Chapter 3
Was there no help for her torment? During the past two days Rita Danilov walked a thin edge of self-denial, denying the existence of the physical torment she was helpless to understand or control. Now, with evening coming on, the Hamilton Street neons beginning to bleed a mixture of scarlet and green onto the seamy pavement, the tiny interior of Danilov's Produce Market was unbearably stifling.
The familiar tang of cheese in the delicatessen case mingled with the crisp scent of lettuce and other produce. In the store-room at the back, near the stairway that led up to the flat where Rita Danilov had been born, she heard her father's heavy tread, and the cracking of thin slats as he opened a fresh crate of oranges.
No customers were in the market. Few ever came after sundown. Yet Simon Danilov, an old-fashioned man, stubbornly insisted upon keeping the doors open until ten, flying in the face of the softness ,the laziness he saw creeping like rot down Hamilton Street. Who worked a decent fifteen hour day any more? Only Danilov.
Danilov was a stranger to his daughter, a bald, corpulent stranger unable to pronounce English except in a bumbling, accented way. Rita didn't really hate him. Her mother Flora had run off with a salesman from a large biscuit company who called on the store. Simon discovered him in the back room on Flora Danilov's fattishly attractive body. Flora fled Hamilton Street when Rita was only twelve.
Since then, Rita had grown apart from her father, during those critical years when her smooth young chest was beginning to bud with the suggestion of two pink nipples.
Her hips fleshed out and grew firm. The mystery of pubescence lent her body the first shoots of that dark mystery Rita was soon to learn to hate violently as the source of indecently exciting pleasure. She'd had her first boy at thirteen:
Afterward, as in the gangbang at the theatre, the flames in her belly were temporarily quenched, but there was no sensation of pleasure, really. No thrilling emotion akin to what the movies always showed, complete with violins, just before the fadeout demanded by the censors.
Rita had no idea why she had to possess a man so frequently. Once, before she quit high school upon reaching the legal age, Rita had been examined by the school doctor, a young chap with a nervous manner. Stripping for him in the quiet of his office one late winter afternoon-Rita was already on probation for being caught in the locker room after hours with a member of the basketball squad-she'd flushed as he ran his eyes over her white panties and bulging bra.
"Perhaps-uh-Miss Danilov, it's a different kind of help you need. Not medical help, but-I hesitate to say mental, but that's the root of the problem. It's a condition we know too little about. It has many sources. Childhood problems. And-"
The doctor stopped, sweat beading his brow. Rita sat on the examination table. The blinds were drawn. The office was stuffy. Against her white young thighs, the material of her panties began to bind and prickle. She felt the live ends of her nipples rise.
A bitter smile touched her lips.
"The kids on Hamilton call me a nympho. What's that mean? Is that what you're trying to talk about?"
"Nymphomania? Uh-yes, that's the condition which-"
From his hip pocket the doctor dragged out a white handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He had managed to draw near the examination table, so near that his belt buckle was touching Rita's knee. She felt his probing stare between her heavy-hanging breasts and clamped her hands at her sides because she suddenly wanted to kiss him.
Clearing his throat, the young doctor tried to go on:
"Because your problem is clearly one of-uh-a mental nature, I'm going to recommend to the principal that he withdraw the dismissal notice. Of course your father will have to be notified."
A shrug lifted Rita's shoulder, bringing her right breast closer to the doctor's face.
"I don't care if I'm dropped. I'm quitting school next May anyway."
"You are? Don't you think it would be wise to-uh-complete your senior year?"
"Talk to my old man about that," Rita said bitterly. "Listen to him bitch about having a worthless tramp daughter who should be helping him in the market instead of sitting in school filling her head with silly ideas."
Then, because the room was warm and cut off from the world, and because the young doctor seemed a patient, understanding sort, Rita gave release to the torment with which she was all too familiar:
"Don't tell him what happened in the locker room, doc! Please, I beg you, don't! He'll whip me, whip me sure. He thinks I like what I have to do every time I get with a boy."
An almost unhappy look clouded the doctor's brow.
"Don't you?"
Rita's face was half smile, half sorrow.
"Oh, yeah, in a way. It feels good for a minute when one of them-I mean, when it happens. But afterward, it's sort of empty and sad all over again, until the next time. Simon-my old man-says I was born to be a whore but he won't let me. Her eyes looked past the doctor, scarred with memory. "He says he'll beat me to death before he lets that happen."
