Chapter 7

A good many miles away, in a Manhattan hotel room high above Third Avenue, Fred Markell was also liberating his libido in the approved Freudian fashion. He lay nude with a nude Anita in his arms. She was making little purring sounds as he touched her breasts and thighs. Her warm, sleek body throbbed with life and vigor. The lights were on. He always left the lights on bright when he made love to her. There was no sense robbing himself even of one pleasure. He wanted to be able to look, as well as to touch, to taste, to smell, and to hear her sounds of passion.

He cupped her breasts, squeezing them, feeling the rigid little nipples. He put his lips to them, running his caress over their tops. Anita giggled.

"What's the matter?"

"Tickles."

"Is that bad or good?"

"I don't know. Keep doing it."

He kissed her again. Anita quivered. Markell smiled. This was his tenth session with her, and by now he thought he knew her pretty well. They were old hands at the game of love by this time. She had given him pleasure in a number of ways, and he believed he had given her pleasure as well, and everything was fine.

She had been with him fifteen minutes, now. There was plenty of time left. On some occasions she forgot to ration time with him. She gave him an extra fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes even half an hour. Markell loved her for that. It took some of the sordid curse of prostitution out of the relationship for him, to think that she wasn't doling out the time to him in metered segments.

He caressed her thigh, trailing his fingertips up the warm, infinitely smooth flesh. His fingers touched warmth, and Anita's breathing grew a little heavier. His roaming fingers played about, while at the same time his other hand caressed the ripe hillocks of her breasts.

Then she was draping one lovely tapering leg casually over his body. Her eyes brimmed with desire, and she smiled and said, "Let's love this way tonight," and a moment later she was sitting over him.

Markell grinned. One thing he appreciated most about her was her unrestrained fondness for experiment, for trying different ways of love. With Janet, love was something carried out in one particular standard fashion, and no deviations were permitted. But not with Anita. None of this you-on-top-me-on-bottom nonsense for her. She liked variety.

So did he.

So everything was fine.

He lay back, snuggling comfortably against the pillow, and she sat over him. Her nimble, skilled fingers slid down his body, found their goal. Not that he needed any assistance, but she offered it anyway, and he accepted it gratefully. He half-closed his eyes, shivering a little in pleasure as her slim little fingers worked.

Crouching above him, she bent over, letting her soft golden hair slide gently over his entire body. He filled his nostrils with the fragrance of her.

She bent far over, letting the heavy swaying bells of her breasts move, the hard-tipped nipples so close to his lips that he could and did open his lips to kiss them, like ripe fruit he could reach up and taste.

She sat astride him, her blonde hair cascading down, shimmering about her as she moved She worked her way forward on him, and raised her body, and then slowly lowered it until she rested squarely on him.

Markell clamped his eyes tight shut. He reached up, blindly, for the twin hillocks of her breasts, and found them. He filled his hands with their hard-tipped warmth, and clasped them and squeezed them, while all the time her body continued to churn and twist and rock.

Her body moved, her resilient buttocks bouncing like soft cushions against the hardness of his own body. Faster and even yet faster, until the seething intensity of desire within them seemed so blazingly warm that their bodies appeared about to weld together.

Markell relaxed. He didn't need to do any work. He just had to lie here, letting the deliciously soft warmth envelope him, feeling the satiny cushions of her buttocks against him.

This was really living.

This was the way to go. For .

But how to make it permanent? How to keep Anita with him forever?

As she moved and churned above him, and as he ripped and squeezed her bountiful breasts, he thought for the hundredth time of how he could free himself from Janet and make Anita his wife.

Divorce didn't look too likely. He had no grounds for divorcing her, and, so far as he knew, not even the shrewdest lawyer around was likely to work up any kind of case against her. She was cold, yes, but frigidity wasn't grounds for divorce. And he doubted that an iceberg like Janet would do anything so out of character as commit adultery.

On the other hand, he doubted that he could make her divorce him. She led a nice plush life now, and he would really have to work at it to make her want to pull out. Even if he came home drunk night after night, slapped her around, brought other women into the house, she'd probably try to bear with hiro.

Or else she would take him to court and squeeze him for every penny she could get. Janet was perfectly capable of bleeding a man white, Markell realized bleakly. And the court, presented with the case of a faithful, diligent husband suddenly turning into an ogre, would see immediately that here was a case of a man deliberately trying to force his wife to divorce him, and so the price of his liberty would be a steep one.

