Chapter 7

They caught the 12:32 White Plains local-express out of Grand Central, and Eileen was asleep by the tune they got to 125th Street. She slept, with her head against his shoulder, all the way to Scarsdale. He nudged her awake by lifting his shoulder a couple of times as the train was pulling into the station.

She was fully awake at once.

"Where are we?" she asked, trying to look through the window into the darkness outside the lighted train. "Scarsdale."

"I slept past Bronxville."

"I told you," he said. "I have my car at the station here."

"That's right," she said. "I remember now."

Even in the dark, she was full of admiration for the Packard. It gleamed dully in the dim lights of the parking area.

"It's gorgeous" she said, sliding back on the deep leather seat, listening to the solid, satisfying "thunk" as he closed the door behind her.

"Where'd you get such a magnificent old car?" she asked as he got behind die wheel.

"My mother gave it to me," he said, "on my twentieth birthday." He almost said "eighteenth." It was close.

"I have another question," she said, as he started the engine. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"I think it's great she gave you a classic car, or whatever they call them. But why such a big one?"

"It's a long story," he said. "I'll tell you when I know you better."

"You seem to have gotten to know me pretty well already," she said, sliding closer to him on the seat They were on the entrance to the Bronx River Parkway.

"I'd like to know you even better," he said.

"Well see," she said, for the second time that night, and leaned her head against his shoulder.

He thought she might say something about having a nightcap, on the drive home, but she didn't, so he didn't either. He was glad to know she was just a girl who overreached herself with Martinis, and not an incipient boozer. He had seen too many of the full-grown variety among his mother's friends.

He kissed her good night at her front door, and she kissed him back. It was a nice, warm, affectionate goodnight kiss, nothing more. She drew back when she felt his erection swelling against her belly.

"Don't you know you're not supposed to kiss on your first date?" he said, smiling down at her in the dim light from the front windows.

"It's all right," she said. "I slept in between. I consider this the second date."

Women, he thought, walking back to the car. They always had an answer.

He lay awake for a long time, after he got back to his room, thinking practical thoughts, for a change, not about Eileen in particular or women in general.

He was much cheered by the thought of the new job, and the quick and easy way he'd walked into it He knew, vaguely, that somehow he had his mother to thank for that. He wondered what his mother and Sam Wycliffe had had between them, and then dismissed the thought from his mind. His problem now was to find an apartment-not just to find it, but to find the means to get it-and move the hell out of Screwsdale. The prospect of staying with the Humboldts till his first payday was unthinkable. But he didn't have the money for the first month's rent, and security or whatever it was landlords wanted, and furniture. And he hated the idea of asking his mother for anything, unless he had a real deep-dyed emergency.

He slept but kept waking and worrying, all through the night.

But in the morning there was an envelope addressed to him from school. When he slid it open he saw a check inside, and a great happiness swelled inside him. Good man, he thought, that Student Advisor. Even before he'd gotten the check out of the envelope, he saw the amount-about three quarters of his semester's tuition.

But when he got the check out of the envelope and looked at it he started to choke. It was made out to his mother. She'd paid the tuition in the first place.

"Goddamn it," he said, and pounded the hall table with his fist. The full-blown image of Utopian life that had sprung into his mind had lasted less than three seconds.

He walked out through the front door and paced up and down the lawn in the cool Fall air. Vickie was home, in the house somewhere, but it would be no relief for him to bitch to Vickie. Telling her about something that made him unhappy, he knew, would have her coming in her pants, in spasms of ecstasy.

After ten minutes of pacing on the lawn he had calmed down somewhat There was only one thing for him to do. It was not yet eight o'clock in California, but there was no sense in putting it off. He went inside and put in a call to his mother, collect.

She didn't even sound sleepy, talking to the operator. Of course, she said, she'd accept the call. She somehow managed to sound both respectable and charming. Good old Mom, he thought. She had as many moods as a football coach.

"Paul," she said. "How is everything going?"

"Wonderful," he said. "I'm sorry I woke you, but I couldn't wait"

"You didn't. I'm having coffee. Bill just left for the studio."

"You've changed."

"Sure have," she said. "I'm thinking of joining the local Bird Watchers' Society, or whatever they call it."

"Bullshit," Paul said. "Listen, I talked with Sam Wycliffe yesterday."

