Chapter 2
As the light went out in the garage and the tall, wiry figure of Dan Jurgens moved in darkness to the partly open door and disappeared into the red-brick house, a tall blonde bespectacled woman slowly straightened from her breathless hiding place on all fours in front of the south wall of the garage. Behind her was a tall hedge through which frequent and similarly stealthy journeys to this very same hiding place had cleared a kind of opening to it. She blinked her large, dark-blue eyes behind thick horn-rimmed spectacles, leaned with her back against the wall of the garage and then closed her eyes and drew a long shuddering breath. Beads of sweat glistened" on her high-arching forehead, and her thin nostril wings were dilating spasmodically. The full, sumptuous round breasts, closely spaced beneath a rather shapeless blue cotton dress, rose and fell voluminously, and she planted both palms against the brick wall to steady herself.
Astrid Fullhan, twenty-eight, the wife of an easy-going, mild-mannered commercial artist six years her senior, had watched the shameful and painful penance exacted from Betty Jurgens' voluptuous naked posterior by her father's chastening right palm, and it had left her shaken and trembling and pale.
She was five feet seven and a half inches in height, svelte, yet the lushness of her breasts and buttocks provided a striking sensual contrast. Her light-brown hair was coiffed in two long pigtails, to which tiny blue ribbons were tied near the ends. It was an affectation out of her childhood, for as the only child born to a middle-aged couple who ran a small boarding house on the southern border of Connecticut, Astrid Palmer had known very little of the normal recreation and foibles of a happy child. Her parents had sermonized her many times, on subjects ranging from morality to silent self-effacement at the table and in company. They had both died from pneumonia, when she had been nineteen, cloistered and obviously thoroughly prudish as regards sexual outlook. Her father had left enough insurance for her to continue college and to take art courses, since water colors had been her first real hobby. After graduation from an all-girls' private college, she had gone to work as an assistant librarian in a little Massachusetts town some fifty miles from Summerton. There, just four years ago last month, Matthew Fullhan, a slowly prospering free-lance artist, had gone on one of his brief vacations to do some landscape painting, which was his own hobby. Quite by accident, he had met the tall, reticent blonde young woman while walking through the woods and coming upon a clearing where she had set up her easel. He had struck up a conversation with her, they had discovered that painting was a common bond between them, and a few months later Astrid Palmer had rather apprehensively changed her name to Astrid Fullhan.
Matthew Fullhan, sturdy, with curly light-brown hair and gentle blue eyes and soft-spoken manner, had been a virgin also, except for one fumbling experience in college which had left him frantically frustrated and also somewhat insecure as to his own masculine powers with the opposite sex. In Astrid, however, he discovered a curious melange of almost overpowering inhibition blended with a righteous sense of marital duty. She had grimly told herself that, because this man who had been the first to pay any attention to her and to cultivate her intellectually, was kind and decent and had offered her the role of wife, it was her bound duty to submit as the Good Book decreed that a good wife should to the importunities of her consort. Similarly, Matthew Fullhan, though secretly lusting for his tall, full-bosomed, ripe-hipped wife, respected her innate modesty and prudery which he mistook for ingrained chastity. Hence his "demands" upon her were infrequent, perhaps once or twice a week at the most. And these unions were brief, under the shelter of a completely darkened bedroom, and with Astrid insisting that neither of them be naked for the conjugal embrace. To this day, four years and a month after their wedding night, Matthew Fullhan had never seen his blonde wife naked as the day she had been born, and she in her turn had never seen him entirely uncovered.
Both had agreed, with a kind of brave show of sophistication, that because they were both creative and intellectual people, it would be unwise to have children at the very outset of the marriage. Blushing with shame, Astrid had gone to her husband's family physician, a kindly old man who understood her far better than she dreamed, but who was helpful enough to provide her with contraceptives so that no children would result from even these mild accesses of physical desire which Matthew seemed to experience far more than his repressed blonde bride.
Nevertheless, submissive though Astrid was to the scheduled weekly embraces of her husband, she had begun over the past year to experience disturbing sensations, and these had been brought to a crux when, early this spring, she had happened to see Betty Jurgens and Henry Warren kissing passionately at the back of the garden of the Jurgens' yard next to the garage. That had been when Betty's father had been in Boston purchasing art supplies and visiting an advertising agency who furnished him with about half of his commissions.
A few days later, quite by chance, while she was pruning the hedges near her neighbor's garage, Astrid discovered that several of the bricks had come loose. Out of curiosity, no more at the time, she had moved through the hedge and pulled away two or three of these bricks, only to discover that thereby she created a quite large peephole. And when, the very next afternoon, Henry Warren had leaped over the fence of the garden and gone right to the garage to meet Betty in another of their forbidden rendezvous, Astrid Fullhan had seen him from her kitchen window, stealthily hurried out to the hedge, moved through it, and crouched down to remove the bricks to see what was taking place.
She had watched the auburn-haired girl and the gangling young collegian seated on the trunk locked in a passionate embrace, with Henry's hand slipping under Betty's skirt and stroking the bare flesh of her inner thighs near her panties. She could hear Betty's languorous sighs and little whimpering moans as the gangling youth's hand finally centered on the most sensitive spot of all. And if she had any doubts, it had been confirmed by the redhead's sudden excited gasp, "Ohhhh, Henry honey, tickling my pussy like that just drives me crazy-oh, please stop, before we both do something that'll get us both into trouble, please, darling!"
