Chapter 4
THERE WAS A surfeit of lovers in the park that night It made things difficult for Dave. They were so closely situated on the grass and in the shadows of bushes and trees that you couldn't sneak up on one couple without stumbling over two more couples that you didn't realize were there. a few times he came close to getting a punch in the nose from irritated males. Mobs always unnerved him. Before midnight he gave up on the park and headed for the local lovers' lane.
Things weren't much better on the wooded hillside overlooking the lake. The cars were packed in the clearing, fender to fender. Dave was elated to spot one car parked far back from the ridge under a weeping willow tree. He circled around and came up on it from the rear. It was a sedan, and both front doors were open to provide maximum circulation of air on this hot summer night. The radio was playing softly. Crawling on hands and knees, Dave made his way to a point about two yards from the car where he could see the occupants through the open door. It was a man and a woman. Their faces were dark silhouettes. From the chest down, their bodies were dimly illuminated by the lights of the dashboard and radio dial. The girl's blouse was open, and her skirt was pulled high up on her thighs. She moaned and squirmed in the man's embrace as he kissed her passionately on the eyes and nose and mouth. His hands worked the blouse off of her round shoulders. His fingers dipped inside of her brassiere and slipped one gorgeous, rounded breast out of its cup. It trembled in his hand like a mound of Jell-O. Dave could see the dark summit telescope out as the man teased it between thumb and forefinger. The girl squirmed in delight and kissed him with fierce ardor.
. The man freed the other breast and balanced it on the palm of his hand as if it were a ripe pear. Hungrily, he bent his lips to the upturned nipple. The girl threw back her head and whimpered ecstatically. Her long legs thrashed the skirt almost back to her hips. Her perfect thighs gleamed palely above the tops of her stockings. They parted eagerly as the man's hand plunged between them. She lifted her buttocks off the seat as he pulled her panties down over her hips.
Dave's heart beat faster as he watched the slow descent of the silken garment. The girl kicked off her high heels so the man could pull them over her feet. He bunched them up in his hand and tossed them onto the floor. Dave took a deep breath and crawled closer to the car. He was confident that their mutual rapture and rasping breathing made them oblivious to the crunching of the dry weeds under his hands and knees.
They were frantic to consummate the affair. After the man removed his trousers, the woman got up on her knees and straddled his thighs, holding her skirt bunched up around her waist. She didn't bother to remove her stockings or garter belt. She hung above him momentarily, her firm, round buttocks taut with anticipation. Then with a small outcry of joy, she settled down to receive him.
Dave Pitts was no longer interested in the naked, gyrating bodies on the seat. His attention was fixed on the little bundle of nylon and lace on the floor of the car. Holding his breath, he stretched one arm into the car and clutched the panties. Still not daring to breathe, he withdrew the arm and held the panties possessively against his body. Slowly, he backed away from the car into the cover of some bushes. Limp from the nerve-racking ordeal, he stood up and hurried away from the scene. The last thing he heard was a feminine voice lifted in rapturous fulfillment.
It was after one a.m. when he got back to the apartment. To his satisfaction, Louise still had not returned. He supposed that the plague emergency meant extra duty for all hospital personnel. He hoped she would stay away until he had a chance to enjoy his latest acquisition. It had been a long time since Dave had indulged his strange passion for female undergarments. With trembling fingers, he extracted the frothy bunch of material from his pocket. Holding the panties by their waistband, he inspected them in the light of his bed lamp. They were very brief, made of diaphanous white nylon with a narrow band of lace trimming the leg bands. On the upper right side of the front panel, a word was embroidered in red: "Friday."
Dave" laughed. They were an inexpensive type of underwear sold in sets of seven pairs, with the days of the week inscribed on each pair. Lots of girls wore them, which was probably the reason they seemed so familiar to him. He settled back on the bed and crushed the fluffy things to his face, inhaling the heady perfume of the woman. A spark flashed in his mind, a nagging distraction that made him sit up and regard them thoughtfully. He knew that perfume well. It was the favorite scent of his wife. The spark fanned brighter.
Possessed by an ominous impulse, he sprang off the bed and strode across the room to Louise's bureau. He opened the drawer where she kept her lingerie and rummaged among her panties. He pulled out a pair of lime-colored panties trimmed in lace and spread them out on the bureau alongside the pair he had stolen that night. They were identical, except for the color and the day of the week embroidered in front. Nervously, he sorted through the lingrie until he had assembled the remaining pairs of the set. There were just six. One pair was missing from the drawer, the ones she must have worn on this day, Friday!
There was no longer any doubt in his mind. The faceless girl in the car who had impaled herself so lustily on the unknown stallion was his wife!