"And?"

I'm going to work for them Monday."

"That's fine, Paul."

"I'm going to be some kind of an account executive. What's an account executive, anyway?"

"That's a very good question."

"Anyway, I want to get an apartment in town, as soon as posssible."

"That makes good sense. Vickie must be pretty tough to get along with. She'd make a point of it."

"I was going to use the tuition money to get squared away. The refund check came this morning. But the God damn thing is made out to you."

"I don't want it," she said. "Getting kicked out of school was your very own achievement."

"That's nice of you," he said. "But it's not the point The damn check is no good to me."

"You talk like a...." He thought she was going to mention his paper asshole again, but she didn't. "You talk like an idiot" she said. "You talk like an account executive already. Mountains out of mole hills."

"What am I supposed to do with the thing? It'll take days for you to get it in the mail, endorse it, and send it back."

"Have you still got that special checking account with the Screwsdale National Bank?"

"Yes," he said. "With seven dollars and thirteen cents in it. Roughly."

"Have you got a pen with blue ink in it?"

"Sure."

"Use it to scrawl my name on the back of the check, any old way, just so it's different from your own handwriting. Then when you get to the bank, use their pen to sign your name under it. Bank pens always have black ink, and itll look different, no matter how you write my name. They don't know my signature from Adam's, anyway."

"He keeps his account in a different bank."

"Who?"

"Adam."

"Oh, balls," she said. "Have a good time." She hung up. Good old Mom, he thought. What a banker she'd make.

Saturday morning the Humboldt girls came home for the weekend. Paul had never had much to do with them when they were small, and had seen very little of them since; and the few times he had seen them over the past couple of years, he'd paid them no attention.

But Saturday morning he had nothing to do with himself, and since both the girls were coming out from Grand Central on the same train, he volunteered to pick them up, as much to shock Vickie as for any other reason. He was amply repaid for his gesture by the look of numb disbelief on her face.

They were surprised to see him when they got off the train, and not especially pleased, he was sure, but they were polite about it. He took their bags as they walked to the car.

They were both blondes. Beth, the younger sister, was the lighter of the two, but in color only. She had always had a tendency toward what is known politely as plumpness, and that tendency had increased, if anything, during her year at college. She had a disposition like her mother's, except when she was grinding out what sounded like hymns on the piano, when it was worse.

Karen, the older sister, who had a year on Paul, had always struck him as the lean, scholarly, cave-chested type, but he noticed with interest that she wasn't cave-chested any more, or lean either. She didn't have big tits, but she did have tits. And her legs had rounded out, in long, tapered, athletic lines. She had a nice, firm, round ass and a springy, athletic way of moving. Paul wondered. It wouldn't be incest, really; they were only second cousins or something. Not that he had anything against incest anyway. But that was another story.

They sat three in the front on the short drive up from the station, with Karen in the middle. Every time he reached for the Packard's gearshift he became acutely conscious of the generous view of Karen's smooth, tanned legs afforded by her bunched up miniskirt.

"This is a great old car," Karen said, making polite conversation. Without her glasses, he decoded, she'd turned out to be a hell of a good-looking girl!.

"If it happened to be a couple of years older," Paul! said, "it would have a floor shift. Great car for a natural-born knee squeezer like me. Aren't you glad it isn't two years older?"

"Not especially," Karen said. "I have nothing against a little knee squeezing once in a while."

"You're awful," Beth said, frowning sideways.

Just like her mother, Paul thought. A natural-born pain in the ass.

But by the time they got back to the house, the relationship between Paul and Karen was so easy, so relaxed and pleasant, that an atmosphere of congeniality carried right into the living room. Even Vickie must have been aware of it; he had forgotten the girls' bags in the trunk of the Packard, went back out to get them, and when he came into the living room again, Vickie gave him a long, faintly confused look, and actually smiled.

"You'll be having dinner with us tonight, won't you, Paul?" she asked.

It was Paul's turn to be confused. When he'd first established squatter's rights on the room upstairs, they'd always asked him to eat with them as a matter of course, but he'd accepted the invitation so seldom that they'd long ago given up asking him.

"Why, sure," he said. "I'd like to very much."

"We're having a party this evening for a few friends," Frank said. "Will you stick around for that?"

