Chapter 1

Lee CUSHING, B.A., M.A.-and PH.D. AS of one year ago this morning-sat behind his desk, deep brown eyes dreamily focused on his mental image of a voluptuous woman writhing in the throes of wanton sexual passion. He was indulging in some markedly unacademic daydreaming, sipping his second cup of coffee and just beginning to feel it snap him into unconsciousness. Lee didn't often stare into space, especially when he had a fountain of papers to correct and an exam to map out for his Faulkner course, English 445.

But with a wife like Joan, it was hard not to. And, remembering the torrid sex-session they had had last night, it was just damned impossible not to indulge in a bit of mental skylarking, he thought. That woman brought out the beast in him at times. It was frightening!

He had come home from school, depressed. It had been a bum day-faculty meeting, horrible class, run-in with Cook, one of his colleagues. Terrible day. He'd walked into their rented house with a sour frown, thrown his brief case savagely on the couch. Joan had offered herself for a kiss, which he'd accepted dutifully rather than with any real enthusiasm.

"Bad day, darling?" she'd asked.

For reply, Lee had snorted, lit a cigarette, then answered, "My God, yes, the worst day imaginable."

Joan had smiled sympathetically. "Sit down, and I'll fix you a drink. You can tell me all about it"

Lee had nodded mutely, too tired and too disgusted to offer any argument.

"It's so damned silly," he'd said. "I shouldn't let things get to me like this.

"No, you shouldn't," , she agreed. "Lee, you're awfully tense these days. You should try to relax."

"Sure! A novel to finish, a new course to get off the ground, relax just like that."

"Lee, I'm your wife," she'd said plaintively, "and you haven't given me much chance to show it." He looked up from his drink, and their eyes met. Her meaning was clear enough. She didn't have to draw pictures.

It had been a hell of a long time since they'd made passionate love, and it was his fault. He laughed inwardly. If he kept going like this, he'd become a fossil like old man Stone, the department chairman. Joan was right, he should leave his problems at school and give her the attention she needed and deserved.

He slipped his arm around her, and she snuggled against him. A very warm, alive body, Joan's: sweetly redundant with curves, swelled with breasts that were creamy-white and firm, that defied any brassiere to hide those hemispheric tops-breasts that his hands could not completely surround, breasts whose nipples were pink, hard and pebble-like. The cleavage between the globes was deep enough to submerge his nose and lips in.

Before their marriage, Joan had been a dancer, and she still kept her body young by going through her old routines. Every inch of her body was firm, lithe, womanly. Her stomach was flat; waist, taper-thin; hips, full and rounded; thighs, strong and pillar-like. When she walked, her buttocks strained suggestively against her skirt, or her shorts, or whatever she wore. You could clothe the woman in a pup-tent, and her body would beckon underneath.

But after two years of marriage and increased responsibilities, one slipped, became careless in recognizing the signs of sexual need she was now reminding him of with her blue, flickering eyes; her full, sensuous lips that needed no paint to heighten their healthy red coloring; and the very warmth and vitality of her body leaning against him.

Lee felt her body move more firmly against his, her lush, compliant breast touching his shoulder.

"I've been thinking about ... us, all day," she whispered throatily. "It's been too long, darling." Her hand stroked his hair; every now and then, her fingertips sent electric currents into the back of his neck, streaking through his body. Her lips touched his cheek, his ear.

There was nothing academic about wanting your wife.

You didn't have to reason things out, didn't have to consult the PMLA for references. He put his arms around her, held her close against his hard body.

"You don't let a guy forget," he smiled; he nuzzled his lips against the white, soft skin of her neck and breathed hot air into the opening of her blouse so that it bathed the tops of her breasts. She gasped, pulled him closer still.

"You make me dizzy," she marveled, "absolutely dizzy." She felt his fingers deftly working at the blouse-buttons, one by one until his hand was resting against the warm, smooth skin of her stomach and ribcage. It was slightly awkward trying to unsnap the bra because of extra strain caused by her hill-sized breasts, but he managed. The breasts leaped free, pushing the bra defiantly out of the way; no doubt the garment would have catapulted across the living room had it not been for the straps that hung on her shoulders.

His hands roamed her breasts, cupped them, squeezed them. They were smooth, round, unbelievably full. His palms got the brunt of pebble-hard nipples that swelled in response to his touches.

"Lee, my God, Lee!" she gasped. He saw her jaw go suddenly slack, her lips open and pout moistly for a soul-kiss; he closed his eyes, moved his face toward hers, and their lips collided. There was the sweet, body-trembling collision of tongues. She searched the interior of his mouth with its white-hot tip, making him tremble and quake all over, while her hands moved deftly down his back, around to the front of his loins: wherever she touched him, his muscles tightened into little knots, until he became one collective bundle of painful need.

