Chapter 6
THE STEAMING-HOT WATER RAINED DOWN UPON her soft, curvaceous body, seeping into the pores, racing down the entire length of her.
Frank stood a few feet away, facing himself in the mirror, shaving. He cursed as he nicked his chin, then cursed again as he applied the styptic pencil to the tiny spot of blood before it dripped down to his clean, white shirts.
It had been a long three weeks, he reflected. Long and hard. Ever since that first night they had joined the club every man he met there seemed to assume that they had as much right to Mona as he did-and that right didn't vanish when the club meetings broke up.
Twice this week he had come home to find Tim in bed with Mona. Once he was just getting up to leave, but the other time....
It was evening.
Frank had just returned home from a series of lectures, eager to tell Mona about some new theory or other.
Of course he hadn't bothered to knock. After all, it-was his own goddamned house, wasn't it? He just put the key in the lock, twisted it, and opened the door.
Mona wasn't in the living room, and so he had gone to the bedroom to see if perhaps she was napping.
She wasn't.
Tim lay under her, grunting and panting, while her legs were flailing high in the air, almost as if she were attempting to reach the ceiling.
"What the hell is going on here?" he had demanded.
"Oh, hi, Frank," grated Tim between his clenched teeth. "Be with you in a minute."
"Take your time," Frank said disgustedly.
"Love to, but the little woman's in a bit of a hurry."
She was too.
Her face turned red when she saw Frank glaring at her, but she was too far gone in her passion to relinquish her grip on Tim.
She returned his stare for a moment, a look of apology sneaking across her face. Then, suddenly, her eyes rolled back, showing nothing but the whites, and her face contorted in the ecstatic pleasure-pain look of sex.
She began whimpering, then laughing, and finally uttered one piercing shriek of utter fulfillment, punctuating its volume with wildly uncoordinated spasms of motion.
"Don't wait!" she had babbled, tears of pleasure streaking across her face. "Don't wait! Come now!" She punctuated it with the urgent motions of her body.
"I'm coming!" Tim had gasped, as the bed erupted in a fiery cataclysm of lust.
Afterward, when Tim had gone, she had walked up to him and said, "I'm sorry you walked in then."
"Ashamed?" he had replied bitterly.
"No. Not ashamed. Not guilty either. Just sorry."
And now, as Frank stared at his clean-shaven reflection, he would be taking her right back to Tim and the others, handing her body over to them on a silver platter.
There were compensations, to be sure. He had as much right to their wives as they had to his, and he exercised that right whenever he had a chance-which was often.
But Mona for Jeannie, for example, wasn't a fair swap as far as he was concerned. How could anyone compare Jeannie's firm, hard little breasts to Mona's big soft ones with the unique nipples? Why, a man could smother himself just reaching his tongue out for Mona's nipples. He needed a microscope to even find Jeannie's.
And Ellen! Did the girl do nothing but read Tarzan books and fantasize? Do it like a snake does it, Frank, or let's be elephants today ... when someone asked Ellen for a piece of ass, she took it all too literally!
Some of them weren't bad. Hank-Henrietta-especially, was something else in bed. But none of them had the body Mona had, and none of them, not even tight little Sue Ellen, could react the way Mona did.
Not that Mona ever acted that way with him. it took Travis or Tim or Sam or one of the others to really turn her on, but just the same, it was there, and he didn't like the idea of sharing anything like that with anyone else, no matter how much the idea appealed to Mona.
But it sure as hell appealed to Mona. Hell, she just might be a nympho at that!
Though he knew, when he thought about it, that she wasn't. She could say no, all right; she'd never once said it to him, but he'd seen her turn down Tim and even Travis on occasion.
Besides, nymphos weren't able to make it. That was why they couldn't turn a man down; they spent their entire lifetimes on the brink, so close to it that they could almost hold it in their hands, but somehow they could never quite reach it when the chips were down and the skirts were up.
Not that he asked Mona every day, but since joining the club, he had asked her often enough so that she would have had an excuse for turning him down if she had wanted to.
And that was the part he couldn't understand; one look at Travis and her panties were aflame, while her behavior toward him was no different than ever. Yet she did turn Travis down, and she did go to bed with him whenever he wanted. Why?
He sighed. If Churchill had thought that Russia was a puzzle within a riddle within an enigma, what would he have said of women?
