Chapter 10

Eleanor didn't expect Mark Torrance to invite her back to the house he occupied on Faculty Row, nor did he. The steaks were as good as any she had eaten in Chicago, which wasn't surprising because the farmers did their own slaughtering and fed their cattle on corn in the pens right on their own farms close by. When they left the restaurant, he got into his car and let her follow behind him as he took the highway back towards Marwell, turning off under a viaduct about twelve miles from the little college town.

There was an abandoned farm to the right, off the highway, and the barbed-wire fence had already been cut at a dozen or more places. He beckoned to her and took her hand as she walked up to him, and together they made their way through a yawning section of the fence and on eastward.

A full harvest moon shone in the sky, and the weather was unseasonably warm. There would be a cold spell next week, the radio had warned. But for now, it was almost seventy-five degrees with a gentle breeze from the west.

"I'll bet you've never been on a farm before, city girl," he said jokingly, turning to her after they had gone a few paces.

"You'd win your bet, country boy," she laughed huskily, and gave his hand a suggestive squeeze. Did the guy actually think he was going to take her in her sparkling silver lam‚ dress off to some abandoned haystack and maul her around? If he did, he had another think coming.

As if he had read her mind, Mark Torrance banteringly remarked, "I suppose you think I brought you out here to neck."

"Well, didn't you?"

"Not in the least. I'm a firm believer in the old slogan of never trying to make out the first date."

"Now that's a singular expression for a college professor to use."

"Oh, I'm not a dry-as-dust professor yet, Eleanor. I'm only thirty, after all. And I even write paperback novels. At least, I'm trying my hand at it. Sold a couple of pretty good short stories to a national magazine a little while back."

"I'd love to read your novel when it's finished."

"I'll give you a personally autographed copy. I'm using a pen name, naturally. The powers that be might just be a bit stuffy if they found out their English literature professor was the author of a sexy romance. But at least it's youthful writing."

"If it deals with sex, then I know I want to read it."

"Everything deals with sex in one way or another. Only the bluenoses and the reformers pretend it doesn't exist or try to bowdlerize it out of literature. Take 'Ulysses', for example. A generation, our courts banned it as obscene. Now it's recognized as a classic, which it always was. It's just a matter of intellectual honesty. We'd be better off if people stopped trying to censor what's natural and tried to eliminate bigotry and prejudice and ignorance and fear. The efforts they waste in burning books or trying to burn them could be put to wonderfully better use in emancipating all of us from economic poverty and illiteracy and a lot of other evils far more deadly than a so-called racy book. There. I had to get that out as a man who teaches literature and tries to get his students to approach the subject with an open mind. Lecture finished for the night. Come on, let's walk."

"Isn't this private property?"

"Yes, and it still is. But the man who owns it wants to sell. He's an old man, and his wife died three years ago and his only son was killed in Vietnam last spring. So he's living with a younger brother a few miles from here. I might even buy the place some day. I like the idea of being a gentleman farmer. And it's close enough to Chicago to drive in when I want to hear the orchestra or go to the opera or maybe even a night club, which we don't have in this area at all, as you probably know."

"I can't exactly picture you as a farmer, Mark."

He chuckled, squatted down, took up a handful of earth and sifted it through his fingers. "I can't either, to tell the truth. But if I have any luck writing and decide in a few years to make a career out of it instead of just teaching, this would be a wonderful spot. See that wide low hill over to the left? It's part of the property, and I could build a little cottage there, just for writing, with my living quarters off where Mr. Crozier's dilapidated house still stands. And I could either do some of the work myself or hire a tenant hand to work the land for me. That way, I could have my food bills at least halved. Of course, I wouldn't do that till I got married-and that's not--likely for a while, anyhow."

"Oh? You prefer being a bachelor?"

"No. But I'm not sure I'm exactly monogamous by instinct. I like girls, but that doesn't narrow it down to one for life. Not now, anyway."

"Then maybe there was someone once you might have narrowed down for?"

"You're very perceptive, Eleanor. I keep having to revise my opinion of you."

"I hope it's favorable."

He looked at her for a moment, and she straightened with unconscious pride of bearing, knowing herself to be on display. It was as if the two of them were the only ones left alive in the world. Rows on rows of un-tended, dying cornstalks, and, over two hundred yards to the right, a clearing where once there might have been soybeans or tomatoes. In the distance, the vague outline of the old farmhouse, a two-story wooden frame building with Gothic arch at the rooftop, wood that had once been white and was now dirty gray and merging with the darkness of night as the moon's rays played on it.

