Very pvt sec'y. Typg, shthnd secndry to appeamce, prsnlity mt cstmrs. 332-7926
Holding purse and want ads in her left hand, Julia crowded into the phone booth. She glanced hastily up and down the street. Seeing no one around, she hiked up her miniskirt and gave her pantyhose a quick tug. A delivery boy on a bicycle rounded a corner at that moment. Staring at her nylon-covered derriere, he crashed into a parked truck. Julia didn't notice the boy's predicament.
When a man's voice answered the phone, she felt a momentary doubt which she quickly managed to suppress.
"Are you the person who needs a private secretary?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Well, I. . . " Julia hesitated. She had never asked for a job before.
The man's voice seemed kind, or at least patient. "How old are you?"
"Oh, uh-I'll be nineteen in another month."
"What color is your hair?"
"Blonde."
"Is it long?"
"Well..." Julia thought for a moment. Hanging wet and straight in the shower, her honey-blonde hair was long enough to cover her firm, upward-pointing breasts. But she thought that she shouldn't describe it that way in an employment interview.
"What are your measurements?" the man's voice continued.
For one panic-stricken moment Julia thought he was reading her mind. Then she got hold of herself. "I'm five-one," she said. "My hair is fairly long. I weigh one-oh-five. I'm thirty-three, twenty, thirty-four." She paused, then added, "I can type fifty words per minute, but I don't know much shorthand."
There was a moment's silence on the other end of the line. Finally the man said, "It's three-thirty already. Can you be here by four?"
"Be where?"
He gave an address which she quickly jotted down on her notepad. "Where are you now?" the man asked.
Julia peered up at the street sign. "I guess it's State and Spring."
"Right around the corner."
"Oh?"
There was another moment's hesitation, then he asked, "You're from out of town?"
"Yes."
"Well, do come right up. The door's open, so you needn't bother knocking."
The address he had given to her included a room number. Julia's doubts returned when she discovered it was not an office. It was a hotel. The desk clerk glanced sharply at her as she stood waiting before the elevator door. Julia was embarrassed. I'll bet he thinks I'm a . . .
The desk clerk lowered the Daily Racing form that he was reading to stare at Julia. The elevator doors opened. Julia stepped in, then relaxed.
She could guess what the old man was thinking. Even though her clothes were off the rack, she didn't feel comfortable in them. Nor had she yet learned to feel relaxed with her hair done in a tightly wound bun. She could imagine the old man sizing her up as a small-town librarian or a music teacher. Miss Prudence Chastity, looking as if she were late for an ice cream social.
The elevator doors opened on the third floor. Julia studied the room numbers for a moment before walking down the heavily carpeted hall. She paused briefly before room 348. Timidly, she turned the doorknob.
The leering ogre she had half expected to drag her in and force her to do unspeakable things was not there. She stepped inside the empty room. "Is anyone here?" she called.
"Be out in a minute," came a voice from behind the open bathroom door.
When he came out, Julia's prospective employer was wearing light-blue slacks and a matching jacket that she had always vaguely associated with yachting. He was a foot taller than Julia, and not as old as she had expected. Not as old as her father would have been, she decided. In profile he was rather handsome. It was several minutes before she realized that he kept maneuvering so she never saw him face-on, only from the left side.
A series of questions soon established that Julia was alone in the world--that the insurance her father had intended for his daughter had instead been gobbled up by her mother's bout with terminal cancer.
"But surely there must've been something you could do in Centerville?"
Julia sighed. "I suppose so, Mr. Version. But have you ever tried being poor in a small town after you've been rich? Besides, small towns are so--well, anyway I wanted to see the world.
"And you'd like to start here?"
She nodded.
He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Julia as he continued, "Semantics, I guess. If only we could really make ourselves understood instead of fumbling with words." He wrenched himself away from his reverie. "The salary is four-hundred dollars a month. That may not seem very much for the hours involved. You'll have to live in and travel a lot. But remember, you'll also have free room and board and a generous clothing allowance."
"Exactly what are my duties, Mr. Version?"
"Actually, you'll be my front. Run errands, answer the phone, handle those of my outside contacts that are within your scope. Do a little modeling on occasion. I deal in women's clothing."
To Julia it sounded too good to be true. She had broken her last twenty-dollar bill that morning. "When would you like me to start?"
"How about right now?"
"What do I do first?"
"Move in."
A little tremor shot through Julia. Silly, she thought. Julia had led a sheltered life, but she knew that any girl would know that look in a man's eye. Mr. Version had not even looked directly at her since she'd come into his room.
He led the way to a door opposite the bathroom. Julia followed him, and she was reassured when it turned out to be a large, airy room with a big window that overlooked a patio in the center of the hotel. There was a bed in the room and also a telephone, a desk and a file cabinet.
Julia hesitated. "My landlady won't be home until a couple of hours from now. If you have anything that needs doing right away, I might as well get started, then later this evening I can go back and check out."
Mr. Version smiled. "I'll wait in the other room," he said.
"For what?"
"For you to undress."
"What!" Then she remembered about the modeling.
"Not everything," Mr. Version quickly added, "just down to your undergarments. If you're to get a new wardrobe, we'll need a few measurements." He sidled out the door.
Julia hesitated. She needed the job. I wanted to see the world, she thought. I might as well get started. She put down her purse and the want ads. She was wearing a moderate miniskirt which exposed half her thighs. She was struggling with it when she heard Mr. Version call from the next room, "Need any help?"
"No, thanks," she replied hastily. Struggling to get her turtleneck sweater off without ruining her coiffure, she felt her skin start to prickle and tingle. Finally she had the sweater over her head and off without loosening more than a strand or two of her hairdo. Standing before the mirror in bra and pantyhose, Julia knew that she hid more of her body than most bikini-clad girls on the beach. Yet she felt a moral trepidation about taking off her dress in a strange man's apartment.
"May I come in now?"
Julia could feel her body blush with embarrassment, from her forehead down to her upward-pointing breasts. Even beneath gossamer pantyhose, she could feel her firm flat belly glow. It's only a job, she kept telling herself. He's only going to measure me for some clothes. She steeled herself, then drew in a deep breath. "You can come in now."
In the mirror she suddenly saw that Mr. Version was already standing behind her with a tape measure. "Have to take off the bra," he said. "Interferes with a really accurate measurement." Before Julia could protest, his deft fingers had undone the hooks and her bra dangled from the crooks of her hastily upraised elbows.
Gently and impersonally, Mr. Version put a hand to her shoulder and turned her around to face him. Still not looking directly at her face, he removed the bra from her outstretched arms, then he turned her around again. Standing behind her, he thrust the tape measure beneath her armpits. "Just stand relaxed in your normal posture," he said.
Julia wondered how she could relax with her firm young breasts cupped in a pair of strange hands. But before she could protest, his hands were gone, replaced with the tape measure which stretched across her pink and suddenly firm, quivering nipples.
Mr. Version hummed, and in the mirror Julia could see his handsome reflection as he made notations in a tiny book. Just as she was trying to decide whether she was relieved or disappointed, he was behind her again, this time slipping the tape around her trim waist. "You'll have to change that hair," he said.
"What?"
"Hair's a sex symbol. You have a very feminine body. Sexy. Yet your uptight hairdo spoils the whole effect. The first rule of merchandising is proper packaging."
"But I'm not selling anything!"
"Aren't you?"
Before Julia's mind could define his last statement, he continued, "Everybody's selling himself in one way or another. I'm also selling women's clothes. Remember, when a woman buys a dress she doesn't really want a beautiful dress; she wants to be a beautiful woman." His hands moved busily through her hair. Suddenly she felt her hairdo unravel as her honey-blonde hair cascaded down her back. "Now you're beautiful," he said.
Julia looked up. In the mirror she saw him writing in his book again. Studying herself in the mirror, she saw a more mature woman. But if she'd ever worn her hair loose in a place like Centerville . . .
Julia was fourteen, she was convinced that the employees of her father's mill were the narrowest, most puritanical lot of hypocrites this side of a Fundamentalist's heaven. But it wasn't until she had just turned sixteen that she learned her parents were the biggest hypocrites of them all.
She had learned of her parents' true selves during choir practice. She was driven to the church by her father who usually gave the chauffeur the night off. And since her father's singing voice wasn't up to choir standards, it was only natural that he wait somewhere else.
One night when the choir director was sick and everybody went home early, Julia sat on the church steps waiting for her father. When her father finally came an hour earlier than usual, he was not wearing his usual relaxed smile.
She wondered why they drove around aimlessly, killing time until they got home at the usual hour. She didn't find out why until the next time the choir director was sick, and Julia, rather than stand in the rain, called Mr. Jenkins from the gas station who served as Centerville's only taxi driver.
That night she finally realized that her father wouldn't be keeping the coast clear for her mother if he didn't have something of his own going too. She never told anyone what her mother and the chauffeur were doing in the big canopied bed. Within a week she convinced herself that it hadn't really happened-that it was just a fantasy, like some of the really weird dreams she had been having lately.
Julia used to dream that men were undressing her-that she was hypnotized, paralyzed in some mysterious fashion and standing terrified while some slavering monster slowly, delicately, with a gentleness that hinted at the brutality to come, was taking her clothes off.
Julia snapped out of her reverie with a rude awakening. A man was taking her clothes off! Mr. Version had inveigled her into taking off her clothes. He had helped to remove her bra and let down her tightly wound hair. She was standing before the mirrored image of a strange man, wearing nothing but pantyhose. Unbelievingly, she felt Mr. Version's gentle fingers worming their way under the elastic waistband, lighting fluttery fires in her trim flat belly.
"No!" Julia murmured in a strangled voice.
"Bad as a girdle," Mr. Version was saying as he gently worked the pantyhose down past Julia's burgeoning hips. "Squeeze you out of shape til no measurement's accurate." Kneeling behind her, he gently lifted her right foot and peeled the pantyhose from her leg. He leaned forward for an instant, and Julia quivered as his hair brushed her buttocks with a delicious tickle. She wondered if this was the feeling the other girls had meant when they whispered about "playing doctor."
"No!" she said again, perplexed that she had not stopped him earlier. Julia stood naked before the mirror in a strange man's apartment. Half fearing, half wishing, she waited for Mr. Version's hair to tickle her bottom again as he helped her other foot out of the pantyhose, but this time it didn't happen. In the mirror she saw his handsome profile as he hummed and scribbled in his book once more.
She saw herself in the mirror, looking like the naked apparition that she had always seen in her nightmares. She had an hourglass-shaped body. Not fullblown like those sex-pots whom Julia predicted would be fat and flabby in another year. Julia was thin for her height, well-rounded, with a nipped in waist that made her hips and bulging breasts seem much larger than they actually were. It was a body that Julia made flat and unappealing by the loose-waisted dresses she wore.
Mr. Version was on his knees in front of her, unfurling the tape measure as he studied her hips with a sidelong glance. She didn't know what to do with her hands. She didn't know if she should cover her firm-nippled breasts or cup her hands over the fine blonde hairs of her well-rounded mons veneris. She could feel her skin burning with an eerie sensation. Good Heavens, she thought, am I blushing down there?
Mr. Version seemed oblivious to her predicament as he drew the tape measure around the fullest part of her hips, his hands delicately brushing the hairs of Julia's pubis. "Just as I thought!" he murmured. "Another full inch!"
Involuntarily, Julia glanced down at the crotch of Mr. Version's blue slacks. Then she realized that he was talking about an extra inch around her hips now that they were no longer imprisoned by her pantyhose. Mr. Version was all business as he scribbled into his notebook. But she wondered why she couldn't keep her mind on business. Mr. Version was old enough to be her father. He must have undressed so many girls he had no more feelings than a doctor doing a routine vaginal check.
"Nervous, aren't you?" he said. "I can see you've never been undressed by a man before."
"No," Julia said.
As he rechecked the figures in his book, Mr. Version continued, "It's that old problem of semantics again."
"What does that word mean?" Julia thought she knew, but standing here naked, not knowing where to put her hands, she thought she had to say something. Somehow, she was afraid of silence-afraid of what was sure to happen once they stopped talking like two civilized human beings, and she was forced to face up to the fact that she was eighteen years old--not a child any longer, but a mature woman free to do whatever she wanted.
"Semantics? It's about the meaning of words. Mostly it's about the way people misunderstand one another, because what seems a simple straightforward word means totally different things to different people."
"Like what?"
Mr. Version was checking his figures again. "That can't be right," he muttered. "Oh, like very private secretary, for example. What do you think that means?"
"Why . . . ?" Julia was puzzled. "That was the wording of the ad you put in the paper. I suppose it means something like this."
Standing behind her, Mr. Version cupped his hands over her firm thirty-three-inch breasts again. Before she could protest, he quickly dropped his hands to his sides. "Didn't you know that 'very private secretary' is another term for 'mistress'?"
"Well, I suppose I'd be the mistress here-in charge of all the files and papers and things. Is that what you mean?"
Mr. Version laughed coarsely. He knelt in front of Julia and put the tape measure around her hips again, his hands brushing across the wisp of blonde fur on her pubis. "That's what I mean," he said. "You see, the same word means different things to different people."
"What does it mean to you?" Suddenly Julia realized what the word meant. She knew as well as anyone else what "mistress" meant.
Mr. Version crossed the room. Standing with his back to her, he found a dictionary and thumbed through it. Finally he handed the opened book to her.
Standing in a trancelike stupor, Julia read the definition of mistress: "A woman with whom a man habitually cohabits without being married to her." Still holding the heavy dictionary, she felt Mr. Version's arms snake around her hips again. He was kneeling in front of her. She felt her belly quiver as his cheeks grazed the tingling skin beneath her navel, then his hands lay on her pubic patch, holding the tape measure again.
Suddenly Mr. Version dropped the tape measure. Cupping her firm young buttocks in his hands, he drew her forward and buried his face in her warm hairy loins.
"No!" she moaned, half whispering, half shrieking. "Stop it!" Julia realized that he had gone too far. No girl had to put up with this just for a job. But as Julia filled her lungs to scream, she thought of the hotel manager, strangers, police, everyone bursting into the room and finding her naked with a strange man nuzzling her crotch. "No!" she hissed again.
Mr. Version wrapped his arms tighter around her hips, burying his face deeper into her hot thigh conjunction.
Julia raised the dictionary high, like a Fundamentalist preacher brandishing a Bible. Then she slammed it down with all her strength on the back of Mr. Version's head.
Her employer collapsed slowly. Julia found herself gasping in a nervous, high-pitched whinny. Then as he fell to the thick carpet, she saw the other side of his face, the side he'd kept so carefully turned away. That was when she screamed.
The other side of Mr. Version's face was decimated by a birthmark that blazed in a zigzag path from his cheekbone to his jawline.
Suddenly Julia remembered that she was still naked. Frantic, she scrambled about, getting into her pantyhose. She stuffed her bra into her handbag, then she slipped into her turtleneck sweater. She looked at herself in the mirror and with her hair loose she looked no worse than when she'd come in. If anything, she looked better.
Mr. Version lay still on the carpet. Suddenly Julia realized he might be dead. Be calm, she thought. How many people saw me go in here?
Finally she realized no one had seen her enter Mr. Version's room. The desk clerk might remember her, but he would have a hard time proving that she had seen Mr. Version.
Mr. Version groaned and stirred. Relief coursed through her, coupled with a new anxiety. After what had happened, she couldn't face Mr. Version again. She knew that he wasn't responsible for that birthmark or burn or whatever it was. But he should have warned her. And after what had just happened between them--the stupid way she'd just stood there and let him undress her and fondle her breasts and kiss her lower belly, Julia wanted to die rather than face him again.
Julia gave her appearance a final check and was ready for the street. With her firm upward-pointing breasts, no man would know that her bra was in her handbag, unless they saw how deliciously her breasts jiggled as she trotted down the hall toward the elevator.
Hurrying through the lobby, she tried to ignore the desk clerk's curious glance.
The clerk smiled wryly. So Mr. Version was at it again. Some day one of these girls was going to kill him. Maybe that was what Version really wanted.
Standing on the corner and waiting for a bus, Julia tried to sort out her feelings. She had come to the city looking for something different from Centerville. She had found it. Thinking back over what had happened in the hotel, Julia decided she had nobody but herself to blame. Hadn't she felt from the start that there was something wrong with Mr. Version's ad? Of course she had. She promised that next time she would be more careful.
She shuddered, remembering that horrible side of his face that Mr. Version had finally revealed as he fell unconscious at her feet. Poor man! No wonder he put ads in the paper. But Julia realized that Mr. Version's face wasn't what bothered her most. The real horror was how near she had come to letting him go on. She remembered the split second when she had the dictionary in her hands. She had almost put it down, to wait and see what it felt like to stand naked with a strange man kissing, nuzzling, building a fire in her taut young belly.
Finally the bus arrived. She was halfway through the door of the bus when she realized an even greater horror: She had no money. She had no purse!
Julia stepped back down onto the curb. As the bus pulled away, she thought back. She's stuffed her bra in her purse. There was only one place it could be. Mr. Version's apartment! From the back of her mind, she wondered if some part of her subconscious wanted her to go back. Had she deliberately left her purse behind, so she would have an excuse to see Mr. Version again, ugly deformed face and all?
Julia started walking toward her rooming house. The change from her last twenty-dollar bill was in that purse, along with the key to her room. She reassured herself that at least her landlady would be there to let her in. Tomorrow, she decided she would have to pawn her mother's jewelry and look for another job.
It took an hour to walk the twenty-two blocks to her rooming house. A cold wind started blowing, and a misty fog shrouded her apartment building. Shivering, she went through the front door and knocked at the landlady's door. No answer. For a moment Julia thought she was going to cry. Then she pulled herself together and walked down the hall. Maybe she could open the door with a bobby pin . . .
She was fumbling at her door in the dimly lit hallway when it suddenly opened. She stepped into the darkened room and reached across the bed for the hard-to-reach light switch. Suddenly someone caught her from behind, imprisoning both of her arms. Something soft covered her face. After a moment of heart-stopping panic, Julia knew she was being smothered with a pillow.
"Don't scream and you won't get hurt!" a voice hissed in her ear.
Julia stopped struggling. An instant later the light went on, and her assailant cautiously lessened the pressure on the pillow. When she didn't scream, her attacker let the pillow fall to the floor. It was Mr. Version.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I came to apologize."
"How did you know where I live?" He handed Julia her purse and key. "Really," he began, "I don't know what came over me." Mr. Version stopped and shook his head. "Not true. It was the oldest and strongest instinct our Creator gave us. I know perfectly well what came over me and so do you. What I came to apologize about was ..." he sighed, "I didn't want you to think I'd force myself on you. I may be many things, but I'm not a rapist. If you want the job, it's still yours."
Julia stared warily at Mr. Version. He kept his face turned so that only the unmarred side showed. He'd probably done that so many years it was automatic, Julia thought. She remembered how close she had come to surrendering-to letting this half-faced monster nuzzle her naked belly and do all the horrible things that came afterward. "Thank you for bringing my purse," she said. "But why did you have to scare the daylights out of me?"
"Would you have stopped running long enough to hear me out?"
"No, I guess not."
"Will you come back?"
"I'm sorry. It'd never work."
"Why not?"
"You told me what 'very private secretary' means. I'm just not cut out for that kind of work."
Mr. Version eyed Julia's trim, taut body, her waspish waist that made her body look so much more voluptuous than she really was. With a saturnine grin he said, "You're cut out for it all right. Whether you want to do it is something else again. You didn't have to clobber me with a book. A simple 'no' is sufficient."
"I'm sorry," she repeated. "I'm not used to that kind of thing."
Mr. Version bowed. "If you ever change your mind, the offer still stands." He stepped out and closed the door. As she sprang to lock it, Julia heard his steps down the hall. The outside door opened and closed.
She stood trembling in the middle of her room. Finally she collapsed on the bed. She felt sick. She felt dirty. Finally she undressed, got into a robe, and went down the hall to the bath.
After a shower and shampoo she still felt dirty. She scrubbed again, between her fingers and toes, she rubbed the skin raw over her upright breasts, around her waist, her hips, trying to wash off the feel of Mr. Version's hands, hoping to eradicate the feel of his lips burning into her trembling belly.
Finally she was in bed, tossing and turning, trying not to think. It wouldn't be so bad, Julia thought, if she could just shrug it off as a disgusting incident. People read in the paper every day about disgusting things-dirty old men who exposed themselves to little girls in the park. But Mr. Version hadn't exposed himself--she had.
No matter how she rearranged events in her mind, she could not avoid one glaring truth: Instead of being sickened and disgusted, she was secretly thrilled. The real reason she had turned down Mr. Version's offer was she knew that he would be measuring her again sooner or later. The next time Mr. Version buried his face in her belly, she felt that she wouldn't have the strength to belt him with a dictionary.
Suddenly she sat up and removed her nightgown, now tangled around her body from so much turning. Sitting naked on the edge of the bed, she remembered her purse. Everything seemed to be there. She counted the change from her last twenty.
The bag was heavy with small coins. She counted more than five dollars in change. Then she began counting the bills. There was a total of a hundred and twenty-nine dollars and thirty-eight cents in her bag. Finally she realized Mr. Version must have emptied his pockets. Remembering his horribly scarred face, trying to imagine what it must be like to live with such a burden, Julia cried.
She knew that the money had to be returned to Mr. Version. She couldn't accept money from a strange man, no matter how beneficial his intentions might be. Tomorrow, she decided, she would look for another job.
Julia overslept and didn't get up until eight when her landlady knocked on the door. This time there were no hints about the overdue rent. She demanded it. Minutes later Julia had a receipt. She had used all the money that Mr. Version had left her. Now she couldn't mail it back with a note of thanks. Meanwhile she decided to call it a loan. One thing was definite in her mind, she would pay it back sooner or later.
This time Julia was reassured when a woman answered her questions about the ad. She copied the address and caught a bus. She figured that any job where a woman insisted on experience had to be on the up and up. And she was confident that she could lie her way long enough to actually get a little experience.
The address turned out to be a seedy office building. Going through the doorway, Julia bumped into a messenger boy who stared appreciatively at her body before straddling his bicycle.
The elevator was for freight, and a man in overalls with a load of cartons on a hand truck showed Julia how to pull the rope that started and stopped it. She could feel his eyes undressing her as she walked down the littered hall.
"It's piece work," the aging woman at the switchboard told her. "Or call it commission if you like."
"You mean there's no salary?"
"That's right. But our girls all keep busy and none has ever complained about the money."
"What do I do?"
The woman laughed. "You are experienced, aren't you?"
"Oh yes!" Julia lied. "I've worked for several meat packers."
"Then let your conscience be your guide, honey. You can take Number Five." She buzzed an electric latch and let Julia through the gate. "Be a customer along any minute," she added. "Time for the noon crowd."
"Don't I sign anything or fill out a form?"
"Later, honey. Get settled in first."
Julia walked down a narrow corridor and found cubicle number five. She opened the door and gasped. The room wasn't an office. There was nothing but a bed in the room. She turned to leave, but a man was coming down the narrow hallway. "You the new girl?" he asked.
"Yes, but-"
"That's all right. I'm an old-timer. Let's get acquainted." He gave Julia a friendly pat on the shoulder. She tried to squeeze by him, but the hallway was too narrow. Before she realized it, she was back inside number five, and the man was bolting the door.
He was about forty, his head becoming bald, and with a heavy wrestler's build. He belched, and the odor of garlic-spiced salami filled the small room. "Come on!" he said. "I got to be back on the truck in... " He checked his watch. "Thirty-eight minutes."
"I'm sorry," she began. "There's been a mistake. I thought this was some other kind of a job."
The belcher grinned. "Reluctant virgin," he mused. "Okay, you want to play games it's all right with me." He stepped forward with his arms spread. Julia raised her elbows to thwart his embrace, but her first customer had no time to waste hugging a girl with her clothes on. Like a Russian dancer he suddenly squatted and bounced upright again. When he came back up, both hands were gripping the hem of her miniskirt.
Instead of peeling it all the way off, he left it tangled over her head and shoulders. Julia felt herself being spun around. Still stumbling, she felt cloth tear as the hooks came out of her bra. "Goddamn!" her customer said, "You sure got a nice set."
This can't really be happening, Julia told herself. But happening or not, Julia felt her nipples tingling, hardening, as the rugged man ran his rough, sandpapery hands over them.
