Chapter 3
It was only twelve o'clock. My God, but the time seemed to just creep.
Barbara shifted her position on the bed, fluffing her pillow. She then laid motionless, her eyes shut, waiting for drowsiness to overtake her.
But, she wasn't sleepy. She ... simply ... wasn't ... sleepy. And, the warm bath she had taken prior to retiring—that bath which usually relaxed her sufficiently for sleep—had done very little for her this particular evening. If anything, the warmth of the water had seemed somehow distracting, almost irritating. And, the spray nozzle Barbara had used to drench her skin with water to wash away the soap film had sent rushes of unwanted pleasure surging through Barbara's body.
"Oh, Christ!" Barbara said aloud, opening her eyes and stretching for the night-light.
The light came on; and, Barbara got out of bed, not bothering her robe that was thrown over the back of a nearby chair.
She headed directly for the bathroom, turning on that light as soon as she had passed through the door. Her reflection was immediately thrown back to her by the mirrors that covered every spare space of bathroom wall.
Barbara was wearing a low-cut negligee that revealed the ample cleavage of her full breasts. The clinging, lacy material was so transparent that both of Barbara's nipples (large and hard), as well as her pubic thatch (black and veed), could readily be distinguished.
Barbara, with a wry smile, wondered why in the hell she had worn this particular nightdress. Who was she expecting to come visiting? It had certainly originally been designed for a lady entertaining a gentleman friend. And, Barbara was entertaining no one, the provocativeness of her outfit lost on herself.
She opened the medicine cabinet and took out the small bottle of sleeping capsules.
Her negligee was still on her mind as she remembered how she had seen it in a department store and had bought it on impulse, hoping ...
Hoping what, for Christ's sake? That she could somehow get her husband out of his sexual lethargy? Because, after that evening when they had caught Bobby and Jill fucking in the library, or, more pertinent, perhaps, after that evening Willis had reached his apex of sexual performance, it had been all downhill from there, hadn't it? Willis not only never again achieved his high-standard performance of that evening, but he slipped below his previous—somewhat mediocre—performance level. Actually, for the last three years of their marriage, Barbara could probably count on the fingers of one hand the nights Willis had tried to perform at all.
The nightgown, when first bought, had produced none of the desired results Barbara had been hoping for. And, Barbara had only run onto it again quite recently, folded in the bottom of her dresser.
The sleeping capsules dumped into the palm of her left hand, Barbara ran some tap water and filled a glass. She swallowed the capsules and a mouthful of water, frowning slightly even though she had been quick enough to keep any of the medicinal bitterness from clinging to her taste buds.
She put the lid back on the bottle, put the bottle back in the cabinet. She shut the cabinet door.
She turned to momentarily face one of the mirrors, deciding that—although older—she still possessed a good deal of the sexiness she had when she had married Willis. So, if she hadn't changed, then why had Willis suddenly gone almost impotent? Because of something about his having gotten turned on by Bobby and Jill fucking? Well, as much as Barbara had found herself jumping to that conclusion, she wasn't quite convinced. Why? Well, for one, because—while the experience had certainly been a traumatic one for Barbara as well as Willis—it hadn't made Barbara frigid, had it? Hell, no, if anything it had even made her more desirous ...
But, how could she even think such a thing? How could it have made her even more desirous of getting fucked? In all eventuality, she only thought that was what had happened; because, Willis had stopped screwing her quite as often as he had in the past (which hadn't been all of that often to begin with).
Or, maybe the natural response to a parent catching his children fucking each other was to suddenly lose his sexual drive. Maybe Willis' sexual decline had been what occurred to every parent—under similar circumstances—and should have occurred to Barbara.
Madness! Goddamned madness! And, why in the hell was she cluttering up her brain with all of this nonsense now? What in the hell did it matter? Willis was dead and gone and wouldn't be there to do any fucking, even if the urge had suddenly possessed him, which—all things considered—wouldn't have been very likely.
Barbara turned off the bathroom light. She didn't want to see herself any longer in the mirrors. There was something not quite right about her being forty-three, dressed to kill, wanting sex like crazy, but being alone in her bedroom nevertheless.
And, it wasn't fair to dump all of the blame on her poor dead husband, was it? Because Barbara's sexual frustrations weren't all his fault, were they? Barbara had forever—at least since puberty—felt a desperate need for sex, counteracted by a puritanical reticence to go out and get it. She had thought that by marrying she would finally have a legal and moral framework within to satisfy her hidden lusts that boiled just beneath the surface. But marriage—even though she had married well, financially—hadn't done the trick. Willis had only once—yes, only once—come even close to even partially fulfilling Barbara's needs.