He didn't want that. He didn't want to have to bankrupt himself just to get rid of Janet.

But he wanted to be rid of her. Soon. And she was too damned healthy to die naturally any time in the next forty or fifty years. Markell couldn't wait that long. He found it all but impossible to wait the three days that separated one visit with Anita from the next.

But how-?

He pondered the situation. And while he pondered it, Anita continued to rock and roll above him Her breasts overflowed in his hands. He looked up at her, saw her eyes slitted in passion, her lips slack, distorted with excitement. He felt the inner quiverings of her, the first surging pulses of ecstasy.

His own body trembled with the nearness of his fulfillment.

He struggled to hold it back, to keep from going off like a roman candle. Not yet, he begged, not just yet, Let it Last for a while-

She churned and thrashed above him. She rocked and she rolled. She wriggled and heaved and swayed, now clockwise, now counterclockwise, every wild motion sending new shafts of pleasure through him.

Now she was bouncing, and he closed his eyes again and felt the sensation of having warm butter dropped on him again and again, and then he opened his eyes, to see her breasts bouncing, those plump, taut, heavy globes with their swollen red tips, and then passion got hold of him and he was forced to shut his eyes again, and he felt glowing within her, and her muscles were doing tricks again, and he was close to the finish, and suddenly she let out a sobbing gasp of pleasure and in the same moment he felt his body rear involuntarily, felt his muscles convulse and quiver.

A million flares went off back of his eyeballs. Sirens wailed in his brain. Fireworks went off.

It was as if a rocket had come surging off the launching pad in a blast of flame, was rising, rising heavenward, and exploding in a wonderful shower of brightness, and a tidal wave of ecstasy crashed through him and he felt her body spasm and go taut, and he reached up, seized her breasts again, held on to them as though he felt that he was drowning in the tide of his own need and wanted something solid to hold.

And then, then at the peak of his ecstasy, in that numbing, mind-jarring instant of pure physical pleasure, an idea struck him.

An idea involving Janet and Jack Donovan.

An idea that might just solve his marital problem for him.

Naked, Janet Markell crouched on the floor in front of Jack Donovan. Her hands gripped the thick muscles of his thighs. Her head was thrust forward, and her kiss was fervent.

She could hear his hoarse panting, and she knew he was pleased. She continued to do it. She felt a new excitement. It gave her a strange pleasure to be doing this.

She had never done it with her husband. She had always felt that Fred would be shocked by it, that he would object, that he would find it repugnant. Fred tended to be too fastidious about love, Janet thought.

But she had no such qualms with Donovan She knew that in his eyes, anything went. He was unshockable, like her analyst. So long as something contributed to pleasure, why, that something was not only permissible but downright desirable.

Only once before in her life had she done this with a man. and it was so long ago she hardly remembered it, now. It was back in her college days. Fourteen, fifteen years ago. There had been a boy-what was his name, Jimmy, Bruce, she couldn't even remember that?-and they had had a campus love affair.

It wasn't her first experience, but it was almost the first, and she was very, very, serious and scholarly about it. She and Bruce or Jimmy or Jerry or whatever his name was would buy paperback books on sex, things like How To Have A Harmonious Marriage, and they would sit naked and crosslegged on the bed in his dorm room to pour over them, and they would run across words that stood for activities that could not be mentioned in their Anglo-Saxon forms, and after they read about them they would put them into practice.

So Janet had done it with him, then. She could remember the pleasure of it, and the sudden surprise of his culmination. Fourteen years, maybe fifteen, and she had never done it again. Until now.

And then he said, "Wait! Stop, Janet!"

She looked up, her eyes wild with pleasure. Why?"

"Because I want you to enjoy it too."

"I am enjoying it."

"No. There's a better way. Come on up here on tine couch with me."

Obediently, she scrambled up. She felt like a rank amateur, like the veriest of beginners. Even though it was sixteen years since she had lost her innocence, she realized she actually knew very little about love. Even after ten years of marriage. Even after who knew how many hundreds or even thousands of rounds in bed.

She had never learned much, somehow.

But Donovan was teaching her.

He was better than a marriage manual. With him, she had no need of poring over closely-printed pages and puzzling over Latin terms, as she had done in the forgotten past with the boy of forgotten name. With Donovan, it was a matter of immediate doing, not of reading about.