For a moment, he felt weak and nauseous. He staggered back to the bed and collapsed with the incriminating panties clutched in his hands. He stared at them numbly. A chaos of emotions whip-lashed back and forth in his mind like the churning of storm clouds in a black sky. He had expected Louise to divorce him, but he had never expected this. Divorce was one thing. Infidelity was very different. He had married Louise because he loved her and trusted her. It was true he had failed her sexually, but he had not betrayed her. Adultery was betrayal. The anger built up inside of him slowly but powerfully. He twisted his fingers in the flimsy nylon of the white panties and methodically ripped them into shreds.
Standing up, he looked at himself in the mirror. His face had a wild, contorted look that made him look like a stranger. It was a familiar stranger, though. He remembered then. It was the look on the face of his mother when she had surprised him and Betty Smith on the couch that day when he was fourteen. It was the look on the face of Betty's father. Shock, disbelief, wounded fury.
Dave's mind was very clear. He knew what he had to do. Marching into the bathroom, he opened the linen closet and searched for the old-fashioned razor strap that a previous tenant had left behind. He carried it back to the bedroom and placed it on his dresser. Then he lit a cigarette and waited.
Louise came in a few minutes after two o'clock. Her thick hair was disheveled, and her blouse and skirt were badly wrinkled. Her pretty face looked tired, but there was a quality of smooth serenity about it that sent his anger towering. She was limp, relaxed, fulfilled.
She smiled, but her luminous eyes avoided his eyes.
"Sorry I'm late," she apologized. "I should have phoned, but the hospital has been a madhouse all day."
"That's all right," he said, controlling himself with great effort. "Did you walk home?"
She turned away from him and placed her bag on the dresser. "No, Doctor Evans drove me home."
"Oh, Doctor Evans?" His voice was flat.
"It's amazing," she said. "The town is still jumping at this hour."
Dave laughed without humor. "It's jumping, all right."
She headed for the bathroom, unbuttoning her blouse. "I'm screaming for a shower. I'm going to throw these grimy clothes right in the hamper."
He blocked her way. "Wait! Take your clothes off out here."
Her dark eyes flared, not in alarm but in puzzlement. "Why should I?" she asked. Her laughter was shaky. "Have you been drinking, Dave?"
"No!" he snapped. "I just want to watch my wife undress. That's not an unreasonable request for a husband to make, is it?"
Louise flushed, and her voice faltered. "No, but I don't understand. Is this some kind of joke?"
"No joke. Take off your clothes."
She laughed uneasily. "This plague is doing queer things to everybody. Whatever you say, my dear. Okay, here it comes. Little Louise, queen of the strippers." She performed an exaggerated series of bumps and grinds. Beneath her flippant bravado, he could tell that she was scared.
She finished unbuttoning the blouse and whipped it off. Her bra looked as if it had been put on hastily, and her breasts appeared lopsided. Reaching behind her, she unfastened the brassiere and shrugged it off. She arched her back, so that her breasts surged forth boldly, the red tips turning up pertly. She danced around him, shaking them like a burlesque starlet. It was quite a show she was putting on, a desperate show to distract him.
Undulating her hips from side to side, she pulled down her half-slip and stepped out of it His eyes burned into her dimpled navel. She was naked, but for her stockings and garter belt! She was not wearing panties! What slim doubt he had reserved, the long chance that it had been a remarkable coincidence and that Louise would be wearing her white nylon panties with "Friday" embroidered on them, went up in smoke now.
"No panties?" he asked, with a smirk.
She looked down at her bare hips and belly and giggled. "Oh! It was such a hot day, I didn't wear any."
"You wore them," he said relentlessly.
Her cheeks were on fire. "No, no you're mistaken. I didn't wear them." Her laughter climbed to a hysterical pitch. "A girl just doesn't go and lose a pair of panties without knowing it," she said, trying to carry off the hoax.
Louise Pitts was on the verge of panic, and she didn't understand why. There was no possible way her husband could know what had happened tonight between her and Don Evans. So, why was she so frightened? She had never been frightened of Dave, even before she discovered he was impotent He was a weak, ineffectual excuse for a man. But the man, the Dave Pitts who was confronting her now, seemed anything but weak and ineffectual. He towered over her imposingly, his handsome face craggy and brutally masculine.
"No," he said acidly, "a girl doesn't lose her panties without knowing it" He reached into his back pocket and took out the ripped undergarment, thrusting it toward her. "Here are your panties, doll. The same ones that Don Evans pulled off your backside tonight."
Louise thought she was going to faint. The room spun giddily before her glazed eyes. All day long the feeling had been growing in her mind that the world was topsy-turvy. It was true.
"Oh, Dave," she whimpered, "how did you get them? How did you find out?" She had not missed the panties until she and Don were driving back to town, but had dismissed the loss lightly. She thought they must have fallen out of the car in lovers' lane.
"Never mind how I got them," Dave said. He turned to the dresser and picked up the leather razor strap.
Louise jammed the knuckles of one hand against her mouth to stifle a gasp. "Dave, what are you going to do?"
