure the total. I'll write a check for it."
Hilda phoned Paul at the store. "I'm not supposed to contact you under penalty of public exposure of my loose morals, but I just had to thank you for my mid-summer Christmas presents."
"Oh, the photographic stuff?"
"I detected some of the reductions on prices."
"That was only your employee's discount. You more than earned it."
"Thanks, Santa," Hilda said, warmly. "I won't ever forget it."
"The debt still is very much on my side of the ledger."
He could hear her breathing quicken. "I left there so quickly, I couldn't think of quite everything. How would you like it if I take the work of making Raydent off your hands?"
"Oh now, lady, look here," Paul jeered trying to cover his excitement at hearing her voice, at visualizing her at the other end of the line, "I have something to say about that. You were the one who said that Raydent was mine; it belongs with the store. It certainly will have to be taken care of on these premises."
"In that case, seeing it is too much of an added burden for you, maybe you'd just better drop it."
"No," Paul said earnestly, all lightness leaving his voice. "I've been thinking that maybe that is just what we need to put us over the top. Without it, this store may be headed for the rocks."
"Please let me help with it, Paul," she pleaded. "I've been a working gal in that store since when I went to school and it's kind of hard to retire."
He considered the offer. He really could use her assistance, especially in that. Yet he knew that any connection between them would be misconstrued by Eva and would lead to further trouble. Maybe it would be better to keep the break clean.
"Get busy on your pictures," he said, brusquely.
She tried to jest. "You're breaking my heart. I can't understand how you get along without me."
"I can't ... and that's the real truth, Hilda. It's nothing but the truth."
"Well, it's nice to hear you say it anyway you prevaricator. And now goodbye, for the last time."
"Hey, we're still friends, aren't we?" He was loath to let her go. "Even if I did ungratefully throw you out of a job right onto the street ... you can still call me now and then, can't you?"
"I promised your Mafia that I wouldn't." A rich huskiness had crept into her voice. "So I better keep my word and desist right now."
"This is a public place, Hilda. You can stop in to shop or to talk any time you like."
"With all the private eyes trailing me?"
He tried another tack. "Well, anyway you'll still patronize Ray's Pharmacy for your necessary photographic supplies, won't you?"
Addie Sloan, eager to be as helpful as Hilda had been, had gone to the post office for the mail. She now stood before Paul, slitting envelopes, then sorting letters and circulars, as she fancied any good personal secretary should.
Suddenly she let out a little yelp and went very white, then very red, and finally a sickly greenish color.
"I guess I mistakenly opened somebody else's mail," she whispered, contritely.
The letter was on personal stationary, Paul noted. The envelope was addressed in a large scrawl, to Eva Ray. The postmark indicated Audubon, two hundred miles across the state.
River Junction had no mail delivery, but this letter was designated "Douds Street" instead of to the Ray box number at the post office. Eva long ago had insisted on a family box, separate from the one for their business mail. This was to discourage Hilda from "snooping". Eva habitually picked up their household mail daily because of the newspapers that were sent them.
Some careless postal employee must have absent-mindedly dropped this note into the pharmacy box, so now Adelaide was "snooping".
The paper fluttered as Addie handed it to Paul, with trembling fingers. The back of his neck bristled with his first glance at it.
Obviously, the message never was intended for his eyes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Paul took the letter home at noon and slapped it on the kitchen worktable where Eva was slicing onions.
"What does this mean?" he demanded.
She looked up at him coolly, unabashed. "What does it say? You can read, can't you?"
She suspended a kettle of boiled potatoes over the sink so she could drain them into a colander. Then she recognized the postmark on the envelope and, possibly, the handwriting. It was her turn to change color and to look sick.
"Who is Al?" Paul asked, ominously.
"A former schoolmate."
"Why did you ask him to drive clear across the state just to see you? You did ask him, of course?"
She nodded trembling. He had her at a disadvantage because, not having seen the note, she could not be sure just how much it had revealed.
"Why, Eva? Why?" Paul rasped.
She tossed back a strand of steam-dampened red-brown hair from her heat-and-annoyance-flushed cheek.
"For old time's sake," she said, shortly.
"He's an old flame, isn't he?"
"Oh, no!" she cried.
The letter indicated that Eva at least had had a case on the man, but Paul wanted to hear her admit it.
"He never before was your lover, yet you invited him here, and the day before yesterday, you spent the entire afternoon in bed with him!" He was almost shouting now, completely furious.
The kettle dropped into the sink, and the steaming potatoes went rolling.
Eva staggered backwards, as though her legs were about to fold up under her.
"Did he write that?" she asked, her eyes dark with sudden fright.
"All of his clever innuendoes give the actions of both of you away very clearly."
"The fool!"
"I asked you why, Eva? After all of these years, why did you have to turn to him for lovemaking?"
She avoided his eyes. "What difference does it make?"
He began nervously pacing the length of the kitchen. "You lie around with other men while I'm slaving to make a living, and it isn't important for me to ask why."
"Paul, you make it sound awful!"
"It is awful! It might be one thing to be carried away by a moment of extreme passion which compels you to sex. It's quite another thing to deliberately plan and maneuver for a man to come that far to please you."
"You don't even know Allen."
"I'm glad I don't. What's so different about his ability in bed?"
"You just won't even try to understand. When I was a girl, getting raped by Allen was like belonging to an exclusive club."
"Oh, so that's it? And you never made the club while you were in school?"
"No, I didn't," Eva admitted, in scarcely more than a whisper.
"Who is this 'E' to whom he refers so cleverly? That's Esther who was your best girl friend, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"So he laid her, and he didn't lay you, and after all this time, you had to get even?"
Eva choked. "You always manage to find out everything, don't you?"
Paul heard Addie cry out. He saw her clutch at the front of her brown sweater with both hands. Then he could hear the individual pearls go peppering to the floor like a dash of small hail.
She looked at him, halfway across the store, in a wild appeal for help.
"Grab them! Save a many as you can!"
He hurried to her, and she pressed the two cushioned domes within the soft knit sweater against his hands.
"Here! Catch them" She meant the beads from her broken necklace, of course.
He cupped his hands below hers while she released the pearls she clutched, and allowed them to drop into his palms. She gave him the remains of the severed strand, with many of the beads still in place. Then she took hold of his thumb and cut the edge of his little finger sharply against and under a mound of softness while she brushed the last stray pearl from the mesh of knitwear, stretched as it was over the nipples of those pert young breasts.
He always had thought that a lot of those cones were padding, or at least that they were part of the design of the bra.
Now he knew that, in this case, they were all Addie.
"They are matched, you know." She meant the pearls, he presumed. "We have to find every one of them, then sort them and put them back in their proper order."
She crouched down and began picking up the little translucent spheres from the waxed tile floor. Her narrow tubular olive skirt pulled well above her thighs, exposing a long expanse of bronzed nylons above dimpled knees to his fascinated gaze.
"They're scattered all over the place!" she wailed. "Somebody'll come in and certainly step on them before we find them all!"
Paul turned to the counter and deposited the pearls he had found and was holding, into a convenient box-lid. He knelt to help her hunt the rest of them.
Reaching for one, she rocked well back on her heels and allowed her knees to go slack, spreading apart. Her suntan hose were extra long, suited to the extreme shortness of her skirt. But, farther along, against the pink background of her slip, he could see pale thigh flesh bulging over the darker garter tops.
"Yes, I know, Uncle Dudley!" She clapped her knees together when she saw the direction of his gaze. "My! My! Isn't it awful? I forgot to put on my long bloomers today, and you never saw a girl's legs before!"
"What else did you expect?" Paul flared. "When you invite a man to look, that's what he does!"
"For your information, Mister Prude, you can see my thighs any day that I'm home ... in short-shorts!"
"That isn't at all like looking up a skirt, above stockings, and you know it."
Angrily, she grabbed the hem of her narrow skirt and lifted it as high as it would go, so that he had a clear view of her smooth young thighs, all the way up to the yellow band that was the crotch of her lemon-colored panties.
"There! Take a good look! You can't see a bit more than you could if I had on my swimsuit, now can you?"
"You hate me, don't you? Eva snarled at her husband, as they watched the ten o'clock news on television. "You dread to go to bed with me, don't you?"
"Why, no!" Paul protested, caught off guard.
He had thought that they were getting along fine, exchanging comments on the drama they just had viewed, as it had unfolded. This was something different, refreshing, not to find Eva already in bed when he got home from the store, not to be expected to retire promptly, himself.
"Sitting there, sneaking those hateful glances to me, passing judgment on me!" she said, furiously.
She half rose from her chair, her eyes flashing wildly in the subdued lighting. "You always were so damned self-righteous."
"Oh, now honey, wait...."
"I can't stand it!" she screamed. "I simply can't stand it. All of this suspense, while you decide what you're going to do about me!"
"What is there to do?"
"I know you! You prude, you! I know exactly what you're thinking right now, that I'm dirty and sin-stained, unfit for you, now isn't that right?"
It was true. This Allen deal was so premeditated, so long-range. It had disillusioned him completely as to Eva's wifely fidelity.
The first betrayal had come as enough of a shock, because up until then, he had had implicit faith in his wife, had been sure that their love for each other was sufficient for all of their mutual sex needs. Dazedly, he had tried to find excuses for her, reasoning that she, like anyone else, just could not help herself in a weak moment. He had blamed himself for inadvertently letting her see him fumble up Hilda's skirts.
But to write and to proposition a man such as Allen!
Since the moment when he first saw that clandestine note, he had been raging inwardly, telling himself that she was no damned good, that they were through, this time for sure. He should have seen through her when he caught her that first time, with the ape-man, should have thrown her out into the street right then, as men throughout history have disowned unfaithful wives or concubines.
He had been considering divorce as the best way out, thinking about it often during the busy day. Divorce might be the one best way to show her up publicly, using scandalous testimony. Denouncing her and her evil ways would set him right with the Joe Chradys and the Lloyd Schuberts and all of the other parents of the teen-agers who had, for so long, frequented his soda fountain.
But...! Eva claimed to have witnesses, too, witnesses with plenty of evidence to checkmate him in the courts.
He should at least have beaten her soundly so that she would be afraid to try anything like that again. As it was, he had been so understanding, so kind, she had assumed that she could get away with anything, and she went right on playing around.
"You men don't have any monopoly on free love!" Eva shrilled. "I enjoy my sex every bit as much as you do ... maybe more! Women do nowadays, or haven't you heard?"
"Eva!" Paul shouted at her, scandalized. "Do you realize what you're saying? I've never heard you talk like this before!"
"You damned hypocritical goody-goody! You bigoted double-standard would-be saint! You think it's perfectly all right, for you as a man, to undress your whoring Hilda. But for me, your wife, to have a little fun on the side, oh no! I must wear a chastity belt!"
"I don't ask one thing of you that I have not lived up to myself."
"I know better than that!"
"Now, Eva," he protested, seriously, "Whatever you may think, I have not played around, certainly not all the way. We agreed on moral standards as man and wife, by mutual consent, long ago. It came easily for us to be true to each other because we get all we need at home."
"You handsome devil, you!" Eva flew at him like a snarling wildcat, clawing his face with her painted fingernails. "I'll fix you so your oldmaid sweetheart won't ever want you!"
Once, twice, she raked his cheeks before he could succeed in grabbing her wrists.
She struggled against his hold, falling face-forward against him, landing half in his lap, trampling his toes, bumping his knees with hers, elbowing his belly.
"Let me go! Let me go, you brute!" she squalled, biting at the thumbs that held her.
He had heard all of this before, many times. She always protested, "Not fair!" whenever they tussled even in fun and she found herself at a disadvantage because of his superior physical strength. She had some kind of a complex about the inequality between the male and the female in contacts such as this. Now, the feeling of being trapped threw her into a frenzy of rage.
She deliberately thudded her skull against his, trying to daze him, to blind him, to weaken him. Recoiling from the blows, he leaned backward and allowed his thighs to part. Immediately she aimed a knee for his groin.
"You won't bother any woman ever again!" she snarled, trying to get at him.
He warded off her dirty in-fighting by rocking her backwards before the blow could reach him. She thrashed about wildly, twisting against his wristholds. She was infurated beyond reason, just like a jungle animal trying to evade a trap.
Their struggles brought him up out of his chair, wrestling to pin her arms to her sides, to subdue her.
"Don't! You're hurting me!" she squealed. "You damned sadist!"
Still, she would not let the battle die down. At the slightest easing of his efforts to hold her off, to tame her temporarily, she flew back at him with another fierce attack, using her teeth, her nails, her elbows, her knees, her heels, wanting to injure him in any way she could.
"I hate you! I hate you!" she spat in his face. "You're cruel! You don't fight fair!"
They tottered about in a weird dance, grappling, panting. She stumbled against a hassock and lost her balance. Her falling weight pulled at him and spun him about. He managed to keep on his feet until the length of her lounging robe entangled with his legs and tripped him. Then he was helpless; he had to yield to gravity, and the two of them toppled over into a disheveled heap.
"Kill me, you strangled" Eva screeched. "That's what you want, isn't it ... to really get rid of me!"
"Oh, Eva," he cried appalled at her going that far. "How can you say such things?"
He had felt plenty of bitterness toward her all day, ever since seeing Allen's letter, but murder never crossed his mind.
Not even though, at times, he was sure he hated her so much that he never could look at her again, let alone live with her, sleep with her, be part of her wanton flesh.
By the time he reached home, at nine-thirty, the first rage had diminished, and his thoughts had mellowed considerably. Finding her still up and seated before the TV, in her robe and with her hair delightfully touseled, the familiar domestic atmosphere helped still more to ease his feeling of wrong, of betrayal.
In the dimmed room, the electro-magnetism of her femininity commanded his attention. Her freshly-tubbed warm cleanliness scented every breath he drew. The aura of her long-adored individuality reach out to him as an opiate, enveloped him whenever he sneaked covert glances at the luscious curves of her in her soft lounging apparel. He could not be in the same room with her, anywhere near her, without falling under her spell.
Now, he lay within her parted robe acutely aware of her naked thighs, of the provocative skimpiness of her baby-doll sleepers. Sensuous responses, conditioned by long practice, tingled within his loins where they pressed against her flank. Instinctively, he rubbed his belly against the lush roundness of hers.
