I've given it up now. I want you to know that. If I hadn't I could never write about it. Would never, because it wouldn't be clever. And I am clever. I've given up my phony name, stopped dyeing my hair, grown a beard and moustache. I have an obscure job in another country.
You might think, "Hell go back to it someday. They always do. Or at least there'll always be that strong chance. They're like alcoholics."
Well, I suppose everybody's addicted to sex. It's just that some people get hung on it in unfortunate ways. What I mean is, whatever you're hooked on, you're hooked pretty deeply, and if you're hooked on something unfortunate, you're deeply unlucky. So you have to be damned lucky if you're ever going to kick your habit for good. From that point of view it wouldn't be surprising if you didn't believe me.
But I don't mean to convince you by telling you. I mean to convince you by writing this book, which will wrap up the person I used to be. Permanently. What you have to understand-at the end of the book, not the beginning-is how there was a period in my life when I was compelled to do some things that were pretty bad, and there was nothing I could do about it Fantasies struck me and there they were, all laid out with foolproof plans for making them real. It was just as if the woman was already spread out on her back with her panties down and all I had to do was stick it in. And you know how hard it can be to resist at that stage-how pointless it seems-especially when nobody else will ever know it happened. So I was dragged into my fantasies like a bull with a knife edged ring in his nose. I was just along for the ride.
Oh, it was the ride of my life, that's for sure. Your fantasies show what'll do the trick for you every time. But between those times when I was just carried away my conscience whipped me bloody.. . .
And then that period ended.
"Or so he thinks," you say to yourself.
Let me put it this way. You read this book and decide for yourself whether the person who wrote it will go back. But don't say you think I will just because it turns you on to imagine doing the things I've done and you figure, "Hell, if I could get away with that I'd do it." Because then you're not just making a prediction about what I'll do; you're saying I should go back. If you're as clever as I am you probably could get away with it, at least as well as I did, but take it from me. After all, I've been there. Whether you've got a conscience that would whip you bloody or not, you shouldn't, and I shouldn't have either.
I wish I could read this book objectively, the way you can, and see whether I thought the person who'd written it would go back. Right now I know I won't just the way I know that two and two are four, that the earth revolves around the sun, and that there is no God. But it would be so nice to be somebody else and look at me and say, "He's right about himself." Then I'd know even better.
But suppose I could read this book objectively, and suppose I could see that yes, the person who wrote it was deluding himself. That would mean I was deluding myself, and if I started believing I was then I might get lost again.. . .
The way I did to begin with.
It's funny. At the time it seemed to hit me all at once, but really it had been coming for years. It was an attitude toward women that caused it.. . but I don't know whether "caused" is the right word, because without that sudden flash that came by accident it might never have happened.
I'd better take things one at a time.
The attitude toward women started when I was a boy and it dawned on me that I had tremendous sex urges but I was not very attractive and would never be what you'd call handsome or dashing or whatever you have to be to satisfy yourself.
Not that I was what you'd call really ugly to begin with-and I got more respectable looking as I got older. I have a longish face and a sort of prominent Roman nose, thin lips, and I guess I have a weak chin. Back then, when I was growing too fast and was very unhappy, people used to call me Gaunt for a joke. Looking at pictures of myself from junior high I can see what they meant. My cheeks were hollow and my eys looked like they were bugging out. But that was more because I always had a forlorn expression than because I'd been stuck with a really ass face. If you saw a picture of one of my high school classes you wouldn't pick me out as the ugliest boy. Actually you'd probably put me around average or just a little, below on the basis of purely physical appearance. But what made me repulsive to girls was that I had so much sexual energy pent up inside me, and there was no place for it to go. You could tell I was warped from the guts out.
I just didn't know what to do with girls. I wanted a piece of one so bad-I don't mean fucking, at least at first, because it wasn't safe, but, well, you know-and it showed so much that every time I said "Hello" to a girl she looked like she was going to vomit.
I didn't know how to play the game. It was like I was playing five-card stud, trying to bluff into a pair of aces with garbage on the board. With a nickel bet in a table stakes game. My eyes said, "I haven't had any cards all night and I'm all but wiped out." I half wanted the aces to fold out of charity, and I half hated myself for begging because taking charity isn't winning. It didn't really matter because I never got any charity and I never won either. I got wiped out. One of the big winners once told me, "The first rule for getting it is to convince the chick it's not really what you're after." But I was too honest to pull that off. It was what I was after, and I couldn't hide it. Girls could see right through me and the way I imagined them, they said to each other, "Jesus Christ, that guy needs it so bad! Whatever you do, don't give it to himl" I used to dream of a woman who'd take one look at me and say, "Good God! What've they done to you?
You'd be a fine man if somebody'd let you take the first step! Look-I've got it. You need it. It's not doing me any good. So take it! Just be gentle, that's all." I would've been so gentle.
But none of them were like that. They were all the other way. Every last one.
It was a conspiracy. At the very least I'd have to fall in love with a woman, pretending that she was all smooth between the legs like a plastic doll. I'd have to marry her and then she'd decide whether I wasn't too repulsive to touch her. Well.. . but how was I going to fall in love with somebody when I couldn't trust her to give me what made her a woman, and what I needed most?
Who knows-maybe at that stage all" I needed was a girl who understood and had sympathy; who said, "Look, I just can't give it to you now, but if I would I could." A girl who'd hold my hand the way your mother does when you're sick, who'd pat me on the head and cuddle up to me. If only I'd had that, maybe after a few minutes I would've grinned and then laughed at myself and jumped up and danced around and said, "Hell with it, then! Let's go bowling!"
But I never had anything like that either.
All through high school I was lucky to get one date in two months. The ones I did get were with the dregs of the class. (I didn't mind that so much. I knew I was a dreg myself.) They came on like whores when I was all they could get to take them to some big, expensive event like a Prom, and then turned into nuns and called me a pig if I tried to put a hand on them afterwards. What could I think? I became a pig to everyone-myself included.
Once after that happened I pnt my fist through the windshield of my car. I cut an artery in my wrist. Blood spurted out like crazy. For a second I loved the pain and I loved the blood's rich, red color, and the sound of the girl screaming. But the blood kept gushing out and I couldn't stop it. We were parked in a Lover's Lane and the girl couldn't drive. She didn't want to go for an ambulance because that way everybody would know she'd gone to the Lover's Lane with me.
Can you imagine? I knew I'd been the biggest pig ever and I could see how it would be bad for the girl if people knew she'd gone to a Lover's Lane with such a pig. I felt sorry for her! So I got a hold of myself. I said, "I know how you feel." This was when blood was already running down into my shoes. I got out of the car and tried to walk to the hospital-four miles away! But I passed out in the dirt two steps from the car.
Then the girl got good and scared. She ran through the woods and found somebody else parked and told them about me. They got me to the hospital just in time.
She didn't even go to the hospital with me. She jumped out of the car in the middle of town. Afterward she made things all right for herself by telling everybody I'd driven her out there against her will and then gone nuts trying to rape her. And she was a real dog whore! She'd gone down for everybody but the real dregs. The only reason her father didn't press charges against me was that he knew that would come out at the trial.
For months after that I wished she'd just run away and left me to die in the dirt.
I guess you can see the attitude Fm talking about. I was bitter as hell. Nature had made me so my cock just had to go into a cunt and then had given the cunt to somebody else who dangled it in front of my face, keeping me on a leash, choking me and getting off on what a pitiful creature I was. Girls didn't need sex and they certainly didn't want it. I was amazed when friends told me about times when it looked like girls really wanted it, but I never believed they did. To me it always looked like, "Is she going to let me?" And I was pretty sure it was the same for all the guys. It was just that for me the answer was always "NO!"
I guess there's not much more you need to know about my high school days. I was an A student and math was my best subject but the girls didn't care if I was smart In my sophomore year I lifted weights and ran a lot and came out with an okay physique but that didn't make any difference either. For a while I was the second tallest guy on the basketball team but I wasn't such a good athlete. I never made it past the third string 'and I gave it up junior year.
My family lived in a rural area about eight miles from town. There were good woods for hunting and I did a lot of that. I loved to bring down that fine feathered quail and pheasant with those loads of hot birdshot. I was a hell of a clever hunter and I had a nice collection of guns. I had a few cool guys who were friends because they could take advantage of that. I was a good fisherman too. I knew where the big rainbows were and I could stick them with the barb every time. I'd watch their colors go dull as they drowned on the bank and then I'd pick up their clammy bodies and slip them into my creel. I liked the quiet of the woods and all that lush green and the sounds of water trickling.
CHAPTER TWO
That bitter attitude toward girls seemed to go away while I was in college and in the army but it just went underground because I gave up chasing girls altogether.
I took ROTC in college and studied math. That took a lot of time, and the rest was filled up with drinking beer, watching TV, playing poker, and going through all the bullshit that my lousy fraternity dreamed up to keep horny guys from going off the wall. It was a rejects frat and everybody knew it
After college I got commissioned as a second lieutenant and ended up in Germany as an accountant. All through that time I kept away from girls. I acted like sex was beneath me. When the guys were out whoring I'd stay in my room and jerk off. I couldn't stand their patronizing crap. "Come on, Bob! Let's go get laid!" They could take it that lightly because they didn't really need the whores. The whores were just a drunken lark for them. They'd come in at four in the morning and wake me up and if they weren't too bombed to talk they'd tell me all about it
"You should've seen it! We picked up four of them over by the park and we got this hotel room. They were good lookin' as hell and they were out for those nice fat soldier-boy bankrolls. The first thing we get into the room this dark-haired one with the biggest tits you ever saw tears off her blouse and gets down on her knees and before I know it she's sucking me off. Jesus, what a fucking mouth she had! Then she puts my dick between her tits and I fuck her tits for a while, just getting it up into her mouth with the farthest pushes, you know, till POW! I shoot the biggest load of come you ever saw all over her face. She tries to get down on me while I'm still shooting but we're both laughing like crazy and she can't get it
"Meanwhile Jack and Charlie have got the clothes off this skinny blonde and they've got one up her cunt and another up her ass-standing up, yet She's just bouncing around between them like a basketball, wailing those phony whore-moans, shoving her tits up into Jack's mouth.
"Well there's this other blonde, a little bit bigger-could've been the skinny one's sister, for all I know-and so I say to her, 'Why don't you lick my come off this one's face?' I take out a pile of tens-Jesus, do they go for that American money-and start throwing them around like confetti. Well that did it. Those two were all over each other, sucking tit, licking twat, biting ass.. . .
"The last was this super-slick looking redhead and she was the finest of the bunch. Had these wide, innocent-looking green eyes . . . a face like a little girl, you know, but a nice full figure with two of the snow-whitest tits you ever saw. I pull her blouse off and BANGO! Her nipples, nice little soft pink ones, snap right to attention like buck privates at inspection, and they're sticking out about an inch, all red. Hahaha! They looked like a sow's! I never saw such a thing with a whore. So I yank her skirt down and she's not wearing panties, and her box is shaved clean! I say to myself, 'Got to have some of that right now,' but before my peter even pops up all the way she jumps on me and wraps her legs around my waist and holds me around the neck with one hand and crams it in with the other. We're off and fucking, and this chick's grunting and squinching up her eyes and writhing around just like she's doing it for free. Such a cunt "she had. She could do more to you with that thing than the best cock-suckers can do with their mouths, I swear to God.
I grab her ass cheeks like I'm squeezing juice out of them and watch the two other girls going at it on the floor and I give her a good shot, nice and deep. She seizes up for a second and just milks the come out of me, and then what do you think happens? She starts groaning, 'More! More!' Only at first I can't understand her because of her accent and because I'm so fuckin bombed. 'More cock! More cock!' she goes. She makes me hold her up and she reaches around behind and in a second I can feel her shoving fingers up into her cunt along with my cock. Well I get my hard-on back and I say, 'Jack, get your porker over here right away, this is a red alert!' Over comes Jack and whips her fingers out and crams his cock in. Well the chick goes 'AAAAAA-AAHH' and spreads like she was droppin' a kid. Jack and I fucked her together like that, and was it wild. . . . "-
Stuff like that. I used to listen to it like I was sort of amused but mostly bored. But I also saw the whole thing happening, right down to the last detail. I'd collect scenes like that and when I jerked off, if I wasn't using the old standby of the imaginary girl who just said, "It's yours-take it," I'd play them back to myself like so many dirty movies. Except that I'd put myself in the other guys' places.
I couldn't go whoring myself because I was scared to death of women by this time and besides, for me it would have been an indignity to pay for it because I couldn't get it any other way and everybody else knew it. I couldn't go without the others because I knew I'd die if I had to ask a woman for anything even if I had a thousand dollars to give her for it. And I couldn't go with them because besides being scared to death it would be my first time and I couldn't take it lightly the way they could. If I could get over my fright they'd see me going crazy over some whore and they'd know I was a fool and a bumbler.
So instead they thought I was queer. It began as kidding at first but when they saw how I really was they began to think they might be right.
That led to another strange thing. One night a sort of wimpy-looking guy-maybe five-six, a hundred and thirty-knocked on my door, and when I answered I could see he was really bothered, scared, desperate about something. He had a shallow, pale face, with a nose kind of like the blade of an oar, but he was a pretty kid all the same. He had blond hair.
It turned out he was queer and he'd heard I might be and he knew he was taking a terrible chance but he couldn't help it He was the manager of the football team and I'd seen him at some games. I could tell he was a nice, smart kid. I told him to get the hell out.
He got really petrified and begged me not to report him. He started to cry.
Well that was too much. I didn't know what the hell I was doing but I dragged him inside and asked him what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to suck my cock. So I just pulled it out and shoved him down on his knees and crammed it into his mouth.
He went crazy. He gobbled it down and licked it all over and then he started kissing it, which gave me the creeps. But he was so good! I just got drunk with the sensation and collapsed back onto my bed.
He got me off twice and then he wanted me to ass-fuck him but when I said I didn't want to he said that was fine, that was great, anything I wanted, was there anything else he could do for me? All this time he was acting just like a girl, and looking at him I'd have said he could have been one, add to his chest and take away from his crotch. I said no and then I realized that I really wanted to ask whether there was anything else I could do for him. I was even tempted to try ass-fucking him. But I didn't say anything.
He left pretty soon after, and it scared me a little, the way he looked at me almost like I was a god. But when he was gone I realized that my body was still shaking and my cock was going up again remembering him sucking me. I had to admit it had been the only real sex I'd ever had with another person and it had been good.
This happened just before my tour of duty was up. Ronnie-that's what I'll call him, just like Tm calling myself Bob-came back a few more times and I did end up ass-fucking him, and that felt pretty damned nice. He liked it hard. He even liked me to hurt him a little. So I imagined I was ass-fucking that bitch I'd almost bled to death over, with her strapped over a rail and screaming for mercy, and between that and the feeling of my cock getting gobbled up by a living hole for the first time and Ronnie going insane with pleasure I had my best orgasm ever.
Then I came back to the States.
I hope that wherever Ronnie is today, he's getting what he needs from somebody better than I was. I guess I wasn't so bad for him at the end, because I was actually beginning to believe I was queer. I sucked him off a few times and it really did something to my groin to know I could send that kid into seventh heaven just by letting him squeeze a shot off into my mouth.
He gave me the addresses of some of his friends in New York and said that if I was queer I'd better live there, or in San Francisco or LA maybe-someplace big. I didn't have any other plans so I got a job in New York as an accountant. I never called any of his friends and for the first few months I went to a whole lot of porno movies and strip shows and things, some hetero, some homo, trying to figure out where I was.
Then this friend of Ronnie's named Bruce called me up. Ronnie had written him about me and would I like to come to a party.
I won't go into the party or any of that, but the fact is that I started having an affair with Bruce. There were a lot of good things about it but we both knew there was something strained and finally one morning he said, "You know, you're not really gay." He didn't say it with a nasty tone, but he was pretty hard on me. "You just want somebody more desperate than you are to come after you the way you'd like to go after women. That way you can play the part of the woman the way you'd like to see it played. You can say, 'Go ahead and take it. It's yours.' Then you can imagine what the gay guy feels like, just having it given to him like that when he needs it so bad. You can identify with him and pretend you're fucking the woman you're also pretending to be." He was really a smart and together guy, Bruce was. "You don't start with any attraction to the male body. You start with the female and you have to go through so many changes to get yourself to accept the male that, for shit sake, I sometimes have to sit around watching you make them!" He laughed. He basically liked me a lot. "You're a closet hetero!" He chuckled and clapped me on the shoulder. He watched me carefully while I got dressed and he could see just from my frown that he was right. Ji I hadn't been so busy repressing things I would have known that from the moment I took out my cock for Ronnie.
"Look," he offered as he said goodbye to me, "I know some pretty nifty bisexual chicks, even a few hetero ones, who'd lie down and spread out for you in two seconds. Why don't I intro.. . . "
"No thanks," I said. I was really up and down at the same time and I just had to be by myself. I was up because I knew I wasn't gay and there were so many hassles connected with being gay, and besides, it was just true of me and I'd denied it and that's never good. I was down because I'd been a failure as a hetero and at least Td got some satisfaction as a homo, but now that I knew how I'd tricked myself-just to avoid facing my failure at being what I really was-I knew that was gone, Td never get satisfaction out of a homosexual relationship again.
Bruce was really sympathetic. "Look," he said, "I know how you feel. It was the same thing when I admitted to myself that I was getting off on girls by pretending that they were guys. But it'll work out sooner or later. Take my word for it. You're luckier straight than you are gay in this world." He snorted. "So I guess I don't feel that sorry for you."
I walked out of the gay life for good then, and after that came three months of the purest hell in my life. I'd got used to that real human contact with Ronnie and Bruce and the others and no matter how many pictures and movies I looked at, no matter how many books I read, they didn't make a real woman. They weren't even meant to. A movie was a movie and a picture was a picture and a book was a book. People naturally liked to watch movies, look at pictures, read books-and sometimes they liked to watch sex movies, look at sex pictures, read sex books, and get excited by them, just the way they got on edge watching suspense movies, got feelings of peace from nature pictures, got thrilled reading adventure stories, and so on. But with me it was different. The books and pictures and movies were all I'd ever get in my whole life and I couldn't enjoy them because I had to try to make them something they couldn't be. I'd curse at them, stomp out of the movies, rip up the books in fits of rage. It was idiotic. I thought I was going crazy.
Then came that sudden flash.
I was lying at home in bed late one night watching a detective show. An absolutely gorgeous brunette was trying to blackmail a big-time politician because she'd once had an affair with him and he'd thrown her over. She lured him to her apartment "just once more" and this time she got pictures. Well the hero, the detective, was working for the politician, and once he saw what was up he went about doing research. He found out that the brunette had a little brother, about fourteen, whom she was supporting while he lived with their grandparents. She desperately wanted to protect him from the crap she'd put up with from the world since their parents had died. The detective got a tape recording of her trying to blackmail the politician, and he had copies of the pictures of the girl doing some pretty raunchy things with him. (I imagine. Naturally they didn't show them on TV) So he showed up at her apartment grinning like a Cheshire cat and laid it on her. "Give it up or your little brother gets an ear and an eyeful."
I thought that was clever as hell. It put me in mind of a passage in a book called All The King's Men to the effect that if you dig deep enough you can get dirt that hurts on anybody.
The show was about over and to tell the truth I was jerking off on the brunette-she was so sexy, so tough looking, so perfect an example of the kind of woman I was bitter about, and here she was breaking down and begging this detective not to wreck her life. She was helpless. "If I was in his shoes," I said to myself, "I'd tell her, 'And pull down your panties too, while you're at it. I'm going to fuck you good before I go.' "
Jesus did that get me off. A whole new feeling of power swept over me saying, "You can fuck those bitches!" I must've shot nearly to the ceiling.
Everything fell into place: the hunting, the fishing, the rejection, the misery? the revenge-and the satisfaction.
I had just the chick in mind and I knew a whole lot I could get on her. From there on out it was all downhill.
CHAPTER THREE
Janet was a secretary in the office where I worked. Her husband was a Wall Street broker and she made a big thing out of the fact that she really didn't have to work, she just couldn't stand to sit around at home doing nothing. It was as if she was just a little better than the rest of us because she was working-"being productive," she called it-simply because she believed in it, while we plebeians were working for baser motives. (Just to survive.) Every summer she rubbed her wealth in peoples' faces by inviting everyone in the office to an ostentatious party at her house in Scarsdale. I'd been at the office ten months when "the occasion" came around. That was when she first made me want to fuck her. And I don't mean just fuck her in the sense of having intercourse. I mean I wanted to fuck her, you know, the way you mean it when you say, "Fuck you!"
Janet was the girl I thought of right away when, a few weeks after the party, I got my idea from that TV show. I knew she was playing around with some other guys and I guessed from what I'd seen of her husband that he wouldn't take too kindly to that. She was about twenty-eight, and he was almost fifty. Everyone in the office believed she'd married him for his money. That made her a sort of whore to begin with. And then she had the gall to act as though I was beneath her-like some kind of insect. Even though I was an accountant and she was only a secretary.
I'd picked out Janet as the most attractive woman in the office the day I'd gone to work there, and I fantasized a lot about balling her. As usual, I couldn't hide the fact that I was desperate for some sex. I tried my best but as always, even in so little as a casual "hello" while passing her in the hall I knew that my horniness showed through. She was always polite. Too polite. I could always see that little taunting in the corners of her eyes that said, "Well, what do you know! The Worm!" I could tell I had about as much sex appeal for her as a dead cow. At the same time she went out of her way to look sexy and be sexy-superficially at least-all the time.
Janet was medium height-maybe five foot six-and she had wavy brown shoulder-length hair. Her complexion was pale, and showed vague remnants of childhood freckles, a few on her high forehead and more on her cheeks. Her brown eyes had a perpetually haughty look. Her eyebrows were high and finely tweezed; her nose was straight and regular, with a subtly molded bulb that hooked slightly at its tip. Her cheeks were full. Her face was oval. Her upper lip was sharply arched while her lower lip was straight across above her smoothly rounded chin. From what I could tell from looking at her in the fashionable clothes she wore to work, which varied from short pleated skirts and turtle-necks to stylish pant-suits to things like Greek peasant dresses, she had large, loose, bulbous tits, a decently but not spectacularly slender waist, a smooth, relatively flat stomach, and a pair of nice, round, heavy buttocks. Her legs were just slightly heavy-if you really wanted to be picky about it All in all she was a damned good-looking woman, although not quite as gorgeous as she thought she was, and she made it obvious just which men she was attracted to and which she wasn't
Janet was the treasurer's secretary, and that meant she dealt with me quite often. In fact, her office was next to mine. We were in an old building down on Park Avenue in the Thirties, there were connecting doors between lots of the offices. There was one between hers and mine, and one between hers and her boss's on the other side. Sometimes she bothered to close the door, but most of the time she didn't, so there were many days when I spent eight hours pouring over columns of figures and half watching her out of the corner of my eye.
I remember one afternoon in particular. It. was around 4:30 on a Friday in mid-June, about a week before the party. She was wearing one of her short pleated skirts. It was white and it reached to about three inches above her knees, so that when she bent over you could see the bottoms of her tight bikini panties.
She got a call and she talked loudly enough so I could overhear. Her husband was out of town and she was setting up a date with a boyfriend. As she talked she kicked her feet up onto her desk and swung to and fro in her swivel chair and laughed and gestured. Sometimes her tone was soft and seductive, and sometimes it was coy and teasing. "How desirable I am," she seemed to be telling me.
She rolled her head back and looked at the ceiling and swung in her chair with her feet up. The hem of her skirt slid up her thighs. She wasn't wearing stockings, and I could see the mounds of her ass cheeks against the chair squishing back and forth, back and forth, and the seams of her panties rubbing against them all around, and once in a while when she swung especially far I could see the hollow between her thighs where wisps of dark hair strayed out from beneath the bulge of white silk that covered her cunt
She was going on and on about how they shouldn't meet at that place, they should meet at this place, and she didn't feel like Chinese food, how about French? (Much more expensive, I thought.) I just sat there with my mouth open and my pencil hanging over a column of figures like a dead branch off a tree and listened to her practically fuck the guy over the phone.
Suddenly she rocked forward. She noticed me and saw what I was looking at and gave me a shocked start and pulled her legs down. She looked at me as though she'd just bitten into something rotten-as if to say, "How disgusting you are!"
She looked straight at my crotch and that was the first time I realized I had my hand there and I was gripping my cock through my pants. It was rock-hard and there was a little damp splotch. I was wearing light brown pants and it showed up black like an ink spot.
She stopped talking to her friend in the middle of a sentence. He must have asked her what was going on, because she said, "Oh, nothing, just some creep that works in my office ogling me." She swung around to face in the other direction and put her feet up on her desk again. She spread her legs out this time, but I couldn't see anything. "Oh," she said coyly into the phone, "I was sitting sort of facing him through a connecting door with my feet up on my desk, and I'm wearing a short skirt and no stockings and little skimpy silk panties. He'd must have got quite an eyeful." She chuckled. "Now I'm sitting with my feet up on my desk and my legs spread, but I'm facing away from him . . . " She glanced back over her shoulder at me with another look of disgust.
I got up and slammed the connecting door closed. After that it was all I could do to make up my mind to go to the party at her house.
I had one friend in the office. His name was Gary. He wasn't much better off than I was, but he did have luck with women occasionally. Only with ugly ones, though, because he was skinny as a split rail and about six-three and altogether sort of gangly. He was the personnel director, so he'd been the one who'd hired me, and from the beginning we'd sensed that we were brothers in desperation.
"Look, you ought to go," Gary told me the day before the party. "First, its always a hell of a spread-hors d'oeuvres like caviar and anchovies and shit like that, open bar, and then porterhouse steaks roasted over charcoal . . . I mean, you'd pay fifty bucks for it in a restaurant. Live band, champagne, imagine cigars.. . . Second, all the company's big-wigs go. Its sort of incredible when you think that Janet's just a secretary, but her husband-now he handles lots of the company's investments, and so its kind of like a social-business thing.
And if you want to get any place in this company, you ought to go where the executives go. Take my word for it. And third, they've got a swimming pool, and everybody takes their bathing suits. And you should see Janet in some of hers. I've been to three of these things, and they get skimpier every year. And some of the other girls, like Nancy and Jill, come out looking pretty good too." Nancy was the head buyer-I should have mentioned that this was a wholesale fabrics company-and she was about thirty-six. She was a little chubby and too aggressive for my taste, but she was a nice-looking brunette on the whole, and she was single. And Jill was the vice-president's secretary. She was a miniscule redhead with a couple of nice tits to show for herself-if her bras weren't padded-but just about no ass at all. An ass like a little boy's. I hadn't got close enough to be rejected by them yet
I saw that Gary had logic on his side, and that anyway, it would just make Janet's victory over me all the more complete if I didn't show. So I showed.
Their place was really something, all right. You could tell it was going to be just driving up into the hilly section where it was located. It looked like there was one hill for every house-or mansion, I guess you'd say. There were columns of brick and stone at the entrance to the driveways, and big old oak trees and maples and sycamores and so on, and lush green lawns watered by underground sprinkler systems, and huge flower beds, and hedges trimmed into all kinds of artistic shapes. And up behind all the flowers and greenery you could see the facades of English Tudor and American Colonial and Southern Plantation and even Gothic and Frank Lloyd Wright-type architecture. As we swooped down into a hollow and crossed a stream-Gary was driving his new Pontiac; I didn't have a car-and came to the Jamiesons' Georgian arch, I thought to myself, You can keep those big lawns and old trees and twenty-room houses and three-car garages and swimming-pools and all that shit. Just give me a piece of ass, that's all!"
"Well," Gary chuckled as he swung into the drive, "hang onto your peter, Bob! Here we go!"
Janet met us at the walk to the front entrance. She was just ushering the president of the company and his wife into the house, where her husband was taking over, when we drove up. She smiled super-politely and came down the walk. She motioned to a college-age kid in dark pants and a white shirt who had just finished parking the president's car on the grass next to the garage off to our left. He came running.