Paul knew about those parties for a few friends. They were Christ awful. If you weren't a drunk already they'd make one out of you, out of sheer nausea. He hesitated.

"For God's sake, say yes," Karen said. "If nothing else, be my bodyguard. Otherwise Daddy's friends will be asking me to dance the Lindy with them, or whatever it is they do to that throw-away-your-truss music. They stomp all over a girl. And they have more hands than an octopus, as the evening wears on."

"Karen!" her mother said.

"Do all the girls at your school talk like that?" Beth asked.

They made quite a pair, Vickie and Beth, Paul thought. A compound pain in the ass.

"Sure, Pd like to be here for the party," he heard himself saying. "Besides, I like that throw-away-your-truss music. My mother brought me up on some of those old records, and that stuff was even before her time."

He looked at Vickie, defiantly, when he mentioned his mother, waiting for her reaction, but he saw none. Instead, Vickie turned and smiled at Frank, and he smiled back. It was almost as if they were both pleased to have him around, and it was the first time he'd seen them in accord about anything.

Karen must have said something nice about him while he was getting the bags out of the car, he decided. But what? Imaginative girl, that Karen. Worth exploring.

Dinner was almost pleasant. Miraculously, Frank and even Vickie were sober, that late on a Saturday. Not cold sober, but sober to a degree. It was probably the impressive responsibility of hosting the impending party. Parties were serious business, in Screwsdale, and the host and hostess usually did stay sober with the press of preparations, until the party started. Paul could never figure out why they went to all that effort, because invariably they were the only ones who were sober at the party's beginning, and they caught up with the guests' condition with remarkable swiftness.

He went upstairs to shower for the occasion.

After he'd stripped down to his shorts he looked in the mirror, debated with himself for a minute, and lost. He needed a shave. He got out his electric razor and worked his face over with leisurely care, humming all the while through the buzz of the razor, He was very cheerful. Even the ghastly prospect of the party about to start downstairs didn't depress him. He could ignore the old farts, and spend his time with Karen. He could enjoy himself with Karen, he was sure. Too bad the surroundings and the personnel were so confining.

After he'd shaved and put his razor away in the top dresser drawer he put on a terrycloth robe and slippers and walked to the bathroom he used, two doors down from his room at the end of the hall.

The bathroom door was ajar. He pushed through it and closed the door behind him. When he turned around Karen was just stepping around the shower curtain, dripping wet. She had a lovely, slender, athlete's body.

She stared at him for a second, stunned, and then laughed cheerfully. She reached unhurriedly for a bath towel and held it in front of her, casually, with one hand. One pink nipple peeked up at him.

"I should have closed the door," she said. "I guess I'm just not used to the idea of having you here."

"Don't apologize," he said. "The pleasure's all mine." He made no motion to leave.

"I think you better get out of here," she said, still smiling. "We'll scandalize the damn family."

"Well," he said, looking at the one exposed white globe with its winking, wrinkled pink eye, at the long gradual curve of hip into thigh, at the swelling graceful lines of her legs.

"If I snap your picture, will you go?" she asked. She seemed quite cheerful about the whole scene.

"Snap what?" he asked, feeling dumb.

"Snap your picture. It's a land of euphonistic expression the girls have, at the sorority house."

"Sure," he said. "Snap my picture." The words "sorority house" made him momentarily uncomfortable, but what the hell.

She placed one foot on the edge of the toilet bowl.

"Say 'cheese.' "

"Cheese," he said, and while he was saying it she dropped the towel and swung her upraised knee outward and back again, opening and closing the lips of her pussy like a cloudy-day exposure with a camera shutter.

"Click," she said.

He stumbled out through the door and closed it behind him.

She had the happiest-looking cunt he'd ever seen.

After the bathroom had been vacated, he took his shower, then loafed around his room for a long time, reading and listening to classical music on WQXR. Classical music-anything on QXR, for that matter-had a serene, calming, somehow ennobling effect on him, especially noticeable after an episode like the encounter with naked Karen in the bathroom. When he'd gotten back to the room, his prick had been turgid, tense, bunched in a semi-crouch, like a tiger ready to spring. No stripes, no fur, no claws, but a tiger just the same. The music had calmed him, and his serenity spread slowly downward to the area of his balls. Not that his pecker was guaranteed now not to become a tiger again, crouched or otherwise, as soon as he went downstairs and saw Karen again. Alone in his room, thinking about it, he shrugged his shoulders ruefully. He'd cross that bridge when he came to it. Damn his foolish commitment, anyway, to this party of middle-aged Screwsdale squares. Squares? He added a new dimension. Cubes, is what they were. His private little joke pleased him, and he got up and started to dress.

