Chapter 1
"Anna, I just don't think I can stand another day working under that man! Jake Ralston has got to be the coarsest, most vulgar human being I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. How he ever got to be manager of a trucking terminal the size of this one, I'll never know." Leonard Melton had just come in from another day at the ABC Trucklines Pine Junction terminal, his ninety-fourth day there as a management trainee sent down here to the Carolinas from the Maryland home offices. Melton knew precisely how many days he had spent under Ralston's tyranny, for he carefully marked them on his desk calendar, numbering them one by one, each morning wondering more desperately how he could hope to live through a year of suffering under that man.
His pretty, blonde wife was compassionate and reassuring, as she always was when he came home in one of these frequent depressions, but even Anna had found lately that there was nothing more for her to say-it had all been bandied about so much that she could practically recite her husband's complaints word-for-word like a litany, adding the oft-rehearsed "Yes, dears" and "I understand, honeys" until Leonard had calmed down and they could proceed with the task of finishing dinner. That is, if Leonard felt like eating; lately, food was becoming an anathema to her husband of nearly three years, as he so seldom managed to finish a meal without the onset of stomach cramps that his doctor had warned might be the beginnings of an ulcer. An ulcer at twenty-eight! When she and Leonard had first started going out together at college, he had been the one person on campus she would never have guessed could succumb to the ravages of corporate in-fighting and pressures.
Their friends had labeled their romance a coming-together of opposites-quiet, scholarly Leonard, bookish and quite distinguished looking; boisterous, gregarious Anna, freshman member of the cheerleading squad, night-owl and tennis player. It would have been difficult to find two more unevenly-matched students on the whole campus, yet it was almost love at first sight. Second or third date, anyway, and plans for marriage in the air before mid-term exams were being fretted about. They had their future all mapped out-college degrees for both of them and then a business administration master's for Leonard followed by an assured top-echelon position that would both utilize Leonard's flair for computer science and provide them both with the standard of living they expected. But little Richie had changed all of that before the end of their second year as Mr. and Mrs. Melton; Anna's doctor had advised her to stay away from birth-control pills for a while, as the strain of going to college and running a household was starting to wear on her, and the pills just made her more depressed and irritable. So it just happened, their adorable son, now almost a year old, was born before Leonard graduated, and any plans of graduate school studies went out with the first load of dirty diapers. Anna had never finished at all, of course, and her husband was in the ranks of the unemployed the day after graduation, joining the thousands of others who had guessed-wrongly-that American business was waiting out there somewhere with open arms, anxiously writing-up five-figure contracts and dangling stock-options. Only it had not worked quite that way at all; a full month after graduation, Leonard was at the point of exhaustion, having mailed dozens of resumes, answered countless newspaper ads and walked an estimated two hundred miles trekking from one employment agency to another, only to be told the opportunities would be better in the fall. Or in the Midwest. Or overseas. Or with more education. Or less education ... on and on until Leonard would gladly have taken a spot as night custodian in a shoe factory if he had been offered it. And then a man Leonard met in an agency waiting-room told him about this job with ABC Trucklines. It was a position nobody seemed to want, for though the money was fairly good and the advancement opportunities exceptional, it meant a full year on assignment as a management trainee in one of the transportation company's widely-scattered truck terminals. The only thing these sites seemed to have in common was their remoteness and inaccessibility-one on the sandy Georgia coastal plain in some little one-horse town no one outside the town limits had ever heard of. Another, sixty miles from the Mexican border in New Mexico, in a desert region so isolated they did not even have television. And the one Leonard finally chose ... five miles outside a town of four thousand souls in the Carolina Piedmont section, a veritable metropolis by comparison with the other two.
Pine Junction was a lumber and factory town originally carved out of the rolling Appalachian foothills in the last century as a rail depot for the burley lumber crews hacking their way west through the virginal pine forests in a frantic effort to supply the East's burgeoning shipbuilding industry. Most of the isolated town's present inhabitants were descended-legitimately or illegitemately, as they were quick to relate-from those original rough-and-tumble lumbermen and their women, though it seemed, from local folklore, that at least half the village sold out and left en masse when word was received of a spectacular gold-strike bonanza in the Klondike of the nineties. Those that stayed behind, the ones either too successful or too poor to just up and leave in search of a fortune, became the bulwarks of the Pine Junction community generally narrow-minded people, isolationists before the word was coined-people fearful of anything resembling progress lest their success draw "that sort" looking for work or a hand-out. Meaning Negroes, poor whites, or mostly just anyone not born and reared within spitting distance of Pine Junction. Leonard and Anna Melton, quite obviously, were outside on several indisputable counts: being college-educated was sinister enough, but heaven forbid, Leonard and Anna were from Connecticut ... Yankees!