The house reminded me of a college dormitory. Not that it was that shapeless or anything, but it was huge and brick and it had a white marble portico in front. It had a slate roof and gabled windows and ivy growing up the sides.. . the whole bit.
Janet was wearing a gauzy shift of muted blues and greens over a white crocheted bathing suit that, in Gary's whispered words, was "skimpier yet." She treated us with exaggerated grace. "Raymond, would you park the gentleman's car, please?"
"Certainly," the kid said like a trained parrot
"So glad you could come," Janet told us as Gary got out of the car and found he'd automatically taken the keys out and looked silly for a minute and then gave them to Raymond. To me it looked like Janet wanted to impress Raymond with how "social" she was. That was a funny thought It also looked like she was out to give every guy in the place a hard-on. She looked past me, half acknowledging my existence and half not, but I felt she was getting a big charge out of teasing me with those tits that made her halter look like a band-aid over a pair of watermelons. The crocheting was thickest at her nipples, and you couldn't really see them through it at all, but it thinned out around the rest of her tits and all that soft, pale white flesh showed through.
Then she turned to lead us into the house. I swear she did it just so Gary and I would stare at her ass and look at each other and shake our heads and think, "Christ! What a piece!" Her shift was transparent, really, and under it was this piece of white crocheted cloth looking like a pair of birds' wings. It came to a point where it cut like a piece of rope up into her ass crack, and the bird's body would have been her cunt, which bulged down between her legs. It fanned out up her crack and across her ass cheeks, leaving the bottoms of her cheeks exposed. The wing-tips trailed off at the points of her hip-bones, where the front piece of the bathing suit was joined to the back piece with rings. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that those rings were gold. Anyhow, she seemed to walk with a swagger, half-prancing almost, like a little girl, and that swiveled her hips and threw the weight of her buttocks back and forth almost as if she was juggling them for us. We stared for a few seconds at her ass, and the way the creases between the bottoms of her ass cheeks and the tops of her thighs bunched up and flattened out, first one, then the other, then one, then the other . . .
She turned around and grinned this shit-eating grin at us as she introduced us to her husband. He was a distinguished, tweedy-looking type, about my height, with thinning gray hair that I guess you'd call distinguished, and a lean, athletic-looking face and body-at least for a man of his age. He was wearing a blue smoking jacket and tan double-knit trousers. He sort of smirked as he shook hands with us. He knew the score. What he actually said was, "I'm Hamilton Jamieson. Pleased to meet you." But what he meant was, "I know you don't want to take your eyes oft my sexy-looking wife's body to shake hands with me, but-those are the breaks! She's my wife and it's my place and it's my food and my booze and my band. Look and wander and swim and eat all you want And while you're at it, eat your hearts out!" I didn't dislike the guy, though. I would have been the same way if I'd been in his position. Probably worse.
We went through the house past the kitchen where a couple of cooks were at work and followed the rest of the crowd out into the back yard. There was a flagstone terrace with a lot of wrought iron tables and chairs scattered around, and then the swimming pool off to the right, and a "rose garden off to the left. The "bar" was set up right outside the back door on the terrace, so you could pick up your drinks first thing. Besides the bartender there were a couple of uniformed waitresses wandering around with trays of hors d'oeuvres and taking orders for drinks. A five-piece rock band was setting up by the poolside. There were fifty or sixty people there-most of the people in the office-and it was really a funny mixture. Gary and I got ourselves a couple of Chevas Regals on the rocks and wandered over to the pool. We'd brought our bathing suits-Gary had them in his briefcase-but we hadn't decided whether to go swimming. Seven or eight women and about a dozen men were swimming or standing in the shallow end of the pool talking or sitting on the edges or diving off the diving board. Gary nudged me as Nancy, wearing a plain blue bikini "more decent" than Janet's, but not much, trotted her ass out to the end of the diving board and bounced up and down. "See?"
I saw, all right. I wouldn't have thought Nancy could have looked better in a bathing suit than she did in clothes, because as I said before, she was a little chubby-mostly in the ass and thighs-but the sight of all that ass flesh bouncing and jouncing and rolling around inside her bathing suit really turned me on, and I had to admit that the rest of her figure was pretty damned nice. "Yeah," I admitted. Then I whispered to him, "You ever get anything off her?"
"Nope. Asked her for a date once but she turned me down. But I really wish she hadn't. Who knows? Maybe she does too. I mean, I know she has dates and things, but not so many. She's just so damned New York Businesswoman that she scares guys off, I think. So what can she do at night but sit home and jerk off?"
"I wish you wouldn't say things like that," I told him. "You're going to give me a hard-on."
He laughed.
Just then Janet and her husband passed by with drinks in their hands on the way to the pool. "'I guess just about everybody's arrived," she was saying, "and Raymond can show the others in. I think I'm going to take a dip." They stopped by the side of the pool about ten feet in front of us. "Do you want to change into your suit and join me?" It was strange to see the way she put her arm around her husband's waist and leaned up against him like a sapling that needs a strong stake to support it.
"Yes, I suppose so." Hamilton turned around and glanced back toward the house. Janet did the same, and noticed us standing behind her.
"Would you two like to go for a swim?" she asked us. "Did you bring your bathing suits?"
To me she sounded like she was challenging me, the "dirty old man" (even though I was only twenty-five) to get into the same water with her. She looked like she believed I'd come right into my bathing suit, right into her pool, at the very thought.
"Yeah," Gary said. "I'd like to, anyway. Where can we change?"
Just then Jill, who'd been sitting nearby with a couple of friends, got up and came over to Janet. "I think I'd like to go swimming too." Janet smiled at Jill, who was wearing a slinky orange dress and carrying a little canvas bag, which she dangled before her to indicate that it contained her bathing suit. "Where can I change?"
Janet looked at the bag as though a little miffed that it couldn't possibly contain a bathing suit any more modest than hers. "Any of the upstairs bedrooms," she said to all of us at the same time. And then, as Jill turned to go, she added, "Just be sure you keep the little boys' and little girls' rooms separate!" She chuckled snidely, as though changing in the same room with us would be the last thing Jill or any other woman would want to do.
Jill kind of laughed and we all walked off together. When we got up to the second floor landing there were two doors facing us, right away. Jill was a little drunk already, and she'd caught Janet's snide tone, and when she saw the two doors she said, "Okay, which side do you guys want?" in a sarcastic tone meant to mock Janet. All of a sudden I felt as if Jill was really a pretty nice person, although I'd tended to think of her as hardened and self-centered. Why I didn't know.
Then Gary said the cleverest damned thing I'd ever heard him say. "I'll take the left and Bob can take the right."
Jill giggled and swung her canvas bag ground in circles like a lifeguard swinging a whistle. "And which one do I take?"
"That's up to you," Gary told her. I thought he was really being suave. I mean, he sounded as if the whole thing really was just a big joke. I never could have done that
Jill looked us over for a second and kind of snorted and shook her head if we were her younger brothers or something. She had a reputation for using foul language. She'd grown up in the Bronx, and her-speech still reflected it. Now she grabbed us by the cocks with some of the nicest dirty language I ever heard. She was drunk enough that she stumbled a little as she waved her hand in front of her face and took off for the door on the right. "Fuck it! We're all big boys and girls. We don't need Janet's kiddie-shit I'm changing in here. You change wherever you want to-here, there, anywhere."
Gary and I stood there looking stunned for about half a second. Then Gary took off after her, pulling me along behind him. "I guess it wouldn't be too flattering to you if we chose to change in another room, now would it?"
She looked back as though even she appreciated how sharp he was being. She opened the door and we all went into the bedroom and I managed to swing the door closed behind us. There was a connecting door in the right front of the room, and when we walked up to the windows to look out over the lawn and drive, we could see the other bedroom through the half-open door on the other side of a bathroom. "That must be Janet and Hamilton's room," she observed, noticing that the room we were in was tidier and more sparsely furnished, like a guest room. She threw her canvas bag onto the bed and turned her back to me. "Could you unzip me?"
My rocks just about fell out. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely get a grip on her zipper. "All we're doing is changing into bathing suits, right?" she reminded us.
"Right," Gary stammered. He put down his briefcase on the bed and opened it up, not taking his eye off Jill for a second, and fished out our bathing suits.
I drew Jill's zipper down slowly, carefully, slitting the cloth of her dress open like a banana peel. Blood pounded in my temples and I felt dizzy. I'm sure she felt my excitement like she would have felt an earthquake, but she just sucked in her cheeks as if she was very amused and hunched her shoulders forward to slip the dress off over them.
I got the zipper down to the bottom, right above her waist, and then suddenly the slinky orange material was in a puddle on the floor around her feet She was so tiny, and had such a skinny rear end, that the broad band of her bra with its four hooks was the first thing that caught my eye.
"Thank you," she said, and stepped out of her dress and bent over to pick it up. Her curly red hair flopped down out of sight, and her freckled shoulders, and her slim back with her ribs showing slightly, and up popped her rear end. Between the tight little mounds of her ass cheeks under her orange bikini panties her ass-bones stuck out, and that made the valley between them all the deeper. In my mind I took a hundred photographs of her every second from then until.. . .
I traced the valley between her legs ran all the way from the faint indentation of the crease at the front of her cunt down to where her slit closed in a loop and she seemed very hollow, on up to where her ass crack came to a close above the waistband of her panties.
Gary slipped off his shirt. I staggered back a step and groped for my shirt buttons. Jill stood up and flipped her dress onto the bed. Gary's shirt followed it and then she took a step over to him and turned her back to him, grinning sideways at me. "Would you unhook my bra, please?"
Gary put a hand on her shoulder. I could see he was pressing his luck, but he managed to make it a brotherly kind of pat and Jill let him do it. Then he unhooked her bra. The band gave a sharp little snap when the last hook let go. There was a lot of weight straining at those huge cups. I didn't know how I was going to be able to change into my bathing suit with Jill around, because I had the hottest hard-on of my life. All the strip shows and spread mags in the world couldn't measure up to an ordinary woman changing into a bathing suit.
Jill's bra slid down her arms and she wiggled her shoulders to shake her tits free of it. She caught it in her fingers as it slid off and tossed it onto the bed with her dress. She took a step away from Gary and turned around to face us, grinning all the while with this teasing, reproving sort of grin. Her tits hung huge on her chest, swaying tautly and jiggling in quick little ripples like a W, made out of a pair of hps. Only the shapes, perfect as they were, were under water, and their image was rippling.. . .
Her aureoles were wide splotches right in the centers of her udders, the color of warm orange-pink frosty lipstick against white-sand-beach backgrounds of pillowy flesh. The depth of her cleavage was startling. I stood there mesmerized by the sharp darkness of its shadow.
I got my shirt off and now it had to be either my pants or my shoes and socks. I couldn't take my pants off, so I bent over to untie my shoes, but at the same time I had to crane my neck up to keep my eye on Jill.
She laughed at me. "I bet you don't get so much," she said half sympathetically. "I can tell you're all hot and bothered. I'll tell you the truth-in the crowd I run around with this would be no big thing." She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her panties and her hands slid down the sides of her legs to the floor. Her tits ballooned out at me.
"I hope you don't mind my staring," I said lamely.
Gary winced and I could tell he wished he'd never known me. But Jill just shook her head and stood up straight again and chucked her panties onto the bed with the rest of her clothes. "Don't be stupid," she laughed in a friendly sort of way. "Males are attracted by the sight of naked female bodies, and that's all there is to it." She picked up her canvas bag and loosened its drawstrings casually. I got one shoe off and started on the other while I devoured the vista of her rich red pubic hair curling up in a silky triangle puff, and splitting the triangle from its center to its bottom, the scrolls of her cuntlips parting around the slitted well of her hole. In my mind somebody was screaming, "Jump on her! Throw her back onto the bed and rip her legs open and plow it right up into that wet, sucking, animal hole!" But the screaming was just part of the whole screaming of my body, and I'd learned so well not to listen to that.. . I just squatted there taking off my shoe and staring. Besides, Jill deserved better than that.
Gary slipped his pants off and he had a tremendous erection that made his jockey shorts look like a tent, but he stripped them off anyway, and just like he would have done if he'd been alone, grabbed his bathing suit and pulled it on, tucking his erection into it neatly. Jill hardly seemed to notice. She fished her bikini out of the bag and shook out the orange and green flower-print bottoms and halter, one in each hand. She grinned mischievously at us and turned slowly around like a model on a revolving platform, giving us one more view of her petite form with its slim hips and girlish ass cheeks and slender legs and torso and big, firm tits. She fluffed up her cunt-hairs a little with her fingertips as she revolved back around to face us, and for just a second I could see the ridges of her inner lips hanging down like edges of pink oyster, looking, like they'd once been deep in the ocean. . . .
She put her halter on first. She held its cups in her hands and lowered her tits down into them, then leaned back up to press them up against her. She shook her head to throw a few wisps of hair out of her eyes as she reached up behind her to fasten it.
I stood like a stork on one foot to pull off a sock. All I could think of was that pursed slit of warm, ripe cunt. How I wanted to bury my face in it and fuck it with my tongue and spread it open and just stare at it and have her pull down my pants and suck my cock and cram it into her! But in three seconds she'd pulled an obscene piece of cloth over her treasures, and that was the end of it. She tugged at the seams of the suit to smooth it down and fit it over as much of her as it covered-which wasn't much-and slapped her ass with gay finality when she was done. She looked to Gary. "Well, at least we're ready." She glanced at me. "Do you want us to wait for you, or shall we go on ahead?"
I could hear someone moving up the stairs or in the hall. I couldn't leave that room until my erection was down. Gary was cleverly covering his with a towel as it subsided. "Go ahead," I mumbled. "I.. . . "
Jill flipped a wrist at me, as if to say, "Don't bother to explain," and headed for the door.
I slumped numbly against the bed facing the windows as Gary opened the door and they went out
"Hoho!" I heard Janet exclaim from the hall. "Could it be?"
"Could what be?" Jill replied icily.
The sound of Janet's voice shocked and excited me, and the tone of Jill's reply made me suspect that she'd done what she'd done mostly, in some crazy way, to spite Janet. I could tell there was some really bad blood between them. I wondered why, but I never found out. She and Gary went on down the stairs and I heard the door to the adjoining room open. I sat there on the side of the bed with my shirt and socks and shoes off and my cock aching, listening to Janet cross her room and suddenly seeing her appear in the doorway to the bathroom. The sight of her in her almost-nothing bathing suit with her soaking hair sticking to her head and neck and shoulders and beads of water running down across her flesh in hesitant little trickles, jolted me with such desire that I thought I'd go crazy.
Now that there was nobody else around she didn't have to be polite to me. "So-you caught a little sight of Jill's skinny ass and big titties," she jibed. "And now you're all excited." She made another one of those faces as though she'd tasted something bad. "You're really something." She leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms. "I just came up to get some suntan lotion.. . and take a shit. I do hope you'll excuse me."
I stared blankly at her.
"I bet you're so weird you get turned on watching me take a crap."
She didn't say anything else. She just went over to the toilet, the front of which I could barely see from where I stood, and whipped down her bikini bottoms and sat.
I didn't know what I was doing. All I knew was that I could only see her from her bare thighs down to where her bikini bottoms lay coiled around her ankles, and that wasn't enough. I got up and walked like a robot to the bathroom door.
She sat there and I watched the way the toilet seat cut into the fattish flesh of her thighs and ass, and the way a startling shock of mossy brown hair burst up out of the juncture of her inner thighs and her pubis. After a few seconds came the tinkling and plopping sounds from within the toilet I'd stooped so low that I was just plain nobody.
After a minute or so she reached out and slapped the toilet paper roll and tore off a handful of paper and wiped her ass. I stared at the parting of her cuntlips as she spread her legs. Such a lush, forbidden paradise.
She got done wiping her ass and got some more toilet paper and wiped her cunt. The lips pushed up and apart as she wiped one, two, three times, turning the wad of paper around at different angles. I couldn't take my eyes off her cuntlips as they flared to bare her pale, pink, luscious insides.
She started to drop the paper between her legs into the toilet and then suddenly changed her mind and thrust it out at me with a sneer. "Here! Here's a present for you! Take it home and jerk off with it!"
I almost vomited. I grabbed the doorknob and slammed the bathroom door so hard I thought I'd tear the wall down. For a few seconds everything was red and anger and a whole burst of bitterness and hate against the world blotting out everything. I wanted nothing more than to cram my cock into Janet's mouth; to ram it down her throat; to bang away at her cunt and make her kiss my ass. Reels of pornographic revenge-fantasies played through my mind.
I heard her moving around in the other room, opening dresser drawers, and then she walked back to the bathroom door and opened it with exaggerated softness. She stood hanging onto the handle, half leaning on it, with a hard, nasty look on her face that said, "I've got your number." She had a tube of Coppertone in her left hand. She dropped it and let go of the doorknob with her right The stony hardness in the lines of her face broke, and though I knew it was all just bait, just a lure, that there was a hook in it someplace with a sharp barb, my body flooded with excitement at her sultry, seductive smile. For just a few seconds I thought she might really be human.
Then she started in. "Poor, poor Bob," she cooed. "Can't get a piece of ass anywhere. Has to sit around and jerk off." Her hands rested on her waist and then began slipping tentatively down over her hip-bones. Her fingers reached the metal rings at the sides of her bikini and hooked into them. "Well, poor Bob, how'd you like me to give you something to jerk off about for the next month?"
She pulled out on the rings, stretching the crochet-work down tightly across her pubis and releasing a tiny puff of hair from beneath its waistband. "You could even jerk off now, if you wanted to," she grinned wickedly, staring at the throbbing lump in my pants. "I wouldn't mind." She bent slowly from the waist and held her arms stiff and her hands traveled to the floor and took her bikini bottoms with them. She straightened up and spread her legs and hooked her fingertips into the outer lips of her pussy and curled them in to get a grip and pulled the lips up and out. "Come on, you poor sucker!" she snarled. "Take out your meat and beat it! That's what you want to do, isn't it?"
Now that she had me hooked right by the balls she could get nasty again. She knew I couldn't help myself.
I unbuckled my belt and unsnapped my fly and unzipped it. With my eyes still glued to the pale lavender-tan of her inner lips and clit, I pushed my pants and my underpants down together.
My cock caught on the waistband of my underpants on the way down and then snapped free and slapped back up against my belly with a plopping sound. I have a pretty good-sized cock-one of Brace's buddies once measured it at over seven inches hard, and it's good and thick-and when Janet saw it she gave a derisive smirk, as though it was a nice cock, but it was really a shame it had to be wasted on an ass-hole like me.
She pinched her clit between her cuntlips and wriggled it back and forth and started to get excited. I could tell she was getting hot holding all this power over me, but it didn't matter why. The sight of her getting hot drove my hand to harder and faster pumping. I staggered back and leaned against the bed with one hand.
She pursued me. The bed was a low four-poster, and she came over to stand next to it, about three feet from me, gripping one of the slender foot-posts for support. The post had a roundly pointed knob on top that made it look like a long cock or a dildo, and when she wasn't leaning against it she was running her hand up and down it like she was jerking it off. "Bet you'd like me to jerk you off," she taunted. "Or suck you off, or let you fuck me. No chance! I wouldn't let you lay one of those filthy hands on me if my life depended on it!"
No matter what she said now, it turned me on. Just her talking about jerking and sucking and fucking drove me wild. But the lingering tangle of shame and degradation in the pit of my stomach kept me from coming. I would latch onto the sight of her tits flopping around on her chest, or of her cunthole, which she opened wide and shoved two fingers into, or of the firm, jiggling bounce of the bottoms of her ass cheeks that tantalized me from behind the arch of her legs, and I would feel that gripping tension that says you can't help it, you're going to shoot, it's coming now . '. .
But every time I felt the come rising up out of the roots of my manhood like a column of mercury under a blazing sun, the shame and degradation of it all descended on my groin like a cold ice-pack, and I quivered with impotent frustration. I whacked away desperately at my poor cock, trying at least to prove that I was virile, trying to prove it in the face of a woman whose bitter brown eyes and acidly curving lips kept telling me I'd be better off as a eunuch.
Janet sensed my problem. She gave a guttural grunt from deep in her throat and then threw her head back and cackled. She kept her hand rubbing in little circles over her clit and climbed up onto the bed. She grabbed a post
The post reached about three feet above the mattress, and right away I could see what she was going to do. Its prick-head knob was just a little bigger than the head of my cock, and now she stood up and edged back toward the corner of the bed, backing over it, getting up on her tip-toes to let it slide forward over her ass-hole and up into the opening of her pussy. "This bedpost is probably a better fuck than you are," she said. She pulled her cuntlips up and out again to let me see its dark, polished hardwood sinking slowly, carefully into her dilating slit
I crawled up onto the bed right underneath her. The sight of her muscles stretching and relaxing and gripping and making the shiny wood wet had me going. "Lie on your back," she commanded. "I don't want you shooting all over the bedspread." I did as I was told. "Now just watch this pole reaming up my cunt, and watch my clit and my tits and my fingers while I get myself off, and maybe you'll be able to get something out of that poor old prick of yours." Her clit lanced up out of its folds of flesh like a spearhead jabbing at the bedpost's shaft, which now probed four inches up her. "Come on, you pitiful mother-fucker," she almost shouted, "let's see some cream!"
I sensed that things had changed; that she was on the spot now. If she couldn't make me come, that would mean she wasn't as hot a sex bomb as she thought she was. After all, a wretched, sex-starved baby like me . . . I should have come in my pants just at the thought of her. So she wanted me to come, and she was trying her damnedest to make me.
That got me off. That and the way she squatted down on the post and slid back up and squatted down again, and whipped her fingertips up and down, back and forth, over her clit.
For a split second I had a horrible fantasy. If I kicked out and knocked her legs from under her the bedpost would skewer her right up the middle. She'd scream and the hardwood would tear up into her insides like a spear and burst her wide open. Maybe it would even kill her. But the horror of it was too much for me, and the fantasy vanished. Instead I saw her groaning on the tip of a huge, dark prick, like a horse's.
This time the heat was really on. The mercury in my loins boiled at the sight of Janet's hair swirling and jouncing wildly over her shoulders and across her face, of her mouth twisted up in grim concentration, of her tits like two white water-balloons floating stormily above me, their pale nipples flushed and hard; of her fingers working and her hips squirming and her thighs going tense and relaxing. The sounds of the bed creaking and her little squeals and gasping breaths and my hand straining at its task, making little clicking noises of gooey secretions in loose skin, blended into a gathering crescendo. The muscles of my forearm were rock-hard and aching for relief when Janet mashed down mercilessly on her clit with her fingers and squatted ferociously on the bedpost and stole a long, lingering look at my cock and got off.
It was that stolen look at my cock that finally did it for me. I knew she wasn't seeing my cock, just a cock, but that didn't matter. It was a big, healthy, excited male cock. It was a good cock, and Janet liked good cock.
I shot up my chest almost to my chin. The release was delicious, searing, explosive, total. That real live semen splatting over my flesh was proof of whatever had to be proved, and for an instant I felt an uplifting surge of triumph.
But the minute the overpowering sensations of ejaculation began to ebb. I plummeted down a dark mine-shaft of hopeless self-hate and hit the bottom like I'd jumped from a twenty-story building.
Janet saw that in my face and that got her off even more. A flitting shadow of the fantasy of kicking her legs from under her returned and departed. I should want to kill myself, for Christ's sake!
Janet squirmed and writhed to the conclusion of her self-indulgence. I lay on the bed beneath her, unable to take my eyes from her but revolted at the sight
When she was done she slid off the bedpost and got down off the bed and rubbed her pussy a little and went to get her bathing-suit. She didn't say another word. She just slipped the suit on and, without even looking at me again, picked up her tube of suntan lotion and walked out
I cried. Honest to God. I cried. I got up sobbing and went to the bathroom and wiped the come off myself and splashed cold water on my face and dried it off and went back and sat on the bed. After a few minutes I realized that people would be missing me. I managed to get my bathing suit on and stumble downstairs. When I got there Janet was sauntering around among the guests arm-in-anh with her husband, once more playing the gracious hostess.
I dove into the pool, all the way down to the bottom, and I wanted to stay there.
CHAPTER FOUR
It didn't take me long, after I'd had my idea, to get the goods on Janet. She was the easiest girl I ever did. That was because she liked to flaunt her sexiness-even her extra-marital affairs-in people's faces. I guess she never believed anyone would have the gall to tell her husband about it, or threaten to. All I did was follow her to where she met her dates a few evenings and write down their descriptions and, where I could, their addresses and names.
After the incident at the party Janet no longer teased or taunted me much. She acted as though I didn't exist, or as though I were only a machine. She'd come into my office saving, "Mr. Parkinson wants to know whether you have the week's expenditures totaled yet," and she'd look straight into my eyes like she was looking into a fish bowl. An empty one. In a way that was even worse than the teasing and taunting. She refused to recognize my humanity. But I soon took care of that.
When I had four or five dates and times and places and descriptions on her, and three or four names and addresses, I stayed after work one night and typed out a letter to her husband. "Dear Mr. Jamieson: You may be interested in the following information concerning a few of the many extra-marital affairs in which your wife has engaged recently." And then I listed the information. , After that I said, "It doesn't sit well with a person of conscience to see a kind and generous man like yourself being deceived by a woman you think is a good and loyal and trustworthy wife, but who is actually no more than your part-time whore. In my opinion she is not deserving of your affections or your generosity, but of course it is your opinion in this matter that counts. I just thought you would appreciate knowing the truth." And then I signed it, "A Distant Friend."
I made a carbon copy and stuck it way back in the back of a drawer in my desk and took the original home.
Next I called up Bruce-whom I hadn't been in touch with for six months-and asked if he knew how a person might go about assuming a false identity. I thought his gay or antiwar activist friends might know something about that. He said he'd see what he could find out, and he didn't ask any questions. He was a good guy, Bruce.
Then I waited. I waited almost two months. I did my job and I jerked off a lot imagining how it would be. I thought to myself, "Even if it never comes off, it's worthwhile believing it will happen just to make those fantasies seem real." I saw exactly what I would do with Janet a thousand times over.
After about three weeks Bruce called me and said he had a contact. I won't tell you how it worked, but two weeks later I had all I needed to prove I was James McCawley Northrup, Jr. I gave my landlord a month's notice and opened new bank accounts in my new name. Under that name I also rented a modestly elegant furnished room in the West Village. I put the furniture from my old apartment in storage. As I looked at the few pieces I'd managed to accumulate being carted away by moving men, I thought to myself, "When I see those again, I'll be Bob again." I had no idea how long that would be-and still don't to this day. The furniture is still in storage.
I stayed in my old apartment, sleeping on an air mattress and eating all my meals out so I could continue to answer the phone at my old number until the right time came. Occasionally I went down to James Northrup's room to make phone calls inquiring about other jobs. I knew I'd have to take something pretty menial, because I wouldn't be able to take any of Bob's references with me. I'd just have to show my natural intelligence and work my way up again on the basis of what I could do.
It was late August when the right time finally came. The company was preparing a financial report for a Board of Directors' meeting in September, and that meant lots of after-hours work for the Treasurer, his secretary, and the accountant. We had about a week's worth of work left to do when I handed in my letter of resignation, effective as soon as they could find someone to replace me. I knew that with all the accountants who were out of work at that time that they'd get somebody easily. I was good at my job, but as far as my personality went I was no asset to the office, and I guess even
Gary was glad enough to see me go by that time. "What do you say?" he asked as I handed my letter to him and he read it. "Do you want to stay out the month, or would you rather leave as soon as the financial report's finished?"
"As soon as possible," I told him. "I have some urgent personal business out on the Coast, and to be truthful, I'd just as soon make Thursday my last day." This was on a Friday afternoon. "I may have to leave even before that, but whatever happens, I'll finish my work on the report. I'll try to do a lot of it over the weekend." I turned to go.