He slapped the heavy strap rhythmically against the palm of one hand. "I'm going to beat the daylights out of my cheating wife, that's what I'm going to do!"
Louise made a desperate dash for the bathroom, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her. She sprawled on the floor on her hands and knees, with her bare, buxom bottom sticking high in the air. Dave lashed the leather strap viciously across the rosy cheeks. An angry red welt seared the tender flesh from hipbone to hipbone. The girl shot to her feet and ran around the small bedroom, massaging her smarting buttocks frantically. Dave cornered her and swung the whip again. The leather strap snapped wickedly across her bobbing breasts.
Pain such as she had never experienced in her life exploded through her body. She clutched at the throbbing mounds and collapsed to her knees, weak with agony. She tried to scream, but her windpipe was clenched in a vise of steel.
A warped ecstasy compounded of rage and lust surged through Dave's body. He felt masculine, powerful, omnipotent. This cringing female creature groveling on the floor was completely in his power. He could use her as he willed. He whipped the razor strap across her shoulder blades, branding another cruel welt in the helpless, soft flesh.
Louise wailed like a baby and arched her back. Her breasts were swollen hummocks of burning flesh, the nipples inflamed and twice their normal size. Dave was seized by a mighty urge to clasp the tortured mounds in his hands, to fasten his lips on the scarlet summits. Her raw, pulsing buttocks enticed him. And then it happened!
A painful cramp knifed through his innards, convulsing his bowels and doubling him over. He dropped the strap and clasped his stricken belly. It was as if a dam had begun to crumble deep inside of him, and the torrent behind it tore at muscle, flesh and bone with vindictive fury. It filled the dry well in his loins with miraculous suddenness. Dave was astonished.
"Look at me!" he gasped in wonder. "Look at me, Louise!"
The girl was crouched on her haunches on the floor, holding her tormented breasts. Pain had numbed her senses. She shook her long hair out of her eyes and looked back across her shoulders with dull obedience. He had shed his clothing, and stood over her like a conquering warrior. The muscles of his thick thighs were knotted with tension. His belly was corded, and a pulse fluttered wildly near his right hipbone. Her eyes went round as saucers. This was not the half-man she had been married to for so many futile, frustrating days and nights. This man was all man, a vital, potent bull of a man!
With a cry of triumph, he kneeled down behind her and grasped her throbbing buttocks with masterful, confident hands. She shuddered as his hard belly and thighs convulsed against her hot, soft flesh. The powerful surge of his virility between her thighs wiped away the emotional pain she had endured for so long, and the physical pain she had endured this night from the strap, in a single sweeping stroke, like the swipe of an eraser across a chalked blackboard. His hands slipped underneath her armpits and closed on her sensitive breasts. She winced, but the agony of the flesh could not defeat the glory of the spirit that filled her flesh.
"My husband!" she sighed. "My lover!"
He filled her womanhood completely. What she had experienced and enjoyed with Don Evans earlier was pale satisfaction compared to the monumental bliss she knew at this moment. She reared back against him, wanting to make her whole body one with his body. They rocked together in a frenzied dance of love, plastered thigh to thigh, belly to buttocks, chest to back.
"I love you, darling," she cried out at the beautiful instant of fulfillment. "I love you, Lou!" he said rapturously.
They soared into bliss that seemed to last an eternity. The pleasure was too exquisite and heady for the frail human flesh and spirit to tolerate. Before it was finished, they both blacked out, the same way an astronaut lapses into brief unconsciousness when he descends from heavenly heights to the atmosphere of the mortal world.
When his senses and sanity returned, Dave picked up his wife and carried her to their bed. He placed her down gently. The cruel welts striping her breasts, back and buttocks made him cringe with shame. He lavished kisses on the dear flesh he had so abused with the heavy razor strap. He soothed her burning breasts and buttocks with his cooling, healing saliva in the way an animal will lick the wounds of its wounded mate.
Louise came out of her swoon to find her sore body already replenishing the desire she had believed was drained bone dry by the glorious climax she had just achieved.
"Don't you do a thing," he murmured to her softly. "Just lie there and let me love you."
She reached for him with her hands, and her breasts swelled with sweet gratitude as his flesh responded to her caresses instantly and ardently. Abruptly, her pleasure waned as she saw herself as she had been with Don Evans in the car, a wanton, panting female animal, eager not for love but for a quick, bestial coupling. Louise began to cry.
"What is it, darling?" he asked.
She told him about her shame, sparing herself nothing.
Dave was hurt, he could not deny it. "Still, if it hadn't been for what happened between you and Evans, this good thing the two of us discovered tonight might never have happened," he rationalized.
"I suppose so," she conceded. "But will you ever forgive me that? Can you?"
He smiled. "I don't know, really. Can you ever forget the torment I've inflicted on you? Who can tell? All we can do is to try."