Chapter 3
Susan had a bacon-and-tomato sandwich at the snack shop after leaving Lucia's. She hurried the light lunch. She had killed a lot of time since buying groceries and didn't want to risk having any of the expensive meat spoil from being shut up in the car on a warm, sunny day. When she got home, she lugged the heavy sacks of food into the kitchen without thinking anything of it. She was a strong, healthy girl and carrying a few bags of groceries wouldn't hurt her.
She put the box with her new dress on top of the refrigerator until she had finished putting away the groceries. Finished, she called Gil. As she suspected, he had forgotten to send out for lunch. The drive-in up the street from the shop delivered. Susan ordered two hamburgers for him and then, her mind at ease, went into the bedroom and laid the dress across the bed to admire it.
It was, indeed, nice material. She just had to try it on again. She stripped, donned the sexy dress and studied her image in the bedroom mirror. She had always been thankful for having nice breasts and a good body, but she had never seen herself set off so well. She turned and posed. She giggled at herself. If anyone could see her, cavorting around half-nude, they'd think she was ready for the booby hatch.
But what the hell? It wasn't every day a girl had a new dress, especially a dress like this. It was a silly luxury, completely useless for public wear, an extravagance she tried to justify by telling herself that it would please Gil. If it made Gil feel as she felt, wow!
She felt voluptuous. She felt as if being semi-nude were delightfully naughty. She felt, thinking of Gil, a hint of desire. She plotted how she would reveal the dress to him. She imagined how he would look at her, how his hands would do the first natural thing that occurred to him, how they would reach for her readily accessible breasts. She pushed her hands down her stomach, flattened them against the smoothness of her loins and, their pressure created a hint of languorous passion.
She willed the day to speed along its way so that she could show Gil the dress, so that he would do that natural thing and reach for her breasts and ... Well, hell, there she went again! But it was nice to think about it. She liked thinking about it. It was better than dreaming erotic dreams about another man, wasn't it? At least she thought only about the caresses her husband gave her.
It wouldn't do, though, to think about it too much. She tried to think of other things during the slow afternoon. She thought about life in general and about life with Gil in particular. Gil was a good man, a hard worker. He would stay at the shop until the last possible minute, trying to turn out just one more job, trying to make that extra dollar.
This line of thought brought out the hidden streak of resentment in her. She considered bitterly how hard Gil worked, how easily his hard-earned dollars were spent on the bottomless well of expenses which was his mother's home. It wasn't fair! It wasn't fair to Gil and it wasn't fair to her.
A young married couple should not be saddled with the extra responsibility of having to support an additional household. Those income-tax finks had actually questioned it when Gil put his mother down as a dependent. He had had to fill out a long, complicated form to prove that he actually contributed more than half of his mother's support.
More than half, ha! They allowed him a deduction of $600, the same deduction Gil could have taken for a child. And, dammit, she didn't even have a child. She wanted kids, had always wanted kids, lots of them. Gil had to support his mother and his mother's house, so they couldn't afford kids.
She always became morose when she thought about having a baby. At such times she damned the efficiency of modern birth control methods. If it weren't for those damned pills, maybe she could just slip up once or twice, and then there would be nothing to do but have the baby. What a sweet thought! But she couldn't deliberately forget to take the pills. That would be doing Gil dirty.
It would be very easy to hate old Mrs. Emory. Didn't the woman realize what she was doing? Susan was 22. She had friends her own age who had already started on a family. One girl Susan had attended school with had three, two darling little girls and the meanest, most adorable little boy she'd ever seen. Susan smiled fondly as she thought of the little boy. She wondered what her first child would be. Twins might even be nice. Twins ran in her family.
Wouldn't it be lovely, she thought, to start one tonight? Uninhibited love play carried through to the conclusion intended by nature....
Funny, the way she thought about making a baby. It was by far the sexiest thing she could think of. It went back to the very first time when, as a virgin, she gave herself to Gil. Lord knows, she was excited enough that night. She was atrem-ble, weak, hot and cold at the same time, scared, expectant, and so damned eager that Gil couldn't believe his luck.
She had determined in advance, of course, that she was going to let Gil make her that night, and she had come prepared. She wore her frilliest bra and panties. She was ready and willing, and when Gil started playing around, after long, torrid kisses, she wanted it so badly she was almost crying with need. And with Gil inside her, after the first shattering pain, she was not disappointed in the results.
