Chapter 8
Driving home with Joan sitting beside him, LEE felt like the villain of a soap opera. He felt as though he had been caught at some odious, devious sexual game that he had no business playing. It is hard to detect mental gymnastics. His game was on that level.
Joan had been in the living room, and he had been in the den with the honest intention of just taking a breather when Peggy Stone had come in and made that flagrantly clear offer. Offer, hell. A proposition. So that hidden quality that Stone was supposedly blessed with didn't exist in the first place.
He wondered how much influence she really did exert on Paul Stone.
"Tired, Lee?" Joan asked.
"Pooped. It must be after three. I have to get that manuscript together to show John tomorrow."
"Is there any part of it you have to clean up or revise?"
"He wants to see it as it is."
"But it might make a better impression on John if you...."
"Damn it, will you mind your own business!" he exploded. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, his jaw tensed into muscular rigidity.
"I'm sorry, I was just trying to be helpful," she said sullenly. In her mind's eye, Joan saw the sympathetic face, heard the sympathetic voice of Paul Stone. Why, he was hungry for the very thing Lee resented! "You must have a guilty conscience, the way you bite my head off if I so much as suggest that you try to improve yourself."
"I don't have a guilty conscience, and I'm damned sick of your interference! It's based on absolutely nothing intelligent."
"Nothing, Lee?"
"Nothing. Now drop it." There was tense silence. He yanked the car savagely into the driveway and cut off the engine. He got out and walked abruptly to the door, without coming around to Joan's side as he usually did.
They spent the night in taut, tired silence, watched the dawn come without exchanging a single word. Lee's nerves jumped every time he accidentally touched Joan's body, an unavoidable circumstance. He gave up fighting the image of Peggy Stone. With amazing clarity, he could see the bare shoulders, what the flesh beneath the evening dress must look like.
And there was Brenda Wood.
Like two persistent reminders, the two females stayed in his mind, enticing, beckoning, while Joan slept fitfully beside him, her voice still nagging and unrelenting in his memory.
Saturday morning held every indication that the day, as it progressed, would become increasingly boring and unrewarding. Brenda had told Bill that she was going to spend the day working on her paper for Cushing, and he was in between writing projects.
Studying was out of the question.
What the hell, it was Saturday, and you just didn't waste it buried in the books. The immediate problem, then, became one of occupation, of how to fill one's time. Bill Holloway was a reasonably resourceful soul, one given to full imaginative flights.
Just for the pure hell of it, he'd drive by the Stones. On what pretext, he had no idea, but he remembered distinctly that you didn't need a pretext for Peggy. She was starved for male companionship, and the way things had been going between him and Brenda, he was damn well ready to give it to her.
Brenda was drifting.
Getting real thick with Cushing. Bill was no fool, he could read the handwriting that spelled out the obvious: wide-eyed girl flips for young instructor, made more enticing by his marital status and good looks. He was not going to be the one to throw fits, to display the rather juvenile emotion of jealousy. He'd just play the game, and keep it in the good old academic community.
Why not?
Peggy Stone seemed hot to trot, eager to play the horizontal game. So why the hell not? Make Brenda sweat a little, let her see how it felt to be exposed to doubt and mental agony.
First he called the school and found out that Stone was in his office. It was not an unusual occurrence. He was always there, all day long. Bill just wanted to be certain that he had clear entrance.
Next, he drove to the Stone residence, parked the car around the corner. He didn't want to create an embarrassing situation. By this time of course, he had gone beyond the proverbial point of no return. He threw away last-minute reservations.
Peggy Stone was going to have something to pant about.
She answered the door almost as soon as he rang the bell. An oriental-tyne robs was wrapped around her, the belt loosely knotted. The hem came a little below her knees, and he could see the promise of perfection that the calves held: strong, firm and finely shaped.
"Hello," Bill said, feeling a sudden tremor nf uncertainty. He felt like an idiot. What was he doing here, anyway? What possible reason could he offer for being here?
"Hi, how are you? Have you saved any damsels in distress lately?" she asked, smiling. Peggy acted as though it were the most natural, expected occurrence in the world for Bill to come see her. "Come inside, Bill." She stepped aside to make the entrance possible, and when he walked inside, he saw that professors decidedly do not qualify for the Poverty Program, at least not men of Stone's rank. It was a damned plush joint, about thirty-five or forty thou's worth. Well furnished, well decorated. Nice.
