Chapter 13

In the morning, Niles left right after breakfast, grumbling about the uncivilized hours he had to put in at the office. Mavis packed, had a farewell whiskey sour with Jackie, and started back to Darien, saying she had a lot of things to do before Charlie brought the kids home. She looked radiant, driving off, Jackie thought. Or maybe refreshed was a better word.

By noontime, there was still no sign of Bob, and no phone call either. Valerie and the boys were too restless to sit still any longer.

"We're going to have to take off without Bob," Andy said to Jackie. "He knows where to find us in Woodstock if he decides to follow us up."

"Will you need the station wagon?"

"No. There's plenty of room in the Ford Valerie's driving. It's her mother's car."

"All right. Bob will be disappointed, but it's his own damn fault."

After they'd left, Jackie shook up another whiskey sour for herself, but it didn't seem to help. She felt very much alone again, in that big empty house.

She forced herself to eat some lunch, but that didn't help either. She tried to read, and found herself reading the same paragraph, over and over. She couldn't concentrate at all. She put on a stack of records, which normally cheered her up immensely, but even that didn't work. She turned off the record player. Damn that Bob, anyway. Why didn't he at least call?

Well, she was not about to spend the afternoon waiting for him. It was a nice, warm, sunny day. She got out her swimsuit and glasses and went to the club. In her own car, this time.

She had just pulled herself out of the pool after her first dip when Tom arrived, surrounded by his wife and four kids. She dried herself vigorously and stretched out in her chair, pretending not to see him. She began to feel as lonely here at the club, surrounded by people, as she had felt at home in her empty house. She made herself he there in the sun for half an hour, then took another dip and left.

It was only three-thirty when she got back to the house. Bob's Gladstone bag stood at the foot of the stairs, in an ideal location to be tripped over. She pushed it against the wall with her foot. At least he's home, she thought. Thank God for that. She went up the stairs swiftly.

The door to his room was ajar, and she looked in. He was stretched out naked on the bed, lying on his side, facing the windows, with his back toward her. She thought he was asleep, but apparently he had heard her coming up the stairs.

"That you, Mom?" he said, without rolling over.

"Nobody else," she said, pushing the door open and going into the room. She sat down on the side of the bed, looking at his smooth tanned back.

"They couldn't wait any longer," she said. "Andy, Pete, Steve, Valerie, all of them. They went to Woodstock without you. They said you'd know where to find them."

"I don't think I'll go," Bob said. "It's only for the weekend, anyway, and I'm sort of pooped."

"I'll bet," Jackie said. She reached out and traced down the line of his spine with one finger. His skin quivered.

"That tickles," he said.

She began making little circles on his back, lightly, with the tips of the fingers of both hands. She hadn't done that to him in years and years, since he was a little boy.

"That tickles more," he said.

She kept it up, loving the texture of his satiny bronzed skin against her fingertips. "Don't do that, Mom."

T used to do this to you all the time, when you were little." 'Tm not little any more."

She kept up the motion, with the tips of her fingers, but somehow the motion had become more of a caress.

"Please, Mom," Bob said. "Cut it out."

"Why?' she said.

"Oh, for God's sake," Bob said, and suddenly rolled over onto his back. "That's why."

Jackie gasped. His cock, stiff as a hammer handle, stood straight up. Her little boy, she thought, my God. It was as long as Andy's at least, and maybe a little thicker. A vein running up the side pulsed angrily.

She tried to get her voice under control to say something, but she couldn't. She found herself staring into Bob's eyes, and he didn't break the stare.

"Well," he said, "you see what you've done."

"I sure do," she said. She was still staring into his eyes, transfixed, but even as she stared she could see his stiff, throbbing penis, pulsing upward toward the ceiling.

"Well?" he said again. This time it was a question.

Without thinking, without a will of her own, as if she were in a dream, Jackie felt herself lifting her shift up over her head, slipping out of her pants. She wore no bra.

Bob finally dropped his eyes to her body. She was astride him now, standing on her knees.

"God, but you're beautiful," Bob said.

Without a second's hesitation, she took the straining hard head of his cock and inserted it between the warm, wet, open lips of her burning twat. Slowly, deliciously, keeping her mind a blank, her body receptive only to sensation, she slid down the whole length of his rigid shaft, until it was imbedded in her to the hilt. Then she leaned forward, slowly, until her breasts were mashed against his hard chest, and brought her legs together, between his, closing her cunt around his pulsing prick, capturing it, making it her own.

Now, with her whole weight on him, her cunt imprisoning his rod at an angle almost parallel to his own body, Bob began to drive it up into her, thrusting with a fury she had never felt before. She felt her own hips responding, in some insane rhythm that seemed to match Bob's crazed plunging.

She heard Bob gasping with every stroke, and she got her fingernails behind his shoulders, scratching, tearing, but it was nothing to the tearing that she felt at her insides.

There was no telling, for her, how long it went on, but suddenly she was screaming, and then crying, and her orgasm was pounding her insides apart. Then she felt Bob coming, in a series of belating gushes, and she lay very still.

Minutes later, she rolled away from him, got to her feet, and left the room. She didn't speak.

Neither did he.