"Undress me," she whispered.

He looked at her. She had shrugged the shoulder straps loose, and through the completely opened blouse, he could see the mounding thrusts of perfect hemispheres, punctuated by the swollen, engorged nipples.

He gently removed the blouse and threw it on the floor beside the brassiere, then worked on the zipper to her skirt. His hand moved inside, next to silky sheer panties, pushing the skirt down her hips, thighs, finally past the knees.

Her legs were a wonder-long, lean, tight but meaty and sensuously, voluptuously, undeniably feminine. The thighs joined the hips with a perfect symmetry-a long, gentle, continual swelling and rounding of undulating white flesh.

They kissed again.

She felt good next to him, squirming with hot eagerness, her soft, yet firm belly flaring Us warmth through his shirt, while her hands frantically tore at his clothing, with a refreshing disregard for their well-being. A button popped loose, went across the room jet-propelled and hit a wall with a clicking sound. Her hands were inside, trembling against his downy-haired chest, seeking their way down, until they came to fitful rest against his belt line.

His belt was loosened.

His slacks were opened.

Her hand joined his flesh and moved slowly down, making his muscles cramp painfully.

"All the way, Lee, get them all off!" Her voice was now reduced to a grating rasp. A voice of raw sexual want. They separated limbs just long enough to divest themselves of all clothing, and embraced again, completely nude.

Now Lee felt her nipples scratch at his chest; an overwhelming urge to kiss those nipples, to feel them between his lips, took hold of him. He kissed them slowly, for long, excrutiatingly pleasurable moments.

Her response was rabid.

Every chord and muscle of her body snapped loose, and went haywire, until she moved against him with the fury of a lioness in heat, hands scratching his flesh raw.

Her thighs were dewy with wanting. Her flesh screamed for release; helpless, they fell back against the cushions of the couch and locked in embrace. The final embrace. The ultimate onslaught.

In his passion, he bit her lower lip and drew blood, while she whimpered with a sound hovering deliciously in pleasure-pain.

"God, I'm hot, take me hard!" she moaned, "Hard, hard, hard!" The word moved out of her lips with the force and rhythm of her body vibrating expectantly against his.

He took her.

Viciously.

Her hot readiness allowed their bodies to join in an embrace of hungry flesh with moans and gasps and violent words born of unslaked pleasure.

Lee jammed his hands under her buttocks, grasped her quivering cheeks. They worked together, struck up raging movement while her thighs spurred against his sides.

She drew him to her slowing his rapacious pace. She moved with maddening, deliberate slowness. Her body, her needs, dictated the tempo of the embrace, and he was sure he would go insane with anxiety and excitement, when blessedly, she picked up the beat and urged him on with her hands, which grasped the small of his back, near his buttocks, pushing, driving....

It hit him all at once.

It welled up inside him and swept through him until he saw bright, flickering lights; a warm liquid bubble increased in size until it pushed against the walls of his body, threatening to burst him wide open.

Then it happened.

It had not been one bubble at all, but two bubbles blended into one. It burst simultaneously; their bodies stiffened, their lips gasped out incoherent sounds of pleasure, and they were swept away by the force of their perfect lovemaking. Their pleasure spilled over with titantic, mutual force, lifting them into ecstasy.

His office was hardly conducive to passion-packed reminiscing. It was small, business-like, lined on two walls with books, mostly paperback texts. On one side of his desk was an office-sized typewriter, on the other the telephone. Between, the pile of papers to be corrected. Students would hound him, It was their right. He remembered his own undergraduate days, when an instructor or professor had taken months to return papers. It was annoying, frustrating. It created needless tension on the student's part.