He knew from her increasingy rapid breathing, that she was feeling the familiar urges, the wanting that contact always brought, too.
Slowly, teasingly, he began moving his hands around over her arms, over shoulders, around and over her bosom. He folded back the lapels of her lounging robe and lifted a breast out of the scooped low neckline of her skimpy sleep-togs. The answer he sought was there in the resilience of the satin-skinned globe, the little nipple spool standing right up at attention, inviting his fingers and his lips.
She might say she hated him, but her body didn't hate him. All of the old physical tokens of love still were here.
Eva made the next move herself. She stripped down the pajama-rompers and raised her buttocks to get the pants rumpled to her knees and out of the way. Then she drew his body directly on hers.
While the TV actors came and went across the screen, speaking of love and romance, telling it with prim fondling and with glances, the couple on the floor acted it out with deeds far wilder than words.
He had to push harder, deeper, into her moist reaching womanhood to black out the thought of another man ever feeling this hot, loved flesh.
Eva took him greedily, as though she had been without sex for months, gasping her delight, her sensuous pleasure as though amazed that it was even better than she had remembered it.
When he paused briefly, not wanting it to end right away, she gyrated her hips wildly, almost screaming, "Screw me! Give it to me! Damn you, damn you, don't stop now!"
He did ... he gave it to her hard and fast and deep, keeping up the rhythm, pounding until they both wilted in mingled sweat and fulfillment, in moans of pure hot sexual pleasure.
CHAPTER NINE
"WHAT'S this? Why didn't you tell me?" Eva demanded, while reading the Junction Journal.
"What does it look like?" Paul asked, laconically.
He knew that his wife had found Hilda's ad on Raydent.
"Your own brand, even," she sputtered. "And you never said a word to me about it."
He gave her a hard look. "Do I have to have your express permission to promote Wednesday night specials?"
Somehow, Eva always managed to put him on the defensive, to make him feel guilty, because he no longer could discuss frankly with her the happenjngs of his working day. Almost everything at the store still involved Hilda in some way.
"It seems to me that starting a new venture such as a product with your very own name on it would be exciting enough so that you would want to discuss it with your wife, so that you wouldn't even be able to keep it to yourself."
She was bent on building this into another serious family quarrel.
"You've given me to understand plainly enough that you really don't care to be bothered with business affairs," Paul countered.
"I'm deeply interested in your welfare and in the successful management of the store."
"But you do have secret little adventures all your own that you do not confide in me."
Eva looked ready to explode with rage. Paul was giving her to understand that, from now on, it would be tit-for-tat in the extra-marital love game, that he not only was on to her game, but that he was about to start playing a few of his own.
"I suppose this is another of Hilda's brainstorms on how to make the store rich and famous," Eva said, sarcastically. "It sounds just like her. She's always off on another wild scheme, wasting your money ... our money, trying to bottle rainbows."
"What if she is, or does? As you say, she has always done her share to make things go."
"Raydent? What a name!"
"Everybody else thinks it's a good name," Paul told her, coldly.
He was grateful that the family name had been incorporated into the trade name.
"Everybody? Or just you and Hilda? Or did you go out and take a poll of this thriving metropolis for public opinion?"
"For your information, this is J. B.'s formula. He just happens to want it retailed through the drugstore."
"The dentist? In that case, I suppose he is paying for this ad."
"No, but Doc Hill is."
"Fred Hill, eh?" Eva's face lighted up with a malicious grin. "Now I'm really beginning to understand."
"All you have to understand in a deal like this is that the dentist and the doctor both are successful business men and if they say...."
"Don't you know what is going on between Hilda and Fred Hill?" Eva interrupted.
"I don't know or care what you gossiping women say goes on," Paul retorted. "There you go, exactly as usual. Jumping to your dirty conclusions."
"Every word of this is true," Eva said, stonily. "Ione told me, herself." Ione was Doc Hill's wife.
"Ione made a federal case out of a big nothing, I suppose, just the way you always do?" Paul asked.
He could not help regretting the chain reaction of trouble that had been set off by his being caught with his hand up Hilda's skirt.
Eva sniffed. "Hilda's got Fred hypnotized until he doesn't even have ordinary good sense."
"Boy, oh, boy, that Hilda babe must be some sexy mantrap!" Paul jeered. "You're jealous of her. Doc's wife is jealous of her. All of you women are jealous of her!"
Eva laughed, scornfully. "What she's got that you men like so well, I can't imagine. It certainly is not looks or personality, so there's only one thing left ... heat."
"Eva? Paul Ray asked, cold sweat breaking out all over him as a result of the nervous tension brought on by what he was about to bring to light. "That man I drove out of here...."
"You mean Sol Judd?"
"Was that his name?"
"You mean you don't know, that you didn't even follow through and find out that much about him? Believe me, whenever you get mixed up with a broad, I get all the dope on her...."
Paul resolutely continued. "That wasn't your first time with him, was it?"
"I never said it was, did I?"
She spoke so flippantly, he had a sudden impulse to hit her. He had been piecing together facts, and now that he had her answer, it made him sick. Revulsion for her welled up in him until he again felt all of the nausea he had experienced that Wednesday night when this terrible feud had started.
Even though the evidence had been there before him all this time, he had blindly tried to keep believing the best of his wife. The teen-agers of the band who had been gathered around the soda fountain that night had known what Paul would find by returning so early, before nine. Even the Better Business Bureau had tried to tell him of other offenses. Hilda, especially, had known, offering her sympathy in so many ways.
"How many times?" Paul insisted.
"Oh, I don't know." Her answer was angry, evasive.
"How often?" He felt as ruthless as an inquisitor of the dark ages. "Only on Wednesday nights? Or was it every night?"
"Oh, just whenever he happened to be in town, on stopovers from his trucking trips."
"Ever since you quit work at the store?" Paul was shaking with suppressed rage.
"What is this? A court of law?"
"So that is the way your health failed?"
"The way you neglect me, you should be glad for a little help with your homework."
"Why, we're at it every night and every night!" he sputtered.
He had been killing himself, going without sleep he needed, just to satisfy her, and it had all been for nothing.
"Well, you sure fixed me up as far as Sol was concerned," she flared. "He skipped town the same night, and I haven't seen him since."
"Without his clothes?" Paul asked, skeptically.
"He had trouble finding anyone who would loan him any. By the time Ma Killigan and Babe Bendasek got through calling all around about what they saw in here, poor Sol was locked out everywhere he went."
Paul glared at her. "I'm probably not the only one who has reason to hate him."
"His wife is suing him for divorce, anyway. With all of the graphic details she got about what happened here, she had all the evidence she needed."
Eva seemed to be getting a morbid delight out of discussing her ape-man with her husband. "He took the next truck out, and no one has seen him around here since."
Paul called Doctor Hill's office and asked for an appointment. The receptionist told him to come right up. Even so, he had to sit in the waiting room along with a lot of other patients before the white-capped nurse led him back to a small examining room. Another several minutes went by before white-smocked Fred Hill appeared.
"Business must be rushing," Paul said, with a smile.
If business rushed for the doctor, it rushed for the druggist, too.
Fred sighed. "Old-biddy business. Imaginary ailments."
"No emergencies this morning?"
"Only old crones coming in to check up on what they hope every young medic knows."
"Is this true, doctor?" Paul teased. "Does just looking at you and having you touch them make them feel any younger?"
"It makes them act childish, that's all!" Dr. Fred snapped. He drew a long breath.
"Now what can I do for you?"
"Nothing urgent. I just wanted to consult you."
"Well, what are your symptoms? Do you want long Latin names for what ails you, if anything?"
The breezy friendliness was acknowledgement that Paul, as a pharmacist, would understand many of the medical terms he used.
"It isn't I. It's my wife."
I can't diagnose her by looking at you. Or can I?"
"That's very possible," Paul said, wryly. . "Why don't you bring her in?"
Paul twisted on his stool, embarrassed. "I'm not at all sure she would want to come."
"Something acute?"
"It's becoming chronic ... and malignant. For me, fatal."
Paul sucked in his breath and braced himself, finding it difficult to admit what he had to admit, even to his professional friend.
"She's over-sexed," he said, dully.
"Oh, is that all?" The doctor turned away, with a mocking gesture.
His levity angered Paul. He had come here, feeling that he was disgracing himself by disclosing the depravity within his family circle, and Doc could toss it aside lightly, as a thing of small matter.
"She's a nympho!" Paul spat out. "She thinks of sex all the time!"
"Aren't they all?" Doc waved his hand to include the women in adjoining examination rooms. "Don't they all?"
"She never can get enough!"
"Can any woman?"
Paul looked at the doctor, aghast. Could it be true that other husbands were having the same trouble that he was having?
"What can a working man do about it?" he asked.
Fred Hill shrugged. "He can wish he lived back in the good old days when a woman was property, when she was not allowed to express any of her own desires."
Paul nodded. "She merely submitted to her man."
The doctor sat down, leaned back in his chair. "We freed them. Now they want to pamper their passions, absolutely, freely."
"You think that women always have been capable, biologically, of being crazy about sex?"
"Read back through history, especially through literature, and see for yourself. There always has been some dame ready to disgrace herself to get her body satisfied."
Paul had come hoping for some sort of sex-tranquillizer, perhaps something that he could slip into Eva's coffee to cut down her erotic appetites, but Doc made such a request sound foolish. Eva apparently was acting like any other modern woman!
Paul took a different approach. "The way nature has made all women, so much slower to warm up than a man, the poor kook exhausts himself, on top of already being all tired out from his job, before he can tease her up to full enjoyment and finish her off."
Doc assented, soberly. "Also, if the man, in his excitement, pulls the trigger and lets himself blast away, he and she both are done. While with the broad, when the fuse does burn short and she explodes prematurely, it is only the first of multiple-stage rockets."
"I, for one, can't lose sleep, with love-play that has to go on all night."
So far, he had avoided the admission that, after all of his careful self-denial to keep Eva satisfied, she still whored around on him.
Doctor Hill brought the tips of his fingers together and peered over them at the wall above Paul's head. As though reading from prompting cards, he recited, "Sex harmony, in marriage especially, is psychological far more than it is physical."
"We've both done everything the books recommend," Paul put in, hastily. "We always have tried for mutual culmination."
"Bedroom adjustment, between man and wife," the physician droned, still as though quoting from read or remembered text, "comes more from pleasant accord throughout the day than from knowing the tricks at night."
Paul threw out both hands, palms upwards. "We've always gotten along perfectly in every way. At least until recently."
"If you are having a little family friction, try and patch it up so you can both be happy," Dr. Hill advised, in a more natural tone.
Paul pondered. "Gosh ... I just can't think of anything special...."
It was the old, old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did couples lose sexual harmony because of quarrels, or did quarreling result from diminishing sexual fulfillment?
Paul tried to remember if there had been misunderstandings away back when, as he had so recently discovered, Eva first had started playing around?
"Maybe you both expect too much," the doctor said. "After all, the honeymoon is over."
Tell that to Eva, Paul reflected, bitterly.
"Or maybe you're overly concerned about anything being wrong with your sex life," Dr. Hill continued.
When is a man is driven to psychological impotence? So far, Paul dodged admitting that, either.
"With those long hours at the store, day and night, you are working pretty hard, and no doubt you are worried about finances, also." The doctor's abrupt movements indicated that he was ready to dismiss Paul as a patient. "Take it easy, boy. Just let nature take its course in the bedroom."
Neglect Eva so she'll have still more excuse to turn to other men, Paul flared inwardly, disappointed in his medical consultant.
Aloud, he said, "She's far too demanding for that. She won't leave me alone."
"Aggressive? Then, let her do the work!"
Rebellion boiled up in the druggist. Let Eva take over his entire life? She already was too possessive. She dictated to him, even in his little world of business, discharging his treasured help in such a high-handed way that he could not stop her. He would not let her seize command in bed, as well ... that was his role, as the male.
"She does that often enough, already."
Paul remembered a night not long ago when Eva had crawled in upon him and wiggled around when she thought he was asleep. Did she get the kind of satisfaction she had craved that night?
Shortly after Addie left the store at nine-seventeen, a light tapping began on the locked door. Paul, in the prescription booth at the back, ignored it. People knew his hours. Whoever it was who wanted drug sundries should have been here earlier. There was a special phone for urgently needed prescriptions, or Doc Hill would come himself.
Paul had to get at least a hundred vials of Raydent packaged for the Wednesday night onslaught. Now that the announcement was in the paper he had to be ready to deliver, and free samples always are popular. He and Hilda had gotten all carried away with other ideas before they had accomplished much on the Raydent project.
The rapping increased to a demanding loudness. Paul walked to the front and peered out against the glare of the corner streetlamp, intending to signal the customer to go away. No one was in sight, but another sharp rap made him jump.
He unlatched the nightlock, opened the door six inches and spoke into the night. "We're closed. Sorry."
"Let me in! Quickly." Hilda whispered, crouching within the doorframe. She glanced about, furtively. "There's eyes and ears everywhere."
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, in astonishment.
Hilda threw herself against the door, bumping it back against him. She edged in through the narrow opening and headed straight back to the prescription booth.
"I hear this place is off-limits for juveniles like me," she chirped, composed and cheerful, now that she was in.
"Yeah. Everything is going to the dogs since you left, Hilda. There is at least a partial boycott against the soda fountain. Poor Addie is bewildered by the slump in the soft-drink business."
"The stricter parents are warning their kids against hanging out here." She flashed him a teasing smile over her shoulder, in the dim night lighting. "I thought I would come in to see for myself what's so terrible about the joint."
CHAPTER TEN
Hilda seemed so different tonight. Her tawny-blonde hair, short as it was, fluffed out in soft waves that bounced at her every step.
Following her toward the lighted prescription booth, Paul realized with an upsurge of erotic excitement, that her silhouette was entirely new. The black knit dress clung to her every curve, bulging at the bosom, pulled in to her unbelievably small waistline, rounded out over her wide woman-hips, revealing that she had a genuine hour-glass figure.
"So this is what the new photographer looks like?" he exclaimed, in admiration. "What do you plan to do, dazzle them with the glad-rags all the time, now?"
"No. This is a special occasion."
Her skirt was taut, against her striding thighs. It was so short that he actually could see the fascinating contours of her silken knee joints.