"By the way," Gary said somewhat proudly, "I'm going out with Jill tonight. I hope she introduces me around in some of those swinging circles she was talking about!"
My cock stiffened at the thought of Jill. Of all the people in the office, she alone had treated me at least sympathetically-even more so since the party-although she'd turned me down when I'd asked her out But she'd done it nicely. She'd patted me on the shoulder and said, "I'm afraid you're just not my type. But don't take it personally. You'll find someone who's your type sooner or later, and it'll be better all around." I remembered that for a long time. Gary noticed my reaction to his news, and so on the spur of the moment I said, "You don't think you could get her to drag me along sometime, do you?"
"I don't know," Gary replied, and I could tell from his expression that he thought he was gangly-looking enough that he didn't need to add my ineptitude to his social problems.
"Oh, forget it," I said. I wasn't going to be "Bob" for long enough for Jill to set anything up and get in touch with me anyway, even if she'd do it. And anyhow, I was through with taking chances on being rejected. "Have a good time, and fuck her a few good ones for me." Gary seemed mildly relieved as I headed for ihe door. "And let me know as soon as you find a replacement for me, will you?" I added. That was a very necessary remark, but I made it sound offhand.
"Yeah-okay." Gary smiled the way you do when you're saying goodbye to someone you would have liked to like if he hadn't been so intolerable at times.
I spent the weekend working like a dog on the report material and training myself to answer to "Jim" instead of "Bob." Except that on Saturday afternoon I went to Coney Island and rode the roller coaster four or five times to burn off some tension. While I was careening wildly around with the pit of my stomach dropping out and that funny tingling sensation taking over my groin, visions of my coming trial plagued me with scenes of failure: accusations, scandal, possibly even jail. But then, as I recalled how I had planned for every possible contingency, my fears evaporated to images of success that flipped before my eyes like a pack of dirty postcards. When I got off the roller coaster and wandered among the crowds I suddenly saw every desirable young woman as accessible to me. As I watched slim young girls in skin-tight pink pants and tit-grabbing halters, lusty-looking women in short skirts and see-through tops, sinuously sensual wives and girlfriends and lovers in skimpy, clinging hot-pants, all resting on the arms of their men as they strolled along easily and laughed and joked and sighed and talked in quiet whispers, I thought to myself, "There isn't one of them I couldn't track down and hang up. There isn't one I couldn't get something on-I'll bet there isn't" But right then, at that moment, there was only one that mattered: Janet.
When I went into work on Monday morning I had all but a few loose ends of the report material tied up. I could fiddle around with those as long as I wanted and feed what I'd done at home to the treasurer at will. If I hadn't felt so completely in control of everything I think I would have panicked. But I didn't see myself in an office anymore. I saw myself on a dewy forest trail in-the early morning, with my shotgun over my arm and my bird dogs out, waiting for the instant when the game was flushed and the gun-butt would jump to my shoulder and, like a precision instrument, the trigger would trip and the birdshot would find its mark. I laughed to myself over that. Birds and birdshot. It was terrible.
At just a little before five on Tuesday afternoon Gary wandered into my office. "We found a replacement for you," he said. I'd been into Janet's office just a few minutes before and I'd made sure I left the door open, but when Gary came in she was in her boss's office. "So you're free to go as soon as you get the last of the report work in. I just thought I'd stop on my way out and let you know."
"Oh, that's good," I answered, rocking back in my chair and stretching a little as though to start a conversation. "Who is he? Is he good? Where did you get him from?"
Gary chuckled slyly. "It's a woman. First-rate credentials, and a body to match. A little light on the face end, but she's okay looking. She's thirty-three, and she looks like she knows where it's at. I've had her application on file for three months now."
I could see why Gary hadn't been sorry to see me resign, and I couldn't blame him for it. "Good luck with her," I replied. "Have any luck with Jill and her friends?'
Just then Janet came back into her office and glanced at us. She was wearing a silk pants-suit. It was lemon yellow and you could see the lines of her matching bra and panties beneath it. She went to a file drawer and Gary said, "Let's not discuss that right now."
"Okay," I agreed. Janet returned to her desk with a thick file and I could see she had another few hours of work before she'd be off for the night. "Anyhow, when does my replacement want to start?" I asked loudly enough for her to hear.
"Any time. She's been out of work for a few months now, and she says she's ready to get back to the money-spending life. Hahaha."
"Well, I can understand that," I said. "I'll tell you, I've been working like a dog, and I can get everything finished up by tonight."
There was a long moment of silence. Everything had been said that needed to be said, as far as I was concerned.
"Well, then, I might not see you again," Gary said. "If I don't-good luck. With whatever those personal problems out on the Coast are, and just . . . well, you know."
I shook hands with him and he left. I pulled out my bottom desk drawer and reached far into the back of it and fished out the carbon copy of the letter to Janet's husband. At the same time I turned on a mini-cassette tape recorder I'd bought a few days before. The salesman had told me it was the kind the FBI and the police used for electronic surveillance. It was just a little bigger than a cigarette pack and it had a remote microphone which I jammed into a pile of papers toward the front of the drawer. I closed the drawer all but about a quarter of an inch and then cleared most of the papers off my desk and smoothed the letter out on it. Then I went rapidly to work tying up loose ends. That took about half an hour. During that time Janet's typewriter rattled like a machine gun and Parkinson called her into his office three times. Then he left for the night, and Janet and I were alone. As soon as he went she sauntered into my office. "Did I overhear correctly that you're going to be leaving us?" she asked, looking past me out the window behind my desk that fronted on Park Avenue.
"That's right. And pretty soon, too. In fact, I've just finished up my work on the report ahead of schedule, so this will be my last day." I patted a pile of papers on my desk. "This is it."
She looked disdainfully at me and at the papers and took a few steps around the desk to glance at them over my shoulder. "Well I must say, we're going to miss you around.. . "
Before she could get her parting shot out she saw the letter.
She froze, and then she sneered and picked it up and looked at it more closely. Her face contorted with anger. "What the hell is this? What the hell is this? What do you think you're doing, you slimy bastard?"
I smiled blandly at her and rocked back in my chair. "It's all explained in the letter. The way you cheat on your husband is disgusting. No man ought to allow it to happen. If you want to be a whore, then go be a whore, but don't ask a perfectly fine man like Hamilton to support you-to lavish money on you, for Christ's sake-in the meantime."
Her mouth dropped open and she took a half step back. "You can't do this," she gasped. "It'll ruin me.. . my life.. . "
"Rough shit," I said. "After what you did to me at that party at your house, I don't give a rusty fuck about you."
I could see the wheels spinning in her head, and I could see her noticing that the letter she held was a carbon copy, and that the original might already have been mailed. "Did you . . . did you send this yet?"
"No," I replied, "I'm going to mail it tonight. I was thinking about giving you a chance to see it first. Common politeness, you know."
"Now wait a minute," she stuttered. She took a step or two toward me and leaned over me with one hand on my desk and one hand on an arm of my chair. I averted my glance from her tits and looked her straight in the eye. "Don't you think we could . . . work something out? You don't have to do this. There's no reason for you to do this. It's just. . . well. . . there's no sense to it!"
"Work something out?" I asked. "What did you have in mind?"
Her eyes narrowed and she stared at my crotch. I was too tense to have a hard-on, which was a good thing. She straightened up a second and listened to see whether anyone else was in the office. "Well I don't want to talk about it here, but I think I may have something as important to you as that letter is to me. So why don't we discuss it after I get done working this evening? Hamilton's in London, and I had made some other plans, but I'm sure they can be adjusted."
"Well I was going to leave in a few minutes. But I certainly wouldn't deny you the right to try to talk me out of this."
She relaxed visibly. "Okay. Here's what you do. Come to the Hotel Pierre, 5th Avenue and 62nd Street, at eight o'clock. Ask for Ruth Deerborne. I'll be registered under that name. We can have dinner in my room together and talk about it"
"Fair enough," I said.
After that she went back to work and I spent fifteen minutes cleaning what was left of my personal belongings out of my office and surreptitiously packing up the tape recorder. Then I left the office for the last time.
I took a cab back to "Bob's" apartment and moved everything that was left there down to James Northrup's place. I took a shower and fixed myself a martini and put on my best suit Then, with a cheap portable recorder I'd bought in a pawn shop, I made a copy of the afternoon's conversation, and put it and the cheap recorder into my briefcase. I left James Northrup's identification in my room and took Bob's with me. I arrived at the Pierre at ten minutes past eight and by quarter after I was knocking at the door of Ruth Deerborne's room on the 14th floor. Janet answered, her face a mixed study in apprehension and relief. "Come in."
I walked into the elegant suite with its plush beige carpets and its Louis XIV-style furniture and its sconces and oil paintings on the walls. A magnum of champagne and a bucket of iced shrimp sat on a sideboard in front of a window overlooking Central Park The sun was just setting over the West Side, and the view was spectacular: a cauldron of molten orange-red. It suited my mood perfectly. I put my briefcase down and sat on a sofa. "Well," I said, "Go ahead. You're going to do the talking, right?"
"Champagne? Shrimp?" I nodded. She popped the champagne cork and filled two glasses and made us each a plate of shrimp with cocktail sauce and delivered mine to me as she came to sit next to me on the sofa. "All right. I guess there isn't too much sense in beating around the bush. You've got a lot of shit on me that I wouldn't want my husband to know about You'd also like to fuck me. Am I right?" I nodded deferentially. "So-that's what I'm offering. But . . . " She stared at me as though she were all businesswoman. ". . . just this one time. I'm not going to have you calling me up for a free screw every time you feel like it. If it came to that it wouldn't be worth it for me. Do you know what I mean?"
"Perfectly. Just this one time. But you're going to do exactly what I want. Within the limits, shall we say, of what could be expected from a versatile whore?"
She showed no sign of having been insulted. In her own way she was very tough. She put her hand in her chin and mused a little. "This one time? And that's all? Your word of honor?"
'You're a funny one to be talking about honor," I laughed. "But my honor is better than yours. After all, if I accept your suggestion, it might be construed as my having blackmailed you. And I can go to jail for that. Now I happen to have a recording of our conversation this afternoon in the office, and you can hear for yourself . . . " I pulled the cheap recorder out and turned on the tape. . . that it proves that you were the one who made the suggestion that we work out this arrangement-not me."
She listened to the tape in numb silence and gaped in disbelief.
"I'm not as dumb as you think I am," I assured her, putting the recorder away. "By the way, that tape is of course a copy. But-the only way to get away with something like this is not to press your luck. So I won't press mine. This one time and that's all. But you do exactly as I say. Right?"
She knew she'd been outfoxed right down to the wire. She lifted her champagne glass in a half sarcastic, half respectful gesture.
"The sarcasm isn't appropriate any more," I said as I clinked my glass against hers in a macabre toast. "Don't you agree?"
She nodded in compulsory agreement as she put her glass to her lips. "All right. I'm at your service. What do you want me to do?"
I stretched out and took a deep swig of champagne. "I've always fancied you sucking my cock . . . for starters." I gestured at my crotch and a thin smile came across her lips. "I have a feeling you can suck cocks quite nicely. Then we'll have dinner, which I assume you're capable of paying for, and then we'll do a few other things. But at the moment.. . why don't you take off your clothes?"
"All right." She got up and shoved the coffee table in front of the sofa back a few feet. I think she half expected me to grab my cock and start whacking, but I just lay back picking shrimp off my plate and dipping them into a blob of cocktail sauce and pulling them off their toothpicks with my teeth. That made her a little uneasy, but still, she reached up behind her and the zipper of her pants-suit hissed down.
"With a little style," I requested. "It's too bad we don't have some music." I looked over to the wall and spotted a sound system control panel. "Hold on a second." I got up and went over and found a radio station that was playing a lot of old danceable rock music; hard-driving stuff with a solid beat, the kind the band at her party had played. I returned to the couch. Janet had frozen in place with her zipper down. "Okay," I said. "Dance and strip. Strip-tease. Get it?"
She nodded numbly and began to dance. I'd seen her dance a few times at her party, and that was what had given me this idea. She had a way of rotating her hips in tight little jerks that made the flesh of her thighs and ass cheeks jiggle like jelly in the dining car of a speeding railroad train. "Just pretend you're stripping for Marlon Brando or Paul Newman or one of those super-studs," I laughed. I was still a little tense inside, but I knew everything was going to be all right now.
Janet shook her shoulders and danced around in circles. Her jugs bounced back and forth. She seemed to be taking my advice, because she certainly didn't look like she was stripping for The Worm. She was putting everything she had into it. No wonder. If she didn't please me she had her imagine house and her imagine clothes and her social position and all her money to lose.
She went down on her knees a foot or so in front of me and bent forward. The top of her pants-suit slid off down her arms, revealing her pendulous tits suspended in the cups of her gauzy yellow silk bra, their nipples poking out like pretty little pink buttons. She stood up and the pants-suit slithered down across her belly, caught for a second on her hips, and then, as she shimmied back and forth and ran her hands up and down her sides, it fell like a pile of used draperies to the floor. Her cunt-hair made a curly mosaic beneath the ripely bulging cloth of her panties.
She half-turned and shook her ass at me and reached back to peel her panties halfway down her crack. I smiled and sipped champagne and reveled in the memory of her telling me, "I bet you'd even get turned on my watching me take a shit!" She was going to pay for that-right up the ass.
Then, leaving her panties halfway down her ass, she took off her bra, with her back still to me, and flung it away just as though she was throwing it to an assistant offstage. "She'd make a good stripper," I thought to myself. "I wonder whether she's ever done it."
She cupped her tits in her hands and juggled them in her palms like the pair of ripe melons that they were. She plucked at the nipples and rolled them around between her thumbs and forefingers until they stood out like a pair of wrinkled red lightbulbs. She rubbed her palms over them and squeezed her tits and pulled them apart and shoved them together. "Nice tits," I said. "Not quite as nice as Jill's, but nice tits all the same."
She ignored the remark. She had to. She grabbed one of her tits in both hands and pointed it up and stretched it as far as it would go and lowered her mouth toward it. She could just reach the nipple with the tip of her tongue. She licked around it and wagged her tongue in sharp little jabs over it, making it glisten and sparkle. Then she did the other one. And then she started to push her panties down. Inch by inch they crept over the terrain of pale skin, from less to more private regions; first just the hairless suggestion of the rise of her pubis out of the subtle hollow of her lower abdomen, and then wisps of that mossy brown hair, and then the top of her cunt, thickly forested, with the creases between it and her thighs deepening, and then her pussy itself, scroll-lips curving inward to her deepest recesses, with just the very edges of that muted crimson oyster-flesh showing.
My cock rose and she saw it and started to feel safer. But a quick glance into my uncompromising eyes told her that she'd better keep up the good work. She kicked her pants-suit out of the way and went down on her knees again, this time bending back to let her tits hang down off her chest on either side. Her cunt pushed up toward me as she arched her back. She spread her legs like she was doing the limbo and its hole eased open. She reached down and, just the way she'd done that time at the party, pinched her clit between her cuntlips and jiggled her fingers. That started her moaning, and I knew that the moaning was for real. I thought to myself, "She has to have as hot a pair of pants for a woman as I do for a man. She can get her cunt watering in three seconds whenever there's a cock around. If only Td been born good-looking and rich!" And then I said, "Lie down on your back and kick your legs up and spread it all out nice and wide. I want to see what I'm getting, and I want to see it deep."
She did as she was told. She lay on her back and brought her knees up outside her chest and reached down around her hips to spread her cunt Inside the wishbone of where they met to fold over her clit in the front, inside the teardrop-shaped loop her inner lips made toward the back, a tawny, livid grotto of spongy inner muscle opened wide, its depths lost in the most intimate of shadows. The depths seemed to beckon to my cock, saying, "See how this pleasure-cave is made just for you? See how its walls will squeeze in on you when you push up between them?"
"Your ass-hole too," I said. "Spread your ass-hole too."
Her fingernails, delicately-filed and carefully polished, crossed the wide bridge of flesh between her cunt and her ass-hole and delved into the tight aperture of her sphincter. It was neatly creased in four, and it had an ephemerally doughnut-like pout to it, above which there was a slight indentation. An imperfection, I thought. Not a bad one. Not like some of the really gross ones I'd seen in low-rent strip shows that had bothered me; even turned my stomach. But still, an imperfection. I chuckled to myself. It didn't matter. Her ass-hole was going to get fucked anyway. And then her cunt, for a grand finale.
But first her mouth. I hadn't jerked off since Friday, saving up for this. If I had anything left after three shots she might get it in the ear or something! I laughed to myself again. "Wider," I demanded as she teased timidly at the rim of her ass-hole and spread it to a tiny little pinhead of an opening. "Relax. Push out." I knew that when she pushed out on her ass-hole that would push out on her cunt too, and I wanted to see that; the depths rising up to meet me. "Just like you've got a cock up your ass," I told her.
"I've never had a cock up my ass," she half-whined. Then she realized her tone had been wrong. But still, she was afraid. "Do you want to fuck me in the ass?" She strained to dig her fingernails deeper into the aperture and brought up a spreading panorama of cherry-pink insides. That was nice. So very tight and smooth. More perfect than a cunt, in a way. So much simpler and so much more constricting. At least, that's what my gay friends had argued.
"We'll see about that later," I told her. "But just in case I do, you'd better practice relaxing. You can do it if you concentrate. Your cunt too. You can open yourself up wider all around. Do it!"
I didn't know how far I could really push her, but it was at least that far. She hooked her little fingers and her ring fingers into her ass-hole and her index and forefingers into her cunt and I saw the muscles of her abdomen go lax and the muscles of her ass convulse in little tightening and loosening rhythms that opened her up wider each time. Her ass-hole became a wide funnel of cherry-pink flesh and the well of her cunt deepened until, in the fight that shone from a table-lamp over my shoulder, I could see all the way to the curving walls of her grotto's innermost depths. That was where my cock was finally going to go. In there. For the first time my cock was finally going to go up a cunt, and it was going to be this one, and was going to be good.
"Okay. You can blow me now." I got up in the middle of her gyrations and went over and turned off the radio and came back and stood over her. "Pull down my pants."
She was really getting into this thing. Maybe she was secretly getting off on it. Maybe she just wasn't taking any chances. But she came up off the floor onto her knees and reached around me and hooked her hands behind my calves and ran them up over my ass and nuzzled her cheek against the bulging cloth of my crotch. That sent shooting stars down my rod right to the core of my genitals and made me shudder all over.
Then she unbuckled my belt and took down my pants and underpants together, and when I stepped out of them, she got up and went to drape them neatly over a chair. Just the way I'd imagined. I sat down on the couch again and she curled up on the floor between my legs. She took my cock in her fingers and diddled it for a little bit, feeling its superficial softness over its hard, almost brittle muscle. She goosed my balls with her fingers, finding just the right place at the root of my cock to rub and stroke and vibrating her fingertips on it. "Do you want to come into my mouth?" she asked.
"Yes. I want to shoot right down your throat. When I shoot, I don't want there to be any of my cock outside your mouth. I want you to get it all. Do you understand?"
She nodded. Apparently that wouldn't be too hard for her. She was probably a very practiced cocksucker. I wondered whether she'd be as good as Ronnie or Bruce. She eyed my rod with just a trace of awe. Most-likely it was one of the bigger ones she'd run across. I wondered about her husband. Maybe he was Needle Dick the Bugfucker! Hahaha.
Then she wet her lips. I'd been waiting a long time to see her do that; to see her running her tongue up the sharp arch of her upper lip and back down again, and then straight across her slightly pouting lower lip, and then up the arch again, almost like a roller-coaster.. . .
She blew lightly on the underside of my shaft, and that felt great. Then her tongue wound out of her mouth like a fat, gentle pink snake, and licked. Then she bent down over my cock and brought her lips to it. The first contact on its horny head was total ecstasy. The coursing warmth, the live coaxing, the jolting little electric shocks of irresistible sensation . . .
Then she really came after me. All of a sudden the seal of her lips broke over my cock-head and ran down the length of my shaft like a flag down a flagpole until they nestled in the furry bed of my crotch-hair. My rod waggled far down her throat. She gulped and half-gagged on it and drew a pounding rhythm of exultation out of it. I thought I was going to let go on the first attack but I held out. I'd planned it that way. I was going to make her work for it.
She came up off me and gripped my rod in her fingers and then sucked back down to the top of her fist and swirled my cock around in her mouth with her hand, jerking and milking it all the time. The breath streamed from her nostrils onto the top of my shaft as she worked, and her tits banged against my inner thighs, and at the end of the knotted white ivory rope of her backbone, the deep cleft of her ass crack framed a curving V of plush carpet.
It wasn't only the sensations that transported me into an uncharted realm of bliss. It was the idea of a real live desirable woman totally absorbed in the task of pleasing me. For an instant I thought to myself, "How much better it would be if she really wanted to do it! How much better it would be if this were an act of passion rather than of compulsion! Then I could respond with my own passion. I would be obliged to respond with my own passion and I would love it." But this was good too, and for me it was the only way. This way I didn't have to worry about pleasing her. I could let myself be totally involved in my own pleasure; a pleasure sweet with the nectar of the clever hunter's triumph.
I closed my eyes and a surge of delirious abandonment sucked all my feelings of impotence from me. I felt like a sultan enjoying his favorite haremite. It was all there: the opulent surroundings, the subservience, the sparkling wine, and the wishes instantly translated into reality. My potency was free to release itself at will into a madly sucking mouth whose only function was to call it forth.
I let my hips succumb to the whip-lashing cadence of orgasm.
The joy-pumps were primed and the vital fluids were rising in their tubes.
Masculine muscles seized upon the semen with fierce exultation and squeezed it crazily up in grunting pleasure-thrusts.
Janet felt me coming and her throat opened wide and her whole body rocked to cram my shaft deep down her throat. Her lips and nose ground into the wooliness of my crotch-hair and lingered while her lips and tongue swirled over me like tidal eddies to the rhythm of the earthquake tremors that wracked our bodies.
The come-blast splashed with dizzy fury into the tight recesses of her gullet and surrounded the head of my cock, then the shaft, with slimy warmth and primeval wetness. My come came back around me and saturated me in the close tightness of its throat-bound channel. It spurted and gushed and filled Janet's mouth and over-flowed it at the corners, leaking and then squirting across her cheeks, down her chin. It dripped in cloudy white-gray droplets on the edge of the sofa and down onto the floor.
I rode the inebriated currents of consummate satisfaction for.. . it seemed like forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Am I doing all right so far?" Janet asked with a half smug, half anxious grin as she picked herself up off the floor and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
"Terrific," I admitted. "You just keep it up like that and you won't have anything to worry about"
She chuckled and picked up her purse and went to the bathroom. I heard water running and I heard her brushing her teeth. "If I can't give a good blow-job when I need to, I'm in pretty sad shape," she said when she turned off the water. It was very strange. She seemed suddenly to have more pride in her ability to satisfy me than she'd had before in her ability to make me feel like a worm. I wondered whether any lessons could be drawn from that about women in general. I hoped not, but I feared so. Well-for me it didn't matter.
"So now let's have some dinner." I picked up a room service menu from the coffee table.
Half an hour later we were fully dressed. Three waiters delivered and served filet mignon, medium rare, for me, and lobster Newburg for her. We sat in muted tension, conversing little while we ate and I drank from my private, outrageously expensive bottle of vintage claret while she sipped reflectively from her excellent but somewhat less extravagantly chosen bottle of white burgundy. I knew that nothing like this had ever happened to her before, and I sensed as I savored the musky, mellow dry-smoothness of my wine that although deep down she was angry and bitter, she was also fascinated by my sudden change of character-as though it was very interesting to see a worm turn. Even, perhaps, a little exciting. I knew that she was of one of those strange women who admire forthrightness, even a certain degree of selfishness and insensitivity, in men; as long as they were strong. Stronger than she was. For whatever reasons, and in whatever ways.
"All right," I said when the time had come to lay aside my napkin and slosh down my fourth and last glass of wine. "I think Fm ready to go at you again." My eyes betrayed a faint suggestion of humor at the situation-an attitude I never could have assumed as Poor Bob. "For our next act, Fm going to fuck you in the . ass."
Her brow wrinkled in fear and her mouth puckered as though attempting to deny entrance to the tighter, more constricted opening at her bottom end. She leaned over the table earnestly. "I really don't know if I can do that, Bob. I told you, Fve never done it before. I've never even tried. There have been lots of men who've wanted to; but I'm just too tight. . . . "
I got up from the table and motioned her to follow me to the bedroom. "Well, you're just going to have to loosen up." On the way I scooped up my briefcase, and when we got there I took a small bottle of mineral oil out of it. "This'll help. And it'll also help if you just get the idea into your head that my cock isn't that much bigger than a turd!" I laughed insidiously. One of Brace's buddies had told me that the first time he'd ass-fucked me and it had made a ludicrous kind of sense.
Janet grimaced ruefully. "That's not much consolation." Then she looked at me with pleading impatience. "Are you sure it's really necessary?"
"Absolutely." I was really beginning to enjoy this.
"All right, then. I guess I'll just have to chalk it up to experience and hope it doesn't hurt too much. What do I do?"
"I'm not out to hurt you, so I'll make it as easy on you as I can." Her expression said, "Nice of you." I smiled. "Just take off your clothes and bend over the bed there and spread your ass nice and wide. I'll put some of this stuff on you and work my finger up. It'll go a lot easier if you try to suck it in. Don't make me force it-take it yourself. Understand?"
She heaved a deep, tense sigh of resignation and removed her clothes. I undressed at the same time. It was amazing how natural it all seemed, especially since we were about to commit what's often called an "unnatural act." For a second I imagined that Janet was my wife, and that.. . . But of course that was absurd.
She moved to the bedside and bent over it till her tits squashed to the bedspread. She shuffled her feet and flexed her knees until she was comfortable, then reached back to spread her ass open. "Unh!" she groaned. "I don't know how wide I can.. . "
"It looks just lovely," I assured her, opening the bottle of mineral oil while my cock rose once more. I stuck my finger into the clear, slippery substance. "That's right. Just let all your muscles go lax. You're a garage waiting for a car to come in!" I laughed heartily and she managed an uncertain little giggle. Either she was a damned good actress, or she had made up her mind to go with the flow and get what she could out of a bad situation.
Her sphincter was flaring and constricting, flaring and constricting, like the petals of a livid iris, expanding and deepening its hole until it was as open as it had been before when she'd been on her back on the floor. I applied my finger to it, spreading the oil around its rim, where creases rapidly smoothed and flattened to my touch. Then, resting the finger easily against the opening, I began to work it in. Janet kept forcing out and sucking in, forcing out and sucking in, and I needed no pressure at all to get an index finger in to the second knuckle. She'd determined to make it as easy on herself as possible. "How does it feel?" I asked.
"Not so bad. It felt better when you were playing around the outside. I sort of liked that. But it's not uncomfortable yet. When you push forward toward my cunt it does something . . . "
It took a few more minutes for me to get the whole finger comfortably in, and then I started with a second. She moaned a few pained syllables at the stretching of the edges of her hole, but it didn't take long before she'd accommodate it, and once it got in past the rim, it slid into the softer inner regions more easily than the first. I got two fingers in all the way and wormed them around. "Okay," I said. "I think you're ready now."
She wasn't so sure. I could feel it in the tautness of her ass-hole and the rigidity of her back muscles as I ran my free hand up and down her spine, making little excursions to knead her to relaxation. "Well, take it at your own speed," I advised. "But you've got to take it all sooner or later. And once you get it all in and start moving a little I'm going to shoot in about three seconds. I've never been able to hold out very long with a cock up an ass. It's just so tight and hot . . . So the quicker you get it all in, the quicker it's all over." I thought that sounded good, as though I'd had all kinds of experience with women. like most good silent lies, it had the virtue of being true.
