Chapter 2

The shades were already drawn in the manse's master bedroom, but Isabel Fairbanks paused in her undressing to draw them more closely. She hung up her dress in the closet in the resulting semi-darkness, then neatly folded her slip before placing it over a chair.

She struggled with her tight girdle, a well-armored type advertised as restraining full-flowing curves. She finally succeeded in tugging it downward, and she stepped out of it with a feeling of relief. She quickly removed bra and panties and ghosted about the darkened room momentarily, like a substantial white wraith, before donning a plain, unadorned, square-neckline nightgown.

She had one glimpse of her full-breasted amplitude and massive-looking rear in the bureau mirror before the descending nightgown covered her nudity, and she instinctively averted her eyes. Then she sat down on the bed after stripping off the coverlet and waited with folded hands. A wife had a duty to perform, regardless of her personal inclinations in the matter.

The bedroom door opened and Dr. Ralph Fairbanks entered. He grimaced at the room's darkness, but made no comment. He had long since given up protesting his wife's phobia about daylight or lamplight attending their lovemaking. He undressed speedily before approaching the bed where Isabel had stretched out on her back.

He knelt beside her as Isabel drew up the nightgown and tucked it under her armpits. He lay down alongside her, slipped his arm under her neck and shoulders, and half-turned her toward him so that his hairy chest rested against her large, bare breasts. No word was spoke, nor any kiss exchanged.

With his left hand he searched in the dark for his wife's vagina. Isabel widened her thighs, and Ralph began to massage her bearded crevice. It was the one victory he had won in his marriage. Isabel had banned stimulation initially, until he insisted he would no longer insert his penis into a dry hole. Isabel had reluctantly given in against her better judgment. She instinctively felt such stimulation was unchurchly, to say nothing of unladylike.

In their whole marriage she had never touched her husband's penis. It was not part of the marriage bargain, she told Ralph firmly when he suggested it. She suffered his manipulation of her own sexual orifice only because she experienced relief when she became lubricated. Relief was not illicit pleasure, she told herself.

Ralph stroked and penetrated his wife's labia until moistness changed to wetness. He drew spend from inside with which he coated the outer lips. Too often in the early days of their marriage he had risen from his wife's body with his penis smarting and burning from unlubricated friction.

Isabel closed her eyes as Ralph rose from his position beside her. He parted her long legs and moved in between them. She widened and elevated them, as per instruction, but it was the moment of the week she hated most. She had too vivid an image of the picture she must present, sprawled on her back with legs askew and her black-haired, wet orifice boldly upthrust. It was why she insisted there be no lights. The sex act was humiliating and degrading for a woman.

She opened her eyes again when she felt Ralph sink down upon her as the bulbous head of his long, thick penis slowly penetrated her. She did not hold her husband in her arms as he began to plunge into her. She hoped it wouldn't take long for him to come.

Her body moved hardly at all under Ralph's insistent prodding of her sex. She changed position slightly once to ease a feeling of strain in her back, and Ralph's vigorous frictioning of her at once increased. Isabel, however, at once went limp again as she listened uncomfortably to the slurping sounds emanating from the darkness. It was all so animalistic.

Ralph's heavy breathing took on a rasping note and his hips flurried mightily as his orgasm overtook him. His lean belly smacked audibly against his wife's rounded one while the wrenching ejaculations vibrated through his penis, and with a gasp he expired upon her after a final draining spurt of sticky semen.

He rose from Isabel's comatose figure in less than a minute. She kept her face averted. His wife permitted no after-sex intimacy. Ralph went into the bathroom and performed a quick cleansing of his penis before returning to the bedroom and fumbling in the dark for his clothing.

He left without having said a word.

Back at his desk in the study, a glance at his watch revealed that thirteen minutes had elapsed since his departure.

Bobby Maxwell entered the back door of his parents' home in which he had not resided for over a year. He had a room above the local bakery which he paid for by doing odd jobs around the premises. "Hi, Ma!" he sang out cheerfully to the bulky woman standing by the kitchen stove. "Gettin' anything strange these days? I can fix you up with plenty of good stuff if you're goin' short."

"You shut your filthy mouth, young man," his mother warned, but she was smiling. She examined his features closely. "Are you eating regular meals, Bobby? You look thin."

"I'm eatin' fine, Ma. It's just the women keep me thin."

She chose to ignore the remark. "Your own room is waiting for you right upstairs. I don't know why you don't use it."

"Yes, you do, Ma." Her son grinned at her impudently. "You get too nervous listenin' to me boost my girl friends up the apple tree an' over the roof to my bedroom window."