Twelve months in Pine Junction was going to be sheer purgatory for Leonard and Anna, cut off from friends and family, from even the merest pleasures like good conversation and social life, but they lived for the day they could move out of there and into a better assignment, possibly an assistant managership in one of the company's regional sales offices. But this in-the-field training was obligatory and his progress with ABC hinged on that all-important evaluation his immediate superior would prepare in six months. And that superior was Jake Ralston.
Jake had once been considered an outsider himself in Pine Junction, though his position as manager of the truck terminal gave him a certain added respect in the close-knit community, as the terminal offered much-needed employment and income to Pine Junction, but there was another reason for his quick acceptance as well. Jake was a man that no one dared rebuff, for he had the presence of sheer physical power about him, a giant of a man who commanded authority wherever he went, often garnered at the threat of a few broken bones. Jake minced no words when it came to giving orders, and it seemed to Leonard that practically everybody in town took orders from Ralston at one time or another. He was accepted as a necessary evil, a man with few friends but no outspoken enemies.
The story was often told of Jake's unusual climb to management with ABC, a company noted for its college-grad training programs and incentive stock-options. Jake was an exception, a maverick, and he resented the smart-aleck young college kids who came into the company with nothing and quickly moved up the management ladder he had taken years to climb. Jake had first been hired as a dock-helper, the lowliest of the rowdy, work-toughened men who work around the truck terminals, assisting the higher-paid union men, cleaning up and just generally doing what they are told. Jake had taken the job as a stop-gap measure, just something to hold him over until a better spot came along, but it was the early fifties and the job market was glutted with men like himself, hardly out of their teens but hardened-veterans all, Jake being a newly-discharged Marine just returned from Korea. He quickly established a reputation around the Georgia terminal as being no man to trifle with-he took orders and carried them out to the best of his ability, but he had little time for complaints unless they were justified.
As Leonard heard it from the crusty old night-dispatcher, Jake had broken a tough grizzly trucker's jaw his third week on the job and was called into the foreman's office expecting to be fired. Only it seemed they were having labor troubles at one of their terminals and they needed some men who could handle their fists as well as their heads so Jake was sent in as a new line-foreman with only three weeks experience under his belt. The rest of his climb to management was far from meteoric, however, as the leap from foreman to white-collar management level is a wide chasm indeed; it took him almost twenty years to make it this far and he bore more than a little resentment toward those "kids" who often made the same climb in a couple of years. Leonard had heard enough about Jake Ralston, both here and back at the home office, to convince him he was a man to whom one gave a wide berth; he was no man of violence himself, though he wasn't afraid to fight if he was pushed into it. But he knew that just one serious encounter with Ralston could dead-end his chances for making a decent life for himself and his family; it was for that reason, and that alone, that Leonard Melton, each morning, before the day was officially under way, crossed off another day on his desk calendar. One day less in Pine Junction, one day less under Jake Ralston's calloused thumb.
"Honey, you've got to eat something. Look at you, your clothes hardly fit, your pants hang off you like they were hand-me-downs."
Leonard shook his head and cleared away some of the cobwebs; he had been daydreaming again, only it was actually more of a nightmare and now he was back, back to his tiny formica-topped table in his company apartment on the town limits of Pine Junction, out of Jake Ralston's clutches until tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. "I'm sorry, Anna, I wasn't listening. What did you say?"
"I noticed. You never are these days." Anna was irritated; this dinner was supposed to be a special treat. She had kept little Richie up all day without a nap so he would go to bed early and then surprised Leonard with her special braised chicken in wine-coq au vin. And for all the fuss he had made over it, it might as well have been Kentucky Fried Chicken in a box.
"I said I was sorry, Anna. Don't get your feelings all ruffled."
"I'm not doing any such thing! But you could have at least said something about the dinner. I spent half the afternoon getting it ready and you didn't even notice!" She was close to crying now, her eyelids fluttering to quench the tears.