I touched the head of my cock to her gaping ass-hole, which now quivered in raw suspense, caught between rejecting as it wanted to and accepting as it had to. A hoarde of memories came flooding back to me: of the girl I'd almost bled to death over, of the first time I'd ass-fucked Ronnie, of the first time I'd got it up the rear end myself . . . of all those times when I'd thought, "This girl is too good to be fucked up the cunt! What she needs is a good, hard, merciless shot up the rear end! Then she'd appreciate getting it where it belongs! Even from me!"
Suddenly a charge of excitement sizzled on the surface of my rod; a charge from Janet's reluctant ass-hole itself. I felt-I knew-that deep down Janet really wanted this. I knew she wanted to shudder and squeal and squirm and cry. I knew that I'd been doing It all wrong, being gentle with her. She wasn't undergoing this only because of the letter to her husband. She was submitting to me because she wanted to be punished for it all. Inside her someplace, in a tiny little sealed-off shell, there was the microscopic remnant of a decent person crying to be released; crying for its shell to be broken. It was in a case-hardened sphere of indifference that only violence could puncture. She didn't need it gently. She needed it roughly, like she needed a good spanking. She needed some agony to wash her accumulated guilt away. Her soul was in debt because of the things she had done to her husband, and it wanted to repay.
I placed my palms on her ass cheeks and leaned with all my weight to push them aside, to yank her hole open like you yank open a newfound purse to see what fortune has seen fit to throw in your path. My cock jabbed at the center of her pain like the steely-tipped fingers of a karate master delivering a knife-point blow. I pinned her dead to the mattress. With a quick sweep of my arms at the sides of her head I bunched the bedspread over her face to muffle her scream.
The dikes broke and the floodwater rushed in. I could feel her saying, "Yes! Yes! Fuck me blind and deaf and dumb! Fuck me till you kill me! God, it feels so goodT
When that guilt-bound person sprang free from her dank and solitary prison to meet the fertilizing thunderstorm and searing lightning-bolt of my orgasm, the drenching outpour of a cooling rain of semen diffused her in a tepid swamp of relief and vague pleasure.
Then the circuits closed and the juice pulled the parched ground up to meet it. Suddenly Janet shoved her hands down between her legs and folded them over her cunt and began humping. The flesh-in-flesh-thing seized up in a terminal state of bittersweet euphoria and rattled my bones to the marrow. My skeleton shook like a fluorescent glowing ghost in the hands of a sly trick-or-treater and the Northern Lights flickered ephemeral phosphorescence inside the planetarium of my skull. The tempo of my climax reverberated in my ears like the tinnily brassy boing-boings of a pinball machine, and the impossible had happened. I'd reached into my pocket to fish for a nickel to make a last, desperate, hopeless, inane bet, and out had come a thousand dollar bill. The pair of aces couldn't cover it and folded to my "garbage cards": four of clubs, two of diamonds, six of hearts. I laughed and rolled my three in the hole, and then beckoned the dealer to turn up the card-that-would-have-been. I was already sweeping my winnings off the table and heading out of the door when the five hit the felt.
CHAPTER SIX
"Jesus, that was really something." Janet rolled out from under my spent, sprawling body. She hung her head in bewilderment and put her fingertips to her temples as though to straighten her mind out manually. After a few seconds she got up and rubbed her ass ruefully. "That was one of the most excruciating moments of my life." She gritted her teeth slightly "But it did something to me. I don't know what. Once the excruciation was gone . . . Well, I guess you know what happened." I would have expected her to have said this with at least a little shame, considering whom she was with, but I could detect only a kind of stunned wonder in her voice.
I went into the bathroom and started to run a bath. Janet followed me in, flipped up the toilet seat, and proceeded to clean herself off. "That's what I need. A good, relaxing bath."
"What makes you think it's for you?" I asked a little tauntingly.
"Nothing. In fact, I suspected it was for both of us."
I adjusted the water to make it a little hotter. Then I sat down on the edge of the tub. "Funny thing," I said. "I really do wonder whether I'm no longer disgusting to you." I shuddered a little as words came to my lips from some unknown and irresistible source. "Especially when I've just done something-or I'm doing something, really-that I think is pretty disgusting." I managed to keep a serene face as I said this. "Or are you really just putting on the act of the century to make sure your cheating isn't going to boomerang on you?"
Janet didn't know really what to make of this. I had the feeling she was just beginning to see how clever I was. More clever than the cleverest thief. I could see she was trying madly to figure out whether a true answer would be the best one, or whether she could tell a credible Be if she had to. Finally she decided-as nearly as I could see-to take the easy way out and tell the truth. "I won't tell you that I don't have any feelings of hate or revulsion connected with you. But right now I'm pretty confused about who you are, to me anyway, and if I don't know that, how can I know whether those feelings are connected with the real you? I mean, I still get little twinges of mental nausea when I look at you." She caught herself and stopped. "I guess that's not a very smart thing for me to say in my situation." She bit a fingernail nervously. I could see her cursing herself. "But . . . " she stammered, "I mean-you just don't seem to be the same person you used to be. I just.. . "
"Don't worry about saying the wrong thing." I had suddenly realized that it was more important to have her be honest with me than to have her say what she thought I wanted to hear. Not that I was sure she was really being completely honest, but at least she was coming closer than she ever had before. What galled me and made me bitter and ashamed was what I'd had to do to her, or maybe just what I'd done to her, to work this change. I kept asking myself, "Is this really what you have to do?" And certainly it wouldn't work like this every time. Janet could be one in a hundred, or one in a thousand.
"I get a little mental nausea when I look at myself in the mirror," I said sadly. "But at this point I'm not going to send that letter to your husband no matter what you say." She looked up searchingly at me as if to see whether that could possibly be true. "As long as you do what I say for the rest of the evening."
That seemed to bring things into focus again. "A deal's a deal," she said, "and I'll live up to my part." She got off the toilet and stood up in front of me with her hands on her hips. The bath was almost full, and she nodded at the rising water. "What do we do now?"
I was a little bewildered. It was going to be a hell of a lot harder to order her around now, but I knew I had to do it. "Get in." I turned off the water and unwrapped a couple of bars of soap. In seconds we were seated in the tub face to face with our legs under each other's arms.
"Mmmmmm," she sighed as the hot water steamed the tenseness out of her. I leaned forward to soap her shoulders and breasts as the water buoyed them up. It gave me a new kind of turn-on to feel her tits squishing soapily between my fingers, to see the lather coating them with tiny white bubbles that slid and slithered down her flesh. Once more sensations of desire emanated from my groin, and as they did I felt my commanding strength returning. I reached around behind her to soap her back, and then moved around to her arms and hands, cleansing and exploring and digesting the shape and feel of her body.
"Get up," I said when I had reached her waist. She stood in the shin-deep water and rotated slowly as I washed her lower half, my hands lingering in the softness of her wet, soapy crotch-hair and tickling back up toward her now-tender ass-hole in little excursions of conciliatory gentleness. "It's still pretty loose," I smiled up at her.
"Do you think it'll be easier . . . if I want to do that again?" I finished washing her and put the soap aside and she sat down.
"Now you can wash me," I informed her. "It'll probably be easier just because you know how to do it. Your ass-hole isn't going to loosen up all that much physically after being fucked just once, but it's mostly the mental looseness that counts. Did you like it enough to want to try it again some time?"
"Some of it," she said. She was washing my back and shoulders, and to emphasize the "some" she dug her finger nails briefly into my back and scratched. The little moving pinpricks of mild, sharp pain felt good.
"Yeah," I sort of grunted. There was a long silence while I closed my eyes and tried to banish recriminations from my mind and enjoy her almost motherly massaging of my chest, my sides, my buttocks, my cock and my balls, my thighs and calves and . . .
We turned on the shower after we were done and rinsed off and then dried each other. I rubbed a towel up into her cunt and she wrapped one around my cock and stroked easily.
"Okay. Why don't you go pick up some more champagne and come back to the bedroom for the last act."
"Can I ask what that's going to be?"
I slapped her casually on the ass. "Just a good old-fashioned fuck. You on the bottom, me on the top." She went to get the champagne. I went into the bedroom and pulled the sheets all the way down. Opening a closet at the foot of the bed, I found a full length mirror on the back of its door. Perfect. I'd be able to watch myself fuck her if I looked back around at it. I'd be able to see my cock sliding up into a pussy for the first time.
I was a little nervous. What if I did something wrong? I laughed at myself as Janet returned and set two champagne glasses on a nightstand and spread out on her back with her head framed seductively against a snowy white pillow. This time I didn't have to worry about doing anything wrong. However I wanted to do it, that would be right
"I see you've got things set up so. you can watch the show," she grinned. I crawled up beside her on the bed and put my head on her chest and began licking and sucking a nipple. "Mmmmmm, that feels good." She took my head in her hands and pressed it a little harder to her breast.
That gesture grabbed hold of me with a crushing bear-hug of genital impulse. I knew she'd had some conflict over doing it, and that made her doing it all the more exciting. I no longer felt her nipple in my mouth as something to be captured and made mine. I pressed its rubber-pebble hardness against the roof of my mouth and probed its finely wrinkled texture with my tongue tip, sucking at the feeling of it in my mouth, and I felt it as a thing to be coaxed, cajoled, seduced. If I could make her want to fuck me, that would be the biggest victory yet. Maybe I'd never know whether she really wanted to. But if I could make myself believe she did
She took my hand and put it down between her legs. She kept hers over it and guided my fingers in their quest for the right motions, the right pressures, the right places. The flat tips of two fingers curled down over her clit and hooked a little way into her hole, and a lightly circling motion captured her clit between the fingers and pushed its hard little nub around in circles.
She curled up against me. A hand traveled down across my chest and stomach to massage my crotch and fork my half-erect cock between two fingers that stretched down to probe my balls and the root of my shaft. Then she took my cock in her hands and started jerking gently, with long, teasing upward strokes that pulled the loose skin up and bunched it around the head. She ran her thumb up and down the underside of the head and then went back to jerking.
A brush-fire started someplace in my nether regions. The idea that I was, after all these years, in bed with a woman and about to fuck-or be fucked-saturated me with premonitions of an impending breakthrough. A new stage of my life was about to begin. Even then I knew that shame and degradation and self-repulsion were lurking outside the sphere of erotic firelight, but the conflagration was growing and burning everything away before it, enveloping me in its center and sending the demons of self-hate screaming off into the outer darkness with their clothing and their hair aflame.
Janet tugged hard at my cock and squirmed a little, and I could barely believe it, but it seemed she was trying to tell me she wanted to suck me again. I let her tit drop out of my mouth and rolled onto my back and her head traveled down. A leg swung over me and then she was straddling me with her mouth over my cock and her cunt hovering inches above my face.
"Come on," I breathed, "Sit on my face. Fuck it hard. Take what you want out of it!" I was inviting her to get her revenge and she accepted. Her cunt mashed down over my lips and nose and chin and her thighs gripped the sides of my head, pinning my ears down, and she was off and humping. I pressed my lips and tongue up into her slit. I darted my tongue-tip out to catch her clit and delve into her hole as she rocked back and forth. Then I felt the insides of her mouth sliding dizzily down the shaft of my cock.
I was lost in the damp tropical jungles of primitive womanhood. I fought through swamps and bayous, up mountainsides, slipping and sliding and reaching and grasping for the ephemeral ghost of her excitement. I had never dreamed of exploring this terrain in such intimate and overwhelming close-up. It writhed and pressed its flabby mounds of furred lips over my cheeks and vibrated the flesh-peak of its magic mountain over the soft, sensitive surfaces of my lips and tongue. Its juices slimed a thin coating of slipperiness over my face. The intoxicating ocean-earthiness of its odors captivated my nostrils. Once in a whlle I pulled back to stare at the pink mountain slope-tunnel mouth that led in a curving chute to the depths, or to lean around and watch her sucking me in the mirror.
After a few minutes she came up off me and laid her head on my thigh and pressed the shaft of my cock against her cheek. "I don't want to rush you, but I'm ready to fuck any time."
If she hadn't been so obviously ready-if her hips hadn't been churning of themselves, if her words had not come amid bated breaths and panting, I might have suspected that she simply wanted to get her ordeal over as soon as possible. I'd said this was to be the "last act." Suddenly it struck me that after all those weeks and months of planning and fantasizing, the brief moments of reality were slipping away, and soon I'd be cast into the solitary oblivion of a life with a new and empty identity. Empty except for the fact that I was a confirmed blackmailer . . .
I was shaking as Janet got up off me and moved around to lie on her back by my side. She pulled her knees up and apart and closed her eyes and massaged her breasts with her hands, pushing them around like living things underneath the white sheet of her pale flesh and pinching their nipples hard.
I strained to make everything seem real. I had got so used to things like this not being real that I could barely grasp hold of it when it happened. I was desperately afraid of missing it all even while it was taking place. My cock ached with longing for that exotic, bizarre sheath nestled between Janet's legs. It didn't know why, and neither did I, but once I pulled myself up and moved around to straddle her and she reached up and ran her fingers from the rim of my ass-hole to the root of my cock, up over my balls, and gripped the shaft to fit it into her, my shuddering body broke down and I fell heavily to her chest.
My rod lanced forward and sank into the antechambers of her womanhood with a searching desire of its own. Janet kept her hands on it. She dragged its head up out of the folds of her inner lips to run it over her clit and then shoved it down again. Up and down, and her legs kicked high and her feet pointed at the ceiling, and the hot, living suction of her insides went to work on me.
"Do you like to fuck me?" she whispered, circling the head of my cock around the entrance to her hole, pushing the lips aside and letting me feel the rough hairiness of the exterior and the smooth, yielding softness of her interior. "Do you like me to stir your cock around in my cunt like that? Does that feel good to you?"
For an answer my hips started jabbing, pulled by the silent cry of my genitals, and my cock-head pushed in past her bone-guarded cave-mouth into the one-way world of her clutching, grasping interior. It was all down there between my legs, surging out in ecstatic convulsions through my stomach and thighs, longing to nail her good and deep and make her scream with the pure pleasure of something suddenly gone right.
Her hole-mouth sucked and chewed at me and grabbed me and pulled me deeper. It was like sinking through quicksand to seventh heaven. She wrapped her arms around me and grabbed my buttocks and sank her fingernails into them. The deep sudden pain boosted the sensations of pleasure streaming from my groin to impossibly far-away heights. Her hands crammed me far into her living quicksand and the engine of my body heated up and hammered away, pounding down on her clit with its pubic bone, rocking her clit back and forth in the cradle of my cock's base, waving far up inside her with its magic wand, unrolling its hose to give her rabid heat a good dousing. I wormed and squirmed my way into her till we were glued and welded together, nothing more than the maniacal argument that blossomed toward conclusions between our legs.
I pushed myself up a little and looked back around to catch a glimpse of us in the mirror. There was my cock-my very own cock-plunging in and out of a glistening well of flushed doeskin; a pouch of pleasure whose elastic mouth stretched and gave, clinging in thin membranes to my cock as it had its way with her. And down below her ass-hole constricted with her every rhythmic convulsion, briefly eclipsing the loose gap of its cherry-insides with each powerful wrinkling-in of its sphincter.
Janet looked over my shoulder on the other side and our eyes met in the mirror. I could tell she liked to watch herself being fucked. She slapped my ass cheeks like a jockey going to the whip in the home stretch and flopped her head back down onto the pillow. I stared back at her for a few more seconds, memorizing the image of this once-in-a-lifetime event. So this was how it felt! It was good. Very good.
I buried my head against her shoulder, breathing in faint odors of lilac perfume and the smell of her body, and closed my eyes to blot out everything but the feeling of fucking.
I plunged and Janet spread wider. She wanted all I had, and I gave it to her. How easily my rod slid into her up to the hilt! How deliciously she spread herself, holding nothing back, shoving herself up into me and laying herself bare and shoving again, pursuing me with the tickings of her clit-tongue against me, forcing my ass down with her hands and swinging hard to drive me deeper, deeper, deeper.
I clutched her and I never wanted to let go. I had her forever now. I had her right up through the center. There was no more left to take. My balls swung up against the pillowy barrier of her bulging ass cheeks; my pubic bone ground against hers; our bellies heaved together; our chests squashed her breasts between them like drops of water between plates of glass. She sank her teeth into the muscle of my shoulder and shook her head like a bulldog. Her breath came in huge gasps and nine kept breathless pace with them.
The gun barrel blossomed and flamed with incandescent fireworks.
The tendons in Janet's thighs snapped tight like steel bands and her cunt lay rigidly open, soaking up the impact of my orgasm and shuddering in the vibrant life-throes of its own.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After that it was all quickly over. I had got what I had come for. Now I was stricken with the uncontrollable urge to get away.
Janet lay uncomprehending but vaguely relieved as I got up and dressed. She was too cautious to say anything, and I was too agitated. When I'd got all my clothes on and had my briefcase in my hand, I walked quickly to the side of the bed and drained one of the half full glasses of champagne that still sat there. "Well," I said, "That's it. I'm leaving town now right away. I'm going out to the Coast. This is a big world, and it shouldn't be too hard for me to make sure you've seen the last of me."
She sat up on the side of the bed and looked at me quizzically. "What's the rush? Why don't you stick around for a while and relax?"
"You're worried that I haven't got enough to satisfy me, right?"
"Maybe," she mused. "But maybe I'd just like to know some more about you."
"Why? If I were still going to be working at the office and I asked you for a date, would you accept?" I could see I'd put her on the spot, and that was all I really needed to know. "You don't have to be afraid to say no. In a way, you already have. And that means that I shouldn't tell you any more about myself." That was a rule I had adopted; my first and firmest rule. "Never let the woman know more about yourself than is absolutely necessary." It would have been stupid; and I had made up my mind to be clever.
"Fucking with you was a lot better than I thought it would be. In fact, I really got off on it."
"But," I pursued, "I'm not basically your type, right?"
"I guess I'd have to admit that's true."
"And you wouldn't exactly look forward to another time?"
"I wouldn't dread it, if that's what you mean," she laughed.
"But you wouldn't do it if you had the choice."
"I don't know. Maybe I would."
"Maybe isn't enough for me. And since I can't ever expect a woman to give me any more than maybe, women can't expect me to tell them much about myself. Anyhow, it's been fun. Goodbye." I left.
I went down to Jim Northrup's apartment and dyed my hair a few shades fighter. Except for a trip to a bank the next morning to put Bob's identification in a safe deposit box and a few trips to the grocery-store now and then, I stayed in my apartment for the better part of two weeks, letting my hair grow out. I made some more calls looking for jobs, but even such things as restaurant waiter and store clerk were out because I didn't have any references. Toward the end of the two weeks I ventured out to purchase a new wardrobe; jeans, double-knit bell bottoms, cowboy boots, loafers, work shirts and turtle necks and a few mod-dress shirts from a little shop in Chelsea. I got myself a pair of steel-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. I really looked different Then I started pounding the pavement.
It was another week, and my savings had swindled to less than three hundred dollars, when I finally found an owner of a small restaurant desperate enough for a short-order cook that he would hire me with the explanation that I'd come from a rich family and so had never had to work before, but had just had a falling out with my father and decided to leave home. Luckily the old cook, the owner's brother-in-law, was willing to stay around a few days to break me in, and soon I was tying omelets and hamburgers and pork chops and ladling out soup and browning chicken with the best of them.
The restaurant was a sort of hole-in-the-wall, with only eight tables, but it was a nicely furnished, comfortable neighborhood place where people brought in their own beer and wine and hung around talking until all hours of the night. It was a few blocks from my. place, and it had that air of respectable, artsy solidity of the West Village. I was glad it was isolated from the chaotic and often unpleasant scenes of Bleecker Street. The owner handled the cooking from ten-thirty, when the place opened, until late afternoon, when the traffic started to get heavy. Then I took over, and worked until one or two in the morning, depending on how late it was profitable to keep the place open.
For the first two weeks after my night with Janet I was numb-all but paralyzed-with conflicting recriminations and desires. It was over the stove at Hardy's that the world started to seem real to me again. It was so simple, and so mechanical, breaking those eggs and slapping those meat patties onto the griddle, throwing buns in to toast and banging pots and pans and utensils around.
It was there I found my next "subject." When it happened, and I knew that I was going to get her, I also knew better than ever that I was hooked by the blackmail game. Janet had done something nasty to me; she had given me a reason for wanting to fuck her. But Robin, the college-girl waitress who worked my shift five nights a week, didn't do anything like that. I told myself she did, but really, she didn't. I had to look for insults to justify what I did to her, and even though I never quite found enough, I did it anyway.
Not that Robin was exactly what you'd call either gorgeous or brilliant. In fact, in spite of the "educated" way she talked, I sometimes suspected she was basically dumb. For instance, she'd been working at Hardy's nearly a year, but she still got orders mixed up, got specials-of-the-day turned around, added people's checks wrong, and so on. Not often, but enough. On the other hand, she wasn't at all pretentious, as Janet had been. She was rosy-cheeked and sprightly, and was generally cheerful and polite to everyone. She was the kind of person who assumed you were all right until you proved otherwise.
Robin used to come to work in the wildest assortment of things, from grubby old jeans to long, flowing shifts of oriental print. It was a joke among the regulars to try to bet on what Robin would show up in on a given night.
Robin also had a good sense of humor. One night she came in through the back door twenty minutes early so she could eat her supper in peace, and overheard three or four guys actually making money bets on what she was going to show up in and laughing hysterically at the combinations they put together as their guesses. "Cowboy hat, pasties, and a burlap-sack shirt. Bridal gown with blue-jean bloomers and dog-bone tiara. Man's tuxedo with bathing-suit halter and six-inch cork platform shoes." She happened to have on a tie-dyed dashiki over a skirt that looked something like burlap and a pair of tennis shoes, but she didn't want the guy who'd made the first guess to win, so she decided to "pull a good one." She looked in her purse and counted her money and asked if she could borrow five dollars. I was, of course, more than happy to lend it to her. She skipped out and fifteen minutes later made a grand entrance in a rented tuxedo with a skimpy bathing-suit halter underneath and four-inch cork platform shoes. The place went wild. There were a few good-natured whistles at the brevity of her halter amid the laughter, foot-stomping and applause, so to string the game out she stripped the jacket off and sauntered around a bit, modeling the halter as though she were Gypsy Rose. Then the guys chipped in the bet money to pay for the tuxedo rental.
That little episode was what first made me notice her, or any woman since Janet, who had occupied all my fantasies as well as all my nightmares. Robin was medium height, slender, sprightly, and boyish. Her tits weren't anything to get excited about, but the casual way she slipped off that absurd tuxedo jacket and sauntered around between the oak tables with her shoulders back and a slinky turn to her gait was enough to trip my trigger.
This happened about two weeks after I'd started to work at Hardy's, around mid-September. When Robin was through with her little joke she skipped back to the kitchen on her way to the ladies' room to change her clothes. She stopped to give me back my five dollars.
"That was a good one," I said, hoping to hold her up for a while so I could look over the top end of her figure. Despite the relative flatness of her chest she made quite an appealing picture, and I couldn't help remembering Jill and Janet and imagining what she would look like without her halter. She had a sort of athletic form-not athletic in a muscular way, but athletic as in durable, graceful, and not weak. She wore her amber-blonde hair in short curls that gave her a kind of Roaring Twenties look. She had hazel eyes with mysterious gold flecks, and she had the habit of staring very hard at you when she spoke.
"Ha ha! Do you think so?" She leaned up against a counter to scrutinize me closely, the tuxedo jacket over her arm, her hands folded over the subtle young curve of her bare belly.
It was just one of those times when I didn't know what I was doing. I have a compulsion to play the fool, I guess. Maybe I just keep hoping that I can be my own inept self and people will accept me. Maybe I unconsciously like to be inept and challenge people to like me anyway. I was wiping my hands off on a towel on the refrigerator door a few feet from her. I stared pointedly at her chest and grinned. "It was a good one, all right. It looks like you've got a couple of good ones there. Bet you could put on a nice show if you wanted."
She couldn't believe it. She looked shocked, as if surely I should have known better than that-that she wasn't that kind of girl, and so on. But I'd heard her say some pretty risqu' things to a boyfriend who had stopped by a few nights before, and I knew that it was just me she was reacting to.
Well, I guess at that point I didn't look too attractive. I was in jeans and a T shirt and an apron spattered with grease. I was sweaty and now that my eyes had suddenly been opened to a living female body again I knew I had that sex-starved look in my eye. I'm sure that's what scared her.
I turned to chopping some stew meat and tried to come up with some casual banter to smooth the situation over. But before I could say a word Robin marched into the ladies' room and slammed the door. I thought to myself, "Well, what would I think, and what would I do if I were a girl her age alone in New York City?" I knew Robin lived alone, and that although she was nobody's virgin, she tended to stick to one boyfriend at a time. But then I thought, "It is just because it's you, you know. If you'd been handsomer, tougher, wittier, suaver, you could have got away with that. But you're just who you are, and who you are is someone who can only get women into bed one way."
From that moment on I started looking for a way to get Robin. From that moment on, also, all feelings of guilt were left behind. It was always that way when I got on to the scent of a new woman. I had a one-track mind then, and my sole objective was to get what I wanted and get away. I was taking enough risks that if I got caught I'd be. punished plenty-more than I wanted or, as I thought, deserved. I guess I didn't mind building up a debt to society because I thought society already owed me more than it could ever repay. The individual girls were just marks and markers in a game. As far as sex went, we were still playing by the laws of the jungle. "Sexual welfare" was an idea that had not occurred to anybody yet
So after Janet, and the first big swing from triumph to despair, the cycles shortened. After every triumph I learned to seek another subject right away, with the knowledge that as soon as I found her, my self-torture would stop. Toward the end I started working on three or four girls at a time, so I was never out of the hunt and never out of danger. Blackmail became my obsession, the pace quickened until I was racing madly about at the far limits of sanity.
It took me a while to get what I needed on Robin. For a month or so I said very little to her, but tried to overhear as much as I could. There was an open serving window to the kitchen at the rear of the restaurant, and when the din of cooking was not too loud I caught a lot of conversations between her and the customers, many of whom were her friends. They were mostly NYU students like herself, but there seemed to be some vagabond street-types too, who were always looking for ways to make a few bucks here or there without committing themselves to anything as horrible as a steady job. She had one particularly close girlfriend like that named Shirley. They had apparently grown up together in southern California. Shirley called herself an artist, but I never saw anything she painted, and all I ever heard of her doing was setting up her easel in Washington
Square once in a while and doing portraits of passersby for a few bucks each. Shirley was more petite than Robin, and had straight black hair, close-cropped, wide cheek bones, and a smooth complexion that suggested that maybe she had a little Oriental or American Indian blood in her. Her face had that sort of proud, distant, aloof look, but her manner was just the opposite; she was loud and raucous and joked and giggled a lot. She wore the same raggedy paint-spattered jeans and work-shirt almost all the time, and though she had nice full tits and a firm, high-slung ass, she always looked a little too lean, as though she didn't quite get enough to eat. Sometimes I wondered whether she took a lot of speed.
The break on Robin came when Angie, the restaurant's owner, got behind on his books, and was too hassled to catch up again. I came in one morning in late October to hear him grousing about it. I saw a chance to make a little extra money and maybe get back into book-keeping or accounting sooner or later, and I offered to take over the job. He took me up on it.
The first night I sat down to total expenditures and receipts I began to suspect that something fishy was going on. It wasn't that the receipts were a lot lower than they should have been, but looking through the customer checks, it felt to me as though there wasn't quite enough there, especially for certain week nights. If I hadn't been the cook as well as the accountant I would never have become suspicious, but I knew every order that came through the kitchen while I was there. I had a good memory, and sometimes for fun, or just to keep myself occupied, I would keep running totals of how many dollars' worth of food I put out on a given evening. I looked at a few recent days and found that on the previous Wednesday Robin had written $234 worth of checks where I'd added up more like $250 worth of food going out the serving window.
If I hadn't had so much confidence in my memory and calculating ability, I would have dismissed the whole thing. But it was all just too logical. Robin was feeding free food to her down-and-out friends at Angie's expense. Maybe she was even getting a little kickback for it. She wasn't going overboard. Lots of nights were perfectly all right as far as I could tell, and out of a few others where I'd bothered to keep running totals the difference was only three or four dollars. But still.. .