She heard the keys and coin change in his pants pocket hit the linoleum floor. She felt herself being lifted. The dress over her head shifted slightly and she could see he was lifting her up with one hand.
"Don't!" Julia exclaimed. "I'm not that kind of a girl. I don't work here. I just came in by accident."
"Yeah?" The customer grinned. "Just think of the story you can tell someday when you're old." He dropped her on the bed, and she felt his hands stripping off her pantyhose.
Her arms were still entangled in her dress. Finally she got an elbow free and started to pull it down again.
"You're going the wrong way," her client said. He grinned and finished peeling her dress off over her head. "Goddamn!" he uttered, then reared back to study her full length. "Built like a regular brick shithouse!"
Julia giggled hysterically. She remembered the chauffeur saying those same words when she had been sunning herself beneath her mother's bedroom window.
Julia lay naked on the bed. A man, naked from the waist down, knelt beside her. He tried to get a knee between her legs. When she clamped her thighs together and moaned "No! It's all a mistake!" he grinned and yanked her knees apart with as little effort as if he were opening a newspaper.
Julia screamed.
His calloused hand slapped her. Julia nearly fainted from the force of the blow. Cheek smarting, beginning to puff, eyes watering, she heard him say, "Now stop that crap. I only got thirty minutes left, and I don't want to waste one second of my screw time. Fun's fun. Now let's fuck!"
Through tear-blurred eyes Julia saw her balding customer position himself, kneeling between her thighs. She saw his red-veined cock, foreskin peeled back as it throbbed and jerked. He's going to put that into me! It's too big; he's going to kill me!
It was the second time in two days that Julia had faced a virginal death. She wondered if she'd ever get used to dying morally. His fumbling fingers were between her thighs, rubbing her blonde-furred oval. Fingers were spreading her lower lips, stretching them until the pain made her gasp. She felt his hot-blooded, red-raging rod poking, probing, sliding its blunt head up and down her unused slit. She braced herself for the shock of entry.
She was terrified. Her mind reeled beneath an onslaught of vexing questions. This kind of thing just didn't happen to factory owners' daughters. Where had she gone wrong? Was God punishing her for some sin? What had she ever done to deserve this?
Julia closed her eyes and braced herself. Her customer still knelt between her creamy thighs, gently sliding his monstrous purple-headed organ up and down the dewy lips that she had scrubbed so thoroughly last night. Was God punishing her, because she scrubbed her cunt a little more than necessary? That couldn't be right. Cleanliness was next to godliness, even if it did feel good sometimes to gently slide a bar of soap up and down her virginal vulva.
Any minute now he would ram it in where nothing--not even her finger had ever gone before. And that, she knew, wouldn't feel like any bar of soap. It was going to hurt her--maybe kill her. Suddenly she gasped at the realization that she was no longer fighting the idea. She was actually impatient. Would he never get around to actually doing it? her mind queried.
Finally he stopped sliding the point up and down in her gathering juices. Julia braced herself again as she felt her balding muscular customer gather himself for the lunge. She felt his hot, throbbing, purple-headed invader pushing at the gates of her virginity. She squeezed her eyelids tightly shut and tried to control her breathing.
Why was she panting like a dog-like a bitch in heat? Surely, Julia thought, she wasn't looking forward to this ordeal. Or was she?
Julia breathed in a shuddering gasp. The man between her legs had been waiting for that moment of relaxation in her body. Before she could draw another breath and brace herself for his penetration, she felt the throbbing pressure increase. She felt the lips of her virginal pussy pucker and turn inward, wrapping moistly around that throbbing, thumping, pushing instrument of torture.
Then suddenly the pressure eased. There was a tiny sharp pain, a sensation of something tearing, then the lips of her slash were no longer straining and puckering inward. Like a tremendous red-hot iron rod, she felt it sliding into her-in much farther than she had realized possible. It burned; it tickled; it poked and pressed and stretched until she felt her cunt distend like a rubber glove stretched over a muscular hand for the first time.
Her customer gave a gleeful whinny. "Goddamn!" he squealed, "You sure got a nice tight little box!"
Julia opened her eyes. His bull-like wrestler's body smothered her body. With an elbow on each side of her ribs and his barrel chest pressing down on her squashed tits, she could hardly breathe. What next? she wondered. Would he hit her again?
She remained motionless while he raised his body up, and she could breathe again. She knew men were supposed to become tremendously excited, uncontrollable when they were "doing it." To her amazement she was breathing faster than he was. And he wasn't really doing anything-just crouching on top of her, leaving it inside her. She wondered why he didn't move it in and out.
Finally he began moving, but in an unexpected direction. As he raised higher, supporting his weight on his palms instead of his elbows, Julia wondered, Is it all over? Is that all there is to what everybody makes such a thing of? But he wasn't pulling it out. Eyes glistening, his pupils feasted on her trim, helpless body. "My name's Barney," he said. "What's yours?"
"Ju-, uh, Jane," Julia managed to say. "Have you finished? Can I go now?"
Barney laughed and glanced at his wristwatch. "I still got twenty-eight minutes," he said gleefully. "You got somebody else waiting or something?"
The thought of having more men had never occurred to her. My God, she pondered, what if there's a whole line of them waiting in the hall? What if they keep me prisoner here? Maybe I'll never get out!
Barney had dropped onto his elbows again. His monstrous thing still lay inside her, pressing, throbbing. She could feel each individual pulse beat as it throbbed within her. Still he wasn't moving it. Instead, he was nuzzling her firm, upright breasts, nibbling her nipples with surprising gentleness for a man who had slapped her moments before.
Julia felt her nipples harden. Her breath came faster even though she willed herself to be calm, to endure his caresses and get out as fast as she could. Barney thrust his nose between her breasts. He switched rapidly back and forth, kissing first one nipple, then the other. Her arms began raising. Horrified at her actions, she put them back down moments before she would have wrapped them around this smelly brute and drawn him closer into her. She felt a gentle movement down below as Barney tried a couple of short, experimental strokes to see if he could fuck her tight little slit without coming on the first lunge.
The first time it slid out an inch or so, Julia thought with sudden disappointment that it was all over. Good heavens, all this suffering for something that isn't any fun at all! Then she felt it slide back in. Barney's muscular thighs quivered as he pushed, ramming it in to the hilt and straining, squeezing his buttocks to keep from coming.
Julia had no idea what was going on. Watching his strained face, his suddenly hasty breath, she wondered if he was having a heart attack.
Finally the spasm passed, and Barney had his second wind. Very slowly and carefully, he began pumping. She felt his monstrous thing slide out, in, out and in again. Finally she realized that the other movements had just been a warmup. Now, after being undressed and fondled and slapped and tit-kissed, and having that red-headed rigidity diddled up and down her savory slit-only now was Julia finally being fucked.
It hurt each time he pushed that thing all the way into her, but with each stroke she noticed the pain diminishing. Something was making her blush and tingle all over--even inside. Barney had buried his face in the hollow of her neck. He was breathing heavily and each breath burned and tickled the nape of her neck. The strong sweaty smell of his hair was affecting her in a most unusual way.
She wanted to be disgusted by it and everything else that was happening to her in this waking nightmare, but as she moved her body slightly, trying to find a position where his slow-moving piston wouldn't be so uncomfortable, she found Barney's strong sweaty male smell was not so disgusting as all the deodorant ads had conditioned her to believe. Suddenly, to Julia's surprise, she found herself breathing deeply, burying her nose in the greasy locks of Barney's hair.
She bumped into his ear, and, without quite knowing why, she abruptly stuck her tongue into it. Barney bucked convulsively. She felt his thing swell and grow even harder as he began moving it faster now.
Julia began panting, trying to understand what was happening to her. She wanted to fight and scream. But instead of whacking him in the testicles, she lay beneath him with her knees slightly raised the way he had arranged them, wondering if it was natural for a girl being robbed of her most precious possession to feel this mounting tension in her belly. Something was growing, swelling, stretching until it threatened to burst and tear her in two.
Once before she had felt something like this when she was rubbing herself with the soap. But that time she had been so frightened by the runaway sensation that she had hastily stopped. She wished she could stop it now. "Stop!" she wailed, "Wait a minute!" To her utter amazement, Barney stopped.
He glanced at his watch. "Now that's more like it," he grinned. "Still almost twenty-six minutes to go. No use rushing it."
Now that he had stopped, her unrelieved tension became unbearable. She squirmed, trying to do something-anything to relieve the terrible hurting explosive feeling that was building up inside her. Moments ago she had wanted to escape. Now she wanted him to continue, to start again with that pumping action deep inside of her raw-rubbed vagina, to ease the hurt that could only be eased by hurting it more. She squirmed again, and she could feel Barney's thing in her up to the hilt.
Julia guessed he was fighting not to come. Each time she made a little grinding motion to get comfortable, she nearly turned him into a spurting, blurting idiot. He gritted his teeth and clenched his buttocks as a single tiny drop of semen shot from the end of his throbbing tool. If he could just cool it now that he'd fired that one drop, Barney knew that he would be good for a solid half hour.
Julia felt the tiny spurt, but she didn't know what it was. She waited, impatiently for what would happen next. A moment later Barney, with his tool still buried up to the hilt, began grinding his hairy crotch against the scant blonde fur of her pubis. His cock had a new lease on life now, and Barney was in no hurry. With each slow circular grind around her tender young ass, his tool twisted and poked her in a new and more thrilling direction.
Julia began breathing harder. She wanted him to stop fooling around, to start pushing it in and out again and get it over with. She couldn't stand being teased much longer. She had thought it was going to hurt. It was hurting, but she had never guessed that pain could feel so good. She felt her ass rising to meet Barney's, straining and pushing against him as his pitiless probing found still new sources of sensation.
Julia's body went out of control. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling his puffing face deeper into the curve of her neck. His hands clutched her firm breasts. Each time his rough fingers twiddled her rock-hard nipples, she fought the impulse to scream out her pleasure.
Something was stretched to the bursting point inside her belly. Finally he stopped with the grinds and began feeding her slow regular strokes that titillated every sensuous nerve that lined the hair-fringed entrance to her cunt. His rhythmical thrusts reminded Julia of her piano lessons-the four-four beats, the steady tick-tick-tick of a metronome . . .
* * *
There had been something funny about those piano lessons, Julia remembered. Old Miss Prouty had been thorough and infinitely patient as she guided Julia through chromatic scales and finger exercises. Within weeks Julia had been playing simple little pieces. Then Miss Prouty had taken to feeling poorly.
Mr. Jerkin was not as old as Miss Prouty. He wore loose, floppy clothes. Born a hundred years too late to be a Parisian artist and thirty years too soon to be a hippy, Mr. Jerkin was very much a loner in Centerville.
He brought a metronome and four-handed exercises into her life. She was fascinated by the metronome as she rocked her budding, eleven-year-old body back and forth on the piano bench, vigorously keeping time. She was less enchanted with four-handed exercises. Mr. Jerkin had to sit very close to her in order to reach the keys, and she didn't much care for his smell.
Usually Mr. Jerkin sat on Julia's right. "Your left hand's weak," he explained. "You need to exercise it playing bass." Often Mr. Jerkin found it necessary to put his own arm around her and bang out a chord fortissimo before she could get the hang of it. Mr. Jerkin's arm seemed to be around her quite a bit.
First he would wind up the metronome and set it for a slow steady beat. Then Mr. Jerkin would sit beside her and get his left arm around where he could play bass. She had to do her best in between, eyes on the metronome as she rocked back and forth, pounding away on the one-two, one-two of some endless exercise.
Mr. Jerkin would rock enthusiastically in time with her, his face growing redder and his breathing more labored as he fell under the spell of the music. "Don't stop!" he said in a strained voice, "Don't lose the beat!"
She never did. Usually it was Mr. Jerkin who would suddenly begin hitting wrong notes and go into a little flurry before the piece was quite over. "Practice your finger exercises," he would say as he hastily left the room.
* * *
Looking at Barney's flushed face and hearing him puff, Julia suddenly realized what Mr. Jerkin had been up to. And I was only eleven, hardly any body at all!
Now she was suffering as Mr. Jerkin had years ago. This puffing red-faced monster was crushing her, squeezing the breath from her as he rammed his relentless rod steadily in and out of her seething slit.
She still couldn't believe this was really happening to her. Short months ago she had been the untouchable queen of Centerville. Now this belching, stinking truck driver was--he was actually fucking her! It was dirty. Nasty! Now Julia knew why she had always instinctively shied away from Mr. Jerkin no matter how much he cozened and flattered her. Dirty old man! He was no better than the chauffeur who did nasty things with her mother in the big four-poster bed.
The chauffeur's hands were never entirely free of black stains that came from working on the car. Nor was his breath ever free of the rank odor of chewing tobacco. When Julia had seen his pallid buttocks bouncing between her mother's energetically kicking legs, her shock had been deeper than she realized at the time. Silently, she had withdrawn, and neither her mother nor the chauffeur had ever known that Julia knew.
Later, when her mother was dying, Julia had no doubts about who was being punished and for what. She had taken a firm resolve never to follow in her mother's sinful footsteps. Yet here she was in a whorehouse being fucked by a total stranger.
And Julia realized that he was so slow about it! Would he never stop that slow metronomic slide in and out, in and out? She thought of the first time she had seen an oil field--the way some dark corner of her mind had been fascinated by all those steel rods slowly and steadily pumping up and down, ramming into the earth, drawing up black gold with each stroke.
Julia could smell Barney's rank male scent, like the odor of an old saddle blanket. But then she wondered why she was burying her face in his chest, why her arms were wrapped round him, her thighs clasping his buttocks, her knees locking round him, drawing his relentless rammer into her deeper.
"Oooooooooh!" she moaned. "Now! More!"
Suddenly Barney was not moving. With his throbbing cock still stabbed into her up to the hilt, he rested on his elbows, looking down at her. "Goddamn!" he marveled, "This ain't no put-on. You're really coming!"
"Please!" Julia moaned.
Barney glanced at his watch. "Still twenty-three minutes," he grinned. "What's your hurry?"
My god, she thought, what have I been saying to this animal? She lay naked beneath him, helpless under Barney's brawny body. As he reared back to admire her taut little body, she felt her creamy whiteness turn angry red; face, shoulders, firmly erect little tits-she was blushing clear down past her flat little belly as she cringed beneath Barney's gaze. A moment ago she had been begging the vulgar oaf to do so many salacious things to her.
Julia wanted to die.
"Yes sir, built like a reg'lar brick shithouse!" Barney exclaimed. He had had enough of a breather to keep from coming right away. Very slowly and gently, Barney pulled his monstrous meatus out until the tip was barely parting her quiff.
Before Julia had time to rejoice, she felt his tremendous tool sliding back into her, groping its way up, up, into her innermost being, filling her with despair, with desecration, but worst of all, filling her with an unholy joy.
Julia felt her tingling body obey instincts older and stronger than her moralistic mind. She strained to control her emotions, not to cooperate physically in the act of procreation. Moaning in agonized ecstasy, she felt tears stream down her face as her arms locked uncontrollably around his burly, sweat-smelling masculine body. Barney was pleasuring himself and no more thought for her than if she had been a nicely upholstered chair.
Julia's thighs trembled, opened and closed convulsively as she moaned her shame and her uncontrolled desire to be tortured more, harder, deeper by his pitiless prod.
She felt it start again, the rushing, building feeling synonymous with the time years ago in the bathtub when she had played too long with the soap. Barney felt it too. Suddenly his relentless ramming speeded up. His metronomic plunges blurred as he began lunging recklessly, driving deeper, faster, hurting her. Suddenly he began squealing in a high-pitched voice.
There was a final bucking lunge. Julia felt a sudden slimy dampness as her sweating assailant fell to one side, inert as a spent rabbit. "No!" she wailed, "Don't stop now!" Julia wiggled her ass against him, trying to force his flaccid tool inside her again, struggling to release the pressure that threatened to strangle her.
Barney refused to accommodate her. After a moment he opened his eyes sleepily, then glanced at his watch. "Still fifteen minutes to go," he frowned. "But goddamn, you sure put out a good fuck." He washed himself at the basin in a corner of the room, then climbed back into his pants.
Julia closed her eyes. She wondered if it was possible to wish herself to death.
"Keep it nice and tight for me," Barney said. Closing the door, he added, "Don't let all the other guys wear it out."
Other guys!
She realized that Barney might be at the head of the line. She had to get out quickly. Frantically, she scrambled from the bed and snapped the spring latch on the door. She made a hasty toilette at the sink, then tried to salvage the clothes that Barney had torn off her.
Apparently some former occupant of the room had had similar problems, for there were safety pins and a needle and thread. Julia used big basting stitches to get her bra back together. Her pantyhose was a hopeless mass of runs. Finally she cut the legs off and put on the panty part, hoping it wouldn't unravel and expose her lithe loins before she could get back to her room. Her dress was wrinkled, but apart from a couple of strained seams where Barney had pulled it off over her head, it seemed all right.
She dressed quickly and did what she could to her hair. There were footsteps in the hallway. She froze, and the footsteps passed on. She gave herself a final check in the mirror. She looked like a refugee from a disaster area, but she thought she could get home without being arrested for disturbing the peace. She was opening the door when she noticed the money Barney had left on the edge of the dresser.
For an instant Julia thought she was going to cry again. Then she stiffened. She was going to need money to replace her ruined clothes. She might need it for other more expensive reasons too. She picked up the money. After all, she told herself, I earned it.
"Going already, dearie?" the aging receptionist asked as Julia hastened out.
Julia averted her flaming face and didn't answer. The elevator was stopped at another floor. She was afraid somebody would come after her and prevent her escape. She looked around desperately, then saw a staircase. Running down two steps at a time, she knocked the tap off one heel and fell forward.
It could have been a serious fatal fall if she had not ploughed squarely into a young man in a messenger's uniform. He fell backward as she sprawled spread-eagled atop him. His armload of manila envelopes flew in several directions.
The messenger boy was young, not over twenty, but he had a curiously aged, knowing look about him. "You again?" he said good humouredly as he helped her up. "I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance."
Julia gave a strangled scream and rushed past him into the street.
She walked blindly for several blocks, then found herself amid throngs of shoppers on a downtown street. She blundered into a variety store and tried to see if anyone was following her.
Nobody paid her the slightest attention.
She sat at a lunch counter and had a cup of coffee. By the time she finished it, her hands were hardly shaking. Julia knew she ought to call the cops. But if she did, there'd be questions and maybe her name would get in the papers. Visualizing herself surrounded by policemen and reporters, telling them exactly what had happened to her, Julia shuddered.
One other thing would have to be done pretty quickly, Julia realized. She paid for her coffee and ignored the counterman's admiring stare as she walked past a magazine rack to a pay phone.
CHAPTER THREE
This time Julia was going to take no chances. She needed some sound advice. She needed a doctor. The one thing she didn't need was another dirty old man with a good excuse to undress her and paw her some more.
Between the white and yellow pages of the phone directory were a few green pages. Julia looked for doctors and saw: See specific kinds such as: chiropractic doctors, dentists, drugless practitioners, optometrists, osteopaths, physicians & surgeons D.O., physicians & surgeons M.D., podiatrists, psychologists, veterinarians.
Julia didn't know that much about doctors, but she knew the kind she wanted wasn't listed here at all. Finally she turned to physicians & surgeons M.D. There were eleven pages of them.
Julia thumbed her way through the A's and B's. Finally in the C's she found a Dr. Mary Carter, M.D., specializing in gynecology. She dialed.
"Doctor Carter's office."
"Are you Doctor Carter?"
"May I ask who's calling?"
"It's a kind of emergency. Can I speak to the doctor?"
"Are you a patient?"
"No, but I-"
Julia heard a click as the receptionist hung up and then Doctor Carter's voice came on. "This is Doctor Carter. I was just leaving for the day."
"I've been raped."
There was a momentary silence, then, "Are you badly hurt? Can you walk?"
"Yes. I'm calling from Woolworths."
"You'd better take a cab. I'll be waiting for you."
She walked outside, and there was a taxi stand right in front of her.
* * *
Dr. Mary Carter was in her early forties. Beneath her white coat Julia saw a severely tailored tweed skirt. The doctor's greying hair was cut short in a neat bob. "Poor dear," the doctor said. "It happened to me once. I know just how you must feel."
"It was horrible," Julia began. "But the worst part..." She couldn't continue. How could she explain the mixed revulsion and fascination she had felt for the balding stinking stranger who had terminated her maidenhood? Undressing, she suddenly remembered the wording of the classified ad that had gotten her into that awful mess: Receptionist, meat packing firm. Tactful, handle unusual situations. How could she have been so stupid? "It isn't as if it was the first time I've been victimized," she sobbed, and went on to tell Dr. Carter about Mr. Version's horrible turkey-wattled face and the stupid way she'd just stood there and let him undress her. "It's almost as if I wanted these terrible things to happen to me," she concluded. "Twice in two days. Thank heaven this time I was smart enough to pick a woman doctor so nothing else could happen."
"Very prudent," Dr. Carter agreed. She helped her up onto the examination table. She placed Julia's heels in the stirrups and warned, "This may hurt a little," as she inserted a stainless steel speculum up Julia's vagina, forced it through her virginal cervix to survey the interior of her womb.
"You were a virgin, weren't you?"
"Yes. Am I badly hurt?"
Dr. Carter gave a humorless chuckle. "You'll never be a virgin again, but I don't see any real damage. While you're dilated, we'll do a quick rinse-more as a precaution than anything else. And I'll give you some antibiotics just in case ..."
"Then I'm not pregnant?"
"Not pregnant, not diseased, not damaged," Dr. Carter smiled. "You're just not a virgin any longer. You were lucky."
Julia lay on the examination table while the doctor prepared syringes. "Lucky," Julia said tonelessly.
The doctor glanced at her.
"Maybe I need a different kind of doctor," Julia mused, "Someone who can look into my head."
Dr. Carter laughed. "So it was a horrible experience. Would you feel better if somebody'd brought you in here from an auto accident, maybe with an arm or a leg torn off?" The doctor frowned and squinted as she worked the air bubble out of a syringe. "This isn't the middle ages," she continued. "Girls don't walk around with little bells and shout 'unclean' just because somebody else was readier than they were."
"Oh I know that. The trouble is, he was a perfect stranger. He forced himself on me and--. Well, maybe I could have fought harder."
"And gotten a broken jaw for your trouble?" The doctor touched her cheek and Julia winced. "I didn't get hit that hard before I gave in," the doctor said.
"But I... "
The doctor swabbed her buttock with cotton and had a needle in and out before Julia could brace herself. She busied herself with some complicated plumbing and placed several multicolored douches into Julia's still dilated womb. Finally she handed Julia a capsule. "You'll be sore for a while. Take this."
Julia put on her clothes and tried to repair her face. No matter what she did, she could not stop the tears that flowed down her cheeks.
"And you haven't even seen my bill yet," the doctor teased. When Julia exploded into racking sobs, the doctor smiled and waited. Finally Julia had cried herself out.
"How long since you've been to Sunday School?" the doctor finally asked.
Julia gulped. "Two, three weeks, I guess." Dr. Carter nodded knowingly. "They've been preaching that morality crap ever since men got the upper hand somewhere back in the caveman era. But your body doesn't hear those sermons. Every gland and muscle in you listens to an older wisdom that has existed since some tree-dwelling ancestor of ours decided it'd be fun to have a man hanging around to help raise the kids, so she thought up a way to keep him.
"That," the doctor continued, "was when we females learned the most profound biological lesson of our species: If you want to keep a man, you keep something ready to amuse him. How many happy families do you think there'd be if we copulated only in estrus like the female of every other animal?"
"I don't understand."
"You do. Only you've been conditioned not to. Haven't you ever watched dogs?"
"Well, yes."
"A bitch is only in heat while she's bleeding.
Any other time a dog couldn't care less about her. That's why a bitch leads a dog's life, and a woman has men buying her fur coats: Our kind of bitch has something for the boys all the time; not just once a month when there's blood on the moon."
"But-"
"You don't want to believe it. Your body believes it. I'm not knocking religion. Maybe we need some kind of moral standards, but you'd be surprised how much extra work all that hellfire and guilt business brings me. I suspect people might be happier if they'd accept what their bodies keep trying to tell them."
"What does my body have to do with it?"