Still, he could count his blessings-a wonderful, extremely sexy wife who loved him, his doctorate behind him, a novel well in progress, that if well received, would enhance his academic career and propel him into a literary career as well. He was young, the youngest in the department: twenty-six years old. He was on his way. In a few years, by virtue of his creative abilities he'd be up with Stone, the department chairman. Damned few academicians had it, he knew. They were critics, pedants, theorizers, everything except writers. They were unable to see that writing and literature were two distinctively different things. And he knew that people like Stone resented men who had attained a professor's ranking by virtue of their writing reputation. Hell, take Faulkner, Lee's specialty-a man with one year of college, flunked freshman English-they'd made him a professor at UVA. More immediate, John Hanley of their own department: a B. A. from some third-rate school, nothing more. But he had written a novel hailed as the greatest thing since The Ginger Man and Cantly. John had a light schedule. He held office hours three hours a week, and worked on his new novel under the auspices of the university. He had professor's rank and salary. Guys like Stone resented it. In fact, Lee was one of few people in the department who had befriended Hanley, had had him and his sex-pot wife over for dinner and drinks. It was all part of the stinking game. If you were a thinker, you ground out your degrees and your critical essays and your unassailable theories concerning writers who had been dead many years and were not around to defend themselves. Shakespearean critics were especially guilty of the error. On the other hand, if you were creative, you didn't need a degree; you merely needed a school hot for the prestige that your literary butt could ostensibly offer if it graced a chair in their English department. Lee did not want to be a pedant; nor did he wish to be a scholar. He wanted to be a teacher with utterly complete rapport between himself and the students he taught, and he wanted to be a writer. He knew he could write. He felt it in his bones; all those years of academic slavery had robbed him of the time required to try his talents. Now, he was doing it; he had shown his manuscript to Hanley, who had been visibly impressed.

Everything seemed to be working well for him. There was just a minor difficulty, one that hardly mattered, as long as he asserted himself. Joan was a bit ambitious for his sake, a bit too taken up with the idea that a wife should prod her husband, regardless of whether or not he possessed the essential ambition and drive. He had it. He didn't need anyone else to supply it for him, and he constantly reminded her of that fact. Last night had been an exception, really. It wasn't often that she urged him to relax, to lose himself by making love to her. Other than that, their marriage was as nearly perfect as marriages were meant to be.

He began looking over papers. Already, he was associating names with faces, with personalities. It was the second week of classes, but his Faulkner class was a small one by University standards, fourteen students all told. On the very first day of class, he had assigned them the first of the Snopes books, The Hamlet, thinking that he would slowly work them into monuments like Sound And The Fury and Absolom, Absolom! They were to have a short paper in by the beginning of the second week, without referring to critics or outside references. He'd told them that his main concern was their personal reaction to the book, to Faulkner.

He started reading the first one on the pile. It belonged to Brenda Wood, who had struck him as being exceptionally perceptive. Some of her comments had been astute, to say the least. He read the paper through for the first time. Each paper would be read twice, then corrected. It was a slow, but thorough process. It would take him all day; fortunately, he had no class today. All he had to do was correct papers and think of an exam for his Survey course.

Dr. Paul Stone III, B.A. at Harvard, M.A. at Yale and Ph. D. at Oxford awakened, and got out of bed, leaving Peggy (B.A. only) curled fetus-like, her even breathing disturbed by his movement. He heard her stir, quickened his steps toward the bathroom. Lately, it was hell getting up in the mornings. Jt was a sinister little game to see if he could get away without an argument. A game that he had absolutely no desire to play.

"Paul?" she called out. He stopped and grumbled, "Wait'll I come out of the bathroom," then proceeded forward again. He prolonged as many activities as possible, hoping that his wife would not argue when he came out, and perhaps by scantest possibility that she'd have some coffee ready. It was an old tactic, and seldom worked.

This morning it did not.

"Paul, could you get home early tonight?" Peggy asked. She was still lying in bed.

"You know I'm in the midst of meetings with the administration," he told her. "If I get out early, I'll be home early."

Peggy Stone sighed.

"Paul, did it ever occur to you that most of your colleagues entered the academic profession so they would not have to work such long hours?"

"Not true," he snapped. "Nobody in my department worth his salt has an attitude like that."

"I'll bet they have enough time for their wives." She looked at him archly; he averted his eyes.

"They're not chairmen, dear. They don't have my responsibilities."

"OK, Paul, it's too early to argue. You go to school and you do your work, and you impress everyone with your grand importance. Get old and dried up. Be the great scholar who can't give his wife five minutes' worth of sex!" With that, she slammed the bedroom door. From outside, he heard sobs, her body falling on the bed. He sighed and walked out with his brief case under his arm.

It wa? impossible for a man like Paul Stone III to understand a woman like Peggy. He had worked slavishly, diligently for years to achieve his status. Now that he was there, he had the long-awaited opportunity to go back into research. He was able to delegate responsibilities to other men in the department. Tne week before, he had applied for a year's leave of absence. In any other school, this was known as a sabbatical, but at this university, with an administration that wallowed in executive efficiency and red tape, it was simply a leave of absence. And, you had to apply for it. If granted, it would mean an entire year in which to complete a project he had been nurturing for fifteen years: a comprehensive critical study of American literature in the 20's, 30's 40's and 50's: an ambitious project, certainly, but one well under way. He could see it quite clearly in his mind; a year abroad somewhere, with a sensitive graduate student to assist him with typing, researching, and other chores-a year to escape meetings and students and instructors. It would be grand, indeed.

