Chapter 14

In her own room, Jackie closed the door behind her and lay down on her bed, waiting for the pounding of her insides to subside. She lay very still, trying to stay numb, trying not to think, but the pounding subsided very slowly. It seemed to have a number of resources for its pitiless, continuing pulse. Pure physical excitement. Emotional turmoil. And something very much like nausea.

When her internal torment had finally stilled, Jackie reached for the phone. She was grateful to find that she could dial without the handicap of palsied fingers. She was acutely aware that she was very close to coming all to pieces.

Niles answered, himself, on the first ring. Thank God, Jackie thought, for small favors. I'd wind up in a sobbing heap if I had to go through a playful conversation with one of those hip secretaries.

"I've got to see you, Niles," she said.

"What's wrong?"

"I can't tell you now. Fm too mixed up. And please don't ask me to tell you, right away when I see you."

"I won't"

"When I'm ready to, I'll tell you." If ever. She hoped she could postpone that day forever. "When do you want to see me?"

"Right away. As fast as I can whip that car into town."

"I'll be in Siro's in an hour."

"Not Siro's. Please, Niles. Your apartment."

"Whatever you say." He told her the address, carefully. He'd told her where he lived, before, but she'd never been there.

"I should be there before six," she said, "if the traffic isn't too bad."

"You shouldn't be driving the way you sound."

"Don't worry about my driving. I'll get to your place in one piece."

"That sounds better," Niles said. "I'll be there."

When Niles opened the door for her, she stepped inside, pushed the door closed with her back, and put her arms around him swiftly, clasping her hands together behind his back. She squeezed herself to him in a sudden frenzy of relief.

"Hold me, darling," she said. "Just hold me."

He held her, tightly, her breasts mashed against his rib cage. She knew he could feel her heart pounding against him. When the pounding slowed, he touched her chin, tilted her head up, and kissed her gently.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I can't tell you now." She took her arms, away from his back and clutched his hand, tugging him toward the open door of what had to be the bedroom.

"Just be with me," she said. "In bed. Right away."

It was a double bed, in the bedroom. Of course Niles would have a double bed. She pulled her dress off over her head, stepped out of her slip and pants in one motion, discarded her bra. She saw Niles watching her, his face a study. He was not taking off his clothes.

"You're absolutely lovely," he said. She was standing naked except for her shoes. Her breasts felt swollen, the nipples darkening red and pointing upward.

"Please, honey," she said. "Right now."

"It's rape," Niles said. Then she saw by the look on his face that he knew it was no time for jokes. He undressed quickly. When he was completely nude Jackie was still standing, at the side of the wide bed.

"Lie down," Jackie said. "Please. On your back."

He stretched out, watching her. His cock, long even in repose, lay inert between his legs like a garden hose dropped carelessly on a Larchmont lawn.

She knelt on the bed beside him, leaned over, and kissed him on the mouth, her own mouth open, her tongue darting out to find his. Their tongues met, entwined, wrestled wetly until Jackie broke the hold to insinuate her tongue in his ear. She began to kiss and lick her way down his body, kissing and sucking and licking at his chin, his neck, the hollow of his collarbone, the stiffening puckered dark skin of his nipples. She reamed his navel with her tongue hard and pointed, and drew a thin moist line down the middle of his belly, using her tongue as an artist does his brush.

Her cheek bumped into something hard, like a telephone pole. She turned her head and looked up, her heart pumping faster again. At the top of the great shaft she sighted up was the rock-like knob of his cock-head, the big shiny red apple, the apple of her eye.

She changed her position, getting to her knees between his legs, and began to lick her way up the satiny soft skin that sheathed the underside of his granite-hard pole, wetting it with broad loving strokes of her tongue. Niles lay very still She could feel his eyes on her, watching the workings of her tongue, her mouth.

When she got to the head, she hesitated only a fraction of a second. If Mavis can take that in her mouth, so can I, she thought. She opened her mouth wide and enclosed the whole gleaming head in the soft wet cavern of her mouth. Niles sighed, gently, as her tongue tickled his sensitive underfolds.

Jackie had gone as far as she could, she knew, or her pussy would drown in its own flowing juices. She got to her knees, straddling his legs, and moved forward, up his body toward his hips.

She raised one leg, as if mounting a horse, and fitted the apple of her eye into the wet palpitating folds of her angry-pink cunt. She held herself erect, then, and rode the elevator down the entire thick length of the oaken shaft.

It filled her completely, reamed her, cleansed her. All at once, every lingering whisper of Bob's young invasion was driven away. Forever.

"Ah, Niles," she said, and began her long, perpendicular round trip to paradise. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Niles clasped his hands behind his head and smiled at her.

There was no way for her to measure time, no way to count the thousands of round trips she made, but it was getting dusk outside the window when she knew the time had come. Niles was miraculous. His monument was as upright as it had been at the start

"Now?" she said. "Can you?"

"Yes. Right now. Can you?"

"I can't not" she groaned, and as she said it, Niles' warm juices were spurting inside her, and she was coming, and coming, and coming, and coming...

When she woke up it was dark in the room, but there was a light slanting through the open door. Niles was not in bed. She got up and found him sitting in a deep leather chair in the living room, naked, smoking a cigarette.

"I woke up a few minutes ago," he said, "and had to get up to make sure I was alive."

"You almost killed me," she said, smiling tiredly. She let herself down gently onto the arm of his chair.

"You almost killed me" he said. "But it sure is the only way to die."

He lighted a cigarette for her.

"Niles?"

"Yes?"

"I want to go to California. For good."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"So do I," he said. "The only thing that's been keeping me in New York is you."

"Can I find work to do out there?"

"If you want to. More than in New York. What about Bob?"

She got up and walked to the window and looked out without seeing anything.

"He's due back in school next week," she said. "I can send him all the money he'll need. He's big enough now to take care of himself."

"What about your house?"

I'll put it up for sale, with an agent."

"Well," Niles said, "I can be ready to leave by the end of next week."

"Me, too."

"Well take the Mercedes."

She turned from the window and grinned at him. "You could get arrested."

"What for?":

"Remember a thing called the Mann Act?"

"Shit," Niles said. He put out his cigarette in an ashtray, taking a long time doing it.

"You know what?" he said. "We could even stop somewhere in Maryland and make the whole trip legal."

She looked out the window again, still without seeing anything. She took a long time to answer him, and kept her back to him when she did. There was nothing messier looking on a girl than runny eye-makeup.

"There's an old-fashioned word for you, Niles," she said at last. "What's the word."

"Corny."

"That's me," Niles said. "Corny."

He got up and stood at the window beside her.