"You'll get a disease. I worry all the time."

"Nothing' like that. I take on only prime stuff. About your age, Ma." He winked at her. "Really ripe."

"I'll take the broom to you, Bobby Maxwell! Before I forget it, Curt wants you to call him."

Bobby's smile died. Deputy Sheriff Curt Sylvester was Bobby's uncle, the youngest brother of Bobby's mother. "Why should I call him?"

"Why not, for heaven's sake?" his mother wanted to know.

"The man comes on too strong." The boy waved a hand in dismissal. "Forget it. How's Pa? In good sexual health?"

His mother shook her head. "Don't you ever think of anything else except sex?"

"You mean there is somethin' else?" Bobby expertly dodged the half-hearted slap aimed at him. "Come on, Ma, admit it, you love to have Pa slap the saddle on you, don't you?" He broke and ran for the door as she advanced upon him determinedly. "See you later, Ma!" he called back as the screen door slammed behind him.

"You be here for dinner on Sunday or I'll send Curt after you!" his mother's voice floated after him.

He waved acknowledgement as he climbed into his car. He drove to the bakery and parked in back, then climbed the outside steps which gave him a private entrance to his second floor room. Two late nights in a row left him feeling the need of a restoring nap.

He stretched out on the single bed in his jockey shorts. His elbow almost dislodged the telephone on the night stand. He rolled onto his back and shielded his eyes with an arm against the early twilight. Thoughts of Cindy Gaynor danced in his brain. Young, fresh-faced, virginal-looking Cindy. What a change in a girl! The way she'd acted in the car he knew it was there almost for the asking. And it should be some kind of sweet.

He drifted off into a light sleep.

The strident ring of the phone woke him. He sleepily reached for it, conscious that twilight had turned to darkness and the sound he heard was rain against the windows. "Yeah?" he mumbled, trying to revive from his lassitude.

"Are you alone, Bobby?" The feminine voice was shaky and strained-sounding.

"That's right," he said more alertly. "Who's this?"

"Monica Simpson. Can I stay with you tonight?"

"Stay with me?" Incredulity threaded his tone until comprehension dawned. "Oh. Pete found out about Curt?"

"No, but he might just as well have."

"Why don't you call Curt?" The line hummed emptily in Bobby's ear. "Okay, forget I mentioned it. Where are you now?"

"In the phone booth around the corner from the bakery."

"Come up the back stairs. I'll have the door open."

"Thanks, Bobby," the feminine voice said in heartfelt relief. The click of the broken connection sounded in his ear.

Bobby pulled on his shirt and trousers. He felt uneasy about getting involved in his uncle's affairs.

Curt Sylvester's explosive temper was legendary. Still, Monica really sounded shook. He kind of liked her, too. She wasn't a small woman, but there was a cuteness about her that tickled him.

He opened the door. Rain thrummed steadily on the wooden stairway. There was no outside light at the rear of the bakery, but he could see via the streetlight at the coiner when Monica turned into the back yard. The way she was walking sent him trotting down the stairs barefoot. She was half-doubled over, holding her side. "Christ!" he exclaimed involuntarily when he saw her face. It was swollen and misshapen, and her eyes seemed glazed. "Take it easy, Monnie. Let me help you." He put an arm around her gently. "Jesus, you're soaking."

He guided her up the stairway and into his room. He was drenched during the ascent of the stairs, and Monica's bedraggled-looking clothing was sodden. "He threw me out," she said numbly as Bobby put on the light. Her red hair, usually in an attractive upsweep, was plastered wetly to her small skull. "I had no place to go, Bobby, looking like this." She still held onto her side.

"Okay," he said soothingly. "Let's get you out of those wet things."

The fastener at the back of her dress was only half-zipped. She stood like a mannequin while Bobby pulled the zipper down and carefully eased the dress from her wet shoulders. He did the same with her slip, and dress and slip collapsed suddenly at her feet after being steered down her body by Bobby.

"What about your side, Monnie?" he asked.

"The punched me," she faltered.

He tested her rib cage while she winced. "I don't think there's nothin' busted. Who hit you? Pete? Or Curt?" "Pete."

He knew it could have been either, but he refrained from mentioning her choice of men. He examined her face. It wasn't as bad as he had first thought. "You've got a lump an' a beautiful shiner, but I've got some skin paint. Maybe we can fix it in the morning."