"Let's see," he said at last, taking her by the wrist and drawing her towards him. She uttered a soft laugh of acquiescence as his left arm curved round her waist and his mouth came down on hers. His kiss was impersonal, almost clinical.

"Well?" she asked tauntingly.

"You smell of Chanel Number Five, one of my favorite scents. And you don't have too much lipstick, which is good because it won't be incriminating."

"I think you could write detective stories, Professor Torrance."

"Possibly. Now let's try again."

This time, his fingers sank into her shoulder blades, forcing her round breasts hard against his chest and his lips were demanding, even cruel. Eleanor moaned softly, and then her creamy arms clasped round him and she found herself responding. The almost cynical, elemental force of his kiss piqued her like a kind of insistent challenge; and it was out of character, for it was she who was the challenger, not the challenged.

"That's better," he said hoarsely. Let's walk some more."

"What are you thinking?"

"That it would be fun to have you in a room with a locked door and a comfortably wide bed, and that it isn't going to happen. Not at Marwell anyway."

"There must be motels in the vicinity."

"Oh, there are. But I'm too well known in the community, and so are you."

"What do you mean, Mark?" she asked wonderingly.

He uttered a short, ironic laugh. "There's a very effective grapevine at Marwell. Almost every professor on campus has heard about the sophomore who dared a young man to climb up to her room in Comstock Hall and then sent him packing."

Eleanor Landers impulsively giggled. Suzy Mersh had really toiled in her behalf. It had been worth the offer of paying Suzy's rent on that lucky room.

"I did that to get attention so they'd pledge me at a very important sorority, Mark. Can you blame a big-city girl who finds herself exiled to a prison like Marwell? My folks thought I needed isolating, but I swore I'd have fun anyway in spite of that."

"No, I don't entirely blame you. I might be more inclined to blame your parents for not having taken a hairbrush to you at a tender age when you could still be influenced in the right direction."

"Now you're being nasty."

"I just don't like teasers, honey. Either you're all woman or not, but there's no halfway stage in my book-or any of the ones I'm going to write."

"That particular young man didn't mean a thing to me. Besides, he's got a steady girl. I just proved he was like any other man-an opportunist who thought he'd sneak himself some fun with another girl while his financee wasn't looking."

"So you proved your point, men are human. How about you?"

She drew back her hand to slap his face, but he caught her wrist and his other arm went round her supple waist to pull her to him as his mouth brutally fused on hers to stifle her cry of indignant anger. Eleanor writhed against him, and then again her sensual senses surged to the fore as his vitality encompassed her. Her hands locked at his neck so that he could feel her sharp nails, and her lips parted under his, and he felt the sudden stab of her adroit pink tongue.

Now his hands roamed at will over her back and hips, caressing the glossy-smooth silver lam‚ as it plaqued over the rotundities of her firm resilient buttocks and hips and upper thighs, while Eleanor writhed and gasped, roused to fulmination by the audacity of his caressing. It was better than it had been with Henri; doing it outdoors standing up like this alone in a deserted cornfield under the moon invested this amorous byplay with a spicy tang that excited her. Yet one part of her mind was craftily figuring just how to turn his desire into her profit. The recorder for sure their next date. Oh, there would be a next date, and a next after that one. The way his fingers were stroking her, she knew he wanted to have her. It was so easy. Even the most intellectual men could be governed by the law of the flesh.

"No, darling, not so fast, please-you-you're making me giddy," she protested, feigning a near-swooning ecstasy as she drew her face away from his.

Instantly he released her, his face taut and darkened with desire. But he too was in full control of his senses. "You're quite a woman, Eleanor," he said. "And now it's time to go back. You in your car, I in mine. And Monday, I'll expect you to sit decorously in my classroom and devote your attention to the lecture."

"Mayn't I even cross my legs, darling?" she teased him, tracing her forefinger tip over his nose, then his rugged jaw.

"What's the point? You've already convinced me you've got gorgeous legs. Why flaunt it in class, where I can't do anything about it?"

"Oh? Then you want to see me again, outside of class, I take it."

"You knew I would when we started out tonight, honey. Let's be completely honest. Only we aren't going to rush this. Everything gains by prolongation and waiting. Let's make sure this isn't just playacting and sham."

"It isn't. I don't kiss every man the way I just did you, Mark dear."

"Good. We'll leave it at that tonight. Come on, Eleanor. It's turning a bit chilly."