Chapter 1

Katherine Beauchamp listened to the automobile approach, a low drone that began far away and drew ever so gradually louder. When she thought it was time for it to round the corner she went to the window and watched, yet knew from the sound of it, or from intuition, this would not be him. When it appeared that was confirmed; it wasn't the Volkswagen bus he'd written her about but a big green car, a Chrysler or Pontiac or one of those. She turned away as it whizzed past the mail box, sighed softly and then took a deep breath that expanded her bosom so she could feel the straps of her brassiere pull at the soft flesh of her shoulders. Through the open top of her blouse she saw the beginnings of her smooth, mounded breasts that flared out suddenly from her body, casting a vague, forbidden-looking shadow between them, straining at the bra cups which hid just the tips of her crimson, perforated nipples.

Her gaze slipped on down her body: the sleek belly from which her pelvic bones flared suddenly, wide and lewdly inviting like a cradle in which nestled her lower abdomen and pubis, the "V" of it distinctly out-lined now in her tight pants, the lithely contoured thighs and very long, slender calves, the small thin ankles. At thirty-five, she had to admit, she was still a very beautiful woman. Then she looked up suddenly, flushing self-consciously, though she was alone and there should have been no reason for that, and paced in one circle around the kitchen. She was off balance today. And strange as it seemed, she dreaded her son Tom's arrival from San Francisco after his first summer away from home almost as much as she anticipated it. And her anticipation had become since his letter, an acute longing that permeated her being, an obsession that made everything except the passage of time, the arrival of that day, today, seem trivial and annoying. She wondered if after his promised week's visit she would miss him again as much as she'd missed him these last three months. She tried to tell herself she would not, that it was only the first separation that was so hard.

Another car came and passed and again, still knowing it wasn't him, she went to the window and watched it. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee and sugared it and sat at the table and stroked her black silken hair, almost loath to drink it now and further jangle her already unsteady nerves. And once more her eyes went to her body. If anything, she thought, she was more attractive now than she had been at ... say ... seventeen when Tom was conceived. Then she'd been almost too sexy, too ripe and bursting with it, radiating it lewdly, her mother had always said. But she'd hardly been aware of that, or of the meanings of the looks she got from men when she walked down the street with her voluptuously ripe hips almost bursting out of the skimpy shorts that exposed and accentuated the beauty of her long bare legs. Sex, in any vivid sense of the act itself at least, was hardly a part of her consciousness then. She knew there was something people did that made babies, knew even without often thinking of it that it consisted of the man inserting his "Thing," while it was hard into the woman's vagina. But she thought that even knowing that she must never have pictured it as a reality, as something someday that would be done to her. It was just a dirty, distant thing, not to be thought about or talked about by respectable girls.

Another distant drone caused her to perk up momentarily; then she realized it was an airplane and settled disconsolately back in her chair. She sipped the coffee without interest. Again the dread and the anticipation of her young son's arrival fought for balance in her mind. In two hours Paul would be back from the office. As that thought struck her she sensed an even greater urgency. Desperately she wanted Tom to arrive before his father got home. She wanted that moment, the first hug, the first glimpse of his lank, sinewy body and wild handsome face to be all hers. Or all hers and hisnot shared, anyway, by Paul, not dulled or somehow even tainted by that half-friendly, half-distant father and son banter and handshaking. Though she was surely a bitch for feeling that way. And where Tom was concerned and where his father and her husband were concerned perhaps she always had been a bitch. A remote memory popped into her mind, that she had not thought of in years, of something that Paul had once said not long after they were married, when Tom was still an infant: "The only sex kicks you get are nursing that goddamn baby."

Perhaps it was true, she thought now. She had never in her life experienced that kind of pleasure. But it wasn't a dirty pleasure. It wasn't sex. It had been something pure, something almost holy. Another sigh escaped her, followed by a sob that though barely audible seemed to evoke in its soft sound all the sadness and longing that welled in her and surged through her body, from deep near her abdomen, through her limbs, in her heart and in those same vibrant and longing breasts that had nursed him so long ago.

Almost consciously her hands moved up, almost touching them, waited hanging poised in the air inches away from the upflung breasts that strained against the blouse. Then, like a child reaching into a forbidden box of candy, she did touch herself, laying both her hands on the full firm breasts, squeezing and kneading them softly through the brassiere cups, teasing the nipples quickly to prickling points that made vivid protrusions through the flimsy bra and soft material of her blouse.