"You came from a picture appointment?"
"I have an appointment," she said, enigmatically, "but not for a picture."
The calves of her legs, in their shimmering nylons, rounded out just the way he liked them. They tapered in to slim ankles that looked strangely frail above, of all things, three-inch spike heels.
Watching her trip along, he felt sure that this was an outfit-glamorous yes, even sexy-in which she would never dare to let Aunt Jessica see her.
"Must be a very special affair you're headed for-all dolled up like that."
The whites of her eyes and the flash of her teeth gleamed in the gloom. "It's in honor of my old boss."
Had he heard her correctly? Would she really go to so much trouble dressing up for him? If so, why?
"You know, you're a damned good-looking babe, fixed up like this." He tried for a jesting tone, but he heard the emotion in his own voice.
"Well, thank you, kind sir," she mocked. "Still, you can't spend all evening just gawking. Let's really get some work done."
They fell directly into the same routine they had used the first night on which they had produced Raydent. They worked well as a team, mixing the powders, filling the vials, striking on regular prescription labels. Later, they planned to have special wrappers printed.
For die first time, Hilda was wearing some kind of heady perfume that was almost too potent for this confining, restricted area.
Except for comments relating to the packaging they were doing, they did not converse, but by common consent, hurried to reach their goal of at least a hundred packages. Although she flashed him frequent smiles, Hilda seemed unusually shy in his presence, carefully avoiding any physical contact, not even allowing their fingers to touch.
For another surprising thing, she had darkened her brows and her lashes, and even had colored her eyelids a bewitching blue, the way other girls always were doing. He was startled to discover that the face he always had thought rather plain, needed only these little helps to equal in beauty that of any woman he knew, even including Eva.
Most important to him was the personality he knew to be underneath the glamour. He would be eternally grateful to her for all she had done for him. Take the way in which she was cooperating at this very moment, trying to be a helpmate to him. "You know what I really came for, don't you?"
Hilda shot a sidelong glance at him, blushing.
He pretended innocence. "No. What?"
After what had happened between them in the prescription booth the last time they had worked together on Raydent, he felt sure that he knew. The very thought was intoxicating.
"You're going to finish up what you started," she asserted, her voice trembling.
She snapped off the booth lights so there would be no damning tell-tale shadows and shet turned to him, coming close to press all that warm softness in clinging kitted fabric, against him.
"Now, Hilda, you stay as nice as you are!" he admonished, weakly.
His conscience forced him to protest, even though he had known all this time what was coming. The stimulus of contact with her tempting woman-flesh made any resistance seem foolish.
She clasped his trunk to her, fiercely. Glossy lips-she wore very pale lipstick in common with fashion, he noted-turned up to his. Automatically, he responded, taking her into his arms, clamping his mouth possessively over hers. This time, there was more knowing fire in her kiss. He wondered, with a twinge of jealousy, if she had been practicing with someone else since the other time with him.
Her teeth parted, allowing her mouth to yield, luring him inward. Her tongue touched his lips, prying them open, darting between to tag his tongue. She retreated, daring him to follow her back into her own cave.
Naive as she was, the simple act of intermingling oral organs in a deep kiss was the same as sex union to her. Already, he had her panting, their breathing intermingled, while her whole body shuddered with sensations almost too strong for her to bear.
She strained up on tip-toe, crushing her breasts, her belly, her flanks, and her thighs against him.
But, as before, she had her mind on direct results. She twisted her hips far enough away to allow her hand between so she could open his trousers.
She grabbed his hand and pushed the soft knit of the black dress back between her thighs with it, turning her knees outward.
After a moment, he reached for the hem to gather the dress up, and he found that jersey-knit rolled easily. He wound it up along the silken hose, up around the laciness of her slip, up past die width of her hips. He raised the curtain of the filmy slip and tucked it into the rolled skirt at her waist.
"You like?"
Hilda drew back from him again. There was a gleam in her eyes as she stood exhibited before him in black lace panties, so skimpy they covered almost nothing.
"I like!"
With him, it was far more than liking. The whiteness of her flesh above the hosetops, the fullness of her woman-thighs, the inviting flare of her flanks between the wide hipbones, all were maddeningly erotic to him.
At his touch, as his probing fingers found their way into the meager bikini, she shivered and sobbed and sought his body with hers, throwing her weight against him again.
Shut off from any further chance to caress her below her waist, he began undressing her from the top down. He found a short zipper, and the soft black material peeled easily from her shoulders, from her arms, from her bosom. Half moons of those magnificent mounds loomed whitely above a strapless black brassiere.
He wondered fleetingly how she ever had found one with a cup-size big enough.
He toyed around inside the black net, making her gasp and groan with the thrills brought forth through these erogenous points in her anatomy. He stripped the bra downward, allowing the two balloons to pop out, free from constraint. The nipples of the mammoth domes were as pink and as mellow-firm as two near-ripe raspberries.
He took one between his thumb and his finger, but she grabbed his head and forced it down roughly, demanding kisses.
She still thrust her flanks at him, inviting him to enter. Remembering her virginity (or had she lost it since that other time?) he wondered if he might be able to please her without ruining her, merely by fondling.
"Ever have a real petting party?" he asked.
"No! Not with any boy long enough to get beyond the first stages of awkward fumbling."
"But you do know what I mean? If you'll just let me-" He hesitated.
He stripped off the black scanties and traced experienced fingers upward along her white thighs.
"Not that way!" she protested. "I'm like any other girl, Paul! I want a man! I need sex, real sex! Please!"
He felt that he just couldn't. "I won't do it, Hilda! Not when you've saved yourself for so long!"
"I saved myself for you! I love you; I want you to be the first to touch me!"
"Shall I go against all the decency you have been taught?"
"It's what I'm here for tonight, Paul! So you may just as well get it done, over with!" It was part plea, part desperate command.
She bent her knees outward, opening her thighs wider, and allowed her weight to descend against him.
What was there about the mere thought of deflowering innocence that was so maddening to a man? Paul was not fading away at all as he had the other time, despite his words of protest.
Instead, he thrust at her with all the possessive passion of any mating male. She had been asking for it for a long time; now she would get it. He was just the guy to give it to her too, but good!
Her hurting resistance gave way. He heard her little ohopped-off cry of anguish, and felt the sting of her pain. He recoiled for an instant, half ashamed. But she clenched both arms around his rear end and held him to her while she went into a fierce thrusting motion of ecstasy.
As the movement kept on, grew easier, she really went wild, running her hands over his whole body, pausing to dig her nails in whenever an especially sensuous movement forced her eyes more tightly closed, her legs more wantonly open.
"Oh, so this is what it is like!" she panted, in rapture. "Is this what all the girls go crazy for? I always knew I wanted it-bad-now I know why!"
When the supreme moment came, she nearly fainted with the hot wild goodness of it. Paul had to hold her to keep her from falling, all the while feeling the floor rock under his own quivering, sated flesh.
Paul was looking for an old table lamp which they had not used for quite a while. Eva had the habit of storing such unused items in the very top of the built-in kitchen cupboards. In fact, he recalled having seen the lamp up here while looking for something else only a few days ago. Standing on the kitchen stool, he rummaged among the discarded parts that had accumulated.
Then he found an envelope tucked among the junk, one that looked as though it had come from a packet or from a box of stationery.
The familiar handwriting struck him like a blow. Yes, the postmark was Audubon!
His legs trembled so he had to get down off the stool and and stand on solid floor to keep his footing. He was slipping the folded notepaper out of the envelope when Eva entered the kitchen.
She grew so white, he thought she would faint. "So Allen came back again?" Paul roared at her. "So you asked him back, again and again?"
"Now Paul, I-" she faltered.
Scared though she was when she knew that she was caught, her tone still was defiant. "Eva, what's gotten into you?"
"I told him not to write-that you always somehow got hold of the letters!"
"It's proper to send a thank-you note after a party you really enjoy." Paul rasped, with a sneer. "He seems to be a very proper man, etiquette-wise."
"Don't try to be funny! It doesn't become you!"
In the short time since she had first been caught, with Sol Judd, with resultant tearful remorse, she had fast developed the attitude that what she did with other men was really none of Paul's business-so long as she took care of him when he wanted her.
"You told me you had to have him once to know what he was like and to get him out of your system," Paul accused. "Then you were supposed to be through with him!"
"You don't think you're giving me all I want, do you?" she asked, half in anger, half in anguish.
Paul just looked at her. Then he shrugged helplessly, hopelessly, and walked away.
Away from his nympho wife.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"YOU like Fred Hill, don't you?" Eva asked Paul, at noon.
"You bet I do. Doc's a fine fellow."
"I'm glad of that. I've been getting quite well acquainted with his wife, and I've discovered that she speaks my language."
"Getting up in the social swim, eh?" Paul was glad that Eva was coming far enough out of her shell to begin making friends. "The Hills are on top echelon in this burg."
"So I've asked them over for dinner tonight."
Just like that, she told him, not as a subject for consultation, but as an announcement of plans already made. Without considering the effect it might have on his work schedule for the evening.
To hide his irritation at her dictatorial possessiveness, he teased, "Formal affair? Got my black tie and tails all ready?"
"Paul, I wish you would be especially nice to them," she said, over her shoulder to avoid facing him.
"Am I not always the nicest guy you ever could want to meet?"
"I mean, keep your eyes open," Eve said, with asperity. "Maybe you could learn something from them."
"Don't my table manners suit you, my dear?" he inquired, acidly. "Shall I take a couple of hours off during the day to bone up on Emily Post?"
"Let's just call it a lesson in the modern viewpoint on marriage."
With that enigmatic statement, she cut out for the back lawn. Ione Hill was a picture of socialite perfection.
She ignored short-hair fads to let her golden hair descend in a well-brushed waterfall to her shoulders. Every movement of her head or of her body was a conscious display of her crowning glory. Even when talking, after each statement, she gave her head a slight shake to settle her tresses into their most flattering lines.
She was tall for a woman, almost as tall as Paul, and her high spike heels made her seem even taller. She seemed to tower over other people, especially men, in a dominating way. Her face was round and smooth, strangely lacking in expression of her inner emotions.
The soft violet color of her strapless sheath, modestly topped by a bolero jacket, complimented her ivory skin, her yellow hair, and the amber of her eyes.
The open jacket allowed tantalizing glimpses of the upper halves of the two creamy moons rising above the edge of the bodice.
Paul always had thought there couldn't be a time when he would not feel at ease with Fred Hill, but tonight he was on edge, maybe because of Eva's warning to him to be on his best behavior, or maybe it was because something about Ione bewildered and frightened him. He realized, as the conversation progressed, that Doc, too, was far from his usual cheerful self, that he was under a strain of some kind, tilting his head to listen to the chatter of the two women as they moved from the kitchen to the living room.
Eva had not sounded this joyful since before they had moved to River Junction. The two wives lowered their voices to mere whispers at times, like secretive schoolgirls, then burst into frequent peals of giddy laughter.
Paul was glad that Eva had at last found a friend she liked so well.
When the girls called the two men to supper, Paul beamed proudly at his wife. Eva made a wonderful hostess. Dressed in deep brown, with a white lace jabot fringing a V neckline, she looked like a prim Puritan. Flushed with new-found happiness, she was a really beautiful sight to behold.
If this-entertaining and being entertained-was what it took to make her like her old self, they would have to do more of it, even if it meant, as in the case of this evening, sacrificing time from the store.
"There's a young married's club over in the city," Ione stated, "where the couples come in and toss their house keys into a hat. When the party is ready to break up, the husbands draw keys from the kitty, and each one goes home with whichever wife the temporary key belongs to."
"Sounds like fun!" Eva drawled.
"Imagine having to turn your old horse over to any hateful bitch who happened to be there," Ione groused. "What you get in exchange could turn out nowhere near as good!"
Eva frowned, thoughtfully. "I suppose membership in this kind of key club is very exclusive."
"Still, I'm not sure I'd like that way of picking a bed-partner," Ione murmured, but it was clear that the question was debatable.
"Or who you let your husband go home with," Eva opined.
"If you're going to swap, you might just as well know beforehand who it's going to be with," Ione declared, with conviction.
Paul resolved to watch and to listen carefully to see how Fred handled his wife to keep her in line. Perhaps he could learn from an old pro "how to be happy though married-to a wanton."
Doc's nervousness increased. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped beads of sweat from his brow and from his dewed upper lip.
Eva was instantly sympathetic. "Oh, you poor man! Staying dressed up so formal on a hot night like this. After all, we're well enough acquainted by this time, aren't we, so you men can take your coats off?"
She turned to Fred, unbuttoned his suit coat, and grasped the lapels to slide it back off his shoulders. His white shirt was darkened with perspiration.
As she shoved at the coat, Eva lost her balance and toppled over against Fred, giggling and thrashing her legs. The doctor, very red of face, glanced over at Paul to see how he was taking it, then he helped Eva to regain her primly-perched pose-except that her maneuvering with him had her dress hem riding the tops of her hose.
"Do you like legs?" Ione murmured in Paul's ear, diverting his attention to herself.
She raised her foot which was nearest him, flexing the ankle, pointing the toe, to show off its best curves, accented by her high-heeled pumps. Shifting toward Paul, she brought the foot to rest on his knee. The narrow skirt of her purple sheath yielded upward, putting plenty of silken thigh on exhibition.
Eva continued her efforts to make Fred comfortable. She unknotted his tie, holding the clasp between her teeth as she removed it from his collar.
"There's one thing about we women," Eva said, talking around the pin, "we can dress for this kind of weather. Neither of us has to have much on, certainly not on a night like this."
She dropped the tie clasp from her lips, losing it deep within the neckline of her puritanical dress. Clutching the lace front, she peered down inside, as though trying to reach in.
"I can't find it. Can you?" Eva leaned toward Fred, pulling the blouse out to give him a clear view inside it. "Can you see anything?"
Paul realized with a shock that, from the amount of bare bosom he could see even from this distance, his wife had neglected to put on a bra tonight, and the visitor was seeing plenty.