He unfastened her bra and removed the cups from her breasts. He pulled down her wet panties and added them to the pile of clothing at her feet. He whistled softly when he saw the multiple red streaks crisscrossing her plump white buttocks.

"He threw me on the bed and wh-whipped me," Monica explained in a voice that still trembled. "Then when I stopped yelling he pulled me up and punched me all around the bedroom."

"And then threw you out into the rain," Bobby added in disgust. "That's his speed." He could see discolored dots on her upper arms and lower belly he knew were incipient bruises from hard punches. "All I can give you to wear is underwear."

"I don't want anything touching my behind," she said quickly.

"Okay. Stretch out on the bed."

She did so with a tired sigh, carefully refraining from placing her body weight on her hind cheeks. Bobby came to the bed with a wet towel he'd wrung out in cold water from the bathroom down the hallway. "Hold this against your eye an' cheekbone," he ordered. "It'll hold down the swelling." He looked at the welts on her mottled backside. "Christ, girl, you've got an unhappy-lookin' ass!"

"I'll be all right," she said. "I heal quickly." She tried to smile. "I've had practice." She held the cold towel to her face.

He found a jar and brought it to the bed and showed it to her. "Liniment," he explained. "It'll feel a little warm at first but then you'll feel better." He poured some onto his cupped palm. "Okay, zebra ass. Onto your back." She tried to smile again while awkwardly complying, her breath hissing loudly as her bottom touched the bedsheet. Bobby eyed appreciatively the reddish curls adorning Monica's white lower abdomen. "That's a hell of a muff you got there, pardner."

He applied a thin film of liniment to her arms and shoulders and began to work it in with smooth, gliding movements of his palm. Gradually Monica relaxed and closed her eyes as the soothing warmth and gliding palm combined for an almost hypnotic effect. Bobby did her breasts when he saw a bruise on one, then moved down to her dimpled round belly and sore rib cage. He stopped to fold a towel and place it over her crotch, drawing it snugly inward. "Got to keep the liniment out've your gazebo or you'll be climbin' the walls," he explained.

He worked liniment into her belly and thighs with circular sweeps of his palm. He had begun with medication only on his mind, but the sensation of the pliant female flesh under his palm began to get to him. His prick rose stiffly inside his jockey shorts. The tight pressure added to his risibility. He tried to keep his face impassive. "Roll over," he ordered.

Monica hitched herself onto her stomach, glad to get her weight off her whipped bottom. Bobby resumed the massage. He did her shoulders and back, stopping when he reached the little hollow at the beginning of the deep cleft separating her cheeks. "This stuff is too hot for your ass," he said matter-of-factly. "I've got some cream."

Monica's previously tremulous breathing had eased to slow inhalations by the time he came back to the bed with a tube of cream. He squeezed some of it onto her upturned bare globes, and she shivered. "It's cold!" she protested.

"It won't be when I work it in," he assured her.

He spread the cream gently over the rotund spheres. He could feel the welts under his gliding palm. Monica moved uneasily but made no sound. "God, that feels good!" she said, her face against the pillow.

Bobby stepped back after completing his task. Monica half-rolled on her side to look at him. "I'm a pig to push myself on you like this," she said soberly. "But I panicked when I found myself on the street in the rain. I never felt so completely rejected."

"You'll bounce back in the morning," Bobby predicted.

The redhead was looking around the tiny room. "I'm taking your bed," she realized aloud. She made a move to rise, but Bobby stayed her with a hand on her shoulder.

"Relax," he advised her. "I'll take the armchair." He pulled the sheet at the foot of the bed up over the plump, ivory flesh. "I'll get you another cold towel for your eye. And if you need to go during the night, call me and I'll show you where the John is."

Monica curled up gingerly with murmured thanks.

In ten minutes deep breathing sounded from the bed and the armchair.

Curt Sylvester stared with a hard gaze at the defiant boy in the chair beside Curt's desk in the sheriff's office. Curt was standing beside the chair as the boy looked up at him with attempted coolness that couldn't hide a touch of apprehension. "Well?" Curt rumbled. "I done told you I found a medicine bottle of pot in the glove compartment of your car. Where'd you get it?"

"I want to talk to my father's lawyer," the boy said sullenly.

Curt slapped him heavily across the face. "I asked you a question. Where'd you get it?"

"You can't do that to me!" the boy cried shrilly when the first shock of the hard slap had worn off.