Tom was a man now, she thought. He was eighteen and he'd lived on his own for a whole summer. He'd left New Mexico with less than a hundred dollars in his pocket and against her will had hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he'd known no one, had no contacts of any kind. He'd worked for three months on the waterfront and managed not only to make his way but to buy an automobile in the bargain. Now, instead of going to college in the fall as she and Paul had always planned, their son wanted to drive around Mexico for a month or two, then go to Central America.

Suddenly she dropped her hands from her pulsating breast, breathing out heavily. A shiver of self-admonition passed through her body. Her hand moved up to softly stroke her long, black hair. Then she grasped the thick strands and twisted it into a tangle. Flustered, she left it tangled, removed her hand again and stood up. She couldn't understand what was happening to her. The dread and anticipation. Though there should have been no connection, she felt somewhat the way she'd felt that night so long ago when sex, the act itself, had suddenly become something real and pertinent in her life.

Paul Beauchamp had grown up in a small town not far from where Katherine had lived in Arizona. He was a track star. He'd won the state championship in the mile run when he was a junior with a time of four minutes and a few odd seconds, which in those days was good enough to put him in the bracket of the most promising high school athletes. Numerous college teams were already bargaining for him. So were quite a few of the girls. But he was shy, studious, and sometimes seemed almost to abhor the attention that was heaped on him, and the flirtations and sometimes even outright propositions of the more forward and worldly-wise of the women. Katherine was one of the most beautiful girls in that part of the state. At sixteen she'd already developed a set of moderately sized yet flawlessly formed breasts; Her legs, which she regularly displayed each fall as she performed as a majorette with the high school band at football games, were renown as a subject of fascination. Her ass was ripe and rippling with invitation, bursting in her tight shorts that stretched thinly over the soft inviting crevice beneath her firmly rounded young buttocks. But even more renown than her legs was her reputation. She was known as a prick tease, but only to the boys who hadn't dated her. Those had called her frigid and uncooperative.

And as far as she was concerned, most of them were just male animals. Sometimes she wondered why she occasionally accepted their frequent invitations. But something, some instinct or feeling that she had to date and even put up with some of the lunging and pawing or perhaps it was simply loneliness kept her going back for more. And it wasn't even so much that she should have minded being kissed, or even caressed a little bit in a decent manner. It was the way they went about it. Whether they were going to a movie and God forbid, never a drive-in or to an occasional party at someone's house or just to the local Dairy Queen Drive-in for a coke and some small talk as a prelude to the parking, the whole night, everything they said and did and pretended to be interested in, seemed to lead to that. They were obsessed with it. And when they began it was always rough and blundering, like words blurted out in anger. They came at her like animals, breathing hard, trembling, their adolescent hands clumsy and over-eager. She thought that was the thing that repulsed her most, their eagerness to do something that was dirty, their disregard for her as a human being with feelings, the relegation of her to an object of sex, a prize to be pawed and taken and used for motives that were purely hedonistic.

It was probably only natural that she and Paul should have come together, though in the beginning she'd thought with him it would be the same as with the others. He'd met her at an inter-school function and they'd seen each other off and on and been on speaking terms for over a year. He called her once and invited her to go to a movie with him and afterwards took her to eat. Later, she would remember that she'd sensed something different in his attitude and conversation. It had seemed he was sincerely interested in the things he said, though now she couldn't even recall the topics. But at the time she must have presumed he was merely more skillful at concealing what was really on his mind. But when they'd finished eating he astonished her by driving her straight home, astonished her even further by simply talking to her, honestly and straight-forwardly in the car for a few moments outside the house. Then he walked her to the door and kissed her good night and said goodbye and left. But even the kiss had been different. There'd been something warm and honest in the way he'd done it, not groping, pawing, lunging, or slurping with his tongue.

