Chapter 3

Paul Stone was disturbed by his interview with Lee Cushing. Here was a young man, he thought, with obvious gifts for teaching-in short, for the academic way of life, who expressed a manifest unwillingness to do things that were expected of him. He had read Lee's doctoral thesis, and it had been an excellent one. One of the finest he had read, to be sure; full of good solid documentation and allusion and connection and cross-reference. It was the work of a scholar. Why did Lee Cushing choose to rebel against established policy?

He was working on a novel. Fine. Wonderful.

But it was a conjectural enterprise at best, one that might fail dismally. And John Hanley did not help matters greatly with his encouragement of the project. Hanley was a writer, made his living at it, but in no way was he a scholar. He unhesitatingly admitted that he couldn't be bothered with "academic hogwash." Yet, Stone had chosen to hire Hanley, because of the very real prestige that the man could give to the Department.

He was a currently discussed writer, one who had the critics whirling. It was a decidedly rare thing for writers to arouse so much attention in their own time. But damn it, Hanley was making his job more difficult. A man Lee's age was especially impressionable, subject to Wind idealism. He wanted to be a teacher and a writer, two very fine ambitions; but he failed to accept the reality of current requirements: that of establishing himself on scholarly grounds.

It was disturbing, because his hands were tied. Cushing had a two year contract with the university, a contract unbreakable at either end; he couldn't be fired, and he couldn't resign. It boiled down to the uncomfortable fact that they had to live with one another for two years-but Stone was determined to turn Lee around. There were ways, many ways to achieve the turn-around. As an administrator, he was well-versed in those ways, indeed, he thought.

Peggy Stone addressed the last of her invitations and put them out front, under the mailbox, where the mailman could pick them up.

Another silly faculty party.

A brain-picking session, where they spoke to one another like vultures awaiting death so they could pounce on helpless gray matter. It would follow the customary pattern, of course: cocktails, pre-made, pre-chilled whiskey sours, manhattans or daquiris. Everybody drank the same thing. It was part of the uniform process. They talked; God, how they talked. It sounded invariably like an oral dissertation. Every now and then, they would talk about the same thing, a remarkably rare occurrence. It was standard for one to talk into mentally closed ears; when he was through, the other talked immediately, and expounded his unsolicited theories. Years of these affairs had taught Peggy that original thinking was unwelcome. It upset the apple cart, blew the pattern all to hell. Yet, if it did happen on occasion-if someone did have the audacity to strike out in new directions; it was listened to, secretly dissected, weighed, mentally visualized in print, and if academically marketable, used in different, barely disguised language.

It was all a waste.

But Paul insisted on these parties as a working part of his responsibilities. It enabled him (so he claimed) to keep attuned to the members of the department, his subordinates. It helped him to evaluate each individual member, something he hardly had time for during a working day.

And like a good faculty wife, Peggy did her best to make these parties a success. She made what she thought to be interesting, yet acceptable hors d' oeuvres; paired people off as best she could; and introduced new people around, people such as the Hanleys, trying to get them into the swim as quickly and painlessly as possible because there was no mistaking or evading the fact that it was, for the uninitiated, a highly painful undertaking.

Everything done, she went to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of coffee. She was drinking too much of the stuff these days. Her nerves were keyed to a screaming, potentially explosive pitch. She was randy as a brood mare from Paul's lack of attention, and the sexual frustration created tension that overlapped into every other part of her life.

She had never even contemplated infidelity until very recently. Lately, it had begun to erode her brain like an insistent little termite eating into rotting wood. It had started in dreams; faceless, for the most part unidentifiable men had had her, had used her in delicious forbidden ways; and when she awakened, it was with a horrified sense of physical release.

It upset her, it was a damned waste. Why did husbands and wives in their prime sleep together? Just to sleep, and nothing else? Why couldn't Paul give her a fraction of the attention he gave to his job, to his critical project? She wasn't asking, had never asked, that he neglect his career for her sake. She knew that men were ultimately married to their careers. That was what made careers successful enterprises. All she wanted was a little attention, some acknowledgement on his part that she existed as a human being, as his wife, a woman with needs to be enjoyed and fulfilled.

But he wouldn't listen, however she broached the subject. She could see his ears close tight, his mind throw up a roadblock of concentrated deafness that nothing on earth could penetrate.

