Chapter 17
Steve Kramer listened to the chaplain's soothing voice and stared straight ahead, so he wouldn't see how few mourners there were in the tiny chapel of the funeral home. Donna Martin was there, of course, and a woman who had said she was Mel's sister. The resemblance was striking. But neither Hugh Laurens nor Jennifer Laurens had chosen to show their final respects for the man they had destroyed. Kramer could understand why. With Shan and Mel gone, the Laurens' secret was safe. Donna Martin would expose them at her peril, but she probably wouldn't try to...." and into Thy Hands we commend his spirit," concluded the chaplain. "Amen."
Kramer, who felt no guilt at having attended Mel's funeral without being asked, got up and filed out with the others. Due to the rain, there was no graveside ceremony. His eyes met Donna's at the door, but he didn't try to touch or talk to her. Donna's, he noticed, were red and swollen, but whether from grief or lack of sleep, Kramer wasn't prepared to say. He sent her a silent message: Later.
He waited two weeks-a decent interval, he felt-before going in search of her. After the funeral, she became a recluse who went out only for food and services. He had become accustomed to not seeing her much, so it came as a shock when he saw that her name had been removed from the building directory. Kramer sped to the supervisor and demanded an explanation. "The Martin widow-what happened to her?"
"What happened to her?" The super bared his misaligned teeth and scratched his bald head. "The same thing that happens to all widows, bub. She moved away to forget. Maybe she wanted to forget every thing-including you."
Kramer grabbed the man. "She must have left a forwarding address. Find it."
"Keep your shirt on. I keep records like I'm supposed to. If she sent me an address, I still have it."
A battered gray file cabinet behind the super's desk yielded the information that Kramer sought. He made two copies and rushed out without thanking anyone. He drove, searching for an older apartment building where the rents were lower. He found it. Of course, Kramer thought, parking his car and climbing out. She would have to scale down her standard of living now that Mel was gone. Or would she? There might be insurance.
He knocked on Donna's door and wasn't at all sure he'd catch her home. But she opened the door on the second knock and gazed out at him. Kramer's jaw sagged. He had trouble recognizing the devastated widow of two weeks earlier. Donna's hair was in a younger, more flattering style; her widow's black had turned into a red, tailored mini-suit. And she was smiling at him, although there was a hard, bitter cast to the smile. "Can I ... come in?" he asked.
She nodded, and stood aside to let him enter. "I knew you'd find me-sooner or later. I suppose I should be glad ... that someone cares."
He saw the daring in her eyes, the invitation, and even if she was a recent widow, he was still a man. He reached her in one stride and bent her almost double, almost tripping them both when one of her feet got entangled with his. Donna opened her mouth to say something-but he covered those fresh-painted lips with his own and ground them into her teeth. The lips tasted sweet, and with good reason: she's been into someone's Scotch this morning. Her own, he hoped. After perhaps three seconds when she was rigid in his arms, Donna kissed him back, sliding her arms around his neck so that they were locked in a snug embrace.
He had a client waiting at his office, but Kramer forgot about the client in the sheer dizziness of this kiss. The taste and scent and feel of her was familiar. The two weeks they had been apart melted away until not even Mel's name on a death certificate mattered to them, certainly not to him. He wanted her so badly, needed her so badly, it was an ache, an agonizing throb in his guts.
They broke apart. Kramer went tense when Donna's eyes opened, because if she was still hard around the mouth, he wasn't sure he wanted her. But she was merely wide-eyed with need, the same as himself. She wanted him, too, even if she hadn't admitted it.
"Steve, you wouldn't-you wouldn't toy with me, would you?"
"Christ, no!" His voice sounded choked, even to his ears. "Do I look like I'm toying? Do I feel like I'm toying?" He pressed himself close against her and let her know what he was talking about. He had a hard-on, the likes of which she probably hadn't seen-or felt-in two weeks.
