Chapter 2
Cass Fordham wasn't quite what Jennifer expected of a bookie, having read Damon Runyon avidly. He was handsome in a bold, hawkish way and, except for an occasional effort to make nature copy Runyon's art in his speech, an articulate and facile talker. An interesting man.
He had opened the door to Jennifer, eyeing her costume warily. And it was a costume, a sort of modified child's middy blouse with an over-long blue skirt which Mother Dear had considered appropriate for a growing girl.
"You the girl I talked to? Mrs. Lorn's kid?" He had backed away, grudgingly making room for her to enter. "You don't look much like your voice. I mean, like you sound on the phone. You sounded hip."
Jennifer caught her breath, held it for a long moment, and then let it out slowly, saying the line she had rehearsed a thousand times on the way over. "If you don't like the clothes, why not take them off?"
Cass scowled, studying her, and then laughed. "Kid, you got a line! A real, swingin' line. 'Why not take 'em off!' That's a real swingin' greeting. So come in, unless you want it right out there in the hall. And I'll accommodate."
He shut the door behind her, urging her deeper into the room with a little shove between the shoulders that became a caress, wandering down to her little rump. "We can get to those clothes, but first, a little business. Here's a hundred and forty bucks. Two dollars at a hundred to one."
"That's two hundred dollars." Jennifer said it shakily, hiding her nervousness. This was madness, utter, unparalleled madness. She ought to turn and flee. Now!
"Less my commission-less a little matter of twenty bucks which she was into me for. So it's one forty. Okay?" He handed her the money and Jennifer stuffed it in her purse without counting it, without even looking at Cass.
Anyway, he didn't produce those hot flashes down in her pudendum the way the other man had. Jennifer had somehow expected every man to have the same effect. They did in the books she had read-each man had produced tense and exciting passion, and then gratified it in spectacular ways. Even thinking of those ways produced some hot flashes.
And Cass produced more when he slid his hand up her arm and slid it across her breast. He hugged her briefly, feeling her body stiffen.
"Don't be so tense, kid. Take it easy." He laughed. "Take it easy-but take it. All of it, eh?" And slid a hand under the looseness of the middy blouse, looking mildly surprised when he encountered her bare breasts. "No bra? You did come prepared." He flipped a hand at the over-long skirt. "No panties?"
Jennifer shivered, partly in fear, partly with the stimulus of a hand on her bare bosom. It was bare, there was no bra, because Mother Dear had never got around to admitting that Jennifer was old enough or had enough development to warrant a bra. Panties were different. Jennifer had on panties, very boyish jockey shorts.
Cass moved closer to her, until she could feel the male heat of his body. And his body was urging her toward the couch.
Jennifer stumbled trying to turn, trying to flee this crazy predicament into which she had got herself.
And sat in a tangle of legs that was very revealing. Cass leaned over, the better to enjoy the view. "Verrry nice. Verrrry!" He dropped beside her, one arm instantly draped around her shoulder, the other sliding softly over the skin of her bared thigh.
Cass seemed to have half a dozen hands roaming over Jennifer's body. She could feel one slide up under the middy blouse, caressing one bared breast, while another seemed to pull and lift at the unwieldy middy blouse. And another ran strokingly down her spine, until she was arching up, ready to scream with tensions. And there was a hand that brushed across the fuzzy fur of her triangle and another that seemed to sneak in from the rear, teasing at her cunt and bringing a series of hot flashes that all but scorched her.
They couldn't all be doing these things at the same time and also undoing the skirt and slipping her out of it. It just seemed simultaneous, a confused, exciting and tremendous experience.
Jennifer moaned, rolling with the pressure of his hands, obedient to them, even though she could feel rebellion rising. She followed his whispered, hoarse instructions by lifting her little buttocks, and the panties slid away.
She was naked!
It was a horrifying discovery, yet exciting, churning up her stomach, closing a tight band around her chest, making her breasts stand up, the nipples hard and erect, seeming to emerge amber-pink and growing from the pink coins of their bases.
Her cunt was open, with juices flowing, hot, exciting juices. And Cass's hand stroked her inner thighs and across her mound. His fingers traced the creases between her legs and her stomach and then slid down, opening her slit wide. And all the while there was this hungry gulping in her throat.
Cass seemed to sense it, and kissed her. It was a completely new kind of kiss. Not just a peck on soft lips but a grinding of flesh, a thrust of his tongue into her mouth. And she was accepting it, sucking on it, and thrusting back with hers.
She would never understand how he managed it, but while all this was going on, at a pace so furious Jennifer seemed to be melting, her juices flowing, her throat parched with a new kind of hunger, her stomach knotting and gnawing, Cass slid out of his shirt and undershirt and stripped down his pants. He didn't seem to have any underpants, or else they went when the pants did. For all at once his penis stood erect, sliding up against her leg, a contrast in colors, in shapes. His penis was hard, thrusting, and a long, reddish shaft with large blue veins throbbing through it, with a head that was almost purple. And shiny, wet with a few drops of his juice.
She was twisted on the couch so that she could look down the length of her body, curved now so that she could see her cunt, realize it was open and flowing, wetting her, wetting the couch.
And Cass was edging up on her, thrusting his huge penis toward her cunt, moving an inch at a time by humping his body while his hands played over her breasts, squeezing her nipples until they spurted up between his fingers-and the fingers, like stiffened lips, chewed at them.
Her whole body cried out for completion, for that enormous prod to crash into her cunt, to stab upward through her, bringing new tensions and promising some ineffable release.
