Chapter 9
AFTER A FROZEN TV SUPPER, WES READ A while in the study, but about nine, he laid the book aside. The night was warm, and he was restless in the silent house. He lit a cigarette and mixed himself a drink, but that only made it worse. Dormant lust kept uncoiling every time the image of bare breasts drifted across his mind. Or round buttocks encased in tight panties. Or long, slender legs. The trouble with him was, he finally realized, he was hungry.
Well, a few days had passed since the exhilarating encounter with Celia Brown. The vivid images of Celia, which he still carried with him were maddening.
Unable to cope with his fantasies any longer, he put on a sweater and went out for a walk. It was a clear night with myriads of stars twinkling in the navy-blue sky, perfect for walking. And for other things more stimulating.
On the campus, he passed a girl and boy locked in embrace behind some bushes. He could make out the outline of the girl's bare legs with her skirt rumpled. Wes walked on in a warm sweat. Quite inadvertently, his feet took him past the campus lovers' lane. It was jammed with cars this lovely, earthy spring night. The sap was flowing freely through young, eager bodies, just as through the limbs of the trees and the stems of the flowers.
He glanced down wryly at himself, and thought, "Yes, and flowing free in the older bodies, too."
They were oblivious of his presence, the kids in the cars. He saw a bare breast in the flare of a match, the nipple glistening.
One girl was sitting demurely on her date's lap, with her skirt spread like a tent over their legs. They might have been admiring the panorama of the campus spread out in the valley below. Except that Wes saw the girl's panties and the boy's shorts on the seat beside them I
He believed he was walking aimlessly, though later he suspected some subconscious will had directed his footsteps. In any case, he abruptly found himself at the edge of the campus, where a new development of three-room bungalows had been erected for students who preferred private quarters rather than the enforced intimacy of dorm living. Several of the unmarried teachers had moved into this inexpensive housing developments, as well.
One of them was Ann Wayne, the busty economics instructor. Shortly after she had moved in, she had given a small cocktail party for a few intimate friends nn the faculty Wes and Sue Parker had been two of those invited. And now Wes was pretty certain that he was standing in the back yard of her bungalow. It was a small yellow structure at the very end of the development, with its back to the woods that ran uphill to the lovers' lane.
His initial intention was to go around to the front and ring Ann's doorbell, maybe chat a while with her and have a drink. But then he noticed that the only light in the house was burning in the back room of the little place. He thought it might be the bedroom, and, naturally, he didn't want to disturb her if she were preparing for bed. Not without some titillation, he walked across the small, pitch-black yard and stopped by the back window. The sill came up to his chest. She had pulled her blinds, but one of the slats was out of line and there was a wedge at one corner of the lower edge through which he could peer and see the interior of the room. It was the bedroom, all right.
And there was Ann Wayne standing before her vanity, brushing out her long, gleaming black hair, which hung almost to her waist in back. She was breath-taking in a diaphanous, gauzy nightgown whose frilly hem scarcely reached her knees. Her shapely body was dimly hut provocatively silhouetted beneath the translucent fabric. And when any part of her body came in contact with the gown as she brushed her hair, the effect was even more provocative.
Her buttocks molded the gauze as she bent forward to pick up a bobby pin. A breast was outlined so vividly that the pink nipple might as well have been bare. She turned toward the windows to examine her profile in the mirror, and the light streaming out of the bathroom door behind her defined her tapering legs. Wes's desire climbed to the peak, taut and tormenting. Through the half-open window, he heard her humming to herself.
She turned and went into the bathroom, wagging her saucy derriere at him. As soon as she shut the door, he reached through the window and pulled the blind cord. Noiselessly opening the window a few more inches, he crawled over the sill, snakelike, and dropped inside the room. He readjusted the blind and walked softly to the chair where her discarded lingerie lay crumpled up. Picking up a nylon stocking, he slipped that over his head, as he had seen thieves disguise themselves, in the movies, before a big robbery. He examined himself in the mirror and was astonished at the transformation the makeshift mask had accomplished. His features were all mashed and distorted by the snugly fitting nylon. Then he went into the hall outside her room and began to undress, following the same pattern he had employed in planning the rape of Celia Brown. Only this time, he did not require any adhesive tape. Before he had closed the blind he had locked the window. In this remote spot; Ann could scream her lungs out and nobody would be likely to hear her.
Her door had been ajar, and he arranged it that way again. There was a half-inch gap on the hinge side, between door and jamb, through which he could see her bed, with the sheet and blanket neatly folded back. Some time later, Ann came out of the bathroom, and, still humming, lay down on top of the covers. It was a warm night, and her body was sticky and uncomfortable in spite of the cold shower she had taken.