Donna's laugh was more nearly a sob. She held him to her like a mother clasping a long-lost son, which wasn't exactly what he had hoped for. But she was stroking his prick through his slacks. "Steve, Steve, Steve, I thought you'd never come.
In another week, I would have given up."
"Then I came just in time."
Kramer drew in a lungful of air and then he bent to Donna's lips again. He kissed them this time with less brutishness and more skill. He kissed them the way he knew she wanted them to be kissed.
She was kissing him back with more fire than he ever knew was in her. She was also lifting her warm thighs, one at a time, to rub them across the front of his slacks, exciting both of them, but especially him. He was owner now of a seven-inch cock which, at the moment, had nowhere to go.
He licked at her lips with his tongue until she parted them for him. Kramer submarined in and began flailing wildly at everything he could reach. Donna had to calm him by first mastering his tongue with hers, then by driving him backwards until they, or their their tongues, were in his mouth. After which she gave him a short, refresher course in how to french. He had taught her much of what she knew. She applied that skill now.
Donna sucked at the inner side of his lips and she cleaned his teeth-one at a time until they were all shiny. She swirled her tongue around his until he nearly came in his shorts. She fastened herself, leech-like, to the underside of his tongue and made him think about every good thing that had ever happened to him. When he began to think that there was nothing else she could do, Donna paused and then slowly lashed her tongue from side to side on the roof of his mouth, caressing him with her marvelous thighs.
He knew what was expected of him now-his best. He mounted a counterattack. Whereas she had only licked and sucked him into a state of coiled readiness, he nibbled and bit at her teeth, lips and tongue until she was like Jell-O in his arms. The moans coming from Donna's lovely throat had a lusty quality to them. She was turned on and he'd soon be in.
She was supporting herself partly on the television set and partly on his shoulders, so there was no need to hold her up. Kramer moved his hands from her waist and buttocks to her breasts, covering each magnificent mound with a palm which could barely circle it. He began to massage each tit in time with his frenching. Donna's fingertips tapped approval on his shoulders. She began to tremble. Her head turned, to enable him to reach her better.
They couldn't fuck on the edge of the television, so he stopped and scooped her off the floor, heading for a bed with her. The apartment was a mess, but he didn't mind. He set her down beside the bed and tore at her buttons, almost ruining one. Donna pushed his hands away and worked the buttons herself, watching him. Kramer realized she wanted him to bare himself at the same time that she did. He started undressing.
When he looked at her again, Donna was totally nude, totally vulnerable. He stared at this white-skinned creature with the jet-black hair and the jet-black pubic bush, and it was like he was peering at a stranger. He had forgotten, during those two weeks without her, how awesomely physical she was. Then he noticed that she was examining him in the same, hungry way-the tangle of dark-brown hair on his chest, his trim, athletic waist, the prick jutting out stiffly from below his belly. Kramer grinned, because a grin masked the embarrassment that he felt. "Have I gone downhill since you saw me last?"
Donna shook her head, and it seemed to him that there was a mistiness in her eyes. "You haven't changed, Steve. You just seem larger."
"Flattery works both ways. I feel like a new groom."
She crawled into bed, making room for him on the rumpled covers. Kramer climbed up and stretched out beside a woman he was beginning to like better and better. He reached out for her again, returning his tongue to its steamy resting place and his hands to her breasts. The woman's scent was stronger now, filling his nostrils so that he was aware of nothing else.
His tongue tired after a few minutes, and he let hers do most of the teasing. When he recovered, Kramer licked a path of pure fire down her chin and across her throat, over her collarbone and down into the moistness between her breasts. He drank the moisture dry before lapping at her nipple. When he took the left one between his teeth, Donna's hands came to the back of his head and stayed there. She expelled a long, shuddering sigh.
"Steve, if you only knew," she whispered, struggling to get closer to him. "If you only knew...."
He gnawed at her swollen nipple. Then he sucked it into his mouth. Donna's legs thrashed the covers, reminding him of the treasures yet untouched.