"Everything!" Dr. Carter snapped. "Your body was raped-not your mind. Your body enjoyed it whether your mind did or not. It couldn't have been all bad."
"No, but I don't want it to happen again."
Dr. Carter laughed uproariously. She took off her glasses and her white coat. "You're unbelievable," she said. "Come on. I'll buy you some dinner."
* * *
First they stopped at a bar that seemed inhabited mostly by middle-aged professional women with a sprinkling of lovely, exquisitely dressed young women. Julia wondered if those fantastically groomed creatures were in show business or if they were models. They seemed on good terms with the older women. It was funny, she decided, the way some of the graying short-haired women in their tailored jackets hovered over the young ones, possessive as any man. She saw eyebrows raise as they greeted Dr. Carter with smiles and raised glasses.
A man in a boater straw hat came in and sat at the bar. His clothes were so outlandishly eastern in this western city that even Julia knew he was a tourist who had lost his way. The man glanced timidly at one of the exquisitely dressed girls. The girl smiled. An older woman beside her frowned and her high voltage glare focused on the tourist until the poor man left without finishing his drink.
Dr. Carter glanced at her and grinned. Julia smiled back uncertainly. The fat, epicene bartender came to their table. "What'll it be, Mary?" he asked.
"The usual. And you, Julia?"
"I don't know. I've never ..."
"You might like a creme de menthe frappe," Dr. Carter injected smoothly. The bartender nodded and waddled off. Moments later he was back with Dr. Carter's Manhattan and a glass of something green poured over crushed ice.
Julia sipped through the straw. "It tastes like peppermint candy," she said.
Dr. Carter smiled. "I knew you'd like it."
"You're really very nice," Julia said timidly. "Why did you say those awful things in your office?"
"Because they're true. Before you begin an impassioned defense of religion and morality, you might stop and ask whether you'd rather be an angel on the way down or an animal on the way up."
Julia started to say something, then realized whatever she said would only expose her ignorance. She sensed that Dr. Carter's ideas were all wrong-maybe even evil. But she didn't know how to answer them without making herself appear ridiculous. Then a buzzing sound coursed through her mind. "How strong is this green stuff?" she asked.
"Not very. But you'd better not have any more on top of that pain pill I gave you. Are you feeling better?"
"Fine. I just hope I can walk straight."
"We'd better get some food into you." Dr. Carter led Julia through a doorway into the restaurant, and they surveyed quarto-sized menus.
"Golly," Julia said, "It's all in French."
Dr. Carter translated her way down the menu until Julia brightened at the knowledge that chouettes d'agneau were only lamb chops. Her head cleared slightly after soup and salad. The restaurant's gilt mirrors and hovering waiters reawakened in her some confused childhood vision of fairyland. Still floating slightly, she allowed Dr. Carter to help her in a cab.
She thought the doctor was going to take her home. She dozed and woke with some surprise as the doctor led her through a foyer to the elevator of a building as elegant as the Centerville opera house. Still floating in a slightly dazed happiness, Julia found herself on the couch of an elegant French provincial room.
"I thought you might enjoy a nightcap before I take you home," Dr. Carter explained. "I remember when I was in medical school how I hated to go back to that dreary little room." She produced immense snifter glasses and poured two fingers of cognac. Julia held her glass uncertainly, waiting to see what Dr. Carter did with hers.
Dr. Carter seemed to be sloshing the brandy around in the glass, smelling it more than she was drinking it. Julia decided if it tasted as strong as it smelled, she'd better do the same. She still couldn't get over the floating feeling that came from the pain pill and one drink on an empty stomach.
Dr. Carter told amusing stories of how she had struggled to make ends meet when she was young. Before Julia knew it, she had unburdened herself of her own life history in Centerville. One mad corner of her mind listened to her telling this kindly woman about Mr. Jerkin, her piano teacher, and what she had once discovered going on between her mother and the tobacco-chewing chauffeur. She had never told anyone that before.
"They're all so dirty," she concluded. "They only think of one thing. I don't ever want to get married."
Dr. Carter laughed. "I'd think about that a while if I were you."
"You're not married, are you?"
"No, dear, I'm not."
"Did you ever want to?"
Dr. Carter gave a reminiscent smile. "Not really," she said. "But my reasons may have been slightly different from yours. By the way, how are you feeling now?"
"Fine, it doesn't hurt a bit."
"Good. Maybe we'd better have another look and make sure everything's coming along all right."
"Whatever you say," Julia said uncertainly. "Do you want me to get undressed?"
"No, dear, just lie down there on the couch." Dr. Carter knelt on the rug, silhouetted in the glow of the fireplace. In the office the doctor's movements had been all brusque efficiency. Now in her home the doctor's action seemed different. She seemed more gentle. "Warm in here," she said, slipping off her jacket. Beneath it the doctor wore only her tweed shirt and a serviceable bra to contain her full round breasts.
"No, dear," Dr. Carter sighed, "I never married. My way of life was frowned on when I was a girl. Now I'm happy to see that the world is catching up with us."
"Oh?" Julia didn't have the slightest idea what Dr. Carter was talking about, but she decided that she had made enough of a fool of herself lately.
"I suppose the ecology scare has something to do with it," Dr. Carter continued. "My, it's warm in here. I think I'll slip off my skirt too, so I don't get it all wrinkled. This couch's so much lower than my examination table that I'll have to work on my knees."
While Julia lay supine and slightly puzzled, Dr. Carter unzipped her tweed skirt and laid it carefully to one side with her jacket. Now, clad in bra and panty girdle, the doctor glanced at Julia, shrugged, and began removing her stockings.
Julia was even more puzzled. Every one of Dr. Carter's actions seemed reasonable enough. It was warm. The couch was too low, and there was no point in the doctor ruining her stockings by kneeling in them.
Dr. Carter finished peeling off her stockings. Clad only in bra and girdle, she knelt down and ran her hand up Julia's thigh. Julia spread her legs, so the doctor could get a good look at home base, then she remembered she was still wearing the cut-off panties of her ruined pantyhose. "Relax, dear," the doctor said. "Oh, this girdle's been killing me all day!"
Dr. Carter stood up again and peeled the offending garment from her hips. She emitted a deep sigh of relief and straightened, wearing only her bra. The doctor winced and ran a thumb under the shoulder strap which was cutting into her. "Unhook me, dear," she said, turning her back to Julia.
Still in a puzzled daze, Julia unfastened Dr. Carter's bra. Dr. Carter shrugged out of it and piled it atop the remainder of her clothes. "When you're my age dear," she promised, "You'll appreciate simple pleasures like getting out of tight clothes." She stood between Julia and the fire, running her hands over breasts and hips, rubbing out the faint creases.
Dr. Carter was as tall as Julia and thirty pounds heavier. Standing in the firelight, her sturdy mature body was muscular, tanned to an even brown, and showed the results of faithful workouts in tennis court and pool. Her ample, bronzed breasts reminded Julia of the Gauguin prints that she had once checked out of the Centerville library.
"But I like to think it's more than the ecology scare that's made my kind of person more acceptable nowadays," the doctor continued. "Maybe people are finally growing up."
Julia wondered if she could risk a question without appearing too stupid. "In what way?" she asked.
Dr. Carter paused a moment. "In Biblical days when the earth was underpopulated and three out of four babies died in their first year, it was sinful to enjoy one's body in selfish ways-ways that didn't contribute directly to maintaining the tribe's population. That's why certain forms of behavior were frowned upon.
"But now when there are entirely too many people in the world, they're beginning to realize it's the other kind of behavior that's sinful: the kind that makes babies most people don't really want and then abandons them in a world that can't possibly produce enough food. Now my kind of people are being accepted. Within another generation we'll be the norm, and people with too many children will get the angry looks and things thrown at them as they walk down the street."
"What do you mean by your kind of people?"
"People who know how to separate pleasure from reproduction," the doctor said. "My, you have a nice, firm young body. I remember when I was like that."
"But you're still very attractive. You don't look -old or anything like that."
"Do you really think so, dear?" Dr. Carter knelt and ran her hands up Julia's thighs again. "Might as well slip your dress off," she said. "While we have time, I'll give you a thorough physical-check your breasts for lumps and all that."
Julia raised up her trim buttocks, and the doctor's capable hands slipped her dress off. "Oh my," Julia said, "That stuffs making me dizzy."
"That's all right, dear. Just raise your shoulders a little." She slipped her hands under Julia and unhooked the hastily sewn bra. The bra fell aside, revealing Julia's ivory-white breasts and cherry-colored nipples. Dr. Carter put her hands over Julia's breasts and pressed down. "Does that hurt?" she asked.
"No."
"Good. Now does this?" She pressed thumbs and fingers into Julia's jaunty little nipples from every angle, and she was apparently satisfied with their perfection. Julia lay relaxed, floating. Dr. Carter's hands were so smooth, so soothing. She felt the doctor gently rubbing at the sore spots on her shoulders where bra straps had cut in. Then, with her eyes still half closed, she dreamily felt the doctor's capable hands gently caressing her breasts again, felt a thumb and forefinger delicately tease each nipple into rampant rigidity.
"You see," the doctor said gently, "With a man you have all kinds of problems. They're so impetuous. They never really care about a girl's feelings. At the crucial moment they forget themselves and the first thing you know, Pill or no Pill, you're pregnant again."
Julia felt herself enveloped in a gentle warmth, felt herself loved and protected on all sides. She felt happy basking in a drowsy security, enjoying the doctor's gentle touch, knowing nothing could possibly go wrong, or become brutal in the perfect, exquisitely furnished room. She felt Dr. Carter's hands peeling off the remains of her pantyhose, and she raised her globular ass-cheeks to facilitate the movement. "Such a lovely body," the doctor was saying. "Poor dear, you've been through a lot today."
Julia roused herself. "I don't know what I'd have done, if I hadn't found you. I was ready to go out of my mind."
"I know dear." The doctor patted Julia's wispy mons veneris. "So much joy and so much trouble it can bring." She nudged the younger girl, and Julia moved back on the couch. Sleepily, she felt Dr. Carter slide down beside her. Strong arms wrapped round her, pulled her face gently around to nestle between the doctor's cushiony, faintly perfumed breasts.
Julia felt a hand caress her inner thighs, running up and down over her still tender vulva. "Men are so impatient, so brutal," the doctor was saying. "They take pleasure from us, but they don't know how to give it."
Julia hadn't felt so relaxed, so deliciously warm and snug since she'd been a little girl in flannel pajamas.
Eyes still closed, Julia felt the doctor's smooth-muscled body move closer to her, felt lips gently kiss her eyelids. Julia took a deep breath, felt it escape in a sign of utter contentment.
Mary was kissing her lips now, running a gently kneading hand up her back, massaging her shoulders, kissing her lips, her throat, running a gentle loving tongue over Julia's tingling nipples.
Suddenly Julia realized that this wasn't any medical examination. What was it? She wasn't sure. Wasn't Dr. Carter-Mary, doing all the things that men liked to do? But Dr. Carter was a woman, wasn't she? Before she could fully descend from her perplexed cloud. Dr. Carter was all business again.
"This time I won't have to dilate you," she said. "I'm just going to slip my finger in and I want you to tell me what you feel each time I move it."
Julia felt a nimble finger going right up where Barney's angry red thing had gone a few hours ago. But Mary's finger was not hurting and tearing. Instead, she felt it slip gently through the juicy folds of her vagina and finally stop. "Now tell me what you feel," Mary said.
"I--I don't know how to say it."
"Does it hurt?"
"Oh nooo, not at all." Julia tried to relax. What was she worried about? Dr. Carter was a woman; she was a doctor. This was a medical examination. She felt Dr. Carter's finger wriggling inside her, then she felt another finger gently twiddle that ticklish spot just above her vulva entrance.
"That's your clitoris I'm touching now, dear. What do you feel?"
"It doesn't hurt," Julia replied. "It tickles. When you touch me that way and move your finger inside, I feel tingly all over."
"Like this, dear?"
"Ooooooohhh, yeeeeeeesss!"
"Those are called erogenous zones," the doctor explained. "First we must map them all out. Some are stronger, some weaker in different people."
"Why do you have to do all this?" Julia asked. "We have to find out if that brute damaged your sensitivity."
"Oh." Julia lay back, thighs lightly spread to let Mary's educated hand probe her womanhood. "Do I have any other-erogenous zones?" she asked.
"That's what we're finding out, dear. First I'll map yours, and then I'll show you how they compare with mine."
Julia bucked uncontrollably as a third finger suddenly tripped against her anal sphincter muscle.
"Mmrnm, yes, that's a good one," Mary mused. She moved her finger gently in a stirring motion inside Julia's vagina, while rubbing a thumb over her suddenly marble-hard little clit. Julia tried to control her breathing. She almost had it made when another finger gave her quivering anus a quick jab. Julia reacted so violently that the cheeks of her fluttery buttocks locked over the offending finger. Promptly it poked her again. "Now what are you feeling?" Mary asked.
Julia was breathing too hard to answer. She felt Mary's mouth close over her own, felt a sinuous tongue invade her. Mary caressed her breasts, rubbing her nipples to a shivery, ecstatic hardness. It was going to happen again: that same ecstatic pressure was building inside her-the same sense of impending explosion that had made her do all those crazy things, bury her nose in Barney's sweaty stinking chest, wrap her arms and legs unwillingly around his rampaging masculinity as he tortured her to the brink of-something she had never experienced.
Her boggled mind drew an analogy from half forgotten Sunday School lessons. Death was supposed to be a blessing, a release, a passing into a more perfect world. Yet none of Julia's fellow worshippers had ever seemed anxious to die.
What was happening to her now? Was she going to die? Certainly she couldn't live much longer with her heart laboring like this, her breaths coming in strangled gasps, tension building, stretching, straining, threatening to tear her belly apart.
This was stronger and more irrevocable--much worse than it had been with Barney. She remembered her first fluttery tremors when Mr. Version had undressed her and fondled her trim naked body under the guise of taking measurements.
Then balding, brutal Barney had misused her, driven her unwillingly to claw at the walls of ecstasy. And now . . . Now she suddenly realized it was too late. That terrible tearing tension that threatened to rip her apart was reaching the peak of climax. Is this how it feels to die? If this was death, why was everybody hanging around suffering?
"Dear, Jesus," she whispered, "I'm coming!"
Dr. Carter's hands, her mouth, her capable muscular body were working every sensitive spot in Julia's body, helping her to scale that wall. Mary worked harder, faster, auguring her finger in lubricious circles, searching put the hidden folds and secret corners of Julia's passion-flushed vagina. A thumb tortured her turgid clitoris, sending shuddering waves of lust through her inexperienced body. Another finger of Dr. Carter's busy hand was tapping, poking, probing at her quivering bunghole.
Disgusting, Julia thought. Dirty! Suddenly the tapping finger was invading her. There was a sharp pain that drove Julia farther up the wall of agonized ecstasy. Then the finger was inside her, feeling through the partition for its mate in the classic bowling-ball grip.
Julia felt herself flying over the proverbial wall, body twisting and straining, lashing uncontrollably as she fell into the void. Her insides were dissolving, turning to water as the unbearable tension melted and flowed, coursing through her body like a stream of tranquilizing drugs. My body's gone now, Julia decided. Now I'm just a disembodied soul in paradise.
Then she realized her body was still there, still spurting its juices, purging itself of all unresolved tension.
She was spent, exhausted, utterly drained of all passion. Then gradually her satiation was marred by the realization that she was not dead. She was very much alive! Dr. Carter was patting a damp towel between Julia's legs, wiping the pit of her delight clean again.
"Now what did you feel?" the doctor asked in a precise clinical voice.
"Ooooohhh!" Julia moaned.
Still naked, the doctor patted her consolingly. "Perfectly natural to feel that way, dear," she explained. "Omnis animal post coitum triste. "
' What's that?"
"It's rather bad Latin, dear. The doctor who wrote it was better at psychology than he was at grammar. Coitus literally means going together. The whole phrase means 'every animal is sad after coition'."
"Is that what-what we just did?"
Dr. Carter grinned. "Well, dear, we got rather close together."
"But it- It was just like with Barney today. And you're a woman!"
"Just like with Barney? Are you sure you didn't enjoy this just a little more?"
"Well..." Julia knew perfectly well this had been much better. Gentle, soothing, no stinking brutal beast ramming and tearing, breathing garlic-scented salami breaths at her-but it was wrong.
Mary was kneeling beside the couch again. She put her hands on Julia's waist and got a fingertip into her navel.
"What are you going to do now?" Julia asked in a quavering voice.
"Dear, we're still mapping your erogenous zones."
"You mean there are more?"
"I'm sure there are. And if you want to be free from stinking sweaty monsters like the one that attacked you today, you're just going to have to be patient and let me do a thorough job."
"Well..." Julia said nervously.
Julia rationalized that she'd better go along with the doctor. Mary's hands were massaging, caressing her midriff, stopping occasionally to introduce a fingertip into Julia's navel. "Now tell me what you feel, dear."
"It feels, oh-I don't know. Kind of nice. It isn't like what you did before-down there. But... I don't mind. It's kind of nice. You can keep it up if you like."
Dr. Carter smiled. Suddenly she bent over to kiss her firmly rounded belly. Julia tried to ignore the doctor's overt actions. Maybe it had to be done but she still didn't think it was right to enjoy it. She tried to think about something else.
The only thing that came to mind was the last time somebody had nuzzled her bare belly. Remembering Mr. Version's deformity, she tried to work up a feeling of revulsion. But the doctor was so gentle and kind. Her hands fluttered like twin butterflies, barely skimming her body, half soothing, half arousing. Julia felt a tingle as her creamy skin blushed with an unwilling excitement.
At first Mary had just been darting dainty love nips across her belly. Then the doctor worked her way up past Julia's midriff. Julia stiffened, trying not to involve herself in the warm glow that became more intense as Mary kissed the tender undersides of her firm breasts, worked her way around them in diminishing spirals until her lips locked over a nipple.
Julia felt her rigid thighs open involuntarily as Mary switched rapidly to her other nipple and began tonguing it rigid. "Now tell me what you feel, dear," she said between nibbles.
Julia braced herself. She reminded herself that this was a clinical examination. She wanted to give objective, dispassionate answers. Mary's mouth closed over her nipple again. Julia's thighs clenched tight, then opened against her will. A hand darted between her legs and began caressing the tender skin of her inner thigh, flicking an impudent finger at her pulsating vulva with each stroke. "Now what do you feel, dear?"
"Oooooohhh!" Julia gritted her teeth. She tried to close her legs, to turn off that hot, rushing sensation before it overwhelmed her. Yet she sensed dimly that her legs were not closing. They were opening wider, inviting Mary's gentle caressing hand into the volatile pit of fire that was centered at the apex of her gapped thighs.
Perversely, the doctor's hand refused to gratify Julia's demands. Julia tried to ignore the throbbing need in her crotch, tried to concentrate on the lovely things Mary was doing to her taut tits.
Timidly, Julia reached out, half expecting the doctor to tell her to keep her hands to herself and not to ruin the objectivity of a scientific experiment. But she couldn't be cold and scientific when everything Mary did opened some new gateway to unmapped passions.
Julia put out her hand blindly, timidly, without opening her eyes. It touched Mary's shoulder. Gently, she worked her hand around until it was cupping one of Mary's magnificent suntanned tits. She felt Mary's nipple start to come alive and grow in her palm. She touched it experimentally with a fingertip, felt it swell even more. "That's right, dear," Mary murmured. "You're starting to get the hang of it."
Julia had expected the doctor to keep on doing something nice to her sprightly tits, but she was abandoning them, starting to kiss around her waist. Gradually the doctor was working her muscular body around the other way, climbing onto the couch.
Julia felt Mary's hip against her ear. To her sudden horror Julia felt an overwhelming desire to turn her head and kiss Mary's tanned, muscular hip. She was relieved from temptation when the doctor abruptly slid farther down the couch. Now she was kissing Julia's lower belly, darting her agile tongue along the hairline of her furred mons veneris.
Julia had a sudden premonition of things to come. This has to stop right now! Good heavens, it's like all those dirty things scribbled on toilet walls were actually true! Surely people don't really put their mouths there!
Julia felt hackles rise at the realization that she couldn't stop the doctor from doing whatever she wanted to do. She felt that tension building in her belly again--not so terrifying now that she knew about the state of blissful satiation afterward.
Julia suffered a horrifying disappointment when she realized that Mary was not going to do it. The bronzed-skin doctor was slithering even farther down. Julia tingled as Mary's warm calf brushed her ear. The doctor was kissing Julia's calves.
For Julia, it was a letdown. She had felt herself rising, swelling, preparing to enter the world of lust again. Instead she was stretched on the couch, seeing Mary's lithe-muscled calves silhouetted by the dim glow of the fireplace.
Mary was kissing her ankles, working her way around one then switching to the other before returning to plant another ring of tickling, tantalizing kisses an inch farther up. Julia resigned herself to disappointment. When the doctor asked, "What are you feeling now, dear?" Julia murmured something unintelligible.
For Julia it felt rather nice just to lie there not doing anything, except feeling the gentle tickle of Mary's lips around her ankles, up her calves.
Mary kissed her way behind one knee, and Julia again felt a sudden tingle. "That's the popliteal fossa, dear. We can put it down as a secondary erogenous zone."
"Oooooh yes," Julia murmured. Suddenly that feeling was back again as if Mary had never left off kissing her tits, her tender lower belly just above the hairline. Now Mary was kissing the back of her other knee. It felt so good that Julia had to struggle not to kick. The doctor inched her muscular bronze body back up as she began kissing Julia's thighs.
This was nice and safe, Julia decided, no different from the caresses her mother and father used to give her before she became too old for caresses. Mary's muscular calf brushed against her once again. Surely, she told herself, no harm could come from burying her face in the doctor's calves, in kissing that hollow behind the knee that Mary had given some funny Latin name to.
Julia kissed Mary's smooth tender skin, then felt her leg brush lovingly against her cheek.
But when she kissed the doctor's popliteal fossa, the doctor retaliated with a series of playful kisses. She began biting her way up Julia's thigh, gently nipping the soft warmth of her inner thigh.
"No!" Julia moaned. "Don't!" But she felt her legs open wider, and her willpower disappeared as the doctor abruptly stopped nibbling one leg an inch short of her fur piece and began torturing her other limb barely above the knee.
She closed her thighs over Mary's short-cropped hair. The doctor seemed to enjoy the feel of Julia's creamy-skinned thighs clamped over her ears. She redoubled her frenzied nipping, gradually twisting her head to work up her other thigh until her demanding mouth was back in disputed territory.
Julia's body was disobeying. That building, rushing sensation of rut was tearing her libido asunder. She felt herself scaling the wall of passion, knowing once again she would vault out into the void, not knowing, hardly caring whether it would be better or worse than last time.
Julia clamped her thighs tighter, and Mary kissed and nibbled more furiously, her questing tongue barely flicking the hairs on the lips of her vulva.
Julia felt her thighs open. She wondered if Mary was pulling her legs apart. Then she realized that she was doing it herself. Maybe if she relaxed her grip, Mary would not kiss and nibble quite so insatiably.
Who do you think you're kidding? Her conscience exclaimed. What she really wanted was for Mary to dive in there. She wanted Mary's agile tongue to work its way around her opening the way her finger had stirred up her passions a while ago. She clapped her thighs shut an instant too late.
Mary was deep in her crotch, lapping away, kissing between Julia's gaping lips, torturing her turgid clit, drilling her voracious tongue into that same hole Barney had opened this morning.
Julia felt herself scaling the wall, ready to launch herself into the black void of fulfillment. Mary's muscular thighs were quivering, opening and closing just as she felt her own legs move without conscious volition. It was wrong. It shouldn't be happening. But it felt so irresistibly good to her.
But Julia knew that something was still lacking. She felt a sudden need to hide her face, bury her shame at what was happening--what she was allowing to happen. She caught Mary's muscular leg and dived face first into that back-of-the-knee hollow. Then, as the throbbing, driving need of her crotch became even more urgent under Mary's insistent tongue, Julia knew she was in the wrong place. She slid her cheek along the smooth tawny skin of Mary's inner thigh.
