Chapter 2
The funny thing was, Ray got his magazine order. Then he left, smiling and telling Cindy he would be back.
She went through the rest of the day as if she were in a trance.
She had intended to do some shopping that afternoon, but she didn't leave the apartment. She didn't want to face any strangers.
As Ray had predicted, she didn't want to face Don, either. But she knew she would have to, so she made a great effort to pull herself together just before he was due to arrive from his office.
A warm bath helped.
She tried to force herself to stop thinking of Ray, but she couldn't do so entirely. What had happened to her today had been cataclysmic in its effect. It was impossible for her to belittle the impact it had upon her life.
Don was a junior engineer with a large utility company. He had a good future with the firm, but he wasn't making a very big salary as yet. That was why he and Cindy continued to live in an apartment, rather than to buy a house and begin raising children.
He was tall, moderately good-looking and conservative in most everything he did. Solidity was the main impression he gave out. If a person wanted to be unkind, they could call him a square and hit the mark exactly.
His squareness had appealed to Cindy when they first met, because she was the product of a square home herself and this was the quality she had been taught to look for in a man. But after two hundred plus nights spent in his bed, she had come to realize that she needed something more. Until today she had realized it only subconsciously, and she had sought to satisfy her need in fantasy. But Ray had forced her to admit her need on a conscious level, and it was doubtful whether fantasies would satisfy her any longer.
It wasn't that Don was a worthless lover; he was just too fast and inconsiderate, from her viewpoint. She had longed for him to take more time with her and, when the coitus actually began, to draw out the act more.
Ray did that. Oh, God, Ray was the greatest!
But she couldn't think about him any more. He had said he would be back, but she wouldn't let him into the house if he showed up. She couldn't afford to. She had sinned enough already. It was questionable whether she would ever live down that much sinning, let alone more.
By the time Don got home, Cindy had recovered her composure to a substantial degree. She smiled and kissed him, as usual, and he gave no indication of suspecting that anything was changed.
In fact, he didn't. He was not very sensitive when it came to reading other people.
He and Cindy chatted. They had dinner. They watched television. The time approached for them to go to bed together.
Panic began to close in on her.
Ray was right. She was going to freeze. If Don so much as touched her, she was going to turn into-what had Ray said? A popsickle? Yes. That was what she would be.
The thought then occurred to her that Don might not know the difference.
She studied him covertly as he gazed at the TV screen, lost in the antics of a pair of comedians. Would he know if she was cold inside, if she didn't want him to take her? If she forced herself to move a little and moan and sigh, would he suspect there was anything different about her?
She decided she could probably put the act over.
But she didn't want to have to try if it could be avoided. She would tell him she had a headache, and perhaps he would let the sex go. There had been times when he had.
But on other occasions, he had forced the issue, in spite of the fact that she hadn't felt like it. On those occasions, she had responded once they got started. She always responded honestly when they were in the midst of it, even though she knew he wouldn't drive her to a fully satisfactory climax. She was always aware of a sense of lack at the end.
There had been no sense of lack with Ray. God, no! That had been sirens and bells!
Mustn't think about Ray, she cautioned herself. Never again. Ray was gone. He was out of her life forever. She was married to Don.
That meant she had to try to make him happy.
She bit her lip and decided she wouldn't seek to avoid sex with him tonight if he acted as if he wanted it.
He wanted it, all right.
Don was the kind of man who took sex the way he took his Wheaties and his morning shower. Not daily, but with whatever regularity his body demanded, and without apparently giving it any more thought than that. He seemed to proceed under the assumption that Cindy gave it no more thought or no greater depth of involvement than he did.
She was tense and silent as he rolled toward her in bed and placed his hand on her breast, feeling it through her nightgown. He gave it a little shake, grunted, and began to pull her nightie down.
The word Neanderthal came to her mind. She would have bet that the caveman made love something like that.
