Chapter 3
Kathy was glad her father and Kay had left for the city the next morning before she finished dressing. She was certain her face would tell them something. She knew she never would look at them in the same way, just as she had seen her mother with new eyes after witnessing the horrible spectacle in the stable as a little girl.
Unlike most cases, the divorce of her parents had not been an emotional circus with the lone adolescent child the prize in the center ring. There was never any question about custody. Her father had anted up a large cash settlement on the condition that Lillian never again set foot in the State of California, or make any effort to contact Kathy.
From the age of twelve, Kathy was the mistress of the Carlson house, the only woman other than servants. She quickly mastered the supervision of a household, leaving every duty to be performed by others. The major disadvantage in the new solo arrangement came the day she did what she had been doing ever since when confronted with a problem of a personal feminine nature. She had gone to Jean.
Kathy ate a light brunch and packed her tennis costume in a bag. She climbed in her car and drove over to the country club. The old man at the gate, a cripple Kathy had long ago decided was senile from the eager delighted grins he always gave her, waved her through with his cane without leaving his stool in the tollhouse.
Jean, who had driven from home wearing her tennis clothes, was waiting for Kathy in the parking lot, sitting on the fender of her new Mustang smoking a cigarette. Jean stalled the welcome until Kathy had joined her alongside the car, and then she dropped the bomb.
"I'll give it to you straight. I'm pregnant."
She said it evenly, as a simple statement of fact, without the slightest show of emotion.
"B-but how?"
Under different circumstances Jean would have laughed out loud.
"The usual way. You mean who?"
Kathy nodded, or she thought she nodded, not sure it wasn't just the weight of her jaw dropping.
"He's a medical student from Southern California. We met at a party over the Memorial Day weekend. I had too much to drink and... well, it happened."
"He took advantage of you."
"Advantage, hell! I loved every minute of it. I never felt so gloriously female and wonderful in my whole life. It was great. I was stupid, that's all."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, Kathy, when are you going to stop behaving like you're starring in old Margaret O'Brien movies? Doesn't that dreamboat Craig ever stick it to you? I'd let him if he was mine."
"Heavens, no!" Kathy replied. "Not until we're married."
"That's your hangup. Mine is that my period is four weeks overdue."
"Have you seen a doctor?"
"You nuts? My father's a dear and glorious physician, remember? The medical Mafia has a pipeline that puts the CIA to shame. Dad would know the minute the rabbit died. I have to handle this on my own. With your help."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Be my cover. Go with me on a cruise to Mexico. You see the sights and I'll see an abortionist."
Kathy was staggered by such an idea.
"That's terrible. Doesn't the fellow want to marry you?"
"He doesn't know and I'm not going to tell him. We're big girls and we have to be responsible for our mistakes. I wouldn't marry him regardless. He's studying proctology. Can you feature talking hemorrhoids at the breakfast table?"
Jean's brash proposal made Kathy's head spin. What made it all the more strange was that Jean had no remorse whatsoever about giving up the virginity that Kathy valued so highly. And to a virtual stranger. In fact, she relished the memory of surrendering it. Jean no longer was a fit person to hear Kathy's problems; she, like the others near to her, was committed to the life of the flesh, from which there was no turning back.
"I was going to ask your advice today... about a personal matter," Kathy shook her head, seeing the irony.
"I presume about S-E-X. Take my word, it's groovy. But be smart. What do you say about Mexico?"
"Let me think about it while I change," Kathy said.
"Okay. I'll be waiting on the court."
Jean left for the clay playing courts and Kathy walked with her head in a fog in the other direction, toward the women's locker room beside the pool. Grayson, the maintenance man, was coming out as she entered, carrying his toolbox under his arm. She tilted her head in thanks as he held the door open for her with his back, Kathy hardly noticing who it was, the silly notions of the night before overwhelmed by the weight of subsequent developments.
"Afternoon, Miss Carlson. Fine day for your little tennis game," he said, glancing up and down her body with undisguised longing.
Kathy didn't even hear him, too preoccupied was she with the lewd images of Jean and her faceless man, her father and Kay, and even herself and Craig naked on the dark beach, all blurring together in her head.
She stepped inside a dressing cubicle and drew the curtain behind her. She was startled to see her own reflection, her troubled face straining in a futile quest for answers, looking back at her. A new full-length mirror had been installed, a good idea probably suggested by some of the older women who were weary of bending over backwards like contortionists to see if their slips showed while dressing after a day at poolside.