And, that had been on the night they had walked in to find Bobby and Jill fucking!
So, when Willis had turned out to be less than the sexual dynamo for whom Barbara had been looking, why hadn't she looked elsewhere? There had, after all, been several such opportunities of which Barbara might have taken. There had been the tennis pro at the club: "Hung like a horse, my dear; and, does he know what to do with it!" There had been Harold Mason, after his divorce from Emily: "Why don't we go to bed, Barbara?" There had been ...
Oh, anyway, there had been enough. No sense choking them all off as if she were going over items on a shopping list, was there? No matter either, that she hadn't gone to bed with any of them. Why hadn't she?
God only knew why! Probably because Barbara had been raised into believing that there should be faithfulness in marriage. And since, she had never gotten even a hint that Willis was stepping out on her, Barbara would have felt especially guilty cuckolding him. Adultery somehow—though not quite—seemed almost as bad as incest in the list of perverted activities. And, quite aside from all of that, Barbara always had the sneakiest suspicion that neither the tennis pro, nor Harold Mason, nor any of the others, would have ended up being any better in the sack than Willis had been. So, why should she have risked the stability of her marriage on the mere chance that she could find better? And what if—IF—the tennis pro or Harold Mason would have been stupendous in bed? Then what? Well, for one, Barbara would have been more frustrated than ever, knowing that good sex was out there, and she wasn't getting any of it Two, people like the tennis pro usually ended up taking money or gifts for their stud services; and, Barbara didn't think she liked the idea of paying for her sex (good or bad). Three, divorcing her husband to marry someone like Harold Mason—assuming that Harold would even have wanted to marry her—would have been such a sticky mess. Scandal, at least, to Barbara's generation, was still something to be avoided whenever possible.
Of course, now that Willis was dead, the situation had changed somewhat, hadn't it? There was no more Willis to worry about or even be considered. However, Willis now gone, Barbara found the idea of going to the singles' bars a little frightening. She wasn't sure that she anymore knew how to go about looking for a man, especially at a time when women's liberation had exploded on the scene. Barbara rather felt like a fish out of water.
Jesus! As it turned out, there seemed to be countless reasons why Barbara was home, alone, taking sleeping capsules to get to sleep. But, no matter how many reasons there were—valid or not valid—that didn't mean that whatever it was on fire inside of Barbara's body was going to suddenly become extinguished and die. She simply had to learn to live with it now, as she had lived with it for most of her life.
Barbara crawled back into bed, reached for the light to turn it off. She fluffed her pillow and put her head down on it. Barbara shut her eyes and waited for the sleeping capsules to dissolve and speed her off to dreamland.
She waited ... and waited ... and waited. And, she still didn't feel any the less awake than she had before taking the pills. Maybe she had taken the wrong capsules. No, she had taken the right ones. Two of them as a matter of fact.
Goddamn, her system had to be really screwed up if she couldn't even get to sleep with the pills!
Barbara opened her eyes, saw a fine crack in the ceiling above her. So, if she wasn't going to sleep, what now? Did she turn on the light and read; even though, she had already proved downstairs that she wasn't in the mood for reading? Or, did she just stay where she was until morning, hoping that between now and then sleep would finally come?
Or ... ?
Wasn't she a little old to be contemplating masturbation as a solution to her ills? Besides, wasn't it a fallacy that masturbation relieved all tensions? Judging from all the times Barbara had masturbated in the past, the exercise had only left her more keyed up than she had been before she had started.
Still, she had reached the point of trying anything. Besides, whether she wanted to admit it or not, most of f her thoughts that evening—revolving as they had around the purely sexual—had gotten Barbara more than a little horny. And if there was no cock handy, no big rubber dildos hidden away in the closet, then what was the next best thing?
So, Barbara threw back her covers, pulled her lacy negligee up so that its hem was laid across her middle, her hair-fringed pussy bare to the night air.
Barbara dropped both of her hands to her cunt, running the tip of her right index finger up and back along the mouth of her vagina. Her finger got quickly wet on the juices bubbling from the sexual crack; and Barbara was once again that evening able to be embarrassed by the fact that her cunt had— somehow—become primed for fucking more than her finger.
Still, Barbara knew it was her finger or nothing; so, she dug her finger into her crack and immediately found her rigid and quivering clitoral nipple.
Mechanically, Barbara tweaked her clitoris, moving her left hand to fondle one breast. She moved her hips, bouncing her ass gently on the bed.
There was pleasure. Oh, yes, there was certainly that; but, there wasn't enough of it to keep Barbara from falling to sleep long before she managed to successfully play herself to orgasm.