She had tried everything.

She had humiliated herself in incredible ways.

Like the time last year when she had done herself up in that bizarre fashion in an attempt to make herself irresistibly attractive to Paul. One of her supermarket-friends, the checkout girl, had told her how men were easily enticed by visual aids. She had gone home, thinking of a way to make herself especially attractive.

A pair of black mesh stockings.

Held up with a pair of garter bands: pink ones.

Coral-pink lipstick around the breast nipples.

Heavy, lewd-looking eye shadow.

Nothing else but her perfect body. She had stood in front of the full length mirror, working, practicing, experimenting, until she was satisfied with the effect. When she honestly felt that she could walk outside and be raped by the first passing male, she stopped. Paul had come home.

She had greeted him, like that, lying full-length on the sofa, arms stretched behind her and holding onto the end, so that the twin hillocks that were her breasts rose and fell in sharp contrast to her concave, hollowed stomach. She had arched her thighs so that hip curves swelled in symphony with the rest of her. It was a picture that would make any man forget where he was or who he was, and fall quickly to the business of utilizing that body. She had done it, thinking possibly she hadn't made herself appealing enough. After all, she remembered thinking, when two people live together day after day, a little more effort, a lot more imagination is required.

His reaction stunned her.

"For God's sake, Peggy, stop acting like a doped up teenager!"

For something like a full minute, she had remained stunned, speechless. Then, as the result of built up, nurtured desire, she had thrown herself at him in a last-ditch attempt to succeed in a long-absent sex bout.

He had shoved her aside, almost brutally.

"I'm very busy, Peggy. Please change into more presentable attire, if you will."

At that moment, she knew hate in all its manifestations. In a symbolic, but altogether real way, she had humiliated herself on his account; and he had flouted it, rejected it like yesterday's newspaper.

After that, and ever since, things were markedly strained between them. Perhaps three times, they had made love. It had been mechanical, dutiful and detached on his part; desperate and furiously futile on hers. It simply did not work with them any more. The old carefree days were gone forever, it seemed.

Now that she had given up any hope of a successful emotional and physical relationship between them, her mind insiduously, inevitably turned to irreverent thoughts. Physically, she was a bundle of sexual desire, that accumulated over a period of months, manifested itself in emotional frenzy. She went through the other motions of being a wife: she cooked meals, shopped, kept a house, organized social functions, paid bills-all empty, purely dutiful acts. They had long since been stripped of any real significance.

Brenda told Bill the next morning that she wanted to speak to Dr. Cushing, and that it might take a while.

"OK, sweetie, I've got that story to get off, anyway. I'll give you a call tonight." They squeezed hands, and Bill left.

Lee looked up when Brenda approached his desk.

"Hello, Brenda. Good class today. I enjoyed your contributions."

"Thanks. Could I talk to you-when it's convenient, I mean?"

"It's convenient right now," Lee smiled, "come on to the office. I have two hours before my next class." She followed him out; he stopped at the coffee machine.

"How do you take your coffee?" he asked.

"Black with sugar," she replied. Brenda watched him put money into the machine; it went through the cold mechanics of delivering the watered-down beverage.

When they reached his office and went inside, he shut the door; the noises of students outside were remote, dimly unreal.

"What's on your mind?" he asked, motioning her into a chair.

"I want to do something extra for your course."

"Not necessary," he said. "People like you don't have to." Her paper had been extraordinary, and her class discussion was beyond belief, he thought.

"I don't mean for a better grade," she said, leaning forward in her chair; Lee could not help noticing the gentle swing of her breasts, the young voluptuousness of her body. Quickly, he stopped looking at her and let his eyes meet hers.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Just keep in mind I'm not brown-nosing, Dr. Cushing."

Lee nodded, thumbed some tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. "Okay." He grinned. That expression was still alive from his own undergrad days.

"Faulkner fascinates me, pure and simple. I want to know a lot more, and no class on earth at undergraduate level can do any subject justice. Right?

Lee nodded agreement, and again his eyes roved over her abundant breasts, shapely thighs.

"Right. So, I want to read ahead, get a good grasp of his overall work, and do a paper; a very comprehensive, all-embracing paper."