Her lips brushed Mary's pubic hair. For a brief moment she wondered if kissing a man with a beard would be like this. But the rest of her mind was aghast, making her feel that she had no moral obligation to return the favor-licking and kissing Mary's dew-gushing vulva. I'm doing it! I've put my mouth down there just like those. . . The realization of what she was doing and what she had become was cut mercifully short.
Rape, plus dilation and douching, plus her first drink, plus seduction by a lesbian doctor, plus two explosively destructive orgasms. . . There was only one thing left to complete the day. Julia fainted.
* * *
When Julia woke up, the fire had died down and the room was beginning to chill. Dr. Carter was snoring, her breasts moving up and down with each sonorous breath. She draped a shawl over Mary's naked, muscular body, then wondered what she should do next. She knew what she'd like to do: She wanted to kill herself.
Now that the heat and passion had died down, Julia knew it had been wrong no matter how ingenious the doctor's rationalizations. But she didn't blame it all on Mary. Julia knew nobody had forced her. She had violated more Commandments than she cared to think about. Yet now her anguish was not so acute as it had been this afternoon when she had been raped-sinned against, but not yet a sinner.
Julia guessed her mind had been numbed by the avalanche of sensual events. Soon her conscience would work it out in her mind, and then the real hell would start. Now there was only a sensation of something not quite right, of something out of tune with the harmonious setting.
And that something out of tune would come soon, she thought, unless she dredged up some moral fiber and got out of here before Dr. Carter woke up. She wondered what she should do about Dr. Carter. Dr. Carter had seduced her, taken advantage of her just as thoroughly, perhaps more so than Mr. Version and Barney. At least the men hadn't been quite so sneaky building up to what they wanted. But Dr. Carter? Had she really been mapping erogenous zones?
No copouts now! Julia shook her head firmly. She got off the couch and began getting into her clothes as quietly as she could. Julia knew that Dr. Carter had known what she was doing. And so had she once things really got started.
No use crying now, she decided. Just get out of here and don't ever let it happen again. She had trusted men and been taken. She had trusted a woman and been taken. From now on, she vowed, she would have to trust only herself. Then remembering how her legs had opened for Mary's titillating tongue, Julia wondered if she could even trust herself again.
Finished dressing, she let herself out of the apartment and rode the elevator to the street.
Outside it was cold, and a damp wind made her shiver. The streets were dark and empty. Much too empty for Julia to feel at ease. A taxi cruised by, saw her, then slowed down. Julia hesitated. She had to return that money to Mr. Version. Then, remembering all the ways she had been used of late, Julia made a sudden decision. "Fuck him!" she murmured to herself, then hailed the cab.
Sitting in the warmth of the taxi, she wondered how deep her new resolution was. She couldn't give Dr. Carter back her dinner, her liquor, her caresses. She had no intention of ever again getting within grabbing distance of Barney. She counted the money in her purse. After paying her rent, there was less than a hundred dollars left. Julia decided she had sold herself rather cheaply.
Cab fare plus tip took another two dollars. She let herself into her chilly, empty room and turned on the heater. God, she murmured to herself, what a mess she was! Legless pantyhose, hair all snarled, clothes rumpled; she passed a hand over her face and wondered for a panic-stricken moment if the place where Barney slapped her had been bleeding. It wasn't blood, but something stiff had dried on her. She realized what it was, and suddenly she began retching.
It took half an hour to sponge up the mess in the wash basin, using towels and dirty clothes, wringing them out down the hall in the John. She returned to the bath and spent an hour bathing, shampooing, massaging her puffy cheek. Thank heavens, she exclaimed to herself, she wasn't getting a black eye.
CHAPTER FOUR
The morning paper had the usual series of classified ads for born losers. Encyclopedia sales . . . Julia mentally envisioned herself propositioned and assaulted five times per block.
- Exotic masseuse, locals. -
Julia knew that masseuse meant a lady who gave massages. Sometimes, when she was younger, Julia had massaged her mother's stiff neck. She gave a sour grin. Two days ago she would have fallen for that one. Now she'd already had a massage.
She sipped coffee at a nearby snack bar, and she ran her finger down the help wanted, female column, automatically skipping all the "high commission sales jobs," looking for anything honest that would permit her to catch her breath and learn to survive in the jungle of the city. She wasn't going to be choosy or particular. She'd settle for waitress, dishwasher, as long as it was work instead of a setup for some lecher.
Go-go girl over 21. No experience req'd. -
Julia choked on her coffee. The counterman looked up, received the full voltage of an all-men-should-drop-dead stare, then went back to filling salt shakers. Most of the swivel chairs that lined the U-shaped counter table were empty. Julia felt conspicuous and lonely.
The counterman walked toward her with a glass of water. She was about to say she didn't want any, when she saw a young woman sliding into the seat next to her. She was a brunette, and she wore an elegant dress that Julia used to be able to afford but never dared wear.
"Morning, Carol," the counterman said.
"How's it, Gus?"
"Fine. How's the little boy?"
"Birthday tomorrow. He'll be four."
"Well now, isn't that something!" The counterman poured coffee.
Julia felt strangely forlorn. Julia wondered if she would ever again converse casually like that. Just passing the time of day without analyzing every remark to figure which angle this rapist was using to screw her?
The elegant brunette and the counterman made meaningless small talk about children. Julia tried to concentrate on the classifieds. As she placed the newspaper down on the counter, the go-go girl ad became prominent.
Julia shrugged. At least the girl who applied for that job would know what she was getting into.
"Looking for a job?"
Wrapped in her own bitter thoughts, Julia didn't realize the brunette was talking to her.
Then Julia felt sudden shame. A moment ago she had felt sad listening to their cheerful talk. Now she was being invited back into the human race. "Uh . . . yes. I'm looking for one."
"Any luck?"
"Lots," she said wryly. "All the wrong kind."
The brunette saw Julia's paper folded at the go-go ad. "You'll get worse if you go to that place," she said. "Between the boss and the customers, a girl just doesn't have enough hands."
"But I wasn't..."
The brunette took a final sip of coffee, then stood up. She looked critically at Julia's body for a moment, the kind of look that Julia expected from a sex-oriented person.
"You'd do all right," the brunette said. "You might drop in this afternoon and ask for the manager. Tell him Carol sent you."
"Drop in where?" Julia said numbly. A go-go joint was about the last place on earth she'd be caught dead in, but she sensed the brunette was only trying to be friendly.
Carol fished scraps of paper from her purse but no pencil. The counterman was filling pepper shakers at the same end. "Here," she said. "The address is on this. Whatever you do, stay away from that other dump."
"Thank you. I'll look into it."
"They don't open 'til two," the girl said hastily as she left. "Ask for Vito."
Vito. Fat chance! Julia thought. After what had happened to her in the last couple of days, she wasn't about to stick her nose into some place with a bunch of Italian gangsters. She paid for her coffee and walked out.
In the few minutes that she had been inside, the sun had come out, but it was still cold and windy. Julia stood squinting while a motorcycle pulled alongside the yellow-painted curb, and a young man in some kind of uniform got a handful of manila envelopes and small packages from the saddlebag. She stood aside to let him pass. The young man stopped. "You again?" he smiled. "We bump into each other all over town."
It was the same man she had knocked down yesterday coming out of that place where Barney . . .
Julia gave a short, high-pitched shriek and began running. They must have agents looking for me everywhere! How can I escape them?
Behind her the delivery boy was shaking his head. Finally he went into Woolworth's and made his delivery.
Two blocks away Julia ran out of breath, out of panic, and out of patience with herself at the same moment. She didn't know what was wrong with her. There were bicycles and motorcycles and trucks with that same messenger's insignia all over town. They couldn't help but meet again. He was a good-looking boy, and he had helped her up after she had knocked him down, and now she had just screamed at him and made a scene. She knew that it she had any real gumption, she ought to go back and apologize. Sadly, she realized that he was probably gone by now, delivering more packages and envelopes in some other part of town. There were dozens of small businesses in that building where Barney had taken her virginity. She wondered vaguely which business the young man had been delivering his packages to.
Julia had reached a small park. She stepped into the rest room to repair the damages of her fearful flight. This time her pantyhose didn't run as eagerly as she had. Suddenly Julia realized that she still held the brunette girl's scrap of paper balled tightly in her fist.
It was a check stub from Jackrabbit Jack's with an address printed across the top. Julia idly noted gross pay, deductions, net take-home pay. Not much for a month's jigging around, letting strange men stare at half nude bodies. Then she saw the "hours worked." Good heavens, she thought, all that money for less than a week? Her conscience forced her to resume hunting for a legitimate occupation. There were jobs to be checked out. She phoned and got addresses.
The dentist's approach to fitting her out with a white uniform was more blatantly crude than Mr. Version's. She made her escape and tried out for the secretarial pool of a large agency. The barracuda-eyed office manager said he would call when there was an opening, but she suspected this call would come even slower than her typing of "Dear Sir: If this bill is not paid within five days we shall be forced to .. . " Oddly, she really didn't care. She was puzzled for a moment, wondering why she felt so nonchalant.
Faintly shocked, Julia realized that she wasn't interested in pounding a typewriter for sixty dollars a week, less deductions. She knew instinctively she was going to be a go-go girl.
Carol had a child, friends, maybe a husband too. If her occupation was immoral, at least it wasn't as bad as the job she had held for fifteen minutes yesterday noon . . . What if Barney should wander into one of these places and see her dancing? It was a big city. She decided that she would cross that bridge when she reached it.
Jackrabbit Jack's was a low to the ground, windowless cement building surrounded by an empty parking lot. Julia pushed back the heavy curtain and stood blinking. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light. Two men in overalls and hard hats with lunch buckets beside them sat on bar stools, drinking beer at the counter. Neither was paying any attention to the nearly naked girl who twitched on a raised runway behind the bar. A heavy, bald-headed bartender with a face like Porky Pig's padded toward her.
"I'd like to see Mr. Vito, please."
The bartender undressed her with one casual glance. "How old are you?"
"Carol sent me." She said it unthinkingly, laying a smoke screen while she thought about the bartender's question about age. They couldn't hire anybody under twenty-one.
"That ain't what I asked." The bartender's voice sounded like the gears in a worn-out truck. "What year were you born?"
Julia was eighteen. She couldn't think. If she said twenty-one, he'd be suspicious and want proof anyway. In a brilliant flash of inspiration Julia saw the answer: A girl under twenty-one might lie about her age. So would a girl of thirty, but only in the opposite direction. Besides, ten more years made it easy to keep track of everything. "I was born in 1943," she said.
The bartender's eyes widened momentarily. "Come in the office where there's more light."
"I want to see Mr. Vito."
"I'm Vito."
"Oh." From the corner of her eye, Julia saw the nearly naked girl stop dancing and draw beer for the two hardhats.
In the office Vito inspected her body with minute scrutiny. "Any marks or scars?"
"No."
"Take off your dress."
"What?"
"You got something underneath, ain't you?"
"Y-yes," Julia quickly replied. She put down her purse and began raising her dress. Before she had it high enough to muss her hair, Vito said, "Hold it."
Julia froze, remembering how Barney had immobilized her this way. If he touches me, I'll put my knee in his fat crotch.
"Turn around."
Slowly, she turned.
"Okay. That's enough"
Vaguely disappointed, Julia let her dress down. "You sure don't look twenty-eight."
"I'm sorry."
"Why? I wish to Christ I looked ten years younger. When you want to start?"
Julia had been so sure she would be turned down that she didn't know what to say.
"Going to school, or another job, or a husband, or anything?"
"No"
"You'll work relief then."
"What's that?"
"Most of my girls have a family . . . kids. You?"
"No."
"Somebody always calls in sick or some damn thing. I'll call you next time I need a fill-in."
"How soon will that be?"
The phone rang. Vito picked it up. "Yeah? Oh? When? Well, okay. Congratulations, I guess. Yeah, I'll mail it." He turned back to Julia. "Got married. You wanna start now?"
"I guess so."
"Ever do this before?"
Julia had lied once already. "No, I never have," she admitted.
"Nothing to it. Just keep moving. Go through there and Lonie can find you a costume." Vito heaved himself laboriously to his feet. "Oh yeah ..." he paused in the doorway. "... fill this out before the state gets all bent out of shape." He handed her a questionnaire.
Julia stood bemused in the empty office. Just like that, she thought, and after all the chasing around and getting pawed. Still not really believing it, she went through the door.
The next room was like an elementary school nurse's dominion: cots, lavatories, lockers, and a row of bare-bulb makeup mirrors. She sat on a cot and began filling out the form, remembering to add ten years to her age.
"Hi. I'm Lonie." It was the near nude girl from behind the bar. She flopped on the couch and threw her legs in the air like an obscene drawing.
Julia was so startled she nearly ran from the room, then she realized Lonie was just resting tired feet. "That locker on the end's empty," Lonie continued. "We haven't lost anything lately, but if you've got money in your bag, you'd better leave it with Vito or get a lock. There's costumes over there. Ooooh, my feet are killing me!"
Julia smiled uncertainly at her and went back to filling out the form. "Do that later, kid. Hurry and get out there before the animals start growling."
"Oh. Yes. Sure." Julia began undressing.
"Gee, you got a nice body, kid."
Oh no! But when Julia turned to rhetorically beat off this new assault Lonie had already turned her face to the wall.
The whole wardrobe of costumes would have fitted in a rather small shoebox. Julia held one up and gulped. She put it down and tried another. Apart from some fringe they were nothing but tiny triangles of black nylon with enough string to hold them more or less securely over the blonde fur of her scanty pubic patch. She slipped out of her pantyhose and began putting one on.
Suddenly Julia realized she wasn't half as disgusted as she had pretended to be. It might be vulgar, but she decided it would also be fun to prance around getting men all excited and then retreat to the safety of this room where she could laugh at their frustration. "Screw them all!" she murmured.
"That could turn into more work than you think," Lonie drawled.
Julia decided the pasties were secure on her thimble-sized nipples. She checked herself in the full-length mirror and tucked in a stray wisp of pubic hair. No worse than what they wear on the beach, she told herself. But, since Centerville was almost as far from the nearest lake as it was from the ocean, she had never worn a bikini in public. She took a deep breath and stepped through the curtains.
"Wow, look at that!" one hardhat said. The other glanced up, grinned wolfishly, then went back to his beer.
Julia felt slightly letdown, despite actually having come up in the world. Somehow, in the transition from bar to office to dressing room, she had risen until now her feet were on a level with the two hardhats' beer glasses. The way they had to turn their faces up to see her gave them a gawky look of barnyard stupidity. "Wonder what makes a girl take a job like that?" the dumber one muttered.
"Same thing makes you'n me climb steel," the other answered. "We better go."
"Yeah." They picked up their lunch buckets and left.
Vito turned down the raucous rock music in the now empty bar. "They ain't animals," he said in his gear-grinding voice. "You gotta smile, enjoy having such handsome men notice you. Above all, you gotta keep movin'."
"Why?"
"It sells beer. You want my personal opinion, bars should be for drinking. But I gotta live; you gotta live."
"But why move?" Julia asked.
"I'm a psychiatrist or something? Keep moving, keep smiling; everybody's happy. Stand around and mope and a slob starts thinking, 'What the hell? I wanna look at an unhappy bitch, I can go home and fight with my wife.' "
"What else do I have to do?"
"You know how to draw beer and make change?"
"I can make change, I guess."
"Come on down here."
Julia descended from the spotlighted runway and learned how to draw a glass with just the right amount of foam. When the fat bartender was satisfied, he began pouring her samples down the sink, then he hesitated. "Want one?"
Julia was about to say she'd never tasted beer when she realized this would sound odd from a twenty-eight-year-old woman. Vito noticed her moment of doubt, but he drew a different conclusion. "You got a problem?" He smiled. "Maybe we can help each other."
Julia found to conceal the revulsion this waddling porky pig inspired. If he touches me, I'll scream, she thought.
"Been on the Program eleven years now," Vito said proudly.
Finally Julia realized what he was talking about. She had read somewhere about Alcoholics Anonymous and the way they helped talk each other out of drinking. Once more Julia knew she had misinterpreted a friendly gesture from a fellow human being.
Daylight flashed as several men pushed through the curtained doorway. Vito turned up the raucous rock music. "Get moving and smiling!" he hissed, quickly returning back to his businessman's composure.
Climbing back onto the runway, Julia suddenly wondered if her anus was visible. It was hard to decide whether a front or a rear view offered the greatest danger in these costumes. Nervously, she fingered her breasts, making sure the pasties were still there, then she turned around. She swayed a moment, then finally found the beat.
"Smile!" Vita hissed. "You look like you're constipated."
Normally she would have been offended, but for some reason this made Julia laugh. Wearing an expression of vacuous joy, as if she had just taken a mouthful of something bitter and found it sweet, she batted her eyes, twitched her belly and began shuffling to the rock beat.
The lights on her nearly naked body made it easy to pretend there was nobody sitting in the shadows on the other side of the bar. Swaying monotonously, Julia wondered if she was seductive-looking. To her, her movements seemed more like the monotonous back and forth pace of an animal in a cage.
The late afternoon sun slanted past the curtain in brief flashes as the bar began filling. As the level of talk rose, Vito turned up the sound, and the shouting became louder to overcome the music. Julia wondered briefly if the noisy din helped sell beer too. Suddenly she realized another nearly nude girl was gyrating beside her. It was Carol, the one who had gotten her the job. "Smile," Carol hissed, dancing down the bar her breasts swaying sensuously.
Julia snapped out of her trance. The bar curved in a giant horseshoe around three sides of the room with the customers on the inside and a runway against the wall. Vito opened up another section. Now Lonie was dancing too. Julia go-goed her way down one wing.
Across the room Carol was smiling vapidly at the men at her feet, moving her lush body seductively. Men stared at her rapturously, interrupting their staring only to yell and wave for more beer which gave opportunities for the nearsighted to ogle her massive breasts as she descended to serve them.
Julia swayed absently, daydreaming about Carol's lush body, thinking of the delicious way her hips swayed, how flawlessly smooth her olive skin was. It would be nice to touch it, she pondered momentarily.
Abruptly she realized what her thoughts inferred. She knew that if she was going to go that route she should have stayed with Dr. Carter!
Vito was hissing again. Julia glanced down. Several heads at her section were twisted to watch Carol. She felt a slight twinge of jealousy. Carol was lovely, but if she had a four-year-old boy she must be at least twenty-eight, her own fictitious age.
I'm blonde and I'm only eighteen! Can't I compete with an old woman? Julia gritted her teeth, tried to put on a real smile, then began undulating her hips. Slowly faces began turning back to watch her slight, firm-titted young body gyrate in ways calculated to show the swell of her hips and the smallness of her tiny waist.
Julia looked down into the shadows and focused on their staring faces. She seemed to have a crowd of college types-all noise and demonstrative masculinity. She wondered if any of them would be as good in bed as he thought he was. Close-cropped heads bobbed with the beat, never taking their eyes off her wildly gyrating body. For Julia, the dancing was turning into work.
Yet there was a strange exhilaration to it. She saw the raw eagerness, sensed the frantic desire of hot young blood reeking with maleness, inflamed by her near-naked body, the frustration of knowing that they could never get a hand on her, much less kiss her, spread her legs, or ram his purple-throbbing masculinity into her. What would it be like to let them? Julia asked herself. They were so eager. They reminded Julia of those sad-eyed pictures of hungry war orphans.
From scraps of talk she finally understood that the close-cropped young men were not college boys. They were sailors who had been at sea for weeks without seeing a girl, much less touching one. She thought of their hard young bodies, all that pent-up desire. She found herself comparing them with the only other man she'd experienced.
Barney had said that he was a regular patron of prostitutes. Would these young men with their urgent rabbit like sensuality be fun? Or would they stink of sweat and garlicky salami? They would not be gentle and sweet like Dr. Mary Carter. Instead of a tender tongue they would invade her with surging self-centered spears, stiff, hard, throbbing . . . Julia was breathing faster.
It was silly. She remembered giggle-punctuated stories whispered at school-stories that ended abruptly whenever Miss Julia, rich man's daughter and the visible emblem of Fundamentalist morality, had appeared. Suddenly she understood why this place was called Jackrabbit Jack's.
One young man sat apart from the others at the end of the bar. His hair was long, so Julia knew he was not a sailor. He had been there for some time, now that she thought about it. Not once had she caught him looking at her. His glass was empty. A dollar bill and loose change lay beside it.
She glanced around. Vito was busy. She danced down the stile and go-goed to the end of the bar. "Another?"
The young man glanced up with a look of unbelieving surprise, and Julia saw the puzzled look in his agate-colored eyes. Disturbing, yet attractive. She caught herself wondering what his thing looked like. Was it swollen rigid with desire like those loud young sailors? Somehow she suspected this young man had his thing under firm control. He nodded. She undulated to the tap and drew beer. The young man sat silent and unmoving, staring hazy-eyed as she danced back to him and put the beer in front of him. She took money from his pile of loose change and dropped it in the cash drawer, knowing the young man was staring at her with his unblinking eyes. It was impossible to know if he desired her, was repelled by her, or if he was even thinking about her.
"Take five," Vito's husky voice said. Julia glanced up. Behind her a girl she had never seen before was gyrating on the runway.
She didn't realize how tired she was until she sat on a cot in the dressing room. No wonder Lonie had thrown her legs in the air. Julia did too, reveling in the feel of getting the weight off her feet as blood left her throbbing feet.
"I see you got the job." Carol was coming through the curtain from the bar.
"Yes. Thanks for telling me about it."
Carol flopped on a cot. "It's hell on the feet, but it pays good money."
Despite her tiredness Julia caught herself studying Carol's smooth olive-skinned legs. She wondered if the brunette's pubic patch would be sleek and curly like her dark brown hair. How would it feel to caress those legs, kiss-Julia jumped from the cot. "I'd better get back out there," she said. "My five minutes are up."
The lights glared as she stepped back out onto the runway, but for a moment she could see into the shadows. She saw the raw redness of freshly shaven sailors, saw their pimples and their alcoholic smiles. She served beer rapidly, working her way down the line until she reached the lone drinker at the end of the bar. This time when he looked up, she knew he had been watching her even though his face did not change expression.
Not handsome, she thought. He was cute, with a sensitive boy's face and skin smoother than a girl's. Julia knew instinctively that a kiss from this young man would never have the sandpaper feel she remembered from her father--and from Barney. If only his eyes weren't that disturbing color. Like agate pebbles. She drew him another beer and danced away. She didn't really want to think about him.
But she didn't want to think about Carol either, so her thoughts turned almost abstractly back to the stranger at the end of the bar. What would this smooth-faced boy with the agate eyes look like with his clothes off? She danced down in front of him, to see if she could provoke a smile, a look of interest or desire from his stoic face. Was there something wrong with him? Some secret sorrow? Julia was reminded of the romantic nonsense she had read about young poets dying of some incurable disease.
There was a sudden lull and the bar was half empty.
"Everybody's eating or going to the movies," Vito explained. "The place'll be jumpin' again in an hour. Tired?"
"A little."
"You don't have to strip your gears," Vito explained. "Think about the last really nice screw you had. Dream about it and grind away. The other girls say it's easier that way."
Julia felt insulted when she realized that the porcine bartender was just giving practical advice to a woman who at twenty-eight was old enough to know her way. "I'll remember that," she promised.
Only don't ever date any of these guys," Vito continued. "You try to break it off, they hang around the bar night after night until there's trouble. Besides, they've already seen you naked. What do you do for an encore? And especially, watch out for types like that kid at the end of the bar."
"I think he's cute."
"Probably his mother does too," Vito said. "But I bet she don't like him hanging around here every night."
"What's the difference between him and the others?"
"Look at this dump," Vito growled. "The way you're dressed. It's okay for kids fresh off a ship to drop in for a night's gawking. Normal for some guy whose wife is starting to spread out like my body. He likes to look at a nice young body once in a while. But it ain't natural for a kid to nurse his beer here every night, when he could be out finding a girl of his own."
"He's just shy and lonely," Julia protested.
A dozen bearded and slightly drunk men came through the curtained doorway. Vito began drawing beer as she climbed up onto the runway and began dancing. She tried to remember Vito's advice to think about her last. . . but she didn't want to think about brutal, stinking Barney. She didn't want to think about Dr. Carter either. But that quiet young man at the end of the bar had the smoothest skin. I'll bet his hands would be as smooth as Mary's.