Karen had preceded him downstairs, and was talking and laughing with three grayed, paunchy men with drinks in their hands in one corner of the room. She appeared to be quite animated, quite happy, and just after he entered the room she said something that made the three men bend in a sudden burst of laughter. She glanced at him quickly and away, almost furtively, and raised and waved two secret fingers in a private hello.

Feeling minutely elated, Paul made his way through the shifting knots of noise and laughter, through the archway to the dining room, where the congestion was thickest, around a small bar that had been moved away from the wall for the occasion. Behind the bar was a sweating, unsmiling bartender in a white coat, also for the occasion. Paid managed to get a drink from him. A few friends, shit, Paul thought, looking around. There had to be thirty people in the place. He was certain the Humboldts didn't have that many friends. Not one tenth that many.

Vickie came up to him, in the first high flush of bourbon and good will, and with a smile that looked pasted on only if you knew her well, she tugged him around the room and introduced him to people. He didn't remember one name one minute later.

He found himself with his shoulder blades against a wall near where Karen stood in the precise center of a knot of laughing men. As the knot untied and tied itself again, he had an occasional rear view of her, wearing a light, very short dress, snug at the hips, flaring at the hem. In the condition he found himself, even the backs of her knees were unbearably exciting.

He never saw her look his way, but she must have sensed that he was there. She untangled herself somehow and came over to stand beside him, looking out into the room, at the flushed, maniacally merry, determined faces, the prideful paunches, the ostentatiously threadbare Brooks Brothers sports jackets. Frank, Paul knew, was ten years older than his mother; but a lot of the people at his party were even older.

"Aren't they awful?" Karen said, without looking at him.

He didn't answer her question. "You seemed to be having a good time."

"I know them I get with the ones who really enjoy themselves."

"You give them something to enjoy. You light them all up."

"Thank you."

"Wherever you are," he said, "that's the middle of the room." He glanced down at her, and found that she was looking at him, steadily, not smiling.

"When the dancing starts, and that'll be any minute now," she said, "I don't want to dance with anyone but you."

"That's simple self-preservation," he said, and laughed. "Toe-and-arch preservation."

"It's more than that," she said. "You'll see."

And as she said it, Paul saw Frank heading for the massive console record player at the far end of the room. Karen sure knew her Scarsdale, Paul thought For some strange reason, since this afternoon he'd felt an unspoken bond between them, a warmth that had grown and blossomed in a few short hours, in the time between the drive up from the train and now. Yet he'd known her all his life, couldn't remember not knowing her. He'd seen her often, when she was a very small girl and dear cousin Frank had been a frequent visitor at the house. And now, all at once, he began to feel as if he'd known her all his life. He almost knew what she was going to say before she said it Maybe it had something to do with being cousins. He dismissed the thought immediately.

Sure enough, Frank started up the record player with the old Glenn Miller record of "A String of Pearls." Reissued on LP, from the sound of it. Recorded at least ten years before he was born, but his mother had it even though it was before her time, too.

"He's starting it off quietly enough," Karen said.

"I guess the throw-away-your-truss music will follow."

"As the night the day," Karen said.

Two couples got up and started dancing, their arms around each other in some ancient ritual. From the way they held each other, Paul surmised that they were all married to someone else. "Obscene, isn't it?"

"Sure is. Grabbing each other like that. Pushing against each other."

"You noticed?"

"You see me standing here with a tin cup and a seeing eye dog?"

"You noticed," he said.

"When the truss-away music starts, some of them here will start doing the Charleston and something called the Bunny Hug and the Black Bottom. Jesus save us. And the bric-a-brac."

"What they're doing now is called the fox trot. At least, that's just what they think they're doing."

"I know," she said. "My father taught me how to dance the fox trot, a long time ago."

"Can you still do it?"

"Sure."

"So can I. My mother taught me. Christ knows who taught her. She's a goddamn anachronism."

"I like your mother."

"So do I," he said. "Sometimes."

"My mother doesn't."