"That's a big order, Brenda. You're talking about a thesis, maybe even a dissertation. Are you ready for that kind of thing, do you think? You have to be realistic, too. Why don't you save a project like this for graduate school, where it'll really count?"

"I plan to use it as a draft, or skeleton for my thesis. What I want is some independent study, Dr. Cushing. I don't mean not going to classes, but some outside discussion with you. Like they do at Oxford."

Lee had to laugh.

The girl wanted the impossible. The whole American educational system of grades, numbers, statistical data, averages and exams, the system that said do the least for the most, and conceal lack of quality in vast quantities: and she wanted summarily to buck all of it.

Good girl.

"Brenda, you are a hopeless, wonderfully rare idealist."

"All I'm asking, and it's a lot, I'll admit, is extra time on your part."

"But what do you ultimately expect to get out of this, Brenda? We've established the fact that you don't need anything of this sort for grade's sake."

"Something that I have yet to get in college."

"What's that, Brenda?"

"An honest-to-God education. A chance to do some creative thinking and writing. I'm a little sick of paraphrasing, of throwing back information in different words. Your course is nice and small, and I just want to do it." She smiled and crossed her lovely legs, giving him a quick flash of hot, creamy thigh.

Lee thought of his short supply of time. There was the novel, the outside preparation for classes, so many things.

She was asking something of him that no student of his had ever asked, something that he himself had not asked during his student days.

Which meant that he had to give it to her.

"When do you want to start?" he asked.

"I've read the whole Snopes trilogy and The Bear. I'll be finished with The Sound And The Fury by next week. Is that enough ammunition?"

Lee thought with idle, mild alarm that she had nearly covered an entire semester's work in three weeks; what, he wondered, did she do with her other classes? Certainly, she didn't neglect them.

"Okay. I usually have a couple of free hours after our class. We'll use an hour of the time then to discuss things, and maybe once in awhile you can come to my house in the evenings. We'll find time."

Brenda stood up and smiled, straightening her skirt. Again, Lee was aware of her ripeness. She had a younger, less mature version of his wife's body, a thought that set off a host of other thoughts concerning last night's torrid sexcapade with Joan. He forced it out of his mind and said good-bye to Brenda, who stood at the door.

Well, Stone, he thought, try that for size, you know where! How's that for independent thinking on the part of one of your student numbers? An undegraduate at that? Undergraduates were traditionally last on the totem pole of consideration; graduates, after all, were the future scholars and teachers, whereas undergrads were somehow far removed as objects of value, beings worthy of development.

Brenda Wood sensed that something was going to change in her life. What, how and when, she did not know; but sitting in Dr. Cushing's office, the sense of change, some kind of metamorphosis had surrendered her like an invisible vapor.

She liked Dr. Cushing.

He was so young, so alive.

And yes, damn it, good-looking. But that was not a consideration as far as a young woman of Brenda's caliber was concerned. She was only aware of her response to his presence, his strength. Dr. Cushing was anything but a non-entity, she decided. He would somehow stand out in any room with any number of people.

He was compelling, magnetic. Every pore of his being exuded dynamism, a silent, surging demand to be known and acknowledged.

He was very much like Bill. Her Bill, the Bill she was going to marry in June. Cushing lacked Bill's hard quality, that ex-marine hardness; and Bill seemed to lack Cushing's razor-sharp empathy, an empathy that radiated like electronic waves from him.

Languidly, as one in half-sleep, she wondered what Dr. Cushing would be like in bed, as a sex mate, a lover. It was a silly, irrelevant thought, but one that seeped into her brain anyway. Sometimes irrelevant thoughts are the most significant thoughts, the thoughts that we would rather not face.

Skip it, she thought.

With not much difficulty, she conjured up a big, fat image of Bill, standing with male readiness over the bed where she lay naked, moist and trembling with anticipation. It was a picture she dwelled on, reveled in, until she felt a hot, dry wave roll through her body.

Bill would not call until evening.

Such a long, long time to wait for it!

She would study; read; write, anything to erase the long gap of time that remained between her and Bill. When he called, she would make known her wishes-would convey the reality of her horniness to him via the impersonal network of wires and electronic components. She would do anything to get them together in bed this evening.