Another pair of breasts pushed directly in front of him, their weight sagging the bodice edge of the lavender sheath, Ione matched everything Eva did, giving Paul as good a show as Eva was giving Fred, keeping Paul's attention turned away from his wife. The cleft between the two pushed-up pillows of soft flesh looked exactly as he would have pictured Ione's posterior. Ione sagged over against him, her freely-flowing hair caressing his ear and his cheek. She took one of his arms and drew it around her, leaving his hand in the armpit where it easily could find the bulge of her breast. His other palm she placed directly upon the sheen of her nylon thigh, so that his next move might be up her skirt.
Paul knew now that the whole evening had been planned to lead up to this.
All the lewd "key club" talk had been to get him and Fred aroused and ready.
What man could resist the baiting of a sex-bomb such as Ione? This was no time to question motives or morals. If all of these other people considered this the right way to get along in marriage, Paul decided, who was he to object?
He allowed himself to be swept along on the crest of the wave of emotion that was swamping all four of them in mass passion.
"What's the matter, doctor?" Eva taunted. "Didn't you ever see a breastbone before, except on your own examining table?"
Fred Hill flushed and shot another anxious glance at Paul. Instead of Fred being the instructor in this scene, as Paul had expected he would be, he seemed to be seeking guidance from his host.
Seeing how far Ione had Paul involved already, Fred summoned courage to make the plunge expected of him, reaching down the dress for the tie clasp.
"Oh, doctor, you tickle so!"
Eva shrieked with hysterical laughter, squirming and throwing her legs about. Paul was shocked all over again to discover, from the dark glimpses he got, that Eva had not bothered to put on panties, either.
With Fred's hand trapped inside her blouse, Eva flounced about until she tumbled over onto the couch, pulling Fred down upon her.
The brown skirt was about her hips. She raised a nyloned knee to hold Fred between her thighs. Ione loomed over Paul, shutting from his sight what was happening on the davenport. She threw a knee next to his knee, raking up her skrits so she could straddle his lap, facing him.
She was without panties, too.
She hunched her shoulders to squeeze her breasts together and to pop them out of the sheath. She brought Paul's hand to one of the smooth-skinned mounds of flesh, placing his thumb and his finger so they could pinch the hardened nub. Panting, she tore at the zipper of his trousers.
She demanded his mouth, her lips scorching his. His tongue crept forth and forced its way between her teeth, where it was met and wrestled by hers. Stretching and straining within the oral cavity, probing and pushing against yielding resistance, kissing a woman such as she, was almost an orgiastic act in itself.
If this was the game he was supposed to play, he would enjoy it to the hilt. Never could any man have had a more maddening playmate than this golden-haired, ivory-skinned sex-queen.
From behind and beyond Ione's bare torso, a female scream sounded. It seemed to split the air, to rend the room wide open, like a minor nuclear explosion.
Paul heard a noise of scrambling commotion coming from the davenport. He saw Eva's white face her whiter bared bosom appear just behind Ione. Eva's eyes blazed with insane fury; her lips twisted in a snarl as though she had fangs to bare instead of teeth. Fingers with nails like talons hooked into the golden hair and yanked.
Ione's neck popped, audibly. An answering wildcat screech emitted from her mouth, so close to Paul's ear.
"You damned dirty whore!" Eva reviled her. "Do you think you can come right into my house and lay my husband before my very eyes?"
She jerked her guest up by the blonde hair, thumping Ione's half-nude body against Paul's, hurting his groin, the way Ione still was impaled upon him. Ione twisted about, turning on her tormenter, injuring Paul still more.
Eva cursed and fumed, raking at Ione's cheeks, at her bare bosom, as though determined to disfigure her.
"I'll fix those goodies of yours so no man will ever look at them again!" she raged.
The fingers of the infuriated Ione snagged into the lacey jabot of Eva's puritanical brown dress where Ione's husband's tie clasp had disappeared. Panting, she ripped the dress downward to the belt. Red-enameled nails plowed downward again and again, across the two bobbing mounds of woman-flesh, laid bare.
"Whoever said you had anything to show a man, anyway?" Ione retaliated, furiously.
Their wrestling brought Ione up to her feet, hurting Paul again as she left him. Ione whirled on Eva, pressing in to kick at her shins, to stomp toes, to knee her opponent's belly.
Eva darted in to attack with her teeth, biting and rending any exposed skin that she could reach.
Paul and Fred arose, as though by common consent, and pushed in, intending to separate the women and to stop the fight. Swinging Ione by the hair of her head, Eva knocked the men back and pounded her opponent against the furniture and the walls.
"You lewd exhibitionist, you! Why don't you take off every single stitch and show yourself completely?" Eva screeched.
She grabbed the purple sheath, rumpled into a mere ruffle about Ione's midriff, and yanked until the fabric parted and the loosened garment fell past the woman-hips to trip Ione's ankles.
The blonde stumbled about, covered by nothing but her long hair, a garter-belt, and torn hose.
The telephone rang.
Four people froze, in a disheveled tableau.
"Might be for me," the physician said, straightening his trousers and zipping them closed. "I left this number with Bessie in case of an emergency."
Bessie Hagen was night "central" for River Junction's one-switchboard telephone office. Her duties included an answering service for the various business and professional men in town.
The hostess looked down at herself, let go of Ione's hair, and hastily stuffed her breasts back inside the valentine border of torn lace before going to answer the phone, as though Bessie or whoever else might be calling could see her tousled condition.
Meanwhile, the woman-handled statuesque sex-queen untangled her golden glory by combing her fingers through it, sorting out strands and smoothing them back into place, before she did anything about her state of undress.
Or maybe, Paul reflected, Ione's procedure was intentional. Perhaps she wanted to stand there nude, letting him look at her, while she raised her arms and thrust out her breasts. The two flesh-balloons still were distended and taut with unresolved passions, bouncing to her brushing strokes, vibrating with a fascinating quiver after each beat. Ione had been hurt in the fight. Scratches, and droplets of red contrasted with the pale skin of her face and her breasts, of her belly and her thighs.
Eva came running back, forgetful of her appearance, letting one breast pop out.
"Somebody by the name of Ben-Ben Logan, I think-" Her eyes were wide with horror. "Shotgun accident!"
The doctor whirled on his wife, like an old fire-horse, quickly alerted.
"Get your clothes on. Let's go."
"Clothes?" Ione shrieked. "I don't have any!"
She nudged aside tatters of her violet sheath with a nyloned toe.
Eva immediately was the solicitious hostess.
"You ran along," she said to Doc. "Your wife can stay here till you get back."
"Stay here?" the pin-up snarled. "After what I've just been put through?"
"Ione, dear, I'm sorry-" Eva began.
"You're sorry? Ha! I've never been so humiliated in my life!"
"The night still is young," Eva coaxed. "We can have fun and games after Fred gets back from his call." Ione glared. "And have a squalling tigress like you on my back again? No, thanks!"
"It won't happen again, I promise you," Eva begged. "In fact, you ana Paul can go right ahead now, pitching a little woo-"
"Never again, you green-eyed bitch!" Ione spat the words, like a cornered cat.
The doctor interrupted. "Come along! Get something on! While you stand there bickering, a man may be dying!"
He snatched up his discarded suit coat, draped it over Ione's shoulders, and hooked an arm about her waist to march her out to the car. Long nyloned legs twinkled, like a skater's, under the dark shorty garment.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Eva wilted in a heap in the middle of the floor.
"Oh, it was awful!" she wailed. "Wasn't it, Paul?"
"You put on quite a show," Paul admitted, grimly.
"What happened? Why did I do it?" She buried her face in her hands, oblivious of her gaping blouse. "Whatever came over me, anyway?"
"You're human, after all," he conceded, grudgingly.
"Ione is my best friend!" Eva protested. "How could I ever have fought with her?"
Paul couldn't restrain a smile. "Well, you sure as hell did attack her. You can't stand another woman touching me, even when you help plan for it."
"Other people do it. Switch partners, I mean. We can, too."
"I rather like marriage the conventional way," Paul said, firmly. "You and I for each other, with nobody else included."
"I'm going to live the way other people live," Eva protested, vehemently. "The sophisticated way. Be happy, get all the sex I want, even though tied to an inadequate man."
"What was inadequate about the way I went after Ione?"
"That's just it! That proves what I say! You need fresh adventures, too the same as I do!"
"I'm getting all I need." Paul paced the floor and spun to face his wife. "You're getting your thinking all twisted up. You had better see a psychiatrist pronto, and let him straighten you out."
Eva looked straight ahead, her mouth stubborn. "There's nothing wrong with me."
"You've just gone crazy over sex, that's all."
"Any head-shrinker will tell you that the way to stay normal is to be uninhibited about sex."
"Within the scope of decency. So long as you do not ignore or interfere with the personal rights of others."
Eva glared at Paul scronfully. "Oh, sure, preacher-man, go ahead and give the poor little sinner a lecture!"
"We're sure as hell going to do something about this compulsive passion of yours before it ruins our reputations completely," Paul declared. "The way you two women shrieked at each other, the neighbors surely must have heard what went on here. And they probably got their eyes full, too, when Doc rushed his wife out to their car, without even a dress on."
Eva sniffed. "Nothing can hurt him. There's no other good doctor in town, you know that."
"There are plenty of them over in West Cedar, I'm sure," Paul said.
At nine o'clock the next morning, Paul got a phone call at the store.
"I have to see you! Right away!" The female voice was husky, scarcely above a whisper, obviously disguised. "What about? Who is this?"
"Unfinished business. Last night."
Beads of moisture popped out on Paul's upper lip and in his palms as he recognized Ione's inflection, as the secretive impact of the message hit him.
"That was finished last night, as far as I was concerned," he said.
He peered nervously over his shoulder to see how close Addie of any other customers were, anyone who might overhear.
"Come on up here," Ione persisted. "Let's talk it over."
"You know I wouldn't dare to do that."
"Why not? You deliver prescriptions, don't you? Especially to old ladies, to invalids like me?"
Paul tried to assume a business-like tone, although his breathing was becoming difficult. "Oh, I don't know. We're pretty well tied up here, right now."
"You have to help me! It's an emergency!" she pleaded.
"I just can't."
His conscince said, hang up on her. Stop all this craziness. But his emotions already were responding to the challenge she threw at him, as he remembered last night, the connection with her before the fight, the sight of her wanton nakedness as she was yanked out of the house.
"I'm burning up-and it's all your fault!" she almost wailed. Then her voice grew cautious. "Oh dear-wonder if that operator is listening?"
The mere thought of a possible gossipy eavesdropper frightened Paul still more. "I'm pretty busy. I had better get back to my work."
"Here is my prescription number. Please get it up to me as fast as you can."
She banged the receiver.
The front door unlatched and swung open to receive him as Paul stepped upon the porch of Doctor Hill's home, Ione sneaked him inside as quickly as possible, without a word of greeting spoken between them. Her amber eyes swept covertly up and down the residential street to see who might be passing where they could possibly observe this clandestine call.
She was in a simple cotton-print shift and in slip-slapping scuffs. Her glorious golden hair was confined in a net snood. The flesh below one eye, was darker than that below the other.
There were scratches in her cheeks and as far down her neck and chest as he could see inside the square-necked garment. Ione smiled, wryly. "All things considered, I came out pretty well, don't you think? How about you?"
"It was terrible. I died the death of a thousand humiliations."
She led him down a long hallway and into the huge living room. From the way the thin cotton was shaping itself to her shoulders, her spine, and her buttocks, he discerned that she had little, if anything, under it.
She indicated a chair and sat down across from him, pressing her bare knees together, primly.
"It's better to leave little Evie out of the game, isn't it?" she asked, dulcetly.
"She disqualified herself last night," Paul was forced to agree.
"I have troubles with Fred, too," Ione observed. "He has so damn many scruples."
Paul's tone chilled. "That bitch-in-heat of mine seemed to have him going last night."
"Oh, Fred does all right, once he gets into the spirit of a good sex binge." Ione inspected the toe of her slipper, bending down to wipe away an imaginary speck of dust. Her unconfined bratsts, Striped with wounds, made by Eva's fingernails, rolled forward like two ivory bowling balls, nearly jumping out of her blouse entirely.
"I found it easy to get carried away myself, with you," Paul admitted.
After the way he had been allowed to toy with those playthings last night, he could scarcely stay seated now, could hardly keep his hands off of them.
"Paul?" She brought one knee up to cross it high over the other, continuing to polish the slipper with a fingertip, leaving a long expanse of soft underthigh revealed to him under the short skirt. "This is a game that two play best, isn't it?"
He saw the promise she wanted from him, that this visit, that their future relationship, be kept secret from both their spouses. He agreed to her ground rules. "It isn't the same, with other people around."
She smiled her thanks, her head tilted back, her eyes gleaming under lowered lids. As her body straightened back, still fooling with that slipper, she brought one foot up to rest on her other knee, throwing her thighs wide, letting him know she again was minus panties.
Paul never knew when he leaped over and attacked her. He found himself trapping her possessively in his arms, smashing his mouth down upon hers so cruelly, he forced her head back over the top of her chair. She moaned and writhed under him, her spine arching to shove her belly against his. He swooped the cotton skirt out of the way, above her hips, and clamped one of those generous buttocks in his grip, suspending her hips horizontally out of the chair. He greedily pounded against her flanks with all of the brutal selfishness of any sex-mounted male animal.
With this clandestine atmosphere elevating his always intense excitement to an even keener pitch, it would not take long for Paul. And he knew, from the way Ione was whimpering, bucking with her entire body, and digging her long nails into his back, that she was keyed up to an equal pitch of passion.
"Yoo-hoo, Ione! Anybody home?" a harsh female voice called from somewhere in back.
A screen door, no doubt in the kitchen, slammed.
"Where are you, dearie?" the intruder yelled. Ione Hill flung Paul aside, nearly knocking him backward on the floor as she scrambled from the depths of the chair. She hurriedly shook down her wrinkled dress, casting frenzied glances toward the sounds, still indicating an ill-timed intrusion.
"That old she-bear never knocks!" Ione grated. "Hoping to catch me at something, I'm sure. Some day she will, and I'll have to kill her for her damned nosiness!"
Paul tried frantically to get his own clothes in order, Ione showed him through the nearest doorway.
"Don't make a single sound till I get rid of her!" she hissed.
The room into which she pushed Paul turned out to be the doctor's study. On any other occasion, because of the similarity of their educational backgrounds, the vast library of medical books would have been interesting to Paul. As things now were, he listened to the jangle of feminine tones which continued to sound from the kitchen, and he knew that Ione had been unable to shoo out her nosy neighbor. He could not stand the tedious passing of time away from the store.