I didn't say anything to Angie about it. The way things were set up, it was impossible to prove anything anyway; the waitress just yelled orders to the cooks, and the cooks put out the food, and the waitresses wrote up the checks and collected the money. The only record of what the cooks had put out was on the waitresses' checks, and if they were fudged to begin with, it was a pretty nifty little con. It would have been my word against Robin's.
But the very next night my suspicions were confirmed. A whole raft of Robin's friends-about eight of them-took over three tables toward the front of the place. Shirley was among them. They all ordered a lot of stuff. This time I wrote everything down myself. Toward closing time I took out the books and gathered np Robin's pile of checks and started adding and entering figures on one of the tables toward the back of the place. Robin looked a little alarmed, but she tried to hide it. She came back and spoke to me for the first time in a long while. "I didn't know Angie had you doing the books now." There were still a few customers finishing up late night snacks, and pretty soon Angie would be coming in to close the place up.
"That's right," I told her. "And I think there's something you and I better talk about." I'd found that one steak, one bowl of stew, one salad, and one order of french fries hadn't been charged for. The steak, salad and french fries had gone to Shirley.
Robin's face went pasty white and she leaned down over me shaking. "What do you mean? What would we have to talk about?"
"I think we'd better go back into the kitchen."
She followed me numbly. When we got there I hit her with it straight out. "You've been, shall we say, neglecting to charge some of your friends, Shirley for instance, for their meals. like tonight, for instance. I made $25.50 worth of food for that table. It's all recorded right here. And you only charged them $17.30. You realize that if Angie found out about this you'd lose your job in two seconds and you'd have a hell of a hard time getting another one."
"I.. . I can't afford that! I was just trying to help out some friends down on their luck! But if I lost my job, it'll cost me everything! I couldn't afford to stay in school, or keep my apartment, or...." She looked up pleadingly at me and I knew I had her. "What are you going to do? You're not going to tell him, are you?"
"I haven't made up my mind yet. It's really my duty to tell him, you know. If I don't, I'm involved too."
"But I won't ever do it again!" She was really frantic now. "I promise I won't!" She was half sobbing. "Please don't tell him. I'll make it up somehow. I just don't know what to do. Please don't tell him! I'll do anything!"
I sat down on a stool and shook my head. "I doubt that you'll do anything."
The light of comprehension dawned in her eyes. She took a step back and stared at me and her face went blank with outraged horror. "You . . . you . . . " She couldn't finish telling me what I was. I had her trapped but good.
"All I said was, I doubted that you would do anything. I didn't make any suggestions as to. what you might do."
"But I do know what I can do, don't I?" I could see her thoughts racing like a rat on an exercise wheel, and I could see her realizing there was only one way out-and even that it was, all things considered, a pretty cheap way. "I know you're a goddamned sex freak," she said. "I could feel you staring at me with your damned x-ray vision from the day you came to work here."
"Yes?" I smiled. "Well to put your mind at ease, I happen to be a pretty tame sex freak. You probably think I have all kinds of weird perversions floating around in my mind. Whips and spurs and ropes and things like that." I shook my head. "Not so. My sexual desires happen to be very normal. They're just a little frustrated and upfront, that's all. But of course you can understand how a man like me might be frustrated?"
Just then Angie came in the front door and stopped to chatter with some customers. Robin seized up with sudden dread and her voice fell to a low, hissing whisper. "I don't know. I just don't know. Are you going to tell him now? Please don't tell him now. At least give me some time."
I sat on my stool with my arms folded regarding her stonily.
She took a few steps toward me, out of the frame of the serving window. Her jaw tightened and her eyes blazed. She was wearing a blue sweat shirt, inside out, with no bra underneath, and bell-bottom jeans.
She yanked the sweat shirt up and her tits popped out at me like a pair of fried eggs. Not that she was really that flat chested. In fact her breasts rose in nice, neat, separate swellings, taut and firmly rounded, that raised her nipples well off her chest and pointed them up and out. But the nipples themselves, puffy and raised with that slightly swollen look, were just about the size and shape of egg yolks. "Here's a first installment to keep you quiet for the night!" She shook her shoulders and made her nipples dance before my eyes. "Is that enough, or would you like to grab them too?"
"Not at the moment" I grabbed the bottom of her sweatshirt and yanked it down. Then I turned to cleaning the griddle. "All right. I won't mention anything to him tonight. But you and I are going to have to get a few things straight. Understand?" I gave her a side-glance that withered her to trembling once more. "I don't know what we can work out and what we can't, but with your present attitude it doesn't look like it's going to be much. You're the one who wants to do something about it, not me, and you're the one who brought up sex in the first place." Naturally I was getting this all down on tape. But I wasn't going to tell her that. This tape was for plugging holes in an emergency. "If you expect me to wink at your cheating, to cover it up, to become an accomplice to it, really, in return for the favors of your body, you'd better make the favors look a little more favorable. Otherwise you'd better retract your suggestion before you get in even more trouble for trying to bribe me."
She was silent. Angie stopped in and said hello and asked how the books were going. "Okay," I told him. "There are a few things that have to be adjusted, but I should have them up to date by the weekend." He said that would be good and went about putting chairs up on tables and sweeping the floor.
"Why don't you go home now?" I said to Robin. "And simmer down." I looked up at her with a bland smile. "There really is an easy way for this to turn out all right, you know. If you figure out what it is, let me know. You've got until Friday morning."
She left and immediately I was caught up in a stream of fantasies of how it would be.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When she left that night I followed her home. She lived, in the garret of a brownstone on MacDougal Street. I was casing the joint-deciding whether, when the time came, we should go to her place or to a hotel, or even to my place, since I intended to move out of there immediately afterward. I decided I had to get an idea of what her place looked like inside and whether she really did live alone.
I went down a side alley. The fire escape on the brownstone next door hung down just far enough so I could reach it. My heart was a pounding lump in my throat as I scampered noiselessly up to the roof and concealed myself behind a pair of chimneys. I didn't know why I was doing this. It seemed like an unnecessary risk. If I were caught now the whole thing would be blown.
Robin's garret was directly opposite me, 15 feet away across the alley, and it was small; two rooms at most, although I suspected it was one big one. Three windows were open from the bottom with their shades half way up, but I couldn't see dividing walls through any of them. The right one framed part of the kitchen counter and a garbage can; the middle, a bare stretch of floor with part of a green plastic-covered armchair and matching ottoman in the background; and the left, the wide expanse of a water bed on the floor in a corner. The strains of a Joan Baez song drifted out from a cheap stereo somewhere in the interior, and I could hear water running-muffled, as though filtered through a closed bathroom door.
I waited for a few seconds, looking anxiously around to make sure I couldn't be seen from any nearby apartments or roofs, and then there was a noise of a door opening. Robin's legs appeared with a carelessly belted blue terry cloth robe covering their backs and sides and splitting open in the front to reveal flashes of her inner thighs almost all the way up to her crotch.
She went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, and I heard her open a pop-top can. She paced up and down a bit and then crossed to the bed and threw herself down on it. She curled up on her side, and though I could only see the bottom half of her, I could tell she was agitated. I'd really scared the shit out of her.
For a few moments I waited breathlessly to see whether she would shift her position and give me a glimpse of her pussy. My groin started to throb at the thought and my cock stiffened. I saw half of a lean flank, and a good, soft piece of thigh, and even a few stray wisps of pubic hair scattered down over where the sides of her thighs went hollow. But a flap of her robe hung a corner down irritatingly over her cunt.. . .
Then her buzzer rang and she jumped up. I got a single-frame shot of her golden-furred cunt with its flaring pastel lips against the background of her lean, sinuously curving abdomen and her slender thighs and the springily bulge of her tight little ass cheeks.
She answered the door and Shirley came in. "Jesus Christ, I'm glad you're home. Boy, am I strung out You don't have any meth around, do you? Or any goddamned thing at all-I don't care. White Cross.. . . "
"I made Paul get all that shit out of here yesterday, and I don't want to hear anymore about it I've got some dope if that will help you out, but that's the limit."
"What are you on the rag about?"
"I think Angje's getting suspicious of our little food game. If he finds out my ass is grassed. I lose my job and everything. He might even press criminal charges. So that game's at an end."
"Shit!" Shirley cursed. "I mean, I'm not saying shit about the food, I'm saying shit about your good-for-nothing friends maybe having got you in trouble. I'm sorry, Robin. I hope it works out."
"Perfect," I thought to myself. "Right on the script." The almost sensual tone of Shirley's sympathy gave me a start. It almost sounded as if.. . .
Robin wandered across the room and flopped down on her bed again. This time she bent one knee up and waggled it nervously from side to side, drawing the rough terry cloth draperies back and forth over her cunt With every swing of her knee the delicate rose-petals of her inner lips opened up and out to an inviting hole about the size of a cock-head.
I wasn't the only one looking. Shirley strode across the room and flopped down next to her on the bed and pushed her robe to one side. "Look," she said. "Why don't we smoke a joint or two and try to forget our troubles. like old times."
Robin's voice was amused and sarcastic and yet it held a hint of promise. "like old times?"
"Yeah. I'll get the dope." Shirley bounced up off the bed and returned with a little green plastic container full of coarse olive-drab powder and a pack of papers and a Time Magazine to roll on. Robin shoved over and down to make room so Shirley could sit cross-legged, and that brought her entire body below the neck into view. From the bottoms of her feet up over her finely turned legs, her crotch, her belly, her softly heaving rib cage, her buoyant little tits, the whole vista of her body lay open tome.
I stuck my hand in my pants and grabbed my cock hard. At the first few rotations of the flat of my thumb against the underside of its head it threatened to shoot. I held off. There was more and better to come.
Shirley got the joint rolled and lit it and passed it to Robin, and then stood up next to the bed, out of my range of vision. But her clothes, as she discarded them, fell into my window-framed picture: a blue work shirt; a pair of jeans; a pair of brief panties, plain white nylon, with runs in the crotch. I'd barely adjusted to the sight of Robin's naked body when Shirley's joined it. My hand worked in my pants with the uncontrollable excitement that the image pounded into me. My cock started to cream and my hand got sticky. I wished I had a camera. That would be my next purchase.
Shirley really was skinny; wasted, almost. But her hips had a flare to them that demanded flesh on her ass cheeks, and it was there in nice handfuls, jutting out at me as she lay on her side facing Robin. Once in a while when she reached to pass the joint the almond-brown of a nipple flashed into view under her arm, riding high on a loose, floppy tit. But her ribs showed through like she was a skeleton wrapped in wax paper, and her arms and legs were positively skinny. Still, there was a primitive kind of magnetism about her body, as though to fuck her would be to fuck the devil herself.
Suddenly I knew why I was up on a roof crouching behind a couple of chimneys with my hands in my pants. I was going to get Shirley too. Right after Robin. I didn't know what sixth sense or animal instinct had showed me the way, but whatever it was, I suddenly trusted it and made up my mind to listen to it in the future. Maybe my brain was making subtle calculations deep down some place where I couldn't penetrate-Maybe it had deduced beforehand what I now saw with my own eyes; that Robin was not only a thief, but bisexual as well. That meant she was half a lesbian: one more thing I had on her. And three things I had on Shirley. She was a party to the free-food game, she was a speed junky, and she too was half-lesbian. At least. Both girls might laugh at the threat of their heterosexual affairs being exposed, but as far as being lesbian went, I knew society had already done a blackmailer's work for me. A couple of letters to a couple of sets of parents and I couldn't help but create more than a fuck's worth of misery.
"Look, I don't know if I can get into this," Robin said uneasily as Shirley stubbed out the first joint and reached for her crotch.
Shirley's hand paused and then its palm rubbed tentatively over Robin's abdomen in a half-motherly, half-sensual gesture. "Is it because you're upset about the food business, or because you just can't get into making it with me anymore?"
"Could be a little of both, I guess." My heart sank and I cursed. Maybe they weren't going to get into it after all. I took my hand out of my pants and looked around for the best way to get out of there unseen.
There was some mumbling that I couldn't catch. Finally Robin stripped off her robe and lay on her stomach. "I don't know," she said almost petulantly. "I guess it won't hurt me any, and if you get me turned on enough, I'll get into it." She chuckled. "like old times...."
That one line-"I guess it won't hurt me any,"-really got to me. Why did she have to say it to her skinny rat of a lesbian friend? Why couldn't she say it to me? But it turned me on all the same. In a way it was so close to, "It's yours. Take it."
Shirley laughed and slapped Robin playfully on the ass. "That's the spirit." She reached out of view to bring back a can of Budweiser that Robin had been sipping from. She took a swig and held it in her lap. "You just relax and I'll get you turned on good and proper." She took another swig and put the can aside and lay down next to Robin on her back. One hand crept beneath Robin's stomach and down to hook a few fingers up into her cunt from the front. The other patted and rubbed Robin's ass and then began to probe from the rear. Robin lay still as a corpse for the first few minutes, but when Shirley's fingertips met in her crotch and formed a cradle of fingers that pulled up into her with rippling, drumming motions, restless writhing stirred her, and she began to squirm and moan. "That's right,"
Shirley purred, "That's right. Just let yourself drift off into that fine dreamland...."
From the way her hands were going to work on Robin I guessed that Shirley was a real expert in bed. I wondered whether she'd ever picked up any money to support her speed habit by exploiting her talents.
Robin turned on her side, facing Shirley-and me-and reached meekly out to run her fingertips over Shirley's nipples. I knew she was a goner then. I unzipped my fly and took out my cock, my ears alert to any warning noises nearby. All I had to do was get caught beating my meat on a rooftop! But it was so damned fine! It wasn't really my hand stroking up and down, gripping that ancient-looking tube of flesh and conjuring its explosion out of it. It was Shirley's. She was getting me just the way she was getting Robin.
And then Shirley went for Robin's cunt with her mouth. She rolled her over and straddled her and pressed her legs up and apart with the backs of her elbows and started spreading those rose-petals with her fingers. like a curious child in an exotic garden, she stroked every tiny bit of private flesh meticulously, seducing and arousing and absorbing. She pinched Robin's cunt lips and tugged at them; she ran a finger around the opening of Robin's hole, teasing it to budding dampness. She sought out Robin's clit and bared it with a wide stretching of lips and bent to put her tongue to it. She licked down over it and plunged her tongue into Robin's hole, then withdrew it and licked around the opening, then returned to Robin's clit with nibbling lips. Meanwhile she settled her own cunt down on Robin's face-which was just out of my sight-and began humping. Her tits hung down with the upper skin of their sacks stretched and narrowed and the weight of them swinging wantonly to brush her nipples across Robin's abdomen.
Then they really got into it. Shirley's tits squashed flat to Robin's body and her tongue darted out like a snake's and her head pressed down till her mouth was one with Robin's open pussy. She licked and gobbled and sucked and pummeled and stroked and plunged like she was going after a pearl at the bottom of a deep lagoon. From the hard bucking of her hips I could tell she was close to getting off on Robin's face and struggling to take Robin with her at the same time. I held myself on the brink of ejaculation and careened along with them, trying my best to mute the sounds of my ragged breathing and the exertion of my hand on my cock.
Smothered moans and the symphony of sloshing from the water-bed and the tension that emanated from the picture of the two possessed female bodies told me that the time was near. Shirley was boring in on Robin with a wild drill-tongue that couldn't be denied. The come was welling up in me like the seawater of the rising tide.
Then a muffled shriek of abandon soaked the night air in animal erruption. Shirley had what she wanted right there in her mouth; the methodically pumping clit that reached out to her for the welcoming resistance of orgasm.
She clutched Robin to her and drank down her prize. From the bulging of the veins in her neck and the agonized expression on her face and the convulsive shuddering of her body I could tell she was getting hers too.
My come splattered onto the tar of the roof. I threw my head back and opened my eyes wide to see that it was a clear, starry, gorgeous night.
I lingered there a few seconds stroking out the last of my pleasure and breathing deeply of the air of forbidden release. Then I wiped my hand and my cock off with a kleenex, and wiped the roof up too, and retreated. I crawled on my belly to the top of the fire escape, concealed by the roofs low parapet, and peeked over to make sure I couldn't be seen. One quick vault and I was gone.
That night I packed up my belongings, now reduced to what could fit into one trunk and one large suitcase, and lay awake until almost dawn running through all my plans, checking out all my contingencies, and jerking off three or four more times at what I'd seen and what I was going to do. I slept until almost five the next day, and when I arrived at work fifteen minutes late Robin was already making a tuna fish sandwich for one of the waiting customers. I could tell she'd been worried about what it would mean if I didn't show up. She wore a plain blue sack dress, quite short, which I'd never seen before. When she reached across the counter for the mayonnaise the back of it climbed to reveal the curving bottoms of her ass-cheeks escaping from beneath her panties. "Is that for my benefit?" I asked.
"You might say so," she said sourly. "You've got a cheeseburger, a club sandwich, two spaghettis and a veal platter to make." She finished the tuna sandwich and turned to go. "After that we can talk."
People kept coming in, and orders kept flying, and "after that" didn't turn out to be until almost nine o'clock. Then we hit a slight lull and Robin came back into the kitchen. She sat down wearily with her heels up on a high rung of a stool and her cunt bulging impudently, almost casually out in the ripe pod of a pair of black lace panties. "Okay. I guess I have to make a deal with you. What do you want?"
"I won't admit to wanting anything if I can help it What are you offering?"
"Jesus, you're not making it easy on me." She fiddled with the hem of her dress and then looked up anxiously. "I don't know who you are, or what you have in mind. But you've really got me up against a wall. If you want to fuck me, I don't see how I can turn you down. Or if you want to eat me, or have me suck you off, or whatever. But if you.. . "
"I think those three activities would fill the bill admirably," I smiled.
"How many times?"
"Once. That's all. I'm not greedy."
"Really?" she asked. I could tell she'd expected me to demand more, but trying to take more was against my rules.
"That's right," I replied, feeling free to steal an obvious glance at her cunt now.
In the end she agreed. We set up a date for Monday night, when the restaurant was closed. I decided her place would do just fine as long as she made sure we wouldn't be interrupted. I had it in mind that I might try some of her marijuana It would be my first time.
I knocked on her door at seven-thirty on Monday to find her alone and drunk. Or maybe stoned; I didn't know which. Now that the deal was made and the time for payment had arrived she was scared and full of surly self-pity. "Come in," she mumbled. "Come in and bang my box!" Then she got a little hysterical. "Bang away, everybody! Free bangs at Robin's pussy!"
She sat down heavily in the green armchair as I loosened my collar and looked around. The place was an eclectically furnished mess. Besides the chair and the bed, there was a battered old bureau with a large cracked mirror, a couple of straight-backed chairs, an end table, a bunch of large yellow cushions slightly grimy, and an old steamer trunk whose top served as a coffee table. Clothing was scattered all over and papers were randomly strewn about the bed and trunk. Open sociology and history and anthropology texts lay face down in odd places like on kitchen counters.
"There's no need to be so crude about it," I said reprovingly. "Look, this doesn't have to be hell for you unless you make up your mind that it does. If you just loosen up a little bit, maybe you'll even enjoy it."
"Fat chance." She reached down beside her chair and picked up a water glass full of what looked like straight scotch on the rocks. She took a deep drink and then reached down into her pocketbook to pull out three joints. She waved them around. "You smoke this shit?"
I caught sight of a half-empty fifth of J & B on a shelf in a half-open cupboard. I got up went into the kitchen. "Never have, but I'm willing to give it a try. You don't mind if I rip off a shot or two of your scotch, do you?"
"Hell no!" She slurred her words badly. She started to say something else but her tongue got tripped up on itself. She waved impatiently and lit up a joint. I found a glass and filled it with ice and doused the ice with scotch. The acrid reek of marijuana smoke already saturated the tangy autumn air drifting in through the windows as I walked across the room and flopped casually down onto the bed.
I stole a look out the window and caught sight of two chimneys on the opposite roof. It was all different now. I felt calm, relaxed, confident, in control. At first I'd been afraid Robin would be too drunk to do anything, but I now realized it didn't matter. She wasn't Janet. I'd been right about Janet. She'd been one in a thousand. But drunk or sober, I'd get my cock into Robin before the night was over. That was what I'd come for, and that was all I had a right to expect. "Why don't you come on over here and share that with me?"
She dropped a train of ashes down the front of her blue shift-the same one she'd worn to work-and stood up. She brushed them off with a short curse. The motion jiggled her tits animatedly and she laughed a drunken laugh. She almost fell over as she bent to pick up her drink and the hem of her dress climbed to the middle of her ass. "Bet you like the view back there." She straightened up and sauntered over to me, mimicking a cheap whore. "Whatcha say, sweetie? Wanna go out?" She bent down over me and her stifled breath blew hot on my face. "Wanna get inta my box?"
She handed me the joint. "Take a real deep drag and hold it in as long as you can." She put down her scotch and grabbed her dress by the tops of the shoulders and pulled it off like she was emptying herself out of a paper bag. Before I could catch my breath she'd stripped off her panties and sat down beside me on the bed. "I must say, it's not much of a body you're getting," she sighed as she looked down at herself and then took the joint from me, pinching it daintily between long fingernails to avoid touching my hand. "But what do you want for I'll nothing?" She giggled hysterically again. "For nothing! I get my hungry friends food for nothing, and look what it gets me!" She glowered at me resentfully.
I sensed that I'd better not get her going on any long rap. I slipped off my clothes and took another half-dozen drags on the joint. I'd smoked cigarettes for a while in college, so I knew how to inhale, even though my lungs rebelled when I took in too much too deeply.
"If you've never smoked dope before," she said, lighting up a second joint when the first one was all but gone, "you might not get stoned. It usually takes a few times. This is outrageous stuff, though." She stopped abruptly and took a deep drag on the joint and looked at me with critical inquisitiveness. She let the smoke out in a long, pale blue stream. "What the hell kind of person are you, anyway?"
"I'd rather not go into it. And you don't really need to know. I'm leaving the job and the city in the middle of next week, and you'll never see me again. Fair enough?"
We sat there drinking and smoking for another half-hour, not saying a word, watching the last of the sun-fight as it faded from the western sky. Just as the city's lights spread their ground-glow up to replace the lost daylight with their huge illuminated dome she got up and turned on the stereo.
It was entrancing the way her drugged and drunken body moved. like a lurching serpent or a greased clown she oozed to a pile of records and bent over, sticking her ass brazenly out at me and squatting on her haunches. Her blonde muff split its sparsely-haired lips back at me as she picked out a record and put it on. The music was a cross between rock-and-roll and country-and-western, with dazzling lead guitar work and an easily moving beat.
She came back to the bedside and stood over me with her hands on her hips. "Well, we may as well get this over with. As soon as you're done with that thing." I was nearly finished with the third joint, but I still hadn't felt much of anything. Once or twice I'd thought I felt a little funny, but nothing like the changes in time perception and all those other things that people talked about.
Then, as Robin hovered over me eyeing the flaccid lump in my underwear with barely concealed distaste, it hit me.
It was like coming awake to the world from a whole new point of view.
I was still me. I still knew who I was and where I was and why, and I knew I could still control my body and, if necessary, my mind.. . although the control now seemed remote. But in an emergency I knew I would react as well as I would straight. Or at least I thought I knew it. But all the surroundings seemed to be closer and more vivid; every thought and action and expression seemed to present itself with singular clarity and individuality. And objects too. It was as though scotch glasses and ash trays and scraggly plants, a few of which sat on the middle windowsill, all demanded that close attention be paid them separately.
The most vivid example was Robin herself. Now maybe I understood why she stared at people in that intense way. People were very mystifying animals.
I reached up and grabbed her wrists and held them for a second, feeling her pulse throb, establishing contact. She shivered a little and I felt her wrists trembling with the impulse to pull away; but like a child who's gone to a doctor's for a shot, she made up her mind to suffer through and get things over as quickly as possible. So after a second, when I put out the remains of the last joint with my free hand, she sank to her knees on the bed beside me and hung her head gloomily, waiting for me to proceed.
I suddenly knew that, whether I spent ten seconds or a hundred years with her, she was not going to respond. She was being taken and she knew it, and that was the way it was going to have to be; I was going to have to take her, and I couldn't expect any encouragement. Well, maybe that could be exciting in its own way.
I lay back and, since she was already kneeling at my side, pushed her head down into my crotch with one hand stroked my cock a little and pointed it at her mouth with the other.
She yielded like a slow automaton. Her thin, finely bowed lips parted in grudging stages of acquiescence as they approached their target
I took my hand from the back of her head and she stopped bending. The symbolism of coercion necessary for her.
I dug my fingers back into her lush blonde curls and rested my hand lightly on the back of her head. Her descent continued until her lips touched like damp, timid feathers to the pinkly reptilian crest of my cock and tickled it with staggeringly erotic reluctance.
The dope had me blinking mentally at every new eruption of sensation, trying to see how the separate moments of time were fitted together by the continuous stream of impulse that flowed from my genitals. I looked steadfastly at the familiar girl who bent over me and now, instead of asking me for a ham sandwich and a bowl of potato salad, licked around the head of my cock with the tip of her tongue. She was a little animal; no more. And so was I. Perhaps we were squirrels, or cats, or something in between. We were drawn together by a natural magnetism, and.. . .
But of course Robin felt none of that so-called natural magnetism. At least not for me. She was sucking me timidly, fearfully, and suddenly her very touch, which communicated her emotions to me, was painful.
I would not stand for pain. Not on this night. If she couldn't do it to me, I could do it to her.
"Oh, fuck it!" I pushed her head up off me and drained my scotch glass and got up. I staggered a little with the sudden change in altitude. "If you can't suck my cock, I can fuck your mouth!" She gazed up at me with dumb incomprehension. She was really out of it "Do you want me to put on my clothes and leave right now?" I knew she no longer remembered why she didn't want me to go, but she shook her head insistently. "All right, then. Here. Get up." I reached down and grabbed a limp wrist as it waved in the air. I pulled her to her feet. "Come on. Sit in the armchair." I dragged her over to the green vinyl-covered chair and she slumped down into it. She was so gorgeously soused. "You're a necrophiliac's dream," I laughed. I didn't care. She'd wiped herself out because I'd run her down and cornered her, and I was going to have her whether she was there or not
I straddled the arms of the chair and inched my cock up toward her face. Her arms hung limply at her sides, and the rest of her body was still, but when my cock-head pressed against her lips they opened, and when I began to shove I found the channel of her throat widening for me. "Watch your teeth," I told her. "They're scraping me . . . " She covered them with her lips. "That's better." I gripped her head in my hands and planted my feet and flexed my knees and fucked her mouth.
Her soft blonde curls bounced up against my belly and the thrusting of my cock pushed her lips in and pulled them out. Her nostrils flared and the air rushed in them as she fought to keep from gagging on the thick piling of flesh that I drove down her throat. I bounced her head down onto me and twisted it back and forth, sending my rod into the corners of her mouth, up against its roof, and down against her tongue.
I leaned forward harder and my deepest thrusts pressed the back of her head deep into the vinyl. My balls swung up beneath her chin and batted against her throat and now I was going to pump her face full of it. She felt me reaching the peak and for the first time her eyes opened wide and she braced herself.
I got off with the top of my cock-head nosing hard down the gulping curve of her throat and her hp-covered teeth clamping convulsively. Her brow furrowed in drowning desperation till I pulled my still-spurting organ up into the wide cavern of her mouth and she could swallow. The flood of semen kept gushing in on her, and she gulped feverishly. The action of her gulping brought on still more and longer thrusts.
It was many minutes before I dragged my withered organ out of her mouth and stumbled over to collapse on the bed. "God, I just fucked her mouth like a cunt," I thought to myself. "I just used it like it was a fucking animal!"