Idly, she thought of her paper, the one she was to do for Cushing. The more she thought about it, the more it excited her. It would undoubtedly be the first truly original thing she had done in three years of college. Cushing was the first teacher who had given her a chance to demonstrate her talents as an individual thinker, rather than as a tape in playback phase. And, most ironic and damning, she had had to ask him; and he had been visibly surprised. But he had come through too. That was rare, she decided, vary rare. A teacher like that could very easily spoil you.

It was going to be nice working so closely with Dr. Cushing.

On the following afternoon, Joan Cushing went for the mail. It was after two; their mailman was incredibly slow, preposterously devoid of any zest for his work. The mail was erratic because of the man's basic lack of motivation and drive-sometimes it arrived at noon, other times at three, other days not at all. It was maddening.

She threw it all on the kitchen table and gave it a cursory glance. Most of the envelopes contained bills, as it was the first of the month. She didn't bother opening them, as Lee didn't get paid for another week-why ask for aggravation? It was a mental form of masochism, one that every suburban housewife indulged in frequently. She had learned to avoid it.

After deciding not to open the bills, and after throwing away the sucker mail addressed Resident, there was remarkably little to open. A letter from her mother, one from her sister in Tucson, and a small envelope from Mrs. Paul Stone III.

Judging from the size of the envelope, it was an invitation. It couldn't be a thank-you note, since the Cushings had not given the Stones one damned thing.

Lee had been adamant on that score. He had made a wry remark that they could score brownie points in other, more subtle ways. It was an invitation.

A faculty cocktail party, to be held at the Stone residence at seven-thirty o'clock on the fifteenth, exactly one week from now-please come, we can't survive without you. Peggy Stone wrote astoundingly clever notes, Joan thought. This was something that she did not bother consulting Lee about. She simply sent off an acknowledgement, stating that the Cushings would be there, come hell or high water. And that was that, except for the idle woman-thoughts of what dress shall I wear, and gee, I'd better call Helene at the beauty parlor and see if she can squeeze me in, and on it went, until she found herself looking forward to the damned thing-Faculty parties were Joan's form of masochistic entertainment. As an ex-dancer, a decidedly anti-intellectual (she was merely well-educated, well-read) and a mistress of inwardly voiced quips, she was not the most popular of faculty wives. Rather, she was the antithesis of faculty wifelihood: She exuded too much sex-appeal. Stone especially seemed to secretly hold his nose when he saw her, but that could be her imagination rather than a working reality, she thought. In a word, she felt uncomfortable in these gatherings, until she saw through the facade of what they stood for; after that, she had an evening's worth of laughs. Someday, she would have the courage to indulge herself a little by putting those stuffed shirts on in a big way. She would have done it long ago had it not been for her concern about Lee's career.

Speaking of that, she was disturbed.

Very disturbed.

No, not disturbed: angry: seething, as a matter-of-fact. Lee had come home last night aglow with good news. Her heart had leaped. It could be nothing less than his being appointed to the Associate Professorship, or perhaps a publisher's acceptance of his novel, based on cnapters plus synopsis.

But it was none of those things.

He had poured them each a drink, and told her about one of his students, a bright young lady who wanted to do some independent study, with his help. He'd told Joan of the arrangement.

"You don't have enough time to work now, and and you take that on?" she had asked, disappointment evident in her face.

"I'll find the time. It's just such a wonderful feeling to find a student who cares that much. A teacher'll knock himself out for a student like that, honey."

"I wish you'd knock yourself out for Lee Cushing a bit more," she'd replied, sorry as soon as the words fired out of her mouth.

"Joan, I'm not a chronic unemployed member of our society, nor am I an alienated soul who needs outside help in planning his destiny. We've been through it before, and I don't want to go through it again. I'll clue you in one more time. A novel is not a letter to Mother, nor is it like writing checks. A writer works all the time, even while he eats dinner or makes love to his wife. I'm always thinking, and when the thoughts get, I write."

"I'm sorry," she'd replied. The had left it at that, but she hadn't been able to forget Lee's self-imposed commitment, one that would no doubt act to suck him dry, time-wise and thought-wise. It was extra, extraneous work that would do nothing for him by way of promotion or added prestige. It bothered her; she wished that her husband would be more willing to play the game Stone's way.

Bill Holloway threw the plastic cover over his typewriter and gathered up the pages. He dashed a quick letter off to his agent in New York and stuffed the whole works into a large manila envelope. Through.