"If he'd only realize!" the doctor said. "Understand that his behavior might be the very reason-!"
Abruptly he stopped. He tore the stethoscope from his neck and slammed it into the desk drawer. He lifted the blind for a quick peek out at the snow. It mantled the grim pile of Riverfront High with a softening coverlet. Rita watched him, watched a vein in his forehead throb like a red snake.
The torment inside her thighs began to mount. Her pink tongue slipped out between her lips. Little fingers of desire crawled between her knees. A trickle of sweat ran down into her navel.
The doctor said:
"Miss Danilov-put your clothes on and leave. Quickly!"
Rita closed her eyes a moment, hating herself, yet powerless in the grip of the inflamed arousal she was experiencing as a result of the doctor's presence and the quiet, lonely intimacy of the examination room. Rising, she moved toward him.
He saw her coming and started to perspire freely. Rita's legs were cool and white, superbly rounded as they scissored smoothly while she crossed the room, inner surface stroking inner surface, a whisper of flesh that tingled the very depths of her being and made her want the doctor more than she'd ever wanted anyone before.
Standing close, her big breasts touching the starchy stiffness of his white coat, Rita laid the palm of her hand on his hip.
"I can't go, doc. I can't get out of here yet. You got me worked up."
The doctor spun, livid.
"I'm a married man, for God's sake! And what you feel isn't genuine. It's a sickness!"
Her white-clad belly undulated slowly. Rita seized his hand.
"What I feel, doc? Why don't you feel instead?"
"Damn it, you're underage. I'd be arrested for-come here!"
He whipped his arms around her. He bent her backward and arched her tight against him.
Rita felt his palms on her back, below the elastic of her bra, moving in a circle, slipping downward under her panties to close around her plump buttocks. The doctor's mouth was rough, bruising.
For a moment Rita was sickly ashamed of her behavior. But only for a moment.
A rising wildness between her hips made her groan and press closer. Their mouths came together. Rita opened her lips on contact.
The doctor cursed as he kissed her cheek and nuzzled her ear. Rita stroked his body. Her hips shook, as the doctor's fingers struggled with the hooks of her bra.
Rita's hair became disheveled with the kissing and fondling. Her face was smeared with lipstick as she and the doctor clung to one another, hands and mouths exploring. Each kiss, each tickle and probe only heightened the immense desire she felt.
"Take this off," the doctor wheezed. He was having no luck with the bra. "For God's sake-!"
"Rip it off!" Rita bit his neck. "Oh, doc, please rip it quick.
"Christ, I've never met anyone like you. So hot-"
"You're-making me hotter."
The doctor gave a sick laugh: "I don't know what's wrong with me. I shouldn't-but I've got to see you-"
Rita shrieked at him:
"Then rip it off! Rip me naked!"
His hands fastened in the straps of her bra, tore them. Rita felt the glorious freedom of her breasts, big fully-matured breasts that rose from her young body like ivory sculpture, each with a ruby imbedded at the apex.
The doctor worked his palms over her hips. Rita hung on his neck, thighs flung from side to side with excitement.
At the same time he undressed her lower body his mouth quivered over her breasts, prickling, tormenting. Rita found herself pressing those mounding breasts forward, harder and harder, for more exciting kisses. The thrill she'd first craved with fright and trembling as a thirteen-year-old in a back alley off Hamilton Street was repeating its frenzied pattern:
The panties slipped lower.
Their filmy whiteness was stripped from her navel.
Then at last she could kick them away and be naked for the young doctor.
Her body quivered with anticipation. Her breasts shuddered like whipped cream. The doctor rained kisses on her.
"Lover, I'm burning up for you," Rita sobbed. "Lover, come on, get naked."
"In a minute, in a second-"
The doctor ripped at his own clothes.
Somehow Rita slid onto the examination table.
She wrenched her hips up and down, banging her buttocks frantically to still their tormented drive. But the harder she banged, the more livid and intense became her craving. Her hair hung down over the table's end, a coal-black shining, rain. Her hands quested into the air, imploring.
"Doc, don't make me wait, lover. I'm exploding inside. Where are you?"
With a strangled curse the doctor was on her.
"Ohhh! Oooo! You're wonderful! Go! Go like hell!"