Julia ground her hips, dancing out a fantasy where the young man with the disturbing eyes was even more inexperienced than she, and she was spending lazy golden afternoons teaching him the arts of love. Occasionally she wakened to serve beer and noted that now none of her customers swiveled their heads to watch the other girls. What would happen if they could read my mind? At the end of the bar the beardless young man still sat motionless.
Julia slipped into another dream fantasy, and the shouts and drooling stares assured her that her dancing had improved. This time in her dream the young man was a war veteran, victim of some horrible wound that had left him incapable of pleasure. In her dream she caressed him tenderly, rubbed her body against his, kissed him and did her best to reawaken in him the memory of dead passions. At the end of her dream they had both cried.
"Take five," Vito told her.
On a cot in the dressing room Julia tried to forget her idle fantasies about the young man. She knew that nothing would ever happen. She tried to put him out of her thoughts, but every time the young man left, Carol's lush olive-skinned body drifted into her thoughts. Whenever she evicted Carol, her mind filled with the memory of Dr. Carter's suntanned muscularity. She sighed and thought about the agate-eyed young man again.
Maybe he wasn't wounded. Maybe he was a whole man. So quiet and self-possessed. He wouldn't be quick and brutal like Barney. This young man would caress her. He would kiss her from head to foot. He would run his gentle hands over her perky young tits, he would rub her vulva until she moaned with passion. Only then would he enter her, gently, tenderly, working his just-the-right-sized thing slowly in and out, then faster as Julia's juices began to flow. Together they would rise to a crescendo, kissing and moaning their passion. And when it was over, he would kiss her eyelids and maybe laugh for the first time. Then after a while they would do it again.
"You all right?" It was Vito.
"Oh! Yes. I'll be right out."
Somehow the night passed, and finally Vito and the doorman, who doubled as the bouncer, were clearing out the last of the customers.
"Oh god, my feet!" a girl said.
Julia was so tired she said nothing. Dazedly, she got into her pantyhose and bra, slipped into her dress, then fixed her hair.
"You be in tomorrow?" Vito asked.
"I suppose so, if you want me."
"You'll do."
"All right," she said. "Good night."
It wasn't night, Julia realized as she stood outside in the chilly wind. It was almost three in the morning. A taxi came by and she shared it with another girl who was going the same way.
Her room was cold as ever when she got home. Julia saw an envelope slipped under the door, but she wanted to get the heater going first. Then she slipped out of her clothes, got into a robe and went down the hall for a bath. Only as she was going to bed did she remember the envelope.
She tore it open. The note was from Dr. Carter:
----
"I'm sorry I let myself be carried away last night. I hope we can still be friends. Even if we can't, I have a professional obligation. The enclosed prescription is for The Pill in case you decide you like men better than my way. Whatever you decide, if you're ever In Trouble, remember me. I'm making some house calls in this neighborhood. If I'm not too late I'll drop back and see if I can catch you home.
Love, Mary
----
Julia felt tears in her eyes. She fell asleep thinking that no matter what else she was, Dr. Carter was a very nice person. Somehow she found that comforting.
Someone was pounding on the door. Julia sprang from the bed and got into a robe. She knew who it was and she wondered how she was going to explain to Mary that she really did like her, that she appreciated all the doctor had done, but that from now on they had to be "just friends." It was going to be difficult. She hoped that Mary would take it nicely and not cry, because if Mary cried she would have to comfort her and heavens only knew what that could lead to. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
It wasn't Dr. Carter. It was a long-haired young man with a ragged beard. "You must have the wrong door," she said.
"This is the right place." He shouldered his way past Julia and barged into the room. Two other men followed him in. Julia recognized them. They'd been drinking at her section of the bar right after the sailors had gone. They had been a little drunk then. Now they were more so.
"It's four o'clock in the morning," she said.
"Please leave quietly before the neighbors send the police."
"We ain't gonna make any noise," a burly man said. He grinned loosely and fished a coin from his pocket. "Odd man first?" he asked. The others nodded.
Julia stared in disbelief. She didn't want a scandal with the other roomers. But she didn't want these drunken louts to gang-rape her either.
She could see it all now: neighbors snickering about girls who didn't know any better than to let men in their rooms, police making self-righteous remarks about go-go girls who advertised and then refused to deliver the goods. And worst of all, she felt that same glowing excitement that had carried her through the long evening at Jackrabbit Jack's. She wondered if she had been subconsciously wishing for something like this. It was a tough decision, but Julia made it. She filled her lungs full of air.
The slap across the face made Julia fly backward across the bed, breath gushing from her vocal chords instead of the scream that she intended. For a moment she thought she had been shot, then she realized that the tremendous explosive noises had been simultaneous punches to her jaw and midriff. Paralyzed, she struggled for breath and felt herself moved and maneuvered like a mannequin as three shaggy satyrs stripped the robe from her naked young body. They spread-eagled her arms across the bed, then opened her legs.
"I told you she was a real blonde," one snickered as he unzipped his Levi's. He leaped onto the bed. Her bruised solar plexus finally recovered, and she drew in a gasping breath. She tried to raise her arms, to protect herself, but she discovered that a man was sitting on each side of the bed, holding an arm down. "Now you ain't gonna scream, are you?" Before she could answer, a hand clapped over her mouth and nose.
This time I'll kill myself afterward, Julia thought. It had been bad enough with Barney, but these monsters were totally insensitive to human suffering. First they would take turns raping her and then, if she wasn't already dead, they would kill her. Julia felt hands spreading the scant-haired lips of her vulva, felt the monster's blunt bulldozer prod around, blindly seeking the opening. Her body writhed as she struggled for another breath of air.
The hand over her mouth and nose was gone. Breathing in rasping gasps, she fought her way back to full consciousness. She could see the shaggy bearded face loom above her, frowning with an idiotic concentration as he fought through a drunken haze to get his thing into her.
It was inevitable. Julia was going to be raped again. If she fought, she'd just be raped unconscious instead of knowing what was going on. She struggled to breathe quietly, to hold her jerking pelvis still. Let him go it and get it over with. If she was quiet and let them all have a good time, maybe they wouldn't kill her. And if they did, at least she could know once before she died what it felt like to have a young man's thing inside her.
Finally he had it in. Julia had expected it to hurt. She had heard all the violent rape stories. And she remembered Barney. But this was different. Either this monster had taken the time and trouble to lubricate his weapon, or else her traitorous body had prepared its own lubrication. She felt him enter, felt his frantic lunging, felt his hot spurting wetness.
Roused to uncontrollable lust by Julia's dancing, this young satyr's body had betrayed him just as Julia's was betraying her. One quick lunge and he was empty, blurting, hurting, squirting in a desperate effort to achieve one more push, one extra millisecond's pleasure before his lance folded, pointing its accusing tip back at the man whose overactive mind had betrayed it.
One of the others pulled him off. Gasping and muttering disappointed curses, he fell across one of Julia's arms and began rubbing his calloused hands over her tender nipples.
The second rapist had less trouble than the first. They all failed to notice that she had caught her breath. She could scream any time she wanted. But it would bring curious neighbors to stare at her abused body and admire the shambles of this rented room. And her attackers would be long gone.
Julia gritted her teeth, tried to remind herself that she was suffering. These men were raping her. Probably they would kill her. The second assault artist was not an overeager jackrabbit like the first. She felt her body cautiously relaxing as her vagina gauged the size of his tool and knew it wouldn't hurt. It wasn't big like Barney's. Besides, he wasn't ram-slamming and lunging like the berserk billy goat who now held her arm.
The second rapist was taking his time, enjoying himself as he drove it leisurely in, held a moment, ground his pelvis against her, forcing the tip of his tool in gentle circles around her lubricated vagina. Julia tried to remember she was being raped, that she was suffering.
Her treacherous body refused to separate friend from foe. She felt her buttocks rise to meet his thrust, goad him on. She closed her eyes, tried to remember where she was and what was happening. Willing or not, part of her was enjoying the gentle thrust and grind, thrust and grind. Why not enjoy it? You didn't volunteer. It's not your fault you're being raped, is it?
Julia gulped. All her life, Fundamentalist preachers had brainwashed her into thinking how persuasive the devil's arguments were. Resist, she thought. Suffer. Don't enjoy; you'll burn in hell!
The monster who was violating her inner sanctuary began breathing harder. His pelvis began jerking as his rampant rod lost control, began lunging, poking, slamming, going for the fall. Julia's breaths came faster. She closed her eyes, tried to pray, tried to renounce the devil and his works.
There was a sudden crunch like a ripe cantaloupe splitting open. The man on top of her changed expression abruptly, a look of total astonishment; then his head lolled on her breast. There was an opening in his hair like a sudden bald spot; then, as she watched, it started bleeding.
Suddenly nobody was holding her arms. The one who had already raped her cowered in a corner, clutching his head. There was a cracking noise as a blur hit the third man.
Julia thought they had begun fighting among themselves, then she realized there was a fourth man in the room. She was still having trouble focusing her eyes after the blow on the jaw. Finally she recognized the agate-eyed young man from the end of the bar-the one she had tried vainly to coax a smile from. He carried a baseball bat. She wondered why the three powerfully built young men didn't rush him. Then she saw the knife in his other hand.
The three men faced the young man in silent tableau: a smooth-faced, slightly built young David with knife and club facing three Goliaths. One rapist was unconscious. The other two were dazed. The slender youth gestured toward the one he had knocked out. Finally the others understood that they were not going to die instantly. They got their partner's arms over their shoulders and, propping the unconscious man between them, the three rapists staggered out into the hallway. "Jesus!" Julia heard one of them mutter, as they started to descend the stairs.
How had he found her? Julia asked herself. Had he read her mind? Then she realized how easy it would have been for him to sit in a car up the street from Jackrabbit Jack's and wait until he could follow her cab home. But if he'd done that, how had the other three arrived first? She didn't bother to answer her last self-asked question.
Julia was still naked. But it seemed silly for her to worry about such things at a time like this, especially when she had bounced about all night with nothing more than a G-string and a pair of pasties. All night she had dreamed of Doing It with this young man. Now he was here in her room.
Julia climbed painfully to her feet. Tomorrow her face would be so swollen she knew that she wouldn't be able to work. She would have to phone Vito. Her midriff was still tender from the blow that had knocked the breath out of her. She forced a rueful smile as she walked toward the silent young man who still stood with knife and club.
"I don't know your name," she said. "But I'm certainly glad you got here." She hesitated a moment. This young man was so silent, so strangely timid. She wanted to go clean up, but she was afraid that if she left the room, he might disappear as silently as he had come.
Julia noticed that he had such lovely smooth skin, and she hadn't kissed a man since her father used to give out good night kisses. Did she still know how? She drew a shaky breath and stepped toward him, opening her arms. "I'm so glad you're here," she said with all the fervor of a melodramatic heroine.
All the way down to the floor Julia remembered her sudden feeling of surprised outrage. Just before she lapsed into unconsciousness, she wondered, Now why did he hit me?
CHAPTER FIVE
Julia woke up clear-headed, remembering everything. Agate-eyes had lifted her back onto the bed. He was in bed beside her. Good heavens, she thought, my conquering hero's no better than the others! Why couldn't he be kind and gentle? Why couldn't he turn the act of love into something sweet and pleasurable, something to be remembered with a tenderness that would make a girl want to do it again? Why couldn't it be nice instead of brutal and nasty?
Her jaw ached. Her middle was sore. Agate-eyes was snuggled up to her. She felt her damp crotch, and she guessed that he had already done it. Then she remembered that the goo at her loins was probably from the first three rapists. And she hadn't even filled Dr. Carter's prescription for The Pill yet.
She wanted to get out of here. Like it or not, she knew that she would have to go back to that examining table and let Dr. Carter flush her out again.
She felt him nuzzle her firm young tits. Even now she could feel her nipples swell. Won't I ever stop feeling like doing it?
What on earth is he doing? He wasn't kissing her. He wasn't caressing her. He wasn't climbing between her legs, trying to get it in. Her firm young nipples were swollen pink and hard as the cherries on ice cream sundaes. She felt them throb under his insistent sucking.
Julia felt increasing impatience. If this was all he wanted, she wondered, why he had hit her. She would have let him do this all night. But it seemed increasingly odd to her that he should only want to do this. I thought he'd be so nice and here all he wants to do is. . .
It took some moments to realize that agate-eyes was not happy sucking her firm young breasts. Uttering strange mewing sounds of complaint, he rooted and nuzzled, sucking harder. His eyes were screwed tightly shut.
Julia wanted to ask what was wrong, but the last time she had said anything he had hit her. He was becoming angrier by the second. Grunting, growling, he sucked furiously, tugging first at one nipple, then switching to the other with an audible popping noise like a cork being screwed out of a champagne bottle. She wondered what he was doing.
Still growling and chewing, he began beating his fists around her chest and face. Then he bit her nipple hard. "Ow!" she yipped. "Stop that!"
He looked up momentarily, staring with those disturbing agate eyes, then he squinted his eyelids shut and began rooting at her breasts again, still moaning those strange mewling sounds.
He was punching, pawing at her. Nothing loving or lovable about this. Just animal-like sucking; no loving, no kissing, no caressing, no fucking. Julia was shocked at even thinking the word but she knew that was what she really wanted. He was punching and kneading at her breasts.
Face contorted with anger, he glanced up again. "Goddamn you!" He grated. It was the first time she had heard him speak. "Where is it?"
"Where's what?"
"Hungry!" he said in a high-pitched strained voice. "Where?"
Suddenly she understood. Good god, she thought, this maniac's going to kill me because his mama was too busy to breast feed him! Even when agate-eyes stopped sucking and began pounding her with both fists, she could not stop her hysterical shrieking laughter.
The next time she awoke, Julia knew immediately that she was in a hospital and that she was going to live. Nobody could hurt that much without being thoroughly alive. After a moment Julia cautiously touched her face. It felt sore and puffy.
It was funny, she thought, the one place that didn't hurt was where she ought to be sore after a rape. Julie opened her eyes again. Two people were standing over the bed. Her eyes drifted into focus and she saw that the two people were split images of Vito, the fat porky pig bartender. For the barest second the two fingers melted into one figure, then there were two Vitos again.
"Her first night on the job," he was saying. "I hope they kill the sonofabitch twenty different ways!"
She felt her mind split in two. One side knew he was just a kindly old man who felt responsible for his girls. The other knew this pig faced monster was like all the others. He wouldn't be here beside her, if he didn't intend to hurt her, fuck her, beat her, paw her, hit her, fuck, hit, hurt-There was a hysterical screaming that Julia faintly recognized as her own voice.
A white-coated blur with Mary's voice hovered over her. There was a pinprick hardly noticeable above all her other hurts. "There, there," Mary was saying. "Nobody's going to hurt you." From the background came an odd gulping and snuffling.
The porcine bartender was crying.
The white coat loomed over her again. Julia screamed again. Then the injection took effect.
Later she caught scraps of conversation. "Lovely set of bruises." A white blur slid something cold beneath her. The chilled bedpan started her screaming again.
Another shot.
"Not really hurt, but I wonder about the psychic scars." Another blur.
"You know her personally?"
"Slightly," Dr. Carter's voice said. "She's a patient of mine."
"I'll have to question her sooner or later. Will she ever come out of this?"
White and charcoal gray blurs moved out of sight. She could still hear them mumbling. Then the detective was back. He had a mustache. For some reason this made Julia scream again.
Another shot.
She drifted off to sleep again.
Julia's dream was of a far-off place that she had seen in travel posters. There was a lake and an Alpine meadow. The air was clear. She was alone, save for the finches that warbled in the pines at the edge of the meadow.
In her dream it was a hot mid-afternoon without a breath of wind. She wore a dirndl with countless petticoats like some Disneyland peasant lass. It was warm; the lake was cool. She sat at the edge of the lake, thinking idle thoughts and picking daisies. Eventually it came to her that dirndls and petticoats might be picturesque, but they were also warm for such a sunny day. It would be nice to take them off and get a nice even suntan. But it was such a lot of work. If only someone would . . .
Someone in a strange uniform glided from the sky on a winged bicycle. No, it was a motorcycle! The uniformed young man put down his packages and envelopes and walked toward her. He smiled. And then he kissed her.
He had the funniest way of talking; as if describing her to someone else instead of speaking directly to her. "Lovely enough to tempt any man."
He began unbuttoning her blouse-doing it with an unhurried gentility so unlike all the other men she had known. She thought he was going to take off her bra, but instead he bent and kissed her forehead. He kissed her eyes, her nose, her lips.
He was kissing the hollow of her neck when she felt his hands round her waist, and an instant later the dirndl fluttered to the grass like a collapsing parachute. Still enfolded in his embrace, Julia stepped out of the skirt. Where had she seen this gallant young man before?
Suddenly there was a blurry double vision, rumble of normal hospital sounds, the sound of a washrag being wrung out over a pan of water. She looked to see if his winged cycle needed washing, but now he was loosening another petticoat, still guiding her through a delirious slow motion waltz.
His embrace did not alarm her. Instead it seemed to light the fuses of a row of sky rockets warmed by the sunlight inside her. She felt herself soar, then quite abruptly her Fundamentalist background caught up with her. She became passive. Ardor was a man's prerogative. Woman was but a vessel to receive man's passions.
"She's afraid of me, just as she's afraid of all men," he said. Gently they continued their slow waltz across the meadow. Suddenly she wondered. Are we married? Is this what marriage means? Somehow it seemed perfectly proper for this handsome young man to kiss her, to run his hands gently down her bare back, to cup her buttocks. He had kissed her so many times. Surely now she was going to have a baby.
He was unfastening the hooks of another petticoat. "Whole life ahead of her, if she can just learn to take it as it comes, enjoying the good and trying to forget the bad."
Is this good or bad? Surely there can be nothing bad about this gentle young man undressing me, kissing me, waltzing lightly across the meadow with me in his arms.
They stopped for a moment, and Julia began unbuttoning his uniform shirt. Beneath it, his chest was broad and smooth with just a hint of man smell. He was unhooking the last of her petticoats. She unfastened his belt clasp, and her waltzing partner kicked his trousers off effortlessly, with none of the ungainly hopping required of gallants who live in the workaday world outside of dreams.
His belly was flat and corded with hard muscles. His generous jock dangled from crisp black hair, hanging slightly to one side. It reminded Julia of his lopsided, quizzical smile. His dangling attitude of casual relaxation reassured her. Like most peasant girls, she wore no panties under the petticoats. They waltzed nude across the meadow, clasped tightly to one another, gliding to the strains of some inaudible tune.
This was no sudden lust like the frantic fornicating habits of rabbits. She felt within her the slowly warming glow of desire. She could feel her juices flow, feel her nameless partner's cool gentle hand pass between her legs, soothing her, inciting her to new height. Then that low melodious, almost feminine voice said again: "Having her period. At least she won't have to hang around for an abortion."
Then he stopped rubbing her awakening crotch. His hand was gone for a moment, then it returned, seemingly clad in a mitten this time. After a moment she realized his hand was no longer there, but he had left the fluffy quilted mitten between her legs. She clasped her thighs over its delicious bulk and waited for the next act of her dream.
Whole days passed with that comforting bulk between her legs. Julia and her hero in messenger's uniform waltzed deliriously across the meadow, skimming lightly over billows of pleasure. They picnicked amid the daisies; they dozed in gentle sunlight. And finally the comforting cushion was gone, and a hand was touching her there again.
Gentle soothing hands passed a warm damp cloth over her face, over her neck, down the hollow of her shoulder to her perky, defiantly pointing young tits. She felt his gentle hand scrub her midriff, screw a twist of damp cloth into her navel. Gentle butterfly hands across her belly like Mary's. Only this was a man; they were married. That made everything all right.
Now hands were bathing her feet. Her breath came faster as deft knowing hands caressed her ankles, her calves, slowly and with infinite patience worked around her knees and began the slow stretch climb up her tingling thighs. It seemed to go on forever.
He was talking again, "--bruises practically gone, but this semi-coma thing worries me."
Semi-coma? It sounded like a punctuation mark to her. Julia sighed. She could type fifty words per minute, but she still wasn't sure when to use a comma or a semicolon. Semi-coma? That isn't punctuation. That means I'm half unconscious!
Screw it! She relaxed, floating blissfully in the knowledge that now she could say four-letter words without wincing, without subconsciously waiting for an angry god's thunderbolt to scorch her for breaking the rules of Fundamentalist stoicism. Screw it all! She didn't care any more about anything except floating across a sunny Alpine meadow with her uniformed young gallant. She felt one arm clasped tight around her waist. The other still caressed her inner thigh as they danced, floated, soared above the daisy-flecked grass.
Suddenly she wondered. Who was he? How had they met? His face was familiar to her. Not really handsome. It was a boyish face, slightly lopsided just as his Thing also hung just a trifle to one side. But it was a curiously old and wise face in spite of his boyishness. What was his name? Julia knew she knew it. There was a device on his winged chariot. It was also emblazoned across the front of his cap, the only part of his elegant uniform that had not been tossed beside her petticoats.
Richards Messenger Service. So his name was Richard. Not Dick, she decided. Richard was not the kind of young man who'd be called Dick.
He kissed her, and they floated dreamily across the meadow. Julia felt once more the golden glow that began in her firm little breasts and slowly grew to suffuse her abdomen, to warm that cavern of wonders between her legs, to work its way up her spinal column until her entire body was enveloped cocoon like in a web of gentle, undemanding pleasure.
They lay down amid the daisies, and she knew that finally, unhurried after going through the gentle ritual of undressing and caressing and dancing about the meadow, they were going to do it.
She felt his gentle butterfly hands spread her legs, felt gentle caresses as something smooth, slick and hard entered her. She sighed, tried to relax, wondering vaguely why his Thing was cold. Shouldn't it be warm, throbbing with the hot blood of young desire? Why so cold? Why wasn't he moving it gently in and out instead of slowly pushing its cold rigid length in farther and farther. And farther!
Good heavens, he'd already gone all the way! How big was his Thing? She'd never seen it raised and ready. Did he have an extra foot coiled somewhere inside him? It didn't hurt. He was putting it in slowly, gently. But it was going in so deep. It was so hard and cold! There was an obstruction, then she felt his exploring Thing press past the gates of her cervix, all the way through her vagina, and enter her womb. Finally he stopped putting it in and he was talking again.
"No damage whatsoever. No disease. We need these beds for people who're really sick."
Now what did that mean? Still floating on a wool cloud of endless, peak-less pleasure, Julia abruptly found out. Richard had pulled it out now. He hadn't gone into any flurry of panting and puffing like other men she had known. After he had had it in where most men never go he had just quietly and gently pulled out. And his Thing was still as stiff, as cold and unyielding as when he had put it in. She sighed, but there was no time for regrets. Richard was standing, pulling her to her feet. They were waltzing again. Only this time he was leading her across the meadow to the lake. They were waltzing right into the water.
It was cold. Much colder than she had expected. And Richard was not just splashing through the shallows. The water was freezing, and they were going deeper, up to her waist, up to her neck. Was Richard going to drown her? Was he as treacherous as all the other men she had known?
"No, Richard!" she shrieked. "No, don't! Stop it!"
Suddenly Richard disappeared. Julia's head stuck through a tight collar in the middle of a heavy canvas sheet. The sheet was stretched drum tight over a tub. Water swirled through the tub in alternating waves of hot and cold. At one end of the room a white-clad attendant fiddled with valves. He saw awareness in Julia's eyes.
"Welcome home," the attendant said. "We were beginning to wonder if you'd ever come back."
"Where am I?"
"University Hospital. You've been here a week now."
"Oh?" She couldn't think of anything to say or do.
The attendant turned valves and the tub emptied. He unfastened the tight collar so Julia could get out of the tub. She started to crawl from under the canvas he was loosening, then she realized that she was naked. The attendant handed her a large towel.
Moments later she was in an office seated across the desk from Dr. Mary Carter.
CHAPTER SIX
"Do you remember me, dear?" the doctor asked. "Yes."
The doctor polished her glasses and sighed. "I feel partially responsible," she began. "Perhaps I forced you along the road too fast for your mind to catch up.
"You must understand that I still believe everything I told you. And if ever you feel like it, I'll gladly do again what we once enjoyed together. You really are a lovely child." The doctor cleared her throat and composed herself. "But it was too much too soon.