That was what Peggy was incapable of understanding-the fact that he had to get the department into perfect working order so that administration would consider his request. All she seemed to care about was sex, sex, sex! It made him sick.

Hence, the sudden, not-yet-announced opening for an associate professorship in the English department. He was going to post it today, and all who applied would be reviewed and interviewed accordingly. He could think of several men and a woman who might be eligible, as well as interested. They had excellent records for critical publications, which meant of course, they were true, competent scholars. He needed and wanted a department with a reputation. Reputations were born of scholars whose names and articles appeared consistently in journals and literary magazines, and an occasional book in the form of collected essays in criticism. Unfortunately, it was essential to have people like John Hanley around, who were anti-academe, but had reputations on the creative level. Personally, he thought Hanley's novel, Long-Gone Charlie, a redundant, poorly executed novel. It didn't begin to compare to the gems of Fitzgerald or Wolfe, or even Hemingway at his best. No underlying themes that he could see, no symbolic significance, no underplotting-as he saw it, a most invaluable book loaded with sex. Yet, the critics and reviewers had hailed the novel as the greatest thing since The Ginger Man and Young Adam. Pressure had been exerted on him, and he had contacted Hanky, hoping that he was obligated already and would be unable to come. He came.

And, Paul Stone III resented men like John Hanley with their lack of interest in the academic community, their preoccupation with themselves. But it was part of the overall structure; he needed at least one "Name" like Hanley around to round out the department roster.

He parked in the lot in front of annex B, the English department offices. As he walked down the corridor toward his office, he got several greetings from instructors, and graduate fellows, none of whom he knew personally. He had no time to know them. They were thrown assignments to teach freshman English to disinterested students, and that was that. There was more important business at hand than mere teaching and molding of young, impressionable minds. There was research, administrative duties, checks into his people's publication records, etc. The students-well, they had to be processed and run through as best as possible. It was a large university, with a student body exceeding ten thousand. He could hardly be expected to establish contact with such a horde. Theoretically, everv one of them had to run through his department in their freshman year, as English was a required subject. It kept his department busy, kept the budget requests high.

He called the secretary, and she came in.

"Good morning, Dr. Stone," she husked, pouting sensuous perky breasts to attention.

"Good morning," he said, "take this down, will you, and have it posted immediately. There is a depart mental opening for one qualified individual for the position of Associate Professor of English. All interested applicants indicate same to the department secretary, and arrange for interviews. Sincerely."

"Yes, sir."

"I want it up this morning."

"Yes, sir." She walked out, shutting the door behind her. Stone turned to the pile of papers on his desk and concentrated on them. He had an admirably discip-lined mind. He was able to shut out everything but those papers, including the image of his wife Peggy.

Peggy was not so disciplined. She was not able to shut out the memory of the unpleasant introduction to another day. It was becoming a standard prelude, but its repetitive quality didn't accustom her to it.

Peggy was a beautiful woman, and she knew it. She was in her prime. At thirty-four years of age, Peggy looked like most women of twenty-four would never look like if their lives depended on it. As if her looks were meant to serve a distinct function, she had a sexual desire to match them. She had always been endowed with the need for stud, lots of it, but in the past year or so, it had increased with uncomfortable frequency. It was uncomfortable because it remained unacknowledged and unsatisfied. Her husband did not know that she existed as a woman with woman's craving for sexual attention.

Peggy was everything that a normal man could want in a wife: devoted, loyal, uninterfering, yet interested, tender, passionate, good company, an object of quiet envy on the part of other men.

She had auburn hair that hung shoulder length when she chose to wear it down, a pretty oval, un-lined and unwrinkled face which it framed. Deep brown eyes, full body-a body that had not thickened with the onset of middle age. It was as rounded and curved and inviting as ever. It had in fact ripened and improved with age: breasts that stood firm, upthrust; waist, slender; legs, smooth; buttocks, massively heart-shaped. In a word, Peggy Stone was in good condition. Not that thirty-four is old. It is theoretically the pinnacle of female perfectibility, but most women let themselves go to hell as soon as they leave their twenties.

But not Peggy.

It was Paul, damn it.

He was a mere thirty-nine, young-looking, in good health, the envy of all the other faculty wives. She knew he was virile, but he was so preoccupied with his work that he had no time for her in bed. It had been weeks now, since they had made love, and the last time around had been a disappointing experience, to say the very least. He had merely done his duty, rolled away, gone to sleep. No words of love and passion, no exciting preliminaries, no tenderness afterward. He had left her tense and taut for the rest of the night.

