A ringing sound was reaching his subconscious mind. He stirred heavily. The louder it got the more it made him move, his body sore from fatigue and aching for sex relief even in slumber. Finally the ringing broke through and he lay on the edge of sleep, knowing with his bones though not yet with his mind that he was alone in the double bed, that Jackie hadn't come home.
The phone kept ringing.
His eyes didn't want to open. Didn't want to face the day, world, job, anything. Muttering, he crawled out of bed. It must have been just a couple of hours ago he'd stuck his body between sheet and blanket, every muscle yammering for rest after a sixteen-hour grind covering a gambling expose for The Record. With his sex-need tormenting him, making his slumber a starving hell.
He'd gone to sleep anyhow, so bushed he couldn't wait up for Jackie even if she had held out on him three weeks this time. Now the damnable persistence of the phone brought back all the trouble: Jackie gone again-sore about nothing, something, everything-gone home to mother, out with some guy having a sex orgy, or holed up alone somewhere to scare her husband, worry him like hell, bring him to heel.
Now the ringing phone struck terror into him. Was it Jackie ... police ... hospital? Would he never be rid of these frights in the night, never be rid of the dread?
Even after they divorced, he and Jackie-and divorce they would, for two people couldn't go on like this-would he be rid of her even then, truly rid of desire for her, rid of her problems and her escapades and her emergencies and her troubles, real and fancied?
Stumbling, he made it across the bedroom and into the living room where he'd had the phone put because Jackie couldn't bear to have it ringing near the bed. He looked into the radiant ball of sun popping from behind the yellowing trees beyond the window, and shuddered.
The phone went on ringing. He grabbed it. "O'Shea," he growled.
"Wake up, Flash," a man's voice said, a familiar voice, though he couldn't identify it. "I've got a real one for you."
Well. It was only the job, a hot tip, a story. Not Jackie, not this time. But he growled, because he was bushed. "What the hell do you mean, pulling me out of bed? Don't tell me the mayor was caught in a whorehouse raid-I've heard that one."
"You awake, Flash-boy?"
Now he knew who it was, with the ribbing. Lieutenant Joe Watson, an old friend at the police department, who called only when he felt he had a good story.
Flash was instantly alert. "Let's have it," he said, grabbed a pencil and scribbled as Watson talked. "Donald K. Eichlober IV ... holdup ... gas station ... 4700 Ridgeway ... attempted murder and arson. On my way!" Flash yelled, and threw the telephone into its cradle.
With the precision of a fireman getting dressed to answer an alarm, he jumped into his clothes. In forty seconds he was out of the first-floor apartment and on his way in the sedan. But still he'd had time to see that Jackie's side of the bed was unslept in, her pillow undented. And her old white convertible that she'd taken off in yesterday, crying mad but refusing to cry, wasn't parked outside.
Angrily he threw his wife out of his mind and put it on the story he was after. He wasn't surprised that one of Lake City's young scions was involved in a holdup. Nothing surprises you in newspaper work, he'd found out long ago, not when you're a special assignment man. He upped the sedan's speed and went shooting toward the scene of the trouble.
The brass was already there, asking questions. One of them spotted Flash as he walked in, and grinned. "I knew you'd be busting out to this one," he said.
This was Detective Roger Barber, plenty smart to be such a good cop at only thirty-four. He was a couple of years older than Flash, a couple of inches over his five-eleven. He was what the chicks call handsome in a burly blond way and Flash wasn't, not with his sandy, unruly hair and half-homely features. Which bothered neither of them.
Flash grinned back at Barber and lifted his brows questioningly.
"Silk stocking society's got a bad one now," Barber said. "After young Eichlober held up the couple that owns the station, the bastard made them stand in the corner while he poured oil all over the floor. Just as he was about to put a match to it, the girl-the station owner's wife-she tossed this one-pound can of grease and caught him right between the eyes. Too bad she didn't kill the punk."
"Where is he now?"
"Getting patched up at Municipal."
Flash snorted. "Great guy! Armed robbrey, arson and a few other raps. And he'll beat them all." Flash shook his head. This young Eichlober, he had everything. What the hell went through his mind, anyhow? He had family, name, fine home, society, money-yet he'd gone on a two-bit rampage.
Like Jackie. She had husband, good sex relations when she wasn't holding out for some damn reason or another, home, security, small luxuries, opportunities for pleasure. Yet look at her, at the turmoil she made of living. Over what, and to what end?
He stood to one side in the service station office and watched the young couple who'd had the misfortune to tangle with Eichlober. They were still in their twenties, and they looked alike-plain and thin, with brown-color hair-and both of them scared and holding to each other, still shaking from the ordeal.
Flash looked at the girl's flat body and wondered if she ever held out on her husband, and decided she didn't. This thin, plain sort of girl would be a firebrand in bed, her husband's bed.
Flash was mad when he talked to them and jotted notes, mad at what had happened to them, at what was happening everywhere, all the filth and violence. And guys and their wives not hitting it off, like him and Jackie.
He drove home fast and went back to bed-after a tour of the apartment to verify the obvious fact that Jackie still hadn't come home-with a mind full. Crazy thoughts bumped into each other. Sleep? Nuts, once you're roused, you stay up in this business of being a reporter on call.
And if your wife has denied you sex for three weeks because you can't buy her a new convertible, you sure as hell stay awake from sheer physical discomfort. You roll, you toss, you ask questions. What the hell's the world made of? But you don't answer yourself. Maybe you're afraid to, because it'll be a horrible answer.
But you remember things. If you've got wife-trouble, you remember. Five years ago. When Jackie was eighteen and you were twenty-seven. When she was so innocent you wouldn't believe it at first. Hell, she knew there was sex, but not how, not the mechanics, and he was already a fire-eating reporter.
Take their first night, when she was bride and he was groom. She was actually a virgin. He was even more anxious for sex that night than he was today because, from the day he'd met her four months earlier, he hadn't touched a woman. Not even her. Not even to pet, beyond a few lingering goodnight kisses.
She was so dewy he wanted to keep her that way; it was a matter of pride with him, and also it whetted his sexual appetite the way nothing else had ever done.. To know that here was this beautiful, clean girl-next-door beauty with the warm brown hair and warm blue eyes, all virgin, all his.
They went from the church to her home on the wedding day. There she changed into a going-away suit that matched her eyes, then he headed straight to a downtown hotel. He didn't even wait to scoop rice out of the car or take off the 'Just Marriedsign. He drove to the hotel as fast as the law allowed, the tin cans and old shoes tied to the rear bumper jangling and bouncing on the pavement.
Jackie stood uncertainly just inside the door of the room after the bellhop left them alone. The soft silk of that suit followed her high, full breasts and sweet, curved buttocks and dipped in between her legs excitingly. Her eyes were a blaze of blue innocence, and her rosy lips were quivering into a smile.
Flash stood back from her, in the middle of the room, desire lining his veins with fire. The fire almost got into his voice, but he managed to keep the tone gentle, the way Jackie was used to it.
"You don't really mind coming right here?" he asked.
The rosy, quivering lips made their smile and the eyes blazed their innocence. She moved slightly, and the way the blue skirt clung to her inner thigh creased a fold into the material which formed a silken, shimmering arrow pointing to her secret womanhood. The sight of that made sweat pop out all over Flash under his wedding suit.
"Of course I don't mind, darling," Jackie said. "I....I know what you want."
Her saying that so boldly out of her innocence-for she had no faintest concept of what he really wanted-stimulated him so he had to clench his fists to keep from grabbing her, tossing her onto the bed, ripping the blue silk away and taking what he'd waited four hellish months to get.
But he had to play it gentle. This was a virgin ... his virgin. He had the perfect setup for the prefect sex-life. He was the teacher. Handled right, Jackie could be the wife every man secretly yearns for-a lady in public and a whore in bed. But with her husband, only him, Flash O'Shea.
So now he said, still gently, "I want to undress you."
"Darling, of course. I want you to."
Hewent to her, keeping his pace leisured, love in his eyes. With unsteady hands he drew off the blue silk coat and hung it on a chair. He unzipped the skirt, pulled it down, and she stepped out of it, and he put that on the chair. He unbuttoned the sheer blue blouse, tossed it like a piece of froth onto the suit.
Next he lifted the pale blue slip by the hem, drew it upward, heard the soft sound it made riding up her smooth skin. This he tossed toward the other things and never knew where it landed.
Now she wore only a lacy blue scrap of strapless bra, blue panties and garter belt, sheer, almost invisible hose and high heeled blue sandals. Her breasts filled the bra to near-bursting and swelled high from the top of it. Her light perfume crept into his nostrils, and he wanted to seize her and burrow his face into her breasts, but he held himself sternly in control.
She looked at him, those blue eyes wide. "Do you like me, darling?" she asked softly.
He couldn't answer, couldn't trust himself to speak. For if he spoke he might grab and tear and rape. Gentle, keep it gentle, lead her into it the right way.
So he smiled, or tried to, and nodded.
"I'm glad, darling," she said.
Sweat was running off his forehead. He knelt at her feet, his legs shaking, and removed her sandals. Then he unfastened the hose and pulled one down, his fingers trailing the back of her shapely calf, slim ankle and across the heel, he felt her tremble at this touch and hastened to remove the other stocking and the garter belt, letting them fall where they would.
He stood again, feeling his sweat soak into his underwear, put his shaking hands behind her and unhooked the bra. It fell away unheeded as her breasts jumped out, revealing themselves to him. They were perfect-round and full, but not gross, resilient. The circles of pink at the nipples were in tiny soft wrinkles. The nipples were small and delicate and in harmony with the other delicacies of her, body and mind.
He touched one nipple with his fingertip, rubbed the finger lightly back and forth. The small, perfect nipple rose in a tiny bud from the surrounding pinkness and stood ready for him.
He touched the other breast too, though there was no need, for the twin bud was risen there. So he filled his hands with her treasures, and they were a perfect fit.
He held her that way, her breasts in his hands, and felt her shiver in one long tremor. It seemed to start from far within, course up her thighs, into her breasts and from them into his hands, then his arms and down until sweat began to drench him, and his urgency grew.
He took his hands away from her breasts and watched them bounce and settle into their proud, swelling thrust. The kind to drive a man crazy, he thought. Well, I'm willing to go crazy any time.
"My clothes next, sweetheart," he told her, the fire in his voice now, but he couldn't keep it out any longer. He stripped faster than ever in his life, kicked off his shoes, ripped away the socks and was ready for the real unveiling.
He glanced at Jackie's face and saw that she was watching him in fascination, and this excited him so much he could hardly breathe. Hands really shaking, and letting her see them shake, he took hold of the panties and swept them down and off and away.
Her womanhood was the same warm brown of her hair, and such as he'd never seen on any woman. It was a personality in itself, a wild and wanton temptress, a gypsy of a love-spot, waiting, asking, begging. Look at Jackie's face, and there was the lady; look lower, and there was the whore.
He forgot he must be gentle, must prepare his virgin. He swept her into his arms and she clung and quivered. He tossed her upon the bed and knelt on it and hovered over her. He kissed her lips, opened them with his tongue and her tongue came to his, warm and moving, and it was as if their tongues truly kissed.
His sex was ready, bursting with pent-up need, but even as he poised to thrust it into that gypsy-whore, he remembered that the gypsy was virgin and must be wooed and won with finesse. So he moved his lips to one sweetly upthrusting breast, traced that sweetheart rosebud nipple with his tongue, heard the small purring in Jackie's throat, traced the other rosebud with his tongue.
He trailed kisses over her breasts, down the cleavage, along her nipped-in little belly, clear to the wanton-spot, and Jackie was moaning and purring and breathing in a half-sobbing manner.
"Darling," he murmured, "do you want me to keep on with this ... or do you want me to go on ... to the best part?"
"Go on ... please, Flash ... tell me, show me!"
"It may hurt some, sweetheart, right at first."
Her arms came around him, pulling him close "Please, darling ... just do it ... hurry!"
He put his hand gently between her thighs and barely pressed, and they opened to him at once. He tried to enter gently and gradually, but her virginity was intact and strong. So he did what every nerve in him was crying out to do-he thrust vigorously and cruelly into the virgin-spot and Jackie cried out in pain. She clutched him and her nails cut his shoulders.
He moved in her, a circular, gentle motion, holding back. She began to breathe differently, not in pain now, but anticipation.
"What next, darling," she asked, "what do I do?"
"Move when I move," he said, "as if we were dancing. Do what your heart says and you'll see-you'll find out."
He moved strongly, slowly and she moved with him. They were perfectly matched. He moved faster and she with him faster. He changed to a thrust-lift-thrust and she changed too. The thrusting was deeper on his pan each time, hers higher, and it was harder for both of them, and faster.
Her body moved as if it were his body; it came naturally to her ui to that gypsy-spot. Her body was flattened to his and he had the sensation that if he, by some miracle, should go floating into space she'd float with him, their fast, beating movement ever faster as they soared, even hotter, fulfilment ever closer.
He felt himself go into a sort of free-wheeling, and her with him. He felt the fire running through his body ... veins, eyes, brain, bones, and he felt the fire running in her. Their fires exploded, shattered, sprayed simultaneously on their bridal bed, the virgin-whore conquered by her man.
For almost two years of marriage, Flash enjoyed what he'd dreamed of-a wife who was a lady in public and a whore in bed. And then things changed. Or, more properly, Jackie changed.
Her clean girl-next-door beauty seemed to set and harden at the edges. There was a look of discontent. Yet she was lovlier than ever. Flash told himself she was beginning to grow up. It was natural, that she'd go through various stages. This would pass.
Only it didn't. First she went clothes-mad and built herself a wardrobe so fine Flash could hardly scrape the money together to pay for it: This brought on the fights over money. And her withholding sex for lengthy periods of time to punish him. Only she punished herself too, for she needed sex as much as he did. Then, in rapid succession, she went golf-mad, card-playing-mad, dance-mad. It was when he couldn't take her out dancing every night that the fights really began.
And when the fights attained a certain pattern, that was when she started running out on him. He'd chase after her and bring her home and they'd have a brief honeymoon.
Later, she began having sex with other men, feed ing her own sex-needs when she was holding out on Flash for some damned reason or other. Sure, he could have gone for other women, but Jackie was the one under his skin, her and that whore-spot both. He didn't want anybody else, wouldn't .settle for less. Also he felt if he could get her over this kick they could make their marriage work. No matter how mad he got and cussed himself out over it, that was how it stood.
Along in that time the calls began to come in the night-police about her reckless driving, and from the hospital about fake suicide attempts. And there were calls from her, lonely calls in the night. And him, he'd go to wherever she was. He'd stagger out of bed, bleary with fatigue, and bring her home.
When they got home, they'd fight. He'd accuse her of having men and she admitted it, threw it in his face. She liked a change of pace, she'd cry. And him, starved for her, when he'd see that gypsy-wanton of her womanhood, would go wild and then they'd have sex and he'd take it, not knowing when he'd get it again.
Now, on this Sunday morning, lying sleepless in their bed, hungering for his wayward wife, Flash tried for perhaps the thousand and tenth time to figure out why she acted as she did. It wasn't sex ... he scored with her there. And the things she wanted to buy, like the convertible, weren't that important. There just wasn't any logical reason. Nothing he'd done had formed her into what she now was. The seeds had been there. She had been destined to grow into what she was. He'd done his best, and it wasn't enough.
Maybe if he'd had a million dollars, or if they'd been nearer in age, without the chasm of nine years between them-but what the hell. Maybe was a lot of dirty water under the bridge. Jackie was a bitch and Flash was Flash, and never the twain shall meet. He tossed and swore and dozed.
CHAPTER TWO
When he awoke day had grown into afternoon, and out of that had come quiet darkness and still no Jackie. And he didn't go looking for her, not any more.
This was the time when Lake City's one hundred thirty thousand inhabitants were having their Sunday night snack before settling down to television. Flash dressed and ate, gathered up his notes and drove to the newspaper office, knowing this to be one of the few peaceful times in the editorial department.
There in his cubbyhole, facing the door to the deserted editorial room, he sat at his typewriter, slashing away at the lead about Donald K. Eichlober IV.
"A playboy went berserk yesterday morning after staging a holdup, and admitted he'd wanted to watch two people die in the hungry jaws of a fire...."
His eyes lifted, attracted by a creak of the editorial department door, then by a movement. The movement was made by two pretty legs coming toward his office. They were more than pretty-they were sexy in sheer black nylon with a black silk hemline sliding and caressing them just below the knees. They promised sex to a sex-hungry man who was trying to fill his time at the typewriter.
His heartbeat stepped up. They were like Jackie's legs-Jackie who'd spend any amount on clothes, get herself up like anything from an ingenue to a black-silk siren and still keep her look of innocence. They could be Jackie's legs. She could be coming back to him-this time-in the role of siren, coming back of her own accord, because she wanted to, offering him the sex she'd been denying, giving him joy, not trouble. On those legs she could, those sexy Jackie-legs. He kept staring at that sliding hemline as they moved toward him.
The hemline belonged to what the dress trade calls a sheath, and this one really sheathed the doll who was inside. It clung to slim, swinging thighs, spread over delicately voluptuous hips, cut in at the waist and climbed breasts that rounded out the snug-fitting top. Her arms were shapely and bare and white and swung with grace, ever so slightly, as she walked.
Flash knew, long before his eyes reached her face, that this wasn't Jackie. This beauty was the opposite of Jackie's clean loveliness, but with every bit as much allure, and a confident, reserved come-on to boot.
When she stopped at his desk her perfume melted away the odor of cigarettes, even the one in his mouth. Her head tilted to one side, and she looked at him with deep-green eyes from under carefully trimmed dark brows. Her hair was jaw-length, a beautiful, gleaming black that shifted as she moved her head, then swung back into place. Her lips, which were full and soft and carried a pure red lipstick, moved into a tentative, searching smile.
Flash moved too, pushing his chair back from the desk. He was undressing and caressing her in his mind, thinking, what man wouldn't? She was a miracle of beauty. He wondered, who she was. And instantly told himself, a doll with a yarn for the Soc department, that's who. And then, before he could get his eyes under control, she asked, "Where do I find Flash O'Shea?"
The question was a shock, though it shouldn't have been. He'd had all kinds asking for him-stumble-bums, actresses, governors-but this one caught him off guard.
"What do you want with O'Shea?" he asked.
"It's ... personal."
"How personal?"
Her softness vanished, a hard seriousness thrust through her beauty and an almost male determination showed before she did a switch back to the softness.
"I must see him tonight," she said appealingly.
Flash gave his cagarette a long drag and let the smoke trickle past his lips as he stepped to the ash tray and crushed the cigarette out. He frowned, motioned her to a chair a few feet from the desk, and sat down himself.
"I'm Flash O'Shea," he told her.
"I'm Shirley Eichlober. It's about my brother."
His eyes raced from her pitch-black hair to that adorable face, down the luscious figure to the sexy ankles. Her toes were twitching, moving in their sandals and they were sexy, too.
So this was the girl real estate wonder. Twenty-eight years old. Mentally Flash whistled. She was the first sex-pot he'd ever met who was also a business success.
He brought his eyes back up her body very slowly, then to her eyes and waited as if to say, now that I've undressed you, what's on your mind?
"I'm here to kill that story about my brother-that filling station affair," she said directly, as if she were giving an order in her office. "The publicity would ruin him. He's a weakling. He didn't mean what he did."
As usual when he was amused or skeptical, Flash let his tongue press the inside of his cheek and felt that crazy grin break out and waited.
"The publisher of the Morning Chronicle said he'd kill the story if I could get to you," she said.
"The hell he did!" Flash exploded. "Well, I'm not the publisher of The Record. Why come to me?"
"An Eichlober go to a Brock? Really, Mr. O'Shea, don't be naive ... don't expect me to believe that-"
"Oh sure, I knew about the feud."
"Then you know what old J. I. Brock would do if one Eichlober appealed to him to save another Eichlober."
"I work for Brock, remember?" Flash said. "I can't kill stories."
"This one can't be published. I'll do anything."
"Uh'uh. Go home. You're wasting our time."
He swiveled to his typewriter and began to type. She leaned closer. The almost-touching of her body sent a sensation rippling all over him.
"Okay," he growled, "what's on your mind?"
She bit her lip. He watched determination and control come back into her.
"I know I can't pay you with money," she said. "But I have something else to offer, something no one else has ever had from me. It's-I keep an apartment in connection with my office." Her voice softened as she went on with complete honesty in her tone. "It can be ours, yours and mine. But first you kill that story."