"Oh damn, honey, I'm really sorry," he said consolingly. "It's just that I've got a lot on my mind, really. I do appreciate the dinner, honest, it's just ... well, you know, we've been through it all a hundred times already."
Anna reached across the narrow table and rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand. "I know, darling, I really do. But can't we have some time to ourselves without that horrible man hanging around like a curse? I know how much you despise him but he can't get to you here, darling, he's...."
"And what's that supposed to mean!? You think I'm afraid of him, don't you? Can't you see it's for you and Richie that I go through all this crap? I'd walk out on that uncouth bastard tomorrow if I was single!"
Anna jerked her hand away abruptly.
"Well, that can be arranged as well, Leonard!"
Her husband stood up and tossed his unused napkin onto his plate. "This is a re-run, Anna. We've been through it all before. I'll be up late working on some payroll reports for Ralston, so you might as well go on to bed without me."
Anna felt like saying, What difference would it make whether you came with me or not? You haven't treated me like a woman in weeks anyway! But instead, she quietly went about the chore of putting dinner away in plastic left-over cartons. And tomorrow would be day number ninety-five ... only two hundred and seventy to go
It was never like this in the dreams we used to share, Anna thought sorrowfully later that night, alone in their double bed as Leonard shuffled papers around on the dining table. Does he really have all that extra work to do or is he just killing time until he thinks I'm asleep? God, how long has it been now? Two weeks ... no, more like three? But it never seems to bother Leonard; doesn't he get these same hungerings? Aren't men the same?
When we were both still in college and newlyweds, then it was different. Wow, was it ever! Then it was every night, sometimes twice, and then often again in the mornings. Mmmmm, it was like a honeymoon for months and months! Even the first time was something special, that night in the back seat of Leonard's old Chevy, the night we got engaged. We were planning to get married, so we figured, what the hell, why should we be in agony when we could get a head start on married life right now? We didn't know it, but it was the first time for both of us ... and wow, was it everything it was supposed to be! Lights flashing, fireworks going off, sirens wailing ... could that only have been three years ago?
There was a sound of water running from the bathroom and Anna felt herself tense in futile anticipation; it was like this almost every night now ... her alone and hopeful. And Leonard exhausted and preoccupied.
She pretended to be asleep when he came in and whispered her name. It made no difference nowadays whether she was awake or not, and if she was awake, they would probably get into another argument. Anna felt the sheet lift and his body settle beside her; instinctively she snuggled her buttocks up against his side. It was October in Quarry County, but the last few days had heralded a spell of Indian Summer, so Anna had come to bed tonight with only her panties on. With the practiced touch acquired from night after night of being rebuffed, she waited expectantly for him to jerk away from her ... to grunt his usual good-night or perhaps kiss her on the cheek like she was a child ... anything to tell her, as usual these last months, that he preferred his own side of the bed to hers. But tonight, just perhaps, it might be different.
"Anna, honey, are you still awake?" he whispered. Feeling delightfully wicked, she answered with a seductive wiggle of her behind. She was almost afraid to hope ... maybe he just wanted to talk. "I finished my work, honey ... and I'm sorry about dinner. I know you went out of your way to fix something nice and I acted like ... like,. well, Jake Ralston". Maybe being around him has corroded my manners. Anyway...." His hand slipped around her tiny slender waist as he settled close behind her and pulled her firm buttocks up against his bare belly. One hand coursed over the smoothness of her perfect, unblemished back; he could feel the soft warm nakedness of her bare feminine flesh against his abdomen and he quickly slipped out of his jockey-shorts.
Anna felt a naked shiver of excitement and anticipation course over her bare flesh at the first passionate nudge of his hardening cock nestled suggestively in the soft hairless furrow of her buttocks. She pushed her soft ass-cheeks back tightly against the stiffening flesh of his manhood and trapped it firmly between the firm womanly half-moons of her ass. She was hesitant to open her eyes, lest this all be a cruel dream, a hoax played on her by her own unconscious. But when she did, she could see that it was real ... her husband and lover seemed miraculously to be his old eager self once again. She could only pray it would last; that this somehow-ignited spark of desire she had thought long extinguished would flame one more time into the raging wildfires of passion she had once known.