He was positioning her, now. Adjusting her limbs on the couch.

She was mystified for a moment. But only for a moment. The logic of what he had in mind, the sheer good sense of it, struck her an instant later. Of course. He always knew the best way of doing anything. He had had so much experience in these arts.

They lay together on the couch, and once again, her eager kiss met him.

But this time she felt his hot breath against the softness of her, and then-

She gasped for breath.

Her nostrils flared. Her whole body quivered. She felt his lips, and she shook with passion, and her head moved violently.

Yes, she thought. Yes, this was far better than her way. This way they could both share the same sensations, could rise together toward that summit of ecstasy, toward the moment of passion.

She held tight to him. She coiled her body, opening for him. Their harsh gasping filled the room.

Janet quivered. She had never known a pleasure as strange as this. She wondered how Fred would react if he walked in now and saw the two of them entangled this way. Did Fred ever do things like this with his blonde floozie, Janet wondered? Perhaps he was less fastidious with her than lje was with his wife. Maybe he was more adventurous in Anita's arms. Maybe-

Janet went tense. She felt a trembling, now, a sudden inner spasm. Her body began to churn in the rhythms of passion, and her lips redoubled their efforts. In another moment, she knew, she was going to be at the crest of ecstasy. What about Donovan? Would he get there too? Was she doing the right things to him? She felt confused, felt like a timid virgin.

And then she heard him gasp, and knew that she was doing the right things, and suddenly he was rigid and panting against her, and her mind blanked out as passion hit her and she gasped and writhed and then came the pounding explosion in her body, and an instant later she felt Donovan give a tremendous shiver and then it was happening to him, too, and she took a strange pleasure in what was occurring, intoxicating herself on the wine of his ecstasy, and then it was over, and they lay still in a tangled heap on the couch.

His hands stole down to cup her breasts. His breathing was hoarse and ragged.

"Did you enjoy it?" he asked after a moment.

"It was wonderful, Jack."

"I wasn't sure. I was so tied up myself that I couldn't tell how you reacted."

"It was tremendous, Jack. If it was only as good for you as it was for me-"

"It was. I'm sure of it."

She put her arms around him. They came close together on the couch, and she leaned her head against his chest.

"Jack, I-"

She stopped.

"What did you start to say?"

"Nothing," Janet said.

He didn't reply. Janet opened her eyes and stared across the room.

I almost said, I love you.

She studied the words in her mind. I love you? But she couldn't say that. She was married. He was married. There was no room for love. Love led to marriage, and they had other partners. Donovan even had children. Love was out of the question. Passion, yes. But not love.

She bit her lip. Cold reality had intruded into her dream world, drifting in unbidden in the aftermath of her ecstasy, taking the edge of warmth off her pleasure.

Donovan sensed it. He said, "What's the trouble, baby? Tell me."

"It's nothing, Jack. Nothing at all."

"I can tell. You're worried."

"No."

"Saving it for your analyst?"

"Please, Jack-"

"Something's eating you. Come on, out with it. I won't even charge you for the advice." Janet sighed. "All right. I'm worried."

"Go on."

"I'm worried about us. Where are we going from here? What are we heading toward?"

"I don't get you," Donovan said.

"You've got a wife and children. I've got a husband. We've got to think of them."

"I haven't thought of my wife in six years," Donovan said, "and I don't intend to start doing it now. I support her and I clothe her and I sleep with her now and then, and she's happy, and why should I worry about her? As for your husband, he's busy having a play-for-pay girl right this second, and I bet he isn't worried about you. So why the hell get worked up about it?"

"Because-because-how long can it go on, Jack? You and me, making love in secrecy like this?"

"What could stop it?"

"Something always does. No love affair lasts forever. Something always breaks it up. Some outside force."

Donovan laughed gently. He put his hands on her breasts, on the firm swells that had grown so pleasingly plump in the last few weeks. He caught the nipples between his fingers, and playfully toyed with them, rubbing the curves of her breasts together.

"Don't worry," he murmured. "Nobody's going to tip over this apple cart. Fred's happy, and my wife is happy and we're happy too. I don't see any reason why our little affair can't quietly go on until we're all old and wrinkled. For ever and ever and ever, Jan. Forever and ever."