It was nothing like it had been in the beginning, when Paul was a struggling instructor, working on his doctorate. They had lived in a furnished apartment. She had worked in the Bursar's office to bring in grocery money so that he could devote more time to his studies. Lacking leisure and comfort, their life had been a perfect one; in retrospect, it was quite better than their present life together. Then, a walk around the block, looking in store windows at things they had no business looking at, had been diversion for them. Casserole dinners, a radio program, a game of chess....

And bed. And sex. He simply couldn't get enough of her.

My God, she thought, they'd been at each other constantly. Their passions had been insatiable then. Just ten short years ago, she had been the happiest woman in the world, with no comforts, no money, a pocketful and headful of dreams for the future, and more sex than she could handle.

It had been marvelous.

Every night, they had made love, and never with any design: it had always "just happened." Paul had been a good lover at age twenty-nine, ten years ago, because he had been a youth. Now, he could still retain a youthful outlook, if only he weren't so tied up in his work. Ambition was a fine thing; she was grateful to be married to a man of his stature, his reputation, but she regretted his negligence of her.

It didn't have to be that way.

There was nothing organically wrong with the man.

Every now and then, Peggy had a dream. Tt was a dream born of pent-up desire. It wasn't a complicated dream at all. It consisted of her lying on her back, naked, with knees well-aimed at the ceiling. There was a man on top of her, straining, smashing a s oody with pleasurable violence against hers, bringing her to whimpering, sobbing completion. Then, the man disappeared. She'd had that same dream for several consecutive nights; awakening, she found that she had a very real feeling of release-it was a woman's wet dream, nothing more.

It disgusted her.

A woman of thirty-four, with a perfectly capable husband, subject to nocturnal dreams of that sort; there was no excuse for it. She didn't resent it on moral grounds, but instead harbored a grudge against Paul. It was a hard fact to face, but nevertheless she tried to accept the reality that her husband was all work and no lay.

Joan Cushing awakened, but kept her eyes closed. She knew that Lee was gone-there was a cold spot on the mattress where he had lain beside her. Looking at the clock, she saw that it was after nine.

There wasn't any reason to get out of bed just yet. She lay against the pillow, thought about her behavior with Lee the night before. You couldn't ask for a better husband, she thought. Their life together was a good one, for the most part. The only thing that disturbed her was Lee's refusal to do certain things. Oh, nothing major, just that he could do certain things that would further assure his future. Things like making an attempt to be friendlier with the Stones, or devoting a bit more time to writing critical articles.

If he'd just play the game.

They all did, and they all seemed to get ahead, but Lee adamantly refused to do those certain, apparently essential things. He was a teacher, he laid, and hopefully a writer, not a bundle of theories revolving around long-dead issues and people. It was the one weak link in their relationship, the only time he told her in no uncertain terms to keep her nose out of his affairs.

Perhaps he was right.

She was aware of male pride and self-confidence; but she was also deathly afraid that he would make a fatal error and lose everything they wanted so much, everything they'd built their dreams on.

Her mind switched to the voluptuous sexing of the previous night.

The two of them, lovemaking on the couch in the living room, not like two people tired of one another, but like young, fiery lovers hot for one another's bodies. It was something that neither of them tired of, a pleasure that enhanced itself with time.

When he'd sucked her breasts-her nipples swelling and surging against the sweet flips of his tongue-she had lost her breath in her wild grunts. A wildfire had burned inside her flesh, and she'd responded with joy, throwing all inhibitions to the wind. He never failed to affect her that way. A kiss, a look. It didn't take much for her to get hot.

I must be oversexed, she thought; maybe a nympho. It made her giggle to think of it: the professor's wife unable to get enough sex to satisfy her. Wouldn't that be a hell of a conversation at the next faculty tea? Certainly a welcome change from the usual patter about literature and critics.

She ran her hands over her lush breasts, felt the nipples begin to throb. Enough of this she thought I've got other things to do. She had to shop, pick up some dry cleaning, a host of chores that are never noticed unless neglected. And she wanted to cook something special for Lee. Perhaps, if she could find some decent looking lobsters, she'd buy a couple. Broiled lobster was one of his favorites.

Lee walked down the corridor, his brief-case stuffed with the corrected papers and a copy of The Hamlet. He was on his way to English 445. He could feel the youthful bounce in his footsteps. It was a class that excited him, one that he had worked hard to have listed in the catalogue. It had taken a certain amount of intellectual prostitution, but he'd achieved his goal.

He caught the words "Associate Professorship opening" almost out of the corner of his eye. He stopped quickly to read the notice just posted on the board, then walked hurriedly to his class.