Crazily, his heart went out to her. He'd had offers, but never one like this. He told himself to get rid of her. He wanted to grab her and toss her out. But he was afraid if he touched he'd never toss. Even if he did, it would solve nothing. She'd be back. She had to be persistent or she'd never have made it to the top in business.
So there she sat, waiting.
He studied her, trying to keep his sex-hunger out of his mind. Why would this young woman, with her beauty and success and wealth, make such an offer to save a punk brother notoriety? Family pride, personal pride, some prig she wanted to marry-what?
He reached for his cigarette pack, shook one loose, and poked it at her. She took the cigarette and held it. He shook out another. Stuck it between his lips. Struck a match and brought the flame to her. Her face came close to his. He thought how simple it would be to take her into his arms and kiss her. His hand trembled and he pulled it away and lit his cigarette.
The stood up, holding their smokes. What do you say in a spot like that? The silence began hitting him. She inhaled, blew out smoke. Her lips moved silently, then words came.
"It's only a short distance from here."
Anger grabbed him, hard and unannounced. He had a job to do, a story to write, and she was trying to keep him from it. He had to get rid of her.
So he said, "Let's go."
She led, walking gracefully, head up. And with each step Flash took the anger grew in him. What won't people do to kill a story, he raged. Isn't there any integrity left, or does each person have his own brand of honesty?
Outside, the girl went to a long convertible parked beside his car, motioned for him to get in. He shook his head and gestured, indicating that she was to go ahead and he'd follow.
She pulled into traffic and took the convertible gliding down the street. His sedan padded after it. He watched lights come at him, draw near, pass and fall behind, and always more were coming.
He kept thinking, this is something new in your life as a newspaperman. Then he reminded himself: what's new about it? Just another babe throwing herself at a guy to get what she wants.
He felt a brief anger that he was two-timing Jackie, but it was her own fault, what the hell. If she hadn't run out again, he'd have told this doll to skip along.
His private thoughts ended as she pulled up in front of a combination office-apartment building. She waited on the sidewalk, smiling. He could see her by the lights from the street and couldn't help responding to her. Then her courage or boldness or whatever it was made him uneasy.
He took a quick look around to make sure nobody saw him before he followed her into the building. The self-service elevator let them into a dimly lit, carpeted hallway.
She walked to a door and unlocked it. Flash waited. His heart began to pound. Suppose I'm walking into a trap, he thought. There was nothing new about a man following a woman into a trap.
Too late, he questioned his wisdom in coming here. It just didn't make sense. He had enemies, every good newspaperman has enemies. How did he know one of them wasn't using this doll for bait?
Yet when she pushed the door open he stepped in ahead of her. Warily, it is true, but he stepped in. Like a lamb. She closed the door and they stood in the darkness.
"Well," she said softly, "here we are."
"I hope you've got a drink," he said.
He felt her moving away and tensed, ready for anything. A light sprang on and after he'd blinked a couple of times he found he was looking into another room, a small, bright kitchen. There was the click of a refrigerator door and the doll called, "Scotch?"
"Right. And make it a double."
Now he breathed easier, not much, but some. And he was sweating. Not some, but a lot. He found a wall switch nearby and turned on the lights.
This was a living room, decorated in shades of green-carpeting, walls, drapes across the window. There was a long couch, paintings on the walls, a glass-topped cocktail table, big lamps. There were more books around than he'd ever seen in one room.
There was a closed door directly opposite him and he began to concentrate on that.
The doll walked in with the drinks on a little silver tray. She was smiling, a victorious smile, yet soft. She had him in her apartment, the smile said.
He took a glass from the tray. It moistened his hand and kept him alert, in spite of her, to any trap she might set up. He took a long swallow of his drink. The Scotch quenched the dryness of his mouth and left a long cold trail as it went down. He didn't take his eyes off that closed door.
"Do you think someone is going to jump out?" the doll asked. "There's no one here ... look around."
He opened the door which bothered him. It gave into a bedroom that sparkled crystal green, like her eyes. The bath was black and white, like her hair and skin.
She was laughing softly in the other room, and he reminded himself that this was real, and the drink in his hand proved it. He gulped some more Scotch.
"Flash," she called, not laughing now, but with a memory of laughter around her words, "do come back.
He strode into the living room. She'd turned off the light, but there was plenty from the kitchen. She was sitting on the couch and her dress had slid halfway up her thighs. She reached out to him, fingers curved invitingly.
"Please ... right next to me."
He took a deep breath and blurted, "Now look-sometimes in moments of stress people say things they don't mean."
She was up and away from the couch, smiling. "Find out," she challenged. "Tell me what you want!"
Her manner swept away his tenseness and roused an angry curiosity to see just how. far she was going to carry this game before she called a halt.
So he said, "Off with the dress."
She laughed, put her hands back, and there was the sound of a zipper. She bent, flipped the dress over her head, flung it aside. The light from the kitchen cast through her slip and showed how her thighs glided into the round hips.
"More?" she taunted.
His heart beat hard. Harder. He was beginning to sweat again, the way he always did in moments of stress. His aching need for sex pounded in him, only now it wasn't for Jackie ... it was for this woman ... and fast.
"Take everything off," he said, "and come here."
She pushed the slip straps down, let the black garment slide, kicked it away. Her shoulders moved so the bra straps fell and she tossed that scrap of black satin past him, laughing softly and defiantly. Her breasts were big and white and lush, like melons, and they had big dark aureoles. His throat went dry, looking at them. She pulled down sheer black panties and, lifting one leg at a time, stepped out of them. She kicked off her sandals, peeled the black nylons off white legs and stood before him, all smooth white beauty, with that swinging black hair above and ebony delight below, and then she walked slowly to him. Her lips were moist. Every movement was grace and beauty and seduction.
Flash stood there, burning with his raging need.
She put out her arms, slowly circled them around his neck, came against him. He could feel her body .pressing, warm and pressing and moving a little, and he held her, moved with her and it was good. It was the best thing he'd felt in a long, long time. Too damn long.
Her lips were close to his. "I'm ready," she whispered, "to make the down payment."
He could only stand there and hold her. He dared not move again lest his passion throw her down on the floor and ravage her here and now, over and over, in his need, and in his rage of anger.
"Afraid?" the doll in his arms whispered.
He couldn't find the right words, or any words. He couldn't swallow the anger or subdue the need. He moved against her again, feeling her with his sex, her nubility, her beauty.
But still his anger held him, his ingrained newsman's honor not to sell out on his story. He pushed the doll from him, lifted his hands, cupped them unsteadily on the naked beauty's face, held it and felt his anger at her drain away. But not his passion or his want.
"Are you a virgin?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, after the slightest pause. "Yes."
Her reply and its honesty helped shake him all the way back into reality. He pushed her away, harder than he meant to, so that she swayed before she caught her balance. A rage of disgust burned through him without burning away the desire, and with it a rage of anger at the absent and erring Jackie who had driven him to almost selling out on his job.
"Save it, baby ... save it!" he snarled, and stalked out.
The night air refreshed him. He got in his car and .drove for miles, trying to find an answer to what had happened.
There had to be one. And when he found it, it might lead him to the answer about Jackie too ... some kind of an answer.
CHAPTER THREE
Eventually he went back to the office and wrote his story about the Eichlober punk. Then he dropped it into the wire basket on the city editor's desk and went home.
Jackie still hadn't come back. He considered putting in a call to her mother in Cleveland, decided against it. If Jackie wasn't there, no use getting the old girl upset.
And if Jackie was with her mother, she was okay.
He thought about hospitals and the police station, dismissed them. If she turned up either place, he'd be notified. The cops knew her, the personnel at the hospitals knew her. If they'd tried to reach him while he was out, they'd try again. Just as Jackie herself would do, if she wanted to. All he had to do was wait.
At midnight he crawled into the double bed. He couldn't sleep and lay on his back, deliberately relaxing. It wouldn't get him anywhere to stay awake worrying and wondering. It never had. He should be used to these absences of Jackie's by now, but he wasn't.
At last he slept, heavily and uneasily, waking frequently, aware that she still hadn't come home. He was not resting at all and knew how he was going to feel in the morning-spent, bone-tired and sore at the world.
Because of Jackie, because she'd starved him for sex and he'd turned down something good last night partly because of her, because she'd been gone two nights and he'd feel like this until she returned, at which time he'd feel worse. For then would come the quarrel, eventually there'd be the sex, more quarrels and living with the knowledge that she'd run out on him again, and that more nights like tonight were to be endured. He more or less made up his mind that the next time she held out on him, he'd take his pleasure where he could find it. And as often.
He got up at seven and stumbled to the kitchen for coffee, hoping she'd be there cooking breakfast, but of course she wasn't. He got the percolator on, then opened refrigerator and cupboards. No eggs, no bread. He sat at the table and drank scalding black coffee and smoked half a dozen cigarettes before he was human enough to go into the shower.
The city editor was at his desk when Flash walked into the office. This was Bob Rawls, bald as a duck's egg, fat in the middle, and a shrewdy. Many times he knew things Flash thought he couldn't know. He was in his late fifties and showed it, but was quick-witted and not to be matched at his job.
"Good story on Eichlober," he said before Flash could grunt good-morning. "I got pictures this morning."
Flash managed a grin, knowing that Rawls was giving the story a Page One spread. "Now the Eichlober girl will have to get off my back," he said.
The city editor's dark eyes came up. Flash jerked his head toward his cubbyhole and went directly to it, nodding at a couple of reporters who were already typing.
Rawls followed him, carrying a copy of their early edition. Flash looked at Page One. The headline screamed, PLAYBOY JAILED FOR HOLDUP, ARSON.
"Well," Flash remarked, "now she knows she didn't kill it."
"What're you talking about?" Rawls demanded.
Flash told him what had happened the night before.
Rawl's face went fiery. "Why, the damned little fool!" he swore.
Flash reminded him of how both newspapers had killed one story a year earlier. A prominent old lady was found dead in the swimming pool at the family home early one morning by her daughter and the daughter's married lover, who had spent the night there.
Rawls just glared.
So Flash gave details about last night. All of them. A muscle in Rawls cheek began to twitch. For him, that was a broad smile.
"Was she ... nice?"
"She almost had me."
One of Rawls non-existent eyebrows went up. "Gave up pretty easy, didn't she?" Flash shrugged.
"Follow the story through," Rawls ordered, and returned to his own work-filled desk.
Flash picked up the paper and stared at the needle-like features of young Eichlober. It was a blown-up head shot. He didn't resemble his sister except for the dark hair, but he was good-looking, the kind women go for.
He dropped the paper and leaned back in his chair wondering anew why the girl would trade herself to save her brother's name. To save it one time, when she must know he'd do as bad or worse again. Maybe she had a mother complex. Or was there something deeper that had triggered her to offer herself-a wild streak of her own, a thirst for revenge?
He wondered if there was a basic likeness in the Eichlober girl and Jackie. On the surface they were different, but underneath was there an underlying common female impulse, a need that perhaps they themselves couldn't recognize?
Impatiently he swept the newspaper to the floor and reached for the telephone. Rawls said to follow up on the story, and he sure as hell wouldn't get it done if he sat here and daydreamed about women.
Before he could dial, Rawls was at the door. He had a hound-dog sadness on his face the way he always did when something serious popped.
"Flash," he said, "get out to the Lazy Tyme Motel ... Ridgeway Avenue. Double death ... accidental, or so it looks."
"Photographer?" Flash asked, grabbing pencil and paper.
"I'll send one. Use your judgment about pics. Got it by radio. Chambermaid found them-gas heater still burning, but apparently they suffocated. Get going."
His words came after Flash, who was already halfway across the editorital room. It was ten-forty by the clock on the wall, and he swore at himself mentally for not trying the apartment to see if Jackie had come home. Now there wouldn't be time, not until he got back from this assignment.
He made it through midmorning traffic as fast as he could. In a fairly reasonable time he was on Ridgeway, the blocks ticking off behind him until he was passing 6700, where young Eichlober had tried murder only yesterday.
He wheeled into the Lazy Tyme, which was made up of a semi-circle of white brick double cottages. Police cars were there, and ambulances. Even as he parked, a small hearse rolled in, its windows covered. He could tell from the cluster of people at an end cottage which was the death house, and went directly to it.
Reporters from The Chronicle were there. They gave way as he approached, looking solemn, and when they stood back so did the onlookers, clearing a path for him.
The cop standing there helped to clear this path, looked at Flash soberly, seemed about to stop him, then nodded and let him proceed.
This is the red carpet for sure, Flash thought, and wondered why. Could be the Eichlober story, but not likely. He'd had other stories that put this in the shade and no red carpet, especially from the opposition. Even the brass had never given him this before. But he took advantage of it, stepped through the human aisle as it formed, and right up to the motel cottage.
Here Detective Roger Barber suddenly appeared in the doorway. "Flash," he said, "I don't think you'd better come in."
Now the significance of the sober looks, the opening pathway, hit Flash. The premonition of what he was going to see when he stepped through that door made the hair on the back on his neck prickle.
"Whatever it is," he told Barber, "I'm ready."
The detective moved aside and Flash went in. The windows had been raised and the door was standing wide, yet the stuffiness in the room was pronounced. His look went to the beds, which were pushed together, and he felt his heart stop, actually stop though he'd been forewarned, then resume in a very slow, deep and tremendous pounding. Like a drum beating a dirge in his body, an unbelievable,-hurting dirge.
She looked very young in death. Her hair was warm brown, and a strand lav across one cheek. Her long lashes too touched her cheeks in death sleep which had come to her during slumber. She was beautiful, with a clean, girl-next-door kind of beauty. The sheet was drawn up to her chin, but Flash knew that beneath that sheet she was naked. He knew every slim line and sweet curve of that lovely body, knew the dimples in the bend of its legs, knew so well the forever-stilled gypsy womanhood.
Jackie, his wife. On her wedding finger, under the sheet, would be the gold circlet he had placed upon it when he vowed to love and cherish her until death. Until now.
The man beside her was handsome even in death. He had hair yellow as a candle flame. He had strong, chiseled features and a square chin.
Flash had never seen him before. Yet this stranger
-this man under the sheet-had known the dead girl
-wife of Flash O'Shea-and he had made love to her.
CHAPTER FOUR
There were people in the room. Flash knew they were there, though he heard no sounds. He glanced around. They were absorbed-cops, brass, identification men-in watching him recognize Jackie.
Detective Barber stood beside him. "We didn't realize they'd send you," he said. "Nobody'd play such a trick, not even your worst enemy.
Flash gestured. "Skip it. Rawls got it by radio, he didn't know."
"We didn't either, not at first. Thought it was people just passing through."
"Skip it," Flash repeated. "I feel nothing."
And he didn't. He was emotionless as a chunk of stone. It made sense for Jackie to come to this end. She'd gone to bed with still another guy, and here he was, handsome as a prince.
"I'll have one of the boys call in," Barber said. "They can send someone else, or kill the story altogether."
"Kill hell," Flash said automatically. "A story's a story, reporters included."
He watched Barber digest this, could all but see the thought process going on in the other's brain. Hell, he had something, this being a stone man. Nothing hurt, but nothing.
He went about his reporting job as if the dead girl weren't his wife, and the dead guy hadn't been her lover. The motel manager and the chambermaid gave statements. The Chronical reporters were inside now, taking notes, not looking at Flash. They were acting as though he was just another reporter and not the cuckolded husband.
Barber asked Flash to identify the body of his wife, and he did. The Chronicle reporters would put in their stories that the husband identified the body of the nude girl. They might even go so far as to identify the husband as Flash O'Shea, reporter for a local newspaper, but they'd not mention the name of the paper because it was against their policy to publish the name of their competitor.
Barber wouldn't let the newspaper photographers come inside. Flash was relieved about this, even if he was a man of stone. He went outside and instructed his own photographer to take an exterior shot of the death cottage.
Barber came to him there, and while The Chronicle man was photographing funeral home attendants as they wheeled one of the sheet-shrouded bodies to a hearse, asked if he had any preferance in funeral homes. Flash noted the name on the hearse and said that one was okay. He stood until the second sheet-covered figure was shoved into a second hearse, with Barber keeping at him to let one of the cops drive him back to the office.
"Skip it," Flash said, thinking those were the only words he seemed to know right now.
Barber said he'd be notified when the body was released so he could plan the funeral, and he realized that sure there was that to do yet. But first the story to write. And Jackie's mother to notify and be kind and polite to.
He shook Barber off with a brief, "Thanks," and hightailed for the office.
They still didn't know about Jackie when he walked through the editorial department. The atmosphere was tense, but it was the normal condition this time of day with reporters banging typewriters, rushing to meet the deadline.
Flash went into his cubbyhole, sat down and rapped out his story at his usual fast pace, feeling nothing. When he tore the last sheet out of the machine he leaned back in his chair and read what he'd written, still feeling nothing.
"The nude bodies of a man and woman were found in twin beds in a cottage at the Lazy Tyme Motel, 6900 Ridgeway Avenue at 10 a. m. today.
"The dead were identified as Jacqueta O'Shea, 23, wife of Flash O'Shea, a newspaper reporter, and Carl F. Anderson, 30, a St. Louis, Missouri shoe salesman, Detective Roger Barber, who is heading the investigation, said:
"The bodies were discovered by a chambermaid, Miss Blanche Winters, when she unlocked the door for the purpose of cleaning the room.
"Miss Winters told police she stepped back when the intense heat in the room struck her.
"'After fresh air rushed into the room, I noticed the flames were turned high in the gas heater, the chambermaid told police. I then glanced at the beds, and that was when I saw them.
"Upon realizing that the pair were lying very still, Miss Winters ran to the office of the manager of the motel, Abner S. Mott.
"'I think they're dead, she told Mott.
"Mott dashed from his office to see for himself. Not certain the couple was dead, Mott called police.
"The manager showed police a register which showed the couple had registered Saturday midnight as Carl F. Anderson and wife, St. Louis, Missouri.
"The woman was identified by her husband. Anderson's identity was established through personal cards found in his wallet.
"Detective Barber and Coroner Dr. Arthur Strimbles are satisfied that the couple died from carbon monoxide fumes. However, they said they will continue their investigation before making a final decision.
"Barber said that the gas flames consumed the oxygen in the air-tight room and that the couple died in their sleep.
"The bodies were removed to Lenox Hospital, where autopsies will be performed. Barber expects a preliminary report to be in his hands this afternoon.
"Funeral arrangements for the pair are incomplete."
Flash corrected a couple of typos, then went into the editorial room and smacked the story down on the desk in front of Rawls. The city editor began to read. His face took on the hound-dog sadness, and when he looked up his eyes were brighter than Flash had ever seen them
"Don't say it," Flash said, thinking that now even his voice sounded like stone. "You had no idea, and you wouldn't have sent me. Well, I'd rather be the one."
Rawls nodded. "I get the message. At least I can kill the pictures."
"Don't bother. Let them go."
"Take the rest of the day off. Tomorrow. As long as you need."
"I've got Eichlober to follow up. Remember?"
Rawls stared, scowled. "Want it that way, do you?"
"Why not-What else is there?"
And those words, his own words, pointed up to him for the first time what had happened, made it almost real. He realized also that his inadvertent words were true. Without Jackie to love and worry about and; half-hate and even divorce, what was there? Without work, especially today, there would literally be nothing for him any where.
Back at his desk, he put in a call to Cleveland, but Jackie's mother didn't answer. Flash hung up and plunged into the Eichlober story. After that was finished he tried Cleveland again, got no answer, jumped into another story, another and another.
It was late when Rawls came in and ordered him to knock off. He now realized nobody had bothered him all afternoon. So the word was out. Everybody was respecting his grief.
Grief, hell. You have to hurt to grieve.
"You're in shock, fellow," Rawls said. "Better let someone go home with you. This is no time to be alone."
"Shock, hell," Flash said. "Anything wrong with my copy?"
"Of course not."
Flash recalled now he'd been sending copy out by a scared acting copy-boy whose very silence and fright showed he knew what had happened. Now he saw there was a wrapped sandwich someone had brought, shoved way to the edge of the desk, and a clutter of empty paper cups.
His phone rang and as he answered, Rawls went out. It was a routine story, and as he made notes Flash was thinking. Shock, hell ... if this is shock it's a pretty-damn good state to be in.
He still thought so when he stood with Jackie's mother beside Jackie's casket. The old girl was small and thin and fifty-five-she'd borne Jackie, her only child, late in life-and there was no trace of the daughter in her.
She blamed Flash for everything that had happened to Jackie, including her death, but she approved of the manner in which he was putting her away.
Well, Jackie would have wanted to make a stunning exit. White, everything white, she'd said once. Something about a white velvet casket lined with white velvet in puffs, white dress, flowers.