Ray hadn't engaged in many preliminaries. As a matter-of-fact, he had been quite abrupt in getting the main action started. But he had seemed to have a little more regard for her than Don had and, once the main action got underway, he had drawn it out and loved her with enough concentrated intensity so that she had really come.
Damn! She mustn't think about Ray any more. She really mustn't!
Don had her nightie pulled down to her waist by now and he was leaning over her breasts, smearing his wet, open mouth across the nipples. He clamped onto one tingling tip and pulled it into his mouth. He sucked hard, hurting her a little.
Ray hadn't sucked like that. Ray had just played with her nipples, and she had enjoyed that more.
God! She couldn't keep thinking about him!
Don was now pulling the lower portion of her nightie up. She wore ruffled pants beneath it. He petted her vulva through the gauze fabric and she opened her legs wide. He got his hand inside the panties and petted her directly.
She responded, but in a rather strange way. She could feel herself opening and beginning to moisten down there, while in her mind she was aware of a resentment.
Don didn't pet her for very long. He gripped her panties now and grunted as he began tugging them down. She lifted her rump to help him.
He tossed the covers away and she lifted her legs to let him pull the panties off. It was dark in their bedrooms. Don always took her in the dark.
No. Correction. When they were first married, occasionally he had been real daring and had gone after her with the lights on. But the last time he had tried that had been several months ago.
They had been married for only seven months and, with many people, that was still part of the honeymoon. But she and Don had settled into an old-married rut already.
Did it have to be like that?
He fumbled with the front of his pajamas to let his cock out, and he rolled atop her.
"Here we go, honey," he said indelicately, and he directed his penis to the slit which nestled in the folds of her vulva.
He was surprised to encounter more resistance than usual. Ordinarily she was very open and moist and he was able to slide right in.
"Hey, what's the matter?" he asked.
"Wh-what do you mean?"
"You're ... kind of closed up."
"Push," she said. "It will be all right."
He pushed and his rod did enter her. But it went only about halfway and stuck.
He grunted, withdrew, and pushed in quickly a second time. He went a little deeper.
He began pistoning, deepening his penetration gradually, but not trying to go very deep at all. Cindy moved with him, feeling little involvement.
She knew she wasn't going to get there tonight. She just knew it.
How would she feel afterward when she didn't make it? she wondered.
He grunted as he screwed her like a rabbit. She began to feel something-but not much, compared to the way she had responded to Ray.
Ray, again. God! Stop it, she ordered her mind.
Don moved faster and faster, then suddenly he was twitching and spurting. She was receiving his warm cream.
Over. It was over.
If she were the sort of girl who thought in dirty words, she would have said Shit! to herself. But as it was, she just sighed and felt very let down.
Don pulled out and rolled onto his back. He didn't say a thing. Evidently he hadn't noticed anything lacking in her response.
The resentment which had risen gradually in her mind as Don made love to her (if that's what it was) now assumed full growth and, if she had been forced to say anything at that point, she probably couldn't have kept her voice steady. But he didn't require her to talk after sex, any more than he felt impelled to talk himself.
She sat up and rummaged to find her baby-doll pants, located them and slid them up her legs. She raised her rump and slid them up around her hips, letting the elastic snap against her belly. Now she drew the top of the nightie up into place.
She drew up the bedclothes to cover both herself and Don. She lay on her back and stared up into the darkness.
Don's even breathing soon told her he had dropped off to sleep. The trouble wasn't that he didn't love her. She knew that. He did love her in his way. But the physical part of love was just an automatic thing with him, its purpose merely to ejaculate. And he assumed she was the same, that when he ejaculated she somehow gained her satisfaction, too.
In spite of her resolutions that she wouldn't think about Ray any more, her thoughts drifted back to him.
Would he really return to see her? she wondered.
If he did, it would be very difficult indeed for her to close the door in his face.
Shame called her a slut. Any woman was a slut who cheated on her husband, regardless of the circumstances.