"Not lately," he said. "Women seem too independent for that sort of thing."
"Not as much as you think," she answered. "Sit down. Have you had breakfast?"
"Yes."
"Coffee?"
"That I'll have." He watched her as she moved. She walked as though she were used to having him around, as though she had absolutely no impression to make, no illusions to create.
She didn't.
Peggy was well able to stand on what she had, which was plenty. Sensualty constructed body, consisting of breasts that were high and firm and defiantly out-thrust; swollen, firm hips and heart-shaped buttocks that had all the animation of a teen-ager's, and with a distinct difference: it was no effort. It was unconscious, unknowing, uncalculated. She was just a broad with a magnificently put together body that said Come and get it, it's jun.
"Why did you come over?" Peggy asked. She studied him with an air of mild amusement, as though expecting him to squirm like a piece of live bait on a hook.
"I wanted to," he replied. "Does there have to be a reason?"
"There always is, Bill. Nobody acts in a vacuum. And I'm not talking academic clap-trap, just common sense."
"True. I was lonesome. I wanted to see you, thought you might want to see me. If I was wrong, say so, and I'll leave."
"Such marvelous defiance," she marveled. "Truly a spirited soul."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he snapped, on his guard now, with the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that he was being manipulated like that same piece of live bait.
"It's a compliment," she replied quickly. "It means that you have the admirable quality of net giving a damn how you get what you want. You've got guts, Bill."
"And what do I want?" Now it was becoming a game, a silly transparent game.
They both knew what they were playing. "Me."
"True. I'm male, and I'm alive. Do me something."
"Suppose I don't want you? Suppose I throw marriage and happiness at you? What then?" Her smile was challenging. It said, Come on, man, think.
"I'd say you're either a remarkable liar or a remarkable tease. Neither assumption would be very complimentary, would it?"
"No, I guess not. So you know an invitation when you hear one?" Her heart was pounding rapidly, her throat was tight and dry. The thrill of the chase had her on edge, it was an exhilarating feeling that she hadn't known in a long, long time.
It was sensational, she thought.
"Is that so amazing? Come on, Peggy, we're both adults, and we know the score, right? So why go on playing? You want me, I want you. It's a bond between us-we have something right from the start."
"Do you write as convincingly as you speak?"
"I'm not trying to be convincing. I'm just giving you facts as I see them."
"Okay."
"Okay, what?"
"Okay, let's stop talking and start playing" There was a hardness in her voice that jarred Bill's nerves.
"I'm not forcing you. I have no intentions of raping you," he said.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just so hard to start without some kind of manufactured justification."
"Stop being academic, Peggy," he told her, and she was unable to reply because you cannot speak through another pair of lips, especially when they are blocking yours.
He kissed her.
It was a passionate kiss.
It had fervor, desire, intention, all the rest of what goes into a good kiss. It was a kiss that made her lips open and moisten, one that made her jaw go slack with sudden, overpowering desire. Their lips reacted violently: warm, panting, breathless contact between them.
"Nice," she murmured, settling against him. "Encore." He kissed her again, and it was nicer. Familiarity does not always breed contempt; sometimes, it can breed excited anticipation, as it did now. Her heart pumped wildly against her breasts while his hands ran down her back in fluttering motions, exciting the nerves with light-fingered touches. It was nothing at all like with Paul, she decided. Oh, sure, in the beginning, way back when ... but that was nine, ten years ago, back in the Middle Ages sometime. The important time Was now. His lips, his caresses obliterated the importance of the future and the past.
Only now was important.
Only his maleness mattered.
"God!" she moaned, "God almighty!" Her voice was high-pitched with incredulity, as though she were experiencing love for the first time.
Her breasts were ripe and warm to the touch. The silk robe made them all the more enticing, and when his hand finally plunged beneath, touching bare flesh, their reaction was electrifying. She quivered and gasped. He trembled. With an impatient yank, he pushed the robe away; the belt loosened of its own accord.
They were marvelous breasts.
They were breasts you kissed, loved, caressed until the nipples swelled and filled with heat-propelled blood. They were breasts you bit and reveled in with animal-like enthusiasm.