So here it was, white velvet casket with silver fittings, a blanket of tiny white roses, with banks of flowers around all white, and Jackie in the misty white crepe bridal robe. It came to him as he stood there with the mother that the cost of burying Jackie was coming to considerably more than the cost of the convertible she had wanted so much she had died because of it.
He felt no grief, no rancor, looking upon the lovely corpse. The wedding band was still on her finger. He found it hard to believe she had desecrated the ring. He found it hard to realize that she whom he had vowed to cherish was no longer to be cherished. He stood and looked at her and heard her mother sob and was not moved. He didn't feel even regret, but only a yearning for time to go.
If only he could shorten time, he thought as the hours dragged along. Why had no one ever told him of this drag of time for those who wait to put a departed one beneath the ground?
Why had no one ever written of that awful creep of hours when the dead lie on view and the grave waits out yonder, a gaping mouth in the dirt? Why had no one sung of those who sit the death watch? Why must the living learn it for themselves ... why do not those who have suffered it warn those who have not?
Those who wait for release so they may themselves live on.
Flash endured and waited through the time which did not move. But of course it did pass and earth eventually covered the concrete vault which encased the white casket, and white flowers covered the raw earth, and the procession wound out of the cemetery, and all was over.
Now all he had to do was observe a decent period of respect for the dead. Then he could do something about his raging sex-hunger, which was driving him like the fiends of hell.
There was his job, and that took care of the days. It was the nights and weekends that were rough. There were invitations from friends and he tried that, but it was no good. He'd leave early, get to a bar, home to a bottle. And in the morning, while he didn't exactly have a hangover, he felt rocky. He tried playing poker with the boys, and that was a flop.
This left movies, TV, record player, reading, the bottle. The bottle was the easiest. Shower and flop on the bed with the radio going and the bottle there. It brought sleep, eventually it did.
In this manner the days passed, and the nights, and the weeks until it was the one-month anniversary of her death. That night he got stoned. The next day was the one-month anniversary of the waiting, and he got stoned again. The third day was the one-month anniversary of her burial, so he got stoned the third time.
And the day following he quit the drinking. He was suddenly sore at the world, but mostly sore at Jackie. She'd colored his life while she was living, but he'd be damned if he was going to let her keep on doing it after she was dead. To hell with proper respect.
He was going out and do what he should have done a long time ago, while she was alive and holding out on sex. He was going to get himself a woman. A new woman-one he'd never seen before. Tomorrow night.
CHAPTER FIVE
He left work on the dot next evening, because he was going to start his woman-prowl. A woman a night and every woman food for his sex hunger until he was replete.
He got into his car and started quarreling with himself about dinner, and decided to cook his own. Later, he'd go to a cocktail lounge and get his date.
At a supermarket, he put a quart of orange juice into his cart, then went to the meat counter. Here a good-sized I-bone got his attention, and it won out. He tossed it into the cart and pushed along to the frozen foods.
Suddenly a blonde was beside him. "You have my cart," she said with an edge of annoyance.
Being woman-minded, he looked her over. She was lovely. She looked clean, as though she'd never have to bathe again. Her hair was almost shoulder length with what they call 'body' and obviously hadn't gone through the torture of a cold wave. It was parted at the side and bound back by a brown velvet ribbon.
Her eyes were deep brown like the velvet and a bit slanted, giving her a hint of the Asiatic. Her lips were soft and full and a new, pale red.
"My cart," she said with more annoyance.
Flash saw he'd tossed his steak into the wrong cart for sure. He looked at her again. Somehow she reminded him of Jackie, and this angered him. Maybe it was the velvet ribbon and her innocent eyes or maybe it was the girl-next-door quality.
"Which steak is yours?" he asked, shortly. Khe picked up her package, smaller than his, and placed it in what had once been his cart. Now they each had a quart of orange juice and a steak. Her left hand, resting on the cart, bore no ring or mark of one.
Flash moved his eyes slowly over her. She had high breasts, a tiny waist, and hips that were a trifle full. She wore sheer nylons on slim, smooth legs, and the toenails that showed in open brown sandals were enameled the same pale red as her lipstick. She might be as tall as five-five without heels, and she might be thirty years old, but not more.
She let Flash undress her with his eyes then flipped around to the counter, making the hem of her red dress swing. He stood there, angrier than before. Because she had reminded him of Jackie, he wanted to hurt her as he had been hurt. This wasn't how he'd meant his woman prowl to go. Yet here she was-his woman for tonight-and he wasn't going to fool around.
He watched her put a mixed salad into her cart. Suddenly she smiled, still half-annoyed. "You're forgiven," she said.
"Thanks." Then, "My idea was to fix my own meal. I'm tired of eating out alone."
"Me too," she said, smiling without the annoyance. She hesitated, seemed about to turn away.
Flash said quickly, "Wait."
She waited.
"Seeing that I goofed," he plungde, "I should pay a penalty. How about my buying the food and both of us cooking?"
She looked startled. The brown eyes searched his face.
"Well?" He made a crazy grin, sticking his tongue into his cheek.
"I'll think about it," she said, and moved on.
He trailed. She stopped at the frozen foods. As he came near she whispered, "French fries or peas?"
"Both."
He put them in his cart and moved her steak to his. When he reached for her orange juice, she stopped him. "I have to buy something or the checkout girl will notice," she said. "I come here all the time."
"You go on outside then," he agreed, "and I'll meet you there, Miss-?"
"Cotten. Sue Cotten."
"I'm Flash O'Shea," he told her, and waited.
If she'd heard the name before, she gave no sign. She picked up a quart of milk on her way to the checkout counter. Flash added coffee, hoping it was the right grind, two small pies and ice cream to his order before checking out.
Sue was standing beside a small green car in the lot. He got into his car and followed hers north some blocks, then east and finally to an apartment house.
She had a small layout, with kitchen and eating area divided from the living room by an archway. There was a TV and some books and magazines and what looked like needlework. There was a short hallway with two doors opening off it, a bedroom and bath.
Sue closed the blinds, turned on the ceiling light and smiled at Flash with a kind of shyness. He forced himself to grin back, feeling uneasy over that shyness, and she turned away fast and set her grocery bag on the formica table. Flash set his groceries on the table and began to turn on the coils of the small electric stove.
She made quite a fuss getting pans out. "For French fries and peas," she said a little breathlessly. "You're on your own ... I'm going to change." She went into the bedroom fast, almost like she was running away.
Flash began to whistle as he put the steaks to broil. Next he started the peas and potatoes.
The steaks were beginning to sizzle when Sue came back. He could see the shadow of her legs through the soft white cotton dress buttoned down the front. The top buttons weren't fastened, and he could see a portion of her breasts. She was wearing white sandals on bare feet.
She stooped to tend the French Fries and he could really see those breasts. They were round and full, just the kind he liked. He wanted to cup them in his hands right now but was afraid it was too soon and she'd be angry.
A moment later, as they watched the steaks, she turned and looked into his eyes. He put his hands on her arms and gently pulled her to him. He felt her body touch his, and what felt like an electric charge went through him, making his ears ring. He tried to pull her close, but she held back, then put her finger on his lips and shook her head, and he let her go.
He thought then, and when they were at the tabic eating, this is the tease-type. Go easy ... don't get too excited ... don't move too fast.
So he asked, "Hungry?"
"Very," she said, like she was glad to have something to say. "It makes an appetite to have someone here. I think this is exciting?"
"You like excitement?"
The brown eyes lifted, shining. "Oh, yes!"
"Real excitement?"
"Umm."
"Sky-the-limit?"
"Oh." She blushed, just a little.
They ate a few bites. Her eyes kept shining.
"Do you have a job?" Flash asked.
"Yes. Department store. I'm a buyer."
"Divorced?"
The brown eyes quit shining. "Widow." That hit him. "Sorry."
She made a small smile. "It's all right. It's been over three years." She paused, frowned slightly. "This is the first time I've been with a man, the nearest to a date I've had ... in the three years."
And he was at it in a little over a month. He felt as tall as a gnat.
And then he thought about Jackie and her tricks. How she'd been capable of sitting here like Sue was sitting and of saying the exact things under the same circumstances, and she'd be lying. So, because of Jackie, he felt himself getting mad at this girl.
"You married?" Sue asked.
"Nope."
"Going to be?"
"If you mean am I engaged, no."
"Going to be?"
She made him uneasy and very angry. Also down-right nervous. He looked into her eyes, but if they held wedding bells he couldn't see them, not in all that brown.
So he asked her. "You got wedding bells in your eyes?"
She shook her head, smiling.
He should have felt relieved, because of what he planned to do with her. Instead, he felt angrier. But whether the anger was at her or himself, he didn't know. Anyhow, it served to remind him that Sue had once been married and knew men and what they wanted. There was no reason to handle her with kid gloves. He would get rid of the anger as soon as lovemaking started.
So, to proced with that, he held her eyes with his and smiled intimately. She smiled back, with a kind of seriousness at first, then with a gaiety that seemed reckless.
He insisted upon serving dessert and coffee.
"It's nice to have you around," Sue laughed. "No one ever waited oh me before."
"Maybe it can be arranged," he said. "I like it."
And it was true. First damn time Flash O'Shea had ever liked anything of the sort. It made him uneasy, beneath the anger, like it was going to dispel the .anger.
"You'd get tired of it," Sue said.
"I don't think so," he heard himself say. It was a pat answer, sure, one he'd naturally use for effect. What made him really uneasy was he meant it and it pushed more of the anger aside.
"Maybe I'd bore you," she said.
"Want to try?"
Her brown eyes went very steady. Flash was more than uneasy, now-he was half-scared. Because he almost meant even this, crazy-wild as it was. And as far afield from what he'd come here for as it could possible be.
"You mean," she asked, "just-cohabit?"
"Something like that."
"And when you got tired of it, you'd walk out?"
"Wouldn't that be better than dragging it on?"
"I play for keeps," she said softly, "Such as?"
"Double rings."
"Then you do have wedding rings in your eyes."
"Maybe. For some man. Some time." There wasn't anything more to say. Flash knew he'd had a damn close call. Out of sheer hunger for the companionship of a woman, a thing apart from his sex-starvation, he'd almost trapped himself into shacking up with one woman. For him it was going to be strictly go to bed and skip-lay them and leave them.
So as soon as they went into the living room, he got right on with it. He sat in a chair and she sat on the couch, clasped her hands and let them drop into her lap, a little forward. They pulled the soft dress so it outlined her thighs, though she didn't seem to be aware of it. The dress pulled slightly above the knees, showing how smooth they were.
"Do we need so much light?" Flash asked. She hesitated, then turned on a lamp on an end table. Flash got up and switched off the ceiling light and stood looking at her.
The tenderness of lamplight made her all the prettier, with a softness not many girls have, Flash thought. He went to her and pulled her up into his arms, holding her lightly.
"Persistent man," she whispered. "Can't help it," he murmured. "Why don't you control yourself?"
"How can I?" he whispered.
He pulled her closer, not much, but enough. He could feel the sweetness of her the softness, the firmness. She put her palms to his cheeks, drew his face near, touched her nose to his.
He laid the palm of his hand against her head, turned it and brought her lips under his. She held them still as he kissed, but he kissed more deeply, and her lips moved at last and she sighed and kissed him as deeply and let him hold her fully. The vibrance of her body, the promise of it, excited him almost beyond endurance. He backed toward the bedroom, kissing and she followed, kissing, step by step, as if they were dancing to the music of their kisses.
By the time he'd kiss-danced her thus into the bedroom. Flash's pulse was double-pounding. Now he held her away from him, by the arms, and she held his arms and they step-danced, always toward the bed, without the kissing and with their eyes clinging and burning.
She began to sway, stepping back and forth yet forward too, fitting her steps to his progress backwards toward the bed. Like that she followed him, in rhythm of desire. It was driving him mad. He began to sweat.
He had to get her onto the bed, had to take her.
"Persistent," she whispered, not smiling, brown eyes aglow, "so persistent."
"If what you're doing makes a guy persistent," he said unevenly, "then I'm for persistence."
"I didn't mean to, not really," she said. "Or maybe I do. I haven't before-ever. It's just-I like to do this with you. It feels-right."
"How right does it feel?" he murmured, drew her into his arms, kissed her again, still step-stepping.
She began to take little stinging bites at his lips. He kept kissing and backing and she kept nipping and following in that dancing walk.
At the bed, Flash put his hand between their bodies and unfastened some of her dress buttons. All the while he was doing this, they made the step-step sideways in the one spot beside the bed, dancing their love-dance.
She pressed closer, nipped harder, then gently. He slid his hand down, slipping buttons free until he could reach no more. He pulled the dress up, unbuttoned it to the hem, held her away, putting a halt to their dance-rhythm, and flipped the garment off.
She wore only white bra and panties under the dress, sheer and frothy.
"Take them off," he said.
Her fingers went to the elastic, stopped as if they were powerless, so he eased the panties to her ankles and she stepped out of them. He unfastened the bra, flung it away, sucked in his breath at sight of her freed breasts.
Gently he took her into his arms, naked, gently held her, moving against her with gentleness, holding back and she moved against him sweetly. And gently, kissing her, with her body at last almost limp in his arms, he lowered her to the bed and sat down beside her.
Her body was clean-lined, with a virginal kind of purity made tantalizing and madly exciting by her breasts. They were high, all right and round, but more buxom than he'd thought, with large pink nimbuses with good nipples which were standing erect as if they were reaching for his mouth.
Her sex was a large, beautiful triangle of hair the exact shade of that on her head, a soft feminine blonde. It was the most beautiful he had seen on any woman, and it set him to trembling as he gazed at it.
Her whole figure was a melody that flowed and swept with the smoothness of music from shoulder to waist, past the almost voluptuous breasts, past the hips with their hint of fullness, down legs that were perfection. He traced his finger down one leg, loosened her sandals and dropped them on the floor.
Now she was unmarred by clothing. Now she was as God had fashioned her.
He stripped off his own clothes in seconds. She lay watching him and when she saw his throbbing, urgent sex a tiny blush came and grew until her face was softly pink.
He stood for a moment while she looked thus. He smiled at her, his throbbing excitement roughening his voice. "You're a darling," he said, "you know that, don't you? That you're a sweetheart?"
The blush went down her neck; onto the breasts and shaded into those upstanding nipples. "I-guess I do," she said softly. "If you don't hear it-you forget
-after a time, sort of."
She smiled, all of her-lips, brown eyes, the upstanding, nippled breasts, the flowing lovely body. All of her smiled at him. "You-you're wonderful, Flash
-all over. I-guess there's a lot I've almost forgotten."
It was crazy, this talk, but nice. It was like an exchange of vows he thought, sex-vows.
He moved to the bed fast and arranged himself on it, kneeling on one side of her with his body above hers, and she lifted her arms and rested her hands lightly on his shoulders. He could feel them burning hot against his own hot skin.
He kissed her, wanted to kiss, had to. First he kissed her soft blonde hair, then her brow, then the tip of her nose which, earlier in the evening she'd touched playfully to the tip of his nose, skipped the lips. If he touched those lips now he'd be lost, he'd rape her, deprive them both of the perfection they sought.
He kissed her chin, her pulsing throat, down one breast to that nipple which was reaching for him, took it tenderly into his mouth, caressed it with his tongue.
"Oh-Flash," she sighed, "that's so wonderful ... the other one, darling please ... then this one again ... ohhhhh!"
He caressed the other breast, the nipple, down the flat abdomen, along first one delicately full hip, then the other, along the insides of the thighs. Now they were both moaning, and she was moving slightly as if she wished to writhe but dared not lest she miss one touch of his traveling, kissing lips.
"Flash ... my own...." she whispered, "must we wait any longer ... must we, darling?"
And even while he was thinking she'd already waited three years and he'd waited seven weeks and fulfilment would be all the better if they waited a bit longer now, his sex had mounted to such enormous urgency that he was shoving it into her. And as he went into the tight, inner parts of her, he heard a man's deep, gratifying outcry and that of a woman also.
"Wait," he whispered when she moved under him, "hold it."
And she stilled, but her inner self held him tight pulsating with inner movement which squeezed, loosened, tightened again with a rhythm like that of their step-dance into the bedroom only moments ago. He held his body quiet, keeping his weight off her, and timed her squeeze-loosen rhythm of her inner, wonderful muscles.
The moment came when he moved in her, slowly, deeply, voluptuously and she moved in response, and then he moved a bit faster and more deeply and again she matched him.
"Now," she whispered, "Flash-now-please-hard-quick...."
"No, little sweetheart," he whispered back, going still, "hold it ... it'll be better," and she moaned but lay quiet, doing only the squeeze-release with her inner muscles which he found so delightful to his sex member.
This was so good, the first time with the first girl, that he didn't ever want it to end. If he could control himself and her, this joy could go on indefinitely, making the final bliss the best he'd ever had.
He moved gently and she with him, gently. Yet there was an urgency to her gentleness.
Her breath was sobbing in and out, but she timed her movements to him. She went faster and harder when he did, slowed with him, quickened again, for all the world as if they were dancing together.
The world stood still and there was only their sex-dance upon the bed, the squeeze-loosen-tighten, the slow, the fast, hard, slow, the hold, the wait. He was streaming sweat, and it was streaming onto her, and her body was drinking his sweat, his body, his odors and this put him all the way out of control, he who had kept such rigid control.
"Now," he cried low and hoarse. His body went of its own urgent, long-starved need into a hard, mounting movement with hers matching, threatening to outstrip, but never quite doing so, yet matching always. His cry went on, low and above a moan and hers wound into it, low and also above a moan.
When release came, his passion burst into her flooding her, and hers burst over him, flooding him, and then their bodies quieted with only a slow, round movement at times, and their sobbing breaths quieted.
They lay there in golden silence for a long time, neither knowing what to say, Flash thought. He was fighting with himself. She's wonderful, he thought, and wanted to propose a toast of friendship, or more properly, of sexship, but stopped himself.
Maybe she's another Jackie, he argued with himself. How the hell do I know if this is real, honest love.
He moved out of bed and started to dress.
She lay watching, a look of contentment enveloping her. When he'd finished, she sat up and looked at him in a puzzled manner, then with hurt.
"Are you going to just-leave?"
He didn't know what to say. He was mad all through. Mad that he'd got himself so emotionally snarled up with her during the sex-act that he couldn't tell now whether it was love he had expressed or sex-hunger he'd fed or both. Right this minute he was sick of the whole male-female setup.
Yet tomorrow night he'd seek a woman. A different woman. He wasn't getting himself into another mess of marriage.
He made for the outside door but she was there first, clutching the white dress around herself buttoning it crooked. She was angry now and she was prettier angry than she was at her softest and sweetest. She was lovely. Dressed or undressed, happy or mad, before sex or after, she was the loveliest thing he'd ever seen.
"I hate you!" she cried. "You ... animal!"
"Sure," he said.
And he was. But so was she. He'd given her something she'd done without for three years. And she'd taken it and been glad to get it.
He jumped into his car and roared away. But oh how he wanted to go back and stay. With clean passion this time, not stored-up lust.
She's lovely, the torment ran through him, through veins and body like a refrain, like her, the music of her. She's lovely.
CHAPTER SIX
Lovely ... lovely. The refrain persisted hours after Flash returned to his apartment. The urge to go back was compelling, but would Sue have him now? She'd probably scream if he came to her door.
Or would she?
There was a way to find out, and he had to find out.
Never had a woman stirred him so, not even Jackie during the honeymoon. In memory he could feel Sue's little, bites on his lips and craved more.
"Okay reporter," he mumbled, "gamble".
He opened the phone book, found the C's raced his finger down the column. There it was-Sue Cotten. His heart was beating fast and he was trembling as he dialed the number.
He glanced at the clock. It was aftre midnight. Sue's phone rang twice, and the receiver lifted.
There was a hesitation, then a voice filled with tears said, "H-hello." Flash didn't answer, couldn't. Another tear-filled "Hello" came into his ear. After the next pause a spirited, "Damn, why don't you answer?"
He turned coward. He couldn't see her again, for that hadn't been his original idea. No involvement wanted. A woman a night was his plan and he was going to stay with it. Better for both of them to let her think he was a heel. He hung up.
Now he wanted her sexually as much as at first, more even. He paced the floor. Yanked off his clothes, got under the shower and turned it on cold, real cold. He didn't shiver. The heat of his body seemed to absorb all the cold that came rushing from the shower head. Realizing this wasn't solving his problem, he got out and rubbed himself dry.
He stomped off to bed, but not to sleep.