When she had heard that, the blonde matron had closed her eyes and shivered, her pale-pink-sheened cheeks had suddenly turned a fiery red, and she had pressed one hand against a suddenly surging full round breast, so hard that against her palm she could feel her own nipple palpitating and stiffening.
She couldn't have explained what compelling instinct had drawn her as a magnet draws a pin towards this hiding place and why it was so important that she hear and see what Betty Jurgens was doing. For she had forgotten, crowded back into the farthest filing-place of the mind, what she quite unexpectedly seen when she was fourteen . . . coming home from school one wintry day and taking a short cut through the alley to reach her parents' house, there had been a window in an English basement apartment with the shade somehow not drawn. And quite by accident she had glanced down and to her left and halted there, her mouth gaping, her eyes bulging and glassy at the forbidden sight. There on a bed, a buxom honey-haired woman, plump and naked except for gunmetal-gray nylons with red rosette garters high on her ripe thighs, her knees aloft and straddled as she received between them the wiry, hairy body of a gray-haired man who wore only his socks. His hands were under her jutting, succulent, round buttocks, hoisting them upward as he thrust himself to the hilt inside her, and her arms wrapped tightly round his shoulders. Her head had been tilted back, her eyes wide and ecstatic, and Astrid had seen the look of stricken lust indelibly inscribed on the woman's face ... a look she had never forgotten.
Only the night before, her mother had given her a stern lecture on how important it was for a girl in her teens not to encourage in the slightest way any boy at school or even to speak to him on the street because it could lead to terrible trouble. She had hinted how sometimes young people forgot themselves and ruined their lives. And she had obliquely mentioned the sexual act, though of course using words that had no lustful images for the young girl's mind to retain. But those words, combined with what Astrid had inadvertently seen that afternoon, had remained with the lonely blonde girl all of her days.
And because of the restrictions and the inhibitions which had become so naturally a part of her life even in marriage, she had tried to crowd back into her mind, where they would be forgotten, that salacious sight and those meaningful words. But now seeing vivacious Betty Jurgens sneaking off to neck and pet with her young lover and discovering the loose bricks and how that could be turned into a voyeuristic hiding place where she could watch all the lascivious wickedness of those youngsters without herself committing a sin, had begun to waken the long dormant sensuality that was inherent to both the soul and the tormented, repressed flesh of Astrid Fullhan.
And so, on this memorable Friday afternoon, having remembered how she had overheard Dan Jurgens angrily warn Betty not to let him catch her with that fellow again, Astrid Fullhan had found chores to do in her kitchen all through the afternoon, secretly yearning for Betty to break her promise to her father and to invite that wicked boy over. And, sure enough, she had.
That was when she had gone to the telephone and dialed the number of the Summer-ton Bulletin, and when the young apprentice Tom Murray, who sometimes helped set type when old Mr. Fisher wasn't feeling well enough to handle the whole paper, answered the phone, she had asked him to call Mr. Jurgens. And when Dan Jurgens had said, "Hello, this is Jurgens," Astrid Fullhan, holding a handkerchief over her voice, had said in a forced high-pitched voice to disguise her own identity, "I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Jurgens, but I think you ought to know that your daughter is entertaining that boy you don't like in your garage right now," and had then hung up.
She had leaned against the wall of the hallway beside the phone, closing her eyes and shivering. A warm sticky sensation had begun to pervade the insides of her legs, and she could even feel her cuntal lips quivering and moistening. She had put a hand against her mount, pressing her palm hard through her skirt until she could feel the pain of that pressure. But it had been sweet, exquisite pain, and she had begun to tremble and to feel her legs give way beneath her.
Then she had waited a little while, until she was certain that Betty and Henry were inside the garage, and had crept out into the garden and gone through the break in the hedge to find the place she knew so well.
And when she had seen the redhead pulled across her father's lap, her skirt lofted and her panties relentlessly yanked down, Astrid Fullhan had reverted to the most secret practice of all, one which her husband would never have guessed she still employed as a mature married woman. She had put her hand up her skirt and into the leg of her frilly pink nylon panties until her forefinger touched the twitching cuntal lips. And then, her breath coming quickly and feverishly, her body oozing with the sweat of vicarious passion, she had watched Betty's naked behind jerk and weave and twist and redden furiously while her finger had rubbed and touched and caressed the moistening cuntal lips until, at the very climax of the spanking when Dan Jurgens had at last halted, she had felt the blissful waves of crashing fulfillment sweep her into rapturous limbo.
She had waited until both of them had left the garage, and then carefully made her way back to the kitchen, heated a cup of coffee, strong and black and without sugar, and gulped it down. She knew that Matthew wouldn't be home tonight, because he had decided to spend the weekend in Boston to get some art supplies and also to have Sunday dinner with the family of the agency art director who gave him most of his work. She thought with a kind of tortured longing of the long night ahead and her being alone in bed in her nightgown and her own prying finger pretending that it was a secret lover wooing her and bringing her to the shattering fulfillment she had known while watching Betty Jurgens get her bare-bottom punishment. And because there wasn't any man, because of course she was faithful to Matthew and always would be because she had been brought up that way, there couldn't be any sin to experiencing the sweet pleasures she had learned to give herself after she had seen two other people act in a sinful, lustful way. No one could ever know what went on in another person's mind, and Matthew would never dream what went on in hers, she would see to that. . . .