When he switched to the other breast, Kramer snaked a hand down between her thighs and let it rest for a minute in the thick growth of her bush, luxuriating in the tangled duskiness he remembered so well. Wandering to her cunt, he encountered more good news: Donna was practically dripping with lubricant.
He delved between the out-puckered lips with a stiff forefinger, and Donna twitched in response. He moved the finger around a few times, and she was ready to crawl on top of him. He could forget about eating this particular dish; she'd been too long without his cock. Kramer wondered, while he sucked her right tit and swiped back and forth at her clit, why she had chosen to run and force him to follow.
If he had any worries, it was that he might not be able to perform quite as well as she expected. He had gone without pussy for two weeks, too, and the strain on his control might possibly be more than he could handle. But he had never had trouble getting it up.
If he could bring her off this way first, he reasoned, then he would take the edge off her lust. By the time he put his prick in, they would be roughly equal in desire. He would try to make her climax twice, and hope she was satisfied.
Rather than urge him to stuff it in before he was ready, with possibly disappointing results for both of them, she held him by the head and let him know, through words and action, that she was close to an orgasm. Her voice climbed two octaves and peaked out in a shrill cry. Her body exploded so that he was obliged to hold her down.
"I'm coming! Steve, I'm coming! Whatever you're doing, keep it up!"
He pressed his weight closer to hers and maintained a steady pumping. While the spasms racked her body, every nerve ending in his was attuned to what was happening in hers. She went limp at last, beads of perspiration breaking out across her forehead and running down into her hair.
Donna was quiet while her heart and respiration were returning to normal. Her hands stroked his hair and her flanks quivered under his hand.
"I needed that, Steve. You'll never know how much I needed it. I have the money, but I needed that, too."
Aching to take her, but determined to wait until she wanted him, too, Kramer moved his head away from her breasts and talked into the hollow of her shoulder. "Money?"
She hesitated. "I may as well tell you. You'll probably find out anyway. The Laurens have paid me fifty thousand dollars not to make trouble. In cash."
"Wow. You won't get away from me again. Bank on it." He was only half-kidding. A woman with money had to be more attractive than a woman without. But Kramer knew he'd be interested in this particular woman even if she lost every dime.
"From now on, I think I'll buy my men, Steve. Can I buy you?"
"Shut up," he advised, using his lips to seal off hers before they infuriated him further. To his utter astonishment, Donna sank her teeth into his lower one, deep enough to draw the blood. Rather than make him angry, she awoke the primitive beast in him. Kramer came alive with sexual need, with the urgency of joining his body with hers and fucking her into submission.
Donna felt it, too, because her nipples had erected again with no help from him. She arched away from him in wanton invitation. "Come and get it, Steve!" she trilled. "If you think you can!"
He piled on top of her, grabbed her arms, then tried to spread her legs long enough to make an entrance. Donna was a strong young woman, however, and it was an even match until he let his heavier weight do his fighting for him. When he lay squarely across her belly, Donna stopped and yielded her body to him.
"All right, Steve, damn you!" she gasped. "Fuck me! Fuck me until you can't fuck me any more!"
He wriggled until his knees were between hers, then he seized her thighs and forced them apart. Her cunt was a lovely one-big and gaping and glistening with proof that he was expected, and soon. He couldn't miss. Kramer speared her cunt. Donna bleat out her ecstatic approval. He leaned forward, and she pounded his bare back.
"So long, Steve, so long!"
He wasn't sure if she meant it had been a long time since they fucked, or that it had been a long time since any man drove himself inside her the way he was driving. There was no time to ask. He was home now, and there was nowhere else to go. Donna wrapped her legs around his waist, and they were locked together.
Kramer teetered on the edge of blackness, and for a few seconds he wasn't sure if he could stay conscious, or even if it mattered. He was dimly aware that he was still above her-weak and spent, but still above her-and that she was asking him something. Only he didn't know what. And then she was pushing him off her. Or maybe he was falling. When he was supine on his back, the darkness came for him.
He slept.