He was at the office early next morning, sitting at his typewriter in a self-imposed coma over Sue, putting off the movement when he'd have to check her off in his own mind as finished business.
Finally he gave up and tackled his routine work. The rest of the day was rough. So rough he was too busy to think about Sue. .Or maybe he was finding excuses to put off thinking about her.
Anyhow, when it was time to dress for the dinner-dance at the Lawlor Hotel he was assigned to cover, he had to quit brooding. The affair was being sponsored by businessmen and industrialists, with some top-notch industrialist as principal speaker. He was going to discuss the economy of the world.
Flash loved those jokers, especially when he felt this lousy. What they said could be summed up in a few words: if you don't go out and get the business you won't have any business. But they always rambled on for twenty minutes, throwing out a lot of figures and theories that made everybody hope they'd choke or pass out so the party could begin.
Flash put on a new black business suit, his Cufflink shirt and the one decent tie he owned. He wore this tie only to boring affairs, or at least it seemed that way.
But tonight he was going to look at his assignment in a different light, a little excitement from latching onto the fifth wheel. In other words, an extra girl in a foursome, who'd been dragged along out of sheer courtesy. There were always a few like that at these affairs, and most of them had come-on eyes.
At the hotel, he found the joker who was to speak, got a copy of the prepared oration, and went to a phone booth in the lobby. He called the office and got the rewrite man.
"Here's one you can toss into the classified ad slopover section," he said. Quickly he dictated a lead, picked a few salient quotes from the speech, and ended with a quip of his own: "That's all for this cure-all to depressions and recessions."
"Why the hell didn't you just say 'that's all?" the rewrite man yelled. "I typed that last sentence, you ham!"
Flash hung up, grinning without real humor. Now, with his assignment out of the way, he strolled about the lobby, which was well filled with people, alert for his prospective date. He looked the women over, all ages, sizes and all kinds of makeup, but the real dolls were with husbands or boy friends.
He made a try for one sitting near the elevators. She was a little overripe, but full of looks and promise. She gave him a fast freeze and he turned away, not at all discouraged.
It was then he saw the figure, or the rear of it. It was in a tight-fitting champagne colored silk dress, and the hips made a neat little semi-circle that moved, as she walked, swaying back and forth with the smoothness of a clock pendulum. Her hair, cut short and set in one gleaming swirl around her head, was champagne color, the exact shade of the dress.
From the side, when she half-turned, she appeared to be about thirty-six, twenty-five, thirty-five. The thought hit Flash that it was a hell of a thing to evaluate a shape like hers in mathematical terms.
Her manner of walking was attracting the eyes of other men in the lobby, some of whom Flash had already identified as being there for the dinner-dance. He lost her when she stepped into the elevator with others following so closely he couldn't see her face as she turned. He concluded she was going up to the second floor ballroom to the affair and shrugged her off as somebody's wife.
He hung around the lobby a while longer searching for a pickup, then decided to go upstairs and join the mess of dull faces. This particular group never livened up until it had downed three or four drinks apiece.
He shuffled into the next elevator, only to be sent against the back wall as the crowd surged in. They were the late-comers, and those who had been sitting around the lobby, and you'd think they were about to miss the greatest event of their lives the way they packed themselves in.
Upstairs Flash had to work his way through the corridor toward the ballroom. There was a specially set up bar at which six or seven bartenders were pouring drinks as fast as they could collect the money and drop it into the cash registers.
Flash managed to get off into a corner and catch a bartender as he finished pouring a string of Scotches. "Give me one before you disappear," he said.
The bartender served the drink. "That's seventy-five."
Flash handed him a dollar bill and waved him away. He was lifting the glass when he again saw the woman in the champagne dress. She was trying to get through the crowd to the bar just a few steps away. She looked even better from the front than she had from the rear and since this was the second time he'd seen her alone, Flash decided to try his luck.
He waited, and when she glanced his way, searching to him, not smiling, but with a kind of pleasant eagerness for a space at the bar, motioned to her. She came dircetly. That was better than a smile. He moved, making room.
"Thank you," she said. "It's certainly crowded."
"Yes."
"I need a drink," she said, looking for a bartender.
"Have mine,Flash said, "Scotch and water."
"Anything ... anything," she said with an eagerness that was almost impatient.
She accepted the drink and took a long sip, looking up at Flash. Her eyes were only a little darker than her hair and dress. They were the first champagne eyes he'd ever seen, and they were beautiful.
She set the drink down. "I've been a nuisance."
Flash grinned, waved to his bartender, who came over. "Repeat," Flash ordered.
The bartender went through his motions, and Flash had his drink.
The champagne doll looked him over frankly, with that eagerness, and Flash looked her over. Liked what he saw. She was in her early twenties, and excitingly proportioned. Her breasts showed plainly in her tight dress, appearing almost oval in shape and a little low on her chest. Sexy.
They drank together, set the drinks down.
She had fair skin, an oval face and thin, perfectly rouged lips. She was one of the prettiest women he'd ever seen, and with that eagerness and an underlying, subtle air of experience, she was a bundle of charm. The combination of eagerness and experience was intriguing and different somehow-maybe because there was a sparkling polish to it like the sparkle of champagne.
"Are you here alone?" Flash asked.
She looked at him as if she were trying to read his mind. "What would you like me to say?"
"That you're single, bored, and want to get the hell out." He grinned, stuck his tongue into his cheek, waited.
Her eyes went to slits.
"Okay," he said, "sorry."
She bit the edge of her lip, gazing at him.
"Better put that drink away before it's all water," he said.
She lifted the glass, took a long, long drink and set it down, still looking at him. He began to feel uneasy but thought to himself, I'll be damned if I'll move my eyes first.
"I don't think I've met you," she said.
"What's a name?" He grinned.
This brought a touch of smile to her, the first he'd seen.
"What are you doing here tonight?" he asked.
"I work for Tweed Steel Co. My boss forgot his tickets, and I brought them to him. He was supposed to have an out-of-town customer here for the party, and I was to be his date. He couldn't make it, so I'm stranded. Does that answer all your questions?"
"All but one," he said. "What are you going to do-go in to dinner alone or spend a lonely evening at home?"
The crowd was beginning to thin as people moved into the ballroom. They were among the few remaining at the bar.
"Anywhere but here," she said.
"I've got forty bucks," he told her. "Let's spend it. Even as he spoke he thought she was probably used to more expensive places than the forty would warrant. She made a gesture of distaste.
"Okay," he challenged, "if I'm acceptable, you call the shots."
"We can go to my house."
"My car's outside," he said, put his hand on her arm and headed for the elevators.
When they reached the elevators she said, "Let's not be seen leaving together." She gave her address, in an exclusive section on Oklahoma Street, and murmured, "I'll expect you in half an hour," and stepped into the elevator.
Flash went down the stairway in time to see her pass through the lobby and out the side entrance. There she handed an attendant her ticket and in a couple of minutes he was back with her car, a cream colored convertible. She got into it and roared away.
Twenty minutes later Flash left for Oklahoma Street himself. He didn't know quite what the Champagne girl had in mind, but she'd soon find out what he wanted
CHAPTER SEVEN
He was a little late arriving at the address on Oklahoma Street. It proved to be a white, two bedroom house set in a lawn that he could tell, even in darkness, received much care. There was a light in the living room. When he pushed the doorbell he heard musical chimes within.
The champagne girl opened the door. "Come in," she said with that muted eagerness.
He stepped in, glancing around openly. "Do you live here by yourself?"
"All by myself."
He grinned at her, poking his tongue into his cheek. Then he looked at the room. The walls were champagne color and the furnishings were in varied shades of rose champagne. Country scene paintings blended into the walls.
"You must like champagne," Flash observed, "or is all this the mark of high living?"
"I just like champagne. Care for some?"
"There's one brand I want-you. Bubbling all over."
"Am I bubbling all over?"
"More than bubbling. You're in a champagne class by yourself."
She smiled and motioned him to follow. They went into a kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and brought out the champagne. Flash saw several more bottles of it at the bottom of a specially made compartment.
She handed him the bottle and he removed the green foil and the wires that held the cork. Slowly he worked the cork loose and as it was freed from the neck of the bottle, it announced its freedom with a loud pop, followed by a small curl that looked like gray smoke.
He filled two goblets and returned the bottle to its special compartment, noting that the refrigerator was a custom built job and contained very little food necessary for everyday living. He asked no questions but closed the door, handed one drink to his companion, and lifted the other.
"Champagne for a Champagne Lady," he said.
She smiled, touched her goblet to her lips.
He raised his drink higher. "To a pleasant evening."
They wandered back to the living room as though they were strolling along a moonlit country lane. She put her goblet on a cocktail table and sat on the couch behind it. Her dress pulled up to her knees, showing shapely legs with graceful ankles and calves.
Here in her champagne room in her champagne dress, with that champagne hair and those golden eyes, she was filled with exotic sex. Just looking at her aroused Flash.
This could be private property, he warned himself. Careful. So he took a lounge chair a few feet away, enjoying her beauty from a distance. She would arouse any man. It seemed every move she made was connected with sex. Almost, he demanded of her: How much? Instead, he swallowed, hard.
She saw him do that and asked, "What were you about to say?"
"What would a man want to say to a beautiful woman like you?" he blurted before he could stop himself. He expected her to be angry. But she smiled as if he'd given her a compliment.
"Drink up," she said.
They both did. Set their goblets down.
"I'd like to play cards," she said, "if you're in the mood."
He needed no prodding. He was always ready for cards.
"What kind of cards?"
"Draw," she said. "Strip draw poker."
There was a sparkle of wildness in those champagne eyes. He felt stunned.
"What the hell do you mean-strip draw poker?"
"I have on seven pieces of clothing," she told him evenly, and now the sparkle was in her voice too. "You get down to seven pieces before we start to play. The one who loses a hand takes off one piece of clothing."
The wildness was all over her now. It excited him even more than her beauty.
"Then what happens?" he asked, letting excitement into his voice.
"Let's see who wins."
She gestured toward one end of the room where a mahogany card table stood with chairs drawn to it. They went over there. He took off his coat and kicked off his shoes before he sat down.
"Now I'm wearing seven pieces of clothing," he said.
"Fair enough."
There was a new deck of plastic cards on the table. "Play this game often?" Flash asked. "Must we have questions?"
"Okay-who deals?"
"High card cut."
Flash cut a queen, and she cut a four. He shuffled the deck, watching her, placed the cards in front of her, and she cut.
His blood was pounding. He dealt five cards each. She picked hers up, fanned them, tossed three aside. He picked his up, saw three Kings, gave her three cards, dealt himself two. It didn't help, so he announced three Kings.
"You win," she said and looked at him with that sparkle.
He met her look fully, waiting for her to start the strip act, expecting her to kick off a slipper. Instead she reached to the back of her dress, pulled the zipper, slipped the garment off her shoulders and down, rising only slightly from the chair. One flash of her arm and the dress fell to the carpet in a silken puddle.
Flash stared at the revelation in the champagne lace bra. Her white skin seemed to take on a delicate golden tinge from the lace so that she was all of a piece, a marvel of beauty in shades of champagne. Her breasts were really oval, and the low-cut scraps of lace virtually exposed them. He had a hard .time restraining himself, he wanted to fondle them.
With her eyes still on his, she picked up the deck, shuffled, put it in front of him. He cut with uneasy hands and furious pulse. After she had dealt he picked up his cards, his palms moist.
He pulled his eyes from her and looked at the cards. Two little pair-deuces and treys. He drew one, and still had the same pair.
The Champagne Woman drew three and when he muttered, "Two pair," she again announced, "You win."
Now he was sure one of her slippers would go. But again she reached back, and this time unfastened the bra and lifted it off. Her breasts seemed to blossom out of the lace, oval and white with pale halos of pebbled skin out of which rose pale nipples which looked to be permanently erect.
Flash could hardly pick up the cards to deal. He was staring openly, burning to ask a question, the big one, but recalled her "Must we have questions?" and refrained.
The mounting tension, mounting torture went on until he was down to his shorts and she was in her panty-girdle.
This hand would determine the winner. And the loser.
It was his deal. His face was hot, and he knew it was fiery. His body was broiling with passionate heat. He had little control, at this moment, over his emotions or impulses. The slightest move on her part would have resulted in his taking her there, on the champagne carpet, but she showed no sign of invitation or response. She just played cards, never speaking except to announce who won.
Only forty minutes had passed since they started, but to Flash it seemed more like forty years.
He wanted to leap up now and carry her off to bed, but that would only mean trouble. She was the type who did one thing at a time, and at the moment it was strip poker.
This time he shuffled the cards longer than usual. The noise they made sounded like a roaring waterfall. His fingers were trembling, and he dealt slowly. When he laid the fifth card down in front of himself he look-ed to see if she'd give any sign of what she was holding, but her face revealed nothing.
She threw two cards away. Flash threw two cards away. He dealt to her and to himself, picked up his first card, and it was a five, the second and it was a five. He had a full house.
They lifted their eyes and gazed at each other. Nc sparkle in the Champagne girl now. Only a cool waiting.
This was the thirteenth hand. Is thirteen lucky for her, he wondered, or is this a diabolic game she likes to play--a decision on the thirteenth hand? Does she play all her men this way?
His eyes were still on her eyes. He wasn't interested in the cards and what would happen to the winner. And to the loser.
"Full house." He shot out the words.
She said nothing, just spread her cards on the table. Flash's eyes raced from one card to another.
She had three Aces.
Slowly he raised his eyes to hers.
That wildness was in them again.
"You win," she said softly.
She stood, moved away from the card table, wearing only the champagne, lacy panty-girdle. Deliberately, looking at Flash, her eyes traveling intimately down over his shorts and legs, she pulled it off, revealing the creamy beauty which he had won at cards, or had at least won the privilege of looking at.
His eyes fastened onto the champagne secret part of her where awaited untold delight. His blood set up a pounding, but he held himself quiet, letting her call the signals.
Unhurriedly she gathered up her clothing, picking up her slippers last, and walked to a door on the other side of the room. There she paused and cast her sparkling, golden glance at him.
"You win," she repeated, smiled and disappeared.
He followed her through that door fast, into a bedroom. She was putting her clothes away, handling them daintily and with care. When she finished, she went to the wide, satin-covered bed-champagne satin, of course-and sat down on it. Her creamy flesh seemed to melt into the pale color of the spread.
He moved toward her," hardly able to restrain himself. She watched, seeming to sparkle wildly all over with anticipation and that appealing, overwhelming, beautiful sex.
"This is the first time I've played this game," Flash told her. "I'm not sure what the stakes are."
She smiled a quiet smile, as if she had played the game many times. Why, he wondered, would such a beautiful woman go in for games? Did she need the excitement of the gamble before she would give herself to a man?
"The stakes-for you-are forty dollars," she said softly. "That's what you said you were willing to spend on me."
That stopped him cold for a moment. So. She was a high priced call-girl for big business in Lake City. Probably her fee was usually a hundred bucks, or even more.
She moved, sitting on her satin coverlet, smiling. "Well?" she asked. "Are you taking it or not?"
The very sound of her voice excited him sexually. Hell, she was selling it, and he had the price. He was buying.
"Sure," he said. "You bet I'm taking it!"
He stepped out of his shorts, taking his time, his sex hardening at the way she watched him come naked, the way her eyes lingered on him, making him grow. He snapped off the bed table lamp and touched her for the first time. He took her ankles and spun her around on the bed.
She lay back slowly on the satin, provocatively, the light from the adjoining room falling across her softly. He crawled onto the bed in a hurry, reached over and touched her breast, and she stirred. He realized this was the first reaction he'd had from her, but instead of stimulating him further it made him wonder if he was being used for some twisted, unexplained pleasure of her own. Maybe she's got ice water running through her, he thought.
He cupped her breast and began to fondle, let his hand roam, moved it slowly across her abdomen, onto her champagne sex delight.
She reached down and pressed his hand to her, then rolled to face him and he felt his sex-organ clasped in her hand. As he continued to caress her, she opened, closed her fingers on him rhythmically.
And when he felt he could not contain the joy this gave him, but must seize her and expend his passion, she knelt before him as in awe and began to. kiss where before her fingers had caressed, began to trace her hot, probing tongue. He held himself still, his whole body stiff and quivering under the ecstasy of these kisses, the first such he'd ever known.
When he began to groan with it, she said, still kissing, "Kiss me, lover ... the same way."
So he gave her the same delight she had given him. But when she would have again given him this delight, he could no longer contain his passion. He moved to thrust into her and found her ready. She met him with such eagerness that their bodies made a slapping sound as he went into her.
The impact threw them off balance so that they lay on their sides as they began the thrusting, pounding movement he had to have, that she had to have, for she cried out to him that this was so. She wound her legs around him, thus holding him in a double clasp, his body and his sex. It was as if he were in a vise, a pounding, hot, flooding vise that scalded him and her.
When the scalding ended, they lay entwined, unable to move, their breaths uneven and fast and hurting. Gradually the breathing calmed and they lay together on the bed and slept.
When they awoke they fondled each other again in that way so new and delightful to Flash, and when their passion flamed anew, they came together with even more delight than before.
It was very late before he moved off the bed and wandered into the other room for his clothes. She trailed after him, not bothering with a robe, but moving about naked and with perfect unconcern.
"Don't go yet," she said.
Flash took a long look at her beautiful breasts. He'd heard that paid women were usually frigid. Well, if this one was, somehow he had stirred passion in her and now she wanted more of him.
He grinned tiredly. "I've got a job," he said.
She smiled, perched on the arm of the big chair and watched him dress. He turned his back to her under guise of fastening his trousers, and unobtrusively put his forty dollars on the card table.
She went to the door with him, still naked, and he kissed her goodnight-goodbye lightly.
He heard the door close behind him.
He got into his car. Tonight had cost him forty bucks but it was worth every cent. Abruptly he felt sorry for the Champagne girl. Because she had so much to give but chose instead to sell.
He gunned his car out of there.
Away from the beautiful, lost bitch.
She'd given him a wonderful night, but she hadn't wiped Sue out of his mind at all. Sue, whom he wanted, even now, with a rage and hurting and longing such as he had never before known existed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Flash got to the office next morning his bones hurt and his body felt big and heavy and sick. Sleep had become a joke, even with all the sex-release. The hours in bed were only a period of argument with himself about Sue.
Now, as in the night, a desire to be with her swept him, sweet and piercing. Forget her, he thought as he'd thought before. And remembered her lips, their sweetness, nipping, remembered her in his arms, all warmth and eagerness, remembered the spice of her anger.
She wasn't like the others, he argued now as in the night. She couldn't be. She was too-real. He must have been mumbling about it because unexpectedly Rawls voice said, "Something sure must have hit you."
Flash looked up, scowling, and Rawls was in the doorway. "What's eating you?" Rawls asked.
"Didn't sleep."
"Why not?"
Flash told him. Part of it, anyway. The part about the Champagne girl. And the hidden story behind her which he couldn't write because there was nothing for proof.
Richard Tweed, he reminded Rawls who needed no reminder, was an industrialist and civic leader. Tweed's wife was a socialite-clubwoman; his daughter was to make her debut this winter. Tweed himself was one of the most respected men in the state.
Yet he had set up the Champagne girl in a fine neighborhood to pass herself off as a lady. In reality, and to promote Tweed's business prosperity, she was a delectable commodity he provided for the sexual entertainment of his business associates.
"Yeh," Rawls agreed calmly, "it's a stinker. But you'll have to sit on it. I know-you want to tear things apart, only you can't, not yet. That's part of the newspaper job-waiting until the right time. Now suppose you clean up the police blotter, huh?"
Flash guessed the police blotter would yield nothing and he was correct. Last night had been a dull period. So, after writing the few stories he did get and turning them in, he settled to a. minor political intrigue on the local level and several run-of-the-mill civic club meetings.
He was glad to get to his apartment at the end of the day. He showered and flopped into bed. Sleep was another thing. Food could be any time.
He dozed off sometime, when he didn't know, for that is something man will never find out-when he fell asleep, what instant. The phone blasted him up and into the living room.
He grabbed it and croaked, "Hello."
It was Rawls. He sounded disturbed. "Get any sleep?"
"Some."
"This dame-she's called me five times. Young voice. Three times yesterday-wouldn't give her name-and twice today. Wants to talk to you. Says you're always out when she calls the office, and won't leave her number for you to call back. Says ... just now she did ... that her name's Sue Cotten. She cried every time and got mad every time. Sounds like a handful."
"Did she say what she wants?"
"Just that she's got to talk to you."
"What did you tell her?"
"The truth-that you've got an unlisted number, but I'd call and give you a message."