Tomorrow, he'd mail it off in plenty of time to make the deadline. Everybody would be happy except for himself. It was a hurried, slipshod job that he had not had time to rewrite or revise. It upset him to send off sloppy manuscripts, but everyone screamed about deadlines, and there was nothing he could do except break his hump to meet them.

School was a handicap to him, to his career. School and its demands conspired to rob him of time and thought power, and consequently, more money. If he were out of school, he could write more junk, think about more junk, and climb the ladder more rapidly. But hell, he had too much time invested in college to quit at this point. There was no choice but to ride it out. Unlike Brenda, he was just serving time; it was the Marine Corps all over again. You counted time in terms of papers and exams and class meetings and credit hours consumed. At the end of it all he would have a B. A. degree in English. Big deal.

No publisher would ever ask him about his education; it would not help one iota with his writing career. Yet if it ever came to pass that he had a dry spell-the writer's occupational malady-he would have an insurance policy to cash in, to get an interim-type job. Other than that, the degree would be a useless piece of paper to remind himself of the fact that he had delayed his writing success by approximately two years.

He remembered it was time to call Brenda. He picked up the phone and dialed the dormitory number. As always, another girl answered and he had to ask for Brenda.

Eons later, Brenda came to the phone.

"I was in the John," she explained.

"There should be a phone in there," Bill said. "Every John should have a phone, a radio and a stack of maeazines."

"True. Finish your story?"

"Yep. All ready to mail. Finish your work?"

"Not really, but I'm not about to do any more tonight."

A moment of silence, sound of quiet breathing over the distance of wires. Brenda's mind raced wildly. It was seven o'clock, she could stay out until eleven, the curfew imposed on week nights. Four hours to be with Bill, four hours of fun and games and talk, if he would come bv and pick her up.

"Feel like coming over for awhile?" he asked.

"I was wondering when you'd fret around to asking the big question," she replied with a laugh. "I'm as ready as a nanny goat, Bill Holloway."

He laughed raucously into the phone.

Brenda's candor never failed to amuse him. When they'd first met, she had been a truly shy, inhibited girl; now she talked as he did, as he had from the beginning with her. Her humorous lapses into vulgarity was one of her endearing qualities.

"You need fixing, girl," he said.

"And you're the repairman. I know."

"Believe it."

"Oh, I do, I do, but we're wasting time. I'll be waiting out front for you."

He hung up, changed his shirt, put on his wind-breaker and left the house.

Outside, he breathed the early autumn air, the first hint of frost. It was invigorating, cleanly brisk. It filled him with a sense of being alive, of every pore of his body being ready for action. It reminded him of tropic nights in Suji Bay, where after a stinking day of one hundred thirty in the shade, the temperature would plunge down to sixty-five degrees, and you had to sleep in long underwear beneath blankets. You felt alive, when all the sluggishness of heat and humidity went out of you. On those jungle nights, though, there hadn't been any women; there hadn't been Brenda; there hadn't been the comfort of someone to love, a body to enjoy.

He skipped the analogies and started up the Triumph. The plugs were wet, and the car patently refused to start until he almost exhausted the battery. It was a tired car, a car ready for the junk heap. He could afford a new one, and planned to buy one during Christmas vacation when he had time to look around.

The damned thing finally started, kicking over with a valve-clattering commotion, and he pulled out of the space and wound out first gear going up the ramp. By the time he was in the street, he was in second; with a whip-like motion, he snapped it into third, then high gear. Once the car was going over thirty, it ran all right. It was especially designed for fast driving, rather than clanking around in the city.

Brenda was waiting in front.

She heard the unmistakable sound of his car, and walked to the curb. When she was inside the car, she kissed Bill, then leaned back in the seat.

"Hi."

In the half-light of the dash instruments, he could see the twin bulges of her breasts, the sweet curve of hip and thigh, slight roundness of lower belly....

"Hi." He leaned over and kissed her again; her lips clung to his with a cloying, sumptuous insistence, he felt himself responding. "Come on, let's go," he said with a dry sound.

He flicked through the gears quickly, took the turns faster than the balding tires were capable of negotiating, and managed to get back to his apartment in seven minutes flat. He threw the car into the ramp, and hurriedly got out.

"See what you've done to me, Bill Holloway? You've made a wanton woman out of an essentially pure maiden."