"Don't try to tell me what I can do. Where'd you get the pot?" The boy remained silent. Curt slapped him again. The boy tried to spring to his feet. Curt punched him in the belly, doubling him over, then slammed him back into the chair. He reached down and grabbed a handful of the boy's hair to keep his head erect and slapped him four times. A trickle of blood dribbled from the boy's left nostril, ran onto his chin, and dripped onto his shirt. "Where'd you get the pot?" Curt repeated.

Fear had replaced defiance in the young face, but the boy tried to hide it. "You wait till my father's lawyer sees this blood on my shirt," he said shakily.

"You ain't never gonna get to show him the shirt," Curt informed him. "But even if you did, can I help it if you're the ignorant type who wipes the shit off his ass with his shirt? Now you start payin' attention to me. You bought pot, an' you're gonna tell me from who or you'll have bells ringin' in your thick head."

"I want a lawyer!" the boy cried out desperately. "You can't-"

Curt's slap was so hard the boy's chair nearly overturned. He swayed in his chair, dazed, a hand raised defensively to his reddening face. "Talk," Curt advised him. "Before I lose my damn temper an' wear you out. Who'd you buy the pot from?" He raised his hand again when there was no reply.

"Mr. Allen," the boy said quickly, flinching.

Curt checked his hand in the midst of its swing. "Mr. Allen?" he repeated in disbelief. "You mean the teacher?"

The boy nodded resentfully.

"You're funnin' me, boy, an' I don't like that," Curt said dangerously.

"It's true! All the kids buy from him!" The boy's eyes were riveted upon Curt's right hand.

"Well, now." Curt straightened up slowly from his half-crouched position in front of the boy's chair. "Mr. Allen, eh? That creep?" He thought of something. "What about that snotty wife of Allen's with her hair hangin' down her ass? Does she know about it?"

The boy nodded again.

"Well, now," Curt repeated. "Ain't that the most interestin' thing?"

The boy was beginning to regain his confidence. "You can't use anything I say here against the Aliens. I know my rights."

"You do try a man's patience," Curt said. "When you gonna get it through your fuckin' skull you got no rights in this office? I run better types than you the hell out've town. You remember Charlie Grant? Whole family just kind of disappeared?"

The boy looked puzzled. "I remember Charlie just all of a sudden wasn't in school any more. But-"

"Young Charlie was smart just like you're tryin' to be, my boy," Curt said heavily. "He kept screwin' around the wrong party's daughter after he was warned to lay off. I had a little session with him like I'm havin' with you now, an' he still didn't lay off. So I caught him sneakin' through the girl's back yard one night an' I used him up a trifle. Nothin' serious. I just left my fingerprints on his balls." The boy in the chair swallowed hard. "Then the next mornin' I went to see young Charlie's father, an' I suggested the family leave town."

"But you can't ..." The boy didn't finish what he had been about to say.

"So the father went to see the mayor," Curt resumed. "But a little bird in the mayor's office told me about the father's visit, an' then I went to see the mayor." His smile was cynical. "So the mayor went to see young Charlie's father an' told him the girl's father who'd turned me loose swung too much weight locally. An' the family left town."

"But that's coercion!" the boy blurted. "It's not right! It's not legal! You can't-"

"You don't never learn nothin', do you, boy?" Curt said sadly. Then a hard edge replaced his previously jovial tone. "Now you listen to me real close. From now on around this town you don't piss till I tell you it's time to piss. Understand? I don't want no tomfoolery from you. For starters, I'm warnin' you right now not to say a word about this little conversation to the Aliens or anyone else. If I hear a whisper that any of this has got back to that bastard or his bitchy wife, I'll fracture you, an' I'll guarantee you won't enjoy it. You hear what I said?"

"Yes," the boy mumbled. His tone was sullen again.

"Then don't forget it." Curt smiled again. "I'll take care of the Aliens." The smile turned down one corner of his hard-looking mouth. "Without your reluctant testimony." The smile disappeared, and his pale blue eyes pinned the boy to the back of his chair with a hard glare. "Shuck your shirt an' leave it here, then rustle your ass. An' you might just kind of keep it in mind that I've got your fingerprints on that medicine bottle of pot."

He threw the shirt on the desk, made a wide circle around the glowering deputy sheriff, and left the office hurriedly.

Cindy Gaynor sat in the semi-dark in her bedroom, her chair drawn close to the window against which the rain was pelting hard. The window was cracked open at the bottom, and the damp night breeze flowed over her nightgowned body.

She was thinking about Bobby Maxwell whose sudden appearance in the library parking lot that afternoon had jarred Cindy's well-ordered life. She could close her eyes and remember him in high school, smashing a halfback to the turf in a grotesque heap with a crushing open-field tackle. Bobby had looked at Cindy without seeing her in those days, but Cindy Gaynor saw Bobby. Saw, and silently yearned.