"I'd better phone her."
"Might be an idea, find out what she wants."
"He gave no orders, asked no questions. Rawls was like that. He would advise and lead, but rarely gave an order. All the reporters worshipped him, for he invariably suggested the right thing.
They hung up and Flash dropped into a chair, still undecided. He'd stirred up a mess with Sue and didn't know how to handle it. Trouble was, she was so damn sweet and real. He frowned deeply. Or was she? Was that part of her act, to seem real to a guy? She'd come out of her clothes for him, and she'd been ready to go sky-the-limit. That put a big question mark after her being sweet and real, a great big one.
Yet he almost had to call her, before she made trouble at the office. Besides, if he talked to her, he'd probably find out he'd built her up in his mind beyond what she ac tually was. In fact, he'd stand a very good chance of discovering that she was just another good-looking chick who wanted to play.
The really sensible thing was to see her. Get the proper perspective in person. No insults, no quarrel, no passes, nothing. Just solid brainwork. Keep her from making trouble at the office, and prove what she was.
With that assurance, he dialed her number. He did not have to look it up. It had stuck in his mind along with the other things concerning her.
"H-hello," she said into his ear.
Hell, he hadn't expected her to be crying. It made him almost stammer. "You-called The Record?"
"Y-yes."
"Damn it!" Flash yelled. "I can't stand a crying woman!"
"That's too bad," she wailed, with anger lacing the sobs and fighting them because she was angry. "That's too darn ba-ad!"
"Shut up," he said "and listen."
There was silence on the wire. Then a snubbing sound.-This made chills race up him. She sounded like a little girl who'd been spanked and wanted cuddling. Which somehow made him madder than ever.
"I'm coming over there," he told her, "and settle this."
"No! I look horrible!"
"Fifteen minutes, and I'm on my way."
Her receiver clicked in his ear.
He was ready in less than ten minutes and had to wait. It was only 6 o'clock. The minutes dragged like centuries. The damn clock hands didn't move. He picked up the clock and listened, and it was ticking. He set it down with a thump and went out to his car. The hell with waiting.
She opened the door the minute he pressed the bell. Her brown eyes lifted. They were too bright, and the lids were pink. She just stood, eyes on his.
If he'd had any hidden notion she'd be undressed or scantily dressed like the other time, he was wrong. She was practically swathed in a sheer white wool dress that came way up on her neck in a round collar and to her wrists in narrow cuffs. It was belted in the middle and fell below her knees in a soft, full skirt.
She was even lovelier than he'd remembered. Her loveliness got him in the throat. He wanted to touch her, strip off that dress and uncover the loveliness it was hiding. He wondered if she somehow knew that covering up holds more allure than uncovering.
"Are you coming in or not?" she asked spiritedly.
She moved aside and he strode in and sat on the first chair. She sat on the sofa with her hands clasped in her lap, and they pulled her dress so it outlined her thighs. The way it had done the other time, and he was aroused again. In fact, all he had to do was look at her and he was aroused, which was no good.
He was determined to settle everything and get out.
"Aren't you going to talk?" she asked.
"What do you want me to talk about?"
"You-could ask me why I wanted to see you."
"I can guess," Flash said. "You want to give me hell about--the other night."
Her face was pale and lovely. Her eyes were brighter now. She had given him a chance to apologize and he had spoken rudely.
"You might call it that, I suppose," she said. "Only-well, it's this. When I read some of your stories in The Record, I remembered-the other story. The one you wrote about your wife's-death. And then I could understand-in a way I could, why you-why things happened as they did between us. I could even see how you might want to hit out at some other woman and do to her what she-what your wife did to you. And I-wanted to apologize to you for not realizing who you were when you told me your name, for-for-"
Flash swallowed. His face was hot, his body burning. He stared at her and she stared back. Her lips trembled.
He started to her, not knowing what he was gonig to do. Take her in his arms maybe, shake her, kiss her, spank her. Some damn fool thing, not being in his right mind at the moment. But she motioned him to sit back down and he did.
"No," she said, "please ... or it may all start over again. I want to hate you, but-I can't." Tears rose in her eyes, and she produced a handkerchief from some hidden pocket in her dress, patted at them and half-smiled. "S-sorry," she managed, and then the tears were coming fast.
He sat beside her and pulled her head to his shoulder. She wept, body shaking, wept hard and silently. He rested his lips on her shining hair. Gently he ran his hand over her head and this seemed to comfort her for she stopped crying and looked at him.
"I guess there isn't anything to say on either side." she said. "I can't blame you. You were a man who'd been deeply hurt, and if I hadn't ... Maybe it'll teach me a lesson."
Flash tried to pull her close again, but she pulled away.
"You-won't do that again-with anyone-will you?" There was a spark of eagerness in her voice.
"Do what again?" But he knew. Also he knew she was trying to get her hooks into him.
"Try to-go to bed with some girl-like you did with me?"
"I'd say that's my personal affair," Flash said.
They just sat staring at each other. She looked like the kind of girl a guy would ask to marry him. She did not look like the kind who would strip and go to bed without benefit of clergy.
But she'd done it.
How could a guy marry her, knowing?
Flash wanted to shake her, kiss her teeth down her throat, hurt her. She was mad, too. Her eyes were glinting.
If he touched her now, he knew she'd claw him until he bled. It emanated from her, a sort of radar, but to late. She should have used it the first night.
Somehow they were at the door, not speaking. Suddenly, he was outside and she slammed the door. He stomped down the walk to his car.
He hadn't settled a damn thing. He had, however, made a discovery of great personal worth, and just in time. It had to do with love, which all men eventually consider. It pointed up how no man can find love, the real and pure flame, in the jungle of woman-kind he was currently exploring.
The jungle in which he had found Sue, lovely, baffling Sue.
CHAPTER NINE
Flash barreled down the street, sore as hell. Sore at Sue, at himself. Sore because he was on his way to some unknown woman to burn out his torture when it was Sue he wanted.
He gripped the steering wheel so hard his fists hurt. He should go to a whorehouse and buy what he needed every night and get it over with. But no, he had this thing of taking one woman after another, proving tha he was as good as the guy's who'd taken Jackie, hi wife. He had to have his head set to win himself a wo man a night until he was sated. And now there was also Sue to burn out of himself.
He didn't really want her, because she was trouble Any of the women-for-a-night were. A man couldnbuild a life of respect and home with such a woman. I would be like trying to build a marble palace out o slime. For success, he'd need to find an untouched girl one with the highest ideals. If even that would work It hadn't with Jackie.
Which then was the lesser risk-the girl yet to be tempted or the woman who has already yielded and returned to decency? A man would always wonder: Can this untried one resist? Or: Will this one who has once yielded, yield again?
Sue, for instance. She'd never so much as slipped before. Just the one time, and with him. But how could he know he'd remain the only one?
The thing to do was forget her, not become involved. They had no basis to start anything on, not even friendship. A man can't undress a woman until she's naked, much less have sex, and get back to a clean am innocent starting point. If any start between any man am woman can be completely innocent, the one being male and the other female.
He took a corner, tires squealing, daring some cop to pinch him, but none did. He hadn't even seen a cop between Sue's apartment and the newspaper building, where he screeched to a stop.
To hell with it, he thought, and got out of the car to prowl the streets for a pickup. She wasn't going to be blonde this time, and he didn't want her to be young or anything like Sue.
He eyed a few women walking in pairs or alone or driving cars and couldn't help wondering if each was plotting a secret rendezvous with some man. Until recently he'd taken most women for granted when he saw them and assumed they were on some decent mission.
Ahead, under the street light, a woman was approaching. She didn't look too young or too old, and appeared to be brunette. She was an altogether different type than those he'd been with so far.
Deliberately, as if strolling in deep thought, he walked toward her. Just as they were ready to pass he veered, managing to stumble into her. The impact knocked her handbag to the sidewalk and he began to apologize profusely, stooping for it. As he returned it he asked her to see if anything was broken.
She unsnapped the clasp, rummaged, smiled. "No."
In the soft light of the street she looked about forty-five. She was wearing a tailored coat in a deep blue and one of those high-style hats that went with it. She seemed to have a trim figure inside the coat.
"Married?" Flash asked boldly.
"I'm a widow," she said quietly.
That set him back momentarily. Sue was a widow, also. He brushed the thought away and asked, "Then may I buy you a drink to make amends?"
There was a brief hesitation before she said, with perfect diction, "I'd be delighted."
"Do you have a favorite spot?"
"I'm not familiar with the night spots," she said. "One doesn't go to them alone."
Oops, Flash thought, you've finally met a lady. It was at that moment he realized he'd come to feel that a man could have any woman by just saying, 'eeny, meeney, miney, mo ... you're the one I want to lay tonight."
"The Stag Spa is quiet," he told her. "And they have good food."
"If you say it's nice," she agreed, "I know it is."
He escorted her to his car. There didn't seem to be anything to say as he drove the short distance to the Stag Spa, so he didn't try to talk. At the dining room entrance he did say, "Well, here we are, Mrs....?"
"Dotte," she smiled. "Oh, this is exciting!"
He opened the door and they went inside to be greeted by the very brunette hostess. He held up two fingers and motioned toward the rear. Tall booths lined that wall, hiding the occupants from the semi-circular bar, which was filled with men.
As they went to a booth, he raced his eyes down Mrs. Dotte's legs. They were trim in sheer nylon and had beautiful calves.
At the booth she asked, "Do you mind if I freshen my makeup?" Then she looked at him almost in consternation. "Why, I don't know your name!"
"Flash O'Shea."
"Flash. I like that." She smiled, turned and went toward the powder room in a quick, proud walk.
She was another one who hadn't recognized his name. Yesterday's scandal is old news, Flash thought without humor. Even the names are gone from the minds of the readers unless there's money or position attached to them.
A chubby waitress arrived with menus, rolled her eyes provocatively. "Drink?"
"Two Scotches on the rocks."
She left, and Flash's inward quarrel began. Was Mrs. Dotte really a lady? What would be her reaction to his advances? And if she gave in, would she satisfy him, would she do anything at all to quench the raging fire of his body and his anger?
Chubby came with the drinks, rolled her eyes again, departed.
Mrs. Dotte returned a moment later, carrying her coat. She almost startled Flash with her fresh daintiness. Her dress was dark blue and fitted to her form, which could put that of a younger woman to shame. She was a little large in the hips, but otherwise perfect. The only thing Flash didn't give her full credit for was the well-rounded contour of her bust. It looked artificial, but what the hell, the overall effect was fine.
He half-rose as she slid into the booth. "I ordered Scotch," he said.
"That's a fine drink." She gazed at him, lifted her glass, sipped, set it down.
Her eyes were hazel. The dark brown hair which showed under the hat held traces of gray. Her face was slightly oval, the features pleasing. She was decidedly attractive.
Flash raised his glass and drank, never taking his eyes off her, hoping she'd talk about herself. This she seemed about to do when Chubby made her appearance again, this time with pad and pencil. Flash gave Mrs. Dotte a menu, they ordered and got rid of Chubby, at least temporarily.
Flash decided to proceed with the business at hand. "Where were you headed when I bumped into you?" he asked.
"I was going to catch the bus home."
"You work downtown?"
"Yes. I'm a private secretary to an attorney. I stayed late to prepare some legal papers."
"What sort?" Flash asked, to further the conversation, watching for an opening to steer it the way he wanted it to go.
"A divorce action. The husband charges the wife with infidelity."
"Do you get many cases like that?"
"No."
There was a silence. Finally Flash remarked, "You don't look like a widow."
She regarded him seriously. "It's been a number of years," she said. A sad and tender smile rippled over her face, and her eyes glowed. "We did enjoy living. We had three children-they're married now and living in other states. They're making good lives for themselves."
Chubby arrived with food, putting an end to talk. At last she was gone.
Flash watched Mrs. Dotte eat, noting how she handled her knife and fork with slim, graceful fingers. The more he studied her, the more he felt she might slap him down. She was fifty, with grown children. She just couldn't be like the rest of them, the younger ones. He almost hoped she wouldn't be.
Then he realized that the hope was somehow tied up with Sue, and he got very mad. He discovered he was eating in spurts, making conversation the same way.
She noticed. "Are you bored?" she asked. "Am I the wrong company for a young man?"
"No, I've been admiring you," he said.
A flush showed on her cheeks, receded. "I haven't heard such-flattering words for years," she said. "It makes me feel-young again. Thank you."
What the hell does she really mean? Flash wondered. 'Young man ... flattering words'?
"Dessert?" he asked now.
"No, thank you."
"After-dinner drink?" he persisted. "That would be delightful."
Chubby brought the drinks. Flash got rid of her by asking for his check.
Mrs. Dotte said, "This has been exciting. I didn't expect a lovely evening when I left the office. Thank you."
"It's a pleasure," Flash said then, sat looking at her, long and hard.
She gazed back, as if she felt embarrassed. "You must find me amusing."
"Interesting ... delightful ... refreshing."
He saw that flush come to her cheeks, go. He had to press on. "How about a drive?"
"A short one, perhaps. But I must get home."
"Someone waiting?"
"No. I just retire early."
"I'll take you home right now."
She smiled agreement and they left.
As she slid into the car her dress pulled up over her knees. Flash let her see him look at them, and she covered them, fast.
Her home proved to be a roomy white house on a wide boulevard in a fine neighborhood. She indicated a driveway and Flash turned into it, stopping near a side entrance. He switched off the ignition. "May I come in?" he asked.
"Please do," she said with dignity.
She unlocked the side door and turned on a light. They entered a large kitchen. What looked like breakfast dishes were neatly slanted in a drainer on the white porcelain drainboard. She kept going through the house, turning on lamps in dining and living rooms, which were both furnished in modern, clean-lined pieces.
"This is quite a house," Flash remarked.
"Yes, and it's too large for me," she said, "but I hate to give it up. The children come to visit, and sometimes I have a card party, though I don't entertain as much as I did years ago."
She excused herself, and Flash sat down. It was a comfortable room; he felt at home in it. When she returned she had taken off her coat and hat. Here in her own setting she looked more than ever the lady, and extremely feminine and attractive.
She caught him staring, glanced away, back.
Flash took the plunge. "Mind if I turn the lights off?"
"Why-no."
She even helped, in an embarrassed manner. She snapped off one lamp and Flash turned off the others, and when they had finished they stood in semidarkness. He could almost feel her embarrassment change to expectancy. His heart began to pound at his own presumption, but he put a question anyhow.
"Mrs. Dotte," he asked bluntly, "what would you do if I started to get-familiar with you?"
"What would you want me to do?" she countered. She didn't sound angry or even shocked, but simply curious, as if she really wanted to know.
"It's nicer for the man," Flash said, "if the woman would like for him to make the advances."
"But how can a woman know if she likes it before the man does something?" The words came on a breath. She sounded young, like a girl. But a girl who knew the score.
Flash took a step toward her, another. His arms closed about her and he sought her lips and they came to him, hot and pressing. Her arms circled him, but only momentarily, for one hand went roaming and searching down his neck, his back, along his upper leg.
She was beginning to breathe quickly.
Flash was stunned at what was happening. Who is going to be the conqueror here? he wondered. She kept her wandering hand moving, at last pausing on his growing sex and fondled gently, slowly. He began to sweat as she continued the kissing and fondling.
She moved against him, her lips moved under his. She was a bundle of passion.
"You excite me," she whispered. "You excite me, too," he said.
She stopped the fondling and he was relieved, for in another moment he would have had a rough time to keep from picking her up and carrying her to the couch. And he wanted this one to take the lead.
There was a sweet, expectant silence. Then he pressed on, because she did nothing, because she had roused him, because release was in sight. "Let's go to bed," he suggested.
"I'd like that," she said.
"Lead the way," he whispered.
She looked at him in the half-light from the dining room. Her lips were full and moist. He could see that she was trembling as she turned away. He followed and sat on a chair just inside the door.
She turned on a small lamp on the dressing table and sat in a chair across the room. First, daintily, she took off her slippers. Then she pulled up her dress, unfastened her nylons, stripped them off, placed them inside her slippers.
She stood, back to Flash, took off the belt of her dress and curled it on the seat of the chair. She opened the zipper on the side of the dress, pulled it over her head, and hung it flat over the back of the chair. Then she stooped and removed her slip, laying it carefully over the dress.
Her hands looked graceful in the soft light as in a few swift movements they had her long, lace-trimmed foundation garment off and laid on the chair seat.
She'd kept her back to Flash all this time. It didn't have a flaw. Her figure was smooth and rounded and desirable. Suddenly he was in a great hurry to see her, all of her, to make use of the body.
"Should I-turn around?" she asked.
"Please."
Slowly she turned, arms folded over her breasts. The front view was as pleasing as the back, what he could see of it. He wanted to tear her arms away from those hidden breasts, get her on the bed and have his satisfaction.
"You haven't undressed!" she exclaimed.
"I was watching you."
"Well, now I can watch you," she smiled.
He stripped fast, never taking his eyes off her. She stood with her arms still crossed, which was beginning to excite him inordinately, for her sex-patch was thus displayed without competition from the breasts. This spot on her was small and was about the same color as her hair with that amount of gray in it. He found the silver tinge there highly exciting.
When he was at last naked, her eyes went all over him, hungrily. Holding her arms crossed the way she was, it was almost like she was holding him. He held out his arms and she came into them, still not uncovering her breasts.
Her naked body against his set him on fire. He lifted her, half-threw her onto the bed and flung himself beside her ready to enter her at once and consummate his passion.
Impatiently he pulled her clasped arms free and spread them. She gave a small moan as her arms parted, and he started to put his hand on her breast to fondle it, then did not. Instead, he directed the hand to her gracefully turned thigh and caressed it with more tenderness than he'd ever caressed a woman. For those breasts were filled and amazingly firm.
"Thank you," she whispered, touching his caress-essing hand, then moving her hand to his sex and beginning to fondle, lightly and thrillingly. "If my age ... fifty-one ... But you won't be the loser. I promise. I know how to give pleasure ... I'll show you."
She put her lips on his, rolling their lips together. Now her sex lay against his aroused manhood and was moving in the same rolling way of her lips on his. He ground his kisses into her and ran his hand along her thigh, slowly and repeatedly.
He could feel his throbbing sex as she moved against it. Now she put one hand on each of his bare shoulders and pushed until he lay flat on his back. Kneeling over him, legs apart, she placed one hand on his inner leg, pressing, and he opened to her as always before the woman had opened to him.
With her lips again on his, she lowered her sex until it touched, encompassed, then held him in a gentle-firm clasp of love. Her inner secret part was hot. She moved, a circular motion clockwise, and he moved in response, counter-clockwise. Very slowly they moved thus, building gradually to a hard, whirling speed, then decreasing to slowness again, with her setting the pace.
Now she began a down-thrusting motion which he instantly met with a strong upthrust. This was fast from the start. The bed under them quivered to the power and speed of their movement. He could see her body tossed upward with each of his mighty upthrusts, for all the world as if she were riding a bucking bronco.
This idea excited him so he went out of control, and so did she. There was only the sound of their bodies pounding the bed, and their breathing ripping in and out. Then his whole inner self eruputed into her like a volcano into a tight, hot summer sky, and that sky ground down upon the volcano, both comforting and quenching it. He heard the rumbling of the volcano and the murmuring soothing and knew it was their joined, moaning voices.
They fell apart and for moments lay motionless. Later she sat up in the center of the bed, smiling at him. Her age didn't matter a damn, Flash thought, not-with what she had to give a man. Her husband had been a lucky guy if he'd had the sense to appreciate her.
"Thank you, Flash O'Shea," she said at last.
He half-grinned. "Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you taught me something."
"No," she contradicted seriously, "I owe you gratitude. A woman wants to go to bed at any age with a man who excites her. Especially at fifty-one-when it may be her last chance to feel youth, or any man at all, beside her."
"I imagine it's the same for a man, when he's fifty-one," Flash said. "We're all human-men or women."
They smiled, and after a moment, since there was nothing more to say, he began to dress. She put on a housecoat and saw him to the side entrance, where they'd come in.
They didn't kiss, but parted with a smile.
Driving away, he thought of Sue's freshness and sweetness and wondered that he could have felt desire for the older woman after feeling it for Sue. And then he thought, Why not? She wanted it, needed it-how's she different from Sue? They've both done the same thing.
He drove faster, determined never to see Sue again.
CHAPTER TEN
Miserable, he wanted to see Sue anyhow, to make things right with her. Trouble was he couldn't tell her he hadn't been intimate with other women, and she might demand to know.