Ann Wayne's mind might rebel at the idea of love, but she possessed a young, vibrant, healthy female body whose natural impulses were constantly at war with the thinking part of her. At twenty-seven, these impulses had been denied far too long, and each spring they became more insistent. The sight of young love, so rife on the campus during this season, was repugnantly fascinating to her.
Just the day before, she had spent the hot afternoon in the college library stacks, planning her class schedule for the week ahead. It was Sunday, and Ann had assumed that she was the only one in the vacant, tomblike building, humming with silence. At one point she decided she needed a certain volume which was located in a small vault on the top story of the library, a room seldom visited. Not bothering to put on her shoes, she got up from the work table and padded up the stairs noiselessly to the room. As she reached the doorway, she was brought up short by the sound of muted voices at one end of the room. Strange-sounding voices; guttural, heavy-breathing, gasping, tittering voices. Ann frowned. The stacks were off limits to students on Sunday. She hurried down the aisle, frowning, with the clear purpose of reprimanding the trespassers. Instinctively, she decided to reconnoiter before announcing her presence, to see exactly what they were doing. She slipped into the stack next to the one from whence the voices were emanating and bent to look through an open space in the shelves. She saw what they were doing, all right, and the sight almost sent her into a swoon.
A girl and a boy were sitting on the boy's coat in the corner of the stack. The girl was a cute brunette with dark lustrous eyes and dimples in her cheeks, whom she recognized as Wanda Holmes, a nineteen-year-old junior. The boy was a stranger, probably from the nearby boys' school. One of his arms was around Wanda's waist and the hand was beneath her sweater, quite obviously playing with one of her small breasts. She could see the hand's gyrations straining the taut material.
His other hand was doing something even worse! The girl had her legs drawn up and her skirt was bunched around her hips. Her peach panties had been rolled halfway to her knees' and his hand was plying her trembling naked flesh lasciviously. Ann stared in horror as Wanda sighed with pleasure and rolled against the hand.
Then, worst of all, the shameless hussy opened his clothes! That was all Ann could take. She lurched back to the stairs and made her way to the closest lavatory, where she threw up.
All yesterday, all last night, and all day today, she had been unable to put the experience out of her thoughts. That kept intruding in class, at the faculty meeting, at lunch; the image of the boy's hand caressing Wanda, the girl's hungry hands on him.
And, now, as she lay on the bed in her filmy nightgown, the image came to her once more. She was horrified at the awareness that gave her of her own body. Try as she might, she was thinking at this moment of her full melon breasts which men could never keep their eyes from, her plump buttocks which disgusting males were always rubbing against in elevators and on crowded buses, her long, shapely legs which always drew brazen ogling when she crossed them. A shudder wracked her frame. Vile! To distract herself, she picked up a novel from her night table and began to read.
Unfortunately, the book was one of those modern, unabashed hack novels written with brutal realism. After a page or two. she was right in the middle of a torrid scene between the hero and the heroine in her boudoir.
She read with widening eyes and growing dismay.
" . . She felt Claude's cool hand slip over her knee and glide along her silken upper leg. She wanted to stop him, but as his fingertips passed the top of her nylon and touched her bare flesh, a gasp was torn from her lips.
"'Oh, my darling!'
"A great weakness overcame her resistance. When he touched her, nothing else in the world mattered. Not even her husband . . . "
Ann flung the book down, feeling the blood crimson in her cheeks. The race was becoming decadent, she decided. You could not escape anywhere. Love. Lust. In books. In movies. On hillboards. Everywhere, corrupting the young and the old alike. Even Dr. Peabody, the college physician! At her mid-term physical, he had squeezed her buttocks on the examining table and winked.
"Isn't it about time you made some man happy?" he had joked with her.
She had been too mortified to answer him. Dr. Peabody was seventy-six years old!
Every muscle in her body was as taut as a bowstring tonight. Her breasts felt heavy. She felt an annoying pulse pounding in her armpit, and a nerve would twitch in her smooth cheek from time to time. Lifting the hem of her nightgown, she pulled the skirt up and began to fan herself with the gauzy material. She felt wanton, lying there like this, with the bottom half of her body exposed. Even if she was all alone. When she fanned, the flow of air tickled her.
Just suppose, she thought, some man should walk into the room unexpectedly now. Say. someone who entered the wrong bungalow in error. Those things happen in these developments, where all the bungalows were identical. That was a daring thought for a girl like Ann to be thinking. Not the kind of thought a proper girl should indulge in at all. But she couldn't help herself. She shifted her buttocks and was acutely conscious of the caress of the cool sheet tickling her. She shivered.