"I can see you're all eaten up with regret." Her hip nudged against his coquetishly.

"I am. I'm an outcast."

"You're a conformist, dear girl. Show me a virgin under sixteen years of age in this contemporary culture of ours, and I'll show you a museum piece."

"Why are men so damned skeptical about female morality?"

"Realistic is the word you're seeking, darling. You're surrounded by sex in an inherently Puritanical society; it makes for insurmountable hang-ups if you dwell on it. But let's skip the semantics and get on with our investigation. We empiricists have no room in our arguments for idle conjecture, as it were."

They didn't wait for the elevator, but walked up the stairs instead.

"You're going to wear me out," Brenda said.

"I'm warming you up, dear girl. A good sweat always releases untold amounts of energy and vitality."

"Damn, not only a scientist, lover and philosopher, but a gym coach as well."

"Admittedly, a man of many and diverse gifts," he agreed.

In the apartment, with the door locked, he led her to the couch. "The bedroom is an unholy mess. I've been working in there, and it's like a smoke factory."

"Always the couch, she grumbled. "I'm not good enough for your bed."

"Can't beat the status system, girl. I'm afraid my bed's reserved for unexpected guests-Sophia Loren, Bardot; they drop in to see me from time to time, and they detest used beds. Very immaculate girls, those two."

"Fix me a drink and stop the patter. You're punchy."

He threw her a grin and poured out some bourbon on the rocks for both of them. Brenda didn't care what she drank, as long as she got there. The taste of liquor held no charm for her whatever.

They drank.

"I love you, you know that?" Bill said, putting his arm around her.

"I love you too, thank goodness."

"What's goodness got to do with it?" he asked.

"Nothing, really." She laughed. "It really doesn't have the first damned thing to do with it, does it?"

"No."

She told him about her plans for Cushing's class. It was conversation that would last the duration of the drink she held in her hand.

"You're nuts. What for?" She told him the same thing she had told Dr. Cushing, and Bill nodded. She knew he understood; if he didn't agree, he at least understood, and let it go at that.

"Let's have sex."

"Okay. If you really want to."

"I sure do want to. And so do you."

"I just tolerate my woman's burden," she sighed. "Part of my wifely duties."

"Hell, we're not married yet."

"As far as I'm concerned, we have a better relationship than any married couple alive," she said with a new note of seriousness.

Bill sobered, put his arm around her, and held her close against him. "We sure do, kitten. There's nothing on earth that can take it from us, either."

"No. Nothing." She held her mouth up to be kissed; a pretty, petulant, pouting mouth. He kissed it. Her lips grew warm and pliant, then moist with readiness to respond; they parted, and their tongues met, sending a shiver of delight through each of their bodies.

Brenda sighed, leaned back.

The atmosphere had been established by previous conversation; ground rules were laid and in effect: no words, just action. She had come over to have sex, and he was going to give her sex on a man-to-woman basis.

He peeled her sweater over her head and unsnapped her brassiere. Breasts poured out like half-solidified (lava, with a flowing, leaping motion, and he surrounded the hemispheres of flesh with his big, powerful hands and hefted their feathery weight. Such warmth, such soft vivaciousness! They were fine breasts, perfect breasts, the epitome of mammary development in homo sapiens female. He cupped them, tried to sway them. There was a little give, but essentially they were firm and solid, resplendent with youthful fullness. Chances were, Brenda's breasts would never take on that middle-aged sag.

He rubbed her seashell-pink nipples into swollen little pebbles, rolled them between his fingers like tiny marbles, and heard her breath whoosh out of her mouth in gulping chunks; she leaned her body backward, arched her back to make them more accessible.

Hands, magnificent male hands on her breasts. Warmth born of growing desire spread through her body in huge waves; every now and then he hurt her. It added nicely to the pleasure.

Very nicely.

"Ooooooh!" Her thighs dropped limply off to the sides, parting, pulling her tight skirt up past her knees so that white, moist flesh showed shadow-like. She was a woman, a pleasure instrument, being manipulated and aroused and about to be used. It was pure raw sex, nothing else.

Precisely what she had asked for.

His breath came hotly into the deep cleavage, spread gently over her white flesh, touched her nipples and made her quiver with joy.