Besides, he felt guilty at having played hooky for such a disgraceful errand.
He was almost certain that the old harpy in the kitchen had seen him arrive, that no matter what he did now, his reputation was ruined worse than it had been before. Listening to the way her mouth flapped on and on, Paul was sure she was the worse kind of gossip, that his supposedly secret rendezvous would be known all over town before the day was done.
Letting her see him leave couldn't possibly make matters one bit worse than they already were.
After all, according to the alibi Ione had presented to him before he ever decided to take such a chance as this, he did deliver prescriptions all over town.
What could be more natural than for Paul to bring one directly to the doctor's house, when the need for a special prescription arose?
All he had to do now was to walk right out of here in a business-like way, as though he had every right in the world to do so, as though nobody had better try to make anything of it.
Back in the drugstore, he found that he had jumped from the frying pan right into the fire. Joe Chrady waited for him, along with another Better Business Bureau officer, Ralph Merkle, from the bank.
"You don't seem to be heeding our advice about helping to preserve the morals of our young people," the pompous Chrady accused.
Paul flinched. Could it be that these city fathers already knew about the disgraceful catfight at his house last night. Mrs. Killigan or Mrs. Bendasek, or both, must have been peeking out of their windows at just the right time to see Ione leave, with her long limbs exposed, and they must have promptly broadcast it.
He threw out his hands, helplessly. "A man can only act according to the opportunities circumstances deal out to him."
"The magazines and the books our kids bring home from your racks are unfit for decent eyes," Chrady declared.
That attack was a surprise blow from an entirely unexpected angle.
"Which ones?" Paul asked, honestly concerned. "We don't have a thing for sale here except popular publications which may be bought anywhere where such publications are sold."
"There's too much nakedness, too much suggestiveness on the covers. There's too much divorce news and sex information on the inside pages," Chrady blazed.
"They go through the United States mails by subscription," Paul defended himself.
He glanced over at Addie and was surprised to see that her cheeks were flaming, that her eyes were defiant. Hilda, before her, had been like that.
These girl employees had a fine sense of loyalty to him when he was under fire.
"If you don't see to it that better reading material is sold to our youngsters, we will set up a committee to decide on the selections for you," Chrady threatened.
"I thought you already had boycotted this store for your precious darlings!" Paul flared.
He threw all caution to the winds, in his anger.
"Or aren't your offspring gullible enough to obey their old-fogey parents?" he jeered.
Both men surveyed him coldly. "You'll find that it does not pay to go against our wishes."
"What is this gag about my purveying publications calcualted to corrupt your kids intended to lead to?" Paul asked, angrily. "Is it another angle to cut off one of my sources of income? Do you figure on amputating my trade, limb by limb?"
Ralph Merkle cleared his throat and stepped forward, a self-appointed judge and jury.
"It is noticeable at the bank that your receipts are falling off badly-" he asserted, then stopped, glaring balefully.
Paul wanted to shout at him, "And what else would you expect, when I have to constantly buck your Better Business machine?"
Instead, he countered, mildly, "That is not uncommon during summer months. Things will pick up when school starts."
Inwardly, Paul wished he could believe that, that there were hopes of reviving his volume to what it had been some time before.
"You're a month behind with Mrs. Brawnson," Merkle reminded him placidly, chewing on his words like a ruminating cow. "And another payment to her is due-"
"I've been holding off to see how things shape up. I can make last month's payment and scratch up enough for this month's, with some collections. The old lady needs her money, I know. I'm really not trying to beat her out of anything."
"And your loan with us is in even worse condition-" Merkle meant the payment on Paul's house, due to his company. If it came to a financial showdown, Paul had decided, the home would have to be sacrificed first, over what he was sure would be loud, angry protests from Eva.
The prime consideration would have to be his place of business.
"You'll have to wait for your money until I get it," he told the financier, firmly.
As he watched his harrassers leave, he resolved to try harder and to keep his fingers crossed. He wished his wife would do the same with her legs.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The store phone rang. Addie answered and called to Paul.
"It's for you!" she yelled.
Paul had hardly said 'hello' before a command scorched his ears.
"Come back up here!" Ione screeched. She made no effort to conceal her identity from whoever might be listening in at the switchboard.
"I can't."
Her boldness frightened Paul.
"Do you intend to leave me in this state?" she demanded. "You may have gotten what you wanted, but I didn't!"
"I didn't either, you know that. So we're even!"
In spite of his fear, the sound of her. voice, plus the memory of their brief but violent clash, had him lusting again for all of her blonde lusciousness.
She persisted, her voice hot. "Come around by the side street. Through the hydrangea bushes, might be best...."
She took it for granted that he would yield to temptation, that he would come to her in spite of all his protests, just as he had before. If she could restrain herself from making it sound so unlawful, so much like sneaking around the way a pair of criminals would, he might be persuaded to try to satisfy her, at the same time easing the aches within himself that had been left by their hasty pulling apart.
"No, it's too risky!" he objected, letting her sense his panic at the thought of being caught still another time.
"Then I'll meet you someplace. How about the lane back of the old circus grounds?"
He was aghast at her daring. "Are you out of your mind?"
"Yes, I am. You left me that way." Her voice became shrill, abusive.
"Are you trying to ruin everything?" he asked, angrily. "We simply can't do a thing like that!"
Paul saw that Addie was watching him, and he was ashamed. She was too nice a girl to be disillusioned about life so early, having a boss as much of a philanderer as he had become. She no doubt had recognized who the caller was.
She almost certainly could figure out, from his side of the conversation, what kind of "business" Ione insisted upon.
He dropped the phone in its cradle, leaving the sex-addict wife of his friend still sputtering like a lit and dangerous fuse.
Addie Sloan carried an armload of shaving cream boxes from the storeroom in the back to some shelves toward the rear of the store, then began re-stocking the shelves. Paul heard a loud clatter and a stifled scream, then the thud of her falling body as it jarred the floor. He hastened to her and found her sprawled among a pile of smashed boxes and broken bottles.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, reaching out a hand to help her up.
"Oh, I've ruined everything, haven't I?" she wailed.
His eyes on her were anxious. "Are you all right?"
"You'll never get this store in shape if I smash things up as fast as you get a little remodeling done. Look at this shelf. I stepped on it and broke it down."
He ignored her self-recriminations. "Did you sprain an ankle? Are you sure your leg isn't broken?"
She shook her head. "I guess I'm just a little too short to reach the top shelves the way you do."
"So long as you're not seriously hurt," Paul said, relieved.
"I'm so ashamed. It's just that I'm new at my job, I guess," she apologized.
Addie tried to bend to pick up a broken bottle of aftershave lotion which threw out a strong aroma throughout the surrounding area.
She winced, changed positions, and tried again to stoop, sucking in her breath, painfully.
"You did strain your back, didn't you?" Paul asked, once more alarmed.
He was concerned about employer liability, especially with money matters running against him.
"Better get up to Doc with it," he urged.
Addie demurred. "Oh, it's just a little skinned place on my leg."
She twisted over sideways, drawing up the hem of her plum-colored skirt so she could peer at a run that had snagged the side of her coppery nylon right at the knee. A darker spreading spot proved that she had drawn blood. Paul could see that she wore maroon pettipants, nearly as long as her skirt, the purple lace edging of which obviously was intended to match her skrt.
To follow the path of the abrasion along her thigh, she began working the drawers higher up her leg.
"Better get out of sight," Paul cautioned.
He glanced nervously toward the front of the store.
"Yes, Uncle Dudley!" she said, sarcastically. "It wouldn't do for anyone to see me showing you my underpants, now would it?"
"People have the habit of spying on this place and misunderstanding what they see, as it is," Paul retorted.
"You mean they report it where it causes trouble," Addie corrected, impishly, showing that she knew all about Eva's jealousy.
Obediently, she headed for the stockroom in the back, holding her skirt above her hip on the side where she had been hurt, and pinching the fabric of her red pettipants to pull it away from where the bruises were. On the other side, her hem stopped midway of her thigh, leaving all of the laciness of the lower half of her pantaloons on exhibition for him.
By the way she cringed with every movement, Paul knew she had been hurt worse than she admitted.
"You need a doctor," he reiterated, worriedly.
"A band-aid will do it." she snapped, with the impatience of pain. "Just bring first-aid stuff and come along."
By the time he followed her into the storeroom, she had her skirts up under her armpits. She stood before him, half-defiant in her glaring undies. Turning sideways, she shucked down the pants and stepped out of them, entirely. She unfastened the supporter tab of her damaged nylon stocking and flinched with pain as she rolled the filmy stuff down to a tissuey cuff, just below her knee.
She turned her injured thigh toward him, revealing that it had been barked from the knee joint to the point of her hipbone.
"We had better treat it as a burn," Paul suggested, hesitating.
"It hurts so!"
She could not keep from sniffling a little.
Paul's eyes strayed to where the pink bulges of her roly-poly rump winked at him from under the up-raised skirt. Everything about her was so round and dimpled and cute-and so damned tempting!
"We had better use a little dusting powder to keep out air and to help stop the pain," Paul went on.
"Yes, doctor," she teased, "but please hurry!"
"You'll have to lean over a little further so the medication will stay put until I can get the bandage in place."
Without hesitation, she flipped her skirt still higher in back, then dropped over sideways, reclining across a packing box, her bared buttocks toward him.
Paul's hand trembled and he had difficulty breathing as he approached, holding the medicine. Those rear cheeks were baby-soft, the crease as velvety as a peach. Almost, it seemed that this girl was deliberately baiting him. Yet, how else could he treat her wounds if she did not undress enough to make them accessible?
Even the light touch of the powder made her wince and shudder.
When he began taping on the gauze, she tensed and whimpered.
"Careful there, Uncle Dudley! Watch what you're doing!" she cautioned, tremulously holding onto her sense of humor, as he pressed the tape forward on her flank.
"What's this Uncle Dudley business?" he asked, a trifle testily.
She hesitated. "Well-it's the way you act, sometimes-so-so proper. So-I hope you'll forgive me, but it's true-so-old fashioned."
"How am I supposed to act?" he asked, a trifle indignant.
"Nobody tries to be as nice as you try to be, not these days." She defended her judgment of him stiffly.
Addie obviously did not know what a philanderer he had become. She never would believe what he had done to Hilda, nor what he had tried to do this very day with Ione. Because of the frustration brought on by his interrupted, unfinished orgy with the blonde, he was keyed up almost beyond self-control right now.
"With a slut like you have, for a wife-" Addie began, then stopped in confusion. "Oh, I beg your pardon-No, damn it, I don't! I mean, the way she plays around, I don't see why you should keep from kicking up your heels!"
What was she trying to say-that she expected him to make advances?
Mischievously, he tested this tempting theory by extending the tape still farther along the front of her thigh.
"Oh, docor, you're tickling me!" she giggled, wriggling her hips in a fascinating way.
Thoroughly intoxicated now with the possibilities before him, Paul allowed his fingertip to slip near the forbidden zone. She twitched delightedly at his touch. Her flesh was so crisp, so fresh. Not like the feverishly wanton flesh he had been fondling; that of Eva or of Ione or even of Hilda. Addie's new-bloom delicacy brought back his youthful years when he had first experimented with sex, when some of his most memorable scenes had been enacted. No wonder older men went crazy after that young stuff.
"When will you be through?" Addie gasped, panting.
"Through? I've just begun!"
He trickled a finger along her inner thigh to her soft under-belly.
It was too much for her.
She moaned and her legs spread.
"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" she breathed. "I've been waiting for you to get to this!"
She was no virgin, but it hadn't been long since she had been one. He could penetrate easily enough, but there was the hot tightness, the delightful clamping that marks the avid beginner.
Roughly, blindly, he pushed her skirt clear out of the way, bared her clear up past her breasts, not caring that the skirt flipped up to cover her face.
Mindless, except for her lustful lower flesh, she did not seem to care, either.
Joined savagely, they pumped and rocked in unison, bent over the packing box. As his own heat rose to a raging inferno, her whimpering grew in volume, intensified to a low ecstatic scream as she clutched him close, close, holding on, draining him, not wanting to let go.
He had to pull away at last, gently but firmly, leaving her still shuddering with the strength of her orgasm.
Forcing composure, he zipped up his trousers, smoothed at his hair, went out to a couple of customers, growing impatient over a drawn-out selection of greeting cards, a wait for a pack of smokes.
Still, it had been worth it-brother, had it....
Paul Ray took his wife to a show. The Metropolis Theatre in River Junction was so behind the times, running movies that the Rays had seen long before moving there, they seldom had any interest in attending. This one happened to be a show that had had excellent reviews, that they had missed seeing before, so Paul took an evening off from work, leaving the store in Addie's increasingly capable hands while he did the honors with Eva.
They scarcely were settled in their seats when Eva stiffened and listened, turning slightly.
"That sounds like Hilda!" she hissed.
"What if it is?" Paul asked, huffily. "It's a public place!"
Eva whirled and glanced back, then began scrambling to her feet. "It is Hilda! Let's get out of here!"
"Are you going to let her spoil our fun?" Paul demanded.
"I won't have her watching us all through the show," Eva said, sullenly.
"If she's silly enough to miss seeing the show just to watch us-which I doubt-let her watch. It won't hurt us any."
"I know very well you won't put your arm around me or cuddle me close, the way other couples do."
To stop the silly argument which was making them conspicuous, Paul gave in and followed his wife. The seats were filled, and people still were coming down the aisle.
They had to keep asking to be excused, waiting for people to get their knees out of the way, stumbling over toes on their way to the aisle.
Behind his wife's back, Paul flashed a smile and a nod toward his ex-employee. A lightning-shock of jealousy flashed through him as he saw that Hilda was with a man, Andy Jansen, that they sat very close together.
Crowding in past the feet of other irate patrons, far back in the theater, Paul just was beginning to pick up the thread of the drama when Eva bounced up, straight-spined, again.
"Damn those two!" she exclaimed.
"Sh-h-h!" Paul cautioned.
"The old gossip-mongers!" Eva continued.
"If you would behave, you wouldn't have to worry about their venomous tongues," Paul grumbled.