It wasn't really jealousy or anger that he felt when he saw Mona swinging with one of the others, he decided. If that was the case, he'd have done something long before now. After all, when a man is burying himself between your wife's legs and sucking on her breasts like a baby, if you don't murder him then, you never will.
No, it was more a sense of frustration than any thing else. Sure, he took every woman in the club
(though if Ellen insisted that they play "treasure hunter" one more time he-was going to take the longest stick he could find and jam it clear up her precious "treasure"). Yes, he took them all, but more out of form than for any other reason.
Want a little sex? Go home. Wife humping with your best friend? Go to his house. His wife trying it a new way in the bathtub with a neighbor? Go to the neighbor's wife. Sooner or later you'll find an unoccupied field to plant your seed.
But it was all a reaction. There was no initiative. He never took a woman before Mona had made it with her husband, and while he enjoyed it nonetheless, he couldn't escape the fact that his actions, his sex life, his choice of bedmates, was predicted by Mona's.
Watching her reflection in the mirror, he watched Mona step out of the shower, stretch languorously, and reach for a towel.
"Want me to help you?" he asked.
"Sure," she smiled. "Help yourself, too."
"I may do just that," he answered, as he took the towel from her. All vague philosophical notions vanished from his mind as he began running the towel over her.
"My breasts are still damp," she said, turning to face him. "Dry them for me."
He ran the towel over them, gently and tenderly, squeezing and molding the flesh in his hands. Mona's body stiffened, her back arched, and she ripped the towel from his hands.
"I'm cold in here," she whispered.
He lifted her dripping body up and carried her into the bedroom.
"I have no towel," he said, as he laid her gently atop the bedspread.
"Improvise," she grinned.
He lowered his lips to her breasts, licking the tiny droplets of water from them. He reached up with his fingers, massaged and manipulated them, and finally took a nipple in his mouth.
He rolled his tongue tantalizingly around it, toying with it, flicking it until it stood erect, rigid and proud. Then he squeezed it between his lips, half-sucking, half-biting.
Mona clutched at him with her hands, fumbling with his belt. She reached inside his pants, found what she sought, and caressed it.
"Wait," she whispered, "let me please you now!"
Slowly she swung her body around, forcing him to lie back on the bed. Her fingers swiftly unsnapped the top of his pants, then caught the zipper and pulled it down.
In another moment he was lying nude, except for his shirt, with Mona curled up in a ball by his thighs, her head lowered to his pulsing cock.
Her lips clasped his peter at the tip, and her tongue teasingly raced across it. His hips lunged forward spasmodically, and with a low chuckle she moved her head back accordingly so that the tip of her tongue just barely touched him;
His whole body was covered with sweat now, as he fought desperately to control himself. Mona was thrilled by what she was accomplishing, and began racing her tongue sensually up and down the length of his tool, pausing occasionally to give him a gentle love bite.
Then she stopped to watch him. His eyes were tightly shut, his face contorted in pleasure, and she bent once more to her task. She slid her moist, hungry lips over the head of his prick, then leaned down. He groaned, and she straightened up and repeated the process in a regular rhythm, feeling the huge, swelling erection forcing its way further and further into her mouth, seeking out her throat, and still not stopping in its mad search for pleasure and containment.
Now not only her tongue, but her teeth as well were working on him, sliding along the entire length of his immense prick, kissing, licking, sucking.
"Oh, God!" he murmured. "Come back up here!"
"Soon," she promised. "But let me please you first."
"Now!" he whispered urgently.
"Soon," she repeated, lowering her head once again to the throbbing organ which reached out to meet her. .
"Hurry!" he moaned. "I can't wait-" He gasped like a dying man. "I can't ... I can't ... I can't...." Then it was over.
Mona got up and walked to the bathroom. "I'm sorry," he called to her. "It's all right. I liked it."
"Where are you going?"
"To brush my teeth, or maybe gargle with a mouthwash."
"We can try again, later," he offered.
"We'll be at the club," she said. "It's all right."
"When we get home then."
"You'll be tired."
"Are you mad, Mona?"
"You mean crazy?"
"I mean mad at me?"
"No," she said wearily. "I'm not mad at you. Not even a little bit."
"Damn it!" he exploded. "I said I was sorry."
"There's nothing to be. sorry about. I'll get enough at the party. I felt like an hors d'oevres."
