Chapter 11
Jim McHughes woke as sunlight splashed him in the face.
He woke the way most men simply dream of waking. His head was on the bosom of a lovely naked girl, and another lovely naked girl had her head in his lap, giving him a friendly little good morning kiss.
He grinned at Cleo. He grinned at Peggy.
But he didn't take them. He had had more than his quota of that the night before. Again and again, body thrusting at body, writhing, stirring. He had made it with Cleo, and he had made it with Peggy, and Peggy and Cleo had made it with one another, over and over. Then they had slipped into a quiet doze as morning neared.
"Upsy-daisy," he said. "Let's all take a nice shower and then you two chicks clear out and let me get some work done, okay?"
They were hazy with sleep. McHughes tugged them to their feet and shepherded them into the bathroom. They moved sleepily, two nude, statuesque females whose breasts swayed enticingly with every lurching step.
It was pretty crowded with the three of them under the shower, but that wasn't anything to complain about. They soaped each other up, rubbing the slippery stuff here and there with a lot of giggling and chuckling, and then, when they were all soapy and lathery, they washed clean and got out.
McHughes passed towels around. They got dry, with many a hobbling of bosom. They were a cute pair, these two. Stacked, lively and sexy. He couldn't object to the way he had passed his night.
Except that he hadn't passed it with Ellen. Broads like these, sexy as they were, were a kopeck a dozen. Ellen was special. Ellen was his. Or so he thought. But she wasn't his enough.
Tonight would be the showdown, McHughes vowed. For sure, he'd get things straightened out.
Cleo and Peggy wanted to stay and play some more. "Sorry, girls," McHughes told them. "The fun's over. Daddy's got to work."
"Can't you work later?" Cleo asked.
"Don't tempt me," he laughed.
He gave them each one last good feel as a parting gift. He ran his hands over Cleo's silken boobs and satiny bottom, and then he filled his hands with the incredibly generous ripeness of Peggy's bosom, and stroked the cool, tender mounds of her backside, and then he aimed both of them toward their clothing and supervised them while they did a reverse of the strip tease of the night before.
It was past eleven in the morning before they finally cleared out. McHughes went through the studio, opening windows, letting the scent of last night's orgy wash away in the clean morning air. Then he picked up his brushes and started to tackle his current project.
He didn't feel much like working, though. He wanted to talk to Ellen.
But that would have to wait till later. He forced himself to push the paint around.
In early afternoon, he phoned her. She sounded tense and tired, as though she had had a busy night last night with little sleep. McHughes felt bitter about that. He didn't like to think about the things she might have been doing. Even though he had scarcely been a dutiful fiance, balling two chicks at once, his conscience was clear. He would never have picked up Peggy and Cleo in the first place, if Ellen had not forced him to look elsewhere for companionship. And he didn't see how he could be blamed for doing what he had done, when she had He preferred not to think about that.
He said, "I'll be over around eight-thirty or nine tonight, okay?"
"Whenever you come, okay."
"You don't sound enthusiastic."
"I'm tired, Jim. That's all."
"Rough night?" he asked sarcastically.
"A busy day," she said.
"How late did he stay?"
"Jim, please-"
"All night?"
"He left before eleven," she said. "Are you satisfied? Do you believe me?"
"Then why are you so tired?"
"I didn't sleep well," she said. "Bad conscience?"
"Could be," she admitted.
Somehow he used up the rest of the day. He didn't spend it very usefully. He wandered around his studio, looking at the unfinished paintings but not even considering working on them. Mostly he rehearsed the things he was going to say to Ellen, going over and over them in his mind until they echoed in his brain.
He couldn't help seeing Cleo and Peggy before his eyes. The two naked girls who had spent the night here with him still throbbed in his brain. Forget them, he thought. After tonight there won't be any more such little amusements. Just you and Ellen.
After a skimpy dinner, he set out for Ellen's place.
He got there a little late, about quarter to nine. When he ran the bell, the door opened immediately, as though she had been standing behind it waiting for his ring. She glided toward him and into his arms.
"Ellen," he murmured. "Ellen, darling-"
She looked radiant, magnificent. She was wearing a pink, filmy negligee, but it didn't hide her body in the slightest. McHughes could see the white, ripe, luscious globes of her breasts within the material.
He folded her into a tight embrace. The deep bowls of her breasts crushed against him. His mouth sought hers. Her lips were soft against his, and his tongue plunged deep. She dug her fingers into the muscles of his back as they kissed each other passionately.