"You're kidding." She looked at him and laughed. "My mother's impossible," she said. "You're being polite."

"My mother's a pain in the ass."

"That's better," he said. "You took the words right out of my mouth."

She laughed again, happily.

"You want to try it?"

"What?"

"The fox trot."

"Only when it's necessary. To keep you from being trampled to death. Or pawed."

She frowned. She looked hurt

"You don't understand," he said. 'It's going to be a long evening, and I don't think I could stand it dancing with you like that, all that time."

She moved around in front of him and brushed against him, lightly.

"I see what you mean," she said.

"Does it show?" he asked, worried. His cock was straining at the leash.

"I don't know. I don't trust myself to look."

"Anyway, you understand why I don't want to start dancing with you so early."

understand," she said. "I feel the same way."

They did start dancing, though, much earlier than Paul wanted to. A tall balding man in tweeds approached, smiling at Karen, during the opening bars of the Tommy Dorsey record of "Marie."

"This is it" she said, and took his hand. They moved together out to the space where the rug had been rolled back for the dancing. The tall man stopped smiling, stood still, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled again. He moved off toward the bar. Good sport, Paul thought Old goat.

She fitted very nicely when he put his arms around her and they started to dance. Too nicely. Before the Dorsey arrangement got as far as the vocal, his rampant erection was prodding her belly, poking between her legs whenever he took a long backward step. She never pulled back, but kept her body pressed close to his.

"Jesus," he said. "Do you suppose anybody's noticing?"

"No," she said. "They all dance like this."

"With one major difference."

"I don't know. You notice that none of the men is dancing with his wife. You'd be surprised how many hard-ons this room is capable of producing."

"You know?"

I've danced with all of them."

"Old bastards." He looked around with new respect

"Yes," she said.

"You remember one of these old bands, I think it was Guy Lombardo, had a slogan. Or maybe it was Kay Kayser. Or Blue Barron. My mother told me about it Somebody told her."

"Well, what about it? What was the slogan?"

"Guy Lombardo and his makes-you-want-to-dance music."

"I've heard that"

"You know what this music is?"

"Makes-you-want-to-fuck music," she said softly, in his ear.

"That's my girl," he said, and held her tighter. "Probably any land of music would do that to you" she said, pushing against him. "Even 'Rock of Ages.'"

"I never thought of that," he said. "That's because you probably were never exposed to Hock of Ages.'"

"You're right. Speaking of rocks...." The record ended.

"Yes, isn't it awful?" she said. "Let's sit down somewhere."

They managed to sit out a number of dances, but Paul had to lead her out to the floor to dance every time they saw a gallant paunch approach. It was torture.

After about an hour, Frank started what Karen had called the throw-away-that-truss music, with Benny Goodman's long record of "Sing, Sing, Sing." Karen stood up suddenly.

"Excuse me," she said and headed for the bathroom in the downstairs hall. She had trouble threading her way through three couples who were trying, with precarious balance and bereft of beat, to Lindy.

She was gone a long time. So long that "Sing, Sing, Sing" was over by the time she got back, and Benny Goodman's "Savoy" was playing.

"I had an idea," she said, reaching for his hand without sitting down. "Let's go out and dance on the sun porch."

"Won't they notice?" he said, standing beside her.

"There's nobody out there," she said. "They're afraid of the dark. And nobody in this room will notice anything. They're all drunk."

Paul looked around. She was right. Hand in hand, they walked to the porch, two steps down, and into the semi-darkness. Paul looked into all the comers but there was no one else there.

He put his arms around her and they started to dance in the private dark.

"You know something?" she said.

"What?"

"I took my panties off."

He dropped one hand to the hem of her miniskirt in back, and reached up underneath. The palm of his hand lingered on the smooth yielding naked globes of her ass.

"Jesus," he breathed into her ear.

She drew away from him slightly. He felt her hand fumbling at the front of his trousers, and before he could stop her, she'd zipped him down.

"Put it between my legs," she said. "We can keep on dancing that way."

"Jesus Christ," he said. "You want me to get thrown out of here on my head?"

"Even if anybody comes out here," she said, "they can't see anything. We're just dancing close, in the dark."

His cock, pulsing with a will of its own, had poked its way out of his pants and under the front of her short skirt. He stopped dancing for a second and fitted it between the incredibly soft spots at the top of her thighs, the top of his cock pushing up into hair and the moisture of her open outer cunt lips.