Cass kissed her throat, slid his tongue over her breasts, teasing her nipples. He backed off in his creeping approach with his shaft on her cunt. Instead, he slid his head down, tracing out the lovely lines of her body, sliding it over her breasts, over her belly button and on down, along the crease between leg and stomach, and down, right into the valley of her cunt, tickling her clitoris, sending new electric charges up her spine, tightening the band around her chest until she could scarcely breathe.
His tongue lapped at her clitoris, slid over the brighter pink of her opening vulva, sliding in, probing to reach deep inside her.
Jennifer fought it. It was what she had sought, but twenty years of Mother Dear's reiterated horrors of men and sex were stronger. With the excitement that tormented her body Jennifer saw punishment, an immense and unimaginable future of terrors and regrets. So she fought, writhing under Cass's attack on her body, twisting away from the tongue that seemed to slash at her pink and vulnerable vulva.
Cass was stronger, and for a long moment he held her, weighting her down with his body as he slid back into position, so that his penis throbbed and thrust directly at her cunt.
"Please! Cass, don't! Don't! I can't. I mustn't let you. Oh, please, please..." This died to a frantic moan as his penis slid up against the open vulva, sending great shocks up through her. If she didn't stop him now...
Just why she felt she had to stop him wasn't even clear to Jennifer. It was just years and years of Mother Dear's vague and unspecified horrors, more frightening than the excitement that surged through her body.
Unknowing, she did the one thing that could have stopped Cass. She brought one leg up sharply between his, smashing it into his balls and penis. Cass screamed and rolled off her, cursing.
He tried to stand up and couldn't. He struggled up, half crouched over, holding his injured manhood. "Damn you! You little teasing slut! Oh, damn you! Damn you..." He went on into language Jennifer only half understood.
She huddled miserably on the couch, her arms wrapped inadequately around her nakedness, feeling her body cool suddenly, shivering at the coldness. She hadn't meant to put so abrupt an end to her seduction. Just as she hadn't been truly sure she wanted a seduction.
I am hopelessly confused. I'm lost. I want sex and I'm afraid of it, afraid of this man who would have given it to me, who would have showed me the mysteries and wonders of it. I will always be like this, tormented for want of sex, frightened and ashamed of wanting it.
Jennifer lay back against the couch, only half seeing Cass stumbling and limping, groaning and cursing her, bent nearly double with the excruciating pain. "Get out! Now! You little cheat! You wanton tease! You unpaid whore!" As he stumbled around, bent over, grasping at his injured balls and penis, he gathered up Jennifer's scattered clothes.
In an untidy bundle he carried them to the door, opened it, and flung them into the apartment hallway. "Go get them. They suit you. A child's clothes for a woman's body. That's what you are-only partially a woman. Go home. Grow up! And don't come back here. Ever!"
Still in her stockings and shoes, Jennifer huddled her nakedness to the door, circling around the crouching figure of Cass swearing at her. She bent to pick up her clothes and Cass thrust at her with his bare foot, flinging her face down on the carpet. It wasn't that it hurt, it was the utter degradation of it. Naked-and kicked out of a man's apartment because she was inadequate as a woman.
Behind her the door slammed, then opened again, and her purse, well aimed but weakly thrown, hit her right where the kick had landed.
It was the final, the crowning humiliation. Swatted in the ass by her purse!
Jennifer gathered herself up, shivering, and started picking up her clothes. Gradually she became aware of a pair of legs-trousered legs- standing nearby. She turned hastily away, tangling her feet in that cursed blue skirt, and pitched backward into masculine arms, into arms that went around her with surprising gentleness. She could feel the rough texture of cloth against her skin, the pressure of his hands holding her, cupping her breasts.
She wrenched herself free, stooped and snatched at the skirt that had tripped her, and fled down the hall.
On a landing of the enclosed stairway she hurriedly dressed, sobbing softly. Outside the door she heard his footsteps and his voice asking, as courteously as if he sat at tea, "Shall I go back and beat him up?"
"N-no. Please, just go away. Far away. I want to be left alone. That's all. Alone! Please go." It was jerkily said as she yanked the middy blouse over her head and tugged the offending skirt into place. She wouldn't even try for the panties till later, till she, too, was far away.
At least covered if not dressed, Jennifer fled down the stairs and into the night, where she located a cab. Huddled in the back seat she gave way to tears. I'm frustrated-and always will be. I can't ever learn to accept sex. Mother Dear's bogeymen rise up to haunt me. Then she realized how her thoughts were running and was horrified. This can't be me, rushing out to fling my body before some man-a strange man. Flaunting myself. Oh, dear God! I'm just an animal. I'm a bitch in heat. It's against everything I've known. Not just Mother Dear's prejudices but everything I believed in. If I had been more churchly, I'd say against my religion.
She caught her breath with a gulp, staring into the rushing night outside the cab, horrified at how close she had come to the ultimate in humiliation. Cass had done her a great favor. He had thrown her out before she could violate her body. Oh, yes. It was me, not Cass, who set that scene. It would have been me, violating myself, not Cass violating me.
And I am ashamed.
She came to as the taxi driver said, not unkindly, "If you need help, ma'am..." When she shook her head, he added, "This is the address you said..." He turned to look at Jennifer's strained and stricken face, and asked, with a touch of anxiety, "Didn't lose your purse, did you?"
Jennifer caught her breath, fumbling across the seat. No, there was her purse. She sighed, trying for a smile. "No, I have money." She paid him, climbing wearily out of the cab, as if her body rather than her spirit was bruised.