He swore to himself and drove faster, swung in at a drugstore and was ramming a dime into a pay phone without consciously planning to do so. He dialed Sue's number fast. After four rings, she answered.
"How-are you?" he asked.
"It's you," she said.
"Were you expecting it to be someone else?"
"Why not?"
He knew she was trying to make him believe that another man or even a number of men might be calling her. He knew she was trying to make him jealous. But it wasn't going to work. In a way he was even grateful to her, for the female trickery had warned him off anew.
"I want to take you out-now," he heard himself say. And felt his forehead go damp.
Well, he'd got her into the mess where she felt guilt)about undressing for him, and now she had these men phoning, so the least he could do was brief her on how to handle them.
"Why?" she asked, suspicion in her tone.
"Why what?"
"Why do you want to take me out?"
"Not what you think."
"What do I think?"
"Oh, hell," he said, his face hot. "I don't know what you think."
"That's what I thought."
He saw her game. She was trying to mix him up and that wouldn't work either, just like she couldn't make him jealous.
"Where?" she asked suddenly. He didn't have the first notion what she meant. Somehow, she seemed to know. "Where do you wanl to take me?" she asked. "Oh-that. Out."
"Out where?"
"Drinks." It was the first word he could think of.
"I see. And who did you take to dinner-!"
She left it dangling, but Flash knew what she meant. "Now see here," he yelled, "I'm not accountable to you ... I'm not married to you! You knew it before I called ... you've known it several days!"
"And I'll remember it the rest of my life!" she cried, that beautiful anger in his ear, making the hair on the back of his neck rise. She didn't even say goodbye. She just clicked the receiver in his ear like a period, a soft and definite period of her anger. He hung up the drug store phone and stared at it.
He couldn't understand his own behavior. The other night when he left her, he wanted to go back. Tonight he had fought with her and left, and this moment had wanted to go back, only to fight again. When he had a chance to be with her, he thought miserably, he did nothing but fight. Aside from the moment she'd wept in his arms, he'd never really held that piercing sweetness and cherished it the way a man will. That sweetness for which he longed so often and illogically.
That sweetness which it would never be safe to woo and win. Somehow, she was saving him from himself.
It was then, softly and naturally, and as no surprise whatsoever, he knew that he could love her. If things were different. Only, they were as they were.
He flung out of the drug store and went for his car. At last he knew what he was fighting. It was his own awkward, doubting heart, his knowledge of what Sue had done with him, what she might do on another night, in some other year, with yet another man.
What some woman would do with him tomorrow night after he picked her up. Another woman, another broad, another frail ... no matter what name he called her, she was the same. Even another Sue.
And when the next night came, he decided to try a small town. At least he'd be miles away from Sue, his Sue, who could never be his.
He sat at the wheel of his car, eyes on the road, and drove mile after twisting mile, ever into darkness, the night growing later. Eventually he wheeled into this place, this village, and parked at a late-hour roadside restaurant. There were other cars, there were people.
There would be a woman, some woman.
He stood just inside the door looking for her. The place was clean, not too busy, but busy enough that he had his choice of two women who were there alone. One was fat, and the other, who was looking at a menu, had hair as red as a blaze, cut and set in the new soft straightness, and it drew him like a beacon.
He walked over to the booth and asked if she'd mind if he sat down. "I don't like to eat alone," he said.
She raised brown eyes that had fire in them, brown fire, glanced him over and said, "I have no objection."
The waitress brought another menu and left. Flash pretended to study the list of sandwiches but instead looked at the woman.
She was in her early thirties, perhaps, with an appearance as dynamic as the color of her hair. Her brows were bold sweeps of fire tilting upward at the ends; her eyelids were lashed in darker fire. Her nose was on the Roman side, in a mobile, squared-off face with strong jaw and chin. Her flame-red mouth was somewhat unusual, for the upper lip was slightly larger than the lower. Her skin was so white it reminded Flash of snow under that red hair. She looked to be tall and well proportioned in the gray woolen suit she was wearing.
Now, with a controlled, yet forceful movement she opened her handbag, removed a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and lighted it. She took long drags, blowing out gusts of smoke with a small sound. This she did several times before she laid the cigarette down on the ash tray, all the while gazing into the distance.
She seemed to be tortured, but whether it was a material or mental torture was hidden and didn't seem to matter, either to Flash or to her, for the torture, whatever it was, overwhelmed its cause. Flash had a feeling that she might erupt, that the subdued fire in her-hair, eyes, personality, the very pores of her body-which was smoldering now, might grow hotter and lick out, leap out and consume her and him and everyone who got into her path.
She picked up her cigarette again, but didn't drag on it so hard. Presently she was smoking almost gently, and her eyes had quit their smoldering and came to his.
"I'm Virginia Stocker," she said. "I live up the road."
"Eating a second dinner?" Flash asked, to make talk.
"You can call it that."
"What town is this?"
Her eyes lost the gentleness and showed a hint of flame. "You don't live around here?" she asked. "No."
"This is Girard. Fairview is next. I live between."
"Housewife?"
There was the flame again, a whisper of the torture. "You can't call it that. I lease land." The flame burned, subdued itself.
"Are you-all right?" Flash asked.
"Certainly."
"I thought you might be in trouble."
"You can call it that." , "Can I help?"
"I have someone dying. Leukemia."
"It must be hard on you."
She blew out smoke in gusts, audibly. Blew again, and more. Then she began to relax, to smoke in a more lady like manner, but as Flash watched he felt she was essentially a rough and coarse woman who was difficult to deal with and drove a keen bargain at her land leasing or anything else.
She ignored his sympathy, ignored him.
The waitress returned, they gave orders, she departed.
Virginia Stocker lit another cigarette and smoked calmly, looking neither at Flash nor into distance, but glancing almost idly about the restaurant. It struck Rash as odd that she hadn't asked for his name, and he waited to see if she would.
The waitress began to serve them, apologizing for not bringing their coffee. "I forgot it," she confessed. "I'll go back after it."
"That's all right," Flash assured her.
She couldn't be more than eighteen, and looked fresh as country dew at the job. In fact, she looked like she was just off the farm, with baby fat still around her chin and waist.
Still, no sooner had she scurried away for the coffee than his redheaded companion said irritably, "These young people! Always some excuse!"
"Now, don't be harsh," Flash smiled.
She smiled too, but under the smile was irritation, even anger. It made him wonder if she was a divorcee, especially in view of the cryptic answer she'd made when he asked if she were a housewife. "You can't call it that," she'd said. Which made her: mistress, widow or divorcee.
As they began to eat, Flash watched that anger beneath her smile, watched how it lingered, and thought she could give anyone a hard time. He noticed, too, that she kept glancing at him more and more, as though evaluating him for some purpose known only to herself.
It wasn't until after the waitress had brought their coffee and gone that their eyes, Virginia Stocker's and his, met again. Hers were completely gentle and glowing.
"You're a quiet man," she said.
For the first time there was no hint of torture or irritation or anger or hardness or coarseness in her, but only an easy, careless sureness. Now, also for the first time, her voice took on a throb and richness like blood pulsing hot and fast. And it was the first voice Flash had ever heard do this, a voice that was invitation, stirring a response from far within him, beneath even the unsatisfied passion already bedeviling him, reaching out to the promise of raw and deep and velvet passion in her.
"I look at it this way," he replied, his own voice instinctively deepening, almost stroking in its quality of warmth and gentleness, "some people like to talk, others like to meditate, a few prefer silence. I go along with the tide."
"You're-passing through here?"
"You can call it that." He smiled. A new flame lifted in her, a hot and joyous flame at his use of her favorite reply. "Going far?" she asked. "That depends."
"Where do you live?"
"Lake City."
"Come this way often?"
"Maybe once a year."
"In a hurry?"
Smiling, he shook his head. "Want to go have fun?
"Fun. What is fun?"
"Two have fun. Alone."
"Where?"
"A motel."
Her whole being seemed to blaze. "A motel is so-public."
"Any suggestions?"
"I live up the road."
"Live alone?"
"You can call it that."
There it was again, that answer. Well, maybe she hac a handyman on the place.
"How do I get there?" Flash asked. "Follow me."
Without another word or look she slid out of the booth and so did Flash, picking up her check with his. He left a tip and went to the cash register. She walked out while he was paying.
She was waiting beside a low-slung, high-powered car when he came out and when she saw him she got into it and roared off. By the time Flash got his car started he'd lost her in the darkness. All he could identify her by was the large tailight fins of her car, so he followed and spotted her a quarter of a mile away after hitting a traffic break.
They drove for some miles, with him losing and finding her. Finally she must have realized he wasn't going to match her speed, for she slowed until he caught up. She gave two blasts of her horn and he answered with two short ones.
A little farther on her directional signal began to flash for a right turn and Flash slowed, for it was very dark on this stretch of highway. They hadn't even passed a house for more than a mile.
He followed her down a hard, graveled road. He could hear pebbles hitting against the fenders, and in his headlights could see big trees growing thick on each side. They were going more slowly now, and soon he made out a darkened house to the left.
She parked in front of it, and Flash spun his car around to face the road. She got out and he joined her. They stood together, silent, and he began to sense the utter isolation of the place.
"Aren't you afraid out here?" he asked.
"I usually carry a gun."
"It's a great place for a murder," he said. To himself he thought. You may be getting yourself into one hell of a mess.
"Follow me," she said quietly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As they approached the house it seemed very large, its dark outlines reaching into the night until Flash couldn't tell which was house and which was black emptiness. They went up wooden steps, quietly; she unlocked a door and he entered behind her.
It was dark in here, really dense, like being swathed in black velvet. He heard her close the door and shove the bolt softly. His own passion stirred again. This woman wants to be loved, he thought.
Her hand found his. He felt a trace of callous on her palm, felt strength in her grip. She squeezed, and he thought she could really hurt a man's hand with her power. It was at this moment, for the first time during this encounter, Flash became a little uneasy.
His uneasiness communicated to her, somehow.
"We'll have light," she whispered.
They moved through the darkness, tiptoed, her grip on his hand stronger, squeezing. He didn't squeeze back. He was measuring her, waiting to follow her lead. On they tiptoed, with Flash holding his breath.
He felt her stop, felt the motion of her body as she bent forward. A dim light went on.
"Better?" she whispered, closing a door behind them very softly.
"Much," he said.
With a smile she gestured widely and in obedience to the gesture, Flash looked the room over. It was a large living room, beautiful in decor. For the first time he realized that he was standing on thick carpeting, a sort of silver tweed. The furniture was modern, with couch and chairs in tones of gray and gray-blue. The walls were a misty shade that melted into the grays and blues; the drapes were a blend of the three.
He looked at the woman standing in her room. She was a flame burning hot and red in the dusky-dawn of the secluded house within the black night. With that hair, with that fire in her eyes, and that raw, velvet passion that emanated from her, she seemed to be sending out sparks of fire to catch him into her flame.
He could feel her kindling his desire, but made no move. He simply waited to see what she would do next.
She stepped to him, fast, threw her arms around him, and they were strong. "Kiss me," she moaned, and her lips bore against his.
He brought his arms around her almost gently and returned her kiss, still holding back, still trying to get the measure of her need. Her lips opened and tried to devour him. Her grip got stronger, and he .could feel passion rising in her, hot full depths of passion and she pressed against him until he could feel her thighs. They went into a light rolling movement and stilled, pressing until a great tremor went down his body and he pressed back.
"It feels so good to hold a healthy man," she whispered, "so wonderful!"
She held him with even greater strength, her lips crushing his. Her breathing became faster and she moved against him, faster this time, forcing him to respond to a degree though he still held back, wanting to prolong the anticipation. Her breath grew short, furious, and her movements the same, then she went limp and clung to him like a fighter who had been delivered a knockout blow.
"You're wonderful!" she whispered on a quivering breath. She stepped back and looked at him with soft eyes.
Flash managed a deep breath. Maybe he shouldn't wait, even a moment. Maybe he should burn out his anger, desire, need upon her now, then get out fast.
"It's been months since I've known what it's like to hold a man," she whispered hoarsely. "Many, many months. Tonight I want to be loved all night ... I've got to have you!"
It was the hoarseness, somehow, that made Flash suddenly feel she'd never burn Sue out of him, that no-body ever would. He had to try here and now, but without the talk.
"Don't talk like that," he said, uneasy over the holacaust he had stirred, yet wanting to stir it more.
She made a rough, impatient gesture. "Hush," she said in the same hoarse whisper. "Hush, and let me talk!" She paused, then went on in soft and gentle tones. "I'm hungry for the feel of you, hungry as a little baby crying for food. I've got to know I'm still a woman, not just a tough business female doing the chores of a man ... doing unspeakable ... other chores."
She seized his hand, pulled him to a door, opened it. There was a large bedroom, dark and shadowy in the whisper of light. She urged Flash inside and he went, but he was wary and scared, damned good and scared.
He began listening for a husband. If there was one.
She shut the door carefully and turned on a lamp.
This room was attractive as the other, in the same colors. The wide bed was covered in silk. She stripped the covers to the foot, tripling it neatly. Then she turned to Flash.
"Undress me," she said aloud, as if the closed door had shut away the need for whispering. "Undress me," she repeated, that hot, pulsing throb in her voice.
He made no move, still listening for a husband. The torture he'd seen in the restaurant sprang into her eyes again.
"Start," she ordered, "damn you-start! Your clothes first-off with them!"
You don't say no to a tornado, you don't run when it strikes. Especially when that tornado reproduces itself in you. You grab one tornado and weld it into the other and master them both and take glory in the mastering.
So he got out of his clothes in double time, her eyes on him hungrily, missing nothing.
Then he slipped off her suit coat and laid it aside. She laughed, a throaty, rising laugh which brought his desire up, hot and bubbling. He tugged her blouse off and her skirt.
She watched every motion with those smoldering, tortured eyes which raped even his hands, laughing that pulsing laughter, laughing herself into more and more passion. It emanated from her in hot little waves, and with it the torture and the flame that waited, building his own passion into a smothering blanket of fire.
He unhooked her satin bra and cast it aside. Her shoulders curved in a feminine manner and below them, rising high, her breasts rounded out, full and big with dark aureoles and standing nipples. Her waist nipped in surprisingly and her hips swelled out and into thighs which were medium in-size and well shaped. Her legs were developed and rather heavy, such as you usually find in an athletic woman.
Her fiery patch of sex blazed like a flame. He stared at it, feasted his gaze, anticipating. Just looking at that big, flaming spot excited him so he tried suddenly to grab her to him, but she held him off and let her hands roam over his body, feeling his arm muscle, pinching, then stroking down across his abdomen.
"I think you're a great lover," she said, voice trembling.
Flash pushed the hands away, ordered her to lie down. She got onto the bed and lay flat, legs spread. Flash couldn't help thinking she was a vessel, a living and passionate vessel awaiting the inpouring of his love. At last he was over her, and she reached for him. And when he would have kissed her, gently at first and then brutally, she yanked him to her, hand on his sex, hurrying him into her, and he was beyond waiting.
She was burning hot within and so, instantly, was he. They started moving at the same time, lunging and thrusting and rolling on the bed, attacking each other with violence.
He mated with the flaming woman as one raging fire meets another and joins it and they burn together. He mated with her as blazing beast with blazing beast, mated in scalding, searing heat. And she mated with him, a tumultuous, hot and endless female holacaust burning ever higher and hotter, a muted, hoarse hot scream coming from her all the while. And when their merged fire had lowered-unquenched and only smoldering for the moment-they fell apart and waited for it to flare again.
He lay with blank mind and blank body until she stirred beside him, and again they mated and again the fire raged and the tumult and the muted, hoarse screaming from her hot and tumultuous depths was his, and again they lay still. When he moved again she clutched him back until, almost, he returned to the struggle of mating, but he put her aside.
He stood beside the bed and looked down upon her, the unquenched flame. She sat up, her fiery hair a tongue of the flame licking out, reminding him of how it had been, and he felt the rage of desire renew itself and knew that it would ever be so with her-a renewal and a mating and renewal, with no satisfaction.
He began to throw on his clothes.
"No!" she cried. "All night-one night of wonders!"
He shook his head, jammed his shirt into his slacks.
"You've got to!" she demanded. "So I can go back to my chores, the chores of a man, and unspeakable chores for a-man. If you can call him that."
Flash was alarmed, suddenly and completely. He knew he was in trouble, that she meant what she said. Something was wrong in this setup, something evil.
What she had just said about doing unspeakable chores for a man, and her earlier comment, 'It feels good to hold a healthy man' alarmed him more. And the someone who was dying. Could that be a man-her husband?
Could she be widow to the living dead? This vital female, this raw, velvet flame? "What's wrong?" she cried.
He wanted to get out. Without disturbance or trouble or doing any more to her in any way than he had already done.
The more he thought about it, the few seconds, he could manage for thinking, the more he was convinced that she did indeed have a husband, and that he was lying ill somewhere in this house.
I won't let you go," she warned from the bed. "Not until morning. Not until-after."
He saw the key in the lock of the bedroom door. In one swift move he had his shoes in one hand, the key in the other. In another second he was outside the room, turning the key.
He knew he should get the hell out and fast. Instead, because he must know the secret of this house, he paused to look hurriedly around the living room. There was a door leading to the entrance hall and another across the room from Virginia's room.
Flash went to that second door, turned the knob, eased it open and peered in, not knowing what he expected. But he found what he'd sensed and even feared.
The man lay in a rumpled bed on a flattened pillow, and he was whiter than the sheeets. If he'd been a skeleton, he might have looked better. His hand-claw would be a better word-had lifted to turn on the dim bedside lamp, for the fingers were still on the lamp base, and there was a waiting, expectant expression on his face, if a travesty of face can hold an expression.
His eyes looked like holes punched in his head. They hadn't yet adjusted to the light from the way he was staring at the door. Flash pushed it shut and as he did, the man's voice, a shadow of sound, asked, "Ginnie ... Ginnie?"
The closed door cut off the sound of his voice like a light being turned out, like dirt closing a grvae. Flash was shaking.
He ran into the hallway, pushed back the bolt, opened the door, dashed from house to car. He got in, fumbled the keys, switched on the ignition. At last the motor turned. He raced it, loud on the night air.
Virginia Stocker came bursting out of the open door, a garment clutched to her. "If I had my gun," she screamed, "I'd kill you!"
His gears wouldn't mesh. He wasn't shifting properly. Then they fitted, he stepped on the gas and roared into darkness. Away from the living dead he had just cuckolded.
He flicked his lights on barely in time to avoid hitting a tree, turned the wheels sharply, and sped along the gravel road. He didn't look back, but barreled onto Route Five, then east, back to Lake City.
He drove by instinct, seeing little of road or traffic. He could only see that wasted, dying man. He could see only that insatiable widow, that starving flame of woman who had only bones to feed upon, bones which could no longer place themselves at her disposal. So starved that she had fed upon Flash and he upon her, so desperate she hadn't even gone first to see if the bones were yet dead, for she knew that they could not be alive, ever again.
What the hell, he thought, I gave her something ... quite a lot. And she gave to me. And maybe we both gave to the poor dying guy ... she's found some release, it's bound to show up in the care she gives him. Maybe it'll last until he doesn't need it any more.
Flash O'Shea, he thought with a touch of humor, be cause it was that or cuss himself from here to hell and back. Flash O'Shea, the great experimentor.
Now he saw the street lights of home. They looked beautiful.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A feeling of unrest pervaded Flash as he rolled along the streets of Lake City. He wished he could have done more for Virginia Stacker and for her husband, but how was a question he couldn't answer.
He couldn't go to his apartment, not yet. So he went to his second home, his cubbyhole in the editorial department.
He glanced at his watch. Five o'clock. No use going home now. He'd work straight through, then sleep all afternoon.
He thought next that he'd phone Sue, get her to meet him for lunch. Why, he didn't exactly know. Or care. He just wanted to see her, no reason needed. But then he decided to let well enough alone.
When night came and he awoke in his apartment from a five hour sleep, he ate a couple of sandwiches then set out with a what-the-hell attitude. He had a need and was going to satisfy it.
It was a dark night, for clouds had blanketed the city, shutting out stars and moon. Good night for people to stay home, Flash thought as he decided to take a long, long walk before he did anything else. So he walked. He didn't have a thought in his mind as he turned into West Sixth. This was a wide street in an exclusive residential area where lived a good many of the rich and influential.
He'd heard some raw stories about a few of the residents, but as a whole they were pretty decent people. About the best way to describe them would be to say they had more chairmen of charitable committees per block than the rest of the city had per square mile.