From their owner's viewpoint, they were organs of excitement, vessels of titillation and pleasure. They were two lumps of flesh, perfectly rendered and shaped, that attracted man to you, woman. They were made to be toyed with, to be centers of excitement: what the self-appointed experts called erogenous zones. Peggy Stone had no distinctly isolated zones: she was one vast erogenous center, from head to toe. Her breasts were contact points that jumped to life and awareness when touched and kissed.
Bill, then, was reduced to a generator.
She made sure that he had sufficient juice with which to operate. Her hands were very thorough. In minutes, Bill Holloway was a quivering mass of flesh, screaming for release and gratification. Her hand? sought him, found him, retreated in gesture of pleasant surprise-such wonderful, huge maleness, they said.
Her whole body said it well.
Bill let his hand follow its own inclinations, which was up. Way up. Up past the smooth knee, against the smooth, warm skin of her thigh. A good thigh. A perfect thigh. A thigh that parted itself from the other, while Peggy let herself fall backward against the cushion, succumbing to his insistent onslaught that would result in blissful touch.
"Ooooooh!" she gasped, "oooh! Yessssssss!" Her hips trundled into a slow, rocking motion that brought them closer together, that drew his exploring fingers deep inside her hungry flesh, while her mind crackled with images of final contact, the grande finale itself: the meshing that would strike the core of her being.
Her fingers were light and exciting on his body. He wanted her to undress him quickly, but she did not give in to their mutual compulsion. She took her sweet time, unbuttoning one button at a time, unlacing the sneakers, pulling out the shirt.
It was agony.
It was hell.
It was great. He had never experienced or sensed such hunger in a woman, such insane desire, not even in Brenda. Brenda was packed with woman's passion-she had a healthy, inexhaustible sexual appetite, but it hardly approached the quality of Peggy's. There was not the gasping, whimpering, semi-paranoiac drive that was Peggy's. There was not the frightening absence of inhibitions, the necessity for forbidden contacts.
All of which Peggy displayed.
Her hands undressed him slowly while her body promised, while her lips culled up a seething torrent of uncontrollable desire in him. No, Brenda did not have that. Nor was her body one of promise, a body that said I've been around, I know more cute tricks than you'll ever know, my body has a hunger that younger women can't know....
His teeth sank into a red, swollen nipple. It was a gesture born of savage frustration. The woman had flesh that you just wanted to pinch and violate and make crawl.
"Harder!" she begged. He bit down, tasted blood, felt a sickening yielding of tender flesh. "Harder, baby, harder! Love me hard, baby, hard, hard, hard!" It was an intonation, possessed with a tempo that reminded him of some primitive fertility rite. The hard, hard, hard matched the tempo and intensity with which her hips rocked back and forth. Her fingers squeezed the sides of his skull tightly, drew him closer to the breast, then yanked his head away, against the other one.
"Hurt me, you beast, kill me!"
She was psycho. Really out of it.
He bit her as hard as he had the stomach for, tried not to visualize the damage he was doing to those beautiful little nipples. Then he moved down to her heaving, panting belly. There, it was softness. Not flabby, gone-to-hell softness; nice yielding, come-and-have-a-ball softness. The kind of softness that women with only the most perfect bodies have. It is the kind of softness that fits in the briefest bathing suit, in the tightest pair of slacks, a softness that appeals to the beholder under the harshest lights.
It was a softness he nipped at with his teeth.
She jumped and meowed with a strangely feline sound, her hands fluttering ecstatically in the air over her head while she drove her hips with wild abandonment. Her buttocks swished against the cushions. Hers was a body gone haywire, dancing to the tune his fingers and lips played upon it.
Bill was wailing, and Peggy was swinging with it.
Swinging hard, running with the whole bit.
When they were both naked, their bodies came together with an incredulous feeling of sweet collision-such warmth, such sensational shock, unbelievably delicious.
"God, take me, pleeeease!" she pleaded, "please now!" Bill was no fool. She had already surpassed the intensity that most women, that most people feel as the result of foreplay. To prolong the ultimate embrace would only key her up to an impossible pitch.
The time was now.
