Chapter 12

All the world-shaking events that had transpired with Kay Lennen had taken so long that they were back in the office before five o'clock. Dingman was deeply depressed, but Wycliffe seemed to take the whole thing calmly enough. It was evident he'd been through this thing many, many times before, and it was nothing a few Martinis wouldn't cure.

Paul was strangely exhilarated by the scene in Kay Lennen's office, and by the knowledge that she'd been impressed enough by what he said to want to talk to him again, alone. In the cab, he'd debated with himself and finally decided to tell the others about his Thursday appointment with her. He thought it might give them a ray of hope, at least a stronger ray than they had.

But Dingman gave the news a bad reading. The way he was feeling, there was no such thing as good news, no such thing as hope.

"She probably wants to offer you a job," he said, gloomily. "In the mailroom."

Wycliffe had looked sideways at him in disgust, then looked at Paul.

"Hang in there, lad," he'd said, enigmatically.

Back in the office, Paul was still excited, and any time he was excited, he got horny. He walked around to where redheaded Eileen sat, outside Wycliffe's office. She wasn't there, and he had to go back three times before he found her at her desk. Each time, walking became more difficult. He was rapidly extemporizing plans for the maiden from Bronxville. Who'd ever heard of a virgin in Bronxville, anyway? It was an insult to something.

When he did finally find her at her desk, she gave him her Christmas-tree smile. She lit up all over.

"Can you have a drink with me after work?" he asked very quietly, with his back toward the open door to Wycliffe's office, "and maybe dinner?"

"I was wondering when you were going to ask," she said, in her clear cheerful voice. "I haven't forgotten last week, you know."

Paul hunched his shoulders in the scared gesture of a kid who thinks his baseball is going to sad through the greenhouse, and nodded his head sideways, indicating Wycliffe's office.

"He's left for the day," Eileen said. "Saloon bent, if I ever saw a man saloon bent."

"Well, can you?"

"Can I what?"

"Have a drink after work."

"Sure. I'll call home and tell them IT! be late. You don't just want to have a drink, do you?"

"No. Of course not."

"Me either." She smiled at him, happily. "I liked what you did to me last time. I loved it."

Paul looked down and shuffled his feet.

"You're so nice." She laughed. It was a merry little laugh. "You're embarrassed."

"I don't like to talk about it. Not here in the office."

"We could even do it in the office."

Paul was shocked. First Norma Olsen. Now this one. This guileless little redheaded virgin.

"Jesus, no," he said. "I still have my hotel. And after Saturday, I'll have an apartment."

"As long as you do it." She still had her schoolgirl srmle.

"Well see."

She frowned.

"I hope you'll do more than just see."

"We can't leave the office together. I'll go down to the Miramar."

"See you there in fifteen minutes."

She was putting the cover on her typewriter as Paul left.

At the Miramar she ordered a Martini, straight up, no vegetables.

"No," Paul said.

"All right. I'll have Scotch, like you." The waiter made the change on his order pad and went away.

"You remember what we talked about last time?" Paul asked.

"We talked about a lot of things. You probably mean about me being a virgin on a technicality. A technical virgin."

"Yes."

The waiter came with the drinks. He was probably the fastest waiter in New York, Paul thought.

"I told my mother that. That you said I was a technical virgin."

"You what?" This girl had shocked him at least three times in half an hour.

"I told my mother. I just said I was talking to this nice guy in the office about one thing and another and he finally came to the conclusion that I was a technical virgin. She thought it was very funny."

"Do me a favor," Paul said. "Don't repeat to your mother anything I say to you."

"She's all right. I tell her a lot of things."

"How old is your mother?"

"Thirty-eight."

"She probably doesn't believe it, about your being a virgin. Even on a technicality."

"She doesn't," Eileen said. "She got knocked up with me when she was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence."

"Where do you pick up antiquated expressions like that?"

"Like what?"

"Knocked up."

"From my mother. She's a swinger."

"She ought to meet my mother," Paul said. Jesus, what a gruesome thought. "They could form a Friendship Club and hold pre-menopause meetings."

"Don't talk dirty," Eileen said.

They had only two drinks but it was more than enough to get the little redhead's motor running. In the elevator going up to Paul's room they were alone, and she pressed against him urgently. When he bent to kiss her, her humming-bird's tongue went into his mouth and vibrated there until the door slid open.

In the room, she sat down immediately on the edge of the double bed, kicked off her shoes, raised her hips along with her skirt, and whipped off her pantyhose with a dazzling display of two-tone, tan-and-white smoothness. And red hair. The immodest virgin, Paul thought.

She sat on the edge of the bed, her skirt around her hips, her lovely legs slightly apart. Her neat round knees were slightly elevated as she held her feet extended like a toe dancers' to touch the carpet.

"Please," she said. "Please do it. Right now."

He couldn't say no. He wondered if all the virgins in Bronxville were so eager to have their clits licked, once they'd had a taste of it. All two of them. He knelt and kissed the soft swell of velvet skin inside one knee.

She inched herself forward to the very edge of the bed and spread her legs. Her tender little pink pussy pouted at him, as if it were ready to kiss him back. He leaned forward and licked it gently, then teased the tiny swelling bud of her clitoris with the tip of his tongue.

"Ooh, golly," she said. "If you ever knew how much I've been wanting you to do that."

