Chapter 16
The address Steve had given her was in the East Seventies. As she paid the cab driver, she noticed that there was a doorman in front of the canopied building, and it amused her, the contrast between this and her Greenwich Village four-flight walk-up. But it accounted for part of the confidence and sense of security she'd noticed in Steve, a confidence and composure she'd thought remarkable in a boy so young. Money wasn't everything, she mused, slamming the cab door, but it sure did a lot to ease the growing pains in a growing boy. Or girl, probably. She wouldn't know. Her own small-town, small-minded parents had been chronically only a short jump away from welfare. Poor, but proud.
The proud part had served Toby well. She stared the doorman down, before pushing her way through the revolving door into the tastefully carpeted and richly appointed little lobby. Some of her friends, she recalled, had confessed to being awed by doormen, and headwaiters, and other presumptuously, spuriously haughty menials.
Toby considered the people in positions like that pathetic, as well as phony, and the jobs they clung to, archaic. Even if she'd been dressed to look as if she'd just fallen off a motorcycle, she'd have felt no uneasiness with this or any other doorman. And today, for the second day in a row, she didn't look as if she'd just fallen off a motorcycle. She was wearing a dress again, another dress that her sister had sent her, a dress as short, as flimsy, and as revealing as the dress she'd worn yesterday.
Maybe she looked to the doorman as horny as she felt, she thought, and the thought pleased her. Maybe some day she'd get a doorman to go down on her, just for kicks.
That thought pleased her so much she was almost visiHv glowing by the time she stepped into the elevator.
Steve opened the door for her, almost before she'd taken her finger off the buzzer. After she'd stepped inside and he'd closed the door behind her, he hugged her warmly. Confidence and composure he sure had, she thought, remembering her conclusions about him only two minutes before.
The tall redheaded boy she remembered so well got to his feet as they walked arm-in-arm into the big living room.
"Good to see you again, Toby," he said. "You look lovelier than ever."
"Why, thank you, Kevin," she said, smiling and doing a mock curtsey, aware suddenly of the brevity and airiness of the dress she was wearing. It made a mockery of anything like modesty or concealment. Her sudden awareness was caused by the presence of another girl in the room.
And what a girll She was a startlingly pretty tawny-blonde, with white, almost translucent skin that evidently stayed that way even in summer, since it was now mid-August. Quite obviously the girl took no chances with exposure to the sun. She was standing at the far end of the room, by the windows, a tall girl with a body that was pliantly slender, almost fragile-looking. She had young, budding, un-bra'd breasts, and long, slim, exquisitely formed legs. It was difficult for Toby to imagine her doing anything so indelicate as spreading those legs. like Toby, she was wearing a dress, a light, pale-green summer dress with a skirt that stopped just below the hips, putting her lovely white legs on open display. Her legs were not quite as ripely spectacular as Toby's, but they were longer, Toby thought, with a touch of envy. She'd always wanted to be tall and long-legged.
"Toby, this is Betsy," Kevin said, and the tall .girl swayed with a model's graceful strut toward Toby, to shake hands. The way her boobs jiggled and bobbed with every step made it even more acutely obvious, to male eyes, that she was wearing no bra. Toby wondered idly, as she let go of the girl's hand, if she was wearing pants under that short dress. Not that it mattered.
"I'm smashed," Betsy said happily, turning to sprawl in an easy chair. "Drinking Rob Roys with a bunch of people before Kevin came to drag me away. Ever drink Rob Roys?" The question was directed to no one in particular.
"Best thing to switch to after Rob Roys," Toby said helpfully, "is plain Scotch and water. I'll have one myself, Steve, if it isn't too much trouble."
"No trouble," Steve said, moving toward the bar in an alcove in one wall of the spacious room. "There's someone else here you know, Toby, beside me and Kevin. He's in the bathroom."
She started to ask who, but heard a door open and close. Toby closed her mouth and looked in the direction of the sound.
Roy Horlick walked into the room, grinning.
"Well," Toby said, hoping she'd concealed her fleeting fraction-of-a-second of shock. "Uncle Roy. Are you chaperoning this weenie roast?"
"You know better than that, Toby," Roy said, smiling at her. "I've bridged the generation gap. I've been assimilated into the lifestyle of the young."
Maybe, Toby thought, not saying anything. And maybe he could turn out to be a terribly inhibiting influence on Steve's party. A very wet blanket.
Oh, well. Play it by ear. She sat back comfortably on the couch, and sipped her Scotch, waiting for the rest of the party to arrive.