Her hands, both of them, devoured and surrounded him like two greedy plants drinking up water. The caress made his eyes snap shut, then open, rolling hysterically. She squeezed him hard, with all her strength.
"Now! Now, dammit, now!"
Pain brought tears to his eyes. With savage desperation, he pushed her onto the floor with a suddenness that made her relinquish her hold. He piled on top of her, without bothering about the fact that his two hundred pounds might crush her. She wanted bestial love, she would damn well get a bellyful of it, he thought.
Their bodies collided.
All the breath went out of her, left her gasping hungrily for air. With brutal disregard, he yanked her thighs apart and forced his way into position.
Then, he took her.
Hard.
Grunting, hitting, pounding. Of all the nerve, he thought wildly, her thinking she could coerce him with a move like that. She wanted to get rough-he'd get rough!
He threw her legs up over his shoulders and slammed himself hard against her, his hands rocking her face back and forth with open-handed slaps. He saw her teeth clamp tightly together, her jaw set, her eyes grow narrow. Pride, stubborn pride. She won't scream unless I damn near kill her.
"Oh yes, lover, hard, hard, hard!" Her lips drove against his with piston-like regularity, her hands played up and down his back as though it were an invisible fingerboard of some stringed instrument. On her face was an expression of complete ecstasy.
She likes it this way! he thought. She wants to be roughed up. It became clear to Bill that she had purposely aroused enough animosity in his breast to precipitate violence on his part. It was no longer revenge, and he, the hunter, was the hunted. There was no discernible way he could stop himself: she had pulled a cork, unleashed a strain in him that he had never known to exist. Now he wanted to take her savagely, without consideration or compassion. Just savagely. Make it a purely physical, lustful act. devoid of any relationship except a pair of bodies blindly seeking gratification.
Peggy Stone was not conscious of anything except the male body riding roughshod over her, the male body buried deep inside her hungry flesh. It was a faceless, unidentifiable body; merely male, merely expedient and available. It was a unit designed to satisfy her hunger.
It was a unit.
A good unit.
Lots of stamina and durability that pounded and drove and hit and bit with unrelenting regularity against her until the intolerably large, liquid, hot bubble inside her broke loose and ejected the passion within her outside, into the open somewhere. A great, hollow feeling replaced the hunger, and she lay back and sighed, exhausted as she had never been before in her life. For the first time in years, she was truly gratified.
"Holy God!" she sighed incredulously. Her eyes were empty of all but grudging admiration.
"Feel better?" Bill asked. He wanted to be tender, wanted to stroke her, but her eyes silently forbade such familiarity. He had served his purpose. He had serviced her, had fixed her, and there was nothing else she wanted from him.
"Get out," she said flatly.
He knew the bit. Regrets, sorrow, all turned inward and adding up to one big blob of guilt directed at the other person. Sure. He'd been there himself.
"Okay, Peggy. But you know where I am if you ever need me again." His voice jarred, made her set her teeth: such damned annoying confidence. A bland assumption that she would throw herself at him or at any other man now that the cork had been pulled out of her inhibitions.
She had gotten a good introductory dose to a good, good thing, and he knew damned well that a woman like her would have an endless demand for it. Her rage was born of his confidence and her acquiescence.
The truth hurt.
Hurt very, very much.
From now on, it would be one encounter after another. Oh, not just with this guy, this kid. There would be others, a long line of them, until it became town legend that she was a compulsive, promiscuous nymphomaniac.
How had it started? Where did it all begin? With Paul's negligence? No, hell no, she thought, it went deeper than that, beyond that single ready-made alibi. It went farther back than anything she could put her finger on. What, how and why were beyond her. All she knew was that there would be no stopping her impulses. There would be no reining them in.
Pathetic.
What kind of world do we live in, she thought, where we feel guilty for having experienced something so damned good, so undeniably delicious? She had just had a sex bout with one of the best-had had the kind of dose that every woman who is a woman needs. Yet, she felt compelled to feel guilty, to conjure up some sense of regret.
It wasn't there.
She didn't feel guilty. She felt only sadness, a sadness born of her dependency, an addiction to that good thing. That hurt, the de facto element of it hurt more than any moral considerations. Infidelity' Nothing of the sort, she decided. Expediency. Emotional therapy.
Paul Stone could go to hell.