After that I fucked her in everyway imaginable. I waited a few minutes for her to recover, and grabbed a towel off the rack in the kitchen and wiped her mouth off. Then I pulled her over to the bed. She was so limp and lifeless, so unresisting and unresponding, that she was like a hunk of living clay . . . a supple manikin I manipulated at will.
I fucked her on her back with her legs down flat, and then I pushed her legs up until she was doubled over with her toes brushing the mattress above her shoulders.
I turned her over and fucked her from behind, rubbing my crotch hair around in her ass crack and then spreading her cheeks so I could see my cock sliding in and out of the mangled blonde mouth.
I pulled her up to her knees and fucked her dog-style.
Then I stood her up straight and reached around to feel her tits with one hand and finger her pussy with the other, and fucked away at her like that
I made her bend over a straight backed chair, squatting a little, and I got off battering her so hard that the chair inched back until it ran up against a wall.
I sat her down in the chair with my come dribbling out of her and darkening the wood with its wetness and squishing between her ass cheeks and under her thighs. I helped myself to more scotch and managed to roll a sickly-looking joint. While I paced up and down in front of her smoking it she stared straight ahead with a Wank, glazed look. After a while she seemed to come back to life a little. She folded her arms and watched me as I walked back and forth, her head moving from side to side like she was watching a slow-motion film of a tennis match.
For some reason she made me want to fuck her until I was worn out. Maybe it was just that she wasn't going to give me any satisfaction, I had to take it for myself, and it took a lot more to satisfy me that way. If she wasn't going to give an inch, I certainly was going to take a mile. "Ready for some more?" I asked flatly.
She shrugged her shoulders as if it was ah the same to her.
I went over to her chair and pulled her legs up and rested her ankles on my shoulders and fucked her where she sat. That was nice; she was split open tike a ripe fruit and I really got her deep. Then I lowered her legs to hook them around my waist and picked her up and bounced her up and down on the fat spike of my rod.
I let her back down on the bed and lay on my back and dragged her up to sit on top of me, first facing me, then facing the other way. For a while I lay still, with my prick lost in her and jerking spasmodically as I simply absorbed the feeling. Then I started undulating like a snake, setting up rolling currents inside the water bed that lifted her up off me and eased her back down. I did that for a long time, and finally came again, with her cock-filled cunt and her ass staring me in the face.
That was all. I left her lying fucked-out on the bed. As I departed I said, "Don't forget to lock the door after me. There are all kinds of nasty perverts roaming around in New York."
I chuckled to myself on the way down the stairs, but by the time I reached the bottom the image of a wasted, lifeless person haunted me with grim reproach.
"Well, she wanted it that way," I tried to tell myself. "She could have made it shorter and sweeter if she'd wanted. Shit-she's a big-city girl, and she knows how things go. She'll get over it. If she hasn't already. Right now she may be laughing her head off at having been a necrophiliac's dream!"
But I really couldn't make myself believe that, and when I imagined myself her father or mother or brother, and how enraged I'd be if I found someone had done that to her, how I would want to tear him to pieces, I hid my face in my hands and fled to my apartment. It was only the sudden fear that right after I'd left she'd called a boy friend, or a brother, or a parent, or the police, that snapped me out of an agonizing trance of reviewing what I'd done in open-mouthed horror. I called a cab and dragged my suitcase and trunk downstairs and got the hell out of that apartment for good. I went to a small, moderately priced hotel on the llpper East Side, wondering whether I should risk going back to work the next day.
But as I lay in my soft hotel bed tossing fitfully, worriedly trying to maintain my cleverness at all costs, I suddenly knew that I would go to work the next day. I had to. I thought it through many times, and decided that it would probably be safe. But even if it wasn't completely safe, I had to go. That was the only place to start my pursuit of Shirley.
CHAPTER NINE
When I arrived at work Angie told me that Robin had called in sick. I was relieved, in a way, but it also made me feel even guiltier. "What the hell am I going to do for a waitress?" he was moaning. "Shit-I can't do it myself, I promised to take my kid to the circus. And I don't know anybody else.. . "
"Why don't you ask Robin if she has any friends who could fill in for her? She seems to know lots of people who are always looking to pick up a few bucks, and most of them are regulars in here. They know the menus and prices and procedures and everything."
I smiled to myself and held my breath as Angie called Robin back. Cash-register bells sounded in my head when I heard him say, "Shirley? 741-0632? Okay. I'll try her." I memorized the number just for the record and anxiously awaited the outcome of Angie's call. When he told me Shirley was on her way, everything was all right. I was in the black; on the hunt again, and hungrier than ever. Janet had been one thing. Robin had been another. Shirley, from all I knew of her, would prove to be yet another.
When Shirley arrived half an hour later I was helping Angie serve some customers. The place was starting to fill up, so Angie stayed around to make sure Shirley knew what she was doing. She actually looked much more together than I'd ever seen her. Her hair was clean and neatly brushed and newly waved; her pale, vaguely primitive-looking face was tastefully made up with muted strawberry lipstick and a hint of blue eye shadow; and she wore a black satiny pants-suit belted at the waist with a scarlet sash. She was a little more hyper than usual, and I suspected she'd got a hold of her methedrine. Although I looked for uneasiness in her-since she was, after all, coming to work for a man she'd been ripping off-I couldn't find any.
She came back to the kitchen first thing. "Hey, Jim! Howya doin'? Rattlin' those old pots and pans?" She said it in a half-friendly, half-jibing way, as though she liked me okay in my place, but the only thing I was good for was rattlin' those pots and pans.
"I'm doing all right, I guess," I replied covering a liver steak with a pot-top as it fried on the griddle. I leaned and motioned her toward me.
"What's up?" she asked curiously.
"Nothing much, maybe. But there's something I've got to talk to you about before you leave."
"What?" Her dark eyes narrowed and faint frown-lines crossed her forehead.
"Later." I went to the refrigerator for beef patties.
The night was busy and chaotic, what with an unusually heavy clientele for a Tuesday and an inexperienced waitress. Shirley threw me a few perplexed frowns as the evening wore on, but on the whole she was too busy scampering back and forth to think much. That was fine. All I'd wanted to do was plant a seed.
At twelve-thirty a large group of people left together, and the place was empty except for two young folk singers in the front just finishing up pastrami sandwiches. Shirley made her way wearily back to the kitchen and leaned against the doorsill taking her apron off. "It's a good thing Angie suggested that I put this on," she said, eyeing the messy ketchup and grease stains down its front. "This is one of the two or three decent outfits I have left, and I'd hate to have done this to it." She chucked the apron behind her into a hamper. "I guess we're about done for the night." She pursed her lips and turned serious. Her gaze was not quite as penetrating as Robin's, but it was cool, wary, and analytic.
"I may as well come straight to the point, right?"
"I suppose so." She was more disturbed now.
"Angie's been a little concerned lately about how much he's paying out for food and how much he's taking in. He's let his books get behind for a few months, and a couple of days ago I told him I'd bring them up to date for him." She looked surprised. "I'm not just any old dumb cook, you know." I smiled acidly. "I can add and subtract and multiply and divide, too." She was plainly taken aback at the firmness of my voice; as though she'd really never realized I was a man before. "And what I began to suspect was that more food-not a whole lot, but enough to make a noticeable dent in the profit margin of a place like this-was being bought than was being sold. In other words, that there was a leak."
"You mean somebody's stealing?" She'd decided to take the offensive.
"I wouldn't put it that way if I were in your place."
"What the hell are you talking about."
"It shouldn't be too hard for you to figure out. I'm in a better position to spot this particular bit of chicanery than Angie is, since number one, I'm the night cook, and you always eat here after he leaves; and number two, I tend to remember things like what I cook on a given night. A strange habit, perhaps. But to be quite blunt, I made a steak and a salad and an order of french fries for you last Wednesday that never showed up on a check and was never paid for. Same thing with a bowl of stew and a salad the week before. I know you're not the only one Robin's been playing this little game with, but you're her closest friend, you eat here most often, and I assume that you are, as we might say, the chief beneficiary."
"I'm not admitting that any of this is true, but if it were, so what? What would you do? Call the cops? Tell Angie about it? Give me a spanking? Face it, Jim. By New York standards a meal or two a week is petty bullshit. Anybody who doesn't steal at least that much can't keep his head above water in this ratrace."
If I hadn't overheard her conversation with Robin I would have been thrown by that reply. "Is it petty bullshit if Robin loses her job for stealing?"
I'd touched a raw nerve and Shirley admitted it. Her hands dangled helplessly at her sides. "No, it's not." She thought for a second. "But that'll only happen if you blow the whistle. Look, I've got seventeen dollars in tips here . . . " She emptied her pockets onto the cutting board. "That'll pay back some of it. And I'll give you whatever Angie pays me, too. I'll go back and fix up the last few checks so everything's square, and when I get some more money-you just tell me how much-I'll give it to you and you can write out checks as though I'd bought something. Unless . . . "
"I'm not sure that'll be sufficient. But-unless what?"
She cocked her head and looked at me with a new eye. "Unless we can work out some other arrangement."
"like what?"
She smiled indulgently and looked down at her body. Her tits rolled gently under the satiny cloth of her pants-suit and the nipples poked little ridges in it. Almond-brown, I remembered. "Why don't you use your imagination?"
I laughed easily and finished cleaning up the griddle. "Are you suggesting that I might be bought off with your body?"
"I suppose that's the most obvious possibility, isn't it?"
I took off my own apron and walked over and threw it past her into the hamper. I looked her up and down with a kind of patronizing amusement. "That's a pretty strange offer, but not unintriguing. But what makes you think your body is worth that kind of compromise on my part? I mean, you're asking me to become an accomplice to your little game."
"A game that is now at an end," she said firmly. She undid her sash and dangled it suggestively in her hand. "It's not so much my body as what I do with it. As you can see, I'm pretty skinny." I couldn't see nearly as well now as I once had. The flowing lines of her pants-suit made her look less bony than she really was. But I believed her about what she could do with that skinny body, and it turned me on to have her offering. This was so easy. Too easy, I thought. I became suspicious. Not paranoid, but just suspicious enough to watch my step. After all, I really had no way of knowing whether Robin had told her about the night before.
"On the other hand," I said, "I'm not going to be sticking around in this job much longer. It's not as though Angie was going to be my employer for life. In fact, I'm quitting in the next couple of days. I have some personal business to take care of out on the Coast, and I've been letting it slide for months."
"That's convenient," she replied, pushing off the door-frame and laying her sash up on the cutting board, brushing a tit casually against my arm as she leaned past me.
"Why convenient?"
"Because that means you won't be around to push me for seconds and thirds and fourths." She stared at me frankly. "Let's get down to brass tacks. I can sense you want to make a deal." She took a step back and grabbed her pants-suit at the waist and gathered the material up in her fists until it was tight from her crotch to her shoulders and every line of her body stood out starkly; even the rounded bulge of her cuntlips and the shallow slit between them. "You can come back to my place right now and I'll give you the best night in bed you ever had. You'll promise not to tell Angie, or anybody else, about the food business. We'll cut that out. And that'll be it. Okay?"
I moved to her and ran my palm down into her crotch. She spread hejr legs and squatted on it a little and smiled. "Done," I said.
We cleaned up the restaurant in a hurry and walked the eight blocks downtown to her place. We didn't say much on the way. She was satisfied and not at all uptight, and I was trembling in anticipation. I wanted to ask her whether she'd ever been a hooker, but somehow it didn't seem right.
Her loft was one huge open room on the third floor of an old warehouse. The neighborhood wasn't residential, and I found myself a little uneasy walking the dimly lighted, deserted street. I expected a barren pigsty, but was surprised to be ushered into a fully furnished-almost over furnished-space with newly scraped pine floors, newly washed windows lining the front, and lit by two elegant Tiffany lamps-originals or excellent imitations.
"I went on a cleaning binge today," she told me as she went to the refrigerator and pulled out a couple of beers. She motioned me to a water bed half again as large as Robin's. It was covered by a World War II parachute canopy. "Also, a friend just laid a little bit of really dynamite Turkish hash on me, which I'm going to proceed to smoke. Want some?" She dipped her fingers into a masonry cookie jar and came up with a few shavings of what looked like close-packed brown dirt, which she transferred to a pipe that sat on a glass topped coffee table toward the front of the room.
"I'll try it," I replied, pushing the edges of the parachute aside and kicking off my shoes to wade into the bed. There were half a dozen fat candles on a shelf at the head. I found some matches and lit them up and took a deep breath and relaxed. This was really going to be something. If Robin and her boyfriend and ten cops didn't break down the door the next ten minutes.
When Shirley joined me under the canopy she brought not only a small brass water pipe with a thin rubber hose and mouthpiece, but also a bottle of rubbing oil. The hashish bits glowed in the bowl of the pipe and reeked an odor of flowery midsummer fields. "I thought you might like a body rub," she said softly as she handed me the pipe. She opened the bottle and set it . down. "Do you want to take off your clothes, or shall I?"
"I'll let you do it" I choked as the first drag of hashish seeped down into my lungs and attacked them with jolting strength.
She leaned over and reached for my shirt buttons. "I can see you don't do dope too much," she laughed. When she got my shirt undone and I pushed up onto my elbows so she could slip it off she paused for a second. "This is really weird, you know. I mean, I've made it with a lot of guys for a lot of reasons in my time, but never anything like this. Well-I guess I've done it to eat, and that's what this comes down to." She cocked her head and looked at me curiously. "Does it surprise you to hear that?"
"Not particularly. If I was a girl Yd sure as shit end up a full-time whore."
She shook her head as she folded up my shirt and went for my belt buckle. "No you wouldn't You just try being a full-time whore sometime and see."
I could tell she was good and ripped already. I'd heard that the more you smoked, the easier it was to get stoned, and she seemed to be living proof. Even my brief experience with the night before seemed to help. With my fourth or fifth drag on the pipe I found myself on an elevator speeding right out of the universe. "After
Shirley you ought to give it up," I told myself suddenly. "You'll never get a better one than this."
By this time Shirley was hauling my pants and underpants down together, glancing approvingly at my cock as it rolled around bloatedly on my belly, and laying them next to my shirt beside the bed. The pipe went out and she went to refill it. When she got back she handed it to me and reached for the oil. "You smoke while I rub." I propped myself up on a couple of pillows and closed my eyes and puffed lazily. She dribbled a thin stream of oil down my chest and caught it with her hand and smeared it up and around, over my shoulders, down my arms, seeking out the lines of my muscles and seducing them to relaxation.
"The rewards of sin are great," I found myself thinking. "It's only the dangers that keep people from sinning all the time. How many are clever enough to avoid the dangers? Am I one?"
The phone rang. Shirley cursed and answered it. All she said was, "Yes? Sure. Right now? No. I'm tied up. For the night. Okay. Fine. Goodbye."
Alarm bells went off in my head. Could she just have told somebody I was with her, that they could get me now? I wanted to ask her who it had been, but if my dim suspicions were correct she'd have a good lie ready anyway, and so far the word "blackmail" hadn't been spoken. So it was smartest just to let it ride.
When she was done with my upper body she moved to my feet and worked upward. She had a phenomenal touch. She seemed to know just what my body needed. By the time her fingers probed up into the crevices of my crotch I was limp and panting. She teased me expertly, running rings around the base of my cock, grazing light over my abdomen and raking through my crotch-hair, coming ever so close to my cock, but not actually touching it. I grinned up at her acknowledging her expertise. She grinned back down as though it was to be expected. Then she clasped her oily hands over my cock and it slithered between them like a slippery, drunken snake. It was as though she had my whole sexual being right there between her palms, beneath her fingers, and she was intent on massaging it to orgasm. "You want to get off like this."
"You want me to?"
"It's up to you. You're the boss as far as I'm concerned." I had the sudden, strange feeling that she'd just really said, "You're the John." That made me a little uncomfortable for a second, but then I thought, "That's what you are, and you'll never be any more. If you could buy this you would, but you can't. So you're more and less than an ordinary John. You're more because you're not paying, because you're smarter; and you're less because you can't pay, and so you're stealing instead." I realized I had a lot in common with Shirley when it came to satisfying basic appetites.
I drifted along for a while just soaking up the sensation. I'd never felt anything so good in my life, and it would go on all night if I wanted it to. "Why don't you see how close you can get without getting me off?"
Shirley seemed pleased at the idea of a challenge. She stroked thoughtfully at my cock for a little bit, as though feeling out its particular ways, and when she seemed satisfied that she had the combination she wrapped a fist around it and reached under to goose my balls with her other hand.
She took me racing dizzily right up to the brink in seconds, and then, just when two or three more strokes would have done it, she stopped and let go. My rod quivered and stuck up rigidly.
"How about taking off your clothes," I suggested.
"I was wondering when you'd get around to that" She got up on her knees and stripped the pants-suit oft quickly. I suspected she was afraid I'd be turned off at how skinny she really was. She sat with her arms folded across her stomach as though to cover the visible skeleton of her rib cage.
"How'd you like to sit on my face?"
The invitation seemed welcome. She presented her rear end to my face as she took up my cock once more, this time grasping it between her palms? reaching her pinkies down to search for the pleasure-channels at the roots and stretching her forefingers up to massage the underside of its head.
I wasn't sure I could hold out with her cunt in my face. I licked the outer lips and sniffed the intimate female odors and parted the lips with my fingers to bare her clit, still flaccid but seemingly eager for attention. It stuck up like the tip of a tiny baby's finger wrinkled by long immersion in water and squashed easily to the touch. I put my tongue to it and she gave a short, low hum of appreciation.
I ran my hands over her ass while I ate her and she milked my cock with long, preparatory pulls. Then I touched a fingertip to her ass-hole. It was, like her cunt and in fact the whole of her crotch, a rich, dark honey color, more tan than pink, and her sphincter was wide and smooth and lined with a pretty daisy pattern of creases. It flared automatically to the touch and my fingers sank to the hilt in it with no resistance. That was a click. She pressed back against me, wiggling my tongue harder on her clit and wagging her ass down hard onto my finger. "Jesus Christ," I thought. "This has to be one of the most fuckable ass-holes in history!"
She brought me rushing right up to the gates of climax again, squeezing my shaft hard, digging her fingertips into it almost enough to hurt, stroking right down to the core. I hung in breathless suspense as my lower body started that race-horse humping and that eerie, tingling sensation took over my genitals. I was reaching for it, reaching hard, racing, struggling, and there it was.
As though she could read my body, Shirley stopped again at the crucial moment. But this time she kept her hands clasped around me and I pumped a few weak streams of barely-cloudy fluid out to settle in the juncture between her hand and my cock. She smeared the secretions around daintily and then, with a lingering caress, let me go again. I pulled my head back from her cunt a little and gritted my teeth and inhaled deeply. The fresh oxygen boosted a new surge of sensation out of my groin.
"I don't know how much longer I can take this," I chuckled.
"I don't either. Why don't you turn over and I'll do your back the way I did your front?"
For the next twenty minutes I came down slowly. Shirley proceeded as before, pouring a puddle of oil into the hollow of my backbone, and then rubbing my back and shoulders, going next to my feet and working up from there. By the time her fingers kneaded my buttocks and slid down to circle the rim of my ass-hole and grease my balls, I was once more in a state of dreamy relaxation, ready to climb the peaks again. She wiggled a finger a little way up my ass, pressing down to feel along the root of my cock through the thin membrane that separated them.
She reached down between my legs and pulled my cock through so that so that it pointed straight down like a dog's tail. I knew I was going to have to fuck her soon. She cupped my balls in one palm and worked them with her fingers, resting her forearm in my ass crack to rub her wrist over my ass-hole. She moved around to straddle my back and pressed her pussy to it-a slithery hot damp place that oozed around with maddening seductiveness. Her other hand wrapped around my rod and stroked it
This time the shuddering of my body came hard and fast. I was like a firecracker with a short fuse. I couldn't take the heat. I wanted to plant the immense load of come that threatened to break free in her cunt.
I stirred to indicate she should get up. She flopped onto her back and looked upside down over her head at the candles on the shelf. She stretched and rubbed her cunt absently, making sure the lubrication was spread around and giving her clit a little encouraging treatment along the way. "How do you want it?"
I climbed up over her and knelt, resting my ass lightly on her stomach and gathering up her loose tits in my hands. I threw them around and nipped at the nipples with my thumbs and forefingers, and watched them rise and grow hard. "How about with you on top? That way you'll really be able to show what you can do."
"Good choice. That way it'll be easier for me to get myself off. If you don't mind."
"I'll really get off if you really get off," I told her. "I guess the most exciting thing for me is to see a woman really excited." I wanted to add, "For years and years I never believed that women got off or could get off on sex at all! So help me prove that I'm really wrong! I'll come so hard you'll think you got caught in a flash-flood!" But of course that isn't the kind of thing one admits to either to a victim or to a hooker. Whichever one Shirley was.
The billowy silk of the parachute canopy was like a warm and friendly cloud as I rolled over onto my back and floated on the plastic-covered ocean of the water-bed. And I was like a sky-diver leaping from a high-flying plane with a pack of silk on my back that had to burst and catch air and hold its symmetrical mushroom form if I was to hang from the harness and swing like a child from the ropes and shove my thumbs into the harnesss-straps that crossed my chest the way a fat and happy gambler hooks his thumbs into his suspenders at the end of a winning night and drift down through the atmosphere and land safely on a grassy patch of Mother Earth.
"Okay," Shirley grinned, her wide mouth flashing fine ivory at me from inside the frame of her luscious, promising lips. "This little box here . . . " She slid two fingers down into her cunt as she got into position over me and spread it in a V that jiggled her clit in its crotch. ". . . is about to give you the ride of your life. Take it from Mama Shirley. You'll never take it from anyone else."
More of the "John" feeling. Well, I could live with that. In fact, I was beginning to enjoy the idea that I was one of "Mama Shirley's" clients. It struck me that maybe she was a whore by nature; that that was what nature had meant her to be; that she could be a great whore if only people would allow that there was such a thing as a great whore. "Hold that thing up there for me, will you? And I'll just come along and squat on it."
She pushed herself up to a squatting position and giggled as she tried to get her balance on the uncertain footing of the water bed. She spread her forked fingers in an even wider V-sign and the redder, richer honey of her cunthole opened its smoothly sculpted trough to me. She inched forward in funny little waddles until the end of my cock was fitted to her groove and the viscous oil of her juices pasted pleasure to my cock.
This was really living. This was going all out. All the scales of life were in balance and time was stopped in an eternal moment of breakneck racing. I was closer to the present than I had ever been before; so close that everything that was real seemed real. I was with a woman who could not be tricked even though I had tricked her. I was "just another trick" for her, and that was what set the balance right. I remembered watching her eat the food that had paid for this night, laughing and joking with her friends, acting just as if she wasn't stealing anything-acting so well that she probably didn't believe she was really stealing.
And perhaps she hadn't been. If she hadn't been, I wasn't now.
I laughed at all the shallow-minded bitches who had crapped on me for fifteen years and more. They'd followed their straight, conventional ways, and lived their straight, conventional lives. They'd never know the thrill that I knew now; the thrill of total satisfaction at the payoff of a bet that bet their lives; the thrill of the long-shot coming in and the belly-laugh that marked the cleverness of the fix. They'd cook breakfasts and send kiddies off to school, pick crabgrass from lawns and buy their husbands golf clubs for Christmas, but they'd never end up in a parachute-canopy getting what they really wanted between their legs.
Strange how few good moments of life were needed to justify the rest.
Shirley's cunt fitted over my cock like a glove. As soon as I felt the groove behind the crest of my cock-head passing through the narrows of her bone-shield and breaking into the open bay beyond, all the illusions of misery that had kept me prisoner of my genitals exploded into freedom; the free-falling release of the deep-plunging earth-diver. The muscles of Shirley's humping cunt extracted all my pain. The knowing flesh of an inspired hooker took me rambling. Scarred on my face by endless repetitions of rejection, I yielded to the molding surgery of the erotic, and found myself a handsome man. Not Bob or Jim or a blackmailer or a poor pitiful son-of-a-bitch depraved beyond humanity, but myself all the same.
I was really doing all right. The collar of cunt on my cock was real, and the cunt-flesh that gripped and jerked me was real, and so was the clit that strove to hook forward and down to fawn on the top of my shaft. I could see it. It was a baby's finger, now firm and rosy, a finger that reached out to touch. To touch and take and give. To fuck as though fucking were a high art. To forget the whole stupid tangled mess of society and wander off down a forest path where two were alone and no one was watching. What would happen? People were too timid to guess. But Shirley, the amateur whore, the best kind of professional, was showing me.
Robin's cunt had been like an animal because I'd fucked it like a piece of furniture. She had been sub-human. But Shirley's cunt was like an animal because she became all animal and she became all cunt. She gave her genitals what they wanted. They knew what it was, and when they got it, she had all she wanted.
Shirley's cunt was a hand and a mouth in its power and control and sensitivity. Its insides rippled up and down as the currents of suction coursed through them, dancing across the surface of my cock with the gleeful abandon of a mad seductress. There was nothing as completely close as this rapid-fire flesh-to-flesh signaling.
Two ships passing in the night had their blinkers on and they were heaving to. Their engines idled and a balmy breeze pushed them southward in a light chop. The moon was bright overhead. Flying fish took to the air and skimmed over frothy waves, escaping the sharp-toothed jaws of predators lurking in the life-giving medium below.
The crews made ready their ropes. In the wheel house the mates chattered amiably and sipped coffee.
Shirley and I came together in a little island paradise of tacit understanding. She sought my orgasm no less than I sought hers, and I did the same. When she hooked me I knew I'd been hooked right. I reeled dizzily in the vacuums of man-become-cock, turning, slowly turning inside-out, throwing myself away like the spent first stage of a rocket. It was all there; the sight and smell of the woman squatting and impaling herself, the ecstatic excruciation radiating from her fiercely primitive features, the weight of her body borne on my thighs and shoulders, the flapping brush of her almond-nippled tits on my chest, the feeling that came to me from down below in my own body of the struggling-toward-satiation of an appetite far greater than hunger or thirst.
It took a particular woman to do this. It took a living body. It took a woman who knew what the hell to do with her cunt. Until I found a woman like that, I really didn't know what to do with my cock.
Shirley's cunt felt like a bird descending on me with flying talons and flapping wings. Bird! Ha, ha ha. I'd never known why women were called birds before.
Then she was a loping cat on top of me; loping in place. At a slow, graceful gallop she ran along with my rod stuck up between her legs. It was just a thing stuck up there to give her pleasure while she moved through space over time; just a sweet lollipop for a little girl to chew on. An all-day sucker. Hah!
But still, there she was with strain painted deep in her features and the capture of the prize complete. There she was with the sacks of her tits plunking down onto my chest. Her musculature worked like a well-oiled machine, and there she was pulling close to me as the heartbeats of idling engines propelled us together. There she was as the lines were cast and strong hands seized upon them and the hauling began. There she was as our hulls clanked together, sending melodic waves radiating through metal and air and water, metal echoing metal, cunt-to-cock, bashing and banging and blasting and spurting and drinking and hitting the apex of sanity.
CHAPTER TEN
"Glad you turned out to be a reasonable man," Shirley said. "In more ways than one." She kicked her legs up and wiggled them in the air as though to loosen them up, incidentally pointing her cunt and ass at me. "What would you like next, boss?"
"How are you at taking it up the ass?" She laughed heartily. "That's my specialty, which I assumed you might already have guessed." She put her beer aside and, with her legs still in the air, reached down to spread her ass.
She had a strikingly simple and strikingly open ass-hole. It had almost no rim at all. It was like a whirlpool that trailed immaculate walls of flesh away inside her in casual invitation. "I thought you might be into that Lots of men are. Just by coincidence, I happened to take an enema this afternoon, so I'm all empty, and I had a nice long bath afterward, so I'm ah clean."
"In anticipation of a date tonight-which you have since broken?"
"How perceptive you are," she chortled. "You can use some of that rubbing oil on me."
I oiled her up and it turned out that she preferred to take it lying on her back. "More comfortable that way," she commented. I could hardly say, "I know. Most gay guys will tell you that." So instead I smiled laconically and inched up to her on my knees.