More than an hour had passed when he approached Gridley Park, where he meant to sit on a bench and rest. At the curb across the street from the park, he stopped under the street light to let a car round the corner. It began to slow and, thinking the driver was going to make a left turn, he paid it no attention until it stopped in front of him.
"Where are you going?" a woman's voice called.
At first Flash thought it was someone he knew. "Nowhere in particular," he said, stooping to peer inside the car.
"That's where I'm going," the woman's voice said. "Join me?"
Flash looked her over as well as he could by the street light, and didn't remember having met her. Being a police reporter, he'd heard about prostitutes riding around to pick up business, so now he drew back and told her to move on, that he wasn't interested.
"Just a minute," she said, "I'm not going to hurt you."
"You're damn right you're not," he said. "Go on-get out."
"Now is that the way to talk to a lady?"
"Look, I've heard about gals like you prowling the city," he said angrily.
"Don't be cross. Come on-get in."
"Who are you?"
"Get in, and I'll tell you," she said in a coaxing tone.
A plan hit Flash that would either scare her off or prove her to be legitimate. "Okay," he said, opening the door and getting in, "to the police station."
"To the police station it is," she said. She put the car into gear and started driving toward headquarters, some six blocks away. "What are you going to do? Turn me over to the police?"
Flash didn't answer, just studied her as well as he could in the light from the street. She didn't look like a prostitute. She was on the buxom side. What he saw of her legs, they were a little chubby. Judging from the shine on her brow, she didn't use powder. The part of her dress that showed under her dark coat had a flower design.
Two blocks from the police station Flash asked again, "Who are you?"
"Thelma Mason. I'm a schoolteacher, live in Harbor Creek and can prove it to the police or anybody."
"Are-you in the habit of picking up men? I could have been a hood."
"I knew you were all right the minute I saw you," she said. "I don't know-something made me stop and ask you to ride. An impulse." She fell silent. After a few seconds she asked, "Are we still going to the police station?"
"No," Flash said, "drive around, whatever you want."
Though he more or less believed what she'd said, he wasn't convinced. It didn't add-a schoolteacher picking up a strange man. Why, she could lose her reputation, her job, her whole way of life if she indulged in this sort of thing.
She turned to face him momentarily, and he got a good look at her face. It was round, the lips heavy, coated with that funny looking light lipstick.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
"This," Flash said. He slid close, dropped his hand to her knee.
"Don't!" she gasped.
He ran his fingers along her upper leg. It was big and solid. She put her hand on his, lifted it away, but gave a slight squeeze. "Please," she murmured.
"So you want me to be a schoolboy and do what teacher says?" Flash retorted.
"Would you like to get out now?" she asked.
"That's up to you. But not here. Downtown." She turned the car and headed for the business district. The street lights showed she was in full pout.
"You can't pick up men and expect them not to get fresh," Flash told her.
"Why did you do it-get fresh?"
"To test you, see if you're a 'pro'."
"Did you-decide?"
"A pro wouldn't throw me out of her car."
"Do you still want to get put?"
"Nope. I want to go with you."
"Where?"
"Home with you."
She was silent for an entire block. "Why?"
"Why do you think?" Deliberately he let the insinuation into his tone, into the turn of words. She was a woman, she would serve his purpose.
"I can't offer you anything but coffee. And cookies."
"Coffee and cookies'll be fine. Let me out at the next corner and I'll get my car and drive to your place. That way I'll have a ride home if you throw me out."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh.
He was offering her every chance to get rid of him. She could give a false address if she wanted to. It was up to her.
"Tell me where you live," he said.
"Four-oh-two Harbor Road. I live by myself."
"Okay. I'll see you in a few minutes."
She brought her car to a stop at the curb. "Promise?"
"Promise."
"I'll start the coffee," she said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He headed down-block to his apartment, looked back once to see which direction she took. She was going toward Harbor Creek.
Within five minutes Flash was moving along in h car, wondering what approach to try or whether it w a case of finding the nearest bed. He kicked himself m tally for not grabbing her license number and stopping at police headquarters to check her identity. Then he decided to call the office and have Thacker make a run-down in the school directory.
He pulled into the first gas station, and while the attendant was servicing his car, got Thacker and told him to look up Thelma Mason.
He could hear the other man ruffling through pages. Then his voice came through the receiver. "Thelma Mason-four-oh-two Harbor Road."
"Thanks old boy," Flash said and hung up.
The attendant finished with the car, and Flash paid his bill and drove off. She hadn't been lying. She really was a schoolteacher.
Her address was easy to locate, for he knew the area. He stopped near her house, which was second from the corner, and parked in the black shadow of a large maple.
Most of the neighboring houses were dark. In fact, it was very dark in the entire section, for there were no street lights. A lighted match would glow like a bonfire, so Flash didn't strike one to see her house number. If he had the wrong place, he decided, he'd give a factitious person he was looking for, and be on his way.
He went onto the porch. As he reached for the bell, the door swung open. The schoolteacher was standing inside and he stepped in fast and she closed the door.
The room was dark except for a light showing from an open bedroom, casting a glow over everything. Flash knew he was standing on thick carpet and could see chairs and couch but no television.
He asked, to make conversation, "Don't you like TV?"
"I surely do," she replied. "I like to watch it in bed."
He sized her up in the half-light. She was plump, a good five-six, somewhere in the hundred-forty pound class. Her breasts were high and really buxom, and she looked every part the schoolteacher in spite of them.
Now, on a coffee table, he spied an electric percolator, heard the coffee hitting the glass top, smelled it. He could also make out cups and saucers and a plate of cookies on the table.
"I'll bet you eat a lot of cookies," he said.
"I devour them," she admitted, smiling. For the first time she looked a little pretty. "Won't you sit down and be comfortable?" She turned, and Flash could tell she had on a tight-fitting girdle from the neatly rounded cut of her hips.
"Why don't you be comfortable, too?" he teased. "Take the girdle off."
She smothered a laugh. "I didn't know a man noticed."
Flash said nothing, just waited. He was surprised, yet not surprised when she took him up.
"I'll just go into the bedroom," she said, "and do it." Her words came on a sort of running chuckle, like a little girl ready to do something very daring.
"Why don't you get into a bathrobe?" Flash suggested. "Be really comfortable."
"That wouldn't be nice, sitting around like that." She stopped at the bedroom door and looked at him with a big, baby grin, then closed the door, plunging the living room into total darkness.
Flash was alone with the aroma and the fast, slapping noise of the coffee. He grinned to himself. The whole thing smacked of comedy with the chubby teacher seek'ing a thrill.
The percolator cut off and the room was silent. The bedroom opened and light seemed to pour in, though actually it was no brighter than before. He looked around and saw that the drapes were closed and of an expensive material which didn't seep light.
The teacher sat beside him on the couch, putting quite a dent into the cushion. She was still wearing the flowered dress.
"I feel much better with it off," she said. "The-you know." She leaned forward and began to pour coffee. "Cream and sugar?"
"No, straight black."
"Just like newspaper men!"
Flash almost started. "Do you know any reporters?"
"No, but I know about them from TV. They're so fascinating."
"I've never been called fascinating," Flash said, "but I'm a reporter. Flash O'Shea."
She regarded him full-face, her moist lips making a small 'o'. "And what you do is fascinating, too," she said.
To get to a more comfortable topic. Flash began to ask her questions about herself. "You're not married?"
"No. I was in love once, but he married the other girl."
"Why did you pick me up tonight?"
"I don't really know," she said. "Something-well, mysterious came over me. I honestly don't know why. I just did it."
"Are you in the habit of doing this sort of thing?"
"Goodness no. This is the first time in my life. I haven't even been out with a man since I broke up with my boy friend. And that was nearly five years ago."
"Then you must feel excited now."
"Oh yes, really excited! Here, have a cookie-I baked them."
She offered the plate, and after Flash had taken one of the tea cookies, she ate one hungrily and was biting into another as she set the plate back on the table.
"Excited-and full of mystery both?" he pressed.
"More than mystery!"
"How do you mean?"
"Adventure!" she cried, chewed happily, swallowed. Before she took another bite she said, "It's thrilling to be part of an adventure."
She's like a little kid with a play-toy, Flash thought, watching her with her cookies. And got a glimpse of how she might have looked when she actually was a little girl-chubby, rosy-cheeked, a cookie in each hand.
She stuffed another one into her mouth, bite upon bite, and chewed, staring into space. Flash had no idea what was going through her mind, had no desire to bring her out of her dream world, whatever it was.
She washed the cookies down with a long, careful gulp of coffee before she turned and looked squarely at him. The room was very quiet, so quiet her look seemed almost to make sounds of its own.
"You're a cautious man, aren't you?" she asked, finally.
"Just making sure-let's put it that way.
He got up, walked to the end of the couch and sat on the arm beside her. In a moment she rested one hand on his knee, and after an interval her fingers began to play a tune on his thigh. He followed the beat but couldn't identify the tune.
He put his hand on her large, out-thrusting breast. It felt like she was wearing nothing but the dress. She didn't protest this time, but kept tapping his thigh. His fingers roamed, and she didn't stir or show any sign that she was enjoying what he was doing. He pressed his hand against her breast and made it move in small circles, slow at first, then picking up the pace.
He felt the nipple, and it was big and erect and hard.
She looked widely up into his eyes and sighed. "I like it."
"Not much fun sitting like this."
"Sit beside me," she invited.
"I'd rather be in bed," he ventured.
"You'd be disappointed."
"How do you know?"
She pouted. "I just-know."
"You can't know without trying."
"You wouldn't like me."
"I wouldn't be here if I didn't."
"You're just trying to flatter me."
"No, I'm serious."
"How serious?"
"Enough to make love to you."
"Just love?"
"Whatever you want to call it."
He got up from the arm of the couch and took a chair opposite her.
She pouted again. "Now you want to look me over."
"No. It's uncomfortable on the arm of the couch."
"You don't really want to-you know. You're just making fun of me."
"No, honestly" Flash said. "That's why I'm here."
"But I don't know what to do," she said simply, like a child faced with its first lesson in writing.
"Take your clothes off."
"Right here?"
"No. In your bedroom."
"But that's not nice-is it?"
"It's better than keeping your clothes on."
"You talk like a man with experience."
"Not as much experience as you think. Only, it's the custom-the no-clothes thing."
Excitement played across her face. "It's like a mystery, a game," she said in a half-whisper. "This all sounds like a buildup to a climax."
Flash didn't know how to take the word climax, but decided to go along with what he knew of her way of thinking. So he began to whisper, like a conspirator: "We'll go to your bedroom and turn the light out, and no one can see us. It'll be mysterious in the dark. You don't know what I'm like, and I don't know what you're like. Some women get wild in the dark with a man."
Her big breasts were rising and falling, fast. She got up and walked slowly toward the bedroom. Flash followed, also slowly. Once she turned, saw that he was behind her, gave that big, baby grin and walked into the bedroom.
She turned on the light in an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and snapped off the bedroom light. She sat in a chair as if debating whether to go through with it.
"This surely is mysterious," she murmured at last.
Then, swiftly for so large a woman, she took her dress off casting it aside recklessly. She had indeed been wearing nothing but the dress since removing the girdle. Her breasts were large indeed, somewhere in the forty-four class, as well as Flash could make out. The large, hard nipples lifted proudly out of great, dark nimbuses. And even after all that looking it took him a moment to get the impact of how round and huge and wonderful those breasts were.
When she'd got shoes and stockings off, she went over and lay on the bed, her thick, dark hair spreading on the pillow. Her sex was big and dark ... the biggest he'd ever seen. Her whole body was heaving with excitement, her breath going in and out with a loud sucking sound.
"Are you-undressing?" she asked on one of the breaths.
"Right now," Flash said and in no time was naked. He went directly to the bed.
"In the dark," she gasped. "Like you said-all dark."
He closed the bathroom, returned to the bed. "Don't hurt me," she said.
As he came to her big, soft body it was not as to a lonely woman pleading for sex, but as to a young and eager girl who had, before that, been a small child holding out her chubby hands for cookies, eagerly, a little afraid perhaps, but hopeful. Thus in the darkness he entered her big and willing body and moved in her, and she moved under him, her moist inner part holding his sex-organ in the hot, tight clasp of the virgin. They moved strongly and with a hunger that was like starvation. They went fast from the beginning. He rode her with all the power he had, and she gave every movement back to him with strength which almost matched his own.
The ending, when it came, was one of the best he'd ever known. It coursed through him, down his spine, into his ear drums, spreading in his thighs and along his legs.
And she moaned and cried out and even laughed with what she had from him. When she did this he ground even harder into her and prolonged his own ecstacy and panted and swore with what he had from her.
When it was over she sobbed, and through the sobs whispered, "That was worth waiting for, all my life! I've had the best, the very best! I'll never be afraid of it again!"
When he was ready to leave, she knew. He heard her laboring to get out of the bed, heard her pad across the floor. The lights sprang on, blinding him momentarily in the act of buttoning his shirt.
She was standing beside the bedroom door, naked still. All her weight seemed to have gathered in her legs and breasts. Otherwise she carried a halfway decent figure made out of cookies.
"Won't you have more coffee ... cookies?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Will you-be back?"
"I wish I could-but no. I won't be back."
"Why? Tell me that."
He couldn't explain. It would make her feel cheap to be told of his woman-a-night program. And she wasn't cheap.
So he went to her and kissed her once, on the lips. Kissed not the big, soft body he had made such delightful love to in the darkness, but that long-ago, deep-hidden cookie hungry little girl.
"Goodnight, schoolteacher," he said softly.
And then he walked out of her house, into the darkness.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Late the next afternoon Flash struck out for another long, hard walk. He let his mind drift, not thinking but also not rejecting any random thought which came. He'd sort of drift himself tonight, he decided, the way he was letting his mind do. Then tomorrow night he'd seek out one more woman to make sure he'd got all the anger and rancor and hurt out of his system.
After that he'd phone Sue and ask to see her. And when he saw her he could tell her his emotional binge was finished-for life. She'd, understand that a man must get through some crises however he can, and when that was out of the way he'd explain to her how he felt about quite a few things. In fact he hoped they'd be on an altogether new basis. No fights, no misunderstandings, just a friendly coming together of minds.
He was still in a pleasant glow when he reached the Dono Club, where he'd decided to dine in leisure and solitude.
A pianist was rippling off soft music. He left his wraps with the check-girl and went to a table in a far corner where it was rather dark, feeling that no one would disturb him there.
Jack, the waiter Flash preferred, came right .over. "How's Mr. O'Shea?" he asked. "Busy?" He grinned.
If he knew about Jackie, he was playing it light.
Flash grinned back. "The usual," he said. He kept grinning, because he liked this fellow. Jack was five-eleven with pitch-black eyes and pitch-black hair which was always combed to glossy perfection. Women went for him and now Flash recalled that he'd said once: "It does not pay to get married when you can enjoy variety."
After Jack had taken the order and gone, Flash leaned back in his chair and looked idly over the room. It was slowly filling at the dance floor, ringside. There were couples, and there were women alone, some looking bored, some expectant, some openly inviting.
Sue came into his mind, so honest and sweet. So peppery when she was mad. So altogether beautiful. He smiled at all the things she was.
A warm chuckling woman-voice asked, "What are you smiling about?"
He glanced up, irritated, and found himself gazing at a woman whose hair was tinted silver-gray. She was in her fifties, swathed in a blue dress which was a little too blue, and fashioned to show every curve Which she had. Curves, that is. Her breasts looked too round to be real, but they stood out there.
"What can I do for you?" Flash asked coolly, but standing courteously.
She smiled. If ever a smile carried a chuckle that one did. Because he didn't want to be a lout, Flash pulled out a chair for her and she sat down in it.
Jack came with the Scotch and Flash asked the woman to join him in a drink and she accepted. Jack stood waiting for her order, giving no sign of recognition, though Flash could tell from his manner that they'd met before.
"Jack," he said, "will you introduce me to the lady?"
"Mrs. Easterlin," the waiter said, "may I present Flash O'Shea, a reporter. Mr. O'Shea, this is Mrs. Roslyn Easterlin. She dines here with family friends usually."
She inclined her head. Flash nodded.
"Tell Jack what you're drinking," he said.
Her eyes lifted to the waiter, which gave Flash a side view of her features. Her profile was beautiful. Her face showed tremendous care, as did her swan neck. There was a fragile look to her, which somehow made her appear older and added to her appeal.
Damn, she's attractive, Flash thought, hoping she'd put her drink away fast and leave. She was tapping her fingers on the table, deciding what to order.
"I'll have a ... stinger," she said.
"A stinger!" Flash exclaimed.
"You don't approve of stingers, Mr. O'Shea?"
"Why, a couple of them'll knock you for a loop!"
"I know. I drink only a few in a night."
"How about some food?"
"I've had dinner, thank you."
"Well," he asked for the second time, "What can I do for you?"
"Keep me company tonight. I'm lonely."
Flash shook his head. "Sorry. You picked the wrong guy"
She gave one of her chuckling smiles. "I don't think so."
"Thing is, Mrs. Easterlin, I'd planned to be alone."
"And now you're not."
"Just who are you?" he asked, not caring.
Her smile fell away. "I'm a widow."
Flash took a gulp of Scotch. Another widow.
"My husband was a surgeon. As for me, I'm often to be found on the society pages of your newspaper."
Flash nodded, vaguely recalling her name.
After a moment she said, "You're not happy that I joined you."
"Nor am I unhappy," he said rather gently.
Jack brought her drink. While he was serving Flash dinner, Mrs. Easterlin sipped the drink.
"It's very good," she said. "I can feel it all the way down."
Flash cut his steak, chewed a bite.
"Stubborn," she said quietly, with a ring of sex in her tone. Flash glanced up as if to ask, What's your game? She caught the unspoken question and answered it.
"I like your company," she said.
Somehow this angered Flash. He reached for his Scotch and tossed it down with a gulp.
"Vicious man," she said.
"You can leave."
"I don't choose to leave."
"Then stay."
"I like gentlemen."
"I'm no gentleman."
"You could be."
He continued to eat.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked. "I'll bet it's not decent."
He laughed, his anger gone. He had no intention of making her or anybody, not tonight.
"You're cute when you laugh," she said.
He puckered his lips. "You don't know how cute I can be."
"I can imagine ... oh, I can."
Her stinger was gone and she ordered another. Flash let her enjoy it, finishing his meal and another Scotch himself. The dinner crowd had thinned and a few other people were arriving. This place never came to life until the late crowd surged in for drinks and dancing.
Mrs. Easterlin seemed to want to keep drinking, so Flash drank with her. She ordered another Stinger, and he had another Scotch.
They sipped together in a long and comfortable silence. It struck Flash that this was part of what she wanted in companionship, this being together, making no demands on each other. He even found himself more or less enjoying it.
Finally he broke the silence. "Mrs. Easterlin, what is it you really want tonight?"
"The company of a man."
"Just any man?"
"No, not just any man."
"Why me ... a total stranger?"
"At first I thought, you were someone I knew."
"Appropriate answer."
"I did think so."
"Then after you found out you didn't know mc. why didn't you go away?"
"I was-curious."
"Enough to stay when not wanted?"
"You intrigued me."
"If you're looking for a lover," Flash said slowly, testing her, "my fee is one hundred dollars."
She didn't give any sign of surprise though she did sit motionless for a moment. Then she opened her handbag and pulled out a hundred dollar bill and laid it on the table. "There you are. Do you want more?" Swiftly she took out one hundred dollar bill after another, spreading them out to show five in all.
Flash stared at the money. She looked at him with softness, smiling.
"You'd pay?" he asked.
"Why not?"
"Go to bed with me?"
"Why not?"
"In your home?"
"Why not?"
"I could stay all night?"
"Why not?"
"Why ... why with me?"
"I'm comfortable with you."
"A night of-oneness?" She nodded, smiling.
"Don't you know you can't buy it?" Flash asked. "Why not?"
"Not what you want. You can't buy-merging into another person and being one-in love," he said gently, looking into her eyes.
He got up from the table. "Think about that, Mrs. Easterlin," he said very softly, "and remember it."
And then he left.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He checked in at the Lawlor Hotel late the next day just for a change of pace. His room was on the seventh floor and once in it he unpacked and hung up his tux.
Then he took a shower, getting ready for the Annual Philanthropy Ball, which was being held in the hotel. This was Lake City's one event that brought all the important names in society together at one time, as well as all those trying to be accepted.
Covering the story for the newspaper was simple. What he'd taken the room for was another thing-for the hell of it. to live it up a little.
The women would be at their loveliest, wearing the latest fashions created by internationally known designers and by local designers. And their men would be present, in tuxedos that made them miserable.
