Chapter 1
Stephen Blaze was a mild, kind, forgiving man by nature. In fact, he came closer to physically resembling Bob Cratchit, in the Dickens books, A Christmas Carol, than any human being alive. He was short, only five-feet-eight-inches in height, with dark hair, gentle brown eyes, a broad nose, and a full mouth. He was slightly overweight, about fifteen pounds, but far from fat. Aside from being mild-mannered, with a gentle disposition and a simple face, he was also one of those multitudes of men one passed on the street and never noticed at all.
Un-like his literary counterpart, Stephen Blaze had never married. In the days of the liberated woman, few females were interested in such a milquetoast.
So Steve, as everyone knew him, got his few sexual encounters from various married women he occasionally met at the local bar and grill on Saturday night. While their husbands were out hunting, fishing, or on business trips for the weekend, they were out looking for a good fuck and Steve, as they all called him, was one man who really knew how to throw one. For all his Clark Kent-mildness, in bed he was really a Superman.
Steve lived in a small village known as Bellwin. He worked in another nearby village for a bank, the Traveler's National Bank. For many years he had taken his car, a car which he used only to go to and from the bank, or to go to and from the bar on Saturday nights, and he would drive to the bank parking lot. When the first gasoline crunch hit in 1973, he philosophically accepted it. What he didn't philosophically accept was the higher price of heating oil. He spent four thousand dollars on a wind charger, what the neighbors at the time had called wasted money, a weathervane-like windmill that used the wind to generate electricity. As a result of certain laws passed, he was able to sell excess electricity back to the village power plant. Then he converted his oil heating system to electricity, and as a result paid virtually nothing for heat and hot water, nor did he pay for electric power, since the wind charger almost always managed to generate more electricity than he would need.
When the second gasoline crunch came, Steve began carpooling. Caryn Burns lived less than a mile away from Steve and she worked as a supervisor in the bank where he was head teller. Caryn was, like Steve, slightly overweight, but otherwise extremely attractive. She had auburn hair cut very short, gray eyes, a short nose, and a nice smile except for the space between her front teeth. In spite of the slight excess poundage she carried, Caryn had a firm body, with orange-sized breasts, a fleshy waist, and a very cushiony ass. Steve had often thought about playing with that ass, but Caryn was one of those perennial old maids who had lived her entire life in terror of what a man might do to her. As a result, at the age of thirty-two, eight years younger than Steve, Caryn was that unbelievable female commodity, a virgin.
For more than a year she and Steve got along exceptionally well, and when one had a car breakdown, the other always was available to help out. It was a good platonic relationship, though Steve often ached to get his hands on Caryn's juice body. His Saturday night bouts kept him cool, and as a result he remained mild-mannered, and the chances were, Caryn would never have found out about his lust for her had it not been for Joyce.
Joyce was the newest teller at the bank. She was much younger than Caryn, about twenty-two, and she was already married and divorced and looking for a new man. Joyce had frizzy, mousy brown hair, and she was as thin as Caryn was pleasingly plump. Her features were almost prettily harsh, with puddled brown eyes, a slightly overlong nose, and very thin lips. Joyce had slightly smaller breasts than Caryn, just as she had a narrower waist and slender, almost boyish hips. Yet she was extremely feminine, and though Steve definitely didn't appeal to her, she would occasionally practice her feminine wiles on him to make certain she hadn't lost her certain indefinable attractiveness.
Caryn and Joyce became good friends. But Joyce lived on the opposite side of town, and when it was Caryn's turn to drive, Caryn began whining, complaining that she had to drive south to pick up Steve, then head north to pick up Joyce. What Caryn wanted was for Steve and Joyce to drive to her apartment building, park their cars, and then be driven to work by her. But when it was Steve's turn to drive, the two women were more than willing to let him drive around and do all the picking up, while when it was Joyce's turn to drive, Joyce was willing to pick up Caryn, but also insisted Steve go to Caryn's building, park his car, and then be driven to work.
Being a gentle person at heart, Steve suffered along with this arrangement for a while. But it irritated him that even though he was somewhat heavy and Joyce was slender, when Caryn drove, he was the one forced to squeeze into the back of the two-door subcompact. Both women were inveterate smokers, and both women puffed away like mad inside all three cars. Steve had always been proud that his car had never carried the lingering stench of cigarette smoke, because Caryn had never smoked in his car until Joyce had come along.
When, in the winter, Steve complained that the smoke was burning his eyes when he rode in the back seat, the girls opened their windows and let him all but freeze in the rear of the car. As a result, Steve decided it might be a good idea if he left the car pool.
Caryn, however, as a bank supervisor, on her way to becoming a vice president, decided she didn't want him to quit the car pool. She let him know she would do anything and everything in her power to make life miserable for Steve at the bank if he dropped out of the car pool. After all, with him and Joyce driving, she only had to use her car every third week, and as a sub-compact, it got better than thirty miles to the gallon. So she was spending about thirty dollars a month on gasoline, even with gas prices edging up and up.
It was one thing to take advantage of Steve. It was something else again to coerce him. The final insult was that Joyce, a teller even lower than he, sneered openly at him, letting him know there was no way out for him. So Steve decided to make his own out.