Now, at least, she felt some sympathy for sluts. She felt some sense of kinship to them. But she didn't feel she was a confirmed slut yet. She had cheated only once. If she could resist the temptation to cheat again, that would amount to absolution, she believed.
She would have to resist Ray if he came back. She would have to do it somehow. And she would have to stop this awful itching need for more than Don seemed able to give her.
Perhaps Don could be educated. Perhaps he would change if she were to talk with him about it.
But how could she do that? She had been brought up to think of sex as something not quite nice under the best of circumstances-meaning marriage. Her mother had told her that a woman was supposed to please her man but should not expect any great physical thrill herself. The belief that women derived such satisfaction was fictitious, her mother had said-the product of the erotic imaginations of male writers. There were women who led their men to believe that they enjoyed sex very much, but that too was a put-on.
Cindy had experienced enough with Don to suspect that this wasn't the case. She had derived limited satisfaction from him and had been very close to a big orgasm several times.
With Ray, the big orgasm had happened. It had happened twice. So there was no telling her that women couldn't get there as enjoyably as any man.
Anyway, she had talked with other girls about it-some who were married and some who weren't. Most of them belied what her mother had said.
So perhaps her mother was wrong about the moral implications of non-marital sex, also.
Those teachings weren't linked to religion in Cindy's mind, because she wasn't religious. Her folks had never trained her along that line. Sex morals were as they were because they were. That was all. Funny she had never questioned this before.
Her nerves had eased by now, and she felt better about everything-even Ray.
She dropped off to sleep thinking about him.
Throughout the next day, she kept wondering whether he would show up. She hadn't fully resolved what she would do if he did.
She really had to do some shopping, but she put it off until mid-afternoon. When Ray hadn't made an appearance by three o'clock, she left the apartment and walked to the bus stop. (The Mitchells didn't feel they could afford a second car as yet. That is, Don didn't. He was very practical about such things.)
She kept wondering, all the time she was away, whether Ray was at that moment ringing her doorbell. If there was no answer, he might assume she was at home and simply didn't want to see him.
Well, she didn't ... did she?
But if he believed that, he might never come back again. This thought gave her a very real pang.
She cut her shopping short and hurried home, even though she knew it was too late for Ray to call on her. She was thinking that perhaps he had been there earier and left a note.
There was no note.
She felt depressed.
That evening she was restless. She wanted sex, but she didn't want to submit to Don.
Don didn't want it, and neither of them made a move toward the other after they went to bed. Cindy lay awake for quite a while before sleep came.
She dreamed she was with an attractive man. Ray, perhaps? She wasn't sure. But she was with the man on a bed, where they rolled and played passionately.
She handled his big, stiff penis.
She saw that penis plainly, its head gorged with excitement. The entire organ quivered with masculine power. Then, suddenly, she wasn't holding the penis any more. The man who owned it was poised above her, and he was sliding the rigid rod into her slick, warm depths.
God, but that felt good!
She rose to his lusty plunges, absorbing thrust after thrust of the sturdy shaft. She cried and gasped in her dream.
"Baby ... baby! What's the matter?"....
Her eyes opened. She was damp with sweat. Her entire body was agitated.
The light was on and Don was leaning over her.
He grinned. "You were having a whale of a dream," he said.
"Ooh ... oh, yes..."
"What was it all about, anyway?"
"Nothing. It didn't amount to anything."
"Well, you were certainly worked up."
She looked at him closely, trying to perceive if she had given some sign that it was a sex dream. But if she had, apparently Don hadn't recognized it.
"You must have some indigestion, hm?" he said.
"Yes. I guess that's what it was. Indigestion."
"Do you want to take something?"
"No, it will be all right. Just turn the light off."
"Okay." He reached and did so, then settled back.
Did she want to take something?
That was the key question, wasn't it? She certainly did want to take sometthing.
Would Ray come tomorrow? she wondered.