A grand and glorious night, and the most glorious moment of all came, with Gil pounding down on her in finishing frenzy, with their movements smoothed from their initial awkwardness, when she suddenly realized that she had forgotten one damned little thing. She had thought about it all day and all evening and had prepared herself with careful washings and perfumings-and she had forgotten the basic thing.
She was very, very near when she thought about it. She was panting with her first experience of total sex, and her body was burning with rapture, and the thrills were coming so thick and fast she could hardly keep from screaming aloud in her delight when she thought, Damn! He's not using anything!
She clung to him for a long moment while a shuddering realization of total intimacy cascaded through her body, a white hot flash of pure desire that made anything she'd felt before seem pallid in comparison. That moment, that tiny little moment when she knew she could become pregnant by what she was doing, when she realized that there was nothing to stop her from being the truly complete woman big with child, was the hottest, most passionate moment she had ever known.
She tore at Gil like a woman possessed, grinding against him, pulling him into her with a cosmic force, wanting more, more, wanting him to share her moment of complete abandon.
That was why she had this thing about having a baby. It all went back to that first night. Now she tried to tell herself that it was no different, but there was not a chance of her having a baby thanks to the modern pills and, by God, it did take something out of it.
Oh well. She was young yet. There was time. She sure wasn't going to ask herself to wait until she was thirty or so to have a baby, but there was time. Gil didn't like to talk about it. It worried him to think about all the expenses of having a baby. When she talked about babies, it made Gil irritable.
He had changed a lot since that first night so long ago. He had changed since the Army years. Money was scarce during the Army years, too, and then Susan was in agreement about waiting to have a baby, but things were different then. Gil didn't know then he was going to learn enough electronics in the Army to open up his repair shop. Now that things were fairly settled, when it was a logical time to think and plan for a family, there was Mrs. Emory, and Gil was always so tired.
Come to think of it, he did a hell of a lot of television watching and a hell of a lot of sleeping. When had that started? When had things reached the point where it was more fun, for Gil at least, to sleep or watch television than to have a spirited game of mattress polo?
"Ah, come on, hot-pants," she told herself aloud.
She couldn't blame Gil. Tension and worry erode desire in a man.
But she couldn't accept that excuse as a total explanation. When they were first married, there had been days when Gil would slip away from his company at lunch time, skipping his meal, to come home to her for a quickie, a fast and lusty roll in the hay which was very, very good in spite of the lack of time to really get the most out of it.
Then there were the nights and the mornings. Gil was very fast in the mornings. In the mornings, she had to work fast to keep up with him. He'd awaken, all warm with sleep and with the night-taste in his mouth and she'd be awakened by his hand in her gown, playing with her.
Sometimes she wouldn't even know a thing until she was rocked out of sleep by his movements within her, and those were really lovely times, when she knew first the deep feeling of being penetrated and she'd come slowly awake to find that her body had been functioning in her sleep.
Then she would have to steam up quickly because he was so fast in the mornings and she'd put a little extra effort into it, heaving under him like a wild wench, straining to beat him. Her mornings were good, not really complete, but good, more like nice preludes to better things ahead.
She said aloud, "Knock it off, or you'll be doing it with yourself." She wasn't reduced to that yet.
Gil hadn't made love to her in the morning, hadn't sneaked home at lunch, in years, but she wasn't reduced to playing with herself! She had a man!
But she had a man so concerned with his job and money problems that he had been neglecting her needs.
"Don't be an ass," she said, talking aloud again.
She tried reading but couldn't concentrate. She watched a soap opera on TV. One of the characters was pregnant out of wedlock. She smirked. Other people got knocked up at the drop of a pair of panties, and she couldn't manage it because of modern science and a husband who worried about money.
She said to hell with it and went into the kitchen. It wasn't time to start on the evening meal, but if she went slowly and meticulously she could stretch the job of getting ready for the Friday night feast until it was time for Gil to come home. If he came home on time....
She called him at the shop. "Gil," she said, her voice going soft and warm at the sound of him. "Gil, you're not going to work late tonight?"
"Gee, honey," he said, sounding harried, wanting to get back to his work, "I've got jobs stacked up to the ceiling."