"Now understand. You're not insane. I don't want to harp on that, but you must remember it at all times. Remember to say to yourself, 'I'm not insane.' The world may be mad. Ninety percent of the time it is. It's only by accepting the world's madness that we can preserve our own sanity."
"What's wrong with me?"
"You were assaulted by a barrage of new experiences beyond your imagining. Your mind blew a fuse."
"Then I am crazy."
"You're not!" Dr. Carter shouted. "You had a slight breakdown just like any other machine that's abused and overloaded. City life does that if you're not prepared for it since childhood."
"What am I going to do?"
"Get out of the city for a while."
"I have to earn a living."
Dr. Carter wiped her glasses again. "Once a doctor has paid off debts incurred in school days, the profits are positively obscene. Let me ease my conscience as best I can."
Julia sat passive, half understanding.
"Once you've had a few weeks peace and quiet somewhere, perhaps you can gather up the scattered pieces. When you're whole again, you can tackle the city another time. Next time you'll be sadder and wiser. But meanwhile, you must always remember two things: Number one, you're not crazy. Number two, I'm your friend."
"Where am I going?"
"You're going to the Esfarsa Institute."
"An asylum?"
"No! It's a beautiful country estate by the ocean. There are trees and hills, meadows, all kinds of interesting people. More importantly, there are no gates. You're free to come and go as you choose."
"What kind of people?"
"People like you--people who've had a little trouble adjusting so they've got to see Doctor Rubies."
"Who's he?"
"He's a group therapist, dear. He doesn't work with insane people. He won't cure you of anything. He'll just help you to-to learn to live with yourself."
"Did you say trees and meadows?"
"That's right, dear. Pine trees. It's in an isolated area on the California coast. You'll love it there."
Julia remembered her idyllic dream of an Alpine meadow. She wondered if she'd find her dream lover there. Suddenly a hazy memory of the mustached detective surged into her mind. "The police ..." she began.
"They're all four in jail," Dr. Carter said. "The police put them in separate cells and crosschecked their stories until they got it all. You won't have to testify." . Checking out of the hospital was swifter than she had realized possible. Within minutes she was standing at a side entrance to the building. It was the place where ambulances, delivery trucks, and an occasional hearse came for their respective businesses.
She was jolted from her reverie by a familiar sign. It was a Richards Messenger Service truck. Suddenly Julia recognized the young man from her dream. He was brushing past her with an armload of small packages and envelopes when he stopped suddenly. "You again?" he said with that same lopsided smile. He noticed the suitcases beside her. "Been ill?"
"Yes. I. . . I'm sorry I screamed at you. My mind was on something else."
"That's all right," the young man said. "My sisters all remind me periodically that sometimes I need screaming at."
They stood smiling at one another, not knowing quite what to say next. Then a black limousine pulled up. The driver got out, opened a door, and busied himself with Julia's luggage. The boy's eyebrows went up when he saw the limousine. "Been nice seeing you," he said. "I hope we meet again some day."
"Oh so do I!" Julia said fervently. Looking faintly puzzled, the messenger boy went into the hospital with his armload of envelopes. She allowed the chauffeur to help her into the back seat of the limousine. She wondered what had gotten into her, gushing that way at a total stranger. Now she had scared him away for good.
And he seemed like such a nice boy. If he were even half as nice as he had been in her dream . . . She wondered confusedly how much of her memory was truth and how much was dream. Somehow there seemed to be other memories just beneath the surface of her mind--things she didn't want to remember just now.
The limousine drove smoothly to an airport, and a half hour later she was in a tiny single-engined airplane that bounced and bucked in the turbulent air over the California coastal range. Then the plane was landing.
The pilot put her luggage on an electric cart, and they bounced across a golf course toward an immense gabled house with steep shingled roofs. It reminded her of the cover of some genteel novel by one of the Bronte sisters.
The man who stood on the broad front steps looked familiar. It was several seconds before she realized he looked as if he had posed for those bumper stickers proclaiming, Dirty old men need love too. When he stepped forward and placed his hands on her shoulders, Julia thought, here we go again.
"My name is Friedrich Rubies," he said. "Everybody calls me Fritz."
"Do you have a brother named Hans?"
The doctor stared nonplussed for a moment, then realized she did not associate the connection between a named and its German contraction. Finally he laughed.
He had an ugly face-at least that part revealed by the almost white beard was as ugly as the bust of Socrates Julia had once bought at the annual Centerville white elephant sale.
The pilot stopped grunting as he placed her luggage on the portico steps. Fritz Rubies picked up one bag and said, "Follow me." She stood uncertain for an instant, then picked up the other and hurried into the immense gothic house. He was halfway up a curving staircase. She followed him up two flights then down a narrow hall into a room with a gabled window. The wall sloped at the same angle as the roof.
There was a bed and a small dresser. One wall framed a pair of closet doors. She dumped her bag beside the one Fritz had put on the bed. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders again, staring her straight in the eye as he said, "I can't do anything to cure you. I can talk when you feel like listening and listen when you need to talk. Sometimes, if people talk long enough, they help themselves better than anyone else can. There's a bath across the hall. Dinner downstairs in half an hour. Wear anything. We're not formal. And remember how when you come downstairs, or you may have trouble finding this room again. It's a big old house."
Julia wondered why it was necessary for him to put his hands on her shoulders just to tell her this. He looked at her a moment longer, then walked out, leaving the door open. She closed it and began unpacking. She had no watch and there was no clock in the room. When she thought it was dinner time, she went downstairs, trying to remember the route, then she joined the others in a big room. She guessed it was what the fancy magazines called a drawing room though her own parents had never referred to it as anything but a front parlor.
For a mad moment she was reminded of her dirndl-in-the-meadow dream. The drawing room presented a silent tableau of a century old Viennese ballroom with people dressed in everything from obsolete military uniforms to bikinis.
They stood in pairs, hands on each other's shoulders, looking for all the world as if Arthur Murray had had a heart attack and left them all stranded in mid waltz.
It is an asylum! I'll never get out of here!
Fritz Rubies appeared, his white beard vaguely reminiscent of an explosion in a yak hair foundry. He put his arms on her shoulders again. "You're confused," he said. "It's part of our therapy."
"What?"
"Physical contact. Did you know that babies refuse milk and die unless they're held and cuddled by someone in their first hours of life?"
"No," she said vaguely. "I didn't know that."
"Perhaps it's Nature's mercy," Fritz continued. "A quick easy death for the orphaned and the unwanted. Here . . .," He waved at the roomfull of people. Some, she saw, had progressed from the rigid formality of hands on shoulders. One man had his hands cupped over the generous buttocks of the girl with whom he talked.
"Here," Fritz continued, "Are the walking wounded. Asylums and prisons are full of people who might still be leading productive lives if sometime, just once at some crucial moment, someone had been able to touch them, to listen, to say, 'I care.'-and if those poor souls had not been so scarred as to fear all human contact.
"We have one simple rule here. If you want to talk, you have to touch. We don't talk at each other. We talk to each other. And no matter how painful or silly your thoughts might seem to you, if you touch, we listen."
"It sounds crazy," Julia said.
Fritz looked at her blankly. Finally she remembered her instructions. Timidly, she put her hands on his shoulders. "It sounds crazy," she repeated.
Fritz grinned and winked at her. "Of course it is. We're all nutty as fruitcakes, but we're trying to help each other. Now let's go in and eat." He took her arm and led her through a door to the head of the table. Behind her, she sensed the others following.
At the dining table it became apparent that the touch-to-talk rule was flexible enough to permit introductions without everyone jumping from his seat or developing a boarding house reach. She endured Fritz's introduction and knew she'd never remember all the names. She felt relief when the twenty others at the table stopped staring at her and devoted themselves to the veal cutlet.
Julia endured dinner. She wasn't very hungry. There was a glass of some kind of vinegary red stuff which she supposed was wine. She took one sip and tried to suppress the sour belch that resulted.
Throughout the meal Fritz played the genial host. She studied the other guests covertly, trying to fathom how . . . how odd they were. A hand fell on her shoulder. It was the thin, rather intense-looking woman who sat to her right. "What sort of work do you do?"
"Well, I. . . "
The thin woman had a blank expression on her face. She remembered to put her hand on the other woman. "I've tried several jobs. I haven't really found anything I'd like to make a career of."
"Oh?"
"I was a dancer for a while." The woman had an intense look of birdlike concentration. "What do you do?" Julia asked, desperately wanting to change the subject.
It was like pressing the button that turned on some complicated electrical display. The thin woman's face lit up as she began talking nonstop. A flood of unbelievably dull stories and anecdotes engulfed Julia as the thin woman spouted endless details of children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, cousins, all the intimate quiddities of gluttons and bedwetters. Julia began to wonder if she was back in Centerville. My god, she thought, do I have to listen to this drivel?
Finally Fritz rescued her from the floodtide of verbiage. She noticed that his accent grew thicker with each glass of the horrible red ink he poured. "Ve haff zummting new here," he said with an expansive wave down the dinner table. "Alvays before, analysis hass been a private thing between analyst und analysand. Alvays hass the analyst read into the relationship hiss own uphangs-I mean hangups.
"Thiss iss fine for the analyst; he gets cured und the patient pays. Now for the first time the patient gets cured by himselbst instead of getting all the analyst's hangups on top of his own."
Julia didn't know what to say, but if she dared to let the conversation die, she would be stuck with Miss Sparrow's reminiscences again. "You have hangups?" she asked. "I'd think a doctor would be all through with that."
"Please," he protested. "Zo oldt I am not yedt. Hangups, of course I got hangups!"
"Like what?"
Dr. Rubie's eyes glinted boyishly behind his glasses. "I'm a dirty oldt man," he explained.
"Each time I look at a luffly young chicken like you, I vant to do vot I used to do. Gott tamn, you sure sure got a nice liddle set of knockers!"
Julia was uncomfortably aware of his arm over her shoulders, dutifully respecting the privacy of her nice liddle set. "But you wouldn't do a thing like that," she protested. "Do you know why I'm here?"
"Yah. Mary-Dr. Carter toldt me the whole geschichte. You had a bunch of bad luch. Could happen to anybody."
"But, why me?" she insisted. Glancing down the table, she saw that the hand-on-should had in several cases descended to caress the ladies' nice liddle sets. The ladies' hands were apparently caressing something beneath the folds of the damask tablecloth. People began leaving the table. A smooth shaven young man laid an arm on Fritz, and she made her escape before the sparrow woman could inundate her with more details about toilet training grandchildren.
Back in the drawing room people stood in frozen waltz postures talking with one another. She had never seen so many earnest conversations going on at once. An elegant middle-aged man in a tuxedo came toward her and Julia felt a slight thrill of desire. He was handsome, with a dark Mephistophelean beard. Putting both hands on her shoulders, he said, "I abandoned a wife and five children just so I could talk to lovely young bodies like you. Now, of course, I'd love to be intimate with you. At least, that's what I used to think and I'm sure my wife thought so too. At least she accused me of it countless times. But here I am with my hands on you. I play little games in my mind: What would she do if I kissed her, if I invited her upstairs to my room?"
"I'd accept." Julia blurted out hastily.
"Oh dear!" Hastily he dropped his hands and moved away to stand staring moodily into the flames of the fireplace. Moments later he was back. This time Julia beat him to the punch and got her arms on his shoulders first.
"I'm very inexperienced," she said. "Every time I try to be friendly, I end up getting screwed. Every time I look for something tender and beautiful, I get bruises. I just wondered what would happen if I did the pursuing for once."
"But you see, that's just the point," he said desperately. "I really don't want to play around with young girls, no matter how appealing they are. I just want to think about it."
"I don't see much fun in that."
"Neither do I," he said sadly. "I don't see much fun in anything." He brightened suddenly. "But I'm being selfish. What's your problem?"
"I don't know," Julia said. "I always thought I was a normal human being. But lately either the world or I is getting awfully weird."
"That's exactly what happened to me!" His eyes glistened. "I was--am a floor manager! In charge of all the sales girls on one floor of a department store."
"Maybe you can give me a job."
"Job? You need a job? Oh yes. Well. . . There I was surrounded by girls. Tall girls, short girls, fat ones, thin ones, smart ones and stupid. Some were beautiful. Unfortunately, the beautiful ones don't work out well in sales."
"So what was your problem?"
"None. I had no problem at all. Except..."
He still had his hands on her shoulders so she guessed she would have to listen. "I had a good job, a nice family; I wasn't involved with any of my girls or anything. I enjoyed my work. I used to hear the girls complain about sales work. Not one out of a hundred really liked it. They all wanted to be actresses or sculptors or singers or housewives or some such thing. They complained night and day."
"I still don't see your problem."
"They were all having more fun than I was!" He had begun the sentence in a normal tone, but it had ended in a scream. Julia writhed in an agony of embarrassment as tears filled his eyes. Finally he took his hands off her and returned to stare into the fireplace.
Julia started to approach him when a hand fell on her shoulder from behind. "Let's touch tongues." It was the intense, sparrow woman with all the family problems. "Are you a natural blonde?" she continued.
"Yes."
"That's nice. So few people are what they seem these days."
"I've noticed that."
"Have you dear? My that's a lovely dress you're wearing."
Since Julia was wearing slacks and a pullover, she didn't know what to say.
"Such lovely skin! I'll bet all the boys want to touch it. " Miss Sparrow hesitated for a moment. "All the girls too," she added slyly.
"Yes, it's been a problem."
"But you don't really mind it, do you dear? My, such lovely smooth hair!"
"Yes. One hundred strokes every evening."
"Yes, yes! That's the way."
"The last hundred strokes put me in the hospital."
"Oh my yes, that's nice!"
"Yes, the black and blue marks were stunning."
"What?"
"Excuse me a moment, I've got to find a ladies' room." She hastened through the frozen waltzers and finally spotted a woman coming out of a door. She tried the door and it turned out to be an immense book-filled room with fumed oak paneling. In the corner a heavyset man sat reading. His hair was close-cropped. His skin was so black it seemed to glisten with a blue sheen. "Sorry," she murmured, turning around to leave.
He glanced up from his book. "It's all right. Come sit down."
"Don't we have to touch each other?"
He laughed. "I'm not a patient here."
"Oh?"
"Not a shrink either," he added. "I beg your pardon?"
"I'm not a headshrinker. I can only fix the ache in another part of your body."
"Yes," she said sourly. "I can just guess what part."
"Can you?" He sounded amused.
"Since I came to the city, every man I've met has been willing to assuage a pain I never knew I had before. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm anything besides two legs and a cunt." She was getting the hang of it now. It wasn't as hard as she'd thought it was going to be, to say those words to a man.
"Oh, you got another part," he said. "Ain't cunt, ain't tits. Man got one too. That's the part I takes care of." Suddenly he was laying on a Southern darky accent.
"Go ahead and tell me. So far I've learned something new every day for the last couple of weeks."
"I only ease the pain of an empty stomach."
"I'm the cook."
"Oh!" Suddenly Julia was so embarrassed she didn't know what to say. She could feel her face turning pink. "I'm sorry," she began. "It's just that..."
He grinned. "Yeah, I can see where a kid with a build like yours would have problems. Didn't anybody ever warn you about people?"
Julia sighed. Suddenly she found herself pouring out stories of her father's amours with mill girls. Then she was dredging up that day when she had discovered the tobacco-chewing chauffeur between her mother's wildly thrashing legs. He listened gravely, encouraging her to talk. Finally she had confessed about everything that had occurred to her since her arrival in the city.
"Ev'body got problems," he said.
"Do you?"
He laughed. "You jus' try bein' black in this country."
"Yes. I hadn't thought about it." Suddenly she was overwhelmed with pity, with gratitude, and another emotion she could not identify for this kindly man with the shiny black face. "Would you like to . . .,to fuck me?" she asked.
"Sure," he said, reverting to standard American speech. "But only if you really want to."
"Well, I. . . "
"If you want to be brutalized by a big black beast, maybe you'd better hunt up King Kong."
"No, I. . . " Suddenly she was telling him about how she had been ravaged, not by a big black man, but by a small, smooth-skinned white boy with funny agate eyes. As she told the story, Julia realized she hadn't remembered it consciously until this moment. "I don't know," she concluded. "Maybe it's a reaction to what's happened to me. But when I said it, I was just trying to be friendly . . . thank you for listening to me."
He stood up to cross the room. He patted her shoulder, and for the first time she could see how immensely tall and big he was. Good heavens, she thought, if he's like what everybody in Centerville always said, he'll split me right in two.
Realizing her sudden doubts, he laughed. "Standing at attention they're about the same size no matter what color," he explained. "Only difference between us and whites is mine doesn't shrivel up to nothing between times."
Julia smiled uncertainly.
"You don't really want to, do you? Not with me anyway."
"Oh, yes! You're ..." She knew she wasn't supposed to use that word, but it just had to come out. "You're the only sane man here."
He laughed. "Don't let Doctor Rubies hear you say that."
"Let's fuck."
"Right here, now?"
Julia stretched on tiptoe. She was not surrendering to an uncontrollable lust. It was more like curiosity. He was nice. She wanted to see if she could kiss his shiny black face without shuddering. She stretched as tall as she could reach, but his face was still nearly a foot away.
"Tell you what," he said. "You're way up in the attic, aren't you?"
She nodded.
"Tonight, after everybody's gone off to bed, I'll come asneakin' and acreepin'. I don't want to take advantage of a little girl who might not know what she really wants. If your door's locked, I'll just sneak and creep right back downstairs." He patted her shoulder and gently guided her until suddenly Julia found herself outside the library. She shook her head. Already the whole conversation was assuming a dreamlike quality. Had she really said all those things to a man as strange as he was black? The really unbelievable part of it all was that, no matter how nice he'd been about it, she knew she had been turned down. Eighteen years old and already a has-been?
"Oh, there you are!" A heavy hand clutched her shoulder. It was Fritz Rubies. Every time she looked, his off-white beard seemed bigger and bushier. He was opening his mouth to speak, when a hand clapped on his shoulder and the sparrow woman monopolized him.
"I've been thinking it over."
"I beg your pardon?" Julia turned and it was the handsome floor walker with the Mephistophelean beard.
"Oh! Sorry." He put his hands on her shoulders.
Oh Jesus, she thought. Is all this handling really necessary? "What have you been thinking over?"
"You. I've been searching my motives, trying to separate the true from the false. I've decided to put it to the test."
"Oh?"
"Yes." He gave a sudden fatuous smile which destroyed his brooding Mephistophelean air. "I've decided I don't want to just talk about it or think about it."
She wondered what he was building up to this time.
"I really do want to invite you up to my room. For drinks and to ..." He stammered and his face turned a bright crimson.
"That's very kind of you," Julia said. "And perhaps I'll come some other night, but I have a previous engagement."
"But you said you'd accept!" he wailed.
"You turned me down half an hour ago. You can't expect a girl to be a wallflower all her life." She struggled to keep a straight face. "Besides, if you're married, how can I know your intentions are honorable?"
He bit his lips. After a moment he removed his hands from her shoulders and returned to stand in front of the fireplace. She saw the sparrow woman coming and decided to call it a night. Going up the stairs, she could hear rustlings and gigglings and the drone of earnest compulsive talk, talk, talk from behind closed doors. Up on the third floor, where she had her attic room, it was quieter. Expecting some nut to be waiting in her room, she opened the door cautiously.
The room was empty. She undressed, found robe and towels, then crossed the hall to the bath. She luxuriated in the tub of hot water, trying to remember how she had gotten into the canvas-sheeted tub where she had abruptly returned to reality. She could remember the dream of delight in an Alpine meadow. She could remember dancing into the cold lake water, and the next thing she knew the lake was a hot and cold tub in a hospital. It was confusing.
She took another moment of cautious reconnoitering when she returned, but her room was still empty. She put up her hair. There was a small shelf of century old children's books in one corner. She tried a page of ROLLO IN HOLLAND, then gave up. She was just turning the lights out, when she remembered the black man in the library. Would he come? Somehow she didn't think he would. But he had been gentle and kind. If he did come, she knew that it wouldn't be nice to refuse him, not after the way she had led him on. She got up and unlocked the door. Within moments she was asleep.
She didn't hear the door open, nor did she hear it creak as it closed again. And she didn't hear footsteps crossing the wood-planked floor to her narrow bed. She had just been starting another dream about the young gallant in messenger's uniform with a lopsided smile and a lopsided Thing, when she felt someone lift the blankets at the foot of her bed. She remembered the black man's words: "I'll come asneakin' and acreepin'."
She had awakened gently, without jumping up or screaming. She decided to play opossum and let him do whatever came to mind. It would be instructive, she decided, to learn what a man would do to a girl if he thought he was undetected. For the moment he didn't seem to be doing anything. She felt crisp hair as his head nestled between her feet. He was kneeling on the floor at the foot of her narrow bed. She waited in the dark, trying to keep her body relaxed as if she were still asleep. She could feel warm breath on her feet.
A moment passed and he began oozing snakelike up under the covers, plowing his face between her calves. She waited for him to start kissing his way up her thighs, but he slithered ever so slowly up her legs. She gave a deep sigh, and she heard him give a gasping breath. He's terrified that I'll wake up suddenly and start screaming.
It was fun for Julia to have a man terrified for once instead of being on the' receiving end of all the fear and brutality in the world. Julia sighed again, spreading her legs slightly. She lay supine, staring up into darkness, waiting for him to gather courage for the foray past her knees. Finally he was moving again. He was afraid to kiss or nibble her tender skin, but she could feel his hot panting breath as he buried his face, groveling in the soft skin of her lower thigh.
She began to feel the familiar sensation as the blood rushed to her lower abdomen. The lips of her--cunt! She felt her cunt-lips fill with hot pulsing blood, felt her clit harden. There was a faint tremor of belly muscle as she felt a glow spread slowly upward from her cunt, past her belly, across the narrow length of her waist, to suffuse the hardening nipples of her rose-glowing tits. It was such a warm, cozy feeling. She decided to continue playing opossum.
She felt hands snake their furtive way up her calves, appreciating the warm, fine-grained smoothness of her knees. Finally his thumbs were at the outer edges of her vagina. He hesitated momentarily. Julia decided to give him a scare. She moaned and moved her legs as if trying to turn over; then she waited to see what he would do.
He stopped breathing. She stopped breathing. It turned into a contest to see who could hold his breath the longest. Finally he wheezed and breathed raggedly. While he was gasping, Julia caught her breath. Who's conning who, she wondered? Surely he's guessed I'm awake by now.
If he had, it suited his purpose not to accept the fact. A minute passed and Julia settled down to the regular deep breathing of sleep. Finally his face inched closer to her until his crisp hair was butting at the wispy blonde strands of her pubic triangle. Still he was afraid to kiss or nibble at her body. She relaxed, relishing the warm suspenseful glow. Somehow the waiting, the will-he-or-won't-he suspense made it much nicer than she had expected. She felt hands slide up her thighs, cup her buttocks.
She sighed and bent her knees slightly, opening her thighs in invitation, wondering if it was the gesture a girl might make naturally in her sleep. She wondered if he had had much experience in this kind of night prowling. From his terrified breathless silences, she suspected he had not.
Gingerly, he began angling his head until his face was turned up toward her crotch. Obligingly, she raised first one knee, then the other, sighing and moaning, as if it were the natural action of a sleeper in the fitful embrace of an erotic dream. She felt his nose burrow into the wispy hair over the bony protrusion of her mons veneris. A moment later his lips closed over her clit, and he began gently sucking, relaxing, sucking; barely moving as he concentrated on the delicate titillation of that most sensitive of her-what had Mary called them? Erogenous zones?
Suddenly Julia remembered that unbearable tension, that sudden rushing feel of release that had come from Dr. Carter's ministrations. She had never believed it possible to live again through that impossible gut-rending gratification. Yet, it was happening once more. Pent up by the restraints of her "asleep" game, she could not writhe, could not moan or scream or yodel or clasp her thighs over those lips that teased the rock-hard jewel between the lips of her moist vulva.
She tried to breathe steadily, to preserve the facade of sleep. But it felt so good to her. The whole business was just a little startling though, now that she realized he was going to keep on doing this for a while, instead of continuing his slow slide up the bed until he was properly atop her.
She had thought oral obeisance was a substitute, something dreamed up by Dr. Carter's kind of person to take the place of that great red-knobbed ram-slammer that men carried between their legs. It had never occurred to her that a man might use his tongue.