His hands roved Ellen's body. He cupped one thrusting breast, feeling it warm and hard-nippled through the negligee. Then he slid his hand down her back, finding the twin mounds of her buttocks and grasping the resilient flesh with the tips of his fingers.
Then he let go of her.
She was panting and gasping with desire. Her face was flushed, her eyes were glassy. Her breasts were heaving in agitation, and clearly visible through the gauzy fabric were the tall, hard, excited nipples, thrusting up like little red towers.
"Get undressed, Jim," she said in a harsh, passion-wrought voice. "Hurry up! Let's go to bed!"
He shook his head. "Not so fast. First we have some talking to do."
"We can talk later, Jim." She came toward him again, her breasts swaying, her lips parted, her tongue flickering between them.
He held up one hand as though to push her back. "I'm serious, Ellen. We've got a lot to discuss, and I want to get it over with before any distractions set in."
Ellen sighed. "All right. What is it, Jim."
"I think you can guess,"
"Are we going to have another one of those discussions, Jim?"
"We're going to have the last of those discussions," McHughes told her in a flat voice. He folded his arms and stared levelly at her. The lure of her almost nude body was a powerful one. He could see those ripe, swelling curves beneath her filmy negligee, but he refused to let the magnetism of her seductive thighs and breasts sway him from his purpose. He said coolly, "I want all this crud to stop, Ellen."
"I told you. In a few more months-"
"No. Now."
"Don't pressure me, Jim."
"Listen, Ellen, the kind of relationship we have now is absolutely crazy. You know what I did last night? I went out and picked up a chick named Cleo in a coffee house, and I took her home and balled her. And because Cleo happened to have a pal along, I took the pal home, too. Two of them. Cleo and Peggy. Peggy had a pair of boobs on her out to here. We made it maybe half a dozen times last night."
"Are you bragging about your prowess?" Ellen asked sarcastically.
"I'm telling you what you forced me to do. Do you think I enjoyed doing it?"
"It sounds as if you did."
McHughes shook his head. "I enjoyed the physical part of it, the animal part, sure. But that's irrelevant. What I hated was the fact that I could have been having you in my arms instead of those two wild chicks. Only I couldn't have you, could I, Ellen? Because you were here, getting spanked by Brubaker. Getting your fanny tanned by that fat, middle-aged, stinking pervert."
Ellen bit her lip. "I would have been with you if I could have been, Jim."
"You say that. But you don't mean it. Think about it, Ellen. Why were you with him? Because you didn't say no. That's all. If you had spoken up and told him to go to hell with his spanking-"
"He'd have fired me."
"What of it? I can support you."
"We aren't married yet, Jim. I can't take the risk of throwing up my job until I've got that ring on my finger. It's a damned good job. The pay-"
"To hell with the pay," McHughes said. "What is it, a hundred fifty a week? T'd pay you a hundred fifty a week just to spit in Brubaker's fat face!"
"That would make me a kept woman, wouldn't it?"
"Is a wife a kept woman?"
"Sometimes she is." Ellen replied evenly. She shook her head. "No, Jim. I don't want any money from you. I just want you to bear with me. If you'll be patient-"
"I can't be patient any longer. This is tearing me in half, Ellen."
"Just a few months," she said.
"Not even a few hours. Here's what I want, Ellen. Stop sleeping around. No more spanking parties with Brubaker, no more giving in to your sniveling wreck of a husband, and no more fun with oddball guys on the side. Give up all sex, except with me. I'll do the same. We'll act as if we're man and wife, except that we won't be living together until your divorce decree comes through. And then-"
"No, Jim."
"No?"
"I've explained this half a billion times," Ellen said. "I need these few months of freedom between my marriages. T want to hell around. You don't know how it is. You've been free all your life, and if you want to boff two chicks a night, or three, or seven, you just go out and get them and do it. But I've had it differently. I've been a married woman, and now I want my fling."
A muscle flickered in his cheek. Tension roiled his guts. McHughes said, "You've been separated from Ray Dawson for more than a year, haven't you? That's a pretty good fling, I'd say. You've had lots of fun. How much more freedom do you want? A year? Two years?"
"Just the next few months, Jim." She smiled thinly at him. "Let me have my adventures a couple of nights a week. And you have your Cleos and your Peggies. And then-"
"I don't want that, Ellen."
"But I do."