"You're so exciting. I never had a woman so exciting-"
"Stop talking and go, go! Go like hell, Doc, go like hell!"
The doctor's hard body lashed her, whipped her, incinerated her with sensation.
"Bitch! Shouldn't be doing-ruin me if-"
"Hurry!"
Rita screamed it, eyes closed, mouth open, screaming to match the flesh-whipping frenzy, the love-plunging rise and fall of locked flesh.
A bomb went off in her belly.
Then another bomb, a whole chain of them after that, crashing, ripping, bursting, smashing.
Fire ran down the hot-wrenching insides of her legs. Fire scalded her back from shoulder to wrenching buttock. Fire boiled out through her breast-cones to the dagger-hard ends under his chest. Fire burned her to pieces with terrible fulfillment.
"I'm there-oh, Doc, I'm all the way there!"....
In semi-darkness, the only illumination filtering into the room that of distant snow-obscured streetlights outside the school, the doctor dressed and led her to the door.
Shame-faced, he guided her through the sour halls to the outer exit. He held the door for her, refusing to meet her eye, fumbling with a cigarette as she stepped into the snow:
"Good night, uh-Miss Danilov. I'm sorry about-"
He swallowed his words and ran back into the darkening building.
Turning up the thin collar of her cheap coat, feeling her body aching from toes to lips, Rita laughed emptily and hurried off through the snow to Hamilton Street.
Three days later Simon Danilov was summoned to Riverfront High to learn of his daughter's activities in the locker room.
Rita had already heard that the doctor had resigned. She'd also resigned herself to the cruel beating Simon would administer when they returned to the flat above the market:
"A whore I got for a daughter," Simon rumbled, unloosing his belt, staring down at her trembling voluptuous white buttocks exposed on the frowsy bedspread. "A whore I got, like her mama. Spreading for any tramp who comes along. You quit that school, Rita, quick as you can. That principal, he says you're a sick kid, got a disease or something. He can't fool me. You don't need no doctors to cure you. All you need is a few good licks with this belt on that cheap body. Once I get you tending the counter full time, once I get you where I can watch you, we won't have no more whoring. The hell with the principal and his screwy notions about how sick you are. I got the way to cure you. Whip that white tail of yours till it bleeds-.'"
Cursing and panting, Simon Danilov laid stroke after stroke on Rita's tender-white buttocks.
After that, Rita Danilov learned how to cope with her father.
She obeyed him. And concealed by all sorts of trickery every occasion-at least four times a week-when she managed to find a man, either in the store or out, who would quench the hell-hot burning below her belly.
Soon after leaving school she drifted into contact with the Cobra gang. They had Hamilton Street for their turf. Rita became, at least unofficially, Whitey Noonan's steady. The deceptions required of Rita were less complicated from then on. Simon thought she was settling down. He no longer questioned her when she slipped out of the market for thirty minutes or an hour.
Once Rita had thought of appealing to Simon for help with her problem. After the beating she did not. Instead, by pretending to play the role of dutiful daughter, she convinced Simon that the problem no longer existed. That miraculously, she had been relieved of her desires.
But tonight, as she watched the good-looking guy with the suitcase and the coat slung over his shoulder pass the lighted storefront, Rita's breasts began to hurt and yearn for caressing under the tight confinement of her sweater. Whitey was in hiding somewhere down near the river dump, Rita wasn't sure of the location.
And she couldn't wait.
"Out for a minute, Pop," she called to the back room, hoping the guy with the suitcase wouldn't escape her. He looked virile, looked really able to satisfy her. "Make it quick! And bring me a loaf pumpernickel from Ginsbach's. Damn bakery man missed us this morning."
Hating herself, yet driven, Rita rushed from the store. She forgot everything-the guilt she'd felt over the death of the boy Pepe; her loyalty to Whitey Noonan; the fears she'd experienced yesterday when that bastard Kregg stopped in to question her about the Cobras. Luckily Simon had been taking his midday nap at the time or he might have pressed her, might have spilled to Kreeg that Rita had gone out for an hour the night before.
Stop thinking! she told herself. Where's the guy?
Where's the guy with the goods?
Down the fetid neon strip of Hamilton Street she glimpsed him swinging along toward the river.
Rita Danilov hurried after him. Her hips worked smoothly as she walked, switching back and forth in a rhythm that made the heat down there all the worse.