Gradually the pretense of sleep was slipping away. She tried to control herself, but with that tender torturing tongue titillating her twat it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep from clasping her thighs around his head. She wanted to shriek, to howl her beatitude. She wanted to grab him by the hair, by the ears, to open her legs wider and draw him in deeper. His lips were torturing her clit, his tongue rasping around its marble hardness in lascivious circles.
She could feel his growing excitement. He abandoned her fluttering clit to auger his tongue into her vagina, twisting and poking it deeper than she had imagined a tongue could go. Then he was rooting, digging his whole nose and face into her wet pit, grunting and wallowing in the oozing oils of her vagina cream.
Julia abandoned all attempt to pretend that she was asleep. She grasped his head, pulled it in deeper. Blankets flew from the bed as they thrashed about uncontrollably. She remembered her frenzy with Mary when she had suddenly been overwhelmed with a desire to bury her face in Dr. Carter's machinery just as the doctor had done to her and as this black man was doing.
She felt him maneuvering on the narrow bed. First he was lapping her crossways, then his mouth was upside down, tongue rasping first over her sensitive clitoris, ending each stroke with a leisurely lick around her fleshy vaginal lips. Julia moaned with each sandpaper wipe of his tongue over her cunt.
Suddenly his muscular belly was touching her face. It was hairy. He hunched down until his monstrous hot-throbbing hammer touched her, the tip rubbing circular snail tracks on her cheek each time it jerked in unison with his heart beat.
Julia's understanding was sudden and absolute. Of course! If a man gave her this much pleasure, she had to do something in return. If she didn't take his Thing in her cunt, she had to take it in her mouth. Could she? She had put her mouth on Mary's cunt, but she had done it in a moment of uncontrollable passion. The unexpectedness of this end-to-end maneuver had taken her by surprised. It had felt nice the way he had rooted around there; she could have let him do it all night. But now she had to pay the bill.
I'll do it, she decided. Even if it makes me vomit, I'll do it! He was bucking and grunting, his sweaty body heaving as he nuzzled her wet-lipped pussy. His blind-stabbing barb threatened to put out an eye, if she didn't do something soon to ease his erection. She put out a cautious hand and gripped it around the base.
It was the first time she had ever had her hand on a man's Thing. What do they call it? Prick, she guessed. It was hot. The underside pulsated in unison with his heartbeat.
Now what was that soft funny thing underneath? She asked herself. She had seen that pouch on dogs, on tomcats. She caressed it, exploring its hairy folds. There was a name for it, and if she tried to remember it. There had been a scandalous book hidden somewhere in the back room of the Centerville library-a play by Mark Twain with a character named Scrotum who played a wrinkled old family retainer.
She ran her finger down the brief joy-filled junction from scrotum to anus as his tongue penetrated deeper into the red meat of her cunt.
How much of it can I get in my mouth? How much was I supposed to? The whole thing, scrotum and all, the full length of his thrill drill, or just the tip? Which part is the most sensitive? The tip had to do all the hard work. Probably it was tough and calloused.
Still gripping his whang by the shank, she removed her other hand from his squirming scrotum and felt the end of his erection. Good heavens, it's bigger, harder, and throbbing more than anything else!
Yet, the skin was so loose she could actually slide it back and forth. How far will it go? How far can I stretch it before he winces or complains? He didn't seem to be hurting. He was rooting in her garden as if afraid it might disappear at any moment. Ooohhh, it feels nice when he puts his tongue way in deep that way! She tensed, squeezing her legs together, balking her fists in an effort to stop the runaway rushing feeling that threatened to split her bouncing belly open.
The involuntary clenching of her fist forced his foreskin all the way back. He emitted a blissful moan and redoubled his efforts to stab her eye out with its bare tip. Julia wondered if she was supposed to put it in her mouth this way, or if the loose skin was supposed to go back down first. If this thing--his prick, was as tender as her own inner parts she might hurt him with her teeth no matter how careful she was. She got her hot little fist around the bald knob of his rod and tried to pull the skin back down. And that was the end of the show for tonight.
She hadn't really wanted to put it in her mouth, but when his spindle began spurting, blurting, squirting great gobs of goo, she almost wished that she had put it in her mouth, in her cunt, or anywhere else that could have kept his slippery seminal slime away from her face and hair.
His sudden angry whinny sounded like a frustrated horse. She had not imagined a man could make such a shrill sound. He bucked and lunged, sprayed a final spurt of love's elixir, then collapsed beside her on the narrow bed, face still buried in her foamy cunt.
Despite the messiness of it all, Julia felt better, more relaxed and at ease with herself then she had since she had taken a taxi home from Dr. Carter's apartment, relieved that her affair with Mary had ended. Now Julia knew she was normal after all. It could be fun with a man. They weren't all hairy stinking brutes.
Lazily she reached down to caress the head that lay nestled against her inner thigh. She had never felt Negro hair before. But she thought that it should feel crisp and kinky. Her bedmate's hair was short and straight. Suddenly curious, she ran her finger down past his ear. He had a short beard!
The man wasn't the giant black she had promised to pleasure. It was the brooding, Mephistophelean bearded floorwalker whose life was embittered because his salesgirls all had more fun than he! She wondered if he had enjoyed himself tonight. Probably he would complain tomorrow because she hadn't gotten it in her mouth in time.
But Julia decided that he had no business sneaking in and doing it to her when she had told him that she already had a date. Damn all treacherous men! She filled her lungs to tell him and the other guests how sneaky he had been, but before she could prime her vocal chords, he silently slithered from the bed. The door opened, closed, then he was gone.
Julia got up and bolted the door. She turned on the lights. She looked at the bed and gulped twice. He must have fired a gallon of goo onto her sheet. There was one large spot on the pillow. The top sheet and blanket were unscathed. They had been kicked to one corner before the eruption.
She tore the bottom sheet off and turned the spots toward the foot of the bed. As short as she was, her feet would not touch them. Finished with this, she found her robe and went across the hall for a quick wash-up. Seething inwardly at the floorwalker's masquerade, she remembered to take The Pill. Moments later she was in bed; lights out, door locked.
Though she tried to nurse her anger, Julia was actually tired, and very sleepy. She decided to take car of that nasty man with the beard when she got around to it tomorrow. Damn all men!
Then she realized she was being a little unjust. Only one man here had betrayed her. And she had actually led him on before changing her mind when she had discovered what a milksop he was.
She wondered if the black man would still come. She didn't want him to--not tonight anyway. But if she left her door locked, he might not understand. He had been nice and he hadn't demanded anything from her. She got up and unlocked the door. Then she went to bed and drowsed, wrapped in the self-satisfied glow of a girl at peace with her conscience.
She was almost asleep when she heard the doorknob turning. Oh well, she thought. He probably doesn't get many chances with white girls. I'm eighteen and I really am nice looking. Maybe he'll get so excited he'll just stick it in and squirt that gooey stuff quick and then I can get back to sleep. She wondered what time people around her got up in the morning.
Before she could get to sleep, the door opened again. Suddenly she realized she didn't know the big black man's name. She decided to wait and see what happened.
"Choolia?"
Oh, for Christ's sake! First the nuts, then the bushy bearded savior who's going to make me sane? "Fritz?" she asked.
"Yah."
"You'll have to wait a moment. I'm not ready."
"Ach zo?"
Julia improvised desperately. "Fritz," she suggested, "Why don't you go back downstairs and bring another bottle of that delicious red wine we had for dinner. That'll give me time to slip into something comfortable." She tried out a girlish giggle.
"Yah. Dot's a good idea. I'll be right back." The door closed, and she bounced out of bed.
So far as the Esfarsa Institute and Dr. Fritz Rubies were concerned, she had had it. She had been confused, in need of peace and quiet, maybe a little professional counseling. But so far the only person who had made sense to her had been the cook. Julia was more sane than the bushy-bearded old fool who thought he was going to inject her full of sanity, starting from the crotch.
She dressed hurriedly in the first thing she could find. It was the same sleeveless mini with turtleneck sweater that she had worn the day she met Mr. Version and again the next day when she had answered the meat packer's ad and met Barney. She pulled it over her head and scrambled into her pantyhose. She still had money in her purse. But how was she going it get away? Finding a bus out here in the boondocks would be hard enough in the daytime. At night. . . But she wasn't going to hang around until she'd been fucked by every man in the house.
Touching. Laying on hands. Hah! She wondered if all the different schools of psychology boiled down to the same thing: some dirty old man got a doctor in front of his name, then he settled down to build a harem. Well, Dr. Rubies could build his harem without her. If she wanted to get laid all night long by strange men she might as well go back to the meat packer where they paid for it!
She wondered what she was going to do. She didn't really know. But she had to get out of here, get back to the city, and find some kind of job even if it was washing dishes. She wanted an honest job where she could sit down and sort things out.
But right now she had to get out of the house. She tossed clothes into the smallest bag. Mary could send for the rest of her things later. With bag in one hand and her purse in the other, Julia slipped downstairs, fearing that at any moment she would bump into that dirty old man coming back with a bottle of his horrible red ink.
But she reached the front steps without meeting anyone. She stood in the dark just outside the house, trying to guess the way. She had come by plane. Which way was the road? Was there a road? Would she ever escape this houseful of freaks?
Suddenly there was a sound apart from the faint whisper of pines. She listened and a moment later realized it was the sound of a fast moving automobile. A half minute passed, and she saw faint headlights in the distance. The lights disappeared as it dropped into hollows, reappearing nearer and brighter each time. Finally the car passed a quarter mile in front of the house and disappeared in the opposite direction. Now she knew where the road was. She got a firm grip on bag and purse and started walking.
She had not gone more than a hundred yards before there was a commotion in the house. She walked faster, conserving her strength because she knew she couldn't run all the way. Behind her lights went on and off. She heard a motor start. Then a car was coming behind her.
She looked for a ditch to hide in, but the car lights showed that she was in a narrow driveway fenced on both sides with chain link fence. She plodded on, knowing she was outlined in the headlights. It's so unfair! Why does everything have to happen to me? Does Dr. Carter know what really goes on at this place?
The car pulled even with her and stopped. "I don't want to go back," she said. "I just want to get away from here."
"Ah don't blame you." It was the big cock with the shiny black skin.
"Did they send you to bring me back?"
He laughed. "I don't think anybody knows you're gone."
"Then what was all the racket about?"
"Rush call to go inland and pick up a patient. The pilot says there's too much fog to land here. I say he's drunk or getting laid."
"Oh, dear!" Suddenly Julia remembered what she had promised the black man.
"I'm sorry I didn't come around," he said. "I had some work to do, and by the time I was done I thought you'd be asleep."
"I wish the other two had been that considerate," she said bitterly.
"Oh ho! They at it again?"
"You mean they do this all the time?"
"I'm afraid so," the black man said sadly. "Get in and I'll give you a ride. It's twenty miles nearer the city where I'm going, and you can catch a bus there."
Julia climbed in gratefully. The heater was just beginning to put out warmth. She stretched and sighed.
An instant later he was nudging her gently. She opened her eyes and saw they were in front of a Greyhound bus depot. "I don't know how to thank you," she said gratefully.
He grinned. "No sweat. Maybe someday we'll meet again, and if you still want, I'll do a little sneakin' and creepin'."
They shook hands, then she stepped onto the running board of the pickup. Moments later she was in a bus, rocketing toward the city.
She wondered where she was going to stay. Her rent was paid up for another week. Her room ought to still be empty. It would do until she worked out something better. Only from now on she would make sure that she would have a chain on the door.
The bus arrived. She escaped the turmoil of the station and walked out to a cab stand. It was empty. A newsboy stood alone on the corner. "Where're all the taxis?" she asked.
"On strike."
My cup runneth over. Now she wondered how she was going to get home. Her room was clear across town. "Are there any city buses?"
"First one passes about a quarter after five in the morning," the boy said.
She shivered and went back inside the waiting room. Every bench was filled with travelers in the same plight. She stood in line behind a stool at the lunch counter and a snappish waitress finally had the time to give her a cup of coffee. The clock behind the counter said 3:15.
Two hours to kill! She dawdled as long as she could over the coffee. She found an unoccupied seat and an abandoned magazine in the waiting room. The next time she looked up, it was just turning daylight. The clock said 4:50.
Suddenly Julia realized there would be an ungodly jam when the bus finally came. She decided to get outside right now in case a line was forming. But when she got outside, the street was still empty. She stood breathing the damp dawn air. At this hour the city seemed almost beautiful.
A cab pulled up in front of her. She stared. INDEPENDENT. So there was one company that wasn't on strike. The driver didn't get out to open the door or anything. She picked up her bag and got in. When she was in the back seat, he started moving. "Where to?"
Julia gave him her address. "Do you know where it is?"
"Yes, I know."
His voice seemed familiar. Where had she heard it before? She looked for the cab license by the meter. The cab didn't have a meter. There was no license with a picture of the driver. Apart from the cab sign outside, it looked just like a private car. Suddenly Julia realized that without a meter this driver could charge whatever he felt like. "Uh, how much is it going to cost?" she asked, "I don't have much money with me."
"Don't worry, Miss. For you I'll make a special price." He turned a smiled. Julia's heart skipped a beat. That horrible half face! The cab driver was Mr. Version!
CHAPTER SEVEN
She tried to control her panic. After all, he had been to her room once. He had left money in her purse. He had seemed sincerely apologetic. Maybe he wasn't violent like the other men. But. . . "What are you doing driving a cab?" she asked.
"It's a hobby," he said. "Since the cab strike started, a group of businessmen organized an emergency service."
Julia thought a moment. When things like this had happened in Centerville, people had come up with ugly words like scab and strikebreaker. "How can you afford to take time off from your own business?" she asked.
He laughed. Turning his good side to her, he said, "I can hold out a few days before the brassiere industry collapses."
"I wanted to thank you for that money," she said. "I'd have returned it before now, but something bad happened and I had to go to the hospital."
"Nothing serious, I hope. Are you all right now?"
Years later Julia was known to wonder how the course of her life might have been altered if she had answered, "I was raped by four garbage men. I have leprosy, syphilis, and acne." But all she said to Mr. Version was, "I'm fine."
"Would you like to come back to work for me?"
Julia was shocked. Not at Mr. Version's offer which, for a man, she supposed was perfectly natural. She was shocked at her own change of attitude. When Mr. Version had buried his face in her virginal belly ten days ago she had expected the earth to open and swallow them both into hell's hottest hole. Now that he repeated the offer, she could consider it dispassionately.
How would it be to become the mistress of a rich, ugly man? Horribly deformed he might be, but he was gentle and kind. He would shower her with gifts and money. He would keep the world's ugly exploiters away from her. Only he would exploit her. And he was the ugliest of them all. She shuddered. If she'd accepted his offer ten days ago, where would she have been now?
She would have been well-nourished, without bruises, unraped, and a damn sight less knowledgeable in the ways of the world. She sighed. "Thank you, Mr. Version. I'm just not ready to settle down yet."
They were nearing the turnoff for her part of town. She gathered her bag and purse and got ready to get out. "How much is the fare?" she asked.
Mr. Version didn't answer. He didn't stop either. The cab passed her turnoff and continued cruising slowly down the boulevard.
"Now please," she insisted, "You've tried to change my mind before. You ought to know by now that you can't do it."
"I have something to show you," he said. "You never really saw what I have to offer."
"Anything you offer includes you," she snapped, "Now please take me home."
The cab turned at the next intersection and began circling back toward her neighborhood. "What does a young woman want out of life?" he asked. "Money? Jewels? Security? Or does she want high adventure?"
Julia decided to remain silent.
"Girls marry young men. They struggle, they bear children, they grow old before their time. And all for what? Because some penniless young squirt offers them something he doesn't even know how to use properly." Mr. Version broke off his conversation as he passed a parked milk truck. Slowly the streets began filling with early morning traffic.
"A girl finds an older man," he continued, "One who's made his mark in the world and has all the hamburger and spaghetti years behind him. A smart girl finds a man who can fulfill those promises to treat her like a queen--to give her the clothes, the apartment, everything she's always wanted."
"What I really want is an honest job," Julia said. "Preferably behind some barrier that'll keep me safe from all those people who want to protect me."
They reached her street, but the cab kept right on moving. "Behind some kind of barrier?" he repeated.
A sudden scare shot through Julia. "Let me out! she screamed.
Mr. Version started driving faster, then suddenly he braked to avoid a traffic jam. The pack of cars ahead slowly sorted itself out and began creeping. A delivery truck was opposite them, heading the other way. She recognized the winged emblem of Richards Messenger Service.
She came awake and peered through the window, suddenly noting there was neither door handle nor window crank. Her dream gallant, the young man with the lopsided smile and Thing to match, was driving. She waved and gesticulated frantically. Finally he noticed her.
Her conquering hero peered and finally recognized who was waving. He smiled and gave a friendly wave in return. Traffic began moving again. Her gallant went one way and she was taken in the other, still waving and screaming.
Nobody paid the slightest attention. Slowly the cab left the downtown area. Her voice was hoarse. She sat in the back seat, saving her strength. If she was going to get away, it would have to be when they stopped wherever he was taking her. Surely he couldn't get away with a struggle right in sight of everybody.
When she stopped waving and screaming, Mr. Version began talking again. "Please," he soothed. "I'm not that kind of man. Have I ever forced myself on you?"
How about right now? she thought. But she didn't vocalize her thoughts because she knew it would do no good. The cab bumped over railroad tracks and crept down a long street lined with loading docks. Men were unloading trucks at some of the buildings, but no one looked at the cab as she passed by. Finally Mr. Version pulled into a driveway beside a windowless concrete building.
He backed the cab to the side of the building and got out. He unlocked a small door and went inside, closing it behind him, leaving Julia alone in the cab. She scrambled into the front seat, ruining another pair of pantyhose as she struggled to open the front doors. They wouldn't open either. The steel door in the side of the building began rolling up. Mr. Version stepped to the side of the cab and opened the door. The cab was so close to the building that there was nowhere to go but through the doorway. She was trapped.
"I own this building," he said proudly.
The last ten days had taught Julia the futility of struggling against impossible odds. She remembered the night in her room, how strong his hands had been when they had choked off a possible scream. Whatever she did, there must be no invitation to violence. She sensed that basically he was a timid sort of man. How could she keep him that way? She took a deep breath. "You were going to show me something," she snapped. "After all this, it better be good."
"Oh, it is! You're going to love it here." From his suddenly defensive attitude, she knew she had taken the right tack. Like a realtor trying to sell a house, he led her across a dusty concrete floor crisscrossed with tire tracks. Behind her a noisy electric motor was closing the steel door. Opposite was a rope-pull elevator like the one at the "meat packers."
Riding up the elevator, she suddenly realized she had a weapon. The tire tracks meant that he normally kept the cab inside the warehouse. In tire excitement of her capture, he had forgotten and left it outside.
Fat lot of good it'd do her, she decided. The cab was parked out of sight of the street. And who would miss her? She had no real friends. Dr. Carter, if she thought at all, would think she was still up there getting straight with that fluff beard. And Dr. Rubies, after chasing downstairs for a bottle of vinegar and coming back to find her gone, was probably so mad he wouldn't give an investigator the time of day. The cook? She didn't know his name, and the black man probably didn't know hers.
The elevator stopped. Mr. Version led her to a blank wall. He did something with his feet and a section of the wall pivoted.
It was a nightmarish Victorian dream of a Turkish harem: cushions, hookahs, tapestries, full-blown Rubens' nudes on the walls. She had never seen a room like it. There was not a single chair or sofa--only cushions, pads, and an immense polar bear rug. Before the fireplace was a brass stand with poker and tongs. She looked closer. There was a whip with barbed thongs.
Julia suspected that she was not going to like the games played here. She sniffed. "Where's the machine?"
"What machine?" Mr. Version was disconcerted. He had expected her to be terrified.
"The one with the wires and the big insulators."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The one that brings the monster to life during an electrical storm," she snapped.
Mr. Version's lip quivered. She studied him and realized this had probably never happened before. A girl brought up here this way should panic--if he had ever actually had a girl up here before. Somehow Julia suspected this whole hidden apartment was a playhouse where Mr. Version acted out dreams of rape and violence he had never actually had the courage to fulfill. She wondered about the cab.
Had he been doing it for years or had it been a sudden idea to take advantage of the taxi strike? She felt a dash of pity. Poor ugly man-he's gone to all the trouble of working this dream out and when he gets me here I won't act my part. What did he expect her to do? Grovel? Scream? Beg for mercy? She had had enough. It was time for somebody else to grovel.
"Fuck you!" She didn't shout or scream. She said it very coldly and distinctly.
Suddenly something changed in Mr. Version's face. He turned his hidden side toward her. His arm was swinging. She couldn't quite see what was in his hand, but it looked big and heavy. There was a tremendous thundering whack as it slapped against her ear. Still half conscious, she fell, knowing as she fell that she had misjudged Mr. Version.
She gathered her senses, then discovered that he had bound her hand and foot. The pad beneath her was so fluffy that she was practically submerged in it. While she had been in a drowsy state, Mr. Version's deft hands had removed her dress, her bra, her pantyhose. She could see them neatly stacked on a cushion in the corner. She was nude. Her ankles were taped together. Her wrists were taped behind her.
Mr. Version crouched over her. He was doing something to her down below. She strained to see what he was up to. She saw the blade.
Julia knew she must not panic. If she screamed, he'd start whatever he intended to do. What was he going to do? She recognized that kind of blade. It was an old-fashioned cutthroat razor like her father used to use.
She struggled, trying not to giggle as the brush touched her. Mr. Version had a mug of lather and a brush. He was spreading lather over the scant blonde hair of her pubic patch, slapping the bush with the abandon of a mad painter. He tried to spread her legs, to get lather in the rest of the way, but her ankles were taped.
He frowned and thought, then crossed the room. He came back with a long piece of wood that looked like the padded tops of two crutches placed end to end. He untaped her ankles.
He slipped an end of the padded board into the crook of her knee, hooked her other knee over the opposite end, then taped her ankles together again. Now she was trussed as securely as before, except that her legs were spread. Her defenseless cunt gaped wide open.
Mr. Version had given a lot of thought to this project, she decided. But then, a man who didn't like to show his face in public was bound to have time on his hands to think up little projects. Wondering if this one would have gotten him an 'A' in manual training, she almost giggled again.
He had finished brushing lather on her. His nimble fingers were working the foamy lather into her snatch, massaging. If shaving was all he intended with that blade, she could relax and almost enjoy it. That thing holding her legs apart felt almost like Mary's examination table when the doctor had inspected her after Barney's rape. She wondered what would happen if she pretended to like it. "Mmmmmm," she said, "That feels good."
Mr. Version grunted. He didn't seem angry. He finished rubbing in the lather, then picked up the old-fashioned razor again. There was a faint snicking as it glided over the bony hump of her mons veneris. Suddenly she was amazed to feel the familiar warm rush. Her taut little belly was blushing as the lips of her vulva prepared for action. She could feel her clit hardening. What kind of monster am I, she wondered? Turning on at what's probably going to end up as my own murder!
Frowning with concentration, Mr. Version finished the easy part. He began angling the razor to get at stray hairs in the wrinkles and folds of her gaping gash. Holding one lip in his left hand, he stretched it and shaved from one angle after another until she felt the tender skin of her cunt burn. This, Julia decided, was too close a shave.
She endured the same thing with her other vaginal lip. Then he snicked the stray hairs that surrounded her anus. She was clean and considerably smoother than most newborn babes.
He began sponging the remaining lather from her loins. He wiped her with a towel, then he applied a fragrant powder to her crotch. She felt the tickle as a duster passed over the sensitive flower in her gaping garden. He got up and cleared away the mess of towels and lather.
Overture finished, she decided. Now the audience settles down for Act I. Only she wasn't just the audience. She was part of the play. He disappeared. From somewhere to her left she could hear swishing sounds. Then he was back. At least she supposed it was Mr. Version. The man who stood before her now was naked except for his face. Over his head he wore a black executioner's domino mask. Over his rigid throbbing cock he wore nothing.
Despite her predicament Julia could not help noticing it. His Thing was different from any of the others she had seen. It was hard and rigid as Barney's, big as any of the rapists'. But this one was not angry red-purple. Nor did its head glisten like the others. She looked for the loose sliding skin she had grasped last night.