"Then we'll have to take some drastic steps," McHughes said. "Such as?"
He took a deep breath. "I love you very much, Ellen; that should go without saying. But I'm not going to let you torture me this way any more. It's got to be one way or the other. Either you stop going to bed with the other men or you stop seeing me altogether."
It was a bluff. He didn't know how he could possibly get along without Ellen as a part of his life. But he had to do something to spare himself this torment.
He stared levelly at her.
Ellen said, "You're trying to blackmail your way into getting a monopoly over me."
"All I want is what any engaged man is entitled to have from his fiance." he replied. "Decency. Fidelity. Old-fashioned things like that."
"And if you don't get them?"
"Then I'll walk out. And I won't be coming back," McHughes said bluntly.
"In other words, I give in or we break up?"
"That's it."
"I guess it's good-bye, then, Jim. You aren't going to push me around like this. I love you and I want you, but I'm not prepared to let you dictate to me about my life until the proper time comes."
McHughes gaped at her in disbelief. Was she bluffing, too? Was this a test of strength?
There was a red haze of anguish before his eyes. He couldn't accept the idea that Ellen was so wedded to her life of promiscuity that she would risk their breakup rather than abandon her wildness.
And yet she seemed serious.
"Do you mean that, Ellen?"
"I mean that. Yes."
Something snapped in McHughes. He knew that from this moment on, his love for Ellen was dead and could never be brought back to life. She had defied him; she had virtually declared war on him. He could not love a woman who openly admitted giving herself to other men, to weaklings, to perverts, to strangers. There were depths of evil in her that he could not begin to understand. And he saw that he had no assurance that she would ever stop sleeping around, even after their marriage. If he married her, he was letting himself in for constant uncertainty, for a cuckold's horns, for shame and torment and bitterness. He would not marry her.
But neither, he thought in a wild surge of emotion, would anybody else.
"All right, Ellen," he said in a voice so thick with passion that he could scarcely recognize it in his own ears.
"If that's the way you want it to be."
"Jim-"
He stepped toward her. Her eyes widened, and she gasped in alarm and tried to back up, but McHughes moved faster than she did. His big, powerful hands rose and clasped themselves around Ellen's throat.
"No-" she choked.
His hands tightened.
He felt the softness of her skin as he gripped her. Like satin. Like fine silk. And the eyes, so blue. The hair, so golden.
Grasping her throat tightly, McHughes began to shake her, until her head rocked from side to side as if it would fly from her shoulders. Within the filmy negligee, the succulent, tantalizing white globes of her flawless breasts jiggled and quivered like mounds of jelly. McHughes stared fixedly at the globes of delight. But he did not let the provocative near-nudity of her distract him.
She fought-with ever lessening strength. She hammered at him and clawed him.
His hands tightened.
Her face was red and blotchy now. He felt a strange calmness. She would die, he thought, and then he would be free of his torment. He would no longer have to worry, each night that he spent away from her, that she was engineering some loathsomely perverse act of sensuality. He would be free at last! Tighter-Tighter.
She was sagging. Consciousness was leaving her now, McHughes realized Tighter.
The window! The window's open!
McHughes realized suddenly that in his single-minded determination to have it out with Ellen, he had forgotten all about the blinds. As usual, she had left the blinds undrawn, for in her shameless way she seemed to enjoy putting her nude body on display for any onlooker on the far side of the courtyard.
If Ellen wanted to show her naked flesh off, that was her business. But McHughes did not feel like having an audience while he committed murder. Perhaps he had been seen already In that case he was as good as in the electric chair. But maybe luck was riding with him, maybe there still was time to ring down the curtain.
He released his grip on Ellen's throat. She hung bonelessly from his hands. Not dead yet, he knew he could see the mounds of her breasts still rising and falling within her garment. Well, he could finish the job in a moment. He eased her to the floor.
Then he walked to the window.
He looked out. Was anyone watching? It seemed to him that he saw a figure sitting in a window across the way. McHughes bit his lower lip tensely. Had he seen? Or was he just an old dodderer, staring myopically into nowhere as he used up another night of a dull, useless life?
McHughes carefully pulled down the blind and made sure it was completely closed.
Now to take care of Ellen, he thought. To finish in cold blood what he had begun in murderous rage.
McHughes started to turn.
There came a sudden impact, unexpected and incredibly painful, and he went stumbling forward in surprise and shock his face twisting with agony.