They began gradually to go out more often. Paul made a good impression on her mother, who previously had uncategorically refused approval of all the boys Katherine dated. After a while they did park when they went on dates, and they kissed and petted, and Katherine let him go much further than any of the other boys she'd gone out with. But that was because it was different with Paul. In his manner he still lacked that lunging desperation. When he touched or kissed her, she felt that it was all of her and not just her body that he wanted. Sometimes she even liked it a little, the feel of his lips on hers and his tongue snaking into her mouth, his body pressed against hers, mashing her sensitive, silken breasts, his hands touching her velvety smooth buttocks, caressing her softly rounded thighs from the outside of her dress or sometimes even, at least her lower thighs, from beneath it. And of course that was still a far cry from the sex act itself, from that horrible image that now occasionally did invade her consciousness, the thought of them actually naked, panting and moaning and wrestling, the thought of his male hardness, which at times inadvertently she had brushed with her hand and perceived, or felt prodding at her belly as they embraced, actually violating her chaste vagina. That was something they would do only after they were married, if they ever got married it had seemed to creep proposal; she was happy with Paul and she loved him and he felt the same way about her and respected her besides. But even thinking of it after they were married, it had a remoteness from her, or she had an immunity from it. She thought of it still with no more sense of its reality than her sense of the reality of pain of childbirth.

Sometimes, he went too far for comfort. Once he managed to get her brassiere unbuttoned and his hands beneath her sweater. His fingers massaged them to maddening hardness, made inexplicable tingles emanate from her nipples and course like gentle shocks through her body. She liked it and at the same time she hated it. Most of all she feared it, something strange and unknown about the fluttering and surges of wanting that welled in her body. Then she'd felt his other hand slide beneath her skirt. A sigh escaped her and she heard his breathing, that harsh guttural gasping of breath that came too fast, like the breathing of the moronic sex maniacs she'd dated before. But even with the confusing revulsion she'd felt, she hadn't resisted as his hand moved up the cool soft flesh of her thighs, pushing them apart, stroking the taut inner tendon that ran down out of the elastic legband of her panties. Shivering, she put her arms around him, hugging his face to her swollen breasts that had popped out of the cups of her bra. Then she felt his finger wriggle up under the soft nylon crotchband of her panties, stroking and parting her thinly curling pubic fuzz, worming into the slit of her vagina and brushing and titillating her moist, tortuously throbbing little clitoris.

She writhed sensuously beneath his touch, squirming her body down in the car seat so he could almost stretch out on top of her, at his urging even further parting her smooth, milk-white thighs, letting the tip of his middle finger begin to probe into the burning wet slit of her exposed little pussy mouth.

Then she sobbed again and pushed his face from her breasts, struggling beneath him and clamping her thighs shut on his hand. She opened them again and grappled with him until she could push his hand from beneath her skirt.

Reluctantly he slid off her and straightened up in the car seat. In a moment she also raised up and though she was unable to snap it, managed to at least fit the cups of the bra back over her tingling breasts.

"You're right, I guess," he said grudgingly after they'd caught their breath. "We don't want to do it like this."

She hadn't known what he meant then. It was two weeks later, a Sunday afternoon after Paul had broken the state high school record for the mile run, and had graduated and tentatively accepted a scholarship to New Mexico State University, that she found out what he'd meant by that.

He'd taken her and her mother to church that morning, then had Sunday dinner with them. Then he and Katherine drove over to his parents house to spend the afternoon. She wasn't particularly surprised to find they weren't home; nor were her suspicions aroused when Paul told her they'd gone to Bakersfield, California and wouldn't be back until Monday night. They listened to a baseball game on the radio and Paul drank a couple of beers from the six pack his father kept in the icebox, something she'd never seen him do. After the game ended he got up and motioned for her to follow him. She did, still unsuspecting. Only when they got to his bedroom and she turned and saw the look in his eyes, a look of faint nervousness overwhelmed by a calm determination and a longing and an appreciation of her virginal, inviting body that though discomforting still was not quite tike the fanatical boyish lechery she used to see in the eyes of the boys she used to date, did she truly understand.

She tried to meet his determined gaze and found herself unable to, averted her eyes and looked down at her body with an almost curious sheepishness. She was wearing a short sleeved sweater that buttoned down the front, that lay down in the crease between her breasts so they rose up like small pointed hills on each side of it. Her skirt and in those days they wore them below the knees nonetheless out-lined the lithe perfection of her thighs and was tight enough to accentuate the flare of her well ripened young buttocks.

She looked up at him again and took a step backward toward the door, nervously shaking her head.