She had heard the stories about his leaving school after having impregnated the banker's daughter. The banker had sent his daughter to Switzerland and the baby had been placed for adoption. Cindy remembered that her prime reaction had been envy of the girl who had borne Bobby's baby.

She thought of the afternoon wonderingly. She had never permitted a boy's hand under her dress, not that all that many had tried until recently, yet in ten minutes Bobby had been fingering her, deliciously so. She squirmed in her chair at the memory. What would Bobby think of her for permitting it? Of course he was probably used to feeling girls' pussies.

She had developed so late she had never had a close girl friend her own age with whom to exchange sexual confidences. Her mother had dutifully instructed her in the mechanics of sex; Cindy knew about boys' cocks and what they did to a girl, although many of the details were fuzzy to her. She had always been too ashamed to ask outright. She was a good girl, but it hadn't been too hard to be when she was a gawky teen who even then had had eyes for the cherubic smile of the broad-shouldered, athletic Bobby Maxwell.

Her thoughts returned to the episode in Bobby's car that afternoon. He hadn't forced her. It was just that his every move was made with a masculine confidence that overwhelmed her, dazzling in its seemingly guaranteed success. What must it be like to be alone in a place with Bobby Maxwell where no eyes could pry? Where a girl's inhibitions would be at the mercy of his confident manipulations of girlish flesh?

Cindy sat and thought about it, dreamed about it, until a slow itch started and expanded in her loins. She drew her legs up, then lowered them. The itch, tantalizingly remote inside her secret flesh, burned on. She tried to ignore it. She never liked this aspect of herself, the moments when her usually good opinion of herself slipped. But her thighs writhed together of their own volition, encasing the itch which throbbed deep within her virginal vaginal walls.

She raised the front of her nightgown and folded it back on her thighs. Her right hand caressed the soft, warm bowl of her nude stomach, and she tangled a finger in the blonde curls surmounting her supple slit. She widened her thighs and curved the finger downward to touch her pussy, and at the first contact a powerful shudder rippled through her whole body and her thighs clenched convulsively.

She was lost, and she knew it. She rose to her feet with the nightgown pinned under her armpits. She walked to her bed, the curved finger still dipping between her thighs. She sat down on the coverlet after elevating the nightgown to her smooth shoulders, unconscious of the coverlet's rough texture upon the silky white skin of her bare bottom.

She stretched out on her back and elevated her long, slender legs, widening them once more to make additional room for the finger at the gate of her existence. Her soft platinum fleece was already damp. She ran the finger inside, parting the spongy labia, and another tremor shook her. She withdrew the finger slightly in a desire to prolong the sensation.

But then the itch magnified itself suddenly, and a slow, deep throbbing enveloped her moist pussy. Cindy's cute, bell-shaped nude behind rose involuntarily from the coverlet in an unconscious twitching tribute to what was taking place within her. Her finger groped frantically for her tight little bud and rubbed it hard.

And then a boiling upheaval erupted inside her. Her legs climbed, writhing, and a low moan escaped her half-parted lips. Her finger jerked rapidly in and out of her box as the finger became inundated with pearly cream. Cindy's stomach muscles fluttered wildly as her pussy thrust back against the probing finger.

"Ohhh!" she murmured. A final twitch or two and the internal quivering ceased. "Ahhh!" Cindy sighed. She removed the wet finger reluctantly. She held it aloft, not wanting to wipe it upon anything that would leave betraying traces. And she had to swab off her overflowing cloister. She rose from the bed and stood on shaky legs.

Always during the aftermath she had the exasperated feeling that good as it was, it might be even better if she only knew better what to do for herself. She had never discussed it with anyone; she couldn't imagine discussing it with anyone. But she couldn't escape the feeling that somewhere beyond what she had just experienced there was another, more glorious experience.

She stepped out into the corridor before she realized that her nightgown was still draped around her neck and shoulders. Cindy's mother, tired faced, was just opening her bedroom door, and she looked in surprise at her semi-nude daughter. "What is it, dear?" she asked. "Do you need a napkin? I have some if you've run short."

"I have plenty, mother," Cindy replied, keeping her voice steady with an effort. She walked down the hallway to the bathroom.

Mrs. Gaynor would never suspect her sweet daughter of masturbating.

Cindy returned to her bed after her vaginal ablutions but sleep escaped her for some time.