She kicked her legs so far up and out, and let her ass-hole open so widely and so expertly that from where I knelt it almost seemed as though that was meant to be the right hole and the one higher up, with its jumble of lips glued together by swampy adhesion, seemed an accessory. But as I played my cock-head around in its entrance and she squeezed rhythmically to haul me in with what felt like sharp little kisses, she banished that illusion. "I'd like it more if I could use a vibrator on myself," she panted, moving her fingers to her clit "There's one under the pillow. I think you can reach it without pulling out. If you don't mind, of course."
I shook my head and grinned broadly and leaned back and slipped my hand under the pillow and found a long, hard cylinder, pointed at the smooth end with a nose like a rocket. It was white plastic, about a foot long, and battery operated. I gave it to her and returned to concentrating on the feeling of my cock slowly slipping up her ass.
She turned the vibrator on at medium speed. Its hum was somewhere between the whine of an electric shaver and the warning of a rattlesnake. She winked as she touched its head to her clit
She went into writhing ecstasies. "These things are terrific," she enthused. "I never go anywhere without one. When you get a load of this vibrating in my cunt while you're fucking my ass, you'll lose your rocks. Believe me."
I believed her. Already I could feel the quick vibrations as they set her bones and muscles humming.
"Okay. Let me get it in a ways before you go all the way up my ass." She parted her cuntlips, giving me a lovely view of my shaft up her ass, and then eclipsed that sight with a picture of the creamy white plastic jiggling its way into her cunt.
As soon as those vibrations started to come at me through the thin membrane that separated her channels my groin fell prey to a leaden feeling of tight, hot rapture. I grabbed her tits and yanked them up and pulled them around. They were so free and full and pliant!
"Mmmmmm. That's terrific. Ooooh! Yeah! Pinch the nipples really hard! I love it!" She plunged the vibrator in and out of her now, wrapping her fist around it and mashing her knuckles up against her clit with every probing, circling thrust. I clamped my fingers hard on them as I rolled them back and forth and pulled on them, stretching their aureoles out like short strands of molasses taffy. "Oh yeah, shove that cock up my ass! Do it to me! Do it hard!" The hand that held the vibrator jittered now, rapping like a jackhammer on her clit, and I plowed her ass-hole deep. Every muscle in my body strained rigidly toward that withering blast of satisfaction.
Beads of sweat collected on my brow and my face and chest flushed. It was hard work keeping my cock up her when she caught those constricting bursts, from her clit that tried to wrench her ass-hole closed, but the harder the work, the bigger the prize, and I'd never felt anything at once so demanding and so rejecting, altogether so exciting, as this tit-grabbing, ass-fucking, humping half-rape, with the electric cock-gone-wild pressing the front wall of Shirley's rectum to the top of my cock and saturating it with insane vibrations.
I was frying my cock in some fine oil, and it was just about done.
I managed a fierce grimace of pleasure to show her it was on the way. Her expression turned to a feminine mirror of mine. She gritted her teeth and the veins and tendons in her neck stood out in petrified relief.
I plunged and rotated my hips, locking into that oblivious terminal rhythm. Suddenly her mouth gaped wide and she raised her hips and then let them fall into the yielding medium of the water bed.
Then she raised them and punched the vibrator into her like she was stabbing something to death and wanted to make sure that it was good and dead. Her ass-hole clamped down on my cock with vise-like determination. "Come on! Give it to me!"
She threw her head back. The glistening waves of her short black hair danced and rippled across her forehead. She thrashed her head back and forth and let her ass-muscles go. With a sharp, battering lift of her hips she rammed me deep and clamped down again.
She got it right when she wanted it. My cock and the vibrator packed her crotch with pulsing, thrusting, reaching fullness. My come shot her ass-hole even fuller. I rammed my rod up as far as I could and pushed and pushed in the lost, ragged tempo of ejaculation.
Afterward we sat around and drank and smoked some more. We even watched the late news on television. While newsreels of riots in Portugal and plane crashes in France occupied the screen I found myself wishing I could stay in my job at Hardy's and move in with Shirley. But I had to laugh at those wishes. And I had to go my own way. The simple fact was that Shirley would never have me, and that I wasn't much worth having. Maybe she really wasn't worth having in the long run either. Although I'd often told myself that if I had a woman who could keep me satisfied, I wouldn't care who else she kept satisfied too.
After the news we fucked once more, this time with me on top, and although we were too spent to reach our earlier heights again, it was easy and comfortable and it took the last of my desires from me. We even fell asleep in each other's arms-something I had never dared hope for and in fact had resolved, for purposes of caution, never to let happen.
I awakened around four-thirty in the morning. I felt wonderful and terrible at the same time. I knew I had to leave but I didn't Want to, and anyhow, I was afraid to stay. I guess a thief always-likes to escape in the night. The daylight is just too much for his misdeed to withstand. I dressed quietly and rifled Shirley's purse for her front door key. I went to the cooky jar and found, as I had suspected, that her "friend" had "given" her more than "a little" hashish. There was a brick half the size of a baseball in there, and considering that a few small shavings had wiped both of us out for the night, I reckoned that was enough to last Superman for a century. So I picked out a few little bits and wrapped them in a paper towel and put them in my pocket. Then I wrote Shirley a short note, which I printed with my. left hand. "Thanks for a good time. Great 'honor among thieves.' Being a fellow thief, I've ripped off a few bits of hash. You'll find your front door key under your door if it'll fit, otherwise in your mailbox. Thought I ought to leave you locked up safe and sound. See you again sometime. Love-" And I left it unsigned.
I laid the note across her clothes and stood silently watching her sleeping form for many minutes before I finally bent down and kissed her softly on the neck.
I think that was the most wonderful kiss of my life.
Then I left.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After Shirley I was in a strange state. For a few days my horniness was just not there. I called Angie the next morning and told him my mother had just died in California, and I would have to quit immediately to go back home for the funeral; that my father had agreed to support me on my own terms, and that I didn't have to work anymore. I was really sorry to leave him in the lurch and I told him so, but I guess he was used to it, because he just gave a kind of "Oh not again!" moan and agreed that I could stop and pick up my last check right away. I told him I had his books up to date and that everything was square, and that to make up for my cutting out with no notice, I wouldn't charge him anything for that. He said he was sorry that he had to take me up on that, but of course I knew his financial situation as well as anyone. I replied that I would be more than satisfied if he would write me a reference recommending me as both a short order cook and a bookkeeper just in case I ever did have to work again. He agreed good-naturedly.
I managed to get in and out of the place quickly, without running into Robin or Shirley or any of their acquaintances. As I shook hands with Angie and looked around the place one last time I felt a little nostalgic. I'd really been at home with that simple, absorbing kind of manual labor, maybe because it claimed my physical attention and made it a little easier to put up with my perpetual horniness. It was the kind of place I needed. I'd actually developed some affection for those pots and pans and utensils, that stove and griddle and cutting board. Then again, the place had been a gold mine of success for my "blackmail brothel." Very strange, I thought to myself as I pocketed my check and letter of reference and walked out onto the street.
I spent the rest of that morning walking all the way back up to my East Side hotel room. As I wandered up Eighth Avenue past the wholesale florists and then into the Garment District I was taken up with thoughts and memories of Shirley.
Maybe I'd been too hasty. Maybe I should have stayed at least until morning. Would she have made me breakfast before sending me on my way? What would our parting have been like?
I hardly noticed the women in the streets as I neared 42nd street and lunch-hour crowds clogged the sidewalks. For once my eyes did not dart feverishly through the crowds in search of short skirts or transparent dresses or tight pants or naked tits bouncing beneath sheer blouses. It was a great relief not to have to worry, "Can she feel me staring at her? Is she cringing at the gaze of yet another dirty pervert?" When I thought about it, it was the first relief from those worries I had felt in years.
I crossed 42nd Street to amble uptown and passed the $5 strip show that had recently cut its prices to $3. For some reason I felt freer to go in than I had before; as though I could take it for what it was, a strip show, and now spend my time agonizing over the distance between me and those professionally flaunted pussies.
I hesitated for a moment, but decided not to go in. My limbs were still stiff and my lungs wanted more of that fresh autumn air. I decided to walk east on 42nd street and uptown on 5th Avenue.
By the time I got to St. Patrick's and Rockefeller Center I had noticed something interesting. Although the smartly dressed ladies that paraded high-class un-touchability there aroused me no more than the hookers and the hippy-teenagers of 42nd Street, I found them far more appealing. "Because they think they're so unreachable," I decided. They were something like Janet, all of them, but they were un-like her in that she practically advertised her sexuality, and they did their best to keep theirs concealed; to pretend they really didn't have any. I was especially attracted to the middle-aged women-the ones in their late thirties or early forties. What I really wanted to fuck, I realized, was the goddamned holier-than-thou upper-middle-class Establishment. I wanted to take all its prim and prissy prohibitions and shove them right up its ass. These people were the ones who laid down the laws, and they laid them down to their own advantage. They fixed things up so poor slobs like me didn't stand a fucking chance.
By the time I'd crossed Central Park South and, just for nostalgia's sake, taken Fifth up past the Pierre, I'd made my decision. My next "subject" would be a wealthy, uptight middle-aged lady.
I started looking for a job that would put me in contact with people like that. It was a new thing for me, deciding what kind of woman I was going to go after, and it shifted my whole pattern of operation. But after Shirley some shift was needed, and in the growing depression that followed those days of calm satisfaction it proved to be the best way for me to keep the devils out of my head.
The depression came when I fully realized what the outcome of the night with Shirley had meant. If there was ever going to be "a girl" for me, she was going to have to be a lot like Shirley. But a girl who was a lot like Shirley wouldn't want me. So there was never going to be "a girl" for me. I supposed I'd always known that, but now it was plainer than ever. The night with Shirley had been fantastic, but it had just made the ensuing depression inevitable and all the more painful. And it was going to continue to be that way with every new Shirley who came along. I just couldn't afford to fall in love, so I decided I'd better stay away from women who could take me that way. Maybe that was why I'd come to the decision as to what kind of person my next victim would be.
After only ten days of job-hunting I struck it lucky. A private caterer on the East Side advertised for an assistant, and when she heard that I had both cooking and bookkeeping experience and was willing to work for the slave-wages she was offering, she hired me right away. Agnes Blake-that's what I'd call her-did all the imagine cooking herself, and the tasks of her assistants were simple. She needed polite people in starched white uniforms to bow and scrape to the guests at the functions she serviced; parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs. All terribly "high society" events. Her other assistants were Juan, a sharp young Puerto Rican whose childishly sexy smile helped him get enough on the side to pay his way through college, and Frank, a jovial but mildly retarded fatso who'd been with Agnes for ten years. I had a few good laughs with Juan, but of course I couldn't afford to get too close to anybody.
I hung around Agnes's midtown co-op apartment, which she had fitted with commercial stoves and refrigerators and all the equipment of her trade so she could run her business from there, for my first week, learning the niceties of obsequious servitude. It was really funny the things Agnes was so rabid about. Every smile and olive and toothpick had to be right where she wanted them when she wanted them, and if a tart had a slightly crumbled edge, it was into the garbage with it But it was worthwhile putting up with all that, and even with Agnes herself, who was a nasty old hen if I ever saw one, for the rich bonanza of feminine vulnerability that the catering trade opened up to me. If Hardy's had been a little goldmine, Agnes's ushered in a whole golden age. By the time I left her I had half a dozen women set up, and all I had to do was cash in.
The first of the "Agnes-women" was Grace. She was the busty, bustling, oh-so-social wife of a prominent publisher. She was also the worst name-dropper I ever knew. She dropped more big names than a rabbit drops little turds. But despite this irritating habit she was a gorgeous piece and basically, as I saw her, a fine woman. She had silver hair (dyed, of course . . . from blonde!) running down her back like a shimmering mountain stream; a full but foxy-looking face with firm cheeks and cheerful little squint-lines at the corners of her eyes, the result of smiling aggressively all the time; and a pampered, carefully exercised body that made it believable that she was as young as she claimed. (She said she was 34, although I later found out she was 39.)
I got onto her at a party her husband held for his star writers and their agents. There were some pretty big names involved. Grace herself was an interior decorator, and their Brooklyn Heights apartment was a marvel to behold. They'd virtually gutted their brownstone, and doubled the size of the windows on the middle floors. She'd chosen an amazing collection of modern American and Swedish and Japanese furniture to give it a spacious and sleekly elegant look.
Grace was the first woman I got evidence on even before I'd considered going after it. Hers was the third job I went on with Agnes. In the midst of serving London Broil with b'arnaise sauce I overheard Grace talking to one of her husband's writers, who also happened to be a prospective client of hers. They were on the back porch just outside the kitchen where I was working. They talked for a long time about draperies and slip-covers and pieces of sculpture and paintings and so on before my ears perked up to the magic words: "My fee is going to come to around two thousand if you pay by check and twelve hundred if you pay in cash."
"Oh ho!" the writer laughed. "Cheating on your good old Uncle Sam, huh?"
Grace shrugged. "We're in a fifty-percent tax bracket now anyway, and it's getting to the point where it's barely worthwhile for me to work. What kind of a country is this, anyway?"
"I have no idea," the writer said, "but you'll get your money in cash, that's for sure. When do you want to start?"
All I had to do was establish some kind of persona contact with Grace. The chance came toward the end o the party, when the last few guests were straggling out and Agnes had left Frank and me to clean up. Her husband went off to bed and she stayed up to "supervise" us. Undoubtedly to make sure we wouldn't walk of with anything, I started a conversation about her business, and, not have anything better to do, she proved all too happy to tell me about her rich and famous clients and the exquisite and lavish things she had done with their houses apartments, mansions-even their yachts. "It's true!' she assured me proudly over her ninety-seventh Old Grandad and branch water. She was no southern belle, but she liked to drink like a southern gentleman. I thought that was funny. Frank waddled in with trays full of dirty plates and waddled back out in search of more, and I packed them away to be washed in Agnes's commercial dishwasher in the morning. "I once decorated the interior of a seventy-five foot yacht! Did it in genuine Arabian, too. Desert stuff. Hung wineskins on the bulkheads and used camel saddles for seats." She was obviously quite proud of herself. By the time she was done boasting I had a mental list of two dozen famous clients she'd worked for in the past few years, and a pretty good idea of how much she would have got from them in commissions. "You must make a hell of a pile," I said admiringly.
She shrugged, and I could see she didn't suspect me personally, but she made it a policy not to discuss her income with strangers. "Wish I could get into something like that," I went on. "What Agnes pays me is barely enough to keep body and soul together." At that point we were all done and ready to leave. "Say, if you ever need any help, I'm always looking to make a few bucks. Either with the business or anything you might want done around the house. Let me give you my number, okay?"
"Okay," she said in the manner of someone who's used to being asked for favors and doesn't give out many. I wrote my name and number down for her. "I work for Agnes in the evenings mostly, so I'm free during the mornings and early afternoons. I really would like to get into the interior decorating business. I know I couldn't actually be a decorator, that you need all kinds of training for that, but I really like to be around nice things and it would give me a big thrill to see the 'before and after' of some of your places. Your own place is such a showcase-I bet you get a lot of work just from people who come here and see it."
That little bit of flattery obviously made her notice me and remember me, because on the next Saturday morning she called me to ask if I could help her move a few big things around-first at a client's, where she wanted to see whether a breakfront should go on one wall and a desk on the other or vice versa, and then at their own place, where she needed a few things moved up from the cellar and a few others moved down. "I always like to keep my own place changing," she explained. "Gives guests something to talk about, and when guests start talking about decorating, that's good for business."
Things couldn't have worked out more perfectly. I was the model employee at her clients', a penthouse in Washington Heights, and by the time we got back to her place around one-thirty she'd decided I was a great find. While I moved things from study to cellar and cellar to library and library to cellar and cellar to bedroom and so on, I kept my eye out for where some rather special things might be kept, and by the time I left and hurried down to Agnes's, I had a pretty good idea where they were and how I could go about getting them.
Grace had told me that she and her husband were about to leave for a week in the Bahamas, and that took care of the problem of when. When I went down into the cellar for the last time that day I crawled back over an old piano and pushed the black curtains to one of the windows aside and unlatched it
At three in the morning in the middle of the following week I went down to the house and got myself in through the window. After about half an hour of picking locks and searching through file drawers I found what I was after; a copy of Grace's tax return for the previous year, along with the account books she'd cooked up to substantiate it. When I looked at her "gross income" line I knew I'd hit the jackpot. She'd reported $12,000 and just from the clients she told me about I knew her income had to have been at least $25,000. Less than half of the big accounts she'd mentioned to me appeared in the books. I made Xerox copies of everything the next day and put it back where it belonged the next night
The second Agnes-woman was a small-time nightclub singer, the low-cut-dress type whose cleavage got more attention than her voice. She was Italian and dark, and her downfall was that she was married but had a boyfriend who liked to make it in the wild. I got some fabulous pictures of them fucking on the deserted dunes of Fire Island one brisk November weekend. Getting those photos with my new Nikon and its incredible telescopic lens was almost as big a kick as socking it to her with the evidence and then socking it to her with something better. I still have copies of the pictures, although I keep meaning to burn them. They show some of the nicest candid pussy that's ever been filmed; as if Td been kneeling two feet from her curly black jungle with its long firebreak of pouting lips. She had some of the lushest cuntlips I ever tasted. You could suck them half way down your throat and they'd flutter in your gullet-like flags.
Another of my Agnes-women was Laurie, a thirty-eight year old wife of a thirty-one year old doctor who she'd learned had taken to expending his best energies on younger material. Younger like twelve and thirteen. She gladly gave up the ghost of her fidelity to protect him, although scandal caught up with him anyhow in the end. I showed her some lovely pictures of her husband examining the genitals of one of his prettiest pubescent patients with his tongue, and some more of him taking the virginity of another with crazed ardor. (I had to rent the office upstairs from his and rip up the floor and play with light fixtures to get those shots.) She agreed to buy them and my silence with a night of self-sacrifice, although she cursed me under her breath every fucking minute and went away firmly believing that I was the devil himself, while her husband was Gabriel in nothing more than a rather eccentric disguise. Still, I rather liked her, and was sad to read about a month after our encounter that the enraged parents of one of her husband's "patients" were charging him with raping their 14-year-old daughter. "Well," I thought to myself, "doctors are supposed to be more clever than that."
And then there was a housewife and mother of four from New Jersey who-happened to pick the wrong party at which to meet her old childhood sweetheart and start an affair. (She's another one I still have pictures on. There's one terrific one of him coming into her mouth that I got through the keyhole of an old-fashioned hotel room in Connecticut.) She wasn't particularly ravishing-she was in a fire when she was about six, and still had burn scars on one side of her neck-but she had gorgeous wide brown eyes and a very appealing settled-young-mother look. By the time I got around to her I was really going after the forbidden fruit. Only the most untouchable of the untouchable, the real challenges, were of interest to me. It wasn't only my sexual appetite that was at stake every time I fixed my sights on a new victim: it was my masculinity; my very identity. There was only one thing I'd ever really learned to do successfully and well in my life, and cornering big cats was it. I'd become addicted to danger, or at least to risk. That was why I arranged it with the housewife so we could have our little session in her home, and I insisted on keeping my cock in her until five minutes before her children were due home from school. I passed them on my way down the street disguised as a vacuum cleaner salesman.
Then there was a reporter for a prominent New York newspaper who'd taken a bribe to lay off a story about a kick-back scandal in the city government. She was the most touchy of all my cases. She was a little unbalanced to begin with, and when I first confronted her she tried to scratch my eyes out. Fortunately it happened in a deserted corner of Central Park and there were no witnesses. Afterward we went across the street to the Plaza and she suffered the price of my silence stoically. She had the nicest pair of long, coltish legs I'd ever seen, and when she wrapped them around me and started using them for what they were made for I decided all my troubles and a few facial scratches had been worth it
And then, to round things off, there was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy manufacturer who happened to be Catholic, and would have been even more upset than most parents to learn that his daughter had spent part of her Christmas vacation getting rid of an illegitimate baby in a Manhattan abortion clinic. After a run of older women she was just what I needed. I still have vivid memories of the glowing tauntness of her body and the springy tightness of her cunt.
But the most memorable of them all was Grace-not only because she was the first, and not only because she, like relatively few fast-moving New York women, was religiously faithful to her husband, but also because she gave me the hardest time of any of them. She came the closest to being as clever as I was, and she damned near got me killed. She got her husband involved, and in the end I had to get him to agree to let her go to bed with me. In the process, I also forced him to fuck his wife while I watched, and then to watch while I made love to her myself.
During the few months that I worked for Agnes I was totally absorbed in the demanding task of figuring out half a dozen foolproof plots at once. It was a barren time sexually, at least as far as really making it with women was concerned, but it was a rich time as far as fantasies went, and it was also rich with the memories of Shirley and Robin and Janet, and even occasionally Jill. These memories I systematically exploited and refurbished in solitary orgies of masturbation in my East Side hotel room. A few of those orgies were greatly enhanced by the hash I'd got from Shirley, and after that was gone I got some more through Juan. I would work for Agnes in the evenings, sometimes until two or three in the morning, and then I'd sleep six or seven hours, and then I'd spend the mornings and afternoons working on my "cases." I knew I was living a lot of weird illusions, but they were exciting illusions, and I was drawn deeper into them just the way I was drawn deeper into a cunt when I got a hold of one.
I imagined myself a private detective. I was working for a rich and righteous employer, and the success of my missions meant the salvation of society. Or I was working for the FBI or the CIA, and the success of my missions meant the salvation of the American Way of Life. I laughed at that one even as I entertained it, because I had nothing but contempt for the American Way of Life, and deep down for myself when I pursued it so extremely. I went about my business as though I had to prosecute my victims before the Supreme Court, and that particular illusion saved my ass a number of times, especially with Grace and Harold, her husband. I was so well prepared that God Almighty Herself couldn't have fought loose of my traps. In a strange way, all of my illusions were true.
By this time I was planning months ahead, and I was able to give Agnes two weeks notice before I quit with the usual excuse that I had urgent personal business out on the Coast. I had learned to flatter her, to play to her weak points, and the old bag had grown quite attached to me, so she was happy to write me excellent references and wish me good luck when I departed. I'd saved enough money working for her and doing little side jobs to live for a month or so, even though it meant eating rice and beans a lot of the time. My only luxuries were the bare necessities of sex, and I sacrificed everything to get them.
After Grace and her husband got back from the Bahamas I worked for her half a dozen more times, and got her to tell me in great detail about certain jobs I was particularly interested in. I overheard the making of a few more cash-on-the-barrelhead deals, and learned how her pricing system went. Eventually I figured that she was making more like $40,000 a year, and that she had been for years. She owed Uncle Sam something in the neighborhood of $100,000, and she'd committed the cardinal crime of income tax evasion; not reporting all her earnings. She could go to jail for that just the way Al Capone had.
I won't go into the scene when I originally confronted her. It and all the other confrontations were remarkably similar to the ones I've already described, except that , Grace was a little more self-righteous than most when she figured out what I wanted from her and a little less-likely to believe that I wouldn't come back again later for seconds-or for money. I was a little suspicious when she suddenly agreed to entertain me at her place one Thursday night in mid-February when she said her husband was going to be out of town. I checked that out by simply calling his office and asking if he'd be in on Friday. His receptionist told me he would. At first I was tempted to drop the whole deal like a hot potato. But I'd put too much work into Grace, and I had too strong a case against her, to do that. At least I was prepared when her husband came bursting out of the bedroom closet at the first suggestion of Grace removing any clothes. But I wasn't prepared for him to be pointing a .38 at my chest. He was a big guy, an ex-marine, and Ml of that wild-dog macho of the red-blooded American man whose woman has been threatened. Fortunately I read him right: he was just a little too smart to pull the trigger. And since he was that just smart, he turned out only smart enough to make things harder on himself and his wife. Step by step I showed him that his best and only option was to let his wife go through with the $100,000 fuck. After he'd grasped that much I said, "And since you'll want to be assured that I won't mistreat her, you can stay and watch."
The very idea of that drove him crazy. It was like crushing his oversized balls in a nutcracker. He cursed and raved and said he would never do such a thing, that he'd kill himself first. (I'd convinced him he couldn't kill me because I had accomplices who knew where I was who'd jack both of them up for a murder rap. And also forward my information to the IRS anyhow.) I urged Grace to get the gun away from him, and she did. I had her throw the slugs out one window and the gun out another and then told him he didn't have any choice; that he had to watch; that I insisted he be satisfied that his wife was being treated right. In fact, I insisted that he show me how she liked to be treated.
"Are you suggesting that Grace and I put on a sex show for you?"
"A purely educational one, of course," I told him.
His bushy black eyebrows arched in fury and he huffed and puffed around like a bulldozer gone wild. "And for $100,000 and your wife's freedom, it had better be very educational." By this time I knew I was home free, and feeling a little cocky, so I added, "And when I take over, you'll get to see what kind of a student I am. You can even give me a grade, if you like."
That sent him into still another frenzy. He went into the bathroom and smashed a couple of glasses. I had to admit that I sort of admired the genuineness of his emotions, although as a person I despised him. Otherwise I could never have done what I did to him. He was just the kind of Establishment bull I wanted to wave red flags at
While he was throwing his tantrum Grace was staring at me with monstrous hate and bitterness, but I could see she was resigning herself to her fate. "Look," I told her, "you two are really making this a much more traumatic thing than it has to be. Just pretend you're at home alone making love as usual for a while, and then . . . pretend I'm Harold, I don't care. But if you get your shit together the whole thing'll be over in a couple of hours. Fll be out of your life for good, you'll be safe again, and you'll be able to look back on the whole thing as a short bad dream."
"I really can't believe you want to do this, Jim," she said for the thousandth time. "You've always seemed so honest and straightforward."
"Just the way you've seemed to the IRS, I imagine."
She seemed to understand then that what money was for her, sex was for me, and once she understood me in her own terms, I think she believed I really wouldn't be back again, because it wouldn't be clever, and I was clever. She also saw that I wasn't going to move without what I'd come for. She looked at a clock over the bed. "It's eight thirty," she said. "Can this be over by ten thirty."
"By eleven, at least. If.. . "
"Sit down in that chair over there and keep quiet. And try not to bait Harold so much. He knows it would be stupid to hurt you now, but you can see he's got a hell of a temper, and if you get him mad enough he might do something stupid." She got up. "I'll try to get him." She went toward the bathroom. "You might not know what kind of risk you're really taking," she said over her shoulder. "I know you don't realize how close you came to being shot before."
I shrugged. "Blackmail is risky business. My own life isn't so wonderful that I care a whole lot about losing it"
She frowned a little thoughtfully and for the first time took a hard look at me. "I've never known anyone like that."
"It's a different world," I assured her as she disappeared into the bathroom.
CHAPTER TWELVE
After a few minutes Grace came out of the bathroom and went downstairs to get a broom and dustpan to clean up the broken glass and a couple of stiff drinks for her and Harold. I sat quietly in my chair listening to glass being swept across tile and the low sounds of argument. Grace's voice was calm, rational, insistent. Harold's whined off into mumbling as he rapidly got drunk. After about fifteen minutes they emerged, with Grace leading Harold by the hand. He threw one rancorous glance at me as he located me in the chair and then didn't look at me again . . . until he had to later on. He took the side of the bed closest to me and undressed with his back to me. He drew a deep, quavering breath as Grace gazed out the window and started unbuttoning her blouse, as though resolving to close his eyes to the whole thing until it was over. The minute Grace touched the first button a searing thrill of victory and overwhelming excitement coursed through me and my cock began to stiffen. We were on the way.