"No, Paul."

There was a look in his face she'd never seen before. In all that resolution in his eyes there was a frightening strength. She felt like cowering before it. Something in her, even at that instant, wanted to yield willingly to the sinful thing she knew without words he'd already distinctly proposed. But at the same time she was repulsed. And most of all she was afraid.

"No," she said again.

"Why not?"

"I'm going back to the den," she stuttered. Hearing herself say it, it seemed absolutely a stupid thing. It probably was.

He shook his head, half turned and walked over along side his bed. She started to go out of the room but his voice stopped her.

"Come here, Katherine." She paused, looking over her shoulder back at him. Now he wasn't even watching her. "Relax and come over here and sit down. I'm not going to force you to do anything."

She took two hesitant steps before he added: "I'm not going to have to force you."

She stopped again, trembling, that mingling dread and anticipation making her mouth dry, her stomach flutter.

"Paul? What are you ... ? We're going to wait ... until we're married?" Somehow that sounded foolish too. And Paul was shaking his head, now a look of condescension in his eyes. "I'm going," she blurted suddenly, trying to conjure some evidence of resolution in her own voice.

"Home?"

"Paul?"

"Are you saying you want to go home?"

"Paul?"

"It won't even be possible for us to get married for at least a year. I don't want to wait that much longer."

"I'm a virgin, Paul. And ... and I want to be a virgin ... for you ... when we are married."

Even that, somehow, was a lie. She'd never thought about wanting to be a virgin for him.

"I am too," he said with a remarkable calmness. "And I don't want to be anymore. And I want the first time to be with you, because I love you. Not with someone I don't care anything about."

That, somehow, did it. Though she still hadn't consciously yielded, it must have been inevitable as she walked toward him, thinking she walked there because she wanted just to embrace him, out of gratitude for saying that, out of love for him, but still not quite admitting that she was going to do what he asked.

But his determination was not going to waiver. He took her into his arms when she reached him, clinging her light supple body to his, his lips covering hers and his tongue warring with hers for a place in her mouth, his hands roving forcefully over her back, squeezing her and crushing her to him.

She only faintly struggled as he unbuttoned the sweater and pulled it apart, revealing the upper half of her luxurious breasts pushed up high and together by her brassiere, the rich amber hue of her flesh heightened by the white of her slip.

"No, Paul," she murmured faintly through her own heightened breathing as he pushed the sweater off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor behind her.

Then he took her face in his hands, a palm on each of her cheeks, and tilted it up toward his own. He looked down at her with a smile that though still resolute was almost tender.

"Take your slip off."

"No."

"Yes."

"I ... I might get pregnant."

"I have something for that. Take your slip off and get into bed."

He kissed her lightly, then stepped back and began to unbutton his shirt. Unbelieving, she watched him. But the uncanny stirring in her loins was only heightened by the sight of his lean, muscular torso. Scarcely believing it was really happening to her, the fear and the dread waging a seeming death-grip struggle in her mind, she peeled the slip over her head, reached behind her back and unfastened the bra, hunched her shoulders to let it slither off her arms. A sob of incredulity escaped her as she saw her flawless bared breasts exposed, as she was aware of the almost incredible beauty of their bursting firmness, of the pert swollen nipples, rich and dark-colored, and was aware that Paul also was seeing them for the first time. And beneath the soft flimsy covering of her silken panties, which now was all that protected her, she knew he could also see the lovely forbidden shadow of triangle of her pubic hair. She dropped her hands into the waistband of her panties, still struggling against both the fear and the desire. She wanted to turn, even now, and run from the room. But the mere touch of her own hands there on the silken flesh of her belly sent currents of irrefutable desire through her. In a sudden, almost impulsive gesture she rolled them down over her hips, balanced on one leg and worked the other out, then stood, naked, like a young Grecian goddess before him.

She watched with a strange combination of fascination and horror as he pulled off his trousers. Even before he removed his underwear she could see the incredible bulge of his engorged cock, standing up like a tent pole in his drawers. But when he pulled them off a gasp of fear burst from her. It was even more bigger and more frightening than she had imagined, almost purple with the blood that filled it, far too huge to ever fit up inside her small, virginally tight vagina.

"No, Paul," she whimpered as he approached her.