They began to dance, moving their feet very little. "Savoy" was still playing. The song started with two lingering notes, the second higher than the first She started to sing along with the record, but instead of singing "Sa-voy" as the first word, she substituted her own lyric.

"Let's fuck," she sang sweetly into his ear. "Da-da-dada-da-da. Let's-fuck." She had a lovely voice. He stopped dancing, and held her still, in the middle of the sun porch. He was afraid he was going to come all over the inside of the back of her skirt.

"Enough of this junior-high-school agony," he said. "I've got to do something."

"What? Just what? You tell me."

It pained him to look into her face. She was hurting as badly as he was.

"I'll go up to my room. You can join me. Like you said, everybody's drunk."

"My mother may be drunk, but she is one sharp old bitch."

"You found the word," he said.

"I know. Say you're going out for cigarettes, and come around the house and in the side door and on upstairs. Nobody will see you."

"On the way out," he said, "what do I do, make a public announcement that I'm going out for cigarettes?"

"Something like that."

His hard-on had slackened somewhat. He put it back in his pants and zipped himself up.

"You know what'll happen? Some son of a bitch will say he has plenty of cigarettes, and offer me his."

"Don't buy that. You smoke that crazy brand."

"Spuds."

"Say you can only smoke your own brand. There's not one chance in a million that anybody here smokes Spuds."

"You're thinking good."

"And to make this whole thing look natural, you announce that you're going out for cigarettes. Ask if anybody else needs cigarettes. Or anything else."

"Like from the drugstore."

"That's the idea. All because you're such a nice, considerate type fella."

"I am, you know?"

"Oh, shut up," she said.

"Suppose some silly son of a bitch does want something?"

"Fuck'm," she said. "He'll forget." He started up the steps from the sun porch, then came back to her. "One more thing," he said. "What?"

"Your sister. Beth."

"She's in her room. She hates these things."

"That's what I mean. She's right there, upstairs. She might hear us."

"She won't," Karen said. "Anyway, she wouldn't go near your room with a tractor dragging her."

"There's only your mother for you to worry about, then," he said. "How come she's watching you so closer"

"It isn't me. It's you. That's why she's watching me."

"You mean she doesn't trust me?"

"Something like that."

"I wonder where she got that notion," Paul said.

"I think it has something to do with your mother. I never found out just what."

"Neither did I," Paul said. "But I could guess."

"Tell me some time," she said. "But not now."

She pressed against him, hard. His prick swelled against the insistent mound of her pelvis through the thin fabric of her dress.

"Anyway," he said, "what're you going to tell your mother? Why are you leaving the party and going upstairs?"

I'll tell her I'm getting the curse." He looked at her, startled for a second. "Are you?" he asked.

"God, no," she said. "I certainly hope not."

"Come up in three or four minutes," Paul said.

He went out into the shrieking confusion of the living room waded through it, and made his statement about going out for cigarettes, did anyone need anything, in a random sort of way to the people closest to the front door. Vickie, he saw with satisfaction, was among them.

Nobody needed anything. Nobody even heard him, as far as he could tell, except Vickie.

"Hurry back," she said. She smiled fuzzily at him as he gave her an abbreviated wave and went out the front door.

He was naked under a terrycloth robe when Karen pushed the door open and slid silently into his room, closing the door quietly behind her. She turned and was in his arms. His open mouth fused with hers. Their tongues entwined.

"Oh, God," she said, breaking away. "This is going to be awful."

"That's a hell of a romantic thing to say." His swollen throbbing cock stood out arrogantly from the opening of his robe.

She stared at it. She seemed to have forgotten what she was going to say. The tip of her tongue came out, seemingly all by itself, and circled her mouth, moistening her lips.

"What's going to be awful?" he asked her, kissing her under the ear. His hands cupped the tender round mounds of her buttocks, under the skirt.

"We have no time," she said. "No time for anything practically."

"Why not?"

"Mother. She has a calendar for a brain, and she knows I'm not due for the curse. I said I'd lost track, it must just be a headache then."

"Isn't that good enough for her?"

"Not for her. I said I'd take some aspirin and He down, and she said she'd come up in a little while and see how I was. I said don't bother, I'd probably feel better and come back down in twenty minutes or so. But I don't trust her. She's loaded, God damn it."