Flash dressed impatiently. Why the hell don't they come up with a decent evening suit? he thought, looking himself over in the glass, feeling like a waiter.
He took an elevator to the mezzanine, where the hotel had set up a beautifully decorated bar for the evening. Here he ordered Scotch and stood watching the society parade as it drifted in from elevators to the bar and the ballroom.
The open doors of the ballroom revealed a lavish display of palms around the walls and floral arrangements on the tables, set up for parties of from four to sixteen. An orchestra was playing softly, and an air of gaiety, some of it forced, was beginning to show in the gathering crowd.
Flash finished his drink and went into the ballroom. He nodded to some people, spoke to others and wandered on, eyes roving.
He returned to the mezzanine, where his glance fell upon a girl who had not been there earlier. She was standing alone, off to one side of the doorway he'd just come through.
He stopped. His eyes frankly drank her in. She was tall-statuesque was the word that came to his mind. Her dark hair swirled back from her face, making a lustrous crown that seemed to be caught into a gentle, long roll at the back of her head. Her eyes were gray and her features were chiseled without being sharp.
She was wearing a dress of white velvet so simply made that it held her beautiful breasts with tenderness and flowed off her hips into a clinging fullness that befitted a queen.
She shouldn't be alone, Flash thought. Not this woman, ever. She should have a prince in sweeping plume; at her side, an entourage, admirers, adorers. He went to her because he could not resist.
"May I help you?" he asked.
She looked at him, not showing surprise. "Forgive me," she said in a rich, low voice, "but I've, forgotten your name."
"Flash O'Shea. Of The Record."
"Oh, yes. A splendid newspaper." She looked at him honestly, and he wondered if she had connected his name with Jackie's death. "Then we haven't met before," she added.
"No, and that I regret. But you were alone and it didn't seem proper that you should be, so on impulse I came over and spoke to you."
She looked at him steadily and then she smiled. Her lips made the loveliest smile Flash had ever seen. She smiled as if it were a privilege, a gift that had been bestowed upon her, and it added the final exquisite touch to her beauty.
"It was kind of you, Mr. O'Shea. I'm Mrs. Robert Thurston."
Flash made a small half bow. Mentally he whistled. The Thurston clan was in the ingot steel and oil business and worth several million. Robert Thurston was the president, the one who ran the outfit, a dynamo, a genius, a man of real stature.
And this was his wife, this lady, this untouchable woman.
"You aren't angry with me?" he asked. "Should I be, Mr. O'Shea?"
"I couldn't resist you," Flash said truthfully. She smiled; she was pleased.
He'd noticed that women were invariably flattered when he complimented them. But with this one it was different. She wasn't flattered, not at all. She was simply pleased-honestly and frankly pleased.
"Are you waiting here for Mr. Thurston?" Flash asked.
Her smile faded. "No, I'm waiting for my sister and brother-in-law. Though they don't know it."
Flash wondered where her husband was. Her eyes went over his face and she said, "Robert telephoned that his plane developed motor trouble and had to land in Cleveland. He's coming on by train. It will be midnight before he can join me."
Flash glanced at his watch. Nine o'clock. "I'm going to be bold," he said, "and ask for the pleasure of your company until Mr. Thurston arrives."
She considered. "I'll be grateful, Mr. O'Shea."
"Cocktail?"
"Yes."
Flash offered his arm and didn't feel like a fool. For her, the gesture seemed natural. She laid her hand lightly on his arm, just the fingers, the left hand. Her wedding ring was a pure white flare of diamonds. Flash had never seen such a ring, couldn't even guess at its worth.
They walked to the bar together. Her movements were sheer grace and held more subtle invitation and promise than he'd sensed in any woman.
The bartender came directly to them.
"What would you like?" Flash asked her.
"A champagne cocktail, please."
The word champagne sent a thrill of apprehension through Flash. If the Champagne girl were here she might come over, even say something embarrassing. He raced a look around the mezzanine, and didn't sec her.
"What's yours, sir?" the bartender was asking.
"Scotch and water," Flash said, glancing around again, this time for a place to sit. He found two unoccupied chair at a tiny table and asked, "Would you like to sit down?"
"Oh yes, thank you," she smiled.
He carried their drinks and put them on the table between the two chairs. Mrs. Thurston sat down, seeming only to touch each side of her soft, full skirt, but spreading it gracefully as she sank into the chair.
Flash offered the champagne, and she took the tiny goblet and sipped, her eyes smiled at him, sending a ripple down his back. How do you talk to such a woman, he wondered, what can you say that will interest her?
"Do you enjoy these affairs?" he asked, not to make conversation, but because he wanted to know.
"Sometimes. I'm enjoying this one-now." She took another sip of champagne.
"Thank you," Flash said.
They smiled together, sipped together.
"How do you use your time?" he asked, again because he wanted to know.
"I spend many hours on charities," she said, "and church activities. With friends, entertaining, functions ... travel, when Robert can spare the time. That hasn't been frequent during these past years. But we do see plays in New York and opera ... ballet ... concerts Summers, if Robert can get away, we take the yacht along the lake."
Flash knew instinctively that such a life could never fill this woman's needs. She would require a depth and purpose ... and he knew further that she'd had more in life than she'd mentioned. There was nothing he could touch, but he sensed its presence and identity and it excited him.
"When you are alone, when you are with your secret self ... what then?" he asked softly.
"I read," she replied, also softly, "and dream."
"What do you read ... and dream?"
"History ... biography ... of daring women."
Is this the clue, Flash wondered, is there daring under that polish, abandon beneath the culture, rapture underlying the control and the beauty? Is there a primitive woman at the heart of the queenly one?
Their drinks were finished
"Would you like another?" he asked.
"Thank you, but no."
"You were speaking of daring women."
"Yes."
She changed position slightly and Flash noticed that her feet were shapely and encased in white slippers that were dusted with what looked like chip diamonds.
"What do you consider daring?" he asked.
"I've never given it that much thought. I've simply enjoyed reading it."
"Would you consider it daring if a man said he'd like to hold you in his arms?"
She looked at him. A pulse began in her white throat, slow and hard.
"Are you that man?"
"I might be."
"Are you-asking?"
"I'd give anything just to kiss you."
"You-would?"
"Indeed I would."
It was hard to believe he'd gone so far without reprimand. He searched into her eyes, into the silvery quality that was like a veil obscuring any trace of excitement which might lie in them.
"You'd like to say more," she said.
"Much more."
"Well...?" The pulse in her throat was stronger.
"I'm afraid I'd find it impossible to stop at a kiss."
Her voice lowered. "You-would?"
"Yes, I would," Flash whispered. He added, "I'm registered here-on the seventh floor."
Her lips formed what could be a sort of kiss.
He said, "I suppose a man would have to offer a lot to ... :"
"Yes?" The word came on a whisper.
"...entice you."
She caught her breath softly. Her breasts were very still, very lovely.
He whispered. "Would ... enchantment ... bring you there? Would enchantment make you ... daring enough?"
A quiver came into her breathing, exciting him. His eyes boldly caressed her moving breasts, went to her throat with its lovely, throbbing pulse. Passion took him, abruptly and fiercely.
""I'll leave you now ... before I sweep you into my arms right here," he whispered. Their eyes met; they sat in throbbing awareness. "My room number is seven hundred," he told her. "The door will be unlocked."
He had one last swift glimpse of her as he rose. The silver quality of her eyes had swept aside like gossamer and revealed a longing, a lovely, lovely longing.
Rapidly he walked to the elevator, pressed the button. The door opened, he got in and told the operator the fifth floor. Here he stepped out, went to the stairway and walked the remaining flights. This way, clever though elevator men were about such things, if the woman rode to seven, the operator would have no reason to suspect where she was going.
In the room, Flash paced. Would she come ... was her longing building, too? Four minutes passed ... six. After an interminable wait he looked at his watch again and nine minutes had gone. Turn, knob, he willed, staring at it. Open, door.
What will you do if she comes into your arms? some far devil taunted. Will you take her ... dirty her? He brushed the devil aside. Only the door mattered, the knob, the woman. What about Sue? the devil asked.
But he didn't heed because the knob was moving and he must watch it and the door was opening and there she was, unsmiling. He crossed the room, pushed the door shut and drew her to him, his eyes on those sober lips.
Slowly he laid his own lips upon them, held his lips quiet upon them, felt their heat begin and the heat of his own, felt it grow. And then her arms came around him, she quivered once and suddenly the beating pulse in her was thrusting into him. Then and only then did their lips move and cling as their bodies clung in a kiss that was of both lip and body.
When it ended and she moved, Flash let his arm drop. They stood free and apart yet so close there was but a whisper of space between them.
"I was never kissed like that before," she said.
"Nor I," he told her.
She moved away, sank onto the edge of the bed and gazed at him wonderingly. He followed, holding out his hands. She put hers into them and he lifted her.
This time when their lips came together hers parted a little and moved under his, back and forth, tenderly, and she pressed him gently close. He slid one hand to the back of the velvet gown, found the zipper, felt the gown come free at the shoulders. Her scent reached him on the released warmth of her body. It was a sweet, spicy, passionate woman fragrance that got into him-nostrils and pores and imagination.
The zipper slid past her waist. She stepped away. "The light," she whispered, "a soft light, please."
Flash turned on a table lamp, switched off the ceiling light, locked the door.
She let the gown drop, pushed it off her hips, stepped out of it and held the velvet like a drapery, wearing only white silk panties and the white slippers. Her breasts were milky white, voluptuous yet not over large, with rose-pink halos from which rose nipples like firm, proud crowns.
Flash took the gown and laid it across a chair. This time it was she who offered her arms and he who went into them, pressing his lips into hers even as she was pressing hers into his. When he tried to hold her away, briefly, she came back, came with the kissing and the warmth.
He laid one palm along each side of her face, held it, pulled it back from his own. He moved his hands down her-cheeks, shoulders, arms, along the insweep of the waist to her panties, stripping them off without pause, aware of the satiny texture of her skin. He tossed the panties away and stepped back, breathing fast.
She stood before him like a vibrant, living statue in the high-heeled, diamond dusted slippers. Her figure was near-perfect. There wasn't a trace of excess flesh or sagging muscle. Her hips curved with delicate voluptuousness to milky thighs; her legs were long and dainty and smooth, ankles small and slim and altogether beautiful.
-And her sex-ah, it was the essence of her beauty-dark and swept with silver, gracefully shaped, sex-between her thighs like a priceless crown. The first sex-crown he'd seen.
Here, embodied in this woman, was beauty itself in full, luscious bloom, with none of the promise of the future for the future was here, and she was the future, was now. And she was smiling and waiting for him, the invitation and the longing and the immediacy in her eyes.
He held his arms to her and she came into them, came with a soft readiness, came with a womanliness such as few men surely have ever received. And even as they kissed she was tugging with his garments, gently hut impatiently, and he knew of no greater excitement than this, and he stood back and let her remove his clothing, piece by piece.
Together they removed their shoes and he went to her and tpok her wonderful body to his and she took his body to hers, and they stood in embrace. He lifted her and carried her to the bed and lay holding her, their lips together.
He traced his fingertips along the crease between her shoulders so lightly, he scarcely felt the smooth skin, and this coaxed a tremor from her and a drawing closer. He trailed them down her back and she sighed, and his hand came to the outcurve of hip and drew her closer still, where he could feel the wonder and the promise.
He moved against her, slowly, almost questioning and she moved in responsei sweetly. They moved together, slowly and richly, their lips fallen apart. She lay with her head back, her breathing softly audible, softly sighing, and he paused and kissed the pulsing throat, kissed between the breasts and the breasts themselves and their rigid nipples. He kissed her shoulder and up, to the lips again.
With his lips enveloping hers, their thighs together now and moving so luxuriously, they warmed and burned toward the dark, tight clasp which was the ultimate goal, even as they held back from it, saving the delight for later, the hot and bursting glory for the unbearable last. . "You're so gentle," she said.
"Do you want me to be different?" he asked with a sudden clutch of fear in his gut that he was not being an adequate lover.
"No," she smiled. "I've known so little gentleness. Don't misunderstand-I love my husband very much, and I admire him. But his love is a violent love. Always violent. And I hunger sometimes for a man's hands on my body that will be slow and patient and tender." She looked up at him anxiously. "Maybe that explains why I'm here. Can you understand?"
For answer, he pulled her deeper into his embrace. She locked her arms around him, pressing her softness against him as if to merge their two bodies into one.
"Now," she whispered. "Come into me."
Carefully he positioned himself and began the slow, sensuous thrust that would bring them truly together. She lifted to meet him, moving with a smoothness and fluidity that was like exotic music. His heart began to thud violently, but his body maintained the slow drum-beat of their sultry rhythm. Passion built in him, but he kept it in rein, pacing himself to her movements.
"Oh, yes!" she cried. "How lovely! How wonderfully lovely!" He could feel her own desire building, throbbing through her body. She twisted beneath him, and rose again and again to meet the thrust of his manhood eagerly.
As his passion increased, Flash struggled against the desire to flip himself into frenzied movement. But he knew he must not. Like most women, she had her individual pace, and he knew he must not break the tenuous rhythm they had established.
Then gradually she began to move faster and to clutch him stronger. "Ahh-h-h-h", she moaned. "Please ... I'm almost ... almost...." To his intense delight, she passed over into the frenzy of passion. She wrapped her long, smooth legs around him and her fingers bit into his shoulders.
Flash gave himself up to the desire of his body, and they rocked together, harder and harder, climbing the stairway to ecstasy together.
"Now!" she cried. "Oh, NOW!"
Flash felt her body tense under him, her back arched like a steel bow. His own nerves screamed with the intensity of the beginning of the long-awaited release. They clung together, racked by wave after wave of ecstasy. Then at last he fell forward on her soft body. She sighed deeply and went quite limp.
Some time later, she stirred gently beneath him, and he rolled over to lie beside her. She looked at him with brimming eyes.
"I can't tell you how lovely that was," she said.
"More than lovely," he whispered.
"This is an odd thing to say," she continued, "but I feel that my marriage will be better because of this."
He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her questioningly.
"I've never had the courage to tell Robert how ... how I wanted it."
"Why not?" he asked.
"I think it was because I wasn't sure satisfaction was really possible for me." She smiled at him. "Now that I know-now that I know it can be like this-I won't be afraid anymore. You've done a wonderful thing for me."
She rose and began to dress. He handed her the white panties and she put them on with the utmost grace and dignity. Only this women of all women, he thought, could put that garment on after such an episode and do it with dignity.
He watched her because it was a privilege, because in truth it was she who had done something wonderful for him. He realized that beneath his bitterness and hurt over Jackie, had lurked the terrible fear that he was inadequate, that in some way he was incapable of bringing a a lovely, well-born woman to the peaks of fulfillment. Now he knew that his fear was groundless. This beautiful creature of grace and beauty had, in a sense, given him back his manhood.
When she was dressed, she sat on the bed and touched his face with her hand.
"Will I ever see you again?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"No," she said, smiling tenderly. "But I'll never forget you, my love-my fleeting love."
He took her hand. Not the one she extended, but the other, the one with the flare of diamonds on the wedding finger. He lifted it and laid his lips against its palm.
When she opened the door, just before she went through, he saw that the fingers of that hand were curled shut. The door closed.
He reached for his clothes and began to pull them on.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next day was hell from the time he woke up.
First, there was the day's work to get behind him when all he wanted was to see Sue. For he damn well knew one thing. Sue was love, and love was Sue.
He began to shake. Why, he loved Sue! Without benefit of common sense, he loved her.
But try to make her understand. She'd click phones in his ear, slam doors on his nose. She'd slap him down in any number of ways. Probably forever.
Because she knew damn good and well what he'd been up to with the women.
Nevertheless, the minute he could get out of the of fice, he did. He was shaking as he slammed into his car and sent it down the streets, night streets with lights everywhere, but he didn't know how the hell night had come so soon. Or even whether he'd done his office work at all today.
There was a light in Sue's apartment. He didn't hurry up the walk, just moved briskly. When you've got something to get through, don't fool. The minute she came to the door, he was going to have it out with her. None of her backtalk, none of her temper.
He put his thumb on the buzzer, hard. He could hear it inside, authoritative and commnading.
She opened the door so fast it startled him.
She had on that white, cover-up dress again.
"Well?" she said. "Surely you've seen a woman before?"
Her eyes were like brown ice, but with mad little fires in them.
Flash quit shaking, he was so mad. He'd come to her feeling contrite and tender and masterful, even noble, offering her what every woman yearns for, and how did she behave? Snippy.
At least this was a switch. The last time they were together, they'd been decent to each other at the beginning and ended up in a fight. This time it was to be a battle right down the line.
He'd no sooner thought that, than she slammed the door on his foot, but he kicked it open and walked in. He shut the door, giving it a slam.
"You get out of here!" she cried.
"After I pound some facts into that head of yours," he said.
"What facts?"
He wanted to grab her, take that dress off her, spank her. He'd never seen such a female. Reason wasn't in her. She couldn't understand anything because she didn't want to.
"The facts of life!" he shouted.
She glared at him. "I know them."
"You don't know any such damned thing! I'm through-know what that means?"
"Through what?"
"Through with women!" he yelled, trying to penetrate that stubborn, locked mind of hers.
"Oh, but women are habit-forming. Didn't you know?"
"Don't you want to know?" he shouted.
"Know what?"
"What women really want!"
"I already know."
"The hell you do!"
"The hell I don't," she said, very quietly.
Now she was swearing. It was a good thing he'd found out about her. Now he knew exactly what kind of female she was. He grabbed her by the shoulders and stood her against the wall. She was as rigid as a slim steel rod. He could feel her anger sparkling into him.
"That's right," she cried, "manhandle me! You can't take the truth-no, you have to be the big reporter who hands out the truth to others!"
"You damned little spitfire! I came here to--!"
"To what?"
Flash heard the tears in her voice, saw them in her eyes. They were angry tears, and they made him wild. "To explain! I might even have-"H-have what?"
"Asked you to marry me!" He yelled loud enough to be heard clear to The Record building, and kept bleating, like a schoolboy, "Asked you to be Mrs. Flash O'Shea! What do you say to that?"
She went very still. She'd been still before, but this time it was different. She became pliant and still, as if her whole body was listening.
"I say it was s-sweet," she whispered.
"We got started wrong," he babbled, not having the least idea what he was going to say until he heard himself saying it. "If I hadn't been trying to get women out of my system, I'd never have made a pass at you."
"Oh!" she gasped.
She was mad again, for no reason. And ramrod stiff.
Flash gave her a shake. "Why the hell did that make you sore?"
"Never mind!" she snapped.
So. She was going to be contrary.
"You little fool!" he shouted, hoping the neighbors were listening. He had to tell somebody, make somebody understand. "I wouldn't have made a pass at you because I would have respected you! And I'd have known the second time I saw you that I would one day want to marry you."
"Why?"
"Because I would have thought you were decent!"
He found out right then, though not for the first time, that it doesn't pay to tell the wide-open male truth to a woman. You may learn to meet her soul in tender moments, but try to tell her the truth at a time like this and she'll take it wrong because she's made that way. Because she damn well wants to take it wrong.
"So ... I'm not decent!" she screamed. And then she screamed names at him, names he'd have never dreamed she knew, and she tried to scratch him and tried to kick like in tough detective novels. He was busy trying to hold her and save himself from her fingernails, kness, teeth and those damn sharp-toed shoes.
And all the time he was struggling with her, right up to the instant when she repeatedly drummed her fists on his chest, hard, he was stunned that a guy could pay a girl the highest compliment he can ever pay her, and she'd try to kill him for it.
He held her at arm's length, and she jerked and kicked and pounded. "I came here to tell you," he yelled, on and on, "that I want to marry you!"
"That's different," she said. Then she collapsed into his arms and began to sob. "Flash ... oh, darling!"
He kissed her. The kiss was high-schoolish and salty and wonderful. All their problems were solved, their troubles over. Then he remembered all the women, especially the one last night, and thought he'd tell her.
"I don't believe it," she said, going stubborn. "Don't lie to me ... I have faith in you."
So. She was shutting her eyes to what she didn't want to know, and that was just as well.
"There won't be another woman, ever," he promised.
"You're damn right there won't be," she said.
She gave him a sharp nip on the lips, one that must have drawn blood the way it hurt, then she cooed and cuddled into his arms. He'd never imagined such perfection could exist.
His lip was hurting, but that didn't matter, because she was beginning that step-step back and forth, and nipping and kissing his hurt lip, and he found it magnificently simple to start their walking-dance backward into the bedroom, moving together in that wonderful, thrilling rhythm to her bed.