Cautiously peering around, he could make out Mrs. Killigan and Mrs. Bendasek with their heads together, whispering just behind them.
Head high, eyes flashing, Eva sprang up and began shoving her way out of the theater.
"We can't do anything in this town!" she stormed.
"You aren't letting them drive us out, are you?' Paul protested, impatient at her outbursts.
He meant out of the theater, but Eva chose to take it the other way.
"We sure are!" she flared. "We're getting clear out of River Junction just as fast as we can!"
"But this is our home, where our business it!" Helplessly, Paul followed Eva to the foyer, then outside.
"Sell then!" she stormed. "You're losing money every day anyway!"
"It isn't as easy as that, unloading a business. Besides, we would be fools to sell. We're just getting started, just beginning to realize something on our investment."
"We were never treated this way in other towns where we lived!" Eva raged.
She hurried along, walking so fast, Paul had trouble keeping up.
"The change is in you, not in the rest of the world."
Her chin rose, defiantly. "I just can't take it any longer, all the whispering and pointing, everywhere we go."
"Come on hack and work in the store. Prove to them that you don't care!" Paul pleaded.
"I'm warning you, Paul! If you stay in this town, you'll stay alone or maybe with Hilda, or with whoever you can find to sleep with. I've had it! I'm getting out!"
Dejected, Paul could see that she meant it. At least for the moment.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Addie had scarcely left for the night before Hilda appeared at the drugstore door.
"I couldn't wait to tell you," she gushed, as though that was her reason for coming, "Mrs. Morgan paid me seven whole dollars for some extra prints of her little Jimmy!"
"You're on your way!" Paul enthused, honestly happy for her. "I told you, you could do it, that you could eventually own your own studio, or anything you set your mind to."
"I owe it all to you. To your patience, teaching me, advising me."
"Some day when you are rich and famous, I'll say I knew you, way back when."
What Hilda really came for, she did not hesitate to make known, without any more fooling around. She drew Paul around beyond a high display of drugs and she faced him, her wheat-colored hair end-curled and springy to her every movement.
The crisply-starched white blouse and the flared short skirt she wore gave her a schoolgirl look that eradicated his former old-maid concept regarding her.
"Do you think the 'butch' type becomes me?" she asked, with a giggle, under his admiring gaze.
She seemed giddy, for her. "That's what Eva said, you know, the time we had our fight-that I look mannish!"
"Fight?" This was something new to him. He was bewildered.
"I really laid it on her, that last day of hers at the store. The time she went home saying she was sick, and never came back."
"No, I didn't know," Paul said, stonily. "Did you two have trouble. Why didn't you tell me? Maybe I could have straightened things out."
"She's your wife. It was her place to confide in you. Besides, at that time I was doing everything I could to avoid making trouble between you. Now I don't care."
Hilda threw her arms around Paul and squeezed, crushing her breasts, in her crackling blouse, against the hardness of his chest.
"What did you fight about?" Paul demanded, still confused.
"She had been making snide remarks against me ever since you people first moved here, with the attitude that she was my employer, that I had to do anything she wished. That day, she became abusive in her orders and began tearing my clothes off...."
"Are you accusing my wife of being lesbo? Eva queer? I can't believe that, not as man-crazy as she is!"
"She's crazy about anything connected with sex," Hilda insisted.
The store phone rang, with a startling loudness that made both of them jump, in this dim, clandestine atmosphere. They looked into each other's eyes and tried to ignore the ring. But it persisted, jangling on and on.
"Must be someone who knows I work all hours," Paul grumbled, giving in and heading for it.
"Probably Eva, insisting that you come straight home," Hilda jeered.
The sultry tones of Ione Hill purred into the earpiece. "A certain man has been called on a case that should keep him away most of the night. This is our chance, Paul."
The sight or the sound of anything about the blonde queen could always excite Paul. He still burned with resentment, as much as did Ione, at the interruption of their stolen sex orgy that forenoon at the doctor's house. But the surprise boldness of her call, plus the need to answer her here, with Hilda listening, had him floundering for words.
"I-I'm sorry-but," he faltered.
"I need you! Get right up here!"
Perhaps it was the silent promise of forthcoming action with Hilda, already at hand, that gave Paul the courage to snub Ione.
"You must have the wrong number," he said, coldly. "Don't play games with me!" she yelled, hotly. "Let's get together right now!"
"I just can't do it."
Hilda quietly clapped her hands in approval of his stand. Paul knew that the metallic clickings of Ione's indignant commands were reaching Hilda's ears, too.
"Don't let me down, after all your build-up. I need a man tonight-this minute!" Ione sounded ready to come to the store after him if he continued to refuse. He had to shut her up.
"Sorry. I resign from the key club."
"How can you say that?" Ione agonized. "I know better! I know you want me!"
"No," Paul said, shortly.
Hilda applauded a trifle louder and encouraged Paul by mouthing, "That's telling her! The hot-pantsed bitch!"
"Who's that? Who is with you?" Ione blasted in Paul's ear. "That explains everything! If that bitch is who I think it is, don't admit a thing!"
"Why can't Eva see that Ione is a disgrace to Fred?" Hilda blazed, loud enough to be heard over the phone. "A disgrace to the town, in fact!"
"Is that Hilda?" Ione raged, more sharply than before. "Now I understand. If you prefer her to me, go on and lay her right now, if you really want to. Sorry I'm detaining you!"
Paul expected to hear the phone crash into place, but Ione wound up with a last venomous threat. "Just wait till I tell Eva!"
"You just do that!" Hilda shouted, directly at Ione. "Be sure and call her this minute!"
"You'd better cut out for home," Paul apologized to Hilda. "It looks as though we've done it again ... gotten ourselves in a jam."
"If I'm going to be convicted of a crime," his ex-employee mocked, glancing toward the windows and shoving him back into the shadows. "I'm at least going to have the fun of committing it."
She took his hand and thrust it inside the neckline of her crisp cotton blouse. The weight of his wrist stripped away the burtons, allowing the blouse to open halfway down. Paul obliged by probing within the cup of the homemade bra, fassing the warm loaf of flesh. But his spirit of sensuousness was not in it. He felt guilty and trapped. He pictured Ione calling Eva and pouring out to her all that she knew ... and guessed.
After all that his wife had done to keep Hilda away from him, facing her after such a report was too much to which to look forward.
"Watch those two, Eva and Ione," Hilda warned. "They are in cahoots and out to get you!"
Paul wondered. Was Ione that two-faced? Could she demand secrecy from him, regarding their furtive sex activities, yet still carry on a chummy relationship with his wife?
Spiteful as both women were toward Hilda, what wouldn't they make of catching the girl here with him?
What was wrong with Hilda? She seemed to want Ione to know that she had come to see Paul, in spite of Eva's resentment. She had deliberately taunted the sexy Ione on the phone.
"You can't shoo me out until I get what I want from you," Hilda teased, writhing wantonly.
"I saw you with another man last night," Paul grated, with more jealousy and malice in his voice than he had intended. "Didn't he take good enough care of you?"
"Who? Andy?" Her laugh was derisive. "By making him walk the long way home, I got him into the mood to go this far!"
She grabbed Paul's other hand and thrust in up her skirt, spreading her knees to make it easy for his fingers to probe inside her cotton shorts.
As he caressed her, Paul realized that he was not as disinterested in sex with her as he had supposed. He had a sense of possessiveness toward this girl, probably because he had initiated her.
She had been deprived for so long of enjoying her passions, she deserved all the pleasure he could give her, now that the seal was broken.
"And then to prove I wasn't afraid of what he had, I was a naughty girl and did this to Andy."
With a smirk, Hilda unzipped Paul's trousers.
With the two-way contact of fondling driving him upward toward peaks of action, new jealousy surged through Paul. The thought of Hilda sharing this intimacy with any other man was infuriating.
"Did Andy take the more than a hint?"
He had to know just how far she had gone with the garage mechanic.
"All the men I know are prudes," Hilda sulked. "Everybody seems to take it for granted that I'm too nice to know about sex."
"Are you?" he flared.
"I don't see what kids get out of mere petting parties," Hilda panted, her torso worming, wantonly. "I want more-lots more!"
"Is that all you did ... pet?" Paul demanded, harshly. "I finally managed to get his sap drained," she admitted.
With the same directness that she had shown before, Hilda folded up the front of her wide skirt, tucking the hem under her armpits. She unbuttoned the waistband of her cotton pants and let them drop to her ankles. She swayed her back and thrust her nakedness up at him.
"All he did to me was to tease me," she complained. "I've been inflamed all day, waiting for the real thing."
Paul felt glad that Andy had such a conscience.
Rising on tiptoe, turning her nyloned knees outward, thrusting with her flanks, she guided him inward, engulfing him with her tingling warmth. Automatcally, he shoved, reaching around to clutch her roly-poly rump. He began pushing and pumping to piston his way to the innermost depths of her.
She was so right. The heat really was on. The fire Andy had started began to climb to a fiery holacaust. Their tempo teased with deliberate slowness, then, as the heat turned the brains of both to hot redness, they increased their speed, wildly, together.
Hilda's mouth pressed wetly, feverishly against his. He could feel her tongue sucking against his, as though she could not get enough sensation with just their lower joining.
"Oh! Oh, o-o-o-oh!" she moaned, pushing with all her strength, suctioning him in, holding him.
Then, in an agonized frenzy of rapid beating against each other's body, it was over, and they clung, dripping sweat, panting for breath.
If he had to pay now, at least they both had had it.
Early the next afternoon, Ione Hill came into Ray's Pharmacy and began walking around, inspecting the renovating that Paul had been doing.
"I hear this place is for sale," she remarked, casually.
She looked lovely in a shoulder-length hair-do. She knew how to style that golden springy hair to capitalize on her even features.
"No, it isn't," Paul said, flatly, looking at her in some surprise.
"Maybe you should sell," she persisted.
Standing tall on spike heels, her knees flexed to outline the contours of her thighs against the slim skirt, her avocado-green suit against her blondeness, made her really regal this morning.
"I'm about to get returns on my investment, on the improvements I have made."
"That's what I like about the place now; you've modernized it." Ione's amber eyes regarded his newest remodeling project, a new display case, still unfinished.
"I've often worked here until midnight," Paul said.
"Well, your time can be your own from now on," Ione said, cheerfully. "I'll take the place off your hands."
"My store?" Paul asked, unbelievingly. "What in hell would you do with a drug store?"
"My doctor says I need some diversion to keep me out of mischief," Ione said, with a smirk.
Paul stared. Would Fred send his wife to buy his best friend out?
"Why pick on my store? Go buy yourself a dress shop or a card shop or a beauty salon," Paul said, half angry. "I want this."
Her purring tone could not mask the belligerence of her demand.
"But I'm not selling," Paul reminded her, patiently. The glamour-girl face hardened. "Eva says that you are."
So that was it. How stupid could he be, not to have seen immediately! This was proof positive that Ione had reported to Eva about last night. Eva no sooner had gotten it into her head that she and Paul were pulling up and leaving town, than Ione knew about it. Paul's look chilled.
"Sometimes my wife talks too much." Ione met his cold look with one of defiance. "I have a feeling that this time she is right."
Again, he heard the undercurrent of threat.
"Exactly what has my wife been telling you?" If there was a conspiracy between these two, he wanted to know about it.
"If you don't unload your property now, it could be that all the animosity already directed toward you will continue to build until you have to leave, sacrificing everything."
"Did the Business Bureau hire you to say that?" Paul asked, with asperity.
"I'm just telling you what your poor wife is afraid of." Ione continued on toward the back of the store, possessively eyeing every display she passed. Paul glanced at Addie and felt cheered to note that his clerk shared his indignation at Ione's presumptiousness. He shrugged and courteously followed his none-too-welcome visitor, keeping at a conversational distance.
Ione's pencil-thin heels clicked sharply on the vinyl-tile floor, drawing attention to her slim ankles. The narrow skirt molded itself to the roundness of her buttocks, the hem pulling into the hollows of the backs of her silken knees at each step.
Those sights were sex come-ons which Paul could not behold and remain unaroused, especially after his previous erotic clashes with this wanton female.
Coming to the storeroom door, Ione pushed it open. From the doorway, she surveyed the stock of drug sundries, still piled in boxes.
Paul looked back, to find Addie still watching them, with a frown. She obviously was remembering, as was he, the last time she had led him back to this area of privacy.
"To take advantage of cash discounts, I try to pay within the billing month," Paul answered Ione, strolling behind her in the narrow aisles between cartons. Ione stopped suddenly, cocking her head to one side, as though coming to a difficult decision. "I'll take all the worry off your hands, Paul."
Paul nearly collided with her.
The scent of her gadenia perfume was overpowering. "I told you before, I just don't want to let it go!" Paul flared.
"I'm just trying to do you a favor, help you out. Can't you see that?" Ione complained, prettily.
She rolled her eyes to glance sidelong at him, past the wealth of her golden hair. The only light in the musty room came from one small window, nearly obscured by heaps of supplies.
"Because we're friends, you and I," she added, with husky softness.
She waited an instant, then seeing he held firm, she stepped backward and leaned against him, crushing the silkiness of her crowning glory against his cheek.
He glanced back, nervously, toward the open door.
"Anyone watching?" she purred, wriggling the bulges of her rear beauties under his belly.
"No," he said, but he envisioned Addie, surmising what they were up to, then coming in to catch them at it.
"Quickly, then!" Ione panted, putting his hand inside her suit jacket, against the sheerness of her silken blouse.
He no longer cared for consequences. Too often he had had his chances at this hot piece, then lost out before he could sate himself with it. He reached for the hem of her skirt and yanked it up, roughly, in spite of its narrowness, until he could prod the moistness of her inner thighs with the fingers of his other hand. She reached behind her buttocks to unzip him. She turned her face until their mouths met, hers opening to possessively draw in his tongue and wrestle it with hers.
Paul pushed aside her jacket to gaze down at the two half-moons of white flesh peeking above the laciness of her slip within the tissuey film of her sheer blouse. Frightened by the risk of detection and the shortage of time, he swept her off her feet and threw her down across some boxes, struggling with the tightness of her green skirt as it yielded reluctantly up along the sheen of her taupe-tone nylons.
"Oh, yes, yes! Hurry!" Ione moaned, wriggling.