Grace removed all her clothes standing and looking out the window. When her royal blue slacks slid down over full, lyrically curving hips and her hands reached up behind her to unhook her full-to-bursting bra and she bent demurely to push her panties off my blood started to race and I got dizzy with the sight of Harold's very private flesh-reserve opening up to me. Grace had a model's figure with just a little extra added all around to soften her lines. Except that her tits had a lot extra. They were high and jutting and firm in a generous, motherly way, with nipples that were pink-champagne pale in the centers of wide, almost invisible aureoles.
When she turned and looked through me and reclined on the bed my eyes darted to the platinum blonde fuzz of her nearly hairless' cunt and I stifled a gasp. Her lips were soft and full as a baby's cheeks, and the tenuously exaggerated rise of her pubis seemed to thrust them out with muted brazenness, as though for the right man they could satisfy all the desires of a lifetime. I guess I have to admit that what excited me more than anything about her was the idea that, at least since her marriage more than fifteen years before, no man had so much as looked upon her cunt but Harold-and me. There really was something to the idea that what was most rare was most precious.
Grace lay on her back and Harold lay on his side next to her, temporarily blocking my view. But Grace knew that wouldn't do, and I heard her whisper, "Remember, we're alone." She patted his thick, muscular neck comfortingly. "Come on. Let's make love, and let's not let any worries get in our way." I had the feeling she wanted to say, "Let's show this bastard what making love really means. Let's show him what he's missing. Let's twist the knife. He can never measure up to you, so don't worry." But of course she couldn't say that, because that would be admitting my presence. So instead she pulled him up on top of her and pressed his head to her breast. She closed her eyes and shoved a knee up between Harold's legs and rubbed the top of her thigh against his long, dark, slender cock. After a few seconds he reluctantly took a nipple into his mouth and began sucking. She was doing pretty well at ignoring me, because she arched her back, pinching her shoulder blades together, and moaned softly. Then she started kissing his cheek and nibbling at his ear.
For a long time I had my doubts that Harold was going to be able to get it up. I started to get impatient at his laconic toying with Grace's nipples, even though he stretched them up and let them snap back provocatively and they grew bloated and hard. But maybe it always took them a while to get going, and I contented myself with adding the details of Grace's private parts, or as much of them as I could see, to my memory-collection. The all-but-bald bulge of her cuntlips, which rubbed together hypnotically with the grinding of her thigh into Harold's crotch, formed one of the most perfectly erotic little sculptures I'd ever seen.
Grace knew what she had to do to get this over, and after she'd calmed and soothed her three-quarters-soused husband for a while she disentangled herself from him and laid him on his back and covered his head with a pillow. Then she crawled down and spread his legs and knelt between them with her own knees wide apart, sticking her rear-end back at me, presenting me with a perfect picture of the vista between her legs. She even reached back to spread her outer lips and free the thin, still-dry ridges of the inner ones to dangle like ripe sections of fruit before my eyes. She wasn't giving much, but she was giving a little, and from here it was more than enough to send me into new ecstasies. Her ass cheeks were full and her crack was deep, and even with her spread the way she was I could barely make out the dully shining edges of her peachy ass-hole nestled at the bottom.
She took Harold's cock in her fingers and raised it. It was just the slightest bit hard. She sucked it whole into her mouth and swirled it around, and immediately I knew that was what got Harold off more than anything. She kissed it with the same gentle intimacy that had caressed his face and neck, and it responded of itself. It took a few minutes, but soon she was bobbing up and down on its hard saliva-polished shaft with intoxicating insistency. Her ass bobbed up and down to the rhythm, transfixing me with its full feminine sensuality.
When she had him good and hard she came up off him and looked around at me briefly. Her stare was blank, but through it I could read a guarded question: "If we go ahead and fuck now, will that be enough?" I smiled in vague assent. I might have been deceiving myself, but I thought I saw her return a tiny acknowledgement of gratitude. Another rule of mine: once you're in control, be as generous and flexible as you can. It minimized the dangers and maximized the possibility that the woman herself would get excited, which was the supreme triumph. Of course I knew better than to expect that from Grace, but I felt that I'd just lubricated things considerably.
In fact, just for my little gesture Grace gave me a little bonus. She was too dry to fuck and she knew it. She frowned a little and felt herself and then, stroking on Harold's cock to keep him hard, she glanced pointedly at the top drawer of a bureau next to me. She put a finger to her lips, indicating that I should pull the drawer out quietly, and I knew there was a tube of KY jelly or something similar in it. I slipped off my shoes and stood up and tugged gently at the drawer, but the wood of the bureau creaked and Harold stirred under his pillow. Grace winced, and I knew that by this time her only hope was to get us all through the evening in one piece. She shook her head. Then she glanced narrowly at me and her brow wrinkled. Finally she looked back at her cunt and made a licking motion with her lips, indicating that I should wet her with my tongue.
A jolt of delirium wracked my cock with convulsions. My breath came hard and shallow and that hollow feeling grew in the pit of my stomach. I tip-toed the few steps to her, testing each board before I put my weight on it to make sure it wouldn't creak, and bent to fit my face into the bowl-like hollow of her thighs, out of which her cunt bulged like a whale's back out of the ocean. The smell was sweet and the pungent, earthy odor of her secret crevice wafted but faintly to my nostrils. I wetted my tongue. She was stroking Harold hard now, with a fluid wrist-motion that said she'd learned just how to jerk him off, keeping what was left of his consciousness occupied. I touched my tongue-tip delicately, hesitantly to her slit, falling into the deliberate slow-motion tempo of barely flickering sensuality that carried us along cautiously on a murky, lazy river full of unseen snags.
Grace's cunt was absolutely delicious. There was no other word for it. The flesh was so soft and pliant, so feminine and yet so resilient, that it was like an answer to all my tongue's prayers. I licked its outer lips fully open with light, short, lingering strokes, feeling every tiny curl of fur. Then I probed into the gully between the outer and the inner lips, separating them methodically. Finally I pushed the inner lips out and, with my mouth now watering freely, dampened her well-mouth, prying it open in little circling motions and delving down into it to dredge up its natural juices and spread them over the entrance.
I pulled back and looked. Grace turned to me and nodded. Her cunt wasn't the oozing spring of readiness that it might have been, but its translucent rose-marble muscle was wet enough to reflect little star-points of light from the lamp atop the bureau, and it was wet enough to fuck. Noiselessly I sat back down again and held my breath.
Grace pushed Harold's legs together and planted her knees outside them. She shook her head to throw her stream of silvery hair in a wide, shimmering curtain down her back. She breathed deeply, as though gathering inspiration in the far recesses of her lungs and forcing it to seep down and saturate her crotch. In a way she was like an actor getting into character, except that the character she was trying to get into was herself. Suddenly it struck me that she had an intuitive grasp of what I wanted, and that although if I'd said, "All right, that's enough, you don't have to do any more if you don't want to," she would have had a blanket around her in a second, she was thinking of this whole thing now as a business deal. Somehow it had got through to her that if they held up their end they really would be free of me forever, and that since Harold couldn't face the prospect of being helpless before another man and could barely lend his body to the" occasion, the burden of saving herself and, actually, both of them, had fallen to her. She also knew that I was interested in her, not in Harold, and that if she tried her best everything would turn out all right. So she picked a position that would put her in control and show me the most, and then tried to forget that I was watching.
I could almost believe she had succeeded. I sat stork still and all but held my breath. She moved up over Harold and reached between her legs to grab his rod. She knelt straight up and blindly groped for her hole with its head, pushing lips aside and squeezing its shaft in sharp little attacks. When she had it firmly but shallowly implanted she bent and snuggled down onto him, grinding her tits to his chest. Keeping her head on my side of his, making it harder for him to see me, she removed the pillow and deftly buried her head in the crook of his neck. She slid her arms under and around him and hugged him hard and started fucking. The soft stretched leather of his cock sank into her as she sank onto it, her back sharply arched and her ass held stiffly high like the rear end of a cat in heat. Her thighs seemed pried apart and held by some invisible force as her back muscles tensed and levered her down in short, spasmodic thrusts. The membranes of her hole-mouth clung hungrily to the swollen-veined surface of his rod, puckering in and pouting out like a neatly punctured drumhead.
Little whines of excitement escaped from her lips. She hooked her cunt down harder now, grasping for all of him, and when his coal-black pubic hair met and meshed with her ephemeral blonde ones, when the base of his cock lay buried in the lush earth-mounds of her cuntlips that were piled and bunched around her opening, she began finishing each stroke with that upward-licking clit-motion that said she was ready to take her satisfaction.
Harold's hands had rested limply across her back, and except for his occasional stirrings and his erection, I would have believed he was asleep. Perhaps that was what he wanted me to believe. But when Grace went after him with the irresistible call of genuine passion and the promising, familiar intimacy of her long-time-wife's cunt, he responded. Perhaps he really responded more to the challenge of showing me I truly was excluded from their world no matter how close I sat, and of excluding me by showing me I really was excluded. I could hardly believe he had managed to forget me. Perhaps he had simply grasped his wife's wisdom. But for whatever reason, in response to whatever excitement, he spread his palms across her back and pressed her to him hard, and slowly his hips started to rotate. Grace came back with lazily-starting, fast-finishing undulations of her backbone mat shoved her tits even harder against him, setting up whip-like waves that cracked the knot-end of her clit against the base of his cock. He flexed his knees a little and planted his feet and curled his toes to get a grip on the sheet and mattress.
His flurry of passion did not last twenty seconds, but that was long enough. Grace felt him bracing himself and she squirmed and sprawled and writhed to beckon him on. She had her back to me in every sense of the word. I was no more than a piece of furniture; an ugly piece to be thrown out as soon as possible. Her fucking itself told Harold this. His strength flashed to life under the comforting cover of his wife's reassurances and he answered her with a furious barrage of lancing thrusts.
He chased her depths up and she chased his heights down. He slapped her ass cheeks red with his palms and guttural grunts echoed from his chest. Three fingers slid down into her crack and dabbed at her ass-hole and rubbed it to raw looseness, mashing it down onto the underside of his cock, running around the bottom of her cunt. One finger slid into her cunt along the underside of his cock. Her hole was big and his cock was thin. It took his cock and a finger together to really fill her up. When she got it all he started pulling his finger out as he pushed his cock in, pushing his finger in as he pulled his cock out, pushing and pulling and sawing in her slit with a rapid-fire motion that jerked him off inside her while it set her cunt on fire. He got off and threw his cock like punches into her, driving his come home. She weathered his savage attack, going with his rhythm, letting him have the reins, and then seizing him as he shot his last and struggling to choke her own orgasm out of him. Her hair flew into tangles as her cunt bumped, bumped, bumped against him. But she couldn't quite get it. She hung on, grinding away, her rounded ass-cheeks clenching, back and shoulders and arms working, until his erection failed and there was no more hope.
She lay panting on him, hanging her head like a dog after a long run, her cheeks puffing slightly with each breath. He looked up at her and I was surprised to see that his glance was steely and grim. He made a move to look in my direction but she put a hand over his eyes and turned back to me herself with a questioning expression. I nodded, smiling faintly at the sight of a fatly cone-shaped tit that hung in swaying profile beyond an arm. She bent and whispered into Harold's ear, "That's ah. We're done. Now please, darling . . . we've come this far. Let's finish it and be done. I know it's going to be hard for you, but it's going to be harder for me, sc please help me. It's the only way."
"Right now," I thought I heard him mumble.
"It's the only way," Grace repeated. "So please keep your temper. Try to pretend you're watching me choose draperies or something."
"I can't do it. I can't watch," he said.
"But I don't want to be left alone with him!"
I knew Grace was playing a subtle game now. She wasn't afraid to be alone with me. She understood me well enough to know that I played by strict rules and wouldn't hurt her. But she was afraid of what would happen if Harold tried to deprive me of the chance to humiliate him completely. So she made my wishes into hers.
"Oh, Jesus! What am I going to do?" He pushed her off him and rolled off the bed and stood facing me for a second, hands on hips, his features a picture of mixed hate and agony. Then suddenly he looked sick; nauseous. He bolted for the bathroom and slammed the door and we heard him vomiting.
Grace turned to me and fixed me with a look that asked, "How can you do this? Are you human?"
"I'm jealous," I said. "like him. The only difference is that I'm jealous of what he has ah the time, and he's jealous of what I have for maybe an hour in my life." I gave that a second to sink in. When she saw-or thought she saw-that I would not budge her face went stony. She got up off the bed and walked over and put a foot up on an arm of my chair. She looked down at where Harold's come dribbled out of her cunt and fell in thick little blobs to the carpet. She pulled her cunt open to show me the sticky mess inside. "Does that satisfy you?"
Harold was still vomiting in the bathroom. The toilet was flushing in between his gaggings. The whole thing suddenly made me nauseous at the thought of myself. I sat expressionless as that awful feeling threatened to turn my stomach inside out. It passed. "Yes," I replied. I pulled a kleenex out of a box on the bureau-top and handed it to her. "Here. Wipe yourself up. Harold doesn't have to stay for the whole time if he doesn't want to. But he's going to see some of it so I can prove a point. And if he's not in here, he's going to be in the next room or something, because I'm not going to have him going down and getting that gun again."
"He won't do that. When can he leave?"
There was the sound of running water from the bathroom. "You'll know." Harold reappeared looking weak and beaten. I got up and took Grace's hand and led her to the bed. I stripped off my clothes. My cock had gone soft with my nausea, but it slapped heavily against my thighs as I climbed up onto the bed and stretched out on my back. "There's just one little thing I want you to see," I told Harold. I motioned Grace to get on top of me in the 69 position. With a worried cautionary look at Harold, she complied.
Harold staggered back against the doorsill. A kind of glazed look came into his eyes as he watched in horrified fascination. "Now," I told Grace, "let's see if you can do me as nicely as I do you. I won't ask more. Okay?"
She shuddered. "Okay," she croaked hoarsely. I spread her pussy with the flats of my palms and my tongue journeyed once more between her cuntlips, tenderly licking her aroused-but-unsatisfied clit, coaxing it back toward gut-gripping inflammation. She couldn't help but feel the sensitive, subtle care I lavished on her genitals. It had to come as a pleasant shock. I guessed that, had she not known, she wouldn't have been able to tell my tongue from Harold's. Now she saw why I'd challenged her as I had.
She started off jerking me with her hand. Her movements were wooden, mechanical, at first, but I started pumping to show her the rhythm and placed my mouth sideways over her clit and sucked, and soon I felt that fluid wrist-motion taking over down below. It was a little too fast, but soon it slowed right down into my natural groove, and I was winging along on a magic carpet of stimulation, flying just below the fateful altitude of ejaculation. I pushed her ass down, signaling that she should show me what she liked. Grudgingly she let the weight of her hips down and squatted full on my face and shimmied from the shoulders, throwing her clit across the flat of my tongue with the regularity of a slow metronome. When I felt that I knew I had her combination. I worked her up as close to orgasm as I was. At the end I was shaking my head in wild little arcs. I could tell she was suppressing groans of pleasure. Finally she did what she knew she had to; she took my cock into her mouth.
At the first swirl of my parched flesh between her lips, over her tongue, around the insides of her cheeks, up against the roof of her mouth, a few inches down her throat, my aching overload of semen spurted free. It caught Grace by surprise. Her first instinct was to pull off, to spit out. But she stifled it and stayed down on me and swallowed valiantly, her nostrils flaring to suck in breath, her throat working desperately. I attacked her clit again with the boring vibrations of a mad tongue and felt her slipping. I nipped her swollen little love-bud and she was wracked with shuddering like a big ship running aground. She lost control of her lower body and it ground out an orgy of satisfaction on my face.
For a few seconds Grace hid from her husband, resting her cheek on my thigh and looking in the other direction. When finally she drew herself up and off me she paced agitatedly to the window and then stole a quick glance at me. The tiniest little nod of my eyes was enough to let her know.
Harold was still leaning against the doorsill, but the look of horrified fascination had been replaced with a crazed, disquieting expression of shell-shock. He was like a soldier whose best buddy had just been blasted to pieces ten yards from him by a mortar round. "You can go now," Grace said softly. "Please go."
"But stay on this floor," I added.
He ambled numbly into the next room. He didn't make a sound for the rest of the time I was there, and I never saw him again. After he left I fucked Grace twice, once with her under me on her back, and once from behind as she stood bending over a chair, and made her fuck me once just the way she'd done Harold. She was sullen and morose inside, ashamed of playing her part a little better than she really had to, certainly a lot better than she'd wanted to, in front of her husband. She didn't hit any more peaks of inspiration. But she used her body and mine with detached, almost scientific ex-pertness to get me off and get me out as thoroughly and quickly as possible, and the thrill of having her so completely under my power was more than enough to make up for her reluctance. In fact, if she hadn't been reluctant she wouldn't have been herself at all, and she probably would have been a lot less exciting.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I went through my half-dozen Agnes-women in two weeks. It was a wild, frenetic time. Just before I started on Grace I moved to a small, dingy furnished room on the Upper West Side. It was nothing but a storage place for ah my files of evidence, a dropping place for my dirty clothes, and a crash-pad to which I fled after every new triumph. What I'd done to Grace and Harold would have torn me apart if I hadn't had another "case" to start on right away. As it was, the scene of Grace spreading her messy cunt to me and asking, "Does that satisfy you?" with her husband vomiting in the background festered in my unconscious for weeks. When I was done with the 17-year-old girl who'd had the abortion it rose up and haunted me with a vengeance. I'd taken to smoking a lot of pot and hash that I copped-at some risk-from street pushers around 96th and Broadway, or further downtown around Needle Park, and now to quash the effects of my terrible self-persecution I started getting morphine and eventually heroin from the same sources. I tried to be careful with the stuff but soon I was taking it three, four, five times a week, and I knew I was getting hooked. I couldn't pay my rent and I couldn't eat. I got evicted from my room, thrown out on the street with my suitcase and my trunk. I was a ragged, hungry, unshaven, dirty mess, and I knew I'd be dead in six months if I didn't break the habit. There was still time. So I put the blackmail-hooks to my main pusher, a small-time junkie-whore with straggly bleach-blonde hair, vacant rat-brown eyes, and a body three times as emaciated as Shirley's. I threatened to turn her in to the cops one time when her old man was out of town pushing some shit in Pennsylvania. I knew I was taking my life in my hands for a piece of her sordid pussy, but she was too dumb and wiped-out to resist, and I knew I had to get back on the cunt-trail again or I'd be a goner. What I mostly did was to burn my bridges behind me.
I moved downtown to a Bowery flop-house and spent my days panhandling or picking up odd jobs now and then. I substituted cheap wine for opiates. Once I knew I'd never take another shot of horse again I started to watch out for the alcohol-skids.
Then I got a break. I wandered into one of those places that try to save Bowery bums by pumping them full of a lot of religion and a little food, by getting them jobs, and so on. By that time I looked almost as bad as the guys you see sleeping in gutters and doorways, but right away the people saw there was something left of my brain, that maybe they could make something out of me. I still had my references from Angie and Agnes.
They got me another short-order cook job in the Wall Street area. As soon as I got a load of the sexy-looking secretaries that piled into the place every noontime for lunch my life did a sharp about-face. I kicked the drinking habit, got myself another cheap apartment, and started to look out for victims again. Deep down I knew that my conscience would come back as soon as I made another hit, and I'd get into the frenetic cycles trying to escape from it again; that the chances were that I'd end up on the skids again within six months. But as I started to eat and sleep right my sexual desires came back with all their irresistible compulsions, and at least I felt alive again.
But before I could bring down another bird, strange things started to happen.
It began when I came to work one morning and my boss told me, "There was a guy in just after you left yesterday. Asked if you were the same Jim Northrup that used to work for Agnes somebody, and before that at Hardy's in the West Village. I said yeah, you had references from those places. Said he was an old friend of yours. Heavy-set guy with a scar on his cheek. About forty. Talked with a kind of Brooklyn-type accent."
I'd never had a friend like that. I started to get worried. After all the girls I'd blackmailed, I had no idea which one might have hired a thug to get revenge for her, and if anybody had traced me back as far as Hardy's, they knew my game, and they knew I'd have no idea who'd made up their mind to get me. Harold was the most-likely suspect but the junkie-whore's man was also in the running and so was everybody else. I couldn't afford to quit my job yet. I didn't have a penny saved. I made up my mind to hang on for a couple of weeks and be careful. "Look," I told the boss, "he's no friend of mine. There are people I owe money to, and people who have beefs with me over women-there's nothing I can do about that. But if the guy comes back, tell him I quit. Don't let him back into the kitchen, and let me know right away. He didn't ask where I lived, did he?"
"Yeah, but I told him I didn't know. I've been around a while, and I didn't like his looks much. He was a little too nosy."
After that I dyed my hair a redder color and started to grow a moustache. I wore shades and got some cheap, loud, flashy clothes. I'd come in to work through the back door as much as an hour early and leave up to two hours late. I'd take crazy routes home, doing things like going into the subway and hopping on and off trains at the last minute. Naturally I couldn't so much as look out at the customers, let alone try to get a line on any new victims. I went to a few strip shows and movies, but for two weeks I spent virtually all my time at work, locked in my apartment, or going back and forth between them.
It didn't do any good.
The hit came from out of the blue. I'd just left work, dodging between buildings, climbing over garbage piles and slipping through holes in fences. I came out into a back alley just wide enough for a truck to pass through and looked up and down. There was an old blue Chewy with its engine idling, its door open, and nobody in it pulled up behind a warehouse. The warehouse door was open and I figured the driver had gone inside. It was to my right, the direction I wanted to go in. It looked innocent enough so I took a few steps.
A heavy-set, scarred face popped up behind the windshield and the engine roared. The open door slammed as the car charged toward me. I didn't get half turned around before the left front fender smashed my thigh and slammed me up against the warehouse wall like a rag doll.
I woke up three days later in a hospital room drugged, dazed, and confused. My head was heavy with bandages. My left arm and shoulder were in a cast that reached down to my wrist and my right leg was in another cast that came up nearly to my crotch. There wasn't a nurse in sight. My bed was next to a window that looked out on a brick wall. In another bed next to the door an old man with bottles hanging over him and tubes running all over the place snored noisily. The scene of the alley and the car and the head popping up and the car surging toward me with a snarl of raw vengeance returned, and then the stunning black-out impact. There was a buzzer near my right hand. I winced with pain as I reached out and pressed it.
Ah the bones in my right leg had been fractured. So had the upper bone in my left arm, which had been smashed from its socket when I'd hit the wall. My head had abrasions and contusions and my left ear had been ripped, but miraculously my skull had stayed intact with only a mild concussion. That was well enough now that they'd already started giving me morphine. The nurse said that the night before I'd screamed in my sleep. "Morphine?" I said. "I don't want that shit. Give me something else." They gave me Demerol, which I guess is just some weaker kind of morphine. It killed the pain fine and I wasn't as afraid of it. Then the nurse said, "Do you have somebody we can contact?"
I started to give her my boss's name but something stopped me and I said, "Let me think." There was a phone by my bedside. "Can I just call myself when I think of somebody?" She said that was all right, but that I'd better find some place to go because I'd be discharged in a few days and she didn't know what Medicaid would pay for. They'd automatically charged me up to that when I'd been admitted with $12 in my wallet and a checkbook showing a $27 balance. When I said that was all I had she gave me a lot of forms to fill out. It was simple stuff but it took me hours to fill out, what with the Demerol messing my mind and wearing off to horrendous pain and then the Demerol coming around again. For the whole next day images and memories and hopes and fears tossed like a lot of wind-blown bits of paper in my mind. Who was I? A blackmailer. Why? Because that was the only way I could get a piece of ass. What had it done for me? I jerked off under the covers remembering some of the things when I was really high and feeling no pain. I cringed and my stomach went queasy when I remembered others. In the end it had almost killed me.
Would I go back to it? Would I go back to it? Would I go back to it? That was the question that played like a stuck record in my mind, gave me the chills and made me sweat. How could I decide?
I couldn't. It would just happen to me, one way or the other. Either I'd be too scared, and-what would happen to me then? If I had to go back to my old, conventional, impotent frustration . . . I'd rather kill myself. Or-have myself castrated.
That horrible thought was not so horrible to me. To be rid of those urges completely . . . it might open up a whole new life. It might make me far calmer. It might let me walk down the street admiring architecture, go into a restaurant and savor the food, read a book and appreciate its literary value, without always searching for sex, sex, sex. Take away an appetite and you couldn't starve it any more. But.. . take away sex and you'd removed the greatest chance for human pleasure along with one of the greatest sources of human misery.
If only I could believe there was the slightest chance of finding satisfaction some other, some conscionable way. If only for a moment I could doubt that all women were always the way they'd always seemed to me. If only I could have it proved to me that somewhere, sometime, there might be "a woman" for me. Then maybe I'd go hunting for her and leave my guns at home.
But how could that be proved?
If one woman, one time, saw my need and understood me and said, "It's yours. Take it." That would turn my whole life around. The minute I thought it, I knew it was true. Right now, at this particular time, that would do it.
I plunged into despair. Who would do it? Certainly no woman I knew or knew of. Certainly none of the women I'd blackmailed! One of them had put me here with my body broken and my soul in torment. And the rest.. .
I could never be sure which one it had been. The Demerol was wearing off and the pain was coming back again, and with it all the voices that shouted in my ears, "You don't deserve it. You can't expect it. You can't ask for it. Castrate yourself or kill yourself. Kill your manhood or kill your whole body. There's nothing in this life for you."
And then, out of the excruciation, a set of numbers started tossing in my mind, struggling toward the surface like divers out of air. A set of numbers that I'd heard just once and written on my memory "just for the record." 7.4. 1. 0. 6. 3. 2. S-h-i-r-l-e-y. Shirley.
Suddenly, intuitively, deeply, I knew she was my last and only chance. If she'd do just one thing for me, just one little thing, I'd take that as my proof. I'd give up blackmail forever and go hunting without my guns at home. I'd go to another country. I'd start all over again. Why, I knew something about women now! I'd take the understanding that I'd stolen and use it to try to make up for what I'd done. I'd.. . .
But if Shirley refused, that would be it for me. I'd really go to California this time. I'd start my brothel up again, and this time I'd blast so many birds from the sky that the pavements everywhere would be littered with their bodies. Oh, I'd get mine in the end, all right. But they'd get theirs in the beginning.
I knew it was crazy. I knew it was stupid. Resting the whole of my future on the outcome of one phone call to one woman.. . it didn't make any sense. But the rest of my life didn't, either, and it wasn't going to until I had my answer. One way or the other. Shirley's image haunted my mind. I couldn't get it out.
A half a dozen times I picked up the phone, but I couldn't make myself dial. What if she wasn't home? What if she'd moved? What if . . .
But then I knew the time had come. The pain was growing intense but I had to make the call before I got doped up again. "It's just a phone call, stupid," I told myself. "Make it!"
So I did.
Shirley answered on the third ring. "Yes?"
"Shirley, this is Jim Northrup." For a second the pain got me and I reeled in confusion and I couldn't talk. "I know.. . I know I promised that you'd never hear from me again, but, well, I hope you can forgive me."
"I don't know," she said softly. "What do you want?"
"I'm in the hospital. I got hit by a car. I'm banged up pretty bad. There's something that I need. Now . . . I want to tell you that this has nothing to do with . . . with the deal we worked out before. You've got to understand that and believe it or it's no good. I don't have anything to deal with anymore and even if I did I wouldn't use it. We're square, and more than that Okay?"
She laughed. I loved to hear her laugh. She laughed pleasantly, gently, and then she said, "Poor Jim's flat out on a hospital bed and he's all horny. Am I right?"
My silence told her that she was. She paused and thought a minute.
"And you'd like Momma Shirley to pay you a visit and do a little number with the curtains closed?"
I held my breath in dazed suspense.
"How bad are you? What's the matter?"
I told her.
"Well then, you're in no position to fuck." She paused again. "But I'll tell you what, Jim. I kind of like you. To tell the truth, I was a little bit sorry to wake up that morning and find you gone. Not that there could ever be anything big between us. At least not that I can see. But just for old times' sake I'll drop by this evening and treat you to a nice blow-job on the house. Tell me where you are."