And she remembered, vividly, how Wanda had shivered the day before in the library stacks when that awful boy had put his hand under her skirt and touched her. That was ridiculous, childish, she knew; the product of an unclean mind, for a female to carry on so when a male touched her naked flesh. She could not help but wonder what that would be like, though. Idly she dropped a hand to her bare waist, stroked the smooth skin with her fingertips. The flesh prickled in the manner of a hand or foot that has gone to sleep. The sheet tickled her buttocks uncomfortably. Ann sighed and closed her eyes. There was nothing so special about that. She lowered the hand, placed the palm against her upper leg. The flesh was very warm, and she wondered if she had a fever. Involuntarily, her hand moved, and with an electric shock, she realized what she was doing. She willed her hand to stop, hut her body, gripped in its first tremor of voluptuous pleasure, countermanded the order. She stared at the moving hand in horrified fascination, shuddered, sighed and closed her eyes.
In the hall, Wes was astonished and indignant. Now why, he asked himself, did a broad like Ann Wayne act like that? That was outrageous! And here he was, ready, willing and able to take care of. her. Taking a deep breath, he stepped into the room and moved swiftly to the bed.
In her eyes, he was unreal, a phantom, a fantasy conjured up by the trance she had drifted into. The nylon stocking over his head gave him a faceless appearance that heightened the illusion. Her body was heavy with the slow surge of passion.
Silently, he knelt on the bed alongside her. And, now, her unbelieving eyes fastened on him as he shamelessly strained toward her. She remembered the scene in the stacks. She remembered what Wanda had done to the boy. With a smile of abandon, she reached out both of her hands. This was all right, she told herself. This was only a dream.
Wes was taken aback by this encouragement. He had expected her to scream, struggle, try to get away. But she just lay there with that dreamy smile on her face, her eyes glazed and unseeing.
A thought hit him then. Self-hypnosis! That was a common thing that happened to adolescent girls, he recalled reading in a psychology manual. Their vivid imaginations, their intense concentration on the newly discovered thrills, the excitement of experimentation, all contributed to a condition that put mind and body into a state of hypnosis. In such a state, that was not uncommon for a girl to fix upon some desirable male of her acquaintance as the object of her fantasy. In certain cases, the experience was so real that the girl actually convinced herself that the dream was reality. The courts were full of cases where impressionable young women accused young men of rapes that were purely figments of their own imaginations.
There was no other explanation of Ann Wayne's sensual behavior, even if she was a mature woman. But was she really mature, he asked himself? He thought of her single state, her seeming disinterest in men and dates. That could be the answer. Ann was physically and mentally a mature woman. But emotionally, she was an adolescent girl.
He eased himself down beside her and pulled her shoulder straps down, exposing the quivering breasts. He bent his lips to one tense summit, and the nipple leaped like a thing alive. Her hands clutched at him so urgently that he winced in pain. Gently, he stroked her. The skin was soft as velvet.
Her eyes were rolled back in her head so that only the whites were visible. Tiny bubbles of foam formed on her parted lips. The muscles of her face were twitching as if she were in the grip of a fit.
While his hand continued to work, she cried out softly and moved her body for his convenience. He smiled wryly. Ann might well be a greenhorn at the art of love, but she knew what she liked and what her bed partner liked. She was a born hussy, even if she didn't realize that!
"Yes, yes!" she breathed warmly.
The instant he tested her, he knew she was a virgin. An inflexible virgin at that. Years of inhibition had, in fact, so reinforced the normal barriers against males that she had become a veritable fortress of chastity. As he grunted and sweated to gain some small advantage, she kept begging him, imploring him.
"Go ahead! You've got to! I'll go crazy if you don't!"
And so, finally, oblivious of her scream of pain, and of his own pain, he achieved victory at last.
Her culmination was instantaneous, and endless. The torrent of repressed desire became a tidal wave, each successive wave lifting him higher and higher on its crest. He had the sensation of a leaf caught up by a hurricane.
And then her own activity set him free, tore him from the hurricane fury, shot him out into the wild skies.
When the excitement and furor were all over he moved away from her, She was in a deep sleep.
He got his clothing and dressed, then slipped back through the window, the same way he had entered.
"Sweet dreams," he murmured as he ducked into the woods and made his way home. He felt alive as he had not felt in years. Ever! He felt powerful. Invulnerable. Nothing and no one could touch him.
He was king, and the whole world was his kingdom!