He felt that she could be helping him more than she was.
She actually hindered him, with her needless movements
"I'll take over your contract with Mrs. Brawnson," she gasped, as though offering her all, from the depths of her passion.
"Same difference, whether the buyer, if there ever is one, pays her off or if I do," Paul snapped, resenting her talking business at a time like this.
"Just so we understand each other, so the terms are clear."
She raised her hips expertly to allow her skirt to work up a little farther.
"What the hell are you talking about?" He recoiled from her tempting nakedness. "I'm not selling! I told you that before!"
"You just did sell," she told him, smugly.
She drew his eyes to the whiteness of her inner thighs by spreading them until he could see as far as the lime-colored triangle of her nylon panties.
"We just agreed that I would take over your obligations, from here on in."
"With no additional payment to me?" he cried, aghast.
"What the devil kind of a deal would that be?"
"It's the best you can do, darling," Ione purred, fondling him, erotically.
"What about the money I brought with me to this town-my life savings-which I had to put down as down payment?"
"Charge it off as a gambling loss," she said, airily.
Now that he had backed off, had quit undressing her, she slid up her skirt, hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her panties, and peeled them down for him.
Still, he held himself rigid. "What about the installments I have already paid? What about the cost of materials for improvements, what about my unpaid-for hours and hours of labor?" Ione smiled. "You've had your living out of the place all the time that you have been here."
"Some living!" he fairly shouted. "I haven't held out decent wages for myself."
"Then you admit what a failure the whole deal is?" Cattiness crept into her tone. "You have made Eva sacrifice her right to a decent living, too, just so you could keep this store."
"She understands that," Paul declared. "She agreed on it. She knew it was part of getting started, of having a business of your own."
"Come here!" Ione urged.
She opened herself wide, and tugged at him, trying to tumble him down upon her. "Let's not argue, sugar. We've got better things to do!"
"Buy my store with sex?" Paul stormed. "Oh, no, you don't!"
He whirled and dashed from the stockroom, straightening his clothes, his hair, as he went, not caring if Addie-or even if the customers-knew from what he had fled.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Paul received a phone call at the store. The voice on the line was unfamiliar, a deep bass.
"This is Dr. Egstrom at West Cedar," the voice announced. "Your wife has been having several sessions with me."
"Oh yes, doctor," Paul said, cordially. "How are things coming along?"
This was the first knowledge Paul had that Eva actually had taken his advice to see a psychiatrist. She came and went freely, while he was in the store without feeling obligated to tell him of her activities. Still, to make weekly trips to another town and to spend his money on accounted-for fees seemed like taking too much liberty, even for a nympho wife.
The specialist sucked in his breath, and growled, "She does not need me."
"What do you mean by that?" Paul demanded. "I told her to go to you. You can't have accomplished very much, yet."
"Tell her not to come back."
Paul's heart sank with foreboding. "Why? What's wrong, doctor?" .
"She doesn't want to be cured. I can't help her."
Paul couldn't believe that. "Surely you must have done her some good."
"No!" the doctor denied, fiercely. "It's a waste of your money!"
"Want to tell me about it?" Paul almost pleaded. "There's nothing to tell."
The psychiatrist sounded bitter.
Perhaps a public phone system was not place over which to be discussing this. If Bessie or another operator were listening in, it was like hanging out the still-dirty family wash.
"I'm coming over to see you," Paul said. "No!" the doctor protested, in alarm. "It won't do any good. I'm booked up solid with appointments."
"You can take a few minutes to see me," Paul insisted. "I can't!"
"I'll be there as soon as I can drive over." With that, Paul hung up.
Eric Egstrom was an intellectual, an idealist, Paul decided, on sight. Despite the doctor's nervous embarrassment, Paul liked him. He felt that the psychiatrist was a sincere student of human nature, that he had been conscientious about trying to help Eva.
"Ordinarily, we encourage the patient to continue with the analyst even after full adjustment, since continued contact can prevent a serious relapse. But, in Mrs. Ray's case, I'm sure that this procedure would merely aggravate her trouble."
Eva would describe the doctor as an egghead. His face was hatchet-shaped, he wore dark-rimmed glasses, and there was only a fringe of sparse black hair around his shiny bald pate.
"What's so different about her?" Paul demanded, hotly.
Eva had given him plenty of trouble, chiefly with this over-sexed bit, but nobody else had ever dared run her down to him.
The doctor leaned back, tried to explain. "She has what we call a matriarchal complex. Or more exactly, in her case, an anti-patriarchal complex. She resents the fact that, despite all of the talk about equality between the sexes, this still is a man's world. She feels that, as herd leader, as head of the family, the male dominates, but only because of superior physical strength, not because of intelligence or ability." Paul nodded.
"I've seen signs of that rebellion in her, but I never fully understood it."
"She protests, as do many women, that when she married, she had to take the man's name. In a business partnership, the husband has legal title to the firm. Even in the marriage bed, the female is underneath, submitting to the selfish lust of the male animal."
Paul objected. "This last isn't entirely true. We've always shared equally, in sex."
If anything, he had let Eva get away with usurping too many of the male prerogatives, in their relationship.
The doctor leaned forward. "But don't you see why she strays? In extra-marital affairs, she can be the aggressor, chase down her own prey, or at least take the initiative, as seductress."
"Still she chose some of her lovers because they were brutal types, because they dominated her completely. It seemed I was too considerate, too gentle with her."
"Just as does everyone else, she has her contradictions, changing from one extreme to the other. While wanting to have a hand in running things, she still likes the luxury of being a kept woman, as in Victorian times, to not be responsible for helping in the economic struggle for existence. At times, she likes to enact the role of the helpless, clinging-vine type, swept away, emotionally, sensuously, into being used by the overpowering male. These are moods that just have to be dealt with as they appear."
"How are you and Doctor Egstrom getting along?" Paul asked Eva.
He wondered if she would notice that he knew the psychiatrist's name, even though she had never confided in him.
His wife smiled. A far-away, dreamily sensuous look came into her blue eyes. "I think we are beginning to come to an understanding."
Paul sizzled. How well he knew that look. "Eva! You didn't ruin everything again, did you?"
"What's wrong with what I did?" She assumed an injured air. "You ordered me to see a head-shrinker!"
"Did you have to disgrace him before one of his most influential clients?" Paul remembered the doctor's shamed tone, relating the incident.
"I guess we over-ran my hour, and the impatient old harridan came bursting in on us. She's probably telling about what she saw all over West Cedar by now."
Paul was appalled by her complete lack of shame. "Can't you see how you go around wrecking lives? His professional career was at stake!"
Eva smiled, remembering. "He's a prude, like you. It took a while, but I won him over to me on the couch."
"You seduced him, humiliated him before others!"
"Did he tell you that?"
Her eyes sparkled, asking.
He couldn't believe it. She was giddy with triumph, rather than repentant.
"He wouldn't exactly say, but it was pretty easy to guess," Paul said, coldly.
"I wore that navy blue orlon with the white polka dots," Eva mused, pervertedly eager to discuss with her own husband the details of her latest sex conquest. "You know-the one that rides up when I sit down. It does it a lot more when I lie down. It got the doctor jittery, watching it creep up, every time I moved. I kept sitting up, trying to tug it down, but it wouldn't stay. Finally, when I got so interested in telling him our troubles, I forgot to tug, and he reached over to do it for me, ordering me to cover up. As you know, I'm ticklish on my thighs. At his touch, I doubled up and clapped my knees together. Somehow, I trapped his hand between my thighs. After that, one exciting contact led to another."
Her torso wriggled as she recalled the erotic experience. "He's quite a man when he forgtes to be a near-sighted bookworm."
"He told me today to keep you away from him!" Paul said, furiously.
"Oh no! Not just when he's beginning to do me some good!" Eva protested.
Paul wanted to strike her.
"I'm not paying any man a fee for stud service to my wife."
Paul Ray stopped by his own house one afternoon, after delivering a perscription to an elderly lady invalid. He heard giggling in the bedroom, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
Even in bright, warm daylight, he felt an ominous chill, a reminder of the night when he had caught Sol Judd in his bed.
Enraged by his fear of further disgrace, he made no effort to silence his steps as he strode to his bedroom door. Two totally nude bodies lay on the bed, as before. Now, though, there was a distinct difference. Eva lay on top, hair touselled, face moist. She raised her head, her mouth hot and wet from contact with Ione's.
"So it's true!" Paul bellowed. "You are lesbians! You both are!"
With no guilty haste, with no show of remorse, Eva rolled aside and allowed Ione to sit up beside her on the bed.
They exchanged amused glances.
"Well, if you men can't take care of us, we have to do something," Eva said, pouting. Ione ran her fingers through her long golden hair, as she had the night of their attempted swap party.
The movements made her distended breasts bob like two balloons.
"It's all in your head!" Paul flung at the two women. "You're both getting all you need at home, from men who are considerate of your needs. If you'd go to work, if you'd do something useful, you wouldn't be so sex-crazy!"
"My doctor's exact words," Ione agreed, with saccharin sweetness.
They both deliberately baited Paul, thrusting out their swollen and moist-glistening bosoms. Ione dropped one knee over to the side, and Eva preched, yogi-fashion, showing everything she had.
Right before Paul, Eva turned to her companion and erotically toyed with Ione's breasts, cupping them in her hands, plucking at the nipples to stretch them, then allow them to snap back suddenly, with a rubbery rebound. In return, Ione bent to kiss the breasts of her hostess.
"Stop it, you two!" Paul yelled.
"Maybe, if you'd take care of us, as a man should-" Eva left Ione, swinging her bare legs over the edge of the bed.
She spread her knees and pressed a hand, rubbing under her belly.
"You're trying to sicken me on sex, entirely!" Paul raged.
"That's up to you, sweetie!" Eva stood up, walked to the dresser, and began brushing her hair, making her breasts bounce in a wanton way.
"It depends on whether or not you're too old a man to enjoy women any longer."
From the swollen condition of their nipples, he knew that they had progressed only fat enough to both be keyed up to a maddened pitch of expectancy. As passionate as they were, they would stop at nothing to get their burning fires cooled down.
"Three makes a more exciting number, don't you think?" Ione asked, examining her own breast, as an excuse to lift the heavy resilient dome of it.
"Oh yes, we've been wanting to try a circus," Eva teased. "This is our chance!"
"Leave me out of it," Paul snarled, even as he fought down the titillating impulses within him. "I thought I made that clear to both of you--that I don't go for that sort of thing!"
"He always was so inhibited," Eva explained to Ione, as though speaking of a backward child.
"If he doesn't know opportunity when it hits him in the face. I don't know what else we can do for him," Ione purred.
She melted backwards with slithering sensuousness, coming to a reclining position on the bed. She arched her knees, then allowed them to flop outward like an opening book. Her eyes dared Paul to look at her.
Eva padded over and fumbled for his zipper, jerking it down.
She probed a knowing hand inside his trousers. "He just needs a little coaxing, that's all," she cooed sweetly.
Her touch, added to the sight of two naked sex-bombs, sent overpowering sensations soaring up through Paul. He could well imagine the fun he could have here today, with two such experienced tricksters egging him on.
Still, he swung an arm, hitting Eva's wrist and knocking it out of his fly. Her hand hurt him as it left.
He directed his rage at Eva's guest. "Get your clothes on and get out of here! This is the kind of debauchery that has ruined our reputations in this town!"
The blonde increased her brazen exhibitionism.
"Oh, they've come to warn Fred, too," she said. "Mouthing off about what a wicked woman I am. But it's all just talk. After all, what can they do to us for just acting natural in our own homes."
"Well, this is my home!" Paul bellowed. "Leave this minute, or I'm calling Fred to come and get you!" Ione shrugged, giggling, making her breasts dance. "Hasn't Fred told you? He's given up on me. He has nothing to say about what I do any more."
Eva looked from her husband to her guest. "I'll get out of here, if you two want to be alone."
"No you don't!" Paul yelled. "None of that, either!"
Paul angrily yanked up his trousers and left the two wantons to what he strongly suspected would turn out to be a lesbian orgy.
The next day he stopped home again, this time intentionally. The murmured voices now came from what they called "the shed," a lean-to back porch, used as a utility room, a catch-all for garden tools.
As Paul strode across the kitchen toward it, Eva met him at the back door, trying to block his path. She was too late to prevent him from seeing the other figure, lanky and awkward, dodge back trying to crouch behind the washing-machine.
"Must you spy on me every day?" Eva flared, making hasty efforts to smooth her rumpled skirts.
Paul pushed her aside and confronted the squatting intruder. It was Todd Scott, son of the family across the alley. Bent almost double, Todd struggled vainly with the fly of his blue jeans.
He couldn't close it because the edge of his I-shirt was jammed in the zipper.
"What's going on?" Paul roared, more at Eva than at Todd.
Caught in this forbidden adult hide-and-seek game, the red-faced culprit sprang up, all knees and elbows, bumping against Paul as he tried to duck by. He bolted out past the screen door, thrashing through the rows of vegetables instead of bounding over the delicate plants or going around them.
The white flag of his shirt-tail waved in his still-open zipper.
The youth's enraged mother emerged from the Scott house. She glared first at his obvious state of undress, then at the Ray cottage.
Paul whirled on Eva who, now with that the situation was known, no longer tried to hide the fact that her panties were wadded like hobbles about her knees.
"Now see what you've done!" he raged. "Seducing a mere boy!"
"Well, you men like to pick young stuff, in girls, don't you?" Eva retorted.
"Don't you realize what it means to entice a minor?" Paul asked, aghast. "It's a criminal offense!"
"It was easy," she defended herself, defiantly. "He wanted it. He's been eyeing me every time I step outside."
"His mother saw what happened," Paul said, grimly. "She'll bring a morals charge against you."
"Do you really think she will, Paul?" For the first time, the seriousness of the situation seemed to penetrate the haze of her passion, and she showed fear.
"We can't even settle out of court. We haven't got the money."
"Oh, Paul!" Her growing terror was evident. "They won't make a really scandalous legal case out of this, will they?"
He shrugged, dejectedly. "I don't know any way to hide what's been happening to us, once they get to digging into all the evidence."
"Oh, darling! You won't let them turn you against me, will you?" she pleaded, in anguish, while her fluttering hands clutched at him. "You won't ask for a divorce? You'll stick by me, won't you, honey?"