Kathy kicked off her sandals and changed into sweatsocks and sneakers. She pulled the bright paint-splashed granny dress over her blonde head and unhooked the bra, tossing both down on the bench and picking up her tennis suit. She turned to the mirror and hesitated, naked except for bikini panties through which bulged the golden triangle above her vagina.
Kathy closely studied herself in the mirror, mystified by what it was there on her body that turned a sensible young man like Craig into an unreasoning animal. Her breasts were large and full, but they were only breasts. Every woman had them. She took a lot of envious ribbing about their size from Jean and girls at school, which made her blush. Jean told her if they swapped some ass for some titty, both of them could have perfect hourglass figures. Jean's hips were full and rounded, while Kathy's were slender and compact. Jean mercilessly kidded Kathy about her thinner hips: "Honey, the guys say the sweetest meat is closest to the bone."
Kathy was beginning to see everything with a sexual connotation, and that worried her. She remembered the damage of promiscuity. It had cost her mother a good marriage and was about to result in the destruction of an inborn fetus in Jean's womb. Kathy herself had gambled by not letting Craig take excessive liberties, and she was certain he respected her more for it.
Thinking of Craig, her hand absently slid down the front of her belly to her crotch, gently feeling for the clitoris through the panties. The effect was instantaneous. The sensory nub of her vagina filled to a bursting hardness and Kathy's body jerked as if the finger had wandered into an open light socket. She had to see, to closely examine this part of the body that operated independently of her conscious commands. Kathy poked her head out the curtain and looked around. The locker room was empty. She slipped out of the panties and moved closer to the mirror, her hands parting the golden patch and peeling back the fleshy cunt-lips to expose the raw pink mouth of her unmolested vagina. The clitoris protruded like a bud, tingling and throbbing, crying to be stroked back to peaceful inactivity.
Kathy touched her clitoris again and felt her knees give forward, her loins instinctively leaning into the stimulation and the automatic pump in her vagina clicking on to feed liquid lubricant to its walls, drooling out the open mouth of her cunt. Now her hand was drawn to the pulsating bulb magnetically, soothing it with a single stroking circling digit, gradually applying greater pressure, keeping alive the foreign flowing current that made her thighs tremble and the nipples on her breasts smart with prickliness.
Kathy felt something building from deep inside her, as if little balloons packed inside her womb were waiting for instructions to burst. She was standing flat-footed, knees bowed out, her head turned upward and eyes clenched shut and straining, her every body fiber reaching out to that spot where her finger worked magic on the sexual control box of her womanhood.
Goosebumps broke out on her flesh and a chilly phantom finger crawled up her spine. Her loins were bucking, sweeping the clitoris up against the charged finger in a conflicting direction.
She pitched her head forward and her whirling brain was unable to guarantee balance. Kathy opened her eyes in fear of falling face forward into the mirror. What she saw horrified her, the wanton, contorted, crazed expression on her own face. A wave of shame swept through her body, drowning the fires that had been ignited by her manipulating finger. Kathy found her panties and pulled them on, afraid to face her own reflection in the mirror. She hoped she never again would wear such a look of uncontrolled abandonment. She shuddered as she felt the crotch of the panties filling with her vagina's sensual excretion. She hurriedly put on the tennis costume and threw open the curtain to the dressing cubicle. She put the bra, dress and sandals in her locker, and removed her covered tennis racket and a can of balls. She closed the metal door with a slam that cleared her head of the last dying pleas for fulfillment. She passed by the open curtain on her way out, but kept her eyes on the concrete floor, too ashamed to look at her own face in the mirror and see the self-rebuke she knew was there.
Grayson had been converted. He now believed there was a merciful God who favored him from somewhere in the heavens. He had a massive leaking hardon that stained the front of his trousers and threatened the very strength of the denim material. He could have masturbated, but he was supremely confident he was going to do better. Better than he had ever done in his entire life.
He was going to screw the snotty blonde babe.
He knew it as sure as he was standing there in the darkness, in front of the full-length two-way mirror looking into the now-empty dressing cubicle, with a Polaroid camera in his feverish hands.
The country club architect had thought of everything, including concealed utilities, electrical, gas, water and telephone lines that ran through a shaft, big enough for a man to enter to repair without having to tear up the fucking walls of the joint, separating the locker rooms near the pool from the main banquet room in the clubhouse. What the architect forgot, Grayson took care of, cutting out two doorways linking the tunnel to the women's dressing cubicles and installing a pair of mirrors, camouflaged on the shaft side with twin thin sheets of easily-removed paneling no one would ever think to look behind.