Maybe she could grab it, slid it back and forth a couple of times and put a premature end to this foolishness just as she had terminated affairs with the Mephistophelean floorwalker last night. Funny how like the floorwalker Mr. Version would look, if only he had two sides to his face and no beard. They were about the same age, same slight build. As near as she could tell, they had the same size too! except that Mr. Version's was-
Now she remembered!
There had always been some vague and hurried explanation in Sunday School whenever a child asked what circumcision meant. The one thing she remembered was that Fundamentalists didn't believe in it. Obviously Mr. Version was not a Fundamentalist.
What was he? He's sicker than I am, Julia decided. And she had no idea how to cure him. "Mmmmm," she tired, "That felt good. Do it again."
It didn't work. His face was invisible beneath the mask. But his hammer still pulsated, rigidly erect like a miniature flagpole bobbing at the head of a parade. He stepped out of sight for a moment. When he returned, he carried the odd mess of barbs and thongs she had seen by the fireplace. He whipped it experimentally through the air, and it whistled like the sound track in a Dracula movie. Mustn't scream, she thought. I'll blow my cool, he'll blow his. She continued thinking this right up to the moment when the barbs lashed across her defenseless belly. Then she screamed.
The lash hadn't really hit very hard. In fact, it hardly touched her but... It was the uncertainty, she guessed, the knowledge that she was utterly at the mercy of a man who might do anything.
She braced herself for the next stroke. When it didn't come, she opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was Mr. Version's Thing spurting with the vigor of a fire hose, spouting great gouts of goo clear across her body to splash on the tapestry of the wall. So that was how he got his kicks.
She wondered if he had ever had it inside a woman. Maybe he couldn't. Maybe this was the only way he could achieve satisfaction. Was it too late to teach him some socially acceptable mode of gratification? She had to do something. The violence of his orgasm had left him shattered, huddled in one corner and sobbing violently.
He's never done this before, she guessed. He probably sat here alone night after night until I came along, a happy accident delivered into his cruising taxi. He probably regarded it as a sign from heaven.
But now he's done it. Now he knows what he has done and that's why he's crying. He's kidnapped me. That's a death penalty. He's burned his bridges. Now he has to kill me or I'll turn him in. Either way he dies.
"You need help," she uttered fearfully. "You're selfish."
"What?"
"You're selfish," she repeated. "That nice big stiff thing and you didn't give me any! A girl's got feelings too, you know."
"What?"
Keep talking! "You had your fun. It felt nice when you shot it all over the wall that way, but I was waiting for you to shoot it in me."
"What?"
"Into me," she said again. "Here I am, still feeling just like you did before you emptied yourself. You're all right now, but I'm still hung up there waiting. Next time why don't you let me have some fun too?"
"All right."
At least there's going to be a next time! She writhed on the pad, trying to get comfortable. "Couldn't you untie me?"
"You'd run away."
She sighed. "At least untie my hands. You can leave my feet tied up if you think you can get in there with that board."
"Want to bet?" He crossed the room and knelt. She thought he was going to untie her, but he only darted his head into the triangle formed by her thighs and the padded knee-spreader. Helpless, she felt her clit hardening again as his tongue darted from the domino mask to lick it.
She didn't want to. She wanted to keep her wits about her. She had to think of something she could do to make him untie her.
But she didn't know what. He was licking experimentally, as if he had never had his tongue in a girl before. Poor man probably didn't get many opportunities, she guessed. He was really not terrifying. He was pitiful. But pitiful or not, he had burned his bridges behind him. Now he had to kill her. Unless she killed him first.
"Mmmmmmm, that's nice," she said. "Do it some more."
Obligingly, he licked her clit and screwed his tongue into her gaping vagina. Little by little he was licking the powder off her open crotch. If he decided to put it in, at least it wasn't going to hurt. She wondered if he'd do it. Did he have the courage?
Suddenly she realized what he was going to do. He was angling his body around just like that sneaky floorwalker last night. His thing was rigid again. She knew he wanted her to suck it.
She didn't want to. She thought for a moment. Would she rather die than suck his Thing? It was a hard decision to make. He was licking her clit. His knob was growing harder by the second. Still she hesitated. Bite it? It might kill him, but probably not fast enough to keep him from killing her too. While she was trying to make up her mind, he straightened and forced her mouth open. Julia found herself gagging.
It was big! She couldn't breathe. She felt her bile rise in her throat. She was glad she hadn't eaten. He moaned and mewed, wailing his passion as she strove to eject his errant erection. She was choking, strangling, drowning as his ram drove its devious way down her throat. She felt his final ecstatic lunge, felt sudden spurting slickness, then it was over. He lay beside her, his body jerking spasmodically. She gagged and spat, trying to ignore the throbbing need in her own crotch. What would he do now?
This, she realized, was going to be her only chance. "Untie me," she whispered.
"Why?"
She took a deep breath and opened her mouth wide. Gently she nudged her way forward between his legs and got her mouth over his dangling balls. She bit just hard enough to let him know why he should untie her.
If the apartment hadn't been soundproof, Mr. Version's soprano shriek might have alerted City Hall. Julia waited a moment. When nothing happened, she brought her jaws together again. Frantic fingers began tearing at her ankles.
While he worked the tape loose, Julia tried to plan her next move. If he got loose now, he'd kill her for sure. How long could she keep her mouth locked over his hairy pouch? Already it seemed as if she had had it in the grip of her teeth for centuries.
Her ankles were free, but her wrists were still tied. She wiggled her hands and made an angry noise, the best she could do with her mouth full of hairy scrotum.
"I can't reach unless you let go," Mr. Version protested.
She bit harder. He screamed, then she let up. Panting and sobbing, he strained to reach behind her. She twisted toward him. He really was trying. She could feel his scrotum stretching, his balls pulling at the inner edges of her teeth. He couldn't make it. "You've got to let go!" he wailed. She bit again.
One corner of her mind was busily cataloguing odd facts: how his rampant raging Thing had shriveled to peanut size, how his scrotum seemed to shrink, trying to draw his tortured testicles up inside him. He strained and got a thumbnail under the tape around her wrists. He got it loose, then had to rest. She gave him a moment, then made an angry noise again. This time he moved promptly.
The tape tore. "The rest is farther down," he wailed. "Kill me, but I just can't do it."
Julia bit. He screamed and kicked wildly, not even trying for the tape. If only she knew more about male anatomy. If she bit down hard, bit them clear off, what would happen? Would he die? Would he faint from pain? Or would biting him off leave him mutilated but free to wreak his revenge on her? She couldn't lie here forever with his hairy pouch in her mouth. One sneeze or cough and he would be free.
If he fainted from pain, she could look for the razor. Where had he put it? How long to free herself working blind from behind? Would she end up slashing her wrists?
Julia felt her stomach churn. Any moment now she would retch. The instant her mouth opened, it would be all over. There was only one way to stay alive: kill him. She bit down hard.
She had not believed a man could scream so high, so ear-gratingly loud. She didn't even hear the door burst open.
Suddenly she was surrounded by uniformed men. She recognized the messenger boy with the lopsided grin who had waved at her an hour ago. The others were police. The messenger swung his fist in a short arc, and Mr. Version stopped screaming. Someone threw a blanket over Julia's naked body. The young man with the lopsided smile stripped the tape from her wrists. "You're going to be all right," he promised. She didn't think so. Suddenly she was weak. The floor tilted and abruptly the room seemed to spin around her falling body.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Back in the hospital again. The police had ignored her protests that she was all right, written them off as female hysteria. Clad only in an open-backed hospital gown, she lay fuming and gritting her teeth. Suddenly she knew what the Fern Lib people meant when they spoke of male chauvinism. An intern poked his head in. "How do I get out of here?" she asked.
"Search me. I'm not on your case."
"Then what're you snooping for?"
"I was looking for Dr. Carter," he said huffily, then left.
Just what I need! A kind understanding friend who'll ship me off to some other funny farm, if she doesn't send me back to that same fluff-bearded lecher.
Her face was swollen where Mr. Version had hit her, but her belly, where he'd hit her once with that barbed whip, wasn't even scratched. Her crotch burned from his close shave. In a few days, when it started growing out, she supposed it would really itch. But apart from that, there was nothing wrong. She didn't even need a douche despite having been given several by interns who all assumed she had been raped.
She had come out in better shape than Mr. Version.
Poor man! She hoped that she hadn't done him any permanent damage. But if she had cut off his sex drive and liberated him from those compulsions that dominated his life, maybe she had done him a favor. And if he ever got out of wherever they put him, she had done some other unsuspecting girl a favor.
I've been lucky, she decided. I've learned more in two weeks than lots of women learn in a lifetime. I've learned what kind of person I really am, what I really want, and how to get it. Most important, she had learned that no matter what she wanted or how weird, all those desires stemmed from the same body that yearned for apple pie and mother. She was a whole human being. She would never feel guilt again. She got out of bed and found her clothes in the closet.
Moments later she walked down a corridor. In the lobby she saw a policeman sitting in a lounge chair. She wandered about the first floor and found the side entrance.
There was a Richards Messenger Service van in the driveway. She was edging past it, when the driver leaned out. "Aren't you even going to say hello?"
It was the young man in her dream-the one with the lopsided smile and the crooked hanging Thing to match. Suddenly she realized that he had become curious and followed her after all the waving from the closed taxi. Abruptly she remembered how helpless she had felt. What would she have done, if he hadn't come bursting in with all those cops?
It had been embarrassing to be caught naked, shaven cunted, biting the balls off a deformed lunatic but, embarrassing or not, it beat being murdered.
"Can I give you a ride?"
Julia hesitated. Then she remembered he had brought the cops with him when he rescued her. He probably wanted to fuck her, but--who didn't? She got into the van. The engine was between the two front seats. It would be quite a stretch to get his hand on her knee. He began driving.
"Don't you want to know where I live?" she asked.
"I know."
"You do?"
"I live there too."
"Since when?"
"Since I got curious enough to follow you home. I thought if I moved into the same building, I'd have a chance to meet you."
"Nothing like a direct approach," she mused.
"It saves time."
She thought a moment. "You know," she began, "The first time I saw you, you were on a bicycle. A day later you'd graduated to a motorcycle. And now you're driving a van. You win promotions awfully fast."
"Richards Messenger Service is a growing company. Mr. Richards believes in equal opportunity for everyone. Every executive must work his way up from the bottom. Of course," he conceded, "Promotion is faster if your last name is Richards. The owner's my father."
Julia laughed. "I'm sorry about the way I screamed and ran that day. I had been looking for a job, and it turned out not to be the kind I thought it was. I thought you were trying to drag me back in there."
He grinned his lopsided smile. "My father warned me about that place."
"Oh?"
"He said the monthly raid was due. You got out just in time."
Julia shuddered. "You mean I could have been arrested as a--"
"You sure could have."
She decided to count her blessings. "Even then you already knew me. Where did we meet?" Then she felt a delayed reaction to his first explanation. "Your father warned you not to go to a ... "
"He's old fashioned. He doesn't realize young people don't buy it any more."
"You don't like girls?" She felt a sudden sharp disappointment.
"You were pulling up your pantyhose in a phone booth the first time I saw you. I rode my bicycle right into the side of a parked truck. I can't imagine what was on my mind."
Julia saw his sly lopsided grin. She tried not to smile, but she couldn't help giggling. "You know," she said, "I had a dream about you."
"What was it?"
"Well..." What the hell? He's seen me bare-assed and shaven. "I dreamed we were waltzing naked in a meadow full of flowers. And the funny thing was, your Thing hung a little to the left just like your smile."
"No kidding!" he laughed. "You really dreamed that?"
"Does it hang crooked?"
He checked his watch and picked up a microphone. There was a squawk of static. "This is Jimmy in No. Six. I don't feel good. Could you send somebody to my place and pick up the van for the rest of the day?"
"Roger wilco," the radio squawked.
"You haven't answered my question," Julia insisted. "Does it hang crooked like I dreamed it?"
Jimmy flashed that lopsided grin again. "We've got all afternoon to find out," he said.
CHAPTER NINE
He parked in front of the rooming house. They walked in together, and she hesitated in front of her door, but he urged her on past her street floor room. The upstairs hall was carpeted. Jimmy opened his door, and she thought for an instant of Mr. Version's torture chamber. This room was unique too, but different. Her parents had been rich. Now she saw what money could do if one didn't need to impress anyone. The whole apartment reflected the reserved elegance of Old Money.
"You couldn't have done all this in just a week," she protested. "You didn't follow me here."
"I confess," he laughed. "It's handy to the office. Actually, I didn't even notice you at first."
"Oh?" She felt sharp disappointment, then saw his sly lopsided grin. "How long did it take to notice me?"
"You must've had a heavy suitcase or something, because you were bent over backing out of the cab."
She was never quite sure when he was kidding. "Is that the part of me you noticed first?"
Jimmy grinned. He put his arms around her, and she felt a warm glow through her body, rising like mercury in a thermometer. She turned her face up, and he kissed her.
It was a slow, leisurely kiss. Julia felt the red glow suffuse her body. She gasped, and his tongue invaded her. Julia wanted to break away, then she was intrigued by the sensation of another tongue in her mouth. She returned his kiss and was rewarded when his embracing arms slid smoothly down to the hem of the mini. She felt his belly grind against her, felt the slight bulk of her skirt rising between them.
Her breath came shorter. She had never realized a simple kiss could be so exciting. She was gasping for breath, feeling a sudden rushing glow in her belly that had come to her once before, after long minutes of Mary Carter's ministrations.
Finally he broke off the kiss to peel her mini over her head. He wasn't rough like the others who had undressed her. He peeled her dress off so gently that hardly a hair was displaced. She stood before him in bra and pantyhose, wondering suddenly if he had ever seen her dance at Jackrabbit Jack's. She was sure he hadn't. His eyes glowed as he inventoried her lovely lithe body.
He kissed her again, rubbing his scratchy uniform against her bare midriff. She wormed her fingers between their bodies and began unbuttoning his shirt.
Still running his tongue gently in and out her mouth, he dropped his arms and allowed her to peel off his shirt. It was just like her dream, she realized. He wore nothing beneath his shirt and, unlike other men she had seen, his tanned chest was not hairy. Running hands across his torso, she discovered he had a surprisingly wide chest, smoothly muscled but without those horrible bulges she had seen in weight lifter's ads.
"How'd you get those muscles?" she asked.
Jimmy grinned. They stood apart and looked at one another. "Water polo," he said. "Are you a champion sprinter?"
Julia didn't know what he meant. Before she could ask any questions, his arms were around her again, fiddling with the hooks of her bra. She remembered Mr. Version's expert fingers the day he had undressed her. Suddenly she was patient, grateful for Jimmy's fumbling fingers. She struggled with his belt buckle. Then he knelt and it was out of reach.
When he was on his knees, Jimmy's face was directly below her firm, up-jutting breasts. She thanked heavens that her waist was small enough to make her tits look larger than they actually were. Jimmy seemed to find nothing wrong with them. He kissed a nipple, and she felt it swell to rigidity, then suddenly he was kissing the other one, darting circles of tickling torture around her little breasts, licking their tender undersides, flicking his tongue at her hardening nipples.
He buried his face in her breasts, burrowing in like some digging animal, and she was overcome with a feeling of sudden unbearable tenderness. It had never been like this before--not even with gentle, understanding Mary. Her breath came in short, sobbing gasps as he filled her with an ardent, aching desire so unlike any of those other abrupt, brutally physical experiences.
Slowly Jimmy kissed his way up from her bosom, up her shoulders to the ticklish hollow of her neck, nibbled her ear until she wanted to scream with pleasure. Then their tongues were touching again. They stood silently swaying in the middle of the softly lit room. Faint music came from a hidden hi-fi.
Julia was melting, her knees so suddenly weak she slipped from his embrace and knelt. She rested her forehead against his crotch until her breathing became steadier. Then she began fiddling with the buckle again. It unclasped with a sudden snap. She began peeling his tight-legged trousers down, irrelevantly remembering the part of her dream where he had so effortlessly kicked them off.
Finally he stood before her, clad only in his lopsided grin and white broadcloth boxer shorts. He drew her to her feet. They kissed again. Never had Julia felt such sustained excitement. Her breath was ragged. She could feel her heart beating faster than it had the day she had panicked and run from him.
She felt his hands inside the waistband of her pantyhose. Delicately he worked the gossamer garment down over the swell of her hips, past Joy Junction and down her smooth-skinned thighs. She felt his muscular hands ease her pantyhose past her knees, down her calves, felt the wispy cloth cascade around her ankles. Gently he lifted first one foot, then the other free from the nylon entanglement.
He tossed her pantyhose atop the common pile of their clothing, then stood to kiss her again. This time she could see a bulge in his boxer shorts. Good heavens, I'm practically dying and he's just getting it up!
She knelt to peel his boxer shorts from his waist, force them past his rampant rigidity. His Thing sprang back to attention as his shorts eased past and dropped at his feet.
She stayed on her knees, studying his Thing. She had never had time--never really wanted to look at one so closely before. But this was Jimmy's. She hoped she would be seeing a lot of it. It was long and firm, with a bulging purple-veined foreskin that permitted the tip of his meatus to peep out at her. A thick stringy vein ran down its bottom to connect with the hairy pouch that had been Mr. Version's undoing.
She put her hand to Jimmy's, gently probing to feel the twin jewels within. She saw this Thing swell to greater, more demanding rigidity. His hands were on her shoulders, trying to draw her up again. She gave his scrotum a final caress and was rising when she suddenly changed her mind. She dropped to her knees and gave the tip of his Thing a quick kiss.
Jimmy swept her off her feet, carrying her effortlessly across the room. She supposed they were going to the couch where he would put her down and then it would be Barney all over again as he huffed and puffed above her. But he didn't deposit her on the couch. Instead he rearranged his grip until she was facing him, thighs locked around his waist, arms round his neck. Then he sat on a low hassock. He got his arms under her, supporting her weight effortlessly in his cupped hands. He lowered her gently and delicately until she felt the shuddering tip of his Thing probing the gaping petals of flesh between her widespread thighs.
She felt it center on her vaginal lips, felt him lower her delicately and slowly. She felt herself open up, stretch to accommodate his throbbing masculinity. She felt a tiny tickle as his glans touched her exposed clit. Then she felt his arms relax as he released her body, and her pussy engulfed the remaining distance of his rod.
It was in all the way now. Julia could feel her bottom jammed tight against the bony prominence of his pelvis. Suddenly she realized that this position, impaling herself by her own weight, offered greater possibilities for depth than any of the huff and puff man-on-top things she had experienced before.
They sat relaxed for a moment with Jimmy enjoying the warm wet sensation of her snatch, and Julia facing him, spiked on his rigid spindle. She moved slightly, becoming more comfortable and feeling him reach new depths. It felt so good--so deliciously and sensuously warm just to sit here on his lap so that her face was even with his.
They kissed, and she felt a sudden rush of passion. She began breathing raggedly, and she hoped he would remain perfectly still for the next few moments. If he moved or wiggled the least little bit, she didn't know what she'd do. Probably scream, shriek, howl--it felt so good to her.
Imperceptibly he began moving, rocking gently back and forth. She felt her tender tits slide up and down his chest with each rocking movement. She felt his turgid Thing slide in and out, going deeper each time he leaned back. She moved forward, thrusting her weight down around his probing prod, rubbing her breasts, midriff, belly against his muscular body in a smooth lascivious slide.
They began rocking faster. His mouth was kissing her nipples again, driving her ragged breathing past the point of no return. She felt the funny rushing sensation in her belly, felt her clit flutter as it rubbed his bony tuft. Each time they rocked, she could feel the tip of his tool touch something tender and sensitive way up in her vaginal tube. She felt the familiar unbearable tension. It was building stronger, throbbing, threatening to explode as Jimmy continued his inexorable torturing rock back and forth.
She wanted to stop. She wanted to do anything to end the impossible elation. She thought that her heart and lungs would burst if it didn't end soon. "No!" she gasped, "Wait a while!"
Jimmy kept on kissing her nipples, running his hands up and down her lithe body, drawing her in closer, moving deeper, harder, faster.
He had a hand in between their close-locked crotches, fingering her marble-hard clit. Then his other hand was invading her from behind, inserting still another sensation into her over-stimulated body.
Julia wanted to scream, shriek her ecstasy to the world. Suddenly she wondered if the walls of this luxurious apartment were soundproof. She wasn't hearing the constant barrage of strange noises that filled her room below. But she had no time to wonder about it.
She heard a faint banshee-like wail of pure sensuality. It was her own voice. She could feel it now--the intolerable strain, the sudden rush had culminated in some kind of thrilling internal explosion. She was melting, dissolving, crumbling to tiny shapeless bits as Jimmy's relentless rammer continued its throbbing thrusts.
Then, just as the storm within her was dying, she felt his rocking movements speed up. His loins tensed as he plunged upward at the end of each stroke, achieving new depths of penetration. His lunging found some hidden trigger within her. It was starting all over again.
Shrieking, kissing, wailing, biting his shoulder as she fought to retain her sanity, she felt his Thing quiver and spurt while she ascended to that unbearable explosive tension. Then just as suddenly, she was dissolving, melting, flowing in great sheets of liquid fire as his thudding Thing fired its load deep into her inner being.
They fell off the hassock, rolled on the rug, and then he was atop her. She locked her ankles behind his back and struggled to contain his passion.
And still he touched the secret trigger a third time. Her entire being exploded. Tiny pieces of her soul seemed to be strained through a sieve of pleasure. Then she was transformed into a wonderfully warm, drowsy relaxing state, feeling his warm breath on her cheek as they dozed still linked together.
She woke moments later as he gently freed himself. It's over, she thought. She didn't know whether to be disappointed. It had been so wonderful. Surely it could never be that marvelous again.
Jimmy returned with a damp towel and began wiping the sticky spots on her lush little body. Then he began kissing her again. She stared unbelieving. Already his reviving rod was at half-mast. She reached out to touch it, then felt the hardening maleness in her hand.
He kissed the nape of her neck. She trembled. The tearing sensation was building again. No, she thought, not already! But it was coming. He bussed his way down her shoulder, planting burning kisses over her perky little breasts, forcing her nipples into eager rigidity as he worked his way down, past her slender waist. He tongued her navel, kissed his way down her belly, kissed her clean-shaven pubic patch, then nuzzled his way between her cunt-lips.
She wanted to wait, rest, hold her thighs tight, but against her will they were opening, lusting for his kiss. Then his tongue was in her, his head between her thighs as he licked her clit back to a pulsating rigidity, ran his tantalizing tongue round the gateway to her flushed vagina. She felt the raging rush in her abdomen again, then realized she had nothing to kiss.
Frantically, she wormed around, moving gently in order not to break the tender junction between his mouth and her joyous vulva. She found his Thing, emerging beneath its half-peeled foreskin.
She got her mouth over it, forming her lips in a careful "O", fearful she might hurt him with her teeth. His prepuce snapped back the rest of the way. She began running her tongue in gentle circles around the throbbing tip of his tool, and from his suddenly frantic kissing of her own tender target, she knew that she was giving him almost as much pleasure as he was giving her.
What would it feel like to have that great throbbing thing fire into her mouth? She didn't know, but she resolved to swallow it, enjoy it, do any and everything to give Jimmy as much joy as he was giving her. She felt the blushing rush in her belly again. Then abruptly, in a brief thrashing tangle of arms and legs, Jimmy was atop her, ram-slamming as he poured his passion into her raging receptacle. Now they were both biting, kissing, moaning as the love fire consumed them.
Moments later Julia awoke with a start. She lay on her side on the rug, and Jimmy was between her thighs. She felt him move lazily, felt his Thing inside her. It was still hard. Not ragingly rigid like a moment ago, but still able to move very slowly in and out with a gentle rhythm as natural as breathing. This time she knew there would be no swelling urge of passion, not for a while anyhow. They would just lie there, moving barely enough to keep it hard. They could do it for hours. Then suddenly she realized why she had awakened with such a start.
"You know," she said lazily, "I didn't notice if it hangs to one side. Does it?"
Jimmy flashed his funny lopsided grin. "We've got all afternoon to find out," he said. "And if you don't know by evening there's still all night."
"And then what?" Julia asked.
"If you're really curious, I guess we have the rest of our lives."
Julia thought a moment, then finally guessed this was Jimmy's way of saying he loved her.