At supper-time, as soon as Mr. Scott had come home, both parents came over, in company with Joe Chrady.
"We've been good neighbors to you, haven't we?" Samuel Scott demanded, on prodding from his wife.
"You have been kind and more than helpful," Paul admitted, recalling the evenings when they had worked in their adjoining gardens, sharing get-acquainted confidences.
"This always has been a clean town," Amelia Scott flared, less patient than Sam, getting directly to the subject at hand. "It used to be a fit place in which to raise kids."
"We saw that when we moved here," Paul agreed, trying to keep the discussion calm.
"Was it?" Eva challenged Mrs. Scott venomously, ignoring Paul.
The relationship between the two woman never had been friendly, although Paul never knew why.
"Shall we review the reputations of certain people we know?" Eva goaded.
"The comings and goings at your place have been watched," Amelia Scott shot right back. "They will create quite a scandal, when made public."
Eva shrugged. "I understand you are pretty fond of truckers, yourself, and I can talk plainer than that!"
Amelia went white, while her husband reddened. Paul saw that others knew things that he didn't know. What did his wife know about her neighbor to be so contemptuous of her?
"Too bad I took him away from you!" Eva jeered.
Was she implying that Sol Judd, her ape-man lover, had bedded the Scott woman before Eva, a younger, hotter, and more willing piece came along?
"You are being charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor," Joe Chrady said, glaring at Eva.
He rapped with his fingernail as though with a gavel, to restore order in the court.
"Why don't you look into what your minors are doing among themselves all the time?" Eva flared. "Far from teaching them anything new, I could learn a few new tricks from them!"
The chairman of the Business Bureau fairly exploded with righteous indignation at her absolutely unrepentant belligerence.
"We've put up with your brazen attitude as long as we're going to!" he yelled. "Either you move out of town voluntarily or we'll take legal action to make sure that you do!"
"That's fine with me!" Eva yelled back, even louder. "I hate you people as much as you do me-more!"
Paul saw, with dismay, that she meant it. She couldn't care less if he were ruined financially, just so she could escape the hell she had helped create here for both of them.
"We've tried to avoid the distasteful, incriminating publicity that filing a case against you would bring." Chrady threatened, ready to leave. "But we have plenty of evidence, along with plenty of witnesses to take this to District Court, if necessary."
Even with Amela Scott visibly taken aback by Eva's jeering accusation, Paul had the feeling that he and Eva were left losers in this not-so-minor skirmish.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Paul continued furious all through a sleepless night. The next day, he battled a feeling of failure and of frustration.
Everybody and everything seemed against him. He felt that he might just as well give up.
Still, at other intervals, rebellion at the thought of losing his store imbued him with defiance. Nobody, he told himself, could drive him out of this town. River Junction was his home low, his place of business. Where a man made his living was where his spouse had to live with him; that had been he code of marriage throughout history. Eva was stuck right here with him.
He did not believe in divorce, and he had a strong sense obligation to get her cured of her sex mania, cherishing her for better or for worse.
No conniving wife nor gossiping neighbors, nor dictatorial commercial club could run his life for him, could order him to move.
By evening, he was calmed down and his better judgment took over. A man could stand only so much. He was beaten, but he need not admit defeat to anyone, not even to Eva. instead, he still could call the plays, keep in control of the situation by taking the initiative, act as though the idea of selling out was his own.
He called Fred Hill to make sure the doctor was at home and could help to negotiate matters. Having Eva present, too, making her share responsibility for seeing that they got a fair deal, would ward off dissatisfaction between them, later.
Having made tentative plans with Fred, Paul approached Eva.
"Maybe if we went somewhere else to live, if we started all over again, we could do a better job of getting along together than we have here."
"Oh, Pau!" She was radiant with joy. "Could we?"
"We have a chance to sell the store. Ione has offered to buy it!"
He did not reveal that he knew Eva had sent Ione to him.
"Let's go over to the Hills' tonight to see what kind of price we can agree upon."
His wife fairly danced with glee. "I'll be glad to get rid of it! Then things will be like they used to be, for us."
Paul doubted that. Eva had changed too much. Correction: they both had changed too much. There were wounds that never would heal, scars that would remain. Their disillusionments in each other, their lack of mutual trust, could not be left entirely behind.
"We'll try to do things differently than we have here," he conceded.
Eva hugged him and promised, "I'll do everything the way you like, from now on. Just you wait and see!"
She seemed so much her old adorable self that Paul felt convinced that his decision to sell was right. If leaving here would save his marriage, if they could restore their relationship to something like its former perfection, he would be justified in taking a financial loss on his investment.
"Tell them about Raydent," Fred urged his wife as the four of them sat by a small table in the Hill home.
The sexy blonde dropped her eyes, twisting with guilty reluctance to admit, "I guess I was premature in what I did on that."
"What about Raydent?" Paul had not thought through what he would do with this special enterprise of his-and of Hilda's-if he gave up the store. Ione shot a glance at Eva that looked like an appeal for help. Paul already was on guard, watching for signs of a conspiracy between the two women.
Just before they had left home, he had caught his wife making a hushed phone call, and he had made out enough of the words to believe that Eva was tipping Ione off about something.
It enraged him to think that, so soon after promising him that she would be good, she would turn right around and plot against him.
"When I offered to buy you out," Ione confessed, "I sent a sample of Raydent, together with the formula, to each of the larger producers of dentrifices."
She paused. "One offered five thousand dollars outright purchase for the formula. That's largely to get rid of any possible competition, of course."
Doc looked at Paul. "It's up to you. Take it or leave it. Considering the hazards of going into production on a really large scale, I would suggest that you take it."
Paul hesitated "How would the five thousand dollars be split?"
"One thousand for J.B, the dentist, seeing it was his formula, one thousand for Hilda for her ideas and for her work, one thousand for me as the one and only share holder, and two thousand for you."
Paul still hesitated, pondering. "I could take Raydent with me, produce it anywhere we happen to live."
Eva gave him a sharp, reproving look. "It would just continue to make trouble. It would mean long evenings away from home, just the way it's been here." Ione smiled up into Paul's eyes and advised, "Two grand in the hand is certainly worth several thousand in false hopes."
"Take it! Take it!" Eva cried to Paul, snatching up the check. "We need the money, at a time like-this!"
"First, let's sell the store," Paul told her.
Again, he sensed Fred's approval. With Doc on his side, it was two men aligned against two women, pretty good odds.
Eva fingered the green slip of paper, thoughtfully. "Anyway, this check is the one good thing that River Junction has brought us."
"It shows that your man is a go-getter," Ione beamed.
Paul corrected her. "It's just one more of Hilda's ideas that have turned out well."
Both women sniffed, so the subject was dropped. Paul did not want the hostilities to get to the point where he might lose his chance for a sale.
"What figures on costs will you need to establish the present value of the store?" he asked Ione.
"Well...." she began, nervously, as though using sex as her purchasing power was more to her understanding than to go into another type of figures. "I suppose the inventory...."
"And improvements made should be taken into consideration," Paul interposed.
"Oh, yes, the materials used in remodeling," Ione conceded, vaguely.
"How many hours of night work did you put in, fixing up the place?" Fred interposed. "You're entitled to wages for your labor."
Gratitude for his doctor-freind's fairness welled up within Paul. Getting a fair return on his overtime was more than he had dared hope for. Ione boiled with resentment at her husband's interference.
"Are you trying to make me pay more than the business is worth?"
"No," her husband answered, dryly, "just as much as it's worth."
When Paul and Eva left, it was with the understanding that the four of them meet again on the morrow with an attorney to start transfer of title.
When he entered the darkened drugstore to take care of a few last-minute chores, Paul immediately sensed that someone was there. A few whiffs of a perfume he had smelled before told him who it was.
So Hilda still had her key.
This time there were no preliminaries. Silently, she approached him, pressed the softness of her breast, the hardness of her need against him.
"One more time, before you go," she breathed, her hot breath right in his ear.
Coming from the sight, the scent, the brief contacts that summed up Ione, Paul had been burning up with lust all the way to the store, trying to figure out some way to really lay that bitch at least once before he left River Junction.
Hilda's wantonness drove him to a maddened pitch, immediately.
He guided her around beyond some merchandise and took her in his arms.
He sought her lips but Hilda ignored kisses in her need for more direct sex.
She yanked up the front of her skirt, then tugged at him, trying to lead him to prompt action.
"All right," he agreed, willingly. "One more for the road, and let's make this one good.
"Give it to me! Give it to me!" She tried to impale herself upon him.
"Wait, honey. Let's take time to do it right. Where can we lie down?"
He thought of the special order of toss-pillows he had stocked as an advertising leader. He pulled Hilda in that direction.
Hilda couldn't wait. Following him, she shucked up her dress, bent forward to arch her back, and yanked it over her head.
She tossed it aside in a crumpled heap. A few steps further, she raked up her slip and discarded that, too.
While he scattered cushions on the floor, she came at him through the semi-darkness, bisected by three zones of white, the bandeau-bra, the shorts, down to her knees now, and the cuffed anklets. She swept aside his suit coat, both ways, and attacked him erotically, all over his body. She shoved her flanks at him, expecting him to thrust for direct connection.
"Take it easy! We've got all night!" He removed his coat.
She renewed her fondling, trying to drive him to reckless abandon, so he would seize and take her. Instead, he leisurely lowered her to the cushions and stretched out beside her, his fingertips seeking out every sensitive curve and crease of her lower body.
Hilda still had only one thing in mind, to pull Paul on top of her and to get violent action where it counted.
She pumped vigorously at him, trying to trigger him to the point where he would lose self-control, jump on and then blast away.
Like a rutting she-animal, she was beyond caring about anything but the climactic clash of their bodies. He caressed the delicate area between her thighs until she melted in utter surrender, spreading her legs wide as the underpants at her knees would allow, then kicking them off entirely. She opened herself to his touch, breathing in catchy gasps, rolling her head from side to side in the agony of her ecstasy.
Breathlessly, she thrust her bosom out at him. He lowered his lips to the nearest nipple, still tweaking the other between his fingers.
She writhed in the throes of ever-mounting ardor and murmured, "Oh, Paul-Paul-you make it so good!"
She hugged him again, then feverishly pulled his trousers down.
"No one else can be as nice as you."
Even at this moment, especially since he soon would be leaving, he felt impelled to say, "Next time, set your sights on a single man who is eligible to marry you. How about Andy?"
Her body winced, close to his. "Oh, Andy's a nice enough fellow, but-"
"Maybe if you had him do this to you, you'd see him in a different light."
Paul, now as naked as Hilda, rolled on top, invaded her with male ruthlessness, and began pistoning forcefully into her moist reaching heat.
The thrusting and letting go, then thrusting back began slowly enough, but the speed increased rapidly as their heat rose to a high fever pitch.
"Oh-h-h-h-!" Hilda wailed, "What are you doing to me, darling-its so good, I can't stand it!"
She arched her back to raise her hips, and her flanks thrust to m'eet his strokes. "Nobody-nobody could make it feel this good-"
"Just try it next time you're with Andy, and-"
Whatever else he might have said was lost as her wild clutching of him almost cut off his breath, as her scream of fulfillment drowned out all other sound.
When Paul got home, Eva was sitting up in bed. She had put on her filmiest blue nylon negligee, so sheer it was like nothing at all, so he knew that she was making this an occasion.
Tonight they would celebrate their coming release from the troubled times in River Junction.
He thought he had exhausted himself sexually with Hilda, but one look at those two balloons thrust out expectantly, and all of the old familiar flames began licking up along his sensory nerves.
This was his girl, the one female in all the world with whom he found emotional perfection. For all his playing around of late, he had not entered one who could take Eva's place.
He could not disappoint her. They would make a party of it tonight. In anticipation, his passion mounted with each passing second.
Even before he finished undressing, he was aroused and ready.
Smilingly, Eva watched the signs, her blue eyes sparkling as they used to sparkle.
"Could it be, Mr. Ray, that you have the same thing in mind that I do?" she teased.
Involuntarily, her torso began writhing, the slight dome of her belly beneath the thin blue veiling, welling forward and back like a pulsing bellows.
"Seeing you in that outfit, what else could I think?" Paul asked, with a grin.
As he approached the bed, not bothering to put on either half of his pajamas, Eva sniffed.
"How was it with Hilda tonight?" she asked.
His sense of guilt almost spoiled his lustful mood. Since both Addie and Hilda had made themselves available to him, how could he deny Eva's charges? Still, he did not want jealousy spoiling his marriage now.
"I hope you saved enough for me," Eva smirked.
Eva reached out and sought to re-stimulate his passion ... even the tricks of her fingertips had a naturalness, a tightness that brought everything back into nuptial focus again. The promise in her spreading legs as she opened to invite his return caresses; restored the stomping-bull sensations he had experienced such a short time ago.
He was ready to take her on, to take any woman on, in an all-night orgy, if need be.
He slipped an arm around her, one hand seeking its way inside the thin blue net that tinted the tightened pink breast a passionate violet, while the other hand continued to tease her below.
They fell back together on the bed.
The phone rang, shattering their sensuous tension with its intrusive harshness. It rang seven times before Paul finally rolled off the bed.
"I had better answer it," he muttered.
"This is Fred." The doctor's voice was disturbed. "Our deal on the store is off."
"What do you mean? Why...."
"That damned woman of mine went downtown to celebrate buying you out." The doctor was so agitated that he could scarcely get the words out, intelligibly. "They arrested her for disturbing the peace."
Paul didn't know what to say.
"That's too bad," he managed, at last.
"They said they won't give her another chance," Dr. Hill went on, mournfully.
Paul wanted to ask for details. It was not until much later that he learned that the blonde sex-queen had done a strip-tease dance on a pool table, then had dared the men ... or women ... to come up, one by one, and give her all they had.
"We've been...." It sounded as though the physician were crying, "we've been ordered to pack up ... to get out of this town...."
"Who was it?" Eva asked, worriedly, sensing disaster from his half of the conversation, from the worried slump of his shoulders.
"What has happened?"
Paul shrugged, then with sudden resolution, he straightened his back and returned to the bedroom, smiling.
"I'll tell you about it later," he said. "Right now, let's not spoil our second honeymoon!"