At best he hoped for a few snaps of rich broads to add to his collection of naked pictures, just something he could invite the guys on the staff over to see for laughs. They would be impressed as hell, because Grayson wasn't going to let them in on how he got the pictures. He'd smile and let their imaginations do the rest. He figured if he got real lucky he might get a snatch shot of the Carlson girl, hopefully a double feature with her dark-haired girl friend naked in the next cubicle. But it worked out better than he might have dreamed.
He had only just finished the mirror job when he met her coming into the locker room, waltzing by him without looking, treating him like something she found on a toilet seat in a whorehouse. Grayson hightailed it to his quarters down in the boiler room and found the camera, then back out and racing alongside the pool, slipping on the wet surface of the deck and nearly breaking his ass, over to the narrow unnoticeable door opening to the utilities tunnel, for which Grayson alone had a key. He was afraid to use a flashlight, not knowing if the illumination would show through on her side of the glass, and so he felt his way along the dank walls in the darkness until his fingers found the rough edge of the first sheet of paneling and he detected the vibration of a body moving on the other side of the glass. He softly removed the covering and that was when the hardon arrived to stay.
She was pulling off her low-cut panties and then she turned to face the mirror, spreading her snatch right in front of his eyes! The ragged pink hair-lined lips of her cunt called to him to burst through the transparent barrier and taste the inner sweetness they protected.
The tunnel was steamy hot, but Grayson was hotter. He could feel the sweat rolling down off his forehead and burning into his eyes. He mopped his brow with his sleeve and fell back against the wall facing the mirror for added support as he steadied the camera. Then he remembered! Shit, there were only two exposures left. He had wasted all the other shots on the flabby slut who had been almost as good a fuck as a pile of rising pizza dough.
No matter. He'd have to make the two he had count. He wanted the most erotic ones he could get and he shuttered quickly on the split beaver, a pose where her face had a curious expression, as if contemplating the size of an off-camera dong about to split her pussy. Grayson waited quietly, watching the necessary minute spin off on the luminous dial of his wristwatch with one eye while the other grew wide in depraved glee as the bitch began to softly finger her clit.
Everything suddenly fell into place in Grayson's mind. This was a picture that could be converted into a currency more meaningful than the money that separated them socially. He would have that rich bitch's body twisting and cooking on his spit of a prick before the day was out.
He tore out the first picture and loaded for the last, one that would win him the cunt of someone who spurned him and viewed him as a bug.
Grayson breathed quietly, his eyes shifting from the finger in the wet cunt up over the mountainous tight tits to her working face, aiming the camera and holding out for the right second.
Then it was there, an unearthly immoral face above the straining stance of a savage African dancer, and Grayson clicked, capturing and freezing on a chemically treated small sheet of paper the single most impassioned second Kathy Carlson had ever known.
Grayson acted just in time, for then the girl changed as though someone had dumped a bucket of snow over her head. She didn't look at the mirror again. Her face was flushed with exertion, Grayson presumed, leaning forward as the aroused cunt disappeared inside the panties and then to see the heavy heaving tits jacketed into the skimpy tennis suit. He pocketed the second print and waited until she walked by the dressing cubicle on her way out before he folded the camera and began feeling his way out of the tunnel.
Back in his boiler-room quarters, Grayson massaged the straining front of his pants as he carefully examined the two photographs. He returned one to his shirt pocket and put the other in a plain white envelope, deciding against sealing it. Then he reloaded the camera with a roll of film from his trunk. He checked his watch and calculated that Barker, the bartender, would be finished with his luncheon shift upstairs in a few minutes. He gently slid the envelope into his back pocket and left the room to wait for Barker in the kitchen.
The volleying was more with words over the net than tennis balls. They weren't bothering to keep score, each girl halfheartedly swatting the ball and not stretching to return a shot just out of reach. It was a slow-motion physical background music, that was all, quite a contrast to the usual fiery tournament-style of their competition. Jean noticed a change had come over Kathy when she arrived at the court and felt a stab of guilt. It was her predicament, Jean felt certain, that had made Kathy finally aware that life's harsh realities are far different than she had imagined in her Pollyanna world of innocence.
They met over the net after an unspirited warm-up exercise.
"What exactly do you want me to do?" Kathy asked, staring at the tennis ball in her hand as if it were a crystal containing the secret of her future.