"Yeah," he muttered. "I know. I can see those bastards now, betting about which one got you the highest. And I can see Sam, too, carrying you around like some fish he had impaled on a lance."
"Don't be bitter about it," said Mona. "After all, I didn't explode in your mouth. Not that I especially mind it, you know."
"For Christ's sake, I said I was sorry!" he bellowed. "If you hadn't had so much goddamned practice blowing every guy on the campus, maybe I could have...."
She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her.
For a few seconds she considered taking another shower, but decided against it. After all, she didn't really need one, and besides, the party would be starting in fifteen or twenty minutes.
She poured some mouthwash into a glass, filled it to the top with water, and sloshed it around in her mouth, spitting it out in the sink when she was done. It was light red, almost pink, and it slithered down to the drain at the bottom of the basin like a thousand tiny worms crawling hungrily across a corpse.
Mona's cheeks glistened wetly in the mirror. That's funny, she thought, I thought I had dried my face before ... well, before.
Then she saw that they were tears. Not tears of frustration, for she knew she would soon be sitting astride Dave or guiding Tim's eager organ inside her. Not tears of pain, for nothing hurt her. Not tears of disgust, either, for after a few sessions with the swap club, nothing surprised her any more.
Still, there they were, rolling freely down her cheeks, losing themselves between her freely swinging breasts, rolling down the quivering softness of her belly, and she couldn't understand them.
Oh, well, she shrugged. Soon I'll be there, and everything will be all right then.
She thought about everything being all right, and then she thought about the men who were going to make it all right, who were going to send her on a one-way trip to the moon, and pant in her ear while she fell slowly, lazily back through the stardust and clouds to earth.
Dave would be the first, probably. The past two weeks he had been saving himself for her. Partly balding, smiling, laughing Dave, who fancied himself as a wit. But he was good, very good indeed, and that made up for everything else.
She still blushed when she recalled last week's session. He had met her at the door, and helped her undress. Two minutes after she entered the house she was lying on the couch, with Dave humping and jerking his body on top of her.
He finished first, and even while he was still inside her, even while she was still biting him, digging her nails in him, wrapping her legs tighter and tighter around his waist, he turned to the others, chuckled to himself, and said, "Say, did I ever tell you the one about the...."
There was Tim, lean, tall, bushy-haired Tim, Who prided himself on his aloof expertise. He was good, too, better than Dave, better than most of them-but he was so damned concerned with his "artful craft," so interested in the effect that he was having on his partner that he remained aloof from the whole thing until the last minute. There was nothing wrong with the whole thing, to be sure, including the last minute. God knows he made her scream for more, but something was missing in him too.
Sam wasn't bad. A nice man, a doctor, with long steady, delicate fingers, equally adept at cutting a man's ear off or turning a woman's flame on. But all Sam wanted was a little bit of straight, normal sex. No threesomes, no back doors, no cameras, just a good roll in the hay. He was pretty adept at it but, even though she gushed with passion every time, it was somehow dull and out of place at a gathering like this.
Travis was another story. There was nothing he and Sue Ellen hadn't tried, with themselves and with others. He was no gourmet, but a sampler. Nothing failed to arouse his curiosity, no matter how unique or grotesque, and he never failed to arouse his partner, no matter how fat, flabby or frigid. Travis had a good, wholesome attitude about sex-it was all good fun, and if you wanted to add a little variety with him, his wife, or both of them, why sure, why the hell not? He alone of the men was her contemporary in both age and thought, and he alone could still turn her to water just by giving her a single good-natured leer.
But there was something lacking in even Travis. The others used her as nothing more than a plaything, an escape. Sure, they pleased her as much-more-than she pleased them, but when the pleasure was done, so was everything else. And Travis, though he never used sex as an escape from reality-it was his reality-viewed her as he viewed all women, even Sue Ellen, as a playmate, a good-natured chum. It was just a more mature level than football or hopscotch, but it was just a game nonetheless.
But she liked them all, some more than others, but the only reason she bothered with them at all was her need.
And now she understood the dampness on her cheeks.
Damn it! She didn't want to have to depend on them! There was no guilt, no shame attached to it, but no-woman should have to depend on other women's husbands to keep her happy. She loved Frank. He loved her. Why the hell couldn't they just go on alone, just the two of them? Why couldn't they see the Blands across a bridge table instead of beneath a bedsheet?