He held the soft outer folds of her delicate cunt lips apart, and licked up and down, back and forth. Then he stiffened his tongue and probed deep, through the tiny aperture between her inner twat lips, putting his mouth over her entire eager warm little cunt, sucking. Then he gave it three more long licks and stood up. His rampant erection stood up with him.

"That's all for right now, honey," he said. "Let's get undressed."

She looked disappointed, crushed, almost, but she was undressed before he was, lying gloriously naked in the middle of the bed when he came out of the bathroom with a large Turkish towel.

"No," she said, looking at it.

"I don't want us to wrinkle the spread," he said. She raised her hips and watched him without smiling as he spread the towel under her. He lay down beside her and kissed her, his mouth open. Her tongue was wilder, much wilder, than it had been in the elevator. He ran his hands down her twitching back and squeezed the firm little globes of her ass. When he bent his head to suck her breasts, he found the nipples poking out, like the eraser end of a new pencil.

He put the tip of his tongue in her navel, and she quivered. His hand stroked downward over the smooth roundness of her belly, tangled in soft silken red hair. His little finger slid into the warm wet slit below. He started to get to his knees.

"No," she said, "please, no."

He got to his knees and then arched over her. Her legs spread without his touching them.

"Don't," she said. "Please, Paul."

He leaned forward on his elbows and kissed her deeply. Her tongue was a triphammer against the roof of his mouth. The underside of his long throbbing prong pulsed against the soft warmth of her belly.

"Please don't," she said again, but he felt her say it, rather than heard her. Her tongue was tangled with his, her mouth gulping his own. He raised his hips and fitted the taut glistening head of his cock between the wet warm lips of her little cunt.

"Oh, golly," she said. "Don't. Her hips, writhed, raised and pushed toward him until the clutching lips of her pussy had engulfed the whole head of his rigid prick.

He put on an almost imperceptible bit of forward pressure. She opened her legs wider, and tried to slide herself toward him with her hands. His cock moved into her, another inch.

"Oh, don't. Please don't." Her hips were starting a small, irregular pumping motion. He reached back, hooked her heels inside his, and pushed forward, with a slow, gentle, steady pressure.

Eileen screamed once, a tiny scream that was more a gasp, and that was it. His whole oaken shaft sank in, in one long, tight-squeezed, delicious trip. He held his cock still, all the way inside her, his pelvis pressed against the soft silken hair of her inflamed cunt. For just a second, she was still too. She looked at him out of wide eyes and tried to smile.

"It was nothing," he thought she was trying to say, but she was quivering so the words were only a short series of tiny gasps. Then her hips began to flutter and thrash wildly, the tight grip of her clutching cunt shifting erratically on his stiff slippery shaft.

He put a hand behind one of her palpitating hips and stroked it, gently. Like quieting a horse, he thought. Gradually, her fluttering and thrashing subsided, and he started fucking her with a slow, controlled rhythm, sinking his stiff, stern tranquilizer deep on the in stroke, holding it for a second, with just the head inside, on the out. Soon she was responding to every thrust with a thrust of her own.

He increased the rhythm, eliminating the pause that refreshes, and she fell into the new timing immediately, meeting the new pounding with beautifully timed counterpunches of her own.

Instinct, he thought, clenching his teeth and fucking his way happily in and out of her tight-clenched cunt, is a wonderful thing, and this girl's got it, in spades. Good breeding manifests itself, every time. Class will tell.

Then she was quivering, and gasping. Her squeezed-shut eyes and contorted face showed mortal agony. With a tiny, wrenching scream, she went into orgasm, unhooking her heels and throwing her legs into the air, pumping them frantically, as if in an inverted bicycle race.

Paul was nowhere near coming. He kept his cock inside her, holding it still, buried deep, while her spasms subsided. Then he raised one of her legs and lay on his side, careful to keep the connection intact, and started slowly, comfortably, to fuck her from that position.

"What do you call that?" she asked, her hips starting to move. She was smiling at him. She looked very

"Indian style," he said, fucking her slowly, with long, deep strokes. "You mean the Indians did it this way?"

"Supposed to have. Probably still do. With or without reservations."

"How can you make jokes," she said, starting to breathe harder, "at a time like this?"

"Why not?" He was pumping it into her faster, now.

"I don't know. I don't believe the Indians did it this way. They didn't have that much imagination."

"You'd be surprised about Indians," he said darkly. He was banging away with abandon, now.

"Sidesaddle, I'd call it," she said, gasping, and came again. She didn't scream, this time.

Paul came with her, bathing the inside of her inflamed little pussy with his soothing gushes. He didn't have to come, but he did, and not just to be sociable.

There's always another time, he thought.

He was right, about another time. The first one was like the first olive out of a bottle. After that they were all easy.

Easy, hell. Demanded. After they'd rested a while, he got her to straddle him. He thought he'd never seen a girl so happy as Edeen, sliding up and down his Maypole.

They went out to eat, and came back to the room, and he fucked her, a long, exhausting, delicious fuck, in the first position.

They had both taken showers and were getting dressed to leave when she decided she wanted to try it again, on the side.

Paul obliged.

Afterwards, she was quiet for a long time, apparently in deep thought. When she looked at Paul and spoke, finally, it was apparent that she'd made a profound decision.

"I like that the best," she said. "That's the best way of all."

As they were leaving to get his car from the garage on die corner, she touched him on the arm just after he'd opened the door. He looked at her.

"In the office some time, like before lunch," she said, "if I say 'side saddle' to you, will you know what I mean?"

"I sure will."

"Good," she said.

She smiled a smile of utter contentment.