"Sweetie, it's Friday night, don't you remember?'
"Friday?" he asked absently. Then he added, "Oh, yeah."
"If you'll close on time and be home early, I'll have a surprise for you," she promised.
"Yeah?" His mind seemed to be elsewhere. "What?"
When he was in the Army, he worked in Company Headquarters and had access to a telephone. When things were slow, he'd call her at home and they'd play telephone games, making sexy little remarks, teasing each other until they could be together again.
He sighed. "Look, Suze, I have a customer waiting. See you later?"
She frowned, disappointed at not being able to play the game. But, after all, they weren't newly-weds any longer. "You'll be home on time?"
"I'll try."
"Don't just try, buster," she said, letting her beginning anger show. "You do it."
"All right," he said irritably. "All right! Now, if you don't mind, I have a customer."
When they were married, someone gave them two place-settings of good silver. It was supposed to form the foundation for a complete set, but somehow they could never afford to add to it. She got it out of the drawer, took it out of its cloth wrappings and spent a few minutes polishing it. With her good china and two of the tall crystal wine glasses, the table looked very chic.
She put fresh candles in the silver candle holders, also a wedding present, and fussed with napkins and arrangements until things were perfect. Then she put two medium-sized potatoes into the oven, wrapped in foil. She got out the steaks and put meat tenderizer on them. She made the salad-tomatoes, lettuce, radishes and tiny bits of apple-and put it into the fridge. Allowing an hour for the potatoes, she could put on the steaks at six if Gil showed up.
With nothing to do, she sat down on the kitchen stool and looked out the window at the palm tree in the yard. She and Gil had planted the tree when they moved into the house. It was growing nicely.
Across the street, two small boys rode skateboards. She felt the familiar ache of wanting when she looked at them. They were about six, she imagined. If she had had a boy when she was first married, he'd be only a couple of years younger than those two. She stopped herself. No need to go down that road again. She watched the second-hand on the kitchen clock. She noticed the paper she'd bought at the grocery store and reached for it idly without leaving the stool.
The story of the woman who entertained her cub scout troop in an unusual way was as unbelievable on detailed reading as it had been when she scanned the headlines. She looked out the window at the two little boys and couldn't imagine a woman wanting to do anything to them except mother them. Intercourse with one? How silly. She turned to the inside pages of the paper and read about an axe murder. She shuddered.
On page three, an article claiming to be the true confessions of a nymphomaniac held her attention for a few minutes. Then she thumbed through the pages, her interest flagging, skipping over stories of rape and incest and perversion to the inside of the last page. The classified ads caught her eye and she scanned the columns. Offered for sale were pictures of nude girls, fancy underwear, aids for those who wanted to quit smoking, for those who had irregularity, for those who needed trusses.
Her eyes stopped at a column headed PERSONALS:
FUN LOVING FLORIDA COUPLE WOULD LIKE TO MEET BROAD-MINDED COUPLES INTERESTED IN PHOTOGRAPHY, MODELING, PARTIES. SHE'S A SWINGER, 36-24-36. HE'S CONSIDERED HANDSOME.
And:
ATTRACTIVE BLONDE, DIVORCEE, HAS SWINGING MALE FRIEND FOR PARTIES WITH BROAD-MINDED COUPLES.
Susan made a wry face and put the paper aside. It was a bunch of nonsense, she thought. The article about the woman and the cub scouts implied a lot and said little. It was the same with the ads. If they were for real at all, the definition of "broadmindedness" would be the exchange of pictures of naked girls or something. She couldn't imagine anyone advertising for sex partners, not for real. It was just something to make people buy the paper. Otherwise it made no sense to her.
Susan was a one-man woman, pure and simple, not because she had never felt a stir of interest for another man, but because she didn't believe in a quick roll in the hay, a casual hump in the back seat of a car. She knew the difference between sex and love and that was important, but she could not separate sex and love.
She liked her sex, Lord yes, she liked to roll in it, throw herself into it body and soul. She liked being used by her man, used well and long until every nerve in her body was screaming from the loveliness of being loved. She liked to do it again and again....
"Whoa, girl!" She laughed.
Hot pants again, and Gil a full hour away!
Well, what harm would it do to dream a little?