He kissed her gently behind the ear and tugged her panties down over the swell of her hips and along the smooth bare flesh of her legs; she shivered again at the feeling of utter nakedness and squirmed tighter against his throbbing hardness. His cock was fully erect and stiff now, poking curiously between her thighs as she clamped them claspingly around the softly pulsing rigidity. She could feel the full hard length of his familiar cock rubbing incitingly against the sensitive fleshy folds of her cunt, the swollen purplish head brushing electrically over the nerve-jammed bud of her clitoris. Without even trying, she could feel the warmly moist lips of her vagina flower open to receive him eagerly, hungrily nibbling with unabashed desire at the hardness of his cock.
Leonard eased further down behind her, lowering his body as they both lay nestled together on their right sides on the mattress, sliding down over the firmly rounded cheeks of her buttocks and the naked, unblemished smoothness of her back. His desire-stiffened cock was perfectly positioned to surge into the soft moist pinkness of her vagina; its throbbing, lust-engorged head, distended and purplish with lust-heated blood, was poking between the wetly clasping lips of her cunt and her hotly eager vaginal flesh ravenously urged him into her very belly. "Okay, sweetheart?" he murmured needlessly.
Anna could barely manage an answer. "Y ... yes, darling, yes ... now, now!" His stiffly erect manhood surged forward relentlessly between the hungry lips of her vagina, not stopping until his loins smacked resonantly against her buttocks and his testicles rested between her thighs. Anna choked on a soulful cry of ecstasy as she felt the incomparable joy of lust-hardened maleness between her legs. "Oooooohhhh ... yes, yes, yes!" She shuddered from the tips of her bare toes as his love-stiffened cock thrust rapidly in and out of her voraciously clasping velvety cuntal sheath, each backward jerk of his hips pulling the softly clinging flesh of her vagina out and then stuffing it deeply into her belly as he burrowed skeweringly again, poking and prodding her innermost secret joy-spots with harder and harder thudding thrusts. Her eyes were tightly closed again, this time not in dread but in passion, as his maddeningly rhythmic strokes pumped in and out of her sex-starved cuntal slit; each long, impaling thrust seemed deeper than the one before, and she could feel the electrifying waves of wanton ecstasy that were welling up from her lust-incited loins, sweeping thrillingly over her whole naked body. She wanted to cry out in erotic delight, but she dared not for fear of waking little Richie.
Her nipples had hardened arousedly and were now throbbing with the overwhelming strength of her long-suppressed passion. She could warmly feel the spreading wetness of her own love-juices as they fervently lubricated her husband's skewering hardness in passionate anointment.
Leonard looked down his chest at the splendid exhibition of his well-formed voluptuous wife, as beautiful tonight as that first night they met, her tantalizing buttocks-cheeks clenched tightly as she ground back lasciviously onto the impaling thickness of his cock, her soft ivory thighs parted to accommodate his stiffened sex, her legs scissoring in an open rhythm with the hoarse throaty moans of ardent passion that escaped her quivering lips ...!
Anna's heart stopped in her naked breasts as she heard her husband grunt huskily behind her, and then she knew it was all over ... his sperm-laden testicles gushed a seething flood of hot liquid into her belly that oozed from around the shaft of his cock and dribbled warmly down her passionately-clenched thighs. Her whole body was tensed and immobile, as though by remaining perfectly still, not moving, not even breathing, her worst fears might be proven groundless.
But when, after a few moments, she felt his rubbery cock slip wetly from her reluctant vaginal grip, she knew there would be no more for her. "Leonard ... p-please ... just ... a ... little ... more...." But he was swinging his legs off the bed now and making his way in the dark to the bathroom.
She knew she would not cry this time, the tears were all shed a long time ago, but she was agonizingly crushed and depressed none the less. Leonard's unexpected passion after all these nights of neglect had given her hope ... and now that too was gone.
Anna bit painfully into her trembling lower lip, purposely hurting herself to distract her mind from the greater agony between her thighs, the fervent throb of unfulfilled desire. She knew what she would have to do, just as she had shamefully done so many times already ... tomorrow when Leonard was gone. Tomorrow when her own caressing fingers would have to quench the agonizing hurt that once her husband had destroyed so wonderfully ... tomorrow. And now, for tonight, she had simply to find the means to sleep.