Chapter 9

The two of them dressed in silence.

It was very painful for Paula to pull her clothes on over her battered and still-aching body, but she managed to do so. She was in a hurry to get out of this place. She was eager to get into this car with her boy friend, and then the two of them would go back to Paula's house, and they would make sweet passionate love to each other. They would have Sex.

Sex was so much nicer than acid, Paula told herself. She and Carl must have been crazy to ever have fooled around with the drug in the first place. They got such a high from Sex, such a super-powerful trip from it, that any chemical substance would only seem pale by comparison anyway. The blonde girl promised herself that from now on drugs and pot and booze would have to take a back seat to Sex.

She finished putting her clothes on, and when she turned towards Carl she saw that he too was fully dressed, and that he was looking at her intently.

He took her in his arms and kissed her, and when he kissed her Paula could feel something in the space between Carl's legs grow hard and press against the space between her own. She couldn't wait to get home with him.

"Ready, darling?" the boy asked her, and Paula did not have to answer. The look on her face would be answer enough.

"I'll always be ready ... for YOU, Carl," she breathed.

The girl and the boy kissed again, and a moment later they were walking towards the green sports car at the edge of the clearing. They paused only a moment while Carl slammed down the hood over the engine, and then the key was turning in the ignition, and the steering wheel twisted in Carl's strong capable hands, and then they were going off back down the road towards home, towards the place where they would enjoy the indescribable delight known as Sex....

"My father is gone on a business trip," the blonde girl told her boy friend. "And my mother is with him. They shan't be back till tomorrow. So you can leave the car in the driveway and come right on inside."

Carl nodded obediently. If any of the neighbors had seen the boy's car in this driveway, or if they had seen the girl who lived here go into the house with a boy her own age, they would have thought nothing of it, being reasonably fair-minded people. But Paula's parents were extremely conservative, and would have gotten angry if they had known Paula was even LOOKING at Carl, let alone going to bed with him....

The boy parked the car and they both got out of it, then started walking towards the front door. As Paula started to unlock it she stopped suddenly, frozen in her tracks as though in the middle of an epileptic fit.

Carl didn't like the look of this. "What's wrong, baby?" he asked.

"Huh?" Paula shook herself back to reality. "I was just ... just thinking about something. Something I don't want to think about."

Carl was interested. "What is it?"

She shook her head. "I told you I don't want to think about it. I don't want to talk about it either."

Carl kissed her lightly. "Then you SHOULD tell me about it. That way you'll get it out of your system."

"Well ... -" There was a pause, and then Paula spoke: "All this time, ever since you showed me the pill bottle that we dropped acid from, something's been bothering me like crazy."

"Like what?"-

"Well, you mentioned you had thought some guy named Frog had torn apart the car engine. It so happens that I thought I saw the exact same thing. So what I want to know is: HOW COME WE BOTH HAD THE SAME ACID TRIP?"

Carl's eyes widened for a moment in what looked to Paula like horror, but then the boy grinned. "Don't worry about it, baby," he muttered. "Scientists don't know all about LSD yet. Things like that can happen...."

"No, they CAN'T happen!" Paula was firm. "Two people having the same acid trip is like two people having the same dream! It's impossible!"

Carl frowned. He didn't like to hear Paula talk this way. "Now, Paula ... " he cut in warningly.

But Paula wasn't listening. "What if THIS is the dream and THAT was the reality? This could be another one of Veena's little tortures, you know! What if we go into my room and fuck, and then all of a sudden we're back in the Arena, and Veena and her men are laughing at us? What if they're watching us right now,. Carl, and listening to every word we say? What if...."

Carl didn't want to hear any more. He pushed his face up against Paula's and kissed her hard and squarely, firmly on the mouth. Running his own lips across hers, the boy whispered thickly into her ear: "Everything is all right now, Paula. Everything is all right. Come into the house with me. I want to make love to your body...."

For a long moment the girl said nothing, only looked deeply into her boy friend's eyes. "Oh, Carl," she whimpered, and kissed him. And as soon as she did that she knew that everything WOULD be all right from now on, for both of them and for all time to come.

She opened the door to her house. "My bedroom is upstairs," she whispered.

The boy nodded. "Yes, darling. Yes, darling, She heard a noise out in the hall. For a moment Paula was seized with panic: Veena and her friends were alive again! But then she realized that that was nonsense: Veena and the others had never existed in the first place, except in Paula's own imagination.

The footsteps came closer. Oh my God, Paula thought, my PARENTS are back! She knew that they would walk into her room without knocking and see her lying on the bed naked, and in broad daylight, arid then they would see Carl come in with a liquor bottle, and then that would be that.

The door started to open slightly, and Paula froze in terror. She knew that if her parents saw her like this there would be more trouble than she cared to put up with.

The door opened all the way. "Hello, Paula," whispered Carl.