"Kiss them, darling," she shuddered, "bite them, love them!" She made a high, whimpering noise when his lips took a nipple and squeezed it; his other hand cupped an entire breast, squeezed it. She moaned and shook and sighed with ecstasy.

She pulled her legs farther apart, into a sprawling attitude. It made her skirt hike up to her thigh tops where hips and legs joined almost imperceptibly.

His fingers touched the sensitized flesh.

Crept upward, to the hem of her silken panties. They were tight; her thighs filled them completely, forced his hand to move up over her hot silk-covered belly until it found naked skin around the navel. Something like a high-voltage shock traveled through her when his fingers crept beneath the waistband and encountered bare flesh, poised momentarily above the silky, rough-hewn fluff-

And then plunged in. Probing, seeking, finding.

Her body responded with instant acceleration of hips driving forward, up and down, in timeless prehistoric movements of passion. Her body accepted his probing, sucked him inward, held him with clamped, possessive thighs while he kissed her naked breasts and smooth hot flesh, worked the zipper of her skirt downward while she moaned and held her head back against the top of the couch, eyes smoky, lips hanging limp and pouting with passion. She was too far gone with desire to be aware of time or space; nothing could snap her back into the present except release, a blessed journey upward into the realm of head-blasting sensations engendered by their meshing.

A sudden sense of freedom around her waist told her the skirt was unzipped. Half consciously, she lifted her buttocks a half-inch off the couch to aid Bill in pulling them down over her full hips. Then they were off, and his hands were drinking in the splendor of full buttocks and ample thighs, running hectically over her.

She shuddered, then cried.

It was unbearable.

Unbearably delicious and sweet, like forbidden lotus fruit, making her drugged and sleepy with passion that warmed her body until it. grew hot and aching with lust.

Her hand reached out, trembling and small, and found what it sought. Him.

The essence of him."

The him that mingled with her.

She found him, felt his body uncoil like a tightly wound spring. She touched him in ways she knew he liked to be touched: gentle, all-consuming, with a soft, rubbing motion of delicate fingers. He gasped, and she gently worked the zipper of his khakis down, plunged her hand inside Jockey shorts, and felt him, heard him lapse into delirium.

He was huge.

Long ago, his hugeness had frightened her, but not any more. Now it just excited her, thrilled her with knowledge born of experience that she was capable of containing that maleness, of bringing it to a state of satisfied exhaustion while it did the same for her.

He doused the living room lamp while she finished undressing herself; she saw the room fall into darkness, heard the rustle of his clothing while he removed it all from his body. They didn't always do it in the dark; in fact, they seldom did. They delighted in seeing one another-passion-tight faces, physical manifestations of desire; but tonight, somehow, they wanted darkness to be their silent companion.

She felt his weight on the couch.

He was sitting beside her, reaching out to caress her warm musky body, brushing his hands over her breasts, her belly, her hips and thighs, and between the thighs. She shuddered, moaned under her breath. He was able to feel her unconscious pelvic movements.

Brenda felt herself being lifted.

His hands were strong.

They lifted her body as if it were a feather, and placed her on his lap, facing him. His hands shifted up to her breasts, cupped them possessively.

A grunt escaped her lips-an animal grunt of pleasure-as she became aware of what was about to happen. Her full, heart-shaped buttocks ground smoothly against the tops of his legs as he pulled her close.

She lifted herself, breathing hard, grunting nonstop.

Then, suddenly, swiftly, they meshed. With an excited whinny, she clamped her full, sumptuous thighs shut and heard him croak.

There were no words.

Words were impossible. They choked and cried and sobbed and laughed like two hysterical people, driving piston-like against one another. Her buttocks slapped suggestively against his thighs, and she felt his hands against her buttocks when they lifted, urging her on.

They hit the top together.

It was more violent, more tremulous than usual. It had the intensity of a volcano erupting. Her hands lashed out helplessly, flailing the air while she moaned and sobbed and drove herself up and down, and then it was suddenly over.

Exhaustion.

Utter, complete exhaustion.

They slept on the couch, and a sixth sense awakened them in time for Bill to take her back to the dorm. On the way back, they were silent. They exchanged glances, smiled at each other.

She would sleep well tonight.

She would curl up beneath the blankets and fall off to sleep with sweet, uninterrupted dreams.