Nothing was going to stop Paul now. He could have hung a suitcase on the end of his crowbar of a cock and it wouldn't have bowed. He took her by the hand, led her to the bed, and started to lift her dress off over her head.

She slipped away from him and lay down on her back on his bed, flat on her back, her knees in the air, her short skirt up around the soft gentle curve of her naked hips.

"There's no time for me to get undressed," she said. "No time for any preambles at all. Tomorrow we'll find a place where we can take some time."

She spread her legs wide, the knees elevated. Her open, wet, joyous pink cunt smiled up at him. He felt his lips going dry, and licked them. There was a monstrous lump in his throat

"Jesus," he heard himself say, in a choked voice. "You're lovely."

"Please, right now, Paul," she said. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be. Fuck me now."

He dropped his robe to the floor and mounted between her legs. He guided the swollen, glistening, purple head of his cock to her wet, welcoming, warm cunt lips, and held it there, between them, filling her eager entrance.

He slid his cock halfway in through the snug, moist portals of her willing twat. It seemed to move forward of its own volition. Her cunt wrapped the thick, stiff shaft in a tight warm embrace.

"Ooooh," Karen said.

"All-American girl," he said. "Likes to just plain fuck."

"Just ... plain ... fuck," she said, her hips rising, her cunt seeming to gulp in more of his shaft all by itself.

"You're my dream girl," he said.

"That's me." Her eyes smiled up at him.

He sank his great, thick shaft all the way in then, to the bone-hard base.

"Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh," she said again. It was almost a whimper.

For one awful moment, then, he thought he was going to come, right away. Please, God, no, he said to himself. It was a hell of a time to get religion, he thought, and the thought saved him. He clenched his teeth, and was under control again.

He began to fuck her then with long, slow, deliberate strokes, and she responded, with exquisite timing, to every stroke, pasting her pussy tight against his pubis with every in stroke, holding the very tip of his cock lingeringly in her lips at every withdrawal. He quickened his stroke, and she met every move with flawless timing. It was if they had invented fucking, he thought, just the two of them.

As the speed of their fucking increased, he found himself pounding his huge sliding, shuttling pole into her with a kind of manic fury, like some kind of enraged stag, and her hips and hungry, gulping cunt pounded back with a fury that matched his own. They were groaning together, gasping, moaning, writhing, squirming, driving, pounding, until they reached a crescendo he knew he could not stand a second longer. This was it, but please, oh, please, a second longer.

Then he heard the little breathless screams in her throat, the spasmodic clutching of her inner lips, the uncontrollable quivering deep inside the warm, wet cave of her cunt, and he came with her, spurting in a great mutual explosion of an orgasm.

And as they lay quivering together, panting, he heard the door open, and he closed his eyes. "Oh, my God," he muttered. Not again.

When he opened his eyes he half expected to see Mrs. Halsted standing in the doorway, and when he saw who it was, he would have welcomed Mrs. Halsted. Kissed her on both cheeks.

It was Vickie.

She was drunk, but there was nothing wrong with her eyesight. Or her vocal cords.

"Paul Beck!" It was a harsh, choked scream. "Out of this house!"

Even in his shocked despair, he had time to hate her. God, she was a corny old bitch.

"In the morning," he said. He was glad he was able to talk.

"Now," she said. "You have ten minutes to dress and pack. Frank will want to shoot you."

He got to his feet, his back to Vickie, and put on his robe. Karen still lay on the bed, on her back, a look of uncomprehending shock on her face. Her skirt was still up around her hips. Her wet, dosing cunt was no longer smiling.

"I'm sorry," he said softly, and reached out a hand. She took it dazedly and got to her feet, slowly. For a brief second, her ear was near his mouth.

"Be right next to the phone," he whispered. "Noon tomorrow."

She nodded without speaking and left the room, walking past her mother as if she didn't exist "No good-for-nothing, rotten, fucking bastard," Vickie said, and spat at him. She went out, slamming the door behind her.

Numbly, as if sleepwalking, Paul got his bags but of the closet. Two Saturdays in a row, he thought. First he'd fucked himself out of school, then out of a place to live.

He'd have to give up fucking on Saturday, he thought That's all there was to it.