His eyes, with a deep appreciation, traversed the length of her nakedly trembling young body. Then he pulled her to him again, kissing her passionately, one of his hands kneading gently at her firmly quivering breasts and the other squeezing her smoothly flaring buttocks, his finger snaking between the softly giving crevice between the warm white moons to miraculously curl beneath them, and find the exposed little slit of her vagina nestled in the sparsely growing pubic hair that was already slightly damp with her involuntarily rising pussy juices.

After that it seemed almost to happen too fast. She was in a delirium of mingled terror and desire. He'd pushed her onto the bed on her back, kissing and sucking the hardened little nipples of her breasts, his hands roving over her smooth belly and between her silken thighs to stroke her pleading clitoris and gently probe at the slick wet lips of her cunt. After a while, though it could have been only moments or might have been some time, he'd rolled off her and leaned off the bed to get something out of his trousers. She watched out of the corner of her eyes as he unwrapped the foil with trembling fingers to reveal the thinly transparent rubber sheath and fit it over the end of his hardened cock. Unrolled on it, it looked like a tight, clear-plastic balloon.

She'd said no again and she thought she struggled with him as he'd rolled back upon her and spread her thighs apart with his knees. She cried as she felt his huge, rubber-enclosed young penis prod between them, felt his hands seek out her vaginal cunt and fit it slowly into the tight fleshy lips. Then she screamed and saw red as the blinding pain surged through her, as she felt the enormous thing cutting into her, going where it could not go, where there was no place for it, inching its way in slowly as he covered and filled her mouth with his wetly swirling tongue to smother her scream.

Nor did she know how long it had lasted. She remembered that at last it seemed it had been all the way in her, or as deep as it would go in her overfilled young belly, and the pain had sought a level and didn't increase further, only came in sporadic flashes as he began the slow, in-and-out fucking motion, as he again began to gently caress the other parts of her body even as he tortured her violated vaginal cavity. She may even have blanked out for a time.

It seemed that all too soon she had felt his penis expand suddenly deep up inside her and explode and it was over and she was awake again, but a delirious kind of consciousness, and he'd finished and lain still upon her, the size of his excited male hardness that filled her gradually diminishing. Then he withdrew and looked at her sheepishly.

"Katherine, honey, I've lost the rubber up in you. Let me put my finger in and get it out."

She stared at him incredulously, then screamed and pushed him away. She got up and ran naked to the bathroom, and filled with shame she searched inside, her fingers sending stabs of pain through her, until she found it and threw the bloody, sperm-dripping thing into the toilet.

She returned from her reverie suddenly, with a vague disorientation, as though her spirit had flown with her wandering mind and on their return to this time and place they hadn't quite rejoined.

She couldn't quite believe the sound she heard, the sputtering of an automobile engine in front of the house. She sat and listened to it dumbly. Then it stopped and she heard the beeping of a horn, then the slam of a door. She jumped up suddenly, breathless. She had the strangest impulse, that she had to get to a mirror and make sure she was arranged, was looking her best, before he saw her. But instead she chided herself for her vanity at a time like this and ran to the front door.

He was standing beside the Volkswagen, tall, still handsome and young-looking and healthy, his hair a little bushier and sideburns longer than when she'd last seen him, even at this distance a glint in his eye he had not had three months ago, but all in all looking no worse for his time away.

"Mom!"

Then she was going through the door, bounding down the steps and running; then she was in his strong long arms, against his hard chest, sobbing, mashing her soft bosom, her face buried to hide the happy tears. She felt his strong but gentle hands move over her back, felt his chin snuggle against her head. Then, after a joyous moment of the sensation of her son's body against her own, he was pushing her gently back.

"Mom," he whispered. "Mom. I want you to meet my girl friend. Lys."

She drew away suddenly, a lump in her throat, her face wrinkled with bitterness even before she saw the tiny blond girl in obscenely tight shorts and a skimpy halter that hid only her nipples and a little bit of the golden-tanned skin around them, with waist length hair that looked fluffy as golden fleece, supple thighs, tanned like her breasts with a silken coat of downy hair on them bleached white by sun to make the tan look even richer, and almost barefoot in a pair of flat wood sandals that laced with thin leather thongs almost to her knees to give a curious, almost Egyptian slave effect.