"Agree to go to Mexico. Cruise ships leave San Francisco every other week. I'll dip into the trust fund and pay all expenses. It won't cost you a dime. It'll be more comfortable in Ensenada with you there... just in case."
"You've thought about that?" Kathy said, raising her face to Jean. There was a flicker of fear, disappearing as easily as Jean might have swept back an irritating lock of her dark hair.
"Everything's crossed my mind, but I'm not afraid. It's as simple as pulling a loose tooth at this stage. Any later and there could be complications."
"I'm not sure daddy will let me go to Mexico."
"That's baloney, Kathy. The way I get it he's scared to death he raised a potential nun. We're liberated modern women and your dad's a worldly understanding guy. Didn't you notice him practically screwing that Kay with his eyes last night?"
Kathy pulled back, debating whether or not it was incumbent upon her to defend the morals of her father. Sounds through the closed door to Kay's room re-echoed in her ears and she remained silent.
"I'm right," Jean said prophetically. "You haven't learned the signs yet. If you were better trained you'd also know how much poor horny Craig is suffering because you won't let him in your pants. Do yourself and him a favor, Kathy. Just be careful."
Kathy was appalled by the suggestion and backed up to the service line. They hit a few balls back and forth, the exercise helping to settle Kathy's jangled nerves. She wondered how her whole life had been altered irreversibly by the sordid events of one evening and an afternoon. Confused, she had allowed her emotions full rein until her remaining good sense checked them at the very edge of a plunging precipice. Jean's return of her serve zinged by to the right, but Kathy made no effort to reach it.
"All right, I'll do it," she called.
Jean rushed to the net. "Thanks, Kathy, I'll never forget," Jean said, almost bursting into tears of relieved joy. Kathy joined her at mid-court.
"I want to discuss some things with you on the trip. There are a number of questions you may be able to answer for me. Let's leave as soon as we can."
"That's all I want to know. I'll make arrangements this very afternoon."
Jean dashed off the court, sprinting for the parking lot. Kathy walked over to the bench wearily and mopped her forehead with a towel. She hooded the racket and canned the tennis balls. She went to the drinking fountain and tasted a cooling sip, spotting someone entering through the chain-link gate. It was the country club custodian and he had an envelope in his hand.
"Miss Carlson, I was asked to give this to you."
She took the white envelope curiously. Perhaps a quickly scribbled note of thanks from Jean, she thought. The man stood his ground, smiling at her strangely, the look that made her feel so uncomfortable and afraid at the dance.
"Thank you," she said, dismissing him with her tone. "I'll read it later."
"Read it now," he replied with a directness Kathy thought rude and frightening. "The party is waiting for an answer," he added softly as if trying to explain his bluntness to her.
Kathy's displeasure was gone as she looked into Grayson's unusual eyes. The envelope was not sealed and she was able to remove the contents without taking her eyes off his face. The note paper, little more than the size of a playing card, had a strange sticky substance on it that made her look down inquisitively.
The first sight of the pornographic photograph, the vile, disgusting paper in her hand, made her want to heave up the contents of her stomach. But in the next split-second she realized that the twisted spellbound face beneath the long blonde hair was her own. Now she could feel Grayson's eyes burning into her body even though she dared not look again at his face.
"There is another picture, much more lively, that a certain party has for you in the boiler room. Unless you arrive to pick it up in the next ten minutes, it goes in the mail somewhere you wouldn't like."
Grayson turned abruptly and sauntered off, leaving the gate to the tennis court open wide behind him.
Kathy ripped the offensive photo to pieces, stuffing the fragments back into the envelope and wadding it into a ball so tightly that it hurt her fingers. She threw the paper into the trash barrel by the drinking fountain, wishing she had a bar of soap to scrub the filth from her hands.
What could she do? She saw Grayson's slouched figure shrinking as he spread the distance between them, on the way to the boiler room. It was clear to Kathy that the unnamed "party" was Grayson himself.
She had no time to listen to the pros and cons from the debate going on in her mind. Ten minutes. Six hundred seconds stood between her and a disaster unknown. Kathy would make the custodian understand the pain she felt, the shame that coursed through her body, the humiliation she wallowed in from head to toe because of one deranged moment in which she had yielded to sensual temptation somehow being preserved on film.
She had to have the picture at almost any price. Grayson was a reasonable person she could convince with her entreaties, her kneeling prayers if need be. Human beings were rational. She was certain she could make him see.
Kathy ran in Grayson's tracks.